If you follow its path consider yourself in the business of turning yourself into a spiritual adult. Now, the paradox on this path is this: For many years you'll be the baby, the teenager and the adult all in one person. Life doesn't come with an instruction leaflet; all boundaries are temporary in nature. As part of your journey with the Quareia material nobody will disciplinise you, except for yourself. And nobody will praise you, except for yourself. Someone once said, 'Integrity is what you do when nobody is watching'. Without integrity you can still have a fulfilled live, believe me. You might even be able to become a magician in the traditional, sad sense. But you certainly won't get anywhere with Quareia.
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Looking from the outside in one could come to the conclusion that by the late 15th century ritual magic had degraded into a mummified, fractured and fallen version of a once golden antique past. Sigils, circles, recipes and barbaric names were copied from manuscript to manuscript and seemed to lose more and more of their original and integral meaning each time a scribe put their hand to them. Ultimately the genre was perceived to degenerate to a cryptic extravaganza, a marginal phenomenon within a dark and largely unchartered ecclesiastic subculture. (...)
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(...) Most importantly, however, we can now see the lay of the magical land towards the end of the Middle Ages: By no means was the ‘renaissance of magic’ a rebirth of magic, i.e. the revival of a tradition interrupted since classical times and only preserved in Greek or Arabic source texts. The magical tradition towards the end of the 15th century was well and alive. Yet, its blood pulsed through veins hidden from the public eye.
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(...) Magic as such didn't hold its own category but rather presented a particular view of the world - including a broad array of spiritual practices that could be applied to any subject. Thus treatises on e.g. precious stones could be written from a magical point of view as could be treatises on certain diseases, agricultural rhythms or even astrology itself. Broadly speaking, magic was not a matter of subject but of perspective. It was precisely this fluid nature that made it incredible hard to confine for medieval authorities - and still makes it incredible hard to track down for modern day researchers. A treatise providing instructions on certain 'magical practices' could be bound into literally any sort of codex.
Read More(...) In short, we have to let go of our own inner compass of judgement, of the things we like to take for granted, when trying to understand the lives and motives of our forefathers several hundreds years ago. Just as people looked and smelled differently, so they also felt differently, thought differently and appreciated things in very different ways from us today. Modern day gut feel thus is a terribly bad tour-guide to explore our ancestors' actual living realities.
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(...) At the turn of the 16th century Agrippa of Nettesheim was a young man of fourteen about to immerse himself into a life weathered by more storms than many of us could imagine today. For decades already these storms had been gathering forces over the continent. Now they were about to unfold on what we have come to know as Europe today, overthrowing and changing the very foundations of society as people had known it and never questioned it for centuries....
Read MorePublished in 1888 - during the same year as the publication of the opus magnum of the Theosophic Society, Blavatsky's 'Secret Doctrine' as well as the inception of the first temple of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn - Waite wrote this article at the dawn of the currents that would come to define Western magic in the 20th century. It thus allows a glimpse into how one of the GD’s earliest members rationalised and comprehended their own magical tradition - before going on to forge a new link in this chain through their own order. If we allow ourselves to forget the forged letters of Fräulein Sprengel, it’s in this early essay that we can find a lot of the intellectual assumptions as well historic roots the early GD emerged from.
Read More(...) Then I hear the voice of the commander of Auschwitz talking through my radio. His voice is cold and marked as if he was biting off every half-sentence. He talks about how he had been involved in organising the operations of the killing, in transforming a large labor camp into a the world’s most infamous death camp.
Read MoreSomewhere out there is - or maybe once was? - an African tribe that had a very particular initiation rite turning its boys into men. For them that threshold consisted of a ritualised fight between pairs of boys battling each other. However, the only weapon they were allowed to use was a double-bladed knife. This knife was forged into a ring and worn on their wrists. Thus one blade was facing outside while the other faced inside towards their own skin. Now, leashing out at each other during the fight, every single cut they landed would cut just as deeply into their own skin.
Read More(...) Ritual magic is a fascinating case example to this. A tradition that is highly unstable in its actual transmission, yet incredibly persistent in its existence. The idea of an orthodox version of any grimoire really is a paradox in itself. What these books are, are records of personal experiences - written down from the practitioner’s perspective in the attempt to define and pin down the actual practices that opened the door to his particular experiences.
