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 MoreOver the course of our exploration into the history and teachings of the order we were able to identify a few clear lines of transmission that came together and were united within their teaching. Especially important to identifying these lineages were the works of Gershom Scholem, Karl R.H. Frick and Jakob Katz. The below synopsis represents a highly simplified overview on the most important influences on the documented teachings of the Asiatic Brethren (...)
Read MoreLet’s begin by calling out that anything we are about to hear in this chapter we were never meant to hear. The Asiatic Brethren were founded in 1781; in 1701 the 15 year old maidservant Dorothee Tretschlaff had been the last victim of a German witch-trial and was beheaded in public. Of course 80 years later the executive power of the Catholic Church had further diminished and the struggle for the Age of Enlightenment had captured large parts of society. (...) So naturally we have to assume that the Asiatic Brethren took according precautions. The most obvious and secure of which obviously would have been to establish two streams of transmission: one in writing, and a second, more closely guarded of individual oral instructions.
Read MoreLike any good occult order the AB strived to provide a founding myth leading back into an ancient lineage. This was particularly important as we see highlighted in the order’s name, the aim was to establish a particularly strong connection to Asian occult traditions. The term ‘Asia’ in this context, however, is a vague reference to Asia-Minor. Thus it indicates a tradition that doesn’t stem from the European mainland, but from the Orient instead. Secondly, the term aimed to function as a name-tag which in the 18th century marked a tradition that was equally - or possibly more - ancient than the established Roman Catholic and Jewish orthodoxy.
Read MoreThis is the second chapter in our exploration of the order of the Asiatic Brethren. During the first chapter we undertook an excursus into Sabbatianism. However, in order to prove a direct influence of Sabbatai’s teachings on the Asiatic Brethren, we still need to bridge more than hundred years from Sabbatai’s death in 1676 to the founding year of the order in 1781. A second, maybe even more magical excursus on our Western Mystery tradition will therefore lead the way and quite easily guide us over this bridge.
Read MoreSo what is it that makes this short-lived order stand out from the crowd of other secret societies of its time? Why has it been hailed - rightly or wrongly so - to be one of the critical forerunners of the Golden Dawn and many its descendants - as well as to be an influential force on so many of our ancestors such as Eliphas Levi, Papus, P.B. Randolph, Frederick Hockley or Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie?
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 MoreNow, in my eyes we are confronted here with an essential consideration about the nature of the Great Work. And that is the question of its pace and speed. People often say ‘You cannot speed up the harvest.’ Often when I hear this I get impatient and think to myself: ‘Right. But you can certainly forget to sow, water and shield your crops.’ (...) So the question that emerges seems to be: How do we marry the virtues of discipline, focus and commitment with their balancing counter-weights of letting go, accepting, experiencing and immersing ourselves into what is offered to us? In short: how do we marry our male and female sides to become one in the Great Work?
Read MoreYet in the end it is so easy to fairly judge according to just criteria whoever seems to be leading or might be perceived as a leader. One may only look at them and upon their deeds. Not at the life they are leading as this is of no matter. Daimonic instruments such as these tend to lead their lives in different ways than the majority and in this respect are almost always abnormal. Yet are they supporting the spiritual freedom of humanity?
Read MoreSo once we have fine-tuned, trained and strengthened the magical and spiritual faculties that make up the human being - what is the Great Work we are meant to do? How do we contribute beyond ourselves? And what then is the path that we need to keep ourselves from squandering?
Read MoreWhat I am about to share here and for the first time in English language is one of the finest gems of their collections. It is the transcript of a lecture given in 1933 by a German Jewish magician and lodge member by the name of Brother Leonardo. In fact it is the second lecture of his in a small series. I will share the speech without any long introductions. For whatever it is worth to other people, this lecture in my eyes deserves to stand on its own, to speak for itself and to find ears that can hear wherever you may life.
Read MoreAt a relatively early stage when we begin to practice magic it is really helpful to develop a proper understanding of the term ‘topography’. Today, especially in the US the term is mainly used to refer to a map with elevation contours. However, its original meaning was much broader and one still can find it being used in its old form in many countries in ‘old Europe’. Topography is made up of the two Greek words ‘place’ (topos) and ‘writing’ (graphia). Thus in its original meaning it signifies an accurate description of a specific place. Such description wasn’t limited to geographic features but could also include an accurate report about the people living in this place, its wildlife, weather and even history.
Read MoreWell, I should warn you - this might be the most foolish post I shared yet. For one, because the two reports of magical experiments from the 1920s which I have translated for you don‘t shed a very positive light on our art and ancestors. In fact, they are probably amongst the worst examples of how to practice magic. As so often the anonymous magician involved seems to have held sufficient half-knowledge to be dangerous - dangerous all at the same time to himself, to his scryer, to the beings he worked with as well as to his own cat.
Read MoreVolker Lechler’s biography of Heinrich Tränker opens a profound new perspective on our magical past as it emerged in the early 20th century. Based on the life and work of Tränker as its central hub the book paints an equally broad and incredibly accurate and detailed picture of the origin stories of many of our current magical orders and how they were formed by the personalities and human weaknesses of their founders.
Acquiring such knowledge and understanding of one’s own tradition’s history is so much more than satisfying academic or historic curiosity. It enables today’s students of magic to consciously realise the human errors woven into the tapestry of tradition they learn from.
Read MoreHow do you review a book that begins to dismantle the myths of an entire tradition? A tradition that depends so much on the numinous, the ill-defined such as Western Ritual Magic. A tradition in fact that was only able to develop in the absence of books like this.
Such books are the results of decades of research, countless hours, weeks and months in old archives, of reading, re-reading and cross-referencing handwritten notes, letters and biographical evidence left behind by their now famous authors. Such books begin to replace myth with fact and craving for a mythical past with the knowledge of what truly happened. It is books like these that make the busts of our ancestors tumble and threaten to reduce them to what they truly were - people who struggled to understand the path of magic just as we do today. Yet, maybe even more drastic to some, books like these threaten to make entire lodge egregores tumble and fall - in the bright light of historic facts, in the mirror that reveals our ancestors’ flaws and lies born from their desire to recreate a romantic past rather than recognising it for what it was.
Read MoreBefore you learn how to sit still, before you learn how to breathe, before you learn how to cast a circle, before you even learn how to focus your mind, ideally the very first thing you learn is how to look. That is: How to look into the talking mirror of your inner contacts and listen to what they tells you. For most of us in the Western Tradition this talking mirror is the Tarot. What you see in it depends on what you put in front of it - which question, situation, sickness, being, vision or dream. However, whatever it is you expose to this mirror its answer will be unapologetically straight forward.
Read MoreRecently I shared the account of the sixth ritual in the Arbatel cycle, the rite of the Olympic Spirit of Bethor. Performing this ritual was an eye opening experience on many levels. Not at least because it was the first Grimoire-related ritual I performed simultaneously in vision and in ritual. Being able to witness the magical tides and dynamics from both sides was a completely different experience to any of the previous Arbatel rites.
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