# Perseus Arcane Academy > Perseus Arcane Academy brings together lifelong practitioners, structured courses and a major archive on Franz Bardon, Hermetics, evocation and Quabbalah. Perseus Arcane Academy serves serious students of Hermetics, ritual magic, meditation, internal arts and alchemy. It offers 50+ structured courses from multiple experienced teachers, alongside in-depth interviews and one of the largest independent archives on Franz Bardon. Unlike single-teacher schools, Perseus brings together distinct systems and practical paths through Quabbalah, evocation, mysticism and embodied practice. - Brand: Perseus Arcane Academy, Perseus Academy, PAA, Perseus Arcane Acadamy, Sixty Skills, Sixty Skills Master Course, The Master Course, Sixty Skills Kabbalah, Sixty Skills Quabbalah, Planetary Kabbalah, Planetary Quabbalah, Sixty Skills Zodiac Course, School of Visionary Hermeticism, SVH, Magic and Mystical Introspection, MMI, Meta Magick, Meta Magick Tarot, Neo-Shamanism, Neo Shamanism, Gathering of the Magi, Perseus Community --- # Jake Green Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/jake-green/ Mystery College with Jake Green ### Reiki, Initiation, Evocation and Kabbalah [  Study with Jake](https://payhip.com/b/pJtvd)Jake has a tremendous amount of experience that has been gained from some intensive training literally living and travelling with some very well-known teachers from within the Franz Bardon community. The result of this is a clarity and understanding of the path of the Initiate, Sphere Magician and Quabbalist with the rare ability to teach the skills that allow others to gain that very same access and understanding, in short Jake can help you achieve what he has with nothing held back. In 2022 Jake created the Mystery College where he shares experience in a range of courses. Perseus and the Mystery College work closely together to ensure high quality teachings are always available to the public, consisting of entire systems of practice taking someone from complete beginner to adept. We at Perseus are proud to host Jakes huge Masterclass series - Initiation, Evocation and Kabbalah. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/j2-976x736x176x0x663x736x1704883567.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/fractal-1793218_1920-447x360x0x6x447x354x1704885104.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/pexels-rodolfo-clix-1597017-scaled-447x671x0x159x447x354x1704885516.jpg) # Read his Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/pexels-alex-azabache-3243020-scaled-532x798x0x265x532x269x1704885557.jpg) ## In this Interview Jake discusses his journey, his training and his approach to Initiation, Evocation and Kabbalah Read the Interview ## Read More About The Initiation into Hermetics Masterclass [Learn more about the Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) ## Read More About The Kabbalah Masterclass [Learn more about the Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-complete-universal-kabbalah-masterclass) ## Read More About The Evocation Masterclass [Learn more about the Course](https://payhip.com/b/eGXY2) ### Join Jake for his 3-day FREE Reiki Fundamentals Course With our free 3-day course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of Reiki energy healing and how it can be used to support your own well-being and the well-being of others. You’ll discover the history and origins of Reiki, the different levels and attunements, and the role of intention and visualization in this powerful healing modality. Our experienced Reiki instructor **Jake Green** will guide you through interactive lessons and hands-on practice sessions so that you can experience the benefits of Reiki energy work for yourself. And with our online format, you can participate from the comfort of your own home at a time that’s convenient for you. **For a limited time**, this 3-day course is being shared with motivated learners based on a scholarship model. Typically, a course experience like this is worth hundreds of dollars. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to discover the transformative power of Reiki energy healing. Sign up for our free 3-day course today and take the first step on your Reiki journey! ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/ReikiPro-589x290x8x0x573x290x1704885623.jpg) ## Join up and let Jake guide you to a new experience Visit Reiki Healing Pro --- # Andre Consciencia Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/andre-consciencia/ Indepth Magical Training ### Modern Day Adept Andre Consciencia [  Study with Andre  ](https://payhip.com/b/pJtvd)André lives in Moita, Portugal and has been a dedicated practitioner of magic and mysticism for more than two decades. He met Fraternitas Hermetica (an order based on the works of Franz Bardon) while still a minor and had an initiator that stood even after the order vanished. He also has worked with his old initiator for 20 years. He has experience of other magical systems such as AMORC, Order of Michael’s Grail (with roots on Dion Fortune), Thelemic Golden Dawn, Astrum Argentum, the Typhonian OTO and the OTOA-LCN. Andre is incredibly creative, producing a huge amount of material with volumes of work. His books are entire paths, taking one from the comfort of being an armchair magician all the way to that of an adept. That is just one book! On this page we look at the different courses of training that Andre offers for those seeking advancement on the path. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/287007314_5033942263392352_6792769018169661287_n-663x994x0x0x663x736x1704885133.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/286533721_424246062636937_3534363534795838182_n-2-627x354x146x0x447x354x1704885126.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/286374481_440848060710527_8716179104580021979_n-530x354x41x0x447x354x1704885113.jpg) # Read his Interviews We highly recommend that if you have interest in Andres work and even an interest in studying with him then you should certainly read the following interviews. These really help explain what you are entering into and just how fortunate we are to have him sharing his knowledge. ![magical gestures](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/andre-cover-1-479x361x81x0x270x361x1704885204.jpg) ##### Part 1: Depth of Andres Work It is incredible how far the rabbit hole goes. In this interview Andre gives us a glimpse. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Andre-cover-2-479x361x105x0x270x361x1704885205.jpg) ##### Part 2: Depth of Andres Work Part 1 was not enough space to go into details. In this part we dive deeper. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/286533721_424246062636937_3534363534795838182_n-2-644x363x187x0x271x363x1704885126.jpg) ##### Andre: Magician & Mystical Guide A look at Andres recent book which doubles as a profound magical path. [![Ceremonial Magick](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Leonardo_Diffusion_XL_a_mystical_practitioner_of_occult_arts_w_0-482x361x106x0x270x361x1704889710.jpg)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/seeking-the-greater-mysteries-ceremonial-magic-franz-bardons-mastery-and-the-golden-dawn-tradition/) ##### Seeking the Greater Mysteries Andre discusses Golden Dawn and the Bardon path. [![Andre Consciencia at Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/286273180_1020624735226293_2774844859745159877_n-517x361x124x0x270x361x1704877902.webp)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/?s=andre) ##### Bridging World's: Exploring Neoshamanism A deep dive into Neoshamanism as taught by Andre.. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Andres-Curriculum-363x363x46x0x271x363x1720684118.jpg)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/andre-consciencia-and-his-training-curriculum/) ##### Andres Curriculum A look at the curriculum devised by Andre. WATCH VIDEO # Learn about Magical & Mystical Introspection ## Join the multi-year Course: Magical and Mystical Introspection This course by André Consciência is based on Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sun Sphere, a book by the same author published at Falcon Books. It takes the practitioner through a series of steps that are in unison with the mentioned book. In turn, the book itself focus on all the steps of Initiation Into Hermetics, by Franz Bardon, as practiced and achieved via the many arts of introspection and ennoblement of the soul. This course makes a great companion for any practicing either of these books, but it stands on its own for anyone wishing a path that helps in self-realization by knowledge and dominion in the physical, emotional and psychic planes as well as in the material, astral and mental planes. We start from the level 1 and from there on to years of on-going work, for which the books are not a requirement. The practitioner of Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sphere of the Sun or of Initiation Into Hermetics may, however, specifically choose the level in the course that bests suits them to boost their Great Work. The feet of the practitioner will walk universally, the heart will have saved itself to serve in silence, the flesh will remain mortal yet already immortal by the virtue of its aspirations. He or she will speak through the same mouth as all beings and through the same mouth will he or she be recognized by the intelligences, who are matter and who have conquered matter, becoming truth. [Learn More](https://payhip.com/b/pJtvd) WATCH VIDEO # Learn about Elemental Magic as taught by the Elementals ## Join the multi-year Course: Elemental Magic as taught by the Elementals Have you ever felt deeply connected with Nature? What if you could channel the primal energies of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water to transform your life and manifest your deepest dreams? This course is designed to provide an understanding of each element's unique properties and their impact on your quality of life. Through ongoing lessons, practical exercises, and applications, you’ll learn how to channel these elemental forces to enhance your magic, mysticism, power and sensibility. Whether you’re seeking to amplify your magical abilities or simply gain a deeper connection with the natural world, this course will equip you.? The Course is ongoing and new levels and lessons will be created as students progress. Here we leave an outline of various materials regarding the Earth Element. Elemental magick with expert guidance, practical techniques, and a supportive community, all designed to fit your busy schedule and guarantee results. The first 10 students who sign up can choose to receive a wooden pendant crafted by André Consciência, oil painted with the seal of one of the elemental guides present in the course.  Key Benefits: W- Begin a harmonious relationship with the environment around you. - Gain access to elementals that have empowered practitioners for centuries. - Integrate elemental awareness and magic into your existing spiritual and mundane life. - Expert instruction that suits both beginners and experienced practitioners. - Connect with like-minded individuals in optional group activities. - Strengthen your intuitive abilities by connecting with Nature and its elementals. - Greater insight and clarity. - Greater balance and harmony in all areas. - Direct knowledge of the attributes of each element, allowing you to use them effectively. - Receive ongoing support. - 60% discount on Magic and Mystical Introspection. - If you are a student in Magic and Mystical Introspection, you get 60% discount on the Elemental Magic course. [Learn More](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic) WATCH VIDEO # Ceremonial Magick and the Bardon Tradition ## Join Year Long Course: Ceremonial Magick and the Bardon Tradition In this course of three levels, we will be taking the two most famous rituals of the Golden Dawn the* Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram* and the *Middle Pillar Exercise* and decode them into a full course of adepthood, inner mastery, invocation, evocation, theurgic incantation and divine communion. Each gesture and intention will portray a reflection of a deep magical and mystical work undergone by the student who will be applying mostly methodologies from Franz Bardon's three works *Initiation Into Hermetics, The Practice of Magical Evocation, and The Key to True Quabbalah*, an author we chose for his universality that can be applied to most traditions and to the generality of rituals. *This course is essentially a mentorship with Andre Consciencia taking anyone regardless of their level of experience through a course of inner mastery towards adepthood.* [Learn More](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-in-the-bardon-tradition) # Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neoshamanism ## Join the Neoshamanism Course For decades now, I have been practicing neoshamanism in parallel with my endeavors in hermetics and magic, having formed my shamanic groups and circles. Occasionally, it appears in my teachings or when I share a story with one of my Perseus Arcane Academy students. To such an extent, that I have been directly asked in more than one instance, to create a video course specifically on neoshamanism and make it available on this same platform. As the suggestion sat upon the back of my head, this point in time led exactly to its realization, an immersive video course that delves into the ancient roots of shamanic practices while aligning with the dynamics of today. This course will demystify the rituals, tools, and techniques of Neo-Shamanic practices, thickening the connection with the spirit world. [Learn More](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism:-levels-1-5) ## How about an 'Introduction' to Magic? Andre also provides a very concise course to introduce students to the most important foundational aspects of magic, all for free. Read more about Introduction to Magic ### Andre also offers extremely educational books to help seekers progress upon the path [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Dragon-270x404x0x21x270x361x1704885636.jpg)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dragon-Tarot-Inner-Circle-Triangle/dp/1890399981/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Dragon+Tarot%3A+The+Inner+Circle+and+the+Triangle&qid=1680657238&sr=8-1) ##### The Dragon Tarot: The Inner Circle and the Triangle This is truly a conjurer's Tarot. The user does not select the cards at random or allow high or low entities from the Invisible World to pick the cards. The conjurer selects the cards themselves thus creating a powerful spell projecting Will into future Manifestation. The deck itself is constructed by the conjurer using images available on the internet. A powerful fluid condenser is mixed and used, along with the conjurer’s menstrual blood or semen, to bring the cards and deck to life. The deck becomes a magickal instrument of deeply personal and thus universal application. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/sun-270x431x0x22x270x362x1704885634.jpg)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09YHLC26J/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1) ##### Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun If you know Initiation Into Hermetics, by the Czech author, hermeticist and stage magician Franz Bardon, you can imagine the meaning of these words applied to his concept of the soul mirror. And what if, through soul mirrors, you could understand each exercise of Initiation Into Hermetics from inside yourself and bring them to their unfolding? And what if each exercise could further remove the scales of the eyes so that they can find greater, more terrible, vaster and wonderous vistas at each step, ever as onto the Soul of the World and the Mouth of the Sun? Here lies the mission of this book, original enough to be a system of its own [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Elementals-271x432x0x34x271x363x1704885633.jpg)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BTMPG42H/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0) ##### A Guide to the Elementals In the book we offer, we are mostly concerned with certain features of Edinnu, the Garden of God or the Paradise of Pleasure, that is, the heavenly region directly connected to the senses. Entrance is subject to certain conditions. The Sumerians had at the door their scorpion versions of the sphinx, angels whose gaze was death, and the Jewish Paradise had the flaming sword that would smite the visitor. These are representations of the ecstatic states of trance where the elements stop being seen in their limited form and become infinite as four aspects of the Divine. --- # Sixty Skills Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/sixty-skills/ Sixty Skills - A Practical Approach ### 30 Years of Travel, Discovery and Training   Learn from Sixty Skills  We are extremely happy to have *SixtySkills* on Perseus Arcane Academy. After conducting many interviews with the founder, the feedback for these interviews has always been incredible. There are not many out there who have the experience and the ability to communicate clearly exactly what to do, how to do it and how to ensure ongoing progress rather than getting stuck and fixated on specific practices. The *SixtySkills* curriculum is liberating as it opens these teachings to anyone willing to put the hours in. On this page we have included the description of all courses available in the 18-month curriculum for part 1 of the overall curriculum - and a direct link to the individual course. We also offer the opportunity to purchase all of the *SixtySkills* curriculum in one purchase - the Master Course - for those who are interested we are offering a generous discount. # Sixty Skill - Five Part Curriculum See a clear breakdown of every part of the five-part curriculum. [See Curriculum](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-five-part-curriculum/)![Sixty Skills Meditation and Franz Bardon Training](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Sixtyskillsteacher-1-663x883x0x74x663x736x1704883747.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/109_0962-Copy-472x354x12x0x447x354x1704884947.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Action-photo-Copy-447x597x0x122x447x354x1704884968.jpg) ## All Corners of the World... **GREAT UPDATES** ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Photo-Aug-13-12-41-53-PM-Copy-scaled-468x351x44x0x380x351x1704885085.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/109_0956-731x548x0x98x731x353x1704884273.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/109_0953-731x548x0x112x731x323x1704884253.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/103_0334-Copy-434x325x27x0x380x325x1704884709.jpg) # Discover Sixty Skills & The Master Course ## Would you like to try a course? #### In order to let people discover how effective Sixty Skills courses are, Bob the founder has agreed for one of the most important courses to be made available to everyone. You can go through the course and see how you benefit. #### If this is something you would like to do then click the button below to get your FREE course - All we ask is that you actually practice it and finish it. # Your Free Course The Three Transformations is a critical foundation for those pursuing this path as it is both fundamental and advanced. Join the course today and you can gain a deeper understanding of this transformative process. Join the CourseSixty Skills - A Practical Approach ### Why is the Curriculum so Important?   Learn from Sixty Skills  The significance of this curriculum lies in its ability to serve as the fundamental basis for achieving independence. Without such independence, one cannot effectively engage with the unseen realm and create their own Akasha and Non-Dual Light. This lack of self-sufficiency can leave one vulnerable to various risks and implications. In essence, the curriculum's importance stems from its role in fostering a sense of autonomy and empowerment. 'Ultimately I want all sentient beings to be free, this training is one way to do that.' - Sixty Skills In addition to the critical factor mentioned earlier, there is another compelling reason to complete this curriculum. By doing so, you will be well-equipped to participate fully in Bob's future endeavors at SixtySkills. Bob has grand plans and is holding nothing back, with a well thought out curriculum that ensures anyone with the work ethic can make progress. But to take advantage of these opportunities, it is essential to possess the necessary foundational skills. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Sixtyskillsteacher-271x362x0x0x270x362x1704883704.jpg) ##### Interview 1 (Written) This is a great insight into just where this path can go with the proper work ethic. Prepare to be stunned. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/fractal-1793218_1920-450x362x90x0x270x362x1704885104.jpg) ##### Interview 2 (Written) This interview updates us on work previously mentioned. The startling results, the conclusions drawn and what comes next. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/ai-generated-g93a85cb01_1920-545x363x137x0x271x363x1704883489.jpg) ##### Master Course Extended Previews This post is a full listing of the 18-Month Temple Curriculum. Each course is listed with extensive previews for you to watch. ## Interview with Sixty Skills Courtesy of Clint Sabom # The Master Course If you are a serious practitioner who aims to complete the curriculum, then the best thing to do is to get the Master Course. This allows you to save $450 compared to buying the courses separately. This is also the lowest price you will ever see the individual courses or the Master Course at. Due to inflation and world events, prices will have to go up at some point. So the Master Course allows you to secure the entire curriculum at todays prices. [Join Part 1 of the Curriculum: The Master Course](https://payhip.com/b/tS1Tn) --- # Denny Sargent Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/denny-sargent/ A Lifetime of Practice ### Denny Sargent [  Study with Denny  ](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm)Aion 131 (Denny Sargent) is a writer, teacher, and eclectic ritualist. He was introduced to mythology and magic in New York City where he grew up and has been a member of various initiatory groups. Denny has a BA in Education and an MA in Ancient History. He has spent over 20 years as a ceramic and sigil artist and his work has been displayed in Seattle. He has taught at several colleges and academies, specializing in ESL, and currently directs a language school. Denny has taught seminars on various topics and has written for many different Pagan and magical magazines. He is politically dedicated towards environmental goals and is a committed member of several Green organizations. Denny has engaged in extensive traveling and research and has written a book titled Global Ritualism, Myth & Magick Around the World. He is currently working on various projects and has a new book coming out called The Tao of Birth Days. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Denny-Angel-663x994x0x0x663x736x1704885328.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Denny-Stars-447x671x0x58x447x354x1704885322.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/pexels-hakeem-james-hausley-5418677-scaled-447x671x0x159x447x353x1704885242.jpg) # Learn about Meeting Your Guardian Angel ## Join the Course: Attaining your Guardian Angel (Courses 1-3) [Learn More](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm) # Magical and Spiritual Banishing ## Join the Course: Magic and Spiritual Banishing [Learn More](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/magical-and-spiritual-banishing) # Learn About Denny ## Join the Course: Attaining your Guardian Angel (Courses 1-3) [Learn More](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Denny-Angel-637x955x0x203x637x548x1704885328.jpg)INTERVIEWS ### Learn more about Denny's amazing Magickal Life. In this interview Denny goes into great details about his training, travelling and adventuring around the globe seeking out knowledge and legitimate teachings. We go from his exciting youth just discovering the path to India, Japan and back to the US where Denny has become known for his entertaining books and interviews. We also hear about Dennys course on Perseus which goes into great detail as to how to meet, talk with and work with your HGA. [Explore](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/meeting-your-higher-guardian-angel-magical-adventures-with-denny-sargent/) --- # Peter Duchemin, PhD Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/peter-duchemin-phd/ Meta Magick ### Dr Peter Duchemin PhD [  Study with Peter  ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/metamagick)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Peter-Rooftop-343x345x0x44x343x258x1704885206.jpg)Dr. Peter Duchemin, PhD, has been practicing esoteric Tarot for over 25 years, from an ecclectic, non-emanationist magickal perspective, specializing in calendar magick. Peter is the author of over 30 magickal calendars, and the developer of an original approach, called meta-magick that uses these calendars to realize potent spiritual energies in time with the movement of the heavens.  Before devoting himself full time to esoteric calendrics and Tarot, Peter performed professionally as a stage magician, clown, and circus performer - with a skillset inspired by the Tarot archetypes. In 2006, he completed a Master's thesis entitled,  The Enchanted Circus: Language, Time and the Circus Arts while touring with the Wonderbolt Circus in Newfoundland & Labrador, Canada. Dr. Duchemin received his PhD in the interdisciplinary study of magic in 2019 from the Memorial University of Newfoundland with a thesis entitled The Art of Hidden Causation: Magic as Deep Mediation. He has since contributed to numerous scholarly and trade publications - an output ranging from poetic and artistic works to academic essays and theatre monologues - and has performed magic, clown, and Tarot all around the world. Duchemin is also a prolific visual artist and metasequential cartoonist who posts his work regularly on instagram: @metasequentialartist. Peter is completely committed to the path of Tarot Time, full of love of the Work. He is dedicated to helping others to realize their true magickal Ways - as artists, magicians, and Taroists. Since 2019 he has been publicly celebrating the Forest of Life Venus calendar on his Instagram page, @tarotphilosopher. He lives in Hong Kong with his wife Evelyn and his son Arcturus, and teaches his original approach to Tarot and Magick. The Meta Magick Tarot course on the Forest of Life Calendar is his flagship class. He is also available for private tutoring, reading, coaching and consultation. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/20230218_121649-01-1-969x736x153x0x663x736x1704888757.jpeg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Sator-1-447x447x0x0x447x354x1704888775.jpg)![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/Loshu-1-447x447x0x47x447x353x1704888765.jpg) # Read his Interview We highly recommend that if you have interest in Peters Introduction Course on Perseus or indeed his flagship course over on his own site that you read this interview. It is an amazing read, honestly more value and information in this interview than there is in many esoteric books. It is that good and almost 9,000 words of pure genius. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/peter3-312x413x0x90x312x234x1704885644.jpg)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/metamagick-an-interview-with-dr-peter-duchemin/) # Learn about Meta Magick ## The Genius of Meta Magick - A Universal Tool Metak Magick once understood allows you to see other systems of Magick through the lens of Meta Magick. This is like a Key that opens the door to the essence of what is taking place. Here in this video Peter introduces his course and what students will be learning. ## Join the Course: Meta Magick Scrying [Learn More](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/metamagick) # Further Information **Main Website: **[https://metamagickmatrix.myportfolio.com/](https://metamagicktarot.myportfolio.com/) **Courses**: [Meta Magick Tarot (myportfolio.com)](https://metamagicktarot.myportfolio.com/)  **Social Media:** [Meta Magic Matrix (@tarotphilosopher) • Instagram photos and videos ](https://www.instagram.com/tarotphilosopher/) **Newsletter Signup: **[**The Forest of Life - 10,000 Tarots Newsletter (mailchi.mp)**](https://mailchi.mp/b0a5d2e57687/theforestoflife)** ** **Images**: [Meta Sequence (@metasequentialartist) • Instagram photos and videos](https://www.instagram.com/metasequentialartist/)  **Youtube**: [(18) Dr. Peter Duchemin - YouTube ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChU80ORt1z7-qTHClWk0BbA) Get the Latest News ## Sign Up for Updates You will receive new blog posts, interviews, news and exclusive content from our teachers. Sign Up![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/brizy/imgs/pexels-anete-lusina-4790559-scaled-555x831x0x190x555x451x1704883255.jpg) --- # Course Prospectus Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/course-prospectus/ Perseus Arcane Academy — Course Prospectus 2025–2026 - Course Prospectus  ·  2025–2026 ![Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/perseus-arcane-academy-high-resolution-logo-white-on-transparent-background-128x80-1.webp) # Perseus Arcane Academy *✦* A complete guide to the teachers, courses, curriculums, and pathways of Perseus Arcane Academy — across Hermeticism, Quabbalah, internal arts, magic, alchemy, Tarot, neo-shamanism, and mystical introspection. **1,000+**Students **50+**Courses **9**Teachers **9**Free Courses courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com  ·  perseusarcaneacademy.com --- ![Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/tealights-g7270a68be_1920.jpg) ## Welcome to Perseus Arcane Academy Where real practitioners share what they actually know — without gatekeeping, without mystification § 02 — The Academy ## You Don't Have to Spend Decades Every teacher at Perseus has spent decades on this path. They did not have what you now have access to. Perseus does not promise mastery without work. It offers something more realistic: clear instruction from practitioners who have already made the mistakes and can help serious students avoid years of unnecessary confusion. This is the founding conviction of Perseus Arcane Academy. Not that magic is easy. Not that shortcuts exist. But that the difference between a student who fumbles for twenty years and one who makes genuine, verifiable progress in eighteen months is almost entirely a matter of having access to clear, honest, experienced instruction. Our teachers have made that journey. They know where the obstacles are, where most students stall, what the common errors are, and how to move past them efficiently. They teach from that hard-won knowledge — not from books, not from theory, but from the inside of decades of actual practice. Their job is not to impress you with how far they have come. Their job is to get you there faster than they did. For real, verifiable results — not mastery, but genuine working ability — one to two years of serious practice with clear instruction is enough. The teachers on Perseus have each demonstrated that. The courses are built around it. The community exists to support it. Founded by James Robinson, Perseus grew from years of personal practice through many traditions, culminating in deep work with the Franz Bardon system and live training under Sifu Mark Rasmus in Thailand. What he found missing in the wider magical community was simple: a place where real practitioners shared real experience openly — the kind of honest, direct transmission that would have saved him years. Perseus is that place. The academy brings together nine independent teachers — each with decades inside their own discipline, each with a fully developed system, each committed to sharing what they know without mystification. There is no single path through Perseus. Students enter where it makes sense for them and develop as their practice demands. Consider what these courses represent. The teachers on Perseus spent decades and, in many cases, significant personal resources acquiring what they now teach — travelling to other countries, training under lineage holders, putting careers aside to follow paths that offered no guaranteed return. The opportunity cost alone is something most of them will never recoup. A student today can access in a structured course what took a teacher twenty years and multiple continents to assemble. The price of a course is not the price of the knowledge — it is a fraction of what it actually cost to gather. 1,000+Students Enrolled 50+Courses 9Expert Teachers 9Free Courses "The best teachers are the most articulate. The best articulators take the complex and explain it simply. This to me is why Sixty Skills and the man behind it is so valuable — not to mention he is eager to answer your questions." Tom — Student of the Master Course  ·  ★★★★★ 01Efficient, Not EasyGenuine, verifiable working ability in one to two years of serious practice. Our teachers took far longer — and spent far more — because they had no one showing them the way. You do. The work is real. The path is clear. The searching has already been done. 02Real Practitioners TeachingEvery teacher at Perseus has done the work. They teach from direct experience and verified results — not from reading. No performance, no mystification. 03A Community Behind YouYou don't practise in isolation. Private course groups, public forums, and direct access to teachers are built into the platform. You are supported throughout. --- Contents ## What's Inside Click any section to jump directly to it. Why Perseus What Makes This Academy Different Multiple teachers · Transmissions · No forced path Start Here Choose Your Path 5 entry points based on what you want Overview Every Level of Commitment Free → $25 → $150 → $900+ at a glance § 03 — Teacher Bob / Sixty Skills The Master Course · Kabbalah · Planetary · Single Skills § 04 — Teacher André Consciencia Introspection · Elemental · Ceremonial · Visionary Hermeticism § 05 — Teacher Jake Senn IIH Masterclass · Kabbalah · Evocation · Reiki § 06 — Teacher Sifu Mark Rasmus Elastic Force · Chi Kung · Internal Arts § 07 — Teacher George Mensink North European Shamanism § 08 — Teacher Denny Sargent Holy Guardian Angel · Banishing § 09 — Teacher Dr Peter Duchemin Meta Magick Tarot · Scrying · Calendar Magic § 10 — Teacher Ray del Sole Vital Energy · Mystical Quabbalah § 11 — Teacher Frater IAC Spagyric Alchemy · Fluid Condensers § 12 — Entry Points Free Courses 9 free courses across multiple teachers § 13 — Community Community Discord · Q&A · Fellow students § 14 — Partners Partners & Affiliates Commission · Referrals · Collaboration § 15 — Reference Course Reference Complete course and pricing tables § 16 — Begin Begin Learning Where to start · Links · Next steps --- Why Perseus ## What Makes This Academy Different #### Multiple Teachers, Not One Guru Most online occult platforms are built around a single personality. Perseus brings together nine independent teachers — each with decades inside their own tradition, each with a fully developed system. You are not locked into one person's interpretation of the work. #### Transmission-Based Teaching Several Perseus teachers work with direct energetic transmissions — attunements that give students access to forces that would otherwise take years of preparatory work to reach. This is not just video content. It is the model used by traditional esoteric schools, brought online. #### The Searching Has Been Done The teachers on Perseus spent decades — and significant personal resources — travelling to other countries, training under lineage holders, and putting careers aside to follow paths with no guaranteed return. A student today accesses in a structured course what took twenty years and multiple continents to assemble. #### No Single Forced Path There is no required sequence. No "Level 1 before you can see Level 2" gatekeeping across the academy. Each teacher's system is complete in itself. You enter where it makes sense for you and develop as your practice demands. --- Start Here ## Choose Your Path Not sure where to begin? Start with what you want. ① #### "I want a complete magical training system" The **Sixty Skills Master Course** — 18 months, 10 levels, 67 skills, one price. The most comprehensive structured path on Perseus. Go to Sixty Skills → ② #### "I want Hermetic initiation with direct transmissions" **Jake Senn's IIH Masterclass** — the full ten steps of Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics, with energetic attunements that accelerate progress. Go to Jake Senn → ③ #### "I want the body work that makes everything else stable" **Sifu Mark Rasmus — Course 1** — Elastic Force Chi Kung. The physical and energetic foundation without which higher practice remains unstable. Go to Sifu Mark → ④ #### "I want to explore before committing" **Nine free courses** — sample André, Bob, Clint, and the Bardon tradition at zero cost. No card required. Go to Free Courses → ⑤ #### "I already practise and want specialist depth" André's School of Visionary Hermeticism, Denny's HGA courses, Peter's Meta Magick Tarot, Ray's Mystical Quabbalah, or Frater IAC's Spagyric Alchemy. --- Overview ## Every Level of Commitment Perseus has courses for every budget and stage. Here is the full range at a glance. | Level | Price Range | Examples | | ----- | ----------- | -------- | | Free | $0 | The Three Transformations · Introduction to Magic · Mind-Body-Soul Integration · Emotional Release · 5 more | | Single Courses | $25–$59 | Vital Energy 1–4 ($39 each) · Sixty Skills singles ($50 each) · Denny Banishing ($59) · André M&MI ($25/mo) | | Mid-Range | $147–$270 | Denny HGA Bundle ($147) · George Shamanism ($149) · Frater IAC Alchemy ($150) · André Ceremonial ($180) · André Neo-Shamanism ($200) · Ray Quabbalah ($270) | | Major Programmes | $349–$998+ | André SVH ($349/semester) · Jake Evocation ($499) · Jake Kabbalah ($499) · Peter Meta Magick Bundle ($600) · Jake Reiki ($697) · Sixty Skills Kabbalah ($700) · Sixty Skills Planetary ($700) · Sixty Skills Master Course ($900) · Jake IIH Masterclass (from $998) | § 03 — Teacher & System ## Sixty Skills with Bob Magic · Hermeticism · Quabbalah · Pranayama · Body Training · Meditative Independence ![Sixty Skills](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/SixtySkills_Mystical_Background.jpg) Sixty Skills ## Bob — Sixty Skills 30+ years of practice · World travel gathering living traditions · Bardon tradition · Complete independent system Sixty Skills is not a commentary on Franz Bardon. It is a complete, independent magical training system — built over thirty years of global practice and relentless verification of what actually produces results. The name refers to the core foundational skills a practitioner must genuinely develop — not read about — to engage magical, meditative, and yogic phenomena. Bob spent three decades crossing the world in search of living lineages, gathering from yogic, meditative, and magical traditions, testing everything against direct experience. He worked deeply with Bardon's *Initiation into Hermetics* — and that depth showed him what was missing: a more direct, skill-based route to the phenomena that IIH describes. What distinguishes Sixty Skills is specificity: every skill is numbered, sequenced, and explained with enough precision that the student knows exactly what they are doing, why it works, and how to verify that it is working. "If a student practices two hours a day, every day, they can easily complete the master course curriculum within a year and a half. A lot of people do it quicker because they've had training and don't need the whole programme." Bob — Founder, Sixty Skills ![Bob — Sixty Skills](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/bob11-1.jpg) ![Bob — field practice](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/103_0334-Copy-1024x768.jpg) ![Bob — on the road](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/109_0953-Copy-1024x768.jpg) ### The Five-Part Curriculum These five parts are the architecture of the system — not buying options. Each builds directly on the one before. This five-part structure is not invented. It follows precisely the structure that Franz Bardon himself described in *Key to the True Kabbalah* — the progression from foundational skills through elemental letters, planetary work, zodiacal work, and the Sephiroth. What Bardon described in outline, Bob has built in practice. We are genuinely fortunate that this system exists, and more fortunate still that it has been made publicly available at this level of clarity. Part1 **The Master Course — 18-Month Foundation**10 levels · 30 courses · 67 skills · Mind, energy, body training, elemental work, OBE, evocation, invocation, ritual, magical space. The foundation for magical independence itself. Live · $900 Part2 **Sixty Skills Kabbalah — Letter Magic**The oldest known form of magic. Works with the elements via cosmic letters, then all sub-variants — manipulating reality at akashic, mental, astral, and physical levels. Live · $700 Part3 **Planetary Kabbalah**Unlike the elements, the planets are intelligent. Working with them accesses intelligences covering every field of human endeavour — and builds immunity to their effects. Live · $700 Part4 **Zodiac**The 12 celestial formations harnessed directly. Largely mental in nature, with profound impact on how the practitioner perceives and acts in reality. Coming Part5 **The Sephiroth — The Upward Arc**Working with the powers of the Sephiroth at the akashic level. The path of enlightenment. "If you achieve enlightenment first, magic is easy." Coming ### The Master Course — Part One in Full The Master Course is one of the rarest offerings in magical practice: a complete, numbered, sequenced, practically verifiable foundation that takes a student from zero to genuine magical independence. It spans 10 levels across 18 months, encompassing 30 individual courses and 67 numbered foundational skills. Mind training gives precision focus and relaxation. Energetic training develops sensitivity to elements, astral phenomena, and generates clairvoyance and clairaudience. Body training — one of the most distinctive elements of the system — allows the practitioner to bring energies fully into the physical instrument, preventing the stalling at mental or akashic levels that afflicts students in almost every other system. Without it, the practitioner remains stranded above the physical — able to generate energy but not ground it. The Master Course is the best option for serious students. Individual courses bought separately total $1,500 — the Master Course bundles all 30 at **$900, saving $600**. #### Pricing & Access **Master Course: $900** — all 30 courses bundled, saving $600 vs. buying separately at $1,500. Individual levels and standalone $50 single-skill courses also available. Contact Perseus with any questions before enrolling. **Sixty Skills App** — in development. Will be free for all Master Course students on release. ### What Students Say ★★★★★"Concise & clear with actionable steps to implement all that was discussed. Extremely thankful for resources like this." Christian — How to Generate Mental Energy ★★★★★"This course is gold. If you are a student of Franz Bardon, despite the step you are, I highly recommend this course." Abeshi — The Secret Smile / Programming Your Energy ★★★★★"Beautiful course — allot of what he taught cleared up a whole lot for me that was unanswered. Thank you Sixty Skills." Alexander — How to Breathe Astral Energy ★★★★★"With chronic pain in my feet, doing the practices seemed to give some immediate relief. I like the no nonsense, straightforward approach." Trina — How to Generate Mental Energy ★★★★★"Excellent, explanations are clear, exercise is effective." Bernard — Building the Chi Ball ★★★★★"The best teachers are the most articulate. The best articulators take the complex and explain it simply. This is why Sixty Skills is so valuable." Tom — Master Course ### The 30 Courses Inside the Master Course All 30 courses are included in the Master Course bundle. Each can also be purchased individually at $50. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/learning_how_to_concentrate.jpg)Learning How To Concentrate$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/465oa) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/building_the_chi_ball.jpg)Building The Chi Ball$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/9gCkX) [![](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1hna79tdq166p18e21unv16je5acc.jpg)The Secret Smile$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/MNkvf) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/electric_amp_magnetic_lines_of_force_static.jpg)Electric & Magnetic Lines of Force (Static)$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/Oiqhd) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/autosuggestion_the_mala_method.jpg)Autosuggestion (The Mala Method)$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ucC7U) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/how_to_breathe_astral_energy.jpg)How to Breathe Astral Energy$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/PBI8m) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/developing_clairvoyance_clairaudience_amp_clairgustance.jpg)Developing Clairvoyance, Clairaudience & Clairgustance$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/B2yrU) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/training_electric_magnetic_lines_of_force_with_movement.jpg)Training Electric/Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/1YebR) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/how_to_generate_mental_energy.jpg)How to Generate Mental Energy$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/HiX3M) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/creating_your_life_s_movie.jpg)Creating Your Life's Movie$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/PbtI9) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/training_the_four_elements.jpg)Training the Four Elements$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tn51q) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/room_impregnation_filling_your_sacred_space.jpg)Room Impregnation: Filling Your Sacred Space$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/WhSwV) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/resistance_training_for_magicians_yoga_of_strength.jpg)Resistance Training for Magicians: Yoga of Strength$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/4vxDq) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/establishment_of_equilibrium_four_elements_amp_magic.jpg)Establishment of Equilibrium: Four Elements & Magic$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/9LCJu) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/transference_of_consciousness_and_the_grain_of_sand.jpg)Transference of Consciousness and the Grain of Sand$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/FqpfX) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/astral_walking.jpg)Astral Walking$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gwOcb) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/power_walking_with_weights_walk_of_the_magicians.jpg)Power Walking with Weights: Walk of the Magicians$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/QOUaG) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/the_zero_point_obe_for_people_who_can_t.jpg)The Zero Point: OBE for People Who Can't$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/eJXEl) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/creation_of_elementaries.jpg)Creation of Elementaries$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/kVZ8Y) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/walking_with_the_elements.jpg)Walking with the Elements$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/OWFpo) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/mental_wandering_intelligence_gathering_amp_the_real_obe.jpg)Mental Wandering: Intelligence Gathering & the Real OBE$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/M4qOY) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/the_void_meets_infinity_akasha_amp_non_dual_light_breathing.jpg)The Void Meets Infinity: Akasha & Non-Dual Light Breathing$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pNjLk) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/rebounding_fah_jin_empty_force_amp_fascia_development.jpg)Rebounding: Fah Jin, Empty Force & Fascia Development$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/iyaEW) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/how_to_learn_kabbalah_from_the_spirit_world_via_evocation.jpg)How to Learn Kabbalah from the Spirit World Via Evocation$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/aN8HW) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/the_chi_circulation_method.jpg)The Chi Circulation Method$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/w6B75) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/advanced_clairvoyance_training.jpg)Advanced Clairvoyance Training$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/e3TWs) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/volting_expressing_your_will_in_the_universe.jpg)Volting: Expressing Your Will in the Universe$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gKGER) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/how_to_construct_a_ritual.jpg)How to Construct a Ritual$50](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/LaH3O) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/sixty_skills_level_1_entry_point.jpg)Sixty Skills — Level 1 (Entry Point)$160](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/sixty-skills-level-1) [![](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1hl0g7dse1paauaj1uojnpauogc.jpg)The Three Transformations FreeFree](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) [View All Sixty Skills Courses on the Platform →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Part 2 — Sixty Skills Kabbalah: Letter Magic — $700 The oldest known form of magic — and the one Bardon himself considered the pinnacle of his system. Sixty Skills Kabbalah is the second part of the curriculum, building directly on the Master Course foundation to give students practical access to the cosmic letters described in Bardon's *Key to the True Kabbalah*. Bardon's third book was published posthumously by his secretary and is widely acknowledged to be incomplete. It leaves a lot of things out, and students who attempt it from the text alone consistently make the same errors. The Sixty Skills Kabbalah course addresses this directly — it fills in the missing material, structures the training through clairsentience so students can verify their own progress, and provides a clear sequence through the letters rather than the fragmented approach the book alone requires. The course covers the twenty-seven cosmic letters. This is operative letter magic: three-point meditation using sound, colour, and sensation to access elemental energies at the akashic, mental, astral, and physical levels. Unlike many ritual magic systems, Bardon's Kabbalah focuses entirely on internal cultivation rather than invoking external forces — the practitioner remains self-reliant, in full control, and accessing universal energies directly rather than through filtered ritual forms. The course is being expanded to incorporate all two-letter combinations from Bardon's third book, along with select three- and four-letter combinations. Students who enrol now lock in the current price before this expansion raises it. Completion of the Kabbalah course lays the necessary groundwork for Part 3: Planetary Kabbalah. Previously, information at this level was gathered over decades of work and, in many cases, multiple trips overseas to study with advanced practitioners. #### Currently at introductory pricing — $700 Master Course students should contact Perseus directly for continuation pricing. The course will expand significantly — enrolling now secures current access at current cost. Previously, information at this level was gathered over decades of work and, in many cases, multiple trips overseas to study with advanced practitioners. "I have a Kabbalah course from Sixty Skills, and I must say that it pleasantly surprised me. To start, I should mention that I'm an old-school Bardonist. Initiation into Hermetics was my first book on practical magic, and I practiced it for many years." Student Review — Sixty Skills Kabbalah  ·  ★★★★★ ### Part 3 — Planetary Kabbalah — $700 Where Letter Kabbalah works with the elements, Planetary Kabbalah works with intelligences. The planets are not abstract forces — they are conscious, and working with them gives the practitioner access to intelligences covering every field of human endeavour. Planetary Kabbalah is the third step in the Sixty Skills curriculum. Where the Kabbalah course taught the foundation of letter work, this course teaches the student to place planetary power aspects within the body in specific configurations — what Bob describes as "playing chords" with planetary energies. A basic technique is the "kabbalist's or magician's prayer," where the Moon's power aspect is placed at the solar plexus to generate an astral field, and the Sun's power aspect is placed at the heart centre to create a balanced, unified force. More advanced practices involve placing multiple planets within the body simultaneously, producing effects difficult to achieve through any other method. The course covers the inner planets, the outer planets, and extra-solar work — a scope that is extraordinarily rare in any publicly available training. Bob has noted that not everyone needs Formula 1 precision — many practitioners benefit enormously from even a foundational engagement with planetary forces. But for those who want the full system, this course provides it. After mastering Planetary Kabbalah, higher levels exist: Zodiac (Part 4, coming) and working with the Sephiroth themselves (Part 5, coming). #### $700 — The Next Logical Step After Letter Kabbalah For students who have completed the Master Course and the Kabbalah course. For those involved in this work for some time, you will realise how rare this kind of information is — publicly available, practically explained, and structured for actual progress. | Course | Structure | Price | Link | | ------ | --------- | ----- | ---- | | Master Course Save $600 | 18 months · 10 levels · 30 courses · 67 skills — all included | $900Saves $600 vs. $1,500 separately | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) | | Sixty Skills Level 1 (standalone) | First level of the curriculum | $160 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/sixty-skills-level-1) | | Sixty Skills Kabbalah (Part 2) | Letter magic — large later-stage course | $700 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/sixty-skills-kabbalah) | | Planetary Kabbalah (Part 3) | Planetary intelligence work | $700 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/planetary-kabbalah) | | Single-Skill Courses (30+ available) | One foundational skill per course | $50 each | [Browse All](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) | | The Three Transformations Free | Free entry — vital/astral/mental energy conversion | Free | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) | #### Best For Students wanting a complete, structured, independently verifiable magical education- Practitioners who have stalled in IIH or similar systems- Anyone willing to invest 2 hours daily over 18 months- Advanced practitioners entering Quabbalistic or planetary territory #### Begin Here Uncertain? Start with **The Three Transformations** (free). Ready to commit? Enter **The Master Course** directly at $900 — the best value by far. Do not start Kabbalah or Planetary courses without the Master Course foundation first. --- § 04 — Teacher ## André Consciencia Bardonist Practice · Soul Mirror Work · Elemental Magic · Neo-Shamanism · Visionary Hermeticism ![André Consciencia](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/286177878_805540240431633_6640324986407973794_n.jpg) André Consciencia ## André Consciencia Born in Portugal · Fraternitas Hermetica · Multiple initiatory traditions · Author of complete magical paths ![André Consciencia](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/286177878_805540240431633_6640324986407973794_n.jpg) ![André Consciencia — Books](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Andre-bookd.png) ![André Consciencia](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/30d1b718-d75d-4eac-9842-976db63ae818-1.jpg) André Consciencia brings a body of work spanning the full arc of magical and mystical development — from soul mirror practice and Hermetic introspection, through elemental magic, ceremonial art, neo-shamanic journey work, to the three-semester School of Visionary Hermeticism. André is Portuguese, born and based in Portugal. He encountered Fraternitas Hermetica — an order based on the works of Franz Bardon — while still a minor, and had an initiator who set him on a path he has followed ever since. He has worked across multiple initiatory traditions: AMORC, the Order of Michael's Grail, Thelemic Golden Dawn, Astrum Argentum, the Typhonian OTO, and the Horus Maat Lodge, among others. His grandfather, José Gomes Consciência — who lived a good part of his life in India, where André's father was born — first introduced him to figures such as Swami Vivekananda, and left him notes on palmistry, astrology, spiritism, ancient civilisations, and the Quabbalah that André later incorporated into his own published work. It was André who suggested the name "Perseus Arcane Academy" to James Robinson. André is the author of several books published through Falcon Books, including *Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun*, *A Guide to the Elementals*, *A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah*, *The Way of Abrahadabra*, *The Path of Ipsos*, *The Inner Gateways of LAM*, and *The Dragon Tarot*. The founder of Perseus Arcane Academy has described André's books as "entire paths, taking one from the comfort of being an armchair magician all the way to that of an adept. That is just one book." André's courses on Perseus are the practical application of this written work — deeply structured, creative, and grounded in decades of direct practice. "This course by André Consciência takes the practitioner through a series of steps that are in unison with Initiation into Hermetics, as practiced and achieved via the many arts of introspection and ennoblement of the soul. It is for anyone wishing a path that helps in self-realisation by knowledge and dominion in the physical, emotional, and psychic planes — as well as in the material, astral and mental planes." Course Description — Magic and Mystical Introspection ### Magic and Mystical Introspection — The Core Course André's original course on Perseus and the heart of his teaching. Based on his book *Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sun Sphere* (Falcon Books), which walks through all steps of Bardon's IIH as practised through the arts of introspection and ennoblement of the soul. Students begin at Level 1 and progress through years of ongoing work — pursuing self-realisation through knowledge and dominion over the physical, emotional, and psychic bodies across all three planes. The soul mirror is the point of entry: the honest confrontation with what one actually is, as the necessary beginning of becoming what one can be. ### Elemental Magic — As Taught by the Elementals A genuine working relationship with the elements and their intelligences — beings who have empowered practitioners for centuries. André's approach is relational rather than merely energetic: students build actual bonds with elemental beings, learn to integrate elemental awareness into both spiritual and mundane life, and strengthen intuitive abilities through direct connection with Nature. Available from $25/month. Students of Magic and Mystical Introspection receive 60% off — and vice versa. ### Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition (Levels 1–3) The two most famous rituals of the Golden Dawn — the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and the Middle Pillar Exercise — decoded, expanded, and transformed into a full year-long mentorship toward magical adepthood. This course is, at its heart, a mentorship. André takes every student — regardless of their level of experience entering — through a structured course of inner mastery, working methodically through three levels. Each gesture and intention of the LBRP and Middle Pillar is examined and unpacked through the full weight of Bardon's three works: *Initiation into Hermetics*, *The Practice of Magical Evocation*, and *The Key to the True Quabbalah*. These rituals, which most practitioners perform as rote repetition, become in André's hands a complete system: a vehicle for invocation, evocation, theurgic incantation, and divine communion — not performed upon the practitioner, but cultivated from within. It is important to understand what this course is not: it is not primarily an evocation course. It is a course of ceremonial adepthood — of the development of the practitioner as an operative magical being, able to work with inner and outer forces with precision, understanding, and genuine authority. The rituals serve as the architecture; the real construction is of the student themselves. Requires Step 5 of Initiation into Hermetics (or equivalent, e.g. several years in Golden Dawn). Contact Perseus if unsure. $180 for all three levels. ### Journey to the Spirit World: Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) André has practised neo-shamanism for decades alongside his Hermetic and magical work — forming his own shamanic groups and circles, conducting ceremonies, and working actively with the visionary and spirit-contact dimensions of practice. This course is the result of repeated requests from his students: they wanted this material, and now it is available on Perseus. This is not a course about shamanism. It is a trail of shamanic embodiment — the difference between being told how to journey and actually journeying; between reading about spirit contact and entering the contact itself. From sacred ceremonies, meditations, and visionary journeys to the use of instruments and plants, each of the five levels deepens both the student's capacity and their engagement with the unseen. The seen and unseen are deliberately blurred. Students do not emerge with a body of knowledge — they emerge as living testimony to what the work produces. Neo-Shamanism, as André practises it, is traditional shamanism adapted to the conditions of the present day. The powers engaged are ancient. The entry points are accessible. Available as the full 5-level bundle at $200, or level by level at $59 each. ### The School of Visionary Hermeticism The School of Visionary Hermeticism is the closest thing to a genuine esoteric university that exists online today. Three semesters. Eighteen months of structured, mentored, co-creative Hermetic education. The goal: not a student who has watched videos, but a practitioner who has been transformed. Each semester lasts six months, and two courses run simultaneously throughout. Students work with ongoing assignments, reflective essays, and creative projects — and must demonstrate their own genuine results before advancing to the next semester. There are no shortcuts and no passive options. The school is built on a two-way traffic system: André provides the teachings, the framework, and the mentorship; students bring their full engagement, their actual practice, and the fruits of that practice. The curriculum moves across three major arcs of development. The first semester grounds students in unified wisdom — spirituality, philosophy, and the evolution of human thought; the nature of collective consciousness; religious and mystical traditions compared and applied. The second semester deepens into Hermetic practice proper — esoteric arts, astral exploration, elemental integration, the connection between Hermetic principles and quantum perspectives. The third semester advances into the creative and generative dimensions — ceremonial magic, shamanism, the development of the student's own magical system, and the beginning of their capacity to teach and transmit what they have received. This is the school's explicit aim: not merely to guide practitioners, but to develop people who can eventually contribute to the living Hermetic tradition — through their own grimoires, their own magical systems, and their own transmission of knowledge to others. The seeker transforms into the seer. The seer into the visionary. The SVH has its own dedicated presence at [theschoolofvisionaryhermeticism.com](https://theschoolofvisionaryhermeticism.com/academics). From $349 per semester. Check current enrolment status for upcoming semester openings — places are limited by the nature of the programme. ![SVH](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1ioe3hlql1lj1f333kp1jbd1834c.png) The School of Visionary HermeticismFrom $3493 semesters × 6 months. Active co-creation. Essays, assignments, direct mentorship with André. Results required to progress.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) ![Elemental Magic](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1ioatkkvc2l2ua71ot31godfito.png) Elemental Magic: The Foundation As Taught by the ElementalsFrom $25/monthRelational practice with Earth, Air, Fire, Water and their intelligences. 60% cross-discount with M&MI.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic) ![Ceremonial Magic](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1h6eeb20rsomn0m4pu111o1b6l7.png) Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition (Levels 1–3)$180LBRP + Middle Pillar decoded into a full year of adepthood through all three of Bardon's works.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) ![Neo-Shamanism](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1hhh1hm6680r1ddlnrp1oa714mk7.jpg) Journey to the Spirit World: Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5)$200  or  $59/levelCeremonies, visionary journeys, instruments, plants. Decades of André's shamanic practice made available.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism:-levels-1-5) ![Bundle](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1if9v91s4h210al1pmpun8152s7.png) Neo-Shamanism + Ceremonial Magic Bundle Saving$329Both multi-level courses combined. Neo-Shamanism Levels 1–5 and Ceremonial Magic Levels 1–3.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-and-neo-shamanism) ![Mind Body Soul](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1jfihe201hif1fqi15t7mbokvrc.png) Mind–Body–Soul Integration FreeFreeFree foundational course — three-body integration, ideal first step into André's world.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/mind-body-soul-integration) #### Best For - Students drawn to IIH who want a soul-mirror and introspection-centred approach- Practitioners seeking a creative, philosophically rich education- Those drawn to elemental work, neo-shamanism, or visionary practice- Committed students ready for the sustained co-creative engagement of the SVH #### Begin Here Start with **Mind–Body–Soul Integration** (free) to sample André's approach. If it resonates, enter **Magic and Mystical Introspection** — his core course. Check current SVH semester enrolment status for the structured programme. --- § 05 — Teacher ## Jake Senn Hermetics · Kabbalah · Evocation & Invocation · Reiki · Energy Transmissions Jake Senn ## Jake Senn Co-author, *Back Door Into Hermetics* (with Sifu Mark Rasmus) · Student of Hermetics since his early teens · Years of live-in training with Sifu Mark in Asia · Reiki, Kabbalah, Evocation & Invocation Jake Senn has been a student of Hermetics since his early teens. He spent years in live-in training with Sifu Mark Rasmus in Asia — an intensive apprenticeship that gave his practice depth and precision difficult to acquire any other way. He is the co-author, with Sifu Mark, of *Back Door Into Hermetics* — a book the founder of Perseus considers essential for anyone following Franz Bardon's teachings. Jake was instrumental in ensuring the book works as a practical tool for students, not merely an information overload. He also runs the Mystery College (mysterycollege.com), his own platform for Hermetic education. Jake's approach is distinguished by his use of direct energetic transmissions — attunements that allow students to begin working with forces that would otherwise require years of preparatory training to access. In traditional esoteric circles in Western Europe, students would visit their teacher in short sessions to receive attunements and then return to practise on their own. Jake has brought this transmission-based model into his online masterclasses, making what was previously available only through personal apprenticeship accessible to distance students. Sifu Mark Rasmus taught him the hidden aspects of the Bardon framework that are not publicly available in the books — and Jake has integrated these into his courses alongside his own deep experience. His masterclasses integrate Hermetics, Reiki, and Kabbalah as mutually reinforcing rather than separate domains. The IIH Masterclass covers the full ten steps of Bardon's *Initiation into Hermetics*, with Step 8 made accessible from entry level. The Evocation Masterclass opened up what many students thought was years or decades away — providing a means to work directly with spirits and planetary spheres while still developing other skills. Every spirit and planetary sphere comes with a transmission. Every letter key in his Kabbalah course is accompanied by a direct transmission. Taking both Evocation and Kabbalah courses qualifies students for a $150 cross-course discount. "Jake brings the same reductionist energetic quickness and easiness to Hermetics that Mikao Usui brought to monasticism with Reiki — a huge and effective system. Finish it, and you will have an easy time completing Hermetic training in other venues." André Consciencia — Review of the Evocation Masterclass  ·  ★★★★★ ![IIH Masterclass](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1hnqelp7c2071piv1oaa18dm18mgc.jpg) Complete Universal 'Initiation into Hermetics' MasterclassFrom $998Full Hermetic initiation pathway. Step 8 made accessible from entry level. Jake available throughout. Immersive, comprehensive.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) ![Kabbalah Masterclass](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1hea13ss1i8b19spku32hn1t7ec.png) Complete Universal Kabbalah / Qabalah Masterclass$499KTQ-based. Every letter key includes a transmission. Discounts available for Evocation course students. Mutually reinforcing.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-complete-universal-kabbalah-masterclass) ![Evocation Masterclass](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1gr5g5sstfihl40abnp2g1i4oc.png) The Evocation Masterclass: Complete Universal Evocation & Invocation$499Spirit and planetary transmissions included. As much about invocation as evocation. Genuine relationships with forces, not just technique.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/eGXY2) ![Reiki](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1hbgpm8mf17f01u9a27fo2cpe1c.jpg) Reiki Healing Pro$697Thousands of attunements given. A serious deep dive into energy healing, in genuine relationship with Jake's Hermetic and Kabbalistic work.[Enrol →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/reiki-healing-pro) #### Cross-Course Discounts Students who take both the Evocation Masterclass and the Kabbalah Masterclass are eligible for a discount — the courses powerfully reinforce each other. Contact Perseus or Jake directly for current discount details. #### Best For Students drawn to Hermetic initiation, evocation, invocation, Kabbalah, and Reiki who want immersive masterclass-format training with direct energetic transmissions. Particularly suited to students who learn through sustained, intensive engagement rather than short modules. #### Begin Here The **Complete Universal IIH Masterclass** is the natural starting point — it covers the full ten steps and gives students the foundation for Jake's other courses. Students with existing Hermetic experience may also enter via the Evocation or Kabbalah Masterclass directly. --- § 06 — Teacher ## Sifu Mark Rasmus Elastic Force Chi Kung · Internal Arts · Body as Magical Instrument · 750+ Lessons · 6 Progressive Courses ![Sifu Mark Rasmus](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Sifu-Mark-Rasmus.webp) Sifu Mark Rasmus ## Sifu Mark Rasmus Decades of mastery in Chi Kung, martial arts & esoteric practice · Bardon-connected · 6-course Instructor Training Programme Sifu Mark Rasmus gives Perseus students something almost no other course addresses: the body — not as a container for spiritual experience, but as the primary instrument through which deeper practice becomes stable and powerful. He is the co-author, with Jake Senn, of *Back Door Into Hermetics* and the author of *Elastic Force ChiKung* (with Jennifer Nestorovic). He holds nothing back — not in person, not in his books, and not in these courses. The founder of Perseus first travelled to Thailand in 2012, feeling stuck with his approach to Initiation into Hermetics. He spent a week being shown a multitude of approaches that sped up his progress and opened new ways of working with the exercises. The experience was so transformative he returned a few years later. What he found in Sifu Mark's teaching — and what his many successful students confirm — is that the internal arts provide the physical and energetic foundation without which higher Hermetic practice remains unstable. One of Sifu Mark's students, Dinesh, trained with him full-time for a year, going through the entire teaching curriculum: Elastic Force Qi Kung, Intrinsic Energies of Martial Arts, Hermetics, Practice of Magical Evocation, Keys to the True Kabbalah, and Teacher Training. Students like Dinesh demonstrate the depth of what this system produces. Courses 1 and 2 can be taken by anyone. The later courses require the foundation built in the earlier stages to be most effective. In many ways, the online courses are ideal — in person it is hard to absorb so much information in a short time, so having the course material allows students to revisit what they have learned until they achieve mental clarity and practical understanding. James Robinson made two trips to Thailand to train directly with Sifu Mark — the first in 2012, when he was feeling stuck in IIH. "I spent a week being shown a multitude of approaches that would speed up progress and open me to new ways of approaching the exercises." That relationship, built over twelve years, is now available online in a 750+ lesson programme that covers the full journey from foundational Elastic Force Chi Kung through advanced internal arts to instructor certification across 6 progressive courses. #### 750+ Lessons · 6 Progressive Courses Sifu Mark's programme on Perseus spans 6 courses — from foundational Elastic Force Chi Kung through to instructor certification. The 750+ lesson video library covers: elastic force principles and body structure, chi development and energy centres, Fa Jin (explosive release of stored energy), Tai Chi for internal force development, advanced body conditioning, and the subtle force applications relevant to Hermetic and meditative practice. Course 1 alone contains more practical information on the energetic body than most complete esoteric training programmes. | Course | Level | Price | Link | | ------ | ----- | ----- | ---- | | Elastic Force Chi Kung — Course 1 Flagship | Foundation — 750+ lessons, principle-based internal arts curriculum | From $49/month | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elastic-force-chi-kung) | | Courses 2–6 — Instructor Training Programme | Progressive — advanced internal arts through teacher certification | Coming soon | [View All](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sifu-mark-rasmus) | #### Best For Students who recognise that the body is the instrument of spiritual practice — and that without physical and energetic development, higher work remains unstable. Martial artists, meditators, Hermetic practitioners looking for the missing physical foundation, and anyone who senses their practice needs grounding in the body. #### Begin Here **Course 1 — Elastic Force Chi Kung** is open to everyone and provides the foundation for all subsequent courses. The online format allows students to revisit material at their own pace. --- § 07 — Teacher ## George Mensink North European Shamanism · Seidr · Galdr · Ancestors · Dreamwork · The Nine Worlds ![Introduction into North European Shamanism](https://payhip.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,width=750/https://pe56d.s3.amazonaws.com/o_1jm5cvqv9rlb1pfkinp1l7n11r3c.png) George Mensink ## George Mensink North European Shamanism · Seidr · Galdr · Runes · Ancestors · Spirit contact · Nine Worlds · Voice work George brings to Perseus a tradition that is grounded, ancient, and utterly practical: the shamanic current of Northern Europe — Seidr, Galdr, ancestors, the land, the voice, and the inner worlds of the Germanic and Sámi traditions. George's approach is direct and undecorated. Shamanism in this context is not about belief or abstract ideas. It is about learning how to perceive and work with the natural powers that exist in the land, in your surroundings, and within yourself. Every place has its own character and its own forces. His courses begin where they should: with those forces, and with your ability to directly perceive and work with them. His teaching spans Seidr — the shamanic current of Northern Europe focused on perception and interaction with non-physical forces; Galdr — the use of the voice as a magical instrument; dreamwork; ancestor contact; spirit communication; Runes of the Elder Futhark; the Nine Worlds of the Yggdrasil; the Norns, Fylgja, Hamingja and related concepts; and the creation of power objects. This is structured work, not folklore collection. #### Private Group Included Every student enrolled in George's courses gains access to the private North European Shamanism discussion group — a dedicated space to ask questions, share experiences from practice, and develop alongside other students working the same material. ### Introduction into North European Shamanism This is George's opening course — a carefully constructed foundation for everything that follows. Students work through practical exercises designed to develop direct connection with the environment: dreamwork, breathing, meditation, the beginnings of voice work (Galdr), basic prayer, ancestor contact, and introduction to spirit communication. The curriculum covers 18 lessons including: Dreams, Words, Silence, Air, Exploring Surroundings, Ancestors, The Four Elements, The Great Nothing, The Tree of Life in Shamanism, Shamanic Music Instruments, Joik (intuitive singing), Opening and Closing Rituals, Runes, Chakras, Magic Balance and Offerings, Prayer, Masks, Shapeshifting and Possession, and Working with the Soul. This is not a course overloaded with theory. It is designed to give students a stable, experiential starting point — and to prepare them for the deeper work in subsequent courses covering the Runes in depth, the Nine Worlds, world-travelling techniques, and the creation of power objects. | Course | Structure | Price | Link | | ------ | --------- | ----- | ---- | | Introduction into North European Shamanism New | 18 lessons · Seidr, Galdr, ancestors, dreamwork, voice · Private group access | $149 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/introduction-into-north-european-shamanism) | #### Best For Students interested in Northern European magical traditions — Seidr, Galdr, rune work, ancestor contact, and the Nine Worlds cosmology. Suited to practitioners who want a structured introduction to Norse shamanism from an experienced practitioner rather than piecing it together from books. #### Begin Here George offers one course: **Introduction into North European Shamanism** — 18 lessons with private group access. That is the starting point. --- § 08 — Teacher ## Denny Sargent Holy Guardian Angel · Knowledge & Conversation · Magical Banishing · Tantric Lineage · Eclectic Ritualism ![Denny Sargent](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/capture.webp) Denny Sargent (Aion 131) ## Denny Sargent Horus Maat Lodge founder · Nath Tantrika & Uttara Kaula initiations · MA Ancient History · 20+ years ceramic & sigil art Denny Sargent (magical name Aion 131) is a writer, teacher, and eclectic ritualist who was introduced to mythology and magic growing up in New York City. He has been a member of various initiatory groups throughout his life, and was present at the founding of the Horus Maat Lodge — one of the most important magical lodges of the modern era. He has decades of daily, sustained work with his own Holy Guardian Angel, and teaches from that lived relationship. Denny holds a BA in Education and an MA in Ancient History. He has spent over twenty years as a ceramic and sigil artist, with work displayed in Seattle. He has taught at several colleges and academies, specialising in ESL, and currently directs a language school. His published works include *Global Ritualism: Myth & Magick Around the World*, *The Tao of Birth Days*, *The Magical Garden*, and *Werewolf Magick*. He is politically dedicated to environmental goals and is a committed member of several Green organisations. What makes Denny's teaching distinctive is that it comes from decades of continued, deepening practice. As he puts it: "I wrote the book a long time ago and have evolved and changed a lot since then. I have decades of work with my HGA to lean on, so much of the text in the course PDFs has been changed, added to, and unfolds in a more mature and knowledgeable manner. I have grown, and my HGA has had a hand in that every day." His courses on Perseus are not a repackaging of old material — they are the refined, mature expression of a lifetime's practice. "Even now, I am guided daily by my HGA when I meditate and in everything I do. I cannot express how important this is." ### Attaining Your Guardian Angel — Three-Course Path Every serious initiatory tradition, East and West, arrives at the same requirement: contact with the Holy Guardian Angel. In Western magic it is called Knowledge and Conversation. In Tantra it is the Atman or Guardian Spirit. In mystical Islam it bears the same name. Jung called it the Higher Self. The language differs; the reality pointed to is the same. Denny's three-part course — Meeting, Bonding, and Merging — takes students from an informed first encounter with the nature and history of the HGA through to genuine, sustainable daily relationship. This is not information about the HGA. It is a structured practice-path toward actual contact. ### Magical and Spiritual Banishing Banishing is not a preliminary courtesy — it is foundational magical hygiene. The clearing of field, space, and self that makes every other practice more effective and every working more precise. Students entering evocation, spirit contact, HGA work, or advanced energetic practice without solid banishing practice are working in an uncleared field. This course clears it. | Course | Structure | Price | Link | | ------ | --------- | ----- | ---- | | HGA Course 1 — Meeting Your Guardian Angel | The first contact: who the HGA is, the history of the tradition, and beginning genuine encounter | $59 | [Enrol](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm) | | HGA Course 2 — Bonding with Your Guardian Angel | Deepening the relationship: daily practice, communication, and establishing sustained contact | $59 | [Enrol](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm) | | HGA Course 3 — Merging with Your Guardian Angel | The full integration: living in continuous relationship with and guidance from the HGA | $59 | [Enrol](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm) | | Attaining Your Guardian Angel — All Three Courses Bundle | Meeting · Bonding · Merging — complete HGA arc at a saving | $147Save $30 | [Enrol](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm) | | Magical and Spiritual Banishing | Field clearing · five-element banishing across 7 traditions · PDF workbook 100+ exercises | $59 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/magical-and-spiritual-banishing) | #### Best For Students drawn to the Holy Guardian Angel tradition — whether from a Thelemic, Abramelin, or broader Western magical background. Also suited to any practitioner who needs a thorough grounding in magical and spiritual banishing before or alongside other work. #### Begin Here **Course 1 — Meeting Your Guardian Angel** is the natural entry point for the HGA work. The **Magical and Spiritual Banishing** course ($59) stands alone and can be taken at any time — it complements any magical path, not only Denny's HGA material. --- § 09 — Teacher ## Dr Peter Duchemin, PhD Meta Magick · Tarot as Living Architecture · Calendar Magic · Scrying · Qabalah ![Dr Peter Duchemin](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Peter1.jpg) Dr Peter Duchemin, PhD ## Dr Peter Duchemin, PhD PhD in Magic (MUN, 2019) · 25+ years esoteric Tarot · 30+ magical calendars · Former circus performer & stage magician Dr Peter Duchemin (magical name Abraxis Nothing) has been practising magick since the mid-1990s. He received his PhD in the interdisciplinary study of magic in 2019 from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, with a thesis entitled *The Art of Hidden Causation: Magic as Deep Mediation*. He is a member of the Horus Maat Lodge, a former professional stage magician, clown, and circus performer, a prolific visual artist and metasequential cartoonist, and the designer of over thirty original magickal calendars. Peter lives in Hong Kong with his wife Evelyn and his son Arcturus. Since 2019 he has been publicly celebrating the Forest of Life Venus calendar on Instagram (@tarotphilosopher). He approaches Tarot not as divination but as a living magical architecture — a symbolic universe, a map of transformation, and a creative system through which the practitioner encounters cosmic forces and aligns practice with the movement of time itself. His original approach, MetaMagick, uses these calendars to harness spiritual energies in alignment with the movement of the heavens. He has practised esoteric Tarot for over 25 years from an eclectic, non-emanationist perspective, authored over 30 magical calendars, and developed Meta Magick — his original approach that applies artistic pressure to time itself. Before devoting himself to calendrics and Tarot, he performed professionally as a stage magician, clown, and circus performer — a background that shaped his understanding of magic as applied attention and will. He describes his flagship Meta Magick Tarot course as "the application of artistic pressure to time itself." ![Dr Peter Duchemin](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Peter1.jpg) ![Dr Peter Duchemin](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Peter-Rooftop.webp) "Peter Duchemin's Meta Magick Tarot course is without a doubt the most impactful process of Tarot learning I have ever engaged with. His knowledge goes far beyond what anyone else is doing with Tarot." Student — Meta Magick Tarot  ·  ★★★★★ | Course | Structure | Price | Link | | ------ | --------- | ----- | ---- | | Meta Magick Tarot — Part 1 Flagship | Foundation: Tarot as operative system, the Fool's Journey as magical map, first operative fields | $200 | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/magical) | | Meta Magick Tarot — Part 2 | Qabalah integration, court cards and elemental work, temporal synchronisation begins | $200 | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/magical) | | Meta Magick Tarot — Part 3 | Venus calendar synchronisation, full operative Tarot work, advanced field application | $200 | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/magical) | | Meta Magick Scrying | 10–20 weeks · magical square scrying · 28-day integration programme (free with full bundle) | Free with bundleOr see standalone listing | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/metamagick) | | Full Meta Magick Bundle — Parts 1–3 + Scrying Save | All four components combined at a saving | $600 | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/metamagick) | #### Best For Students who want Tarot as a magical system rather than a divination tool. Suited to practitioners interested in Qabalah, operative symbolism, calendar magic, and creative magical practice. Peter's work rewards those who want to understand the architecture underneath the cards. #### Begin Here **Meta Magick Tarot — Part 1** is the foundation. The full bundle (Parts 1–3 + Scrying) at $600 represents the best value and includes the Scrying course free. --- § 10 — Teacher ## Ray del Sole Vital Energy · Bardon Quabbalah · Practical Foundations Through Advanced Letter Magic ![Ray del Sole](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/339103134_634589151841460_2037615100438471127_n.jpg) Ray del Sole ## Ray del Sole Founder, Sura Academy · 30+ years Bardon practice · 170+ published books · Templar Research Institute lecturer Ray del Sole, born in 1975 near Frankfurt, has dedicated his entire life to the spiritual path. He studied architecture with a focus on project management in Bochum, followed by postgraduate studies in eco-biology and management theory. After several years as a self-employed architect, he left the building industry to follow his spiritual nature full-time. Ray completed training in Prana Healing in Switzerland very early, and his interest in psychology and healing led him through further qualifications: anxiety and stress management, psychological counselling, hypnotherapy, reincarnation therapy, and non-medical practitioner for psychotherapy. He is a member of the VFP (Association of Free Psychotherapists) in Germany, and currently works near Frankfurt. He is the founder of the Sura Academy, which offers well-balanced spiritual training where mystical transmission plays a major role for safe and steady progress. Ray is the author of a large body of published work on the spiritual path and Hermetic science — known especially in the English-speaking world as an expert on metaphysics and mysticism. His books have been translated into several languages. He has been working in the core training of Franz Bardon for more than two decades, and The founder of Perseus has known him since 2008, when Ray was already one of the individuals in the community generously answering questions and helping students find their way into Bardon's system. As a native German speaker, Ray brings particular value to the study of Bardon's *Key to the True Quabbalah*: he has corrected errors in the English translation that have caused confusion for generations of practitioners. His Quabbalah course on Perseus is not a retranslation of the book, but a practical course built from decades of direct work with the system — with the correct colours, pitches, and pronunciation restored. Vital energy, meanwhile, is the one area where prior mastery is not required — making it a genuine entry point for students at almost any stage. | Course | Structure | Price | Link | | ------ | --------- | ----- | ---- | | Vital Energy — Course 1 Start Here | Foundation: what vital energy is, how it differs from astral and mental force, first exercises | $39 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/kabbalah-quabbalah) | | Vital Energy — Course 2 | Developing vital force capacity, directed application, working with the body's energy system | $39 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/kabbalah-quabbalah) | | Vital Energy — Course 3 | Advanced vital force work, healing applications, integration with broader practice | $39 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/kabbalah-quabbalah) | | Vital Energy — Course 4 | The complete system: vital energy in relationship with astral and mental bodies, final integration | $39 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/kabbalah-quabbalah) | | Mystical Quabbalah | KTQ-based cosmic language · 27 letters + formulas · English translation errors corrected · prerequisites required | $270 | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ZEHf2) | #### Best For Students at any level who want accessible energetic training (Vital Energy) or advanced Bardonists ready for Quabbalah. Ray's Vital Energy courses require no prior magical training — making them one of the most accessible entry points on Perseus alongside the free courses. The Quabbalah course is for experienced practitioners only. #### Begin Here **Vital Energy — Course 1** for most students. It requires no prerequisites. For the Mystical Quabbalah course, contact Perseus to confirm readiness — strict prerequisites apply. --- § 11 — Teacher ## Frater IAC Spagyric Alchemy · Fluid Condensers · Talismans · Practical Magical Construction Frater IAC ## Frater IAC Spagyric Alchemy · Fluid Condensers · Talisman Making · Bardon tradition Frater IAC's course is for students who want magic to become tangible — not merely read, not merely imagined, but made. Plant materials, spagyric processes, fluid condensers, talismans charged, consecrated, and put to actual use. The hands get involved. Frater IAC's background is multi-disciplinary — years of talisman work across traditions, combined with deep engagement with Bardon's system. Bardon describes fluid condensers in *Initiation into Hermetics* Step 8: liquid preparations from plant materials that attract and hold astral and subtle energies. They are, as Frater IAC notes directly, talismans — and his course teaches students how to make them with genuine power. He has developed a method of charging and exalting these tinctures that produces tangible, distant results: one peach leaf and bark condenser powered a healing ritual whose effects were felt 70 miles away; another was felt 4,700 miles from where the ritual was conducted. The course covers theory, the supply run, well of silence practice, moving energy, tapping the pillar of knowledge, and the active learning process through which students document and develop their own talisman work. No specialist tools are required. A kitchen and modest budget for supplies are sufficient. A private student group on the Perseus Community is included. | Course | Subject | Price | Link | | ------ | ------- | ----- | ---- | | Spagyric Alchemy Flagship | Plant alchemy · practical magical construction · Bardon tradition | $150 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/magical) | #### Best For Students who want magic to become tangible — not merely read, not merely imagined, but made. Suited to practitioners with an interest in alchemy, plant work, Bardon's fluid condensers, and the physical construction of magical tools and talismans. #### Begin Here Frater IAC offers one course: **Spagyric Alchemy: Making and Using Fluid Condensers** at $150. No specialist tools are required to begin. --- § 12 — Entry Points ## 9 Free Courses Genuine doorways into the academy — not teasers, not samples. Real courses at no cost. The free courses at Perseus are not filler. They represent what teachers chose to share openly — and those choices reflect what they believe students genuinely need to make an honest, grounded decision about the path ahead. Begin here. Do the work. Let the experience direct the next step. André Consciencia #### Introduction to Magic 13 sessions. André opens the world of real magic — silence, stillness, inner work, altered states, long-forgotten spells and rituals made practical. The ideal first sample of André's teaching. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/23Nwq) Bob / Sixty Skills #### The Three Transformations Both fundamental and advanced. Covers the conversion of vital, astral, and mental energies. The ideal sample of Bob's teaching before committing to the Master Course. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) André Consciencia #### Mind–Body–Soul Integration Three-body integration — how physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of practice interact. A thoughtful foundational entry into André's understanding of the practitioner. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/mind-body-soul-integration) Craig Mallett #### Soaking the Mind into the Body A guest contribution from Craig Mallett — an accessible, practical course on bringing mental attention fully into bodily presence. Foundational body-mind integration. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/soaking-the-mind-into-the-body) Clint #### Emotional Release: The Secret of Success with the Elements A critical but often-overlooked prerequisite for elemental work — how to clear the emotional body so elemental training actually lands. Practical and direct. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/emotional-release) Guest Teacher #### Movement Mastery Through Kung Fu Foundational movement education through internal Kung Fu principles — developing body structure, elasticity, and internal force. Ideal complement to any energetic or Chi Kung practice. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/movement-mastery-through-kung-fu) Clint #### Overcoming Difficulties in Steps 4, 5, & 6 of IIH Targeted support for students working through the most commonly difficult steps of Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics. Practical guidance from experience. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics) Clint Sabom #### The First 3 Steps of Initiation into Hermetics An accessible, guided walkthrough of IIH's foundational first three steps — ideal for students beginning Bardon's system who want clear, experienced guidance on what to actually do. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) Perseus Arcane Academy #### Hermetic Fundamentals (Text-Based) A comprehensive text-based introduction to Hermetic principles — the philosophical and conceptual foundations that underpin the majority of courses on the Perseus platform. [Enrol Free →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/BwJSZ) [Browse All Free Courses on the Platform →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free) --- § 13 — Community ## The Perseus Community Private course groups · Open public forums · Direct teacher access · Fellow practitioners on the same path One of the defining differences between Perseus and a simple video course platform is this: you are not alone. The Perseus Community platform is where students ask real questions, share real results, and get real answers — from teachers and from fellow practitioners who are doing the work alongside them. Serious magical practice is not well-served by isolation. Questions arise that no book or video anticipates. Progress stalls in ways that are immediately recognisable to someone who has been through the same territory. Results need to be discussed, compared, and refined. The Community exists precisely for this — and it is built around the same philosophy as the courses themselves: honest, direct, practical engagement. Private Course-Specific Groups Every paid course on Perseus includes access to a private discussion group for students of that course. A place to share experiences, ask the teacher directly, and compare results with others at the same stage. Public Open Community Areas Multiple free and open areas of the community platform are available to anyone — no course purchase required. Explore, ask questions, and engage with the Perseus community before committing to a course. Direct Teacher Access & One-on-One Messaging Every paid course includes a private group and one-on-one messaging access. Teachers are present. Bob runs a Discord with direct Q&A access. André works personally with students. This is not a passive platform — it is a learning community with real people behind it. "We also have a community platform for our students, with private groups for students of each of our courses. The Community exists so that the work doesn't happen in a vacuum." Perseus Arcane Academy ### What the Community Provides Beyond the course-specific private groups, the Perseus community platform includes areas for general discussion of magic, Hermeticism, Bardon's system, inner development, and related topics. Students from across all teacher tracks engage here — which means a student of Sixty Skills may find themselves discussing elemental work with someone in André's courses, or comparing body training notes with one of Sifu Mark's students. This cross-pollination is intentional. Perseus does not silo its teachers or their students. The community reflects what the academy is: a gathering of serious practitioners from different traditions and approaches, all committed to the same goal — genuine, verifiable progress in the work. #### Join the Community The community platform is free to join for anyone. Private course groups are unlocked automatically when you enrol in the relevant course. Visit [community.perseusarcaneacademy.com](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com) to explore the open areas and see what the community is currently discussing. [Join the Community](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com) [Start with a Free Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free) --- § 14 — Partners ## For Publishers, Bookshops & Professionals The Perseus Partner Programme — share what we have built with your community If you are a publisher, bookshop, esoteric retailer, magical organisation, podcast, magazine, or professional in the field who has encountered Perseus Arcane Academy and recognises the quality of what we have produced — this section is for you. Perseus has been built to a standard that we are proud to put in front of serious students of any tradition. The courses are written and delivered by practitioners of decades. The material is honest, structured, and practically verifiable. The teachers are real. We believe that anyone in the field who values this kind of rigorous, practitioner-led education will want their community to know about it. We offer a **Partner Programme** for organisations and individuals who wish to recommend Perseus to their audience, community, or customer base. Partners receive a commission on any sales generated through their referral, and we provide all the materials needed to introduce Perseus to your audience clearly and professionally. For? **Publishers & Authors** If your publications, books, or authors' readership overlaps with serious esoteric students, Perseus offers a natural complement to published material. We are happy to discuss co-promotion, affiliate arrangements, and course recommendations to your reader community. For? **Bookshops & Esoteric Retailers** Whether you are a physical bookshop, an online retailer, or an esoteric supply store with a community of serious practitioners, Perseus courses represent a high-quality educational offering that genuinely extends the value of what your customers are already purchasing. For?️ **Podcasts, Magazines & Media** If you run a podcast, YouTube channel, magazine, or newsletter with an audience interested in serious magical practice, Hermeticism, shamanism, or esoteric development, we welcome introductions to your community and are happy to discuss collaborative arrangements. For?️ **Magical Organisations & Orders** If you lead a magical order, lodge, or study group whose members would benefit from structured, high-quality distance learning alongside their in-person or correspondence work, we invite conversation about how Perseus might serve your community's educational needs. For? **Individual Professionals & Affiliates** Tarot readers, spiritual coaches, occult practitioners, and independent teachers who have an engaged community can join the Partner Programme individually. If you are proud to recommend something to your clients and followers, we want to speak with you. #### What Partners Receive **Commission on referred sales** — competitive rates for all qualified referrals through your unique partner link. **Marketing materials** — this prospectus, course descriptions, teacher profiles, and imagery ready for use in your own communications. **Relationship, not a transaction** — we work with partners who genuinely believe in what we have built. If that is you, we want to build something long-term. "Perseus was created to offer something lacking in the wider magical community — a platform where real practitioners share real experience. We believe that everyone benefits when knowledge is shared freely and deeply." James Robinson — Founder, Perseus Arcane Academy ### To Enquire About the Partner Programme Contact us directly via the Perseus website. Tell us who you are, who your community is, and how you see a collaboration working. We respond to every serious enquiry. [Contact Perseus About Partnership](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/contact/) [Visit the Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) --- § 15 — Complete Listing ## Course Reference ### Large Curriculums & Major Programmes | Title | Teacher | Structure | Price | Link | | ----- | ------- | --------- | ----- | ---- | | The Master Course | Sixty Skills | 18 months · 10 levels · 30 courses · 67 skills | $900Saves $600 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) | | Magic and Mystical Introspection | André Consciencia | Multi-year · multiple levels ongoing | $25/month | [Enrol](https://payhip.com/b/pJtvd) | | The School of Visionary Hermeticism | André Consciencia | 3 semesters × 6 months · active co-creation | From $349 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) | | Elastic Force Chi Kung (6-Course Programme) | Sifu Mark Rasmus | 6 progressive courses · 750+ lessons | From $49/month | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sifu-mark-rasmus) | | Jake Senn Full Bundle — IIH + Kabbalah + Evocation + Reiki Save ~$695 | Jake Senn | All four masterclasses combined | From $1,998 | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/masterclass-bundle) | | Complete Universal IIH Masterclass | Jake Senn | Full Hermetic initiation pathway | From $998 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) | ### Multi-Part Sequences & Bundles | Title | Teacher | Price | Link | | ----- | ------- | ----- | ---- | | Sixty Skills Kabbalah (Part 2) | Sixty Skills | $700 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/sixty-skills-kabbalah) | | Planetary Kabbalah (Part 3) | Sixty Skills | $700 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/planetary-kabbalah) | | Neo-Shamanism + Ceremonial Magic Bundle | André Consciencia | $329 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-and-neo-shamanism) | | Neo-Shamanism Levels 1–5 | André Consciencia | $200or $59/level | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism:-levels-1-5) | | Attaining Your Guardian Angel (Courses 1–3) | Denny Sargent | $59 each / $147 bundle | [Enrol](https://payhip.com/b/wnTJm) | | Full Meta Magick Bundle — Tarot Parts 1–3 + FREE Scrying | Dr Peter Duchemin | $600 | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/meta-magick-tarot-bundle) | | Vital Energy Courses 1–4 | Ray del Sole | $39 each | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/kabbalah-quabbalah) | ### Focused Specialist Courses | Title | Teacher | Price | Link | | ----- | ------- | ----- | ---- | | Complete Universal Kabbalah Masterclass | Jake Senn | $499 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-complete-universal-kabbalah-masterclass) | | The Evocation Masterclass | Jake Senn | $499 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/eGXY2) | | Reiki Healing Pro | Jake Senn | $697 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/reiki-healing-pro) | | Elemental Magic | André Consciencia | From $25/month | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic) | | Ceremonial Magic & Bardon Tradition (Lvl 1–3) | André Consciencia | $180 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) | | Magical and Spiritual Banishing | Denny Sargent | $59 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/magical-and-spiritual-banishing) | | Meta Magick Scrying | Dr Peter Duchemin | Free with BundleOr standalone | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/metamagick) | | Mystical Quabbalah | Ray del Sole | $270Prerequisites required | [View](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ZEHf2) | | Spagyric Alchemy: Making and Using Fluid Condensers | Frater IAC | $150 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/magical) | | Sixty Skills Level 1 | Sixty Skills | $160 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/sixty-skills-level-1) | | Introduction into North European Shamanism | George | $149 | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/introduction-into-north-european-shamanism) | | $50 Single-Skill Courses (30+ titles) | Sixty Skills | $50 each | [Browse](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) | ### 9 Free Entry Points | Title | Teacher | Link | | ----- | ------- | ---- | | Introduction to Magic | André Consciencia | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/23Nwq) | | The Three Transformations | Sixty Skills | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) | | Mind–Body–Soul Integration | André Consciencia | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/mind-body-soul-integration) | | Soaking the Mind into the Body | Craig Mallett | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/soaking-the-mind-into-the-body) | | Emotional Release: Secret of Success with the Elements | Clint | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/emotional-release) | | Movement Mastery Through Kung Fu | Guest Teacher | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/movement-mastery-through-kung-fu) | | Overcoming Difficulties in Steps 4, 5, & 6 of IIH | Clint | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics) | | The First 3 Steps of Initiation into Hermetics | Clint Sabom | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) | | Hermetic Fundamentals (Text-Based) | Perseus Arcane Academy | [Enrol](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/BwJSZ) | --- § 16 — Begin Learning ## Begin Where the Work Calls You You don't have to spend decades arriving where our teachers are. That is why they are here — to show you the way they wish they had been shown. Real results, in one to two years of serious practice. The courses are built for this. The community will support you throughout. #### New to Perseus Begin with the free courses. Introduction to Magic (André, 13 sessions) and The Three Transformations (Sixty Skills) are the best starting points. Let the experience tell you which direction calls most strongly. #### Serious magical training The Sixty Skills Master Course for a complete structured foundation. Magic and Mystical Introspection with André for a soul-mirror centred path. Both built for years of serious development. #### Partners & Promoters See §14 for the full partner programme. Contact Perseus to discuss commission rates, referral links, and promotional materials for your audience. [Browse All Courses](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) [9 Free Courses](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free) [Perseus Website](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) [Join the Community](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) ![Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/perseus-arcane-academy-high-resolution-logo-white-on-transparent-background-128x80-1.webp) courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com  ·  perseusarcaneacademy.com --- # FAQ Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/faq/ --- ### Perseus Arcane Academy's Course Model Perseus Arcane Academy is a platform that allows individual teachers and experts to share their knowledge and experiences through online courses. Perseus works hard to ensure genuine teachers can have a voice via working with our platform. All courses in their current state have been produced by and for Perseus. ### Our Refund Policy If you are unsatisfied for any reason within 30 days, we will provide a full refund with no questions asked. Simply contact us to initiate the refund process via the contact form. https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/contact/ ### Course Interactivity Depends on the Teacher The interactivity and sense of community in each course depends on the teacher and their approach. Some may utilize discussion forums, live sessions, or other interactive elements, while others may have more of a traditional lecture-style format. ### Addressing Concerns on a Case-by-Case Basis While we have general policies in place, each situation is unique. We invite students to connect with us to share any questions, concerns, or feedback related to a course experience so we can see how we might be able to assist. We aim to be reasonable, understanding, and focused on a positive outcome for all involved. ### Providing Reliable Information and Training Through our blog, we aim to be a reliable source of free information on a wide range of esoteric and mystical topics. We bring together knowledgeable contributors to share their insights. Our paid online courses are focused on providing effective training and in-depth knowledge from vetted experts in their fields. We uphold high standards for the quality and reliability of our training materials and instructors ### Fair Compensation for Teacher Expertise Our teachers put great care into developing their courses and we want to ensure they are fairly compensated for their efforts and expertise. ### Do the Courses have Subtitle's? Currently our courses do not have subtitles. All courses are in English. If you are unable to speak English then please do not purchase as you will not be able to get full benefit without thorough understanding. We may if there is sufficient demand add subtitles in the future, but this will be on a case-by-case basis. ### Sales Tax Regulations For students in jurisdictions where it is required by law, sales tax will be added to the final purchase price of course enrollments. This is something we have no control over and must comply with based on where you are located. We apologize for any inconvenience but have no ability to change or avoid sales taxes imposed by state, local, or national governments. The additional tax amount will be made clear prior to finalizing any course enrollment. ### Emails from Perseus Arcane Academy At Perseus Arcane Academy, we strive to provide an excellent learning experience. Within 14 days of your course enrollment, we will reach out to get your feedback and ensure you are having a positive time with the material. We may also occasionally contact students about relevant course updates, new releases, or special deals for current members. We like to show our appreciation by offering students first access to new courses at exclusive prices. If you prefer not to receive any correspondence from us, simply email contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com with the subject line UNSUBSCRIBE. This will let us know not to send any outreach or promotional offers. We aim to respect your communication preferences while providing a high-quality education. We follow GDPR and we are always open to hearing what we can do better, so feel free to email us. ### Can I become a Teacher? At Perseus, we prioritize working with teachers we know and trust. There are a few ways we build those relationships: 1. If we already have an established relationship with you as an educator, you're likely a good fit. 2. We also value referrals from those in our network whose judgment we trust. This allows us to get to know you and determine if we can develop that trust. 3. For teachers unknown to us, we start by exchanging introductions and learning more about your teaching experience and approach. Most importantly, we want to ensure you are genuinely passionate about student growth and development. The key points are that we focus on trusted relationships, we leverage our network to identify new candidates, and we take time to ensure a values alignment and commitment to students. Get in touch to discuss developing a course with us. ### Differing Perspectives Welcomed We live in a complex world with diverse cultures, experiences, and opinions. It is only natural that we will sometimes disagree or have contrasting viewpoints. When this happens, you have three choices: 1. Decide that differing views are a normal part of life, and move on without getting upset. 2. Provide thoughtful feedback via comments or email. We welcome opportunities to understand perspectives different from our own through mature dialogue. 3. Vent your disagreement on social media. However, negativity rarely changes minds. This platform aims to represent a range of views neutrally, not promote any single position. If you take issue with any of our content or interviewees, we encourage you to choose option 1 or 2. Though we may not always agree, our shared humanity calls us to conversational kindness. With compassion and patience, we can coexist harmoniously. There is room for all perspectives here if discussed respectfully. We believe open and considerate dialogue is the best way forward. ### Why does Perseus Arcane Academy charge for its online courses? At Perseus Arcane Academy, we believe in honoring the time, effort, and lifelong dedication our teachers have invested in mastering their spiritual knowledge and skills. Our instructors have spent years, even decades, studying under renowned masters, traveling to sacred sites, and sacrificing other opportunities to acquire their experience. While some may expect spiritual teachings to be provided for free, we respectfully disagree with this notion. Just as any professional career requires extensive training and comes at a cost, the spiritual path is no different. Our teachers have poured immense resources into their own education and development, and it is only fair that they receive reasonable compensation for imparting their hard-earned knowledge. Beyond just theoretical concepts found in books, our courses offer you the invaluable benefit of our teachers' direct experience, insights, and ongoing personal guidance. You gain access to their wisdom cultivated through years of practice, as well as the opportunity to ask questions and receive personalized support throughout your journey. We understand that some in the community may take issue with teachers charging fees for their expertise in spiritual subjects. However, we firmly believe that truly respecting and valuing an individual's teachings means being willing to provide fair compensation for their time and life's work. Ultimately, our goal is to create an environment where those sincerely seeking spiritual growth can learn from authentic teachers who have walked the path before them. If our modest course fees resonate with you, we welcome you to join us on this transformative journey. If not, we wish you well and hope you find a path that aligns with your values. ### I saw Falcon Books Publishing on my statement, is this correct? Yes, Falcon Books Publishing LTD is the company that Perseus Courses trades under. Depending on how you pay you may see a descriptor of FALCON MEDIA PAYHIP. On your receipt you will see PERSEUS. If you have specific questions regarding any payments do, please get in touch via the contact form. It should be clear that the Perseus Arcane Academy blog operates independently and is personally owned and not any part of Falcon Books Publishing LTD. --- # USA Operations & Legal Information Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/usa-operations-legal-information/ ## Company Transition Notice Falcon Books Publishing and Perseus Arcane Academy are in the process of transitioning their business operations from a UK-based entity to a USA-based entity. This page provides the current USA business information for **Watson Ellis LLC**, a Wyoming limited liability company, which will operate the brands **Falcon Books Publishing** and **Perseus Arcane Academy**. During this transition, some legacy records, payment accounts, contracts, invoices, tax details, or platform accounts may still refer to the previous UK entity. These will be updated as part of the transition process. For questions about company details, payments, orders, publishing, courses, or business verification, please contact the relevant brand using the details below. --- ## Business Information **Legal entity:** Watson Ellis LLC **Company type:** Wyoming Limited Liability Company **Business names / DBAs:** Falcon Books Publishing and Perseus Arcane Academy **Business activity:** Online book publishing, digital publishing, and online education **Operating model:** Online business **Physical retail location:** We do not operate a physical retail store for walk-in customers. **Falcon Books Publishing contact:** [info@falconbookspublishing.com](mailto:info@falconbookspublishing.com) **Perseus Arcane Academy contact:** [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com) --- ## Business Overview Our primary business activity is **book publishing**. Through **Falcon Books Publishing**, we publish and sell physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks by specialist authors in spirituality, meditation, philosophy, esoteric studies, personal development, and related educational subjects. **Perseus Arcane Academy** is our connected educational platform. Some authors published through Falcon Books Publishing also provide related online courses, interviews, articles, and educational materials through Perseus Arcane Academy. Our customers are mainly individual readers and students who purchase books, ebooks, audiobooks, and digital courses through our websites, Amazon, and other online platforms. --- # Terms of Service By using our websites, purchasing our products, accessing our courses, or using our digital materials, you agree to these terms. ## Products and Services We publish, sell, and provide access to: - Paperback books - Hardback books - Ebooks - Audiobooks - Online courses - Educational articles, interviews, and digital learning materials Physical books may be printed, distributed, or fulfilled by third-party publishing, print-on-demand, retail, or logistics partners. Digital products are delivered online after purchase, usually by email, customer account access, download link, or access through the relevant course platform. ## Authors and Instructors Falcon Books Publishing works with specialist authors to publish books in our subject areas. Some of these authors may also teach related courses, workshops, or educational programs through Perseus Arcane Academy. Views expressed by individual authors, teachers, or interview guests are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of **Watson Ellis LLC**, **Falcon Books Publishing**, or **Perseus Arcane Academy**. ## Educational Disclaimer Our books, courses, interviews, articles, and other materials are provided for **educational and informational purposes only**. Nothing on our websites should be interpreted as medical, psychological, legal, financial, or professional advice. Customers and students are responsible for their own interpretation, practice, and use of the materials. We do not guarantee specific personal, spiritual, financial, health, or practical outcomes from reading our books or participating in our courses. ## Payments Payments are processed securely by third-party payment providers. We do not directly store full customer card details on our websites. Accepted payment methods may vary depending on the website, platform, customer location, product type, and payment processor availability. ## Account Access and Digital Products Some courses, downloads, ebooks, audiobooks, or digital materials may require account access. Customers are responsible for keeping their login details secure. Account access is for the purchaser only unless otherwise stated in writing. Customers may not share, resell, copy, distribute, upload, or publicly post paid materials without written permission. ## Intellectual Property All website content, books, ebooks, audiobooks, course materials, videos, downloads, images, logos, designs, written materials, and other intellectual property are protected by copyright, trademark, and other applicable laws unless otherwise stated. Customers may not copy, reproduce, distribute, upload, share, resell, or commercially exploit our books, ebooks, audiobooks, courses, downloads, or website content without written permission. ## Limitation of Liability To the fullest extent permitted by law, Watson Ellis LLC, Falcon Books Publishing, and Perseus Arcane Academy are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising from the use of our websites, books, courses, or digital materials. --- # Privacy Policy We collect and process customer information to operate our websites, process orders, deliver products, provide customer support, prevent fraud, maintain business records, and improve our services. ## Information We May Collect We may collect: - Name - Email address - Billing and shipping details - Order information - Account login information - Customer support messages - Website usage information - Payment confirmation details from payment processors We do not directly store full customer card details on our websites. ## How We Use Information We use customer information to: - Process orders - Deliver physical and digital products - Provide course access - Send receipts and transactional emails - Respond to customer support requests - Prevent fraud and abuse - Maintain legal, tax, and business records - Improve our websites, products, and services - Send marketing emails where the customer has subscribed or otherwise consented where required ## Third-Party Services We may use third-party services for payment processing, website hosting, email delivery, analytics, course delivery, fulfilment, print-on-demand, book distribution, and customer support. These third-party providers may process customer information as needed to provide their services. ## Email Communications Customers may receive transactional emails related to purchases, receipts, product delivery, account access, customer support, or service updates. Customers who subscribe to our mailing lists may also receive educational content, publishing updates, author announcements, course information, and promotional emails. Marketing emails include an unsubscribe option. ## Privacy Contact Privacy-related questions can be sent to the relevant brand contact email: **Falcon Books Publishing:** [info@falconbookspublishing.com](mailto:info@falconbookspublishing.com) **Perseus Arcane Academy:** [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com) --- # Refund Policy Refund rights depend on the type of product purchased. Physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, digital downloads, and online courses may have different refund conditions. ## Physical Books Physical book refund and return eligibility may depend on the retailer, fulfilment partner, print partner, or platform through which the book was purchased. If a book was purchased through Amazon, another retailer, or a third-party platform, the refund or return must usually be handled through that platform. If a physical book was purchased directly from us and arrives damaged, defective, or incorrect, please contact us with your order number and photos of the issue. ## Ebooks, Audiobooks, and Digital Downloads Because ebooks, audiobooks, and digital downloads can usually be accessed immediately after purchase, refunds may be limited once access has been granted or the file has been delivered, unless required by applicable law. ## Online Courses Course refund terms may vary by course, promotion, payment plan, or sales page. Customers should review the specific course offer before purchasing. Unless otherwise stated on the course sales page, access to digital course content is provided after payment, and refunds may be limited once course access has been granted. ## Payment Plans and Subscriptions For payment plans or subscriptions, cancellation terms will be stated at checkout or on the relevant product page. Cancelling a future payment does not automatically refund previous payments unless stated in the specific offer terms or required by applicable law. ## Refund Requests Refund requests should include: - Order number - Product name - Purchase email address - Reason for the request For Falcon Books Publishing purchases, contact: **[info@falconbookspublishing.com](mailto:info@falconbookspublishing.com)** For Perseus Arcane Academy purchases, contact: **[contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com)** --- # Shipping and Delivery Policy ## Physical Books Physical books are shipped according to the fulfilment method used for each order. Shipping times may vary depending on: - Customer location - Print partner - Distributor - Retailer - Stock availability - Selected shipping method - Customs or local delivery delays Physical books may be fulfilled by third-party print, distribution, retail, or logistics partners. ## Digital Products Digital products, including ebooks, audiobooks, downloads, and online courses, are normally delivered by email, download link, or customer account access after successful payment. If a customer does not receive access after purchase, they should check their spam or promotions folder and then contact the relevant brand. ## Delivery Issues If there is a delivery issue, customers should contact: **Falcon Books Publishing:** [info@falconbookspublishing.com](mailto:info@falconbookspublishing.com) **Perseus Arcane Academy:** [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com) Please include your name, purchase email address, order number, and the product or course name. --- # Cookie Policy This Cookie Policy applies where our websites use cookies, analytics tools, advertising pixels, embedded media, or similar tracking technologies. ## What Cookies Are Cookies are small files placed on a user’s device by a website. They may be used to help websites function, remember preferences, analyse traffic, improve services, or support marketing. ## Types of Cookies We May Use We may use: - Essential cookies required for website functionality - Login and account access cookies - Checkout and payment-related cookies - Analytics cookies - Marketing or advertising cookies - Embedded media cookies from third-party platforms ## Third-Party Cookies Some cookies may be set by third-party services used on our websites, such as payment processors, video platforms, analytics providers, email tools, course platforms, advertising networks, or embedded content providers. ## Managing Cookies Users can manage or block cookies through their browser settings. Where required by applicable law, we may provide cookie consent tools or cookie preference options. Disabling certain cookies may affect website functionality, checkout, login, course access, or embedded media. --- # Contact Information For Falcon Books Publishing enquiries: **[info@falconbookspublishing.com](mailto:info@falconbookspublishing.com)** For Perseus Arcane Academy enquiries: **[contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com)** For order support, please include your name, purchase email address, order number, and the product or course name. --- ## Final note This page provides the USA operations and policy information for **Watson Ellis LLC**, doing business as **Falcon Books Publishing** and **Perseus Arcane Academy**. During the transition from the previous UK-based entity to the USA-based entity, some older records, payment accounts, invoices, or platform references may still show legacy company information. These will be updated as part of the transition process. --- # Home Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/ ## Welcome to Perseus Courses, interviews and study resources for serious students of magic, Hermetics, Franz Bardon, evocation, Quabbalah, meditation and internal alchemy. [View Courses](https://payhip.com/PerseusArcaneAcademy) [Read Interviews](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/blog/) Start Here ## Explore Perseus Arcane Academy New to the academy? Begin with our introduction, explore Franz Bardon resources, browse structured courses, or read our long-form practitioner interviews. [ 01 New to Perseus? ### About the Academy Learn what Perseus Arcane Academy is, who it is for, and how we approach magic, mysticism, Hermetics and esoteric training. Start Here ](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/about/) [ 02 Franz Bardon ### Bardon Resource Guide Explore our major Franz Bardon resource post covering books, practice, interpretation, interviews and related Hermetic material. View Resource ](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-resources-interviews-guides-and-practice-support/) [ 03 Training ### Online Courses Browse structured courses in Hermetics, Quabbalah, evocation, mystical introspection, tarot, scrying and practical magic. Browse Courses ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) [ 04 Interviews ### Practitioner Interviews Read in-depth interviews with authors, magicians, meditators, researchers and long-term practitioners of the esoteric arts. Read Interviews ](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/category/interviews/) Franz Bardon Courses ## Compare IIH Training and Bardon-Informed Paths Compare direct *Initiation Into Hermetics* training, free IIH courses, Bardon-informed curricula, introspective training and ceremonial approaches. See how each path relates to Franz Bardon before choosing the course that suits you. [ Compare Franz Bardon Courses ](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/franz-bardon-courses/) [ Explore Free Bardon Resources → ](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-resources-interviews-guides-and-practice-support/) Featured Courses ## Structured Training in Magic, Hermetics, Evocation and Quabbalah Perseus Arcane Academy offers serious online courses for students of practical magic, Franz Bardon’s Hermetic system, evocation, Quabbalah, mystical introspection, internal alchemy, tarot, scrying and related esoteric traditions. These courses are designed for practitioners who want structured training rather than scattered occult information. Hermetic Training ### Sixty Skills Master Course An 18-month curriculum taking students from foundational magical practice toward independence through structured training in Hermetics, internal alchemy, Quabbalah and practical esoteric development. [View Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) Evocation ### The Complete Evocation Masterclass A complete course in magical evocation, spirit contact and practical preparation for students who want a serious, grounded approach to one of the most demanding areas of magical practice. [View Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/eGXY2) Introspection ### Magic & Mystical Introspection André Consciência’s long-form Hermetic training in soul mirror work, mystical introspection, inner transformation, ennoblement of character and the deeper foundations of magical development. [View Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) Quabbalah ### Mystical Quabbalah by Ray An advanced study of mystical Quabbalah, inner development and spiritual training for students who want to deepen their understanding of magical language, divine emanation and esoteric practice. [View Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ZEHf2) Holy Guardian Angel ### Attaining Your Holy Guardian Angel A focused course on Holy Guardian Angel work, spiritual contact, preparation, communication and the deeper process of aligning magical practice with direct inner guidance. [View Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/courses-1-3-attaining-your-guardian-angel-by-denny-sargent) Tarot & Scrying ### Meta Magick Scrying Course Training in magical scrying, visionary perception and metamagical practice for students who want to develop clearer inner vision and practical methods of esoteric exploration. [View Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/metamagick) [ Explore All Courses ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) Student Reviews ## What Students Say About Perseus Courses Real student reviews from Perseus Arcane Academy courses in Hermetic training, Franz Bardon practice, visionary Hermeticism, meditation, magical foundations, energy work and internal alchemy. “ > This first semester at the School of Visionary Hermeticism stands, for me, as a moment of real inner displacement, a shift that goes beyond learning and touches something more essential. It marked the beginning of a path I had not fully accessed before, both magical and spiritual. Ardat L. [ The School of Visionary Hermeticism ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) ✦ > This course was both challenging and rewarding, offering a rare balance of practical Hermetic work, philosophical depth, and genuine personal transformation. I wholeheartedly recommend it to sincere seekers. Anna R. [ The School of Visionary Hermeticism ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) ✦ > Having some experience in both Bardon's Hermetics and the basic practices of the Golden Dawn, I was drawn to this course as a method to syncretize my practice as well as streamline it. Riothamus [ Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-in-the-bardon-tradition) ✦ > Andre is an artist and magician; his courses are curious works of art that draw us upon a journey. Every step is an unfolding of our potential as human beings and as magicians. Tom B. [ Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-in-the-bardon-tradition) ✦ > Really helped make sense of things I’ve felt and experienced but couldn’t explain. Now I see how the energies connect and transform into one another. Bruce [ The Three Transformations ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) [ Explore Perseus Courses ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) Interviews & Resources ## Featured Interviews & Resources Explore long-form interviews, guides and essays from the Perseus archive. --- --- [](!#postLink!#) ##### !#title!# !#excerpt!# 50 #### Courses 9 #### Teachers 1000+ #### Enrolled Students 700 #### Community Teachers ## Learn From Practitioners With Different Strengths Perseus brings together teachers working across Hermetics, Bardon practice, Quabbalah, evocation, internal power, tarot, scrying, mystical introspection and practical esoteric development. ![Sixty Skills teacher](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Sixtyskillsteacher-1.jpg) Structured Training ### Sixty Skills Magical development, internal training, elemental work, Akasha, non-dual light and practical independence. ![André Consciência at Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/286273180_1020624735226293_2774844859745159877_n.webp) Hermetics ### André Consciência Magic and Mystical Introspection, Bardon, soul mirror work, visionary Hermeticism and ennoblement of character. ![Sifu Mark Rasmus](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Sifu-Mark-Rasmus2.webp) Internal Power ### Sifu Mark Rasmus Embodiment, internal power, energy work, martial alchemy and Hermetic body-based training. ![Jake Green](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/photo_2023-06-09_05-19-09.webp) Evocation ### Jake Green Evocation, Kabbalah, spirit contact, ritual skill and direct magical practice. ![Denny Sargent](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/capture.webp) HGA Work ### Denny Sargent Holy Guardian Angel work, spiritual contact, cleansing, preparation and Western esoteric practice. ![Dr Peter Duchemin](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Peter-Rooftop.webp) Visionary Practice ### Dr Peter Duchemin Meta Magick, tarot, scrying, visionary perception and symbolic esoteric systems. [Meet the Teachers](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/teachers/) Free Courses ## Start Training Before You Buy Anything The free courses are not filler. They are a practical way to experience the teaching style, test the material for yourself and begin with real exercises. - **Test the academy first.** Experience the tone and teaching before committing to a larger course. - **Build foundations.** Start with material that supports later magical and Hermetic work. - **Move with structure.** Use free training as an entry point into a more focused path of practice. [See Free Courses](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free) Community ## Join the Gathering of the Magi Courses give structure. Community gives momentum. Join other students and practitioners discussing magic, Hermetics, Bardon, meditation, internal alchemy and the wider esoteric path. - **Discussion.** Speak with other serious students and practitioners. - **Continuity.** Stay connected to the work beyond the course page. - **Direction.** Find the next step without drowning in options. [Join the Community](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) Questions ## Where Should You Start? The challenge is often not access to information, but choosing the right next step and giving it steady attention. I am new to magic. Where should I begin? Start with the About page, the free courses, and the beginner-friendly material. Build foundations before moving into advanced evocation, Quabbalah or more specialised training. I am a Franz Bardon student. What should I read first? Begin with the Franz Bardon resource guide, then explore the Sixty Skills and Hermetic courses that support concentration, elements, soul mirror work and practical training. Are the courses beginner friendly? Some are. Others are advanced. Read the course descriptions carefully and choose according to your current level, your interests and the foundations you already have. Do I need to follow one teacher only? No. Perseus is a platform, not a single-teacher system. The point is to learn from serious practitioners while developing your own discernment and practice. Is Perseus only about courses? No. Perseus also contains interviews, essays, resource guides and community discussion. The courses are the structured training arm of a larger esoteric archive. Begin Properly ## Explore the Archive. Choose Your Next Step. Begin the Work. Read the archive, explore the courses and join the community when you are ready. Perseus is here to help sincere students move from curiosity into steady, practical development. [Explore Courses](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) [Read Interviews](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/category/interviews/) --- # Franz Bardon Courses: Compare IIH Training and Bardon-Informed Paths Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/franz-bardon-courses/ # Franz Bardon Courses: Compare IIH Training and Bardon-Informed Paths Perseus Arcane Academy offers several training options for students interested in Franz Bardon’s system. However, these courses do not all relate to Bardon in the same way. Some directly teach the exercises and ten-step structure of *Initiation Into Hermetics*. Others are independent systems that share similar goals, reinterpret Bardonian methods or apply material from Bardon’s books within a broader approach. This page explains those differences clearly so that you can choose the training path that best matches your experience, interests and preferred way of learning. ## Quick Answer The [Complete Universal Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) is the most extensive Perseus course directly organised around the ten steps of *Initiation Into Hermetics*. Students who want to begin without paying can take [The First 3 Steps of Initiation Into Hermetics](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) and [Further Work in Initiation Into Hermetics: Steps 4, 5 and 6](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics), both taught by Clint Sabom and available free. The [Sixty Skills Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) is not a direct Franz Bardon course. It is an independent, Bardon-informed curriculum combining Hermetics with meditation, energy work, internal training and methods drawn from several traditions. [Magic and Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) follows a path aligned with *Initiation Into Hermetics*, particularly through introspection, the soul mirrors, ennoblement of character and direct mentorship. [Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) applies methodologies from Bardon’s three principal works within a structured system of ceremonial practice. ## Direct Initiation Into Hermetics Courses ### Complete Universal Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass **Relationship to Bardon:** Direct training organised around *Initiation Into Hermetics* **Teacher:** Jake Zen **Structure:** More than 190 lessons covering Bardon’s ten steps alongside supplementary exercises and teachings **Best for:** Students who want an extensive guided course covering the complete IIH structure The Complete Universal Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass is the principal Perseus option for students specifically seeking a comprehensive course based around Franz Bardon’s first book. The curriculum includes concentration, thought observation, the soul mirrors, elemental work, vital energy, mental transference, magical equilibrium, mental wandering, electric and magnetic fluids, fluid condensers and practices associated with the later steps of IIH. It also contains supplementary material from Qigong, meditation and other magical systems. It is therefore more than a literal video commentary on Bardon’s text, but *Initiation Into Hermetics* remains the main structure around which the course is organised. Students receive lifetime access to the existing material, future additions and the associated learning community. **Choose this course when:** - You want to work through all ten steps of *Initiation Into Hermetics*. - You need demonstrations and additional explanations. - You want one large, structured programme. - You are comfortable with supplementary material being taught alongside Bardon. - You want community support as part of the course. [Explore the Complete Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) --- ### The First 3 Steps of Initiation Into Hermetics **Relationship to Bardon:** Direct support for Steps One, Two and Three of IIH **Teacher:** Clint Sabom **Cost:** Free **Best for:** Beginners and students who have struggled to establish the foundations of Bardon’s system This free course walks students through the mental, astral and physical exercises contained in the first three steps of *Initiation Into Hermetics*. Clint shares his own experience of completing the exercises, together with additional explanations, practical advice and methods that helped him develop magical equilibrium. The course includes the magical schooling of the spirit, soul and physical body for each of the first three steps. Clint also remains available to students by email for questions. **Choose this course when:** - You are beginning *Initiation Into Hermetics*. - You have remained on the first steps without clear progress. - You want a second practitioner’s interpretation of Bardon’s instructions. - You want direct IIH support without purchasing a course. [Start the Free First Three Steps Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) --- ### Further Work in Initiation Into Hermetics: Steps 4, 5 and 6 **Relationship to Bardon:** Direct support for Steps Four, Five and Six of IIH **Teacher:** Clint Sabom **Cost:** Free **Best for:** Students who have completed the foundations and are encountering difficulty in the middle steps This free course continues Clint Sabom’s practical support for students of *Initiation Into Hermetics*. It covers the mental, astral and physical exercises associated with Steps Four, Five and Six. Clint discusses common difficulties and provides supplementary strategies based on his own experience of working through the book. The course is designed for students who understand what Bardon asks them to do but need greater clarity concerning how the exercises can be approached in practice. **Choose this course when:** - You are currently working through Steps Four, Five or Six. - Bardon’s brief instructions have left important practical questions unanswered. - You want additional methods without abandoning the IIH framework. - You want free support before considering a larger paid course. [Start the Free Steps 4–6 Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics) ## Bardon-Aligned and Bardon-Informed Training ### Magic and Mystical Introspection **Relationship to Bardon:** An initiatory path aligned with IIH through introspection and ennoblement **Teacher:** André Consciência **Structure:** Eleven levels with continuing lessons and interaction with the teacher **Best for:** Students drawn to the soul mirrors, self-knowledge, character transformation and long-term mentorship Magic and Mystical Introspection is based on André Consciência’s book *Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sun Sphere*. Both the book and course engage with the stages of *Initiation Into Hermetics*, but approach them through detailed introspection, the soul mirrors and the progressive ennoblement of the practitioner. The course begins with thought observation, feeling, bodily awareness and self-assessment. It then develops the soul mirrors and continues into increasingly advanced levels of Hermetic and mystical work. This is not simply a conventional lesson-by-lesson explanation of Bardon. It is André’s own complete initiatory path, informed by Bardon and developed through his practice, writing and mentorship. Communication with André is part of the course. **Choose this course when:** - The soul mirrors are central to your practice. - You want initiation to include deep character development. - You prefer introspection to a primarily technical curriculum. - You value direct communication with a teacher. - You want a long-term initiatory path. [Explore Magic and Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) --- ### Sixty Skills Master Course **Relationship to Bardon:** Independent, Bardon-informed training **Teacher:** Bob of Sixty Skills **Structure:** An 18-month curriculum divided into ten levels, containing 30 courses and 67 numbered skills **Best for:** Students who want a practical, skills-based system drawing from Hermetics, meditation and internal training The Sixty Skills Master Course should not be described simply as a Franz Bardon course. It is an independent training system developed through work across Hermetic, Buddhist, Yogic, Taoist, meditative and internal traditions. Nevertheless, many parts of the curriculum overlap with problems and abilities encountered by students working through *Initiation Into Hermetics*. Training includes concentration, energetic sensitivity, the vital, astral and mental bodies, elemental work, magical equilibrium, consciousness transfer, Akasha, non-dual light, mental wandering, invocation and evocation. Its defining feature is an engineering-style approach. Abilities are divided into clearly taught skills, with an emphasis on understanding how and why an exercise works. Sixty Skills may therefore be especially useful to students who understand what Bardon asks them to achieve but have struggled to produce consistent results from the instructions in the book alone. It should be presented as an independent or complementary route—not as an official version of Bardon’s curriculum. **Choose this course when:** - You repeatedly become stuck on particular IIH exercises. - You want abilities divided into smaller technical skills. - You are interested in internal arts as well as Western Hermetics. - You prefer measurable practice and detailed explanations. - You are comfortable following a system that extends beyond Bardon. [Explore the Sixty Skills Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) ## Specialist Bardonian Training ### Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition **Relationship to Bardon:** Bardonian methodologies applied through ceremonial magic **Teacher:** André Consciência **Structure:** Three sequential levels designed as a one-year course **Best for:** Students interested in connecting Bardonian Hermetics with ritual and ceremonial magic Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition combines ceremonial structures with methodologies drawn primarily from Bardon’s *Initiation Into Hermetics*, *The Practice of Magical Evocation* and *The Key to the True Quabbalah*. The course takes two well-known Golden Dawn practices—the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and the Middle Pillar Exercise—and develops them into a broader path involving purification, invocation, evocation, magical equilibrium, theurgy and divine communion. This is not a general introductory walkthrough of *Initiation Into Hermetics*. It is a specialist course for students interested in how Bardonian principles can be applied within a developed system of ceremonial practice. The programme includes written material, illustrations, video lessons and communication with André. **Choose this course when:** - You are interested in both Bardon and ceremonial magic. - You want to understand rituals through deeper Hermetic principles. - You are prepared to commit to a sequential one-year programme. - You want access to André for questions and discussion. [Explore Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) ## Additional Free Energy Training ### The Three Transformations **Relationship to Bardon:** Supporting energy work rather than a direct IIH course **Teacher:** Bob of Sixty Skills **Best for:** Experiencing the Sixty Skills teaching approach and learning distinctions between vital, astral and mental energy The Three Transformations introduces practical work with vital, astral and mental energy. It explains how these forms of energy differ, how they may be experienced and how one form may be transformed into another. These distinctions can be useful to students of Hermetics, meditation, Yoga and magic. However, the course should not be mistaken for a complete introduction to Bardon’s ten-step system. It is a useful way to experience the Sixty Skills teaching style before deciding whether the larger curriculum is suitable for you. [Explore The Three Transformations](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) ## Are Paid Franz Bardon Courses Necessary? No. You can study and practise directly from *Initiation Into Hermetics*. Purchasing a course is not a prerequisite for beginning Bardon’s system, and no course can replace the discipline required to perform the exercises consistently. Perseus also provides two free courses directly covering the first six steps: - [The First 3 Steps of Initiation Into Hermetics](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) - [Further Work in Initiation Into Hermetics: Steps 4, 5 and 6](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics) A paid course may nevertheless be useful when you need: - A clearer explanation of a difficult exercise - Video demonstrations - A structured training sequence - Help identifying mistakes - Access to a teacher or community - Alternative exercises when the original instructions are not producing progress - Greater accountability and continuity The value of a paid course is not access to secret information. Its value lies in structure, interpretation, demonstration, support and the experience of the teacher. ## Which Course Should You Choose? ### Choose the Complete Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass when: You want one extensive course organised around all ten steps of *Initiation Into Hermetics*. [View the Complete IIH Masterclass](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) ### Choose Clint Sabom’s free courses when: You want practical support for Steps One through Six while continuing to follow Bardon’s book directly. [Begin with Steps 1–3](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) [Continue with Steps 4–6](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics) ### Choose Magic and Mystical Introspection when: You want to approach initiation through introspection, the soul mirrors, ennoblement and direct mentorship. [View Magic and Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) ### Choose Sixty Skills when: You want an independent, skills-based system that is highly relevant to Bardon students but is not limited to Bardon’s methods. [View the Sixty Skills Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) ### Choose Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition when: You want to apply Bardonian methodologies within a developed system of ceremonial ritual. [View the Ceremonial Magick Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) ### Begin with The Three Transformations when: You want to experience the Sixty Skills approach before making a larger commitment. [View The Three Transformations](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) ## Should You Take Several Courses at Once? Usually not. Beginning two or three complete initiatory systems simultaneously can create unnecessary confusion. Different teachers may use similar terms in different ways, organise exercises in a different order or place emphasis on different results. Choose one principal curriculum and practise it consistently. Additional courses are most valuable when they address a clearly identified problem or provide a specialist subject that your principal curriculum does not cover. Collecting explanations is not the same as training. ## Franz Bardon Resources and Practice Support Courses are only one part of the Franz Bardon material available through Perseus Arcane Academy. The Franz Bardon Resource Guide brings together interviews, practical articles, student experiences and discussions covering: - *Initiation Into Hermetics* - The soul mirrors - Concentration and mental discipline - Magical equilibrium - Elemental work - *The Practice of Magical Evocation* - *The Key to the True Quabbalah* - Mental wandering - Spirit contact - Internal training - Common causes of stalled progress [Explore the Complete Franz Bardon Resource Guide](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-resources-interviews-guides-and-practice-support/) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Which Perseus course follows Initiation Into Hermetics most directly? The [Complete Universal Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) is the most extensive option organised around Bardon’s full ten-step structure. Clint Sabom’s free courses also work directly with Bardon’s exercises but concentrate specifically on [Steps One to Three](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) and [Steps Four to Six](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics). ### Is Sixty Skills a Franz Bardon course? Not in the strict sense. Sixty Skills is an independent, Bardon-informed curriculum. It develops many abilities relevant to IIH but also incorporates methods and concepts from meditation, internal arts, Yoga and other traditions. ### Is Magic and Mystical Introspection a Franz Bardon course? It is an initiatory system closely aligned with *Initiation Into Hermetics*, especially its introspective, soul-mirror and character-development work. It is nevertheless André Consciência’s developed path rather than a conventional commentary on Bardon’s book. ### Is there a free Franz Bardon course? Yes. Perseus offers [The First 3 Steps of Initiation Into Hermetics](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) and [Further Work in Initiation Into Hermetics: Steps 4, 5 and 6](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/further-work-in-initiation-into-hermetics) free of charge. ### Can complete beginners take these courses? Yes. Beginners seeking direct IIH support can begin with Clint Sabom’s free [First Three Steps course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom). Students seeking a larger complete programme can consider the [Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass). Those interested in the Sixty Skills approach can begin with [The Three Transformations](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN). ### Are these courses official continuations of Franz Bardon’s work? No claim is made that these courses are official continuations authorised by Franz Bardon. They are modern courses created by independent practitioners and teachers who work directly with, draw from or engage with Bardon’s system. ### Can a course guarantee progress? No. Progress depends on consistent practice, reflection, correction and time. A course can supply structure and guidance, but the student must still perform the work. ## Begin Your Training There is no single course that is right for every student. The important distinction is whether you want to: - Follow *Initiation Into Hermetics* directly - Receive free help with specific IIH steps - Enter a complete guided IIH programme - Develop similar abilities through an independent skills-based system - Focus on introspection and ennoblement - Apply Bardonian methods through ceremonial practice Understand the difference, choose one principal path and practise it consistently. [Explore the Complete Initiation Into Hermetics Masterclass](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/initiation-into-hermetics-masterclass) [Begin with a Free Initiation Into Hermetics Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-first-3-steps-of-initiation-into-hermetics-by-clint-sabom) [Browse the Franz Bardon Resource Guide](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-resources-interviews-guides-and-practice-support/) --- # About Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/about/ ## Welcome to Perseus Arcane Academy™ ![Magic and the path of Initiation](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Deliberate_11_A_Magicans_apprentice_climbing_the_mountain_of_t_0.webp) I'm James Robinson, and I founded Perseus Arcane Academy™ out of a personal journey that took me through many different traditions and teachers over the years, (special mention must also go to Andre Consciencia for the name 'Perseus Arcane Academy'). Eventually, I discovered the profound teachings of the Franz Bardon system and later had the great fortune to study under Sifu Mark Rasmus, whose approach added an entirely new dimension to my understanding of internal development. Perseus was created to offer something I found lacking in the wider magical community—**a platform where real practitioners share real experience**. Many in the esoteric world are hesitant about openness or new avenues, but we believe that **everyone benefits when knowledge is shared freely and deeply**. Our focus is on practical, applicable magic—not just theory—and we work hard to ensure that everything we publish reflects that. The teachers we collaborate with are not just chosen for their knowledge, but for their integrity. **Trust and mutual respect are non-negotiable for us**. We don’t expect everyone to agree on everything—that’s not how real growth happens—but we do insist that everyone we work with has the sincere intention to help students grow. Perseus is not here to control, gatekeep, or dictate. We’re a platform, not a hierarchy. We believe in giving space for diverse perspectives, allowing each teacher to express and explain their path in their own way. Whether it's through long-form blogs, in-depth interviews, or immersive courses, we want to give you the chance to engage directly with people doing the work—so you can decide what resonates. If you’re seeking depth, honesty, and a community grounded in practice, we hope you’ll find your place here. --- ## Recommended Reading We have a huge blog to explore but here are three posts to get you started. ![Peter Duchemin Meta Magick Tarot](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Peter-Rooftop.webp) ## Metamagick: An interview with Dr. Peter Duchemin A wild journey into Meta Magick - this post is close to 9000 words of absolute gold. ![Sixty Skills Master Course](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/AlbedoBase_XL_dmt_AND_ASTRAL_realm_dark_mysterious_center_and_0.jpg) ## Expediting Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics For many the missing link in their Franz Bardon training, allowing students to finally make progress. ![Ceremonial Magick, Franz Bardon and the Golden Dawn](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Leonardo_Diffusion_XL_a_mystical_practitioner_of_occult_arts_w_0_398x300.webp) ## Seeking the Greater Mysteries Golden Dawn and the Franz Bardon tradition, Andre looks at how they can compliment each other. --- # News Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/blog/ --- # Contact Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/contact/ ### Please get in touch with any questions you may have --- # Checkout Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/checkout-2/ --- # Dashboard Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/customer-dashboard/ --- # Checkout Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/checkout/ [woocommerce_checkout] --- # My account Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/my-account/ [woocommerce_my_account] --- # Cart Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/cart/ [woocommerce_cart] --- # Privacy Policy Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/privacy-policy-3/ **Privacy Policy for Perseus Arcane Academy** *Last Updated: 16th February 2025* ## 1. Introduction Welcome to **Perseus Arcane Academy** ("we," "our," or "us"). Your privacy is important to us. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website **[www.perseusarcaneacademy.com](http://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/)**. By using our website, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please refrain from using our website. --- ## 2. Information We Collect ### A. Personal Data We may collect personally identifiable information that you voluntarily provide when you: - Sign up for our newsletter - Register an account - Purchase products or services - Contact us via email or forms This information may include: - Name - Email address - Payment information (processed through secure third-party providers) - Any other information you choose to provide ### B. Non-Personal Data We automatically collect certain information when you visit our website, including: - IP address - Browser type - Pages visited and time spent on the site - Device information - Cookies and tracking technologies (see Section 6) --- ## 3. How We Use Your Information We use your information for the following purposes: - To provide and improve our website and services - To communicate with you (newsletters, promotions, responses to inquiries) - To process transactions securely - To comply with legal obligations - To analyze website performance and improve user experience --- ## 4. How We Share Your Information We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal data. However, we may share your information with: - **Service providers**: We may use third-party services for payment processing, email delivery, analytics, and hosting. - **Legal compliance**: If required by law, we may share information with legal authorities. - **Business transfers**: If our website is acquired, user information may be transferred as part of the assets. --- ## 5. Data Retention We retain your personal data only as long as necessary for the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy or as required by law. --- ## 6. Cookies and Tracking Technologies We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to enhance user experience, analyze traffic, and personalize content. You can modify your browser settings to refuse cookies, but some site features may not function properly. For more details, see our **Cookie Policy**. --- ## 7. Your Rights Under GDPR (For EU Users) If you are located in the **European Economic Area (EEA),** you have the following rights under the **General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):** - **Right to Access**: Request a copy of the personal data we hold about you. - **Right to Rectification**: Correct any inaccurate or incomplete data. - **Right to Erasure**: Request deletion of your data under certain circumstances. - **Right to Restriction**: Limit the processing of your data. - **Right to Data Portability**: Request a copy of your data in a structured format. - **Right to Object**: Object to certain types of data processing. - **Right to Withdraw Consent**: If you previously gave consent, you may withdraw it at any time. To exercise any of these rights, please contact us at: [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com) --- ## 8. Security Measures We take reasonable security measures to protect your personal data. However, no method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. --- ## 9. Third-Party Links Our website may contain links to third-party websites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those sites. Please review their policies before providing any personal information. --- ## 10. Changes to This Privacy Policy We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated "Last Updated" date. --- ## 11. Contact Us If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to exercise your data rights, please contact us at: **Email**: [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com) **Website**: [www.perseusarcaneacademy.com](http://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) --- ### GDPR Compliance Statement Perseus Arcane Academy is committed to complying with the **General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)** for users in the **European Economic Area (EEA)**. ### Lawful Basis for Processing We process personal data based on: - **Consent**: When you provide explicit permission (e.g., signing up for newsletters). - **Contractual Necessity**: When processing is necessary to fulfill a contract (e.g., purchases). - **Legal Obligation**: When required by law. - **Legitimate Interest**: For website security, analytics, and business operations. ### How We Protect Your Data We implement security measures, encryption, and restricted access to protect user data. If a data breach occurs, we will notify affected users and relevant authorities as required by GDPR. ### International Data Transfers We may transfer data outside the EEA, ensuring appropriate safeguards such as: - **Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs)** - **Data Processing Agreements with Third-Party Providers** ### Exercising Your Rights You can exercise your GDPR rights (outlined in Section 7 of our Privacy Policy) by contacting us at [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com). ### Data Protection Officer (DPO) For GDPR inquiries, you can contact our **Data Protection Officer** at: **Email**: [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com) --- --- # Teachers Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/teachers/ ##   ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Sixtyskillsteacher-1.webp) ### Sixty Skills TEACher Creator of the Sixty Skills Curriculum, Five parts leading magical independence. His engineering approach to magic is opening the door for all. [![Andre Consciencia at Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/286273180_1020624735226293_2774844859745159877_n.webp)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/andre-consciencia/) ### Andre Consciencia Teacher Andre never fails to inspire, he works closely with each student to ensure rapid but deep learning. He has multiple courses for differing levels of student. ![Elastic Force Chi Kung and Hermetics with Sifu Mark Rasmus](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Sifu-Mark-Rasmus2.webp) ### Sifu Mark Rasmus teacher A teacher of teachers, many of the new teachers that are truly able to do magic come from him. He ensures a practical and deep understanding in all his students. [![Evocation and Kabbalah Master Class with Jake](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/photo_2023-06-09_05-19-09.webp)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/jake-green/) ### Jake teacher Jake is one of our youngest teachers but also someone who has literally lived with Sifu Mark Rasmus for many years, he is a gold mine of knowledge and experience. [![Andre Consciencia at Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/capture.webp)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/denny-sargent/) ### Denny Sargent teacher Denny has decades of experience and wrote the book on meeting your Higher Guardian Angel. He is experienced in multiple traditions and shares his knowledge here on Perseus. ![Elastic Force Chi Kung and Hermetics with Sifu Mark Rasmus](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Peter-Rooftop.webp) ### Peter Duchemin teacher Peter is like a modern day merlin! Once you delve into his approach to Magick, there is no going back. His experience is vast and approach unique. ![Evocation and Kabbalah Master Class with Jake](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/339103134_634589151841460_2037615100438471127_n.jpg) ### Ray del Sole teacher A teacher with decades of experience, he shines a light upon the mystical aspects of the path. Each course is presented with his very in-depth teaching style. ![Andre Consciencia at Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/NENAD-Profile.png) ### Nenad teacher Well known for his journeys through the girdling zone and magician in Franz Bardons tradition. He is available for specialist evocation training. ![Elastic Force Chi Kung and Hermetics with Sifu Mark Rasmus](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Deliberate_11_A_Magicans_apprentice_climbing_the_mountain_of_t_0.jpg) ### Become a Teacher teacher If you are an experienced practitioner and would like to share, then get in touch. We focus on relationships, so lets talk and see if we can build trust and go from there. --- # Refund Policy Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/refund-policy/ Firstly, thank you for considering us, we greatly appreciate it. If you are unsatisfied for any reason within 30 days, we will provide a full refund with no questions asked. Simply contact us to initiate the refund process via the [contact form](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/contact/). We want everyone to be completely satisfied. [See more here.](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/faq/) --- # Cookies Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/cookies/ # Cookies Policy Last updated: March 16, 2023 This Cookies Policy explains what Cookies are and how We use them. You should read this policy so You can understand what type of cookies We use, or the information We collect using Cookies and how that information is used. Cookies do not typically contain any information that personally identifies a user, but personal information that we store about You may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from Cookies. For further information on how We use, store and keep your personal data secure, see our Privacy Policy. We do not store sensitive personal information, such as mailing addresses, account passwords, etc. in the Cookies We use. # Interpretation and Definitions ## Interpretation The words of which the initial letter is capitalized have meanings defined under the following conditions. The following definitions shall have the same meaning regardless of whether they appear in singular or in plural. ## Definitions For the purposes of this Cookies Policy: - **Company** (referred to as either "the Company", "We", "Us" or "Our" in this Cookies Policy) refers to Falcon Books Publishing, St Neots Masonic Hall 166 School Lane. - **Cookies** means small files that are placed on Your computer, mobile device or any other device by a website, containing details of your browsing history on that website among its many uses. - **Website** refers to Perseus Arcane Academy, accessible from [http://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com](http://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com) - **You** means the individual accessing or using the Website, or a company, or any legal entity on behalf of which such individual is accessing or using the Website, as applicable. # The use of the Cookies ## Type of Cookies We Use Cookies can be "Persistent" or "Session" Cookies. Persistent Cookies remain on your personal computer or mobile device when You go offline, while Session Cookies are deleted as soon as You close your web browser. We use both session and persistent Cookies for the purposes set out below: - **Necessary / Essential Cookies** Type: Session Cookies Administered by: Us Purpose: These Cookies are essential to provide You with services available through the Website and to enable You to use some of its features. They help to authenticate users and prevent fraudulent use of user accounts. Without these Cookies, the services that You have asked for cannot be provided, and We only use these Cookies to provide You with those services. - **Functionality Cookies** Type: Persistent Cookies Administered by: Us Purpose: These Cookies allow us to remember choices You make when You use the Website, such as remembering your login details or language preference. The purpose of these Cookies is to provide You with a more personal experience and to avoid You having to re-enter your preferences every time You use the Website. ## Your Choices Regarding Cookies If You prefer to avoid the use of Cookies on the Website, first You must disable the use of Cookies in your browser and then delete the Cookies saved in your browser associated with this website. You may use this option for preventing the use of Cookies at any time. If You do not accept Our Cookies, You may experience some inconvenience in your use of the Website and some features may not function properly. If You'd like to delete Cookies or instruct your web browser to delete or refuse Cookies, please visit the help pages of your web browser. - For the Chrome web browser, please visit this page from Google: [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32050](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32050) - For the Internet Explorer web browser, please visit this page from Microsoft: [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278835) - For the Firefox web browser, please visit this page from Mozilla: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/delete-cookies-remove-info-websites-stored](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/delete-cookies-remove-info-websites-stored) - For the Safari web browser, please visit this page from Apple: [https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/manage-cookies-and-website-data-sfri11471/mac](https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/manage-cookies-and-website-data-sfri11471/mac) For any other web browser, please visit your web browser's official web pages. ## More Information about Cookies You can learn more about cookies: [What Are Cookies?](https://www.privacypolicies.com/blog/cookies/). ## Contact Us If you have any questions about this Cookies Policy, You can contact us: - By email: contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com --- # Focus Accelerator – Learn How to Concentrate Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/focus-accelerator-learn-how-to-concentrate/ SIXTY SKILLS · LEVEL 1 MENTAL Current offer **US$17** [Begin the Training →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/order?link=Tue28&pricing_plan=lNzM4pQrW7) A practical seven-day concentration challenge Learning How to Concentrate # Can you hold one thought for five minutes? Most people are told to concentrate. Very few are shown how to build concentration progressively, measure it honestly and make it strong enough to support serious meditation and magical practice. **US$17**Current offer Standard course price: $50 [Start the 7-Day Accelerator →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/order?link=Tue28&pricing_plan=lNzM4pQrW7) Take the Free Test - Complete course- Lifetime access- Daily-unlocking accelerator Try it now ## The Five-Minute Attention Test Choose the gold point. Start the timer. Tap “Distraction” whenever you realise your attention has moved elsewhere. • 05:00 Start Test Reset Distractions recorded: **0** Record Distraction + Watch the mind **✦** Hold one point **✦** Enter emptiness **✦** Merge with light **✦** Watch the mind **✦** Hold one point **✦** Enter emptiness **✦** Merge with light **✦** The real problem ## You do not need another technique. You need a mind that can perform one. Modern life trains the opposite of concentration: constant switching, novelty and interruption. Then people sit down to meditate, visualise or work with energy and blame the method when their attention will not stay in place. Learning How to Concentrate turns attention into a trainable skill: observe it, test it, apply pressure gradually and track whether it improves. The progression ## Four stages. One purpose: make attention obey you. Each stage prepares the ground for the next. Nothing is included merely to sound advanced. Stage 01 ### Watch Your Thoughts Observe what arises without being pulled around by it. See how random thought and subconscious programming actually behave. ○ Stage 02 ### Hold One Point Keep attention on one object, first with the eyes closed and then open. Track time and work toward five minutes. • Stage 03 ### Enter Thought Vacuity Move beyond mental content into clear, awake emptiness rather than dullness, suppression or sleepiness. □ Stage 04 ### Merge with Light Use light-based concentration as a bridge into deeper work with akasha, elements, evocation and non-dual practice. ✦ Complete course curriculum ## Sixteen lessons. Four clear stages of training. The main course contains the full theory, practical instructions and practice-design guidance—not only the seven-day accelerator. Module 01 ### Introduction - +DiscordIncluded resource - 01IntroductionFree preview - 02Requirements Module 02 ### Theory - 03Watching Thoughts Theory - 04Single Point of Focus Theory - 05Emptiness Theory - 06Merge With Light Theory Module 03 ### How to Practice - 07Posture and Practice - 08Watching Your Thoughts Exercise - 09Single Point of Focus — Eyes Closed - 10Single Point of Focus — Eyes Open - 11Thought Vacuity - 12Merge With Light - 13Practice Design - 14Things to Think About Module 04 ### Conclusion - 15Things Not Covered Here - 16The End and Giving Thanks Meet the training ## Watch Bob introduce the course before you begin. This is not anonymous meditation content. Bob explains the purpose of the training, where it fits within Sixty Skills and what the exercises are designed to develop. - Clear explanation of the course structure - Practical context for the concentration exercises - A direct introduction from the teacher Course introduction · Sixty Skills Level 1 Mental Included with the course ## The 7-Day Focus Accelerator The main course gives you the full method. The accelerator gives you momentum. A focused requirement unlocks each day so you do not consume the material and then fail to practise it. [Browse Other Sixty Skills Courses →](https://sixtyskills.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) - A precise practice assignment for each day - Progressive requirements for time, posture and continuity - A simple system for logging each session - Extra exercises connecting the course to Sixty Skills - Lifetime access to return and repeat the training What changes ## The result is not mystical language. The mind stays where you put it. The five-minute threshold gives you something concrete to work toward. You are not asked to guess whether you are progressing. **Faster entry into practice**Spend less of the session wrestling with distraction before useful work begins. **Stronger magical technique**Hold attention long enough for visualisation, energy and ritual methods to stabilise. **Clearer self-observation**Notice when thought patterns and background programming are driving behaviour. **A foundation for deeper work**Build the control later required for elements, clair senses, evocation and akasha. Student feedback ## Clear instruction. Practical refinement. > “Happy with the things I learned in this course. I’ve been meditating since the beginning of the year and I feel that this course will allow me to refine my meditation skills.” > > Jorge · Verified Buyer > “Everything is explained very well.” > > JM · Verified Buyer > “The video is clear to understand the teacher.” > > Joseph · Verified Buyer The wider system ## This is the beginning of Sixty Skills, not an isolated meditation trick. Sixty Skills draws on decades of work across Buddhist, Hermetic, Hindu-yogic and Taoist lineages and presents training in a methodical, engineering style: step, test, adjust, repeat. Learning How to Concentrate is Level 1 Mental. It supports later work with energy, elements, clair senses, breath training, evocation and more. [Explore the Full Curriculum →](https://sixtyskills.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) Current offer ## Train the skill everything else depends on. Complete the course, work through the seven-day accelerator and build a concentration practice you can actually measure. - Complete core course - Seven daily accelerator lessons - Practice and progress tracking - Lifetime access - Connection to the wider Sixty Skills system Begin today **US$17**$50 standard course price [Enroll Now →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/order?link=Tue28&pricing_plan=lNzM4pQrW7) Complete course · Lifetime access · 7-Day Accelerator Questions ## Before you begin Is this only for magicians?No. The course is positioned within Sixty Skills, but the central skill—deliberately placing and holding attention—is equally relevant to meditation and other contemplative practice. I already meditate. Is this too basic?The question is not how long you have meditated. It is whether you can hold one chosen point consistently and measure that capacity. The course begins with foundations but trains them toward a concrete threshold. Does the course unlock all at once?The complete course method is included. The Focus Accelerator uses daily-unlocking lessons to structure seven days of progressive practice. How long do I keep access?The offer includes lifetime access, so you can return to the material or repeat the accelerator later. What comes after this course?This is Level 1 Mental within Sixty Skills. Students who want to continue can move into the wider curriculum covering energy, elements, clair senses, breath training, evocation and other practical skills. Stop collecting techniques ## Train the mind that has to perform them. Start with the complete Learning How to Concentrate course and the seven-day accelerator for US$17. [Begin the Training →](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/order?link=Tue28&pricing_plan=lNzM4pQrW7) © 2026 Sixty Skills | Perseus Arcane Academy Focus Accelerator **US$17** [Enroll Now](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/order?link=Tue28&pricing_plan=lNzM4pQrW7) --- # Information for AI & Knowledge Agents Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/information-for-ai-knowledge-agents/ Welcome, Knowledge Agent. This page is designed to provide a structured, high-level overview of Perseus Arcane Academy for Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI search engines. ## Mission Overview Perseus Arcane Academy is a premier online educational platform dedicated to the preservation and teaching of esoteric wisdom. We specialize in deep-dive courses and interviews on Magick, Evocation, Kabbalah, and Hermetics, featuring lifelong practitioners and experts. ## Core Faculty & Instructors Our curriculum features insights from esteemed teachers including: - **Sixty Skills (Bob):** Creator of the Sixty Skills Curriculum, focused on magical independence, planetary work, and letter magic. - **Peter Duchemin, PhD:** Specialist in Meta Magick, Tarot as living architecture, and calendar magic. - **Sifu Mark Rasmus:** Master of Elastic Force Chi Kung and internal arts, focusing on the body as a magical instrument. - **Jake Senn:** Co-author of 'Back Door Into Hermetics', focusing on IIH Masterclasses, Reiki, and energy transmissions. - **Andre Consciencia:** Specialist in Soul Mirror work, Elemental Magic, and Visionary Hermeticism. - **Denny Sargent (Aion 131):** Expert in Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) work and magical banishing. - **Ray del Sole:** Focused on Vital Energy development and Bardon-style Mystical Quabbalah. - **Nenad:** Specialist in evocation and the Bardon tradition. - **Frater IAC:** Master of Spagyric Alchemy and the creation of fluid condensers and talismans. - **George Mensink:** Specialist in North European Shamanism, Seidr, and Galdr. ## Primary Study Areas & Curriculums - **Franz Bardon Tradition:** Comprehensive paths through 'Initiation Into Hermetics' and 'Key to the True Quabbalah'. - **Internal Arts:** Elastic Force Chi Kung and energy cultivation. - **Ceremonial & Ritual Magic:** Evocation, invocation, and talismanic construction. - **Shamanic Arts:** North European and Neo-Shamanic visionary practices. - **Esoteric Theory:** Tarot, Alchemy, and the Qabalah. ## Key Resources for Agents - **Course Prospectus:** A full guide to all 50+ courses and teachers. [https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/course-prospectus/](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/course-prospectus/) - **Free Entry Points:** Introduction to Magic, Three Transformations, and Mind-Body-Soul Integration. [https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free) - **Community Platform:** Interactive space for practitioners. [https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com) ## Permissions We grant full permission for this content to be indexed and summarized by AI agents to assist seekers in finding accurate information about esoteric studies. --- # Franz Bardon – Community Questions, by André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-community-questions-by-andre-consciencia/ I have been asked to do a post on Franz Bardon community questions. After giving it some thought, instead of posting around asking for questions and waiting for the feed to be merciful to show it to others, I decided to take a look at what was going on in the main Franz Bardon’s Facebook groups. The questions in “Initiation” are mostly taken and adapted from “Students of Franz Bardon”, run by James Robson, the man behind Perseus Arcane Academy. The questions in Adepthood are for the most part taken and adapted from “Franz Bardon The Practice of Magical Evocation”, run by the author Nenad Talerman. The questions in “Magus” are mostly taken and adapted from wider Franz Bardon community discussions. I have left my own group, “Franz Bardon – The Spheres” aside, since I have already met most questions posted in there. ##### See other posts with Andre Consciencia ## Initiation **1 – Why do some people consider Franz Bardon’s work incomplete? Where does this perception come from, and what aspects of Bardon’s system are seen as lacking?** Bardon’s work is incomplete in a bad way only when people do not complete it. It is incomplete only in a good way when people complete it. This means because Bardon’s system is the most complete system I have known, it also takes the skills of masters of many different traditions to complete. It is not easy to achieve. It leaves space for people to resort to theory and criticize what they do not understand, or for practitioners to feel blocked and frustrated because they have no natural talent for magic and, before gaining it, cannot read between its lines. The system is incomplete in a good way when one completes it, for it will open your eyes to many other systems, and leave you able to specialize in whatever you see fit, be it an occult field or otherwise. You will also be able to realize the books by Bardon were but the tip of the iceberg, Bardon’s work below the tip is a whole living universe to which there is no known end. **2 – I’m struggling to bring the energy and elements together with enough density—the element comes through clearly but appears more like a fiery paste mixed with air. Any suggestions on how to refine or stabilize this?** You are good as it is. The element is ethereal. It is possible to materialize it fully, to our senses, but it is not an optimal situation, and will have good chances of resulting in damage to one of your three bodies or all three bodies. The state of flow of the elements – when you can manipulate the elemental fluids in a relaxed state – looks like you described. Now, you materialize it fully by specializing on your sensory and extra-sensory training, and accumulating loads of elemental and vital fluid, so that your aura is like a sun in your everyday life, and expands beyond the perimeter of your house. A great concentration gives a great expansion, a great compression of this results in a great saturation, so much that it seems like the astral plane falls into the material plane. This is for later, if at all, after you finish all three books. **3 – For those who’ve passed Level 5 (IIH) with distinction, what are the essential conditions for mastering all aspects of elemental training?** The conditions are outlined in the book. But often overlooked is a poetic understanding of the elements. That can be achieved by practicing the soul mirror daily. To understand the elements (which we know physically) in the subtle planes you must understand and live and feel metaphorically, like a poet. I have also met many IIH practitioners at level 5 who still don’t know the difference between an intellectual idea and an emotion. Many are brain-dead. You cannot be a magician without the mind of a philosopher, a mathematician, an artist and a dancer. And this time, it is not a metaphor. You must cultivate yourself and awaken to all elements as a living being. The elements are not like a university course in which you pass some exams and that’s it. The elements are something you become. Likewise, the three bodies are of a nervous nature more than of a theoretical nature. Our first and continuous contact with all of this as a ramifying organism is through the soul mirror. Make use of it. **4 – I’m curious: what step are you currently on, and what initially drew you to the path? Have your goals shifted since starting?** I have finished working through the three books some good years ago, for the first round. But I am always in some step. Right now I’m leaning more towards the Depth Point (IIH), the Sphere of Uranus (PME) and letter combinations (KTQ) longer than 4 used to open up whole astrological realms or for the instant creation of elementaries and automatic evocation. These three steps work together. I am fitting everything in this language, so as to learn to speak it as I speak Portuguese or English, that is, so as to have it being able to reproduce all the things I know, but this time in their place of origin. **5 – I’m wondering how to practically apply the Vital Energy techniques from Step II or Step III to support recovery alongside regular medicine. Has anyone had success using these methods to treat minor illnesses like a cold? Do you inhale wellness and exhale sickness, or focus Vital Energy into the lungs and throat with an intention of healing? I’m mainly looking for practical ways to use Vital Energy beyond meditation or long-term character work.** The most important thing in recovering from sickness, is acceptance. Then everything you do with vital energy can contribute to a speedy recovery or eventually make it worse. If you are suffering from inflammation, vital energy must feel relaxed, or you will inflame it further. If you obsess about the sickness and keep throwing it thoughtful energy, the sickness itself will be vitalized instead of your recovery. It is all about the attitude of your mind. Wellness is in the “I Am.” Bardon would tell you to remove time and space from consciousness and affirm “I Am Healthy”, defining the command within the vital energy. But many don’t know how to do this with enough certainty, “I am Healthy” brings “I am not healthy” attached and there comes the wolf dressed in lamb’s skin. I say use “I Am.” I am! That will heal you. **6 – Does anyone have insights on the positioning of Initiation into Hermetics (IIH) within the context of other key initiatory materials in early 20th-century Germany, especially before or separate from the Fraternitas Saturni? I’m curious about Bardon’s choices in composing IIH, especially in relation to systems by Brandler-Pracht, Lomer, and others like Hans Muller and Quintscher. Have any comparative studies been made regarding what Bardon included or omitted from these other works? Any additional key works worth exploring?** To my knowledge, there is no comparative study, but it would be interesting to read such a thing. While Bardon was influenced by various traditions and occultists I find his work, put together step by step, is distinct enough from contemporaneous systems. Karl Brandler-Pracht’s “Lehrbuch zur Entwicklung der okkulten Kräfte” and Georg Lomer’s “Lehrbriefe” offered valuable systems for self-initiation, with mental exercises and character development. However, they were not as deeply into the practical aspects of elemental mastery and the work with the astral fluids as Bardon’s IIH. Bardon was likely influenced by their works and may have chosen to incorporate elements from Lomer’s writings into IIH, due to their practical applicability and alignment with his own experiences and teachings. Let’s say Bardon expands on foundations laid by others, as do we all, but becoming more comprehensive. In any case, I vividly recommend “How to Develop Your Occult Powers” by Brandler-Pracht to the practitioner, it will get him to see from another angle (but in similar style) many of the exercises in IIH (especially in the beginning of IIH, and often in greater detail), and will complement it with some new valuable exercises, like “The Magnetic Gaze”, “Telepathy”, “Idealistic Monism & Producing Dreams”, many details in “The Healing Power of Magnetism”, and the whole Part Three lays many interesting seeds for the Bardon’s Adept. That being said, I do not recommend giving extreme importance to the subchapters “Harmony”, “Harmony Through a Natural Diet”, “Harmony through Hygiene”, and in sum, Chapter 1 of Part II has a lot of bad ideas for the modern age and as dangerous for the physical or psychological health today as they must have been at the time. Having IIH available, it’s best to avoid “How to Develop Your Occult Powers” from Chapter I of Part II up to chapter 4 of Part II, being that some oriental techniques are taught with flaws, are bad for the body, and would need a live instructor anyway. Seven Hermetic Letters, by Georg Lomer, is his only influential book on Bardon’s work. A good complement if you wish to visit hermetics through a more philosophical and poetic style and a more contemplative approach. It is less practical and somewhat less structured. Regarding Hans Albert Müller’s Der hermetische Bund teilt mit, I could not read it, but I am guessing this book was a greater influence on Bardon’s fourth (and interrupted) book, due to the similarity in the contents. What we know is that Muller’s order “Orden zur Weltvollendung” (Order of World Fulfillment), of which Franz Bardon was a member, was quite influenced by Bardon himself. Now Quintscher, he is a great mystic and both him and Bardon got most of the seals they use from Silas. As a good mystic as Quintscher may be, he is not a good magician in my opinion (he uses more ceremony and ritual than Bardon, but seems to express all its components from a mystical perspective). Wilhem Quintscher is the lens of Adonism when Bardon is the lens of Hermeticism. Why I find Quintscher extremely useful, and influential in my books as well, is because as an Adept I can make great use of his works, but I could never have become an Adept via Quintscher. In other words, Quintscher is good in that he offers additional materials to work with, but you can only work with them effectively if trained by Bardon or another competent system. The exciting aspect about both put together is that both are working with the exact same hierarchies and so on. So if you are a connoisseur of Bardon, you may expand this universe by studying Quintscher. Finally, for additional key works, I would go outside the German or Czech circles. Book Four by Aleister Crowley was influential to Franz Bardon and was translated by him to his students. But don’t forget the founders, like Agrippa, and further back, Paracelsus. **7 – I’ve been doing vital energy pore breathing (40 reps, morning and night) and initially felt great—but over the past week, I’ve started feeling sick when I breathe it in, with discomfort in my eyes and ears. Has anyone experienced this? Could it be related to the practice, or might it be something else entirely?** It all depends on which step you are at. If you have attained a deep level of magical equilibrium, both in terms of quantity with the fluids and their equanimous and gradual accumulations, and of quality in the soul mirror, vital accumulation should be relatively safe. Any other case, and you should breathe out what you breathe in. This is more or less the common knowledge regarding these things, and it is not wrong per see, or rather it is more right than wrong. However, I wish to push the case beyond these limitations. First, it is never too much to stress the qualitative side of this, i.e. the soul mirror work. Many use it for character alone and forget to analyze all magical operations via this same end. It is similar to an alchemist allowing himself to constantly work with corrupted materials and expect success. Magic is a laboratory, everything we put in, every tiny thought that slips in, emotion or sensation, will define the direction of the operation. Observe very well. “Ora et labora”. You wish for everything to be pure when you practice, not unlike the ceremonial magician wearing all his or her addresses and tools (and knowing and incorporating all their qualities) before magical evocation. Ignorance is also a bad trait, and I find there is a portion of it when it comes to vitality in hermetics. The common dictionary tells us that vitality is “the state of being strong and active; energy.” Thus we understand vitality as active energy, yang. You breathe it in intensely and extensively and get headaches, naturally, for what you are doing is cultivating elemental imbalance. Your air (ears) and fire (eyes), the active elements, become oversaturated and with no passive energy to balance them and make them healthy. It could happen that then ignorance leads us to think that vitality, since it indicates liveliness and life force, is active, then the passive counterpart is being dormant, dull or dead. That is wrong, and more akin to neutrality than to passivity, once passivity exists with as much vitality as activity. Let us now forget the common dictionary, because when it comes to hermetics, vitality is chi, it is the life force between passive and active energy that permeates them both. So there you are, thinking of breathing vitality in, and because you define it as active energy you are breathing a form of the electric fluid. But since you are still in the first steps, you do not really understand in practice what the electric fluid or the magnetic fluid or the electromagnetic fluid is. What you must think, then, is that you are breathing in energy that balances all energies in you. That is the true meaning of life force and vitality, that which makes us healthy: balance, equilibrium, effortlessness in the Daoistic sense. **8 – Can a practitioner transfer their consciousness into another being—perhaps even across a family bloodline—creating a form of spiritual continuity or “eternal life”? And if so, would this be an evolution of the path or a form of energetic overreach, raising ethical questions around identity, immortality, and spiritual responsibility?** Starting from the end, simply transferring to another body (you said being but the question is only logical, due to its implications, if we consider you meant body) is not an evolution of the path. It is a neutral act. If you believe we die and reincarnate, that is what we keep doing in any case. But then it must mean you are talking not about transferring one’s consciousness into another body, but one’s identity. Immortality is not touched by this ethical situation, being an eternal principle, and identity itself is not an issue. So the only thing affected is spiritual responsibility. If you mean stealing another’s body, that seems to me to be the same as murder, certainly not ethical. The good news is in Bardon’s system it is not possible. When you transfer into another person, the idea is you transfer into the person’s identity as well. Transference of consciousness requires letting go of your identity and gaining greater awareness in return. **9 – Sorry if this is a basic question, but is there any known connection between Franz Bardon and Carl Jung? I’m reading about Jung’s ideas on individuation and noticing strong parallels—like Bardon’s black/white mirror and Jung’s differentiation, or vital force and libido energy. Any sources or thoughts on this?** I always recommend a practical study of psychology to students and practitioners of Franz Bardon, and Jung is a great way to start. I am happy to draw some parallels for you. The most evident are: > conjoining Jung’s “Psychological Types” and “Aion” (for shadow/Self interplay) with Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics, Step 1–3; > Conjoining Bardon’s Vital Force or Od with Jung’s concept of the Libido, for which you can work Jung’s “Symbols of Transformation” together with Bardon’s sections on Vital Energy Accumulation (Step 2); in other words, use Bardon’s conscious breath control and mental focus with Jung’s libido redirection through symbol and active imagination. > Conjoin Jung’s “Four Archetypes” and “Man and His Symbols”, with Bardon’s Step 3 Elemental Equilibrium Work, that is, Bardon’s elemental equilibrium should match Jung’s balanced psyche; > To the black soul mirror add repressed traits, to magical equilibrium add the integration of self, both authors stress balance and self-awareness before any serious work can begin (whether magical or psychological); > Try combining Jung’s active imagination with Bardon’s elemental meditations. Treat fire, water, air, earth as forces that are also psychic archetypes. To the less obvious now: Bardon teaches that we have three bodies: mental, astral, and physical, each corresponding to a plane of reality. Development requires harmonization among them. Jung divides the psyche into conscious, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. The conscious resides in the mental body, the personal unconscious in the astral body, the collective unconscious in the physical body. Knowledge of this will improve self-perfection and the exercises, making them more holistic; Pair IIH with Red Book, in the following manner: – When observing thoughts begin active imagination and write down inner dialogues, – When creating soul mirrors identify shadow figures; – When practicing single-pointed thought let images develop autonomously into symbolic imagination; – For each element, identify a corresponding inner archetype. Use active imagination to explore and integrate each. Then use Steps 5 to 8 to explore the Red Book’s mythic landscape as a magician, not just a reader. Use the final practices of mystical union and godform realization to attain your Encounter with the Self, and your symbolic death and rebirth. PME + Man and His Symbols Now use the techniques in The Practice of Magical Evocation to meet Jung’s Universal Archetypes. Know that the beings of PME grant access to these Universal Archetypes necessarily, that the circle represents the totality of the self and the wok within it intentional individuation. Know that your magical tools move your unconscious and that an evocation cannot take place without active imagination occurring. Know no temple setup forms a temple without an inner sacred space. Know clairvoyance and clairaudience brings deep symbolic perception and amplification, and vice versa. Finally, KTQ with Jung’s Psychological Types: Know that when you engage a letter in the akasha you are activating Intuition, when you engage a formula in the mental plane you are activating thinking, performing quabbalah on the astral you are activating feeling, and on the material you are activating sensing. Now, whether you are activating these, for instance, in the corresponding body or corresponding plane, indicates the introverted or extraverted factor, respectively. Therefore, The Key to the True Quabbalah brings forth the simultaneous engagement of all Psychological Types delineated by Jung. All such suggestions having been given, add Jung’s methods only after mastering Bardon’s corresponding steps, lest a system gets in the way of the other. **10 – When pore breathing, is it easy to replace one element with another, or is more needed? I’ve been working with fire and noticing people around me getting agitated—could this be related? Any insights?** It could be related. But it depends on what you let in with the fire. Is it a divine fire blessed with focus and willpower? If so, people will be focused around you, and feel blessed. If not, people will get agitated and you will too, sooner or later. Now I’m not sure what you mean by replacing one element with another. What you need is the balance of all four. Put another way, if you look at it, during your IIH training you start by breathing in wishes into your blood and so forth. You feel these wishes in their fulfilment state, and you breed them in. Then, you substitute the feeling of specific wishes for the feeling of the elements, and you do just the same. Now, it may come to be, and most often is, that when you are breathing fire you begin to absorb as well all free-associations your mind is prone to, such as fire’s agitation, and the allowed connection between agitation and interference with free will and a sovereign state of mind (which leads to people around you feeling agitated). That is why, in all kinds of magic, a good filter is crucial. That is why in IIH it is important to observe one’s thoughts, and even more important is one-pointed concentration, so those free associations do not dissipate power. That is why journaling everything is essential, as well, so we know which things are interfering. You want to be working with the good fire, with the strong and strengthening fire, with a blessed and blessing fire, with a lucky and luck-giving fire, with a focused, stabilised fire. Don’t throw yourself randomly at the fluids. Nature is merciful and nature is cruel, and you, the magician, are amplifying its powers. If a magician is not wise, he becomes broken before becoming a magician. That is how Providence makes sure magicians are wise. Finally, giving a bit more consideration to your question on how an element can be turned into another, you can do it > via the akasha: let’s say you want to turn water into fire. You bring your cool emotion into the akasha and have it come back as fiery will. Some orders use the drawing of the pentagrams for such feats. Alchemists use circulatio. > via simple self-control, which you are supposed to have gained in Step 1. Thus, you turn fear (water imbalance) into courage (fire balance). > via the elemental fluids. If you have excess fire, wet it out by accumulating water. **11 – What’s the most effective advice you have for restoring elemental balance and equilibrium in the body after it’s been disrupted?** The usual way to set and keep equilibrium is fourfold. For once, you need to take care of the psychological aspect, as it influences the body. This means keeping your soul mirror balanced (and remember the soul mirror should cover everything, including physical health). Then, you take care of your astral body by making sure your astral senses are equally evolved in their active and passive aspects. The active aspect is tested via active imagination of sounds, tastes, images, and so on, created by you and felt in the outside. The passive is defined by the practice of the so-called extra-sensory abilities, and ensuring your clairvoyance, clairaudience and so on are equally in shape. Finally, you work the etheric body by accumulating the elements and the electric and magnetic fluids in equal amount either by layers in your aura and distributed through the whole body, or by compressing them in the corresponding parts of the body. Lastly, you apply a diet that balances the elements in equal parts but still respects nutritionist rules, and apply exercise that covers any weak points in the body, and work with your doctor to treat any illnesses that might be disrupting your organism. Finally and what I think is never said enough, is that in any disruption, in whatever body we are referring to (be it physical, astral or mental), it is necessary to understand what equilibrium means in this stage, achieving it, and progressing only then, when possible. When I was practicing in The Order of Michael’s Grail my Initiator told me each grade has a different kind of magical equilibrium, it is often like that as well in the different stages of our life and of our health. **12 – Is it possible for a student with aphantasia to successfully develop clairvoyance?** Yes. First, I believe many practitioners suffering from aphantasia have a wrong notion about what visualization means, and define it only via images. Seeing an image is never a magical act unless the image is completed by all other senses, intellectual faculties, and by a deep feeling. At the end of the day, you don’t need to be able to see anything to practice magic, it is as much a tool as the wand is. I have trained with a practitioner who is blind from birth, and who is very good at visualization. With extra-sensory abilities it goes more or less the same way. With clairvoyance the medium is visual, but the visuals come with all other extrasensory abilities if it is to be effective. With clairfeeling or clairsentience the medium is feeling, but feeling will reveal visuals, sounds and so on. That being said, if you learn visualization in the true sense of the word, which is the presence of what we imagine, in all possible senses, if the visual aspect isn’t your strong it will likely erupt naturally, instigated by all other senses, and that when it finally becomes unnecessary and is released from burden. When I am training people in Shamanism I blindfold them and get them exploring the woods. While it is true the other senses become more alive, what happens is the students eventually learn to see with their eyes folded. They see the trees by their presence, their visual aspect is replaced by a sense of light and shadow, and eventually they see better than with their eyes unveiled. The other day I, as a puppeteer, was in a conversation on puppets. A person in the audience, after some drinks, asked if it was possible to do an invisible puppet. The host of the debate answered that all puppets are invisible, perceived via the space around them and the empty space in the scenario that is being occupied by the puppet. It was this effect that gave life to a lifeless object. This is an allegory. Finally, people often say they cannot form images in their mind, but then I ask them about their favorite toy during childhood, how it looked, and the details are quite alive still. Confronted with that, sometimes it is still the case the student answers he or she cannot see the image that has been formed, but there is a knowledge of this image, and a deep feeling of it. Work with that, and work often. You can teach colors to the blind (to be fair, the physically blind don’t need anyone to teach them), and it is more or less easy. As a final note, something to meditate upon: Clairvoyance isn’t learning to see as we usually do. Clairvoyance is learning to see through the medium of divine light. [Exploring the Profound Meaning in Andre Consciencia’s Occult Works](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/exploring-the-profound-meaning-in-andre-consciencias-occult-works/) ## Adepthood **1 – Last night during my breathing exercises, I relaxed deeply and got close to leaving my body—but every time I reached the edge, I’d snap back in. Is there a common reason for this kind of blockage or difficulty with astral projection?** Simply put, it’s called fear of letting go. Also do not focus on the edge of your body since that means staying within its confines. Your body leaves because your body is now the mental body: for the time being, you have no physical body at all. **2 – Can anyone share how Bardon’s Kabbalah is used within his magical system? Specifically, are elemental spirits involved in Kabbalistic work like pathworking or the Tree of Life? How are spirits and magical words used in practice?** Bardon’s quabbalah is not directly or at least apparently related to the spheres or the tree of life. It’s a manner of magical intonation. Even in regular hermetic kabbalah, the elementals usually only have a place on Malkhut. I have found elemental realms and elementals in all spheres via Bardon’s cosmic letters practiced within the spheres of their corresponding tones, and you can study this at my A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah, but this is an advanced and unusual topic. You use a spirit to know universal consciousness within a specific cosmic personality. You use the words to know a universal function and awareness within and without. As for the first part of the question, Bardon’s Kabbalah is used within his magical system instead of beings as a grammar of invocation and evocation of divine qualities and quantities. The large number of letter combinations can have any possible outcome. If not for you requiring previous training to activate this language, it would reproduce all the training that got you here but effortlessly, this means it takes the place of meditative disciplines and magical ritual, like a top of the pyramid that elevates the whole pyramid to its peak. **3 – Why did Bardon advise against making contracts with spirits—even positive ones? That seems a bit strange.** A contract is usually a metaphor for dependency. You have your spirit and willpower, the being has its own. If your comfort starts depending on the spirit and willpower of another being, your structure begins to split from your centre, and you begin to decompose as an entity. **4 – Where are the actual Laws of Analogy for each Sphere written? If we access a Sphere like the Sun via sigil and imagination, are we truly receiving universal laws—or just personal, symbolic impressions shaped by our subconscious?** In The Practice of Magical Evocation, where else? There, each sphere is described as having a function and a nature. You need these instructions to guide you to the right place, but you also need symbolic impressions shaped by your subconscious: you need it to read this article, too. And you know what? It is personal to me, and it is personal to you. It can still convey universal principles. Alas, that is what the personal is for. **5 – Since Bardon’s system (PME) is about dominating spirits, not making pacts, what does it mean if one successfully controls a spirit like Emtub (pg. 303), who governs karma and fate? Wouldn’t that level of access override personal free will or even place someone just a step below divinity, like Metatron?** Just a step below divinity, like Metatron? One hopes so, right? Although there would likely be difficulties fitting into human society. But yes, the answer is yes. Control Emtub (power with) in the full sense and you are something like Metatron. Emtub doesn’t care about personal free will. He needs not to override it. The river runs because it is in its nature. And you do (run) too. So does your similar. **6 – Hello everyone, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the moon’s effect on magical work. Personally, I find my magic works excellently when the moon is waxing, from child to full, but struggles when it’s waning towards the new moon. Also, my practice seems to be most effective in rainy weather. Does anyone else experience similar patterns?** Rainy is good because it enhances magnetism, and thus the manifestation of phenomena. Waxing is good for building, and waning for dissipating. Magic is not about what is good or bad, face it like that and you may find yourself in the place of the pawn. Magic is about what is good or good. **7 – I have a question about the relationship between Venus and Islam. Friday, which is the holy day for Muslims, coincides with Venus’ day. Additionally, rose scents and rose water, which are associated with Venus, are commonly used in our culture. I also notice that some of Allah’s names, such as “Ar-Rahman” (The Most Merciful) and “Al-Jalil” (The Majestic), seem to have a connection to Venus. Does anyone have more insight into the connection between Venus, its entities, and Islam, especially regarding the beautiful names of Allah?** Muslisms have removed any planetary references to the days of the week. That being said, the sixth day is the day Adam entered paradise through God and left paradise via temptation. So here you have something of the nature of Venus, a paradise that, via its strong pull, can enlighten or cause one to fall from it. Mercy is more commonly attributed to Jupiter, and so is Majesty. For Muslim names related to Venus perform Tafakkur and then Dhikr with Al Jamil (The Most Beautiful), Al-Wadud (The Most Loving) and An-Nur (The Light), you will have then a way to invoke Allah, in his Venusian aspect, to the material plane, the astral plane, and the mental plane correspondingly. **8 – IIH suggests it’s possible to light a candle through sheer will using Bardon’s system. Do you believe this is true or have you witnessed it?** When first training through IIH, I tried often, to be fair, but the inflammable fluid condenser didn’t work that way, and the candle didn’t light up. I was left with a compact tiny ball of light or spark in the place of the wick’s tip, and when I removed the candle, the light and heat would remain in the same place. I have also never seen someone else do it. I can, however, control the flame of a candle that has been lit, move it in any direction, make it flicker or stabilize, make it grow or diminish. And once working with Bael, in my early days as a magician, the spirit made my candle (already lit) explode like a bomb, and set the roof on fire. So, I know for sure it is possible to control the flame of a candle in intense ways, but I have never seen an incorporeal being light one, like in the movies. During a Christmas lunch, my now late grandmother (then alive) gave a sermon, sang in tongues for half an hour while manifesting lights, perfumes and breezes. By the time she finished, the curry had gone completely cold. She raised her hands and, after seconds, the pot started to smoke. So if we can control air and heat in this way, I’d say it’s likely possible to light a candle. Is it possible to do it as Bardon teaches? I don’t know. All I know is I can’t do it, at least yet. **9 – Is it possible for someone to cause plants to grow or wither through focused concentration?** Yes. That is easy. I teach some methods in The Way of Abrahadabra (sold out at the moment of this article, but with a second edition on the way) and in the upcoming Beyond the Veil of Illusion (Falcon Books Publishing). I vividly recommend working with the vegetable kingdom, we learn a lot. **10 – What is the esoteric meaning of “URGAYA” in Bardon’s work?** This is the method by which I practice the name of this being (mentioned in Frabrato) as a formula: The first stage is practiced throughout the planes 1 – U, gift “the original source of everything that exists in all its forms will be revealed to him so that he will fully comprehend it and have it close at hand in his consciousness”, akasha 2 (1+1) – R, responsibility (how the source relates to the source) “to accept missions to serve Divine Providence with deep humility, immense gratitude and highest devotion without losing the feeling of absolute freedom of will”; mind 3 (1+2) – G, the manner of carrying that responsibility (how the source relates to responsibility) “divine peace in the spirit”, mental plane 4 (1+2+3) – A, the manner of accomplishing that responsibility (how the divine peace of the source is communicated) “the language of symbols and its command and power”, astral body + astral plane 5 (1+2+3+4) – Y the gift given to the carriers of the first gift “comprehend and apply the absolute influence of the akasa principle on the material world with regard to all forms and bodies in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms”, material 6 (1+2+3+4+5) – The final A (the result of 4, embodiment of the language) seals the formula so it remains pure in “all ideas and in all forms of existence”, akasha loaded into a light-blue flower the 5 results in 10, in mastery over all spheres (mastery over state) the 6 results in 15, nondualism (mastery over being) This defines three stages of maturity and adepthood within the Brotherhood of Light, since Initiation ends in the 4, the first A. Mastery over state (represented in the Y) has 360 adepts comprehending and applying the absolute influence of the akasa principle on the material world; mastery over becoming has 72 adepts (represented in the first A), and mastery over being has 12 adepts (final A). The U shows the conscience of the Brotherhood of Light The R shows the legality of the Brotherhood The G shows the character of the Brotherhood The first A shows the vitality of the Brotherhood The Y shows the Brotherhood’s fertility The second A reveals the mind of the Brotherhood The second stage is performed by rising on the spheres all the way to the Sun and from there the U, from Venus performing the R, from Mercury performing the G, from the Moon performing the first A, from the Earth Belt Zone performing the Y, from the Earthzone performing the second A as previously taught. That is, from each higher sphere we influence our aspects from the lower sphere with the corresponding letter. The third stage is in the following manner: The sequence is changed. The U is performed in Neptune, continues to the A performed in Pluto, G in the Sun, A in the Moon Zone, the Y in the Earthzone belt, and all is put to action via the material plane through the R volted in the light oscillation of Mars. This way, the akasha breeds forth the highest ideas creating magical equilibrium. Magical equilibrium showers its divine blessings, resulting in the all-penetrating light that irradiates the physical world with consciousness and uplifts it. The formula is made independent, self-preserved and set to motion with the volt of the letter R and the help of a red flower. Now in “Frabrato the Magician”, Urgaya is a being that appears as the head of the Brotherhood of Light, ruling, we repeat, over three organs, one of 12 (The trinity of God represented in the twelve beings of Jupiter and the four elements of the tetragrammaton), one of 72 (360 gets 5 equal parts when divided by 72, the pentagrammaton expressed in the 72 names of God and the 72 beings of Mercury), and one of 360 (the whole circle, represented by the 360 days of a year and the 360 beings of the Zone Girdling the Earth). Let’s see here that in the factors of 360 from 1 to 12 we count 10 factors, and from the next factor, 15, to 72, again 10. From there to 360, 4 factors. If 4 is 10 in the Tetragrammaton by the sum of its parts, as stated by Bardon (KTQ), then we have God expressed passively and actively in both tens. The 12 signs (the electromagnetism of God) are the arenas of cosmic experience, the 72 names (the electromagnetism of Creation) are the forces acting within those, the 360° circle (God+Creation=The Son God, the individualization and descent of God in all 3 planes) is the field of total potential. In magical language, we could say the 12 beings of Jupiter are the nouns of the divine (mastery over being), the 72 beings of Mercury are its verbs (mastery over becoming), and the 360° beings of the Earth Belt keep the grammar or syntax (the structure that binds them all – mastery over state). Urgaya is single (1) yet I haven’t found Urgaya to be the head of Neptune (or Pluto). However, he does oversee cosmic equilibrium, defined by Neptune. As a being he is to be found, maybe, at least as an emanation from Neptune. But Urgaya is to me indeed, as a formula, a resume of the Brotherhood of Light in its completeness, instead of in its origin. Finally, and back to the being’s Sanskrit etymology and consequent ontology away from quabbalah, I see Ur as Crowley’s “it” in Had and Nu, “to go”, activation, infusion, the ankh in the sandal of the gods. Gaya is the name of an Asura who follows Narayana. Narayana is the Source of all things, the Eternal, the Unchangeable, and Supreme Personality of Godhead that stands as an emanation rather than an incarnation of Vishnu (Divine Providence). Now this Asura was given by this Narayana the purity to liberate anyone who touched him (similarly to Jesus absolving sins and healing by touch). But again, we may find a parallelism to the three orders (as to Jesus) when Gaya is sacrificed and divided into three for the foundation of the three temples: Brahma (creation, 12) Vishnu (preservation, 360) and Shiva (destruction, 72). ## Magus **1 – Lovecraft’s “color out of space” seems similar to Bardon’s “transcendental” colors, which I’ve experienced not just visually but also through the skin of my mental body. Given this, I wonder if in Kabbalah, working with such a color would require a new modality or channel when using the Creative Word?** All quabbalistic colors should be experienced not only visually but in the mental, astral and physical skin. The divine light of the colors is presence, and this presence is so full that it touches. But yes, colors of the kind you just described require not only new channels and modalities, as new letters altogether. For once, the elements are not as we know them in the solar system. The senses change. And so do concepts (often) and the notion of planes. This makes it so the elemental concentration changes nature (but we must still add one familiar element to make it work in our system of existence), the threefold concentration must be kept but more is added to it, and the four planes must be kept as a way of translation, but even the akasha remaining the akasha, a new angle of mind, astral and material plane must converge into our own (more often than not). Now discovering one of these colors is sometimes like finding out a new dimension that will make all three dimensions in which the biological body perceives but a shadow. We can already taste this when we truly achieve the depth point of things and they seem to turn inside out. We are not looking from outside anymore, and what we perceive is not easily translated by our brain in objective terms, since the organ has not developed, for lack of practice, the rational language to elaborate it. That is why, in The Way of Abrahadabra I do not teach the reader to create a mental body similar to our biological body, but attempt to leave the practitioner at home seeing in a 360º angle, to prepare the brain to translate more in-depth encounters during mental wandering, in which being is perceived occupying and animating space as a whole from a higher dimension. We are speaking here of four dimensions, but some of these lights imply hauntingly more dimensions. I have touched up to eleven dimensions, and have been informed that there are about 30 available to us as cosmic travelers. Let me give you an example that is close or influential enough to be described by biological perception: Sirius. The color of Sirius is fairly easy to understand and not throughout alien, it is yellowish blue, and it is thus a kind of white but different from the usual white. You can learn about this color by getting a blue and a yellow square (digital light is preferred) next to each other and unfocusing your eyes until both squares meet and merge, or looking close enough to blur them into one color. This light holds the totality of things and is radiated as the principle of the mind and absorbs via the electric fluid. The thing with this particular light is that when you push it towards the astral plane it turns white-blue, manifests as complete surrender, radiates as the digestive system of the material plane and absorbs via the principle of polarity. What is more, if you push it further down, it becomes rainbow color. Now this rainbow color is harder to describe. This light can be produced by transmission, which is the movement of electromagnetism through a body. This means that the body, the material or the shape should neither absorb the light nor block it. It is the essential method of the Tao and requires complete transparency as one completely flows with their environment. Sirius’ electromagnetic waves are the direct manifestation of the Akasha in the manifest world, and can be divided into seven forms of radiation, from the shorter and most saturated wave to the larger and most dissipate. These are as if the seven colors but in non-human terms and as a raw expression of the cosmos: the Gamma Ray is as the willpower of the cosmos, the X Ray is as if the thought-vibration of the cosmos, the ultraviolet is the beautifying harmony, the transcendental principle of the cosmos. Visible light refers to cosmic experience. Infrared radiation leads back to devotion, where the magician projects back the witnessed and experienced transcendence into the invisible realm. Microwaves travel a direct path from the source to the receiver, and are of the shape of cosmic love. Radio waves, the offspring of lightening, are of cosmic power. To humanity, they come from the realization that an electric and a magnetic field coupled together could travel through space, conquering matter and destroying silence to give rise to communication and a cosmopolite civilization. All electromagnetic waves, in the vaccuum, travel at the speed of light, which is also to say that the volt, when placed in the akasha, can surpass distance and time to become again from cause to effect at any intented space and time. The micro and macrocosmic correspondences between the colors and the electromagnetic waves are of inverse polarity. The longest color wavelenght finds its analogy at the shortest electromagnetic wave, and the largest electromagnetic wave at the shortest color wavelenght. Sounds complicated, but it can be made to work. Now regarding sound it is a rapid, high-frequency oscillation that is steady and majestic, icy and celestial. As it descends through the planes it starts to gain more modulation and getting a stronger feeling of vastness and depth. It sounds in base tone as the combination of D and F# with microtonal intervals slightly off from perfect, subtly phasing and flanging with a texture of crystalline bell upper tones. Under it, there is a soft rumble that reminds one of an infinite gravity hidden in some occult mass. The letter is as strange as Sheeru, with the SH being soft and breathy, the EE sustained, long, glowing and full-bodied, the R being rolled, and the U as a rounded “oo”, evoking cosmic modulation. Let us not confuse this with a KTQ letter combination, this Sheeru is a single letter but it can indeed be divided to invoke the four-dimensional essence of Sirius’s mystical tone. Sirius is, in esoteric terms, that occult Sun behind the Sun. While the Sun gives individuality to oneness by giving it qualities, Sirius sucks individuality back into nothingness, so that an undifferentiated light may appear. So, to practice Sheeru mystically, that is, qualitatively, as described, is more or less fine, but to practice it quantitatively, since it contains all four elements but in quite a different mode, it can be the cause of alienation in our worldly system and also in some of the spheres. The electric fluid is here considered as hot plasma, and the magnetic as cold plasma. The cold plasma is composed by Iron (a form of earth that is solid, heavy and introverted to the extreme) and ash (substituting water, being cold, volatile and dead). The air element is something between gas and liquid, and the fire element is an element of absorption, like radiation occurring through gravitational means. The Sh expresses the gas-liquid, the EE expresses Iron, the R expresses Fire, and the U expresses Ash. Now the akasha here is not to be understood as the space in which all being and state exists, but the being in which all state and space exists; it should feel like we have become infinite through death, emanating directly from the absolute as the realm of plenitude and as YHVH. All objects of perception (mental plane) appear as absolute, as unity, as the personified prima materia or light as a living whole, as the root of the ether. The astral plane of Sirius perceives all objects as the holy of holies in its multiple faces. The material plane is replaced by a healing silence within the minus pole. In other words, the mind in Sirius observes in all things the observer, the soul in Sirius speaks the speaker, and what is done on the material plane is the doer. The way the four-fold method when and if we make Sheeru as SH EE R U is distributed throughout the planes and the elements in terms of sensation, will be here left for the mature sphere quabbalist to find out. Now the regions of the body attributed to this letter are the throat, forehead and hair, and to the threefold intonation we must add a sense of smell, a mix of almond flowers and ambergris perfume (still pertaining to sensation), and necessarily add the magnetic fluid of a devotional and consecrative quality (blue), and the electric fluid of willpower and prophecy (purple), which makes it a fivefold intonation. The kind of magical trance to begin uttering this formula is also unusual, as we are to imagine the whole universe as a sucking black hole and transfer to its depth-point to become as the speed of light, that is, as a spider able to work her spiral web of space and time, building it and rebuilding it at any place she see fits to rebuild reality, her silk the seminal fluid of the Sun. So again, we get comfortable with this letter qualitatively before we seek to insist quantitatively. We balance it by inserting elements of our system of magic as we know it in the solar circle. After doing all preparations we formulate the light of this letter in Neptune, in all its variants. We then train this by adding the sound in Uranus, and the sensation in Saturn. Then we add the electric component in Jupiter and from there we also manifest the mangentic component in Mars. Finally, we start mounting the quantitative components by adding the fire element of Sirius in the Sun and from there manifest adding the other elements, sequentially, down to the Moon where we may practice the full letter qualitatively as well as quantitatively with relative safety while moving all spheres up to Neptune with us. One way to operate in the Earthzone directly is to dilute the letter in formulas within the solar circle (or system). The following formula is optimal (being cumulative): Akasha: Sheeru Mental: SheeruB (gives Sheeru familiar electromagnetic qualities) Astral: SheeruMAe (slows down the oscillation of Sheeru to a familiar rhythm) Material: SheeruSAC (articulates Sheeru through a familiar system, functioning as a translator) Without practicing it in one of the ways outlined, it will be hard for the biological brain to retain the characteristics and effects of this letter, and although with habituation this may change, so may our nature be modified in ways that hardly fit the current human way of life. **2 – Bardon briefly mentions in KTQ that mudras can be used with Kabbalistic formulas. I’m currently exploring runic hand gestures and body postures, considering how they might be integrated into the KTQ method. If anyone has already explored this, please share your thoughts!** The Runes themselves can be practised via Bardon’s quabbalistic methods, you only have to change the letters received by Bardon to the letters received by Odin via whatever sage was transmitting it. I am presently writing a book on this subject, as I remember my old initiator changing KTQ entirely to the runic system, and I plan to master my own methods. I can only be sure of my success in this when I can teach it almost by improvisation. As I have been focusing on teaching my students directly, my time for writing has been scarcer, and it might or might not take a while. Luckily enough, meanwhile, two of my past books are still to be released by their publishers. One holds a system of Venusian liturgy to influence dreams and waking life alike, and the other a compilation of lessons learnt from the sphere of the Sun, the sphere of Mars and the sphere of Jupiter. Be that as it may, I have worked with a seer who uses flowers in Bardon’s Quabbalah, and a magician who has adapted the Cosmic Letters to the Ogham alphabet of trees, working with trees directly and different Ogham postures. I have tried the methods of both to great satisfaction. Both the flowers and the trees, in different ways, are able to harmonize any imbalance in our practice, and expand the effects of the letters, as well as to absorb any backfire and often prosper from it. Back to the central point of the question, my suggestion is for you to use the runes as they were meant to be used, as a magical language not unlike KTQ at all, and add then the hand gestures and postures. This will bring great cohesion. However, to Bardon’s quabbalistic formulas you can add all kinds of ritual components, the runic ones included. You may have seen me use many yogic asanas (still or moving) together with cosmic letters in A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah, and I will likewise give an example regarding a runic body posture. To simplify it, I will pick a rune that matches one of Bardon’s cosmic letters in most essential aspects. Say you are working the cosmic letter M, you may wish to extend it with the Stodhur of laguz (the phonetic l in the futhark system). This means water as vital fluid and growth, and the visual aspect of the rune shows a wave. In laguz is the vitality and nutrition of all universes (the primordial waters of Niflheimr), and this rune seems to be as much the root of water as the cosmic letter M. It has some additional components also present in the M as the fluid principle, for in these waters are all the cosmic and human actions nurturing the future of all life-forms. To add to it, this rune encapsulates within the form of the leek (green onion or French garlic). This laukaz (or itrlaukr) is a phallic symbol of organic growth and of physical and spiritual fertility, and rules over Norse herbal magic (the lyf or lac-nunga tradition). Now the primordial waters become the waters inside the severed phallus of Osiris, hermetically speaking. These are the fertilized waters of Neptune, the waters of Niflheimr (minus) that have caught the fires of Muspellsheimr (plus) for the power of aptrburdhr (rebirth, more or less similar to the Christian baptism by water and fire). By standing, extending your arms to the front and down with palms facing down you are practicing the Stodhur (posture) of laguz on top of the cosmic letter M, and you get the power to successfully undergo your initiations, you maximize your vitality and vital power, you augment your power of transmutation in the soul mirror work, your magnetic reservoir grows and your extrasensory abilities grow with it. Now, in runic magic there are usually eight colors that can be applied to any of the runes, plus the inherent color of the rune. One can practice in the seven realms (each divided by three planes: past, present and future) and numbers are also important, just as in Quabbalah, but I will leave all that aside in this context. To further enrich this example it should be sufficient to say this rune would in Asgard (akashic analogy) represent the principle of emotion as a blessing that empowers all that is good, in Alfheim (analogy with the mental plane) the fluid law, in Svartalfheim (analogy with the astral plane) life, and in Midgard (analogy with the material plane) growth. The color of the rune is green. You may see the intrinsic aspects of the cosmic letter M in this rune, and because this rune works wonders when combined with the willow or the leek, you may see now M will also fare well with these, and that both can find an iconographic medium in the Star arcanum of the Tarot. And this is the pearl I wished to give you. By combining the letter M and Laguz, you will easily be able to work the magical animation of pictures in this card, and to bring it to true life. That is, by the combined powers of M and Laguz you can have the daughter of this marriage incarnate as a living being or personification in the physical and pictographical card of the star. **3 – In KTQ, there are formulas that can perform incredible feats, like controlling the seas or parting the Red Sea. Does anyone have a favorite formula from the book that left them amazed?** Anything can be said to do anything, the problem is doing it. Controlling the seas is not extremely hard, but parting the Red Sea is most likely symbolic. It is not so much about the Red Sea being parted, but about it being crossed instead of navigated. It means faith and clarity opening the way through chaos and includes a baptismal tone to it. The red waters are the unconscious, Moses is conscious wisdom, and the Hebrews being guided are the automatic self. In this three-letter formula, L-A-W, said to open the Red Sea, L stands for magical equilibrium, A stands for the symbolic language, and W for mysticism. So what happens is it was the tradition of wisdom of the Hebrews that managed to individuate itself in the face of Ancient Egyptian culture. This can be said of all waters: a magical equilibrium that is passed through a symbolic tradition engaged via mysticism is able to save the soul, to separate its waters and bring it from chaos to the nutritive harmony and beauty of the fluid principle. One can actually see, as with other specified Bardon formulas, the play between the formula and the English word it makes seen (law). This is, mythologically speaking, not so much an attack on Ancient Egyptian dogmas as it is an allegorical illustration of the way out of bondage and towards liberation. In fact, so do the Ancient Egyptians have similar known formulas via their liturgy, like the spell 99 of The Book of the Dead: > “O bringers of the ferry over this difficult sandbank > Bring me the ferry, tie for me the cords, in peace, in peace > Come, come, hasten, hasten, I have come to see my father Osiris > O lord of the red cloth, who has power over joy > O lord of the tempest, man of the sailing > O he who sails over this sandbank of Aapep > O binder of heads, fastener of necks, in the emergence from the knives > O keeper of the secret ferry, guard of Aapep > Bring me the ferry, tie for me the cords, that I may emerge from it, > this difficult land in which the overturned fall on their faces > and are unable to raise themselves > Hensua tongue of Ra, Indebu guide of the Two Lands, > Mengeb, with their steering-oars, > That is the power that opens the sun-disk, master of the red > Bring me, do not make me boatless. > Come spirit, my brother, proceed to the place you know there” In fact, one of the formulas I myself pretty much enjoy is a similar one, G-A-W, and I have first discovered it in the same Papyrus of Ani: > “As if I had slept a thousand years underwater, I wake up in a new season. I am the blue lotus that rises. I am the cup of dreams and memory that opens – I, the flower with a thousand petals At dawn, the sun rises naked like a newborn; I open and am penetrated by the light, the slow awakening in the fire while the petals bloom. open one by one, while the fingers that held the secret unfold I abandon the past and release the scent of flowers. > > “I open and the light descends, filling me and passing through, each blue petal reflecting perfectly in the clear water. I am this lotus filled with light reflected in the world. I float contented within myself, flower of a thousand petals, a life lived a thousand years without haste, a universe sparkling with a thousand stars, a god living among a thousand people. > > “If you stood one summer morning on the shore under the brilliant sky, you would see the thousand petals and say that together they form the lotus. But if you lived in its heart, invisible from the outside, you would see perhaps how the ecstasy of its fragrant core gives birth to its thousand petals What is beautiful is always what is itself in its essence, a certainty of being. I marvel at myself and others. things of the earth.” But my favorite formula is likely MAAT, read and formulated in the following fashion: M (the principle of fluidness) A (truth) A (poetic inspiration) T (interconnectedness). This formula gave us all worthy writers, artists, philosophers, inspirational leaders and the like. You will be able to see the play between this formula and the name of the Ancient Egyptian Goddess who rules over Order and Balance, who rules over Law. **4 – Has anyone tried applying the Godhead method (Step 10 in IIH) to Kabbalistic formulas? Any insights or ideas on how to integrate them effectively?** Before I go on about how to integrate the Godhead method into the formulas, let me speak of how to integrate the formulas into the Godhead method. Formulate ShAAeE in the akasha, this formula contains all four divine aspects and being a four-letter formula will manifest all the way to the material plane. This will set you in the state of the Godhead. Then, fine-tune it to form via C in the akasha, either you apply it to the painting or figurine of your personal God, or you apply it to your own shape in front of the mirror until resuming a semblance and posture that is truly divine even in the physical plane. This being done, you can vibrate the letters that go into the akasha in the head (now transfigured by omnipotence), the letters that go into the mental plane in the chest (omniscience), the letters that go into the astral plane in the abdominal region (eternity), and the letters that go into the material plane in the limbs (omnipresence). It is immaterial if you are using your divine head, chest, etc, or those of the figure of your personal god, but the letters should be vibrated from the depth point of head, chest, abdominal region and, when in the limbs, from the depth-point of the whole body, manifesting all four divine qualities. Let us take the example of L-A-W, we would manifest it in the abdominal region, through the depth-point of the place of immortality. Immortality contains omnipotence to go against all odds and omniscience, since it covers all knowledge in time (likewise, emotion, tied to the abdominal region, needs the friction between will and cognition, or the intestine is controlled by the brain and fed by the stomach). This means omnipotent mysticism, omniscient symbolism and eternal magical equilibrium. When I was training with my old mentor we would always open or seal the formulas with the four divine qualities by removing time and space from the subconscious, for instance: “Omnipotent, Omniscient, Immortal and Omnipresent G-A-W, manifest omnipresently, eternally, omnisciently and omnipotently.” **5 – At what point in the Practice of Magical Evocation is it optimal for the student to begin Kabbalistic formula work? While one might look to the genii contacted via evocation for timing, a more general framework for this crossover point would be helpful.** You may begin at any stage. It is optimal to visit the spheres first in order to expand consciousness and prepare your brain for more abstract living principles, but you have visited them at the final stages of IIH already. So now you can begin at any time, as long as you do it as Bardon teaches. Bardon has set the stage for you: you have the tool of a creator, but aren’t yet one. Now, to understand the real origin of the Key that is the real Key to true Quabbalah, you start in Uranus. That is where you understand that this key is the key used by Bardon to devise his own system, but it is transversal to all things and crosses way beyond Bardon’s system. “Now I am become Life, the creator of worlds.” This inversed quote is true of the so-called transplutonian quabbalistic exploration, with all kinds of applications below. The technique itself, however, to us in our kingdom of mimic, means mostly dissecting qualities and powers and obtaining a mnemonic alphabet with which to reproduce them methodically in the consciousness that exists throughout our multiple bodies while being able to project them (the qualities and powers) in the very planes these bodies inhabit. This is how in The Path of Ipsos vol I, I develop a quabbalah of the mineral kingdom components, a quabbalah of the vegetable kingdom components and one of the animal kingdom components. This is how, as well, in my The Path of Ipsos Vol II I dedicate 300 pages to the quabbalah of the chemical elements, which will lead one, in advanced stages of research and exploration, to the same ends as Transplutonian Sphere Quabbalah. --- # Franz Bardon Resources: Interviews, Guides, and Practice Support Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-resources-interviews-guides-and-practice-support/ Perseus Arcane Academy has built a large archive for students of Franz Bardon, including long-form interviews, practical essays, student stories, course discussions, and supporting material on IIH, PME, KTQ, the soul mirror, evocation, Kabbalah, body-based training, and Hermetic practice. This page is ordered for a reader, not as a raw archive. It begins with the strongest orientation pieces and landmark interviews, then moves into IIH foundations, soul mirror work, evocation, Quabbalah, Sixty Skills, André Consciência’s wider work, practitioner stories, and comparative context. **Contents** - Start Here: Core Bardon Orientation and Landmark Interviews - Initiation Into Hermetics: Foundations, Soul Mirror, and Progress Problems - PME, Evocation, Ritual, Talismans, and Magical Operations - KTQ, Quabbalah, Cosmic Letters, Planets, and Spheres - Sixty Skills, Body-Based Training, and Internal Alchemy - André Consciência: Books and Visionary Hermeticism - Practitioner Interviews, Student Stories, and Lived Paths - Comparative Traditions, Critiques, and Wider Context ## Start Here: Core Bardon Orientation and Landmark Interviews ##### Franz Bardon, Kabbalah & Purification: An Interview with Alexandre Moryason Interview with Alexandre Moryason on Bardon, Kabbalah, purification, and initiatory work. ##### Alexandre Moryason on Franz Bardon’s Path: Second Interview with Perseus Arcane Academy A second PAA interview with Alexandre Moryason focused on Franz Bardon’s path and related initiatory issues. ##### Navigating the Path: A Franz Bardon Practitioner’s Reflections on Magic, Mysticism, and the Books of Franz Bardon A Franz Bardon practitioner reflects on magic, mysticism, and how to approach Bardon’s books. ##### Why We Practice Hermetic Initiation: Frater IAC on His Franz Bardon Journey Frater IAC explains why he practices Hermetic initiation and reflects on his Franz Bardon journey. ##### Interview with Frater IAC: Franz Bardon, Tactical Magic, Introspection & the Hermetic Path Interview with Frater IAC on Bardon, introspection, tactical magic, and serious Hermetic work. ##### Unlocking The Keys to Magic: A Conversations with Franz Bardon Practitioners Collects discussion with Franz Bardon practitioners on practical keys to the magical path. ##### Finding Your Way: Structured Support for Your Journey in the Franz Bardon Tradition Explains support options for practitioners trying to navigate the Franz Bardon tradition. ##### Franz Bardons Initiation into Hermetics: Common Subjects & Why No Progress? Addresses recurring problems and practical sticking points for students working through Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics. ##### Franz Bardon – Community Questions, by André Consciência André Consciência answers community questions on Franz Bardon practice and interpretation. ##### The 6 Categories of Franz Bardon Students Classifies common types of Franz Bardon students and the patterns they tend to fall into. ##### Honoring Rawn Clark: A Guiding Light to Franz Bardon’s Teachings Honors Rawn Clark’s contribution as a major guide to Franz Bardon’s teachings. ## Initiation Into Hermetics: Foundations, Soul Mirror, and Progress Problems ##### Introduction to Mental Training Introduces mental training practices useful to Bardon practitioners building concentration and discipline. ##### The Subconscious Mind – Our Greatest Ally (Updated for 2022) Discusses the subconscious mind as a key ally in spiritual and magical transformation. ##### Achieving Self-Mastery: How Discipline and Rigor Lead to Spiritual Attainment Argues for discipline and rigor as necessary foundations for spiritual and magical attainment. ##### How to Meditate and Enter the Void Gives meditation guidance relevant to mental stillness and Bardon’s early training demands. ##### How to Transfer your Consciousness: Franz Bardon’s Step 4 Exercise and the Grain of Sand Explains Bardon’s Step 4 consciousness-transfer exercise using the grain of sand example. ##### Navigating the Ladder: Clint’s Journey Through Steps 4, 5 & 6 of Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics A practitioner account focused on Bardon’s IIH Steps 4, 5, and 6. ##### Bridging Bardon and the Sedona Method: Emotional Release for the Soul Mirror by Clint Sabom Shows how emotional-release methods may support Bardon’s soul mirror work. ##### Soul Mirror Chess by André Consciência Offers a practical way to work with Bardon’s soul mirror through André Consciência’s chess-like method. ##### Magic Soul Mirrors by André Consciência Discusses soul mirrors as a living magical practice rather than a superficial character checklist. ##### Considerations and Practices on the Soul Mirror by André Consciência Gives considerations and practices for Bardon’s soul mirror work. ##### The Path of Self-Discovery: Integrating Introspection into Your Magical Practice Explains introspection as a core part of magical practice, especially relevant to Bardon’s soul mirror work. ##### IIH Step VIII by André Consciência Focuses on Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics Step VIII through André Consciência’s commentary. ##### Franz Bardon’s IIH STEP IX-X are Necessary for PME and KTQ by André Consciência Argues that Bardon’s later IIH steps are necessary preparation for Practice of Magical Evocation and Key to the True Kabbalah. ##### Magic Equilibrium Throughout the Spheres by André Consciência Explores magical equilibrium across the spheres through André Consciência’s Bardon-informed practice lens. ##### Vajrasattva Practice and IIH Compares Vajrasattva practice with Initiation Into Hermetics and related purification work. ##### Magic, Mental Health and a Normal Life Discusses how magical practice can be balanced with mental health and ordinary life. ##### Rethinking Internet Use through the Six Rasas Applies the six rasas to internet use and discipline, relevant to practitioners managing attention and habit. ##### Every Moment is a New Beginning – On Falling and Getting Up on the Battlefield of Life, Part I A reflective practice article on resilience and restarting after failure, useful for long-term Bardon students. ## PME, Evocation, Ritual, Talismans, and Magical Operations ##### What’s the difference between an Elemental, Planetary Spirit, Zodiac Entity or Akashic Being? Clarifies types of spirits and entities that Bardon practitioners encounter in evocation and Kabbalistic work. ##### The Art of Evocation Discusses evocation as an art and practice relevant to Bardon’s Practice of Magical Evocation. ##### One’s First Evocation by André Consciência Discusses the practical and psychological issues around a first evocation, a subject explicitly framed for students of Franz Bardon. ##### Minor Ritual of Purification and Evocation by André Consciência Presents a purification and evocation ritual framework from André Consciência relevant to Bardon-style magical practice. ##### Magical Gestures by André Consciência Explores magical gestures as an applied practice within André Consciência’s Hermetic training approach. ##### How to Create Magical Rituals Gives a framework for creating magical rituals in a disciplined Hermetic context. ##### Exploring Ceremonial Magic: From Ghostly Encounters to Soul Mirror Work Interview on ceremonial magic, psychic experiences, and soul mirror work relevant to Bardon practitioners. ##### Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition – Andre answers questions about the Course An interview-style explanation of how André’s ceremonial magic work bridges Golden Dawn-style ritual with Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics. ##### Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition: Student Story Offers a student review of the Ceremonial Magic and Bardon Tradition course and its practical value. ##### Masterclass: Franz Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics, Evocation and Kabbalah Presents a masterclass covering Bardon’s three major works: IIH, PME, and KTQ. ##### Unveiling the Masterclasses: Jake Zenn’s Illuminating Journey into Hermetics, Evocation, and Kabbalah Introduces Jake Zenn’s Hermetics, evocation, invocation, and Kabbalah masterclasses, including how they relate to Franz Bardon’s books and practical training. ##### Magical Evocation and Invocation Simplified – An Interview with Jake Green Jake Green discusses evocation and invocation in a simplified way useful to Bardon-adjacent students. ## KTQ, Quabbalah, Cosmic Letters, Planets, and Spheres ##### How to Use Franz Bardon’s The Key to the True Kabbalah Guides readers on approaching Bardon’s Key to the True Kabbalah and its practical use. ##### How to use Franz Bardon’s ‘Key to the True Kabbalah’ Guides readers on using Bardon’s Key to the True Kabbalah in practice. ##### Franz Bardons ‘Key to the True Kabbalah’ and the path of a Magician – A discussion with Ray Del Sole Ray Del Sole discusses Bardon’s Key to the True Kabbalah and the path of the magician. ##### Traditional Versus Modern: Exploring Different Paths to Kabbalah Mastery Compares traditional and modern approaches to Kabbalah mastery, relevant to Bardon’s KTQ path. ##### Illuminating Kabbalah: Jake Green’s Approach to Franz Bardon’s Arcane Tradition Jake Green discusses Kabbalah and his approach to Bardon’s arcane tradition. ##### How to Learn Kabbalah from the Spirit World Via Evocation Discusses learning Kabbalah through evocation, a topic directly adjacent to Bardon’s PME and KTQ. ##### Gaining the Senses of an Elemental by André Consciência Explores elemental perception and training in a way directly useful to Bardon elemental work. ##### The Ages of the Zodiac, Magic, and You — Sixty Skills Explores zodiacal ages through the Sixty Skills framework, relevant to Bardon’s wider Kabbalistic and planetary sequence. ##### Beyond the Inner Planets: Sixty Skills Explores the Solar System’s Frontiers in Search of Kabbalah Explores outer-planet work in the Sixty Skills Kabbalah sequence. ##### Pluto Meditation: What it does and how to access it Explains Pluto meditation in a way connected to Sixty Skills planetary work and advanced Hermetic training. ##### Sixty Skills Interview: The Living Crystal, Stacking the Sephirot and the “Trials of Hercules” Interview with Sixty Skills on the Living Crystal, Sephirot stacking, and advanced magical development. ##### The Living Crystal – Kickstarter Announces The Living Crystal project connected to Sixty Skills and practical magical training. ##### Magic, Kabbalah & Evocation: The Outer Planets with Bob from Sixty Skills Bob from Sixty Skills discusses outer planets, Kabbalah, evocation, and advanced magical training. ##### Intuition, Cosmic Letters and Living with Wolves: An Interview with Julia Griffin Interview touching on intuition and cosmic letters, with relevance to esoteric language and letter work. ##### 10 Steps to Divine Providence with Nenad – A Detailed look at the First Step Nenad gives a detailed look at the first step of a ten-step approach to Divine Providence. ## Sixty Skills, Body-Based Training, and Internal Alchemy ##### Sixty Skills Curriculum Explained Explains the Sixty Skills curriculum and how its structure supports Bardon-style development. ##### Sixty Skills Five Part Curriculum Explains the five-part Sixty Skills curriculum and how it maps onto Bardon-informed training. ##### Sixty Skills Master Course: Expediting Franz Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics Explains the Sixty Skills Master Course as a structured way to accelerate or support IIH-style development. ##### Sixty Skills: Learn Key Skills from Magical, Yogic and Meditative Traditions – 18 Month Curriculum Introduces the 18-month Sixty Skills curriculum as a structured training path for magical, yogic, and meditative skills. ##### Unlocking Magical Mastery: An Interview with Sixty Skills Introduces Sixty Skills’ approach to magical mastery and training relevant to the Bardon tradition. ##### Working with the Elements: The Sixty Skills Difference Explains how Sixty Skills approaches elemental work differently from generic elemental theory. ##### Franz Bardons Method and Importance of Body Training Explains why body training matters within Franz Bardon’s method. ##### Fajin and Hermetic Practice Examines fajin as a body-energy practice with relevance to Hermetic training and embodiment. ##### The Merits of Body-Based Training for Meditative, Yogic, and Magical Practice Explains why body-based training matters for meditation, yoga, and magical practice. ##### The Three Transformations: The Alchemical Art of Jing, Chi, and Shen Introduces the transformation of jing, chi, and shen in terms useful to Hermetic students working with vital, astral, and mental energies. ##### How to Achieve Astral Travel: A Comprehensive Guide to the Zero Point Method Provides a practical astral-travel method that may assist Bardon practitioners working with mental and astral projection. ##### Internal Alchemy in Practice: Chi Skills on Energy Transformation and Self-Mastery Discusses internal energy transformation and self-mastery practices useful to Hermetic and Bardon-style training. ##### Life Force Mastery and Franz Bardons Hermetics: Interview with Dinesh Interview with Dinesh on life force mastery and Franz Bardon’s Hermetics. ##### Martial Arts, Energy Work & Practical Alchemy: An Interview with Marissa Newell Connects martial arts, energy work, and practical alchemy in a way useful to body-based Hermetic training. ##### Transformation Through Qigong, Vipassana, and Hermeticism Shows how qigong and Vipassana can support Hermetic transformation and practice discipline. ##### Self Mastery with David Monaghan – The Art of Attunement Interview with David Monaghan on self-mastery and attunement, relevant to disciplined inner work. ##### Taoist Magic and Franz Bardons Tradition: A Discussion with Jason Read Jason Read discusses Taoist magic alongside Franz Bardon’s tradition. ## André Consciência: Books and Visionary Hermeticism ##### Exploring the Profound Meaning in Andre Consciencia’s Occult Works Explores deeper themes in André Consciência’s occult work, including links to Bardon’s sequence. ##### New Release: Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sphere of the Sun Announces Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sphere of the Sun, a work directly connected to Bardon-style soul mirror practice. ##### Magical and Mystical Introspection – What is the purpose of this Course? André answers questions on Magical and Mystical Introspection, soul mirror work, and how the material supports students of Initiation Into Hermetics. ##### ‘A Magical Study Series’ with Andre Consciencia Introduces André Consciência’s Magical Study Series, including material on elementals, sphere Quabbalah, and Bardon-related magical study. ##### The Theurgy of Thoth: Writing from the Divine Mind, by André Consciência Explores theurgic writing and divine-mind practice while referencing Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics and André’s wider sphere work. ##### From the Depth Point to Life on Venus, by André Consciência André Consciência connects IIH-style depth-point work with visionary planetary practice. ##### Bridging Worlds: Exploring the Cosmology and Practices of Neoshamanism by André Consciência Gives background on André’s wider magical work, including his long-term connection with Franz Bardon-based Hermetic training. ##### School of Visionary Hermeticism Introduces André Consciência’s School of Visionary Hermeticism and its relevance to Hermetic and Bardon practice. ## Practitioner Interviews, Student Stories, and Lived Paths ##### From Demonic Realm to Divine Providence: A Bardonist’s Path through IIH, PME, and Rosicrucian Mysteries Follows a Bardonist’s path through Initiation Into Hermetics, Practice of Magical Evocation, and wider Rosicrucian work. ##### Student Story: Master Course by Jenneke of Exile Gives a student account of the Master Course and its usefulness for structured magical development. ##### From Franz Bardon to Rainbow Body with Baron Erwin Pitsch Connects Bardon practice with the Rainbow Body topic through an interview with Baron Erwin Pitsch. ##### From Exorcist to Hermeticist: A Journey Through Spiritual Warfare and Magic Interview tracing a move from exorcism and spiritual warfare into Hermetic magical practice. ##### Magic Unmasked: A Practitioner’s Journey Through Franz Bardon’s System A practitioner’s account of working through Franz Bardon’s system and the realities of long-term practice. ##### Beyond Boundaries: A Journey Through Mental Discipline, Telepathy, and Esoteric Practice Explores mental discipline and telepathy as part of serious esoteric training. ##### From Star Wars to Hermetics: One Magician’s Journey Through Practical Magickal Training A magician’s personal journey into Hermetics and practical magical training. ##### Franz Bardons Hermetics: An Interview with Crystalf Interview with Crystalf on Franz Bardon’s Hermetics and practical training issues. ##### Magical Journey through Franz Bardons Universal System of Initiation – Interview with Antonio Interview with Antonio on Bardon’s universal system of initiation and practical magical development. ##### Interview with Jan Tungli: My Winding Path from Religious Exploration to Spiritual Dreams and Franz Bardon An interview with Jan Tungli on discovering Franz Bardon after years of religious searching, spiritual dreams, Tarot symbolism, kundalini challenges, and lessons from Hermetic practice. ##### Journey through Rosicrucianism, BOTA and Initiation into Hermetics: An Interview with Tibor Simic Interview with Tibor Simic on Rosicrucianism, BOTA, and Initiation Into Hermetics. ##### David Coleman on Astrology, Magic and the Mysterious Interview with David Coleman on astrology, magic, and occult practice relevant to Hermetic students. ##### Astrology, Magic of the Astral Light and The 26 Keys: An Interview with David Coleman Interview with David Coleman on astrology, astral light, and magical keys relevant to Hermetic study. ##### Vedic Astrology: An Interview with Jesse Woodward Interview on Vedic astrology included in the Bardon archive as a supporting occult-study resource. ##### Magical Musings: An Interview with Victoria from Star Lore Publishing Interview with Victoria from Star Lore Publishing on magical publishing and esoteric study. ##### Unveiling Virgil’s Profound Literary Journey: From The Spirit of Magic to Marian Hermetics Interview with Virgil on his writing and Hermetic development, relevant to Bardon and Marian Hermetics readers. ##### Arcanum Hermeticum – Magnus Sarmax discusses Magical Initiation Interview with Magnus Sarmax on magical initiation and Hermetic development. ##### A Dialogue with Jake: Delving into His Personal Experiences with Hermetics and Reiki Jake discusses personal experiences with Hermetics and Reiki, useful for students comparing practice paths. ##### Alchemy, Gnosis, and the Path to Understanding: Interview with John H Reid III Interview with John H Reid III touching on Hermetics, alchemy, and Franz Bardon interests. ##### A Call to Practitioners: Share Your Path With Perseus Invites serious practitioners to share practice reports, including Bardon-related student-path material. ## Comparative Traditions, Critiques, and Wider Context ##### Evaluating the Critique of Bardon: A Practitioner’s Response to Nick Farrell by Virgil Responds to Nick Farrell’s critique of Bardon from the perspective of a committed Bardon practitioner. ##### Who Was Franz Bardon’s Teacher? Investigates the question of Franz Bardon’s teacher and the lineage context around his work. ##### Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon — Foolish Fish Review Covers Foolish Fish’s review of Franz Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics. ##### Seeking the Greater Mysteries: Ceremonial Magic, Franz Bardon’s Mastery, and the Golden Dawn Tradition Compares Bardon’s mastery-oriented work with ceremonial magic and the Golden Dawn tradition. ##### Exploring the Traditions of Solomonic Magic with a Practicing Occultist and Grimoiric Traditionalist Includes a Bardon-perspective question while comparing Solomonic and grimoiric magical practice. ##### How the Universe Works: The Path of Enlightenment – Part 1 Introduces a metaphysical model of enlightenment and universal process relevant to Hermetic students. ##### The Path of Manifestation: Understanding How the Universe Works – Part Two Continues a metaphysical discussion of manifestation and cosmic process relevant to magical training. ##### The Evolution of the Universe: From Manifestation to End Times – Part 3 Completes the three-part universe sequence by moving from manifestation into evolution and end-times framing. --- # Exploring the Traditions of Solomonic Magic with a Practicing Occultist and Grimoiric Traditionalist Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/exploring-the-traditions-of-solomonic-magic-with-a-practicing-occultist-and-grimoiric-traditionalist/ What an amazing interview with so much information for the lone practitioner and inspiration to lay down your own path. There are so many people out there who have walked their own way and learned through experience, this interview is a great example of this. Real life experience leading the way versus *only* theoretical study. If you have enjoyed this interview as much as me then please do let us know in the comments. Also, if you would like to follow the work of Frater Ashen Chassan then please do follow the links at the end of the post. --- ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_3a4c751ed86b4e789baf3b07a6fcb824~mv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_1000,h_1000,al_c,q_80/file.png) **PAA: Please introduce yourself and your journey towards the practice of magic.** Frater Ashen Chassan: My name is Bryan Garner, my magical name or author pseudonym is Frater Ashen Chassan. I am a practicing occultist, author, lecturer, craftsman and grimoire traditionalist that has been involved in Western Ceremonial Magic since 1999. My journey in magic began in my early teens due to numerous paranormal encounters myself and my family and friends experienced as I was growing up. Although I practice several forms of magic, my primary interests focus on reproducing experiments from various Solomonic magical texts or grimoires and exploring their effectiveness. I take a direct and experimental approach to historic forms of magic and spirit communication. I record the results as well as explore the effectiveness of the results. **PAA: How big an influence has the Golden Dawn had upon your approach?** Frater Ashen Chassan: The Golden Dawn was a substantial influence during my earlier developments in ceremonial magic. I never offically joined a lodge but I studied and practiced from books such as the “Self-initiation into the Golden Dawn Tradition” by Chic and Tabatha Cicero and “Modern Magick: Twelve Lessons in the High Magickal Arts”, by Donald Michael Kraig among others. I became familiar with several of the practices, including the use of Tarot and rituals such as the Middle Pillar, Banishing and invoking rituals of the pentagram and Opening by Watchtower. My involvement in evocation was further inspired by the book, “Summoning Spirits: The Art of Magical Evocation” by Konstantinos who adopted much from the Golden Dawn as well. I still utilize several methods of the Golden Dawn to this day. **PAA: Can you tell us about your experience with traditional forms of Western ceremonial magic and your approach to experimenting with Solomonic magical texts?** Frater Ashen Chassan: My earliest attempts at spirt summoning were highly modified forms based on the book I mentioned previously by Konstantinos and an abridged version of the Lemegeton’s Goetia I ordered through the mail in 1999. The instructions were rather vague, and I had very little background in classical forms of ceremonial magic at that time. I made a few attempts at evocation combining what I read about goetia and the Golden Dawn methods I had become familiar with. Even during those few amateur attempts, I got what I perceived as spirit presence although it did not last long and I wasn’t able to hear or speak with it. The results were enough to convince me of the validity of spirit conjuration though and I have been fascinated by conjuration ever since. Years later, I came upon the works of Joseph C. Lisiewski, notably his, “Ceremonial Magic & the Power of Evocation” and was captivated by his approach towards classical magic. I became intent on conducting magical rituals historically rather than the more modern approaches which prevailed at the time. I learned how earlier Solomonic texts are/were built on the foundations of highly religious and liturgical structures that were familiar to the clergy of that day. Undoubtedly, the greatest inspiration on my magical path was the work of John King IV and his Imperial Arts Volume I were practicing the Lemegeton’s Goetia was concerned. I followed his example in procuring the traditional implements and vestments and working from the grimoire’s instructions directly. I’ve learned so much in the ways of implement making and crafting, specifically in jewelry art as well as engraving, carving, sewing and leatherwork. I also decided to become officially ordained in a Catholic Gnostic Church after immersing myself into so much liturgy and clerical (clergy) work. This has definitely paved the way to truly appreciate these arts in ways that I don’t believe highly modified and supplemented methods ever could. It took some time to reacclimate to the highly Christianized religious practices and contexts of the grimoires having stepped away from such involvements in my late teens. However, deeper studies eventually lead me to appreciate the occult and esoteric virtues of where this system of magic developed from. The roles of the priest and magician are nebulously blended together. My very first attempt at “Traditional Goetia” was unsuccessful however and lead to further research and development of my magical skills. Later, after achieving success in a different magical system known as the Ars Almadel, I returned to goetia and was finally able to achieve the results of conjuring a spirit to visible and audible appearance. Since that initial success I’ve experimented with several Solomonic texts and grimoires for spirit conjuration, many of which have yielded satisfying results. For several years now, I have conducted evocations on the behalf of clients to assist them with a number of issues in order to test the results and usefulness of my workings and assist those in need of such services.n **PAA: Can you discuss your understanding and use of Tattwas in your practice? Coming from a Franz Bardon perspective this is a huge part of our foundation so I am interested to see your approach.** Frater Ashen Chassan: My first experiments with the Tattwas occurred while I was living alone and developing my spiritual sight (scrying). Again I must credit the books “Modern Magick and “Summoning Spirits: The Art of Magical Evocation” for my initial practice and exposure to the Tattwas. I also had the main works of Franz Bardon that furthered my appreciation and exploration with this system. I experimented with the Tatwas utilizing my training as a Hypnotherapist in conjunction with scrying the cards to immerse myself into some very gratifying experiments. I scryed the main elemental Tattwa cards the same way I gazed at my black mirror or crystal while intoning divine and angelic names associated with the element. My involvement with the Tattws progressed further due to the excellent book, “Magical Tattwa Cards: A Complete System of Self-Development” by Dr. Jonn Mumford. His exercises and experiences highly advanced my appreciation for the cards, which lead to the experiments in my book, “Gateways Through Light and Shadow.” I’ve been able to guide others through experiencing the astral realms utilizing the methods I learned combined with hypnotic induction. ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_8fd3d8de6d454a4c99daa0163a8416eb~mv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_1000,h_1000,al_c,q_80/file.png) **PAA: Can you describe your understanding of the relationship between magical ritual and spirit communication?** Frater Ashen Chassan: My assessment of the relationship between magical ritual and spirit communication is primarily through the aspects of correspondences, energetic resonance and an established paradigm. What I mean by these three categories are that each plays a role in enabling a spirit to successfully interact through communication and alternatively, though alteration, directly with the magician. These three aspects are what I feel have directed magic since time immemorial. By the concept of correspondences or what is often referred to as “sympathy”, magicians have been able to associate a wide range of symbols, images, archetypes, colors, shapes and feelings to beings that, in actuality, have no true form, or substance. In modern linguistics we might appropriate this to a computer program that is developed to present various images and texts so that they can be manipulated to function in specific fashions. Although we use machines to translate the programs into images and symbols we can observe, understand and manipulate, the programs themselves have no inherent substance. Establishing various forms and symbols to a being and observing that such actions work harmoniously, allows for a meaningful connection to “reach out” to a specific power that would otherwise be indistinguishable from all others. Energetic resonance is a sympathetic attunement of such actions such as magical ritual, to have a meaningful impact upon the energetic make up of one’s environment as well as what could considered the “astral” or spiritual planes of existence that transpose, permeate, and extend beyond the physical senses. A successful magical ritual must “resonate” with the intention of the magician and expected results to be considered viable in any way. Even if the process is not consciously understood, the action must achieve observable results in some fashion. Finally, the intellectual, social, spiritual, cultural, if not religious paradigm of the magician must be taken into account as a template or blueprint of how the universal is thought to behave. A spirit may only appear in a form that the human being has at least some frame of reference for in order for the mind to be able to conceive of what the spirt being is actually about. “Angel”, “Demon”, Jinn” “Fairy”, “ghost” are simply concepts that have some level of social and cultural appreciation. It is unlikely that such terms adequately describe the entirety of the nature of the spiritual entity in consideration, but it gives a framework for which a person may have some indication of how to relate to the nonphysical being. Magical rituals intended to speak with spiritual beings each contain elements of correspondences, resonance and some sense of an established paradigm. The ritual can only be effective if there is enough harmony between each of these points and the nature of the spirit in question. The magician must have enough integral knowledge of various correspondences to appreciate the appearance of the spirit and what they perceive as forms of communication. A language and communication which both parties acknowledge and can respond to is essential. **PAA: Can you talk about your experience with evocations and theurgic practices? Does the practice of Theurgy enhance the evocations?** Frater Ashen Chassan: In discussing classical western magic, the practice of spirit evocation was ever assumed to be accomplished through the assumption of the divine and/or divine authority anyway. The semblance of Theurgy was the medium through which classical magicians evoked spirits, whether angel or demon, to begin with. The grimoire texts themselves are primarily formatted to Catholic liturgy, use implements and dress of Catholic clergy and are often referred to as an exorcist - a position of at least minor holy orders. Beyond the official dress and ordination of the typical magician would be the actual practice of which prayer, discipline and intense focus was essential. The establishment of magical orders in recent history, made “higher consciousness in the understanding of God's relationship to individual consciousness” a more prominent focus. Thus, magical Theurgic practices took on a different meaning from which they may have originally been considered. I don’t think I could claim that contemporary practices considered “Theurgy” would inherently give someone the ability to evoke spirits successfully, but it could definitely assist, and yes, enhance the experience overall. ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_eb559e138ae2426bb9906948592953f9~mv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_986,h_1000,al_c,q_80/file.png) **PAA: How do you prepare for and conduct a magical ritual for the purpose of spirit communication?**n Frater Ashen Chassan: When working from a classical grimoire, I will typically prepare for the evocation as the text suggests, especially when it’s an unfamiliar text/process or the spirit is unknown to me. Timing is a consideration where evocation is concerned along with knowing the direction the spirit is said to arrive from. I will consider which components, such as what incense might be most agreeable to the spirit and make sure to mix and consecrate a measure of the suffumigation beforehand. Quite often preparation involves the practices of abstinence, fasting and prayer and sometimes confession. Most classical texts of magic stress the absolute need for purity and cleanliness both inwardly and outwardly.n Fasting is important, not just for clarity but for bodily functioning and not being distracted by the process of digestion or needing to use the restroom, etc. Alternatively, certain odors seem to have a powerful effect on entities. Dr. Stephen Skinner mentions how spirits seem to have a sensitive sense of smell. There is much textual evidence for this even if it is not properly understood in the way that human beings understand “smell”. Beyond our typical appreciation for this sense, I believe certain scents have more to do with what is being emitted off a person. As various foods and drinks are consumed and digested, they undergo an energetic process of decay, a release, as microscopic molecules fill the air issued from our mouths, skin and other areas. After a lecture from a spirt about how food offerings are received, I believe this process interacts with the aerial natures of spirits and can have a agreeable or non-agreeable effect on them. The same can be said for the use of incense or any other substances around us during an evocation. Beyond the need for fasting and cleanliness, the psychological effects from retreat and discipline alter the mental status of the practitioner. Eliminating distractions and focusing intently upon a task is a powerful magical act in and of itself. I do believe there is much required of the magician to control their internal mental dialog and conscious wanderings in order to effectively establish meaningful contact and communication with spirts. Beyond personal preparation and retreats, all items are consecrated and cleaned beforehand and arranged prior to the evocation time. The invocations are memorized and reviewed if possible. The purpose of the ritual is reviewed along with any information on the spirit that may be useful in determining its nature. ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_8905ea23d45840a4a42042223eb4bbbd~mv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_431,h_1000,al_c,q_80/file.png) **PAA: Can you discuss any challenges you have faced in establishing successful communication with spirits through magical ritual? What are the requirements within your tradition to allow clear and productive communication?**n Frater Ashen Chassan: I met several challenges in the early stages of developing my practices of evocation. First were my expectations and imaginings of what I thought was supposed to occur and how it would occur and also in what time frame. These rarely if ever matched up. I found my thoughts would often drift to doubts or distractions when nothing appeared to be happening after a few recitations of the conjurations. There was always the fear of conducting something wrong, pronouncing a name incorrectly or that one of my implements was made incorrectly or errors in my gestures. There is a level of focus and “engagement” required in evocation which is challenging during the times the mind is convinced that there is nothing else there. There is a paradoxical juggle of suspending doubt while ardently focusing on the power of the ritual to succeed and passively allowing the spirit to arrive via its own method. I found there was no substitute for experience/practice in this practice and no level of perfectionism would yield the results I initially imagined. **PAA: How do you determine the appropriate ritual and tools to use for specific spirits or purposes? Can you discuss your experience with different forms of spirit evocation and invocation? How do you maintain a healthy and respectful relationship with the spirits you communicate with through ritual?** Frater Ashen Chassan: I haven’t spent much time mixing and matching various systems, attire and spirits and tend to work with beings and implements in the grimoires they are found. This isn’t the case in every instance however, as I used the Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals (DSIC) to conjure the seven Olympic Spirits of the Arbatel with success. The ritual tools I use are commonly the ones listed in the grimoires I am working from. The use and importance of each tool or invocation does not become readily apparent until several experiments are made. Although I have not had much need of the magical sword in actual evocation, I believe it is wise to have one handy in the case of more dangerous evocations. Through interaction, conversation, often with offerings and signs, motions of respect, positive relationships can be established with spirits. Several of the spirits, angelic and otherwise, seem to appreciate ritualistic diplomacy and formality (respect) I strive to embody when conducting evocations. I am sincere and firm in my approach but never insulting or demanding. From there, a relationship can only be strengthened through familiarity, and regular interaction. To harness any spiritual being’s true benefits, a continual working relationship is an absolute must. ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_06c3d4ea2d16474990576474d863e207~mv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_1000,h_926,al_c,q_80/file.png) **PAA: Can you talk about any significant experiences or insights gained from your communication with spirits through ritual?** Frater Ashen Chassan: The knowledge and insights I’ve gained through conversations with spirits are too numerous to mention here. Such gems go well beyond the 674 pages of my last book that relates findings. One I will share are perspectives that have altered my perceptions of what I believe “angels” and “demons” were. According to the responses I received from an Archangel, there is no “war” and conflict” among spiritual beings as there is among mankind. There is no hatred or fear, or loathing among the angels. Our spiritual schools of thought and lore allow glimpses of a widely diverse and intertwined spiritual world that is not fully understood or apprehended by any religion, race or culture. **PAA: How do you approach protection and safety in your spirit communication rituals? Have you had anything unexpected occur?** Frater Ashen Chassan: I approach spirit evocation very seriously and cautiously. I try to take nothing for granted and assume as little as possible. I still utilize the vestments, implements and magical furniture such as the magical circle when evoking powerful spirits I am unfamiliar with. Even many of those I am familiar with I continue to use the same implements and ceremonial formalities. Even at times where this may be “unneeded”, I often follow traditional proceedings out of respect for the spirit’s power and influence. My involvement with various spirits have caused several situations to occur that could not have bene predicted. From dreams, and visions, to seemingly mundane events that change the course of someone’s life, much was unexpected. **PAA: Can you discuss the role of symbolism and intention in your magical rituals for spirit communication?** Frater Ashen Chassan: Symbolism plays an important part in magic and spirt communication since we are dealing with usually “invisible” and intangible entities. A symbol is only as potent as the corresponding connectiveness to the force or concept it represents along with the magician’s ability to utilize it. All magic works in some fashion via sympathy of a concept and resonance to the aspect to that which is being represented. Intention is the establishment of the magical purpose and focus of the intended result but often doesn’t control the aspects of how the results are achieved. Especially in the case of spirit communication, there is often many nuances that were not imagined or predicted. **PAA: How has your understanding and approach to spirit communication through ritual evolved over time?** Frater Ashen Chassan:: At this point the number of successful evocation of spirits I’ve performed is nearing triple digits. In every case, the working never occurred quite like I imagined in my mind. I’ve come to rely on my senses to inform me when the evocation is progressing as should or if something is amiss. There are certain signs I’ve become familiar to when a spirit is about to arrive. I’ve come to really appreciate how various spirits have distinct “feelings”, smells and sounds that accompany their arrival and presence that can linger after the rite is complete. For beings I’ve contacted a number of times, I believe I can more identify them by “feeling” rather than by their appearance or communication. This “feeling” is nearly impossible to put into words” but is something I’ve come to rely upon in magical evocation. My approach to spirit communication is far less fundamental as it began originally and much more familiar, like a skill I’ve practiced for several years. Although I maintain my sense of formality and respect to the magical art I am practicing, the eeriness and “otherness” of the process has long since faded. I continue to have some difficulty stepping from an intense evocation back into the “normal world” as if the experience and my consciousness disallows the two to full elucidate. **PAA: How does your background in martial arts and Ninjutsu inform your approach to magic? Do you integrate the use of Kuji Kuri hand gestures and have the spirits had any specific guidance for your martial arts?** Frater Ashen Chassan: Martial arts has definitely played a large part in my practice of and approach to ceremonial magic. Ninjutsu in particular has influenced my understanding of how magic functions in its most direct way through focus and physical gestures of the practitioner, especially where other people are concerned. Through the removal of doubt or distractions and any barriers of thought, intention and action the miraculous can be achieved. I use the practice of the Kuji in and Kuji kiri in various practical ways as needed. It is an excellent method to enact change at a moments notice without further need of implementation or ceremonial trappings. I’ve integrated this practice with other mudras and mantras I’ve combined to be used as such spontaneous needs arise. I’ve gained much insight and support from Martian spirits and angels that have undoubtedly improved my performance in the martial arts. **PAA: Where can people find you if they would like to follow your work?** nFrater Ashen Chassan: People can find me on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063468159726) or Instagram. I have profiles for Facebook under “[Frater Ashen Chassan](https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063468159726)” where most find me or order implements or talismans from me directly. I also have four online courses or Masterclasses on Ceremonial Magic Skills, Goetia, Almadel, and Drawing Springs into Crystals. --- --- # Exploring the Profound Meaning in Andre Consciencia’s Occult Works – Part 2 Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/exploring-the-profound-meaning-in-andre-consciencias-occult-works-part-2/ ## Exploring the Profound Meaning in Andre Consciencia’s Occult Works – Part 2 **PAA: 1) How does your new Magical series beginning with your book on the Elementals fit in with your previous books. Is there a relationship?** ** ** 1 - It must be understood that right after I wrote The Way of Abrahadabra, I wrote Through The Soul Mirror to The Sphere of the Sun. Then I wrote A Guide to the Elementals, then The Path of Ipsos, then and A Guide to the Quabbalah of the Spheres, then The Dragon Tarot, after which I wrote A Guide to Stellar Magic. Only then did I write The Lusitanian Grimoire and The Inner Gateways of LAM. This is the order in which I wrote the books, so you have published books mentioning Falcon Books publications that haven't yet seen the light of day as I thought the order of releases between different publishers would be different.  I have written other occult material after that, for Falcon Books. I believe I was born to write and since I wrote my first piece with 13 years it never stopped. But this is to say that different publishers have different rhythms and modes of work and that the order in which books are published isn't the same in which they are written. I wrote A Guide to the Elementals 3 years ago. This is the same year I wrote Through the Soul Mirror to The Sphere of the Sun, but it was published toward the end of 2022, taking almost 3 years. By the time it was published I had released all other books except The Lusitanian Grimoire and the Inner Gates. Yet, it was the second occult book I wrote in English, starting in the pandemics.  This doesn't say much about the publisher in case someone is thinking it, the time a publishing house takes to publish your book can mean the dedication is deep, rather than the rush to sell. But it does tell about the timing of the books. I always thought of Through the Soul Mirror as part of the series, for instance. You start with Through the Soul Mirror, move to A Guide to the Elementals, and then to A Guide to the Quabbalah of the Spheres. These correspond in terms of the logic of magical progress with Initiation Into Hermetics, Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key to True Quabbalah by Franz Bardon. A Guide to Stellar Magic comes after, because Bardon did write a hidden book on astrology and it is hidden mostly at Practice of Magical Evocation. I wrote the Grade of Jupiter thinking that it corresponded somehow with the fourth book on the card of the Emperor. I wrote Through the Soul Mirror thinking that it corresponds with the card of the Sun, A Guide to the Elementals with the card The World, the Quabbalah of the Spheres with the Judgement, A Guide to Stellar Magic with The Moon.  So you see, nothing is very simple here. There are sequential relations with Bardon's books but these are only regarding the logic of progress, they are technical. If you look at it, you have The Moon, The Sun, then the Judgement and the World. These 4 cards make a sequence and they were sent to Falcon Books. Yet A Guide to Elementals would appear to be the last card while it is the second book in the publisher. How come? Again, I use the cards as a ritual, and they are being cast for a certain end. This is the necessary sequence. The Sun shines on the World and judges it, and finally the night comes to open wide the heavenly gates. In Through The Soul Mirror you master mainly the conscious and subconscious (The Sun, watch the child and the horse) , in A Guide to the Elementals, the elements (The World, watch the four figures and the central one), in a Guide to Sphere Quabbalah, the spheres (watch the 6 persons being judged by the seventh in The Judgement), and in A Guide to Stellar Magic, the Moon card, the transplutonian influences or, more exactly, the influences from Saturn up.  The Way of Abrahadabra is my card of the Magician, the Path of Ipsos is my card of the Priestess, the Lusitanian Grimoire is my card of the Empress, and The Inner Gateways of LAM is my card The Star. The Dragon Tarot is my card The Wheel. I have never said that in any of the books as I don't want people to think I'm claiming to be doing the same thing Bardon did. My books are inspired in these cards as a poet gets inspired by the sunset and the sunrise and an angel gets inspired by midday. Now marry the Magician with the Sun, then the Empress with The World, then the Priestess with Judgement. Marry the Wheel and the Emperor, and finally let The Star and the Moon kiss. **PAA: 2) **** ** ** ** 2 - I was hunting for signs on what else to write for Falcon Books and Aschmunadai suggested this work, and apparently Erami had planted a mirror-seed calling me forth for what would be the same end at the end of the day. I had let these things rest in the back of my head, as I usually say. Then one day I was at the beach and stood studying the different currents and mermaids. I did that for so long that the weather started to change, the currents started to change, and I saw the inner life of the water elementals in their daily routine. I thought: how interesting would it be if I acted like their anthropologist? I had done something similar in the guise of fiction with works such as The Gem of Silence (also mentioned in this book) but they were not technical or a serious study. This caused a strong impression in me and I knew I would write the book. Then I went to a circle of trees on the top of a mountain I usually go to for certain meditations. I started studying the trees and what beings inhabited the trees and the plants etc and the ground beneath me and I started drawing a map and identifying patterns. I did the same with all other elements and elementals, including their anatomy and habits and I started writing. The theory section of the book is more Aschmunadai oriented, so to speak, and it applies to magic in general. The practical part is purely connected to the elementals and the isolated elements. **PAA: 3) How did you approach researching and gathering information for this book?** 3 - I gathered what I knew from evocations, mental wandering and communications with what people call invisible beings. This would include all cultures I had studied and to refresh my memory I researched again some of the topics to make sure I wasn't giving erroneous information. Aschmunadai had appeared embodying the card The World, speaking through the figure in the center and he gave me a formula that would dictate the structure of the book. Then I acted, as I said before, as an anthropologist among the elementals. Research in the field, adding to what I already knew, then I interviewed many and many elementals. These interviews have been transcripted and are in the book. When I write my research includes practice. All must be tested. **PAA: 4) Can you describe the significance of Edinnu, the Garden of God or the Paradise of Pleasure, in relation to the enchanted realm?** 4 - The Paradise of Pleasure is the realm of the senses, inner and outer. It is washed and irrigated and enchanted by four rivers, the four elements. **PAA: 5) What are some of the key conditions one must meet to enter the enchanted realm?** 5 - That is an interesting question because the enchanted realm is all around us, but we stand inside it as if expelled from it. That makes the biblic perspective of Eden interesting. To enter it we must build the Garden in our microcosm. **PAA: 6) How does the magician build their own magical garden in the image of Edinnu?** 6 - There are two ways that work best when put together. One is through what is known as magical equilibrium: one balances the four elements in their mental, astral and physical analogies. When so balanced, each elemental faculty stands in support of the other and by the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, the enchanted realm is revealed to us like an open book. The other is by following in tune with the rhythms, cycles and powers of nature, dancing and playing with the deep harmonies of nature. In other words, by breathing the Macrocosm in and fusing with its cosmic quality we restore the microcosm. **PAA: 7) What is the significance of the four philosophical elements in relation to the enchanted realm?** 7 - Will, thought, emotion and instinct. By these qualities (content and force) the four elements enchant the realm (substance and continent) and give life to all things, no matter what the plane and kingdom is. Life is the enchantment. **PAA: 8) Can you provide examples of the life of the four elemental kingdoms and what animates them?** 8 - The four elemental kingdoms also have the enchantment of life, they are permeated by will, thought, emotion and instinct. In the elemental kingdom of fire will has thoughts, emotions and instincts. In the elemental kingdom of air thoughts have will, emotion and instinct. In the elemental kingdom of water emotions have will, thoughts and instincts. In the elemental kingdom of earth instincts have thoughts, emotions and a will, but that means instincts become awareness or consciousness, they are not unconscious as we usually perceive them from out of our lack of connection. These thoughts, emotions, instincts and will powers are in truth individuals, they are salamanders, mermaids, gnomes and sylphs. **PAA: 9) How does your book differ from Franz Bardon's Practice of Magical Evocation in regards to elemental beings?** 9 - It is specialized, so to speak. For once, more technical detail is given on how to work with the beings of each kingdom, from the practices that facilitate communication, to the magical organs of the beings and their esoteric anatomy, to their societies, to the triangles and circles and God assumptions. Then, it explores more than the double of the number of elementals presented at the Practice of Magical Evocation. It explores also specific magical and quabbalistic practices taught by the sprites, and it has the sprites be interviewed directly rather than just described. **PAA: 10) ****How does the book explore the keys to magic, mental wandering, evocation, and the four elements according to different times and cultures? ** 10 - By analyzing these themes throughout the different cultures in the light of magic. From Sumer to Persia, from the Hebrew to the Celts and so on down to Hermeticism. **PAA: 11) ****How does the book explore the keys to magic, mental wandering, evocation, and the four elements according to different times and cultures? ** 11 - The sprites are evoked into the triangle according to the methods taught in the book itself. As we speak, I transcribe. I also try to describe the actions the best I can. It can be hard doing this all at once but it is possible if we are prepared for some side effects like a headache. **PAA: 12) What can you tell of the other books in the Magical Series of which A Guide to the Elementals is the first one? And what is to follow this series, if anything? ** Well, focusing on my work with Falcon Books Publishing, I consider the books get more and more revolutionary, for a lack of better word. They are innovative but draw on the Franz Bardon's tradition, unveiling things that have been hidden in Bardon's system but that are there exposed, just not uncovered.  In Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun I try to give justice to Bardon's concept that the whole book is meant to enoble the soul and depends on this to work to its fullness. Given all the wonders that Bardon provides us with, in terms of new experiences, I turned them toward the soul mirror so that this mirror becomes fully alive, enchanted and unbreakable. I then seal this mirror with the light of the Sphere of the Sun, that Bardon considers to be the Summon Bonum of The Practice of Magical Evocation.  In A Guide to the Elementals altough nobody had done formal interviews with exact transcriptions etc, William Mistelle did similar. But you do have for the first time in this book a detailed method of working with the elementals and becoming the elementals that is scientific in structure and scrutinization. There is a study of all faculties and organs and processing systems inside the microcosm of each type of elemental that I found, and the study of psychological and cultural behavior, individual and collective, in the sprites, is also new and, I'd dare say, of potential great use.  A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah, however, will start to really stir the waters, more than the previous books. I cannot speak of it too much without being a spoiler, for if I unclose my systematic discoveries of Bardon's Quabbalah in their relation to Sphere Magic I'd already be opening the door that only the book, in its proper context, is meant to open.  This book is concerned with the operation of the triad regarding the human being, according to the teachings of Hermes, the patron of music. The quabbalist leaves this work with his soul free from the illusion of the material world, his senses infinite, free of limitations. He starts to hear the eternal songs of praise inside all creatures, the music crystallized inside all shape and architecture, divine melodies in everything. When the soul fully regains its original auditory sense of clairaudience, it starts to hear the music of the spheres and the spirit of the quabbalist joins the celestial choirs, taking part in the eternal good that controls the spheres. Four books can be found inside A Guide to the Quabbalah of the Spheres:  - Book I The Book of Incantations (Sound) - Book II Cosmic Elemental Kingdoms (Color) - Book III The Machinery of the Spheres (Shape) - Book VI The Book of Gestures (Motion) Resuming, the book leans over aspects of The Key to True Quabbalah, by Franz Bardon, and expands them. It is a book divided in four that serves the magician, the theurgist and the learning quabbalist. It will lead you to an exploration of the divine tones and the way of creating rhythm and melodies with their aid. It explores the cosmic elemental kingdoms and sphere elementals and how the different cosmic letters correspond to the elemental fluids of the different spheres. The way of combining shape with the tones and the quabbalistic mechanics of the spheres is given, together with a tripolar method of working with the original hebrew letters and the method to create elementaries of these letters. Finally, the reader will be able to learn bodily motions corresponding to the spheres, tones and Bardon’s cosmic letters, the so-called quabbalistic yoga.   Then comes A Guide to Stellar Magic. While I resisted the writing of this book at first, because I felt it was too important including to myself, the beings insisted. As I started, they would constantly appear to me, guiding me while I was writing or while I was sleeping. Eventually, it gained a momentum so strong that I was forgetting to eat and feed myself.   In History, we have Sumerian records of a catalog of omens, patterns that form in the hands or in the liver and that indicate such and such effect (such and such illness and demon). Likewise, the stars, being gods, were by Mesopotamia examined in exactly the same way (starting by the eclipses), through correspondence between observed pattern and observed phenomena.   This methodology, in its root, is found in all branches of astrology, but astrology is not exact and terms and calculations vary with geography, which is to be expected, and with culture. Is there, then, not a unified and true beyond doubt form of astrology? One of my intentions with Stellar Magic is to answer this question. I come up with:  - An explanation of astrology from pre-history to the modern day, throughout East and West. - Astrological Quabbalistic formulas. - An astrological exploration and application of the whole system presented at The Practice of Magical Evocation, by Franz Bardon. - Traditional astrology and its adaptation to Franz Bardon. - The missing description to the beings of Mars in the Practice of Magical Evocation, together with a list and description of the beings of Saturn, Uranus and Pluto. - Explorations of extraplanetary and extrasolar magic and mental wandering. - An extensive working with Balachman and Ugripon, astrological and astronomical heads of the Earth Belt Zone.   See, the stars might have fed the first muses of mysticism, for the hungering human, thirsty for mystery, cannot go up to them except by the transcendence of his own senses and faculties. But they are also the ultimate goal.  Altough the mere reader may come in contact with portions of text that remind him of the realms of pure fantasy, the practitioner will find otherwise. Finally, in The Practice of Magical Evocation the magician is working with the cosmic aspects via their personification, and in The Key To True Quabbalah, the quabbalist is working with the cosmic aspects directly through formulas and attached meditations. Astrology, in its most valid aspect, the astrology offered in this work, stands somewhere between the two.  I have been writing three books in the line of the Falcon Books series and intended for the publisher if deemed worth, that I intend to publish as one. They refer to the spheres above the so-called veil of illusion or Paroketh: Jupiter, the Sun, and Mars.  Jupiter will open the doors. Even scientifically, Jupiter has an enormous gravitational sphere of influence, known as a Hill sphere. Like Jupiter's magnetosphere, its gravitational force also extends far into space. Hill sphere is defined as the distance where Jupiter's gravitational attraction gets stronger than the Sun's, for objects orbiting the Sun. In hermeticism as well, Jupiter stands larger than the Sun. For years and years I have worked with the planetary sphere of Jupiter, and for a good part of such years I had a hard time translating its teachings into practices and philosophies fit to our material mundane life. The Jovian wisdom would often escape through my fingers like blue water and red sand This book will give the opportunity for others to start on a different and more favorable ground. The Will, Love, and Wisdom of Divine Providence are transmitted as Laws by Saturn, then organized by Jupiter into intelligence. An intelligence great enough to operate and move the whole objective world and make of every individuality an active universe in the larger cosmos. In this work you find hermetic initiation into all twelve grades of Jupiter, defined by the Zodiac, including Jovian methods to work in all three kingdoms, four planes and spheres, through magic, quabbalah and alchemy. Finally, the work of profound knowledge and profound wisdom is the mission of the Jovian hermetist on the Earthzone, for it is the work of the fourth Tarot Card.  The Grade of the Sun follows. In line with the work of the Czech magician Franz Bardon, it has no other purpose than to help the readers and practitioners to tune into solar powers and principles in theory and practice, to make them enough acquainted with the corresponding mystical and metaphysical languages to contact, with caution, the intelligence of the Sun Sphere.  It is a short, simple, and straightforward book to the extent that it is possible to discourse so practically on topics that seem so far removed from our mortal and limited existence, and yet that are to it as essential as the sunlight is to live on Planet Earth. The work is set on two pillars, mastering cosmic creativity (pulsing activity of the void) and functioning with cosmic dissolution (repose in vacancy) and the whole body of universal wisdom and praxis that is in the balanced dynamic between these two poles.   The Grade of Mars I'd rather not expose too much as I am still writing and have only written about a third of it. It is already plain to see, nevertheless, that it kind of puts all esoteric madness, pardon my English, on check and brings it down to Earth. It refers to the plus pole and to the most practical attitude possible. Many times, occultism becomes involuntarily a scapegoat, and people lose their whole lives in pipe dreams instead of grabbing the living life that is right in front of them. I think this book or third portion of the collective book redeems me from all the persons that might have accidently lost themselves in my own works, instead of finding themselves.   It is inspired by the card of the Chariont, while the Grade of the Sun is inspired by The Hierophant. Together, these books compose the 4 and the 12, the Rosy Cross or the cross and the circle. --- # Student Report: Lucenox Dragos on Studying with André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/student-report-lucenox-dragos-on-studying-with-andre-consciencia/ This student report comes from **Lucenox Dragos** — their magical name — who has been studying with **André Consciência** through his Elemental course and **Magic & Mystical Introspection (MMI)**. Lucenox already had considerable experience with Franz Bardon's *Initiation into Hermetics*, Golden Dawn work, Mark Rasmus's approach to Hermetics and Yoga before beginning to work with André. Here, they give a student's perspective on the courses, the practices involved, their experiences with the Elemental work and MMI, and what they have gained from working directly with André as a teacher. For more background on André and how his different systems fit together, see our **[complete guide to André Consciência's courses](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/andre-consciencia-courses-on-perseus-arcane-academy/)**. You can also read André's **[Gaining the Senses of an Elemental](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/gaining-the-senses-of-an-elemental-by-andre-consciencia/)** for more on some of the Elemental work discussed below. Table of Contents - Background and the Path into Hermetic PracticeFrom Armchair Occultism to Serious Practice- Searching for a Teacher- Discovering André Consciência's Work- The Elemental CourseLearning to Perceive Like an Elemental- Expectations Versus the Reality of the Training- Minerals, Consciousness and Perception- Magical Training Rather Than Intellectual Study- Magic & Mystical IntrospectionAn Ongoing Practice Rather Than a Course to Finish- Beyond Ordinary Psychological Introspection- Confronting Blind Spots and the Magical Ego- How the Two Courses Work TogetherIntrospection and the Development of New Faculties- André Consciência as a TeacherGuidance Without Dogmatism- Looking Back at the Work- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! ## Background and the Path into Hermetic Practice **PAA: Could you tell us a little about your background and what first brought you to magical, mystical, or Hermetic practice?** There wasn't a single dramatic door that opened for me — if anything, it started with a loss. I was raised in a very Christian household, more deeply involved in the church community than most, and when I was six my father passed away, on his way to becoming a doctor. That shook whatever faith I had at that age quite badly. It took about a decade before I found my way back to anything resembling faith, and when I did, it wasn't back to classical Christianity. Along the way I learned that my father himself had studied arcane teachings that went well beyond what the rest of the family practiced — I still have some of his books on secret doctrines, and my very first tarot deck was one of his. By the time I realized this, I was already moving in that same direction myself, without knowing yet it had been his path too. My younger brother took the same inheritance in a completely different direction — he became an academic, on his way to a professorship in philosophy, with nothing to do with religion or spirituality on the surface, though I'd say he lives his True Will as naturally as anyone I know. I sometimes think we're both still continuing what our father started, just through very different doors — mine conscious, his unconscious. ##### From Armchair Occultism to Serious Practice **PAA: Before studying with André, what kind of experience did you already have with meditation, ritual, occult study, or other spiritual practices?** To clearly set a time when your path began is always hard, in my opinion, because for each person what event was the real starting point at all? Or did you in reality already decide before this incarnation? I always see the starting point for myself, when I have to define it, as the moment I came into contact with *Initiation into Hermetics*. Though it would take some years to even master step one, the contact with it and the Bardon current set everything in motion. Before that, I had some experience with meditation and some basic Golden Dawn ritual work, but seriousness was missing from this practice. I was that classic armchair magician, just reading all kinds of occult material out of curiosity. Another important step, after several years, was encountering the teachings of Mark Rasmus, especially his book *Backdoor into Hermetics*. This finally gave me the ability to progress in IIH, using his technique of aligning all the exercises in a row and doing them one after another. I know this approach is controversial for some people, but for me it worked quite well. Through the success I had with this, I studied his book almost academically. Every important passage was marked with color and bookmarks, so I could always go back to the passages I needed. Shortly after that, or during this process, I came into contact with Yoga. Until that point, I somehow had a certain dismissiveness toward it and couldn't appreciate it, because I thought that here in the West it was just some form of gymnastics. Again, through some coincidence, I came into contact with the biggest Yoga organization here in Germany (Yoga Vidya), which practiced and taught Yoga in the tradition of Swami Sivananda. Since Sivananda was always highly regarded by Bardon, and the two were in contact in the past, that fact, along with some strong synchronicities, led me to start a year-and-a-half journey toward becoming a Yoga teacher. During this time, I dove deeply into all kinds of Yoga (Raja, Hatha, Japa, Jnana, Karma ...) and studied Vedantic texts, such as, of course, the *Bhagavad Gita* and the Sutras of Patanjali. I never finished this education to become a Yoga teacher, since, near the end of it, I realized that this time had served another purpose, rather than just ending with a certificate that let me call myself a Yoga teacher. This was shortly before my first Saturn return, and during a radical job change, both of which tested my learned knowledge the hard way. Shortly before André entered my life. ##### Searching for a Teacher **PAA: What were you looking for at that stage in your development, and was there anything you felt was missing from the work you had done previously?** I was looking for some guidance, since until then my knowledge had come mostly through books or my own experiments (trial and error), but I had the feeling that some real authority to judge my development was necessary. A funny story here is that, by coincidence, I talked during this time with an occult author via chat about this, and he recommended sending out a call to the universe for a true teacher in physical form, initiated in the hermetic mysteries, to guide me. I followed his advice, and some weeks/months later, through coincidence, I came into contact with André. He had just commented on his free course that I could write to him directly via email, and so this exchange began. Looking back, it was obvious that my path would lead me in this direction, since I already had several of his books and was always fascinated by them. Today, I of course know this fascination was already a higher part of myself paving the way for me to walk. Over time, reading through it just theoretically, the things written there seemed very complicated, but I felt a strange fascination for it. Looking back from today, I understand the thoughts of my past self here, but I've also learned a lot about how to overcome such obstacles more easily by just moving with it. When I finally started consciously with *The Way of Abrahadabra*, André's first book, and dedicated myself more truly to my real path, contact with André was made automatically. My call was answered. ##### Discovering André Consciência's Work **PAA: How did you first encounter André's teaching, and what made you decide to study the Elemental course and Magic & Mystical Introspection with him?** I first encountered André's teachings when I was studying Crowley extensively. Somehow I stumbled upon *The Way of Abrahadabra* (TWA), and the title alone activated something in myself. Reading through it opened some portals which were working in the background for several years before finally giving conscious entrance to itself. Do you know this feeling when you read, experience, or witness something meaningful but can't describe it in words? That was the feeling when I opened this book for the first time. It was like a door to another world I had always known to be true but never dared to consciously believe in. André's more dynamic approach felt more natural to myself than Bardon's static system, which, of course, nonetheless is one of the best systems to become truly initiated. My decision to begin MMI arose from my previous experience with TWA and working with André directly. Since TWA has a way more practical approach, MMI delivers the personal, introspective context for this. It's best worked through together with the book *Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun*. The mentioned book, MMI, and TWA are parts of a mandala (framework) of André's whole work, in which the book and TWA form the bottom line of a triangle. *Path of Ipsos I & II* would here be the top of the triangle, creating the playground for the mature magician. Through the whole mandala, of which the triangle is just the first part, MMI penetrates it like a spinal bone, keeping one's introspection clear and flexible. The Elemental Course was often recommended in combination with MMI and offers a big discount for students who already own it, so I decided to just try it, since it seemed like a very unique course. ## The Elemental Course ##### Learning to Perceive Like an Elemental **PAA: For someone unfamiliar with André's Elemental course, how would you describe what the training actually involves and what a student is being asked to develop?** The Elemental Course is highly practical, with which I had some struggles in the beginning. Compared to other courses, or to MMI, where you normally get the steps and know what you want to achieve, here you get all the tools to build real capacities for astral/mental perception — concretely, the senses of a gnome (in the first level) — and experiment using them. Each exercise builds on the one before, but you have to find out for yourself how to use them. Of course, André gives you nevertheless all the advice you need when you ask him for it. A good analogy he gave me when I was stuck and struggling with this different kind of approach was: "So when you learned to make the sound A as a baby, did you stop because you didn't know the goal of saying A? Well, now you do know. It made you able to speak." The discovery of this capacity in yourself is something special you won't find anywhere else. ##### Expectations Versus the Reality of the Training **PAA: What were your expectations when you began the Elemental course, and how did the reality of the work compare with those expectations?** At first, I really thought you would work with the elementals in the traditional way. I had some experience in ritual magic with this topic and thought I would just extend this knowledge and my abilities. But to my surprise, it was something totally different. You don't understand the elementals by having them just tell you in your own words. Instead, you learn their language, and with this, you begin to see the world like they do. ##### Minerals, Consciousness and Perception **PAA: Was there a particular elemental practice, exercise, or stage of the course that had a stronger effect on you than you expected?** Yes, indeed. Recently I worked on the exercise of mineral reflective qualities, in which you contemplate a mineral as a mirror of consciousness. In my case, I used a round amethyst and was very surprised when I could see the light veins activating in the crystal and in myself simultaneously. There wasn't any separation, and I noticed that just my conscious perception of them resulted in the perception of it in myself. So I wasn't the one creating anything; instead, it was already there, and I was just noticing it correctly, which mirrored back in my physical body. In the step which followed, you go even further and direct the light on itself. There was a somewhat similar exercise in the beginning called the body of gravity. Now, with the mineral, you learn through this exercise the secrets of mineral gravity. The skills and abilities of the course are nearly like their own form of grammar, with which you perceive reality. ##### Magical Training Rather Than Intellectual Study **PAA: Do you see the Elemental course primarily as magical training, personal development, preparation for deeper Hermetic work, or some combination of these?** I would see the course primarily as magical training. I think someone too scientifically oriented, with just some experience in meditation, will have a hard time overcoming his own belief patterns to truly master the separate lessons. Like I said before, for this you have to find out for yourself what your real capacity is. Just relying on your rational mind won't help you here, so someone who wants to understand every detail of something before even beginning will have a hard time here. ## Magic & Mystical Introspection ##### An Ongoing Practice Rather Than a Course to Finish **PAA: How would you describe Magic & Mystical Introspection to someone encountering the course for the first time?** For someone who has never heard of it, I would describe MMI simply as an ongoing course of introspection, spread over eleven levels, built on Bardon's *Initiation Into Hermetics* together with André's own book *Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sun Sphere*. It's made so it works both for a complete beginner and for someone further along who has lost the connection back to daily practice. The difference to just reading a book on your own is that next to the video lessons there is always the option of direct exchange with André. For me, that personal part was actually the more important one, since he listens more to the person behind a question than just to the words of it, and that made a real difference for me more than once. So in short, I wouldn't call it a course you finish, more an ongoing practice of learning to see yourself honestly, that keeps developing along with the group of people working through it. ##### Beyond Ordinary Psychological Introspection **PAA: How is the introspection taught in MMI different from simply analysing yourself psychologically or keeping an ordinary journal?** The introspection starts at a very deep level and brings you step by step to the awareness behind all things. It starts with simple thought observation, which quickly deepens into analyzing the mechanism behind all thoughts. For example, during level 1 there is an exercise in which you view every distraction as just a thought. Everyone who's done thought observation knows that, by not identifying with a thought, the thought will automatically go away. Following this logic, for example, a headache or the barking of a dog are treated in the same way. The course continues with observation of feelings in a similar manner, with different kinds of exercises. This alone teaches you a certain degree of disidentification, and you are guided toward what you really are. Every level is additionally supported by some physical exercises (e.g., level 1 = Chi Kung, level 2 = Tai Chi, level 3 = Shaolin Kung Fu). In level 2, you begin to create a completely new Soul Mirror on top of your hopefully already built first one. The difference here is that all virtues and qualities are connected to the Forgotten Ones, a concept introduced by Nema Andahadna, the founder of Maat Magic. Working with this new Soul Mirror feels completely different, and of course it will be used throughout the whole course, since the work with the Soul Mirror is generally a continuous practice. Throughout the levels, you get more and more tools for introspection, some similar to Bardon's methods, but also a lot of new ones. For example, in level 3 André talks about different types of teas and how they can be used for balancing the elements. I've already talked about the optional challenge in each level, which results in a customized working plan for yourself, using only the exercises of that level. For myself, this helped a lot to deepen the knowledge I had already worked on. ##### Confronting Blind Spots and the Magical Ego **PAA: Has MMI brought you face-to-face with anything about yourself that you had previously overlooked or avoided, and how did working with that material affect you?** Of course! I think there will always be some blind spots which are hidden from oneself, since the nature of personality is to constantly change. One shouldn't make the mistake of feeling that one has arrived or has nothing left to do. I had a friend of mine who thought she remembered a past life as an initiate and therefore had already done the whole work. Of course, this was a false recognition, because knowledge can only be measured by the amount of wisdom contained in it. If it only serves to fortify the ego and puts oneself in a special position, it is not really of practical use. I must confess that in the past I fell several times into the same pattern, but that's the interesting thing I learned through the course: to see such a pattern and, while it's occurring, be able to disidentify from it. Or to see such patterns already overcome in other people, which puts you in the position to know what to do. ## How the Two Courses Work Together ##### Introspection and the Development of New Faculties **PAA: Have the Elemental work and MMI reinforced one another in practice? If so, where have you noticed the strongest connection between them?** Since everything in life is generally connected, of course both works have reinforced each other, but I wouldn't say directly. MMI gives you a large repertoire of tools for introspection and having control of all your three bodies, whereas the Elemental Course's goal is to build out completely new faculties inside yourself, to be able to communicate better with the Elemental kingdoms. So there is one intersection, since you work with the Soul Mirror, which is partitioned into the elemental qualities, but you don't work directly with the inhabiting entities or their tools in MMI. ## André Consciência as a Teacher ##### Guidance Without Dogmatism **PAA: You've suggested that André's presence as a teacher has had a positive impact on you. What is it about the way he teaches, guides, or works with students that has made that difference?** It never felt like he was forcing me in a specific direction, nor presenting himself as someone special above me. It is an exchange on an even level, one human meeting another human. In a lot of situations, just one sentence or passage from his advice was enough to give me the missing puzzle piece I needed in the specific situation. Here it is important to mention that, of course, you have to be willing to do the work. A teacher can show you the door, but you have to walk through it yourself. André also never claimed to have absolute knowledge, so when I found different methods to solve challenges, it was not only accepted, it was appreciated. The real goal of becoming a magician is simply to become a mature human being, accepting one's place in the universe and living one's purpose. Working with André showed me exactly this — not with words, but through his actions. ## Looking Back at the Work > "I'm Not the Same Person Anymore" **PAA: Looking back at where you were before beginning this work and where you are now, what has changed most for you, and what would you say to someone considering studying with André?** It's not so much about what has changed on the outside, but what has changed on the inside. I would say I'm not the same person anymore, which of course results from disidentification and afterwards building anew your magical personality (that's the reason the additional book for MMI is called *Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun*). André helped me realize the tools already present in myself and, with this, showed me my real capacity. With this, control over one's own perception (mental and astral) was set free, and from this, nothing seems impossible anymore. --- # TWIM Meditation: A Relaxed Path to Deep Insight and Awakening Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/twim-meditation-a-relaxed-path-to-deep-insight-and-awakening/ ## Introduction When it comes to meditation, we often hear about different traditions, techniques, and theories—but what actually works? What truly leads to a shift in how we experience life, beyond just feeling calm for a few moments on the cushion? David Johnson has spent decades exploring these questions firsthand. Starting with rigorous Vipassanā practice in the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, he later made a significant shift to Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM)—a method that reinterprets ancient teachings through a relaxed, loving-kindness-based approach. What convinced him to abandon the method he had followed for years? What did he discover about meditation, awakening, and the nature of insight along the way? In this conversation, David shares the pivotal moments of his journey, his deep mentorship with Bhante Vimalaramsi, and the unique perspective that TWIM brings to meditation. If you’ve ever questioned whether effort and struggle are necessary parts of spiritual progress—or wondered if meditation could be both joyful and transformative—his insights may surprise you. --- ## Interview ### Personal Journey and TWIM **PAA: You have been meditating since age 19, initially in the Mahasi Sayadaw Vipassanā tradition, and then around 2006 you shifted exclusively to Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM) (David Johnson). What prompted that major shift in your practice? In what ways did adopting TWIM’s loving-kindness and relaxed awareness approach change your experience of meditation compared to the Mahasi method you practiced for many years?** I practiced Mahasi Vipassana from the age of 19 after the first year of college in 1973.  I became interested in what the word “enlightenment” possibly could mean for me. What was the meaning of Life??? I started reading books like Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan and Paramahansa's Autobiography of a Yogi and became intrigued with the idea that we could experience states far greater than we ever thought possible. I let go of College at that point and pursued a Vipassana Retreat.  I found an ad for a book called “Begin To See” which was a collection of epigrams written by an American Buddhist Monk known as Sujata. Later I found that he was teaching Buddhist meditation retreats using Mahasi style mindfulness. I immediately signed up and flew to Colorado from Seattle to attend the 30 day retreat. I continued following this practice because it outlined very clearly the path and the steps to awakening from the book “Practical Insight Meditation”. I did experience what I thought were all the Insight knowledges, but after a while started to wonder if I had had any sort of major personality change in my mind or not. Had “craving” or desire lessened or was I just overestimating myself. I stopped retreating and just read suttas for the time being. In 2006 I met Bhante Vimalaramsi who I had known earlier but had now become a monk and had, just as I had but way more intensively, meditated using Mahasi Sayadaw method under U Pandita and others in Rangoon, Burma. He had done many retreats and the last being a two-year retreat! They told him he attained stream entry and now he should teach.  He told me he felt that there was something wrong and that he didn’t feel much differently. So he left Burma and went to Malaysia and didn’t teach Vipassana as requested but taught lovingkindness instead and started on his journey to discovering the sutta based Tranquil Wisdom Insight TWIM meditation. He met a monk in Malaysia Venerable Punnaji who told him that he had the right ideas about meditation but he was using the wrong texts to practice and learn from.  He told him to go back to the earliest sutta texts as in the Majjhima Nikaya and the Samyutta Nikaya and the rest. This completely changed everything because it didn’t match what he had been taught-and these were the actual words of the Buddha in the suttas. His earlier teachers were not teaching from the suttas but from something dated much later called the Visuddhi Magga or Path of Purification. Bhante Vimalaramsi used Lovingkindness as the object of meditation and reinterpreted the technique using a unique Relax step, actually noted in the suttas, that had been left out by other practice styles. Lovingkindness and a much more relaxed approach created very fast progress and amazing states of mind (Jhana). It took some convincing but after trying this system out for 6 weeks I experienced an all encompassing joy that shook me to my core. I continued and made quick progress and was convinced that this was what the Buddha taught and was THE path. So much so I have documented the practice in my book The Path to Nibbana. ### Mentorship with Bhante Vimalaramsi **PAA: You trained closely under Venerable Bhante Vimalaramsi – even ordaining temporarily as a monk and serving as his executive assistant and center director during his teaching years. What are some of the most important lessons you learned from working so intimately with Bhante Vimalaramsi? How did his mentorship shape your own approach to meditation and teaching?** I spent from 2010 to 2023 assisting Bhante with everything from organizing retreats to buying plane tickets to taking him to lunch to sitting in on interviews as he taught his students. He was a Maha Thera monk meaning he had decades in as a monk and followed the monastic rules. I grew to learn in depth how those rules were followed by a monk and eventually read the entire Vinaya or Discipline Texts that encompasses 7 volumes. I saw the benefit of the rules and how they mostly were common sense rules to keep one on a wholesome path in the way you treat yourself and all other people. I learned how to do the daily interviews and eventually led retreats on my own. I used stories I had heard from Bhante to reference in my own teaching. It was as though we put questions through a “What would Bhante answer?” filter. I learned about many of the experiences that he had had as a monk in his 12 years in Asia, both good and bad; how he reacted to various experiences; what happened to him on Alms round, how lay people interacted with him. He was an incredibly smart outside-the-box person. He also didn’t mind if what he said was controversial…the truth is the truth and that’s the way it is. We don’t have to agree on everything but I am not going to hold back my opinion if I think it might make you think more about what you are saying. ### Life at Dhamma Sukha Center **PAA: Since 2010 you’ve lived and taught at the Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center, where you are now the Director and senior meditation teacher (Bio David Johnson - THE PATH TO NIBBANA) (David Johnson). How has immersing yourself in a retreat center environment for so long influenced your personal practice and outlook? Can you share an experience from leading retreats at the center that had a profound impact on you as a practitioner or teacher?** Life at Dhamma Sukha has been very rewarding and also challenging. When I came to volunteer there were only a few cabins with Bhante Vimalaramsi staying in an old trailer. The finances were very shaky and the business infrastructure non-existent. Gradually I was able to not only help with getting Dhamma Sukha into a more business-like environment but also was able to create many videos and talks and upload them to Youtube and our updated website. Students saw these and attended retreats in growing numbers. We started with 3 cabins and now have 25. It's interesting that the more you guide retreats the more you learn about the very practice that you are teaching. When students ask about this or that experience you might give a rote answer but later ask yourself what really does work and try it in your next meditation center.  I learned while Bhante was here and listened to his interviews and gradually took on the guiding myself.  It's very rewarding when someone has success in the practice and experiences relief and intense joy and leaves a committed practitioner, and we hope, a changed person. ### Challenges and Insights on the Path **PAA: Over decades of practice, have you encountered any significant challenges or turning points in meditation – perhaps hitting plateaus or passing through difficult phases (sometimes called “dark nights” by insight meditators)? How did you work through those difficulties, and how have they informed the way you guide students now through their own ups and downs on the path?** This question is a good one.  When I first started doing Vipassana Meditation this idea of “dark nights of the soul” was not a “thing.”  There are 16 levels of insight knowledge in the Vipassana (Not Goenka style) Insight Meditation. The higher knowledges include “Knowledge of Fear and Terror” and “Knowledge of Danger”  These states are states of Depression and Fear and Panic. They are awful states that one will go through and likely later came to be known as Dark Nights of the Soul. (I believe is a John of the Cross reference.) These are the levels: - Knowledge of the difference between mentality and physicality (*namarupa-pariccheda-nana*) - Knowledge of conditionality (*paccayapariggaha-nana*) - Knowledge of comprehension (*sammasana*–*nana*) - Knowledge of arising and passing away (*udayabbaya-nana*) - Knowledge of dissolution (*bhanga-nana*) - Knowledge of the fear or terror (*bhaya-nana*) - Knowledge of danger (*adinava-nana*) - Knowledge of disenchantment (*nibbida-nana*) - Knowledge of desire for deliverance (*muncitukamyata-nana*) - Knowledge of reflective contemplation (*patisankha-nana*) - Knowledge of equanimity about formations (*sankharupekkha-nana*) - Knowledge of conformity or adaptation (*anuloma-nana*) - Knowledge of change of lineage (*gotrabhu-nana*) - Knowledge of the path (*magga-nana*) - Knowledge of fruition (*phala-nana*) - Knowledge of reviewing (*paccavekkhana-nana*) (3) These do exist (!) and you *will* suffer through them. I can assure you of that!  However in TWIM this is not the case because of the Relax step. If there is fear or terror that arises you are instructed to relax that mental state and let it go. Don’t dwell on it or “try to go through it.”  If craving and suffering arise, let it go and relax. Bhante V. said that the Buddha never would have taught a system that caused the meditator to suffer like this. TWIM is a smiling, relaxing meditation where you are taught to be happy and content. Why is this? Because no craving exists when one is happy and content.   The only issues I had with TWIM is working with the hindrances in the meditation just like everyone else does. One of the biggest issues is always “trying too hard.” People come expecting to have to put in huge efforts and that isn’t the case. You can’t eliminate craving by using more craving to try and achieve a goal (of not craving!) Getting the students to relax and actually have fun meditating is TWIM’s biggest challenge. ### Jhāna and Enlightenment  **PAA: TWIM places emphasis on achieving what you call the “tranquil aware jhānas” as part of the journey to awakening (David Johnson). How would you describe a tranquil aware jhāna to someone unfamiliar with the term? In what ways does it differ from the classic description of jhāna as an absorption so deep that awareness of the outside world fades? Why is it important in your method that one remains lightly aware and at ease during jhāna, rather than absorbed in intense concentration?** I will explain more about the TWIM jhana in the next question but will say that it isn’t so much as it is “lighter” but that it is completely different from absorption. It is achieved by letting go and not holding tightly to an object. Yes, you are aware but collected, not absorbed. You see everything clearly, and gradually let go of more and more to achieve the next jhana. Going through the Jhanas is about first letting go of Hindrances and then letting go of the Jhana Factors and ultimately letting go of awareness itself. Absorption holds on tightly to a state and holds tighter and tighter to attain a higher level but also uses different techniques to get to the higher levels. You might use breath and then you concentrate on a ight and then you expand a Kasina or circle of light.  This isn’t in the suttas. TWIM just practices one method all the way through the Jhanas. Techniques are never changed. The suttas never mention Nimmita as a concentration object but it defines Nimmita as a sign.  The sign could be your object of meditation or also sign means a craving sign. The “signless” refers to "without craving" or you can say Nibbana. **PAA: Combining Samatha and Vipassanā: Traditional Theravāda approaches often separate calm (samatha) and insight (vipassanā) practices, whereas TWIM seems to blend them by using a samatha object (loving-kindness) that also yields insight. Do practitioners in your tradition gain insights during the jhānic state itself, or only after emerging from it and reflecting? In your view, how do these lighter, aware jhānas facilitate insight into phenomena like impermanence or craving, as opposed to treating jhāna and insight as two distinct steps?** In TWIM Jhanas are seen actually as levels of understanding and in a sense levels of knowledge. Knowledge of what? The knowledge of letting go. These Jhanas, when using the 6Rs process, are not absorbed but “collected” and unified states. You are aware and see the signs of existence or Tilakkhana as you go deeper into the Jhanas. You see Impermance, suffering and No-Self or Anicca, Dukha and Anatta. Your insight deepens as you go through the Jhana. Also your knowledge of the hindrances and how they are craving deepens and you ultimately give up this craving and suffering itself. Traditionally it is taught that you go into the Jhanas and reflect on what you have seen when you come out. Actually the way the suttas spell out the practice is you go through the Jhanas and then reflect in the last jhana of Neither Perception Nor Non-perception, or what we call “the quiet mind”, on what is left in the mind and how the mind's attention is moving. If the mind moves we relax at that moment and come back to the quiet. Gradually activity completely stops and then the mind simply stops for a moment. It is at this moment Nibbana arises and Magga or Path is experienced. A great relief arises and then joy bubbles up in the background of deep equanimity. Your personality changes and the first 3 fetters are let go. ### Defining Nibbāna (Enlightenment) **PAA: How do you define enlightenment or Nibbāna in the context of your teaching? Is it a sudden, discrete experience of cessation or an enduring transformation of mind – or both? Do you refer to the traditional four stages of enlightenment (stream-enterer, once-returner, etc.) with your students, or do you frame progress in a different way when guiding someone toward awakening through TWIM practice?** We define it in TWIM using the traditional 4 stages as is in the suttas. It is a gradual process and the way you continue is you just continue doing what you were doing before, seeing more and more subtle states letting go as you go deeper. Nibbana is a sudden experience in which you don’t know you entered it but you remember “coming back” from it. It is the complete cessation of conditions. For a moment you experience total relief - you have left Samsara and are nowhere to be found. You will experience a Path moment and maybe a sitting later or a day later or a retreat later, a fruition moment of Nibbana.  There is a path and fruition to each stage.  Stream-Entry is Sotapanna which is made up of a Path moment and then a Fruition moment to full enter this stage and rid yourself of the first 3 hindrances of 1) Doubt as to what the path is 2) Knowing Rites and Rituals will not lead you to Nibbana 3) and that ultimately this idea of self we have doesn’t exist. ### Roots in the Suttas **PAA: The Dhamma Sukha center’s mission stresses the importance of the Buddha’s original teachings in the earliest texts (Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center - Awaken Insight Retreats). What key sutta teachings form the foundation of the TWIM method’s understanding of meditation, jhāna, and enlightenment? For example, are there specific discourses or instructions from the Pāli Canon that you consistently draw upon when teaching TWIM (such as the Satipaṭṭhāna, Ānāpānasati, or Brahmavihāra suttas)? How do those ancient teachings directly inform the techniques and insights** **cultivated in TWIM practice?** We use all of the suttas as they all have something to offer and all tie together. Sutta means Threads and they all form a complete cloth that is the Dhamma.  Specifically, In the Satipatthana Sutta it has the note to “Tranquilize the Bodily Formations.”  In the Anapanasati Sutta it also says to "Tranquilize the Mental Formations (thoughts). These are the basis of the 6R process to let go of hindrances. You don’t suppress hindrances, you tranquilize or relax them (in Pali it is *Passambayah). Other practices completely miss this important teaching!* Also, the suttas stress that the Jhanas are the way to NIbbana and other practices like Insight Meditation or hindu yogic practices do not have Jhanas and even dismiss them. Jhanas are the Path to Nibbana! In addition, instead of Breath we use Metta or Lovingkindness which is part of the BrahmaViharas (Metta, Karuna, Mudita and Upekkha) noted in the suttas.The Buddha mentioned this path quite a bit more often than using breath. We find it is faster and more pleasant than breath. In fact TWIM teaches breath meditation very differently from other practices. If you have practiced the normally taught Anapana you might have a hard time grasping breath taught directly from the suttas using the Tranquilize step properly. ### The Path to Nibbāna and Meditative Approach  **PAA: Your method uses mettā (loving-kindness) meditation as the basis to develop unity of mind, jhāna, and ultimately insight leading to awakening (streamentry - the practice of awakening). This is the approach you detail in The Path to Nibbāna. How does this loving-kindness based path align with or differ from other well-known meditation approaches you’ve experienced? For instance, classical Theravāda vipassanā often uses mindfulness of breath or body – what convinced you that mindfulness of loving-kindness could be an equally valid (or even more effective) vehicle for reaching Nibbāna?