E. E. Rehmus

Joseph Haskew, his long-term partner, wrote of Rehmus's early life and youth: Edward, an only child, was born midsummer's eve 1929 in Upper Michigan, of German ancestry.

His contributor notice from The Ecphorizer runs thus: Ed Rehmus was well-known within San Francisco Regional Mensa in the 70s through the 80s as the "weird" cover artist of the newsletter Intelligencer.

[2]His public reputation rests mainly on his contribution to the study of the occult through his renowned book The Magician's Dictionary, a vast pseudo-encyclopaedic work first published in 1990 that proposes a re-evaluation of some of the core building blocks of modern belief structures through definition and commentary on key words and phrases, from "Aaron" to "Zuvuya".

Apart from founding and editing various magazines and journals (sometimes under pseudonyms), Rehmus was a regular contributor to numerous and diverse scholarly and amateur publications, providing articles, texts, artworks, and even erudite crossword puzzles.

[3] While he remained an obscure figure to the public eye during his lifetime, the posthumous volume The Magic of Ed Rehmus, compiled and edited by Fred Vaughan and published in 2006, sheds light on his personal life and many other previously inaccessible aspects of his thought, wide interests, and activities.

Graphical depiction of the gradual decomposition of the magical formula "Abracadabra", from "Abracadabra" to "A", in the shape of an down-pointing triangle
Gradual and triangular decomposition of the magical formula " Abracadabra "