E Rehmus - The Magician's Dictionary

ATHAME Consecrated, black-handled knife, used for drawing circles to invoke spiritual entities. Implements for performing M/magic(k)al acts must themselves be M/magic(k)al. Ordinary tools do but ordinary work.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------ATHEISM Can be divided roughly into two phases - Sartrean Atheism and Post-Sartrean Atheism. For Sartre, raised in the Catholicism of the 19th and early 20th Century, God was the meaning of life and the world. Once God was proved not to exist (or murdered as Nietzsche put it), meaning also ceased to exist. The universe for Sartre was hence absurd and nauseating. We now recognize that meaning and purpose can be present even if Creation is self-created - either as the original cause of self-creation or as its ultimate (not-yet-completed) result.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------ATHTAR One of the Arab Trinity, the male Venus, destroyed by Mohammed.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------ATLANTIS Plato's legendary continent "West of the Pillars of Hercules" which achieved great technological heights of civilization and then sank beneath the sea. Whether or not we choose to lend credence to its historical reality is less important than what it symbolizes - the incessant rise and fall of civilizations in the past, as "scientifically advanced" as our own.

Indeed, many of these are said to have been further advanced than our own by several leagues. Thus, Atlantis warns us to avoid unnecessary futility.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------ATTENTIONALITY The quality or degree of that which is capable of bringing other minds to attention. From a subjective point of view, anything to which we give our attention becomes interesting - BEWARE OF FOOTBALL. When you begin to understand something, if you deliberately concentrate on the problem more deliberately, that will produce a feedback with subsequent intensification of the attention and understanding.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------ATTRIBUTE That which is assigned, ascribed or considered as belonging to an entity, as a familiar is an attribute of a witch or the thunderbolt is an attribute of Jupiter. A person's attribute can be anything traditionally associated with him, such as Don Quixote's horse (Rosinante) or Hitler's dog (Blondi), or even inanimate objects such as Thor's hammer or Mercury's caduceus.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------ATU The tarot trumps are called atus, which is Egyptain aat "mansion", aatu "mansions." Erroneously, atu is thought to derive from French Ă tous, since trumps are above all other suits.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------ATUM (Sometimes identified with the Hebrew "Adam"). Egyptian God often depicted as masturbating, since he is self-created and as he is also credited with pulling the whole of creation out of himself (precursor of Adam's rib?). He also represents the return of the Cosmos to its origins, as the serpent devouring its own tail. By masturbating in Heliopolis, his brother and sister, Shu and Tefnut, were produced by ejaculation. Sometimes he was described as "spitting forth" life from his