Book Update on my Paracelsian Trilogy
Let me take a moment to share a long overdue book update. Let me cover both the writing I have been doing over the last years and projects I aim to complete before the end of 2022. And if you don’t have time to read it all, I’ll make it really short. Here is the Paracelsian trilogy I am close to completing:
HOLY HERETICS - is a book of Promethean spirit and a primer on stealing the mago-mystical fire from the tombs of the Christian churches. It culminates in a restored Paracelsian initiation ritual with the Olympic Spirits. It is focussed to generate inner fire and magical contact.
INGENIUM - is a book about what it means to be truly human when standing surrounded by spirits. It shows a path into Radical Otherness and back again into the magi-mystical inner tools of magic as laid out by Paracelsus. It is focussed to generate wisdom and a living heart.
THE OLYMPIC SPIRITS BOOK - is a book about the history and the evolution of practice with the Olympic Spirits. It’s a deeply Paracelsian primer to walk the narrow path, and a restored grimoire of white magic. It is focussed to generate clear thinking and clean practice.
Contacted Writing
Before we get into the details, though, I should stress how these books have come to life. All the writing I have been doing over the last ten years happened in magical contact with the same group of spirits.
What does that mean? It means, I work with a small group of spirits and I invite them into my house, into my heart, and into my mind and hands. It is together with these spirits that I co-create all the written work that over the coming months will take the form of physical books.
The way this works in practice is simple: As long as I refresh my ritual contact to the respective spirits each week, they are ever present with me. They are with me, within me, like moons circling around the earth of my mind, giving me tides of images, ideas and words. If I stay still and open long enough, I can get their expressions down on paper quite cleanly.
The challenge in such way of contacted writing, as I have learned over the years, is both to allow the spirits to speak unconstrained, as well as to ensure that facts are not overlooked, that quotes and footnotes are tight and precise. Ultimately, to ensure the narrative adds up and shows a path that is worthwhile walking.
So, what fruits has this work borne over the past two and a half years?
HOLY HERETICS
Following on the heels of completing Black Abbot White Magic in 2019, the spirits had a very precise idea of our next project: They told me to write an outline of how the mystical fire had been passed on, hidden and almost extinguished in Continental Europe over the last two-thousand years. Of course, I immediately replied: Thanks, but no thank you.
Not only would I be entirely unqualified to do such work, I thought, but also the limited time I have each day for writing presented the outlook of a decade long project… As often before, while still pondering the sheer magnitude of the project they suggested, I felt spirits rolling their non-existent eyes, and slap me over the back of the head. — By spring 2021 we had completed the book.
The process of writing Holy Heretics was the most pure experience of writing with magical contact I ever had the privilege of living through. Each morning I sat down, and each morning I was precisely instructed where to look for guidance, what to include and what to leave away. If you have ever studied under a highly experienced but very strict tutor, you know exactly what I am talking about.
Unfortunately, from an editing and layout perspective the book turned out rather complex. Which is why I am deeply grateful to Alkistis and Peter from Scarlet Imprint who have been wrestling with this mystical beast for many months. I will equally always be indebted to Jose Gabriel Alegria Sabogal for bringing to life this book with the magic of ink and paper, which he has perfected like no one else…
Thanks to additional Covid-related delays, pre-order for Holy Heretics is now scheduled to open in July 2022. Below is the high level content section – which also tells you that I did not live up to the spirit’s original instruction. Instead of covering an outline over a full stretch of two-thousand years, we follow the weave of the mystical light over 1500 years only.
What I am particularly surprised by is the last chapter on the Rite of the Olympic Spirit. For this chapter, in addition to the spirits, Josephine McCarthy shared brilliant guidance through several versions of this work. When I look at the end result – a never before published Paracelsian ritual fully restored – I know I’ll never write a more powerful (which also equals, dangerous) chapter on magical practice.
INGENIUM
The fact that INGENIUM would need to follow Holy Heretics was already clear to me, before I finished writing the latter. I put a statement out in 2021 that it’s likely going to be several years before this book would be done. Again, more than to anybody else, I was speaking to the spirits in my house, in my heart and my hands - and asked them to slow down and give me a break.