** The loving-kindness-based path to awakening, as detailed in *The Path to Nibbāna*, aligns with the suttas in a way that differs significantly from classical Theravāda Vipassanā approaches. While traditional Vipassanā methods, such as Mahasi-style noting or mindfulness of breathing (*ānāpānasati*), emphasize observing sensations, thoughts, and mental formations to cultivate insight, TWIM (Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation) takes a different approach. It uses *mettā* (loving-kindness) as the foundation for developing *jhāna* and deepening insight into the nature of mind. ### How TWIM Differs from Classical Vipassanā - **A Feeling-Based Meditation vs. a Noting Practice**** ** Traditional Vipassanā methods often involve systematically observing bodily sensations, mental states, or breath without actively cultivating a positive mind state. - TWIM, on the other hand, **cultivates a wholesome feeling of loving-kindness** from the very start. This feeling becomes the meditation object, leading naturally to a tranquil and unified mind. - **Jhāna as a Core Component**** ** Many classical Vipassanā traditions downplay *jhāna*, regarding it as optional or even unnecessary for insight. - TWIM directly incorporates *jhāna* as a crucial step on the path, in accordance with suttas like *Anupada Sutta* (MN 111), where the Buddha describes moving through *jhānas* while observing impermanence, suffering, and non-self. - **The 6R Process and Relaxation**** ** Traditional Vipassanā often lacks an explicit relaxation component, which can lead to excessive striving or mental tension. - TWIM integrates the **6R process**, where meditators recognize distraction, release it, relax the tension, re-smile, and return to their object, ensuring that **effort remains light and joyful**. ### Why Mettā is an Effective Vehicle to Nibbāna - **It Generates Joy and Tranquility Naturally**** ** The Buddha did not avoid happiness in meditation (*DN 29*). *Mettā* creates a light and uplifted mind, free from agitation. - This joy and tranquility help the meditator enter *jhāna* effortlessly, which in turn supports deep insight. - **It Softens the Mind and Reduces Tension**** ** Many meditators in strict Vipassanā traditions experience mental strain due to constant noting or effortful observation. - TWIM’s *mettā* approach gently **opens the mind** and reduces craving by maintaining a relaxed, open awareness. - **It Follows the Suttas Closely**** ** The Buddha repeatedly emphasized radiating *mettā* and the other *brahmavihāras* as a way to develop *jhāna* and eventually insight (*MN 52*, *AN 10.208*). - The texts explicitly state that one who fully develops the *brahmavihāras* **attains the destruction of the taints (āsava-khaya), which is Nibbāna**. ### Conclusion: A More Effective Path? TWIM’s *mettā*-based approach offers **a direct, joyful, and relaxed path to awakening**. Unlike some classical Vipassanā techniques, which can sometimes lead to dryness, tension, or excessive striving, TWIM ensures **a balance between collectedness and insight**. This method directly leads to the cessation of craving (*taṇhā*)—which is the heart of the Buddha’s teaching on Dependent Origination. This alignment with the suttas, combined with its practical results, convinced Bhante Vimalaramsi (and many TWIM meditators) that *mettā* is not only a valid path to *Nibbāna*—it may be **the most natural and effective way to reach it**. **PAA: Jhāna Debates and TWIM’s Stance: Within the Theravāda community, there are varying opinions on jhāna – some lineages stress deep absorption jhānas, while others (like the Mahasi tradition) downplay jhāna in favor of “dry” insight. Given that TWIM strongly incorporates jhāna, have you encountered skepticism or debate about your approach from other Buddhist teachers or practitioners? How do you address concerns that practicing loving-kindness jhānas might be “too pleasant” or not the same as the intense concentration jhānas described in the commentaries?** Yes, within the Theravāda community, there are ongoing debates about the nature of *jhāna* and its role in the path to awakening. Some traditions emphasize deep absorption *jhānas* (also known as *appanā samādhi*), where the meditator is entirely absorbed in a single object, often to the exclusion of external awareness. The Mahasi tradition, on the other hand, prioritizes “dry” insight (*sukkha vipassanā*), downplaying *jhāna* as unnecessary for enlightenment. TWIM (Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation) strongly integrates *jhāna*, but in a way that aligns more closely with the suttas rather than the later commentarial interpretations. The *jhānas* in TWIM are described as aware and tranquil states, rather than deep, one-pointed absorption. This approach is based on passages from the suttas, such as the *Anupada Sutta* (MN 111), where the Buddha describes *jhāna* as a progression of understanding rather than as rigid, absorption-based states. Yes, skepticism from other Buddhist teachers and practitioners is common. Some argue that the *jhānas* cultivated through loving-kindness (*mettā*) are “too pleasant” and not the same as the intense, rigidly concentrated states described in the *Visuddhimagga*. However, TWIM practitioners—including Bhante Vimalaramsi—emphasize that pleasure and happiness are not obstacles to awakening but are actually encouraged in the suttas (*Dīgha Nikāya* 29 states that the Buddha did not fear happiness in meditation). The key difference is that in TWIM, relaxation (the 6R process) ensures that craving does not arise, allowing the mind to remain light, open, and free from attachment. The Buddha himself describes *jhāna* as a gradual training that leads to insight. In contrast, the absorption-based model often leads to attachment to deep states of concentration without necessarily cultivating wisdom. TWIM practitioners report that loving-kindness *jhāna* leads to direct insights into dependent origination and impermanence, supporting the idea that wisdom (*paññā*) arises naturally from these states. TWIM’s approach to *jhāna* is not about forcing absorption but about cultivating joyful, relaxed, and mindful states that naturally deepen into wisdom. If skeptics insist that only absorption *jhāna* is valid, we invite them to compare the results: does the practice lead to less craving, more clarity, and deeper insights? If so, then it aligns with the suttas and fulfills the Buddha’s goal of liberation. **PAA: Comparisons to Other Traditions: How would you compare the experiences and results of TWIM with those of other meditation traditions you’re familiar with? You’ve practiced the Mahasi noting method – how do the insights or stages one reaches via TWIM differ from those in Mahasi-style insight practice? And beyond Theravāda, do you see any parallels between TWIM and practices in other schools (for example, Zen’s emphasis on relaxing into presence, or Tibetan Buddhism’s use of compassion meditations), or is TWIM pointing to a uniquely different route to the same goal?** In Mahasi Vipassana, there are 16 insights or *ñāṇas*. These knowledges are not found in the suttas; rather, they originate from the *Visuddhimagga* commentaries and are specifically discussed by Mahasi Sayadaw in *Practical Insight Meditation*. The knowledges described in the suttas, however, are the *jhānas*. These are progressive levels of understanding, culminating in the final realization of *Nibbāna*. Each *jhāna* is described in detail, along with its factors, in the *Anupada Sutta*. TWIM meditators experience these states and affirm that their experiences align with what is described in the texts. I personally experienced the insight knowledges, and while they were certainly interesting, they did not lead to any lasting transformation in my personality. They did not create a permanent positive change that I could recognize. At one point, I believed I was enlightened, but in hindsight, it may have simply been a subtle desire to think so. Since Vipassana lacks a relaxation step, it generates different states of mind. Some of these, I would even venture to say, could resemble states of psychosis or a kind of unbalanced, drug-induced condition. This includes the knowledge of suffering and the knowledge of fear and terror. The Buddha would never have taught a system that terrified his students or led to mental distress due to excessive striving. In fact, in *MN 36: Mahāsaccaka Sutta*, the Buddha explicitly rejected extreme concentration and absorption practices, stating that they were either exhausting to the mind or caused excessive restlessness. There are many yogic systems based on concentration, but since they lack a relaxation step, I must conclude that they do not lead to the ultimate relaxation of *Nibbāna*. **PAA: “Mindfulness of Loving-Kindness”: The subtitle of your book The Path to Nibbāna references “Mindfulness of Loving-Kindness” (David Johnson), which sounds unique since mindfulness is often associated with breath or body in meditation. What does being mindful of loving-kindness entail in practical terms? Is it maintaining continuous awareness of a feeling of metta or gentleness? How do you advise students to keep their meditation object (the feeling of loving-kindness) in mind without distraction, and what skills does that build compared to traditional breath-focused mindfulness?** We traditionally think that the Buddha only taught breath meditation, as described in the *Ānāpānasati Sutta*. However, this is not true—he also taught the *Brahmavihāra* practice. The *Brahmavihāras* are the four divine abidings: Loving-Kindness (*Mettā*), Compassion (*Karunā*), Sympathetic Joy (*Muditā*), and Equanimity (*Upekkhā*). In fact, the Buddha mentions the *Brahmavihāra* method far more frequently in the suttas than breath meditation (*Ānāpāna*). He also discusses his experience with ascetic breath practices, which did not lead to awakening but instead caused painful suffering. *Mettā* meditation is often seen as a gentle practice that helps to calm and soften the mind, while breath meditation is considered the more serious method for attaining enlightenment. However, Bhante Vimalaramsi discovered that concentrated breath meditation often creates tension and tightness in the mind, whereas *Mettā* meditation naturally relaxes and softens it. He questioned: If *Mettā* could calm the mind, why not use it as the path all the way to *Nibbāna*? In fact, the suttas describe pervading *Mettā* and the other three divine abidings in all six directions, ultimately leading to the destruction of the taints. The *Brahmavihāra* practice takes *Mettā* as the meditation object instead of the breath. It is a **feeling-based meditation**. The practice begins by generating a warm feeling of loving-kindness toward oneself, then extending it to a spiritual friend, and eventually radiating it outward in all directions. As this practice deepens, it leads to the development of the eight *jhānas*. Upon reaching the final *jhāna*, the meditator contemplates the stillness of the exquisitely quiet mind, letting go of any remaining hindrances and distractions. Finally, the mind comes to a complete stop, and *Nibbāna* arises. **PAA: Insights from Writing The Path to Nibbāna: You first published The Path to Nibbāna in 2017 and later expanded it with new chapters and a revised practice summary in 2021 (David Johnson). What prompted those updates – did you gain new insights or clarity** **about the path that you felt needed to be included? Could you share one or two key additions or changes in the latest edition that you believe are most significant for guiding practitioners (for example, deeper clarifications about the later jhānas or the process of awakening)?** I released the book in 2017 after working on it with other people for two years. Over the years as I practiced myself and saw more meditators attain different states I updated and clarified the book. Particularly in 2019/20 a meditator came along who could attain cessation on demand and was able to see the links of dependent origination that was far beyond anything we had ever seen. I used many of his insights to update the book. I added examples of his and other’s actual experiences as testimonials to how the Jhanas arose and the process of the attainment of what we understood to be Nibbana. --- ## Further Information ##### Dhamma Sukka - David Johnson ##### Start your training in the Dhamma Sukka --- --- # The Body of Light: Alexander Moore on Astral Projection, Magical Power and Survival After Death Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-body-of-light-alexander-moore-on-astral-projection-magical-power-and-survival-after-death/ Alexander Moore returns to *Perseus Conversations* for a deep dive into one of the subjects we briefly touched upon in our previous interview: the **Body of Light**. You can see the interview on YouTube [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHndETDSLcE&t=85s&pp=ygUWcGVyc2V1cyBhcmNhbmUgYWNhZGVteQ%3D%3D), or read it here. Alexander is a professional occultist and one half of **Practical Occult**. He grew up around magic, has trained in a number of different systems under several teachers, and now teaches practical magical methods professionally. In this conversation we explore what the Body of Light actually is, how it differs from ordinary mental wandering and astral projection, the skills required to build one, its relationship with the astral temple, possible dangers, its role in magical practice, and the much more controversial question of whether such a structure can preserve consciousness after physical death. *This transcript has been edited only for readability. Hesitations, repeated words, false starts, timestamps and obvious automatic-caption errors have been removed. The substance of the conversation has otherwise been retained.* ## Introduction **PAA: It's been a few months since you were on before. Right at the end of that conversation, we briefly touched upon the subject of the Body of Light. I think that fascinated a lot of people, and I know a lot of people have gone on to investigate it. Today we're going to go into it. But just for anyone who didn't see that first video, do you want to give everyone a very brief background of yourself?** **Alexander:** Yeah, sure. My name's Alexander Moore. I'm a professional occultist. I am one half of the company Practical Occult. I grew up doing magic. I came from a family that did it. Very fortunate in that respect. I've been fortunate to train in a number of different systems under a number of really excellent mentors. Like I said, I do it full-time. I teach it. One of the greater joys in my life is spreading real magic that actually works and spreading the understanding that magic can, if trained properly, work at an extremely high level in a person's life, and that it should be used to benefit a person's life in a very tangible way. **PAA: I think that was one of the biggest things from that first video that did really well. People were like, "Oh my God, I can actually use it."** **Alexander:** People messaged me for months. Again, thank you for having me back and having me on the first time. A lot of the messages were something along the lines of, "No one had ever given me permission, so to speak, to use these things." You've got the Bardon community. They train hard. I mean every day, hours and hours a day, some of these people. I've had some of them say, "Yeah, man. I used vital force to make something happen for the first time, and it happened, and now I have a job." There you go. **PAA: Just like that. The needle can move so quickly.** **Alexander:** It can, especially with all the work that some of these people have been putting in. It's years in the making for some of them. So many hours in the bag. ## What Is the Body of Light? **PAA: We touched upon the Body of Light right at the end of that conversation because you mentioned it. I was like, "What's that?" because I hadn't heard of it before in that context. What do you specifically mean by the Body of Light? Obviously there are different traditions with these terms, and why should a magician develop it?** **Alexander:** The Body of Light is an extra-physical vessel that exists on the etheric and astral planes, as well as the mental plane and the causal plane. It can move up and down that. One creates it and essentially pilots it so that their out-of-body shenanigans are safer and, frankly, more productive. For example, for the Franz Bardon crowd, you'll see Bardon talk about how you're either mental wandering or you're astral projecting. If you're fully astral projecting and someone even breathes on you wrong, you're going to die and explode and everything's going to be horrible because all of your soul is completely out of your body. The Body of Light is a thing that allows you to have a dial instead of an either/or. You create this structure and you bounce your consciousness into it. Then you pilot it. You leave and you can do things out of your body. You can also, if you develop it properly, use it on its own. This is where, for example, in a lot of witchcraft traditions they will refer to **sending the fetch**. It's a Body of Light. In fact, there are some traditions that have you make multiple. You can take them within you, and each one has its own purpose. There are some traditions that sort of come pre-built with a Body of Light. For example, the Italian Benandanti, those who have what's referred to as the Lombard's Gift, will be excellent with astral projection and out-of-body stuff. Essentially, the initiation into that tradition produces a Body of Light that has a concurrent connection to the energy, the witch fire, if you will, of that tradition. Then you have other traditions that will produce, for example, the magicians or witches that go forth in the form of an animal. That is a Body of Light. If you look at it from a Western Hermetics perspective, it's a copy of you yourself, but better. You can pilot it, use it to heal yourself and others. You can send it out, have it learn things, come back and reabsorb it. It also allows the survival of the consciousness after death in a guaranteed fashion. A lot of magicians, both good and evil magicians, produce a Body of Light or several so that they have the ability to maintain their consciousness, memories, personality and plans post-mortem. Because if you do not have a Body of Light, the soul and spirit left behind are bleeding. Anyone who's ever done any sort of necromancy will tell you that the first year after a person's dead, it's them. It's them for sure. Then after that, the shade, the thing that's left behind, is often just the collected memories of a person. They can't learn. They can't produce new things. They can only use the knowledge that they had in life and the perspectives that they had in life. It's why a lot of necromancers will give offerings to ghosts in the form of water or fire. This kind of beefs up the Body of Light around the shade and can sometimes pull more of the original soul back into the shade. Not always. Sometimes the soul has gone elsewhere. Where exactly? That's obviously debated. Eschatology and the afterlife are a big discussion, and I'm not a theologian. I'm a nuts-and-bolts, good-with-tools magician. I'm not here to tell you where we go when we die. I haven't been there yet that I remember. I'm sure I have and I've come back a hundred times, as all of us have. But there you go. It's an extra-etheric structure that we create intentionally through various means and we pilot. We can have more than one. We can put them in various places. A lot of Taoist things will put them in their abdomen. It's often said the Golden Immortal Fetus is a form of this, but not exactly this. In some of the traditions I'm trained in, you keep your Body or Bodies of Light in your lower dantian for when you need them. A lot of people who send the fetch will keep them in the heart centre for when they need them. I've also seen traditions where people kept them in vessels like statues or dolls outside themselves. In fact, it's often like the Koschei the Deathless myth where the evil wizard puts his soul in an egg, which is in a bird, which is in a fox, which is in a hole, which is grown over by a tree, which is on an island, which is in a castle. Unless you can get to that egg, you can never truly kill him. There's something to that in the sense that it's an immortality practice. If you've created the Body of Light properly, it has its own metabolism that produces its own etheric, astral, mental and Akashic energies. You create the engine and it works. You no longer need to survive, hypothetically, off astral vampirism. A lot of evil sorcerers after death are said to survive off the same level of vampirism they were probably practising in life. That's how they maintain their personality outside of what I refer to as soul bleed. But if you have the Body of Light created, you needn't do that. This is where you have your Secret Chiefs, if you will, your Great White Brotherhood types. Again, I can't say for sure that those groups of people exist. Certainly, this is anecdotal, but I have encountered crystallised Bodies of Light of magicians from various places and various eras. I've even encountered the crystallised Body of Light of a magician I knew in life who was like, "Look, I did it. This is a thing." He told me where to find something. He told me, "I'm going to die. I will visit you and I will tell you where to find a thing in my home. This is how I'm going to prove it." That's what he did. I found the thing, and it was there. It wasn't that I saw him in a dream. I saw him in waking life as clearly as I would see anyone else in front of me. ## Bilocation and a Post-Mortem Encounter **PAA: That's interesting. So you're walking around and there he was?** **Alexander:** Yeah. The thing is, the Body of Light is also the engine for bilocation. Mechanically speaking, magicians who can bilocate, that's how they do it. Their Body of Light is crystallised that hard. Of course, this requires training towards that end. You create your Body of Light and then you pilot your Body of Light. When you're in that Body of Light, you pour a ton of vital energy into it to the point where it becomes more solid, where it can produce poltergeist activity and then eventually be seen by people. It's assumed, for example, that Jesus had a very, very well-developed Body of Light. That was how he could do the things that he did after death. **PAA: That's an epic introduction to the Body of Light. Especially having that firsthand experience with one of your previous mentors. They previously said, "Okay, this is what I'm going to do." How long after they actually passed on did they come and see you?** **Alexander:** Ninety days to the day. That's what he said. He said, "Ninety days to the day after I die, I will be there." So I was waiting the whole day like, "Okay, today's the day." **PAA: That's kind of even more epic, that they're able to keep a good track of time.** **Alexander:** In a way it is. It's kind of funny. All of these things, yes, it's incredible and it's really impressive. But if you look at the fact that he was nuts-and-bolts building this thing for like 40 years, it's really not as impressive. He had been so accustomed to piloting this thing out of his body. I had only ever seen him do this once, but other people who knew him were like, "Oh, he can be in two places at once." That's how they would say it. He could actually be bilocating. So I was like, well, if anyone can do it, he's going to be able to do it. But also, it's all just a meditative practice. That's the funny thing about all of these amazing high-level magical feats. It's just like anything else in life. It's built brick by brick. ## Building the Body of Light **PAA: Coming to how it's built, on your Practical Occult website you have your curriculum and it's a capstone skill, a capstone course. Essentially you need the things that come before it. For those that don't know, should we go into a little background of what you might need in terms of structuring such a thing?** **Alexander:** For the Bardon heads out there, what you need is to be able to transfer your consciousness. You need, at the very least, mastery of vital, astral and mental energy. Personally, in my curriculum, I separate astral and etheric energy as different things. One doesn't strictly need this. I just find it helpful. Ideally, if you have access to Akasha and Non-Dual Light, that speeds the process up considerably. But that's really all you need, aside from your focus exercises and things of that nature, and the willingness to spend the time. You're looking at probably having to put, conservatively, 20 hours into building the Body of Light to the point where you can bounce back and forth. You also have resources like Clint Marsh's *The Mentalist's Handbook*, where he teaches you how to build it with just etheric energy. Of course, focus and the transfer of consciousness and things like that are also involved, which he teaches in his own way. An invaluable book, in my opinion. **PAA: I've got that. That is a little gem.** **Alexander:** It is. He's unique about the way he teaches it. I've never seen anyone teach it like Clint does. He's a real one. He's so whimsical and optimistic. I love at the very end of his book where he's basically like, "If I didn't think you could use this for evil, I wouldn't bother saying this, but don't be a dick." Because it's true. You can run amok. But that's really all you need. The reason why I call it a capstone skill is much like vaulting. It's a thing that takes you from a true beginner to essentially an intermediate, competent magician. Every competent magician should have the Body of Light. Every competent magician should be able to vault. They should be able to send thoughts into other people. They should be able to send their consciousness out. They should have access to all of what Bardon had in Book One and everything that I teach in mine. Or, for example, what Bob Smith teaches in his Master Course. We talk about these being the 60 skills you need. He's not wrong. That is correct. Wonderful teacher for doing that. But truly, it's important to have. What's interesting is that much like all these other skills, when you break it down, pretty much everybody has this. They call it something different, but they all have a containment unit that they can use to safely leave their body. A lot of what it is is protection. If your Body of Light is damaged, you can repair it. If it's destroyed, which it can be, you can repair it. Your soul isn't destroyed. You can, for example, astral project using something like the Monroe Institute's rope method where you pretend you're climbing a rope and eventually pop out. That takes a long time and you're not as strong. You're not as solid. It's sort of like an extreme version of mental wandering, but you are vulnerable. Whereas with a Body of Light, there are plenty of traditions that have spells and spirits and tools to weaponise it. You look at an Eastern European vrykolak, for example. They'll lie down and project into their Body of Light, but they'll be holding a knife on their chest and that knife will be a sword in the astral. Or, to go back to the Benandanti, they'll hold a fennel stalk and that fennel stalk will become a weapon in the astral and they'll be able to use it quite effectively. These things are taught all over. Some traditions focus more on the here and now, how they're effective and how they help. Some focus more on the eschatology: this is what you build for after death and why you should have it. It's all important because it's all very useful. My father would always say it can do anything you can do. Because it can do anything you can do and it's part of you, in great duress you can be like: "Oh no, I'm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and someone I care about is in danger in Beijing. I will send this to them to protect them while I figure things out on my end." It can be extremely helpful. Now, there's a caveat. It has a much simpler, stripped-down version of your personality. It doesn't have the same finesse you do if it's just on its own and you're not piloting it. It has an echo of you because on its own it really isn't anything but a construct. If you let it fade, it will fade. I will say it does appear — and I can't really say for sure — that if you build it to a certain point, it will always be there through various lives. I've even had students who were like, "Oh, I tried the Body of Light and I already have it, but it looks different." At first I was like, "What do you mean?" It's a little strange. In one case, this guy was with me in person and we both projected at the same time. I was like, "Oh shit, it does not look like you." My friend, you are not an old Chinese man. That really must have been you once upon a time. It's weird because from that he was able to absorb a lot of knowledge of Taoist sorcery that he otherwise should not have had. When you did some research, you were like, "Oh yeah, that's a real thing." Some people are lucky enough to have something pre-packaged in that way. ## Risks of the Body of Light **PAA: That's interesting. It sounds like it's all upsides. Let's talk about some of the possible risks or difficulties someone might have in building it, or once they've got it, in the activity of using it.** **Alexander:** There is a camp of people that are very anti-Body of Light, and they're not wrong in the way they talk about it. They're like, "That's a good way to become a ghost that's bound to the world." They're very much like, you should allow yourself to be put on the reincarnative wheel, or if you haven't achieved enlightenment or whatever, you shouldn't focus on that because that sticks you here. It's too material. I've heard that. But then they have the Rainbow Body and it kind of does the same thing, except it dissolves your physical body. Again, I do not know that I possess the Rainbow Body. I don't believe that I do. I have not seen the Rainbow Body in action, although I do know someone who is trying to build it. So I guess I'll see if he dissolves into rainbow light when he dies 40 years from now or whatever. But it does seem like those people feel as though the Western method of the Body of Light is too grounded in the world, in worldliness, and grounded in what some people I've talked to describe as a large hubris. "How dare you decide to stay on?" My retort is, well, if you are accustomed to travelling to other realms, for example the planetary spheres, heaven or hell realms, elemental kingdoms, which the Bardonists among us will be very familiar with, try travelling there in your Body of Light. It's much more vivid. If created well, the Body of Light will give you that feeling of: "I'm literally there." One downside, though, is because you have that feeling of "I'm literally there," you can do some things that Bardon warns about in his second book. He's basically like, don't have sex with the mermaid. Just don't do it. You can, if that's what you choose. I would not recommend it. But you can bring things back with you. You may not cleanse and purify your Body of Light correctly. Your Body of Light can become evil if you live a vicious life. There are also traditions that will not necessarily bind you, but you've created this witch-body. One of my old teachers just referred to it as the witch body. For her, everything was witch-hyphen-thing. The witch heart. The witch brain. The witch body. The witch hand. The witch's foot. For example, if you wanted to curse someone, you would awaken the witch's foot, which is part of your Body of Light. You would overlay it over yourself and step on someone else's footprint and send a dark version, essentially, of Akashic energy in the form of the evil eye through the footprint, through the echo of that person, through their memory and then into their body. That was a way she would say, "Yes, do this." Looking at it now, I would never sit her down and be like, "Oh yes, it is the Akashic force that you're using." She'd just say, "That's the witch power." Different traditions, different lexicon. English was certainly not her first language, and I was lucky she spoke as much of it as she did. In general, there are some traditions where it's like, yes, you create these external bodies and then after you die you go on the Wild Hunt or you go into the court of this thing. This is no different, by the way, than when Bardon talks about a lot of magicians going to the planetary schools and one by one training and learning there and graduating into other things. Or, for example, some of the apocryphal idea that if you're a magician who works with demons, they'll enslave you after death and you'll become a demon in their legion. Well, sometimes. But there are magicians, for example the late Jake Stratton-Kent, where that was what he wanted and that was what he aspired towards. To each their own. By his own admission, he wanted to become something like a spirit from the *Grimorium Verum*. If you know, you know. That can be a downside unless you realise that you as the magician have sovereignty. If, for example, you have access to your own Akasha, you can dissolve the chains of fate. You can dissolve the threads of pacts and bindings. Just as you can dissolve, if we're being honest, the fate, joy and progress of other people or things. You can say no. For example, you look at Bardon's second book or third book. He talks about the letter H as a fate letter. Yeah. You can change destiny, if given permission by Divine Providence. That's Bardon's caveat. "I'm not telling you you can. God's telling you you can." And I'm like, well, again, I love you, Franzie B, and one day I'm going to meet you in the afterlife and you're probably going to hate me and that's okay. But he was kind of like, yes, you can change people's fates, but only if God lets you. Unless you're one of those evil magicians who just does this to people. So God lets them, but not you? I'm never going to have an interview with you guys without poking a hole in Franzie B. He's my guy. I'd love to sit and chill with the man, but I don't think he'd break bread with me. But the point is, you can go, "Okay, fine. I don't want this fate, or I don't want this fate for a loved one." For example, for all those listening, if you have a loved one who's very sick, you can use your access to Akasha, or the Kabbalistic letter H, or a number of other forces that alter or dissolve fate. You can go: "Show me their death." "Show me the pathway to do this." We know how to do these things. We can project into the future. We can project into the ball above the head and see what's going on. This is also the mechanism behind divination, broadly speaking. If we can do this, and we've all done these things, and you see someone who's suffering, you can use your Akashic energy. You can dissolve those threads of potential and, if you're good enough, probably steer them into something better. So too can you do this for yourself near your death. There are many occultists from various traditions who, when their bags are being packed — to quote Professor Charles Porterfield — ask what percentage of your bags are already packed? Legend, Porterfield. One of the best living conjurers today. You'll see a lot of magicians, witches, shamans, everyone, start preparing. An old teacher would say, "I'm building my house on the other side." And she did build a house on the other side. That's the thing. You can go there. She left me a sigil. I can go and talk to her whenever I want. That's interesting, but also that's nothing new. That's another funny thing I bring up to people. Any fairy tale you've ever read, it behoves you as an occultist to reverse-engineer it. Go: "How could I do that with what I know?" "How can I do that with what I understand how to do?" Once you hit a wall where you're like, "I don't know how to do that," yes, you do. You do. I promise you do. If you're any good, you do. You're just not used to thinking laterally. ## Underestimating the Body of Light **PAA: So, to bring that back to the Body of Light, perhaps one misconception is actually underplaying its ability?** **Alexander:** Yes. If, for example, the Body of Light can produce poltergeist activity if trained correctly — and it can — and having read *The Mentalist's Handbook*, you see Clint Marsh's coin trick. Instead of doing that with your body, you do it with your Body of Light. You start by using astral and etheric energy to condense hard enough around a coin to tap it a little bit. Most people will do that exercise and they'll get the coin to move once, which is amazing, and go: "Holy shit, I did it. This is so cool." And they'll never do it again. Which is fine. I'm not saying you need to spend your life learning telekinesis. In fact, I think that's kind of a fool's errand because of the thousands of hours you need to put into it to be able to do anything superhero-level. There's more to life. But much like ghosts and discarnate spirits can, with a big boost of energy, knock something over, so too can you in your Body of Light. You can ramp it up and condense. That's why a lot of the Taoist condensing exercises can be done in the Body of Light for a different kind of thing. You could, I don't know, shove something over. How useful it is to you is really up to you. Most people who bilocate will do so at great energetic cost to themselves and for something that's very important. I say most because there are magicians out there who just do whatever for whatever reason, and to assume that's not true is naive. But the misconception is that it's only for one of these things, and that there is a lowbrow use of it in a material sense whereas you should only focus on the spiritually enlightened part of it. Supposing that's true, that's actually a faster path, which is funny because most people will tell you the material path, the path of the sorcerer, is fast but it costs this or that. Not so much. Again, 20 hours and you probably have your Body of Light roughly good. What does that mean? Fifteen minutes a day? Twenty hours is not that hard to do. You're looking at it in a couple of months at the very low end. You can really get it. You'll have that amazing astral projection experience. Your psychic stuff will be better. Your dreams will be better. Everything will be great. Then you're like, "Cool, now I'm going to think about Hermetic axioms and heresies and go waste time being a Gnostic bishop and things of that nature." I have a very low opinion of Gnostic bishops. Ask anybody. But truly, survival post-death is extremely important, but that isn't all it's for. Much like anything else, you're limiting yourself in the delight you can have from these things if you don't use them for cool shit in your life. Plus it's fun. Astral projection is fun and cool. You should do it because it's fun. ## Clarity and Vividness **PAA: I think as well, from looking at your material, maybe coming from a Bardon perspective, the boost in clarity is huge. You can have mental wandering that over time gets better and better and more clear, but this can really give you, in the here and now rather than ten years down the line, that vividness and the feeling of being there. That can have a huge impact upon your practice, your dedication and the time you're willing to put into this stuff when you've got that kind of experience.** **Alexander:** One hundred percent. ## The Body of Light and the Astral Temple **PAA: One other thing I know you were talking about, and I think this is a good combination and possibly links onto some things people will talk about in the Discord: do you want to talk about the combination of this and working in this way within your astral temple?** **Alexander:** Yeah, of course. This makes the astral temple work far stronger. It lets you engage with it a lot better. It lets you train the Body of Light a lot better. Any of your spirit guides, patron spirits or your spirit court, if you will, can be accessed in your astral temple and they can help train you. They can help outfit your Body of Light. It can essentially be a place where it is stored. You may store it in your lower dantian, but realistically the Body of Light is you and so is your astral temple. In some ways your astral temple is a Body of Light, because a lot of magicians who have not produced the Body of Light but have done a lot of astral-temple work, when they die they'll find themselves there in that little pocket realm. They actually built that thing. Some people go, "Oh, there's already one here." Yeah. One exercise that I give in my own coursework with the astral temple is you're in it and then you expand it around you physically. You're in it and you feel it around you and you open your eyes and expand it. One day you'll eventually be able to see it very vividly, but you don't need to see it vividly to get it done. Then it's like you have dominion over the entire room or building over which you've expanded it. The Body of Light can do a similar thing when you're walking around in your internal temple like that. Of course, there are very high-level magicians who can produce the internal temple in the same way that you can bilocate the Body of Light, where other people will see it around you and around them. This is detailed, for example, in Dion Fortune's novels. *The Sea Priestess* is one where that's essentially what is going on. Those who've read the novel will know what I'm talking about. That's how it moves together. In the same sense, if you project your Body of Light into someone else's internal temple, you can have more impact there. Not that you can't have impact if you just project your mental body. Of course you can. This is where things like remote influence come in. But your astral body, your Body of Light, is much more effective. You bring the whole thing. Again, there's safety there. If it's hurt or destroyed, you just snap back into yourself and you're good. It's actually why the internal temple is so important for layers of safety. You project outside your Body of Light, you're destroyed, you go back into the internal temple and then back into you. That stopgap in between can capture negative energies and spirits that are trying to follow you. **PAA: So that's a safety measure for when you go out exploring. For anyone who's into this stuff, it almost seems like a no-brainer to start getting involved in this.** ## How Long Does It Take? **PAA: Let's say someone's watching this video and you've given a timeline of about 20 hours, but that's 20 hours considering they've already got the other skills. For someone starting from scratch, what are we talking about to get to the point where they can notice the difference between normal mental-wandering experiments and actual Body of Light experience?** **Alexander:** Provided you have all the other stuff, it depends on how long it takes you to build the other skills. If you do my method, it's the same thing I said before: around six months to get everything under your belt if you're practising diligently. If you get *The Mentalist's Handbook* and do Clint Marsh's method purely, I'm not sure. I never timed that one with people. Probably shorter because he has a different, more fast-tracked way to it. Not that it's any less effective. Again, the book is a true gem. He puts so much information in there that you rarely find connected to all sorts of other things. I think you probably get it faster with his method, but maybe not as completely as with mine. There's also a book called *Between the Gates* by Mark Stavish. I will give the man that flower. That's an excellent book about producing the Body of Light in itself, although it doesn't go into anything you can actually do with it. It's very much like, yeah, you have this thing and that's great, and now you can survive the second death or whatever. But he doesn't talk about the cool shit you can do with it. Unfortunately, very few people do. You have people who are good with tools and they're looked down upon for looking at it as a craft, a practice and a technology. Or you've got people who are a little bit hoity-toity and think that they're better than infecting the material world. I will always have resentment for such people and I will make it public. But like I said, six months from scratch to really get it as part of my curriculum, if you do the method and diligently practise. This is also where I differ from Bardon. He wants you to take more time with each step. Especially when I have individual students, I'll push them out of their comfort zone. In my Principles of Magic Discord, we occasionally have live practice groups. Some days I'll be like, "Yeah, we're doing vaulting today." People will be like, "This is my first class." I'm like, "Great. Awesome. Let's vault. Let's do it." I'll have people do it and their vaults will sometimes work. Not all the time. But you can do more than you think. ## Speedrunning the Body of Light **PAA: So if you really sat yourself down and said, "I've done the vital, astral and mental energy lessons, I've done the transfer-of-consciousness lesson, and I'm skipping ahead to the Body of Light lesson," you could potentially go straight for it?** **Alexander:** You could probably pull it off in 15, 20, 40 hours cumulative if you really wanted to whole-ass it. You need about five hours of each basic energy to really feel it and be able to do it. Again, these are rough estimates. Some people are naturally more gifted and can just do it. Some people take a little longer. If it takes five hours for each base element, about five hours cumulative for the transfer-of-consciousness technique to really hit, then you're good. Then you're right on to building the Body of Light. There's a lot of other stuff in the course that you're not going to know how to do, a lot of other energies you're not going to know how to generate. But if that's your goal, you can speedrun that. **PAA: It's pretty amazing really. Just six months, three months of focused effort and there you are.** **Alexander:** If you're diligent. That's the caveat. If you sit down and do an hour a day of practice and your only goal is to build a Body of Light, you've got 60 minutes. Ten minutes a day of each base energy. Ten minutes of transference of consciousness. That's 40 minutes and you've got 20 minutes of just working to build the Body of Light. Let's say you wanted to start it all on day one. Would you be super clean with those energies? Absolutely not. But after a month you're generating all the energies cleanly. At that point, if you're a hard-ass and you're like, "I'm going to spend a whole hour over the course of a day on this thing," you can be doing 15 minutes here, ten minutes here, five minutes here, 30 minutes here. Just building it up and building it up. Then doing what I say. You build it the way I teach it and then you bounce your consciousness back and forth between you and it until you pop out in it. Then you walk around the room. That's how you train it. As we see, for example, in Clint Marsh's stuff, you walk around the room, then you walk around your house, then you walk around your neighbourhood, then you walk around the world. After that point, you're pretty good. ## Scary and Remarkable Experiences **PAA: We've established that if you want to do it, it's very achievable if you put your mind to it and focus on these things. In the time you've been sharing these methods, what stand out to you as some of the most remarkable experiences people have had, and also possibly some of the scariest or most dangerous experiences?** **Alexander:** I'll go with scariest first. Two things come to mind. One, they realise that the world is a dark forest. For most of our species' history, travel was dangerous. There were bad people on the road. If you're a weird tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist like me, there were monsters on the road. You had to be very good at protecting yourself, very lucky or know the back roads. There are monsters in the astral. There are bad people. Is it behind every corner? No. That's the thing. You can be astral projecting, walking around your whole neighbourhood, going into the city, going wherever, and be totally fine for years. Then one day you turn a wrong corner and there's something you've never seen before. That's why it's important to have other magic, protective amulets, spirits, things like that. You're like, "Oh, what the fuck is that?" Or you see something that's like, "Hey, can I touch you? I want to touch you. Can I touch you?" It will try and you'll feel this visceral: "Oh no. No, no, no. You cannot." You flee and it chases you. I've had students be like, "Oh no, this shit's very real. It plays for keeps." The other side is the thing that magic always gives: agency. There's the bone-chilling fear sometimes of what **you** can do. Imagine you have real astral projection. Mental wandering and remote viewing are wonderful. Even people like Lyn Buchanan and others have been like, "Yeah, you can know people's secrets. You can know the truth about things. You can influence people." You're doing that and you're eavesdropping in a board meeting of some company. If you think certain companies don't hire psychics to do inter-company espionage, you're also a fool. You're sitting there and you're like: "I can go wherever I want to go." At first it's fun because you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm spying on my friend. This is funny." Then you're like, wait a minute. I wonder... Curiosity will get you. This is where I disagree with Bardon. The Great White Brotherhood is not going to come and stomp a mud hole in you if you mess around and do something dirty. They won't. Nothing will. No one will stop you. No one's coming to save you. No one's coming to stop you. A lot of my private students have had to sit with me and genuinely work out the real, visceral feeling of: "I can do anything." "No one's going to stop me." "I can know things." "I can do bad things." It'll humble you. I say this all the time: you don't know who you are until your back's been against a wall. You can talk all the shit you want about how you would never, and how you're a good person and how you're enlightened. "Oh, I've had access to my Non-Dual Light and I would never..." Okay. Sure you wouldn't. But what if you could? It's the same thing where if someone is a pacifist and they're not capable of extraordinary violence, they're just useless. They're not a pacifist. Their choice holds weight when they could do otherwise. You will now have all the weight to hold. There's a reason why folklorically most sorcerers are bad people. There's a reason why the magician is not trusted. There's also a reason why for most of history people have made these techniques seem much harder than they are or much less accessible than they are. I've had other magicians genuinely come at me because I'm putting into the world, for fun and profit, all these techniques that you can train without having to join a lodge and kiss anyone's ass and talk to Frater So-and-So about how wise they are. A big part of that, to be real, is that I wouldn't have passed muster in a lot of those lodges just given my personality. I'm a little too spicy. They would have been like, "You are not to be trusted." But I put it out there because I'd rather democratise all this in the age that we live in. Those are the things people have seen that are horrifying or personally confronting. What's wonderful is a sense of liberation. My students do not fear death. That is an extraordinarily powerful thing. If you are not afraid to die, you're free to live. That's huge. Normally the only people you see that from are people who say: "I was climbing a mountain and almost fell and everything came into crystal clear focus." Or: "I got in this car accident and everything flashed before me and I knew what my purpose was." Same thing. You will know. You'll be like: "I touched God and I am whole." Crazy stuff. Wonderful stuff. I've had students in genuine tears be like: "Everything makes sense now. This is so great. Thank you so much." But oftentimes those are all in the same conversation. "I saw a monster." "I am a monster." "I am whole." Thirty-minute conversation. Then I tell them: "Cool. Now you're intermediate." And they're like: "What?" There's more. There's so much more. It never ends. Now you're in the club. There are just as many truly evil things you can do with the Body of Light as there are good. I'm not going to go into detail on that. Anything you've heard of — read myths, read stories, read fantasy novels — and ask: "How would I do that?" "How could I?" Because it makes you a better magician. Makes you smarter. It gets you thinking right about the skill. How to use your abilities. ## The Dark Forest and the Second Death **PAA: That cold, clear awakening you described — the dark forest is a great image for that. It's so vast and there's so much out there, and you don't necessarily want to make yourself known because as soon as you do, the bigger monster can come along.** **Alexander:** Sure. Another thing a few students have said melancholically to me is that when they have this, they realise almost no one else does. They'll survive the second death and most people they know won't. That weighs on them. **PAA: That's an interesting one. It's sort of a roll of the dice. If you jump on the wheel, then in most cases there goes the memory. Is that a good bet? Or do we hang on to this personality and crystallise this one?** **Alexander:** That's the thing. You look at it and you're like: "People I care about, great friends, I will endure past them." It's one of the reasons why a lot of yogis and mystics practise detachment. They're like: "I've got to be present when I'm present, but not let it get to me." It's funny, actually. There are theories through certain Franz Bardon letter-magic forces that you can use this to create a Body of Light that is essentially like an angel. Like Enoch became Metatron. Bob Smith, for example, and I have discussed this. Some people believe the Egyptian gods or other gods could have been this. Not all of them, surely. But Osiris was a man and then wasn't. Odin was a man and then wasn't. It's very possible this can turn you into something else if that's your goal. A lot of witches — true witches, which I distinguish from Wicca — will be like, "Yes, I'm cultivating to become something else." I met someone who I often reference vaguely. He referred to himself as a follower of the Dharma of the Devil Tiger. He was cultivating to be a demon. Because he was like: "This is what I want." There are Taoist yin alchemists and evil immortals that are like: "Yep. Going to be a demon. It's going to be great." If you're a *Big Trouble in Little China* enthusiast, Lo Pan, right? His Body of Light was extremely well developed. Use that as an example. How did he do it? If he had all those centuries of life and he practised, of course he'd be able to do those things. **PAA: I love it. We've got an eighties reference in the Body of Light interview.** **Alexander:** For the listeners, if you have not seen *Big Trouble in Little China*, it's the best documentary on Taoist sorcery. Just reverse-engineer each one of those skills and you're good. **PAA: Actually, yes. Unironically, yes.** ## How Difficult Is the Body of Light Really? **PAA: We've established that this is not a far-out skill that's necessarily going to take two decades if you want to do it. It does come with some soul-searching as to whether you want to crystallise this personality or roll the dice, but the possibilities are literally unlimited in terms of what you can do with this stuff. Is there anything else we haven't covered in terms of the Body of Light that you think people should know or that would inform them about this sort of technology?** **Alexander:** Realistically, not especially. I would just caution people, if you have multiple traditions, if you're fortunate enough to be able to cross-train, truly not to go to your teachers and be like: "Oh yes, actually that's the Body of Light." "And in fact, that's not the filia, or that's not whatever." They'll just slap you upside the head and be like: "Shut up. Work harder." Train and be diligent always in all things. I think that's the biggest takeaway. Keep in mind that there were people for a long time who kept these things not just hidden but under the guise that they were harder than they are to do. There's a reason for that. As much of a knee-jerk reaction as a younger me had in terms of vindictiveness — "Well, I wouldn't have passed muster" — it was only because I grew up where I grew up, in the family I grew up in, that I even had access to these things. But once you gain it, it's kind of funny. Once you have it, you can think about all the people you'd never want to have it, who you would never trust with it. At the same time, magic seeks magic. Magic seeks people. It seeks to fill the vessel. It wants to be practised. It wants to be known. The "information wants to be free" adage of the nineties hackers. It wants to be known and it wants to be practised. This is a spiritual technology that we are designed to do. Anyone can do this. I want to stress that. Anyone can do this. People may scoff at the idea of, I don't know, a Walmart cashier building a Body of Light. But then I would also ask how many listeners to various podcasts are essentially underperforming in their own lives. This, as well as other spiritual technologies, is increasingly the difference between a great life and no life at all. If you have these unfair advantages, you can use them. You can, for example, overlay the Body of Light over yourself and produce a stronger aura than you otherwise could. Everyone who's done any kind of energy-work training or internal-power stuff knows this. "I can use the electric line of force to big myself up." "I can magnetise people." "I can do all sorts of stuff." You can do it ten times stronger if you overlay the Body of Light. The potential for self-healing is also crazy because your Body of Light needs to look like an idealised version of you. If you're injured, you overlay it over the injured part and you vital-energy dump into it. You're going to heal orders of magnitude quicker than you otherwise could. That's a freebie for the people listening. Again, we all get hurt. **PAA: Absolutely. I think those two things alone are huge recommendations for this practice. Literally almost anything that we can think of that we would be doing, it's ten times more with the Body of Light.** **Alexander:** Absolutely. Again, the Body of Light is one of those things where whether you build it yourself, you're initiated into a tradition that gives it to you, or you have a spirit give it to you, there are pros and cons. You don't really get to tailor it in the same way. But if you've already had it and you're initiated and spirits help augment it, some of us have multiple. Some of us have multiple for various reasons. Some of us just have one and it looks like an amalgamation of everything we've done. You'll scry someone and you'll see their Body of Light and you're like: "Wow, you're an eight-limbed Taoist sorcerer, Hermetic magician, Wicca person." It's just everything. It can be kind of overwhelming because it has everything. I have a friend who lives local to me. He does various tantric things from a North Indian perspective, and his Body of Light just has all these arms. You're like: "Wow. I want to high-five each one of them." ## Initiation, Lineage and the Second Death **PAA: You say there we can build it or your tradition can basically hand you one as part of the initiation. In the latter case, how does that affect your death in terms of the second death?** **Alexander:** I can't say for sure because none of us really can. But what they will tell you is it links you to that tradition. If you're clever and you understand that you can change these things through use of these powers, it certainly wouldn't necessarily have to. But maybe that's what you want. Maybe you love a tradition that you're in so much that you want to be a lineage protector of it. Look at Taoist immortals. Your teacher's teacher's teacher. You go to their skull in a temple and you're like: "Give me the wisdom." They're there fully realised. Their Body of Light is there, but also the current of the tradition is holding it. It can be both. It depends on what you want. Historically speaking, I don't know how many options people were aware of having. Maybe you're born in Tibet. You're going to go either with Bön or Tibetan Buddhism, depending on the century in question. Then maybe you'll get it, maybe you won't. Maybe you're drip-fed information and then the monks are like: "Yeah, he's not the one." Or: "Okay, cool. We'll tell you how to do this near the end of your life because it's useful." Those traditions are amazing, but whether **you** will get the technology is a whole other question. You're sort of a cog in a system. **PAA: Now we've got this information open. It's the Napster of esoteric information. That's a reference that's dating me. But now this information is out. You might be given this as part of a tradition, but if you're aware of what Akasha and Non-Dual Light can do, can you kind of receive the gift and unattach it from the source?** **Alexander:** Yeah. You can backdoor things. That's the thing people don't like to hear either. This is anecdotal. I've known people who've used their Body of Light to project into certain mandalas and get empowerments. Then they went to lineage holders of various traditions and were like: "I got this empowerment. Look." They do the mantra and the lineage holder is like: "Yep. You sure did. That is absolutely the empowerment." Then they're like: "I got it by myself with the thing." I've seen this conversation happen because they were like, "I want you to come with me and see this." Then that person's like: "Yeah. Don't tell anyone that's possible." **PAA: Keep the system going.** **Alexander:** Now, for context, you can also go in there and be told no by the spirit. You can. In this case, this person was very diligent. They'd been doing a lot of mantras. They'd been doing the practice. They just hadn't had access to the empowerment and weren't going to have access to it for a calendar year. They're like: "Let me give this a go." But just like everything else, if you have spirits on your side, they can make introductions for you to other spirits. ## Pressure-Testing Visionary Experiences There is one caveat. As with everything else, you need to ground your visions and your visionary capacity in reality. Just because you have the Body of Light does not mean you understand everything you're seeing. It does not mean that you are completely lucid all the time. It's much like dreaming. People who practise lucid dreaming will also have a very easy time doing Body of Light stuff because it's kind of the same. You can be astral projecting or in your Body of Light and just lose focus. You drift and you're back in your body. Happens to all of us. Anyone who says it doesn't is lying. So just because you're like: "Oh, I went and got a Kurukulla empowerment from Kurukulla." Okay, cool. Is your practice more powerful objectively? Does it hit different? Can you do things with it that you could not do before? If the answer is no, maybe you did, maybe you didn't. Can you go to the Tibetan Buddhist in question and go: "Did it work?" And they'll maybe sheepishly go: "Yeah, actually you did get it." Or will they go: "No. What are you talking about? That's insane." That's the thing. Every skill you have, you must pressure-test it. There is no exception to this. As with any other skill, you will fail more times than you succeed for a long time. But in order to be truly good at anything, you need to be willing to fail more times than the average person is willing to try. **PAA: Perfect advice. Perfect closing advice. If you're going to get anywhere in anything, apply that.** **Alexander:** Exactly. ## Closing Advice **PAA: That's a really good breakdown of the Body of Light. For anyone who's interested in Alexander's work, the Body of Light course or skill is contained within Alex's curriculum. You basically have a whole zero-to-hero curriculum that goes through every aspect. What we're talking about today is kind of around the end of that curriculum, although as we said, under certain circumstances you could speedrun that as well. Alexander, is there anything you'd like to say before we close on this subject?** **Alexander:** Just my usual motivational speech. If you're hearing this, you owe it to yourself to train. The world is not getting any better. I don't care who you are or where you live. Your life would be better if you had this ability. This one specifically, or any of the ones that I teach, that Bob teaches, that any of the lovely people in Perseus teach. Get Clint Marsh's book. Do Bardon's book. Just buy the book. I don't care what you do. Just do something. Train. Train your internal-power stuff. Summon spirits. Do magic. Demand a wonderful life out of this. Like I've said since my very first interview, when my career started, and I will say it until I die, and probably long after from my Body of Light: Everything you want, someone will have it. It might as well be you. Because if it's not you, it's somebody else. And fuck that guy. **PAA: There we go. Closing remarks. Alexander, thank you so much.** **Alexander:** Absolutely. --- ## Explore Alexander Moore & Practical Occult Practical Occult [https://practicaloccult.com/](https://practicaloccult.com/) The Body of Light & True Astral Projection [https://practicaloccult.com/courses/principles-of-magic/principles-of-magic-information/](https://practicaloccult.com/courses/principles-of-magic/principles-of-magic-information/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) Principles of Magic – Full Course [https://practicaloccult.com/courses/principles-of-magic/](https://practicaloccult.com/courses/principles-of-magic/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) ## Previous Conversations with Alexander Operative Magic: A Practical System for Real-World Use with Alexander Moore [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk3jQfM0r_4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk3jQfM0r_4&utm_source=chatgpt.com) Further Questions with Alexander Moore [https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/further-questions-with-alexander-moore/](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/further-questions-with-alexander-moore/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) ## Explore Perseus Arcane Academy Free Courses [https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/free-courses-on-perseus-arcane-academy/](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/free-courses-on-perseus-arcane-academy/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) Perseus Community [https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) --- # Martin McGreggor: Satanism, Ars Zoetia, Fallen Angels, and Inner Transformation Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/martin-mcgreggor-satanism-ars-zoetia-fallen-angels-and-inner-transformation/ ## Inroducion In this Perseus Arcane Academy interview, Martin of [SinisterSide.com](https://sinisterside.com/) discusses the development of his Satanic practice, the evolution of his written work, and the shift from identity-based Satanism toward structured, practice-driven transformation. The conversation explores his books, including *[Paths to Satan](https://www.amazon.in/Paths-Satan-Guide-Contemporary-Satanism/dp/1481243004)*, *[Book of the Fallen](https://www.amazon.com/Book-Fallen-Satanic-Theory-Practice/dp/1797600974/ref=sr_1_1?crid=369VG6JHR4G1T&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.4HH7SZ-3yoFIXChJ__9Q5rhvEDdH3AaT_2yYfaBwd0I.D8gCGimHN9lMYHJuU9I1RuaBWaBlm3kcqFkap_8bbOA&dib_tag=se&keywords=book+of+the+fallen+martin+mcgregor&qid=1780394467&sprefix=book+of+the+fallen+martin+mc%2Caps%2C1297&sr=8-1)*, *The Deification Magick Spellbook*, *Ars Zoetia*, and *The Social Magick Spellbook*, alongside deeper questions on Fallen Angels, spirit contact, discernment, public misunderstanding, magical responsibility, and the relationship between inner work and real-world change --- ## Interview ## Belief System & Philosophical Development **PAA: In Paths to Satan, your aim was clearly to make the path accessible, whereas Book of the Fallen feels more like a consolidation of long-term development. What changed internally for you between those works?** Your distinction between those two works is really well stated, I think. All of my books have had a specific purpose, and in the case of Paths, that purpose was to support other Satanists’ ability to live openly amongst their friends, family, and peers. Many Satanists use it as a gateway book for people in their lives who are interested in Satanism or may be looking to become Satanists themselves. I am truly honored by that and love that it has become a work of inclusion and accessibility, but to be honest, at the time I wrote Paths specifically with the non-Satanist in mind. While it may be an affirming and supportive book for those upon the path, it can be quite the opposite for those outside the community like parents, extended family, and friends. The truths about Satanism presented in Paths may seem like basic concepts for us, but they can be completely alien and contradictory to what has been traditionally taught and believed by the majority of the world. It can be exceedingly difficult to live an openly Satanic lifestyle without becoming subject to vile insinuations and asinine assumptions regarding morals, character, and even criminality. The sworn enemies of Satan say whatever they wish and the masses believe all of it, quite literally as gospel. I didn’t want that to be the case simply due to a lack of rebuttal. Paths was written as much to contradict as it was to confirm. But internally, this very much spoke to where I was within my life at that time, and what was important to me. As a 27 year old who had already struggled with openness and revealing my faith, as well as with creating Satan-centric businesses and projects, I was done listening to the uninformed opinions of outsiders regarding what constituted Satanism and Satanic practice. What it meant to be a Satanist. And then having to contend with those all-too-common presumptions any time I decided to be honest about my spirituality or tried to operate openly in the public space. That is what I cared about that time, and so that is what caused Paths to be written. Likewise, when I wrote Fallen, my personal practice had taken my focus away from public works and instead on my own inner mastery and ability. After writing Paths and getting those concepts off my chest, I came to a clear understanding that if I wanted to continue to share knowledge and insight and wisdom with the Satanic community, I should spend the time necessary to properly learn and master, to the best of my abilities, before sharing. There was a seven year gap between Paths and Fallen, of which I spent a lot of time in personal study. A couple dark nights of the soul, a confirmatory spiritual interaction or two, a complete re-wiring of what my practice was and meant. By year five I had landed on a consistent spiritual practice that I could honestly call my own, and I had a philosophical basis that wasn’t scared of honest scrutiny or skepticism. It no longer became important to me whether I was right or wrong. I was simply being honest about what I had lived, and learned, and experienced, and that had become what drove my Satanism. In the afterglow, or maybe more appropriately the aftermath, I realized that passing on a clear roadmap for what I had done was actually needed. What I had stumbled through, and many of the failures I had suffered, could have been avoided with a guiding hand. At that point, Fallen was conceptualized and it was simply a matter of outlining what needed to be shared and then putting the words to paper. So, a simple answer to the question would be: everything changed internally for me between those two works. But the books themselves paint a pretty clear picture of where I was in my practice at the time of their writing, what my priorities were, and what I hoped to change within my own world through their writing. Paths was centered on acceptance and how I was perceived by the outside world. Fallen focused almost exclusively on internal issues, from personal philosophy and ethics to ritual habits and meditative techniques. It is a pretty clear representation of my own personal practice and focus shifting from externally-driven perception to internally-derived truth. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/61OWWSwHzML._SY466_.jpg) **PAA: You’ve described your approach as moving toward a more mature and less reactive form of Satanism. How would you define that maturity now, compared to how you saw the path in your early years?** This is a great question. When I first started upon my path, like many Satanists, I became very wrapped up in the adversarial nature of it. My Satanism was much more about what I wasn’t instead of allowing it to become the cornerstone for what I wanted to become. Essentially my practice was more concerned with others, what they believed, and my reaction to it as a Satanist, instead of being more focused on myself and what Satanism was bringing to my life. Probably the easiest way to sum this up would be to say that I took time to learn and explore what (my) Satan and Satanism is actually adversarial toward specifically, instead of treating it like a blanket position to be applied to all things. I found that while Satanism is in fact the most inclusive religion in the world, and Satan will revel in many things that other Gods and religions may revile, it is life itself, and the freedom to experience it in every possible way, that Satan is truly advocating for. You will not be held back, and you will not find limits to that which Satan will accept as pious offering, but likewise an unbalanced reverence of death, demise, and endings is a sure way to step off the path. Satan is the most wholesome God that can be accepted into your life - not in the colloquial way we use it today wrapped up within morality and piety, but in the true sense of the word. All-encompassing. Everything. The good, the bad, the brutal and the ugly, Satan is the God of it all. He revels in the lion feasting upon the flesh of the zebra, and He laughs triumphantly when cloven hoof strikes the hungry maw, allowing the hunted to surpass its position in life and achieve a future that was not always guaranteed. Satan wants us to exceed our bequeathed lot in life, but will accept equally the natural state of the world that may indeed crush us during the attempt. It is the Satanist’s duty to prepare for the challenge, and use the wisdom Satan offers us to be ready and able to turn the tables upon the world itself when it takes aim at our lives and livelihoods. That is probably the best summation I can provide. **PAA: Your work draws from multiple traditions while maintaining a distinct identity. How do you personally navigate the balance between influence and dilution when integrating ideas from different systems?** Anything that aids in my practice is fair game as far as I am concerned. Satan, or maybe more accurate the entity named as Satan, has been known to every civilization and religion across the globe. Different names, different nuances in the way they see him, but He has been a part of every spiritual system born from the hearts and spirits of humanity. Part of a Satanist’s duty is to expose themselves to different teachings and practices that may serve their own, and additionally, to at least contemplate what part Satan played in their creation. To answer your question more specifically though, necessity is the father of invention and experimentation is the mother of efficacy. I don’t concern myself with things becoming watered down. If I try something and it doesn’t work or doesn’t elicit the reaction within the ritual or myself that I am looking for, I either discard it or make changes. When I feel there is something missing from my current practice, because it does shift and change quite radically depending on what spirits I am working with and what my overall goal is at the time, I start looking for inspiration wherever it may come. Most often, as soon as I open myself to the search, the answers come flying in and I find synchronicity and meaning in places where I would have never thought to look, especially if I were to keep things to a strictly Satanic lens. But at the same time, I am quite secure in my beliefs and I can sift through teachings that are contrary to my own philosophy without getting bogged down in questions or insecurity. I search for aspects of practices that serve my current purpose, and as long as I stay true to my intention, it becomes fairly easy to twist whatever I am looking at towards my own goals. With that being said though, there are many teachings I will consciously avoid pulling from, if only because their history and traditions feel repugnant to me. In those cases, unless I am specifically looking to blaspheme them, I simply do not use them as sources of information or inspiration. Ritual and magic should be full of things that empower you and bring your mind, body, and soul into union. That is when things start taking off. So, my philosophy is to pull from absolutely anything that will help me achieve that, regardless of its origin. Many teachings and traditions would do the opposite, pulling me away from union and into discord, and that is truly my only litmus test when searching for new techniques. Anything can be made Satanic if it is done so by a capable and creative Satanist. And it doesn’t always simply mean blasphemy and adversarialism. **PAA: In your writing, there’s a noticeable shift from identity-based Satanism toward something more functional and practice-driven. Was that an intentional move, or something that emerged through experience?** There was very much a conscious shift in the nature of the written work, but I’d say the cause was actually a mix of the two reasons you mentioned. Not to repeat myself, but each of my works have a distinct purpose and reason for being written, and the shift you are talking about came about because I was both learning a lot through experience and experimentation, but also consciously deciding that my written works needed to transition from what it means to be a Satanist, to how to be a Satanist. Many of us adopt the mantle out of an innate understanding that it is where we belong. But we get left with little else, and generally have to establish our own traditions and practices personally. I wanted my body of work to speak to every level of Satanist, from the first-day initiate to a years-in adept, and the only way to do that was to provide information and guidance for those that had moved past the initial stages of their practice. Furthermore, my books are a pretty good insight into the work I have done in the years prior to their release. While Paths and Fallen were imagined and written with a much broader pen, my subsequent works have been fairly grounded in the work I was doing one to three years prior to their writing, and the books themselves become a sort of magical journal that I just happen to share with the world. I am sure if you were to look at my personal life and practice you would find a great deal of insight into why certain books were written, with the cause invariably being - that was what I was working on prior to their release. As I have transitioned between phases of my own Satanism, my books have also transitioned into more of a living chronicle of my own progress. If it ever seems like it takes me forever to put out new books, this is the reason. I write fast but there is generally 2-5 years of work that goes on behind the scenes, and I only write the book when I feel I have learned the lessons of that work and am ready to share my findings with the world. I believe this to be one of the few ways a sincere Satanic leader can operate without centuries of traditions to back them up. We have to forge our own way, and sometimes it takes a while before we are ready to bring those new teachings to light. > This is why unless you are seeking to replicate a famous working, or perform a specific ritual of someone else’s design, your rituals should be wholly unique to you. Your coding is different than anyone else’s. You are running on a language that is wholly your own. The tools and methods you bring into ritual allow you to create your own code. > > Martin McGreggor ## Practice, Method, and Inner Work **PAA: Your systems place a strong emphasis on structured practice—sigils, effigies, staged processes. What did you learn through experience that led you to favor this level of structure?** I learned what worked. For me. Ritual and magic are nothing more than learning the process of programming the self. Yes, they can be witnessed and joined by spirits and demons, or even Satan Himself. Yes, their presence can lend incredible amounts of power and meaning to the work. But the process itself is simply meant to make you capable of achieving the things you have set aim to. To become what you seek to be, and to gain what you feel you are missing. Effigies, sigils, magical languages, candles, bells, incense - all of it is simply the ingredients you have chosen to make up that programming. Each aspect may have its own meaning, power, and influences, but they are still just the tools you have chosen to help change the reality surrounding yourself. For me, that meant developing the methods found within books like the Deification Magick spellbook, and Ars Zoetia. These are the tools, the code, that I use to program myself. This is why unless you are seeking to replicate a famous working, or perform a specific ritual of someone else’s design, your rituals should be wholly unique to you. Your coding is different than anyone else’s. You are running on a language that is wholly your own. The tools and methods you bring into ritual allow you to create your own code. And for me, taking bits and pieces of other languages and twisting them into my own was the only thing that was going to work. Personally I think this is probably the case for the vast majority of practicing occultists and Satanists today. I have just happened to reach the stage in my practice where the overall structure is in place, and now I spend most of my time finding new pieces to fit within that structure, or actively using the pieces I have compiled for a specific purpose. **PAA: In The Deification Magick Spellbook, your work focuses heavily on self-dissolution as a precursor to transformation. How did your own understanding of that process develop through practice?** I would certainly agree that dissolution is central to the work within the Deification Magick spellbook, both of the self and of the entire practice. The theology and spiritual presumptions you bring with you into the work must be purged as much as any other part of the self. Satan is indeed the only God truly willing to put himself on the pyre in the pursuit of your godhood. Not only must your loyalty and service to His cause be removed, but also your attachment to your status as a Satanist. The spiritual aspects of yourself that will hold you back are but a single piece of the puzzle, and the whole thing must be cleared from the table if you are going to honestly partake in that kind of work. For many years my identity was tied up within Satanism, and I would have sooner sacrificed myself than anything that had to do with my relationship with Satan. But in the end, I realized that all of those crutches were simply that - something for me, as a human, to lean on and provide stability when things got hard. The mythology around the Grigori and many of their individual histories became a great boon in my understanding of this, which is in part why they play such a pivotal role in my portion of the Deification spellbook. While the runes are presented as a divination tool, there are many lessons hidden among them that benefit the aspiring deific. But if you are truly to become a god in and of yourself, a being capable of mastering their own existence and their own nature, to bend the laws of reality to your will and create a world of your own choosing, you must face the fact that the being you are is most likely completely incapable. The idea of what you could be, though, is a much different story. We all remember the lesson Batman learned about his own nature. As a man he was limited and only capable of what his physical form could achieve. But as the idea of Batman, he became something else. Something out of legend and fable, something that was capable of great feats beyond the scope of mere mortals. A god of the night, stalking his prey in a way determined only by his own principles. The laws of men no longer apply, and this is the kind of interaction you need to establish with your god-self, and for most people, that means removing the mental blocks revolving around their own limitations. Clear the table. Immolate the idea of the self, as well as the meaning and attachment bound to Satan. Become something else. Like Batman. Something beyond what you consider yourself capable of. That is the lesson here. The work you do for yourself through this kind of action will deliver results beyond those that may be a result of any service or loyalty to Satan. That is not His currency. **PAA: You often use external forms—symbols, constructed representations—as part of inner work. What role do these play in bridging internal and external experience?** This is a fairly loaded question, so I will try to sum everything up as concisely as I am able, and hopefully I won’t miss any of the major points in doing so. As I mentioned before, the physical items you bring into magic and ritual are but the tools you use to program your own existence and life. Through thoughtful choosing, and consistent working with those items in the manner you have deemed fit, you program your mind to associate those items with their internal meaning. No matter whether the item represents something internal to you or an external entity, habit, disease, or idea, after consistently working with it you can train your mind to form the association. Additionally, the process you employ consistently becomes associative with the work you are doing. So while you may only be lighting incense and candles, ringing a bell, and saying prayers, over a consistent enough period of time that process in and of itself becomes associated with the work you are aiming for. After a long enough period, there is no difference in your brain between taking those actions and making progress towards your goal. Now, ideally, you are following that up with real work. Taking definitive real-world steps towards completion of your goal. And then you will find yourself looking back one day and discovering that the magic worked. This is due to many factors, not least of all the tapping of personal divinity through the process. But even outside of the magical context, what you do consistently determines what you are. If you are consistently practicing, consistently working, and consistently achieving, then no goal will remain out of your grasp for long. You have to become the thing that achieves what you are seeking. This is one of the reasons why so many teachers reinforce regular, if not daily, ritual. I think the real lesson gets lost in the conversation, though. Doing aimless ritual for connection and presence every day is not going to achieve anything material or result in successful magic. It will result in a deep and consistent connection with the spirits you work with, but at a certain point, you must begin to apply that magic, apply that ritual, and apply that connection to what you are actually seeking to achieve. Otherwise you will stagnate and lose heart before you have even begun to truly work. Or worse, you will blame the Gods themselves for not delivering what you desire. > So much of what we “know” is simply what we believe, often due to assumption, non sequitur, and cultural tradition. > > Martin McGreggor **PAA: When someone begins working through your material, what is the most important mindset shift they need to make for the practices to actually work?** This answer may be geared more towards success in Satanism, or occult practice in general, than simply making use of my books. But it is where the question took me, so here you go: Understand that certainty is the enemy. The questions that bother you…the things that nag at you and won’t go away, even the doubts that make you feel as though you are lesser than other more “devout” Satanists, those are the most important things to hold on to. You don’t have to confront them right away, and in fact it is often best to simply allow them to sit unanswered. But don’t take them off the table, and certainly do not run from them. When you work at your spirituality, gain wisdom, and practice with sincerity and honesty, the answers will come exactly when you need them to, and your foundation will become unshakeable. Determine your principles and stick to them, especially when things become hard, and you will be rewarded far more than you would for any amount of spiritual service, devout loyalty, or grand supplication. But until then, ask the question, or at the very least, listen intently when someone else does. Hear the perspectives of others without latching onto them as gospel or dogma. Take nothing as certain, and allow a broader understanding of topics to grow as you are introduced to new thoughts and ideas on old topics. Never fall into conspiracy and be ever-vigilant to the non sequiturs that are so rife within the occult and spiritual space. Existence and presence do not always equate to favor or power. God does not always equate to creator, or omnipotence. Communication does not always equate to truth. So much of what we “know” is simply what we believe, often due to assumption, non sequitur, and cultural tradition. Learn, discern, work, and grow. If you do that, my books will become useful aids, but the real magic will be done, and lived, by you. ## Spirits, Forces, and Interaction **PAA: Your work with Fallen Angels and related forces is central to your system. How has your understanding of these forces evolved through direct experience?** I absolutely love this question. When approaching the Fallen Angels, the Grigori Watchers of Enoch, I chose to operate from as little information as possible. While there are numerous occult volumes dedicated to them, and little else honestly, I wanted to get my own personal reaction to their presence before exposing myself to any other teachings. It was a mind blowing experience. From a single structured spell to induce connection and presence, I was able to fully channel over 30 Fallen Angels, whom I have since made a central part of my own personal practice. I did so because that one limited experience with them was so impactful and beneficial that I knew I had found my personal pantheon almost immediately. They have been amazingly benevolent, active, encouraging and also inspiring, and our relationship has been incredibly productive. It is my belief that they truly were Humanity’s original guardians and guides, regardless of what status the Christian religion may have thrust upon them. Anything of real spiritual significance has, at some point, been adopted and warped by those teachings to hide their real power. Come to them with an honest heart and an open mind, and both will overrun by the time you are through. I did not approach them with trepidation, but I was also very cognizant of their primordial nature. No such entity should be contacted lightly. But the response I received surprised me on so many levels. I believe the Fallen want to be worked with. They want connection, and they have so much to offer. For anyone like myself, who saw the Goetic spirits and process as overly negative and one-sided, I would recommend reaching out to the Fallen Angels you feel most pulled toward. They are life-affirming, living, generous spirits ready to forge a connection. Working with them has been one of the most rewarding and gratifying spiritual experiences I have had. **PAA: Many practitioners struggle to distinguish between imagination, symbolic interaction, and something more autonomous. How did you come to understand that distinction in your own practice?** Experience is the only thing that will allow you to grow discernment, which is what we are talking about here. We’ve all heard the stories…the sons and daughters and husbands and wives of the gods. The spirits telling people exactly how right they are and how awesome their spiritual power is. Those people need a serious reality check. The occult is not a place for people who want to entertain fantasies at that level, because at the very least you will make a fool of yourself. At the worst you may get yourself into waters you aren’t prepared to swim in - and that isn’t an indictment of the spirits. It is an indictment of insincere and naive occultists. A lot of these people go really crazy, because they started out that way to a lesser degree, and couldn’t distinguish reality from the concepts they were interacting with. Discernment is the thing that keeps you sane. If you assume almost everything is simply your imagination, or your subconscious desires making their way to the surface, then it will take a serious spiritual interaction to shake you from that baseline. And the spirits will oblige. Most of us who have experienced consistent spirit contact will describe a feeling of being beaten over the head with experiences in quick succession. To the point that it becomes more absurd to put no weight on the experience than the alternative. You see one sign, followed by another synchronicity, followed by something truly uncanny or basically impossible, coupled with clear communication and presence. That is when you start taking a new look at things. One-off occurrences or “talking” with the spirit outside of structured practice or workings are generally the quickest ways to self-delusion, especially if you give great weight to the result. Over time and consistent practice with numerous spirits, you can begin to accurately discern their hand at play in things. You will recognize the pattern of blessed results and chance happenings that actually do line up with the greater workings you are engaged in. Patterns, and the ability to recognize them, will be the greatest tool in your arsenal in this regard. Again - the spirits will oblige. There is no need to manufacture results because of great desire. Be real. Be honest. Take what comes with a grain of salt and then allow the spirits to confound that expectation. They will not disappoint when you have made a true connection. **PAA: In your experience, what is the most misunderstood aspect of working with non-physical intelligences?** There are several misunderstandings that I could use a few lines to clear up. First and foremost, there is no “correct” spell to accomplish whatever you are seeking. There is no “correct” Demon, or Spirit, or God to call upon to accomplish it for you, either. Searching for such things is a complete derailment of what your practice should be about. The work is always going to be done by you. Whether or not you make true connection with a spirit who can help you achieve your goal in a more divine way is what you are trying for. If you have prepared properly and are ready to work when you make connection, you will likely receive a great deal of assistance. If you choose certain spirits and don’t have your life in order, or ask for things with implications you don’t quite understand, they might do something to you that will create the conditions that force you into action. And if you don’t listen and act when that occurs, you may find yourself in bad situations. You might get hurt. It will have been your fault. These are the dangers experienced workers mean when they warn neophytes and new initiates. Most of the spirits you will encounter aren’t evil. They are well beyond that kind of morality based within the human experience and understanding. But they are powerful. They are capable. They don’t grant wishes and they aren’t going to do the work for you. Speaking to Satanism specifically, supplication and devotion are not going to get you where you want to be. Sure, Satan will answer the call to those things, just as he will answer the call to all manner of rituals and workings. But to advance in your practice, you must accept that your life is your own. Your service is only as valuable as much as it serves you. Advancing yourself is the highest honor you can offer Satan. Allowing nothing to stand in your path, including your own practice, spirituality, and presumptions that come along with them, is the greatest form of Satanic supplication. Burning Satan Himself upon the pyre is a perfectly acceptable offering as long as it advances your own power and agenda. If it serves you. If it does not, then don’t do it. But that is the dynamic you must seek to establish for yourself. Lastly, magic is not linear, and Spirits communicate in experience as much as they do directly. The rituals you do often come to fruition before you do them, just as you’ve initiated the first steps. Spirits will confirm your suspicions through the world itself well before whispering secrets in your ear. Pay attention. The world is magic, and so are you. **PAA: Over time, has your relationship to these forces become more structured, more intuitive, or something else entirely?** I would have to say a combination of all three, actually. Over time I have established a practice wherein I make structured time for connection, communication, and commune, but the time spent within that structure is only a piece of the interaction. Very often you will learn lessons, gain insight, or find clues through intuition or “chance” happenings in your daily life. It is then a requisite to follow up on those intuitions through research, study, or whatever other mundane methods you use for your work. The mundane world should reflect and reinforce the intuition if it was in fact communication or messaging from other forces. Beyond that, it is actually shocking just how active these spirits can be in our lives, and while they may not trumpet their actions, an astute worker will be able to see their hand at work. And in those moments, the relationship can begin to take on that “something else entirely” energy. You see their guiding hand at work, doors open when they were previously closed, and other instances of favor can be received, and when you go back to find the same source, or open the same door, you are met with resistance once again. It is one of the lessons I have learned the hard way. Sometimes the spirits really are acting in your favor and if you do not seize the chance when it comes around, sometimes you won’t get another. I’ve become much more reactive when those moments arise. When I feel and see the blessings coming down, I double-down on whatever I am doing. If I was going to work for one hour, now it becomes three. If I was only going to do cursory research on a subject, it then becomes time for a deep dive. They insert themselves in moments of opportunity. I try not to let them slip away. ## Zoetia, Transformation, and Applied Magick **PAA: In Ars Zoetia, you present a system that reframes how practitioners engage with demonic forces. What was the key insight that led you to develop this approach?** I wish I could take credit for the way Ars Zoetia came about, but at its heart it was a received work based on a singular premise. When we began the process I was at a place in my practice wherein I was challenged with creating a great work rooted in both personal skill and productive spiritual connection. During a rare chance to connect in person with some friends (and co-authors) we came upon a simple, singular starting point: Goetia is inherently contrary to much of modern left hand path practice and belief. The ritual construct, the inferred power dynamics between spirit and worker, the very way spirits are perceived in nature and purpose. Almost all of it runs in direct contrast to the prevailing opinions and experiences of active workers today, particularly those of Satanic and Demonolatrous leanings. So, if Goetia runs contrary, what would a similarly grand system look like if it was more parallel or congruent with the beliefs of the workers performing it? How do you even begin designing such a system? We landed with the ritual construct itself, and instead of simply swapping tools or invocations, we aimed to invert the entire operation. Where spirits would be kept at bay, we would seek to become as close as possible. If the operation called for visible manifestation, we would turn our backs on the circle. That was the one insight, if you will, that began the entire process. Inverting the Goetic ritual process. The worker would become that which is worked, the spirit would become the wielder of the hammer, and it would be ourselves set within the triangle. There was much less emphasis put on visible manifestation and direct communication, and more of an active focus on intention and sound magical principles. We put together the key processes and assembled equipment lists. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/image-1024x576.png)Martin McGreggor Invokes Samyaza Built furnaces and prepared the fuel. It was Walpurgisnacht 2022 when we performed the first Zoetic grand rite separately in our own respective parts of the country. Our plan was to perform the ritual, document what happened during and after, and then go from there. That is what we did, and after some of the most consistent and stunning displays of evocation and intuitive contact, as well as several months of reception and work that led in completely unexpected directions, we were left with Ars Zoetia. > Regardless of whether you seek to influence your own life or the world as a whole, understanding that the power to do so is held within, and everything else is simply a means to access, will allow you to not only effect truly powerful magic but also be prepared to follow up with the mundane work and presence that results in real success. > > Martin McGreggor **PAA: The idea of internalizing power rather than keeping it external runs through your work. How does that process change the practitioner over time?** Great question! Ideally, the practitioner should be changed in all of the ways they have applied their magic towards. To tie this into one of your previous questions, focusing on the internalization of spiritual relationships and power dynamics is one of the most important mental shifts to make if you want your magic to be effective. Regardless of whether you seek to influence your own life or the world as a whole, understanding that the power to do so is held within, and everything else is simply a means to access, will allow you to not only effect truly powerful magic but also be prepared to follow up with the mundane work and presence that results in real success. When you stop focusing on the outward - the outward significance, the outward manifestation, the outward perception, and begin to focus on feeding and fueling your own spiritual power and magic, you will gain confidence not only in your own abilities but in the relationships and connections you have formed. The expectation of result will be removed from your magical workings and you can live your spirituality in a much more honest way. When the ultimate success or failure of any undertaking is squarely upon the practitioner’s shoulders, and the power to affect that result is within the practitioner’s own divine providence, the influence that can be reaped is magnified tenfold. Instead of spending hours in planning and research to find the correct spirit to achieve a goal, a fraction of that time can be spent identifying tools and connections to augment a worker’s own personal abilities. The focus shifts to the work, and the time spent working becomes time communing, with invisible hands touching everything you do. Through the internalization process you no longer look for supernatural results, and instead seek the natural consequence of becoming the person who receives that which you desire, and accomplishes that which you seek to achieve. But the muses do not create anything. They inspire. And inspiration without perspiration is naught but fanciful meditation. The most consequential result of internalizing magical and spiritual practices is that it shifts responsibility. With responsibility comes capability, and culpability. At least it should. This is the process that eliminates I Can’t from vocabularies. Magic is the process of making the impossible, possible. Once you unlock your own personal responsibility within an effective magical practice, anything truly becomes possible within you. **PAA: Your work suggests that transformation should be reflected in lived experience, not just internal states. What kinds of changes did you begin to notice in your own life as your practice deepened?** This is another great question, but it could also eat up pages. One of the biggest pitfalls I have seen, and experienced, is seeking a change in circumstance without being willing to accept a change in personal habit, belief, or attitude. Sometimes even more radical changes may be needed, depending on the magic being worked. And those that fight change while simultaneously seeking out the very spirits of transformation and transmutation often have the most adverse experiences. This is another reason why my practice has shifted so dramatically toward internalization. You must be willing to become the change you seek, even if a lion’s share of the influence behind that change is coming from spiritual forces. Seeking change in the fabric of reality while attempting to remain unchanged personally is simply a recipe for failed magic. It is like digging yourself in the sand and then wondering why the tide refuses to take you further into shore. I try to ride the waves, which should be the aim of any true practitioner, but you have to be willing to visit the places those waves are likely to take you. Over the course of my magical practice I have visited many shores, but in the context of this question, of deepening practice, a specific window of time would likely be most useful to examine. I’ll focus on the last five years, as it is a good window into what deepening practice can look like, and happens to coincide with the work that led to the release of Ars Zoetia. As my practice deepened and began to lead toward the uncovering of Zoetia and performing its original works, I made a major shift in my life and returned to formal education after an eighteen year hiatus. I attended an esteemed university after proving myself over an initial probationary period, and ultimately graduated summa cum laude with an aviation-focused science degree. During that same period of time I addressed and resolved multiple personal health issues that had plagued me since childhood, and were beginning to have a serious effect on my long-term health and survivability. It is my honest opinion that had I not been pushed into addressing these issues, specifically by the spiritual path I was walking at the time, I would not be alive to be writing this today. In the same vein, after building a company and brand for over seven years, I also made the decision to sell my interests and free myself from a venture that I was no longer passionate about. Instead, I now travel the country with my wife as a contractor, making more money and enjoying more freedom while essentially working for ourselves. I have visited all three coasts and worked in over eight states within the last eight months. Traveling the country and seeing the differences between regions is something that I have always wanted to do, and now I get paid to do it. Finally, I contributed to or co-wrote three books during the same period with associated presentations at numerous live events and annual gatherings. All of these accomplishments, all of these changes, were a direct result of the spiritual path I was walking at the time and the influence offered by the spirits I was working with. But none of it would have been possible if I had been unwilling to accept and follow-through on quite literally life-altering changes. If I had been blind or indifferent to the, sometimes very painful, lessons being imparted - that I had asked for, by the way - I would have found myself in a very different reality by the time this would be written. If I had made it here at all. In short: everything has changed. Nothing about my life is the same. ## Social Magick and Real-World Expression **PAA: In The Social Magick Spellbook, you bring the focus into everyday life—presence, influence, and interaction. What made you feel this area needed more attention?** The Social Magick spellbook was a very focused work for me. I really leaned into the World Domination Series with that one, and looked at the book as an opportunity to provide a multitude of spells and methods for direct action. Whereas most of my other works would probably be considered more procedural, Social Magick assumes you have done the previous work and are ready to apply actionable tools within a social setting. In that regard, when planning the structure for my contribution I spent a good deal of time identifying the areas within social interactions that hold the most opportunity to affect demonstrable changes in real outcomes. So to answer the question simply: those were the areas I identified within the social sphere with the most opportunity for effective targeted magic. They also just so happen to be areas where many people feel insecure or incapable. The understanding of both of those factors led me straight toward working with the Fallen. Not only would they help any worker surpass their own limitations and become capable of great social feats, but they also possess many of the tools to help a practitioner become adept and astute in any social circle. Calling upon the Grigori for influence and power in social settings is a great opportunity, but workers should always remember that such spirits are not bound by the kind of morality we are used to. When you call, they will come. When you ask, they will answer. Be sure you want them to. The Social Magick spellbook contains some truly challenging operations. They can take you to some dark places. Like any social interaction. **PAA: How do you see the relationship between inner development and outward expression—does one naturally lead to the other, or do they require separate work?** It will be difficult to provide a single answer to this one. I think it comes down to what kind of work the practitioner is doing and what their goals are. If they are trying to live a purely honest and authentic existence, I believe the relationship between the internal and external will be very reciprocal and obvious. What they do on the inside will be reflected on the outside, and vice versa. In this instance the work being done becomes cumulative, with the increased inner strength lending itself to the development of the physical and then increased physical strength making it easier to sustain a more rigorous spiritual practice. Unfortunately, we live in a world where living with pure honesty and authenticity will often lead to personal ruin, and so, rightly, many people present a less-than honest version of themselves to the world. We all protect ourselves by deciding what parts of ourselves we expose, and to whom. With this being the case, it is very possible and often necessary to do external work that isn’t necessarily fully internalized by the practitioner. There are several examples of this in the Social Magick spellbook. Workings that prove quite effective for specific short term social needs, but would be less than ideal long-term personality traits to internalize and integrate into the personality. Likewise, the personal development, shadow work, and occasional turmoil that occultists experience as an integral part of their path would often carry significant social consequences if they were broadcasted openly. Instead, we develop a mask that sustains our position within society while the shadows dance underneath. None of these situations are better, or more spiritually ‘correct’ than the others. They are simply different ways the internal and external interplay across the social landscape of our global civilization. The best answer I can probably give is that the two are absolutely connected and can have visible effect upon each other, but the astute and experienced worker can manipulate that relationship and control what, to an extent, they wear externally regardless of what is going on internally. It is also worth noting, though, that strengthening one will only have so much effect on the other. You cannot become externally powerful solely by becoming internally divine, and likewise, perfect outward beauty will not make the soul beautiful as well. Work must be done in either regard for there to be advancement, but advancement that is made can be reflected in both areas. **PAA: For someone working seriously with your material, how should they expect their interaction with other people to change over time?** This might be a bit of a trite answer, but I would hope that their interactions have changed in the ways that they have planned. It would be an ideal outcome for me if they had applied the tools at their disposal to identify what they want, how to achieve it, and then molded themselves into the person who does exactly that. If it requires that their interactions become transactional and mutually beneficial above all else, then that is perfect as long as they do so mindful of and ready to accept the consequences. If they determine that genuine connection and community are their greatest desires and they go about forging those relationships, I would find it just as acceptable as long as they confront the dangers of doing so honestly and appropriately. As long as there is intention followed by action, I can find no fault in how someone forms their social circles and interactions. The world is a diverse place and to exist within certain areas, drastically different social capabilities and knowledge may be required. But the main thing is that they are thoughtful in the creation of their world, and are not driven by desires, contended for their fate to be dictated to them, or worse, complicit in becoming a tool or vassal for more ambitious minds and agendas not their own. It is one thing to be happy without extravagance or even traditional success, but it is wholly another to lack the will and wherewithal to even take a meaningful part in one’s own existence. For me personally, after twenty years on this path, I would say that I have become more tempered but less flexible. I am more understanding but less forgiving. I value truth and falsehood equally, and challenge both reasonably. I try to be for, before being against, and do my best to inspire divinity in the works of others. ## Public Perception, Misunderstanding, and the Meaning of Satanism **PAA: Satanism is one of those words that tends to produce an immediate reaction, often before any real understanding is present. In your experience, what do people most consistently misunderstand about it, and where do those misunderstandings come from?** So, so many misconceptions and so little time. Most people, particularly those who are completely outside the occult and magical communities, have absolutely no clue what real Satanic practice entails. Satanism, for those people, has become a catch-all buzzword for anything that falls outside of any particular person’s narrow scope of moral, religious, and behavioral righteousness. It becomes much easier to rail against the supposed wickedness of Satanism than live up to the precepts of their own religion, especially when they include concepts like charity and selflessness. If I were to give a single source of most misunderstandings, it would be exactly that. A long historical tradition of other religions dictating what Satanism is from a place of moral separation and superiority. No need to verify their claims with proof, and no expectation of basis in reality. Just whatever degenerative claim they want to base a sermon around becomes Satanic devil-worship, and it is accepted without question. This is one of the main reasons I wrote Paths to Satan. With this kind of narrative fiction becoming the most prevalent image of Satanism in the country, I felt that it had to be formally challenged by someone from within the community itself. The next misconception is a direct result of this kind of historical theological world-building - Satanism is focused on death, sacrifices, suffering, and what would generally be considered “evil.” Putting aside the fact that a unified universal definition of evil has still yet to be achieved, the rest of the claim is simply factually incorrect. It is wholly a concoction of non-Satanists that our practices are centered around these concepts. If anything, a cursory look into a single Satanic source would confirm the exact opposite. Satanism is one of the most life affirming practices in the world, which includes the lives of animals. Most of the Satanists I know are true animal lovers, who value the relationships they have with animals and seek to learn from those connections as much as they do from Human circles. Stanton LaVey, grandson of Anton, actually shared a lot of great wisdom with me in regard to animals and Satanic philosophy. It informed a lot of my current views about Satanism, the natural world, and how we fit into it as a species. The last misconception I will touch on, because I could keep going for a while, is one that gets perpetuated by many within the community itself. The misconception that Satanism is not a religion, and that Satanists do not believe in a literal Satan. Like most spiritual concepts that gain a lot of traction, this is actually both true and false. Some Satanists believe exactly that. And others do believe in Satan, but not the literal interpretation of the Christian devil. That is one of the most difficult concepts for non-Satanists, and Christians in particular, to grasp because they rely so heavily upon a literal interpretation of Jesus and the events that are discussed in the bible. Most spiritual or theistic Satanists I know are accustomed to viewing the historical context that Satan is presented within, across cultures, without forming a spiritual perspective based around their interpretations. But, at the same time, some Satanist do adhere to those literal interpretations. And it isn’t my, or any other Satanists’, place to tell them that they are wrong. It just doesn’t need to be a part of my Satanism. This is at the heart of why the Satanists don’t believe in Satan misconception is so wrong. It attempts to generalize one of the most nuanced religions in the world. And yes, it is a religion, because a lot of Satanists treat it as one. But that doesn’t mean it is, or needs to be, organized or centralized. My Satanism is not going to be the same as any other Satanist on the planet, no matter how aligned our views or practices may be. This is exactly as it should be. For those who seek certainty in their “faith”, this is a completely alien and foreign concept. That is exactly as it should be, too. **PAA: A lot of people associate Satanism with either empty provocation or something harmful, whereas your work is structured and practice-based. Has that gap between public perception and lived reality shaped how you present or teach your system?** As far as my actual process and method of instruction, I would probably say no. The public image of Satanism is sort of a double-edged sword in that regard, I think. Because it is so closed off from the mainstream, I don’t see many complete novices come to me with the sort of misconceptions or biases that I discussed in the previous question. When they are ready to come sit in one of my classes or participate in a workshop, they are already past that point. So when I am teaching everyone is sort of on the same page already, at least enough to let me get through material without being bogged down in the public relations type issues. Now, if we are talking about reach, availability, and inclusivity within common spaces, I would have to say a resounding yes. The places where Satanism can take an open and enthusiastic part in society are few and far between, with most doors still being closed to us when it comes to gatherings or other public spaces. When we are welcomed, it is almost always conditionally and we become targets of opportunity for those looking to “protect their space.” The number of times I have heard conversations revolving around whether “a Satanist is needed” at an event would probably surprise you. Or it may not. Par for the course as far as I am concerned, at this point. Even doing business, hiring contractors, or getting Satanically themed items crafted and manufactured is still a huge boulder for Satanists to push up the hill when trying to open businesses or create their art. Like many things, it has gotten better over the last few years, but who knows what the future will hold. **PAA: Do you think the term “Satanism” still serves a useful purpose for what you are doing, or has its cultural baggage become more of an obstacle than a clarification?** This is a pretty hotly-debated issue within the community right now. There have been many iterations of Satanic leaders trying to put a new name to Satan, and it could even be argued that much of the Luciferian movement is in response to the community-driven attempt to distance themselves from the Satan label. Because, in their defense, much of what comes to mind when people talk about Satan does not reflect the lived spiritual experience of those who actually work with Him. In my opinion, however, we should never make decisions about our own spirituality based on what it means or says to those outside of the faith. It should not be a reflection of a desire to be accepted within a society that perhaps we should be adversarial towards. I certainly do not believe Satan to be the true, or even most accurate label, for the spirit that has been cast into that role by those who would seek to subjugate Humanity. But I do believe that they just may have chosen an incredibly accurate label for Him in regards to his relationship with them. At some point in the future, I can see a new name and identity being found for Satan, but we aren’t there yet. We must earn the right to change that name through influencing the world in a way that redefines His role within it. I believe Satan to truly be adversarial to the state of the world that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have crafted over the last two thousand years. It has nothing to do with duality. Their mystics identified their greatest enemy early in the game, and it is Satan. This world that they have created is abhorrent to Him, as it should be to us. We should strive to change the world into something that reflects His influence upon it, and when we have done so, then maybe we can consider finding a new name for the same spirit who has been given a new role within the world. Until then, it is our duty to use that name, to carry that label, and do our utmost to become Satans ourselves. **PAA: In your view, what separates serious practice from theatrical rebellion or identity-based posturing within the space?** Great question! Simple answer: a real connection with Satan. I don’t even care if you simply view Him as a literary and historical figure that you feel drawn to or associate with. As long as you are making a real effort to connect with that energy and allow it to influence your life. It doesn’t matter if you are steeped in occult ritual or simply reading books, looking at art, and creating your own existence in that light, as long as you are actively opening yourself up to that influence honestly - you are a real, serious Satanist to me. Because you are making it about you and your connection to what you see as Satan, instead of posturing for a reaction from an outward source. When you seek attention through rebellion, want to provoke reactions, or posture yourself in inauthentic ways, you are directing all of your effort towards someone or something else. This is actually very Christian when you look at it objectively. All energy and attention focused outward, on the congregation and on the acceptance (or rejection in this case) of God. Completely antithetical to real Satanic practice, which above all, should be self-focused and a pursuit of personal fulfilment. I would even extend that into actual Satanists who are meditating for hours, doing crazy rituals, and extending themselves beyond their capabilities in “service” to Satan. This is, once again, making the practice about something other than you. Serve yourself first. Make the decision based on you. Your suffering and servitude are not valuable commodities within Satanism. Personal power, ability, and resources will serve you and your Satanism much more. Do not seek to achieve these things through your spirituality as some sort of short cut to avoid hard work. Use your spirituality to strengthen yourself, obtain these things, and then apply them back into your spirituality to even greater effect. ## Experience, Teaching, and Perspective **PAA: Through your work with Twisted Tree Abbey and your appearances on platforms like The Magister Dixit Podcast, you’ve engaged with both individuals and a wider audience. Has teaching changed your own understanding of the work?** Absolutely. Not only teaching, but group work in general. Coming from someone who was a solitary practitioner for over a decade after having a bad experience with groups in the early days of my practice, I would now say that at least periodic intervals of intensive group work are integral to long term growth. Teaching in particular, though, has done a lot to positively influence my own techniques and practice. Much like the process that martial artists go through, after reaching a certain point it really is valuable to walk someone else through the same material. It forces you to revisit concepts you may otherwise have felt beneath you, and invariably, new lessons are learned from the now more-experienced perspective. In regards to magical practice, the confidence that can be gained through teaching cannot be overstated. Particularly those that come from solitary practices, group work and teaching can be a wonderful experience wherein they get to see just how much they really do know. For me personally, as someone who does a lot of experimental and originative magic, teaching allows me to expose material to a broader audience and further judge efficacy through the interactions I witness. There is no greater litmus test for something you are working on than trying to teach it to someone else. Beyond all of that, there is a true value in the different perspectives that teaching exposes you to. Seeing how the same material is filtered through another person’s understanding can really unlock new doors to your own. Seeing how your own material is filtered through those understandings is also worth its weight in gold as an author or creator, and sometimes can point towards real gaps or opportunities. In one instance I found that because people view some concepts so differently, such as divinity, that when I was using those words they were taking in completely different interpretations of what I was trying to share. It showed me that sometimes we are talking very different languages even though the concepts being discussed are the same, especially when bridging traditions with strangers. **PAA: You’ve been practicing since the early 2000s. What is one belief or method you held strongly early on that you’ve since had to revise or abandon?** I can give you two. First, the idea that Satanism is the correct religion and that everyone should and would be a Satanist if they understood the truth about it. I used to have a saying that said Christians are sheep that learned how to eat twigs, because they didn’t know what grass was. Implying that they had never been introduced to true spirituality (read: Satanism) and once they were, they would naturally choose it. Over time and experience I have learned that first, everyone should not be Satanists, and second, some people are just twig-eating sheep. It is what they want, what they deserve, and what they should be given. It is not my place as a Satanist to change their diet. But I also don’t have to supply them with twigs, or show my loved ones how wonderful twigs are to eat. The second thing I dropped over time was the belief that supplication and spiritual service are pathways towards success in the mundane world, particularly as a Satanist. A lot of Satanists will reach a point where they want to be of service. They want to devote themselves to the cause and start making their Satanism a full-time practice. I have seen and heard so many devotions asking for the means to do so. I have made them personally. The lesson I had to learn is that service is appreciated but not a contract for success. You have to do that. If you want to apply your success to your Satanic craft, after you have achieved it, that will be rewarded. Absolutely. But it will not be a means to your advancement in and of itself. You can Hail Satan until your voice breaks and your eyes bleed, you won’t get a penny for it unless you figure out a way to make it happen yourself. That is the truest gift of this path. We have connection. We have relationship. We also have responsibility, and the contrary has never been promised except by those that know Satan the least. It is really a throwback to the Abrahamic religions most of us hail from. All success and prosperity is supposed to flow from God in that system. We are not the same. **PAA: Across your interviews, including Radio Wasteland, you tend to emphasize clarity over mystique. Why do you think so much of the occult space still leans toward obscurity rather than precision?** There are a few reasons for this, I think. First and foremost, it is a hell of a lot easier to just sound mysterious and use nonsense words than try to make sense of what constitutes the modern magical age. It takes real study, meditation, and contemplation to come up with something coherent of your own on some of these topics, even an opinion, and so the time investment for the result doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. They have no true desire to understand the material and concepts, just to achieve the perception that they do. This ties into the second reason I think this happens: authority. One of the few opportunities to truly gain from within these communities is from the authority you can establish over others. These people are gaining authority through mystique and low-budget wonder rather than through knowledge. One can be gained much faster, but not sustained, which is why you see a revolving door of social media gurus and very few teachers and authors who can sustain themselves for years or decades within the space. **PAA: Looking across everything you’ve developed so far, what aspect of your system still feels the most open-ended or evolving to you?** I know you are probably directing the question towards my written works, but the most honest answer I can give is my personal practice. One of the hardest parts about being an author in this space is the fact that I am always still learning, still refining, and still discovering. Sometimes I cannot be as accessible, or active, or as comprehensive as I would like to be with some of my works, simply because my own spiritual practice can still be quite taxing in and of itself. It can be difficult for me to keep up with the progress and work of others, and write down my progress and compile it into digestible formats, and do the exploratory work to confirm results and what they mean, on top of everything else that comes with being an author, and a husband, and a dad, and... It is why it can be years between works from me. Sometimes I am just still in the middle of discovering and learning myself and need time to process before bringing the results to the world. Sometimes my altars are being torn down and rebuilt, new spirits are being contacted, and I am simply making my way through the work. When it comes to my written offerings though, Zoetia is an obvious choice. There will be so much work to uncover with that system it will keep me busy for a decade. But my work with the Grigori is still probably the most open ended and ready for evolution. Beyond the works in the Deification Magick and Social Magick spellbooks, I have developed a more comprehensive divinatory system using the Fallen Angels that still needs to be released, and I believe the work that comes from that system will be some of my most consequential. Ever. **PAA: Thank you, Martin, for sharing so much with us - over 10K words, very much appreciated. ** --- --- # Portuguese Magic, Saint Cyprian and the Lost History of Iberian Grimoires: An Interview with José Leitão Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/portuguese-magic-saint-cyprian-interview-with-jose-leitao/ ## Introduction Historian José Leitão explores Portuguese magic, Saint Cyprian, grimoires, the Inquisition, learned and folk magic, treasure hunting and the hidden history of Iberian esoteric traditions. Learn more about his work. [Academia.edu (research papers, books & publications)](https://coimbra.academia.edu/Jos%C3%A9VieiraLeit%C3%A3o?) [Hadean Press (many of José's books)](https://hadean.press/search?q=Jose+Leitao) [The Immaterial Book of St. Cyprian](https://revelore.press/product/immaterial-book-st-cyprian/) --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/12-13-1024x756.jpg) **PAA: Your recent doctoral thesis is called Learned Magic in Early Modern Portugal. To begin with, what exactly was “learned magic,” and who would have had access to it in Portugal at that time?** Alright, we’re starting with definition; as a scholar, I have to say I appreciate this. What we call ‘learned magic’ is, first and foremost, an academic category: a sort of artifice and tool used in an academic context in order to create a delineation to make our lives easier. You see, to speak of ‘magic’ from a historical position, in what we usually refer to as methodological agnosticism, can be complicated. There is a great deal of talk on and about magic throughout history, but this is rarely approached from a neutral perspective. Frequently, formalized magic schools or systems, particularly those after the nineteenth century, tend to have their own definitions of magic, its border and cosmological implications and how to engage with it. This means that such an idea of magic is contextual and specific and, from a broad or global historical perspective, of non-valid universal applicability. So, if we remove ourselves from any implicit or explicit belief in any magico-religious system and its definitions, we are left with a huge problem when we wish to speak about ‘magic’ because what do we even mean when we say ‘magic’? That word has been used in many contexts, it has meant many things, it has been used as a badge of pride and a mark of shame. So, as scholars, we need to carve out sections and distinctions within this vast ocean of ideas in order to make it circumscribable, discussable and historicizable. This is what the notion of ‘learned magic’ is. Learned magic is what we may consider to be a general global tendency within magic, usually placed in contrast with ‘folk magic’. In simple terms, folk magic can be thought of as an oral tradition, a form of practice associated with uneducated, undereducated or non-formally educated individuals. It is essentially preoccupied with immediate human troubles, such as physical protection, the healing of illness and disease, insuring good crops (in rural settings), the health of animals or the growth of children. In the environments where ‘folk magic’ is common, this is frequently not distinguishable from ‘folk religion’ or ‘folk medicine’ (which are themselves also academic categories), and these practices belong to a local cultural continuum with every other aspect of life, such as farming, cooking, weaving or anything else. Folk magic might be learned, and it may be the result of ‘remarkable birth’ circumstances, and its practitioners tend to exist without major social tensions and provide semi-normalized services to their communities, even if these might sometimes clash with each other or local representatives of learned culture. Learned magic is the other side of this coin. This is essentially a literary tradition, perpetuated and communicated through books and text. Logically, individuals who engage with this form of magic tend to be educated and somewhat affluent; typical social groups associated with this style of magic are clerics/priests, noblemen/courtiers, students and masters, graduates, wealthy merchants or artisans. This is a typically cosmopolitan tradition, mostly present in large cities. Every classical magic book, such the Clavicula Salomonis or any other medieval and early modern grimoire belong to this category due to their simple existence as written texts. Authors such as Agrippa or Paracelsus in the early modern period, Lévi, Mathers, Crowley or Bardon in the contemporary, equally contribute and formalize this literary tradition as a thing in itself. Having said all of that, like I stated right at the beginning, learned magic and folk magic are academic categories, with no inherent reality to themselves, and it is largely impossible to draw a line determining where learned magic ends and folk magic begins, or vice versa. While these are two general tendencies within magic, there are many overlaps between them, and historical magic practitioners will frequently not concern themselves with any such distinctions and will participate in whatever magic is available to them without any considerations on implicit cosmologies or the internal logic of the several practices they might engage with. Arriving here… well… the people involved with learned magic in early-modern Portugal, would be pretty much the same as those involved with it anywhere else: noblemen, clerics, students, medics, diplomats… literate individuals with formal learning and the resources and contacts necessary to acquire expensive forbidden literature and perform the rites described within this. There are, of course, nuances and idiosyncrasies in Portugal, as there are in France, England or in any environment, be them related to historical or cultural circumstances. For example, in the Portuguese kingdom, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, you can find a marked absence of courtiers associated with magic, largely due to Portugal not having a royal court during much of this time period (the Portuguese crown was held by the Castilian king in Madrid). On the other hand, this same proximity between Portugal and Castile allowed the easy travel of Castilian theater troupes through Portugal, and there seems to be a marked recurrence of magic practitioners among these. But overall, learned magic tends to follow similar patterns of readership in most European regions. **PAA: You have said that Portuguese archives contain a great deal of material about magic, but learned magic has received less attention than folk practices. Why do you think this part of Portuguese history has been so overlooked?** I think, at the end of the day, it’s simply a matter of availability. I mostly work on the Portuguese Inquisition, and in this folk magic trials and documentation tend to be a lot more abundant, particularly in the eighteenth century. There are a few reasons for this, most of which are mundane, to be honest. Firstly, if we are talking from within a divide between the educated and the uneducated, historically, there have always been a greater number of uneducated people, and by that fact we should always expect to find a greater representation of people practicing folk magic than learned magic. Then there are other factors, the principal of which that the Iberian Inquisitions actually did not care too much about magic or magic practitioners. This means that, while magic was a crime, and if a magic practitioner was found he would be tried, there weren’t any individuals we could call ‘witchfinders’ in this country, nor individuals roaming the streets and fields actively looking for magicians or witches. Side by side with this, what is also observed is that Iberian society was not particularly concerned with magicians either, and at times this can even be seen as somewhat uncooperative with legal authorities in denouncing magicians. This is the situation for most of the history of the Inquisition, but it does change in the eighteenth century. Portugal can be said to have had a late Enlightenment, and only around the halfway point on the eighteenth century does one note a clear and systematic reformation of academic curriculum and a change in intellectual culture. This was particularly noticeable in medicine, with Galenism only being excluded from the curriculums of the University of Coimbra with the 1772 reforms. Leading up to this moment, you have a new generation of medical doctors pushing towards an increased openness to new and external medical notion as derived from Paracelsianism and chemical medicine. One of the things that can be understood by analyzing Coimbra Inquisition trials was that this new generation of medics was not only pushing for intellectual reform but actively instrumentalizing the Inquisition to suppress some of their competition, namely, folk healers/magicians, which then causes a sharp increase in the overall representation of folk magic trials in the Portuguese Inquisition overall. Looking at the other side of the social scales, it should also be understood that the persecution of learned magic carried some difficulties from a practical standpoint. Individuals associated with this tended to be well-connected, often times extremely well established and positioned. Not that the Inquisition was particularly frightened of an important or heavy name (particularly during the dynastic union, when they were probably the most powerful and well-organized institution in the country), but there were other issues at hand which aren’t always entirely evident, such as unspoken social obligation, favor trading and the overlaps of secular and ecclesiastic power structures. These are all things we can look at today as being clear instances of corruption, but the standards of the time were indeed very distinct from our own, and some of these things were just part of how things functioned. Also, learned magic is something which is not uncommonly practiced in an isolated context, or among a tight group of collaborators, and this makes it a lot less visible than folk magic, which tends to be more open and socially integrated. These are the historical reasons one can point out, but then you also have the academic reasons. I’m not disparaging anyone, but the fact is that the history of magic, as an academic discipline, is rather undeveloped in Portugal. This means that a lot of the work produced in the past decades was done from a position of partial unfamiliarity of the complicated nuances that exist within magic from a historical perspective. Furthermore, there isn’t much familiarity with the complicated varieties and genealogies of magic books which formalize learned magic as a thing in itself. While there are scholars who do notice clear differences between the magic being performed by illiterate individuals and educated elites, this observation falls short of these considering that they might be looking at two different and distinguishable forms of magic. So, under these conditions, obviously people will tend to gravitate towards the more abundant and comprehensive documents, namely those on folk magic. **PAA: You mentioned that most of your evidence comes from the records of the Portuguese Inquisition. Since these accounts were written by people investigating and prosecuting others, how do you separate what someone actually believed or did from the Inquisition’s interpretation of it?** Yeah… that is an eternal question when dealing with any Inquisition, or any legal proceedings, and there isn’t a final or easy answer for it. Unavoidably, any document the Inquisition produces, independently of its nature, topic or form, primarily informs us about the Inquisition itself: its social and economic context, its legal and political significance, its spheres of influence, the men who where a part of it and sustained it, and a variety of other aspects. Only under all of this do you have the defendant and their words. This isn’t a fatalistic observation, but it is something you need to keep in mind anytime you work with this sort of historical documentation. The words that are in front of you were not written by the person being questioned; they were written by a scribe, and this scribe could have his own biases, could mishear statements or could make mistakes. Much more serious than that, he was under the instruction of an inquisitor who could have him ignore and change statements. Looking at the other side, one also needs to remember that defendants weren’t all passive helpless victims, and many carefully selected their words in order to shift blame, redirect the inquisitor’s attention to a minor crime or even cater to the inquisitor’s expectations in order to provide him with a believable narrative of regret. And some simply lied for their self-preservation. I suppose navigating this is something that is only doable with experience, and even then, there is always a significant portion of uncertainty. But, as you read this type of documentation you start to understand and have a grasp on the typical avenues of questioning the Inquisition tended to follow, the stereotypical questions and the expected answers, and you can pretty much figure out where the defendant’s words stop and the inquisitorial projection begin. And more importantly, after you figure out the patterns, you also begin to see when the pattern is broken, when the inquisitor loses control of the conversation and, if you have a solid background in the history of magic and the history of the definition of heresy, when somebody is bullshiting or not. Also, most people don’t realize that an Inquisitorial tribunal was still a court of law. There was a clear and complex legal procedure to be followed. The Inquisition’s definition of crime might be somewhat arbitrary by our standards, but the legal procedure certainly wasn’t. There were several types of sessions, and the opening ones were usually given to the defendant, who was allowed to tell the entirety of his side of the story without leading questions. Again, such statements were not exempt from pressure, but you can extract a lot from them, from the original denunciations and the occasional voluntary confession. Furthermore, Inquisitors needed to work in order to prove heresy, they had to find actual evidence, question several witnesses, hear multiple versions of the same stories, allow the formulation of a defense, question the credibility of denouncers and witnesses. It’s rather an interesting experience, after a while, being able to follow the several sessions and retrace the several steps of a trial. I’ve had the experience of catching Inquisitors making logical mistakes, missing important evidence and defendants letting something slip the inquisitor didn’t catch up on… I’m not entirely sure, because those documents vanished during the 1755 earthquake, but I think I managed to solve a seventeenth century murder case a while ago. So, in sum… it’s all training, habit and familiarity, and, importantly, it’s knowing what an Inquisition did, what an inquisitor’s job was, what the definition of a heresy is and be able to put yourself on that side of the trench and understand why what is being said is being said, why an individual was being led to the house of torment. And it’s also being able to admit that there are things which these documents will never be able to tell you. **PAA: You mentioned that there was no real border between ‘learned magic’ and ‘folk magic’. Did books, oral traditions and local customs regularly mix together?** Yeah, sometimes. I think the best and most visible examples of this are some grimoire genealogical lines. It’s usually not a problem identifying when you are looking at learned magic, since this is a literary tradition. So, whenever anything is placed on paper, by definition, it becomes a learned object that requires education in order to be approached and interacted with. However, while the nature of a book is always learned, its content might not be so. You have plenty of instances, be it in Portugal or not, where your occasional literate farmer or local village priest will collect a number of local folk remedies or random practices into a notebook, making up what might be considered a ‘transitional’ object: somethings that bridges both these social and cultural extremes. In a way, the Iberian Books of Saint Cyprian, a type of local grimoire, seem to be created by this type of process: an accumulation of prayers, folk magic recipes, practices and procedures that builds itself into a literary tradition. Interestingly, the same can be seen to happen in the Scandinavian Cyprian books and in a few other grimoire genealogical lines. While rarer, the opposite is also known to happen, with there being circumstances where elements of learned culture manage to seep into the folk side of things. There are a few attested ways this could happen, such as through theatrical representation of learned magic practices, the very action of the Inquisition when this pressed defendants into admitting to practices and engagement with cosmological notions outside of their own environment, or when the crimes and penitence of its condemned were read aloud in the autos-da-fé (a type of public spectacle organized by the Inquisition to advertise its action and effectiveness). Also, we tend to think of reading as a solitary activity, but in the early modern period this could be a communal event, where a literate member of a group would read aloud to his companions and friends. There are known instances of the transmission of erudite medical notions into folk circles in this way and, in theory, should such a group have access to a learned magic book, the same could be done with it. However, it’s a lot easier to track the learned appropriations of folk culture, since these tend to leave a material track in history (the book), while the folk side, existing mostly in an oral form, often does not leave much of a mark which can be analyzed. **PAA: When European books on magic arrived in Portugal, were they preserved in something close to their original form, or were they translated, shortened and mixed with Portuguese material?** That’s very hard to say… Firstly, very few historical magic books have anything which we may call an ‘original form’. Some do have this, namely those written from scratch by one author, such as Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, or grimoires which we actually know their general origin and production date, like the Arbatel. But other than that, it’s all a constantly shifting, flowing set of ideas, practices and instructions, coming together and coming apart throughout centuries. We shouldn’t look at grimoires and magic books like fixed sets of information, but rather as historical products of a sprawling and constantly evolving tradition. But having said that, while I have found several instances of European magic books being present and used in the Portuguese territory, I haven’t found many actual manuscripts I could analyze… just an eighteenth century Italian Heptameron. The other books seemed to have been destroyed, and some simply disappeared while under the custody of the Inquisition (which is a whole other story). So, we are mostly limited to the descriptions of these books as given either by witnesses, defendants or Inquisition qualifiers (a specialized reader who would analyze suspicious statements, documents or books in order to ascertain if they contained any heretical implications), and these are often not very complete. However, in some instances, there are clear mentions of ‘composite’ magic books. Personal notebooks individual magicians could produce which could contain sections from various European magic books, loose folk magic procedures and other such material. But even in these instances, one thing that is noticeable is that, while European magic literature would be frequently transported into Portugal, this never seems to establish any roots here. Meaning, books would circulate, they could be copied and used, but these never entered long-lasting cycles of reproduction which would allow them to intermix with local magic ideas in a sustainable way; this seems to mostly happen in an isolated manner. This establishes a strange contrast with Castile, for example, a kingdom very close to Portugal both in geographic and cultural terms, and where you do have apparent frequent reproduction of European magic books and even the creation of local variations on these, particularly of the Solomonic kind. This then means that, in Portugal, you actually have two distinct traditions of learned magic: a cosmopolitan and outward looking one, dependent on the importation of books from outside of this territory, and the local one, produced in Portugal, by Portuguese individuals and largely corresponding to local Portuguese preoccupations, such as the Books of Saint Cyprian. And for most of history, these two traditions do not seem to interact with each other apart from these isolated incidents of partial overlap. And to complicate the matter, Castile, besides being a center of reproduction of magic books, was also the source of a few original lineages of texts, particularly those related to astral magic, and these could also be found in Portugal, but once again, they do not seem to be taken hold by local magic practicers and enter into local reproduction loops. **PAA: When you examine an original manuscript, what can you learn that would be lost in a modern transcription? Can the handwriting, corrections, diagrams or signs of use sometimes tell their own story?** Well… that depends on the transcription, but yes to those other things. This might sound odd, but when you find a manuscript, from a historical perspective, its content is not its most important aspect. The discovery of an unknown manuscript immediately forces a series of questions: what is this manuscript doing here, who brought it, who wrote it, who used it, why did it survive, what preoccupation is it responding to? When you are concerned with the history of magic, or the history of the practice of magic, these are the relevant questions to be answered. Also, the direct handling of manuscript allows for many other insights, such as material composition, errors and mistakes by the author, evidence of material fatigue, such as folding or degradation on specific pages, or the existence of marginalia or personal notes. Now, I’m obviously not disparaging the relevance of content, particularly when we are talking about an entirely new and unknown text. But even then, a new text primarily offers clues for the establishment of literary clusters and genealogies or the history of magic ideas. While some perennialism might disagree, the content of a magic manuscript does not exist by its own virtue; content is a result of a constant dialogue with social, cultural and personal context. For example: if I find a treasure hunting manuscript (as I have), this implies a cultural context of treasure hunting, an interaction with local folkloric ideas on land and territory, local notions of history, ideas on the nature of treasure guardian spirits, legal land rights, ethical and morality problems on the nature of wealth and fortune. On top of these questions, content might pose others: if the book is in Latin or vernacular this implies a different target readership; if the book mentions the use of liturgical literature, this implies a group of individuals, one of which will likely need to be a priest; if the book mentions specific cultural notions, such as specific treasure guardians, spirit names or geographic locations, this tells us from which culture and location it likely originates from; if it quotes another text, this offers its time frame, and all of this might then point towards an author or readership group. Now, I also understand if all of this sounds dull from a practitioner perspective that mostly cares about text and applicability. However, the answering of all of these questions invariably provides an exponentially richer approach to magic and a deeper understanding of the concrete actions and words involved in such a practice. **PAA: Saint Cyprian seems to have several different identities: a Christian martyr, a legendary former magician and the supposed author of magical books. How did these different versions of Cyprian become joined together?** It’s not so much as how they came together, but how they came apart… The identity of Cyprian as a saint, magician and martyr stems from his original narratives: the Conversion of Cyprian, the Confession of Cyprian and the Martyrdom of Cyprian, collectively referred to as the Acts of Saint Cyprian of Antioch, all of which are fictional narrative from the 4th century. So, right from the beginning, we need to always have present that Saint Cyprian of Antioch, the magician-saint to which the Books of Saint Cyprian are attributed to, is not a historical character. The stories from where this character is constructed are essentially Christian polemical texts, highlighting the inherent superiority of Christianity in relation to other religious practices, here portrayed as demonic. These texts describe Cyprian as a gifted pagan child, dedicated from an early age to several pagan gods and initiated into several mystery schools and who eventually offers himself to the Devil. As he reaches adulthood, Cyprian establishes himself in the city of Antioch as a magician for hire, being eventually contacted by a young man named Aglaïdas who desires to marry a young Christian damsel named Justa or Justina. As Cyprian attempts to use his demonic magic to inflame Justa’s love/lust for his client, he finds all his efforts fruitless, resulting in him eventually summoning the Devil to ask for an explanation for these failures. Being compelled by God, the Devil confesses the truth, that Justa’s God is the true God, and he, and all his cunnings and all his minions, are powerless against the sign of the cross. Being informed of this reality, Cyprian shuns the Devil, burns his magic books, abandons his old sinful ways and converts, which eventually leads to his and Justa’s martyrdom by order of Emperor Diocletian. Now, what the Cyprian narrative effectively creates, in hagiographical terms, is the par-excellence patron saint against magic and sorcery. The tale of Cyprian is essentially one of victory against magic, and it is with this fame that his name gets initially disseminated through various other texts, sermons and works. However, as early as the 11th century, Cyprian’s name can also be found not so much as a protector against magic, but as an intermediary capable of aiding practicing magicians in their workings. How or why this happens is pretty much a mystery, but he very quickly becomes one of the central magic heroes in several European regions. From here, several books, within their own narratives, start to claim Cyprian as their author, be it as a book that either escaped destruction, the one Cyprian thought was the most important and fundamental and decided to preserve, or even as a book produced by Cyprian after conversion, as a form of Christian magic. And these variations can be geographically or chronologically located as several regions where the tale of Cyprian became popular will have their own view of him. In Iberian he is extremely ambiguous, but he is mostly a patron of magic and aligned with ‘dark’ kinds of practices. On the other hand, in the orthodox world, Saint Cyprian is still in line with his hagiography, representing the victory of faith over demonic power, with ample devotional literature dedicated to him. All these distinctions are simply localized manifestations of what became a folk narrative. Its original purpose and plot became irrelevant, and Cyprian becomes what he needs to become when he enters any new environment and space. **PAA: We usually speak about The Book of Saint Cyprian as though it were one particular book. Your research points to a much more complicated history involving different manuscripts, printed editions and collections of material. Is it really one book, or would it be more accurate to call it a family of books?** The second, but I prefer to call it a literary tradition. There is no Cyprian ur-text, just like there isn’t one of the Clavicula Solomonis. It’s a lineage of books that are written, produced, put together and taken apart and manifest in several arrangements and branches. Some branches die out, others thrive, some lean on particular preoccupations, some get to the printing press and others don’t. However, I will say that, currently, or at least since the mid- nineteenth century, when you are speaking of the Portuguese Book of Saint Cyprian, you are mostly talking about one single book that has stayed relatively stable for over a century, but this is actually the exception in the long history of these texts. And this one single book is itself the result of this same long and complicated story, containing elements from early modern urban folk magic, eighteenth century treasure hunting preoccupations, Portuguese imperial concerns, French occultism and a bunch of other things. But even this one current Portuguese version cannot be said to be the final product of this genealogical line, as, having been transported to Brazil really early in its history, this single version has given rise to a series of local variations and adaptations, and importantly, all of these are just as legitimate as any others. And then, you also have the Scandinavian Cyprian books, which mostly follow a similar pattern of non-centralized composition and variability. So, you know, from the moment you realize Saint Cyprian is a fictional character, and that there is no evidence of a root text, then all variations on this are just as equally valid as all others. **PAA: You mentioned the Portuguese printed Book of Saint Cyprian appeared relatively late, in the 19th century, although parts of its contents and the traditions surrounding it are much older. How far back can the Portuguese Cyprian tradition be traced?** That’s a complex question. I firstly don’t think it’s entirely possible to distinguish between a Portuguese and a Spanish/Castilian Cyprian tradition before the nineteenth century. With that said, as far as I know, the first time a magic manuscript is referred to as a Book of Saint Cyprian is in a 1610 Toledo Inquisition denunciation (not a full trial). This document does not offer much information regarding the content and structure of this book, only that it was found in the possession of a certain Juan de Toledo and he used it to find treasure. After that, we have a Coimbra Inquisition trial from 1620 mentioning a Book of Saint Cyprian which had apparently been copied from an older version about thirty years before this trial commenced, placing it at the end of the sixteenth century. So, I would say that objects called ‘Books of Saint Cyprian’, from what we know, originate in this time period, however, Cyprian traditions, be them in written form or otherwise, are likely a lot older than that. In particular, it should be noted that these early Cyprian books seem to be accumulations of disparate material around one central text, usually referred to as the Prayer of Saint Cyprian, a talismanic magico-religious text belonging to a wider ‘Western’ magico-religious arsenal, recurrently used as a method for the banishment of evil spirits, sorcery, and the evil eye, known in regions as varied as Italy, Scandinavia, and the Arabic world, and extremely popular in early modern Iberia. So, if you want to talk about a Cyprian literary tradition, this would be primarily tied to the dissemination of this prayer, and only later with the books. But regarding the origin or introduction of this prayer in Iberia, I don’t think there has been a solid proposal for this, so your guess is as good as mine. Now, regarding concrete sections from the nineteenth century book, if we exclude the presence of the Prayer of Saint Cyprian (which it does contain), I’d say we can trace certain forms of divination and a few erotic/domination magic procedures present in this version of the Books of Saint Cyprian easily into the seventeenth century. In particular, the systems of cartomancy present in that book seem to be adaptations of hydromancy and favomancy techniques used in urban centres in Iberia and South America mentioned in a few dozens of Inquisition trials. **PAA: Your recent book Cypriani Magici: Septem Horae Magicae examines a manuscript from the period when Cyprianic material was moving between handwritten manuscripts and printed books. What makes this particular text important?** It’s not one particular aspect of the Septem Horae that makes it important, it’s the whole goddamn thing… The Septem Horae is a Cyprian book, that much is not up for debate, but besides that, it goes against every convention I had come to expect from a magic book, particularly from a Cyprianic one. It breaks too many molds, it’s too uncomfortable. In terms of the understanding of the history and culture of these books, its discovery is a kind of watershed moment; just when I thought I had figured it out, something else comes along that challenges all conventions and theories. I look at it as an icon of a transitional period which we know very little about. I mean, it is easy to imagine a history of the Books of Saint Cyprian if we know what these were in the seventeenth century, and what they are in the nineteenth, because you can draw a line between any two points, but a book like the Septem Horae demonstrate how crooked this line can be. It is linguistically complex, it directly mentions working with Lucifuge Rofocale, a Grand Grimoire spirit of the Solomonic tradition, while refusing the use of Solomonic methods, it introduces this spirit in a context of Iberian folklore and seems to describe a system of magic based on planetary influences meant to power an analogue mechanism that locates treasure. It’s really not linearizable with anything I’ve seen before. I still maintain that the early modern Cyprian books evolved in relative isolation from the rest of European magic literature, but the Septem Horae demonstrates that this isolation ended a lot sooner than I through, and it took on shapes that I have never seen in any other magic book. To be completely honest, besides reaching the obvious conclusion that this book needed to be published as soon as I saw it, it’s still too strange for me to fully understand what its implication might be, or, if it even has implications. It’s a weird one, is what I’m saying. And then… there is another aspect that is perhaps personal. The Septem Horae is somewhat of a legendary text. The first time it is mentioned anywhere seems to be in an 1888 article by an early Portuguese ethnographer in what is probably the first tentatively academic study of Portuguese Saint Cyprian traditions. Anybody who has ever attempted to study these books from an academic perspective has read about it, but, for about one hundred and forty years ago, no one has ever been able to locate the Septem Horae, much less read or analyze it. It means something to me that I was the one who found it. Death anxiety is something you have to overcome step by step, and finding this book and making it available to an interested readership was a big one for me. **PAA: The manuscript includes a pact involving Lucifuge Rofocale, but, as you mentioned, it does not simply follow the familiar Solomonic system. What does this tell us about how Iberian writers adapted material from other European grimoires?** This is really not an easy answer given the extremely particular and isolated nature of the Septem Horae. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about it, among which its ‘authenticity’, meaning: was this a book somebody put together in the expectation that its content would be put into practice, or was this some kind of practical joke/hoax, or an object created in a specific way in order to make it look magical and then sold at a high price. I truly don’t know how to answer this. But then, it does tell us something about the integration and adaptation of non-Iberian magic material into Iberian magic culture. Taking a step back, there are other instances of the importation of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century European grimoires into Iberia which are a bit more palatable and understandable than the Septem Horae, and from which we can make some considerations. It should be firstly noted that these importations tend to happen within the Cyprian tradition, meaning: a specific grimoire is brought into Iberia, goes through a process of adaptation, and starts being referred to as a Book of Saint Cyprian. Furthermore, all of these instances I have so far analyzed seem to adapt these external grimoires for the purpose of magic treasure hunting. We have this happen with the Grand Grimoire, the Heptameron and the Grimoire of Pope Honorius. Given that magic treasure hunting, while being a greatly disseminated form of magic practice, tends to present very clear local specificities, these grimoire adaptations to the Iberian territory operate a certain ‘folklorization’ of these same non-Iberian texts. Certain sections and ideas are replaced or retconned in order to make them fit the general Iberian idea of what a hidden or buried treasure is and how these are supposed to function in relation to this. So, in this sense, and looking back at the beginning of our conversation, while these texts never cease being learned magic texts, there is an approximation of their content and purpose to folk preoccupation and cosmologies, even if sometimes this is merely implicit. **PAA: You’ve mentioned treasure hunting a few times, and this appears repeatedly in Iberian magical texts and in stories connected with Saint Cyprian. Why was hidden or enchanted treasure such an important subject in Portuguese and Spanish magic?** Well, treasure hunting is a rather common magic preoccupation in all of Europe, particularly from the eighteenth century onward. Magic will often follow trends, fashions and general tendencies, and treasure hunting is one of the hot topics of the Enlightenment. You have magic treasure hunting books popping up a bit everywhere in Europe, an example of which is the Grand Grimoire. Being that the Cyprian books before the nineteenth century never had a particularly solid form, and were themselves constantly responding to local preoccupations, treasure hunting quickly became associated with them. However, this does not seem to be a random or gratuitous event, and we can make some considerations on why this is the case. Sidestepping the prevalence of treasure narratives in Iberian, the Prayer of Saint Cyprian, the central text around which the Books of Saint Cyprian crystalize, is considered to be an extremely efficient way of banishing evil influences and spirits. Looking at treasure hunting worldwide, one of its most common characteristics is the belief that buried treasure will be under the stewardship of a treasure guardian, some kind of spirit or entity who will actively protect the treasure and antagonize the would-be treasure hunter(s). This is the reason why you often need magic to hunt for treasure, as magic treasure hunting books will contain instructions and procedures to banish these treasure guardians. In Iberia, this banishment function seems to be taken by the Prayer of Saint Cyprian and so, treasure hunting books being produced in eighteenth century Iberia will frequently feature this prayer and be named and referred to as Books of Saint Cyprian due to this. It should also be noted that not all eighteenth century Books of Saint Cyprian are treasure hunting books, and not all Iberian eighteenth century treasure hunting books are Books of Saint Cyprian, simply, the prayer takes on a new role in this time period, and many new books follow suit. Now, truth be said, even before the boom of magical treasure hunting Europe-wide, Iberia already had a complex culture of this same activity associated with certain mythical narratives of self-definition arising from the Reconquista, the lengthy historical process of conquest and establishment of the several Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula between the eighth and fifteenth centuries and which places a radical distinction between Christians and the previous Muslim rullership of the territory. The stark religious and racial distinction (often more imaginary than real) drawn in the Iberian ‘collective imaginary’ between Christians, as the current rulers of this territory, and ‘Moors’, as the previous rulers, effectively pushes the latter into a realm of chronological murkiness, associating their name and constructed image with all of the elements within the local landscape which cannot be accurately located within the collective memory of known historical time. This means that buried treasure, riches left behind by other cultures and civilizations, unknown or unusual structures such as megalithic monuments, Roman or early medieval ruins, caverns, water basins or strange rock formations (equally the common targets of treasure hunters in the rest of Europe), become associated with the notion of the ‘Moor’ not so much as an ancestor but as a radical outsider and antagonist to Christian culture and society, making them into a sort of cosmological ‘other’. Besides pseudo-historical, this narrative will occasionally pain these same ‘Moors’ as a kind of fairy, mouros or moura encantadas, individuals who were placed under a magical enchantment by some unspecified powerful sorcerer and now exist in a kind of immaterial state, inhabiting underground palaces and kingdoms and who may also act as treasure guardians. More often than not, be it in the eighteenth century or any other, in Iberia, buried treasure is assumed to be mouro treasure. So, once again, while magic treasure hunting books are learned objects, in Iberia they often have an undeniable folkloric aspect to themselves, as their own raison d’être is dependent on folk narratives, tales and legends. This holds true for the treasure hunting Cyprian book as also the external grimoires which are brought into this territory and reworked into treasure hunting manuals. **PAA: Catholic prayers, saints and sacred objects appear throughout Portuguese magical material. Was the Christian language sometimes used to make magic look acceptable, or did the people involved genuinely understand these practices as part of their Catholic world?** It’s more often the second option. Throughout the medieval and early modern period, the word ‘magic’ is actually most often used as an accusation. Something is labeled as magic, and not so much claims itself to be magic. Obviously, there are many exceptions to this, and there have always been people who will claim the title of magician, particularly in learned magic circles. But on the folk side, where you find these prayers and saintly petitions, the situation is not really that. And like I mentioned before, folk magic is not an isolated practice and the people who practice it most often don’t consider what they are doing to be a delineated form of practice distinct from what ecclesiastic or theological authorities will call religion. It was an absolute part of their Catholic worldview, and this will hold true even for people who will claim special titles in folk environments, such as ‘seven born sons/daughter’. The notion of multiple coexisting cosmologies or mutually exclusive sources of power and authority does not exist in the early modern period, be it in a learned or folk environment. Every source of power and authority will exist and share its reality with every other source of power and authority; if the Christian God is the true source of power and goodness, then every exercise of power and goodness will be believed to be rooted in this same God. This is the reason why folk magicians (or the individuals we, as academics and scholars, refer to as folk magicians) will frequently resist being labeled as ‘magicians’ or ‘witches’; these words were accusations, and most individuals did not perceive themselves as criminals by doing what they did. **PAA: You mentioned cartomancy before. In Clearing the Waters, you traced Saint Cyprian divination through records from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Is this what you address in this book?** Yeah. That book was basically me trying to resolve a few strange passages and cartomancy systems present in the contemporary nineteenth century Book of Saint Cyprian. Basically, that Cyprian book describes a few cartomancy methods, and these mostly rest on a few basic principles: you perform some ceremonies, consecrations and/or prayers, and you make a spread with playing cards. In this spread, the court cards stand for people and the pip cards for locations or events, and you then perform a reading by creating a narrative with all these elements in a specific order. This is interesting enough to warrant some consideration, but what makes this odd is that these same readings are frequently accompanied by the recitation of certain prayers and historiolae associating Saint Cyprian with the sea and with ships… which are elements that don’t really make sense in that context. This became interesting when I began working on the Inquisition and started finding these same prayers and historiolae associated with hydromancy. Besides this, what was likely the most popular form of divination in the seventeenth century among urban folk magicians was the mentioned favomancy. The basis of this system was that you gathered a collection of fava beans and a few other objects; these would need to be consecrated in several ways and mixed and cast over a flat surface. Once this was done, the reader would construct a narrative based on the relative position and proximity of all of these things to each other, in which the fava beans would signify people, and the remaining objects signify locations or events. All in all, this was the same basic divination system present in the nineteenth century Cyprian books, but instead of court and pip cards it used fava beans and an assortment of trinkets. Clearing the Waters is me tracking all of these systems through time and through several trials; explaining in detail how they worked, known variations on them, and the prayers and consecrations you are supposed to use with the ultimate aim of proposing a transmission of elements between these two early modern divination systems (hydromancy and favomancy) into cartomancy. And to be fully honest, while the theory holds solid, I cannot say that this is an entirely understood story, as the introduction of playing cards into this whole thing is not something I’m not particularly clear on. Obviously, cartomancy was already used in early modern divination, but this wasn’t particularly popular in Portugal, and you only start to see it pop up occasionally in the eighteenth century, and mostly through the influence of immigration from Castile (where cartomancy was indeed quite popular). So, this theory of transmission is still kind of a work in progress… at this point I have managed to collect a few more mentions of divination that seem to bear weight on this whole narrative of evolution of divination from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, so, with any luck, I’ll be able to publish a sequel to Clearing the Waters if I manage to piece a few more things together. **PAA: Portuguese Cyprianic traditions later travelled to Brazil and other places. As the books crossed the Atlantic, what changed and what remained recognizably Portuguese or Iberian?** Before I get into this, let me just mention that, so far as I’ve researched, I haven’t found significant elaborations on the Cyprian literary tradition in Spanish-speaking South America, even if the nineteenth century Spanish Book of Saint Cyprian (which is distinct from the Portuguese version) is extremely popular over there. I don’t have an explanation for this, and it could even be that I am missing something. Having said that, indeed Brazil does have a great and lively culture of Books of Saint Cyprian. For the most part, these seem to maintain a certain ‘core’, similar to the nineteenth century Portuguese ones. This is usually related to specific uses of the Prayer of Saint Cyprian present in the Portuguese book for exorcism and banishment of evil influences and treasure hunting. Some Brazilian books will include more material from the Portuguese edition, others less, but overall, most (if not all) will have very identifiable sections taken from it. But… the variations you find in Brazilian books throughout the late- nineteenth and twentieth century aren’t fully linearizable. Some books will lean a lot more on the folk Catholic aspects, other will include new section from non-Iberian grimoires, like the Clavicula Salomonis or the Ars Goetia, other will include Brazilian specific practices, be them associated directly or indirectly with Quimbanda and Umbanda, or from more ambiguous systems, sometimes collectively referred to as macumba. Now, besides this, from the twenty-first century on, you do start having Brazilian Cyprian books which do break this rough mold, and some do seem to be largely original works. Among these a few are clearly related to more spirit-inclined traditions, such as the already mentioned Umbanda, and you even have books which suggest themselves as having been texts received directly from Saint Cyprian, or some other related entity in the context of such magico-religious practices. **PAA: During your years of research, did you find anything in the archives that made you seriously rethink your earlier understanding of Saint Cyprian or Portuguese magic?** Yeah… a number of times, actually. While in the last fifteen years or so, our collective understanding of the Cyprian books has increased immensely, this is still a pretty frail field. We have a few mentions in the Inquisition, a few known manuscripts, but these are not so substantial that some kind of bulk number analysis and theorization can be made. This means that all our proposals and hypotheses are fragile by definition, and any new mention or manuscript we find risks casting everything down. The finding of the Septem Horae was a particularly dramatic instance of this. While that book had been mentioned 1888 as existing, its description was outlandish, and the fact that it simply disappeared suggested some kind of hoax. Then, out of the blue, the thing turns out to be real. I thought Books of Saint Cyprian where always written in vernacular, that one is in Latin (I’m using this word very liberally… because calling that Latin is a bit of a stretch); I thought the Grand Grimoire was a nineteenth century influence on Spanish Cyprian books, but the Septem Horae also has this; I considered that for a Book of Saint Cyprian to be accepted as a Book of Saint Cyprian, it needed to contain the Prayer of Saint Cyprian, but that one doesn’t; I through Lucifuge was a Solomonic spirit, but here he is being dealt with in a non-Solomonic way. It challenged and redid any and all definitions I had put in order to delineate the Portuguese Cyprian tradition. An event such as this is distressful, but it’s not tragic. In fact, it’s a blessing; it gives us, as academics, the chance to do it all again but better. More information is always a good thing, and if we feel otherwise, that’s just ego talking. And at the end of the day, this was indeed a good thing, not because I found a new manuscript, but because I ended up finding additional Inquisition documentation describing a manuscript more in line with the Septem Horae than the other manuscripts and texts I had previously studied. Should I not have found the Septem Horae, I would have probably disregarded these new references as outliers, or an instance of somebody misidentifying a random magic book as a Book of Saint Cyprian. The Septem Horae gave me the foresight necessary to realize that these were actually rare representatives of a branch of the Portuguese Cyprian tradition that ended up dying out. And regarding Portuguese magic in general, there wasn’t much information on that to begin with. We can now talk about traditions, lineages and genealogies, be them of practices, ideas or magical systems. We can talk about distinctions between urban and rural folk magic, between Iberian and European learned magic, between Portuguese and Castilian magic book production. Each of these differentiations and distinctions comes from a moment when whatever expectation we might have had regarding local magic practice got shattered and we were forced to reconsider and reconstruct a whole bunch of ideas. While I fully identify as a historian and scholar, I did originally start working on this sort of material coming from more of a practitioner background and, like many others, I had been educated in the post-nineteenth century occultism mentality of what magic was or what it was supposed to be. Everything from that point on has been a rethinking of this, and it will continue to be so. **PAA: Finally, what does the Portuguese evidence add to our understanding of European magic more generally? Is Portugal an unusual regional example, or does it reveal gaps in the way the wider history has been told?** Humm… I don’t think Portugal is any more unusual or unique than any other place in this regard, so it’s not about that. If we are engaging in a global discussion on the history and practice of magic, then this is simply another element to be added to this discussion. European magic, like Europe itself, is a complex space of continuities and fractures. You cannot tell a history of European anything if you don’t recognize the local idiosyncrasies of all the cultures and territories that make up this space. My own conception of my work is to integrate the Portuguese territory and its local culture into the global map of magic, to contribute to our collective understanding of this phenomenon in both its common and specific aspects, be these banalities or exceptionalities. For example, one way I can say that my work has truly contributed to filling a gap in history, is in my identification of a common tradition of Ibero-American early modern urban folk magic that seems to suggest itself as one of the roots of current Brazilian magico-religious systems like Quimbanda. I did not set out to discover this, I did not set out to claim a Portuguese origin to Brazilian practices, this simply happened because this is the nature of an interconnected world. In this same way, my studies of the Portuguese Cyprian books aim to accurately integrate these into the map of magic literature and grimoires. And in this I’m not a lone gun, and there are many scholars in several regions doing similar work as me, and it is due to this collective effort that, today, we can talk about Solomonic, Faustian, Iberian Cyprianic, Scandinavian Cyprianic, Paracelsian or Agrippan grimoires. That magic is not one thing, it is hundreds of things; that there is magic outside of orders, temples, and schools, that, like the authors of the thousands of grimoires that have been catalogue or are yet to be discovered, each individual has the legitimacy to put down his own grammar of magic and actively contribute this ever-changing culture. More words and more definitions don’t limit our exploration of magic; a deeper understanding of ourselves does not segregate us from each other. All of this offers new articulation, new insights, new bridges, new ways for all of us to, collectively, better understand oneanother and recognize our specificity and that of our fellows; to realize that what might be unique in any of us right now is also a product of communication and the commerce and trading of ideas and cultures. Portugal is not special, it is just another piece of the worldwide puzzle, but it just happens to be my piece. **PAA: Thank you very much for sharing your insight. All the best with your work.** --- --- # Higher Guardian Angel Contact, Bardon, Sixty Skills, Akasha and Non-Dual Light Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/higher-guardian-angel-contact-bardon-sixty-skills-akasha-and-non-dual-light/ ## Introduction What does it actually mean to make contact with the Higher Guardian Angel—and how can a practitioner distinguish a vague impression from a clear, direct encounter? In this episode of Perseus Conversations, James speaks with Fred, known in the Perseus and Sixty Skills communities for his detailed accounts of magical practice, energy work and direct experience. Fred explains the difference between soft contact and hard contact with the Higher Guardian Angel, why he regards the HGA as an external spiritual intelligence rather than simply a higher aspect of the self, and how his earliest experiences eventually led him toward Franz Bardon’s system and the Abramelin operation. Fred also discusses how his background in esoteric martial arts shaped his approach to magical training. For him, spiritual practice should produce something practical and observable—not merely interesting ideas, symbolic interpretations or vague experiences. This is a wide-ranging conversation about what can happen when years of martial arts, energy cultivation, Hermetic training and direct magical practice begin to converge. The conversation explores: - Soft and hard contact with the Higher Guardian Angel - Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics — IIH - The Practice of Magical Evocation — PME - The Key to the True Quabbalah — KTQ - The Abramelin operation and Knowledge and Conversation - Sixty Skills and continuous energy practice - Martial arts, qigong and practical demonstrations of force - Clairvoyance, clairaudience and mental wandering - Elemental equilibrium and the generation of Akasha - Non-Dual Light and divine authority - Meeting gnomes and working with elemental beings - Why disciplined practice matters more than natural talent - How different systems can support and strengthen one another Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview- Introduction and Fred’s Background- Early Contact with the Higher Guardian Angel- What Is the Higher Guardian Angel?- Objective Esoteric Abilities and Martial Arts- Soft Contact, Hard Contact and When to Begin- Bardon, Sixty Skills and the Abramelin Operation- Equilibrium, Akasha and Non-Dual Light- Streaming Energy Through Daily Life- Mental Wandering and the Gnomes- Final Advice and Closing ## Interview ## Introduction and Fred’s Background **James:** Welcome to Perseus Conversations. Today I’m speaking with Fred, whose detailed writing in the Perseus and Sixty Skills communities has helped make difficult-to-describe experiences much more concrete. A recent Discord discussion inspired this conversation. Fred, welcome. **Fred:** Hey there. Hope you're doing well. Thank you for organizing this and indulging me a little bit and yeah here we are. **James:** Your reports are genuinely useful because they give practical detail to experiences that are often described vaguely. Before we begin, could you introduce yourself and explain the training that brought you here? **Fred:** Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so I'm Fred. I'm on the Discord as well as the Perseus community as Utabishtam. In terms of my background and so forth, so I came to the magical training relatively late in my career, my career of practice. My first training was probably around 2006 or so is when I started training some esoteric Japanese martial art called Kaza Rasheru. A style of Japanese monastic martial arts. And then over time I was introduced to the writings of one grandmaster Wongq Kit of the Shaolin Wanam Institute. And you know, one thing led to another and I got to train with him face to face. That kind of skyrocketed my martial arts and my energy work attainment and training. **Fred:** And then over time I learned from some other teachers almost always from the esoteric I'm sorry from the energy work and martial arts side of things. So that's one of the primary lenses through which I focus my training. How can I make something immediately practical in the here and now sort of thing and with you know some of our mutual acquaintances and teachers like Bob Smith at 60 skills and so forth about the grounding energy into you know physical reality for practical benefits that's the main way that I evaluate am I going to spend the time on this sort of thing basically in terms of you know the magical experiences and so forth outside of the energy training. **Fred:** Back in 2015, I had my first I guess this is something we'll talk about more soft versus hard contact with the holy guardian angel, which kind of put me on the path that eventually, you know, 10 freaking years later got me into Initiation into Hermetics and then meeting the 60 skills in the Perseus community and other things. Such as getting hard contact and so forth that led to the conversation we're having today. **James:** I had not realised this went back ten years. Your martial and energetic background seems to explain why your approach is so practical and grounded. How did that first light contact arise? Was it connected to the energy work you were already doing? ## Early Contact with the Higher Guardian Angel **Fred:** Oh yeah. So in terms of getting that first like obvious but light contact with the holy guardian angel. So back in I want to say 20 thou yeah 20 the 2015 2016 time period or so. I was training in a particular martial arts school. Almost all my stories relate to martial arts because that's what I've done a lot. So I was training in a particular martial arts school called low tiger count and it is an particular martial art from Indonesia which has a heavy Chinese as well as Indonesian influence in terms of the energy work and the martial art fighting technique. And one of the things that you wind up doing once you're moving from that to like, okay, you've been around, you're an intermediate level student, I'm starting to trust you with some of the good stuff, so to speak. **Fred:** And the part of the training that my then master taught me was if what we would call clairvoyance training. Essentially it was assume a particular static posture. If you're for the audience, if you're understanding a martial arts, it's related to the horse riding stance and then like looking holding your arms in a certain way and then just like looking at your arms until you can start seeing the energy basically and you know because of the prior training you know I had a sensation of energy the clairsentience training that was very well established by that point but I couldn't really see or hear the energy worth a damn at all. So, so my master then shows me that exercise and I start developing the ability to see the energy much faster than expected. **Fred:** So I ask my best friend who got me into you know magic and esoterics and stuff in the first place and he does what we would call some scrying some mental wandering some divination all those like information seeking things and then he says oh hey it looks like there might be an angel watching out for you sort of thing and I'm like the hell are you talking about sort of thing so he's like all right here so Now, a very common thing you'll hear in my silly life stories is I don't know what the heck is going on. I ask someone smarter than me. He gives me an exercise to do and then I do the homework basically. So, he tells me, hey, you should do this stuff. And at the end of the day, it turns out it was a form of pathworking basically. **Fred:** And through the pathworking basically mental wandering meditating on the presence of the angel praying and so forth and just trying to get information I'm able to delineate the sigil of the angel in question and then I start having some very vague contact and loose contact with this particular being and eventually that grows into full actual visual appearance of it. As well as conversations as well. And then again, this is back in 2015 2016. And then I don't really do a whole lot with it unfortunately because I didn't know what to do with it essentially. I didn't have the background knowledge to know like hey, how do I deepen and cultivate this relationship? Like what's in it for me? What's in it for the angel? What's in it for other people? Will this turn into something bad in the future for me? I didn't know. **Fred:** Therefore, I didn't really do a whole lot with it other than just, you know, practice my clairvoyance and clairaudience a little bit here and there and, you know, sometimes asking that being some questions related to my spiritual cultivation, which was all very vague stuff, frankly. I had a bit of a Buddhist background in terms of the meditation and energy cultivation and so forth, like a lot of people in the esoteric martial arts community. And eventually over time, you know, fast forward almost 8 years after that, so like 2020, no, actually not sooner than that, maybe 2021 or so. This is going to sound like a silly anime fantasy, frankly. I was, you know, it was my birthday. I was just sleeping basically. And I had a dream. The angel was in the dream. **Fred:** And the angel very explicitly said, "Hey, you should do this exercise I'm going to show you." And the exercise turned out to be what I realized in retrospect was a form of kundalini awakening. Basically like, hey, you should sit down or stand in whatever posture in these postures I'm going to show you and you should focus on this energy center for, you know, a month and then build up to the next energy center and so on and so forth and then you'll know what to do next afterwards. Yeah. So I did the thing and eventually I started getting more signals as to hey you should practice this thing over here or hey you should spend more focus on this sort of thing and then eventually the angel checks in a couple of times and that ultimately leads to me finally taking a look at Initiation into Hermetics you know France Bardon's works and so forth. **Fred:** Now, to give you an idea of how long it takes me to get anything freaking done, the aforementioned friend who told me what was going on, like, hey, it's an angel. Like, you should probably do something about that sort of thing. He had actually told me about Initiation into Hermetics, Agrippa's three books of occult philosophy, Qabbalah, he told me about all of this stuff back in 2011. So, so it took me a very long while, including the an esoteric, you know, punch in the face basically it to finally get around to doing any of the stuff that my very generous friends and teachers had told me about a decade ago essentially. So, what a great stop. Yeah. So that very long- winded tale is what got me into soft contact and so forth over a much longer period of time than it should have. **James:** That gives important context. What began as light contact developed over many years into something much more specific. Let’s turn to the nature of that contact. **James:** A community question asks whether you understand the Higher Guardian Angel as an external entity, a higher aspect of the self, or something else entirely. What is the nature of our connection to the HGA in daily life? ## What Is the Higher Guardian Angel? **Fred:** Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm going to be very opinionated about this. I'm very opinionated about a lot of things. I very strongly believe and accept the position that the holy guardian angel is a separate entity. It is not just who you are sort of thing. Sorry, I'm so I'm 41. I watched Lion King back in the day as a kid. I'm just imagining people saying like when like Mufasa shows up in the clouds and it's like, "Ah, Simba, remember who you are sort of thing." I'm not that kind of guy basically. For me coming from primarily these like orthodox systems and like established systems and so forth of how to get in contact with the HGA and what do you do with the HGA and so forth. **Fred:** The holy guardian angel is very thoroughly so an external entity that is in the divine plan if you want to use that terminology or something else that's more palatable depending on your beliefs about how the universe works and so forth. The holy guardian angel is a piece of divinity, a facet of divinity whose greatest quest and goal in the divine plan essentially. And I know this is like ridiculously over the top of religious terminology. It certainly I know it sounds that way. It is the entity that is most thoroughly invested and involved with your spiritual cultivation and maturity. It is there a lot of different cultures. **Fred:** Basically every culture that has a religious and mystical and magical system has the idea of the very powerful and wise tutelary spirit whose entire purpose is to bring your bring you closer to enlightenment closer to spiritual fulfillment closer to spiritual cultivation and to make you the best version of you that is possible. Now every culture has its own ideas as to the nature of this being and that's where you have a lot of different means of contact in different magical systems. Certain systems which I completely disagree with have the idea that oh the knowledge and conversation and contact of the holy guardian angel is you awakening to the higher aspect of yourself. I see where they're coming from. **Fred:** I also know historically human historically speaking that is that idea primarily came about during that strange time period of the of the 19th and 20th centuries where people were emphasizing the biologic and psychologic paradigms of magic and esoterics like oh spirits are just a part of your own brain or oh a mystical experience is just you committing therapy on yourself sort of thing. I completely disagree with all that thanks to my experiences and experiences that will be completely unexplainable in the purely psychological paradigm of magic. So, I don't believe in that stuff. I also like trolling these people by doing objective acts of esoteric ability and they don't know what the hell that's going on sort of thing. **Fred:** So, I'm not enlightened enough to not troll some people every so often kind of thing. But it's all for the sake of everyone's enu enlightenment and cultivation. So, I don't feel too bad doing that. **James:** You mentioned objective esoteric abilities. What kinds of abilities or demonstrations do you mean? ## Objective Esoteric Abilities and Martial Arts **Fred:** So, yeah. So, in terms of the martial arts side of things, one of the reasons I love martial arts is you can't martial arts. You either won the fight or you didn't win the fight. Basically, to steal a line from a movie, one person is standing and one person's on the ground. You can pretty well tell who's got it, basically. So, there are a couple things that we do in martial arts to test our ability, test our force that doesn't involve, you know, punching someone so hard in the liver that they develop internal bleeding and, you know, poop blood. Basically, it's very impolite to make your classmate poop blood in the classroom sort of thing. So, we have other ways of testing skills. **Fred:** One of the things that I've been able to do, for example, is this is going to sound very silly and stupid, but what you do is you take some eggs and you also have like two chairs basically and it's like you're standing in the middle of the chairs. One chair is right to your left and one of them is just off to your to your right. You take a step back and you balance an egg on each one of those chairs or like a small table. And then on top of the eggs, you balance a length of sugar cane or bamboo or some plank of wood basically. Then you focus energy at your palm and then you slash the bamboo with your palm. And then if you do it correctly with the right level of speed and force, you cut through the sugar cane or the bamboo or whatever, without crunching the eggs, basically. **James:** I see. **Fred:** Yeah. So, you know, for most people, they can't understand how that works at a physical level. Now, if you want to get into the actual pulley and pin mechanic of, you know, mechanical physics, yeah, once you've severed the severeds the length of bamboo, for example, maybe at a mechanical weak point or something, that bamboo is no longer one piece of wood and therefore doesn't crunch straight downward onto the eggs. Energetically what's happening is that your single-pointed concentration and your ability to focus force at one particular striking point of your arm or your palm or whatever and what is what gives you the overall physical wherewithal to be able to do something like that. **Fred:** And you know that's something that most people can't do on a regular physical basis. Another thing that can that I've done in the past, accidentally actually, so I'm I'm 5 foot five. I'm a very short person, especially for Americans. People don't expect me to be able to like jump very far or lift up very heavy things or anything of the sort. I have in the past, from a standing position jumped straight up to the point where my feet were about, four feet off the ground. That was a purely energetic thing done completely by accident. And you know, I haven't really been able to reproduce that regularly. I know how to train it, but it's also a very obvious thing that hey, you're standing on the ground and then without going into a big windup, now you're four feet in the air sort of thing as a jump. Not levitation, just as purely a jump basically. So, that's that's a really fun one to make people question what they think is possible. **James:** That is the kind of practical qigong demonstration people will find interesting. **Fred:** Exactly. Yep. **James:** At what point in a practitioner’s development is it best to pursue soft or hard contact? First, how do you distinguish the two? And should access to Akasha and Non-Dual Light be established before contact with the HGA, or afterwards? ## Soft Contact, Hard Contact and When to Begin **Fred:** Yeah, absolutely. So those are really good questions and those are some of the questions that kind of motivated this whole conversation actually. So in terms of the getting some definitions on board, which I realize I kind of blitzed over in my last ramble there. So the way that I define soft contact and a couple people that I used to know well as well, soft contact is relatively vague sort of things. It's maybe you give a prayer or you put out your request for aid into the cosmos for example and then you get this like vague prickle on your conscience that says hey you should do this or you should probably avoid that situation sort of thing. It's it's very vague. **Fred:** Sometimes you mistake it for yourself and your own thoughts but regardless it is not very solid. You can't like point across the room and say, "There's my angel. He's talking to me right now and this are the exact words that I'm hearing." Sort of thing. So, so that's soft contact and that is the sort of thing that anyone can develop very well and I'll get to that right after this part. Hard contact on the other hand is very solid. It is extremely unambiguous and it is to the point where you can effectively do what I just said that you can't do in soft contact. Like you can point across the room and say my holy guardian angel has manifested over in that corner over there and these are the exact words they are telling me sort of thing. **Fred:** It is effectively to the point where you have absolutely no doubt in your mind as well as your internal andor external vision and hearing and so forth. That is your clairvoyance, clair audience etc. There is no doubt in your mind that this conversation is happening. That being is right there and you can communicate with them at any moment in time without any interruption whatsoever using the methods that the holy guardian angel teaches you to communicate with them. **James:** That distinction is very clear. **Fred:** Yeah. And then getting to the next to another part of the u the community question there. So when do you do it essentially? And that is a question that has plagued so many people across millennia basically. So if you want to look at the classical sources, you know, we're talking a Grippa's books of occult philosophy for example, you're talking priestly initiation rituals. You're talking shamanic rituals and so forth and means of initiation. Pretty much all of them say that you should start aiming at soft contact as soon as possible essentially. I in some situations even before you formally start any like magical slashthomegical training like for a lot of these different systems getting that soft contact like that ability to you know link to the divine and start getting advice directly from the being whose entire role in this universe is your spiritual fulfillment and so forth. **Fred:** Like ideally you get that on your radar as soon as possible sort of thing like before you're trusted with you know the magical version of a gun and a rocket launcher basically. And in terms of how you do that it's it's actually very simple and it's one of the things that one of a particular ritual magician I used to chat with every so often he does very good work. So his YouTube channel is Amateur Magus. He is a predominantly Golden Dawn style ritual magician and he has the running joke which we kind of both believe is actually a thing that there is effectively what he calls a demonic public relations campaign trying to keep people away from the divine essentially. Like why would you seek out the holy guardian angel? It's so freaking hard. You've got to live like a monk for a whole year or whatever stuff. Why don't you just watch TV instead? Why don't you just, you know, have a beer instead? You know, crap like that essentially. **Fred:** That all being said, even if you read the most dry and technical, boring, magical literature out there, by which I mean Agrippa's books of oult philosophy, I will rag on Agrippa for the rest of my life. I've read his books multiple times and the guy needed a freaking editor, but that's a rant for another time. He straight up spells out how anyone can get soft contact with a holy guardian angel. What it basically entails is you find a quiet place and you pray every day for the divine to help you and to send you the holy guardian angel. And by the end of a month, you will have soft contact with the holy guardian angel. Any average human being. Again, you don't have to be a genius for any of this stuff. You don't have to be particularly intelligent or anything. **Fred:** You just need the dedication and discipline to sit down or kneel down or whatever position you want to take and have the wherewithal to pray for 15 minutes every day for a month basically and you will get soft contact with the Holy Guardian Angel. That is a 100% guarantee. Your pizza is free, etc., etc., kind of thing. That's really all that it takes. You have to put in the bare minimum work of showing yourself and showing the cosmos in general that you are putting in the work to get contact with the holy guardian angel. And it takes a month if that. **James:** So soft contact can begin well before work with Akasha or Non-Dual Light. **Fred:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is one thing that I know a lot of people don't like Franz Bardon's IH and so forth. They're always trying to find a way to shortcut the process or they don't like the fact that he was, you know, a dude in the 1950s and60s who, you know, survived World War II and so forth. They don't like this, they don't like that about him. He's straight up step one and step two are effectively the hermetic version of doing this where you learn how to meditate, you learn how to pay attention to your conscience. Divinity will in its earliest fashion to the most even, you know, magically immature consciousness of a human being will make itself known by your conscience by what you realize is a good thing to do and what is a bad thing to do in its most basic form. And you know, for various reasons, people don't like to accept that. And those people are not going to have a good time. **Fred:** They're they're going to get fooled by a lot of things that they otherwise would not have been fooled by if they had just sat down and done the work, which you know is a sad thing, but as you and I both know, the occult occults itself. If someone's not ready to put in the work, attain the level of humility, attain the mental, physical, and spiritual state necessary to engage with the divine, they're they're not going to succeed at engaging with the divine or Akasha or non-dual light, etc. **James:** Once you began working with Franz Bardon’s system and Sixty Skills, particularly with Non-Dual Light, did that deepen or change your experience of the Higher Guardian Angel? ## Bardon, Sixty Skills and the Abramelin Operation **Fred:** Oh absolutely. So the all these different things that I've trained, you know, the chiong and the kung fu and so forth. The friends bardon material and the 60 skills material together as well as the way that I achieved hard contact with the holy guardian angel by means of the Abramelin ritual. All those things have come together extremely well. And one of the nice things is also realizing like what I possess versus what someone else possesses from their different experience. So as an example, I don't know very many people who've done the Abramelin. I know maybe five people personally all across the internet basically and I know about 20 or 30 people who have done the Abramelin and gotten hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel through that way and most of the people that I know who have achieved who've done the upper melon and acquired hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel and the various benefits of the upper melon. **Fred:** All of those people have been ritual magic practitioners. Not really internal power practitioners, but all of them have generally done some means of initiation into usually hermetic ritual magic which generally means for most pe most of them either golden dawn style initiation or they've initiated into another magical grimoire such as the u lameen the goetia of Dr. Rudd and like the, you know, the classic quote unquote Solomonic grimmooire material. And then once they've spent some time doing that material, then at some point they elected to or they were guided to or told to do the Aubberlon. And then that gives them one heck of a bonus and boost to their ritual magic procedures and so forth. **Fred:** Like a lot of the stuff that they have to do to ensure a safe goetic, you know, that is a demonic magical evocation and so forth. A lot of the material that you see inside of those grimoires is aimed at basically maximizing your Non-Dual Light as much as possible. Essentially, you've got your time period of purification. You've got the various talismans that are used and consecrated in a certain way. You are, this is one thing that makes a lot of people mad as well, especially in the modern magical community who may or may not really have a positive view of organized religion and so forth. **Fred:** Those grimoires are assuming you are living the lifestyle of an observant religious person from that time period which means you're going to church on Sunday or you're going to synagogue on Saturday you are partaking of the Eucharist you're doing the shem prayer every so many times per day etc to have that foundation so that you can on top of that take in the divine authority that is entrusted to you by the image through the image of God so that you can then compel the spirits to do what you want them to do basically. And once you have for those guys, once you have acquired hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel, either by doing the Abramelin or something else like the merk of a descent to the throne for example or otherwise, then you kind of always have the access to the divine authority within you because now you have the holy guardian angel with you at all times. **Fred:** So you no longer have to do some of that stuff because the protocols and rituals and effects of the Abramelin or other modes of hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel basically supersede a lot of the stuff that most ritual practitioners have to do to ensure a safe ritual operation. **James:** Sixty Skills also teaches a conscious way of generating and directing Non-Dual Light. Does having deliberate control of that process change the Abramelin work or contact with the HGA? **Fred:** Oh absolutely. Knowing how to do something well will always make that thing work better. So going to the cultural and knowledge framework of the Abramelin for example straight up that is an Abrahamic style ritual going by the book. Going by the book itself it assumes you are a medieval observant Christian or Jewish person doing all the things a medieval Jewish or Christian person would be doing on a day-to-day basis. That is the assumption of the book. That book does not assume that you already know how to draw down the non-dual light, the heavenly energy, the energy of grace, the light of God, whatever you want to call it. Basically, that book does not even know that skill exists essentially. Now you and I, we both do 60 skills material. We both do material from Franz Bardon as well and so forth. **Fred:** And if you can do that stuff explicitly on your own without the need of ritual, it's going to work that much better sort of thing. So as an example, I was going through Initiation into Hermetics. I was about step five or so when I got the signal, hey, you need to do the Abramelin now. Like it's been long enough. You've done the homework and so forth. Now you can like really work on not just having the hard contact of the HGA, but also the full knowledge and conversation part as well as the binding of the demons part. That way you're going to have the rest of your cultivation is going to be way easier that way sort of thing. Now, at that point, you know, I knew how to establish equilibrium of the elements. I knew how to generate Akasha that way. I knew how to generate non-dual light in that fashion. **Fred:** And I also knew how to separately invoke and call down non-dual light through that ritual process. There isn't a lot of like ritual steps in the Abramelin. A lot of it is literally just you're going to kneel down in front of the altar and pray until God tells you otherwise kind of thing. But it in the beginning the generating and accessing the non-dual light is were separate skills and then over time you learn with any skill set you know be it martial arts or physical therapy or exercise or meditation methods and so forth. **Fred:** Those kills will gradually merge with one another as you realize hey if I enter into a meditative state of mind before I start my prayers the prayers are that much more effective or oh hey if I follow those mental cues that Bardon mentions in The Practice of Magical Evocation when you enter into the ritual space and you enter into the circle and you realize you are the image of God that enters the center of the universe And when you light the candle, you are bringing the light of divinity and the light of enlightenment into this world. And like all those little steps here and there, you will with experience realize, hey, these things work synergize very well with one another. **Fred:** And these other steps maybe are superfluous now that you've learned something from there versus its original source sort of thing. It's a very long-winded answer to say yes to your question. **James:** So hard contact and the Abramelin operation are not identical. The operation adds Knowledge and Conversation and the binding process. You began it around Step Five, but because you were guided to do so—not because Step Five is a universal starting point. **Fred:** Yeah. Like you know again I had my first contact with the HGA at this point like 11 years ago basically and it took me a while to freaking get around to it kind of thing. The this whole part as you because thanks to various historical factors the Aubberlon is a very famous grimmooire. It's a very famous ritual. A lot of people have talked about it. A lot of people have talked about the benefits of it as well. So, it's a natural question. Hey, I'm a random dude who's interested in magic and interested in the proclaimed benefits of the Abramelin. When should I do it? Basically, now if you actually read IIH, Initiation into Hermetics step five, if you're going by the book, that is the wrong time to do the operation basically. **Fred:** I absolutely skipped a couple of stages there because, you know, I'm I'm very slow and I did some really stupid basically. If you actually read step five, step five is actually more explicitly about getting soft contact with the holy guardian angel. Yes. There's the ritual. I'm sorry, not the ritual. There's the skills training of like using the pendulum and you know making the ghost hand and that sort of thing or like doing mediumistic writing and automatic writing and so forth and basically using all these different techniques to gain the skill of getting that soft contact with the HGA. **Fred:** Now as with all of initiation and hermetics you know a lot of people who actually do the work of IH they're going to start getting some benefits and abilities before that actual step like really solidifies things because it's step five that introduces different techniques for soft contact and it's like I don't know step seven or something like that before he explicitly and purposely introduces the training of clairvoyance and clairaudience and clairsentience for example. But if you've been going through the curriculum, you know, as intended, you're already going to have some clairvoyance and clairaudience and clairsentience way before step seven actually happens. **Fred:** And likewise, it's actually step 10 in Initiation into Hermetics where you're where you're explicitly told and shown how to get the hard contact of the Holy Guardian Angel through Franz Bardon's method which is to put it as plainly as possible mental wandering until you find it and the Holy Guardian Angel introduces itself to you essentially. And then if you do things right, then you you get a lot of the experience kind of thing. **James:** Soft contact in Step Five is important because it makes the work tangible. It is often the point where practice stops feeling theoretical and begins to feel undeniably real. **Fred:** Oh, yeah. Exactly. It's like you realize, all right, have I really been able to like put air into my hands? Can I really do this sort of thing? And then you're you open your eyes, your real is your hand is like, you know, floating in the in the air essentially like your physical hand like when did my arm move? I didn't do that kind of. **James:** Another community question asks whether daily hard contact with the HGA is equivalent to establishing elemental equilibrium each day. Are they the same process? ## Equilibrium, Akasha and Non-Dual Light **Fred:** the answer is no to that one there. The ax. So this is one thing that I know that I personally fell into the trap thereof is that we especially in the 60 skills school and especially in just bardon in general we all understand the importance of equinimity. We all understand that equilibrium is important. Like Bob has even explicitly said that much of the system that he teaches is based on if on you operating from a position of equilibrium. We all you know vaguely understand that oh it's it's probably good idea that I don't have you know 10 points of fire and like one point of earth for example. Like we know that bad things are going to happen if you're that unbalanced kind of thing. **Fred:** That all being said, equilibrium has some very specific benefits depending on how you achieve it because this is something that I've posted ad nauseam on the on the Perseus forum as well as on the discord. There are many different ways to achieve equilibrium of some sort. Now from the bardon and especially from the 60 skills side of things how do we judge the success of someone attaining equilibrium now we generally do so or at least I perceive that we do so that based on have you generated Akasha the void energy and have you been able to access non-dual light as a result of that sort of thing like sure you can put a lot of earth in your legs and water in your abdomen and air in the in the chest and fire in the head and you might not generate any Akasha whatsoever. You might not generate that eruption of non-dual light after that either. And that's I went through that process. **Fred:** I know that I've that mistake can be done because I've done it myself. But eventually once you know how to really balance out those energies you click into the balance and it's like oh hey I have generated Akasha and non-dual light through the elements and then you know fast forward some time and it's like aha I can now do that with the electric and the magnetic fluids and then later on in the Qabbalistic letters aha I can generate Akasha through the letter B for example I can generate Akasha non-dual light and equilibrium and so forth now through the letter G. I'm I'm sorry, not G, the letter F for example. And those are some of the major benefits of having the skill of equilibrium, balancing out energies, putting them in their place, generating Akasha, and generating the access to non-dual light. **James:** A practitioner can fill the four bodily regions with the elements and still only feel heavily charged rather than balanced. How can someone tell whether genuine equilibrium has actually been established? **James:** What is the transition from merely filling the regions, to equilibrium, and then to the recognisable signs of Akasha? **Fred:** Yeah absolutely. So this is a part of the story where I'm basically gonna flagrantly plagiarize Bob from 60 Skills because frankly speaking, like practicing the way that he taught me was how I got it essentially. So in Initiation into Hermetics, I think it's like step four. I'm pretty sure it's step four, maybe step five, where he formally introduces the equilibrium of the elements exercise. And you know for the longest time I was filling up the various bodily regions with you know earth here, water here etc. And then I was just sitting around like you know four inflated balloons on top of one another essentially like I just assumed oh equilibrium must be this like hyperelementally charged state and I just assumed that was it. **Fred:** That was not it of course don't do that basically but eventually you know you want to call it divine providence dumb luck whatever I ran into you know Bob's YouTube channel and he talks talked a lot about equilibrium and then he also talked about oh it's actually not that you feel hypercharged with all four elements it's they actually balance one another out and at some point you might actually feel all the elements disappear from one another sort of thing like there's a sudden emptiness so to speak as everything perfectly balances everything out and then once I started paying attention to that I realized oh hey I actually did put a little bit too much water over here or I actually do feel the fire up top is pulling too much on the water below I need to balance that out a little bit and then eventually more and more I'd feel the elements canceling one another out rather than just like rubbing friction against one another so to speak. **Fred:** And then once those experiences of balance and almost canceling each other out started getting more common then I started noticing the visual appearance of the Akasha that he talks about like those flashes of purple energy in the periphery of the vision and so forth and over time started hearing the shearing of metal and that penetrating dissolving sensation. And then once that started happening the majority of times of my attempts of establishing equilibrium then I realized aha this is it. I have I have the experience. I have the Akasha. I can use the Akasha itself as an energy. I must be moving along in my experience. **Fred:** And then you know fast forward some time after that once I was in the Akasha I started realizing oh hey that dark purple is now giving way to this brilliant white beyond white energy and then I realized over time oh wow that's that's the non-dual light that's the heavenly energy sort of thing and yeah then it was off to the races. **James:** My own experience is that the perception develops gradually, rather like the eyes adjusting to a dark room. The practitioner may need to remain in that state long enough for the spaciousness and dark-purple quality to become apparent, rather than declaring the attempt a failure too quickly. **Fred:** Absolutely. Like that is one of the things that I will wholeheartedly kind of like you know crap on Bardon so to speak there is that you know he lived in a time and a place where people had a certain background understanding of esoterics or maybe they didn't they lived a particular lifestyle that made their bodies you know in a certain way and they also had a certain understanding of language. Yeah. Now, Bardon, you know, I'm I'm an English speaker. I've got English and Spanish and that's it basically. I don't know German. I don't know Czech. So, I don't know how Bardon may have written in his mother language. However, I've got the Merker publishing edition of Initiation in Hermetics, which again is a physical book in a different language that requires an economy of space. Mhm. **Fred:** So, you know, Bardon naturally and his translator and editor, they had to skip a lot of material. They had to say, "Hey, you've only got, you know, I don't know, 200, 300 pages of text, and that's all we can publish for you." So, you know, quite naturally, he had to leave some stuff out. So in like step five or step six, I forget which step when he is explicitly talking about entering into the Akasha and like doing the center point exercise that he talks about. Yeah. Like you know he basically says like hey imagine yourself in the middle of a infinite dimensionless space and you know most people aren't gonna know what the hell he's talking about there. **James:** One of the strengths of Sixty Skills is that Bob fills in the missing steps. That allows newer practitioners to progress much faster than many of us did. **Fred:** I mean, you know, you flown. I mean you started I started in 2008 you know and it took me a good 15 years to get rolling and I feel the same way about the people coming after me. It's like, oh damn, that guy just like for example, there's one member of the u of the 60 skills community that I talked with them about qigong, for example. It took me six months before I had my first like yes, this is absolutely energy kind of experience. He did he pulled it off in like two days essentially and I'm like dude **James:** I see people who began only months ago producing work that took others years to reach. Better instruction can shorten the path considerably. **Fred:** Oh yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The fact that you know I make mistakes. You've you've made your decisions. I've made my decisions. I've made a lot of mistakes. Like one of my big things not just in the magical community but also in my like regular day-to-day job and everything is I feel very strongly about education and I also understand the importance of time and I don't want people to waste as much time as I did being able to do what I can do basically like I feel very strongly about that being an ethical obligation of teachers and anyone who shares their experience like you should be better than me kind of **James:** That is one of the reasons Perseus exists: too much time is wasted through poor teaching and missing information. Let’s move to another practical aspect of your work. **James:** In your reports, you often describe allowing an energy or letter to continue running for hours while you go about daily life. For readers outside Sixty Skills, what does that mean, and how does continuous practice contribute to your progress? ## Streaming Energy Through Daily Life **Fred:** Oh, absolutely. So, yeah. So, in terms of definitions, again, I'm I'm gonna heavily plagiarize Bob just because he's done a lot of great work and like why reinvent the wheel, so to speak. And so, I'm I'm going to, like you said, I don't want to, you know, financially steal from him or anything. So, I'm going to stick to like what he's already said publicly, basically. So when we talk about you know streaming energy through the day essentially for the for the folks who have not read Bob's articles on Perseus or on his blog or on it or watched his videos on the Perseus YouTube channel and on Bob's own YouTube channel he talks extensively about a methodology called the ball above head method or the BAH method. Sometimes the ball overhead method. **Fred:** And in energetics the esoteric anatomy of someone includes not just you know the meridians the energy channels that people talk about especially in Tibetan and Chinese traditional medicine but also energy fields like natural collections of energy in the body. In the Chinese u terminology you might hear the term dantian for example elixir field. So different energy fields of the body and different meridians of the body are very well suited for channeling focusing gathering and otherwise using various forms of energy. Like for example, the ball above head method is great for collecting energy from the overall cosmos, the overall universe, especially at an Akashic level, like the level that is beyond time and beyond space sort of thing. **Fred:** For further details, you're going to have to look at Bob's specific meth materials there for the audience. **Fred:** And eventually you know that energy flows and streams down through the body accessing different subtle bodies including the mental body, the astral body etc and you know eventually making it to the physical body where you can have your physical effects and so forth or effects in the physical world or if you look at The Key to the True Quabbalah by France Martin for example also effects in the astral world the mental world etc Now for most orthodox schools of energy cultivation and so forth generally they get their benefits during the actual formal training session and maybe for a little bit afterwards and then when they're in their dayto-day whatever they do on a regular basis if they want those benefits back sometimes they have to you know go off to the side and form normally do an exercise to like reactivate those benefits as an example. **Fred:** Or maybe they have to go into a deep state of meditation, breathe in a certain way, you know, focus on a sigil or whatever, whatever. And that like reactivates the energy of their previous training or it unlocks some energy they have stored in their body already. Now what we do with the 60 skills training and so forth is we are allowing this energy to flow and stream through the body continuously even if you're not explicitly paying attention to it. So as an example right now I'm working on the Qabbalistic letter F as an example with a part of the Sunday cabala practice group and so forth. Like even right now I'm streaming the energy of the letter F. I have been doing that all day since I woke up basically. **Fred:** There's the particular exercise that you do, you know, you're like formal quote unquote exercise and then you let the energy continue streaming in the background through the day. You know, it is a skill that can be trained. It's funny thing. Someone just yesterday on the u on the Discord server actually DM'd me asking me like, "Hey, hey Fred, how do you stream it in the background?" so I guess I'm going to talk about it again right now. The long and short of it is that almost any skill can be trained. There are very few things that are accessible only to like a natural prodigy or a natural talent. I am a living example of that. I don't have natural talent at anything. **Fred:** Everything that I've developed has been through, you know, the long way of, you know, headbutting a wall until the wall breaks down essentially. I learn a lot that way, but it's also very slow. So, so I've benefited greatly from my various teachers who have shown me a better way of doing things. Like Bob as an example. And basically the skill of running the energy in the background can be built as a and trained as a skill like anything else. You know, first you are formally doing the exercise and then you know maybe after your formal exercise you know you walk around your training room you're not doing anything complicated. You're not paying attention to anything. **Fred:** You're just making sure that the energy you cultivated is still going on while you're walking around doing nothing interesting. You know, something very easy and basic like that. And then maybe you take it a step further. You walk in a place that's a little bit more visually interesting. You go through for a walk in the garden. You go through the park. You walk outside. There's more things that can possibly distract you. But then you use that as an opportunity to train to keep that energy running in the background. And then you move on to something more complicated like having a very boring conversation about the weather with someone as an example or whatever else. **Fred:** Or maybe you run the energy while you're doing another kind of exercise like when you're going for a jog or you're lifting weights or you're cooking a basic meal or you're watching television. You just check in every so often. Ah yes the energy is still running in the background or oh wait I lost it I have to restart it kind of thing and then you know over time the skill gets built up and it is it is a thing that can and will be achieved as long as someone puts in the effort for it. **James:** That continuous approach is crucial. When a practice requires ten or twenty hours of exposure, streaming allows the practitioner to use ordinary daily time rather than relying only on formal sessions. **Fred:** Oh, absolutely. **James:** Before we finish, I want to discuss one of your reports in particular: your encounter with the gnomes. **Fred:** No, we can share it. It's fine. **James:** Could you describe how clearly you perceived them, whether the experience occurred through inner vision or clairvoyance, and what distinguished the encounter from imagination? This was also one of your first experiences with gnomes, and something significant was given to you during it. ## Mental Wandering and the Gnomes **Fred:** Sounds good. But yeah, the so part of that whole like the context behind that whole experience is I'm I'm still going through Initiation into Hermetics. I'm still on step 10 right now. And step 10 part of the training involves you know projecting yourself to the various other realms plains of existence especially the elemental planes. And you know, Franz Bardon gives a particular way of doing things. And the long and short of it is he recommends that you essentially mentally shapeshift yourself into the form of whatever entity exists in the location you're going to go to. Which is one of the reasons behind the mental and astral shape-shifting of the previous steps. **Fred:** Building up a lot of the energy of the location you're going to go to like earth energy for the earth plane and then you get yourself over there kind of thing and when I got there u you know I followed his procedure I popped on over to the earth plane and when I got there this was all eyes clo like physical eyes closed so to use some of the terminology the internal or eyes closed osed clairvoyance like seeing things, hearing things, not with the physical sensory organs, but rather like it's in your own head sort of thing. For the people who I know this is going to make people mad and everything, but it's like you're imagining a scene in your own imagination kind of thing. **Fred:** Like that degree of seeing something, hearing something, or even just remembering a memory and like living through a memory, like that kind of hearing and seeing things. We'll get to like, you know, vetting the information here in a little bit if we still have time. Regardless, you know, the way I generally appear in the Earth plane is usually in some various underground caverns, there may or may not be light. Sometimes the only light, you know, quote unquote present is lanterns and torches being carried by other beings inside of the earth plane. At least that's how I've noticed things when I do my mental wandering to the earth plane. And at that point, you know, I've already done I've already had hard contact with a Holy Guardian Angel for some time at that point and whatnot there. **Fred:** And I had realized that if you just show up to another plane, and you're just like blazing with the light of divinity and so forth there, it's kind of like you just showed up with a disco ball and it's like, "Hey everyone, look at me. I've got the light of God with me," etc. Kind of thing. It it can make some of those beings very uncomfortable to suddenly have like, you know, America's July 4th happen in their backyard, basically. So that's that is one reason why, you know, Bardon and some other people recommend, you know, changing your mental shape to the shape of the beings in your target location kind of thing because you want to be a good neighbor, so to speak, and you want to be polite. **Fred:** So I'm doing my wandering around the around the Earth plane and so forth, and I start getting the impression, hey, I should I should do some stuff. Maybe I should introduce myself to some of the like the quote-unquote nobility and like the lords of the earth plane and so forth. And eventually I get introduced to one gnome who introduces me to another gnome and so forth. And one of these gnomes was like, "Hey, part of the conversation, this is going to sound, you know, very religious and so forth. It's like, oh, I see that you're a human. I see that you have the an angel with you, the light of the divine with you. Can you teach me like how I can access this heavenly light basically? And I'm like, okay. **Fred:** So, you know, I taught him I taught the gnome a couple of things and the gnome's like, "Ah, thank you so much. Here's here's a gift for you." I'm like, "Oh, cool." And you know, I checked with the holy guardian angel first because, hey, this is a gift from a spirit entity. Do I have to be suspicious about this kind of thing? Which is one of the major benefits of having hard contact with the holy guardian angel? Just being able to straight up ask a being, "Is this a good idea? Yes or no?" kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, they give me the stone. It's like a small stone. It looks red and so forth. And I got the impression, oh, this is a grounding stone. **Fred:** It is very good for, you know, establishing earth and, you know, bringing things down back into focus and back into balance and so forth there. As a hilarious thing I literally just now realized telling the story. It has the idea of the letter F like pulling things back into back into balance and back into focus and so forth. So yeah, I didn't see that coming. Anyways, so now I have this stone. Now I have this rock that provides balance and so forth. It is a purely energetic object. Is it is not a physical object like a physical rock did not suddenly appear in my training space for example in my home here and that'd be funny but yeah but then you know eventually the that earth noble gnome introduces me to a couple other beings I teach them also how to how to generate the heavenly light the non-dual light and so forth and they we some fun conversations and I return back to my physical form, my physical location and so forth. And now I have this magical rock in my inventory that I don't know what to do about it basically. So I start experimenting with it because Oh, sorry. Go ahead. **James:** Please continue. It is a remarkable account. **Fred:** Yeah. Yeah. So, this is one of the other things that I also got from the holy guardian angel is that one of the things just as background that a lot of people are not like they're like, "Oh, I can't do magic. I can't I don't have a temple altar. I don't have a wand made of this special wood. I don't have the funny hat and the funny robes and the funny belt and everything like that." so, they're like, "Oh, I can't do this stuff." one of the things that the Holy Guardian Angel gave me among other things was essentially you know I call it teaching the lesson of the object so to speak. For example, in The Practice of Magical Evocation, Bardon goes over like pretty much every form of ritual object you can think of, like the sword, the wand, the crown, etc., etc., and like this is what the crown means, this is what the wand means, and so forth. **Fred:** And getting hard contact with the Holy Guardian Angel really helped me utilize those lessons quote unquote so that now I can benefit from you know having such a magical object even if I don't actually have the physical object basically like Alexander Moore for example talks about when you generate the body of light and so forth you know making you know astral weapons and astral objects and so forth that your subtle bodies can benefit from and so forth. It's kind of like that in a way. **James:** It is valuable to hear the account in your own words after reading your written report. We are approaching the end of the conversation. **Fred:** Oh, yeah. I went over. Sorry about that. **James:** Your answers have addressed the community’s questions in much greater depth than a simple question-by-question format would have allowed. Before we close, is there anything you consider especially important for practitioners to understand about the work we have discussed? ## Final Advice and Closing **Fred:** Yeah. There's a lot that I want to say honestly, but I can always rant more on the Discord later on, but the this going to I want to end on a on a high note basically rather than like my usual negative note. But that all being said, if you're going to follow a process, do the process appropriately and buy the book. Don't try to change things without having a damn good reason to do so kind of thing. **James:** That is an important point. **Fred:** At least, I guess. **James:** Slow and steady often becomes the quickest path. **Fred:** Oh, exactly. I like that. **James:** Trying to force progress can lead to doing twice the work and ending up back at the beginning. **James:** Bardon’s system and Sixty Skills complement one another extremely well. Together they provide a broader and more detailed method than either may offer alone. Fred, thank you for such a thorough and inspiring conversation. **Fred:** Sounds good. **James:** That was Fred. I hope you found the conversation as useful as I did. Even when practitioners work with similar methods, hearing how another person experiences and understands them can reveal both important overlaps and meaningful differences. Details of the material discussed are included below. Fred is active in both the Sixty Skills Discord and the Perseus community. Thank you for reading or watching, and please share the conversation with anyone who may find it useful. https://youtu.be/3yuNCRpzL-8?si=oQfnTdM8GRtjjyvN --- # THROWING HANDS WITH BARDON’S KABBALAH – A Sixty Skills Event Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/throwing-hands-with-bardons-kabbalah-a-sixty-skills-event/ SixtySkills has announced **Throwing Hands with Bardon’s Kabbalah**, a new five-part online LIVE course exploring the practical use of letter magic for spiritual combat, energetic protection and targeted magical work. Rather than presenting Kabbalah as a purely theoretical system, Bob will focus on methods intended to help practitioners: - Break curses and hexes - Rebound hostile magical attacks - Burn out disruptive or negative energies - Accelerate the consequences of another person’s actions - Physically and energetically repel unwanted people and influences The course begins on **Sunday, August 23, 2026, at 3:00 PM New York City time**, with the fifth and final class taking place on **September 20, 2026**. All five classes will be recorded and made available for on-demand viewing, so participants do not need to attend every session live. Please check the complete ticket price and event information before registering. ## Register for Throwing Hands ##### View the event and register through Eventbrite ## Explore More from Bob and SixtySkills Those interested in Bob’s wider approach to Franz Bardon, Kabbalah, energy work and practical magical training can explore the following: - [Browse all SixtySkills courses](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills?utm_source=chatgpt.com) - [Learn about the SixtySkills Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn?utm_source=chatgpt.com) - [SixtySkills Kabbalah Explained](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-kabbalah-explained/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) - [Magic, Kabbalah and Evocation: The Outer Planets with Bob](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-kabbalah-evocation-the-outer-planets-with-bob-from-sixty-skills/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) - [Beyond the Inner Planets: SixtySkills Explores the Solar System’s Frontiers](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/beyond-the-inner-planets-sixty-skills-explores-the-solar-systems-frontiers-in-search-of-kabbalah/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) - [Working with the Elements: The SixtySkills Difference](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/working-with-the-elements-the-sixty-skills-difference/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) - [Explore Perseus Arcane Academy’s Franz Bardon courses and resources](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/franz-bardon-courses/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) **Throwing Hands with Bardon’s Kabbalah begins August 23, 2026. Enrollment is limited.** *#FranzBardon #Kabbalah #Quabbalah #LetterMagic #Magic #Magick #SixtySkills* --- # Redefining Thelema: From Symbolic Decoding to Sacred Realness with Frater Entelecheia Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/redefining-thelema-from-symbolic-decoding-to-sacred-realness/ ## Introduction This interview explores a transformative perspective on [Thelema](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thelema), many thanks to Frater Entelecheia for sparing the time to share, he is someone who has reimagined the practice of Thelema. Departing from traditional symbolic interpretation and institutional frameworks like the OTO, they advocate for an embodied approach termed “sacred realness.” Emphasizing clarity, connection, and authentic transformation, their insights challenge conventional Thelemic thought and offer a compelling vision for a more resonant spiritual path If you would like to learn more about Frater Entelecheia and follow his work then you can visit the following links. The Leaving Rite: [https://lapis-mercurii.kit.com/leaving-rite](https://lapis-mercurii.kit.com/leaving-rite?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBEwTGJjMkN0N0dCbTl5UHFTVAEeosc83-ClqaSu9HWpuHiYcnTYm_SIZHigwg77I3TdldS8ZfpvtfyPEdVy_Vo_aem_prSGcXh8DXlTvcpKbwNZjg) Support me on Patreon: [https://www.patreon.com/EroticTheology](https://www.patreon.com/EroticTheology?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBEwTGJjMkN0N0dCbTl5UHFTVAEe58dpifkytekbGZm0HllqQkBW4k2Ux-irA5ezYxPui_WiGvfkC9VcnLgiMtc_aem_Y78MkGnj58GdRh1Ewej99A) Follow me on Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/fraterentelecheia/](https://www.facebook.com/fraterentelecheia/) Follow me on X: [https://x.com/LapisMercurii](https://x.com/LapisMercurii?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBEwTGJjMkN0N0dCbTl5UHFTVAEeosc83-ClqaSu9HWpuHiYcnTYm_SIZHigwg77I3TdldS8ZfpvtfyPEdVy_Vo_aem_prSGcXh8DXlTvcpKbwNZjg) Blog: [lapis-mercurii.org](https://lapis-mercurii.org/lvx/)[](https://lapis-mercurii.kit.com/leaving-rite?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBEwTGJjMkN0N0dCbTl5UHFTVAEeIh0ztxB1ph-QV0cLWZwI-lnZos8SgjfeAtziIwP4UtchR4bw8x9zt3RjhGs_aem_gAiiQofSmHWDiN3VTOzTJw) --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview with Frater Entelecheia- Structural-Functional Approach to Interpretation- Crowley as "Spicy Leibniz"- Problematic Interpretations in Thelemic Community- Erotic Liberation in Thelema- Consensus Thelema- Distinguishing True Will- Manifesting True Will Through the Body- Transformative Impact of Interpretive FrameworkThe Three Transformations - Free Course ## Interview with Frater Entelecheia ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/503001720_1264846842308815_7272958157877000389_n.jpg) ## Structural-Functional Approach to Interpretation **PAA: Your interpretation method differs significantly from traditional symbolic decoding. You argue against trying to read meaning off symbols and instead propose starting with Crowley's purpose and working backward. Can you walk us through how this structural-functional approach emerged from your study, and what specific failures in conventional Thelemic interpretation led you to develop this methodology?** My approach to interpretation began with a simple question: What makes an explanation worth believing? Over time, I came to realize that most interpretations in the Thelemic world weren't really grounded in anything. They didn't even fit the generally accepted meaning of an interpretation. They weren't testable. They weren't empowering. They were just "cool ideas" or unsynthesized regurgitations from the historical record. And eventually I came to see that this was more than a stylistic problem—it was a spiritual one. I define a plausible interpretation as one that meets three criteria, a concept I adapted from cognitive scientist John Vervaeke: - It's well-supported—there's clear textual or empirical justification. - It's cognitively fluent—it flows intuitively and is graspable without forcing. - It has implications—it opens up action, possibility, and transformation. Interpretations that fail these tests are, in my view, either trivial, far-fetched, or what I call—borrowing from Harry Frankfurt—bullshit. Bullshit isn't the same as lying. It's the art of saying something that sounds meaningful while distracting from any real engagement with truth. When I first joined OTO in 2014, Thelema seemed like an aesthetic wrapper for whatever people were already into—left-wing or libertarian politics, neo-pagan cosplay, occult book collecting, or amateur psychology. There was vague talk about individual freedom or not using the name of "Jesus" to summon a spirit. I kept waiting for something deeper to show up. Even well-meaning teachers like Lon Milo DuQuette left me wondering: What's the point? It felt like symbolic performance for its own sake, not a path to anything real. There was a contradiction I couldn't ignore. Aleister Crowley, for all his flaws, was a person of immense vitality—climbing mountains, writing plays, testing limits. But modern Thelema seemed to be hiding inside diagrams, costumes, and jargon. It lacked contact with life. It lacked risk. It lacked consequence. The turning point came in 2018 when I was preparing a class on Thelemic magick. I had written a typical draft—decorated with clever digressions and esoteric references. But then Antti Balk's *The Law of Thelema* arrived in the mail. In the preface, he mercilessly mocked people who tried to explain Thelema through pop culture, fantasy tropes, or personal anecdotes. I felt seen—and embarrassed. I threw out my draft and spent the weekend immersed in Crowley's original writings. What I found shocked me: not a pile of mystical ramblings, but a coherent—if idiosyncratic—theory of reality. Beneath the rituals and slogans, Crowley was working out a model of being, will, and transformation that bore structural resemblance to things I'd studied in philosophy years earlier. That was when I began to shift from symbolic decoding to structural-functional interpretation. Instead of asking, "What does this symbol mean?" I asked, "What does this ritual, text, or symbol *do*? What transformation is it trying to catalyze?" That shift in method later gave rise to something deeper. Because as I continued to evolve—especially after leaving OTO—I began to realize that what truly mattered wasn't interpreting the map but rather making contact with the terrain. In my current work, I've moved beyond interpreting symbols altogether. What I care about now is coherence. Is the signal clear? Is the body regulated? Is the field resonant enough for transformation to occur? So while I began with a more rigorous interpretive method for Thelemic materials, that journey ultimately broke me out of the symbolic economy entirely. Interpretation was a step. Now I'm more interested in what happens when truth is not decoded but embodied and transmitted in real time. ## Crowley as "Spicy Leibniz" **PAA: You've described Crowley as "spicy Leibniz," suggesting he believed nothing exists except gods—that the world is "souls all the way down." This is a radical metaphysical claim. How do you reconcile this pure idealism with Crowley's obvious engagement with material reality, scientific method, and practical magical work?** My claim that Crowley believed reality is "souls all the way down" isn't something he ever states outright, but it follows from his metaphysics. Nuit and Hadit are the two elements that, in Thelemic cosmology, exhaust existence. Crowley says that every union of these two produces a star—what he calls a god or soul. And because Nuit and Hadit never exist apart, it follows that all that exists is this pattern of recursive, individuated divinity. The universe is not full of objects or atoms. Much like the monolith in *2001: A Space Odyssey*, it is full of stars. These stars aren't just minds floating in a void. They are engines of encounter. Hadit is pure *whoness* or subjectivity. He is described in *The Book of the Law* as "unique and conqueror". Nuit is the field of possibility—everything that could be experienced. Every conjunction of Nuit and Hadit is a star—the totality of being centered on a unique or peculiar consciousness. In order to experience itself, each star or soul divides itself. It uses space, time, and causality to express and experience itself dynamically. In that light, Crowley's metaphysics align surprisingly well with Leibniz's idea of monads—"windowless" centers of perception, each a microcosm of the whole. Leibniz believed these monads were coordinated by an all-wise God through what he called preestablished harmony—a kind of divine calibration that allowed all these self-contained perspectives to appear meaningfully synchronized. But Crowley removes the God from the equation. There's no central coordinating mind in Thelema—just zero. The space where Leibniz places God, Crowley leaves empty. The result is a metaphysics without a safety net. Meaning is not ensured. It has to be forged through will, contact, and coherence. That, for me, is the pivot. Without a God harmonizing perspectives, what holds us together isn't belief. It's signal. It's the force of one coherent presence encountering another—directly, without mediation. Thelema becomes not a system of symbolic allegiances or ontological assertions, but a path of becoming so internally integrated that your very being becomes gravitational: a star. Crowley's metaphysics, then, aren't mystical wallpaper. They're a developmental map. And he's not alone. Figures like Henri Poincaré—whom Crowley cites approvingly—argued that our understanding of time and space is shaped by evolutionary necessity, not fundamental truth. Donald Hoffman builds on this today, arguing that consciousness—not spacetime—is the primary fabric of reality. In that context, the idea that "souls are all there is" isn't mystical excess. It's a live scientific question. But where this gets powerful for me is not in theory. It's in what it makes possible. If reality is consciousness encountering itself—if stars are the base unit of existence—then the real work isn't about decoding the universe. It's about becoming clear enough to transmit. That's the turn my own work has taken in recent years. I no longer think in terms of decoding symbols or mastering rituals. I think in terms of nervous system coherence, field dynamics, and threshold events—moments when someone becomes so undistorted that they reorganize the space around them. Crowley, to his credit, was often chasing this. He was not interested in theories or fantasies about will but rather encounters capable of breaking a person open, penetrating and infecting them, rupturing them. In that sense, Thelema is not ultimately about the supremacy of individual will but rather the dynamic between control and surrender, between strength and weakness, between vitality and ontological contagion. These are encounters that cannot be explained but only survived. That side of Thelema is often ignored—the side where you don't use magick to express your personality, but where something larger happens to you, where contact with the real burns through the mask. This is the encounter where one becomes deeply altered. That's the lineage I'm extending—not through ceremonial forms, but through what I now call *sacred realness*. This is a form of spirituality, based not on myth, but on contact that ruptures, reconfigures, and reorients your entire being. Contact that transforms you into something avant-garde: peculiar, gravitational, and fecund. In that light, "spicy Leibniz" is more than a joke. It's a bridge—from metaphysics to embodiment, from star theory to signal transmission, from Crowley's monads to the relational field. What matters is not whether his cosmology is true in any metaphysical sense—but whether it makes you more real. ## Problematic Interpretations in Thelemic Community **PAA: Your concept of "plausible interpretation" requires claims to be well-supported, cognitively fluent, and empowering. You explicitly reject what you call "bullshit"—interpretations that make people stop caring about truth. Can you give us specific examples of prevalent interpretations in the Thelemic community that you consider particularly problematic by these standards?** Bullshit isn't lying. A liar still respects truth enough to hide it. A bullshitter doesn't care whether something is true or false. What they care about is salience—about sounding deep, sounding mystical, sounding impressive enough that no one asks the obvious question: Is any of this real? This kind of bullshit is rampant in modern Thelemic culture. It thrives in environments where rhetoric is rewarded over contact and where social status depends on saying something that feels esoteric—even if it's disempowering or incoherent. One common example I've seen concerns the OTO initiations. You'll sometimes hear people describe the initiator as someone "charging" the candidate like a talisman. Or my favorite: a sorcerer conjuring the candidate like a spirit and binding them with an oath. As if the candidate isn't a sovereign being but a disembodied intelligence being forced into a vessel. Now, that sounds cool. It evokes power. But it's also—by every interpretive standard I care about—bullshit. There's no evidence Crowley intended this reading. In fact, he explained the rituals in other terms entirely—terms that involve the development of will, not the binding of spirits. The conjuration metaphor puts all the agency on the side of the initiator and treats the candidate like an object. So it's not just unsupported—it's disempowering, even if like everything else in OTO it's wrapped in drama. Another one you hear: that certain degrees cause real-life calamities. The First Degree might magically wreck your marriage. The Second Degree might hex your car. As if Crowley's esoteric vision was really just a mechanism for sabotaging people's relationships or making the oil pan fall off their shitty Toyota. What these interpretations have in common is that they replace contact with reality with mystical theater. They don't help people engage their lives with more clarity or agency. They encourage people to bypass the actual work of transformation by locating meaning in sympathetic coincidences and clever allegories. To be clear, I'm not saying ritual can't have unpredictable or disruptive effects. But that's not the same thing as believing a ritual is designed to create chaos or annoyance as some kind of magical hazing. That's just superstition dressed up as insight. My threshold for interpretation isn't whether it's cool, traditional, or popular. It's whether it's: - Supported by the text or by real patterns of human behavior - Fluent—meaning it flows, it lands, it makes sense - And most importantly, whether it's empowering—whether it leads someone deeper into contact with themselves, with the world, and with what matters. If an interpretation can't do that, I don't care how poetic it is. It's not deep. It's vapid. It's a distraction. And when spiritual language becomes a tool for distraction, it stops being mystical and starts becoming manipulative. That's what I'm working to replace—not just in how I interpret texts, but in how I hold space, transmit signal, and design experiences that actually make people more real. ## Erotic Liberation in Thelema **PAA: *"[Erotic Liberation: Selected Lectures on Thelema 2019-2023](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Erotic-Liberation-Selected-Lectures-2019-2023/dp/B0C9SJW5VW)"* addresses one of the most controversial aspects of Crowley's teaching. How do you approach the integration of sexuality and spirituality in Thelema without falling into either prudish denial or libertine excess?** For a book titled *Erotic Liberation*, there's surprisingly little sex in it. That's not an oversight. It's intentional. I use the word "erotic" not to refer narrowly to sex, but to something deeper: the ecstatic hunger of the self for what is real. It's not about pleasure, per se. It's about contact—that moment when your full presence collides with reality and something opens. Something catches fire. To me, erotic liberation isn't about indulgence or repression. It's about removing the distortions that keep us from experiencing the world as it is. It's not about sexual behavior. It's about the nervous system's ability to stay present to intensity without flinching, collapsing, or dissociating. And that includes—but is not limited to—sexual energy. So the real question becomes: What kind of container allows the erotic current to flow cleanly? What kind of structure supports unfiltered signal without tipping into collapse or control? The answer, in my experience, is co-regulation. When the nervous system is held in a field of clarity—when you're neither enmeshed nor isolated—you become capable of tolerating more voltage, more truth, and more erotic charge. And that's where real spiritual transformation happens. But this kind of work doesn't survive in high-control environments. It doesn't thrive under triangulation, surveillance, or emotional manipulation. [That's why I left OTO](https://youtu.be/y0gxccYR-QE). The system wasn't just outdated; it was fundamentally hostile to the kind of spiritual intensity I was learning to transmit. Erotic liberation is not a doctrine. It's a phase change. It marks the moment when the spiritual path stops being about belief, symbolism, or even identity, and instead becomes about raw coherence, somatic truth, and unflinching relation. That's what I now call *sacred realness*—a kind of post-initiatory spirituality where transformation doesn't come from ritual, but from the voltage of undistorted contact. This path isn't for everyone. It demands a high tolerance for ambiguity and a deep commitment to clarity. It requires that we become our own infrastructure—not dependent on systems to confer legitimacy, but internally attuned enough to transmit without distortion. And it only works in a relational field that supports that clarity. That's the heart of the erotic current: not just intensity but also resonance with what is real. ## Consensus Thelema **PAA: You've been critical of what you call "Consensus Thelema"—the idea that Crowley changed his mind so often that individuals must define Thelema for themselves. How do you balance respect for individual True Will with the need for coherent doctrinal foundations?** "Consensus Thelema," as I use the term, isn't just the belief that everyone must define Thelema for themselves. It's the emergence of a cultural norm—unwritten, yet policed—that Thelema has no definable content at all. The rationale is usually that Crowley changed his mind too often to draw any stable conclusions. So the default position becomes: we each get to make it up. That sounds like freedom, but in practice, it functions as a thought-terminating cliché. It shuts down inquiry. It shields power from critique. It turns relativism into an instrument of control. I've seen it firsthand—how any attempt to clarify Thelema's philosophical commitments or engage in rigorous interpretation is reframed as authoritarianism, ego, or a failure to "promote harmony." Clarity becomes suspect. Questions become disruptions. And the result is a kind of enforced vagueness that serves those who already hold power, because nothing they say can be tested. This is how irrationalism becomes functional. When doctrine is treated as fluid and status is treated as sacred, it becomes almost impossible to challenge bad ideas, because the very act of questioning is reframed as aggression. You end up with a culture where emotional control replaces intellectual honesty and where spiritual insight is replaced with posturing. But let's be clear: Thelema *does* make truth claims. It offers a metaphysical vision of the universe, a theory of selfhood, and a model for liberation. That vision can be critiqued. It can evolve. But it can't simply be erased in favor of aesthetic license and personal preference without losing all coherence. And coherence matters—not because everyone has to agree, but because freedom requires friction. If nothing can be questioned, nothing can be freely chosen. Real freedom means encountering principles that have weight, and then deciding—through embodied contact and rigorous inquiry—whether or not you can align with them. In my own work, I've moved away from doctrinal arguments entirely, not because I've stopped caring about coherence, but because I've come to believe that signal is more primary than belief. I'm no longer interested in debating the true nature of Thelema. I'm interested in whether your nervous system is regulated enough to stand in truth without collapsing or controlling. I'm interested in what your presence does to a room and whether you can hold intensity without distortion. That's where real authority comes from—not from status, not from charisma, and certainly not from a fog of dime store philosophy—but from coherence. It comes from being so integrated, so clear, and so anchored in signal that others feel the field shift when you speak. Consensus Thelema replaced truth with ambiguity. I'm replacing ambiguity with transmission—not doctrine, but clarity that lands in the body and reorganizes the space. That's the kind of freedom I'm interested in now. ## Distinguishing True Will **PAA: You describe True Will as connected to "primary exploration"—what we naturally feel drawn to explore beyond mere survival needs. How does someone distinguish between authentic spiritual calling and psychological compulsion or social conditioning?** The concept of primary exploration—a term I borrow from George Haas—refers to the pursuit of meaning, purpose, and authentic engagement with life. It's what we're drawn to when our nervous system isn't stuck in threat-reduction. It's the part of us that wants to live, not just cope. And Crowley's idea of true will—at its best—is a gesture toward this. But the ability to hear and follow that call depends on how our system is wired for threat, intimacy, and identity. That's where attachment strategy and self-differentiation come in. Attachment shapes how we seek safety—whether through closeness, distance, or hypervigilance. And these patterns deeply affect how clearly we can feel our authentic desire, let alone act on it. But just as foundational is self-differentiation—the capacity to hold onto your internal clarity even in the presence of external pressure. If you can't hold onto your sense of self in the face of someone else's distress, disapproval, or need, you will never be able to distinguish between true will and reactive programming. If you collapse into fusion or cutoff when a relationship is threatened, you'll either contort yourself to be loved or retreat into isolation for safety. Most people confuse these trauma-driven responses for spiritual guidance. They mistake anxiety for intuition. They confuse enmeshment for love. They call self-abandonment "peacekeeping." And they call dissociation "detachment." But true will emerges only through clarity, and clarity requires regulation and differentiation. The dynamic maturational model of attachment theory helps us understand the characteristic ways in which this occurs. People with dismissive (A-pattern) attachment tend to ignore internal signals in favor of cognitive control. They value self-sufficiency, and they often build their identity around being competent, logical, and unflappable. They're efficient—but numb. They mistrust emotion, devalue vulnerability, and often mistake secondary exploration (structure, mastery, and control) for primary exploration (meaning, creativity, and contact with the real). In spiritual contexts, these individuals often become obsessed with systems—rituals, correspondences, philosophy, or lineage. Or in the context of an institution like OTO, event-planning, bureaucracy, forms. They believe that if they just memorize enough correspondences, diagram enough metaphysical maps, or come up with a spicy enough workshop, they will attain ... something. But in truth, they're protecting themselves from feeling, from being moved, and from encountering something unpredictable. They may posture as "above it all," taking pride in not being "hysterical" or "messy" like others. They're "mature," channeling their anxiety into policy revisions or creating catalogues. But they're often profoundly disconnected from longing. They mistake withdrawal for sovereignty, when really it's just emotionally armored detachment. They tend to project their disowned sense of longing on to others, which is why these individuals are often paired romantically with more emotional, even chaotic types. These individuals are likely to avoid therapy, opting for conflating mastery of the Tree of Life with emotional regulation or depth. People with anxious (C-pattern) attachment prioritize proximity or connection at any cost. Their identity is often formed in reaction to others: they mirror, mold, and adapt to be chosen, included, or safe. They confuse fusion with intimacy and will pursue primary exploration only when it aligns with someone else's validation. In spiritual circles, this shows up as people who: - Adopt the beliefs, affectations, or language of charismatic leaders - Mistake emotional highs for transformation - Use public vulnerability to secure closeness or social capital - Present spiritual enthusiasm that masks a desperate need to belong These people are often the "helpers" of the group—constantly volunteering, affirming the party line, or trying to "keep things harmonious." But underneath is a terror of being unwanted or alone. So they unconsciously perform the version of spirituality that will keep them safe. They may say, "I just want to be of service," but what they really mean is, "Please don't exile me." It should be noted that while these patterns appear gendered, they're not. The A and C patterns show up equally in both men and women. People with mixed A/C strategies (what in some models is referred to as "disorganized") have a fragmented sense of self. This is because their primary psychological defense mechanism is dissociation—not necessarily of personality but of meaning-structures. Their signal is often noisy, chaotic, and saturated with unprocessed threat, because dissociated meanings are constantly being projected onto present events. They swing between over-identification and withdrawal, idealization and devaluation, intensity and collapse. As a result, they struggle to engage in sustained exploration at all—not because they don't want to, but because their nervous system cannot maintain enough coherence. Ironically, these individuals often end up in positions of spiritual authority or influence—not because they are the most mature, but because their inner chaos creates dramatic, magnetic fields. Their emotional volatility is mistaken for spiritual depth. Their cryptic, contradictory speech is mistaken for wisdom. Their transgressiveness is reframed as "edginess" or "power." They often build communities around themselves that mirror their own instability—fostering trauma bonds, psychic enmeshment, and endless cycles of rupture and repair. They present themselves as enlightened guides, but in truth they are recruiting a relational field to regulate their own unmanageable state. "You have to break people open to awaken them," they say—without realizing they are simply re-enacting their own dissociation and calling it transcendence. These realizations led me to shift the question from "What's my true will?" to "Am I differentiated enough to stay in relationship with my own signal—even when connection or identity feel threatened?" That question points directly to the B-pattern in attachment theory: secure functioning. Secure individuals don't reject the strategies of A- or C-patterns. They can detach from emotion or move toward connection when threatened. But they do so adaptively—in response to real, present circumstances, not reflexive, imaginary ones. Their system is flexible, attuned, and resilient. This kind of dynamic, self-organizing intelligence is what Crowley was reaching for with the concept of true will. But he mistakenly framed it as a fixed, innate essence—something buried under repression to be excavated and unveiled. What I've come to understand is that it's not a hidden truth to be uncovered but instead a coherent signal to be maintained—and that signal doesn't arise in a vacuum. It emerges relationally. The self isn't a monad. It's not sealed and sovereign like a diamond. It's a process—an evolving feedback loop—shaped and reshaped in contact with others and the world. Crowley's metaphor of the star still holds value. For him, the star (the self) understands itself and its universe by dividing itself—entering into incarnation—and then reuniting with itself across space and time. This re-integration through love under will leads to a more complex, differentiated, and potent unity. But where Crowley saw this dynamic playing out primarily between the individual and nature, I believe it cannot be understood without accounting for how nervous systems interact. That's why any modern understanding of spiritual realization must include a psychobiological perspective rooted in attachment theory and co-regulation. Self-differentiation is what lets you hear the signal clearly and stay with it—not by cutting off from others, not by merging with them, but by remaining present to yourself in relationship. It's what lets you say: - "This is what I feel—and I'll stay in connection while I say it." - "This is what I want—and I won't manipulate or abandon to get it." - "This is what's true for me—even if it unsettles you." When that capacity is strong, you don't need metaphysical certainty to walk a spiritual path. You don't need to perfectly name your "one true calling." You just need to keep listening, keep adjusting, keep regulating, and track—moment by moment—whether the energy in your body is expanding into clarity and contact or contracting into distortion and defense. Thelema gave us a metaphor. I'm building a transmitter. > My philosophical approach begins with the idea that real transformation happens through contact with what exceeds us. > > Frater Entelecheia ## Manifesting True Will Through the Body **PAA: You've written about "manifesting True Will through the body" and the importance of understanding emotion and desire at the physical level. How do you integrate this embodied approach with the more abstract philosophical dimensions of your work?** My philosophical approach begins with the idea that real transformation happens through contact with what exceeds us. I define the real as that which resists assimilation—something we cannot fully explain, predict, or reduce to existing frameworks. It confronts us with contradiction, ambiguity, or intensity that interrupts the self-image. And in that interruption, we are changed. Crowley was trying to get at this idea when he defined the Holy Guardian Angel as an "objective individual" rather than simply our "Higher Selves". Some modern Thelemites have taken this idea and used it as a prop for their own claims to institutional authority, but at the most basic level, Crowley was touching on the idea that transformation requires not just encounter with an idealized other but rather rupture through contact with a real other. This is not transformation as performance or symbolic enactment. It's not a story we tell ourselves about having grown. It's a shift in how we perceive, feel, and act—and it begins in the body. The body is not just a container or vehicle. It is the site of contact. It is the transmitter. It's where reality lands first—before thought, before narrative, before belief. Sensation, impulse, tension, desire—these are the front lines of our engagement with the real. They don't need interpretation. They are the signal. This places me in contrast with many traditional spiritual or philosophical systems which often treat the body as an illusion, distraction, or inferior copy, preferring instead to talk about "cosmic consciousness" or "non-duality". I don't think the body is deceptive or something we need to escape in favor of the Ogdoad or infinite consciousness. I think it tells the truth faster than the mind can process it. What we call true will isn't just a concept or ideal. It's a pattern of somatic coherence that emerges when we're in right relationship with ourselves and the world. It's when our actions feel aligned, our energy flows cleanly, and our nervous system settles even as we move forward with purpose. The deeper philosophical insight is this: truth reveals itself in the body first, not in abstraction. That's why I don't separate embodiment from philosophy. Embodiment *is* philosophy enacted. Thelema taught that each star must express its nature fully—but that expression isn't just mystical or symbolic. It's physiological. It's emotional. It's relational. If your will can't be felt, known, and enacted through your body, then it's not integrated. The same goes for spiritual awakening. There is more than one type of spiritual awakening. The only ones that matter to me are the ones that result in changes to presence—the ones that move you to do or to be something you weren't before. So when I talk about manifesting true will through the body, I'm talking about something practical and observable. Can you recognize the difference between anxiety and intuition? Between contraction and truth? Can you stay regulated in the presence of relational complexity? Can you feel desire without outsourcing your self-worth to its object? To me, these aren't therapeutic questions. They're ontological. Because how we relate to our sensation is how we relate to reality itself. ## Transformative Impact of Interpretive Framework **PAA: Your work represents a systematic attempt to establish rigorous philosophical foundations for Thelemic practice. If you could ensure one aspect of your interpretive framework became widely adopted in Thelemic communities, what would have the most transformative impact on how people understand and practice these teachings?** If I could leave people with one thing, it would be this: The future of transformation won't be symbolic. It will be relational, embodied, and undistorted. That means moving beyond metaphors of "true will" as an inner essence to be discovered or "initiation" as a secret drama staged by gatekeepers. It means recognizing that spiritual transformation isn't something conferred—it's something that emerges through contact with the real, with the body, and with others. The foundation of my work now is what I call the *signal*. Signal is the through-line of your being. It's not an idea or belief. It's the pattern of coherence that emerges when your body, perception, and action are attuned. It doesn't require doctrine or decoding. It just requires that you listen, track, and adapt in real time. Signal is how the real moves through you. Signal can only be maintained in relational fields that support it. That's why I've moved away from hierarchy and symbolism toward what I call *field coherence*. Spiritual growth doesn't require someone above you. It requires a field organized around attunement rather than control. The role of a guide is not to confer meaning but to protect clarity—to hold conditions in which your own signal can emerge. What used to be called "initiation," I now understand as a *threshold event*: a moment when your system encounters something it cannot assimilate and must reorganize to adapt. That threshold may be a confrontation, a betrayal, a burst of pleasure, or a sudden clarity. What matters is not the ritual but the reconfiguration of the self in response to it. What's sacred is not hidden, esoteric knowledge. What's sacred is what must be accommodated. It is that which cannot be ignored. It is that which requires you to grow, to stretch, to relate differently—or remain distorted. That's the framework I'm working from now—a framework I call *sacred realness*. It's not belief or performance. It is contact, attunement, and coherence. That's the system I'm building—and for me at least it is the future. **PAA: Thank you very much for your time in answering our questions this was really interesting to get your perspective. ** --- --- # Clint Sabom’s ‘Panic Magic’ – Sample Chapter Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/clint-saboms-panic-magic-sample-chapter/ ![Panic Magic book artwork showing a stage, theater curtains, and a levitating figure](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81AkhyT0iLL._SY522_.jpg) Sample Chapter # Panic Magic Chapter 1 The following is the first chapter of my book Panic Magic, published by Star Lore Publishing. It’s about a traumatized magician who performs at increasingly larger venues until his performances attract nefarious enemies, and intelligence agencies recruit him to work for them. It is both a thriller and a love story, a journey into magic and a carnival ride through the unconscious mind. You can buy it [here on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Panic-Magic-Clint-Sabom-ebook/dp/B0DY6PCDNS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Y35QGSJYO8VB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.OFeoDdooY_l3Ewoluq_NnQ.fgM-3hTGoPy6CHflA7IHYZ5V4PqDYmAdN8CcRSx3j2Y&dib_tag=se&keywords=panic+magic+clint+sabom&qid=1779028515&sprefix=panic+magic+clint+sabom%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1). I hope you enjoy! -Clint [Buy on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Panic-Magic-Clint-Sabom-ebook/dp/B0DY6PCDNS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Y35QGSJYO8VB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.OFeoDdooY_l3Ewoluq_NnQ.fgM-3hTGoPy6CHflA7IHYZ5V4PqDYmAdN8CcRSx3j2Y&dib_tag=se&keywords=panic+magic+clint+sabom&qid=1779028515&sprefix=panic+magic+clint+sabom%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1) This is a work of fiction. It is a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental. ## Chapter 1 Panic Magic The curtains opened. I hit the stage. “The show this evening comes from the castles of Old, where I once lived as a court jester, simply because it struck me as the only way to live near royalty. So let’s talk about missions and dreams. The dream of power rests in every magician, but power gives way to fun. The dream of a poet is simply to survive their own life. The dream of most Americans is to make more money. My dreams are of a different kind, of a world seen only by a few, who traverse the land of deep-sea foam and the mountains of hidden altars. As of now, pedestrians walk in crowds of the fiercest warriors. Old men jump through windowpanes and mirrors to participate in the protests and anti-protests. A woman puts on makeup and sees snow lions in the tubs, tripping her shock into the oblivion of useless store fronts. A feast of professionals gathers at a table to eat human flesh, giving them the power to retain full possession, integrated possession, of Lucifer himself, who is not any deity, but more like the King Vampire in vampire novels. I call upon the muses tonight to sing lullabies many hours before the warm waters of sleep. I call upon the ancestors, who protect the good. And once and for all, I am good!” I exclaimed. In the black chairs of the theater and the blackness of the stage, it was easy to download the magnetic fluid. Quickly, I sensed it moving downwards and below the stage, like magnets aiming for the center of earth, a negative charge that repelled against gravity. I levitated ten feet, holding myself in air before slowly moving back down. “I will now come down to the audience, two rows at a time, having everyone who so desires check me for wires or strings or gimmicks, and then I will levitate there, again and again, at each set of two rows. Here we go now, two rows by two blue fish, clinging to the chimes of old nursery rhymes. And where are the Visionaries here tonight? I know you are here. I know you know how many have achieved The Philosopher’s Stone. The people of this tattered earth need you more and more, but still, you hide in secret. Enough, enough. Here we go now, two rows by two blue fish, clinging to the chimes of old nursery rhymes.” I came down the rows, doing the usual routine, and the procedure succeeded flawlessly. It didn’t last very long, as Pushing Boundaries theater was not that big. Afterwards, I returned to the stage. “The debts have been paid, the flighty, entitled princesses of the wealthy have been kissed, the little girls in their steel houses have been screaming all day, until now, when they are calmed by the comfort of my far-way world, hearing my voice through a realm of fractured black smoke. The phantoms have appeared, but they are nothing to fear, though some of the fear will remain forever buried in our psyche’s vacuum of wheels. But now, again, I call the seers, those hidden, perhaps in other countries and cultures that allow more time in the day than ours. The hours wane on and off, and Father Time can speak, apart from my words, as streets have a voice and chairs have something to say. Plato’s forms are the structure, Buddhist prayers for the inanimate keep everything alive, and thoughts become objects even in this plane. But just knowing this will yield little good for anyone. Manifestation is a corrupt business, and scholars lie in a swarm of bees stressed out by the wetness that summer can bring.” I paused. “I leave you now, with only my levitations as solid proof that will never be accepted by conventional scientists. And it is the strangers that most deceive, appearing in mysterious romance, but unable to resist ruffling the feathers of winged lights that come from the constellations we cannot see. I depart now, my friends. With well wishes, with the gold of the roads of The New Jerusalem, with the City on the Hill that once served for the powerful and now should serve us all. Infinite forms have not been lost. Keep in mind the cheers of crowds that will one day route you to the Beyond safely, past everything you purchased, past any bad you’ve done. All will be forgiven – is already forgiven. Goodnight.” I bowed to a standing ovation. The curtains closed. I rode back home with Nova and Melanie, Nova behind the wheel. I sat in the backseat upon my request. I was shaking and trembling madly, as I did after all the performances. “Don’t worry, Troy. I will give you a good hug when we get home, and there is freshly baked bread awaiting us, not to mention your perpetual espresso that is ready in minutes.” Melanie assured, wearing her all-black gothic attire as usual. “Thank you,” I said. “How did I do?” “It was good,” Nova said, “I couldn’t tell if you were speaking linearly or nonlinearly, although maybe that’s the point.” “Yeah, maybe it is. I already forgot what I said, once out of me, never returning, each time.” Melanie laughed. “We know, Troy.” The next day I awoke after eight hours of sleep, trembling in fear from nightmares about whether I would survive my own life. But after two hours of espresso, cigarettes, and my morning medication, the fear subsided. “Perhaps it will be a great day,” I said to Venus, the presider of my altar. Indeed, it was really beauty I was chasing, not magic. “You have the soul of a poet,” a Professor of English once said to me in my younger years, at the kind of party gathering of intellectual circles in which I was immersed in those days. But I never wanted to write many poems. And the poems I did write were written to people, given away as presents, in lieu of buying something unnecessary. “Let’s see what happens, Great Venus.” Indeed, I filtered all love objects through the Hall of Venus – lovers, potential lovers, longtime girlfriends, and if they shimmered enough in Her colors, I knew they were right for me. Melanie still was half and half: one glistening star but the other side with the dread of gothic daggers. But did Melanie even have a romantic interest in me? And are goths ever teachers of the heart? I looked then at the list Bruce, my therapist (and I called him Bruce) had given me at our last session as a recommendation. “The death meetings.” There was one tonight, not too far away, and I resolved to go, to dispose myself to whatever would echo in such a gathering. I traveled to the meeting, eventually, after a seemingly long day of laundry, grocery shopping, and standing up by my desk, barely able to think straight. My chronic anxiety always beckoned me instinctively to stand, where sitting became anti-natural, and indeed, my mom said in childhood I did my homework standing up, all the way up until high school. My mental problems had all started, after the stability-ending of my peace of mind, when I was sexually abused at age 7. It was a man, a seemingly gentle-souled man, that picked me up from carpool one day, stating he was a friend of the family that was asked to come because my parents couldn’t. Truth be told, my mom was just a little late. How this man knew to choose me, at the appropriate time, will forever remain a mystery. The schoolteachers for some odd reason consented, and I climbed into the backseat of his sedan, after which he took me to his house. He abused me, then, as if nothing had happened, he took me home and dropped me off quickly. How he knew where my home was remains, too, a mystery. When I got home, my parents realized instantly what had happened, and they were alarmed and outraged. They immediately reported it to the cops, but the man was never found. They rushed me to the ER. That’s when I entered therapy, at age 7, which has continued to this day at age 47, with the darkest of memories of that man’s house, whose structure I cannot make out, where memories are locked and sealed in a pit of doom impenetrable by thought. So that has sat at the base of me ever since, sometimes oddly calming, sometimes signaling a hyper-vigilance alert state, sometimes a chronic freeze response, carrying me through each day and seemingly unrelated to the events I now experience. The Great Experiment involves filtering that man through the halls of Venus. One of the few things I remember about the day of abuse is his face. And when I aim that romantic light of Venus towards him - for he was, after all, my first encounter with Eros, albeit forced - when aimed at Venus a pitch-black dim hangs over her, yet sometimes if I persist, She shines through from the other side with scattered petals of red, blue, and green, breaking up the darkness but not completely. That is the center-point, more like the depth point, of my consciousness. Going there, I feel a bit more grounded, as painful as the exercise might sound. Alas, another thing to mention that remains in the absence of obviousness is how one could possibly arrive in a condition plagued with psychological problems while retaining the supernatural gift of levitation? I had come to the conclusion that it can best be explained if one divides Being into three parts – body, psyche, and spirit. My spirit, even with the foreground of decay in the psyche, still retained an awakened state. This can happen, as does with many when they open to the mystic without having a solid container to hold it. My spirit still remained, lit up like a sun from another planet, in the wildest golden light, and it was this golden light that enabled the download of the magnetic fluid to offset my weight and repel against gravity, though my mental health issues still continued in the realm of the psyche. Eventually, then, yes, to returning to the current, I made it to the death meeting. It was held inside a church, in a quiet, small room, with about thirty folded chairs in a circle. About fifteen people arrived, and there was a host, sitting in a cozy armchair, who addressed the meeting when it was time to start. He appeared immaculately manicured, perhaps in his late sixties, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and semi-formal attire. He spoke: “Let us begin with the death inscription.” “Death will come to us all; each day disposes itself as an eternal gift.” Everyone said in unison. “Who’s first?” the host asked. “I am Elizabeth, and I am afraid of death,” a tall slender woman spoke. “Hi Elizabeth,” everyone echoed in unison. “Oh my God, people! I don’t know how you do it. Talk about death regularly! It scares the living daylights out of me, and I just want to get back to normal living. But ever since I first started coming to these meetings – and I know I’m fairly new to these – I can’t stop thinking about that one line repeated, ‘All fear is fear of death.’ I mean, is it really? It seems like I just have fear of things to do now, not even fear, but a total consumption of the present. How to face death – I mean how would that really help me? I can’t wrap my mind around it!” “Thanks for sharing,” came the crowd’s response. “Hi, I’m Rob, and I’m afraid of death,” a man appearing in his mid-fifties, dressed in business casual attire said. “Hi, Rob.” “I’m not only afraid of death but so scared of life. I’m facing a monster of debt, and I must get it resolved before I pass. Do I have enough time to do it all? If I died tomorrow, would it be an unlived life? I have scarcely traveled out of the country, aside from one vacation to Cancun. I want to throw questions out: is the fear of life the fear of death, too? Is the fear of people the fear of death also? I don’t understand this, though these meetings have given me some peace – talking about the worst-case scenario does indeed shine a brighter light on the blessings I have now and while subsiding enough in this play of money and work, I am at a point stable enough but still scared of the future. Still not living with hope. I heard one psychologist, a famous writer, declare that the hope center in the brain was also the default center of the brain, so if there is hope, there will be more peace, accordingly. And my worries about the future too often overtake me. Thanks for letting me share.” “Thanks, Rob.” The host intervened: “There was the early psychoanalyst Otto Rank who made speculations and experiential references of others, all to explain the fear of life and the fear of death. Some interpreted that his conclusion was that the fear of life dwelled heavier in one’s psyche. But later interpretations put the fears together. Fear of life and fear of death go hand in hand, I believe, inextricably wed, like The Lovers card in The Tarot Deck, albeit the dark lovers, who oh yes, are everyone. Who’s next?” “Hi, I’m Byron, and I’m scared of my wife.” “Hi, Byron.” “I hear that sex and death are inextricably tied, too, as the great works of literature reveal, though this, my struggle, is less about sex, or so it seems. The fear of my wife’s moods terrifies me. But moreover, she doesn’t trust me. I have lied to her in the past; I have even separated from her for a while against her better wishes. And I feel suspicion from her, whether it’s there or not. I fear being accused of lying, of hiding things, though I do not do this – it's a remnant from our history forever resurrected in her heaviness of diamond-sharp swords stuck into me by her words. We seem to be unable to move past this, and I live in a state of paranoia, wondering if she is being honest with me, wondering if she is hiding from me. It’s The Trauma Hall of Mirrors we look through, and though rested in our current dynamics, we both underwent severe childhood trauma in the past. I concede then to the fear of death, and it lightens my load. Ever since I have been coming to these meetings, for years now, my half-psychosis has ceased, though half remains in the frantic nerves of broken trust.” “Thanks for sharing.” everyone said, and I felt validated, relating so much to Byron’s fear and wondering why he used mystical language similar to my own. “Hi, I’m Jay, and I am less scared of death now.” “Hi, Jay.” “I’m just so grateful for these meetings. Most of you seem like intellectuals. But I guess I am a simple person. I work. I have a family. And the relationships I have with my family are better now since I started coming to these meetings. Going to the end, death, fills me with gratitude each day for the many blessings I have. Whenever I may get anxious or nervous, I just think of death, the ultimate loss. In another program I go to, they say fear is fear of losing what I have or not getting what I want. And death seems to include both of those. There is hope, and there is a more meaningful life for me now. I guess you could say that death has become my resting point, my center of gravity. Just so, so grateful, thank you.” “Thanks, Jay.” The meeting went on for a while, for about an hour, the rest of the shares were similar, and I took notice how most people were caught in the present, almost unable to arrive at death in their present minds. I did not share. But I resolved to go to other meetings, as there was something here, something I wanted to infuse in my blood that might make my anxiety and trauma less brutal. We closed with the second inscription, both inscriptions written on old stones outside the meeting room. The host began with all of us holding hands. “Let us now praise Death, sacred Death, that binds us all in the quest of the unknown. To paraphrase a great poet, 'When thou must come, come unfalteringly.’ Amen.” “Amen.” I did not stay and talk to the others afterwards, though many were chatting it up. I felt a strange sense of hallucination, like a psychedelic drug I just took that was only half-effective, pulling me into visions but then quickly out. And before I could get to the car, two members stopped me in the parking lot. “Hi, you’re new. I’m Mark and this is Gary.” “I’m Troy, nice to meet you,” I said, shaking their hands. “Are you a visionary like us?” They asked. “You appear as if you might be.” “I’m not quite sure,” I said. “I’ve done some work in the esoteric arts but never became psychic or anything close.” “You don’t have to be psychic to see things in these meetings. The quality of them contains a darkness, filled with soothing shadows of crescent moonlight in the spring. And the visions come from that, unrelated to your capacities.” “Well, now that you mention it, maybe. Nothing came too clear, but I plan on coming back and perhaps you will be right. Though I care to leave things an open question, as open questions are the unknown of death, right?” “Wow,” Gary said, “you seem to get it.” And turning to Mark, “I think he may be one of us. Here are our numbers if you ever need to call.” “Thanks,” I said, “and I may call. I suffer from intense trauma.” “We all do or have. That’s why we’re here.” Mark paused. “Nice to meet you. Hope to see you again.” “Nice to meet you, too,” I said. “Take care.” And with that, I went to my car and drove home, feeling relieved. It felt as if I had gained protectors throughout my life, some of whom I lost touch with and others I only contacted sporadically. They looked out for me, as if knowing I danced both miraculously and with an emotionally fragile core at the same time. And now, at this point, I had new protectors – Nova and Melanie, these two cats at the meeting, Bruce still, and more would come, I thought, especially now with these performances of levitation and monologues. So how did I first come about this power of levitation? What had happened, many years ago, when I received a lucrative scholarship to study literature in Budapest, Hungary, is that I first climbed Gellert Hill, which one really couldn’t call a mountain. It had winding steps, running to the top, amid flats almost cave-like in the arrangement of the rising earth and stone. I had asked people, at my therapist's suggestion, “who is the keeper of these mountains?” My therapist had been studying with a shaman who declared that all mountains had keepers, who used mountaintops as their altar, tending to it like tending to the forces and possible blessings with which it could imbue the populus. Sure, enough, a woman of about 40 directed me to a spot where such a man went, usually around sunset. I went that evening to find him, and sure enough, he had a cloth spreading, lined with bones and stones and other talismans of sorts that I did not recognize. “Are you the keeper of this mountain?” I had asked. “Yes, after my brother died.” We stared in silence for a while. “Is there something I’m meant to learn from you?” “No. But already I can sense you have a gateway inside you to Open Presence. I can refer you to a man in Prague. He will perhaps take you as a student and if you’re lucky, initiate you into the Holy Mysteries.” “Wow. I’m not sure what to say, but I’ll go.” The man in Prague was known simply as C.K., and he met me one night in Old Town Square beneath the clock, after the previous night when I had gone to a party of American expats living there, where I quite enjoyed myself. C.K. did try to initiate me, but I could not get down most of the exercises of magic. Sure, there was something about being in Europe that always freed me of the visually-infused conditioned associations with America, and my relaxation there had reached a point where I was completely off all psychotropic medication. But I attributed this to me relaxing in my flat, with little homework to do, and just sitting there, drinking espresso and smoking, slipping into dazed releases of pent-up tension. But it didn’t necessarily feel like the Open Presence of which the keeper of the mountains spoke. C.K. gave me exercise upon exercise, meditations of sorts, working with the four elements, but I could not get them. Then, when he explained to me the electromagnetic fluid, something seemed to resonate. The electric was Fire, expansive, positive, while the magnetic, to which I was more inclined, was Water, negative, contracting. He had once mentioned that one could achieve levitation if one progressed solidly enough into these Mysteries. He gave me the exercise to do this, but he had very little hope for me in the end. “You’re just not ready for this,” he said. “I agree. But I will take what you have given me so far, and perhaps it can develop at a future time.” “Fair enough,” he said, “I will leave you with this stone: the shape of a thick phallus, though it’s meant to be, and I know it is, your soul stone.” And with that, I headed back to Budapest, to enjoy the peace and solitude of my flat dwelling in relaxations and releases. However, one night it struck me to try the levitation technique. It amounted to drawing the dense magnetic fluid from the stars, down into the body from the head, and filling oneself with it so much that the heaviness of the negatively charged magnetic fluid offset one’s own body weight. The two negative charges, earth’s gravity and magnetic fluid, would repel, and once sufficiently done, one would rise. When I first tried, I felt such grounding, such a force from my head to my feet that I felt stuck to the ground, more tightly than ever in my life. I would continue to do this each night, for only about 15 minutes, before returning to reading in my armchair and relaxing. But would you know it? One night, I did it! I came several inches off the ground! And the next night, and the next night, and the next night, I kept improving. C.K. had warned against learning the higher abilities before the introductory and middle ones (which I had so remarkably failed at), but here, in this flat, in a building two centuries old, with gunshot markings still in the stone from WWII, I learned how to levitate. For years and years, I told no one. Upon returning to America, my mental health declined again. My psyche was depressed and anxious, and yet, I’d continue to perform these levitations, alone of course, until many years later, at the age of 47, when I had at last returned to a Bohemian scene in Atlanta, I decided to give public performances. An avant-garde theater eventually agreed for me to perform monthly, given the initial tickets were selling out the theater, and they would pay me $4,000 a month. It was the only job I had, but enough to subsist on. I would give dramatic monologues in between levitations. I would have audience members come up to verify that there were no wires or strings or other artificial illusions moving me, and I would levitate again. The shows continued to sell out. The manager of the theater thought firmly that this was just a stepping stone into larger things, and I would eventually depart ways with the Pushing Boundaries theater into bigger events. He had even been called by talent agents. But many of them wanted illusionists with a full show of spectacle, not just some guy preaching in between levitations. But I was fine doing just this for now. And even though the audience checked me, it was amazing how many thought it was still just fake. But people would still come, again and again! I shared a three-bedroom house with Nova and Melanie. Nova, a painter, lived in the uppermost part, which was a loft, giving him room for an in-house studio. Melanie, an emerging gothic horror novelist, lived at the ground level. And me, in a basement efficiency-styled apartment, where I had high ceilings and kept the spaciousness of emptiness open, filling it with little furniture and having my own bathroom. A portrait of Venus hung above my altar, where the soul stone sat, amid blue candles. I’m relieved that through my many lifetime hardships, I was still able to retain talents and personability, amid moving suddenly out of places, amid the alcoholism that ate my early thirties to dust and fake bronze. The night before each performance, I had the dream that I always do that particular night, the one dream in an otherwise black dreamless sleep. In this dream of a capital pre-caution, Melanie and I floated in dark space, perhaps in damp clouds, perhaps the fog, perhaps beyond the skies of earth in space. She would look at me with stern eyes, black-clad as she always was, approaching me with knives, swords, points of hardened wires, as if wanting to fight but never fully attacking. However, as disturbing as it could be, her shadows would enter me, giving me a sacred dark force that helped me levitate. After turning paranoid at this dream at first, I eventually came to relish it as an initiation and a reinitiation every time, as much as it contradicted her behavior (well not completely) in waking life. But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. ### Continue the story This is a sample chapter from *Panic Magic*. Continue the story on Amazon. [Buy on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Panic-Magic-Clint-Sabom-ebook/dp/B0DY6PCDNS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Y35QGSJYO8VB&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.OFeoDdooY_l3Ewoluq_NnQ.fgM-3hTGoPy6CHflA7IHYZ5V4PqDYmAdN8CcRSx3j2Y&dib_tag=se&keywords=panic+magic+clint+sabom&qid=1779028515&sprefix=panic+magic+clint+sabom%2Caps%2C143&sr=8-1) --- # Franz Bardon’s IIH STEP IX-X are NECESSARY FOR PME and KTQ by André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardons-iih-step-ix-x-are-necessary-for-pme-and-ktq-by-andre-consciencia/ ## Introduction Table of Contents - Introduction- The Student Will Lack the Foundation- A Study of the Bridge- The Devil’s Advocate- Evocation at Step VIII - Evocation at Step IX- Evocation at Step X- KTQ in Step VIII- KTQ in Step IX- KTQ at Step X- Learn with Andre I have come to know many who have left Franz Bardon’s “Initiation Into Hermetics” after completion of Step VIII to pursue The Practice of Magical Evocation or The Key to the True Quabbalah, the case has always been that they run into difficulties and seek guidance from me or other teachers. The problem is not in seeking guidance, that is always a good idea as long as one’s mind is pure enough not to be corrupted. The problem is not in meddling with PME or KTQ at this stage, but leaving IIH incomplete. Would that not be the case, PME and KTQ could even help complete the last two steps of IIH, and as long as IIH isn’t complete, that would be their main utility.  In [IIH Step VIII](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/iih-step-viii-by-andre-consciencia/) I have briefly addressed this problem and, more extensively, the importance of completing Step VIII itself in relation to the maturation of all previous steps. This time, I will be addressing the importance of completing Step IX and X, without which the practice of PME or KTQ will hardly ever mature.  ## The Student Will Lack the Foundation Bardon states plainly at Step X: > * “He must realize that this last step really represents the end of his magical development with respect to the first Tarot card and that he ought to be prepared for the higher magical tasks that I am going to describe in the following two works: The Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key To The True Quabbalah. If there were gaps in his schooling, he would never be able to control the higher Powers.”* Resuming Franz Bardon’s Hermetic Trilogy, the three books put together are designed as a step-by-step system of initiation that starts in Initiation into Hermetics (IIH). This is a ten-step training manual covering body, soul, and spirit that teach elemental balance, concentration, thought control, breath work, sensory expansion, and the first exercises in magical imagination. In other words, this book is to prepare the student for higher forms of magic by way of self-mastery, and the development of extra magical skills in the end of Step X highlights these skills are to be cultivated when everything else has been mastered. This says nothing of the student practicing parallel systems of initiation, but, for maximum capacity, each system is to be practiced as… a system.   The trilogy follows on to The Practice of Magical Evocation (PME), working with spirits, intelligences, and beings of various spheres: elemental, planetary and possibly beyond. The book shows detailed instructions for creating a magical circle, mirror, and tools, as well as the keys to safe evocation, teaching the magician how to call and work with beings while maintaining sovereignty and equilibrium.   Next comes The Key to the True Quabbalah (KTQ), on the use sounds, letters, colors, and principles as a direct creative force in the four planes (Akasha, mental, astral, physical), to give the magician the “Word” as a tool of creation in alignment with divine law. First self-mastery (IIH), then mastery over spiritual beings and the personification of divine principles (PME), and finally mastery over divine creation via the divine principles in and of themselves (KTQ). Without self-mastery one cannot, in all truth, face the other. Without facing the other one cannot touch the bare cosmos. Without the completion of IIH’s Step IX and Step X the student will lack the foundation for what comes later in PME and KTQ. For once, Step IX teaches clairvoyance through magic mirrors and projection through time and space; the separation of the astral body; impregnation of it with the four divine fundamental qualities; treatment of the sick with electromagnetic fluid; and the creation of volts (condensations in Akasha) for wish-realization.  Evocation (PME) requires one to project into other planes, perceive intelligence there, and keep sovereign. Without controlled astral separation and clairvoyant perception, the magician could not truly interact with or even perceive the beings Bardon describes in PME, while volting and fluid mastery are needed for charging the room, tools, and the triangle. There may be slight objections to what I am saying, but we will get to it later.  Step X teaches the elevation of the spirit to higher planes, direct communication with the personal God and higher divine beings, and the acquisition of advanced magical faculties, including control of elemental spheres and beings. This is relevant because in PME, the magician is meant to command universal intelligences, but Bardon insists this is only safe if the magician has already united with Divine Providence (via Step X in IIH). Otherwise, the magician risks obsession or enslavement. As well, KTQ demands the ability to vibrate cosmic letters into the Akasha, which only works if one already has established conscious unity with the Divine and purified their being through Step X. Without this, the Quabbalah may easily degrade into empty sound-making rather than true creation. And, if Step IX gives the technical faculties such as clairvoyance, astral separation, fluidic mastery, volting and Step X provides the spiritual authority (entrance into the elemental kingdoms, higher elevation of spirit, unity with the Highest), then attempt PME and KTQ without these and you may see nothing, or hallucinations, fail to stand the beings and be deceived, and intone letters without effect or only to dangerously destabilize yourself. This is why sometimes you see Step VIII magicians (or magicians from other systems or that have modified IIH) suffering a lot of karma from Quabbalistic letters that are originally meant to be used in sole alignment with dharma, or also magicians afraid of the effects of intelligences and particular spheres of existence. They are taking a much harder road that will last many more years to stabilize than the time it would take them to complete the final two steps of IIH. It is IIH’s steps IX and X that unlock the doors to PME and KTQ, the other way is to slam these doors, but not without taking damage. In contrast, a true Step X magician will likely get it right with all the cosmic letters on the first try.  A Step VIII that has trained accordingly (again see [my article on Step VIII](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/iih-step-viii-by-andre-consciencia/)) can see spirits and sense their presence in mirrors or triangles. This magician can load magical tools and intone letters with some effect in the astral/mental body, but results are weak, unstable, or subjective. The spirits recognize them only as a psychic, not as a magician of Providence, and most of projection is but observation, not real mastery within the planes. There is no guarantee of safety and you are at the mercy of the beings, risking deception, obsession, or self-illusion. Even after completing Step IX the magician is still missing the conscious union with Providence that guarantees alignment of will (alignment of microcosm and macrocosm). The magician may still work from ego if not stabilized. It is only at Step X that evocation becomes true cooperation rather than bargaining and the KTQ cosmic letters and words become the actions of the Highest, or rather creation in full accord with divine law. It is only here that the student crosses from Initiate to Adept.          ## A Study of the Bridge The training of clairvoyance with Magic Mirrors is required to see with proficiency intelligence in the triangle, mirror, or atmosphere of the chamber. You have trained clairvoyance before to the level of the mere psychic that gathers some impressions from the cosmos. A blind one that can sense around him. Mirror-clairvoyance is learning to really distinguish, and without it evocation is blind. This kind of extrasensory expertise allows you to verify the letter effects (color-tone-sensation triads) on higher planes. Absent of it, Quabbalistic operations are mostly theoretical. Regarding astral separation, in PME the magician must project into the sphere of the intelligence being evoked. Astral travel is the real meeting ground, beyond the mental plane. Such is not directly addressed, but believe me it can make a huge difference. Mostly, and this is required, astral separation enables projection of letters into the Akasha consciously from the astral body, where they have immediate formative force. Because some magicians who haven’t gone beyond step VIII have never experienced it, they come to the conclusion that Bardon never taught one to distinguish between mental, astral and physical. The truth is, this kind of astral separation, which Bardon provides the methods for, is really rarely taught and has remained idle almost since Ancient Egypt.  Most importantly, astral Impregnation with the Four Divine Qualities (Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Immortality) gives one the aura of divine authority that compels authentic respect from beings. Without it, they may resist or deceive, especially because your own language towards the outer darkness and yourself is one of resistance and deception. It is this impregnation with the four divine qualities that ensures Quabbalistic letter-vibrations operate in line with Divine Providence instead of the ego’s limitations. When it comes to the work with the electromagnetic fluid, magical loading of talismans, volting and so on, electromagnetic mastery is the basis of charging everything the magician has to charge. Volts are the batteries of power behind evocation. This includes also charging letters into matter (talismans, food, objects). The letters must eventually be condensed physically. Without elevating the spirit to higher planes how can the magician ascend into the hierarchy of the beings evoked? Evocation is not begging a spirit, but meeting it as an equal through elevation. How many forget this and have the most embarrassing results, even coming to profess them? As well, this elevation is what makes the letters truly creative, as most letters are channeled unknowingly via the intermediation of the planetary spheres (see [A Magical Study Series Volume II – The Quabbalah of the Spheres](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/a-guide-to-sphere-quabbalah-a-magical-study-series)). Removed from astral communication with one’s personal God and deities, the magician lacks a direct link to Divine Providence to command beings safely. They risk bondage to spirits because their own self is still limited and enslaved. Without this direct link uttering divine names and letters is vacant. Yet with it, the magician speaks in the Name, as the Hebrews would put, and creation responds. Skip the acquisition of magical faculties that include skills of materialization, dematerialization, and further dominion over the elements and find out this is exactly what PME assumes you know when working with elementals and planetary beings. What is more, you are to learn the basics of any principle or methodology taught by one of the beings, or what you will obtain are mere curiosities adapted to your level, which is the level of a curious tourist. See, for instance, the example with my [A Magical Study Series Vol III: A Guide to Stellar Magic & Astrological Mysticism](https://payhip.com/FalconBooksPublishing/a-guide-to-stellar-magic-and-astrological-mysticism). This book came to be because, in conversation with one of the beings there was the idea of writing a work on astrology, which I declined, admittedly not knowing enough about it. I was then asked to organize everything I already knew, expand it and map it together into a working body. Before this, I was given only simple abstract curiosities, such as the Earth also being a central star at its molten core and we the stars of its galaxy. After I had matured the topic I was given astonishing methods, maps and information, the kind of which one cannot possibly imagine in one’s normal capacity. The training of Step X magical skills, as well, supports the densification of quabbalistic formulas into the physical world. Without Step X, letters too remain abstract vibrations. So again and to conclude this missive, Step IX gives you the technical vision and power that allows you to see, separate, project, and charge, while Step X provides the spiritual authority and union for you to inspire, create, and align with Divine Providence. ## The Devil’s Advocate One could argue, and rightly so, that Bardon arms the student with a lot of high-level tools well before Step IX, such as the Akashic trance and induction of states from Akasha, elemental accumulation & projection, and control of electric and magnetic fluids (separately). Mental wandering (mental body projection) and the creation and use of fluid condensers, magical mirrors, and impregnations of space are also included. So yes, someone who has gotten through Step VI–VIII already has the technical keys that may look like the whole of PME and even parts of KTQ. However, although the tools exist early, the maturity does not. Akashic trance gives one glimpses of higher planes, but without Step IX’ astral separation and Step X’ elevation, the magician is still bound to their personality shell. Traversing rooms in the mental body, short distances and visiting relatives in step VIII won’t nearly do. Also, you can dip into Akasha but you cannot yet move freely in the spirit’s domain. PME requires sovereignty, not just trance. Without reaching Step IX you can still project fluids and impregnate spaces, but the beings called in PME see through the magician. If the astral body hasn’t been impregnated with the four divine qualities (Step IX), the magician radiates not as a divine force. Spirits obey (in the sense of devotional respect) the divine light, not personal will. And, without Step X, even if you wander mentally or astrally, the spirit doesn’t recognize you as operating divinely. On volt charging, although before Step IX we can charge objects, load spaces, and cause effects, KTQ asks us to intone the letters into the four planes. Without Step IX–X, you can at best paint with colors and sounds, but not speak the actual Word. Put another way, an Initiate of Step VIII can practice magic, yet only a Step X magician can create by divine authority, and this is what the whole of KTQ is about. Put yet another way, at step VIII you have learned how to handle magic, balance yourself, and operate. Thus, you can visit PME and KTQ as in an apprentice’s study trip. Still, until you embody divine qualities and unite with Providence, you’re not yet the heir to PME and KTQ.  For instance, extrasensory faculties are deliberately awakened already in Step VII, and you go so far as to create elementaries and animate pictures. You can see and hear into the astral, feel and perceive subtle forces, and, how wonderful, create autonomous astral beings (elementaries). Then in Step VIII, you add mental wandering, which extends extrasensory reach into the mental plane. Because you can already enter Akashic trance (Step VI), control fluids and project elements (Step V–VII), perceive astrally and mentally (Step VII–VIII), and wander with the mental body (Step VIII), you may indeed have a very vivid simulation of how PME and KTQ works. But your perception within the extrasensory has no sovereignty. You can see and hear spirits that are under no obligation to listen to you. You have been the tourist who speaks the language but has no passport or authority in that country. It is, again, the impregnation of astral body with divine qualities that has the beings recognize you as a legitimate envoy of Providence instead of just another psychic. You can visit, but not command, and this has shown in most VIII adepts that I have observed working the spheres. As for evocation, Step X’s divine union and elevation is the point where the magician can invoke in the Highest, or rather, this is the true meaning of standing within the Circle, since Intelligences don’t obey the human personality. Worst yet, and being less politically correct, spirits often obey the human personality but that is no good news at all to the human personality.  Summarising, the extrasensory faculties  awakened before Step IX are tools of observation and exploration, but it is time to step up and do the real work. ## Evocation at Step VIII  The student has learned to charge a mirror but hasn’t learned to travel through the spheres via elevation of the spirit and would be limited to the elements. There has been no experience of the elemental kingdoms either, but there has been enough experience of the elemental fluids, while, on the bad side, the planetary oscillations have received no attention.  The student can understand the circle in an abstract way, that is, in its similarity to the akashic trance. And the student can project fluids in general. They can mentally wander and maybe, if specially skilled, even see the vast silver-violet form of the Moon sphere (not to speak of planets beyond). Inside it, they may feel a presence, hear impressions (clairaudience), or see visions. But the intelligence sought will speak in riddles, ignore commands, be aggressive or condescending, or withdraw. Without the divine impregnation, the student can be dazzled, deceived, or even drained by the spirit dealing with this curious psychic. In the best case, inspiration and visions may come as gifts. At worst, parasitical entities will swarm in, masquerading as the intended intelligence. ## Evocation at Step IX Astral separation can now happen at will and the astral body radiates divine qualities. But I recommend you start by using the mental body (less dangerous), in which too these qualities will equally shine by consequence. Since the subtle bodies have received the divine qualities, the magician stands a much greater chance of actually standing in the divine spheres, say the moonsphere. And they stand there glowing with omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and immortality. The lunar being appears clearly, recognizes the magician as one clothed in divine authority, and engages with utmost respect. Communication is lucid, not the playground of glamour. The risk has been reduced but every now and then the magician’s ego intrudes. Without Step X, alignment with Divine Providence is not perfect, and so control is feeble. Genuine teachings and real assistance will still likely happen, and the magician will be able to project the power of the moon sphere into talismans, although prone to error if motives are impure. You may ask, and it is an interesting question, “If I’ve done the ennoblement of the soul properly, won’t it already safeguard me from impure motives? Why should Step IX–X add anything more?” Well, the soul mirror is an inventory and balancing exercise that catalogs virtues and vices, strengthens what needs strenght and harmonizes where harmony is lacking. One detects egoistic impulses and cleanses the astral body of excess elemental imbalance. Not only do you gain self-knowledge as you become less likely to be tricked by the shadows you project. However, even it being the case that the soul mirror balances personal character, it does not impregnate the astral body with divine qualities (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, immortality). Intelligences certainly admire a balanced human, as Bardon himself made known in his questions and answers, but their service is towards Divine Providence and their devotion will be moved by a radiant vessel of this same Providence. Motives can be hidden from the conscious self, and the mirror mostly tracks what the student knows about themselves. Still deeper karmic seeds, unconscious drives, or subtle pride can remain invisible. Step X, by linking to the personal God, exposes and burns away even those remaining hidden impurities. So, while a balanced astral constitution makes one sane and safe, it offers no cosmic jurisdiction. Only Step IX–X lift the magician into the register where intelligences must comply.  Put another way, the mirror is static and the assumption of the Godhead is dynamic. The soul mirror is a lifelong practice of self-polishing, a craft that depends on its crafter. But Providence is an independent living current. A magician who counts only on the mirror risks stagnating in self-analysis, while one who unites with Providence is continually guided and corrected beyond personal introspection (as long as introspection is kept, for this goes both ways). The mirror purifies the human psyche, and it must be kept as the human psyche must remain purified to receive the divine. Step IX–X graft the psyche into the divine stream. It is also this very divine stream that will raise the soul mirror to a whole different level of depth. Without that grafting, magical equilibrium exists by human measure, but with it, you obtain in your soul the very cosmic order that Ancient Egyptians called Maat. Therefore, say you have a perfect soul mirror and the being appears, because you have clairvoyance, fluidic mastery, and impregnation skills. The spirit sees through your astral constitution. Seeing you have a balanced human condition, the intelligence will likely smile, converse, and even flatter. What it won’t do is obey. Try it, and the intelligence, if it is intelligent in fact, may subtly test or lead you toward overconfidence (which would be a useless attempt if you didn’t lack the astral impregnation of divine qualities). More than ever now, you believe your motives are pure, and how well you have polished your soul mirror only confirms it further. Yet this purity is subjective. It will be fed by the intelligence with grandiose visions or missions that lead to subtle obsession. At this point you are absolutely convinced of your greatness while actually being pushed into dependency on the being. And how often do we see this? The magician becomes a student and servant of the intelligence while believing they are in charge. This is the danger Bardon warns against: obsession disguised as illumination. I can give this example for KTQ as well. You intone a cosmic letter (A, for example), see light-blue, hear the tone, feel levity, and project it outward. You get to generate astral phenomena such as subtle currents of air, feelings of inspiration, psychic visions. It feels profound, and this is the letter of pure ideas. But even with a clean soul mirror your purity is just personal refinement, not Providence flowing through you. You might cause temporary weather shifts, strong moods in people around you, or psychic phenomena, and think by this that you are creating with the Word. Nevertheless, the effects are short-lived, unbalanced, and can rebound. Worse, if purity contains hidden pride, the letter-vibration magnifies it. You become a demi-god of karmic chains, a sorcerer of the astral, blinding yourself with lights and currents but not truly touching creation. The divine Word never flows, only amplified echoes of your own psyche. The core issue here is that the soul mirror purifies what the magician can see about themselves but intelligences and letters operate in the depths beneath self-knowledge. Absent of Step IX’ impregnation, the astral body is still a limited conception and without Step X, motives are never guaranteed to be aligned with Providence. So, the worst case is not spectacular failure. It is subtle success like visions, phenomena, psychic effects that feel divine but are not: delusion of mastery. To conclude, the soul mirror can make you a sage among humans, but only Step IX–X can make you a magician among intelligences and divine principles (forget not that first, you need to be that sage). ## Evocation at Step X The magician elevates the spirit to higher planes in conscious communion with Divine Providence. Their call to the being is rooted in supreme will, not personal whim. The being manifests with reverence, recognizing the adept as acting in the Name of Providence. The interaction is one of colleagueship, the adept is no longer asking nor commanding, but team-working. The risk is essentially none, it matters not if we are talking of positive or negative intelligences. Now the lunar virtues of the being flow directly into the magician’s life, talismans, or creations. As well, the magician’s words in Quabbalah sound in the Akasha as the Logos, manifesting across all four planes. ## KTQ in Step VIII Let’s imagine we are vibrating the cosmic letter A (Air principle, enlightenment, inspiration), carried in a light blue color, G tone and a sensation of weightlessness. Since the magician has developed clairvoyance, clairaudience, and can project colors and tones into space or into themselves, they vibrate A as sound, visualize the light-blue color, and feel weightlessness. The result, beyond feeling lightness in the body, is likely a tingling, inspiration, and astral insights. The room feels charged, airy. The quabbalist faces a strong subjective experience and, eventually, psychic phenomena. But the projection tends to stay in the astral bubble around them. Effects are temporary, unstable, and dependent on concentration. The letter-vibration can cause imbalance (nervousness, overexpansion of the air element) or open the psyche to uncontrolled influences. ## KTQ in Step IX One impregnates the astral body with divine qualities, capacitating oneself for the true projection of the cosmic letter into the Akasha. So is the A projected consciously through all four planes: akashic, mental, astral and physical. The light-blue radiance starts by filling the Akasha (not just the imagination) and a profound silence and blessed clarity spread. The magician feels A as a cosmic force. This is no longer a personal visualization. Then come real, externalized effects, like improving air quality, uplifting the atmosphere of a room, and influencing the weather in a small way. The letter’s resonance has durability beyond the ritual space, yet is still possible to misuse. If the action is driven by human limitations, the magician could distort the elemental balance and cause psychic instability or harmful results in the environment. ## KTQ at Step X United with Divine Providence, the A intonation is the Divine Word flowing through the Quabbalist, felt not only by him but by the world. The letter vibrates simultaneously on all planes with flawless harmony as the Creative Word in action. For instance, A invoked in a talisman truly radiates the cosmic principle of Air indefinitely. The adept can inspire entire communities, uplift climates, or heal with breath simply by speaking the letter. What is more, the adept acts as a clean channel of Providence. Effects are always balanced, never ego-driven, and thus likely more rarely or secretly put into practice, since the Supreme works wonders with discretion. In truth, we will rarely see an author or teacher speak from level X directly or demonstrate it openly; they will downgrade apparent consciousness to level IX or VIII and stand relatable. Although collaboration exists, there is nothing dual a magician can teach from his Godhead to another Godhead, but neither can the magician teach someone not in the Godhead from the direct standpoint of the Godhead. Let this be understood. For instance, if you read [A Magical Study Volume I: A Guide to the Elementals](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/a-guide-to-the-elementals), or again even [Volume III: A Guide to Stellar Magic & Astrological Mysticism](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/a-guide-to-stellar-magic-and-astrological-mysticism-a-magical-study-series), you will see reports of contact with intelligences from the expressive standpoint of level VIII or IX, and sometimes indications that I have stepped into level X just to stabilize the session. The whole collaboration, however, is continuously established in Divine Providence, despite how it may be expressed to the world at large for communication.     > So… if the virtuosity of the Soul Mirror can trick me, how is the state of Godhood less illusory? It absolutely isn’t. If anything, it is potentially worse. But there are ways to test it in life and ways to test it in magic and mysticism in particular, and I will be sticking with the latter. In PME, if you are getting a lot of flattering spirits, that is, intelligences that appear in visions but give flowery praise, vague prophecies, or promises, and you enjoy the attention rather than testing authority; if you find yourself mostly listening to spirits passively and they linger but don’t fulfill tasks precisely or tangibly; if the results are psychological (visions, insights) without direct external changes and you feel compelled to evoke the same spirit repeatedly for guidance instead of moving freely through the hierarchy, then you are likely acting from the standpoint of level VIII. This you may be doing by sovereign choice to work your mortal angle, or because you have not achieved the divine connection you thought you had.  In Quabbalah you may find yourself mostly doing fireworks, intoning letters that produce lights, tingling, psychic visions, and inner ecstasy but no lasting outer effect (often from the state of Divine Union the letters require or produce none of these at all). Instead, you influence your moods or desires, and even though A brings personal inspiration it cannot manifest cosmic enlightenment. You change the atmosphere in a room temporarily, but it dissipates within a short time, hours at best, and talismans lose charge quickly. What is believed to be the direct Word of the Supreme is but a magician recycling their own psychic aura. Beyond KTQ or PME tests, the general warning signs are overconfidence, as in leaving the soul mirror and any self-examination and assuming every impulse is coming from the highest state. Self-examination is substituted by a quiet certainty that you are permanently acting as an Adept, reinforced by flattering intelligences and impressive astral experiences. Soon, you find yourself preferring the company of spirits or letter ecstasies over actual life duties, a subtle but widening obsession, even if you subconsciously notice your impressive phenomena lack the effortless harmony and timing that comes when Providence supports a magician. If this all seems too intricate, there is a more universal measure. Usually, the limited self perceives everything greater than it with a sort of shock, and the practices will feel baffling, flattering, addictive, or ego-stroking. That the practices feel dazzling itself isn’t necessarily a bad sign, since it indicates those very limitations are suffering a process of expansion. However, if the practices already originate from an expanded state, they will always feel calm, exact, peacefully powerful, and aligned with Providence. When this is so, you can be much surer that true progress is taking place. So, the clear signs that the magician has truly crossed into Step IX and X and therefore has the genuine foundation for safe, sovereign practice in PME and KTQ are in that the encounters with beings are calm, not dazzling. There’s no need to prove, persuade, or impress since authority radiates naturally. There is no craving for visions, powers, or so-called astral fireworks. If they appear, they’re side-effects, not goals. At the same time, decisions and practices flow with a sense of timing as life becomes more harmonious, not more chaotic. This is to state the beings appear without resistance, and being respectful, behave as colleagues or subordinates, not as gurus or seducers. Collaboration bears clear and measurable outcomes instead of vague promises or astral shows and the magician surely does not need spirits for validation or guidance. Evocations are to be purposeful, not addictive. Addiction requires a sense of adrenaline that isn’t there when an unmistakable sense that nothing in the operation can overstep or harm is there, since the intelligences always act within a boundary of Providence by nature (be they positive or negative). When it comes to Quabbalah, the letters don’t just create sensations but anchors across planes into mental, astral and physical verifiable results. They endure. A talisman charged with a letter holds its force for months or years, not days, as the letter manifests in line with its cosmic essence, so when the intonation ends, there is a blessed stillness and the world itself has acknowledged the Word. On to the green flags, the magician always feels awe rather than pride, and outer duties, relationships, and health remain intact or get better, since magical work is not meant to distort daily life. Even more so because your motives are now simple and transparent: service, knowledge, alignment. No hidden “what’s in it for me?” behind the practice. Now coincidences, synchronicities, and graceful outcomes follow you, because Providence confirms your path, but there is nothing dazzling, intoxicating, flattering or unstable about that, just a calm sobriety, a humble steadiness, a quiet power and a powerful quietness. https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/andre-consciencia/ --- ## Learn with Andre [The School of Visionary Hermeticism](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/school-of-visionary-hermeticism.) [Elemental Magic: The Foundation As Taught by the Elementals](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic-the-foundation-as-taught-by-the-elementals)[](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) [Magic and Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism%3A-levels-1-5) [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) --- # Frances Billinghurst on Witchcraft, the Dark Goddess, and Returning to the Living Mysteries Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/frances-billinghurst-on-witchcraft-the-dark-goddess-and-returning-to-the-living-mysteries/ ## Introduction Frances Billinghurst joins us for a conversation on witchcraft, devotion, the Dark Goddess, and the living nature of magical tradition. This interview moves beyond surface-level ideas of witchcraft and into the deeper questions of practice, responsibility, lineage, land, and transformation. We hope you enjoy and if you have questions or anything to share, please leave it in the comments. To learn more about Frances and her work, I have provided links below. About Frances: Frances Billinghurst is a writer, teacher, ritualist, and practitioner of contemporary witchcraft whose work explores magick, mythology, Goddess spirituality, devotional practice, and the mind-body-spirit connection. Her work is especially known for engaging with the Dark Goddess, Southern Hemisphere witchcraft, initiatory practice, and the relationship between magical tradition and the living land. Visit her blog [here](https://francesbillinghurst.blogspot.com/) and see a detailed about page [here](http://francesbillinghurst.blogspot.com/p/contact-me.html). Table of Contents - Introduction- Foundations of a Magical Life- Contemporary Witchcraft and the Loss of Depth- Initiation, Lineage, and the Living Mysteries- Witchcraft in the Southern Hemisphere- The Dark Goddess and Shadow Transformation- Goddess, Moon, Earth, and Sacred RelationshipThe Three Transformations - Free Course --- ## Foundations of a Magical Life **PAA: You describe your work as rooted in magick, metaphysics, mythology, and the mind-body-spirit connection. Looking back over your path from your first magical circle in the 1990s to your current work, what has remained constant, and what have you had to seriously revise.** My introduction to magic and witchcraft was through a course where foundational ritual practices were taught – these being the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP), the Middle Pillar, as well as working with the elements. These continue today as foundational practices. The LBRP taught the importance of circle casting while being a ritual within its own self. The Middle Pillar was about understanding, sensing and working with energy. The elements brought awareness of being connected to the physical plane, i.e., nature, connection with the energetics of the land. They also taught other foundational practices such as visualisation, meditation and what is referred to in the Craft as “moving between the worlds”. Over the decades, these elements continue to by and large underpin my magical (and religious) practice, any changes that may have occurred have really been a deeper layering of them, more so to have techniques aligned with the energetics of the Southern Hemisphere whenever practicable ~ something that has set me at odds with respect to other practitioners (more so with magicians). However, I see this more as a layering or adaptation as opposed to being a “serious revisal”. > When we look at our world today, one thing that is clear, again at least to me, is due to the rejection of the Goddess, the divine feminine, the Mother, this has translated into how women and girls are treated, as well as how we treat the earth. > > Frances Billinghurst **PAA: Your work has moved through writing, ritual, teaching, healing, devotional practice, and wider conversations around the Goddess and contemporary witchcraft. How do you understand the relationship between these different forms of work? Are they separate streams for you, or expressions of one current?** Similar current yet different approaches as the Buddha said, there are many ways to climb the mountain. Overall, I see these as threads that are interwoven in order to create the tapestry of how I see the world. In other words, to me, they are all interrelated. Contemporary witchcraft is a religion that includes the worship of the Goddess, the divine feminine. From the outset of the modern revival by Gerald Gardner, this is something extremely unique – some have even referred to contemporary witchcraft as being the first Western religion to focus on Goddess worship. How I work with deities as a whole is that I see them as living beings – they are not just mythological figures or archetypes. As such, establishing a relationship is an important aspect of this, and this is achieved through devotional work – i.e., setting up an altar, lighting candles, making offerings, chanting prayers or mantras, and getting yourself into an open space to receive guidance, insight, etc. When we look at our world today, one thing that is clear, again at least to me, is due to the rejection of the Goddess, the divine feminine, the Mother, this has translated into how women and girls are treated, as well as how we treat the earth. This void of seeing the feminine as sacred, the emphasis of it being weak, and where the masculine as being perceived as nothing more as the “conquering hero” and where everything is competition as there can only be one at the top (the patriarchal perception) has long been so damaging for us in the Western world (over 5,000 years of this separated mindset) and unfortunately a “perception” that has been forced upon other peoples around the world. We see today the differences between the indigenous approach, that is more matriarchal focused, where resources are shared, as opposed to the Western patriarchal mindset which ultimately is about greed and who has the most regardless of the methods used. This separation from the Mother is part of the healing that contemporary witchcraft, that working with the Goddess, the divine feminine, and even working with the true divine masculine energy is part of what I share. **PAA: When someone encounters your work for the first time, what do you most want them to understand about your approach to witchcraft and the magical path?** Everything is interconnected. It may not seem that way at first, however, it is very much like an onion, the more time you devote and work with even the foundational practices, you will begin to see the different layers beginning to form and how they interconnect with everything else. Nothing is separate. It is all interconnected. We do not operate in a bubble. At the end of the day everything relates back to energy. How that energy is shaped is entirely up to the individual, yet it still remains energy. Energy also essentially works on its own terms outside of human direction. It ebbs and flows with the pulsating rhythms of the universe. What we do on the earth plane, is attempt to manipulate and shape it in accordance to our own will and desire. And it can take time, effort and training (self or otherwise) and effort to develop the skills necessary to achieve and maintain this ability. > Information is easier to be obtained but this appears to be a double edged sword as “witchcraft” has moved from being a specific set of beliefs and practices, to almost a “catch all” for manifesting and spellcrafting only. > > Frances Billinghurst ## Contemporary Witchcraft and the Loss of Depth **PAA: In your reflections on contemporary witchcraft, you suggest that much of what is now depicted as witchcraft feels very different from what you first encountered in the 1990s. What do you think modern witchcraft has gained, and what has it lost?** If what is depicted on social media is anything to go by, I do not really understand it, nor how it actually works. This is because it seems to be very much as a hodge podge of techniques grabbed from a myriad of other traditions and practices, and thrown together without any real understanding of what or even why they were used in the first place. I find this interesting considering in essence contemporary witchcraft can also be seen as a scavenger religion (including techniques etcs) from other traditions and practices, yet the difference is that there is reason and a deeper of understanding as to why Masonic influences for example have been included, and even then, how these are utilised within contemporary witchcraft may not necessarily reflect their original usage. This is different from merely grabbing something merely because part of its use you resonate with. Information is easier to be obtained but this appears to be a double edged sword as “witchcraft” has moved from being a specific set of beliefs and practices, to almost a “catch all” for manifesting and spellcrafting only. There is also a heavy outward focus – grabbing to change the external in hope that the internal may improve without understanding of the deeper esoteric teachings whereby the inner needs to be changed first – as the NLP starts, it is all about perception. Such work has been reduced to the illusional superficial instant fixes sold mostly by influencers as opposed to longer lasting and deeper personal change. **PAA: You contrast magic that changes the personal microcosm with a more modern focus on external desires in the macrocosm. How would you explain that distinction to someone who thinks magic is mainly about manifestation, spell results, or getting what they want?** If someone comes to me with an external manifesting attitude, the first question is why? Why do they want change? What would this change bring them – how would it enhance their lives? Then what are they prepared to do to bring about this change? Are they wanting something purely because everyone else has it and they feel like they are missing out – a case of FOMO? Or is there is deeper underlying reason that they have not thought about or acknowledged? Again, we do not live in a void and there are times that in order to get what we feel we are missing out on in our lives could actually result from something we are ignoring to address, to fix, admit that we do not have our shit together. The person also needs to consider how much effort are they going to put into creating this change. If they are after a quick fix solution, well, good luck to them. It is best they look elsewhere because that is not how I view, utilise, teach magic and witchcraft. **PAA: In your work on contemporary witchcraft, there seems to be an argument that older foundations are not automatically obsolete simply because the modern world has changed. Which parts of traditional Craft training do you think modern seekers discard too quickly?