Death
by Al
My friend Ben Rowe is dead. He died this last Thursday (6/20) from complications due to the chemo he was getting to treat his lung cancer. I received an e-mail from a family member telling me while I was out this weekend. Ben and I hadn’t spoken a lot during the last two years. He’d been sick for much of it and hadn’t been on the net much. He and I only met in the flesh once, about four or five years ago, when he came to town to visit another mutual friend but he and I had known each other from the old pagan/occult BBS networks back around 1990 or so. I’d known him for most of my adult life.
Ben was a magician and a dedicated one. His work focussed on Enochian magic quite heavily and I felt that Ben had had some profound insights over time. When I first started doing webwork on what eventually became Hermetic.com, putting up some of his work was one of my first priorities. This was back when it was much rarer to have a website and Ben didn’t have the skills or the inclination to create his own. This site was the result and it’s stayed largely the same for the last few years. Eventually, Ben put up his own site at http://w3.one.net/~browe/ and started some really cool projects like converting Agrippa and the Abramelin work to PDF format. Ben was always a presentation purist and hated the way HTML didn’t let you lay things out how you wanted… ;-)
I’m going to copy his website and put it up on Hermetic.com in the next day so Ben’s work doesn’t disappear. His family member didn’t know how long the existing site on one.net would stay up though he thought Ben paid the bill on an annual basis. He told me that anyone interested in the materials there should copy them soon or risk them disappearing at some point.
I’ll miss Ben. Maybe I’ll see him again. We’ll see.
Update, 10:53 AM
Ben’s site is up on Hermetic.com as http://www.hermetic.com/browe_mem/index.htm now.