... Sättler points us to the historic name and records of an infamous magician, social revolutionary and martyr who aimed to restore the true form of Adonism roughly 1500 years ago. Compared to more recent occult celebrities who showed similar aspirations - Edward Kelly, Aleister Crowley or Gregor A. Gregorius to name a few - this man can fairly be considered the original godfather of occult social revolution, playing in his own Western league only with the likes of e.g. Shabbatai Zevi or Jakob Frank.
Read More(...) What is most striking in this presentation is Dr.Musallam’s continuous emphasis of the social aspects of religion or mystery cults. His measure for any cult is less founded on the volume of magico-mystical secrets revealed to its practitioners, and much more on the social impact it hand on the respective society.
Read More(...) Since the publications of Wilhelm Quintscher and Franz Bardon these spirits have come to be known as the ‘360 Genii of the Earthbeltzone’ (die 360 Genien der Erdgürtelzone). Unfortunately outside of the tight boundaries of the German speaking countries, they remain almost unknown to this present day. This is even more surprising considering that the first mentioning of their 360 names stems from one of the original manuscripts of the infamous ‘Book of Abramelin’.
Read MoreToday I have the pleasure to introduce you to someone whose magical work - as well as hermetic worldview - is very dear to me. Through my conversations with him as well as through experiencing his magical amulets firsthand, he offered me a completely fresh perspective on what it truly means to walk the hermetic path and to master magic. Even if few of us will ever be able to follow him in his footsteps, it is all of us who we can ensure it's genuine adepts like him who leave a deep mark on our Western Mystery Tradition.
Read MoreDespite being buried in oblivion by most of us today, Dr. phil. Franz Sättler was quite a remarkable figurehead of the 20th century German speaking occultism. Born on 7th March 1883 in Brüx, Bohemia and deceased about 1942 in Nazi captivity, Sättler during his lifetime was not only a remarkable and highly gifted orientalist, travel writer from the Orient and co-author of the first German-Persian dictionary, but also a spy, a magician, a dealer in occult books and services, a social reformer, a rebel for sexual freedom and - obviously - the founder of the cult of Adonism. (...)
Read MoreIn Eugen Grosche (1888-1964, aka Gregor A Gregorius), the founder of the Fraternitas Saturni, we come across one of the most chatoyant characters in the more recent tradition of Western Magic. Throughout his life he had a strongly polarising effect on people. While avoiding much of the public excesses and scandals of his magical contemporaries (e.g. Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley or the slightly younger Rosaleen Norton), his impact on the German speaking tradition of magic cannot be over-estimated. (...)
Read More(...) Just like the previous release, Mr.Lechler’s new book on 'The First Years of the Fraternitas Saturni' is of incredible value in light of the above. It continues to dismantle many of the myths of our tradition that we allowed to turn cold and become false orthodoxy. The results of his painful private studies and research continue to break open the stone we, i.e. the German speaking tradition of magic believed to firmly stand on. In doing so, Mr. Lechler’s new book offers a vast amount of new perspective, new interpretations and of living stories to come. (...)
Read MoreIf 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.
Read More
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. (...)
Read More
(...) 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.
Read More
(...) 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.
Read More
(...) 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 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 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 More