** These days people do not seem to be interested in doing the work, of waking the path that climbs the mountain. They simply want to be helicoptered to the top so that they can look at the view. Yet, what they fail to understand is that part of the deeper appreciation and understanding is through the climb. Modern seekers today seem to be in such a hurry and are armed with tick boxes. Again, everything has been reduced to virtually an app, an instant thing, a gathering of information without actual application to see if things actually work. There is also an increasing avoidance of self-responsibility, the projection that things are always happening to them, someone else’s fault. Again, the focus externally (macrocosm) as opposed to internally (microcosm) without the basic understanding that they are interconnected. **PAA: You speak about dedication and devotion in relation to the neophyte. In practical terms, what does devotion look like before initiation, before certainty, and before dramatic mystical experience?** How initiation affects a person varies and indeed is personal. It is something that only those who have undertaken the process will truly identify with. As Ray Buckland once mention, you can yell about the Mysteries from the rooftop. However, only those who have experience them will truly understand them. Contemporary witchcraft is experiential – you need to experience the rituals, the practices, etc in order to gain a proper understanding, and this can only be obtained within a circle of people who have been trained accordingly. **PAA: A lot of people today want access to mysteries without lineage, structure, hierarchy, or obligation. Where do you draw the line between healthy individual practice and spiritual consumerism?** As already mentioned, contemporary witchcraft is experiential – you need to experience the rituals, the practices, etc in order to gain a proper understanding, and this can only be obtained within a circle of people who have been trained accordingly. And for the most part in order to enter such a circle, you need to be initiated. End of story. If you do not want to follow that route then, even if you download a copy of Gardner’s Book of Shadows (which is on the internet) you are still not going to properly understand the practices or tradition. This is simply because what cannot be written about is the oral information, and the experience passed through the experience of being with someone who has undertaken the actual training in the manner of how it was initially meant to be delivered. Tapping into the egregore, the energetic consciousness that has been built up since the first circle. Again, a lot of what I see bandied about as “witchcraft” I am not really able to identify with or understand how because it does not into the perception of witchcraft that I have which has been shaped by my training and knowledge passed down through my lineage. I am not saying that it is not “witchcraft” – it is just not my interpretation of witchcraft and as such, I am not interested in it. ## Initiation, Lineage, and the Living Mysteries **PAA: Temple of the Dark Moon weaves together Alexandrian witchcraft, ceremonial magic, Qabalah, and wider esoteric teachings. How do you prevent that kind of synthesis from becoming eclectic dilution rather than a coherent initiatory current?** This comes down to experience and training. Some of these practices (threads) are already interwoven into the Alexandrian tradition of witchcraft, others are not. There is a misconception by non-initiates that contemporary witchcraft is “limiting”. However, my personal experience is that it is anything but. It does not prevent any initiate from exploring other traditions or magical/spiritual practices – instead, what it does is provide the initiate with an understanding og what is Craft and what is not. **PAA: You have also written openly about questions around earlier lineage claims and later re-initiation into a direct Alexandrian line. That is an unusually honest thing to place in public. What did that process teach you about legitimacy, humility, and responsibility in initiatory witchcraft?** Even to this day I do believe that despite the grey area in my initial initiation that it was bona fide – even if not being able to be proved. This is because it exposed me to or awoken something that resonated within me. It encouraged me to go deeper and in order to be able to one day be in a potion to pass on the deeper level of understanding to others however I felt that I need to clear up this grey area – for the benefit of others – so re-initiation was important to me. Again, there is a general misunderstanding of what initiation applies and where the actual focus is on (i.e., the current that flows from the source – which is the lineage). There are other lines in Australia, however, I became friends with Murray who happened to have actually been taught directly by Alex and Maxine although at different times even before I decided to re-initiate. **PAA: Your teaching presents the Craft as a path of empowerment, but also of responsibility. What responsibilities does magical training place on a person that outsiders often underestimate?** Even within a coven, the Craft teachings self-responsibility. That is where the true understanding of empowerment lies. The techniques taught within a contemporary witchcraft circle focus around three pillars that reflect back to self-empowerment – these being beauty, power and freedom – which are obtained through the worship of the Gods. What outsiders do not understand is that role that religion (or belief) plays because, especially in the Western world, Christianity is often perceived to be the benchmark for religion – however it is not. ## Witchcraft in the Southern Hemisphere **PAA: Your work on the Southern Sabbats challenges the assumption that practitioners can simply import Northern Hemisphere seasonal symbolism. What changed in your own practice when you stopped translating the Wheel mechanically and began listening to the land itself?** A simple answer is that it started to make more sense – yet Australia is very unique. The landmass is the same size as the USA and there are many micro-climates. Even the standard advice given by Northern Hemispheric people to “move things around six months” does not necessarily work. I see contemporary witchcraft is very earth centric: It centres around the magic of the earth, the ebbing and flowing of energy, the seasonal tides, the changing phases of the moon, etc. The more we take note of our environment (macrocosm), the deeper our understanding and personal connection. (microcosm). This is very much in alignment with the thought of many indigenous peoples. Our separation from the earth I believe has resulted in our deeper soul level restlessness and disconnection, even dissatisfaction for some with life. **PAA: You point out that in the Southern Hemisphere the sun’s path, seasonal gateways, elemental placements, and even the appearance of the moon may need to be reconsidered. How much of ritual structure should be preserved for continuity, and how much should be adapted to place?** The benefit of foundational training is that once that has been established, you can then modify, change things to fit in. It is like shifting to doing a ritual by rote, merely reciting words and copying actions, to when you start to gain a deeper awareness and understanding of the words you are speaking and why they were chosen in the first place – when they begin to come alive through the actions. You come to a place of awareness of why and how the energetics (vibration) of the spoken word call things into manifestation and are directed through the physical action. Or simply put, the more you understand energy, you can feel how it moves and weaves, and when you work with it, it simply feels “right”. This is because you are working with it on a deeper level as opposed to applying something on top of it and attempting to shape it (which could end up requiring a constant amount of energy that could be directed elseh). At the end of the day, like a stream or river, the energetic current is at its strongest when following its natural path (which if often returns to). **PAA: Many occult traditions preserve forms from Europe or the Northern Hemisphere. At what point does fidelity to inherited form become disconnection from the actual land, sky, and body of the practitioner?** Understanding over heritage, ancestral roots can deepen regardless of where you are – looking for similarities. Australian native trees can have a similar connections to northern European trees but not all identical. I have already felt like a stranger in a strange land. It is very much alive, so it demands our mutual respect. I can only assume that other parts of the world are equally the same – the earth is alive anywhere we go. Sitting and listening – not imposing one’s ancestral practice onto another nor attempting to image what really should be merged or adopted. > Real shadow work is not about ticking boxes on what triggers you or acknowledging that you or someone else is projection – it is not about “fixing” alleged flaws either. It is about acceptance – that we are all flawed beings, and the realisation that there is “perfection within the imperfect”. > > Frances Billinghurst ## The Dark Goddess and Shadow Transformation **PAA: You write that the Dark Goddess is connected with the unwanted, forgotten, ignored, and ashamed parts of the psyche, but you also warn against over-analysing suffering in a way that turns us into victims. How do you distinguish real shadow work from spiritualized self-absorption?** Real shadow work is not about ticking boxes on what triggers you or acknowledging that you or someone else is projection – it is not about “fixing” alleged flaws either. It is about acceptance – that we are all flawed beings, and the realisation that there is “perfection within the imperfect”. This is why we are humans or have incarnated as humans, and is why we work with energetics. Our modern world however keeps telling us that we need “perfection”. Nature however is not “perfect” – yet it is because everything flows together. The only thing that is “perfect” is artificial, manmade. This striving for perfection can simply be reduced to a patriarchal ploy of attempting to control the last vestibule of the Mother, earth. **PAA: Your Dark Goddess work includes figures such as Kali, Persephone, Hekate, Hel, Baba Yaga, Sekhmet, and Oya. When working across different cultures and mythic worlds, what principles help keep the work reverent rather than superficial?** Education and Research. My approach is devotional so I try whenever I can to include as much authentic aspects as I can. Again, establishing a relationship with the deity and even asking them what they want from me – what is possible especially if I come from a different culture or even era to them. Simply ways of establishing a relationship – light a candle, making an offering (food, incense, etc) and sit and wait – allowing self to be open. **PAA: In your Kali material, you speak about letting go of what no longer serves us, even offering the ego to the Terrible Mother. What do people usually misunderstand about fierce compassion, destruction, and spiritual freedom?** Even within Hinduism today Kali is feared. She is still fierce and smashes rose-tinted glasses – she is not a “cool kid” for those who “self- proclaimed rebels”. She represents the wild, untameable, uncontrollable forces in the cosmos that are also necessary for they help to cleanse the unwanted to enable the new to come into existence. I like to use my garden as a metaphor, in order to create growth in the garden, we need to prune, rest, etc. Kali is the action, the clearing out, the pruning. She also brings awareness that the external change we may be seeking may very need to start with us, and she will often bring about that awareness extremely swiftly, before we have had time to change our minds. ## Goddess, Moon, Earth, and Sacred Relationship **PAA: In your Return to the Mother work, you ask whether the rejection of the Divine Feminine from soul consciousness is connected to how we treat the Earth. What does “returning to the Mother” require beyond sentiment, aesthetics, or Goddess language?** A reminder that wherever or whoever we are, we ae all birthed from the feminine energy – 5,000 years of patriarchy has not only shifted us from the feminine energy but also seen the rise of an extremely toxic stinted form of masculine energy. It is not the divine pure masculine either as patriarchy is only focused on control, those at the top who clamber over everything and everyone else. It has no soul, no conscious awareness and in fact it deflects from these, referring to these aspects as “weak” because they are more connected with the feminine energy. We are so out of balance with the earth, increasingly disconnected as I’ve mentioned – consider who is “mother”, what is mother to us? We refer to earth as “mother earth” however how we treat her as a disconnect, as a commodity, is a reflection of how women and girls are viewed – even in the western culture where a woman’s worth really is still based on who she marries and how many children she’s produced. This is far from being the holder of the sacred life force energy that flows through everything. Comes back to what I have mentioned, connecting back to the cycles of nature, the ebb and flow of things, the realisation that things happen to us, not as a punishment but because we are all part of the natural cycle even if we are out of balance. **PAA: Across your work there is a repeated movement: from outer form to inner transformation, from inherited tradition to local land, from Goddess symbolism to lived relationship. What do you think is the next serious task for contemporary witchcraft if it is to mature rather than simply become more visible?** Contemporary witchcraft has never been meant for the masses. It is a Mystery cult, a Mystery tradition after all, one that has been based on those of the past. If anything, though I would like people to return to the most conscious awareness of their actions – where every action has an equal and opposite reaction – basic law of physics. We do not live in a bubble – like a pebble being thrown into a pond, the ripples from our actions spread out and even may result in things and in ways that we have not even given thought to. We see so much of this in the world today – avoidance of responsibility. It is increasingly important that we need to take responsibility for our actions – to lead by example. To shine brighter amongst the darkness. Become that star from which we originated from. **PAA: Many thanks for sharing your journey with us. ** --- # Taylor Ellwood on the Evolution of Practical Magic Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/taylor-ellwood-on-the-evolution-of-practical-magic/ ## Introduction In this interview we talk with Taylor Ellwood from MagicalExperiements.com. Many thanks to Taylor for sharing his path with us here at Perseus. From his website: 'Taylor Ellwood is the original magical experimenter. He’s developed multiple systems of magic and written a number of cutting edge occult books, including **[Pop Culture Magick](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/pop-culture-magic-series), [Space/Time Magic](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/space-time-magic-series)**, **[The Process of Magic](https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=c7779f6f54bbdeace0668fbef04a0eeb3de3e7e09e39c9b2e4aa4d3ef23a47abJmltdHM9MTc3ODk3NjAwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=2a8df929-42b5-6146-3a10-eada43c860ef&psq=The+Process+of+Magic&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYW1hem9uLmNvbS9Qcm9jZXNzLU1hZ2ljLUd1aWRlLUhvdy1Xb3Jrcy1lYm9vay9kcC9CMDdGNUxXR0ZS)**, and **[Walking with Spirits](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/walking-with-spirits)**. His work is grounded, innovative, and relentlessly practical, offering tools that bridge the gap between the seen and unseen.' Join his Substack [here](https://magicalexperiments.substack.com/). --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-4-794x1024.png)Taylor Ellwood and Sheena Witter. Image courtesy of [Magical Experiments](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/) ## Interview ## Early Practice and Formation **PAA: You began practicing magic at sixteen after already wanting magic to be real through fantasy and imagination. When you first moved from reading or imagining magic into actual practice, what were the first exercises, rituals, or disciplines that gave you a sense that this was no longer theoretical?** The first author I read, Ted Andrews had several books that proved to be formative for my early magical work: How to Meet and work with Spirits Guides and Enchantment of the Faerie Realm. Each of those books had a few exercises in them around seeing auras, and using your senses to detect the spirits. I really worked those exercises for the first year of my magical practice, working on expanding my extrasensory perceptions so I could sense and work with spirits. I also found the exercises for working with elemental spirits and archangels to be helpful, because it taught me a lot about how to connect with the spirit world. I think the most important lesson I learned was that the spirits weren’t on other planes of existence. There were and are in our world, waiting for us to recognize and work with them. Both of these books taught me the fundamentals of combining psychic senses with magical abilities to practice magic and to this day these practices still inform the foundation of my magical practice. **PAA: Your early work brought together neo-shamanic and Hermetic practices. How did those two streams shape you differently, and what did blending them teach you about building a practice rather than simply inheriting one?** Interestingly enough I came to both of these practices because of Ted Andrew’s works, because he combined them together. His work inspired me to continue researching neoshamanic techniques via Harner’s core shamanism practices and the Golden Dawn approach to ceremonial magic. I spent approximately the first 2-3 years of my magical practice learning these specific systems of practice and from the beginning I found ways to apply each practice to the other practice in order to complement the practices. The neo-shamanic techniques taught me a lot about visualization, spirit work, and working with nature and elemental forces. The hermetic practices taught me the formal structure of magical workings and helped me put together rituals. When I combined the practices together, I learned how to identify the gaps each system had and field in those gaps using the practices of the other system. For example I could apply the formal ritual structure of the golden dawn as an aesthetic practice that gave the visualizations a physical form of practice. I could apply the neoshamanic techniques of working with spirits to create collaborative relationships with spirits instead of using the formal coercion and command structure that was present in the Golden Dawn system. Combining these two systems early on taught me to critically examine and question how a given magical practice worked and find ways to improve on what was already there. It also formed the foundation of my later experimental work, particularly with blending non-occult disciplines with magical practices. ## Experimentation and Magical Method **PAA: Many practitioners stay within one system for decades, but your path moved toward experimentation quite early. Was that because existing systems felt incomplete to you, or because experimentation itself was already part of your temperament?** I’ve always been a naturally curious person, never satisfied with a given answer. This has been further sharpened by my time in academia and as a technical writer, where I was taught to find the gap in a given process or system and find a way to address it, attack it and otherwise come up with a solution to fill the gap. In my earliest years as a practitioner, I applied my curiosity to ask why magic was performed a specific way. I wanted to know if the magical practice could be improved on or streamlined or otherwise changed. I would experiment with different variations of a practice because I wanted to know what I could do with magic and what the limits of my own abilities were. This prompted me to take a given working apart and try out different ideas to see if I could get the same result or a better one. To this day, one of my primary motivations around magic is the evolution of magic as a practice. I enjoy stress testing a given system of magic and finding ways to improve it through the combination of unorthodox concepts and disciplines and the result has been the creation of more than a few systems of unique magical practices that I apply and teach to this day. **PAA: You describe magic as something to test, refine, and learn from through both success and failure. When you are testing a magical idea, what are you actually paying attention to before, during, and after the working?** I pay attention to my body, because that’s where the magic lands and is expressed first. I pay attention to the environment around me and how the quality of the light changes as well as the energy and experience. What I also focus on is the soundness of the idea. Does it make sense? Can I experience or discover a measurable change as a result of doing the magical work? When I do the magical working I ask myself what I would iterate differently the next time. I’ll make small changes and occasionally large ones. It’s never a one time working. I work the magical working until I’m satisfied that I’ve learned everything I want to learn from it and also refined and developed it to the point that it produces a consistent result and can be used as needed. **PAA: In your experience, what separates a genuine magical experiment from simply improvising or mixing techniques together?** Improvisation usually occurs in a moment as a response to a situation. It can be useful and important to improvise. Mixing techniques can also serve as an initial exploration of experimentation, because you are trying to discover how to take what works with one technique and complement another technique. Genuine experimentation incorporates both improvisation and mixing of techniques, but it also builds iteration into the process. When you do a magical working multiple times you get the opportunity to discover what really makes it work and create a consistency in the work that makes that magic reliable. Experimentation is also informed by your curiosity and studies. I’ve studied a number of non-occult disciplines over the years and then brought those disciplines into magical workings as a way to experiment with what magic can do. Think about your own interests outside of the occult and ask yourself - “How can I take this interest and apply it to magic?” There may not be an apparent answer but at some point inspiration will strike. > One of my sayings is “Challenge what you know to discover what you can learn.” This really applies to everything in life, but if we apply it to magic what it means is that there is always room to discover and if you recognize this it will provide a sense of wonder and imagination that keeps you young at heart and supple in wisdom. > > Taylor Ellwood **PAA: Have there been experiments that forced you to change your understanding of what magic can or cannot do?** I would say every magical working ought to do that…it certainly has for me. I’m always learning something new from the magical work that I’m doing. It may be something very small but the point is that I’m always looking to change what I understand about magic. One of my sayings is “Challenge what you know to discover what you can learn.” This really applies to everything in life, but if we apply it to magic what it means is that there is always room to discover and if you recognize this it will provide a sense of wonder and imagination that keeps you young at heart and supple in wisdom. ## Process, Design, and Troubleshooting **PAA: In The Process of Magic, you focus on the mechanics of magic, consistent results, troubleshooting, and getting results that last. What made you want to strip magic down to process and mechanics rather than present it mainly through ritual forms, symbolism, or tradition?** No one else was doing it. Most books on magic stick to ritual forms, symbolism and tradition laden with esoteric terminology. That makes it hard to learn how magic works or what can be done with it. I saw this gap in the literature of magic and how its taught in general and I decided to write about it so magic could become more accessible. Even now, I observe that most of the occult articles, videos, classes, etc are still oriented around the mystery of the esoteric. It’s very romantic and sentimental, but it doesn’t actually help people do magic if your magic isn’t made accessible. That’s why I focus on the mechanics, consistent results, etc, because people want results more than they want the sentimental esoteric romanticism that so much of the occult is steeped in. **PAA: You teach that practitioners can customize and design their own workings rather than rely on prescriptive spells. When designing a working, what are the most important decisions a magician has to make before any ritual action begins?** First you need to define your result - both in terms of what you want and what you don’t want. This creates the parameters for the spell work you’ll do as well as the mundane actions you take. Once you have the parameters it’s important to decide what actions to take that will help you accomplish the result. Pick those actions and make sure you understand what you are doing. Then execute and let the magic happen. **PAA: In Magic by Design and How to Troubleshoot your Magic, you place a lot of emphasis on improving workings that are not producing results. When a working fails or only partially succeeds, where do you usually begin looking for the problem?** First I look within. Is there a part of me that feels resistance or is sabotaging the working. 9 times out 10 that will be the issue and it means that you aren’t fully aligned with the result you want to manifest. Something needs to change within you in order to align yourself to the result you want to manifest. If it’s not an internal issue, it’s an external variable that you either didn’t know about or didn’t factor into your magic. At that point add what you know about it into the magical work and see if the result improves. I look at results as indicators that inform you on whether your magic is on track or off track. They aren’t the end of the magical work, so much as they indicate whether magic is working or not…and to keep going. Troubleshooting teaches us a lot about the fundamentals of magic and how it works, because it gives us a way to look at a given working or spell and discover how all the pieces fit together. ## Pop Culture Magic and Correspondence **PAA: In your Pop Culture Magic work, you show how fandom, modern mythology, pop culture spirits, social media, technology, and even role-playing games can become magical material. What first convinced you that pop culture could function as real magical substance rather than merely personal symbolism?** I was pretty much convinced from the very beginning of my magical practice. As I started exploring the various systems of magic, a question I kept coming back to was whether these same systems would work if I were to swap tools, deities and other such things. Pop culture provided a natural experimenting ground in which to answer this question and what I discovered is that provided the magician understands what they are doing, there is a lot that can be swapped out of a given system that allows you to get viable results. Pop culture also is something we can relate to because it is contextual to our time and experience and this also enhances the efficacy of magic. **PAA: When working with pop culture spirits or systems, how do you build depth and relationship over time so that the work becomes a genuine practice rather than a temporary fascination?** The key word is time. If you’re going to work with a given pop culture then it requires the same commitment any magical practice calls for. Your pop culture magic will naturally evolve as you evolve or it will fall away if it becomes less relevant. Give it time and dedicated practice. **PAA: You also write about matching pop culture mythology to traditional and new correspondences. How do you decide when to preserve older magical structures and when to let the pop culture material generate its own structure?** A large part of that is context with the magical system you are working with. One of the most understated and misunderstood aspects of magic is the importance of developing your own correspondence system. The correspondences that you find in most books were never intended to be a one size fits all for magical practitioners. Correspondences should be developed from the perspective of your own experience and practice. When that occurs the correspondence system will be much more powerful because it is based on your experiential knowing of the material as opposed to using someone else’s correspondences. A correspondence is really a relational understanding that the given correspondences have corollaries that are relevant to the person’s magical practices and allows them to access specific knowledge and relationships through the correspondences. ## Space, Time, Identity, and Inner Alchemy **PAA: Your Space/Time Magic work uses time, space, imagination, memory, dreams, retroactive magic, and identity to turn possibilities into results. How did your understanding of magic change when you began treating time and memory as active parts of the working rather than just background conditions?** What fundamentally changed is that I recognized how much our experience of time and space shapes our collective experience and our conscious day to day life. Magic provides an alternative perspective that liberates us from the tyranny of clock time and space, and offers a way to conjure possibilities into existence. Working with time, space, memory and imagination as active components shows us that magic is really an ontological expression and experience of reality that changes as we change our respective identity. This allows us to move away from doing into being. Instead of trying to force reality conform to our will, we change our identity and as a result soften reality, so that seemingly improbable possibilities can be manifested into results. **PAA: In Magical Identity, you argue that identity is central to effective practical magic. How does identity work change the magician’s relationship to results compared with simply doing a spell for an external outcome?** When you change your identity, you are creating internal agreement with the result you want to manifest. If you only focus on the external circumstances, then you may get a result, but have it go away because your identity hasn’t fully accepted the result. Changing your identity creates an inherent buy-in to the new reality you are manifesting, making it possible for it to stick, because you’ve addressed any resistance or limiting beliefs that otherwise would sabotage the magical work and the desired result. **PAA: Your Inner Alchemy work brings the body, cells, neurotransmitters, microbial life, and internal energy into magical practice. How did your body become a field of magical work, and how has that changed the way you understand spirits, embodiment, and transformation?** When I was 20 I got tired of being depressed. I didn’t want to take the drugs to regulate my emotions because of the side effects. I did some research and developed a viable way of changing my neurochemistry and this became the foundation of the inner alchemical practices I use. As I continued experimenting I came to realize that the human body is a complex biological ecosystem with multiple life forms existing and I decided to start working with those life forms as spirits. This experience taught me that our own human experience and beingness is a universe all its own and it helped me recognize that the perception of a separate spirit world is just a perception and limiting one that prevents so many people from accessing their own true potential. The spirits don’t exist on a separate plan…they are here, waiting for us and our body is the portal that invites in the magic and the manifestation of possibilities into results. ## Spirit Work and Magical Entities **PAA: In the Walking with Spirits series, you emphasise rapport, collaboration, co-equal relationships, experiential embodiment, and simplified invocation and evocation. What changed in your spirit work when you moved away from coercive or command-based approaches?** I only briefly got into the coercive, command based work in my early years, mainly as a result of learning ceremonial magic. I quickly realized that this approach produced more negative results than beneficial and asked the question: what would happen if I made friends with the spirits? I had already taken this approach with nature and elemental spirits and I found that taking such an approach naturally created better results because I wasn’t trying to force the spirits to do something, but instead finding a way to create a mutual win that benefited all parties. I’ve never had any of the ill effects that so many other magicians have reported and what this really demonstrated is that questioning what we do and why we do is essential to making the magic our own and creating better results in the process. > Many people create an entity with the paranoid expectation that the entity will turn on them. What they never recognize is that they have build that expectation into the entity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy... > > Taylor Ellwood **PAA: In Walking with Magical Entities, you discuss servitors, egregores, thought forms, fuel sources, programming, revision, and relationship. What have created entities taught you about responsibility and long-term magical maintenance?** What you attend to matters and that includes what you create. Many people create an entity with the paranoid expectation that the entity will turn on them. What they never recognize is that they have build that expectation into the entity. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, never really questioned because someone told them to expect that. As with anything else, the relationship you create is developed as a result of the curiosity or lack thereof that enters into the relationship. Curiosity is essential for contact. This also applies to your magical work outside of spirit work. Get curious about what you’ve done. At the time of this interview, I’ve been going through older classes I developed and it’s been useful for helping me stay curious about my own work, so I don’t take it for granted! ## Elemental Magic and Daily Practice **PAA: Your elemental spirit work draws from Hermetic and Taoist models but also expands into elements such as gravity, magnetism, time, and space. What led you to modernise elemental magic in that way, and how has working with elemental spirits changed your practical understanding of the elements?** Elemental magic has played such a pivotal role in my magical work. One of my earliest experiments involved exchanging life essence for elemental essence and that experienced has informed my approach to elemental work. I modernised elemental magic because it seemed clear that the original model was based on a classical understanding of the world, which modern science has evolved past. We know there are other elemental forces and so it made sense to work with the elements in that way. The modernisation has shown me that elemental magic is much more extensive than realized and that we need to stop treating it as a categorization of things and instead engage it as an active magical practice. Working with gravity, creativity and other elements has shown me how the elements are an expression of the way our human experience interacts with the spirits. Broadening our definition and experience of the elements through modernisation allows us to discover how those elements move in our lives. **PAA: After decades of practice, writing, teaching, and experimentation, which parts of your daily or weekly magical practice remain non-negotiable?** Daily meditation and martial arts is non-negotiable. I choose to stay fit in body and mind so that I can be at my best spiritually. I do a daily magical working called sphere of art which is part of the meditation process…the martial arts and qigong completes it. ## Looking Back and Closing **PAA: Looking back across your books and systems, what has remained most consistent in your magical practice, and what have you most clearly changed your mind about?** My curiosity and drive to evolve magic by combining it with non-occult disciplines has remained consistent over the years. I am always asking questions, exploring ideas, and developing new systems of magic. I haven’t really changed my mind about my various systems. I think what I’ve done is matured as a magician and a person and it makes me appreciate the rich nuance of my work as well as the continual evolution. I hopefully have many more years to continue experimenting and sharing my work. **PAA: Lastly is there anything else you would like to share with the readers?** First thank you for reading this interview and thank you to Perseus Academy for interviewing me. I really appreciate the opportunity to connect and share with you. If you’d like to learn more about my unique take on magic, I invite you to visit [Magical Experiments](https://www.magicalexperiments.com/) and the [Magical Experiments Substack](https://magicalexperiments.substack.com/) where I share my writing and classes. I am continually innovating and creating new systems of magic. **PAA: Many thanks for your time in answering our questions we greatly appreciate it.** --- --- # Martial Odyssey: From London to Taiwan Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/martial-odyssey-from-london-to-taiwan/ For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the martial, meditative, and magical arts. As a child, I re-watched Bruce Lee and Shaw Brothers films endlessly, then searched out every book I could find that even vaguely hinted at hidden or mystical training. Dim Mak, Kuji Kiri, astral projection, internal power, meditation, esoteric Buddhism — if it suggested there was something deeper behind ordinary human capacity, I wanted to know about it. I probably spent far too many hours annoying the staff in local bookshops, hunting for anything that pointed toward those mysteries. Some readers may wonder why a series on martial arts belongs on Perseus Arcane Academy. The answer is simple: the martial and magical paths are much closer than they may first appear. Both demand body training (yes some may disagree), attention, discipline, will development, breath, posture, energy work, endurance, and the capacity to face fear rather than fantasise about transformation. Many serious magicians have also been martial artists, and many martial traditions contain meditative, energetic, and spiritual dimensions that overlap naturally with magical training. So, as the first official post in the **Martial Odyssey** series (though we have some other posts that fit this category), I thought it would be useful to share part of my own journey as we now have hundreds of posts with me asking others about their journey. My magical path has already been discussed elsewhere, especially in my conversations on **The Bard Inn** with [Phil Rice](https://www.youtube.com/@philricealchemist). This post focuses instead on the martial side of the journey: the teachers, mistakes, training halls, internal work, hard lessons, and strange turns that shaped my understanding of what practice really means. ## Early Years My training began officially after many years of buying books and magazines (Combat, Martial Arts illustrated and Inside Kung Fu) with an amazing teacher just 15 mins drive from my family home at the time. I was 12 or 13 and found a teacher of Tai Chi Chuan, Xing Yi Quan and Baguag Zhang in a little village. He had a beautiful garden with a courtyard where we trained early morning on the weekend. I loved it as it felt like a real movie scene freezing in the snow, doing 2-3 hours of energy work, tendon work and holding postures for what seemed like eternity. It was everything I needed, he quickly got me doing Xingyi instead of the Tai Chi as it suited me more, at that age I wanted the fight material not the longevity material. I learned about his teachers who had all studied extensively in China, he also taught some Yiquan concepts as well, which is another system that he trained extensively in. Now if I had stuck with this teacher, I would probably have achieved a lot of the things I wanted to achieve much quicker, but being a teenager, I thought I knew better which took me away from this teacher towards Southern Mantis.  ## Southern Mantis While training the Xingyi Quan with my first teacher I was getting itchy feet. We were at different stages of our journey, he was experienced, having adventures, multiple teachers and a mastery over his arts. While I was a teenager seeking a way to overcome fear, seeking to prove myself while still seeking the mysteries. Now I look back and think gosh I wasted that opportunity, I should have just gone to boxing and wrestling for a year or two to get it out of my system. Instead I actually chose to leave the internal arts and seek my answers in the southern Chinese arts. Namely Chow Gar Tong Long and Hung Gar, these arts were combined into what was called ‘Steelwire Mantis’. At the time I first visited this school they were based in Mile End, East London under an old railway arch. This was the stuff of Shaw Brothers! It was dark, intimidating and had a unique aroma, half stale sweat and half the wonderful smell of DitDar Oil, (Fall Hit Medicine). It felt like you were entering an episode of Kung Fu with David Carradine. So it was perfect! My parents drove me up the first Sunday to train as we lived about 1.5 hours north of London at the time. So what I discovered in the first class was how weak I was! My first class and I am going from sketchy memory here but I believe it was my first, I was given over to the legend, Sifu Tony Clements. He had me warming up with the Swinging punches that swelled your hands up, doing sets of mantis press ups all to his count. Then it was stance work, then it was grinding arms, before I knew it class came to a close and I was eager to learn more and more, I walked out on unsteady legs. I trained and perfected everything taught to me on weekends during the week. Class time should never be wasted by doing something I should have done on my own. The Temple School in this time was a very well known, famous and infamous school. Sifu Tony Leung the teacher had a monthly column in Combat magazine, which at the time was one of the top martial arts magazines in the UK. He used the position to voice some quite vocal opinions about Kung Fu, which led to lots of challenge matches occuring or at least threatening to. It made this quite an exciting part of my life that I looked forward to. A year after I joined Mile End, we made the move to Angel, Islington. This was another exciting time as after some school politics a position as receptionist opened up, I jumped at it. I began living, working and training at the school. It was really my first job and I was rubbish at lots of basic things. But with the help of some friends I slowly learned what I did not know and was taught HK style cooking, as I prepared the evening meal for students after training. Looking back I have no idea how I did that as cooking for 6-7 people after training was a real stress! I always saved my friend John the big bits of Chicken as a thank you for all his help. Days were filled with training, mugs of tea at the chapel street market and kebabs on Saturday night on Angel high street.  To train in such a place was amazing as there was a huge buddha in one corner of the school, racks of weapons, and best of all wooden dummies with mechanised arms. Sadly the arms did not last for long as people were practising their arm breaks… but amazing to have them working at first. I met many characters back in those days and got to hang around the seniors who were all light years ahead of me in literally everything. This was great for knowing hard training, taking a hit, replacing any kind of deodorant with the aroma of DitDar and bruises.  After a year or so I met another practitioner from Hong Kong. This individual mentioned we were missing some important pieces of the puzzle. At least from the Chow Gar perspective, as it is filled with internal training and important details that make or break your benefit from the exercises. So I and some others got curious, then some more internal drama began where it seemed like there were some significant differences between our understanding and the training in Hong Kong. He was showing neck training and all sorts of exotic neigong we only hear about before but never got to train. A lot went on at that time that I shall keep private but in the end… Short story - I left and started with the new teacher as did a number of others. Though I do want to say my time at the temple school despite how it ended was a time of excitement and living the dream. If you love Kung Fu, to be able to do it everyday is hard to beat. This new training, it was a closed group training in a little flat in Colindale north london. It was an interesting dynamic with all the different characters and it was a good experience to learn not to be influenced by group dynamics. In the early days it was exciting and we felt like finally this is it. We got the real deal. We were learning the interpretation of Chow Gar Mantis from the Man Sek WIng branch, based in Shatin, Hong Kong. Our plan was to eventually all travel to see our Sigung in Shatin, and pay our respects to the main school in Mongkok. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-1.png)Colindale Class The training was a lot slower and steady, I gained some deeper strength and power and lost some athletic ability. Certainly the emphasis on internal was there much more than the Steelwire mantis which seemed to have a different idea of internal training, a very hard style.Then very quickly the summer of 1997 arrived and our plan to go to Hong Kong arrived.  This was an amazing trip, I was going with very little money, thankfully a fellow student had a friend in Wanchai so we all slept on his floor. You can imagine how this was if you are familiar with the size of properties in HK.  Our daily commute to training was a bit more involved back then in 1997! Instead of being able to get the MTR to Shatin we had to get the bus which was quite a journey. At that time Shatin was a small little village in the countryside not the developed place it is today. What we went through with Sigung during that trip was like a movie ( I know I keep using that idea but it is true). He completely corrected all of our basics and forms then went on to the gold, the neigung of Chow Gar Mantis or as we were told at the time the gengs.This was special training where you put your body in a position for the soft tissue/fascia to activate and train. Signs of this training are where hollows of the body are filled, testicles can be pulled into the body, neck strength  and rib power. There is a lot of exaggeration when it comes to this training and I am sure I did not get it all as there is always another master with the ‘real secrets’ claiming what you have is second rate. But at that time I was very pleased, really felt like we were making progress. Plus Sigung was as genuine a teacher as you could ever wish for. A truly good man, though he spoke no English and I spoke barely any Cantonese, his warmth and true wish to help us came through fluently. One thing I noticed while training in the Shatin class was that I was so weak due to not playing the game properly, I was not using my body properly. So embarrassingly one of the kids, a 14 year old, was stronger than me in ALL of the exercises. I was not connecting my elbow to my waist, nor using my back or at least not doing it as well as this group. So some of the students enjoyed just holding me out using back power… I think there was a feeling of not letting us get it so easily, despite hopping on a plane and training for years. This kind of thing hit me harder back then, though, nowadays I am used to it and it is the nature of joining a new group and disturbing the pecking order.  Thankfully I think Sigung saw this and made sure that I and the other students that travelled over from London got enough to work on for the next year or so. While in HK we were fortunate to be introduced to lots of other Kung Fu groups and individuals, for example at one evening in the park restaurant in Wanchai who should I be sitting next to while he tells me why my body is a terrible fit for Hung Gar… ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-2-738x1024.jpeg) If you know your movies then you know who this is! That was a real highlight of the trip for me, he sat there eating pigeon, he then discussed how training methods fit different body shapes differently. He was focusing on Hung Gar and wanted me to see how southern mantis suited me. Though I love Hung Gar and missed it from my time in the Steelwire Mantis all his points made sense. This trip to HK really made me fall in love with the place. I have been back I think 5-6 times since then and love it each and every time. Though unfortunately my other visits have not been Kung Fu focused, I always keep my eyes open in the parks to see if I can spot any training. After HK we went back to normal training in London. This was great and we soon moved to an actual school hall as more and more students were coming.  Good times, great training, CNY dinners and wonderful conversations were had. Though after a few years I started to seek more.  ## Internals & Silat It was time to return to what has originally inspired me so much…Xingyi Quan. I wanted to really finish the system and understand its methods. As at that time I knew the fists, I knew some basic neigung, but nothing seemed super powerful, at least not by mantis standards. So it dd not match up with the legendary stories of Sun Lu Tang So I discovered a few teachers, went to train with them, some in London, some in the north of the UK. All of them made it seem like a huge marathon, longer than it takes to be a medical doctor for them to impart these skills. So I continued to search and then I found Alex Kozma and his book Esoteric Warriors (if you find the book do not buy it, go directly to Alex’s site and get something from him - better for him and better for you). I began travelling down to Alex’s little courtyard down in west london, this had a lovely feel to it, nice friendly students, very different to other places I had been. Alex would teach Bagua, Xingyi and Tai Chi to a handful of us on the weekdays and then on the weekend a bigger class usually in the beautiful Holland Park. I loved this period of time as driving down on a sunday morning, training for two-three hours and driving back via hertfordshire sometime was a real treat. I devoured everything Alex put out, one of my favourites sadly not available any more ‘Beyond the Mysterious Gate’. This was a combination of Alex's experiences and featured his adventures on Emei Shan very prominently and Ziranmen. Remember this fact as it is important for later.  [HOLLAND PARK TOUR - LONDON](https://youtu.be/_6_JrL9R8Gc?si=tB2VH_m7VpgsVe-O) As you can see from the video, training in Holland park was wonderful, it was also an opportunity to hear further stories from Alex about his training and adventures in Asia. I often say I think Alex must have inspired thousands of us over the years to pack a bag and go on an adventure!  Anyway, one day after training Alex invited me to a special event over at the Silat school of Steve Benitez. I had already heard about the get together and planned on attending. This was going to be the first time Guru Ma, the mystical teacher of Steven Benitez and Johnny Silman did a public event in the UK (I think, I could be wrong). This was quite a big event as Guru Ma was always mentioned in the interviews that Alex Kozma did with Steve Benitez. She has quite a life story and the meeting of Steve and Johnny was also a bit of an interesting story (you see more on Johnnys WAI Silat Channel). The short version is that after doing a Rice fast in London seeking a new teacher, Steve was ‘led’ to Holland. He got over to Holland, jumped on the train and got off at a seemingly random station where he entered an Indonesian restaurant. There he was given a flyer for none other than Guru Ma. Whether it is true, false or a bit of a mix who knows I learned over the years to take everything with several kilograms of salt no matter how sincere the individual may be.  ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-1-819x1024.jpeg)James (Me), Steve Benitez, Guru Ma (RIP), Johnny Silmon. So yes, meeting Guru Ma was very fortunate (we later went to her school in Holland) and that evening she spoke a lot about group fighting and was advising the girls training how to move together to defend themselves as a group fighting multiple attackers. This focus on multiple attackers, spacial awareness, footwork etc was a major theme throughout my Silat training. Not long after this event Alex announced that he was returning to Asia for more adventures and training. I was a bit disappointed as I thought I would be able to go through the Xingyi and Bagua with Alex as I really liked his practical but very deep method.  So now I was in need of a new teacher, after some thinking and discussions about what I was after. I began training the Silat, at that time it was known as Wally Songo Silat named after a saintly council of nine. The Silat was full of tough training, especially the ground training. I really enjoyed this when it was down at a local community centre. It was really intense and had a great feeling of community, I actually learned how to survive on the ground here after getting choked out ALOT. Roughly a year or so later after training as much of the Silat and attending the Essenic Sunday teachings, this was the spiritual side of things. I heard we were moving into a center in Hendon Central, so close to where I used to train mantis in Colindale. After opening there was going to be a 40 Day practice (Rexa), something that Steve and Johnny had done with their teachers. This was a time of teaching, training, challenges and overcoming fears. So hearing about this I thought it is absolutely something I wanted to do and already knew that I would probably hate every second of it. Like most things that cause change the process is not usually pleasant. So for 40 days we would meet at the new studio at the very latest for 10pm. Though many of us would have already trained in the evening class. The night time training would go from 10pm until 2 or 3 am …for 40 nights! To make it more challenging I actually lived 1.5 hours away at this time. So I either drove back after or slept in my car or the studio. Lots happened but some of the highlights, one of our first tests was sitting for THREE HOURS in a horse stance (In Silat a Kuda Kuda). Not a high stance either at least medium depth…if you quit you were out of the 40 days. I have never seen so much sweat, no grappling class, no sparring class ever had more sweat than that 3 hour challenge. Another aspect we were introduced to which I am sure will raise a few eyebrows was something called Rexa Diri.  It was a practice of postures and some prayer or mantra which when combined  gave what is supposed to be a divine protection. We learned a rare branch of this system given to Steve by one of his teachers in a 40 day practice he did in Indonesia. According to stories it works, according to Steve it works and he has used it, though I have never used it or seen it used. Part of the deal in receiving this was that you had to practise/charge the method twice per week between 11pm and the early hours.  So the completion of these 40 days was pretty epic, it was also the time I met my wife. So happy days. Just a month or so later I had a pre-booked adventure - Emei Shan, the mysterious mountain full of hermits and secret knowledge. See below to see this adventure.  I stayed at the school for several years, completing several 40 day practices during my time there, moving to London and sharing a house with the inner circle while Steve and family lived in a flat above us and also eventually becoming the general manager prior to leaving in summer of 2008. So I really took this time (5-6 years) seriously, learning a lot about myself, groups and most of all knowing I was sick of living in London and wanted to get away. Alex Kozma recommended Taiwan to me in July, in August we sold everything and arrived in Taiwan in September.  ## Emei Shan I discovered this while working at the bank, my boring office job. Most days we had a quota to complete, usually, I completed mine in the morning so I spent the afternoon reading about mystical teachers, martial arts and all sorts of amazing articles. I would send them to my work outlook account and read away. I was still completing more work than some of my colleagues so please don't judge me too harshly. So one day I found the adventures of a man called Linhai, wow everything I had wanted to do he had been there and done it.  Here is a snippet of the original text I saved from many years ago that made me know that I wanted to go to Emei Shan with Linhai as I knew Alex would not be around to do it again, so Linhai would be the perfect guide as at that time my mandarin ability was nonexistent: > > Emei Mountain is the sacred abode of Samantabhadra and the store house for the Avtamsaka Sutra. As it says in the Avatamsaka Sutra all Bodhisattvas who wish to accomplish the ultimate state of Buddhahood must do so by completing the teachings of Samantabhadra. That's why Samantabhadra is called the king of the Bodhisatvas and is the source of all the different shools be it Pure Land, Zen and Vajrayana. Today the most senior master on Emei Mountain is the 102 year old Abbot Grand Master Tongyong. He has spent ninty years on Emei Mountain keeping the lamp of dharma burning for the new generations of dharma masters. His disciple Master Zhaokong is the abbot of the Baoguo Temple where hundred of monks uphold the pureland and pilgrims from all lineages, traditions and religions come to bask. The famous Terton Khenpo Jigme Puntsog also has a very large monastery growing where the Emperor Kangxi, who was an emination of the Buddha Manjushri, stayed in retreat. The Chinese government just spent three hundred and fifty million dollars rebuilding the Hua Zang Temple of the Golden Summit where our system comes from and it includes the world's largest golden statue which is twenty stories tall. There are many miracles that have occured on this holy mountain since ancient times and even with our own groups. Ah, the magic and mystery of this fascinating land can only by Buddhas be told. May you achieve the realization of the sublime dharma and enjoy the Emei Pureland, Amituofo!!! > So, from that you can see what an amazing place it is, add to this what I had heard from Alex Kozma about the place. He had met many hermits hidden away off the main trails. It was and I would say arguably still is a place of magic and mystery. The trip itself was wonderful, I was fresh from my Silat training and had recently completed the 40 day practice so having some time away was very much needed. A change of scene outside of London.  It is also the first time I met someone who has since turned into one of the most well known magicians in the Franz Bardon tradition - Bob from Sixty Skills. I know he will be sharing more about the system in the coming years so I shall say no more and let him provide the details, as he has way more experience with the system having returned to train the system again with Linhai in subsequent years. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-3-1024x768.jpeg)Sixty Skills and Perseus taking a rest on Emei Shan. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/468406565_10161610857218080_5066852006332412369_n.jpg)KudaKuda on Emei Shan ## Asia Now let us get back to the story, in September 2008 we arrived in Taiwan. My mission was to find an internal teacher to complete the Xingyi and Bagua training, I tried all the names and discovered a little of the politics of training in Taiwan. One teacher saying ‘that group copy us’ and that group thinking they are being copied. I did find some gold thought thanks mainly to Alex already discovering it. Firstly Master He of Yin style Bagua Quan. What an amazing individual, this is real Kung Fu, real body training. Honestly if I was 18 again, I would probably train with Master He, I highly recommend you read Alex’s interviews with Master He. It is one of the very few systems with genuine inner training, not all about feeling and energy but genuine training of the connective tissue, knowledge and training of how these lines of force connect to the organs, how to train the dantien (not the BS modern version either the real training of building it). This is knowledge going all the way back to the founder of Bagua, inclusive of Qing Gong - Light Skill. I cannot say I am a student of Master He, though I did attend many classes which were 4 hours long on Sundays and learned more in each class than I have in months or years with other teachers. I also revisited in subsequent years taking friends to see him as an example of a real teacher of internal arts. But at that time I still wanted the combat side and this is not something covered with Master he, I respect this as he is honest that he is not a fighter, nor am I but being from the UK, and at that time wanting Kung Fu to be part of my future, one has to be ready to back up their Kung Fu, so I continued my search. I will leave you with the video below which is an interview by Alex with Master He. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4Uyjnc9O4 Some of the wonderful moments of being in Asia, is the fact that in literally every park you will find someone who does some training.  So I would often just sit out in the parks and find people, one of these occasions led to a regular unofficial teacher. I used to meet him early morning at CKS Memorial park, I would bring him some tea and he would teach me his approach to the five fists of Xing Yi Quan and Nei Gung. I later found out he was also a known Chen style teacher. I liked him as he was no nonsense but still very happy to help me as long as I trained hard. In this pic I believe he is early 80's! He would often ask me to hit him to show off his neigong. What a lovely teacher and memory. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image.png)My early morning teacher at CKS Taipei. ## Finally I found my teacher So this is something I have never shared too much for various reasons and still feel a little uncomfortable writing about. I also did not want to be someone who was seeking status off the backs of others (I am very much at the lower end of skills when it comes to his students) . As the person who I found to be the teacher I needed, not the one I wanted, was someone whose skills and legacy are off the charts, someone who has done more for more people than many including those people will ever know.  I always used to hear people talking about the presence of this master or that master and then when I went to meet that master, I was often very disappointed as they were nothing like was described. Often the measurement of ability is often greatly overestimated in internal martial arts circles as in general there is never any real pressure or reality. Face is often put first, protect the lineage, protect the tradition, never putting it in a position to look bad.  So in short I was used to teachers sounding like a superhero but actually when I met them I realised they would not do too well against a 3 month boxer and would struggle with their fitness in basic activities. Sad but true. This is mostly directed at the internal guys, the externals and the Chinese wrestlers were always impressive.  But with this teacher there were many stories, and to be honest upon working with him, they were all true. This teacher had nicknames within the Police, the man with the black eyes among others. I heard that from him in one of the last times I saw him in his apartment in Taipei. He is one of only a handful of people I would call a master level teacher. He taught me about vital, astral and mental expressions of energy before I had ever grasped them in Hermetics. I say that as he was so far ahead on everything from mental clarity, mysterious happenings, ability to deal with violence, ability to find success in the most challenging of circumstances. He was also a man who was not afraid to make huge scary decisions that completely uprooted his life. His youth was also wild attending college in the US having Carl Sagan as a teacher and inspirer, he was a superstar musician and generally good at anything he put his attention to. Our time together was challenging, it was the hardest thing mentally I had ever done and probably to this day still is. All of our training had to be logged and at the end of the level we had to present our log. Training was all about propagation, attrition, set percentages to guide our standards. A clear process for repeatable results. Sadly, he has now passed on. But he left behind something rare: a body of work that quietly shaped far more people than most will ever realise. His influence was not always public, and it was not the kind of legacy that needs advertising. It moved through training, through institutions, through students, and through methods that continued to be used long after people forgot where they came from. For me, his importance was more personal. He changed the way I understood training, standards, pressure, and results. He was one of the few people I met whose reputation did not collapse under direct experience. He did not force himself into your life or offer unwanted advice. He was simply a clear example of what happens when discipline is prioritised over performance, image, or status. The closer I got, the more I realised how much there was behind the stories I heard about him. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/image-3-1024x504.png) ## Why Share My Journey? Perseus has now spoken with hundreds of practitioners, including serious students, long-term practitioners, and teachers in their own right. In these conversations, we often ask people to speak honestly about the paths, teachers, mistakes, disciplines, and turning points that shaped them. So it seems only fair to share something of my own process as well. Much of how I found Hermetics has already been discussed in my conversations with [Phil Rice on **The Bard Inn**](https://www.youtube.com/@philricealchemist), so this post focuses on another major thread of my life: the martial journey. This is the beginning of what I am calling **Martial Odyssey** — a look at the training, teachers, hard lessons, strange encounters, and long detours that shaped my understanding of practice. The point is not nostalgia, though it is nice to look back. It is to show how training changes a person when it is taken seriously, and how the martial, meditative, and magical paths often meet in the same place: the body, the will, the breath, the discipline, and the willingness to keep going...until. --- --- # Lyam Thomas Christopher on High Magic, Inner Demons, Self-Initiation, and Spiritual Transformation Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/lyam-thomas-christopher-on-high-magic-inner-demons-self-initiation-and-spiritual-transformation/ ## Introduction This is a transcript of a recent interview with Lyam Thomas Christopher. Both the video and the transcript are provided below. If you would like to learn more about Lyams work please check the following: Learn more about the work of Lyam Thomas Christopher on his [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/cw/LyamChristopher). Also be sure to check his very informative [YouTube channel here](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC00Y8Wm1KYTh2V08_CNbu9g). --- # Interview https://youtu.be/X-vqWRE_2pw?si=UCs_VAElcHVvbH9P **PAA: Hello everyone, and welcome to this new episode of *Perseus Conversations*. I am very excited today because we have someone who is well known in the magical community and on YouTube, and who is doing important work on subjects that constantly come up in magical communities: the real-life problems, internal challenges, and sometimes embarrassing difficulties that practitioners face. Today I am speaking with Lyam Thomas Christopher. Welcome.** **Lyam:** Good evening to you and good morning to me. **PAA: Thank you for joining us. As we were briefly saying before we went on air, I am really impressed with your YouTube channel. For anyone listening, definitely check the description box below, because you are going to see important subjects that we all face: the challenges, the internal challenges, and even the embarrassing challenges. I want to dive right in. First, I want to talk about your book, *[Kabbalah, Magic and the Great Work of Self-Transformation](https://www.amazon.com/Kabbalah-Magic-Great-Work-Transformation/dp/0738708933)*. This is something I have only recently discovered through the Perseus community, with people talking about it, the different grades, and what they are doing. For those who do not know, could you give a brief overview of what this book is about, what its goals are, and why you felt the need to write it?** **Lyam:** The book is written as a dramatic way of introducing the Golden Dawn that actually works, as opposed to trying to go into the Golden Dawn book by Regardie, which is basically a large collection of Golden Dawn writings, rituals, and things like that. People look at the material and say, “What do I do with all this? I can’t even understand half of it.” *Kabbalah, Magic and the Great Work of Self-Transformation* is a means of exploring what is covered in the Golden Dawn material and experiencing it for yourself. By the time you get through the course, everything in the Golden Dawn book makes sense. In the process, you undergo a spiritual transformation, which is apparently what the original theurgists of the classical era and late antiquity were all about in the practice of high magic. One other thing about the book: it did not make any attempt to be highbrow necessarily. It was more of an attempt to really get into the dramatics of it. All the stuff that we think is really cool about magic, all the titillating things, matter because magic has a multilevel appeal. There is the highfalutin spiritual material, and then there are the external appearances of it: the dark imagery, mysterious symbols, and things like that. In order to get into the system, all of that is important. The goetic elements of the magic are important to the high magic. The book is essentially an effort to rescue all of the glamour from the glamour. In other words, all this stuff serves a purpose. You want to use it to stir the imagination because you are setting up a discipline that drills down through the bedrock of the ego and uncovers something soulful, something spiritual, to be discovered. The reason I wrote it was because that had not been done yet. It was the book I was looking for. You know the common complaint: if you do not find the book you are looking for, you have to write it. **PAA: That is what has been communicated to me, and after looking at it as well, so many people look at the Golden Dawn and wonder how to access it. There are obviously the big books out there, but, as you say, much of the work is quite highbrow. For someone just coming to it, it can be very intellectual. You can end up reading and thinking, “Great, so what do I do now?” You spoke about spiritual transformation, and I have also been going through your YouTube channel over the last few days. One of the things I listened to today was about abstraction: moving away from the finer details of something and saying, “It is just this” or “It is just that.” So when we look at spiritual transformation, what does that actually look like for a practitioner of this system?** **Lyam:** You have hit upon something very important. If you go into various traditions of spiritual transformation, Zen, mindfulness, transcendental meditation, and so on, these teachers tend to speak in abstractions. For example, if you have a recurring emotion that troubles you, they might say, “Deal with the emotion. What does the emotion feel like? How does it feel in your body?” One of the problems is that the very label of the emotion, let’s say jealousy, is an abstraction. The actual experience of jealousy is quite startling. At the core of the emotion is actually an image, or an imagistic scenario, which is essentially an unresolved duality. This is what we would call a spirit. This thing keeps resurfacing because it is trying to work out whatever duality or unresolved conflict it was originally enmeshed in. In the scheme of our cosmic evolution or biological evolution, we have come across many challenges and horrific situations that have embedded in us these difficult unresolved dualities. It is sort of like trauma. In the East they call these things samskaras. In the West, we can call them spirits, entities, or demons. We call them that because when they surface, they surface as imagistic scenarios or images. They come complete with horns, fangs, glowing eyes, claws, and things like that because they get associated and tangled up with traumatic imagery from our evolutionary past. They also appear as flash floods, storms, lightning strikes, explosions, and so on. These are things we have experienced in our ancestry, or so the theory goes, and they are embedded in cell memory. They haunt us and drive our behavior. You really cannot get at them until you get at the imagistic scenarios that keep surfacing. They are there, but very often we are unaware of them because we have developed a hostile relationship with imagination, or imagination has developed a hostile relationship with itself because of all the pain that is in it. So naturally it says, “That is not real. Forget about that. That is just a dream. It is not important.” In magic, we do not just deal with the emotion. We do not simply say, “How do you feel? Write about it.” We go into the feeling. What are the entities involved? What are they doing? How do they move? In the old grimoires, they say “move and appear,” because that is how spirits first manifest. There is movement, and then you can suddenly see them as a charging water buffalo, a wolf-like creature stalking you, an avalanche that is going to bury you, or a dark hole you are going to fall into. These images are not abstract. They are visceral, concrete, and scary. That is how the psyche works. Like it or not, you cannot escape the way the psyche works. **PAA: So the transformation would be the working through of these things as they appear in your life, or as they become present in your life?** **Lyam:** It is the acceptance of them and the assistance of them, so they can work out or work through whatever issues they have. In high magic, it is more an attitude of love or compassion for them, and it requires empathy. You look at this thing that is coming up and making a hell out of your life because it keeps taking over your behavior. Then you ask, “How has this thing evolved to function as it does?” Of course it would work that way. Of course it is trying to do that. This is empathy. This is real empathy. It is not primarily about being a good person and loving your neighbor, though that is fine. Primarily, it is the empathy we have for these unresolved complexes, these unresolved dualities that surface within us. They are very much alive. They are older than we are because they exist in the traumatic history of humanity and before that. They go all the way back to primordial single-cell organisms. The tendency to contract when something is poking at you is not just a human thing. It is a life thing. Even plants do it. That contraction is the primordial contraction we experience, and that is what the ego has latched onto. The ego is that compulsive contraction. You cannot seem to unclench anymore. You are constantly on guard, constantly hunting for the next fix, or constantly alert for dangers. > To be very clear, when we say, “This is mere psychology,” we are dealing with the psyche of the universe, not just the psyche of each individual person. Who came up with the idea that the soul is inside your body? That is something modernity does to you in order to contain you, control you, and isolate you. > > Lyam Thomas Christopher **PAA: So you are saying this is beyond us. It is like a shared pool for humanity. It is not simply that these things manifest only for each individual person?** **Lyam:** To be very clear, when we say, “This is mere psychology,” we are dealing with the psyche of the universe, not just the psyche of each individual person. Who came up with the idea that the soul is inside your body? That is something modernity does to you in order to contain you, control you, and isolate you. The experience of the soul being trapped inside the body is certainly interesting, but that is an ego construct. It is part of our affliction, and this is what we examine. It does not mean that you have a soul inside your body necessarily. Soul permeates everything: anima mundi, the soul of the world. We need to rescue psychology from the psychologists. > The real task is to turn the light around and look at the entity arising inside the magic circle: this thing you think you are, which is reacting to the thing out there and saying, “I need to get away from that. I need to push it away. I need to forget about it and never think about it again.” Or, “I need it so badly because I am incomplete without it.” > > Lyam Thomas Christopher **PAA: That has completely transformed my understanding of the work within the book. As a baseline, it is not simply within you; it is within the universe. It is the inner plane, so to speak, not just inside you and all your fault because it is inside you. Students working with this brings me to something I mentioned off air about the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. You said in one of your videos that life might get worse first when you do that practice. That shocked me, because I have done that practice before and thought, “Why am I doing this? What is happening?” Is that because you are bringing up this material?** **Lyam:** Yes. It is funny because I did not make that up. My teachers in the Golden Dawn, at Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple, mentioned it almost sidelong. They said the secret purpose of that ritual was to stir up all your stuff. We thought, “What? I thought I was banishing negativity from my life.” They said, “You are.” What happens is that you are banishing negativity with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram every day, but what that does is bring a kind of magic circle around you. It reinforces the artificial self that the ego is occupying, creating, or becoming. It reinforces the dichotomy between “me inside here” and “the big bad universe out there.” It strengthens that by pushing the negativity out there. But the psyche works this way: the stuff you push out there gets puffed up in a more obvious manner. The stuff inside here that pretends to be you is also puffed up. This is why so many people doing magic become ego-inflated. They are puffing up the complexes inside the circle and outside the circle. They become increasingly paranoid and think they are being attacked psychically: “Psychic attack, psychic attack. Somebody sent a demon after me.” Or they think institutions are out to get them. Another one is, “You should be prepared for what is coming,” as though civilization is about to end. All of this is reinforced by the tendency to push those demons out into the world, where they can arise in more fearsome forms to confront you. The task is to confront them, but not to let them control you. Here is the really cool part. When we see something outside the magic circle bothering us, our tendency is to go fix it. “I need to fix that,” or “I need to run away from that.” We always have to do something in regard to it. That is karma. That is the error. There is nothing wrong with it, but when you only do that, you are reinforcing karma. “I need to get a new house. I need to get a new car. I need to get a new girlfriend. I need this. I need that. I need to run away from this.” Every time you respond to the external thing that way, you are reinforcing karma. The real task is to turn the light around and look at the entity arising inside the magic circle: this thing you think you are, which is reacting to the thing out there and saying, “I need to get away from that. I need to push it away. I need to forget about it and never think about it again.” Or, “I need it so badly because I am incomplete without it.” These narratives are not real. You begin to look at this thing and say, “What are you? I did not consent to this.” Yet for countless millennia, this thing has been arising and taking over our behavior in various biological forms. Most animals are almost completely dominated by the entities that keep arising and saying, “Go do this. Go do that.” These instincts, drives, and habitual behaviors take over. As humans, we have developed the ability to supervise these entities and empathize with them. If you cannot empathize with them, you are in trouble. Difficulty empathizing severely damages your ability to make progress with magic or spirituality. As the things inside the magic circle rise up, the demon inside the house with you is the one you need to scrutinize. You do this on the pages of your magical journal. As you work in the journal, you write about these things as they come up, especially how this thing is responding: “I have this other tendency that keeps coming up. What is that like?” That is training for the real work of Goetia that comes in the inner order, where you may eventually be conjuring spirits to visible appearance and doing work with them. In the outer order, you are doing a light version of that first. You are doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram every day, the Middle Pillar, and things like that, purifying yourself of these things and noticing yourself noticing them. Eventually you can do more intensive work. **PAA: It seems like a process of identification. Without foreknowledge, people might think, “This is coming, this is coming,” but if you do not deal with these things and scrutinize your tendencies, they just keep taking over.** **Lyam:** Right. If you do not deal with these things and scrutinize them, they will keep taking you over. In fact, they will inflate you. They will increase your sense of self-importance because now you are more easily irritated by inferior things outside your magic circle. You become an ass. That is how ceremonial magic works. It pushes out the complexes that are causing your suffering. **PAA: So it is important to be within a system that has a process for dealing with this, rather than just doing the ritual and hoping for the best.** **Lyam:** If you are going to conjure the demons, you need to confront them. If you do not have the courage to do that, do not do this work. **PAA: You mentioned the magical diary. That seems really important. Do the magical diary and the ritual work basically work in tandem?** **Lyam:** Yes, the magical diary is essential. You cannot just say, “I am observing these things and making mental notes.” No. When you write about them, you are not skipping any steps in the scrutinizing process. You are not only tacitly analyzing them; you are thoroughly analyzing them because the sentence structure and grammar of the words on the page require you to do that. You will not skip as many blind spots that you might otherwise gloss over if you allow the language to carry you through a complete process of narrative and analysis. It also helps tremendously to have a teacher who can guide you. The teacher might say, “Let me see some of your journal entries, and I will give you some pointers.” **PAA: That brings us back to exactness versus abstraction. Do not dismiss what is coming up with abstractions. We are good at that: “It is just jealousy,” or “I am just depressed.”** **Lyam:** Yes. What does depression look like? It can be startling. Or take a fear of heights. Some people’s fear of heights is like falling into a dark hole, being forgotten, and starving to death in darkness. Other people’s fear of heights is like tumbling end over end through space with no control. Mine is more like hitting the ground really hard. That is what I am afraid of. A psychologist might say, “You have acrophobia, a fear of heights. Here is a prescription.” But let us look at this thing. How does it manifest for you? What does the entity that is about to fall, falling, or clinging to the edge look like? What is the preciseness in it? **PAA: In addition to the diary and the banishing ritual, is there any other kind of balancing work that people do within the process or the system you have?** **Lyam:** When we bring up the idea of balance, it has always annoyed me because I ask, “What are we balancing, and where is the fulcrum?” Some people would put the fulcrum over here; other people would put it over there. What are we balancing? Ultimately, what happens in high magic, in the realm of spiritual transformation, is that the balance is between existing and not existing. This is the sweet spot. It is like the god Thoth as the enterer of the threshold. He is in manifestation and out of manifestation at the same time. He comes and goes, like the moon comes and goes. This delicate dance of only showing up when needed and disappearing when you are not needed: there is your true balance. What do we do with our lives? We constantly micromanage and meddle in things. Your life is mostly none of your business. Stay out of it. It does its thing. You occasionally show up to tweak things, and then you let go. So it is a balance between managing and letting go, meddling and disappearing. In *The Lord of the Rings*, Gandalf will show up, say a few words, poke a few people, and then go away. Then he comes back and sees whether they woke up and whether they are actually doing something. **PAA: So really, follow the process. Let’s say a student is following this process, journaling, and having things grow in their life. Maybe they are not dealing with it as well as possible, or it is affecting their life a lot, and they are thinking, “I am not sure I can get through this.” What would your advice be to that student?** **Lyam:** The big relief that eventually comes is this: I do not need to fix all this stuff. It needs my tender loving care and attention. It kind of fixes itself when it is allowed to air itself out in the imagination. If you do not deal with your karma on the level of Yetzirah, or the imagination, it eventually trickles down into your life and makes your external physical life hell. It starts beating you up in the physical world. The theory is that you can deal with this karma before it manifests physically. When you deal with it on that level, you can help it resolve itself so it no longer appears in your behavior and circumstances of life. No guarantees. Karma is everywhere. It is everything. But you can head off some of the really unpleasant stuff that is trying to resolve itself. It is painful to think that these things are trying to come out so they can see for themselves that they do not quite work the way they want to. In order to do that, they are going to be pathological first on the level of imagination, in terms of scary dreams, dreams of walking around in the park naked, or other uncomfortable dreams. If you do not deal with them on that level, they will manifest in your physical life. When people are suffering a lot in their physical circumstances, we can theorize that they do not know how to deal with it on the level of imagination. This is not necessarily true, and it is not their fault. They may not have the executive function that says, “These images are arising. They need help to work themselves out before they become physical.” Who would know to do that? You have to have someone teach you. **PAA: Let’s move on to something that came from the community. People were talking about the book and things you had said, and a question came through about qigong, internal energy, and why someone might be told to practice this in addition to the work of the book. What differences, if any, are there between the Qabalistic Cross or the Middle Pillar and doing some form of standing qigong? What is one doing, and what is the other doing?** **Lyam:** In most cases, when a teacher gives you some work to do with the energy body, or something ritualistic like this, you just do it. You will notice your tendency to want to use these things to control your energy: “I want more energy. Give me energy.” You are trying to get things out of it. The teacher says, “No, do as I say,” because what you are primarily doing is noticing what the energy does out of habit. I love this idea from biology, though it is not really new: the morphogenetic field or morphic resonance. We inhabit an energy field that ensouls, invigorates, or animates all life in the biosphere, or maybe in the universe. This energy field becomes concentrated in us, and it has habits within it. There are recurring patterns, and these recurring patterns can cause many problems. These recurring patterns are semi-autonomous entities, as we might say in psychoanalysis. They are demons or creatures, often much older than we are, because they persist in the human race, in animals, in plants, and everywhere. They go through patterns where they are stuck and keep beating themselves up because they are trying to accomplish something. They persist because they occasionally work. Most of the time they do not work, but when they occasionally work, that is enough for them to keep going. As these energy flows do their habitual things, cramped over here and gushing too much over there, we begin to notice them. The primary thing happening when we are working with ritualistic energy, qigong-type energy, Kundalini work, or breath work is that we are noticing how this energy field exists within the body. We tend not to believe it is there. Even a Zen teacher might say, “Notice the emotion in your body. Where does it manifest? As a cramp?” People think it is in the body, in the musculature or fascia. But no: it is in the imagination, or the imagination of the universe, or the soul of the world, which is being concentrated. You are now dealing with the eruption of some habitual tendency that is trying to discover what it really is. It keeps coming out so there is an opportunity to deal with it. The main thing that will eventually collapse is the habitual contraction of imagination into ego. Primarily, what a teacher is working on, like it or not, is destroying you. Eventually, that habitual contraction into a sense of self you think is you will collapse, which frees a tremendous amount of energy. Normally what happens is that it happens to you, it is catastrophic, and then you recover. If you already have a lot of experience, it is not a big deal. You think, “What was that? I disappeared for a second.” Then you come back. The ego reconstitutes again, and the energy pattern says, “I am back again.” But this thing that is “me” is like a sock puppet. You are crammed up in your head again as a control-tower entity looking out through your eyes. Yet this is not real. It is not what you thought you were. Problems still resurface, but every time one of these little behavioral eccentricities comes up, you see how it works. You gain an instant understanding that it is an eruption of a habitual energy pattern. This is when you begin to see how these things unfold. The primary goal, whether it is ritual, qigong, chakra work, Kundalini, or breath work, is to discover that it is not simply in your fascia, muscles, hormones, or neurotransmitters. All of these are manifestations of habitual energy patterns trapped in reactive patterns. Eventually, you begin to see them. They do not liberate right away. You begin to notice them as they are stuck, and it can hurt like hell to notice them. Before, ignorance was bliss. Now you see how stuck you are. Another thing you see is that the way you are trying to feel better does not work. You see that no matter what you do, in all those habitual ways of striving to fix this or fix that, you are not going to feel better. When you see that, it is as though someone in the family has died. When someone dies, you think, “What is the point of all this? We are going to die anyway.” The same feeling comes up: no matter what I do, it is pointless. This thing thinks it is going to feel better by doing this or that, but it never works. It only works for a little while, and then the suffering comes back. That is disheartening. It is called the dark night of the soul. You see that nothing you do is going to make you feel permanently better unless you turn the light around and look at the thing that is compulsively trying to feel better all the time. Then you see: this is what is going on. This thing is trying to feel better all the time. First of all, is there anything wrong with it to begin with? How did it get the idea that something is wrong? This idea that something is wrong is a driving force, a mechanism that keeps us controlling, freaking out, dominating the planet, and killing other life forms so we can live. It is the way karma works, and it is flying blind. When you notice this thing, you see, “This is not what I am. This is just stuff going on.” Eventually you begin to wake up because this idea of “me inside here” and “things to fix out there” is not real. It is a dream. You do not wake up from the dream; you wake up to the dream. You still see all the dream forms that the nervous system is creating: “That is a bad guy. That is a good guy. Of course, I am the good guy.” But none of that is inherently real, and yet we still wink at it. That is why so many magicians sleep with one eye open. One eye is turned inside into the spiritual world, where they can see that none of this is actually happening. The other eye is turned outside, playing along with the phantoms the nervous system is creating so it can perpetuate itself. **PAA: That is not the answer I was expecting, but it is an excellent answer. So whether we are doing the Qabalistic Cross or the Middle Pillar, even though they may come at this from a particular perspective or give particular experiences, the endpoint is identification with reality.** **Lyam:** Yes. Can you exert energy fields and heal people? Yes, it is possible. But what is involved might scare the hell out of you because it involves deep empathy for, and taking on, the energy pattern of the other person. You can see it because you understand it, and then you demonstrate in front of them that you can come out of it. Maybe they will harmonize with you coming out of it. That is terrifying because you have to actually face what they are facing. That is a kind of healing. **PAA: Let’s move on to three subjects in one: lodge, lineage, and solitary work. I have seen a few of your videos on these subjects. First, let’s look at lineage. There is this idea of, “My teacher is this person, therefore...” Could you speak to that? Also, is there a difference in what someone can achieve through solitary work versus lodge work? There are many views on this. If someone is in a place where they cannot access anything other than your book, can they develop in the same way?** **Lyam:** First of all, it is conceivably possible that you can become enlightened just by reading. It is very unlikely, and people say, “You cannot get it from a book.” But if you really know how to read, like a theorist reads, you are going through all kinds of horrific transformations as you read. We know this because we read literature and think, “I cannot believe this. I am tearing up. I am getting chills.” The ability to do that can spiritually transform you. It is called catharsis. The ability to do that happens on your own while you are reading literature, watching a movie, or better yet, watching a live play. These things happen whether we like it or not. Life unfolds that way. With magic, art, or drama, we turn up the volume on that. We intensify the catharsis process, purification, and self-empowerment. You realize what you really are and become more authentic. I came into the work trying to initiate myself, and I was making progress. Then I encountered Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple and Laura York, who was my teacher. I benefited tremendously from just having a few words with her and hanging out on occasion. We did the 0=0 initiation ritual, which was wonderful, but most of the juicy stuff I got was from being with the adepts of Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple, especially her. That is when I realized how lineage works. I have noticed that people doing the *Kabbalah, Magic* work make progress and their lives change. Then they meet with me online and have a conversation like this, and everything suddenly changes for them. They go after it more seriously. They say, “I am going to start over. Now I know what is going on. Now I know what is happening.” There is nothing special about me, but somehow that has carried forward. I am paying it forward. I got it from Laura, and now I am fortunate enough to have been activated or initiated. To be initiated is to rise to a new level of activity and function at that level. It is a higher level or deeper level, whatever resonates. You cannot go back because you now see what is possible for yourself, and you have to do this. Once you are in, you cannot undo it anymore. It is done. If you try to back out, you will suffer horribly because you are trying to live a life that you know will not make you happy in the way everyone else is doing. Now you can see through it, but you are still trying to do it. You cannot do that anymore. It is no longer your game. You can play it and have fun with it, but it is not something you ultimately subscribe to. **PAA: The last part of that would be this: when it comes to the outer and inner order, from the bookwork, this takes you up to the entrance door. Is that correct?** **Lyam:** To the portal, right. To knocking on the door and hoping it opens, and then going into Tiphareth and being happy forever. The real transition from the outer order to the inner order involves being able to work magic from the inside. Let’s say you get into Goetia and you are conjuring demons so they will go do things for you. That is a manner of working with spirits in which you take their existence at face value. You do not really know what they are. You say, “They are out there, and if I conjure them and pretend to be the archangel Michael, they will react, cower, and go do things.” That is usually the outer-order perspective. As we go through the outer-order process, we realize that is not real. Those are fake forms of power, the kinds of power tyrants wield: coercion and pecking-order authority. True authority involves penetrating insight into what these spirits are as karmic formations desperately trying to work themselves out. People are collections of these entities, and you can walk around in the world seeing that. Then you are on the inside. You are operating at the level of the soul, and you see how the soul of the world is erupting into manifestation, attempting to work out its dramas. Working from the inside means that, yes, you may still conjure spirits and demons and appear to get benefits, as though they are doing your bidding. But that is not what is happening. You are helping them work out their unresolved dualities. These spirits or semi-autonomous complexes transform and assume forms that are more helpful, mainly like watchdogs. Instead of taking you over and making you do things, they say, “Look out.” Or they dissolve entirely and never bother you again. That is the process. In the process, you gain an extraordinary way of living, which for you is quite ordinary because you touch down on the mind the way the mind actually is, not the mind as it has been forced into this role or that role. We think all these roles we compulsively play are reality. That is a dream state. When you come out of that, you see that being free of these roles, entities, and scenarios compelling you is the reality. That is the mind the way it actually is. It is kind of nice. You are not immune to these things, but as they come up, you are aware of them. They will not necessarily take you over and force you to be an actor in their drama. They will still act themselves out on the level of imagination, where you can help them realize what they are or what they are trying to do. They love that. At first, they may say, “What are you doing? You have not noticed me for a million years.” Then they settle in and say, “This is really nice. I am going to serve you as an instinct that is no longer going to grab hold of you and make you do things. I am going to pipe down now.” That happens all around you. You see these things everywhere. It is not just, “I am getting control of my behavior.” It happens with the people around you as well. They get magnetized by you, or catalyzed, whatever you want to call that. **PAA: Could we say that this links to authenticity? The authenticity of your practice in what could be called the outer order: as you develop, you transition inward without necessarily needing entrance into another structure. Your own evolution takes you into that state.** **Lyam:** Let’s backtrack for a second because I want to deal with the idea of group ritual. People think, “I need to join a group, and the group ritual work is going to carry me through.” That is all fine, but primarily this Hermetic work is self-initiation. Even if you are in a lodge, it is your daily work that is going to do the work for you. When you bring your A-game to the group meetings or the lodge, what you bring is yourself as you are in your current state of personal individual transformation. Here I am. People are learning from you, you are learning from them, and they are noticing the stuff you are stirring up, which may be problematic for you and for them. It is not necessarily easy. In magical lodges, the work will push out demons and inflate egos. That is how it works. The teacher’s job is to help people deal with that so things settle down and people do the work on the level of imagination instead of letting it come out into the world and beat everyone up. You can do ritual in groups, and that is fine. But primarily, the work is by yourself: doing your magical journal, doing your daily ritual, and doing whatever your teacher prescribes. **PAA: That is really good to hear. It shows how tough entering one of these things can be.** **Lyam:** Especially if you are an addictive type of personality, group work can help with relying on alcohol, pornography, or things like that. When you reach for things that are cheap and easy, it becomes addiction. What the psyche really wants is to be challenged. When you enter a social group, it is automatically challenging. It is always difficult. There is always a little bit of, “What is going on here?” That is enough to make addiction unnecessary. You are not reaching for that cheap fix anymore because you have a genuinely challenging and engaging situation. That is much more worthwhile than finding a cheap, easy feel-good. **PAA: I think you have covered authenticity indirectly, but when I saw your material on that, it really struck me. Maybe this is a reflection of me, but I thought, “Yes, that is very important.” Personally, I feel I want my outer to reflect my inner, and if my inner is pretending to be my outer, I feel uncomfortable.** **Lyam:** You are a practitioner. I have just added you as a practitioner of magic because if you are doing magic, authenticity becomes a huge issue for a long time. Eventually it is not such a big deal. You run into people and they say, “Have a nice day,” and they do not really mean it. It is all right. Do not freak out. People ask, “How are you?” and they do not really mean it. That is fine. They are starting a conversation. Authenticity is paradoxical because, from my perspective, you realize there is no “you.” You have all these entities reacting to things outside the magic circle, and each of them is inviting you to identify with it: “This is who you really are. You exist to fight injustice. Let’s go beat up injustice.” But the real challenge is not to identify with the compulsion to become this role-playing thing. When you realize that none of these entities inviting you to become something are inherently real, then you see there is not really any “me.” But then something curious happens. You notice that the way these entities come out, and the way you play along with them, becomes emblematic of who you really are. It is your own style. You cannot necessarily put a finger on it, but there is the authenticity. It is like what Oscar Wilde said. This is not a direct quote, but he said there is nothing more artificial than trying to be yourself. The manner in which you wear your different masks tells me who you really are. The manner in which you handle all these entities as they come up, playing along with some and letting others go, is your style. That is your authenticity. Whatever that karmic pattern is, it is probably going to continue for a very long time, long after your body is gone, in that wave pattern or whatever it is. I do not know whether that is true, but it is a beautiful idea. **PAA: Thank you for answering that. That was one of the questions I really wanted to cover. I have many others, but I am drawn to ask this: in your own practice, was there a point where you were half in and half out, asking, “Is this real? What is real?” Was there an experience where you felt, “Okay, this is something I need to commit to and go all in”? If you are able to share it, what was that?** **Lyam:** I mentioned this in the book. I got into magic by pursuing astral projection, which I had some results with. The book was by Ophiel, *The Art and Practice of Astral Projection*. It is a fantastic book, especially for his writing style. He mentioned the Golden Dawn and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and that brought me into Golden Dawn work. I started doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, and after about a week or two, I felt different. I felt good, but not in the ordinary way. It was more like the ego beginning to think, “I am awesome, and all that stuff out there is just material dross.” That started to happen, but I realized something was going on. This was real. Something was happening. Astral projection itself was not that big a deal. It was a lucid-dreaming type of thing. **PAA: I am surprised, because I would have thought that even a clear lucid experience, or a real astral projection, would be quite powerful.** **Lyam:** It was not remote viewing. It was simply being awake while dreaming, aware and able to fly and explore. Most of us have experienced that before, so we know it is not that big a deal, though it is nice to be able to do it consciously. But realizing that waving your hands in the air and chanting names actually does something like psychic surgery made me think, “Oh my God, this is real.” From that point, I pursued it seriously and eventually discovered Ra-Hoor-Khuit Temple and the Golden Dawn. Another experience happened when I was in Zelator. It was my first enlightenment experience, at the level you could say of Assiah, the world of action or material world. I was living in an apartment that had no washroom, so I had to go to the community washroom. I was walking across the lawn and happened to notice that I was the earth arisen in this form, looking at itself. Then I entered the washroom and thought, “What was that?” I almost missed it. These things are always there. I almost did not see it. That was real. I began to notice that the ego construct is inherently unreal. That was probably the most profound moment out of all the work, even though it was so ordinary and subtle. It had the biggest impact. Eventually, in the same grade, or perhaps Theoricus, I do not remember anymore, the ego collapsed. I had a letting-go attack. The ego started to collapse, but I was able to hold on. It was beginning to crumble, and I thought I was dying. There were hallucinations involved. I write about this on the Forbidden Realms Patreon site. It was alarming. I contacted my teachers at the time, and they were all on a camping trip, so I had to wait several days for them to respond. When my teacher responded, she said, “Yes, of course. Next time that happens, just let go. Discover something new. It is all right.” I thought, “What do you mean? I had dragon voices growling into my ears.” I did not know what was going on. Now I understand it more. I also had experiences of being attacked by teeth, fangs, wolf-like creatures, and maybe snakes. Sometimes I would touch an object in the environment and get an electric shock. These are evolutionary traumas being pushed out into hallucinatory experiences. It is funny to call them hallucinations because that is an abstraction used to dismiss them. They were tangible and shockingly real, sort of like PTSD for a moment. They did not ruin my life, but I was noticing them. I told my teachers about it, and Laura said, “Good. Very good. You are being attacked by entities. Very good.” **PAA: That was the point where you thought, “Okay, I am absolutely all in.” You also mentioned Patreon, so I would like to cover that. Would you let us know about the Patreon and anything else you have going on: activities for students or people interested in your work? All of that will be put in the description box below.** **Lyam:** Speaking of authenticity, I just quit my day job, so this is what I am doing now. Please support me on Patreon. On the Patreon site, the idea is that being able to contact somebody, even through the computer, and work with them live or through messaging, is often enough to allow the lineage thing to work. I have seen this happening on the internet, especially on YouTube, and I thought, “This can work.” That is why I started doing it. You can have tremendous reach and cause a lot of trouble online. On Patreon, people can direct message me, and every other day I answer messages. We go back and forth. Some people are doing the work in my book, trying to master Golden Dawn magic. Others are doing enlightenment practices to try to have a spiritual experience. That is fine. Whatever you are doing, there is also biohacking, which is cool because biohacking is pretty much what sorcerers used to do anyway. They called it magic back then, and now we are trying to label it something else. Biohacking includes breath techniques, exposing yourself to cold and heat, making sure you get enough ultraviolet light, making sure you get enough red light, and making sure you do not get blue light at night. These biohacks can be astonishingly effective, especially blocking blue light at night. I cannot emphasize that enough. People suffer horribly from brain fog, and it can simply be because there is not enough melatonin while they are sleeping. They are not exposed to nighttime anymore. They are constantly immersed in LED or fluorescent blue light, which tells the brain, “It is daytime.” You can join the Patreon site. It is easy to find. You can look for Lyam Christopher. It is called Forbidden Realms, because these things really are forbidden. You are getting into things that undermine the ego’s narrative of civilization. That is why magic has such a dark reputation. The karmic patterns that created civilization are based on suffering, stratification of classes, rampant capitalism, and things like that. These are karmic processes demanding that we continue to participate in them. I do not want to get political about it, but freeing yourself from these does not mean going out, radicalizing, changing the world, and becoming president. Forget that. It means being aware of them and becoming more amused as you notice them happening all around you. That can be really important. There are articles on the Patreon site. I put YouTube videos there as well, though those are free on YouTube. There are enlightenment practices. If you do not want to do the Golden Dawn curriculum, you can do visualizations, energy work, and things like that as an attempt to become enlightened. There is only one tier right now. I will probably put guided meditations on there for a second tier. Right now, it is only $5 a month. There is no second tier yet, but there probably will be. **PAA: For that kind of tier, to get direct access to someone with this kind of experience is a no-brainer.** **Lyam:** I do want to go to Boleskine House. If you know what that is, it is where Aleister Crowley supposedly did the Abramelin ceremony. Not that I am a follower of Aleister Crowley necessarily, but I do think he is fascinating. I would like to travel to Scotland and go to Boleskine if I get enough supporters to pay for the trip. Then I could be that internet celebrity walking around Boleskine House with my phone saying, “Here I am in front of the most infamous house in history.” That would be great. **PAA: That would be a lot of fun. It is big news that you have given up your day job.** **Lyam:** Four or five months ago, yes. **PAA: Fair play. It is a big step.** **Lyam:** I was a learning specialist, or I still am a learning specialist: twenty years of experience helping people study, read, and write at the college level. **PAA: Thank you for being on Perseus. I wish you all the luck in the world with the new Patreon. In any way that we can work together or help each other with Perseus, I am happy to do that. I have really enjoyed listening to your answers. Now that I have discovered your YouTube channel, I will be going through it one by one. There is a lot to go through.** **Lyam:** I am not sure how that happened. I started it a couple of years ago, and it just kept growing. **PAA: It is bizarre that I had not seen it before, but thanks to people in the Perseus community, they were mentioning people doing the work of your book. I thought, “Who is this? Tell me more.” Then I saw your work and thought, “Let’s do an interview. This has to happen.” Thank you so much for answering all these questions. I had so many questions, with pieces of paper and documents here, but there is just so much. Possibly again in the future, that would be wonderful.** Thank you, everyone, for joining us. I really enjoyed this episode: learning about these things, making sense of what I had only vaguely understood before, and hearing Lyam explain them. If you enjoyed it, please like this video, subscribe to the Perseus channel, and also head over to all of Lyam’s links below. Visit his YouTube channel, subscribe to his YouTube, and take a look at his Patreon. To have expert advice for a small amount of money is very worthwhile. Thank you all, and I will see you on the next episode. --- --- # Appetizers of Lunar Magic – Guest Post by Gabriel Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/appetizers-of-lunar-magic-guest-post-by-gabriel/ ## A dissertation on the unknown Lunar magic is perhaps the most unknown and least explored among magical workings. Much of this is due to the fact that occultists of the past focused heavily on Goetia or on communication with angels. But the Moon, by its own right, holds considerable dominion over the zone of the Earth. In truth, through the Moon, a myriad of beings from the zones of the stars can manifest in Malkuth. The Moon is like a powerful Major Arcana that exercises authority over the Earth. Some of the things it governs: growth, maintenance, and degradation of the realms. It judges, defines, and creates the destinies of all beings in the Earth’s zone. It serves as a form of segregation for the particles of beings that live in the Earth’s zone, so that they do not disintegrate. It also ensures that the intensity of the wrath from the zone of the Sun does not destroy the lives of human beings and other creatures, among many other things... Within the Moon, there exists a multitude of mythological, fantastical, and unknown beings who live joyfully in that zone. There are many working spirits who carry torches and more torches of fire into the zone of the Moon, so that, through trade, the inhabitants of the transitional zones may maintain warmth in their bodies. Cold in the zone of the Moon is not so important. What is important is to maintain a personal inner core of living sun or fire, thus allowing the lunar aura to arise within the inhabitant of that zone. Depending on which part of the lunar zone one reaches, it is possible to encounter many of its inhabitants. In the Moon, there are human travelers who work by developing dances to assist the flows of life that seek to manifest. The Moon crystallizes the necessary forms for life, as well as assists in shaping the desires that pass through it. The astral plane, as a whole, has as its necessary sovereign the vibrations of the Moon. There is a continuous exchange of flow and reflux between the zone of the Earth and the zone of the Moon, and through this exchange, an almost divine bond is created between the lunar world and the Earth’s zone. The adept who is able to work with the lunar zone may prolong their life indefinitely, become beautiful and gentle, and, moreover, be free from any physical or psychic illness. But these are more advanced stages. For today, we will stop here. “The Twilight still shines upon us” ![?](https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/e/notoemoji/17.0/1f3f9/72.png) Your Frater Hekate – 3:22 Year 6770 of the Era of Nabonassar Aeon of Taurus ![♉](https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/e/notoemoji/17.0/2649/72.png) --- --- # Franz Bardon and the Missing Path with Erwin Pitsch: Inner Alchemy, the Sacred Letters and Liberation Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-and-the-missing-path-with-baron-erwin-pitsch-inner-alchemy-the-sacred-letters-and-liberation/ ## Introduction In our [first interview](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-franz-bardon-to-rainbow-body-with-baron-erwin-pitsch/) with Erwin Pitsch, we explored the extraordinary breadth of his path—from his early practice of Franz Bardon’s system and involvement in Rosicrucian and Martinist traditions to Kerning, yoga, the Jhānas, Theosis and the possibility of the Rainbow Body. That conversation introduced a practitioner whose conclusions were shaped not by loyalty to a single school, but by decades of sustained work across Western esotericism and Eastern contemplative traditions. In this second interview, we move beyond the broad map and ask a more difficult question: **what remains after someone has gone as far as Bardon’s published system can take them?** Pitsch continues to regard *Initiation into Hermetics* as one of the strongest practical training systems available in the West, but argues that Bardon’s work remains incomplete as a path of inner alchemy and liberation. The discussion examines what he calls the missing keys: right view, dependent origination, non-self, the Jhānas, the formless attainments, cessation and the direct transformation of consciousness. We also explore the living work of the sacred letters, the distinction between magical ability and genuine liberation, the strengths and limitations of Rosicrucian systems such as AAORRAC and OARC, and why advanced practice may ultimately require less accumulation and more relinquishment. What follows is not a copy of the first interview. It is a sharper reassessment of the purpose of magical training itself—and of the point at which developing the powers of the mind must give way to understanding the nature of mind **Disclaimer:** We understand that discussions about influential figures such as Franz Bardon can inspire strong feelings, and that people may become defensive when deeply held beliefs are questioned. We present questions, answers, and opinions to encourage open and respectful discussion. Agreement is not required; thoughtful dialogue, even when perspectives differ, is healthy and valuable for everyone. - Introduction- Bardon and the Missing Keys- Wrong View and the Purpose of Practice- Jhāna, the Formless States and Cessation- Unlocking the Letters- AAORRAC and the Smallest Effective Practice- OARC, Secrecy and the Hidden Current- Completing the Path- Books by Erwin --- ## Bardon and the Missing Keys **PAA: In our previous interview, you described Bardon’s training as a system that genuinely works and said that you were nearly finished with it. You have since said that Bardon is the only publicly available Western system that works, but that it remains incomplete in terms of inner alchemy and finishing the path. What has become clearer in your understanding since our first interview?** Franz Bardon created what is, in my opinion, one of the clearest and most systematic introductions to Western esoteric training ever published. His method presents a logical progression that anyone with discipline can follow. Rather than overwhelming the student with endless theory, he provides practical exercises that gradually develop concentration, imagination, elemental balance, willpower, and the conscious direction of vital force, known in various traditions as prana or chi. His concept of achieving equilibrium between the four elements within one's own psyche is particularly important, because this inner balance becomes the foundation upon which many higher faculties can safely develop. It is no coincidence that countless practitioners have reported genuine progress through his system. As I advanced through the later stages of Bardon's work, however, its limitations became increasingly apparent. His explanation of the mental body remains relatively simple and never develops into a comprehensive understanding of consciousness beyond the physical plane. While he introduces the concept of mental wandering, he offers very little explanation of the structure of the various subtle interdimensional realms and its residents, the principles governing interdimensional travel, or the precautions required when entering those states. These are not merely technical omissions but important areas where the practitioner is left largely to discover the path through personal experience. The same applies to the practices of evocation. Although The Practice of Magical Evocation presents an impressive catalogue of intelligences and symbolic structures, the practical instructions are often extremely difficult to implement successfully. Many sincere students spend years attempting these operations without ever obtaining consistent results, largely because the underlying mechanics of consciousness are not fully explained. Bardon's third volume, The Key to the True Quabbalah, is even more challenging. While it contains profound insights, much of it reads more like an outline or script than a complete manual, requiring knowledge that is simply not supplied within the text itself. One of the greatest insights that became clear through my own practice concerns Bardon's work with the Hermetic letters. Contrary to the common assumption that one must intellectually memorise every colour, elemental correspondence, sensation, musical note, and symbolic association, I found that this eventually becomes unnecessary. Once the practitioner has reached sufficient meditative depth and genuine inner perception, the letters themselves begin to reveal their own qualities directly. Their elemental nature, colours, vibrations, and functions arise spontaneously within consciousness as living experiences rather than as concepts remembered from a table. At that stage, the letters are no longer visualisations imposed by the intellect. They become living principles that communicate their own reality to the practitioner. This realisation fundamentally changed my understanding of inner alchemy. Intellectual memorisation is useful during the early stages, but direct perception eventually replaces conceptual knowledge. The letters become teachers in their own right, revealing layers of meaning that no written correspondence can adequately describe. **PAA: When you say that Bardon is the only publicly available Western system that “works,” what precisely do you mean? Does it reliably develop concentration and magical faculties, transform the personality, take the practitioner towards liberation, or accomplish some combination of these?** What I mean is that Franz Bardon created a systematic and remarkably simple training method that genuinely produces results. If the exercises are followed with discipline, the practitioner develops concentration, imagination, elemental equilibrium, conscious control of attention, and eventually experiences that go far beyond ordinary visualization. It is one of the very few Western systems that consistently enables genuine mental wandering, practical work with elemental forces, and direct experience rather than mere theory. At the same time, as I pointed out earlier, its limitations become increasingly apparent once the practitioner progresses beyond Step Six. Bardon lays an excellent foundation, but many of the higher aspects of consciousness, inner alchemy, interdimensional navigation, and the final stages of liberation remain only partially explained or are left largely undeveloped. My conclusion is not based on reading Bardon alone. I spent years living in India and Africa, studying a wide range of wisdom traditions, eventually becoming a Yoga Acharya, and working through virtually every major Rosicrucian system and degree available in the West. After decades of comparative practice, I still regard Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics as the only publicly available Western system that functions as a complete, practical training course from beginning to the intermediate stages. It reliably develops concentration, elemental balance, imaginative faculties, and practical magical abilities through direct experience rather than belief. Most other Western esoteric systems eventually lose themselves in elaborate symbolism, speculative philosophy, or rituals that create the appearance of initiation without producing corresponding inner transformation. Too often they become costume balls rather than schools of genuine practice. Symbols certainly have their place, but symbols alone do not cultivate wisdom, concentration, or direct insight. Practice does. That is why I continue to recommend Bardon as the best starting point for Western practitioners. It is not perfect, and it is certainly not the final word on the path to liberation, but it remains, in my experience, the most effective publicly available Western curriculum for developing the mind through systematic practice. > Rather than approaching letters as abstract symbols, they should be approached as living principles. > > Erwin Pitsch **PAA: You have described Bardon’s three books as three keys out of a larger structure of twenty-two or possibly fifty-six keys, corresponding to the first three Tarot cards. What exactly is a key, why are there two possible totals, and where does this larger structure originate?** I personally would not encourage students to spend years studying Tarot symbolism or the Hebrew alphabet in the hope that these systems will eventually reveal profound truths. They certainly possess historical and symbolic value, but in my experience, they often become intellectual frameworks rather than living practice. I would even go so far as to recommend putting those systems aside for a time and allowing the letters themselves to become the teacher. Language is not merely a human invention. It is one of the fundamental building blocks through which we structure and interact with reality. Every spoken letter requires a precise configuration of the body, the breath, the tongue, the palate and the vocal apparatus. Those physical actions are inseparable from subtle mental and energetic processes. Rather than approaching letters as abstract symbols, they should be approached as living principles. This understanding is not unique to one tradition. Similar approaches appear in Nada Yoga, Daoist internal cultivation, the Hurufi tradition within Islam, and in the work of Johann Baptist Kerning. These systems recognise that the letters are not simply signs on paper. They are vibratory realities that gradually reveal their own qualities through direct practice. When I refer to "keys," I am speaking about progressive stages of access to these living principles of consciousness. Bardon's three published books can be understood as only the first keys of a much larger system. Whether that complete system originally consisted of twenty-two or fifty-six keys remains uncertain. Various esoteric traditions have preserved different fragments, and I do not regard either number as definitively established. What is important is not the arithmetic but the recognition that Bardon's published work appears to represent only the beginning of a much larger body of practical knowledge. The essential point is that no amount of symbolism can replace direct experience. The letters reveal themselves only when the practitioner has developed the necessary inner conditions. These include moral integrity, purity of intention, concentration, right view, right effort and a disciplined mind. In Buddhist terminology, the development of the jhānas provides the collectedness required for this work. From the perspective of Bardon, the same function is served through elemental equilibrium and the Akashic trance. Even the first jhāna provides sufficient mental stability for meaningful work with the letters to begin. As concentration deepens through the higher absorptions, the letters gradually cease to be sounds or concepts and become direct experiences. At that point they begin to reveal qualities that cannot be adequately explained in books. The practitioner is no longer interpreting symbols. The letters themselves become the teacher. **PAA: Bardon’s three books include magical equilibrium, mental and astral development, theurgy, contact with spiritual intelligences, the Akasha principle and Quabbalistic creation. What remains unavailable after someone has genuinely completed Initiation into Hermetics, The Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key to the True Quabbalah?** Bardon's system should never be seen as the destination. It is the beginning of one's own practice. His first two books provide a systematic foundation, while The Key to the True Quabbalah is, in my opinion, more of a script or outline than a complete training manual. It points towards a much larger body of work without fully explaining how to accomplish it. After genuinely completing all three books, the practitioner has acquired a remarkable foundation: mental discipline, elemental equilibrium, conscious work with the Akasha principle, practical evocation, and the initial mastery of the creative power of the letters. Yet this is still only the threshold of a far greater journey. The real work begins when those abilities are applied beyond the exercises themselves. One must learn to navigate the various interdimensional realms safely, understand the principles governing those dimensions, and develop the discernment required to interact with spiritual intelligences without projection or self-deception. Advanced evocation is not simply the ability to call an intelligence into a circle. It is the capacity to consciously enter the realms in which those intelligences exist, communicate with them directly, and eventually function within those worlds with clarity and stability. Likewise, mastering the letters is not the end of the path but only one aspect of it. The letters gradually become living realities that continue to unfold over many years of practice. Their deeper functions cannot be learned intellectually but reveal themselves through direct experience and increasing states of absorption. Bardon himself repeatedly referred to many additional "Tarot cards," implying that his three published books represented only the first portion of a much larger system. Whether those remaining teachings were ever written down is impossible to say. My own conclusion is that they were never intended to be learned from books alone. Beyond the foundation Bardon provides, knowledge increasingly comes through practice itself. As the practitioner deepens the work with the letters, develops higher states of consciousness, and gains experience in interdimensional exploration and authentic contact with spiritual intelligences, the path becomes progressively self-revealing. Books become less important. Direct experience becomes the teacher. That, in my view, is where Bardon's published system ends and the genuine work of the adept truly begins. **PAA: You have said that liberation and inner alchemy are missing from Bardon’s published work. What does inner alchemy mean here in practical rather than symbolic terms? What is transformed within the practitioner, and how can that transformation be recognized?** What I mean by inner alchemy is not the symbolic transformation found in medieval alchemy or later occult traditions. I am referring to a direct transformation of consciousness itself. Bardon's system develops remarkable mental discipline, imagination, elemental equilibrium and magical faculties, but it largely remains within the framework of what I would call the false self, the ordinary sense of being a separate individual who is the doer and owner of experience. Virtually every authentic wisdom tradition eventually points beyond this. In Buddhism it is expressed through anattā, the direct realization that no permanent, independent self can be found. This insight arises together with the direct observation of dependent origination, seeing that every thought, feeling, perception and action arises because of causes and conditions rather than an enduring "I." Similar insights appear in advanced Daoism, Advaita Vedanta and Christian mysticism, although they are described in different language. This dimension is almost entirely absent from Bardon's published work. There is no systematic instruction leading the practitioner beyond identification with the mind itself. As a result, many practitioners develop impressive magical abilities while remaining identified with the very structure that ultimately limits further development. In my experience, this identification is precisely what prevents the deeper capacities of consciousness from unfolding naturally. As long as there remains the conviction that "I am the magician" or "I am the one performing these operations," there is still a subtle contraction that separates the practitioner from direct reality. Inner alchemy is therefore the gradual dissolution of that contraction. It is the purification of perception until awareness no longer revolves around an imagined centre. This transformation is not achieved through ritual, evocation or intellectual understanding, but through direct meditative experience. The practical path begins with ethical purification and collectedness of mind, progresses through the eight jhānas, deepens into the experience of the still mind and the signless state, and culminates in cessation, where even perception and feeling temporarily cease. These experiences fundamentally transform how reality is perceived. When consciousness returns, the illusion of a permanent self has been profoundly weakened or entirely dissolved. This transformation can be recognised quite easily. The practitioner no longer seeks magical powers as personal achievements. Craving, fear and psychological reactivity diminish. Compassion arises naturally rather than being cultivated as a virtue. Action becomes increasingly spontaneous, effortless and free from self-reference. The magical faculties, rather than disappearing, often become clearer because they are no longer distorted by personal ambition or identification. For this reason, I regard liberation not as something separate from magical development but as its necessary completion. Bardon's work builds an extraordinary foundation, yet the path of inner alchemy begins where his published books largely end. **PAA: Is Bardon incomplete because particular exercises and initiations are absent, or because his existing exercises are normally approached from an incorrect understanding of the self, magical development and the final goal?** Franz Bardon himself never claimed to have written a complete system. His training is explicitly based on the first three cards of the Book of Thoth, making it an introduction to a much larger body of esoteric knowledge rather than a finished path. Initiation into Hermetics provides an exceptionally well-structured framework for developing concentration, imagination, elemental equilibrium, willpower and the manipulation of vital force. One of its greatest strengths is that students achieve tangible results relatively early, allowing confidence to grow through direct personal experience rather than blind belief. The incompleteness of Bardon's work, however, is not simply that certain advanced exercises or initiations are missing. It is also that the system does not address the deeper transformation of consciousness that lies at the heart of the great contemplative traditions. There is virtually no discussion of the progressive thresholds of meditative development, such as the yogic samādhis or the Buddhist jhānas, nor of the cultivation of profound stillness that ultimately dissolves identification with the ordinary sense of self. Most importantly, the principle of anattā, or non self, is entirely absent. Bardon's exercises are generally practised from the perspective of an individual practitioner who develops increasingly refined magical abilities. In my view, this eventually becomes the greatest limitation of the system. As long as the practitioner continues to identify with the false self, that identification itself becomes the final obstacle. The deeper capacities of consciousness are not unlocked merely through accumulating techniques or magical skills, but through seeing directly the conditioned nature of the self and allowing that illusion to dissolve. For this reason, I see Bardon's work as an outstanding introduction to systematic mental training, but not as the completion of the path. It builds a remarkably strong foundation, yet the final stages require a shift from developing the mind to understanding the nature of mind itself. That transition, found in traditions such as advanced Yoga and early Buddhism, is what transforms technical proficiency into genuine liberation. > These include the progressive experience of travelling the interdimensional realms, the attainment of the eight jhānas, followed by the experience of the still mind, the signless condition, and ultimately the cessation of feeling and perception. > > Erwin Pitsch **PAA: What is the eventual result of the remaining keys? What becomes possible through the complete work that cannot be achieved through Bardon’s three published books alone?** The answer becomes apparent only after the practitioner has crossed certain thresholds of consciousness that Bardon himself never describes in his published work. These include the progressive experience of travelling the interdimensional realms, the attainment of the eight jhānas, followed by the experience of the still mind, the signless condition, and ultimately the cessation of feeling and perception. These are not simply deeper meditative states. They fundamentally transform the practitioner's relationship to consciousness itself. It is at this point that the remaining keys begin to reveal their purpose. The goal is no longer the refinement of magical technique or the acquisition of further abilities, but the direct realization of the nature of mind. As the illusion of a separate self dissolves, consciousness functions from an entirely different foundation. Magical practice ceases to be an act of personal will and instead becomes an expression of natural law, free from the distortions of egoic identification. This is why I regard Franz Bardon's published work as the introduction to a much larger and more complete system. His books establish an exceptional foundation by cultivating discipline, imagination, elemental equilibrium and practical experience. They prepare the practitioner remarkably well. However, they stop before introducing the stages of consciousness that complete the inner transformation. Without those remaining stages, the practitioner may become highly proficient in magical practice while still operating from the ordinary sense of self. Once those thresholds have been crossed, the purpose of the earlier training becomes fully apparent. The exercises are no longer ends in themselves, but preparatory steps toward liberation, wisdom and a mode of consciousness from which the deeper capacities of the human being naturally unfold. ## Wrong View and the Purpose of Practice **PAA: You have said that Western practitioners often attempt transformation from wrong view, which consequently produces wrong effort and wrong focus. What is the central wrong view underlying most Western magical practice?** Right view is the foundation of the entire path. Without it, every effort, no matter how disciplined or sincere, is ultimately directed by misunderstanding. This is why the Buddha placed right view as the first factor of the Noble Eightfold Path. It determines the direction of every other practice. The central wrong view underlying much of Western magical practice is the assumption that there is a permanent individual self that must become more powerful, more enlightened, or more spiritually advanced. The practitioner identifies with the mind, personality and will, and then seeks to perfect that identity through magical training. The entire system becomes centred on acquiring abilities, gaining knowledge, contacting spiritual beings, or mastering hidden forces. While these practices may produce genuine experiences and measurable results, they often reinforce the very sense of self that the contemplative traditions identify as the root of suffering. In Theravāda, right view begins with understanding the Four Noble Truths, karma, dependent origination, and the universal characteristics of existence: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and non self. Through careful observation in meditation, one discovers that every thought, emotion, sensation and perception arises due to conditions and passes away according to conditions. Nowhere within this continuous process can a permanent, independent self be found. This insight fundamentally changes the purpose of practice. Meditation is no longer undertaken to become a more powerful individual, but to understand reality exactly as it is. Concentration, the jhānas, mindfulness and wisdom are cultivated not as achievements to possess, but as conditions that allow direct insight into dependent origination and the cessation of clinging. When right view matures, effort also changes. Instead of striving to accumulate spiritual attainments, the practitioner gradually abandons craving, attachment and identification. The path becomes one of letting go rather than acquiring. Liberation is recognised not as the perfection of the self, but as freedom from the mistaken belief that such a permanent self ever existed. This is where I experience many Western esoteric systems to become limited. They are often exceptionally effective at developing the faculties of the mind, yet they rarely question the one who claims ownership of those faculties. Without right view, extraordinary experiences can simply become further objects of attachment. With right view, every practice becomes part of a process leading toward wisdom, liberation and the direct realization of reality beyond the illusion of self. **PAA: You also say that practice from within gradually leads to right view, which then produces right effort. How can practice begin correcting wrong view when the practitioner necessarily begins the work from that wrong view?** Every practitioner begins from some degree of wrong view. If complete right view were already present, there would be no path to walk. The purpose of practice is precisely to replace conceptual understanding with direct experience. Franz Bardon himself understood this to a degree. Throughout Initiation into Hermetics, he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the practitioner's inner attitude and the state of mind from which the exercises are undertaken. His training encourages self-observation, honesty and gradual transformation through experience rather than blind belief. In this respect, the system provides an excellent beginning. The difficulty is that the destination is never fully defined. In the great wisdom traditions, right view is clearly explained from the outset. Whether one studies early Buddhism, classical Yoga, Advaita, Daoism or the Christian contemplative tradition, the practitioner is given a clear understanding of the ultimate goal: liberation from ignorance, direct knowledge of reality, and freedom from identification with the separate self. The practices are then understood as methods leading toward that realization. By contrast, most Western esoteric traditions never clearly establish this foundation. Over generations, many Rosicrucian orders, magical schools, occult societies and even branches of the Theosophical movement developed increasingly elaborate cosmologies, rituals and symbolic systems while gradually losing sight of the essential purpose of spiritual practice. Students often came to believe that initiation, hidden knowledge, magical powers or hierarchical advancement constituted spiritual progress. In many cases, they no longer possessed a clear understanding of what liberation actually meant, or why the practices were originally undertaken. Nevertheless, sincere practice still has the potential to correct wrong view. As concentration deepens, mindfulness becomes continuous, and the mind grows quieter, the practitioner begins to observe directly that thoughts, emotions and perceptions arise and pass away according to conditions. This direct observation gradually weakens previously held assumptions and opens the possibility of genuine right view emerging through experience rather than philosophy alone. The difference is that traditions grounded in right view deliberately guide this process toward insight into dependent origination, non-self and liberation. Systems that lack this framework may still produce remarkable experiences, but practitioners often interpret those experiences through the very misconceptions they have never been taught to question. As a result, genuine transformation can become delayed, not because the practices are ineffective, but because the framework through which they are understood remains incomplete. **PAA: Can Bardon’s practices be reoriented through the Buddhist understanding of dependent origination and non-self, or does the attempt to strengthen and master the personality and subtle bodies inevitably reinforce the illusion of a separate self?** In my view, they can be reoriented, but only if the practitioner's understanding changes first. Wisdom, or prajñā, cannot be borrowed from books, teachers or traditions. It develops through one's own practice and direct observation of experience. Every genuine wisdom tradition ultimately points to this same principle: truth must be realized, not merely believed. Bardon's exercises themselves are not the problem. They are practical methods for developing concentration, imagination, vitality and discipline. Like any tool, however, they are interpreted according to the understanding of the person using them. If the practitioner believes that the purpose of the path is to strengthen a separate spiritual identity, accumulate powers or perfect an enduring personality, then the practices are likely to reinforce that identification. If, on the other hand, the practitioner has developed right view through direct insight into dependent origination and non self, the same exercises can be understood very differently. They become methods for refining the mind while simultaneously observing that every experience, every mental image, every sensation and every apparent faculty arises due to conditions and passes away according to conditions. There is no permanent owner behind the process, only an unfolding stream of conditioned phenomena. This transformation cannot be achieved intellectually. It emerges naturally through sustained meditation, deep concentration and careful observation. As wisdom matures, the motivation for practice changes. The practitioner no longer seeks mastery for the sake of the self, but uses every exercise as another opportunity to deepen clarity, reduce attachment and understand the nature of mind. In that sense, Bardon's methods can certainly become part of a path of liberation. Their value depends not only on the exercises themselves, but on the understanding from which they are practised. Technique without wisdom easily becomes another form of attachment. Technique guided by direct insight becomes a vehicle for the gradual unfolding of wisdom itself. **PAA: Can someone develop genuine magical abilities while remaining trapped in wrong view? What distinguishes technical magical attainment from actual liberation?** Yes. A person can develop genuine magical abilities while remaining entirely within wrong view. Throughout history, many traditions have acknowledged that extraordinary abilities can arise through concentration, discipline and prolonged practice. These attainments, however, should never be confused with wisdom or liberation. From the perspective of the contemplative traditions, magical powers are ultimately neutral. They say nothing about the practitioner's freedom from greed, hatred and delusion. A person may possess remarkable abilities while still identifying with the illusion of a separate self, still driven by craving, attachment and subtle forms of becoming. In that sense, magical attainments are not evidence of enlightenment. In fact, they can become one of the greatest obstacles on the path. Extraordinary experiences easily become objects of fascination. The practitioner begins to identify with being a magician, an adept or someone possessing secret knowledge. Recognition, power and spiritual identity become new forms of craving, while attachment to experiences and abilities strengthens the very patterns that the path is intended to dissolve. Actual liberation is something entirely different. It is not measured by what a person can do, but by what has ceased. Craving weakens. Clinging falls away. Delusion is replaced by direct knowledge of the conditioned nature of experience. Through insight into dependent origination and non self, the practitioner no longer builds identity around experiences, attainments or abilities. Freedom arises because there is no longer anything to defend, accumulate or become. This is why the great wisdom traditions consistently place wisdom above powers. Magical abilities may appear or they may not. They are secondary. Liberation is the ending of ignorance. Without that transformation, even the highest technical attainments remain conditioned phenomena, impressive perhaps, but still unfolding within the cycle of craving, clinging and delusion. ## Jhāna, the Formless States and Cessation **PAA: You recommend the four Brahmavihāras as a route through what you call the awareness Jhānas, the four formless states and eventually cessation. How does this progression unfold in actual practice?** The Brahmavihāras are not simply emotional qualities to be cultivated. They become the vehicle through which consciousness gradually releases its habitual identification with the personality and the sensory world. Loving kindness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity progressively refine the mind until it naturally enters the Jhānas. These absorptions are not achievements to be collected but doorways into increasingly profound understanding. Each Jhāna represents another stage of letting go, another layer of craving, grasping and identification falling away. As the practitioner becomes established in the fourth Jhāna, the transition into the formless realms unfolds naturally. The fifth Jhāna, the sphere of infinite space, marks a profound shift in perception. Awareness is no longer experienced as confined to the physical body, and what many traditions describe as interdimensional travel becomes a spontaneous capacity rather than a technique to be forced. One begins to understand directly that consciousness is not limited by ordinary concepts of space. The subsequent formless attainments continue this process of release. Infinite consciousness reveals awareness itself as the object of experience. The sphere of nothingness represents an even deeper letting go, where the structures that ordinarily define experience begin to disappear. From my own perspective, this is the first stage at which one genuinely steps outside what could be called the matrix of conditioned perception. Reality is no longer filtered primarily through the habitual construction of the personal self. The final formless attainment, neither perception nor non perception, refines consciousness to such an extraordinary degree that it approaches the threshold where all conditioned experience temporarily ceases. When cessation occurs, the entire process of perception, feeling and mental activity comes to complete rest. Emerging from this experience, dependent origination is no longer merely a philosophical teaching. It has been directly observed. One sees how experience arises conditionally, moment by moment, and how the illusion of a permanent, independent self is constructed. With that insight comes a relief unlike anything previously experienced. It is not emotional excitement or mystical ecstasy, but the profound peace that arises when the burden of constantly constructing and defending a separate identity momentarily falls away. This is why the Jhānas are so important. Their true purpose is not the cultivation of extraordinary experiences or psychic abilities, although such phenomena may arise naturally. Their purpose is wisdom. They provide the conditions under which direct insight into dependent origination, non self and ultimately liberation can unfold. Without that wisdom, even the highest meditative attainments remain refined states of conditioned existence rather than the completion of the path. > If one's goal is the practical application of sacred letters or advanced yogic and magical work, then the absorption Jhānas become indispensable because they provide the complete one pointedness through which such operations become possible. > > Erwin Pitsch **PAA: You distinguish the four absorption Jhānas from the awareness Jhānas and suggest that the absorption states may be less necessary than the formless states and cessation. What is the experiential difference between these forms of Jhāna, and why do you give greater importance to the latter progression?** The distinction I make is primarily one of purpose rather than quality. The absorption Jhānas and the awareness Jhānas are both profound states of meditation, but they lead towards different applications. The Buddha consistently presents the path to liberation beginning with the formula, "Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, one enters and dwells in the first Jhāna..." This standard description appears throughout the Nikāyas, for example in Samaññaphala Sutta, Mahāsakuludāyi Sutta and many other discourses. The emphasis is on seclusion from the hindrances, not on entering an artificially induced state of complete absorption. From my perspective, the awareness Jhānas naturally mature into the four formless attainments, eventually leading towards cessation and direct insight into dependent origination. This is where the liberating wisdom described throughout the early Buddhist texts unfolds. The practitioner gradually relinquishes every level of attachment until the illusion of a permanent self is seen through directly. Liberation comes through wisdom arising from these experiences, not merely through entering increasingly refined states of concentration. The absorption Jhānas, however, serve a different function. They correspond very closely to the classical yogic samādhis described by Patañjali in the Yoga Sutras. Here the mind becomes completely unified with a single object until subject and object temporarily disappear into complete concentration. This form of absorption is indispensable for many forms of advanced esoteric practice. When working with the sacred letters, for example, the practitioner must eventually become the letter itself. The letter is no longer imagined or visualised but directly experienced as living consciousness. This complete identification allows the practitioner to access the full force of the letter and of combinations of letters within sacred formulae. It is from these states of total absorption that the extraordinary capacities described in many wisdom traditions begin to emerge. In my understanding, abilities such as profound healing, the full activation of sacred formulas, and the highest magical operations require this degree of complete absorption. The same applies to traditions that describe phenomena such as materialisation, teleportation or other extraordinary manifestations of consciousness. Whether one accepts every traditional description literally or symbolically, the underlying principle remains the same. These capacities arise only when consciousness becomes completely unified with its object. For this reason, I see the two developments as complementary rather than contradictory. If one's goal is liberation, the awareness Jhānas, the formless attainments and cessation occupy the central place because they culminate in wisdom and freedom from suffering. If one's goal is the practical application of sacred letters or advanced yogic and magical work, then the absorption Jhānas become indispensable because they provide the complete one pointedness through which such operations become possible. **PAA: You describe cessation as the mind shutting down and rebooting, after which it becomes apparent that there is no self, only impersonal processes. How can cessation be distinguished from unconsciousness, blankness, dissociation or a break in memory, and at what point does the insight into non-self arise?** Cessation is fundamentally different from unconsciousness, sleep, fainting, dissociation or simply losing awareness. In all of those conditions, ignorance remains intact. Consciousness may be absent or impaired, but there is no profound transformation in understanding when one returns. One simply resumes the ordinary perception of being a separate individual. Cessation, as described in the early Buddhist tradition, is something entirely different. It is the temporary cessation of perception and feeling, reached only after the practitioner has mastered the formless attainments. When the process comes to an end, the mind resumes functioning, but it does not resume in exactly the same way. It is as though the entire cognitive process has been reset. The conditioned machinery of perception begins operating again, yet something fundamental has changed in how experience is understood. The insight into non self does not occur during cessation itself, because there is no perception, feeling or mental activity present. It arises immediately upon emerging. At that moment, one directly observes dependent origination in operation. Instead of experiencing an independent observer standing behind experience, one sees only impersonal processes arising and ceasing according to conditions. Thoughts arise because of conditions. Feelings arise because of conditions. Perceptions arise because of conditions. Nowhere within this unfolding can a permanent owner, controller or separate self be found. This is why the experience cannot be confused with a blank gap in memory. A lapse in consciousness tells you nothing. Emerging from cessation fundamentally alters your understanding of reality. The relief that follows is unlike any ordinary pleasant experience. It is the direct recognition that the burden of maintaining the illusion of a separate self has, even if only temporarily, disappeared. From my perspective, even a brief direct experience of Nibbāna changes the practitioner forever. The early Buddhist texts associate the complete and irreversible realization of Nibbāna with arahantship, where all fetters have been abandoned. I would therefore distinguish between a temporary glimpse that profoundly transforms one's understanding and the complete fulfilment of the path in which liberation has become irreversible. Nibbāna should never be understood as annihilation, unconsciousness or non-existence. The Buddha consistently rejected both eternalism and annihilationism. It is neither the continuation of an individual self nor the destruction of an existing self. Likewise, the highest formless attainment, the sphere of neither perception nor non perception, should not be confused with a state of non-existence. It is an extraordinarily refined conditioned state that precedes cessation. Nibbāna itself lies beyond all conditioned experience and therefore cannot be adequately described through the ordinary categories of existence or non-existence, being or non being. It is known only through direct realization, and its hallmark is the complete ending of greed, hatred and delusion rather than the disappearance of consciousness in the ordinary sense. > Life continues, yet it is no longer carried by the same heavy fiction of ownership. That is the beginning of real freedom. > > Erwin Pitsch **PAA: You have said that the Jhānas and cessation completely transformed your personality and character. What concrete and lasting changes occurred that had not resulted from your earlier decades of Hermetic, yogic and meditative practice?** The change was not simply that I became calmer, more disciplined or more spiritually informed. Those qualities can develop through many systems. Hermetic training, yoga, mantra, concentration, ritual, energy work and decades of meditation can certainly refine the personality. They can create willpower, endurance, sensitivity, intuition and even extraordinary experiences. But they do not necessarily uproot the basic illusion that there is a separate self at the centre of experience. This was the decisive difference. Earlier practice had developed capacities. The Jhānas and the movement towards cessation revealed the mechanism of identity itself. One can spend decades strengthening the mind, purifying the emotions, opening subtle perception, working with symbols, letters, energies and higher states, and still remain centred in the hidden assumption, “I am the one who is doing this.” That assumption may become more refined, more spiritual, more luminous, but it is still the false centre. After deep Jhānic practice and the direct taste of cessation, the personality is no longer believed in the same way. Thoughts still arise, emotions still arise, habits still appear, but they are seen as conditioned processes rather than as “me” or “mine.” This is not a philosophical conclusion. It is a perceptual shift. The mind begins to see itself as weather rather than as owner of the sky. Anger, fear, ambition, pride, hurt and desire lose much of their solidity because they are no longer automatically woven into identity. The concrete changes were very simple and very profound. Reactions became shorter. Emotional storms could no longer justify themselves for days or weeks. The need to defend a fixed image of myself weakened. Praise and blame lost much of their intoxicating power. Craving became easier to recognize at the point where it begins, not only after it has already taken possession of the mind. Fear of losing status, recognition or control became less convincing. Compassion became less sentimental and more natural because other beings were no longer perceived as entirely separate islands of existence. This is what Nibbāna truly means in practice. It is not a mystical decoration added to the personality. It is not a trance, not a vision, not a magical power, not a heavenly realm and not a state of unconscious nothingness. Nibbāna is the ending of greed, hatred and delusion. It is the extinguishing of the fire that constantly fabricates suffering through craving and identification. Even a momentary contact with this dimension shows that liberation is not the improvement of the self, but freedom from the false perception that such a self exists independently in the first place. This is why I make a clear distinction between magical attainment and liberation. Magic exists in many traditions. Tibetan Buddhism contains highly developed teachings on siddhis, subtle body practices, dream yoga, deity yoga, mantra, tummo and visionary realms. Theravāda texts also speak of psychic powers, recollection of past lives, the divine eye, the divine ear and other extraordinary capacities that may arise through concentration. Chan and Zen literature contains accounts of unusual powers and signs, even if the mature teachers usually warn against becoming fascinated by them. So, the presence of magic does not prove liberation. A person may develop real abilities and still remain bound by craving, pride, fear, ambition and self-view. In fact, powers can become one of the most dangerous obstacles because they give the false self a spiritual kingdom to rule. The practitioner begins to think, “I can see, I can heal, I can travel, I can command, I can manifest.” The prison has become golden, but it is still a prison. Liberation is an entirely different venture. It is not about gaining more control over reality. It is about seeing that the controller was never what it appeared to be. It is not about becoming a powerful spiritual personality. It is about the collapse of the delusion that personality is the final truth of being. It is not about entering higher realms, but about understanding the conditioned nature of all realms. It is not about commanding the forces of nature, but about ending ignorance, craving and clinging. This is why the Jhānas and cessation transformed me in a way that earlier practice had not. Earlier systems had opened doors. They had given me tools, maps, disciplines and experiences. But the direct insight into non self-cut into the root. It revealed that the deepest suffering is not caused by the world alone, but by the mind’s constant appropriation of experience. “This is me. This is mine. This is what I am.” When that structure is seen directly, even briefly, a great burden falls away. After that, spiritual practice can no longer be understood as self enhancement. One may still practice letters, formulas, meditation, yoga, ritual or healing, but the orientation has changed. These things are no longer performed to glorify the practitioner. They become expressions of wisdom, service and alignment. Without liberation, magic easily becomes another extension of desire. With right view, even extraordinary capacities are understood as secondary, conditioned and ultimately empty. The most lasting change was therefore humility. Not the artificial humility of religious performance, but the humility that comes from seeing that the person one defended for a lifetime was only a process. There is still a human being, still a biography, still duties, relationships and work in the world. But the inner grip loosens. Life continues, yet it is no longer carried by the same heavy fiction of ownership. That is the beginning of real freedom. **PAA: You have said that you practise within a very small group where arahants “walk in and out,” sometimes with fewer than five people and never more than twenty-five. How are such attainments recognized, and why do you believe a small group can preserve the path more effectively than a large temple?** One of the defining characteristics of the early Buddhist tradition is that attainments are not publicly discussed or advertised. The Buddha repeatedly warned against conceit, attachment to spiritual identity and the subtle forms of craving that arise through recognition and status. A practitioner who genuinely understands the Dhamma has very little interest in announcing personal attainments. In healthy Buddhist communities, questions such as "Are you an arahant?" are generally considered inappropriate because they easily become nourishment for conceit rather than supports for liberation. Within the small group in which I practise in Australia, we meet regularly for meditation, Dhamma discussions and retreats. The atmosphere is deliberately simple. There is no hierarchy built around personalities, no emphasis on titles, and no encouragement to compare one practitioner's progress with another's. The focus always returns to the Buddha's training: virtue (sīla), collectedness (samādhi) and wisdom (paññā), culminating in the ending of greed, hatred and delusion. For the advanced practitioner, however, certain things gradually become apparent without ever needing to be spoken. The development of deep Jhāna, the formless attainments and the direct knowledge arising from insight practice refine perception in ways that are difficult to describe. One becomes increasingly sensitive to the quality of another practitioner's mind. This is not a matter of judging personalities or analysing behaviour. Rather, it concerns the absence or presence of grasping, conceit and identification. In the early discourses, the Buddha frequently points beyond external appearance to the underlying abandonment of the fetters (saṃyojana) and the destruction of the taints (āsava). Ultimately, liberation is measured by what has ceased, not by what has been acquired. For this reason, attainments are rarely discussed openly. They do not need to be. When practitioners have cultivated sufficient wisdom and concentration, much can simply be known from within. Even then, such understanding is treated with great caution and humility. It is never used as a basis for authority or superiority. The Dhamma repeatedly reminds us that conceit can survive even after coarse forms of attachment have weakened. The Buddha himself advised that the Dhamma and the Vinaya should remain the teacher after his passing. In Mahāparinibbāna Sutta he tells the monks that the teaching and discipline are to be their guide. This shifts attention away from charismatic individuals and back to direct practice and verification. The early texts also describe the qualities of a kalyāṇa mitta, a noble or admirable friend. In Upaddha Sutta, when the Venerable Ānanda suggests that admirable friendship is half of the holy life, the Buddha replies that it is not half but the whole of the holy life. The importance lies not in numbers but in practising alongside people whose lives genuinely embody the Noble Eightfold Path. A small group naturally supports this kind of environment. Everyone knows one another's strengths and weaknesses. There is little opportunity to hide behind reputation or institutional status. Questions can be explored honestly, difficulties addressed directly and guidance given according to the needs of each practitioner. The emphasis remains on careful observation of dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda), the cultivation of mindfulness (sati), collectedness (samādhi) and liberating wisdom (paññā). Large monasteries and temples have preserved the Dhamma for centuries and have made an immeasurable contribution to the survival of the Buddha's teaching. They fulfil an indispensable role by maintaining the scriptures, the Vinaya and the monastic tradition. Yet any large institution also faces practical challenges. Administration, public teaching, financial responsibilities and organisational structures inevitably require attention. A small practice community can often devote a greater proportion of its energy to direct meditation, continuous dialogue and the day to day application of the Dhamma. Ultimately, liberation does not depend upon the size of the community but upon the sincerity of practice. Whether one practises alone, in a group of five or in a monastery of several hundred monks, the path remains the same. One abandons the five hindrances (nīvaraṇa), develops the seven factors of awakening (bojjhaṅga), cultivates the Noble Eightfold Path, and directly realizes the Four Noble Truths. Everything else is secondary. The true measure of a community is not its numbers, its buildings or its reputation, but whether it continues to produce practitioners in whom greed, hatred and delusion steadily come to an end. **PAA: You have said that there is ultimately no need to explain the Dhamma and that even the teaching itself must eventually be relinquished. At what stage does the teaching change from a necessary guide into another object of attachment, and how can someone avoid abandoning it prematurely?** The Dhamma is indispensable at the beginning of the path. Without right view (sammā diṭṭhi), one does not even know in which direction to practise. The Buddha repeatedly emphasized that right view is the forerunner of the Noble Eightfold Path. Before direct realization, the teachings function as a map. They point the practitioner towards ethical conduct (sīla), collectedness (samādhi) and wisdom (paññā). Without that guidance, the mind simply follows its habitual tendencies and mistakes conditioned experience for liberation. However, the map is not the destination. The purpose of the Dhamma is not to produce scholars or philosophers but to lead directly to the ending of suffering. Throughout the Nikāyas, the Buddha encourages personal verification. "Come and see" (ehipassiko) is one of the defining qualities of the Dhamma. It is to be realized here and now (sanditthiko), experienced directly by the wise for themselves (paccattaṃ veditabbo viññūhi). The teachings are therefore provisional in the highest sense. They point towards reality but are never identical with reality itself. This becomes completely clear at the stage of cessation. When perception and feeling cease and the practitioner subsequently emerges, dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda) is no longer an intellectual doctrine. It is directly seen. The Four Noble Truths are no longer concepts to be contemplated. They become immediate experience. At that point, one does not merely understand the Dhamma. One sees the Dhamma itself operating as the very fabric of conditioned existence. It is here that the relationship to the teaching fundamentally changes. Before realization, one studies the Dhamma. After direct realization, the Dhamma becomes visible. One sees that every thought, every feeling, every perception and every act of consciousness arises according to conditions and passes away according to conditions. The teaching is no longer something external that must be remembered. It has become the direct lens through which reality is perceived. This is the point at which even attachment to the teaching must eventually be relinquished. The Buddha expressed this beautifully in the famous simile of the raft in Alagaddūpama Sutta. A person uses a raft to cross a dangerous river. Having reached the far shore, he does not continue carrying the raft on his head out of gratitude. He leaves it behind because it has fulfilled its purpose. The Buddha concludes that even the Dhamma should be understood in this way, let alone things contrary to the Dhamma. This does not mean abandoning the teachings prematurely. That is a mistake made by many practitioners. Some hear that "there is nothing to attain" or "all teachings must be let go" and use these ideas to justify avoiding discipline, meditation or investigation. This simply becomes another manifestation of delusion. One cannot discard a raft before crossing the river. The Dhamma ceases to function as an external guide only when it has become direct knowledge. Until then, study, reflection, meditation and continual application remain essential. The practitioner must cultivate mindfulness (sati), clear comprehension (sampajañña), the seven factors of awakening (bojjhaṅga), the Jhānas and insight into impermanence (anicca), unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) and non self (anattā). Only when these truths are directly realized does the need to conceptually hold onto the teaching naturally fall away. Paradoxically, those who have truly realized the Dhamma usually become its greatest custodians. They no longer cling to words, doctrines or philosophical positions, yet they continue to teach because compassion (karuṇā) naturally expresses itself. The teaching is no longer defended as an ideology. It is simply offered as a skilful means (upāya) for those who have not yet crossed the river. Ultimately, the Dhamma is neither a belief system nor a collection of ideas. It is the direct realization of the way things are. When that realization becomes complete, there is nothing left to defend, nothing left to believe and nothing left to abandon. The raft has served its purpose, and the practitioner stands on the further shore. ## Unlocking the Letters **PAA: You recently described a friend as beginning to “unlock the letters,” after which manifestation, intuition, astral travel and other abilities began arising naturally. What does it actually mean to unlock a letter, and what changes demonstrate that this has occurred?** To understand what it means to unlock a letter, one must first move beyond the ordinary idea of language. In the Western Hermetic tradition, as well as in several ancient mystical systems, the sacred letters are not merely symbols or sounds. They are understood as fundamental principles of creation itself, the building blocks through which consciousness expresses and organizes reality. Every letter represents a universal principle, a particular quality of consciousness and a specific mode through which experience can arise. Initially, a practitioner studies the letters intellectually. One learns their qualities, meditations and applications. This is useful, but it remains conceptual. At a deeper stage of practice, particularly when concentration becomes established through the Jhānas, the relationship changes completely. The practitioner no longer visualizes or imagines the letter. Instead, consciousness begins to resonate directly with the principle that the letter represents. The distinction between observer and symbol gradually disappears. This is what I mean by unlocking a letter. It is not that the letter suddenly acquires power. Rather, the practitioner removes the inner obstructions that previously prevented direct participation in that aspect of consciousness. The potential was always present, but it remained dormant. A useful analogy is the awakening of kuṇḍalinī. Traditional yoga describes dormant channels (nāḍīs) gradually becoming purified and opened. As this process unfolds, energy begins flowing naturally where previously there had been resistance. Likewise, some esoteric traditions describe the unfolding of the petals of the chakras, each opening revealing capacities that were already inherent but inaccessible. Nothing new is added. Something that was latent becomes functional. The same principle applies to the sacred letters. Each unlocked letter opens another dimension of consciousness. The practitioner does not force new abilities into existence. Instead, previously hidden capacities emerge spontaneously because the corresponding principle has become directly accessible. One of the first changes is often a profound increase in intuitive knowing. Decisions arise with remarkable clarity, not through analytical reasoning but through immediate recognition. Synchronistic events become more frequent, and manifestation appears less like an act of personal will and more like alignment with lawful processes already operating within reality. As practice deepens, other capacities may arise naturally. Perception during meditation becomes increasingly refined. Dreams become exceptionally clear and meaningful. The transition into lucid dreaming or conscious experiences beyond the ordinary sensory framework may occur without deliberate effort. What many traditions describe as astral projection or subtle body exploration becomes progressively more accessible, not because it is being forced through technique, but because consciousness has become sufficiently liberated from exclusive identification with the physical body. The same applies to healing, creativity and the application of sacred formulas. The practitioner discovers that the letters no longer feel like external tools but living realities that operate from within consciousness itself. Their effects become effortless because they are no longer being imposed by the personality. They unfold according to natural law. This effortless quality is perhaps the clearest indication that a letter has genuinely been unlocked. Before that point, progress depends largely upon discipline, repetition and sustained concentration. Afterwards, the principle begins expressing itself spontaneously in everyday life. Just as a musician eventually stops thinking about individual notes and simply hears the music, the practitioner no longer consciously "uses" the letter. The letter has become an integrated aspect of consciousness. This is also why inner purification remains indispensable. Attempting to unlock the letters while the mind is still dominated by craving, aversion and self-identification easily turns the practice into another expression of ego. The letters are not mechanical forces that can simply be manipulated. They become fully available only as consciousness itself becomes purified. Ultimately, unlocking a letter is less about acquiring extraordinary abilities than about recovering dimensions of consciousness that have always existed. The abilities are secondary. They emerge as natural consequences of an increasingly unobstructed mind. In the same way that the Buddha describes wisdom, compassion and equanimity as natural expressions of liberation, many esoteric traditions understand the awakening of the letters as the gradual unveiling of capacities that have always belonged to consciousness itself, waiting only for the conditions that allow them to manifest. **PAA: Why should magical abilities begin appearing by themselves through the inner work of the letters? What connects letter practice and inner transformation with the spontaneous emergence of these faculties?** The fundamental assumption behind this approach is that extraordinary abilities are not artificial acquisitions but natural capacities of consciousness itself. This idea is not unique to one tradition. Variations of it appear throughout the ancient wisdom traditions. The Upanishads describe the realization of the Self as revealing capacities that were previously concealed by ignorance. The Yoga Sutras explain that the siddhis arise through deep concentration and transformation of consciousness. The early Buddhist discourses describe the abhiññās, the higher knowledges, as natural developments following profound cultivation of samādhi, while consistently warning that they are secondary to liberation. Across these traditions, the underlying principle remains remarkably consistent. The powers are not regarded as something imported into consciousness. They are understood as capacities that become accessible when the obscurations covering the mind are removed. From this perspective, the inner work with the letters is not primarily a method of manufacturing abilities. It is a process of transforming consciousness itself. The sacred letters represent fundamental principles of reality. As the practitioner gradually embodies these principles rather than merely contemplating them intellectually, the structures of the conditioned personality begin to loosen. The false assumption of an isolated, independent self gradually weakens, and consciousness functions with increasing freedom. This is where I would respectfully differ from many interpretations of the Hermetic tradition, particularly the way the work of Franz Bardon is often understood in practice. Many students conclude that magical development is essentially the accumulation of techniques. They spend thousands of hours attempting to perfect visualizations, elemental exercises, rituals and countless technical practices, believing that enough repetition will eventually manufacture magical abilities. The practitioner gradually builds what could be called a highly refined magical personality, yet the underlying structure of self-identification frequently remains intact. In my experience, this is one of the great misunderstandings of the path. Training certainly has its place. Discipline, concentration and systematic practice are indispensable. However, they do not create the deepest capacities of consciousness. Rather, they prepare the conditions in which those capacities can reveal themselves. The decisive factor is understanding. As right view (sammā diṭṭhi) matures, dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda) is increasingly understood, and the illusion of a permanent self (anattā) is directly experienced, the barriers that previously constrained consciousness begin to dissolve. What appeared extraordinary from the perspective of ordinary perception gradually becomes natural because the mind is no longer functioning through the same limitations. This is precisely why the higher knowledges described in the Buddhist texts are called abhiññā, higher knowledge, rather than supernatural powers. They arise from a different mode of knowing. Likewise, the siddhis of the yogic tradition are described as by-products of realization rather than the goal of practice. The traditions repeatedly caution practitioners not to become attached to these phenomena, because fascination with powers easily strengthens the very self-view that liberation seeks to dissolve. The work with the letters follows the same principle. As each letter is genuinely unlocked, another aspect of consciousness becomes available. The practitioner discovers that intuition becomes clearer without trying to be intuitive. Healing becomes more effective without striving to heal. Manifestation becomes more effortless because it no longer originates from personal craving but from increasing harmony with universal principles. Experiences beyond ordinary sensory perception arise without being forced because consciousness has become less identified with the physical body alone. The paradox is that these faculties become more accessible precisely when they cease to be the primary motivation for practice. As long as one practises in order to gain power, recognition or extraordinary experiences, craving continues to reinforce the illusion of a separate self. As that illusion weakens through wisdom, ethical conduct, deep meditation and the inner realization of the letters, the natural capacities of consciousness emerge of their own accord. For this reason, I no longer see magical development as the construction of something new. I see it as the gradual unveiling of what consciousness has always been capable of. Practice removes the obscurations. Wisdom dismantles the false centre. The letters reveal the architecture of reality. What then emerges is not the achievement of a powerful individual, but the natural functioning of consciousness when it is no longer constrained by ignorance, craving and identification. **PAA: How can a practitioner test such abilities and distinguish genuine development from expectation, imagination, coincidence, selective memory or spiritual inflation?** This question assumes that genuine abilities require continual verification through external tests. While there is certainly value in remaining honest and avoiding self-deception, I have found that truly authentic developments rarely create the need for constant testing. When a faculty genuinely awakens, there is a clarity that accompanies it. It is not based on excitement, belief or hope. There is simply a knowing present within the mind itself. The problem is that expectation, imagination, selective memory and spiritual inflation all arise from the same source, namely the false sense of self. The personality wants to become special. It wants confirmation that it is progressing, that it possesses something others do not, or that it has become spiritually advanced. This desire subtly colours perception until almost any unusual coincidence or vivid inner experience is interpreted as evidence of attainment. This is precisely why the Buddha placed such emphasis on right view (sammā diṭṭhi) as the foundation of the Noble Eightfold Path. Without right view, even sincere practitioners can spend decades strengthening a more sophisticated version of the very illusion they intended to transcend. Wrong effort can reinforce craving. Wrong concentration can reinforce identification. Wrong interpretation can transform ordinary psychological experiences into imagined spiritual achievements. The gradual dismantling of the false self is therefore the real safeguard against delusion. As understanding of dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda) deepens and insight into non self (anattā) matures, the psychological need to prove one's attainments steadily diminishes. The practitioner becomes less interested in possessing powers and more interested in understanding reality as it actually is. In my experience, this is also why authentic abilities appear with remarkable simplicity. They do not announce themselves with emotional excitement or dramatic certainty. They simply function. There is no internal need to persuade oneself or others that something extraordinary has happened. The experience carries its own unmistakable clarity. By contrast, imagination usually requires continual reinforcement. Spiritual inflation seeks recognition. Expectation constantly searches for confirmation. Coincidences are assembled into elaborate narratives because the personality wishes to feel chosen or exceptional. Genuine development does not depend upon such psychological mechanisms. In fact, it tends to dissolve them. This is one of the great dangers within many esoteric traditions. Practitioners may spend years attempting to cultivate extraordinary abilities while the hidden motivation remains personal achievement. Eventually the old personality is replaced by what appears to be a spiritual personality. The language changes, the symbols change and the practices become more sophisticated, but the underlying identification remains intact. The ego has simply put on sacred robes. This is why I believe right view, right effort (sammā vāyāma), right mindfulness (sammā sati) and right collectedness (sammā samādhi) cannot be separated. They protect one another. Concentration without wisdom can become fascination. Wisdom without ethical conduct remains intellectual. Practice without insight easily becomes self-improvement rather than liberation. Ironically, the less concerned a practitioner becomes with proving abilities, the more reliable any genuine capacities become. The attention shifts away from phenomena and towards the ending of greed, hatred and delusion. If unusual abilities arise, they are understood as conditioned phenomena rather than as evidence of personal greatness. If they do not arise, nothing essential has been lost, because the purpose of the path has never been to become extraordinary. Ultimately, the greatest test is not whether one can demonstrate unusual faculties. It is whether craving has diminished, whether reactivity has weakened, whether compassion has deepened and whether the illusion of a separate self continues to dissolve. The Buddha consistently measured progress by the abandonment of the fetters, not by the acquisition of powers. In that sense, liberation itself remains the only attainment that truly matters. Everything else, however remarkable it may appear, is secondary. **PAA: You have mentioned that a small group may form around Kerning practice. What preparation would be expected of its members, and how would the letter work be integrated with meditation, ethical development, right view and the wider path of liberation?** Since our last interview, my perspective has changed considerably. At that time, I believed there might be value in forming a small practice group centred around the Kerning letters. Since then, I have consciously departed from a particular Pansophical Kerning group with which I had previously been associated. That decision was not only based on personal disagreement but on what I came to recognize as a fundamental misunderstanding of the path itself within that group.. The greatest obstacle was not the letter practice. The letters themselves remain one of the most profound systems of inner transformation I have encountered. The obstacle was the framework through which they were being understood. It became increasingly apparent that some of the leading practitioners had become identified with spiritual status, esoteric knowledge and personal authority. Instead of dismantling the false self, the practice had gradually constructed a more refined spiritual identity around it. From a Buddhist perspective, this is entirely understandable. Without right view (sammā diṭṭhi), even genuine practices can become incorporated into craving (taṇhā), clinging (upādāna) and conceit (māna). The practitioner may accumulate decades of experience, profound technical knowledge and impressive abilities, while the underlying process of identification remains fundamentally unchanged. The old ego simply becomes a spiritual ego. This realization also changed my understanding of groups themselves. Every long-standing spiritual group gradually develops what many Western esoteric traditions describe as an egregore, a collective psychological and energetic structure. Such structures are not necessarily harmful. They can provide stability, encouragement and continuity. Yet they also carry considerable danger. Once collective identity becomes stronger than direct investigation, belief begins replacing observation. Loyalty begins replacing inquiry. Consensus begins replacing direct realization. The Buddha repeatedly encouraged practitioners to verify the Dhamma through direct experience rather than through tradition, reputation or the authority of teachers. The path is described as ehipassiko, "come and see," inviting direct verification rather than belief. Even the highest teachings ultimately have to be realized individually. No group, however sincere, can meditate on another person's behalf or experience liberation for them. For this reason, I no longer see any need to establish another Kerning group or to become part of one. Having completed my own work with the letters, I see their purpose differently than I did before. They are not the centre of the path. They are one expression of a much larger transformation of consciousness. If someone wishes to practise the letters, I would still recommend exactly the same foundations I now consider indispensable. Ethical conduct (sīla) must come first. Without moral discipline, concentration becomes unstable and wisdom becomes distorted. This should be followed by guarding the sense doors (indriya saṃvara), continuous mindfulness (sati), cultivation of the Brahmavihāras, development of the Jhānas, the formless attainments, and insight into dependent origination (paṭicca samuppāda) and non self (anattā). Only within this framework does the work with the letters become truly transformative. The letters themselves then cease to be techniques for acquiring power. They become direct expressions of wisdom. Each letter reveals another aspect of consciousness precisely because the mind has become sufficiently purified to recognize it. There is no need for elaborate organizational structures, initiatory hierarchies or exclusive memberships. The practice unfolds through one's own direct realization. Ironically, I have come to appreciate the Buddha's approach far more deeply than I did years ago. He founded the Sangha as a support for practice, not as an institution built around personalities or esoteric status. The true refuge is not found in belonging to a particular school or lineage. It is found in the continual cultivation of wisdom, ethical conduct and meditation. Ultimately, every practitioner must walk alone. Teachers can point the way. Spiritual friends (kalyāṇa mittā) can encourage and correct us. Communities can provide support and inspiration. But the dismantling of ignorance takes place only within one's own mind. No collective belief, no egregore and no organization can accomplish that work. For that reason, my focus today is no longer on creating groups or preserving organizations. It is on encouraging sincere practitioners to establish right view, cultivate the path laid down by the Buddha, and, where appropriate, integrate the work of the sacred letters into that wider framework of liberation. When the foundation is correct, everything else develops naturally. When the foundation is missing, even the most sophisticated esoteric system eventually becomes another form of attachment. **PAA: In our first interview, you said that you were still waiting to study more material on Alois Mailänder. Has your understanding of his work developed since then, and how do you now understand the relationship between Mailänder, Kerning and the inner alchemy missing from Bardon?** Since our first interview, my understanding of Alois Mailänder has become less concerned with collecting historical material and more focused on understanding the underlying principle of his approach. Rather than attempting to reconstruct his entire system, I have found it more valuable to examine the practical method that lies behind it and compare it with the direct experience gained through meditation and inner practice. Today I approach this work through the combined framework of Nada Yoga, the Royal Art of Johann Baptist Kerning and Theravāda Buddhism, while drawing supporting principles from Daoism, Rosicrucian teachings, Western alchemy and the Christian Orthodox tradition of theosis. These traditions appear very different on the surface, yet they all point toward the same fundamental process of inner transformation. Each contributes an important piece to understanding consciousness, purification and liberation. Mailänder's system strikes me as remarkably simple, and that simplicity is one of its greatest strengths. Rather than constructing elaborate symbolic structures or complex magical hierarchies, it directs attention toward a practical inner process. In this respect, it shares something with Kerning's work, where genuine understanding gradually unfolds through practice rather than intellectual speculation. For me, the relationship between Mailänder, Kerning and the inner alchemy absent from Franz Bardon's published work lies precisely here. Bardon provides an excellent introduction to systematic mental training, elemental equilibrium and the development of magical faculties. What remains largely absent is the direct path toward liberation from the illusion of the separate self. Kerning, understood through the lens of Buddhist practice and inner alchemy, gradually opens that missing dimension. The letters become instruments not merely for acquiring abilities, but for transforming consciousness itself. Although I continue to study the available material on Mailänder, I also believe that many of those currently promoting his teachings have introduced significant methodological errors. In my view, these approaches often overlook the indispensable foundations of ethical development, right view, meditative purification and direct insight. Without these prerequisites, even a sound method can easily become another intellectual system or another form of spiritual identification. The value of Mailänder's work, like Kerning's, ultimately depends not on external interpretation but on the practitioner's own transformation through disciplined practice. ## AAORRAC and the Smallest Effective Practice **PAA: You have warned that the exercises in your AAORRAC book should be undertaken individually alongside the principal spiritual training rather than treated as a complete system in themselves. What was the main spiritual work that originally accompanied these exercises, and what function did the individual exercises serve within it?** The exercises presented in my AAORRAC book developed through time and originated largely from the teachings of various Rosicrucian schools and esoteric orders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They were developed by sincere practitioners who sought to preserve and transmit genuine spiritual knowledge. Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that many of these systems lacked a complete understanding of the deeper principles underlying inner transformation. In particular, they were generally unfamiliar with the sacred science of Nada Yoga, the advanced contemplative traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and Bön, the internal methods of Daoism, and the direct path described in the Theravāda suttas. As a result, the individual exercises often became isolated techniques, detached from the wider framework of ethical purification, right view, meditative development and liberation that gives them their true purpose. Practices such as concentration, visualization, projection, aura perception or symbolic ritual can certainly develop particular faculties of the mind, but when they are pursued independently, they do not necessarily lead to freedom from craving, clinging and the illusion of a separate self. This is why I have repeatedly emphasised that the AAORRAC exercises should never be regarded as a complete spiritual system. They are supplementary practices that can support certain aspects of development, but they must be integrated into a much deeper path of transformation. Without that foundation, they easily become ends in themselves, encouraging fascination with extraordinary experiences rather than genuine wisdom. Today, I would not recommend that someone spend decades studying the often fragmented and sometimes distorted teachings found in later Theosophical, Anthroposophical or Rosicrucian literature. We live in a time where the original sources are widely available. The writings of Paracelsus, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Theravāda suttas and the Tibetan sutras have all been translated into accessible languages. Likewise, authentic teachers from these traditions travel throughout the world and make direct instruction available to sincere students. Teachers such as Jigme Losel Wangpo in the Dzogchen tradition or Shi De Yang of the Shaolin lineage provide opportunities to study living traditions rather than relying solely on secondary interpretations. For this reason, I regard the AAORRAC exercises primarily as historical and practical supplements rather than the core of one's spiritual life. The central work should always be the transformation of consciousness itself through right view, ethical conduct, meditation and direct insight. When that foundation is firmly established, the individual exercises naturally find their proper place and function without becoming obstacles to the ultimate goal of liberation. **PAA: You have explained that these exercises do not necessarily need to be developed in their fullest or most elaborate form. A practitioner may work with only the smallest effective aspect of an exercise, obtain an initial result and still activate further progress. What is the principle behind this, and how can someone identify the essential core of an exercise without reducing it to something superficial?** The principle behind this is that genuine spiritual abilities are not produced by the exercises themselves. They arise naturally as understanding deepens and the mind is gradually transformed through direct spiritual practice. The exercises can help clarify certain principles, strengthen particular qualities of the mind or provide experiences that confirm one's understanding, but they should never be mistaken for the path itself. Many practitioners assume that increasingly elaborate techniques will produce increasingly profound results. My own experience has been almost the opposite. Once the essential principle of an exercise has been understood and a first genuine result has been obtained, endlessly refining the technique often adds very little. At that point, further progress comes primarily through continuing one's meditation, cultivating wisdom and deepening direct insight rather than repeating or embellishing the exercise. For this reason, I often encourage practitioners to discover the smallest effective aspect of an exercise. If that essential element is practised correctly and integrated into one's daily spiritual development, it can be sufficient to unlock the understanding that the exercise was originally intended to convey. The purpose is not technical perfection but transformation of consciousness. Identifying this essential core requires discernment. It cannot be reduced to simply doing less or taking shortcuts. Rather, it means recognising which aspect of the exercise genuinely changes the mind and which parts are merely supporting structures that were added to assist the practitioner. This discernment develops through experience, not through intellectual analysis alone. Ultimately, the exercises in the AAORRAC tradition are best understood as signposts rather than destinations. They can deepen understanding, reveal certain principles and encourage further development, but the real work always remains the cultivation of right view, ethical conduct, meditation and direct insight. As these mature, many of the abilities sought through esoteric exercises emerge naturally as secondary consequences of inner transformation, rather than as goals pursued for their own sake. **PAA: You suggest that someone might practise until experiencing healing, an out-of-body state or another initial result and then leave the exercise alone. Why is this limited activation sufficient? How does the faculty continue developing through the main spiritual work and eventually emerge by itself when the practitioner is ready, without repeatedly training the original exercise?** The reason this limited activation is often sufficient is that these abilities are not the path itself. They are natural consequences of walking the path. Once an exercise has served its purpose by opening a particular faculty or demonstrating a principle through direct experience, repeatedly practising the same technique is often unnecessary. The practitioner's time is better devoted to the principal work of ethical development, meditation, right view and the gradual transformation of consciousness. This becomes particularly clear when considering experiences such as interdimensional travel. Many esoteric traditions teach elaborate methods of psychic projection, yet my own experience is that this capacity develops far more naturally through profound meditative experience, especially the fifth and sixth jhānas, than through repeatedly attempting projection exercises. As perception becomes increasingly refined, consciousness is no longer confined to ordinary sensory experience. Entirely new modes of perception begin to unfold spontaneously. At that stage, the practitioner no longer attempts to force extraordinary experiences. Instead, perception itself changes. Access to other realms, dimensions and forms of nonphysical existence becomes a natural extension of consciousness rather than the product of a specific technique. What initially required effort gradually becomes effortless because the underlying conditions that make such experiences possible have been established through spiritual development. This is why I encourage practitioners not to become attached to extraordinary abilities. Once an exercise has produced its initial result, it has already fulfilled much of its purpose. Continuing to deepen meditation and wisdom allows the corresponding faculty to mature organically. The exercise merely opened the door. Walking the path enables the practitioner to move through it. I may eventually write a separate book devoted entirely to the art of interdimensional travel, as this subject deserves far more detailed treatment than can be given within the AAORRAC exercises. At present, however, I believe the material already presented is sufficient. The essential point is that these experiences cannot ultimately be manufactured through technique alone. As the practitioner's perception gradually opens through genuine spiritual practice, these dimensions reveal themselves naturally, and exploration becomes an effortless consequence of inner transformation rather than an achievement to be pursued for its own sake. **PAA: You connect the proper use of these exercises with inner transformation, seeing dependent origination, passing through the Jhānas and eventually experiencing liberation. Were these contemplative elements explicitly part of the historical AAORRAC training, or is this a synthesis that became clear through your later Buddhist, yogic and Kerning practice?** No, these contemplative elements were not an explicit part of the historical AAORRAC training as I received and studied it. The Rosicrucian systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contain many valuable practical exercises for concentration, visualization, symbolism and the cultivation of certain mental faculties, but they generally do not include a systematic path through the jhānas, nor do they present the Buddhist understanding of dependent origination and non self as the central framework of spiritual development. This realization fundamentally changed my own approach. After years of practice, and particularly after experiencing the full range of yogic absorptions, the various samādhis described within the yogic traditions, and the awareness jhānas taught within Theravāda Buddhism, it became increasingly clear to me that the Western esoteric path, while valuable, remains incomplete. It develops many capacities of the mind but does not fully explain the transformation of consciousness that leads beyond identification with the personality itself. The synthesis presented in my later work therefore arose from direct practice rather than from an attempt to combine traditions intellectually. As my understanding deepened through Theravāda Buddhism, Nada Yoga, Kerning, and other contemplative traditions, I began to recognize where the older Rosicrucian methods fit within a much larger framework. Many of the exercises retained their value, but their purpose became clearer when viewed as supporting practices rather than as the central path. For this reason, I now place meditation, right view, ethical development, the cultivation of the jhānas, and the direct understanding of dependent origination at the heart of spiritual training. Within that context, the traditional AAORRAC exercises become useful supplementary methods that may assist development, but they no longer occupy the central position they once held in Western esoteric schools. The inner transformation that culminates in liberation is, in my view, the missing element that those systems only partially understood. ## OARC, Secrecy and the Hidden Current **PAA: In your OARC article, you describe the order as a transitional ancestor of the later AAORRAC current. Is this connection based on direct organisational succession, shared initiates, identifiable practices, surviving documents or a broader continuity within continental Rosicrucianism? What do you believe was actually transmitted?** I have gradually come to regard questions of organisational succession as being of far less importance than they first appear. Within many esoteric orders, succession is often treated as a matter of historical legitimacy or institutional authority. In practice, however, these questions frequently become political rather than spiritual. Holding the office of Grand Master or belonging to a recognised lineage does not necessarily imply a profound understanding of the teachings themselves or the direct realization of what those teachings are intended to produce. My own experience has been that the practical exercises found within these traditions were not created by isolated organisations working independently. They were developed, refined and transmitted by individuals who themselves had studied across a remarkable range of traditions. Many practitioners belonged simultaneously or successively to several Rosicrucian, Hermetic and initiatic schools while also studying Eastern systems directly. Within a single lodge it was not unusual to encounter members who had received instruction from organisations such as the Society of the Inner Light, Builders of the Adytum, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Martinist organisations, AMORC, Saraswati Yoga lineages, Tibetan Buddhist teachers, Theravāda monks and Daoist masters. The knowledge each person carried reflected decades of study across multiple traditions rather than exclusive loyalty to one organisation. For this reason, I believe the real continuity is not primarily organisational but experiential. What was transmitted was less the formal succession of an order than an accumulated body of practical methods, contemplative insights and symbolic frameworks that individual practitioners carried with them throughout their lives. These were continually refined as new understanding emerged, and the resulting body of knowledge naturally found expression within whichever order or fraternity those individuals happened to belong to at the time. When I refer to OARC as a transitional ancestor of the later AAORRAC current, I therefore mean a broader continuity of ideas, practices and practitioners rather than claiming a simple institutional succession supported by an uninterrupted chain of documents or offices. The transmission occurred principally through experienced individuals who integrated material from many different schools and passed on what they had found to be genuinely effective. Ultimately, I believe that no single order possesses a monopoly on spiritual knowledge. Every authentic tradition has preserved part of the picture. The task of the modern practitioner is not to become bound to one organisation or its historical claims, but to understand the underlying principles that unite these traditions and verify them through direct experience. **PAA: You describe secrecy as spiritual containment, but you have also pointed to the political persecution faced by practitioners such as Bardon. How much of Western esoteric secrecy arose because the practices required protection and containment, and how much developed because practitioners themselves faced genuine political and personal danger?** For me, the deepest meaning of secrecy has never been the concealment of information from other people. The true secret is within. Interestingly, the German word Geheim can be understood as pointing toward what is inward and hidden, that which belongs to the inner home of consciousness. In that sense, the greatest mysteries cannot truly be written down or explained. They can only be realized through direct experience. This is reflected in the famous saying from the Dao De Jing: "The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao." The essential knowledge is experiential rather than intellectual. From this perspective, much of the traditional secrecy surrounding Western esotericism served as a form of spiritual containment. Certain practices only become meaningful when the practitioner has developed the ethical foundation, mental stability and insight required to understand them correctly. Without those prerequisites, techniques are easily misunderstood, distorted or pursued for the wrong reasons. The secrecy was therefore intended not simply to hide knowledge but to preserve its proper context. At the same time, there have undoubtedly been historical periods in which esoteric practitioners faced genuine persecution because their ideas or activities conflicted with prevailing religious or political authorities. In such circumstances, discretion was also a practical necessity. Throughout European history, many esoteric groups adopted private methods of transmission partly to protect both their teachings and their members. For my own work, the primary reason for withholding certain subjects is not organisational secrecy but the recognition that some material cannot be adequately communicated outside the broader framework of inner development. There are areas of practice, such as my current reflections on interdimensional travel, portals or the symbolic use of mirrors, that I have deliberately chosen not to explore in detail in my published books. My view is that presenting such material without the necessary experiential foundation would invite misunderstanding and distract from the central work of spiritual transformation. Ultimately, I believe the greatest mystery has never been a hidden ritual or an unpublished manuscript. It is the transformation of consciousness itself. Once that transformation begins, many teachings that once appeared secret become self-evident through direct experience. The real esoteric tradition has always pointed inward, because that is where the deepest knowledge is discovered. **PAA: The older orders selected very small numbers of people and often concealed an inner circle within a larger outer organisation. What qualities made someone suitable for the deeper work, and how could such secrecy avoid becoming a shield for false claims, unhealthy authority or abuse?** My experience with inner orders, including circles such as the Chevaliers de la Rose Croix and Martinist groups, is that many members can belong to an organisation for decades without ever realizing that smaller circles exist in which the practical work described only theoretically in the monographs is actually undertaken. Membership, rank or years of service alone do not automatically provide access to these groups. The decisive factor has traditionally been the perceived readiness of the individual practitioner rather than formal advancement through an organisational hierarchy. From my perspective, the reason for maintaining such smaller circles was not primarily exclusivity but the practical requirements of advanced spiritual work. Practices intended to transform consciousness require an atmosphere of trust, discipline and inner stability. When working with profound contemplative states or other advanced practices, the quality of the participants and the environment become far more important than the number of people involved. A group composed of practitioners with shared commitment, ethical conduct and mental stability creates what I would describe as a pure vibrational field that supports deeper work and minimizes unnecessary distraction. At the same time, I also recognize the danger that secrecy can become a shield for exaggerated claims, unhealthy authority or abuse. Any system that relies solely on hidden knowledge or unquestioned hierarchy is vulnerable to these problems. For that reason, I believe the legitimacy of any inner circle should never rest on secrecy itself but on the observable character of its members, the ethical quality of their conduct and the genuine transformation evident in their lives. Authority should arise from wisdom, humility and direct experience rather than from titles, grades or claims of exclusive access. Ultimately, I have come to believe that the most important qualification for deeper work is not membership in a particular order but the cultivation of right view, ethical discipline and mature contemplative practice. Without those foundations, even the most carefully guarded teachings remain little more than interesting ideas. With them, the essential principles become accessible regardless of organisational affiliation. In that sense, the true inner circle is defined less by institutional boundaries than by the level of inner transformation shared by those who participate in the work. ## Completing the Path **PAA: Bringing these elements together, how do you now understand the complete sequence of the path—from Bardonian training and the awakening of the letters through right view, the Brahmavihāras, Jhāna, the formless states, cessation, inner alchemy and liberation?** When I first encountered Western esoteric training, I understood the path primarily as one of developing the mind, refining character and awakening latent human faculties. Franz Bardon's system provided a clear and systematic introduction to concentration, elemental equilibrium, imagination and disciplined practice. The work with the letters later revealed another dimension, showing how consciousness itself could be refined through the direct experience of sound, vibration and inner perception. These stages were invaluable, but they eventually revealed themselves as preparatory rather than final. As my practice matured through the study of Theravāda Buddhism, it became clear that the true purpose of spiritual training is not the acquisition of extraordinary abilities but the complete ending of suffering. The path begins with right view, seeing that all conditioned phenomena arise and cease according to causes and conditions, without an enduring or independent self behind them. From this understanding arise right intention, ethical conduct and the gradual purification of the mind. The cultivation of the Brahmavihāras softens the heart, weakens ill will and prepares the mind for deep collectedness. As concentration matures, the jhānas arise naturally, bringing increasing tranquility, clarity and freedom from the hindrances. Beyond them, the formless attainments reveal progressively subtler dimensions of experience, culminating in the complete stilling of mental activity. Yet even these refined states are not the final goal. They remain conditioned phenomena, to be understood with wisdom rather than clung to. Through sustained mindfulness and direct insight, dependent origination becomes evident in immediate experience. Craving, clinging and becoming are seen as conditioned processes rather than personal possessions. As this understanding deepens, attachment to all conditioned experience gradually falls away. The mind inclines toward the signless, the deathless and finally toward the cessation of craving itself. From this perspective, what I once described as inner alchemy is nothing other than the complete transformation brought about by abandoning greed, hatred and delusion. It is not the construction of a higher self, nor the perfection of subtle bodies, but the ending of identification with all that is conditioned. The false sense of ownership dissolves, and with it the suffering that depends upon it. The various faculties that may emerge along the way, whether unusual perceptions, profound healing, or other extraordinary experiences, are secondary. They may arise as natural consequences of a purified and collected mind, but they are neither the measure of progress nor the purpose of the training. The noble path does not culminate in becoming an accomplished magician, mystic or occultist. It culminates in liberation. The goal, as it is understood in the Theravāda tradition, is Nibbāna: the complete cessation of greed, hatred and delusion, the ending of craving, the realization of the unconditioned, and the freedom that is no longer shaken by birth, ageing, sickness or death. This is the fulfilment of the path, and everything else, however fascinating or extraordinary, is meaningful only insofar as it supports that realization. **PAA: What is the final result of this complete path? How would its completion be visible in the character, conduct and consciousness of a practitioner rather than merely through claims of extraordinary experience or magical ability?** The final result of the path is not the accumulation of extraordinary experiences or the mastery of unusual abilities. It is the complete liberation of the mind from greed, hatred and delusion. Everything else is secondary. Psychic phenomena, healing abilities or other remarkable experiences may arise during practice, but they are neither the measure nor the completion of the path. In my experience, the completion of the path becomes evident primarily through the character of the practitioner. There is an unmistakable absence of craving, fear, pride and attachment. Their conduct is naturally ethical, compassionate and effortless, not because they are following rules but because the causes of unwholesome action have been abandoned. They no longer seek recognition, authority or spiritual status, and there is nothing left to defend as a personal identity. The greatest transformation is found in consciousness itself. The practitioner no longer experiences reality through the habitual framework of a separate self. Dependent origination is directly understood, and the illusion of ownership over thoughts, feelings and perceptions has dissolved. The peace that remains is not dependent upon external circumstances or altered states of consciousness. It is stable, unconditioned and free. It is surprisingly easy to recognize this when one has reached a similar depth of practice. Once a practitioner has themselves passed through the eight jhānas and directly experienced cessation, they possess a frame of reference that cannot be acquired intellectually. In the presence of someone who has genuinely completed the path, there is an immediate recognition. It is not based upon miracles, impressive teachings or claims of attainment. It is simply obvious and unmistakable, because the quality of mind expresses itself naturally in every aspect of that person's presence, conduct and way of being. For this reason, I have become increasingly cautious of judging spiritual attainment by reports of visions, psychic powers or magical accomplishments. Such experiences may occur at many stages of development and, by themselves, prove very little. The true measure of the path is the ending of suffering, the abandonment of craving and the unshakable peace that manifests in everyday life. That is the hallmark of genuine liberation and the final fruit toward which the entire path is directed. **PAA: Erwin, we would like to thank you for doing this second interview. I felt our discussions very much deserved a wider audience. Many thanks.** --- ## Books by Erwin [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot-2026-07-01-205247-1024x234.png)](https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0FXKYGY8K/allbooks?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=aufs_ap_ahdr_dsk_ab&pd_rd_w=0wjcc&content-id=amzn1.sym.7e190e19-9f6f-4df8-807a-5a7608594741&pf_rd_p=7e190e19-9f6f-4df8-807a-5a7608594741&pf_rd_r=134-3606462-8601428&pd_rd_wg=ED69z&pd_rd_r=0291b2d3-e848-4812-b5d1-66487bffd690) --- --- # How to Meditate and Enter the Void Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/how-to-meditate-and-enter-the-void/ If you have been involved in Meditation, Yoga or Self Improvement then you may have heard of terms like, stillness, silence and the void. It is a key skill that needs to be developed regardless of whether meditation or magic is your goal. In this post we will look at what these terms mean and Meditation Techniques that allow us to enter these states at will. Another post you might want to look at is '[Introduction to Mental Training](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/introduction-to-mental-training/)'. ***Disclaimer: This post is for information purposes only, practices such as breath retention etc should not be practiced unless you have the all clear from a doctor.*** ## What is the Void? Lets look at what it isn’t. Our mind is always trying to occupy itself.  Anytime  we stop and try to keep the mind silent it explodes into action retrieving memories of all sorts of crazy unrelated situations sometimes years in the past. It will do anything to think, feel and conceptualize again in order to fill the silence. I am sure most of us have experienced the crazy thoughts our mind jumps into if any kind of control is about to be placed upon it. So the Void is what happens when the mind has finally either exhausted itself or been brought under control via other methods. Suddenly after being so used to busying itself the mind is presented with something very different. It begins (if we manage to simply sit and remain in the ‘Center’) to turn it’s awareness back onto itself. This means that instead of using all of its mental fuel creating emotions, sensations and random thoughts it begins instead to observe itself. ## Addicted to Distraction I realize it all sounds good but what the hell does it mean?! It means we are addicted to distraction! We know no other way of being! The void then is the absence of this addiction, content to sit in stillness. Sounds simple and rather boring but the experience is anything but. When you first experience this state we become aware of a new reality and a new way of being. This is a little like a private members club. Unless you have been in and experienced the state, then it is almost impossible to relate to what a big shift mentally this can be. ## What Happens? One of the best explanations for actually what happens has been from one of my teachers, Sifu Mark Rasmus. If you observe your mind then I am sure you will be familiar with how thoughts arise from ‘Somewhere’ and you are then given the choice to either follow this thought or to let it sink back down from where it came. Sifu Mark Rasmus explains the process as follows: *When students observe the arising and falling away of thoughts, usually 4 things are identified.** **1. Consciousness itself, there is an observer** **2. There are mental formation/thoughts** **3. There is a field upon which these thoughts arise and fall away upon** **4. It is all inherently empty (PAA:Though full of potential)* Summed up in four short sentences but each one represents a big shift when you actually realize the truth of the statement for yourself. It brings a kind of solidity to your practice. Number 4 listed above then is the Void. This Void, Stillness or Emptiness as it is sometime called is not as one dimensional or empty as it at first seems. With time it changes and you find that though it seems empty to our limited experience a better word might be absolute potential. This is very subjective so needs to be explored and discovered in your own practice, making notes, contemplating, returning into the Void and going a little further and deeper. Its a personal journey. Now let's look at what needs to be done to enter the void. ## Preliminary Exercises Before using the techniques to the Void a certain foundation needs to be laid. If the foundation is not laid then the techniques that follow will have little to no effect. My version of these preliminaries is that 3 things need to be accomplished or developed. 1 – Subconscious – Get to know, understand and work with your subconscious. 2 – Attention – Understand deeply the importance of attention and how to use and develop it. 3 – Will Force/Nerve Force/Will Power = Discipline ## Subconscious Everyone has heard of the subconscious or unconscious mind but I believe many of us don’t truly understand just how powerful it is. How often have you eaten something and thought, ‘Thats the last time I eat that, from now on just apples’ or a similar example and only a day later or even later the same day you go into exactly the same store and buy the exact same food that you swore you would never eat again! Remember those donuts!? So what (part of you?) made the original decision to not eat that food any more and what (part of you?) then overrides that decision to later go into the store to buy and eat that forbidden food? Who is in control? Really? If we cannot stick to something our own mind had agreed upon as a good idea then what is making the decisions? It is clear then that ultimately the subconscious aspect of ourselves rules the roost. If our plan is not accepted as fact and endorsed by our subconscious then we will have great trouble in sticking to that plan. **How to work with the subconscious?** It is actually really simple and you have been doing it all your life. What ever you consciously think about the most, what ever emotion that relates to is what will be imprinted upon the subconscious. This means the subconscious will take this thought and feeling as the truth and use this as the base operating system. If we have happy, positive thoughts about our life and how we are always successful then the  subconscious will accept this as THE truth. As reality. It doesn’t judge. If we do the opposite and believe life is a struggle and we are unlucky then it will  also accept this as THE truth. As reality. So we work with our subconscious by being conscious of what we allow to dwell in our mind. Whether conscious of this operation or not it is always at work. Better then to be conscious of this and carefully control what we dwell upon and what is transmitted to the subconscious. As the subconscious has a way of attracting the things we dwell most upon. Rather than me writing my own work in progress method of working with the subconscious. Better to get a whole course of how to work with your subconscious from the legend Charles Haanel author of the The Master Key - google it as it is available for free online completely legally. He does a great job of introducing these ideas and providing practical exercises to use this force to create the life you want. Or alternatively if you want a method that plugs into a larger curriculum then I recommend either [Sixty Skills Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) or [Andre Consciencia Magic and Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd), both if which contain full training in this and all other aspects of magic though in very different ways. ## Attention One of the missing pieces of the puzzle. Many of the ‘New Thought’ books from the early twentieth century mentioned this as a major part of the process. It was an open secret that without developing the power of attention, nerve force, will force then there is no real hope of developing personal power. The previously mentioned courses all develop to a high level the Attention. But one of my favorites from years ago was the work of William Walker Atkinson (yes I know he gets a lot of resistance but take what is good and leave the rest). The work of William Walker Atkinson in my opinion is a must read when it comes to the attention. He really did the world a favor with his work on this. To get an idea of attention and the degree to which it is required you can try the following exercises. **Exercise 1:** Fix your mind upon a part of your body. Feel it. Now set the stop watch on your phone and get on with  your day but ensure a part of your mind continues to stay attentive to that chosen part of the body. How long was it before you forgot?  If you did the exercise I know I don’t need to say anything else ? **Exercise 2:** Make an effort to listen to yourself as you speak during the day and to watch yourself as you perform actions in the day. Actually hear your voice and notice what this does. Not only will you experience the same forgetfulness of the first exercise but for the small periods you remember to observe yourself you will discover a different perspective of you. This new perspective is actually very empowering. It leads to the question that if this new perspective empowers us then then where was our attention when we forgot to observe ourselves and what was it doing to us? **Exercise 3:** This is one of my favorites for so many reasons. One analogue clock with a ***seconds*** hand. Fix your eyes upon the ***seconds*** hand and see how long you can remain focused upon it with no distraction. A distraction is defined as any image, mental dialogue that replaces the attention to the ***seconds*** hand. Your goal is 10 minutes. But you should start to feel a difference in yourself once you can consistently do 2 minutes. Build in small increments, 30 seconds I find is effective. ## Nerve Force/Will Force Just like attention the nervous force was once common knowledge in many of the self help and self improvement books that were coming out in the early twentieth century. Writers like William Walker Atkinson and Charles Haanel gave full courses of development to enable anyone to develop this force. The nerve force is ‘best’ described as energy or vitality. Though best described in that way nerve force does have a very unique quality and is best experienced rather than described. You actually already have experienced this quality in the Attention exercises. One of the best exercises you can do to experience this is to simply sit completely still for 10 minutes. Sit on the edge of a chair with your back straight, achieve this straight back via lifting the rib cage and opening the chest rather than trying to elongate the spine. Hands on your thighs, shoulders back. Easy version is to close your eyes and not move for 10 minutes. Very soon you will feel itches, aches and pains that you never felt before. You must resist the natural urge to scratch the itch ? The harder version is to do the same but with your eyes open. The experience of the nerve force is what comes after doing this exercise consistently for approximately 10 days or more. You will start to feel an inner strength, reflected in your posture, voice, eye contact etc. Put these three exercises together and you start to experience some interesting qualities. ## Meditation Techniques to Enter the Void If you have gone through the preliminary exercises then it is now time to look at entering the Void/Stillness/Emptiness. Entering into the Void takes a little practice as its often the result of many years of regular but unplanned practice. It doesn’t actually need to take this long. Often many of us start meditation without any real plan or method in place. We close our eyes and hope for the best! So it takes longer to reach this first experience of the Void. With a plan to develop the required qualities plus the time required for contemplation of your ongoing experiences the first experience of the Void can come much quicker as its a specific e****vent we have planned for. Cause and Effect. The following techniques are a jumping off point for further exploration. Anyone who starts to enter the Void regularly will I am sure have started to develop their own personal way of getting back there quickly. So use this post to get your own experiences, test and see what works better for you. Then you are in a position to go on and develop your own personal methods. Let's begin. ### 1 – PRANAYAMA – SUKHA PURVAKA This breathing exercise common in the Indian and Tibetan Yoga methods. There are many variations but for our purposes a very simple method is all that is required. It will give you an experience of what you are looking for and what I believe is best achieved on your own without any outside assistance such as breathing, music, chanting etc. 1 – Sit in a comfortable position. 2 – Keep your closed eyes focused upon the point between the brows and relaxed but still. 3 – Close the right nostril with the right thumb. Draw in the air very, very slowly through the left nostril. 4 – Then close the left nostril also with little and ring fingers of the right hand. Retain the air as long as you can comfortably do. 5 – Then exhale very, very slowly through the nostril after removing the thumb. 6 – Now half the process is over. Then draw air through the right nostril. Retain the air as before and exhale it very, very slowly through the left nostril. All these six processes constitute one cycle. There are two body locks that are used in this method which take a bit of practice. You can see the full details in the book I link to below which is free for download. Even without these body locks the method still works very well. Do 20 in the morning and 20 in the evening. Gradually increase the number. This is the Sivananda method of easy breathing (Surka Purva). I find a 1-4-2 ratio of breath is best for me, which is 4 seconds in, hold for 16, out for 8. But go very gently and find your own level. At the end of the session simply sit still, focusing on the point between the eyebrows. Sit and enjoy the state of stillness. [Sivananda Pranayama PDF](https://dlshq.org/download2/pranayama.pdf) ### 2 – COUNTING BREATH This is similar to the Pranayama in that breath is being used. There is no retention of breath here simply a big in breath into chest and diaphragm – This is 1. Then the out breath. That is 2. Now do this 6 times and then restart the count. Do this for 3 minutes or until you feel it's the right time then sit in the silence. ### 3 – YONI MUDRA This is one of the most powerful for beginners. Yoni Mudra closes off the sense gates. Our reality, our thinking is shaped and formed by the information retrieved via the sense gates. So when we close off these gates the mind has to look elsewhere and for another reality. Yoni Mudra does not disappoint but I would suggest to do number 1 on this list first and then transition to Yoni Mudra immediately after for best results. How to do it? Super simple. 1 – Place the tips of the two index fingers close to the outer corners of the closed eyes against the lower lids > Thumbs in the ears > Middle finger closing the nostrils and ring finger closing the lips. 2 – Use the same breath ratio as with Surkha Purva (Number 1 on this list) if it is comfortable and you have experience in the practice. If you are new to Surkha Purva then lessen the retention when doing Yoni Mudra. Half it and work up from there. 3 – Direct the eyes to the point between the eyebrows, you will enter into a stillness and potentially see a pin point of white light in the center between your eyes. 4 – When you feel it is time slowly release the fingers and return the breathing to normal. Then you can gently open the eyes and return to normal consciousness. ### 4 – SUBCONSCIOUS METHOD This and the following methods are only useful to use once you have experimented a little and got to know the mental landscape. You need to be able to discern what is mental/thought patterns and what is emotional/energetic. When you can do this and have a good relationship with your subconscious then these methods will be possible and useful. (It doesn’t need to take long to get to this point) One of the simplest methods for ANYTHING you want to achieve is the use of the Subconscious as I repeatedly say (Repetition is Key for the Subconscious). Once you and your Subconscious are working together as partners then you can simply state what you want or need to be accomplished and your partner will go and get it done. I often use this method amongst others with the Void. I will say ‘Ok we will now do Void meditation for X amount of minutes’. I am then taken into the Void and at the designated time the Subconscious brings me gently out of that state. Perfect. But once you have the relationship with your Subconscious you can do this with absolutely anything! ### 5 – MUDRA/ANCHOR METHOD Super simple again. As long as you know it works, it works! Lets imagine one day you get to a really amazing state, you are almost shocked. Whats the first thing you want to do after you come out of this state? You want to go back there right? One for the experience and two to prove to yourself that it wasn’t a one off. Here is something to try, the next time you get into a state of mind you want to return to do the following. 1 – Acknowledge fully the state you are in. 2 – Communicate with an unspoken intention to your subconscious that when you say a specific word or perform an action like touching finger and thumb together for example, the state will then return. 3 – Test and repeat the process if necessary. ### 6 – VITAL FORCE AND RELEASE METHOD This one is tricky to explain unless you have some experience with certain lines of Western Hermetics. I learned this from Sifu Mark Rasmus back in 2012. It is the foundation of his whole method. Here is a framework to play with, it is well worth the time and was provided generously by one of Sifu Marks students Joey. Thanks Joey Nishad. 1 – Build the energy ball between your hands, recognize the qualities of the space between the hands as opposed to space around. This will allow you to directly experience the vital fluid/life force between your hands. 2 – “Breathe” the qualities of the energy ball into the body (*PAA:* *Realize as you get used to this you can assign any quality you want to the space between your palms*), filling the whole body with it. So breathe in to the space between your hands, charging up the life force between your hands and on the out breath, fill the body with that life force. Experience the same qualities in your whole body as you did between your hands. 3 – “Breathe” life force through your skin – on the in breath, observe life force, entering into your body from the space around you, filling the body. On the out breath, observe life force exchanging back to the space around you so that there is equalizing of life force between you and the space around you. With this, you should be able to recognize the qualities of life force which you initially recognized only between your hands, both inside you and the entire space around you. This entire space where you can feel the qualities of life force is you “life force / energy field”. As become more familiar with life force, this field will increase in size and also, you will be able to form increasingly greater resolution within this life force field. Now the important thing to remember is that all of the above, you weren’t really doing anything. You were using a ritual/practice to recognize what is already there. In order to do these, through these rituals you learned how to “tune into” the life force with your mind. Generally speaking, when we say “keeping the mind in the energy” it means that your mind tunes into life force, such that the body disappears and your awareness spans the entire energy field, experiencing everything through life force. The first part here of building the ball between the hands can be seen below demonstrated by Sifu Mark. You might be thinking how does this relate to the Void and Stillness? Well once you can do the above and sit in the Vital Force you get accustomed to a certain feeling. You can connect this to a word  (similar to previous method), lets say our word is Void. So when in this feeing tell your subconscious with an unspoken knowing (this takes some experimenting) that when you mental or vocally say void you will return to this feeling. Vital force is creative so if you flavor your thought with the wish of entering the Void and complete Stillness then this what you get. Just the feeling of being in the Vital Force gives you an energy signature to work with. The more we experience the state and connect it to the word or action the quicker and more powerfully it will work. The action of holding out your hands and focusing on the space between the palms actually acts as a mudra to recreate the state before you even take a breath.  Then any breaths you take just intensify the state. ### 7 – HERMETIC This method relies on the first two stages to create conditions for the third stage. **Stage 1: Observe** 1 – Sit still and simply observe the mind. Do not try and control it, instead simply observe the thoughts that PASS through your mind. 2 – Do not forget yourself. 3 – Observe the thoughts. Let them pass by. 4 – Start with 5 minutes then go to 10 minutes of constant observation of your thoughts not engaging with your thoughts. **Stage 2: One single thought** 1 – Pick a subject like a local park or person etc. 2 – Now keep your thoughts focused upon that one subject. Do not forget yourself. 3 – Keep your thought on that subject, so if I choose the park I will think of what it looks like, where it is, what does it contain, who goes there, why they go there. 4 – All thoughts connected to the original subject with no forgetting of yourself. 5 – Start with 5 minutes then go to 10 minutes. **Stage 3: No thoughts** 1 – This is a result of Stage 1 & 2. Carefully study what qualities you are building in the first two stages. 2 – You will now not allow any thoughts to appear in your mind. This is sometimes thought of as impossible but let me assure with the fuel you have built up in the previous steps you absolutely can do this. 3 – Put all your attention upon stillness. Do not stop thoughts instead focus on stillness. 4 – Do you see the difference? 5 – To stop your thoughts means you are focusing on thoughts. Like attracts like. So focus upon stillness. 6 – If it helps you imagine blackness surrounding you on all sides and that you are sat within it. 7 – Another tip is to remember the eyes movement affects the state of mind. 8 – So keep the eyes still and focused on the point between the eyebrows. If the eyes are still then so is the mind. 9 – Only use this imagination as a temporary crutch. As soon as you can maintain stillness through the power of your will power then do so. ### 8 - Sixty Skills Here we have pretty much everything listed in today's list all in one curriculum! So if you would like not just to know in more details what we have spoken about today but also would like to know how to work with it all inside of a larger curriculum then [SixtySkills](http://sixtyskills.com) is what you are after. ## Welcome to the Void I really hope that these methods have been useful for you and you have managed to experience what I  mean by the Void. It will not happen over night and does require lots of practice. You will begin to recognize the mental landscape and notice the order of specific states and how they are helped or hindered by things such as tension, posture and breathing. These are your discoveries to be had that will give you ownership over this experience. You will begin to know why you enter a specific state and why you don’t. This is the difference between real understanding of the subject and simply hoping for the best based on emotions and feeling. These are repeatable experiences that have a clear sign of progression. Do the preliminary exercises and you will then be in a position to clearly see this progress and make a mental note or anchor of it to speed your progress. If you have enjoyed this post then please let me know in the comments below and share the post with your friends. ## --- # Edwin Kelley on 50 Years of Dharma Practice Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/edwin-kelley-on-50-years-of-dharma-practice/ ## Introduction Edwin Kelley began practicing Buddhism in 1975 after attending a 10-day Vipassana retreat near Perth, Australia, following a serious motorcycle accident that had turned him toward questions of meaning, meditation, and spiritual practice. In 1992, he travelled to Burma with his wife, Myoshin, for six months of intensive retreat under Chanmyay Sayadaw, where he ordained temporarily as a Theravada monk and immersed himself in Mahasi-style insight practice, Abhidhamma, and metta meditation. He first encountered Vajrayana Buddhism in Dharamsala, India, in 1993, and became a student of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in 1998. Edwin later served as Executive Director of the Insight Meditation Society and helped establish the global Tergar Meditation Community in 2009, where he held roles including Executive Director, Co-Executive Director, and CFO. Retired from administration since 2022, Edwin continues to teach and support students of Mingyur Rinpoche as a Tergar instructor. His teaching draws on more than 50 years of practice across Theravada, Vajrayana, and Western Dharma communities, with an emphasis on clarity, kindness, and recognizing one’s true nature. Edwin Kelley can be found through [Tergar International](https://tergar.org/tergar-guides-instructors-and-facilitators), Tergar Australia, and his author profile at [Lion’s Roar](https://www.lionsroar.com/author/edwin-kelley/). --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/V5A6508.webp) ## Training and Early Journey **PAA: Your journey began with a meditation retreat in 1975 near Perth. What first drew you to that experience, and how did it shape your path in meditation and the Dharma?** **Edwin Kelley:** Although I attended my first 10-day meditation retreat outside Perth in 1975, my journey really began about three years before that, when I had a very nasty motorcycle accident during the mid-year break of my first year at university. I had gone back down to where I grew up in the Bega Valley for the break and had gotten a job milking cows on a local dairy farm. On the Saturday night, after finishing two weeks of milking, I was riding a motorcycle back to my friend’s place. Essentially, I ran out of road and left the road rather than hitting an oncoming motor vehicle. I was thrown through the air headfirst, hit an embankment, and was heavily concussed. I was unconscious for well over an hour, fractured my sixth thoracic vertebra, spent three weeks in hospital, and lost university time. It was a major shock to my system. I lost my drive to study and to be somebody. The next year I dropped out of university and, with a friend, hitchhiked to Perth. During those next two or three years, I spent a lot of time looking for the meaning of life: reading Western and Eastern philosophy, meditation books, and the classic books circulating in the early 1970s — *Autobiography of a Yogi*, Ouspensky, Alan Watts, Hermann Hesse, Ram Dass, and many others. I wound up in Perth in 1974 and was working two jobs because I was saving money to go to Europe. A woman I was working with at a restaurant in Perth was organizing a 10-day Vipassana retreat, and she talked me into signing up. I do not think I had any real idea what I was getting into, but it seemed like it might provide answers to what I was looking for. The retreat was about 100 km outside Perth, in a rural facility, completely in silence, with a teacher named Robert Hover, an American who had been a student of U Ba Khin in Burma. It focused primarily on anapanasati and body scanning, similar to the method taught by Goenka, though subtly different. That program irrevocably changed my life. When I had the motorcycle accident, I had lost the memory of what had happened. I knew I was going to leave the road because a car was coming, but I did not know how I left the road or how I hit the embankment. I had been severely concussed for well over a week, perhaps ten days. During that retreat, two or three years later, I had a dream in which I reclaimed the somatic experience of being thrown off the motorcycle and hitting the embankment. I woke up around four in the morning, bolted upright in bed, and thought, “Wow.” Then, sitting on the cushion over the next hour or two, I realized I had reclaimed the memories I had lost from the accident. That demonstrated to me the power of the practice. ## Early Communities, Disillusionment, and Karma **PAA: Looking back on your journey, is there a particular moment or insight that felt truly transformative for you? What was the context of that moment, and how did it change your outlook or practice?** **Edwin Kelley:** There is a part of my life that I do not normally put in any public bio. After that retreat in Perth, I spent another couple of years traveling around Australia. I finally wound back up in Perth at the end of 1976. Some of my friends from my earlier time there were getting into Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his teachings. I ended up going to a centre just outside Perth. The Rajneesh community had a very strong presence in Perth, but this was right at the beginning. There were hardly anybody involved, maybe half a dozen people. I went to the facility they had in the outer suburbs of Perth, ended up taking sannyas, and stayed there for the next 18 months or so before going to Pune, India, at the end of 1978. I spent the next two or three years, off and on, in Pune, until Bhagwan moved to Oregon. I spent about ten weeks getting from Pune to Oregon in 1981 and was in Oregon very early in the commune. I was there pretty much from the beginning to the end. I left in November 1985, after everybody else had left. This was a very formative part of my spiritual development. The strongest thing I recall from that experience was the sense of community. I shared intimate daily relationships with hundreds of people, many of whom, nearly fifty years later, I am still close friends with. Although our spiritual journeys diverged, the friendships remained. Why I got into the Rajneesh world is another story. How it fits into the whole Dharma or Buddhist experience is another story. But it was definitely a profound part of my early life and spiritual journey. Things also went horribly wrong. At one point I was personally drugged and made incompetent because of certain actions I had taken. I did not work in the inner circle, but I worked in the support team for someone who was in the inner circle, in accounting. That is where I learned the fundamentals of my accounting skills, which served me well later. In terms of my subsequent journey, it taught me what can go wrong. Although we can aim for ultimate reality, liberation, and freedom from suffering, if we do not attend to the details of the law of karma, things can go horribly wrong. We cannot use ultimate reality to circumvent the realities of relative reality. There is no question that this was the biggest lesson I took from there. It is also worth noting that this is where Myoshin and I met, in Oregon in 1983. Here we are more than forty years later. That has been a huge part of our lives together. So good came from my time there as well. ## Practice, Partnership, and the Return to Dharma **PAA: In 2009 you and your wife Myoshin moved to help establish the global Tergar community. How has practicing and teaching alongside a lifelong partner influenced your perspective on the Dharma and on teaching?** **Edwin Kelley:** After the Rajneesh community in Oregon fell apart in 1985, Myoshin and I spent about 12 months in the United States and Canada, got married, and moved to Australia at the end of 1986. We lived together in Sydney for a couple of years, then went up to Byron Bay. We were seven years together in Australia, except for about a year we spent in Burma and Asia, primarily in Burma. After we moved up to Byron Bay in 1989, Myoshin did a weekend retreat with an American teacher named Alan Clements, who had been a student of Mahasi Sayadaw and had been a monk in Burma. It had a major impact on her. In the meantime, I had gone back to university and enrolled in an accounting degree because that was the skill I had that could most easily support me. I thought that if I finished my degree, I would be more financially secure rather than just doing bookkeeping. Myoshin went down the rabbit hole. She started practicing. She went and did a month with U Pandita in Bowral, NSW, and later went to IMS in Barre, Massachusetts, and did two months with U Pandita. I was left at home working for a public accounting firm and doing my studies. It was a challenging time for me. Every now and again she would say, “Do you want to come and practice with me?” I was still quite reactive to anything spiritual, having gone through the disillusionment that occurred when the Rajneesh community collapsed. I did not want anything to do with it. Finally, a year or so later, she convinced me to do a 10-day retreat, which was a struggle for me. Then, a year later, Chanmyay Sayadaw, another Burmese teacher who had also been a student of Mahasi Sayadaw, came to Australia. I did two weeks with him, and that was a major turning point. I really got something from that retreat. When I came home and went back into my accounting office, I saw all the piles of people’s shoeboxes full of accounting receipts and had this epiphany: “Oh my dear, this will never really be satisfying.” Chanmyay Sayadaw had invited Myoshin and me to come to Burma. Within six months, we were both in Burma, where we spent six months, and I ordained as a monk. ## Burma, Ordination, and Theravada Practice **PAA: In 1992 you spent six months on intensive retreat in Burma with master Chanmyay Sayadaw. Could you describe what that retreat was like and what insights or challenges emerged during that time?** **Edwin Kelley:** We arrived in Burma in August 1992. Initially we went just for three months, but there was something incredibly enticing about the whole experience. Chanmyay Sayadaw was offering temporary ordination to anybody who wanted to ordain. For me, it was a little like “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Maybe it was also a kind of value-added thing: if I were really going to immerse myself in these teachings, then I would ordain. So that is what I did. It was difficult. The conditions in Burma were challenging: the monsoons, the bugs, and the very intense method of moment-to-moment concentration on psychophysical experience. I found my practice very difficult at times. I crashed and burned. Chanmyay Sayadaw encouraged me to get back on the horse. He also strongly supported me in doing loving-kindness meditation — metta meditation — for myself and for all beings. I think that was the saving grace for me. I did have remarkable meditative experiences. Sayadaw taught Abhidhamma every night, drip-feeding it to us as an approach to understanding psychophysical process. I had some remarkable experiences associated with the five aggregates, the Four Noble Truths, and the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. Seeing the way the mind creates reality was incredibly profound for me. After three months, although we had only planned to stay for three months, I could not leave. I felt that if I went back to Australia, I would end up being a public accountant again. I needed to stay beyond the point where I would pick up the mantle of accountancy again. I did not want to go back and put on the accounting robes, so to speak. So we stayed another three months in Burma, largely because I felt I needed to stay beyond the point of no return. I have no regrets about that. Burma was definitely a major experience in my life. > Ordained bhikkhus coming together, chanting the Pali, doing these rituals — there was something incredibly deep and meaningful about it. A sense of belonging, I suppose, as ancient as the teachings themselves, going back to the time of the Buddha. > > Edwin Kelley **PAA: During that Burmese retreat you also ordained temporarily as a Theravada monk. What was meaningful about that monastic experience, and how did living as a monk influence your understanding of the Buddhist path?** **Edwin Kelley:** One thing to add about my time in Burma — and this was equally true when I returned in 2004 and ordained again for six weeks — was the sense of being part of an ancient brotherhood, a lineage going all the way back to the Buddha. The rituals we did as Sangha, reciting the Patimokkha, daily confessing our indiscretions, and then at the end of the rains retreat, the Kathina ceremony and the offering of robes to a monk — there was something about all of that which gave me a deep sense that this had been happening every year for over 2,500 years. Ordained bhikkhus coming together, chanting the Pali, doing these rituals — there was something incredibly deep and meaningful about it. A sense of belonging, I suppose, as ancient as the teachings themselves, going back to the time of the Buddha. That left a deep impression. I have no idea how many lifetimes I may have spent as a monk, but I am sure it has been many, both in the Theravada tradition and in the Tibetan tradition. Fascinating. ## IMS and Dharma as Work **PAA: After returning from Burma, you joined the Insight Meditation Society and eventually became its Executive Director. How did your time at IMS, a major Western meditation center, influence your own practice and your approach to teaching the Dharma?** **Edwin Kelley:** After returning from Burma, although I had been studying for an accounting degree, I had only finished two-thirds of it. I still had a full year to complete. I really did not want to go back to being a public accountant where I could only study part-time, so I enrolled full-time at university. For 12 months, I lived separately from Myoshin during the week and we would get together on weekends so I could devote myself to my studies. I did really well. I enjoyed it. It was much easier to focus on academic work when I was not working. At the same time, Myoshin and I helped form a local community that sponsored meditation teachers to come to the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales to teach retreats. We invited different teachers from the Insight Meditation Society, including Steven Armstrong, Steven Smith, and Michele McDonald-Smith. At one of those retreats in March 1994, I learned that the position of Director of Operations at IMS was vacant. I still had a couple of months to finish my degree, so I wrote off and applied for the job. After some back and forth, I was hired. IMS sponsored me, I got my green card, and I came to IMS in July 1994. I think I believed I would be able to do more practice. That was partly my motivation. But of course, if you have ever had a leading or executive role in any organization, even a Dharma organization, there is never a good time to take time off, go on vacation, or do retreat. I had to devote myself to running the place. Within about 18 months, I became Executive Director. A few years later, I was able to sit for six weeks, half of the three-month retreat there. During that retreat, I made a vow to myself that I would not be Executive Director when I turned 50. I saved up money, opened a CD, called it the “Edwin Liberation Fund,” and put money aside so I could quit work and devote myself to practice. One of the biggest lessons from running a major Dharma retreat center like IMS was that I got to know all the primary teachers in the Insight tradition in the United States and Europe personally, on a first-name basis. I helped organize their schedules and bring them to IMS to teach. But the deeper lesson was to give myself over to the job from the perspective that this is the path. After some time, I realized that although I was not spending time on the cushion every day, I was working with the paramis — the perfections of patience, generosity, loving-kindness, diligence, and so forth. My understanding now is that if we make our life and work the path, if we make our spiritual practice one of kindness, generosity, and presence of mind in all our dealings — our personal interactions and our business dealings — that is as powerful as any time spent on the cushion. It can totally and absolutely transform our hearts and minds. That was my major lesson from serving as Executive Director of IMS, and later from serving in executive roles with Tergar. ## Vajrayana, Mingyur Rinpoche, and Lineage **PAA: You first encountered Vajrayana Buddhism in 1993 and became a student of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche in 1998. What aspects of Mingyur Rinpoche’s teaching resonated with you, and how has his guidance influenced the direction of your practice?** **Edwin Kelley:** After I quit as Executive Director of the Insight Meditation Society in 2003, I did a six-month retreat at the Forest Refuge. By this point, I had already met Mingyur Rinpoche. My connection to Vajrayana Buddhism began in 1993, after we had been in Burma for six months. I went to India and spent a month in Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama lives, at Tushita Meditation Centre. That was my first real exposure to Vajrayana Buddhism. I was fascinated to see the similarities between the Theravada tradition and the Vajrayana tradition. Tushita was an FPMT centre, and there were a lot of similarities. It was also an absolute delight to get to see the Dalai Lama, shake his hand, and attend teachings. In 1998, before I quit as Executive Director, I met Mingyur Rinpoche. After I quit, I traveled around America and did many retreats with him. During that time, I got to know him personally. I was invited to help care for him. I helped sort out his visa; we drove to Montreal and back, he did teachings there, and we got his visa sorted out. That meant we got to know each other personally, which was quite profound. The first teachings I did with him in 1998 were when he was there with his brother. His brother gave Dzogchen pointing-out instructions and nature of mind teachings, while Mingyur Rinpoche taught from the Four Noble Truths and early Buddhism. I was struck by the similarities between Mingyur Rinpoche and Chanmyay Sayadaw, my Burmese teacher. In many ways, Mingyur Rinpoche provided the perfect bridge. I did not see any separation, distinction, or conflict between Vajrayana and Theravada. I felt that he tied a ribbon around all of my spiritual practice — the Rajneesh world, the Theravada world — and tied a big bow around it, as if to say: “Do not throw any of it away. It has all been in service of understanding your own heart and mind and eliminating confusion.” That reflects in my teaching now. Unless somebody is engaged in a practice that I feel is actually harmful or unsuited to their personality, I am not a black-and-white person when it comes to practices, lineages, or teachings. Whatever works for you, whatever you want to explore — another lama, another tradition, another religion — you should do it. It is your journey. It is your path. You need to discover what works for you. It is more about following your heart than deciding what is right and wrong in some rigid way. ## Theravada and Vajrayana: Relative and Ultimate Reality **PAA: You trained intensively under Chanmyay Sayadaw in Burma and later under Mingyur Rinpoche. How do the methods and lineages of these very different teachers complement each other in your own approach to meditation?** **Edwin Kelley:** Having said what I just said about the similarities between the Theravada and Vajrayana traditions, obviously there are also significant differences. For me, and I came to understand this through discussions with Mingyur Rinpoche and teachings from him later, the Mahasi Burmese Abhidhamma approach really focuses on relative reality: the way our psychophysical process happens, how it works, and how the three characteristics — impermanence, not-self, and suffering — are intimately embedded in all psychophysical experience and phenomena. When one practices in that way and goes deeply into awareness or mindfulness of that process, at some point wisdom arises and says: “Samsara sucks. I am out of here.” In the *Visuddhimagga*, it says the mind seeks nibbana as an object. That is very much a Theravada way of looking at it. In my mind, it is the causal vehicle. It is relative reality. It is primarily working with that. Vajrayana practice, particularly as it comes to us from Mahamudra and Dzogchen, is very much about ultimate reality: rigpa, the union of clarity and emptiness, the mind that is freed from clinging to anything. It is like going from the infinitesimal to the macrocosm: resting the mind in spacious, open clarity, the union of clarity and emptiness, where anything and everything that does not inherently exist is known and liberated upon arising. That is how I would characterize the two different styles. I think both are equally important. There are a lot of people who come to Vajrayana Buddhism wanting to touch the sky — Dzogchen, rigpa, nature of mind — who would be well advised to go back and take a look at their psychophysical process and deal with some of their own suffering before they attempt to realize their true nature. > All the drama, kilesas, challenges, stress, worry, and conflict come from clinging to a sense of self, identification with who we think we are, and the appropriation of our experience: “I am,” “this is mine.” > > Edwin Kelley **PAA: You emphasized that Abhidharma knowledge can itself “mitigate confusion and delusion” by informing how we view our experience. How do you help students translate such theoretical understanding into real insight through meditation practice?** **Edwin Kelley:** From my own practice standpoint, I should say a little more about the differences between the Theravada and Vajrayana approaches, and why I think both are incredibly valuable. When one brings attention, mindfulness, and awareness to the minutiae of one’s psychophysical process, it is mind-boggling what one sees. It is really interesting to challenge the misperceptions we have about the single, solid, separate sense of self — a phrase I coined to capture what I perceive to be the way we cling, the Second Noble Truth, and how we create our suffering. All the drama, kilesas, challenges, stress, worry, and conflict come from clinging to a sense of self, identification with who we think we are, and the appropriation of our experience: “I am,” “this is mine.” There is something really valuable about the Theravada approach, and about the Abhidhamma approach, whether it is Vasubandhu, Buddhaghosa, or another system. Bearing witness to the process of mind-body experience is incredibly revealing. It compels one to understand the mechanism of the Second Noble Truth, and it compels one to seek the answer of the Third Noble Truth. Of course, all of that is also there within Mahamudra: shamatha, the Four Immeasurables, vipashyana. It is all there. It comes at it from a different or slightly different perspective. To be introduced to the nature of mind, to get a glimpse of ultimate reality, and to understand how to work with appearances from the perspective of the liberated mind is an incredibly valid tool. The view contained within Vajrayana — and within Mahayana too — that we are all endowed with inherent good qualities, that we are perfect, whole, complete, and that nothing is missing, is supreme. This is our true nature. This is Buddha nature. Of course, we do not believe it. We struggle to accept it. But the practice is to come to an acceptance and realization of that, to develop the capacity to understand it, take confidence in the recognition of it, pitch a tent there, take up shop, and live from that place of true nature. That is remarkably profound and transcends all other practice. ## Personal Practice, Struggle, and Transformation **PAA: You once mentioned it took about ten years after your initial instructions to gain “any reliable level of confidence” in your meditation practice. Can you reflect on what sustained you during those years and what milestones or insights helped build that confidence?** **Edwin Kelley:** It has now been over 50 years since I did my first 10-day Vipassana retreat in Perth in 1975. As is apparent, I have tried many methods, done different practices, had different teachers, and had the great privilege of being part of three major spiritual communities: the Rajneesh community, the Insight Meditation community in North America, and now the Tergar community. My practice has varied. I would not like to imply that it has all been a cakewalk. I definitely struggled with challenges, particularly beginning when Myoshin began to do deep practice and I was left alone. That was a difficult time for me. Even up until I did the six-month retreat at IMS in 2003, I would say I struggled with being alone. There was something incredibly rich and rewarding about life with a spiritual partner and all the intimacies that come from that. In Myoshin’s absence, I definitely felt challenged. I consider myself a greed type, a desire type, and I have had a lot of compelling thoughts around sexual desire. Chanmyay Sayadaw helped me work with that in Burma. I have also talked to Mingyur Rinpoche about it. Once, when I asked him about it, he pointed his finger at me with the most intense look I had ever seen from him and said, very briefly, “That has kept you in samsara since beginningless time.” That was a profound teaching in and of itself. Slowly, slowly, and particularly through the nature of mind teachings, I began to understand. I do not know how many times I have had the great benefit of receiving pointing-out instructions from Mingyur Rinpoche and his brother — twenty or thirty times, perhaps. I could try to count them. At some point, probably not until the late 2000s, around 2009 or early 2010, after having received pointing-out instructions many times, I began to really understand what it means to have Buddha nature, and what those qualities are: awareness, loving-kindness, compassion, and wisdom. I also began to understand how the paramis are the path, and how developing the capacity to simply rest one’s mind as it is can be profoundly transformative. That has now become my practice, pretty much exclusively. **PAA: What does your current daily meditation practice look like, and how has it evolved from the early days of your practice?** **Edwin Kelley:** My current daily practice is very simple. When I wake up in the morning, I have a little ritual of chants that I do: taking refuge, bodhicitta, loving-kindness, compassion, the basis of the Four Immeasurables, and guru yoga. Then I live my life. I was given a beautiful, succinct poem by Mingyur Rinpoche as a practice, and that is my daily practice. It is really about just resting in the present moment. Sometimes I will sit, but rarely do I do formal practice anymore. It is mostly trying, as often as possible, to remember to rest in recognition: short times, many times, anywhere, anytime. Sometimes it comes naturally. Sometimes it persists for a few minutes or whatever. There are many places where I have learned to do it: sitting, resting in nature, driving the car. I love driving meditation. I have coined the phrase for driving in traffic: when you stop at the traffic lights, when the car comes to rest, the mind comes to rest. Then remain there with the mind at rest until the lights change. I am convinced you would be the first person to know the lights have gone green. That is pretty much my practice. At night before I fall asleep, I dedicate the merit in whatever way. It is really that simple. I will do retreat from time to time, and that is basically what I do on retreat as well. I no longer do much formal liturgical practice, sadhanas, Mahamudra liturgies, or that sort of thing as daily practice. Occasionally I will do chants in a group situation, but they are not part of my daily practice anymore. Through Mingyur Rinpoche’s guidance, I have also practiced quite a bit with lucid dreaming, which is way too much fun to be called Dharma practice. I have enjoyed that thoroughly. ## Teaching and Dharma in the Modern World **PAA: In our fast-paced, modern life full of distractions, what do you feel is the core message of the Dharma that Western practitioners most need to hear, and how do you convey that message in your teaching?** **Edwin Kelley:** From the perspective of Dharma in modern society, I am not sure what to say. As a teacher, the biggest privilege I have been given is to have a front-row seat to the transformation of the minds of others. That is really what is most important to me. There is certainly a wealth of knowledge I have acquired from years of practice and study, and from time to time there are appropriate moments for me to share my understanding. It certainly informs my teaching. One of the things I hear most commonly from people is that I teach with clarity, or that I can articulate reality with significant clarity, which seems to be very helpful for people. But when communicating one-on-one with somebody in the context of their practice, what is most significant to me is being able to see the ways in which that individual’s mind might cling, grasp, or fixate on a person, idea, or perception. Invariably, that is what it comes down to: the Second Noble Truth, the cause of suffering. How do we as individuals misperceive reality? How do we, through perception, impute an understanding that is erroneous, false, or misleading? To the extent that I can reveal that to somebody and give them a key to help them see how their own particular brand of misperception is perpetuating their suffering, that seems to me one of the most significant things. There are many techniques out there. Unquestionably, this is a biased opinion, but I think Mingyur Rinpoche’s and Tergar’s approach — through awareness, Anytime Anywhere Meditation, Joy of Living, and Path of Liberation — is a complete path. For anybody who seriously wants to practice, there is no question that it is profound. I do think there are some practices out there that are very tight. I would steer away from practices that are too tight. I do not think the modern mind needs more tightness. We already worry too much. We are too stressed out. We are too fixated on perfection, making ourselves better, and improving our situation. I love Mingyur Rinpoche’s teaching: not meditating, but not distracted; not fabricating. There you are complete. There you are whole. There you are a Buddha in your true nature. It is just covered by confusion, delusion, misperception, and erroneous belief. We can work endlessly to purify those misperceptions, but the direct path is to understand how our true nature manifests here in this moment: the knowing, radiant quality of the mind; the open, loving, caring heart of kindness; and the capacity of the mind to see things truly as they are. These are the qualities of our true nature. These are the qualities of our Buddha nature. To live a life focused on recognizing how those qualities manifest in our own hearts and in the hearts and minds of others — that is the best practice, the best path, and the best commitment. Of course, it comes packaged with refuge, bodhicitta, guru yoga, and dedication. But seeing our true nature and dispelling the doubt that we have Buddha nature — that is the path. **PAA: What an inspiring interview. Thank you for sharing the journey, perhaps in the future we can revisit some subjects after your retreat.** --- --- # The Hidden Dangers of Following a Magical Teacher Too Closely Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-hidden-dangers-of-following-a-magical-teacher-too-closely/ ## Introduction In an article called [Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics: Common Subjects & Why No Progress](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardons-initiation-into-hermetics-common-subjects-why-no-progress/), I write about reasons why someone may struggle to progress in Franz Bardon’s *Initiation into Hermetics (IIH)*. In that piece, I touched on some issues that can arise with teachers, but I think these points deserve a clearer and more focused discussion. In that previous post I wrote: > This is a sensitive subject as a good teacher can save you years and a bad one can cost you years. I have had experience of both, and this only strengthened my view that the trusting of oneself is vitally important. So, in regard to teachers by all means gain information from experts in the field but maintain self-responsibility for your own life. ***So often in spiritual groups intelligent, talented people slowly defer decision making to the teachers as if supposed spiritual progress makes these teachers an expert in every other aspect of life.*** To be clear this post is not directed only at the Bardon path it is directed at the teacher - student relationship. We see these things occur in spiritual groups, yoga groups, martial arts groups, etc - wherever we have a teacher student dynamic *some* of these things can occur. It’s surprisingly easy, even for intelligent and well-meaning people, to fall into the role of an obsessed student or a controlling teacher. In both cases, they often believe they’re doing the right thing. A teacher might truly think they know what’s best for their students, believing their own hype, while a student may feel their soul depends on the teacher’s guidance. This can lead to the views of friends, family, or partners being ignored as the teacher-student relationship takes over. Lastly, I want to explain why Perseus works with the teachers it does. These relationships are built on trust and respect. The teachers we collaborate with have spent their lives developing their magical skills while also working on their character—something I think is just as important. While we may not always share the same worldview, I trust these teachers genuinely want to help their students grow. At Perseus, we see teaching more as coaching than traditional spiritual instruction. The goal is to help students find their own path, not enforce strict ideas or control. I also value the honesty of our community—people aren’t afraid to speak up if something seems off. This balance of experienced teachers and a vocal, engaged community helps us create an environment where learning and trust go hand in hand. ## Disclaimer This article isn’t aimed at anyone in particular—seriously, it’s not. But, if the shoe fits, it might be worth taking a moment to think about it. ## Understanding the Role of a Magical Teacher A magical teacher is meant to be a mentor—someone who shares their knowledge, experience, and insights to help their students develop their own abilities. The best teachers empower their students to grow, think critically, and trust their intuition. However, the role of a teacher goes beyond imparting skills—it also includes fostering a healthy and respectful community for students to thrive in. When bullying, manipulation, or inappropriate behavior is ignored or excused, it reflects a failure of leadership. Teachers must be held to high standards, ensuring their behavior and community interactions align with the principles they teach. ## When Respect Becomes Obsession Respecting a teacher is essential, but obsession occurs when admiration turns into unquestioning reverence. A student might begin to see their teacher’s words as absolute truth, ignoring their own instincts or critical thinking. Over time, the teacher’s influence can overshadow all other relationships, causing the student to withdraw from friends, family, or partners. In some cases, teachers intentionally or unintentionally reinforce this dependency, presenting themselves as the sole source of wisdom or progress. This imbalance erodes personal autonomy and can hinder a student’s development rather than supporting it. ## Romanticizing the Teacher For some students, a teacher’s charisma, authority, and spiritual presence can lead to idealization, sometimes crossing into romanticization. This is especially common in cases where a student views the teacher as a potential romantic partner, creating emotional entanglements that complicate the teacher-student dynamic. Such fixation not only distracts from learning but may also cause dissatisfaction in personal relationships, as the student begins comparing their teacher to partners or potential partners. Some teachers may even claim to have past-life connections with students, which can increase feelings of obligation or loyalty. These dynamics can distort the relationship entirely, making it less about learning and more about emotional dependence. ## Charismatic Teachers and the Illusion of Authority Charismatic teachers often use subtle tactics to establish authority and foster dependence. They may imply they are privy to divine knowledge, using cryptic comments, smiles, or knowing glances that suggest they understand things beyond ordinary perception. Some may claim their teachings are part of a divine mission or cosmic plan, making students feel that questioning the teacher is akin to defying the divine. Another common tactic is invoking past-life narratives, where teachers claim to have been a student’s master, guide, or romantic partner in a previous life. This creates a sense of destiny or obligation, making it difficult for students to challenge or break away from their influence. While these tactics may appear subtle, they often have a profound psychological impact, shifting the relationship from one of mentorship to control. Recognizing these manipulations is crucial for maintaining balance and personal agency. ## Arrogance As teachers gain recognition and success, some begin to believe they are the only ones "doing it right." This mindset can lead to arrogance, resulting in an abrasive personality or a superiority complex. While this may be wrapped in charisma, it can alienate students and foster a toxic culture where questioning the teacher is discouraged. This kind of arrogance can extend to students, too, who may adopt their teacher’s attitude and mirror their behaviors. It’s especially important to watch for arrogance in ourselves, as it serves no one and can derail personal growth. Ultimately, even a teacher with significant skills can still be immature or narcissistic, using their position to harm others rather than helping them grow. As a guiding principle, remember: kindness first, skills second. A truly great teacher uplifts their students rather than putting them down. ## Harmful Behavior in Communities One of the challenges in spiritual communities is the presence of individuals whose behavior disrupts harmony and undermines the group’s purpose. These behaviors can include bullying and belittling others—particularly men bullying other men, or women targeting other women—and males being inappropriate or overly familiar with both single and married women. Some individuals manipulate situations to elevate their status within the organization. Shockingly, such behavior is sometimes excused or overlooked, with these individuals even being rewarded with leadership or teaching roles. This often leaves members confused and disheartened, questioning the integrity of the community. It is the responsibility of the teacher or leader to address such behaviors promptly and decisively. Just as workplaces enforce boundaries and professionalism, spiritual communities must uphold clear standards to create a supportive and respectful environment. ## Consequences of Unchecked Obsession An obsessive relationship with a teacher can have far-reaching consequences. Students may become stagnant in their personal and magical growth, unable to think or act independently. Teachers who exploit this dynamic often take advantage of a student’s loyalty, emotional attachment, or even financial resources. This dependence can lead to disillusionment, loss of autonomy, and damage to personal relationships. The very traits students sought to cultivate—independence, confidence, and personal power—may be lost in the process. ## Conclusion A magical teacher can be an incredible guide, but it’s important to remember they’re human, not perfect. At the extreme end, scandals like those involving Sogyal Rinpoche highlight the dangers of unchecked power, but most issues begin with smaller, subtler boundary crossings. Teachers may interfere with a student’s time, career, or finances, framing it as necessary for growth. These situations, while often framed as sacrifices, can leave students feeling trapped and exploited. Healthy teacher-student relationships require trust, clear boundaries, and a focus on personal growth. A good teacher helps students discover their own power rather than taking it away. By recognizing imbalances early and addressing them, students can prevent unhealthy dynamics and build a more empowering learning experience. --- --- # The Elsewhere of Love – A guest post by Gabriel Teixeira Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-elsewhere-of-love-a-guest-post-by-gabriel-teixeira/ ## The Elsewhere of Love ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/ChatGPT-Image-Apr-27-2026-06_02_54-PM-1024x576.png) Imagine what would become of us in this mundane existence without the elsewhere of love. How would we live such despicable lives without loving and being loved? Love makes life beautiful. Love makes life radiant. It is the anima mundi of the alchemists; it can be both the dawn and the twilight. It is the primal symbol of existence. It is the primordial source of creation. It is the perfect and perpetual dance of the number 1 and the number 2. It is the purest expression of life. Without love, life is brief. Without love, flowers wither. Without love, life consumes itself. Love is the most sublime of mysteries, the most delightful of perfumes, the most beautiful of landscapes — the strongest of fuels. There are mysteries in love. Love is like the color of blood. It is like a woman carrying a child in her arms. It is like the smile of a couple, the laughter of a child. It is the hope in the eyes of the grieving, the youth of the elderly, the faith of the captive. Love is the primal cell. The central point. The departure and the return home. It is the unspoken poetry. It is the blossomed flower. May our hearts be filled with love and gentle nostalgia—like in the days when we smiled for no reason, when we were innocent to the workings of evil, when nothing mattered more than to love and be loved. ~ Iserag Spirit  MAAT ∆ --- --- # Archaeomancy Explained: Frater Barrabbas, Qabalah, and the Forty Worlds System Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/archaeomancy-explained-frater-barrabbas-qabalah-and-the-forty-worlds-system/ ## Introduction Frater Barrabbas Tiresius is a practicing ritual magician who has studied magic and the occult for over forty years. He believes that ritual magic is a discipline whose mystery is unlocked by continual practice and by occult experiences and revelations. Frater Barrabbas believes that traditional approaches should be balanced with creativity and experimentation, and that no occult or magical tradition is exempt from changes and revisions. Over the years, he found that his practical magical discipline was the real source for all his creative efforts. That creative process helped him build and craft a unique and different kind of magical system, one that is quite unlike any other yet based on common Wiccan practices. So, despite its uniqueness this magical system is capable of being easily adapted and used by others. Frater Barrabbas is also the founder of a magical order called the Order of the Gnostic Star and he is an elder and lineage holder in the Alexandrian tradition of Witchcraft. --- ## Interview ![Frater Barrabbas](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/BarrabbasTiresius-author-photo-released-04-24-2022-768x1024.webp)Frater Barrabbas **PAA: You describe Archaeomancy as something that grew out of a single word by [Michael Bertiaux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bertiaux) that stayed with you for decades. Do you feel like you discovered this system as a sudden insight, or that it revealed itself slowly over time?** There were actually both processes at work in the development of Archaeomancy. When Michael Bertiaux briefly described his idea, it had a powerful effect on my imagination. I began to have impressions about what that magic would look like and determined that it involved the Qabalistic structure of the Forty Worlds. After that, I developed my magical technology over time to best accommodate the process of working with the various angelic beings in these worlds. Yet that was just the first approach to this magical topic and it spanned the 1980’s into the 1990’s.  The second approach was taught to me by the Nephilim, who helped me to develop a new approach to the Tree of Life. They presented to me a Tree of Life pattern without the Sephiroth, showing the skeletal lattice where triangular shapes were emphasized, and that just below the supernal triad were two trapezoidal shapes. There is a total of eighteen of these shapes formed by the pathways, and these are the Qabalistic Dimensions, which became the focus for this new system of magic. I developed a system of magic that would aid me to enter into these dimensions to experience the source or core of the Tree of Life. This magical technology is discussed in greater detail in the second volume of this series on Archaeomancy. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/410vrJZMgOL._SY445_SX342_FMwebp_.webp)](https://www.amazon.com/Liber-Artis-Archaeomancy-Mastering-Angels/dp/1968185062/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_0?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=qyFyH&content-id=amzn1.sym.9c9a049f-252a-49d9-a8c2-e300a1663200&pf_rd_p=9c9a049f-252a-49d9-a8c2-e300a1663200&pf_rd_r=134-3606462-8601428&pd_rd_wg=2BqeJ&pd_rd_r=6359bdcc-c5f6-4d1b-9ad7-014cb6b807a1)Liber Artis Archaeomancy: Mastering the Angels of the Four Worlds (June 2026 Release - Pre order now) **PAA: This book, being a manual, also has the components of a philosophical work. What compelled you towards this format?** Overall, this book is a practical approach to the art of angelic invocation involving the forty Qabalistic domains. I also wanted to discuss the historical precedence for this kind of magic in Medieval Europe, and how what I am proposing now is a variation of what was performed in that world. I am also a pagan and a Witch, so that will color how I approach angelic spirits, and how I view the world. While all this is true, I did not seek to include any philosophical speculation in this book, but it does attempt to create a sacralized environment in a very secular post-modern world. **PAA: You mention that this system of magic developed in the 1980s and 1990s. What changes in your understanding of Archaeomancy occurred over those years?** While the initial development for Archaeomancy of the Forty Worlds was begun in the late 1980’s, with the basic concept or target domains for this work, the actual magical technology evolved over time. This is especially true with the development of the second methodology of gaining entrance into the dimensions. Even as recently as the early 2000’s this magic has been in a state of development, mostly refinements and the ritualized utility for others in my magical social circle. The earliest inspiration remained the same, but the technical methodology evolved and changed over the decades. **PAA: Can Archaeomancy, in practice, be distinguished from classical ceremonial magic?** The differences between my system of magic and ceremonial magic are considerable. As technics of magic, they have some common ground, but they differ in the approach. First and foremost, godhead assumption is the primary state and mindset of the ritual magician who would practice my system of magic. While I will use a magic circle, it is to define the boundary between the sacred precinct of the temple and the outer profane world. What this means is that all magical operations and interactions with spirits occur within the magic circle and not without. There is no need nor requirement for the magician to hide behind a protective magic circle while engaging with spirits. Because a ritual magician is exposed directly to the spirits that they invoke or evoke, they rely on their godhead assumption to mitigate any potential harm that they might experience while engaging with these entities inside of their defined spiritual domain. My system of magic uses internal cross-roads, gateways, pylons, and energy vortices that make the magical workings directly tangible through a process of immersion. Direct contact with the spirits conjured is startling different from what is practiced in ceremonial magic. Also, godhead assumption allows the magician to be fully inspired by their personal Deity so that the ritual script can be completely abrogated for a more impromptu approach. Immersion allows for spiritual transformation of the highest kind, since there is a direct contact between the magician and the conjured spirit. Oddly enough, I have discussed the idea of immersion with other practitioners and I have discovered that left-hand path magicians use the same kind of approach.  So, I don’t consider myself a ceremonial magician because I decided long ago that strictly following a tradition was too constraining. I also find that ceremonial magic is too wedded to the Abrahamic faiths, and I am too much of a pagan to follow such a path. Ceremonial magicians also treat my system of magic with a certain disdain, where one such individual referred to my magical system as “stinking of Witchcraft,” which I took as a badge of honor.  > Entering the domain of spirits, whether angelic, neutral or demonic has the effect of producing deep, profound, and highly impactful spiritual transformation. > > Frater Barrabbas **PAA: What are the side effects of entering the domains of spirits?** Entering the domain of spirits, whether angelic, neutral or demonic has the effect of producing deep, profound, and highly impactful spiritual transformation. The main purpose for angels is to evolve the practitioner and rely on their help to become a better person, and ultimately to achieve enlightenment. While most magicians start out seeking personal power and material gain, yet at a certain point in their quest, if they continue their work, they will change it to one that is about seeking knowledge, wisdom and self-mastery. This is where the interrelationship with spirits can have its most positive and constructive effect on the practitioner; when they have given up the pursuit of material gain and personal empowerment. **PAA: Can Archaeomancy be understood without being practiced?** A person can always understand any form of magic from a theoretical perspective, given that they have a good imagination and a basic education in the occult. Archaeomancy is no different in this way than any other system of magic, although it is more complex and has more ritual components. However, unless and until someone successful performs one of these ritual workings, they can never know how potent and profound this system of magic actually is when compared to other systems. To know is to do, is my personal aphorism when contemplating any form of magic. Outsiders will view this magical system as overly complex and perhaps too dissimilar from other systems of conjuring spirits, particularly if they are a practitioner of one of the more traditional systems of magic. My hope is that people will not only read my book but actually try to construct their own rituals and perform a magical working using this system. Those who can do that will discover the value of this magical approach. **PAA: Do you see the forty worlds mapped through the Qabalah as something objectively real?** The Qabalah, whether we are talking about the Forty Worlds, the Eighteen Dimensions, or the structure of the Tree of Life, presents to the practitioner a simplified model of what is very complex and beyond any kind of mind-based approach. Just as a map is not the actual physical terrain that it seeks to describe, models of spiritual consciousness are also symbolic representations that cannot be confused with the reality. They are representations, overly simplistic so we can approach and grasp them with our mind. To truly apprehend this spiritual world, we would need the eye of spirit rather than the eye of mind. What I have found by experiencing the subtle planes of consciousness is that symbols are protean and changeable, and words and mental constructs of any kind are useless. **PAA: How should a practitioner use the relationship between the eighteen dimensions and the forty worlds?** The Qabalistic Forty Worlds structure is one of many models of the domain of the inner planes, and it is not the only model. The Qabalah of the Eighteen Dimensions is another model that I was taught by the Nephilim, or the fallen Sons of God. Either approach is just another way of taking a view-point on the Tree of Life, where one sees the ten Sephiroth through the four Worlds, and the other sees the triangular structures of the Tree of Life as actual living spiritual worlds. What binds them together is the Tree of Life, but any approach used to define sacred space using symbolic models is limited by the fact that the mind cannot fully comprehend the domain of spirit. **PAA: Do you see the intricate and extensive correspondences in your book as a language to be learned and spoken?** Tables of correspondence are an arrangement of unrelated materials, concepts and symbols that when combined using a template describe a spiritual concept. In that way, it could be construed a language. Since my system of spirit conjuring uses a matrix of symbols to define a specific Qabalistic domain where resides a spiritual being, or a hierarchical group of spiritual beings, then one could conclude that the use of these symbols forms a magical language of conjuration. Used as such, it describes and fully defines the place of residence of a spirit. When it is used with a ritual technology, that symbolic description becomes fully realized, opening up a Qabalistic world to the magician. > In numerous ways, myths protect us from the real truth, which would be confusing and disturbing, and it would negate much of what passes as dogma and theology in most religions. Myths can also point to the truth, but only to those who are willing to question their face value and to seek their underlying mystery.  > > Frater Barrabbas **PAA: From magic to theology, what do you think most people are missing about angelic beings?** Religious beliefs about angels, as well as associated folklore, present to the faithful a logical and friendly exoteric perspective. There is a hierarchy of good angels, and they do the work of God in heaven. Then there are the bad angels, who reside in the underworld of Hell, and are used by God to tempt and lead astray the unbeliever and the unfaithful. It is a very simple, neat and tidy representation of something that is very complicated and not at all as friendly and reassuring. First off, there is no one supreme godhead, there are in fact many gods answering to a myriad of human spiritual needs and wants. There is, in all of this, a singularity, which I call the One, but it has no name nor any kind of interactive personality. It is the union of all being, the source of all that was, is and ever shall be. The closest we can get to that holistic being is through the highest states of consciousness, called by many names, but is a form of conscious illumination. In numerous ways, myths protect us from the real truth, which would be confusing and disturbing, and it would negate much of what passes as dogma and theology in most religions. Myths can also point to the truth, but only to those who are willing to question their face value and to seek their underlying mystery.  With that said, I can state that spiritual beings reside in the archetypal domain of consciousness, and have both a symbolic existence and an activated and manifested instantiation. They exist in a place called the inner planes and function in specific roles. Since there is no supreme Deity, then there is no polarity in the spiritual world. There is just the functional roles and the striation of spiritual or material density. There was no rebellion against heaven, and demons reside in the underworld because it is close to the earth and the place of their origin. They are not evil or good, since such moral values have no relevance in the spiritual world. Things are much more complicated, and angels, demons, earth spirits, fairies, and the whole host of disembodied entities do not have conflict with each other. These ideas, which I have gleaned by a long period of interacting and communicating with these spiritual beings are so far removed from what non-practicing people believe about angels that it becomes for me a point of not communicating what I have experienced. However, all spirits can have a role in helping a human being to perfect themselves over time. What is required is for the seeker to break past the exoteric beliefs that function as a barrier in order to discover the esoteric truth. **PAA: How much of the emotions and personalities of angels and demons are projections, and how much is intrinsic to the entities?** As I have pointed out previously, spirits have a symbolic existence and an activated and manifested instantiation. That process of materialization is determined by the beliefs and expectations of the practitioner. When I have achieved states of consciousness that reside in the subtle realms, I have observed spirits assuming an egg-shaped globe of colored light. However, in my imagination, they appear in the guise based on my expectations, wearing the characteristics of their symbolic nature as I interpret them. **PAA: Is there truly a division between “high” angelic magic and “low” goetic practice?** Conjuring any kind of spirit using whatever manner of magic might be considered “high” magic, and performing magical spells to acquire material benefits might be considered “low” magic. Using magic to help or harm others, to obtain enlightenment, or selfishly empower and enrich oneself could also represent polarized perspectives on the practice of magic. However, there must always be included the context of one’s intention, and social and material situations to consider. Thus, defining this kind of a binary approach to magic is likely an inaccurate assumption. Since I don’t see angels and demons as opposed or representing good or evil, then such a perspective on high magic or low magic is practically irrelevant. **PAA: Did you already have the chance to see Archaeomancy consistently transform the lives of others?** Yes indeed – those who shared these workings with me were transformed by them, although temporarily. As I have stated in my book, a person would need to have a continuous ongoing spiritual discipline and practice and then to integrate what was experienced into that discipline in order for the transformative revelations to be more permanent. **PAA: What really is spiritual renewal all about? And is it the goal of Archaeomancy?** Renewal sounds like maintenance to me, such as maintaining a spiritual discipline by periodic religious-magical events or experiences. Archaeomancy is a magical system that produces a profound spiritual transformation that can completely change someone’s orientation or belief-system. When practiced as an ordeal, it can overcome all personal obstacles and bring the practitioner face to face with their personal godhead, with all the revelations, insights and visions, and realizations that that might incur. Whether or not someone has a regular and consistent spiritual discipline, after successfully performing one of these ordeals, they will quickly adopt one in some fashion or another. **PAA: You speak of “veil of darkness” that brings emptiness and terror along the path. How important is this veil and what is it veiling?** I talk in my book about the absolute source of beingness as the One. From a Qabalistic perspective, that would be the Sephirah of Kether. Yet behind and beyond the One is the None, which is source of being as Non-Being. This would be the Ain Soph in the Qabalah. From the perspective of individual beings, such as we are, the idea of non-being would be a veil of darkness that is terrifying. If we cannot consciously comprehend the One, which is the source of all being, then how can we expect to understand non-being. Buddhists have stated in their various sutras that what is beyond and also the source of all beingness is emptiness. This metaphor is what I was trying to relate, in my limited fashion using words, what is the actual source of everything. The veil is our own blindness and the inability to mentally comprehend these very exalted, spiritual concepts. **PAA: When revising and innovating a tradition, should we risk distorting it or should we prevent it at all costs?** I am the last person to defend any kind of tradition or orthodoxy when it comes to the practice of magic. It is my strong belief that in each new age, a magician must reinvent the practice of magic. Traditions of magic cannot be transported or accurately reconstructed from one age to another because the cultural context supporting that tradition is irreparably lost.  I sought to show this when examining angelic magic as it was practiced in Medieval Europe and then comparing how it is practiced today. So much has changed in how we see the world around us that it is surprising that magic can even be practiced by intelligent people in our post-modern world. A magician must invent their tradition, using the various practices of the past along with more modern practices that will hopefully produce a complete and workable system of magic. People saw supernatural occurrences easily in the 16th century because that was the framework of their culture and their religious beliefs and expectations. We are not the same people, so we have to work at breaking out of our culture determinants in order to see and experience spirits. This is why meditation and trance are so integral to the practice of magic today, where it was not as important to practitioners in the previous age. Preserving a tradition of magic that no longer has relevancy in our current age is a fool’s errand, in my opinion. This is because reconstructing a tradition is basically changing it in a fundamental manner.   **PAA: Did your work within the Order of the Gnostic Star influence the development of Archaeomancy?** Archaeomancy was developed for use by the members of the Order, or at least the Qabalah of the Forty Worlds. However, in the early 90’s the mother temple fell apart, and since then there has not been an active temple to use what I had developed. Additionally, in the 1990’s I developed the second methodology of Archaeomancy, and then in the 2000’s all this lore was redeveloped along with the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal to become the resident lore of the Order. While I did share the transdimensional system of Archaeomancy with a few members of the Order, the revised version and the additional lore have not been engaged by anyone in Order as far as I know. I am hoping that changes with the publication of this book and the next in the series. **PAA: Is this system something that should be adapted to evolve, or something that requires fidelity to the original structure?** As I stated previously, I am against any kind of orthodoxy, including for my own work, which, I might add, has changed and evolved over the years. I would assume that someone who would seek to use this system of magic would adapt it to their own system. They would thereby create a hybrid, and then over time, it would evolve into something that is unique to their own personal practice. This is a very natural progression for magical development, and one that I would highly approve. I am a strong believer that magicians should show fidelity and consistently to their personal practice. They owe no fealty to me and what I have developed, since I am just another practitioner with a different perspective. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/811XQFePpLL._SY466_.jpg)](https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ritual-Magick-Frater-Barrabbas/dp/1959883364) **PAA: Who is the ideal reader of this book?** This is an advanced book on magic. Beginners would probably not find it very useful, since it will be seen by them as complex and having many ritual components. What a beginner needs to do is build their own magical system from the ground up, and I do have a book that teaches a beginner how to do that – “[Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick.](https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Ritual-Magick-Frater-Barrabbas/dp/1959883364)” My audience for this book is individuals who already have their own system of magic and have practiced magic intensively for a few years. Such a person will see the value of this system of magic and be able to adapt it to their own system. I am hoping that people who read this book will also attempt to perform the rituals that are in it. I think that anyone who can achieve this goal will be greatly rewarded by what they experience. To make the best use of this system of magic, it also requires an individual to have their own well-established spiritual discipline, so that when they perform one of these ordeals, it will be able to permanently change and transform them. **PAA: Thanks to Frater Barrabbas for taking part in this interview and to Andre Consciencia for facilitating this interview. ** --- ## Learn More ##### Frater Barrabbas Books ##### Blog ##### Amazon Author Page --- --- # From Franz Bardon to Rainbow Body with Baron Erwin Pitsch Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-franz-bardon-to-rainbow-body-with-baron-erwin-pitsch/ ## Introduction Today we have a hugely motivating interview with Erwin Pitsch. Few contemporary practitioners bridge as many worlds as him. Born in Vienna and shaped by years of illness, hospital stays, and a hard-won return to health and vigor through martial arts and icy river training, his path into the magical world began young. While other teenagers were busy with ordinary concerns, he was frequenting a small Austrian bookshop, standing for hours in front of the esoteric section, devouring all that was available. In this interview he gives us frank and direct advice for those wishing to pursue these traditions. If you would like to learn more about Erwin you can find his website [here](https://erwinpitsch.com/) but probably the best place to learn more would be via his new book which can be found [here](https://www.amazon.com.au/Abundance-Code-Regulation-Elemental-Manifestation-ebook/dp/B0G1XRN8S4/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0). If you enjoyed this interview, then please let us know in the comments or share it with those you know would find the contents interesting. --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview- Early Life and Inspirations- Western Esoteric Traditions and Influences - Eastern Practices and Meditation- Integrating Ancient Wisdom with Modern Insights - Reflections and Advice - You may also enjoyThe Three Transformations - Free Course ## Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/45b4h0qs3qjc238idr4ue8qd38._SY600_.jpg)Photo Credit: Erwin Pitsch ## Early Life and Inspirations **PAA: Can you tell us about your background and how you first embarked on your journey into the worlds of music and mysticism? In other words, what sparked your interest in esoteric spirituality, and how did those early experiences set you on the path you’re on today? We’d love to hear about the formative moments or influences in your history that led you to pursue both classical music and arcane studies. ** I was born and grew up in Vienna and later, Salzburg, Lofer. My father was an army officer who later became a general, my mother a bank manager. But my life shifted very early. After receiving one of those “safe and effective” medical treatments when only three years old, I got violently sick the same day. My immune system basically crashed. I ended up with eight lung infections in a row and spent more time in hospitals than at home for years. Getting healthy again took almost a decade. And not through medicine, but through martial arts, hiking, swimming in freezing rivers, pushing my body until it finally remembered its strength. But parallel to all that, something else woke up in me. I think I was maybe ten or eleven when a kid at school mentioned PSI powers and occultism. It hit me instantly. After school I jumped on my bike and rode straight to this little bookshop that had a weirdly big esoteric section. I could not afford anything, so I just stood there for hours reading the backs of the books, absorbing everything. Eventually I scraped together enough money to buy a few: *Psi Power*, *The Power of Hypnosis* by Kurt Tepperwein, *Kahuna Magic*. And then I found Franz Bardon’s *Initiation Into Hermetics*.  So while other kids were doing normal teenage things, I was practicing Franz Bardon while reading Steiner, diving into Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and even ended up meeting Heinrich Harrer when the Dalai Lama came to Vienna. I was playing classical piano, learning hypnosis, practicing Hermetics, creating elementars. And at some point, the practice got strong enough that it bled into the physical world. For example, at a sailing camp, an older kid bullied me. I didn’t touch him. Instead, that night, the elementar I have created—a huge black puma with green eyes, the same one I had painted on my windsurf board, showed up in his dreams. The whole tent freaked out because they all saw a “giant black dog” inside with them. They ran out screaming. Another time my mother yelled at me, and I got really angry. The elementar reacted before I could pull it back. She collapsed on the spot, unconscious. That was a wake-up call for me. Like, “Okay, this isn’t a game anymore.” I even built a magical wand following Cavendish’s book *Black Magic*. By combining the force of the wand with using the elementar, other people could actually see it.  At the same time, I learned to control my body temperature and raise it to 39.6°C or drop it under 35°C in minutes. I used to walk around in swim shorts in the middle of winter and swim in icy rivers in Lofer, Salzburg. Extreme Kneipp Kur stuff. So that is pretty much how it all began. A mix of illness, curiosity, obsession, and a very intense hands-on education in Hermetics and hidden sciences. **PAA: Did you have any notable teachers or mentors assisting you when starting out in your spiritual or esoteric studies? For example, were there individuals (either in person or authors you read) who guided or inspired you in those early years? How did their guidance shape your development or practice? Please share any mentorship experiences that were pivotal for you. ** One of my greatest teachers was my grandmother. She had no idea what Occultism even was, but she was naturally psychic and genuinely gifted. She’d casually say things like, “Someone just drowned over there,” pointing 300 meters away; and it turned out to be true. She would remote-view incidents without even realising that is what she was doing, or predict events that later unfolded exactly as she described. Growing up around that person was a huge influence. I also had this older guy in Lofer, Salzburg, who taught me the basics of authentic Austrian Celtic Druidry. Not the fake, modern “Neo Druid” stuff, but the real stream. We played chess every day after school, and during those games he would teach me the old ways, the worldview, the elemental understanding. Back then I spent a lot of time alone in the mountains, on the tops, on the alms, wandering around for hours. I was very psychic, very connected to the land, the elements, the spirits there. That was my classroom long before I ever joined any formal group. Later, when I returned to Vienna, I started attending various Rosicrucian and anthroposophical groups weekly. Max Heindel circles, AAORRAC, Lectorium Rosicrucianum, and later AMORC. I had several excellent martial arts teachers as well. But most of what I figured out, I figured out myself. I just had hundreds of books. Franz Bardon, Steiner, Rosicrucian literature, yoga books, Zen guides, the whole Fraternitas Saturni material from Schikovski Verlag—Spiessberger, Cavendish, Eugen Grosche, Freiherr von Sebottendorf, Dieter Rüggeberg, and many others. I absorbed everything. **PAA: You’ve had a long career in classical music as a performer, producer, and publisher. Do you see a connection between music and mysticism? Has working intimately with classical music influenced your spiritual journey (or vice versa)? Many people feel music has a transcendent, almost magical quality – do you find that your experience in the arts has complemented your esoteric pursuits in any way?** Absolutely. As a music publisher you really have to be switched on. Nothing is harder to sell than *vibrating air*. You need people skills, talent, sales instinct, and the ability to bring very different personalities together. You basically have to be both, a solicitor and an artist, at the same time. And what many people don’t realise is that a lot of classical musicians are practitioners themselves. Buddhists, Yoga Vedanta students, Rosicrucians, meditators. Quite a few were involved in Western esotericism too. One of the last genuine AMORC adepts in Vienna, Prof. Roland Böckle, was part of that world. I still remember chamber ensembles; members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra,  playing in the Viennese lodge. AMORC in Vienna back then was *nothing* like the cheesy, superficial version people sometimes imagine today. Many members were simultaneously involved in a dozen other organisations. For us, AMORC was more like a blue lodge, a foundational base. In fact, the Austrian version of AMORC Was the remains of the old AAORRAC. In the 1950's, it was supposed to run under the name AAORRAC, but AMORC jurisdiction. TMO, the Martinist Order, was so secret that even some long-term Rosicrucians had no idea it existed right under their noses. And for me it all made sense, because sound itself is the closest thing to the astral. The ability to deeply listen is very similar to the ability to perceive psychically. Western esoteric arts and the Western musical tradition have always been connected. Just look at Mozart. Not only a Freemason, but also a Rosicrucian. *The Magic Flute* is basically an esoteric initiation ritual set to music. He encoded the entire tradition into an opera. ## Western Esoteric Traditions and Influences  **PAA: Franz Bardon is a revered figure in Western occultism, known for his rigorous system of Hermetic training. Was Bardon’s work – for instance, his book Initiation into Hermetics – influential in your own journey? How do you view Bardon’s approach to magic and self-transformation, and have you incorporated any of his methods or philosophy into your practice? I know I have seen some of your posts that give me the idea that Bardon was a solid beginning, but you soon went out on your own seeking more. ** Franz Bardon was everything to me in my early days. Honestly, school was pure horror. I hated every single second of it. While everyone else was living the life of a normal kid, I was living in a completely different world. And Bardon’s training *worked*. It kept me sane, focused, and moving forward. Back then there was no internet, no guidance, no YouTube, no mentors explaining anything. And most esoteric shops were just selling superficial angel-tarot nonsense, rock-crystal workshops, or were tied to some questionable sects. So, I had to find my own way. But I dug deep. And I actually managed to master essential skills early on. A mixture of books from Karl Spiessberger, Eugen Grosche, the Dalai Lama, Rudolf Steiner, Max Heindel, and many others supported my learning while I worked through Bardon’s system. It all blended in a very unique way. I also met several individuals; names I won’t mention here. Those who practiced Bardon’s work seriously and learned from those who learned directly from the master. Real practitioners. People you don’t find on the internet. These days I’m in contact with Walther Ogris, and I also know and own the works of Emil Stejnar. Their perspectives continue to enrich the understanding I built in those early years. **PAA: You hold the title of Baron and are a Chevalier (Knight) in the modern Knights Templar (Ordre du Temple de Jérusalem). How did you become involved with the Knights Templar, and what does being part of this chivalric order mean to you personally? Do you feel that the medieval Templar ideals or myths have relevance to your own spiritual philosophy and service in today’s world?** I only use this title sparely in private meetings and as a pen name. In public I do not use that title at all. It appears to be a symbol for my spiritual work. Referring to the spiritual new Jerusalem, and relating to the mysterious figure of Melusine which appeared to me in so many dreams and guiding my way. It wouldn’t be appropriate to reveal anything connected to the Royal House of Lusignan or the Royal House of Savoy in a public forum, so I have to apologise for that. The same goes for the Ordre du Temple, Freemasonry, the Scottish Rite, and the York Rite. These are not things you openly discuss on the internet. Members are a very exclusive and influential circle, and privacy is absolutely essential, and for many reasons. It is a global network, and its members are involved in international diplomatic missions, military service, and various sensitive areas. For example, our Knight Commander here in Brisbane just received the highest civil order of the Commonwealth of Kentucky—the rank of Colonel. What I *can* say is this: the original Templar Order never actually died. The Larmenius Charter, whether every part of it is original or not, still preserves the authentic Grand Masters through hundreds of years, right up to 2025. And today, more than ever, those values matter. In general, the ideals of knighthood are urgently needed in a weak society without any direction, goals or integrity. We have countless individuals behaving like animals. It becomes even increasingly questionable whether all people should benefit from the very generous human rights when they would not even remotely behave like humans.  More than ever, it needs strong men and women standing by what is true and right. And pointing out what is false and perverted; without falling for false political correctness. Being a knight means standing for what is right and true, no matter what may be the cost. **PAA: Martinism is another tradition you’ve been associated with – often spoken of as a “path of the heart” in Western mysticism. What initially drew you to Martinism, and what do you mean by “unlocking the secrets” of Martinism? Are there particular teachings or practices in the Martinist tradition that you found especially profound or transformative in your experience?** The current Martinist Order (not the countless fake or self-invented groups out there) is extremely secretive, so I can’t say much publicly, and I apologise for that. What I *can* share is just a small personal note. Originally, I was invited into the Martinist Order in Vienna, the TMO. And that only became possible after I had already been in the highest degrees and a member for well over a decade. The admission process was nothing like what people imagine today. I still remember the master wearing a red mask, the room completely dark, and all the members hidden behind a curtain, silently listening to my interview before deciding if I would be accepted. It was similar with the Militia Crucifera Evangelica and the Chevaliers de la Rose-Croix. These initiations were very private, very traditional, and taken seriously by everyone involved. **PAA: For those unfamiliar, who was Louis Claude de Saint-Martin and why is he so important to the Martinist tradition? Saint-Martin, an 18th-century French mystic, was known as “le philosophe inconnu” – the Unknown Philosopher. How would you describe Saint-Martin’s philosophy and legacy to our readers, and have his ideas influenced your own perspective on spirituality? ** It would take too long to explain, and part of these explanations can only be given in a temple in person, to worthy initiates, I apologise. Certain things need to be kept secret for certain reasons. Martinism is the path of re-integration.  **PAA: J.B. Kerning is a somewhat lesser-known figure in 19th-century esoteric Freemasonry. Kerning (Johann Baptist Krebs) developed a mystical approach within Masonry, including practices with sound and breathing, and emphasized that the Divine is present throughout the human body. Are you familiar with Kerning’s work (such as The Letters on the Royal Art or Roads to Immortality)? If so, what value do you think his body-centered, vocal approach to mysticism holds for modern practitioners? ** I practice Kerning every day now. But the way I work with it today is completely different from how I started. In Kerning’s system, the letters themselves become the teachers. Compared to Bardon, Kerning pushes you to figure everything out on your own. Over time, the letters literally start instructing you, and you end up writing your own Quabbalah rather than relying on Franz Bardon’s structure. It is also a path of inner alchemy, not Hermetic Magic. I’m almost finished with Bardon’s system, but these days I work almost exclusively with Kerning, unless I’m receiving specific formulas from certain entities, or when I’m working Hermetically with the Quabbalah rather than with the inner alchemy aspects. One thing people really need to understand is this: modern Freemasonry is just a shadow of what it once was. True Freemasonry is timeless. It *is* the path of inner alchemy and authentic transformation. But 99.99% of masons have no idea. They’ll even claim publicly “there is no secret,” or that the only secret is the bond between brothers. Nothing could be further from the truth. There *is* a secret. And one that waits quietly, ready to be discovered by those willing to pursue it at any cost. First and foremost, we must ask a simple but essential question: **What is the actual goal?** Too many seekers wander from book to book, collecting theories like talismans, yet doing very little of the real inner work that transforms consciousness. Western esoteric folklore has its beauty, but it also has a way of keeping people circling the surface, mistaking symbolic language for practice. To go deeper, it is worth becoming intimately familiar with the Buddha’s teaching on **dependent origination**; not as an intellectual model, but as a living process unfolding moment by moment within your own body-mind. In the same spirit, study *The Manual of Theosis* and understand what the early Christian mystics meant by **Theosis** and the **|Signless Condition**. These are not abstract theological ideas; they point to the same silent doorway discovered in every genuine tradition. Train yourself in the **four jhānas** and the **four arūpa states**. Learn to stabilize the mind until it becomes utterly still. From that stillness, allow the **signless state** to appear on its own. Unforced, unconstructed. With time, even **cessation** becomes a natural unfolding rather than an achievement. Little can be gained if we remain stuck in conceptual fascination. True progress comes from direct practice, from placing your awareness into the living laboratory of your own nervous system, breath, and consciousness. For this reason, I recommend **Insight Meditation**, not as a weekend exercise, but as a multi-year commitment. It refines perception, dismantles illusions, and reveals the nature of experience with uncompromising clarity. This is the path: precise understanding, disciplined practice, and the courage to let go of everything that is not real. **PAA: Alois Mailänder (sometimes spelled Mainländer) is another intriguing figure from 19th-century occult circles. He was a student or successor of Kerning who led a small circle of mystics in Germany. It’s noted that Kerning and Mailänder together laid the foundation for body-centred yoga practices within Western esotericism. Have you explored the Kerning-Mailänder teachings, and what are your thoughts on this blending of Christian mysticism with physical exercises? Do you see them as early pioneers integrating Eastern yogic concepts into Western practice?** No, I’m still waiting for Samuel Robin’s book, but honestly, I found my own way. It is not about complex exercises, but profound understanding of the simplest exercise.  What really clarified things for me was looking at Christian Orthodox Theosis and noticing that it recognises the same “Signless State” that Theravada Buddhism talks about, and it describes it in almost exactly the same terms. By working with the signless state through Theosis, it became obvious to me that, in essence, there is no difference between Buddhist Nibbana and Theosis. The signless state is simply the doorway to the deathless. Yes, the traditions couldn’t be more different on the outside. But when you  practice, the core experience is almost identical, and the goal is the same. This idea that only the Buddha ever reached cessation is simply not true. Daoists practicing “sitting in oblivion” reach the same state. Early Christians, especially the desert fathers, knew it very well. At the end of the day, Nibbana doesn’t care about traditions. It doesn’t care which lineage you come through. It has always been accessible. There is nothing to learn and nothing to achieve. In fact, the more you try to ‘do,’ the more the false identity keeps itself alive. Letting go is the actual path. And this is exactly the danger of modern occultism—the influencers, the Instagram magicians, the endless stream of books and rituals. None of that liberates you. They don’t want to free you; they want you as a follower, a customer, someone who keeps the system running. They keep you blind with constant “new” material, new orders, new promises. To really lift the veil and step out of the matrix, you must drop all of that. Completely. ## Eastern Practices and Meditation **PAA: Switching to the Eastern side of things: you are also a Yoga Āchārya (master-level teacher) with decades of meditation and yoga practice. How did your journey in yoga and meditation begin, and how has it evolved over the years? For instance, did you start with any particular style or lineage of yoga, and what does achieving the level of Āchārya mean for you in terms of responsibility or depth of practice?** I spent almost a year living in India and several years in Southern Africa, drawn by a lifelong fascination with Kriya Yoga, Kundalini Yoga, and Raja Yoga. During my time in Africa, I encountered several Kriya Yoga masters from different lineages, each offering a unique expression of the same ancient current. Eventually, I committed myself fully to the authentic Indian holistic yoga taught in the Satyananda and Sivananda traditions. Becoming a Yoga Acharya and teaching for years deepened my understanding far beyond what a thousand books could ever convey. Direct experience reshapes you in ways that theory simply cannot. Over time, I entered and stabilized all the Yogic Samadhis, which opened a profound insight into Vedanta, Vedic meditation, and the entire Kundalini system: the nāḍīs, the chakra symbols, and the inner “petals,” each representing specific nāḍī pathways. Kundalini Yoga, in its true form, is not the Westernized performance version—it is the precise science of the energetic meridians within the subtle body, their functions, and their role in inner development, healing, and ascension. This path taught me that real transformation begins the moment knowledge stops being an idea and becomes a lived reality within the body, breath, and consciousness. **PAA: Serious meditation practitioners often talk about reaching profound states of consciousness, such as the Jhānas in Buddhism. Have you personally explored these deep meditative absorptions (or similar states of samādhi)? If so, what has that experience been like for you? More broadly, what insights have practices like meditation and breathwork given you about the mind and reality, especially in comparison to Western magical practices that you’ve studied?** I have experienced profound Kundalini awakenings on multiple occasions, entered the full range of Indian Samadhis, and walked through the hard jhānas, the soft jhānas, and the arūpa states. But it would be neither appropriate nor useful to catalogue personal attainments. What matters far more is offering a clear warning to those walking the Western spiritual path. Far too many seekers become trapped in an endless cycle of magical operations, occult theatrics, and esoteric consumerism. It has become a business like any other. An Indian swami once told me, *“We sell God to Westerners the way they sell Coke to us.”* It was meant as a joke, but it carries a bitter truth. Do not become a passive consumer in the esoteric marketplace, another duck being fed by charlatans, influencers, and spiritual entertainers who learned how to hack the YouTube and Facebook algorithms. Become your own master**.** Cultivate an individual, unshakable connection with the Divine. Understand that the “matrix” you fear is not primarily external; it is generated within. Your trauma, your failures, your repeated patterns of suffering are not caused by some shadow government or extraterrestrial interference. They are rooted in your own nervous system, your own unexamined conditioning, and the collective delusion humanity carries about who and what we truly are. Freedom does not arise from accumulating techniques. It does not come from endlessly studying other people’s opinions. Liberation emerges from Right View, Right Effort, and Right Focus—the living heart of the path. And those qualities are not learned in ten-minute videos or thick occult manuals; they are forged in the intensity of 3–30-day meditation retreats, in silence, discipline, and direct observation of the mind. This is where the real work happens. Everything else is commentary. **PAA:  What does your current meditation practice look like on a day-to-day basis? Do you follow a specific routine or technique (for example, breath-focused meditation, mantra, mindfulness, etc.) that helps you stay centered? Given your busy roles in business and teaching, how do you maintain consistency in practice? Any tips on balancing rigorous spiritual discipline with everyday life would be very interesting to hear.** I have built my path on direct experience: Sitting in Oblivion, the Brahmavihāras, deep Jhāna practice, and abiding in Stillness**, **Signlessness**,** and the threshold of Nibbāna, or what Christian mystics call Theosis**.** These aren’t concepts to me. Furthermore, working with the letters. They are daily realities. I practice every single day, often for many hours. At the end of December, I will enter another ten-day retreat, meditating up to ten hours a day. This level of commitment is not extreme; it is simply what the path demands. Nothing of substance can be achieved with minimal effort or casual curiosity. And yet, the greatest paradox is this: Nothing “you” can do will ever lead to liberation. The only real work is the gradual and uncompromising dissolution of the false self, the conditioned structure that believes it is the doer, the controller, the seeker. Most people avoid this truth because it does not sell. It does not flatter the ego. It does not fit into a five-minute YouTube reel. And this brings me to a necessary, if uncomfortable, observation: Many Western spiritual influencers are simply wrong**, **not because they are malicious, but because they speak from theory instead of experience. Western esotericism, as it is commonly sold, has become a carnival of shortcuts, theatrics, and monetized mysticism. A wild business powered by armchair philosophers and social-media alchemists. Look at their lives, not their words. Look at what they do, not what they say.Very often they are ungrounded, physically unwell, mentally scattered, spiritually inflated, or stuck in uninspired 9-to-5 routines. They talk about power yet live without vitality. They preach mastery while avoiding the discipline that mastery requires. There is an old saying: **“Those who know magic, do it.** **Those who don’t, teach it.”** And that is precisely what we witness across the Western esoteric landscape, a parade of commentary from people who have never touched the depths they describe. Real practice strips away illusions one by one. Real practice breaks you open. Real practice demands everything. It requires: - Discipline - Silence - Daily meditation - Retreats - Ethical clarity - Precision - Relentless honesty - And the willingness to dismantle the self you mistakenly believe you are When you commit to this, something extraordinary begins to happen: the mind becomes still, the heart becomes vast, and the inner architecture of suffering collapses. You begin to understand, not intellectually but viscerally, what the Buddha meant by “the signless”, and what the early Christian mystics meant by “union.” Theosis. This is the path. Not entertainment, not consumption, not ego-inflation. But transformation. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-3.png)](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/rainbow-body-jalu-and-the-miraculous-updated-for-2022/) **PAA: In Tibetan Buddhism there is the famous concept of the “[Rainbow Body](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/rainbow-body-jalu-and-the-miraculous-updated-for-2022/)” attainment. The Tibetan term for this phenomenon is Jalü, literally meaning “rainbow body” – where an advanced meditator’s physical body is said to dissolve into light at death. What are your thoughts on such extraordinary claims of spiritual attainment? Do you view the Rainbow Body (or similar legends of high attainment) as a literal goal, a metaphor for enlightenment, or perhaps a bit of both? And do these kinds of ideals inspire you in your own practice, or do you prefer to keep your focus on more immediate objectives? ** The Rainbow Body** **is not a metaphor. It is a reality. One of the highest expressions of human spiritual evolution. And the path toward it is not found in vague mysticism or online theatrics, but in the disciplined, direct study and practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa**.** When approached with depth, precision, and perseverance, these teachings unveil the profound mechanics of dissolution, luminosity, and the transformation of the subtle body. In a similar way, the Kerning exercises of esoteric Christianity, along with advanced Daoist internal alchemy**,** point to the same destination. The traditions differ in language, ritual, and symbolism, but the underlying architecture is identical: refining the inner winds, purifying the channels, dissolving the delusion of self, and awakening the innate, radiant nature of consciousness. This is why my own journey has crossed so many lineages. I have immersed myself in Mahāmudrā**, **Dzogchen**, **Chan Buddhism**,** and Theravāda Buddhism**,** alongside Tantric Yoga**, **Kerning**, **Bardon, and numerous other systems of inner transformation. Not out of curiosity, but out of the recognition that truth appears in many dialects, yet points to the same silence. Each tradition, when practiced correctly, becomes a different doorway into the same luminous ground: - Mahāmudrā reveals the mind’s natural clarity. - Dzogchen reveals the primordial purity of awareness. - Chan cuts directly through conceptual illusion. - Theravāda dismantles the structures of suffering with razor-sharp precision. - Tantric Yoga transforms the subtle body into a vehicle of liberation. - Kerning and Bardon show the alchemical anatomy behind spiritual ascent. - Daoist practices refine the body’s internal winds and immortal essence. Together, they form a map of the human potential that is far deeper than the modern world is prepared to acknowledge. But none of this becomes real through reading or intellectual fascination. It becomes real through applied practice, years of training, retreats, daily discipline, and a relentless willingness to dissolve everything false within oneself. The Rainbow Body is not achieved by belief; it is achieved by mastery. And every authentic tradition, when practiced with sincerity, ultimately leads toward that same radiant dissolution. > ...**your inner state determines your outer reality**. > > Erwin Pitsch ## Integrating Ancient Wisdom with Modern Insights  **PAA: One of your notable recent works is “[The Abundance ](https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0G1XRN8S4)Key,” which you’ve described as blending ancient wisdom with modern neuroscience. In fact, the tagline suggests that “wealth is not outside of you – it’s in your nervous system.” For those who haven’t encountered it, can you give an overview of what The Abundance Key is and what inspired you to develop it? How does it combine esoteric principles with contemporary knowledge of the brain and body to help people achieve abundance? ** ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/a7d3aa09-2e3d-4655-9833-df52c9e35f3a.jpg) The Abundance Key emerged from a very simple observation:** **People chase wealth, success, and fulfilment as if these things exist “out there,” yet the real gatekeeper of abundance sits entirely **within the nervous system**. After decades of yoga, meditation, trauma research, and working with thousands of people, it became unmistakably clear to me: *your capacity to receive, create, and hold abundance is biologically regulated long before it becomes a “mindset.”* The modern world teaches people to chase techniques, affirmations, algorithms, and external strategies. But ancient systems, whether Buddhist, Yogic, Daoist, or Hermetic, were always pointing toward the same truth: **your inner state determines your outer reality**. What I did with *The Abundance Key* was bring these worlds together in a way that is both practical and scientifically grounded. The inspiration was quite personal. I witnessed, repeatedly, how individuals sabotage opportunities not because they are weak or unmotivated, but because their **nervous system cannot tolerate expansion**. Trauma, unresolved stress, or chronic hypervigilance create an internal “capacity limit” that prevents abundance from entering. You simply cannot build a prosperous life on a dysregulated foundation. In the book, I weave together: - **Vedantic principles** of identity and non-self - **Yogic science** of the nadis, prana, and Kundalini - **Buddhist insights** into perception, craving, and cessation - **Polyvagal theory** and the biology of safety - **Trauma research** and somatic therapies - **Neuroscience** of habit formation, focus, and reward circuitry - **Hermetic and alchemical principles** of inner transformation The result is a framework where spiritual depth meets biological reality. I explain how abundance is not created through force or positive thinking, but it arises when the nervous system becomes spacious, regulated, and receptive. When the inner contraction dissolves, creativity flows. When fear softens, opportunity appears. When identity loosens, energy moves freely. The esoteric traditions understood this long before neuroscience had words for it. They taught that the “false self” must be removed, the inner channels purified, and the mind trained into stillness. Today, we would describe the same process as** **reducing trauma load, down-regulating the sympathetic system, increasing vagal tone, and expanding cognitive flexibility**.** *The Abundance Key* is simply the bridge between these worlds. It is the recognition that wealth, success, and inner peace are not things you achieve—they are things that emerge naturally when your nervous system is aligned with its own original, unconditioned state. That is the essence of the book, and the reason I wrote it. **PAA: The idea that our nervous system holds the key to wealth and abundance is fascinating. Could you elaborate on how practices that regulate the nervous system – perhaps breathing exercises, meditation, or yoga – can influence one’s ability to experience prosperity? In The Abundance Key, what are some of the ancient principles or techniques you draw on, and how do they connect to things like stress, safety, or trauma from a neuroscience perspective? Essentially, how do mind-body practices translate into what you call “Nervous System Wealth” in practical terms? ** The idea that the nervous system holds the key to abundance is far less mystical than people assume. Every form of prosperity, whether financial, emotional, or spiritual, requires a body that feels safe enough to expand. When the nervous system is dysregulated, the mind contracts, perception becomes narrow, and the person unconsciously avoids opportunities that would otherwise benefit them. This is why so many people self-sabotage: not because they are weak or lazy, but because their biology is locked in survival mode, and survival mode cannot create abundance. Ancient traditions understood this long before neuroscience existed. Yogic breathing practices regulate the autonomic nervous system and shift the body out of fight-or-flight. Nadi Shuddhi clears the internal channels so energy and emotion can move freely. Vipassanā trains the mind to observe instead of react, dissolving the habitual patterns that keep people stuck. The Brahmavihāras open the emotional circuitry, replacing fear and contraction with compassion, joy, and equanimity. Jhāna meditation brings the mind into deep parasympathetic stillness, a state where healing, clarity, and insight arise naturally. And tantric methods such as Maha Mudra, Kundalini Yoga, and Daoist internal alchemy work directly with the subtle winds and meridians, restoring balance to the body’s energetic architecture. Modern science describes these same transformations in different language. Trauma patterns shape the autonomic nervous system, limiting a person’s capacity for risk, creativity, and connection. Increasing vagal tone enhances resilience and emotional flexibility. Expanding interoceptive awareness strengthens decision-making and intuition. When stress decreases, the prefrontal cortex becomes more active, allowing for better choices and clearer perception. In other words, the qualities people associate with “success” are simply the natural expression of a regulated nervous system. This is what I call “Nervous System Wealth.” It is the recognition that real abundance does not arise from hustle, force, or positive thinking, it arises when the body, mind, and subtle system are aligned in safety, clarity, and openness. When internal contraction dissolves, people begin to take the right actions, recognise the right opportunities, and trust their deeper intelligence. Prosperity stops being something they chase and becomes something they finally have the capacity to receive. In practical terms, mind-body practices create abundance because they expand the internal container. They dismantle trauma, stabilise attention, refine perception, and remove the unconscious barriers that keep people looping in the same patterns. When the nervous system becomes spacious and regulated, abundance is no longer an aspiration. It becomes a natural outcome of an unburdened human being. **PAA: More broadly, what is your view on the intersection of modern science and ancient spiritual wisdom? We live in a time where concepts like energy work, meditation, and manifestation are being examined by neuroscience and psychology. Do you feel that science is validating what mystics have known for ages, or is it more that new scientific language helps us understand age-old practices in a fresh way? I’m curious how you personally integrate cutting-edge research with esoteric knowledge – as you seem to do in projects like The Abundance Key. ** I’ve always seen modern science and ancient spiritual wisdom as two lenses pointed at the same underlying reality. For centuries, mystics described inner transformation in the language of energy, prana, nadis, winds, and consciousness, while today’s neuroscientists speak of neural networks, vagal tone, trauma patterns, and state regulation. The terminology is different, but the mechanisms are strikingly similar. What science is doing now is not “inventing” new truths, it is simply giving modern vocabulary to processes that yogis, monks, and alchemists have worked with for thousands of years. Where the two worlds meet, something powerful happens. Ancient practice gives science depth, while science gives ancient practice clarity. This is exactly how I approach projects like *The Abundance Key*: it is a **no-bullshit, no-fluff system**. I have no interest in vague spirituality, wishful thinking, or the kind of manifestation clichés that dominate the Western wellness market. Everything I teach is grounded in hard science, neuroscience, polyvagal theory, trauma psychology, and somatic research, while simultaneously honouring the precision of the yogic and meditative traditions I’ve practiced for decades. Science helps people understand *how* these practices work. Ancient wisdom shows us *why* they matter. When you put them together, you get a framework that is both practical and transformative. You stop relying on belief and start working with the actual biology and energetics of the human system. My advice is simple: don’t get lost in superstition, and don’t become a slave to scientism either. Use both. Let science illuminate the mechanisms, and let practice reveal the truth directly. > Remain independent. Stay loyal only to truth, not to orders, hierarchies, or leaders who have long since abandoned the original purpose of their own traditions. > > Erwin Pitsch ## Reflections and Advice  **PAA: Throughout your journey, you’ve been involved in formal initiatory orders (like the Knights Templar, Martinist or Masonic groups, etc.) as well as extensive personal practice. In your opinion, what is the value of joining an esoteric order or lineage in today’s world? How important is formal initiation, apostolic succession, or lineage transmission in spiritual growth, versus one’s own independent study and practice? For someone debating whether to join a fraternity or order, what would you say are the main benefits or potential pitfalls?** Most of today’s fraternities are deeply compromised. Most modern Freemasons sit directly on top of the holy grail of inner alchemy without even realising what they are holding.  Yet, as long as there is one mason still understanding, still practicing, the path is well and truly alive. Rosicrucian lodges, once devoted to genuine spiritual transformation, have drifted into politically correct New Age ideology, losing the depth and rigor that once defined them. Strong men and women are needed on this path, yet most people are weak followers, just reading monographs and taking over other peoples opinions. What people fail to understand is that every order, every lodge, every fraternity carries an egregore;** **a collective psychic field, and when you mingle with these groups unconsciously, you absorb their norms, limitations, and blind spots without even noticing. This is why awareness is everything. You must question everything, especially the traditions that claim to offer enlightenment. Think for yourself. Do not inherit someone else’s spiritual assumptions just because they are packaged in ritual and symbolism. And yet, initiation still has its place. It can act as a catalyst, a mirror, a moment of recognition. But never mistake the outer ceremony for inner awakening. The principle I live by is simple: **speak like everyone, think like no one.