Read MoreIt's been several years now that I have been researching on the history of magic in the German speaking countries. It all began with the simple question of how our tradition of Western Magic looked before the time of the GD - especially in Germany, a country where much of their work was published only much later and which was once home to the Rosicrucians movement. The in-depth study On the Order of the Asiatic Brethren which I shared in five parts in mid-2014 was a first result of this research. It focusses an often overlooked strand of our tradition in the 18th century (...)
Read MoreIt's almost been six months since my last post. I can't tell you how much I missed this place and how much I am looking forward to getting back in touch with you over the coming weeks. Like for many of us, 2014 was full of the gods' tough love for me. With all the best intention, they sometimes forget how fragile we are? But then I guess, the only way hard lessons are learned is head on?
Read More(...) what I had misunderstood is what the term ‘work’ actually stands for. The Latin word ‘producere’ can be translated literally as to ‘bring forth’ or ‘draw out’. So in my simple Western mind ‘work’ was something that flowed from the inside outwards. From intend to action and from action to result. I understood work as the process of achieving a state of change by means of applying ourselves to the world. May it be through the help of our hands, of our minds or words. Whatever interface between us and the world we choose to use, work was an active noun, the opposite of death almost, and altogether a pretty safe sign for being alive.
Read MoreShould magical training come for free? I guess that’s a question we all come across at some point. Whenever people dip their toes into anything ‘spiritual’ correlations to financial interests or dependencies can easily turn problematic. Or do they? I recall asking exactly that question to my first teacher during the early days of my own training. He looked at me quite startled and had a very straight forward view on this subject. Here is what he said.
Read More'What becomes important in the end only, should create the beginning: The magical awakening! Book-spectre and ritual-larvae otherwise find a welcome sacrifice in any student, and associations will begin to serve nothing but the life force-hungry group egregore as well as their own leaders - most of which ultimately live on the breadline themselves and keep above water by offering pseudo-positive thinking, knowledge and imagining of various configurations. The history of magic has proven it over many centuries - what comes out at the end is mostly wasted and precious life time, without having enriched one’s own life or the world. The institutionalising of magic is a delicate matter indeed.' -- Walter Ogris
Read MoreOver the last months Josephine McCarthy and I have been working quietly on a project we called 'Quareia'. This Medieval Latin term refers to 'a place where stones are squared'. It seemed a fitting metaphor for a place where also we are shaped and born as magicians. And that is what Quareia is meant to become: a new and completely open magical school - without fees, structures of hierarchy or imbalances of power between students and teachers. A place to be shaped for every magical practitioner who is searching for a new way of learning, integrating and practicing magic. All the way from beginner to adepthood.
Read More(...) General theories about the nature of the being Choronzon are completely meaningless. By following them you are just led further away from what needs exploring. All they do is to put another label on top of an existing one - and thus seal away the actual experience even further. — I’d like to hope that for Crowley Choronzon wasn’t a label - but a living seal that expressed and summarised his personal experiences in the Abyss. It was the ‘you’ that he encountered on his journey into this darkest of places. If we really have to, then I’d encourage all of us to find our own Choronzon, our own ‘you’s as we explore the magical realm.
Read More"Magic and training? Are these two not contradictory and incompatible concepts? Are the two terms not mutually exclusive? Can you be trained in something that according to the general conception and representation is a discipline of self-responsibility, of active self-awareness and thus a process of self-knowledge par excellence, that defies any specified instructions or even preconceptions?" -- Agrippa
Read MoreWhenever the topic of magical titles or grades comes up I felt pretty divided. On the one hand I couldn't care less about symbols of hierarchy invented by humans and labeled onto other humans. At the same time, the way my mind worked for the first decade of magical training I really needed something that acted as milestones to map out the magical path I was following. At IMBOLC we used the classical 10° system mapped onto the Tree of Life. I remember the first three years, practicing daily for at least an hour and probably having done about 16 practical and theoretical exams before I was granted the grade 1°=10 Zelator... -- So what does it mean to me today, if someone calls me an Adept? Is this a title I should accept or refuse?
Read MoreJosephine and I have been collaborating on various magical projects for several years now. A side effect of this partnership is that I receive wonderful lessons from a true adept and she gets a brick wall to bang her head against. Or almost. At least it's fair to say that initially our approaches to magic were diametrically opposed: Josephine teaching a very organic, though incredibly pragmatic approach to visionary magic - and me having just emerged from more than a decade of rigorously structured ritual work and occult philosophic studies. So when we first met it could have easily been the perfect clash of paradigms. Yet, it turned out to be the opposite.
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