It's been five years since a close friend and I entered into the 'Arbatel Cycle' in 2009 and decided to complete all seven stages of this ritual work. Since then a lot has happened and step by step I have added detailed ritual accounts for each rite completed on this site. With one more ritual remaining and a few significant spirit-induced crises behind me, I decided to write a slightly longer introduction to this work. It is both because it has turned into a significant part of my magical life - and because I am beginning to see its limitations, costs and imbalances clearer and clearer.
Read MoreIn spring of the same year Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was born - 1486 - a mysterious scholar, forgotten by the Western Magical tradition and remembered only by academic history, explained the key concepts of Jewish Kabbala to a young Italian philosopher and squire. The latter was called Pico della Mirandola and became world-renowned as the founding father of Christian Kabbala and remembered until today as a pivotal force in the emergence of Renaissance philosophy and Hermetic magic. The former, however, vanished with little traces into the mists of our Western occult memory...
Read MoreHere is what I think I missed to call out in the previous post on faith - and what Hanegraaf’s wonderful chapter helped me realise: As a gnostic you are faced with the essential fact that all of your faith’s ties to the past need to cease to exist - for any true experience to come to life. Walking the path of the gnostic takes courage more than anything. Because what it takes is exactly what the Neoplatonist Porphyri had suspected: Each one of us needs to ‘cut out for themselves a new kind of track in a pathless desert’.
Read MoreWhenever life turns truly practical and concrete all scientific knowledge and ratio begin to fade into the background. What takes the limelight instead is a Pandora’s Box: What is inside nobody will ever know. All we know is it is a box that will be eternally closed to the hands of knowledge and science. Yet, we also know the very same box will open almost effortlessly to the touch of faith. At the same time nothing can be said about the inside of this box objectively, yet it presents its content devotedly to the subjective view of our senses...
Read MoreLet’s begin with a very simple thought: There is a man inside of us and a man outside of us. Both of these men are not us. The one outside of us is marked by our skin, the bones and blood and nerves we are clothed into. He - or she - is what the Gnostics called the living grave. Nothing could be more misjudging of its possible power and beauty and divine alignment. The man inside of us on the other hand often remains buried and un-contacted until the day the man outside of us dies.
Read MoreThe most essential dependency we encounter as magicians is our ability to extend our sensual ‘reach’ beyond the physical realm. Wether we call them ‘siddhis’ or ‘astral senses’ - without being able to open our senses to input from beyond the physical realm any spirit will struggle to directly connect with us.
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The following chapters explore the subject of Resilience and Renewal from the viewpoint of the practicing magician. The tools and models we will apply, however, will not be ‘magical’ by any means. Instead they stem from various fields of modern research such as behavioural science, science of sports or performing arts. Such choice of tools is not meant to devalue any magical approaches on the subject, but rather highlight their wide absence in the Western Tradition as we will see. Still, irrespective of their origins none of these tools will work unless they are practically applied - repeatedly.
Read MoreThe world around me seems to go crazy with the idea of self-optimization. To be more precise I should say: with the idea of self-quantification. Unfortunately the difference between the two seems to be insignificant to many? And that's where trouble begins... Let me suggest to go on a little walk. A walk back and forth between our everyday lives and our lives in the circles of the magical art.
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Nick Farrell recently posted twelve indicators that might help you identify wether or not you actually are a magician. Now, I don’t know Nick personally, but I have followed his writings for a while. From what I found I came to genuinely respect him as a magician in the tradition of the Golden Dawn, a knowledgable teacher of his subjects and overall a pretty reasonable person. It surprised me even more, therefore, to see such a naive list of criteria for supposedly true magicians on his blog?
Read MoreThe last months have been really intense. They began to change my approach to magic more radically than many years of practice had done before. So much is going on in fact I cannot predict at all where these tides will take me in the long-run. Actually I might not be making any progress at all - instead I might have started to go backwards? I guess thinking of progress in a linear way is another one of the concepts I’ll need to give up in order to move forward.
Read MoreThere is a fascinating book called ‘Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn’ by Amira El-Zein. I started reading it right after finishing Bill Gray’s biography. At this point I cannot share a full review of it yet - it is soon to come though - but want to take a moment of something important it helped me to see...
Read MoreSome recent ritual work pointed me to look closer at the function of the four elements in magic. To be honest - for quite a while the topic of the four elements had seemed so basic to me that I had lost sight of it over the years. Well, how wrong life would proof me again!
Read MoreIn a previous post I shared an overview on the human constitution according to Gnostic Hermetism. The differentiation of inner organs as Vitals, Elementaries and Elementals is essential for a deeper understanding of how magic and magical Yantras work as we will see.
Read MoreWhen explaining how to work magic based on inner vision it is helpful to take a look at one of the main differences between traditional Shamanism and Western Ritual Magic. It lies in the different pathways chosen by its practitioners to achieve a clear state of Inner Sight. Wether we aim to develop it in the circle of practice or in the forests at night, wether we use a crystal ball to fix our gaze or wether we keep our eyes closed with our fingers following the lines of our mesa: Inner sight knows no differentiation between paradigms and so don’t the spirits we aim to work with. Inner vision represents a gift we can only give to ourselves.
Read MoreSo the moment that changed everything arrived. On a sunny day I was standing at the beach in the Netherlands, waves ahead of me, wind, people walking their dogs in the dunes, boats afar. And suddenly everything I had thought of to be myself had vanished.
Read MoreSome people asked me why I burned the rosy-cross. I guess that’s a fair question? My initial answer was it is a personal matter and so it is indeed. But on pondering about it, I realized there are actually a few things I can share about it. So should you be interested to learn about the use of mesas in ritual magic, here are some thoughts...
Read MoreThe Fourth Step on the Everyday Path to your Holy Guardian Angel, Realization is now online. In the stage of Realization we get down to the essentials: we are re-creating our lives. In the article I use the analogy of creating our own Golem from the clay of our everyday lives, i.e. the choices, decision and actions we take everyday. We are not what we feel or think or fear inside, but what we choose to do. The shape of our life, the shape of the Golem we are about to create is defined by our deeds mainly.
Read MoreSince a couple of days I am working on the fourth part of the Everyday Path to your Holy Guardian Angel. In this phase it will be all about Realization. None of the five phases are more important than the other. Yet, as we advance on the path things become more occult in comparison to what most people would call their everyday lives... While gaining more Trust and Joy in life can be meaningful exercises for almost anybody - it's only once we emerge ourselves into Darkness that the magical aspect of this journey comes fully to the fore. And once we emerge from it back into daylight, I guess that is when the magic really starts. And that is also why writing about Realization isn't easy...
Read MoreLet's dig into the obvious question first: who am I to tell you how to achieve knowledge and conversation with your Holy Guardian Angel? Certainly I am not living in a desert like good old Abramelin did and hopefully you haven't searched for a wise teacher for years like Abraham of Worms once did. I am no teacher and you are no student - at least not more than we all are on our individual journeys.
Read More(...) In magic every piece of natural substance is a vessel of spiritual force. In a world that delivers almost any spiritual artefact, substance or rare ingredient right in front of our doorsteps 24/7 our altars and homes can easily turn into Egyptian tombs filled with all sorts of dwellings of power...
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