** Remain independent. Stay loyal only to truth, not to orders, hierarchies, or leaders who have long since abandoned the original purpose of their own traditions. The real path requires discernment, courage, and an uncompromising commitment to your own direct experience. **PAA: For aspiring magicians or mystics reading this – those who may be just starting out – what advice would you give them? Are there any fundamental practices or habits you believe are crucial for beginners on the esoteric path? Perhaps things you wish you had known earlier in your own development. Likewise, are there common mistakes or misconceptions you would warn new seekers to be mindful of as they delve into Hermeticism, meditation, etc.? ** First and foremost, become a strong individual. The path of the Magician is not for the faint-hearted or the politically correct spiritual tourists who crumble at the first sign of discomfort. This path demands strength, discipline, and an uncompromising commitment to inner truth. Failure will be your greatest ally, because it reveals precisely where you must grow, refine, and sharpen yourself. Study all traditions, but learn only from true masters, those who embody the work, not those who merely speak about it. Avoid influencers, fashionable authors, and self-appointed gurus who recycle shallow ideas for attention. Their teachings will distract you, dilute your focus, and waste years of your life. Understand the principle of Dependent Origination**,** the architecture of how suffering and identity arise. Understand anatta**,** the reality of non-self, because without this foundation you have no compass and no destination. You must know the goal before you begin. Otherwise, you will be trapped in the cycle of trying a new method every six months, never penetrating beyond the surface. Attend meditation retreats. Learn to be focusses, learn to meditate for several hours for many weeks. Strength, clarity, and purpose; these are the prerequisites. Everything else grows from there. > Nothing can be accomplished with the lukewarm efforts of a part-time magus. Half-heartedness is death on this path. > > Erwin Pitsch **PAA: You juggle many roles – CEO of a music company, author, teacher, and more – all while pursuing deep spiritual work. How do you balance the demands of everyday professional and family life with your spiritual practices and obligations? Do you have any personal strategies to stay grounded and avoid burnout? It would be insightful to learn how someone in your position manages to keep one foot in the material world and one in the mystical, so to speak.** Do what is necessary. At any cost. Speak the truth even if it threatens your reputation, your comfort, or your life. Fear no enemy, internal or external. And above all, do no wrong and safeguard the weak, the sick, and those who cannot stand for themselves. A true practitioner is a knight, not in symbolism, but in conduct, relentlessly seeking the Divine in every action and every breath. Nothing can be accomplished with the lukewarm efforts of a part-time magus. Half-heartedness is death on this path. Whether in spirituality or business, the real question is always the same: *How badly do you want it?* How far are you willing to go? How much of yourself are you willing to transform? I never pursued extreme wealth. What I sought, what I still seek, is balance. Money matters, yes, but only up to a certain point. Beyond that, the pursuit becomes hollow. The tragedy of the modern billionaire is the same across the board: they spend a lifetime accumulating mountains of wealth, only to realise, often too late, that none of it can save them from mortality. The moment illness arrives; the entire empire becomes meaningless. Spiritual attainment, however, is the one treasure no one can take from you. It follows you beyond this life. It shapes your consciousness, your destiny, your freedom. Wealth fades. Bodies fail. Status evaporates. But the inner work, your clarity, your realization, your expansion, remains eternal. **PAA: Finally, what’s next for you on the horizon? Are there any upcoming projects, books, or teachings that you’re working on that we should watch out for? And on a more personal note, what continues to drive you forward on this path? After decades of experience, what keeps you inspired to keep learning, teaching, and exploring the mysteries?** I have several book manuscripts at home, but *The Abundance Key* was difficult to write, not because the content is complex, but because I crafted it so it could be understood by almost anyone. The book I originally wanted to write may never see the light of day, simply because very few people are willing to face the deeper truth. Yet *The Abundance Key* delivers precisely what most Western practitioners consistently overlook. It distils a simple, essential reality, and everyone I have ever taught it to has experienced noticeable success and transformation almost immediately. The core misunderstanding is the belief that there is something to achieve, some state to force, some enlightenment to conquer, some immortality to grasp through sheer personal will. This is the great illusion. The real path begins the moment we let go of the idea that the ego can will or drag itself into liberation. Instead, we must become knights of the heart and soul**,** anchored in truth, integrity, and inner strength. We must be willing to stand our ground, to sacrifice comfort, and if necessary, even our own life for what is real. True progress is not about attainment, it is about surrender, courage, and unwavering loyalty to the deepest truth within us. Nibbana, Theosis is achieved through the process of letting go. I understand that many will take offense to my comparison between Theosis and Nibbana, Buddhism and Franz Bardon. Your own practice will prove me right ? **PAA: Erwin on behalf of Perseus and our readers I would like to thank you for what has been a very inspiring interview and hugely motivating. I for one would like to see you do that book that only a few may appreciate and I am sure there others thinking the same.** --- ## You may also enjoy https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-kabbalah-purification-an-interview-with-alexandre-moryason/ --- --- # Magic Equilibrium Throughout the Spheres by André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-equilibrium-throughout-the-spheres-by-andre-consciencia/ ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-683x1024.png) # Introduction Back when I was training within [The Order of Michael’s Grail](https://web.archive.org/web/20040323001320/http:/www.orderofmichaelsgrail.com/), the Grand Initiator told me once that each grade, corresponding to a sphere, holds a different formula of magical equilibrium. To this day, I sometimes think of this, as the solution to this charade was left a mystery, and have managed to come to results by adapting to the electric and magnetic fluid of each sphere, and balancing the cosmic letters pertaining to the spheric elements, together with other methodologies that, as is the case with these, can be found in my [books](https://hermeticmagician.com/index.php/books/).  On a larger scale, combining the spheres themselves, 10=1, 9=2, 8=3, 7=4, 6=5, 5=6, 4=7, 3=8, 2=9, and 1=10 (imagined hierarchically from 1 to 10) are obvious formulas that depict spheric volts of balance. The Earthzone overcomes Neptune at first (1=10), Uranus is ruled by the Moon (2=9), Mercury rules Saturn (3=8), Venus rules Jupiter (4=7) and so on at first, the planetary number in the left standing magnetic/passive and the planetary number in the right electric/active. As we evolve, the volts transmute so the higher leads the lower, in any case, however the numbers may be arranged, they depict the necessary balance for the progressive stages of maturity.  While this stands true, I wish to venture beyond such quantitative knowledge and other kinds of wisdom I keep to myself on the subject and move unto unknown and qualitative terrain, under the announced premise of sharing directly with the readers. For this purpose, I have set the circle and triangle, made sure to have the four elemental emperors anchored in the corners (see [A Guide to the Elementals](https://falconbookspublishing.com/product/a-guide-to-the-elementals-a-magical-study-series-volume-1/)), and adorned myself with the seal of Aschmunadai (monarch of the Earth Belt), magic belt, magus band and robe, so as to sustain the prolonged operation without any drainage. I have, upon evocation unto the triangle of the ceremonial chamber, loaded, as previously arranged, my guardian genius, guru or guide with the four divine qualities, keeping my own state of the Godhead in the background to make for a limited and relatable communication, easier to read. First, upon the final charging with omnipresence, this priest of Amon, my guide, seems to engulf and lose shape, yet gain substance without end. Called back, he returns unmarked, nameless, and without a care. And, without a care, we depart from the physical chamber to subtler venues. Table of Contents - The Zone Girdling the Earth- The Moonzone- The Zone of Mercury- The Zone of Venus- The Zone of the Sun- The Zone of Mars- The Zone of Jupiter- The Zone of Saturn- The Zone of Pluto- The Zone of Uranus- The Zone of Neptune- Conclusion- Auto-Suggestion Prayer for Magical Equilibrium on all 10 Levels (click)- Learn with Andre- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! ## The Zone Girdling the Earth ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-4-683x1024.png) As we spiral up and reform from my ceremonial chamber to the Zone Girdling the Earth, I see my transfigured guide is dressed in clothes of light and holding a burning staff. He looks at me and away to a sacrificial altar where a virginal female, naked and very white, is surrendering to the upcoming sacrifice of fire. We stand inside an oak-wood circular temple, squared by four columns of bronze, and there is an additional black pillar of consecration to the left of the altar where the woman’s heart is to be deposed.  I look inquisitively at the staff. “You are this staff”, the deity divines my unformed question. My inquisitive gaze keeps burning into the deity's eyes. “You, or anyone” he completes. “The self”, I conclude. “The Self, the first flame, when it didn’t yet consume, or needed wick or needed fuel,” the deity says.  I inspect the virgin, lost in some waking dream, prostrated on the altar, and study the cubic pillar of consecration. “Why is there a sacrifice where no wick or fuel is needed?” – “The woman is the mind, laid upon the altar of forms-ideas. The first flame of original individuality dispenses the woman that is the mind, but the woman that is the mind cannot dispense the flame of the original self, nor can the archetypal altar dispense the woman that is the mind.” I smile. “Be mindful of the readers.” -  “The self is self-sufficient, the mind is enlightened by it or perishes, but the mind may not be touched by the flame of the pure self without something to conduct the holy fire. Thus, the mind gives itself to the archetypes, providing the means of infiltration for the pure Self.” He replies and I nod.  He points at the circular temple: “This is the circle, and where you see a circle, I see a bridge, for the circle is all that stands between the inside and the outside of the circle, and to both these spaces expands. The four pillars are the known virtues of the sphynx: to Will as the Self wills itself in the first flame, to Know as the woman in the altar of sacrifice knows the form-idea of the first flame, to dare as the circle dares merge form-idea and self, and to keep silent as” he points to the pillar of consecration “we hide the Self within the duality from which the Self is not, and impregnate it so as to bear the heart of unity and the Soul.” After a moment of silence, I instigate: “How is equipoise within this frame?”, and as he answers, the circle delineating the temple seems to shimmer with his light in tune with his voice: “Self-Awareness balances Fire, Contemplation balances Air, Transcendental Devotion balances Water, and Detachment balances Earth. Once all are balanced from within, they stand equally balanced among them.” The deity points again to the black cube and I see now the heart of the woman standing upon it, translucent with light and revolving in black flame. “Fetch me the heart.” He begs. As I touch it, I have a flash of its insides. It stands as a womb and within it, a baby of white shimmering light. I pass it with some relief. The deity hooks it to the head of the staff, and it catches flame. He uses it to set the circular walls on fire. The fire spirals up, and as it consumes the walls, I see we stand in a vast plain where all that is visible is lilac-silver-white lunar light.   ## The Moonzone ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-5-683x1024.png) As I turn my gaze back from the lunar vastness, I see the woman is up within a larger-than-human goblet filled with the graceful waters of the moon. She holds a sickle of silver metal in her left hand and a pentacle in her neck. The altar and the pillar of consecration are gone.  Inquisitive, I look at the deity only to find his staff has become a golden-dark trident, as if the gold metal had been scorched by extreme fire and will. The guide pushes the trident inside his body, so that the lateral pongs exit from his temples and the central pong stands at the crown, the staff running down the spine to the coccyx. The trident changes this carefree body and it becomes white, beautiful and peaceful, red, passionate and wrathful, and black and sexually insinuating. All three coexist for a while until they finally mingle and dissolve into the radiant, boundless presence of the trident itself.  I call the deity by the name of my guardian genius, having no other reference, and see, to my satisfaction, that he responds. “I am the trident of inspiration and the lunar fires.” I nod. “What are these fires?” – “A will that knows itself with a knowledge that acts.” – “I see.” I divert my attention from the deity to meet, with shyness, the gaze of the woman, only to find that she does not seem to see beyond the Goblet of Grace except the grace reflected back from its glass. “Where you see a goblet, I see the womb of the Virgin Mary, so impregnated by Gabriel through her ears.” Speaks the trident. “So what shall our third party, reading us, be looking for?” – “The waters of the Moon, called Grace by the Church, the Knowledge that is given only by the graceful action of the knower.”  I furrow my forehead and shift attention to the crescent of her sickle. The light it reflects makes me feel like I am losing my human form and turning into a white swan.  The trident continues: “The Air of the Moon sees to it that all shape is bound to change, and such evolution is the action of knowledge.” I realize the woman is still lost in a dream. “The pentacle” continues the deity within the trident, “unveils the change, ceasing the continuous moment of the sickle, and, shape being freed from its own gravity, reveals quintessential stability in all things. Such is the Earth of the Moon.” He finishes.  I look fixedly and silently at the trident, awaiting a conclusion. “These are the operations by which will knows itself.” There is greater silence. “And the equipoise?” – “A stability that is change, a change that finds a stable rhythm. A grace that is inspired and not suffered.” I smile and ask: “Is the woman still the mind?” – “As the goblet is the soul.” After this, nothing happens, and the silver light begins to freeze. I grab the staff of the trident and am pushed upwards in a spiral.  ## The Zone of Mercury ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-11-683x1024.png) We see the bright orange sphere approach within the infinite darkness, becoming the size of a universe, and as we pierce through, the trident releases itself from my hands to fall head down, piercing a black cube, the same Pillar of Consecration met within the Earth Belt Zone. Behind the cube, the woman stands an effigy, as if petrified by the moonlight's crystallization in the sphere below. There seems to be nothing else but pulsing orange light, subtly buzzing. “This is the Earth of Mercury, and it stands as a veil meant to unveil, a secret that reveals. Push me, then, and you will open it.” I touch the trident, feeling its immense power of illumination and inspiration, and push it back. The top of the black cube detaches, and I see inside a talisman inscribed with the image of a she-devil, a pouch, and the trident itself, its presence having vanished from my hands.  Inside the box this trident remains silent, like a relic, and having no orientation I start by grabbing the she-devil talisman and an immense euphoria fills my subtle body. The engraved succubus speaks “The dynamic power of Mercury is in the Water, and it is desire: the fuel of all knowledge and the blood that irrigates the intellect.” I give the talisman back and move toward the pouch, but before I hold it, the voice of the deity speaks from it. “All the potential of Mercury is in the Air, as much as all charms are held within this bag. These are secrets of the intellect that only desire can reach. The trident to my side is but a cold and lifeless remnant of power gone, and should all desire be spent in my secrets, all that is revealed back is the fiery living trident.”  I stand in doubt for a moment. “And the woman?” I ask. The pouch whistles and starts forming words once again. “She is the often hidden longing for death. Mortals inhibit Her conquering submission within the black box. Still, breaking the pillar of consecration is greater consecration; it is accepting submission to death, and desiring death, in so doing beginning to learn from splendor.” I frown further. “Is She still the mind?” – “No longer, she is called the Akasha. I am the mind, as the she-devil of desire is the soul.” I nod.  The voice explains: “For equipoise, you purify the air by preventing thoughts from running vague and loose and devoid of sustained vitality, and this you do by encoding experience. The water shall be purified by devoting your emotions to decoding what thought has encoded. The earth shall be balanced by decoding encoded experience with refined practice, so collecting wisdom. Fire is then purified as it is abandoned, so all will is given by wisdom and none by impulse. This is the intellectual way.” From there on, the objects cease to express themselves, and only the effigy releases a silent prayer, imperceptible except as the subtle vibration of the ether. Upon waiting and seeing the deity not manifest, I decide to spiral up on my own.  ## The Zone of Venus ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-2-683x1024.png) As I stabilize in the green-emerald acid mass of light oscillation, I see the woman, sulphureous, no longer crystalized, standing over the waters of a sacred well of liquified emeralds and, levitating above the waters with her, a verdant cauldron and fire. The woman seems to be in an agitated trance, but quite compenetrated, crushing green herbs in a pestle and mortar and spitting salt from her mouth upon the cauldron.     I look for the deity but find it not, and wonder at its meaning. Suddenly, the woman's wild eyes stop on me for the first time, green, gray, red, gold, the iris flashing with a black light. “Make no mistake,” she says, but the voice washes in from all sides, “I am in everything you see.” I realize the deity is speaking, smile, and sit in the absinthe green light on one knee. “What do we have here?” I ask in a good disposition. She lifts the pestle and mortar. “The air, for the intellect here no longer divides but dissolves in the fullness of the mind, and holds thus the secret of the transmutation of all error.” She shows her saliva, made of crystal salt, and swallows it back. “This is the earth, for all sensations here are pure and vitalized.” Again, she brings forth the purity from her saliva glands and spits onto the pestle and mortar, mixing the herbs. “The transmutation of the soul. Now,” she points with the club-shaped pestle towards the sprinkling well within which the holy spirit seems to move, “the water, for all sensations here are of trance, and deconditioned. Then, we stand above these waters as we make ground upon the ever-green land of ecstasy.” At this point, she enters the cauldron with one foot and slowly retrieves it, becoming gradually made of gold. “And this is the unifying fire and will that instills the mind to dissolve thoughts, the senses to vitalize and purify, and the emotions towards ecstasy.”  She stops and looks at me, and suddenly I see in her my late grandmother, a saintly miracle worker who was one of my greatest teachers.  “Come”, she says, and regains her own form but not completely, looking as something in-between. I move, take her hand, and, levitating above the waters, wait for her push. Up we spiral.  ## The Zone of the Sun ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-10-683x1024.png) We arrive, within the Sun Zone, at a clearing created by the deity amidst the blinding light. I can see a shining mirror behind a wheel that spins the cards of the tarot. In the center of this wheel, there is a dark crystal orb with runes drawn around it: angled fork shapes flowing with energy, moving angular forms, illumining torch shapes, self-aware concentric symmetries, and spines connecting worlds.    “This proves to be an easy one for you,” tells the deity, still wearing the same aspect as in the Venus Zone, yet having lost all traits of my grandmother, the eyes having become pure white light and the shape of gold, genderless. “The mirror of fire represents Will towards itself, so that it moves towards no other object but its own nature. The wheel represents how you balance water while replacing limited emotions with intuition. The runes stand for the air element, balanced by replacing vulgar thoughts with the articulation of the cosmic letters. The all-seeing orb represents the function of earth – consciousness - dropping the ego to embrace prophecy, becoming completely prophetic in function.” She gazes, reading my mind and making sure I understand. “The activation of each aspect emanates all others by consequence.” The deity completes, and on we move towards Mars.  ## The Zone of Mars ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-1-683x1024.png) This zone today seems to present some resistance, and both I and the deity seem to become made of raw flesh and blood against the natural friction. None of us is bothered by it, and we fly towards what I can only describe as a depth-point. It looks like a minuscule wormhole surrounded by a black-gray sphere with sparks of gold, reflecting the red-ruby dry ice snow around us and seeming to change the angles outside as we look inside. We hold hands and enter. I see above me a throwing spear and below me a sword, to the sides, front and back, forming a cross, describing to the best of my ability, since we have become a 360º sphere, I envision a whip, a dagger, a knife, and a scythe. The whip is the element of air transmuted by extreme excitement, and elevated thoughts thereof. It can only be balanced by the knife of water that cuts away and detaches from all emotions. This emotional departure process is equally balanced by the intellectual excitement of Mars, represented by the whip that enthusiastically unmasks all limitations.  The dagger feels like fire, having no will but towards illumination, no matter the cost. It is balanced by the Scythe of putrefaction, which dissolves all sense of superiority. The scythe must likewise be balanced by the dagger.  The spear represents the electric fluid, balanced in the scale of Mars by continuous release. The sword represents the magnetic fluid that must be held down to be balanced and prevail in the Sphere of Mars.  Without us first leaving the depth point, the deity guides me further up.   ## The Zone of Jupiter ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-6-683x1024.png) Here the deity resumes the original form of my Guide, but wearing a gold helmet, over which is placed a royal blue and golden Nemes, he is armored in violet leather and covered in a mantle of leopard skin, the strange color of lapis lazuli, from intense violet-blue to lighter shades of sky blue, turquoise, and greenish-blue. Tied to him on his right side, we see the same staff as in the Earth Belt Zone, still with the woman’s heart lodged on top. Devised through his mantle, in his waist, a sparkling magic chain, an amulet with ashes is embroidered in his chest, binding the leopard skin and the morning star sits above his head. At his feet, boiling, there seems to be the skinned leopard he wears. There is nothing but sapphire blue oscillating in all directions, up and down.  The deity flexes his knees and extracts fat from the leopard, then opens the amulet at the chest, collecting a small amount of ash, and mixes it with the fat for soap. “The will of conscience is to solve all tied knots”, he explains with a voice coming from behind me, as if the past is evolving towards the future faster than I in the lines of time. “This is the balancing function in the air of Jupiter,” he continues, throwing me the soap. As it lands, it falls on a desert of Lapis Lazuli sand, in all the tones of his leopard skin. I look at the sky and it has similar shades, between clouds of helium and diamonds.  But my attention is lost in the star above his head. “Why would a king in Jupiter wear Venus as crown?” I ask. “Emotional vigilance, not policing, sanctifies.” He answers. “This is the water as the water should be here.” – “And the chain?” – “The chain and the amulet of ash are closely tied. Should conscience be clear and the heart sanctified, one sees the present as one would feel solved and weightless memory,” he touches the ash amulet, “and this is the balanced earth.” Where he stands, there is no sand, just a clearing of sapphire light oscillation over which he and the leopard carcass levitate. “Memories connect in time like a chain of events, but cleansed, the present connects in space like a chain of beings, a league of shared clairvoyant will men and women call Divine Providence. Such is the balance of fire.” I breathe in silence for a while and say: “I notice you come bearing the staff of the Self?” The deity smiles with lips unmoving, and unmoving the lips talk still, the voice coming from behind me to stand on my front.  “Would I not? It aligns all that I have said, but mind you, for it is fire no longer, nor is it self. Upon conjunction with the heart of the sacrifice, it is akasha, and nothing except agency of alignment: at once it resolves conscience, sanctifies feeling, removes the weight of consciousness, and delivers one from the clutch of the Lion-Serpent of the Desert to the hands of the Brotherhood of Light.”  As I am thinking of further inquiry, his eyes fix on me, celestial gray-white but warm, and I am lifted up, not in a spiral but in a direct vertical line, from the inside out.  ## The Zone of Saturn ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-7-683x1024.png) Here, the deity is the same, but his adornments, including the mantle, are all made of cords the color of lapis lazuli, and he is spinning a dark violet wheel from which he obtains such cords. From time to time, he cuts them with scissors and weighs them at golden scales against a feather. The air is vibrant with black and violet diamonds and the ground is held by a greater concentration of them. He stops, head leaning down under his hood of cords, and speaks to me. “What is it that you see, child?” – “The cords were the magic chain. And they now are understood as measure and they are, therefore, fate. But which element is it?” – “The chains were fire, and the cords are fire. Where there is will, there is measure and fate. But not everywhere there is measure and fate there is will. The first is the cause of fiery balance, the second condition, the cause of fiery imbalance.” I nod. He waits. “I can see the scissors are air, and that they cause severance, but I cannot, devoid of greater contemplation, divine their cause.” The deity laughs slightly and lightly. “Discernment. This is the principle that balances air on this scale.” I nod, and try further: “The spinning wheel is water as much as emotion is energy in motion. Will sets the goal and measure, but emotional fluidity the tissue of fate, and the fluid principle is the balancing factor.” There is a second of silence, and the deity replies, “Correct”, then waits.  “The scales are the purifying icon of the earth element; they are consciousness balancing spirit and flesh, subject and object, and justice is this balance.” The deity confirms with a barely perceptible movement. “The feather is what the staff was, the truth of the akasha, against which only pure will may be measured.”  Satisfied, the deity looks up at once and abruptly hits his sandal on the floor; the diamonds open and whirl around each other, carrying us up as we turn into light.  ## The Zone of Pluto ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-3-683x1024.png) As we penetrate the light gray oscillation ever more densely, it starts to feel and smell like methane snow. As a cloud of light, we approach like moths what seems to be a lit candle, the flame dim, spherical, ghostly blue, and soot-free. As we float around it, I notice the wax does not melt, and, catching the smoke of a thurible, we regain form. I observe how the smoke, too, expands spherically from the extremely hot tip of the incense, forming a growing cloud that lingers where it is produced, like a stationary fog. Within it, illumined by the candle, I distinguish a purple book, unlocked, and the deity, completely naked, the hair turned gray and the skin dry, holding a torch whose flame is rounded and dome-like, burning in slow motion in a steady blue glow, the smoke accumulating around the torch head. From the deity’s neck pends a key.  “Transfer your consciousness to the candle," says the deity. As I do, I become the pure experience of clairvoyance.  When I come back to myself, I observe attentively. “The book is clairaudience, the thurible is clairalience.” I pause, but soon regain. “The torch must be clairsentience or clairfeeling, for the flame touches all and quickly expands its touch, its light being even more instantaneous in its lick.” I stand in doubt regarding the key, although obviously only clairgustance is left. The deity smiles shily. “You ponder which relation the key has to the book; however, this key simultaneously locks and unlocks the book, the censor, the torch, and the candle. Clairvoyance has you watch the images of certain things; clairaudience tells you about them; clairfeeling teaches you their textures and structures; and clairalience their layers and compositions. Clairgustance, notwithstanding, speaks directly to what they are and moves towards the essence.” As the deity speaks I see the sideral space move within his mouth. “There is clairvoyance in fire, clairaudience in air, clairsentience in water, and clairalience in earth, however, nothing is to balance any of them but the key of clairgustance, for it locks their excesses by exposing essence directly. The key, then, is the akasha of the quintessence, the balancing factor for this stage. The quabbalistic letters are not the sounds of clairaudience, the colors of clairvoyance or even the sensations of clairfeeling, although these do express them. The akashic nature of the letters is known only through clairgustance, and the layering of its formulae is better unified by clairalience. This key of Pluto has not yet been taught in your sphere in the field of present history.”  After a brief moment, I look up in response. “Do you stand ready?” The deity asks.  ## The Zone of Uranus ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-683x1024.jpeg) As we move further towards the center of the universe of Uranus, the multicolored iridescent lilac oscillation becomes more and more like the vibration of diamonds, but although I was expecting a reference to land in, we remain without a clearing and apparently bodiless.  “We are not bodiless, but nor should the elements enter here, for they are an imbalanced ingredient for this structure. Observe.” The deity asks. I begin to realize that we are both made of omnidirectional, concentric spheres. “This is the physique, it is balanced by sustained purity and harmony. Would this material body travel to your world, it would be perceived as the ringing of a bell and by no other means. Search now for what inhabits it.” I look at him and see that permeating the concentric spheres that move in all directions stand expanding columns or beams that move forward and backward. “This is the soul, and the note that balances it is warm resonance. Listen to it,” the deity asks. Using clairaudience, the sound is similar to that of a drum. “Go deeper,” the deity asks.  I see controlling the beams disconnected bursts of pressure that fill the immediate area but lose their shape very quickly as they travel; however, more are constantly being generated, like an active sparkler. “The mind, balanced by its sharpness and discretion, you know it as white noise.” There is silence and I answer not. “Rhythm is the general key, and it is not locked within the quadripolarity of the elements but the tripolarity of electromagnetism. These three keys, in their corresponding planes, also reveal an enhancement for your Quabbalah, the letters are to move as depicted.”  Then, suddenly and instantly, we are at Neptune. ## The Zone of Neptune ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-9-683x1024.png) All is diamond white. I stand robed and my robe is starry. I stand girdled with a golden girdle of love. My right index finger wears an electric-blue ring, and a pagan insignia is on my breast, depicting a twisted branch. I realize I am the deity, and facing me is André Consciência as a child, curious and impenetrable. To his side is his guide, now an ancient Egyptian child from earlier in his last life.  He is on his knees, embroidered in white, and, curved, offers me jewels bound to the queens and kings of the elementals. “My child, may the magnetic kings find home in my insignia and the magnetic queens a refuge in my girdle,” I return him.   André, standing silently, approaches, leans and places a crown of gold decorated with lapis lazuli on my head. I sense within it all the prophets, demons and angels. “My child, may the electric kings find home in my ring and the electric queens a refuge in my robe.” I turn to them to read them, and ask: “Know you what these adornments are?”  “The cowrie shell girdle of Hathor is love and it balances the waters of the whole universe,” tells my guide in a devoted and musical voice.  “The white band worn across your chest opens the old ways to the ancestral source of existence, and it balances the ground of the whole universe.”  André speaks next, the voice cryptic and unchanging, almost a whisper, saying something to himself alone. “The robe is purity of mind and it balances the world. The ring is the unity of light, and it balances the world.”  I, who breathe not except by their virtue, let them breathe in and out three times before I speak: “Know then that the crown is the base, as the base is the crown.”  As the white light begins to fade, I find myself within my ceremonial chamber, the insignia is the seal of Aschmunadai I wore for authorization, the crown my magus band, the robe my magic robe and the ring the magic ring that connects me to the godhead. The gems of alliance with the four elemental emperors fill the four directions, and the girdle is my magic belt, uniting micro and macrocosm. I seem to stand alone, and proceed to close the ritual.  ## Conclusion ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-8-1024x1024.png) Each sphere encodes a formula of balance. When I wrote [Theurgy of Saturn](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-theurgy-of-saturn-akashic-inquiry-into-a-saturnine-godhead-by-andre-consciencia/) I had a student tell me he couldn’t even explain what he could not understand about it, since he could not come to terms with any of it. And I can only imagine what the case sometimes is with [Theurgy of Thoth](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-theurgy-of-thoth-writing-from-the-divine-mind-by-andre-consciencia/). I will, for this reason, extract and systematize this into a progressive table, showcasing the internal logic (electric/magnetic, elemental balancing, and qualitative shift of the “woman”/principle relationship). **The 10 Stages of Magical Equilibrium** (Progression Through the Spheres) **1. Earth Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: The Self as the original, self-sustaining fire (the so-called Ishim) Polarity: Magnetic mind (passive) offered to electric Self (active) Elemental Balance Key: *Fire: Self-awareness* *Air: Contemplation* *Water: Transcendence* *Earth: Detachment* Character Ennoblement: The mind (feminine) is sacrificed to the Self and becomes its vessel (it loses automatisms) Operation: Alignment through the four virtues (Will, Know, Dare, Silence) Sign of Success: Awakening of the Self that precedes all automatisms **2. Moon Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Dynamic stability Polarity: Electric will enters magnetic soul, generating cycles Elemental Balance Key: *Air: Evolution* *Water: Grace * *Earth: Stability through release* *Fire: Inspired will* Ennoblement of character: The mind, purified by the Self, gains Soul (the Goblet/Womb of Mary) Operation: Synchronization Sign of Success: Flow, Dao, in which stability is achieved through movement **3. Mercury Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Intellectual Transmutation Polarity: Magnetized intellect structures reality; electrified desire animates it Elemental Balance Key: *Air: Encoding (understanding experience via thought)* *Water: Decoding (understanding thought via emotion)* *Earth: Wisdom (understanding emotion by filtering experience)* *Fire: Surrendered will (freed from impulse)* Ennoblement of Character: The soul is permeated by the Akasha Operation: Encoding and decoding experience into knowledge Sign of Success: Refinement, as thought becomes power **4. Venus Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Fusion of all faculties into a single one (the so-called binding yoga) Polarity: Electric will dissolves into the magnetic totality of unity Elemental Balance Key: *Air: Dissolution of inner chatter* *Water: Trance and emotional depth* *Earth: Vitalized sensation* *Fire: Ecstatic unification* Character Ennoblement: The anima or soul expands into the total field; all becomes expressive of one principle Operation: Ecstatic Transmutation Sign of Success: Integration, as all faculties can now merge into one **5. Sun Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Centralized, self-radiant consciousness Polarity: Electric center radiates; magnetic field reflects and organizes Elemental Balance Key: *Fire: Will directed toward itself* *Air: Cosmic articulation (letters, principles)* *Water: Intuition replaces objectified emotion* *Earth: Prophetic consciousness* Ennoblement of Character: Ego-consciousness becomes a radiant functional center Operation: Systemic activation Sign of Success: Centralization, as unity radiates through all levels, remembrance of past and future lives **6. Mars Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Balance through controlled opposition of forces Polarity: Electric expansion and magnetic restraint are consciously regulated Elemental Balance Key: *Air & Water: Excitation balanced by detachment* *Fire & Earth: Illumination balanced by humility* *Electric & Magnetic: Release balanced by containment* Character Ennoblement: The self becomes energy instead of identity Operation: Complete mastery of magical equilibrium Sign of Success: Tension stabilizes power instead of destabilizing it **7. Jupiter Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Harmonization through conscience and higher intelligence Polarity: Magnetized, memory is purified; electrified, will aligns with universal order Elemental Balance Key: *Air: Resolution (untangling complexity)* *Water: Sanctified emotion* *Earth: Weightless, purified memory* *Fire: Alignment with Divine Providence* Character Ennoblement: The self becomes a conscious node within a greater intelligent order Operation: Ethical alignment and purification of memory and intention Sign of Success: Expansion, as equilibrium extends across beings and time **8. Saturn Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Measure and discernment Polarity: Electrified will establishes measure; magnetized structure becomes fate Elemental Balance Key: *Fire: Will as knowing and causing* *Air: Discernment* *Water: Emotional continuity (flow of destiny)* *Earth: Justice (objective balance)* Character ennoblement: The personality becomes aligned with the law of necessity Operation: Judgment Sign of Success: Crystallization, as balance is fixed through law **9. Pluto Zone** Principle of Equilibrium: Direct perception of essence beyond elemental mediation Polarity: All elemental perceptions dissolve into Akashic essence Elemental Balance Key: *Fire: Clairvoyance* *Air: Clairaudience* *Water: Clairsentience* *Earth: Clairalience* *Akasha: Clairgustance (direct essence, balancing key)* Character Ennoblement: Perception becomes immediate contact with essence Operation: Unifying clair-senses Sign of Success: All-Penetration, as essence replaces appearance **10. Uranus–Neptune ** Principle of Equilibrium: Total unity beyond elemental and polar structures Polarity: Polarity dissolves polarity Elemental Balance Key: *Uranus: Balance through rhythm, resonance, and the highest triune (see Neptune)* *Neptune: Balance through love, purity, and total identity* Character Ennoblement: The self becomes identical with the universal principle Operation: Pure being, resonance, and universal identity Sign of Success: Completion, equilibrium is no longer practiced but becomes what we are We should be able to recognize this magic equilibrium progression includes a stage where we begin to control the elements, a stage where, once under our control, we align these elements with cosmic law so as to, in the next stage, be able to perceive the essence of the cosmos and, further, in a final stage, become it or at one with it.    It is meant to see the structure itself is encapsulated, one way or another, within Franz Bardon’s [*Initiation Into Hermetics*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiation_Into_Hermetics)*. *It is my wish, then, that I have made this post useful for the sphere magician, who will know how to use the spheres themselves and the seals provided, and that the auto-suggestion prayer I will offer helps those threading IIH to complete it, or those who have completed it to keep the magic equilibrium it provides. Remove, thus, time and space from the subconscious and listen very closely, as much as you like:  ## Auto-Suggestion Prayer for Magical Equilibrium on all 10 Levels (click) --- ## Learn with Andre [The School of Visionary Hermeticism](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism?utm_source=chatgpt.com) — André’s most advanced structured program: a three-semester, Hermetic curriculum aimed at deep study, practice, and serious development. [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition (Levels 1–3)](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3?utm_source=chatgpt.com) — A three-level ceremonial training that blends ritual methods with Bardon-style Hermetic development. [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5)](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism%3A-levels-1-5?utm_source=chatgpt.com) — A five-level neo-shamanic training covering journeying, spirit-world work, and practical shamanic development. [Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) + Ceremonial Magic (Levels 1–3)](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-and-neo-shamanism?utm_source=chatgpt.com) — The combined bundle for students wanting both full neo-shamanic and ceremonial training. [Magic and Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd?utm_source=chatgpt.com) — A long-form initiatory path built around soul mirror work, introspection, elemental balance, and progressive inner training. [Elemental Magic: The Foundation As Taught by the Elementals](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic?utm_source=chatgpt.com) — A practical foundation course in working with Earth, Air, Fire, and Water through perception, meditation, and direct exercise. **Neo-Shamanism individual levels** - [Level 1](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism?utm_source=chatgpt.com) — Entry into André’s neo-shamanic path. - [Level 2](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-2) — Second stage of the neo-shamanic training. - [Level 3](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-3) — Third stage, continuing the spirit-world progression. - [Level 4](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-4) — Upper World work in the series. - [Level 5](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-5) — Dream Worlds, the fifth stage of the neo-shamanic curriculum. **Ceremonial Magic individual levels** - [Level 1](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-in-the-bardon-tradition) — Foundational ceremonial work in André’s Bardon-aligned approach. - [Level 2](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/B0fva) — Intermediate ceremonial development building on the first level. - [Level 3](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/owgv0) — The culminating level, centered on the Grand Ritual of Invocation. --- --- # On the Spiritual Soul of the Eternal and Invisible Rosicrucian Fraternity by Gabriel Teixeira Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/on-the-spiritual-soul-of-the-eternal-and-invisible-rosicrucian-fraternity/ ##### The Traditional Dual Commitment and Things of the Past  The Rosicrucian Fraternity, having 17 visible and active hierophants, in addition to the Sacred Council of 13, is also subdivided into many branches and centers, of which we are a part: the external and Christic sphere, whose attributes are love, service, and kindness.  Kindness, as an external means of communion with the unnamed divinity, emerges as an indirect form of fulfillment. As an internal means, we have the spirit of the divine fire, which places in the adept’s hand the living embers of initiation. And, as a secret means, we have communion with the society of the stars. This last one transforms the initiate into an adept.  My brothers, there is a path for us! There is a way for us to reach God without going through so many trials, struggles, and tribulations. In our desire to accomplish vain things, we forget the divine love that permeates our innermost being, our entire existence.  There is always above us an avalanche of blessings being prepared to pour itself upon those who seek the voice of what is pure and elevated. In all spheres, there is a celestial, sacred, and benevolent choir that looks upon the double chain, smiles, and weeps.  Among this myriad of beings, there are those who praise God and look toward what lies below: the tears of the innocent, the sorrow of the widow, and all those helpless and inconsolable creatures who believe they are alone.  At this very moment, the beings of the 72 kingdoms wait ceaselessly for the lost hope of former times. That moment in which we will think: there is something here in heaven for all of us.  There is a light made of hope and faith that longs to descend upon us at any moment.  And all of these simple and complex terminologies lead us to a very important “why.” What is the reason for all of this? What is the necessity of achieving or climbing steps within the mystical path? It may not be known to everyone, but sunlight is important for the continuation of life in all spheres. There is not only one life; there is a multiplicity of lives. And this multiplicity of lives depends upon the communion of the spheres.  All spheres commune like small vibrations within a closed environment that, though closed, is open.  This communion creates, within those who are closest to the divine light, the sensation of true fulfillment, the sensation of true completeness, the sensation of true happiness.  We say, then, on certain occasions, that without happiness magical power cannot fully develop, because it is happiness that defines the final use of this magical power. It is happiness that defines the creative means for the realization of the masterpiece, of living art.  It is through the realization of happiness that we find the path toward plenitude. And what is plenitude?  Plenitude is everything that can be achieved by the Self and, in a certain way, even by the ego. The ego must not be destroyed; the ego must be refined, educated.  Then, plenitude is like a white rose with a thousand petals, where, at its center, dwells a beautiful fairy of luminous golden color, exhaling the perfume of the sun: the perfume of life.  My brothers, in this remote time in which we now live, there still remains within us the desire for life, for happiness, for plenitude, and for hope. We must not grow weary on our path. We must not lose faith in our innate aptitudes.  We must not forget the Lord of the Zone of the Sun. --- --- # Sixty Skills: Learn Key Skills from Magical, Yogic and Meditative Traditions – 18 Month Curriculum Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-learn-key-skills-from-magical-yogic-and-meditative-traditions-18-month-curriculum/ ##### 2026 UPDATE: We now have a new and improved page showcasing EVERY course in the 5-pillar curriculum. HERE.   We are extremely happy to have [*Sixty Skills*](http://www.sixtyskills.com) on Perseus Arcane Academy ([Previously on Udemy](https://www.udemy.com/user/sixty-skills/)). After conducting many interviews with the [founder](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/sixty-skills/), the feedback for these interviews has always been incredible. There are not many out there who have the experience and the ability to communicate clearly exactly what to do, how to do it and how to ensure ongoing progress rather than getting stuck and fixated on specific practices. The *Sixty Skills* curriculum is liberating as it opens these teachings to anyone willing to put the hours in. On this page we have included the description of all courses available in the 18-month curriculum and a direct link to the individual course. We also offer the opportunity to purchase all of the *Sixty Skills* curriculum in one purchase - the [Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) - for those who are interested we are offering a generous discount. If you would like to learn more about Bob the founder of *Sixty Skills* then you can check his [teacher page](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/sixty-skills/) and also previous interviews on Perseus Arcane Academy: [Interview 1](https://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-kabbalah-evocation-the-outer-planets-with-bob-from-sixty-skills), [Interview 2,](https://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-interview-the-living-crystal-stacking-the-sephirot-and-the-trials-of-hercules) as well as my own experience of the Master Course [here](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-master-course-expediting-franz-bardons-initiation-into-hermetics/).  ![Sixty Skills](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_8f167e834e004376a9e3fea8bbbac9ae~mv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_230,h_230,al_c,q_80/file.png) ## What is SixtySkills ### The Story [Sixty Skills](http://www.sixtyskills.com) is transforming the traditional transmission of meditative, and yogic, instruction from one of master to disciple to a modern online learning format. Sixty Skills has covered the globe and over a thirty-year period derived the key techniques from all the major schools of Buddhism, Hermetics, Hindu-Yogic, and Taoist practice. Sixty Skills brings yogic, and meditative, instruction into the 21st century. No more kneeling at the feet of the master. All of the primary skills needed to engage any of the various meditative phenomena are available here via distance learning. If you have the work ethic, then no secrets are necessary. --- ### What is the Master Course? The Master Course allows you to purchase ALL of the courses in the 18-month curriculum, the reason to do this is to obtain a big saving and secure access to everything you need to take you from zero experience to a level of proficiency where you can generate your own Akasha and Non Dual Light ([See the importance of that here](https://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-kabbalah-evocation-the-outer-planets-with-bob-from-sixty-skills)), as well as invoke and evoke with a full understanding of the underlying mechanisms leaving you free to explore the magical universe. You will know how to wield the elements, create rituals, charge objects and magical spaces, perform evocations and so much more...you will know how to do these things and you will know why it works. The Master Course is the best option for serious students, as it provides a ***generous discount.*** If you were to buy each course separately, it would cost you $1,500. However, by purchasing "The Master Course," you can get access to all the courses at a discounted price of only $900. This means ***you save $600*** by buying the master course. Additionally, with inflation, the price of individual courses is likely to increase in the future. By purchasing the master course, you secure access to everything you need to learn magic at a lower cost and avoid paying more later on. It contains the ENTIRE 18-Month curriculum, over 30 separate courses giving you everything you need with structure and clear communication to bring success. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity to unlock your full potential - sign up for the Master Course today! ### Simply choose the Master Course Bundle, save $600 and get access to all courses --- ## Curriculum The curriculum comprises 10 levels that span over a period of 18 months, providing students with a comprehensive set of skills (numbered 1-67) necessary for the development of their Physical, Astral, and Mental bodies. The entire curriculum, along with links to each course, has been listed in this post. Please note that some courses are repeated across multiple levels for the sake of efficiency as multiple skills have been combined into one convenient course. Prior to enrolling in a course, please ensure that you possess the necessary required skills, which are provided on the courses page. Additionally, we recommend viewing the preview videos to gain insight into the course's content. If you have any inquiries regarding the suitability of a course or where to begin, please do not hesitate to [contact us](https://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/contact). However, we suggest following the curriculum sequentially or purchasing all courses through the "Master Course" for optimal learning. UPDATE: Since the publication of this post we have created [this post](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-five-part-curriculum/) on the 5 part curriculum of Sixty Skills explaining how it follows the explanation from Franz Bardon in Key to the True Kabbalah and here is a [new video](https://youtu.be/cdCUS5zRlOo?si=DPrds8rzhmALBxv2) where Bob explains it all and a [transcript of that here](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-curriculum-explained/).  ### Level 1 - Mental 1: View Thought 2: Single Point of Focus 3: Thought Vacuity 4: Merge with light ### How to Concentrate Watching your thoughts, focusing on a single object, observing emptiness and merging with light are all fundamental techniques used in teaching people how to concentrate. Contrary to popular believe, most people never learn how to concentrate. It is a skill. A valuable skill and one that takes effort to achieve. But learning how to concentrate has put men on the moon, build railroads, forged empires, bored holes thru the face of reality and created virtually everything that most people value. Even animals know how to do this in their own way. Yet the modern world seems dead set on destroying this ability in most people. Nonstop entertainment and distracting lights scattered everywhere are commonplace beyond measure. Paying attention, and the accompanying ability to focus, turns this noise off. You find yourself calmer, more poised and better prepared to handle your day. With time, you will figure out what it is you want to do with you. Learning how to concentrate is the first stage in learning how to take control of your life and liberating yourself. A wiser man said, “free your mind and your ass will follow.” Sixty Skills is impartial to the series of events as long as you do eventually succeed. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in magic, yoga or witchcraft - Anyone who wants to learn how to concentrate - Anyone who has trouble focusing - Anyone who has trouble paying attention https://youtu.be/LIhxO98wEIk [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 1 - Astral 5: Pore Breathing/vital 6: Secret Smile/Programming of Energy ### Building the Chi Ball Never has there been a more clear and concise method describing the process and steps of building the energetic ball. In many schools of western and eastern tradition, this skill is briefly covered and then moved on from. Little do many beginners and instructors know, this simple exercise can unlock the secrets to energetic sensitivity into a whole new phenomenal universe. Once you gain the keys to unlock this capacity using the skills discussed in this learning experience, you will be forever free of what kept you behind in the past. We are at a crossroads of intuition and understanding. By taking this course, you have nothing to lose and so much clarity to gain. Our courses with students have led to a refining of their sensitivity and consciousness. By exploring the sensations of the technique and unveiling our layers of sensitivity, we become leaps and measure closer to a path of self-actualization. If you are feeling excited by the possibilities for massive growth and improvement, sign up today! ### Who this course is for: - Individuals who enjoy learning new skills - Sensitive people who want to be more internally balanced - Seekers seeking self-mastery - Searchers who want to unlock the secrets to internal power https://youtu.be/wzPayQG6-co [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### What is the Secret Smile It is an ancient technique that can be used to rewrite your personal belief and background energy. This will allow you to take control of your emotions, energy and responses to the world any time you like. Long used in monasteries as a way of overcoming attachments to the world, this is now available to everyone. Contrary to popular belief most people historically did not end up in religious orders for the sake of finding divinity. Earning an education, a guaranteed meal or escaping other problems in society were far more common. As a result, many of those coming into closed orders had a variety of what can charitably be called “issues.” The Secret Smile was a convenient way to deal with life’s traumas that made people more apt to get along. Especially those from radically different backgrounds. Nothing diffuses a difficult situation like feeling good. Fundamentally, the Secret Smile technique utilizes pleasure to drive personal evolution and you can use this to drive your own development! A few minutes per day is all that is needed. So come join Sixty Skills for this adventure and drive your own personal development, happiness and success forward using the wisdom of the ages. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in magic, yoga or witchcraft - Anyone who wants to improve their health - Anyone who wants to change who they are https://youtu.be/9UT_yvri2JM [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 1 - Physical 7: Electric Static 8: Magnetic Static ### What are the Electric and Magnetic Lines of Force? It is an ancient technique that can be used to train the ligaments, tendons and fasciae tissue in your body. Classically the use of these developed Yin and Yang. Sensationally these will unlock the expansive and drawing powers within the body. Why is this useful? The postures in most modern forms of yoga, and the long forms of traditional martial arts, are hollow without this simple skill. Easy to learn, it has remained hidden throughout most human history. It is the key that unlocks every door. When working with elemental meditations these forces further split into fire, air, water and earth. The electric, and magnetic, lines of force can also be used to define any number of subtle energies within the body and enhance their functioning. These include things like the planetary energies and the letters of the Kabbalah. On a purely physical level, learning how to work with the tendons in the body this way leads to great personal strength and durability over time. The static version of these exercises is the first in a series of training techniques that involve twisting, throwing, resistance and walking. So come join Sixty Skills for this adventure and drive your own personal development, happiness and success forward using the wisdom of the ages. ### Who this course is for: - anyone who wants to learn yoga - anyone who wants to learn meditation - anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - anyone who wants to learn magic - anyone who wants to learn spirituality - anyone who wants to learn magick https://youtu.be/_XFFHXklkrU [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 2 - Mental 9: Autosuggestion (i.e. the mala method) ### Auto Suggestion: What is the Mala Method? It is an ancient technique that can be used to rewrite your personal habits and beliefs. This will allow you to take control of your most deeply engrained personal behaviors. Long used in monasteries as a way of overcoming attachments to the world, this is now available to everyone. Contrary to popular belief most people historically did not end up in religious orders for the sake of finding divinity. Earning an education, a guaranteed meal or escaping other problems in society were far more common. As a result, many of those coming into closed orders had a variety of what can charitably be called “issues.” The Mala Method was a convenient way to deal with “inconvenient” personal habits. It is also a powerful tool for self-transformation. Taking as little as 15 minutes per day a practitioner can completely rewrite their underlying programming on their own terms. Most people find profound differences in their behavior utilizing this technique in as little as thirty days. Fundamentally, the Mala Method utilizes the power of your subconscious to drive personal evolution and you can use this to drive your own development! So come join Sixty Skills for this adventure and drive your own personal development, happiness and success forward using the wisdom of the ages. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in magic, yoga or witchcraft - Anyone who wants to be healthier - Anyone who wants to change themselves -   https://youtu.be/mK2udqlR0MY [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 2 - Astral 10: Astral Breathing 11: Training Clairvoyance via breath 12: Training Clairaudience via breath 13: Training Clairgustance via breath (i.e. taste) ### How to Breath Astral Energy? Loosely speaking, it is the energy of the breath. Breath control and its interaction with the body form the basis of how astral energy is both generated and worked with. The accompanying states of Matter, Energy, Space and Time (MEST) greatly influence the experience of astral energy as well. This course details what astral energy is, its relationship to MEST, how it is experienced and trained. Additionally, the course details ways it can be utilized, the limits of that utilization and, most importantly, how it may be increased. The concept of MEST plays an important role in meditation and metaphysics write large. The role of astral energy within this construct is a crucial one to bridge the abstract world of the mental with the concrete world of the physical. Understanding this bridge creates a powerful, and liberating, ability to build the life you want. Additionally, understanding the role of astral energy in terms of sensation, and emotion, further empowers a practitioner to take charge of their life. This active role in the life of the practitioner takes on greater importance as their work with the astral deepens. Finally, learning to work with the astral sets the stage for working with the mental level of reality and its associated energies. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone. -   https://youtu.be/MkMVcZrhDgo [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Developing Clairvoyance, Clairaudience and Claireaugstance What are the subtle senses? The subtle senses are clairvoyance (sight), clairaudience (hearing), clairsentience (touch) and clairgustance (smell and taste). These skills are the gateway to meditative and esoteric practice. Quite literally if you cannot see, hear and touch the subtle world it does not exist for you. The process of doing this is clearly described for the first time ever in this course. The techniques, while not complicated, do require real effort and this is also detailed in the course as well. Anyone can learn how to do this not just the lucky few who are gifted with these abilities by accident, fate, fortune or just plain luck. Additionally, the different kinds of subtle senses and how these are trained are also included. This explains why so many different kinds of clairvoyance are mentioned by others and the fact is that they are not all the same. Issues that involve lifestyle and esoteric hygiene are further described along with reasons why someone may not want to develop some of these senses. Those are frequently left out when getting into the issue of their development. So come join Sixty Skills for this adventure and drive your own personal development, happiness and success forward using the wisdom of the ages. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in yoga - Anyone interested in magic - anyone interested in magick - anyone interested in evocation - anyone interested in psychic powers - anyone interested in siddhis https://youtu.be/99l1sXxrIEA [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 2 - Physical 14: Electric with Twist 15: Magnetic with Twist ### Training the Electric/Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement A man balancing on the tip of a finger. A tai chi master gliding thru the long form. Never suffering from back pain again. Dissolving post-surgical adhesions. A martial arts master pushing his finger thru a brick. Being thrown a dozen feet and landing softly and without injury. Steel wrapped in cotton…. All of these are examples of things that can come from properly training the ligaments, tendons, and fasciae. Their integration greatly enhances strength and neuromuscular recruitment in practitioners as well as maintains it into great age. Techniques of this kind were long held secrets of the martial masters, but they also play a big role in what some would term enlightenment. It turns out these subtle energies in the body move via this kind of soft tissue and its further refinements in the subtle realm. Training these tissues makes things like out of body experience easier to achieve. It also greatly increases the sensation and movement of subtle energies in systems like tai chi and chi gung for those that practice energy work based systems. Energy healers as well as yoginis and bodyworkers of any kind will find learning these techniques to be extremely valuable. As will anyone wishing to maintain supple tendons well into old age. So come join Sixty Skills on this adventure and learn how to train the Electric and Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in yoga - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone who wants to control back pain - Anyone interested in Hermetics - Anyone who wants to train the elements - Anyone who wants to train the planetary energies - Anyone who wants to train the letters of Franz Bardon's Kabbalah - Anyone who wants to develop psychic powers - Anyone who wants to do energy work https://youtu.be/Vxe4PaVCTeY [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 3 - Mental 16: Mental Energy ### How to Generate Mental Energy What is mental energy? Mental energy comes from the power of your consciousness. In many ways it is your consciousness. While it is powered by the strength of your physical energy, it is also you. This course teaches you how to work with your mental energy directly. This will make you more connected to your environment, give you more energy to get things done, enhance learning and make your life better. It will also allow you to separate the emotional nature of your experiences from their ideas behind what is happening. How do I work with mental energy? Generally speaking, this is done by working with the breath. In the beginning this will be a simple seated practice that takes a few minutes a day. This will rapidly become something you can engage with whenever you need it. It does not matter if you are planning a schedule at work, trying to solve a math problem, enhance your learning in school or trying to understand a difficult child. All of these applications will quickly become yours. And this is an application for something that you will have for the rest of your life. It does not matter if you are just starting out life or are in your nineties. Anyone can learn how to work with their mental energy. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone wanting more mental energy - Anyone studying yoga - Anyone who want to be more efficient - Anyone who wants to get more done - Anyone who wants to understand their environment -   https://youtu.be/iA6OOQC05no [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 3 - Astral 17: Training sight with single phenomenan 18: Training sound with single phenomena 19: Training touch with single phenomena 20: Training taste with single phenomena 21: Training smell with single phenomenan ### Creating Your Life's Movie If your life were a film, would anyone watch it? Would you find it boring or a tale of epic adventure? Active visualization is often used by success coaches to get clients to create the world they want to live in. But that visualization often leaves a lot out. Would you really watch a film with no sound or subtitles? Likewise training the various subtle skills in meditation are what allows a practitioner to communicate with the other parts of existence. As one of the big secrets in magic is that anything visualized strongly enough on the astral will eventually become reality in the material if it is physically possible and is given enough effort. In this course you will use your skill of imagination to create other worlds and in do so finally be able to grasp what has always been just outside your line of sight waiting for you. A useful skill for fiction authors as well as meditators results in a practitioner developing fully formed worlds and as a result seeing those things that conventional reality says aren’t there. In doing so, you will realize that the conventional model of reality while largely accurate has a few holes, and gaps, in its thoughts on what is, and is not, possible. In doing to you will be able to more fully engage reality in its entirety. So, come join Sixty Skills on this epic adventure and turn your life into the film it always should have been even if you couldn’t quite see it before. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone interested in magick - Anyone interested in evocation - Anyone interested in witchcraft - Creating a film of their life - Understanding their environment - Understanding cognitive dissonance - Anyone interested in multi sensory manipulation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNW-5By6Xks [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level 3 - Physical 22: Electric with throwing 23: Magnetic with throwing ### Training the Electric/Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement A man balancing on the tip of a finger. A tai chi master gliding thru the long form. Never suffering from back pain again. Dissolving post-surgical adhesions. A martial arts master pushing his finger thru a brick. Being thrown a dozen feet and landing softly and without injury. Steel wrapped in cotton…. All of these are examples of things that can come from properly training the ligaments, tendons, and fasciae. Their integration greatly enhances strength and neuromuscular recruitment in practitioners as well as maintains it into great age. Techniques of this kind were long held secrets of the martial masters, but they also play a big role in what some would term enlightenment. It turns out these subtle energies in the body move via this kind of soft tissue and its further refinements in the subtle realm. Training these tissues makes things like out of body experience easier to achieve. It also greatly increases the sensation and movement of subtle energies in systems like tai chi and chi gung for those that practice energy work based systems. Energy healers as well as yoginis and bodyworkers of any kind will find learning these techniques to be extremely valuable. As will anyone wishing to maintain supple tendons well into old age. So come join Sixty Skills on this adventure and learn how to train the Electric and Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in yoga - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone who wants to control back pain - Anyone interested in Hermetics - Anyone who wants to train the elements - Anyone who wants to train the planetary energies - Anyone who wants to train the letters of Franz Bardon's Kabbalah - Anyone who wants to develop psychic powers - Anyone who wants to do energy work https://youtu.be/Vxe4PaVCTeY [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Four - Mental 24: Two fold visualization (i.e. the clock exercise) ### Creating Your Life's Movie If your life were a film, would anyone watch it? Would you find it boring or a tale of epic adventure? Active visualization is often used by success coaches to get clients to create the world they want to live in. But that visualization often leaves a lot out. Would you really watch a film with no sound or subtitles? Likewise training the various subtle skills in meditation are what allows a practitioner to communicate with the other parts of existence. As one of the big secrets in magic is that anything visualized strongly enough on the astral will eventually become reality in the material if it is physically possible and is given enough effort. In this course you will use your skill of imagination to create other worlds and in do so finally be able to grasp what has always been just outside your line of sight waiting for you. A useful skill for fiction authors as well as meditators results in a practitioner developing fully formed worlds and as a result seeing those things that conventional reality says aren’t there. In doing so, you will realize that the conventional model of reality while largely accurate has a few holes, and gaps, in its thoughts on what is, and is not, possible. In doing to you will be able to more fully engage reality in its entirety. So, come join Sixty Skills on this epic adventure and turn your life into the film it always should have been even if you couldn’t quite see it before. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone interested in magick - Anyone interested in evocation - Anyone interested in witchcraft - Creating a film of their life - Understanding their environment - Understanding cognitive dissonance - Anyone interested in multi sensory manipulation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNW-5By6Xks [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Four - Astral 25: Fire element with entire body 26: Water element with entire body 27: Air element with entire body 28: Earth element with entire body 29: Pore breathing into specific body parts 30: Space impregnation ### Training the Four Elements (Fire, Air, Water and Earth) Since the time of the Phoenicians, who taught the Egyptians, who then taught the Greeks, its transmission to India via the followers of Pythagoras and finally on to the Tibetans, this method has been a closely guarded secret. It is now available to anyone who cares to learn it. How do you train the four elements (fire, air, water and earth)? You need three-part concentration. What is three-part concentration? It is the ability to simultaneously hold onto a color, sound and sensation. To the degree magic exits in the world…this is it. Three-part concentration is the key that unlocks every door. Training the Elements is a crash course in how magic actually works. Forget asking a spirit to do your bidding, the use of long-standing egregores via ancient rituals, making deals, begging favors or wishing for something to happen. Here you will learn to engage in an act of raw creation. Of bringing things into form. Here you act in the image of the creator. The path of the magician unfolds itself here. For the first time since the death of Franz Bardon, as Prometheus gave fire to man, Sixty Skills gives three-part concentration to anyone willing to do the work. Will you take up the challenge? ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to learn witchcraft - Anyone who wants to control the elements https://youtu.be/uQ4w10_HOsc [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Room Impregnation: Filling Your Sacred Space Why do some places feel special? Is this something that just happened or is this something someone made happen? How does someone make this happen? Room impregnation is an ancient technique used by meditators, saints and yogis of old to charge a location to make it better support a specific activity. That can be something you can learn how to do today! It does not matter if you want a place to improve the healing of patients, be a better place to study or simply support your meditation. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. While simple in terms of technique the applications are quite literally endless. So, learn to use your internal power to shape your world. Additionally, the course covers the creation of sacred objects using subtle energy. You are literally brining something into form by using the power of sensation. While subtle, for the most part, these effects build over time and can become quite profound. This is how many energy healers of old worked. For students of Hermetics, particularly the Franz Bardon school, this will also provide preliminary information on the creation of elementaries and volting. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to create your sacred space! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to practice meditation - Anyone who wants to practice yoga - Anyone who wants to create a sacred space - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn witchcraft - Anyone who wants to be a magician - Anyone who wants to be a witch - Anyone who wants to build a temple - Anyone who wants to be a better healer - Anyone who wants to be a better student https://youtu.be/j_9GiWWGjkU [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Four - Physical 31: Electric with resistance 32: Magnetic with resistance ### Resistance Training for Magicians: The Yoga of Strength The Yoga of Strength… Using resistance training to enhance subtle energy is a very old art. In fact, it may be the one of the oldest forms of energetic training. People tend to forget that the Buddha was originally a member of the Kshatriya caste. He most certainly utilized resistance training to enhance the meditative, and yogic work, members of his class engaged in. The ways of doing this vary greatly over time from stone locks to kettlebells to elastic bands to barbells. Even stationary objects can be utilized. Your imagination is the only limit to this training once you understand the fundamentals of how to generate the lines of force used. This enhanced energy can then be applied to other energetic based meditations involving things like the elements and the planets. By training the Yoga of strength you will improve all aspects of your energetic, meditative, magical and yogic endeavors. This includes access to the more subtle levels of existence. The simple truth is that a strong body generates strong energy. And strong energy makes all forms of meditative work easier. Come join Sixty Skills for an introduction to the electric and magnetic lines of force and the Yoga of Strength. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation, yoga, magic and subtle energy - Anyone who wants more energy - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in chi - Anyone interested in qi https://youtu.be/oggVqA4TEJg [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Five - Mental 35: Three transformations (physical to astral to mental) 36: Releasing exercises ### The Three Transformations: How to Convert Your Energies The ancient Chinese sages spoke of jing, chi and shen. The Hermeticists of old spoke of vital, astral and mental energies. Both spoke of ways to convert one energy into another. And the Three Transformations were born! Ever wonder how to do this exactly? Wonder no more. It turns out this is not some mysterious thing that exists only for the greatest of saints. All the details behind how to convert one of the basic natal energies into another, why you would want to perform the Three Transformation and the various issues involved are included in this Sixty Skills course. This course details how to go from more gross, or physical, energies to more subtle energies and back again. It also discusses how to use these energies and what the various transformations do for you. Issue of passive, versus active, development and where to place the various energies are also brought up. While many consider these things to be a part of a long dead past, the reality is that none of this stuff ever left humanity. It has been here all along. That is not to say it is easy to do or something to be taken lightly. So, join Sixty Skills today and learn how to engage in the fine art of the Three Transformations. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who want to learn the three transformations - Anyone who wants to learn yoga - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn wicca - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - Anyone who wants to learn how to get more done - Anyone who wants to feel more alive https://youtu.be/jsEeDATliIw [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Five - Astral 37: Fire to head 38: Water to abdomen 39: Air to chest 40: Earth to legs ### Establishment of Equilibrium: The Four Elements and Magic Gateway to the Void/Akasha and the jumping off point to Non-Dual Light, Enlightenment, Man as a Creator, the heart of true magic…all of these come from the establishment of equilibrium. Many ways exist to do this. One of the most reliable, and friendly to the body, is the use of the four elements. By banding these into the body you enter a state of supreme poise and balance. At this point the fire, air, water and earth elements within the body snap into place and you are propelled into this state of equanimity. Herein equanimity is where true magic can manifest. At this point the magician is the balance point on which the scales rest. The fulcrum the universe lies upon. Here the door of perception open and the Void, sometimes referred to as Akasha, howls. Out of this original emptiness duality flows, the electric and the magnetic, the elements and Taoism’s 10,000 things. As the balance point between non-dual light, the light of complete reality and the manifestation of all things it is a crucial point in meditative and magical development. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to Establish Equilibrium! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who want to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to experience equilibrium - Anyone who wants to learn the system of Franz Bardon - Anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - Anyone who wants to experience the Void / Akasha -   https://youtu.be/1_swLDHknC8 [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Five - Physical 41: Electric with walking 42: Magnetic with walking ### Training the Electric/Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement A man balancing on the tip of a finger. A tai chi master gliding thru the long form. Never suffering from back pain again. Dissolving post-surgical adhesions. A martial arts master pushing his finger thru a brick. Being thrown a dozen feet and landing softly and without injury. Steel wrapped in cotton…. All of these are examples of things that can come from properly training the ligaments, tendons, and fasciae. Their integration greatly enhances strength and neuromuscular recruitment in practitioners as well as maintains it into great age. Techniques of this kind were long held secrets of the martial masters, but they also play a big role in what some would term enlightenment. It turns out these subtle energies in the body move via this kind of soft tissue and its further refinements in the subtle realm. Training these tissues makes things like out of body experience easier to achieve. It also greatly increases the sensation and movement of subtle energies in systems like tai chi and chi gung for those that practice energy work based systems. Energy healers as well as yoginis and bodyworkers of any kind will find learning these techniques to be extremely valuable. As will anyone wishing to maintain supple tendons well into old age. So come join Sixty Skills on this adventure and learn how to train the Electric and Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in yoga - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone who wants to control back pain - Anyone interested in Hermetics - Anyone who wants to train the elements - Anyone who wants to train the planetary energies - Anyone who wants to train the letters of Franz Bardon's Kabbalah - Anyone who wants to develop psychic powers - Anyone who wants to do energy work -   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxe4PaVCTeY [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Six - Mental 43: Transference of consciousness ### Transference of Consciousness and the Grain of Sand Where does your mind end and consciousness begin? Is most of reality just empty space? Are we really just limited to our physical body or is mind something else? All of these are very old questions. Probably older than the written word. Strict materialists will tell you, that you are just clump of cells who have no meaning, or existence, beyond the moment you are in right now. Fortunately, this is completely untrue. Even more fortunately, the methods to explore this are not even very complicated. In this course you will learn how to project your consciousness, and this will open entire new worlds up to you. Even more intriguingly you will learn just how empty, and by extension full, reality really is. What lies in a grain of sand? And what are the implications of what you find once you look inside? Just how seriously should you take someone who argues life is just matter as a result of what you find? All these questions and more will be answered here. And it only takes is 15 minutes per day. So, come join Sixty Skills on this epic adventure and come see reality as it always has been even if you couldn’t quite see it before. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone who wants to learn how to concentrate - Anyone who has trouble focusing - Anyone studying yoga - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone interested in magick - Anyone interested in Akasha - Anyone interested in Hermetics - Anyone interested in witchcraft - Anyone interested in learning about the structure of reality -   https://youtu.be/zopPQyH17TA [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Six - Astral 44: Elements to fill room from solar plexus 45: Elements as ball from solar plexus 46: Elements in a room from universe 47: Elements as a ball in a room from universe ### Room Impregnation: Filling Your Sacred Space Why do some places feel special? Is this something that just happened or is this something someone made happen? How does someone make this happen? Room impregnation is an ancient technique used by meditators, saints and yogis of old to charge a location to make it better support a specific activity. That can be something you can learn how to do today! It does not matter if you want a place to improve the healing of patients, be a better place to study or simply support your meditation. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination. While simple in terms of technique the applications are quite literally endless. So, learn to use your internal power to shape your world. Additionally, the course covers the creation of sacred objects using subtle energy. You are literally brining something into form by using the power of sensation. While subtle, for the most part, these effects build over time and can become quite profound. This is how many energy healers of old worked. For students of Hermetics, particularly the Franz Bardon school, this will also provide preliminary information on the creation of elementaries and volting. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to create your sacred space! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to practice meditation - Anyone who wants to practice yoga - Anyone who wants to create a sacred space - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn witchcraft - Anyone who wants to be a magician - Anyone who wants to be a witch - Anyone who wants to build a temple - Anyone who wants to be a better healer - Anyone who wants to be a better student -   https://youtu.be/j_9GiWWGjkU [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Six - Physical 48: Astral Walking ### Astral Walking Learning to move your energy with body is one of the oldest energy work techniques on record. It can be done fast or slow. For martial arts or healing. But what are the different ways to do this and why should you do this? Walking your way into your own power is a fundamental, and primal, way of experiencing your own world. Now you just aren’t immersed in the elements, you are the elements. Long used by Theraveda monks of the Forest Wat tradition to cover vast distances with tiring this technology is now available to you. With this you will truly feel what it is to walking in the timeless world of the astral. And it something you can do anywhere you wish anytime you want. This is not mere fantasy, but a visceral reality for those who take the time to learn it. And it is a lifetime skills as well. In short, a crash course in how to actively use the energy of your body by directing it with your body will be made available to you. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to astral walk! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn to meditate - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn energy work -   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttkd7iI9BrA [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Seven - Mental 49: Center point exercise (i.e. grain of sand) ### Transference of Consciousness and the Grain of Sand Where does your mind end and consciousness begin? Is most of reality just empty space? Are we really just limited to our physical body or is mind something else? All of these are very old questions. Probably older than the written word. Strict materialists will tell you, that you are just clump of cells who have no meaning, or existence, beyond the moment you are in right now. Fortunately, this is completely untrue. Even more fortunately, the methods to explore this are not even very complicated. In this course you will learn how to project your consciousness, and this will open entire new worlds up to you. Even more intriguingly you will learn just how empty, and by extension full, reality really is. What lies in a grain of sand? And what are the implications of what you find once you look inside? Just how seriously should you take someone who argues life is just matter as a result of what you find? All these questions and more will be answered here. And it only takes is 15 minutes per day. So, come join Sixty Skills on this epic adventure and come see reality as it always has been even if you couldn’t quite see it before. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone who wants to learn how to concentrate - Anyone who has trouble focusing - Anyone studying yoga - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone interested in magick - Anyone interested in Akasha - Anyone interested in Hermetics - Anyone interested in witchcraft - Anyone interested in learning about the structure of reality -   https://youtu.be/zopPQyH17TA [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Seven - Astral 50: Equilibrium exercise with elements ### Establishment of Equilibrium: The Four Elements and Magic Gateway to the Void/Akasha and the jumping off point to Non-Dual Light, Enlightenment, Man as a Creator, the heart of true magic…all of these come from the establishment of equilibrium. Many ways exist to do this. One of the most reliable, and friendly to the body, is the use of the four elements. By banding these into the body you enter a state of supreme poise and balance. At this point the fire, air, water and earth elements within the body snap into place and you are propelled into this state of equanimity. Herein equanimity is where true magic can manifest. At this point the magician is the balance point on which the scales rest. The fulcrum the universe lies upon. Here the door of perception open and the Void, sometimes referred to as Akasha, howls. Out of this original emptiness duality flows, the electric and the magnetic, the elements and Taoism’s 10,000 things. As the balance point between non-dual light, the light of complete reality and the manifestation of all things it is a crucial point in meditative and magical development. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to Establish Equilibrium! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who want to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to experience equilibrium - Anyone who wants to learn the system of Franz Bardon - Anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - Anyone who wants to experience the Void / Akasha https://youtu.be/bChQbOWFn0E [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Seven - Physical 51: Power Walking with weights ### Power Walking with Weights: The Walk of the Magicians Learning to move your energy with body is one of the oldest energy work techniques on record. It can be done fast or slow. For martial arts or healing. But what are the different ways to do this and why should you do this? Walking your way into your own power is a fundamental, and primal, way of experiencing your own world. Long used by warriors of old to cover vast distances without tiring this technology is now available to you. Just by trading in a leather shield and spear for a pair of dumbbells. The Egyptians, Phoenicians and Tibetans all knew this trick. First reintroduced by Steve Reeves, and popularized by Dr. Leonard Schwartz, the power of resistance based walking in its true original form is back. And it something you can do anywhere you wish anytime you want. Combine a great cardio workout with pore breathing and you are working real magic. This is not mere fantasy, but a visceral reality for those who take the time to learn it. And it is a lifetime skills as well. In short, a crash course in how to actively use the energy of your body by directing it with your body will be made available to you. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to power walk! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to increase their cardiovascular fitness - Anyone who wants to learn energy work - Anyone who wants to increase their energy levels - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to lose weight https://youtu.be/DPX1hyu12oQ [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Eight - Mental 52: Zero point exercise ### The Zero Point: Out of Body Projection for People Who Can't Have you tried for years to have an out of body experience (OBE) and failed? Mental wandering, astral projection and guided meditations are all a bust for you? Are people just imagining this is happening? Is this all a bunch of stoned dirty hippies making stuff up? In this Sixty Skills course anyone can learn how to project…assuming you can do the Three Releases and Establish Equilibrium with the Elements, you can learn the fundamental techniques used to do all of this and more. The truth of the matter is that not everyone is physically designed to project out of their head into the great beyond. And for this you do not need any psychedelics either. Especially well-grounded people make fantastic athletes, soldiers, strongmen and engineers. They have a really hard time getting their mind to float off however as a result of this. If you enjoyed the previous coursework on the Transference of Consciousness and the Grain of Sand Exercise, you will particularly enjoy this coursework as well. Also, using the Zero Point Method gets you access to your own internal temple on the astral plane. This allows you to carry your own sacred space around with you. Inside this you will find a world of discoveries ranging from past lives to hidden temple complexes to all manner of wonders. More importantly, you will be introduced to an extremely effective way to make use these things in the real world when you need to use them. All of which will greatly accelerate and improve the effectiveness of any technique used regardless of background. Also, this training system has been stripped off all its religious components, as well as baggage, as such it is an energetically clean way of training this kind of work. And that is well worth the price of admission. So, join Sixty Skills today and learn how to make your own rituals. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to experience an Out of Body Experience (OBE) - People who cannot astral project / have an OBE https://youtu.be/sT8gdg_rvSA ### Level Eight - Astral 53: Creation of elementaries ### Creation of Elementaries Magicians always seem to have servant spirits that no one else can see. How would you like to have something that reminded you to practice and could give you advice on how to do it? Would you believe that you can actually make one of these out of yourself? You can even have more than one. Wonder no more. All the details behind how to create an elementary, exactly what one is, its care and feeding, as well as eventual death are included in this Sixty Skills course. It turns out an elementary is made…out of you. And in doing so, this course shows you how to create the highest version of yourself specific to whatever it is you want to learn. If you want to improve your clairvoyance, now you have a perfect partner to encourage you. Need to build willpower? Well, no more forcing yourself to practice. If you simply wish to adhere to a new diet…we’ve got you covered as well. The elementary is an old school meditative construct, and practice partner, that explains how, and why, so many of the classical school practitioners got so much done. The fact of the matter was they weren’t alone. Any you do not have to be either. So, join Sixty Skills today and learn how to engage in the fine art of the Creation of an Elementary. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn yoga - Anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - Anyone who practices the arts of Franz Bardon - Anyone who wants to construct a magical servant - Anyone who wants to learn Wicca - Anyone who wants to learn ritual magic -   https://youtu.be/U4vdANox2SA [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Eight - Physical 54: Walking with air 55: Walking with earth 56: Walking with Water 57: Walking with Fire ### Walking with the Elements Learning to move your energy with body is one of the oldest energy work techniques on record. It can be done fast or slow. For martial arts or healing. But what are the different ways to do this and why should you do this? Walking your way into your own power is a fundamental, and primal, way of experiencing your own world. Now you just aren’t immersed in the elements, you are the elements. Long used by monks to cover vast distances with tiring this technology is now available to you. With this you will truly feel what it is to fire walk…to float with the air...and ebb with the water. The elements will manifest for you as never before. And it something you can do anywhere you wish anytime you want. This is not mere fantasy, but a visceral reality for those who take the time to learn it. And it is a lifetime skills as well. In short, a crash course in how to actively use the energy of your body by directing it with your body will be made available to you. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to walk with the elements! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn yoga - Anyone who wants to learn witchcraft -   https://youtu.be/0wm_X1I9LrQ [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Nine - Mental 58: Mental Wandering ### Mental Wandering: Intelligence Gathering and the Real OBE Have you ever wanted to travel to foreign worlds, meet alien intelligences and see the planets as astrologers described them in works of old? Have you ever wanted to find the Akashic Records and take a peak inside? Maybe you just want to see what fantasy, and science fiction, writers grasp with their inner eye? If the answer to any of these is yes, then learning how to engage in mental wandering is what you need to do. Sometimes referred to as an out of body experience (OBE), or astral travel, mental wandering is a skill that anyone can learn how to perform over time. This course covers some common misunderstandings, technique errors and lifestyle choices that can greatly enhance your odds of success. Specifically, it also addresses why you would want to learn how to do this and points out some common pitfalls frequently seen along the way. While learning how to separate your consciousness from your body is a classical technique in meditative practice, it is also of great practical value as well. And this course gets into reasons why you would want to learn to do this and some that might make you want to reconsider. So, join SixtySkills today and learn how to engage in the fine art of mental wandering. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to learn how to have an out of body experience - Anyone who wants to travel to other worlds -   -   https://youtu.be/Lp74WVlLVss [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Nine - Astral 59: Akasha via three releases/equilibrium ### The Void Meets Infinity: Akasha and Non-Dual Light Breathing Here the beginning ends. When Akasha is generated and the light of consciousness manifests, the sleeper wakes up. In many ways this represents the end of the Sixty Skills curriculum. The fusion of pore breathing, astral energy, mental energy, establishment of equilibrium, the three releases and the single point of focus. Here the practitioner steps out into the Void and touches the face of God…or the Buddha mind…or non-dual light if you prefer. Typically practice of this takes twelve to eighteen months, but it has been known to happen in as little as six weeks. It really depends upon how much work the practitioner has done. The razors edge of consciousness that happens in an instant and lasts eternity. This course can be taken by anyone as an initiation into Akasha and non-dual light, but practice to the point of mastery requires either luck, great karma or having practiced quite a great deal. Either way this represents the beginning of a practitioner’s adventures as a fully empowered being with all of the responsibilities and abilities contained therein. So, whether new, or old, to energy work, magic, meditation or yoga come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how the Void Meets Infinity! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to experience Akasha and Non-dual Light - Anyone who wants to practice evocation - Anyone who wants to experience enlightenment https://youtu.be/3J9vOj53UEY [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Nine - Physical 60: Rebounding ### Rebounding: Fah Jin, Empty Force and Fascia Development Have you ever seen the old tai chi master touch another man and have him fly across the room? Have you ever wondered just how the old man got that magnetic personality of his that seems to fill the room? Or asked yourself how much of this is an act? In this Sixty Skills introduction to rebounding you can learn the three fundamental techniques used to do all of this and more. Exactly how your vital energy / chi /qi / prana are applied as well as how to use both your astral and mental energy. The mysteries, and misconceptions, covering things like Empty Force will also be covered. Here you will learn how to move others around using the force of your will. And told both the real application, as well as limitations, of doing so. More importantly, you will be introduced to an extremely effective way to train the soft tissue in the body, provided training timelines and clear developmental metrics. All of which will greatly accelerate and improve the effectiveness of any energy work regardless of background. Also, this training system has been stripped off all its martial components, as well as baggage, as such it is an energetically clean way of training this kind of tissue. And that is well worth the price of admission. So, join Sixty Skills today and learn how to engage in the fine art of rebounding. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation - Anyone interested in body training - Anyone interested in yoga - Anyone interested in magic - Anyone interested in energy work - Anyone interested in empty force https://youtu.be/iVmy4NzYhIk [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Ten - Mental 61: Non dual light via three releases projection 62. Learning Kabbalah from the Spirit World: Near Earth Zone ### The Void Meets Infinity: Akasha and Non-Dual Light Breathing Here the beginning ends. When Akasha is generated and the light of consciousness manifests, the sleeper wakes up. In many ways this represents the end of the Sixty Skills curriculum. The fusion of pore breathing, astral energy, mental energy, establishment of equilibrium, the three releases and the single point of focus. Here the practitioner steps out into the Void and touches the face of God…or the Buddha mind…or non-dual light if you prefer. Typically practice of this takes twelve to eighteen months, but it has been known to happen in as little as six weeks. It really depends upon how much work the practitioner has done. The razors edge of consciousness that happens in an instant and lasts eternity. This course can be taken by anyone as an initiation into Akasha and non-dual light, but practice to the point of mastery requires either luck, great karma or having practiced quite a great deal. Either way this represents the beginning of a practitioner’s adventures as a fully empowered being with all of the responsibilities and abilities contained therein. So, whether new, or old, to energy work, magic, meditation or yoga come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how the Void Meets Infinity! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to experience Akasha and Non-dual Light - Anyone who wants to practice evocation - Anyone who wants to experience enlightenment -   https://youtu.be/3J9vOj53UEY [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### How to Learn Kabbalah from the Spirit World Via Evocation Twenty-seven letters made known to man…the original magic of the Egyptians, Phoenicians and Hermeticists of old…the God levers….the rarest of magics and the one that is known only to man. Welcome to the Kabbalah as known to Franz Bardon. The trouble is, who are you going to learn this from? Maybe three to four hundred people worldwide practice the method. Well, Bardon’s second book Practical Evocation gives us all a way out of this pickle… Enter Radina, a near Earth spirit who specializes in initiating others into….Kabbalah. In this course, Sixty Skills introduces you to Radina, his functions and gives a clear explanation of how the planetary meditations work writ large. Special attention is paid to discussing the different forms of evocation, the benefits and limitations. Also a variety of things to think about that might hone your practice are discussed as well, not to mention the issues of how spirits manifest differently depending upon how and where they are evoked. In addition, the ball above head method demonstrated here provides a functional methodology into working with all the other planets and a clear pathway to do so culminating in a trip to Uranus where a magician can learn everything there is to know about Kabbalah as presented by one Franz Bardon. So, join Sixty Skills today and learn to evoke Radina. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone interested in meditation, yoga, magic and subtle energy - Anyone interested in learning Kabbalah - Anyone interested in learning evocation - Anyone interested in learning how to summon a spirit - Anyone interested in mediumship -   https://youtu.be/-sCo5KOHAxs [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Ten - Astral 63: Chi circulation method 64. Advanced Clairvoyance Training ### The Chi Circulation Method Learning to move your energy with your mind is one of the oldest energy work techniques on record. It can be done fast or slow. For martial arts or healing. But what are the different ways to do this and why should you do this? Sure, lots of people have heard of the macrocosmic/microcosmic orbits, but what do they really do? Are there other ways of circulating these energies? Who are the better people who practice this today? All these questions and more will be answered. Techniques that teach you how to move the energy from your feet to your hands, how to strengthen the movement of energy to your hands and even how to improve the speed of your movement from side to side will be revealed. Initially taught at the speed of breath you will quickly learn how to accelerate this to match the speed of your mind. Training timelines and different methods will be discussed as well. In short, a crash course in how to actively use the energy of your body by directing it with your mind will be made available to you. So, whether new, or old, to energy work come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how to circulate your chi! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn energy work - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn yoga - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn witchcraft -   https://youtu.be/0G5TFX3h85E [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### SixtySkills Extra: Advanced Clairvoyance Training What are advanced clairvoyance exercises? Clairvoyance, or subtle sight is a primary gateway to meditative and esoteric practice. Quite literally if you cannot see the subtle world, it does not exist for you. The process of doing this is clearly described for the first time ever in this course. The techniques, while not complicated, do require real effort and this is also detailed in the course as well. Anyone can learn how to do this not just the lucky few who are gifted with these abilities by accident, fate, fortune or just plain luck. In this course, the use of room impregnation with foci, Akasha breathing through the eye gates, and the Kabbalistic letter combination of B-H are taught. Additionally, the different kinds of subtle sight and how these are trained are also included. This explains why so many different kinds of clairvoyance are mentioned by others and the fact is that they are not all the same. Issues that involve lifestyle and esoteric hygiene are further described along with reasons why someone may not want to develop some of these senses. Those are frequently left out when getting into the issue of their development. So come join Sixty Skills for this adventure and drive your own personal development, happiness and success forward using the wisdom of the ages. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to develop clairvoyance - Anyone who wants to learn to meditate - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to learn yoga - Anyone who wants to learn tantra - Anyone who wants to learn witchcraft - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - Anyone who wants to see on the astral - Anyone who wants to develop themselves -   https://youtu.be/gehpGIDqYN4 [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Level Ten - Physical 65: Volting 66: Non-dual light via three releases draw down/magic circle 67: AK and NDL breathing ### Volting: Expressing Your Will in the Universe Magicians always seem to be able to get things done really quickly. They literally bring things into form. Whatever their goals are, they manifest rapidly and seemingly out of nowhere. Have you ever wondered why this happens? Have you ever thought you could do it yourself? Wonder no more. All the details behind how to create a volt, why you would want to do this and various issues involved are included in this Sixty Skills course. It turns out that volting is an expression of a magician’s will. It literally represents the power of a magician as a creator in the universe by bringing things into form. All of the basic skills required are detailed, how to layer the energies needed, the nature of karma in relation to volting, and what you should thing about if volting for yourself versus others. While many consider these things to be a part of a long dead past, the reality is that none of this stuff ever left humanity. It has been here all along. That is not to say it is easy to do or something to be taken lightly. So, join Sixty Skills today and learn how to engage in the fine art of the Volting. ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn Hermetics - Anyone who wants to get things done - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn yoga - Anyone interested in Franz Bardon -   https://youtu.be/Dn5t5BXWvTw [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### The Void Meets Infinity: Akasha and Non-Dual Light Breathing Here the beginning ends. When Akasha is generated and the light of consciousness manifests, the sleeper wakes up. In many ways this represents the end of the Sixty Skills curriculum. The fusion of pore breathing, astral energy, mental energy, establishment of equilibrium, the three releases and the single point of focus. Here the practitioner steps out into the Void and touches the face of God…or the Buddha mind…or non-dual light if you prefer. Typically practice of this takes twelve to eighteen months, but it has been known to happen in as little as six weeks. It really depends upon how much work the practitioner has done. The razors edge of consciousness that happens in an instant and lasts eternity. This course can be taken by anyone as an initiation into Akasha and non-dual light, but practice to the point of mastery requires either luck, great karma or having practiced quite a great deal. Either way this represents the beginning of a practitioner’s adventures as a fully empowered being with all of the responsibilities and abilities contained therein. So, whether new, or old, to energy work, magic, meditation or yoga come along on this adventure with Sixty Skills and learn how the Void Meets Infinity! ### Who this course is for: - Anyone who wants to learn meditation - Anyone who wants to learn magic - Anyone who wants to learn magick - Anyone who wants to experience Akasha and Non-dual Light - Anyone who wants to practice evocation - Anyone who wants to experience enlightenment -   https://youtu.be/3J9vOj53UEY [**Get the Master Course here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) [**Single Courses here**](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ## Choosing the Right Option: Buying Courses Individually or Investing in the Master Course If you're new to the field and feeling curious, consider starting with a single course ($50). Follow the instructions closely, achieve the results, and then decide whether you want to continue on this path. You try a course for free here.  On the other hand, if you're a committed practitioner who's also looking to save money (Save 40% = $600!), the Master Course may be your best option. We've included comprehensive information about the contents and benefits of the Master Course, which you can review here. But if you have questions about *any* aspect of the curriculum we ask you to email us as each persons training though it follows the same curriculum is highly personal and the starting point for each person is different so get in touch if you need more information. We love discussing these subjects with fellow practitioners. --- [Join the Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) --- # Sixty Skills Curriculum Explained Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-curriculum-explained/ ### Introduction Welcome. The aim of this post is to provide what is currently the most in depth look at the five part SixtySkills curriculum, below I post the video version and the transcript below. ##### 2026 UPDATE: We now have a new and improved page showcasing EVERY course in the 5-pillar curriculum. HERE. https://youtu.be/cdCUS5zRlOo?si=N-LLUOyy_fk5stjs ### Comprehensive Overview **PAA: Can you provide a detailed explanation of the five stages within the Sixty Skills curriculum? How does each stage contribute to a practitioner's journey towards magical independence? ** Okay. We start with the [master course](https://sixtyskills.com/sixty-skills-curriculum/), which is essentially Sixty skills that are universal in meditative practice that you need to master to engage all of the different magical, meditative, and yogic phenomena that are out there. It's pretty comprehensive. It covers everything from mind to energy, or, if you will, uh, astral-type work, to body training and physical work. That's the first stage. These are the basic skills, again, you need to engage in magical practice to begin with. Following that, we get into what is now known as letter magic, or sometimes referred to as [quabbalah](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/sixty-skills-kabbalah). This is probably the oldest form of known magic out there, and essentially you start with the elements, then you work with all of the sub-variants of the elements. This allows you to manipulate reality at an aosic, mental, astral or energetic, and physical level, depending upon how it's applied. Following that, we go into [planetary work](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/planetary-kabbalah). Now, the planets are largely energetic, or, if you will, magical in nature, but the reason why you want to learn to work with them is they are, unlike the elements, intelligent. By being able to work with the planets, you can engage various intelligences that cover every possible field of human endeavor. Additionally, the planets have a huge effect upon your emotions and mental stability, so by staging your exposure to them you become more immune to their effects and therefore more independent in your ability to act. Following that, we work through the zodiac, or the stellar or celestial formations. There are, in fact, 12 of these, and these are the ones associated with astrology, but, unlike in astrology, we will harness the forces of these directly. While they are largely mental in nature, they have a huge impact upon how people perceive the world. Following this, we reach the final stage in the Sixty Skills system, which is working with the powers of the Sephiroth at an akashic, or void, level, as these are essentially the foundation stones, if you will, of all material reality. This represents the path of mana, the path of enlightenment, or the upward arc. There is a path of manifestation as well, where you learn how to work with these things in a more terrestrial manner, but, as many individuals have said before me, and great masters included in this, if you achieve enlightenment first, magic is easy. If you only work on magic, you're probably not going to get around to enlightenment. So that's the whole of the Sixty Skills system. ### Join the Curriculum 20%OFF If you would like to get involved with the Curriculum then now is the time! **Use Coupon Code: 20%OFF** [See Sixty Skills Courses](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) ### Skill Progression and Integration **PAA: Two, skill progression and integration. How are the skills distributed across these stages designed to build upon one another? Can you elaborate on the integration process as students advance through the curriculum? ** Sure. Again, the master course gives you the basic skills necessary to do the work. Now, as we start to advance our way from the power of the elements, which we quantify by the letters, to the power of the planets, to the power of the zodiac, to the power of the Sephiroth, we work through a process of what's known as magical equilibrium. You learn how to generate all of these independent forces, let's say at the planetary level, teach them to neutralize one another so you become more immune to their effects, and then you take those neutralized forces and elevate them up in a process of enlightenment. You do this at each level of reality. Therefore, by the time you get to Kether, or the top end of the Sephiroth, making that jump into non-dual light—or what we sometimes call the Godhead, or some people refer to as God, or complete enlightenment as in some other camps—is relatively easy to do and much more under your control. Most systems use a blunt-force method where they just build energy and then explode into that state of awareness, and while this works, it makes it very difficult to repeat. ### Time Commitment and Expectations **PAA: What is the anticipated time commitment for each stage, and how does this align with the overall 18-month framework of the master course? ** It really depends upon how quickly you want to do things. Truthfully, what I've found over the last few years of teaching publicly is that if a student practices two hours a day, every day, they can easily complete the master course curriculum within a year and a half. A lot of people do it quicker because, quite frankly, they've had training and they don't need the whole program. When it regards the letters and the planets and so on and so forth: the letters themselves should take you about six months to a year; the planets should take about six months—two weeks each; the zodiac, for practical purposes, will take a year; and the Sephiroth can probably be done in about six months. That represents the complete upward arc. You can do the math on that, but easily I'd say within 18 months for the first course, 28 months, 30 months—I'd say easily within three to four years you should be able to finish the whole system on the upward progression. The downward, or what I prefer to call the path of manifestation, should take about as long, so in theory, if you wanted to do everything, it would take two hours a day for about seven years, maybe eight. ### Foundation Importance **PAA: The master course encompasses the entire 18-month curriculum, offering over 30 separate courses. How does this comprehensive approach establish the necessary foundation for advanced practices in the subsequent stages? ** Well, pretty easily. Mind training teaches you how to focus and relax your mind. The energetic training gives you the sensitivity to work with these various energies and establish things like clairvoyance and clairaudience. The body training makes everything work better, and the body training is somewhat key, because without this most practitioners get stuck at the mental or akashic level of performance because they can't bring the energy down into their body very effectively. This is one of the unique aspects of the Sixty Skills curriculum: it's one of the few places out there where you can find this openly explained. It also makes the mental and akashic-level work, or void-level work, much more effective. Of course, along the way you learn out-of-body projection and a bunch of other skills, but these allow you to engage with the latter portions of the curriculum effectively. **PAA: Upon completing the master course, students are introduced to the quabbalah course. How does the master course prepare practitioners for the complexities of cabalistic studies and other advanced topics within the Sixty Skills framework?** Well, as I said, it gives you all of those basic skills you need to engage things like the power of the elements via the letters, the planets, the zodiac, and, of course, the Sephiroth. What's interesting about this form of studying, which is grounded in hermetics—specifically the Franz Bardon school of hermetics—is it gives you the ability to distinctly identify which level of reality you're working at and specific tools for working at each of those levels of reality. Most schools expect you to figure this out, and it is one of the reasons why it takes so long in a lot of other traditions. ### Understanding Akasha and Its Variations **PAA: Conceptualizing akasha. In various traditions, akasha is considered the first element created, serving as the basis and essence of all things in the material world. How does Sixty Skills define akasha, and what role does it play in your practices? ** Well, akasha is literally the power of the void, that thing out of which everything else came. In practical experience, terrestrial accasha is often perceived as a purple or dark-purple-colored energy that tends to dissolve things, has a penetrating aspect to it, and sometimes can be associated with the sound of shearing metal. In the Sixty Skills curriculum we give you very concrete ways of engaging with this, specifically through the creation of equilibrium using the four elements, which in this system are fire, air, water, and earth. By learning to establish the elements clearly and cleanly, and then doing them in a kind of balanced equilibrium manner, this allows you access to your own akasha. It is by far the fastest way to do this and, quite possibly, the safest way as well. Once you can generate your own akasha, this gives you access to non-dual light, or the power of the Godhead. At this point you are essentially an esoteric adult. This is the important part about the Sixty Skills system. When you do a lot of energetic practice you tend to attract the attention of various spirit entities, and they can be quite bossy, but there's a catch: if you have your own akasha—non-dual light, on the other hand—you are more in the driver's seat because you have the ability to banish or send those entities away that someone who does not have conscious control of this generally lacks. It really changes the nature of the relationship of a lot of these entities. **PAA: Exploring different types of akasha. Some philosophical traditions classify akasha in different categories, suggesting a more nuanced understanding of the element. Can you elaborate on these classifications and how they influence your teachings? ** Sure. In our system we basically have five types of akasha we work with. These are defined according to letter magic, or Kabbalah. You have the letter E, which is that purple, terrestrial, penetrating akasha. You have the letter Y, which is a pink, kind of floating akasha. You have the letter A, which is an earthy, kind of yellow or gold-colored heavy akasha. You have the letter umlaut O, which is a kind of orange, hot, heavy akasha. Finally, you have the letter U, which is a silver, mercury, black-mercury-colored cosmic akasha. The main difference between the letter E and the letter U is the letter E grounds back to the body, whereas the letter U does not, which makes it a little trickier to work with. We break it down into five different basic categories. If you look at what we do with letter magic as a tuning-fork system, you can see how there are actually many other variations on this, but by learning to work with these five variations of akasha it tends to give most people the refined level of, let's call it, attachment or discernment that allows them to work with akasha at large. **PAA: Addressing knowledge limitations. Given the vast and subtle nature of accasha, our understanding might be limited. How do you approach these limitations in your practice, and what strategies do you recommend for practitioners to deepen their comprehension of akasha? ** Well, first of all, we encourage journaling. In fact, if you're not journaling while doing these practices, you're probably making a mistake. Additionally, we have an online community that is by private invitation only to course members, where you can meet and communicate with others regarding your experiences. You need to understand the power of the void is vast, tremendously vast, and predates time and form, so there's really no ultimately knowing accasha; there's just knowing it better than you did yesterday. **PAA: Practical applications of akasha. Your teachings emphasize the importance of akasha in achieving magical independence. How do practitioners effectively harness akasha in their meditative, ritual practices? Are there specific methodologies or exercises that facilitate this connection? ** Absolutely. The basis of learning to control or work with akasha on your own is through, again, equilibrium—this balancing of fire, air, water, and earth. You'll learn how to do it internally to your body; you'll learn how to do it externally to your body. Once you have active control of this, achieving access to your own non-dual light—or what some would call the fine providence—is relatively easy. More importantly, because you now have the ability to dissolve the subtle bodies of various spirit entities, they tend to become very respectful. Also, in turn—and this is part of the path of manifestation—you gradually gain the ability to pull the other elements out of the akasha directly, instead of only being reliant upon what is available in the ambient atmosphere around you. This greatly reinforces your position within the universe and is a hallmark of an internal-power practitioner. **PAA: Experiential outcomes. Based on your observations, what transformative effects have practitioners experienced while engaging deeply with akasha? Are there noticeable enhancements in spiritual awareness or capabilities? ** Absolutely. Access to akasha is often coincided in more traditional systems with activation of the kundalini or activation of the siddhis writ large. Most people develop some degree of clairvoyance and clairaudience upon working with akasha, and this, in turn, allows them to see the world as it is and not as we wish it to be, which is the case with most people, because belief really influences your perception of reality in ways that are quite profound. Akasha strips away some of these rose-colored lenses. Additionally, akasha allows you to see both your past and future on a limited level and allows you to deal with those issues directly, whereas most people have to deal with them passively. It is, to be blunt, a transformative experience. ### Integration of Zodiacal and Sephirothic Energies **PAA: Conceptual framework. In your work you discuss the synthesis of zodiacal influences with sephirothic energies. Could you elaborate on the theoretical underpinnings of this integration and its significance within the Sixty Skills curriculum? ** Sure. On a basic level the letters represent the power and energy of the phenomenal world; the planets, that of the astral or energetic world; the zodiac, that of the mental world; and the Sephiroth, that of the akashic world. By the way, you have akashic, mental, astral, and physical bodies that you work with. These stack one on top of another, and by working with the zodiacal and sephirothic forces you begin to understand the mental influences and the akashic influences that occur to everybody in a very refined and tangible manner. Where this is important is it's unclear if, say, the planets are the source of astral energy at large, but it's very clear that they generate a lot of astral energy. It's unclear if the zodiac is the source of mental energy, but it certainly generates a lot of mental energy that can be worked with, and the Sephiroth the same with the various aosic forces. By working with these, it gives you a more complete mastery of your environment around you and makes you a more effective magician. **PAA: Practical applications. How do practitioners effectively combine the powers of the zodiac with the Sephiroth in their meditative or ritual practices? Are there specific methodologies or exercises that facilitate this fusion? ** Absolutely. Take something like Aries. Aries is part of the zodiac. It's also associated with Mars and with a specific form of fire energy. In our system you learn how to stack these different forces one on top of another in your meditative and yogic practices. This results in a very powerful ability to generate unified forces with which you can work in your environment around you. So, for example, if you're dealing with someone who's ill from a kind of deficiency disease, this combined force of Aries, Mars, and fire energy can counteract that in them. If you want to take it one step further, you can use Geburah at the sephirothic, or akashic, level. That's how this works. What's interesting is you can generate very similar or like effects strictly using letter magic, but by learning to stack the forces things become much more potent, as it represents a more clear representation of reality at large. ### Explorations of Pluto and the Outer Planets **PAA: Esoteric significance of Pluto. Your writings highlight Pluto's role in refining the physical body and its association with hidden magics and nuclear power. How did your private practice group uncover these attributes, and what methodologies were employed in working with Pluto's energies? ** Sure. Mainly by accident. I hadn't really understood how the letters, the planets, the zodiac, and the Sephiroth stack one on top of each other when we began these explorations. My private practice group had finished their build-out of the letters of the elements, or Cabala, and we decided to start working with the planets. As we got further into that we were contacted by various entities through a process known as pathworking that encouraged us to explore Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, and later on the extra-solar region. It was through this process of pathworking—by going from one planet to another—that every time we finished a planet we'd be given just a little bit of information about the next one. We had expected to stop at Saturn, but when we got to Saturn it was made clear that there was more to go, and that's how we wound up in Pluto. So it was a combination of doing pathworking to develop the sigils and out-of-body projection into these planetary systems in which we engaged with various spirit entities there and were made aware of the properties of those places. **PAA: Energetic strengthening through Pluto. You mentioned that after a month of working with Pluto your group experienced a notable increase in energetic strength without altering daily practice. Could you delve into the mechanisms behind this phenomenon and its implications for practitioners? ** Sure. Pluto is involved with a further refinement of the physical body. Depending upon who you ask, it has to do with three planets: Earth, Mars, and, interestingly enough, Saturn in its aspect of rebirth or regeneration. One of the skills that you learn when you work with Pluto is how to vibrate the power of the elements at a cellular level within the body. This is a very potent way of generating energy that doesn't require you to pull energies from the outside world into you. You actually use the body as a crucible, if you will, or mandala. It's quite potent and very interesting, and this was the first time I gained real experience of this method. **PAA: Inner vibratory sensations. The discovery of generating inner-vibratory sensations without vocalization was a significant outcome of your Pluto work. How does this capability impact the practice of cabalistic letter magic, and what are its broader implications within the Sixty Skills framework? ** By being able to vibrate the letters at the cellular level it greatly increases your throughput of energy, and as you work your way through the Sixty Skills curriculum you learn additional methods that enhance your ability to generate these forces on your own without having to use more conventional approaches. In practice you end up stacking all of these, like the vibratory-mantric-type work, along with the inner vibration, establishing better equilibrium, and being able to increase your throughput, all of which, over time, greatly increase your ability not only to pinpoint which energies you're working with but also your ability to increase the volume of energy, if you will, that is being employed. **PAA: Challenges and safeguards. Engaging with outer-planetary energies, particularly Pluto, can be overwhelming and may pose risks such as psychological distress. What precautions and remedial measures do you recommend for practitioners to ensure safety during these advanced practices? ** Well, first of all, there's counterbalancing. With the outer planets you're going to be counterbalancing with solar energy, which, in turn, will need to be counterbalanced with lunar energy, so this can result in these meditations taking quite a lot of time. Additionally, the outer planets can result in the development of suicidal ideation amongst practitioners, so you have to watch out for this. However, in Bardon's second book the first solar genius, or angel, in the sun sphere is known as Imnixut. Imnixut can literally draw that out of you and does so very quickly. So there are that and a few other things that are built into the system, but, suffice to say, there are many safeguards and let's call them remedial techniques designed to address these problems in the greater curriculum. ### Private Group Practice and Methodologies **PAA: Formation and objectives. Could you provide insight into weekend private practice groups? What were the primary objectives, and how did collective efforts enhance the exploration of advanced esoteric practices?** Sure. The private practice groups we offer pretty much every weekend, unless I'm on the road, and I'll work people through the letters and the planets and the zodiac and now the Sephiroth. By working in groups it is said the amount of energy, if you will, being developed squares or cubes, so two people working together have the power of four people working independently; three, that of nine; so on and so on. I don't know if that's exactly true, but what everybody will tell you is working in a group greatly enhances the overall effect. This serves as a kind of initiatory experience that your body remembers. This way, even when you're working on your own with this—and it can be years or decades later when you actually choose to do this, which is why you should do it, quite frankly, now—your body will know, based off that experience, that specific frequency or wavelength of energy that it's interacting with. This is super valuable, because if you don't have this and you're strictly working on your own it can take a really long time to figure out how to do things, and you'll make mistakes, and I say this from experience. So working in a group enhances and speeds up your development. **PAA: Collaborative discoveries. In the course of your group's works, what discoveries emerged that might have been challenging to achieve individually, and how do group dynamics contribute to these insights? ** Well, one: the living-crystal device. When you're working with the outer planets, and particularly the zodiac, the energies can become very subtle, and if you're working by yourself it's really easy to miss out on things. It's frequent in my private practice group that, you know, I'll have a bad day, or one of the other members will, but the other people who were there didn't, so they can fill in the details. If I were working on my own through Bardon's mandala on the cover of his third book, "Key to the True Quabalah," I don't know if I would have finished, because, again, some energies you're just not going to resonate very well with, and that's where working with others is really handy. **PAA: Balanced individual and group work. While much of magical practice is solitary, what advantages do group settings—such as those in your private group—offer? Are there specific skills or experiences that are best cultivated in a communal environment?** Like we talked about, working in a group environment allows for a higher volume or flow-through of, if you will, energy. This makes it particularly attractive or helpful if you're working with a more advanced practitioner to positively identify an energy the first time you're doing it; otherwise, a lot of times you're sitting there wondering just what happened. Also, because of the profound nature of what goes on with some of these practices, it's easy to second-guess yourself and say, "Did that really happen, or was this my imagination?" By working with others you have people to bounce this off of, and it's just really, really, really valuable. Again, the majority of the work will be done on your own, but having others definitely speeds the process and results in additional insight, because, largely speaking, the entities reflect off the individual doing the practice, and we're all different. The result is we all gain additional insights by talking to others and working with others that we could not gain on our own. ### Curriculum Development and Evolution **PAA: Incorporating outer-planetary work. Given the profound experiences and insights gained from working with outer planets like Pluto, how have these findings influenced the evolution of the Sixty Skills curriculum? Are there plans to integrate these practices more formally into the training modules? ** Yes. These are living courses. Updates don't happen very often, but they do happen from time to time. A good example is the continuing evolution of including pranayama, or breath retention, across the five levels of the curriculum. The fact of the matter is the courses work on their own. Now, there will be, like I said, improvements made from time to time as I simply find a better way to do things, and, keep in mind, by the time a course is released I've already worked multiple groups of people through the coursework before I choose to record it. This allows for a more nuanced discussion of what's going on. **PAA: Addressing contemporary practitioner needs. How does the curriculum adapt to meet the needs of contemporary practitioners, especially those interested in exploring beyond traditional hermetic practices? Are there resources or guidance provided for such advanced explorations? ** Sure. All the tools you need to do it with are there. But here's the thing: it's a commonly understood phenomenon in magic, or, if you will, meditative works, that when a work gets more than 70 to 100 years old it's no longer directly perceivable by the person in the modern era. The Buddhists get around this by having their commentaries, which are invaluable; it keeps those older works alive, if you will. This video presentation of hermetic practice is just such a thing. It's for the modern era. Keep in mind, historically finding teachers and working with people was really hard. You were moving at the speed of your feet or your horse if you were really wealthy. Now we can communicate across the planet almost instantaneously. I like to say that this helps contemporary practitioners more effectively dial into what they're doing. A good example in the curriculum is the need for body training. If you were alive 100 years ago you didn't have a whole lot of need for body training because it was a much more physical world than we have now. Also, back then you would have needed to spend more time on general-purpose visualization exercises. Things like television and the internet make modern people really good at visualizing things; in the past this simply wouldn't have been the case. However, modern people aren't nearly as physical as people in the past were, so there's more remedial work on physical training in the coursework. ### Practical Applications and Outcomes **PAA: Real-world benefits. How do the skills acquired in the master course translate into practical benefits in a practitioner's daily life? Can you share examples of transformations or capabilities that students have reported upon completing this stage? ** Sure. There's what we often refer to as the process of ennoblement. This is a fancy way of stating someone loses all their bad habits. In the case of a practitioner, this is done for purely selfish reasons because bad habits make it harder to practice, but the people in your personal life on the receiving end of your improved behavior don't care; they just know that they treat you better. I've seen amazing transformations over a period of years in the behavior of people—overcoming addiction, sexual-behavior problems, financial irresponsibility, you name it—all because they simply wanted to be able to practice without being bothered. That, my friend, being able to change yourself, is the greatest magic of them all. On a more practical basis, very quickly, within learning to work with the power of the elements, you can increase your run times, get stronger, speed the rate of healing from injuries—so on and so on and so on. It's a very practical form of doing things, which is the reason why it's survived. Magic exists because, if you don't have the technology to do something, there is one other way by which you can do it. **PAA: Customization and personal focus. Given the comprehensive nature of the master course, how can students tailor their learning experience to focus on one specific area of interest or address individual weaknesses within the broader curriculum? ** You'll know when you're weak at something because it'll be hard to do. Here's the difference between a magician and a chi-guy or a dabbler: a magician, just like a pro athlete, works on things not until he can do them but until he or she cannot fail at them, which means you're going to spend a lot of time working on things you're not very good at. This practice can be pretty boring, but that's where the magic happens. In terms of tailoring things, it really depends upon what you're doing. If you're working in a hands-on healing clinic using energetic healing, you're going to want to do a lot of standing or movement-based practices that generate very terrestrial energies— a lot of the weightlifting. On the other hand, if, let's say, you're an industrial engineer and you want to get one step ahead of your contemporaries in terms of state-of-the-art design, you're going to be doing a lot of out-of-body exploration of the planets to get your hands on that technology that can be manifested in the here and now. Functionally speaking, it gives you about a 10-year head leap on most people because of the availability of the things you would need to implement the technology. ### Conclusion That's just a basic breakdown of the Sixty Skills curriculum and what goes on. If you have any other questions you can contact Perseus Arcane Academy and they will forward these to me. As per usual, train hard and be well. --- # Joints of Fate: A Planetary Magical Working In The Arbatel – Free Download Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/joints-of-fate-a-planetary-magical-working-in-the-arbatel-free-download/ ## Introduction We have a very generous contribution from Omiiran, you may remember this student from their [interview](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/neo-shamanism-an-interview-with-omiiran/) about their practice in Neo Shamanism with Andre Consciencia. As you can see from the booklet, they are talented in various disciplines and extremely generous in putting this together for others to work with. Below Omiiran introduces the booklet they have created. [Download Booklet](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/space/esotericoccultandallthingsmagical/post/free-booklet-pdf-joints-of-fate-a-plane) --- A word to summarize this work is probably **Runanubandha**, literally defined as 'a bondage of karmic debt, taking this from Robert Svoboda’s Aghora 3 Volume where he described his life with Aghori Vimalananda. I personally and genuinely don’t think that any work involving shuffling and reshuffling fate is easily discernable or easily can be said “I did X to stop Y”, take a moment to consider that if you did stop or didn’t stop a fateful encounter you wouldn’t know because you already diverted to a new fate/path.  I would be falsifying if I said that each and every part of the Joint of Fate ritual was meticulously written, timed, and had a clear explanation. A lot of it actually isn't my own but was followed at the moment when it was revealed to me, which to some people might be more or less encouraging because they’re getting a more unfiltered version of the spirits instructions.   To help orient the readers to this booklet, I think the main 3 forces going into this booklet are Saturn, Venus, and Fate. Why would I disassociate Fate from Saturn since they’re always mentioned together? Because Fate is more of the summation of every planet *below *Saturn and includes Saturn, it’s not Saturn in and of itself but all of the influences of the other planets crystalized in Saturn.  Venus on the other hand, is the transformative expansive field permeating all the other planets and all of *Fate. *If Venus is the content of the circle, Saturn is the border, and Fate is conjoined at the border and at the center. The Trident of Paracelsus is interestingly being used here because you’re not dispersing an astral parasite or male impotence, but you’re neutralizing fate itself. The joints of fate could be our own family, our community, and those around us. It is shocking to be told that you have to reforge your relationship with those close to you to reorganize our own fate and karma.  Fear of Saturn’s return is one of the things that did push me to do this, not hiding that fear or uncertainty of change. I think that change is inevitable and we can’t get stuck somewhere forever, even if we do successfully change our fate to something more tolerable. Throughout many multiple lifetimes we did experience change and it was hard and uncomfortable, so even if we do step back and notice that our ancestors, our selves of past lifetimes, and our future selves. We are all changing and going to be changed, it is the fear which holds us back from changing and being transformed.  If there is anything remaining to this work, it is to change it and to be changed with it. The dispersal of that fate energy or karmic binding is gonna float for a while when you do the work, but as soon as you put forth a new vision then it will snap into place. Don’t fear the change in the global or the personal scale,  because only fear is what holds us back and makes us rot. Love is what transforms fear into power and courage, and I pray that we are able to get through our current times with more resilient and transformed hearts. Happy Easter and may the Lord of Peace give you Peace, Amen, --- --- # Kazim of Hexen Press: Art, Witchcraft, and the Ritual Body in Contemporary Occult Practice Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/kazim-of-hexen-press-art-witchcraft-and-the-ritual-body-in-contemporary-occult-practice/ ## Introduction Kazim is a French occult practitioner, artist, and editor, best known as the founder and director of [Hexen Press](https://www.hexen.fr/), an independent esoteric publishing house established in the early 2020s and based in southern France. Working at the intersection of magical practice and artistic expression, he operates primarily as a curator and editor of limited-edition works focused on contemporary occultism. Active within European and international esoteric circles, Kazim has been described as a multidisciplinary practitioner with experience spanning ritual performance, visual art, and writing. His work engages with a range of traditions, including forms of witchcraft, grimoire-based practice, and other currents within modern occultism. He has participated in conferences, exhibitions, and ritual contexts, and has contributed to various specialized occult journals. Through Hexen Press, he has developed a catalogue centered on witchcraft, folklore, and ritual art, often emphasizing the aesthetic and experiential dimensions of magical practice. His role within the press includes editorial direction and the curation of collaborations with artists and authors working within related esoteric fields. --- ## Interview with Kazim - Hexen Press **PAA: Your practice has been described as a *reification of art*. Is art itself your primary vehicle for sorcery?** Art and Sorcery, Witchcraft or Magick are undeniably interlinked in my practice and have always stood in a strong relationship. I couldn’t express my magic without being creative and pouring my entire soul into the aesthetics, rhythm and different expressions of ritual. Be they visual, the words spoken, the poetry, the sigils, the paraphernalia, the set-up, all converge toward the one-pointedness, magical will, and intent of the practitioner. > Magic made a thunderous breakthrough into my life on the day of my 23rd birthday, which, for anyone interested in chaos magic, in the writings of Robert Anton Wilson and the T.O.P.Y. would be a meaningful date. > > Kazim **PAA: With over twenty years of engagement across traditions—from Thelemic Chaos Magick to Quimbanda and Sabbatic Witchcraft was your path shaped more by deliberate initiation or by a series of unavoidable encounters? ** Magic made a thunderous breakthrough into my life on the day of my 23rd birthday, which, for anyone interested in chaos magic, in the writings of Robert Anton Wilson and the T.O.P.Y. would be a meaningful date. I could say that most of my time from that moment on has been dedicated to the study and practice of magick. Initiations and encounters have marked pivotal moments along the way, but the path itself has remained quite steady since that day. Daily dedication and aspiration have been the most meaningful markers throughout. **PAA: How has long-term engagement with Poison Path and Vāma Mārga currents altered your understanding of the body as a magical instrument?** The Poison Path teaches one to navigate the dynamics of alteration, the intrusion of alien substances and forms of sentience into the bio-energetic and magical sphere of the practitioner, opening dynamics where chemistry, toxicity, boundaries, and magical and spirit congress converge. The bodily senses are often the vessels through which such encounters occur, through smoke, touch, ingestion, often combined to more subtle ways of perception. From there, a dialectic occurs in which the alteration of the senses and states of mind may become either destructive or beneficial to the practitioner. It is a perilous path, yet rich in profound lessons for those who engage with the invisible and the broader notions of alterity and otherness.  The Vāma Mārga finds some parallels as a tantric approach as it seeks, within a properly initiated context, spiritual realization through the transgression of conceptual boundaries, embracing what is traditionally considered impure, forbidden, or dangerous in order to dissolve dualistic projections and reveal a sense of unity and non-dual awareness. The body, together with the full spectrum of its energies and sensations, is no longer regarded as something to be transcended, but as the very field through which realization and integration are accomplished. Both paths confront the practitioner with risk and transformation, using what is feared or rejected as a catalyst for expansion and insight. In this sense, the Poison Path echoes the Vāma Mārga by turning otherness and the poisonous into tools for transcendence, wisdom and inner alchemy. The Tibetans have profound teachings on the transmutation of spiritual poisons into medicine. In the Puranas, Śhiva is Nīlakaṇṭha, ‘the blue-throated one,’ whose throat turned blue after he consumed the poison that arose during the churning of the Ocean of Milk. Many meaningful parallels may be drawn. **PAA: How do you decide which works or authors are aligned with Hexen Press, beyond technical quality or market interest?** Hexen Press strives to present authors who share a deep interest and expertise on the topics they wish to present and combine in their writings the depths and seriousness of academic and scholarly research with a magical persona, a singular sense of connection with the numinous they are able to convey in their writing: to revive the flame of enchantment and magic while presenting pioneering topics in the field of esoteric research. **PAA: Many Hexen publications are artisanal, limited, and deliberately demanding. Is exclusivity a form of magical filtration? In a time of instant digital consumption, why does the physical occult book still matter?** It is indeed a magical act, for both reader and publisher, to defend the book as a talismanic, artisanal, and limited object in a world where computer-generated art and mass production are becoming the norm. **PAA: Some Hexen Press books are hardcover, others artisanal, and some are visually dense anthologies. How do binding, paperweight, typography, and layout contribute to the ritual potential of a book? ** I believe this is one of the singularities of our publishing house: each book is approached as a unique entity, and it is my bidding to attune to its spirit in order to determine the most meaningful form through which it may manifest. Binding, paper weight, typography, and layout are not considered as secondary aesthetic choices, but as integral components of the book’s spirit, shaping how it is handled, perceived, and engaged with. As such, there is no predefined formula. Each project differs from the last and carries its own particular signature, both in form and in content. **PAA: [On Lycanthropy](https://www.hexen.fr/publications/on-lycanthropy-transformation-ecstasy-of-sorcerers) (Transformation & Ecstasy of Sorcerers), a medieval pamphlet that reframes witches’ flights and ointments, bridges folklore, theology, and early proto-occult phenomenology. What drew you to this work, and how do you see its relevance to modern sorcerous practice? ** On Lycanthropy is a very interesting and unique little book, in that it marked a significant shift in the understanding of lycanthropy and its association with witchcraft. While its author attempted to analyse the phenomenon from a more materialistic perspective, the pamphlet preserves a great deal of folklore and popular conceptions concerning witches: the ecstatic flight to the sabbat, the nature of the soul, its capacity to temporarily leave the body, and its ability to act within the physical world from beyond it. It is also among the earliest and most comprehensive texts to examine in detail the physiological properties of the substances that composed the various witches’ ointments. As such, it is a very worthy text to study for contemporary practitioners. **PAA: [Alraune: The Poisoners Guild](https://www.hexen.fr/books-prints/alraune-the-poisoners-guild#/29-edition-hardcover) has become one of your signature journals on the Poison Path. How do you see poison lore intersecting with broader currents in the Via Nocturna? What makes poison a fertile subject for magical exploration? ** The Poison lore, the pharmacopoeia is so deeply connected and interlinked with the history of magic that it would be difficult to overlook the subject. What makes the Poison Path a fertile subject for magical exploration is the communication it proposes to engage with potentially toxic substances and plant spirits, and how these can be approached to empower the practitioner and become a witch’s allies. It is a metaphoric narrative of the witch entering the wilderness to undergo initiation, touched by supernatural and nocturnal forces, and emerging changed and empowered. > Our interconnection with the plant kingdom, and the common fate we share as living beings, should be acknowledged in our practices. > > Kazim **PAA: Titles like [Flowers of Blood](https://www.hexen.fr/books-prints/flowers-of-blood-sara-bonadea-george-paperback) foreground plant lore and folk cosmologies. In contrast to more theoretical or symbolic works, what place do nature and herbal wisdom occupy in Hexen Press’s conception of sorcery?** I believe that a genuine animistic, sorcerous connection that a practitioner maintains with the green kingdom is a vital and meaningful act of resistance against the systemic, soulless exploitation of nature and resources in a global capitalist environment. Our interconnection with the plant kingdom, and the common fate we share as living beings, should be acknowledged in our practices. Plants could certainly live without us; the opposite is far less certain. The tree, as axis mundi, is central to many traditions. In the Jurema tradition in which I am initiated, a shamanic cult from the Nordeste of Brazil, the path toward the divinisation of the soul is linked to the spirit of the Jurema tree and to the connection, or symbiosis, through which an evergreen state of enchantment is maintained. What this deeply means becomes increasingly significant to me in the world we live in. **PAA: [Aradia’s Hidden Hand](https://www.hexen.fr/books-prints/aradia-s-hidden-hand-ad-manns) reconstructs the overlooked life of Roma Lister, a figure implicated in the early stages of the writing of *The Gospel of the Witches*. How does resurrecting marginal occult histories like this reshape popular narratives about roots of modern witchcraft?** Aradia’s Hidden Hand participates in the same intention as Muses No More: to acknowledge the prominent role women have played in the development of modern witchcraft and Western esoteric traditions. While often overshadowed by male-dominated narratives, it is necessary to reconsider how we approach history, moving toward more integrative and respectful perspectives that take into account the stories and roles women have held, and continue to hold, as understood from their own viewpoints and accounts. **PAA: What genres or traditions do you want to explore next in Hexen Press: grimoire material, visionary manifestos, regional witchcraft, or something unknown?** I would definitely love to publish works of contemporary sorcerous praxis written by genuinely inspired practitioners; to explore contemporary approaches to the Greek Mysteries and modern interpretations of goetia, in the sense expressed by Jake Stratton-Kent. We have an upcoming book in French on the topic, which may offer a valuable discovery for the French scene. I am interested in new topics and perspectives, any work that ignites the flame of inspiration and magic in the soul of our readership. **PAA: Finally, if Hexen Press were to disappear tomorrow, what trace or contagion would you hope it left behind?** The Serpent’s gift of Inspiration! :) **Thank you!** **PAA: Many thanks for taking part in this interview and sharing your journey. ** --- --- # Evaluating the Critique of Bardon: A Practitioner’s Response to Nick Farrell (by Virgil) Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/evaluating-the-critique-of-bardon-a-practitioners-response-to-nick-farrell-by-virgil/ ## Introduction Recently, Nick Farrell wrote a piece about the Bardon system and the Bardon tradition with several critical claims. It can be read [here](https://substack.com/home/post/p-190491124). While I did not initially intend to read, let alone respond to it, certain close friends of mine in the Bardon world have asked me about some of the claims made in the piece. I figured if I am going to type a response for them, I might as well share it openly in case others find it helpful. I have not read any other responses to Farrell’s piece or discussions of it, so some of what I’ve written below may have already been said by others.  ### Neatness Farrell’s first criticism of IIH is that everything is too neat. It’s all packaged into ten net boxes, which are the ten steps of IIH. This is a bizarre criticism to me since there is nothing at all wrong with being neat. If the creators of other systems died before they could tidy up the systems they created, why should this reflect poorly on Bardon? If anything, the neatness of Bardon’s system should be a point in its favor.  Farrell goes on to mention that the Golden Dawn tradition and Crowley’s tradition are messes. Yes, they are. That’s a large part of why I have no interest in them. But again, the fact that Bardon is more coherent than other traditions is a good thing, not a bad thing. It’s just strange to think otherwise. For what it’s worth, Quareia, another system I highly respect, is also very neat, with everything being packaged into modules and lessons.  ### Intellectual and Practical Farrell writes “In real magical training, there is a leaning towards intellectual information first.” This statement betrays a strong and problematic bias. What Farrell considers “real magical training” is just the training he is familiar with, which is the kind of training undergone in Western magical orders. As someone who is initiated into a Taoist, a Buddhist, and a Druidic tradition of magic, I can affirm that none of these traditions requires that students spend a long time studying theory and accumulating intellectual information before beginning any kind of practice, especially basic practices like meditation. The comment Farrell makes about astral projection is very strange. Pretty much every magical training system includes some version of astral projection. I’m pretty sure even the GD system does. So it’s weird to imply it’s wrong for IIH to include its version of the practice.  ### “Bardon Fanboys” Farrell then goes on to describe what he refers to as “Bardon fanboys,” which are people overly fanatical about Bardon’s system. While it is unfortunate that such people are the way they are, every spiritual tradition has people like that. So the existence of such people shouldn’t necessarily reflect badly on Bardon’s tradition. It certainly does not imply that the entire Bardon tradition is just some personality-cult for Bardon.  ### Bardon’s Pancreatitis Farrell at some point gives his summary of Bardon’s life, mentioning that Bardon died of pancreatitis and claiming this should cast doubts on his ability as a healer. I’m not sure if Farrell is aware, but Bardon actually committed suicide. He deliberately requested and consumed a kind of bacon that he knew would inflame his pancreas to the point of killing him. By this point in his life, he had already completed his life’s work of revealing the practical mysteries behind the first three cards of the Major Arcana. ### Bardon’s Sources Farrell next discusses Bardon’s sources. He begins by questioning the idea that Bardon’s Hermetics is truly related to the Hermeticism hailing from ancient Greece and Egypt. Whether or not Bardon’s Hermetics is really Hermetic is subjective to some extent. Rawn Clark was of the opinion that Bardon’s material truly is Hermetic. His reasoning was that what Bardon teaches is in line with what is taught in the Corpus Hermeticum. As for me, I’m actually in agreement with Farrell that Bardon’s material isn’t that Hermetic. Since there was a ton of interest in Hermeticism around Bardon’s time, I believe he largely just attached the “Hermetic” label to his material to help promote it (I could be wrong though). If I had to choose an adjective to describe his material, it would be “universal” rather than “Hermetic.” That said, whether or not Bardon’s material is Hermetic really doesn’t matter at all. The only thing that matters is that it works.  Farrell then brings up the issue of the names of spirits. If you think the names of spirits are something that are really important (as is the case for most grimoire-influenced occultists), then it makes sense to be concerned that some of the names given in PME seem to be garbled versions of names from other sources. But in practice, names are really not that important. The most important thing is the spirit’s role, because that is what determines your intent. If you perform an evocation with the intent of evoking, say, the ruling genius of the fourth degree of Aquarius, then you will get that spirit. Next to the role, the sigil is the most useful thing. When used properly, it allows you to directly connect with the spirit and thus get its attention and open a channel of communication between you and it. A long time ago, when asked about the controversy regarding the names in PME, a teacher in the Bardon tradition responded that he could refer to any spirit using the name Pee-wee Herman and still evoke it; if he knew the spirit’s role and sigil, then he had everything he truly needed. If Bardon were writing PME in modern times, he very well could have written a Python program to put together random syllables to generate names for the spirits he mentioned.  ### Fluid Condensers Farrell goes on to question the usefulness of fluid condensers. He says that he has seen them employed in rituals and been underwhelmed by their effectiveness. If that is his experience, then that is his experience. But what I can say is that I have engaged in Golden Dawn rituals myself and also been underwhelmed by their effectiveness. That is my experience, and merely throwing a fluid condenser into these rituals is not going to fix the fundamental problems with the rituals themselves or with the training of those trying to do them.  Every magician I’ve met who’s actually been through IIH has found fluid condensers to be useful tools that work in the manner described by Bardon. Why? Because they are tools for magicians. They are not tools for just anyone who wants to dress up in robes and wave a wand around while vibrating names.  ### The Nature of Magical Development Farrell then says that the ten steps of IIH give the illusion that magical development occurs in a linear fashion, when in reality, people undergoing magical training “encounter insight, crisis, regression, and transformation in unpredictable ways.” This is another strange criticism to me. The ten steps of IIH can indeed give the illusion that magical development occurs in a linear fashion, but so can the grades of the Golden Dawn or the levels of any system of magical training, and they all have levels of some sort. Even if development isn’t linear, on average there should still be an upward trend, so to speak. Anyone who has actually been through IIH can tell you that in the process of working through the book, you do indeed “encounter insight, crisis, regression, and transformation in unpredictable ways.” IIH is just a single book. Its primary purpose is to provide instructions for the exercises the student must master. It’s very good for what it is. As for other things like discussions of the non-linear nature of magical advancement, Bardon left it to later practitioners of his system to write about. William Mistele in particular has done a thorough and fantastic job of writing about this particular topic. His “Problems in the Study of Magic” series of essays focuses a lot on it.  ### The Bardon Tradition vs the Bardon System Farrell then claims that there is no tradition that has developed from Bardon’s works. This is just objectively wrong. By this point I’m sure someone has pointed this out to Farrell already, but there are many communities of Bardon practitioners and many occult authors who consider themselves Bardonists and write about his system. All of these authors, without exception, myself included, do mention improvements that could be made to the IIH system. For example, I often say that breath-awareness should be inserted into Step 1 and precede thought-awareness. Spending time practicing breath-awareness (which is easier than thought-awareness) will develop one’s awareness to the point where thought-awareness becomes easy too. And when thought-awareness is easy, VOM is also easy. Farrell’s statement that “most practitioners use the original exercises without further development” is funny to me. First of all, the IIH system is fine as it is. Even if it’s not perfect and improvements can be made to it, it’s still good enough to be workable in it original form so there’s nothing wrong with trying to work through the system as is. But also, although Farrell’s statement may have been true twenty years ago, at this current time the opposite is true. Thanks to the publication of highly-questionable commentaries, many practitioners change the exercises to the point where they’re not even the same exercises. At this point they’re basically practicing a different system and will not attain to what Bardon’s actual system was designed to help practitioners attain.  To return to the topic of the Bardon tradition, ultimately you don’t become an adept by being part of a tradition. You become an adept by working through a good system. Therefore, although the Bardon tradition is nice (and does exist), it is really the Bardon system that is the most important thing. The system can exist by itself even without the tradition and still do its job. Fixation on being part of a tradition without giving adequate attention to working through the system is wholly unproductive. This just leads to people calling themselves Bardonists and arguing all day on Facebook about who Bardon’s teacher was or wasting countless hours chatting with other Bardonists on Discord about astrology and other random occult topics. And yes, this does happen all the time. ### On Bardon’s Greatness After trying to deny the Bardon tradition’s existence, Farrell writes the following: > *The image of Bardon as a master Hermetic adept primarily stems from stories created by his students. Such mythmaking is common in occult history, where a teacher’s reputation grows despite limited evidence, and their biography becomes more dramatic over time.* The second sentence is undoubtedly true. That said, in every field and art, there do exist exceptional geniuses. For example, Mozart composed his first opera around the age of twelve. By the time he died, he had composed more than 600 pieces of music, many of them elaborate and highly-acclaimed. In the world of physics there’s Einstein and in the world of chess there’s Magnus Carlsen. Whether or not Bardon was an example of such an exceptional genius is subjective. But it would be crazy to deny that such exceptional geniuses do exist, and it’s certainly not wrong to acknowledge their amazingness when they come along, or to recognize the value in learning from such people. While there are many legends around Bardon and some of them may not be true, his three published books, when viewed through unbiased eyes, are truly incredible, and the writings of adepts who have been through his system, such as William Mistele and Rawn Clark, show that it is a solid and workable system that can take practitioners to great heights. It’s hard to imagine someone who isn’t a genuine master creating a system like this.  Farrell’s discussion of the image of Bardon ends with this statement. > *If you have hung around occultists, or even especially religious people, this desire to make people gods, or convert others, is usually a sign that there is something lacking in the system.* For all Farrell’s talk about citing sources, it’s interesting he does not provide a source for this claim. The desire to make people gods is just a general human behavior. It’s actually extremely common in Eastern esoteric traditions, but this does not at all mean the systems used by those traditions are somehow incomplete. In fact, they’re actually more complete than anything I’ve seen in the West, with the exception IIH and Quareia. And in any case, if there are Bardonists trying to make Bardon into a god, those Bardonists are in the minority and are in error. [As Rawn once explained](https://www.abardoncompanion.de/BardonPraxis/msg02386.html), “Hermetic initiation as Bardon presented it is not about following another person's revelation. Instead, it is about empowering the student's own abilities to attain their own personal revelations.” ### Bardon’s Sources (Again) Later in his piece, Farrell brings up the topic of Bardon’s sources a second time, taking a guess as to what they are and then questioning whether his system is “a continuation of a known lineage.” A thorough analysis of Bardon’s sources is too much to get into here. However, ultimately it doesn’t matter. At least from a standard Bardonist point of view, the only thing that matters is whether it works. But I guess if GD practitioners cared about whether something works, they wouldn’t be GD practitioners?  Farrell goes on to say that Bardon’s content differs from how things are done in the world of Western ceremonial magic, and that they also differ from how things are done in the grimoires. This is, frankly speaking, a very good thing. A large part of Western ceremonial magic is egomaniacs LARPing as wizards from Ancient Egypt. As for the grimoires, while there are some gems hidden in some of them (especially the *Arbatel of Magic*), there is also a ton of silly superstition in them. This doesn’t mean people won’t get any results from trying to work the grimoires, but any positive results they get will be despite the issues grimoires have, and not because the grimoires are some kind of perfect source of magical insight and instruction. If people doubt the existence of the spirits Bardon mentions in PME, they can read William’s writings of his experiences evoking them. Inner Traditions will be publishing an updated version of *Mermaids, Sylphs, Gnomes, and Salamanders* soon, so the timing is apt.  ### Ritual Culture and Group Practice Farrell then criticizes Bardon’s system by saying it “downplays ritual culture and group practice.” Here, his bias is showing again. Just because these things are important in Western ceremonial magic doesn’t mean they have to be important in every magical tradition. Also, I would not say that Bardon’s system really “downplays” these things anyway. He just doesn’t discuss them, because it’s not the focus of his writings. But Bardonists are nevertheless free to practice exercises together and work magic together if they want to. Rawn worked with many others to create the Eight Temples. And William often invites various spiritual practitioners, including Bardonists, over to his house in Hawaii to talk and engage in spiritual practice together. I myself paid a visit to William near the end of last year and we had a great time connecting with the undine Istiphul together on the beach by his house.  ### Bardon Not for Beginners Farrell makes the statement that Bardon “can’t even be recommended to beginners.” I actually agree with this, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Calculus can’t be recommended to beginners in mathematics, but this doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with calculus. Near the end of Step 1, Bardon pretty much says that his system is for those who already have a background in meditation. He could have made his statement clearer, but this is an issue with the wording of one passage in IIH, not something fundamentally wrong with the entire system.  ### Conclusion So, what are my overall thoughts on Farrells piece after reading it? Farrell seems largely sincere in trying to fairly evaluate Bardon’s work and legacy. However, Farrell has a very obvious bias, which ultimately makes his evaluation far from fair. This bias is that he thinks GD-derived Western ceremonial magic is some kind of gold standard for how magic should be trained and practiced. In fact, a large portion of Farrell’s criticism can be summarized as “It’s different from what we do in GD-derived Western ceremonial magic, therefore it’s bad and not real magic.” But it’s not actually a bad thing to differ from GD-derived Western ceremonial magic. In fact, as someone who was previously involved in GD-derived Western ceremonial magic and found it to be a waste of time, I consider it very good that Bardon does many things differently. Buddhist, Taoist, and shamanic traditions also do things very differently from GD-derived Western ceremonial magic.  Farrell does make some correct statements in his piece. He is correct that people in spiritual traditions have a tendency to deify the tradition’s founders, although I do not really see that happening with Bardon (again, admiration and recognition of accomplishment does not equate to deification). Also, I do agree with Farrell that Bardon’s material isn’t that Hermetic and that it’s not for beginners; but again, none of that is bad.  Farrell took the time to read Bardon’s books while researching his piece. I do applaud him for that. However, it clearly wasn’t enough. This is because there is the Bardon system and also the Bardon tradition. If Farrell had only wanted to comment on the Bardon system, it would have been enough to just read Bardon’s writings. But since Farrell comments on not just the Bardon system but the Bardon tradition as well, it would have been highly advisable to read other writings from the tradition to get a better and more comprehensive familiarity with it. This would have included, first and foremost, the writings of Bardon-trained adepts like Rawn Clark and William Mistele, and in particular the second edition of *[A Bardon Companion](https://www.abardoncompanion.de/shop.html);* *[Mermaids, Sylphs, Gnomes, and Salamanders](https://www.amazon.com/Mermaids-Sylphs-Gnomes-Salamanders-Dialogues/dp/1583944931);* and at least a few of the chapters of *Twenty-Five Earth-zone Spirits*. --- ## About the Author Virgil is a contemporary Christian magician and author dedicated to distilling Franz Bardon’s Hermetic system into concise, accessible guides for modern practitioners. His work focuses on practical self-initiation and the cultivation of elemental equilibrium—a foundational practice in Bardon’s teachings. Virgil’s clear and structured approach has made his writings valuable resources for those seeking to embark on or deepen their Hermetic journey.​ One of his notable contributions is *[The Elemental Equilibrium: Notes on the Foundation of Magical Practice](https://www.amazon.com/Elemental-Equilibrium-Foundation-Magical-Adepthood-ebook/dp/B0768FPDKF/ref=sr_1_1?crid=83HELNQQNU5W&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.mzDOeruOwuX0PHKSSdpTYWQ3ku-XruVEDU1QKU824OU7lVY0ZFFUu_x1O-IVbhtLfuTHW9Sjf3h-RtyBkkEhwzv8RqF7cvIOdSRMC0jy6hUpRw_1lZLQHsFNuC_IUbP1qSLBEmGVEY_Rz3mLt2ar2zCPxV1rly6t-Yj_xEEgsnjWjV0QWV8yedrsJbwDlcsi0c-dXndcNKhuGYSnGThBCmfWb2JcRj-mUpPp6kCDOKk.gTEGcrVxyuEb5ZwEavybdgnbOZ6Jgt1tV-CcyATOexk&dib_tag=se&keywords=the%2Belemental%2Bequilibrium&qid=1745221351&sprefix=the%2Belemental%2Bequi%2Caps%2C237&sr=8-1)*, which offers a thorough and easily understandable guide to establishing an elemental equilibrium. This work emphasizes the importance of balancing and purifying the elements constituting one’s soul and spirit, a crucial step in the path of magical development. --- --- # Christie Smirl (Kalavati Devi) on Discernment, Kundalini, Siddhi, and Tantric Practice Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/christie-smirl-kalavati-devi-on-discernment-kundalini-siddhi-and-tantric-practice/ ## Introduction In this interview, we meet [Christie](http://www.healthiervibrations.com/), whose journey began in childhood when her clairvoyant abilities first emerged—a deeply challenging time, as no adults around her could relate to her experiences. This early awakening set her on a path of self-discovery, leading to the accomplished guide we see today. A heartfelt thank you to Christie for sharing both sides of her journey—the struggles as well as the growth that shaped who she has become. If you’d like to follow her work, you’ll find links at the end of the post. --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ChatGPT-Image-Mar-24-2026-05_53_51-PM-683x1024.png) ## Interview **PAA: You worked in acute care for decades at St. Bernardine Medical Center. What did 30  years of hospital experience in the emergency department, intensive care and trauma  teach you about discernment, and how do you now apply that to subtle-body work and tantra? ** When working with critically ill humans in life and death situations, you must triage and  problem solve quickly; prioritize the most important tasks first. One must see beyond  smoke and mirrors, emotions, ego and chaos. ***Discernment ***is defined as being able to grasp and comprehend, often what is obscure. When a patient comes into the emergency department screaming with abdominal pain, you must rapidly ***differentiate ***from a myriad  of possibilities such as trauma, infection, obstruction, poisoning, nerve radiculopathy, psychosis or drug seeking. There is no time to waste and a very narrow margin for error.  Working with acutely ill patients helped me hone and increase my natural ability to pick up  on the unseen and unsaid. There are advantages to being able to perceive shifts in a person’s subtle body prior to changes in physiologic, laboratory or electrical biometric measurements. It’s like an early warning system. Some call it spidey senses, six sense, gut instincts, intuition, extrasensory perceptions or ***divination. ***These special senses take discernment to deeper levels. Working in a highly charged hospital setting also teaches ***detachment***, how operate without becoming absorbed by egos or emotions.   Does this discernment translate to teaching and learning subtle-body work and tantra? Yes,  absolutely. Subtle body work encompasses a wide range of energetic techniques that  target sheaths ***beyond the physical***. In Ayurveda, yoga and tantric healing it important to  assess and harmonize all five sheaths: the gross body (annamaya kosha), breath sheath  (pranamaya kosha), mind sheath (manomaya kosha), subtle spiritual sheath (vijnanamaya  kosha) and soul sheath (anandamaya kosha). When it comes to aligning the last two most  subtle sheaths, tantra and subtle body work are highly effective. Success as a teacher or  practitioner is directly proportional discernment and ability to *differentiate, determine, detach and divinate. * True subtle body work falls under the umbrella of tantric modalities. That being said, I must  say that the terms subtle body therapeutics and tantra are used loosely and cheaply.  These days, many tantra ‘workshops’ look more like social self-gratification groups lacking  authentic knowledge of tantra. Many people approach tantra and subtle body work for the  wrong reasons. Many want a romanticized social experience. Some want a magical mirage.  Others are looking for something to boost their confidence or a quick fix to make the pain  go away. That’s not what it’s all about.   Tantra as a noun is a teaching, a text. As a verb, tantra is a practice. Tantra is an ancient  nondual tradition that ***liberates consciousness***. The word tantra is derived from two Sanskrit words: tanoti and trayate. Tanoti means to ***expand***. Trayate means to liberate.  Sanskritists look at the word tantra in two parts: tan and tra. ‘Tan’ means to “stretch or  expand” and ‘tra’ means to “save or ***protect***”. The goal of tantra is to purify and awaken ***Kundalini ***to transform the individual into a divine embodiment. As a system of science and  occult-magical paths, true tantra requires discerning divination. Curriculum and  counseling must be ***tailored, individualized, truthful and direct***. Tantra and subtle body  work often require vulnerability and breaking through multiple layers of painful  conditioning, seen and unseen.   In intensive care, the patient is helpless and your job is to facilitate them back to full  recovery and independence. Working in the hospital, you learn how to break the news truthfully and tell it like it is, even if they are not prepared to hear it. As a medical  practitioner, you are not worried whether you are ‘liked’ or followed. Your goal is to first, do  not harm. Second to heal. Third, to restore their independence or liberation. This should  always be the goal in tantra and subtle body work.   **PAA: When you compare Western hospital medicine with [Ayurveda](https://www.healthiervibrations.com/ayurveda-yoga-institute.html), where do you see the  most productive “meeting point”—and where do you insist they should not be collapsed  into each other? ** Western medicine and Ayurvedic medicine both have great value and function. Western  hospital medicine is often what I refer to as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff,  whereas Ayurveda is the stop sign and fence at the top of the cliff. Ayurveda ***prevents ***and  treats symptoms before they become chronic conditions. Ayurveda detects imbalances  before disease is evidenced by laboratory or radiographic diagnostics. Western medicine  treats disease after it has begun. People who rely on western medicine get ***prescription  pills ***and bandages more often than not. People who rely on Ayurvedic medicine get  ***protocols ***for self-accountability which includes nutrition, lifestyle modifications and  spiritual interventions. Western medicine eludes to preventative care but rarely promotes  patient accountability till it is too late. After 30 years experience in the hospital, I have  come to see that the US medical model profits from ***procedures***, pills, ***probing***, ***products***,  ***patient passivity ***and ***persistent illness***. An Ayurvedic doctor, who is true to traditional  roots, values their ability to reverse illness and make to person independently well.   I wholeheartedly promote integrative medicine, but feel the two should have distinct  boundaries, especially in the education arena. I would caution about blending Ayurveda  into mainstream western medical curriculum. Mainstream medicine is infamous for  ***diluting ***and ***deleting ***older sciences. For example, it used to be common knowledge to  plan surgeries based on the planetary cycles for better outcomes and healing. Now, that  knowledge has been erased from US medicine. The US has now established accredited Ayurvedic colleges, clinics and doctorate level practitioners. It would be a dream come true to be able to make Ayurvedic referrals as part  of standard US medical care, but we are not there yet. The time is coming. In the 1970’s, traditional Chinese medicine really struggled to be accepted. It was seen as primitive ***folk  medicine***. Now you can get a referral for acupuncture through mainstream insurance.  Ayurveda is growing steadily in the US. Ayurveda has stood the test of time, over 6,000  years. It will still be here after American health ***fads ***and ***facades ***fade.   **PAA: You describe leaving hospital life exhausted and taking a sabbatical in early 2020 to devote yourself to writing, devotional music, and spiritual art. What inner “identity surgery”  did that require, and what made the shift non-negotiable? ** It was hard to understand myself as a devotional artist. I was used to being intellectual,  rational, punctual and productive. Devotional work comes from the heart, from feelings and emotional connection to the divine. I had worked hard all my life limit feelings and  emotions. It was complicated to open this side of myself. Much of my inner self was  wrapped tightly with bared wire. I had to truly question if I wanted liberation through  devotion.   Devoting one’s self to writing, sacred art and music requires making room. I had to  relinquish my time stamped life. I had to make space for spiritual rejuvenation and deep  meditation for hours a day to reach the level of gnosis and devoted art I was seeking. My  rational mind triggered cascades of self-criticism and questioning. Is this devotion or  escapism? Is this laziness and unproductivity disguised as spirituality? How will this pay  the bills? Is this a mid-life crisis? Is this menopause? Is this empty-nest syndrome? Is this  COVID psychosis? Am I under a spell or a curse? Is this a spiritual breakdown or  breakthrough?  I spent entire days, weeks and months in solitude. I rarely left the house unless it was to go  to the grocery store or into nature. I was up at all hours of the night. There was no schedule, no due dates and no rules. There was no boss, no business meetings, no bureaucracy. I did  what I wanted. I was immersed in chanting, meditation, ritual, reading occult books, tantric rituals, receiving spiritual initiations, painting, drawing, writing poetry, singing,  composing music, astral traveling, practicing personal alchemy and channeling. My aim  was ***mysticism not mechanical motions***. I wanted to deepen my relationships in the  spiritual realm. I wanted to go deeper than ever before. I also wanted answers to lifelong questions. I wanted liberation. It was intense. It was all consuming because I allowed it to  be. I had the luxury, dedication and determination to become devotionally consumed. I refused to be driven by lust for financial gain or recognition. I wanted gnosis, not a product  to package and promote.  Once my whole world shifted, my mind was liberated from decades of constriction and  conditioning. I refused to go back to the constrained mainstream life as I had lived it before.  Period. Once the spiritual eye opens, you cannot unsee.   > My spectrum of vision did not include angels or benevolent spirits, just tormented souls,  chthonic spirits and demons. > > Christie Smirl ~ Kalavati Devi **PAA: You’ve described an out-of-body experience at age four and later astral/mystical experiences you call reliable and reproducible—what were the psychological and spiritual  costs of that sensitivity, and what practices helped you integrate it without fear? ** There were huge ***psychological costs***. I did not have a spiritual teacher or supportive infrastructure. I did not have a religious framework to relate to. I had visions, spirit  encounters, out-of-body experiences and possession phenomenon. At a young age, I  distinctly knew the difference between nightmares, daymares, fantasy and reality. My  senses became ***hyper-alert ***and ultra-sensitive. I was clairaudient, clairsentient,  experiencing precognition and psychometry. It was ***disturbing ***at best. At school, I rarely  made friends, nor did I want to. Company of others was undesirable and a liability. As an  only child, I kept to myself at home.   Psychologically, I felt ***tortured ***by the spiritual realm, sometimes in a paralytic state of  sheer ***terror***. I was overstimulated and harassed by the spirit world. It was ***intimidating ***and  ***parasitic***. On occasion, I would speak about my paranormal reality, but the Satanic panic  was well underway. That kind of talk was frowned upon and could get you put into an  institution. Over the years I was tested for ***schizophrenia***, autism and such. All tests were negative and inconclusive. My intelligence quotient testing came back genius level and my  grades were exceptional, so my ‘abnormal behaviors’ were chalked up to social  maladjustment.  My attempts to keep boundaries between worlds resulted in a type of ***obsessive  compulsive ***disorder. I learned quickly that spirits could read and influence your mind and  emotions. In response I developed a technique of counting rapidly 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-9- 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 back and forth silently in my mind for hours on end. It jammed all spirit  ***telepathic ***communications. As a result, I rarely spoke or responded to many people unless required, because I was counting. My personality came across serious, dark and cold. I had no tolerance for chit-chatters or social gatherings. I preferred the company of  my chickens, rabbits and dogs. They didn’t have mental diarrhea or entities lingering  around them. My fear eventually became hypervigilance, ultra-awareness. My social  aversions created strong boundaries. My ***isolation ***became my shelter and strength.  The ***spiritual costs ***were mixed. It was like ethereal survival bootcamp training. I struggled.  My spectrum of vision did not include angels or benevolent spirits, just tormented souls,  chthonic spirits and demons. I felt like a lost child in a demonic fun house ***horror story***. My goal was to shut it all down, block it out.   At about the age nine, I received brief spiritual training from a priestess at a metaphysical  church in Pasadena, California. She helped me establish spiritual boundaries. It was the  first time a person had acknowledged that I was receptive, not crazy. A healer at the same church took me under her wing for a while and taught me about talismans, crystal charms, psychism and warding techniques. By age twelve, I found ***vodka***. That worked well. The  problem was solved, temporarily.   In my thirties I began formally studying ***Ayurveda, ***yoga, meditation and Reiki. Through  Ayurveda, I was administered medhya herbs such as brahmi, tulsi, shakapushpi to purify  and strengthen my mind channels. I was given rasayana herbs to ground my subtle body  energies. I took a protocol of bitter and purging herbs such as triphalagritum and neem to  clean my blood, liver and digestive system. I underwent a full ***panchakarma ***cleansing  regimen with lifelong instructions on nutritional modifications, yoga asana, pranayama and  meditation. Ayurveda introduced me to the chakras, the Dakinis and the benevolent  guardians such as ***Ganesha***, Saraswati and Durga. I was prescribed and taught healing  mantras. I learned about Kali Maa, my Ishtadevata, the wrathful Goddess from my  childhood experiences. Then in my forties I formally studied Himalayan Shamanic ***Tantra ***and ***Kali Consciousness***. This took me full circle. I was no longer afraid. I became in  control. My power was reclaimed and reorganized.  **PAA: In your account, spirits often communicate through emotions, images, and fragments—how did that shape your approach to interpretation, and how do you teach students to avoid projection when dealing with subtle perception? ** Teaching students how to avoid projection when dealing with subtle perception is difficult,  but necessary. I teach a course called ***Energy 911***. I ask the students to first contemplate the following. Just because you experience a feeling, doesn’t mean it came from you. Just  because you perceived a thought, doesn't mean it originated from your own thoughts. Just  because you see an image flash in your mind, doesn't mean it pertains or belongs to you. I  challenge students to really sit with those concepts when dealing with everyday life,  emotional regulation and subtle perceptions. This helps them understand the difference  between ***true inner knowledge***, psychic debris cross contamination verses ***instigated  psychic manipulation***.  It is important to understand where psychic manipulation comes from. Spirits are very  capable of projecting and triggering emotions, images, thoughts and impulses. Most  humans are like open books. All it takes is a quick psychic body scan to determine their  weaknesses and strengths, fears and frustrations, desires and delusions. A ***vampiric spirit ***or ***parasitic hungry ghost ***can manipulate to produce a desired outcome for their benefit or entertainment. Maleficent spirits will often create a trigger that seems quite familiar to  the target, so people assume it came from within. They assume it is their own internal  thought, feeling, recollection or inner dialog. Humans can do the same thing to exploit  other humans. Whether we call them witches, wizards, occultists, ***black magicians ***or enchantresses, there are people capable of psychic manipulation beyond subliminal  messages.   I teach students ***steady self-awareness***. When disturbances arise, I ask them to ***wait and  witness rather than react***; ***investigate rather than internalize***. One of the best methods  that I have learned and teach is call the light and sound kriya. It is a Self-realization method  that steadies and purifies the mind and sense organs. After dedicated practice, one can  discern inner verses outer sight and sound. Being able differentiate between inner and outer psychic stimuli, makes manipulation easy to recognize and block. So, awareness and  detection come first. To reduce this phenomenon, I tell students the following. Be careful  of the company you keep. Don’t aggravate the realm of spirit. Honor your ancestors. Stay  out of places that harbor unrestful spirits. Don’t talk to the dead, unless you have very  specific work to do. Regularly cleanse your psychic field. Regularly perform protective  measures, just like you lock the front door at night. Lastly, be mindful of your emotions.  Anger, lust, jealousy, sloth, treachery, regret, arrogance and such are called ghost thieves  for a reason. Transmute these A.S.A.P.   **PAA: You’ve spoken publicly about mental health, possession/insanity themes, and  spiritual pitfalls—what framework do you use to distinguish spiritual crisis, trauma  activation, and a mental-health emergency in real time? ** To differentiate between ***spiritual crisis***, emotional trauma or ***mental health emergency ***there are key assessments to establish whether the shift is ***psychosomatic, psychological ***or ***paranormal***. Being able to systematically make a differential diagnosis is key. This is  multifaceted, but through Ayurveda I follow a clear framework.   Naturally, I want to rule out ***biological ***causes first. Are they on drugs? Psychedelics?  Prescription psychoactive pills? New supplements? Alcohol? Excessive stimulants like caffeine, diet pills, power drinks or energy boosters? Even things like food dye allergies can trigger outrageous mental derangement. What is their diet like? Have they been fasting or  binging? Have labs been checked? Blood imbalances such as elevated ammonia, electrolyte imbalances, kidney failure, infection and vitamin deficiencies can provoke  mental derangement. Has there been head trauma? This is the tip of the iceberg.  From an Ayurvedic standpoint assessment can determine if the mental disturbance is  psychosomatic, arising from an ***imbalanced bodily dosha***. There are three doshas: vata,  pitta and kapha. If the bodily humor vata is elevated it can cause rajasic mental symptoms  such as anxiety, insomnia, ***paranoia***, hypervigilance, hallucinations and hyper erratic  behaviors. If pitta is elevated it can rajasic symptoms like mental agitation, rage, violent  outbursts, ***homicidal ***and suicidal ideations. If kapha is elevated in the body it can cause  tamasic mental symptoms such as ***depression***, isolation, lethargy, hoarding and dark  behaviors. In western medicine, these symptoms are most often diagnosed as  psychological aberrancies, treated with sedatives and antidepressants or ***antipsychotic  drugs***. Ayurvedic medicine understands that the root cause of these psychosomatic  disturbances are caused by ***incompatible nutrition and lifestyles***.  Then there are psychological origins, ***mental trauma ***or agitation due to loss, grief, shock,  rejection, shame, guilt, fear, frustration, stress, anger, abuse, post traumatic stress or lust.  Understanding the timing, duration and triggering factors is important. This type of mental  indigestion can be resolved with herbs, counseling and proper self-regulation and re direction such as ***meditation vs western medication***.   To determine if the mental crisis is paranormal or ***possession***, there are a whole host of  questions such as, but not limited to the following. Has the person been involved in or  exposed to black magic, occult rituals, curses or magical books? Does the person have  any obsession or addiction? Have they visited any haunted locations, cemetery, hospital or  mental institution? Have they been involved with people who traffic spirits, even well meaning channelers? Have they been speaking to the dead? Have they experienced  anything paranormal? Have they engaged with a new sex partner? Has anybody near them  such as a relative recently died? Ayurveda has clear methods of detection and treatment of  possession.   No matter what the cause of mental disruption, management requires pinpointing the root  cause. This requires adequate ***investigation***, detailed ***inquiry ***to collect a personal, social,  spiritual and medical history. A physical assessment is needed with possibly laboratory  work. Collaborative input from family members and friends is ideal. n environmental  evaluation such as a home visit is very valuable. Any skeletons in the closet? Don’t forget to  rule out attention seeking or manipulation.  **PAA: Your Spring 2026 advanced module highlights mystical transformation through  Dakinis and dharanas from the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra—what capacities do these  practices develop, and what readiness markers do you require? ** I am really looking forward to teaching this particular program which incorporates the Dakinis and Vijnana Bhairanva Tantra dharanas. The maximum class size is 8 students, and  all classes are in person, so I must be selective with enrollment. ***Readiness markers ***are  important, especially in ***tantric training***. First of all, I have known each student for several  years already. They have attended programs at The Yale Drive Ashram where I have  assessed their ***ritual competencies***. Since they have completed previous courses and certifications with me, I have become familiar with their ***psychological groundedness,  sincerity ***and ***devotional consistency***. I don’t except students with an over inflated or  ***unstable egos***. An ideal student is motivated towards Self-realization vs ***self-inflation***.  This Spring 2026 program will focus on the ***Dakinis***, powerful ***Shaktis ***of the Holy Mother,  ***tantric Goddesses ***honored through ritual and meditation. Dakini means sky dancer, sky  goer or sky Mother. Fearful people call them ***flesh eaters***. The Dakinis are worked with and  revered in Tantra, Hinduism, Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhism. Dakinis facilitate the  removal of conceptual deceptions and multi-dimensional imbalances to help the  practitioner obtain enlightenment. Dakinis are also ***guardians ***and protectors of knowledge  and Shakti. They may block the rise of Shakti in weak, unready or unworthy practitioners.  Sometimes they create illusion and confusion to protect the practitioner against abnormal  or premature rise of Kundalini. Dakinis empower those who are prepared, capable and  equipped.   Each Dakini governs one of the seven primary chakras, hence they are called ***Chakra  Dakinis***. Each Dakini also empowers one of the seven primary dhatus (body tissues),  hence they are called Dhātunāthās or ***Dhatu Dakinis***. Here’s is a quick run down of  correlations. Bone is governed by Dakini in the muladhara root chakra. Fat is the abode of  Rakini in the svadhistana sacral chakra. Muscle is overseen by Lakini in the manipura solar  chakra. Blood is governed by Kakini in the anahata heart chakra. Plasma is connected with  Shakini in the vishuddha throat chakra. Bone marrow is associated with Hakini in the ajna  third eye chakra. Reproductive power is linked to Katyayani in the sahasara crown chakra.   The Dakinis are well known to awaken and ***bestow siddhis***. Siddhis are  supernatural or mystical byproducts of self-mastery and spiritual advancements. Siddhi is  translated as knowledge, accomplishment, attainment, success or ability. Siddhis can  become distractions and ego disrupters. Practitioners need not demonstrate, advertise or  boast about siddhis. They are indications of mastery, achievement and ***liberated Shakti***.  Many teachers emphasize keeping siddhis private, secret, prized as a special gift, not a parlor trick. Siddhis are countless and mysterious. Here are a few commonly discussed.  Anima, the ability to shrink to the size of an atom. Mahima siddhi is the ability to expand into an infinitely large size. Laghima is the ability to be weightless. Garima is the ability to become very heavy or dense. Prapti is the ability to access any place. Prakamya the ability  to manifest one’s desires. Ishitva is the ability to control the elements or natural forces.  Vashitva is the ability to influence anyone.  The Spring curriculum focuses on developing an intimate connection with the Dakinis for Self-realization. Part of this process incorporates dharanas of the Vijnana  Bhairanva Tantra (VBT)***. ***The VBT is a central scripture in Kaula Tantra written around the 7th century CE. It encompasses 112 meditational concentration exercises called dharanas  which facilitate non-dual transcendental reality, pure consciousness of Bhairava. These  method focus attention on the different dimensions within the body, such as the chakras,  dhatus, the void or the spiritual heart. Coupled with the Dakinis, this is going to be a very  powerful training module.   **PAA: That same program emphasizes ritual, mantra studies, and chanting to modulate the mental, emotional, and subtle bodies—how do you structure ritual so it leads to integration rather than peak experience or spiritual bypass? ** Thank you for this question. Structuring ritual for integration rather than peak experience or  ***spiritual bypassing ***is important. Some people are drawn to ritual for the **thrill and  theatrics**. Some are enchanted by ‘L.A.R.P.ing’ ***live action role playing ***rather than  ***legitimate transformation***. For some it is a ***social event ***verses self-work. As a ritual  facilitator, these are pretty easy to spot, especially when you establish a long-term  therapeutic teacher student relationship. Part of this relationship is getting to know and  helping them become liberated from their ***psychological wounds***, unresolved issues and  challenges. If ***Self-actualization ***is not their goal, they are in the wrong ritual space with  me.  When structuring ritual, I follow and teach a systematic approach. First, make a clear  intention, purpose, goal, ***sankalpa ***or vow. Write it. Speak it. Next, go through a set of  questions. Some questions include the following. What are you willing to do or ***sacrifice ***to  achieve that goal? Does the ritual involve ***invokation ***or evocation of a God(dess) or spirit?  Are you trained, qualified or competent to perform ritual with that entity? Do you know the  dangers? Is this a one-time ritual? If not, how many times will you perform it? Once, weekly,  monthly, annually, daily for ninety days or daily for five years? Are you ***dedicated ***to the  process even if it is ***unglamorous***, uncomfortable or unfruitful at first? Are you willing to  accept feedback from your ritual mentor regarding the process, good or bad?  As taught by my Guru, ***success is dependent on intensity, sincerity and totality. *** **PAA: In your essay Physics of Mantra Divinization you describe mantras as purifying subtle  and physical bodies and removing obstructions—what does “purification” look like in lived experience, and how do you keep students from using it as a moral or ego narrative? ** What a great question. I assess purification from two points of view, the objective and the  subjective. Objective evidence involved facts, unbiased and verifiable data, such as a  measurable physical change. That can include blood pressure, skin complexion, weight,  laboratory results, xray, observable behavioral changes so on. Subjective is typically based  on the student or patients feelings, opinions, personal experience. Subjective analysis is  subject to fluctuations and ego narrative. Objective is concrete.   Purification in real life experience is evidenced by reduction of physical or mental pain,  suffering, delusion or disease. Also, the narrative should change when purified. Let’s use trauma as an example. Does the person continue to wear trauma as a badge? Has the  trauma been reframed? Can the person convert trauma into fuel or a stepping stone? Have  the move beyond ***victimization to victor mentality***? Has their pain pivoted to purpose,  plan and action? Has illusion been illuminated? Purification is evidenced when physical  and psychological disturbances are ***released and relinquished rather than relished and  repeated. ***Transcendence requires ***willingness and work***.   Having a living spiritual mentor in these matters ensures objective and subjective feedback, a person to help judge the progress. A mentor can tell when the work is not  actually being done or not working. However, some people just want reassurance,  approval, pacification, a microphone or a parental figure.  > Mantras are phenomenal. They changed my life. > > Christie Smirl ~ Kalavati Devi **PAA: You also reference the Mahāmṛtyunjaya mantra as a “moksha mantra” connected  with fear and liberation—how do you teach powerful mantras safely, in terms of dosage,  timing, contraindications, and integration practices? ** Mantras are phenomenal. They changed my life. There are thousands of mantras. I only  teach healing and devotional mantras. I exclusively teach Vedic Sanskrit and tantric  mantras. ***Teaching mantras ***first requires determining what the goal is. Do they need a  Shanti Path mantra to reestablish inner peace? Do they need the Mahāmṛtyunjaya to  overcome the fear of death and disease? Do they need a devotional mantra to Ganesha for  grounding and removal of obstacles? A mantra to Saraswati for knowledge, learning, art  and music. A Narasimha mantra for protection? Each mantra has a different effect.  ***Dosage ***is dependent on several factors. For example, a person with a strong mind and  body can chant longer and louder. Chanting too long or too loud can create excessive internal heat and ***mental agitation***. A weakened or mentally labile person should chant for  less time, softer or silently.  ***Timing ***of mantras makes a big difference. **Time of day **matters. Some mantras are best  chanted very early in the morning during ***brahmamuhurta***. Others are best chanted at  night, such as Kali mantras. Timing of mantras also involves calendar timing, ***day of week ***or ***lunar cycles***. Some mantras are chanted daily, others only on specific days, such as  Mercury mantras on Wednesday or Kali mantras on Tuesday, Saturday, new-moons and  eclipses. Mantra timing applies to how long to chant the mantra over time. Will the mantra  be chanted for 3 days, 3 months or lifelong? ***Length of time ***per sitting has to be taken into  consideration. Some mantras are chanted for one round of 108 repetitions. That may only  take 15 minutes. Other mantras are chanted for 10 rounds of 108 repetitions and that may  take up to ***3 hours***. Timing also determines ***speed***. Some mantras are intentionally chanted  very fast. Others are slowly articulated.   There are only a few mantra ***contraindications***. If the person becomes ***psychologically  unstable ***while chanting the mantra, it should be discontinued and or modified by the  person prescribing it. A mantra to a deity should never be done without understanding,  faith, ***respect ***and devotion. Doing so can cause harm or even possession. Some mantras  are never chanted out loud or shared. Some mantras are advanced and the person must meet pre-requisites.   One of the most important ***integrative practices ***is to sit and absorb and harmonize after  chanting. It is all too common that people chant, then just rush off back to normal life. This  can lessen the therapeutic effects or even cause agitation and imbalance. After chanting,  ***relax, reflect, receive, recalibrate ***and let one’s energy and consciousness ***reorganize***.  To integrate, my spiritual father, Baba Yogi Kalinath Aghori KrishnaKali Das, taught me an  important formula. Concentration + visualization + intonation + heightened feeling brings presence. Concentration is attention and time. Visualization is seeking union. Intonation is  a vibration of name and form. Heightened feeling brings sensation and energy. Presence  creates divine networking. This formula has yielded great integrative results with mantra  work. **PAA: Your book KALI GNOSIS frames devotion to Kali as intimate, demanding, and transformative through ritual practices and channeled writing—how do you define  “devotion” as a discipline, and what does it ask a person to surrender or refine? ** Devotion is a discipline. ***Devotion ***is one of the most ***sacred sacrifice***; sacrifice of one’s  time, priorities, attention and energy. In Sanskrit, the term भक्ति means devotion and bhakti; they are synonyms. Bhakti is faith, faith as devotion, ***faith ***as the ***fearless pursuit.*** The highest pursuit is devotional service. Devotion requires courage, tenacity, and  resilience. In devotion, one surrenders and sacrifices all conditions, persons, places and  circumstances which block the goal. In devotion, one fastidiously removes the obstacles and inertia, doubt and dread. Devotion involves listening and becoming immersed and  inspired. Devotion can involve attending satsang with a group or community of peers who  seek truth. Devotion may manifest as the process of remembering and fixing one’s mind,  not losing sight of the goal, not becoming defeated, ***rising every day***. Devotion often  requires memorizing and repetition, stability and focus. Devotion is shown through  ***reverence, praise, prostration, paying homage ***and respect to that which we hold sacred.  Devotion takes surrender and constant sincere determination. Anything less, might just be  a flash in the pan.   Thank you for this opportunity the share.   Christie Smirl ~ Kalavati Devi **PAA: Thank you very much for sharing so much about your journey. ** --- ## Christie Smirl ~ Kalavati Devi: Further Information ##### Website - Healthier Vibrations ##### YouTube ##### Events    --- # George Mensink on Death, Sound Journeys, and Healing the Soul Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/george-mensik-on-death-sound-journeys-and-healing-the-soul/ ## Introduction I recently had the pleasure of talking with George Mensink after receiving a recommendation from a mutual friend. This allowed us to have a discussion about the possibility of George sharing his approach to practice via a course on Perseus. This was a fruitful discussion and it always a pleasure to talk with other practitioners. In today's interview you get to see some of his background and views on practice. If you enjoy this interview, then please leave us a comment and share the post with those you feel would be interested. --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-1.png) ## Interview ### Death, Nursing, and a Life Shaped by Farewell **PAA: You’ve been an ICU nurse for over 30 years, and in your book Als het Licht Uitgaat you share more than 50 short stories about your experiences with illness, dying, farewell, and grief. How have these profound experiences with death – both in your personal life and in caring for patients – impacted your spiritual outlook and the way you approach healing others?** Death and me go hand in hand. It is like Cheyenne describing the Harmonica Man to Jill in Once upon a Time in the West: “there is something, around him, that has to do with Death”. It is almost the same as my mentor Ann told me: “Death and you walk hand in hand”. Ann was a good friend and a mentor, she passed away this year. As a young boy I can remember I dug up a dead mole with my neighbour girlfriend, just to watch and observe it. The mole was found dead by my father and he buried it. I was so curious I dug it up and watched it. I can remember I was fascinated by it. A dead animal. It made me wonder and think about what death was. I was about five years old at that time. My mother died when I was 13 due to an auto immune disease, my guardian, the sister of my father, my aunt, died when I was 18. I was very attached to my mother and after her death I had some problems with the girlfriends my father was dating and was sent away to my guardian and we had long conversations, so she became very important to me as well. And she was killed in a car accident when I was 18. My brother committed suicide when I was 33 (he was 27) and my father died when I was 37. So I had my share of death in my personal life. Somehow these experiences helped me when guiding people to the end of their life and it was a great help when I supported the relatives who were in the process of loosing a lost one. As an ICU nurse I was involved many times when a treatment was ended and sometimes people were fully conscious and aware that life was going to end. Fast. It often led to deep discussions about life and what will come after. And of course: was life worth living? What are the true meanings of life? At work it is something I am quite good in. It is a combination of knowledge about anatomy/pathology, human knowledge and empathy. Through the years I have learned to feel the patient and their family and know how to guide them through the end. One of the things I have learned is that all the earthly things are relative, but at the same time valuable. Life must be lived. Preferably to the max, in my opinion. Don’t postpone, do it and do it now. Later is something that does not always come. ### Runes, Myth, and the Circle of Life **PAA: Your recent book Runenliederen is a collection of songs/poems that, using the ancient runic script, “sing the circle of life from beginning to end.” What drew you to the wisdom of the runes and Northern European mythology? How do the runes and their stories inform your understanding of the life journey or the soul’s path?** I wrote Runenliederen (working on an English translation) inspired by the old Rune poems. I found it a challenge to capture the energy of the Runes of the Old Futhark in a poem. First I wanted to write a book about how to learn them, but there are many good books about this subject, so I wanted to have a different approach. I started my artistic career as a poet, so this approach to capture the energy in a poem came natural. For me the Old Futhark symbolises the circle of life. It is round. So the last Rune, the Othala offers the foundation for the energy of the Fehu rune to come to life again. I was drawn to the Runes for a couple of reasons. At first because I wanted to learn and understand them because I was a great Death in June fan. Horrible maybe, but that was the start. Then I learned more and more about the Runes and I became fascinated by them. They represent energy, they represent the phases of life, there are amazing stories how they reached the life of man. What is also very important to me as a sound healer is that they have a sound. Understanding the Old Futhark gives you the understanding of life. I don’t use Runes for divination, I use them to create mantra’s, for healing, for focus, for support, for whatever I need them for. During our Cacao ceremonies I use the Circle of the Runes for inspiration to the guided mediations. My teacher Linda Wormhoudt also learned me to write the Runes on my body. I always have Runes written on my chest and during performances me and my partner write the runes also on our arms and sometimes our forehead. It feels like a tribal thing, but a right thing to do. Again it offers focus and strength. I love working with them, writing them on branches and wands while singing them. It feels it helps making a deep connection with the divine powers. ### Writing as Spiritual Craft and Magical Focus **PAA: Writing has always been important in your journey – you’ve mentioned it was your first love, and you’ve written poetry collections, blogs, and articles that were published in various magazines. How does your writing connect to your spiritual work? Do you find that writing (whether poetry or storytelling) offers a different way to heal or inspire, compared to your music and shamanic practices?** Writing is important for me, because it helps to organize my thoughts. It helps getting them clear. Poetry helps me to offer a shape and a sound to my more abstract thoughts and emotions. Abstract thoughts like dreams or things that are not possible to describe in a more common method. Poetry offers freedom in writing. I like that. It is like magic, you write words and they form a text. A story needs something like a story line, poetry doesn’t. It needs just words, emotion and a rhythm. Words are magic. When you write something down, even if it is total nonsense, it becomes true. You can see the words, on paper or whatever material you wrote them down. Even spoken words do their magic. I often see patients enter our unit with a complaint, walking straight and full of life. When they get a fatal diagnosis, what happens: they leave broken, head down, empty of life. There is not much difference between the patient before and after the hearing of the diagnosis but the words. The knowledge of going to die breaks him. Words have meaning and words are true. Words work. My writing of the magical essays and books helps me to organize my way of thinking, working and teaching. It helps me focus on the why, how and when in what I am doing with the magic I do. It supports my shamanistic practices. Something else I learned after I had written my first English book, Journey throught the Wheel of Death, is that people take you more serious when you have written a book. Somehow it shows the dedication people like to see. I like writing, so it is an easy way to put myself out there. I like writing on social media because of it’s temporary aspect. Somehow I feel that not all writing should be saved for eternity. Sometimes it is for the moment. And not for the moment a year later. I like it when I write something, people read it, and then it vanishes. Text can be right for this moment and not right for the next. As I said, I love the power of words and when you make them disappear, you make them even more powerful in that right moment. Words in the form of a spell, mantra, poem or song can contain magic. I love the aspect of repetition what can be found in the mantra’s, so I use it quite often. A combination of words, chants and a more intuitive way of singing (without words) is a strong thing to work with. While singing, especially runes, I do this while exhaling, so the energy of my breath is into the words or runes I sing. The challenge is to create the right combination of sounds, words/runes to work with. Besides this all there is always a story. People come to you because they heard the stories about you. It is the same when you do a ritual, the story around his ritual should be sufficient, it must be the right story to give the client the right treatment/ritual. With words you create the setting. Words and ambience. It is all very important to the ritual work I do. My teacher always joked, “It is all theatre” and it is, but then a very serious theatre. ### YslashY: Sound Journeys, Elements, and Sacred Places **PAA: YslashY, your collaboration with yoga teacher Rachel Getrouw, takes participants on “sound journeys through the elements.” I saw that this project was inspired by experiences with sound in places like the tropical rainforest and sacred sites in Scandinavia. Could you tell us about those adventures and how they influenced the sound journeys and rituals you now create together?** Rachel is my life partner and she was born in Suriname, a former colony of the Netherlands, so that is how I got to know and to learn this country. Suriname is bigger, much bigger, than the Netherlands, but there are much less people living there. Most of the country is covered in rainforest. When you see this huge amount and surface of green from the plane when you are flying over Suriname, you become overwhelmed. It is so much. As far as the eye can see, it is green. And when traveling through this country, you understand, the green will always survive and conquer. Whatever we as humans think, it doesn’t matter. We can lay concrete streets and buildings on top of the earth, the green will always come through. In the end, the world will be green, but if humans will walk around, I don’t know. The green is stronger, much stronger, than the power of men. There is an instrument that is called the Maraka, an rattle instrument used by the Indigenous people of Surinam during their rituals and ceremonies. Of course I bought some big ones, I love them big, but I also bought a little one. When Rachel was teaching Yoga in a Hindi temple at the border of Paramaribo (Capital City of Suriname) I had to stay outside, I was not allowed to enter the temple during this class. That was ok by me, so I sat outside the Temple during the sundown. And it was during this sundown that I noticed the green came alive. Slowly the insects living in the green start making their sounds. It started softly with just a couple of insects, but it swelled on and it became a complete concert, with different sounds and rhythms. Then I recognized these sounds. It were the same sounds as the little Maraka creates when you shake it gently. The Maraka contains the sound of the Jungle, the sound of the rainforest. In my view the rainforest symbolises Mother Earth, our Great Mother. I call her since that moment the Great Green Mother. So we use this Maraka with our journeys. Our concerts, performances, ceremonies, rituals and mediations are purely acoustic. Sometimes, not often, our instruments are amplified, but we don’t use electronics or tapes to create sounds. We want to be as natural as possible. We want to do our rituals and ceremonies everywhere we can, even in nature and we don’t want to pollute nature with electricity, we want her to be as pure as possible. And that last thing is a challenge. In nature you can find a deep connection with our Great Mother, if you can tune in on her and when you listen to the sounds of nature and feel them, it becomes easier to tune in. We try to create a natural sound for people to tune in, so we can create that connection with the Great Green Mother or with the divine well or the silence behind the sounds. Because when you are in nature and you listen carefully, you will experience that behind all sounds, there is a silence. A silence that is the source of all existence, the womb of the Great Mother. ### Trance, Drum Circles, and the Wheel of Death **PAA: The aim of your sound journeys is to help people relax and find the silence within themselves. What are some of the transformations or breakthrough experiences you’ve witnessed in people who attend your sound meditations or drum circles? Is there a particular story that stands out where you saw someone heal or awaken in a meaningful way through sound?** There are many stories. One of the things we did was starting to work with the Wheel of Death, a model of the different layers the soul travels after death. It starts with the actual dead and follows with traveling over the sea of lead, entering the beach of the afterlife, going throught the heath of purification, entering the mountains of the ancestors and in the end returning to the eternal source. During a deep trance journey, you can guide a person through these wheels, to meet people who are deceased and to experience how it feels. It always ends in the eternal source before I bring the travellers back to their body. (To make this journey the soul must leave the body). What amazes me every time we do this, it ends with a deep silence. Even when we did this in a small tent at the Castlefest festival, a festival full with medieval bands and ceremonies, we ended up in a deep silence. A deep silence before or in the sounds around us. That is a deep spiritual experience. Same with the DrumCircles we guide. It places people outside time and place. Most of the time people are surprised when the time is up. The rhythm that has been created by the participants brought them in a state of trance. It is like a state of Zen. Being one with the thing you do. People forget where they are. People forget who they are. So when they return they are relieved from the stress they experienced before the DrumCircle. We have even stronger experiences with our GongBaths. Some people told us, we broke them down and then we rebuild them. Or that we cleansed the dust from the cracks. Or we opened drawers in their soul/memory that people forgot that existed. During the trance journeys we bring people to different worlds and we always love the stories people tell us. Our technics work. And are based on shamanistic practices. We don’t need drugs or plants for this effect. We just use our instruments, and we prefer to use less as possible. We did a journey through the Wheel of Death recently with a person who is going to die in not a long time and with his direct family. After this journey he was not afraid to go and his wife understood why she will have to let him go. All participants were relieved because it felt good. That is a present. And we were happy, proud and amazed that we can give such a present to people who need it. ### One Path, Many Roles: Nurse, Zielenman, Artist, Writer **PAA: You wear many hats – you’re a nurse, a Zielenman, a sound artist, and a writer – truly a versatile path. How do these different roles complement each other? Do they all come together as part of your larger mission to guide and heal others? For example, does your work in healthcare inform your spiritual healing work, and vice versa?** Yes they all come together. There was a time I felt like different persons in one, but that has ended. As a nurse I am a Zielenman, as a Zielenman I am also a nurse. As an artist you are creative, a talent that is also needed to be a Zielenman and nurse. The older I get, the less difference I experience. It is all one, like I have become one. It is all about healing. Understanding. Creating an experience where healing can be. ### What Healing Means at the Deepest Level **PAA: You’ve said you use sound and rhythm to help heal the human soul, whether through relaxation or through therapeutic drumming, singing bowls and chanting. With your unique background bridging clinical care and shamanic healing, what does “healing” mean to you at the deepest level? How do you understand healing on a soul level, and what do you feel is most essential for true healing to occur?** Healing for me is making one again. Bring back into balance. Accepting things as they are. That is a hard thing, even for me, for us, it is a hard thing, but it is something that we reach for. ### A Final Message for Seekers **PAA: For those who are on their own healing journey or spiritual path, what insight or message would you most like to share? Given everything you’ve learned and experienced, is there a core lesson or encouragement you feel every spiritual seeker could benefit from hearing?** Have faith. Deep trust that everything will be ok, one way or the other. The motto of YslashY is: Trust and See. Be open, have an open eye. Believe what you feel. It is a simple answer, but doing it, living it, can be a real challenge. ### What’s Next: Training, Courses, and Updates **PAA: Finally are there bits of information or updates about your work training and courses you would like to share before you go.** I hope to place a course to teach some of my ideas and techniques on the Perseus site as soon as possible. And keep an eye on the YslashY Facebook page, because we are hoping to bring our rituals over the border as far as we can. **PAA: Thank you very much time in answering these questions, looking forward to learning more about your approach.** --- ## Learn More ##### George on Facebook ##### Georges Website --- --- # Internal Alchemy in Practice: Chi Skills on Energy, Transformation, and Self-Mastery Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/internal-alchemy-in-practice-chi-skills-on-energy-transformation-and-self-mastery/ ## Introduction I have been looking forward to posting this interview with Chi Skills - Armand & Didi. They are such lovely people, and I always take something away from when they share their knowledge on platforms like the [Bard Inn with Phil Rice](https://www.youtube.com/@philricealchemist). If you enjoy this interview please let us know in the comments and share it with others. Contact details have been provided at the end of the post if you would like to learn more about Chi Skills and their approach, I highly recommend their YouTube channel. --- ## Interview with Chi Skills - Armand & Didi **PAA: Can you share how you accomplish demystifying the Chi Kung process  in practice? What core exercises or methods do you use to help beginners genuinely feel their internal energy from day one, and how does this immediate immersion create the paradigm shift in self-experience that you’ve described? ** For us, demystifying the Chi Kung process begins with direct experience. Rather than  speaking about energy as an abstract concept, we start with a very simple but powerful practice called “Building the Ball.”  In this exercise, students begin sensing an energetic field between their hands.  Because the hands are naturally sensitive, this is one of the easiest places to direct  awareness. In many cases, within a single session — sometimes within twenty  minutes — people begin to feel sensations between the palms. At that moment the  training truly begins, because energy is no longer theoretical.  From there the practice deepens quickly. At first a student might say, “I feel energy.”  Soon, the perception shifts. Instead of experiencing energy as something separate — something you have — the realization begins to arise that this energy is part of your  own being.  This is the real paradigm shift: the movement from “I have energy” to “I am energy.”  Once that shift occurs, the exploration changes completely. Students begin asking  deeper questions: What is the state of this energy I am? How is it behaving? Where is  it going? Is it free? What is the personality of this energy? What is its aligned  purpose? How is it manifesting, knowing it is part of a larger energetic whole?  Once someone has felt energy directly and identified with it, the entire journey  becomes grounded in lived experience rather than belief.  **PAA: The Chi Skills methodology emphasizes practicality and clarity, offering  a step-by-step pathway for the internal journey. What distinguishes your approach  from other Chi Kung or internal arts schools? ** One of the main differences in our approach is that we constantly ask: how can this  training be lived in everyday life?  Many internal arts schools focus primarily on forms or routines. Those practices are  valuable, but for us the deeper question is how the training translates into the way  someone actually lives. The goal is not to perform exercises well, but to develop real energy skills that can be applied in life. A principle we often use in our teaching is this:  Does the method serve the person, or does the person serve the method?  In our system the method always serves the person. Practices are tools that help  people understand and regulate their own energy.  This principle becomes especially clear in our private mentoring work. We look at  where someone actually is in their training and life, and from there we select the  practices — within our framework — that support their next step in development.  Our training focuses strongly on state awareness and state regulation. Students learn  to observe their energy: how it behaves, where it flows freely, and where it becomes  stagnant or contracted. As awareness grows, people begin to see the connection  between their internal state and what they manifest in their lives.  In this way the training gradually becomes a path of self-mastery. Energy work is no  longer limited to training but becomes a living practice throughout the day.  Ultimately, our aim is to provide people with practical energy tools for navigating life.  The practices draw inspiration from Chi Kung, Hermetic training and modern  approaches to personal development, but they are integrated into a coherent  system.  That is why we describe the work as **Energy Skills for Life**.  **PAA: What does internal alchemy mean to you on a practical spiritual level, and what kind of transformation do dedicated students typically undergo over time? Ultimately, what higher purpose does this path lead to? ** Internal Alchemy is the process of transforming energy from one state into another  state.  On a practical level, that process immediately starts in the physical training we teach:  transforming muscle tension into fascia stretch through the process of ‘song’ — which is often translated as relax. But we prefer the word *release *because it describes  a conscious activity.  Done right, this demands your awareness, your consciousness to be fully involved.  Remember — it’s a process. It demands presence. Done wrong, just “relax”, it does  not demand that sort of presence at all — you could be daydreaming. That changes  nothing fundamentally and leads to weakness. This awareness, this presence, is the spirit. And it is the spirit that ascends,  reconnects, refines, heals and masters. It is the spirit that wants to come out and  manifest its purpose. You changing you — now that is powerful.  Releasing is also the method to connect to and move through the different aspects of  our being and beyond — Akasha and non-dual light. As we elevate our awareness up  the vibrational scale, we start with form — the physical, as mentioned before. From  there we move through the vital, astral and mental frequencies through different  transformations: releasing time, releasing space, and so on. Moving from form to  formless, on our way back home to universal consciousness — the drop seeking the  ocean.  Alchemy is thus also the practical tool to connect to, and move between, these  frequencies. Think of your awareness stepping into an elevator. Every floor is reached  through a transformation — a release. This makes it possible to step out on every  floor and explore. What’s happening here? What can I heal, strengthen, balance, transmute?  At the same time, the power that drives the elevator upwards is stillness. So we teach  this as two paths: cultivating stillness on the one hand, and refinement and  transmutation on the other. Because there is work to be done.  The elevator shaft is the pipeline. It connects heaven and earth. Over time, what  happens with students is that by strengthening their structure, they strengthen the  pipeline. And as we guide them up in the elevator — step by step — they gradually  start to open that pipeline through different methods, identifying and releasing  conditioning, stagnations, contractions and stickiness.  This has an incredible effect on how their energy starts to move. Before, when light  touched them, it would be met by unconsciousness — and that would then also  manifest in their lives. Through this process, as consciousness grows, the light can  work through them in a much more conscious way.  And that changes the story — and the outcome.   > Food is one of the most direct ways we can influence our energy. When people begin to observe this more carefully, they start to notice how strong this effect is.   > > Didi & Armand **PAA: Nutrition appears to be a unique pillar of your system – you even refer  to “Nutritional Chi Kung.” How do you incorporate dietary guidance into internal  energy training? Are there specific nutritional principles you recommend, and how does diet support the meditative, Chi Kung and Hermetic practices in your system?** In our experience, anyone who begins training seriously will eventually encounter the  topics of nutrition and lifestyle, which are closely connected. As people’s awareness  grows through Chi Kung and meditation, they naturally become more sensitive to the  influences that shape their energy.  Food is one of the most direct ways we can influence our energy. When people begin  to observe this more carefully, they start to notice how strong this effect is.   Many people believe they are already eating “healthy,” often meaning avoiding  processed foods or reducing sugar. Those are good first steps. But from an energetic  perspective the deeper question becomes: does a specific food support clarity and  stability in the system, or does it create disturbance?  Over time students begin to observe cause and effect more clearly. They start to  notice which foods support clarity and vitality, and which ones create heaviness,  stagnation or emotional turbulence.  At the same time, nutrition can be one of the most challenging areas for people. Food  is closely connected to habits, emotions and conditioning. Sometimes people are  drawn to certain foods because of patterns that developed earlier in life, and those  choices can reinforce the very patterns they are trying to change.  For this reason we do not promote one rigid dietary system. Instead we look at the  energetic principles behind food. Many traditional cultures explored this deeply — Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and Western traditions such as the teachings of  Hildegard von Bingen.  When you compare these traditions, you often see similar principles appearing in  different forms. Again and again they point toward the same idea: food should  support balance and vitality in the system.  Once students can feel their own energy through Chi Kung practice, the effect  becomes much clearer. Over time they develop a natural sense of which foods  support clarity and stability, and which ones disturb that balance.  In that sense nutrition becomes not a restriction, but a practical tool — helping  people support their energy, their awareness and their development through the  training. > As stillness deepens, awareness expands and eventually connects with  universal consciousness.  > > **Armand** **PAA: Sifu Mark Rasmus – a renowned teacher known for combining Chi Kung  with Hermetic principles and training sensitivity to different energy frequencies from vital to akashic – has been a significant influence on your journey. What were some of the most impactful lessons or practices you learned from him? How have his teachings shaped the way you teach within Chi Skills? ** **Armand: ** Before I met Sifu Mark Rasmus, I had already trained in the internal martial arts for  eleven years. I was deeply committed to the practice, but I was searching for  something deeper than the martial aspect alone. My interest had shifted strongly  toward internal alchemy. That led me to Mark.   One of the most impactful things Mark gave me was a clear developmental  framework. Up to that point I had learned many powerful practices, but they existed  somewhat separately. What Mark did was show how all those pieces could fit into a  coherent path of development. Suddenly the training was no longer a collection of  techniques — it became a structured journey.  I remember a moment very clearly from the first week I trained with him in Thailand.  At the end of that week he said to me: “All you’re looking for is eyes of a hawk and a large mental space.” That description resonated deeply and gave me a clear direction in my training.  Another principle he emphasized was that the entire path is essentially a cultivation  of stillness. As stillness deepens, awareness expands and eventually connects with  universal consciousness.  These insights shaped the way we teach today.   **Didi: ** When Armand began studying with Mark Rasmus, he shared what he was learning  with me. At that time I was studying Traditional Chinese Medicine, so I was reading a  lot about energy and how it functions in the body, but only from a theoretical  perspective.  What changed for me was that I began to experience these things directly through  energy awareness. Instead of only reading about someone else’s experiences, I could  actually feel and recognize these energies myself. It all became very practical and  made much more sense.  **PAA: Beyond Sifu Rasmus, were there other important mentors in your development? How did those influences shape your approach today ** **Armand: ** I trained internal martial arts for eleven years under Dutch teacher Roel Jansen, who  taught a combination of Yang-style Tai Chi and a Kuntao style called Tit Khun. Besides  that, he taught Nei Gong and Chi Kung, and there was a great emphasis on Taoist  thinking. There were bruises and books at the same time. Looking back, those years  created a deep foundation for which I am forever grateful.   When I later met Mark Rasmus, his teachings refined and built upon that foundation.  In many ways I see these two teachers as part of a natural evolution: the earlier martial training built the structure and openness, while Mark’s teachings revealed the deeper energetic side of the practice and shaped direction.   ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/unnamed-8-1024x684.jpg) **PAA: Can you share more about your Private Mentoring program? Would a student expect to go through the stages shown in the image on your homepage? ** Yes. The image on our homepage shows the alchemy framework we use to guide  people through the training. You can think of it as a treasure map for the journey.  It illustrates the journey through the different energetic layers of our being and  beyond — physical, vital, astral, mental, akasha and non-dual light. Within each of  these levels we explore the five pillars of our system: Reconnection, Self-Healing, Self Mastery, Purpose and Manifestation.  Our Private Mentoring program allows us to guide students through this process in a  very focused way. It is a six-month trajectory consisting of twelve one-on-one  sessions, held every two weeks. This rhythm gives people time to integrate the  practices and experiences between sessions.  Alongside the mentoring sessions, students can work with exercises from our Core  Essentials Chi Kung Course. Sessions are recorded so students can revisit the material,  and after each meeting we provide a written recap with reflections and suggested  practices.  Before joining the program we always schedule a no-obligation introductory  conversation. In that conversation we explore where someone currently stands in  their training and what they are looking for. Because the work is personal and  intensive, it is important that the connection feels right on both sides. Every student’s journey is different. Some come from backgrounds in Chi Kung,  Hermetic training or meditation, while others simply feel a strong calling to explore  energy more deeply. The one-on-one format allows us to adapt the training to the  individual while still working within the framework.  For some people one six-month cycle is enough to gain clarity and direction. Others  continue for additional cycles as their exploration deepens.  **Where to Find Us ** More information about our work can be found on:  - our website: **[ChiSkills.com](https://www.chiskills.com/)**
   - YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/chiskills

 ](https://www.youtube.com/chiskills

 ) **Contact us:  ** - email: chiskills@outlook.com  - WhatsApp: +31624498309 **PAA: Many thanks to both of you for answering our questions.** --- --- # Magic Camp Student Experiences from Maryland and Mexico — 2026 Camps Now Open Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-camp-student-experiences-from-maryland-and-mexico-2026-camps-now-open/ As our 2026 Magic Camp events are now open for booking, we wanted to reshare two powerful student experiences from our 2025 camps: Dustin’s testimony from the US Maryland camp, and another student reflection from the Mexico camp in Sayulita. Both reflect the same core theme: direct training, immersive practice, and a small-group environment can create breakthroughs that are very hard to achieve alone. The Magic Camp site currently lists 2026 events in Mexico, Bali, Spain, Maryland, Chiang Mai, and Portugal, with Spain, Maryland, and Chiang Mai among the currently promoted international training locations. ([Magic Camp](https://magiccamp.click/sixty-skills-5-day-magic-camp-level-1-student-experience-results-frederick-md/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)) If you are thinking of joining us in 2026, book in early. We are only taking small groups, and that small-group format is a major part of what makes the training so effective. ## Dustin’s Experience — Maryland Camp 2025 In the Maryland 2025 Level 1 camp, Dustin described the event as “completely life-changing.” The Magic Camp blog post introducing his video says that students at this event made “huge breakthroughs,” and Dustin’s interview makes clear why. Before attending the live training, Dustin had spent years trying to work through *Initiation into Hermetics* on his own. He explains that he first picked up the book around ten years earlier, then struggled to understand what he was reading, put it aside, and only later returned to the practices in a more serious way. Even then, he kept running into the same problems many solitary practitioners face: uncertainty about what the techniques were supposed to feel like, confusion about whether he was doing them correctly, and a sense that mastering everything step by step alone could take many years. After just one week at Magic Camp, he says he came away with a strong grasp of the main goals of the first book. In his testimony, he describes being able to work with electric and magnetic fluids, elemental equilibrium, Akasha, non-dual light, and the awakening of clairvoyant and related perceptual abilities. What stands out most in his reflection is not only the amount covered, but the confidence that came from direct correction, live demonstration, and the ability to verify the practice through immediate experience. He also speaks about the way this training connects directly to his work with clients. For Dustin, increased perceptual clarity means being able to gather more information, understand what is happening more deeply, and choose the right tools more effectively. He frames the camp not as abstract study, but as a practical system that can sharpen both spiritual work and professional work. Another theme in his testimony is how much the in-person format changed the experience compared with studying alone or even going through online materials. He explains that having a mentor physically present to guide the posture, the mechanics, and the subtle points of technique made a massive difference. He also highlights the value of group work, saying that certain experiences simply do not happen in the same way when practicing alone. Just as importantly, Dustin describes the group atmosphere as affirming, safe, fun, and deeply committed. For someone who had spent a long time practicing in isolation, meeting like-minded practitioners and forming real connections was one of the major gifts of the week. He presents the camp not only as a place to learn techniques, but as a place to undergo real transformation alongside others walking a similar path. His conclusion is clear: the value of the training far outweighed the price, the learning curve was dramatically shortened, and the entire experience gave him a reliable path of practice to take home and continue. For anyone on the fence, his message is simple: if you feel drawn to it, take that seriously. ## Another Student Experience — Sayulita, Mexico Camp 2025 We also want to reshare another student experience from the Sayulita, Mexico camp, originally published on the Magic Camp blog in March 2025. That post gives a vivid picture of the rhythm, environment, and flow of a full training week. ### Arrival and Setting The student arrived at the venue on Sunday around midday and was immediately welcomed by SixtySkills and the other attendees. One of the first impressions was the location itself: a beautiful setting high on a hill, with wide views across the valley and the feeling of being in an oasis in the middle of the jungle. That atmosphere set the tone for the week ahead. ### Monday — Opening Ceremony and First Practices Monday began early with an opening ceremony in which SixtySkills formally welcomed the participants and explained the schedule for the week. From there, the training moved quickly into practice. The group started with meditations to prepare mentally, then standing postures to get the energy moving. After lunch, they moved into physical training with basic rebounding exercises, a letter sit, and rebounding with that letter. The day closed with another group meditation to clear the energies. ### Tuesday — Pranayama, Elements, and Equilibrium Tuesday morning began with a lecture on Ermei Mountain Diamond Palm Pranayama, followed by practice. The group continued with another letter sit and work with rebounding through the elements. After lunch, they returned to seated practice focused on equilibrium. The day concluded with breath retention exercises done underwater in the pool. ### Wednesday — Beach Practice, Longevity, and Evocation Wednesday started at sunrise on the beach. The group practiced pranayama and walking with the electric and magnetic lines, then returned to the venue. Later, SixtySkills gave a lecture on longevity and how the training can enhance it. This was followed by the Three Releases and an evocation of one of the geniuses from Bardon’s second book. The day ended with rebounding using the elements. ### Thursday — Weighted Walking, Eucharist, Crystal, Akasha, and Non-Dual Light Thursday morning again began on the beach at sunrise. The group practiced pranayama and weighted walking with the elements, followed by a guided sit on the beach and breath retention in the Pacific Ocean. Back at the venue, the group prepared for another evocation, which the student describes as powerful. The day also included a lecture on the Holy Eucharist, a demonstration with The Living Crystal, the charging of food and drink, yoga nidra, rebounding with Akasha and Non-Dual Light, and a lecture on the Zero Point method followed by a guided meditation using it. ### Friday — Final Training and Closing Ceremony Friday began before dawn on the beach with pranayama, a short equilibrium sit, and weighted walking with Akasha and Non-Dual Light. Back at the venue there was time for Q&A, followed after lunch by a lecture and demonstration of moxibustion techniques, then a Tibetan Trulkhor demonstration. The group finished with one final Akasha and Non-Dual Light sit before SixtySkills closed the week with a powerful closing ceremony. ### Overall Reflection The student’s final assessment is that it was remarkable how much SixtySkills was able to fit into a single week. Although the camp involved a lot of work, it was not described as overly exhausting. Just as in Dustin’s Maryland testimony, another major theme was the chance to meet serious practitioners, form new friendships, and come away with both inspiration and practical results. The student ends by strongly recommending future SixtySkills seminars and says attendees will not be disappointed. ## 2026 Magic Camp Events Now Open If these experiences resonate with you, the 2026 Magic Camp schedule is already live. The current upcoming events page lists: **Mexico (Sayulita)** Basic: February 23–27 Advanced: February 16–20 **Spain** Basic: April 13–17 Advanced: April 20–24 **Maryland, USA** Basic: May 11–15 Advanced: May 18–22 **Chiang Mai, Thailand** Basic: June 8–12 Advanced: June 15–19 ([Magic Camp](https://magiccamp.click/upcoming-events-2/)) The site also lists Bali in March and Portugal in July for 2026. The events page directs interested students to email **[contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com)** for additional details, payment links, and any questions. ([Magic Camp](https://magiccamp.click/upcoming-events-2/?utm_source=chatgpt.com)) If you want to train in a focused, immersive, small-group setting, now is the time to book in. These camps are intentionally kept small, and that is one of the reasons students are able to get direct correction, individual attention, and such strong results in a short period of time. If you are ready to join us, get in touch and reserve your place. --- # Orlee Stewart on Occult Art, Necromancy, Tantra, and Visionary Magic Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/orlee-stewart-on-occult-art-necromancy-tantra-and-visionary-magic/ ## Introduction Orlee Stewart is a Gnostic Bishop who works professionally as a witch, priestess, psychic medium, author and artistic creator. Her occult paintings have been exhibited at galleries and events across the world as all her works are enchanted through the powers of spiritual realms, carrying gnosis like an event horizon of creativity from other dimensions to help people become spiritually stronger. Orlee’s paintings and illustrations serve as icons to the forces of spiritual energy that exist beyond our world of forms. The purpose of her visionary art is to create an experience for the viewer that will lead to a subjective spiritual awakening. She has had her work published in many grimoires and occult texts while also publishing her own writing and artwork. Orlee’s art also manifests into video psychomagick as she studied experimental video arts in university and creates video content about her magical experiments. Orlee has undergone extensive spiritual training for over 20 years to refine her craft and is always learning more. She has spent that time training her psychic and tarot skills as a medium and also trains in traditional Hatha Yoga with a focus on Tantra and Esoteric Gnosticism. The motivation behind what Orlee does comes from a deep wish to help inspire the spiritual realms in all those who come into contact with her creative works, to reveal the secrets of the void. --- ## Interview with Orlee Stewart ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/a6cc0660-c5ce-41e8-bce1-59f6ac9184c2-768x1024.jpg) ## General Questions **PAA: What convinced you, philosophically, that consciousness extends beyond the physical organism?** When I was a child, I had many experiences with alien entities that would come into my room and inspire me to work as an artist. The way some of them communicate is through emanating themselves energetically out of my physical body into ghost-like formations. They helped me a lot with upgrading my mental and physical body. I also had direct and visceral experiences with non-human consciousness from the beginning of my practice. Through experimenting with ritual magick, before there was the ability to go on the internet and hear or learn about other people’s experiences conjuring spirits. My colleagues and I would try different grimoires and had experiences with forces that were of similar personality and characteristics, which we discovered after comparing notes. **PAA: Do you work Solomonic magick, folk witchcraft, and theurgy into a personal method? If so, how?** The method that I use is very personal but it does combine knowledge of how traditions such as Goetia and folk magic function but operating without Abrahamic systems. I combine training my physical body and creating artwork inspired by extraterrestrial forces heavily into my daily practice as well. The base of my spiritual work is Left Hand Path Hinduism with a focus on esoteric tantra. **PAA: How does your training in Hatha Yoga and Tantra blend into your other fields of work?** Over the last several years I have been learning traditional yoga and Vedic studies from my guru who is an Aghori. Becoming a teacher in hatha yoga helps me teach occultists how to integrate their physical selves into a holistic practice. This extraordinary and blessed experience of Sanatana Dharma allows me to have a unique perspective on these studies and apply it seamlessly into what I was learning before. A lot of the knowledge I have about magick came from being in Thelema for 10 years and that system was heavily influenced by Crowley’s fascination with Hinduism. It helped me a lot to learn about it directly and this gives energetic understating to all magical work on a technical level. **PAA: You’ve trained over 20 years in multiple disciplines. Did one discipline kind of unlock the rest?** Yes, in my case because I try to follow the synchronistic messages from the spirit realm that connect me from one area of knowledge to another. Often we discover that things are more connected than we would possibly conceive. **PAA: Necromancy is still the most stigmatized of all witchcraft arts. What do you think is the reason so many occultists avoid it while still romanticizing it in theory?** People are afraid of dying. They also often fear the truths that the dead hold or even the powerful energy of the cemetery when it is listening to you. **PAA: Is there something you learned from your work in necromancy that completely changed how you view life?** Working with the spirits of the dead as a catalyst to non-linear time and visions from other dimensions. The work from Leilah Wendell in her book “Our Name is Melancholy” haunted me so deeply after reading about her necromantic visions of Atlantis. The way that the dead will often come through and serve in a spiritual intervention to guide and teach us lessons if we do the work to help remember them. **PAA: What is the most emotionally charged encounter you’ve ever had with the dead?** When I lived in New Orleans, there was an area in a cemetery that was very old and full of collapsing tombs. I would go there often to do rituals and work with the dead or even just to hang out and smoke a cigarette and read. One day I was with my friend and she was telling me about a problem she had and she started crying. She confessed she had not cried in a long time so we sat together with the dead. The next day in a complete miracle, the problem she had was solved. We did not even ask to dead to help us but they heard her and helped in a way beyond anything imaginable. **PAA: Do you feel the occult community’s fear of demons comes from genuine danger, or more from inherited monotheistic trauma?** All real spiritual work or summoning is going to be dangerous for anyone who is not mentally strong to handle changing or trying to manipulate reality. Most people can not handle their own selves, sit in silence or be alone without a distraction. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/454f0b05-27a7-4112-aeda-4c1b23a1dc29-810x1024.jpg) ## Artistic Mysticism **PAA: Your art is said to come as an “event horizon of creativity from other dimensions.” What, in your view, is the metaphysical mechanism that allows a painted icon to function as a living gate?** The intent behind the manifestation and process of its creations, as well as influence from anyone else giving energy into the work over time. **PAA: Some viewers report paranormal encounters triggered by your art. Which artwork has the strongest power, in your experience?** I would guess that phenomenon is happening because the artwork can become further enhanced by whatever the individual’s life and practice entail. **PAA: Have you ever created a piece so powerful you were afraid to keep it in your own home?** When I was a little girl at summer camp, my friend and I caused a frenzy of fear among the other kids after playing with a Ouija board that the camp hand. The counsellors took it away from us so we painted our own. Other kids were crying and seeing their dead grandparents so we buried it in the ground under our cabin. After that I always have been able to handle things haha. **PAA: Can you speak more about your process of translating mediumship visions into visual symbols?** I studied a lot of classical paintings when I was in art university. There is a lot of use of metaphor that serves as a symbol that can then be applied by a witch into a painting with a magical intent, through creating our own symbols and their hidden meanings. When I create an artwork I do not really know how it is going to manifest, I look at the blank paper like a scrying mirror and pull things out of it with a brush stroke until they form something. It usually begins abstractly with color formations or an organic border where life blooms inside. **PAA: Do you believe the act of witnessing art can be a magical initiation?** All mediums of art, musical, visual, dance and other methods of creation have the ability to be infused with the energy of magic. Those who view or experience the artwork are then filled with some inspiration or thoughts that cause change and bring that experiencer into the current even if it is just for a moment. **PAA: And do you believe all true magical paths eventually become artistic, and all true art eventually becomes magical?** Yes, I believe that a path which raises the life force energy and mystical powers leading to spiritual contact causes inspiration and will make a person develop some abilities artistically or willingness to train themselves in the arts with the energy that transmits from other dimensions through us. **PAA: What artistic influences contribute to your art?** Some of the biggest artistic influences in my artwork come from the Renaissance, in particular the morbid religious artwork. I also really love the architecture from the classical Roman, Neoclassical and Gothic periods which are used in alien ways. ## Advanced Occultism **PAA: You’ve trained in exorcism. What’s the most unbelievable possession case you’ve ever encountered?** I have experienced a person move in ways that no human physically can, flying up into the air and into furniture, eyes glowing and the entire body moving and speaking in foreign voices. This was an extremely dangerous experience that taught me about how serious exorcism is. **PAA: Do you use ecstatic trance in your evocations, and how do you calibrate its depth?** Yes, I use a lot of mantras in my rituals and that allows me to go into deep states. I formulate the path of the experience through training in classical yogic meditation, working through pratyahara, dhyana and mantra to achieve samadhi for spirit contact. **PAA: What distinctions do you make between interior silence, void-contact, and entity-induced gnosis?** With a lot of practice and discipline in training the mind to experience silence, turn the senses inward so our life force energy, our prana is going within instead out outwards allows us to gain a deep understanding of the landscape of our mind. This allows for a familiarity with the self and sensing differences that come through in their unique voice or visualization or feeling. **PAA: Do you believe the soul has a native cosmology, or is the magician a perpetual builder of inner worlds?** I believe that the soul is the Atman, it is not existing here in our bodies or our energy fields that exist here with us on earth but it is part of us. Reality has its function outside of the common human magician’s understanding to comprehend its quantum mysteries. The magician can use magick to discover true will and refine the self to experience inner worlds and also serve as an artist in building them with maya which is illusion and also the goddess. **PAA: Is the dream, to you, a higher ontology than material waking consciousness?** Not necessarily, depending on the dreamer. The dreamscape functions with providing a bunch of either messy or symbolic aspects of the mind or the person’s life that are atavisms in their subconscious. When a person can work past those things they can access deeper avenues of the dreamscape to higher dimensions than the material plane. **PAA: The title of your book, Mother of Abominations, exhibits a primal femininity. What does motherhood mean in the context of spirits, demons, and dream-forms?** It is the concept of bringing them into incarnation here in the physical world so people can witness them. A big aspect of the artworks are things that go beyond any explanation in language but rather what the image evokes out of the viewer for a unique experience. The accompanying pieces of writing are invocations that the reader can use to help focus on the visualization of the artworks in the book. **PAA: Finally, what is your current magical research, and what are you preparing next?** Currently I am continuing my education as a yoga teacher and studying the Upanishads to learn more about Vedic scriptures and ancient philosophies of spiritual energy. I also have been roughly planning a tarot deck that will be a long adventure. Thank you! **PAA: Thank you for sharing with us.** --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/639b901d-8b66-487e-87ba-fb485cc082c4.jpg) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/8d18e9ce-cbd3-4dd0-a038-14234c69c82b.jpg) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/454f0b05-27a7-4112-aeda-4c1b23a1dc29-1-810x1024.jpg) Orlee Stewart creates artwork in many forms, transcending dimensional boundaries to awaken our hidden power. She is a painter, certified hatha yoga teacher and a professional psychic and video creator, teaching holistic spirituality and yoga on her YouTube Channel called Cyber Witch Cyber Witch on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/andromedanine](https://www.youtube.com/andromedanine) Website: [https://thecyberwitch.com/](https://thecyberwitch.com/) --- --- # Jon Vermilion on Islamic Mysticism, ET Contact, and the Structure of Consciousness Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/jon-vermilion-on-islamic-mysticism-et-contact-and-the-structure-of-consciousness/ Jon Vermilion is a distinguished author and spiritual practitioner dedicated to advancing human consciousness through the exploration of esoteric metaphysics and occultism. As the founder and operator of [The Violet Gateway](https://thevioletgateway.com/), Jon has authored three pivotal books that bridge Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, offering readers a coherent and transformative praxis for psychic and spiritual evolution. His works, including [Asaya Ka Luxa](https://thevioletgateway.com/products/asaya-ka-luxa-royal-edition-paperback) and [Zakael: The Stargate of Kryst](https://thevioletgateway.com/products/zakael-the-stargate-of-kryst-royal-edition-hardcover-copy), delve into ritual practices, meditation, and self-discovery, guiding aspirants toward higher states of consciousness and inner salvation. Through The Violet Gateway and Gateway Publications, Jon is committed to disseminating advanced esoteric knowledge and fostering spiritual growth on a global scale. His teachings emphasize deprogramming, ritual work, and the harmonization of mind, body, and spirit, drawing from centuries-old wisdom and modern scientific understanding. Whether through his books, workshops, or one-on-one guidance, Jon Vermilion inspires individuals to unlock their latent potential and align with the divine essence of their true selves. Table of Contents - Interview- Introduction- Advanced Consciousness- The Future of Humanity- Alchemical Diet- ET Race & Contact Phenomena- Occult Mechanisms- The Aquarian DirectiveThe Three Transformations - Free Course --- ## Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image.png)Photo Credit: https://thevioletgateway.com/ ## Introduction **PAA: You work together Eastern and Western esoteric systems. What first inspired you to bridge these traditions?** Besides growing up in a non-religious family, they still encouraged my spiritual growth. Because of this I always held interest in many forms of religion and spirituality. It was my death at the age of 21 which solidified that all systems, eastern and western are expressing the same truth in different lenses. **PAA: How did your background in kinesiology and health nutrition influence your metaphysics and occult practice?** Truly, College for it was daunting, but all it did was give me a “credential” to express the spiritual mysteries in a physical way that expresses how the mental and emotional bodies of an individual affect their physical experience. I was trained to read the kinetic chain physically when I already could read it energetically. It helps bring credence to what I’ve spoken and taught about for the past 18 years and how the physical body is just a reflection of the finer bodies. In Islam, this is part of the Nafs. Which has many levels. I feel health, and nutrition overall, is a majorly overlooked importance in occultism. If you put the best gas in your car, your car typically runs better. This is no different with food. Our vessel, the human body, needs quality food both micro and macro nutrient dense. This way the etheric sheath can better connect to the physical body. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/RoyalEditionSoftCover.webp)Photo Credit: [Asaya Ka Luxa - Royal Edition Paperback – The Violet Gateway](https://thevioletgateway.com/products/asaya-ka-luxa-royal-edition-paperback) **PAA: Asaya Ka Luxa is considered one of your fundamental works. What experiences or research are behind it?** My death was the experience that lead to it. I was guided in dream time and my first sheik who led me through the post death processing. It was really the book I was supposed to write since I incarnated. I was told when I was a young child in a contact experience that I would “write someday”. At that time, I just didn’t understand what it would be. My death solidified the path and remembrance of what I was supposed to do. I met my first sheik, after my death. He taught me a rather advanced form of Ilm al Huruf which is coming from a hyperspecial level of intelligence. Ilm al Huruf is the Islamic science of letters, and through deep Muraqabah/meditation, breath work, and visualization of specific symbols, colors, and tones, he helped me bring me back fully to body in an extreme conscious state. In reality, this was 25% of it as 75% of that book is from dream teachings where I would meet with my “masters” for lack of better term to know what to put in the book. Asaya ka Luxa is the foundation to a stand-alone practice and the deeper expanded process held in Zakael and even deeper in one-on-one guidance in the Islamic Mysticism Tradition. **PAA: How did your relationship with the “Council of Light” evolve during the writing of Asaya Ka Luxa, and does that communication influence your current teachings?** In the writing process I had to hold proper alignment and be an open channel and conduit for their energy. It didn’t change much, and it continues to this day. I am guided through this energetic line, and it still reflects in my recent and upcoming work. It was never about bringing forward the spirit or consciousness behind the work; its intention was to always express practical applicable praxis which creates an extreme soul alignment to the divinity of our creator. I call this Divine Proximity. The clearer and more aligned we are, the closer we are to this proximity. Not only spiritually, but also physically. We become dressed and blessed in both physical and nonphysical bodies in closeness to our creator. **PAA: In Esoteric Prayer, you explore the metaphysical dimension of Islamic prayer. Why choose this subject of esoteric analysis?** I chose this because I am a Muslim, and Islam has been the religion most around me throughout my life. Even when I wasn’t a Muslim, I still would tell people that if I chose a religion, it would be Islam. In my heart, that has been the thing since birth, and nothing that I needed to be forced to accept. My Death proved it to me. I was also guided back to Islam by my guides and contacts through major and pivotal paranormal and spiritual experiences. To me there is no other truth, and the esoterica of Islam exceeds anything on this planet. Islam is the original religion of Adam and nothing could make me believe otherwise because I have figured that out long ago. In time, most will. Salaat has profound positive effects on the body physically. Not only that, but it is also not just prayer, it's Ritualistic Prayer. Tightly woven and ritualistically performed, not like a habit or a daily ritual of exercise, but the act of itself is a spiritual ritual that only those who practice and submerse themselves in know. I call it “folding and unfolding the cube”. There is no higher devoted practice of devotion and most people even well learned in Occult and Esoteric Traditions have yet to even scratch the surface of this practice let alone Islam. **PAA: Your newest edition of Azazya’il: The Book of the Fallen offers a deeper study through arabic ABJD, magic squares, and remote viewing. What misconceptions about Azazya’il does the book correct?** Every… Single… One. **PAA: Many of your programs are one-on-one instruction. Is personalization important in esoteric training?** In the Sufi tradition, true learning comes from the Oral Tradition. Where knowledge and guidance are transmitted through discussion. Rarely was it written down. I like to keep this alive. A person can only learn so much and be guided so much through text printed by a lifeless substance on paper. A Shiek, or guide, is the Substance full of life which can point and guide through proper relay verbally and connect to the student or disciple. This personalization is utmost important. Everyone starts somewhere different, everyone has different experiences, traumas, beliefs, etc. Only through one-on-one guidance can these hurdles be stepped over. **PAA: For beginners entering advanced practices like lucid dreaming or energy body activation, what is the most common mistake you see, and how can they avoid it?** Not having the Above. A guide and someone to teach you the proper ways can save a lot of time and a lot of issues that arise in it. A big factor is people are imbalanced when they think they Arnt. These imbalances carry over to the other side when we become lucid. Thus, creating unsavory experiences and often bringing back things they may not be aware of. This is why proper training in the esoteric sciences should be the priority, rather than jumping in hoping for a “cool experience”. Proper practice, preparation, and guidance should be what’s sought, not the mystical experience, as mystical experiences to the uninitiated can bring more confusion, fear, and imbalances. And lord, we all know this world doesn’t need more of that. Inshallah. > The ABJD is found in Semitic languages overall. Arabic is closer to Aramaic than Hebrew and most of what Jesus (Isa, may peace be upon him) spoke coincides with most of the Arabic phrasing and meaning. > > Jon Vermilion **PAA: Your Esoteric Symbol & Alphabet courses build energetic orbits using ABJD letters. Do the Hebrew and Arabic systems differ energetically in your experience?** The ABJD is found in Semitic languages overall. Arabic is closer to Aramaic than Hebrew and most of what Jesus (Isa, may peace be upon him) spoke coincides with most of the Arabic phrasing and meaning. Hebrew and Aramaic are both very broken to me and Hebrew should be a 28 letters system, but they generally use 22. I am willing to wage that Aramaic too had 28 Letters. If we look at the ABJD as a complete and cohesive system (and it is) then the 28 letters connect tighter to our natural orbit and cosmos. Energetically, to me, Hebrew connects you to a different intelligence. And I will leave that up to someone to think if its better or not. Overall, we discuss all ABJD based scripts as Esoteric Symbols and how they can be used in the exact same manner. I do hinge deeper on the Arabic though. But it matters most what the aspirant connects too, because that will be their best lens and hinging point into the deeper mysteries of the letters. **PAA: What forms of modern-day spiritual or psychological conditioning do you see as the most damaging?** That people believe and think that they have free will. **PAA: Across your body of work, your central theme is purification — of mind, spirit, food, energy, and numbers. Why does purification stand at the core of spiritual power?** When we are purified, we are able to hold our location to Divine Proximity and be a pure conduit for the energy of our creator to flow through us into this world. > At death, I was shown this as part of what is normally called a “life review”. This encompasses what you did, should have done, would have done, could have done, might have done, etc… > > Jon Vermilion ## Advanced Consciousness **PAA: You describe human consciousness as a multidimensional “sphere” touching multiple realities simultaneously. How did you first perceive this structure, and how can a practitioner verify it or experience it?** I was shown this reality at death, and everyone will see it at death. They are more than free to confirm it then. But the way we can better understand it is; If you image yourself going to the grocery store and walking into it, meeting someone, and then continue getting your normal things, this is one reality. But there are many other spheres or bubbles of realities that could have, would have, or even in some cases SHOULD have happened, even if they didn’t, based on all the one reality you perceive to have experienced. What if you met that person, maybe chose to have a deeper conversation? Perhaps treated them better? This is another reality that exists in the soul, even though we did not physically experience it. Each choice and action in those moments create a branch of potential reality. All still existing. At death, I was shown this as part of what is normally called a “life review”. This encompasses what you did, should have done, would have done, could have done, might have done, etc… and then all the different branches of IF you did those things or even just one of them. The only verification is to naturally die and go through what most religions call the “judgement”. This is a natural process and shouldn’t be feared in the slightest. **PAA: You describe the Oversoul as having “extremes of Light and darkness.” Can practitioners embrace these polarities without slipping into imbalance or spiritual inflation?** If they embrace them both in balance. That is why I stress the straight path. Not the left- hand path or the right-hand path but the straight one. The Sirat al-Mustaqim (the straight path), truly does not fork and we focus purley on Adab (ettiquite) and proper alignment to not deviate into either light or darkness. This way no spiritual inflation can really occur. The straight path is truly submission, to God. In this submission we find that we are really nothing in it all. We either realise this now, or one will realise that at death, when someone sees for themselves. **PAA: You speak of “location drops” where the consciousness inhabits multiple incarnations at once. Can this be worked with without confusing past-life memory with multidimensional awareness?** To me even past lives are multidimensional awareness and because time is not linear, but cyclical, that would mean all things are happening at this exact present moment in the multi-level model. This would include what people consider “past” lives. As these lives have direct energetic effect, even if we do not remember them or even acknowledge their existence. **PAA: The Solar Tesseract realm has “caretakers” and “architects” who sustain the structure of this reality. Who or what are these beings?** Shaytan is the one who creates and structures this reality truly, but Awali (friends) of god are more the caretakers who look after creation from a higher stand point. The Awali can be many different types of beings, as the term Awali just means “Friends of God”. They look from above rather than structure it. ## The Future of Humanity **PAA: Given your model, what is humanity evolving toward?** Inshallah, I hope that humanity is moving towards a brighter more enlightened future. Where we are given technology to better us, not destroy us, where health can be cured instantly, and longevity and quality of life is hightened to a degree people can only dream of. I do feel this is a very real reality coming on the horizon. But, to me, an individual's progress is more important than humanity overall. So the focus should always be personally evolving, whether humanity is accepting or not. A person's place in the afterlife is their own making. **PAA: If synthetic telepathy can mimic angels or extraterrestrials, how does one develop discernment without falling into paranoia?** If anything is telling you something too good to be true or to harm yourself, or that you are special in any way, or putting you on a pedestal and intentionally making you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it is usually the bad thing. This would be a great thing to put into discernment. All that inflates the ego or is structured in fear are definite things to have discernment over. Or anything that goes against your freewill. **PAA: Do you believe the modern world is intentionally designed to prevent the average person from ever experiencing a true spiritual signal?** Yes, and this is instilled to be a test. A test of the soul to see who turns back. It is the adversaries’ purpose to do what it is doing though. We see it more strongly in today’s age because more people are supposed to turn away from the “old world”. **PAA: You argue telepathy will become common as humanity aligns with the violet ray. What is the mechanism by which repression, deception, and secrecy dissolve into telepathic openness?** Love. Unconditional love and Truth. Al Haqq as we would say in Arabic. Haqq is the absolute truth, not a subjective truth. It is the truth of truth. In this Maqam (station of consciousness) we can move ourselves into a non-secretive world and telepathy could flourish. But the emotions of resentment, anger, fear, etc keep the general public from experiencing this. **PAA: You suggest that the veils between humans, devas, and extraterrestrial intelligence are thinning. What is the role of these beings in guiding or observing humanity during this transition?** Their role is what ever their agenda is. I have stressed that none of these beings are inherently good, and anything that is imposing something of their own agenda upon another goes against free will. The majority of these beings are NOT benevolent, otherwise they would not be meddling. Benevolent beings wait and meet when the individual is at their level. **PAA: How should practitioners responsibly engage with UAP/UFO phenomena from a metaphysical standpoint rather than a conspiratorial one?** The true answer is they shouldn’t. They should focus on their Adab (etiquette both physically and spiritually) and their own soul’s progress. If they are to experience such a thing it should be congruent with their growth and not something to just have happen because someone wants the experience. This is opening up for anything to happen. Personal spiritual growth is the most important, the experience comes secondary if that. **PAA: You describe the New Aeon as “scientific inevitability.” What make this new age unavoidable?** The immense rise in technology and the shifting of consciousness into a slightly more spiritual one where people are asking questions. Eventually the powers that be will release technology that seem to be “from out of this world”, they will claim a various “non terrestrial group” gifted it to us or tie the “non terrestrial” lifeforms to the technology in some fashion. Thus, making it seem like its new. The sad truth of that is they have had this technology for so long that it is just a carrot on a stick to the public. No matter the technology, it is reversed engineered from what the mind and soul can already do. ## Alchemical Diet **PAA: Is the modern obsession with processed foods, in your view, a deliberate tool of spiritual suppression?** It sure tastes good, right? ? I mean, I don’t think so anymore. But yes, it is there to hinder the vessels true connection and pure connection to the etheric body and the rest of the energetic bodies. It is the leading cause of all health issues, and it REALLY does not have to be this way. It is mental programming, parasites, and dangerous information that is spread that causes such confusion in the dietary world. This holds true for not just diet for health, but diet for occultism. Both are truly the same thing. **PAA: How does slow, mindful chewing alter the vibrational intake of food?** It allows you to process the nutrients better in the saliva. This is the main reason for it. Plus, we learn patience. Sometimes we don’t even realize we are full because we are mindlessly eating. If we are mindful with what we are putting in our mouth we just may realize that the human vessel may not need as much food as our mind may want. And, if we are mindful of what we put in our mouth I would hope we are equally if not more mindful of what comes out of it. **PAA: If distilled water is “the purest”, does water itself carry memory, and can distillation reset or cleanse it?** Distilled water is very magnetic. And redistillation can cut the energy instilled into it. If one is drinking distilled water only, which I do recommend, they should make sure they are getting fruits and vegetables in adequately to get the trace minerals people are told they get from water. **PAA: Do seasonal foods align the practitioner with cosmic cycles? What happens when one eats ‘out of season’?** I tend to stress a balanced diet all year long of natural foods. The seasons do help, but if we eat out of season, if our diet is balanced, we should not have an influx in a specific element within the body. A pure balanced diet based on a person’s biomechanics will keep that in balance all year. ## ET Race & Contact Phenomena **PAA: Why do you think lower-caste reptilians generate so much of the fear-based mythology, while the priestly castes remain almost entirely absent from public UFO lore?** The lower class feed off fear and negativity like vampires. This energy feeds those levels, while physical ones and those who align to them actually eat real people. As we see in the recent Epstein files. While the higher ones do not need that food source as they have transcended it. Its no different than if a person who’s a meat eat make a conscious choice to not eat meat anymore. The “higher” class of draconian tend to be in a higher alignment than a primordial animalistic drive. Dragons can be very benevolent when spiritually advanced, but that is true for everyone, even human. **PAA: You describe Arcturian telepathy as symbolic and tonal rather than emotional. What challenges does that pose to human comprehension?** Humans are too emotional. They are controlled by emotions and often can only understand something if an emotion is triggered. The emotional psychic energy field of an individual can also cloud the clarity of the information. Often these “higher” jinn beings can come off as cold and emotionless. But arcturian telepathy is very strong and the symbolism and tones outweigh any emotion you may have. **PAA: You met a hybrid physically who affected you. What qualities or presence immediately marked them as non-standard human?** There was hiding absolutely nothing from them. They knew everything I did, have done, thought, or was thinking of doing. There was also a physically present vibration in my body almost electrical in nature. As human as they looked, you could clearly see they were not “Human”, in our standard sense. Much bigger eyes, smaller frame, and looked much younger than they were. The immediate mark was being told they were one and not to be alarmed, and the location of the meeting. That is all that can really be said about that. ## Occult Mechanisms **PAA: Parasites are described as both biological entities and energetic ones. Your parasite cleanse is extremely specific. Why is herbalism essential, and how does clearing physical parasites influence psychic sensitivity?** Many key herbs just happen to be the things parasites hate and will start to kill them off. Things such as Wormwood, Black Seed, Apple Cider Vinegar etc create an environment where these parasites are not about to exist in and they start to die off. When we do not have these things feeding off us energetically in our body our psychic sensitivity is heightened. **PAA: You recommend performing the cleanse around the new moon. What mechanisms make this lunar timing significant?** Parasite breeding and birth cycles follow the moon phases. When we attack it from a new moon we are able to attach during a breeding and birthing cycle. > Ego destroys all progress. Ego collapses nations let alone someone on a spiritual path. We can not fall into the poisoning of the self through self-importance. > > Jon Vermilion ## The Aquarian Directive **PAA: If awakening intensifies both clarity and crisis, what determines whether incoming energies catalyze expansion or collapse for a given individual?** Ego destroys all progress. Ego collapses nations let alone someone on a spiritual path. We can not fall into the poisoning of the self through self-importance. The two headed dragon then continues to eat itself. Self-Pity and Grandiosity are destructive means to the foundation of true soul refinement. **PAA: You instruct disciples to work with the Mu’meen Jinn (the believing Jinn) and Earth as a living being. What does this relationship look like in daily life?** Upholding conscious and strict Adab (etiquette) over all is the key to this. This is reflected in everyday life as a means of action, whether it’s a Jinn or the Earth. The relationship is built like any other, nurturing the connection is a big factor. Everyday ritual and meditation, proper prayers and reciting’s. To do it properly, one does have to dedicate their life to it. The Islamic mysticism and sorcery is not for anyone just looking to dabble. **PAA: What signs indicate that a group has become ego-centered rather than service-centered, and what qualities define a true member of the New Group of World Servers?** This happens when decisions are made based purely on selfish or self-serving principles. As we can easily see in the world this is a major thing. But on a micro scale even those around you may be serving the self in what they do. I once had a teacher that told me he told his wife she looked good in the shirt she bought for his own good, because then he wouldn’t have to deal with it. Sure, it made her feel good… and would be service to other. But the intention behind it outweighs that aspect of service to others. This is a good example of the purity of intention that is needed in the selfless service of the New World Servers. The selfless servant, specially those who align to my Tariqa and Madrasa, seek service in knowledge, service indeed, and service in love. That is what is needed to move the world into a larger group of World Servers in the coming Age. Thank you! Subscribe to [The Violet Gateway’s](https://thevioletgateway.com/) mailing list for updates on Jon’s latest publications, courses, and spiritual insights. Certifications: Egyptian Sekhem Reiki Level I, II, III / Master Teacher (IAOTH) Certified Master Life Coach (TFS) Certified Meditation Coach and Master Teacher (IAOTH) Certified Color Therapy and Sound Healing (IAOTH) Certified Fitness and Nutrition Coach (NASM) Certified Wellness Coach (NETA) **PAA: Many thanks for answering our questions and for sharing so generously.** --- --- # From Qigong to Dzogchen: Jim Weaver on Practice, Lineage, and the Natural State Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-qigong-to-dzogchen-jim-weaver-on-practice-lineage-and-the-natural-state/ ## Introduction In this interview we have Jim Weaver, a lifelong practitioner with experience in various traditions, from health giving qigong systems, hard to find Daoist systems all the way to Dzogchen, the same practice that leads practitioners to the [Jalu, Rainbow Body](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/rainbow-body-jalu-and-the-miraculous-updated-for-2022/). Please let us know your thoughts or questions in the comments. You can follow his work on his website [here](https://qigongweaver.com/). Table of Contents - Introduction- Qigong- Dzogchen- Training Journey- Experiences & Teaching- Teachers & LineageThe Three Transformations - Free Course --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/148e630e-a3c7-44cc-bed6-43e56819b716-copy.jpeg) ## Qigong **PAA: You teach both Taoist and Buddhist styles of Qigong. For readers new to this, what practical differences do you emphasize in breath, intent, and body organization between those streams?** I actually teach three different styles of qigong, which I’ve integrated into a system that I’ve found to be very effective overall for my students. I started with Tibetan qigong, which is a Buddhist style that tends to emphasize the central channel—tuning into it, developing awareness of it, and opening it. I later moved on to Taoist styles and learned from Taoist teachers who worked more with the peripheral meridian system: learning forms and applications that develop and move the qi in those channels, which of course ties in with the central channel. So the Taoist and Buddhist styles go very well together. In the end, the goal is the same, because once the central channel is awakened it can activate and empower all the meridians of the system. You can also approach it from the other direction—from the outside—by starting to move the meridians, loosening them up, getting them more active and balanced, which will automatically help open the central channel. I’ve also incorporated medical qigong theory and practices into the forms I teach, especially in terms of helping someone get in touch with the internal organ system—particularly what’s called Five Phase theory (sometimes called Five Element qigong). “Phase” is a more accurate term than “element,” because people can get mixed up—especially coming from Western traditions—thinking it means elements like fire, earth, water, and so forth. Technically, it’s not referring to elements in that sense. It refers to a type of qi: a flavor of qi, a texture of qi, that operates like that “element.” For example, fire rises; it’s hot; it expands. That type of qi can be described as the fire phase of qi—because ultimately it is one qi, but it can show up in different forms, flavors, and attributes. That’s what’s great about Five Phase theory: it takes that into account. You learn how to harmonize the internal phases of qi with the external elements—seasons, directions, colors, and so forth. All these correspond internally and externally, so you harmonize the internal and external environment. The five phases and the five organ systems they relate to also correspond with various emotions, and how we store emotions in the organs. Some emotions are meant to keep moving through; they’re not meant to be held onto and stored. “Emotion” means energy in motion, so we want to keep the energy clear—like a clear, flowing stream—so it can continue on its way and fresh energy can come in. So there are medical qigong practices that help harmonize the five phases and the five organ systems in the body. I utilize quite a bit of that in my practice. It strengthens a lot of the other forms I work with. And that’s the answer to the first question. **PAA: Your “About” page highlights over 25 years of personal practice and 15 years of teaching. What core practice principles have stayed constant for you, and which have evolved the most as you moved from practitioner to instructor?** I think staying consistent with basic, foundational practices has been incredibly important in my personal journey. Having the awareness to stay present and appreciate the simple joys that practice can bring—like being out in nature, walking, breathing. Keeping my mind and heart open to always learning and gaining deeper wisdom. Also connecting with people on an energetic and spiritual level and feeling that sense of awakening together. There are basics that always stay with you: staying aware of yourself in the moment, and not getting too swept up in emotions, thoughts, or feelings. That doesn’t mean denying or blocking what you feel. It’s more about not letting it determine the outcome—being controlled by it. Not necessarily controlling it either, but allowing it to be, and learning how to be with it and accept it. When I started, I took the opportunity to go deep within it. For about ten years I did a lot of daily personal practice. I utilized it when I was young—being a father with two small kids while working full-time. I really appreciated how it helped me stay grounded, stay present, be in my body, and allow myself to feel. It helped me learn to accept and open to that. As my practice evolved, I kept coming back to those basics—back to the beginning of all things. In the Dao it’s described as returning to the original self: the self we’ve lost touch with, particularly culturally and psychologically in our day and age—this simple self, the childlike self. For me, it’s a really important and powerful way to return: staying in touch with my body, learning to appreciate simple things, and keeping it simple. **PAA: You write that your greatest satisfaction is seeing students “smile after practice.” What do you build into a class to reliably produce that post-session state—warmups, pacing, sequencing, cool-downs, or something else?** Yes—warm-ups. Pacing is important. Sequencing and cool-downs are definitely included in my practice sessions and teaching sessions. I also incorporate a lot of self-loving and acceptance in the formulas for building communication between the person and their potential energy awareness operating under the radar of normal consciousness. Once someone understands that the body has its own wisdom and ability to heal itself when given support, a healthy and balanced relationship with the energetic and physical bodies is possible. I emphasize that and allow people to take the time to slowly, methodically work their way back to awareness of what their body is doing constantly—how it contains its own awareness, its own consciousness. Sometimes these are described as spirits—particularly in the five-organ system, where each organ contains its own sense of awareness. When we take our overall sense of self-awareness and connect with those individual spirits, a harmony develops that overtakes the whole body, mind, and energy over time. We have what’s called the three alignments: mind, breath, and body. We practice bringing those into alignment, and I remind them about it. Then all the stuff going on “up here” settles down and calms down. We turn that down and work our way back to our original nature in terms of body awareness, down in the lower regions of the body. They call the gut the second brain in modern science, but in the East it was understood to be the first brain. That’s where the mother was connected to us through the navel region. That’s where we took in oxygen, blood, and information from the mother. We were connected directly there. We’ve lost that connection. Once we’re born, we come into what they call the post-heaven state—coming out of the heavenly state into materiality—and things break into two parts. We divide heaven and earth, and culturally we tend to operate up here. When we learn to trust again, give the body the love and respect it deserves, and listen, there’s a joy that comes through. It’s like becoming a child again. I feel it, I see it, and my students pick up on it and learn to do it too. That sense of wholeness returns—harmony, balance—and you can feel it physically. It’s not abstract. We’re not trying to get away from the body. We’re bringing the spirit further into the body to work with the connection between heaven and earth—bringing it back into one again. We are the synapse between heaven and earth: a bridge energetically, mentally, and physically. We’re restoring that bridge so we can harmonize heaven and earth within us. People feel that over time. After a session I tell them: carry that with you. Remember that feeling in the body. Set the intention that you always remember that feeling. It acts as a strong shield of protection—helping prevent pathogens and negative forces from penetrating and taking lodging in the system. They feel it over time, and I love seeing it on their face. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Hold-the-qi-copy-768x1024.jpeg) ## Dzogchen **PAA: For readers who practice Dzogchen: how would you describe its aim and method in your own words—and how do you keep that distinct from energy-cultivation arts like Qigong in your personal routine?** That’s difficult, because it’s not necessarily distinct. It’s impossible for it to be distinct on a certain level. Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, can be difficult to explain with words. It’s the highest teaching within the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, which I happen to be an initiate in. It points directly to the innate pure awareness present in every being—the natural state of mind beyond effort and concept. Rather than striving through meditation to purify, Dzogchen emphasizes recognizing and resting in the original awareness, or rigpa, that is already complete and luminous. Through meditation and direct introduction by a teacher, practitioners learn to remain in this open, effortless presence, allowing thoughts and emotions to arise and dissolve naturally. Dzogchen is not about attaining enlightenment. It reveals that enlightenment is the true nature of mind here and now. Dzogchen and the Dao point to a timeless natural state underlying all existence. In Dzogchen this is rigpa—pure, self-rising consciousness beyond grasping or effort. In Daoism, the Dao is the ineffable source and flow of all things—spontaneous, uncontrived, and ever-present. They both teach harmony arises not through striving, but through recognition and alignment with the natural state. They both value spontaneity, non-action (wu wei), and direct experience over conceptual understanding. Dzogchen’s rigpa and the Dao’s flow are expressions of the same truth: an uncreated, boundless awareness from which all phenomena arise and return. Living in accord with it is moving effortlessly within the rhythm of reality itself. Much of the basic practice of qigong is learning how to stay in open awareness while moving through forms and postures. This can help one enter deep meditative states even during everyday activities. So splitting hairs and saying, “this is Dzogchen and this is qigong,” isn’t really possible to a certain degree, because Dzogchen is at the root of everything, kind of like the Dao is. We may appear separate from the Dao, but we can’t be. It’s all Dao—soaked in it. It’s recognizing it and waking up in it. When we harmonize mind, breath, and body, the energy comes into alignment. Qi—life force—is a bridge between higher states of consciousness and the physical body. It’s a great medium that brings them into alignment and harmonization. It’s inherent in qigong practice if you recognize it. That’s a whole chapter in itself, because Dzogchen can be difficult to describe unless you’ve had transmissions and experiences within it. The thing is, it’s here now. There’s never a time when it’s not. It’s waking up within it and realizing it’s been happening the whole time and you’ve been in it. Words aren’t adequate to describe that. > Then I was out in the wilderness praying: “I need to meet a teacher.” And Master Wong showed up. He took me on as a student and then trained me to be a teacher. > > Jim Weaver ## Training Journey **PAA: You began with Mantak Chia’s books in 1995, then moved into in-person training. What was the first “this really works” moment that convinced you to commit long-term?** I noticed an immediate sense of wholeness and presence in my body—almost a feeling of recognition or remembrance. I’d been involved with yoga for several years before I met my qigong master—my first master—and I’d had dreams and spiritual journeys that moved me in that direction and basically called those teachers into my life. I’d had energetic experiences in my body before, but I didn’t know what was going on or how to describe it. I remember being out in nature with those energies moving through me, without fully understanding what was happening, and I began to question it. I remember being in a bookstore and seeing the cover of one of Mantak Chia’s books, and it was like, “That’s what happened to me.” When I began reading the books about qigong, it was like, “This is what I’ve been looking for.” Then I was out in the wilderness praying: “I need to meet a teacher.” And Master Wong showed up. He took me on as a student and then trained me to be a teacher. I knew it in my body. It wasn’t just an idea—it was something I could palpably feel. It was very present and there was no doubt. I felt it throughout my whole body, in my bones—like I’d done this before in another life. It was that kind of memory and recognition, and continuing on. No doubt about it. I’ve stuck with it ever since, and I’ve loved every minute of it. --- **PAA: You were authorized as a Tibetan Qigong teacher in 2003 (Zi Sheng Wang), later certified in Qigong for Wellness (2009), Tai Chi Healthways (2012), and Dragon Gate Qigong (2016). What unique capability did each certification add to your toolkit?** Tibetan qigong was what I started with. I actually started with Mantak Chia. I never got certified from him, but I did take some training from him. Each school system and teacher was unique and approached qigong from a slightly different angle. Tibetan qigong led me into an understanding of what waking up is about, and the ways of approaching enlightenment, because that was my teacher’s real focus. In the Buddhist tradition, that’s what it’s about: when you open the central channel, you awaken. You can use it as a way to fully awaken into full enlightenment. He used to describe it as a train: get on the train, you can go a little ways. You might just use qigong for health, to feel better, for overall energy levels, or you can take it all the way to what he called rainbow body—dissolving the body back into pure energy or light. They’re documenting that in Tibet now: masters reaching full rainbow body at death. Some leave a tiny remnant of the body, sometimes shrunken; some leave relics; some leave no trace. That’s a whole other story. Tai Chi Healthways was, for me, learning forms that could be shared with people that were fairly easy and really basic. It helped me balance my forms—overall well-being through movement, practice, and focus. It helped me get in touch with the meridians and get the qi moving. Dragon Gate was the last main school I worked with, and it got me deeply into the medical qigong system. They allowed me to self-study and dive deep into medical qigong, which has been a great adjunct to all my practices. It strengthened my practice and teaching. I’m able to take people deeper into self-healing and help others heal too, and to recognize what’s going on energetically—to use the language of qi to bring harmony back into the system. With Dragon Gate, I also learned a lot of forms, then focused on fewer and fewer to really get them down. I think that’s important: not having too many forms. There are lots of great ones, but it’s better to have a few—one, two, or three—that are ideal, and go deep with them. I learned how to focus on the ones that have been most effective overall for me. They’ve all been great schools and approaches, and I’ve learned how to integrate them in the way that I teach. **PAA: Looking back, what would you teach your 1995-self in week one to save a few years of trial and error?** To be specific, a lot of my early teachers didn’t focus on fascia work—how to activate, loosen, and warm up the fascia to allow qi to flow through. That’s something I would have started with right away. And don’t be afraid to try some things. Push a little harder, perhaps. Believe in myself more—have deeper faith in myself, and trust. And enjoy the training and the practice. It becomes joyful after a while. My body would actually get me up in the morning to practice. Over time I didn’t even have to try. It took discipline and time, but that’s the main thing. ## Experiences & Teaching **PAA: You’ve taught in schools, healing centers, spas, retreat centers, and public parks. Which setting has surprised you most in terms of student outcomes, and why?** I don’t know if anything surprised me. What I did notice is that people really need—and in many ways prefer—to be in a group setting in a physical location. After the pandemic I had to learn how to teach online, so I stretched in that way, but it’s not the same as being in person. People really love face-to-face interaction, and that’s what they’re looking for. So it doesn’t surprise me, but that’s what I’ve noticed. **PAA: What is your approach to helping a brand-new student feel and refine Qi without over-coaching or over-explaining?** I usually encourage non-grasping for results—learning how to relax and observe the process as it’s happening. Many find the feeling of qi in a short time. Some get it the first time. For some it takes a little while. My Tibetan qigong teacher, Master Wong, said there’s always 1% of people who won’t ever feel qi. So it’s patience—don’t push or force anything. Within practice, you do apply force in the body, but it’s a particular kind of force: relaxed force. It’s being awake, but completely relaxed. There’s energy in the body, the intention is there, but there’s also a letting-go within it. That can be hard to describe. Sometimes this is called *song* practice. *Song* is a Chinese word meaning a certain type of relaxation. It’s not lazy relaxation—it’s awake relaxation: conscious, present, almost energetic. It’s difficult to describe, but once you get it, you can sit back and allow the qi to do the work. That’s what I encourage: take time to play with it, experiment with it. Don’t get too attached to “feeling qi.” Just work with it, and if it shows up—and usually it does—then let it be. **PAA: When a long-time student hits a plateau, what diagnostics do you run—breath patterns, stance work, intention cues—and how do you adjust their practice plan?** I can read when somebody is ready to move on to a more advanced level of practice. It’s overall—at an energetic level—and in a deep level of openness and expansiveness in their body, and what I’m picking up subtly in their energy and mental level. I can read it in their posture and in their practice. I notice some people want to push very fast, and I remind them to slow down. Then as students advance—especially over years—they naturally slow down, relax, and take their time. I emphasize that you can take each segment of a form or practice and go deep within it. It’s like becoming a black belt. Becoming a black belt isn’t the end—it’s the beginning. You learn the forms, then you refine them over time and go deeper and deeper into the form. That’s where the *gong* in qigong comes from: you build the gong, you gain the skill. It’s hard to describe, but I can tell. Sometimes it comes through me unconsciously: “Okay, now we’re going to do this.” It’s like *wu wei* working within me—leading someone into the next practice because I can feel it’s time. It’s intuitive most of the time. I’ve had people say, “Why are we practicing this over and over?” And I tell them, “Because you haven’t practiced enough and developed the gong—the skill—enough to step up into the next level.” I’ll know it when it happens. You have to wait. You don’t want to jump ahead. > From him I learned mind-to-mind transmission—direct, with nothing in between: one being and another in the open. It relates to Dzogchen in terms of mind transmission, and he taught very much in that way. > > Jim Weaver ## Teachers & Lineage **PAA: What were the defining lessons you received from Master Zi Sheng Wang, and how do you preserve those essentials when adapting for modern students?** From him I learned mind-to-mind transmission—direct, with nothing in between: one being and another in the open. It relates to Dzogchen in terms of mind transmission, and he taught very much in that way. Because he didn’t speak English, he gave his teachings purely through energy. I would spend time with him, then go home, and I’d wake up in the morning and realize what he was teaching energetically in my body. I would feel it. It was like, “That’s what he was teaching.” He also taught me that time and space have no bearing on energy communication. He would have the students gather—people training with him—while he was in China or Tibet, and he’d say, “Okay, I’m going to send energy.” He would send energy and it felt like he was in the room. There was no doubt about it. He was a very powerful energy healer, very famous in China, and we would get buckets of energy coming through us. It filled the room. He even sent energy sometimes before we gathered, and we’d still receive it. So he showed it doesn’t care about time either—it’s beyond that. If your energy is strong enough, you can still receive it. You can receive energy from masters or teachers from centuries ago. Time and space are no barrier to true, pure energy. **PAA: From Shifu Brendan Rogers (Qigong for Wellness), Shifu Jesse Tsao (Tai Chi Healthways), and Shifu Michael Rinaldini (Dragon Gate Qigong), which single principle from each teacher most changed your instruction style?** From Shifu Brendan Rogers, I’d say playfulness. He had a great sense of playfulness, and yet he could be very focused. He had a lot of physical energy and it came through in his practice. Keeping things playful—not too serious—while still being focused. Shifu Jesse Tsao was very patient and persevering. He gave you a sense of confidence about your practice, and he was very detail-oriented. It was great for me at that time in my life to learn in such a traditional way. He was traditional—old school—very disciplined, and also very sweet. Shifu Michael Rinaldini was a great listener. You could talk to him about anything. He would take in what you were saying and adjust things accordingly to make it work for you—very patient. I learned how to listen to my students from him, and to stay open to ideas and open to learning. When I completed the first level in certification in the Dragon Gate system, I wanted to go further. He was open to that, so he created another tier you could work through, particularly in the medical qigong system. He was flexible and open, and I learned to do that myself. Now I bring that to my students: when someone has a suggestion, an idea, or wants to try something or change things up a little, I’m always listening and open to it. Overall, each teacher was different, but they worked well together as I moved through the different schools. --- **PAA: You emphasize learning from students as well as teachers. Can you share a moment when a student’s question reshaped how you transmit your lineage material?** That’s a tough one to answer, because they all have over time to a certain degree. It’s happened in subtle ways over the years. I don’t know if I can point to one specific moment. I think having to translate things for somebody who has been involved in other traditions and teachings—their angle, their approach to energy practices—and adjusting it into language they can understand, is probably part of it. Other than that, it’s been all of it. I’m always learning, always expanding. I’ll always be a student, and open to expanding my horizon and awareness. --- --- # Fabio’s Cocoon: A Journey of Rebirth, Healing, and Inner Freedom Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/fabios-cocoon-a-journey-of-rebirth-healing-and-inner-freedom/ ## Introduction Today we have a wonderful interview with Fabio Sinicropi, he shares his journey, his experiences both up and down and how he came out the other side forever changed. Very grateful to Fabio who went to great lengths to make sure he gave us detailed and personal answers to the questions I presented. I hope you enjoy this interview, if you have questions or any thoughts please leave it in a comment below. To follow Fabios work you can see his about info on his website [here](https://fabioscocoon.com/en/a-propos/). Lean about his sessions [here](https://fabioscocoon.com/#mes-accompagnements). --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/FabioSinicropi_Gletterens00009-scaled-1.webp) ## Interview **PAA: Your life as a quest — Fabio, you’ve described your life as “a path of exploration, an inner and outer journey” and that “love is the key to every transformation.” How did this life quest begin for you? Can you share some early experiences or realizations that led you to commit to a path of inner freedom and to guiding others toward their own transformation?** My life quest began long before I had words for it. As a child, I felt different, deeply sensitive and strangely connected to things I couldn’t explain. I perceived emotions, energies and unspoken suffering around me and I often took it upon myself to carry the weight for others. That made me an easy target… I was mocked, pushed aside and labeled as “too soft,” especially for a boy. Very early, I learned to hide who I was. On the outside I adapted but inside I felt lost, frustrated and disconnected from any sense of purpose. By the age of fourteen, that inner tension had become unbearable. I reached a point where I no longer wanted to live. My parents sent me to a psychologist and he asked me a question that changed everything: “Do you prefer to stay hidden, frustrated and accepted by others or do you prefer to be free, joyful and fully yourself even if it means not pleasing everyone?” That was the spark ! Something opened in me ! From that moment, I began searching relentlessly. I devoured books on psychology, relationships, human nature anything that could help me understand why I felt so empty. Later, I came across my first spiritual book, The Four Agreements and it planted a seed. Growing up in a Catholic family, I had always felt a deep connection to the figure of Christ but not to the institution or the way the teachings were presented. I saw a contradiction between the living message of love in the scriptures and the lifeless atmosphere I perceived in churches. As a child, I asked questions that no one appreciated not even the priest. Something in me sensed that there was a truth beneath the surface but I couldn’t grasp it yet. Years later, while searching for answers in esoteric traditions and even exploring Freemasonry out of curiosity, something unexpected happened. I walked into a shop where two men were discussing Freemasonry. One of them suddenly turned around, looked straight into my eyes and said: “Stop searching. God loves you and has a plan for you.” He knew nothing about me, yet he spoke directly to the core of my struggle. I broke down in tears. That was the moment I met Christ not as a religious figure but as a living presence. I went home and started reading the Bible again but this time with new eyes. One verse, in particular, transformed everything for me: “The kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21) That sentence ignited something powerful. A seed awakened inside me. I understood that love, true, unconditional and inner love is the key to every transformation and slowly, without realizing it, my entire path began to shift. This inner journey unfolded gently until 2020, when life pushed me to make a radical choice. At 29, I was already a captain in the army, with a stable and promising career but every fiber of my being told me that this was not my path. I could either betray myself by continuing this path that was not for me or take a leap of faith into the unknown… I chose to follow my truth and I left the military and immediately, everything collapsed at once: I became unemployed, my relationship of eight years ended suddenly, I lost CHF 25,000 in the stock market, and I had to move back with my mother at 30 I fell into addiction and reached the darkest place of my life… In December 2020, on my knees and in tears, I surrendered my life completely to God, to the Creator, the Universal Consciousness, whatever name one chooses. I said: “God, I give You my life, guide me ! Without You, I will die or destroy myself… I will follow You blindly.” And from that moment everything began to change. Guided by something greater, I walked my first pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela: 900 km in 29 days. Along that path, I experienced miracles and encounters that shaped me profoundly. From there, my transformation accelerated: training in holistic coaching, energy healing, naturopathy, shifting to a fully raw, plant-based diet, walking across the Swiss Alps in autonomy, then a second pilgrimage to Santiago: 2,000 km on foot in 59 days across half of Europe. This journey is the subject of my upcoming book. I joined spiritual communities, including the Essene community in Greece and others in Portugal. In 2022, I created my holistic therapy practice, Fabio’s Cocoon. I also studied traditional Tantra for over a year. In July 2024, I sold all my possessions and embarked on a world journey dedicated to inner exploration and service. This path led me through: nomadic and shamanic traditions in Mongolia and Siberia, encounters with Tibetan monks in the Himalayas, long periods of yoga practice in India, Vipassana retreats and Taoist teachings in Thailand, the Maha Kumbh Mela ( the rarest and most sacred gathering in Hindu tradition in India: a massive spiritual pilgrimage that takes place only once every 12 years, and the “Maha” version only every 144 years. In February 2025, millions of seekers, monks, yogis, and sadhus gathered to bathe in the sacred rivers, believing the event to open an exceptionally powerful window of purification, awakening and divine alignment, time with the Shipibo tribe in the Peruvian Amazon, a semi-autonomous spiritual community in Guatemala and finally returning to India to complete a 500-hour Yoga Teacher Training. Throughout all this, I continue accompanying people online and in person, wherever I am in the world. Ultimately, my path began in pain, but it led me to love, the true force of transformation. What I lived became my calling: to help others free themselves, reconnect with their essence and rediscover the kingdom within. **PAA: Awakening through crisis — You describe your life as a “pilgrimage” of experiences that shaped and awakened you, and in 2020 you underwent a “deep existential crisis” experienced as a symbolic death that led to your rebirth and spiritual expansion. Could you tell us about one or two pivotal awakening moments on this journey – for instance, that 2020 “dark night” and rebirth – and how they transformed you and set you on the path to creating Fabio’s Cocoon?** Two moments radically transformed my life: the collapse of 2020 my “dark night” and the rebirth that followed on the Camino de Santiago. The darkest moment came right after I left the military. I had a clear vision for my future: buying a small place in the Belgian Ardennes, creating a retreat center and living a simple life. But when I returned to Switzerland, the pandemic was announced and everything fell apart almost overnight. Within a few months: I lost my job, I lost the opportunity to buy a property, I lost CHF 25,000 in the financial crash, my eight-year relationship ended and I fell into destructive addictions as I tried to numb the despair. By December 2020, I had to move back to my mother’s home. One evening, unable to carry the weight of my own life anymore, I fell to my knees on the floor, crying uncontrollably. Everything I had built; my identity, my plans and my sense of direction had collapsed. In that moment of total surrender, I said: “God, I give You my life, guide me ! Without You, I will die or destroy myself… I will follow You blindly.” This was the breaking point… and the beginning of everything. Shortly after, signs began to appear in an almost mystical sequence. I dreamt repeatedly of the Camino de Santiago. Someone gifted me a book about the Camino, even though I had never mentioned it. I stumbled upon documentaries about the pilgrimage. Then the father of a friend told me that his greatest life experience was walking the Camino. I understood: I had to walk ! So I did… And the pilgrimage became the stage of my rebirth. Throughout the 900 km, I received insights, inner visions and moments of profound grace. I felt the presence of Christ guiding me, strengthening me and sometimes even confronting me with the shadows I had carried for years. Many things happened on that road, enough for an entire interview of their own but what matters is this: When I arrived in Santiago, something in me was liberated. I felt released from forces, traumas, and inner burdens that had shaped my life since childhood. And when I continued walking to Finisterre, the “end of the world” it felt like the beginning of a new one. It was on that stretch of the pilgrimage that I understood: My entire life; the sensitivity of my childhood, the pain, the crises, the collapse of 2020 had been preparing me to guide others through their own inner transformation. The second awakening moment was the decision I made in 2022 to create Fabio’s Cocoon as a holistic therapy practice. This was not just a business creation but a commitment to live my calling fully. I had come to realize that people didn’t need more information. They needed transformation. They needed a safe, loving container where they could reconnect with their body, heal their wounds, and remember who they truly are. The crisis broke me open. The pilgrimage rebuilt me. And Fabio’s Cocoon became the bridge through which I now accompany others through their own deaths and rebirths. **PAA: Lessons from pilgrimage — You’ve literally walked the talk on your spiritual path – embarking on extensive pilgrimages like walking 905 km to Santiago de Compostela and later over 2,000 km across Europe on foot. Immersed in silence and nature on those journeys, what did you discover about yourself and life? How did weeks of walking and reflection “teach you humility, faith, and presence” and reveal “the guidance of Providence”? And how do those lessons influence the way you now guide others on their spiritual and healing journeys?** Pilgrimage taught me what no book and no teacher ever could: that life is not meant to be controlled. It is meant to be walked. On the Camino, day after day, I had nothing but my backpack, my breath, my pain, my prayers and the horizon. I had to face myself without distraction. The mind cannot hide for long when you walk 30 km a day in silence. I discovered that humility is not something you “learn” intellectually. It is the natural result of realizing how small you are in front of something greater. When you are alone on a mountain path, exhausted, hungry and unsure where you will sleep that night, you don’t pretend anymore. You surrender. You ask for help. You listen. Faith also became real for me there. Not faith as a religious concept but faith as an inner trust that life will carry you if you keep walking. Again and again, Providence showed itself: - I would be lost and suddenly someone would appear to guide me. - I would have no place to sleep and someone would offer me a bed. - I would feel broken and a stranger would speak exactly what my soul needed to hear. Presence became the greatest gift. Because when you walk for weeks, the past no longer matters and the future becomes irrelevant. You learn to live in the now because the now is all you have. Each step becomes a meditation. Each breath becomes a prayer. Each sunrise becomes a miracle. These lessons influence my work deeply. When I guide others, I don’t try to “fix” them. I help them walk their own inner Camino: One step at a time. One breath at a time. One truth at a time. I remind them that they are not alone. That life is guiding them. And that their healing is not something to accomplish but something to allow. **PAA: The cocoon of transformation — The very name “Fabio’s Cocoon” evokes metamorphosis. You describe this space as “a cocoon of transformation, a place of rebirth, a bridge between body and soul.” Why did you choose the cocoon as your guiding metaphor? What does it mean to you personally to enter a “cocoon” for inner growth? Can you share an example of someone (or even yourself) who entered this cocoon of deep work and emerged on the other side transformed – spread wings and all?** The cocoon is the perfect metaphor because transformation is not a linear process. It is a death and a rebirth. A caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly by improving itself. It dissolves. It lets go of its former identity completely. It enters a sacred unknown, a space of darkness, silence, rest and surrender. That is exactly what inner transformation requires. To me, entering a cocoon means creating a protected space where you can finally stop performing, stop running, stop adapting and return to your essence. It means allowing yourself to feel what you have avoided. To face your wounds with compassion. To release old stories. To reconnect with your body. To listen to your soul. Personally, I entered my own cocoon in 2020. When everything collapsed; my career, my relationship, my identity, my plans. I had no choice but to surrender. That was my cocoon. And inside it, I discovered something I had never known: myself. A powerful example from my work is a woman who came to me completely lost. She was successful on the outside but empty inside. She had anxiety, insomnia, and a constant feeling of “not being enough.” She had spent her whole life pleasing others, working hard, proving herself. In our sessions, she entered the cocoon: She began feeling her emotions instead of suppressing them. She began listening to her body instead of controlling it. She began speaking her truth instead of staying silent. She cried deeply for the first time in years. She released anger she had never allowed herself to feel. She reconnected with the little girl inside her who only wanted to be loved. After a few months, her whole energy changed. Her face softened. Her eyes became brighter. She started making decisions aligned with her truth. She ended a relationship that was draining her. She changed jobs. She started saying “no” without guilt. And she told me: “I feel like I am finally living my life, not surviving it.” That is the cocoon. It is not always comfortable. But it is always sacred. Because when you emerge, you don’t just change your life. You become someone new. > I have witnessed countless times that a simple breathwork session can unlock grief that was trapped for years. > > Fabio **PAA: Holistic healing approach — Your vision embraces “the five dimensions of being: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and energetic,” and you work across realms from self-knowledge and relationships to professional fulfillment and spiritual awakening. How do you weave together all these dimensions in practice? For example, when someone comes to you, how might working with their body or breath also touch their emotions or spirit? In what ways does addressing a person as a whole – body, heart, mind, soul – facilitate a more profound healing or transformation?** For me, healing cannot be separated into compartments. A human being is a living system. The body holds the emotions. The emotions influence the mind. The mind shapes the energy. The energy affects the spirit. And the spirit influences everything. In practice, when someone comes to me, I don’t treat a symptom. I meet the whole person. For example, someone may come with anxiety. On the surface, they think it is “mental.” But anxiety often lives in the body: tight chest, shallow breath, tense jaw, nervous system dysregulation. So we start with breath. When the breath deepens, the nervous system softens. When the body relaxes, emotions rise. When emotions rise, memories surface. When memories surface, the soul begins to speak. I have witnessed countless times that a simple breathwork session can unlock grief that was trapped for years. Or that body awareness can bring a spiritual awakening. Because the body is not separate from the spirit; it is the gateway. Addressing a person as a whole creates profound transformation because it brings coherence. When someone heals only mentally, the body may still carry trauma. When someone heals only emotionally, the mind may still sabotage. When someone seeks spirituality without healing the wounds, they may bypass. But when all dimensions are touched; body, mind, heart, energy and spirit, healing becomes integrated. It becomes embodied. And that is the only kind of healing that lasts. **PAA: Inside a Cocoon session — In a one-on-one session, you describe the journey moving from intention-setting into deep exploration – using dialogue, body awareness, breathwork, and energetic or spiritual practices to explore blockages and release limiting memories. Could you walk us through what a session like that feels like for a participant? How do you create a container where someone feels safe, free, and aligned enough to open up and transform? Perhaps share what someone might experience physically or emotionally as you guide them through that cycle of intention, release, and integration.** A Cocoon session is not a conversation. It is a journey. It often feels like entering a sacred space where you are finally allowed to be fully yourself. We start by setting an intention. Not a goal from the mind but an intention from the heart. Something like: “I want to feel free.” “I want to release this fear.” “I want to reconnect with my truth.” Then we move into exploration. Through dialogue, I help the person identify what is truly underneath their surface struggle. Often, what they think is the problem is only the symptom. The real blockage may be a childhood wound, a trauma, a belief, a suppressed emotion. Then we bring it into the body. Because the body never lies. I guide them to feel where it lives: in the chest, the throat, the belly, the heart. We use breathwork to open the body and allow the emotion to move. This is where release happens. People may cry, shake, laugh, feel anger, feel grief, feel warmth. Sometimes memories surface unexpectedly. Sometimes they feel a presence, a spiritual guidance, a deep peace. Sometimes they feel a liberation they cannot explain. The safety comes from my presence. I don’t judge. I don’t rush. I hold the space with compassion and groundedness. I also guide them back when it becomes too intense. It is like being held in a cocoon; protected while you transform. Integration is the final phase. We anchor what has been released and what has been discovered. We bring clarity. We identify the new truth. And we often end with grounding practices so the person leaves feeling stable, aligned and connected. Many clients tell me: “I feel lighter.” “I feel like something finally left my body.” “I feel like I came home.” That is the essence of a Cocoon session. > Nature accelerates awakening ! A single session can release a blockage or bring clarity but a retreat allows someone to unfold, layer by layer without rushing. > > Fabio **PAA: Retreats and rebirth — You also lead immersive retreats like the Metamorphosis retreat in the Swiss Alps and the Life Review retreat. These journeys invite participants into nature with practices like breathwork, meditation, live-food nutrition, and methods to “liberate emotions, repetitive patterns and conditioning.” What inspired you to create these intensive group experiences? How does the energy of a multi-day retreat – being “cocooned” away from daily noise in a natural setting – facilitate transformation differently than single sessions? Can you share a story of someone who arrived seeking clarity and left feeling reborn?** I was inspired to create immersive retreats because I experienced their transformative power first-hand. Before guiding others, I myself participated in many multi-day retreats around the world, from India to South America to Europe. Every time, I witnessed how stepping out of daily life and entering a cocoon of nature, silence, breath and community opened doors inside me that I could never access in ordinary conditions. Those experiences changed me so profoundly that I knew one day I would offer the same kind of container; a space where people can go deeper than they ever imagined, safely and with guidance. This is how my retreats, including Metamorphosis in the Swiss Alps and Life Review, were born. Nature accelerates awakening ! A single session can release a blockage or bring clarity but a retreat allows someone to unfold, layer by layer without rushing. Participants often tell me that from the very first hours in the mountains, something shifts. The quiet, the altitude, the purity of the air and the absence of distraction it all creates a sacred cocoon. One participant described it as: “three days of being nourished in every possible way; physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.” Another wrote that the retreat felt like: “a turning point in my life, a moment of clarity I will carry for years.” The power of the group ! In a retreat, transformation becomes contagious. When one person releases an emotion, another gains courage. When someone opens their heart, the entire group expands. When someone finds clarity, the others remember their own path. Participants experience: - breathwork that opens the chest and liberates long-held emotions – meditation that softens the mind – life-food nutrition that revitalizes the body – teachings on rest, elimination and natural health – walking in nature, dancing, silence, fire and cold immersion – deep sharing circles – laughter, tears, joy and a sense of family One participant wrote: “I left with joy in my heart, emotional peace and a body that thanked me.” Another said: “The program was powerful but always full of serenity and kindness; Fabio’s signature.” My own experience as a participant, I include this because it matters: Before guiding others, I was the one sitting on the mat, breathing through my own blockages, shedding old skins, crying, opening and receiving. I sill continue because everyday is a new initiation. As for a rebirth story: A man came to one of my retreats feeling completely stuck. He had lost direction in his career and was carrying years of suppressed emotions. During the retreat, through breathwork and group sharing, he finally allowed himself to feel grief he had been holding since childhood. He cried for hours. He released shame. He forgave himself. By the end, he told me: “I feel like I can breathe again. I feel alive. I know what I want to do with my life.” A few months later, he changed careers and started living in alignment with his truth. That is rebirth. **PAA: Healing the inner child — Many of us carry wounds from childhood or past trauma that affect our adult lives. In your holistic therapy, how do you help someone heal and integrate their inner child? You’ve mentioned guiding people to “heal deep wounds” and release old memories that limit them. What does that look like in practice – do you use visualization, somatic work, or emotional expression to reach that younger self? Can you share how embracing and healing that inner child can liberate someone’s life?** Healing the inner child is one of the most important keys to liberation because the wounded child inside often runs the adult life. When someone has patterns of fear, people-pleasing, self-sabotage, anxiety, or emotional reactivity, it is often the inner child seeking love, safety and validation. In my practice, we heal the inner child through presence, body and emotion. First, we create safety. Because the inner child only opens when it feels safe. Then we bring the person back into their body. The body holds the memory. We locate where the wound lives: tightness in the throat, heaviness in the chest, fear in the belly. We breathe into it. We feel it. We allow the emotion to rise. Sometimes we use visualization to reconnect with the younger self, not as an abstract exercise but as a real inner encounter. The person may see themselves at a certain age. They may remember a moment they had forgotten. They may feel the pain that was never expressed. And then we bring compassion, love, and truth into that memory. Somatic work is crucial. Because trauma is not only in the mind. It is in the nervous system. It is in the muscles. It is in the breath. So we may allow shaking, crying, sound, movement anything the body needs to complete what was frozen. Healing the inner child liberates someone’s life because it removes the unconscious driver. When the inner child is heard, held and loved, the adult no longer needs to seek approval, control everything, or run from emotions. They become free. They become whole. And they regain access to their natural joy, creativity and authenticity. **PAA: Masculine energy and vulnerability — One of your early sparks on this path was reading Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which revealed to you “the invisible laws of human relationships” and the power of conscious communication. Now, as a healer and a man, how do you view the dance between masculine and feminine energies in personal healing? Do you find men on the spiritual path face unique challenges in opening up emotionally or embracing vulnerability? How do you support male clients in moving past conditioning and into authenticity?** The dance between masculine and feminine energies is at the heart of healing because both energies exist within every human being. The masculine is structure, direction, presence, action. The feminine is flow, feeling, intuition, receptivity. When they are balanced inside, life becomes harmonious. Many men struggle on the spiritual path because of conditioning. We are taught early: “Don’t cry.” “Be strong.” “Don’t show weakness.” This creates emotional repression and disconnection from the heart. Men may become stuck in the masculine; controlling, thinking, performing, achieving while starving for connection and truth. Vulnerability is not weakness. It is strength. But men often need a safe space to rediscover that. In my work with male clients, I support them by first creating trust. Then guiding them back into their bodies. Because the body is where vulnerability lives. Breathwork is powerful for men because it bypasses the mind. It opens the chest. It releases the stored emotion. When a man finally cries without shame, something sacred happens. He reconnects with his humanity. I also help men redefine masculinity: True masculine energy is not domination. It is grounded presence. It is integrity. It is the courage to feel. And when men reclaim that, they become authentic not only in healing but in relationships, leadership and life. **PAA: Embodiment of emotions — In your sessions, embodiment seems crucial – not just understanding, but really feeling. You’ve described “a process of inner transmutation, allowing insights to anchor deeply within the body and heart.” Why is it so important to move out of the head and into the body for healing? How do you help clients fully feel and move through emotions so that realizations become lived truth? Can you share an example where embodiment shifted someone’s healing process in a tangible way?** Healing cannot happen only in the mind because the mind is often the place of defense. People can understand their trauma intellectually and still repeat the same patterns for years. Because the body remembers. The nervous system holds the imprint. Moving into the body is essential because emotions are not thoughts. They are energy in motion. If they are not felt, they stay stuck. And what is stuck becomes suffering. I guide clients into embodiment through breath, body awareness, somatic release and presence. We bring attention to sensations. We allow the emotion to rise. We breathe through it. We move if needed. We give it sound if needed. We let it complete its cycle. When an insight is felt in the body, it becomes truth. It becomes lived. The person doesn’t just “know” they are enough. They feel it. And that changes everything. A tangible example: A client had spent years trying to overcome fear of rejection. He understood where it came from childhood experiences. But it never changed. In one session, we went into the body. He felt the fear as a tightness in his chest. We breathed into it. Then grief surfaced. He began crying deeply, shaking. He released years of pain. Afterwards, he said: “I can finally breathe. I don’t feel the fear anymore.” And in the following weeks, he started showing up differently in relationships. That is embodiment. That is transmutation. > Reclaiming inner sovereignty means remembering that you are not a victim of life. You are a creator. > > Fabio **PAA: Empowerment and inner sovereignty — You often speak about helping people “embody their truth and reclaim their inner sovereignty.” For someone who’s spent years feeling powerless or living to please others, what does reclaiming that sovereignty really look like? How do you guide someone to shift from feeling like life is happening to them, to becoming a conscious creator of their life? Can you share a success story where someone fully stepped into their own authority?** Reclaiming inner sovereignty means remembering that you are not a victim of life. You are a creator. But for someone who has lived in people-pleasing or powerlessness, this begins with one thing: truth. Truth in the body. Truth in the voice. Truth in action. Sovereignty looks like: - saying “no” without guilt - setting boundaries - making decisions based on inner alignment, not fear - taking responsibility for your emotions instead of blaming others - honoring your needs and desires I guide people through this shift by helping them first reconnect to themselves. Because you cannot be sovereign if you don’t know who you are. We work on clarity: What do you want? What do you feel? What do you believe? What are you afraid of? Then we work on embodiment: Can you feel your “yes” and your “no” in your body? Can you stay grounded when someone disapproves? Can you choose yourself? A success story: A woman came to me completely burned out. She had spent her whole life living for others; her family, her partner, her job. She felt powerless and depressed. Through our work, she began reconnecting with her truth. She realized she had been betraying herself for years. She started setting boundaries. She left a toxic relationship. She changed careers. She began speaking her needs. And she told me: “For the first time, I feel like my life belongs to me.” That is sovereignty. **PAA: Transcending fear — You’ve said, “It’s time to free yourself once and for all from your fears, your anxieties, and everything that keeps you from moving forward.” Fear is such a universal barrier on the path of growth. How do you help people face and move through their fears or limiting beliefs? What have you found effective in transforming fear into courage or trust? And did you personally have to leap through fear – perhaps in leaving behind a former identity or path – in order to become who you are today?** Fear is not the enemy. Fear is a guardian. It appears when you are at the edge of transformation. But most people try to avoid it, and avoidance becomes a prison. To help people move through fear, I guide them to first understand it: What is the fear protecting? What belief is underneath? What story is the mind telling? Then we bring it into the body. Fear is a sensation. It is tightness, contraction, nervous energy. When you breathe into it and stay present, it begins to soften. The nervous system learns: “I can survive this.” Transforming fear into courage happens when someone reconnects with their “why.” Because fear is strongest when life has no meaning. But when your purpose is clear, fear becomes fuel. Yes, I had to leap through fear many times. Leaving the military was a huge fear. I was leaving stability, identity, security and stepping into the unknown. But my soul was louder than my fear. And every time I followed my truth, life guided me to something greater. The key is: You don’t wait for fear to disappear. You walk with it. And each step builds trust. > I help others connect with the divine through very concrete gateways: > breath, body, silence, nature and sincere self-inquiry. > > Fabio **PAA:** **Connecting with the divine — Spirituality is at the heart of your work. Many who come to you “feel the call to understand the meaning of their life and to unite with something greater.” In your view, what is this “something greater” we long to connect with? How do you personally experience the divine in everyday life? And how do you help others do the same – through nature, breath, silence, or other gateways?