Where Holy Heretics unearthed the mystical fire and aimed to create contact to the Olympic Spirit(s), INGENIUM’s mission is to pierce through all byways and detours, and to reveal what happens to a human after they have created such contact.
INGENIUM is a book about human qualities. More specifically, as Paracelsus would have put it, it is a book about the human quality and how it is enlivened through magic.
When I enquired for the best way to approach this book, the spirits already had a clear idea again: To know what makes a human human, one best begins by gazing fearlessly into the mirror of Radical Otherness.
So after all, you’ll get less history and a lot more of my own and my spirits’ voice in this book. In a way, this book is an antithesis to Black Abbot White Magic, which focussed on bringing Trithemius’ voice and magic back to life. INGENIUM will be my most personal book yet.
And still, it presents a seamless continuation from Holy Heretics in so far, as it is a deeply Paracelsian book. At some point over the course of 2020, I guess, Paracelsus’ spirit simply took a seat in the circle of the daemons I was working with already. He is still here with me in this house now, or the echo of his presence is. He shows me where to open his books, where to find keys to deliberately cryptic passages, and how to listen to his words not with an academically trained mind, but an open, ancient, pagan heart.
If anybody truly conducts the Rite of the Olympic Spirit, they will find INGENIUM to be a compass helping them navigate the Olympic wilderness – the Olympi Terrae as Paracelsus would have said – they will find themselves thrown into.
INGENIUM, just like the deeper process of becoming human, is a story that only unfolds once we have mastered many years of practical magic. I did not set out to write an easy book or an accessible primer. I set out to write a genuinely Paracelsian book, coloured by my own blood and filled with both of our lives.
Below is the draft content section. The book is currently in the masterful hands of an artist I have admired for decades: Joseph Uccello. He has full creative control over its final form and body. We are currently on schedule to release it late in 2022 with my friends at TaDehent Books.
THE BOOK OF THE OLYMPIC SPIRITS
Relentless, raging, wondrous, beautiful experience of writing with the spirits in my house.
I finished INGENIUM in early 2022, and soon after that I had the content section of my next book outlined. It was taking me into a completely different direction, into the lore of Russian fairy tales, into blood, bones and back into the stained lands of goeteia and the ancient Scythian past.
It was after I finished the material collection for this book, that the spirits told me to put a pause on the entire project - and to return to the Olympic Spirits once again. In no uncertain terms, they told me to finish the work I had started - and that I wasn’t done yet.
It took me a while to adjust, but now I can see it clearly: Where Holy Heretics is mediating magical contact, and INGENIUM is lightening up Paracelsus’s spirit from the heart – what required completion still is the actual written history as well as the evolution of practice of the Olympic Spirits.
The Book of the Olympic Spirits is a working title. As I am sharing this update, the project is two thirds done. Below is the content section as it stands. We will cover a lot of ground - from Paracelsus’ Archidoxis Magicae, to the Arbatel, to previously untranslated magical sections from Robert Fludd, to early 18th century grimoires and early 20th century folk-shamans still conjuring the Olympic Spirits…
Deliberately, I am writing this book as a stand-alone volume that people can read without having delved into any of my other work. Especially the second part will be the most grimoire-style book of my publications yet. And because I don’t like that necessarily, I am slowing down to infuse all the Paracelsian spirit required to unlock the deeper meaning of magic in its first part.
To my great delight, I had the honour of attracting the attention of a truly outstanding female artist to breath visual spirits into this book: the amazing Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos. We are currently exchanging thoughts about how to stay true to the hardcore Paracelsian spirit of the book, and at the same time find ways to give shape to all the ghosts, and magical contacts he deliberately hid in plain sight…
The Book of the Olympic Spirits is a work genuinely inspired by Paracelsus’ Musa sagax. It is currently on schedule for publication with TaDehent Books in early 2023.
“I swear to you by everything that is holy to me: neither Arius, Photin, nor Mohammed, nor any other heretic were ever so heretical as this unholy magus.”