Stephen Skinner

After graduating from Sydney University, Stephen Skinner began his career as a geography lecturer at what is now the University of Technology in Sydney. He authored his first book on esoteric subjects, The Search for Abraxas, in 1972 with co-author Nevill Drury. He migrated to London in the same year and co-authored, with Francis King, the Techniques of High Magic in 1976. After spending some time in the manuscript reading rooms of what was then the British Museum, he produced Terrestrial Astrology: Divinatory Geomancy, which is still the most complete work in English on the history and practice of Western divinatory geomancy. After reading the manuscript diaries of Dr John Dee, he published a dictionary of the angelic language with Dr Don Laycock. He then published a facsimile edition of Meric Casaubon’s True & Faithfull Relation of what passed for many Yeers [sic] between Dr. John Dee…and some Spirits… He edited both the Magical Diaries of Aleister Crowley (1923) and the first edition of Crowley’s Astrology. Highly illustrated coffee-table books on Millennium Prophecies: Apocalypse 2000 and Nostradamus (with Francis King) and Sacred Geometry for Gaia/Hamlyn, pursuing a longstanding interest in geometry, followed. Reverting to his interest in European magic, in 2005 he edited a completely reset edition of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s often maligned Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. From 2004 - 2010he collaborated with David Rankine to produce the first six volumes of the Sourceworks of Ceremonial Magic series. This has involved much manuscript research into, and transcription of, important grimoires from the 16th-18th centuries, resulting in completely new and much expanded editions of The Key of Solomon, the Lemegeton (including the Liber Malorum seu Goetia, Ars Almadel, Theurgia-Goetia, and Ars Paulina), Janua Reserata, and Sefer Raziel: Liber Salomonis (with Don Karr). The series also includes the Clavicula Tabularum Enochi, an expansion of Dr John Dee’s angel magic texts by the 17th century magician Dr Thomas Rudd, and a unique Solomonic grimoire pseudepigraphically attributed to St. Cyprian of Antioch. During this time he produced a substantial reference book: the Complete Magician’s Tables is a tabular summary of the correspondences that are important to the theory and practice of magic; their Kabbalistic framework; the attendant angels and demons from many grimoires; the gods of many cultures; the constituents of astrology (Greek, Babylonian and Egyptian); gem stones, plants, perfumes and incenses of practical magic; the gematria and isopsephy of many Greek and Hebrew words, and correspondences with Eastern belief systems like the Yi Jing, a total of over 840 comparative tables. Stephen summarized the practical magic techniques to be found in the grimoires in his Techniques of Solomonic Magic in 2015. He then went back to the main root of all western magic, the Greek magical papyri written in Egypt between the 1st and 5th centuries, and extracted from the Greek text details of all the methods used by these magicians which he published in Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic in 2014. Both books concentrate on practical magical techniques as recorded by the magicians who actually used them. Stephen is also the author of more than a dozen books on classical feng shui, including the first one written in English in the 20th century, Feng Shui: the Living Earth Manual. He has also edited four translations of feng shui texts from classical Chinese and wrote a substantial reference book to the subject: the Guide to the Feng Shui Compass, the fruit of years of research into Chinese sources in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Stephen has written more than 46 books, translated into more than twenty different languages. He was awarded a PhD in Classics by the University of Newcastle for his research on the Greek text of the PGM and a number of Latin grimoires. Stephen lives in Singapore. His website is www.SSkinner.com His Wikipedia entry is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Skinner_(author)