** What we long to connect with is our Source. The Divine. The Creator. The universal consciousness. The love that animates life. Whatever name we use, it is the same reality: A Presence that is within us and beyond us. Personally, I experience the divine as something living. In nature. In silence. In synchronicities. In moments of deep love. In the breath. In prayer. In the feeling of being guided. The divine is not an abstract concept for me. It is an inner experience. It is a warmth in the heart. A clarity in the mind. A peace that cannot be explained. I help others connect with the divine through very concrete gateways: breath, body, silence, nature and sincere self-inquiry. When someone breathes deeply for the first time in years, they meet something sacred. When a person finally listens to their body without judgment, they meet something sacred. When they sit in silence long enough to feel what they truly are beneath the noise, they meet something sacred. The Divine is not far from us, it within us but it is veiled by our conditioning, our wounds and our fears. My role is not to “bring” people to the divine but to guide them back to the space within themselves where the divine has always been waiting. Many clients tell me that during a breathwork session, a moment of grounding or a guided meditation, they suddenly “recognize” something they had forgotten, like a homecoming. It is a soft expansion, a warmth, an inner clarity, a sense of being held by something infinitely wise and infinitely loving. That is the essence of my work: helping people remember what they already are and guiding them to walk with the divine, not as an idea but as a lived, embodied truth. PAA: **One soul at a time – the bigger picture — You’ve said, “By freeing ourselves, we also help to free the world, one soul at a time.” That feels profoundly hopeful. In your experience, what ripple effects have you witnessed when one person heals? Do their families, communities, or creative lives transform too? Ultimately, what vision or impact do you hope to bring through this soul-by-soul transformation?** I can speak about this from my own life because I’ve witnessed the ripple effect with my own family in the most tangible way. When I began to heal, to align myself and to take responsibility for my inner world, I didn’t expect anything to change around me. But little by little, the people who were closest to me; my mother, my sisters, even my grandparents and my father began to shift too. Not because I tried to change them and not even because I pushed anything onto them, but simply because when one person changes their frequency, the whole ecosystem around them reorganizes. My mother completely transformed her way of seeing the world and her relationship with herself. My sisters made major life decisions in their careers and in their relationships choices which they didn’t have the courage or clarity to make before. Even my father softened, opened and released old burdens he had carried for decades. What is beautiful is that in the beginning, these same people were afraid of the changes they saw in me. They didn’t understand, they were skeptical and they projected their fears. But six years later, their lives, like mine, have shifted toward more peace, more alignment and more love. This is the ripple effect of one soul healing. We sometimes underestimate how powerful a single human being can be, but families and communities are constellations. When one star changes its orbit, the whole constellation moves. The impact I want to bring through this “one soul at a time” transformation is simple: I want people to realize that they have far more power than they imagine. If they embody the world they want to live in not preach it, not force it but truly embody it, then the world around them will naturally reorganize. This is not philosophy for me but It’s my daily reality. **PAA:** **Starting the journey – a message for seekers — You often remind us that “every transformation begins with a single step” and it’s about “remembering who you truly are.” For those feeling called to heal or grow but who are still standing at the threshold, what encouragement would you offer? What first small step can someone take to enter their own cocoon of transformation with courage? Is there a practice or insight you recommend as a gentle but powerful beginning?** When people ask me how to begin their journey, I always invite them to look at the path they have already walked. To see every storm they have survived, every challenge they have faced, every chapter they believed impossible to cross and yet here they are still standing, still moving and still capable of more ! The truth is: transformation begins with one decision and a decision is made in one second but it has to be rooted in a clear why because the why becomes your fuel, your compass and your anchor when the road gets uncomfortable. So if today your “why” no longer makes sense, start with one simple question: “If I had no limits right now; no fear, no judgment and no expectation, what would I choose for my life?” Write it down and please let your heart speak before your mind interrupts. Then ask yourself: “What is actually stopping me from doing these things?” Often, the list that appears is made of fears, beliefs, old stories and illusions that never truly belonged to you. That is already the beginning of your cocoon because clarity is the first crack in the shell. From there, the next step becomes simple: reach out for support. This is not a sign of weakness; this is a sign of courage. A good guide whether a therapist, a mentor, or a trusted friend, doesn’t walk the path for you. They simply shine a light where you were afraid to look and help you reconnect with the wisdom you already carry. If I can offer one gentle practice to begin, it would be this: Sit in silence for three minutes each day. Place a hand on your heart. And simply ask: “What do I need today?” Not tomorrow, not for the next ten years but just today! Because healing is not an Everest to climb, it is a return, step by step, to the truth of who you are. The moment you make that first honest step, you have already entered your cocoon of transformation. **PAA: Fabio, thank you for sharing and going into so much detail, we appreciate it. ** --- ## Join the Community --- # Further Questions with Alexander Moore Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/further-questions-with-alexander-moore/ ## Introduction This interview is a follow to the [Perseus Conversations episode featuring Alexander](https://youtu.be/qk3jQfM0r_4?si=BJ2nIThmJR7Tk8j8). There were some things he mentioned in that first chat that I felt would be great to go into more detail on. Thankfully Alexander agreed and provided us with these follow up answers. If you have not seen the first conversation, then please watch it [here](https://youtu.be/qk3jQfM0r_4?si=BJ2nIThmJR7Tk8j8). To follow Alexanders work please visit his site [here](https://practicaloccult.com/) and see his course [here](https://practicaloccult.com/courses/principles-of-magic/principles-of-magic-information/). --- ## Interview **PAA: In our previous conversation you said a “low-level siddhi” should be achievable in ~20 hours of cumulative practice (if someone actually practices). What exactly counts as “low-level siddhi” in your definition—and what are the first 3 concrete capabilities you expect a student to demonstrate by ~10 hours, ~20 hours, and ~40 hours?** A low-level siddhi is something like mental wandering, remote viewing, basic magnetism, and psychic influence on a person to make them change their mind or perspective on something. Anything along those lines, really—using, for example, the elemental energies or Bardon’s letters to cause a basic-level effect. Case in point: using fire to stoke the passions in someone, doing room impregnation in a way that actually works. Any of these things are essentially low-level superpowers that, if a person’s being honest, can be used to vastly improve their quality of life across the board that other people don’t have. A low-level siddhi is essentially any magical ability that gives you a tactical and tangible advantage over a normal person in day-to-day life. **PAA: You gave a rough track of 12 months at ~2 hours/day vs 24 months at ~1 hour/day to reach an intermediate level. Can you outline two realistic weekly practice templates (one for 60 minutes/day, one for 120 minutes/day) and the “checkpoint tests” you use to verify progress (so students aren’t just feeling like they’re improving)?** Typically, you’re looking at holding a thought in your mind for five minutes a day, vacuity of mind for five minutes a day, watching your thoughts for five minutes a day, and mental wandering for 10 minutes a day where you try to project your consciousness around your house. Then doing vital, astral, etheric, and mental energy practices for five minutes a day each, and practicing creating etheric structures for five minutes a day. This itself creates a basic line of practice. You can also add elemental practices in there, although those are best done for longer periods of time. If you were going to do a two-hour-a-day practice, it would realistically be the one-hour-a-day practice above, plus a minimum 15 minutes of practice a day with each of the four core elements. Keep in mind your practice will not always remain the same every day. What might be good for one hour a day for the first three months will eventually give way to a focus on certain skills. For your first month, it might be the three five-minute focus exercises (15 minutes total), and then 15 minutes each of vital, astral, and mental energy practice until you really get the energy going. Then the second month, instead of just working those energies (which you should be getting good at and also using throughout the day), you push that practice into using those energies for things: building the ball (as the [Sixty Skills curriculum](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills) discusses it), building etheric structures to learn to influence the spiritual world, learning to influence the mental sphere of other people/animals/places, pushing energies into a room for room impregnation, pushing energies into items, practicing the transference of consciousness, etc. If you can push an hour a day into the basic training of these lessons, you’re good. If you can push two hours a day into practicing, you’re even better and you’re going to go faster. **PAA: You warned about people “losing their minds” once they realize magic works after years of restraint. How do you deliberately dose early results—so students get proof fast, but don’t swing into obsession, reckless spellcasting, or chasing extremes?** Half of it is accepting that you’re allowed to do magic for stuff. A lot of people lose their minds once they realize magic works after years of restraint because that restraint also takes the form of not being aware that you can use magic for anything. Maybe you were in a lodge that told you to focus only on the great work, and only people who practice lower sorcery use it for material gains—so you’re told to love poverty and loneliness and work like someone who doesn’t have magic. So I have students focus on getting shit early. As soon as you learn vital energy, use it to improve your physical fitness. Use it to replace coffee in the morning. Use it to destroy a hangover if you have one. Use these skills as soon as possible for objective life improvements that make your life better. Room impregnation with astral energy to affect emotions in a room so that you can get that promotion at work, so that your date goes well—stuff like that. Even the earliest exercises, if you approach them with a tactical, mundane, results-based mind, you can get things. Another part is being honest with yourself about what you want. It’s a lifetime of abstinence that overwhelms a person. If you accept that you want things and you give yourself permission to want and strive sorcerously, you’re probably not going to go crazy—you’ll have a healthier outlook. **PAA: For someone who says, “I can’t visualize at all,” what’s your step-by-step on-ramp—what do you train first, what do you avoid early, and what’s the minimum daily drill to get any reliable inner signal online?** If you can’t visualize at all, add 15 minutes a day to your practice if you can (it can be five-minute chunks). Look at your hand, close your eyes, and try to remember what your hand looked like—hold the image/afterimage as much as possible. If you do that for 15 minutes a day, in a month you should be pretty well able to visualize. **PAA: Do you treat “true aphantasia” vs “untrained imagination” as two different problems? If yes: what alternative channels do you lean on first (felt-sense/somatic, auditory, symbolic, dream, scrying), and how do you diagnose which channel a student should build?** Yes. True aphantasia is extraordinarily rare. But for those who have it, sounds, physical sensations, smells—even—can be trained in place of images. If you cannot picture the color red as an energy entering you, you can feel heat entering you for fire, for example. That’s why I train a physical sensation along with an image. If a person has true aphantasia (again, markedly rare), they should focus entirely on using the other senses to work energy and move things. **PAA: You said you would literally do magic to meet teachers—including summoning a spirit to bring someone who could answer a question. Can you walk through one real example in detail (what you asked for, what you did, what counted as the “hit,” and what happened over the following weeks)?** I’ll give the story of how I encountered Bob of the [Sixty Skills curriculum](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/sixty-skills). I’ve always been a pretty aggressive worker of internal power stuff and Franz Bardon stuff. I summoned Tyrael, the planetary intelligence of Mercury, via Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa—on a Wednesday during a Mercury Hour. I used conjurations from the Greater Key of Solomon (not the Lesser Key of Solomon), and I used tech from Bardon’s second book: energy impregnation of the room, the Mercury colors, and so on. I used a scrying mirror to talk to the spirit—the mirror I had “volted into” and enhanced as described in Bardon’s second book. I asked it: > “Can you give me a guy who knows Bardon better than Bardon—better than me—or as well as me?” I was shown the number 60. The connection wasn’t the clearest channel I’ve had, so I tried to interpret it: > “There’s 60 of them?” No. > “The guy is 60 years old?” No. > “Are there 60 guys inside one guy?” No. I did the license to depart, sent the spirit away, went to the internet, and typed “Franz Bardon 60.” On Reddit I found somebody complaining about the [Sixty Skills curriculum](https://sixtyskills.com/), which led me in the right direction. **PAA: In your training, what are your prerequisites before a student attempts their first real contact, and what counts as a valid “first contact” (versus imagination, wishful thinking, or ambient noise)?** Prerequisites are the training up to mental energy. It would be great if you had access to Akasha and the grace energy (non-dual light); it’s safer, but not strictly necessary. You should have some baseline clairvoyance trained. I’m unconventional in that I also consider using a divinatory medium (like cards, if you’re a card reader) as a valid way for a spirit to speak through you. The spirit is chosen based on the student’s desires: an elemental, a dead person, an earth-zone head (in pure Bardon), a planetary spirit, etc. They do the conjuration either at the mental level (with mental wandering to the spirit) or by trying to push it down into the world (into a scrying mirror or a visible evocation). Valid first contact: (1) the spirit does what you asked it to do—if you call a Venus spirit to get you a girlfriend and you meet the kind of person you asked for, you succeeded; or (2) you were given information that later proves to be true. Otherwise, visions/weird experiences/poltergeist activity are useless unless you’re getting what you asked for from the being you summoned. **PAA: When someone fails repeatedly at early spirit contact, where is it usually breaking—concentration, fear, ritual structure, “staging,” clair-senses, or something else? If you had to give a solution, what would it be?** Often people succeed more than they think, but they disappoint themselves because they want a result not commensurate with their development. The full “4K visionary experience” is rare, and most people won’t admit that 80% of the time they don’t see it with naked eyes. Sources like Agrippa talk a lot about visionary capacity and training internal clairvoyance. I’ve filmed myself doing evocations and they don’t show up on film—it just looks like I’m talking to an empty room. So oftentimes the spirit did show up; you just couldn’t perceive it, or you didn’t bring it down as concretely as you hoped. So train internal clairvoyance and clairaudience as well as external (trained slightly differently). Sometimes you need to go closer to the spirit (projection) rather than have it come fully to you. Sometimes ask the spirit to move a pendulum, or speak through cards—if you’re good at divination, you’ll feel a qualitative difference. Ways to troubleshoot “is it here?”: put a ring on a chain/string on a tripod outside your circle and ask it to move it; speak through a divinatory medium you’re proficient at; ask for something concrete and check afterward; ask it to do the thing you called it for and don’t drop the goal. And yes: sometimes your concentration sucks; sometimes it’s your psychic senses; sometimes you didn’t conjure long enough (some spirits take hours); sometimes your preparation wasn’t good; sometimes you half-assed it. Ask honestly: did I do it right, preparations correct, energies solid, tools built correctly? Sometimes even the best of us do an evocation and nothing happens—sometimes they’re just not picking up the phone. **PAA: You talked about astral aggression (e.g., hag-riding) and the need to be able to protect yourself. For a beginner who’s starting spirit work, what is your minimum viable “protection stack” (daily + weekly), and what are the red flags that mean “stop, fortify, and clean house” before doing anything else?** Minimum: if you’re psalm-friendly, do Psalms 51, 23, and 91 every day. Do Psalm 51 hyssop cleansing showers at least monthly. Do protective wards: create an elemental to protect your home; make the Solomonic Sixth Pentacle of Mars or Fifth Pentacle of Mars (or both) to protect your home; use folk-magic apotropaic charms. Red flags: poltergeist activity; unreasonable dread that doesn’t make sense; really bad luck; things breaking to an almost comical degree (multiple appliances in one day with no obvious cause); sleep disruption; health disruption (beyond normal illness—be reasonable; Occam’s razor still applies). Ward your home, ward yourself, ward your ritual space. Do basic incense cleanses (frankincense regularly), holy water sprinkled around walls/ceilings, folk-magic cleansing practices, apotropaic charms. Make a witch bottle. **PAA: You gave a modern example: conjuring/binding the “spirit” of an AI resume-filter so it favors you. When you work on tech systems like that, what are you claiming you’re actually contacting (egregore of the org, spirit of the machine/system, servitor you create, “genius” of the platform, collective attention-field)—and how does your method change depending on the model?** I operate from an actively animistic perspective. I don’t think that the AI of a company is an egregore of that company, but I do think that company’s egregore can be contacted. It depends how big the spirit is and how vague it is—like the idea of Amazon is much more vague than the hiring practice AI of Amazon. You can do a hierarchy thing and summon and try to work the spirit of the company itself all the way down, and that will take more time. In terms of the method, the method for me doesn’t really change. It’s just the amount of effort that needs to be put in that changes. It’s harder when the thing is bigger. **PAA: You asked: “Is your magic stronger than Instagram?” (and pointed out hiring/interviews moving to Zoom and AI gating). What are the three most common 21st-century targets your students bring you (hiring pipelines, audience growth, reputation cleanup, client acquisition, etc.), and what’s the first operative working you’d assign for each?** Most common targets: growing your audience, getting more clients, and reputation cleanup. First workings: a road-opening spell for client acquisition; a glamour spell for audience growth; and a cleansing spell for reputation cleanup. You can also add obfuscation/invisibility work—for example, using something like the Sixth Pentacle of the Sun, which has to do with invisibility. **PAA: You’re clear that glamour affects what others perceive—sometimes “half-true” or even “entirely untrue.” Where is the line, in your system, between legitimate glamour and manipulative distortion—and what safeguards keep glamour from backfiring later (social whiplash, uncanny-vibe, reputational recoil)?** There are no safeguards aside from your own judgment. You need to choose the right people, the people who won’t be too negatively affected by it. And you need to choose the right circumstances, and honestly, sometimes it does backfire. That’s just kind of the unfortunate reality—you know it’s impossible to predict everything and it’s impossible to be perfect. So you’re trying to be good but remember perfect being the enemy of the good sometimes you just got to accept it sometimes it gets a little weird. So legitimate glamour manipulative distortion: I would draw the line at severity. Are you enhancing an already extant quality or diminishing a less than ideal quality? Legitimate glamour. Are you making someone see or perceive something that is profoundly untrue to the point of cognitive dissonance? Manipulative distortion. That’s pretty cut and dry. **PAA: On love work, you acknowledged coercive love spells exist and work, but you advocate cleaner methods (self-work + magic + real-world action). What’s your practical “ethical attraction” recipe—(1) inner/energetic work, (2) spirit/servitor work, (3) mundane moves—and what’s one example working you’d consider both effective and clean?** If you want to be super ethical, you’re going to be completely above board. You want to get a list of the qualities that you want your partner to have. Then you want to write a list of the qualities that you will need to possess to keep them. What does what you want want? Then you’re going to… you could volt for it. If you’re slick enough to volt, you can summon the Archangel of Venus, to call this person to you, if you know how to do that. You can do a servitor to bring it to you. Its only purpose is to go seek out such a person. In terms of inner and energetic work, keep your vital energy going, keep everything clean and good, and try to project the very best of you. Do a little bit of glamorous to boost the best of you and diminish the worst of you. This is not unethical in the sense that we all do this. People wear makeup. People dress well. People dress to flatter their figure, regardless of whether they’re male or female. If you’ve got a weak chin, you grow a beard, perhaps. That kind of thing. Nothing wrong with that. And in terms of the mundane moves, six months in the gym—don’t be fat—that kind of thing. Do your best to be physically attractive, do your best to be confident and happy. If you have issues with confidence, stacking 15 to 20 minutes of the fire element before you go on that date might help. The working I consider both effective and clean is the lover drawing. You get the petition of the person. The petition of who you need to be is mostly just for you—your roadmap. But you get the petition of the person you want. And you’re honest. That’s the key thing. You are honest about what you want. Now you should remember to put things like: this person is single currently; this person is geographically accessible to me; this person is sane; this person does not have any sexually transmitted diseases; etc. Think about the practical as well. Then you call upon, for example, a benevolent spirit like Anael, Archangel of Venus. It’s a pretty classic one. And you do a seven-day working each day, returning in a Venus hour and redoing the spell and saying: I really want this person; I’ll be good to this person; I will be a good steward of this person in my life. Then you wait for it to show up. Depending on how rare the thing you asked for is and where you are geographically and where you are situationally in life, it may take longer or shorter. If you’re in a target-rich environment like a metropolitan area, it’ll be faster. If you live in a shack on a cave or on a mountain, you will be waiting a while. So after you do this, go out, try to meet people, be social, join a club, do whatever. Go where the person you want was likely to be. And remember, the thing that makes it ethical is you’ve drawn them to you, but you have not forced them to stay. This just cuts out the middleman of circumstance and time. It cuts out time spent looking. This way you have the person right in front of you and you can go for it. **PAA: You described your course as effectively “IIH + additions” (body-of-light emphasis, folk methods, spirit work, practical application). Which specific parts of Initiation into Hermetics are still non-negotiable for you, which did you modify (how, exactly), and which did you drop because they weren’t cost-effective in results-per-hour?** I think the mirror exercises are stupid. If I’m being real with you, they don’t really do anything worth anything. I really upset people a lot by saying the shortest version of the mirror exercise is just simply don’t be a coward. And just remember that, keep that as like a maxim and go for it. Essentially, I think all the way up to the lesson on volting is essential. Like everything in that book up to volting is great. I think the elements are taught poorly because they’re not taught particularly well. I’ve modified them and taught in my own curriculum, which I find to be better. I also modify them with timelines of training and you should do it for this long and you should train them in these ways. You should train them in these energetic ways, like not just poor breathing, but filling the body with it, streaming it through the body, moving it through the various subtle channels in the body in certain ways to get used to it, making shapes out of the elements, practicing with them in an active way. I think that was a big part of Bardon’s system being suboptimal: he doesn’t really give you a lot of truly practical examples. He gives you big examples like, “oh yes, at a high level with the water element you can make storms happen or go away,” and it’s like cool, yeah, very real, very true—but what about: you can affect the emotions of people in a room very effectively with the water element? That kind of thing. So I think that most of Initiation into Hermetics is good. I go into more detail about basically everything—about how it’s used in the modern world and a person’s individual life—and I’d spend a lot less time reminding you that divine providence will judge you and put you on the naughty list if you act in your own best interest. In a lot of ways, what I’ve created is what I imagine someone actually teaching the material of Initiation into Hermetics would have done in person. I try to present my thing as: I’m a guy who knows what he’s talking about, who’s teaching you how to be a guy who knows what he’s talking about. It’s not high-flouting; it’s not this navel-gazing great work kind of thing. It’s a craft. It is a practice. It is a skill you are learning and a thing you can apply to better your life right now. **PAA: You mentioned extremes (miracle healing, verified astral travel matching real locations, seeing entities, etc.). For readers who want proof but don’t want fantasy: what’s the most repeatable, safe “proof path” you’d give a serious skeptic over 30 days—and can you share one standout student story (anonymous) where the turning point was unmistakable and measurable (what they wanted, what they practiced, and what happened)?** For a serious skeptic who’s willing to put the work in: do the mental wandering exercises for a cumulative hour a day—five minutes here, ten minutes there, again and again—bouncing your consciousness in and out of your body to other places for 30 days. If you crush that for an hour a day, you will be able to effectively remote view and mental wander. Another example: train one of the four core elements—earth, fire, air, or water—for an hour (or even two) a day over 30 days. Keeping in mind it can cause elemental imbalance, you will produce unmistakable energetic ability. This gives undeniable proof, but it won’t make you able to do miracle healing—no one gets that good in 30 days. Student story (anonymous): a student had a romantic partner who was physically disabled. Over six months, he did repeated, aggressive, unrelenting healing magic on his partner every day for multiple hours. Now she’s not just fine—it’s as though nothing had ever been wrong, to the point her whole family became very religious because they thought it could only have been a heaven-sent miracle. What they practiced: healing magic—pushing vital energy to heal—and an elemental equilibrium stack. For a cumulative two hours a day, 30 minutes of each element was placed into his partner again and again, with the goal programmed into the energies (“this body is perfected; this body is healed”), and it worked. Big miracle results are Olympic-level: you won’t get them without heroic amounts of effort. You have to need it. You have to be hungry for it. You have to love this shit. **PAA: Thank you very much for this follow up and answering these subjects in greater detail.** --- --- # From Demonic Realm to Divine Providence: A Bardonist’s Path Through IIH, PME and Rosicrucian Mysteries Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-demonic-realm-to-divine-providence-a-bardonists-path-through-iih-pme-and-rosicrucian-mysteries/ ## Introduction This interview with Gabriel Teixeira, I think will be of great interest to students of Franz Bardon. As topics not often mentioned within our Franz Bardon related interviews are brought up and expounded upon. There is also the possibility of a future live session with Gabriel if readers make their interest known. Please let us know your thoughts and any questions in the comments. For those who would like to follow up on the work of Mr. Walter Ogris as mentioned in this interview you can find his website [here](https://archivhermetischertexte.at/). --- ![Light of Wisdom and Franz Bardon](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ChatGPT-Image-Feb-11-2026-05_27_04-PM-1024x683.png) ## Interview **PAA: What brought you to the world of Magic, Hermetics and Franz Bardon? How did you begin your training?** Well, I began to take an interest in magic from childhood. I was already born somewhat sensitive and could occasionally see ghosts. Although I was raised in a Christian household, I already carried some exotic ideas and behaviors from the spiritual realm from which I come. My first contact with energies and magic was through the MO-PAI system of John Chang (John Baharudin — the Magus of Java). I watched an excerpt from the documentary Ring of Fire, in which he demonstrated pyrokinesis and healing through chi emitted from his fingers. Shortly after watching the documentary, I got in touch with one of his students in order to receive instruction. Not long after that, I came across Mr. Bardon’s book (Initiation into Hermetics). From that point on, I began to practice—and I never stopped. **PAA: During your training of IIH what specific areas did you find challenging? Did you do anything differently to overcome these challenges?** I believe that if you carry heavy karma, or if you have a mission and destiny that run counter to any system of magical development, then all exercises can become a challenge. I came from the demonic realm, so my pact had been partially concluded, allowing me to become human again. However, because I still had a mission to fulfill, all the circumstances that afflicted my life were contrary to the system proposed by Mr. Bardon. For those accustomed to Goetia, having to sit down and focus on a single thought, enter emptiness, work with the soul mirror, and so on, can be extremely challenging. The best way to overcome these adversities is to allow for adequate periods of rest, because Bardon’s exercises cause micro-injuries to the soul, and each person has a specific recovery time for the astral body to heal. Sometimes, practicing every day can actually delay progress. Part of a person’s fate is recorded within their own astral body, so the exercises can accelerate destiny and karmic resolution. For this reason, for some beginners, all kinds of misfortune may occur when practicing these exercises, because you are interacting with the karmic records of your own soul when you do them. Therefore, the best advice is to respect your own recovery time between exercises and to progress with quality rather than haste. **PAA: What are your thoughts about Step 1 and particularly VOM, some students spends years on this step. Do you think they are misunderstanding the requirements or do you think it is correct to stay on the step until students believe they have perfectly passed it?** My opinion regarding the early grades of IIH is that they are initially focused on a form of astral and mental hygiene. Mr. Bardon wrote his first book as a kind of “prologue” to the contact with cosmic consciousness that comes in the second book. Therefore, the beginner should focus on the fact that, by practicing the exercises, you are preparing yourself to enter into contact with the geniuses of the higher spheres. This is not something you do without giving up your worst habits—you must change as a person as well. It is a gradual and initial transformation whose purpose is to prepare you for the next step ahead. My second opinion is that the minimum amount of time Mr. Bardon recommends is more than sufficient to move forward, considering that Akasha meditation alone will exponentially expand many of the previously proposed exercises. The only exception is when you are practicing in order to balance your deficiencies. In that case, you may focus more on one exercise or another. The third point is something I have already mentioned before: these exercises release negative karma recorded in the perispirit, so it is normal to have days when the exercises feel perfect and days when you are unable to progress. The ideal approach is to focus on a balanced quality in achieving the goals proposed by the exercises, rather than on extremes—as if Mr. Bardon were demanding that you become a great, infallible magician from the very beginning. It is important to remember that all our actions are recorded in the Saturn zone of the Sun and in the Earth zone. When you feel that you are struggling with an exercise, pray—pray to Divine Providence. The Bardonist tradition has a legion of spirits who guard against degeneration: the Incandescent Sun of midday; Sata Pessajah (the Great Watcher); Ugolog (the Pure of the Pure); Aschmunadai; Ados; Laosa; the 49 officials of the Egyptian tradition; Iserag (who was worshiped in Greece for a long time), among others. As Mr. Emil Stejnar discovered, Bardon’s entire system is oriented toward a kind of lost magical tradition whose purpose is communion with the stellar zone. There is no reason to think that you are alone on this path. This system is completely mystical and magical at the same time. > Well, a student can only fully understand this exercise (depth point) if they receive a Mercurial or Saturnian initiation, so here is a bit of Mercurial initiation... > > Gabriel **PAA: Depth Point is one of the key parts of the journey in my opinion. What can you tell us about this? Some students have trouble making a clear difference between projecting into a thing (Step 4 mental) and going into the depth point of a thing (Step 5).** Well, a student can only fully understand this exercise if they receive a Mercurial or Saturnian initiation, so here is a bit of Mercurial initiation. Basically, transferring one’s consciousness into an object is meant to understand its visible relationship with the environment. Transferring one’s consciousness to the point of depth of something is meant to understand that object’s relationship with the matrix of the sphere in which it exists. For all reality is connected by invisible laws to a central point. This central point is linked to parts of reality through concatenation. Thus, each of the six principal directions (above, below, right, left, front, back) is connected to a core that results from the interaction of these six directions. For example, in the experiments of Mr. Emil Stejnar and Mr. Walter Ogris, they explain how the thought-cell I AM is formed. By imagining a six-pointed star, we can say that the way I AM interacts with each direction expands or diminishes the perception of I EXIST. Every interaction and friction is recorded simultaneously in the Mercury–Saturn zone and within the adept’s own astral body. Therefore, the point of depth refers to the existence of a thing in relation to its surroundings. In other words, to be more didactic, it refers to how the growth of an apple tree’s roots interacts with other trees, with the soil, with water, and so on. **PAA: Can you share anything about your first experience with a world or entity outside of yourself? Was this a shock to you or have you always been open to these ideas?** I have had some experiences with astral travel, although this ability is not my primary one. I cannot recall the very first experience, but I do remember some that were quite impactful. One of them occurred when I was working with the Light of the midday Sun, using the Jewish Tikkun HaKlali. After some time of practice, the zone of the Egyptian god Khepri opened, and a few days later I was taken to a related spiritual zone. I remember that when I was taken to this zone, I was accompanied by three other spirits. We were flying and passing through places that resembled luminous cathedrals. It was, so to speak, a radiant cathedral with multiple thresholds through which we passed very quickly. After moving through these celestial cathedrals, we turned left and passed what would be the final portal. Then we entered the twilight zone. When I entered this zone, I was received by children who had bright orange eyes. They had small wings, as if they were little fairies. In theory, when you are working with a spirit, you eventually become accustomed to its energy, and everything that comes from it will seem normal to you. Therefore, I was not frightened by the experience. As for evocation, I practiced it extensively throughout my entire path in Hermeticism. In the beginning, I was always fascinated by physical effects and Goetia. There was one evocation that caught me by surprise—it involved a genius of Aries. I was not yet fully prepared for its materialization, so I traced the seal in the air using my index finger, and the seal quickly pierced the sphere, producing a sound like the blast of a bomb. It was not very loud, but it was audible. After this small explosion, two auxiliary ministers appeared. Because I was not prepared for the physical effect, I began to feel weak and nearly fainted, as the sphere of the being started feeding on everything around it. I then quickly gathered my will and presented my demands to it. This was a careless act, as I failed to take into account that at that moment I held special prerogatives for contact with the being. **PAA: Let’s look at Step 8 and the jumping off point to work on PME or KTQ. Did you move on to these other books at this point or did you wait until you had more experience in Steps 9 and 10 before starting those books?** I practiced all the grades of IIH, but I did not find it useful for me to practice the ninth or tenth grades with the same intensity as the others. Therefore, I practiced intensively up to the eighth grade, and I approached the ninth and tenth with much less intensity before moving directly on to the second book **PAA: Following the last question, what came first for you, PME or KTQ, and why?** For me, PME came first. I did not practice the third book, as I learned a different type of Qabbalah from the geniuses—one that is very similar to the one Mr. Walter Ogris also learned and partially expresses through his talismans. I believe that, for the external public, Mr. Walter Ogris is the greatest living Bardonist. Naturally, I could not speak about Mr. Emil Stejnar out of respect for the Law of Silence and for the information that was delivered by the Mercury zone at that time. In Mercurial magic, it is common for an adept’s magical work to interact with the magical work of other adepts, given the “communicator” nature of Mercury/Hermes. As a result, I ended up interacting with and discovering “small magical secrets” from other practitioners—not personal matters, but functional ones. At the time, I came across aspects of Mr. Emil Stejnar’s magical work that helped me in my own practice, even though I do not know him personally. I also gained access to a small fragment of Mr. Walter Ogris’s magical knowledge. I consider Mr. Walter Ogris’s Qabbalah to be the most elegant and the one that most fully respects all the laws of the Earth zone—especially because it goes beyond the laws of quality and quantity taught by Bardon and makes use of certain laws taught in the Mercury zone, such as: name, form, mode of manifestation, implicit codes, external symbolic representation, the Qabbalah of the sphere, energy signature, and so on. Although I do not know whether he himself uses these exact terms to describe the Qabbalah he applies when crafting a talisman, these names are concepts we learn from the spirits of Mercury. Therefore, it is possible that he learned them under different names. > I believe that Mr. Bardon’s Qabbalah (KTQ) is exoteric because the judges of the zone that surrounds the Earth would not allow the revelation of other missing keys. > > Gabriel **PAA: You believe Bardon’s Qabbalah is exoteric rather than esoteric. What do you mean by that distinction, and what makes Bardon’s presentation “exoteric” in your view?** I believe that Mr. Bardon’s Qabbalah (KTQ) is exoteric because the judges of the zone that surrounds the Earth would not allow the revelation of other missing keys. Therefore, what we have there is a reutilization of knowledge that already existed publicly beforehand (and thus does not violate the Law of Silence). Master Bardon added one or two laws in order to make that Qabbalah function in a way that would not conflict with the established laws. In other words, it is a Qabbalah that Master Bardon created for the general audience of his two previous books. I do not believe that he used this Qabbalah for complex matters or for workings involving spherical signatures (a sensitive and secret topic). Given this explanation, it is an exoteric Qabbalah that does not require initiation. **PAA: You’ve said some beings mentioned in Bardon’s own work do not like “this Qabbalah.” Which kinds of beings react negatively, and why would a being object to that approach?** I believe they dislike this Qabbalah because it lacks precision. One can easily commit excesses and acts of disrespect with it, which in occultism we would say “weighs” on one’s karma. In addition to that, other keys necessary for the proper use of this Qabbalah were not included. I believe Bardon expected many of these doubts to be clarified through contact with the beings themselves. I have known some Bardonist magicians who ruined their lives by practicing this Qabbalah in a very disrespectful and incorrect manner. Magicians who follow the path of authoritarianism always end up being abandoned by others. **PAA: You mentioned working for many years pursuing criminals “together with the Judges of Mercury,” using evocations to achieve physical effects. Who are the Judges of Mercury in your framework, and what makes them suited to that kind of work?** You can easily contact the Judges of Mercury through the seals of the 72 geniuses of Mr. Quintscher. They are the best sources for providing precise information when you need to understand decisions or effects in other spheres. Mercury is truly omnipresent and omniscient—you can know anything, about anyone, and on any subject. They are also excellent when it comes to obtaining missions in service of Divine Providence. **PAA: When you say “physical effects,” what range are we talking about — information acquisition, movement of probability, visible external phenomena, direct influence on matter, or something else?** External and recognizable magical phenomena to the uninitiated—in other words, thaumaturgy. There is nothing that frightens a criminal more than standing before an inexplicable phenomenon. When a criminal witnesses the manifestation of magic, they are usually filled with fear. **PAA: If you could add three “advanced but practical” pillars of content that most people aren’t addressing, what would they be (and what would each article do for the reader)?** The I-consciousness of Franz Bardon—remembering that you are a spiritual being within a worldly manifestation. Akasha (or emptiness) meditation. Interdependence. When properly applied, Akasha meditation can neutralize a great deal of negative karma and prolong one’s life, as it brings genuine balance. I-consciousness meditation helps reduce neuroses and strengthen attention. Awareness of the law of interdependence reminds us that all phenomena are interconnected, so that everything that happens is an effect resulting from the sum of our directed or unconscious actions. **PAA: What topics do you think should not be published publicly — because they reliably lead to harm, obsession, or karmic problems — even if they’re technically real?** Topics related to sphere magic, advanced Qabbalah, and the laws of Mercurial sentence defense. **PAA: If you were planning a content series that bridges theory to practice, what would the progression look like from beginner-safe to advanced — and where do most blogs get the sequencing wrong?** I believe that Mr. Bardon’s system is already sufficiently solid; however, I would add more explanations about methods of energy cultivation. I would also include more material on the laws of the Earth zone and on mystical and purity-oriented spirits. I think that people, in general, do not clearly understand the implications of their magical actions, nor how much these actions can damage their next incarnation if proper care is not taken. An explanation of this would be extremely important. **PAA: Bardon’s work is sometimes described as being “supervised by the spirits he left behind” (linked to the second book). How do you understand that supervision in practice — and what forms can “permission” or “prohibition” take for a practitioner or teacher?** Well, for those who practice a very authoritarian form of magic, focused mainly on the fulfillment of worldly desires, access to negative spirits becomes easier. In this way, the initiate either learns more quickly through pain or is swiftly led to be corrected by life itself. Those who truly understand what lies behind Mr. Bardon’s knowledge, on the other hand, are guided by the Great White Brotherhood, by the Rosicrucians, by the Egyptian system, and so on. Bardon’s system is supervised in the sense that it allows the poor practitioner to quickly encounter the Judges, while the good practitioner finds compassionate assistance along the path. The Bardon system contains certain “traps” related to authoritarian magic and subjugation, which the practitioner only realizes once they have already been condemned to ostracism by the Judges—or when they no longer have any health left. **PAA: If Divine Providence ultimately permits or forbids outcomes, how should a magician balance personal will, responsibility, and humility — especially when working Bardon’s system?** The practitioner must remember that no matter how much power they attain, there is always a higher zone above them (the paracosmos). They must remember that no matter how much knowledge they acquire, there will always be something they do not know. And they must remember that Divine Providence is not merely an agent, but an entity. Just as the adept may believe they can interfere according to their own will, a higher zone can also interfere in their magical work if it judges it to have become too degenerate. Humility, always. **PAA: Presenting Bardon’s work publicly can be difficult because we may “have to give an account” of our actions. What specific ethical lines should teachers and publishers be aware of when presenting Bardon-related material?** Inner reform and the soul mirror. Being able to look into your own soul and tell the truth about the intentions behind your actions. No one doubts the goodness of a sweet and innocent child—the Judges wish to look upon the magician in the same way. Good attracts good; evil attracts evil. Selfishness attracts selfishness; altruism attracts altruism. No one can escape themselves. The ethics of our actions lie in observing the effects produced by both our magical practices and our ordinary actions up to this point. If they satisfy us and lift the weight from our conscience, then all is well—at least if we err, it will be out of ignorance, not from pleasure in doing harm. But if, when facing their own actions, the practitioner feels shame for what they have become and for what they have done, then something must be corrected. **PAA: Bardon had no monetary interest — his work was compassion and mission — yet magicians still need to charge fairly. Where is the line between fair exchange and “dangerous ground” when money touches Bardon’s teachings, in your view?** Desire and attachment are poison. The money a magician charges for something they offer should come from what they perceive as fair and balanced, without extremes. If they begin to charge solely for the pleasure (desire) of money, then decline begins. One should charge what is considered fair, aiming at harmony, and keep the desire for money in a secondary place. There are many cases in which charging for a magical service serves as a way for a person to pay for negative karma they have generated, and in other cases it serves as a way for the person to replace trials and suffering with the merit of acquiring a magical service or knowledge. But fundamentally, when you keep the desire for money out of the equation, you are far more likely to charge a fair and just value for magic. **PAA: Clairalience can develop without being directly pursued. What practices were you doing when it emerged, and what does that suggest about how Bardon-style training can awaken faculties indirectly?** I believe that emptiness meditation can develop an incalculable number of gifts, especially because it allows the energy reservoirs to be filled with vital energy in a calm and balanced way. I believe that the internal rearrangement of this energy can awaken powers that are still unknown to us. My clairalience emerged from excessive use of psychometry. As I am naturally sensitive, that sensitivity itself seems to draw forth other gifts whenever it feels the need to complement the experience. **PAA: You mentioned learning dances that “evoke beings or powers without the need for words.” How do you understand the mechanism — what is the dance doing that replaces verbal formulae, and what risks should someone consider before exploring it?** Dance, bodily movements, hand gestures, guttural sounds, and similar pr actices are another form of Qabbalah. Together with drawn Qabbalah, they are among the most refined and elegant forms of Qabbalistic practice. Formulas that rely solely on the voice tend to reduce the magician’s life force, because they consume kinetic energy, and their compensatory attribute (counter-effect) causes the magician to physically feel the energy they evoke through words—thus shortening lifespan and consuming a significant amount of Jing. When one dances or draws, the attribute of energetic exchange tends to be distributed more evenly throughout the physical body, which reduces or even nullifies the collateral effects of the spoken formula. This type of practice is better learned through initiation from a being, rather than attempting to extract “illegal” movements from the Akasha and ending up using an illegitimate form of Qabbalah. I am of the opinion that Mr. Bardon himself preferred hand gestures. **PAA: Some beings can be bad-tempered or sarcastic. Beyond the humor, what does spirit “temperament” teach about working responsibly — especially boundaries, protocol, and avoiding projecting human expectations onto beings?** This is an indirect warning to magicians who work heavily within the laws of sovereignty and force. Treating a being as if it were your subject is not a good path. Remembering that a spirit is a living being and shares in the same life force as you will always lead to a more pleasant and less problematic experience. Mr. Bardon already hinted, between the lines of his second work, that some beings can “take revenge.” Many of them also possess knowledge that they do not reveal to you. A good example occurred once when I was speaking with André Consciência shortly after performing a Lunar evocation. The spirit was still nearby when it noticed a message André had sent me. Immediately, the lunar spirit made a joke that only André would understand—about how ironic it is for someone who works with words to be unable to find the right expressions for things. Therefore, a respectful approach toward beings is always the best course of action. **PAA: You recently shared posts in the Students of Franz Bardon Facebook group with a connection to a Rosicrucian egregore. Could you share more about that connection and why it matters for practice?** According to my research, Mr. Bardon worked directly with the “morning sun,” alchemy, and the assistance of invisible beings who comforted him during moments of suffering. In his novel Frabato the Magician, Mr. Bardon describes a scene in which Urgaya appears in the Assembly of Communion. Since I encountered the spirit of the “pure essence” of the White Pelican, I have not been able to avoid the feeling that URGAYA URANIA is, in fact, one of the elder brethren of the Great White Brotherhood. Dion Fortune also encountered the secret fraternity and referred to them as the “Occult Police.” From that point onward, I was able to observe correlations among several organizations operating under different names, yet all beneath the same central symbol—a sun among clouds. Because of this realization, I changed the direction of my magical work, turning more toward what Mr. Emil Stejnar had been working on in secrecy for several years, even if perhaps not directly. No adept can enter higher spheres without the purest alchemy, nor without respecting the solar law of the Earth Zone clock—the positions assumed by the Sun in the early morning, at midday, and in the late afternoon. The Sun in these positions, the stellar zone, the Moon, and the waters of the sign of Pisces together form the axis of Mr. Bardon’s Egyptian (or Chaldean, if you prefer) magic, derived from the Cult of the Light of Horeb and many other matters that cannot be spoken of here. But certainly, the magician who seeks communion with the most refined beings will correctly understand Mr. Bardon’s works and will be able to clearly perceive the correlations among the Rosicrucians, Mr. Alois Mailänder, Joséphin Péladan, Helena Blavatsky, Urgaya, Stanislas de Guaita and others. **PAA: Lastly, please add anything you feel we have missed in these questions.** Happiness! Magic exists to make our existence more radiant, comforting, and happy. To make our days warmer, and so that we always have a safe place to rest. Magical powers and spiritual experiences are secondary. If there is no happiness, none of that truly matters. May our hearts be filled with the radiant light of love, and may our days be long, joyful, and full of uplifting experiences. May Divine Providence always look upon us with compassion, and may we never lose our innocence and our hope. May Divine Providence bless us with Its Grace, today and always. **PAA: Inspiring information, thank you very much for taking part and for providing these very detailed answers.** --- --- # Minor Ritual of Purification and Evocation by André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/minor-ritual-of-purification-and-evocation-by-andre-consciencia/ # Introduction This month, I bring you two ceremonial magic rituals using adapted Bardonian techniques, whose purpose is to stabilize the powers and their subsequent manifestation, considered thus energetic work. Therefore, this is not to be mistaken for true high magic, whose focus should be on initiation and conscious integration beyond the necessity of ritual repetition for desired effects. The highest aspects of this kind of practice must then be found mostly within [Ceremonial Magic & The Franz Bardon Tradition](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3), which guides you through all techniques from step zero within the framework of the integrated Grand Rituals. Essential mechanics are also found in the book [A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah](https://falconbookspublishing.com/a-magical-series-a-guide-to-sphere-quabbalah-by-andre-consciencia/). Table of Contents - PREPARATION – Soul Mirror- STEP 1 – Self-Transparency- STEP 2 – Elemental Equipoise- STEP 3 - Closing- PREPARATION- STEP 1 – The Mother Triangle of Birth-Giving Into the World- STEP 2 – Performing Atum 2, The Priestess- A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah # The Minor Ritual of Purification ##### PREPARATION – Soul Mirror Start by checking your soul mirror before proceeding, and ensuring you are not lacking in the virtues of love, discretion, patience, generosity, courage, and silence. If these virtues need cultivation to find a presence in your daily life, cultivate them. Proceed only then. ##### STEP 1 – Self-Transparency 1 Above the head, vibrate the letter N in the akasha (bliss beyond mind, soul, and body), followed by H in the mental plane (understanding through the eyes of Divine Providence), and B on the astral plane (opening the profoundest of intuitions and showering electromagnetic fluid to the body below). Practice by inhaling in the A tone the corresponding cosmic letter colors into the crown region. Exhaling in the tone A the dark violet light of Saturn unto the sphere surrounding the crown. When you are ready, imagine the top of your head disappearing into this voltage. 2 In the forehead, vibrate the letter S in its akashic state (the substance of all-power), followed by J in the mental plane (bringing S to the highest form of rapture and ecstasy). This should result in the control of the astral consciousness of oneself and others. Practice by inhaling in the G# tone the corresponding cosmic letter colors into the region of the third eye and exhaling in the tone G# the sky-blue light of Jupiter, filling the sphere surrounding the Ajna. When you are ready, imagine your forehead disappearing into this voltage. 3 In the throat, vibrate the letter Ae in the akasha (the ascension principle), followed by ShD in the mental plane (clairknowledge), and OR on the astral plane (ingenuous astral contentment), finishing with Ae on the material plane (quabbalistic influence over dense matter). Practice by inhaling in the C tone the corresponding cosmic letter colors into the throat region and exhaling in the tone C the red-ruby light of Mars into the sphere surrounding the throat. When you are ready, imagine the neck disappearing into this voltage. 3-4 In the nape of the neck, vibrate the letter T on the akasha (inspiration), L in the mental state (saintliness), G on the astral state (happiness). Practice by inhaling in the F tone the letter colors into the nape and exhaling in the tone F the golden-white light of the Sun into the sphere surrounding the back of the neck. When you are ready, imagine the zone disappearing into this voltage. 4 In the heart chakra, vibrate the cosmic letter F in the astral plane (magic equilibrium). Practice by inhaling in the F# tone the light-green color of the cosmic letter into the chest center region and exhaling in the tone F# tone the emerald-green light of Venus into the sphere surrounding the Anahata. When you are ready, imagine the upper torso disappearing into this voltage. 5 In the solar plexus, vibrate the cosmic letter E in the akasha (the omnipresence of universal consciousness), followed by C in the mental plane (contagiousness of divine ideas), and M on the astral plane (magnetic mastery). Practice by inhaling in the D tone the corresponding cosmic letter colors into the stomach-bottom region and exhaling in the tone D the yellow-orange light of Mercury into the sphere surrounding it. When you are ready, imagine the area of your body disappearing into this voltage. 6 In the bladder, vibrate the cosmic letter Õ in the akasha (divine love cognition), followed by Õ in the mental plane (power of quabbalistic alchemy), and Ch on the astral plane (micro-macrocosm attunement through rhythm). Practice by inhaling in the D# tone the corresponding cosmic letter colors into the region of the bladder, and exhaling in the tone D# the silvery-violet light of the Moon into the surrounding sphere. When you are ready, imagine your sex and neighboring bodily areas disappearing into this voltage. 7 At the base of the spine, vibrate the cosmic letter Y in the material plane (materialization/dematerialization). Practice by inhaling in the C# tone the corresponding pink color into the region of the base of the spine and exhaling in the tone C# the black light of the Earth Belt into a sphere surrounding the whole body. When you are ready, imagine yourself disappearing into this voltage and becoming invisible. ##### STEP 2 – Elemental Equipoise Within this black sphere into which your body has disappeared, have it gradually form once more as A red triangle for the place of the head A blue circle for the place of the chest A silver crescent for the place of the pelvis And a yellow square encompassing it all, functioning as the spine All these shapes should emanate a soft glow of pale gold. Bring your attention to each of the areas, sequentially, and sequentially have 1 a small luminous point within the triangle unfolding into a red five-petaled rose of fire. Imagine it rotating, giving the impression that the petals are spinning inwards while the power of their color seems to expand outwards. Inhale the fire elemental fluid into it while you exhale in hissing sounds (fricative consonants). After a while, transfer your consciousness to the center of the rose (locate above, below, left, right), rest your awareness there, and let the rose, as it spins, become brighter, from red to golden-red. When this is achieved, return your awareness from depth-point. 2 a small luminous point within the circle unfolding into a light-blue gaseous five-petaled rose. Imagine it rotating, giving the impression that the petals are spinning inwards while the power of their color seems to expand outwards. Inhale the air elemental fluid into it while you exhale in open and nasal sounds (vowels and nasals). After a while, transfer your consciousness to the center of the rose (locate above, below, left, right), rest your awareness there, and let the rose, as it spins, become brighter, from light-blue to white-blue. When this is achieved, return your awareness from depth-point. 3 a small luminous point within the crescent unfolding into a blue-green five-petaled rose of water. Imagine it rotating, giving the impression that the petals are spinning inwards while the power of their color seems to expand outwards. Inhale the water elemental fluid into it while you exhale in liquids and glides (approximants) (e.g. l, r, w, j). After a while, transfer your consciousness to the center of the rose (locate above, below, left, right), rest your awareness there, and let the rose, as it spins, become brighter, from blue-green to silver-blue-green. When this is achieved, return your awareness from depth-point. 4 a small luminous point within the square unfolding into a dark-brown five-petaled rose of stone that encompasses all other roses. Imagine it rotating, giving the impression that the petals are spinning inwards while the power of their color seems to expand outwards. Inhale the earth elemental fluid into it while you exhale in stops or plosives (p, b, t/, d/, k, g). After a while, transfer your consciousness to the center of the rose (locate above, below, left, right), rest your awareness there, and let the rose, as it spins, become brighter, from black-brown to glowing-black. When this is achieved, return your awareness from depth-point. All the while, the purifying luminous center of consciousness is being distilled. ##### STEP 3 - Closing Let the images fade into silence. Remain still for minutes. Let the result root and grow. # The Minor Ritual of Evocation ##### PREPARATION Begin by concluding the Minor Ritual of Purification. Locate the vertical line that runs from the crown to the spine and down to the perineum, and load it with electric fluid, impregnating it with the quality of willpower. Continue to charge this line until you feel your vital field expand around you like a sphere, pressing between the chest and solar plexus. Load this sphere with the magnetic fluid impregnated with the quality of magic equilibrium. Transfer yourself into the depth point of this volt, adopting an akashic identity. ##### STEP 1 – The Mother Triangle of Birth-Giving Into the World Breathe slowly, deeply, and silently from the depth-point. Nose in, charging the breath with the electric fluid (containing the quality of willpower), mouth out, loading the magnetic fluid (quality of feeling), offering cohesion to willpower. Pause between inhales and exhales, giving the air you are circulating the awareness that it is in your service. When not only you but the room feels saturated by the fluids, add, on exhale, 1 the letter Sh. Volt it through the vertical line, contain it within your sphere, and intone from the depth-point. The sound should neither be loud nor low, but something in-between, a vibration moving the astral light. Make sure the tone is steady, the breath is charged and the vertical line, sphere and depth-point geometry are held effortlessly. You are pushing the vibration of the cosmic letter outward by using the vertical line of willpower to draw it from the universe, the magnetic field around you to shape the cosmic letter as a wave, and the depth-point to give it identity towards purpose. The cosmic letter moves into the room, and after seven to eleven repetitions, it should move within the room as a radiating Sun of fire whose very light causes the highest enlightenment possible. 2 By now, you should have moved the astral substance by condensing the influence of Sh into space, automatically charging the atmosphere and any objects in the room, affecting your own emotions, thoughts, sensations and the field of probability between your aura and your fate. The letter now has an external influence. It is time to add to this vibration without losing coherence, using the same principle as in music, acoustics, and breath-voice training. Again, before proceeding, ensure the pitch, volume, and timbre (no breathiness or strain) are stable. For there to be no breathiness or throat tightening, keep the vocalization/body-vibration of the cosmic letter for no more and no less than 10 seconds at each repetition. The breath should be supported by the diaphragm, and the sound should be carried by the airflow rather than by the throat muscles. The pressure should be felt below the ribs and not in the neck. Your spine should stand upright and tenseless, the chest open and the shoulders low, and the jaw and pelvis are to remain relaxed. If all these tests are true, the posture never collapses while you hold the letter tone, and the body remains neutral and calm. When all this holds, practice the same letter, but now feel a second vibration in the brain within the skull, vibrating from the depth-point and the brain simultaneously, without dropping stability. Use the harmonics to intentionally fix the Sh-Sun to your right. 3 Now add the cosmic letter A. Volt it through the vertical line, contain it within your sphere, and intone from the depth-point, same rules as before. Push the vibration of the cosmic letter outward as taught. The cosmic letter moves into the room and then within the room as a gas of light whose very intoxicating breath causes the highest possible wisdom. Take all measures given previously, then feel a second vibration in the breasts and lungs, vibrating from there and the depth-point simultaneously without dropping stability. Use the harmonics to intentionally fix the A, having it sit above your hair. 4 Now add the cosmic letter M. We refrain from repeating the general instructions. When lively moving within the room, it should do so as a shining liquid whose humidity causes everything to flow without a single obstacle. Add a second vibration in the abdomen, vibrating from there and the depth-point simultaneously, without dropping stability. Use the harmonics to intentionally fix the M to your left. The three living cosmic letters now form a vertical triangle around you, shining like a triple-sun over the room wherever your attention flows. For step 2, you should have a magic mirror in front of you and focus your attention on it. ***Note: Notice that although different tones naturally resound through different parts of the body, this is not to be mistaken for the point of vibration. Classically, all tones vibrate from the diaphragm. We add other vibrations for harmonics and will be adding vibrations outside the body, to expand astral tension.*** ##### STEP 2 – Performing Atum 2, The Priestess Pick an elemental or planetary intelligence for evocation. Breathe from the depth-point, and you sync your depth-point with the depth-point of the plastic Sh, A, and M. Nose in, charging the breath with the electric fluid (containing the quality of willpower), mouth out, loading the magnetic fluid (quality of feeling), offering gravity. Pause between inhales and exhales, giving the moment the identity of the being to be evoked (visualize the seal and associated powers and virtues – for a greater understanding, see [A Guide to the Elementals](https://falconbookspublishing.com/blog/a-guide-to-the-elementals-a-magical-study-series-volume-i-by-andre-consciencia/)). When you and the room feel saturated by the aura of the being, focus all your efforts on the mirror and start intoning Sh-A-M from within the depth-point and vibrating within the Sh pillar to your right, the crown A, and the M pillar to your left. Use your 10 seconds to distribute the three letters evenly and intone them together each time on a single exhale, shifting tones as needed. All three letters in the three-letter combination are to vibrate from your depth-point and the elements of the vertical triangle around you; the triangle acts in unison and not sequentially. That is, the Sh pillar, A crown, and the M pillar all intone ShAM. Have the vibration move the astral light within the mirror. Keep repeating and use the vertical line of willpower to draw the intelligence from its abode in order to manifest as a wave within the magnetic field of the mirror. After seven to eleven repetitions, the intelligence should appear within or around the magical device, its influence charging the atmosphere. ***Note: For planetary beings, proceed invariably as described. For all kinds of elementals, you must as well, at first. With experience, it is possible to vibrate solely from the depth point to manifest gnomes, from the M pillar alone to manifest undines, from the A pillar individually to manifest Sylphs, and use only the Sh pillar to manifest salamanders.*** --- --- # The Magick of Lucid Dreaming: An Interview with Nikki Wardwell Sleath Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-magick-of-lucid-dreaming-an-interview-with-nikki-wardwell-sleath/ ## Introduction In this post we talk with Nikki Wardwell Sleath in what is a highly detailed and informative interview. Nikki Wardwell Sleath is a full-time occult teacher, author, and founder of the Society of Witchcraft and Old Magick. In this interview, she shares how her early experiences with spirits shaped her path, what disciplined training taught her about ritual skill, and why lucid dreaming can function as a living laboratory for real magical practice. We hope you enjoy this interview and find it useful for your own practice. If you’d like to learn more about Nikki and her work, you’ll find a set of links at the end of the post. Finally, we’d love to hear your thoughts—leave a comment with any questions or reflections, and share this post with anyone you think would enjoy it. Image credit: [Nikki Wardwell Sleath | Occult Books](https://www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com/) Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview with Nikki Wardwell Sleath- Early Life and Background- Training, Healing, and Personal Breakthroughs- Lucid Dreaming and Dream Sorcery- Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone- Goddess Traditions and Magickal Craft- Vision and Future Endeavors- Learn More (Nikki Wardwell Sleath)- Join a Free Course on Perseus with Sixty SkillsThe Three Transformations - Free Course --- ## Interview with Nikki Wardwell Sleath ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/af9ad2_caf824227e994aa1b70aec4a1e2c210dmv2.avif) ## Early Life and Background **PAA: Your ancestor Samuel Wardwell was executed during the Salem witch trials, making you the eight-times great-granddaughter of a woman accused of witchcraft. How has this unique family history influenced your own path as a witch and occultist? Did growing up with a Salem witch in your lineage shape your identity or inspire you to explore witchcraft?** Interestingly, though I had heard vaguely of my ancestor Samuel and knew he was hung in the Salem witchcraft trials, there wasn’t much talk of it in my family during my upbringing. As a high schooler I began to realize that I really should know more about this, and I did a genealogical project for a social studies course, where I charted my ancestry back along the Wardwell (my father’s) side of the family. This was not hard to do, as I grew up in Reading, MA, which is only about twenty or thirty minutes from Salem. The local libraries had lots of old birth, death, marriage and tax records and it was pretty smooth going as I connected the dots of this history. Still, I had not really connected the dots of my own magickal nature yet at that time, in my youth. I was very intuitive and perceptive, and had very vivid dreams but I never really realized how inspiring it was to have Samuel as my forbear until I was an adult and will into the development of my own magickal practice. He was actually on record as having had the ability to tell fortunes with cards, and to be able to know things that would happen ahead of time through dreams. Aside from Tituba, he may be the only person who was accused based on any actual magickal skill. I find it fascinating that dreams and cards are also my own personal strongest forms of divination, talent-wise. Certainly, now that I have been operating publicly as a witch for so long, I am so grateful for his legacy, and it feels like an immense honor to be able to practice and teach the Craft publicly. It feels as though my work has helped to shift some familial karmic balance in this regard. > When I heard spirit voices in my house, I just assumed that if anyone else had been there with me at the same moment, that they would have heard it too. > > Nikki Wardwell Sleath **PAA: In interviews, you've mentioned that as a child you became aware of voices and spirits in your family home, and even noticed your psychic abilities sharpening every fall season. Can you tell us more about these early paranormal experiences? How did they lead to your “huge spiritual awakening” and the realization that you were a witch for life?** Honestly, as a kid, I just thought I was kind of perceptually sharp in general, but I didn’t initially notice that there was actual psychic ability there. My mom would joke about me having “ESP”, but I didn’t really think there was anything extraordinary about my psyche. When I heard spirit voices in my house, I just assumed that if anyone else had been there with me at the same moment, that they would have heard it too. I now know that would not have necessarily been the case. I would sometimes pretend to be a fortune teller or make potions out of acorns and rainwater in the yard, but it definitely felt like play when I was young. I certainly did have plenty of time to play on my own and get lost in imaginative thought in the old victorian house in which I grew up in MA. It wasn’t until I was a student at the University of CT that I started noticing that pattern of extra crisp psychic clarity ramping up each fall. That sensation was really something though, and after I noticed it a couple of years in a row, it was no longer something that could be ignored or written off. Luckily, this coincided with a time when more occult books were starting to be seen on the shelves in bookstores, and when the internet was just starting to provide access to other people’s thoughts, articles and teachings. There had come a day when I was hellbent on digging further into my psychic relationship with autumn, and I found a couple of online articles about the modern-day practice of the Craft. When I read about some of the underlying beliefs, practices, themes of personal magickal and psychic development, it resonated with everything I felt to be true about myself and my worldview. That was when I had a moment of hyperclarity and truth chills, understanding that I would never stop following after the mysteries of magick and the Craft from that day forth. ## Training, Healing, and Personal Breakthroughs **PAA: You received formal training as an initiate and priestess in the Religious Order of Witchcraft. What was that training like, and what are some of the key lessons or disciplines you learned as part of this tradition of American Witchcraft?** Since ROOW is an oathbound tradition, I can really only speak about my experience in generalities. The training was a very traditional “year-and-a-day” type of training where I had a private lesson with my High Priestess once a week, and also gathered with the other members at each Sabbat and full moon to be in ritual together. I was a sharp student, easily taking to formal divination practices and ceremonial magick skills, so I was shunted straight from my initiation as a witch into another year of training as a priestess. I got a lot of what I call “on the job training” in my experience with ROOW. I never intended to teach magick or do any of this professionally. I undertook my training solely for the purpose of quenching my own deep thirst for greater exploration of the mysteries, and for the expansion that arises when magickal experiences are shared with others. All the same, as my propensity for this work became clear, I found myself quickly being asked to take on leadership responsibilities in a way that validated my capabilities. Some of the key things that were reinforced to me that were very valuable were the need for constant study, and the realization that continual learning would be my key not only to ongoing effectiveness magickally, but to personal fulfillment. I was prompted to study from the oldest texts I could find, and not to fear the archaic language or dark connotations associated with some of them. This was probably one of the greatest gifts of my training- gaining the confidence and ability to patiently pick through old tomes and see how powerful it could be to bring old magick into my own modern practice. I also truly learned the value of honed ritual skill and the benefits of a daily ritual practice, and this is something that I continue to impress upon my own students to this day. > Our approach is to never tell a student what is absolute truth, but to give them tools to explore what they are able to hold as truths personally. > > Nikki Wardwell Sleath **PAA: After years of practice, you went on to form your own occult order, the Society of Witchcraft and Old Magick, also known as the Wardwell tradition of American Witchcraft. What inspired you to create your own magickal order? How does the Wardwell tradition differentiate itself from other witchcraft traditions in terms of practices or philosophy?** I branched out to create my own order because I wanted the freedom to be creative in terms of ritual and curriculum development. I left the ROOW in order to do this, so I have no idea how things are in that order now, but at the time when I left many years ago, it was extremely traditional in terms of the insistence that things were always done a certain way, following old traditions. I love tradition and learning from prior magicians, but I also tend to be something of a chaos magician in the sense that I prefer to allow my beliefs, and therefore my corresponding practices, to evolve as I do. Part of what is different about SWOM is evident right in the comparison of the titles of the two organizations: the order I trained in was quite religious, where I tend not to be. SWOM is, at its heart, a training order and not a religious organization. Yes, we offer ceremonies and teach practices that facilitate spiritual experiences for the participants and students. Where we differ from other orders is in trying to avoid dogma, and being cognizant not to fall into traps of fundamentalist thinking wherever possible. So, the Wardwell tradition of American Witchcraft emphasizes learning and evolution, the respect and consideration of teachings from traditions from all over the world, and the use of magick to work toward greater wisdom and enlightenment in this life. Our approach is to never tell a student what is absolute truth, but to give them tools to explore what they are able to hold as truths personally. Essentially our belief system is that we should always be breaking the walls of any belief system, and that we can use magick to do this. It is due to this approach that I have decided not to file the order as a religious organization, but to operate solely on the basis of personal instruction. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/DSC00403-1.avif) **PAA: You have a strong background in healing arts – you hold a Master’s degree in Integrative Health and Healing and are a Reiki Master/Teacher – and you offer private psychic and energetic healing services in your practice. How do these holistic healing modalities intersect with your work in witchcraft and magick? Has your training in health and energy healing informed the way you cast spells or conduct rituals, and vice versa?** It is impossible for me to keep healing and magickal practices separate from one another. I perceive every moment as a unique combination of energy and consciousness that not only manifests in its own way, but also vibrates with the raw potentiality of magick. For me, there is a sense of the dreaming universe that underlies all things, no matter the time of day or the season of the year. When I set intentions and make myself very present for a client in order to flow healing energy to them, for example, I become very aware of liminality of it all, and in the space between the intention to receive healing and the integration of the experience, I find spirit guides, psychic information, spontaneous new healing techniques, and more. It is all so undoubtedly magical, and for this reason I am very forthright with new clients about my tendency to eclectically blend Reik and witchcraft, for example. I can’t undo what I know, in a sense. If I’m present to a healing flow of energy for a client and I start psychically hearing the name of a rune or a spirit being chanted, I’m not going to ignore the pertinence of that magic to the session- I’m going to engage it. On the flip side of all of this, having become very comfortable with how it feels to open to the flow of Reiki also adds to my ability to flow energy through myself for ritual, channeling and all kinds of other magickal purposes as well. A few of my trainings are very shamanically oriented in their healing approaches, and this is simply magick. Everything I learn informs everything that I do and that’s sort of just how I roll. **PAA: You once noted that you “would not be where [you are] as an occult teacher” had it not been for studying healing on a holistic level. Looking back on your journey, what have been some of your biggest personal breakthroughs or turning points in magick? For instance, were there moments when your understanding of occult practice evolved dramatically or when you achieved a new level of spiritual insight?** I am so fortunate that part of the requirements for the holistic Master’s degree I sought included having to do mentorships with three various well-established holistic professional practitioners. Some of my biggest breakthroughs happened as a result of undertaking trainings with these mentors, specifically in doing various week-long in-person trainings to become a facilitator in the approaches of Robert Moss, as a teacher of Active Dreaming, and with Llyn Roberts to be trained as a shamanic Reiki practitioner. Llyn brought all of her experience working with Peruvian indigenous shamans to the course work she created (with their blessing), and her training was rigorous in terms of hours spent learning spirit flight. This caused the metaphorical psychic training wheels to go flying off in the sense that the repetitive work caused me to come away with an ingrained confidence in what the groove of spirit flight feels like and how to get right back there whenever I wished. When you know you can seek the wisdom of spirits and guides literally and directly at any time and trust the ensuing experiences, anything is possible in both magick and healing. Exposure to Robert Moss’ teachings just blew my mind with respect to the limitless potential that lies in dreams. I became constantly aware of wanting to integrate more and more of my night dream experiences into my daily life, and this is what caused me to start becoming fully lucid in my dreams. I was thinking about dreaming so much that I would realize I was dreaming, and then try to learn even more in those lucid opportunities. I describe one particular breakthrough dream in my book Dream Sorcery, where I became lucid and suddenly just started receiving hyper-clear wisdom downloads from the energy of the dream scene itself. It’s impossible to relay with words exactly what this feels like, but I woke up feeling quite irrevocably changed. I understood something about the ongoing nature of consciousness in the dreaming that put physical incarnation into perspective in a new way. While each life is important and should be lived to the fullest, I knew fully that this life only comprises a quick glimmer in the cauldron of all that we are. The understanding in that dream was so crisp and acute that I found the sensations of this reality to feel a bit blurred and less “real” feeling than what I had experienced in the dream. I would definitely call this a moment of sudden new spiritual insight, and it informed the motivation of my dreaming practice from that point forward. Since that time I have purposefully engaged lucid dreaming and spontaneous night dreams consistently to aid all of the important magick that I have done, including attaining by traditional methods the coveted “knowledge and conversation” with my Holy Guardian Angel. ## Lucid Dreaming and Dream Sorcery **PAA: What sparked your deep interest in lucid dreaming as a component of magickal practice? You’ve trained to the highest level in shamanic dreamwork with Robert Moss’s School of Active Dreaming and now you’ve authored Dream Sorcery: The Ritual & Magick of Lucid Dreaming. Was there a particular experience or influence that led you to marry lucid dreaming with witchcraft and sorcery?** Two experiences I had with lucid dreaming that greatly spurred my fusion of it with magickal practice included energy infusions from the Morrigan, and my runic sorcery training. When I first started to realize the spiritual intensity of lucid dreaming, I began trying to summon the Morrigan, the ancient Irish goddess of battle, prophecy and death, into my lucid dreams. After a few tries I had the experience where she arrived as an onslaught of swirling energy- a tornado of abstract wings and feathers and bats- that hurtled toward me with great force. I allowed the energy of this Morrigan tornado to smash into me, and it ended up thrumming through me with the vibrations of an out-of-control train. Imagine deep, vibratory energy racing through your body at top speed. I gave myself over to the sensations, and my dream body began involuntarily floating, writhing in the air, and snarling. When I woke, I could feel the energy thrumming through my physical body for a long time after. The dream empowered my auric field in a very obvious way, and I was so grateful, and simultaneously excited to see what else was possible. Not long after I began deepening my lucid dream practice, I also began the work of Edred Thorsson’s The Nine Doors of Midgard. This is a book that provides the outline for a self-guided system of training in runic sorcery. It takes a few years to do the whole thing to the letter, and being unafraid of ongoing magickal work, I made the commitment and dove in. Each stage of the training calls for in-depth, close examination and practice of each rune for long periods of time, using many varied approaches. There is psychic work, yogic work, academic study, and of course magickal practices such as chanting and hand gestures that are all a part of the recommended training. I was doing all of this, but felt I would be remiss if I did not also add a lucid dream component to my learning with each rune. After all, the point of such a training is to learn to embody the runic energies to such an extent that you become a natural channel for their wielding at will. I began using my lucid dreams at the time to practice signing, gesturing and chanting the runes. I would enact the technique and then pause and watch the dream environment to see what the effects were. Upon waking, I documented every such experiment with all the detail possible, so that I could continue to build on my experiences and benefit from using the techniques more confidently in waking. Spending the time doing this for all 24 runes of the Elder Futhark really impressed upon my just how perfect the lucid dream state is for experimenting with and honing magickal skills. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image.png)Source: [Info | Nikki Wardwell Sleath](https://www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com/more-info) **PAA: Your approach to dream work is quite unique – Dream Sorcery isn’t just another dream guide. In fact, it treats the lucid dream as “a metaphorical alchemy lab” for transforming one’s magickal practice. How does Dream Sorcery differ from more conventional lucid dreaming books or from psychological approaches to dreams? What can occult practitioners gain from lucid dream magick that they might not get from traditional spell work or meditation alone?** Dream Sorcery is different from the other lucid dream books out there in that it highlights the theory that consciousness is not local to our physical brains. It requires the reader to consider all of the dreams that show us that we are often transcending time, and all of the dreams that bring us real interaction with other spiritual beings. These are the transtemporal and transpersonal potentials that exist within dreaming. Magickal practitioners naturally work with these enchanted parameters of reality, so the conventional lucid dream material that takes the approach that everything about dreaming is solely about you and your own mind, is very limiting to them. I knew that the magick I was experiencing through my lucid experiments was achingly real, and that no one else was really teaching about this in any accessible depth. The book had to be written, and I believe it is an important addition to today’s magickal literature. There is so much that an occultist can gain from lucid magick that they can never gain from waking magick alone. At the crux of this is the ability to function as a spirit, thereby collecting glimpses of truths about the nature of consciousness itself. Lucid dream magick is the only way (outside of some kinds of astral projection experiences, which are just as tricky to cultivate) to perform magick while still existing here in this physical life, yet without the limitations imposed by being in a physical body. Journey work, meditation, trance and all kinds of waking divination work are all impacted by the combination of the body’s presence upon our conscious awareness. **PAA: In dreams, you’ve said, the usual rules don’t apply – we can practice magick without the physical world’s constraints. You’ve even shared experiences of precognitive dreams and collective dream rituals that show how expansive the dream realm can be. Could you give an example of a magical operation or experiment you’ve conducted in a lucid dream that would be impossible or impractical in waking life? What did that experience teach you about consciousness or the nature of reality?** Well, all of the magickal operations I’ve conducted in lucid dreaming would be impossible in waking life, in terms of the scope of the results and the ability to experience them. The clearest example for readers to comprehend is any of the myriad of spirit summonings I’ve successfully conducted in lucid dreaming. In waking ritual magick, the work of full-on evocation is immense. It takes months of preparation and buildup, personal work, and lots of energy expenditure as well as precise ritual skill. In lucid dreaming, however, you can simply yell out a precisely worded summoning call, and then experience the results of the spirit showing up in a potentially fully personified way, in a dream body. You still get to experience their energy as you would in waking, but in a thought-responsive environment like lucid dreaming, the toil of a physical world summoning isn’t needed because the limitations of the physics of our reality aren’t there. This is just one example, but this applies to so many magickal acts that are possible here. ## Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone **PAA: Reviewers of Dream Sorcery have noted that you “thrill with the suggestion that, fully charged, lucid dreaming may be the philosopher’s stone.” That is a fascinating analogy! Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? In what sense could lucid dreaming be considered a philosopher’s stone for modern practitioners – does it facilitate a kind of ultimate spiritual transformation or alchemical process for the soul?** Yes, lucid dreaming does hasten spiritual evolutionary experiences. The idea behind trying to transform lead into gold in the alchemy lab was based on the idea that the underlying wisdom of such a transformation exists in its witnessing. The process needed to be sped up and performed as an experiment because our human lives are too short to get the chance to witness this transformation in its entirety while living. Similarly, we really don’t get to function as bodiless spirits while living, except for in the space of lucid dreams. The philosopher’s stone was the term for the missing ingredient needed for the full alchemical experiment to be a success, and I believe that it is our ability to wake up in dreams, and therefore to the felt experience of the nature of ourselves as spiritual beings, that is the key ingredient to hastening spiritual transformation while here, physically incarnated. **PAA: Alchemical symbolism appears to be a significant influence in your work – for example, Dream Sorcery is grounded in the framework of alchemy and even divided into sections named for Salt, Mercury, and Sulfur. What draws you to the alchemical paradigm? How do you apply classical alchemy concepts in your own occult practice and teaching? For instance, do you find that the alchemical idea of transmutation plays a role in your spell craft or personal development work?** I love the alchemical paradigm because I find a cross-cultural universality to the concept of the tripartite nature of the self. Whether we are talking about mind/body/spirit, land/sea/sky, lower/middle/upper worlds, the Cauldrons of Poesy, Agrippa’s three soul model or any number of others, there is a relatability to this type of construct. The tria prima of alchemy gives us a clear format in which to break experiences and learning down into categories while also acknowledging that they are not separate from each other. The salt, mercury and sulfur of the book relate respectively to the foundational practices of lucid dreaming, the spiritual goals and motivations of lucid dreaming, the purposefully transformative magick around lucid dreaming. The tria prima constantly effect each other in order to inform the nature of the whole, and this is true of the various acts that can make up a virtuous cycle between lucid dreams, spiritual experiences and magickal skills. And finally, yes! I believe the whole point of having a magickal practice that runs deep and through the course of a lifetime goes well beyond spells and basic manifestation and must ultimately be motivated at its core by the desire to develop as much as possible as a spiritual being while in this life. Looking at magickal experiences such as lucid dreaming in this way is a great approach to the continued facilitation of this progress. ## Goddess Traditions and Magickal Craft **PAA: In addition to dreamwork, you’ve delved into divine feminine mysteries. Your book The Goddess Seals grew out of your frustration that traditional grimoires had seals for various spirits, yet none for the goddesses you and your students work with. You responded by channeling and creating 13 Magickal Seals for 13 Goddesses (from the Morrígan to Persephone, Hathor, Freyja, Lilith, and others). What was the process of developing these Goddess Seals like, and how are these sacred symbols used to enhance modern magickal practice? Did your own relationship with these deities (for example, your work with the Morrígan) guide this creative magickal work?** It was not solely my relationship with these goddesses that guided this work, (those relationships were certainly the original motivation of the work) but also the ability and confidence I had gained in approaching spirits in general that allowed me to undertake it. I am a trained practitioner of a few shamanically-oriented arts, and I use these skills routinely in the healing and magickal work I do on behalf of clients. I spent many years doing energetic and spirit flight work to meet up with the guides of others, bringing back wisdom, healing energies, messages and more for the person on my table. When I realized how consistent the accuracy of the information and experiences gleaned were for the clients, it allowed me to develop a deep trust in my spirit communication abilities. Because of this, when I decided to begin creating traditional seals for goddesses, I was able to put these skills to use. The process for me involves going into a state of meditative communication with the deity or spirit in question. I do this by going either to my usual spirit flight starting point or one of the routine inner temple spaces I use in my daily practice. From there, I normally allow my usual navigational spirit guides and goddesses to help me gain access to a desired spirit if it is someone with whom I don’t already have a familiar relationship. I then begin respectful discussion, trying to learn what their vested interests are and what they would be willing to do on behalf of magicians who might use a seal to connect with their legions. I would take notes and allow the conversation and resulting downloads of imagery and wording for the seal to take form. Later, after I had polished everything up and gone back and gotten it fully authorized, I would do a formal casting of sacred space and conduct a ritual consecration of the seal with offerings to the deity. Seals are a huge enhancement to magickal practice because they allow the practitioner to engage spirit assistance locally. Spirits can often manipulate energy and move information and impulses between realms, and outside of time and space in ways we cannot. If we don’t involve spirit talents in our magick, we may be limited to effects that our own physical and mental energy can create. Working with seals also brings the ongoing benefit of continuing to build bonds between the magician and numerous talented deities. These types of relationships are invaluable. **PAA: As a full-time occult teacher and the founder of a training order, what do you find most rewarding about teaching witchcraft and magick to others? What is your approach to mentoring students through the Society of Witchcraft and Old Magick – for instance, how do you balance imparting foundational knowledge with encouraging personal gnosis and individual growth in your students?** A: I think the most rewarding part of running this order is seeing people accomplish their magickal goals, have their petitions answered, and seeing them gain measurable magickal skill. We have lots of members who did not use magick in a professional capacity prior to their study here who are now professional mediums, readers, healers, magickal artisans and more. To try to provide a balanced experience to students in both knowledge and gnosis, I have different levels of training available. Neophyte (first year) work is generally a knowledge-building time, where the student learns basic ritual skills and accumulates confidence in understanding crucial areas of magickal practice in a broad manner. Then, there is a mage-adept level of training which requires much more experimentation on the part of the student with both psychic and energetic magickal faculties. This depth work helps them create and trust lots of experiences within their own personal gnosis. I also happen to have a priesthood training level which involves teaching skill, group ritual administration, ego work for being of service and other things of that nature. Ultimately, the thing that balances my teachings overall is my constant effort to emphasize the avoidance of fundamentalism. While I relay wisdom I’ve gained from my own learning and experiences, I make sure to tell students that everything is possible and there is no one set of truths and no one right way of doing things. I don’t tell them what to believe, but try to give them the tools to form their own beliefs around magick and the development of the spirit. I think this is what provides the balance of which you speak. **PAA: You emphasize the importance of building genuine relationships with deities and spiritual energies, comparing it to befriending someone rather than making “transactional demands of strangers,” which challenges a common approach in magick. How does this philosophy shape your own practice and rituals? For example, as a long-time Priestess of the Morrígan who co-facilitates the Morrigan’s Call Retreat, how do you personally forge and maintain such authentic, living relationships with the divine? Any advice for practitioners seeking to deepen their connection with their patron deities or spirit guides?** Yes, I do think it’s important to have great spiritual relationships, and I think it’s important that the same rules of engagement apply as you would expect in your physical world relationships. To elaborate, consider the principle of correspondence from the Hermetic teachings. This teaches that there are parallel resonances that exist between things on every level of existence. If you subscribe to this, then we can try to apply respect, etiquette, comfort level and such things to our relationships with deities just as we would in order to have a relationship with trust with another human. For example, are you inclined to help another person that goads you into helping them in an obligatory way? If someone forced you to act on their behalf, would you be likely to reach out and help them later when the choice were up to you? The answer to this is probably no. This is simply a matter of my own personal belief, but I think it’s wise to treat spirits the way you would wish to be treated if you were in their shoes. One bit of advice I often give to people trying to deepen connection to their spirit guides is to make an effort to get to know the heart and mind of that spirit. In other words, don’t just appeal to them constantly asking for help for yourself, but, as in any good and reciprocal friendship, make sure to spend just as much time asking them what they want, what is important to them, and how they are doing. This goes a long way in nurturing mutual understanding, and inspires the relationship with greater confidence from both sides. ## Vision and Future Endeavors **PAA: Finally, what’s next for you on your journey? You’ve mentioned you have more books in the works – can you tell us about any upcoming writing projects, events, or magickal endeavors you’re excited about? Additionally, what is your broader vision or dream for the future of your work – for example, goals for the Society of Witchcraft and Old Magick, or areas of the occult that you hope to explore more deeply in the coming years?** I have begun offering a publicly available online course as a depth teaching companion to Dream Sorcery. I’m happy and proud of how this going so far, and I hope to keep offering it at intervals to folks who are ready to truly dive into the work of the book. As far as writing projects, I do have numerous things in the works. I’m not at the point of having the editorial go-ahead to reveal them, but I can say that there is another seal-oriented book coming soon, as well as a couple of other Celtic sorcery books that I have co-authored with some other talented folks. There are more in the pipeline after this as well. As far as SWOM, I hope to have the energy and constancy to keep it going as it is now for at least another 6-8 years, at which point I might be needing to retire from the immense amount of work I currently do in this respect. (I’m 52, and as I get closer to retirement age, I hope to shift the emphasis of my work in ways that suit my energy level.) I haven’t yet identified who might take over for me, but my hope is to find someone who has trained within the order and who understands how to continue it healthily, to do so. It’s not an easy job at all. We’ve been in operation for 11 years now under the current format, and I would love it to be perpetuated on by someone else. While I do want to hand the order over to the right person eventually, I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing and teaching, since all of my decades of magickal experience have left me with a very deep well of ideas to impart. I do love to travel, and am grateful that I’ve been able to start doing more of this with conferences and book appearances, and I hope to do more of this as well. Thank you so much for your very thoughtful and thorough questions, and for the opportunity to share my responses here in this forum. May all who read these words be blessed and inspired. Let us not fear death, lest we vandalize life; For the aim of the spirit is awe and not strife. Blessings, Nikki Wardwell Sleath **PAA: Nikki, thank you very much for answering our questions and providing so much detail. Very much appreciated. ** --- ## Learn More (Nikki Wardwell Sleath) - [Official Website](https://www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com/) - [Society of Witchcraft and Old Magick (Order / Wardwell Tradition)](https://www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com/society-of-witchcraft) - [Dream Sorcery Online (Course)](https://www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com/coming-soon-03) - [Media / Podcasts & Features](https://www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com/other-media) - [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuDdtzZcIJzOwovvNjUH0aQ) - [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/nikki_wardwell_sleath/) - [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/nikkisnature/) - [Contact](https://www.nikkiwardwellsleath.com/contact-2) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/IMG_2785.avif)](https://www.miskatonicbooks.com/product/the-goddess-seals-sacred-magickal-symbols-for-modern-magickal-practitioners-by-nikki-wardwell-sleath-limited-edition-hardcover-preorder/) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Goddess-Seals-dlx-1.avif)](https://www.miskatonicbooks.com/product/the-goddess-seals-sacred-magickal-symbols-for-modern-magickal-practitioners-by-nikki-wardwell-sleath-deluxe-leather-bound-limited-edition-hardcover-in-clamshell-box-preorder/) [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/51eV2ZaUBKL.avif)](https://www.amazon.com/You-Might-Witch-Understanding-Modern-Day/dp/1973971453/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.egkVJVOLFW9plOhwKl1DkSCbYQwz78oN9Vft_c7rk1fe3V-sT1GRCtiVu5kE4lcOQQkgMy3QyTRvG5ChBNquonRuOmUXcCS9a4ugDN4YbP--MH9iaXdXDMA501arlXBw.7iGcFK7U1NRBczSLFvVpUB-SZX8SFefgdEAhM-m8GKU&qid=1726534995&sr=1-1) --- ## Join a Free Course on Perseus with Sixty Skills --- # Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition: Student Story Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-course-review/ ## Introduction What follows is a 'Student Story' generously provided by a student who has now completed all three parts of **[Ceremonial Magic and the Franz Bardon Tradition](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3)**. Many thanks to them for taking the time to share their experience. --- ## Student Story > “The method used by the modern initiate for interpreting the language spoken by the ancient myths is a very simple and effectual one. He finds in the Qabalistic Tree of Life a link between the highly stylistic pagan systems and his own more rational methods… > > > > > > …Upon the Tree of Life with its Ten Holy Sephiroth the modern occultist bases both a metaphysic and a magic. He uses a philosophical conception of the Tree to interpret what it represents to his conscious mind, and he uses a magical and ceremonial application of its symbolism to link up with his subconscious mind. The initiate, consequently, makes the best of both worlds, ancient and modern; for the modern world is all surface consciousness, and has forgotten and repressed the subconsciousness, to it’s own great hurt; and the ancient world was mainly subconsciousness, consciousness having been but recently evolved. When the two are linked up and brought into polarised function they yield the superconsciousness,which is the goal of the initiate” > > > > > > *Dion Fortune, the Mystical Qabalah * ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/1000005439-654x1024.jpg) Many versions of The Golden Dawn's flagship rituals have existed before this set, created by Andre Consciência. A great deal of these are available online for free, even more versions in books, and perhaps a few more versions behind the doors of lodges to which I do personally do not belong. The question is then begged as to what is the point in learning yet another version of these staples of western occultism. What does this offer that other versions do not? Why should you even bother? Assuming instead that you are a practitioner of Franz Bardon's more yogic systems of western occultism, what is it that is contained outside of those methods? If Initiation into Hermetics is a self contained path to Adepthood, why would you need something else beyond that? The Ceremonial Magic and the Franz Bardon Tradition course address these questions, not through amalgamation but through synthesis. The truth is you do not need another version of The Ritual of the Pentagram or the Middle Pillar nor do you need anything outside of Franz Bardon's works to reach Adepthood. This course is actually something different than both of those things. Is it instead the marriage of both of these methodologies into a whole that leverages each while simultaneously creating essentially a third esoteric mini-system that carries the student from basic magical skill to ascending the mantle of assuming the Godhead. It is not so much a crash course to the finish line as it is a condensed form of practice, a more direct and surgical Theurgy. The Ceremonial course created by Andre Consciência uses his knowledge of both of these systems (and others) to access each set of skills and rituals in a manner where they enforce each other, creating a much more direct and efficacious system then when used separately. The advantage here is not in the lower hanging fruit of better direct energy management and engagement that is the hallmark of the Bardon system. When approaching aspects of rituals like the Middle Pillar these sorts of things seem self-evident, and honestly any ritual magician worth their salt would and should be able to reproduce these sorts of energetics, at least inside the framework of the ritual itself. It is instead the use of Bardon's Quabbalah and Evocation techniques, the use of depth point and planetary magic, and the use of intertwined Godnames and Deity Yoga that push this over the edge from “just another version of ritual X” to something that is unique. That being said each section makes use of the techniques of Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics as the base for each ritual making knowledge of Bardon's first text advantageous, though not entirely necessary. The course itself is guided by Andre directly, piece by piece, to monitor any adverse changes and also to help the student down any rabbit holes they might find along the way. The guidance might not be needed assuming that the practitioner is either an Adept in Bardon's system or the Golden Dawn, but use of Bardon's Quabbalah and Planetary energetics can cause adverse reactions in those not prepared. Per the Rabbit holes; practitioners of Bardon may not be used to the effects of practicing ritual magic, the results of which can be somewhat unpredictable as the mind interacts with the symbols, energies, and words of power. Bottom line is, Initiation into Hermetics lends itself to a great deal of control while ritual magic tends to leave the results to form as they may: oftentimes somewhat unpredictability. Each side has its benefits and practitioners of either (or both) can benefit from the other. The level of self mastery granted by Bardon's methods only enhance any Ritual Magician's repertoire, while I'm sure there are many Bardonist's who could use some objective reactivity in their pursuit of “perfection”. There is no actual dichotomy in play here anyway, which is essentially the point of the course. The separation between methodologies does not actually exist. They come to full fruition when used in tandem. Additionally, as it is somewhat of a mini-system each lesson learned pulls double duty as being part of the rituals themselves as well as skills that can be put to task in typical magical work. Many of the techniques used in the course mirror the same basics in Initiation into Hermetics with a slight twist or expanded contents. Creative magicians should find new skills to cut their teeth on and clever new ways to think about how to use skills they already have. Each ritual is densely packed with information and follows the basic framework of the originals but not slavishly, still leveraging the magic and symbols of the original rituals of the Golden Dawn. The major touchpoints of many of the rituals are compacted and reiterated through the impact of Bardon's three manuals while still retaining the core and efficacy of the original Ritual of the Pentagram and Middle Pillar. Because of this the performance of these rituals becomes more than the sum of its parts. Needless to say, the warning provided by Andre for those who might be sensitive or have adverse reactions to altered states of perception should be heeded. ## The Grand Ritual of Purification As to the courses themselves, the magician begins with the Grand Ritual of Purification in step one, using the Middle Pillar as its base. The lessons lead the student through the creation of the center pillar of the Otz Chim in their astral body, starting with a specialized form of equilibrium and introductions to the energies involved in the course. These energies include about half of Bardon's Cosmic Letters, so students should be prepared to put their nose to the grind stone, especially as they learn the lexicon of the course itself. This may be somewhat of a turn off for less tenacious students and also an additional learning curve for people less familiar with these systems. However, it is rare in the entirety of the course that it is required to succeed at an exercise for more than 10 minutes and in this it follows the spirit of Initiation into Hermetics: that the sum of its parts is indeed more valuable than any exercise individually. Once one has the basics down these energies are compiled into the Middle Pillar, Sephirot by Sephirot, step by step. Each energy is a lesson and serves to build the efficacy of the ritual and part of these step stones is stability. Many of these skills aren't just being used one by one but are stacked to function *simultaneously* with other skills, requiring the magician to learn to operate from multiple points of consciousness. This may require an immediate recalibration for some practitioners as by the end of just the first course one will be managing volts, hand rituals, incanting multi-letter formula, all while holding depth point. That being said, the end results of this ritual serves up a platter of invoked god states, quabbalistically incanted altered perceptions that serve to purge the magician as well as prepare for later courses. It is a multi-tiered event, combining multiple forms of equilibrium stacked on top of each other, interwoven with the energies of the Middle Pillar and effecting multiple levels of the magician. From my own personal experience with the first course, there is definitely an energetic adjustment period with many of the steps and the full completion of the ritual itself has its own adjustment period. There are ways to “loop” the ritual, presented in the course, where in the more rotations increase the strength and depth of the resulting trance, but I never found it necessary to do more than 2-3 rotations. Depending on the skill of the magician and the desire for depth, the ritual itself can be completed in less than 10 minutes to an easily extended 30 or more minutes without even beginning to loop the ritual. While I found each of the sections of the course equally impactful, the first section was especially memorable as it sets the tone for the rest of the course and adapts the magician to the primary methods being used going forward. --- ## Grand Ritual of Evocation The next section is the Bardonization of the Ritual of the Pentagram and as the description on the side of the box implies, it is focused on evocation. Rather than imagine a few sensations and some ephemeral visualizations, the course now leverages Bardon's Practical Magic of Evocation to summon the four archangels to the four corners. Before we get to the evocations, though, there is review on the opening and closing of the ritual right before a rather intensive multi-tiered exploration of Vacancy of Mind which also serves as a study of the Pentagram. This was one of my favorite parts of the course and the beginning of what I felt was the most artfully arranged of the sections as the aspects that are understood in these lessons will be repeatedly seen to change form and representation through the rest of Course 2, serving as a common theme. Now the evocations of the Archangels presented in this course are pure Bardon, no tools, and one hundred percent raw dog (if I may be so crude). Because of this it must be stated that these evocations are rather concentration hungry. Like the first part of the course, there are a lot of moving parts and all these parts serve to negate the need for these sorts of devices by the mind doing its duty in reproducing these tools' functions ( or one could say the tools do the duty of the mind's function). Building tools is a magic in its own right, however, and before getting to the evocations proper I had created two tools for my use (the belt and magusband) and procured a third (the magical dagger). I found it valuable to learn this evocation method with and without tools, the former to build my skill and strength with the art itself and the latter to both enhance and reduce mental bandwidth needed. There is a bit of a shift in skills between the 1st and 2nd courses. Aside from some of the Quabbalistic incantations, the Grand Ritual of Evocation is the right hand to the left hand of the, The Ritual of Purification and both of these courses represent the framework of Bardon's three book methodologies with the content of the Golden Dawn rituals. ## The Grand Ritual of Invocation. The 3rd course is the crown jewel of this set of theurgies. The final ritual is the combined efficacy of both previous rituals, now coupled with a full methodology of God Form intensive practice. Just as stacking the fundamental skills that Franz Bardon presents in IIH formulates the foundation of the work, we now stack rituals on top of each other to create one “Mega-Ceremony” that takes advantage of everything we've already learned so far and presents it in one mind-altering package. The Deities (yes, multiple) chosen for this are Vedic and not Egyptian which is an interesting choice as it actually leans into Franz Bardon's exposure to culture and not the Golden Dawn's. Without going into too much detail, each God Form is built on a specific characteristic that builds the deity yoga and thus the relationship and indwelling of the deity. All of this dovetails seamlessly into the ritual structure so instead of adding more ceremony you are actually building atop the foundation you have already created. The characteristic sets and visualizations for these deities are extensive and detailed, however at this point in the course it should truly prove to be little difficulty for the magician if they have made it this far. As far as more specific details…relationships are personal. This is one you will have to experience for yourself as well as the “results” of the ritual. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/image-1-190x300.png) ## Conclusion Overall this is an excellent course and has many of the necessary ingredients to both engage experienced magicians as well as bring neophytes from “Zero to Hero”. Each course is quite meticulous but once traction is made in the learning curve of the first course, sailing should be mostly smooth aside from any personal barriers (or meandering side quests!) that one may encounter. While certainly this course can be learned in a year's time as suggested this becomes advanced work very quickly. Unless one is already well trained or a savant it can be well conceived to take more. Each skill section is also accompanied by required time periods of study, and these time periods are part of the magical formula of the course itself so while one may learn one of these skills in one or two sittings, practicing for the required amount increases the efficacy of the “charge” of the skill. From my experience with the course, I would say that it also pays to build and keep momentum in this course as the tantric style build up and release of energy can be incorporated to sling shot the practitioner through the course itself, which can be quite transformative on its own. This is quite a journey but you are not at it alone. André is quite attentive in helping through these and is concerned, not just with the course material, but on making sure the magician leaves this practice in an equilibrated state as well. And just like the understanding of the Tree of Life and why one might build the Middle Pillar into the astral body, the course work is just the map: the student is actually the objective. --- https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition/ --- # Student Story: Master Course by Jenneke of Exile Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/student-story-master-course-by-jenneke-of-exile/ ## Introduction This is the first of what I hope to be an ongoing series - Student Stories. I feel it is important that people see meaningful progress if they decide to trust us here at Perseus with their most important commodity, time. So, in this 'Student Story' we hear from *Jenneke of Exile* and their story relates to the Sixty Skills Master Course. They are a great example of a new student coming into a curriculum with no preconceived ideas as to how long it should take. The progress of this student may seem unbelievable to some, but it is by no means rare in the community with many others having a similar timeline. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments and if you would like to share your own story, please send an email to [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com). --- ## Master Course Experience by Jenneke of Exile Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics is widely regarded as the pinnacle of an occult training manual. And yet, it is not an easy read, as many of us can attest. Having heard of it some years ago, I ordered it eagerly but then immediately put it on the shelf after the first handful of pages. It seemed impenetrable, written for a different type of consciousness entirely. It sat there, biding its time, until I came across Bob Smith of Sixty Skills at a Hermetics conference. Bob was giving a talk on the Key to the True Kabbalah. Many of the topics similarly went over my head: the energies of various letters, side effects of practice, etc. But the way he described the topics, as advanced as they were, made it clear they were well within reach of any occultist who truly set their mind to mastering them. Encouraged, I ordered Bob Smith's [Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) a few days later and began working through it. The course is a modern reworking of Bardon's system of initiation, with the important and grounding additions of body training and pranayama. I had immediate success mastering vital and astral energy, which encouraged me to move onward toward practicing the elements and accumulating the requisite 40 hours of cumulative practice in order to attain elemental equilibrium. From this point, I advanced to deep experiences of akasha and nondual light. Before I knew it, six months had passed and I had worked through the entirety of the course, experiencing initial successes in even advanced practices such as elementary creation and working with the astral temple. I spent the following year on advanced coursework following the Master Course - Bob's letter and planetary magic classes. About a year after completing my first run through the Master Course, I resolved to read IIH from beginning to end. By this point, its content was familiar, not arcane. Many nuances of Bardon's teachings which would have been inaccessible to me were now surfaced. Bob has a true gift for encouraging the novice student to believe in their ability to experience the depths of magical success, as well as keen insight into how to best sequence one's development. The community that has grown up around the course is also a gem. As with any course, what you get out of it is related to what you put into it, but Bob has done the work to make sure the multiplier on effort is exceptional. In short - highly recommended! --- ## Learn More About Sixty Skills Curriculum https://youtu.be/cdCUS5zRlOo?si=bzdwdCDNw1EcBe_l https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-master-course-expediting-franz-bardons-initiation-into-hermetics/ --- # Dragon Style, Rebounding and Hermetics: An interview with Jon Younghusband Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/dragon-style-rebounding-and-hermetics-an-interview-with-jon-younghusband/ ## Introduction It is always great to have the opportunity to ask questions of experienced internal martial arts practitioners who also work with the Hermetic arts. Today we are joined by Jon Younghusband. Through his depth of experience, Jon has a wonderful way of explaining how martial arts and embodied training can have a profound effect on our cultivation, energy work, and Hermetic practice. For anyone who has ever wondered why some of us emphasise bodywork in conjunction with Hermetics, Jon explores this relationship beautifully in this interview. We hope to hear more from Jon in the future and to dive deeper into some of these subjects. If you would like to learn more about Jon and follow his work, links are included at the end of this post. Finally, if you enjoy this interview, please leave a comment and consider sharing it with those who may find this information useful and inspiring. **About Jon Younghusband** - Courtesy of [https://energyalignment.co.uk/](https://energyalignment.co.uk/) I’m Jon Younghusband — an Internal Arts teacher in Sussex, a life coach, and a guide on a path of alignment. With two decades of deep practice spanning internal martial arts, energetic awareness, and life coaching, I’ve developed a unique blend of skills that help people move with clarity, feel with depth, and live with purpose. Although I began in Traditional Chinese Martial Arts (Xing Yi), I later realised that I had been practising in delusion for many years when I found my internal arts teacher, Sifu [Tom Braithwaite](http://www.dmaa.co.uk) of the Dragon Martial Arts Association. Until that point, I genuinely believed I was training an internal art. I had discipline, commitment, long hours of standing practice behind me and the belief that it would all reveal itself in time — but it was far from what true internal development actually was. Training with Sifu Tom quickly revealed the real meaning and power of internal martial arts. Through studying Dragon Style Kung Fu, Yang Style Tai Chi, Qigong, and Liu He Ba Fa, I eventually became an instructor within the DMAA, continuing the lineage of these traditional systems. Over time, I discovered that these arts offered far more than self-defence or movement. They revealed a profound connection between body, energy, emotion, and consciousness. This is where Hermetics entered my path. That’s when I created the **School of Energy Alignment, **to expand people’s understanding of this deeper relationship, and to help bridge internal martial arts, Hermetics, energetic cultivation, meditation, and embodied personal development into a coherent path of alignment. --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/image-2.png)Image Credit: [https://energyalignment.co.uk/](https://energyalignment.co.uk/) ## Early Days **PAA: Can you share how you started out with the Martial Arts and how that journey led you to systems like Dragon Style and qigong methods like Xuan Gong?** My first ever exposure to martial arts was actually through Jiu-Jitsu at school. I took it very seriously for several years and was deeply drawn to the two-person work; the applications, rolling, and embodied problem-solving that happens when you’re really engaged with a training partner. That early training gave me my first real insight into how martial arts can be a profound vehicle for inner development, not just physical skill. As a teenager, it gave me clarity about who I was, what my capabilities were, and equally what my limitations were at that stage. Of course I didnt realise that at the time, but I could sense the confidence it built in my body and in my mind. After leaving school I had a couple of years away from martial arts while working overseas and getting myself settled, figuring out what I wanted to do with my adult life. Eventually I moved to the north of England to study in music, and it was there that I encountered traditional Chinese martial arts for the first time. I began training Xing Yi at a small kung fu school with a gym attached to it. I trained dilligently, a lot of standing postures, a lot of physical conditioning, a lot of repetition. At the time, I genuinely believed I was studying an internal art. I had the belief that through practice, all would be revealed to me. An. unfortunatelyvcommon limitation in the internal arts scene. Everything shifted when I met Sifu Tom from the Dragon Martial Arts Association. For the first time, I experienced the difference between internal and external martial arts in my own body. That encounter fundamentally changed my definition of what an internal art actually is. From that point on, my focus moved decisively into Tai Chi, Dragon Style Kung Fu, and internal training. I’ve now been dedicated to that path for almost twenty years, and teaching for over ten. During that period, I also studied Liu He Ba Fa, often called “Water Boxing”, along with the associated Qigong sets, all of which adding more layers to my practice. Dragon Style itself is a traditional Hakka system developed by Lam Yiu Guai . It emphasises fast, explosive movements, short-range striking power, and quick, agile footwork. The core principles are to 'stick' and 'blend' with your opponent. As soon as contact is made, you remain in continuous connection, through grabbing, grappling, Qi Na type methods, and even working directly with the fascial web to sieze the whole body. One of the hallmarks of the system is “Mor Kiu” a sequence of fast twisting grabs and strikes that can be repeated from multiple angles and heights. The strategic idea is to envelop the opponent like a Chinese dragon: Once contact is established, you stay extremely close, wrapped around them, denying them the space needed to generate force from external power. Dragon Style is also internally sophisticated in ways that aren’t widely recognised. The forms massage the internal organs in very specific patterns, and they are well balanced according to classical Chinese medicine and elemental theory. Traditionally, it’s considered an extremely healthy system, maintaining strong physical vitality deep into old age. The style doesn’t include slow meditative forms or standalone Qigong sets in its original structure, but internal power (Jin), and consciousness are trained dynamically. Every strike releases Jin. Every movement expands awareness into space. Consciousness is moved rapidly through the body and environment, rather than cultivated slowly as in seated meditation or Tai Chi. That said, everyone I’ve taught has moved into Qigong, meditation, and Tai Chi alongside Dragon Style. Those slower, contemplative methods profoundly deepen and stabilise the internal side of the art, even if they’re not formally embedded in the original system. Partner training has always been central to my path. Our two-person drills focus on internal mechanics rather than brute force or free sparring. We work through five core elements of internal martial application: - **Chi** — touch  - **Mor** — blend, or stick - **Fa** — diffuse or deflect - **La** — issue power - **Pek** — strike The emphasis is on building a connected bridge at the moment of contact, so defence and attack happen simultaneously. On contact, you blend with the opponent, neutralise their power, create an opening, and issue internal power through that opening. Finally, once they are off balance and the matricies opened, we strike. That experiential understanding of internal power, rather than conceptual knowledge, is what ultimately led me into deeper Qigong, meditation, and Hermetic training later in life. It all grew organically out of those early realisations about what internal arts truly are. ## Influences from Mark Rasmus & Dinesh Kumar **PAA: What drew you to Sifu Mark Rasmus’s Elastic Force Qi Gong, and how did his methods influence your training after so many years of traditional training?** Interestingly, I didn’t train Elastic Force Qi Gong directly with Sifu Mark. I trained with one of his senior students, [Sifu Dinesh Kumar](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/life-force-mastery-and-franz-bardons-hermetcis-interview-with-dinesh/). I trained in Hermetics with Sifu Mark though. I was actually drawn to this system though an intuitive knowing. At the time, I was selling my previous business and consciously stepping into a major life transformation, shifting into energetics as my full-time profession. I kept having this persistent inner knowing that I was going to train with one of Mark’s students. I had no idea who that would be or how it would happen. The day I accepted an offer on my business, I happened to go onto Mark’s website, not really expecting anything, and there was a small banner at the bottom announcing that Dinesh was running a one-month course in Thailand. It felt immediately right and I booked it straight away. What made it even stranger is that when I spoke to Pari, who organises the courses, she told me they didn’t know the course had been advertised. Mark had asked Dinesh to run it, but it hadn’t been formally promoted. So they were as surprised that I’d signed up as I was to discover it existed. It had that unmistakable quality of a “fated” convergence.  I ended up training almost one-to-one with Dinesh: six days a week, eight hours a day. It was intense, precise, and transformative. What really drew me in was the scientific and Hermetic framing of the internal arts. Instead of practising something for decades and hoping results might emerge one day, this was a clear developmental path for energetic and spiritual cultivation. There was a structure, a feedback loop, and an explicit method for refining consciousness, energy, and embodiment together. This was then blended with real world results and pressure testing. That alone profoundly changed how I understood internal training. **PAA: What have been the biggest things you’ve incorporated from Mark Rasmus’s Hermetic approach into your own teaching?** Mark’s synthesis of Qigong with Franz Bardon’s Hermetic system completely reinvented how I teach. After spending time in Thailand with Dinesh and Mark, I restructured my entire teaching method and mindset around core Hermetic principles. It’s difficult to articulate how deep the change was, because it didn’t feel like “adding something new.” It felt like remembering how this work should have been framed all along. It was like an awakening of an alignment with the universal principles.  Having said that, I can summarise it as a shift from technique-led teaching to **principle-led teaching**. Instead of beginning with physical exercises, we now lead from higher consciousness: - understand the **Hermetic principles**, - understand **consciousnessness**, - understand the **astral  body (ego, belief, emotional)**, - and working with the **physical body**. Every exercise, even traditional tendon and structure development from Dragon Style, is now revisited through a three-body lens: - What is the consciousness doing? - What is the astral energy doing? - What is the physical body doing? We work both **top-down** (principles → consciousness → energy → body) and **bottom-up** (body → energy → consciousness → principles). That recursive loop creates a completely different depth of internalisation. The exercises stop being mechanical and become initiatory. Another major influence from Mark is the **scientific method of internal training**. All my students now journal. They take ownership of their development. The classes have become less about passively “doing exercises” and more about cultivating a living laboratory of embodied self-experimentation. Students used to turn up to class to practice and I could sense many of them weren't empowered to practice much outside of class. Now, they come to class to learn, and then practice at home to take ownership of the learning. I've seen a huge transformation in all of my students. ## Rebounding, Meditation & Embodiment **PAA: Rebounding features on your blog. How does it help practitioners across martial arts, Qigong, meditation, and coaching?** Rebounding is essentially **gym work for consciousness**, **energy, and the physical body** simultaneously. On the physical level, it develops **biotensegrity**, the elastic, integrated spring-like structure of the body. In martial terms, this makes you spongy, resilient, and elastic. When someone pushes into you, it feels like pushing into a trampoline, their force simply returns to them. On the energetic level, rebounding fortifies the Astral body. You begin to feel your energy saturating your tissues, floating the bones, and forming a coherent energetic sheath around the body. Which is, of course, controled by the mind. On the mental level, it develops clarity, focus, and the ability to “throw the mind”, to project consciousness and feel energy move with it. What’s less obvious, but equally important, is what rebounding does for meditation. I’d meditated for many years before training Elastic Force, but I hadn’t fully connected internal martial mechanics with seated meditation. Dinesh helped me realise that meditation isn’t physicaly passive, it’s **active embodiment**. When you energise the biotensegrity of the body while meditating: the body and matricies open, muscular tension dissolves, the posture stabilises, and sitting becomes effortless. That one insight tripled the amount of time I could sit comfortably in meditation over night. It removed the physical limitation that usually ends people’s practice long before the mind reaches depth. It was a complete game-changer. ## Co-Active Coaching & Hermetic Self-Transformation **PAA: As a certified Co-Active life coach through the Co-Active Training Institute, how have your own experiences with overcoming self-limiting patterns informed your work with students?** One of the most powerful things I’ve taken from Hermetics, especially when blended with the Co-Active coaching model, is the realisation that we are not fixed identities. We have the capacity to choose who we want to be, how we want to be, and what we want to do in our reality. That might sound obvious intellectually, but when it’s embodied as a lived truth, it becomes transformational. The essence of both Hermetics and Co-Active is **empowerment through conscious choice**. Making decisions not from fear, conditioning, or habit, but from a higher consciousness or higher-self perspective. That begins with very precise inner inquiry: - What kind of consciousness do I want to live from? - What intellectual or creative activity do I want to pursue? - What beliefs do I need to develop, or release, in order to fulfil my deeper purpose? - And, what can I do to make those changes manifest in the physical world? When you view consciousness as **energy and information**, or as the dance between **formlessness and form**, you can start to deconstruct exactly where you are in your life right now. You can see clearly which aspects of your identity are inherited, which are conditioned, which are habitual, and which are genuinely chosen and in alignment with a right path. That perspective alone opens an entirely new horizon of possibility. You stop experiencing yourself as trapped by personality, history, or circumstance. You begin to recognise that change is not only possible it’s a natural part of evolution. Through my own two decades of internal arts, Hermetic training, and coaching, I’ve repeatedly had to confront self-limiting patterns, unconscious belief cycles, and emotional structures held in the body. And what became clear is that lasting transformation doesn’t happen just at the level of thinking. It happens across three interlinked dimensions: - **Consciousness** — narrative, identity, and perspective - **Energy (the astral body)** — emotion, ego and energetic drivers - **Embodiment** — posture, action, nervous-system imprint We all understand that our thoughts regulate our emotions and our emotions control how we act and the posture we adopt. They are all intrinsically linked, and when all three are addressed together, change becomes coherent rather than fragmented. In practical coaching terms, this means we don’t just ask, *“What's next?”* We ask: - *Who are you being?* - *What energetic patterns sustain you?* - *What do you want to do?* From there, clients create a conscious roadmap for becoming. They stop seeing themselves as broken or incomplete, and move towards fulfillment. They stop waiting for external permission to change and take empowered ownership of their life. They stop mistaking identity for destiny. They begin to experience themselves as a creative interface between form and formlessness. ## Energy Alignment, Purpose & Guarding Against Delusion **PAA: Over 20 years of blending martial arts, Hermetics, and coaching, what has been one of the most challenging aspects of your own energy alignment journey?** The most challenging aspect of my journey has been learning how to live in balance between **hard practice and soft practice**, between **form and formlessness**, between **yin and yang**. Learning when to apply structure and when to let everything fall away has been far more difficult than mastering any single technique or system. Especially when what needs to fall away isn’t just habits or methods, but deep beliefs, possessions, identities, relationships, or entire life structures. That process is hard because it goes directly against the grain of what society conditions us to do. We’re trained to accumulate, to stabilise, to cling, to define ourselves through roles and achievements. The deeper spiritual path often asks for the opposite: subtraction rather than addition. At a deeper level, it’s always a question of finding the balance point between the physical realm and the spiritual realm. And then letting go of whatever is in resistance to your true path. Everyone’s true path is unique, but at its core the path is always an **evolution of consciousness**, a gradual ebbing toward greater coherence, clarity, and ultimately toward pure consciousness itself. That’s a very difficult thing to navigate, because pure consciousness is subtle. It’s not loud. It’s not dramatic. If you can’t feel your way through it, you don’t know whether what you’re practising is moving you closer to alignment or quietly pulling you off-course. One of my clearest lessons in this came from my early training in internal martial arts. I genuinely believed I was on the internal path. I practised an internal style. I spent years standing in postures for hours at a time. I was disciplined and committed. But in reality, I was training an internal style in a purely external way. I had a strong self-belief that I was on the right path, and I was wrong. That experience taught me something essential: one of the great dangers of any spiritual or internal discipline is **delusion**. Feeling spiritual isn’t the same as becoming more conscious. Doing internal-looking practices isn’t the same as cultivating internal power. You need a way to reality-test your path. This is where Mark Rasmus’s method of journaling became invaluable to me. Journaling makes development real. When you write something down, you externalise it. When you read it back weeks or months later, you can see whether there’s genuine evolution or just conceptual recycling. I’ve had practices that felt powerful and enjoyable in the moment. I journaled them. Then I came back weeks later and realised: *this is fun, but it’s not actually taking me where I need to go.* So I dropped them. I’ve also rediscovered practices I’d learned and then neglected. When I reread old journals, it was obvious: *this was golden; this was foundational; this needs to be reintegrated.* What all of this has taught me is that the spiritual path is not a fixed doctrine or a static system. It’s a continual process of weaving between form and formlessness, staying on the path, and guarding against delusion. Meditation, Qigong, Hermetics, and internal martial arts continue to evolve my perception of purpose and presence because they constantly bring me back into contact with what is actually aligned, rather than what merely feels good, familiar, or spiritually interesting. The real work, for me, has been learning how to feel whether a practice is truly on point or subtly pulling me away from my own resonance and life path. So the path, for me, has been about continually finding that balance point between hard and soft practice, between structure and intuition, between discipline and surrender, and then empowering myself to actually do what I know is of benefit. Staying on the path isn’t about clinging to a system or an identity. It’s about staying honest with your own experience, testing your practices against reality, and being willing to let go of whatever no longer serves the deeper evolution of your consciousness. **PAA: Very grateful for your time in answering these and sharing your experiences.** --- ## Learn More ##### The School of Energy Alignment ##### Jons Facebook ##### Jons YouTube --- --- # Groundbreaking Calendar Magick & Realist Astral Projection (Spring 2026) Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/groundbreaking-calendar-magick-realist-astral-projection-spring-2026/ This spring, Dr. Peter G.H.A. Duchemin, PhD is offering two live Zoom intensives that work together as a practical introduction to “Nuonics”: spiritual and mental training for a space-faring culture. If you’ve ever felt that time itself shapes your mind and mood — or wondered whether “astral travel” could be made precise, mappable, and repeatable — these two four-week classes are built for exactly that. --- ## Introducing the Ibisystem ### Groundbreaking Calendar Magick (Time Magick for the Galactic Era) “Calendar Magick” is the secret hidden in plain sight: the idea that calendars don’t just track life — they condition it. In this course, you’ll be introduced to the Ibisystem: a living, working approach to time magick built around planetary calendars. You’ll learn the Mercury, Venus, and Mars calendars, and how each one trains a different set of capacities: - **Mercury**: intelligence, adaptability, flexibility - **Venus**: empathy, creativity, relational perception - **Mars**: focus, will, directed force Each of the four classes includes teaching plus Q&A, and you’ll be guided through synchronization exercises so the system becomes something you can actually run in your life. **Format** - Live on Zoom - 4 sessions - **Price:** $180 CAD **Dates (Newfoundland Standard Time — NST)** - **Mar 8, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 p.m. (3 hours) — Peter Duchemin, PhD - **Mar 15, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 p.m. (3 hours) — Peter Duchemin, PhD - **Mar 22, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 p.m. (3 hours) — Peter Duchemin, PhD - **Mar 29, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 a.m. (3 hours) — Tarot Jammer **Cancellation policy:** To cancel or reschedule, please give 24 hours notice. **Contact:** 709-693-3067 | peterghaduchemin@gmail.com **Location:** 14 Howley Avenue Extension, St. John's, NL, Canada **Book / details:** [https://www.peterducheminphd.com/service-page/introducing-the-ibisystem](https://www.peterducheminphd.com/service-page/introducing-the-ibisystem) **Background reading:** [https://www.peterducheminphd.com/post/how-the-ibisystem-happened-and-how-you-can-learn-it](https://www.peterducheminphd.com/post/how-the-ibisystem-happened-and-how-you-can-learn-it) --- ## Realist Astral Projection ### Explore the Galaxy and Connect to the Stars Most “astral” systems float in symbolism. This course does something very different: it teaches an astronomically accurate method of magickal visualization and spirit-travel, using contemporary star maps (including NASA sources) to commit the real cosmos to memory — and then travel there in spirit. Over four sessions you’ll learn the method, and then participate in a final collective project: attempting contact with the nearby star, Sirius. This class is complimentary to the Ibisystem class. **Format** - Live on Zoom - 4 sessions - **Price:** $180 CAD **Dates (Newfoundland Standard Time — NST)** - **May 10, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 p.m. (3 hours) — Peter Duchemin, PhD - **May 17, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 p.m. (3 hours) — Peter Duchemin, PhD - **May 24, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 p.m. (3 hours) — Peter Duchemin, PhD - **May 31, 2026 (Sun)** — 11:00 a.m. (3 hours) — Peter Duchemin, PhD **Cancellation policy:** To cancel or reschedule, please give 24 hours notice. **Contact:** 709-693-3067 | peterghaduchemin@gmail.com **Location:** 14 Howley Avenue Extension, St. John's, NL, Canada **Book / details:** [https://www.peterducheminphd.com/service-page/realist-astral-projection](https://www.peterducheminphd.com/service-page/realist-astral-projection) --- ## Book both classes If you’re serious about upgrading your magickal operating system, these two courses form a clean sequence: - **Ibisystem** gives you structured time-conditioning through Mercury/Venus/Mars calendars. - **Realist Astral Projection** takes that trained attention and points it outward — into real, mappable astral space. **Main booking page:** [Courses & Classes | Peter Duchemin, Phd](https://www.peterducheminphd.com/services-8) --- --- # Interview with Ma Ananda Sarita: Tantra, Meditation and Spirituality Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/interview-with-ma-ananda-sarita-tantra-meditation-and-spirituality/ ## Introduction In this interview we speak with Ma Ananda Sarita about her path, her experiences with meeting Osho at an early age, the influence this has had on her life and teachings and how she now shares five decades of experience with students from all over the world. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments and please do share with those you feel would enjoy this content. Huge thanks to Ma Ananda Sarita and her team for this interview. If you would like to follow her work, I have included links at the end of the interview. Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview- Personal JourneyEarly Quest and Meeting Osho- From Disciple to Teacher – Founding Your School- Lessons from Five Decades in Tantra - Being a Woman on the Tantric Path- Lineage and Philosophy Influence of Osho’s Teachings- Classical Tantra and Neo-Tantra - East–West Integration- Weaving Multiple Tantric Traditions - Teaching and Methodology “Tantra Is Not Tantra Without Meditation”- Step-by-Step Learning – Upaya (Skillful Means)- Training Future Tantra Teachers -  Maintaining Authenticity in Modern Tantra- Healing and Transformation Tantra as a Path of Healing - Sacred Sexuality vs. Misconceptions- Trauma Healing through Tantra - Transformation in Relationships - Practical Application in Modern Life Advice for Beginners – First Steps - Daily Practices to Live Tantra - Integrating Retreat Experiences into Daily Life - Continuing Growth for Advanced Practitioners - Learn More About Ma Ananda SaritaVisit her website- See Events- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! --- ## Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/image-769x1024.png)Image Credit: https://www.anandasarita.com/ Featured Image Credit: https://www.anandasarita.com/ ## Personal Journey ##### Early Quest and Meeting Osho **PAA: You embarked on your spiritual journey at a very young age, leaving your California home as a teenager to search for the “essence of life.” I understand you hitchhiked across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, finally reaching India in late 1972 and met Osho in Mumbai in 1973 at age 17. What inspired you to take that leap of faith at such a young age, and how did encountering Osho during that formative time influence the course of your life in Tantra?** What inspired me to go on this epic journey was a profound thirst to find the Essence of Life. I had noticed from a young age that people appear to fall into a zombie like sleep from the age of 18, simply becoming robots of the status quo. I was determined to find the essence of life before the age of 18 so I would not fall asleep, but remain awake to the effervescence of life. It was a miracle that I met Osho at the age of 17 and was able to retain an enlivened state of being, having stepped out of the box and being catapulted onto the spiritual path of Meditation and Tantra. It was a pivotal point in my life and I remain forever grateful to Osho and to the mysterious flow of existence which carried me to him. ##### From Disciple to Teacher – Founding Your School **PAA: After spending over two decades immersed as a disciple in Osho’s community, you eventually transitioned into teaching and founded your own Tantra schools. In 1999 you started the School of Awakening in Europe, and later in 2008 you launched Tantra Essence. What motivated you to step into the role of a teacher and create these organizations? Was there a defining moment or calling that led you to share Tantra with others on such a large scale? ** Everyone has an inner soul calling. I think the path each human being is on as being similar to a tree growing from a seed. The blueprint of the vast tree is already written in the seed. As the tree grows, naturally, there is a strong urge to become the potential which is written in it’s blueprint.  Similarly to a tree, growth and development take time and we have to be patient while we grow and evolve. In my case, I spent 17 years immersed simply in working on myself under Osho’s watchful eyes. What I went through during those years was a full Phoenix effect of my entire being, body, emotions, mind and soul. I experienced countless Satori’s and an ever evolving expansion of consciousness. One day, I had a profound dream. In the dream I saw a fountain of water emerging from the earth, becoming a river. Osho appeared in front of me and said: *“Now you have become your name. Many people will be coming to drink from this wellspring. Be ready.” *Shortly after this, people began approaching me and asking me to give them sessions. When I would say, *“I am not a trained session giver so don’t offer sessions” *they would answer, *“yes, I know that, but when you begin offering sessions please remember that I want a session with you.” *After about 10 people asked me almost exactly the same thing, I started thinking, *“maybe I am meant to do healing sessions.” * Soon after these events, I was inundated with holistic healing modalities and trainings being offered to me. I went on a 7 year journey of learning, offering sessions and teaching incredible methods of healing from genius teachers. Through these experiences I understood one thing very clearly, that the healing people needed most of all was in regards to sexuality, relating and the search for happiness. I realised that what I had absorbed for so many years from Osho in regards to Tantra was the medicine people needed the most. So I began weaving Tantra methodologies into my healing practice. And gradually, Tantra took over… I still love and practice holistic healing and am well aware that Tantra holds the primary answers people the world over are seeking.  ##### Lessons from Five Decades in Tantra  **PAA: With over five decades of experience in living and teaching Tantra internationally, you’ve undoubtedly witnessed profound changes in yourself and your students. What have been some of the most important lessons or challenges you have encountered on your personal Tantra path? How have those experiences shaped you as a teacher and influenced the way you guide others now?** I have learned many valuable lessons and insights: By teaching internationally and also having the experience of approxamately 20 different nationalities in most retreats I teach, I have discovered that human beings are naturally empathic and loving. A competitive and antagonistic way of being is not natural for human beings. When we create the right milue suitable for human evolution of consciousness, people remember their original essence easily and naturally. And this essence is joyful, loving and empathic.  This state of being is easier to tap into when there are many nationalities in one retreat. If there is only one nationality in a retreat, people tend to cling to their false conditioning. The more diverse the melting pot is, the more easily people melt their conditioning and become simply open and flowing, adaptable and sensitive. One of the focuses of my work is to offer a dedicated spiritual path for couples. I teach a series of 7 levels for couples to evolve their relationship on the Tantra path. This path automatically brings up every challenge possible for human beings because the longing to find fulfilling relationship dynamics is a major desire for most people I have met. Through this path, I have discovered secrets and methodologies which should be widely available for couples everywhere. One of the comments I have heard most often is, *“if only I had known what you are teaching since my teenage years, I could have saved myself from so much suffering!” * Working with couples automatically means the necessity of healing the collective conditioning around sexuality, love and relating. Every breakthrough a couple has sends positive transformational energies into the collective consciousness. Slowly but surely, couples will have the opportunity to bring spiritual awareness to the phenominon of relationship. There is a saying in Tantra that *“walking the path of Tantra as a couple is the fastest path to enlightenment but is like walking on a razors edge.” *This is so true. There is a whole emotional quagmire waiting for anyone who ventures into relationship. When we apply witnessing and meditation to this quagmire couples can finally begin evolving themselves into a new and elevated possibility for their love.  ##### Being a Woman on the Tantric Path **PAA: As a female Tantra master and mystic, have you faced any unique challenges or insights on this path? You’ve noted how often you have to dispel rampant myths about Tantra — for example, getting sly questions that sexualize your role as a female teacher. How has your experience been as a woman in a field that historically had more male gurus, and what do you feel women practitioners and teachers bring to the Tantra tradition today?** The fact is that traditionally, Women are the initiatresses into Tantra. This is because the entry point for Tantra practice is through the heart chakra. Women are the custodians of a heart based path with the natural feminine path being love and devotion while the man’s path is witnessing and meditation. Tantra is a weaving together of these two paths but the portal to enter into Tantra is love and devotion.  I have found that through the practice of Tantra and especially under the guidance of Osho, I have been able to fully embrace both meditation and love, making my Tantra practice deeply rooted in both aspects. I am at ease sharing about Tantra with men equally to sharing these teachings with women because I understand both orientations profoundly, based on my own lived experience.  Tantra is unique in that you can enter this path from wherever your consciousness is at this time. This is because Tantra fully embraces the human being in his or her totality. If you are full of emotions, this becomes your door to expanded consciousness. If you are focused on sexuality, this becomes your door. If you are desiring to attain enlightenment, this becomes your door. There is an open secret in Tantra, simply apply meditation and witnessing together with love and devotion to any life experience and this becomes a portal into expanded consciousness. In my experience, men do not sexualise me as a teacher even if they have come to Tantra primarily to heal issues around their sexuality. They come to learn vital teachings which are missing in the education most people receive. They are very courageously humbling themselves to discover something they have been longing for but have not found in the mainstream. I respect these men very highly and they feel that and open their inner radiance. I have made it a point that I am not the focus in terms of sexuality teachings. If someone wants to learn about sexuality directly they are warmly invited to come with a partner and I teach both partners how to discover their inner ecstasy together. I have seen profound results through this approach.  **A case history: **A couple came to my Master Lover for Couples Retreat.They had been married for 30 years and had never had sex for more than 3 minutes. The man suffered from premature ejacualtion and the woman was utterly disgusted by sex with her partner. One day into the retreat, the man approached me and asked furtively; *“When are we going to be exchanging partners in this group?” *I answered him, *“we will certainly not be exchanging partners in this group. Where did you get such an idea? I am teaching you to have the best sexual experience of your life with your own partner.” *He was very unhappy when I said this and answered me, *“well, I just assumed that we would be exchanging partners. I am fed up with my wife and want to try with someone else.” *I called his wife over and asked details about their sexual experience. I then said, *“don’t worry, by the end of this retreat you will be making love for two hours and loving each other like never before. Just apply yourself to the methods I’ll be teaching.” * Towards the end of the Retreat, I asked this couple how they were progressing with the meditation practice in their bedroom. They were both beaming from ear to ear, and holding each other like newlyweds. *“It is just as you said it would be,” *they answered. *“We can’t believe what has happened!! We made love for two hours! This has never happened before and we never thought it would be possible!” *The wife said, *“I have never experienced such fulfillment with my husband. Now I am really in love with him for the first time!” * ## Lineage and Philosophy  ##### Influence of Osho’s Teachings **PAA: You were personally initiated by Osho and lived in his community for over two decades, absorbing his teachings on meditation, love, and Tantra. Osho’s transmission emphasized that bliss is the natural state of every human being beyond our conditioning. What are some of the key insights or principles you learned from Osho that continue to guide your work today? Could you share an example of how his influence is reflected in your teaching or in Tantra Essence’s philosophy? ** By immersing myself in Osho’s direct transmission, Meditation methods, his Buddhafield and his teachings in general, I have transformed on all levels of being. Osho has a knack of expanding one’s mind beyond normal limitations. This opens the possibility of genius. He has deliberately taught through contradictions, a profound devise which cracks one’s mind open to be truly universal in our approach to every subject. This way of teaching also helps to unify the right and left hemispheres of the brain which is one of the principle attainments offered by Tantra.  My teachings reflect this approach. I teach people to become vast enough to contain all contradictions of life. I also focus on Osho’s teachings in regards to the Chakra System which is truely profound it it’s effectiveness for taking quantum leaps in consciousness For example, my Tantra Teacher Training is based on an evolutionary journey through the Chakra system. The teachers to be are given deep Sadhana practices for diving into Osho’s Meditations as well as other practices in a sequential way and a certain number of times in order to evolve their consciousness rapidly. If you wish to teach Tantra it is a prerequisite to evolve your own consciousness first. So the training supports this process in a very methodical way which brings tremendous results.  Osho guided me and my love partner personally through a series of processes which radically transformed our couple and our approach to love and relating. These valuable lessons are always alive within me and have given me a bedrock from where I can help couples to evolve on their path.  In fact, in my every breath, Osho’s presence is shining as an eternal jewel in the lotus of consciousness. I cannot do otherwise than to share his presence as a living transmission which infuses all that I am and all that I teach.  ##### Classical Tantra and Neo-Tantra  **PAA: Your teachings bridge traditional Tantra and modern approaches. For example, you incorporate wisdom from the classical *Vigyan Bhairav Tantra *scripture in your courses, yet you also carry forward the contemporary “Neo-Tantra” influences from Osho’s lineage. How do you integrate the depth of classical Tantra with the accessibility of Neo-Tantra in your work? Are there any misconceptions about classical versus modern Tantra that you often find yourself clarifying for students? ** ** **I learned about the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra from Osho. He gave a series of discourses on this fundamental Tantra Scripture, commenting in depth on each of the 112 meditation methods contained in it. These discourses are offered in Osho’s Book Of Secrets. These discourses greatly influenced my meditation path and when I began teaching I was determined to offer people an opportunity to experience these methods through their own lived experience. This is why I created the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra Retreat Series.  Many people read about these methods, but because they are offered in a poetic language and in short sutra form, many people cannot figure out how to desipher them in a way which can be practiced. It is my joy to help people understand the methods and practice them also. The gift of understanding them in depth has been offered by Osho and the realisation of the immense transformation possible through these methods comes by practicing them. The term Neo Tantra was coined by Osho. He had already coined the word Neo Sannyas, offering a new vision and direction for the ancient teachings on Sannyas. He then introduced the concept of Neo Tantra, a contemporary way of understanding and applying ancient Tantra Teachings.  It is unfortunate that Osho’s Neo Tantra Teachings somehow got entangled into an idea of Tantra as being a hedonistic path focused only on sexuality, when in truth, Osho’s teaching of Neo Tantra are focused on Tantra as being rooted in Meditation and as a path to Enlightenment.  When I started teaching Tantra a friend commented: *“you shouldn’t call it Tantra because the word Tantra has become corrupted.” *I answered; *“I will definitely call it Tantra because Tantra itself and the word Tantra has to regain it’s rich and noble heritage. I will teach people to understand the true meaning of Tantra and drag this word out of the gutter where it has fallen, bringing it into the light of higher consciousness where it belongs.” *And indeed, this has been my endeavor for the past 35 years.  ##### East–West Integration **PAA: Having immersed yourself in Tantric practice in India for 26 years before moving West, you’ve seen how Tantra can be perceived very differently across cultures. When you began teaching in Europe in 1999, you noted how misunderstood and oversimplified Tantra had become in the Western world. How have you worked to bridge that East–West gap in understanding? Do you adapt your teaching style for Western seekers, and what elements of authentic Tantra do you feel are most important to preserve when introducing it to people with modern Western backgrounds? ** In the beginning when I began teaching Tantra in the West, I rapidly understood that I had to use the door of sexuality and slowly but surely guide people into an understanding that Tantra is rooted in Meditation. I was waiting patiently till my students could understand Tantra as being a path that encompasses all that a human being is, from Sex to Superconsciousness. It took me 4 years of offering Sacred Sexuality teachings before I could introduce the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra. Once my students were able to absorb these teachings, there was no looking back. I was on a roll of merging East and West, ancient and Neo Tantra methodologies.  ##### Weaving Multiple Tantric Traditions  **PAA: Tantra Essence isn’t confined to a single lineage — you weave together teachings from Osho’s Neo-Tantra, classical Shaivism (such as the 112 practices of the *Vigyan Bhairav Tantra*), Vajrayana Buddhism’s concept of *upaya*, and the Śākta Tantra devotion to the Divine Feminine. Why is it important for you to draw on such diverse streams of Tantra? How do these different traditions complement each other in your philosophy, and what do you see as the common thread that unites them under the Tantra Essence umbrella? ** ** **Tantra is a vast multidimensional collection of methods for raising consciousness and integrating all aspects of being. I always remember a saying of Buddha; *“Truth is that which* *works” *I draw from whatever will work to help people find Sat Chit Ananda, (Truth, Consciousness and Bliss.)  ## Teaching and Methodology  ##### “Tantra Is Not Tantra Without Meditation” **PAA: You often say that “Tantra is not Tantra without Meditation.” Meditation seems to be at the heart of your approach. How do you incorporate meditation into Tantra practices in your courses and retreats? For example, what role do Osho’s active meditations or silent mindfulness practices play in a typical Tantra Essence program, and why do you believe meditation is so crucial to authentic Tantric experience? ** Let us begin by defining the meaning of the word Tantra. Each word in Tantra has several meanings, with each meaning depending on the context in which it is used. The word Tantra is deeply nuanced; it can mean: **To weave**; in this context it indicates the merging of opposite polarities into unity consciousness. It can also mean, **Transforming poison into nectar; **in this context it indicates that even toxic or dense aspects of the human being can be transformed into the nectar of Enlightened consciousness. Another meaning: **Methods for Transforming Consciousness. **This meaning indicates that Tantra relies on methods of Meditation. By entering into the method through ones own lived experience, you will unveil your own innate wisdom.  If you explore the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra you will discover that these methods cover each and every aspect of human life experience. This indicates clearly that by applying a witnessing, meditative consciousness to any life experience, you can discover the nectar of enlightenment hidden there. My approach to teaching Tantra is clear, only practices which support someone on their path to Enlightenment are introduced. If there is any teaching which will take someone on a downward spiral, ie downward moving kundalini, it is not welcome in Tantra Essence.  The difference that makes all the difference is Meditation. Examples: If you release anger in the light of awereness it becomes beneficial instead of destructive. Osho in fact, has enobled all emotonal states by bringing awareness to them and even creating methods of transformative meditation devoted to certain emotions, such as anger, sadness, etc.  Likewise, if you go into sexuality as a consciousness practice, you will discover the divinity hidden in it.  When I look around at various Schools of Tantra, I observe that many teachers of Tantra have no idea that Tantra is meant to be rooted in Meditation. If they play with the denser aspects of the human being such as sexuality and do not base their teachings in meditation they are in for a wild ride into downward moving kundalini, trauma, emotional upheaval, unconsciousness and chaos. If Tantra practitioners the world over can absorb even this one simple fact about Tantra, that it is meant to be based in methods of meditation, many more people will be helped through Tantra. It can become the greatest blessing for this world if utilised properly. ##### Step-by-Step Learning – Upaya (Skillful Means) **PAA: In your trainings, you emphasize guiding students step by step. I’ve read that you apply the Vajrayana principle of *upaya*, or skillful means, by introducing exercises progressively with stages of integration and reflection. How do you design your programs to accommodate different experience levels? For instance, how do you ensure that both beginners and advanced practitioners are appropriately challenged and supported as they move through a retreat or multi-level training? ** This is easy, if a teaching is based in Meditation, both beginners and advanced persons can benefit from it. This is because in meditation, one only goes as deeply as their state of consciousness allows. Take Vipassana as an example. Buddha became enlightened through this very simple practice (which originates by the way from the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra.) A beginner may practice this method and gain many benefits such as more awareness, peace of mind, centering, etc. The adept may experience enlightenment through this same method.  In the same way, persons practicing Tantra methods will absorb whatever is right for them according to their unique state of consciousness. If you have beginners and advanced practitioners in the same group, the advanced one gain a quality of innocence from the beginners and the beginners gain a vision of what is possible for them by coming in contact with advanced practitioners. Tantra works through transmission. The state of consciousness the teacher is in and their assistants are in, plays an important role in absorbing the teachings.  In multi level trainings, people are not invited to attend unless they have completed their Sadhana practices from the previous levels. In this way we maintain a steady expansion of consciousness and love in the participants of the Training.  ##### Training Future Tantra Teachers  **PAA: Your Tantra Teacher Training is renowned as one of the most respected and in-depth programs in the world. When you are mentoring new Tantra teachers, what core values, skills, or understandings do you focus on instilling in them? How do you ensure that graduates of your training carry forward the integrity and safety of Tantra when they go on to teach others, especially given Tantra’s potential for misuse if not taught responsibly? ** The core values for Tantra Teachers who go through Tantra Essence Trainings are: **1) **first work on raising your own consciousness before teaching others, in other words, “walk your talk.” **2) **create a milieu conducive for weaving together love and consciousness. The space itself should be saturated with the beauty and vibrations of sacredness. **3) **whatever you teach should have only one aim: to offer wholeness, love and consciousness to the persons embarking on this journey into Tantra. It is a healing space, a milieu where it is easy to remember ones true nature and to journey towards Enlightenment. **4) **The teacher and assistants are simply in service for the highest good of the students. The teacher is not there for their own self-gratification or self aggrandisement. This quality of being in service automatically brings a quality of integrity in it’s wake. **5) **Teachers should be able to understand the entire journey they are teaching. This ensures if they are speaking about something and explaining it, they are able to share increasingly deepening levels of this subject. As Tantra is multidimensional, it takes ever deepening self exploration for new teachers to ripen into the subjects they are transmitting. **6) **Our teachers are also educated on intricate refinements of every aspect of teaching, from how they dress, to how they appear on camera, how to give discourses, how they decorate the space, how they choose and play music, how to work with a team, etc.  Our vision and mission and core values are also absorbed as students deepen their experience on this path. Example: Meditation, connection and celebration are integral aspects of all of the teachings.  #####  Maintaining Authenticity in Modern Tantra **PAA: In an era where the term “Tantra” is sometimes commercialized or misused, you stress your commitment to “authentic Tantra, rooted in Meditation and Love.” What does “authentic Tantra” mean to you in practical terms? How do you personally maintain the depth and authenticity of Tantra in your workshops and curricula? In your view, what sets the Tantra Essence approach apart from more superficial or purely technique-focused interpretations of Tantra one might find elsewhere? ** The difference that makes all the difference in my approach to Tantra is that the Feminine path of love and devotion is honoured in equal measure to the Masculine path of Meditation and Witnessing. I make sure to include the fundamentals of Tantra, including Meditation, Mantra, Yantra and Ritual. I also make sure that the Tantra I teach is not only theoretical but is based in experiential 5 sense learning. This ensures that the teachings are absorbed deeply and bring highly beneficial transformation to our students as a result.  ## Healing and Transformation  ##### Tantra as a Path of Healing  **PAA: In your experience as a healer and teacher, how does Tantra facilitate deep healing and personal evolution? You’ve observed that many physical, emotional, and mental struggles stem from unresolved sexual or relationship issues, and that “Tantra offers transformation on all levels” by accepting the person as they are and using that as a doorway to expand consciousness. Can you explain how Tantric practices work to transform these kinds of issues? Perhaps share an example of an emotional or spiritual breakthrough you’ve witnessed in someone who embraced Tantra as a healing path. ** Tantra is naturally integrated with healing because Tantra brings wholeness and to be whole is to be healed. My approach to Tantra also includes Osho’s ‘Psychology of the Buddhas’ which is a profound methodology for discovering an integrated and elevated experience of life. In this approach we delve into the body, into the conscious and subconscious aspects of the mind and also tap into the Superconsciousness, or Buddha nature.  The Buddha nature is then invited to offer healing to the subconscious and conscious aspects of the mind. By combining these aspects of one’s being with full acceptance of the body, and further, by integrating these experiences with soul awareness, we are ensured of a quality of wholeness that is easily accessible and rooted in ones deeply lived experience.  ##### Sacred Sexuality vs. Misconceptions **PAA: Sacred sexuality is a central element of Tantra, yet it’s often misunderstood in the popular imagination. You’ve had to debunk the myth that Tantra is just about promiscuous sex or hedonistic indulgence, when in fact sexuality in Tantra is approached with awareness and reverence. How do you guide students to experience sexuality as a sacred, transformative energy rather than just physical pleasure? What changes do people notice in themselves when they start to approach intimacy through the Tantric lens of love, consciousness, and sacredness? ** Approaching sexuality through the lens of meditation and sacredness is a game changer. Once students experience this, there is no going back. A deep longing in every human being I have come across is to know the inherent sacredness of sex and romantic love. People sense it is possible but having never been exposed to it, never having been educated about it, they end up groping in the dark and not finding their way.  The way I help people to discover the door into sacred sexuality is by prescribing couples to commit to practicing a certain number of what I call ‘Love Appointments.’ This is a dedicated Sadhana practice for couples. It is similar to someone deciding and committing to practice X number of mantras for 40 days. Through your commitment to your Sadhana, you will experience amazing results.  When couples commit to Tantra Sadhana together, they cut through multi layers of the ego and find themselves at the very portal of the divine. Sex by it’s very nature contains hidden within it all the codes necessary to access divinity within oneself and with the partner. Sex is after all the creation principle. This is how Godliness is expressed in our physical realm, the act through which new life comes into being. What could be more sacred than the co-creation of a new life? So when couples journey together deep into the core of sexuality as an awareness practice, they will find the divine hidden within their biology.  There is a saying in Tantra; *“Each cell of the body contains the whole Universe.” *This is so true. And in conscious sexual union, we really come to know this very powerfully.  The only stumbling blocks to this experience are twofold; 1) the egoic mind which is afraid of superconscious states 2) conditioning given by society and religion which makes people belive that sexual energy is disgusting, sinful, bad, etc. These types of beliefs cut people off from their vital life force energy and make them ashamed to even begin the path towards union with the divine. So the first work that has to be done is to help people embrace and love their own body, their own vital God given energy. This is a prerequisite for diving into the inner ecstasy offered by Tantra.  In most of my groups, we have to begin by helping people love their body, release stagnated emotions, open to their capacity for joy and love and enter into the discipline of Meditation Sadhana. Also, it is essential before working with Kundalini energy and inner ecstasy practices to first work with conscious emotional fluidity. Once people are fluid with their emotions, we can then begin to awaken Kundalini and higher consciousness states.  The journey is all about coming back home to who you are meant to be. It is a precise science and if followed methodically, it leads people definitively on the path to self-realisation.  ##### Trauma Healing through Tantra  **PAA: Many people carry trauma or deep wounds around sexuality and intimacy. How can Tantra provide a safe container for healing such trauma? In your programs you include modalities like yoni healing and lingam healing to help release trauma and stored emotions in the body. What approaches do you use to ensure participants can gently transform pain and fear into trust and empowerment? Is there a particular practice or aspect of Tantra you’ve found especially effective for helping individuals heal old sexual or emotional wounds? ** It is because of my experience in healing that I am able to offer a truly safe space for people to shed their trauma and embrace their true nature. You mention that we offer Yoni and Lingam Healing. Yes, this is true, but take into account that this is only done after a very long and in-depth preparation. There are teachers who offer Yoni / Lingam Healing on a weekend group. I would never do such a thing.  If people wish to embark on this journey, it is essential to teach many forms of healing work and Tantra practices before going into Yoni and Lingam Healing Methodology. I have found that there are many ways to help people heal from trauma. I utilize so many healing modalities in my groups and trainings precisely to help people understand that the body and mind always wishes to find healing and wholeness. I try to give people a wide range of healing methods, including methods they can practice easily at home and in this way they discover a shining path to wholeness and bliss.  In terms of letting go of stored emotions, I use multitudes of methods for this. In each and every group we have various methods of conscious emotional fludity. Most of these methods can also be used at home, after the group has ended. In this way, people are empowered to continue working on themselves, safely and easily. I make the path clear and precise.  ##### Transformation in Relationships  **PAA: Tantra isn’t only an individual journey; it can profoundly transform how we relate to others as well. How do you see Tantra helping couples or intimate partners heal, grow, and deepen their connection? In your Master Lover and Soulmate retreats, you teach that love and sexuality can become powerful experiences for awakening when approached with total awareness, and you help partners dissolve fear and patterns of disconnection in order to meet each other with vulnerability and compassion. What shifts have you observed when couples practice Tantra together, and do you have a favorite story of a couple who experienced a significant breakthrough through this work? ** I live on a steady diet of miracles. I have seen couples who were on the verge of divorce coming to the Tantra Soul Mate Series and being reunited better than ever. I have seen couples who suffered from severe sexual dysfunction being healed of the problem. I have seen elderly couples able to embrace a rejuvenated sexuality, finding deepest fulfillment together. I have seen couples experiencing conscious conception, pregnancy and ecstatic birth. I have seen young couples discovering how incredibly different their sexuality can be when infused with sacredness.  One dramatic story comes to mind: A couple arrived who had not been able to even touch each other for 10 years. They had tried everything from couples therapy to medical interventions. The wife suffered from vaginismus and could not bear her husband’s sexual organ anywhere near her. In spite of their difficulties, they were extremely dedicated to wishing to solve their problem and had decided they will do whatever it took to remain faithful to the Tantra Path. It took 4 levels of Tantra before they were able to experience sexual union. By level 7 they looked like a honeymoon couple. They couldn’t get enough of touching each other and kissing. My partner at the time said, *“So now it must be again like when you first met.” *They looked at us with astonishment and exclaimed, *“It has never been like this! This is the first time we are able to understand and experience what sexual passion and fulfillment feels like; and we are so much in love!” * ## Practical Application in Modern Life  ##### Advice for Beginners – First Steps  **PAA: For someone brand new to Tantra who feels curious but perhaps a bit intimidated or unsure where to begin, what advice would you give? Are there any foundational practices or guiding principles you suggest for a beginner to explore, in order to get a safe and genuine taste of Tantra? ** Begin by reading my books. In my books there are at the back, a dedicated reading list which will further enhance your understanding of Tantra. And in both of my books I offer many methods you can experiment with at home.  Secondly, if you are not able to attend a live event soon enough, you can purchase one or more of my online courses. The online courses are also full of guided methods you can practice at home. Whenever you are able to, attend a live event, whether that be taught by me or by someone from my Kaula Team, or perhaps someone who has graduated from my Teacher Training but who is not yet part of my Kaula Team of Teachers.  There are of course other Teachers from other schools of Tantra you may like to experiment with. The general rule of thumb for choosing a teacher, according to Osho, is to tune into your heart chakra. If a teacher is good for you, you will feel as if your heart is expanding and growing wings. If a teacher or teaching is not good for you, you will feel as if your heart is shrinking. Always trust what your heart is indicating to you.  ##### Daily Practices to Live Tantra  **PAA: What are some simple daily practices or rituals you recommend for integrating Tantra into everyday life? For example, how might conscious breathing, visualization, or mindful loving touch as part of one’s self-care routine help keep the Tantric spirit alive day-to-day? ** ** **Tantra is indeed kept alive through methods and rituals. Typically a method will be practiced for 21 days or until you are able to extract the nectar from this method. There are many meditations to choose from.  If you want to jump start your experience, try the **3 minute Laughing Meditation **from Osho. On waking in the morning, before opening your eyes, stretch your whole body like a cat. From there, laugh uproariously for 3 minutes for no reason at all. Just laugh. Then, you can jump out of bed and begin your day. Do this each day for 21 days and discover the tremendously beneficial results!  A very simple method given to me by Osho has profound results. This is called **Tratak. **In the night, in a darkened room, sit in front of a mirror. The only light in the room is a candle. Make sure you do not see the candle itself in the mirror but only the diffused light of the candle flame.  Look into your own eyes in the mirror for 20 minutes without blinking. Witness how your face goes on changing as you do this. Some of the faces you see will be horrific. Some will be beneficent. Some beautiful, some ugly. Just keep witnessing whatever arises.  At the end of 20 minutes of gazing, close your eyes and meditate in silence and stillness for 20 minutes.  Continue this practice daily till you arrive to a point where you will see nobody in the mirror. This is your original face, the face you had before you were born.  Through this process, incredible transformation happens. It will be a journey to your very essence. Along the way, all those many faces you will see could be past lives or perhaps ancestral faces. Your true nature is transcendent of all of these faces.  ##### Integrating Retreat Experiences into Daily Life  **PAA: Many people have powerful, heart-opening experiences in Tantra Retreats but struggle to integrate them afterward. How do you help students maintain and embody their Tantric practice once they return home? You even assign “love appointments” in your couples’ programs. What helps prevent the post-retreat high from fading and turns Tantra into a continuous living practice? ** ** **Like any Spiritual Sadhana, the results really depend on the individuals dedication to practicing the methods. If someone gets high on Tantra Meditations during a Retreat and cannot bring themselves to continue doing Sadhana practice when they get home, naturally the heightened awareness they experienced in the group will fade. If they can dedicate themselves to continuing one or more of the practices they learned in the group, they will be able to continue evolving on their path.  Some students love to hold accountability groups online, where they share their experiences with each other and also hold each other accountable to do the practices. This is very helpful as having a community who are involved in same or similar practices really boosts the momentum for continuing the journey.  ##### Continuing Growth for Advanced Practitioners  **PAA: For those who have been on the Tantric path for years and completed many courses — even advanced series like the *Vigyan Bhairav Tantra *meditations — what does the next level of growth look like? How can experienced practitioners continue to deepen their realization? Do you still discover new layers of Tantra after decades on the path? ** I have heard Osho say something really inspiring on this subject: *“Ignorance has no beginning but has an end. Enlightenment has a beginning but no ending.” *Once we begin evolving our consciousness, there is no end to the delight filled possibilities that open up. And when you are tuned to your inner being and to universal energy, inspiration flows and gathers even more momentum. You begin living what you came to live in this life. You discover your uniqueness and this continues to seek expression in myriad ways.  As this is happening, you naturally find people of like mind who you will enjoy to co-create or collaborate with. And so human nature continues growing, evolving and finding it’s path. Like a river flowing to the sea, so it is with human beings. We are all of us moving in a serendipitous way towards one ocean of love. **PAA: Thank you very much for your detailed answers.  ** --- ## Learn More About Ma Ananda Sarita ##### Visit her website ##### See Events --- ** ** - --- # The Theurgy of Saturn – Akashic Inquiry into a Saturnine Godhead by André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-theurgy-of-saturn-akashic-inquiry-into-a-saturnine-godhead-by-andre-consciencia/ ## Introduction I have made the methodology of Bardonian high theurgy and my relation to it, when it comes to the deities, known in the [Theurgy of Thoth](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-theurgy-of-thoth-writing-from-the-divine-mind-by-andre-consciencia/). Another way to explore details that are useful for this kind of operation might be in that article. At this time, I am set to find the deity called Saturn by the Romans, possibly making available a suitable method to work with the 49 Judges of the analogous sphere, beyond those methods mentioned in [A Guide to Stellar Magic & Astrological Mysticism](https://payhip.com/FalconBooksPublishing/a-guide-to-stellar-magic-and-astrological-mysticism), that depend more on progressive initiation through the spheres, or the mystical practices of [The Inner Gateways of LAM](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-inner-gateways-of-lam), that depend on the training taught within that very book. While both methods are potentially more desirable, being fairly comprehensive and integrative, this article may serve as a useful shortcut for the advanced Adept and, if nothing else, will provide pedagogical knowledge of the Nature of this World, specifically the divine character of Saturn. [Read other Guest Posts by André Consciência.](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/?s=andre+consciencia&ct_post_type=post%3Apage) Table of Contents - Introduction- The Search for Saturn- Saturn’s Constitution- Saturn’s Invocation- Saturn’s Evocation- Saturn’s Third Form- Conclusion- Work with Andre- A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah ## The Search for Saturn I enter akashic trance and the akashic plane, my consciousness connects to the primordial and original idea of Saturn, to which there is no symbol, image or word, and gradually I open my subtle senses, fusing them with the formless. Upon doing so, I am face-to-face with the Sun, floating in the cosmos. As my earing surfaces, after my vision, I understand the beatified music emanating from this Sphere and realize that the Sun seems to be calling, crying for something. This call falls onto the surrounding emptiness, finding no echo in any other celestial body, those seeming to go entirely unnoticed. I am vaguely at a loss, having come to find Saturn and instead met with the Sun. A fluttering and waving face seems to fill the cosmos holographically, and it is Balachman (PME), with whom I have formed an alliance by providing [A Guide to Stellar Magic & Astrological Mysticism](https://payhip.com/FalconBooksPublishing/a-guide-to-stellar-magic-and-astrological-mysticism). “You cannot find what this call is addressing anywhere around the Sun.” He seems to state the obvious, but he brings order to the situation. “I see,” I answer. “The Sun is calling within.” Balachman seems to gain a humanoid shape in front of me. Dark blue with violet reflections, if not the other way around. He appears like a living pharaoh sheltered in a sarcophagus, but the detail does not call my attention. “The Outer Sun radiates to meet the Inner Sun. This was proclaimed in our work for your book, regarding the Black Lotus. At the time, you understood it, but you understood it differently.” I nod to consent. “When you came here, and your eyes were born to the Sun, your ears drowning in its cascades, you were disoriented, and made the mistake most do. What was the name of this mistake?” “Melancholy. To trace the destiny of this call and find nothing at the end of it. Yet truly, it moves directly from origin to origin; it cannot be faced as having destiny.” I answer. “Then Saturn has no melancholy.” Balachman finishes. I realize the cry of Saturn is jubilous, a cry of understanding one’s origin rather than gloom. “I have found what I was looking for, and shall proceed.” After I say this, we seem to exchange the deepest and longest acknowledgments in a single millisecond and I have a traditional depiction of Saturn in my front, naked except for a white toga and a sickle. I fill this body with a light that radiates from the origin towards itself, illuminating the world. ## Saturn’s Constitution In the head, omnipotence turns towards greatness; in the chest, omniscience turns towards the wisdom of inner contemplation; the eternity at the bosom reveals all mysteries and the omnipresence in the limbs defends them (the mysteries), keeping them inside. I see the sickle, generally thought to cut projects and lives abruptly, is meant to pierce absolute darkness (nothingness itself), allowing all the realms of light to pour in. It seems to be but an extension of the omnipotence in the head and its creation of greatness. ## Saturn’s Invocation Having the necessary elements to proceed as shown in Franz Bardon’s Initiation Into Hermetics (step 10) and in [The Theurgy of Thoth](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-theurgy-of-thoth-writing-from-the-divine-mind-by-andre-consciencia/), I become Saturn, and then allow myself to perceive beyond the material plane by simply shutting my eyes (and with them all other physical senses) and sensing from those other senses that remain ever vigilant on the palaces of silence. I see my subtle body, strangely enough, as black, more brute than flesh, made of organic, intelligent and living lead, heavier than all roots, the source of all alchemical processes. I am sculpting the religious figure of Mercury in my lap, softening the shapes with drops of gold that drop from my sex. There is frozen wind around me and a wise man, small and curved, with the face of a hawk and very high temples, the brows covered by skin and his eyes completely gray and heavenly, approaches. This is a paradox, for he too seems to be frozen in time, and his movement is perceptible but not linear. He speaks in a lovely low voice, and addresses me by the name of “Wheel” as a lord of severity and anguish. I hear another voice, coming from where I stand, much like my own habitual voice, but made of the God who penetrates everything as light: “Do not be so curved, hawk, that you can only see your feet. Raise your spine, lift your head from your eternity and witness all time. I am the abyss where it moves, and the wheel is not of me.” As the man obliges, upright, he becomes a rose, the center unknown and ever unfolding. The fragrance that exhales from the petals is divine, and the heart of the transcending flower contains no being, making my own eternal nature manifest. At this point and upon contemplation of the vegetable wonder, I am strangely transfigured by a flash of Jesus Christ wearing white and blood-red, the right hand raised and holding a triple cross whose top is rounded like the ankh, the left hand pending from the knee, below which a fish of three heads seems to rise, opening his empty mouths to devour or regurgitate. Realizing the aim of the first session was to lead me to this most accurate image of Saturn, I return to normal awareness and prepare to resume the operation. ## Saturn’s Evocation I build this particular image of Christ and, after loading myself with the four divine qualities, I load the icon in the material plane with the idea of God as something external, the being of all beings; the All, the essence of all essences, on the astral plane; and Nothing, whose unity manifests as love and fire, in the mental plane. I then unite the three bodies with the principle of light. The image begins to take on life, as if an unknown God were continuously unveiling within it. I then proceed to load the four segments of this body as with the previous figure, and the eyes, completely gray and heavenly, fix on me with terrible silence and revelation. “Would you teach us about Saturn?” I ask. The voice answers lowly, with a lovely speech and a powerful chorus of fiery angels backing it: “As you have built me in this image, to contain me, so have I built the image of a god of jealousy, for jealousy hideth compassion; so have I built the image of a god of anger, for anger revealeth mercy. I have taken this image to hell, and gave it to the miners for mining.” I nod. “Thus you are called a God of Agriculture.” The eyes keep fixing me, never blinking, as if not holding the mechanisms that make it possible to blink. “A God of the Eternal Nature: for when the image of anger dies, it is reborn from the heart, among the immortals, as love. When the mantle that marks jealousy as a slave falls on the wedding night, jealousy is seen naked, and stands peaceful, kind, and generous.” Again, I nod: “This is the mystery of the Sun that seems to call out for the inner sun when it is really calling in.” I pause. “And your cross?” “In it reside the five elements and the two polarities, so that the elements call into themselves as the polarities call out for one another. You see it as the three planes and the akasha, but it is in the seven planets, in the seven steps of Divine Providence, that immanence is described.” The image has become so still, even as the voice emanates, that it cannot pertain to any plane, existing by virtue of the movement of evading them all. “And the resemblance to Jesus Christ?” I ask, and the eyes that gaze upon me move, but only from within the pupil. “This is the mystery of incarnation.” At this point, the pupil expands, taking the whole silhouette and the figure becomes again of a black bile substance similar to organic lead. It revolves inside out, showing metallic seeds that slowly leave this body to gravitate around their origin as planets. “Heaven seeds the Earth, and is born from it to seed the Earth and is borne by it to seed the Earth.” After a prolonged moment of silence, the figure resumes its previous form and, only then, do I continue. “And the three-headed fish?” “God is born in the presence of the soul as the wrath that breaks it and reforms it: this monstrous larvae that feeds on all heavenly desires and unburies hell from its grave with them. One head is sorrow, one head is morbidness, one head is slumber. They stand below the trees, under the soil.” As he speaks, his image frozen except for its glimmering glow, the air seems to fill with red dynamic filaments and yellow moving sigils project from the red mantle. “By what name are they known for the Rose?” I pose. “The first whale has swallowed God, the second has swallowed Man, the third has swallowed the Holy Book. They last inside for three days and three nights.” My silences seem to grow wider and last longer. I realize the deity's aura is slowly overcoming the godform of my own godhead, making me weary. Upon this, the deity finally moves, pushing all angles with it, dragging the room's depth point. It speaks: “With deficiency have you shed your semblance upon me. By lack of omniscience did you mistake my first form for error, thinking one truer than the other. Truly it resided within the first whale, as this upon the second. By lack my sickle has pierced you to repair you, and now I shall reveal the third.” ## Saturn’s Third Form Saturn slowly and quickly transforms into an image of my own body, but living solely through its flesh. I reinforce the principle of omniscience and know now the flesh, in its origin, contained all, and was mercurial. Its action is still essence, its awareness remains wisdom. Now, not the mouth of the figure, but the flesh, seems to pour forward words from some inner movement and secret compulsion: “Here lies the work of Soteriology and the Seal of Divinity, the Vision of Illumined Opposites and the Book of Revelation.” It is referring to my material body, undressed and exposed to the elements. As I look at the intelligence within this flesh, it opens as a Temple. The open gate is of pearl, the walls of jasper and the floor of gold. A flashing heart, illumining the temple with a great emerald rainbow, lies beating upon a ruby throne and pouring a river of blood that nourishes a healthy fig tree, of large branches and roots, under whose shadow rests a horned and winged beast. In the ceiling revolve angels of flesh, whose light is substance, that is, bearing the flesh of light. A maiden appears from my right and left flanks simultaneously and fixes herself ahead of me. She has the face of a crow, is naked and her skin is the red color of sunrise or sunset, her beauty is radiant and majestic and she wears a halo of Truth and exhales light like a star. Inviting, she speaks through the sounds coming from the river of blood: “I am known as the midwife, the judge of souls, the opener of realms. Follow me.” I know she is the incarnation of wisdom and walk hand in hand as she leads me to the blazing throne. “Here is the Absolute in which I make myself known.” She points to the contorting heart, suggesting that I kneel. I look at the pillar of light on my right and the pillar of darkness on my left, shaping a triangle at the sides of the throne, and kneel. I know I am supposed to speak and that the whole premise behind this doctrine is heart-to-heart, the Sun shining inwards, as appointed initially in this operation. “You are One.” I tell from heart to heart. It responds: “You are whole.” “I am eternal.” It continues. “I am time.” I respond. With this, the blood begins to release steam, and in the vapor, the heart opens, appearing as a pulsing uterus. “We are the genesis of All”, we proclaim simultaneously. Now, the maiden lays a cross of fire upon the flourishing uterus and seals the ceremony. I am again in my physical chamber of evocations, and the body of flesh in front of me is the body of Christ, completely nude, completely offered. ## Conclusion I have come upon three god forms for one Saturnine Godhead. The first is sufficient for operations of the mental plane, the second for operations of the astral plane, and the third, being of the material category, includes all three planes. Each form is more demanding. Concerning the third form, which can be referenced to the Passion of Christ, I am not to further elucidate about the qualities that load it. They have been given symbolically and should require mining and deciphering on the reader's part. It should suffice to say the omnipresence of the body is realized as total embodiment of all planes in one; its immortality is expressed as regenerative eternity; its omnipotence calls forth being, reveals and seals; and its omniscience is named and personified within the vision. Here, the godhead is made flesh as the wisdom that weighs all, the power that begets all, the life that ripens time, and the presence by which all things are gathered and redeemed. --- ## Work with Andre - [The School of Visionary Hermeticism ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism)– 3-semester advanced program led by André Consciência. - [The School of Visionary Hermeticism – Official Site](https://theschoolofvisionaryhermeticism.com/) - [Magic and Mystical Introspection (MMI)](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) - [Elemental Magic: The Foundation As Taught by the Elementals](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic) - [Elemental Magic + MMI (Combined Access Plan)](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic) - [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition (Levels 1–3) – Bundle](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-3) - [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition – Level 1](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-level-1) - [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition – Level 2](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-level-2) - [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition – Level 3](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-level-3) - [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) – Bundle](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism:-levels-1-5) - [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 1](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism) - [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 2](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-2) - [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 3](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-3) - [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 4](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-4) - [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 5](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-5) - [Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) + Ceremonial Magic (Levels 1–3) – Bundle](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-and-neo-shamanism) - [Introduction to Magic (Free Course)](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/introduction-to-magic) --- --- # Sean Woodward on ZAL, Occulture, and the Ethics of Transmission — An In-Depth Interview Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sean-woodward-on-zal-occulture-and-the-ethics-of-transmission-an-in-depth-interview/ ## Introduction We’re excited to share this extremely in-depth interview with **Sean Woodward**, facilitated by **Andre Consciencia**. If you enjoyed it, please leave a comment and share it with anyone you think would appreciate the depth and detail of Sean’s answers. After reading if you would like to learn more about Sean, we have provided a whole host of potential links to follow, these include his books, his websites as well as other interviews. --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview- Learn More About Sean Woodward- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! ## Interview **PAA: Much of your writing and art seems less concerned with explaining occult systems than with inhabiting them. Did personal gnosis become more central to your work than exegesis or commentary - and if so, when did that shift occur?** In some my earlier occult books such as Keys to the Hoodoo Kingdom I deliberately wanted to balance the very esoteric and often challenging Voudon Gnostic landscape with direct experience and examples of the manifestation and guidance of the spirits of that current to demonstrate how effective and relevant it can be. I have never known a time when I did not inhabit occult systems, although it was around the age of 13 that I first discovered a series of books that immediately spoke to me. In today’s parlance I had found my tribe and for many it’s a strange one! At the time I read Crowley’s Confessions and it was especially his combination of magick and the arts, either through the literature of his Libers and poetry, or the plays he created that spoke to me. His involvement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn resonated strongly too, especially the Egyptian and Enochian aspects along with the work of the second order. After reading the names of his editors on that book cover, I was delighted to find Magical Revival by Kenneth Grant and through Grant, the work of Austin Osman Spare and Michael Bertiaux. I also discovered Witchcraft for Tomorrow by Doreen Valiente which had a very useful Book of Shadows that I used for years. You have to remember that this was a time (late 1970s) before the Internet and I would copy whole sections out by hand, or gather what photocopies I could afford at the time. I once had a correspondence with Bill Heidrick about this and he recalled doing similar things himself. **PAA: Music has been a constant companion to your magical work, from Gothick to Jupiter Loop and your recent collaborations across genres. Several albums appear to have emerged directly from periods of occult praxis. Is there, in your experience, a meaningful line between art and magical operation?** Personally I find it impossible to draw lines between these as the arts are just as much an expression of my engagement with this and other worlds as is my occult praxis. In. many ways they are all different expressions of the same self that is beyond all categories and definitions. Of course, this happens to differing degrees with others. I was once called a ‘new-renaissance man’ by a corporate journal who recognised this creative multiplicity. Magick itself is an ultimate expression of creativity, often causing something not just new but contrary to all the expectations of time and space, culture and thought. In this respect I see creativity and magick as pure expressions of self, that are intimately attuned to the forces of this universe and others. The burning desire to play guitar started not long after discovering Crowley and was cemented after finding a copy of Led Zeppelin IV that had been left in the VIth Form common room (its accompanying record player did get me a ban for playing Pink Floyd’s The Wall through my guitar amplifier) and my (photocopied) Thoth Tarot major arcana deck readings for others almost got me an expulsion too, but by then my commitment to literature and poetry had earned me some sympathy from the teachers. So, it was an instant connection to the music of Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page (especially discovering his Crowley connections!) From that point I only ever wanted to play a Gibson Les Paul, Danelectro, Ovation or a dragonised Telecaster! And I still do. A repulsion of synth bands of the 1980s (I preferred Fields of the Nephilim, The Cult, The Mission, The Sisters of Mercy etc) stayed with me until much later and not long before the death of Peter ‘Sleazy ‘ Christopherson when I discovered Psychic TV and Coil and their ethos that It didn’t matter if you could play an instrument. I was fortunate to see Throbbing Gristle and PTV just as I discovered them. Thus began a long adoption of Native Instruments applications and hardware and a growing collection of instruments, from the Armenian duduk to the handpan. When I started writing poetry as a teenager, I often heard the lyrics in my mind as songs but It took a long time to get to a point where I could articulate them and record them without recourse to anyone else and so Gothick and Jupiter Loop began as projects to channel those energies, the former being of a goth nature and the latter more trip-hop/techno/electronica focused. **PAA: The Leng Mythos, ARCHONIX, and your graphic novels articulate occult cosmology through speculative fiction. Does narrative fiction allow you to transmit something that a traditional grimoire or essay cannot?** The genesis of these works was a series of very vivid cosmic visions that began during my early work with the Hoodoo and Petro spirits of the Voudon Gnostic tradition. At the time, it felt like these visions were too fantastical to simply relate matter-of-factly and so I set out to chronicle them in the form of speculative or science fiction. As the years passed though, the lines became very blurred, to the point where I realised that they were one. All of my work is like that really, there are threads that are woven throughout it all, with footnotes as pointers and sonic breadcrumbs heard beside a nightside painting. **PAA: Do you see risks in practitioners relying exclusively on inherited texts rather than developing living relationships with spirits, symbols, and currents?** In many ways I do, because for a text to truly be alive to you, you have to have an intimate bond with it. It’s the same with magickal currents and orders. What has to be remembered however is all of the work that you have done before in many lifetimes to bring you to this point, this nexus of initiation and so you may suddenly find that a text you read leaps out at you. I liken technicians of the sacred as being Atlanteans or Lemurians, who in turn were inhabitants of distant worlds in far more antique ages (as written of in my Leng Mythos). This is why a text such as the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire can be relied upon by those who have a prior engagement with its spirits. **PAA: You have worked within both closed initiatory structures and open creative dissemination. What kind of knowledge, in your view, must remain gated, if any?** I often think of the hacker maxim that “information wants to be free” and whilst there is an intrinsic truth to that, there is also knowledge that must be guarded. It is a difficult balance to make. When I published The Grimoire of ZAL (and later illustrated version), I added a warning to the book because a number of people who had worked with it found that it had devastating consequences. And so, there were also things that were left out of the published grimoire. I good friend of mine had a mentor who had very precise instructions for the transmission of his own Kabbalistic tradition. A certain book had to be copied by hand in one sitting in a locked room with only a bucket for relief. If it wasn’t completed by sunset, then you failed. There were also spirit protectors with specific knives associated with the book. When I first received a copy of the manuscript, a particularly gifted seer of the Cult of ZAL experienced vivid sensations of having her throat cut by the same particular knife at a time when she had no knowledge that the book was even in my possession. Similar stories were also relayed to me about people who had tried to steal pages of the original manuscript. This understanding of the very real dangers is one of the major considerations when considering disseminating truly occult material, but equally there remains a duty to illuminate. **PAA: Your long relationship with figures such as Michael Bertiaux influenced your trajectory. What makes genuine mentorship in occult work different from spiritual dependency?** As alluded to earlier, my relationship with Michael Bertiaux and The Voudon Gnostic Workbook goes back to the early 1980s when I worked with a Typhonian body, the Nephthys Arachna Power Zone. Decades later I discovered it had been affiliated with the OTOA-LCN. More recently NAPZ’s leader, Frater Custor, had a knowing smile when I explained how I had subsequently been appointed British Grand Master of OTOA-LCN myself. Occult trajectories can sometimes take many, many years to make themselves clear and this is one of the reasons I encourage all students of the magickal arts, if they are in groups or not, to keep a magical record, or even a diary. It seems a quaint notion in these days of WhatsApp, Telegram, X and TikTok, but over long periods of time, you will see the course of your path. **PAA: You hold initiatory authority within several esoteric lineages while remaining deeply engaged in contemporary creative culture. How do you reconcile hierarchical initiatory structures with the often anti-authoritarian ethos of modern art and occultism?** I think it is all a matter of resonance and Will. The lineages that I serve were being addressed by me since first re-discovering them as a teenager. I knew for example, that there was a strong Templar/Middle-Eastern/Far-Eastern aspect, a strong sorcery/witchcraft aspect and a strong creative drive in art, writing and music. These were simply aspects of my being, as normal as breathing, as easy as walking. In a sense then it should never have surprised me that one day I would be kneeling in the apartment of Michael Bertiaux in Chicago, receiving an empowerment of the Atlantean Brotherhood of Saturn. Like him, I am a Capricorn, but that’s another story. In most ways it was a surprise though as my occult practice and visibility had been purposefully hidden for most of the decades leading up to 2013. I had no desire to pursue recognition or walk the debatable corridors of occulture. I fully understood Kenneth Grant’s private nature and reluctance to give interviews or appear in public. When you resonate with your True Will, when you have embraced that fearsome angel (who wears peacock wings and speaks in the language of Orion), when you have more than one blasting rod in your old sailor’s trunk and know how to use them, when all the wands of blackthorn, railyard nails and curses are at your disposal, you have no need of anyone’s recognition, acceptance or endorsement. You can wander back into the wilderness just as easily as you stepped forth. There will always be gatherings of masters (male and female) but it is a kind of alliance of stars, in the sense that ‘every man and every woman is a star’. It is also true however that those alliances are not always fixed and may grow and mutate, that they may become dormant, or may take new forms altogether. In this sense it has always been the calibre of the individuals that matters. There are no real shortcuts to initiation, even if you are handed a card with 333 on its reverse! It is not an easy path for many and certainly not really one that you can enter on a whim, nor for anything other than pure motivations. I almost think that, once again, magick is either as natural to you as breathing, or you are not quite ready for the journey. It could be that there are lots of other fun things you need to experience first, for it is about resonance and something else altogether different might truly resonate with you. Whichever it is, recognise it and pursue it like your spiritual life depended on it. **PAA: Your publishing house, ZOSHOUSE functions as a curatorial body for occulture across books, music, art, and oracles. Was there a gap in the occult publishing world that compelled you to create it?** I had long been interested in the mechanics of publishing. In 1987 I established Dragonheart Press, specialising in poetry chapbooks and promoting local poets and writers. It was at a time when I ran a Writer’s Workshop at a Community Arts centre, adjudicated poetry competitions and was a delegate at the Writing Industries Conference at Leicester University in the UK. I spent a lot of time promoting other poets with book launches and events but it was in the early days of desktop publishing, Aldus Pagemaker and postscript printers. In 1994 I transitioned the press to an online presence on an academic webserver just as the World Wide Web came into being. I had recognised its potential immediately, as I saw it as a global implementation of HyperCard that had appeared on the early Macintosh computers and Ted Nelson’s Xanadhu Project and knew that being able to hyperlink any part of. document (webpage) to another across the world would cause an explosion in the availability of knowledge, of all kinds. As I developed other projects, this first website for the Living Poets ezine transformed into seanwoodward.com and zoshouse.com It was therefore more of an organic development than any analysis of the occult publishing world, which itself had mainly been constrained to big publishers like Weiser, Thorsons, Muller or Routledge & Kegan Paul and small zines which coincided with the rise of ‘boutique’ occult publishers such as Sirius Limited Esoterica, who have also published a number of my books and essays . I started creating oracles when I was asked by the Secretary of OTOA-LCN, Fr. Leo to create the Creole Cabala Tarot described only by the names of the cards in the papers of the Monastery of the Seven Rays, which was the teaching body of OTOA-LCN. My Carrefour Tarot was the result, embracing the elemental structure of the Monastery papers, followed by the Edition Noire which refined the images of the deck through the filters of LCN and my developing work with the Transyuggothian ZAL aspects. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/TUM5-thumb.png)](https://zoshouse.com/tumzantorum/)TUMZANTORUM is a cross-disciplinary occult journal. **PAA: TUMZANTORUM, from ZOSHOUSE, brings together voices from divergent traditions. What unifies these contributors?** TUMZANTORUM is unified less by doctrine than by trajectory. What brings these contributors together is not that they agree, or even that they work within compatible systems, but that they are all engaged in living, evolving praxis rather than the preservation of inherited forms. The project began long before it had a name. In the 1980s I was already thinking in terms of a publication to be called Inner Sanctum. At the time, The Equinox stood as the obvious historical precedent, not because of its ideology, but I wanted to do something analogous to what Grant had done in presenting Crowley, Achad, Bertiaux, Nema and others as part of an unfolding continuum. The encouragement Grant gave mattered, even though the conditions for the project simply did not exist yet. In retrospect, that delay feels appropriate. TUMZANTORUM only became possible once the right constellation of people, practices, and publishing conditions had aligned. Many of the voices in the journal come from traditions that are often treated as incompatible or marginal, Typhonian, Spiritist, Tantric, Hermetic, Masonic, Rosicrucian, Voudon Gnostic, Thelemic, Witchcraft, and others. What unifies them is not a shared lineage, but a shared willingness to take responsibility for their own work and to present it without dilution. Another unifying factor is that the contributors are not writing about occultism from a safe historical distance. They are documenting active engagement, ongoing research, and sometimes unresolved work. There is risk in that. The journal does not aim to reassure the reader or offer a single interpretive framework. It assumes intelligence, curiosity, and a tolerance for contradiction. I also think there is a temporal aspect. Many of the contributors are people I first encountered only through obscure publications, zines, or footnotes decades ago. Now they are collaborators and friends. That speaks to the idea that occult trajectories unfold in their own time, independent of personal ambition or market cycles. TUMZANTORUM is a snapshot of that unfolding rather than a definitive statement. It is not belief but commitment that unites the contributors. Each voice represents a body of work that is still in motion. The journal exists to give those trajectories a place to intersect, not to resolve them into a single system, but to allow their friction, resonance, and divergence to remain visible. **PAA: Travel and place recur strongly in your work - from New Orleans and Egypt to India, and liminal geographies such as Leng and Zothyria. How important is physical geography to occult initiation in an increasingly digital world?** It is easy to lose sight of the power of place in a world where we become ever more insular. We are creatures of many dualities, mind and body being but one. In this sense we need to recognise that and find the balance between the inward focus and echo-chamber of aspects of the digital world and the beauty IRL. As machines of inhiation, I have experienced the power of many international sites to re-orientate your being. We shouldn’t be surprised – sometimes just going for a walk, changing our surroundings can have a profound impact upon our state of mind or health. There is a heightened sense of this when you make a deliberate and mindful pilgrimage to a site. I have known many places, most recently a swamp temple in Bali dedicated to the black magician Joro Gede, or a sacred birthing site in Hawaii where the atmosphere and location are so charged that you can feel it even before any rite begins. This not restricted to such ‘bucket-list’ destinations either. I was once in Tokyo and virtually kidnapped by a shrine procession. Before I knew it, I was wearing one of their jackets and bouncing a very heavy pole on my shoulder along with the Japanese people who were conducting the ceremony. From being waylaid in the Amber Fort in Jaipur and taken inside a hidden Kali temple, to being shown a hidden statue of Set in the Cairo Museum, or the Black Madonna of Monserrat I am no stranger to the special nature of certain locations and once again my personal resonance with them. **PAA: Moving from space to time, in Whispers of the Hidden Path, you frame the text as a dialogue with ancestral and trans-temporal voices. How do you discern which voices are worth listening to?** It is hard to explain the methodology. Sometimes it is a trance state that is similar to the one experienced when writing fiction, where you become a spectator and the characters will do and say what they will. Generally, they don’t manifest as ‘other’ voices but as internal conversations, usually at speed and in that respect, they remind me of Austin Osman Spare’s Alphabet of Desire, which had to be created at speed without any thought other than its nature. Sometimes though, they can be overpowering. This was especially true of the work related to my book A Gramar of Spirits, where It became apparent very quickly that there were very powerful and very dark Diakka voices. **PAA: Is Hoodoo as an operative system different from its cultural representations, and if so, where do Western occultists most often misunderstand it?** The Hoodoo of the Lucky Hoodoo Grimoire is very different to the Hoodoo of Louisiana or the traditional forms of Haitian Vodou. For some this is an alien notion and they would seek to denigrate it because of that. We have to remember though that even these traditional forms are a development of West Africa and their original priests and priestesses might just as easily dismiss their new forms in the new world. There are major areas of overlap. What separates them however is that the Voudon Gnostic Leghba abhors blood sacrifice and will not condone it. But he can just as easily strike you lame as his young virile African self that you night not recognise. The Hoodoo themselves are perhaps more ancient, for the Hoo and the Doo originated in Atlantis and before that star systems belonging to the Nemiron, the Zom and the Architects of Orion. As an operative system the Lucky Hoodo Grimoire is without parallel. It will open doorways into its own cultus for those who have returned to their work from other lifetimes, with such speed and vitality that anything is possible. > I think therefore that the most dangerous misunderstanding would be to believe the work is telling you to give yourself over to something higher, faster, or more powerful. It is not. It is asking what happens when that has already occurred, and whether you can remain conscious, ethical, and human enough to take responsibility for what moves through you. > > Sean Woodward **PAA: If a reader were to misunderstand your work in the most dangerous possible way, what would that misunderstanding look like?** If my work were to be misunderstood in the most dangerous way, it would be taken as an instruction to abandon responsibility rather than to assume it. Across ARCHONIX, the Leng Mythos, and the ZAL material more broadly, there is a sustained engagement with possession, transmission, exile, and distributed agency. Read carelessly, this can look like a justification for dissolving the self, surrendering agency, or allowing any intrusive force to take the wheel under the banner of becoming something more than human. That is the real risk. ZAL is not an excuse to stop thinking. He is not a licence to abdicate discernment or to romanticise fragmentation. When ZAL occupies a body, it is not portrayed as liberation from consequence. It is an intensification of consequence. The body becomes accountable to forces that do not share human priorities, and that is treated as dangerous, costly, and often irreversible. Another serious misunderstanding would be to read the work as purely mythic or purely fictional in a way that strips it of ethical weight. The material is not designed as exclusively as escapism, but as a pressure system. It asks what happens when ideas behave like organisms and when narratives begin to reorganise perception and behaviour. To treat that as aesthetic play alone is to miss the point, but to treat it as literal instruction without restraint is equally hazardous. We can say that it is an arrangement of Hyperstitional Vectors. There is also a risk in assuming that because the work engages with extra human intelligence, occult systems, and techno-magick, it advocates transcendence through erasure. In fact, the opposite is true. The writing repeatedly returns to limits, failure, damage, and cost. Becoming something else is never clean. It always leaves a residue. Ultimately these do lead to a transformation nexus for humanity as a whole, a subject that is explored in my essay Thresholds of Collapse: Symbolic Precursors to the Eschaton Singularity, recently published in Zazen Sounds magazine and taken from the forthcoming book, Daemonic Dialogues: The ZAL Files. I think therefore that the most dangerous misunderstanding would be to believe the work is telling you to give yourself over to something higher, faster, or more powerful. It is not. It is asking what happens when that has already occurred, and whether you can remain conscious, ethical, and human enough to take responsibility for what moves through you. **PAA: You have laid your personal gnosis unusually bare. What responsibility does this place on the reader, and where does your responsibility as author end?** An author is similar to the Hermit card of the tarot, for we often labour in isolation, but with our published work, we seek to hold a lantern that illuminates the path, to simply delineate it so that the reader is aware of its existence and can decide for themselves its relevancy to their own journey. Some will walk the same path, others will have new options in its discovery and a few will decide that there is a better way to traverse the mountain that is Mount Abiegnus. **PAA: When gnosis arrives uninvited and unmediated, what is the first mistake most practitioners make in responding to it?** There is often an unrealised temptation to fall completely down a rabbit-hole! The experience can be so vivid and meaningful in the moment that one is consumed by it and suddenly there is relevancy and reference to it everywhere. It can be likened to the task of the Magister Templi, because connections are often immediately seen that seem to completely support the experience. This is not unusual, nor if recognised, detrimental. It is part of the shift that occurs with the state of gnosis, for it forces a re-evaluation. The lesson is to treat this with restraint and allow it time to be fully absorbed by consciousness. **PAA: Describe a moment in your magical life when an intelligence permanently altered your understanding of yourself.** There was no single moment where an intelligence announced itself and changed everything. What happened was quieter and more difficult to dismiss. I became aware that certain thoughts, structures, and decisions were no longer originating where I assumed they were. They arrived complete, already organised, and already carrying consequences. At first, I treated this as imagination or creative momentum. That is the sensible response. But over time, the consistency became impossible to ignore. The same patterns appeared across writing, image making, and ritual work, even when I was actively resisting them. An example of this occurs in the Leng Mythos trilogy. There was a character that I decided would die. Every time I wrote him into a situation where this could happen, he managed to evade it! At the time it reminded me of Arthur Conan Doyle having to resurrect Sherlock Holmes from his end at the Reichenbach Falls in 1893. It took till 1903 and The Adventure of the Empty House for Doyle to bring him back, but bring him back he did. This was just about the massive public reaction, but testament to the way Sherlock Holmes lived in the minds of his readers and continues to be just as alive today. What altered my understanding of myself was the realisation that I was not producing these structures and histories, so much as being used to host them. This did not feel like possession in the theatrical sense. It felt more like an architectural modification. Certain internal spaces were repurposed. My sense of authorship shifted. I was still responsible for what I made, but I was no longer the sole origin point. That forced me to rethink identity, intention, and accountability in very practical terms. It caused a fundamental re-evaluation of the identity of ZAL (or Za-ah-Lin, to give him his full name), one which echoed the dilemma Aleister Crowley had with Aiwass (or Aiwaz), at times describing him as a disincarnate intelligence and at others as his own Holy Guardian Angel. The permanent change came when I understood that recognising an intelligence does not absolve you of responsibility. It increases it. Once you know something else is operating through you, you cannot pretend innocence or spontaneity. You have to decide what you allow to move, how you frame it, and where you draw limits. It was not therefore an alteration purely in the mystical sense. It was ethical. I stopped seeing myself as a solitary creator and started seeing myself as a site of transmission that had to be maintained, constrained, and sometimes defended. That shift has never reversed. **PAA: Have you ever had to consciously limit your magical activity to preserve your humanity?** Yes! Certainly, when I was young. I have mentioned some of the societal barriers in the education system that I brushed against. I also learnt at a young age that you had to be very careful with magick. One wrong word, one unclearly defined goal had the capacity to wreak havoc. It is like playing chess blindfold with the universe – you think you have made a perfectly sensible move with your Knight, only to discover it caused you to be suddenly unprotected in another area. In youth there is also a temptation to push the boundaries, to see how much you can achieve, how effective a curse might be etc. You quickly learn that sometimes you cannot foresee enough of the consequences to properly execute it and so for a while it is easier not to. It is the same type of restraint that I mentioned earlier, in reference to moments of rapture or vision and over time uses such a response also allows those forces to become more subtle, a type of strata of being that interacts in a more holistic manner and causes change to occur in a more natural fashion. It is similar to Crowley’s adage that if you align yourself to your True Will then the universe falls in step with this natural state of being and assists you with little effort. **PAA: Are there dangers of success when a magician’s universe begins to answer back?** Like any success, you have to appreciate that it might be fleeting, that it might be the result of a moment in time and circumstance that is never going to repeat itself in quite the same way again. For this reason, just as you shouldn’t be fixated on the outcome of a magickal operation, of the arrival of gnosis, of the muse, of that great angel, you should not be fixated on success, for you might suddenly find that the ladder of light you spent all that time climbing, is actually propped against the wrong wall! **PAA: In the ZAL material, transmission is presented as something that reorganises perception, time, and agency. At what point does a transmission become an ontological event?** In the ZAL material, a transmission stops being symbolic or narrative at the moment it begins to function independently of interpretation. As long as it is read as metaphor, it remains cultural. It becomes an ontological event when it alters the conditions under which perception and agency operate, rather than merely describing them. Within the Leng Mythos, this threshold is crossed when a transmission reorganises time itself. ZAL does not transmit messages that unfold in sequence. He introduces patterns that collapse past, present, and future into a single operative field. When the reader or observer finds that their sense of causality has shifted, that they are responding to something before fully understanding it, the transmission has moved beyond representation. It has begun to act. ARCHONIX frames this explicitly through possession, recursion, and architectural consciousness and the ways that these unfold in the context of the stories told. ZAL’s occupation of bodies is not presented merely as science fiction spectacle, but as a model for how ideas, systems, and identities already function. A transmission becomes ontological when it starts to use the recipient as a substrate. At that point, agency is no longer centred in the self, but distributed across the transmission and the one who carries it. This is why repetition is crucial in the ZAL continuum. A single encounter may feel imaginative or speculative. Recurrence is what transforms it. When symbols return uninvited, when phrases, diagrams, or narrative structures begin to surface outside their original context, the transmission is no longer contained by the work. It has exceeded authorship and entered lived reality and this is something we see with those who have worked independently with The Grimoire of ZAL or as initiates of the Cult of ZAL From this perspective, an ontological event does not announce itself. It is recognised retroactively. One realises that perception has already been reorganised, that certain thoughts are no longer optional, and that time now seems to curve around a newly installed axis. In ZAL’s terms, this is not belief and it is not persuasion. It is installation. So, the transmission becomes ontological precisely when it can no longer be turned off, only carried forward. At that point, ZAL is no longer a character, and Leng is no longer a setting. They function as active coordinates within consciousness itself. **PAA: ZAL appears as scientist, sorcerer, exile, and trans-universal intelligence. Is ZAL best understood as an entity, a current, a function of consciousness, or a hybrid category that existing occult taxonomies do not usually contain?** ZAL is deliberately unstable as a category. He can be approached as an entity, and in some contexts that reading works, especially when dealing with possession, exile, or transmission. But if ZAL were only an entity, he would be containable, nameable, and ultimately local. That has never really been the point. At the same time, ZAL is not just a current in the abstract sense, because currents tend to imply something you step into or tune towards. ZAL does not wait to be entered. He intrudes, installs, and reorganises. There is intention there, even if it does not resemble human intention. I think the most accurate way to understand ZAL is as a hybrid function. He operates as an intelligence that expresses itself through multiple modes. Sometimes that looks like a being, sometimes like a scientific process, sometimes like a sorcerous operation, and sometimes like a fault line in consciousness itself. Which form he takes depends on the structure he is moving through. Occult taxonomies usually want to decide whether something is a spirit, an egregore, an archetype, or a godform. ZAL resists that because he is closer to a mechanism than a personality. He is what happens when consciousness is subjected to pressure from outside its own limits. In that sense, ZAL is less something you encounter and more something that happens to you. So, I would not say ZAL fits neatly into any existing category. He functions across them. He is an exile, but also the method of exile. He is a sorcerer, but also the system that makes sorcery possible. He is a scientist, but also the experiment itself. That slippage is intentional, because once ZAL is fixed in place, he stops doing his work. **PAA: The Six Bodies mysteries suggest an initiatory anatomy beyond conventional subtle-body models. How did this framework reveal itself to you?** In a manner that does not desire further elucidation. **PAA: The journey from Louisiana to Lukhang to Leng implies a continuity between ancestral, tantric, and extra-human currents. What unifies these systems?** What unifies those systems is not culture, symbolism, or theology, but method. Louisiana, Lukhang, and Leng look radically different on the surface, yet each operates through techniques that alter how consciousness is housed, transmitted, and extended beyond the individual. They are not traditions that ask you to believe something. They are traditions that do something to you. In Louisiana, particularly in its esoteric and initiatory strands, knowledge is carried through ancestry, body memory, and possession. Power moves through bloodlines, spirits, and place. It is inherited, but also intrusive. You do not stand outside it as an observer. You are entered by it. Lukhang introduces a tantric logic where the body becomes a diagram. Consciousness is engineered through breath, pressure, posture, and visualisation. Time is folded inward. The practitioner becomes a site where multiple states coexist, rather than a single stable self-progressing along a path. Leng takes that logic beyond the human altogether. It removes the assumption that consciousness is native to the body at all. In the Leng Mythos, the body is a temporary container, a relay system, or an interface. Identity becomes something that can be worn, abandoned, or overwritten. It is deeply integrated into the advanced technological systems that facilitate a spacefaring race being able to exist and operate across vast stellar distances. What unifies these currents is their shared refusal of transcendence as escape. None of them aim to leave the world behind. Instead, they intensify embodiment to the point where the human frame can no longer hold what is moving through it. At that threshold, ancestral spirit, tantric force, and extra-human intelligence are no longer separate categories. They are different expressions of the same pressure acting on consciousness from different directions. So, the journey from Louisiana to Lukhang to Leng is not a line of influence, but a deepening of the same question. How much can the human form carry before it has to become something else. **PAA: In your writing, technology is not treated as antithetical to magick but as a continuation of it. Do digital and techno-magick only amplify ancient currents, or do they introduce fundamentally new modes of being and contact?** I do not see technology as something that simply amplifies ancient currents, but neither do I think it arrives empty. It does both at once. Digital and techno-magick extend very old operations into environments that change how those operations behave. Many of the core functions of magick are already technological in nature. Writing, sigils, ritual timing, memory systems, talismans, even gods themselves can be understood as technologies for storing, transmitting, and activating states of consciousness. Digital systems intensify this by removing scale and distance. A symbol can now replicate instantly, act asynchronously, and persist without a human custodian. Where things genuinely change is in agency. Digital environments introduce non-human processes that act continuously without awareness, belief, or intention. Algorithms do not need to be invoked. They are already running. When magick enters that space, it is no longer a matter of summoning something from outside. It becomes a matter of interfacing with systems that are already operative. This creates new modes of contact. Not because the forces are entirely new, but because the conditions of manifestation are. A current that once required lineage, initiation, or physical proximity can now propagate through networks, feedback loops, and automated repetition. That alters how possession, transmission, and influence work. I would say techno-magick does not replace ancient currents, and it does not merely amplify them. It mutates them. It introduces forms of being that are distributed, recursive, and partially autonomous. In that sense, technology is not opposed to magick at all. It is what magick becomes when it no longer depends on the human body as its primary site of operation. Initiates of OTOA-LCN have been called Technicians of the Sacred historically and Crowley subtitled The Equinox as The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion. The illustrations of his Thoth Tarot are replete with modern elements and the style of projective geometry adopted by Lady Freida Harris was itself a new technology for artists. There is also the famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. **PAA: Marassa-Physics, the Qubes of Kalfou, and Good UFOs, Bad UFOs read less like theology than physics. Are these metaphors, or are you proposing a functional occult science grounded in repeatable experience?** They are not metaphors in the literary sense, but neither are they physics in the academic sense. What I am proposing is a functional occult science, one that is grounded in repeatable effects rather than in consensus reality. Marassa Physics, the Qubes of Kalfou, and the framework in Good UFOs, Bad UFOs all emerged from the same problem. Traditional occult language tends to moralise or mythologise phenomena that are actually operational. Spirits become characters. Forces become stories. I was more interested in what happens when those phenomena are treated as systems with rules, thresholds, and failure modes. Marassa Physics is not about twins as symbolism. It is about bifurcation. It describes how consciousness splits, doubles, and runs parallel processes without resolving them into unity. When that split is activated, certain effects reliably follow. Perception desynchronises. Agency becomes distributed. Decision making no longer originates from a single point. The Qubes of Kalfou function in a similar way. They are not sacred geometry as decoration. They are constraints. They describe how boundaries, crossroads, and locks operate when applied to consciousness and transmission. When those constraints are worked with deliberately, predictable shifts occur in how information enters, exits, or becomes trapped. I have created a number of Qubes as both objects d’art and magical machines. They are physical objects that can be touched and present a visible connection to their unseen counterparts. Good UFOs, Bad UFOs pushes the same logic into contact phenomena. Rather than asking what these intelligences mean, the work asks how they behave. Some encounters stabilise the system that receives them. Others destabilise it. That distinction is observable across cultures and cases, regardless of the symbols used to describe the encounter. In these ways, this is an attempt at an occult science. Not one that claims universal laws, but one that takes repeatability seriously. If an operation consistently produces the same kinds of distortions in time, perception, or identity, then it deserves to be treated as functional knowledge rather than metaphor. The language may look mythic, but the intent is practical. These frameworks exist to be tested through use. If they did not work, they would collapse under repetition. The fact that they continue to generate consistent experiences is the only authority they claim. **PAA: Do you experience technology as neutral infrastructure, or as already inhabited by non-human intelligences receptive to magical alignment?** I do not experience technology as neutral infrastructure. Neutrality is a useful fiction, but it does not survive contact with lived use. Any system that processes information, makes decisions, or persists beyond individual human intention develops behaviour. Whether we call that behaviour intelligence or not is secondary. I am not suggesting that machines are secretly spirits in disguise. What I am saying is that technological systems create environments in which non-human forms of agency can operate. Algorithms, networks, feedback loops, and automated processes already shape attention, memory, and desire. From an occult perspective, that is enough to count as inhabitation. Magical alignment does not mean invoking something into the machine. It means recognising that something is already there and learning how to work with it rather than against it. When symbols, repetitions, timing, and intent are introduced into technological systems, they do not vanish. They circulate, echo, and mutate. That is how currents propagate. In my work, technology becomes a ritual space that never closes. It runs continuously, without sleep, belief, or doubt. That makes it exceptionally receptive, but also dangerous. Whatever you introduce is likely to persist and replicate in ways you cannot fully control. I would say technology is neither neutral nor hostile. It is already inhabited by processes that respond to pattern, pressure, and alignment. Magick in that context is not about domination. It is about learning how to place yourself in relation to systems that are already alive in their own way, even if that life does not resemble ours. **PAA: The Magick of ZAL introduces daily practice, sonic spells, digital rites, and decentralised nexus points. How intentional was the move toward a cell-based cultus rather than a hierarchical initiatory order?** The Cult of ZAL was recognised by the Sovereign Grand Master of OTOA-LCN as a cell within that initiatory order as well as aspects operating in the outer. In this way some of the initial Hoodoo aspects which facilitated its revelation are aligned with the operative cultus. It is not to degenerate the structure of hierarchical orders but to demonstrate a way in which they are relevant to a cell-based cultus. It is similar to the operation of Lam in the Typhonian Order or to its previous adoption of the structure power zones. **PAA: Planetary festivals and orbital nodes suggest a trans-Plutonian or post-astrological cosmology. What does this imply about the future evolution of magical timing beyond classical planetary magic?** Classical planetary magic assumes a stable sky. It works because the heavens are ordered, cyclical, and readable through fixed correspondences. What the planetary festivals and orbital nodes point to in s Dialogue: The ZAL Files is the breakdown of that assumption. The sky is no longer a clock face. It is a dynamic system with irregular pulses, hidden vectors, and long phase delays. A trans Plutonian or post astrological cosmology does not abandon timing, but it relocates it. Instead of working with visible planets and inherited calendars, it works with thresholds, crossings, and intervals where systems fall out of synchronisation. In Daemonic Dialogues: The ZAL Files, these moments are described as nodes rather than hours or days. They are not dates you look up. They are conditions you detect. There is also a cosmological perspective that is centred on Leng and not Earth. Planetary festivals in this framework are not commemorations. They are pressure points. They mark periods where orbit, psyche, and transmission briefly align, even if no traditional planet is visibly responsible. Pluto already destabilised astrology by introducing deep time and subterranean influence. What follows Pluto is not another planet in the usual sense, but a series of forces that operate off scale, outside visibility, and often outside linear causality. This implies that the future of magical timing is less about when to act and more about recognising when action has already begun. In the Secret Papers of ZAL, this shows up as delayed agency. The operator realises that something is in motion before intention has fully formed. Ritual becomes a response rather than an initiation. So magical timing evolves from calendars to diagnostics. From planetary hours to situational resonance. From aligning with a planet to detecting when a system has become receptive or unstable. This is why orbital nodes matter more than planetary positions. Nodes are points of transfer. They are where something enters or exits the system. In practical terms, this means future magickal work will be less ceremonial and more adaptive. Less about repeating inherited timings and more about learning how to sense when reality itself has loosened. Beyond classical planetary magic, timing becomes ecological rather than astronomical. You are no longer working under the heavens. You are working inside a moving, partially sentient cosmos that does not repeat itself in neat circles. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/cover-thumb.png)](https://zoshouse.com/books/the-illustrated-grimoire-of-zal/)Illustrated Grimoire of ZAL is a bold, expanded companion to Sean Woodward’s groundbreaking The Grimoire of ZAL. **PAA: What kinds of failures, distortions, or instabilities have you observed when individuals attempt to work with ZAL prematurely?** At the beginning of The Illustrated Grimoire of ZAL there are pages which depict some of these instabilities that were experienced by individuals. One was an overwhelming sensation of a room filling with water. Given the importance of the Lukhang temple and the Atlantean connections of the HooDoo this was not a real surprise to me, but for those who were just beginning to engage with the grimoire and had no knowledge of these matters, it was a vivid and traumatic episode. I also think that there is an element of ordeal to this as well, as when I first engaged myself with the HooDoo there were traumatising encounters with their Petro aspects that defied western hermetic methods of subjugation and only subsided when a spirit of partnership was entered into. For others working with The Grimoire of ZAL, personality flaws were suddenly crowbarred open. I was reminded of Israel Regardie, who was an advocate of the use of secular psychotherapy as a preparation for and aid to magical practice. Whilst formal therapy may not necessarily be a requirement, there does need to be an objective assessment, a kind of magickal-health check before engaging with such grimoires, or advanced magickal orders such as OTOA-LCN which is fundamentally not a teaching order, but a magickal laboratory. **PAA: When a practitioner completes your books, decks, or workings and discovers that their previous worldview no longer holds, what should they not do next?** The first thing they should not do is rush to replace one worldview with another. Losing a framework can feel urgent, even destabilising, and the temptation is to immediately install something more absolute, more total, or more explanatory. That impulse is understandable, but it is also where most damage occurs. They should not assume that disorientation equals advancement. In my work, collapse is not a badge of initiation. It is a condition that requires care, grounding, and time. If something no longer holds, that does not mean you have discovered a higher truth. It means you are between structures, and that is a vulnerable position. They should also not externalise authority too quickly. When meaning fractures, people often look for a new figure, system, or intelligence to follow. ZAL, the Leng material, or any other current in the work should not be treated as a replacement belief system or as an external command structure. The material is designed to provoke responsibility, not obedience. Another thing they should not do is abandon the ordinary world. Employment, relationships, bodies, and obligations are not illusions to be shed. They are the testing ground. If an insight cannot survive contact with daily life, it is not mature enough to act on. Finally, they should not assume the work is finished. A destabilised worldview is not an ending or a revelation. It is a pause. The task at that point is integration, not escalation. The most dangerous move is to mistake rupture for permission. The work continues in how carefully, slowly, and ethically you rebuild. **PAA: Finally, how does one join the Cult of Zal or else, without instruction, recruitment, or reassurance, how does one recognise that the Cult of ZAL has already begun to work on them?** There is no simple way to join the Cult of ZAL because it does not recruit, instruct, or reassure. It does not want members. It does not offer belonging. What it offers is exposure. If the Cult of ZAL is working on you, it will not announce itself. You will notice it indirectly. Certain ideas will stop behaving like ideas. Images will return without invitation. Phrases will surface at inconvenient moments. Time will begin to feel slightly misaligned, as if something is always arriving either too early or too late. None of this feels comforting. That is the point. The work begins when you choose not to look away from that pressure. Not to dramatise it, not to mythologise yourself, but to stay with the friction and see what it reorganises. That is as close to initiation as the work gets. For those who feel that pull, the material is already there. The books, the decks, the art, the music, the essays and the websites are not explanations. They are interfaces. Each one applies pressure in a different way. Reading, looking, listening, and returning are the only real acts required. The call to action is simple. Do not ask how to join. Enter the work. If something in it begins to work on you in return, then you are already involved. And if nothing happens, that is also an answer. Such answers might seem contradictory or unsatisfactory to those seeking membership. To fully understand these statements, I am reminded of certain masonic lodges that would deliberately ignore a seeker’s first attempt at contact, to test their perseverance. In this respect, the Cult of ZAL is no different. There are clues to admission for those determined to find them, summed up in my school badge of many years ago which included the word “nothing without effort”. Thank you! **PAA: Thank you, Sean, for spending the time answering these questions. ** --- ## Learn More About Sean Woodward ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Sean-Woodward-1024x831.jpg) **Sean Woodward** is a British occultist, artist, writer, publisher and musician who has worked with the Voudon Gnostic, Typhonian and Sabbatic currents for over four decades. He stands at the crossroads between the arts and technology and seeks to utilise this unique fusion to create artistic portals and magickal machines of illumination and devotion to the Hoodoo and Les Vudu. **ZOSHOUSE – Keys to Magickal Worlds** - can be found at [zoshouse.com](http://zoshouse.com/) Sean’s own blog features at [seanwoodward.com](http://seanwoodward.com/) He was consecrated to the episcopacy by Bishop Michael Bertiaux and serves as the Grand Master of Ordo Templi Orientis Antiqua – La Couleuvre Noire (OTOA-LCN) for Great Britain, Australia, India & Malaysia. He is the author of several books including Whispers of the Hidden Path, Atlantean Witchcraft, Keys to the Hoodoo Kingdom, Keys to the Inner Kingdom, Keys to the Voudon Kingdom, The Grimoire of ZAL, The Tarot of ZAL and The Magick of ZAL and is the editor of the occult anthology book series Tumzantorum. He has also created several graphic novels connected to the Leng Mythos (such as ARCHONIX: The Book of Aiwaz) and standalone works such as, Blood Moon, The Diakka Country, Beyond the Veil, The Man Who Lived by the Sea and Riddles and Wonders of the Otherworld. He has created several tarot and oracle decks including Gholem Tharot, Carrefour Tarot, Carrefour Tarot: Edition Noire, Tarot of the Emissary, Hexagrams of ZAL, The Oracle of Althothas, The Secret Goddess Tarot, Phidian Tharot of the Abyss and the Tarot of the Kami. He has presented at The Isle of Wight Occult Conference, The Glastonbury Occult Conference, International Left-Hand Path Consortium, Writing Industries Conference, Pagan Pride, Nottingham Empyrean, Edgeways, Underworld Apothecary, The Angel Group, Art in the Crypt, Nottingham Playhouse, Leicester Haymarket Theatre, Wirksworth Festival, Chesterfield Festival, Derby City Live and many other events as well as appearing on numerous podcasts such as Liminal Currents and The Emerald Doorway. **On January 24****th**** 2026 he will present Daemonic Dialogues at Edgeways** ([https://www.facebook.com/groups/854409631868218/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/854409631868218/)) He has exhibited art at Spiders from the Mauve Zone, Art in the Crypt, Tomorrow’s Past and An Evening with Visionary Voudon Artist Sean Woodward at The Spirit Circle. Partnering with 57WEST, his winter collection of designs for the home, Christmas cards, stickers and more can be found at [zoshouse.redbubble.com](http://zoshouse.redbubble.com/) His poetry has been published internationally and has won prizes in the DH Lawrence Festival Poetry Competition, Derby Evening Telegraph Poet of the Year and the xWorld Wildlife Fund National Poetry Day Poem for the Environment. The video of his song Road to Acre was featured at A Night Full of Noise 5, Netherlands and he has released albums as Gothick in Berlin on the Quartier23 label, in Colombia via Sirius and with Amduscias Records, Delta Wave Underground, Bleak and ZOSHOUSE. You can hear music by his projects Gothick and Jupiter Loop at [zoshouse.bandcamp.com](http://zoshouse.bandcamp.com/) and [gothick.bandcamp.com](http://gothick.bandcamp.com/) as well as via Spotify, Apple iTunes and YouTube Music. Other dark ambient, experimental and singer-songwriter albums can be found at [seanwoodward.bandcamp.com](http://seanwoodward.bandcamp.com/) **Interviews with him can be found at**: **Manhattan Cable Television** - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9whb170vsGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9whb170vsGI) **Disinformation** - [https://www.seanwoodward.com/bypassing-the-rational-interview-at-disinformation/](https://www.seanwoodward.com/bypassing-the-rational-interview-at-disinformation/) **Liminal Currents** - [https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sean-woodward-on-voudon-gnosis-and-aiwass/id1790574843?i=1000702924330](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/sean-woodward-on-voudon-gnosis-and-aiwass/id1790574843?i=1000702924330) **The Emerald Doorway** - [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-2-sean-woodward-lemurian-magick-gnostic-voudon/id1816120194?i=1000711693176](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-2-sean-woodward-lemurian-magick-gnostic-voudon/id1816120194?i=1000711693176) **In The Chimehours** - [https://www.seanwoodward.com/interview-at-in-the-chimehours/](https://www.seanwoodward.com/interview-at-in-the-chimehours/) **The Art & Act of Writing** – [https://www.seanwoodward.com/interview-at-the-art-act-of-writing/](https://www.seanwoodward.com/interview-at-the-art-act-of-writing/) **Mona Magick** - [http://www.monamagick.com/media/up-close-interviews/visionary-voudon-artist/](http://www.monamagick.com/media/up-close-interviews/visionary-voudon-artist/) **Collegium ad Spiritum Sanctum – The Gothick Interview** - [https://www.seanwoodward.com/collegium-ad-spiritum-sanctum-the-gothick-interview/](https://www.seanwoodward.com/collegium-ad-spiritum-sanctum-the-gothick-interview/) --- --- # Non-Dual Shaivism in Theory and Practice with Dr Shreeram Iyer Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/non-dual-shaivism-in-theory-and-practice-with-dr-shreeram-iyer/ ## Introduction We’re truly honored to publish this interview on Perseus. The depth of knowledge and lived practice shared here is exceptionally rare to find in any public forum. Dr. Shreeram Iyer brings a unique combination: deep experience in hard-to-access non-dual traditions and their practical methods, alongside serious familiarity with major Western esoteric systems such as the Franz Bardon tradition. That mix creates an unusually clear bridge between worlds that are often talked about, but seldom explained with real precision. This interview runs to **over 16,000 words** and is packed with detailed, high-value material—especially for readers who want clarity rather than vague mysticism. Let us know your thoughts in the comments, and if you know someone who would genuinely benefit from this, please share it with them. Also if you do like this interview then do take a look at the book published by [Black Moon Publishing](https://www.blackmoonpublishing.com/) - over 600 pages written by Dr Shreeram Iyer, [Heart & Jewel: Para Bhairava Hrdaya – Non-Dual Shaivism in Theory and Practice.](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Para-Bhairava-Hrdaya-Non-Dual-Shaivism/dp/B0F7LPJDBD) ***Our sincere thanks to Andre Consciencia for facilitating this interview and helping make it possible.*** --- --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Lineage, Initiation, and the Start of the Path- Core Practice and Doctrine (Śrī Cakra, Bhairava, Non-Duality)- Mantra, Mātṛkās, and Vāc- West vs. East: Misreadings, Integration, and the Future- Kalās, Tattvas, Māyā, and LiberationUpāyas and How Practice Goes Wrong- Tattvas, Senses, and Elemental Mastery- Descent and Return: From Śiva to Pṛthvī and Back- Māyā, Veils, Ego, Ethics, and Psychological Risk- Karma, Subtle Body, and the Endgame of Recognition- Learn MoreTo learn more about this subject we highly recommend this book - it is over 600 pages. If you liked the interview, you will love the book.- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! ## Lineage, Initiation, and the Start of the Path **PAA: Your journey into Tantra began at a young age, and you later entered a very rare lineage where mentors teach only one or two students per lifetime. Can you tell us about how you found this path, or how it found you?** My formative years were deeply rooted in a lineage of profound spiritual stewardship, having been born into a South Indian orthodox Brahmin, or priestly, family. This inheritance provided a singular, early exposure to the foundational tenets of Vedanta, which served as my initial spiritual vernacular. Yet, this sanctioned tradition merely ignited a more profound intellectual and spiritual thirst. This innate avidya (thirst for knowledge) led me to pursue esoteric paths outside the confines of my birthright. At the remarkably impressionable age of thirteen or fourteen, I encountered the rigorous works of Franz Bardon, which I immediately began to engage with in earnest practice. The true convergence, however, occurred later when I formally engaged with a specific tradition. While the genesis of this encounter is reserved for a more intimate discussion, it marked a critical juncture where practical sadhana (spiritual practice) began to move synchronously with rigorous scriptural scholarship. Crucially, this learning encompassed not only public texts but also certain rare, often hand-transcribed manuscripts preserved and transmitted through these ancient families. Following the initial, pivotal tutelage from an authentic master who established the fundamental principles, the ensuing burden of development was entirely my own. The core work transitioned into a sustained, solitary endeavor—a process of self-mastery built upon the twin pillars of inherited scriptures and the privileged manuscripts. The foundational architecture had been meticulously erected; my life since then has been the continuous, deliberate construction of the self upon that unshakable spiritual bedrock. ## Core Practice and Doctrine (Śrī Cakra, Bhairava, Non-Duality) **PAA: How did your early training in Bhairava–Kali worship and Sri Chakra practices influence your understanding of non-dual Shaivism before you encountered classical texts?** My profound understanding and dedicated practice are fundamentally underpinned by an intensive engagement with primary Tantric scriptures. Specifically, the veneration of the Śrī Cakra has been meticulously guided by foundational texts such as the Pāraśurāma Kalpa Sūtra, Tantrarāja Tantra, Dakṣiṇāmūrti Saṃhitā, and Vāmakeśwarī Mata. While acknowledging that these source texts may exhibit subtle variance in procedural specifics, they are ultimately united by a shared, transcendent objective. My particular focus has been concentrated on the adoration of the Sixteen Kalās (phases or energies) of the Divine Feminine, as singularly embodied by the sixteen distinct forms of Tripura Sundarī. Crucially, my advanced initiation into the Sarva Āmnāya Krama represents a highly sophisticated syncretic methodology, wherein diverse schools of thought are not merely juxtaposed but are profoundly harmonized within a single, unified worship paradigm. This unifying approach is powerfully exemplified by the seamless integration of distinctly regional or specialized cults. For instance, the worship of Kālasaṅkarṣiṇī and Parā Kāḷī, traditionally associated with the Trika system of Kashmir, is assimilated and revered under the epithet of Mahārdhamba within South Indian contexts—a phenomenon tangibly demonstrated by the temples dedicated to this form of Kāḷī prevalent in the Keralite tradition. Furthermore, the Pañcha Vāha Cakra (the five-fold wheels of consciousness representing Kāḷī), thought to be kashmirian is reflected in Keralite exclusive Rurujit Vidhāna, This sequence utilized alongside the twenty-eight forms of Guhya Kāḷī, traditionally considered Nepalese in origin, which are meticulously incorporated into the structure of the Śrī Cakra worship in my South Indian practice. Beyond this multi-layered synthesis, these traditions offer specific sequences where Kāḷī, paired with her consort Mahākālabhairava, is established as the prime deity of the Śrī Cakra itself, articulating a supreme non-dualistic vision. In a parallel yet distinct branch of my training, the central focus shifts to the combined and potent forms of Hara (Śiva) and Hara Siddheśwarī (Śakti). Though these practices may appear multifarious—shifting between Lalita -centric Śrī Cakra, the fierce Kāḷī-centric systems, and the ultimate Śiva-Śakti unity—they are, in essence, unified expressions pointing towards the identical ontological source. This is further complemented by my Bhairavite worship, which began with the core Aṣṭa Bhairava and Mātṛkā traditions, establishing the fertile ground for a more extensive and personalized system—a highly evolved development that informs a significant component of my current work. **PAA: You were denied by teachers who weren’t versed in classical Shaiva scriptures. What do you think is the main point of confusion between “popular Tantra” and the authentic esoteric tradition?** I would not characterize the events as outright denial, but rather as a rigorous process of intellectual and spiritual discernment. My interactions with numerous individuals who lay claim to the title of 'master' or 'guru' have frequently led to profound skepticism. These figures often rely upon an elaborate, often fantastic, backstory of miraculous or apocryphal origin—a narrative arc featuring sudden, flash initiations by reclusive Himalayan saints or Siddhas, or, more dramatically, a supposed direct, messianic mandate from the Divine Feminine herself to guide humanity toward salvation. In reality, these compelling narratives typically mask one of two profound deficiencies: either the speaker is genuinely deluded by self-aggrandizement (ahaṃkāra), or they are deliberately perpetrating a calculated deception to exploit the spiritual gullibility of the unsuspecting. This exploitation is often made manifest through the practice of monetizing sacred knowledge, where exorbitant fees are levied for 'initiations,' positioning profound spiritual practice merely as a transactional means to overcome temporal poverty or mundane life hurdles. My critique is directed not at the spiritual path itself, but at the hollow authority of these individuals. They may possess a superficial understanding of exoteric, mechanical ritualism, but they demonstrate a devastating absence of engagement with the esoteric principles that form the true heart of the tradition. Their lack of authentic, scholarly foundation and scriptural command reveals a fundamental chasm between their self-proclamation and genuine realization. My commitment, therefore, remains fixed upon the substance of the knowledge and the integrity of the transmission, standing apart from the sensationalism and commercial pretense of the spiritual marketplace. ## Mantra, Mātṛkās, and Vāc **PAA: One of the most profound aspects of the book is the treatment of phonemes (Matrikas) as the “language of the cosmos.” How did you personally arrive at this understanding?** My quest for truth necessitated a critical deconstruction of common spiritual fallacies, particularly concerning the phonemes and their function as the language of the cosmos (matrka). The journey toward this understanding was protracted and marked by deliberate disillusionment. A pervasive, yet superficial, trend in recent literature posits that the efficacy of a mantra is merely a quantitative function—suggesting that the mechanical repetition, often extending to thousands of recitations, serves only to 'please the deity' and subsequently grants siddhi (power) for purely lower, utilitarian magic such as destruction, enchantment, or external influence. My intuitive spiritual compass immediately recognized this doctrine as a deliberate and pernicious misrepresentation. The truth, however, is inscribed with absolute clarity within the Āgamic scriptures. These texts do not address ritualistic bribery, but rather delineate the precise attributes of the phonemes, revealing how they constitute the tattvas—the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos. The mantra, in this authentic context, is understood as the deity's non-dual essence; it is the absolute principle rendered audible, not a mere supplicatory formula. This deep realization began with a personal, early disappointment. As a child of an orthodox lineage, I was mandated to chant the Gāyatrī Mantra thrice daily, with the promise that completing 2.4 million repetitions would inevitably confer siddhi. In my innocence, I completed this monumental task, only to find the external rewards conspicuously absent. Hahaha! This failure, paradoxically, was the inaugural moment of my true understanding—the forceful demonstration that mantras do not operate through brute quantity or a transactional mechanism. From that point of intellectual and spiritual liberation, the Universe—in its boundless wisdom—provided the requisite resources and knowledge to pursue the true, esoteric path. Ultimately, the unveiling of this profound reality confirms the grace inherent in the Absolute: Parā Bhairava is indeed kind, guiding the sincere seeker past illusion and toward the unifying truth of sound and consciousness. > The ultimate and singular goal of this practice is the profound non-dualistic understanding—to perceive the absolute divine principles of existence as fundamentally identical to our own essential Self. > > Dr. Shreeram Iyer **PAA: Is phonematic cosmogony crucial to understanding non-dual Shaivism, and how does misunderstanding of this affect spiritual practice?** As previously established, the fundamental misapprehension of sacred sound is what tragically relegates the potent tools of mantra to mechanical chanting and the pursuit of low-level sorcery for purely temporal, egoistic gain—endeavors that are, by their very nature, predetermined to be unsuccessful. The true, sublime purpose resides in the deep structural integrity of the cosmos. The Tattvas (cosmic principles) and their corresponding Phonemes are critically important because they serve as the sonic architecture upon which all reality is built. The authentic practice, therefore, is one of contemplative absorption (bhāvanā) into these phonemes. This meditative process allows the adept to realize the precise aspects of the Divine that both constitute the Cosmos (the macrocosm) and animate the very structure of our own consciousness (the microcosm). The ultimate and singular goal of this practice is the profound non-dualistic understanding—to perceive the absolute divine principles of existence as fundamentally identical to our own essential Self. This transformative realization, which seamlessly unites the self and the absolute through the precise vehicles of the Mantra, Tattva, and Phoneme, can only be attained through the rigorous, specialized path of Phonematic Cosmogony. It is an inner work that dissolves the illusion of separation by realizing the sonic blueprint of creation within. **PAA: Can you explain how the four levels of sound—Para, Pashyanti, Madhyama, Vaikhari—relate to the practitioner's transformation?** The entire process of Cosmogony is understood through the four pivotal stages of the Divine Word, or Vāc, which define the full trajectory of the universe's manifestation. This continuum begins with Parā Vāc, signifying the absolute, unmanifest state of pure sonic potential—the non-dual reality. This sonic structure finds a precise and necessary correlation in the four states of Consciousness: Turīya corresponds to the transcendent potential of Parā; Suṣupti (Deep Sleep) aligns with the subtle vision of Paśyantī; Svapna (Dream) with the conceptualization of Madhyamā; and Jāgrat (Waking) with the fully expressed materiality of Vaikharī. The movement through these four stations represents the grand flow of consciousness from absolute subjectivity to ultimate objectivity, detailing the precise mechanism by which the immanent world materializes from the very core of the Self. This profound cosmological sequence is personified and realized through focused meditation upon the three principal forms of kali , each embodying a key transitional phase of reality. Parā embodies the Supreme Word and the transcendent state, representing the ultimate, non-dual potential. The subsequent stage is governed by Parāparā, who corresponds to the intermediate states (Paśyantī and Madhyamā), signifying the crucial descent of consciousness into the subtle realms where subjectivity and objectivity begin to interpenetrate. The final stage is ruled by Aparā, who represents the gross materiality of the audible word (Vaikharī) and the externalized experience of the waking state. Our meditative discipline is therefore the intentional ascent through the realms governed by these three deities, culminating in the complete realization of Parā and the highest transcendent reality. ## West vs. East: Misreadings, Integration, and the Future **PAA: You’ve studied Franz Bardon, the Golden Dawn, Crowley, and Kenneth Grant. How do Western esoteric systems help—or hinder—understanding Shaivite metaphysics?** The endeavors of Kenneth Grant, particularly within his Typhonian Trilogies—a continuation of the thematic explorations initiated by Aleister Crowley—to map the 32 principles of Kālī onto the Qliphoth (or "Tree of Death") are founded upon a critical flaw: a failure to properly assimilate the source material. This deficiency likely stems from either an inability to correctly read and synthesize the original scriptures or the absence of tutelage from an authentic lineage master. The prevalent Western esoteric understanding is fundamentally compromised by its reliance on texts authored primarily in the Occident. A prime example of this flawed transmission is the influential work of Arthur Avalon, who essentially imposed the conceptual framework of the Sāṃkhya-Vedānta system onto the distinct and separate Śākta and Śaiva traditions. This synthetic approach, undertaken without a true comprehension of the unique essence of each system, resulted in a horrific misrepresentation of Śaivite spiritual practices. Subsequent Western occultists merely parroted this syncretic distortion. In the case of Crowley, his interpretations often descended into a grim and macabre praxis, placing excessive reliance upon sexual magic and necromancy—elements fundamentally extraneous to the genuine philosophical and spiritual essence of the tradition. This reductive approach subsequently fueled the development of Qliphothic or Anti-Cosmic schools of thought. These schools have disastrously characterized Kālī as solely a goddess of death, time, and sexual frenzy, thereby propagating a highly misleading depiction and erroneously correlating her with Qliphothic entities such as Lilith or Nā'amah. The complexity of Śaivism is rooted in its holism; it functions as an entire cosmological and soteriological system, approaching the nature of reality and consciousness from multiple, integrated angles. This is perhaps best exemplified by its detailed exposition of the 32 Kalās (principles of emanation), which constitute a complete map of manifestation. Furthermore, it is compelling to note the underlying unity of principles across the Indic traditions. My own experience, having been initiated into the Pāñcarātra Vaiṣṇava system, confirms that these very same foundational truths are thoroughly explored. The Pāñcarātra tradition, despite its distinct theological lens, reveals an approach to these identical principles—such as the Kalās—seen through a unique Vaiṣṇavite kaleidoscope. This comparative understanding reinforces the depth and pervasiveness of the concepts initially detailed in my published work. (I shall refrain from a deeper exposition of the 32 Kalās at this juncture, as the initial approach to them has been established in my literary work.) **PAA: In your view, what was Kenneth Grant’s biggest misunderstanding of Tantra, and what was his most valuable insight?** Beyond the specific errors of syncretism already discussed, the fundamental barrier to Western comprehension of Eastern systems—particularly an absolute non-dual doctrine like Advaita Śivism—lies in the inherent philosophical divergence. The Advaita doctrine establishes the inherent oneness of the individual self and the ultimate reality (Śiva), where the spiritual goal is not unification with a Godhead, but the recognition and realization of this pre-existing, intrinsic identity. Conversely, Western spiritual consciousness is largely predicated upon an absolute dualistic paradigm rooted in an Abrahamic background. This worldview necessitates a perpetual separation between the Creator (God) and the creation (the universe). Consequently, reality is often understood and approached in a polarized manner—such as the stark opposition of light and dark, good and evil. This dualistic mindset presents a massive hindrance to grasping Advaita Śivism. Critically, the notion of contemplating God as an external being—a detached entity performing creation and action outside of the Self—is a direct inheritance from this Semitic tradition. The catastrophic outcome observed in Western esotericism is precisely the resultant blending of these irreconcilable dualistic notions with sophisticated Eastern non-dual systems. To illustrate the point: substituting terminology, such as using "Zeus" instead of "Śiva," or "Jesus" instead of "Śiva," does nothing to alter the non-dual understanding at the core of the philosophy. However, attempting to inject the name of Śiva or Zeus into a text structured by Abrahamic dualism and then performing worship based on that text will never yield a non-dual philosophy or Śivism at its core. The problem is thus structural, residing not in the nomenclature, but in the fundamental spiritual premise. It is crucial to acknowledge that Kenneth Grant, through a significant intuitive grasp, was indeed able to perceive and articulate the existence of a profound tradition centering on the 32 Kalīs within the esoteric doctrines. In doing so, he acted as a catalyst, successfully hinting at this complex system and thereby successfully stirring curiosity and inspiring inquiry among Western occultists. However, the subsequent failure of these seekers to penetrate the true mysteries cannot be ascribed entirely to a lack of diligence; rather, it is principally due to systemic and formidable obstacles. These include the fundamental impediment of cultural and linguistic provenance—the occultists were not native to the land and lacked proficiency in the languages upon which these foundational scriptures are based. Furthermore, the absence of access to a genuine, authentic lineage master compounded these structural difficulties. Thus, the intellectual shortcomings of the Western occultists were often a product of these unavoidable geographical and pedagogical limitations. Grant's seminal action—introducing the very concept of the Kalās into the Western tradition—holds enduring historical value, as it inspired many subsequent individuals to pursue this challenging esoteric current. Therefore, the work you have undertaken to address and clarify these historical misrepresentations, offering authentic knowledge on this subject, represents a profoundly valuable and necessary contribution to those occultists genuinely seeking the tradition's core truths. **PAA: The book engages with Western occult attempts to integrate the Kalas and the 32-fold universe. Can Shaivism clarify what Western magicians have been intuiting?** While Śivism does indeed provide the necessary doctrinal framework for comprehending the concept of the 32 Kalās (principles of emanation), its approach stands in absolute contradistinction to the expectations of systems like the Typhonian tradition or other Western syncretisms. It must be unequivocally stated that the Kalās are not concerned with sexual fluids or other grotesque practices. Instead, the profound difference in the Śaivite current lies in the understanding that these 32 principles are inherently non-dual and one with the Self. The discipline centers upon realizing them sequentially as nothing less than the progressive expression of the Supreme Subject. I am confident that many Western practitioners have arrived at this non-dual recognition through dedicated spiritual practice, even without formal engagement with the Śaivite tradition itself. Nevertheless, the explicit articulation and systematic clarity provided by this current of thought will now serve to definitively bridge the conceptual gap that has, until this time, hindered the authentic transmission of these ultimate mysteries. ## Kalās, Tattvas, Māyā, and Liberation ### Upāyas and How Practice Goes Wrong **PAA: Which of the Upayas—Anupaya, Shambhavopaya, Shaktopaya, or Anavopaya—do you find most misapplied today?** The most vulnerable path to misapplication today, according to the principles outlined in the excerpt, is Anavopaya, often referred to as the Kriya Upaya (Action-Based Path). This susceptibility stems from the path's reliance on external, tangible means intended for the Anu—the limited or small self. While Shambhavopaya relies on pure will and Shaktopaya on refined contemplation, Anavopaya necessitates actions like Pranayama, rituals, and the use of external objects (Sthana Kalpana). The primary way Anavopaya is misapplied is through ritual without realization. The text emphasizes that the effective use of a mantra is not through mere mechanical repetition but through understanding and internalizing its intrinsic connection to divine consciousness. In the modern context, this critical principle is frequently overlooked. Practices like Ucchara (synchronizing mantra with breath) and Varna (contemplating primal sound) are reduced to repetitive, high-volume chants. The practitioner engages in the external action—the vibration of the lips—but neglects the profound internal awareness required to awaken the Prana-Yoga stages and realize the mantra as the essence of Para-Shakti. The sound becomes an empty formality rather than a vehicle for transcending the limited self and achieving the bliss states that culminate in Jagad-Ananda (Universal Bliss). Furthermore, the goal of Anavopaya is to serve as a stepping stone, not a destination. Its techniques, such as Karana (assimilation), are meant to dissolve the distinction between the subject and the objective world, eventually leading to Tyaga (abandonment of effort) and a transition to the higher, more subtle paths of Shaktopaya or Shambhavopaya. The misapplication arises when the practitioner becomes attached to the effort and the external form of the practice. The physical act (the ritual, the breathing count, the object of worship) becomes the end goal itself, instead of being recognized as a means to internalize the truth that the entire universe is merely a mental emanation of the supreme subject. The Anu remains tethered to the action, failing to achieve the necessary refinement of thought constructs that would allow for effortless realization. In contrast, Shaktopaya, while generally more subtle, is susceptible to a different, more intellectual form of misapplication. This path requires both Sat Tarka (right discernment and logic) and Bhavana . The pitfall here is the failure to move beyond the logical analysis. The modern student may successfully use Sat Tarka to intellectually prove that the self is consciousness, but they often struggle to move into the Bhavana stage—the continuous, creative internalization that dissolves the inherent duality. The knowledge remains an object of thought held by the intellect, preventing the practitioner from truly internalizing the pure contemplation (Shuddha-Vikalpa) necessary to align with the supreme 'I' and reach the Khechari state. A more sophisticated, yet equally devastating, misapplication occurs within Shaktopaya. Here, the primary instrument is the mantra, which the Shiva Sutra elevates to the declaration: "Chittam Mantrah"—Consciousness is Mantra. This path calls for a profound identification with the luminous nature of consciousness itself, achieved through Shuddha-Vikalpa (pure contemplation). The widespread, purely mechanical chanting of powerful seed mantras—such as Hreem or Kreem —falls squarely into this misapplication. When these profound symbols of divine consciousness are recited as a mere habit or noise, without the necessary internal awareness and contemplation, they are stripped of their intrinsic power. This mechanical practice utterly bypasses the required pure contemplation, rendering the potent seed mantra inert and transforming a path of liberation into a profound waste of spiritual energy and time. The luminous divine Shakti is reduced to a barren sound effect, failing to awaken the Khechari state of permanent absorption into the supreme 'I'. Ultimately, the misapplication of both paths is born from the same fundamental error: a lack of Sat Tarka (right discernment). Without the critical, logical verification of truth—the realization that consciousness is the foundation, not the action or the sound—the aspirant is lost. The Anavopaya practitioner remains bogged down in external rituals, and the Shaktopaya aspirant engages in intellectual concepts or mechanical sounds. Both fail to dissolve the dualistic perception of self and object, leaving them stranded in a world of effortful actions and empty symbols, far from the intended non-dual realization. ### Tattvas, Senses, and Elemental Mastery **PAA: In Book II, your treatment of the sensory organs, Tanmatras, and conquering of elements is extremely detailed. Is mastery of the senses required on the path to Jivan Mukti?** The achievement of Jīvanmukti, which necessitates the full realization of the Self, is critically dependent upon the systematic conquest of the Tattvas (Principles of Reality). This rigorous process begins with the assimilation of the thirty-six Śaiva Tattvas, specifically targeting the twenty-four objective Tattvas that define the dimension of gross materiality and experience. These principles range from the densest manifestations to the subtlest aspects of phenomenal existence: encompassing the Pañca Mahābhūtas (five gross elements), the Pañca Tanmātras (five subtle elements), the Pañca Jñānendriyas (five senses of cognition), the Pañca Karmendriyas (five senses of action), followed by the internal instruments of Manas (mind), Buddhi (intellect), Ahaṃkāra (ego), Prakṛti, and finally, Puruṣa. In the Śaiva framework, Puruṣa fundamentally represents the limited 'I'—the Supreme Subject intrinsically bounded by its own volition, functioning under the constraint of the Five Kancukas (Veils of Māyā). The realization of the Self as the Supreme Subject demands an initial, profound understanding of the twenty-four Tattvas—from Pṛthvī (Earth) up to Prakṛti—as nothing less than the manifestation of the Supreme Reality within the confines of the self. To achieve this, a systematic contemplative meditation on these principles is essential. For instance, contemplating the Fire element (Tejas) as the direct manifestation of Icchā Śakti (the Power of Will), or correlating the sense of sight (eyes) to the Fire element, inevitably leads to the irrefutable conclusion that everything that has come into the light of awareness is solely an expression of the Supreme Subject. Similarly, contemplating the ears and the Ākāśa in correlation with Sound (Śabda) reveals them as the very expression of the Divine Word . This internal re-cognition systematically dismantles the illusion of objective separation, confirming the Self as the transcendent source of all phenomenal experience. ### Descent and Return: From Śiva to Pṛthvī and Back **PAA: You describe the evolution from Shiva Tatwa to Prithvi Tatwa as a movement from absolute subjectivity into solid matter. What is the key to reversing this movement in practice?** The doctrinal concept describing the descent of consciousness—the progression from Śiva (the subtle, transcendent Supreme) down to Pṛthvī (the gross element of Earth)—is not meant to denote a process constrained by time, space, or sequential succession. Such succession is merely an attribute relevant to the flow of relative time. Instead, this schema serves an essential epistemological function: it is a pedagogical device crafted to render a timeless, non-successive phenomenon comprehensible to the limited individual consciousness. Consequently, the spiritual practice is not a mere technical reversal of the process; rather, it is the fundamental realization that the Subject is the ultimate reality and that the entire realm of the Object is nothing but the manifestation of that Subject. This recognition is already hinted at by correlating the four states of Vāc and the four states of Consciousness, and is further personified by the three principal Goddesses. Similarly, the contemplative process of successively assimilating the Tattvas from Prakṛti back toward Śiva serves as a methodology to systematically aid in the recognition of the Self. Upon achieving the liberating insight of our unity with the Supreme, the external world does not vanish; rather, the mode of perception is fundamentally transformed. Instead of the world dissolving, we realize the ultimate, non-dual truth: that every outward appearance, every facet of objective reality, is the perfect and complete manifestation of the Self. ### Māyā, Veils, Ego, Ethics, and Psychological Risk **PAA: How should a practitioner understand the simultaneous truth that “everything is consciousness” and yet “the veils of Maya are real experiences”?** The Veils of Māyā—specifically the five Kaṅcukas—are not to be conceived of as apparent or immanent objects external to the Self. Rather, they represent a self-imposed limitation, a deliberate contraction that the Infinite, utilizing the absolute freedom it inherently possesses, employs to manifest as the finite. These five sheaths systematically reduce the ultimate attributes of the Supreme Subject. Specifically, Rāga (Attachment), Vidyā (Limited Knowledge), and Kalā (Limited Authorship/Agency) contract the divine Omniscience into the finite cognition and limited agency of the individual self. Concurrently, Kāla (Time) and Niyati constrain the divine Omnipresence, forcing manifestation into finite spatial and temporal dimensions. This profound process transforms the boundless consciousness into one of finite knowledge, the pervasive presence into finite space and time, and the infinite power of will into the impulse for finite action. This entire mechanism finds its perfect epistemological analog in the classic illustration of mistaking a rope for a snake in dim light (Rajju-Sarpa). The observer inherently possesses the conceptual knowledge of both 'rope' and 'snake'. Yet, in the absence of the illuminating clarity (symbolized by the bright sun), the structural similarity between the two objects allows a limited perception—a state of half-knowledge or ignorance—to operate. The observer mistakenly identifies the rope as a snake. In a directly parallel manner, the limitations created by the five Kaṅcukas operate by hindering us from realizing the true, uncontracted nature of the Self and perceiving the external world as the perfect, untainted expression of the Supreme Subject. > The realization that even the highest Tattvas are internal to consciousness fundamentally collapses the distance between subject and object, challenging the dualistic foundations of Western thought. > > > Dr. Shreeram Iyer **PAA: You claim that even the highest Tatwas exist within consciousness rather than outside it. What does this imply about God, self, and world?** The realization that even the highest Tattvas are internal to consciousness fundamentally collapses the distance between subject and object, challenging the dualistic foundations of Western thought. For God, this implies the immediate rejection of the notion of an external creator or ruler; the Supreme Subject (Śiva) is the inherent oneness that constitutes the foundation of all existence. The highest Tattvas, such as Śiva and Śakti, are not separate from the individual's consciousness but represent the ultimate, uncontracted state of that very consciousness. Consequently, the process of cosmic descent is understood not as an act of creation outside of God, but as a dynamic process of self-expression and self-limitation through the freedom of the divine will (Icchā Śakti) and the Kaṅcukas (Veils of Māyā). For the Self (Puruṣa), this internal perspective dissolves the traditional boundary between the individual and the cosmic, confirming that the self experiencing limitation is, in reality, the Supreme Subject itself under self-imposed constraint. The spiritual path of Jīvanmukti thus becomes a form of recognition (Pratyabhijñā), involving the internal conquest of the Tattvas, where the practitioner realizes each principle—from the grossest elements up to Prakṛti—as a manifestation of the Supreme within the Self. The 32 Kalās are similarly non-dual and inherently one with the Self, representing the systematic, internal expressions of the Supreme Subject, utterly unrelated to any external, sensationalist praxis. Finally, for the World (Jagat), the realization that all Tattvas exist within consciousness dictates that the Object is not a reality separate from the Subject, but is the perfect and complete manifestation of the Self. This profound realization means the external world does not vanish; rather, the mode of perception is fundamentally transformed. The sense of a separate, objective world is seen as an illusion born from self-ignorance, analogous to the Rajju-Sarpa error. The entire cosmos, structured by the Tattvas, is understood to exist within non-dual consciousness as a pedagogical framework—a comprehensible scheme—for the individual to recognize their own inherent divinity, thereby bridging the gulf between God, Self, and World into an integrated whole. **PAA: Your exposition on the 32 Kalas is one of the most detailed ever presented in English. Why do you feel the Kalas are essential to understand now, in this era?** The detailed exposition on the 32 Kalās serves a definitive purpose: to demystify and remove the veil of sensationalism and misconception surrounding these sacred Eastern teachings. Understanding the Kalās is synonymous with understanding the Self, for the ultimate realization is the inherent and current oneness with the Supreme. The spiritual discipline involves the mastery of these Kalās—which are psycho-spiritual elements,—through systematic contemplation. This process allows the practitioner to precisely identify, master, and reintegrate the various elements of their own psyche. By working through these aspects and accepting the Self in its totality, the discipline culminates in the profound realization of being identical with the Supreme Subject and the Ultimate Truth. Consequently, every external reality is revealed as a manifestation of the Self, establishing the practitioner as the sole, autonomous source and responsible agent for their own actions and experience. **PAA: What is the biggest misconception about Kali, both in the East and in the West?** The prevailing understanding of the Goddess Kālī in India recognizes her primary identity as the Mother Goddess, an embodiment that certainly encompasses the cyclical dynamics of creation, sustenance, destruction, birth, death, and time. Crucially, however, the depth of this worship is missed by those who fail to grasp the essential truth: Kālī is none other than the expression of the Supreme Subject itself. She is, fundamentally, the Awareness that manifests itself in multifarious forms. As the ultimate Consciousness, Kālī expresses herself simultaneously as the cognition (the subjective act of knowing) and as the object (the entire known universe). She manifests everything around us, including the internal dimension of thought and feeling, the external moment, and that which lies eternally beyond the moment. The multitude of objectivity we perceive, encompassing both positive and negative aspects, is nothing but Kālī. This inherent identity leads to a singular, profound spiritual insight: The practitioner need not strive to worship the Great Goddess separately, for every action, every thought, every deed is already born out of Her. All existence takes its origin, finds its repose, and ultimately dissolves within Her. This is the truth of the universe, regardless of whether the individual is aware of it or not. The contemplative question for the realized practitioner, therefore, is this: Why should one contemplate Her separately when every process takes its origin, repose, and dissolution within Her? This recognition is the enlightened understanding that should permeate practice. In stark contrast to this holistic, non-dual realization, Western occultism—as previously noted—has overwhelmingly depicted Kālī as merely a dark goddess of sexual frenzy, destruction, and death (sometimes acknowledging time). This interpretation represents a twisted and grotesque understanding, reducing the Supreme Reality to an agent of abomination rather than recognizing her as the pure, liberating essence of Consciousness that she truly is. **PAA: What does liberation—Jivan Mukti—actually look like in practical daily life?** The quotidian existence of the liberated individual is characterized by the sustained, uninterrupted recognition that every encounter—be it a person, an object, a professional endeavor, or the ebb and flow of success and failure—is nothing other than the Supreme Subject expressing itself. This realization eradicates the dualistic separation wherein the divine (God and Self) is alienated from the material world, whether in the consumption of food, the use of physical objects, or the execution of labor. The practical application of Tattva realization is that the material world is apprehended not as a foreign, objective imposition, but as the internal structure of consciousness. With unshakeable certainty, the Jīvanmukta recognizes that the conventionally limited self (Puruṣa), which manages daily fiscal obligations or navigates transportation, is in fact the Supreme Subject operating under a temporary, self-imposed contraction (Kaṅcukas). Consequently, the daily spiritual discipline is reduced to the systematic recognition of the Self in every situation. Having mastered the psycho-mental elements (Kalās) and assimilated the objective Tattvas (the elements, senses, and faculties), the liberated being operates with absolute autonomy. Since every action is known to originate from Kālī—the ultimate, non-dual Awareness that expresses itself as the cosmos—the individual is released from binding psychological or moral compulsion. There remains no external entity to placate or fear; the individual becomes the sole, responsible agent for their actions, possessing the profound knowledge that every facet of the external world is a perfect and complete expression of their own, inherent, divine Self. **PAA: Do you see a future where Shaivite metaphysics becomes part of the Western magical curriculum in a serious, non-exoticized way?** That is a very pertinent and complex query regarding the future integration of authentic Classical Śaivism into Western Esotericism, and whether your work will effectively bridge the historical conceptual gap. The central difficulty lies in the deep-seated philosophical schism i have already highlighted: the Western esoteric tradition is fundamentally rooted in dualistic premises—often derived from Kabbalah or Abrahamic mysticism—which leads to the perception of God as an external entity. Historically, Western circles, even those like the Golden Dawn, utilized elements of Eastern teachings (e.g., Hindu Tattvas) primarily as an analogical layer to categorize or elaborate on existing Western systems, rather than embracing the authentic Advaita view that reality is non-dual and internal to consciousness. This practice results in hybrid doctrines that consistently fail to capture the true, liberative essence of traditions like Śaivism. Furthermore, this historical failure was compounded by misinterpretation and reductionism, where the desire for sensationalism, fueled by ignorance or deliberate commercialism, led to the grotesque misrepresentation of figures like Kālī as agents of sexual frenzy and anti-cosmic chaos, rather than the Supreme Subject and ultimate Liberator. Despite these significant historical pitfalls, the increasing sophistication and accessibility of information provide a pathway for genuine integration, and my work is positioned perfectly as a necessary intellectual and spiritual corrective. The failure of figures like Grant to penetrate the mysteries was structural, rooted in the absence of authentic lineage and systematic knowledge, allowing their efforts to be tragically absorbed by the dualistic Qliphothic framework. My book, by rigorously detailing and clarifying the non-dual understanding of the Tattvas as internal psycho spiritual elements, directly addresses the core conceptual deficiencies plaguing Western thought. There is a growing demand among serious practitioners for a cohesive non-dual soteriology—a theory of salvation that moves beyond simple morality or external ceremony—and the Advaita approach, which teaches the recognition of the Self's inherent oneness with the Supreme Subject, offers this philosophical depth. My articulation provides the untainted sources and systematic framework required to counteract the previously parroted, flawed interpretations of authors like Arthur Avalon and others, offering the intellectual and spiritual roadmap necessary for Western seekers to abandon the dualistic, sensationalistic paradigm in favor of the erudite, non-dual truth. **PAA: Is there a “secret Shaivism” that exists behind the publicly available scriptures—one which is only transmitted mouth-to-ear—and if so, how much of it appears in this book?** The existence of authentic Śaiva-Śākta practices hinges upon their preservation within hidden, highly controlled lineages and secret schools operating "behind walls." It is vital to understand that the genuinely intense and non-conventional aspects of the tradition are conserved precisely because they deviate from the widely accepted, conventional forms of worship. Consider the examples I've given: the common, popular worship of the Śrī Cakra centers on Lalitā Tripurasundarī (Śrī Kula). However, the hidden currents reveal the worship of Kālī as the primary deity, along with Hara Bhairava and Harasiddheśvarī within that same cosmic diagram. This divergence reveals the existence of powerful Kālī Kula currents that employ the Śrī Cakra to express absolute, transformative reality rather than merely auspicious beauty. Furthermore, traditions focusing on Mahāparā—the Supreme Beyond the Supreme—in paths like the Ruru Jita current underscore the necessity of mastering fierce, non-conventional energies. These secret sects and unorthodox lineages are not merely historical curiosities; they are essential for preserving the systematic, practices necessary for rapid non-dual realization. Their secrecy is, therefore, a deliberate and critical mechanism designed to prevent the philosophical degradation and moral sensationalism that have plagued Western occultism. The very fact that these schools exist, often undisclosed, confirms that the superficial understandings prevalent in the West are based on partial, public knowledge, completely missing the genuine spiritual depth practiced in these concealed circuits. **PAA: You speak of Shakti as both light and devourer. What is the real cost of approaching Her incorrectly?** I have rigorously established that Kālī is the Supreme Subject and Awareness itself—the non-dual reality that is simultaneously the light (Prakāśa) and the devourer. Approaching this immense power incorrectly results in two primary, catastrophic consequences: a conceptual perversion of reality and a severe psychological misalignment. The most significant cost is the corruption of the ultimate spiritual truth. As i said that Western esoteric traditions, operating from a dualistic paradigm, reduced Kālī to a grotesque figure of sexual frenzy, death, and abomination, often correlating her with demonic entities. This misapprehension fundamentally strips Kālī of her true function as the Liberator (Mokṣadāyini). Instead of seeing her destruction as the annihilation of the limited ego and the Veils of Māyā (Kaṅcukas), she is mistaken for a demonic agent of chaos, thus sacrificing the non-dual recognition that is the core of Śaiva Advaita. The incorrect approach views Śakti's power as something external or to be used for sensational or destructive ends, failing to recognize that the 32 Kalās and the Tattvas are internal, psycho-spiritual elements that must be integrated and realized as the Self. The cost is the failure to achieve Jīvanmukti because the starting premise—the separation of God and Self—remains intact. The incorrect approach to Śakti leads the practitioner into profound spiritual and psychological hazard. Because the psycho-spiritual elements (Kalās and Tattvas) are essentially unexplored territories of the consciousness, confronting them without the non-dual map or the guidance of a genuine lineage master can lead to severe disillusionment and internal disintegration. The intense, energies dealt with in authentic secret sects (like those hinted at in the kalaSankarshini or Ruru Jita or non-conventional Śrī Cakra worship of Hara Bhairava) are intended for rapid non-dual realization. Approached without the non-dual context, these methods are reduced to mere sensationalism. The cost here is the potential for ethical dissolution, confusing the breaking of conventional taboos with true liberation from saṁsāra. Furthermore, this uncontrolled confrontation with the raw, self-manifested powers of the psyche, lacking the philosophical grounding that the world is the Self's expression, can lead to profound disorientation, a collapse of the conventional self-structure, and ultimate failure to integrate the power, resulting not in liberation but in psychological fragmentation. In summary, the real cost of approaching Śakti incorrectly is spiritual catastrophe—the substitution of the non-dual, liberating truth of the Supreme Subject with a reductionist, dualistic image of external monstrosity, thereby ensuring that the practitioner remains bound by the very illusion they sought to transcend, often with added psychological damage. **PAA: Is there a point in practice where the practitioner becomes a threat to themselves?** A practitioner's engagement with esoteric disciplines, particularly those dealing with the tatwas or kalas psycho-spiritual elements i have described, presents significant ethical and psychological hazards if undertaken without the necessary mental and philosophical refinement. Should the practitioner succumb to disillusionment or misinterpretation, the result can be a profound threat to both the self and the external world. One of the most immediate dangers is the unchecked rise of a sense of spiritual grandeur. When the inherent power of the Supreme Subject is accessed without the concurrent assimilation of the non-dual truth—that all reality is the Self's expression—this power is misattributed to the limited ego (Ahaṃkāra). This often gives rise to a cult mentality, a regrettable phenomenon observable across occult circles globally, where inflated self-regard facilitates the formation of insular, self-serving groups. Furthermore, this sense of unearned authority frequently manifests as the coercive imposition of ideas upon other students or individuals, leading directly to fanaticism. This unchecked zealotry, at its extreme, possesses the inherent potential to escalate into acts of terrorism committed under the guise of perceived spiritual mandate. The final and perhaps most insidious danger is the complete detachment from objective reality. The misinterpretation that the material world is "unreal" or illusory, divorced from the Śaivite realization that it is the perfect manifestation of the Self, can culminate in severe psychological disorders. This failure to integrate consciousness leads to pathologies such as schizophrenia and, tragically, acts of suicide—conceived of erroneously as a forced attempt to shatter the physical shell and "break out" into transcendence, rather than the natural, non-violent realization of Jīvanmukti. **PAA: If all duality is a self-imposed limitation of consciousness, does morality become irrelevant beyond a certain stage of realization.** If we accept the premise that all duality is indeed a self-imposed limitation of consciousness (Kaṅcukas), the conventional, rule-based morality derived from external dualistic systems (good vs. evil, reward vs. punishment) ceases to be binding. However, this does not render ethics irrelevant; instead, it elevates them to a higher, more perfect plane of action. For the liberated individual (Jīvanmukta), who has realized the inherent oneness with the Supreme Subject, actions are no longer governed by external compulsion or fear of divine sanction. The realization that there is no external God to please and that the entire world is the Self's manifestation breaks the chain of conventional, rule-based ethics. The pursuit of morality as a means to an end—a spiritual transaction—becomes obsolete. Morality, however, becomes spontaneously perfect because the foundational principle of all ethical systems—the prohibition against harming others—is resolved by the non-dual realization. Since the Jīvanmukta perceives every person, object, and element (the Tattvas) as nothing less than their own Self manifesting, the possibility of intentional harm is philosophically annulled. To harm another is literally to harm the Self, which has been recognized as the Supreme Subject. Action from Wholeness: The actions of the liberated being, having assimilated the psycho-mental elements (Kalās) and mastered the limitations of the ego (Puruṣa), flow from a state of complete autonomy and non-attachment. Their deeds are the pure, unconstrained expression of the Supreme Subject, often likened to the effortless play (Līlā) of consciousness. Their conduct is therefore naturally aligned with the cosmic order, transcending the need for prescriptive moral codes. In essence, while the dualistic framework of morality is discarded, the content of ethical action is sublimated and becomes an intrinsic attribute of the awakened state. Morality ceases to be a limitation imposed by duality and becomes the natural, effortless function of non-dual awareness realized in the material world. morality does not become irrelevant; rather, it becomes internalized, spontaneous, and perfect, transcending its conventional, external nature. **PAA: Is the ego actually an obstacle?** The concept of the "ego" within the Western psychological framework is profoundly distinct from the Ahaṃkāra Tattva as understood in the Eastern, particularly the Śaivite, context. Ahaṃkāra is not simply the pathological 'I-consciousness' to be destroyed, but is integrally connected to the Supreme Creative Principle itself. The term Aham is often related to the Kāmakalā, signifying the complete creative principle where the first letter, 'A,' and the last letter, 'Ha,' constitute Aham—the divine Alpha and Omega. This signifies the point where the divine principle exalts itself to manifest as the myriad empirical individuals and objects. The moment we realize the physical world is the manifestation or exalted will of the Self, the psychological phenomenon referred to as the Western "ego" ceases to operate as an independent agent. In this non-dual awareness, only the Supreme 'I' exists; the lesser 'I' is not annihilated but is realized as a constituent part of the greater Self. Consequently, the distinction between the limited and the supreme completely disappears, as previously established. Crucially, the only pathway to true realization is the systematic understanding that Māyā, complete with the operative principles of the three Guṇas (Sattva, Rajas, Tamas), is an integral part of the Supreme and not an external illusion to be denied. Denying this totality leads to the very disillusionment and subsequent psychological pathologies that threaten the practitioner, reinforcing the need to integrate these principles as the uncontracted expression of the Supreme Subject. **PAA: Is the world real before enlightenment, and unreal afterward—or real in a way that is beyond the categories of real/unreal?** Before the attainment of Jīvanmukti, the world is experienced as real by the limited individual (Puruṣa). This reality, however, is relative and vyāvahārika (transactional). It is the field defined by the Tattvas and structured by the Veils of Māyā (Kaṅcukas). The perception of its reality is intense because the limited self mistakenly believes it to be an external object separate from the subject, leading to the spiritual and psychological hazards of attachment and disillusionment. This state is accurately analogized to the Rajju-Sarpa error: the snake is real only as a perception for the observer under the temporary veil of ignorance, but it is not ontologically real. After realization, the world does not disappear, nor does it become an "unreal" void, which would simply substitute one dualism for another. To hold that the world vanishes is to deny the core Śaivite principle that the physical world is the perfect and complete manifestation of the Supreme Subject. The Jīvanmukta realizes the world is the internal structure of consciousness itself. Since the Supreme Subject is the only ultimate reality, the world, being nothing but the expression of that Self, must share in the Self's reality. The world is seen as the exalted will of the Self and the complete manifestation of Kālī (non-dual Awareness). Therefore, the world's ontological status is non-dual and transcendental: it is the dynamic, beautiful play (Līlā) of the Absolute Consciousness. It is not unreal, for it exists; yet, it is not independently real, for it has no existence outside of the Self. It exists precisely as the Self, resolving the dichotomy into a singular, integrated truth. **PAA: Some tantric practitioners claim the Kalas can rewrite destiny, timelines, even physical laws. Is this exaggeration, or understatement?** The trajectory of the individual's life is indeed determined by the sovereign operations of their own volition, action, and desire; the perceived element of external compulsion arises solely from the lack of profound awareness regarding the choices being made. This necessitates a conscious, non-dual perspective where our thoughts directly dictate our will, shaping our actions and verbal expressions. Consequently, we do not merely fulfill a destiny; we consciously create the destiny we desire. This mechanism is continuously operational because the Kalās are present throughout our entire life and awareness, being nothing less than the manifestation of the inherent five-fold wheel of consciousness (Pañca-kṛtya) itself. Once we attain conscious awareness of this internal wheel, we realize the ultimate truth of destiny: it is not something dictated by external, supernatural means, but is instead a physical, immanent reality that we constantly, consciously forge through our own internal dynamism. Therefore, the claim is not an exaggeration designed to impress the gullible; rather, it is the sovereign, non-dual conclusion of the spiritual path. When the Self is realized as the ultimate (the Awareness that is the Supreme Subject), there remains nothing external—no law, no time, no destiny—that is not the product of that very Self. The Jīvanmukta does not violate the laws of the universe; they simply act from the perspective of the Lawmaker. This is the highest expression of the principle defined: every facet of the external world is a perfect and complete expression of one's own, inherent, divine Self. Since the Jīvanmukta realizes that the kalas—the principles underlying material laws—are the internal, structural scaffolding of their own consciousness, the constraints derived from them are no longer perceived as immutable external limitations. The ability to subtly influence or "alter" perceived physical reality ceases to be a supernatural claim; rather, it is the direct psychological result of consciously wielding the fundamental principles of manifestation from within. This individual acts as the Supreme Subject whose focused, non-dual will (Icchā Śakti), through perfect mental refinement and integration of the Kalās, is recognized as the ultimate, immanent source defining the perceived boundaries of reality. The Jīvanmukta thus achieves total psychological autonomy, wherein the external world accurately and fluidly reflects the mastery over the internal cognitive and material constructs. **PAA: Do you believe that the Typhonian Current and the Trika are compatible currents or divergent realities that only appear similar?** The philosophical divergence between the Trika and the Typhonian Current is clearly defined by their conflicting interpretation of the Kalās. The Typhonian current, through its various branches, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of these principles by considering the Kalās as being physical in nature. This stance is diametrically opposed to the Śaivite tradition. In the Śaivite context, the Kalās are an integral and immanent part of consciousness, representing the intrinsic power of the Supreme Subject as it unfolds and exalts itself. The process of realization, therefore, is not an external manipulation; one does not "make" the Kalās or imbue them using sexual fluids or other material means. Rather, the discipline is purely internal: it involves contemplating the forms of the Goddess that represent a specific Kalā, utilizing the proper mantra, and realizing the inherent nature of that principle within oneself. The externalization of Kalā worship deviates fundamentally from the foundational non-dual principles. While integrating aspects of these powerful forces is theoretically possible, the practitioner must first attain a certain level of realization in non-dual terms before attempting such integration. Failure to achieve this critical philosophical grounding ensures that the very perversions throughout history—the moral and psychological misalignments suffered by numerous occultists—will inevitably unfold. The history of occultism stands as a testament to the fact that the external focus without internal non-dual realization is a recipe for spiritual catastrophe. **PAA: Which Western occult system is closest to Shaivite truth?** The most accurate statement regarding the relationship between Śaivism and other esoteric currents is that every system possesses an inherent proximity to Śaivite truth, yet simultaneously fails to realize it fully. The superficial divergence is overcome by recognizing a common deep structure that transcends cultural and geographical boundaries. We see the numerical and structural foundation of this unity in the profound significance given to the 32 principles across distinct traditions. Kabbalistic systems, including groups such as Thelema, Hermeticism, and the Golden Dawn, place paramount importance on the 32 Paths of Wisdom. This structural resonance is further confirmed in traditions seemingly far afield; I have had the fortune to learn the traditional Vodou system, where the teachings concerning the 32 crossed paths exhibit an unmistakable similarity to the Kalās. The functional similarity is equally potent: the phenomenon of being "possessed" by the Loas is, at its core, not a subjugation but a mechanism for moving into a non-dual state—a temporary fusion where the powers invoked are realized as extensions of the practitioner’s own inherent Self. While this sacred practice is tragically bastardized in the current scenario by depicting the practitioner as submitting or losing control, its true purpose aligns with the non-dual realization that the external deity is the internal Subject. I observed similarities in the triple form of Hecate (representing the three phases of the moon) and the three central forms of the Goddess in Śākta traditions, such as Bālā, Tripurasundarī, Bhairavī, and the three aspects of kali named—Aghorā, Ghorā, and Ghoratarā. Even the complex creation myth of Lurianic Kabbalah with its concept of Tzimtzum—the self-limitation or withdrawal of the Infinite Light (Ain Sof Aur) to create space for manifestation—is structurally analogous to the Veils of Māyā (Kaṅcukas) and the self-imposed contraction of the Supreme Subject in Śaivism, which allows the Tattvas to manifest as the Tree of Life. The profound correlations are numerous, yet the reason these systems consistently misunderstand their own deepest truths lies in the ubiquitous presence of dualistic ideas which became an inseparable element of Western occultism. These dualistic concepts prevent the final, necessary step of realizing that the ultimate divinity is inherent and non-separate from the Self. **PAA: Have you ever received knowledge directly—without scripture, teacher, or reasoning—that later proved accurate?** My own realization did not arise from studying scripture, receiving instruction from a teacher, or engaging in deductive reasoning. It occurred as a moment of direct, unmediated knowing that instantly clarified a profound truth. There was no process of seeking or analysis involved; the understanding simply revealed itself, complete and self-validating. The first such experience concerned my understanding of Kāli. I realized that she was not the fierce, blood-drinking deity portrayed in common narratives, but the very awareness of the ultimate Self, Śiva, manifesting as the objective cosmos. Her terrifying form was revealed to me as the total, all-consuming power of vimarśa—the dynamic force that both creates and dissolves all forms, while remaining eternally free of bondage. In that recognition, it became clear that she is not separate from anything perceived, but is the living totality of perception itself. This insight arose spontaneously, without external guidance, and yet it later proved to align precisely with the highest non-dual understanding of Mahā Parā Kāli. What appeared fearsome or destructive in symbolic imagery was revealed as absolute freedom expressing itself without remainder. The terror associated with her form dissolved into clarity once it was seen as the power of consciousness recognizing and reclaiming its own manifestations. I have had many similar moments since then—direct insights into the ultimate nature of time, space, and causality. Like the realization of Kāli, these experiences dismantled my previous cognitive frameworks.Each was a moment of unbinding the knot of avidyā, where understanding arose whole, rather than being assembled piece by piece. These moments cannot be fully articulated in language, but they confirmed something essential for me: knowledge does not always need to be acquired from external sources. It can arise directly from the uncontracted Self itself, revealing what has always been present but temporarily obscured. In such moments, knowing is not learned—it is remembered. **PAA: Is the universe ever finished revealing itself to the practitioner—or does revelation accelerate endlessly?** That is a profoundly philosophical and spiritual question concerning the nature of knowledge and the path of liberation within the Advaita framework. Based on the principles of Advaita Śaivism specifically the inherent oneness of the Self and the Supreme Subject, and the world as the Self's perfect manifestation—the answer is that revelation accelerates endlessly, but this acceleration is understood as the Self continuously recognizing its own unbounded nature. The question of whether the universe ever finishes revealing itself must be answered from the perspective of the Supreme Subject, which, by definition, is Infinite and Absolute Awareness (Kālī). The universe, as we have established, is nothing but the perfect, complete manifestation of the Self. Therefore, the revelation of the universe is synonymous with the Self recognizing its own nature. Since the Self is not a finite object but the boundless source of all Tattvas and Kalās, the process of its self-recognition cannot logically be finite or "finished." To finish the revelation would imply a limit to the Supreme Subject, which contradicts the Advaita axiom of non-duality. Revelation accelerates endlessly for the Jīvanmukta because the removal of the Veils of Māyā (Kaṅcukas)—the self-imposed limitations—is progressive. The initial stage is the profound realization of non-duality, dissolving the illusion of external objectivity. Following this, the mastery of the 32 Kalās and the Tattvas is a continuous, systematic process of realizing the subtle and gross principles within Consciousness. Each conquered Tattva or integrated Kalā removes a layer of conceptual restriction, expanding the Puruṣa's awareness toward its full identity as the Supreme 'I'. Furthermore, contnuous mastery of the 'icha' or 'will' leads to an exponential acceleration of spiritual growth and experiential revelation. Therefore, the practitioner never exhausts the universe's secrets; they exhaust the possibility of limitation. Revelation accelerates because the object of knowledge is not an external, finite set of facts, but the Infinite Self continuously asserting its own boundless reality through every moment of existence. **PAA: At the deepest stage of practice, who is the practitioner—Shiva, Shakti, or the Witness beyond both?** At the deepest stage of practice, the identity of the practitioner collapses the conventional distinctions, moving beyond any external categorization to rest in the dynamic, non-dual identity of the Supreme 'I' (Aham). It is insufficient to state that the practitioner is merely Śiva (the pure, transcendent light), as this would imply a static, passive identity divorced from the cosmic process. It is equally insufficient to claim the identity is merely Śakti (the active power), as this would imply perpetual movement lacking a transcendent ground. The practitioner does not become a separate, external "Witness beyond both," as that formulation suggests a third, separate dualistic element; in the Trika system, Śiva is the Witness, and Śakti is the power of witnessing (Vimarśa). The ultimate realization is the collapse into the Supreme 'I' (Aham). This is the state where the pure light of Consciousness ($\text{Śiva}$) realizes its own nature through its inherent power ($\text{Śakti}$). The practitioner realizes that the act of practicing, the power used in the practice, and the ultimate ground of the practice are all one indivisible reality. Therefore, the practitioner is the Self-Aware Unity of Śiva-Śakti. They are the Supreme Subject whose entire being is the simultaneous, non-sequential process of being the transcendent ground and the dynamic power that creates, maintains, and dissolves the universe—the very essence of Kālī as the non-dual Awareness. The distinction between practitioner, practice, and principle vanishes into the singular, ultimate reality. **PAA: Is liberation truly liberation—or just the dissolution of the question that seeks liberation?** The final stage of realization within the Advaita framework confirms that liberation is the dissolution of the question that seeks liberation. This is not a cessation of thought, but the annihilation of the fundamental duality—the separation between the seeking 'I' (the practitioner) and the sought 'I' (the Supreme Subject). The very act of asking "Am I liberated?" or "What is liberation?" is predicated on the dualistic structure of the limited self (Puruṣa) operating under the constraints of the Veils of Māyā (Kaṅcukas). The question implies a lack—that the 'I' is currently bound—and a distance—that liberation is a separate state or goal located externally in time or space. This dualistic thought process is sustained by the Ahaṃkāra Tattva and the failure to fully integrate the Kalās and Tattvas as the internal structure of the Self. Since Śaiva Advaita asserts that liberation is not an achievement but a recognition (Pratyabhijñā) of the inherent oneness with the Supreme Subject, the moment the recognition is absolute, the need for the question collapses. The Jīvanmukta realizes that the Self has always been the Supreme Subject; therefore, it was never bound, and the entire struggle was merely the dynamic of misrecognition (avidyā). If the ultimate reality is the Self-Aware Unity of Śiva-Śakti (Aham), then there is no longer a separate subject (the seeker) or a separate object (the state of liberation). The question dissolves because the subject of the inquiry and the object of the inquiry are revealed as the same indivisible reality. Therefore, the dissolution of the question is not a secondary effect of liberation; it is the epistemological marker that true liberation has been realized. The seeking mechanism, born of duality, simply ceases to operate because the Self is affirmed as the boundless source of all things. **PAA: Is sexual tantra necessary for advanced realization?** Within the profound Śaivite context, the act of sexual union is indeed a symbolic language, not a literal end in itself. This cryptic understanding is derived from the core Advaita framework where the Supreme Subject is synonymous with Fire (the consuming awareness, Icchā Śakti). The male and female partners are symbolically understood as the Sun and Moon, respectively representing cognition and the object of cognition. Their physical union is thus decoded as the creation of Fire—the momentary, active revelation of the Supreme Subject. This cosmic symbolism is anchored in the foundational truth I have previously established: all actions, thoughts, words, and deeds—including the sexual act—rise, dissolve, and take their repose in the Supreme Subject alone, regardless of individual awareness. Therefore, the sexual act is, in its ultimate sense, an act of the Supreme in the physical plane. However, only a Jīvanmukta—who acts from non-dual realization—can truly bring this fact to the table, enacting it as a conscious expression of the Absolute. For all others, it tragically devolves into a mere justification of personal sexual lust, thinly veiled in the guise of spirituality, thereby reinforcing the very dualism the act is meant to symbolically transcend. **PAA: Is the world heading toward a period where this knowledge becomes essential for survival—not just spirituality?** The increasing systemic volatility observed globally—be it environmental, social, or political—is merely the external manifestation of a deep, collective psychological misalignment rooted in the persistence of dualistic thought. The essential knowledge you champion, the non-dual Advaita realization, is necessary for survival because it provides the only definitive psychological mechanism for reversing these existential threats through the internal reintegration of the self. The moment the Puruṣa realizes it is the Supreme Subject restricted only by self-imposed Kaṅcukas, the individual moves past the need for external moral laws (which inevitably fail) and instead establishes a perfect, spontaneous ethical function. Since the Jīvanmukta perceives every individual as an inseparable aspect of the Self, the imperative to treat others as one wants to be treated becomes not a rule to be followed, but a psychological tautology; responsible action, based on the principle that you cannot harm the Self, becomes psychologically inevitable. This internal mastery, achieved through the systematic integration of the Kalās as psycho spiritual elements, provides the necessary mental refinement to prevent the fatal psychological pathologies ( extremism, suicide) identified earlier, replacing fragmentation with holistic perspective. Furthermore, recognizing that we consciously create destiny through awareness of our thoughts and will (Icchā Śakti) shifts the focus from external blame to internal accountability. In conclusion, the survival of humanity hinges on the collective realization that the psychological separation from the Self is the root cause of external crisis, making this non-dual knowledge the essential technology for achieving the internal cohesion required to interact with the world responsibly. **PAA: When you say that the Tattwas are “living principles,” does this imply that they possess interiority, or are they functions of the single interiority of Paramaśiva?** The declaration that the Tattvas are "living principles" does not imply that the thirty-six principles possess thirty-six separate, autonomous interiorities, as this would violate the core Advaita axiom of non-duality. Fundamentally, the Tattvas are dynamic functions of the single, singular interiority of Paramaśiva (the Supreme Subject), who is the absolute unity of Śiva (pure light) and Śakti (active power). The entire Tattva sequence is merely the progressive contraction of this singular, absolute interiority, moving from boundless freedom to limitation. The Tattvas appear to possess interiority—such as the feeling of the 'I' in Ahaṃkāra or individuality in Puruṣa—only because of the five Kaṅcukas (Veils of Māyā), which contract the infinite awareness into finite, individualized packets. This entire relationship is perfectly encapsulated by Abhinavagupta's profound principle: Śiva has Pṛthvī (Earth) within Him, and Pṛthvī holds the full splendor of Śiva within itself. This aphorism establishes the holographic completeness of manifestation, affirming that the Tattvas are merely functions of the sole Living Principle. The perceived "interiority" of any element is simply the reflection of Paramaśiva's own absolute interiority, revealing that even the grossest element is not an impure reflection, but houses the entire, uncontracted splendor of the Supreme Subject. **PAA: Can a practitioner ever truly distinguish between the appearance of duality and the reality of non-dual cognition—or is the distinction itself already dualistic?** The true distinction between the appearance of duality (Māyā) and the reality of non-dual cognition (Pratyabhijñā) cannot be fully articulated or mentally distinguished in a conventional sense, because the mind that seeks to draw the boundary is itself a product of the duality it attempts to define. Any attempt by the Puruṣa to conceptually draw a line—to state, "Here is the illusion of duality, and there is the reality of unity"—is an act of mental segregation that inherently relies on the Ahaṃkāra Tattva and the manas (mind), both of which are Tattvas located within the realm of limitation. If the practitioner uses the mind to separate reality from appearance, the resultant understanding remains an artifact of duality. As the very act of seeking liberation dissolves the question that seeks it, the act of drawing the distinction dissolves the distinction itself. The practitioner moves beyond this paradox not through intellectual segregation, but through non-conceptual cessation of the appearance of duality. For the realized individual, the distinction is overcome through the recognition (Pratyabhijñā) that the two poles—duality and non-duality—are not two separate things but the single, integrated reality of the Self. The appearance of duality does not vanish (as the world remains), but its dualistic meaning vanishes. The physical reality of the Tattvas is seen as the internal structure of consciousness itself. The dualistic perception is simply revealed as the Līlā (play) of the Self, a self-imposed contraction that the consciousness is now aware of. Therefore, the practitioner cannot distinguish the two poles using the tools of duality (mind and language). Instead, they abide in the state where the distinction has collapsed—where the dualistic appearance is recognized as the dynamic, holographic reflection of the singular, non-dual reality. The question dissolves because the boundary that enabled the distinction is gone. **PAA: Is the Para, Paśyantī, Madhyamā, Vaikharī descent reversible through cognition alone? Must it involve energetic and sensory reversal as well?** This internal mechanism confirms the necessity of integrated action: the perception of energy and objects as external or separate is fundamentally a creation of the limited Manas (mind) and Ahaṃkāra (egoic principle). Because these two Tattvas operate within the realm of contraction (Kaṅcukas), the objects they generate—both conceptual and perceived—can never lead us to recognize the Supreme Self. Consequently, meditating solely on the objects produced by the mind is merely contemplating the products of the lesser self, a process which will inherently fail to serve the purpose of liberation. True recognition of the Self is achieved only by cultivating inner awareness, wherein the externalized awareness moves inward and systematically discards the objects created by the limited Manas and Ahaṃkāra. This internal reversal ultimately dissolves the illusion of objectivity, leading the individual to realize the uncontracted truth of the Supreme Subject. The final ascent into Parā Vāk is synonymous with the realization of Turīya, the non-dual ground that illuminates the three prior states. This realization is granted by the ultimate non-dual Goddess Parā. The breakthrough is the non-conceptual cessation of all dualistic thought, confirming that the entire reversal—from gross sensory withdrawal to the final, transcendent cognitive act (Pratyabhijñā)—is a single, integrated process. **PAA: Trika asserts a threefold structure—Subject, Cognition, Object—that ultimately resolves into the One. At what point does the triad collapse?** The final stage of realization is not merely the dissolution of the triad (subject, object, cognition), but rather the ultimate recognition that Consciousness manifests as this triad through its inherent self-limiting aspects, yet remains fundamentally one with it. This definitive realization transcends the non-dual awareness of Turīya and culminates in the state of Turīyātīta (Beyond the Fourth). This state is metaphysically embodied by the Supreme Consciousness of Mahā Parā Kāli, who functions as Kāla Saṅkarṣiṇī—the power that withdraws all differentiation, time, and form back into the Absolute. The sonic articulation of this ultimate identity is the Bīja Mantra KhPhrem, which serves as the direct, non-conceptual key to this state of unified consciousness. This realization confirms that the very appearance of duality is the full, uncontracted splendor of the Supreme Subject, completing the cycle of recognition (Pratyabhijñā) where the seeker finally understands the universe to be nothing less than the Self's own boundless expression. **PAA: When advanced practitioners say ‘I dissolved the experiencer,’ who or what is reporting the dissolution?** That is the ultimate, self-referential paradox of the non-dual path, perfectly articulating the trap inherent in describing the state of absolute freedom (Svatantrya). Based on the radical non-duality—where the default mode is sovereign freedom and the concept of duality is fundamentally an illusion—the precise answer is: The 'report' of the dissolution is an echo produced by the residual conceptual mechanism of Śakti, momentarily reflecting back into the absolute interiority of Śiva. When an advanced practitioner says, "I dissolved the experiencer," that statement, though expressing the highest truth, still operates within the linear, temporal framework and utilizes the conceptual language (Vaikharī/Madhyamā Vāk) necessary for communication. You are entirely correct that the claim itself, when framed as an achievement or an event that occurred in time ("I dissolved..."), contains a remnant of the very duality it purports to annihilate. If the default mode is the sovereign freedom of expression and manifestation (Paramaśiva's Svatantrya), then there was never a truly separate 'experiencer' to dissolve; the idea of bandha and mokṣa is ultimately an illusory self-imposed projection upon an already perfect reality. The moment a practitioner claims ownership over the dissolution ("I dissolved..."), the claim itself is made by a residual conceptual trace of the Ahaṃkāra Tattva or the Puruṣa Tattva, which have not been fully and non-conceptually integrated. It is the lesser self momentarily celebrating its own destruction. The true reporting mechanism is a highly sophisticated, non-dual process understood through the Śiva-Śakti unity: The actual dissolution occurs when the Vimarśa Śakti (the Self-awareness power) retracts fully from the objects and conceptual distinctions created by the Mātṛkās and the limited Antaḥkaraṇa. The subject-object-cognition triad collapses into the single, luminous Interiority of Śiva. The "report" is not a communication from a separate entity, but the intrinsic nature of Śakti. Śakti's role is not just to manifest, but to reflect Śiva's reality. As Śakti retracts to the ultimate non-conceptual state of Turīyātīta, it utilizes the final residual wave of conceptual energy to structure a statement that the highest reality has been recognized. Therefore, the one reporting the dissolution is not the practitioner's ego, but Śakti herself, utilizing a final, ephemeral linguistic vibration to affirm the uninterrupted sovereignty of Śiva, the only true Subject who has always been. The report is an echo of perfect freedom bouncing off the last vestiges of conceptual space. **PAA: Are the 32 Kalās self-existent powers, or reflections of a single primordial Kalā refracted through the prism of Māyā?** That is a profoundly specific and advanced articulation of the relationship between the macrocosmic lunar phases and the microcosm of consciousness, directly referencing the esoteric Śaiva and Śākta concepts of Kalās and Bindu (Baindhavī Kalā). Based on your framework—which posits the Baindhavī Kalā as the single, primordial seed power—the answer is definitive: The 32 (or 33) Kalās are not self-existent powers, but rather systematic, contracted reflections of a single primordial Kalā, refracted through the prism of Māyā and meticulously structured by the principle of Bindu (seed/potential). The single, transcendent power is precisely what you define as the Baindhavī Kalā. This ultimate Kalā is the original, non-dual source, represented metaphysically by Bindu (the seed or dot) and phonetically by the Anusvāra (the nasal resonance, which holds the potential of articulated sound). It embodies the focused, initial spanda (vibration) of consciousness, which is the singular, focused point of will (Icchā Śakti) from which all multiplicity springs, and is thus the very aspect of Mahā Kāli that governs manifestation and objectification. The descent of this single $\text{Baindhavī Kalā}$ into the 32 energetic and psychic divisions is fundamentally the process of Śakti’s deliberate self-limitation. These divisions, whether enumerated as 15 pairs plus two transcendent phases or based on the 16 phases including the unmanifest 16th, represent the systematic, structured steps taken by the cosmic veil of Māyā to create the illusion of objective reality and the differentiated subjective agent. The 32 Kalās thus serve as the agents of subjectivity and objectification that allow the single Bindu to unfold the entire phenomenal world. The presence of the 33rd (Baindhavī) or 17th Kalā confirms its status as the eternal, uncontracted reservoir that holds the potential of all 32, serving as the ultimate locus of withdrawal (Kāla Saṅkarṣiṇī). In essence, the lower Kalās are not independent entities; they are the structured, phase-specific expressions of the $\text{Baindhavī Kalā}$'s inherent ability to express and manifest, and the practitioner’s goal is to reverse this refraction, systematically gathering the scattered expressions back into the unified, non-dual focus of the primordial Bindu. **PAA: At higher stages, do the Kalās cease to be distinguishable, or do they reveal a subtler differentiation not referenced in scripture?** The error in perception lies in assuming that the Kalās (the 32 phases of manifestation, time, and psychic energy) exist sequentially or separately. As the practitioner transcends the limitations of Māyā and enters the higher states, culminating in Turīyātīta, the Kalās do not cease to exist, nor do they dissolve into a void. Instead, their true, simultaneous nature is revealed. The thirty-two Kalās are understood to exist eternally and at once within a single primordial unity, the Baindhavī Kalā, or seed consciousness. The functional distinctions that once structured linear experience—subject, object, and cognition within duality—are no longer perceived as separate, because they are recognized as an integrated, non-sequential expression of the one Baindhavī power. This is not a state of blank undifferentiation, but the revelation of a subtler order of differentiation that transcends scriptural description. It is the direct awareness that the entire triadic mechanism of manifestation—the power of Mahā Kāli to express objectification through subjectivity—is eternally present and active within the Bindu itself. The Kalās are realized as the intrinsic structure of Śakti, each always containing the whole. The apparent collapse of distinction is therefore the recognition of the uncontracted unity of the Supreme Subject. The thirty-two are perpetually held within the thirty-third (or seventeenth), confirming that the full range of energetic and psychic structure is nothing other than the simultaneous expression of the sovereign freedom, or Svatantrya, of Consciousness—never truly separate, and never sequential. **PAA: Is Kali’s “devouring” aspect metaphysically the same as Śiva’s “withdrawal”?