A Brilliant Resource - Rated 
Brilliantly, Stephen Skinner has pulled off a rare feat indeed: creating a book which is demonstrably better than its counterpart by Aleister Crowley.
Up until now, Crowley's "777" has been the standard reference for the ceremonial magician, its tabular format neatly linking what was then all the known data regarding the occult to the 32 Paths of the Sepher Yetzirah.
Yet Skinner has now gone further, by incorporating all this and a lot of extra data which Crowley never got around to including in the original work: for example, material from John Dee's angelic experiments. Hence Skinner's new opus is now the definitive reference work, and the fact that it is in a nice new format is a bonus. This is the kind of book that a serious magician will want to buy once, and keep on referring to it for many years to come.
Fantastic resource. Highly recommended - Rated
I am just finishing off my copy of the Complete Magicians Tables by Stephen Skinner. The publishing blurb can be found here: http://www.goldenhoard.net/publications.htm
This is really good, and whilst I do have a few quibbles about the book I think that it is a worthy successor to 777 and of a great deal of interest to many people in the occult field.
This book does not and cannot provide tables fore every possible magickal correspondence and consequently it is not so strong on correspondences regarding natural magick. These are the associations' behind plants, precious stones etc and a "compleat book of natural magick" would be as large as this book. Such an imaginary (and possibly impossible) book would be made ever more complex when we need to consider Hoodoo as well as other folk traditions which have been so long divorced from the stream which leads to modern western natural magic. When we consider astrological and elemental correspondences which in turn do lead to the Qabalah and the Magicians territory covered by Skinners book we see the task of creating a truly complete reference to be truly Herculean.
There are some strange omissions to this book which I cannot explain, however the pedantic bastard running in my soul screams to point out. On a macroscopic level I am curious as to why he included the second version of the Great Table from Enochian magic without mentioning the original version (or even Tyson's version). During the vast bulk of the communications with the Enochian Entities, both Dee and Kelley were present. However the account goes that one morning Dee got up and found that allegedly Kelley had been visited in the night by the Archangel Raphael (who crops up again below) who told him to modify the table quite substantially and also that Dee and Kelley should hold their wives in common.
An influential Enochian scholar once made the point to me that there are some good alchemical reasons for this modification with regards to both the tables and also the wife-swap (essentially concerning the comparison between Fire/Water, Air/Earth, Fire/Earth and Air/Water which correspond to Fire (Kelley), Air (Dee), Earth (Jane Dee), Water (Joanna Kelley)) and he does make some very sound points. However to me it sounds a bit like Kelley was having a laugh. Anyway for some reason many commentators and later users of the system such as the Golden Dawn take the later version despite questions being raised with the origin of the story oddly despite the urge many magicians have of going back to the original source materials.
On a more detailed level his tables contain the odd perplexing omission again raising my pedantic heckles. For example, let us check his table on Islamic archangelic correspondences on page 126 (of the deluxe). He lists the Arabic names for various archangels such as Jibril (Gabriel), Mikal (Michael), Azrail (Azrael) etc but misses off some of the Qabalistic equivalents of the names. - For example he mentions Israfil but neglects to note that this one corresponds to the Archangel Raphael, which I feel is a rather fundamental point.
However my biggest quibble is the arrangement of the tables. We see blocks of tables arranged in groups and these groups sorted alphabetically, however there is only one group per alphabetic letter. So there is only one A group (Angels - Biblical, Apocryphal and Gnostic), only one B group (Buddhist Meditation), etc. This strikes me as rather artificial and forced and makes some things harder to find.
For example I might expect to find Enochiana under E, but no this is sorted under D (Dr John Dee's Angels). E was assigned Emblems and Alchemy, etc. U is assigned "Uniform timeline". In these examples why not put Alchemy (which is clearer than having a forced "Emblems and Alchemy" under A, Enochian rather that Dr Dee. under D, Timelines under T, etc.
Whilst we are looking at 2 dimensional tables the problem space is certainly not 2 dimensional and Skinner has done an admirable job in organising the information. It therefore strikes me as strange in that the final level of sorting was done in such a forced way making the task of finding the tables one requires that little bit more difficult.
Having got all this off my chest, I do think that the book is excellent and worthy of five stars (out of five). We see lots of correspondences and tables which are really useful but not really well known. For example these tables are very strong in Oriental systems such as Chinese Taoist Alchemy, Grimoire and Solomonic magic and a useful magical timeline. When modern magicians start combining this valuable information into their systems I think the book will really begin to come into its own and we will see how it surpasses 777.
I found his comparison of the Goetic system particularly useful. I remember about 18 months ago getting interested in the number of legions each demon commanded and going through the Crowley/Mathers edition getting the list - how I wish I had this book on hand then. Also of interest is his comparison both of the Harley 6483 and Wierus/Rudd versions of the Goetia. His list of the differences in ordering places emphasis I think, on the important historical point that these grimoires were notebooks and magicians were expected to fill in the gaps, hence the differences. I also suspect that his mentioning the Wierus/Rudd version was a sneaky advert for the forecoming Skinner and Rankin book on the Goetia which I am looking forward to with a great deal of interest.
I highly recommend this book and think that it is a fantastic resource
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