Today 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 More(...) Now, to make this project happen everyone's contribution is required. Whether you want to help through pre-ordering your copy now or instead through a crowdfunding donation - every little helps! This project has been carried for years by very few people, they have brought it a huge way - and so close to its realisation. I truly hope in the next 21 days we can bring it over the finishing line jointly.
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 More(...) Let’s explore this hypothesis together: The biggest block to leading an ethical life is to fear failure. Actually, to be afraid of failure is a distinctly human invention. Nature never considers failure an option. Had it set out a few millenials ago to achieve evoultion and hat it been afraid of getting it wrong somewhere along that eternal path, where would that have left all of us? None of us would be here. Instead of being afraid of failure, nature embraced the idea of adaptive recovery as its secret design principle for everything it does. Failure thus turned from the worst-case scenario into a necessary trigger for any learning process.
Read MoreMagic was never meant for men. We made it our own. We tore it ouf the earth and pulled it down from the skies. Think of Prometheus as a man who volunteered for a death of fire. Walking up the pyre all by himself, lighting the torch, throwing it down to his feet. Offering himself in the pursuit of what he believed to be withheld unrightfully.
Read More(...) Magical paraphernalia are like four-dimensional recordings of a ritual event. Think of a sacred space filled with a handful of such implements - and now switch positions and look through the eyes of the spirits: Can you see how incredibly busy and noisy this place is? Because from the spirit’s viewpoint these implements, these material tools of spiritual recordings, are in constant playback mode. Without ever stopping they express the rhythms, utterances, forces and living beings recorded into them.
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.
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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?
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