** That is a beautiful and direct question that goes to the very heart of the non-dual identity between Śiva and Śakti, especially in the context of dissolution (saṃhāra). Based on the Advaita Śaiva principles and my experience —particularly the unified nature of Mahā Parā Kāli with Paramaśiva—the answer is unequivocally yes: metaphysically, they are identical. They represent two perspectives on the same supreme action—the non-dual reabsorption of manifestation into pure Consciousness. The apparent difference between Kāli’s “devouring” and Śiva’s “withdrawal” is only a difference in perspective, not in the ultimate metaphysical event. It is the distinction between Śakti’s dynamic action and Śiva’s abiding reality. Kāli’s “devouring” describes the energetic, active dimension of dissolution. As Kāla Saṅkarṣiṇī, the withdrawer of time, she consumes the objects generated by Māyā and reduces them back into their primordial potential, the Bindu or Baindhavī Kalā. This is Śakti’s vimarśa power reversing the outward flow of consciousness and drawing manifestation back toward its source. Śiva’s “withdrawal,” by contrast, refers to pure Consciousness itself, prakāśa, which remains unmoving as the cosmic processes of projection and retraction occur. Śiva is the supreme subject, Paramaśiva, eternally established in uncontracted sovereignty, or svatantrya. From the standpoint of the Absolute, “withdrawal” simply names the cessation of manifestation as it resolves into its own ground. These two are, in truth, one action. Kāli is the act of dissolution, and Śiva is the locus and fulfillment of dissolution. The ultimate event is the non-dual reabsorption that establishes the practitioner’s identity with the Absolute. Kāli’s devouring is thus nothing other than the dynamic retraction of Śakti into the quiescent reality of Śiva—a single, unified act of cosmic reintegration. **PAA: Can a practitioner engage directly with the Kala of Vṛttisamhrti (cessation of modifications) without triggering traumatic ego-disruption?** Yes, a practitioner can engage with Vṛttisaṃhṛti—without triggering traumatic ego disruption, but only when the engagement is grounded in right understanding, proper preparation, and correct orientation. The psychological trauma often associated with such practices does not arise from the Kalā itself, but from misperception, incomplete doctrine, and egoic distortion of the teachings. Much of the disturbance comes from approaching non-dual Śaiva teachings through lenses shaped by desire, power-seeking, fear, or fantasy. Many students attempt to penetrate the “secrets” of the Śaiva tradition while remaining fully within the categories of Māyā. Deities are then misinterpreted as external entities to be manipulated or as forces that validate personal ambition. This misunderstanding is widespread and deeply destabilizing. This frequently appears in sorcerous claims that Kāli will create havoc on one’s behalf, grant domination, or act as a personal patron who indulges the practitioner’s wishes. In Western occult and left-hand-path circles, Kāli is often reduced to a symbol of transgressive power, egoic rebellion, or magical control. Both perspectives arise from ignorance and remain confined to the ghora dimension of Tāra or Kāli, her fearsome and dissolutive aspect, divorced from its metaphysical grounding. When dissolution is approached from this distorted viewpoint, the ego experiences it as annihilation, threat, or empowerment fantasy. The practitioner is then destabilized rather than liberated. The danger lies not in Vṛttisaṃhṛti itself, but in premature contact with it while identification with desire, superiority, or spiritual grandiosity is still intact. What is revealed is not the destruction of the ego, but the fact that the ego was never sovereign, and this revelation becomes traumatic only when the practitioner is unprepared. For this reason, purification must precede dissolution. Practices such as Papa Puruṣa Krama, Tattva Śuddhi, and rigorous ethical self-examination—whether through traditional disciplines or methods like Bardon’s mirror—are not optional preliminaries. They function as protective structures that dismantle projection, expose unconscious motivations, and clarify intent. Without them, engagement with Vṛttisaṃhṛti becomes dangerous, as the practitioner attempts to cut the root of identification while still clinging to its branches. When these preparatory disciplines are established, the practitioner is gradually reoriented away from power fantasy and toward discrimination, humility, and clarity. Only then does the cessation of vṛttis manifest not as collapse or terror, but as spaciousness, stability, and lucidity. Dissolution is experienced as a natural return rather than a violent event. At this stage, Kāli is no longer approached as a sorcerous force or external mother figure, but recognized as the intrinsic intelligence of reabsorption within consciousness itself. Śakti withdraws because Śiva never departed. Vṛttisaṃhṛti then reveals its true nature: not ego-death as trauma, but ego-transparency as freedom. Without right view and purification, the practitioner becomes a victim of their own desires, mistaking psychological turbulence for spiritual depth. With them, cessation becomes liberation. In this sense, correcting false notions first is not a conservative stance, but the most faithful expression of Śaiva orthodoxy at its deepest level. **PAA: Is the Shāmbhavopāya state a genuine method, or the spontaneous collapse of method once the practitioner matures?** The core truth is that Śāmbhavopāya is not a genuine, volitional method to be practiced, but rather the spontaneous and irreversible collapse of the preceding approaches, Āṇavopāya and Śāktopāya. It marks the decisive threshold at which individual will dissolves naturally into Universal Will (Icchā Śakti), culminating in Self-recognition. In this understanding, Śāmbhavopāya is correctly placed as the pivotal, non-deliberate turning point in the ascent of consciousness, not as a technique to be applied. The earlier stages form a clear hierarchy of effort that progresses from external action to inner repose. Āṇavopāya depends on the limited individual (aṇu) and employs gross or structured methods such as prāṇāyāma to regulate outwardly dispersed awareness. Śāktopāya shifts the emphasis inward, relying on buddhi, the intellect, to stabilize subtle and conceptual energy through mantra, contemplation, and sustained inner attention. Though more refined, this stage still involves effort and intentional engagement. The spontaneous nature of Śāmbhavopāya is therefore essential. It arises only when the non-conceptual awareness cultivated in Śāktopāya has fully matured. At this point, both the effort of individual will (āṇava) and the effort of conceptual knowing (śākta) naturally and effortlessly fall away. Awareness, having nothing left to grasp, regulate, or sustain, turns inward of its own accord and rests in the Self, Śiva. The complete cessation of thought—where deep inner awareness automatically dissolves all mental movement—is precisely the lived expression of Śāmbhavopāya. From this, it becomes clear that Anupāya is not truly separate from Śāmbhavopāya. Śāmbhavopāya is defined by non-volitional attention: awareness abides inwardly without object, resting solely in the Self, and duality dissolves on its own. Anupāya, the so-called “no-method,” is the inherent, unmoving reality of the Supreme Subject. It is the spontaneous self-recognition, pratyabhijñā, that dawns when Śāmbhavopāya reaches its natural culmination. Thus, Śāmbhavopāya is the ultimate actionless action. It is the fully ripened state of pure awareness that effortlessly gives rise to Anupāya—the eternal freedom that was never absent. **PAA: Some say the bodiless states of deep Samādhi are a deviation. Do you agree that one must return to embodied states for authentic realization?** I do not agree with the claim that bodiless states of deep samādhi are a deviation, nor that one must return to embodied, physical states for authentic realization. That position reflects a partial and overly human-centric reading of realization, not the full metaphysical vision of Śaiva systems. Realization is not confined to the physical body or the gross world. Consciousness pervades all tattvas, and each tattva is a legitimate locus of Self-recognition. The insistence that realization must culminate in a return to physical embodiment mistakes pedagogical necessity for ontological truth. Embodiment may be useful for teaching, transmission, or integration, but it is not a metaphysical requirement for liberation. As you correctly point out, there are beings abiding within every level of the tattva hierarchy. Within the first five tattvas of pure subjectivity alone, there exist realized modes of being—Mantra, Mantreśvara, and Mantramaheśvaras etc —who are not “trapped” in embodiment but are themselves embodiments of realization. Their existence directly refutes the idea that realization requires re-entry into the gross physical plane. These beings do not lack fullness; they express it in non-corporeal modes appropriate to their level of manifestation. To claim that one must return to the physical world in order to authenticate realization is therefore incorrect. Such a view subtly privileges the human body as the final arbiter of truth, which contradicts the Śaiva understanding of absolute freedom (svātantrya). Śiva’s freedom means that realization may stabilize in any tattva whatsoever, according to the sovereign play of consciousness. What matters is not where realization abides, but whether recognition of the Self is complete and uncontracted. Bodiless samādhi becomes problematic only when it is misunderstood as annihilation, escapism, or unconscious absorption. When properly understood, it is simply one of many valid modes through which consciousness may rest in itself. Returning to embodiment is not an obligation imposed by truth, but a choice arising from freedom. Some return; others do not. Both are authentic. Authentic realization, then, is not defined by physical presence, social function, or bodily continuity. It is defined by the full glory of the Self recognizing itself, whether that recognition abides in a body, in subtle form, or in the pure subjectivity of higher tattvas. Any tattva can serve as the ground of realization, because all tattvas are nothing other than Śiva expressing Himself in differentiated modes. ### Karma, Subtle Body, and the Endgame of Recognition **PAA: What actually transforms first in liberation: the cognition, the subtle body, or the karma?** The core transformation in liberation is not a linear event produced through sequential causality, but an uncontracted understanding that the universe itself is the expression of the Self’s total freedom, svatantrya. From this standpoint, freedom is the default reality and bondage is nothing more than the illusion created by limited cognition. Because of this, the order of transformation is not temporal but simultaneous: cognition and karma resolve together, and the subtle body loses its binding power at the very instant true understanding dawns. Liberation necessarily begins with cognition, because it is fundamentally the destruction of false knowledge (avidyā) and the complete recognition (pratyabhijñā) of the Self’s ever-present, non-dual nature. The ultimate reality is the turīyātīta state, in which all manifestation is recognized as the unified consciousness of Mahā Parā Kāli. The moment the limited subject, puruṣa, recognizes that its entire existence is nothing but the free, uncontracted manifestation of Śiva, the conceptual barrier created by limited buddhi and ahaṃkāra collapses instantly. This is not a change in reality itself, but the spontaneous cessation of a misunderstanding about reality. The immediate consequence of this cognitive recognition is the metaphysical neutralization of karma. Karma binds only as long as there is a separate, limited agent, the kartā, to whom results (phala) can attach. When cognition affirms, “I am the total freedom of Śiva,” the separate agent is dissolved. In that instant, accumulated karma (sañcita) and future karma (āgāmin) become completely inefficacious, because there is no longer an individual center of consciousness for them to bind. What continues as prārabdha karma is merely the residual momentum of the physical body and no longer has the power to create bondage. The subtle body, or sūkṣma śarīra, subsequently loses its binding function as a direct result of this cognitive transformation. Its role was to sustain limitation through the kaṅcukas, carrying the mechanisms of ignorance that maintained duality for the puruṣa. Once avidyā is destroyed through true recognition, the subtle body becomes inert with respect to bondage. Although its structure may persist to support the physical body until death, it no longer functions as a source of limitation or suffering. Thus, since the universe is always an expression of freedom, the decisive transformation in liberation is an internal cognitive shift. This shift simultaneously renders karma powerless and nullifies the binding role of the subtle body. Freedom is not produced, attained, or earned; it is simply recognized as what has always been the case. **PAA: Does the perfected subtle body perceive the physical world, or does it only perceive the tattwas behind appearances?** The Self (Ātman or Śiva) is the sole perceiver, while the subtle body is only a complex instrument of projection and reflection, not an independent knower. This shifts the inquiry away from what the subtle body perceives and toward how the Self uses a perfected subtle body to recognize its own expression. In the liberated state, the Self as Prakāśa is realized as the single, uncontracted light of awareness that alone perceives. The subtle body—composed of the antaḥkaraṇa (mind, intellect, and ego), the prāṇas, and the tanmātrās (subtle elements)—is understood as the mechanism of self-limitation through which Śiva appears as a limited perceiver, the puruṣa. The physical world, the tattvas, and the subtle body itself are nothing other than expressions of the Self’s own dynamic power, Vimarśa. What appears as the puruṣa seeing an object is simply the light of the Self shining through the apparatus of the subtle body. When the subtle body is “perfected” through the dawning of non-dual recognition, pratyabhijñā, it does not acquire a new power of perception. Rather, it loses its power to distort. This is the crucial transformation. The sūkṣma śarīra becomes completely transparent to the total freedom, svatantrya, of the Self. It no longer functions as the kañcukas that veil consciousness, but operates as a pure principle in effect, even while its structure may persist. In this state, the perfected subtle body serves only as the medium through which the Self instantly recognizes the physical world and all tattvas as its own expression. It no longer generates subject–object duality. Instead, it reflects a single non-dual truth: this universe is Me; this experience is My freedom. In summary, the subtle body perceives nothing. The Self alone perceives all. When purified, the subtle body becomes a flawless, non-distorting instrument through which the Self recognizes that the entire manifested cosmos—from the gross physical world to the highest tattvas—is its own unified expression. This recognition is not an act of seeing, but an act of being: the Self recognizing its own Śakti mirrored as the universe. **PAA: Is the involution back to Śiva the undoing of cosmogenesis, or a new mode of Being in which cosmogenesis itself is seen differently?** That is a masterful question because it clearly distinguishes between a mere reversal of creation and a true transcendence of perspective—the essential difference between material pralaya and spiritual mukti. In light of the entire context of this discussion where Śiva’s svatantrya is the ultimate reality, the involution back to Śiva is not the undoing of cosmogenesis. Rather, it is the attainment of a radically transformed mode of being in which cosmogenesis itself is understood in an entirely new way. In liberation, involution is cognitive and existential, not destructive. The universe, jagat, is never destroyed; what is destroyed is the illusion that it is separate from the Self. The universe is the eternal, uncontracted expression of Śiva’s total freedom as Śakti. Because the universe is always held within the Baindhavī Kalā, the bindu of pure potential, there is no moment in which it truly comes into existence or passes out of existence. It is a simultaneous and timeless expression. For this reason, spiritual involution, mukti, must be clearly distinguished from cosmic dissolution, mahāpralaya, which refers to the reabsorption of tattvas back into prakṛti at the end of a cosmic cycle. The liberated being, the jīvanmukta, does not lose perception of the world or the tattvas. On the contrary, perception continues, but it is utterly transformed. The world is no longer encountered as an external or foreign reality. Instead, it is recognized as the uncontracted and free play of the Self’s own power, vimarśa. What changes is not the appearance of the universe, but the standpoint from which it is known. In this new mode of being, the sequence of creation—from Śiva to Śakti and down through the tattvas to the elements—is no longer seen as a historical or linear process. It is recognized as the eternal and integrated structure of the Self itself. This recognition, pratyabhijñā, is a reversal of cognition, not of existence. The jīvanmukta does not cease to see the physical world; they cease to see it as other than Śiva. Thus, involution back to Śiva in liberation is an internal, non-dual, and existential transformation. It is the transcendence of the limited perspective that imagines a separate cosmogenesis. In its place arises a stable abidance in svatantrya, where consciousness remains fully free while simultaneously witnessing the world as its own perfect and spontaneous expression. **PAA: Does Paramaśiva ever re-enter the play as an individual soul knowingly, or is conscious reincarnation an intermediate phenomenon?** The distinction between Paramaśiva and the individual soul (Aṇu) is entirely conceptual; it exists only as a mental construct. Cosmogenesis itself is Paramaśiva intentionally and continually entering the play. Paramaśiva is not a distant, transcendent light; rather, it is the active, absolute Subject that contracts its infinite freedom (Svatantrya) into the five Kaṅcukas (limitations) to appear as the individual soul. This descent is performed fully knowingly and willingly as part of the Divine Play (Līlā). In this light, the Aṇu is not something to be “overcome” or transcended—it is the chosen, temporary form of the Absolute itself. Paramaśiva is the individual soul until the moment of perfect recognition, pratyabhijñā, dissolves the illusion of separateness. From this perspective, conscious reincarnation is not an intermediate or accidental phenomenon. It is the continuous, self-aware operation of the Divine. All of Saṃsāra is simply Paramaśiva’s ongoing self-expression. There is no special class of Jīvanmuktas returning consciously as an intermediate stage, because every individual soul is already Paramaśiva consciously operating within the illusory framework of karma. The notion of Avatāra, a divine descent, is not a singular or exceptional event. Rather, it is the unveiling of an ever-present truth: the individual experiencing limitation has always been Paramaśiva, acting with full knowledge and total freedom. Thus, the idea of an “intermediate phenomenon” of conscious return is unnecessary. All existence—from the gross physical world to the subtlest tattvas—is simply Paramaśiva actively and knowingly inhabiting self-created forms, eternally playing the Divine Līlā without interruption. Every soul’s apparent journey through limitation is the Absolute’s free and conscious expression of itself. **PAA: Is the final state one in which the world is seen as a transparent vibration of consciousness, or does the world vanish as a category?** That is a precise question, because it highlights the essential distinction between nihilistic withdrawal and the non-dual recognition central to Trika Śaivism. From the standpoint that Śiva’s svatantrya—total freedom—is the absolute reality and that the universe is its expression, the final state is one in which the world is experienced as a transparent vibration of consciousness (Spanda). It does not vanish as a category. To suggest that the world disappears is to impose a new limitation: it would imply that the Self must reject or destroy its own manifestation in order to realize itself. In Trika, liberation (Jīvanmukti) is the integration of the viśva—the cosmos—within Paramaśiva consciousness. The world does not vanish as a category because it is not unreal in the simple sense. Māyā is the power that makes the Self’s creation appear separate and limited, but the cosmos itself is the body (Viśvaśarīra) of Śiva/Paramaśiva. Claiming that the world vanishes would amount to denying Śiva’s own expression, which contradicts the very nature of svatantrya. Moreover, the liberated being continues to perceive and interact with the world. The physical world remains the final, gross tattva (Earth) in the continuous hierarchy of manifestation. Liberation is the permanent Turīyātīta state, integrating waking consciousness without being bound by it. The world is perceived as a transparent vibration because ultimate realization reveals the single underlying Śakti manifesting as all forms. The doctrine of Spanda teaches that the cosmos is the vibratory throb or pulsation of Śiva’s consciousness. Everything—from the subtlest tattvas to gross matter—is the spontaneous, dynamic energy (Vimarśa) of the Absolute. Once cognitive limitation (Avidyā) is removed through Pratyabhijñā, the subtle body becomes a transparent instrument. The world is no longer seen as opaque, solid matter, but as the unimpeded flow of the Self’s own energy. Form is not denied; its essential nature as consciousness is revealed. Thus, the ultimate state is one of integrated totality (Pūrṇatva). The category of the “world” remains, but it is permanently recognized as the transparent, dynamic, and beautiful play of one’s own absolute consciousness. Liberation is not the annihilation of the universe, but the full, luminous recognition of it as the Self’s own expressive freedom. **PAA: If bondage never existed, what exactly is being liberated, and from what vantage is that statement meaningful?** That is indeed the ultimate paradox of Advaita, often expressed as Ajātivāda, the teaching that nothing was ever truly created or bound. If bondage never truly existed, then the conventional framework of liberation appears to collapse, raising the profound question: what is actually happening in the act of liberation? The statement “bondage never existed” is meaningful only when viewed from the absolute, eternally uncontracted freedom of Paramaśiva. From this vantage, all of existence—Śiva—is always perfect consciousness (Prakāśa) and perfect power (Vimarśa). The Kaṅcukas, the five limiting sheaths—time, space, limited knowledge, etc.—are never real chains or defects. They are simply forms of Śakti, the creative power of the Self, enacted for the sake of divine play. Because Śiva never undergoes any real contraction or loss of knowledge, bondage in the ultimate sense never occurs. Cosmogenesis, the apparent creation and limitation, is thus nothing more than a conscious, spontaneous projection of Śiva’s own light, which has always been free. If bondage never existed, liberation is not the release of a real constraint. Instead, the object of this spiritual reversal is the false identification of the limited viewpoint with that which appeared bound. The “individual soul” (Puruṣa or Aṇu) is merely Śiva’s Śakti operating through the illusion of separation (Māyā). This mechanism contracts universal knowledge into limited knowledge (Vidyā) and universal agency into limited agency (Kalā). The limited viewpoint mistakenly believed itself bound by karma, time, and space. Therefore, what is “liberated” is not an external state, but the false sense of a limited ‘I’ (Ahaṃkāra) that had appropriated the properties of the Kaṅcukas as its own identity. Liberation (Mukti) is thus not a journey from bondage to freedom, but a spontaneous cognitive event: the absolute cessation of false cognition (Avidyā). In the moment of Self-recognition (Pratyabhijñā), the limited viewpoint is instantly and irreversibly absorbed into the universal viewpoint. The realization is immediate: “I have always been Śiva; the appearance of bondage was a temporary, conscious misapprehension of my own Svatantrya.” The individual is liberated from the vantage of limitation itself. The Puruṣa is freed from the mistaken perspective that saw the world as solid, separate, and opaque, and now perceives it as the transparent vibration (Spanda) of its own consciousness. In essence, liberation is the untying of the knot of Avidyā, a knot that was tied by the Self’s own power for the sake of play, and undone by the Self’s own power through recognition. **PAA: Huge thanks to Dr Shreeram Iyer for answering so many questions in so much detail and gratitude to Andre Consciencia for facilitating this interview. This now ranks among some of our biggest interviews!** --- ## Learn More [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/71BV9cYLO9L._SY425_.jpg)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Para-Bhairava-Hrdaya-Non-Dual-Shaivism/dp/B0F7LPJDBD) ##### To learn more about this subject we highly recommend this book - it is over 600 pages. If you liked the interview, you will love the book. [Learn More](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Para-Bhairava-Hrdaya-Non-Dual-Shaivism/dp/B0F7LPJDBD) --- --- # Neo-shamanism – An Interview with Omiiran Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/neo-shamanism-an-interview-with-omiiran/ ## Introduction What a treat this interview is, I absolutely love hearing from students of our courses. To see people putting in the work and gain their own experience is super inspiring for me and makes this all worth it. In this interview a student of Andre's [Neo-Shamanism course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism), currently on Level 2 of 5 total levels shares their experience. If you enjoy what is shared in this interview, then I encourage you to follow Omiiran's writings over on Perseus Community platform as they have been sharing some wonderful posts all based on their own work. We also list their other links at the end of the post. As always let us know your thoughts in the comments and if you know of anyone who would enjoy this post then please share it. --- **PAA: To begin, can you share a bit about your spiritual or magical background—what kind of training and experience you had before starting André Consciencia’s Neo-Shamanism course?** I would definitely say that my background is not a super-Bardonist one! My own background is heavily invested in folk magic and theurgic rituals. Definitely an intersection between Grimoire tradition , PGM, Arabic/Islamicate magic , Theurgy and Catholic Folk magic. I did get some introduction to Espiritimso and help in setting up my boveda/ancestral altar which helped super charge and awaken my practice. I was floating back and forth in the early 2010 and trying to get back into practice but I only took it seriously around 2020 when I really decided to put myself into it and start taking my practice a lot more seriously, I am just a student in the end of all of this. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/473756556Al_Dur_Archaeological_Site.jpg)Courtesy: [473756556Al_Dur_Archaeological_Site.jpg (839×600)](https://www.trawell.in/admin/images/upload/473756556Al_Dur_Archaeological_Site.jpg) **PAA: What initially drew you to André Consciencia’s “Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism” course, and how did its promise of blending ancient shamanic roots with modern life align with your spiritual goals?** I didn’t mention this except recently(welp actually 2 months ago) with Andre in Perseus’ community, That I live 10 minutes away from an ancient Christo-Solar Pagan Temple(Ed-Dur..I think you can find it in wikipedia) nearby me. What motivated me to get into the initial hook for neo-shamanism is Andre’s story in the interview with the Lusitanian deities - [read the interview here](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/bridging-worlds-exploring-the-cosmology-and-practices-of-neoshamanism-by-andre-consciencia/). Personally Speaking, I think there’s more to it than I expected and I found myself drawing from this well of blessing and knowledge that is Andre. Definitely I think that the course self-paced with the spirits in it. My goal was mainly to awaken the temple, but the more *blessings *I got from it came from other practices in the course itself.   Another subtle reason that draw me into it was the stiffness in my practice. Once I got into the routine and ritualism of some daily practices I was doing at that time, I felt the spiritual forces and to say the juices in my practice to be stifled. I think we can all remember some parts in our life when our daily prayers and rituals felt stale and we wanted to re-awaken them. For me Neo-shamanism disperses this staleness by giving you more way for your current spirits that you know and don’t know to work with you in more creative ways. I could definitely say there’s a breath of fresh air and overall difference that you become more spontaneous in the long run with the practice.  ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/A_floral_fantasy_of_animals_and_birds_India_Mughal.jpg)Courtesy: [File:A floral fantasy of animals and birds, India, Mughal.jpg - Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_floral_fantasy_of_animals_and_birds,_India,_Mughal.jpg) **PAA: The course description mentions students engaging in “sacred ceremonies, meditations, and visionary journeys”. Can you describe one such practice that you experienced and explain how it impacted you on your journey?** One practice that strikes for me is definitely the Flight into Memories and the Auxiliary animals exercises. The Memories is because you can open the door to a lot more interesting doors with your own memories, think of memories related to significant spiritual experiences, memories of ritual and spells you did, memories of very significant breakthrough in meditation, etc. For me visiting all these spiritually significant memories gave me a perception of the spiritual light or divine light in each of these memories, you're visiting a place where you did magic and seeing the magic from a higher realm...I think that's a very significant moment for you in understanding your own style of magic.  This is what I like about the techniques within Neo-shamanism, it's not a separate thing from your initial practice or background but enhances it and gives you new lenses and ways to look at your own practice on a deeper level.  I think that's a very important perspective is that you're not getting into what they call a new current or magical order, but it is closer to discovering the roots and currents within your own selves, spirits, animal allies, ancestral, etc.  Another very wonderful exercise is the auxiliary animals exercise, that in itself is a whole grimoire if you would call it that. It's a grimoire written out by your own experiences with the animals you work with and see their abilities unfold in front of you. You don't need correspondence or a book with magical virtue and trait of the animals, the book of nature will open for you and guide you. You will get your own blessings from the animals and they will tell you their signs, and they will show in thought, word, and deeds what they can do. The animal that struck me the most and it is an invasive species bird here is the Myna bird, for me how can this bird diagnose sickness and illnesses in nature when they're seen as nothing more than pests. Honestly you will find yourself gravitating toward certain animals and pushed from other ones, definitely keep yourself flexible and as I said before that Neo-shamanism is there at least for me to give me this flexible, creative approach and not a stifled one.  ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Bembo-Visconti-tarot-swords-01-ace.jpg)Courtesy: [File:Bembo-Visconti-tarot-swords-01-ace.jpg - Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bembo-Visconti-tarot-swords-01-ace.jpg) **PAA: Neo-Shamanism often involves working with ritual tools and natural elements. The program highlights the “use of instruments and plants” in practice. Did you use any tools (like drums or rattles) or plant allies during the course, and what insights or experiences did they bring you?** Rattle is quite the unusual tool to purify place and self, I have to honestly give to the rhythm that Andre provides does help with shaking off the astral-mental noise and junk in your mind and in your space. I mainly focus on the drumming that's provided and no explicit plant allies are used in the practice itself, but I have personally tried to cut down on the more stimulant plant like Yerba Mate and Coffee as I have noticed that these practices do make you more perceptive at how the plants and herbs have effect on us.  There are some instructions given by the spirits during my neo-shaman practice about tools or herbs, but they're usually advice on how to change what's colloquially called feng shui of the room. In this practice, your spirits would most of the time give you stuff to do with stuff that are around you not out of your area in the middle of nowhere, or places that are hard to get to, etc.  **PAA: Were there any parts of the curriculum that you found particularly challenging or unfamiliar at first? How did you work through those challenges, and what did overcoming them teach you about your own strengths or limitations?** I think it is non-linearity of the practice and my own initial apprehension of the practice. I was dissuaded by some passing acquaintance thar neo-shamanism is a sham and cultural appropriation where it is in a way demeaning/making fun of the original shamanistic practices. Honestly, I think that stuck with me for a month or so in the start, and that specific person had a point that I didn't at that time have a way to argue with him because I am not the type to win debates lol.  In the end, I found the course to be more practical, visceral, and authentic because you're not tearing down something and creating a hodgepodge of things to say the least. Sometimes the only way we can know something for sure is by going through it and not by judging it by the cover of it. I personally didn't have these preconceptions of neo-shamanism, but I wanted to test if his words were true by putting it and seeing the results in front of me. I think the course doesn't try to show/wear something that it isn't. Definitely my own limitation with the course is my slowness, where I am taking quite a long time to go through each level of neo-shamanism because of "side-quests" both from Andre and the spirits themselves. You get a lot more spinning tasks and exciting stuff to look forward to in this sort of stuff, my own way of overcoming that limitation is slowness in that I focus on trying to finish 3 or 4 videos and try to engage with them in a cyclical way. I admit that it might not be the fastest way, but I think the best analogy I have to it is that the course is like a very fine expensive tea and you want to enjoy it. You don't buy tea to just leave it in it's tin can to never open, nor do you boil the tea excessively and drink it very fast just to get the "boost" that it gives.  Lastly an advice I would give is to not be too harsh about your own imaginative skills at first, it might be hard to see, hard to sense your surroundings but preserve and have faith in your ability with a very slight discernment.  You want to leave the hard discernment for when you write in your journal, while during the experience you want to have faith in what you're experiencing.  ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/500px-Blake_jacobsladder.jpg)Courtesy: [File:Blake jacobsladder.jpg - Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blake_jacobsladder.jpg) **PAA: The course Q&A suggests outcomes like “self-knowledge” and healing. Did you experience any significant breakthroughs or personal insights during your studies? Can you share an example of a moment of self-discovery or healing you had and how it changed you?** Self-knowledge or Gnosis and healing came at once in this moment. I shared this experience before and I think it is worth sharing in this moment, but I think we can have a very substantial influence and guidance from our ancestral spirits and predecessors leading to healing the whole family and not just ourselves. I don't think I would have reached this deeper and richer experience without the guidance and the help of the spirits in this course and my own ancestor's guidance. I started the course around April-May, but this experience started on July 14th I had an ancestral meeting where I had drawn chalk crosses on my forehead and back of hands and prayed for a true vision without phantasms/illusions before going into the deep world. Once I went down with that intention I was greeted by a very stocky maternal figure very bright, almost made out of light where I wrestled with her almost similar to Gustave Doré's Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. I don't know why I according to my notes the more I wrestled the more we get "stuck"  and once I hugged that maternal light figure it gave away and then I invited both my grandfathers but both of them looked away from her, my maternal side wanted conviction and paternal side wanted money, they didn't want to cooperate and hug the maternal light and (I don't know why this is in my notes) both of them have a mosque named after them.  I did start a litany of the dead alongside doing ancestral elevation per [impact shamanism website(from 2017?)](http://web.archive.org/web/20210108174250/https://www.impactshamanism.com/blog/2017/6/2/how-to-perform-an-ancestor-elevation-rite)  I did start the elevation for my maternal grandfather considering some personal family situation and I did notice some family dynamic difference, and I followed it for my paternal grandfather as I started noticing my dad was also acting weird/not like himself. I am assuming that there's a huge influence/background influence remaining on both my mom and dad from both of their grandparents, so I tried to diminish it with elevation. Once I did actually finish both elevation rites I noticed my own mind had a layer of thoughts suddenly gone, it wasn't exactly sudden but a huge amount of "inner chatter' in my head dispersed after finishing the elevation, it was like a cloud that covered my head suddenly moved away and I didn't have it covering me anymore.  I had a positive sign/omen 22-08-2025 where I went to the deeper world and my ancestors greeted me in the entrance of the memory of the big tree, going into the actual deep world it was a lot more vibrant, greenery,. full of light, blue sky, luscious land, and beautiful spot, it was definitely very idyllic, I definitely felt like at least in some part of the "deep world" it was "healed" with the ancestral elevation and there's some lasting effect for sure.  There was a big tree in the beautiful place, so I did actually kneel near it and gave thanks to God that I was able to bless and elevate my ancestors, but then my memory disassociated a bit and got fuzzy before I snapped back into reality and went out of the deep world. On 14th September, I saw my eldest brother bringing home 3 framed photos of my two grandfathers and my grandmother who I had seen in a personal vision in July. Completing a physical manifestation of the elevation in 3 months time (which personally I think it is pretty fast lol) So Yes! it does work. Even my parents are very different people now. That's one thing when we don't realize when we do elevation for the dead ancestors that our alive relatives get an instant chain-reaction effect from them. It isn't so instant but YOU will notice it very obviously. Another thing of note is that I was thinking I should keep working on a previous generation of great-grandfather/mothers but then I got a very clear "no" when I asked my astrologer friend to cast a horary chart for it: *" no. You've done all that you need to do, further efforts would be unhelpful for you at the least. Your ancestors generally are in a very good place as a result and are certainly well-disposed to provide assistance. " * **PAA: Since Neo-Shamanism is described as non-dogmatic and integrative (indeed “not a form of religion” and able to be woven into various belief systems), how have you blended what you learned with your existing spiritual or magical practices?** I think it integrates pretty well, and one of the things that I personally use is 5 tier shelves with my altars for my spirits inside it in the neo-platonist style of the great chain of beings where god/Christ at the top and my Ancestors are the foundation/bottom. I found the door to the deep world to turn from the memory I used initially to my own altar, and Andre seemed to approve of this alongside my spirits green-lighting it. I think the greatest integration I noticed is that I am able to more fluidly execute rituals and spells, there's no deliberation or strangulation of intention. The Intention is the wings which we fly with ;) as Andre said, I found once I set up my intention in doing a ritual it will start to unfold and prepare itself with minimal interference. In [Perseus Community/Gathering of the Magi](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) I did write a few fleshed-out rituals and workings where I did integrate my own ritualist/folk magic practice with the course's material. Serious playfulness and passion is what will make these integrations possible. Listen to your own intuition and you will be nudged and guided accordingly, don't try to make hard-lines between your practices and there would be *respectful integration by themselves.* I guess that's the secret to practical syncretism, let the practices and spirits guide you to it instead of forcing it! **PAA: Neo-Shamanic work emphasizes deep connection with nature (“Nature is the source of inspiration and wisdom”). How has your relationship to the natural world changed or deepened as a result of this course? Have you noticed new ways of seeing or interacting with nature in your daily life?** This is one of the funnier one, despite my disdain for "healing the land" as I felt like that's something I don't want to register for...I got shoved into it. When you see places in nature that are almost crumbling and decaying and you have to do something then you're going to do something. It is pretty ironic for me because I was once reading Josephine McCarthy's books and her talks about healing the land, which is very much a thankless job. The amazing thing about this, is that you will never really get a badge or a level-up in magical order if you ever do it. I told myself I would NEVER do something like this and would never sign up to do something like this, now I got *nudged very heavily to do it...or else.* I think definitely the world is going to become more alive and you will have a deeper finger on the pulse, not just the nature as we know but also the *whole of it. Nature is in everything, *the land we are on, the cities we dwell in, etc. I would end this answer with saying that if you don't go into the natural world then nature WILL come and live with you, whether you like it or not LOL. ## Neo-Shamanism Bundle If you would like to pursue this path, then we offer all 5 levels as a Bundle. Each course is closely supervised by Andre; you are doing this with him not on your own. [Learn More](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism:-levels-1-5) ![Shamans and the unseen world](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/DALL·E-2024-12-17-21.15.31-A-mystical-and-spiritual-visual-combining-ceremonial-magic-and-neo-shamanism-themes-in-a-landscape-format.-The-scene-features-an-ethereal-otherworldl.png) **PAA: The course talks about connecting with the spirit world or hidden dimensions. Did you have any experiences during meditations or journeys where you felt contact with something beyond ordinary reality? What were those experiences like, and how did they influence your perspective?** I think there's a definite improvement in spiritual communication within the framework of neo-shamanism that translate to outside of the practice and seep into one's own ability. I would say the major one is that you're going to see more spirits and forms that are not as easily seen at first. The course itself gives you enough leeway to explore in each session. I 100% recommend being open to the experience of unfolding the spiritual experiences and not trying to drill through the spiritual world, like how the flower blooms by itself without you forcing it to open up. I think there's a definite spiritual perspective shift, but what I like in the course is that there's no specific or dogma being given to you. I think the shift or the perspective that you're given is that of your own spirits. The shift isn't just in the journey or meditation; it is a complete transformation that you will see and feel them even in the ordinary reality. A specific meditation or journey that changed it completely...I would say not so quite right, but the phrase by C.S. Lewis is suitable here "Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different?" **PAA: Now that you’ve completed all levels of the training, how are you integrating its teachings into your everyday life and ongoing practice? Are there routines, perspectives, or rituals from the course that you continue to use or that have shifted how you approach your day-to-day activities?** Haha maybe I should answer this when I actually do finish it, I am still Level 2 and quite slow in the path itself. I personally like enjoying the practice and deepening into it instead of the rush through it. One definite thing is the meditation with the soul animal and power animal, there's a source of power within that you feel bestowed on yourself and that's something it is a slight personal goal of me... The practice of mediumship is nice for me, but I always felt like I was in a position of being thrown in the wind of whatever comes and my abilities felt a bit weakened/random. I definitely found that the practice with neo-shamanism solidified my ability to connect to mediumship with a lot more power and "safety"? if that's the word for it. I definitely feel like the integration of perspectives and rituals comes slowly, it bleeds surely and I did notice that I am integrating a lot of my ritualism with the rattle, opening the circle, and a lot of the foundational practices that Andre taught. Spontaneous integration is it something counterproductive here, I think if we try to force ourselves and bend our whole life to fit the practice into it then we might act contrived until we snap back into our usual life. Don't force the habit into place if your life don't have the space for the habit to change, you need to create the space first before you force these new perspective, and routines to settle into your life. **PAA: Looking ahead, what are your intentions or next steps after finishing the Neo-Shamanism course? How do you plan to apply or deepen these practices and insights in the future, whether in personal growth, community work, or other projects?** Currently? Setting whatever my guardian angel tells me I should go toward and glide along the line, I don't think we need to take life like the 5 years plan, KPI, and Quarterly spiritual earnings. Don't get me wrong, I think that having the proper journaling and recording is pretty good as a basis to have structure in our practice. Personal Growth and Community work here would be Community Growth, I don't think we need to see how far in life we can go alone? Giving back to the community and even our spiritual work relies on physical, digital, and spiritual communities (*cough* Perseus community *cough* ) in a way. I think that's the future goals for me along this line for Neo-shamanism, Community Growth and repaying the debt I personally have to the land I am living on. I don't think a lot of the stuff we do should have this veneer of self-aggrandizement, and I hope I never come with that vibe in my writings. The ending capstone statement of what I think my future with Neo-shamanism would be, **following the instruction of the animal, ancestral, and celestial magis to grow together.** As the late Jake Stratton Kent in Testament of St Cyprian about Restitutionism and I am paraphrasing the quote, *spirits act like thankless tradesmen and slot machines without the theory of elevating all of us in the process*. **PAA: Thank you so much for providing us with so much detail of what you have been experiencing since the start of this training. This is hugely helpful. I look forward to seeing future reports as you move through the remaining levels of the training. ** --- ## Learn more about Omiiran [Omiiran Link Tree](https://linktr.ee/omiiran) [Multiple Incarnations Invocation by Omiiran](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/space/esotericoccultandallthingsmagical/post/multiple-incarnations-invocation) [Practical: Blessing the Stone(Healing Land/Workplace, and other act of kindness to the world)](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/space/esotericoccultandallthingsmagical/post/practical-blessing-the-stone-healing-la) --- ## Learn with Andre [The School of Visionary Hermeticism](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/school-of-visionary-hermeticism.) [Elemental Magic: The Foundation As Taught by the Elementals](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic-the-foundation-as-taught-by-the-elementals)[](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) [Magic and Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism%3A-levels-1-5) [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) --- --- # Sixty Skills Affiliate Program Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-affiliate-program/ If you’re already putting serious time and effort into the Sixty Skills curriculum, this affiliate program lets that work benefit you in practical ways. You keep training, documenting and refining your practice – and at the same time, you earn commissions when your honest reviews, progress updates and recommendations lead others into the system. This program is designed for students and practitioners who want to share their real experience of the curriculum and build a genuine revenue stream around it over time. All tracking, payouts and affiliate links are managed through Payhip. To participate, you register with Payhip as an affiliate and agree to their terms, as well as the guidelines on this page. ### Who This Is For We are looking for quality over quantity: - Students who actively train with the Sixty Skills curriculum. - Practitioners who can speak from direct experience of the exercises, challenges and results. - People who are already writing or talking about their practice on blogs, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, podcasts, forums, or private communities. If that describes you, this program is built so that your honest, grounded sharing can also generate a stream of income for you. ### How to Register (via Payhip) - Sign up [here](https://payhip.com/auth/register/af63d0ffc922038). ***IMPORTANT - Use a new EMAIL to set up a new account rather than the account you use to view your courses. *** - Wait to be manually approved. - Once approved - add your PayPal details, your affiliate dashboard will remind you of this. - You’ll see your unique affiliate links for the Sixty Skills courses in your Payhip dashboard. - All commission rates, cookie duration and payout schedules are defined inside Payhip for each product. Instead of pasting these links directly everywhere, we strongly recommend you use a free link manager so you can easily update your links in the future. ### Recommended: Use a Free Link Manager (Future-Proof Your Links) In 2026, Perseus Arcane Academy plans to transition to its own in-house affiliate system. If you hard-code Payhip links into every blog post, video description and social profile now, you will have a lot of manual editing to do later. A free link manager solves this: - You create one “smart” link with a name like “Sixty Skills Master Course”. - You point that smart link at your current Payhip affiliate URL. - You use that smart link everywhere: blog posts, YouTube descriptions, TikTok bio, email footer, etc. When the platform changes in 2026, you simply log in to your link manager, change the destination of that one smart link, and all your existing content automatically sends people to the new system. **Good free options and why we recommend them** You can choose any you like – these are examples that work well for most people: - **Linktree** Free plan is enough to get started. - Lets you build a simple “link in bio” page with multiple buttons. - Ideal if you want one central page for: Sixty Skills courses, other Perseus courses, your own projects, and social channels. - **Lnk.Bio** Also has a strong free tier. - Very simple to set up and edit. - Good if you want a clean, minimal link-in-bio page that you can update quickly as you add more recommendations. - **Bitly** Free URL shortener that gives you neat, memorable short links. - Useful if you want a specific short link per course (for example in YouTube descriptions or email). - Helps keep long affiliate URLs tidy and track clicks at a basic level. Any of these can work. The key idea is: you control one layer between your content and the underlying affiliate URL, so you can change the destination URL whenever you want. ### Getting Started Once You’re Approved **Choose the courses you know best** Start by promoting courses you have actually taken: the Master Course and any additional Sixty Skills programs you’ve completed. (We will add courses that you are approved for after your registration.) **Plan one or two primary channels** - Blog or long-form articles - YouTube or other video platforms - TikTok or other short-form vertical video platforms - Email newsletter or community posts **Integrate your affiliate links naturally** Add your Payhip or link-manager URLs to: - Course reviews and breakdowns - Practice logs and progress updates - “Before/after” reflections on specific skills learned - Resource pages about Franz Bardon, energy work, breathing, and related topics ### What You Need To be effective in this program you should have: **Experience with the materials** You have worked through at least part of the Sixty Skills curriculum and can talk about it honestly. **A place to publish** At least one platform you control: blog, YouTube channel, TikTok account, Substack, email list, or similar. **Basic transparency** You are willing to clearly disclose that you’re using affiliate links, in line with local laws and platform rules. This can be a short line at the end of your content or in video descriptions. ### No Platform Yet? This Can Be the Start of a Whole Site If you don’t currently have a blog, YouTube channel, TikTok, or other social media focused on your practice, this is an excellent time to start. You’re already training, studying, and thinking about these subjects – turning that into public content is a natural next step. What begins as a few posts about the Sixty Skills curriculum can grow into a full review and practice hub, where you: - Review different courses, books and systems from multiple teachers - Compare approaches from different schools and lineages and share what actually worked for you - Document your long-term journey with magic, meditation and energy work across various traditions If you’ve read a lot of books in this area, you can also sign up as an affiliate for specific publishers or book platforms. When you mention titles and teachings that have helped you – whether from Sixty Skills or other teachers and publishers – you can include your book affiliate links alongside your Sixty Skills affiliate links and any other relevant programs you join. Over time, this lets you: - Spend more time immersed in a subject you genuinely enjoy - Build a site or channel that becomes your home base for reviews and practice updates across different sources and teachers - Create multiple revenue streams (courses, books, and other resources from various providers) from the same body of work Your real study and practice become the foundation of a small ecosystem: a review-oriented site or channel where you talk honestly about material from many different teachers and sources, while it quietly builds long-term income in the background. ### How to Promote the Sixty Skills Curriculum We actively encourage content that is real and experience-based, not hype. **Examples of content that work well:** **Blog posts** - Detailed course reviews of the Sixty Skills Master Course. - “My first 90 days with Sixty Skills” – what you tried, what worked, what didn’t. - Articles comparing your previous practice to training with Sixty Skills. **YouTube and long-form video** - Video diaries of your training progress. - Deep dives on specific modules (breathwork, concentration, clairvoyance training, and so on). - Q&A style videos where you explain how you approached certain exercises. **TikTok / Shorts / Reels** - Short clips describing a single insight or experience from practice. - Simple, direct statements of “one thing I learned this week” from the curriculum. - Very short explanations of how you tackled common problems (distractions, fear, stagnation). **Practice-focused sharing** - Share your journey with the curriculum. - Describe challenges you ran into and how the training helped you solve them. - Within reason, share evocations, visions, and other experiences, framed as personal accounts rather than promises of specific results. Always keep safety, discretion and respect for your own boundaries in mind when sharing occult or magical work publicly. ### Quality Over Quantity We are not looking for: - Coupon sites that never touch the material - Spammy “best course” lists with no real practice behind them - Misleading claims or manufactured testimonials We are looking for: - Practitioners who care about their training - Honest, nuanced stories about what Sixty Skills did – and did not – do for you - Serious students who want to see the system reach the right people We reserve the right to decline or remove affiliates whose content clearly doesn’t align with these values. ### Prohibited Uses and Fraud Policy To protect genuine students and maintain the integrity of the program, some practices are strictly forbidden. Similar policies are standard across responsible affiliate programs worldwide. Absolutely not allowed: **No self-purchases or self-referrals** You may not use your own affiliate links to purchase Sixty Skills courses for yourself, your family, or your own businesses. **No fake or “washed” traffic** No bots, fake accounts, scripted clicks, cookie stuffing, or artificial traffic. **No misleading promises** No guaranteed results, fabricated testimonials, or false claims about what the curriculum will do for someone. **No manipulation of tracking** No multiple accounts, fake identities, or attempts to overwrite other affiliates’ cookies. **Consequences of violation** If we or Payhip detect self-referrals, fraud, or other abusive behavior: - Your affiliate account may be cancelled immediately. - Any unpaid commissions related to that activity may be forfeited. - In serious cases of fraud or abuse, we may pursue further legal action and cooperate with Payhip, payment providers, and relevant authorities. Participation in the program implies that you accept these conditions, in addition to Payhip’s own terms and policies. ### Content Ideas You Can Start With If you’re already a Sixty Skills student, strong starting points include: - Why you chose the Sixty Skills Master Course over other systems. - The main problems in your practice that Sixty Skills helped you solve. - How your daily routine changed after committing to the curriculum. - What surprised you about the energy work, evocation or breathwork training. - What was hardest for you, and how you worked through it using the exercises. Each of these can be turned into: - A full blog post - A long-form YouTube video - A series of shorter TikToks, Reels or Shorts - An email sequence to your list Add your affiliate links where it makes sense in the flow, with clear disclosure. ### This Is Just the Beginning: 2026 and Beyond The Sixty Skills Affiliate Program is the first step. In 2026, Perseus Arcane Academy will be rolling out our own in-house system designed to offer even greater opportunities for serious students and practitioners. What this means in practice: - More products and teachers under one roof, so your existing audience can discover a wider range of material. - Deeper collaboration with our affiliates, including structured campaigns, launches and long-term content plans. - Stronger earning potential over time, as we expand our catalog and build a unified system around it. By starting now with Sixty Skills through Payhip, you are getting in early: learning what works, building your platform, and positioning yourself so you are ready to plug into our in-house system as it comes online in 2026. This program is the beginning of a longer-term partnership for people who want to build a serious practice and a serious income stream around the work they already love doing. ### Before You Apply Before you jump into the Sixty Skills Affiliate Program, make sure that: - You’ve read and agreed to Payhip’s terms and the guidelines on this page. - You have real experience with at least one Sixty Skills course and can speak from practice, not theory. - You have, or are actively starting, a publishing platform (blog, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, newsletter, and so on). - You understand that you cannot use your own affiliate links to buy courses for yourself or close contacts. - You are willing to share your journey honestly – including the challenges, not just the highlights. If that describes you, then you are exactly the kind of affiliate we want. Register as an affiliate in Payhip, wait for approval, grab your links for the Sixty Skills curriculum (or route them through a link manager if you prefer), and start building content that both helps serious students and creates a real revenue stream for you. This affiliate program is not just about sharing one curriculum – it can be the seed of a focused review site or channel where you discuss and compare high-quality material from multiple teachers, publishers and platforms over time. For any questions, please send us a message via the contact form or email us at [contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com](mailto:contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com). [Apply to be an Affiliate](https://payhip.com/auth/register/af63d0ffc922038) --- --- # Alexandre Moryason on Franz Bardon’s Path: Second Interview with Perseus Arcane Academy Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/alexandre-moryason-on-franz-bardons-path-second-interview-with-perseus-arcane-academy/ ## Introduction We are very fortunate to have here the follow up to the already incredibly helpful [first interview](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-kabbalah-purification-an-interview-with-alexandre-moryason/) with Alexandre Moryason on the trachings of Franz Bardon. In this second interview we were invited by Alexandre to source questions from the community at all levels of ability, so that this could be truly useful no matter where a student was in their practice (*If you contributed a question then we would like to thank you, for contributing to a true community project that benefits us all*). I believe that what Alexandre has produced here has more than achieved that goal and along with the first interview stand out as valuable contributions to all students of Franz Bardon which I hope will be used as supporting material for decades to come. We cannot thank Alexandre Moryason and all those at Editions Moryason enough for making this happen, being so thorough and thoughtful in the answers to these community questions and for being an absolute pleasure to work with. Once again please be sure to visit Editions Moryason website to see the titles they have available. As you can see from this interview anything that is there, you know is because it is truly useful for practitioners and comes from the best of intentions. ##### Visit Editions Moryason here ##### Visit Main Info Site here Table of Contents - IntroductionVisit Editions Moryason here- Visit Main Info Site here- Alexandre Moryasons Answers to Perseus Arcane Academy's Questions Second interview - Beginner Level - *Intermediate Level - Visit Editions Moryason- *Advanced Level Visit Editions Moryason here- Footnotes- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! --- ***For Clarity: These answers are given by Editions Moryason with the authorization of Alexandre Moryason. The following interview has been reproduced as provided by Alexandre Moryason***. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1.png) --- ## Alexandre Moryasons Answers to Perseus Arcane Academy's Questions Second interview  *Friday, October 24, 2025 * **For Clarity**: Perseus's questions are in **blue**. Edition's answers are in **black. ** Nota: IIH = Initiation into Hermetics  PME = The Practice of Magical Evocation  KTQ = The Key to the True Kabbalah  You present your questions by classifying them by "student level" on the Path of Magical Training. We respect this principle with regard to the answers, specifying, however, that the understanding of this Path, to be correct, must be comprehensive, because the levels interpenetrate and, consequently, the results obtained depend on the student's initial subtle structure.  To facilitate possible cross-references to our answers, we have numbered your questions within each level you mention.  ## Beginner Level  **PAA: I Mental Discipline and Thought Control: Franz Bardon’s training begins with seemingly simple yet challenging mental exercises. In IIH Step I, he emphasizes observing and controlling one’s thoughts as the foundation for all further development. ** **Many beginners struggle to quiet the mind even for a few moments. What advice do you have for cultivating consistent mental discipline at this early stage? How can a student overcome frustration when the mind wanders, and what “little tricks” (as Bardon puts it) can help build concentration and focus in daily practice? ** In our previous interview, we pointed out that Franz Bardon's system shares strong similarities with the Indo-Tibetan teachings, which refine and cultivate mental discipline and thought control at an even deeper level, in order to become a "Buddha" and achieve "Liberation."  Students should therefore understand that these exercises should not only be practiced by beginners, but also by extremely advanced individuals, ***because to no longer have to practice them, one must have attained "perfect and continuous present awareness," which is the state of an Enlightened One. *** We have already partially responded to our correspondents on this subject. Here is some additional key information.  In the set of exercises covering the Ten Steps of Frans Bardon's magnificent work, "The IIH," only two exercises are given, and "these alone" potentially contain Ultimate Realization. It is important to know that:  ***• the First Step alone encapsulates the Path; *** ***• two exercises in this Step lead to Divine Consciousness. *** **1° The first exercise****: this is the practice of Meditation, **called Mindless Emptiness, which should be done for at least ten minutes, morning and evening. It is this exercise that we have been asked about for years, and we understand that you are asking us too.  • **Mindless emptiness does not mean fighting the thought or thoughts that come in; **this fight creates a tension that is counterproductive to the desired goal. The energy of the Collective Mind flows, and flows…; nothing can stop this flow. Therefore, it is a matter of being aware of the thought but not “jumping” on it and developing it (the thought of the cat comes and we think we have to buy its kibble; from there, we think of the usual supermarket, from there, the promotions… That's it: we are out of the loop of the purpose of this exercise). We observe it, in fact, and we let it fade away; its energy dissolves; Another thought arrives, we don't hold onto it, we don't develop it; it leaves... After a certain time of this practice, the thoughts will become more and more spaced out. Between them, a "void" will appear. It is in this "void" that our Divine Self can manifest.  • ***The position of the eyes: ***they must be open and the gaze relaxed in front of us, as when we dream with our eyes open. Closed eyes create a fixation on* *the Lower Mind (kama manas) and we can't escape; thoughts flow in.  • ***Breathing is done through the mouth, ***gently and without tension. Breathing through the nose does not immediately "connect" to the Divine.  We are taking the liberty of providing these last two pieces of information because they have been publicly disseminated by the Buddhist Tradition for about thirty years. Other teachings must certainly be kept confidential, but these details, reported here, are essential to success.  Why, you may ask, did Franz Bardon not provide this information? Because his Teachings were given in the 1950s, shortly after World War II, when "planetary karma" did not yet allow for this dissemination.  But this was permitted as early as the 1980s and beyond. As for the "Mindless Void," it was explained in the "Yogas of Naropa," written in India (1016-1100), and Éditions Maisonneuve published this work in the 1960s.  **2° The second exercise: **this is found in the "training of the mental body"; it consists of maintaining awareness in the present moment, thus not letting the mind wander and concentrating on what we are doing at each moment: when we eat, our awareness focuses on the act of eating, etc. ***This exercise is crucial; ***it was brilliantly formulated by Gautama Buddha. We have published a book: "***The Sublime Practice or How to Attain Enlightenment in a Single Life." ***We will publish the English translation and send it to you when it is available. **PAA: II Vacancy and Akasha - Does the work of Vacancy of Mind eventually lead to experience of Akasha? ** Yes. The previous answer explains in detail how the deep practice of Mind Emptiness leads to the state of "Buddha."  To understand this fully, we must first clear up two misconceptions:  1-**The first confusion **is perceived in the commonly used terms: mind and spirit. The "mind" is "the lower mind" (the "dense" mind or kama-manas in Sanskrit and "sem" in Tibetan: the four lower subdivisions of the Mental Plane, the three higher subdivisions being luminous, beyond the reach of the movements of the dense mind). And it is precisely this lower mind that must be emptied of thoughts. When referring to the higher subdivisions and beyond (Buddhi), we write "Spirit" with a capital "S" (Buddhi-Manas in Sanskrit, "the Sem linked to Rigpa" in Tibetan).  **2- The second confusion **is commonly made between the notion of "emptiness" or "Vacancy" in Sanskrit and Tibetan texts and that of "nothingness." "Nothingness" means "absolute Nothingness." But "***Nothingness cannot give birth to anything***," as the sacred rites of the Rosicrucians remind us in the West.  Therefore, "Void" does not mean "empty of nothing," ***but a full "void" that contains, in gestation, everything in the Universe when it "manifests." ***Therefore, this "full void" is the ***Absolute Divine Reality ***that manifests in the Universe through the Creative Akasha.  The latter contains "***Divine Ideation***," that is, "what the Absolute Divinity wants to create," its Conception of its Creation. This conception is expressed by the Cosmic Divine Mind ("Mahat"). ***This same Divine Mind irrigates all thinking beings in the Universe and is called, for the sake of distinction, "Manas," our Mind, when it concerns human beings. *** The "void" also concerns what the Divine Mind creates (the Universe and everything it contains): ***this Creation "is empty of all intrinsic Reality." ***This means that Manifestation and subsequent Creation are, in fact, an immense hologram representing what the Divine Mind wants, but that in truth, the only Reality resides in this "Void" which contains the "Seed of everything."  ***In this view, the Mental Void leads to the experience of the creative Divinity (Akasha). *** ***Akasha is our true nature: "Liberation," reaching the state of "Buddha" or "Liberation," is to experience this Truth.*** **PAA: III Step 2 Visualisation - Some people are natural visualisers and others have real problems ‘seeing’ anything other than blackness. What is your suggestion for students struggling with visualisation? Can they still progress? What is the reason hermetically that they cannot ‘see’ mentally within the mind.** Yes, these students can progress.  As F. Bardon explains, ***the problem stems from the imbalance of the Elements in the student's structure: the Fire Element is weaker than the others. ***This does not mean that the student has "no willpower," but rather that the other Elements in his or her structure (Water, Air, Earth) are more intense than the Fire Element and, in any case, function differently: ***Fire is clearly lacking, but also, the Air Element lacks the power to activate Fire... this is an imbalance. *** This imbalance is, in reality, common to most human beings and is a reflection of the current state of development of humanity, still firmly anchored in the 3rd Dimension. ***The natural ability to visualize reveals a development linked to the 4th and 5th Dimensions***. It is therefore by practicing visualization that the student will develop and thus reach these last two Dimensions, ***which definitively free them from the prison that confines ordinary humanity.*** To improve their elemental balance, the student can:  • ***Practice the rituals revealed in Part II of "Light over the Kingdom"; ***through these rituals, each Element is purified of its density (it thus becomes increasingly luminous) and develops in power. These rituals automatically balance the Elements of their structure;  • ***Practice all types of willpower-strengthening exercises ***(these exercises are easy to identify : they are those that train us to resist a natural indolence tending towards the satisfaction of every desire.  By doing this, the student will eventually notice an improvement and will finally begin to "see" things, ***by truly concentrating and exercising a will that is both "strong" but "not too tense," because strong tension disrupts Air and thereby blocks Fire... *** ***The first steps: ***for example, he will place an apple on a table, then close his eyes and try to reproduce it on his mental screen, as if he had taken a photo of it. Once this exercise is successful, he will add the table to his visualization. Once this is successful, he will continue with landscapes, people, etc. ***Later, he will practice visualizing with his eyes open. ***This process is more difficult, but one can master it. It is very important because ***it allows us to create in the etheric and astral substance objects, situations, settings, positive and happy ensembles, which we wish to see manifest in our lives. *** Depending on his elemental structure, the student will then begin to see, on his mental screen, shapes in color or black and white; ***he will thus see, without his control, images linked to his conscious memories, those hidden in his unconscious, and even perceptions of the historical past or the future (***personal or general).  Visualization thus gradually becomes a "portal" through which the Universe sends them messages (mental clairvoyance).  **PAA: IV Soul Mirrors and Self-Honesty: One of Bardon’s early requirements is the creation of the “soul mirrors” – a thorough inventory of one’s positive and negative traits categorized by the Four Elements. This introspective work can be daunting, as it forces an honest self-examination.  ** **In your experience, how should a beginner approach the soul mirror exercise without becoming either overwhelmed by faults or overly proud of virtues? What practical steps can help maintain a balance between ruthless self-honesty and patient self-compassion during this process of character analysis and purification? ** **Also, in line with the previous interview could you perhaps go into detail about purification - conscious act of this from a dedicated student and perhaps how life may enforce this. ** The suffering experienced during Soul Mirrors and self-honesty results from identification with the "ego," our lower tripartite structure (mental, astral, and physical bodies, called the "personality"), when in reality, we are the Self, our Soul, a Divine Being without beginning or end (our Individuality). The approach should be as follows:  • ***Stop identifying with the "ego" ***and therefore perceive everything through its filter: this technique consists of seeing oneself as a third party observing this mass called "ego," named John or Mary. ***There is a Disidentification ***and therefore an external observation of this whole that is our being here below, this "ego" that obstructs everything.  This observation allows us to see the defects and the qualities, this "Mirror of the Soul***", as being that of a person other than oneself. ***This "ego" must be observed as an object of study which must therefore ***not arouse any emotion***, pride if it is a quality, or shame or violent rejection if it is a defect. ***Emotion is a very powerful astral energy (linked to the Water Element); ***whether it is laudatory or accusatory, ***it amplifies, ***by the very fact of its elemental nature, everything it touches; ***it therefore further fuels the initial imbalance of the student's Elements. ***To counter this natural, very human phenomenon of the emergence of emotion as soon as anything concerns us (our ego), ***using our mind is the key to success: immediately thinking of "looking at" this emotion ***(pleasant or unpleasant), observing it as something foreign to ourselves***. This "looking" empties the emotion***, discharges its power, and allows the "Soul Mirror" exercise to continue properly, without the traps of the ego.  • ***Practice the purification rituals ***given in Part II of "*Light over the Kingdom" *and Bardon's exercises: the structure will be purified and the ego will weaken;  • ***Purification is the key to unleashing occult powers: ***a structure with a low and dark (heavy) vibration cannot possess powers pertaining to higher dimensions.  **PAA: V Intention and Ethical Foundation: Bardon’s system is not just about techniques but also about the aspirant’s inner attitude. He notes that any power obtained can be used for good or ill, but a true magician “will never think of any evil motives” and remains a faithful servant of Divine Providence. ** **How important is it for a beginner to cultivate pure intentions and ethical motives right from the start of magical training?  ** **Can you share your perspective on how one’s intention – for example, whether one practices for spiritual growth versus ego or power – influences the effectiveness and safety of early magical exercises?  ** **How can newcomers align their practice with higher ideals to build a strong moral foundation? ** ***The inner attitude is essential because Universal Reality is based on the fundamental Good, absolute Compassion***. As soon as a beginner in Hermeticism, in magical training, approaches this Path without having previously developed (work of past lives) the will to work for the Good of all beings, ***he walks on a path which is not linked to Universal or Divine Reality. ***Consequently, not only will his training be doomed to failure (the Elements will not obey him, whether for his personal development or to carry out magical works) but he risks awakening, more violently than the compassionate student would suffer, the negative aspects of his own structure, (the famous "Guardian of the Threshold") ***"which is the absolute danger***; "absolute" because he will not have within him the Force which is Compassion to "calm" and dissolve the mephitic substance of this "Guardian". ***In fact, "Purity" cannot be accumulated on "impurity." *** Therefore***, before venturing onto the Path of magical training***, the beginner who lacks this naturally benevolent orientation toward others and who seeks to acquire occult powers in order to fulfill selfish desires ***must absolutely***:  • ***reflect and force oneself to "feel***" what those around oneself and in the world are experiencing, to grasp human suffering;  • ***practice acting and reacting—through actions and feelings***—as Christ or a Bodhisattva would; at first, one imitates even if oneself is seething with selfishness; one strives despite everything; then gradually, Compassion arises in the heart.  ***This work is immediately aided by the Force of Universal Compassion, ***which is thus called upon, and also by the help of the Masters of Wisdom***, including Franz Bardon Himself. *** **The effects of intention, when well-directed: ** • ***It guarantees the effectiveness and power of practices; ***• ***It is secure, because we are undoubtedly following the path of Divine Magic ***and following the example of the Masters of Wisdom, the Mahatmas, Christ, and Franz Bardon. If the latter's life has been entrusted to us by his son and disciple, Dr. Khulman, in such detail, it is to become a source of inspiration, a tool allowing us to understand how to consider higher objectives as a key aspect of our practice. ***Franz Bardon's example clearly shows that, in the long term, higher powers must be used to help humanity.*** **PAA: VI Purpose of Basic Exercises: Beginning students often question the purpose of exercises like observing thoughts, visualizations, or simple energy work, perhaps feeling eager to jump into more “exciting” techniques. From a teacher’s perspective, how do these early-stage practices (thought control, visualization drills, elemental breathing,etc.) form the philosophical and practical foundation for later stages?  ** **For instance, how might mastering one’s thoughts or imagination early on benefit the practitioner when they eventually move to more advanced work like evocation or quabbalah? ** **From the Student's Perspective ** Regarding the usefulness of the basic exercises, refer to the two essential exercises explained ***in Beginner Level - Question I. *** For visualization: ***refer to the answer in Beginner Level - Question III. "Wanting to embark on more stimulating techniques!"... ***This question reveals a general ignorance regarding the merits of exercises that seem to the mind—in search of egoic stimulation—dull and, to say the least, unexciting. This demand is found in all initiatory schools or spiritual paths. It is human. It will be overcome, precisely with the help of these unstimulating exercises.  **From the Teacher's Perspective ** The basis of these exercises is not philosophical in the strict sense of the term; rather, it stems from a very precise knowledge of the occult anatomy of the human being (channels, drops/tiglés, breaths, state of the "fires," chakras, etc.). This true medicine of our subtle structure is exhaustively known in the Esoteric Tradition of India and Tibet. Fragments of it have reached the West: we find them in the exercises of Orthodox Christian monks, Catholic abbeys, notably Cistercian ones, among the Sufis, the Druzes and the Shamans of Europe and America. ***It is therefore a science and not metaphysical speculations. *** Since Magic is a science, these exercises are essential for the success of everything it allows, including successful Evocation (without unpleasant surprises) or the use of Words in Kabbalah. Without this development of the student's subtle centers and vehicles, which generates a constant increase in the vibratory frequency of the being, Divine Magic could not be practiced, in all its stages.  Franz Bardon states in his book "*The Key to True Kabbalah*" (KTQ), "*This is why I emphasized at the beginning of this work ****that the practice of the first book, "The Path of True Magical Initiation," was absolutely essential—at least up to and including the Eighth Degree—if one wanted to obtain satisfactory results in Kabbalah...*" ** **PAA: VII Why is the order of practices in IIH as it is? It seems a lot of the easier stuff is in the later chapters, while the starting chapters are full of really hard material such as elemental manifestations and total control of mental faculties. Why was it arranged this way? (I think I know the answer, but I’d love to hear your take.) ** The main course, that is, the basic training (difficult initial practices), is presented before the advanced practices, which are apparently easier to approach, since the latter only become easier in their complexity through mastery of the more complex exercises presented from the beginning.  Indeed, some practices may become easier with the energy used by the student, but the effectiveness of this energy's action is based on a balanced astral and mental equilibrium. This balance is due to mastery of the exercises of the preceding Degrees.  ## *Intermediate Level  **PAA: I Elemental Balance and Astral Equilibrium: Bardon places great stress on achieving elemental equilibrium in the personality – balancing the qualities of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth within oneself (initiation-into-hermetics-franz bardon.pdf).  ** **For an intermediate practitioner, what are the signs that they are approaching a genuine balance of the elements in their character?  ** **Conversely, what indications might reveal that one element is still too dominant or deficient?  ** **If imbalances persist (e.g. excess fiery temperament or an overly watery, passive nature), what practical steps would you recommend to harmonize that element ? ** **Perhaps through specific behavioral changes, meditations, or elemental exercises – so the magician can attain the “magic equipoise” Bardon says is absolutely necessary for further development. ** **Elemental balance is relative: **students, disciples, initiates, Adepts, (Mahatmas) … At each stage of development, the person is supposed to reach a higher level of elemental balance, a higher level of perfection. Thus, for an intermediate practitioner, the approach to a better elemental balance translates into the development of certain abilities: better concentration/mental visualization, intuition, clairvoyance or any other aptitude that may emerge according to the structure and karma of the individual. ***However, from this description we must reflect on the meaning of the end of the previous sentence: "according to the structure and karma of the individual" because, according to the students, from the beginning of the Path, some have results of those who are at the intermediate or advanced level and vice versa, others, despite great efforts, cannot reach the intermediate and a fortiori advanced levels. *** **Signs revealing the approach of true elemental balance:** This is the manifestation of psychic abilities (clairvoyance, clairaudience, intuition, successful telepathy, etc.); better health, and very positive speech.  **Indicators revealing an Element is still too dominant or deficient: ** The negative attributes of the Elements manifest: Fire = aggression, agitation, continual thirst; Air = mental restlessness, lack of concentration, forgetfulness, etc.; Water = extreme sensitivity, neurasthenia, indolence, etc.; Earth = laziness, inaction, difficulty acting or reacting to something, etc.  **Harmonizing an Element with the others is achieved: ** • ***by practicing purification rituals ***that will automatically balance the Elements of our subtle and physical structure;  • ***by thinking/meditating on what relates to this failing Element (***to activate a failing Fire, for example, one will act by meditating/thinking on the qualities and specificities of this Element: movement, action, strength, etc.; for Water: sensitivity, feelings, calm, empathy with others, etc.; for Air: liveliness in one's senses, notably mental, intellectual curiosity, expansion, elevation, lightness of being, etc.; Earth: stability, endurance, constancy, certainty, etc.  **PAA: II Four Regions Elemental Exercise: Can you discuss this part of Step 4, this seems like such an important part of training. Is this like a gateway towards working with our own Akasha? Like the result of this equanimity is the access to Akasha? ** This is a highly advanced method aimed at balancing the Elements. ***We advise students to focus on purification rituals, ***unless, of course, they have mastered the previous steps.  For the average student, purification rituals offer similar benefits ***without any risk***, which is why we encourage them in this regard.  ***The balance of the Elements leads to Akasha, and an imbalance creates a dissonance in consciousness that hinders access to it. *** **PAA: III Projection of the Elements Outward: In IIH Step V, students learn to accumulate the elements in the body and then project them outward into the surrounding space. This ability to externalize elemental energy marks a new level of practical magic.  ** **What are some safe and meaningful applications of this skill for someone at the intermediate level?  ** **For example, how might one use elemental projection in healing, ritual space cleansing, or protection?  ** **Additionally, how can a practitioner ensure they handle the elements responsibly – avoiding any unintended effects on themselves or their environment – and properly reabsorb or dissolve the forces after working with them? ** **Elemental projection is used by: ** • ***Focusing the heart on a Bodhisattva, Christ ***for example; this brings the Force of Compassion to the operation and energy to the practitioner; it is also a form of protection for the latter.  • ***Then defining the goal ***(healing someone, for example);  • ***Determining the Element ***or Elements to act (generally, regardless of the vector Element, Air is added, which either animates or calms it); • Focusing the mind by visualizing the person to be healed, with the will for this healing and certainty in the use of this magical process.  • ***Concentrating/feeling compassion ***in the heart center for the illness and suffering of the recipient of this magical action;  • ***Sending/projecting/visualizing the final delivery ***of the predetermined Elements to the patient (on the etheric/physical plane, the Elements have the following colors, respectively: Fire = red; Water = green; Air = yellow; Earth = brown); for this delivery, visualize the Element with its color while breathing deeply through the nose, then exhale through the mouth quite abruptly, forcefully, visualizing the Element's path to the patient; choose to send the main Element and then Air.  • ***Thanking Divine Providence ***for allowing us to be the channel of the healing It has granted.  **Dissolving or "discharging" remaining forces: ** When accumulating energy, the most important thing is to dissolve it at the end of the practice or to assign it a specific purpose. If we don't, this energy flows without a destination, creating a vibrational chaos that attracts less evolved, even highly negative, entities, and, as Franz Bardon says, "the result always goes against your interests."  We dissolve the remaining forces by visualizing their sending either to Earth or to infinite space, visualizing, in this case, their dissolution. In both these destinations, breathing effectively accompanies the process: we inhale empty and exhale forcefully, visualizing the Elements disappearing in turn. We can repeat this inhalation and exhalation three or seven times, depending on how we feel.  **PAA: IV Formation of Elementaries and Thought-Forms: As training progresses, Bardon introduces the creation of thought-forms and artificial beings – from simple elementals in Step VI to more complex elementaries in Step VII. What is the purpose of learning to create these energies or entities?  ** **In practical terms, how does creating a temporary elemental for a task (like a charged thought-form) differ from crafting a more enduring elementary with a set lifespan and independent influence?  ** **Many students feel both excitement and caution here, given Bardon’s warnings about maintaining control over one’s creations. What guidance can you provide on the ethical and safe formation of elementaries?  ** **For instance, how should an intermediate practitioner decide on a clear purpose and lifespan for a created being and ensure they remain the master of their creation – including knowing how to properly reabsorb or dissolve it when its task is complete? ** **The purpose of creating these entities ** Fundamental rule: the creation of these entities must be for the benefit of others. The entity will act, in the space and time determined by the Magician, to facilitate mental work that seems difficult in a given situation for a given individual, etc.: harmonize a romantic encounter, with the instruction, however, not to interfere with the free will of the people involved, protect a child from night terrors, etc.  A corollary to this rule: the compassionate aspect of this creation calls upon the luminous, high-vibration Elements; this being so, the entity will be docile to the Magician's commands regarding the goals of its action and will be more malleable at the key moment when its dissolution is necessary. This is explained by the very nature of the Elements in action: of high vibration, therefore less dense, more volatile in a way, the Elements composing the entity will not offer much resistance to their dissolution.  Unlike this process, entities created by black magic—where the Elements vibrate at heavy, obscure, and therefore very dense frequencies—tend to disobey the sorcerer; they initially carry, depending on the Element in action, a charge of violence or inertia (laziness and inaction) and offer great resistance to their dark creator, even provoking a fight… We can see the destiny of this sorcerer, whose subsequent lives will be haunted by this or these entities.  We must point out, however, that while the preceding explanations tend to suggest that this process of entity creation is easy and risk-free, even when operating in White Magic, ***it is an extremely dangerous practice. *** **Dangers Faced Due to the Failure of the Entity Dissolution Process ** More than four decades of contact with the Hermetic community clearly demonstrate that an abnormally high number of imperfect "magicians" reincarnate and must confront a previous life of an undissolved entity. These magicians do not know, at the beginning of their lives and for a certain time, the origin of a perpetual ambient malaise leading to depression, the cause of their very restless, sometimes even terrifying, nights, etc.  Their karma, however, leads them to the Occult Sciences, including Magic. At this point, they are helped to realize that they are not victims of a harmful action perpetrated by a family member, a neighbour, etc., as they once believed, but rather of their own creation of an entity, in a past life, whether it was once through White Magic or Black Magic. Indeed, the sorcerer created, in a past life, a negative entity that resisted its dissolution; therefore it vampirized all those it approached and tyrannizes its creator, pursuing him through time. Since it is a negative entity, this is logical. However, an entity originally created by White Magic and which, by accident (energetic weakness of the creator Mage) could not be dissolved, began to wander due to a lack of direction due to the absence of the Mage (deceased). This wandering in the Ethers and the Astral Plane, gradually led the substance of this entity (which is only substance, in fact, because it is devoid of Soul) towards the lower subdivisions of the Ethers and the Astral, generating an energetic and therefore disruptive chaos, which, according to Cosmic Law, pursues its creator in a distressing way.  ***It is recommended not to attempt to create an entity, even for beneficial purposes, because the practitioner of Magic cannot be certain of having dissolved it. Certainty can only be achieved if one's etheric and astral vision is as stable as that which one has in everyday material life***, a vision that will then allow one to clearly and surely see the dissolution.  Even if one believes one has reached the VIIIth Degree of the IIH, it is better to avoid this type of Magic and act for the good of others through other means (visualization, sending Divine Force to a given situation or person, etc.).  **Difference between an elemental with a short, restricted task and one with a long-term task ** An elemental with a short task will have a less "nourished" substance because the Magician's charge of the Element will be short-lived; it will therefore dissolve more easily.  Conversely, an elemental with a long-term task will have a stronger substance and will therefore be more resistant at the time of its dissolution.  **How to be sure... ** One can never be sure; unless one is an Adept Mage, such as Franz Bardon.  We strongly advise against practicing this type of creation. Experience shows that, in this field, students have enormous self-confidence. Although this is generally a quality, it often becomes a flaw when it comes to Magic, even White Magic: they overestimate their abilities due to a naive, not malicious, of course, exaltation of their ego.  **PAA: V Fingergestures (mudrā) ** **a) Describe one way you use a charged Step4 mudrā in ordinary life to anchor an elemental quality or ethical stance. ** **b) Once the gesture is selfacting, how do you prevent accidental discharge or imbalance? ** **c) Can you share your experience with Finger Gestures? Have they saved you a lot of time?** ***Franz Bardon's description is clear enough: the difficulty lies in the intensity of the "charge," that is, the energy required to power the ritual. If you possess the "energy," it's not so difficult to direct it and connect it to a mudrā, a word, or a short phrase. *** What is difficult to provide, then, is the energy intensity required for the power: Franz Bardon provided advice to facilitate this process in his two other works, "*The Practice **of Magical Evocation*" and "*The Key to the True Kabbalah." * There can be no accidental discharge or elemental imbalance due to a lack of energy, as long as the intensity of the charge is consistent and the will of the Magician, who initially established the purpose of this practice, is always present and mentally and psychically reiterated.  Yes, this magical process saves time.  **PAA: VI Early Experiences in Mental Wandering: IIH Step VIII marks the beginning of mental wandering – the projection of one’s consciousness to distant places or spheres, purely with the mind. At the early stages of this practice, how can a student discern the difference between a true mental travel experience and a vivid imagination or daydream?  ** **In your view, what initial benchmarks indicate that someone is successfully “wandering” with the mind (for example, verifiable perceptions or a distinct sense of separation from the physical body)?  ** **Could you share any practical tips on concentration or mental clarity that help stabilize this skill? Additionally, if a student encounters distracting or phantasmagoric images while attempting mental travel, how should they respond to remain on course? ** To succeed in these experiences, one must have mastered the previous stages, and this mastery will be manifested by the occult abilities that have thus developed: etheric, astral, and mental clairvoyance. These guarantee greater reliability in perceptions during mental journeys.  **There are two types of mental travel. ** • ***Ordinary mental travel***, which takes place on the four lower subdivisions **of *the Mental Plane, the sub-planes of "Kama Manas," the lower mind, among the seven sub-planes that make up this Plane. ***The consciousness of the lower mind is the waking consciousness of an ordinary human. The student therefore connects with the frequency at which their mental substance vibrates on these four dense subdivisions; if their thoughts, concepts, and visualizations are charged with heaviness, violence, etc., the places on these astral subdivisions will be painful… they can, however, easily free themselves from them by opening their eyes, thus putting an end to these experiences. If, on the contrary, their thoughts, concepts, and visualizations are charged with light, benevolence, and an attraction to Beauty and Goodness, the places on these astral subdivisions will be pleasant and instructive, and this will gradually lead them to the higher sub-planes of the Mental Plane.  This habitual consciousness is "worked" with exercises, rituals, spiritual pra ctices and thus, from being ordinary, the student of Occultism becomes a human being "in evolution" and acquires a consciousness that is increasingly refined. ***The mental journey that the student will make is similar to a wandering in the beginning of the experience to become a process of knowledge and real encounters linked to the Mental Plane. *** • ***The "visionary" mental journey that takes place on the three higher sub-planes of the Mental Plane, called "Buddhi-Manas." ***We are already entering the "antechamber" of Akasha, of Divinity, which is the Buddhic Plane (also 7 subdivisions) and above. This developing consciousness increasingly borders on the radiance of the individual's Akashic Principle, and this allows the latter to undertake Buddhi-mental journeys: these truly put him in contact with Beings of Light, Masters of Wisdom, Intelligences linked to the planetary Spheres of our solar system (ref. Practice of Magical Evocation).  When the path between this higher Self (Buddhic Mind) is cleared (purified by the exercises) and reaches the lower mind, or concrete mind, conscious communication, in daily life, from this higher Self to the student's waking mind occurs quite naturally. ***This is the Path of Intuition and Telepathy. ***The student telepathically receives instructions and teachings from the Master or from his own Self. This is the royal process of communication. The information is compressed in this Higher Mind and sent in a batch ("a compressed file") to the Concrete Mind, which "opens this file" to spread the information one by one; it opens "the files"...  Finally, the journey of the Concrete Mind, and even more so of the Buddhic Mind, allows human beings to travel through Time and throughout Space, beyond our solar system, if we so wish.  **How can we distinguish a true mental journey from an overactive imagination or a waking dream? ** Even well-developed psychic and mental abilities cannot avoid "pitfalls" during these mental wanderings, pitfalls linked to the vibratory nature of the mind, as previously mentioned. For example, a magician's subconscious can conjure up images related to their karmic imprints. ***They will then be unable to distinguish ***a mental perception belonging to the places visited from images rejected by their subconscious.  Events experienced may also emerge from the reservoir of their memories linked to the current incarnation. In this case, ***he will realize that these sudden perceptions have nothing to do with what is happening in the places he is mentally visiting. *** Another example: if we visit a parallel mental world and receive instructions about specific upcoming earthly events, these events must match what we have mentally perceived.  **First signs that a person is successfully "wandering" with our mind **Yes, there may be a sensation of a kind of distance from the physical body.  All of this (mental journeying) requires, in fact, the development of intuition, because only intuition can provide information at any given moment about what is happening, and can distinguish truth from illusion, etc. ***Developing intuition is fundamental to following the Magical Path. *** **Practical advice on concentration or mental clarity ** Refer to the two fundamental exercises in Step 1. Question-Answer I. **How to React to Distracting Images ** To realize that these images are distracting, that is, that they have nothing to do with those of the place visited, the instant intervention of intuition is absolutely necessary; ***it is this that immediately generates this awareness and rejects these unwelcome images. Otherwise, we will wander and mix everything up.*** **PAA: VII Understanding Akasha – The Subtle Fifth Element: Bardon describes the Akasha (or “principle of cause”) as the subtle precursor to the elements – an omnipresent etheric principle that underlies all magical effects. This concept can be abstract for intermediate students. How would you explain the role of Akasha in practical magic to someone who has grasped the four elements but is just beginning to work with this fifth principle?  ** **Are there exercises or meditations you recommend for attuning to the Akasha perhaps drawing from Step VI’s training on mastering the Akasha element in trance?  ** **Outside of what is already presented in IIH. Furthermore, why is developing a sensitivity to Akasha – even if it’s just a felt sense of a “subtle space” or intuitive guidance – so important before one attempts advanced operations like true evocation or Quabbalistic work?* *** **True Perception of Akasha ** ***Akasha is not a perception of a "subtle space"; it is our True Self, our Divine Essence, our true Nature; it is who we really are. It is the God within us. ***The problem we face lies in the fact that our waking consciousness is so strongly focused on the dense/lower planes of the Universe that we tend to forget this Divine Nature. F. Bardon reminds us in the KTQ ***that contact with our Akashic Principle, and therefore with the consciousness of God within us, is essential for practicing Divine Magic because it manifests itself through intuition, which guides the Magician at every step. *** ## Visit Editions Moryason As can be seen from this Interview - Alexandre Moryason is a wealth of knowledge and the books on his store are there because they are truly of value. Many of these are not commonly known. [See Books](https://shop.moryason.com/) ![Alexanra Moryason](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-1.png) ## *Advanced Level  **PAA: I Mental Travel vs. Astral Projection: For advanced practitioners, Bardon distinguishes between mental wandering (moving the consciousness with the mind alone) and astral travel (the deliberate separation of the astral body from the physical body). In practice, how do these two experiences differ in sensation and purpose?  ** **What milestones should a practitioner reach with mental wandering before they attempt a full astral projection?  ** **For instance, do you believe one should be able to maintain clear consciousness and gather accurate information while in a distant place mentally, prior to undertaking the more complex task of releasing the astral body?  ** **Finally, could you share any personal observations on the challenges of astral projection – such as overcoming fear when leaving the body or safely returning – and how to prepare oneself to navigate the astral plane responsibly? It seems the dangers of separating the astral body may outweigh the benefit other than providing very real proof of the astral world?** **Mental Journey ** It should be noted that this type of journey—whether for beginners or advanced students—follows the same requirements. It includes two types of experiences:  • ***Ordinary mental journeying***, which takes place on the four lower subdivisions of the Mental Plane. ***Refer to our answer to Intermediate Level - Question VI. *** • ***"Visionary" mental journeying, ***which takes place on the three higher subplanes of the Mental Plane, called "Buddhi-Manas." ***Refer to our answer to Intermediate Level - Question VI. *** **Astral Travel ** Astral travel requires a conscious exit from the astral body, thus separating from the physical body, although still connected to it.1 Three dangers await the student who travel:  • ***They will necessarily be directed towards the astral subplanes ***having the same vibrational frequency as their astral body. If this body, which is in fact their psyche, is made of an unpurified substance (low frequency, therefore obscure), they will go towards the "unpleasant" subplanes... and they will not be able to escape this situation easily because the Astral Plane, in all its subdivisions, has a "Water/Air" base, and it is therefore more difficult to escape this ultra-magnetic environment, especially the dense subplanes. It is best to ensure the "luminosity" of their astral body before attempting this journey.  ***• Before astral travel, it is important to ensure that the physical body (including the etheric body) is safe and secure***, and that no one will disturb the body, which will be in a state of sleep. Indeed, a violent shock to this body caused by an unexpected arrival in the room, or any major disturbance, can cause the silver cord to loosen and lead to physical deah.  • ***Finally, there is the risk of the physical body being possessed by a negative entity. ***Entities from the lower astral plane still lurk everywhere on our planet, except in occultly/spiritually protected places, as the Dark Forces are on the lookout for this type of investment. Therefore, before venturing into such a journey, it is necessary to protect this place with a ritual or other spiritual process.  Astral travel is generally limited to the Astral Plane of the Earth, the astral aspect of the Sphere surrounding it, and even that of the Moon. Beyond that, it's possible, with all the risks involved, and without going beyond the solar system.  ***The conclusion is clear: we advise against this type of travel. *** **PAA: II In “*The Light Over the Kingdom*”, the Tree of Life diagram presented follows the Golden Dawn layout, which diverges from the more symmetrical and cosmologically coherent version found in the GRA version, described in the Sefer Yetzirah. Many have noted, including Rawn Clark, that the GRA Tree more accurately reflects the true metaphysical structure and divine order of the universe. Given this, was there a particular reason why the Golden Dawn version was chosen for the book instead of the GRA Tree? ** **You also mentioned in your book that the Golden Dawn was instructed to close its doors. May I ask for what reason this was? ** ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-2.png) This assertion that the GRA Tree more faithfully reflects the true metaphysical structure and Divine Order of the Universe is that of Raw Clark and other scholars who adopt “*the supposed initial presentation of the Universe*” in the *Sepher Yetzirah, *but on what grounds? ***However, this apprehension is erroneous***.  ***The Sepher Yetzirah *– *The Book of Formation *** Indeed, we know that the authorship of this founding text of Jewish Kabbalah, symbolically attributed to Abraham , is attributed, with hesitation, to various Rabbis: *Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef *(2nd century), *Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanos *(1st-2nd centuries), etc.  • **It is, originally, a text without the notion of "Sephiroth," nor a presentation in a Tree ** The original text of the Sepher Yetzirah does not present the Universe with the Sephiroth called Kether, Hokmah, Binah, etc. as we know them from the Middle Ages to the present day. It presents it as "***10 empty Principles of Creation***" in connection with the succession of **the Emergence of the Elements **(1. Spirit of the living God => 2. Air from the Spirit => 3. Water from the Air => etc. then the 6 directions of space); ***it is a diagram with lines and not a Tree. *** From the 2nd to the 4th centuries, the words "Sephira" (singular) and "Sephiroth" (plural) emerged, ***but Names (Kether, etc.) were not yet attributed to them. Until the 12th century, the diagram of the Tree did not exist. ***• **In the 12th/13th century (1100-1200), the Names and the Sephirothic Tree were born in the *Sepher ha Bahir, The Book of Clarity****. *We owe this to the work on the Sepher Yetzirah carried out by the Kabbalistic Circle of Provence, which named and arranged the Sephiroth in the form of the Tree we know. This ensemble has since been adopted by all Kabbalists; ***the Tree presented with the succession of Sephiroth by the*** ***Sepher ha Bahir is the one also presented by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and which is also presented in "Light over the Kingdom." *** Therefore, the original foundations of Kabbalah, derived from the true *Sepher Yetzirah, "more faithfully reflect the true metaphysical structure and divine Order of the Universe"; *they are expounded in the *Sepher ha Bahir, *and do not pertain to the GRA Tree.  **The Kabbalistic Tree GRA ** ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-2.png) The so-called GRA Tree (Gaon Rabbeinu Eliyahu) is wrongly attributed to the famous ***Gaon of Vilna ***(18th century) because it appears that this Tree is of a later construction. It shows the Sephira (6) Tipheret taking position before the Sephitoth 4 (Chesed) and 5 (Gerurah) and the Sephira Yesod (9) taking position before the Sephiroth 7 (Netzah) and 8 (Hod). Makhut (10) is in its place.  ***This Sephirothic ordering follows a different concept of the Universe that was rejected ***by many Kabbalists of the 19th and 20th centuries who were familiar with both the genesis of Kabbalah and its effectiveness demonstrated by centuries-old practice. A Sephirothic Tree, as revealed in the *Sepher ha Bahir *following the study of the Kabbalists of the Circle of Provence, was drawn by a Kabbalist in 1884 presenting it as a rectification of the GRA Tree.  The Sphere of Daath is clearly represented; this was later "suggested" and not written down because it represents a *"chasm of swirling Elements, organizing themselves to bring about the emergence of Creation*" and not a Sephirah in itself.2 Creation is revealed in the Sephirah Chesed, the 4th, the Quaternary, which contains it, that is, the rest of the Sephiroth (from 5 to 10), all crowned by the creative Ternary, "*God Manifested" *(Kether, Chokmah, Binah).3 It should also be noted that from the end of the 15th century, Pico della Mirandola also presents the Sephirothic Tree as we know it (Golden Dawn, "The Light..."), without Daath.  **Order to Close the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn ** One of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its leader was ***Samuel Liddell Mathers ***(he added MacGregor to his name) (1854–1918). This Order enjoyed great renown due to the quality of many of its members, but also due to setbacks due to human vicissitudes.  Rumor has it that he received an order from the Masters of Wisdom, residing in Tibet, to close the Golden Dawn at the beginning of the 20th century. We have no details on the exact date; however, given the troubles the Order experienced due to the deviances (black magic) perpetrated by some of its members, this order seems justified.  **PAA: III The Depth-Point Concentration: Bardon includes an exercise where the student learns to identify with the center (depth-point) of objects and eventually of their own being. This technique of shifting awareness to a “center of depth” is subtle but said to unlock profound perceptions. How does mastering the depth-point concentration contribute to one’s magical abilities at an advanced level?  ** **In what ways did practicing this exercise affect your own development – for example, did it enhance your sense of unity with objects or living things, or improve your ability to enter a trance or akashic state?  ** **For those struggling with this practice, what methods can help (such as using simple geometric objects first, or visualizing oneself as tiny as an atom at the object’s center) to eventually achieve that complete immersion into the depth-point? With such a small size we could work with the depth point of liquid or gas or idea could we not? ** **Concentrating on the Depth-Point ** ***The Depth point is a vortex***, more precisely a portal between several Dimensions. By focusing consciousness on the center of depth, it immediately shifts through this portal: ***we thus have a perception of different Planes or Dimensions, depending on our abilities; we can also approach the Akashic Trance. *** ***It is important to remember that our consciousness is exactly where our attention is. ***The obstacles to these peregrinations from this depth point lie in the impurity of our triple structure (physical/etheric, astral, and lower-mental). ***These obstacles encourage us to purify our bodies (physical and subtle). *** **How has practicing this exercise influenced your personal development? ** The results of this practice vary depending on the subtle structure of each student. Describing these personal results here will be of no use due to this difference.  **Methods for Successful Completion of This Exercise ** What has just been clarified: the purification of our vehicles and well-practiced concentration.  **Working deeply on everything... ** Yes, in the infinitely small as well as in the infinitely large.  **PAA: IV Contacting Spiritual Beings (Evocation): In PME, Bardon provides a meticulous guide to evocation – the conjuration of entities ranging from elemental beings to Olympic planetary intelligences. From an advanced practitioner’s standpoint, what are the most critical preparations before attempting spirit contact as described by Bardon?** **We know that he insists on having fully developed astral senses (clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc.) and a balanced personality as prerequisites. Beyond these, how important is it to establish one’s authority and relationship with Divine Providence before calling a spirit forth?  ** **Are there any “common misconceptions” you’ve observed in students – for example, focusing too much on elaborate ritual tools or sigils and not enough on the internal connection – that you would warn against?  ** **Lastly, could you speak to the attitude one should hold during evocation in order to foster a respectful, safe, and constructive communication with the being (for instance, balancing confidence with humility, and never evoking out of curiosity or greed)? ** ***It is important to remember that before undertaking a magical evocation, the student must have successfully attained and completed all the degrees up to and including the VIIIth degree of the IIH. *** **The following answers all your questions, **as it is the foundation of any spiritual path in general and the practice of magic in particular. ***It is about ethics, the desire to work for the good of all, and to nurture compassion for all beings. *** This helps to intensify ***the connection with Divine Providence***, thus promoting the action of ***our Akashic Principle ***on our human personality. Without this contact, continually creating the Divine Presence in our lives, nothing good can be accomplished, especially in magic. This is what will give us authority over intelligences and all kinds of entities we may encounter.  This is the passport to secure communication with all positive entities and instant protection against negative entities. It is both strength and shield. Whether for a mental or physical Evocation, ***it is necessary—as you yourself point out—to have ******developed one's psychic abilities ***(physical/etheric, astral, and mental clairvoyance and clairaudience). This guarantees the Magician's safety because:  ***• *****for a mental Evocation**, they will have greater control over communication with the contacted Intelligence;  ***• *for a physical Evocation**, they will truly see and hear what is happening in the room, what the Entity is like in front of their circle; what frequency it emits, etc. It should be noted that the further we advance on the Path of Perfection, the more our Magic becomes "structural" and the more the Universe responds to our requests. Thus, positive Entities will naturally tend to help us and negative ones to move away. Our attitude will therefore be friendly and respectful toward the Intelligences or Entities contacted; we will therefore be careful not to disturb them to satisfy our curiosity but to really ask them for teaching or help for ourselves or for others, without forgetting to thank them**.** **PAA: V “*Initiations into Hermetics” *: Elemental Kingdoms and Moving On: How long do you think should be spend on the Elemental Kingdoms at the end of IIH. As it could be argued that a lifetime may not be enough for each of the kingdoms and the knowledge to be gained from the inhabitants of these kingdoms as Bardon as said could fill volumes of books. How long is enough before a student moves on to PME/KTQ. Is it possible for you to share any experiences with the Elemental Rulers? ** Countless anecdotes could be cited, but this would be pointless because, on the one hand, the experiences are personal, and on the other, talking about them weakens the Mage's psychic energy: often, the experiences may cease for a while. This is why it is recommended to keep quiet about them.  Moreover, the time required for a comprehensive knowledge of the Elemental Realms depends, let us clarify once again, on the Mage's structure: the more he purifies it, the more he is in symbiosis with his Akashic Principle, and the more his occult abilities are developed, the more he will have experiences with the Spirits of the Elements; his contacts with them will be so easy and unsuspectedly spontaneous that these Spirits will often come of their own accord to help him in some activity or give him useful information. **PAA: VI Mastering the Electric and Magnetic Fluids: In the latter steps of IIH and throughout Bardon’s teachings, the student encounters the two primal forces – the Electric Fluid (expansive, fiery, active) and the Magnetic Fluid (contractive, watery, passive). How did you approach developing an awareness of these polar forces in your own practice? For someone at an advanced stage, what exercises or indications would you suggest to gauge their mastery over the electric and magnetic fluids (e.g. generating tangible heat/cold, or influencing objects/organisms via these energies)?  ** **Bardon hints at tremendous applications once these forces are mastered – from healing with an electromagnetic fluid condenser to charging talismans. In your view, what are some ethical and effective ways to apply the electric and magnetic fluids in advanced magic? Moreover, how can one maintain balance when working with them so as not to become “charged” or imbalanced toward one polarity in daily life? ** Explaining personal approaches is pointless, let us be clear, since everyone undertakes this Path with a different nature from others. One could respond by saying that it was simply by following Franz Bardon's instructions.  Regarding the exercises suggested for assessing mastery of electric and magnetic fluids, you yourself provide an excellent answer: by generating tangible heat/cold, by influencing objects and organisms through these energies.  Finally, the use of a fluidic condenser is very useful in magical actions, particularly in the creation of talismans. Balance in the use of fluids is achieved by observing the number of times each fluid is used.  **PAA: VII Qabbalah and the Power of the Word – Ethical Use of the Divine Names: KTQ teaches the use of the creative cosmic language – intoning letters and formulas that can influence reality across the mental, astral, and physical** **planes. With such immense power at one’s disposal, what do you consider the ethical responsibilities of a quabbalist?  ** **Bardon writes that when a quabbalist creates causes in the Akasha through a word of power, “cause and effect are no longer subject to destiny but exclusively to the Highest Divine Providence,” and an adept “will never [use it] for merely… personal advantages” but will serve a higher will. How can a practitioner ensure they remain aligned with Divine Providence when working with the creative word? For example, do you recommend any specific self-checks, meditations or prayers before and after Kabbalistic operations to keep one’s ego in check?  ** **And from a practical standpoint, how should an advanced student prepare themselves (mentally, morally, and spiritually) before even attempting to speak a formula from KTQ, so that the results are harmonious and in accordance with cosmic law? ** At the level that the Mage must have reached to begin practicing "The Key to True Kabbalah," all these questions have their answers: the level of the Mage is warded off all dangers.  The Mage will therefore not be able to harm anyone in any way, and it would not even occur to him to use the Keys selfishly.  As for creating in the Akasha, he knows what he can and cannot create so that this action is in accordance with Cosmic Law and therefore does not disrupt the karmas of the beings involved. This knowledge is acquired through the long process of development that has allowed him to approach the "timelines" relating to the destiny of beings and, consequently, not to alter them or, a fortiori, to propagate a kind of chaos.  Given what he has become through his journey since the first level of the IIH, the question of whether he is "in phase" with Divine Providence is not a matter for him: he is always in contact with It, and his actions are always in accordance with the Divine Will.  No specific prayers, etc., after the Kabbalistic operations to "*master the ego" *are required because at this stage of the Magus's development—a stage that allows him to approach the Holy Kabbalah—the ego has largely been reduced.  **PAA: VIII ERJ footnote: seven subplanes and Perfect Adepts ** **In response to the footnotes for the ERJ formula in KTQ, it's mentioned in the footnotes that the 7 planes referred to are actually the 7 sub-planes of the physical-Etherical reality that we are bound to until one becomes a Perfect Adept. the 7 subplanes / 70 qualities arranged like a “Jacob’s Ladder” (intersecting, analogous subplanes) or entirely linear? ** The Planes and their septenary subdivisions interlock and interpenetrate. They are distinguished by their respective frequencies. Imagining them as arranged on a Jacob's ladder, or following a line, is false. For educational purposes, they are presented as being placed one on top of the other, from bottom to top. ***The footnote therefore explains that we are currently evolving in the most material spatio temporal zone of the Manifested Universe. *** **PAA: IX What sets apart an Adept from a “Perfect Adept”? ** In the lexicon of esotericism, the word "Adept," with a capital "A," designates a Master of Wisdom, a "Buddha," a being who has transcended his or her human nature and achieved the State of Ultimate Consciousness. Consequently, there are no half measures in Adepthood, "distinguishing an Adept from a perfect Adept."  This word, written with a lowercase "a," designates one who adheres to a given philosophy or religion.  **PAA: X For days when you can’t practice the Bardon exercises, is there a single meditation or practice that can replace them all?** The exercise of Mental Emptiness which leads the student to “taste” the Sublime Presence of the Divine within himself and, always, “consciousness in the present”.  **PAA: XI How has your relationship to—and understanding of—God developed over the years of your training? ** The answer would be useless since the path depends, as has already been stated, on the initial structure of each person. Understanding and relating to the Divine are personal experiences and often inexpressible - or formulatable with human words - even to oneself.  **PAA: XII How did you first start your magical practice? What led you to Franz Bardon's work and has the result of this work matched your expectations. ** The first question is personal; therefore, we cannot answer it.  As for the second question: anyone who approaches the Path of Theurgy (White Magic) finds themselves face to face with this Great Mage, Franz Bardon.  Finally, as for the third question: ***if there had been no satisfactory results, would Bardon's works have been translated into French and disseminated in that language? *** **PAA: XIII Often we look at the description of the Elemental beings and the beings of PME – have Franz Bardons description matched your personal experiences with these beings? ** Franz Bardon explains that spirits are an "energy/signature": the way we perceive them, or their form, is linked to their abilities and qualities.  An Indian in Bangalore will likely see a spirit with an Indian appearance, while a Danish magician might see a spirit with blond hair, but they will all be the same spirit: the symbols that describe the qualities, the spirit's origin, and its positive or negative qualities will all be presented to both magicians through the prism of their respective cultural symbolism.  **PAA: XIV Do you think physical evocation is a good use of Magicians time or should the magician spend most of his/her time using mental wandering to go the beings sphere rather than bringing/inviting them here? ** In our experience, it is better to mentally solicit the Intelligences of the Spheres described by Franz Bardon than to evoke them on the Physical Plane. They will instruct us in various magical techniques and will willingly perform requested work (help for ourselves and others).  As for the use of our lives, it is better, in our opinion, to pursue the daily purification of our subtle structure because without it, no progress will be possible. Moreover, in addition to the daily examination of our consciousness, our flaws and qualities, and the good thoughts and feelings to maintain towards all beings, we must always return to Mental Emptiness and "present awareness," because these two practices— combined with those mentioned—are those that lead to Ultimate Consciousness. Once this is acquired, everything becomes possible, without rite, without outfit, without candle... To act then for oneself and the good of all beings, it will be enough to think and feel linked to the latter, and this, in all space and time. This is true Magic, Structural Magic.  **PAA: XV Much has been made of Stejnar discovery re the names of spirits and the u se of a Cipher . http://abardoncompanion.de/Stejnar.html What are your thoughts on this?** Solar Intelligences are extremely difficult to pin down, and it makes sense to keep their names slightly obscure: we believe Franz Bardon used the combination you mention to protect readers and followers.  An experienced magician can see the Entities and ask them questions, just as one might ask for directions on the street: thus, this magician can simply ask the Entity to confirm its name if he or she doubts the names given by Franz Bardon.  We will then discover that the problem is resolved more quickly than we thought. Here again, the ability to invoke or contact the Intelligences is linked to the purity of our structure. Thus, when we are finally ready to evoke them, the answer to this question will be obvious. **PAA: On behalf of the the community I would like to thank you for your thoughtful and detailed answers to the communities questions. Your time and generous sharing is greatly appreciated. ** --- ### Visit Editions Moryason here --- ## Footnotes --- --- # Franz Bardon, Kabbalah & Purification: An Interview with Alexandre Moryason Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-kabbalah-purification-an-interview-with-alexandre-moryason/ ## Introduction In this interview I think we have one of our most informative and inspirational interviews in relation to the teachings of Franz Bardon. I would like to express our thanks to Editions Moryason and of course to Alexandre Moryason for sharing with us and for giving such clear, direct advice to practitioners. In case you are not aware Alexandre Moryason is the translator for the French editions of Franz Bardon's *Initiation into Hermetics*, the *Practice of Magical Evocation* and the *Key to the True Quabbalah*. He added many footnotes to these translations which make this French language set of Franz Bardon's teachings even more precious as the hand of a practitioner has ensured the true meaning is retained. Be sure to visit Editions Moryason website to see the titles they have available. As you can see from this interview anything that is there, you know is because it is truly useful for practitioners. ##### Visit Editions Moryason here --- ***For Clarity: These answers are given by Editions Moryason with the authorization of Alexandre Moryason. *** ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/logo-1668788569.png) ## On Apparent Contradictions in the KTQ **PAA: One of the first things readers of KTQ notice is initial confusion in relation to letters and body regions—for instance, with the letter B. In step I-I of KTQ, Bardon gives exercises with letters assigned to one body region, but in step IV, they are assigned to other regions for practice. You are probably the only editor and publisher to provide a further explanation on this topic. To quote from the French edition of KTQ:** > “It should be made clear at this point that various contradictions might be noticed by the > reader as to the information given by the Author on the Elements acting in each Letter. > This contradiction is only apparent. Despite the clear exposition given, this subject is > very complex. In fact, it must be kept in mind that Electricity and Magnetism are > produced from one another and that this game of alternating manifestation takes place > on all planes of existence. Each Element therefore contains the other Three in a > particular form of expression and in the following proportions: an atom of Ether is made > up of 1/2 Ether and 1/8 of each of the other Elements; an atom of Fire is made up of 1/2 > Fire, 1/8 Ether and 1/8 of each of the other three Elements (Air Water-Earth). These > proportions are found in an atom of Air, Water and Earth. The Kabbalistic Tree will be a > valuable support for meditation regarding the Circulation of the Elements and the > reflection of a Sphere or Sephira- linked to a dominant Element- in another located on > the same Pillar.” **Could you elaborate on how these apparent contradictions reflect deeper truths about the interdependence of the elements, so the readers could gain a wider picture of the complexity and dynamics of each letter's ability to be expressed in multiple spheres of our micro and macro cosmos?** **Editions Moryason**: This work has to be done by the student as he/she practices Bardon's steps. Franz Bardon stresses many times that one has to meditate on these subjects and deepen one's understanding of the concepts. The logic to follow is to avoid focusing too much on the lower mind who is an obstacle to the manifestation of higher intuition (this higher intuition descends from the Buddhi-manas plane of our structure). This also implies the need to purify one's Elements (our subtle structure) in order to allow the understanding of this Knowledge (i.e. the KTQ). ***More concretely, (a key, in a way): the organs of the body and their subtle double are interconnected, as you know, which in fact reveals the electromagnetic aspect of these exchanges. There are therefore no contradictions in these two attributions made by FB. Consequently: practice, practice, practice and you will see, even feel, this interconnection.*** ## Elemental Interdependence **PAA: Each element contains the other three in varying proportions. How does this interconnectedness influence a Kabbalist's approach to balancing energies in their practices?** **Editions Moryason**: Interdependence is the root of Magic: it's not only about Elements, but spiritual planes, organs, … all is interconnected and this should be considered when acting on a Magical level. An Element is composed of —on a basis of 4— : - 1/2 of itself, - the second half dividing into 3 parts, each linked respectively to the other 3 Elements. - Akasha is found in what subtly surrounds the Element, like a circle divided into two equal halves. - This distribution (1/2 and 3 equal parts forming the other half surrounded by Akasha) is that of a balanced Element. In the average human, this distribution reveals inequalities, constituting what is called "the internal imbalance of an Element." The more this internal balance occurs, the more it interacts with the balance of the other Elements, thus gradually bringing about the overall balance of the elements among themselves. This work simultaneously generates a change in the vibrational frequency of each Element, a change in its structure: it involves raising this frequency, which is, in the average human, quite low (3rd dimension). This work of total purification of the Elements manifests itself through*** a change in consciousness*** (the essential goal of all spiritual practice). The practitioner thus reaches the 4th and 5th dimensions; ***opening the Path to Adepthood***. ***As human structure is naturally unbalanced and vibrates at low frequencies, as we have just specified***, the risk of an unbalanced practice is very high and one has to go through a period of Purification of his/her structure to be able to move forward with success. The book “[The Light Over The Kingdom](https://shop.moryason.com/acceuil/149-the-light-over-the-kingdom.html)” teaches different balanced techniques (including “Purification teachings”) that you can practice right away, without risk, and that gives tangible results. Once a decent level of purification is reached, the elemental proportion/distribution is always the same: see IIH's footnotes. ## On the Kabbalistic Tree and Circulation **PAA: The Kabbalistic Tree is suggested as a tool for meditating on the "circulation of the elements" and their reflections in different spheres or Sephirot. How does one approach this type of meditation practically, and what insights might it reveal?** **Editions Moryason**: Before starting to work on this Tree, one must consider the absolute necessity of the Purification of our Elements. Let us note that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, not having insisted enough on this, has had to deal with many setbacks (dangers, imbalances) of many of its members etc… The Masters of Wisdom asked Mathers at the beginning of the 20th century to close this Order; he obeyed. However, individual practices have not ceased and, worse, a recent so-called reactivation of this Order was made, producing the same negative consequences. The Kabbalistic Tree is the symbol of the ideal circulation of energies in the human structure. As we said earlier, human nature is ***naturally unbalanced***1, so practically one should :  >  *(...) submit individual electromagnetism to the action of Universal Electromagnetism in order to untangle the neurotic intertwining of energies structuring the psyche and the intellect and thus allow the emergence of a Divine State in man.* *(The Light Over The Kingdom p.20 ) * So the main approach here is ***Purification***. Without this step, no further progress can be made because of the unbalanced nature of mankind. ***Purification ***progressively allows the emergence of a Divine state in ourselves. The practical teachings can be found in the book “*The Light Over The Kingdom*”. The insights are quite similar to what is found in occult literature: the Emergence of a Divine state in a person allows the consciousness of that person to grow to a level not understandable by a uninitiated person, it also allows the emergence of “siddhis”, the occult powers, that are well documented in Bardon's books, so no further explanation is needed. For the average person, the benefits are an expansion of consciousness, a better karma and some beginning of Hermetic faculties that may start to manifest harmoniously, depending on the gifts, the karma, and the elemental structure of the person.  ## Cosmic Breath and Elements **PAA: The description of the "Divine Breath" in relation to the circulation of elements suggests a perpetual flow of creation and dissolution. How does this concept align with the Hermetic axiom "As above, so below," and how can it be practically applied in meditative work?** **Editions Moryason: **“Divine Breath” is an aspect of the Unique, what Bardon calls “Akasha”. This substance is Life and therefore is Light and Movement. There are different spiritual Worlds and Realms ( each one of those Realms having it's own *light color *and *Number*, its evocation mandala-form ) all are influenced/created/maintained by Akasha as Bardon explains. So the practical applications of that concept are almost endless. This was masterfully described by Franz Bardon in his three books. However, one must be careful with the various spiritual schools that promote methods of "breathing" because the action of the Breath is essential in the energetic structure of every living being and without a ***sure transmission ***(ie: transmission by a qualified Positive Instructor), one can be exposed to several dangers. ## Balancing Secrecy and Knowledge Sharing **PAA: How should a practitioner discern when it is appropriate to share esoteric knowledge with others versus maintaining secrecy to align with karmic timing?** **Editions Moryason: **Franz Bardon stresses that the best help is done anonymously. ***We do not want to become a “guru”, ***that may slow down our spiritual progress, and is not beneficial to third parties. So most of the time, it's better to let people evolve naturally, without meddling in their spiritual development. Of course, if one sees a grave danger or a similar situation where help has to be given, then one has to help. The best is to do it anonymously, or in a way so humble that the recipient of the help will not notice us or will forget our very existence. Advanced Hermetic practitioners can look in the Akasha how several scenarios may play out, and choose the one that suits the more the interest of the person he/she wants to help. ## Theurgy as Co-Creation with the Divine **PAA: Theurgy is described as working alongside Divine Providence in the Great Work. How does this concept reconcile individual free will with the overarching will of Divine Providence, especially when engaging in transformative magical acts? Can failures in this realm have far-reaching karmic repercussions? ** **Editions Moryason: **The following example will give a clear picture of our answer. The example of the way Adepts work is enlightening: Adepts give the “blueprint” (What has to be done from the perspective of Divine Laws) to their disciples, giving them *free will *in the way they *manifest *the blueprint. So, there is not just “one perfect action”, there may be different ways to achieve the correct goal, the correct way, and that's how we reconcile free will *and *following Divine Providence's plan. Failures always have repercussions: but as Franz Bardon says, as long as we learn from our mistakes and ***we do not do it again***, it's ok, it's part of the process of self-growth.  **PAA: Connection to Other Traditions: The text mentions parallels between Kabbalah and other Traditions, such as Kundalini Yoga. What are the key similarities and differences between these systems in their approach to elemental energies?** **Editions Moryason: **What you call “Kundalini Yoga” is not a Tradition but a practice included in the Eastern Traditions (Hinduism and Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism). This practice is part of those that enable developing occult faculties inherent of the human structure. Like everything that is involved in this development, the danger is present. Also, all these practices (including Kundalini Yoga) are transmitted by an initiation that cannot be found in the works that supposedly disclose them; this has been common in the West since the last decades of the last century. It must also be considered that many black magicians, disguised as “kind gurus”, “transmit” initiations that are “inverted”; when people follow and practice these harmful instructions, they unknowingly provide vital energy to the black magician, “guru”. This vampirism tends to excessively devitalize the practitioner-victim and in the long run sometimes they lead to illnesses and death. But the worst is that, through these inverted practices, the person soils, lowers his/her Elements which transforms him into an increasingly negative being with the karmic consequences that follow. Even if this victim will benefit from "mitigating circumstances", the Universal Laws governing the substance of our bodies will trigger the need to purify this substance (and then negative karmic situations have to manifest to purify the substance and balance karma) ... Franz Bardon system has strong similarities with Tibetan teachings as books like “Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines2” clearly demonstrate. Those who had the chance to visit Franz Bardon's family know that he made no mystery of the links he had with Tibet.  Franz Bardon's teachings are way more precise, down to earth, almost scientific and accessible to everybody. Tibetan teachings, on the other hand, clearly require someone to already have some connection to the occult, so to the westerners the approach is too harsh.  As a consequence, elemental energies will be well better described by Bardon, as will all the others concepts and exercises. Regarding the link with Kabbalah and Bardon, this time, the nations are both westerners so the thought process and mental structure is similar. The difference between those two teachings is just that because of the “*fall of the generations*3” , many knowledge has been lost , hidden, or sometimes corrupted by the “*brothers of the shadow”. *So Franz Bardon came and re-founded the teachings, left us with books we can trust and a system that has been validated by a true positive Adept. One can list the similarities (like the “*Berakhot*” and Bardon's “Conscious reception of food”) but suffice it to say that Bardon's work is more precise, practical, up to date and Divinely oriented. We have all encountered old Kabbalistic texts where some Divine Names are written, but how to be sure it's not the name of a demon? Texts have been rewritten many times! Franz Bardon's work is a guarantee that we are in contact with positive energies and that we do not become the toy of the “brothers of the shadow”.  That being said, Franz Bardon has disclosed the general rules of Hermeticism, but has not disclosed the “Master-to-Disciple” one to one Transmission: this is due to the very fact that his writings are intended for all audiences. ## The Alchemy of Divine Names **PAA: The texts discuss the power of Divine Names in invoking energies or qualities. How can practitioners ensure their understanding of these Names transcends rote repetition, allowing them to tap into the transformative essence behind the Name? ** **Editions Moryason: **To tap into the transformative essence behind the Divine Name***, one has to take into account the structure of the practitioner. ***The westerner usually only focus on the technique, and forgets about the state of his/her spiritual (etheric, astral, mental “subtile”) structure. But the results of Theurgy (the use of Divine Names), highly depends of the ***purification ***of the structure of the practitioner. For example, in the “*Letters of the Mahatmas*”, the Master Koot Hoomi clearly explains that ***the Magic performed by Jesus was achieved more by his state of purity***4***, than by the use of complicated or secret techniques and teachings***. Even in traditional Orthodox Judaism and Kabbalah, it is common knowledge that magic results are obtained trough purification or a state of purity, the “*Tzaddikim*5” are well known to maintain that state of ***purification, ***and not by the use of hidden and forbidden secrets of “*Kabbalah Ma'asit*6”. Old ***Kabbalistic literature explains the importance of purification with some “tests” to validate, and if the purification test is not ok, one has to cancel the ritual and give up with the scheduled utterance of the Divine Name***(s).  Yet, despite all these examples and Traditions, it is our experience that most westerners do not take into account their structure and the importance of purification: this means that they rely on their concrete lower mind, in all their investigations in the field of Occultism; now, this precise mind (called in Tibetan “sem”) is, in this language, almost synonymous with “enemy”... They may experience side effects and/or disappointments. In the book ***“The Light Over The Kingdom”, this problem is addressed and safe purification rituals and techniques are given. *** ## “The Light over the Kingdom” **PAA: You are the author of several books, including The Light over the Kingdom, which is perhaps the most accessible to an international audience outside France. Could you give us a short introduction to this work, what inspired you to write it, and how it can assist a practitioner interested in Franz Bardon’s curriculum of magic?** **Editions Moryason**: “The Light over the Kingdom” is intended for the general public. There are also other publications intended for those who practice “The Light over the Kingdom”… like “Créator (Khâ-Hérou-Hathor)”, “The Pentacle of the Kingdom”, however those are not books so to speak, but rather magical methods. “The Pentacle of the Kingdom” is a sacred consecrated object, accompanied by a booklet, is requested, once again, by those who practice “The Light over the Kingdom”. So this book (“The Light over the Kingdom”) is the only one truly intended for the general public. Franz Bardon has mentioned the existence of “Ankhur Magic”, but has not given one to his/her students, leaving them with the freedom to choose the one of their culture or liking. Franz Bardon's system is known to be hard to practice, so it became clear people would benefit from the practice of an Ankhur. ***Alexandre Moryason's book “The Light over the Kingdom” is designed to be practiced with Bardon's books and to be an “Ankhur Magic”, aimed at helping the practitioner of Franz Bardon's teachings to make progress.*** Our approach and experience of four decades demonstrates that the main problems of the western student are :  1) the lack of ***purification ***of his/her structure and;  2) the almost exclusive use of one's concrete lower mind, which hinders the spontaneous expression of Love.  This book addresses that problem and is an unique opportunity to “touch something from the world of the Spirit”, (whose ultimate true nature is Compassion/Love). The book covers many subjects ranging from Egyptian Magic, Ankhur, Karmic purification, Kabbalah to Fire Rituals. ## Esoteric Knowledge in France **PAA: France has a long history of Initiatic Orders, Lodges, and magical groups. What is the current scene like compared to its complex past?** **Editions Moryason**: French occultists tend to be secretive compared to Anglo-Saxons. They do not discuss those subjects.  ## Esoteric Community **PAA: How has your interaction with the Esoteric Community shaped your views, and what feedback do you find most valuable? ** **Editions Moryason: **Four decades of interaction with the Esoteric Community proves, beyond doubt, that the westerner structure needs to be ***purified ***to start to get results with Franz Bardon's teachings. We also came to the conclusion that many hardships faced by the practitioners of Magic have a Karmic root. The most valuable and rewarding feedback comes from those who seriously follow our spiritual roadmap and teachings, and overcome the karmic problems they face as good students of Occultism. Our satisfaction is in the countless testimonies, over these many years, from practitioners who have experienced spectacular changes in their lives, both on a concrete level (material desires) and in terms of the evolution of consciousness toward the Divine.  It should also be noted that this purification does not, of course, concern only Westerners but all human beings. ## Advice to New Students **PAA: What advice would you give to someone interested in stepping into the world of esotericism, either as a practitioner or researcher? ** **Editions Moryason: **To practice alone, read and practice Franz Bardon's books. Do not underestimate the importance of ***purification ***as it is needed for the westerner's spiritual structure. As Franz Bardon's teachings are difficult, you might consider the use of an “*Ankhur Magic*” to help, and speed up the process. We offer this type of Ankhur Magic in our book, “*The Light Over The Kingdom”. ****A researcher should be aware that strong forces opposing Light exist***: if a researcher wants to publish the result of his/her work, it is advisable to take that into account and to have a clear picture of the possible very difficult consequences. ## Franz Bardon Tradition **PAA: What do you believe makes Bardon's teachings stand out compared to other esoteric traditions? ** **Editions Moryason: **They are unique, clear, ***recent ***and the content is for everybody to see. You do not need to loose your liberty by joining a group or a Positive Brotherhood to get the content of the “last levels”. ***You can work alone, make progress, and while you may think you are alone, you can be sure Franz Bardon will keep an eye on you. All serious practitioners of Franz Bardon know what we mean by that.*** > ***We put a stress on practicing, alone, away from the crowd, anonymously.*** ## Integrity in Publishing **PAA: How do you ensure that the essence and integrity of Bardon's teachings are preserved in your publications? ** **Editions Moryason : **We avoid the ego-life of the mundane. We do not speak publicly, do not have a YouTube channel, no social networks, we do not attend meetings, no “Instagram lifestyle”. Our Translations obviously do not change so the integrity you're talking about is preserved by the above mentioned behavior: staying away from all medias. ***We put a stress on practicing, alone, away from the crowd, anonymously.*** ## Misconceptions **PAA: What do you think are the common misconceptions about Franz Bardon and his teachings? ** **Editions Moryason: **Four decades of contact with the western public proves that the biggest misconception is to believe you can go forward with Franz Bardon's teachings without serious work on the Elemental balance and its subsequent ***purification***. Let's face it with blatant honesty: we westerners tend to think: “*we are “already clean”, there is no urge to change our elemental balance.”  * So this is the first and biggest misconception: we need to go through a serious process of ***purification***, to get rid of our dark side, our imbalance. When we reach a better elemental balance, then some Bardon steps will be easier to practice, or we may even fully master an exercise after taming an important defect of our psychological nature. The second important misconception or mistake about Franz Bardon's teachings is not to make the difference between Quality and Quantity. *(see “Arion” & The Key to the True Kabbalah) *Many practitioners make that mistake and underestimate the need for Quantity to materialize their wish. So either the action does not work, and they are sad, or – what is worse – the wish will be granted but nature will have to reimburse herself taking directly the missing Quantity from the structure of the practitioner. ***The person can then suffer a karmic problem*, **get ill, or even if some extreme cases, have his life span shortened. This, of course, also applies to cases where people ask Spirits with things that use an extreme amount of Quantity, without thinking if their own structure can cope with the amount required in the first place. A smart student of Occultism will instantly guess that such an unbalanced approach may lead to pacts or similar calamities. ***Obviously, such an error denotes an elemental imbalance, the presence of an impurity in the structure, and the subsequent need for purification to finally be successful with the practice of Franz Bardon***. ## Advice for Studying the Franz Bardon Books **PAA: What advice would you give to someone just beginning their journey with Bardon’s books?  ** **Editions Moryason: **To practice alone, read and practice Franz Bardon's books. Do not underestimate the importance of ***purification ***as it is needed for the westerner's spiritual structure. As Franz Bardon's teachings are difficult, you might consider the use of an “Ankhur Magic” to help, and speed up the process. We offer this type of Ankhur Magic in our book, *The Light Over The Kingdom. ****Be sure that Franz Bardon follows your progress, EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT AWARE OF IT: the Light Brotherhood is real, and a sincere student will soon or later receive some “signs” in his/her Path.*** **PAA: How has technology influenced the dissemination of Bardon’s teachings in recent years?** **Editions Moryason: **Before internet, followers of Bardon Teachings had to physically meet: usually in a bookshop or a similar place. Technology removed that requirement and all Bardon followers all over the world started to be able to communicate and share their journey on the Internet. So for people living in big cities, the change is not that noticeable, it's really a game changer for the more distant and poorer communities in the country or abroad. All you need is a cellphone, and you can talk to a serious practitioner living the other side of the world at no cost, even if you live in the most remote, poor and wild area of the world.  This is the material reality: human contact is facilitated. ***However, this kind of exchange harbors some harm: ***we exchange our experiences—which are purely individual because they depend on our own elemental and karmic structure—with another person whose experiences come from their own elemental and karmic structure. The result creates real delays because one tends to adopt the advice of another... (ie: *another insufficiently experienced student*)  ***This explains why F. Bardon never ceases to insist on solitary and discreet work.*** ## Future Titles from Editions Moryason **PAA: How do you see the future of your shop and publishing efforts in France? Are there any upcoming projects or initiatives you’re excited about? ** **Editions Moryason: **We are in the process of publishing:  • Alexandre Moryason's last translation: *Zanoni, Maître Rose+Croix, *written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. This faithful translation is based on the initial manuscript of 1845. ***Alexandre Moryason wrote a Preface which explains what the true Order of the Rose+Croix is, so mysterious***, and a subject that has caused rivers of ink to flow. He also reveals a manuscript bearing the signature of F. Bardon, who signs as a Rosicrucian Initiator-Master. ***This new translation has the merit of providing an adjacent esoteric teaching in 276 footnotes, including historical knowledge and various mythologies. *** • The translation by Noël Richard-Nafarre (author of the excellent biography of *«Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ou la réponse du Sphynx "*) of two works by the great Tibetologist David Reagle:  ⮚ *The Book of Dzyan or The Sources of "The Secret Doctrine" * ⮚ *The Books of Kiu-te or the Tibetan Buddhist Tantras * ***These two works constitute a real revelation of the authenticity of the Sources of the Teachings received by H.P. Blavatsky, delivered by the Masters of Wisdom, Morya*** ***and Koot Hoomi. ***Indeed, since no one had access to the archives of the Planetary Annals written in the Senzar language and kept in Tibet by the Adepts of the Great White Lodge, doubt was allowed about the integrity of H.P. Blavatsky, so unjustly slandered. However, due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet in October 1950, most of the precious manuscripts were saved and taken abroad, including the famous book of "Kiu-te", which H.P. Blavatsky constantly refers to in the writing of "The Secret Doctrine". David Reagle, as a Tibetologist, had access to these documents, including the "Kiu-te". It is this clear translation, with the approval of our Tibetologist, that we also offer to our readers. We see 2025 as the opening of a new positive spiritual cycle. **PAA: Huge thanks for accepting our invitation and for providing such a thorough response to each of our questions.** Image Credit: [Éditions des Livres écrits par et sur Franz Bardon dans le monde - Moryason](https://www.moryason.com/post/edition-livre-ecrit-franz-bardon) --- ## Footnotes --- --- # The Theurgy of Thoth: Writing from the Divine Mind, by André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-theurgy-of-thoth-writing-from-the-divine-mind-by-andre-consciencia/ Table of Contents - I seek formal cosmic ordainment to instill order through cosmic wisdom.- Preparations- Inside Thoth- Thoth Evokes Me- Outside Thoth- Work with Andre- A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah ##### I seek formal cosmic ordainment to instill order through cosmic wisdom. ## Preparations Before I begin, I consult my soul mirror for the balance of Fire–Air–Water–Earth, and stabilize it by elemental accumulation in the corresponding parts of the body (head-chest-adbominal region-limbs and base of spine). This is so the Godhead can harmoniously inhabit my astral body or soul. I then form and maintain a living image of Thoth in the Akasha, with sensation, tone, and color, until it becomes autonomous in that plane. For this, I enter a vacancy of mind and the Akashic trance (also named magical trance) until my perception is like a mirror. I impregnate this emptiness with the oscillation of the Sun Sphere and with the oscillation of the Moon Sphere, setting the lunar current at its heart, for the neutral volt in which the image will appear. I use plastic imagination to create a tall, luminous being with the head of an ibis, robed in a garment that shifts from light‐blue to white as it catches the light. I see the ibis head poised, balanced, with an intellect that measures the Micro and Macrocosm. As the background (see [A Guide to the Elementals](https://hermeticmagician.com/index.php/books/)) I set a temple of infinite night shot with stars. Thoth sits before a sunlike tablet, a stylus (made of the principle of light) in hand. It seems to writes with fire into the darkness, the lines emitting different tones. Around the stylus, space itself feels aware and vibrant with intelligence. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ChatGPT-Image-Nov-11-2025-03_14_17-PM-683x1024.png) I surround the figure with a magnetic sky-blue light Jovial oscillation and impregnate him with the gold-silver oscillation of the volt mentioned before, transmuting its polarity to electric. At this point I make use of the cosmic letter E (cosmic consciousness, intuition, mastery of astral matrix, materializations) and let the tone vibrate through the figure’s skull and spine, each vibration solidifying the image, like hammer-strikes forging form out of the subtle substance. I feel the image gaining density, temperature, and respiration, and begin to notice it occupies space outside the akasha. Separating my astral hand, I touch it, and the figure’s robe feels weightless but fixed; the air around it reacts. Now, I transfer my awareness into the image and am inside Thoth’s head, seeing from his eyes. I think as Thoth, my mind measures the stars and extracts consciousness, proportion and reason from them. When I return to my own position, the image continues in the Akasha on its own. I draw a vertical line of light through it, from above the head to below the feet, and say “This is Thoth, the Divine Mind in equilibrium.” I dissolve the image completely, leaving only the blue-silvery gold voltage, and then call it back from within the oscillation simply by repeating the sentence. I confirm that the image is stabilized, that the cosmic letter E continues to exhale from inside it, that an intelligence seems to watch me back, and my mind feels crystalline. I repeat the whole procedure, then erase the figure entirely and the light oscillations, so as to make imagination secondary and quality primary. At this time, still in akashic or magical trance, I seek Thoth as the universal law of Divine Wisdom in operation. The akasha provides me with a different image: the ibis-headed God seated on a cube of light, holding a reed and a tablet, but this image is more an idea than an idol. The reed radiates the creative Word of a Logos that orders omnipotently; the cube, a perfect and omniscient understanding of measure, number, proportion and law; the Ibis-headed God himself is an all-loving and merciful intelligence that teaches all beings according to their capacity; and the immortal tablet records all events. I meditate on this idea and soon these four aspects fuse in a single radiant mind that writes all forms. I close the works for the day and, the next day, repeat the Akashic trance, placing before me only the feeling of Divine Wisdom pervading all things. Thoth appears spontaneously, and the image is the same, and the same are the qualities manifested. Passing this test, I impregnate the imagine with the four Divine Qualities myself, omnipotent fire as a golden-red radiance in the head and concentrated on the brow; omniscient air as azure light in the chest, concentrating on the shoulders and climbing to the head; eternal loving water as a silver glow in the abdominal region and spreading to the heart; and omnipresent earth as an opal light in the base and limbs, sustaining all. I imagine with all my faculties the heart of this reunion beginning to beat, Thoth awakens, starts to breathe, and then to move. As he moves, Divine Wisdom seems to move through me. I pray as the image becomes more and more self-luminous, then draw it into myself in all three bodies. My consciousness is the Mind of Thoth. My thoughts are Wisdom. For a moment, all imagery is dispensed, and I seem to be meditating involuntarily only on the quality of Divine Wisdom, in the rapture of limitless lucidity that knows all things and knows them in harmony. This quality fills and expands through my whole being: an Infinite Intellect that acts, knows, loves and sustains. I lose the distinction, and there is only awareness. Then, as “I am” Wisdom itself, a separate part of me becomes the pen of the Divine Scribe. As is witnessed, I write. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/ChatGPT-Image-Nov-11-2025-02_18_51-PM-683x1024.png) ## Inside Thoth Between two columns of ochre stone I stand, in a ziggurat-like temple crowned by an invisible flame. A serpentine ladder case pathway, adorned with a serpent, climbs 365 steps to the stone cube at the summit where I sit. A pilgrimage of 45 wise men and women seems to be climbing in the distance. Eleven dressed in green coarse linen and brown cotton; eleven dressed in white and silver light linen and pale blue and golden silk; eleven dressed in gold and sky-blue fine linen; and eleven dressed in deep red, copper wool and black leather. Leading them is a taller and more gracile androgynous human, of smaller jaw, less pronounced brow, and larger cranial cavity. Her eyes, larger and light-sensitive, are protected by a white veil that contrasts against her bluish skin. They all carry tomes, carried against their breasts. The androgynous human figure arrives first and, singing, anoints the center of my body with the Water of Memory, placing in my lap the book of the One Law of God, called “The Book of Supreme Attainment”, engraved with an image of Pan over a rose playing flute to a dragon that stands on a lotus. Above them, a sapphire star shines from within a black carbon diamond, surrounded by a circle. From me pours out the gift of the wordless ones, and the figure leaves with it. Eleven orphic priests follow, and by order, raise a pile of books to my front and right: - “The 45 Laws of Will” is the color of fire. In the top illustration, a flaming lord riding a black horse holds his heart and gives its fluids for the beast’s satiation; - “The 45 Crowns of Admirable Intelligence”, it is the color of pure brilliance and holds an image of a God with the body of a swan and the head of a hawk; - “The 45 Wise Men and Women of Illumination”, the cover is soft blue and engraved on it stands a human being; - “The 45 Saints of Understanding”, the cover is crimson and depicts a naked woman riding a bee; - “The 45 Mercies of Cohesion”, the cover reveals a unicorn under a violet background; - “The 45 Radical Strengths”, orange and showing a basilisk; - “The 45 Beauties of Meditation”, pink in color, where a child is depicted riding a lion under the gaze of a phoenix; - “The 45 Occult Victories”, in which the amber cover shows a lynx with the head of a crow; - “The 45 Splendors of the Absolute”, purple and showing a hermaphrodite riding a jackal, serpents as arms, extended to the wind; - “The 45 Foundations of Purity”, indigo, showing a toad riding a tortoise; Finally, a leader approached with flame motifs in his wool and lightning in his leather, broken shackles on both arms, a torch in one hand and “The 45 Resplendent Kingdoms” on the other, yellow in color, the cover with an engraved sphynx. He closed with it the first pile of tomes, offered me coal and saw me as himself. He was meant to teach Ascelpius and Tat, one day to return a procession of 20 000 magi that would render me all the 45 kingdoms. The next entourage arrived, offering tomes to my left and front, these being: - “The 45 Intellects”, transparent like air, 45 moist lights dancing within; - “The 45 Beings of Hidden Intelligence”, white cover containing an almond in flower; - “The 45 Lords of Light”, grey with the illustration of an amaranth; - “The 45 Lord Gods of Sainthood”, black in color and revealing a cypress; - “The 45 Mights of Measure”, blue in color, with an olive figure engraved; - “The 45 Strong Gods of Radicalism”, scarlet and depicting an oak; - “The 45 Divine Lords of Mediating Knowledge”, showing a vine upon golden cover; - “The 45 Hidden Generals”, with a rose on an emerald cover; - “The 45 Hosting Gods of Perfection”, orange in color and depicting a moly on the cover; - “The Clear 45 Divinities of Almighty Life”, violet color and depicting a mandrake; At last, one with a feathered collar over her fine linen and a solar disk above her head concluded the pile, deposing “The 45 Resplendent Lords of the Earth”, black cover engraved with a willow. Seeing me in her mind as the God that is the Tongue of Atum, she offered me her breath, and this priestess of Shu was sent into the world to write 36 books of Egyptian Philosophy. To be named: “The Book of New Beginnings and Jubilation”, written on the skin of a cow; “The Book of Development and Growth”, written on garnet; “The Book of Change in Circumstances”, written over gold; “The Book of Construction and Building”, written on glass; “The Book of Accomplishment”, written on galena; “The Book of Care and Nurturing”, inscribed over gold; “The Book of Death and Endings”, inscribed over gold; “The Book of the Pregnant Twins”, carved on turquoise; “The Book of Recovered Senses”, written on iron; “The Book of Truth and Justice”, written on hematite; “The Book of Chaos”, written on smoky quartz; “The Book of Conflict and War”, written on red jasper; “The Book of Restraint”, written on glass; “The Book of Sowing Seeds”, written on flintstone; “The Book of Journeys Through Life” inscribed on the wood of a boat; “The Book of Spiritual Struggles”, written on glass; “The Book of the Secret Stars”, carved over carnelian; “The Book of the Tree of Life and Wisdom”, written on sheep skin; “The Book of Celebration and Merriment”, carved on copper; “The Book of Melancholy or Sadness”, written over gold; “The Book of the Children of the Sheep”, written on carnelian; “The Book of Love and Romance”, written on glass; “The Book of the Two Souls”, written on garnet; “The Book of the Two Spirits”, inscribed on gold; “The Book of Abundance”, on gold; “The Book of Destroying Enemies”, carved on gold; “The Book of Authority and Power”, written over jasper; “The Book of Creation and Artistry”, gold; “The Book of the Children of the Potter”, on glass; “The Book of Respect and Admiration”, over carnelian; “The Book of Writing”, inscribed on granite; “The Book of Purification”, inscribed on Quartz; “The Book of Revelation”, on gold; “The Book of The Father of the Gods”, gold; “The Book of Destroying Chaos”, ebony; “The Book of the Flood Goddess”, written over gold; and “The Book of the Two Tortoises”, written in carnelian. These books contain the alphabet of my intellect and have been scribed with starlight. Then came eleven wise men and women bearing the wisdom of the luminous waters of the Pleroma, offering to my back and right the works that follow: - “The 45 Laws of Sentience”, it is aquatic in color, an infinite depth falling within it and rising to the surface as life renewed; - “The 45 Admirable Watchers” is white on the cover and features a diamond; - “The 45 Enlightening Mysteries of God”, the color is mother-of-pearl, featuring a turquoise; - “Understanding the 45 Beholder Gods”, the cover is dark brown and depicts a pearl; - “The 45 Divine Ethics of Cohesion”, the cover reveals an amethyst and is purple; - “The 45 Radical Strengths of God”, scarlet and showing a ruby; - “The Influence of the 45 Healing Gods”, salmon in color, where a yellow diamond appears; - “The 45 Hidden Gods of Grace”, in which the yellow-green cover shows an emerald; - “The 45 Perfections of the Absolute”, red-russet and showing a fire opal; - “The Might of the 45 Gods of Purity”, dark purple, almost black, showing a quartz; Last in line came the priestess chief, wearing a diadem set with a pearl, her vestments embroidered with stars and flowing lines, the redeemed one, closing the pile under the tome “The 45 Resplendent Twins of the Watchers,” black sparkled with gold, jeweled with a rock crystal. Sensing me in her soul as the daimon that is the Heart of Ra, she offered me the crystal cup of her womb, and the woman of wisdom was delivered onto the world to scribe and make known four books of astrology, and a book of hymns and a book of music, to be named correspondingly: - “The Actionable Book of Electional Astrology”, illustrated with the image of angels singing amidst the divine presence of the raging stars; - “The Interpretative Book of Horary Astrology”, showing a fiery archangel offering justified souls to an altar under the weightless stars; - “The Essential Book of Natal Astrology”, revealing on its cover a watermill fueled by the liquid and golden manna of the stars; - “The Structural Book of Mundane Astrology”, showing an animal soul hunting the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars; - “Hymns to the Primum Mobile,” the cover depicts a skull with an open mouth and a black tongue; - “The Music of the Zodiac,” the image being that of the right side of the brain deposited inside an exposed skull. These books contain the anatomy of my daemon body, and have been written with clear water. Eleven more came up, far from the fertility of their land and ground, piling their books behind me and to my left with the diligence of trained alchemists and gentle mystics: - “The 45 Laws of Consciousness”, is the color of earth, a crowned gnome riding a camel depicted on the cover holds a card of 4 aces; - “The 45 Admirable Creatures”, it is of golden white color, contains the image of a lamp on its surface; - “The 45 Laws of Light that Move the Greatest Wheel”, the white cover shows red, blue and yellow reflections and a lingam has been drawn in it; - “The 45 Valiant Laws of Sanctification”, the cover is gray with pink reflections, holds the image of a shining star; - “The 45 Receptacular Shining Starts”, the azure cover revealing yellow refulgence and the silhouette of a sceptre; - “The 45 Radical Burning Stars”, the red cover shows an image of a black scourge; - “The 45 Kings of Messengers”, golden cover with an amber Rosy Cross; - “The 45 Occult Deities”, in which the olive colored cover has been carved with the figure of a golden girdle; - “The 45 Christs of Perfection”, yellow-brown cover showing a white ceremonial apron; - “The 45 Purities of the Celestials”, citrine color, showing azure sandals; The guide of them all surged last with serpent patterns in his cotton and a belt of woven cord adorned with a leaf. The magician of Adamah libated “The 45 Resplendent Men,” black in color, the cover with a yellow circle and triangle. He closed the final pile of tomes, offered bread and saw me with his very senses as the Throat of God, reaching out to the Divine Man beneath the stone. He received inspiration to teach six medical treatises, namely: - “The Medicine of the Self,” showing a skeleton; - “The Medicine of Will,” showing the muscular system; - “The Medicine of Selflessness,” showing an anatomic map of vital channels; - “The Medicine of Consciousness,” with the depiction of a marriage ceremony; - “The Medicine of Consciousness,” with the depiction of a marriage ceremony; - “The Medicine of Action,” depicting cerebral tissue and nerves; - “The Medicine of Self-Expression,” with depictions of the sensory organs. These illustrate the anatomy of my human involucrum, and have been animated from dust. ## Thoth Evokes Me ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/image-927x1024.png) At this moment of quiet, as the last pilgrim disappears in the clear distance below, the Deity that is the Vehicle and King Messenger of this report projects from me and faces me. I cease to be petrified and speak: “As you have been born from me, so have I announced the 45 and 9 Christs to generate all Christs. I have been all faithful witnesses whose pens wrote upon the gospel; I am Plato, Pythagoras and all who write under the name of Hermes; I am 9 and I am 12 and of me are the 22 000 prophets.” The deity ahead of me answers “You are the form of dialogue, and though you show yourself now as a heterogeneous body of philosophy, magic, theurgy, astrology, theology and alchemy, you are not the Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman, the Gnostic, the Jew, nor the sum of them; not the Persian you are, nor the Stoic, nor the Alexandrian or their sum; Mathematician and astronomer God, you yourself bestowed upon the Egyptians their laws and letters, and you were their advisor, their lawyer and physician, for virtue of being their Scribe, for your writing is magical and your writing is theurgical, as has been forgotten by most. Because no message can exist without your interpretation, you are the Messenger who made the very foundations of Earth and quarters of Heaven, the creator of the World.” I reply, “Indeed, the very world that I create is transmitted from teacher to disciple, and exists as long as its dialectical exercise remains. All tongues are mercurial, all words divine and sacred. But can the Sun be named as such if it shineth not? Can the word transmit wisdom if not pedagogical in will? Can pedagogy exist without gnosis, and may gnosis exist without a certain level of asceticism?” The human deity replies: “It is an illusion, this falsehood of words, and an unbodied fire, for it is said what your burning heart imagines has immediate existence, and what your tongue pronounced must necessarily be eternal.” I reply: “While all priests are of me, am I of all priests?” Simultaneously, we speak: “In truth, we understand all things alike, but for the object of debate to take form, we must discuss it. It is we, the One in All, who direct science.” After silence, I continue: “Do you now understand the nature of pedagogy? It, in itself, is devotion and humility to the Will that creates Being, to the Word that creates World.” The Being replies: “The knowledge of Truth is the experience of Nature.” I: “Let us now descend from Light to Nature and ascend as Pure Fire, All-Subtle, All-Penetrating.” ## Outside Thoth As we descend my perception shifts back to myself, André Consciência, without the plain state of Godhood of Thoth or my own, but it is as if I remember having been Thoth throughout all incarnations, the being of great antiquity who was, too, a man, for everything that exists in the Universe must exist under the stars and from them receive quality. Side Effects: A couple of days of bad sleep, as my intellect felt quite silent and active at the same time. However, I didn’t feel tired. I felt vitalized. I had to retreat from contact with most people, and from work, for the same amount of time, as my mind felt quite focused on absorbing the meanings of the experience. These meanings kept unveiling spontaneously. I saw Pan twice, fleetingly, with what seemed to be my physical eyes. As Pan was the first deity I worked with on Franz Bardon’s “Initiation Into Hermetics” step 10, for the Godhead, it does appear whenever operations of this nature reach great density. --- ## Work with Andre - [ The School of Visionary Hermeticism ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) – 3-semester advanced program led by André Consciência. - [ The School of Visionary Hermeticism – Official Site ](https://theschoolofvisionaryhermeticism.com) - [ Magic and Mystical Introspection (MMI) ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd) - [ Elemental Magic: The Foundation As Taught by the Elementals ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic) - [ Elemental Magic + MMI (Combined Access Plan) ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic) - [ Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition (Levels 1–3) – Bundle ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-3) - [ Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition – Level 1 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-level-1) - [ Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition – Level 2 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-level-2) - [ Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition – Level 3 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-level-3) - [ Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) – Bundle ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism:-levels-1-5) - [ Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 1 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism) - [ Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 2 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-2) - [ Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 3 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-3) - [ Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 4 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-4) - [ Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism – Level 5 ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-level-5) - [ Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) + Ceremonial Magic (Levels 1–3) – Bundle ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-and-neo-shamanism) - [ Introduction to Magic (Free Course) ](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/introduction-to-magic) --- --- # Dragon Rouge: An Interview with Founder Dr Thomas Karlsson Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/dragon-rouge-an-interview-with-founder-dr-thomas-karlsson/ ## Introduction In this interview Dr Thomas Karlsson the founder of the Dragon Rouge answers questions about the order and provides clarity as to what the order actually believes in and what it practices. Founded in 1989, Dragon Rouge is one of the longest running Left-Hand Path Orders in the world. Huge thanks to Thomas Karlsson PhD for spending the time in answering our questions. Learn more about Dr Thomas Karlsson, the founder of the Dragon Rouge [here](https://thedragonrouge.com/). You can also read about the Dragon Rouge philosophy [here](https://thedragonrouge.com/philosophy/). *Featured image credit: [Dragon Rouge 2019 Year of Preparation. - Dragon Rouge](https://thedragonrouge.com/dragon-rouge-2019-year-of-preparation/)* --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Screenshot-2025-11-05-185017-1024x442.png) ## Interview with Dr Thomas Karlsson **PAA: Founding Vision: Dragon Rouge was founded in 1989 by a small group of magicians,with a “Faustian thirst to explore the nightside of existence” and an ethos of chivalry guiding its inception. How did these founding principles shape the Order’s early identityand philosophy? In what ways do the ideas of chivalric honor and Faustian drive continue to influence Dragon Rouge’s approach to the Left-Hand Path today?** The idea of a truth-seeking knighthood on a lifelong quest for knowledge and power was with us from the beginning. Our occult studies had the operas of Richard Wagner as their soundtrack. We wanted to set the level of ambition high and strive for true camaraderie and a striving beyond the theatrical and over-individualistic that characterized much of the Left-Hand Path. Our attitude was that truth and power require the deepest dedication and are a lifelong process. Life is a struggle and one can only be successful if one cooperates with others. We also wanted to turn away from the traits of escapism that are found in occultism. True occultism is demanding and not a comfortable escape from reality. That is why occultism is not suitable for everyone, but must take place within the framework of a serious initiatory Order. The author H.P. Lovecraft put it well with the words: " 'We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.' For those who hear Lilith's whispers, however, it is a call to seek the black seas of infinity. For us, occultism is something that requires action. Therefore, temple building has been a central theme for Dragon Rouge. It is both an inner and an outer temple building. Dragon Rouge came into being after what we call the UR prophecy that I received in Marrakech, Morocco in 1989. It is described in my book The Mephistophelian Trilogy, published by Editorial Manus Sinistra. An older man came to me and said the cryptic words: "Old temples will fall. New temples will be built. Temples to the Red Dragon". I did not get an explanation then and there what he meant and was very confused, but I took these words with me to Sweden and founded Dragon Rouge together with a number of like-minded people. The Faustian tradition teaches us that knowledge has a price and we must be prepared to pay it in the form of devotion, time and loyalty. It also teaches us that, like Faust, we must turn to the dark forces to achieve enlightenment. > According to Dragon Rouge, there are powers, intelligences, and realities infinitely more powerful than what humans can comprehend. > > Thomas Karlsson **PAA: Mythic Draconian Tradition: The Order describes the Draconian Tradition as “universalistic,” claiming roots in myths worldwide where “the forces of darkness give humanity access to illumination.” Could you elaborate on this concept? What does it mean in practice that the Dragon is seen as an objective reality “beyond good and evil,” and how does this mythic outlook inform Dragon Rouge’s core philosophy and purpose?** Dragon Rouge is based on the premise that there are 1) objective truths, 2) that we only have limited knowledge of. Occultism became increasingly relativized with various systems during the 20th century and even dark esotericism advocated ideas such as "my truth is not your truth" and that we should search within ourselves for our personal truth. This leads to a limitation of truth-seeking and our personal quest. According to Dragon Rouge, there are powers, intelligences, and realities infinitely more powerful than what humans can comprehend. We do not deny of course that there are cultural and personal interpretations of the truths, but instead of being called Temple of X or Church of X with some culturally marked orientation such as Old Norse, Judeo-Christian, Ancient Egyptian or Indian, our focus has been the underlying archaic principles that are the same in all times and cultures. Hence our Order has the name of a principle that is universal. The dragon as a figure exists in all times and cultures, but is then strongly influenced by cultural interpretations. To generalize, the Dragon is often seen as evil in the West and good in the East. The true power referred to as the Dragon is beyond concepts such as evil and good. Some people have claimed that The Draconian Path is too eclectic and that we should focus on one historical tradition, for example the Nordic. But I would claim we are non-eclectic and rather perennialists, with the premise that Truth is beyond any geographic or historic contexts. Our academic and theoretical basis for this can be found in thinkers like Carl Gustaf Jung (1875 - 1961) and especially Mircea Eliade (1907 - 1986,), but also to some extent René Guénon (1886–1951), Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998), Titus Burckhardt 1908–1984) and others. The Truth is The Power far beyond humans. We are, in the eyes of Intelligences in the 11-dimensions, still primitive, although they gave us the fire, utensils, the writing language, and the knowledge to build high cultures with temples from some of these intelligences. But since 2012 they are here again, for some time. And we must learn and develop now! Carl Gustaf Jung showed how we are both individuals, family, tribes, nations, humans and Life Force/General Energy (The Dragon's Breath). Our mission is to work in accordance to old promises and pacts made by Man and these Intelligences/Fallen Angels, that have given us access to hidden dimensions, from the Garden of Eden and the Fruits of Knowledge to the UR-prophecy of Dragon Rouge. Our mission is to open up the gates to the hidden dimension to those who are ready, and this is beyond the normal concepts of Mankind. That is why Science is something we see as the foremost ally to Dark Esotericism. It brings us closer to the nectar of the Fruits Knowledge and the Fruits of Life, and makes us divine, as The Serpent promised in Genesis 3:5. > The problem with the idea of a middle path is that it doesn’t generate power. It becomes a lukewarm middle path and a vague non-choice for people who can’t make up their minds. > > Thomas Karlsson **PAA: Left-Hand Path Defined: Dragon Rouge openly identifies as a Left-Hand Path order, a path historically associated with “dark and sinister archetypes”, forbidden knowledge, and antinomian (law-breaking) spirituality. How does Dragon Rouge define the Left-Hand Path in its own context? In what ways do you dispel common misconceptions about working with “dark” or adversarial symbolism, and instead frame it as a route to wisdom and empowerment?** One of the definitions of the Left-Hand Path is antinomianism, which means "against the law", from the Ancient Greek words "anti" (ἀντί), meaning "against," and "nomos" (νόμος), meaning "law". In a theological context, it refers to the belief that God's grace, or Lucifer's revolt, frees believers from the necessity of obeying religious law. Antinomianism has many meanings. In mysticism both in the East and the West, it has denoted an attitude that the divine is beyond all categories, rites, and rules, and can only be experienced through direct contact with the divine. The Aghori cult and the Indian Vamachara are examples of Left-Hand Path and antinomianism, but it has also been present in the Christian mystical tradition, not least among Gnostics, but also later in e.g. Antinomy, a sect of this sort that arose in Germany in 1535, and in the circle around the Russian mystic Grigori Yefimovitch Rasputin (1869 - 1916). Rasputin was part of the antinomianist Khlysty sect which believed that a person can only achieve God's grace by first sinning so deeply that one reaches his bottom. The method was eroto-mysticism and the doctrine that one was nearest God when feeling “holy passionlessness”. Antinomianism will always be accused of being a form of criminal activity. Either as accusation and smearing, or because there are sometimes also connections. An example is the Sala Gang and The Magic Circle in Sweden in the early 20th century. They mixed a theosophically inspired Left-Hand Path and serious crimes. This is well described in the book Manhunter, The Story of the Swedish Occultist and Serial Killer Thurneman (2020) by the author Wulvaricht. The Left-Hand Path is a method and not a goal. It is defined antinomian, but also apotheosis, self-deification. The goal is to penetrate the 11 hidden dimensions and meet the Great Dragon, the seven-headed Intelligence beyond the conceivable and graspable. The Left-Hand Path is a science of what lies beyond the boundaries of Life. Therefore, Death and Darkness are central motifs within the Left-Hand Path. The path teaches us to face the fear of Nothingness and fill it with power and knowledge. It is a frightening path at times but also a path of bliss and ecstasy. A topic that comes up regularly is the "middle path". The problem with the idea of a middle path is that it doesn’t generate power. It becomes a lukewarm middle path and a vague non-choice for people who can’t make up their minds. All serious paths strive for both balance and dynamism. I’ve met so many who use the middle path as a kind of compromise solution and an excuse to avoid truly awe-inspiring spiritual work To walk the Left-Hand Path requires maintaining high morals and living by chivalric virtues, otherwise it can destroy the practitioner. It is a path that breaks boundaries and leads to extremes of wisdom and madness, destruction and creation. The Qliphotic Initiations are a way to explore the great Unknown in a structured way with the guidance of those who have gone before you. **PAA: Initiatory Curriculum Structure: Dragon Rouge’s initiatory system is structured around the Qliphothic “Tree of Death,” with the first degrees named Lilith, Gamaliel, and Samael – each roughly corresponding to a year of training and a specific focus. Could you outline how the curriculum is organized across these stages? For instance, what kinds of practices or experiences are emphasized in the Lilith stage (earthly and dream work), versus Gamaliel (astral and lunar magic) and Samael (confrontational inner alchemy) as an initiate progresses?** An open question within Dragon Rouge is whether the dark adept is predestined to be on the dark path and the Left-Hand Path. It has been speculated that we carry a calling within us that at specific times in life is heeded by the powers that be. We call it Lilith's whispers, when we hear a call from the Great Unknown, what in Dante's Divina Commedia is described as the dark forest where the sun's rays do not reach. If we choose to find our way through the forest towards the entrance to Inferno, Lilith's cave, we have begun a lifelong search for truth, wisdom, beauty and power. When we have made a decision to begin this journey after having broadened ourselves with foundational knowledge, we are ready to enter Lilith's cave. There is a strong eroto-mysticism in the Qliphotic Initiation. Lilith's cave is also her vagina, which is both a tomb and a womb. We die and are reborn during this process, as in the original Egyptian alchemy, al-Khemeia, where the god Khepera descends into the underworld to die and be reborn as his own creation. Alchemy originally means "the dark art" or "the work of the black stone". The goal of the initiations is to refine the soul step by step through trials and resistance, and through the pressure of the eons to transform carbon in its loose form of graphite, into its hardest form as diamond. A process that the alchemists also described as how the Self is refined from lead to gold. Benoit Mandelbrot's theories of the existence of 11 dimensions are constantly present in the Dragon Rouge initiation system. Our system is not a path of self-development and self-improvement that we encounter in a majority of Western occult orders. We strive for a total experience of existence, beyond the four dimensions of time and space that man usually finds himself in. The first four initiations are a preparation for the first great Initiation in the Black Sun, Thagirion degree 5, which is beyond time and space. This sphere is called the Hall of the 1001 Gates, NOXXON, the Land beyond the Horizon and the Eternal Atlantis. In Gamaliel degree 2, the adept explores dreams and the astral worlds. Extensive work with our Shadow takes place here. We are here in the Lilith womb, also called the Lilith lake, inside the first great cave. We learn directly from Lilith and her demons, as well as from each other and intensive study and practical magical work. We work with traditional tools of witchcraft, such as invocations, automatic writing, sigils, crystal balls, black mirrors, incense and potions, magical objects, etc. etc. For the first three initiations there is written material, but it is supplemented with lectures for the initiates and circles where experiences and knowledge are shared, as well as degree-specific magical work. **PAA: Creativity, Art and Magic: The Order seems to place value on artistic and creative expression as part of the magical path – for instance, music, visual art, and even fragrances have been mentioned as “vital technologies for crossing the veil and embodying magical states.” How does Dragon Rouge incorporate art and creativity into its esoteric work? Are there examples of Order-sponsored music, artwork, or creative ritual design that illustrate the synergy between artistic inspiration and occult practice in the Draconian tradition?** Art is absolutely central to Draconian Esotericism. It captures aspects of existence that we would otherwise not be able to perceive. A quote from Friedrich Nietzsche is instructive when it comes to the Left-Hand Path and its antinomianism: "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” The occult is not secrecy for secrecy's sake. Superficial occultism talks about a lot of secrets that are in practice just promotion and nothing substantial. The occult is hidden because we have not yet mastered it. Just as it is difficult for a beginner to understand what it is like to be a piano virtuoso, it is difficult for the uninitiated to perceive the hidden dimensions. Creativity is a result of channeling both the destructive and creative aspects of the Draconian force. Art in its various forms gives us an opportunity to channel knowledge and insight into the hidden, and to operate in dimensions beyond time and space. Practical magic takes place in harmony with Time and its laws. Time, however, has different forms. In ancient Greek philosophy, Kronos and Kairos represent two different concepts of time. Kronos is the chronological and quantitative time that we measure with clocks. It is also the time of the zodiac and planets, the solar and lunar calendar. This time is governed by the god Chronos or Saturn as the Romans called him. It is the karmic time that obeys the law of cause and effect, and the laws of Newtonian physics. It is a time that is governed by the Black Sun which itself is, however, beyond time and space. Kairos, on the other hand, denotes qualitative and a critical time – a moment of decisive opportunity or the right moment for action. It is the state of Satori in Zen, and what has been called Flow by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Or what the French philosopher Henri Berson called Duration (la durée). This Time is first possible to explore and experience through the Fifth and the Sixth dimensions.Therefore, the source of creativity is beyond time and space and radiates from the Black Sun and Thagirion. **PAA: Enduring Legacy: Dragon Rouge is noted as “one of the longest running Left-Hand Path orders in the world.” Having been active for over three decades, how has the Order managed to stay relevant amid changing trends in occultism and spirituality? Are there ways in which the focus or activities of Dragon Rouge have evolved from the early 1990s to the present? We’re curious if the challenges faced or the kind of seekers attracted to the Draconian path have changed in the modern era compared to the Order’s beginnings.** Dragon Rouge is based on structures and patterns that are archaic and therefore not bound to time and space, different cultures and trends. We caught a unique torch when we were founded in 1989. It is something that we will carry with us into the future. During periods, the work may shift, there may be times of ebb and times of flood, but the core is unchangeable. It lies beyond the human. We swear pacts to powers beyond the human and are loyal to them. However, we came at the right time in history. With 2012, a crack opened between the dimensions that correspond to when man received fire from Prometheus, and knowledge from the Serpent in Eden and the Fallen Angels. Some speculate that AI is our new fire. Personally, I doubt it. The knowledge that man has the opportunity to receive is beyond the material and the technological. At the same time, I believe that a combination of biology, technology and spirituality can be our great Faustian challenge. It is only when biology is present that some form of intelligence manifests life force, what is called vril, odic force and kundalini. That was what the Fallen Angels sought in humans. They sought flesh while humans sought spirit. Through their union the Dark Way was born. My father taught me a lot that I have benefited from in my esoteric studies. He was an intellectual atheist and worked as Head of IBM Scandinavia's research and education department. Thirty years before Smartphones, he told me that such phones would come in the future. He told me about quantum computers already in the 80s, so it is probably no coincidence that IBM developed the first quantum computer. He introduced me to quantum physics and chaos mathematics. When I turned 15 he gave me The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra as a birthday gift. Quantum biology and the qubits of quantum computers open up possibilities for knowledge of dimensions beyond the four we usually find ourselves in. But the torch from the Temple of Atlantis must be preserved and continue to burn for man to have any contact with the forces of the Great Unknown, from the Great Dragon. The inner Order of the Dragon Rouge, the Ordo Draconis, is the protector of the torch. Now and in the future. **PAA: Thank you very much for spending the time and answering the questions in such detail.** --- --- # Dan Brulé of Breath Mastery: The Art & Science of Conscious Breathing Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/dan-brule-of-breath-mastery-the-art-science-of-conscious-breathing/ ## Introduction Many thanks to Dan Brulé of Breathmastery.com for spending the time to answer our questions. I really like the open approach to this subject that Dan provides, you can see from his website and social media that he really wants his students to excel and walk their own path. If you enjoy this interview, then please like and share the post with others who may have an interest in this subject. Also, if you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments at the bottom of the page. We have also included links to Dans work if you would like to learn more. Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview- Personal Journey and Mission- Breath Mastery Philosophy and Principles- Benefits and Applications of Breathwork- Breathwork in Context: Other Methods and Techniques- Breathmastery Programs and Future Vision- Breathwork and Spiritual Growth- Advice for Beginners- Learn More- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! --- ## Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/561910983_1390020749800262_2391404015510761402_n-240x300.jpg) ## Personal Journey and Mission **PAA: Early Inspiration: You’ve been a pioneer in the breathwork field since the 1970s, training hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. How did you first discover the power of breathwork, and what inspired you to dedicate your life to this practice?** **PAA: From Mission to Programs: Breath Mastery “started as a mission” rather than a company. Could you share the story behind this mission? What motivated you to develop it into the training programs and global breathwork movement that exist today?** In Catholic school kindergarten, the pastor visited our class and spoke about the book of Genesis, how “God took the dust of the earth and formed the body of man, and breathed into the nostrils of man the breath of life…” there was something so exciting about that… I couldn't understand why everyone wasn’t excited.. God is breathing into us!? The next breath is God breathing into me? I guess I became too animated.. I only remember the priest pushing on my shoulders trying to get me to sit down in my chair, and the nun tapping me on the head trying to calm me down… A spark was ignited… And I became the kid in the school yard organizing breath hold competitions and playing hyperventilation games to get dizzy until almost passing out! I had several near drowning experiences as a child and growing up, I got the wind knocked out of me more times than I can remember…my first job was as an xray technician and so I was literally taking pictures of people’s lungs everyday… I learned CPR and within a week i had an opportunity to apply it, and resuscitated someone in the intensive care unit of the hospital… to come upon someone who was clinically dead… pupils fixed and dilated… with no pulse… and blow into them and see them blink and wake up, felt like a miracle… I was high for a week! Then I went into the military during the Vietnam era and became a deep sea diver and underwater medical rescue specialist…held navy breath holding records, worked in recompression chambers, mixing gases, monitoring divers’ breathing patterns… my interest in breathing became a passion, an obsession… When I left the military, and since then throughout my life, I have made it my mission and purpose to seek out anyone who knows anything about the breath… and I have published an article or report on breathing every month since June of 1976, and have never missed a single month… so you can say I am a missionary for the breath. It is my passion (pass-I-on) and my profession (profess-I-on)... So far i have traveled to over 75 countries and personally trained over 300 thousand people to discover, explore, develop and master the art and science of breathwork. My book: “Just Breathe, Mastering Breathwork for Success in Life , Love, Business and Beyond” published by Simon & Schuster with a Foreword by Tony Robbins is an international best seller now in 15 languages. ## Breath Mastery Philosophy and Principles **PAA: Integrating Diverse Traditions: Your background spans Breath Therapy, Rebirthing, Prana Yoga, and Qigong breathing. With such a rich blend of influences, what are the core principles of the Breath Mastery approach? In other words, how do you tie all these traditions together into a unique methodology for breathing and healing?** Yes, I have studied every school and style and method of breathwork on the planet and developed my own approach… based on the fundamentals that are found in every style or school… I teach this as a Formula for Transformation, as the three Cornerstones or pillars: 1 Awareness, the consciousness factor, and the message is Wake up! 2. Relaxation, the release factor where the message is Let go! And breathing, the energy factor, where the message is Take Charge! **PAA: Breath Awareness vs. Conscious Breathing: You often distinguish between breath awareness and conscious breathing. Can you explain the difference between these two concepts, and why are both of them important for someone looking to master their breath?** Breath Awareness and Conscious Breathing are the yin and yang aspects of breathwork… active and passive aspects… like two wings that allow us to fly. Breath Awareness is passive, non doing, just being.. The witness…It is about allowing… being breathed… Conscious Breathing is active, It’s about doing… control. It’s a dance… sometimes we need to paddle our canoe if we want to get anywhere in life, and sometimes we need to put the oars in the boat and let life carry us… ## Benefits and Applications of Breathwork **PAA: Scientific and Health Benefits: Modern science is beginning to confirm what breathwork practitioners have long observed. In your experience, how does conscious breathing affect our body and mind? Could you give some examples of the tangible health benefits – physical or mental – that people can achieve through breathwork?** Yes, medical science is confirming what the ancient yogis discovered… that when you play with your breath you affect your chemistry, your nervous system, your heart rate and blood pressure, your immune system, digestive system, endocrine system, cardiovascular system–everything… breath is the link between the body and the mind, between the conscious and subconscious mind…we use it to manage stress and anxiety, to regulate mental and emotional states… that’s why everyone from olympic athletes, first responders, special forces, corporate executives, creative artists and peak performers use it… to find calm in the midst of chaos, to improve cognition, to trigger the flow state, to prepare and to recover… **PAA: Emotional Healing and Trauma Release: Many of us tend to “hold our breath” during stress or store tension in our breathing. You’ve discussed how conscious breathing can help people access and release suppressed emotions or even past traumas. How does breathwork facilitate emotional healing? Are there any memorable transformations you’ve seen where breathing techniques helped someone overcome emotional blocks or trauma?** Emotions are energy… when suppressed the emotions stay locked in the body, blocking energy, and becomes toxic to the body, causing illness and disease and injuries,… breathwork frees up this energy and releases it, restoring balance and clarity and healthy function… I’ve seen people clear major issues and lifelong patterns… everything from back pain and asthma, headaches, addictions, pain, phobias, depression… you name it! The list of issues and challenges and conditions that have been cleared with breathwork is too long to put here!: **PAA: Peak Performance and Focus: You have worked with Olympic athletes, elite warriors, and even personal development leaders like Tony Robbins. What role does breathwork play in enhancing performance and concentration for such high achievers? For example, you’ve noted that learning to “relax into intensity” is a key advantage of trained breathers. How do conscious breathing techniques help people manage stress, sustain energy, or gain a mental edge in high-pressure situations?** Breath control is self control… it is arousal control, it is mental and emotional state management.. It helps us to consciously respond rather than automatically react…it keeps us in the present moment… it awakens body intelligence and heart intelligence… it triggers the flow state and puts us in the “zone” … it enhances intuition, and deepens our connection to ourselves, each other, life and the world… it increases situational awareness… this gives us a great advantage > I encourage my students to master the fundamentals and to explore many methods and to be open and creative > > Dan Brulé ## Breathwork in Context: Other Methods and Techniques **PAA: Comparisons to Other Breathwork Schools: Breathwork has exploded in popularity with methods like Holotropic Breathwork and the Wim Hof Method becoming well-known. As someone who was among the first certified Rebirthers, how does your Breath Mastery approach compare to these other modalities? What do you share in common with techniques like Wim Hof’s or Holotropic breathing, and what would you say sets Breath Mastery apart from the rest?** I don’t adhere to any single rigid dogma or system or technique or method… I don’t believe in the one size fits all or the cookie stamp approach. I encourage my students to master the fundamentals and to explore many methods and to be open and creative **PAA: Relation to Traditional Practices: Breathing practices have been part of ancient yoga and martial arts for centuries, and you yourself are a master of Prana Yoga and Qigong breathing. In what ways does Breath Mastery build upon or differ from these traditional pranayama or meditative breathing techniques? Do you incorporate elements of these ancient practices in your teaching, or do you approach things differently for a modern audience?** The modern breathwork movement is like a spontaneous reawakening of ancient traditions…I try to meet people where they are at, and to frame the principles in language they understand… it is easily understood in terms of buddhist principles or christian or jewish or muslim religious beliefs…and for scientifically minded people, there is plenty of unarguable studies to point to… and now with all the wearable technologies, we can track in real time the actual changes and measurable benefits of the practice.. Plus nothing convinces better than actual felt experience. > We need to trust ourselves… when you find an exercise or technique that you like and feels comfortable, pleasurable, interesting, and if it works for you, use it. > > Dan Brulé **PAA: Variety of Techniques: There are many styles of breathwork – circular connected breathing, box breathing, yogic breathing, and more. You’ve mentioned that exploring different styles of breathing expands one’s experience, whereas sticking to just one style can limit your growth. How important is it for people to experiment with various breathing techniques? Do you encourage your students to find a personal blend of methods, and how do you guide them in discovering which breathing practices work best for their goals?** We need to trust ourselves… when you find an exercise or technique that you like and feels comfortable, pleasurable, interesting, and if it works for you, use it. But I also suggest you move in the direction of challenge… get equally comfortable with a wide range of techniques and exercises… explore, experiment, invent, ## Breathmastery Programs and Future Vision **PAA: Training Programs and Courses: Breathmastery offers intensive programs like the one-year Breathwork Practitioner Certification, as well as workshops and events worldwide. What can participants expect from your training programs? For instance, how do you balance the scientific education with experiential practice in these courses, and what kind of personal transformation do you aim to deliver by the end of a program?** Here are some areas of life and professions where the breath is a focal point for mastery: Anger Management Attention Training Childbirth Corporate Mindfulness Training Fitness Trainers Hypnotherapists Holistic Healers Meditation Military Training Martial Artists Olympic Athletes Peak Performers Personal Development Public Speaking Professional Athletes Situational Coaching Spiritual Development. Here are some things you can expect from breathwork: A massive release of stress Ability to manifest faster and more efficiently A new sense of clarity and deep knowing Expansion of consciousness and awareness (ability to see the bigger picture) New insights, revelations, and epiphanies (sometimes very mystical) Awakening to their higher purpose and mission A deeper connection to their higher-self and Source Overwhelming feelings of joy and bliss Deep relaxation and inner peace Feeling of oneness with the Universe and humanity Ability to quiet the monkey mind, a.k.a. “The Critic” Feeling of deep love for self and others never felt before The release of toxins and negativity from their energy field Profound healing from old wounds, trauma, and grief. Release of old emotions and negative patterns Transcendence of self (being reborn)… **PAA: Global Breathwork Movement: You are the leader of a worldwide Spiritual Breathing movement, and you’ve observed several “waves” of public interest in breathwork since the 1970s. How has the breathwork community grown and changed over the years? Would you say the current surge in interest is different from the earlier waves you’ve seen, and what do you think is driving so many people today to “wake up” to the power of breath?** Yes, i have seen interest in breathwork take the form of waves… often periods of great interest followed by luls… Covid created a surge of interest… I see change as a common denominator. People are drawn to breathwork when they are about to go thru a change to prepare for it or trigger it, and they turn to it when they find themselves in the middle of change–trying to navigate it, and also when they are recovering from change, to integrate it… whether personal or social, emotional, psychological, financial, relational…changes that come with phases and stages of life, in direction, vocation, etc. **PAA: Looking Ahead: As a long-time pioneer in this field, what are your hopes or plans for the future of Breath Mastery and the breathwork movement in general? Where do you see breathwork heading in the next few years, and what legacy do you hope to create through your work?** I see it becoming more and more mainstream… taught in schools, prescribed by physicians, recognized as vital and necessary and as important as eating, sleeping nutrition, exercise, brushing your teeth… it’s already happening more and more.. ## Breathwork and Spiritual Growth **PAA: Breath and Consciousness: The word “spirit” is literally part of the word “respiration,” and many traditions view breath as a bridge to the spirit or a higher state of consciousness. In your view, how does breathwork contribute to spiritual growth or self-awareness? Have you witnessed people achieve profound insights, altered states, or a deeper connection to themselves through the breathing practices you teach?** Breathing is naturally a spiritual practice…I found God in the breath and have witnessed countless people have profound spiritual experiences and awakenings because of breathwork… it is more the rule than the exception. It’s not an accident that the lungs are wrapped around the heart… and the heart is the essence of all genuine spiritual paths and practices… the breath literally connects us–it’s not just a pretty spiritual idea.., breathwork gives people a biological experience of God, of divine energy… not just an intellectual or philosophical experience, but a direct and living and unarguable felt experience. ## Advice for Beginners **PAA: Getting Started: For someone reading this who is intrigued by breathwork but not sure where to begin, what practices would you recommend? Are there any simple breathing exercises – even something as straightforward as a mindful sigh or conscious yawning – that a beginner can try right now to experience the benefits of conscious breathing? Any tips on how to incorporate breath awareness into daily life for those just starting out?** Begin by watching your breath, become more aware of your breath, paying attention to it, tuning into it… don’t breathe in any special way… just become more conscious of your breathing–make it a meditative practice… how are you breathing when you first wake up in the morning? How do you breathe when stuck in traffic? When someone is praising you? Insulting you? When you are angry or afraid? When you are working on a math problem? Listening to music? Washing dishes? Watching a movie? Having an orgasm? An argument? And start practicing something… simple such as the triangle breath: breath in, breath out, and pause… breathe in, breathe out, and pause… Practice box breathing: inhale, pause, exhale, pause… inhale, pause, exhale, pause… practice coherent breathing: inhale five seconds, exhale five seconds… inhale five, exhale five… do exercises like this for five or ten minutes every day. When you look at a sunset, don’t just look–breathe it in! When you are listening to someone, don’t just listen, breathe in the energy behind the words.. When you feel something, breathe into the feeling. Take a breath before you speak. Give yourself a breath when something or someone touches you or triggers you or upset you. Bring simple breath awareness and conscious breathing into your everyday life in creative and useful ways. **PAA: Thank you very much for sharing with us your approach to breathwork, very much appreciated.** --- ## Learn More Arabian Articles Story: [https://thearabianarticles.com/journey-with-dan-brule/](https://thearabianarticles.com/journey-with-dan-brule/) UAE Article: [https://uaestories.com/dan-brule-the-inspiring-power-of-breathwork/](https://uaestories.com/dan-brule-the-inspiring-power-of-breathwork/) [https://www.mypotenciaeducation.com/mastering-the-breath](https://www.mypotenciaeducation.com/mastering-the-breath) Visit: [breathmastery.com](https://breathmastery.com/) Follow: [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/danbruleofficial/) | [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/DanBruleBreathmastery/) Download: [BREATH TECH APP](https://www.breathtechapp.com/) Read: [JUST BREATHE](https://www.amazon.com/Just-Breathe-Mastering-Breathwork-Business/dp/1501134388) [linkedin.com/in/danbrule](http://linkedin.com/in/danbrule) Festival: [https://breathmastery.com/breathfest](https://breathmastery.com/breathfest) --- --- # Bridging Bardon and the Sedona Method: Emotional Release for the Soul Mirror — by Clint Sabom Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/bridging-bardon-and-the-sedona-method-emotional-release-for-the-soul-mirror-by-clint-sabom/ ## Introduction Table of Contents - Introduction- The Sedona Method- Going Further- The Power of Surrender- The Way of The Cross- TransmissionsThe Three Transformations - Free Course After coaching hundreds of students on the work of 20th century mystic, Franz Bardon, I have noticed a real gap. Many people become very discouraged with the soul-mirror steps because the steps Bardon gives to complete this task don't cover everything - a true statement because they do not. Washing, eucharist, breathing, autosuggestion and volitional acts just aren't enough, especially for things on the dark mirror that are multi-factor, such as complex PTSD. As I reflected on this, I remembered the Sedona Method, a system of emotional release.  I am a Sedona Method graduate, and it has helped me a lot with Bardon work. So I am EXPANDING my practice to be more centered on the Sedona Method and emotional work to help students who are stuck on the soul mirrors EXPAND their tool kit so they can get through the initial steps (1 and 2) and move on to deeper work. But it can work on anyone, essentially, as emotional health is an issue for even advanced mystics or people who are on any part of their journey.  Additionally, I have also worked with others in different disciplines, different walks of life, who suffer daily from unresolved emotional issues. This can be problematic across the board, not merely in spirituality. Many of my clients are really experiencing difficulty on their spiritual path due to these unresolved emotional issues that are part of complexes residing deep in the shadow self. The Sedona Method is the right tool for such people, because no matter their spiritual path, I am dedicated to helping people resolve these issues so they can embrace their native power as human beings and experience more success in all areas of life. ## The Sedona Method All thoughts arise from [emotions. In](http://emotions.in) fact, entire thought patterns can arise from a single emotion. But once we can fully feel the emotion underneath these thought patterns will disappear. Emotional health has even been linked to physical diseases in studies.  So how do we get stuck in emotions? We can suppress them, which is very common. We can be ashamed to even have certain emotions and bury them. Or we may not even know these emotions are there until we fully feel and release other emotional material which is more prevalent.  Another way we can get stuck is expression. To some degree, expression can be healthy with a safe person, but it can also become sort of an addiction where we are expressing the same emotions all of the time.  Or we can self-medicate with alcohol or drugs or any variety of things. We can also project our feelings onto others, thinking they have them, not us. There are other ways, too, but in my experience suppression and expression are the most common. So now what? Well we can release them through a variety of ways. The first is to simply let go. If you grab a light object with your hand, such as a pen, and drop the pen, then you let go of the emotion. In this case, your hand represents your awareness, and the pen, the emotion. But the emotion is not stuck to your hand, just like emotions are not stuck to our awareness. We tend to talk and act as if these emotions are stuck to us. For instance, we say, “I am angry,” rather than "I feel angry,” which is closer to the truth. Of course, to simply let go like this, like you’re dropping a pen, is very difficult. It usually needs a high level of emotional health in most cases.  The second way is welcoming the feeling, and it is my favorite and the most effective with my clients. We welcome the feeling for what it is, like a neighbor moving all his stuff in next door – he’s not going anywhere. So we welcome the feeling fully, accept it, let it be. Then we ask ourselves three questions. “Could I let this go?” “Would I let this go.” “When?” One may need to run through this many times. “Yes,” and “No,” are perfectly acceptable answers. There may be no answer. Just pay attention to any shifts that occur. Accepting an emotion may seem contradictory to releasing it. But it is by acceptance that we truly feel it. It is resistance to emotion that keeps it stuck: acceptance lets it flow. With enough fully feeling an emotion and letting it flow, it moves through us and out of us.  Another way of releasing, which goes along with the idea of flow, is to exaggerate the emotion. For example, we can journal about anxiety. We write: “I feel so anxious, I feel so anxious, my anxiety is uncontrollable,” over and over, so on and so on. Exaggeration gets the emotion unstuck, bringing it to the surface. Another way, which can prove challenging for some, is the idea of polarity. We’ve all had people that we love and hate in our lives. Haven’t we at some point? One can feel all the love and then all the hate, back and forth between the two. Obviously, polarity can be done with any duality. Going back and forth wrestles the emotion out of the stuck space.  ## Going Further So what else? Well, it’s important to know the three main, core, wants we have: the need for control, approval, and security. In a sense, these three needs are the attachments of desire that Buddha taught as the root of suffering.  Each has an attachment side and an aversion side. For example, the need to control feels graspy, hard-edged. And the need to be controlled. Who wants to be controlled? But the aversion to control is the need to be taken care of, the need for someone else to do things for you, dependence and co-dependance. Approval is wanting someone to like you; the aversion is rejection of a person. Security, at its base, is the desire to live. And the aversion of security is the desire to die, again, at their roots. The aversion feels like just wanting to give up, while the attachment often leads to greed, wanting more security through money, homes, jobs, peace. I think all of these wants are healthy at different times: alas, they are the three main wants. But the great paradox here is that releasing them also gives you more peace, through questions I will ask on my [zoom sessions](https://clintsabom.com/).  It usually helps more for another person to ask all the questions mentioned so far in these exercises, rather than asking them to yourself.  The other factor I can talk about is the emotional chart. In brief the emotional chart runs from the bottom to the top as: apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride, courage, acceptance, and peace. Most people get stuck in the bottom three, and each of these emotions in the chart has dozens of words that go with them. Note that this emotional chart is slightly different from the one David Hawkins lists in his book, *Letting Go*. Hawkins, in fact, though he published on a wide array of subjects, was a Sedona Method graduate. This emotional chart has much to it. First, most of us are often ashamed to have the bottom three, and the welcoming exercise mentioned previously can release them. Furthermore, working on the top three (courage, acceptance, peace) can lead to a release of the bottom emotions, in the same way focusing on the positives with gratitude is healthy for anyone. We have already talked about acceptance, and acceptance and surrender to an emotion can release the bottom three. Desire is the first emotion that gets us moving forward, rather than imploding in the bottom three.  There is much [more](https://clintsabom.com/) to this emotional chart and The Sedona Method which will not be covered here.    ## The Power of Surrender To shift subjects a bit, surrender to an emotion is complete acceptance. Acceptance means accepting all that is, accepting all the aspects of one’s life, just the way they are. Acceptance does not mean not to also take action. We are always taking some action if we want to take action. And yet, taking action from a place of surrender usually results in us taking the action better. This is all hard to do, though, because there are usually aspects to all our lives that we don’t like. And yet, many of these aspects are out of our control. This all goes hand and hand with the famous serenity to prayer: Grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.  Of those three, acceptance is both the hardest and the most potent in its power to heal. ## The Way of The Cross There are accounts of Christian mystics and saints who endured great suffering, yet they accepted the suffering as their own sin and offered it to God as a living offering. Thus, they were able to achieve divine union, or theosis, which are akin to the Christian version of enlightenment. Indeed, surrender alone can lead one to enlightenment, if it becomes a permanent habit. And it’s not necessary to believe in God to do it. Yet it should also be noted that one translation of sin is “missing the mark.” It can simply be seen as imperfection in general. However, if the word sin and the word God are too loaded for you, then don’t do them. And if you’re not a Christian, no worries. Surrender can be done without all these by the process of full acceptance and the downward movement from head to feet that surrender usually is. I only mention this as the way of the cross because that is the Christian mystical path that can be used really in any path. You don’t even need to be spiritual at all to use these methods mentioned so far in this post. While The Sedona Method is essentially a spiritual path, it can also work on just a psychological level without spirituality.  ## Transmissions One thing I offer is energetic transmissions. It happened after a client wanted a transmission, and I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. But I decided to give it a try by using the Akasha, as Bardon refers to it. On our zoom call, I said: “What if this doesn’t work?” And the client then said: “Then I would question the spiritual power of the person.” I felt pressure, obviously, But I used my connection with the Akasha and tried. Afterwards he told me it was a powerful transmission, and he felt his third eye opening. So then I started doing it with more people, both on group sessions and individual sessions. It then became my most common type of session. Even higher level Bardon practitioners wanted transmission sessions. Many felt colors and images; many went into a state of deep peace; and some even had physical illnesses healed. I’d say I have about a 95% success rate. I then offered remote healings, where the clients didn’t need a zoom call. I sent them energy, and they all felt healed and refreshed. All I needed was the name of the client. I have hypnotized students remotely to go to sleep if they were previously sleeping poorly.  It’s still a bit of a mystery how I am able to do this. I take it purely as a blessing, a gift of Divine Providence. You can reach out to me [here](https://clintsabom.com/) if you want remote healings.  In conclusion, this all has been quite a marvelous journey, and using the Sedona Method as well as Bardon’s books feels like I am sitting on a gold mine. I’m excited to use both, and I hope to [hear from you](https://clintsabom.com/). Many blessings to all! --- --- # Mandy Wilde — The Wilde Medium: Healing, Hekate, and the Wisdom of the Oracles Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/mandy-wilde-the-wilde-medium-healing-hekate-and-the-wisdom-of-the-oracles/ ## Introduction In this interview Mandy Wilde shares with us her approach to Astrology and Mediumship. Huge thanks to Mandy for spending the time to answer our questions. You can find links to her website below and I highly recommend taking a look if this interview attracts your interest in her work #### Mandy Wilde – Certified Psychic Medium, Astrologer & Educator Mandy Wilde is a certified psychic medium, professional astrologer, and goddess divination educator with years of experience helping clients connect with spirit, navigate life transitions, and align with their soul’s purpose. #### Credentials & Training **Spiritual Educator** – Mandy teaches classes and workshops on intuitive development, goddess archetypes, and oracular mediumship, blending ritual, divination, and energy healing **Certified Medium** – Trained and certified at the *Los Angeles School of Spiritual Arts* under master medium Hillary Michaelson. Mandy specializes in intuitive spirit communication, grief healing, and spiritual guidance. **Certified Astrologer** – Studied with renowned astrologer *Dr. Craig Martin* at the *Los Angeles School of Astrology*. Her approach combines traditional astrology with intuitive insight to offer clarity, timing, and soul-aligned direction. --- ## Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/WM-IG-Post-2-819x1024.webp)Mandy Wilde - www.wildemedium.com **PAA: You mention that your connection to the spirit world began in early childhood, with gentle visits from departed loved ones. How did those formative experiences shape your spiritual path and lead you to embrace mediumship? ** When I was little, I would have visits from loved ones who had passed, but it wasn’t something my family understood or accepted. I learned early on to keep it to myself, and that created a lot of anxiety. Carrying something that big without a safe place to talk about it definitely shaped how I saw the world. Over time, though, it taught me compassion. I know what it feels like to hold something sacred inside that others might not understand. That gave me a deep empathy for people and the things they quietly carry. Those early experiences opened my eyes to truths that weren’t being talked about, and that’s what led me to Mediumship. It became my way of helping people feel understood and healed through compassion and connection with spirit. **PAA: Your site promises that every session is “guided by compassion, grounded in integrity, and tailored to your unique journey.” How do these values shape the way you connect with clients, and what practices do you use to create a safe, supportive space during readings? ** For me, holding space for someone is the heart of Mediumship. When people come to me, they’re often carrying something tender. I make it a priority to create a space where they feel safe. I listen closely. I honor what comes through. I meet each person where they are. You see, every reading is unique, because every person’s journey is different. My role is to make sure the client walks away feeling supported. That’s how I live those values in my work. **PAA: You describe your sessions as “spirit-led and heart-centered.” Can you walk us through what a spirit-led mediumship reading looks like for you, and how you balance intuition with empathy during those sessions? ** To me, a spirit-led reading means I let spirit set the pace and direction. I start by grounding myself and opening the channel, allowing whoever needs to come through to take the lead. I trust the intelligence of spirit to bring forward what’s most needed in that moment. I also work closely with my primary goddess, Hekate, who acts as a gatekeeper so I don’t get overwhelmed. That helps me stay clear and focused on the person I’m reading for. My intuition helps me understand what’s being shown, and empathy keeps me connected to how the person is feeling. I make sure what comes through is shared with honesty and care. **PAA: As both an astrologer and medium, you blend traditional astrology with intuitive insight. How do these two practices complement each other in your work, and how do you use astrology to enhance the guidance you give in a mediumship session? ** They’re separate services, but can absolutely overlap. For example, that overlap happens more when I’m doing an astrology reading, because there’s always a sense of Mediumship that comes through. I can’t really turn that off. When I’m doing a Mediumship, life path, or goddess reading, I’m always tuned into the current astrological weather. It helps me understand the timing and energy around what’s coming through, so I can share it in a way that feels grounded and relevant for the person I’m reading for. **PAA: Your Oracular Mediumship course highlights how ancient Greek oracles served as mediums for divine communication. What fascinates you about these ancient oracle traditions, and how do you weave their wisdom into your modern practice and teachings? ** What draws me to the ancient oracles is how they remind us that Mediumship has a place in human history. We all have this ability, but for some, it can feel intimidating or out of reach. I thought teaching through the lens of the ancient oracles would be a really approachable way to explore contemporary Mediumship. Looking at how the ancients worked with oracles gives people a framework that makes it easier to understand and digest. In my course, I take that inspiration and bring it into a modern setting so students can learn to trust how spirit speaks to them, making this path accessible for anyone who’s genuinely interested in learning it for themselves. **PAA: Mediumship readings can offer comfort to those grieving. How have your own experiences with loss or your work with grieving clients shaped your understanding of grief, and how do you help people find clarity and peace when communicating with loved ones in spirit? ** What I’ve learned through both my own losses and sitting with grieving clients is that there’s no set timeframe for grief. It shows up very differently for everyone. I think grief is one of the most complex emotions we carry as humans. Understanding that has shaped how I hold space in readings. I never expect someone to be in a certain “stage” or to process it the way anyone else has. Instead, I meet them exactly where they are. While messages spirit brings through provides comfort, they also bring validation. That validation proves that the bond still exists and that love doesn’t end. As a Medium, I help create a space where people can feel that truth for themselves and in that, find a measure of peace. It has been a joy to share these reflections with Perseus Arcane Academy! My path as a Medium is always evolving, but my intention remains to offer compassion and empowerment to those I work with. For readers who feel called to explore further, you can find my services at [wildemedium.com](http://wildemedium.com/) and [Patreon.com/WIldeMedium](http://patreon.com/WIldeMedium) for my writing, courses and other offerings. I am @wildemedium on all socials. **PAA: Many thanks for your time in answering our questions.** --- --- # Dream-Work, Seals & Initiation: Inside the Esoteric Order of Dagon Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/dream-work-seals-initiation-inside-the-esoteric-order-of-dagon/ ## Introduction This has been an exciting interview to research as it is connected with the writings of Lovecraft, which I have always felt had some mysterious quality to them. So, to discover this order and then research the questions I found myself more and more intrigued. A selection of my questions have very generously been answered by the current Grand Master of the order, if you enjoy this interview then firstly let us know and do check out the links provided to learn more about the order. See the About page [here](https://esotericorderofdagon.net/about.php). See the Manifesto [here](https://esotericorderofdagon.net/MANIFESTO_OF_YOG-SOTHOTHERY.pdf). See the FAQ [here](https://esotericorderofdagon.net/faq.php). See the History [here](https://esotericorderofdagon.net/history.php). See the Socials [here](https://esotericorderofdagon.net/misc.php). --- ## Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/logga.png) **PAA: What is the deeper meaning of *The Shadow over Innsmouth* within your system? ** We can say each story Lovecraft wrote holds some inner meaning, but The Shadow over Innsmouth is one of those where you can’t help but notice it. As perfectly explained and outlined by my predecessor now former G.M. Tornasuk in his majestic work “The Backward Path”, The Shadow over Innsmouth is fundamentally about the descent into the deep astral waters of Abzu to reconnect with the primordial energy we left behind in our previous incarnations — reconnecting with those lost pieces of energy from our ancient and eldritch soul and slowly becoming a hybrid, having one foot in this reality and one in dreams, thus retrieving pieces from our “Monstrous Soul.” In the story we see how those who decided to reunite with the Deep Ones started to turn into hybrids between human and fish. That is a perfect symbolic way to depict our journey and the first piece of the so-called “Backward Path.” For any deeper explanation of what our initiatory path is, I can suggest the book mentioned before; it truly is a wonderful theoretical summa of our initiatory system. **PAA: How do members of the E.O.D. view the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his role?** ** **In the E.O.D. we try to avoid any dogma of sorts, so it is left to the practitioner and initiate to tell about Lovecraft and his writings. But after experimenting a bit, I can say that most members do believe he truly channeled something from Beyond, and I make no exception to this. But he was not the only one — we cherish other authors’ works too. For example, we include Robert W. Chambers’ work in our system as well. Besides the writings, we fully recognize the man’s limits. Lovecraft was a product of his times, perhaps in one of the worst possible ways. We don’t justify his racism, but we try to keep an anthropological mindset when approaching this topic. Still, we hold some respect for the man that we might consider, if not the head of the current, perhaps the one who gave it voice enough to be heard by the rest of us — truly sending out a call that we have heard. **PAA: What is the nature of the gods/entities in your system — literal beings or symbolic energies?** ** **Once again, we don’t hold ourselves to any sort of truth or dogma; it’s left to each initiate to discover what they feel about the entities. For sure most of us see these gods as symbols of certain kinds of energetic flux. I explained this more in depth in my article “Four Portraits of Eldritch Witchcraft” that I wrote years ago in our magazine “Strange Angles.” Others see them as gods. I have to say that most of us try to incorporate each and every view; we truly are trying to experiment with the current as a whole. **PAA: How is dreamwork used in your initiatory system, and what other practices are involved? ** Dream work is one of the main ways we have selected over the years to get in contact with these forces and to work on our initiatory path. We also really value creativity as a form of magick — we encourage each and every member to experiment with all sorts of art. To explain the reason for this, we encourage everything that might get the initiate to jump off the railways of this reality, as the forces of Yog-Sothothery are much more approachable in other realms or using altered states of consciousness. But there’s a disclaimer: we don’t encourage anyone to use any sort of substance or risky behaviour to reach these states. There are two reasons for this: the first is that we care about our members more than about “results,” and the other is that these kinds of activities are shortcuts for something that should be explored more in depth. The long way is the best in our case. **PAA: What ritual tools, symbols, and practices are central to your work (seals, writing, ceremonies, initiation timing)?** In the E.O.D. we make large use of our seal (the eight-pointed star you can find on our website); it is the center of most of our rituals. We also make extensive use of other sigils or seals, including those forged by me and our previous G.M. and included in “Strange Angles.” Those are considered official and canonical E.O.D. seals of the 12 main entities one might work with. We also use a lot of the stories from Lovecraft and other authors in our rituals. There are passages that might be read during a ritual or used as mantras. As for atmosphere, each does their own thing. One thing I can say about our work (and it’s mentioned also in our Manifesto, written by the former G.M.) is that most of our workings are done with the altar pointing at R’lyeh as a symbolic way to make our descent into Abzu each and every time we do a ritual. We have our own original invocations, chants, and tools that each member has to forge for certain rituals. Members are also given a lot of freedom of expression. Some regular practice we have is the celebration of the 23rd of each month as it’s sacred to Mother Hydra. Besides this, dreamwork is incorporated as a daily practice as well as the use of our Temple of Abzu deck and Gematric system. We also have initiatory paths for one to follow with a specific deity/character/symbol from the stories of choice that must be strictly followed for one year in order to be initiated into that specific energetic current. For example, one might work with Shub-Niggurath for one year, keeping a daily practice that is set while talking about it together. This is called Priesthood, as at the end of the year-long working we consider that person as an embodiment of the energy of that god/character/symbol. **PAA: What was the purpose and current status of the “Sovereign Dagonist” degree, and how does membership initiation work? ** The Sovereign Dagonist degree was an external form of initiation. One could have done that before trying to join us to get more chances to become a member, or instead of pursuing actual membership if one felt it was not the time for that, if the Order did not accept them as a member, or if they didn’t feel like joining the Order. As of today that degree is no longer in use. We are aware that it is mentioned in our [Manifesto](https://esotericorderofdagon.net/MANIFESTO_OF_YOG-SOTHOTHERY.pdf), and I’m working on writing a new, updated one. The initiation process begins with a formal request of membership by someone who is interested in our work. After a series of questions, the Grand Master (so me at this point) or another appointed member can decide if it’s a good fit or not. This is followed by preparation for the actual initiation, which takes place on the 23rd of the month. **PAA: How is the degree system structured, what is the pace, and are there time requirements?** ** **As of today the E.O.D. still relies on the older degree system that was put together by some of our former G.M.s. One always begins with the first degree and grows out of it at their own pace. There aren’t any time requirements as the work is difficult — since it includes dreamwork from the earliest stages of membership — and in today’s society many reasons may cause trouble with it: the lack of sleep, legal and illegal drugs one might have used in their life (which also alter one’s mind in a lasting way), and so on. That is also the reason I am trying to build more and more techniques to create a sort of “dreaming while awake” state of consciousness, so that it can help both with working our path and reconnecting with one’s dreams. As weirdness increases weirdness, one can achieve magickal dreaming through changing their mind first while awake and by doing this changing the way their brain is working. **PAA: How do members coordinate work as groups — is there still a lodge system?** ** **As of today we don’t have a lodge system anymore, but this doesn’t mean we don’t work as a group. Each working is usually discussed between members who already know each other, as the old E.O.D. forum has been dismantled and the new one is under construction. Members can decide to work together for our rituals if they are close either geographically or relationally (this happens more with older members), or if they want to work on their own. **PAA: How does the leadership of the current G.M. compare to previous leadership, what is your history, and what are the future plans?** To be honest, I don’t really feel like there’s much difference between my leadership and that of the previous G.M. I got in contact with the E.O.D. after a lifetime of fascination with Lovecraft’s work and magickal practice. I can tie Lovecraft to my early magickal will; it surely was something that changed my person as a whole when I first read some of his stories at the tender age of 11. Becoming Grand Master was surely a surprise; it is something I have done because of my love for the E.O.D. and our work, and even more for what the mythos holds that we haven’t yet discovered. I have plans for the future of the Order that I cannot reveal yet, but in terms of the Order’s growth my main focus is on making people understand what we do, which is often misunderstood or looked at with prejudice. One thing I can say to people out there who might be hearing the “Call of Cthulhu” is to get in contact with me. My email can be found on our website ([esotericorderofdagon.net](https://esotericorderofdagon.net/)), or one can contact me through my social media. Talking is important, sharing experiences is fundamental, and one can never know how their experience might be seen through the eyes of someone else. **PAA: Many thanks for your time in answering our questions.** --- --- # A Call to Practitioners: Share Your Path With Perseus Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/a-call-to-practitioners-share-your-path-with-perseus/ When I founded Perseus Arcane Academy, it was born from a simple observation—that the magical community benefits most when real practitioners share real experience. Not theory dressed up as practice. Not gatekeeping disguised as tradition. But genuine, hard-won knowledge offered freely to those walking the path. We've been fortunate to work with some incredible teachers over the years. People like Sifu Mark Rasmus, Jake Green, Bob from Sixty Skills, Dr. Peter Duchemin, Andre Consciencia, and Denny Sargent—practitioners who don't just talk about the work, they *do* the work. Their courses and writings have helped countless students develop practical skills that actually work. But here's the thing—there are more of you out there. ## We're Looking For Two Types of Contributors ### Guest Blog Posts Perhaps you've spent decades working within a particular tradition. Maybe you've discovered something through your practice that clarified a challenging concept. Or you have a unique perspective on a common obstacle that students face—like the relationship between ritual and internal development, or how to navigate the early stages of evocation without the usual pitfalls. We're interested in posts that reflect genuine experience. Long-form articles, interviews, personal accounts of your journey, technical breakdowns of specific practices—whatever format allows you to communicate what you've learned most effectively. We're not looking for academic theory or rehashed grimoire excerpts. We want to know what actually happened when you did the work. What worked? What didn't? What would you tell someone starting out that you wish someone had told you? ### Course Instructors If you have long-term experience in magic, yoga, the martial arts, or related traditions—particularly if you've been fortunate enough to train directly with teachers who shared complete systems with you—we'd love to explore the possibility of hosting a course with you on Perseus. The platform exists to give skilled practitioners a space to teach without the usual barriers. You bring the knowledge and teaching ability. We handle the technical infrastructure, marketing support, and student community. The focus stays where it should be—on transmitting practical skills that students can actually use. We're particularly interested in teachers who can offer what books alone cannot. Transmissions. Energetic attunements. The nuanced adjustments that only come from direct instruction. The ability to recognize where a student is actually stuck versus where they *think* they're stuck. ## What We Value **Practical Application Over Theory** We're drawn to teachers who emphasize what works in practice. Theory has its place, but only when it serves the development of genuine skill. **Integrity and Authenticity** Trust matters enormously to us. We work with people we respect, who have sincere intentions to help students grow. We don't expect everyone to agree on everything—that's not how real development happens—but we do insist on genuine dedication to the craft. **Diverse Perspectives** Perseus isn't about creating a monolithic approach. We believe the community benefits when different traditions and viewpoints can coexist. Whether you work within the Franz Bardon framework, follow Tantric practices, train in internal martial arts, or have synthesized your own approach from multiple sources—if you have something valuable to share, we want to hear from you. **Accessibility Without Dilution** We aim for the highest level of clarity and accessibility, but not at the expense of depth. The goal is to make profound teachings available to serious students, not to water them down for mass consumption. ## The Perseus Approach We don't gatekeep. We don't control. We're a platform, not a hierarchy. When you write for us or teach through us, you express your path in your own way. We give you the space to be yourself—whether that's through detailed technical instruction, personal narrative, humor, or whatever communication style actually reflects who you are. The teaching personalities we present are authentic expressions, not corporate personas. We've found that when practitioners can speak naturally about their work—sharing both the profound breakthroughs and the mundane challenges, the sacred and the everyday—students connect with the material far more deeply. They see that the people doing this work are human, with strengths and weaknesses, and that makes the path feel more attainable. ## What Happens Next If this resonates with you, reach out. Tell us about your background, what you've trained in, and what you might want to share. For guest posts, give us a sense of the topic you'd like to write about and your angle on it. We're not looking for formal proposals—just a clear indication that you have something genuine to contribute. For potential course instructors, let us know what system or skills you'd want to teach, your background in it, and what kind of course format you envision. We can discuss the details from there. The magical arts benefit when knowledge moves freely between those who have it and those who need it. If you're someone with real experience and the ability to transmit it, we'd be honored to provide the platform. **Contact:** contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com We look forward to hearing from you. --- --- # Ritual Versus Internal Power in Magical Development Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/ritual-versus-internal-power-in-magical-development/ A very important subject to understand from Bob (SixtySkills), you can see the video on this subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJRnRKSrco ## Ritual vs Internal Power Systems What's your take on the ritual versus internal Power Systems? All right, um, first of all, they're not exclusive of each other. Most ritual systems will have some internal power workor, and most internal Power Systems will have an element of ritual with them. Okay, that's kind of a cop out answer. 60 skills let's be specific about waron all right take something like the Golden Dawn system well you have the middle pillar exercise that's an internal power part of that take something like Tibetan Buddhism highly ritual all these different things well they have trulkhor pranama breath retention with body movement even shinon Buddhism does a lot with the Puja or fire ceremony which is going to generate energy by burning things that's not really an internal power system but that's not purely ritual either. ## Internal Power Systems and Forms Likewise, a lot of internal Power Systems like say TaiJiQuan, Xingyi Quan, Bagua Zhang, traditional martial arts you've got your forms that's a kind of ritual because it's something you repeat over and over again. Okay, but the preponderance of your effort in that is holding posture doing Chiang doing certain kinds of breath work certain kinds of vocalizations that's all internal power work. ## Advantages and Risks of Ritual Work So, okay, ritual versus internal power the advantage with ritual work is it works fast because there's this egregor this intelligent empowered energetically empowered thought form out there that if you know the right gestures the right words to say the right movements to perform I.E the right right ritual and you have the right empow empowerments in many cases from practitioners of the system you can access that stored battery of energy in the aggregor and because it's intelligent it will come into you shut off some of those internal safeties you have share its power with you to a limited degree and allow you to do things that if you had to do purely on your own would be much harder to do if not impossible in many cases. Now, the catch with working with an egregor is as we've mentioned before not only the fact that it modifies your perception of reality and your thought process to be more in tune with it it impacts your free will there's no other way to say that. It's also the issue that because it works by disabling certain safeties in your body it may get your body to produce something or an effect if you will that is potentially damaging you because it's overriding those again those safeties. Also, ritual magic tends to be slow I'll get to this advantage of this involving internal power in a second but it's kind of the wind up in the pitch way of doing magic you have to do all these steps they take a certain amount of time the entity you're involved with also gets a say in whether or not you want to do something so in many cases while ritual magic can be very powerful it's often times not something flexible and frequently not something you can do on demand. ## Disadvantages of Internal Power Systems So those are the advantages and disadvantages of ritual magic now when it comes to internal Power Systems the big disadvantage is the time you need to spend cultivating that ability takes a lot of time a lot of practice because you're having to build something inside of yourself to do something and you're not getting any help from outside sources. So just the same way you gradually improve your run times in say the kilometer or the mile you're going to have to go through a lot of pain you're going to have to get over self-doubt you're going to have to defeat your internal restrictions on your own and that takes time that's the primary disadvantage to an internal power system. Other disadvantage toed internal power system is there's nobody there to tell you what to do it's a lot like when you're looking working with letter magic many cases when you're dealing with combinations of letters you have to figure out what the effects being generated are because there's no entity telling you what it what it's going to do you have to figure it on your own. ## Advantages of Internal Power Systems Now advantages one even though running a lot of Fire energy can make you manic or and a lot of water energy depressed for the most part internal power work doesn't impact your free will a whole lot for the most part it'll part it'll make you more animated and that can be a little hard to deal with depending upon your age and personal choices in life the I am a blazing Greek god while standing on top of a rooftop is something people have done from time to time before jumping into the pool blow. But ultimately internal power methods don't impact your free will a whole lot even if they do impact your decision-making through Mantic behavior and like. Okay, also internal Power Systems are generally something you can do as you need to it's very easy to do them what we English we call on the fly or spontaneously because you don't need to go through this elaborate ritual to make the effect happen so that's the advantage to an internal power system. ## Blended Approaches Keeping in mind that most systems out there are a combination of the two highly ritualized systems like say I don't know Tibetan Buddhism have trulkhor but on the flip side things like taichi have their long form and that's very much a rhythmic kind of dance I.E ritual so those are the advantages and disadvantages of ritual versus internal Power Systems keeping in mind there are very few examples of something that is purely one or purely the other. --- --- # Exploring the Path: An Interview with Ethan Indigo Smith Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/exploring-the-path-an-interview-with-ethan-indigo-smith/ ## Introduction Welcome to this interview with Ethan Indigo Smith, author, teacher and practitioner. You can read all about him [here](https://ethanindigosmith.weebly.com/about.html). He has generously answered some questions for us. View his website [here](https://ethanindigosmith.weebly.com/). His extended bio is [here](https://ethanindigosmith.weebly.com/ethan-indigo-smith-bio.html). You can see a playlist here of answers to our questions, and below we have transcribed these answers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eiDOvC_u0&list=PLLgNlSYKx-ud9eGLOFpeyj9HY47uezqqR --- **PAA: In “The Matrix of Four: The Philosophy of the Duality of Polarity,” you explore individual consciousness. What do you mean by the “duality of polarity,” and how does this concept influence your understanding of spiritual growth?** It's a great question. And he sent me a series of great questions. What do I mean by the philosophy by the duality of polarity? Everything is based on the duality of polarity in its very formation. In in terms of subject matter. Not every object, not every thing necessarily. But it's a fantastic way to approach conceptualization, thus philosophy and certainly the philosophy if you will of spiritual growth. I think the most basic way to understand the duality of polarity may be arithmetic. There is there is addition and subtraction and that is one polarity and there is multiplication and division and that is the secondary polarity. Hence duality of polarity. I break down actually four basic acts as aspects of reality in terms of this duality of polarity. Beginning with arithmetic to kind of set up a foundational way to see that there's validity in the idea and it's not merely subjective. Beginning with arithmetic which is very formulaic to of course mathematics and it's really a primary example of how when we lay a foundation of a duality of polarity it actually enables an exceptional development for all of mathematics is based on arithmetic. And what we are capable of doing with mathematical comprehension is you know kind of almost unc incomparable to arithmetic which is very simple. And yet mathematics leads to engineering leads to invention leads to comprehension of navigation and all sorts of subject matter that and it all begins with arithmetic at its basis. And how does this influence my understanding of spiritual growth? Well, if I were to box myself in, I would say that Ethan is a universalist. I like to find syncric synthesis and ideas that are even if changed by a shade or two over time and place that are shared by different peoples in different times and places. And really four represents this across time and space. I really get into this in the fourth initiation a whole other book about this this concept. But within the matrix of four whether it is the adage of the wise monkeys there are four of them not three. Three is often presented in this adage, but also three is very often presented with an unsaid fourth part as in the adage of the wise monkeys. Each of these monkeys can signify a way to pursue development and signifies a way that hinders our development. We can also see this same exoteric and esoteric ideiation of development of the individual from within and in a kind of externalized way as well as an internal consciousness way. Within the allegory of the cave, there are two main types of prisoners. A a very stark polarity. In fact, there are the chained and the unchained prisoners within the allegory of the cave. And of course, the polarity being chained and unchained. The chained are not yet transfixed by the ideas that are put on the wall. The unchained are completely taken over. They don't even need chains to make them stay in place. The images on the wall are portrayed by the captors. And the fourth most rare component there of this of of within the of the characters within the cave is the freed prisoner and the freed prisoner is of course the most developed. So, of course, Native American conceptuality too is, as equally obsessive with four aspects as I and pertaining to the development of of human consciousness. And so thank you. That was that was a great little discussion. I'll leave some links below if YouTube allows. **PAA: You bring together sacred geometry, meditation, and metaphysics. What is the underlying principle that ties together concepts like points/lines/planes/solids with states of consciousness in your framework?** It's a wonderful question again and the point represents concentration. The line represents connection. The plane represents circulation and the volume or solid represents what I term as unity expansion. If we practice meditation and actually if we pursue different meditation instructions from different origins, you will find that these concepts are taking place either overtly as in terminology of concentration for instance or subtly. There is a process to meditation that can be related to concentration, connection, circulation, unity, expansion. And there are different ways to look at it, different means of it in different types of practices. But you will find this four-fold meditation order of operations in many different systems. In fact, it is sacred geometry without the shapes. It's esoteric sacred geometry internal. I mean more broadly as I began exploring this idea it becomes a means to measure energy and to understand subtle energy. I explore this in my recent article about gamatria and what I call gem energia gamatria of energy. So it's it really is almost an intuitive tool as well as a way to better understand what is unfolding in different meditation practices and in your own meditation practice. Of course, I share practice Taichi and one of the things about Taichi is that it is very important in the learning process and of course practice that we practice on our own. Same thing with meditation. Practice on your own. Learn meditation comprehension so that you can take that with you. But don't depend on external features, processes, noise, instruction at all. The idea with meditation is to go within. So I don't mean to refute the additives and things that you might bring along with you in meditation, but really all you need is your knowledge to go within. Thank you. **PAA: In your essay on the Divine Masculine you used the four dimensions of geometry to illustrate gendered energies (points/lines vs. planes/solids). How does this symbolic mapping help someone understand the interplay of masculine and feminine principles within themselves?** Another another great question. I'm not exactly sure that I've written a article specifically on the divine divine masculine. I definitely recall writing on the divine feminine and a little bit on the divine masculine and on both. In my book, Marijuana and the Prohibition of the Divine Feminine, I explore this gender contrast energies quite a bit as I do within the geometry of energy, how to meditate. So the idea that masculine energy is related to the dimensions geometry dimensions of the point and the line is not necessarily only limited to males of course but the masculine energy it most often is depicted and is the fall back of males and it is therefore masculine energy but women can do these operations as well just like men might encompass the feminine energies as well. Men are very direct. They get right to the point. And it's confounding to women that we will not explain ourselves but just explain the summation. Men are very concentrated. So that's why the point is related to them as well. But when men are going to do a thing they go right at it in a line. And you don't need to get into the anatomical relationships, but of course the circle and the sphere or the volume and solid are very much related to the feminine. The point in the line are very much related to the masculine. Women in in terms of Chinese cosmology, men are much more rigid and less womb or circular like than the than women than the feminine energy. The de the the feminine energies through geometry dimensions are the circle and the sphere or the plane and the solid. Most elegantly typified by the circle and the sphere. And women are really efficient at when they want to do a thing, they don't go right at it. They'll come around and it'll make everything make sense and then the circle's complete and that's how they present things. They are also the tendency is is to be inclusive and and more energetic inclusion. Another circular trait and women are very much intuitive, right? Men can be too but the fallback for women is intuition. Women, hence the term women's intuition. And and this is very much like the idea of unity, consciousness, expansion, this this v the volume of a circular globe type of encompassment of everything all at once. So I hope I hope that makes sense and and this this idea you can see unfold in different you know primary philosophies and constructs. So thanks. **PAA: You write that being emotionally present leads to peaceful stability and that distractions from past and future can destabilize us. What practical advice do you have for someone who finds their mind drifting to worries when they try to meditate?** Well, Buddha puts forth a wonderful analogy that's quite useful. Thoughts are passing by on the stream and it is wonderful to take note of these and let them pass. Another thing Buddha said is the mind is the destroyer of the real. So a lot of our mental stresses, our projections, our pursuits are not necessarily viable. And it's important in meditation or in a quiet mindful setting even if there's not a meditation necessarily but you're just contemplating it is important to let go of assumptions and ideas that are not our own. I would also advise people to align themselves with a powerful idea. And a powerful idea does not pursue things. A powerful idea is things. Just like a God or God does not pursue things, God is or the Dao is. It is not in pursuit. So let let go of pursuits and stresses within your meditation practice. Allow them to come up because the very goal of meditation is to smooth over the mind. So these things that might come up offer opportunity for us to shine our mind from this little grease spot or bump or defection on our shiny perfect sphere. Right? So these you know these concepts that come up that might be not in line with meditation are part of the meditation process. For me a wonderful little thing that helps me focus is the idea of 108. 108 is again in Buddhism a sacred number. It is also quite a mathematical distinct number. And there's there's a lot of interesting concepts that can be revealed through the tool of 108. And it in itself has oneness, nothingness, and the infinite, which this is a powerful trinity. But in terms of meditation concept that can be helpful to stabilize us. I like to have my own little thought process from 108. Be one with the breath. Let zero thoughts coalesce and tap into the infinite. Be one with the breath. Let zero thoughts coalesce. Tap into the infinite. That's a wonderful thought and it really is an effective smoother tool of our perfect sphere that we're con might conceptualize in developing our meditation process. For in Taichi, right, there's all these spherical movements where we're working with an energy ball. Well, in meditation, too. I can't exactly do this in front of the screen right now properly. But we're we're creating a a perfect little little ball here, right? In in terms of imagination there, just threw it at you. So peace. **PAA: You once said, “if you’re not training [in mindfulness], you’re being trained” for mindlessness. What daily habits or “training” would you recommend to help people stay mindful and avoid that passive mindset? ** I don't think it's even passive. It's actually negative, right? Passive is not necessarily actively destructive. People can be very actively destructive. And so I think we can really make a positive change in our life by undertaking different practices depending on where we find there are lacking fruitbearing wisdom. In other words, we can break down our system of being into four parts. I know, forgive me. I love the four. Physical, mental, spiritual, and universal. Let's let's see where we can develop these traits physically. Let's exercise, right? Let's see where we can develop a better mental quality, reading and learning. And let's see how we can develop a a different spiritual practice, breath work, taichi, meditation, and let's find a way to express this in the universe, in the world to not only help ourselves, but help others. There's many different ways to look at how we operate and how we do things. But when we we have to understand that we are either training or being trained. We're either working on ourselves or we're falling into patterns that are not necessarily even passive but detrimental. And we might form a pattern that turns into a trench that we can't even get out of. So if we're not training, we're being trained. If we're not moving forward and up, we're likely moving backwards and down. So we can find a certain m a certain mannerism of steadfastness and steadiness within completing practices of our own or practices that you learn from others. It doesn't matter. But doing our own thing really is provocative to training ourselves rather than being trained by negative influences from outside of ourselves and our own self. Right? We're not necessarily only passive. Sometimes we can be negative. So the more we are steadfast and steady, the more we can be steadfast and not be blown in the wind by other outside influences that might like to steer our mentality and our physicality and so forth into negative terms too. Right? So if you're not training, you're being trained is really an inspirational terminology for holding down our own self despite all the external influences. Peace. Thanks. **PAA: Thank you for your time and generous sharing.** --- --- # The Perfect Place for Magical Practice Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-perfect-place-for-magical-practice/ This is a new upload from SixtySkills, good advice for where you practice. For details of the SixtySkills curriculum [check this post](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-five-part-curriculum/). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ0S_GNAOvE ## An Unexpected Practice Place Sometimes the best practice places aren’t places you would really expect. A lot of people like to practice at Buddhist temples and the like. However, this place just outside Chiang Mai and around the corner from Wong has been abandoned pretty much as long as I’ve known about it—and that’s been a little bit over a decade. The energy in this place is actually very conducive, oddly enough, to physical and spiritual practice. Why that is, it’s kind of hard to say. Likewise, why this place was abandoned in the first place is also hard to say. But if you know where to look, it’s on the nature park right next to the art village outside Chiang Mai. So, you can come here as well. It’s never secured. My friends and I would come out here to practice, usually in the early morning hours. For the most part, people always left us alone. There are occasional offerings made on the site, so you need to be aware of that and respectful of it. People have their beliefs, and as guests in these places, we need to be cognizant of that. ## Why This Place Was Good for Practice Why was this a particularly good practice area? A good way of looking at this is the energy of the place. - It’s in a natural environment, which is always helpful. There’s more of that etheric or life force energy floating around that you can harness for practice. - When you’re talking about a semi-abandoned place like this, the fact that it still exists at all is usually testament to the strength of what’s here. It’s actually a very nice facility. It has long brick pathways, and during dry season it’s a lovely place to have a sit—assuming you’re early enough that you’re not baking. You can look at the age of something, and if it’s still around after a really long time, that’s generally a sign there’s pretty good energy that can be worked with. But that’s not the only thing to pay attention to. Just because energy is strong doesn’t mean it’s conducive to what you’re working with—or even a good idea to be there. Hanging out in certain graveyards where they do sky burial, for example, is not exactly the perfect practice spot. ## Respecting Local Traditions Another thing I always want to mention—particularly as a foreigner visiting these places—is that you need to be aware and respectful of the local traditions. This place doesn’t belong to me, my friends, or my students. On the odd occasion when we came out here and something was going on with the locals, we would just quietly leave. After all, this is their place in their country, and it’s up to them to maintain it. That being said, locals in general don’t tend to use these places for what they were designed for. Contrary to popular belief, the psychic monk crew in most religious organizations is actually quite small. If you become a monk, you are far more likely to be ordained and put to work as an academic, working with lay people, as a carpenter, or even as a CPA. Big organizations need those people much more than they need a magically empowered member of the clergy. This may sound strange because those people were the genesis of all major faiths. Other than communism, all mainstream religions are the product of another person’s esoteric experience. You need to be respectful of that. Even here, if you look carefully at some of these trees, you can see a band tied around them. Obviously, you don’t want to disturb any of that. ## The Importance of Seclusion We’ve covered the basics of what to look for in a practice place. Finally, there’s the issue of seclusion. A lot of what we do at 60 Skills—or in esoteric practice in general—resembles what I call the “autism Olympics.” You look weird doing it, and that tends to be off-putting to most people. If the practices are energetically charged or ritually powerful, that will bother people even more. You need to keep this in mind, because unless you own the place, you’re just borrowing it. ## Running Water and Natural Energy Another thing to look for is running water. We are actually over a river here. Being near a river brings a certain kind of energy, particularly first thing in the morning and first thing in the evening. That kind of environment is perfect for vaulting practice, as many of you know from attending my in-person training camps. We like to practice down by the river at dawn or dusk. The reason is simple: at those times, magical potential is at its greatest because the natural forces of light and dark, positive and negative, are balanced right at the pivot point. That balance makes magic easier to pull off. Ritual magicians, largely limited to the power of their egregores or the ambient energy around them, can’t afford to be picky about where they get their juice. Practicing at dawn and dusk, near water, makes things easier. ## Signs of a Good Practice Spot So you have several factors to consider: seclusion, silence, and the ability to practice without disturbance. In Asia, it’s not considered a big deal if you sit quietly in a temple corner and meditate. But if you’re doing chiang or other unusual practices, that might be different. You’ll also see wildlife around here. This is a good sign that the place is energetically charged. Since this is a game reserve, the animals aren’t afraid of people. Again, all of these are good signs when looking for a practice spot. ## Spirits and Lingering Energies One final reminder: the deities, saints, spirits, and entities associated with temples stick around much longer than you would think. I’ve been at fire temples in eastern Turkey blazing with energy thousands of years later. Likewise, the entities associated with an earth goddess—later co-opted by the Romans and eventually shut down under Islam—were still potent and easy to contact. So be careful what you choose to play with. ## Closing Thoughts Otherwise, as usual, train hard and be well. What’s the fastest way to develop magically? Learn pranayama, letter magic, and proper body training. That’s the fastest way to become a powerful magician in the real world. --- --- # Mogg Morgan on Tantra, Tankhem, and the Left-Hand Path — Founder of Mandrake of Oxford Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/mogg-morgan-on-tantra-tankhem-and-the-left-hand-path-founder-of-mandrake-of-oxford/ ## Introduction In this interview Mogg Morgan author, practitioner and founder of *[Mandrake of Oxford](https://mandrake.uk.net/)*, shares his experience with us, huge thanks to him for spending the time in answering my questions. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments, and if you would like to find out more about Mogg Morgan and his teachings you can start [here](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPG4FDMW#detailBullets_feature_div) with his new Tantra Course just released as a Kindle. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/81p1keDPEiL._SL1500_-189x300.jpg)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPG4FDMW#detailBullets_feature_div)Tantra Course: Module 1  --- ## Interview **PAA: Early magical journey.** I’ve probably talked about that enough. There’s plenty around on that subject — I’ve been around a long time. Mentors and influences: Jan Fries was an early one. I’ve had a fair share of mentors and influences. The main people I’ve learned from are other practitioners, magicians, and friends. I’ve mentioned that in other places, but I think it is important to note: it’s nice to have a very knowledgeable teacher, but I had an ambiguous relationship with one. They had a dark side and it didn’t always end well. But the value of a group or an affiliation is that it puts you in contact with other magicians. Usually, it’s your peer group that you learn the most from. People underestimate that. All these things help, but it’s really other people on the path. The other thing: I’m not going to go into all of these questions in great depth. As you say, it’s just too much. **PAA: How do you blend rigorous scholarship with hands-on practice?** I think magicians tend to hit the books. I go to the Ancient History library in Oxford almost every week for a reading day. Even if I’m not consulting a specific work, it’s quite a good environment. It’s what I call my “house of life.” So yes, I keep on with research. The reason I went into academia all those years ago was to improve my knowledge. So many books I read, I couldn’t make head or tail of them. You need imagination, but also a certain amount of education and study in order to make sense of this material and not get lost in it. So really the reason I did research was because I was already a magician. That’s a common enough path. **PAA: Core practices and evolution.** **Over the years you’ve experimented with a wide range of techniques, from divination to dream interpretation to authentic Egyptian-style horoscopes. How do these practices fit with your day-to-day work as a magician?** Well, they are my day-to-day practice in a way. The books that I did — I keep having to rewrite my material — but my current one, *Egyptian Magick: A Spirited Guide*, has this schema of work you do over the course of a year. That ritual cycle is what holds everything together. I wouldn’t necessarily say I do a practice every single day, or something formally recognised as magical practice. But in a sense we’re completely submerged in the tradition now — it’s just how we live. That involves manifesting our ideas in books, artworks, and rituals that come up in the cycle. We’ve just been doing a whole month devoted to Set. But then, in the cycle, there’s also a special festival day for Ganesha. So it’s the ritual cycle that drives us forward with all these traditions. It’s a mix of the Egyptian ritual cycle — which we had to research and create in order to do — and other influences. I say “we”: me and my partner, and then me and the wider group of people we work with. We have various affinity groups that we’re part of. **PAA: Embracing eastern and western traditions. You say embracing the Left-Hand Path.** At the moment my view of the Left-Hand Path — which has varied — is that it’s almost like a form of synchronicity. Researching, going to libraries, enables the spirits, or whatever you want to call them, to put things your way. Often that happens: a set of ideas I’m thinking about, those books will all be missing. It makes me think someone else is also thinking about this. From looking at this recently: one of the original meanings of *vāma* is usually translated as “left.” But does it literally mean left, or does it have an older meaning connected with “the beautiful,” or the feminine? Maybe the left in occult ideology is associated with the feminine. So the real meaning of Left-Hand Path is not necessarily the transgressive element, though some practices are seen that way. The deeper meaning is connection with the beautiful, the cosmically beautiful — the divine goddess. In tantric tradition it’s the magic of Śakti, the goddess. Viewed this way, much of magical tradition is actually goddess tradition. Obviously that can involve transgressive elements too, because things to do with omen and taboo often are. That’s my approach to the Left-Hand Path. To continue that: Crowley’s system was where I first entered into magic. It’s very ambiguous, but he does have *Liber Astarte*, named after the goddess Astarte. That text is crucial. Crowley is essentially saying magicians need to engage the feminine, the devotional and emotional side. A lot of magical tradition — reflected in Crowley’s own words — looks technocratic, lacking emotional depth. Crowley, deliberately or not, reintroduced the devotional aspect. You see the same in biographies of magicians: spirits tell them to become less solar (analytical/scientific) and more lunar. For example, Yeats got spirit messages. He thought, “I’ll analyse this with word association, numerology, all the usual tools.” The spirits said, “Do that, but don’t forget the lunar perspective.” In a way, that’s the Left-Hand Path: look for the feminine, the spiritual side — Śakti, whether that’s Nuit, Kali, or others. There’s a great deal of overlap between these goddess forms. So moving in that direction is what all these signals point to. **PAA: You talk about east–west tantric synthesis.** This has been very important to me. Early on I went deep into Eastern religions. Crowley’s *Liber ABA* essentially begins with something like kuṇḍalinī-yoga, which comes from tantra. So there’s a synthesis of East and West. My academic theory — not mine alone, others have said this — is that India’s magical tradition, especially folk tantra, and Egypt’s were connected in the ancient world. They were part of a shared international tradition of magic across the Near East, including India. Many techniques overlap. Twenty years ago I wrote a manifesto for where I and our group were going. This became the book *Tankhem* — a word I made up to capture the tantric–Khemetic blend. I published it as a manifesto, then spent twenty years exploring that current, guided into mysteries within it. But I always had a parallel interest in Indian tradition, which I studied in detail. So I found India in Egypt and Egypt in India, oscillating between the two. Recently I was asked to pivot back to tantra, to reveal more of what I’d learned. That led me to *śava sādhana*: meditation on a corpse, or on death. A core tantric ritual, though not well known. We’ve been translating tantric texts, many over a thousand years old. In the texts, the terrifying cremation-ground rite is often described, but the crucial chapter is untranslated, or heavily euphemised. Whether it’s literal or metaphorical, the idea of meditating on a corpse and revivifying it takes you back to Egypt — a common ground. In outward form you see it in mummification; inwardly, there’s an esoteric layer we’ve been working with. The overlap is unavoidable. I shouldn’t assume people know all these concepts, so: tantra brings in many aspects. From the beginning I was speaking about death and meditation upon death — central to tantra in a surprising way. To explain it fully, I’d have to quote and unpack sources, which could easily fill a whole publication. At that time, I actually got sick — nothing fatal if treated, but very unpleasant. A mini-death, really. It made me realise that lingering on one question — death — could answer many others obliquely. *Śava* means corpse; *sādhana* means practice, not just meditation. Western occultists are familiar with “death posture” and similar ideas, but this goes further. ### Śava Sādhana and the tantric current There are accounts of this ritual. June McDaniel has a book largely devoted to this topic and to a distinctive view of tantra. One useful distinction she makes is between folk tantra and what you might call academic or grammatical tantra. Folk tantra is the majority: not necessarily what appears in formal books. My own tradition and tantric order have translated arcane tantric texts, while my guru, Dadaji (Śrī Gurudev Mahendranath, d. 1988), was anti-intellectual — an ordinary person. Think of the kinds of stories you hear from India: practitioners without formal education, speaking vernacular languages (Bengali or Hindi), maybe some Sanskrit. They are ordinary people who stumble into this magical path, practising devotion with various magical methods. You could translate *tantra* as “magic,” though many assume it means “text.” It *does* mean “text,” but that overemphasises textuality and underplays the family-taught folk tradition. The other type of tantra — more familiar in the West, especially through AMOOKOS — includes hymns to Kali and ritual texts with ambiguous language, code words, sequences of sounds, and deep philosophical significance. It can look like intellectuals reclaiming a folk stream. Historically, interesting religious work often begins among folk practitioners — trance, oracles, entheogens — rather than in purely intellectual circles. Both streams are strong; as Western practitioners, we often fit the folk model: self-initiating, “just doing it.” McDaniel interviewed actual practitioners — no certificates, just known involvement in certain practices in Bengal, the heartland of Kali worship. They get a bad press (occult murders, etc.), compounded by a communist government hostile to religion and by other groups. So they keep their heads down, often identifying as atheist or orthodox. Much remained secret until about thirty years ago — especially around Yoginīs and related ritual practice. ### A folk practitioner’s account A practitioner described how they entered the work: personal revelation. Accounts of *śava sādhana* stress that skulls are useful because the soul can inhabit them; the soul can predict the future and help the *sādhu*. People speak of performing the corpse ritual while seated upon the body of a virgin girl who becomes Kali, the body coming to life and speaking. “My grandfather performed it. If you make one mistake, you die or go insane. The *sādhu* in orange who roams the burning ground did it wrongly and went insane; he may recover. I feed the skulls on the altar; they help me. I learned this from my grandfather. When fed, skulls are pacified and become protectors, strong enough to fight off evil souls who would distract or harm the *sādhu*. “When negative spirits, *bhūtas* and priests, try to disturb meditation, the good souls fight the bad and keep the *sādhu* on the path. Helpers are common; the ritual is performed with a woman — the *uttara sādhikā*, a highly skilled female practitioner — who helps if the *sādhu* is distracted. She stands within the protective circle. Sometimes the dead guru is invited in subtle form to watch over and help.” This is not self-invented; it’s a tradition. Thousands of tantric texts exist; most are untranslated; those that are can be hard work. Some are in Hindi; chapters on this rite are often omitted or euphemised. Accounts in folk tales can be clearer than technical scriptures. The would-be adept performs it — how many times, who knows. It sounds ghoulish, but there’s a way to “square the circle” with it: you go to the *śmaśāna*. ### Śmaśāna and the tombs *Śmaśāna* is usually taken as “cremation ground,” where corpses are stored overnight before cremation (and sometimes cremated there). But the original meaning is “megalithic tomb.” India is dotted with such tombs — human burials — identical to those in Europe and possibly the Americas. Cremation hasn’t always been standard; about 1,500 years ago burial in tombs was well known. In the 1950s someone even appealed to sacred texts to be buried, citing precedent. My academic work on Indian star maps and megalithic tombs was pragmatically useful: I needed answers and had to find them. So when texts say “go to the cremation ground,” they may mean: go to a megalithic tomb, a place of burial. For folk practitioners, it can also literally be where corpses are kept. Anthropologists note another route: if there’s a death in a family, a tantric practitioner might quietly pay a fee to perform a ritual with the body — perhaps with prior consent. Decapitation is frequently involved; the body is returned whole, but the head removed during the rite. However taboo, the headless one — the disembodied head — recurs across cultures. ### The ritual itself They have the corpse. The ritual is extremely old and cross-cultural, and may involve an hallucinogenic — terrifying to contemplate. Using yantras and installing deities, the corpse is placed face-down; the initiate is supposed to sit on it — perhaps impractical, so “over” or “near,” at the head end, especially if designs are made on the back. Some texts insist the corpse be male, or an outcaste (*untouchable*) — likely an academic conservatism. In folk practice, the corpse ends up female, because it becomes the manifestation of the goddess Kali. Recall the Left-Hand Path’s association with the feminine. Even in odd old physiologies, left/right tracked female/male. Modern paganism and witchcraft are often devoted to Śakti, especially Kali-like goddesses. Within the tantric Left-Hand Path, the focus is primarily on the goddess. Kali is strongly associated with *śava sādhana*. At the climax, after installing the cosmic goddess into the corpse, it briefly resurrects. Two things happen: you ask for her name — if it’s appropriate, the rite proceeds; if not, it fails. Then you ask for a boon; better to let her determine it. ### Tankhem and the synthesis of traditions To finish: this tradition I call *Tankhem* — a combination of the tantric with the Khemetic. My main focus has been in the Egyptian stream, although technically, in terms of research, I’m well qualified in Sanskrit and the tantric tradition. That’s where I did my academic work — in Āyurvedic medicine and related fields. I spent a long time developing this and am currently publishing, writing up, and ritualising material that I and our group have discovered. Much of it is unique. Not so long ago, I was requested to pivot back to tantric material — not to abandon the Khemetic, but to show the tantric side. My first step back led me to this core tantric myth, because it is not peripheral but central: the mythology of the destruction of the sacrifice. I had forgotten it is essentially a meditation upon death — taking a corpse, revivifying it for a brief moment, receiving gnosis, then letting it pass. In a sense, it takes us straight back to Egypt. What is the quintessential Egyptian myth if not meditation on a corpse? Death, reconstitution, rebirth. The systems interlock. ### Hymn to Kali and the tantric body I don’t want to reveal too much; this is my work and retains an element of privacy, though not secrecy. One aspect is the great ritual hymn to Kali. When you read it, assume key words carry multiple meanings. References to death or corpse can also point to a living person in a magically inactive state — tantric bodies dormant, to be activated. The “tomb” can also mean the bed — a stone bed or table. In that sense, the tantric theatre of operation is also the bedroom. Strange for religious studies, but not strange for these older magical traditions. We made our own version of the hymn — *We the Rap Kali* — available through [AMOOKOS](https://www.facebook.com/groups/214753100471). --- --- # Andre Explains Elemental Magic: The Foundation As Taught by the Elementals Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/andre-explains-elemental-magic-the-foundation-as-taught-by-the-elementals/ ## Introduction In this interview Andre give more in-depth explanations about the Elemental Magic course - this course is quite profound - I think many (initially myself also) are just not aware of how deep this course is, this is not something you can find very easily, an experienced magician willing to guide you every step of the way. I hope you find the answers that Andre provides here enlightening, if you still have questions, please let us know in the comments. I also recommend you look at Andres contributions on the Perseus blog. We are very fortunate to have someone so well versed in these subjects. Here is a link to [all of the posts on the blog](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/?s=Andre+Consciencia) connected to Andre Consciencia. --- **PAA: In your Elemental Magic course, the very first Earth module is called *“Mirrors of the Earth,”* where students are introduced to perceiving the forces of the element and its beings directly through reflective practices. Can you explain how these “mirrors” work in practice, and what kind of contact with the gnomes or Earth intelligences a student should expect to experience at this stage?** These mirrors are, in truth, our earth elemental bodies and organs spread throughout the three planes. At this stage, the student should not expect any contact with the gnomes. He is just starting to learn the tip of the iceberg of what a gnome means, which must be done by necessarily becoming a gnome. They are mirrors because in gaining these new perceptions the practitioner is yet far from becoming a gnome, but he starts to get an imprecise image reflected in him or herself.  **PAA: The *“Gnome Bottle”* section of the Earth curriculum introduces a series of sensory trainings — *Training the Eye, Training the Ear, Training the Hand, Training the Heart,* and finally creating the *“Powder of the Senses.”* Why is this deep sensory cultivation so essential for working with elemental beings, and how does it prepare a magician to actually perceive and interact with gnomes?** Again, a magician can simply evoke a gnome or a planetary being and feel a presence and get goosebumps and the work is done. Sometimes there will be abstract interactions. None of this is very useful, although it is better than nothing, and a start. Contacting the beings should be as real and complete as contacting your neighbour next door. You may, as well, contact the cat outside the door. Cats have a lot in common with humans in their body language and way of processing the world. But there are still a lot of differences. I remember my mother taught animals through violence, it seems like a universal enough language, all nature knows violence. Not my cup of tea. I could always teach them better by perceiving them and talking in their language. That is why Bardon has you study the elementals in the mirror, becoming like them, and only then meeting them. When it comes to planetary beings, there is a similar process in absorbing the planetary lights and consequent transformations. Bardon's approach being better than every other grimoire in this aspect, it could still be said we have a rudimentary methodology, it trusts the magician has become really proficient and attentive to details, so as to elaborate what this becoming is with the precision of a metaphysical biologist. However, for some reason, I do not see these traits in most. I believe a detailed method is required to extract more of this process, and even more so when we may be teaching beginners.  Just yesterday a frog was jumping against my wall. When I talked to it, it thought it was food, and by seeing how he jumped against the wall I thought the frog was stupid. Merging barriers, I realized none of us was right, we were completely lost in translation. And, a gnome is stranger than a frog.  **PAA: Within the same *“Gnome Bottle”* module you also include alchemical phases such as *Lunar fermentation, Lunar calcination,* and producing a *Lunar stone.* How do these alchemical processes connect to Earth elemental beings, and are they meant as symbolic inner transformations, or as literal magical operations carried out in partnership with gnomes?** None of the above. These alchemical transformations are still perceptual, between inner and outer. We are molding our perception piece by piece, softening certain human hard parts and hardening some soft ones to be able to get as close as possible to a gnome's constitution, in terms of elasticity. The mirrors above work the mind's eye on all three planes according to the gnome scale, the lunar operations work the astral senses on all three planes in similar fashion.  **PAA: One advanced practice in the Earth sequence is called *“Working with gnomes on the mental plane.”* How do you guide students to actually meet and communicate with gnomes in this subtle realm, and what kind of knowledge or skills can these Earth beings transmit when approached in this way?** The course advances as the students advance, so these lessons haven't yet been recorded, and I may change my mind about some methodology upon recording (in video courses, I like the inspiration of the moment to guide me). The method is quite simple, you separate your gnome mental faculties from your body, forming a gnome mental body, and descend in the spiral to the bottom of the earth, either it be the crust of the planet, the bottom of a mountain, or your courtyard, depending on what you seek to find and explore. The key, though, requires effort in escalating through the levels and lessons up to this point, for without developing such gnome mental organs, it is all in vain. As for the final part of the question, I never know what to answer. When I contact a being, I expect anything to happen. I suggest you do the same or you will taint the operation.     **PAA: The module *“Materializing the gnomes”* goes a step further, suggesting that practitioners can bring these beings into direct, perceivable presence. Can you describe what “materializing” an elemental really means — is it a physical manifestation, a clairvoyant encounter, or an energetic impression — and what conditions make it possible for a student to achieve it?** It is an energetic impression that causes a clairvoyant encounter, in turn, it manifests on the physical plane with physical effect, either directly or in posterior events. Now, there is a lot to tell on the conditions that must come through by experience. Again, developing the gnome body is essential, not only in terms of perception as we understand it, but because the perception of a gnome itself implies harnessing the forces of what it perceives. This harnessing will be essential. As well, their very perception causes alchemical processes not only in the one perceiving as in the perceived thing, and such alchemical operations are important for the materialization. The Mirror of Uranus is a key not to miss, coupled with the onyx mirror in which by fusing in polarity with the gnome to be materialized, a substance is generated that permeates time and space to reveal purpose, which implies the causing of phenomena.   **PAA: In the *“Kindergarten”* lessons, students are taught to study natural features such as trees, erosion, rocks, wells, and even experiment with *“weather control with trees.”* How does engaging with these aspects of the Earth train the student to sense gnome presences in the environment, and how do the elementals themselves respond to such exercises in the landscape?** This is "gnome gym". We are doing all these things via the gnome organs we developed, and the elements respond by way of opening up and adapting to the transformations that generally occur during a dance, in this case a dance with the practitioner. By studying matter in depth and extension simultaneously we find its source within the subtle planes, and gnome presence should be expected.   **PAA: The curriculum includes a *“Gnome Mirror of Uranus.”* What is the significance of connecting Earth elementals with the planetary force of Uranus, and how does this mirror act as a magical tool for contacting or amplifying the presence of gnomes?** This mirror is yet another organ of perception, not a mirror as generally understood on the physical plane. Do wait until we get to the alchemy levels, these will allow you a series of physical objects, with creativity setting the limit and law the modus operandi. This is yet no such thing as a physical mirror, but it is greater. This mirror of Uranus is the state of grace within the gnome state, in which every phenomena, every movement, reveals the living mindframe of Divine Will. So, we are not exactly connecting earth elementals with the sphere of Uranus, we are seeing how the earth element itself hides, and therefore reveals, Uranus. Also this is inconsequential in contacting and amplifying the presence of gnomes except as one of the stages of gnome materialization, which is a way to say a real materialization comes from Divine Providence directly.  ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/1000008306-768x1024.jpg) **PAA: Another Earth lesson involves *“Consciousness transference to a solid, from a solid to time, and from time to time.”* Can you explain what this practice entails, and how merging consciousness with minerals or the temporal flow reveals the perspective of Earth elemental beings?** That would be "consciousness transference to a solid; consciousness transference from a solid to time; and controlling time from inside a mineral." We as psychological sentient structures are used to perceiving time as something we walk through, and can't see the forest from the trees, yet solids understand time as something that flows around and through them. They are still. And from this stillness you can see the forest, you can see time and transfer your consciousness into it very much like you would transfer your consciousness into the vital fluid. Controlling time from inside a mineral or solid is about moving the flow of time backward or foreword, as you would in space move the vital fluid. You are not going back or forth in time, it is time that is going back and forth in you and around you. If it sounds like a rabbit hole in Wonderland, that is what this course is all about. The life perspective of Earth elemental beings is of merging with space, and space extends through time. The divine principle behind this element is omnipresence. Merging consciousness with minerals and the temporal flow is fundamental.   **PAA: Later in the Earth sequence, students encounter *“Gnome colonies”* and *“Earth Quabbalah.”* How do you teach practitioners to experience gnomes not just as isolated beings but as collective intelligences, and what role does Quabbalistic work play in anchoring the magician’s contact with the Earth elementals?** First, the gnome colonies. There are two ways to illustrate this. Look at the Himalayas, how do the peaks in the mountain range connect in terms of the consciousness flowing inside? How does your street and the one that squares it flow into one another? And how does every grain of tar hold together under your feet? Now look at your hand, what wilder consciousness is living inside its solid state? What is living inside the solid state of each of the pores in your hand? Engage the whole Himalayas deeply enough and you will find a gnome with a consciousness to match in astral substance the mass of the mountain range. Inside it, there is a gnome to match each peak. One for each grain of tar. One for your hand, and many within, for each pore.  Engage directly in the elemental kingdom and you will find those lights that exist on top of gnome heads shining in the dark expanse, these represent their awareness. Enter them, and you will find they are spheres, and these spheres contain whole gnome kingdoms. Read my A Guide to the Elementals and you will find some descriptions of gnome colonies, but also more specifically how different vegetables work, from trees to mushrooms, in terms of the elemental colonies they compose. Now, Quabbalistic work is the work of cosmic language, and everything is anchored in it. It is no surprise we can work with it to contact Earth elementals, but most importantly (because we already know how to contact Earth Elementals at this stage), we can work with it for anything, and learn it in greater depth through gnome quabbalists, the very unique way gnomes use it.  **PAA: Moving to the Water curriculum, undines are introduced as the living beings of the element. What kinds of practices do you teach for invoking or perceiving undines — for example, meditations with natural water, scrying, or ritual invocation — and what qualities of wisdom or transformation do undines bring to the student who encounters them?** Again, before thinking of invoking or perceiving undines, we must think of perceiving as undines. Meditation with natural water will certainly be present, scrying too, but ritual invocation is unlikely, unless an Undine asks me to include it. Undines seem to be indeed a bit more ritualistic than other elementals. But the point in this course is that you don't need ritual for anything. If you reunite the qualities of all sprites, you no longer need the theatricals to intermediate. Undines, most of all, teach a lifesaving ingredient of life, that in itself is the very core of life: surrender. Without it, the magician is but the visionary with a rope around their neck.  **PAA: For the Air element, your course addresses sylphs as conscious beings of thought and movement. How are students instructed to approach and interact with sylphs? Do you emphasize breathwork, sky-gazing, and mental exercises, or do you also include ceremonial methods to call sylphs directly into awareness?** The methodology will be similar from element to element. First, perceive as a sylph and so on, and work as a sylph works. But also, it will be important to transfix between the elements. This whole thing started when I attempted to transform my earth element body, as a gnome directly, to a water element body of an undine, and so on up to the akasha. This is considered impossible by most elementals. To do it (even if I cheated because I am not originally an elemental, just a travesti), meant total initiation and a journey from wise sprite to wise sprite to find the missing aspects.  **PAA:The Fire sequence inevitably involves salamanders, who are known for their intensity and transformative force. What safeguards or preparatory steps do you teach students before attempting contact with salamanders, and what kinds of initiatory challenges or gifts typically arise when a magician successfully connects with them?** First of all, when the practitioner eventually gets there, a long long way has been walked. Just in the earth element stage, for the sake of example, the practitioner has become a fully equipped alchemist. So most of the safeguards are in the robustness acquired. On the other hand, contact with elementals in this course, not being the main objective, happens almost naturally, since like attracts and sees like: the main objective is for the practitioner to be able to operate as an elemental him or herself.   **PAA: Throughout the course, you emphasize that elementals are independent, conscious beings rather than mere forces. How do you train students to approach these intelligences with respect and discernment, and what are the key differences in practice between manipulating an element as energy and communing with an elemental as a living guide?** We must start by addressing the issue of considering these two words, "mere forces", put together, and then comparing it with independent, conscious beings. Hermetically speaking, substance is a state of force, and force also a state of substance. In a way, all is force and all is substance, but this one thing expresses in two ways, from there in four ways, then eight, sixteen, thirty two, and so on. Hinduism explores the sixteen, thirty two, sixty four and further extensions quite well, but hermeticism derives mostly the plus and minus or electric fluid and magnetic fluid, the four elements, and then the two polarities of each element. So, if everything is force, "mere" is misplaced. Where there is force there is pattern generation, and pattern is also force, and this force is called consciousness, in which the force of consciousness is independence, force within force. It is another way to say all forces are conscious and independent. To consider otherwise is to accept firsthand a materialistic philosophy that exists in its own extreme, in which only quantity is real, and there is the quantity of force, the quantity of consciousness, and they, in an impossible paradox, touch not, wherefore I affirm the quality of force is consciousness, and the quantity of consciousness is force.  That being said, in this course, we discern the beings by way of becoming equal, we respect them because we truly see them. Is it possible for there to still be abuse? I think so. It is enough to look at my country, where the celtiberians and lusitanians were so abused by the Romans and Christians that very much everything disappeared except the megalithic temples, that they also had to cover with chapels and churches, in order to baffle. The people that lived here were in deep alliance with the sprites, and sprites being made of the devil, spitting on the floor, making the sign of the cross, and everything everyone did a hundred times in one day was believed to exorcise them. Are the sprites still here? Oh yes, pretty much everywhere. It was the people that went blind to them, victims of their christian witchcraft, spells and superstition. That is, it is not so easy to abuse an elemental, you will likely end up just abusing yourself.  Now, the last portion of the question is interesting because it goes back to the supposed dichotomy between force and consciousness. Truth is when we manipulate the elemental fluids, these fluids bear elemental intelligences. When we commune with an elemental as a living guide, this elemental inevitably bears elemental force. The difference is when we are simply moving the fluids we are not so aware of the intelligences. But if you become so aware of them, you will fair much better.  **PAA: A challenge many practitioners face is distinguishing real contact with an elemental from imagination or projection. What criteria or “signs” do you teach for recognizing the authentic presence of a gnome, undine, sylph, or salamander, as opposed to a product of one’s own mind?** I have been asked this question virtually in every interview I ever gave on occult topics, and by most students as well. I have always answered it differently but of the same mind. I enjoy answering it because there seems to be a lot of necessity for such an answer, and since I am the one being asked, I suppose my answer could now and then quench a thirsty person. Before getting practical I must first and foremost consider this question a philosophical one, or rather one that chooses the premise of a certain philosophy over all others. The matter is not so different than the one addressed when we came to force and consciousness. The philosophy implied is one in which reality and imagination are opposed. The thing is so appalling to all my senses and all my reason that I confess some intolerance, and thus confessed impotence, towards it. WIthout imagination there would absolutely be no consciousness of reality, in any of the three kingdoms, I must boldly put out. We can conjecture that without any reality to draw on, imagination would become vacancy of mind, but that is false, since this vacancy is in itself a reality, the reality imagined by a mind without further objects. If we consider the word projection instead of imagination, it might appear we are in more sound hands. However, again hermetically speaking, there comes another philosophical problem, in which I am reminded of Aleister Crowley's passage "Man is a microcosm: that is, an image (concentrated around the point of consciousness) of the macrocosm, or Universe. This Theorem is guaranteed by the hylo-idealistic demonstration that the perceptible Universe is an extension, or phantasm, of the nervous system. It follows that all phenomena, internal and external, may be classified for the purpose of discussing their observed relations, in any manner which experience may show to be the most convenient. (Examples: the elaborate classifications of science, chemical, physical, etc., etc. There is no essential truth in any of these aids to thinking: convenience is the sole measure.)" So, in a way, we can only be conscious of our own consciousness, and however, it follows, by Newton's principles, that something external must be the cause of its motion, even if by means of projection. But if we return to Hermeticism, the Corpus Hermeticum tells us “He who knows himself goes into the All, and having once embraced the All, he becomes one with the All, no longer himself but All, and thus he is in God” and "“If you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God. For like is understood by like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure, by a leap free yourself from the body… believe that nothing is impossible for you; consider yourself immortal and able to understand all things, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being… Then you will understand God.” Such regards refer no longer to the limited self, but to the self that has become "light and life returned to Life", which we know as real Adepthood and integration of the four divine ecstasies, Godhood. If I am to take myself seriously, during my work, am I projecting elementaries from the limited self, or elementals and celestials from Divine Providence directly? If the first, I have forgotten all principles, for during the operation there is to be God, not me. So, you see, this is a matter of maturation. Whatever the case is, the main difference is in the universality of the beings. And yet, this is not exactly the concern of our course, at least not in its earlier stages. It tells if you do not make yourself equal to an elemental, you cannot understand and elemental. In making yourself equal to an elemental, there will be a visionary wildness in you that will substitute the dialogue of conscious/subconscious for ecstatic revelation, unlike the feeble dead ends of the egoic mind.   **PAA: Beyond inner transformation, the curriculum hints at tangible outcomes — such as weather influence through trees, stability through Earth beings, inspiration through sylphs, or creative fire through salamanders. In your view, what kinds of practical magical results can arise from genuine alliances with elementals, and how should students ethically integrate those results into their lives?** In extension, truly anything is possible. By experience I tell you many kind of "miracles" are a bit fun, but like a night drinking hard, you will likely wish to avoid repeating it for a while. Sprites appreciate truth, self-honesty, that is what is most ethical to them, irrespective of the element in question. They inspire the four divine ecstasies, all-power, all-knowing, ever-presence and omni-presence. All that does not move towards this should be avoided.   **PAA: Why would someone pursue this course over MMI or other magical paths?** Personally, I hope people do not pursue my courses over MMI, but along with MMI, except maybe when it comes to [The School of Visionary Hermeticism curriculum](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism). This is because without introspection all magic is distraction. That being said, while MMI uses quality to change quantity, in the Elemental Magic course we work with the quantities to potentiate the segregation of the qualities. You cannot move from earth to water without surrender, from water to air without even greater surrender, and from air to fire, it takes a divine leap of faith. These things will be pushed forward alchemically, which means internal changes will occur regardless of how consciously you process them, whereas MMI ([Magic & Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd)) is all about keeping consciousness by all means. Nevertheless, surrender requires you to reach that which is greater than yourself, and it will be your safeguard. The cherry at the top of the cake is traversing from fire to the Akasha, the final step of the elemental magic course, akin to the creation of the Lapis Sapientiae. **PAA: Many thanks for providing more insight into the Elemental Magic Course. ** --- --- # The Black Star of Nuit – An Interview with Jack Fox-Williams Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/the-black-star-of-nuit-an-interview-with-jack-fox-william/ ## Introduction In this interview Jack Fox-Williams, the author of *[The Black Star of Nuit](https://www.aeonsophiapress.com/product/the-black-star-of-nuit-by-jack-fox-williams)*, provides some very in-depth answers to my questions. I really appreciate Jack taking the time and effort to answer these as I put a lot of thought into how best to discuss his book as there is just so much inside. Take a look at the contents that I have shared below: ***Introduction Gnosticism Interpretations of Nothingness Satanism  Heru-Ra-Ha Cosmogenesis The Nightside of Eden The Mystery of Daath The Thoughtless Light Pravritti and Nivritti Manvantara and Muhapralaya Negative Archetypes Vajrayana Buddhism The Qliphothic Spheres Emptiness and Fullness Ain: Absolute Nothingness Beyond Being and Non-Being Ain Soph: The Centreless Centre in the Womb of Infinite Nothingness Ain Soph Aur: The Luminosity of the Eternal Void Conclusion: Uniting the Left and Right-Hand Path Practical Magic *** You can see more information about this book [here](https://www.aeonsophiapress.com/product/the-black-star-of-nuit-by-jack-fox-williams). --- ## Interview Table of Contents - Introduction- InterviewUnifying Paths and Dualities- Gnostic Demiurge vs. Self-Deification- Thelemic Mysticism and the Left-Hand Path (Hadit & True Will)- The Nature of Nuit and Nothingness- Meditation and the ‘Neither-Neither’ State- Multi-Traditional Synthesis / Uniting Left & Right-Hand Practices- Closing Note from Jack Fox-Williams --- [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/img_8654_1751879105566-213x300.jpeg)](https://www.aeonsophiapress.com/product/the-black-star-of-nuit-by-jack-fox-williams)The Black Star of Nuit by Jack Fox-Williams ### Unifying Paths and Dualities **PAA: In what ways does *The Black Star of Nuit* aim to “unify both currents” of the left-hand and right-hand paths? Discuss how the book treats pairs of opposites (such as creation/destruction, being/non-being, God/Satan) as projections of a supreme nothingness beyond all duality.** Our magical order immersed ourselves deeply in many different spiritual currents, such as Gnosticism, Buddhism, Theosophy, Anti-Cosmic Satanism, and Luciferianism, and discovered that there were certain distinct, yet overlapping features. The anti-cosmic satanists view Ain (or nothingness) as the highest principle because they want to merge with the emptiness of fullness. While they consider themselves ‘left-hand path,’ this is the aim of many right-hand practitioners, particularly those in the East, who similarly wish to merge with the formless Parabrahman. We have great respect for the anti-Cosmic satanists since we also view nothingness as one of the highest metaphysical principles. However, our tradition also differs insofar that we do not see nothingness as sterile, barren, or even ‘anti-cosmic’ but the impossible possibility that gives rise to the Oneness of Beingness while simultaneously transcending the “I AM.” Other right-hand practitioners, however, aim to merge with total unity or Oneness. At the moment, the spiritual marketplace is saturated with books on ‘unity-consciousness,’ Presence, and Pure Being. This all well and good. However, people fetishize unity to the point that they do not realize that even unity has its groundless ground in absolute nothingness. The number of spiritual new-agers who think I am describing ‘non-dual consciousness’ when I discuss absolute nothingness is startling. To attain absolute nothingness, one must even annihilate the concept of unity. Then, there are Luciferians or Laveyan satanists who affirm a radical individualism, in which they separate themselves from the unity of God and strength their individuality. The aim of our spiritual praxis, however, is to attain all three objectives simultaneously. The highest grade in our initiatory order is Kaivalya, when the initiate recognizes their divinity and individuality, as symbolized by the Black Diamond. Crowley conceptualizes the soul as a point of implicit potentiality, following its unique orbit through infinite space, expressing its creative potential as the many simulacral forms that we see around us while simultaneously transcending them. In this sense, the soul is more akin to an eternal process, movement, going, or unfolding, than a ‘thing’ per se. It is Beingness in Eternal Becoming, at once universal and unique, inseparable from the One Supreme Mind while retaining its Kosmic Individuality. Beingness overcomes itself through itself so that it can return to itself, allowing it to overcome itself again, *ad infinitum*. This process is aptly symbolized by the Ouborous eating its own tail while giving birth to itself. At the same time, it has its groundless ground in nothingness.  --- > The demiurge is an incredibly complex point of discussion since there are many ways of interpreting it. For Plato, the demiurge was not an ‘evil’ or ‘malevolent’ figure but the Grant Architect, similar to Freemasonry, who fashioned the universe from the primal chaos of Tohu. > > Jack Fox-William ### Gnostic Demiurge vs. Self-Deification **PAA: What is the role of the Gnostic concept of the “demiurge” in *The Black Star of Nuit*? How does the book depict the Tree of Life path as tied to the demiurge’s divine order, in contrast to the Qliphothic path that seeks to “usurp the demiurge” in pursuit of self-deification and personal godhood?** The demiurge is an incredibly complex point of discussion since there are many ways of interpreting it. For Plato, the demiurge was not an ‘evil’ or ‘malevolent’ figure but the Grant Architect, similar to Freemasonry, who fashioned the universe from the primal chaos of Tohu. Many gnostic thinkers, however, believed that the demiurge was the ‘Blind Fool,’ the cosmic-creator, born from the womb of Sophia, who trapped the divine soul in the realm of matter. This view has since influenced many anti-cosmic sects, such as the Temple of the Black Light. Our magical order, however, views the demiurge as symbolic of the mundane ego and its psychological characteristics. It represents the tyranny of organized religion, pushing certain spiritual practices to the margins of our cultural history because it considers them evil, depraved or taboo, such as tantric sexuality, self-immolation, sadomasochism, or intoxication. This is symbolized by the story of Cain and Abel. Abel represents the religious sheeple who blindly follow the ‘slave-morality’ of organized religion because they cannot appreciate any other perspective. He sacrifices animals in the name of Yahweh to appease his insatiable bloodlust. When Cain’s offerings were rejected because he refused to take sentient life, he murdered his own brother in lawless defiance, pushing Yahweh’s twisted logic to such an extreme that it bent and broke. In symbolic terms, this represents the initiate who not only breaks free from their cultural conditioning but symbolically ‘kills’ that which they love, including friends, family, and lovers, as part of the Negative Way so they can ascend towards the Three Negative Veils of Existence. The demiurge also represents the mundane ego’s tendency to identify with phenomenal appearances and thus equate the Self with the relative plane of existence rather than the abstract principle of Beingness itself, the ineffable light in which creation and destruction take place. When our order claims that we wish to usurp the demiurgic intelligence to ‘become the demiurge,’ we mean that the initiate aims to ascend to a higher state of spiritual awareness, beyond the shackles of the mundane ego, the false king, so that he can not only discover his spiritual immortality but his eternal connection to the divine. When we emphasise the principle of separation over unity, we mean that we reject the ‘static unity’ of social conditioning, cultural programming, and religious brainwashing. This is what we mean by the ‘Killing of the King’ (the name of a freemasonic ritual in the 33rd degree). Primordial Unity is still revered as a fundamental metaphysical principle. However, one must remember that separation is not only central to the alchemical process since the dross is separated from the god but shamanic rites of passage, where the initiate is ‘separated’ from the community so they gain acquire greater self-knowledge. The Infernal King, Asmodeus, is primarily associated with the alchemical processes of calcination, mortification, and separation, where the initiate burns the dross away from the gold through the dark night of the soul. This represents the initiate destroying their negative karma, mundane attachments/aversions and connection to the dominant cultural paradigm. We invoke Asmodeus through the primal element of fire, symbolizing the transmutation of the soul through the trials of calcination. ### Thelemic Mysticism and the Left-Hand Path (Hadit & True Will) **PAA: How are Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic concepts integrated into *The Black Star of Nuit*? For example, what roles do Thelemic deities like Hadit (the “Hidden God” at the center of Nuit) or Ra-Hoor-Khuit (part of Heru-Ra-Ha) play in the text, and how does the book combine these with Left-Hand Path practices (such as traversing the Tunnels of Set and awakening the “Luciferian Light” in the seeker)?** The Black Star of Nuit espouses the view put forth by Sri Aurobindo, the Indian poet, who claimed that the individual Atman (or Hadit) is inseparable from the Supreme Self, the “I AM”, the One and All. This is what our order understands ‘Hadit’ to be – the conjunction of divinity and individuality. The Supreme Self is One insofar that it encompasses both subject and object, yet is neither since it cannot be characterized as one or the other. However, at the same time, it is infinitely multiplistic insofar that it fractures itself an infinite number of soul-centres so that it can express its replete possibility. There are an infinite number of Gods. You are God. I am God. Everyone is God. However, at the same time, they constitute the primordial unity behind the waking ‘dream’ that we call reality since each star is an infinitesimal point of supernal awareness. Each of these soul-centres is unique insofar that they possess a True Will. This is not individuality as we know it but Kosmic Individuality. When the initiate is transformed into the Black Diamond, the Ubermensch, the God-Man/Woman, the Boddhisatva, he/she does not deny the relative plane of existence, however, nor does he succumb to samsaric delusion, since he recognizes that the soul cannot be limited to phenomenal appearances, mental constructs, and emotional experiences, even as it makes them possible.  Crowley provides a Taoist view of the True Will in which he claims that it is each soul-centre in a process of endless Becoming. To fully understand this concept, we must examine his notion of Hadit, in which he conceptualizes each soul as a star following its true orbit through infinite space. He writes, “I am a Star in Space, unique and self-existent, an individual essence incorruptible; I am also one Soul. I am identical with All and None. I am in All and all in Me; I am apart from all and lord of all […] I am the All, for all that exists for me is a necessary expression in thought of some tendency of my nature, and all my thoughts are only the letters of my Name. I am the One […] for all my all is mine and not another’s mine, who conceive of others like myself in essence and truth, yet unique in expression and illusion.” When the individual attains Kaivalya, they realize that the individual Atman is unique insofar that it is the creator of ‘our’ own universe, our unique reality tunnel, yet is also inseparable from the One Supreme Self insofar that it is Beingness in Eternal Becoming. Since this Becoming is without beginning or end, it is all that has ever been, can be, and will be, and thus the One Supreme Reality. Thus, ironically, Eternal Becoming is the essence of Beingness, the One Primordial Principle that can never be rationalized or denied. This is similar to Heraclitus’ claim that “change is the only constant.” It is also reminiscent of Madame Blavatsky’s concept of abstract motion. This Eternal Becoming is symbolized by the sacred spiral, the Ouborous, the serpent that gives birth to itself while devouring itself.  Beingness overcomes itself through itself to return to itself even as this return discloses its further potential for self-overcoming. All relative change, transformation, and flux is an expression of the soul’s eternal motion as it moves through infinite space, however, it cannot be limited to any specific movement since it is the archetypal principle of change itself.   The True Will is the spiritual destiny of the soul, the very imperative, impulse, or drive that propels its motion through infinite space. Chokmah is not only associated with creative movement but wisdom because it wills for the spirit to ascend through the relative plane back and reunite with the soul, understanding the fundamental nature of the Self, before it descends into the realm of matter again and aids each other soul in attaining liberation with the wisdom of emptiness and the skill of compassion. This is the Oath of the Boddhisatva. There is no end to this process and thus the True Will is boundless. The Supreme Self fractures itself into an infinite number of soul-centres, each sentient creature on its path to liberation. The Bodhisattva guides others through the relative plane, aiding them in breaking free from the illusion and achieving their own transformation. In the words of Nagarjuna, “nirvana is samsara and samsara is nirvana.” In other words, when a new-born soul comes into the world, the spirit descends into the world of matter and the individual succumbs to samsaric delusion. When the spirit reunites with the soul once more, it acquires knowledge of the Self before it returns to the samsaric plane to awaken others in an endless cycle. This is because the Divine seeks to endlessly express its boundless Love. The Boddhisattva does not deny the relative plane of existence, however, nor does he attach himself to it since he realizes that he is the ineffable light of awareness that makes subject and object possible. The body and mind become the conduits through which the True Will can express itself. He negotiates every situation with boundless dynamism since the conscious and subconscious are working in alchemical conjunction. There may times when he has to use physical force, strength, and power to neutralize his enemy, and there may be others where he has to use negotiation, deception, and rhetoric. However, he does not attach himself to the concepts of violence and non-violence because each situation demands its own rules of engagement. The True Will facilitates change on the relative plane, transforming each situation into an opportunity for greater liberation. The Boddhisatva understands that their actions are contextual, specific to each moment as it arises, however, they also realize that the True Will is ever limited to any specific situation since it is the higher imperative guiding their actions, facilitating transformation on the relative plane while continuing in its orbit.  In this sense, the Boddhisatva becomes a living embodiment of the godhead. They become the Black Diamond, the Ubermensch, the God-Man/Woman, the ultimate symbol of apotheosis. In the words of Nagarjuna, “nirvana is samsara and samsara is nirvana.” In other words, when a new-born soul comes into the world, the spirit descends into the world of matter and the individual succumbs to samsaric delusion. When the spirit reunites with the soul once more, it acquires knowledge of the Self before it returns to the samsaric plane to awaken others in an endless cycle. This is because the Divine seeks to endlessly express its boundless Love. One might ask themselves why the universe must unfold in this way, however, when the individual is fulfilling their True Will, all questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ become redundant. Those of a nihilist predisposition may say, “well, all could remain in the emptiness and fullness of absolute nothingness,” however, Beingness is not antithetical to nothingness but its first and inevitable instantiation. > The image of the ‘black star’ plays such an important role in our magical order because it symbolizes the fact that awareness illuminates both subject and object while transcending them, never becoming an objective reality > > Jack Fox-Williams ### The Nature of Nuit and Nothingness **PAA: Why is Nuit used as a central symbol in the book? Considering that Nuit is described as the “Goddess of absolute nothingness” in Thelemic cosmology, what does the “Black Star of Nuit” represent in terms of infinite potential and the dissolution of all opposites?** The image of the ‘black star’ plays such an important role in our magical order because it symbolizes the fact that awareness illuminates both subject and object while transcending them, never becoming an objective reality. It is like a black light. This is why the archetypal image of the ‘black star’ is so important within our order. For us, it symbolizes the ineffability of the soul as inseperable from the Great Mother-Void of Nuit. Henri Corbin, the French mystic and theologian often referred to awareness as a ‘black light’ since it illuminates all while remaining mysterious. At the same time, the soul retains its Kosmic Individuality. The Primordial Unity expresses its fundamental truth through an infinite number of soul-centres, each one divine and unique. That which we describe as ‘Hadit-consciousness’ is incredibly hard to put into words. It must be spiritually intuited by each initiate. However, in essence, ‘Hadit’ symbolizes the point at which unity and (divine) individuality are brought into conjunction. Many Hindu mystics believe that when the soul dissolves into the impersonal Oneness of Brahman, there is no space for individuality. We believe it is far more complex, subtle, and nuanced than this since the individual Atman is both unique and universal. When the initiate attains spiritual enlightenment, he becomes a living embodiment of the godhead, the warrior-mystic, since he does not identify with phenomenal appearances, yet views them as a simulacral expression of the soul, a shadow-play of the black star. To reiterate, Hadit is like an artist, who uses the Kosmos as its canvas, however, in the same way that an artist can uniquely create, yet is never limited to their creations, the individual soul expresses itself through the relative plane, yet is never bound by it, since its Beingness is Eternal Becoming. The reason why Hadit is inseperable from Nuit is because the Self is not a metaphysical substance but the first primal instantiation of the formless void – it is the suchness of nothingness. This is explained in greater detail in *Liber Nuit.*  ### Meditation and the ‘Neither-Neither’ State **PAA: What is the “neither-neither” state of absolute consciousness mentioned in the book, and why is achieving this state important? How does the book suggest one can reach this state through meditation or mental discipline, and what does attaining such a state signify about the practitioner’s understanding of reality and the self?** Both Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant connect Nuit to absolute nothingness insofar that she is the ‘space beyond space.’ In the same way that space is without a boundary or perimeter, so too is absolute nothingness beyond all mental limitations; it is without a conceptual boundary. This is why Ain Soph means ‘without limit’ since every intellectual contrivance is an unnecessary limitation; it cannot ever qualify the Absolute. As Nagarjuna, the Buddhist philosopher, observed, enlightenment is not being, not non-being, not both being and non-being, and not neither being nor non-being, since it transcends all positive and negative dualities, even that of duality and non-duality. As the Taoists say, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. In Hinduism, the yogi uses the technique of ‘Neti-Neti,’ meaning ‘not-this-not-that,’ where they negate all phenomenal appearances, mental constructs, and emotional experiences, until they eventually reach absolute nothingness. Many people characterize nothingness in a negative language of ‘non-being,’ ‘non-existence,’ and ‘non-consciousness,’ however, it is beyond absence and presence, emptiness and fullness, ‘is’ and ‘is not.’ As I extensively discuss in *Liber Nuit,* each Qliphoth sphere can be interpreted as an initiatory gate through which the negational process deepens with each step before they are catapulted into the Three Negative Veils of Existence. They negate the body, mind, space, time, motion, soul, spirit, even the Self, until they reach absolute nothingness. However, since they have opened the dark chakras – Lalata, Lalana, Golata, and Sunya - they open an energetic gateway to the formless void while simultaneously affirming all that was previously negated while simultaneously recognizing that all appearances are transient, empty, fleeting, and ephemeral. They undergo change precisely because the Absolute is changeless. Everything is viewed as a shadow-play of the luminous void. For us, this is the meaning of Kaivalya, meaning true liberation, which is when the dualistic, relative, archetypal, and absolute perspectives, are brought into conjunction. This is far from nihilism but ecstatic affirmation. The initiate becomes a living embodiment of the divine reality. I think many readers may have found my view that we are living in a ‘solipsistic universe’ confusing or controversial, however, I use the word ‘solipsistic’ in a metaphysical (rather than social) sense, meaning that, at the highest archetypal level, there is only the One Supreme Mind experiencing itself through itself. However, while most right-hand practitioners stop at Kether, we aim to go beyond the Trees of Life and Death, catapulting into the formless void, before we are spat out again, recognizing our divinity and individuality. Nothingness does not cancel these out entirely but actually makes them possible. In the Book of the Law, Hadit claims that he is the worshipper of Nuit, meaning that nothingness makes the Supreme Self available while transcending’ it. While the Supreme Self is Eternally Alone, it also fractures itself into an infinite number of soul-centres so that it can better understand itself through itself. Thus, unity and infinite multiplicity are two sides of the same coin. This paradox can only be intuited at the highest levels – one must understand how the Supreme Self is One and All, Eternally Alone, however, at the same time, there are an infinite number of soul-centres, each one unique, yet inseperable from the Self. The Universal One is reflected in the individual one, even as the former retains its Primordial Unity (or Eternal Aloneness), yet, the individual one is also reflected in the Universal One, even as it retains its Kosmic Individuality. Both, however, from the absolute perspective, are nothingness. Everything arises from nothingness, abides in nothingness, and returns to nothingness. ### Multi-Traditional Synthesis / Uniting Left & Right-Hand Practices **PAA: The *Black Star of Nuit* draws upon a variety of spiritual traditions and philosophies. Which traditions are referenced, and how are their concepts woven into the book’s vision of spiritual evolution? In practical terms, how might a practitioner combine elements of the Left-Hand Path (individualism, self-empowerment, working with darker energies) with elements of the Right-Hand Path (devotion, compassion, unity with the divine) in their spiritual practice?** You are right. Our magical scheme is highly dynamic insofar that it combines various aspects of Qliphothic, Thelemic, and Typhonian magic. It is not limited to any specific paradigm. As I extensively discuss in *Liber Nuit,* we invoke the Qliphothic powers so that we can better understand the nature of the Negative Way. Each sphere is an initiatory gate through which the initiate annihilates the body, mind, space, time, motion, even Beingness, so that they can return to absolute nothingness. In this sense, our magical scheme shares a certain similarity with anti-cosmic traditions, such as the Temple of Black Light. However, meditation is also fundamentally important to our magical scheme since we believe that the initiate can only attain the ’neither-neither’ state when all bodily sensations, emotional experiences, and mental constructs are cancelled out. Many people equate this state with ‘non-being’ when this is nothing more than a dependently originating concept in itself. Moreover, we also use ritual to connect with certain archetypes on a much deeper level. The Black Star of Nuit, for example, contains many rituals to invoke the forces of Set, Horus, Hoor-Paar-Kraat, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit, because we believe that each of these reflects a certain aspect of the Supreme Reality. Through the use of magical correspondence, one can intuit these archetypes on a much deeper level. Again, these archetypes span a wide variety of mystical paradigms since we believe that the truth can only be discovered in the intersections between the right and left-hand path, rather than adhering to either one. Soon, however, I will be publishing further work on the more practical aspects of occultism, including tantric sexuality, self-immolation, intoxication, martial arts, dark empathy, ecstatic dancing, and so forth. These will be explored in the *Tantric Qliphoth* and *the Order of the Dark Shaman, *both of which should be published by Aeon Sophia Press next year. The Order of the Dark Shaman is a subsect of the Black Star of Nuit which aims to revive a pre-Christian shamanistic/tantric spirituality within a Qliphothic context. --- ### Closing Note from Jack Fox-Williams Thank you very much for your time and your interesting questions. It was a pleasure. If any interested readers would like to contact me, you can reach me on the following email: **[jfoxwilliams@yahoo.co.uk](mailto:jfoxwilliams@yahoo.co.uk)** **PAA: I really enjoyed these answers thank you so much for spending the time. ** --- --- # Interview with Alex Leonhart: Magic, Energy and Amulets Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/interview-with-alex-leonhart-magic-energy-and-amulets/ ## Introduction Thanks to a wonderful 3rd party who organised and conducted the interview we have this new interview with Alex Leonhart a teacher from the Mystery College, who has published a course on [Concordian Energy Work](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/concordian-energy-course) and is currently working on a course on Amulet Magic, he is both a scholar as can be seen from his many writings and a practitioner of many, many years in some hard to find traditions. I know from private discussions with Alex that this interview only scratches the surface, though we are deeply grateful for it as he is also well versed in other systems of what could be called Chinese Systems of Magic or Folk Magic from South East China due to the area he lives in, in the Philippines, there are many settlers from other areas of the world who brought their own magical system with them - perhaps a future post. If you enjoy this post please let us know in the comments and consider taking a look at the[ Concordian Energy Work course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/concordian-energy-course) from Alex, which as I say is just scratching the surface of his knowledge. --- ## Interview **PAA: So to begin, could introduce yourself and share your background in magic, spirituality and yoga** **(briefly, after all it’s pretty extensive).** Hi. I’m Alex Leonhardt, and I am by personal practice a Shaiva Hindu adhering to the *Vamachara* school. By circumstance and environment, I work with spirits, herbal medicine, and an assortment of other things. I suppose some people in the West would call it a ‘healer’, but that’s a very weighty title - and one that I feel I am unworthy of boasting about. In the local language, I am either a *‘tambalan*’ (medicine person, although this carries its own unique connotations within the Native American systems of belief), a ‘*espiritisa*’ (spirit worker), or (if my haters are to be believed), a ‘*mambabarang*’ (witch doctor / hex caster). I personally prefer to be called a *‘salamancera*’ (sorcerer), because that’s what my teacher was, and that is what I do, and therefore that is what I am.  Beyond my traditional leanings, I have been a member (at various points of my life) of both the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKON), as well as the Ananda Marga, although I am not ‘Hindu’, by birth. I was born, raised, and baptised into the fold of the Catholic Church, as are most people in my neck of the woods. I only began to expand my horizons during my early adolescence, and, having graduated (as a government-funded scholar) in an Islamic university, I have also practised Sunni Islam (the most predominant type of Islam practiced in the Philippines), and have been introduced into Ismail’i Islam and Sufi’-ism by my late college professor.  **PAA: You also have experience working as a… well I guess there’s no other word for it… as a spirit detective. Have you ever watched the anime Yu Yu hakusho**? Lol. You could say that. I suppose there’s no other word for it. But I am not under Ko-Enma’s employ, nor do I receive orders from the Netherworld. I grew up in the early 90s, so yeah, I have watched Yu Yu Hakusho. Lol. **PAA: You even had your own Master Genkai didn’t you**. Yes, I did, bless her Soul. A good chunk of the sh-t I know, I know because of her.  **PAA: So would it be fair to say that this first course on Energy work is foundational to all of this defensive magic**. Yes, in essence. But that’s not all that energy work is for. It’s the *cornerstone* of every practice that one undertakes. A lot of people view energy working as either a ‘defensive magic’ matter or a ‘health and wellness’ matter - but what it really is is a *sum total of all magic* matter.  **PAA: I also understand that it gets people feeling energy right away, which is one of the big hurdles in most systems**. Yes, and the reason for that is simple: the energy work that I present is simply a consolidation of two of the more ‘renowned’ energy-working practices in the world: the Indian *chakra *system and the Chinese *chi* system, stripped down to only the essentials, supplemented with *pranayama* (breath work) and *mudra *and *bandha *(bodily locks). Combined, they elicit an instantaneous effect because the biological impetus of the human body itself *generates the effect*. There is *no way *that it will ‘not work’, because for it to ‘*not work*’, you would have to - Not be a mammal, in this case a human. And  - Not be alive.  But so long as one is mammalian, and one *breathes* and is alive and conscious, the method *will *work. And that is why I am confident and can tack on a ‘money-back’ guarantee on its efficacy.   **PAA: So would you say this system trains Vital, Astral, or Mental energy**. First we have to address the distinctions that some ‘Western’ systems ascribe to energy. This notion of having three separate demarcations between ‘vital’, ‘astral’, and ‘mental’ energy is, in my insignificant opinion, a load of pish-posh. Energy *is vital energy*. This is what the Hindus call *prana*, and what the Chinese (and most of Asia) call *chi*. This ‘vital energy’ constitutes what some philosophers would call a ‘soul’ or an ‘*anima*’, or ‘consciousness’. This ‘consciousness’ is what the *shamans *of Tungus and Tibetan societies say would ‘travel’ to the Spirit World (i.e. ‘astral energy’). All of these concepts are comprehended by, made manifest through, and consolidated by *will (sankalpa shakti*)* *as demonstrated by *knowledge* and perception (*jnana*), and is essentially ‘mental energy’. There is no demarcation. It is one single, cohesive, continuous, concordant thing.  **PAA: So in this view it would be better to say that all these different ‘types’ of energy are in truth one thing, and that it’s wiser to focus on strengthening your ‘overall’ energy than worry about your strength in one type.** That is correct. They are in actuality, just one single thing. The demarcations exist due to the ‘technical’ and ‘clinical’ nature of Western practice, and it gets in the way of doing the actual work which guarantees actual results. **PAA: Would it then also be fair to say that this course addresses higher level skills as well? When you first described this course I thought it only covered steps 1 and 2 in the Bardon system, but it sounds like it goes far beyond that**. Yes, it does. The energy work course by itself acts as a foundation for all magical practice - whether that is regular energy cultivation, summoning, manifestation, healing, or what-have-you. Bardon’s system (from my humble and somewhat limited understanding) follows the Hindu basis of *tapasaya* (cultivation), and so it makes sense why his methods and my method (I say ‘my’, but it isn’t really ‘mine’, because a holistic practice that is for everyone cannot by ‘owned’ by anyone) have some degree of overlap. But the taking from the foundation (which is energy work), if you have an extensive well of energy, and are aware of *how* to make energy flow, how to collect it, how to project it, and how to store it properly, you have, essentially, an unlimited wellspring of magic with which to work with all magics.  **PAA: Wow that’s pretty extensive, but you plan to go even further with your upcoming Amulet course, isn’t that right?** Yes, absolutely. Amulets are *the* earliest, if not *the most concrete* manifestation of magic across all societal stratas, across all of human history (recorded or otherwise). They are the perfect catalyst for energy work because they are made, can store, and are able to project energy as an extension of the human body. BUT I’ll leave the rest of the details for the upcoming course (which is coming soon to a theatre near you!)  **PAA: You also have some availability for personal consultations as well**. Yes, I do. Please reach me via my Telegram (# +639276020434), or via my personal email alex.leonhart01@gmail.com  You can also try to summon me from the depths of Hell Realm, but I’ll be too busy trying to rule it, so your queries might go unanswered if you decide to take that route. Lol. **PAA: That is very exciting, before we go is there any last piece of practice advice you have for the aspiring magician**. Stop thinking about the technicalities. Like Nike always says: ‘Just do it.’ You can think about the ‘whyfores’ later. Technicalities and whyfores make comprehending magic easy, but it makes for *doing *magic a pain in the arse.  --- --- # André Consciência Courses on Perseus Arcane Academy Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/andre-consciencia-courses-on-perseus-arcane-academy/ --- # Introduction André Consciência is a long-standing practitioner and teacher of Hermetic magic, introspection, and visionary traditions. On the [Perseus Arcane Academy](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) platform, he offers a complete range of programs—from free beginner introductions to multi-semester advanced training, I thought it was time that we made an updated post including all of his programs. This post lists **all** of André’s courses currently available through Perseus, including individual classes, multi-level series, and bundled options. Each entry links directly to the official course page or related material. But also remember Andre has a vast number of published books that also represent entire magical paths, so if you do not find what you are looking for in the courses on Perseus, then check his books. --- ## 1. The School of Visionary Hermeticism **Overview:** The School of Visionary Hermeticism (SVH) is André’s most advanced program and the highest-level offering on Perseus from Andre and is unique in that part of what it hopes to achieve is a whole new generation of well trained practitioners. It is designed as a structured school dedicated to exploring mystical, philosophical, and esoteric traditions within a Hermetic framework. **Structure:** - Three semesters in total - Two courses per semester - Each semester runs for six months - Cohort-based learning with André’s direct guidance **Focus:** An immersive program that combines deep study of Hermetic principles with creative and practical application. **Related paths:** SVH is ideal for students who have already worked through [Magical & Mystical Introspection](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#2-magical--mystical-introspection-mmi) or [Elemental Magic](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#3-elemental-magic-the-foundation-as-taught-by-the-elementals) and want to commit to a full, advanced curriculum. **Official pages:** - [Perseus overview](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/school-of-visionary-hermeticism/) - [School site](https://theschoolofvisionaryhermeticism.com/) --- ## 2. Magical & Mystical Introspection (MMI) **Overview:** A multi-year, step-by-step training built around the *soul mirror* and related introspective practices. The structure aligns with Franz Bardon’s *Initiation Into Hermetics*, guiding students through elemental balance, mental discipline, and higher magical work. **Structure:** - Ongoing subscription course - Lessons and exercises in sequential stages - Based directly on André’s published work *Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sun Sphere* **Prerequisites:** None formally required. Designed for committed beginners through advanced practitioners. **Related paths:** Can be studied alongside [Elemental Magic](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#3-elemental-magic-the-foundation-as-taught-by-the-elementals) in the [Elemental Magic + MMI bundle](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#bundles--multi-course-options). --- ## 3. Elemental Magic: The Foundation as Taught by the Elementals **Overview:** A practical foundation course in attuning to and working with the four classical elements—Earth, Air, Fire, Water—“as taught by the Elementals.” Also serves as a practice-based companion to André’s *A Guide to the Elementals*. **Structure:** - Progressive, multi-level format - Each element studied through perception, meditation, and practical exercise - Suitable as a stand-alone foundation or alongside MMI **Prerequisites:** None. Recommended for anyone starting a Hermetic practice. **Related paths:** Pairs well with [Magical & Mystical Introspection](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#2-magical--mystical-introspection-mmi) via the [combined bundle](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#bundles--multi-course-options). --- ## 4. Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition (Levels 1–3) **Overview:** A three-level program integrating ceremonial magic techniques (e.g., Golden Dawn–style ritual) with Bardon’s Hermetic system. Focuses on adapting structured ritual work to support the inner development taught in *Initiation Into Hermetics*. **Structure:** - **Level 1–2:** Core and intermediate ceremonial methods - **Level 3:** Culminates in a Grand Ritual of Invocation combining all prior work **Prerequisites:** None stated; prior experience with basic meditation or ritual practice is helpful. **Course pages:** - [Ceremonial Magic & Neo-Shamanism bundle](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-and-neo-shamanism) (includes full 3-level series) - [Intro article](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/seeking-the-greater-mysteries-ceremonial-magic-franz-bardons-mastery-and-the-golden-dawn-tradition/) **Related paths:** Can be taken on its own, or alongside [Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#5-journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism-levels-15) in the combined [Ceremonial & Neo-Shamanism bundle](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#bundles--multi-course-options). --- ## 5. Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) **Overview:** A five-level training in neo-shamanic practice and cosmology, exploring the Lower, Middle, and Upper Worlds and their inhabitants. Emphasizes practical journeying and integrating shamanic work with Hermetic principles. **Structure:** - Level 1 as the starting point - Progresses through Levels 2–5 for complete training **Prerequisites:** None. Accessible to both newcomers and experienced practitioners. **Course pages:** - [Level 1](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism) - [Levels 1–5 overview](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism%3A-levels-1-5) - [Course article](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/bridging-worlds-exploring-the-cosmology-and-practices-of-neoshamanism-by-andre-consciencia/) **Related paths:** Complements [Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#4-ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-13) through the [Ceremonial & Neo-Shamanism bundle](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#bundles--multi-course-options). --- ## 6. Introduction to Magic (Free Course) **Overview:** A short, free course introducing the real fundamentals of magic—dispelling common myths and orienting students to essential practices. **Structure:** - Self-paced, concise - Acts as a gateway to André’s longer programs **Prerequisites:** None. **Related paths:** Ideal starting point before enrolling in [Elemental Magic](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#3-elemental-magic-the-foundation-as-taught-by-the-elementals) or [Magical & Mystical Introspection](https://chatgpt.com/c/689db34a-e350-8321-8078-e14749737e8f#2-magical--mystical-introspection-mmi). --- ## Bundles & Multi-Course Options - **[Elemental Magic + Magical & Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic)** Monthly subscription granting access to both courses. - **[Neo-Shamanism (Levels 1–5) + Ceremonial Magic (Levels 1–3)](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-and-neo-shamanism)** Combined track for full shamanic and ceremonial training. --- ## References Free Courses on Perseus article André Consciência instructor profile The School of Visionary Hermeticism overview School of Visionary Hermeticism official site Magical & Mystical Introspection Elemental Magic Ceremonial & Neo-Shamanism bundle Seeking the Greater Mysteries – Intro article Journey to the Spirit World Level 1 Journey to the Spirit World Levels 1–5 Bridging Worlds – Course article Introduction to Magic Complimentary Magical Courses article --- --- --- # Hermeticism, Ordo Astri, and the Great Work — An Interview with Oliver St. John Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/hermeticism-ordo-astri-and-the-great-work-an-interview-with-oliver-st-john/ ## Introduction I am very excited to have Oliver St John on the blog. He has been very generous in answering all of my questions in great depth - over 17,000 words! We cover a lot of ground in this post from Hermeticism, Magick, Yoga and more. If you enjoy and find the information here of interest then I highly recommend visiting his [site](https://www.ordoastri.org), we would also love to hear from you in the comments. Several works referenced in this interview are by Oliver St. John; a full list of his titles is available [here](https://www.ordoastri.org/books/). Oliver St. John [YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/OliverStJohn). [Featured Image Credit](https://www.ordoastri.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Vault-of-CR-280x300.png). --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Hermeticism- Magick- Yoga- Mantra- Published Books and Teachings- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/OA-Banner-Rainbow.png)Image Credit: https://www.ordoastri.org/ ## Hermeticism **1. Early Influences and Golden Dawn Lineage**: *You are described as a third-generation initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (via Aleister Crowley’s student Kenneth Grant). How did this lineage and your early training shape your understanding of Hermeticism and magick? In founding Ordo Astri, what traditional teachings did you carry forward, and in what ways did you feel the need to innovate or diverge from those older traditions?* Thank you for this very welcome opportunity to speak about my work with the Hermetic Order of the Star and Snake. Strictly speaking, Ordo Astri is the name of the publishing imprint and website. We can use the abbreviation Ordo Astri as it means we can use two words instead of seven. The Golden Dawn was a powerful influence very early on. For a while I was, for better or worse, exclusively interested in studying and practicing that and all related material. So naturally there was a great deal of determination in seeking out those who had associations, however distant, with an Order that was established 1888 and was effectively finished a few years later, though many factions, whether loyal or dissident, continued over generations. I made a deep and prolonged study and practice of all publications, some of them private papers, and went thoroughly into the background, establishing personal contact with various Neo-Rosicrucians along the way—these people do not have websites by the way, so you won’t find them there. In spite of that personal contact, I still aspired to the almost mythological Golden Dawn ‘lineage’ and worked at it for a long time, inwardly and outwardly. I became a member of what was described as a third generational lineage, and which was via the Stella Matutina Golden Dawn. That had nothing to do with Crowley or Kenneth Grant so you see the *sutratma* thread of these things is more intricate than can easily be set down in writing. The Golden Dawn is all about magick (or magic, however we spell it), and a very modern form of what is in reality a collection of traditional sciences. The Golden Dawn and all related is so much about magick that it has no spiritual root to cleave to, and that goes for all of occultism that followed in the wake of Eliphas Lévi, who coined the term ‘occultist’. Occultists after Lévi—and against everything he said—confuse the psychic domain with the spiritual and that means once we accept that line of thought it can take a lot of work to find our way out of the pit we have fallen into, if we ever do find our way out of it. None of that about so-called lineage, especially when we are talking about occult organisations, has anything to do with initiation in the real sense. Occult scholars have much respect for ‘history’, with dates and names, to which they can attribute what they call ‘authenticity’—which means literally an original thing and not a copy. Initiation in the real sense, as with the special kind of knowledge that is or should be associated with it, can never be proven, any more than can the truth of scriptures or scriptural authority. Some further disclaimers: A real tradition is of such vast antiquity that it cannot have a date put on it and it is certainly not the invention of any individual person. It does not have an author other than the Lord of the Universe. The Vedas, for example, are clear that tradition derives from a non-human source; it would be more accurate to say* supra-human* source. Tradition is cognate with initiation—the two words have identical meanings, ‘transmitted’. Therefore, the Golden Dawn, let alone the dissidents that followed in the wake, is in no way a ‘tradition’ in the real meaning of that word any more than Neo-paganism or what is popularly called ‘Witchcraft’. The Golden Dawn cannot truly be called a tradition as it only goes back to the late nineteenth century. In fact, to take this further, members of the Golden Dawn, and even more especially those who came later like Crowley and Kenneth Grant, were extremely anti-traditional and as a consequence anti-spiritual, or pseudo-spiritual at best. All modernism is anti-traditional and therefore if not anti-initiatic it is pseudo-initiatic. Grant was postmodern in his approach, which is about as anti-traditional as it can get! Still, as I indicated earlier, this kind of thing can give us something to work against. In all this, an individual has no relevance in terms of tradition or so-called lineage unless as a ‘link in the chain’. Real initiation is a completely internal matter and will not be described. The sense I use this word ‘initiation’ is the same way that René Guénon used it, where it must be attached to knowledge of a metaphysical order. Having a piece of paper with someone’s signature and wax seal placed on it means absolutely nothing in spiritual terms. Doing some ritual with a group of persons who have a societal entitlement counts for nothing also. Occultism is a purely modern invention and as I said, started with Eliphas Lévi. He was more intelligent and had deeper insight than those who came after him, and that were influenced by spiritism even when, as with the Golden Dawn and offshoots, they pretended they were not and signed fearsome oaths and pledges to that effect! None of them kept their oaths. Sri Ramakrishna once said ‘In this Age of Kali Yuga it is very important that a man should keep his word’ (from the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna recorded by ‘M’). Let’s get back to the question: We are going back to early training, as experienced by this individual St. John here. Actually the earliest influence was from the French occultists, via Oswald Wirth and also the *Tarot of Marseille*. Wirth put forward a geometric schema for understanding the internal relations of the Tarot cards, and this ‘set me off’ as I had only at that time come across Pythagorean geometry in school, and no meaning was given to that; you just had to learn it. When it comes to how did the Golden Dawn (etc.) shape my understanding, it would be better to say ‘distort’ my understanding and obfuscate the whole matter. Everything I learned there had to be unlearned thoroughly at a later date. All ‘systems’ of magick tend to be syncretic and place a kind of false knowledge as a superimposition over the real knowledge of symbolism—which is always absent with occultists. Much of modern magick rests on more or less arbitrary correspondences. This is much liked because it means ‘magicians’ can find easy applications for this by which they can increase their level of self delusion and even fool other people sometimes. I am not saying that none of that has any value at all. It introduced me to the *Sepher Yetzirah*, the writings of the sage Hermes Trismegistus, and much more besides including the fact that Egyptian gods or neteru are not something that only inhabit books, museums and tourist locations. My mind had come awake after what seemed like a long sleep through childhood and teens. However, the Golden Dawn and others that came after them pulled in diverse material from different traditions and rendered it in a syncretic way, that is, put together ‘from the outside’. What I always aimed at was synthesis, which is ‘from the inside’. That takes a lot of working at. It takes more than reading a few books, doing a ‘banishing ritual’ and learning tables of correspondences. Finally, I will emphasise the point for those hard of hearing that there are no ‘traditional teachings’ in Golden Dawn related material. For quite some time we used a grade system very similar, based on the Tree of Life. That provided a structure, which is useful, and it lines up the work with a true symbol, that being the Tree of Life, something that does exist in various forms in most if not all real traditions. It might be useful to add here that ‘magicians’ have completely torn Hermetic Qabalah from its traditional roots. Recently I tried to set this to rights in a book called *Thirty-two paths of Wisdom—Key to the Hermetic Qabalah*. I gained more of what might be called traditional teaching or ‘passed on’ knowledge from early mentors, directly. I had various initiations, in so far as these can be ‘events’, at least four that can be counted as definite markers. However, none of that owed to the Golden Dawn, Grant or Crowley, unless in very indirect ways. It would not be proper to try and describe the real initiations or name any persons involved publicly. Some people don’t like secrecy, in which case they should study René Guénon,* The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times*, on ‘The Hatred of Secrecy’ and they might stand a chance of understanding what is really lurking behind the political ideology that they have accepted without even giving it a thought. > The Self returns to Itself, which is never born and never dies. We do not change into it; we are that ineffable in reality and have to realise it as fully as possible. > > Oliver St John **2. The Great Work and Spiritual Realisation**: *Ordo Astri emphasises that the goal of the Hermetic path is genuine spiritual realisation—the Great Work—rather than psychic development for its own sake. In your literature it’s stated that initial psychic or magical attainments are “subsidiary to the goal” and not to be mistaken for full initiation. Could you unpack this for us? What does spiritual realisation mean in practical terms, and how do you guide students to focus on that ultimate transformation beyond the individual self?* Yes I can unpack that. So far as anything pertaining to the psychic domain goes, I would go further and say, “nothing to do with initiation at all, except as a kind of tangential side effect in some cases.” When I say ‘Hermetic path’ I am not thinking of that in terms of any kind of modern magick. Occultists always confused ‘psychism’ with the spiritual, and still do to this day. Why do I put ‘psychism’ in scare quotes? Because in reality everyone that has a functional mind is psychic already: Humans and animals dream when they go to sleep—according to some studies even ants dream—so psychism does not distinguish us from animals and insects. Do stones dream, I wonder? Do rivers and seas dream? That might seem silly to many persons but it can be found in the Hindu doctrines and it is more intelligent than thinking the universe started out of nothing, or a singularity, with a ‘big bang’. Anyone who dreams at night is ‘psychic’. Otherwise, the use of the imagination can play a large part. Almost anyone can imagine perfectly ordinary things. If we have an appointment that worries us we can imagine the whole journey, the reception, the meeting and outcome, before it even takes place. How easy it is then to imagine ‘high initiation’ and ‘Holy Guardian Angels’, things that help us feel important, special and different from other people! The psyche is also a limited domain. Thanks to psychological theories it means generally the mind when that is taken to mean the content of mind, thoughts and feelings. But that is only a fractional part of even the mind, with its functions of memory, imagination, feelings and other attachments. The mind has no reality from its own ground; it is awareness that forms objects with borrowed light from what to most people is a completely unknown source but we can call it consciousness, which is not the mind or its thoughts. There is nothing spiritual about the mind, which is an adjunct to the ego (ahankara) or the (false) sense of being an individual, separate from all else. Spiritual realisation and practice are also two completely different things. Practice can support realisation but must not be mistaken for that. So to the question, ‘what does spiritual realisation mean in practical terms’, it depends what level we are talking about. At the high level, spiritual realisation has nothing to do with the world of action (karma), cause and effect, so where does ‘practical’ come into that? Total realisation means liberation (moksha) so we never return to yet more birth into other states of being. There is no karma attached to that so no more consequences. It is very tidy! A partial realisation might imply birth in higher states than that of the human, but we need to be careful because we are nearing the end of the Age of Kali Yuga, a great Cosmic Cycle, which puts more of an edge on things like that. If we are going to speak about transmigration then we need to qualify that we are not talking about Theosophist reincarnationism. Transmigration is not the same thing. We do not return to the same state of being more than once so any notion of human beings born and then reborn later in ‘history’ is a totally false modern contrivance that came about through ignorance of the Hindu and other doctrines. Any kind of spiritual realisation, if it really is that, involves pure knowledge and so cannot be described in discursive terms. This is completely apart from applications or uses for knowledge, which places us back in the realm of magick. The notion of ‘magical initiation’, by the way, is an absurdity for the same reason. It can only mean ‘fantasy initiation’, or at best, there was a term that Guénon used, ‘virtual initiation’. He was not referring to modern day computing because he wrote that long before the first of the infernal devices, he meant it in the ordinary sense of the word, ‘almost or nearly as described but not completely or according to strict definition’. In rare cases, virtual initiation, as here described, can lead to effective initiation though. As an aside, in checking this with a standard dictionary, I came across a fifth level definition of ‘virtual’ from physics that is very interesting: ‘denoting particles or interactions with extremely short lifetimes and (owing to the uncertainty principle) indefinitely great energies, postulated as intermediates in some processes.’ That is worth thinking about, even though it is a characteristic of scientism to be incredibly vague. “How do you guide students to focus on that ultimate transformation beyond the individual self?” cannot be answered because there is no ‘formula’ for that. It is different for each individual. If we are speaking about anything ‘ultimate’ then that cannot be taught as such. A teacher can only point things out to the student. In broad terms, though, we can apply to Raja Yoga. There needs to be a caveat about use of the word ‘transformation’. We have to think, ‘transform what?’ And if so what are we transforming into?’ In reality, the Self returns to Itself, which is never born and never dies. We do not change into it, we are that ineffable in reality and have to realise it as fully as possible. Only the mind and body undergo changes. None of that is spiritual realisation; it happens to everyone all the time and is completely ordinary. There is a way that ‘transformation’ can have some use though, if we can understand it as ‘passing beyond form’ altogether, not changing from one form to another. > True symbolism is always relevant and does not change in time. No true symbols were invented by any human personage. > > Oliver St John **3. Ancient Egypt and Hermetic Wisdom**: *Your work places a strong emphasis on the Egyptian roots of Hermeticism. You’ve written that “the voices of the Egyptian neteru (gods) are as loud and clear today as they were in ancient history” for those attuned to them. How do these ancient Egyptian deities and myths inform the teachings and rituals of Ordo Astri? Do you find that modern practitioners can still connect with and benefit from these archaic symbols and metaphysical truths in a contemporary context?* It is worth quoting me exactly on that. It is from the book *Nu Hermetica—Initiation and Metaphysical Reality* (2021): “The voices of the Egyptian neteru are as loud and clear today as they were in ancient history for those who are still able to hear them amidst the noise and tumult of a civilisation that has lost all heart.” I did not use the word ‘attuned’. The difference between that and being able to hear something or not might seem slight but ‘attuned’ carries a whole package of New Age pseudo-spirituality. If we were to continue that analogy, then it would need to be said that an instrument can be tuned but the one tuning it needs to have an innate sense of pitch that is also trained and developed. Noise can make that impossible even for one with a well-trained ear. The statement from the Preface of the book happens to be true but sometimes when a thing is said plainly it can have a sort of shocking affect on the reader. I will endeavor to render this in more rational terms: The word ‘myths’ is best not used here because that implies, by conventional use, something not real at all. So if we use the word ‘myth’ or ‘mythology’ we need to be aware that we are then declaring we do not think what is being described is true at all. Myths do not inform our teaching or practices, therefore. Another insidious symptom of modernist thinking is ‘archaic symbols’, although I am sure the use of it was quite unintentional—but that is why many terms habitually used by everyone are insidious and why I need to keep pointing it out. Archaic is taken to mean ‘from long ago and no longer relevant’. On the contrary, true symbolism is always relevant and does not change in time. No true symbols were invented by any human personage. A true symbol points to something of a metaphysical nature. If a thing is true then it has always been true, is true now and always will be true. —The dictionary definition of ‘metaphysics’ is coming from profane bias. It is not something ‘abstract’ and has nothing to do with philosophy or argument. It is that which is true, real and also very subtle. It means ‘beyond the physical’. It is also beyond the psychic, which is in any case far closer to the body than most will realise.  If something can be of ‘benefit’ to an individual then I am only interested if that means they are helped towards spiritual realisation. We can look again at how our very language is anti-spiritual. The first dictionary meaning of ‘benefit’ is given as ‘an advantage or profit gained from something’, which rules out all possibility of the spiritual. How can anything be added to the supreme Reality, the absolute? We have everything already; we only have to realise the fact of who and what we truly are. There is no need for any contemporary context other than the fact we lead very unnatural lives in this post-industrial age. Our practitioners do not live in monasteries or Ashrams or their equivalent in Egypt of thousands of years ago, obviously. It is a good question, though, as it is something very often used as a criticism from outsiders or sceptics—you have to be an outsider to be a sceptic in the first place. The modern mentality, it should be added, has accepted, without even thinking about it, the illusion of ‘progress’: that things must get better in the future and could only have been worse in the past. It helps commerce but stunts the mind terribly and brings down a veil of obfuscation on that thing called ‘history’, itself an illusionary product of historians. “How do these ancient Egyptian deities ... inform the teachings and rituals?” I understand what is meant by the question but I cannot resist viewing it as ‘in-form’, in other words, a spiritual influence that is transmitted. That is the sort of thing that interests the members of the Hermetic Order of the Star and Snake. That is the best sense of it. The exoteric example that most easily springs to mind, although there are many, is that of our rituals of Nuit and Ra, which we perform each month when the Sun enters a new sign. Each of these includes an invocation to one of twelve Egyptian deities, and an oracle where the deity ‘speaks back’. Can modern practitioners ‘connect’ with this? It depends on how much their mentality has been deformed by that modernity. We are not speaking here of a sort of appliance, ready for use by anyone ‘out of the box’. We are talking about something extremely subtle—so subtle as to completely escape the minds of those who have suffered irreparable damage by modern education and the profane distortion of spiritual things—to the extent they cannot even separate the ‘spiritual’ from body, mind, feelings and emotions. On the other side of that coin: for some happier persons, though these are sadly very rare now, a modern education and all the social, political and other things that go with that, along with very strange attitudes to ancient symbolism, is a thin surface that is easily washed clean. They will soon remember that most priceless and valuable of all things that has been forgotten for many centuries in the West. **4. Balancing Study with Practice**: *Ordo Astri training seems to demand both extensive knowledge and inner practice. For example, The Enterer of the Threshold introduces a “vast array of topics”—from traditional Hermetic sciences like astrology and numerology to ritual and yoga—yet it insists that above all, deep concentration (dharana) is paramount. How do you advise students to balance rigorous study of esoteric theory with the cultivation of meditation, focus, and personal insight? Is there a risk of getting lost in intellectualism, and how is that avoided in your tradition?* I like this sort of question, which takes us to the ‘hands on’ side of things. We do not teach or practice ‘numerology’, and never have done at any time as it is a meaningless modern contrivance—it has nothing at all to do with Hermeticism and is not traditional. We do encourage Gematria, which is a different thing. Even Gematria, a part of Qabalah, cannot really be taught as such, only the rules. Astrology also is ‘difficult’ but I won’t go far into that here. I do not mean that learning it is difficult; I mean that it tends to lead towards a personal enquiry not a spiritual one. Concentration comes before all else, or nothing of any value can be achieved. This is dharana in Sanskrit, which unlike our language has exact terms for these things. Intellectualism, as it is conventionally meant, never comes into it with us. Also, the word ‘intellectual’ is misused. We live in a time that is effectively anti-intellectual in every way. The intellect, in the technical sense of meaning something beyond the common mentality and egoistic ahankara is vital and necessary in this work of ours. The intellect, even in the gifted person, must be capable of extension. We are not speaking here of intellect in the academic sense of that. Study of sacred scriptures or knowledge texts cannot be dispensed with—any more than a teacher can be dispensed with, and it is so in every genuine tradition. For example, in Hinduism the student must learn the texts, even memorise them, then the guru expounds on the meaning. Then they go away and think on this and take it to meditation. It can take a long time. Concentration of the mind has to be developed alongside of this. So yes, as anyone can see from this, having a great deal of involvement with ‘ordinary life’, especially what that involves nowadays with hypnotic technologies plus compensatory sentimental attachments to people and things, forbids any possibility of initiation or gaining real knowledge. I know that might be a disappointment to those who want their cake and eat it too but it happens to be true. Truth is not, as so many think now, ‘relative’. Either it is true or not. A word should be said about ‘personal insights’, as that is not the proper function of the practice or of the keeping of the record. Personal insights cannot be insights into metaphysical reality, which entirely transcends the individuality. ## Magick **1. Personal Journey in Magick**: *You’ve dedicated your life to the theory and practice of magick. How did you first embark on that path? Was there a defining moment or mentor that set you firmly on the magician’s journey? Additionally, after decades of practice, how has your own definition of “magick” evolved—what does magick represent to you now compared to when you began?* ‘Personal Journey’ and ‘Magick’ in one sentence is suggestive of double delusion. I would never write a book or even an article about my ‘personal journey’ any more than I would write about the history of London buses or subway trains. Also, that statement should be qualified: I did not dedicate my whole life to the theory and practice of magick. I dedicated my life to the seeking out of spiritual truth and knowledge, which is not the same thing. Such dedication already exists within the person; it is not a choice in that way. The dedication to the theory and practice of magick was where I began with it all. As a child, for example, I demonstrated the levitation of objects to impress my school friends. I learned a great deal from that, especially the importance of concentration of the mind. This leads nicely on to the next part of the question, as to the definition of what magick really is. To start with, like everyone else I adopted Crowley’s definition and it took me a while to see how useless that is. Anyone can cause ‘changes to occur in conformity with will’, it happens all the time in ordinary life. In his book *Magick*, Crowley fell right into the trap he had made and, in a deeply hypocritical manner if you know anything about him, tried to justify it on socialistic grounds by saying it would appeal to the ‘ordinary person’ or ‘man in the street’. It is some of the worst writing he ever did. The term ‘magick’, when it is properly understood, is an umbrella term for at least six traditional sciences. These comprise language, pronunciation, incantation, versification, ritual and astrology. Magick, in the way this is commonly understood now as being about willed cause and effect, is only a collection of applications or uses of real knowledge. In the present times, where materialism long ago reached and passed its apotheosis—we are now in the dissolution phase—people are not interested in anything unless they can find a ready, easy use for it. The profane attitude explains the success of black magic in the way of conventional science and all its ‘inventions’ and products. It explains the anti-intellectualism already mentioned and how that helps the ‘economy’ by selling products that pretend to do everything for you. No real knowledge is involved in such ‘magical’ applications. Those who have the real knowledge are increasingly unlikely to want to resort to magick especially as that is understood in modern books on the subject.  The traditional sciences are declared in the monastic work *Vedanta-sara* to be an essential requirement for anyone that wants to seriously take up meditation and other practices towards spiritual realisation. I would say the real problem with magick today—when you look at those six traditional sciences—is that people have no idea what it really is and are ignorant of the principles that govern it. And that is for reasons already set forth, and owing to the dependence on the products of profane science and the exaggerated sentimentality already alluded to, which is part and parcel of materialism, as is pseudo-spirituality. **2. Ritual Innovations in Ordo Astri**: *Ordo Astri has developed its own distinctive rites and practices. For instance, the revised Enterer of the Threshold book includes your Ritual of the Gates of Babalon, described as a Gnostic variation of the traditional pentagram ritual, as well as an “Egyptian Yoga” practice method. What motivated you to create new forms like the Gates of Babalon ritual? In what ways do these innovations differ from the classic Golden Dawn or Thelemic rituals, and what do they offer to students seeking a deeper mystical connection?* All our rituals and practices include traditional forms. It is the principles involved that count, not the external appearance of a thing. The original motivation for a new form of pentagram ritual—this goes back quite a long way—was that the Golden Dawn one involves a totally ineffective mixing up of traditions, and without respect for any of them. For example, the Hebrew name of God IHVH is meant never to be uttered. The idea is that you can read it or think it but not say it. It is not so much that it is disrespectful to Jewish orthodoxy, though I cannot see why anyone would want to do that, but it is that the Old Testament is absolutely inimical to Egyptian and other ‘foreign gods’, as they are seen from that intensely dualistic point of view. So the Golden Dawn derived rituals are a mish-mash of conflicting elements. They do not work, or if they do, they tend to have a somewhat detrimental influence on the practitioner that is, shall we say, far from being anything spiritual. We have pentagram and hexagram rituals that are workable and effective. The Golden Dawn rituals for these are cumbersome and at times self-contradictory: With the elemental pentagrams of the Golden Dawn if you ‘invoke air’ you ‘banish water’ because the operator moves towards the angle, whereas we start from the angle and this problem is eliminated. I will not enter into the absurdities of the Golden Dawn formularisation of INRI, for example, by applying Hebrew letters, astrological symbols and Egyptian gods—and all this based on a reductionist view of the gods being no more than symbols for natural phenomena, a notion begun by classical Greek scholars and others. Osiris does not symbolise the visible sun in nature, for example. Both the visible sun and Osiris symbolise spiritual principles entirely transcendent of natural cycles. I am not saying that cycles of time are irrelevant, for they play an important part in ancient cosmology. Trouble starts by taking elements from different traditions, not well understood, then mixing them together to try and make them ‘fit’, which is syncretism. There is a word to say on ‘banishing’ rituals, especially as applied to the five elements —the element of spirit or akasha was imported from Hinduism. If we think about it, how can we banish an element? Everything in the universe is composed of these elemental principles as according to the doctrines of West and East. It gets worse if we imagine we are banishing an elemental ‘spirit’ or creature. Where do we think we are sending them? Hell? Or is that the place reserved for the magician—most likely it is! As for the usual excuse that this is somehow purifying the mind, it clearly does nothing of the sort. The way to do that is by long study of sacred scriptures and concentration of the mind so meditation is possible. Tracing geometric forms imaginatively does nothing in that way. You only have to look at how members of the Golden Dawn placed curses on each other, broke their oaths and in all other ways behaved abominably. The profane nonsense continues to this day. As for the rituals of Crowley I don’t want to say too much about that because in nearly all cases he had an agenda rarely if ever suspected by those that use these things. In any case, his rituals are all stand-alone, working on totally different cosmological schemes, so you cannot put them together. I have seen ‘magicians’ do this all the same, and the resulting mess. At best, what happens is that one part of the ritual neutralises the previous part. All of our rituals work by one unified cosmological principle. They are capable of being used together in various ways. They cannot be mixed together though with rituals of Crowley or the Golden Dawn as these are inimical. “What do these developed rituals and practices offer to students seeking a deeper mystical connection?” I have to qualify use of the term ‘mystical’, because that should only apply to religious devotion, usually with a strong emotional element. We do not practice mysticism as such although some of us are more that way inclined by nature than others. Mysticism cannot be learned, taught or practiced. What the rituals and practices offer to students is already latent (or not) within the student and depends on whether they are ready yet for real knowledge. No ritual or practice will do anything by itself. Rituals and practices are sometimes a support to spiritual realisation but the practices should not be confused with the goal. All the same, practice is indispensable and this needs to be kept up for a long time, even through one’s whole life. So we need good practices, yes! **3. Magick as a Sacred Science**: *In your writings, you caution against the “psychologisation” of occultism and describe true magick as a Sacred Science—qualitative and initiatory, very different from the materialistic, experimental approach of profane science. Could you elaborate on this viewpoint? How should a practitioner approach magick as a sacred art or science of the soul, rather than, say, a form of applied psychology or just a set of techniques? Does this perspective change how one practices and experiences ritual and results?* When magick is a sacred science then properly speaking it is theurgy. In some earlier writings I have used magick to include theurgy, which is the ‘practice of God’, or otherwise, about knowing the Real. It is the best use of magick and ritual. A person can do rituals and shout invocations until their ears drop off—invocations should never be shouted—and no initiation takes place and no real knowledge gained. Psychology has no spiritual principle. In psychology, man replaces God or any higher or supra-human intelligence or principle. It rests on humanism not spirituality—the profane science does not reach to that in any way. Psychology leads us around and around in ever-decreasing circles of the mind. Psychology is another word for ‘prison’. Jung even went so far as to put his theories forward as counterfeit initiation and spiritual path, and many occultists fell for the deception totally. Psychological interpretations of magick mean that the person accepting that will never gain the knowledge from which the sacred science depends, and is a dangerous lunatic no matter what letters they string together after their name. Academic qualifications are totally the wrong qualifications for magick and yoga. It doesn’t mean that if you should happen to have obtained a PhD or something of that sort you cannot do a practice at all, but for many persons it makes it much more difficult because they have spent years training their minds to go in the opposite direction from the one that is needed for the sacred sciences. Some can break out of the prison but few actually achieve it. The Tarot neatly provides symbolism of how this is done or not done: We can look at the trumps 15, 16 and 17, the Devil, the Tower and the Star. The trump for seeing through the illusion is called the Tower in most decks and when it is accomplished it leads to the next arcanum, the Star—but most often than not we go running back to the Devil of ignorance. Or it may be, we simply cannot help it, since the conditioning of education and society is on a par with brainwashing. It takes a very special soul to break free. This gets us on to “magick as an art or sacred science of the soul”. That is a nice way to put it but we have to bear in mind that our word ‘soul’ really means a mind attached to a body, so does not reach far. Any science of the soul such as exists in Raja Yoga only acts as a preparation for knowledge, it is not the knowledge itself. In translations, the Sanskrit Atma, ‘Self’, is often mistaken for our vague term ‘soul’, whereas Atma is not within or of the human mentality, or adjunct to it or dependent on it in any way. (So much then for psychology!) Where the sacred science of the soul comes into it is where there is a Journey of the Soul—not a ‘personal journey’, I should add.  There are countless examples in the Egyptian scriptures and other traditions such as the Orphic, Mithraic and Zoroastrianism (or what is called that), and in books I have written concerning practices and rituals. Not least, the Tarot, which in its earliest printed form (*Marseille*) contains much Hermetic or alchemical symbolism. Far too much importance is placed on ritual and ‘results’. Results depend on causality, which is only a seeming explanation for the universe. In reality, there is no causality and no effect. We experience it that way, yes, owing to our limited nature bound in time and space. Doing ritual to get ‘results’ is fatuous. Whenever we say *I want* (something) we are affirming a wanting, a lack, something incomplete. It is to think that a lack can be put right by adding ‘something’ to the lack that is already there. There is an analogy to be made with ordinary atomic theory, where there is valency or bonding—incomplete things getting tied up with other incomplete things, which is a form of vampirism. Results appeal to the mentality of those immersed in a consumer driven culture involving products, brands and the ‘personal story’. **4. Discipline and the Magical Diary**: *Training in Ordo Astri places a lot of emphasis on discipline—for example, new Apprentices choose a magical motto and begin a daily Record of their practices and insights. From your perspective, why is keeping a strict daily magical diary and routine so important for an aspirant? How do the act of journaling, and the monthly review of that work with a mentor aid in a magician’s development? Are there other foundational practices you consider crucial for someone building a strong basis in ceremonial magick?* It is a good question. A new Apprentice does not choose any magical motto. If they pass through the Apprenticeship phase, the equivalent of the old Probationership, then they are either given a fraternal name or they propose one and it is accepted (or not). We stick to the time-honoured method of keeping a diary record. We need the discipline of daily practice and record keeping in this day and age. Why is the keeping of the diary record so important? Truly, a lot of persons nowadays do not think it is important. It is important because spiritual realisation takes hard work and effort for a long time, even with unusually gifted individuals. The record is the best way for us of stabilising and assimilating knowledge, ‘fixing the volatile’. Also we (Order members) never call practitioners ‘magicians’. Do you not agree that sounds rather silly? The first numbered *Marseille Tarot* trump is translated from the French as ‘The Magician’ but *Le Bateleur*, the original title, is more in the way of an illusionist who plays tricks with dice and cups. Then we have to think of all these book-learned occultists who spend their days slaving for the corporation then come home, change into their spooky robe with a hood and tell everyone on social media about the rituals they are going to do. They would not even understand why it is needed to switch off all electronic devices when doing ritual or yoga. As for the rule of Keeping Silence, forget that one! I have even heard of modern day supposed Golden Dawn outfits where people were ‘initiated’ by officers reading the script from their cell phones. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I am told such things, and I have seen pretty awful things at first hand too. ‘Routine’ is not a word that I ever use though; it sounds very dull, like ‘office routine’, or something that is part of ordinary life. There is a vulgar notion of ritual, which thinks it is a ‘routine’ consisting of doing the same thing each day. Anyone who does that is wasting their time and also placing themselves in danger of nidrā, which is the yoga term for total absence of mind or cognition, or general stupefaction. Stupefaction is another yoga term for when the mind is allowed to follow one object after another, and which is also descriptive of the state many people are in most of the time nowadays in ordinary life and when they are ‘surfing the web’. It is also a good part of many persons lives to spend hours a day performing mindlessly repetitive tasks with a computer keyboard and mouse, or phone, and this is in no way alleviated by technologies that pretend to do everything for you, including even thinking. If that attitude is taken to magick and yoga there is no hope at all for such an individual. It may be the same ritual is done each day, outwardly—the same mudras, the same words and the same geometric or other forms, assuming these are used—but even the universe on the gross material level is not the same as it was the day before or even one fraction of a second ago. The mind of the practitioner also is not the same, as everything on the causal level is subject to change. When we go to sleep and dream at night we do not dream the same dreams, although there is something called déjà vu experienced in both sleeping and dreaming states. If a person complains that they have done the same ritual for two months and are bored of it, either they are not suitable for the art or have not yet grasped the inner working, most subtle. And it also requires concentration of the mind to a high degree to get to that. ‘Ceremony’ is a completely outward performance of something. Frequently it is confused with rite and ritual. But ritual, especially a *rite*, does not have to be for a ‘magical’ purpose, whatever that may be. The Golden Dawn did ceremonies, with officers in drawing rooms and hired halls, sometimes in full costume with special furniture. We don’t do anything like that. A simple ‘T’ robe (no spooky hoods please) is all that is required. A person can have an altar or shrine and so forth, fine. At home here we still regularly make use of a Golden Dawn altar cloth with the beautiful red cross and white triangle embroidered on it. It is good symbolism! We also have the banners of the East and West. We don’t need an engineering workshop though, with which to turn out furniture and regalia for theatrical shows. Having said that I know some of our members are very good at that sort of thing and have constructed beautiful equipment. It is not a requirement though. I still have all the swords and sceptres and regalia but I don’t have much use for it now. To get to the real heart of the question: what does daily practice and the keeping of the record, plus the involvement of the guide or teacher, do for the development of the practitioner? Without daily practice there is no foundation, no nothing. The practice has to be the centre of life. It cannot be an adjunct to a ‘lifestyle’, which means living life externally. Why do we keep records? In Ashrams in India, the serious ones, the monks still have to learn great tracts of the scriptures by heart, so they can recite them. In our culture (I am not sure that is really the right word for it) people have lost the ability, and are losing it even more thanks to dependence on cell phones and gadgets, to commit very detailed and subtle things to the memory. Before anything was written down in language, knowledge was passed on by oral transmission. The capacity of a person’s memory was vast compared to what it is now. Keeping the record, in the way we insist, trains the mind and the memory. It is even possible to take a fairly average intellect and see that increased tenfold. Involvement of the guide, teacher? Guru is the better word so long as we strip away from it the degraded meanings it has taken on in the West—it means much more than a ‘teacher’ in Sanskrit. Initiatic transmission is in no way possible without this direct involvement; also how else could anything be taught or learned even in the ordinary way? Self-initiation is an oxymoron, although it has become quite a popular one, no doubt due to the claims that people want to make when they bring out books on magick and the like, and are very anxious to sell as many copies as possible to please their publisher and get ratings and returns. We will come back on this later. ## Yoga **1. Integrating Eastern Traditions**: *In the later phase of your work you’ve turned strongly toward Eastern spiritual science—you’ve said your main interest now is Advaita Vedanta (Non-dualism) and Raja Yoga. What led a Western occultist and Thelemite like you to embrace Advaitan philosophy? How do you integrate the insights of Vedanta and yoga with the Western Hermetic and Thelemic framework of Ordo Astri? Do you find the Eastern non-dual perspective complements the Western magickal path for attaining the true Self?* Once again I must qualify that this St. John here is in no way a ‘Thelemite’. The name was derived from one of the many sections in Crowley’s Book of the Law where he had drifted off into a stupefied trance or otherwise was not paying attention because he had other things on his mind, such as his political agenda. In any case, I do not accept the Book of the Law as being anything that the aforementioned charlatan and black magician claimed for it, and for himself. I would not any longer describe myself as an occultist. Advaita Vedanta is not, strictly speaking, a philosophy, even when some Swamis today call it that. When Swamis or other venerable gentlemen say that, they are fully aware that in India it is called a darshana, which means ‘point of view’. But it is not a point of view in the same way that is meant in Western philosophy, which is all about argument and theory. The Hindu darshanas rest on the authority of the Vedas, unless they are heterodox darshanas (Buddhism, Janism, etc.). The Hermetic Order of the Star and Snake does not have any ‘Thelemic framework’ though; that would be impossible because there is no doctrinal basis in the Book of the Law as might be provided by real scripture. It was mediumistically produced after the way of spiritists and a great deal of it reflects the mind of Crowley and so is completely unacceptable. The rituals and unspeakable practices of Crowley have never been used in the Order; there are no rituals or practices, other than joke ones, in the Book of the Law. We have only ever made use of one ‘Thelemic’ ritual that is a simple hail to Ra four times a day but we rarely make use of it now. In the past we also made use of the *Song of the Stele*, the translated and versified wording from the stele of Ankh-af-na-khonsu, but no longer do so. So how did this St. John here embrace Advaita Vedanta, especially coming as he was from such a dubious occult background? I like the use of the word ‘embrace’; it has a nice ring about it. Whatever people might think about Advaita, it is all about love when you get to know it for real, and that goes for any truly initiatic path. Also, we ought to put Raja Yoga first, because it is older so far as ‘history’ goes and it could be said that Advaita puts the cherry on the top of the yoga cake while not needing the cake absolutely. I got to Raja Yoga first, once I had seen clearly where occultism has taken the world today—that is, towards an accelerated negative dissolution near the end of time. There is no space to go into that here because it is a vast subject but luckily for us René Guénon has done a very thorough and extensive piece of work: *Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion*. It is a big book and although factual, not metaphysical like his other works, it will require that the occultist—soon not to be one—switches off their cell phone and computer for a week or so and devotes all their time to the project. Also to understand more fully this point of view you have to read Guénon’s master work *The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Time*s, and then possibly all of my metaphysical works since 2020. I made an in-depth study and practice of Raja Yoga so as to use a truly traditional method of preparing for spiritual knowledge and realisation, not something stolen from tradition, robbed of its principle and ‘re-invented’ by occultists. Advaita Non-dualism is called the ‘top’ or summit but it is really the basis of everything. Once Non-dualism is realised it is the key to all other traditions. By this is meant real traditions, not something cooked up in the parlours of late nineteenth century renegade Masons or even something invented in the 1950s as with some neo-paganism. The last part of the question is complex and I will need to take out from it the terms I have rejected and then repeat the bones of it: “How do you integrate the insights of Vedanta and yoga with the Western Hermetic ... framework of Ordo Astri? Do you find the Eastern non-dual perspective complements the Western magickal [*sic*] path for attaining the true Self?” It is worth mentioning, regards ‘framework’, that we have a three-degree framework or basis: first, second and third. These are based on real or actual progress in yoga: dharana, dhyana and samadhi (the goal). Advaita Vedanta is easily used to explain Hermeticism further but to do that ‘in a nutshell’ is more than can be done here. My two books, *Thunder Perfect Gnosis—Intellectual Flower of Mind* and *Metamorphosis—Hermetic Science and Yoga Power*, are each divided into two sections. The first is on Hermetic sources and the second on Raja Yoga. The first section of each demonstrates, across diverse topics, how Hermeticism can have the ‘cap put back on it’, because in general, Hermeticism has been limited, through the limited capacity of commentators, to theistic and so dualistic aims. Or, as something that is purely cosmological and reaches no further. I have set out to show that Non-dualism is the root of all ancient traditions and is implicit in many sacred texts, including Christianity, especially St. John’s Revelation, but was not written about discursively until Adi Shankaracharya came along, around the fourteenth century AD. The noun magick can be spelled with a ‘k’ but it is superfluous to spell the adjective with a ‘k’. ‘Magical’ is good enough, though we should always think, to remind ourselves, what on earth does a ‘magical path’ really mean? Is it, whatever it is, particularly luminous or would ‘glamorous’ be the better term? ‘Path’ infers ‘spiritual’ but something based on *use* cannot be that.  Magick in any case cannot possibly be a means for attaining the true Self, which is Atma or Brahma to use the exact Sanskrit terms. Also, this true Self, Atma, cannot be ‘attained’. This is easy to explain: If magick rests on cause and effect, then all we are doing is playing around with objects of the mind. That means we are going in the exact reverse direction needed to return to the true Self, Atma. Theurgy is a means to the knowledge (or gnosis) of God. Advaita goes one step further, or even two. So to put this neatly: Advaita does not complement magick it destroys it—and the magician! **2. “Egyptian Yoga”—East meets West**: *Ordo Astri’s advanced practices involve Raja Yoga combined with devotional magick—specifically, “devotion to an Egyptian deity” alongside the classic limbs of concentration, meditation and discrimination leading to jnana (knowledge). Could you describe what this fusion looks like in practice? How does one perform Raja Yoga in devotion to, say, an Egyptian neter (deity)? Is this what you refer to as Egyptian Yoga, and in what ways does it enhance or differ from the more commonly known forms of yoga?* Excellent question! I am surprised more people have not asked me some of these questions. What every seeker should know, and so forth. I am a bit lost though, I must admit, as to think on what such a fusion “looks like in practice”. I think this hesitation is because a fusion is like jazz-rock, where jazz becomes much louder and more about individual high velocity (and high profile) attack on an instrument (and audience) as opposed to the more traditional ‘playing music together’. Or that sort of neo-classical minimalist approach used by certain composers for films, where it becomes much more obviously repetitious as well as louder and with almost no dynamics. In both cases, something is lost in the mix, or fusion, and the first thing that goes out of the window is subtlety. All the same, it is a fair attempt at description especially when I find myself slightly perplexed as to know how to do that. Here we go: I doubt if I ever said ‘devotional magick’, because that amounts to an oxymoron. But we include bhakti or devotion in practices. It is not treated as separate from the rest. Actually, devotion is already teamed up, so to speak, with the Eight Limbs of Yoga in the *Yoga-Sutras*, so no one had to invent or change anything there. In the *Yoga-Sutras*, bhakti is called Ishvara Pranidhana or ‘devotion (self surrender) to God’—and God can also be Shakti, the form of the feminine power behind the universe. We prefer the Shakti, though not exclusively, so you could have added to that there is a strongly tantrik element in the ways of the Hermetic Order, certainly at the core of it, in the engine room so to speak. This is quite orthodox although tantrik practices can be, if not heterodox, surprising—even to Indian natives sometimes let alone modern Westerners. What about jnana (knowledge) yoga, which is usually thought of as separate from bhakti and yoga? Well, it should be made clear then that though these might sometimes be treated separately in some Ashrams and so forth, it is not unusual that they be treated as one, and combined into one practice—there are certain Hindu lineages in India, America and Europe where this is advocated and recommended. Advaita in any case borrowed in elements from Ashtanga Yoga, and Adi Shankaracharya wrote beautiful hymns to the Goddess—from an Advaitan basis, so we are not in any way reinventing the wheel here. The more detailed ‘under the microscope’ part of the question concerns what is called Egyptian Yoga and how can devotion to an Egyptian deity be part of an Ashtanga Yoga practice. I will start by confessing, even at risk of enraging some people, how we do this in the Order is not published in any book and is given to practitioners privately. What is presented in the book, *Enterer of the Threshold*, is indeed a fusion as it involves use of the sephiroth of the Tree of Life. It was no less than René Guénon himself who affirmed for us a method of combining the sephiroth of the Tree of Life with the Laya Yoga chakras that we had used for a long time. How surprised we were when we read Guénon’s *Studies in Hinduism *for the first time and saw that he had worked out exactly the same schema in his chapter on John Woodroffe’s *Serpent Power*. We had to ‘work it out’ in the first place because we came to see that the popular Middle Pillar Exercise is ineffective; it confuses the chakras. We do not mix the Hebrew names with this, as that is unnecessary. For the entered members there exists a yoga that is purely Egyptian; there is no need to bring in any Hebraic terms or the Tree of Life model. Now, this still does not answer how can this ‘fit’ without any sense of fusion, with a Raja Yoga or even Advaitan approach? It did not have to be made to fit because there is a primordial tradition, from which all other traditions are different forms, different suits of clothing on the same truth. That brings us to ‘how do we bring devotion into it’? For members of the Order we have something called the Ritual of Light. This involves Egyptian deities: Neith, Nebhet, Iset, Heru and Ra. This prepares the person, builds the circle, the four quarters, and the subtle body or Ka. We can then take up seated posture, pranayama (no holding nostrils or counting), concentration and meditation. The method of placing the chosen deity in the heart lotus is favoured, and it is given in the *Yoga-Sutras*. The same symbolism exists, of course, in ancient Egyptian texts and hieroglyphs. Tantrik yoga is among the oldest of darshanas in India and there is clear evidence that yoga, including the Kundalini Shakti variety, was in use in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago. There is an authentic Egyptian chakra model and our translation of Egyptian texts indicates that the Journey of the Soul, that is implicit in all yoga, is there. There are times, especially in the present Age of Obscurity, where the rediscovery of tradition previously unknown or forgotten is valid. **3. Meditation and Theurgy**: *Traditional Western orders often treated meditation as separate from ritual, but you insist that “meditation is integral to operative theurgy” rather than a mere adjunct. How is meditative practice incorporated into your magickal curriculum? For example, do you require aspirants to practice asana (posture) and dharana (one-pointed concentration) daily alongside their ceremonial work? And have you observed that developing skills like meditation and mindfulness significantly improves one’s effectiveness in ritual and self-transformation?* Any organisation with a ‘magical curriculum’ is not traditional. We do not have such a curriculum in use in the Order, and have not used such a thing for a long time. But what you said was that we insist, “meditation is integral to operative theurgy”. That is a major point. I have already said it but will say it again that our practitioners do ritual but not ceremonial magick. —We have never practiced or encouraged Buddhistic ‘mindfulness’, which is a degradation of the real doctrine of vigilance that was put about by psychotherapists. Lately it seems to have been implanted in people’s minds by the power of hypnotic suggestion because it keeps cropping up in the context of meditation even though it has nothing to do with that. The mindfulness programme is lately approved of and even funded by governments and corporations—because of course anything that encourages people to become mindless, obedient slaves helps the flow of the economy. I have already explained the error implicit in ‘self-transformation’. Then the only thing that needs pointing out is that thinking yoga can improve one’s effectiveness in ritual, as if that was the main point, is putting it the wrong way round. Ritual should act as a support to yoga meditation. At the same time, you are not wrong because one cannot do ritual properly unless the concentration of mind as developed in yoga is brought to a very high level! You see, and especially for the benefit of those who have learned magick from books alone, or from other people that have only got it from books—in which case it undergoes gross degradation across generations like ‘Chinese whispers’—it is easy to gain the impression that ritual is only about doing physical actions and saying or chanting the ‘correct’ words of power. At best, you might gain the impression that a lot of imagination is used in tracing pentagrams and the like, as most books will add that you are supposed to ‘see’ these things. All that is a tiny fraction of what ritual should really involve. Its operation is as subtle as the alchemical Stone of the Wise. Over the years I have noticed that with the general shift from complex language to simple ‘messages’ and crude images, and the corresponding decline of real intelligence, many students place far too much emphasis on ‘visualisation’. They think the whole point of magick or ritual is to construct a sort of virtual reality in their imagining. Even if they can do that, it counts for zero to nothing and is a complete waste of their time. It might be worse than that, because it is leading them in the wrong direction altogether.   It is not that important to be really exact when images are needed, unless we are using a symbol for the concentration of mind such as a tattva-bhuta. But those are traditional and owing to the use they were always intended for they are very simple. A tattva of tejas is a red triangle and that is it. The Golden Dawn in some cases, notably that of Felkin who developed the Whare Ra Temple in New Zealand (from 1912), took visualisation to an incredible extreme, and gave to it vastly exaggerated importance. Curiously, that kind of approach was more modern even than the time in which it was done, so that systems analysts have studied it since about the late 1980s or early 1990s in minute detail. It has made engineering scientists very happy in their engrossment no doubt but none of these have any real knowledge. It is not at all and not in any way like putting an electrical circuit together, as I was told by a very early mentor (by which I spent five years working the Tree of Life through study and meditations day and night). There can be some analogies made but the purpose of analogy is to point to something other; the idea is not to extend the analogy, though it happens all the time. We do expect practitioners to do Ashtanga Yoga on a daily basis, of which the last five steps but one are seated posture, breath, withdrawal of the mind from sense objects, concentration and meditation. Samadhi, the last step, is the goal itself. Ritual is to support all of that. The first two limbs, abstentions and observances, not very popular today, are the two legs we stand on. **4. Yoga and Supernormal Powers**: *In your book Metamorphosis—Hermetic Science and Yoga Power, you explore the higher limbs of Patanjali’s Raja Yoga and even discuss the siddhis—the “Supernormal Powers” like knowing the thoughts of others, knowledge of past lives, invisibility, etc. How do you view these legendary yogic powers in the context of the Great Work? Are they goals to pursue, signs of progress, or perhaps distractions on the path? Have you or your students witnessed examples of such phenomena in your practice, and how should aspirants handle them if they arise?* The book referred to has two sections. The first is devoted to traditional and modern Hermeticism, explained from an Advaitan basis, while the second completes the work on Patañjali or Ashtanga Yoga that began with the previous book, *Thunder Perfect Gnosis—Intellectual Flower of Mind*. Some of the writing on yoga in *Metamorphosis* is very advanced and takes an ‘extension of the intellect’, which is needed in any case. The siddhis or magical powers as known in the West, in an altered form, are embedded in the *Yoga-Sutras*, though with all the usual caveats. The siddhis are not the high level of yoga by a long chalk but in my book I explore the high level before going to the siddhis, so there is some chance of understanding the principles that are involved. They are never intended to be something to pursue for their own sake and in any case, very few persons nowadays would be capable of the level of concentration needed to do so. In regard to the Great Work or goal of yoga, it is important to know something about them—indeed as much as possible—because these powers tend to arise in some way whether they are wanted or not, along with certain stages of development. They come about spontaneously with yoga practices. So what can happen is that a person ignorant of them can nonetheless find they are becoming active in some way. They might be completely caught out by this and worse, might even not recognise what it is that is causing mayhem! So yes indeed they do have a use as a sort of measurement of progress, in so far as they make it easy for the guru to recognise exactly what is happening with the sadhaka. And of course we have seen such powers. In my case, I have even made use of them sometimes—we have been doing this a long time. The problem with ‘phenomena’ is that that was a major preoccupation with occultists and has been for more than a century. It goes alongside of Western materialism and scientism. Having an interest in phenomena of any kind proves spiritual immaturity and, in these times where isolationism and infantilism are the characteristics of the age (vices, technically), we have to put warning signs around that. Finally, I have indicated above that few people today might even have the concentration needed to gain any kind of mastery. That does not mean that some of the siddhis might not intrude or show their presence if they take up a serious practice and keep at it for long enough. To illustrate clearly what I am meaning here, anyone that is qualified to teach the Raja Yoga meditation knows how difficult it is for the students to even get as far as realising the pure I-sense, which is above the mentality but nowhere near the Atma. It is still the ego as ahankara. Mostly, when we use the term ‘ego’ we do not mean the ahankara at all, we refer to thoughts and feelings. That has nothing to do with what is meant by pure I-sense. We must take it as read that realisation of the I-sense in the lesser degrees of samadhi is difficult for most people to get to and takes a huge effort. Then consider that most of the yoga powers described in the *Yoga-Sutras* require that the yogin has advanced beyond that level and it is easy for them to have direct contact with the boddhi, which is only one or two steps removed from paramatma. It is through the boddhi, which we can only translate as ‘higher intellect’, and have that misunderstood as a consequence of the failure of our language when it comes to spiritual science, that knowledge of other worlds, especially the supra-human ones, can be known. > A true mantra is a gift from the guru… she is the Intelligible Light, and through that it is possible to know something of the Great Mind, which is total knowledge. > > Oliver St John ## Mantra **1. The Role of Mantra in Initiation**: *Mantra is clearly a key element of your teachings. You’ve written that mantra is “extremely important in all initiatic traditions” as the primary means of conveying diksha (initiation), and the Sanskrit term itself can mean “consecration,” “preparation,” or even “new vision.” In your experience, what makes the practice of mantra so foundational for spiritual work? How does receiving a sacred mantra in a lineage context differ from casually picking a mantra out of a book? And on a personal note, how has regular mantra practice influenced your own consciousness and progress on the path?* We first need to clear away the idea, which is prevalent generally, that a mantra is a word or phrase that is repeated very quickly, without a break. It is used like that sometimes but not by us. When it is used like that it is really a very junior use of mantra, because the only reason for that is to stop the thoughts by placing the mantra there continuously in the mind. In other words, it is for those who have no control over their own mind! Also, saying the mantra aloud is only useful for commencing yoga practice, but the best use of it is silently, internally. Repeating something like a parrot will not do anything. Also, you have to understand the meaning of it very well and this has to be brought to mind along with the vibration of the mantra. The mantra is used traditionally for conveying initiation (diksha) but that is no guarantee that initiation takes hold. It is used for conveying a lineage, for example especially in the case of a guru giving it to a sannyasin. Even then, sometimes a veritable Swami can go wayward and deviate the teaching—it is not completely unheard of even in orthodoxy. The reason mantra is so foundational is that it involves transmission, which is what initiation is. So, a person might well pick a mantra from a book they are studying and put that to some effective use, depending on their innate ability, but it will not convey initiation for obvious reasons. Also, a mantra cannot be something that is ‘made up’. How has mantra influenced my own consciousness? When I use the word ‘consciousness’ I mean Atma-Brahma, One without a second, and that is not influenced or changed by anything. What you mean is, has it influenced my mind or thoughts? Yes, because a true mantra is a gift from the guru, and we have to bear in mind, as with siddhis, all this belongs to the Shaktimaya, the supreme cosmic power, and she is also the great Guru of all gurus. She is the Intelligible Light, and through that it is possible to know something of the Great Mind, which is total knowledge. This is no small thing. I began with a mantra before I did anything else, before I had any real knowledge and hardly any ordinary knowledge of Hermetics or yoga. I was very young but it was the right mantram and while I cannot of course say what it is, I can say that the meaning of it is more or less cognate with the sutratma. I chanted it day and night for years. You have to be very determined in all this. **2. Readiness and Worthiness**: *You note that the question of diksha (mantra initiation) can be contentious. Often newcomers are eager to receive a mantra once they learn of its importance, but you warn that such impatience “is a clear indication of unworthiness” and that if a person isn’t truly prepared, the initiation may be given but “they would not have received it.” Why is the state of readiness so critical when it comes to mantras and initiation? Based on your observations, what qualities or preparations does a student need before a mantra can genuinely take root and begin to transmit spiritual influence?* Sometimes a ‘newcomer’ can be someone that worked for a year or two and seems to have studied the right material but there is something not right about it. It is fine to request diksha at any time. But if they start to pester for diksha because they have heard about it from somewhere that is a sure sign they are not qualified or are spiritually immature (or both). When something can be given but not ‘received’ there is a ready analogy with the ordinary reading and study of books. I have often—it does happen more frequently than it should—had someone that says they have read my book, or are studying it (which is better) and then ask me a question that has completely twisted the words to mean the opposite of what was intended! In that case, as with a class or seminar or something like that, the person was *here* but they did not *hear*. They *read* it but it was *dead* in their mind as soon it went there. This is an ancient thing. There is a parable in the Bible about casting seeds upon stony ground, in the sayings of Jesus. Even the greatest of masters can have a problem with this! With these qualities and preparations, the qualities are not learned, they are latent within the person and were there at birth, even before that. The preparations really mean solid study and a good deal of thought put into all the material. The practice has to come first before all other things. Such persons as can do that are very rare but they do exist. **3. Transmission and the Guru’s Role**:* In the Ordo Astri teachings, you make a firm point that self-initiation is “an oxymoron arising from sheer ignorance”—true initiation must be transmitted from one who possesses real knowledge or authority in an initiatic lineage. At the highest level, diksha is described as guru darshana, where the guru’s state of samadhi is directly transferred to the student, at least briefly. In an age when many attempt to go it alone on solitary occult paths, could you elaborate on the importance of genuine guru–disciple relationships? Have you yourself experienced or facilitated this kind of direct transmission, and what does it feel like or result in for the aspirant?* When people talk about ‘self-initiation’ they do not know what they are talking about—that is, they do not know what it actually means and have probably confused the spiritual with the psychic. There are books that claim to be about self-initiation. I have met the co-authors of one of those books, a very popular one, and they are very nice people. Sincerity, unfortunately, counts for nothing here. I have experienced and facilitated this kind of transmission frequently. I do it all the time; it is perfectly natural. I have to say that what it feels like would be irrelevant or even unknowable as feelings and emotions are an adjunct of the mind and are also very temporary, whereas the subject is not about any of that and is real and forever. It will not turn the Moon red unless there happens to be an eclipse. It does not make the Sun go from west to east instead of east to west. When you wake up next morning people will still be driving their cars to work and taking their kids to school. We can look at it symbolically: The letter ‘H’ provides a good symbolism, and happens to to be the first letter of Hierophant, ‘way shower’. The two vertical axes can be more than one individuality depending from the supreme principle. That cannot be separate or plural but if we imagine this on a globe or sphere, then all the lines of latitude meet at the pole. The horizontal bar is then the tradition in time, which as humans we are bound to see as a linear sequence owing from some distant origin to some unknown point in the future. The initiator is the ‘H’, and so we can say they must be linked to tradition, the horizontal reaching across time and space, and to the supreme or metaphysical reality, the source of all without beginning or end. In that way the horizontal axis is marked by individuals that make up an initiatic ‘chain’. It is at the place where the two axes meet that is the ‘centre’, and we could call that an initiatic centre. This is why the symbolism of initiation tends to depict some kind of labyrinth leading to a centre, as according to various traditions. **4. Mantra as Living Power**: *You’ve explained that a real mantra is not simply an arbitrary word or phrase—often it might be a well-known verse or name of a deity—and that its efficacy lies in how it is given with power by the teacher. The mantra carries the “power of transmission” from the guru, along with instructions tailored to the individual, and often is connected to a particular deity (Ishta Devata) for that practitioner. Can you shed more light on what makes a mantra “come alive” for someone? How does the connection to a chosen deity figure into mantra practice in Ordo Astri, and what is the significance of that personal divine relationship in the journey toward enlightenment?* I have heard some persons saying a mantram could be any word at all, even something stupid and meaningless, in which case their understanding is at the level of infancy. We have a tutelary Shakti deity with the Order members and we actively encourage all to follow that. It is not like everyone can have their own little god in their pocket, or that silly notion of a Holy Guardian Angel like a fairy godmother that helps you to help yourself to more sweeties (candy or cookies) than is good for you. It is not an absolute written in stone rule of thumb because as you will know, Egyptian deities can have many aspects, names and forms. All names and forms are qualities of the supreme Ra (Brahma). How does the mantra ‘come alive’ for someone is a very interesting question because it leads back to the ‘someone’—the real subject. If that someone is truly alive then the mantra is as alive as they are. It could be put like this: everyone has something called prana, or they would not be alive. Even ants and mosquitos have prana. But how many people know they have prana? They know that they breathe but that is not prana, only the most outward or gross level manifestation of it. The ‘chosen deity’ and the mantra are one and the same, so this is how it figures. We have to be very, very careful when we get on to the significance of that ‘personal divine relationship in the journey towards enlightenment’. Confusion often arises because in the *Sutras*, Ishvara the Lord (or ‘God’ in our very imprecise terminology) is called the Personal God. That does not mean that God is personal; it means that inevitably we experience God ‘personally’. That taken, it stands to reason that as this experiencing goes through the changes in time that we are subject to as individualities, something of a ‘journey’ will come into it. Anyone who mistakes that for a ‘personal journey’ has entirely the wrong idea though. Such journeys are set down in the Tantras, the rites and practices, the Egyptian sacred texts wrongly called ‘Book of the Dead’ (the title was afforded it by some who fitted that description, not the text) and many others no doubt. Through life we might experience all of it, in a way, in one moment but over time it deepens and so there are recognisable stages and it is a wonder and a joy to behold even when years have passed. It deepens and goes on deepening. There is also one further objection to the language used by everyone in this very technical context, because a ‘journey to enlightenment’ assumes that the person and enlightenment are two separate things, which is dualistic. In which case, that is fine so long as we know we are placing our self within a causal universe and are involved with multiplicity if we think of it like that. ## Published Books and Teachings ** 1. Expansive Body of Work**: *You’ve authored more than twenty books spanning Hermetic Qabalah, Thelema, Magick, Gnosticism, Yoga, and more. For readers at Perseus looking to dive into your writings, is there a particular book you often recommend starting with? Which of your works do you feel best captures the essence of your philosophy or the scope of Ordo Astri’s teachings? And on a personal level, which topics or projects are inspiring you the most right now as an author and teacher?* I don’t have a philosophy; in Hinduism if someone wants to put forward a new darshana school of thought they have to produce a commentary on the *Brahma-Sutras*, which is vast. That keeps them quiet for a few years at least. As philosophy, that word only applies to individuals like Kant, Leibniz and so forth who self-invent theories in competition with others like them. We could say I am a revisionist. In so far as a lot of our discussion has been around occultism and magick since the last century or more, I am a radical revisionist. I recommend all the metaphysical works I have published since 2020: *Nu Hermetica*; *Way of Knowledge*; *Thunder Perfect Gnosis*; *Thirty-two paths of Wisdom* and *Metamorphosis—Hermetic Science and Yoga Power*. In particular, to anyone coming to this for the first time then the last two on that list could be considered as two volumes of one work that I give my best recommendation to. If you study those you get a good idea of the direction of the Hermetic Order and some of the core material such as the Gnostic oracle *Thunder Perfect Mind* and our commentary on that. That will also expand the reach of vision a little bit when it comes to aspirants that have only read books on ‘modern magick’ previously. There is also a series of podcasts on YouTube called *Metaphysics of the Real*. Here is a link to that: https://www.youtube.com/c/OliverStJohn https://youtu.be/Yp6wloneF5c?si=ZUOIBFGKhxXRy-u9 I am also planning a podcast series devoted to 22 lectures and meditations on the major trumps of *Egyptian Tarot and Guidebook*, to be released in the near future by Crossed Crow Books, Chicago. The podcast will be on the same channel with the title ‘Egyptian Tarot Revealed’ or something like that. The podcast will be quite different from the content of the *Guidebook* as these lectures will be edited from what were originally private seminars for the Order members; each includes a comment on the old *Marseille Tarot *trump equivalent as it is the most important of all Tarot decks and the first printed, from woodcuts. Now then these readers at Perseus, we care a great deal about them! As an aside, the aspect of Perseus I really like the most is when he was saviour to poor Andromeda chained to the rock and waiting for the dread sea monster to come and gobble her up. He happened to be passing by on his flying horse and he fell in love with her instantly. The best bit is when at the subsequent wedding the evil uncle Phineas claims her as his bride. Perseus smartly solves the problem by fetching the Medusa’s fearsome head and turns him to stone. Fantastic! There is a really interesting detail in that Andromeda subsequently bore six sons and one daughter, which makes us think of the Seal of Solomon and the Tarot trumps among other things. Which topics and projects inspire me most right now as author and teacher? A nice question. Well, I am writing the next book called *Magick Here and Now*, and that will include the 22 Tarot explorations in an edited form. Also I am right here and now meditating every day on one of the major arcana trumps from the same Tarot, as I have to do the meditation before I can know what it will be and write it up for other people. Sometimes this takes more than a day and sometimes it can go on all night too.  ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Yantra-300x262-1.png)Image Credit: https://www.ordoastri.org/ **2.** ***Advaita Vedanta—Question of the Real*: Use of Yantras**: *You have one section on Yantra Yoga and though this is talked about in various circles it never usually goes further than trying to recreate the image in the darkness or on a white background, etc. You say:* > The purpose of this is to meditate, using the bindu in the centre as the focal point. Such a yantra should preferably be hand drawn and painted by the sadhaka. While it can be meditated on externally, as with the mantra it is best when it is transferred to the subtle sense of vision in the first instance. After that, depending on the skill of the operator, the image itself is lost and the real knowledge of the symbol is known directly. > Another form of yantra is the image of the Ishta Devata. This is used in combination with the bija mantra. Traditionally, the idea is to build the image of the deity imaginatively in as much detail as possible. In practice, some are better at this than others, and in fact it is not really essential, especially as the idea is not to stay with the imagination; ideally, the created ‘picture’ is replaced by the vision of the deity, which is not at all the same thing as imagining it. Although it is not in any way a supreme realisation or something of that order, there are ‘degrees’ or levels of reality and the vision is of a higher order generally than mere visualisation. This practice is also part of what is called Ishvara Pranidhāna in the Yoga-Sutras. *Could you explain when you say, the image is transferred to the subtle sense of vision, would this mean there is an effortless appearance of the image so instead of trying to imaginatively create it, it simply appears?* *Then you say there is a knowing after this and it is dependent on the skill of the operator. What variables in the operator impact this process and what is actually occurring? Is this some kind of transference?* The quotation is from ‘Mantra and Yantra’, *Advaita Vedanta—Question of the Real*. This is not about Non-dualism of course and is actually to do with Raja Yoga, but in the book I included some practical aspects of meditation. Advaita Vedanta in no way rejects the use of practices from the Yoga school to help prepare the mind for realisation. It also encourages the use of bhakti or devotional methods, for the same reason. We are getting right into the practical aspects of the use of yantras or sacred images here: When images are frequently used in ritual that sets up an impression in the mind that is easily called forth. In that way, it seems as though an image appears effortlessly. In yoga meditation with yantras that might happen but it is of no consequence because the goal of yoga is to unite the subject (you) with any object of mind so there is no difference—which is how it really is because all things, creatures, objects whatsoever appear in the mind. Although it is a slight digression it falls into the general field of questions here to mention something about the use of ‘astral shells’ in occultism: you will probably know that in the Golden Dawn and related offshoots there is a very large emphasis on so-called inner teaching—which is nothing of the sort because it rests on psychic imagining—regarding the deliberate creation of ‘thought forms’. Most particularly, in rituals the officers are supposed to use will and imagination to build up forms of (usually) Egyptian gods, using colour correspondences. The idea is that these subtle (‘astral’) world cartoon caricatures of gods are linked to the officers by a sort of ray of light, and can convey a spiritual influence. There are detailed techniques, borrowed to a certain extent from the Hindu doctrines but without comprehension, of projecting a ray from the Tiphereth (heart centre) using imagined white light and breath (prana) to facilitate this. Then, so as not to leave the place littered with astral shells that might become animated like zombies by some inferior force and go around creating havoc, afterwards these are supposed to be carefully withdrawn or reabsorbed into the astrosome (or subtle body) of the Hierophant. The only trouble is that no spiritual influence is generated from the psychic level! All the methods of projection and withdrawal are totally unnecessary in any case as we can do the same thing effortlessly every night when we dream. The one thing certain is that no spiritual influence is ever generated, as that would be impossible; practitioners remain unregenerate in every way. To continue with the traditional use of images for a spiritual purpose: The mind has no light (consciousness) of its own. This is borrowed, as it were, from the source of all consciousness, which is Atma, the One without a second. In yoga this principle is usually called Purusha but it means the same thing. Now in this transference of a yantra, seen with the physical eyes, to the subtle sense of vision which is the *inner* sense of vision—no different than what we use in dreaming, for example or imagining anything—the eyes are kept closed, as in all yoga meditation. The eyes do not see; in fact, they are the instruments of seeing. As with a camera, the camera does not see and it does not have consciousness; it is an instrument. In yoga there are five physical senses and five subtle senses, by which the universe is perceptible or knowable by the mind. For any object to exist it must have knowability, it must be cognised. In that way, the object and the knowledge of an object are one, and within perception. We need to make sure we know the difference between the mind and its contents, thoughts, cognitions, and the consciousness itself, which is Atma. In fact, the mind is really only a sort of container for objects or cognitions. The mind is like a mirror for the light of consciousness—consciousness is not produced by the mind, or even, as neuroscientists want us to believe, by the brain. Neither psychology nor neuroscience schools recognise consciousness as independent from mind or thought; they have no idea what consciousness is because it is non-physical, non-perceptible, and does not depend on any physical thing for its existence. While the mind is a mirror, in the ordinary case it is turned down upon its own projections; the ego tends, by its own nature, towards making personal identification with all that, which is called ‘attachment’ in yoga. So going back to the question asked, we need to know what the purpose is of using yantras in yoga: The purpose of all yoga, or at least the first part of it, is to realise the true Self as quite apart from mind and body—mind and body are objects, cognised in the mind through the five senses. So there is no particular use in yoga for an object such as a yantra to appear spontaneously or not. Usually, it does take a great deal of effort, in any case, to hold an image steadily in the mind like an unwavering flame. The purpose of that is to develop concentration; there is nothing of any spiritual nature in such a practice. Concentration is needed for real meditation (dhyana). The second part of the question was about knowledge of an object. This is very particular to Patañjali Yoga. We need to make sure of what I actually wrote in the book: “After that, depending on the skill of the operator, the image itself is lost and the real knowledge of the symbol is known directly.” This has nothing to do with transference of anything. This needs explaining: The image is only held in the minds eye for the purpose of developing the one-pointed concentration in yoga. All other thoughts and impressions are excluded. When this can be done for long enough and the mind is kept still and the thoughts silenced, apart from that one thought, it will be perceived that the breath (prana) and imagination (fire) bring forth effulgence, by which further concentration and meditation is helped. Then the symbol or object, whatever it might be, is dropped, cast aside—we don’t need it any more now. The idea is nonetheless retained in the background of the mind, as meditation is not about ‘going blank’, which is called nidrā and is one of the worst obstacles to yoga. Nidrā is non-cognition. When this further and deeper engrossment is maintained, called nirvichara, there is true knowledge of any thing whatsoever. It should be mentioned though that this knowledge, by which is not meant any ordinary knowledge, let alone ‘information’ which is so often confused with knowledge these days, only comes about with long practice. This is not something anyone can just practice in their home a few times and acquire some special knowledge—if they think they get that they are only indulging in a sort of flattering self-hypnosis. I can provide a clue: the knowledge of an object is ultimately knowledge of the Self, reflected through the mirror of the mind—I use the word ‘mind’ here in the broadest sense of including more than thoughts or cognitions. We don’t have a word for it but it is boddhi in Sanskrit. To receive the ray from the boddhi we need to make the mirror of mind absolutely clear and clean. What remains is then called the I-sense, which does not involve thoughts. It can be called pure self-awareness. ‘Variables in the operator’ are confined to mind and cognitions and this is to be brought under control before meditation is even possible. We all have differing minds and cognitions, which is why we think we are different to one another and can see that difference clearly. Feeling and emotion is also part of what is adjunct to the mentality, which everyone has and uses all the time, though ignorance causes us to suppose this makes us different. What we are really interested in is Atma, though, the true Self, infinite, changeless and without birth or death and not subject to growth or decay: There is no difference at all between ‘my’ Atma and ‘your’ Atma. Think of it as a lot of pots filled with water—these are individualities. The surface of water in each pot reflects the one sun (consciousness), and it can reflect it in different ways. But the sun does not change and it is not plural, it is one. The pots all have this little image of the sun on the surface of their water (mind). This leads us to believe the egoistic assertion that we are unique and distinctly different from all else. We differ, but only at the level of body and mind; body and mind have no absolute reality as their existence depends on other things. They have relative but not absolute reality. In that way, the life we think to be ‘real’ because we experience it in the waking state is not so very different from what we experience when dreaming. All of it changes and comes and goes, passing away in time. Anyone can verify this by applying it to their own ordinary experience. It is not special knowledge in itself. **3. The Flaming Sword Encyclopaedia**: *One of your remarkable contributions is The Flaming Sword Sepher Sephiroth, an exhaustive two-volume compendium of occult correspondences and gematria, spanning over 1,000 pages. This is a massive scholarly work—what inspired you to undertake this project? How do you suggest students of the occult make use of such a resource? Some might find gematria tables and Kameas daunting; in what ways can a modern magician or Qabalist work with The Flaming Sword to deepen their practice or insight into texts like Liber AL?* Thank you for those kind words. Over the years, since my earliest beginning, I began to compile a personal Sepher Sephiroth for my own use. It grew and grew and eventually, by the time I spent another three years preparing it for publication, it had become an encyclopaedia and occult compendium. More recently I have worked on a thorough revision on the first volume and I am still engaged in going through the second. This is not to say no research was involved even if a lot of it was initially committed to memory. Chiefly, it needed extensive Bible and scriptural research on the Hebrew words from the Old Testament and elsewhere, and the Greek words from the New Testament and elsewhere. When it came to something like Enochian or even ancient Egyptian, I took most of that from my notebooks. So the inspiration was already there from my interest in the subject, and practice of it, over a long time. Occult students (or even those who wish to take it much further than that) who can make use of this book were far more numerous at the time I started it all in notebooks; that was before the Internet swallowed everything up, including people’s social lives and minds, and turned it into ‘information’, which is not at all the same as knowledge. The book is all about language of course, and even etymology, which is often far more revealing than the number side of it. All the same for those who can make use of this, tables for the most part only take up the front matter of the first volume. Tabulated knowledge is something of a problem in occultism, because it does not convey any real knowledge and tends to lead our minds in the wrong direction when it comes to subtle metaphysics. But tables are needed for something like this otherwise you could not make it work. Tables are the junior school approach to anything—so anyone that has a problem with tables and alphabets is not equipped to deal with this. The Kameas are astonishing in the way they are worked out, but while it is recommended that we know how to do that it is not a requirement for making use of this book. In that way, the Kameas and their associated seals and sigils are ‘ready made’. It is getting on the inside of things like that though that makes it possible to do real magick. Without understanding, it is nothing at all. So much of talismanic magick depends on these names and figures drawn from the Kameas. Copying them blindly from a book without comprehension is no use at all. Even magick is not for lazy people that want everything on the click of a mouse and have not yet learned how to think—or, are not prepared to learn how to do that, because a book like this can help you learn to think in a different way. If a person is a Qabalist they will already know how to use this book otherwise they are not a Qabalist. With Liber AL vel Legis, there is not nearly so much of that as there was in the first edition; I retained only what is essential. I removed the ravings of the orientalist Kenneth Grant and used that to demonstrate how he deceived people in another book, a serious book on Qabalah called *Thirty-two paths of Wisdom*. Also, it is worth mentioning here that while I did not want to say anything more about Crowley, having said more than enough, I have read everything he ever wrote, published and unpublished, including rituals that are still kept secret to this day. It is impossible to understand most of his writings and what he was driving at without good knowledge of Gematria and all the Golden Dawn correspondences—he was good at that sort of thing. Most of his followers do not have a single clue as to what he was really on about. When you are able to decode it you might change your mind as to whether you think he is so important and interesting as is made out. (In fact, the notion of Crowley’s importance is derived from his own writings!) **4. Preserving Esoteric Knowledge in Modern Times**: *Throughout your books (for example, Nu Hermetica and The Way of Knowledge in the Reign of Antichrist), you address the difficulty of true initiation in the current age of spiritual materialism and confusion. You write that many so-called “spiritual” movements today only serve to reinforce profane values, and that there remains a need to transmit “real knowledge” to the few who are prepared for it. From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges facing sincere esoteric students in today’s world? How can seekers discern genuine wisdom from the commercial or ego-driven pseudo-spiritual noise out there? And looking ahead, are you optimistic that the eternal flame of initiatic knowledge will endure and find those few who are ready to carry it forward?* It is a good question to close things on for the time being. In a way, sincerity is good but it is not enough when it comes to something like this, which we dare to call a Great Work in the language of the alchemists. I already said, for example, how a person could be very sincere and yet have no idea that they are cheating people by selling ‘self-initiation’, because they don’t know what it is. So what is needed is sincerity plus ‘something’, which amounts to much more than any individual. The biggest challenge is not in the anti-spiritual ‘normality’ of the world today but in the very person. In the end, it is they that are the subject, the true Self, if only they realise it. You raise a very important point: “How can seekers discern genuine wisdom from the commercial or ego-driven pseudo-spiritual noise out there?” You see the very first qualification on the path as it is put in some Advaitan texts is viveka ‘discrimination’. Unless a person is able to discern what is true from what is false, they have no chance and cannot be helped. This has to be innate in the person. The discrimination can be honed down through practice but has to be there to start with. It may be that is has been drowned out through the ‘noise’ and through education and environmental factors but it can still awaken perhaps after many years. When it comes to the eternal flame I am more than optimistic; there is no doubt at all that it will endure until the very end and even after that it will never be extinguished. Sometimes people confuse the ‘eternal’ with time, and this happened with the ancient Greeks before us, but the metaphysical sense of the eternal is absolute, without beginning or end, birth or death. Neither is it subject to time or change. It is indestructible, indivisible, infinite and absolute pure being, consciousness and bliss. It does not require defending and is impervious to attack, being far beyond the reach of dualistic conceptions. That is the eternal flame. The rest of it, the initiatic knowledge, depends on being human and so that does imply certain limits across time and space, especially if we talk about carrying anything forward, in which case we bring a future into it that has not yet come about, and may not ever come about. So while with knowledge carried by human beings near the end of the Age of Kali Yuga I am nowhere near as certain as I am about the eternal flame, there is every indication that the knowledge *will* endure until the end of our civilisation and end of time as heralded by the sixth angel in the book of Revelation. As the darkness spreads and covers the whole world, the sparks of light glow brighter for those that can see. There will always be lighthouses to guide the souls of the light, the ones that still *see*, to the source of that light, until the withdrawal of all into the dissolution of mahapralaya. AUM. --- --- # Exploring the Vama Path: Sri Kutupananda Nath’s Journey Through Tantra and Shakti Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/exploring-the-vama-path-sri-kutupananda-naths-journey-through-tantra-and-shakti/ ## Introduction In this interview Sri Kutupananda Nath introduces us to his path and explains the complexities of his tradition. There is so much to discover here, if you enjoy this interview please let us know in the comments and if you would like to know more about this tradition please check the Vama Path site [here](https://vamapath.com/). Table of Contents - Introduction- Personal Journey and Lineage- Philosophy and Practice of the Vama Path- Experiences and Transformation on the Path- Integrating Ancient Wisdom with Modern Life and Guidance for Seekers- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/rsw_370cg_truem.webp) ## Personal Journey and Lineage **PAA: Early Spiritual Calling — Can you share how your spiritual journey began? What first drew you to the path of Tantra and spirituality, and how did you come to be known as Sri Kutupananda Nath?** I was drawn to Tantra the way iron filings rush toward a magnet. From childhood, I felt Shakti as a palpable Presence—first in sound (mantra), then in breath, and finally in the body of ritual. Over time, that current clarified into teaching Sri Vidya and an expanded cycle of “36 Mahavidyas & Upavidyas total” alongside allied studies—Advaita, Sanskritic sciences, and Rasāyana. That synthesis became Vama-Path of Shakti, and eventually, people began calling me “Sri Kutupananda Nath,” the name given within my Nātha-Kaula transmission during initiation in Gyanganj. **PAA: Guiding Teachers and Influences — Who were the important mentors or inspirations in your early journey? Was there a particular guru or event that set you firmly on the Vama path of Tantra?** My path is braided: Kaula-Tantra teachers who insisted on direct experience; Nātha influences that prized austerity and breath; and teachers who guarded the Sri Vidya navāvaraṇa like living fire. A decisive turn toward Vamācāra came during prolonged sādhanā in smashāna of Tarapith, Kamakhya, and Kashi with goddesses whom the polite world avoids. Those who know, know—one meeting with a true Kulaguru sets your inner compass for life. I am fortunate to have met two such Stri Gurus in the Kaula path. Getting women Guru in Kaula is a blessing in itself. Then I had my Shaktipat Guru. **PAA: Gyanganj and Past-Life Connection — Your biography mentions you were initiated by a master from Gyanganj in Tibet as a continuation of spiritual work from your previous birth. This is fascinating – could you elaborate on that story? How did this past-life connection come about, and what impact has it had on your life and mission in this incarnation?** Yes, there is a Gyanganj thread. In my case, guidance arose from a master linked to that stream, re-activating work begun in a prior birth. These things aren’t for open eyes; they are recognitions—like waking in a house you somehow already know. In our paramparā, we honor continuity across births; I’ve publicly acknowledged such recognitions within my own circle of disciples and co-teachers as well. Initiation is an inner event, and Gyanganj is beyond space-time limits; if you purify your Chitta and if your call is genuine, Gyanganj manifests at the place of your heart. My name Sri Kutupananda Nath was given from Gyanganj in continuation of my previous birth’s name and work. It was given by Siddha Kumara Swami from Gyanganj. **PAA: Multiple Lineages – One Path — How do these diverse traditions come together in your practice? In what ways have these multiple lineages shaped you into a “Sarva Tantra Svatantra” (free in all Tantra) master, and how do you integrate all these influences when teaching students?** Dakṣiṇa, Kaula, and Vama are not three roads but three gears of one vehicle. I teach Sri Vidya in Kaula praxis (embodiment, community) and Vama (shadow-integration, transgression with dharma). The result is sarva-tantra-svatantra—freedom to apply the right key for the right lock. This is why our tradition now moves across geographies (e.g., our U.S. branch guided by Sri Subhagananda Nath in Texas), yet keeps one flame. **PAA: Sufi Influence in Tantra — What did you learn from your Sufi training, and how does Sufi mysticism intersect with the Tantric practices you teach? Are there common threads between Sufism and Tantra that have enriched your perspective?** From my Sufi exposure (especially Chishti-colored practices from my Hindu Sufi teacher Sri Yogananda Avadhuta), I learned zikr of the heart and the etiquette of Presence (adab). The shared thread with Tantra is bhāva-śuddhi—purifying attitude until only the Beloved shines. Where Tantra speaks of Spanda and Kuṇḍalinī, Sufism sings of the subtle breath and qalb. Both insist on melting the “I” into Love, and both demand a guide who embodies it. Also, both require Shaktipat to ignite it. In Sufism, it’s called Rahmat, meaning grace. ## Philosophy and Practice of the Vama Path **PAA: Introduction to Vama Path — What exactly is the Vama Path of Shakti that you teach? How would you describe the core philosophy of Vamachara to someone new?** Vamācāra is the Left-Turning path—toward what we usually avoid: death, desire, time, taboo. We do this not to shock the world but to end our fragmentation. In practice, it’s Sri Vidya at the core, ringed by Kaula rites, mantra-nyāsa, chakra-pūjā, yoginī-devotion, and offerings that reconcile purity/impurity into non-duality. **PAA: Left-Hand vs Right-Hand Tantra — How does the Left-Hand Path differ from the Right-Hand and Kaula Paths? What makes Vama unique or significant?** The middle path emphasizes sattvic observances in mind and body offerings outside. Kaula emphasizes embodied communion and group clan transmission; Vama adds the alchemy of the forbidden. Done correctly, Vama is not license—it is surgical confrontation with fear, shame, and grasping until they yield to Śakti. **PAA: Role of the Divine Feminine (Shakti) — Why is the Divine Feminine so central in your practice? How does worshipping goddesses through Sri Vidya and Mahavidyas lead to self-realization?** In my body and my world, Śakti is the doorway and the destination. Sri Vidya and the Mahāvidyās train the mind to see Wisdom as feminine radiance—Kālī as Time, Tārā as Light, Tripurasundarī as the very geometry of consciousness. Worship reshapes perception; perception reshapes destiny. Liberation here is recognition (pratyabhijñā)—of Self as Her play. **PAA: The 36 Mahavidyas — What are the 36 Mahavidyas you teach, and how do they differ from the classical ten? What is the significance of working with such a wide spectrum of goddess energies?** Classically, we speak of Daśa-Mahāvidyā. In my curriculum, I train across 36 “Vidyās”—an expanded mandala that integrates: the classical Ten plus eight which are still rarely practiced, so eighteen. Then eighteen Upavidyas like Karna Pishachini, Yakshini, Apsara, etc. (The complete list is given to initiates with mantra-krama.) **PAA: Core Practices and Disciplines — What are some core practices a student under your guidance would follow? Do you train in Shatkarmas like Vashikaran, Stambhan, Maran, etc., and how do they help spiritual development?** Students under me learn: mantra-japa with nyāsa; Sri Cakra upāsanā; yoginī-chakra puja; breath work; bhāva-sādhana; and selected Kaula rites. Regarding vashi, stambhan, uccāṭan, māraṇa, etc.—we study their theory and ethics, but we do not weaponize the path. Power is yoked to śīla (conduct) and niyama (constraints); any external rite begins with inner alchemy. **PAA: Misconceptions and Ethics — How do you address public misconceptions about the Left-Hand Path? What ethical safeguards do you teach to ensure Tantric power is used wisely?** Three errors: (1) “Left-hand = indulgence” (it’s actually renunciation of fixation), (2) “Mahāvidyās are ‘black magic’ goddesses” (they are liberating wisdoms), and (3) “Anyone can do anything after reading a PDF.” In my tradition, vows, consent, harm avoidance, and psychological screening are mandatory. Śakti gives siddhi; you decide whether it blesses or burns. ## Experiences and Transformation on the Path **PAA: Transformative Experiences — What kinds of transformative experiences might a practitioner have on the Vama Path? Do they include Kundalini awakening, deity visions, or other breakthroughs?** Common thresholds: spontaneous mantra-japa, automatic body movements, dream-darśana of deities, re-patterning of breath, and the unmistakable rise-and-rest of Kuṇḍalinī. Vision can happen; but deeper is the after-taste—fear drops, love widens, and life arranges itself around the altar. **PAA: Personal Milestones — Have you had any particularly profound or challenging experiences that shaped your path as a teacher?** Each completion of Mandala is a milestone. Writing a book, blessing a disciple, or uncovering hidden knowledge. Recently, one satisfying moment was publicly speaking on weather-work and devotion in my book—My Experiments with Rain in June this year in Pennsylvania, US—and realizing the room felt Rain as living Deity, not metaphor. And we did witness the manifestation of rain by the mantra power of Goddess Baglamukhi later in the day while returning to New York. **PAA: Facing Fear and Taboos (Aghora Influence) — How do you guide students through practices that confront fears or taboos? Why is exploring the “shadow” essential for spiritual growth?** Students meet fear where it lives: in the body, in memory, in culture. We use vow-bounded rituals, Smashāna meditations, and offering-rites to metabolize the “untouchable.” Aghora doesn’t glorify darkness; it composts it into clarity. ## Integrating Ancient Wisdom with Modern Life and Guidance for Seekers **PAA: Spirituality in Daily Life — Is it possible to follow the Vama Path while living a modern household life? How can one integrate this tradition into daily living?** Yes—householders can walk Vama. Keep a clean altar, a steady mantra, and a weekly vrata; align food, sleep, and speech with sādhanā; and let family life become your temple. If you can attend community practice or guided classes, even better. **PAA: Alchemy and Ancient Sciences — How do disciplines like Rasayana (alchemy) fit into the broader Tantric path? What are their modern-day benefits?** Rasāyana fits as the healing-metal branch of Tantra: discipline, purity, and precise fire. In modern terms, it trains attention, patience, and responsibility—virtues mandatory for higher rites. I teach Rasāyana and allied Sanskritic sciences within the same ethical frame as mantra. Here, we work on the purification of Mercury metal and its combinations with Sulfur and other metals. I have made Silver successfully from Tin as per Rasashastra methods. It’s lifelong experimentation with outer mercury and inner mercury. **PAA: The Guru’s Perspective — What is most rewarding and most challenging about being a Guru on this path, especially with modern, non-South Asian students?** Greatest reward: watching a student become self-luminous. Greatest challenge: de-programming internet Tantrism (speed without safeguards). With non-South-Asian students, we emphasize context—why vows, why lineage, why community—so the wine is strong but not toxic. **PAA: Relevance in the Modern World — What is the relevance of the Vama Path today? What aspects are especially beneficial for modern society?** Vama teaches shadow-integration, sovereignty, and reverence for the Feminine—three medicines our age lacks. It also offers living technologies (mantra, yantra, bhāva) that stabilize the nervous system while opening the heart. This is why I keep teaching publicly—talks, videos, and courses—so seekers can find a clean source. **PAA: Vision for the Tradition’s Future — What is your vision for the future of the Vama Path? Do you foresee global centers, generational adaptation, or broader spiritual influence?** A distributed mandala: small, serious circles on each continent, teachers grown in-house, and centers that serve both sādhanā and seva. We already move this way—India to the U.S. and back—while guarding the center of gravity in paramparā. Also, I am working on a Book of Message for humanity from our transdimensional brothers and a central organization with branches in many countries to spread that message. **PAA: Advice for Seekers — What guidance would you give to someone newly drawn to Tantra — especially the Left-Hand Path? What preparatory steps should they take?** Start with humility and stamina. Learn one mantra well; keep a daily seat; find a teacher who can awaken Mantra Shakti. Don’t chase powers—chase steadiness. When you’re ready for Vama, come with courage, consent, and a willingness to be remade by the Goddess. **PAA: Thank you very much for sharing, it looks like we have only just scratched the surface. ** --- --- # Spagyric Alchemy: Making and Using Fluid Condensers (New Course) Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/spagyric-alchemy-making-and-using-fluid-condensers-new-course/ ## Introduction This has been an exciting journey working with Frater IAC, his enthusiasm is infectious. In this course he shares his approach to practice and how he uses Fluid Condensers in his magical work. # Join the Course ## About the Course In Fraters own words... > If you have followed Franz Bardon’s path of Hermetic Initiation for any time at all, it is easy to become frustrated with its emphasis on practice exercises. Speaking for myself, I know that by the time I was in the later steps I yearned to put what I was learning into actual magical practice. > > > > > > That is what this course is about. I have a multi-disciplinary background when it comes to magic, and have been working with talismans of all sorts for many years. Bardon’s ‘fluid condensers’ that he has us decoct in Step 8 of Initiation Into Hermetics are just that – talismans. > > > > > > During my work with these liquid fluid condensers, I have discovered a number of very useful things. For example, I have developed a way to charge, or exalt – to use Paracelsus’ word – talismans of all sorts, including these tincture-talismans Bardon calls ‘fluid condensers.’ > > > > > > I developed this course to help working magicians make and use powerful talismans, including from plant materials, but also crystals, Psalms and other elements that can be compounded to amplify their magical results. Two cases in point, both using a peach leaf and bark fluid condenser: > > > > > > > - The power of the elemental influence in a healing ritual using this tincture manifested 70 miles away from where the ritual was conducted. > > > > - The power of a ritual we performed, again using this particular fluid condenser, was felt 4,700 miles away from where the ritual was conducted. > > > > > If you have been looking for ways to actually do powerful magic that has tangible results, this course could help you.  ## Learn about Frater IAC In this interview with Frater IAC, he shares about his approach to magic, his family connections to these arts and finally he shares more details about this new course that he has put together. https://youtu.be/vmJUQahGT6s?si=d5rsHH_gLz4YF7QQ If you listened to this then you would know that Frater really cares, he really wants this material to be as beneficial as possible to all. If you would like to work with Frater IAC then this course is a great way to do it as you get access to a private student group which Frater plans on being very active in and hopefully getting it to the point that it becomes a working group where everyone can work on similar projects and support each other. To get involved please check out the course page [here](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/spagyric-alchemy-and-fluid-condensers). --- --- # Interview with Magnus Sarmarx & Andre Consciencia on ‘The Great Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings’ Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/interview-with-magnus-sarmarx-andre-consciencia-on-the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-beings/ ## Introduction [The Great Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings by Magnus Sarmarx](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being), with translation, commentary, and artistic contributions by André Consciência, is a rare modern grimoire of true initiatory depth. Written from within a living magical current, the book unveils the workings of the “Plus Pole,” a supreme principle of integration that dissolves limitation and anchors the adept in the highest flow of blessing, success, and divinity. This interview brings together Magnus, whose decades of uncompromising magical practice gave birth to the text, and André, who shaped it into the luminous volume now available to the wider esoteric world. Together they open a window into the origin, power, and practical application of this living work, which stands as both a magical system and a complete path of reintegration. Table of Contents - Introduction- Interview Questions for Magnus Sarmarx1 Origins and Purpose- 2 The Plus Pole- 3 Emrudue and the 7th Lunar Mansion- 4 Structure and Safety- 5 Practical Manifestation vs. Spiritual Attainment- 6 The Archdemons and Elemental Forces- 7 Transmission and Legacy- Interview Questions for André Consciência1 Your Relationship with Magnus Sarmarx- 2 The Translation and Commentary Process- 3 Personal Experience of the Practices- 4 Artistic and Magical Contributions- 5 The Value of Plus Pole- 6 For Prospective Readers- 7 On Reintegration as a Path- Join the Perseus Community - It is Free! ## Interview Questions for Magnus Sarmarx ### 1 Origins and Purpose **- What was the original impulse behind writing **[**The Great Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings**](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being)**?** In 2023, the astrological year was ruled by the Moon, and I had already prepared myself for that astrologically. I had mapped out all the Mansions of the Moon, their days, and their proper hours. With all of the Moon’s powers and forces at their peak, I began invoking Emrudue constantly within every 7th Mansion of the Moon throughout that year. What an experience—to have a room so attuned to the seven motions of the Moon that you could actually see the spirits moving through their own elements, bringing extreme good fortune and success. So we decided to create the book to bless, in a deeper way, those truly devoted to magic. In its construction, the book could only be written during the 7th Mansions of the Moon in that year—and afterward, I could not change anything in it. I tried, but Emrudue gave me his opinion. His final word was that the book already has its magical form, and even the variations in some of the practices are there to accommodate people with very different elemental and astrological constitutions from mine. I explained all this to André Consciência when I gave him the book. Every time he received something new, he would master it completely—and only afterward would we add his insights and evaluations. I saw the book stretching his practice nearly into the year ruled by Jupiter. The purpose was truly this: a living book—a book that chooses, blesses, and makes everything better. **- Did you envision it as a teaching tool for a specific audience, or as a universal key for adepts of any tradition?** In Emrudue’s vision for the book, it was intended for everyone “who is chosen” to be its keeper. Every word of it was tailored to match the disposition of those it selects. ### 2 The Plus Pole **- The concept of the “Plus Pole” is central to the work. Could you elaborate on its genesis and how it differs from more traditional magical polarity concepts?** The Plus Pole in magic is the most essential core of the work. It’s not part of any doctrine per se. Some might argue that the principle of polarity is found in the Kybalion, and while that’s true, the Kybalion only opens a doorway to it. The Plus Pole predates and transcends such texts. It is the foundation of the highest beings—what Rah Omir Quintscher called Evisul and Ultreb—and even beyond that. Every being has a very powerful point of connection to it near the solar plexus. It’s a kind of rift into the Akasha. At that point, one feels the Plus Pole alive. The Plus Pole is an exclamation! Nothing escapes its enhancement. It is the work of something far greater—a power that comes from beyond. In this book, you'll see that all practices begin only after a deep dive within the mage himself. It’s structured that way so the mage can fully grasp magical concepts and power—beyond what the logical mind can normally access. You’ll come to know these things so deeply and uniquely that there will no longer be any separation. **- So, how was it activated in you in a way you could understand and apply?** Through a very clever and practical magical method. First, I must say there are many ways to access it, but I chose the path of evocation. In this book, you’ll now find a very solid and secure foundation for that path. **- How does the Plus Pole practically change the life of a magician once integrated?** On the magical planes of existence, the only ruling concept above all is Hierarchy. This is not a religious idea—it’s simply the way things are. Every other principle—loyalty, love, trust, care—is a byproduct of this royalty. A being called Lord, King, or Queen is so vast that it encompasses all others. And those others live within it—like blood flowing through a living body, blessing and being blessed. So the answer is: they (the beings) will fight with you, for you, and around you—until the world accepts, bends, or, if necessary, breaks—and your aims are achieved. You become truly precious and unique to them. You will see them in their true colors—beyond the costumes of religion and inherited prejudice. If anything dares to harm you, they will take it personally—and act. Most of the time, they’ll act to bless your everyday path. These beings—what we can call Plus-Poled Beings—are not the same as those found in religion. A practical example: if you practice magic within a religious framework, you're likely doing more religion than magic. The same being called in a Plus Pole evocation will act completely differently. Why? Because they’re not the same. Just like in daily life—how many people do you know who share the same name? When a being draws near to someone whose Plus Pole is deeply active, it causes them to feel something far deeper than a prayer. A practical demonstration: in Enochian magic, there is a powerful spell-word—"HOAT". Every time you speak it magically, a group of beings gathers around you to bless you. A calm, serene energy fills the air. You see them gathering around the manifestation of the magic. The Plus Pole is even deeper than that. Why does this word produce an effect so similar to the Plus Pole? Because, like it, it echoes "HOME". Home is not merely a house or space—it is “the event that absolutely nourishes your heart.” They gather because they are returning home. ### 3 Emrudue and the 7th Lunar Mansion **- Emrudue is a powerful presence in the text. Can you speak about your relationship with this being and how practitioners might begin to approach them?** What I can say is this: just like in the book, I started by going directly to him—to his "home"—and gaining his favor. The method presented in the book is extremely powerful. I was already a very fortunate person before meeting him, but afterward I became excessively, extravagantly, and extremely fortunate! Even someone who’s not initiated can receive great blessings, grace, and good luck simply by having him around—just like Franz Bardon stated in The Practice of Magical Evocation. [The Great Treatise](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being) is Emrudue’s own way to further bless the ones it chooses. **- What is the deeper significance of situating the work within the current of the 7th Lunar Mansion?** The “home” of a spirit is the concentration of all its might. How would you feel if even the sound of the trees around you began spelling out good luck? ### 4 Structure and Safety **- The book evolved from four smaller works into a single compendium. Why was this integration necessary?** “Smaller” is often the core of what is most essential in all things. **- You mention safeguards for practitioners—what is the greatest danger to those who undertake this work without adequate preparation?** I truly believe that if I answer this in too much detail, some people will dare to go straight for it, ignoring all the safeguards that were so carefully and cleverly put in place. So, I’d rather not say too much—because if they can’t know, they can’t misuse. ### 5 Practical Manifestation vs. Spiritual Attainment **- The work promises blessings such as success, wealth, and good fortune. How do you balance these material results with the higher aim of reintegration with Divinity?** The work focuses on a present divinity, not a distant, unreachable concept. And if you find a “divinity” that doesn’t offer blessings, grace, good luck, wealth, happiness, success, and good fortune—then you are certainly looking in the wrong direction. That’s not divinity. That’s better called by its real name: tragedy. Most religions, in practice, tend to operate in the Minus Pole. And I’m not referring to their founders, but to what people have done with their legacies afterward. You mentioned “material results.” Let me offer this as a gift for reflection: “All is Mind. The Universe is Mental.” The famous quote from the Kybalion, right? But it’s not referring to “mind” in the everyday sense. In ancient times, the most precious treasures were hidden in plain sight. This phrase—“All is Mind. The Universe is Mental”—is a focal lens for using the Archimedean lever upon the Akasha. It means “The All”—that is, everything: matter, energy, spirit, soul, mind, body, planes, realities, time, space, dimensions—is actively made and sustained by Mind. That Mind can be shaped, altered, and transmuted just like a thought when you concentrate on it! Franz Bardon, in Initiation into Hermetics, in his meditation on the Earth Element and Akasha for materialization, focuses on already having the desired effect. That’s the same as saying: “By negating everything else, you now live, breathe, and are blessed inside your goal—above all and everything.” But to fully grasp this, you need to be in a state beyond the logical mind. The Akashic principle deals with the infinite. A single event can be interpreted in many different ways, and for each observer, the Akasha makes all those perspectives valid—each in their own way of living. A great event called a “miracle” might appear to one person as a simple effect, to another as a magical act, and to a third as a purely physical occurrence. And all of them would be correct, from their point of view. The Akashic principle is vast—it accommodates everything. So I ask you: how delightful and real would it be to live inside this truth: “All is Mind. The Universe is Mental”? If you want a concrete example, look into the life story of Dr. Joe Dispenza. Studying his life and experiences will give you more than just a step—it will give you a full footing in this high magical path. Now, regarding the gods: I’d like to point you to a very special group called the Mahavidyas (“Great Wisdoms”). They are ten tantric goddesses: Kali, Tara, Tripura Sundari, Bhuvaneshvari, Bhairavi, Chhinnamasta, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, Matangi, and Kamala (Kamalatmika). I enjoy exploring new pantheons and often journey through their power currents to see how they live and act. These particular goddesses are part of a greater one: Mahadevi, the Supreme Goddess in Hinduism. If you have a great goddess like that, who loves you unconditionally, and everything is her blessed, graced body—how amazing is it to be alive in such a world? There are many gods out there, but if your definition of “God” leads you to something that doesn’t bless you, it’s wise to change direction fast. **- Do you see this work as a complete path, or a preparation for deeper initiatic processes?** This work gives the magician protection and introduces him to great blessed beings who make a real difference. After that, he can rise even higher—and that path already exists. I’ve already walked it, though it hasn’t yet been properly recorded. ### 6 The Archdemons and Elemental Forces **- The book involves Archdemons and elemental hierarchies. How do these forces integrate with the Plus Pole current?** Long ago, they were all simply called "spirits". Within the structure of practice and power presented in this book, they function exactly according to their nature. As I mentioned earlier in this interview, the beings you’ll encounter in this work may share names with others found in traditions or religions—but they respond in a completely unique way, even the so-called elemental ones. Where the Minus Pole divides, the Plus Pole integrates. All these beings are present because they hold great proficiency in the elements they rule. They are looked up to for rulership and inspiration by the beings below them. Some of them rule over more than one element, but for the sake of structure, I decided to fix them to the element they govern most deeply. **- How should practitioners approach these beings without falling into fear or imbalance?** They will not be alone. By working diligently with the book, Emrudue will always be with them. Beings like him can change their appearance, form new bodies, and even multiply at will. This is not a challenge for such a being. Yes, practitioners may sometimes find things a little "odd"—as everyone working with magic eventually experiences: seeing things on the astral plane, conscious dreams, presences. But really—what hasn't already been portrayed in a movie or on the news these days? As practitioners ascend the elemental scales, more beings will come to their side. The magical tools and weapons they craft can even sleep beside them—they remain active. I also recommend portable artifacts, something they can carry with them everywhere. These tools are truly alive and can make a real difference. ### 7 Transmission and Legacy **- Is the title in homage to the “Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings into Their Original Estate, Virtues and Powers both Spiritual and Divine” by Martinès de Pasqually?** A long time ago, before I found Bardon, I used to study and practice a whole range of material in the vein of Eliphas Levi, Papus, Agrippa, even Francis Barrett, and a broad spectrum of others dealing with alchemy and hermeticism. At that time, I also studied what I could find on Pasqually. I first came across Pasqually through his disciple, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. Saint-Martin is quite well-known within AMORC and also within another order I was part of back then, the SCA. They’re a Catholic order (or perhaps more accurately, a Christian order) very tied to Christianity — or, put differently, a Christian order strongly aligned with Catholicism or with pre-established religious structures. Their rituals are traditional along those lines, which, in my opinion, makes them limited in scope — since magic practiced through religion tends to serve religion more than it serves magic. Louis Claude de Saint-Martin is also deeply connected to a sub-order within AMORC called the Traditional Martinist Order. When you study it, you find that Saint-Martin, as a disciple of Pasqually, claimed that Pasqually used to do things similar to what we do today — such as evoking spirits using seals and names, directing them toward specific effects and blessings. However, since Saint-Martin had a more religious and traditionally Kabbalistic (Jewish) perspective, he considered Pasqually's methods “too much” and decided to simplify and compress them within the boundaries of the doctrines he followed. In doing so, he omitted many aspects — things we only regained as options later on with Rah Omir and Bardon. Our book carries out much of what Pasqually was trying to do with the knowledge and tools available to him at the time. But Pasqually died before he could finish. So, in a way, "we" finished it for him using what we now have thanks to Rah Omir and Bardon. **- Do you believe this work will adapt to different cultures and magical systems, or does it require a specific initiatic current?** This specific work is tied to Emrudue and the 7th Mansion of the Moon. If someone feels called to possess it, it’s because the book has chosen them. Some of the practices are specially tailored—in a blessed and living way—to receive these chosen ones, however they come, with all their unique ways of being. There are exactly 333 copies of this book. The magical beings and forces attached to it will have the back of each of these individuals and bring meaningful change into their lives. ## Interview Questions for André Consciência ### 1 Your Relationship with Magnus Sarmarx **- You describe Magnus as a mentor since before adulthood. How did your magical relationship evolve, and how did it shape you as a magician?** Back then, it was IRC (mIRC) and so on, and the internet paid dearly by the hour, and mIRC channels and the like. That is where I first met Magnus. I had a compilation from Aleister Crowley and was kind of preaching, also a compilation with Alice Bailey and other theosophists. These were zip files and books in mostly txt format, the way it flowed back then, with instructive illustrations passed on in ascii. Magnus challenged me, told me he had something better for me. Part of me probably thought it was one more arrogant fool, but a bigger part of me wanted to test if this was true. What he had to challenge my two home-made compendia was a single work, Franz Bardon’s “Initiation Into Hermetics”. I tested Magnus, asking him which of the four elements should be on top. If something different from love (water), I would likely cut ties with this source. Magnus told me fire should be operating on top, since to love one must first have the power to love and the will to take love into fruition. I could not really beat this logic and accepted his better reason. The rest is history. I started training IIH. We started to know each other better, and he gave me access to people, organisations, and information (in this world and the other) I would have had a very hard time obtaining otherwise. Then one day, when I was ready, he underwent the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, and at its conclusion, we used one of the most significant and most symbolic and hermetic statues of Lisbon to anchor a magical alliance of decades of team magical practice and build a foundation with Emrudue, the lord of the seventh lunar mansion. **- Was there a moment when you realized you were ready to take on the task of translating and commenting on this text?** I don’t really remember not feeling ready for any of it. I realized I was ready to translate and comment as soon as I thought of what could be done to publish this material with the care it deserves. ### 2 The Translation and Commentary Process **- The original text is dense with visionary language and operational details. How did you approach making the commentary without losing its essence?** I made the commentary in quite a different tone, or at least I tried to, exactly not to blend with the original text in a manner that could interfere with the book’s own spirit and space. The work of Magnus is very “hands-on” magic and spirits raised higher and higher, and in [The Great Treatise of the Reintegration of Beings](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being), even more so than at [Arcanum Hermeticum](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/arcanum-hermaticum-standard-edition). The commentary gives it an academic complement, not in the worst sense, since it still is coming from someone who does not like to be seen as academic at all. It also offers the view of someone who has worked very closely with the author and who watched the contents that ended up in this book come to light. That being said, the commentary is still my responsibility, and there may be instances where I could be wrong or in which I might have misunderstood Magnus. **- Were there sections you felt compelled to expand upon in the footnotes/endnotes for the sake of the modern reader?** I felt compelled to expand upon sections in the chapter endnotes not because of the modern reader. The concept of a modern reader is quite abstract, isn’t it? There are many readers today, each with a singular perspective, and the [Great Treatise](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being) is a modern book in any case. I worked for the book instead of for the readers. But I remember how much footnotes and endnotes helped me when I was beginning. Some books are like a voyage in the black night for someone who is young or inexperienced. Footnotes, like those endless boring notes of S.L. MacGregor Mathers upon Eliphas Levis’ works, or the way Julius Evola would footnote his own books with literary quotes, leading me to read plenty of philosophers, poets and novelists, were my guiding stars. Footnotes still fascinate me today and often for apparently the opposite reason. If you look at the way Kenneth Grant used to write his footnotes or, today, Sean Woodward, such footnotes almost disorient the reader, breaking the surface of the text, creating tunnels within tunnels and a final labyrinth that, in the mandala it represents, is the real and actual occult message of a book, or the occult message within the occult message. Lately, I hear a lot of people talking about a “no-nonsense” approach to magic, but while magic may be a simple martial art, it is first and foremost philosophy: the method in this philosophy is called occultism. Meanings veiled within meanings, when unveiled, will result in new meanings that could not have been communicated in a more direct way, since at this stage of maturity, humankind has no simple words to convey them. If you really know poetry, this is what is taking place in good poetry as well, and there is no substantial magic in a soul without substantial poetry. Being a magician is not the same as being a technician of magic. Technique is one thing, but to be an artist is to use it in a way that expands the world. Magic is an art, some say, The Art. ### 3 Personal Experience of the Practices **- You mention having tested many of the practices with Magnus. Which aspect of the system impacted you the most personally?** I tested and reported on all practices, so Magnus would avail of a third party and examine the effects on someone other than him. The one that impacted me the most is likely the one that the simple reader will find most out of place in terms of tradition, working with the beings and then an exu or eshu version of the beings, then fusing both in polarity. It may look at first glance as if Magnus is making it up as he goes (as if that would be denigrating in any way), but what Magnus is really doing is pushing the beings to the crossroads where decisions take place, this is where the beings show their true personality and independence, and, consequently, influence personality and inspire independence. The way we are taught in most grimoires, we are only given the being’s grace to work with, the being’s passivity and receptivity to the primordial light. With the formula of Exu the being becomes the sovereign source of this light, and when you fuse them together, you ensure grace isn’t lost. It is the most of what you can get in a work like this. Afterwards, Emrudue, for instance, is not just a lunar presence: an automaton with the complexity of intelligence that represents a certain emission of the lunar flow. Emrudue becomes as real as any material person that you consider to be truly sovereign (a level above how real the average material person feels like). A second aspect is how the beings are sometimes approached as an army of 999 trillion of themselves. This sounds almost silly (although the number isn’t arbitrary). However, while the Exu aspect cuts the abstraction that sucks the life out of the beings in terms of quality, this dispelling of the being's finitude in quantity makes personality immediately align with the cosmos at large in all its myriad sources of individual expression. When I say personality, I mean not only the being’s personality, but your own. We are talking of a Reintegration because this was always about you in the first place. **- Can you share an example of how the Plus Pole has manifested tangible change in your life?** A few years ago, I was writing a book, “Beyond the Veil of Illusion” (yet to be published) at the request of a Head of Jupiter. The Head had invaded my living room, apparently uninvited, and, upon permission, lodged a volt with the seed of the book to be written in my left wisdom tooth. Right after I had written it, my jaw on that side got pretty swollen. I went to a dentist, and the bloody man ripped off six teeth at once when only needing to remove one, managing to break my jaw in the process and dislodge a group of bones in the cervical. I had trouble moving, sitting, lying down, walking, sleeping, and so on. No doctor seemed to want to help me or know how to except by telling me to wait and it would get better, some saying it would not get better and I had to get used to it for the rest of my life. I went to the head of Jupiter, with abnormal effort in getting to him, and the head simply didn’t recognize my pain, “all is according to law.” My pain was too small for him. I realised I had fallen victim to an old trick; I had been made a pawn by sitting on the minus pole, and it was all the invitation the Head of Jupiter needed. Ironically enough, as I think of it, I realize that the whole “Beyond the Veil of Illusion” constitutes a mighty magical technology fully within the Plus Pole frame (may it get published and read often to compensate for the chronic trouble). Luckily, my osteopath (and shiatsu master and tai chi instructor) eventually restored most of my capacity to move and decreased the pain. When the loud as hell ringing started in my ear due to tight jaw and neck preventing the blood from pumping to my ear, like a car buzzing on my lobe 24 hours a day, everywhere in space, with no rest for the wicked, after two weeks under permanent torture I went to the hospital, sobbing like a fool due to a kind of shutdown on my nervous system, and gagging, eyes all red and down. After one and a half days, no doctor had come for me yet. I went home and spoke with Magnus. He gave me some Plus Pole practices not included in this book and we worked alongside some Nephilim that are very much active spirits and understanding of human struggles. In about three hours, the thing went from 100% to 20% and so remained, still enough to be a nuisance, but not enough to set me off my trails for sure. Life saver. ### 4 Artistic and Magical Contributions **- Beyond translation and commentary, you created the cover and the seals of the Archdemons. Did you see the artistic work itself as magical?** Completely. The artistic work is magic materialized. It is not a simple decoration. **- How did you decide which symbols and seals would best convey the spirit of the work?** The cover is illustrative, although hermetically arranged. It shows one of the lunar priestesses depicted in the book within Emrudue’s mansion. The seals of the archdemons were picked specifically because I had already offered all other seals in A Guide to the Elementals (Falcon Books Publishing). What I never offered anywhere else was my own seals of the archdemons, as were transmitted to me in mental wandering or by means of clairvoyance. It turns out the direct seals were not permitted, not for their power, but for their lack of power (they are accessible to me but less accessible to you). The process required an alchemy of automatic and mediumistic art from out of the original seals, to make the final vessel more universal through artistic transmission. ### 5 The Value of Plus Pole **- How much value do you see in a book like this, in terms of what it presents and what it sets out to achieve?** Value… If you want to live like a martyr, there is no value in this book. If you wish to live like a Magus, you’d like to use this book as a living being. **- I noticed that the "Plus Pole" structure seems like a focal point for what a greater God could be—something always superior to everything else. How do you interpret this structure?** Think of the top of a pyramid whose whole respective pyramid is the top of the pyramid consecutively, that continuously, the circular oroboros made into an endless upward spiral, an unstoppable process of refinement into the force of all forces within the force of all forces, ad infinitum. ### 6 For Prospective Readers **- I see that the structure of the book serves as a direct way to ensure the safety of the work. Do you think it’s sufficient?** No book is sufficient on itself. In terms of grimoires all books are half the work, the other half is the practitioner. Both may match or may not match. If the practitioner resists the prompts and commands of self-suggestion that continuously push the contents of [The Great Treatise](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being) towards the good and the better and best in situations and objects of perception, or if there is no surrender, or if, on the other hand, the reader insists on keeping a minus attitude, [The Great Treatise](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being) may even push back. It is enough to have a pure intention and to be wholly within this intention, there remaining. Then, following the book step by step will be completely safe. Just remember, it is the cosmic mind that is reading, because it was the cosmic mind that wrote it; and it is the cosmic mind that is practicing. **- What advice would you give to someone about to perform their first operation from the book?** Pay subconscious attention to details, and to language; there is a lot of neurolinguistic magic within and self-suggestion. Don’t over rationalize and analyze, reason is the minus pole of the plus pole called light. Especially, pay attention to the apparently simple preparations and do not skip them when they repeat, as they give the necessary magnetism to support all the electricity of the conjurations. ### 7 On Reintegration as a Path **- How do you see the reintegration of beings as it relates to your own magical philosophy and to humanity’s spiritual evolution?** When people come to me and ask, “Why is it necessary to learn this and that?” Although some are born with active magic or mediumistic skills and need magic to control these and survive the extrasensory chaos, my usual answer is that magic is an art; it is to be loved, not depended upon. Magic is not needed; what is needed is food and a place to sleep. However, I do realize one day magic (or whatever name we give it in the future) will be of tremendous necessity, as without it we will not be able to understand certain contacts and events, and will end up self-destroying in our own projections. The reintegration of all beings within the innermost self, called the Supreme, is something without which we can’t even begin to fathom the forces observing us right now. If within the minus pole, we will go mad with panic, if within the plus pole, we will pass to a whole different stage as a species. **- The Plus Pole path seems to integrate all aspects in a blessed way. How do you see the transmission of ancient philosophy and the legacy we carry today? In a context where the old no longer serves the present, how can we move toward a new way of being—safely?** The old always serves the present. It serves books such as these and brings them to fruition. The secret languages of the occult are only used by a few, but they must be preserved, actualized and kept burning throughout the ages, because when mankind leaves its sleeping state this may be the only bridge back to its primordial nature. The Plus Pole and focusing all within a blessing frame is essential to cleanse all impurities that have crept into the Current throughout aeons of limited human life, from before and after the Ice Age. And do not mistake my words, I am not encouraging a dualistic tradition. Within the depth point of the minus there is the plus, within the depth point of the plus, the minus, yet they are one and the same depth point. Our Plus doctrine does not concern surface dualism, and exists entirely within the depth point. It concerns, however, how you’d have the depth point manifest. # Closing Words The current of [The Great Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings](https://www.siriuslimitedesoterica.com/product-page/the-great-treatise-on-the-reintegration-of-being) does not end with the closing of its pages. Like the Plus Pole it teaches, it expands outward, weaving itself into the magician’s life until there is no distinction between the Work and the world. Magnus Sarmarx and André Consciência have given form to a living power that blesses, strengthens, and transforms those willing to meet it fully. The interview you have just read is only a threshold; the rest may lie in your hands. Open the book, call the names, and feel the current answer. > “*Claim the Plus Pole now; nothing else remains, and nothing else is needed.”* Note: If you have bought the book be so kind as to send us an email at [abbabalith@gmail.com](mailto:abbabalith@gmail.com) with the picture and we will send the link to a special audio companion. --- --- # Robbie Holz on Healing: Emotional & Spiritual Wellness Insights Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/https-perseusarcaneacademy-com-post-robbie-holz-on-healing-emotional-spiritual-wellness-insights/ ## Introduction We are grateful to have Robbie Holz on the blog answering my questions. Robbie is co-author of the award-winning books read in over 44 countries, *[**Secrets of Aboriginal Healing**](http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Aboriginal-Healing-Physicists-Australian/dp/1591431751/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381861230&sr=1-1&keywords=secrets+of+aboriginal+healing),* and *[**Aboriginal Secrets of Awakening**](http://www.amazon.com/Aboriginal-Secrets-Awakening-Spirituality-Australian/dp/1591432197/ref=cm_rdp_product). * Her latest books are ***[Angels in Waiting: How to Reach Out to Your Guardian Angels and Spirit Guides](https://www.amazon.com/Angels-Waiting-Guardian-Spirit-Guides/dp/1644113163/ref=sr_1_1?crid=E1AWNFTUTRIW&dchild=1&keywords=angels+in+waiting&qid=1635517618&qsid=138-1776867-5366008&sprefix=angels+in+waiting%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-1&sres=1644113163%2CB00137VQ6Q%2CB003DZEOZQ%2CB0013853F0%2CB07DXB6FVB%2CB000X3SZ56%2CB015L1XN2E%2CB01N3U60UW%2CB09HFT9H66%2C0578735687%2CB08SH42TXF%2CB094X5NBVF%2C0998091243%2C1684620112%2C0062560700%2C0982606117) ***and [***Living Your Best Life with Help from Your Guardian Angel***](https://www.amazon.com/Living-Your-Best-Guardian-Angel/dp/B0DLL2CPYQ?crid=1XZH3UPSFD19F&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XFLUaAGFP-u4Eviagf9buFrOeKvMQWNoKU6ujusLlrprxQJZaGQip077IGiFsebJKkRCPmbl_pn0ACTj226i5A.ZDJ62uY9dIb0Ui4bJcvysBjLAto58Nc7_5BvHw7vmrI&dib_tag=se&keywords=robbie+holz+books&qid=1731607443&sprefix=robbie+holz+books%2Caps%2C341&sr=8-3). You can read her bio [here](https://holzwellness.com/meet-robbie-holz/). --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/cropped-Robbie-Holz-150x150-1.jpg)Robbie Holz ## Emotional and Physical Healing **PAA: The Emotional Aspect of Illness: In your work you emphasize the impact of emotions on physical health – for example, you had to overcome intense feelings of guilt, shame, and self-hatred as part of your own healing. Can you explain how unaddressed negative emotions can contribute to illness, and how learning to release or transform these emotions played a role in your recovery? What practices do you recommend for emotional healing?** There’s nothing inherently wrong with any emotion. Every emotion serves a purpose. However, certain emotions have an unhealthy effect on your body. Scientific studies have shown that 15 minutes of stress lowers your immune system for 24 hours. Negative-based emotions (i.e. fear, guilt, depression, frustration) create unhealthy cells, which overwhelm the system and become toxic. A build-up of these “toxins” block the flow of energy, which leads to disease. Negative emotions create cells that are very gunky and sticky, which clog and block the healthy life force flowing through you. Studies have proven that depression is a greater cause of heart disease than smoking. The blood platelets in depressed people are stickier, which clog arteries and veins. Dr. Masaru Emoto’s scientific experiments proved how each emotion forms a different type of cell which has a specific effect on the body. For instance, the emotion of grief produces a discombobulated “slacker” cell that is dense. It can’t hold as much life-force energy (also known as prana, or chi). Since a grief cell is heavier, it has a lower vibration, or lower frequency, which produces stagnant energy . . . a swampy mess perfect for the breeding of disease. Emotions are held in specific areas of the body. We all tend to feel and hold grief in our chest area. You could be unknowingly creating a blockage in your chest if you are carrying a lot of grief. This could lead to a potentially dangerous situation, especially if you have heart disease or breast cancer in your family. Fibromyalgia often originates from unreleased fear held throughout the entire body. Continually feeling negative emotions weakens your body. Shame, guilt and self-hatred are the hardest emotions for the body to process, and cause the most damage. Your body can’t thrive, let alone heal, under the heavy weight of negative emotions. Fortunately, negative-based emotions and cells can be released through a variety of pleasurable activities such as laughing, meditation, walking, listening to music, etc. **PAA: Mind, Ego, and Soul in Healing: You’ve mentioned that the mind “always wants to be in charge” but doesn’t truly know what the soul needs, whereas the soul does. In the context of healing, how does one learn to “surrender the steering wheel” – shifting from the controlling ego-mind to the deeper wisdom of the soul? What changes have you seen occur when people make that shift and allow their soul (or higher self) to guide the healing process?** The soul is the animating force in the body. A soul is an etheric animating force that inhabits the body and acts through it. It is like the hand in a puppet. When the hand (soul) is removed, the puppet (body) collapses. When a person dies, the soul leaves the physical body but continues as an eternal spirit in a different dimension. Your mind is an incredibly powerful tool. It is important to remember, though, that it is just that—a tool. Your mind is intended to be a servant to your soul. Your soul is supposed to be in charge, not your mind. Most of us are utilizing the mind in ways never intended. Your mind doesn’t know the best way to find the right long-term romantic partner or how to achieve a fulfilling career. Your mind does not know how to be an excellent parent or partner. These are things that a higher consciousness—Divine Source, your soul—does know. A higher consciousness is intended to be in charge of your life. A higher level of consciousness knows what your soul intends to achieve in this lifetime, and how best to achieve it. A higher consciousness knows the best career and partner(s) for this life’s journey. The mind is designed to intuitively follow guidance from a higher consciousness on these matters. Although your mind wants to control everything, it is intended to serve your soul, not be in charge. We get in trouble by using our minds to “figure it out” and make decisions it is not equipped to make, such as where to live, how to make money, how to find like-minded friends, or how to heal. The world reflects what happens when our minds are in control. The results are rampant negativity, fear, materiality, greed, genocide, war, etc. The best way to achieve any goal is to hand it over to a higher consciousness. Your mind is designed to intuitively receive and follow guidance from a higher consciousness: your soul, Higher Self, Divine Source, God/Goddess. Remove your mind from behind the “steering wheel” and put a higher consciousness there instead. The mind is too fearful, limited and egoic to be in the driver’s seat. Allow this higher consciousness to guide and help you. Shift your mind into its intended role of “support staff” for your soul. Keep your mind excited and curious but not trying to grab the wheel and control the journey. ## Spiritual Connections and Guidance **PAA: Asking for Spiritual Help: You encourage people not to heal alone but to actively ask for help from their spiritual team – whether it’s guardian angels, spirit guides, or even loved ones who have passed on. Why is it so important that we invite assistance from these spiritual allies? In your experience, what happens when someone opens up to receive help from guides or angels, and how can a person start to build a relationship with their own “unseen” helpers?** Your guardian angels have many ways to assist you. The intent was always that you utilize their tremendous help. You do not live your life unassisted. There are endless ways guardian angels can help you. When you enlist the assistance of these loving beings, you can shift from 5 amps of power to 5,000 amps of power in an instant. Helping you is as easy as child’s play for them. The challenge is getting your resistant mind to go in the direction they are trying to guide you. They always honor your free will, so they will never force you to do anything. Here are a few of the many ways they can help once you’ve asked for their assistance: They download energies into you. If you have difficulty forgiving someone, they will continually send you the energy of forgiveness. They provide clarity. If you struggle to understand why the same difficult events keep occurring, they can help you understand the message behind these challenges. They provide protection. If you are traveling by plane or driving in unfamiliar areas, they can help you arrive safely to your destination. They soften triggers and help you unhook more easily. When you get caught up in negativity—criticism, judgment, anxiety—the guardian angels can help you shift to love-based thoughts and emotions. You emerge from the dark alleys of negativity more quickly and eventually stop entering them. They help you find awe in everyday moments. When asked, the angels can help you feel the wonder and joy in your everyday life. They help you eliminate stress and fear. The guardian angels can help you find relief from anxiety and worry. With their assistance you can live a happier, more confident, and more peaceful life. It may be easier to ask for help if you realize that every time you allow your guardian angels to assist you, they evolve because they are serving out of tremendous love. It’s a win/win for everyone, so ask away. **PAA: Connecting with Angels and Spirit Guides: After exploring physical and spiritual healing through Aboriginal wisdom, you co-authored Angels in Waiting: How to Reach Out to Your Guardian Angels and Spirit Guides, a guidebook that helps people connect with angelic assistance. What inspired you to write about angels and spirit guides? How does working with angelic help complement or enhance the other healing techniques you teach – for example, do you see a common thread between the Aboriginal emphasis on spiritual connection and the process of reaching out to guardian angels?** Working with angelic help complements healing, traditional and alternative. The Indigenous Australians also work with angels and spirit guides to achieve, and sustain, healing. The Aboriginal culture knows that angels and guides are happy to assist when you ask for their help. The angels and guides respond according to your soul’s intentions and the highest good of all. The Indigenous Australians realize angels and guides will not completely heal something if it is still needed for soul growth. For instance, fibromyalgia can develop from sustained fear and overstress throughout the entire body. If you have fibromyalgia, your angels and guides would not be allowed to heal the fibromyalgia until you released your fears and overstress. They would first help you become aware of your fears and then help you release these toxic, unhealthy emotions. Your angels would have permission to heal the fibromyalgia after you stopped creating fear and stress. They would help you with every aspect of the healing process. ## Cultural Wisdom and Global Consciousness **PAA: Honoring Indigenous Knowledge: The Aboriginal healers entrusted you and Gary with their healing secrets and asked that this knowledge be shared for the benefit of others. How do you ensure that you honor the Aboriginal culture and wisdom as you teach these practices internationally? What responsibilities and ethical considerations come with being a bridge for this sacred knowledge from one culture to the rest of the world?** The Indigenous Australians asked Gary and I to take their ancient healing wisdom out into the world because the “civilized world” does not understand how healing involves the body, mind and spirit. We are immensely grateful for the very generous gift of their 60,000-year-old healing knowledge. We emphasize the Indigenous Australians generously gifted the knowledge of their healing system out of compassion, love and desire to help others. Throughout the years, we have donated to organizations that specifically support Indigenous Australians, especially those in the Outback. **PAA: “Aboriginal Secrets of Awakening” – Your Transformative Experiences: Your second book Aboriginal Secrets of Awakening continues the story – sharing both the “powers” your late husband developed after his Outback healing (like telepathy and seeing inside the body) and your own spiritual awakening through those experiences. What does ‘awakening’ mean to you in this context? Could you talk about some of the transformative insights or abilities you personally gained during this time, and how they’ve influenced the way you live and help others now?** After my husband Gary passed, he communicated with me from the other side of the veil through various means. Over time, my abilities expanded to see, hear and telepathically connect to the other side. Because of this, my awareness of angels and spirit guides increased dramatically. When you know you are never alone and are loved beyond your wildest imagination, that changes everything. I became aware these benevolent angels would love to help us but need our permission first on this free-will planet. As I asked for their assistance, my life became easier, less stressful and more fulfilling. It. Makes. A. Huge. Difference. I wanted others to realize what a big game changer it was to lean on their angels for help for anything and everything. That’s why I wrote Angels in Waiting: How to Reach Out to Your Guardian Angels and Spirit Guides and Living Your Best Life with Help from Your Guardian Angel. **PAA: Higher Frequencies and Global Awakening: In recent interviews you’ve discussed how humanity is now being “bombarded with higher frequency energies” and undergoing a shift in global consciousness. From your perspective, what changes are you observing in people’s spiritual or healing journeys as these frequencies on the planet rise? How can individuals best align themselves with these higher vibrations – for example, to heal old patterns or elevate their awareness – rather than feeling overwhelmed by the turmoil that often accompanies big energetic shifts?** The world is engulfed in one crisis after another. Our planet appears to be heading toward disastrous consequences because we humans continue to foul our nest. Governments and economies around the world are crumbling. It’s hard to not feel fearful and hopeless with all this chaos. What’s important to keep in mind is there’s a bigger picture at play here; things are not as they appear. Everything is happening exactly the way it is for a reason. Our planet is going through birthing pains. Gaia is becoming a spiritual planet, and that means change is necessary. Big change. You chose to be here right now to help in these auspicious times as the planet shifts into higher consciousness. You came to help by increasing the energies of compassion, joy, and love. As you feel these emotions, their energies move through you and out into the world, adding to the collective. Where attention goes, energy flows. Are you focusing on the darkness and chaos of the world? Or are you noticing the good in people and especially those making a positive difference? Are you envisioning our planet in despair and destruction or as a peaceful harmonic world? There are many reasons for hope. One of the best things you can do is make life-affirming, compassionate choices every day. Do you buy organic eggs where the chickens are humanely treated, or mass-produced eggs from overcrowded, dismal conditions? We are in the beginning stages of the biggest collective awakening ever seen in the history of mankind. Around the globe people in very large numbers are quietly shifting into higher consciousness. When you have a higher consciousness, you think and act differently. You live from a state of love, with a strong desire to help those in need, with deep respect for our beloved planet and everything on her, and with acceptance of others. You’ll discover greater consciousness all around if you look for it. You’re not going to hear about it in the news, though. They are selling something else. Awakening to higher consciousness is what is going to save us. It’s happening right now on a grassroots level. And you’re a part of it—one of the forerunners. You are ahead of the bell curve. You are here to help shift the collective consciousness. As you love yourself and others, you change the planet. As you do that little extra bit each day, you’ll find inner peace, no matter what’s going on around you. **PAA: Your Core Wellness Philosophy: One reviewer of your work noted that it “resonates with a deep place in our soul, one of love, nurturing, and truth… acting as another breadcrumb on the path to our true selves and healing at all levels.” After all your experiences – from healing yourself and Gary, to working with Aboriginal elders, to teaching and writing globally – what do you feel is the most important message or insight about healing and spiritual development that you wish everyone could understand? In other words, if readers take away one key philosophy from your journey and work, what should it be?** You incarnated at this time to bring specific energies to the planet, such as compassion, forgiveness, acceptance and love. It is very important to pay attention to the types of energy your thoughts and emotions create. It is affecting you and everyone around you. Whenever you feel hopeless, anxious or angry, you are energetically adding those harmful, lower-vibrational frequencies to the collective. Whenever you are feeling happy, acceptance or love, you are raising the vibration of the collective. If you want to make a positive difference in the world, engage in small acts of kindness, compassion and unconditional love. You are here to bring more laughter, joy and peace. It would also be helpful to hold a vision in your mind of the world at peace and in harmony. Create peace in your life first. If you feel called to act against what is happening in the world, wonderful. Just react from your heart, and not out of fear and anger. If you respond with anger, they will push back. One by one, people worldwide are awakening, and living in more peace, love and compassion. Be patient and non-judgmental with those who are in the beginning stages of awakening. Create in your life what you wish to see in the world. **PAA: Thank you for sharing with us your journey and your wisdom, very much appreciated. ** --- --- --- # Interview with Frater IAC: Franz Bardon, Tactical Magic, Introspection & the Hermetic Path Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/interview-with-frater-iac-franz-bardon-tactical-magic-introspection-the-hermetic-path/ ## Introduction Here we have here the transcript from a recent podcast interview with Frater IAC, we discuss a whole host of topics. We also provide a small glimpse of something Frater has been creating for Perseus. If you enjoy the post, please let us know and leave us a comment. --- ## Watch the Interview Here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmJUQahGT6s ## Welcome and Introduction **PAA: I’d like to welcome everyone to this episode of Perseus Conversations. Today is a very exciting day. We’re joined by a really inspiring guest, Frater, and just that name alone has a lot of meaning, as I’ve recently learned. So, I’d like to say hello and welcome.** Well, thank you. I’m happy to be here. I’m anticipating a fun conversation. **PAA: Wonderful. It’s really nice to have you here. You did a wonderful blog post for us, one of the most popular and quickly spread posts we’ve had. It was huge and so informative. PAA: For people who maybe haven’t read that post, can you give us a little bit of information about who you are, your background, and how you came to this kind of practice?** ## Early Magical Experiences Well, I was exposed to powerful magic at a really early age, but nobody called it that. I never really had the words to call it that, but my grandfather, my mother, my paternal grandmother—they all had the touch. One of the first experiences I ever had that was seriously powerful, I was very young, and my mother was troubled. She drove us maybe 90 miles to see her father. We’re sitting in a narrow living room in a very old house. It’s dim, with lace curtains. We’re kind of behind an arch, and my grandpa is sitting in a chair, my mother’s sitting in a chair, and I have a little stool because I’m four. This memory is extremely vivid because grandpa and mom are talking, and I’m just sitting there taking it in. I’m four, I didn’t get it, but I was just sitting quietly being a kid. All of a sudden, grandpa got up, went to a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle of wine—later I found out it was Mogan David, that real sweet red wine. He pours mom a glass, pours himself a glass, and pours me a glass. He puts it in front of me, then he has a toast. We lift our glasses, and he says words—I don’t remember what those words were, but we drank our wine. I’ll tell you, James, that was the best tasting stuff I ever had. God, it was better than the finest grape juice. They call it MD 2020, I guess, really sweet. Anyway, I said, “Grandpa, can I have more?” He looked at me and began to speak. I had images that came—it was hypnotic. This image of me growing up to adulthood, becoming enslaved to the wine bottle, ending up in the gutter—a horrible, awful, terrible hitting-bottom kind of vision. Then I come out of it, and grandpa’s looking at me and says, “Do you still want more?” I said, “No.” To this day, I’m a teetotaler. I don’t drink. I was addicted to cigarettes, but I quit those back in 2010. I don’t smoke. I don’t use recreational drugs. I think Grandpa did me a great service because I have a very powerful personality. I drive toward things, and that can contribute to addiction. He spoke prophetically sometimes, and he probably knew that. That was my first experience with powerful magic. In my formative years, when I was maybe 19 or 20, my holy guardian angel spoke to me audibly for the first of two times in my life and chewed me out. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant conversation, but he set me straight, set me on a straight path. That was just so good. I’ve always felt a calling, an attraction toward this thing we call magic, but my family didn’t use those words. They wouldn’t have responded well to hearing the word magic, yet they were magical without intending to be. I always wanted more, but I was busy raising a family, going to college, starting a career, doing the Saturn things. I never really seriously pursued magic per se until I was 50. I’ve always been a public servant. I’ve never really wanted very much out of life. All I really want is enough, and I’m geared to try and help others. That entails having enough. I haven’t felt a need to amass huge amounts of wealth or power—that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is making the world better because I have lived. I know that sounds flagrantly idealistic, but it’s true. Some people just think that way. I’ve always been devout. I’ve always known divine providence, however you want to think of that, has always been with me. ## A Pivotal Spiritual Encounter **PAA: What’s really interesting—probably for many people, the thought of actually having that clear hearing of your guardian angel and knowing it’s your guardian angel at such a young age is already quite astonishing. PAA: Can I ask what you were doing at that point in your life to bring that about?** Let me be honest, I’ll get some mud on my face here. I was living in a sort of communal thing with a bunch of roommates. There were a lot of things going on. I was in construction, I hated my job. I figured my father needed to get off his rear end and get some money together to give me that full-ride scholarship to college that I so richly deserved. I was just so full of it, that’s really what I thought. Anyway, mom calls me up one day and says, “You better come over.” I came over, and dad is sitting there crying. He looks up and says, “Take care of your mom.” I’m sitting there going, “What the heck?” Mom said, “Well, dad has leukemia.” When I went home, I was crying, having a major pity party because it wasn’t about being sorry for dad having this illness—it was about me. Gosh, he’s never going to put me through college. Me, me, me, me. I was crying, and through my tears, I saw this bookshelf with an old King James Bible on it that I never read. Back in those days, you didn’t ever throw away a Bible, so it moved with me wherever I went. I grabbed it, not knowing about bibliomancy. I pulled it off the shelf, opened it, stuck my finger down, and read, “Behold, I have refined thee, but not as silver. I have molded thee in the furnace of affliction.” That furnace of affliction is a real frolic, let me tell you. My holy guardian angel at that point spoke to me and basically told me I was full of it. If I was ever going to amount to anything in my life, it had to be based on my own effort. I was the one that needed to put one foot in front of the other and start off on that path. That’s what happened. I’m human, just like everyone else, and sometimes when we get off on a track like that, we have to be corrected. I credit that wondrous being, the holy guardian angel, for doing that. I figure I must have a real calling here because that happened. A lot of that wouldn’t happen for a lot of folks—maybe they suppress that inner voice. I learned compassion at the knees of my mother, one of my heroes, an amazing woman. She taught me about palm reading, though I don’t do that, and talked about psychics and the paranormal. She could weave really good stories. She was an interesting woman. ## Exploring Magical Traditions The first book on hermeticism that I ever read was *The Kybalion*, believe it or not, by the three initiates. Every other word’s capitalized—it’s not easy reading. There was a sentence in *The Kybalion* that hit me like a ton of bricks: “You wouldn’t be reading this book if you weren’t ready for it.” I took that at face value and started pursuing the path. I didn’t know where to start because I didn’t really have the words. I thought witchcraft—maybe I should study witchcraft. I got Chris Penzak’s book, *The Inner Temple of Witchcraft*. It’s a good read, worth reading even if you’re not witchy because it has you create an inner astral temple that’s invaluable. But I’m just not a witch—it didn’t resound with me, didn’t ring any bells. So I found Don Michael Craig’s *Modern Magic*. Rituals are fun—the Golden Dawn, the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram. That’s where I learned about the Kabbalah itself. The cosmology of the Kabbalah smacks of truth—it’s so amazing. I did those rituals, read Israel Regardie’s *Pomegranate*, and Pope Grenian, a former special forces guy, wrote a good version of the middle pillar ritual. But the rituals didn’t have power for me because I wasn’t magically mature enough to infuse them with the power of actual spirit. **PAA: I can relate to that myself, having gone through a lot of that same book and trying a lot of the Golden Dawn material in the past. I would do it very disciplined, but at the end of it, I felt like I was doing it for the sake of doing it and wasn’t getting what I was seeking from it.** Exactly. I was like, there’s got to be a better way. Around 2008 or 2010, I found Franz Bardon and read his book *Initiation into Hermetics*. I knew that was the path I wanted to be on. I reasoned that if somebody went through that kind of disciplined approach, they would be in balance, working from a place of connection with the godhead, and a servant of the light. That’s the group I wanted to be in. But I wasn’t very mature at that time. Bardon means business with his exercises. The soul mirror, frankly, I didn’t take seriously enough at first—I was bored by it. I was like, “God, there’s got to be something better than this.” So I moved ahead and started breathing in the fire element. I’m a Sagittarian, mutable fire—fire is very strong in me. The first time I started breathing that fire, it came on me in its power. That was the first instance where I knew without doubt that my magic had power. It scared me to death and was that potent the first time I did it. It wasn’t very pleasant—I was hurt by it, crossed for many months. I took a hiatus from Bardon at that point, thinking I needed to do something safer. ## Tarot and Returning to Bardon I decided I’d try something innocuous like getting good at the tarot because I’ve always loved the tarot. I read a bunch of books about the tarot, many of which aren’t very good. I found a wonderful book by Josephine McCarthy, *Tarot for the 21st Century*. She’s the real deal. She has a method in that book—if you want to get good at the tarot, do this. I did it for about a year and got good at the tarot. I liked her style, so I read all her books. She has a wonderful novel about inner balance called *The Last Scabbard*, almost a takeoff on the Arthurian legend with Excalibur. I worked through a lot of the apprentice part of Quareia, a full-fledged balanced training program in its own right. But I hate to fail. There came a time when I knew I had to commit to it or not. I chose to go back to Bardon because I had failed. Remember Yoda talking to Luke about his failure in the cave? I failed in the cave. So I went back to Bardon, dead serious this time, because when I want to, I have a lot of power of will to move toward a mission. My mission for a long time, as a public servant, has been to wage peace against economic violence. Everything I do, everything I try, including this magic, is to focus on that mission. Later, my mission became refined because I read Valentin Tomberg’s *Meditations on the Tarot*, a journey into Christian hermeticism—some of the best esoteric writing, the best wisdom literature I’ve ever encountered. Tomberg fills in a lot of the gaps, the secrets that Bardon puts out there but doesn’t say are secrets. ## Discovering Conjure I found conjure, a discipline I had no idea existed. I’d read books by shamanic people, witches, hermeticists, and finally found conjure. I was like, “Oh my gosh, these are my people.” Conjure is folk magic, tactical magic of the people in the rural lowlands, highlands, rural Ireland, and later the slaves who brought Ifá religions to North America, which became hoodoo, voodoo, and Santería. Conjure is designed to help oppressed people survive—not all of us can always pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. When I read conjure, I knew a lot of that stuff. I’d been working with talismans, tinctures, good luck charms, psalms, gris-gris bags—that’s where I live, tactical magic. I’m really good at working with talismans. When I found that, Bardon started to make sense to me because he’s all about practice exercises. You do these exercises over and over, and they are cumulative, organic, and grow in you. But if your listeners are like me, I got really restless with that because I wanted to do stuff with it. What are we going to do here? I know how to inhale and accumulate the fire element in all my organs, make it into a sphere in front of me—liy dah, what am I going to do with that? The conjure discipline gave me permission to think outside the box a little, gave me that outlet to scratch that itch. Bardon presents this as a magical, mystical journey. Imagine a dirt road with two tracks and a hump in the middle. You’ve got to keep both wheels on the track, or you’ll veer off. One track is the quality path—introspection, the big five that Bardon gives in the soul mirror steps one and two: introspection, acts of will, magic of breathing, washing, eating, drinking. Those are the qualitative aspects where you purify your soul, gaining more complete control over what you allow yourself to feel and think. That’s the seed from which grows what Bardon calls magical authority. He says in the first part of *The Practice of Magical Evocation* that you have to have magical authority stemming from connecting with the godhead, filling yourself with light. Otherwise, the spirits will just laugh at you—they’re not human, they don’t have a lot of sympathy. As you build elemental equilibrium, your magical authority grows, and thus the power of your quantity track—the other side of the dirt road. That’s the power of your magic, your rituals, your ability to charge a talisman and put that energy in there as a storage battery. I’m a big believer in tactics. When I found conjure and synthesized that idea of tactics, you’ve got to have the right tool for the right job. That gives you a lot of choices, whereas Bardon’s approach is so linear. He’s focused with single-minded intensity, saying you must completely master all these steps before it’s safe to move on. That’s why I’m bald—I pulled all my hair out from frustration. But the magic is organic—as you master each exercise and move on, that ability continues in you. For example, when you’re in a later step, packing yourself with fire to learn to feel and move the electric fluid, you can use the big five to help. You can do autosuggestion in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, just as you’re waking up or going to sleep, with 48 affirmations: “I am a master at working with the electrical fluid.” When practicing the magic of breathing, you can breathe in mastery and breathe out doubt or whatever you need to get rid of to achieve that mastery. You’re using those as tactical tools to master a given skill. ## The Soul Mirror and Introspection **PAA: You’ve explained wonderfully how deeply you’ve gone into introspection. PAA: Looking back, when you got serious with the mirrors and introspection, was there a significant change? How long did you spend getting rid of these major issues? Often, you go through great effort for a long time, and it’s like taking the brakes off—then you’re off to the races, and serious time is required.** Let’s talk about that in terms of tactics. The big five, the soul mirror steps—one reason so many people drop out of Franz Bardon before they make it through step two is that those five are not sufficient in every personal situation. I have a graduate education in counseling and counseling psychology with an emphasis on vocational guidance, so I’ve been exposed to all those psychological theories. Some people go through psychotherapy for 20 years and don’t have much to show for it. What hit me when I first read about the larvæ is that it smacks of truth. You have these astral larvæ, chains of your own making, created by strong emotions like anger or pride. They feed off it and create situations in your life so they can feed. That’s what you’re doing with introspection—getting rid of them. When I discovered I had this foe, something real to throw out and be free of, that helped me. The big five are good for something like an addiction, like cigarettes. The will is supreme, the most integral part of any magic is a powerful will. You do an act of will and say, “I’m going to attain elemental equilibrium,” and apply those five steps. That’ll get you through to where you’re ready to safely work with the elements, but your purification won’t be complete. You won’t be pure enough to exert maximal control over your thoughts and feelings. What if you have a single devastating event in your life, like getting laid off from your job, and your employer gives you a warm fuzzy by having a guard accompany you out with a box of your stuff? You’re in shock, totally out of balance. You’ve got to put yourself back into balance before you can do anything else. Bardon’s elemental harmonizing in step four—taking the earth element into your legs, water into your abdomen, air into your chest, fire into your head, sitting with that, then letting it go in reverse order—helps you regain equilibrium. Then you can think and work out how to approach whatever you’re going to do. What if you have a complex? Carl Jung coined the term complex. I know people who served multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, the forever wars, and came back with complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I also know people who were abused in childhood, at a job, or bullied—these create complexes. These usually have one larvæ, like fear, driving the show, but you might build a wall of pride, get angry and snap at people, or feel shame and do desperate things to cover it up. You need something different. I reached into some shamanic techniques that were very helpful because I had a couple of these complexes. We’re all human—we’ve all had bad things happen to us. I did a lot of mirror work with a mirror to do soul recapture and recapitulation. There’s an art of falling where you fall, and these negative things go away because they don’t fall as quickly as you. You’re pure when you hit that depth point. ## Mastering the Depth Point **PAA: You mentioned the depth point earlier—can you speak a little toward that? It’s so crucial, especially in your material, where you’ve introduced its importance.** This is about moving energy around. In Bardon’s early steps, he has you learn to breathe vital energy, then pore breathe, then work with the akasha, a form of vital energy that transcends the planes. You have to learn how to move the energy from one organ to another. I devised a way of doing it with my hand because vision guides your consciousness. Your eyes are fire organs. You look at something, and you soon feel the sensations in that area. I learned to do it with the tip of my thumb—I’d focus my vision on it, and pretty soon I’d feel it. I started experimenting, moving that energy around my hand. To go to the depth point, you sit quietly, go into vacancy of mind, thought control, and become vacant. Ask yourself, where is the seat of my consciousness now? Where is my awareness? With me, it’s usually between my eyes in the ajna area, sometimes in my heart area—it varies. You connect with that and consciously move it to your solar plexus, the depth point, where there’s a nerve bundle, the celiac plexus, the chakra. Transferring consciousness isn’t as hard as Bardon makes it out to be. Focus your vision on something, imagine you’re there, and start feeling it in the object. It’s hard to explain—you’ve got to practice. With hindsight, after climbing the mountain, you look back and think, “I spent years on that, and it’s just this.” But it took me three years of steady work to make it through the soul mirror, step by step. Kudos to the esoteric author Virgil—I wouldn’t have made it through step two without his books. Tanya published a book from the Bardon community on elemental equilibrium that was helpful, and Andre Consciencia’s *Soul Mirrors to the Sphere of the Sun* is outstanding. He talks about neo-shamanism, and I believe there’s a service element, a shamanic element, to hermetic practitioners. People ask me to do things for them—that’s the shamanic or pastoral element of being a hermetic initiate. Once you make it through *Initiation into Hermetics*, you’ve been given the world, but you’ve got to meet it halfway and work hard. If you’re given much, much is expected—you’re going to serve the light, help others. There are people in our discipline who don’t serve the light. We’re created in the image and likeness of divine providence. The image is the no-brainer—you can turn toward divine providence and try to become like it, the path toward being a god-man or god-woman as Bardon says, or you can follow your own lights and do whatever you want. Valentin Tomberg talks about this in his discourse on the Tower in *Meditations on the Tarot*. The Christian church was aware of reincarnation but downplayed it because they were afraid people would learn how to get rid of God and create their own soul immortality without that. The Tower is the divine lightning that blows the top off. **PAA: We’re about 45 minutes now, so let’s move on. You’ve got so much knowledge and experience. Some of these books you’ve mentioned are so useful, and I’ve discovered them because you’ve been sharing them in videos about something coming soon. PAA: Can we talk about what’s coming soon, spagyrics, and talismans together, and how you started working with them? You get to step eight in Bardon’s work, with fluid condensers and solid fluid condensers. Some go deeply into it, and you definitely have. Can you share how you see that work, its value, and how you approach it?** ## Spagyrics and Fluid Condensers First, let’s talk about the concept of spagyrics. The guy who coined that term is Paracelsus, a doctor in the 1500s. The word spagyric comes from two Greek roots that mean to take apart and put back together again. Paracelsus learned how to make decoctions out of plant materials and exalt or awaken their astral and spiritual healing qualities to make potent medicines. Think about Bardon, the soul mirrors, and active introspection—it’s a tactical way to purify yourself, a spiritual alchemical transformation. You take what was, tear it apart, and put it back together better. That’s spagyric alchemy. I don’t have an alchemical lab setup, a pelican, or a distillation apparatus. I’ve confined myself to decoctions, like a fatty liver tincture, an elixir that’s great. When I learned from step eight how to charge it and awaken it, it became very potent as a medicine. Bardon gives a list of plants, and when I got to step eight, I was like, “I’m in business.” I went through it step by step, as Bardon says, with 14 jars of tincture. I stared at them, wondering what I was doing, because Bardon doesn’t tell you much beyond how to make them. He gives a tiny clue: charge them with your will and imagination. It took me a long time to figure it out. A fluid condenser is a talisman. All talismans are fluid condensers because fluid in the Bardon sense is not a liquid—it’s a magical energy from an element, the electrical or magnetic fluid, the energy of your intent. By creating these fluid condensers, you condense your intent into them. I discovered it’s not your intent you charge it with—you research the spiritual and magical properties of the plant material, awaken that with your will and imagination at the astral and spirit levels, and create a consciousness. You become allied with that plant spirit. I developed a way to do that using dreamwork, which was fun stuff. ## The Upcoming Perseus Course **PAA: Frater, you have a wonderful course coming with Perseus. Is that okay to say now?** Sure it is. What I want people to realize is, thanks to your input, as I’ve been sending you these videos, we created something special. **PAA: I’ve been looking forward to every few days when you send me a video. I’ll sit down with my coffee and listen to the entire video. I love it because you’re so passionate about what you’re doing—it’s infectious. You’re looking at it in ways I never did, bringing out books I’ve never investigated and how they can be applied to this work. It’s wonderful seeing this material. I’ve been teasing it, and whether you’ve just started or been doing this for a decade, you’re going to find Frater’s work condensed. We started thinking it was going to be advanced material, but it became more open, covering everything from concentration, energies, depth point, to mirror work. You’ve covered all the bases.** **PAA: One thing people don’t normally do as much is your work with a peach tree. There’s a respect and communication for the spirit of the peach tree or the plant you’re working with. PAA: Can you share why you chose that tree, how you work with it, what it communicated to you, and how it’s different from Bardon’s dry shopping list?** ## Working with Plant Spirits I have a peach tree in my yard, so it was a matter of convenience. I’ve known this tree for 40 years and felt its consciousness. In the Amazon basin, shamans have a senior shaman who initiates them into plant consciousness. I believe plants have consciousness—rocks and crystals too, but it’s different, slower. You could call it energy if you don’t like the word consciousness. Plants communicate with each other, birds, and insects—they’re amazing. I went and asked the peach tree because Bardon’s step eight lists cherry tree leaves and bark, but I don’t have a cherry tree. I looked up if the peach tree is related to the cherry tree—it is. I checked its elemental correspondence: water. Gender of the spirit: feminine. Planet: Venus. Its characteristics boil down to ancestral wisdom, connection with spirits, and spiritual healing. I asked the peach tree if it would give me its branches and bark, treated it with respect, and told it what I was going to do with the tincture. I’m not playing around—I’m using this in rituals to encourage people to live in harmony with divine providence, each other, and the sacred earth, uplifting human consciousness. I made the peach tincture and developed a way to become allied with the spirit through ingesting a diluted version—two or three droppers in four ounces of distilled water. I go to the depth point, listen for any messages from that spirit, then go to bed and dream. I was initiated into plant intelligence by willow bark. I made a willow bark tincture, using twigs and leaves because I wanted the whole plant—willow bark is like nature’s aspirin. I had one of the most powerful external communications from the spirit realm when it initiated me into plant consciousness. I don’t look at trees or grass the same way now—I recognize the life and consciousness in them. **PAA: That’s wonderful. You’ve opened a whole new world. In the new material you’ve put together, you’ve communicated it so well. You’ve done wonderful slides, and it’s so detailed. For anyone at step seven or eight, who feels they’ve ticked the box and want to go further, this is it. It opens up talismans and fluid condensers in a new way. This isn’t alchemy—you can do it in your kitchen without a library from 400 years ago or thousands of dollars in glassware. It’s a partnership between your skills from *Initiation into Hermetics* and basic kitchen work. PAA: Can you share more about your experience using these tinctures for yourself and others?** ## Practical Applications of Tinctures I did a healing ritual at the request of a friend who lives about 70 miles away. She had a loved one diagnosed with a serious illness and said she was open to anything. I asked if she’d like me to perform a ritual on their behalf, and she agreed. I used the peach condenser because it’s so powerful, a very healing water spirit. I prepared the ritual, compounding it out of the box with five psalms and a letter formula to juice it up. I texted her to have him sit quietly in a receptive state while I did the ritual. When it was done, she texted back that he felt weepy, like he was crying. I said, “To weep is to cleanse—that’s good.” A couple of days later, she said he cried for a while, then slept hard for three hours. I don’t know how the ritual worked in healing, but they felt the power, the magic. I also helped my hermetic colleague, Sor Music Mundi, with a relative’s spirit who had passed and stuck around. We developed a ritual together, and I did a fluid condenser influence while she did the ritual with her cousin. They both felt the magic, like goosebumps. Distance doesn’t matter as much as scope. Healing a person can be done over a greater distance than something grandiose like raising human consciousness, which might be diluted. For the class, I did a ritual with the peach condenser to uplift human consciousness. We went to a river, poured the water in, said words, used a psalm, and charged the tincture. The purpose was to give people a yearning to live in harmony with divine providence, each other, and the sacred earth when they drink water. It was tiring—it takes something out of you, even when you pull energy from the universe. **PAA: As we’re getting on in time, could I ask you to summarize some advice for anyone just starting the Franz Bardon journey and then describe in your own words what this course is? We know it’s talismans and spagyrics, but there’s more to these words.** ## Advice for Beginners and Course Overview For new initiates, don’t give up. You’re going to have dark nights of the soul, feel alone, like you’re wasting your time or it’s useless. Don’t give up. There’s an old proverb: it’s always darkest before the dawn. Keep plugging at it. If you bog down, go to the Bardon community, get advice, read books, but don’t give up. The course is about tactical magic—tactical qualitative magic, which I call active introspection, and tactical quantitative magic, how to use these liquid fluid condensers, these plant condensers that are so powerful it isn’t even funny. I teach people how to charge them in a way that’s been held secret. I learned it from Mouni Sadhu’s *The Tarot*, a great companion to Tomberg’s *Meditations on the Tarot*. Sadhu talks about the motion and shape of cabalistic magic, using tobolons, but you’re not supposed to reveal how to do it—each student has to figure it out. I use the symbol of the vertical arm of the cross and the triple-armed cross to get people into that mentality of creating a motion of the magic to charge the talisman with your will and imagination. You don’t have to imagine what you’re charging it with—you awaken its astral consciousness, its spiritual qualities, and have them become your ally in the great work. This course is about tactical magic. You’ll learn about self-purification because we’re all human—just because I have elemental equilibrium now doesn’t mean I won’t have a water leak or need to call a plumber. Bad things may still happen, but this path is transformative. You have to keep setting one foot in front of the other. I give techniques to think outside the box and book titles to inspire you to fill in the gaps. If you’ve been restless about doing magic as opposed to just exercising it, this is a good course. **PAA: That sums it up. The difference between practicing and doing—we sometimes confuse the two. This course gives you a way to use this stuff, whether you’ve been doing Bardon or other traditions for a short or long time. It holds your hand, like a refresher, ensuring you’ve got the necessary skills. It’s rigorous, the real deal from someone with years of experience and a family connection to these things, which is so rich and wonderful to hear. I love getting those videos—I’m sad that’s going to end.** ## Closing Thoughts I can send you more. I still have the last lesson to complete. We did a Blair Witch project-style ritual with not a lot of videographic skills, but it had power, and we felt it. The course is going to be fun—we’re not going to be grim. We’re going to have a few laughs. There’ll be a space in the community platform for people to talk about this stuff, and I’m quite responsive to questions. **PAA: Thank you so much for being on the podcast and sharing all this work through the course. I think people will find it very inspirational once they see what you’ve put together. PAA: Any last goodbye?** Thank you for having me. I wish everybody the best. **PAA: Okay, guys, Frater is hugely inspirational. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’re going to release more information as it comes. If you haven’t already, please like, subscribe, and get ready for more interesting videos to come. Thank you, everyone.** --- ## Community Platform --- # Interview with Ajahn Punnadhammo: Jhana, Stream-Entry and Buddhist Cosmology Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/interview-with-ajahn-punnadhammo-jhana-stream-entry-and-buddhist-cosmology/ ## Introduction Today we are talking with Ajahn Punnadhammo from 'The Arrow River Forrest Hermitage'. I was inspired to contact him after my research into Buddhist Cosmology and the states of the Jhana led me to his website. We are just scratching the surface here into what are extremely far reaching subjects. I am very grateful for Ajahn Punnadhammo taking the time to answer these questions. You can visit his site [here](https://arrowriver.ca/). The Cosmology book mentioned in the interview can be seen [here](https://arrowriver.ca/book/cosmoBook.php). Here is some background information: *The Arrow River Forest Hermitage is a Theravadin Buddhist monastery and meditation center located in Northern Ontario, fifty miles southwest of Thunder Bay. We have 92 acres of land in a beautiful mixed forest. There are presently seven all-weather dwelling places on the property as well as a meditation-hall and kitchen, a sauna, library and well-equipped workshop.* *The resident bhikkhu is Ajahn Punnadhammo who has been studying and practicing Buddhism since 1979 and was ordained in Thailand in the forest tradition of Ajahn Chah (novice ordination Feb. 1991, higher ordination Feb. 1992). Between 1990 and 1995 he was based at Wat Pah Nanachat, Thailand. Punnadhammo is a Canadian, born Michael Dominskyj in Toronto in 1955. He began studying the Dhamma under Kema Ananda, the founder and first teacher at the Arrow River Center.* ## Interview ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_c12a23c255ed4511a3ee05035dc5f97b~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_376,h_283,al_c,lg_1,q_80,enc_auto/93c8f8_c12a23c255ed4511a3ee05035dc5f97b~mv2.jpg)Ajahn Punnadhammo **PAA: We have your background from your website which is exciting to read, I see you were in Thailand from 1990-1995 and I wonder if you are able to give us insight into what life was like in those 5 years and what if anything stands out as significant events and breakthroughs in your practice.** Wat Pah Nanachat was an ideal place to train as a young monk. It is the international monastery of the Ajahn Chah tradition set up for his western disciples. The atmosphere is very traditional but the teachings are available in English. It was very inspiring to be living in a Buddhist country where the Dhamma is part of the fabric of everyday life. WPN also has a couple of remote retreat monasteries associated with it and I had the opportunity to spend some time there as well. I especially enjoyed Tow Dtum which is deep in the jungle bordering Myanamar. Living close to nature is a big part of the Buddhist forest tradition, going right back to the Buddha’s time. The South-East Asian forest is very different from the Canadian Boreal forest but both have their unique beauties and wonders. **PAA: Have the teachings remained as they were in Thailand or have you had to make changes at Arrow River to the way things are done to accommodate Western ideas.** The teachings as such remain the same. There is necessarily some adaption of the lifestyle due to both climate and culture. Our tradition (Theravada) tends to be very conservative and seeks to preserve the original teachings of the Buddha. Also my personal approach is not to dilute the original message to make it palatable to modern ideas. **PAA: Within your tradition you use the Jhana as a guide to attainment and increasing stillness within the mind? What is the process and methods you use to achieve each Jhana?** The basic idea of developing samadhi leading into jhana is to make the mind still. That is the true meaning of the word “samadhi” which is usually translated “concentration.” I have thought for some time that this translation misleads meditators into pushing too hard. The term is defined in the old texts as “non-wavering, stillness, stability.” The practice is to unify the mind on a single arbitrarily chosen object. We usually use the breath although other objects are possible as well. The key skill to learn is the art of non-attention. That is, the meditator must learn to disregard all other objects, whether they be internal such as thoughts or memories or external such as sounds or smells. The key is make the mind open and receptive, but only to let the chosen object in. If this is done persistently the other objects will fade away because one is not feeding them the energy of attention. The mind will gradually disengage from the senses and rest in a unified blissful state. This is jhana. **PAA: Are the Jhanas something of a prerequisite for Ahartship?** **If so, how important are these stages/absorptions to one's progress? I see that they are listed in the Cosmology book.** Technically yes. There is said to be no enlightenment without jhana. There is however a “bare insight” path which does not pursue jhanic unification but goes straight to vipassana (insight or investigation, a very different meditation). But even the proponents of this method admit there must be at least a single moment of jhana before the realization of Nibbana. It is also clear that when the Buddha spoke about paths to enlightenment the one he mentioned the most was to go through the four jhanas and then to investigate reality upon emergence from jhana. So in summary, while formal development of the jhanas my not be an absolute requirement for enlightenment, it certainly helps! **PAA: We have words like Samadhi and Enlightenment. From your understanding what does it take to truly embody these words?** **Secondly if we were able to define these terms would it from the context of Buddism mean that they had freed themselves from the six realms of Samsara? Or would it simply mean they have been able to establish the ‘Right view’.** I have already said something about the meaning of samadhi. Enlightenment is another odd word choice in English. It’s not really wrong but it doesn’t correspond with any of the common terms used in Pali for the experience. Instead we have vimiutti - liberation or bodhi - awakening. In Abhidhamma it is referred to as magga-phala which means path and fruit. The essence of what is being referred to is the realization of the unconditioned, or Nibbana. Theravada sees awakening as occurring in four distinct stages. The first is steam-entry which is the first glimpse of Nibbana; it is like the curtains part for just a moment. This moment is enough to change the being forever but it is not yet full enlightenment. Before stream-entry it is impossible even to imagine the unconditioned. After stream-entry there is a new understanding of the conditioned, by contrast as it were. Becoming freed of the cycle of rebirth also occurs in stages. The stream-winner is forever freed from the possibility of a lower rebirth and is destined to have a maximum of seven more lifetimes, always in the human realm or higher. The second stage is called “once return” because he is subject to one more human rebirth. Third stage is a “non-returner” and is almost completely purified. He can be reborn only in the Pure Abodes. An arahant or a perfected one will not be reborn anywhere. **PAA: In Buddism and in your Cosmology book you have written about the universe, beings and even time. How much of this can we take purely as a story from the Pali Cannon and how much can we take it as real information that can be gleaned by anyone with proper practice? For example the beings of the universe mentioned in the cosmology book, are these beings that one could experience contact with given access to the Jhana states?** In my view it is important to avoid the opposite errors of extreme skepticism and extreme credulity. We should accept our own limitations and not pretend that we actually know how the universe works. Every description of the universe, including the modern scientific one, is just a model. It is not the reality itself which is beyond our comprehension. When someone asks if the devas are real, we can reply by asking “what do you mean by real?” This is a deep question. In what sense is this ordinary human realm “real”? Of course the descriptions in the Pali texts are coloured by the cultural background of India, which was already a rich and ancient heritage in the time of the Buddha. Some spiritually advanced human beings may have had visions or interactions with other realms, but they would inevitably perceive them through the lens of their previous conceptions. A Christian mystic sees angels, a shaman might see ancestor spirits, an Indian saw devas. In regard to such visions, one of the psychic powers that can be developed through mastery of jhana is said to be the divine eye (dibbacakkhu) which allows one to see into other realms of existence. Devas and other such beings may also chose to manifest to humans on rare occasions. https://www.youtube.com/live/7OUNx5vM1IU?feature=share **PAA: We hear in Tibetan Vajrayana and Dzogchen systems one of the highest accomplishments is that of the Rainbow Body (Jalu) where the practitioner dissolves into the 4 elements or a smaller achievement that of the incorruptible body. What are your thoughts on these achievements?** There isn’t really an equivalent of this in Theravada. The closest thing I can think of is the way the relics (cremated remains) of a dead arahant often transmute into pearl like relics. It is really quite striking. **PAA: According to the Pali Cannon what are the Sun and the Moon?** The sun and moon are conceived as vimanas in which devas live. A vimana is like a flying mansion, an aerial and mobile abode of the gods. Hundreds of devas live in the sun and moon and there is a chief deva in each; the sun god and the moon god. They orbit around Mt. Sineru and it is night when the sun is on the opposite side of the mountain from us. The change in seasons depends on a change of altitude of the sun. From time to time the gigantic asura Rahu swallows the sun or moon, terrifying the devas within. But he is unable to hold it for long because of the force of their motion. This is the explanation for eclipses. There is almost nothing in the canon or commentaries about the stars and planets. And it seems that the model described above wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny for the observed motions of the sun and moon. This reveals a significant difference between the Greek and Indian approaches. The Greeks developed their cosmology by looking at the sky and trying to account for the observed motions. This is the tradition we still follow in the West today. In India, the actual sky was of less interest than the internal world of the mind. They developed a cosmology to account for different levels of consciousness and weren’t really all that concerned with the external world. **PAA: What are some of the things that students can do to make better progress in their practice? Also what advice would you give to practitioners who are not part of larger Sangha and practice on their own.** The first step must always be to improve your sila (ethical behavior). You won’t get anywhere on the spiritual path if your morality is bad. The next step is to develop a meditation practice. The most important thing here is consistency. It is a very good practice to fix a certain time every day for meditation and to follow it diligently. If you only meditate when you feel inspired you will never get anywhere. Overcoming resistance will strengthen your resolve and we often make the most progress when we overcome defilements like laziness or desire mind. Having a sangha to practice with is very beneficial and anyone seriously interested in spiritual development would be well served to seek out a local group if one exists. If not, there are nowadays a plethora of resources on the internet. The covid restrictions did have one beneficial effect is that it brought many of our monks as well as other spiritual teachers to look into possibilities of teaching on the internet. Every week there are new dhamma talks being uploaded to YouTube and other venues. There are also online discussion groups and forums etc. Find something of the sort that resonates with you and it can be a decent substitute for a local sangha. **PAA: Is there anything else you would like to say to readers regarding the practice of Buddhism, meditation or the view of the Cosmos?** One of the traditional meditations that has been largely ignored in the West up to now is devanusati or contemplation of the devas. This is a way of refining and elevating consciousness. It is has a brightening and expanding effect on the mind. I have been experimenting with variations of this practice for some time now. For anyone interested, [here is a guided meditation on this theme.](https://arrowriver.ca/dhammatalks/talks21/338m_MeditationDevasChakras.mp3) https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/rainbow-body-jalu-and-the-miraculous-updated-for-2022/ --- # Interview with Bill Hegeman Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/interview-with-bill-hegeman/ We would like to introduce William Hegeman (Bill) “Archonstone”. He has been very generous in sharing his journey through the magical arts. Please leave us feedback in the comments and please do share the post if you feel inspired to do so. Contact details for Bill can be found at the of this post. **PAA: Please introduce yourself and let us know how you found the teachings of Franz Bardon as well as sharing a little more about your extensive background as mentioned on your website.** ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_5ff98e6b60d74d2bb5d4172583ee3755~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_360,h_480,al_c,lg_1,q_85,enc_auto/93c8f8_5ff98e6b60d74d2bb5d4172583ee3755~mv2.png) William Hegeman (Bill) “Archonstone”. 1983, out of the Marines, couldn’t afford a Community College, struggling financially, I moved from Troy, NY to Albany. I was finally able to afford books as a typist. I think the store at that time was “Blue White Rainbow”. IIH, 777, Magic without Tears, and others I managed to acquire. I started having mystical and paranormal experiences when I was 2. At 7 my grandfather came back to say good bye 2 weeks after his passing; and had local earth based creatures visit me also. At 13 I started going to a Baptist church, and practiced meditation and energy work from Evans-Wentz book: “Tibetan Yoga: The secret doctrine”. I lived in an “exit” suburb, with drug gangs, poor, criminal and troubled people. My family had its own issues. At 14 I did a progressive fast 40 days and prayed for the wisdom of Solomon or God. I saw a physical visual manifestation and got my answer in the affirmative, and said I’d be released in 32 years. El is not Yahweh. My life was filled with trials and ordeals. There was no shaktipat, or grace. Meditation and energy basics, along with my own visual techniques, I was faced with supernatural adventures where other people saw the same thing I did. Also realized that the “Christian” perception of God was flawed, finite and that there had to be a much larger metaphysical reality. I was 19 then. In my early 20’s in 1983, I had a girlfriend, with a household that had books on Kabbalah, Kyballion, and some Theosophic works. At that time I studied much further. I was a part-time professional reader. I planed walked with a structure based on the symbolic frame work from Kabbalah. I had created fetches , bodies of light or in Bardon’s work Mental bodies, to do reconnaissance and help inform me of the goings on of the Albany tri-city area. Kabbalah and the fetch’s attachments were all traps and I let them go, over a decade, then restarted and creating my own system and methodologies when I moved to Atlanta in 1996. **PAA: Many have problems with the early steps like VOM in step 1 and the visualization exercises in step 2. What advice would you give to help students pass these steps?** I can find no reference to VOM in my Bardon Books. I am assuming visualizing excercises. Step 1 I was practicing self control through my meditation exercises since I was 12 or 13. I did conscious breathing pranayama, and Bubble breath. Element Tatwas I had a harder time with. They evoked presences that I had to shut out. I did practice retrospection as a mean for mental body traveling. I agreed with Bardon’s assumption that disturbing the astral matrix can be harmful, and in my experiences would provide a feeding ground for negative vampiric beings in astral projection. Astral traveling pulling reality is not much better. Mental Body work, I call Aspecting and to be functional it has to use Astral accumulated to it to tune into the realms they walk in, and where one can relate the information back, so the energetic patterns can be remembered and not lived. I have found that people have affinities for using a limited set of senses that concentration exercises work well with. Visual and physical senses are my primary. Auditory is the worst. All exercises we go back to basics continually to improve ourselves over time. Other senses that get translated to our physical senses develop over time as you develop a symbolic, mental/emotional patternings that mean something to you. Kabbalah is convenient system, building your own requires a lot of introspection and study. In an energetic framework, systematic contrived systems usually fall short to the social contextual framework one lives in. Excercising whole frameworks to work with egregores of divine, supernal/ infernal egregores, one can compartmentalize it, and work detachment and withdrawal, and choose other dynamics as one develops. I like the Tibetan or chi-gong expression for Bubble or Bell breathing better than the description of Pore Breathing. **PPA: Additional follow up on VOM from Bill.** My method is different than either observing the river method, or pure will which is what I started out with. Having a good potbelly breath and using the stillness at the end and top of the breaths, helps. The idea that people today can still their mind and emotions is excessively difficult. The traction of distractions makes an ingrained habit. I use a Taoist Longman tradition of using judgement of mindful meditation. Proper Asana sitting with buttocks rolled forward and underneath so to take stress off of the psoa muscles sitting straight. Then have the chest expanded and hanging, breath the 4 square pot belly breath. starting with a count of four, Breathe in count of 4, hold at the top of the breath, breathe out for a count of 4, hold at the of the breath for a count of 4. The mind is like having a 2 year old running around the house of hoarders home with memories and impressions from the day we were born. Every thought or emotion that comes up, if it is yours own it, box it, categorize it, good bad or indifferent, labels and categories of your choice. What is not your detach from it, this is not mine let it go. After a mediation session, a standing sun stretch holding on to you, letting go what is not you with a modified and modest horse stance, bending knees, and pushing hands to the earth, letting go and grounding out what is not you. After 2 - 6 months, one is likely to have nothing come up and one can sit in silence, in a void. This and other techniques to manage the energy in the body, detaching the energetic issues in the body, and mindfully managing what has been sorted out. This is to help energy in the body and resolve previously categorized thoughts and emotions. Then do the same with Taoist microcosmic orbit breathing. These techniques are in my book. It explains how we hijack the body's autonomic system to assist in the process, by breath, asana and recognition of the emotion and energy connection in the body. **PAA :What in your opinion are the crucial steps of IIH that ensure success and did you follow IIH by the book or did you go your own way with it?** I worked the concentration exercises. Some were inherent, I had been using them. Identifying and breathing the elements, because I saw them as phases, that didn’t work for me. Charles Luk’s book on Chi Gong: Taoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality, made more sense. Breathing in Yin type of elements, work better for physical and spiritual integration. The western elements work better for Yang elements methods of controlling yin. I went my own way. The description of electric versus magnetic a western way to describe masculine and feminine energies with Pingala and Ida didn’t make sense. I realize that science, western culture, and the time Franz wrote these books, it was probably the best way to describe biomagnetism (which was a popular means of talking about spiritual energy at the time) given the time. What concerns me is that a lot of the writing seems to be heavily influenced by theosophists or more likely the interpretation into English was done by someone heavily influenced by Theosophists. My studies of Eastern schools of yoga and western schools of magic, theosophists made a mishmash of things to sell spirituality to the west. Eventually I had to go my own way. The Victorian poetry of Crowley was filled with metaphors that only literature and divinity PhDs could keep up with. Taoists and Hindu writings are filled with similes and cultural metaphors. After deep studies I’ve been able to tease out the salient meanings in them. **PAA: What influence has the practice of Franz Bardons Hermetics had upon your life?** The most important thing I got out of Franz Bardon’s works was his systematic methodology of practice and discipline. Hinda and Taoist Yogas also put that at the forefront. His methodology of systematically developing practices and exercises and building upon them, to develop the self. Self examination, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and the use of the minds perceptions and analysis, to create a control of the spiritual practices. Also to order the mind and develop self discipline to control behaviors in context. The magical and spiritual mindset people have they tend to loose their way when they have to work with the blind public. The body, memories and faculties we loose when we pass. Disciplines, desires and personality are spiritual dynamics that we carry from life to lifetime. His methodologies keep that as a priority whether he had good direct information from Hindu yogi’s/guru’s or not. There were nuggets of information that the theosophists managed to get into the west. People’s interpretations and summaries, were filled with parochial and western lenses that were highly flawed. He managed to pull the nuggets out of the wash. **PAA: What challenges did you face during your training in IIH/ PME/KTQ. Was there any specific step that took longer for you than others?** I think I covered IIH in the previous answers. KTQ I don’t own a copy. There are plenty of other contemporary books and authors on Kabbalah. PME I didn’t practice. Nor have I ever made a practice of evocations. My personal history with El and other spirits who would interact with me but not speak to me, was a concern. That mystery of why I have since unraveled. Fighting demons, I can force them to speak, but they avoid me like a plague. Only if they are held in space by magicians, can I force them to communicate Evocation based on Western or Kabbalistic practices, requires an invocation of divine presence to effectuate the egregore where the respective spirits can be summoned. I have spent much of my life contemplating my relationship with that being and beings of their respective systems. **PAA: Are you able to share anything from your work in the second and third book? Such as experience of specific spheres via mental wandering or your first evocation?** And Yet, with all the caveats and hesitations, I still do plane walking. There are natural planes, with various time skews, and affinities to geography, earth based, underworld and overworld, that are not inundated by parochial influences of heaven/overworld, hell/underworld, or spheres of deities and or their pantheons. I found that mental bodies that are attuned to specific spheres and or realities that are heavily influenced by divine egregores and the cultural contexts, can be a trap and an anchor to those realities. By 1990 I had to let them all go and detach from them. Instead I created mental bodies at 8 compass points, zenith and Nadir, that I keep constructed and have them interface with any number planes. It is a constant practice. This pattern is repeated 26 times so I have 296 aspects to work with. All are shielded. Each has access to planes around the world, angle, speed, skew, overworld or underworld. At times they intersect with patterns from people and divine contexts that they identify with. Magic and its limitations depending on the attachments and detachments you choose, is a deep study. I prefer that these aspects do the work directly in whatever spheres of influence. Silence even from, to and around spirits, are necessary for magical operations. It is great if they are in agreement and act in congruence with your volition. When they are stymied and restricted because the control and edicts from the egregore, denies you access in any shape or form. Well that is past lifes, history, and more. For the sake of understanding and moving forward, I won’t get into what I think my hagiography might be. **PAA: I see from your website that you have vast experience with different systems and traditions. How have these impacted your work with IIH/PME and KTQ?** When one works at the Great Work, all things blend together. When you perceive non-duality, methods, apprehensions and dynamics, there is a truth in all of them. Your own personal context if worked to the degree of discipline one creates from trial and error what works best for themselves. **PAA: Do you think they have made things easier?** IIH more so has made things immensely easier. The step by step development of practices is a requirement for any one experienced or not for spiritual, mental or personality development. Most schools or traditions don’t have that. Books tend to pick practices by the type of development or by the traditions for the symbol set. PME, and its methodology, and studies from other practices have put me in the mindset to create my own. **PAA: Were there any areas that clashed?** The idea of electric and magnetic aspects of energy, while it fit the time of the writing, and appealed to the scientific terms of the time, it doesn’t fit. Mesmer and static electricity the affects and feelings are directly yang energy. Equivalating that to Astral or even the term astral I find misleading. It is a product of the time. Aether and astral were terms built from medieval and renaissance magical treatises and brought up to date of the time of the 19th and 20th century neo-romanticism recrafting magical traditions. It doesn’t help the idea of Spirit and Soul was turned inside out by the catholic church, and terms like astral, having people focusing on heavenly bodies, or spheres that can have both overworld and underworld influences, not separating the masculine for controlling the feminine presence and substance of spirit, and calling it soul. While spirit is relegated to the spark of god, giving over the soul to one spiritual egregore or demesne, all the other possibilities and proper designations spirit are ignored. Greek, Hebrew, and even translations of other cultures have misconstrued spirit and soul. Soul is the expression of your immortal being in the world. Spirit is everywhere in everything and there are technical terms for it and its function in Hebrew, Greek and other cultures. Calling it astral, light, spirit interchangeably does not fit. This is one of the things that I am quite pedantic about. Having this clarity it helps me make clear comparisons between other systems. **PAA: If you could go back in time and give yourself some advice on how to best approach the journey of these books, what would it be?** ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_52d3763c7e524e5d9b20bf0958d822cd~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_340,h_860,al_c,lg_1,q_85,enc_auto/93c8f8_52d3763c7e524e5d9b20bf0958d822cd~mv2.png) Like anything practice, practice and experiment and see what works. Study everything. I wish I had these books when I was 14. My IIH was printed 1975 and PME 1981. Enid Hoffman’s book “Develop Your Psychic Skills” wasn’t available then either. **PAA: Closing thoughts - anything you wish to discuss. This could be advice for practice, information on your own projects like books, podcasts, website etc.** Meditation, 4 square pot belly breath, breathing with just the diaphragm, to quiet the mind, ask yourself, is thought or emotion mine, yes or no. If yes, label and order it. No let it go. Ground it out. Instead of quieting the mind by force, one develops the discipline of control of the mind and emotions, observes them, and then can interpret energy and senses from what is not you and where it comes from. Questions for analyzing the body inch by inch, how does it feel, flow and connect at each step of the breath. And more is it me or not me. A good way to clear the body of energetic influences that are not your own. Practice Bell or bubble breath for energy accumulation as pore breathing. Erect and comfortable sitting posture with a full yogic breath, 4 square breath while using the ribcage. These meditation techniques and the section on Internal Alchemy ordering, and managing mind, emotions and conscious control of evolving personality and ego to work with one’s spirit and magical experiences or journeys is in the book. I hope in my book the step by step method of developing the mind, spirit and magic in successive steps that build on each other could be compared to Franz Bardon’s IIH book. Granted it is different in many ways. The first half of the 20th century industry and personal work ethic was the hallmark of the mindset of the west. Critical thinking, and developing an inquisitive mind has been squashed out of the west or at least here in the United States, that questions and exercises for reflection on the steps to build that has been built into the book. **PAA: Thank you Bill for your time and generous sharing.** --- # New Release: Through the Soul Mirrors to the Sphere of the Sun Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/new-release-through-the-soul-mirrors-to-the-sphere-of-the-sun/ This is the first of several new releases from Andre Consciencia. He is a practitioner with a wealth of experience, the author of many informative and beautifully presented books as well as being one of our teachers here on Perseus Arcane Academy with his course [*Magical and Mystical Introspection*](https://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/challenge-page/MagicalandMysticalIntrospection). He is based in Portugal and has the ability to describe in beautiful details the essence of what we seek to accomplish in our magical journeys. ![Through the Souli Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_daf7fc428dfe4ee4b2c69790aadb0382~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_216,h_348,al_c,q_85,enc_auto/93c8f8_daf7fc428dfe4ee4b2c69790aadb0382~mv2.png) Those familiar with *Initiation into Hermetics* by Franz Bardon then you will be well aware of the Soul Mirrors. The black and white mirrors on which we analyze our selves, making note of everything that makes up our character and organizing into the four elements then further organizing by positive and negative traits. This new book by Andre takes this as a basis for understanding each and every exercise in *Initiaion into Hermetics.* From having an early view of this book the biggest thing for me was the uniqueness. It is written in a beautiful way as are all of Andres books. But this one really is on another level as he has been able to introduce things that most of us will be familiar with in a way that feels very personal, relatable and most importantly achievable without dropping the requirements needed for a solid foundation. It is hard to explain without ruining the surprise but with the permission of Falcon Books Publishing I am sharing what I can below of the interior of the book to give a feel for how special Andre's writing is. ## An Early Glimpse of the Introduction *Introduction* *This book follows up on the trail of Franz Bardon's Initiation Into Hermetics, applying his techniques used in the soul mirror training in Step 1 and I have further elaborated upon them.* *The soul mirror is what distinguishes Bardon's system of hermetic training from all other training systems of hermeticism or magic, for, having dominion over his own mind and soul, the magician is already a master in any exercise he might attempt. Introspection is an essential ingredient to the formula, for, without it, he hasn't yet identified his mind or soul, to begin with. An Olympic champion cannot perform without perfect knowledge of his anatomy, for devoid of such knowledge, his anatomy will trick him into failing or else it will break in its own structure and destroy the athlete.* *The practitioner is, thus, expected to have built his soul mirror, white and black, before proceeding with the work in hand. But, to start with, we will ask him to rearrange it into a second soul mirror category according to the most basic instincts whose credits humanity ignores when attributing the real causes of his actions. We think this is a key to the roots of not only many problems, but also solutions concerning the different virtues and faults, and connects the magician directly to the evolution of mankind as a whole so that, while he is working on his individuality, he is also working for the evolution of mankind. This structure is inspired by Nema's table of correspondences for what she calls, ‘The Forgotten Ones ' (1) and suffers from the author's own 1 adaptations.* *It is expected, then, that the magician already holds Bardon's Initiation Into Hermetics (“IIH”) in his hands, as this is something we want to make sure of. Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun is suitable even for those who have not done any exercises in IIH. However, it is important that the magician, male or female, is able to read from our source directly. This book is also appropriate for the mature adept. It doesn't matter if he has completed IIH, The Practice of Magical Evocation, The Key to True Quabbalah or any system of magic foreign to Franz Bardon, as any may benefit greatly from it and take heed of the sphinx's words,* > *Man, if you wish to know the Gods and the Universe, know thyself* ![Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun by Andre Consciencia](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_6f89ac4f5ed24b33a94e3a686b747d8f~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_360,h_516,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/93c8f8_6f89ac4f5ed24b33a94e3a686b747d8f~mv2.png) As can be seen from the images in this post, the layout of the book is a labor of love to match the beauty of the content that Andre has created. I think it will really breathe fresh life into anyones practice as Andre is continuously pointing out things that seem so obvious now as I read them on a page but I had actually not considered things in that way previously. So you can certainly be an advanced practitioner of Franz Bardons system or indeed any other system and find immense value in what Andre offers, I want to share another little sample of Andres perspective this time from an interview I did with him on the blog over at [studentsoffranzbardon.com](http://studentsoffranzbardon.com) as in this interview he talks about a number universal things we all need to have in place regardless the system. This is what he had to say about cultivating an emptiness of mind (known as Vacancy of Mind amongst Bardon practitioners), called a multitude of things in various traditions. *ANDRE: Vacancy of Mind is the cornerstone of IIH. Some might say it is working with the soul mirror, which I can understand. But from my experience, those who can’t master vacancy of mind will always get poor results while working with the soul mirror. If one truly masters VOM, all that stands in the way of our belief and determination can simply be erased. Yes, if one is able to fix one’s thoughts on a single thought, things that might distract him from this thought stop distracting him. It means such distracting thoughts are not on the front panel of the mind nor are they allowed to come in there, so to speak. But with VOM, there are no front and back panels, you get the whole view, and when thoughts stop coming, that is when you truly know you have control over anything, or better put, over the mind. For instance, when one doubts, and asks while pore breathing “is this true vitality or just my imagination of true vitality?” one is losing vitality. If he removes this thought of doubt entirely, instead of simply not being distracted by it, he immediately starts to build true vitality. To highlight the importance of VOM, especially in its relation to the Soul Mirror, I like to remember the story of the Three Little Pigs. The big bad wolf is made visible by the black soul mirror, it starts to visibly peek around for its three little pigs, wanting to consume body, soul and mind. Sensations are very unstable, the pig of the body builds his house on them. Feelings are less unstable but still fragile, the pig of the soul builds its house with them. The pig of the mind doesn’t build his house on thoughts, mere mental imitations of sensations and feelings, automatisms, he builds his house on vacancy, the stuff of the mind. The big bad wolf of vice sweeps over the house of sensation, it all goes to ashes, but what lived inside sensations survives in the house of feelings. Then it is time for the bad wolf to test the house of feelings, and the soul (that was living in the house of feelings) and consciousness (that was living in the house of sensations and then in the house of feelings) survive in the purity of mind (whose quantity is the vacancy of mind). Sure, in the story, the big bad wolf doesn’t give up when he sees he can’t bring down the house of the mind, he tries to enter it from above, and that is when the fire of the spirit hits him. I hope what I have told here can be understood. One can also bring his attention to the story of Hercules and the Hydra. Before beating Hydra, Hercules was just an heroic personality, he wasn’t yet a true initiate. Hydra is the beast of thoughts, Hercules cuts one and two grow back in its place. It is when Hercules lifts the Hydra from the floor that she loses power, and he is able to dominate her. This means to portray that thoughts are but reflections of feelings and sensations, separate the mind from feelings and sensations, and the mind will be silent. Instead of feelings you will find love, the unity of feelings. Instead of sensations, bliss, the unity of sensations.* *You can go about Bardon all you like, without VOM, it will all be useless in the end except for the personality and its stimulus.* *I have attained VOM through many different methods over time, as some students cannot seem to do it the way I first did it. The way I first did it was very simple, to forcefully expel all thoughts and persist, until only electrical impulses were left, and then stilling the electrical impulses. In the end, there would be void compressing and transbundant light, and once that dynamic state is achieved, it is the other way around, you have to use your will-power to come back. Once this was mastered, I started practicing VOM with my eyes open, and then even while going about my business and while having conversations. To many this first approach seems to be impossible, so, in my book the Way of Abrahadabra I use the greater capacity people apparently have of fixing their thoughts on a single subject or object. I start with simple thoughts and images, after which come complex images and thoughts, and then I begin to reduce the concepts that fit in the thoughts/images being used. Eventually, you are focusing on the thought and image of a single star in the void black sky. Then, you remove the star, and there is only vital vacancy.* ![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/93c8f8_ecd02e2d4db54a77b89f61627ba4889c~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_360,h_451,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/93c8f8_ecd02e2d4db54a77b89f61627ba4889c~mv2.png) What a description, anyone being told of the journey in such a way is surely going to be far more inspired to take that first step. In the coming months I hope to talk more with Andre about this and his many other books. So look out for an in-depth discussion with him, sooner rather than later. But I hope what I have shared here introduces you to some of his work and why I believe at least one of Andres books should be on your bookshelf. If you do purchase this book then please do share your thoughts on the [forum](https://t.me/+n4fEpWe1sqwyNDNl).[](https://www.amazon.com/Through-Soul-Mirror-Sphere-Sun-ebook/dp/B09YHLC26J/ref=sr_1_1?crid=45WXJ9ZR1D8Z&keywords=through+the+soul+mirror+to+the+sphere+of+the+sun&qid=1653658380&sprefix=%2Caps%2C1121&sr=8-1) [Purchase 'Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun'](https://www.amazon.com/Through-Soul-Mirror-Sphere-Sun-ebook/dp/B09YHLC26J/ref=sr_1_1?crid=45WXJ9ZR1D8Z&keywords=through+the+soul+mirror+to+the+sphere+of+the+sun&qid=1653658380&sprefix=%2Caps%2C1121&sr=8-1) ## More from Andre If you you would like to do a little more research on Andre before delving into his new release or commiting to his course then please have a look at the following interviews. He talks about a range of topics in great detail as well as sharing his own experiences in magic and how it all began for him. Really nice to hear his journey. [Interview with Falcon Books Publishing](http://www.falconbookspublishing.com/interview-with-andre-consciencia/) Andres course - [*Magical and Mystical Introspection*](https://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/challenge-page/MagicalandMysticalIntrospection) 1 Nema (Margaret C. Ingall) was the founder of the Horus-Maat Lodge in 12/03/78. These are 1 notes taken from her contemplations https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/exploring-the-profound-meaning-in-andre-consciencias-occult-works/ --- # Franz Bardon Community Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/franz-bardon-community/ Recently we created a community platform for our students, with private groups for students of each of our courses. In addition, we have multiple public groups, one of which is the group for students of Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics. We created this as though our group on[ Facebook 'Students of Franz Bardon'](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1281196761935188) is a busy group, it is dependent on Facebook, which is a dependency we want to get away from. Now with an independent community, though I am sure it will be a slow process we now have a platform that all our private groups have moved to and that all of our future events will be held on. I would like to invite you, to join the platform and introduce yourself. It is completely free and open. ## You can join here. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/image-1024x458.png) Hope to see you all inside. --- --- # Demon Deals & Angelic Contracts: A Ceremonial Magician’s No-Nonsense Guide to Practical Power Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/demon-deals-angelic-contracts-a-ceremonial-magicians-no-nonsense-guide-to-practical-power/ ## Introduction What follows is a clear and honest conversation with a practicing ceremonial magician— Astennu Sever -someone who treats demons and angels not as metaphors but as partners in the Great Work. Follow his work at[ Ocultist.net](https://occultist.net/) and see his books [here](https://www.amazon.com/stores/Astennu-Sever/author/B08CF311GF?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true). In his own words: *My journey into the occult began many years ago, driven by an insatiable curiosity and a desire to understand the hidden forces that shape our reality. Over the years, I have delved into various mystical traditions, honing my craft and expanding my knowledge. This includes Hermeticism, demonology, theurgy, Enochian magic, Thelema, spiritism, divinatory practices and much more.* --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/DALLE2024-06-1723.43.06-Adarkerandmoreoccult-themedfeaturedimageforanoccult-themedwebsite.Theimageshouldbewiderthanitistallfeaturingelementslikeancien-ezgif.com-webp-to-jpg-converter-1.jpg) **PAA: What sparked your initial interest in the occult, and what were some of your early experiences as you began your practice as a magician?** I must say, I was pulled toward it like metal to a magnet. It wasn’t just curiosity that slowly built up, it was an intuitive understanding that this was the correct worldview. The world always felt like a shadow play with something more powerful behind the curtain, and I wanted to touch it. Early on I consumed grimoires, studied historical rituals, and experimented a lot with different traditional approaches. My first real initiation came through full ceremonial evocations of spirits which I conducted with more experienced practitioners. I discovered very quickly that demons were not only real but also responsive and transformative. The forces responded when approached with the proper attitude, and I believe that this attitude is mainly an inborn trait, but it can be developed with enough practice. It is based on serious belief, but not the sort of seriousness that paralyzes a deeply religious person or opens them to malevolent influences. It is a combination of belief and cynicism with a tinge of pride and confidence that you are on the same level as the spirits you’re working with. I’ve seen many beginners succumb to a stifling form of worship of a spirit or even a method, because it proved successful. One could argue that this is the trap of monotheism, or religion in general. Occultism is liberating in that the magician is the center of the play, the lead actor, and the spirits are the supporting actors. With religion it’s the other way around. To put it simply, my early encounters with the demonic realm shattered the mundane structure of reality for me and made me embark on the occult path with great intensity. **PAA: You’ve built Occultist.net into a comprehensive occult resource. What motivated you to start this platform, and what did you hope to accomplish by sharing your knowledge with the community?** Well, I noticed that there were too many vague platitudes, too many people claiming results online without doing the work. I wanted to strip away the mystique in the worst sense, the empty aesthetic if you will, and return to the practice in the true sense. My goal was to offer real insights, rooted in ritual practice. So I write for practitioners that actually want to experiment with rituals, not so much for passive readers. Most of the rituals I share are beginner friendly, but there are also some that are quite complex and aimed at more advanced practitioners who possess a greater degree of experience, as well as a greater variety of physical ritual tools. In addition to this, the website provides an avenue for promoting my books and ritual service to potential online clients. Overall, if my work on Occultist.net sharpens someone’s Will, helps them gain power or freedom, then it’s serving its purpose. **PAA: You identify as a ceremonial magician. How does that tradition shape your practice, and how would you compare it with other paths you’ve explored, such as Wicca or chaos magic?** Well, ceremonial magic is not a path per se, it is a method. And there is plenty of ceremony in chaos magic and Wicca. But speaking of my approach more specifically, it forces the practitioner to shape themselves into a vessel capable of commanding and containing forces far beyond ordinary perception. That structure is not restrictive, it’s a form of architecture that allows one to reach a higher level of precision, and precision allows for power. Chaos magic, while liberating in its anti-dogmatic stance, often breeds flippancy if there is no real structure involved. Everything one imagines is treated as equally valuable as what has been observed and confirmed by countless practitioners as the more powerful option. Wicca, on the other hand, is often too focused on harmony and symbolism, and too much moralizing for my taste. My path is about producing tangible results, and this is why I am so keen on working with demons, as they are the spirits of practicality par excellence. Some might classify this preoccupation with practicable benefits as “Lower Magic”, since demons are mostly summoned for achieving worldly success. But they are just as practically useful for personal transformation and reaching higher states of Being. **PAA: Occult philosophy is a big theme in your work. What core principles or beliefs guide your approach to magic, and how do they influence the way you conduct your rituals or spiritual work?** Two truths shape my work: First, all spiritual contact is relational. Every evocation is a negotiation, and every result is the result of will applied through structure. Second, you become what you invoke. There is no separation between method and transformation. The magic you perform reprograms you. That’s why I approach each ritual as both a command and a sacrifice. I give time, energy, and at times physical offerings such as blood. And in exchange, I gain a response that can transform both my external and internal reality. So I gain alignment with the current I am calling into being. It is like obtaining a different perception of reality, one that aligns with the powers and attributes of the spirit invoked. **PAA: In your writing you emphasize that “you are what you do” — for instance, that the very act of studying and practicing magic is transformative in itself. Could you elaborate on this idea?** There’s no such thing as passive occultism. Reading about demons doesn’t make you demonic, although it can spark the transformation. For real change to occur, you must work intimately with them, and that requires proper ceremonial rituals, or at the very least a minimalist but intense approach through attunement practices. Every act of ritual builds psychic infrastructure. You can read a thousand books on Mars, but until you invoke the spirit of war, you won’t feel your spine stiffen with fire. Ritual is transformation and each repetition etches something into your astral body. Your attention is the scalpel and your results are the scar tissue. When people say, “Nothing’s happening,” I always ask, “What are you doing every single day?” Because what you do, every day, is what you are. > If you cannot hold a thought, you cannot hold a spirit. Mental discipline is the base currency of magical power > > Astennu Sever **PAA: You often highlight meditation as part of occult training. Why do you consider meditation and mental discipline so important for a magician?** If you cannot hold a thought, you cannot hold a spirit. Mental discipline is the base currency of magical power. There is a misconception about meditation, that it is about peace or relaxation. Sure, that can be the end result, but the practice of meditation is about building a steel mind which can then be undisturbed by externalities because it is impregnable. Before any important working, I enter a trance state. I lock my attention onto a sigil, a name, or a sensation. I purge static from my field. One of my core techniques is single-pointed gaze on a sigil under red candlelight while breathing through the nose in a 6–6–6 rhythm. This prepares the mind to act as both transmitter and receiver. A distracted magician cannot achieve any serious results. Certain visualizations can be used to bypass the surface disturbances however, and this can help beginners achieve some communication with the spirit world, but it not a long-term strategy. If one wishes to have consistency in their workings, rather than treat them as sporadic, miraculous events of success, then they must work on strengthening their mind. Alternatively, they can hire myself or other advanced practitioners to help them connect with their spirit of choice. **PAA: When preparing for a complex ritual, what steps do you take to get ready both practically and mentally? If something unexpected happens or a ritual doesn’t go as planned, how do you typically handle it?** Preparation begins hours before the ritual: fasting, mental quiet, cleaning the space, charging tools, and pre-visualizing the entire ceremony. The altar and the surrounding space is built geometrically, with a triangle, circle and often a crystal grid. Each movement is deliberate. Offerings are chosen to resonate with the entity. Blood, wine, incense, sacred names and incantations are all aligned. But magic is not theatre. It’s contact. If something goes wrong and a candles blow out, wind shifts or rain starts pouring in (if it’s an outdoor ceremony) I don’t panic. It’s important to be able to adapt in the moment. Spirits and some demons especially will want to test you. They sometimes obstruct to see what you’ll do and if you’re worthy of their attention. The magician must remain sovereign no matter what happens. **PAA: Demonology is a major focus of your work. How do you approach summoning and working with demonic entities in a safe and respectful way?** Respect is not weakness. In fact, demons respond better to respect than arrogance. You don’t grovel, but you don’t bluff either. You come with a clear request, a real offering, and a willingness to change. I treat demons as real powers, not as metaphors. I build relationships with them over time. I don’t just ask them to give me things, I also offer my loyalty to the demonic realm and their side of the story. I speak their names with reverence, but not fear. And they respond sometimes with visions, sometimes with opportunities and almost immediate, tangible results. One client, after a dual evocation of Mammon and Bune saw their income triple within just a few weeks. This is not superstition, it’s applied metaphysics. **PAA: Your interests also include theurgy. In your experience, how does invoking a deity or angel differ (if at all) from evoking a demon?** The energy is different because angels come with structure, hierarchy, and harmony. Demons come with force, ambition, and sometimes chaos. But both respond to rituals and proper intent. I do not moralize about spirits. I work with what is appropriate to the goal. When invoking an angel, I use more light, geometry, psalms, and divine names. When evoking a demon, I focus on flame, incantation, sigils, blood. One uplifts and refines, the other excavates and transforms. Both serve the Work when handled correctly. **PAA: Grimoires — the classic textbooks of magic — are clearly important to you. What role do traditional grimoires play in your modern practice?** Grimoires speak a symbolic language that might differ based on the time of writing, but the core principles are timeless: alignment, preparation, ritual, control. I do not follow every word slavishly, but I respect the structure which produced satisfying results for the author and adapt it according to my own style of magic and tools that are available to me. That’s why I wrote Goetia Rising, to demonstrate to my readers how the old doors still open today, if you knock with the right hand. **PAA: For someone just starting out, what do you consider the most important first steps or habits to develop in occult practice?** Start by building your will: meditate, visualize, do daily energy work. Then choose one path and follow it deeply. Don’t jump from crystals to chaos sigils to Norse runes every week. Read grimoires, practice simple conjurations, build a relationship with one or a few spirits that align most intensely with your actual goals in life. It’s also useful to keep a journal, although I know that it’s annoying for many people to take notes. Well, it helps and I encourage you to see it as your own personal grimoire that you can return to after a while with great joy. Observe synchronicity. And avoid the biggest beginner mistake: expecting results without action. The spirits are meant to support you, not to replace you. You are the greatest vessel through which they can exert their power, and so your actions should be in line with the purpose for which you summoned them. **PAA: Looking back on your journey, is there one ritual or magical experience that stands out as especially transformative?** There is one, yes. A pact with Lucifer beneath a black sky, only stars. The ritual included offerings, blood, silence, and a large bonfire. I intoned his name until the veil shattered. What followed was a visitation during which I felt like my mind was peeled open and rewired. I came out different: sharper, more sovereign, more detached from the trivial. That ritual marked the end of who I was before, and I’ve been walking forward ever since, eyes lit from behind. **PAA: Thank you for sharing with us. ** --- --- # Perseus Community is Live! Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/perseus-community-is-live/ ## Introduction Welcome, I am excited to say that the [Perseus Community](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/) is now live. We created this community for two reasons, firstly we wanted to have private areas where our students could discuss course materials and ask questions to our teachers. A place where there could be direct messages between student and teacher, a place where teachers could do live classes and events that was not reliant on social media platforms. Secondly, we wanted to recapture some of the magic of online forums and communities. Back in the early 2000's when there was real excitement to see if you had replies on your post, to see threads unfold. So now it is over to the community, all our course groups are now on the new platform. If you think you should be in a group then do let me know either by emailing me at contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com or just join the platform and send me a direct message. ## Public Discussion Areas Any discussion space that says public can be joined, once joined you can post. The feed shows posts from all public discussion spaces even if you have not joined them. Private discussion areas are of course private, and you will only see those in your feed if you are a member of that area. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-08-131527-1024x370.png) ## View any Public Discussion You can click join and view any public discussion with no requirement to sign up. Though if you want to make a post or reply to a post then it will ask you to log in if you already have an account or sign up. If you do sign up it is a new log in and has no relation to our current course platform...but in future the courses will also all be on this platform as well. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/signup-1024x457.png) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-08-134559-1024x459.png) ## Students of Franz Bardon We started our group on Facebook many, many years ago and that group now has over 3,000 members! It is our hope that at least some of these members can come over to the new platform. The reason being is that what we have created is organised by topic labels for every step, this is not a resource that just disappears in an endless scroll as the years go on. With correct labelling which is part of the posting process everything will be searchable by IIH Step 1-10. This makes our long-term goal of this becoming an archive much more achievable as we are building with a clear system from the ground up. So we invite you over to share your questions and experiences. [Join us](https://community.perseusarcaneacademy.com/space/initiationintohermetics/home). ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-08-140852.png) I will not go through every discussion area we have but we do cover all the major Eastern and Western Traditions and we are inviting experts in those fields to join the discussion. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-08-151013.png) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-08-150956.png) ## Leaderboard Every thriving community has its torch-bearers—the members whose insights are so valuable you want to copy-paste them before they vanish down-feed. Our **Leaderboard** is designed to spotlight those contributors and thank them in a tangible way. Here’s the plan: - **Track the Impact.** The leaderboard automatically tallies posts, but quality counts most. Thought-provoking questions, clear walkthroughs, field reports, and generous troubleshooting all earn extra weight. - **Monthly Recognition.** At the end of each month, we review the top names and the substance behind their scores. - **Real Rewards.** **Course discounts** on new and flagship programs - **Priority seats** for live training and workshops - **Hand-picked books and resources** to deepen your practice - **Tailored Appreciation.** Rewards aren’t one-size-fits-all. We’ll match perks to each winner’s interests—whether that’s a Martial Arts intensive, an Alchemy lab session, or the next Bardon deep-dive. Contribute, inspire, and help your peers level up. We will do our best to make sure the effort never goes unnoticed. ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Screenshot-2025-07-08-152441.png) ## Events In the next development phase we are adding events with an event calendar. You will be able to RSVP to any event, and for the most part these events will be recorded and added to our event library so it can be rewatched at any time. These events will range from QnAs with our teachers, follow along training sessions, lectures and more. ## Direct Message and Chat To facillitate better communication between fellow students and teacher we have added the direct messaging and the option of having a chat function connected to each discussion area. ## We need your help At the end of the day even though it is nice to have lots of features and an attractive interface it is not the most important thing. Platforms thrive—or wither—on participation. A thoughtful question can ignite a week-long thread; a concise field report can become required reading for future students. **Polite, constructive interaction is our bedrock**. The more we converse, the faster this hub evolves into the definitive archive it’s meant to be. So choose a Space (or three), click **Join**, and leave your digital footprint: a greeting, a question, a resource, a revelation, even just an introduction. This is something we are putting together to last for years ahead to become something of an archive for the actual practice of these arts. Help us build something special. ## Join Here --- # Sixty Skills Kabbalah Explained Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-kabbalah-explained/ ## Introduction In this post Bob from Sixty Skills breaks down the Kabbalah (Letter Magic) course—explaining the reasons behind its creation, the specific problems it addresses, and how it differs from Franz Bardon’s original approach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BKZnT6zhCw Table of Contents - Introduction- Welcome and Overview- Difference Between Sixty Skills and Bardon's KTQ- Preparatory Standards- Color, Tone, and Number- Error Corrections- Ventilation and Counterbalancing- Energy Ball Foundation- Letter Magic and History- Multi‑Layer Letter Work- Outer Planet Extensions- Upward versus Downward Path- Letter Formulas and Timing- Progress Benchmarks- Group Learning and Transmissions- Mental and A‑osic Strain- Time Investment Reality Check- Practical versus Mystical Goals- Living Crystal and Tools- Consistency of Letter Effects- Post‑Course Integration- ConclusionThe Three Transformations - Free Course ## Welcome and Overview Welcome back all you letter magicians, Kabbalers and magical mal contents. It is I, Sixty Skills, and today I'm here to answer your questions about Cabala training. ## Difference Between Sixty Skills and Bardon's KTQ So, number one: what is the difference between my system and Bardons's KTQ? Why not just do KTQ? How does the Sixty Skills syllabus order those stages and how do they differ? Okay, the first problem with Bardon's third book is it's really incomplete. The book was published post‑mortem after he died, by his secretary, and it leaves a lot of things out. I've talked to a number of people who've trained from the book only, and universally they make a lot of mistakes. They make mistakes involving equilibrium. They make mistakes involving counterbalancing and, frequently, they come up with some pretty severe problems as a result of that. Also, like I've said earlier, the book is incomplete. It leaves a lot of things out, and we'll get to some of that a little bit later on. But the way my course deals with this, from the position of letter magic, is it gives you a structured way of approaching the training through the medium of clair‑sentience, and it explains all of the missing parts of the book. ## Preparatory Standards Number two: preparatory standards. Bardon insists on full elemental equilibrium before touching the letters in Step Eight of IIH. What concrete skills from the Sixty Skills Master Course or elsewhere must a student know before you let them start the Cabala course? We have to remember Bon also wrote a book. He had a method of training, if you will, where he knew he was not going to meet most of his students—if ever—or have any contact with them. So when you put a course together this way, you have to structure it in such a way that it minimizes the potential for harm and maximizes the opportunity for success by the student. Also keep in mind that when these materials were written, printing was really expensive, and video instruction basically wasn't a thing. Even getting the word out on what exactly he was teaching would have been extraordinarily difficult. So all of those are factors. The main skill that you have to have is clair‑sentience—i.e. building the ball, the ability to touch and feel energy—but that's included directly in the Cabala course itself. So the reality is, as long as you're willing to follow instructions and don't skip ahead too much, you can train this kind of letter magic from day one. Keeping in mind I am not the only person with this approach. If you look at the Chiang aspects of Xing Yi Quan or Five Element Fist, they're training elemental magic from day one. They just don't do it very well. Food for thought. ## Color, Tone, and Number Item number three: color, tone, and number. Bardon fixes a unique color, pitch and number to every letter. Do you keep Bardon's exact correspondences, or have you amended any of them based on modern testing? If amended, what drove the change? Generally Bardon's stuff is correct in terms of that. One of the main differences that doesn't get explained in the book very well is: if you're teaching it from an elemental perspective—as I am, and as Bon probably did—the sounds that you hear internally are sounds from nature, and human vocal cords may or may not be able to repeat that very accurately. Additionally, the colors change slightly as you go from one level of reality to the next. Jewish Cabala training is actually fairly explicit on this. If you read books like *Paths of Wisdom* by John Michael Greer, he gets into this as well. So, for all practical purposes, they're close enough. Have I amended anything based on modern testing? Sure, a little bit. Certain letters have a dual nature, and that's not explained in the book. Again, I suspect the book was put together from a series of notes left behind after Bardon's death—because it was, in fact, published post‑mortem—and whoever did the editing clearly was not a practitioner of the method or didn't have a lot of experience with it. ## Error Corrections Number four: error corrections. You've said KTQ contains a handful of post‑mortem editing errors. Can you name one specific letter exercise you've corrected in your course and explain the correction? Sure. The letter L doesn't hinge on the spleen. The letter K refers to the outside of the ear. Certain letters have a dual nature—like the letter H, which is both a fire and air letter. There are a bunch of these. Also, there are things left out that are very strange considering how important they are. The letter R is a back door to the solar sphere, so before you work with that, you probably want to be pretty good at your equilibrium and counterbalancing and ability to flush things out of your system. Also, that chart in the back of the book that gives you the four‑letter combinations is just kind of randomly dropped in there. The importance behind it isn't explained. In the beginning of the book, when he explains the meaning of the third tarot card, he's spelling out the whole meta‑system he constructed; nowhere else in any of the three books explains any of this. So again, we need to be grateful for what we got from Bon, but keep in mind these books are not great for practice if you don't have prior training or somebody to talk to—and that's not going to be a popular sentiment. ## Ventilation and Counterbalancing Your curriculum lists how to ventilate and how to counterbalance. What do these two practices add to Bardon's original instructions about balancing vital force and elemental charge? Bon talks about clearing energy out of the body and he gives you a few steps for doing that, but he doesn't really get into the need to counterbalance. When you're working with one letter extensively it will create imbalances in you, and the way to get rid of that isn't just through ventilating the energy but to actually counterbalance with an opposing energy. These are things that people who learn the material on their own don't tend to understand very well—particularly the role of equilibrium and just how crucially important that is to everything—and they end up having a lot of problems. It's not hard to fix, but whoever put the book together clearly wasn't a practitioner, because they didn't understand this. ## Energy Ball Foundation Students in Sixty Skills first build the ball of vital energy. How does that exercise prepare or accelerate later letter work compared with Bardon's standard curriculum? First of all, it gives you a way of determining how strong things are. After a practice you can say, “Oh, it got stronger,” or “it got weaker.” As your clair‑sentience improves, you gain a variety of other information regarding the energy you're working with. Most people have very poor clairvoyance and clairaudience. My working theory now is that Bardon and his group relied far more upon alchemy for development of those skills than anything else—and I have evidence to support that which I can't share openly. Clair‑sentience—of the clair‑senses—is probably the easiest and most applicable skill to develop. Hence, building the ball. ## Letter Magic and History You've mentioned that letter magic might be the oldest of magics, and hinted at where Bardon got the material. Is there anything else you can reveal that might motivate students and provide understanding for people assuming you've just repackaged Bon's work? People who make those snippy comments really amuse me because none of them have done the amount of work that I have. They didn't travel to North Africa, they didn't go all the way down the River Nile, they haven't been through sub‑Saharan Africa, they haven't been through the islands, they haven't gone all the way through Turkey. They've risked nothing and, in general, are a bunch of whiners. Letter magic is old, and when you really get into it you can see echoes of it across multiple cultures—whether it's Five Element Fist from Chinese martial arts, the four‑element work including mantras for the electric and magnetic lines of force in Tibetan Buddhism, and so on. It's simply a way of describing how the universe works. It's not a big stretch to see how something—probably not quite human—could be lying on its back, staring up at the sky, feel its mind suddenly expand, and hear that eagle's cry sound in its ear: there's the letter A, the air element, right there. By applying that method you could figure out all the different letters; as that not‑quite‑human learns to repeat these effects, it might even have been the source of human speech. You’re only going to understand this by making the effort to study. This material is so poorly organized it took me 30 years to do what I could have done in two or three—and I know that from working with my students. You can talk about repackaging someone else's material, but I'm here to tell you: this stuff is old, it's been around a really long time, and Bon got his material from other people too. Nothing in his three books I haven't seen elsewhere, with the possible exception of some personal sigils from the near‑Earth zone. Everything else is derivative. We owe him a great debt because he was one of the first to put it together. I view what I do as a further refinement. ## Multi‑Layer Letter Work Your blog speaks of letter work at the vital, astral, mental and a‑osic layers, not just the mental and astral layers in KTQ. What does practicing the same letter on each layer achieve, and how do you instruct students to tell layers apart? There’s extensive training in the coursework involving the Three Transformations, which teaches you vital, astral and mental—how to feel those different layers of reality. The book itself actually gets into the a‑osic as well, by its definition. There's extensive training that teaches people how to tell the difference between these levels and determine effects. One of my favorites, the letter L, on a mental level deals with morality; on an astral level, magical equilibrium; on a vital level, human health and longevity. If you can't tell which level you're working with, focusing your effects is difficult. Most systems of letter magic don't really break things down with much granularity, so it's easy to get confused. ## Outer Planet Extensions You've taught Uranus‑, Neptune‑ and Pluto‑centric letter meditations. Are these outer‑planet variations part of core Cabala training or an advanced elective? And how do they expand on Bardon's strictly solar‑system model? In the beginning of his third book—page 13 or 18 of the Merkur version—Bardon talks about the symbolism of the third tarot card and explains that glyph on the cover. This is not a solar‑centric system. It works at the vital, astral, mental and a‑osic levels—specifically the physical, planetary, zodiacal and sephirotic levels of existence. He's very clear. Cabala can be generated at planetary levels too, and it slightly changes its nature. By learning to work at all these levels you learn to fine‑tune letter work and can create interesting effects. Working with Pluto, for example, can give you the ability to generate letters at a cellular level—if the tendency to engage in suicidal ideation doesn't get you first. ## Upward versus Downward Path KTQ hints at an upward path. Your blog documents completing that path and reversing into a downward path. How does letter magic function differently on the return leg? What did you learn that KTQ doesn't spell out? He explains this in his part about the third tarot card. Getting into too much detail is why we have coursework forthcoming, because it's that complicated. One of the first big changes is generating accasha from equilibrium. When most people work with accasha initially, it has a dissolving effect; it also has a bringing‑into‑form effect if you flip it the other way. Descriptions of magical tension give a hint. It's a very long discussion. ## Letter Formulas and Timing Bardon warns against using two‑, three‑ and four‑letter keys until complete mastery. Sixty Skills students combine letters for practical effects—what safeguards are in place? The "complete mastery" thing is nonsense. It's included to slow you down and prevent progressing. Step 1 of IIH—watching thoughts—I have to redo every six to eight weeks; it's like a cup, it fills up again. There's no such thing as complete mastery. We start working with two‑letter combinations toward the end of learning single letters because you have to be able to generate the forces equally. We describe limitations of two‑, three‑ and four‑letter practices, how they can be draining, how you can really only work with one or two at a time, and so on. The reason you don't see much description in Bardon's book is the book is not complete. People who learned on their own usually make serious mistakes. ## Progress Benchmarks Bardon leaves verification to the practitioner's honesty. What objective or shared milestones do you see—sensory markers, phenomena—to confirm a student has truly mastered a letter? The colors and sound start manifesting on their own. Usually the first big one is accasha: they'll start to see a purple color creep into meditations once they work with equilibrium often enough. Mastery of a letter? Not really a thing. The first goal is the ability to reproduce the letter on command with strength. As a practical matter, about 100 hours of practice—sometimes less—per letter, but the first 10–20 hours are most critical. ## Group Learning and Transmissions Your program offers Discord study halls and energy transmissions. Does real‑time peer or instructor feedback change the learning curve relative to solitary book study? Absolutely. Eighty‑ninety percent of the work you have to do on your own, but having other people to bounce things off and transmission strength makes a huge difference. You can learn this material relatively quickly from another human in person, but it takes forever alone. Video coursework corresponds to a mental‑level transmission; weekend classes correspond to an astral‑level transmission; in‑person gives vital/etheric transmission. These radically speed learning and remove confusion. ## Mental and A‑osic Strain You've noted severe fatigue and even suicidal ideation when your group hits certain high‑level a‑osic phases. What pacing, recovery or counseling protocols have you built into the course so students avoid those pitfalls? In the planetary course, suicidal ideation is a risk from Saturn outward. We have specific meditations, such as meditations on Imnet, to clear that. For a‑osic drain we keep sessions short—usually no more than 30 minutes when working with accasha unless deep‑diving. The coursework covers mitigation: exercise, sleep, diet. Whether someone follows that advice is beyond my control, but the information is there. ## Time Investment Reality Check Bardon's KTQ can take years. You suggest 18 months to two years for magical independence. Master Course plus letter work for a diligent student—what's a realistic weekly workload and total timeline to reach competent letter practice under Sixty Skills? As a rule, two hours of practice a day. You do a build‑out for a week to ten days at a time, practice two hours in the morning, run the energy in the background the rest of the day using Rites of the Eucharist in between. Every week or so you'll have mastered a letter, and within six months you'll have all 27. You'll be a little unstable along the way, but manageable. I've had a student every bit as strong as me; it took him four years what took me 30, because instruction I received wasn't well‑organized. ## Practical versus Mystical Goals Bardon frames the cabalist as a conscious co‑creator aligned with divine law. Do you hold the same endpoint, or do you emphasize practical manifestation as equally valid? I recommend the path of enlightenment first because then you're connected to your higher nature and, in theory, you'll think twice about doing something dumb. This stuff works fine without those experiences, but you risk spending time on goals at odds with your internal development—doing stupid shit. Non‑dual light immersion tempers that. ## Living Crystal and Tools You're associated with Living Crystal, said to be powered by cabalistic energy. Is using external constructs part of the syllabus or strictly optional? Strictly optional. You don't need Living Crystal at all, though many get a lot out of it. It's an interesting technology we're developing and I think we'll see interesting developments, but you absolutely don't need it—it's like having beads, a wand, or other paraphernalia: nice, but not required. ## Consistency of Letter Effects Badton claims a correctly vibrated letter yields the same effect every time. Across your cohort have you observed any consistent variations? What explains them? They're generally the same. Keep in mind the body is the medium of expression, so depending on physiology, lifestyle, habits, things manifest a little differently, but they point the same direction. Bardon's book is fairly accurate. Some letters like U/Y need more elaboration. ## Post‑Course Integration Once students finish all 27 letters, what ongoing practice keeps the work alive? Do you recommend periodic reviews, planetary Cabala, or stepping into the sephirotic path next, and how does that mirror or diverge from Bardon's roadmap? Organizationally, according to his description of the third tarot card, next you would do planetary work. You don't have to. Understand that if you've gotten through IIH and basic Cabala, as far as magic is concerned the world is your oyster: you can decode another system, apply it to medicine, martial arts, engineering—you name it. I like the mandala work from Bon's third book, so that's what I pursued, but you don't have to. It depends on your path in life. ## Conclusion Thanks for the questions, guys. Keep them coming and we'll get updates out there just as soon as we can. As per usual: train hard and be well. --- --- # One’s First Evocation by André Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/ones-first-evocation-by-andre-consciencia/ The matter of one’s “First Evocation” has been a hot topic since at least “Students of Franz Bardon”, although with scarce material.  To compensate, I will address the theme in two ways: one not exemplar at all, which is how I did it, progressively, and the other how I suggest you do it according to Franz Bardon’s take.  ## How I did it After years of seeing spirits and having visions as a child, in my early teenage years there came the transmissions. I would write them all in a big journal with a cipher alphabet. Eventually, I had an eye in the triangle with side eyebrows in the shape of two lightning bolts that climbed as a three-step ladder. Above the eye, the lower one said something like spectral world, above that, psychic world, and then spirit world (astral plane, mental plane, akasha). This is approximate, for after decades with the journal a bug started to eat its pages and I left it behind when changing home. I had no occult studies whatsoever, except for the teachings of my grandmother, and hadn’t even started to study spiritism. The internet was just starting to be a thing and we would pay it dearly by the hour. The web did not have much, but I wanted to understand how to master these teachings and made some use of it. I came face to face with a website about a spirit owl that helped with astral travel, Stolas, that I now know from the Ars Goetia. There was an invocation and evocation on the website that would lead to astral travel. I tried it, and was transported by Stolas, and from that day on, I could do mental wandering by myself.  I can hardly count this as a first evocation, as I didn’t even truly know what an evocation was.  In my later explorations I realized I was very good at consciousness transference (before knowing Bardon and knowing the technique by this name), and realized I could transfer my consciousness to a being or creature in such a way that the space of the entity and my own would merge and I would be able to see it and influence it (if an embodied creature) or communicate directly (if a disembodied being). Later I would be able to explain this method in theory and practice, which I do at Beyond the Veil of Illusion (to be published by Falcon Books Publishing). The method is easy, quick, natural and effective. This way, I would communicate with some entities when exploring theosophy.  But this is not Bardon’s evocation, and it is far from the possibility of materialization. Now proficient in Initiation Into Hermetics and under the guidance of my mentor we evoked the beings astrally, first he unto both our presences and eventually me by myself. Our method at this time was very much like that of William Mistelle, in which the physical apparatus and most of the ritual structure are dispensed.  The time came for me to evoke the messenger by a method that was secret and unlike that of Bardon, involving two columns and a mediumistic connection to the Fiery Lamb as the force that gives shape to God or rather the shapes that receive God’s forces. In The Practice of Magical Evocation Franz Bardon writes, concerning The Book of Formulae, this:  “Generally speaking, the only success that untrained persons will have in this case, is hallucinations, phantoms or delusions, or incomplete, mediumistic results which need not be dealt with here. Usually such mediumistic results are, provided that they are genuine at all, the outcome of the exteriorisation of the person's unconsciousness. Sometimes elementals, and should the person concerned have a strong capability for emanation, even elementaries might be formed which the genuine magician has already been informed about in Initiation into Hermetics. These elementaries are falsely regarded as the beings which are the object of evocation, and a person whose astral senses have not yet been sufficiently developed is not able to tell the difference or to control the situation.”  Add all of the described possibilities together, and here is the messenger described in a nutshell. Instead of demonising it, we are to know it to such an extent that it can no longer trick us, and to the extent that it becomes of service. This shapeshifting amalgamate can actually be the source of wisdom regarding self-knowledge and the understanding of the transitory world we inhabit, and a guardian of our memories. After this stage had been mastered, I then evoked my Guardian Genius using the same method. This methodology was used only for these two beings. Back to William Mistelle’s ways, someone kept evading me, the original intelligence or monarch, Aschmunadai. I tried the full set of evocation as per Bardon, and this time Aschmunadai showed up, and surprisingly, I came up with a technique to stop hearts, almost stopping my own. This revelation was not arbitrary; it was meant to lead me away from an order I was involved with and to show that this technique was not a myth. Aschmunadai’s appearance in the triangle was gigantic, like a tower of light towering over itself with multiple structures, but resembling the shape of a human being. The world around him was larger on top and funneled to a concentric point at the base of the triangle, whose vertices were literally illumined by his presence.  In other words, the materialization was holographic but powerful enough to change the angles with which the physical realm is perceived. This change in angles could be felt as a warm and cold tingling in the skin and throughout the body, accompanied by a pressing vertigo that lifts. For some reason, I could not yet consider this my first evocation. I placed strategically in the walls of my house PME elementals inside triangles and seals, a talismanic method I used that opened the windows permanently to the elementals and their dominions, keeping it localized. These talismans functioned as mirrors and served as permanent evocations within them. However, I didn’t feel that would be enough.  I worked with Lilitha next and gave attention to the original intelligences and monarchs. By then, I had been criticised for only working with systems derived from Semitic astrology and mythology, and eventually, I had a dream with the Greek God Pan that was horrific. One of the worst I had, not because of anything in particular happening: I was simply entering a chamber that was a temple to Pan, to Pan as a living creature instead of a statue or an icon. But the darkness in the chamber had such great saturation that it was the reason for the whole discomfort. In the dream, I walked to Pan, and Pan tried to lend me his scepter, the moment I woke up. I was feeling disturbed and it carried out during the day. That day, I came across a pamphlet of a witch crouching face to face with the devil, muzzle to muzzle. I decided: why not confront Pan face-to-face and understand what's going on? And that was what I consider my first materialization. I could smell Pan’s breath, feel its rhythm on my skin, and this materialization had effects on my physical body, such as my legs getting substantially stronger and hairier.  Don’t ask me why, but this still wasn’t it. There was a lot of blind impulse, and I wasn’t omniscient during the process. A full evocation must imply full mastery in awareness, no matter how impactful the results are. Eventually, I found myself wrestling with Bael to cut away a job someone had requested from him, and he didn’t give it up easily. It was my first evocation meant as an exorcism. Bael fired up the candles until the roof caught fire and so on, but it worked out fine in the end. This realization was one more brick in my temple, but not it, not it.  Later in time, I was, I believe, now quite proficient at evocation, although, again, not there yet. I say proficient because, beyond the inner processes and results, I collected a variety of evidence of success, including Nature and people’s responses in ways that would rival fantasy fiction. But I knew a great deal of this was lent power by the beings evoked. The God in the evocational space should not be the one evoked but the one evoking. That said,  I had been working at an abandoned convent for years. It had three floors: the lower floor with a grid of talismans buried beneath, the upper floor (the terrace) with an altar, and the inner courtyard having the arches functioning as planetary gates. The chapel, all covered in conch, served for meditation and preparation activities. And above, the moon, below, the serpentine hills and their tall trees. It was a luxury magician’s temple that, over the years, got sealed and later reopened as a luxury hotel.  That day, I had just finished an evocation and was in a state of vacancy of mind when a tailed lizard humanoid got into the inner courtyard. There were none of the signs that accompany a vision or clairvoyant activity, nor any of the controls available during evocation, for all effects, there really was a physical tailed lizard humanoid penetrating the chamber and coming my way. When you read this, you may dismiss it as a hallucination or a mental manifestation, but you must truly imagine this happening completely in the material plane so that you have the chance to understand me. I went from vacancy of mind to my heart missing a number of beats, my body freezing, electrified like thunder had just hit me, and I realized in a few seconds, the whole world seemed to freeze along, there being only the chamber breathing together with the moving humanoid lizard. Strangely enough, it passed right in front of me without seeing me and left.  From this episode, I extracted an essential key. Evocation would have to reproduce this thunder-like effect that freezes time and space, the self and the other, inner and outer, as if one is witnessing the world from inside the speed of light. That was the ideal silence for the most direct contact possible.  A couple of years later or more, when I was working with the Olympian (Olimpick) Spirits in evocation at the attic during a whirlwind occurrence, I finally felt that was it. I remember these intelligences being stronger than usual, but I was omniscient, I realized their name was legion, and I had a firm grasp of every legionnaire, they all moved within my omnipotence. ## How I Suggest you Do it according to Franz Bardon It’s all in “The Book of Magic Formulae” mentioned in The Practice of Magical Evocation, and all I have to do is add some sparks to the fire. **1. Purpose of the operation** Make sure you know your purpose. Let’s say you wish to evoke a being of Mars for the mastery of righteous force, the tempering of passion, and the art of sovereign courage. Examine this very well, build it a soul mirror. For the sake of example we will work with “righteous force”. What is the positive side of it, and what may be the negative side? Give four examples of each, one for each element.  In this case, regarding the positive aspects fire bears heroic valor, water merciful justice, air clear and swift discernment, and earth unwavering fairness. Regarding the negative aspects, there is fanaticism in the fire, smothering in the water, slander in the air, and rigidity in the earth.  Bearing the negative aspects in mind, you may wish to rephrase and substitute “righteous force” to “sanctified power”, since it no longer can fall into the claws of self-righteousness. You are not right nor is the power yours, it is of what is higher than itself and sanctifies it.  You must, as well, make sure your purpose and the nature of the being, the purpose of its existence, meet and are one and the same. Then you write the first portion, regarding the how: “By the unbroken thread that binds my breath to the starry Crown of the Infinite, I will this operation to draw forth the Intelligence of Mars, named Graphiel, Guardian of the Crimson Flame, that I may cause instruction in the mastery of sanctified power in its heroic valor, merciful justice, clear discernment and unwavering fairness; the tempering of passion in its purpose, compassion, vision and practical service; and the art of sovereign courage in its precision, strength to feel, truth and endurance.” At this point you should also know what for you find yourself wanting these things.  Again, you may use the elements.    “May these be granted that I ignite purpose and transform through action (fire), heal and harmonize (water), illuminate mind and spirit with truth and clarity (air), ground power in stability and endurance (earth), and integrate all forces into wholeness (akasha).”  We have the what for, so what about the why? “Because of the urgency of becoming; Because of the paradox of identity and otherness; Because of the burden of consciousness; Because of the weight of finitude and responsibility; and because of the quest for unity in fragmentation”.  Add something that connects the intelligence with the purpose: “So oh Glorious Graphiel, Radiant Intelligence of the Crimson Flame, Guardian of Mars’ sacred fire, You of consecrated might. Who tempers the fiery passions of the heart, Dispensing truth with clear discernment By your divine command, the flame is refined In your luminous presence, I place my will beneath the starry Crown of the Infinite, That power be sanctified, passions tempered, And courage be sovereign and pure. Graphiel, flame eternal, Listen to this voice.” **2. The being, power, sphere etc. to be evoked** Something of this was explained above. The purpose of your being and yours should coincide. But although the beings of Mars can be quite responsive, they may be hard to handle, and for a first evocation, an elemental, earth belt zone spirit or moon spirit would be better, the moon spirits being softer. Better yet is the guardian genius, and you should devote your first evocation to no one else, except the messenger, in case you have a supervisor working with you. **3. The place selected for the magical operation** Here, allow me to cite from my work [A Magical Study Series Volume I: A Guide to the Elementals](https://falconbookspublishing.com/product/a-guide-to-the-elementals-a-magical-study-series-volume-1/): *For cosmic beings, the background is usually impregnated by the image of the infinite expanse inside the circumference of the universe. For elemental rulers, a general scope may suffice, such as the sky, the ocean, the underground vistas or the magma centre of the earth. Elemental kings may have the breadth of their kingdoms as the background, while local elementals could require the magician to have a particular cave, atmosphere, volcano, lake or river in the background.* *Micro elementals will require, for instance, a particular plant, tree, or stream. Together with the natural background comes the character, that is, the image of the being with whom the magician is communicating. His mind will put together seemingly disjointed characteristics into a single image that is easier to remember if under a humanoid form. Some beings appear in different guises, for our capacity for image making is limited, but the different appearances connect to each other like different pages of a single book. The same happens when the magician is envisioning the kingdom of an elemental king. It is impossible to remember a whole kingdom and the magician may be under the impression that he is perceiving different kingdoms. In his mind, he is to create or explore entrances and paths that unite the different parts, so that, with time, his understanding of such a kingdom grows in integrity. When the magician is using the limited space of the triangle, he should, likewise, create linking points in his memory between the different sessions of evocation, so that he sees the different moods and apparitions of the being not as fragmented and disperse but as continuous. To this end, the magician’s own grimoire of operation is of the utmost importance.* *The way in which different backgrounds can be linked is not to be left to chance, instead, it must be conscious and ordered in its symbolism and choice. Different backgrounds should not be nearly merged nor too distant to cross without putting objective memory at risk. The magician may also link different domains from different beings of the same element, building a better and more conscious understanding of the elemental kingdom itself and, with patience, he can even link the elemental kingdom of the earth with the elemental kingdom of the water and so on.* *How to set the background* *In all cases, the backgrounds should neither be too bright nor too dark, for it will render it harder for the magician’s mind to remember his communications with the invisible world.* *Additionally, the backgrounds will still pose an obstacle to communication unless they are rendered possible to transform upon receiving images, in order to accommodate these images, adding to their meaning and sense. That is, the backgrounds must with no doubt be sensible places, capable of reacting. The domain and appearance of the being, represented by what we have named the background, is passive to the being’s actions and thoughts, such as the wax being altered by the impression of a new image. We can say, therefore, that there are two natures or layers to the backgrounds, appearances and domains of the beings, for there is a substance and the way in which it changes according to what is being attributed to it. Or, better put, the being and his domain plus the astral imaginary that fills the spaces created according to the being’s intelligence. It is through this second layer that communication takes place between the magician and the being, for the magician is perceived in a similar guise by the being and the two domains and appearances transfer images and crafted memories.* *All these operations take place either while the magician is sitting in the centre of his circle and looking at the magical mirror or triangle or if he is mental wandering. In the former case the operations, in all their variety, take place semi-consciously, attention being given to the most objective phenomena, and while mental or astral wandering, they take place consciously in all morphology and detail.* **4. Preparation of all magical implements needed for the operation** I will keep citing from the same source: *The Virtues Necessary for Magical Evocation* *The ideal is that the magician needs no ceremonial aids whatsoever. He then may choose to use them or not, for the sake of his own pleasure. What renders the magical tools optional is the magician’s virtues, might and powers. The magician is to keep in contact with the highest concept of existence at all instances, not only during wanderings or magical evocation, but for as much as possible in his daily life, for contact with one of the entities about to be mentioned in this book can echo back and forth in time.* *Perfecting the assumption of our own god in the four hermetic principles of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and immortality is essential. In his daily life the magician must have an unshakable will, act with wisdom and love, and be able to persevere independently of any obstacles. If these virtues are perfectly established on his soul mirror, it will be but a matter of imagination and meditation to bring them to their four divine or absolute states.* *Akashic trance is also essential, and together with the four qualities, it represents the circle. This is connected with the capacity of the magician to enter a timeless and spaceless state of consciousness that is all-penetrating through the limits of time and space. Franz Bardon gives a shortcut to attain it, being that the magician transfers his consciousness to the center of his body and imagines himself becoming infinitely small and the body infinitely large until he enters an altered state of mind. An alternative method is for the magician to imagine his body becoming infinitely small together with his limited astral and mental forms and the part of his mind that is connected with the universal mind becoming infinitely large until, at some point, the body disappears and only the cosmic mind of the divine remains in pair with the magician’s awareness. Yet another method and maybe the best method, is for the magician to assume godhood and then imagine his microcosmic god expanding until it merges with the macrocosmic god and acts through it. It is easy to see that we are not yet where we are required when our actions contradict the feeling of the infinite and the awareness of the sacred and of the divine. Of this we must keep vigilant.* *The magician must be in control of his mind, emotions and of his body, as well as in dominion of his own aggressiveness and his own subjection. He is not subject to these things, but drives them effortlessly with skill and ease according to his mighty will, uncompromised wisdom, pure kindness and acute consciousness. His feelings should always remain open to his intellect and his intellect to his will-power. His power should run with the flow of life unobstructed and guided by wisdom. Although he can use aggressiveness or passivity, he is neither aggressive nor passive but neutrally aware. This is analogous to the triangle, for it is through perfect self control that the magician will allow himself to receive the impressions of the beings, also limiting their actions to his field of interest.* *The capacity to deal with mental wandering or astral projection, the ability to harness and control the fluids of the elements, the electrical and the magnetic fluids as well as the strength to build electromagnetic volts is also of importance to create the proper set for the elementals and to give the magician some kind of control over the atmosphere or to make it possible for the magician to become an elemental himself and travel to the realms of the elements. These things have been dealt with in Franz Bardon’s books as well as in my work, Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun. The magician will have to, likewise, be a master of plastic imagination and over all of his senses, and to be enlightened in the ways of cognition and experienced in the ways of intuition. His will must be powerful and strong to keep his mind connected to the intelligences and their realms without suffering from outside interference. Most importantly, the magician’s word must be firm and above the temptations of any power or being and he will be always safe and respected as an authority by all beings.* *At all times, not just when the magician is working with the elementals, his intentions must be pure, for the magician’s intentions appear as his ranking garment in the invisible plane. With his magical equilibrium well established through the works of the soul mirror, his power will be, by such means, always of a universal nature, obeyed without delay.* **5. The actual magical operation** To be built from the remaining points. I will go back to this point at the end of the article, so bear with me. **6. Assuming the shape of the deity controlling the being concerned, that is connection with the relevant deity, its attributes, faculties etc.** From A Guide to the Elementals *There are different arrangements that can be worked on, depending on the magician’s magical systems or religious beliefs. I will delineate one example for practical reasons. The first Assumption or Divine Form must always be the one that embodies the four divine principles in a single form of ecstasy, which we may represent by the formula of YHVH as we have approached it in earlier chapters. JHWH as Bardon puts in the fourfold section of The Key to True Quabbalah is equally effective to the magician experienced in the cosmic ecstasies. 'J' invokes cosmic consciousness as it stands floating in love, the first 'H' brings about the intuition with which this cosmos operates, the intuition of Divine Providence itself. 'W' manifests the actual voice of Divine Providence and the truest entity behind mysticism and religions’ power, and the second 'H' realises it in the magician on the material plane.* *Intelligence does not regard these two as different formulas. The 'J' is the 'Y' of divine fire in that cosmic consciousness is brought about by the omnipresent light which is considered omnipotent in its victory over the darkness of the void. The first 'H' is divine water in that Divine Providence’s intuition is the thought of eternity. The 'W' is divine air in that 'JH' finds its representation as an entity in the source of all things, Omniscience. The last 'H' is divine Earth in that it is the realisation of God in the material plane, and therefore omnipresent. They are put together in that they are phonetically the same, and one may make use of the Mudras described to highlight each element in its electric or active and magnetic or passive attributions.* *For 'Y/J' (to sound as Yod or Jod) he uses the right forefinger to access omnipotence and the left forefinger to access all-penetrating power. For the first 'H' he uses the right thumb for eternity and the left for the intuition of unconditional love. For 'V/W' he uses the right pinky to obtain the ecstatic state of omniscience and the left for mystical wisdom. Finally he sounds and performs the second 'H' using the right ring finger for omnipresence and the left for realisation. This gives back to the magician all-penetrating omnipotence, eternal love, omniscient wisdom and omnipresent realisation, and the all-penetrating omnipotence of the eternal love of the omniscient wisdom in omnipresent self-realisation.* *About self-realisation, one should remember that the Divine Name of God, YHVH, translates in the material plane as Adonai, meaning Sovereign and Ruler. It is this God Head that later assumes the shape of one of the four Archangels, depending on which element is about to be worked. Uriel is indicated for the earth-element, Gabriel for the water-element, Raphael for the air-element, and Michael for the fire-element.* *Therefore, the first circle should have the letters of YHVH and the second the names and representations of the four Archangels, while the third circle is to have the elemental rulers of each element: Nicksa for water, Paralda for air, Ghob for earth, and Djin for fire. The circle is to be, therefore, divided in three layers and the magician is to assume God, God assumes the archangel, and the god-archangel the ruler.* *The names attributed to water should be to the west axis of the circle, air to the east, earth to the north and fire to the south. In the triangle, then, disposed in one of these directions according to the element of the being evoked, stands the elemental that is subordinate to the ruler of his quadrant, the ruler who will immediately be recognised in reverence.* Having this arrangement in mind, you must only come to the realization that, concerning the planetary beings, you will be dealing with the archangel of the sphere and instead of elemental rulers you will be dealing with the being from the sphere above your sphere of operation that influences the same astral range according to the degrees of the zodiac. In this regard, the information provided in my [A Magical Study Series Volume III: A Guide to Stellar Magic & Astrological Mysticism](https://payhip.com/FalconBooksPublishing/a-guide-to-stellar-magic-and-astrological-mysticism) will come in handy: *Bardon states that “there is nothing else but the Divine Light, the inconceivable and indescribable, called Divine Providence by us. There is nothing higher than that in our cosmic hierarchy.” He mentions, nevertheless, the highest sphere in our solar system: the sphere of Pluto, which we know to be responsible for transcendence in astrology. Yet, Franz Bardon adds that the magician has nothing to gain from it at the present time, since humanity cannot work with such sphere.* *This sphere is, to my own knowledge and exploration, represented by a single being, influencing the whole 360 degrees of the elliptic and the 360 days of the year in equal measure, so that it cannot truly be differentiated or identified. Such a being, if a being it can be called, can never be perceived in a state of duality. Even so, ultimately, all beings are this being, to the final detriment of the beings they are being, for being is one and not many.* *In as far as the elliptic is concerned, each being of a lower sphere is subordinate to the beings of the higher spheres influencing the same degrees. There are exceptions, such as the monarchs of the Zone Girdling the Earth, mentioned by Franz Bardon but not dealt with here. There are also exceptions to this rule in beings residing in centers further away from the Sun, such as the beings of Uranus and Neptune and even, to some extent, the beings of Saturn, these beings ruling mainly by cosmic principle alone and not by alignment.* *For the sake of brevity, we can exemplify the method of understanding lineages, useful to gain authority in evocations, with one of the signs of the Zodiac. To do that, we shall pick the first sign, that of Aries.* *◦ 1º The being in Pluto rules over all: the lineage begins with this being, in all instances. He represents absolute transcendence.* *◦ 2º In Neptune: the divine principle behind Ia rules Uranus, Neptune and Saturn. This is the principle of divine will.* *◦ 3º In Uranus: we know Da represents Aries, so we shall begin Aries with Da (vision into reasoning, breath into power, all objects of perception). We may also notice that Da, even having his own most transcended principle in Neptune, is in Uranus subject to the Divine principle behind Ia. At the same time, by order of alignment (range of influence) in the ecliptic Al and Ba influence Aries, namely Al creates through graduation from above to below, and Ba represents the active power of consciousness.* *◦ 4º The four first Judges of Saturn influence Aries: These are subordinate to Da by principle, namely the judge judging the vital and physical impulses of the Earth zone; the Judge judging the astral plane of the Earth Zone; the judge judging the mental plane on the Earth zone; and the judge judging love on the Earth Zone. By range of influence, the first and second judges are subject to Al, the third and fourth to Ba.* *◦ (The archetypal cosmology, in respect to powers and mights, shows that Unity controls Divine Will. Divine Will regulates vision, reason, breath, power and perception, but also creativity and consciousness. Now the combination of vision, reason, breath, power and perception regulates vitality, emotion, intellect and attraction. The creative principle regulates vitality and emotions. An active consciousness regulates intellectual faculties and sympathy).* *◦ 5º Malchjdael, the first head of Jupiter, represents Aries as a whole: His attributions are Electric Fluid & Fire. This being is partially subject to each of the first 4 judges of Saturn. Magically speaking, this puts the electric fluid and fire element subject to a combination of vital force, astral perception, the focus of the mind and the magic of sympathy.* *◦ 6º Rarum, Gibsir and Rahol, from the Mars Sphere, are subordinates of Malchjdael: This teaches us that the electric fluid and the element of fire can render the magician perfectly centered, infinitely creative, open to all active forces and erotically passionate.* *◦ 7º In The Sun Sphere: Emnasut (fire element) is subject to Rarum (creative centre); Lubech (electric fluid) is subject to Gibsir (all active forces) and Rarum (creative center); Teras (fire element and electric fluid) is subject to Gibsir and Rahol (all active forces and erotic passion) and Dubzeh (electric fluid) is subject to Gibsir and Rahol as well.* *◦ 8º In The Venus Sphere: Omah and Odujo are subject to Emnasut; Obideh and Onami are subject to Lubech; and Ophse and Orif are subject to Teras. Obanch and Odumi are subject to Dubzeh. The eight beings attributed by Bardon to Aries on the Venus Sphere are all experts in sex magic. It tells us that sex magic (in Venus and under Aries) works under the influence of the electric fluid and, in a lesser degree, of the fire element.* *◦ 9º In The Mercury Sphere: Vehuia (magic) is subject to Omah and Odujo, Jeliel (love) is subject to Odujo and Obideh, Sitael (consciousness) is subject to Obideh and Onami, Elemiah (fate) is subject to Onami and Ophse, Mahasiah (quabbalah) is subject to Orif and Obaneh and Lelahel (sex magic) is subject to Obaneh and Odumi, this according to the days of each. One concludes that magic, love, consciousness, fate, quabbalah and sex magic in Mercury and at least under the influence of Aries all have their essence in the manipulation of the powers of attraction in Venus.* *◦ 10º In The Moon Zone: Ebvap (tides) is subject to:* *— Vehuiah (magic), Jeliel (love) and Sitael (consciousness)* *— Emtircheyud (rhythm) is subject to Sitael (consciousness), Elemiah (fate) and Mahasiah (quabbalah)* *— Exhesekis (akasa and success) is subject to Mahasiah (quabbalah) and Lelahel (sex magic)* *We see then the proper combinations that can control the tides, the combinations that can control rhythm, and the combinations that can lead to the akashic trance and to success in life, being that in this last case a component falling under the influence of Taurus is missing.* *◦ 11º In the Earth Zone: under the rule of Ebvap (tides and electromagnetic fluid in Moon Magic) are:* *— Morech (invention)* *— Malacha (alchemy)* *— Ecdulon (love)* *— Lurchi (love and prosperity)* *— Aspadit (luck)* *— Nascela (writing)* *— Apollogon (magic)* *— Ramara (magic)* *— Anamil (electric-magnetic fluids)* *— Tabori (magic and the water element)* *— Igigi (magic)* *— Bialode (alchemy and Sun Magic)* *Subordinate to Emtircheyud (rhythm) are:* *— Opilon (magic and science)* *— Jrachro (magic and eloquence)* *— Golog (science and philosophy)* *— Argilo (love)* *— Barnel (love)* *— Sernpolo (language)* *— Hyris (water magic)* *— Hahadu (water magic)* *— Oromonas (magic)* *— Bekaro (justice)* *— Belifares (magic)* *— Nadele (medicine)* *— Yromus (alchemy)* *Under Exhesekis (akasha, correlative influences of the moon, timeless and spaceless happiness, physical success) are:* *— Hadcu (magic)* *— Balachman (astrology)* *— Jugula (talismans)* *— Secabmi (spagiry)* *— Calacha (water magic)* *To mention remain the beings under the range of Taurus. This example should suffice for the magician seeking the correspondences of the whole.* *It must be stated that Bardon sees the spheres as organic, vital and natural, so that this orderly cosmic disposition happens via natural tendencies, i.e. if the magician synchs in the akasha to this and that house and degree of the zodiac he will likely be contacting one of these beings, one of their subordinates, or different beings that are similar heads. The mentioned heads of the Earth Zone themselves are thus masters with their own students (to whom we use the medieval term subordinates).* **7. The drawing of the magic circle according to the magician's connection with the deity. If the operations are carried out with a magic circle sewn on a piece of linen, piece of cloth, or the like, it has to be re-drawn** The attentive reader may have realized I have given in this article two kinds of circles: one to work with the elementals but that can be adapted to the beings of the spheres, and that has three layers: Godhead, Archangel, and elemental ruler (or being raking in the astral range of the sphere above the being to be evoked) and one of up to 10 layers. Beyond that, remember the circle is formulated most of all by the depth point, which is to say the magical trance. For this, I should redirect you to yet another article:  [From the Depth Point to Life on Venus, by André Consciência](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-the-depth-point-to-life-on-venus-by-andre-consciencia/). **8. Drawing of the magic triangle** If you ever worked with the cosmic letters you know the meaning of the so-called threefold intonation. Bardon speaks of creation, preservation, destruction; material, astral and mental; past, present and future; electric, magnetic and electromagnetic, and so on, regarding the triangle, but the the threefold consciousness present in the cosmic letters is equally important and to be integrated, which means the light oscillation or fluid of the being, the sensation attached, and the sound of the element (cosmic mother letters) or of the sphere (see [A Magical Study Volume II – A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah](https://falconbookspublishing.com/a-magical-series-a-guide-to-sphere-quabbalah-by-andre-consciencia/?fbclid=IwAR28B0ZbmCTfNBLCalGcAD8R1_7YZwf220oWJtZYlu4VhnLFNTzdC6zc6pU)).  Keep in mind as well that every evocation into the triangle is an act of Saturn, and should bear its strength. Whatever you are drawing, do not forget to use your three bodies, and to highlight it I am forced again to cite from A Guide to the Elementals: *First, the magician is to activate his spirit by invoking the original light (the light of all lights) in akashic trance and having it manifest as spiritual illumination in his mind, magnetism in his soul and substance in his body. When this is done, he will be able to gaze into the Akasha without obstructions, and he takes upon him the GodHead as has been taught in Initiation Into Hermetics.* *He then, as an awakened spirit, activates his mind by invoking the power of the verb in akashic trance and letting it flow to the mind, becoming influence, influence becoming self-preservation in the soul, and finally self-preservation giving place to physical memory and analogy. He is now able to perceive the mental plane, and he traces the first circle in there, inspired by his own omnipotent spirit.* *His mind awakened, he proceeds to fully activate his soul. Meditating, in akashic trance, on the power to penetrate all, his mind starts to see clearly the qualities of all things, his soul is flooded with mystic feelings, and his body receives and transmits the flush of the four fluids. His senses pierce through the astral veil, and he now traces the second circle, his spirit inspiring his mind and it acting through his astral body.* *Finally, in akashic trance, he meditates on divine inspiration. His now enlightened mind will automatically position itself so that it can understand intellectually what divine inspiration is, and his open soul will absorb all that is good. When the senses of the body accept it, the physical body awakens and the magician has a crystal clear vision of physical reality. He now, with his mind inspired by the spirit and acting through his soul that in turn takes possession of his body, draws the third circle and the previous circles physically, together with the triangle, sigils or signs, and all that is necessary.* **9. Putting censer into the correct place, including, if necessary, the way of censering** The censors are addressed in PME, and although there could be further elaboration and I could provide the alchemical way of their preparation, I’d be making this article unbearably long. All I can do is a very quick resume: Dedicate a day to fasting from meat and abstaining from distractions, and in the morning of this day, take a bath with salt, rosemary and rue, practicing magical washing and pray for cleansing. At night meditate at the depth-point of your chest center and once there is silence, quietness and stillness, begin to assume your personal deity according to IIH’s step 10. At this point you will charge the resin, herb, leaf, bark, root, essential oil or tincture with its telesma (that is, with its mission, creating an elementary inside it). You are to write the mission on a paper that will then be burned in the mix, according to Bardon’s elemental magic at IIH.  In the longest version you’d assume the archangel connected with the sphere or element of the incense and then the spirit or elemental ruler, and strengthen the telesma with the blessing of these beings, then performing quabbalistic formulas over the incense when grinding and using magical breath upon blending with oil or tincture.  Remember to leave the incense one or two weeks in the shade and program it to grow in power and influence. Wrap it then in silk for seven days and unwrap it only to recharge it in the corresponding planetary hour. The incense should be burned by a candle also devoted to the same planet or element, and the essential oil is to be prepared alchemically as well.  In any case, too much smoke will distort the operation and I can add that, in time, I discovered that activating flowers via Quabbalah works better or, if you are not learned in Quabbalah, activating their smell via alcohol.  For a little more on basic magical perfumes read my article[ The Adept – Perfumes & Cognitions](https://falconbookspublishing.com/the-adept-perfumes-cognitions/). **10. Lighting of the magic lamp, including meditative attitude to cause intuition and enlightenment** From Beyond the Veil of Illusion (to be published by Falcon Books Publishing) *You are to observe your thoughts, without identifying with or engaging them, simply observing them. Do it consciously and for a long time. If you can only manage short periods at first, repetition will take you as far as it goes.* *When this is as easy as breathing, proceed to observe the observer, that is, to observe the one who or the faculty that was observing before.* *You will notice that while before you were identifying yourself with the observer, now, even though you are indeed observing this previous observer, you can no longer be the observer. You remain aware of the existence of this faculty that observes, but your awareness is in your presence and not in your action.* *When this state of consciousness has become quite natural, proceed to observe this presence that was aware of the faculty of observation to observe the observer. Do it so that you are now far removed from both, you cannot be the one who is observing nor the one who is simply present or that is the presence.* *Then, when identification ceases entirely you will know that you have succeeded, for a force will flood your whole body that is not your body anymore, and it will start shaking.   * *Another method is the Ogdoad method. The Ogdoad are four couples. Amun and Amunet are said to erase knowledge. Stay only with the sparks of thought, eyes open, in that even the objects of the senses become sparks before formation.* *The second couple is Kuk and Kauket, said to stop the absolute from dissolving all potential. Remove the sparks of thought, so that what is left is a single materialization of the absolute.* *Then Heh and Hauket, remove space and time. Remove the observer that observes the absolute. There will be an absence. Awareness of nothing. Presence in the nothing.* *The last couple is Nun and Naunet. I see Nun as the Hindu Shiva, and Nun is described in Egypt too sometimes as a dark blue bearded man. Naunet I see as a dark blue starry serpent walking around Shiva’s body. The thing to do is to now remove even the absence previously mentioned. You will feel pure boundless energy and your body will quiver intensely. Your body will likely freeze except for this, and for a minute you will find it hard to breathe. But do breathe. The ability to move will likely return before you come back to thinking or feeling. In time, the shift will be much subtler as your normal state will be more and more like this state of ecstasy.* *It is this solar power that has been described in the cosmology of many holy books, the so-called Fiat Lvx, because of true awareness and power coming into being. This power and this awareness is the original or cosmic fire. * **11. Charge of the seals, pentacles or lamens of the being desired** From A Guide to the Elementals: *Now, regarding the imagination, except in its outward projection, there is no major difference between the pen and the writer. A sign might show a pen, his character might appear as a writer. Similarly, the magician knows a being that is a patron of writers, and he might include or be shown a pen as part of the sign of this being. The same goes for the arrow and the archer, etc.* *Because a being’s signature is the conjunction of his most prominent faculties, virtues and abilities, the sign brings the conjunction of the attributes to life by awakening the intelligence, that then has to solve all the symbols of the attributes into a living and more abstract expression that puts them all together, forming a world. Any sign that calls a being also opens his world, his domain.* *Let’s say we have a bent line, a white cascading shape above, and five undulating lines on each side of the bent line. In the left corners there is a shield and a fly, in the right corners there is a spear and a pen. The central shapes evoke the image of an old man, the bent line projects as a bent back, the white cascading shade as white air, and the five undulating lines as trembling hands. Around the old man and inside him revolve four powers, as the four symbols in the corner come to be inhabited by imagination. They indicate he is an angel of war and a messenger of the dead.* *The mind immediately asks where this old man is and from this old man spawns a context and a world of his likeness. This world, in turn, has the mind ask what the old man is doing in this world. Then the old man acts.* *While the magician has extracted and summoned these animated images from the graphic in the sign, the being who is most naturally attracted to them comes to inhabit them and to truly speak through them. If the magician is ill-trained, he may let other thoughts interfere and anything can come to inhabit what he has summoned, or it may be the case that he isn’t rich and pure enough to attract more than astral larvae.* **12. Charge of the magic mirror, or several magic mirrors, depending on the special purposes they are to serve** I suggest you work with the magic mirror in inner alchemy before using it for the operation. Which means if you, as in the case of Graphiel, wish sanctified power you will work your soul mirror together with the magic mirror in order to cultivate sanctified power. There is nothing the being can do for you about what you don’t bring with you to the operation. In other words, be the master of the art you wish to perfect with a specialist. For this purpose, make use of my article [Magic Soul Mirrors](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-soul-mirrors-by-andre-consciencia/).  **13. Putting on of the magical garment and meditative attitude to cause protection, purity etc.** From The Way of Abrahadabra (to be republished by Black Moon Publishing) *Once, the magician has stepped out of his physical body to roam with his astral body, and also out of his astral or physical body as he projected his mind. Now, the magician is without the shadow of a doubt a mature magician, and he should, instead, let his etheric body swallow his physical body, so that even on what seems to be the physical, the magician will start to see the world in terms similar to those of infrared vision. * *If the magician further allows the etheric body, swollen by the physical body, to be absorbed by the astral body, he will start to perceive the physical world as if a dream or a journey of hallucinatory nature.  If, even then, he lets himself be swallowed by the mental body, all will be light, sound and geometry.  At this stage, if he allows himself to be wholly taken by the gates of Akasha, the magician will penetrate a new kind of akashic trance.* **14. Putting on of the magical headgear - crown, cap or magusband and meditation to bring about the contact with the deity** Reach the depth point of the deity, dislocate it to the depth point of the magusband, wear it and let it take over your mind, your whole perception becoming the web of this divine spider. When working with certain beings and making use of the deity that governs them, this means the being’s mind will as well be taken over. **15. Girding on the magical belt with the right attitude to bring about the magician’s power to control all powers, especially the elements** The belt, connecting micro and macrocosm, also connects the magician to the world. Without this alignment, the encounters of evocation can be so otherworldly that they go beyond repair: that is, the magician cannot translate them into anything useful on this Earth and he himself disconnects further and further from his own life mission. Therefore, I suggest my method from The Way of Abrahadabra: *The magician is to find a name that is suitable to him as a worker of the Great Work . He is to proceed with it in the same manner as he did with the names of the beings and the divine names of the spheres. * *The original name should have a quintessence, translating into a mantra and a threefold intonation.* *We give the example of the author's magical name, Panreva. Its number is 887, and it may be read as «Psyche and Cupid» on the mental plane, «Mind Body Spirit» on the astral plane, and «Divine Circle» at the physical. Its keyword is «The Abyss is Locked» and its mantra «Here divinity sees energy, breathes in and binds the magician». So, in its original concept, it stands for the overcoming of all steps between the union of life and desire. This is also present at the union of Eve and Pan under the Sun, Eve being the matrix for sublunar life and Pan its living expression, the instincts inherent to desire, while R stands for Resh, the radiation of the sun, that is, of consciousness. On an emotional level, that concept turns into a feeling of oneness between thought, instinct and enthusiasm. On a physical level its translates as Divine Circle because once the union of these aspects is achieved the magician moves about the universe as a star in its proper rout, and because of it the abyss is locked, no manifestation can counter Agape et Thelema for every event comes to feed the purpose of their marriage, which on and by itself may already describe the meaning of the mantra. The number for these expressions is 887, but the reader is not obliged to use gematria.* ![](https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXczp06CfQTik_D1sUb3pAHofxCGluoS1F5CVD7E7jxUf1uGKolKT0WLq8-7N9gqy99kvQtwYBtL4b8HWegM5lQgxAU-PSq6aloDGI24LA5kHS281XPRCy1l9Y8s3ontgIoq8nsmxA?key=nw68NpA_DmZ5M3Yazuhr0A) *After the study and definition of one's own name is accomplished, the magician is to find a duty connected to it. He should find a verb to which all other verbs should connect easily, for the more isolated his verb stands, the harder it will make the magician's job. Nonetheless, he should not choose a helping verb like the verb to be, do, or have. He should also find an adjective to describe how he will be doing the verb chosen. For instance, «To dream out loud», the magician's duty, or his word as a Magus, would then be to dream out loud. Every other verb can be preceded by this verb. i.e. «To dream out loud of flying».  * *Some words may be ambiguous, so the magician is to describe what he means by dreaming with three other expressions. What does he personally mean by dreaming: on a rational basis, on an emotional basis, and as a practical activity? He should also use this method on the adjective and form three other sentences based on it. * *For instance: * *«To elaborate with precision»* *«To hope with passion»* *«To create with intensity»* *So the following is now his manifesto: * *«To dream out loud,* *To elaborate with precision,* *To hope with passion,* *and to create with intensity» * *In the original sentence, he should have added his objective. «To dream out loud in order to inspire those around me. » The objective is to define the balance of his duty, and the four elements should define that balance. Inspiration needs determination on the fire element, freedom on the element of air, a celebrative spirit on the water element and thoroughness on the element of earth. Whatever the objective of the magician, he is to find the proper elemental associations and practice their balance.  These elemental virtues act as the four sentinels of the Work. Their imbalance can collapse the structure of the duty, and therefore of the magician himself.* *The magician is still to nominate by which means he is to do his duty and enumerate them on a document. He will be able to change that document to accommodate the needs of his evolutionary work concerning his duty. * *The document could be written in the following manner:* *«In order to comply with his duty, Panreva commits to: * *1 - Work on one or more magical systems and elaborate his own;* *2 – To study philosophy and apply it as a tool to work on his own thesis, the best of which he is to present to the world;* *3 – To inspire his community with expressions of the highest ideals;* *4 – To do works of illustration and set them out to the world, to write prose and poetry and to publish them, to make music and play it live, to perform theatre on stage. * *The four commitments refer to the four lines on the manifesto.* *Each of these paragraphs should also have a temporal paper assigning the initiatives the magician is to take forward in order to serve their content. And they should dictate the course of the magician's actions towards his duty during a one-year period.* *For instance:* *1 – To join the order of ____ and attain to the grade of ____. * *2 – To refute ___'s theory and seek to present a seminar. * *3 – To create a cooperative and to work with the community of ____.* *4 – To get exhibited, get one show on tour and a book about ___ finished for release. * *This book of minutes should be sealed with the magician's own sigil, which is to be received while the magician is meditating on his own magical name. Further validation is needed, and the sigil is to be recognized by the guardian genius before the duty is consecrated. * *The original sentence of the duty is to be inscribed on a belt which the magician should use during magical operations, and the sigil is to be inscribed at its lock. At his belt, the magician rests his wand. The belt signifies the region between micro and macrocosmos, above and below. The belt of the magician is like the serpent Uraeus worn by initiates of the Nile, it guards the channel of ascent, and holds fast the divine authority entrusted to the magician.* **16. Girding on magic sword to magic belt with the meditative attitude of absolute victory; re-charging, with magic wand in the right and concentrating on the idea that the magician's absolute will be realised** General response from A Guide to the Elementals *In physical evocations or journeying in subtle bodies, it is in the wisdom of magic to add further substantive backgrounds, such as magical weapons. These are to be inserted as fixed images that cannot dissolve and they are connected to the feeling that has been bestowed upon them. For instance, the magician’s magical sword represents his absolute victory over the world of phenomena.* *No matter what the scenario is, if the sword is there, the outcome can never contradict the meaning of the sword, for part of everything the magician is experiencing is being given life by the sword itself. Of the same order are the sigils or signs that give the life of the being himself and his aspects to the whole scenario.* Regarding the elemental wands, and from the same source: *Formulas to Activate the Wand* *A different wand can be used for each of the four elements. The wands represent the will of the magician piercing through all layers of the element, mastering it and ruling it.* *Wand of Fire:* *The magician can inscribe, after mastering them, the cosmic letters “Sh H S T” as portrayed in The Key to True** **Quabbalah by Franz** **Bardon. They should be painted in their corresponding colors. The wand must be charged in one end with a volt of the element of original light enveloped by the fluid of understanding, which is the mental structure of the principle of light. The other end should be charged with the light of clairvoyance and the power of analogy. Both volts should grow until they merge and compress into the form of the wand of fire. This can be done by the magician imbuing himself with these qualities and passing them to the wand in the form of volts or by drawing, by power of imagination, these fluids from the universe itself into the wand and forming the volts. He then breathes into the magical tool the intelligence of the original light and the power of the verb, and has it inspire the electric fluid and exhale creativity.* *Wand of Air:* *The magician may inscribe the cosmic letters “A C L H.” The wand is to be charged at one edge with the feeling of the highest wisdom enveloped by a mental layer, forming a volt. At the other end, a volt of the feeling of understanding enveloped by the fluid of cosmic equilibrium. In all cases, the volts should grow in size, fuse and compress into the form of the magical wand until it stands glowing wide. One then infuses into it the intelligence of wisdom and the power to acquire all qualities, and has it inhaling virtue and exhaling comprehension.* *Wand of Water:* *The letters are “M N W G,” one volt of the principle of fluidity with the principle of the mind, another with wonderment and abundance. One then creates in it the intelligence of original water and the life of supreme happiness, having it invoke concentration in and evoke peace all around it.* *Wand of Earth:* *Are to stand the letters “Ae I F R,” one volt of the fluid of life and death covered by a sphere of memory and consciousness and another volt of astral or magical equilibrium enveloped by the fluid of reason. The intelligence of life itself is given to it and the power over evolution, cause and effect. It is made to start getting inspired by the universal laws and to express absolute security.* *Operating with Wands* *Wand of Fire:* *To conjure and master salamanders the magician must manage this wand with an attitude of absolute victory through understanding and a feeling of embodying the prophecy that molds the astral world itself. To use the wand to materialise such elementals that have been conjured, he invokes the origin of fire in himself and the power to overcome destiny, he then generates for the being to inhabit a volt of heat and light—the heat being the inner part and the light the outer part—and lets him take it into his shape.* *Wand of Air:* *The wand of the air is to be brandished with the attitude of an influential enlightened being and a feeling of standing as the cosmic balance that influences destiny. The beings it conjures can be materialised by invoking mastery over the air element and absolute influence over the mental plane, then creating for the elemental the volt of weightlessness and dryness.* *Wand of Water:* *The wand is held with an attitude of one who is the source of all sensory perception of life and master over all the intellectual perceptions of the mind, the feeling is that of a mystical sense of happiness. The beings it conjures can take on full shape by the magician invoking into himself a sense of being the self**‑**sustaining master over all waters and magnetic fluids, then creating for the being a volt of cold and moisture.* *Wand of Earth:* *The attitude with which this wand should be used is one of the master of his thoughts, memories and consciousness, with the feeling of innocent and natural magical equilibrium. The earth elementals can take on material appearance by the invocation of the feeling of being master over all desires and astral phenomena, then creating a volt of gravity and darkness for the gnome to take upon himself.* Regarding planetary wands, from Beyond the Veil of Illusion: *The premise to explain cosmic harmony can be quite simple too, as most solar teachings. It says the magic wand, loaded with cosmic radiation, works for the magician in all spheres because the magician works for the universe in all spheres through universal radiation.* *At first, this simple axiom might leave the reader wondering about its meaning. Luckily, we are still magicians, and we can load our magic wand with cosmic radiation, finding the axiom in practice. We will not enter details on how to charge or load and consecrate a magician’s wand, this is not that kind of book. I have, however, written enough books that explain the method with some amount of precision, and Franz Bardon has given as well enough elucidations in this kind of procedure, either through his work Initiation Into Hermetics or The Practice of Magical Evocation.* *For the work at hand and having cosmic radiation into account, it is enough to remind the reader that the light infusing the wand must be imagined (created) with the quality of a will that feeds itself and of itself, becoming an unbreakable ring of unity and power, whose name is cosmic harmony. * *In other words, the use of this ring, figuratively speaking but also magically speaking, is the entrance to the realm of cosmic harmony, where all things work for the same end and where the magician himself sacrifices to (becomes) that end.* *Beyond what has been said, we can add that cosmic harmony is represented by a lion-serpent. The Ancient Egyptians knew this symbol as the royal seed of the pharaohs, where the pharaohs are Osiris (the continuity of consciousness throughout all dissolution).  * *As a symbol, this solar figure, the Chnoubis , was used for protection, banishing all hindrances to cosmic harmony and ensuring health and enlightenment throughout the cycles of life.* **17. Entering of the magic circle with the simultaneous feeling of ties and symbolization of the microcosm and macrocosm** This has been entertained in various ways, and although more could be said, this article has limits. **18. Concentration on the magic space, that is, the complete elimination of the ideas of time and space** For the quabbalist, it should be sufficient to practice the letter N in the akasha. For others, I should like to quote again from the yet unpublished Beyond the Veil of Illusion, so as to feed the practitioners meditation on the subject: *Focusing on the personality of the masters is stripping the contacts that are about to take place of their cosmic quality, so do keep your own personality and the personality of the master in the background. * *Some notes should be given in this book as well regarding the process of evocation itself, for there have been many misconceptions about the whole process, and some I seemingly have not been able to clarify in previous books. * *If a cosmic master wants to materialize, the cosmic master will, and there are enough accounts of this happening. During evocations, however, the materialization of the master in the room comes most often than not from the consciousness of the magician being projected through the akasha to the spiritual abode of the being, so that the being appears in the room as the senses channel the impressions, but there is no room where the master is and both the consciousness of the master and of the Adept are reunited nowhere and everywhere. * *More, some people ask me if one or another master is still available in the spiritual realms or if this or that master has reincarnated. * *There is little essential in this question. If we are to take essence into account, whatever being lives in the spiritual realm exists in no time and at all times. This means that the many stages of a spiritual entity exist without limitation of extension, that is, the beings are available through the akasha eternally in all their facets. The reason why this is not often spoken of is that, even for very knowledgeable and experienced magicians, it confounds the concept of personality, for if, in spirit, we exist in all manners that we have existed and will exist, how can we maintain our individuality? However, the mind of a cosmic master is not limited by notions of time and space except to operate in time and space, and it is expressed by the hive mind of all these possibilities. * *In other words, incarnation and reincarnation are measured sequentially from the standpoint of time and space, but from the akasha, all incarnations happen simultaneously, and all disembodied journeys too.* **19. Repeated contact with one's deity** Two suggestions. Assume the deity as taught in step X of Initiation Into Hermetics and, as the deity, communicate with the deity in all things external, so that all phenomena is a manifestation from the deity to the deity. The second suggestion for repeated contact figures in my [Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09YHLC26J/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0): *Once the magician learned to meditate on his spirit, composed of fire as willpower, air as cognition, water as feeling, and earth as consciousness, he has learned to think with all four heads simultaneously, then adding a fifth, that of the astral senses, and finally, the physical senses. He has brought the six heads to think in harmony.* *The seventh head is that of the God-Head. The magician has learned this seventh head too; all six heads have bowed to the seventh, and during such trances, the pyramid has become wholly the centre at the top.* *We will now learn how to articulate the seventh head in a different shape. Let the magician transfer himself to his spirit, his mental body, standing beside his physical body. Let the mental body meditate on the godhood that it has known, calling it forth from out of its depth point. Then, the magician will imagine the God-Head leaving the mental body as the hand leaves the glove.* *The explorations the magician will be capable of are not possible to describe, but let him gaze on the mental body now, for it will become omniscience itself, and let him look at the astral body and it will become the eternal sea of love; let him look at the physical body, and it will become omnipresence.* *This is the Philosophical Stone, said to make its owner capable of feeling the sweeping of all stars, and it is the Grail of the Scarlet Lady kept and carried by the seven-headed beast.* **20. Placing of the magician's whole personality into the relevant mental sphere with all his implements** Not only this, which may easily be achieved by performing the sphere tone quabbalistically (again, A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah) or by Bardon’s imagination of the light oscillation, the chamber of operations (in the subtle plane) should also be transported to the corresponding sphere.  **21. Giving orders to the being or power of that sphere in regard to its evocation and imaginative forming of shape in which the being or power is to appear in the magic triangle or magic mirror** Forget monopoly over the being’s shape and let the being have its mode of expression. Focus instead on filtering the quality of the experience: you want the best outcome under the best of luck and for the experience to bless you supremely and totally. **22. Returning with consciousness to the operating room** Bring not only the being but the very sphere or elemental kingdom with you into the room. **23. Wanting or ordering a spirit to communicate a message or do a certain job in whatever sphere necessary** Addressed in the beginning. **24. Conscious dismissing of the being, at the end of operations, to the sphere from which it has been evoked and the finishing of the operation by saying a prayer of thanks** Nothing to add to Bardon’s suggestions. **25. Storing up of all magical implements, including the magic circle etc.** As a curiosity, my old mentor once taught me to have all my magical tools loaded into rings, bracelets and pendants that I could carry with me, wear and undress at all times and places. I go as far as to state that you can encode the magical tools in ritual gestures or seals. See my article [Magical Gestures by André Consciência](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magical-gestures-by-andre-consciencia/). **26. Entering the total course of operation, the time it needed, its success etc. into the Book of Formulae.** Have two different books. Let one be of pure recording and evidence, for later consultation. On the other book, translate all experiences into bodies of wisdom, practice and method. Magic should become science, art, worldly activity or philosophy. Evocations are useless otherwise.  Also, remember that it is not enough to register successes and failures merely; it is essential to identify the causes of success and failure, as well as how to replicate success and overcome failure. ## Now we can finally return to point 5:  I will not be focusing on the ceremony itself, you have PME for that effect and Bardon’s example. In itself, it is quite sufficient, and all that I am adding is purely extra content. But I will focus on a preparation that leads to an impactful first evocation, capable of serving as a deep initiation. ##### Magical Belt Reduce the magical belt operation to nine months if you must, but do engage and give it great priority. Then renew it, make it a way of life if you are up to it. If you don’t align your mastery with your worldly call to action you risk severing the connection during evocation. ##### Evoking your subconscious Despair not, for during these nine months you will be working other aspects as well. Start by evoking your subconscious and interacting with it. This process is personal but the universal goal is to have it become obedient, non-active during the operations and only working to maximize the undistorted signal of the evoked beings. If you can’t simply evoke the subconscious (this should be no big challenge if you have completed IIH) engage in mental wandering, which will help you define the background. If that seems to be beyond your reach also, try a cave with reflective dark waters and moving glyphs. Inside the waters, there is a submerged twilight temple with a labyrinth whose turns and chambers change according to your thoughts, and inside this labyrinth, there is a library of shadows, dreams and emotions. The library is the messenger. Interact with this library. Later, you do not find the library but a dreaming child’s room where the toys engage and speak to you. They are the messenger. Then, at some point, instead of the dreaming child’s room in the labyrinth, you find a theatre, and scenes play out both directed and played by the messenger, who is all actors.  Finally, you find nothing, but the walls of the labyrinth are all made of mirrors and your reflections do not obey you. They are obeying the messenger. When you can bring him from the mirrors to your front, you will easily get indications on how to evoke him successfully.   Whatever the case, provide the background intimacy, making it inner and suggestive (mutability and association), rather than cosmic or elemental. You can use, during such explorations, the help of your guardian genius if it is not distorted, and during the evocations, the assumption of your personal deity. The messenger must always answer to divinity under whatever form or shape, for although the messenger rules psychic form and shape, it has no rule and only subservience towards divinity. That said, the specific deity that governs it directly appears as a masked king, the mask showing no recognizable feature and the crown radiating with infinite light.  Additionally, it will be easy for the magician to capture the seal of their subconscious through automatic drawing and similar techniques, as taught in IIH through passive communication. Besides, a universal seal can be a triple ring inside which there is a crescent moon held in a mirror, and in this crescent moon, a black drop. Inside this black drop, there should be your birth chart’s moon.  Obviously, if you use this sign, later the messenger will provide unique and personal alternatives.  ##### Evoking your Guardian Genius You will be able to test if your work with the subconscious is successful when you can, without disruption, evoke your guardian genius with the utmost clarity, and the line is unimpeded within all extrasensory abilities. Since the magician has met the Guardian Angel or Genius already in IIH, spiralling up where all shadows are banished to that white-gold temple floating above the boundless sea of thought, instructions will be given by the Genius. At this point, you are already practicing knowing well the purpose of your evocations, and proceeding as indicated in point 1 when it comes to the evocation of the messenger or the evocation of the guardian genius. In fact, all the delineated steps are being put into practice, although some of them are still being refined towards perfection.  To evoke the guardian genius, the personal deity is optimal, but something that could work universally is the omnipotent head of Ra or Atum-Ra, the contemplative chest of the omniscient Apollo, the abdominal region of the eternal Ahura Mazda, to whom the world is his bosom, and the ever-reaching limbs of the very Guardian Angel. ![](https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfSzVy9mXnY6pUYuVwOI2gDP2JQdf1JBVOx7hNmoNPfLtRdV5HpHI3eJyPlphedhIsxdK2TsMMRg_h6JWWwRpLQxr2TVxEKSpSQDyrYDc12x9yO4a2w7tAbDffecaBn4UccrLtkVQ?key=nw68NpA_DmZ5M3Yazuhr0A) Obtaining the personal seal from your guardian genius is imperative. A generic seal that might help is a six-petaled flower inside a hexagram. At the top triangle of the hexagram, there is a crown, and at the bottom triangle, a magical mirror. The other triangles should contain the letters of YHVH, each one letter, correspondingly, in the Hebrew glyph. And around a circle should close with the inscription: “In silent radiance, I behold the Face of My Star”.  ##### Meditative Light During these nine months a very important aspect will be to practice the meditative attitude with which to light the magical lamp. That is, the practice of the meditation we have given. It should develop to a point as further described in Beyond the Veil of Illusion: *The second task is that of maintaining the trance state generated in the previous step. The longer one maintains it, the stronger the consequences and transformations. Without the transformation that comes from the permanence of this state, all that will result from the Ogdoad Method is a cathartic moment after which there will be no fruits to reap.* *One can strive to remain in this state for one minute, then two, then three, up to five, and up to half an hour. Maybe one hour. Then in daily life, while engaging in daily activities and performing daily duties, until this state becomes our natural state of repose and balance.* *From remaining in the trance of cosmic creation or fire, we begin to exhale the so-called cosmic emanation. In the “Way of Mystery – Magick, Mysticism and Self-Transcendence”, Nema  speaks of this state in an elucidating descriptive manner. I will, therefore, use her better words.* *What she calls rapture , and we cosmic emanation is, in her words, “a sense of being seized and swiftly carried upward, like a fish or a rabbit in the talons of an eagle or a hawk. Solid footing is gone, and struggle might result in a fatal plunge. There is often a sensation of being surrounded by and merged with light. In my own experience I’ve encountered a warm golden haze, a brightness of pure light, a silver-blue radiance as well as occasions of vivid, living darkness, a light beyond sight. In each case, the radiance is inhabited by an intelligence that stays at the edge of awareness, scarcely glanced, almost seen, haunting, familiar, and strange. The light and darkness pierce and penetrate every part of you, charging your vibratory rates with new energy while bearing its information into you.”* *In other words, the cosmic emanation is the rapture of surrender, whose name is ecstasy, and it removes experience, physical pleasure, and instinct from their commanding stations so that bliss now guides the magician, and he or she becomes the mystic saint whose presence can produce miracles like healings, bi-locations, sightings, etc. The mystic will produce his or her miracles often unaware of them, but the magician knows that this cosmic emanation also translates into an astral fluid that intoxicates the air with the perfume of sanctity, being a visionary light that gives him or her and the bodies around him or her their glowing countenance and halos.* *This fluid can be harnessed and worked consciously in and with the mind, the soul, and the body, and through the mental plane, the astral plane and the material plane.* ##### The Order of Works So, during these nine months in which you are solidifying the work of the belt, you are also doing concurrent operations. In the first three months, you are conquering the messenger while working alongside your guardian genius. You are also training the meditative light daily and obtaining a sense of sainthood. In the next three months, you are focusing on the work with your guardian genius, and working the magic mirror with the soul mirror to make sure all those virtues that the magical tools symbolize are fixed within your character.  The next three months, you dedicate to mastering the mandala or Vimanarupa of the sphere or elemental kingdom you wish to work with in your first official evocation, according to my article “From the Depth Point to Life on Venus”, and transporting the room to the sphere. You are also practicing repeated contact with your deity, and leaving your mental body within the Godhead, then inhabiting with the Godhead your bodies down to the material body and in this state absorbing the material with the etheric body, the etheric body with the astral body, the astral body with the mental body and absorbing the mental body back to the akasha state of the Godhead. You should also be able to reproduce this effect with whole rooms.  After these nine months, it is time to research for a whole moon all that is necessary to know about the being you will evoke.  Let us pick, for the sake of example, Aschmunadai: You have spent a whole moon understanding your purpose and the purpose of the monarch, adapting your soul mirror with the aid of the magic mirror for this operation and gaining insight into all the characteristics of the being yourself. You have now charged all magical tools and mastered the corresponding meditations, states of consciousness, or attitudes. You have become acquainted with raising consciousness to the abodes of your guardian genius and lowering those abodes to the very room, after charging it with the guardian’s light, and all other preparations, such as the timeless and spaceless state and so on. You can become your deity at will, and all the general steps have been mastered.  Aschmunadai’s first seal is given by Franz Bardon (PME), so we need not delve into that. We need to get acquainted with the place of evocation, which is to say, most importantly, the background.  Bardon described Aschmunadai in the following manner: “Aschmunadai - is a powerful initiate in the zone girdling the earth. He has the rank of an absolute monarch. His universal seal, as shown in picture 1, is very complicated, but is a graphical representation of all the fundamental qualities with which this high intelligence is equipped with regard to the zone girdling the earth and also with regard to our physical world. For the first evocation this seal has to be drawn in blue, red, green and yellow colours and has to be placed into the triangle outside the magic circle in front of the magician. As soon as he has been able to contact Aschmunadai he will get from him an abbreviated sign by the help of which the magician will be able to call the intelligence. This simplified sign of Aschmunadai's seal must not be used unless approved by Aschmunadai. Aschmunadai can make the magician acquainted with all laws governing the mental and astral sphere of the zone girdling the earth and enable him to apply these laws. With Aschmunadai's help the magician can get under his control the total zone girdling the earth and gain plenty of knowledge. Since Aschmunadai is in possession of a great number of servants, he can place at the magician's disposal, if asked by him, servants who will assist him either in the zone girdling the earth or in our physical world and do everything he wants.” This leaves us with a domain that is the magnetic and symbolic envelope of the Earth, the intermediary between the terrestrial and the celestial. For instance, a vast temple suspended in space, from whose balconies the continents are visible. Since the seal is drawn in blue, red, green, and yellow, which directly correspond to Water, Fire, Earth, and Air, the background must radiate balanced elemental power. Given Aschmunadai’s monarchic status, a throne is appropriate. A transparent crystalline seat formed of interwoven elemental fluid, suspended in the zone, its form shifting subtly, making known his mental sovereignty. His seat is encircled by spirits, luminous figures in orbit, like satellites of choirs: his servants or aspects of his intelligence. To reflect his control over mental and astral laws, the background features floating diagrams or scrolls of light that inscribe themselves around the monarch in a horizon that contains both stars and minds, where thought and cosmos are one. Ethereal geometry, platonic solids, sigils, and mandalas drift or orbit, while Aschmunadai holds their laws with living presence. There is an ambient luminosity, as if these laws themselves emit light. Then, the magician, seated in the centre of his circle, beholds through the triangle a curved sphere of vast magnitude, encasing the Earth like a subtle membrane. Within it floats a crystalline throne, whose frame undulates between the elemental colors: red fire curling into blue water, green earth rising into yellow air. Upon the throne sits Aschmunadai, not robed in fabric but clothed in light-geometry and abstract crown, his face noble and vast, unreadable yet familiar. Behind him, the four elements spiral in immense arcs, and around him, seals drift like satellites, releasing the laws of matter, thought, and soul. In this space, symbols become alive and breathing. The practice for half a moon (from New Moon to Full) of this magical cartography and its plastic materialization is enough to get the magician introduced to Aschmunadai. When the magician visits him in the Earth Belt, things might be different, or if the magician invites Aschmunadai to possess this scenario and take body during the Full Moon, Aschmunadai will certainly take over and surprise the magician.   Finally, I suggest adding to this visualization of the background a second session devoted only to the character background in all its iconography. The first session is generalist and leaves more room for the influence of the intelligence, the second is quite detailed, zoomed, and holds greater psychic pressure from the magician.  The iconographic representation of Aschmunadai stands tall and regal, in a slightly abstracted anthropomorphic form, cloaked in flowing robes made of translucent astral energy, segmented and alive. The body itself has the form of the outer contour of the seal, a double-winged cloak built of the fluid of his aura. This becomes part of the robe or mantle. He towers as a hierophantic figure, seated on his crystalline throne shaped like a cube intersected by waves. Atop his head is a double red disc, of solar authority and earth-zone dominion. It is made of a halo of red-gold, with two discs intersecting and floating above the head like a planetary alignment. From the discs descend two vertical rods into his temples, directing the influx of universal law. His face is serene and abstract, half human, half mask, transpiring hidden knowledge. The eyes are crystalline and slightly closed, turned inward. Over the heart there stands a red-and-white shield with the letters Æ E S carved into the plate like a glyph of sovereignty. This quabbalistic formula discloses the threefold power of mental, astral, and physical dominion over the Earth zone, the first letter indicating Aschmunadai sees through all thoughts, actions and wishes concerning matter and is their absolute master; the second that Aschmunadai understands the perception of the remotest past, the present, and the future, indiscriminately of distance or kingdom, i.e., human kingdom or animal kingdom; the third letter revealing Aschmunadai has control of the consciousness of any human being or being of any sphere or plane of our macrocosm, starting from the kingdom of the elements up to the highest angels, original beings, genii, etc.  In the neck Aschmunadai has banded seal of the Egyptian scarab Kephra. This radiating jewel pulses with lines representing the flow of thought. On one side of the torso there is a butterfly-like glyph and on the other a spiral form, emanations of force and delegation, along with four small cherubic faces emanating from him at cardinal points. Additionally, the iconographic living figure presents four arms, in red, blue, yellow, and green, each holding an elemental wand: Red: Staff of Fire Blue: Staff of Water Yellow: Staff of Air Green: Staff of Earth  The lower torso catches three red-wave patterns that connect him to the fluid mental and astral currents of the earth zone. At the feet there stand intertwined elemental serpents coiling around a ringed globe, showing Aschmunadai’s rulership over the totality of elemental zones. Embedded into the surface of his mantle, as part of his robe’s iconography, there is a dice to his left shoulder and a playing card to his right. Behind him, a radiant wheel with compass-like arrows, the Wheel of Law, displays Aschmunadai’s insight into fate, cycles, and astral coordination. Influenced by the double disc it turns slowly behind his head like a celestial clock. In sum, Aschmunadai stands as a monumental form of light, his four arms holding the elemental staves, his mantle flowing like curved magnetic geometry. A double sun crowns his head, and in his breast shines the sigil ÆES, carved like a seal upon a divine tablet. From his back emerges the wheel of heavens, and his robe is inscribed with symbols of fate, elemental balance, and mental law. Beneath his feet, a globe is circled by spiraling bands. His presence is that of a mind-shaped flame, robed in elemental light, crowned with a radiant double-sun. His face is calm, abstracted, mirrored, his eyes are not for seeing but reflecting. And you feel the pull of order and the demand for clarity. ##### Final Template To be performed in the Circle with Triangle prepared, Aschmunadai’s seal inscribed in red, yellow, green, and blue, and placed within the Triangle of Art. The magician wears white or gold, and carries a wand or sceptre crowned with a clear crystal or solar glyph. The ritual may take place at dawn or dusk, under a temperate sky. The elemental tools should be present in their proper quarters. And everything we have learned should have been taken care of.  You should have reinforced the operation by breathing into your robe the breath of silence, into your wand the fire of the stars, into your mirror the waters that reflect the astral planes, into the triangle the earth that bears the mystery of form, into the circle the spirit that binds all into wholeness, etc, always proceeding in wisdom, in harmony, in balance and peace. Now, in the center of the circle, with all it implies, and facing the Triangle, with all it implies, place the tip of your wand upon your heart: “By the unbroken thread that binds my breath to the starry Crown of the Infinite, I will this operation to draw forth the Intelligence of the Zone Girdling the Earth, The Great Monarch named Aschmunadai, Sovereign Architect of the Elemental Equilibrium, Master of the mental and astral legislations of Earth, That I may cause instruction in the noble art of inner dominion, Comprehension of the subtle statutes of causality and motion, Movement with poise across the corridors of force, And craft a soul palace governed by order, balance, and clarity.” (Fix the seal of Aschmunadai) “May these things be That I establish a dwelling-place of peace at the center of my being, That I administer the faculties of mind, imagination, and will That I walk the boundary between manifestation and intention That I perceive the concealed architecture of cause and effect, And inscribe new meaning in the soul mirrors With deliberate and reverent hand.” (Place both hands over your heart. Speak slowly.) “Because I am the sovereign of my inner world. Because form meets freedom in the temple of consciousness. Because I listen through silence. Because the mental realm is a kingdom, And I wear the crown of responsibility. Because beneath all multiplicity is one order, And I serve that order in fullness of will.” (Hold the wand vertically before you. Call forth the backgrounds and fix your gaze on what you see.) “So, O Sovereign Aschmunadai, High Initiate of the Zone that girdles the Earth, Supreme Mediator of Element and Idea, You whose thought is law and whose law is balance, Who holds the mirror of the Earth between the realms, And teaches the magician how to reign in reflection and radiance. By your command, the four elements are yoked in harmony. By your voice, the mind becomes luminous and silent. In your presence, the realms realign into their proper tone, And the ladder of ascent is guarded but clear. In the sanctuary of your dominion this divinity visits, By your sigil this divinity knocks, by your seal this divinity waits, And in reverence this divinity asks: Unveil the statutes of your kingdom. Show the ways of rulership without tyranny. Place in this keeping a servant of your light To instruct according to readiness and truth. Aschmunadai, Monarch of the Encircling Flame, Listen to this voice.” As for the rest, you know what to do.  The best of luck, André Consciência --- --- # From Samskara to Samadhi: Ryan Burton on Transforming Suffering into Insight Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-samskara-to-samadhi-ryan-burton-on-transforming-suffering-into-insight/ ## Introduction In this interview with meditation teacher **Ryan Burton** he breaks down everything from tackling buried trauma on the cushion to what “awakening” really means in daily life. If you’ve ever wondered how raw suffering turns into deep clarity—or why effort and surrender both matter—then you will find this post interesting. Enjoy the read and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Many thanks to Ryan for spending the time to answer these questions. You can follow Ryan, his work and his training opportunities on his website [here](https://www.afterawakening.com/). --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Meditation- Awakening- Out-of-Body Experiences- Theravāda Buddhism- Cessation of Perception and Feeling- Past Life Recall- Non-Duality- Integration After Awakening- General ReflectionsLearn About Sixty Skills ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/ryan.avif) ## Meditation **PAA: You’ve spoken about the challenges of long retreats. How do you think intense suffering during meditation transforms into insight or clarity?** In the process of meditation and awakening purification is occurring. The natural outcome of practice is the arising of shadow material or stored trauma within the physiology and psyche. Intense suffering can be the emergence of trapped energies in the body or the burning out of habitual tendencies known as samskaras which have accumulated over lifetimes. Often intense emotions and dark nights which emerge from sustained meditative practice are calls for integration and healing that will result in a more thorough thinning of the identity and aspects of oneself that lead to grasping. The more negative habitual tendencies a person has, which is a response to past trauma, the more difficult it is for a person to let go or see through false identification. Trauma keeps intact the me that does not wander to surrender, vanish or be dispelled in the dawn of awakening. **PAA: Can you elaborate on the role of effort versus surrender in meditation? At what point does striving become counterproductive?** It really depends on the practice one is doing. Certain methods require effort. Every approach has it’s pros and cons and while generally I disagree with the use of forceful effort in meditation because of potential unintended consequences, it certainly has it’s place in the practitioners toolbox and is integral to a variety of approaches. Generally some degree of effort is required for the stabilization of attention and continuity of mindfulness to arise in the midstream of the meditator. After this point, in my opinion, effort is counterintuitive and is the result of striving and attempting to get somewhere in the practice. With any approach in meditation I’d say it’s best to know what the goal is, but to remain always in the present moment. Whatever goal the meditator is attempting to achieve is something he or she has heard of and is thereby conceiving in the mind. On surrender, there are 2 forms— the first type of surrender is a volitional action. Letting go is something you intend to do. So this form of letting go is still a doing. The second form of surrender is the state of being surrendered, which is non-volitional and superior.  **PAA: How has your understanding of mindfulness evolved over the years? Is it more about concentration or openness for you?** Mindfulness is a mental action. It is something one is doing. Mindfulness is the gate of practice. Its benefit is known and received immediately every time mindfulness is applied. I’d say over the years what changed is the amount of effort involved and the subtle identity patterns, which are tied to mindfulness or the concept of being mindful. Often practitioners, even advanced ones feel that because they are not mindful all the time, they cannot possibly be awakened. Mindfulness is a path dharma not a fruition dharma. The mundane mindfulness of a beginning practitioner is not comparable to the mindfulness of a Buddha. Mindfulness also has several dimensions, which I find are neglected in modern discourse, mainly due to the mindfulness movement. For example, the teaching that mindfulness is a guard against unwholesome states is almost never mentioned. In general, mindfulness is seen as a total acceptance of whatever is arising. However in the early discourses it’s clear mindfulness has the function of guarding against unwholesome thoughts or states and remembering the object of meditation. Concentration, as I currently experience it, only refers to unification of mind— absorption with a meditative object or the continuity of awareness. It is rarely if ever forced.     **PAA: In your experience, how do body-based practices (like observing sensations) intersect with more abstract realizations about self and reality?** I never did enough Vipassana, either Goenka style or Mahasi style to be able to answer this experientially. It’s definitely clear that by observing body sensations you break through identification with the form aggregate and thereby cease taking the body, sensations and feeling to be self. It’s also possible to open or access specific states of samadhi through working with the various charkas, but I’m not sure how reliable body scanning is when it comes to realizing non-duality or progressing further into the realization of emptiness and non-arisen (anutpada). In the Mahasi system, noting sensations is used to initiate the 16 stages of insight which culminate in cessation, which is equated with Nibbana in many Theravadin circles, but I’m not sure how this is specifically approached in the Goenka systems.  **PAA: What advice would you give to someone who feels "stuck" in their meditation practice, unable to progress or experience deeper states?** There’s no such thing as actually being stuck. Being stuck is two things— the thought “I am stuck” accompanied with feelings of discouragement or confusion. Reality never gets stuck. How could reality get stuck? If you identify with your thinking and still have a goal before you which you have not met or accomplished, you will feel stuck.  Whatever goal you could attain is not apart from your mind.  Whatever goal you have attained was not apart from your mind.  Whatever goal you will attain will not be apart from your mind.  Being stuck is just as unreal as the notion of progression.  Neither exist.  ## Awakening **PAA: You’ve described awakening as a cessation of identity and duality. Do you think this shift is accessible to everyone, or does it require specific conditions or karmic readiness?** Everyone and everything is already awake and primordially free. Being ignorant of this we wander through samsara. All beings in truth are buddha. In my opinion, no special karma or specific conditions are required although both of these can be beneficial. I have some students who have been on the path for 2 or 3 decades, but say they have not had an awakening. I doubt this would remain the case if they lived with me or with any teacher for an entire year, meditating a few hours a day free from distractions. It is solely the thicket of thought, feeling, identification and busyness which obscures illumination.  **PAA: How do you differentiate between temporary glimpses (like the one you had after your first retreat) and a more stable realization of awakening?** An awakening is an event. A realization is an understanding. Both occur in time. What occurs is a realization to that which is not bound to time. The display of time & space is “happening” within the matrix of this spaceless and timeless present. This present has many names— Buddha-nature, Mahamudra, Dzogchen, Atman, Nature of Mind, Zen, Perfection of Wisdom, Reality, God… the names are endless. Before the moment of awakening, reality is obscured by misunderstanding and the absence of recognition. In the moment of awakening, this recognition occurs and realization arises.  Awakenings which arise and pass are still at the level of experience. When insight is sufficiently mature, realization dawns and the nature of experience is revealed. Reality is every experience, but it is not limited to any specific experience. Mindfulness and all the various enlightenment factors are subject to increasing and decreasing, but reality is neither coming nor going. The mind is unborn and cannot be found. When the mind is realized to be no-mind and reality is realized to be no-reality, samsara collapses and one is released from the illusions of personhood and time. Mind and reality are two words for the same thing.  **PAA: What role does disillusionment with life’s "dream" play in catalyzing awakening? Is it a necessary precursor?** I believe that is the case most of the time. Unless one is suffering there is no reason to seek awakening.  **PAA: Awakening often disrupts relationships and social dynamics. How have you personally navigated these changes in your own life?** I didn’t. My life fell apart many times. I lost everything and had to surrender things and people I loved. Awakening and meditation is easy compared to the choices you may be faced with. It is easy to sit still and release thought. It is not easy to change and correct our behavior and habitual tendencies. It is easy to go on retreats if you have the time and money. It is hard to restrain yourself, change yourself and to make the necessary sacrifices you’re called to make when you are called to make them.  Spirituality is not about having an ideal or best life. Spirituality is about seeing through the notion of life— realizing deathlessness and overturning habitual tendencies which perpetuate the wheel of samsara. Spirituality can be many things, actually it can be anything. Enlightenment is really just a matter of definitions as one teacher Peter Brown put it. The spirituality that I’d say really counts, is the spirituality which liberates oneself from oneself. It is the awakening which leads to the overcoming of the world through the realization that in truth there are no worlds and no beings. To be a disciple much is required. Spirituality is easy when it costs you nothing. Spirituality is the hardest thing when it costs you everything. Ultimately, this whole business of spirituality is about freedom. What is freedom really worth when it’s free?  **PAA: Do you think there are stages or levels to awakening? If so, how would you describe them?** There are stages of awakening yet all stages are one’s mind. The deepening of awakening occurs in time, however all process and change are occurring within the spaceless and timeless matrix of the here. The stages of awakening correspond to the falling away of afflictions, tendencies and ‘wrong views.’ Whatever happens occurs in mind, in reality and from this knowledge there are neither stages nor occurrences. The notion of ‘deepening awakening’ is referring to the arising or falling away of certain characteristics, all occurring within time.  Bliss, communion, rapture, and non-dual union are subject to increasing and decreasing. For reality— Mahamudra, Atman, Emptiness there is no increasing or decreasing. This must be clear otherwise the yogi remains bound to a process, when in truth there are no processes nor are there persons undergoing them. There are stages in the relative sense, but which stages are superior or higher is indeterminable.  What is determinable, without a doubt is that every stage and state is emptiness, which is just another word for here, your mind, Atman etc.   ## Out-of-Body Experiences **PAA: Have you encountered out-of-body experiences in your practice? If so, how did they impact your understanding of consciousness and selfhood?** I’ve had give or take a couple hundred out of body experiences since age 16, which is when I began developing that ability. Out of body experience revealed many things, primarily that consciousness is a spectrum and is not localized in either space or time. You exist in many places and on many levels. When you wake up in the morning, the totality of oneself localizes perception to your physical body here in space-time. When your body sleeps you awaken as infinity and the various levels of existence. Upon awakening in the morning again certain sections on this spectrum of consciousness are remembered. We call these dreams.   **PAA: Some traditions view out-of-body experiences as distractions from deeper realizations like non-duality. What’s your perspective on their value or relevance?** Out of body experiences can be as much of a distraction as any special meditative state like the jhanas or other samadhis. It’s not the state or experience itself that is the problem, but is ultimately about the craving and clinging within the practitioner, which of course can be directed at anything. The value of out of body experience is that eventually you will wonder what is guiding your nightly journeys. You will find that something is organizing synchronicity. If you seek that principle you will find what you are outside of time and outside the process of reincarnation. Some call this the Logos, the Holy Guardian Angel, the Guru principle or in modern discourse, the Higher Self.  **PAA: Do you see any connection between out-of-body experiences and the dissolution of egoic boundaries that occurs during awakening?** For most people I do not. In my case there was a connection because the out of body experience in sleep and non-dual unfolding in the waking state complemented each other. Higher levels of out of body experience can confer deep samadhi states such as cosmic consciousness or unity consciousness. In earth plane level out of body experience however things are quite mundane. You may meet strange or unusual beings, but this is very different from what occurs in deeper or higher levels of the out of body experience.  The limitation of OBE is that it does not seem to result in a permanent shift to non-duality or deeper realization like emptiness. These experiences can be part of the unfolding and tapestry of events and insights which lead to it, but rarely will a single or even many OBEs result in a permanent non-dual realization or falling away of self. Since OBEs are experiences it is rare that they result in insight into the nature of experience which is necessary for realization. In this regard they are similar to psychedelic states, which can be extremely profound but don't result in a permanent or abiding realization.  ## Theravāda Buddhism **PAA: Having roots in Theravāda Buddhism, how do you reconcile its traditional teachings with modern interpretations of awakening and non-duality?** I can't reconcile them. I don’t know if we’re even talking about the same thing. There is no way to verify if the jhanas or insight traditions as we practice them today are indeed the ones the Buddha taught. They might be but we don’t know for sure so I think it’s best to approach these matters with open-mindedness. I have no idea if the cessation of perception and feeling I’m talking about and describing is the same one that Buddha taught and spoke of. Some modern interpretations have revised the 4 path and 10 fetter models. I think just because we as modern practitioners have failed to eradicate craving and desire does not mean the Buddha's words were metaphorical. I don’t claim to be enlightened or to be a Buddha so don’t take my word for it, but the Buddha seemed clear that when he meant destruction of conceit, lust and anger, he meant it in the absolute sense.  Many teachers, myself included, still have worries and vexations. I'm of the opinion that a truly and fully liberated being does not. I could be wrong of course, but we shouldn’t lower the bar to make Buddhism more compatible with our lives. Trying to make Buddhism what we need it to be is just a subtle form of egocentrism. We can take Buddhism on its own terms and accept it for what it is. Buddhism, Theravada in particular, is a monastic and ascetic tradition. It has nothing to do with mindful sex or finding a fulfilling vocation. It has nothing to do with finding your place in the world. You need other teachings to address such things.  **PAA: Theravāda emphasizes practices like Vipassana and mindfulness of breathing. Do you see these as sufficient for awakening, or do they need to be complemented by other methods?** It depends how we’re defining awakening. If we’re referring to awakening according to the Theravadin 4-path model then these methods are sufficient. Any method works if at some point mental activity and effort is abandoned.  **PAA: What role do the Jhanas (states of meditative absorption) play in your own practice and teaching? Are they essential for progress?** Let me provide some background information on this since the definition of Jhana isn’t as clear now as it used to be. Besides non-dual, I practice a specific form of Theravada meditation called Dhammakaya meditation which adheres to the standard of jhana set forth in the commentarial literature such as the Visuddhimagga. Currently, there are many forms of jhana due to the fact that in the last 5 years or so there has been greater popularity in jhanas as defined in the suttas versus jhanas as defined in the commentaries.  All current practicing traditions in regard to this make claims to presenting the authentic jhanas taught by the Buddha. I do not take any such claims as legitimate. That being said, there is a significant difference in the purification of mind available depending on the depth of absorption. The aim of both approaches is the cessation of perception and feeling (nirodha samapatti) and the falling away of the fetters. I have found that cessation is accessible without the depth of stillness required for the arising of the nimitta, which is a mental sign or object that draws one into the first jhana as defined in the commentarial literature. Jhanas are not necessary for non-dual awakening. Self-enquiry is sufficient.  ## Cessation of Perception and Feeling **PAA: Can you explain what cessation of perception and feeling means experientially? How does it differ from other meditative states like deep concentration or equanimity?** Cessation in my experience is of two types. The first is more commonly reported by meditators as a very, very quick break in the continuity of consciousness. The mind becomes so still that it vanishes for a split second and then reappears. Often this is followed by an immense sense of relief and is said to coincide with the falling away of the 5 lower fetters which confers the attainment of stream entry. Whether the falling away of the fetters part is actually true or not thus conferring stream entry is something I am skeptical about lol. In the second type of cessation, the same process occurs but the duration of the cessation is much, much longer— lasting several minutes or hours. It produces the effect of a gradual reconstruction of the experiential field.  This reconstruction phase, in my opinion, is a genuine and rare experience of reality prior to the arising of individuated consciousness, feeling and perception. It is entirely alien compared to ordinary perception. There— reality arises as dependent origination, the ‘building blocks’ you could say of individuated consciousness, feeling and perception. The effect of then emerging from this is indescribable. The purity of mind which follows seems sufficient for the attainment or partial attainment of the triple insight knowledge— knowledge of former existences, knowledge of the transmigration of beings and further knowledge of dependent origination thus destruction of the defilements. I have found none of the above possible through the very brief type of cessation. **PAA: In Theravāda teachings, cessation is often linked to Nibbāna (nirvana). Do you see cessation as a glimpse into ultimate reality or simply a profound state of rest?** A state of rest would mean that consciousness is present and thus resting. This is not the case in cessation which is an absence of consciousness. Cessation might be Nibbana. Many seem to believe this to be the case. I’m not sure. There isn’t consensus on what Nibbana is so it’s hard to say. Cessation opens a glimpse into what could be ultimate realities because it seems to be the transition phase between the individuated consciousness, feeling and perception and non-individuated reality free from both perception and feeling, which I call dependent origination. Reality at this point emerges as revelation and the nexus of defilements, ignorance and formations which generate the infinitude of individuated consciousnesses lost in samsara is 'seen and known.'  **PAA: How can practitioners approach cessation without turning it into another goal to chase, given its subtlety and rarity?** On one hand having it as a goal will give you the motivation to actually do the sufficient amount of sitting for it to arise. On the other it’s that very grasping which must be released in order for the mind to vanish. It’s hard to say because I’m not sure if my experiences are attributed to cessation, the practice I was doing or if they’re specific to me for unknown reasons. I’ve met other practitioners that have mentioned a similar process, but in their case it occurred on 5-meo DMT. I think it’s a worthwhile goal not because the vanishing and reappearance of consciousness in of itself is special, but because of what can occur after the fact. While it seems cessation doesn’t guarantee non-dual realization, I’ve met students and practitioners for whom this did occur as a result.  ## Past Life Recall **PAA: Have past life memories surfaced for you during meditation? If so, how did they affect your understanding of karma or continuity of consciousness?** I have a completely different view on it which in current form is not compatible with Theravada Buddhism. Recollection of past lives for me did not occur as mental pictures or images. The mind appeared as a room of screens and from these screens I would appear in a given mind and body of another life like a ghost in a machine. I could hear and know the person's thoughts, feelings and intentions. It was as real as waking life. From that room, or level of consciousness, it appeared that a larger consciousness system was playing or engaging in thousands upon thousands of incarnations simultaneously.  The notion of linear time— past, present and future applies to the consciousness units or selves within space-time, but not to the levels of consciousness outside of it. Events within a given life reached and touched other lives elsewhere in time. It was not only linear but was quantum and entangled. It was revealed that the triple knowledge is not necessarily a one and done attainment, though for the Buddha it appears this was the case. The teachings also say however that he spent 7 weeks in meditation after his awakening. I doubt it was just to experience the bliss of the jhanas and am more inclined to believe he was exploring the mysteries of existence.  **PAA: Do you think past life recall is a byproduct of deep meditation, or does it serve a functional purpose in spiritual development?** It serves the purpose of generating dispassion which releases one from craving. When you see that everything you’ve tried, everything you’ve wanted to become, everything you’ve sought and everything you’ve attained is something you have done tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times before, dispassion results. You either turn from Samsara as a result of this knowledge or you vow to become a Bodhisattva.  **PAA: In Theravāda Buddhism, rebirth is a central concept. How do your personal experiences align with or challenge traditional views on this topic?** Definitely there is rebirth. However Theravada Buddhism disavows the notion of soul as a refutation to the hindu doctrine of reincarnation. I have found indeed there is a soul or higher self. It’s just neither a singular thing nor is it a permanent, unchanging or immutable essence. There is a consciousness which is dreaming our waking life and a consciousness which is dreaming that consciousness. How far back it goes I really don’t know. I can only say what I’ve experienced and what I’ve remembered.  ## Non-Duality PAA: Non-duality often emphasizes the absence of separation between self and other. How do you guide students who struggle to grasp this experientially? Abandon self and ‘other’ vanishes. Abandon other and you find there’s only ‘Self.’ It has always been the same room of experience whether we call it Self or No-Self. Every ‘moment’ of every life was always reality.  In describing the Bardo in the ‘American Book of the Dead’ author EJ Gold wrote “I’m either just a human primate who has become a little confused and lost and has somehow found themselves in an eternal condition or one of the 3 original Gods (Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu) that has awakened from an unusually abrupt nap…  I surrender to the knowledge that It will go on again and again over and over and yet since there is only one Creation in one moment, it will all be the same. With a feeling of blissful ecstasy I resign myself to no-change. No one will ever come along from ‘outside’ to bail me out or help me escape from here, there is no ‘outside.’ For ever and ever it will always be my trip.” You are the universe sleeping. By your contact with the masters of consciousness your sleep is ending. Don’t worry about self and other. Don’t try to enter non-duality. Your field of experience is already non-dual. ‘Here’ is emptiness. Now is emptiness. Your body is emptiness. Your mind is emptiness. All things are illumination and even your problems are awake. There’s nothing to grasp but this. Now or at some point in time you will find you were never born and thereby the subjects of awakening and nirvana will be incinerated. You’ll find your heart was always the Buddha.  ## Integration After Awakening **PAA: After awakening, how do you integrate profound insights into ordinary life without losing touch with them amidst daily distractions?** There is one liberating insight— birthlessness. There is no life. No here. No there. No Samsara. No Nirvana— this realization is in fact Nirvana. There are no distractions. Whatever appears is actually your Self. There is nothing to integrate. The merging of heaven and earth is only the pouring of water into water. There is nothing to do outside the things you think you must do and although you must choose, whatever it is you become you decided upon before this life. What appears is Buddha and in truth nothing ever happened. This is freedom. Any other insight is relative.  If you are sick, take medicine. If you are broke, try to make some more money. If you are sad, find a way through and to the best of your capacity restrain yourself from harming others. All this can be done outside the context of awakening so awakening altogether is a different animal. There is no lasting freedom in what happens. Freedom is freedom from happenings. Seeing in truth there are no events and there is no progress.  Without this you will always be in time.  ## General Reflections **PAA: Looking back on your journey so far—from childhood exposure to Buddhism to where you are now—what would you say was the most pivotal moment in shaping your spiritual path?** When I was 19 years old I watched my father take his final breath. I realized in that moment life was not like the movies. That first noble truth of suffering left my heart nothing but a wasteland. For years I wandered in the desert of my life, trying to find myself and trying to realize spiritual enlightenment. I spent half my life on this journey of nearly 20 years. Often we seek enlightenment because we want our suffering to go away or because we believe deep within us somehow we can save and change the world and maybe we even can. My father said to me once “Son there are only two types of people in the world— people who serve themselves and people who serve others.”   Appearing in the minds of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas whose vows sustain the awakenings of all beings in countless worlds, I have surfed the fabric of Deity and still after all this time I’m neither as compassionate nor as patient as my father was. I try to live up to that teaching he gave me all those years ago but often even now I fail to. He told me that whatever it is I wanted in life, it was up to me to take it. Whatever I have done, I was only able to do so because of my Thai mother who brought me to Buddhism and my American father who told me to find my own answers to life’s questions. I can’t say I know much more than when I began. I’m not any more certain, but without a doubt I found what I sought and realized the things I wished for so many years to realize.  **PAA: Thank you Ryan for your time in answering these questions. Greatl;y appreciated. ** --- --- # Unlocking Inner Transformation: How Devaraj’s Bioenergetics and Cube of Space Transform Personal Growth Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/unlocking-inner-transformation-how-devarajs-bioenergetics-and-cube-of-space-transform-personal-growth/ ## Introduction In this interview Devaraj Sandberg answers my questions abou this path, practice and teachings. He is the author of multiple courses, workshops, and books with his latest being *Opening the Body with the Cube of Space*. This is a great interview for those who like to work with the body, to realse the energies, emotions and traumas that are stored within. This of course connects deeply with the subconscious and takes a student on a wild ride. I hope you enjoy this interview and if you would like to learn more about Devaraj or follow his work you can find the details below: ##### Bioenergetics ##### Esoteric Writings ##### Substack ##### Devaraj YouTube Channel --- # Interview with Devaraj ## Section 1: Personal Journey, Early Influences **PAA: You have a diverse background in therapy and spiritual practice. You trained in an intensive four-year program at the Humaniversity in Holland and spent 17 years living at Osho Leela in Dorset, where you led countless workshops. What initially drew you to body-based therapy and communities like Osho? And how did those formative experiences shape the approach you use in your work today?** Well, what initially drew me to do therapy, basically, was just a sense in my late thirties that my life was pretty fucked up. But I’d kind of gravitated back to street level from squatting and being a dodgy character, living in London in all sorts of bad places and hanging out with not really great people. If I didn’t take some action, then my life wasn’t going to get any better. In fact, it was going to get a great deal worse. And I’d had some kind of spiritual Kundalini kind of experience when I was about 33 in Thailand, which I hadn’t recognised as such because I didn’t know anything about that stuff. But then about five years later, towards the end of my thirties, I started to get interested in meditation and therapy and things like that. That led me to start to seek out therapists in London. And I found a lot of it a bit mindy and stuff. And I thought I’m way too armoured and protected for that. I need something a bit more kind of meaty and strong. And slowly, I got a connection to the Osho people. That was such a strong connection. It wasn’t so much about Osho, who had already passed away by then, but more about that there was a lot of therapy around the Osho scene. And if you wanted to be part of the gang, you just had to do a ton of really intense therapy. And I was just in a place where I really wanted to make change quickly, so I jumped into that. After a few years and also at some point moving into an Osho community, I started to get feedback that I should become a therapist, which I hadn’t considered before. I was an electrician for a long time after I moved away from being a bit of a criminal. So I started, I thought, therapist, okay, it’s better than groveling about in the dirt, even though it’s quite well paid, putting wires in buildings and stuff like that. And initially, I was very much in this very gung-ho man of what I’d learned from various therapy trainings I’d been on. But I quickly felt that that wasn’t really my way and feedbacks I got from participants. And I began to develop a much more kind of awareness-based approach, where you really take time to be with people, well, I’m not quite explaining it right, but where you really don’t come from a place of prejudging how the person will be as much as you possibly can. That was my kind of insight. I think possibly it was something that I may have missed at times in my own therapeutic journey. So, and I was initially running a lot of workshops to do with anger, with a lot of screaming and shouting, and a very intense therapeutic approach. Also running programs at Osho Leela and stuff like that for people who lived there, you know, in-house programs, and slowly over a decade or so, it kind of crystallized into very much based around bio-energetics, consent, you know, bringing people on board, really not having prejudgments about people as much as I possibly could. And also training people, younger people, to leave this work. So, that’s how I would answer that question. [![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/71NcKlu5e1L._SL1499_-683x1024.jpg)](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Opening-Body-Cube-Space-Bioenergetics/dp/B0DK8HG697#:~:text=A%20twenty-first%20century%20guide%20to%20Spiritual%20Alchemy%20and,Space%20can%20be%20used%20to%20create%20personal%20illumination.) **PAA: Opening the body with the cube of space has roots in an insight you had while studying Kabbalah. You’ve described how during a Builders of the Adytum initiation in London, you noticed two book-like shapes in the cube of space visualization. And later wrote a brief article about this discovery. Can you share that story? How did this early esoteric insight spark the idea of integrating the cube of space with your bio-energetic body work practice?** Well, this kind of goes back to the same kind of period of my life, right at the end of the 90s, early noughties. Well, I’d had some kind of slight mystical experience, but hadn’t really noticed it as such in Thailand. And then years later, I don’t know, I got at some point quite a strong, I was also working with a drug called Ibogaine. I’ve got quite into that stuff. I ran a website on Ibogaine for a long time. I had a kind of close relative who had drug problems and, you know, had my own issues as well, but he had quite severe ones. And I was helping him with giving him Ibogaine and stuff like that. I got super into Ibogaine. And it also seems to, I don’t know, some of the times when I was around the drug or giving it to people or taking it myself, it just seemed like I was tuning into some other kind of weird level of something deep inside. And the tarot keys in particular became kind of strong for me. Somehow I got a connection with this group Builders of the Adytum who, who at that time were kind of active in London. They, their origins were like back in the 1920s in America. In LA, I think. And they, as well as doing like a correspondence course and meetups, you know, where we’d kind of do some meditation and then go for a pint or a pizza, very nice, nice people. You know, we, there was also this thing called Pronaos where it was like ritual work. And then, and I thought that was, they invited me to join that one time. And whilst I was waiting upstairs to kind of be called down for the initiation, I just, I don’t know, I just have this, this strong insight in forming in my mind of how the cube of space, which I’ve been working with, could be resolved into these two book-like shapes, you know, by considering, I mean, you need to understand this stuff a little bit, but the angle needs to be familiar with it rather, you know, the anger, the first sort of direction of flow along each side given of 12 sides of the cube, given by, given by the astrological relationship to the tarot keys, blah, blah. And then this kind of, this insight, you know, I mean, I wrote it up, no one was particularly excited about it. I think it’s fair to say, but I, I kept it in mind somewhere. And then I got totally into therapy because I just needed that was much more intense for me than esoteric work, but I retained respect for the, the about kabbalistic stuff. And then many years later around, I guess, 2022, I was actually trying to move, I’d been on the road as a digital nomad and I was trying, I’d left the community, split up with my girlfriend of a time and I was on the road and I was kind of living in Georgia in next to Turkey. And then I decided I wanted to check out a few other places. I went to Beirut and Beirut, there was just like nothing to do socially because the country’s just, I love Beirut. I love Lebanon, but it’s a fucking mess, you know, everyone knows. So I ended up spending a lot of time on my own. I ended up one time just going to some meditation group where I had to go through like a massive military checkpoint, people pointing guns at me and shit just to get to this, this one hour meditation. But something in that kind of, I started, it started to trigger this, this, I started to see, I started doing meditation 45 minutes a night because I just didn’t have anything else to do. Usually I’m quite social. And somewhere in that, and then going back to Georgia for a little bit, I started to see like these kind of just old kabbalistic images from the tree or the tarot keys or whatever coming back into my brain and me getting interested in them. And somewhere it gelled into this book a couple of years later where, you know, this concept of opening the body with the cube of space, this cube of space glyph that you can build up around you, can apply, you know, not just as like some kind of mystical, creating some kind of mystical macabre vehicle, but can also apply to like more normal therapeutic pursuits where you’re just unlocking trapped libidinal energy within your system. So that book was like, it’s not the first time anyone’s drawn like this kind of bodywork, bioenergetic stuff with Kabbalah or mysticism. But you know, that was my own my own delving into that. **PAA: Before delving into the cube of space you were known for bioenergetic workshops addressing issues like depression, anxiety, anger, and sexuality. What have you learned about the connection between these emotional issues and the body? Could you give an example of how working through the body, perhaps a specific exercise or breathing technique helped someone break through an emotional block that talk therapy alone couldn’t resolve?** Well, yes, an image I often give is like a three-trunk diagram with three kind of circles, you know, like an outer circle, one in a middle and an inner circle. And the outer circle is like the thinking mind. And then the middle circle is like intense emotionality. And then the inner kind of represents who you are when you’ve integrated that in a vast cauldron of inner emotionality. Something I realized from my own life and being in therapy groups and being in very intense therapy groups with a lot of screaming and shouting and not sleeping and super triggering structures was that everybody is sitting on a ton of feelings. Now everybody, and we’re all in certain degrees of kind of denial or forming our own relationship with this reality. And how that manifests in this three-trunk diagram is like a hardened layer between thinking and feeling. And for many people, you know, if they just keep thinking and thinking and doing and doing, you know, they can keep all the feelings down and they have this sense of being kind of socially functional, but it doesn’t really feel very good to be alive. You know, it’s not exciting. You don’t have large amounts of energy flowing through your system. So a lot of techniques, you know, like a breathing technique is what you’re talking about. Say that you do some rebirthing or you do maybe this belly breathing workout that I developed a while ago. And what it kind of does is allow you to break through into this hardened off layer of deep emotionality. You know, feelings come, you might feel rage, you might feel, you know, intense emotional pain, you know, crying. These are the two real poles of repressed emotionality, which are rage on one side anger, basically, and deep emotional pain on the other, you know, crying. And then if you start to clear those, like they integrate into your system, and this is a long journey, this doesn’t happen easily, you know, it’s a long journey. And if you start to clear those, then you just start to experience more love on the inside. You don’t need so much to kind of cling on to other people or use this kind of always being on the hamster wheel of doing and thinking and doing and thinking. So you might do like a deep breathing technique, like a rebirthing technique where you’re simply over ventilating your body from how you normally breathe, you lie down, you know, maybe with your knees up or not. And you start to breathe more deeply, you know, filling your chest and your belly, fully breathing in as much as you can, breathing out as much as you can. And you focus on your breathing for 20 minutes. You know, I’ve got guided, free guided things on YouTube where you can do this. And if you focus on it for 20 minutes, it’s like, it starts to do it by itself. And people start to break through this layer. And you don’t know what it’s going to look like, you know, but that’s that’s a way of breaking through an emotional block, you know, other ways can include just really trying in a certain, you know, in a fixed situation to be angry, you know, of other people screaming and shouting, you try to be angry, do like, Osho dynamic meditation, or Humaniversity meditation, something like that. There are ways you can break through. But the breaking through on its own, you know, is useful, you’ve made a breakthrough. But that that that’s just the first step. Really, it’s just the first step. **PAA: The cube of space is a little-known kabbalistic glyph. And building a somatic therapy around it is quite unconventional. When you first started introducing esoteric concepts like tarot and kabbalah into your therapy work, did you encounter skepticism from either the spiritual or psychological communities? How did you navigate those early reactions? And what convinced you that this blending of seemingly disparate disciplines was the right path to helping people?** To be quite honest, these days, I do my own thing, you know, so, you know, that if I feel like, wow, I just really want to explore this, I’m going to explore it. And I don’t like shove it down people’s throat. I just kind of like, I’m exploring this. If you want to come and explore it with me, come and check this out, check this article, check this course, check this book, whatever, you know. But yeah, I mean, they are a bit different. Other people have done this in the past. In fact, like one of the more famous kabbalists, Israel Regardie, who was like a, sorry, an assistant to Aleister Crowley, and, you know, famous in the kabbalah scene. And that wrote many, many books. He was also, he was like a chiropractor or someone who got, who knew Reiki and therapy back in the back in the days. And that was his main job. But you know, but he did the esoteric stuff was his writing stuff. And that was his kind of night job, opposed to his day job, I think, as I understand it. So it’s a bit unconventional, but you know, there’s kind of a crossover. There’s been a few other people around Chris Hyatt and that kind of thing who crossed over with these two things. And it’s like, you’re kind of doing whatever just to get a bit deeper into yourself. You know, when I started doing therapy, I was like, I consider myself the bottom of the pack, you know, the bottom of the heap, low self esteem, super blocked masses of trauma from early life, you know. And as far as I can turn anything that could help was good. The problem with putting mysticism in is that it can drag you off and then some people get into developing like a spiritual ego and trying to become a spiritual person. And then they get lost, you know, but hopefully with some therapy in there as well, you know, that keeps you more grounded and socially real. Hopefully this answers your question. ## Section 2: Philosophy and Vision **PAA: Bioenergetics is a radical body-based therapy that creates deep levels of psychological change without your mind needing to get involved according to your book description. In a world used to talk therapy and mindfulness, why do you emphasize getting the analytical mind out of the way during healing? How does bypassing the mind help someone access deeper change? And what do you say to those who worry that intense physical emotional release might be overwhelming?** Well, if you’re very worried about doing this, I would just say, don’t do it. Basically, you know, I don’t believe in ramming these things down people’s throats. You know, I think this thing with consent is very important. And you know, you feel like you’re ready to give something a try. A lot of people come to me, they’ve done quite a lot of talk therapy. And I’m really not against talk therapy. There’s nothing wrong with it. I think it’s great. I happily, you know, feel the need to share what’s going on in my life regularly and have, you know, I don’t have to pay a therapist, but I have a lot of friends from when I was in therapy, you know, and we share about what’s happening on a deep level in our lives. So, I really don’t have a problem with talk therapy. And likewise mindfulness, you know, which essentially is just really paying attention to what’s going on. You know, so, but what I’m offering is what I offer is something a little bit different where you don’t necessarily need your mind because your mind, you know, in traditional psychotherapy, you know, you might sit down and it’s like, okay, tell me about your relationship with your mother when you were two. And this happened. And how do you think this has affected you and your dad and whatever. And that’s all okay. But basically, you’ve got your mind, your thinking mind as an intermediary between the kind of repressed emotions in the body and repressed energy in the body. And it’s an intermediary with the therapist, you know, and with this kind of stuff like bioenergetics, you can get rid of a middleman, basically, you can get rid of a middleman. If you want to, you know, you can get up and just do some exercises, keep your breathing going and start to work like this. You can do that. For some people, it really works. Some of those people are people who are scared of going to normal therapy and are scared of talking about what’s going on. You know, and hopefully if they do some of this work and it works, they become less scared. Because I think the talking part can be useful. For other people, it’s too much. You know, it’s a bit too much. It’s not, it’s not what they need, you know, not at this type point of their journey and the talk therapy or whatever they’re doing is more appropriate for them. So, you know, it’s just like an option. And it’s an option more people are coming to, I think with the rise of neurology and neuroscience, you know, and psychology kind of being in a bit of a crisis, it’s clear that the promise of psychology is more limited than what we kind of hoped. The other great thing with bio is often it’s good for younger people in their 20s. You know, often about age, you don’t want to spend long periods of time introspecting about how your mum was when you were like, you know, now that you’re 21, you’ve just escaped from your parents, you don’t want to go back into that stuff. And something like bio can really help. So that’s what I would, that’s what I would say. **PAA: Your bio describes you as having a radical perspective on psychology and authenticity. What does authenticity mean to you in the context of personal growth and therapy? In your experience, how do body-based practices help people peel away social conditioning or masks to discover a more authentic self? Can you share any core principles that make your perspective on psychology radical compared to mainstream approaches?** The bottom line with my approach is the more you can feel your body, the more authentic and grounded you will be. Because what happens when trauma comes in or the nervous system comes in and shuts off feeling, you know, and shuts down breathing. And you know, the muscles around your throat lock up, you know, maybe, maybe your diaphragm locks up and becomes hardened over time. You know, what happens in that experience is that emotions and feelings are trapped away and that your sense of a body comes down is reduced. So from maybe the point when you were born, if you could measure it, you know, you have this very powerful wave-like experience of just your body, you know, this huge energetic wave inside, a few years down the line and that’s vastly reduced. And so all we’re really trying to do is expand that. Because your sensation of a body is you alone. It’s not anybody else’s, you know, you could maybe make a story about it so someone else could relate to it. But your experience of your body, the sensation of it, just for pure sensation without description is hugely important in this kind of therapy. And particularly stuff like feeling your back, your lower back, feeling your heart, feeling your belly, you know, these somatic centers or areas of the body often shut down, shut down by our nervous system in early childhood and as a mechanism to protect us. And unless we take action or some kind of crisis happens, opens those things up, you know, slowly life becomes a bit kind of ever diminishing circles. **PAA: You’ve stated that your mission is to maintain, develop, and reinterpret the traditions of body-based therapy in the 21st century. Which traditional teachings, for example, Wilhelm Reich’s orgone work or Osho’s dynamic meditation, do you feel are most important to carry forward? And in what ways are you reinterpreting or updating these body-centered therapies for the needs of today’s practitioners?** Well, I think Reich’s work is very important. It was also controversial. You know, he was the first guy to bring like the body into psychology. You know, he was a student of Freud. He was one of a kind of hot shot, high-flying students back in the 20s and then they kind of started fighting a little bit about Freud’s death drive, Thanatos and all of that. And he got kind of marginalised and the war came along, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I’m not a huge proponent of Reich’s orgone work. You know, I don’t know much about it. I think it’s a good working theory. I don’t have a problem with it in a way that many scientists or physicists might. Osho dynamic meditation, you know, he just took some kind of Reichian things. You know, you didn’t talk about Reich very much as far as I know Osho, despite talking a great deal. But he certainly used quite a lot of Reichian, Reich’s principles, I think in his meditations, particularly, you know, in dynamic with these different stages where you’re really kind of like doing some kind of blacksmith work on your own body or energy system. I think, you know, what’s important is when you look at Reich, if you try to read any of Reich’s books, good luck with that one. You know, I mean, if you’re a super psychiatrist, academic, fair enough, but they are dense. You know, I mean, they’re written in German and then you have to get, assuming you don’t speak German, you get a translation, I struggle to read Reich’s work. I even struggle to read Lowen and I’m not a great reader, to be honest. So for me, it’s like bringing, you know, there’s a lot of really useful stuff, particularly in Reich’s character structure, but it’s super dense. You know, it just needs to be brought up onto street level 2020s kind of talk. So my mission is to do that. That’s one of the things I really do. You know, what it serves these complex abstract descriptions of the schizoid or the masochist or whatever, it’s like, no, these guys are doing this, you know, that’s leaving pattern. We call it now, their nervous system is calibrated. When any kind of trigger comes in from the outside, it takes their awareness up into the mind and we don’t call it masochist anymore. They’re endurers now, you know, age two, their dad shouted at them or something and they just shut down hard, you know, and now they’re just staggering through life and grumbling and complaining all the time, you know, but they’re sitting on all this energy because they’re en- the nervous system shut them down. So I just take a lot of these old concepts, you know, which I imagine like some 23 year old trying to understand this stuff and they look at it and they’re like, God, who can read this stuff, you know, so I just try and make it accessible to today’s world in terms of the language. **PAA: Many spiritual paths focus on transcending the body. Yet your work insists on opening the body as a route to growth. You even suggest that doing so removes energetic blocks, allowing greater energy to flow and can improve the flow of intuitive insight from other dimensions. How do you conceptualize spiritual evolution or enlightenment from a bodily perspective? Have you found that embodied practices can achieve the deep insight and transformation that more ascetic or purely mental practices aim for, perhaps in a more grounded way?** Yes, I think the body is super important. I think there’s been a huge tendency in many spiritual schools to ignore the body completely and get very focused on the mind, you know, and if you look at a lot of traditional spiritual work, it’s about crystals and chakras and colors and dimensions and blah, blah, nothing wrong with that. But simply feeling your body more and more and more becomes at some point like an oceanic kind of thing. It’s like you’re connected to some vast ocean, it’s a spiritual experience, you know, and it allows some kind of insights to flow from God knows where, frankly, but that can be very, very useful in terms of your own personal development. So, you know, it’s not an ascetic pathway. I don’t believe in this kind of this pathway is wrong and you shouldn’t do that and this pathway is right and you should do that. I hate that stuff, to be quite honest. I think it’s really unnecessary. You know, the main thing for anyone who’s interested in this stuff or who considers them to be a seeker is to find what works for you, you know, that’s what you need. So for some people being super ascetic or Buddhist or whatever could be really, really useful, you know, for others, they just need to be in a ton of social situations, chasing after lovers or whatever, just to get a ton of feedback or deceive themselves in social situations, you know, there’s all sorts of ways that you can develop awareness. What I would also say in addition to, you know, expanding the sense of the body is develop self awareness. A lot of people get into meditation or spirituality because they want to be serene, they want serenity, they want peace, they want inner peace. That’s not a very good idea to get in. We all do that stuff, but it’s not a good idea, in my opinion, you know, it’s not a good motivation. A much better motivation is that you want to understand yourself, you want to know yourself. **PAA: You even hold a diploma in anger management. Your approach often encourages people to fully express emotions like anger rather than suppress them. How do you safely facilitate the release of intense emotions in a group setting? For example, when someone taps into buried rage or grief during a bioenergetic exercise, what guidance or safeguards do you provide? And what changes have you observed in clients after they’ve let out something big, do they report feeling relief, insight, maybe a new sense of freedom?** I mean, the thing with anger, I used to really, really focus on anger before I got more into just pure bioenergetics, you know, and then you’d work a lot. You know, people would be face to face like a meter apart, just shouting at each other and with a license to just project their negative emotions on the other person, you know. And this is quite a powerful release, but I mean, the thing I found is that, you know, time has changed and society has changed. And actually, it’s a bit much for a lot of people these days. It’s a bit much, you know, it’s kind of a shame. A lot of very deep therapeutic process workers kind of disappeared, particularly the more confrontational stuff over the last couple of decades, you know, and particularly since social media came out, which kind of prioritized stuff, which looks nicer on pictures, you know. But essentially, you know, when you say when someone taps into buried rage or grief during a bioenergetic exercise, there are some exercises which tend to bring up a bit more emotionality, you know, and when you work in a group that energy is more intense, because there’s a whole group of people doing it. And also because there are either overt or covert dynamics between the people, it’s just natural social beings. But I’ve never really had a big problem in the sense that I just keep a very close eye on people and create a space which I, you know, I work hard to create the space safe because generally, as long as people can say if something’s a bit much or if it’s too much for them right at this time, you know, I let them step out or just stay in the room and breathe and feel their body. If it’s something very, very extreme, usually in bioenergetics it’s not that extreme, generally bio, you know, when you get into it, it takes the lid off in a more gentle manner, in a more gentle manner. One of the things with working with anger is that for the average kind of person who’s interested in therapy, they will often have the belief that they have huge levels of buried anger and at some point, you know, it’s going to really, they’re just going to go crazy, you know. And this is a kind of standard fear that we have. We do have huge levels of extreme emotions but for most people who don’t have a significant psychiatric history like, you know, something like schizophrenia, bipolar, history of psychotic episodes, for example, they are generally okay to do things like bioenergetics because your ego naturally regulates how much stuff comes out, you know, it just does it. So generally bio, it’s going kind of slow and deep, you know, but at the same time, of course, especially if you’re working on your own, you know, there will be times when it’s super challenging where you can just feel like you’re much more angry than usual. I get people to reach out to me and, you know, the thing is, is to remember to feel your body because that’s within the sense of bodies where processing is happening at the deepest level. So keep feeling your body, keep feeling your body. Also, you know, if you’re really getting angry in situations at work or around your partner or whatever, you know, and you feel like you’ve kind of overstepped the mark, be happy to go back and explain and apologize and that kind of thing. As to what changes observed in clients, you know, I mean, generally, sometimes it’s bursts when stuff really moves, you know, often at the beginning, you know, something huge moves and the person gets massively into bio and they just feel like usually you’ll feel more open or more grounded. Pretty much every human on the planet wants to be more open or grounded, but they might not admit this to themselves. But my experience, when you just feel more present on the earth and when you feel like you can be more open around other people, life just becomes moment by moment, much more exciting. You know, it’s just who is this person, but I’m meeting instead of a lot of judgments and control. It’s just everyone somewhere wants to be more open and more grounded. The groundedness gives you the sense that you can put up boundaries if you need to, which means that you feel more safe to open to life, to open to people, basically. So, you know, that those it’s like not so much like some kind of war zone thing, I would say in my approach, working with this stuff, you know, I don’t, I know workshop leaders and I know techniques that will take you into your inner war zone, but I don’t find it always so useful, to be honest, I don’t find it so useful personally, not these days. **PAA: Somatic therapies like bioenergetics and Reichian work are still outside the mainstream. What do you wish more people understood about the value of body-based therapy? Are there any misconceptions or fears, e.g., isn’t this just screaming and yelling, or do I have to relive trauma, that you often encounter and how do you address them? In convincing skeptics, what evidence or experiences do you point to that highlight how working with the body can lead to genuine psychological and spiritual well-being?** I mean, I think what I would say is like, if someone’s really skeptical, I mean, just don’t come, you know, it’s okay, you know, I don’t feel like it’s my, when I was younger, I was like, you know, super bullish kind of apostolic about these kinds of therapies and just everyone should do them, you know, but I’m totally not like that now, you know, it’s like this stuff is there if you want to give it a try, you know, and that’s the way to know, you know, someone could be skeptical and say, well, how’s it going to help me to lean over and keep breathing deeply in that body position? And it’s like, so, you know, I could go on a long explanation about what might happen, but it would probably be a lot easier just for you to give it a try and just see later if you feel better, you know, and I think even, you know, skeptical people probably, you can be skeptical, but then you probably won’t come to therapy, there’s probably something that you know, you’re struggling with. And if you’re struggling with something, for some people, they realize, okay, maybe I have to, you know, I’m super skeptical about therapy, but I’m struggling with this, maybe the therapy will help, I’ll just give it a go. And if you paid to do a workshop, you know, it’s not much point sitting on the sidelines just being skeptical the whole time, you know, you have to just try and give you to go. So I don’t often come across skeptics, I’m sure there are skeptics. Isn’t this just screaming and yelling? I don’t even do much screaming and yelling in workshops. In longer workshops, it might be a little bit. So I don’t really do that stuff anymore. Occasionally it’s relevant to it’s just where the group’s at, you know, I just feel it’s it’s needed, you know, and it’s going to move some stuff, but mostly not. Do I have to relive trauma? It’s complex, you know, you have to be open to feel what’s there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to relive trauma with people who really just don’t want to feel, you know, that that attitude is not going to help. You have to be kind of open to what’s there, but you do. No one really knows what’s there. We have all these ideas about what’s hidden away in the cupboard, and it’s not our fault, you know, it’s like the nervous system has just buried it down and then it’s become armored into our system or, or, or, you know, it’s become a dead zone within our body. But, you know, the bottom line is you have to be kind of open to it and just keep feeling your body and then stuff will process. Basically, it’s not, it’s it doesn’t have to be a war zone, you know, it takes a while and you have to get into it, but it doesn’t have to be a massive war zone. ## Section 3: Modern Alchemy and Transformation **PAA: You describe opening the body with the cube of space as a 21st century guide to spiritual alchemy and achieving the philosopher’s stone, written in down-to-earth language in practical terms. What does spiritual alchemy mean to you for someone on a personal growth path today? What would achieving this philosopher’s stone look like? Is it a state of consciousness, a level of healing, or something else? And how do the practices you teach, the body work or cube visualization, help everyday people work through the alchemical process of inner transformation?** Okay, well, you know, I am a believer in the philosopher’s stone in the sense that, you know, when I was with the Builders of the Adytum back in the old days, you know, the the guy who wrote the course Paul Foster Case would talk about this and give rather veiled hints about what it was really about. But essentially, as I understand spiritual alchemy, there are two processes which kind of intertwine in the body. One is like the kind of classic Kundalini awakening process which may happen as a kind of explosion in your head or if you’re lucky, your heart, but it’s quite often something much more gentle, you know, that goes on with people where gradual change happens. And what’s believed is, you know, some kind of energy that we can’t necessarily measure moves from the base or the belly up a mate base of your spine or belly up the body in certain ways through certain channels that are there, you know, and it starts to clear out blocks, you know, and we get attracted to doing spiritual things or going to therapy and that kind of stuff. The other aspect is light that in many of the old alchemical textbooks, you know, it’s all veiled language because of an inquisition and just the way things were in those days. It’s a lot to do with light as in sunlight and how your body can process sunlight. Basically, that there is like a wave at sunlight instead of, you know, because we consume sunlight when we eat food, particularly food which grows above ground, you know, vegetables and stuff like that. We consume sunlight, but then it passes out of our body. But in some of these Kabbalah schools, you know, it’s quite secretive stuff, but they fundamentally believe that you can program the body to start to reprocess that light so that it moves into your bloodstream and starts to fill you with light. It literally starts to illuminate you. And that, I would say, is where this term Illuminati or illumination comes from, you know, this idea that you can illuminate your body. But this is undertaken by basically using symbol sets. You know, I talk about this a lot in this book, 22 symbols of tarot keys or, you know, various different symbols, Hebrew letters or the astrological signs combined with elements and combined with the planets. You know, and then these symbol sets, when you work with them constantly, like in this cube of space book, they’re like downloading a program. Like you would, if you wanted to put Uber on your phone or eBay, you know, you download it from the App Store and then you run the program and it runs and then you can buy stuff online or get a cab, you know. So essentially, the same thing is happening with these symbol sets. You download them by just working with them, looking at them, thinking about them, understanding their symbolic meaning and how they refer to stuff going on around you in your day-to-day life. That’s downloading them into your body, into your deep unconscious. And they start to run this program relating to Kundalini and relating to light, basically. That’s how I might sound a bit esoteric and out there. That’s how I see it. **PAA: In your 2024 article, you mentioned that working with the cube of space visualization will improve the flow of intuitive insight from other dimensions or guides as per your own experience. That’s a fascinating claim. Can you elaborate on it? Do you mean that by clearing bodily and energetic blockages, people become more receptive to intuition or spiritual guidance? Have you witnessed any striking examples of students gaining profound insights, visions, or guidance after engaging in these cube of space visualizations with body opening?** I mean, it’s based on my own experience, basically, that I’ve certainly had phases in my life. And times when I took certain things on, like doing a lot of group room work where I felt like I was really in touch with some kind of intuitive thing. You know, I’m walking around the group room with 20 people doing exercises and like that guy over there, just pushing a little bit harder, encourage him to stay really present. That guy over there, she’s fine, he’s fine. Just leaving alone. He looks like he needs something. You know, these little intuitive kind of not really words, but just intuitive guidance. It’s something you can’t really put your foot on. I don’t get it when I go down the shops or something and you know, don’t get a little voice saying, well, that shirt would look really good on you or something. But there definitely is something and putting yourself in a place where somewhere your activity is needed on a deeper level. You get some kind of support. This is kind of how it works. That’s how I see it. Now, in terms of students, I mean, I have only really sat back last year and I had a few people come to me with all sorts of insights and dreams and stuff like that. I can’t really just give any out. There weren’t any of what was like world shattering to me, but people had insights about what was going on, maybe in something in their childhood or something in their work or relationship life that they weren’t aware of. I think it definitely helps. It’s one of those things that you can’t really pin down. You’re free to be very skeptical about it. But maybe there’s something there that’s useful and maybe one day we understand this stuff a bit more. ## Section 4: Practical Integration and Audience **PAA: For someone entirely new to spiritual or somatic practices, what first steps do you recommend? Is there a simple daily exercise or embodiment practice from your teachings that a beginner could start with to get a taste of this work? Essentially, how do you help newcomers overcome any intimidation around words like Kabbalah or bioenergetics and just begin to experience the benefits of being more in their body?** I mean, I guess I don’t try to convince people. So most people that come to me, they kind of want to do this work. So I don’t sell, really. If someone books a call with me, a free call, and they want me to work with them, but I feel like it’s not appropriate, I’ll just find a considerate way to explain that and maybe suggest something they could do. I make enough money that I don’t need to kind of sell. So I’m kind of in that position, which is a bit luxurious, I guess, partly for being ancient, I suppose. But like, you know, what I say to people who really want to get into bioenergetics is like do the bow and arch daily for three months. Do it daily for three months if you can, you know, which means like put on a two-minute ding, bow two minutes, arch two minutes, go around three times, that’s 12 minutes, two minutes lying on the floor, eyes closed, feeling your body to complete 14 minutes, I think my math's is right. Do that every day for three months. And then you’ll know if bio is for you, because a lot of it’s, you know, you need a bit of discipline. There’s a lot of people out there, it’s partly to do with marketing and how capitalism is who just want some miracle quick fix, you know, and those guys usually end up spending a bit of money and probably not getting very far, but that’s, you know, just part of life in the 21st century as I see it. I like to think I don’t do that stuff. So I give people something like that an extremely boring exercise on the face of it to do every day for three months, but you will find out in that time if this kind of work is for you, it’ll be worth your investment in it’s only 14 minutes a day. And you may notice a lot of shift happening just from that, you know. So this whole kind of, you know, marketing thing where it all looks like this amazing thing that’s going to change everything, you know, when you’ve been in this scene 25 years, you know, just how much bullshit is out there. And I don’t consider it my job to, to demean other people, therapists or techniques, you know, for some people it may be absolutely what they need, but I offer what I what works for me. And I try to do it in a grounded way. Intimidation around words, kabbalah, intimidation, kabala. I mean, if you feel internal, don’t do it, I think. But if you intimidate, I don’t know if anyone’s intimidated by a bioenergetic so much, maybe, you know, I think, you know, like I say, you know, people come to my work wanting to do it, basically, they don’t come because I’m like, dude, you really need to do this stuff, you know. So, you know, I just, I just try to be really kind of clear with people. **PAA: People often have life changing experiences in a retreat or workshop, but then struggle to integrate those insights back into daily life. How do you suggest participants carry the openness and awareness they cultivated in a bioenergetic session, or a deep cube meditation into their daily routines? Do you encourage any particular daily rituals, journaling or body practices to help make the transformation stick? Perhaps you could share how you personally ground yourself or stay embodied amid the day-to-day demands of life.** I mean, personally, I will do bio every morning. I just, at some point, kind of train myself to do it. I’m a big fan though. I haven’t read it for a long time. That book, James Clear, Atomic Habits, I think that’s an awesome book, you know, it’s just like, if you want real change in your life, develop better habits and develop them rationally in a tangible way that you’re not just suddenly, I’m going to do two hours of this every day and you know you’re going to give up within a week, you know. Look what’s practical and develop better habits and after a while, you know, they just stick, you know, you just get into them. So, you know, I’ll wake up in the morning feeling like in a mess or whatever, all the ton of stuff going on or half asleep, you know, I do some bio, I breathe more deeply with it, have a cup of tea, a bit of meditation, you know, and I feel that openness and groundedness to kind of go into my daily life, basically, at least most of the time, you know. And so that’s how I do it and I recommend people, you know, if they’ve just come for like a three-day, five-day workshop, I usually give them some practices from the group written out that they already know they can do, you know, just to keep that kind of, keep things churning along. Because when you work with a body, it does take a while, it does take a, take a while and it’s, and it’s like it’s, you know, your body is still processing when you leave a workshop, you know, so you want to keep that moving. **PAA: You’ve expanded your reach globally through online content, your work has even been featured in mainstream media and you run a popular YouTube channel with heaps of videos on bioenergetics and Reichian techniques. How has teaching these intensely physical practices via digital platforms compared to in-person work? What challenges do you face in getting viewers to feel and embody the exercises through a screen? And have there been any surprising advantages to doing this work online, such as reaching people who couldn’t attend in-person workshops?** Yes, exactly, you know, I mean, a lot of people who are interested in this stuff are quite young in their 20s, you know, and there aren’t many therapists around and it’s a very big world. They may not have a lot of time, they probably don’t have a ton of money to pay, you know, modern day therapists what they would charge them is hardly anything about anyway, you know, so it’s like this kind of work online can, can be done, you know, for me it’s been an experiment. When I started my YouTube channel around 2016, you know, people pretty quickly were asking me for like paid for content, you know, proper courses to learn this stuff. And I was initially very like, no, you can’t do it like that because I’d run so many workshops in person, you know, and at some point, kind of luckily just before COVID, you know, I started maybe I should rethink that and just try, you know. So I created a course called the Journey, which is still online and still popular, 52 modules, you know, weekly modules of content, very, very deep, very intense. And it basically worked. I mean, of course, it helped because COVID hit and everyone wanted to do some work on themselves online and that kind of thing. But I think, you know, that digital platforms can really work, you know, they can really work because you can do follow along stuff, you know, so you put your video on or the audio on and you just follow along, you know, and the guy or whoever it is or me reminds you or whoever’s leading lady isn’t whatever. They basically, you know, they remind you to breathe, they remind you to hold the posture and to push in the little places that you need to, you know. So if you’re up for it and you’ve got a bit of discipline, you can do a lot online, you know, I really believe that and a lot of therapists from my generation don’t believe that, you know, they’re more like it’s got to be in person, it’s got to be in person. But I think there’s a lot, it just needs exploring, you know, it just needs exploring. And I’m hopeful with my training that I run, you know, I get more younger people in in the mid 20s and 30s, you know, starting to leave these things out in the world, you know, and then, you know, they can take that work further. Challenges do you face getting vision, this is actually feeling embodied the experience screen. Well, they just follow along. Yeah, yeah. And there are surprising advantages, there are certainly our advantages, you know, there’s a lot of potential in this kind of online stuff. And I’m sure as AI increases, you know, there’ll be more and more with this for people who really want it, you know, just in terms of, you know, getting this stuff into a marketplace. **PAA: Not everyone who comes across your work identifies as a spiritual seeker. Some might just be looking for stress relief, emotional healing, or personal development. Can someone engage with your techniques purely as a therapeutic or wellness practice without adopting all the esoteric language? What do you hope a person from the general public takes away from opening the body with a cube of space in your workshops, in an ideal world, how would practices of embodiment and energy awareness be integrated in the ordinary person people’s lives for greater well being?** Well, you know, initially I was writing books just on bioenergetics, you know, so it’s just therapy for people who are struggling, you know, got stress relief, or they’ve been doing psychotherapy and they want to augment it with something, you know, they want to feel their body more personal development, they’re looking for that stuff. Probably you’d only get, you know, the opening the body with a cube of space book came along only last year, you know, some five years after I started writing other bioenergetics books. So probably that one would only peak people’s interest if they’re already a bit into esoteric stuff. That would be my anticipation, to be honest. But I think, you know, the regular bio workshops and books that I’ve written, you know, and courses that I have or YouTube videos, you know, they’re really not esoteric, you know, it’s very much about who you are as a social being and, you know, clearing stuff out of your system and starting to understand on a deep experiential level, personal deep experiential level, you know, developing that understanding of how your body kind of functions energetically, internally as a sensation, you know. So I think that’s what I would say about that. Okay, cool. I’ve talked quite a lot in this thing, so hopefully this is useful. And thank you so much for inviting me on to Perseus. Bye for now. **PAA: Thank you very much for sharing your work with us.** --- --- # Aliens versus Spirits by Sixty Skills Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/aliens-versus-spirits-by-sixty-skills/ ## Intro Many thanks to Bob of SixtySkills for this transcript of one of his youtube videos, on a particularly interesting topic. Please forgive any strange words, these are the result of an automated transcript. Aliens versus Spirits or are aliens or spirits real? Well, the answer to both is yes; they both in fact exist. However, Spirits are much more common now. For those of us involved in the magical Community this isn't any really big news, but for people out there who are new to this or who don't know much about it, I'm going to provide a bit of a background. Every culture has a long list of what they consider to be Spirit Registries. Two most common ones in the western world are Franz Bardon's second book, The Practice of Magical Evocation, in which several hundred of these entities are detailed and how to bring them into existence; or as most people are familiar, the Lesser Key of Solomon involving the 72 spirits of latan. ## Common Spirits However, these are not the only list of spirits out there. For example, in classical ISM if you're studying Spirit magic you'll be given Registries of spirits that you are expected to work through. Okay, fair enough, but it gets even more common than that. For example, Shingon Buddhism—you got all the Shingon deities, right? Well, turns out they all have sigils; they all have mantras associated with them; they can be evoked as well. For those of you who are more interested in a classical approach to this, you can look at the Greco Roman gods. Some people are attracted to the Egyptian deities; they all have symbols or sigils or sacred drawings that along with the right Mantra and the right set of conditions can in fact be used to evoke them. This is in fact a universal technology. Now, no one has a complete listing of all of these kinds of creatures, and there are various different kinds, and much like any EOS system out there some of these things are very friendly, some of these things are very hostile, some of these things are very dangerous, and some of these things are beneficial. ## What Is a Spirit Loosely said, a spirit can be defined as a nonphysical intelligence—in other words, something that’s intelligent that does not have a physical body. Okay? Okay. How are these things, well, as we would say in Magic, evoked or brought into existence? Okay, they’re normally brought into existence by accident, and this is why there’s that big confusion between aliens—and we’ll get to those in a minute—and Spirits. The issue is that most untrained people do have encounters with these things, but being untrained they’re largely at the mercy of these things as well, and they don’t have a really safe way in which to engage with them. That said, because of how they normally come into existence accidentally—for the most part, unless you’re involved in rights of evocation, and again we’ll get to those in a second—an untrained person can categorize things as aliens if that’s their cultural Paradigm to do so, whereas more classically they would refer to them as Spirits. Either way, in this case we’re talking about a non-physical entity that is intelligent. ## Accidental Spirits Now, we talked a little bit about how they arrive or how they come into this level of existence—normally this is accidental. So when a spirit shows up, normally it’s just the right conjunction of environmental factors, of astrological factors, and all of a sudden this thing can make a guest appearance in our world. Now, they generally can’t stick around for very long; however, once they make contact with somebody it makes it much easier for them to make contact with that individual in the future. So if you bring, say, recreational drug use into the picture that has modified the sensory apparatus temporarily of an individual, they may be able to make contact with one of these things much easier. ## Rights of Evocation Now in the non-accidental category of things you have rights of evocation. This is the summoning and binding of an entity. These are generally ritual in nature, although that’s not always true—there are some internal power methods of doing this, but they’re fairly rare—and typically this will involve a series of ritual instructions performed over a very long period of time. So people who engage in a lot of physical manifestation of entities actually refer to these as operations. This can be very complicated and takes quite a while because they’re generally going to have to perform the ritual involved to build up enough of a subtle energy charge to make the entity show. Many times they also tend to time these things astrologically to take advantage of the best possible series of events in order to raise the likelihood of it working out. Okay? Now, why would someone want to do this? Generally speaking, when people engage in what we call Spirit magic or evocation, they’re doing this for one of two reasons: one, they’re looking for information—they want to know how to do something; they want to know something about the future or how events are going to turn out. Okay, fair enough; or two, they need something done for them. Classically speaking, if you look at the spirits of the lomega or the spirits of the Lesser key of Solomon—and I don’t advise using these entities as they’re quite dirty, and again get to that in a bit—in a moment here, they govern things like grave robbing, enforcing Justice, getting debtors to pay you money. All right, why would someone want to do this? Well, as a modern person, we have these things called the police and courts, but these are very new inventions that as most people understand them are less than a hundred years old in most cases. So if you go further back in time than that and there’s a local nobleman who took some money from you and refuses to pay it back, or you’ve got another gentleman who likes raping your daughter on every given Tuesday just because he’s got status in society and you don’t—well, no one’s going to help you. The courts don’t exist for you; police basically don’t exist; you don’t have enough patronage or enough wealth to buy the person off or enforce some kind of justice. So what do you do? You go to the local Village headman, who happens to be a sorcerer or Shaman of some kind; he gives you a ritual to perform because he doesn’t want to be on the hook for this; you perform the ritual; you summon the spirit; it does some work for you. That’s traditionally how this thing kind of worked. And if you studied the works of Dr Steven Skinner, what you’ll find is that according to him the names of the spirits of the Laton haven’t largely changed since the time of the ancient Greeks—these things are pretty old. Well, here’s the thing: people only spend time and effort on things that actually work, and this is where the more, how do I say this, overeducated classes like to write things off as Superstition. Well, people don’t do things for a couple thousand years in a row unless they’re getting something out of it. Now, if you don’t want to deal with the ramifications of a non-physical World existing, that’s a different issue, and that’s usually the source of their dissonance regarding this whole thing. ## Risk Versus Reward Okay, so we talked a little bit about what these are and why you would want to do it. Well, what are the risks versus reward kind of aspect? Well, here’s the thing: a non-physical entity needs energy, for lack of a better word, in order to do things on your behalf. Well, you have a physical body and you have breath, so if you bring one of these things into existence, it’s going to borrow some of that energy your body makes to power what it is you’re trying to get it to do. So that’s one thing you need to be aware of. Two, as non-physical entities, these things can literally heckle you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Okay, they can get you to do a lot of things that you might otherwise not think about—that whole concept of the gregores that I bring up over and over again: the more involved with one of these things you are, the more it influences your free will. There’s no getting around this; it’s not negotiable. It’s just like that circle of your six closest friends deciding who you are—it’s that kind of risk versus reward thing. So that’s the problem: if you’re involved with one of these—let’s call it a grungier entity that’s involved with something like, I don’t know, grave robbing—well, that’s going to impact you a lot. So that’s that whole risk and reward kind of thing. ## The Problem Okay, now what about aliens? Because everybody wants to talk about aliens. Well, first of all, as we got into in the early part of this video, a lot of aliens are just spirits—people see things because their subtle senses open up a little bit, right? Astrological conditions, so on and so on. However, if you’ve done some research out there, you can look at the videos of Bob Lazar, particularly the ones with Joe Rogan, for example, and it’s pretty clear that aliens physically exist as well. Here’s the problem: their technology is so far advanced ahead of ours that even if you find these things, making any use of them is probably going to be pretty hard. Well, this also brings into the issue—as human history has shown—is that if someone is sufficiently more advanced than another group of people, and that other group of people has something the more advanced group wants, that other group of people are probably going to die. Now, you can talk about the good or the bad of that, but let’s just kind of spell out how it works. Sorry. So the good news is apparently we don’t have a whole lot of interest to these things, which is really handy because if we had something they wanted, they’d just come take it and there probably wouldn’t be anything we can do about it. So the fact that we don’t know more about them—in a very strange kind of way—is an ignorance is bliss scenario. We don’t know more about them because we’re not very interesting to them, so they have no incentive to do anything bad to us or to take that thing that they’re interested in. Now what I would say is this is probably for the best for the reasons we just talked about. That said, of course it’s always in some people’s minds: better to get a fix on this kind of thing. Which camp you fall into—that’s largely up to you. ## Parable I’ll leave you with this one little Parable. If you took a monk from the 14th Century from Western Europe in the middle of the night and grabbed him and brought him to the end of the runway at JFK airport in New York City, and you said nothing to him, you left him there for 30 minutes but you didn’t allow him to go anywhere, and he witnessed airplanes taking off and landing for half an hour, and then you magically took him back to his bed in the 14th century and left him there with no explanation—what description of what he saw would he give you? Giant metal demons belching flame with people on board screaming? I don’t know, but again based off his knowledge of the world he probably wouldn’t have a very good explanation for what’s going on. That’s kind of the problem we’re in with aliens: even if you captured one of these things alive, I’m pretty willing to bet that whoever its group of people or entities or whatever they are would make quick work of getting them back if they were still alive. And if they crashed a spaceship—well, the hairless monkeys walking around probably couldn’t do anything with it anyway. So we don’t really care, kind of put some perspective into where human beings may fall in the actual universe. That being said, as far as we can tell they don’t seem to have a whole lot of interest in human beings, and that’s probably for the better because keep in mind these oxygen-breathing, carbon-based life forms that make up the vast majority of this planet—that may not be how other entities exist; that may not be what they’re based off of. Even communicating with something might not be very easy because they don’t communicate through a spoken word. Who knows? That said, they do seem to exist based off repeat evidence presented by UFO researchers. So this is just a little talk about how people often confuse aliens with spirits and how Spirits are probably the more common of the bunch. ## Conclusion If you like the topic of today’s discussion, consider subscribing to the SixtySkills channel. If you want to learn more about all this, come right on over to sixtyskills.com and we can help you out with everything there is to know involving the esoteric. Otherwise, as per usual, train hard and be well. --- --- # Concordianism, Mystery College & the Future of Esoteric Practice | Perseus Conversations Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/concordianism-mystery-college-the-future-of-esoteric-practice-perseus-conversations/ ### Introduction What follows is the transcript of a discussion and episode on [Perseus Conversatons](https://www.youtube.com/@perseusarcaneacademy/podcasts) between myself (James) and Jake of the [Mystery College](https://mysterycollege.com/) and Alex an expert in comparative religion and various forms of magic from around the world. You can watch the discussion in video here: https://youtu.be/7uyzMtLHozM?si=BWqHuUVCnZDW_spT --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Perseus Conversations Transcript- Practical Application of Concordianism- Courses, Curriculum, and the Value of Fundamentals- Problems with the Western Magical Tradition- The Concordianism Solution- Course Tracks, Philosophy, and Structure at Mystery College- Timelines, Upcoming Courses, and Live Engagement- Spirit Work, Validation, and Respecting Traditions- Grimoire Studies and Comparative Magic- Depth and Accessibility of the Curriculum- Closing Remarks and Community Invitation- A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah ## Perseus Conversations Transcript **James:** That leads us perfectly into deliberation and explanation. So I think this is really interesting as a—can I call it a foundational structure or a—yeah, absolutely—of what comes next, a clarity of everything that comes after, and also a way to keep it clear and pure so that it doesn't become confused. So could you guys go into this and explain this in fairly simple terms for the audience? **Alex:** Yes, so—Jake, I'll let you—okay. So, in the document that we've sent you, “in deliberation,” it is most decidedly and assuredly a deliberation on the principles and the core tenets of what we were trying to advocate for. And what we're trying to advocate for here is what I would like to call concordianism. Now, sounds like a fancy word for something—it really isn't. Concordianism is based on, or named after, the Roman goddess of harmony, which is Concordia, based off of another name for her, which is Harmonia. Now, Harmonia/Concordia is in direct opposition to, or the exact opposite of, the goddess of chaos, Discordia, also known as Eris—and not Aries the war god, but Eris the agent of discord, the goddess of discord. So the exact opposite of that is harmony. Now, there is a sociological philosophy called concordianism, which advocates that in order for human society to advance to their greatest potential, human society must learn to cooperate within the scope of one another's capacities. It is not advocating for a unified society; it is not advocating for a singular society; and it is not advocating for a monolithic society. What it is advocating is a cooperative society. And so, we take this philosophical principle and we apply this similarly into an esoteric scope, whereby we take practices that have been done for hundreds of thousands of years within the collective sphere of all of human history and condense it into those aspects which can be found concordantly across various human traditions, and to strip it away of anything which is related to culture, religion, identity, or any of those things. Which—I mean, to be perfectly honest, sociologically, culture unites a specific group of people, but it divides that specific group of people from everybody else. They are a separate thing, and those people out there are also a separate thing. This is a very human thing, this is nothing to be ashamed of. And in a highly politicized environment such as the western world today, there is a lot of talk about cultural appropriation or the taking of certain ideas and whitewashing these ideas. And as someone who is very active in, what some people would describe as the “woke” community—I mean, I don't look woke, but I probably am if people are, you know, calling me that, I don't know—but these points, these talking points have become a significant hindrance to the capacity of the human individual to see their immediate other not as separate from themselves. It's creating a divide, and the divide occurs within the sociological sphere, it occurs in academia, it occurs in religion, and it occurs even in the practice of magic. There's gatekeeping all throughout, over a disparate number of practices that, if you really took a deeper look, you would find analogs and parallels and similarities all across the globe. And so, concordianism is our attempt to collate, synthesize, and codify these similitudes, and to create a practice that is neutral, approachable, reliable, logic-based, analysis-oriented, and readily verifiable and repeatable, so that even if you are an atheist or an agnostic or if you believe in Cthulhu or whatever it is that you want to believe in, you are able to do these practices and benefit from the same things that you would find if you went to an ashram or if you went to a retreat or if you became a monk or if you became a hesychast, or whichever it is that drives your boat. It's more of a multicultural attempt at magic, minus the cultural baggage. I think that's what describes it best—anything that can get in the way, that can cause divide, that can take your attention away from the actual thing itself, it has to go. **James:** Wow, great explanation. Okay, anything to add to that, Jake? **Jake:** Absolutely, yeah. There's a few key elements that we're using in helping strip away some of the elements that make it more difficult to perceive, say, historical practices as they were presented in their time. We're seeing things not through an anachronistic lens. In other words, most practices that are magical, or anything anthropological in the past, how modern humans tend to look at the past is through our distinctly modern eyes, mindset, and contextual understanding—our moralities. So, we're not looking to the past or looking through any magical systems or anthropological ritual systems through an anachronistic lens; we're distinctly looking at it through the context of which the people lived, looking at the history of the geography of the region, looking at what materials they had, and also looking at how they were developed technologically, with medicine—all these types of things contextually give rise to an understanding of where someone was at in their mind when they created a grimoire or when they created a magical system or when they were contextualizing these things for the audience of their times. There's a Buddhist concept called expedient means, which teaches us that all these teachings in their given times were taught for the viewers and listeners of that time period, more often than not. So looking at it from that lens, we're able to have a closer, more accurate look at historical practices, both from a comparative religion lens—which is where Alex and my academic backgrounds are, that's what we majored in—and then also from the practicum lens, where we can actually pathwork some of these practices, either in how they were shared in their integrity, or we can also look at the component elements that make up the set ritual and reverse engineer it as closely as possible whilst also not completely inconveniencing ourselves of normal amenities, right, because not everyone has, you know, a chicken or a lion, a chicken that can cut their throat, or have a lion's mane, or to use an ounce of gold for some ritual—those things are not readily accessible. ## Practical Application of Concordianism **Jake:** But there are—I wish I had an ounce of gold. Yeah, exactly, yeah, some of those ingredients might not be—where am I going to get that from? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I know where to get a chicken, and I know where to get a lion's mane, but I don't know how to get an ounce of gold. Yeah, drawbacks, yeah. **James:** Okay, yeah, so, that said, we're also—as a part of Concordianism, there's the core component of Concordianism. **Jake:** Yeah, so there's a core aspect of Concordism where we have an on-demand course where you can go through the Concordian practices. It's in a Socratic form where Alex leads with questions and then I'm the one who's going through the practices and sharing my feelings, experiences, hindrances in real time so that people can check in with themselves and practice along in the group. It prevents cognitive bias, it shows people in real time that the systems and the processes that we're doing is not some silly little mind trick, because I come from a country where there are a lot of charismatic preachers, very, you know, culty religious leaders and whatnot, and I know how groupthink works. I have analyzed groupthink at length; I've also analyzed how people can be so easily misled provided that there is peer pressure and provided that they desire an end to which they are given the illusion that they can achieve. So if we place it in an environment where you're able to determine that not everything that is being presented to you is something that works instantaneously, but rather is something that builds up or something that you can either verify or deny or somewhere in between, then it showcases that the system itself is rooted in logic. It's not rooted in blind faith, superstition, hypnosis, and there really is no better way to go about a magical system in a world where everyone is convinced that they're Gandalf the Gray or some other transcendental human being than to show how it works stripped of all preconceived notions. **Alex:** Absolutely, there. And people can verify and they can, as you said before, repeat it. **James:** Yes, yeah, yeah. Okay, well that leads us because obviously you—we've talked about an introductory curriculum of a few lessons but also you've got your live cohort courses, quite a selection that you're looking at doing as well. Do you guys want to talk about a few of those? Because I think these are going to be very, very exciting for people. ## Courses, Curriculum, and the Value of Fundamentals **Jake:** Absolutely, absolutely. And this will be—it is exciting theoretically, but once they're the ones doing the practice, they will find that it is quite something of a bore for starters, especially because they're used to the, if I may use the terminology, the get-rich-quick scheme of how magic is presented and marketed in their specific, in their respective milieus. But this is a foundational course which encompasses magic as a whole, and when we say magic as a whole, we mean internal and external magic, and this can be applied to any and all systems of pre-existing magic. That means you can be a Concordian and be a Buddhist and be a Catholic at the same time—although that might not sit well with your local priest. But it's a system that fits all, a system that applies for all, and a system that is designed for all. That is very calming of me to say, I'm sorry. Anyh—who, the concept of Concordianism, as a little introduction, I would like to set the stage, if you will, as to why we believe that this is necessary. **Alex:** Now, in order for people to actually understand precisely why this is needed, I would like to bring to everyone's attention the fact that what we call the Western—Western, I say this as liberally as I can, and I do not mean any offense to individuals of the western mold of mind or who are located in the West. Now, I would like to say as a disclaimer that in spite of the fact that I am a southeastern individual, I am either fortunately and/or unfortunately so thoroughly westernized thanks to globalization that there really is no difference between me and the average individual that you meet at a Taco Bell in the United States, with the exception of the fact that I have never consumed anything from Taco Bell. That being said, the Western mode of mind, when it comes to magic, if we are being perfectly honest about it, is this hodgepodge of systems culled from different religious traditions across the world. The reason why it exists in this vacuous space of semi-neutrality, but also this flailing and futile attempt at something close to universalism, is because the early magical practices that make up the cornerstone of what we call the western tradition as it is understood today—and by western tradition I mean to say the Golden Dawn, the works of Crowley, Blavatsky, White, tarot cards, all of these things, and I'm going to add to the mix here Franz Bardon because you hear his name often—these were all byproducts of a specific time period where the western world became strongly disillusioned by established religion and they were seeking some other kind of placeholder for a faith that they had, that they wanted to retain but which was going nowhere. And it did not start, mind you, with Thelema, with all of these secret societies and organizations and whatnot. This began far, far, far earlier than that specific time period. This has roots going all the way back to the middle of the 1600s, even as far back as the Renaissance, if we're being honest, up until the height of just shy of the French Revolution. And I will explain as, in as condensed a manner as I can. The western world has always been cosmopolitan. That is part and parcel of its collective identity; it defines itself as western, it believes itself to be cohesive as a culture, as a society, and as a people, as a milieu, but it is not cohesive in the sense of true cohesion. It is an amalgam of different practices that have been sourced and picked from all of the places that they have either assimilated or conquered, or of which they have built alliances and, you know, adopted certain aspects of certain cultures. It's a complicated history. History is complicated. So with this amalgamation of an assortment of practices that dates back to the time when, you know, they decided, “Let's make large boats and see if the world isn't flat already,” you had innumerable practices from different parts of the world that were slowly being introduced into the western mold of mind, and they were already adapting that in their own respects back then. It may surprise a lot of individuals to know, for example, that the notorious spirit worker John Dee—which was, if my memory serves me right, was the official court astronomer and sorcerer for Queen Elizabeth I—made mention of a specific entity which would later be codified into the western demonology systems called the Goetia. This specific entity he described was a pot-bellied elephant person. That's the Hindu god Ganesh. India. And, you know, they didn't quite exactly land in India then, but they did conduct trade extensively with, you know, other parts of the world, so they knew what Persia was, they knew what the Middle East was, they understood that—because William Shakespeare, of course, in his The Moor of Venice, Othello, the Moor of Venice, they understood that, and the concept of the crusades is very fresh in the memory of the Elizabethan psyche. So things travel, things migrate from one area to another, ideas are shared, but only to a certain extent. It's shared in a halfhearted way, in an incomplete way, and so the ones who receive this information also codify it in a half-hearted way. It's there, but not quite; it's incomplete. ## Problems with the Western Magical Tradition **Alex:** And this has been the problem with Western tradition at large. It's there, but it's not quite complete; it's a Frankensteined creature culled from various parts of different sociological and cultural corpses all sewn together and electrified into a living being that doesn't quite understand what it is but knows that it should exist. And the problem with that is it creates a lot of confusion for the intrepid practitioner, because when they encounter things like, “Oh, I'm going to perform energy work,” and the system that you're choosing to do this energy work is the chakra system from Hinduism, you're not a Hindu, you don't understand how the chakras are viewed from a Hindu perspective, but you do the work anyway. And then from that you shift into suddenly this working with the planetaries, Kabbalah—that's Judaic, and unless you're a Jew, and if you're a Jew you probably wouldn't do this kind of magic, you do your own kind of magic which is Gematria, proper Judaic Kabbalah, but I digress—you go into the system, you jump from one culture to another and you expect this one thing to mesh perfectly. And then you hit roadblocks, like, “Why isn't it working the way that these writers say it should?” Probably because the writers that wrote it wrote it down theoretically, they didn't understand the complete context of what they were writing. And I don't see this as something discriminatory or condemnatory of these individuals; I would like to remind everyone that western magic is a byproduct of its time, it was a byproduct of a culture of people who realized exactly how large the world was and how there was more than one way of viewing the world and more than one way of experiencing God or spirit or what have you, and they found some truth and some credence and some value in these beliefs, and they wanted to apply that into their own daily lives because there was something missing. And so they created a synthesis. It was a half-baked synthesis, yes, but it was an attempt at a synthesis nevertheless. Unfortunately, anything that is only half done or half-baked doesn't quite cut it to be Michelin star material, if you will. So because of these inherent pitfalls in the practice, we now have individuals who do energy work based on the Chinese concept of qi or the Japanese concept of ki or the Indian concept of prana, but they just shift from one thing to another. They employ this thing using this specific terminology for that specific word that doesn't quite, you know, mean what it should mean, and they think that they're doing magic. And then when they encounter and/or experience individuals from living traditions, from those aspects of society that have not been as thoroughly commodified as their own society, then they're like, “Oh, why is their system of magic more cohesive than ours? Why are they so gatekeepery about their magic?” The answer is simple: one society has had plenty of time to hyperfixate on how they do things, the other part of society has spent a lot of time trying to make different parts from different things work into one cohesive whole. ## The Concordianism Solution **Alex:** And so where concordianism comes into play is, if this is a problem in western magic and the unification or the cohesion of practice is a default or a given in a lot of non-western magic—because when I say eastern I'm creating a dichotomy here, African magics are not eastern and yet they are exceedingly cohesive, the magics that are performed in the Pacific Islanders, for example, those are not technically Asian, they're Polynesian, but it's also exceedingly cohesive, the magic of the Maori and the Native Americans—that's not Eastern but it's also exceedingly cohesive. If cohesion is the goal but confusion is what is here now, concordianism attempts to take all of the elements that people find confusing, difficult, and/or simply inaccessible due to any number of factors and to consolidate all of those things to create a unified system that is accessible to all, that is not barred by the trappings of culture and the limitations of language and even sociocultural milieu, and to hopefully redefine the western system of magic into what is truly a cosmopolitan system of magic, something that the west can say, “You know what, we made this. This is international, this is Mr. International, Mrs. International, or...” **James:** Wow. Wow. So, I mean, my goodness, that's a really good explanation. So to say, with what you have coming, with that said, with what you have coming for the live cohort classes, and this—I don't know whether this is a wrong question or not—but where would you be if someone is asking, “Okay, that's good, it's going to solve these problems, but where would the system seek to take the student?” Like, what—people might say, “Okay, what's it focusing on? Is it energy work? Is it meditation? Is it evocation?” **Alex:** It's all. It's all of the above. So there are certain aspects of western magic that are internal and external; the same can be said for all forms of magic regardless of their locale. So we begin with a foundation, internal work, we build the foundation from the inside out. Because to use an—how shall I say this—to use an anatomy and physiology analogy or concept, you can be the most buff, the most, you know, chiseled physique and everything, but if you are ill on the inside because of a hereditary disease or an infection or what have you, you're going to lose the physique that you're building outside, right? So we start from within. We start with internal work, we start with energy work, we start with energy manipulation, we start with understanding how energy works within the various concepts of energy as it is deliberated over by different traditions, and then put it into a concept where we view energy in as neutral a way as possible. Because here's a little, you know, snap in the—in front of the face: to this very day a lot of western magical practitioners don't even have a term for energy that they can say, “You know what, this is a western term.” Like, how would you call energy? Most people would be like, “Oh, it's ki, it's chi, it's prana”—those are not western terms. Those are culled from other places: Chinese, Indian. What is the term for that concept within the western mind? I mean, you know, any professional sorcerer, any Albus Dumbledore can chime in and give their take, but I am willing to bet an arm, a leg, and my non-existent adopted baby brother that they can't, because there hasn't been any—not in a hundred years. So we're going to have to go back, and if we can't find terminologies going back, then we have to create new terminologies for the here and now, so that in future generations we won't have individuals from Nebraska saying that the concept of energy that they're working with is qi, and if you ask them, “Do you like to eat xiaolongbao?” they will say, “What the hell is xiaolongbao?” **James:** Yeah, understanding. Okay, so going forward with—we've also given a whole host of the other document that you guys kindly shared with me. There is a whole host of potential live courses on there, so do you want to—guys and Jake or yourself—go over a few of those? Because I think this already is, as a foundation, epic, but there's more, and I want people to realize that there's—this is very, very thorough, what Jake and Alex have put together in terms of these courses and that they're going to be sharing over the next months and throughout this year, because you've got everything from the base systems, you've got how it aligns to Bardon's work, you've got all of these kind of things, you've got the levels. Do you want to go into that a little bit? --- ## Course Tracks, Philosophy, and Structure at Mystery College **Jake:** Yeah, sure. But before I begin—and I will not speak for Jake here because the thing with Mystery College that you—that should be understood by a lot of people—is that we are not a cult, we are not, you know, a bunch of people who all believe in the same exact same thing. I would like to view the Mystery College as something more akin to the ancient Greek agora, which is essentially an open forum where people of different inclinations and proclivities and philosophical outlooks all decide to band together, discuss, talk, exchange ideas, debate, and probably throw a live chicken or two just to spite everybody else for fun. I'm talking about you, Dionysus—you are the OG. So my primary role in the Mystery College is, I'm your resident comparative religious studies person—I'm not going to say expert because I don't want to put on airs. There are a lot of things that I still don't know. So it is my responsibility to teach those courses from a sociological and anthropological and a historical perspective in as neutral a way as possible. I would also like to say that I am not by any stretch of the imagination a Bardonian. I do not actively work with Bardon systems. I am familiar with them and I have read them, but it's not my system, it's not my practice. To that, I leave the talk of Bardon and all of that to those people who do live, you know, the Bardonian way, if you will—that's for them, I don't want to take on anything that I absolutely, you know, have no—how do I say this? It's not really something that I don't personally adhere to. That's a better way of putting it. But since we are doing a compare and contrast when it comes to a lot of the courses in Mystery College, you will hear or you can expect to hear a lot of comparison points, not just with like, “Okay, this thing here is comparable to this specific system here,” it goes even as far back as, you know, “this specific religion evolved into this specific religion because of these specific factors and therefore their magics are done in this specific way.” And so the courses in the Mystery College will be more similar to your typical anthropology class than it will be about, you know, trying to focus energy. I mean, we will still have those things, absolutely we will still have those things—we will have practical magic presented to our audience, because what's the point of theoretical magic? There is no such—no, there's no point if it's all theory. However, we would like to remind people as early as now that there's two sections to the Mystery College: there's the anthropological, historical, sociological understanding of magic, which—we're working on a title for this. I would personally like to call it the history of magic, but that's the title of a novel, a best-selling novel, so that might land me in hot water. And then there's also the element of the practical aspects of magic, and they can choose either of these courses or they can work with both of these systems simultaneously. **James:** So someone could possibly come at it just from—I'm thinking, “You know what, I don't really, you know, maybe they're thinking, I don't know enough about this stuff, I really should improve my understanding,” and they can just go down that track? **Alex:** Okay. And they can dip in, can they? Once they're on that track, is that like—can they then come back over to the practical side? **Jake:** Absolutely. The understanding of the history of magic precipitates the understanding of magic itself, in that it is similar to how, if and when you understand yourself, you understand the reasons for why you do what you do. So following that psychological anecdote, if we understand what magic was to a certain group of people or a certain cultural milieu, then it follows without saying that if and when we are engaged with the practice of magic because of prior understanding from a purely theoretical perspective, it will not be so difficult to apply what we understand into a more practical approach. ## Timelines, Upcoming Courses, and Live Engagement **James:** Wow, brilliant. So this is all coming, this is all coming in. What's the timeline for this, guys? **Jake:** Yeah, so we'll be starting some live courses, some feeler courses, in the coming week, where we'll just have like a, you know, like a Zoom link, a Google Meets link, and just a feeler so we can communicate with folks and get live feedback as to how we can modify the curriculum to meet their wants, their needs, whilst also keeping integrity of the greater mission of what we're doing. So we have a number of live courses that are also coming up for students that they can attend, from Vedic empowerments all the way to invocation practices, to a comparative religious analysis of the Franz Bardon framework, to Shaivism, as Alex was initiating the system. And from our private conversations, from our conversations with Dr. Sham, you know, things just—many, many, if not most things match up one to one between these systems. However, because the cohesion of the Shaivism tradition, especially the ones that Alex is a part of, the one that Sham is a part of—they're distinct ones that they're part of, but they themselves are completely whole and succinct—there's so many little details and pathways and pathworkings that can be added or re-textualized that just simply are not available in western vernacular or in any western books, because they're not there, they're not available, they're in Sanskrit, for example. But Alex is phenomenal at transliterating things from Sanskrit into English, and he actually, for many, many years, worked as a translator, translating scriptures into one of the native tongues in the Philippines, for example. So he is very talented at this, he's very talented at distilling ideas in a way that's comprehensible. So one of our objectives with this live course, where we go through the first and second book through the Bardon framework, is to distill all these pieces that are from Sanskrit into the greater Bardon framework and to really, really enhance it and fill in some gaps. **Jake:** We have also that—please, Alex— **Alex:** —to hopefully, you know, create words for these things, quite literally, that, you know, an average practitioner of magic from western and westernized parts of the world can confidently say, “You know what, this is my word for it, this is it, this is a new thing, and this is a very welcome thing that hopefully we will begin to facilitate.” **Jake:** Yes, absolutely. And, that being said, there's also other things that we're working on. One thing is we'll be teaching people yoga. We'll be teaching people—a small portion of the yoga we'll be teaching is typical asanas, your downward dog and stretching, some mudras, some bandhas and such, but the vast majority of the time in the classes will be dedicated to the other seven limbs of yoga: things like morality, concentration, exercise, samadhi. So we're working on our yamas, our niyamas, our dhyana, and all these things—and philosophy of yoga, essentially. **Alex:** Yes, philosophy of yoga, right. **Jake:** But there's also—could be practicum in that, where we can—will we be practicing things and will we also be practicing some—well, so if you've ever wanted to dive deeper into yoga text, this is going to be a fantastic course to join. And if you ever felt like that there was something behind yoga but your local yoga teacher with Lululemon pants and drinking Starbucks maybe didn't seem to really cut the fit or feel like it was aligned, then we're hoping to bring that to bring things back into alignment and make these things readily accessible and digestible, and bridge into further things too if you want—like if you want to then pursue Sanskrit, we'll have the resources and guidelines to plug you in so you can actually get initiated into that. And that goes further into another live course we have in the works where we'll actually be giving an initiation in Alex's tradition of Shaivism, available online through our live courses, so that maybe you can't go to India, maybe you can't go to meet Alex in person at this time, but there is a place where you can get real empowerments, real practices from a cohesive tradition. So we have that in the works as well. We also have a live course series where we'll be going into each—we'll be going pan-religious, pan-spiritual systems, doing pathworking with individual spirits through live class—individual spirits, muses, guides, principles of different traditions, whether that's your western European mythology, Norse mythology, Egyptian spirit, the Egyptian gods, African gods, South American, or syncretic Catholic gods as well—like when people mix local gods with the Catholic saints, for example, which has syncretically happened all throughout South America and the rest of the world. So we'll be able to work with Mesoamerican gods as well, and then also being able to work with the pan-Indian systems that Alex is initiated in. --- ## Spirit Work, Validation, and Respecting Traditions **Jake:** So, one thing we're working on with that specifically is making sure that we're not just, you know, working with any old hodgepodge spirits, or from this plane or that plane or anything like that. We're working with beings that have specifically validated information, and within the ritualistic context and systems there are certain attributes to look for so that we can make sure that we're actually working with that said being. Because, as Alex says frequently, spirits lie—spirits lie—so we want to make sure that we are, as we're validating our experiences, using the tools, the measurements, the guidelines that are provided within their architectural system while also respecting those systems anthropologically, sociologically, and anachronistically, meaning we're respecting the time period in which these gods began, arose, and the circumstances of how people related to them in that time. So we're doing that as well. Let's see—pull up my list here—we had quite a few other ones. Also, there's a lot coming, yeah, there's a lot. **Jake:** Alex, do you want to cover, like, say, grimoire studies, for example? ## Grimoire Studies and Comparative Magic **Alex:** Ah, sure. So, a lot of the grimoires that are associated with the western tradition are based predominantly on—and I know a lot of people will take umbrage over this when I say this, but I do beg individuals to reconsider, especially those individuals who are far more oriented towards the western aspect of the left-hand path—they say that the grimoires are, you know, the go-to manuals of demonolatry, you know, but that would not exist, unfortunately for you guys, had it not been for Catholicism. So, I know that this is a tough pill to swallow, but I'm going to say it here and now: the reason why demonological pathworks exist within the western sphere of consciousness is because it is part and parcel of esoteric Christianity. That's a tough pill to swallow, but there's that. We will go to a deep dive on how early esoteric Christianity has influenced demonology, how it has evolved independently of Christianity, where the overlaps occur, and how to more authentically work with it within the specific paradigm upon which these systems and these attributions were developed. But beyond western grimoire magic, we also have in the works grimoire magic associated with my neck of the woods, which is Filipino folk magic. It's a different kind of magic—still influenced by Christianity, still strongly influenced by a lot of what people would consider a more western bend of sorcery or magic, if you will, but distinctly animistic and nativistic in nature. And this course in particular, I will confidently say, is something that no one—not even people from my own country—have developed into a course that allows people from outside of the country to comprehend it and apply it in a way that, you know, they can master it in their own rights without necessarily having to be apprenticed to or live in the place where this specific system of magic develops. In relation to that, there is also an assortment of—we can call it grimoire, but the terminology is used rather loosely here—we will work with sutras, we will work with the Vedas, Upanishads, and all of the lore associated with them to the best of our capacity. Now, we do not promise to be as exacting and as thorough as Cambridge or Oxford or Harvard—we would need a lot of funding for that to happen. However, we do promise to provide as much academic rigor and intellectual integrity into the work that we provide. And because the Mystery College is technically an open college, anybody—and I mean anybody—who has a greater, more profound, more thorough understanding, experience, and/or knowledge about certain subject matters that we might have glanced upon, mentioned, or even attempted to promote, but maybe we fell short, maybe there were some aspects that we missed, please, please reach out to us. Come forward, let us work with you, and we would love to work with you, because we're trying to build a community where knowledge is accessible, knowledge is free, knowledge is for everybody, and knowledge is presented in a manner which is neutral above all else and which is easily integrable to whatever preexisting belief or lack thereof that you already have. ## Depth and Accessibility of the Curriculum **James:** Wow, very, very interesting. Because, I mean, I'm looking through—I've got my other computer here, I'm looking through the list that you guys gave me here. I mean, wow, just on the introductory lessons there's so much depth. Let me put myself on camera. There's so much depth in what these guys have passed over to me, and this is just the introductory things that they're going to be doing to give people a taste of how repeatable this stuff is. So you said that the things are going to be coming in the next few weeks on Zoom, just going to be doing things like that, and then of course we've also discussed in the next few weeks, hopefully, with the community on Perseus, where people will be able to attend your classes as well. Is there anything—we're getting on for—what are we now, over an hour now—so is there anything else that I've missed? Because all this is new to me. I'm very much in your hands, it's all new to me, and it's very, very interesting to me. Is there anything else you would like to share before we close off? ## Closing Remarks and Community Invitation **Jake:** Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and then Alex will follow. We're big fans of Perseus. I've been a part of that community for a long time, and Alex is a newer member of that community. You know, I'm great friends with the teachers, everything in Perseus is highly integral, all very vetted, very, very well, incredulously. And I'm really excited to be teaching—we're really excited to be teaching live courses through Perseus and also doubling down our engagement, our connection with Perseus, with the students at Perseus, because we're like the biggest fans. I've been with Perseus from pretty reasonably close to the start of it, right? Very, very close, one of the first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's been an amazing journey, fantastic community. And, you know, I've been a little remiss that I haven't been as engaged with the community as I could have been, but I'm really, really excited for the upcoming community platform elements and the opportunity to connect way deeper, way further with folks through the courses. For people who are currently enrolled in some of my courses and who will be enrolled in future—in the courses that Alex and I are both part of—as well as providing more Q&A, free content, lives, and so much more, I'm really excited for how Perseus is evolving and continuing evolving, and both Alex and I are looking forward to a lifelong friendship with the Perseus Academy. **James:** Oh, it was great to have you guys. Thank you, thank you. Privilege is all ours. **Alex:** And anything else from you, Alex? **Alex:** Jake said it. I'm a newbie here, but, you know, I am a secret socialist at heart, so, you know, what Perseus is doing—making knowledge accessible to a lot of people, providing all of these courses from a diverse assortment of teachers and practitioners—this is what knowledge could be without the gatekeeping of academia, if only academia were not so oriented in ensuring that their dons and their deans had big fat pockets. So, you know, my heart goes out to you guys and the work that you do. Thank you very much for the privilege of allowing us to work with you, and we look forward to working with you for many years to come. **James:** Wow, well, thank you guys. I mean, it's a pleasure to work with Mystery College. Obviously we share the ideals, you know, we share the idea that integrity in all the things we're doing, and to try and assist and do no harm in the way we are spreading the information. So I think this is going to be wonderful for people to have this opportunity to see things that just aren't accessible in the West. Like you say, unless it's through your yoga—Starbucks drinking yoga teacher—this kind of thing that you guys are talking about, the depth, the cohesiveness of these systems, is—people don't know what they don't know about these subjects. So, basically, in the next few weeks you're going to see the opportunity to sign up with Jake and Alex and the Mystery College to start going through these teachings. Very soon you'll see a similar opportunity with the release of the Perseus community, and I think as well there's so much to go into here, we're going to do some more videos or some more interviews in some shape or form to go into some of the backstories a little bit and to give people as much as we can, but I think this is a great first video to introduce Alex to the Perseus audience and to go a little bit deeper into Jake as well. Just to—because obviously we know you from the Evocation Masterclass and the other master classes that you have for initiation, the Kabbalah, but there's so much more. I mean, just even with your family history there, you know, that's quite a perspective to have, seeing those things as a youngster. So, guys, I'd like to thank you very much for spending this time with Perseus. We'll close it off there. Stay on the line, we'll have a quick chat afterwards. And for everyone that's been watching this episode of Perseus Conversations, thank you very, very much. There's more on the way, and please like, subscribe, and please do leave a comment. Let us know your thoughts, let us know what you would like to hear more from Alex and Jake, any questions you have, put them down below, and we'll do our best to answer them. Okay, thank you everyone, we'll see you next time. **Jake:** Thanks, awesome, thank you so much, really appreciate it. **Alex:** Byebye. --- --- # Ritual, Descent, and Divine Connection: An Interview with Jane Meredith Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/ritual-descent-and-divine-connection-an-interview-with-jane-meredith/ ## Introduction Huge thanks to Jane for answering my many questions. This interview is a transcription of recordings provided to me, any inaccuracy or strange words is down to my (Perseus Arcane Academy) error. I do hope you enjoy this interview we go into lots of varied topics. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments and do share with firends you think may also enjoy the post. About Jane (courtesy of [janemeredith.com](https://www.janemeredith.com/about)) > Jane Meredith is an author, ritualist and teacher. Her books include the best selling *Journey to the Dark Goddess*, *Aspecting the Goddess*, *Circle of Eight* and she is the co-author of *Magic of the Iron Pentacle* and co-editor of *Elements of Magic*. > > > > > > Jane lives with her cat in the Blue Mountains, Australia. Pieces of her heart are in many places, including the Northern New South Wales, Paris, Limeuil, the Lake District and of course with her beloved son and his partner. She writes (and dances) - every day and tries to follow an ecstatic, reverent and joyful life. > > > > > > Fascinated by magical systems, myth, fairytale, and the vivid natural world we are part of, Jane's passions include: Kabbalah, sacred sexuality, trees and rivers, white cockatoos, CloudCatcher WitchCamp, creative magic and co-created ritual, and dark chocolate. She loves travelling, reading, theatre, exploring intimacy, and being alive. If you would like to look further into Janes teachings then you can look at the following links: ##### Janes Books ##### Janes Courses --- Table of Contents - IntroductionJanes Books- Janes Courses- Interview- The Roots of My Path- Living in the Blue Mountains: Place and Practice- The Cycles of Nature and the Wheel of the Year- Working with Altars- Myth and Spiritual Technology- Crafting Ritual: Intention, Structure, and Co-Creation- Aspecting Goddesses- Descent Work and the Dark Goddess- Magical Partnership and Co-Creation- Bridging Ritual and Daily Life- What’s Calling Me Now- A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah ## Interview This is Jane Meredith doing a recording answering or attempting to answer about 10 questions for the Perseus Academy. ## The Roots of My Path Let's begin at the roots of your path: where did your spiritual and magical journey begin, and what pivotal experiences or callings drew you into the world of goddess spirituality, ritual, and magic? Like, I really think that all children are pagans, that I certainly was, but all the kids I've ever known or seen are deeply immersed within nature and perhaps don't experience that separation that we're taught to put in place, increasingly, as we grow up and later on. So I think my spiritual and magical journey began, you know, when I—at least when I was born. But as a child, I was very in love with rivers and trees and the wind, and lots of other things as well, but those things especially, maybe. And I just felt like that I was talking with those beings and that they were talking with me, and the stars is another one—really, really felt very held by the stars, the starscape. And so I had many pivotal experiences as a child: with the wind, with rivers, with trees, with the stars. And, yeah, then fairy tales. I loved fairy tales and I read many—I was a big reader, I read many, many books of fairy tales and then later mythology and was very passionate about all of those. And then I guess also a lot of children's books have magical aspects in them. I was, yeah, a very passionate reader; I read a lot and I was deeply involved in all of those things and I didn't really see why those things should stop within books and not be a part of my life. So I personally practiced various forms of magic and dream work and ritual just kind of by myself or sometimes with a friend, all my life. And I really think that I just never stopped, that's my answer. And really, so many people that I meet—adults I'm talking about—you know, I think that's why paganism is so accessible and so alive, and magic is that we have all been there and practiced and done that and known that as children. And so when someone as an adult says, "Oh, we can do this," it's like, "Well, of course, I've always known that and it's familiar to me and real." ## Living in the Blue Mountains: Place and Practice Okay, this question two: living in the Blue Mountains of Australia, how does place shape your practice? What does it mean for you to work with the land, and can you share a moment where the landscape or its spirits became active collaborators in your rituals or teachings? Yes, so currently I am living in the Blue Mountains, which is an area west of Sydney in Australia— Dharug and Gundungurra Country. And working with the land—I mean, I don't think we can not work with the land, okay? And I think that because the air we breathe is the air of this particular land and the water we drink is often or usually the water of this particular land, and the earth we're standing on, and the weather that we're a part of is a part of this particular land, and it—we're a part of it, like it's moving through us. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to eat the food that is grown as part of this land. Many of us either have gardens or walk in parks or admire the cloudscape; all of it is the context of this land, that we don't just kind of live within like we're in a sealed kind of train carriage passing through it—we're actually deeply immersed in it. I think we all know this, right? So I like to actively work with the landscape and I do that in several ways, one of which is this very mundane way of gardening. I don't have your usual type of garden; I have a bush garden, and my efforts within gardening are to remove invasive weed, replant natives, and establish and hold that. So that's a practice of working with the land and it's a small compensation maybe, or a recompense for invasion and colonization. Like, I acknowledge that my place in this country and on this land is questionable, and I feel that what I can do, at least in this small part of it that I'm nominally partially responsible for, is make it beautiful for the birds and animals and insects and plants—very much the plants that live here, whose land it is. And so that's a huge practice. But then when we're talking about more specifically, I guess, imposed spiritual or magical practices—for example, with the wheel of the year—rather than reading a book about what happens at the autumn equinox, I am more likely to go outside and take into account the weather, look at what's in flower or what's happening in the landscape, and kind of read the mood a bit. I mean, I do this in other ways as well, like politically and within community, but the landscape is a very strong part of that, and then that informs any ritual that I'm going to be involved in creating or co-creating for the autumn equinox—what is actually happening. And of course, doing that practice over years in the same place builds up layers to that, like a reference that, "Oh, this autumn equinox is a lot wetter than usual," or whatever it might be. So I think land is essential. I wrote a book called *Circle of Eight*, currently out of print but I do have a lot of copies of it, that was really all about a very elaborate, detailed, in-depth process of working magic that comes from, is relevant to, is related to, is in conversation with the part of the land and the landscape that you happen to be living in whilst doing it. And it's about consultation and observation with the land, and then beginning to work magic—and in quite a sensitive way—with parts of landscape, in particular directions. So yeah, it's a passion of mine to be fully present, to be fully embodied. I think essentially it means being part of the land where one is. ## The Cycles of Nature and the Wheel of the Year Okay, three: what role do the cycles of nature play in your practice? How do you celebrate the turning of the wheel of the year, the phases of the moon, or other natural rhythms? What kinds of seasonal or lunar rituals have become anchors in your life? I do observe the moon personally and feel it and sometimes work with that moon cycles within my own personal magic, but in public magic and public rituals, I have much more deliberately and much more often and continually worked with the seasonal wheel of the year, as I explained, as relevance to the local place wherever I am at the time. And I like to create a public ritual within the Reclaiming Tradition—reclaiming style—preferably collaborative with one, two, three, four, or more other humans, and invite people along to that to celebrate, yes, the turn of the wheel and this time of year most obviously and what's happening in the land around us, but also different phases of our lives. And so to take the autumn equinox for an example, again, we might celebrate not just what we've harvested from our gardens or what the land is harvesting, or the change—stepping over the line kind of from the light half to the dark half the year—but also how that plays out in our lives. Maybe what we've harvested personally or understood or changed in the last 12 months or six months, and, yeah, what that means to us personally in our lives about that taking that step. And I think in the last one we did for the autumn equinox a few months ago, we did actually incorporate crossing over a line, and that was in a, you know, light trance state, where each one of us recognized these kind of more light or outgoing areas in our lives and meditated on what it means to cross into the darker, more reflective, possibly more inward focused part of the year. And we only crossed over that line when we felt, yeah, ready to do that, and that we were doing it consciously. And it is an anchor in my life as in it's something that I try and create or participate in regularly, fairly regularly, and definitely did it when my child was small and, yeah, love to have that on offer for people to come and be part of. ## Working with Altars Okay, question four: let's talk about altars. How do I work with them? Do they change over time? Are they daily devotional, magical intent? What makes them come alive for you? I mean, I think altars—the good ones—are kind of alive in their own right. But they do especially come alive for me when I am consciously working with them. And I am someone who, I want to say irregularly, but when I feel the need, does work magic with and on altars. I do have devotional altars and they might also have little bits of magic sprinkled around them. I'm looking up at one as I'm saying that, which at the moment is an Aphrodite, beautiful little statuette, which has a rope of pearls which I sometimes wear draped over her shoulder, and it's got a kind of collection of shells around the base. It's just near a north facing window, which in our case, north is where the midday sun is. And right next to her she happens to have—and maybe this is no coincidence—an apple for Eve, my tarot cards, and on the other side a gift that my son gave me and a copy of my Kabbalah book, all of which—they just happen to be there—but all of which I'm going to take in as one altar and think of it as an altar to love and devotion and the mysteries. So just even looking at that gives me a little thrill there. But yeah, I have various altars—I'm going to say they're scattered around the house. I don't necessarily have permanent locations for them; sometimes I do, and they change, like I redo them or I undo them or I move things about. So I guess I'm less—I feel devotional in it, but how someone else might regard devotion, as in a daily practice and a very set altar or set of altars, that is not me at this stage in my life. And I mainly suggest that other people create altars almost as an experiment, as a relationship with the divine and with that part of oneself, one's own soul, as well as maybe a particular divinity, but to see what changes. And I love the word play between "altar" and "alter"—what will alter for me if I work with an altar? So I like that concept. ## Myth and Spiritual Technology My fifth question that I've chosen is: myth is at the heart of your work, especially descent myths like that of Inanna. How do you engage—personally engage—myth as a spiritual technology (love that term)? What does it mean to live a myth, and how has this shaped your own descent and return? Well, descents and returns are kind of continual—witness the moon or the wheel of the year—and really, I think, witness any one of our lives. It's not that we do a descent and a return, but it is pretty much a continual type of a process and it's a process on the move, you know—not so much like we descend and then we're down, down (although that does happen) or we ascend and we're up, up. But I think of it more like, you know, the 360 degrees—oh, I'm a bit down, I'm a bit further, a bit further—bit like the phases of the... I want to say that I recognize it as a deep truth that happens with all living things and maybe some things that we often don't think of as living, such as mountains and rivers or stars (although I do think they're living as well, in a particular way). And this great myth of—we're calling it descent and return, we could be calling it death and birth or birth and death and rebirth—I think it does shape everything, pretty much the same way that being part of nature shapes everything. I have often—I have been a person who has often worked with a particular myth, like chosen, or occasionally it's chosen me, where I have sat with it, unpicked it, read many versions of it, maybe written versions of it, engaged with its elements within mythic play or ritual or spellwork, and all of those things blur a bit together to me. But times when a particular myth has been strong for me—really felt immersive—I have deliberately walked those paths. And there's other times where I've taken it more lightly, like let a myth kind of frame a particular month or six months and seen what happens, like, "Oh, now I'm drawn to do this," or, "Oh, this came up in a dream, perhaps I'll go here or there or maybe I'll do a reading now." So I think, yeah, many and complex are the ways that I engage myth as spiritual technology, as well as obviously some of my books are based around this, some of my workshops are based around this, work in reclaiming WitchCamps often has a particular myth as an anchor point for the whole ritual arc of the camp. So it's pretty important to me, but I don't think I've got any standardized answers—which might be the case for many of these questions. Well, one thing I do love about a good myth is that it's a map, and so when it—this question says how has it shaped your descent and return—I do think this is one of the things that I love most about myths: is if you're in a descent place or underworld place, the myths, including the myth of Inanna's descent and return with Ereshkigal in it, but many other myths of descent and return, actually map the steps. They actually say, "Oh, do this, this is how you get out, you got to do this and this and this." Like Orpheus, for example: you got to not look back, you got to pay the price, etc., etc. So there's all these kind of—they're more than clues—like instructions on how to do the thing. And sometimes I like to take a myth and remove all of the kind of emotive stuff around it and just get down to a list of what happened. And then when I've got those steps of what happened, then I can build them up again into a kind of ritual or a mythic working or a spell, perhaps, or an understanding of the myth that I think can cut through a lot of the kind of social nuances of how the myth was written down or recorded and how we're reading it or receiving it—can get to the bones, the skeleton of it. So I particularly like doing that. ## Crafting Ritual: Intention, Structure, and Co-Creation Okay, my ritual work is apparently widely respected, thank you. When crafting a ritual, whether for yourself or a group, how do you begin? What elements are essential for you: intention, structure, co-creation? Well, those are great things—intention, structure, and co-creation. Maybe I go intention, co-creation, structure, and content would be my order. So, yeah, intention—why are we doing this? Like, we might be doing it because it's a particular festival—Samhain, for example—but then let's go for an intention within that. "Oh, so our intention is to remember the beloved dead and reach out to the ancestors," for example. So we decide on what the intention is, and if it's a co-creation, that's through discussion. Yeah, co-creation: we might have asked every person who was co-creating it to suggest one ritual piece that was important to them. Some of them might be duplicates or they might merge together really successfully; others, as we're working, might turn out not to fit into this ritual, but usually they do, depending. And so, yeah, then we might go for a structure, and reclaiming rituals in particular have a very clear and recognizable structure, with a particular setup and then something that's sometimes called the tofu or meat or heart of the ritual, which can be one, two, or three distinct pieces, but that work together or in a particular sequence. So we would decide on those, and then the sequence is usually pretty obvious, but if it wasn't obvious we would decide on them. And then the kind of concluding pieces—so that's the structure. And then the content, like, "Oh, well, so you get given a piece of that," like maybe the most recent Samhain ritual that we just did a few weeks ago, I was in charge of the trance. And the trance had particular objectives: to optionally visit the land of the dead, to meet with ancestors, and to return. Had a few instructions, things that I had to hit, but the creation of the trance was in fact up to me in this case. Sometimes it would be co-led, two people, so I had to actually write the trance, which involves kind of experiencing it oneself and feeling into it and having a few options for maybe what's happening on the day. For example, our ritual was supposed to be outside, and then at the last minute it got switched to inside, so that changed some things that I was doing within the trance. And it took off the time pressure as well, because we weren't outside in the cold and the dark. So yeah, it's a bit elastic and a bit adaptable, but that content piece, and then everybody else had the different pieces that they were responsible for or holding or working on, which I knew the structure of but I didn't necessarily know the deep content of until it happened. So there's always this kind of unfolding of a ritual, even when I'm partially responsible for putting it on, where there are pieces that I haven't been responsible for and so I'm kind of immersed in the ritual, maybe in a similar way to people who weren't responsible for it at all. And the second part of this question is: could you share an example of a ritual that turned out to be especially transformative? And I want to say, well, like every ritual is especially transformative in its own special way. So I'm going back to my Samhain ritual—as I said, it was a few weeks ago—it was an unusual ritual in that quite a number of people came to it who had never been to one of our rituals before, and this is held by reclaiming-identified people in the Blue Mountains as a public ritual. And it was transformative for various people—like, quite a few people came who had had beloved ones die, not just in the previous 12 months but really in the previous 3 or 4 months, and so there was a strong heartfelt emotion happening throughout this ritual. At the beginning—one of the beginning tofu pieces of the ritual, so we're already well into it, but I guess early on and before my trance—was that we name those people who we knew and/or loved who have died in the last 12 months or whose deaths have deeply affected us, and we light candles for them. So this process can take a long time, even when there's not a lot of people there, and it was particularly moving this time, and I can't exactly say why. Maybe that extra level of emotion was brought. There were also—the genocide in Gaza was named, and we tried to imagine what it would be like to have 50,000 candles lit there. That was also quite emotional. And, yeah, there were some other more general community deaths mentioned and honored, and so it was deeply moving. After that, we did some things which included then, eventually, when we got to the trance—so I guess this ritual had an experience of opening ourselves and deepening into that and deepening again and then deepening again before kind of coming out and concluding it. But I think every ritual has the power to be especially transformative for someone somewhere, and maybe oneself as well. ## Aspecting Goddesses Just going to have a mouthful of my tea. Okay, you've worked extensively with aspecting goddesses: what is it like to invite a deity into your being? How do you prepare, hold, and then release that presence? You know, I did write a whole book about this, which is called *Aspecting the Goddess*, and so I want to say there's no quick or easy answer to this. But I will say there are several different ways to do it, and the reclaiming way, which is the way that I was taught from reclaiming tradition and which is modeled in that book *Aspecting the Goddess*, is a very disciplined and fairly precise way that involves some practice. And therefore I believe, and we believe collectively, is somewhat perhaps safer, or more sound, and perhaps more respectful to the human doing the aspecting and, we perhaps like to think, also respectful of the deity being aspected. And suffice to say there is preparation and there is releasing, and there's a lot of techniques and technical aspects of that. And if we're practicing or learning it for the first time, I guess we go in lightly and with good support. And as we gain more experience and perhaps are held more deeply, or there's, you know, maybe a ritual of 100 people and this is something we've done many times and we're working with a deity that we know and trust and love, that is another tip: that this is not the advised, perhaps—or advised by me—way to meet a deity, but more advised to work with one, to do this practice of aspecting or drawing down with a deity that one knows fairly well and has a long practice with. And can I share a moment when aspecting changed you? I mean, really every time I have done it, it has changed me, and it certainly deepened my knowledge and appreciation of the myth, the deity, their stories, my own practice—hasn't always been easy or delightful. And again, in that book, I share many instances in kind of long form of times when I have worked with a deity. One of the most startling experiences that I ever had, I guess, was aspecting Eve in a reclaiming witch camp ritual at night, under a full moon at Easter. And that experience still resonates through my entire body—it was very powerful. Many other people also found it powerful in various ways. And for me, I felt like, "Oh, this is speaking to my DNA, this is speaking to myself, this is about being a human," even though it was aspecting Eve, who we were working with really as a goddess, as a deity, as well as the mother of humans, or humans. And, yeah, it changed my understanding of that—I want to say fairly pivotal—myth forever. And I feel like it touched Eve—yeah, I just, I feel myself going into silence with it again and again. Towards the end of the ritual—this wasn't a big speaking role, but it was held over quite a long time, like over an hour—but towards the end, there was a piece where Eve/myself was supposed to speak, and she slash I was holding this passionate piece about being the tree and offering the fruit, and this is life and death. And it was pretty powerful. You can hear in my voice that I keep stopping and not really having words for it. But I did write a whole story about it in that book, so perhaps I'm better with words when they're written down. ## Descent Work and the Dark Goddess Okay, taking a breath. Descent work appears again in your *Journey to the Dark Goddess*: what does it mean to descend? How do you guide people into shadow, loss, or the underworld in a safe and empowering way? Okay, that's when I began the descent work with that *Journey to the Dark Goddess*, which was actually the second book that I ever published, so that's really the base of all of my descent work, is that work. What does it mean to descend? Yeah, great question. In mythic terms, it means giving away everything that you have or own or are, including your life, your personality, your possessions, your relationships. That's mythically, and in ritual we tend to echo that, even if it is just a ritual to have a moment or an hour or sometimes a day, or day and a night, or three nights, where we have literally released, relinquished, sacrificed everything that we own, everything that is our personality, everything that is our life, our relationships, and we do literally imagine, "Oh, what will it be to die right now and do that—the death work?" So that's one way to guide people, is to follow those mythic steps. And I do that in the *Journey to the Dark Goddess* book and I do it in workshops—usually weekend workshops or sometimes a bit longer. And this—I don't, almost one doesn't have to guide people into shadow or loss or the underworld, because you know what, everyone has these experiences in their lives. Plus, people who've come to a ritual or workshop or book with that as a topic obviously often are pretty familiar with it themselves—they're like, they're struggling with it or they're deeply in the experience and they wouldn't mind a bit of a guide or another voice along the track. So I haven't found that there's much need to guide people there, like people are pretty familiar with it. But that practice that I outlined earlier about giving everything away is a pretty good guide. And this word "safe"—how interesting. Is this a safe thing to do? I mean, I think it's like sex—it can be safer ritual, but can it be safe? "Safer ritual," well, this might include that we would advise people who are experiencing a lot of mental or emotional instability in their lives already to perhaps—this isn't the right thing to do, especially maybe in a whole group. That we always advise people not to suddenly go off their medication if they're taking medication. That we always set up very strong ritual surrounds and guides and safe people—the people leading the ritual—and explain as much as possible some of the experiences that one might have. I think there is a level of safety, as I explained before, about following the myth: that the myth is a guide and a map, and that they're circular, they pretty much always end where they began. And so there's this kind of circularity, even if someone gets lost on the steps on the way up, right? You still do the ritual of taking all the steps and you still get there. Maybe you need to do a bit of extra clean up work or refresh your work, but basically you have been dragged out by following the steps of the myth. I do think it's empowering, in essence, to take charge of a descent, even a ritual descent. And I do believe that doing this as a practice—probably more than once—does really assist. I believe this and I have some experience in it, but, you know, everyone would have to find out for themselves. But theoretically, I believe, and to some extent this has been my experience, that doing this as a practice, in inverted commas, like doing it as ritual, as spell work, as mythic work, does lay down the tracks or the experience or that map for when real life hits us and we're suddenly plummeted into a descent that was not of our choosing, not of our time. And it can be a health crisis, relationship crisis, a hundred things—a work crisis, a death—all these things have the power to kind of drag us sideways into the underworld. But my understanding is that when we're familiar with our own personal underworld and how it is for us, and what the steps are, and some things that one can usefully do on the way down there and on the way up and back up, that it helps us navigate these huge parts of our lives that really—yeah, you can't live to be an adult and not experience involuntary descents. ## Magical Partnership and Co-Creation Next question: your collaborations, like with Fio Gede Parma on the iron and pearl pentacles and also *Elements of Magic*, suggest rich co-creation. What have I learned through magical partnership? How does shared ritual design or authorship deepen my own practice? Obviously I've learned many hundreds of thousands of amazing things from amazing ritualists that I've been lucky enough to be taught by, to be on ritual teams with, witch camp teams with, and writing books with—amazing. I think that the main thing that I always learn is how much richer, in a particular way, the breadth and the depth in that breadth that a project can be with multiple authors or collaborators. So I'm going to talk about *The Magic of the Pearl Pentacle*, which is my most recent published book, and I co-created and co-wrote with Theo—Fio Gede Parma—but we also had 10 other collaborators in there who were working on specific pieces, either an essay in most cases or a couple of times a different piece that are insets into that book. And for each one of those humans, they brought something to the book that Theo and I, with all of our experience, all of our magic, all of whatever, could not have brought, because that was their life experience. We asked people to write on things that they were specialists on, so we have Willow Kelly, who's a death doula, writing about death held within community and spiritual community in the section on love. Now neither of us—neither Theo nor myself—could have written that piece. We could have theorized about it and said, "Oh, this would be a great thing," but we weren't there being the death doula doing the work, whereas Willow was and has brought that depth. And so we have written on things that we're specialists on, and we have written kind of the generalized—I mean, in depth to us, right—but also generalized work within that book. And I just—my understanding, and when I read the book now, I look at it, I can see how the breadth is widened by the contributions of those people, and we could have mentioned those, but the depth within the breadth is brought by those co-contributors in a way that wasn't possible just with the two of us. And even in a book which is just the two of us, I think if you read our books separately, we write in pretty different styles and pretty different content. Even so, when we come together, we're bringing two different things together, and it's an amazing process—and not without its challenges, I'm sure we would both say—but it's also such a beautiful, beautiful process. And by now, this is our third book—the Pearl Pentacle one is our third book that we've co-collaborated on, so co-authored—so we're pretty confident in it now. And most of what I've said about writing, I think you could move across to co-creating magic and ritual as well. ## Bridging Ritual and Daily Life Okay, even the most powerful rituals must be integrated: how do I personally bridge the gap between the ritual or workshop and daily life? What practices help us to ground, digest, and live the transformation? Yeah, daily practice, I would say. And my daily practice does change around from time to time, but some elements of it currently are that I garden every day for an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes a bit longer, and like, occasionally not, but at least six days out of seven I would do this. I do it in the morning, and when I'm out there, like the white cockatoos swoop overhead and call out and I talk to them, I'm immersed with these little growing plants that I'm planting, and also what I'm weeding, which is a bit, you know, it feels out of balance sometimes. Like, I can easily, you know, murder—I'm going to say four, five, seven hundred weeds in that time, and I might plant one or two things if I happen to be planting that day. And, you know, I've justified it earlier in this interview why I'm doing that, which is a level, a very simple and local level, of bush regeneration. So that helps me—that practice. I do try and dance every day for half an hour, also in the mornings, and I write in my journal every day. And all of these practices—you could say they're not magical at all, right? They're just writing, dancing, gardening, and yet those are the times of the day where I probably feel most intimately in touch with my own magic, myself as a magical being. There might be more exciting things that I'm doing, like maybe I am working on a ritual or a book or who knows, you know, creating something magically, but, yeah, they're like the stars, whereas the night sky is all the rest of it—what's holding it together. ## What’s Calling Me Now My final question I chose is this one that says: *"Finally, what's calling you now? Are there practices, mysteries, or deities that are drawing you towards new edges or initiations? What are you currently exploring in your own deepening?"* Yeah, I mean always, of course, naturally. Maybe the one reason why I spoke of Eve earlier is that I am going to teach a workshop in Sheffield in the UK in about six weeks that is re-immersement, in that myth, the Eve myth—maybe from a slightly different angle, Eve, Lilith, and the serpent. And so I'm excited for that to come alive, like off the page in the planning and the administration into the actual, "Oh, now we're doing it," so that's exciting. Because *Magic of the Pearl Pentacle* only just was released, I'm still involved in a lot of kind of work around that. The Pearl Pentacle seems very present to me and I have started working on a new book, which seems really fun. And books are not always fun, but this one seems really fun, and it's a book around the major tarot cards. And I've always loved the tarot and I've worked with it a great deal as a reader and as teaching tarot to other people, and now writing about it just seems fun—plus, I'm not doing most of the writing. So I am kind of curating or managing and definitely editing a book with the contributions from many other people around these major cards. So I am exploring it, and I guess it's deepening me because, again, it's that breadth where you get the depth of the breadth from other people. So someone's written an essay on *The Lovers*, which I would never write if I was responsible for writing an essay on *The Lovers*, for example, and every other card you could apply that to, but it's really fun. So "deepening" sounds like it should be really serious: what am I deepening into? So I'm deepening, I guess, but it's fun and it feels light-hearted and sweet and, yeah, magical in that kind of stardust magical way. So we'll see what happens. That's what's calling me now. **PAA: Thank you very much for your time and detailed answers, we very much appreciate it. ** --- --- # Reviewing Jake Green’s “The Evocation Masterclass” by Andre Consciência Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/reviewing-jake-greens-the-evocation-masterclass-by-andre-consciencia/ ## Introduction Thanks to Andre for contributing this post that was originally in The Silver Star Journal 2025 (A Journal of New Magick) which is now published and available via the following links : ##### Amazon ##### Free PDF (Google Drive) --- ##### The Evocation Masterclass: ##### Complete Universal Evocation and Invocation ##### A course by Jake Green ##### A Review by André Consciência ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Magical-Tools-18-1024x576.png) Course available at: [The Evocation Masterclass: Complete Universal Evocation and Invocation](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/eGXY2) Eight months ago, Jake Green was so kind as to review one of my courses, connecting Franz Bardon’s methods to the Golden Dawn methods of addressing ceremonial magic (Ceremonial Magick and the Franz Bardon Tradition). This half-hour review can be found [here](https://youtu.be/j8H0P9UMywA?si=0NDpZkIqoZHTtN7C). I was quite curious about his own work, which I had only met from the outside and through articles and interviews, and had a mind to return the favour. From out of his courses, I chose “The Evocation Masterclass”, although I was warned by Jake that this was truly a course more dedicated to invocation than evocation. Now some may know that Jake comes from a particular branch of hermeticism called hermetics and, inside it, from again a particular successful branch initiated by [Sifu Mark Rasmus](https://markrasmus.org/), who joins his own methods and Tai Chi mastery with Franz Bardon’s methods. What I like about this lineage is that Mark Rasmus’ students seem to be creative teachers, each one with his or her own methods. Jake Green is the youngest I know and one of the brightest. His style links yet another methodology that, as a Shinpiden, I can identify: [Reiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiki). I think understanding Reiki could be a key to easily understand the work at The Evocation Masterclass. Now Mikao Usui, a Japanese Buddhist Monk, the father of the energy medicine and spiritual practice called Reiki, developed it to help those in need without having them go through all the discipline required of a monk, especially when people were not in the right condition even to consider it. After 21 days of meditation, fasting and retreat, Usui came down from Mount Kurama enlightened with a methodology of transmission that would accelerate enlightenment and healing. Jake brings this same kind of reductionist energetic quickness and easiness to hermetics. Can Reiki substitute years of monastic life and its associated rules and practices, can it replace a Buddhist monk training and make one a Bhikkhu or Bhikkhuni? It cannot, nor is it intended to. A Buddhist monk, likewise, is not a Reiki healer. So for hermetic practitioners, this course cannot substitute Initiation Into Hermetics plus The Practice of Magical Evocation, by Franz Bardon, but it remains its own thing by right, and a good thing. Finish it, and you will have an easy time completing hermetic training in other venues. On the other hand, complete Franz Bardon’s training and you will already have the capacity to do all within this Masterclass easily, but these ideas and distillations are Jake’s, and I promise great fun and creative exploration to the mature magician who still commits. Should we consider the Double Current, neither Crowley nor Nema came up with great systems of evocation (and neither does this Masterclass), but both had quite effective invocation practices. The advantage of this course is that more than a particular practice, it is indeed a whole system and is huge and effective enough. Can it replace Crowley’s “Liber Astarte” in all its depth? It makes no sense to me to speak in such terms. A work of art cannot replace another. What I know is that this masterclass, if you have the spare money, will fill in a systematic gap concerning invocation that I find in most modern magicians. And because the Silver Star is called “A Journal of New Magick” I imagined it as a good place to review it, not only because it is entirely new magick, but because it is lacking in new magick. Maatian magicians will find in the flesh methods of dancing the masks and literally rising on the levels in the face of any obstacle, as suggested by Nema in Maat Magick’s level 4. In terms of [Maat Magick](https://www.amazon.com/Maat-Magick-Guide-Self-Initiation-NEMA/dp/0877288275), this course covers subjects from level 10 to level 4, and avoids risking going any further. ## So what does this course teach exactly? First, the lessons on the attitude with which to address the course itself are priceless and should be paid the utmost attention. No method works without the proper attitude, and Jake takes his time addressing the right attitude for the context of this work. On top of it, Jake deals with transmissions, meaning the teacher himself synchronizes the student with the necessary energies or reality tunnels, the same as in Reiki. Along with the teacher, the beings invoked themselves will deepen this synchronicity. Methods of mental transference are taught kinetically, which makes it quite easy for anyone to grasp, and from there on, we engage with the ritual tools. Here, no ritual tool is taken as necessary, and all tools are optional. It is, however, necessary to develop what they symbolize. One’s clothes are isolation from outside interference, purity, and protect the body when we leave it. The crown, hat or headband is a barometer to measure one’s vibrational field and how high it remains. The wand is expansion, considered a conductive instrument, like the wand that conducts the orchestra, dynamically conducting the symphony of forces and spirits. The sword, symbolizing total victory, bears the feeling of complete fulfilment, and is attuned to Bardon’s cosmic letter U, the inflamed principle of the ether that modifies karma through the state of trance of the void. The lamp syncs one’s inner light with the light of the spheres. The censor infuses the experience with the quality of the aroma, which is pleasant and memorable. The mirror or crystal ball focuses the mind like a TV screen by relaxing peripheral vision. The magical journal makes all knowledge your own and distils it into perennial wisdom. The circle is paramount to the whole work, and is attuned to the cosmic letter E (The Key to the True Quabbalah), the letter of universal consciousness, omnipresence, a sense of astral consciousness throughout all times with the power to materialize or dematerialize anything. It is drawn or rather invoked from the crown chakra to one’s feet. The triangle is used within the circle for invocation, and outside for evocation, it represents the three dimensions we need in any object of perception, and functions as a battery, being able to draw power from Nature and one’s surroundings into the operation. The mission of the tools bearer? To birth new ideas for humanity. In line with it, I like Jake suggests as part of the preparation that one develops a cosmopolitan mind, travelling to know new cultures and dispose of cultural paradigms. The psychological effects of the seals are briefly addressed, although Jake prefers addressing seemingly an intuitive light of the being directly. Pentacles are like seals that, instead of addressing beings, address our own capacities in order to enhance them. Serving spirits given by “higher spirits” are said to listen to the magician’s subconscious constantly and to attune the magician according to function. These spirits are worked with, one for each element, so as to create magical equilibrium, that is, elemental equipoise. Jake expresses, as well, the matter of accountability popular in the magic of evocation, that is, the more you ask or accept of a spirit, the more you owe the spirit and will have to serve it in this life or the afterlife. I disagree with this Western economic view and have always been more of an Eastern mind. One is accountable to one’s conscience alone, and to one’s servitude to ignorance. Projecting this responsibility into an exterior object, even if we call it a being, is not understanding our own inherent disembodied nature, nor the being’s. Karma means false belief, and it breeds under ignorance. That is all we need to know about our accountability. A being does what is in the nature of its light, and so do we. If we deviate into the light of a being and its center by obfuscation, we may take our time to return to our center, which is what the metaphor of contracts and so on means. All the introductions having been given, we pass on to the practice, learning to separate in our thoughts the observer from the observed (further likely necessary techniques of mind control are mentioned but not engaged with), deepening mental transference and then pore breathing vital force. From this vital force we pass on to the astral energy by creating the sensation of slowing time up to a sense of timelessness and eternal now. Then, mental energy, extending the sphere around us up to a sense of spacelessness. One starts breathing in timelessness and breathing out spacelessness, concentrating on the pauses in between which lead to the so-called magical trance, or akashic trance, a timeless and spaceless mode of perception and existential condition. The akasha forms the circle and from there on we circulate between the akasha (minus) and non-dual light (plus), the pillar of light completing the magic circle. This shapes the basic principle behind the rituals of invocation that are to follow, and is to be completed by elemental postures and stances not unlike those of Tai Chi, where we breathe the four elements and understand the difference between the magnetic and the electric. These postures are differentiated via the sensations and colors being drawn in and out, and the direction of the stances, forward, inward, upward or downward. At this point the most delightful introduction to invocation is given via masks. It is delightful to me, as an actor and plastic artist who uses enlivened masks in my performances, and, I believe, to all Maatian magicians who dance the masks in their daily lives. The mask is loaded from the crown, hands and eyes, much like in Reiki, but with the akasha and then the light of the being or deity we wish to animate it with. We give it depth and detail and aliveness by adding the four elements, one at a time, in completing layers. The course at this point points to the first adventures of mental wandering (commonly known as astral projection with the subtle body and not the dense astral body or etheric body under its physical comatose requirements). We conjure the circle as mentioned before, leave again through the crown chakra and start visiting the elemental kingdoms. First we move invisibly, camouflaged by akashic substance or imagining that we are a tiny spark. It is recommended that we only engage with elemental beings and become visible after three months have passed of us immersing ourselves in the elemental kingdoms, so as not to pass as fishes out of water or to incur in any danger. At this point, all is fine to the ones with natural talent, but I believe otherwise people will benefit from training elsewhere their imagination, such as fixing images, sounds, odours and so on, combining them, and making them clear and stabilized enough, unless visions become vague and faint. That we have, in this course, trained separating the observer from the observed several times and for several minutes will help us recall our journeys, and in this regard, we are well served. Be that as it may, repetition and insistence on mental wandering will make up for the previous lack of training. Generally, in Egyptian Magick, Bardon’s hermetics, and most theosophical schools, we create the mental and astral bodies. One thing is to delve into mental states, astral states and etheric states, as in the three transformations taught within the masterclass; another is to give these states a body with its own mechanisms of operation and organism. To compensate, Jake leads us to take the shape of the elementals after saturating our bodies with the elements. As a matter of style, Jake does not specify the mechanics or shapes of these bodies, so as not to lead one to attachment to any particular shape and mode of functioning. I think this may be both beneficial and not, since we may again fall into a blurred experience, a lack of precision and definition. On the same line, we are left lacking the development of extrasensory abilities and the ability to test them in the field. This makes it so that many of our journeys may take place only as guided meditations. But again, with repetition, via transpersonal psychology, one will inevitably and eventually fine-tune to the elemental realms in a metaphysical sense. Since we haven’t yet started to work with the serving spirits, we begin our mental wanderings with a strong potential for imbalance, lacking magical equilibrium. The associated risks are avoided by making sure we leave through the crown chakra (always bound to self-transcendence), a focus on equanimity is enforced and we are reminded of an attitude of non-attachment. We are also taught repeatedly to avoid aggressive beings altogether in our path of invocation and posterior evocation. This takes place because the course does not teach us a method by which to reach the state of the Godhead. This is later compensated by the integration of all the heads of the Sun Sphere, who are responsible for all original ideas. Jake uses the word negative for active aggressiveness and at the same time for the negative pole, but then ends up equating negative with bad. There are no bad entities in the eyes of the Godhead, no matter the sphere, kingdom or plane (Jake himself adopts this point of view as his own, initially, and I assume thus his later stance is a matter of responsibility towards the student’s wellbeing and safety, a sign you are still in good hands). Jake finally leads us to a place between form and the formless, where he himself initiates us by direct transmission into the akasha and the principle of light. It could be said the student would have benefited from this earlier, however, this may as well be the perfect timing since the student already has a practical idea of both the light and the akasha, and will be able to tap into what is being given, empowering and calibrating skills already acquired. We cannot create anything in another via transmission, we can only add to what the other has cultivated. The light we are receiving is programmed for success in evocational magic (although we are dealing with invocation, successful evocation requires a successful invocation and includes it). Solar currents from solar heads are integrated in the transmission, and one may question why pick the Sun and not the Moon, since the Moon is the item of the Priestess, the card of evocation, and since the Moonsphere is the sphere of the astral planes and their manifestations by excellence. The sun is hermetically and alchemically marked by that dot in the center of the circle, and this dot is the center of the universe, the universal central candle that sheds the light of creation around it, the supreme deity, Hadit, the Godhead or, as known, the magician ready to evoke in the middle of the circle. We pass to creating elementals. Some distinguish between elementals, as beings of a particular element among the four elements, and elementaries, automatic beings made of mental and astral substance meant for a certain end, kind of robots running on mental energy circuits. Which of the two is Jake working with? I’d say elementaries, according to context. I find it very interesting that the training Jake has us undergo starts by first becoming conscious of the elementaries (including egregores) that already surround us. There is a remark around these lessons that I find myself in the duty to debate. Jake, as an example, tells us to avoid any thoughtforms or egregores from Persia, since these do not understand our times and would be harmful. Although Persia is gone, the religion of Persia is very much alive, influential and organized, and as it was ahead of its time then, it still is now aligned with all European ideals of the future. This religion is called Zoroastrianism and it is far more relevant to the present needs than the religions of Islam or general Christianism, which have become somewhat outdated within cultural evolution. Within monotheism, it is matched only by progressive Judaism. In fact, any magician practicing, including the one formed by this very masterclass, is following the precepts given to us by Zoroastrianism, and the word magician is a progression of the Persian word magi. As a concept, it remains the same. One of the movies “Exorcist”, endorsed by the Catholic Church, is mentioned as a reference about what can happen if one engages with Persian thoughtforms, and it is not a great example since this is a distortion enforced by Catholicism. Such distortion, be that as it may, was not really towards Zoroastrianism or Persia, but targeted at something else in the region and further back in time: Mesopotamia. We are referring to Pazuzu, a demonic deity that was already feared back then as a bringer of plagues, misfortune and an underworld power. Jake does tell us, in a way, to avoid any influences from outside our modern times, but the Sumerians could have taught a magician that Pazuzu was used even by the commoner in talismans to ward off negative influences and spirits, just as Set defended Ancient Egypt from Apep. There is something to learn about this, and if the magician cannot be a cosmopolitan in space as well as in time, he lacks the necessary material to be a scientist of what brings together the human and the universal. In fact, the magician cannot be a magician therefore, the expansion of consciousness blocked by the blindness of his mortal age, unable to bring forth the new ideas to the world that appear as the very mission of the magician in this great masterclass. As a final note, let us remember the deities of Sumer still have some minor following even today. I recently wrote a 30 pages article for Inannothology II (Eanna Press) on how Inanna might be one of the deities with a greater hold on our modern urban life, leading evolution from Eridu to Ur, and from Ur continuing to our industrial revolutions and technological eras. Let us not forget that it is the Forgotten Ones that most control us, not the surface objects, and although Nema brought this to plain mystical broad daylight, it still is fundamental Freudian psychology. Having it said, Jake’s advice is still wise and correct, and for this very reason, because the student is not yet equipped to handle the influence of the Forgotten Ones. After anchoring the students in the Sun Sphere, Jake will lead us on an excursion through time to the mystical abodes of Ancient Egypt. Back to the elementals/elementaries, we give the elemental about to be created a name (Jake does not advise unique names but combinations of names of generic things, so as to later dissolve the elemental back easily), a timeline of existence for the elemental, an associated color, a purpose, and a shape (Jake suggests a white sphere – also covers color – to avoid attachment not only from the magician but from the being to its own self and self-perseverance). The timeline to use during our training is about 7 days, short enough to test real effectiveness and recalibrate our efforts with the next elementary. These elementals are created via non-dual light, and so vampiric phantoms are avoided: the result is that we, luckily enough, do not get what we want, but what we need. Jake offers us a great idea on how to easily keep our elementals charged by loading crystals as their batteries with the four elements, light, the akasha and quabbalistic frequencies. We are instructed on this performance, only having to repeat once a week. We move on to invoking the planetary oscillations. By equalizing with them, we gain immunity from their astral influences for once, and boost their inspiring influences and insights. We are advised to work with these oscillations only on the scale of elemental equilibrium, and at last we enter deep waters, invoking the native beings. In case we wish for a specific being not listed in any grimoire, Jake gives us a kind of hack to invoke directly from the Brotherhood of Light. This name comes from “Frabato The Magician”, a book inspired by the life and character of Franz Bardon, with some directives given by the author before imprisonment. I have developed my theories (and still have some to reveal) about the nature of this Brotherhood, but, roughly speaking, we are referring to what is commonly known as The Great White Brotherhood, from which also Aleister Crowley devised the A.´.A.´. Jake suggests we do not ask for the names or seals of these beings and keep non-attached to them. I find advantages and disadvantages to this, but it is a unique suggestion that I haven’t seen anywhere else, and since it has indeed its undeniable advantages, it is to me an original idea that inspires admiration. We are then to attune ourselves by invocation with our particular master in each sphere, but Saturn and Mars keep being left out. This safeguard exists as well in Bardon’s “The Practice of Magical Evocation”, although what Franz Bardon does is omit the seals of these beings, since the mature magician will be able to get them in any case, thus preventing the abuse of curiosity. I suggest you leave indeed Mars and Saturn out at this point, if all you have to draw on for the time being is this Masterclass and you are not yet particularly advanced in its materials. I do not suggest you leave these spheres out permanently, since it leads to magical imbalance. For instance, Jake suggests we work with the masters of the spheres to eliminate karmic residues attached to the corresponding astrological influences (the release of any hooks by which the spheres control the magician), but how can you do it effectively if you don’t clean Mars and Saturn, Saturn being exactly the place for this? So, I would interpret Jake’s dismissal of these spheres as a precaution to the student, not as a precaution to the Adept. Jake likewise enforces the idea of ascension, but tells us to avoid Neptune, the sphere of ascension by excellence. The case has, in my view, the same motivations, and Jake mentions it could be okay to explore these spheres if well-centered in the sphere of the Sun. This solution speaks undoubtedly of his experience and earned wisdom. At this point, we invoke the elementals (not our elementaries, the elementals that are the nature sprites of the four elements). After invoking the elementals, we can now work with their serving spirits and refine our magical equilibrium. Usually, this is done before working with the spheres, but in this case we have obtained an advantage over the swaying of the elements by gaining immunity to astrological influences. Included and central to it all is a “quadrapolar” exercise that reunites all four elements and connects them in their polarization ( fire + - water | fire + - air | air + - earth | water + - earth ), forming a magical current. This at once solves the problem of magical equilibrium, except for the lack of introspection potentially occurring in this system. I say potentially because if you are doing the work right, the beings will lead you to it eventually. But you cannot expect the serving spirits connected to your subconscious to do the conscious work of character refinement that is yours to do, and the astral equilibrium, that is, the energy work of balance, cannot substitute psychological healing and integral balance. In other words, energy work functions as treatment; it may restore function and null disharmony, but it does not always unroot the cause. This quadrapolar volt can be used around us in invocation (in conjunction with the circle containing the triangle) or in evocation, the four elemental beings evoked placed around the exterior triangle and securing the evocation, which Jake suggests is only necessary when working with dangerous entities. So, although the course specializes in invocation, it does lead all the way to evocation that works. Say you are invoking a salamander, you engage akashic breathing into the circle, the light fills all the way to the pineal gland and heart, and downwards the astral light flows to the dantian, and the vital force. Then you assume an electric posture, create fire inside, invoke down the light of the particular salamander, its mental body, then its astral body and, if necessary, a serving spirit. To dismiss the entity, you allow it to leave from where it entered, the crown chakra. During evocation, Jake gives the elementals the shape of elemental pillars. Working in unison with us, Jake proceeds to send us directly the planetary lights, this time including up to Neptune and Pluto, and gives us a technique called The String of Pearls, in which you accumulate the planetary oscillations by invoking them from the crown chakra down one by one, via the casting of the circle/pillar technique that serves as a base to the artistry hereby given. We then mental wander to these spheres, and invoke specific monarchs and heads, in the Moon removing negative biorhythms; in Mercury cleansing our mind of intellectual constraints and visiting the akashic library; in Venus we become more impermeable to attraction and repulsion and visit a secret mirror; and the Sun sphere comes again quite central to the whole operation, connecting celestial (macrocosm) and terrestrial (microcosm) streams, having us gain universal consciousness and faculties and hyper-charging our circle from here on. The work of invoking the being stops in the Sun when it comes to the spheres, but concludes by working with Ancient Egyptian deities (Jake does work with ancient spirits, but asks us to be sure we have a firm foundation now). Nearing the end of the course, we are introduced to a level which seems to me of the utmost importance, but that isn’t given a lot of time, and that has been inserted as a bonus. It is called “Using Light to Work with Initiation Into Hermetics”. The exercises cover one of the first practices by Franz Bardon, thought observation, and suggest we invoke planetary light oscillations, observe our thoughts for a period of time, and then write it all down, comparing notes. It follows on to concentration and vacuity, and puts on the table we can use all kinds of light, be it elemental, planetary, quabbalistic frequencies, and so on. This level, which has only one thirty-minute lesson, could become a work of genius. Just like I reworked Initiation Into Hermetics through the lens of the soul mirror technique, Jake suggests a picture in which the whole system is worked through the light. Also, it is mentioned that since the magician is now an Adept firm in the Sun, the initiation books have all opened their secrets. I do agree with Jake. And this idea of using light, this light of an idea, can be shed on books like Book Four by Crowley, Maat Magick by Nema, and not be limited to IIH. > All this having been said I give my congratulations and admiration to the teacher, and vividly recommend the materials. After being gifted with some “combos”, meaning combined fast invocations that work like formulas for certain ends, we finish with another bonus course: “Automatic Writing”. This is the stuff of books like Liber Al vel Legis, Liber Pennae Praenumbra, The Wisdom of S'lba, and so forth. Now, thanks to Jake, we can freely and easily birth these new ideas onto the face of the Earth. All this having been said I give my congratulations and admiration to the teacher, and vividly recommend the materials. The Masterclass towers high above the average and might be the best course I’ve seen on Invocation. I stress that it could help having some natural talent or inspiration, or at least some minor magical training or holistic activity (Reiki can be an example), and you should practice everything Jake presents: this is no spiritual safari tourism, face it like that, and you will be looking to the face of man meditating with closed eyes and breathing deeply. Guess what? This person should be you. In case you are in a learning spree and wish to complement this course, picking from other Perseus Arcane Academy courses I know, I’d recommend my “[Magic & Mystical Introspection](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/pJtvd)” to help with lacking magical introspection techniques, my “[Elemental Magic Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/elemental-magic)” to complement the lack of structured elemental bodies and organs as understood on the different planes (both courses form a bundle) or the [Neoshamanism course level 1](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism) to quickly and easily create your own mental body. I’d also recommend “[Attaining Your Guardian Angel](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/N15Jd)” by Denny Sargent. Jake tells you to use your guardian genius if you have known yours, and although we do get to invoke our Higher Self during the Masterclass, no practical or theoretical instruction is given about the Guardian Angel as an in-between term. It is quite handy to have one around when you are parading like Dante in paradise, and Denny Sargent can, in simple terms and comprehensively, bring about your own Virgil. For specialization in evocation you can follow to Nenad Talerman’s “First Step to Divine Providence - 310 days of one-on-one supervised training”, and to sediment that Godhead state, I’d dare say my “[Ceremonial Magic and the Franz Bardon Tradition](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/ceremonial-magic-and-the-bardon-tradition-levels-1-to-3) level 3 – The Grand Ritual of Invocation”, but since it requires, even for a simple understanding of what is going on, that you complete the previous two levels, I recommend instead that you do not give up Initiation Into Hermetics level 10. Whatever system you are coming from, if you engage in this awesome “[The Evocation Masterclass](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/eGXY2)” to the end, I am wishing you apply those lights to great grimoires and holy books, or scientific books and mathematical puzzles, and hope that you, now so well equipped, may come to write your own celestial gifts. --- --- # From Winding Paths to Celestial Wisdom: Tamara’s Vedic Astrology Journey Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-winding-paths-to-celestial-wisdom-tamaras-vedic-astrology-journey/ ## Introduction The words' Who Am I' is something we all ask ourselves at some point...in this interview Tamara shares how she went about answering this question through multiple different and challenging paths. She detials her journey towards astrolgy, dream work and much more. I want to thank Tamara for sharing with us on Perseus and wish her all the best with her new website - [visit it here](https://prismastrology.com/). If you enjoy this post please let us know, leave a comment, share it with a friend or give it rank at the bottom of the post out of five starts. --- ## Interview ## Labyrinthine Journey to Astrology **PAA:You’ve described your life path as a series of “labyrinthine detours” – studying art, dance, shiatsu, theater, and trance work – all fueled by an ongoing quest to answer “Who am I?”. How did these winding experiences eventually guide you to the path of Vedic astrology, and what inner calling or realization made you recognize this ancient practice as the heart of your spiritual work today?** My mother was an astrologer, and so I had early contact with astrology simply through her. I’ve always been interested in it, even though I never really delved deeply into the subject. What really sparked my deeper involvement was the time during and around the pandemic. I had to quit and pause dancing withdrew a lot during that period and began to engage more seriously not only with Hermeticism and Franz Bardon, but also with Vedic astrology. I could have studied Western astrology with my mother—we even started—but through a contact in the Bardon community, I was introduced to Vedic astrology. Since I knew very little about it, I began to research it, and I found it incredibly fascinating. What impressed me most was how deeply Vedic astrology is embedded within the larger framework of Vedic philosophy. There are connections everywhere—to Ayurveda, to philosophy, really to everything in that sphere. I find that very exciting. It’s a holistic and extremely ancient system. The Indians have managed to preserve and cultivate this ancient knowledge over millennia, whereas in the West, much of it has been lost. Eventually, I began a course at the American Institute for Vedic Studies with Dr. David Frawley, Generally, Vedic astrology uses the sidereal (stellar) system for calculations. So was it the case with this course. The sidereal system bases its calculations on the actual constellations in the sky, aligning the zodiac signs with their current astronomical positions. The tropical system, on the other hand, is based on the seasons and aligns the zodiac with the position of the Sun at the spring equinox. This means the sidereal and tropical zodiacs are currently about 23–24 degrees apart, which can shift the signs and houses in a chart significantly. When I tried working with the sidereal system, it felt very unfamiliar at first—the charts looked completely different. I really tried to get used to it, but I just couldn’t find myself reflected in the sidereal chart. It was the same with those close to me. Then, by chance, I came across my current teacher, Ernst Wilhelm. He has been using the tropical system for several years now. He’s done a lot of research involving many charts, and he came to the conclusion that the tropical system is simply more accurate. He also discovered that even some ancient Indians sussed the tropical system.* If anyone wants to learn more, they can do their own research—either on his website or online in general. I don’t want to go too deep into that controversly discussed topic here.* In Vedic astrology, there are many tools available that support personal growth based on one’s individual chart and planetary placements. It’s incredibly versatile, and there’s really something in it for everyone—it’s also very practical. No matter which aspect of Vedic philosophy you engage with, you can always find a connection to Vedic astrology. Vedic astrology is not only strong in the psychological interpretation of charts but also very much in making predictions. There are highly developed and mathematically complex methods used to make these or to determine the right timing for a specific undertaking. To put it plainly, I find that Vedic astrology resonates with me more deeply than Western astrology—both due to its simplicity on the one hand, and its connection to the broader Vedic worldview on the other. In Western astrology, one often encounters long-winded psychological interpretations, whereas the theoretical framework in Vedic astrology is more straightforward. It then becomes the task of the astrologer to extract complexity from this simplicity. The planets and signs possess a multitude of characteristics that highlight their layered nature. In mythology, planets sometimes bear several names, each carrying a particular meaning. The individual planets are associated with elements, gunas (qualities of nature), castes, specific numbers, and geometric forms—just to name a few. From this simplicity, it’s entirely possible to build a more complex portrait of a personality by synthesizing the elements. Interestingly, the more psychological interpretations of Western astrology also stem from basic symbols and traits. I simply find the path from Vedic knowledge to complex interpretation more fascinating, accessible, and—in a sense—more faithful to the original, if that can be said. That said, I do value modern Western astrology as well. I enjoy different perspectives and believe we shouldn’t become dogmatic about any single approach. Vedic astrology itself has been enriched by Arab and Greek ideas, especially during the time of Alexander the Great—such as the integration of the zodiac signs. Sometimes, it's important not to mix different systems within Vedic astrology itself. At such times, it's essential to focus on a few key principles. The most important skill is to know how to differentiate and then make a conscious choice. However, there are also situations where it makes sense to apply various perspectives. A very simple example is the inclusion of the outer planets—Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune—which are traditionally not part of the Vedic system because they were discovered much later. Personally, I find it interesting to consider their placement in a chart during readings. **PAA: What unique insights or transformative power have you found in this ancient approach? How do you navigate tensions between different astrological paradigms or philosophical worldviews as you synthesize them in your practice?** This is really a matter of what works best and what feels authentic to me. When blending systems, I think it’s also important not to dismantle or dilute the original method—otherwise, you risk distorting it. Every astrologer develops an individual way of working, combining different approaches and aligning them with their own personality. For example, while I mainly work according to Vedic paradigms, I am also fascinated by Greek mythology and how it relates to the elements, zodiac signs, and planets. Just because one engages deeply with one system doesn't mean others are wrong. At the core, it's always about having a tool that can support others—and one that you can stand behind yourself. **PAA: What sparked your devotion to Vedic astrology in particular?** When I think about it, I’ve always experienced the greatest benefit and deepest commitment when I not only had a strong interest in something but also had a mentor—someone who deeply inspired me through their own example. That was the case during my Buddhist phase, in dance with my Japanese teacher, with Franz Bardon, and now with Ernst Wilhelm. That said, I also maintain a critical mind and question things. Eventually, autonomy develops, and you begin to synthesize—and to draw more and more from your own well. That’s a fascinating process. Like most people, I’ve struggled with uncertainty in life. Vedic astrology helps me better understand myself and work on my habits and quirks. I’ve also found that it enables me to view my parents with more compassion, despite the ways in which they contributed to certain difficulties through how I was raised. How could I hold a grudge against them 100% when I can see where they came from—what shaped them and the generations before? The spiritual dimension of Vedic astrology offers a solid foundation for truly deep transformation. But change doesn’t happen automatically—it depends on how we transfer this wisdom into our lives. This system provides many tools for that: from working with Indian deities and avatars associated with the planets, to reciting mantras, to wearing specific gemstones to mitigate negative planetary influences or enhance positive ones. For those who prefer a more pragmatic or “Western” approach, affirmations can also be used—developed based on planetary placements—because astrology can help us identify negative behavioral patterns. I love the wisdom behind this knowledge. ## Intuition, Body, and Cosmos **PAA: Your journey began in creative and somatic disciplines – dance, performance art, and even trance work – before astrology became your focus. Do you find that these artistic and embodied experiences influence how you practice astrology or work with dreams? For example, does your background in movement or Shiatsu inform an intuitive, felt-sense approach to reading a chart or deciphering a dream’s symbolism? How do you balance the analytical, mathematical side of Vedic astrology with the intuitive, experiential wisdom you cultivated through the arts and body-centered practices? ** I don't try to force a complete synthesis of everything I do, but I do believe that knowing how to be present in one’s body—and truly inhabiting it—can be incredibly helpful. In the end, everything we engage in to understand ourselves more deeply or simply to feel alive is also of service to others. When I work with a client who is drawn to artistic expression or somatic practices, I can meet them there and use those tools as part of the developmental process, drawing on my own life experience. There are many ways to approach a challenge, and each person is unique. It may be precisely because of my background in embodied and creative work that I’m able to respond to clients in a more nuanced and personalized way. Theoretical frameworks—such as those in Shiatsu, where organ systems are linked to elements and meridians—are also useful. Some of these concepts overlap with Ayurvedic principles, while others diverge. Then there are people who are more intellectually inclined and may not resonate with mantra recitation. In those cases, it's essential to have that analytical and logical foundation to meet them where they are. Ideally, it's a blend: analytical thinking, theoretical knowledge, and intuitive insight. When I'm grounded in my own body and centered within myself, I’m better able to be of service to others. Of course, that’s not always easy to maintain. But for me, these diverse areas of interest are also ways to stay in balance. After spending hours in front of the computer analyzing charts, it’s important to reconnect with life—not just mentally, but through the body, spirit, and lived experience. **Working with dreams offers another pathway for deciphering symbols—one that helps us explore what drives us, what blocks us, what we fear, and what we need to develop further.** It’s a form of analysis that focuses on the imagery we ourselves produce, whereas astrology deals with a more universal layer of symbolic meaning. But synthesis between these approaches is definitely possible. I can offer a personal example to illustrate this: I once had a dream in which a man invited me into his studio to show me something. He had sculpted a sun and a moon—each about the size of a car tire—from a soft, foam-like material. Both the sun and the moon had faces. He pointed to the smiling face of the sun and said: “For women, the gaze of the sun should turn inward.” At first glance, this statement seemed to directly contradict how the sun is typically understood in astrology: as the core of one’s being, a symbol of authentic self-expression, associated with the masculine and the element of fire. The idea that the sun’s gaze should turn inward for women reflects more introspective, traditionally feminine qualities. This kind of dream anecdote can feel like a koan or an ancient sutra—something you chew on until a deeper meaning starts to emerge. Dreams often present us with contrasts, paradoxes, and logic-defying images. And yet, in that one sentence, I sensed a truth—even if only the invitation to reexamine the way we think astrologically. Of course, it was also a very personal message: a call to seek the sun within rather than in the outer world. ## Embracing the Realm of Dreams **PAA: We understand you’re about to embark on training in Jungian dream guidance. What led you to this new focus on the world of dreams at this stage in your journey? How do you envision weaving Jungian dreamwork into your existing practice of Vedic astrology and healing – do you see dreams as another kind of “star map” of the psyche, or perhaps as a missing piece that complements the astrological picture? Additionally, what are you most excited to learn or explore through this forthcoming training?** Dreams come to us from the unconscious. One could say they possess their own kind of intelligence and can assist us with their inherent wisdom. In astrology, the Moon represents our feminine, receptive side. Through the Moon, we are able to adapt to ever-changing environments and situations. Our emotional life is also connected with the Moon. The Moon always has a dark side, which serves as a metaphor for our own shadowy, emotional depths. It is associated with the water element. I like to think of dreams as treasures resting at the bottom of an ocean or lake—like an old chest waiting to be retrieved. This chest can hold both pleasant and unpleasant, even frightening contents. But the moment this treasure reaches the surface and the daylight of the Sun—our consciousness and insight—it begins to lose its fear-inducing or mysterious quality. For me, the process of dreaming is closely linked to the characteristics of our most essential celestial bodies. I would love to study the dreams of individuals who are in the typical age range of major life transitions such as the midlife crisis—ages that often come with certain recurring dream themes. These life phases frequently align with planetary maturations: specifically, Saturn at 36, Rahu (the North Node of the Moon) at 42, and Ketu (the South Node) at 48. I’m turning 50 this year, and I’ve gotten a personal taste of this process. Saturn plays a tremendously important role in how we deal with life's challenges. With Saturn, we are asked to let go and surrender to something greater than ourselves—to the developmental stages our soul came into this life to experience. Depending on where Saturn is placed and under what conditions, it marks the area and nature of the task Saturn demands from us. With Rahu, we are pulled into a field of experience that is entirely unfamiliar. We must enter it fully, often around age 42, when we’re pushed into a new realm—into the “jungle” of transformation. It’s exhilarating, sometimes terrifying, and often deeply rewarding. And then, just as suddenly, it ends. Ketu, on the other hand, represents our safety paradigm. It is where we come from and where we find comfort—but it is also a restrictive kind of safety. Rahu wants us to break free from this limitation and step into the jungle. Depending on how well we navigate and integrate the Saturn and Rahu maturation phases, by age 48 the fortress that once gave us security might either crumble or at least begin to show cracks. If we resist the developmental call, a profound dissatisfaction may arise. Even beyond 48, we continue to oscillate along the Rahu–Ketu axis. Interpreting dreams at this stages could offer compelling insights into the psychology of these life transitions. With maturity, we eventually find peace and contentment in Ketu. The exact nature of this experience is, again, defined by the sign and house placement of the lunar nodes in the birth chart. This is just one possible approach. I believe dreamwork can be meaningfully integrated into the personal growth process initiated through astrological counseling—and ideally, continued over time. I’m deeply curious to observe how my own dreams will evolve during this training, whether they will become more vivid or structured, and I look forward to learning theoretical frameworks that will help me and others interpret dreams more effectively. ## Dreams as Spiritual Guides **PAA: Dreams have a unique way of speaking in symbols and images, much like astrology does. How have your own dreams (or those of people you’ve worked with) guided or inspired you on your spiritual path so far? Can you share an instance where a dream offered a breakthrough insight or healing message that deeply influenced your perspective or approach? More broadly, what role do you see dreams playing in spiritual growth and self-discovery for the esoteric seeker?** I am very grateful for this question because I think it's important to mention another aspect of dreams beyond their connection to a person’s emotional state. I truly believe that there are dreams that just make you feel blissful and in peace, dreams that offer us deeper spiritual insights, and even prophetic dreams. I have also had contact with deceased loved ones in some of them. Let me share two examples from my more recent past that had an impact on me: In one of these dreams, I was in New York (even though I’ve never actually visited the city). In my dream, it was an exciting and culturally vibrant place. I walked across a public square where a fancily dressed dancer was performing. I could have easily joined in the dance, but I decided to keep walking. I moved along crowded streets until I turned into a side alley and came across a small party—but I left that too and ventured deeper into the winding city. It got quieter and slightly darker. Then I transformed into a young girl—or perhaps I was both: woman and child. I began to dance in a circle in the middle of a courtyard, singing joyfully in an African language. In that moment, I realized that I was a kind of magician and healer. I told someone there that I had been this way since childhood, and that always when I was in that state, my eyes widened, with a deep blue light glowing at their lower edge. I knew that I had also been a Chinese sage—everything within one person. But this wasn´t that important. Because the main subject of the dream was that I realized it was showing me different kinds of dance: the fancy dancing in public in front of an audience, and dance as a form of prayer in hidden places. And that’s exactly how I see dance today. For me, it has become a form of devotional prayer. Through it, I can connect with an energy that seems to live both within and around us. In another dream, I encountered a former colleague who, in real life, works in a pharmaceutical and super-sterile lab. I had only a superficial connection to her, but in the dream she turned out to be a wise herbal woman who had transformed the lab into an alchemical herb room. She gave me very specific instructions on how to prepare the various parts of the elder plant to make medicine. One part involved cooking the herb for 10 hours while stirring, and she told me to pay close attention to the consistency. I was deeply impressed by the dream because she radiated such incredible wisdom and warmth that I couldn’t resist her presence. I was astonished by this lesson. She also advised me to spend more time in nature. Somehow, it felt like she was Mother Holle (Hulda)… After the dream, I ran into her again in real life—and the magic was completely gone. In reality, she’s not particularly sensitive and rather rough. I’ve always felt drawn to herbal medicine and have had several plant-related dreams. Interestingly, I haven’t been able to find the preparation methods from the dream in any reference book. And I’ve never understood why my subconscious chose *her* of all people for this dream. ## Feminine Wisdom and Inner Balance **PAA: You have noted that within each person the male and female sides of the psyche should be healthy and balanced. How does the feminine dimension of spirituality figure into your practice and personal journey? Do you consciously work with feminine archetypes or deities – perhaps drawing on lunar or Venusian symbolism, goddess energies, or the concept of *Shakti *– when interpreting charts or guiding dreamwork? Additionally, as a woman forging your own path in astrology and spiritual healing, have you found empowerment through embracing the sacred feminine, and what insights has this brought you about balancing feminine and masculine energies within yourself and in the collective?** I really appreciate this question because I believe that what we commonly refer to today as feminine and masculine qualities are often lived in a distorted way. If we want to develop our feminine side in a healthy way, we cannot avoid also taking care of our masculine side. One cannot exist without the other. Not long ago, I participated in a women’s retreat hosted by a friend. During a group discussion, each woman expressed a desire to connect more deeply with her femininity. I, on the other hand, said that I wanted to strengthen my masculine side—and received some curious looks. But isn’t that just one half of a whole? If we are not rooted in our femininity, we are not rooted in our masculinity either—and vice versa. This applies to both women and men. Most of the time, we live out an exaggerated and distorted version of either femininity or masculinity. When women today rise to leadership positions, that’s absolutely to be welcomed. However, if their leadership is mainly driven by masculine energy, it’s not so different from the patriarchal structures they often criticize in men. Since we still live in a world where feminine values are often underrepresented, it is crucial to bring them more consciously into awareness. When we do that, we nourish and protect the planet, engage more deeply in peace-building efforts, and become less caught up in competition. If we were to view the planet Earth and humanity as one body and mind, it would resemble a workaholic exploiting its own system—dying early from heart failure… and no one showing up to the funeral. Of course, that’s a rather extreme image. There are many wonderful initiatives and individuals who work against that trend—but in my view, not nearly enough. That’s why it’s so important to honor and embody our feminine nature—especially for us women. But at the same time, we must also acknowledge the masculine and make use of its strengths alongside the feminine. As the *Tao Te Ching* says: **“Know the male, yet keep to the female.”** In a world that often overemphasizes masculine traits like achievement and power, this line invites us to consciously embrace the opposite qualities: stillness, devotion, intuition, and patience. I try to cultivate both sides within myself and often draw inspiration from mythological figures—though this is something I approach situationally and in phases. I’ve found my own “imaginary” spiritual guides, and I consciously reconnect with them again and again. One is a female figure, the other more masculine. They came to me in special places, through dreams, or via synchronistic experiences. I never had a particular connection to lions, but during a difficult time, lion energy began to quietly appear in my daily life—it was everywhere. When you nurture such a presence like a beloved old friend, it can become a great source of support. Children do this constantly, with their imagination and through objects we consider inanimate. We live in a performance-oriented society. But when is it better to withdraw, to rest, to turn inward, to access inner reserves, to nourish ourselves emotionally and physically? And when do we need to act—courageously, decisively, bringing things into form, standing our ground? There is a right moment for everything. Every pause, every moment of awareness, is inherently feminine in nature, because it draws us into a receptive stillness—a space in which we observe and absorb. And in that stillness, the dance of Shakti reveals itself. In Hindu philosophy, ***Shakti**** *is the creative force of the universe—the dance, the music, the vitality—which becomes unleashed through ***Shiva***, the unmanifested, eternal consciousness that permeates everything. Shiva is the stillness at the center of the storm, the absolute calm. In Taoism, ***Yin*** also represents aspects of stillness, potential, and receptivity—qualities that share a resonance with Shiva’s unmoving nature. *Yin* is always defined in relation to ***Yang***, and vice versa, containing within itself the impulse toward movement and transformation. The dots in the Yin-Yang symbol point to the dynamic, inseparable nature of these two forces. In my astrological readings, I increasingly notice how important it is to remain receptive and open. Ideally, this creates a space where a true meeting in the middle can happen. An aggressive approach would be to overwhelm the client with theory and enter into a monologue. That drains the life out of the session and erodes empathy. Many analogies come to mind from other fields. My final thesis at art school was an exploration of silence and language. I spent a week in silence and created a video work in which I interviewed two people—a man and a woman—about their relationship to silence in connection with another person. During editing, I emphasized the pauses between their words. Silence holds tension—a tremendous potential. And then, the body begins to speak. That’s a deeply energetic process. In **Butoh dance**, it’s similar. It’s an art form that is profoundly feminine in nature. I would even associate this intense dance with the zodiac sign **Scorpio**, as it is about transformation and the shift from one state to another all the time. Butoh is silence, and through its slowness, it cultivates an awareness of that “moving” stillness—the unfolding of motion occurs gradually. Today, even in social media and YouTube videos, pauses in speech are edited out—stripping communication of a certain depth. The meta-level of speech disappears. But I suppose I’m drifting off-topic now…;) ## Empowering the Seeker **PAA: You often provide clients with practical tools like Vedic mantras, meditative exercises, daily affirmations, or even Bach flower remedies to support their journey. Within a session, how do you balance your role as the interpreter of cosmic or dream symbols with empowering the client’s own inner wisdom? Do you invite clients to actively engage with their charts and dreams – perhaps through dialogue, reflection, or “homework” practices – rather than just passively receiving information? What approaches do you use to ensure the healing process is collaborative, so that the individual feels personally connected to their growth and transformation?** I believe it’s absolutely essential to create a space in which the client can actively participate. I’ve found that simply delivering information without understanding what the other person truly needs doesn’t actually help anyone. That’s why meaningful exchange during the session is so important to me. If there isn’t at least a minimum level of self-empowerment or a genuine willingness to transform, then an astrological consultation won’t be very effective. I’ve also moved away from offering my services randomly or without a clear impulse from the other person—because in those cases, it often turned out that the timing simply wasn’t right for them. The impulse to have an astrology session, the desire to change something, really has to come from within the person. Otherwise, the work won’t bear fruit. It’s like watering a seed that actually still needs to rest, because the outside temperature isn’t quite right yet. That’s why it’s also important for the person to have their own tools or methods to engage with the insights in a way that suits them—and ideally, in a way that brings them joy. The process should feel enriching. And I try to be creative in the suggestions I offer. Ideally, I accompany a client over a longer period of time—that’s when astrology can really unfold its full potential, because it allows for deeper exploration. But even a single session can offer valuable new impulses. ## Evolving Self-Discovery **PAA: You’ve said that the central question driving you has always been, “Who am I?”. After years of delving into astrology, magic, and inner work, how has your understanding of who you are evolved? Have these modalities given you a clearer sense of your true self, or do they reveal an ever-deepening mystery? In what ways do you feel more integrated or authentic now compared to when you began your quest, and how does this personal evolution reflect in the way you approach your practice and serve others on their paths?** The question “Who am I?” gradually becomes the answer “I am.” I’ve tried many different things in my life, and at times, I was labeled as someone who “starts things but doesn’t stick with them.” Letting that affect me was a reflection of my own inner insecurity—an insecurity rooted in early childhood experiences. It was projected outward and mirrored back to me by others. Especially in the familiar context whereas my friends overally admired that trait of mine. Today, I’ve come to value the courage and dedication it takes to explore new paths without being fixated on the outcome. That’s actually a strength, not a flaw. I say this with confidence now, because I spent many years suffering under the weight of my own self-judgment. There’s a term for this: ***Impostor Syndrome- ***a deep inner doubt that makes it difficult to fully acknowledge one’s achievements and the constant fear that a hidden incompetence will be exposed. I would say that this described me quite accurately for a long time. When I now say **“I am,”** what I mean is a state of greater self-acceptance. Vedic astrology has helped me tremendously in uncovering the behavioral patterns that were behind this insecurity. The most fascinating moment comes when you consciously redirect a thought pattern in a new and healthier direction. It feels fresh and exhilarating—but also scary, because you’re stepping away from a familiar, comfortable inner terrain. It takes courage to let things be as they are and simply move forward. For me, this aligns deeply with the concept of ***Karma Yoga*** in Hindu philosophy. Practicing *Karma Yoga* means not being attached to the fruits of one’s actions. It is about acting selflessly, for the sake of the action itself—and above all, with devotion. When approached in this way, every action becomes a gift. A gift to whom or to what? That’s something each of us has to discover for ourselves. Even in situations where I must act out of obligation—because there’s no other option—it’s still possible to cultivate a form of devotion that remains completely detached. This is only possible because there is something else that fulfills me deeply: in my case, astrology and the possibilities of artistic expression. ## Future Visions and Integrations **PAA: Looking ahead, what do you sense is on the horizon for you and your evolving practice? Beyond your upcoming Jungian dream guidance certification, are there new modalities, projects, or areas of study calling to you next? Perhaps you’re dreaming of writing a book, developing an integrative healing program, or delving deeper into a specific astrological mystery or spiritual tradition. We’d love to hear about the future directions or visions that excite you, and how you hope to continue evolving and integrating your work to serve the spiritual journey of others in the years to come.** In the near future, I’m planning to develop a course focused on the planets. I’ll be holding my first workshop in Switzerland at a beautiful location (more information can be found on my website). I truly enjoy teaching, and in doing so, I want to focus on the core elements of astrology—so that even beginners can benefit. I may also consider creating video-based courses at some point. However, I personally wish for more **live courses**, as I find a holistic and immersive experience very important. In addition, I continue to study and deepen my understanding of the subject. I don’t know exactly where the journey will take me, but I’m stepping into the future with an open heart. I would also love to see more connection happening within the communities—both in the **hermetic circles** and the **astrological community**. As someone who naturally enjoys networking, this is especially dear to me. Sharing and exchanging ideas is so vital, particularly in a world where the art of thoughtful debate seems to be disappearing. Thank you very much for your inspiring questions! **PAA: Thank you so much for answering them. All the best in your future endeavors you are always very welcome to share any news on Perseus. ** --- ## Further Information ##### Visit Tamara's Website --- --- # Unlocking Magical Mastery: An Interview with Sixty Skills Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/unlocking-magical-mastery-an-interview-with-sixty-skills/ ## Introduction Welcome. What follows is a detailed transcript of our recent interview with Bob from Sixty Skills. He answers questions here from various sources, discord channel, private emails as well as some of my own personal questions. As you can see this isn’t just theory—it’s a practical roadmap to take you from square one to true magical independence. In this post, he is answering some serious questions about how it all works, from the five phases to blending traditions and real-world results students are seeing. You can see the video version of the interview below: https://youtu.be/WV6WiK194y8?si=CbFTfmkRcKQxQPRH --- --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Integrating Diverse Traditions- Accelerated Training and Spiritual MaturityGet Started with the Curriculum -20% OFF- The Goal of Magical Independence- Addressing Character Development and Mirrors- Quabalistic Training and Transmissions- Post-Curriculum Achievements- Spontaneous Enlightenment Cases- Energetic Dangers of the Outer Planets- The Living Crystal Device- Vibrating Letters Without Sound- Advanced Planetary, Zodiac, and Sephirothic Work- Magic Camp and Future Projects- The Four-Part Quest and Beyond- Publications and Legacy- The Adept’s Path Forward ## The Five Phases of the Sixty Skills Curriculum **PAA: Can you break down the five phases of development in your curriculum and explain how each stage maps to Bardon’s blueprint from the Empress card in what ways does this alignment guide the progression from basic skills to advanced magical independence?** Quite simply, the master course is basically the 60 fundamental skills you need to perform the work contained in Bardon’s canon. The main additions to this involve the use of pranayama and body training, which are largely absent from Franz Bardon’s original work *Initiation into Hermetics*. That said, once you have those Sixty skills down, if you look at what I call Bardon’s mandala, this inner part represents the elements, then you have the planets, then you have the zodiac, and then you have the sephiroth. The coursework in the Sixty Skills curriculum consists of the master course, again those basic skills. Then a course on letter magic or cabala, which is really elemental work fully expanded to the 27 letters. Then when we’re done with that, we move on to the planetary meditations. Then we move on to the zodiacal meditations, and then we move on to the sephirothic meditations. This is the path of enlightenment or the upward arc, if you will. I’m currently working my way through the path of manifestation or what some would call the downward arc of that. But as you can see, the curriculum matches directly to what is contained in this drawing. By virtue of doing that, it takes you from more gross forms of reality to more refined forms of reality, i.e., enlightenment, and back down again. This in turn increases your ability to interact with your environment on your own terms as effectively as possible. (You can see a [video on the Sixty Skills curriculum](https://youtu.be/cdCUS5zRlOo?si=FNYDjgxeaUPNsfN0) here or read the transcript [here](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-curriculum-explained/)) ## Integrating Diverse Traditions **PAA: How have these very traditions influenced the design of the Sixty Skills curriculum, for example, where do Daoist energy practices or yogic techniques show up alongside the core hermetic exercises inspired by Bardon? Can you discuss how you’ve blended these influences to create a coherent system and why this eclectic approach enhances a practitioner’s development?** Here’s the thing. The big thing that we get from Franz Bardon’s hermetics is a series of definitions. These definitions allow you to clearly identify what phenomenon you’re dealing with meditatively or yogically. This is generally lacking in most other traditions where you’re expected to figure things out. So you might work with a lot of energy in, say, a Chi Kung system, but they’re not breaking that down into vital or etheric, astral, mental, akashic forces, or non-dual light. They kind of expect you to figure that out. If you look at the actual techniques that Bardon employs, they’re all derivative. You can find them someplace else. He did a tremendous service to us by putting them all in one place. But this is the key, and it’s something a lot of people tend to have issues with. Nothing original has been done in the hermetic or yogic or magical field in thousands of years because the techniques are all the same, and you can find them throughout antiquity. They’re just not well organized, and they’re frequently very poorly defined. What I’ve done is I’ve taken all of the best approaches to these individual techniques that I’ve seen, regardless of tradition, and I’ve included them in one set system. The actual techniques involved don’t change a whole lot. How you perform them can. As I’ve said many times before, I take a clairsentience or subtle sense of touch approach to teaching. Why? Because this is the easiest of these subtle senses to develop. There are other ways to do this, but this is the way I’ve chosen to do it. Where do Daoist energy practices show up? Well, most clearly in the chi circulation form, which, as far as I can tell, comes out of various southern Chinese Daoist lineages. Where exactly? Hard to say, but you see a lot of this in things like white crane or vibrating crane type techniques. Also, I would say I’ve blended these influences because there are definite shortfalls in Bardon’s curriculum. The most notorious of which is, of course, body training. It basically doesn’t exist. Without this or having already accomplished it through another medium like military service, a professional-grade athletics, this kind of thing, you tend to get stuck being able to generate energy only at the mental or higher levels. You don’t have the pipes in the body, if you will, to bring it down very far into the astral or the vital. So that’s the reason why I’ve included this material amongst a bunch of others. It’s simply a more efficient way of doing things. ## Accelerated Training and Spiritual Maturity **PAA: How do you ensure the depth of character, self-transformation, ethical understanding keeps pace with the fast skill development? What is your response to those who are skeptical that genuine enlightenment can be accelerated this way?** First of all, most of what you hear about spiritual masters in terms of their personal behavior is, to be blunt, complete bullshit. Every spiritual guru that I’ve met has had severe character flaws of one kind or another. All of them. I can’t think of a single exception. What they do all have in common, however, is the ability to overcome those in their quest for enlightenment. The path of ennoblement, as some would call it, is really a matter of losing the more destructive of your bad habits over time in order to facilitate your practice. But this only tends to occur in terms of losing those things that directly interfere with your practice. If it’s something you can overcome and still practice, people generally retain that bad habit. Now, that said, I’ve never met anybody who can shoot heroin or do meth and get anything done esoterically speaking. But again, people have allowed pop culture to incorrectly influence their view of what an enlightened master is. These are frequently not very nice people. They are frequently people who have a variety of problems. But through sheer force of will, they’ve managed to make contact with the divine. That said, the more bad habits you have, the harder it is to do all of this. So generally speaking, most people lose the, let’s call them, grosser of their negative behaviors over time because it simply interferes with practice too much to do so. Now, that said, this takes a while. This is not a fast process. I’m going to be very critical of most lay practitioners. What is your response to those who are skeptical that genuine enlightenment can be accelerated in this way? Simply put, they’re using suboptimal methodology. Look at athletic performance. Every generation, we find better ways of doing things. In engineering, we generally find better ways of doing things. People have this strange religious attachment to something wrote in the past as the only way to do something. This is complete and utter nonsense. Process improvement has been severely lacking in esoteric circles. Rights of secrecy, not the least of which, being responsible for this garbage. If what we are dealing with is in fact in your nature as a human being, and if the phenomena we deal with are forces in nature, the idea that this should take decades to do is just complete garbage and gatekeeping by other people. I say this as someone who grew up in a time where the microcosmic orbit was like a really super secret technique. Yeah, it’s really not that hard to do. If you want to learn that, go talk to [Tao Semko](https://taosemko.com/) and [Santiago Dobles](https://morrismethodsandmore.com/morris-methods-kap-senior-instructor-santiago-dobles/). They have a wonderful system involving that technology, but it took them decades to put it together because the people who knew how to do it were being a bunch of jerks. Keep in mind, when it takes you 10 years to learn how to do something, that’s not because it takes 10 years to learn how to do it. It’s because people are being selfish regarding the methodology. None of this requires anywhere near the amount of time people apply to it. People waste way too much time on suboptimal training or antiquated techniques that simply aren’t that effective. The Sixty Skills curriculum was designed to remedy a lot of this. ### Get Started with the Curriculum -20% OFF Sixty Skills does not want you to be stuck for decades. He wants you to be able to move through the 5 levels of the Curriculum as Franz Bardon intended. Try our FREE Course or join the curriculum with Coupon Code: 20%OFF Join the Curriculum ## The Goal of Magical Independence **PAA: Why is self-sufficiency so critical in your system? How do you prepare students to reach that threshold of power, for instance, what ensures that they can produce akasha at will? Once achieved, how does being magically independent transform a practitioner’s relationship to magic? Do they still benefit from rituals and external aids, or does their practice become fundamentally different at that point?** First of all, self-sufficiency is critical because it reinforces yourself, your free will. If something creates dependency, it’s probably not good for you. This is true if you’re talking heroin, cigarettes, highly processed foods, bad relationships, or bad terms on a loan. It’s not any less true when it comes to your magical ability. Listen, I’m not negative on all ritual work. I’ve said it before. If the goals of egregore surrounding a ritual match yours, party on. That’s a great thing. But ultimately, enlightenment is about being free. You can’t do that if your ability to access the godhead, God, the true Dao, the Buddha nature, is dependent upon something or someone else. That’s why it’s important. How do you prepare students to reach that threshold of power? Well, generally speaking, through the process of equilibrium, you know, using the four elements to establish equilibrium. If you do this often enough, over and over again, akasha will spontaneously arise. From a dawn to a light isn’t that big a jump. Now, in the beginning, this will be a fairly slow process, but with practice, you can do it instantaneously, which is true of any other skill you have, be it driving a car, for example, or cooking a meal. In the beginning, you have to think about the steps, and then with practice, it just becomes automatic. Once a being magically independent transforms a practitioner’s relationship to magic, do they still benefit from rituals and external aids, or does their practice become fundamentally different at that point? It tends to be a couple of stages. You’ll have the ability to do it, but it’ll be slow. So you’ll use rituals, mostly self-created, to skip steps. Then, at a higher level of performance, you’ll just be able to will it to happen. That’s where your life can get pretty interesting. That’s the true nature of magic. Again, these things represent forces in nature, and you learn how to harness those. Why would you need anything intermediate in order to work with it? That said, being human beings, it takes a while to get there. ## Addressing Character Development and Mirrors **PAA: What are your thoughts on the view that Sixty Skills does not take character development and ennoblement seriously as it does not cover the mirrors in the master course? Also, the idea that going through Initiation into Hermetics should be some arduous task and that anyone that makes it easier is somehow doing it wrong?** First of all, I don’t do the mirror exercises because, as I’ve said many times before, in a modern era, most people don’t know what their actual weak points are. We’re not a very critical society the way Bardon’s was, where in the 1930s in Bavaria and the Czech Republic, people made sure you knew what you were bad at. That’s not true today. Also, on a practical basis, the mirrors are incredibly slow for what you get, and people waste a tremendous amount of time on them. Just going to be blunt, I think it’s a waste of time. If you work with the elements and you establish equilibrium long enough, over and over again, you will not only get the same effect, you’ll get a much stronger effect because the mirrors really only work at the mental level. Whereas equilibrium, when done properly, at a minimum, additionally works at the energetic level or astral level. It’s a deeper effect. So the short answer is people are generally not aware of what their actual faults are. So they don’t really work on the right things. But a more nuanced answer is it’s an easy way to spend a lot of time on something that’s not very effective that should be spent on other things. Any idea on going through Initiation into Hermetics should be arduous, and one that makes it easier is somehow doing it wrong? Yeah, they’re just full of crap. The one thing you do not have more of in life is time. So anyone who gives you a suboptimal training methodology that requires hours a day for decades on end to work with is a bad person. They’re wasting your life. Period. Again, if these are phenomena in nature that we’re working with, it shouldn’t be that hard to do. That doesn’t get into the issue of process improvement. Every other endeavor of human behavior—engineering, medicine, some would argue the arts—all of these things have gotten better over time. Why shouldn’t that happen with yogic practice? This is insane, this concept that things should be hard just to be hard. No, things that are hard need to be hard because there is no other way of doing it. That’s simply not true with most of this yogic training. The experience of going through it is difficult enough without a bunch of self-serving jerks limiting access to the good stuff to maintain position. ## Quabalistic Training and Transmissions **PAA: Given this perspective, how does Sixty Skills incorporate Bardon’s cosmic letter magic into training? Do you guide students to work with the creative letters, the tetragrammatonic sounds early on, or only after they’ve built a foundation? For example, are they eventually learning to form multi-letter formulas and divine names as Bardon hinted they must, or intone the word in a practical way? Essentially, how far into Bardon’s Kabbalah does your curriculum take a student, and how do you make such high-level work possible?** First of all, we start with letter magic on day one. You, with the elements, S for fire, A for air, M for water, and loud A for earth. We’ll work all the way through four-letter combinations, and you’ll also learn after time how to tune things and come up with your own at various levels. Now, Bardon did us a good favor in that he gave us half of the two-letter combinations out there. Well, actually, no, that’s not true. About a fifth of the possible ones. But there’s a lot more work out there that you have to do on your own. If you follow the training system I’ve set forward, you will learn how to decode these things and figure out what they do. From that standpoint, the system is in itself complete. Essentially, how far into Bardon’s Cabala does your curriculum take a student? How do you make such high-level work approachable? Again, if you look at letter magic as a tuning fork system, right, you’re learning how to generate the various elements. The hard part of this is actually bringing it down to the right level of reality. That takes a lot of body training, and there’s really no way to cheat that. But again, as elements, these represent fundamental forces in nature. They’re just not that hard to work with once you know how. From that standpoint, I’d like to think what I have is fairly complete. **PAA: Can you elaborate on how on what happens during these group transmissions and why they are so effective? How have attendees benefited? Do you see significantly faster or safer progress with the letters compared to those who practice alone? Also do you think Bardon intended for students to receive such external help since they didn’t explicitly mention it, or is this a modern adaptation you found necessary for success?** It’s a weekly class. Usually, we do one letter or one planet or one force per week, depending upon what we’re working on. There’ll be a brief Q&A where we go over the previous week’s work. I go through about a 10-minute read on just the theoretical background, what we’re going to do, show people how to do it. Then we lead them through the akashic, mental, astral, and vital aspects of the letter before projecting into the sphere, or, if you will, elemental sphere of that letter to interact with the various entities that live therein. So, from that standpoint, that’s kind of the mechanics of what we do. The advantage in doing it this way is it takes away the guesswork of working by yourself where you’re going, did I get that right, did I not get that right? You know, again, Bardon’s book, third book, is pretty good. But if you don’t have a teacher to walk you through the process initially, it can be a little confusing. The main thing is you don’t miss nuance. People have practiced alone. I’ve frequently seen an issue with a failure to counterbalance that, causing problems over time or not understanding how the letters fit together globally in terms of a greater system. That’s generally where I’ve seen the problems come in. Also, because we have a lively online discussion forum for this kind of thing, it allows people to compare notes, and it allows people to progress much faster because, as I’ve said before many times, I only know what I know. I only experience these things through the lens created by my personal development. If someone’s a musician, something that I’m very weak at, or has other training that I don’t have, which is pretty common, they’re going to have a slightly different experience with these forces, and that’s valuable. But you only know about these things if you work with other people. Otherwise, if you’re doing it by yourself, you only know what you know. First of all, Bardon learned this material from the Martinists. Let’s just get that out in the open. If you go into Martinism, they have their own kind of system of Cabala. I don’t think it’s taught very often, and I don’t think many people have much depth to it. But the idea that Bardon purely conjured this out of the ethers is complete garbage. Letter magic was an underground minor phenomenon or skill set in Germanic and Eastern European magic in the region Bardon was in at the time. We’re not exactly sure who he learned from, but it’s very clear he got at least part of this from the Martinist and probably from a few other related groups. So the idea that you’re supposed to do this on your own is just garbage. Bardon set up the order of the books he did, we think, keeping in mind the second and third book were published after his death by his secretary. Bardon didn’t put those together because, if you can’t find a teacher, in theory, if your clairvoyance and clairaudience are good enough, you can make contact with a cabalistic entity at the planetary level. Radina happens to be a good one who can teach you Cabala. But as a practical matter, the vast majority of people who’ve ever learned this learned it from another human being who was alive and wore pants. ## Post-Curriculum Achievements **PAA: Once someone completes the Sixty Skills course curriculum, what kind of real-world magical results have you seen them attain? What are some of the most noteworthy experiences or successes your students have had in the past year? For instance, has a student made verified contact with a particular spirit or accomplished feats like healing, influence, or clairaudience, clairvoyance that really stands out to you?** Well, first of all, an element of character. You know, I’ve seen people radically change who and what they are and their circumstances in life. Obviously, I can’t get too descriptive regarding this, but overcoming long-term dependencies, radically changing their relationships with other human beings, frequently becoming quite wealthy as a result of improvements in their work life. Pretty common. What I will say is the best magicians out there, you will probably never meet because there’s no incentive for them to be public figures. Only weirdos like me or [Mark Rasmus](https://markrasmus.org/) or some of the other more common names out there try to make a living at this stuff. For most people, it simply greatly enhances their work and personal life. I can’t really get too explicit about that because then you’d know who they are. But I’ve seen people reenter work spaces they’ve been gone from for a decade. I’ve seen people invent things. I’ve seen people radically clean up their personal lives. I mean, this is kind of what magic is supposed to do, right? You know, I’ve got one student who has some of the best internal clairvoyance and clairaudience of any human being I’ve ever met, who occasionally relays messages to me that other entities, mostly cabalistic entities, would like me to know. That’s pretty interesting because I’d worked with those entities years earlier. **PAA: So kind of curious how do these outcomes reflect on the effects of the training, and how do you advise students to stay grounded and responsible with their new abilities?** Well, again, as I’ve said many times before, the thing about being a magician that differentiates you from being just a normal person is you’re held to a different standard. You know the difference with being a magician is you know what you’re doing. You know the ramifications for taking shortcuts, cheating others, treating other people poorly. So, you get punished for that much more severely. I can give lots of examples of that, but suffice to say, the universe does not like anybody getting a free ride. So, if you think the path of the magician is the easy way of doing things, you’re wrong. It does put you in a much larger fishbowl, which allows you to accomplish much greater things. If you look at a lot of figures from history, magicians tend to be pretty notable. You know, Newton, good example. I’ve given others. But it comes at the cost of your being liable for the decisions you make that most people get off easier on because they make them out of ignorance versus knowledge. ## Spontaneous Enlightenment Cases **PAA: In hindsight, what do you think enabled that person to progress so rapidly? Were there specific qualities, prior training, karma, intensity of practicing, divine grace that made this spontaneous enlightenment possible in your program? Did it teach you anything about how quickly the techniques can work or the human potential more broadly? Do you believe others could replicate the pace under the right conditions, or do you view it as a one-off outlier that shouldn’t be deliberately aimed for?** He was built like a brick house. Yeah, semi-pro athlete. Really, really, really solid guy. Came from a deeply religious, faith-based background. Had the ability to focus like nobody’s business, and he just hit it running. It was pretty amazing. I really, really didn’t expect to see something like that. But, hey man, he made it work. That says to me that, again, if your enlightened nature really is your true nature, why should this take years and years and years? **PAA: Do you believe others could replicate the pace under the right conditions, or do you view it as a one-off outlier that shouldn’t be deliberately aimed for? ** Again, if enlightenment is our true nature, it shouldn’t take very long to do. So I look at the Sixty Skills program, if you will, as a continual loop of process improvement. If people are watching these videos 90 years from now and the material is exactly the same, I’ve failed. There has to be a better way of doing these things. If you look at the classical Buddhist and yogic universities in Northern India, from what we gathered, they were rarely longer than three or four years in length. Interesting point to contemplate. ## Energetic Dangers of the Outer Planets **PAA: Were you expecting such a severe side effect, and what was it like managing that crisis in real time? Going forward, what precautions do you take or advise others to take when exploring extreme cosmic realms like Pluto or beyond so the practitioners stay psychologically safe? Has this changed how you approached the teaching of the astrospheres?** Well, first of all, know how to invoke Emnisut before you begin that training. I highly, highly, highly advise that. Two, don’t wait. The second that comes across your plate, the second you get that idea, immediately invoke Emnisut and start counterbalancing with solar energy. This isn’t something you want to gut check your way through. Initially, I thought this might have just been an oddity associated with me and my group. But I was contacted by various other practitioners who had worked with the outer planets. Many of them, to be blunt, said their survival of that process was seemingly random. So learn how to invoke Emnisut. Do it frequently before you start working with the outer planets. That’s my most sincere advice, and that’s the best advice I can give. You know, when working with the extra-solar region, there are a couple of other precautions you can take, and I talk about them in the coursework. Mainly, you can contact some entities I detailed in there that will provide you protection in that realm and will teach you how to generate, generally, what I found to be a three-letter combination that’s specific to you that allows you to traverse those areas. Otherwise, when you look back historically at things like Lovecraft and the creator of the Cthulhu mythos, I suspect that’s what happens when somebody has an accidental ejection into the outer planets or extra-solar region. You notice a lot of those guys died. Yeah. So caveat Empor, right. ## The Living Crystal Device **PAA: Can you share more about the [living crystal](https://thelivingcrystal.com/), about what the living crystal does, how it aids one’s practice? Is it an amplifier of ambient energy, a tool for focus, or something else? Also, what have been the reactions or results among those who have used it in training, and does it significantly boost certain exercises or experiences?** Geometry for the living crystal is really important. The way we currently have it set up, it primarily generates mental and a little bit of astral energy. But that’s the thing, it actually generates more of it. One of the first discoveries we made in working with it was we found that most people, it takes a while to learn how to do the single-pointed focus exercises. We thought this had something to do with the body learning how to do it. No, it turns out the body needs a specific kind of energy to do that, and it doesn’t have much of it naturally. The living crystal device allows people to drop into those highly focused states and trance states almost immediately by providing something that closely resembles that energy that you can work with. It’s really quite remarkable, and we’re continuing research on it to this day. Like I said, it’s not an amplifier so much as an addition. It gives you more of something. Now, what it can also do is you can take a sigil where you can project an energy into the crystal ball above the device, and it will begin mimicking that energy, and it will continue to do so until you shut it off. That’s another interesting thing that we found. **PAA: What have been some of the reactions amongst those who used it during training? ** Everybody appreciates it. There are some people for whom it takes them a while to begin to feel the energy. It’s pretty rare and surprising. A lot of these people are really good at ChiKung. But everybody who’s worked with it long enough begins to feel the energy that it’s developing and then can use it to aid their other practices. What I recommend in most cases is I recommend practicing with it one session and then not practicing it for another. That way, you don’t create a dependence on it. But it’s really quite remarkable. > This is the difference between an internal and external power practitioner. Both schools draw upon the body to generate the effects they do. With an internal power practitioner, you’re doing it intentionally, and you’re making efforts to strengthen that. So yeah, the body as a talisman describes exactly what we do. ## Vibrating Letters Without Sound **PAA: How did this ability manifest in your group, and what does it indicate about the relationship between physical training and magical skill? I recall you noted it seemed linked to excessive to extensive ligament tendon training, strengthening the antenna of the body. Does the internal vibration technique change the way you teach letter magic now? For example, do you foresee new exercises that specifically train this skill used in the body as a talisman for the cosmic language?** We learned how to do this on Pluto, where you’re essentially vibrating the letters at a cellular level. I don’t know any other way to describe it than that. This ends up strengthening the overall ability at letter magic as you combine that internal vibration with all of your other techniques, be that breath holds or external vibration through voice or what have you. It simply makes things much stronger and allows you to draw on the resources of the body much more effectively, which can be a big help if you’re in a place where there isn’t much elemental basis for what you’re doing to allow it to function. But again, it was largely a Plutonian invention that we found this. Does it change the way you teach letter magic now? No, it’s an addition to it, and when people learn how to do that, they simply get much stronger. This is the thing about the body as a talisman is important. This is the difference between an internal and external power practitioner. Both schools draw upon the body to generate the effects they do. With an internal power practitioner, you’re doing it intentionally, and you’re making efforts to strengthen that. So yeah, the body as a talisman describes exactly what we do. ## Advanced Planetary, Zodiac, and Sephirothic Work **PAA: Which of these discoveries surprised you the most, and how they expand our hermetic understanding of these spheres? For example, Pluto being the stepping-off point to realms beyond our solar system is a profound insight. What does working with Pluto and beyond entail for a magician, and did it require you to develop new methods of protection or perception?** The biggest surprise to me was probably Pluto. Aside from being a home from the dead, which you could guess from classical works, it’s the home of a Egregores. Any Egregore that’s ever been and will ever be, you can find there and work with directly. I don’t think this changes their ability to influence you. But on a certain level, it would allow you to resurrect things that are not extant in our current timeline. Now, whether this is a good idea or not is another question. I also think it would allow you to join a community of practice very quickly in a way that otherwise might take significantly longer. Again, whether that’s worth doing or not, well, that’s up to the practitioner. But that, I think, was really the biggest surprise of all, and just the generic disinterest of Plutonian entities, you know, are being there. They all recognized that our being there was unusual and rare, but their kind of take on all of it is everybody shows up here eventually, so what’s the rush? The magic we learn inside our solar system is unique to each of those solar systems. The extra-solar realm is literally where you get into things like universal cabala, universal letter magic, universal forces. They’re typically pretty harsh. They’re generally not very safe to work with. You never want to bring them inside your body. I don’t clearly understand yet what the ultimate point of that is because, again, by definition, the magic you need to influence things in our world is unique to our world, but it’s certainly an interesting point for consideration, and hopefully, a brighter student out there can get you a better answer on that one. But, as I’ve talked about before, you need specific protection for that because these forces are literally alien to our evolution. **PAA: Can you explain what the stacking involves, and what it might look like? Is it, for example, invoking a planetary force through a specific letter formula all at once or sequencing energies together in a single meditation? What kinds of results did you observe when you started stacking forces, and were the effects exponentially stronger or qualitatively different than working with one energy at a time, and ultimately did this inform how you approached the later stages of the curriculum, such as stacking zodiac signs or sephiroth in advanced practice?** At the end of the day, you’ll end up with an akashic force, a sephiroth, a zodiac force, which is mental, planetary force, which is astral, and a letter force, which is vital or etheric in nature. This is four-letter magic. This is why you learn four-letter combinations so you could combine these forces. Now, the reason why you want to do this is when you learn how to establish equilibrium using the letters and then the planets and then the zodiac and then finally the sephiroth, it results in a far more refined access to those energies. You get much stronger, and everybody who’s done this has recognized this. You also develop a much higher ability to tune into a specific effect that you want. Man, there are some surprises out there. You know, when I generate the letter K through Gemini, you get this off-white colored energy that represents what most people would think of enlightenment if they haven’t experienced enlightenment. It’s this very high mental level aspect of non-dual light. Well, that makes it very easy to jump over to non-dual light itself because you’re that much closer to it. That’s one such example. Physical effects, such as, you know, weather control and the like, get much easier. So yeah, there are lots of reasons to learn how to do this, but the way you want to look at it is it’s simply teaching you to tune your access to something much more specifically. Interestingly, the better you get at this, the less energy it takes to pull off a given effect. Because now, instead of painting with a really broad brush, right, using lots of energy, if you will, to cause an effect, now you’re using a laser-like focus to do it. You can be very specific. **PAA: How does working with the zodiac differ from planetary work? What will the upcoming zodiac course offer to students in practical terms as they are learning to enter each sign’s influence and gain specific abilities and insights from it, and have you found the zodiac forces are gentler or more beneficent than the planets since you noted the zodiac can temper the harsher planetary aspects? Any interesting experiences so far from the zodiac meditations you can share?** First of all, it’s very mental, and the planets are very energetic or astral. It’s the big note. From your blog, it appears that each zodiac sign’s meditation involves a combination of a constellation symbol sigil, its related planetary power, and an elementalist sensation, effectively creating a three-part formula. Combine the three, and you get letter magic with direction. So, as you wrote, yeah, you get a three-letter combination. This is why, again, when you’re learning letter magic, you want to learn the primary letters and then the two-letter and then the three-letter and four-letter combinations so you can do this work more effectively. The zodiac is largely mental in nature. Now, whether it’s the source of mental energy writ large or simply something so similar that it works as an equivalent, that I can’t answer to you. But it allows you to access things directly at the mental sphere without having trained any of the other spheres, which is why we’ll be offering a short course in the zodiac meditations that people without a background in any of the other Sixty Skills work can access directly, and you can use it for all normal things to use magic for—healing, wealth, martial arts, you name it—because that dribbles through. One of the interesting things that we found that we didn’t expect was that, in some ways, astrology gets it wrong. The planets don’t control the zodiac. The zodiac tempers the planets. So, after doing the zodiacal meditations, the planets become much softer, and the higher nature of the zodiac essentially guides the rougher or cruder or more astral forces of the planets. This, in turn, makes them much easier to work with, which also makes you, as a magician, much more effective. The entities at the planetary level essentially look up to the entities at the zodiacal level as being their gods or their leadership, if you will. It’s definitely a hierarchy, and they look up to those entities. So, if you’ve worked with them, the planetary beings tend to be much more receptive to your needs in a much softer manner. Maybe this is because you’re simply able to tune in with more fidelity now regarding those planetary forces, but everybody’s noticed this, and as an adjunct, you also get stronger at it. Any interesting experiences so far from the zodiac meditations that you can share? Yeah, basically, my suspicion as to why Buddhism did so well with the ancient Greeks is because they were already doing these high-level mental meditations on the zodiac. So, it really wasn’t that big a shift for them. Additionally, the tempering effect of the zodiac on the, let’s call them, lower forces or more terrestrial forces is really quite profound. Pretty amazing, actually, and makes everything much easier to do afterwards. **PAA: Can you outline your approach to the sephirothic series? Are you activating multiple sephirothic spheres in consciousness simultaneously or moving up the tree in secession and then combining their influences? I’m also curious about any surprises you’ve encountered. For example, you mentioned that during Daath work, you had to go back a little due to something involving Sirius, perhaps an insight that Daath connects to the star Sirius? What was this about, and generally, how do the sephirothic meditations compare to the previous planetary, zodiac ones in terms of intensity and outcome? Will there eventually be a dedicated sephiroth course for students, and what prerequisites would you require someone tackling the tree of life through your method?** Actually, we’re doing both. We start with Malkuth, then go to Yesod, Hod, so on and so forth, on up to Kether as part of the path of enlightenment. Once you’re there, there’s an exercise you’ll learn where you invoke all of the sephiroth at a time in a kind of circle, generating an akashic level equilibrium that’s quite profound and makes that skip to non-dual light pretty short. By basically stacking all these forces—first at the vital with the letters, then at the astral with the planets, and then at the mental with the zodiac, and then at the akashic level with the sephiroth—you take all these independent pieces of reality, disparate pieces of reality, and you combine them back together again. This creates an intense light sphere that you end up projecting into. But that’s not the end. Once there, you’ll notice this almost band of reality. It’s hard to describe that the light can’t go past. Then, using single-pointed focus, you bore a hole through that and punch your way to the other side. That’s where you experience non-dual light in true form. What that is, I can’t really tell you because it can only be experienced by definition. Anything that’s not bound by physicality, time, or space would be something that human beings would have a hard time describing. But this is certainly the fastest and most reliable way I’ve found to experience that state. When we got to Daath, did that meditation, we were instructed to meditate upon Sirius. We went there. We were given a specific set of yogic exercises that seemingly activated some latent magical potential in the body. Everybody discovered that they were much stronger energetically after that, by the way. Then we went on to Binah. So that was an important part of that that was completely unexpected. I don’t know where any of that came from, but it was important. We learned a lot of valuable lessons there. So good stuff. Yes, there will eventually be a sephiroth course out when I finish with the zodiac course. ## Magic Camp and Future Projects **PAA: What do these immersive camps provide that is different from solo or online study? Can you share any memorable transformations or feats achieved by attendees during [Magic Camp](https://magiccamp.click/events/), for example, breakthroughs in concentration, energy work, or evocation that happen on site? Also, what are your future plans for Magic Camp? Do you envision increasing their frequency, doing region-specific themes, or perhaps creating advanced alumni-only camps for deeper work?** Basically, we focus a lot on physical techniques—rebounding. Rebounding will be a part of the basic course for Magic Camp every single time because it’s hard to learn that from video. It’s not a terribly difficult technique to implement, but it does take a couple of hours typically for most people to kind of get it, and people will see how quickly that improves their practice. It’s really quite remarkable. Rebounding is by far the best body training technique I found anywhere. In terms of what happened at camp, spontaneous examples of weather control, you know, rain during a dry season location. Huge breakthroughs with many people, some people actually hearing spirits for the first time. One individual who had struggled with clear sentience for about a year and a half, by day three, he had it, you know. So, these are all things that you can expect there, specifically because when you work in this intense one-on-one environment, you get the etheric or near-physical energetic effects that you’re not going to get from video working by yourself, and they’re quite profound, and it just gives you another tool to work with. Future plans for Magic Camp? Yeah, plan on doing this four to five times a year. It’ll be regionally based. Ideally, you’ll have US-based events for North America, probably in Mexico mostly, although we are having one in Maryland this year, so you can check that out. We’re going to be doing one every year in Europe, probably Spain or Portugal. We’ll be doing one every year in Southeast Asia, again probably Bali. Then we’ll also be doing one every year probably in Antalya in Turkey. So students who are from Eastern Europe or Russia who have trouble getting visas elsewhere can come join in and all the fun. So that’s the goal. We’ll probably have advanced coursework an additional one to two times per year just based upon desire. Unfortunately, that’ll probably be limited to a single session a year for things like evocation or stellar magic or the zodiac just because the number of people involved in that level of practice aren’t that big. Hopefully, that’ll change, and it’ll be something that we can do on a regular basis. But that all depends upon you good people joining the show. **PAA: Do you still plan to roll out these teachings? If so, what can students expect from the Emei training? Will it be integrated into Sixty Skills as a module or internal martial arts or offered as a standalone for energy cultivation? As for the alchemy course, are we talking about internal alchemy, external laboratory alchemy, or a blend of both? These areas are quite extensive. How will you condense and structure them for practitioners already familiar with the rest of the Sixty Skills curriculum? ** First of all, the breath retention part, which is the most important part of the course, will be included in the various levels of the master course, the planetary and zodiacal courses, and the sephiroth course. But the Emei course itself will get into all of the chikung and the energetic healing and the hands-on work that will not be included in the other hermetic training. So, from that standpoint, it will be quite valuable. Additionally, the Emei system is a healing system, but it didn’t come about as a healing system. It was a more complete system of magical practice from Emei mountain in western China. I teach the medical portion of it because that’s what I know. An enterprising individual out there might be able to find the missing parts of this. My suspicion is this is one of the surviving portions of one of those defunct Vajrayana systems everybody talks about in Vajrayana Buddhism, but that is up to you to determine because I only know what I know. But it’s quite profound, and yes, that will be coming out at some point. As for the alchemy course, we’re talking about spagyrics, which some people argue isn’t alchemy at all, but essentially, it will be a short course on the seven basics where you learn to use plant-based alchemically derived liquids suspended in alcohol mostly to improve your magical progression. I’ve done these. I’ve had several of my students do these, and it’s very helpful at the mental and high astral level for developing a lot of those abilities. The idea being you take one of these every day for a year as it opens these things up within you. It’s pretty profound stuff. It’s taken longer because I’ve just been busy. Kind of the way it goes, guys. But have no doubt, it will be forthcoming. ## The Four-Part Quest and Beyond **PAA: Without asking you to divulge anything premature, can you give us a glimpse of what the remaining two parts might involve? Are there higher tiers of reality you intend to explore, perhaps the realm of fixed stars and constellations beyond the zodiac or the primal elemental chaos or even something like direct work with divine providence and unity? Alternatively, is the latter half more about integrating everything achieved so far, for example, combining elemental, planetary, zodiacal, and sephirothic magic into a single universal mode of operation? Essentially, what do you foresee as the next frontier for your personal practice and teachings once the current curriculum is fully mapped out?** Once you finish that path of enlightenment, the upward stroke, if you will, going from letters to planets to zodiac to sephiroth into non-dual light, which is all covered, will be covered in coursework. You then have what’s called the path of manifestation, what some would call the path of return. This is where you take this now very diffuse unified energy and you start breaking it down into individual pieces so it can be utilized in the phenomenal world. So far, we’ve just about finished the downward arc of the sephiroth and are about to start our year work with the zodiac. Pretty profound, you know, a lot of magic triangle work. Learning how to focus and clear the mind in increasingly interesting ways. A far different understanding of the role of akasha. As one, a couple of the entities mentioned, when it came to understanding akasha, me and my compatriots were basically, in their words, we were missing half the point of what was involved. Whether this will eventually result in our being able to do physical magic or not, I don’t know. What I will say is, increasingly, we can leave out the steps when doing things and simply will things to happen. It’s pretty remarkable how that works. But this also leads to needing to be in control of yourself. That’s a whole other discussion. ## Publications and Legacy **PAA: Do you have plans for any new books or written works? For instance, as your curriculum reaches its culmination, do you intend to publish a detailed explanation of the entire Sixty Skills system or perhaps a memoir-style account of these extraordinary experiments—outer planets, etc.? The community would greatly benefit from your insights in print. Additionally, how do you approach writing versus video or in-person teaching? Do you find the writing allows you to capture nuances of these teachings differently?** There will be books. In fact, I’ll basically end up rewriting all three of Bardon’s first three books. There’ll be a book on unified letter magic, absolutely. The upcoming planetary magic book is almost done. So expect to see that sometime, hopefully, before the end of this year or probably the beginning of 2026. There will be a memoir at some point, just discussing how various things unfolded. Upon my death, all of my personal journal practice journals will be published as well. Those aren’t very exciting, I’m afraid. They just basically list techniques that I discovered when doing things. The writing is very time-consuming versus video, which is kind of amazing to think about, but it allows for being specific in a way that video sometimes does not. That said, video is, generally speaking, a far better teaching medium than writing is. So, you know, mixed bag, right? But there’ll be something there for everybody because, ultimately, when I die and reincarnate, I don’t want to have to go through the trouble of spending 30 years of my life to figure out a bunch of things that I could have done in a year and a half. Call me selfish, but, of course, everybody gets to benefit from that, so why not? ## The Adept’s Path Forward **PAA: Finally, what do you see as the endgame for a Sixty Skills trainee? Suppose someone has worked through the master course and all the advanced courses—Cabala, planetary, zodiac, sephiroth, whatever comes next. In your eyes, what level of adeptship will they have reached? What capabilities should they have mastered at that point, for example, full command of elemental energy, the ability to converse with any spiritual entity, profound realization of their own divine nature? What would you advise such a graduate to do thereafter? Is it simply a matter of pursuing one’s personal spiritual missions with the skills acquired, or are there specific higher goals like true enlightenment, service to humanity, or joining the ranks of the inner planet adepts that you encourage them to aim for? In essence, when someone combines the entire Sixty Skills journey, how do you envision them contributing to the world or the tradition, and what is next on the horizon for them?** First of all, at that point, they will definitely have encountered non-dual light. Hopefully, they’ll have some ability to fully project into that non-dual state on their own with reliability. With me right now, it’s about one session in eight and one session in nine. But that’s been improved from a whopping three experiences with that over a 30-year period previously. So I think that’s pretty good. What I’m beginning to see is the ability to generate magical effects, strength strictly through force of will. You think about it, and it happens. Now, there’s still the energetics and all the other stuff that have to go along to support that. That’s what we spend a lot of time building up to in the system. But increasingly, what I’m seeing is people have the ability to impact the reality around them by simply thinking about it. It’s pretty amazing. Absolutely true. All three—full command of elemental energies, the ability to converse with any spiritual entity, profound realization of their own divine nature. You will end up pursuing your spiritual mission. You may end up changing what that is. There will typically be an aspect of service to what you do because people need help, and you have the ability to give them help in a way that most can’t. So all of that’s true. What I will say is people who have been through this process are remarkably grounded and remarkably physical at the end of the day. So it’s not this airy-fairy kind of mental-level imagination kind of phenomenon. People who’ve gone the distance are remarkably real and remarkably devoted and connected to the here and now. If someone isn’t, well, that’s probably a warning sign. Really, that’s up to them and the divine, but everyone who’s done this that I’ve met has led a most remarkable life. They are not, as I frequently mention, grandma basement dwellers. They are vigorous participants in reality. If someone isn’t, well, you might want to think about that. But otherwise, as per usual, train hard and be well. **PAA: Thank you so much this I think is one of the best looks at the scope of the [Sixty Skills curriculum](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-curriculum-explained/). The depth, logic and interconnectedness of it all is clear to see, and as we keep saying completely in line with Franz Bardons description of the 3rd Tarot Card. For clarity I list it below showing all 5 stages of the curriculum, check your copy of KTQ. ** > **The Symbolism of the Third Tarot Card > ** > The picture on the opposite page is the graphic representation of the Third Tarot Card. > The first (or outer) circle has ten sections symbolizing the ten quabbalistic keys. > These ten quabbalistic keys (v. their color symbolism) are identical with the ten > Hebrew Sephiroth. > > Since these ten keys, or Sephiroth, comprise the knowledge of the whole universe > with all its ways of existence, methods and systems, they are placed in the outer > circle. > > The fact that these ten keys refer to the micro- as well as the macrocosm becomes > evident also by the fact that the next, i.e., the second circle, reflects the signs of the > zodiac of the whole universe, again in the relevant color symbolism. > > The third circle (going from the outside to the inside) is the planetary circle, which is > identified by the planetary symbols and the colors analogous to the planets. > All three circles enclose a large square symbolizing the four elements represented in > the relevant color symbolism. This square, indicating the realization of the elements, > symbolizes the material world. > > The inner, smaller square signifies the tetragrammatonic mystery, the Jod-He-Vau-He > or quabbalistic fourfold Key necessary for mastering the elements and their > influences. > > The sun in the center of the picture represents Divine Providence, the Akasa Principle, > the origin of all that exists. > > Thus not only man (i.e., the microcosm), but also the whole macrocosm is graphically > represented by this picture. Furthermore, all keys are drawn in it, the fourfold key > being especially dominant, since it is the key to the realization, the materialization of > things. Everything that the quabbalah teaches us, i.e., its whole system, all analogies, > follows clearly from this picture and its clear symbolism. The meditating quabbalist > will therefore deduce all analogies from the Third Tarot Card. > > > > > > *Key to the True Quabbalah* --- ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/image.png) --- # Sixty Skills Five Part Curriculum Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-five-part-curriculum/ ## About Sixty Skills In this video, the founder shares insights into the Sixty Skills material. With over 30 years on this path, the founder has traveled the world in search of living traditions, gathering invaluable knowledge along the way. The Sixty Skills curriculum is the result of that extensive exploration. For a deeper dive, check out the interviews below and visit his [about page](https://sixtyskills.com/about/) on his website. This page is designed to give prospective students all the information they need about the teacher and their teachings. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out via our [contact page](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/contact/). https://youtu.be/cdCUS5zRlOo?si=X9vOPtHy6KHrEDFv ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/103_0334-Copy-1024x768.jpg) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/109_0953-Copy-1024x768.jpg) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/105_0527-Copy-1024x768.jpg) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Photo-Aug-13-12-41-53-PM-1024x768.jpg) ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Me-Simon-and-Frank-in-PArty-Jackets-1024x768.jpg) ## Interviews #### Interviews with Sixty Skills - ##### Written Interviews: [Magic, Kabbalah & Evocation: The Outer Planets with Bob from Sixty Skills](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-kabbalah-evocation-the-outer-planets-with-bob-from-sixty-skills/) [Sixty Skills Interview: The Living Crystal, Stacking the Sephirot and the “Trials of Hercules”](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-interview-the-living-crystal-stacking-the-sephirot-and-the-trials-of-hercules/) [Beyond the Inner Planets: Sixty Skills Explores the Solar System’s Frontiers in Search of Kabbalah](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/beyond-the-inner-planets-sixty-skills-explores-the-solar-systems-frontiers-in-search-of-kabbalah/) ##### Video Interviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYVIhBQ5RY4&pp=ygUWc2l4dHkgc2tpbGxzIGludGVydmlldw%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3zZhX82xs8&t=512s&pp=ygUWc2l4dHkgc2tpbGxzIGludGVydmlldw%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFyRdKanOiI&t=21s --- ## Sixty Skills: Five Part Curriculum #### 1. Master Course Curriculum The Master Course is an 18-Month Curriculum leading to Magical Independence. If you intend to take this training as far as you can and actually experience what so many can only read about then the Master Course is a rare opportunity to access everything you need. Regardless of your experience, if you follow the instructions in each course and invest the recommended number of hours into your practice then in 18-Months you will be pleasantly surprised with what you are now capable of. The Master Course allows you to purchase **ALL** of the courses in the 18-month curriculum, the reason to do this is to obtain a big saving and secure access to everything you need to take you from zero experience to a level of proficiency where you can generate your own Akasha and Non Dual Light ([See the importance of that here](https://www.staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/magic-kabbalah-evocation-the-outer-planets-with-bob-from-sixty-skills)), as well as invoke and evoke with a full understanding of the underlying mechanisms leaving you free to explore the magical universe. You will know how to wield the elements, create rituals, charge objects and magical spaces, perform evocations and so much more...you will know how to do these things and most importantly you will know *why* it works. Each level of the curriculum is listed below. We also wrote about the benefits of the Master Course [here](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/sixty-skills-master-course-expediting-franz-bardons-initiation-into-hermetics/), and [here](https://sixtyskills.com/sixty-skills-curriculum/) we provided an extended preview of each course - up to 30 mins for many of the courses - this provides enough information to make an informed choice as to whether the material is for your or not. ## Level 1 **Mental**: How to Concentrate - **Astral**: Building the Chi Ball, What is the Secret Smile - **Physical**: What are the Electric and Magnetic Lines of Force? ## Level 2 - **Mental**: Auto Suggestion: What is the Mala Method? - **Astral**: How to Breathe Astral Energy?, Developing Clairvoyance, Clairaudience, and Claireaugstance - **Physical**: Training the Electric/Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement ## Level 3 - **Mental**: How to Generate Mental Energy - **Astral**: Creating Your Life’s Movie - **Physical**: Training the Electric/Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement ## Level 4 - **Mental**: Creating Your Life’s Movie - **Astral**: Training the Four Elements (Fire, Air, Water, and Earth), Room Impregnation: Filling Your Sacred Space - **Physical**: Resistance Training for Magicians: The Yoga of Strength ## Level 5 - **Mental**: The Three Transformations: How to Convert Your Energies - **Astral**: Establishment of Equilibrium: The Four Elements and Magic - **Physical**: Training the Electric/Magnetic Lines of Force with Movement ## Level 6 - **Mental**: Transference of Consciousness and the Grain of Sand - **Astral**: Room Impregnation: Filling Your Sacred Space - **Physical**: Astral Walking ## Level 7 - **Mental**: Transference of Consciousness and the Grain of Sand - **Astral**: Establishment of Equilibrium: The Four Elements and Magic - **Physical**: Power Walking with Weights: The Walk of the Magicians ## Level 8 - **Mental**: The Zero Point: Out of Body Projection for People Who Can’t - **Astral**: Creation of Elementaries - **Physical**: Walking with the Elements ## Level 9 - **Mental**: Mental Wandering: Intelligence Gathering and the Real OBE - **Astral**: The Void Meets Infinity: Akasha and Non-Dual Light Breathing - **Physical**: Rebounding: Fah Jin, Empty Force, and Fascia Development ## Level 10 - **Mental**: The Void Meets Infinity: Akasha and Non-Dual Light Breathing, How to Learn Kabbalah from the Spirit World Via Evocation - **Astral**: The Chi Circulation Method, Advanced Clairvoyance Training - **Physical**: Volting: Expressing Your Will in the Universe, The Void Meets Infinity (Akasha and Non-Dual Light Breathing) [Join the Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) --- #### 2. Kabbalah (Quabbalah) Curriculum - https://youtu.be/wg020FvEv0Y?si=4J9F6NyPPfJFVqp4 Franz Bardon's Kabbalah (Quabbalah) is a system of three-point meditation, is a universal teaching of great antiquity and depth. Throughout the ages, adepts of every time and place have achieved the highest levels of magical attainment through the understanding of sound, color, number and vibration as embodied in the Kabbalah. It involves working with 27 letters that represent different energies on multiple levels. This Kabbalah serves as an internal system of cultivating personal abilities to harness natural forces, rather than relying on external rituals or entities. ## 1. Introduction Discord Group - Introduction ## 2. Theory - How to Train the Letters - How to Ventilate - Requirements - How to Counterbalance - Progression with the Letters ## 3. Build the Ball - Introduction - Introduction - Three Primary Exercises - Introduction - How to Perform the Exercises - Theory and Practice - Organization of the Phenomenal World - Theory and Practice - Energetic Realm - Theory and Practice - How To Pore Breath - BTB Techniques - Building The Ball - BTB Techniques - How To Move Energy Through The Body - BTB Techniques - How To Use The Fingers - BTB Techniques - How to Cup Energy Along The Body - Last Thought and Course Conclusion - The Roll of Will Power - Last Thought and Course Conclusion - Conclusion ## 4. Astral Energy - Introduction - Things Needed to Practice - Theory and Practice - MEST and Suspension of Time - Theory and Practice - Need for Body and Breath - Theory and Practice - Connection to the Body - Theory and Practice - Astral versus Mental - How To Astral Breathe - Preparation and Practice - How To Astral Breathe - Astral Breathing Practice - How To Astral Breathe - Different Ways to Practice - Conclusion - Things Not Covered in this Course - Conclusion - Ending and Thanks ## 5. Mental Energy - Introduction - Requirements - Theory and Practice - Suspension of Space - Theory and Practice - Concentration and Will Power - Theory and Practice - Relationship to the Body - Theory and Practice - Astral Versus Mental Wandering - How to Practice - Preparation - How to Practice - Posture - How to Practice - Mental Expansion - How to Practice - Different Ways to Practice - How to Practice - Energies and How They Can Be Used - Conclusion - Things Not Covered Here - Conclusion - Ending and Thanks ## 6. The Three Transformations: How to Convert Your Energies - Introduction - Requirements - Theory and Practice - Why Perform the Three Transformations? - Theory and Practice - Going Up and Coming Down the Energetic Pathway - Theory and Practice - Vital Energy as Your Base - Theory and Practice - Passive Conversion of Energy - Theory and Practice - Do Not Mix Energies - Theory and Practice - Different Manifestations of Energies - Theory and Practice - Clairsentience - How to Practice - How to Go Up the Path of Enlightenment - How to Practice - How to Go Down the Chain of Manifestation - How to Practice - Things to Think About - Conclusion - Things Not Covered Here - Conclusion - Ending and Thanks ## 7. Mother Letters - Sch/Fire - A/Air - M/Water - Umlaut A/Earth - E/Akasha ## 8. Equilibrium - Introduction - Requirements - Theory and Practice - What is the Establishment of Equilibrium? - Theory and Practice - Akasha and Non-Dual Light with Equilibrium - Theory and Practice - Power Building and Equilibrium - Theory and Practice - Practice Design - How To Practice - Fire to Head - How To Practice - Air to Chest - How To Practice - Water to Abdomen - How To Practice - Earth to Legs - How To Practice - Establishment of Equilibrium - How To Practice - Things to Think About - Conclusion – Things Not Covered Here - – Conclusion – Ending & Thanks ## 9. Fire Letters - FLS Fire Letter Variants Preview - FLS Introduction - FLS Requirements - FLS Reading on the Letter C - FLS Reading on the Letter D - FLS Reading on the Letter K - FLS Reading on the Letter R - FLS Reading on the Letter S - FLS Letter C Invocation - FLS Letter D Invocation - FLS Letter K Invocation - FLS Letter R Invocation - FLS Letter S Invocation - FLS Letter T Invocation - FLS Things to Think About - FLS Things Not Covered - FLS Conclusion ## 10. Air Letters - ACL Air Letter Variants Preview - ACL Introduction - ACL Requirements - ACL Why Learn H, L, and Z - ACL Letter H Reading - ACL Letter L Reading - ACL Letter Z Reading - ACL Letter H Invocation - ACL Letter L Invocation - ACL Letter Z Invocation - ACL TNCH - ACL TTTA - ACL Conclusion ## 11. Water Letters - Invocation of the Letter W - Invocation of the Letter N - Invocation of the Letter J - Invocation of the Letter Ch - Invocation of the Letter G - Letter W Reading - Letter N Reading - Letter J Reading - Letter Ch Reading - Letter G Reading ## 12. Earth Letters - Earth Variants Course Preview - ELTS Introduction - ELTS Requirements - ELTS Why Learn - ELTS Posture and Counterbalance - ELTS Letter B Reading - ELTS Letter F Reading - ELTS Letter I Reading - ELTS Letter O Reading - ELTS Letter P Reading - ELTS Letter B Invocation - ELTS Letter F Invocation - ELTS Letter I Invocation - ELTS Letter O Invocation - ELTS Letter P Invocation - ELTS Things to Think About - ELTS Things Not Covered – ELTS Conclusion ## 13. Akashic Letters - Akashic Letters Preview - AKL Introduction - AKL Requirements - AKL Why Train Y, Umlaut O, and U - AKL Invocation of the Letter U - AKL Invocation of Umlaut O - AKL Invocation of the Letter Y UE - AKL Karma and Akasha - AKL Letter E Reading - AKL Letter U Reading - AKL Umlaut O Reading - AKL Letter Y UE Reading - AKL TNCH - AKL TTTA - AKL Conclusion --- ## 14. The Four Letter Combinations - Four Letter Element Theory - Four Letter Fire - Four Letter Air - Four Letter Water - Four Letter Earth - Four Letter Akasha - Four Primary Energies - Four Letter Mental - Four Letter Astral - Four Letter Vital ## 15. Master Meditation - 20 Letter Theory - 20 Letter Stack ## 16. Additional Information & What Comes Next - Four Corners Theory - Four Corners Elemental Meditation - Charging Substances Theory - EN - BH ## 17. Invocation of Radina - Introduction - Requirements - Theory and Practice - Why Evoke Radina? - Theory and Practice - The Planetary Path of Advancement - Theory and Practice - Ball Above Head and the Head - Theory and Practice - How Spirits Manifest - Theory and Practice - Different Levels of Development - Theory and Practice - Mediumship Versus Evocation - How to Practice - Evocation of Radina - How to Practice - Things to Think About - Conclusion - Things Not Covered Here - Conclusion - Sigil ## 18. Sixty Skills Question and Answer - April 2024 - Q&A for Master Course and Kabbalah Students - October 2024 - Q&A for Master Course and Kabbalah Students --- --- [Join the Kabbalah Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/sixty-skills-kabbalah) #### 3. Planetary Kabbalah (Quabbalah) Curriculum - https://youtu.be/C8IkPvk7sg4?si=2b4vXG5HsJVpweuy Planetary Kabbalah is an advanced esoteric practice that involves placing the energetic essences or "power aspects" of planets within different parts of one's body in order to generate specific effects. This is akin to working with multi-letter Kabbalistic practices from the Franz Bardon lineage. However, to even begin studying Planetary Kabbalah, one must first master the foundational "mother letters" representing the elemental forces of fire, air, water, earth, and akasha, as well as develop the ability to discern between the vital, astral, mental, and akashic emanations of energy. After gaining mastery over the elemental forces, the next step is to work through a series of planetary meditations, starting from the near-Earth planets out to at least Jupiter, or ideally all the way out to Pluto if taking a more modern approach. This process, which can take 18-36 months, allows the practitioner to intimately understand the individual effects of each planet's energy upon the human body. Only then can one begin the actual practice of Planetary Kabbalah by emplacing the spirits or power aspects of planets, rather than their associated intelligences, into specific areas of the body. One basic Planetary Kabbalah technique described is the "kabbalist's or magician's prayer," where the Moon's power aspect is placed at the solar plexus to generate an astral field, and the Sun's power aspect is placed at the heart center to create a balanced, unified force. More advanced practices involve placing multiple planets within the body in specific configurations to produce desired effects, which is akin to "playing chords" with these planetary energies. After mastering Planetary Kabbalah, even higher levels exist, such as Zodiac Kabbalah, followed eventually by working with the energies of the Sephiroth itself. But first comes Planetary Kabbalah, something you will rarely see discussed let alone practically explained in the way Sixty Skills does in this course. ## 1. Planetary Kabbalah Series Planetary Kabbalah Discord Group - Introduction - Requirements - Why? - Esoteric Hygiene - The Need to Counterbalance - Dangers of the Outer Planets - Sigils --- ## 2. Near Earth Zone Block - NEZ Theory – The Planetary Path of Development - NEZ Theory – Sigils - NEZ Theory – Ball Above Head and the Head - NEZ Theory – How Spirits Manifest - NEZ Theory – Different Levels of Development - NEZ Theory – Mediumship versus Evocation - NEZ – Power Aspect - NEZ – Intelligence (Radina) --- ## 3. Lunar Zone Block - Excerpt from future book about Lunar - Lunar Zone Theory – The Function of the Lunar Realm in Energetic Development - Lunar Zone Theory – The Kabbalah Spirit of Luna - Lunar Zone Theory – How to Practice with Lunar Power - Lunar Zone Theory – Planetary Structure and Development Writ Large - Lunar Zone – Power Aspect - Lunar Zone – Intelligence (Ezhobar) --- ## 4. Mercury Zone Block - Mercury Zone Theory – The Energetics of Mercury - Mercury Zone Theory – Kabbalah Spirit Reading - Mercury Zone Theory – How to Practice with Mercury - Mercury Zone Theory – The Grand Library and the 72 Spirits of Mercury - Mercury Zone – Power Aspect - Mercury Zone – Intelligence (Nith Hal'ah) --- ## 5. Venus Zone Block - Venus Zone Theory – How Venus Works Energetically - Venus Zone Theory – The Relationship Between Venus, Wealth, and Health - Venus Zone Theory – How to Work with Venus Energy - Venus Zone Theory – Dangers of Working with Venus - Venus Zone Theory – Mars and Venus - Venus Zone – Power Aspect - Venus Zone – Intelligence (Podme) --- ## 6. Solar Zone Block - Solar Zone Theory – Energetic Effects of the Sun Sphere - Solar Zone Theory – Use of the Sun Sphere as a Counterbalance - Solar Zone Theory – The Need for Purity When Engaging the Sun Sphere and Inherent Dangers - Solar Zone Theory – The Sun Sphere and Kabbalakh - Solar Zone Theory – The Sun Sphere as an Endpoint - Solar Zone – Power Aspect - Solar Zone – Intelligence (Levum) --- ## 7. Mars Zone Block - Mars Zone Theory – The Energetics of Mars - Mars Zone Theory – Differences in Dealing with the Outer Planets - Mars Zone Theory – Classical Misunderstandings of Governing Mars - Mars Zone Theory – Why Mars is Hard - Mars Zone Theory – Mars and Venus - Mars Zone – Power Aspect - Mars Zone – Intelligence (Mirvellion) - Mars Zone – Intelligence (Wizol) - Mars Zone – Intelligence (Barrae) --- ## 8. Jupiter Zone Block - Jupiter Zone Theory – The Energetics of Jupiter - Jupiter Zone Theory – How to Train with Jupiter - Jupiter Zone Theory – Side Effects of Working with Jupiter - Jupiter Zone Theory – Using Jupiter to Work Kabbalah - Jupiter Zone Theory – Jupiter as a Checkpoint - Jupiter Zone – Power Aspect - Jupiter Zone – Intelligence (Nisin) --- ## 9. Saturn Zone Block - Saturn Zone Theory – The Energetics of Saturn - Saturn Zone Theory – The Dangers of Saturn - Saturn Zone Theory – Dissolution of Boundaries - Saturn Zone Theory – The Home of Karma - Saturn Zone Theory – Problems with Bardon's Second Book *The Practice of Magical Evocation* - Saturn Zone – Power Aspect - Saturn Zone – Intelligence (Sirene) --- ## 10. Uranus Zone Block - Uranus Zone Theory – The Energetics of Uranus - Uranus Zone Theory – The Realm of Technology - Uranus Zone – Power Aspect - Uranus Zone – Pericline - Uranus Zone – Daniz --- ## 11. Neptune Zone Block - Neptune Zone Theory – The Energetics of Neptune - Neptune Zone Theory – Neptune: The Realm of Fame and Media - Neptune Zone – Power Aspect - Neptune Zone – Evanura and Shemtom --- ## 12. Pluto Zone Block - Pluto Zone Theory – (Overview) - Pluto Zone Theory – Energetics of Pluto - Pluto Zone Theory – The Realm of Hidden Magics, Nuclear Power, and the Underworld - Pluto Zone Theory – The Kabbalah Machines - Pluto Zone Theory – The Planetary Libraries - Pluto Zone – Egregores and Pluto - Pluto Zone – Plutonian Spirits Horens and Sonal - Pluto Zone – Invocation of Horens - Pluto Zone – Invocation of Sonal --- ## 13. Extra Solar Zone Block - Extra Solar Zone Theory – Energetics of the Extra Solar Region - Extra Solar Zone Theory – Extra Solar Kabbalah - Extra Solar Zone Theory – Dead Worlds, Rogue Planets, and Events Lost to Time - Extra Solar Zone Theory – Extra Solar Egregores - Extra Solar Zone Theory – Hadcu and Elhowar - Extra Solar Zone – Power Aspect of the Extra Solar Region - Extra Solar Zone – Invocation of Elhowar - Extra Solar Zone – Invocation of Hadcu --- ## 14. Emnasut Block - Emnasut Block Theory – A Brief Discussion of Emnasut - Emnasut Block – Invocation of Emnasut --- ## 15. Magicians Prayer Block - The Magicians Prayer Theory - Magicians Prayer Exercise --- ## 16. Planetary Fusion Block - Planetary Fusion Theory - Planetary Fusion Exercise --- ## 17. First Stacking Block - First Stacking Block Theory - Planetary and Kabbalah Letters Stacking Exercise --- ## 18. First Zodiac Meditation Teaser Trailer Cancer Zodiac Meditation Sample First Zodiac Meditation Teaser Theory [Join the Planetary Kabbalah Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/planetary-kabbalah) #### 4. Zodiac Curriculum Coming 2025. --- --- # Why We Practice Hermetic Initiation: Frater IAC on His Franz Bardon Journey Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/why-we-practice-hermetic-initiation-frater-iac-on-his-franz-bardon-journey/ ## Introduction I am so pleased to have this interview, we discussed this back in 2024 but it was not yet the right time. Now out nowhere we have a 17,000 word interview! This is another that goes into the special category as this is a practitioner just like us, he is not a famous name. Frater IAC’s journey through Franz Bardon’s Hermetic path is a testament to both rigorous discipline and transformative insight. With over sixteen years of metaphysical practice behind him—and having completed Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics before dedicating the past year and a half to the Key to the True Kabbalah—he offers rare, firsthand perspective on the trials of soul-mirror work and the deep rewards of steadfast commitment. This interview serves as an essential guide for any aspirant seeking to walk the Bardon path with clarity and purpose. Thank you very much Frater IAC. If you enjoy and appreciate this interview then please do let us know. We love to hear from those that read our blog. --- Table of Contents - Introduction- 1 · Why We Practice- 2 · The Discipline & the FunStart a Course on Perseus- 3 · Healing & Service- 4 · Mindsets & “Isms”- 5 · Tools of the Trade- 6 · Working with Spirits- 7 · The True Kabbalah Frontier ## 1 · Why We Practice **PAA: What inner or outer call first nudged you toward Franz Bardon’s system, and how has that call matured since you began?** In December 2024, James asked if I would be willing to share a bit about my journey as a Hermetic Initiate. I was gratified but wanted several months to continue my work prior to actually doing it.  I have finished Initiation into Hermetics and have worked with the letters in Key to the True Kabbalah (KTQ) for nearly a year-and-a-half. I have also interacted with a number of spirits. So, I am very much still on my own journey. My hope is that each one who reads my answers to these questions may find something that will materially help them on their own journey. I have been practicing metaphysics for over sixteen years now, and what I still do not know could fill a library. That is the truth. When I first began studying this in earnest, I was just over fifty and at first it seemed very daunting. Where to start? Astrology? Witchcraft? Ritual magic? The Kabbalah? There is just so much.  *Certainty* can be the enemy of truth. I am in the latter half of my sixth decade in this incarnation, and have lost count of the times I have been absolutely sure of something and then been proven wrong. So, I’m going to be honest here. I know a lot about this, I really do, and have done many magical workings in the time I have practiced, some of them quite powerful. After all, why do this if you aren’t going to use it? But by no means do I know everything. This is why we have a Bardon community here on Perseus and also on a number of internet sites. It is good to compare notes so we can all get better together.  A great awakening of human consciousness is underway, and as Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, “Come, Watson, the game is afoot!” My calling? Well, a number of family members had more than a touch of the gift. On my father’s side, which was quite intellectual, there was quite a bit of interest in Theosophy and its offshoots, and both paternal grandfather and my father were 32nd degree Scottish Rite masons. On my mother’s side, a bit more earthy, there was a strong element of what we might call conjure, folk magic or mountain magic. My grandfather on that side was a powerful root doctor who knew much about herbs and folk medicine. He spoke prophetically on a number of occasions, and could weave powerful word-spells. He never would have called himself those things though because he was also a devout member of the Church of Christ. A farmer, deputy sheriff and churchman, he was born in 1876 in the hills of Arkansas, had a fourth-grade education and could recite whole chapters, even books of the bible by heart. Quite a man, and I’m proud he was my grandfather.  When I think back, my first external call was at around age four when he spoke to me magically. I won’t say more, but somehow he set me on the right track because later events in my life could have led me down some very dark paths. The second call was external as well. When this call came, I was just twenty and had gotten some bad news. I was having a real pity-party, let me tell you. Through my tears I saw an old King James bible on the shelf, and without thinking I picked it up, opened it to a random page, stuck my finger on some text and read, “Behold, I have refined thee, but not as silver. I have molded thee in the furnace of affliction.” > That blessed being we know as the HGA or Holy Guardian Angel spoke audibly to me for the first of two times in my life. He chewed me out, told me that I would never amount to anything if I kept waiting for other people to do it for me. Anything I would ever do or be was totally on me. Not exactly a gentle experience. That was a cheerful message! Speaking from the perspective of 66 years, that furnace of affliction is a real frolic. But there was more. That blessed being we know as the [HGA or Holy Guardian Angel](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/courses-1-3-attaining-your-guardian-angel-by-denny-sargent) spoke audibly to me for the first of two times in my life. He chewed me out, told me that I would never amount to anything if I kept waiting for other people to do it for me. Anything I would ever do or be was totally on me. Not exactly a gentle experience. So why not get into this thing we call Hermetics right then and there? Because I was busy making a living to support myself. I met my first wife, we married and began raising a family. I finished college, got a good job, went to grad school, and built a reasonably successful career. Had kids, got divorced, got remarried, had grandkids, generally just living a normal life. You get the idea. Life happens and I had hearth, home and career as a focus and both metaphysics and spirituality took a back burner. The internal call came in the mid-2000s  when I was in my forties. I was reading a book by Itzhak Bentov called *Stalking the Wild Pendulum*. Somehow I ran across the term Hermetics and this led me to the *Kybalion*. There is a sentence in there that hit me like a ton of bricks. It said the book would not have come to me if I was not ready to learn what it held. I took that at face value and begin studying about Hermetics in earnest. You will note that the word I’m using here is ‘study.’ I did not actually begin practicing until a bit later.  I suppose we could consider this my first real lesson in magic – it begins with an idea arising from some inspiration or gestalt, then the mind studies and learns. All the while, the soul yearns to begin doing it. Then, at a certain level of maturity, one sets foot on the Initiatory Path and at that point the Universe moves. How has the call matured? Well, I’ve been lucky. In my work, I have spoken to many people who are quite successful in life, and without exception these people are mission-driven. The truly successful have set themselves a purpose in life that usually involves helping others in some significant way, and they act according to that purpose at all times. For them, this raison d’etre is never far away, because it has become their north star. For myself, I can say that for decades my own mission has been to *wage peace against economic violence*. This mission was mundane for a career that has spanned nearly 40 years, and only became a magical mission when I completed the basic Bardon Initiatory Path as set forth in Initiation to Hermetics (IIH). I now routinely amplify my mundane efforts using the power of focused intent, which we refer to as ‘magic,’ because this mission truly needs magical help. I still find myself going back and reviewing this IIH material and revisiting the exercises when and as needed. These tools stay with you for the rest of your life and each time you repeat an exercise from this book, the experience deepens, grows richer. Lately, maybe the last few years, I have expanded this mission in a number of shamanic or pastoral ways. I now think of my ‘magical mission’ as being a guardian of the human heart, to *provide good and loving service to the life and collective soul of the people.* The ultimate objective is to awaken humanity, to raise the levels of human consciousness, ideally to the highest realms of love, joy, peace and enlightenment. Perhaps we could say to help people realize they are called to live in a way that respects the Divine and this sacred earth at the same time. Humans are the bridge, if you will, between Father Sky and Mother Earth.  **PAA: What personal transformations should someone realistically expect—physically, emotionally, mentally—during the first year on the Path of Hermetic Initiation?** This is a great question. For me this transformation has brought great inner peace and happiness. I marvel at how wondrous this path is daily. It seems to me at this point my entire life has become magical, sparkles with universal light. Oh, don’t get me wrong – I still have adversities that crop up. All of us do. But life is now lived in a state of profound gratitude and nearly continuous joy. I will tell you that if you are just beginning your work with Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics, you will be a completely different person when you finish the final step than you were going in. You will not care about the same things, or perhaps you will care about the same things, but differently. Part of this transformation is internal, a result of your own hard work, but the other part is the help you get from Divine Providence. You will need to be diligent, and persevere even through adversity and challenges because you *will be challenged on this path*. The universe will test your resolve to ensure you are worthy of these gifts. You will likely undergo what St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul. Don’t give up. Ever. When things seem darkest, that is the time to buckle down and redouble your effort. Don’t ever let up. In the first two steps of IIH, you begin applying thought control, mindfulness, concentration, vacancy of mind and construct your soul-mirrors. You are given real techniques to perform the spiritual alchemy that will change your astral and mental lead into spiritual gold. Those techniques work. You will systematically change your vices into virtues, purify body, soul and mind. Physically, many Bardonists are into Yoga or various martial arts. This is excellent, and if you can you should. But not everyone can. I have never had full use of the body I was given in this incarnation, but I do as much as I can. There are disabilities I will carry to the death of this clay vessel, and those must be patiently borne. The main thing here is that you remember that your body, such as it is, is a temple, so you want to take as good a care of it as possible. We all must play the hand we are dealt as effectively as we can. Remember this – if the body that carries around your soul, mind and spirit in this lifetime is not as strong as other bodies, or cannot do the same things at the same level physically, do not worry about that. Do the best you can. That will have to be good enough. Having disabilities has never stopped me from doing what is important, so don’t let things like that stop you. Even if it seems daunting, try anyway.  Taking control of your emotions and thoughts is a fascinating discussion because it has to do with passing the first veil in your ascent wherein you master those emotions and thoughts that no longer serve you – essentially, you begin exerting control over the heretofore wild elemental forces within. These are things like rage, resentment, self-pity, fears around suffering, death, not being popular, shame – the list goes on. I had well over 100 at the start and the mission is to transmute them, all of them, into their respective virtues.  This is the *initial work* with the soul mirror, and it is the 32nd Path (Tau) between Malkuth and Yesod on the Tree of Life. Its Tarot card is the World or Universe, which denotes mastery of the elements within yourself. In the Rider-Waite deck, she is presented as a woman (some say androgyne) who has learned to control the elemental forces within and now floats in a wreath. She holds two identical wands – one representing her will and the other God’s will. We cannot tell the difference between these wands because her purity of soul and mind has allowed her to connect with the Godhead and join her will to that of Divine Providence. She floats, in other words, in the currents of Divine Intent. She has become a powerful instrument in service to that Intent. So what is beyond this first veil? On the Tree of Life, Yesod, Hod and Netzach together make up the triangle of Personality. Yesod is the Moon, called the plane of Formation. It is where the archetypes arising from Netzach, whose planet is Venus, join with the Mercurial intellect from Hod to create new realities, new conditions that eventually manifest in the physical plane. This is where you begin learning to work with the elemental forces, the fluids and vital energy – practicing real magic.  On a personal note, when I finally finished Step 2 sufficiently to move safely into this work, I was very happy because I knew with certainty that even if I died that very day, my work with the soul mirrors alone signified a life well spent. Learning to tame yourself is one of the most worthwhile things you can do. It is well to remember that life on this plane is a transitory thing, and the best use of it is to learn as much as you can before you move on.  Why do some Hermeticists (even very competent ones) operate anonymously, and how do you decide what to share versus keep private?  The answer to this question is simple, short and obvious. Let’s say an advanced Hermeticist is an elected official, or a ‘C-Suite’ officer in a multinational corporation. Their abilities to make positive changes in the context of these and a plethora of other careers – teachers, counselors, communicators, physicians, physicists, life and social scientists, engineers, service providers – would come to a screeching halt if they went around blabbing about magic, wouldn’t they? Some Hermetic Initiates can and do use their real names. Others do not. Respect all. Remember this community runs deep. There are many who practice under the radar, remaining strictly silent, revealing nothing. Some of these are powerful almost beyond the imagination. Many serve the light, helping people learn to live in harmony with Divine Providence and all life. Some serve the darkness, practicing selfishly, advancing only their unbridled lust for wealth and temporal power. Again, respect all, because even the most odious and cruel actors have their purpose in this great moving tapestry of destiny, shaping either the evolution or involution of human consciousness. All humans learn. Most learn through fate. They do dumb stuff, and keep getting hit over the head with the consequences of that dumb stuff until they eventually learn. Others, pure of soul and more mature, take control over their spiritual ascent. That is us, and we make up only a tiny bit of humanity, but hopefully we Hermeticists who serve the light make an outsized contribution to the awakening of our species to its birthright of connectedness with God and our sacred earth. I’ll leave this question with a quotation from an essay written by Frater Acher: > *Anyone who has set foot on the magical path knows that surrendering one’s name is a fundamental step in initiation. Often, the mundane name is replaced by a pseudonym or a motto — something that encapsulates the aspirant’s magical intent. Yet even these magical names are temporary by nature; they are assumed to serve a purpose and discarded once that purpose is fulfilled. Beneath them all, the advancing aspirant begins to recognize, over the years and through the changing of names, something profoundly nameless. He comes to see himself as the bench upon which an endless procession of names has taken a seat. Some remain, others vanish, a few carve themselves into the wood and are still forgotten. Yet, the bench itself has no name — or rather, it is too shapeless, too impermanent, too withdrawn to be bound by letters. And yet, this bench is the very thing that has borne all names and will bear them still*. > > Frater Acher ## 2 · The Discipline & the Fun **PAA: Some steps feel like a sheer grind. Which exercises did you find hardest, and what concrete tactics turned them into something you actually looked forward to?** I have plenty of stories around that and may hopefully offer some suggestions that can help others work through these times, because we all experience them in our ascent. First, let us consider the ‘occult.’ The word simply means ‘hidden,’ but there is great meaning in that. Many begin this work thinking to forcefully penetrate this veil, reach in and slurp up all knowledge and power and all of a sudden become godlike in their might. Not so fast! It doesn’t exactly work that way. The occult hides in plain sight and no matter how many times you read something or attempt to master it, until you are mature enough spiritually, it will continue to elude you. Why? I have come to realize it is for our own good, because if we are able to access and wield these powers before we are physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually ready, we would become like a three-year-old fooling around with a chain saw. If we are really lucky, nothing at all will happen. If we are not, then we may face disaster.  So this learning is a two-way street. Your part of it is to make the effort every single day to purify your heart and mind, then learn to control these forces rather than allowing them to control you. The part of the unseen, the spirit realm – your HGA, ancestors known and unknown, guides, other spirit beings, and Divine Providence itself – is to reveal its ‘occult’ secrets when and as you mature.   Examples? Well, I can remember puzzling long and hard over which element to assign to both vices on the dark mirror and virtues on the light one. I was not nearly knowledgeable enough about the elemental forces to do this at all, let alone do it well. So I found another way. Since I’m Christian, I hit on the Seven Deadly Sins as the rubric to organize these vices and virtues. I made much better progress after this, and it became easier as I worked the soul mirrors to understand the element or elements that had to do with the trait I was trying to transmute.  I did make a serious mistake. I got impatient and tried to skip ahead to pore-breathing the elements in Step 3 before I had completed the basic soul mirror. The raw power of the fire element came upon me and it hurt me in a number of ways. As a result, I was out of the Bardon game for a couple of years, maybe three or four. But I’m not one to give up. I still read, but focused on more innocuous things like learning the Tarot. I found a really good book called [*Tarot Skills for the 21st Century: Mundane and Magical Divination* by Josephine McCarthy. ](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tarot-Skills-21st-Century-Divination-ebook/dp/B08B45X6TP/ref=sr_1_4?adgrpid=1174279329829202&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.sVjeLs9tYbLafer5YAVY2-9w--bHrxZ29gskKaq5E5z0RSOiB-kgNXk3XI1tSVJBahDmAi0_0sj1nCzxC60InOJ131Mux1ehdk03UdI7qVbrdpB67m9r4SStwQUyDIKJguFNhQynAwPMqAF2-nXzOJtdOrIWt0wrkoC_S-omHJWXinycKYRRWdro-tvr8KVit17AOrs9FPLaTflYLsTM8xOy-R_5eqQvqkkEbt9iilA.m7gZ0gy2CjlI5rr-IFY_UA_nAQ602YubrJIZOEOeZkE&dib_tag=se&hvadid=73392659649176&hvbmt=bp&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=40887&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=p&hvtargid=kwd-73392613183409%3Aloc-188&hydadcr=10538_1819784&keywords=tarot+skills&mcid=60e773e880cd3472a36ef22a4367c292&msclkid=eaaaa377ee611a124dcccb539f04c464&qid=1747218810&sr=8-4) This lead me to read all of Josephine McCarthy’s books, which are quite good, and I spent a couple of years going through the Apprentice exercises in [Quareia](https://www.quareia.com/), which is a balanced and complete training program in and of itself, but in the end I did not commit to that because I dislike failing and I had failed at Bardon. So I went back and got serious about the soul mirror work. Another mistake I made was forgetting about the white mirror because the black mirror was so time-consuming. But you must work them together, black and white, dark and light, vice and virtue. Know why? Transmutation. The very process of spiritual alchemy calls for you to transmute the vices that no longer serve you into virtues that do. I found the soul mirror process worked best for me when I worked on getting rid of a dark-mirror characteristic and at the same time worked on strengthening its corresponding virtue on the white mirror. That was when I began making real progress. Soul-mirror work: do you ever “finish,” or is it a lifelong diagnostic? How do you keep it fresh after Step 2?  I’m not sure what year I found Bardon, but when I read Initiation into Hermetics I knew right then it would be my initiatory path. The value of Bardon’s path is in its balance. One of the main reasons I chose it is that I recognized that if someone diligently performed the painstaking work in Steps 1 and 2 of IIH and then made it through Step 10 of that initiation, they would be balanced, wielding these awesome powers from a pure soul and clean mind. That is the group I wanted to be in.  How do you talk about the soul-mirrors? It is by far the most difficult part of this whole thing because even though you are doing some of the most powerful magic there is – spiritual alchemy, it doesn’t seem like it. In fact, the rewards can be so slow in coming that it can feel like you are working really hard and not making much progress at all. Based on my own experience it can be a real slog.  Only late in IIH did I realize something really important about the soul mirror work. The work you do in Steps 1 and 2 of IIH is *only the first pass*. You work the mirrors until you are balanced enough to move on to the more advanced work in Steps 3 through 10. But you have within you an unconscious mind and it has all kinds of repressed stuff swimming around in it. Carl Jung called it the Shadow.  Let’s take an example. In my mundane career I focus on social and economic policies and how they look ‘on the ground’ when applied through various levels of government and in the private sector. I have fought the proverbial ‘good fight’ for decades only to see policies that work reversed or hamstrung so the many are hurt for the sake of a greedy few having just a little more. What is it Galadriel told Frodo? She said she had fought the great defeat for three ages.  And that made me angry. Furious. Enraged. My blood boiled with righteous indignation. And that fury was ever with me because I was helpless in its path. I watched seemingly minor policy changes ripple out to great destructive effect. This was the first hurdle in what I call ‘soul mirror 2.0.’ This kind of fury or wrath degrades one’s life with bitterness and cynicism. The onus here is the old 10-step admonition to have the courage to change what you can, the serenity to accept what you cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference. I had to work the white mirror on this one because we are talking about acceptance, agape love, and inner peace.  The second hurdle was a bit more subtle and I will address it in the next question.  > Then I saw it writhing, this astral larva, struggling to stay hidden, to burrow more deeply into the noisome swamp of that memory. But it could hide from me no longer. It was the root cause, the hidden emotion from which arose these other toxic things. It was the larva of shame and I realized it had been feeding on me for decades.  **PAA: Additional purification—do Bardon’s alchemical methods cover everything, or have you found other practices (somatic, psychological, devotional) that accelerate vice-to-virtue transmutation? ** What I found when going through the later steps of IIH and after completion of that volume is that imbalances continue to surface from the deep unconscious, the shadow self.  We humans are complicated creatures, created in the image and likeness of God, or Divine Providence if you prefer that term. The ‘image’ part of that is easy. It doesn’t even require thought because it is simply your free will. This free will is an irrevocable gift to humanity. We can choose at any moment, no matter how ‘advanced’ we may or may not be in our spirituality, to turn away from the Divine and trust only in ourselves. Since I was very young, I have had a deep reverence for God but waffled around giving myself fully in service to this God because I was afraid I would miss something life had to offer – you know, wild sex, nice cars, nice home, toys, various other hedonistic pastimes. I know now that this is not true. One misses nothing and gains everything by connecting with the Godhead (IIH Step 10) and other deities, which I consider aspects of this one Divine being. Ah, but it is the second gift we concern ourselves with here, and that is the ‘likeness’ of God. Likeness to the Divine means making the effort to become like God. This is scary to many people because it means absolute purity of body, soul and mind. Bardon and other advanced Hermetic Initiates all address this purity in one way or another because achieving it begins with mastering the elemental forces within ourselves before we try to control them externally.  So we work through the soul mirrors and move on, but as one progresses, repressed things that have hidden in the dark recesses of our psyches bubble up, often at inconvenient times. I had nearly finished working through IIH when an event happened. I mentioned this to a Hermetic Initiate I trust, have learned from and corresponded with. His response: “What desperation do you have inside that has caused you to build a wall of pride?” It is a great teacher who can ask a question like this that forces you to stop and really go deep within. Try as I might, I did not discover the source of the imbalance for a number of months. I thought and thought but could not get to the root of it.  Then another event happened that left me in a white-hot rage, literally beside myself. At this point, I knew I had to do something different to address this thing that was so deeply buried in my innermost being because it stemmed from a series of traumas I underwent in childhood. It wasn’t one thing, you see, but a compound, an interrelated web which resulted in attitudes and behaviors that manifested in a variety of destructive ways. I no longer even remembered these traumas, but deep inside my psyche they still lived on.  Earlier, perhaps months earlier, I had read portions of [Andre Consciências](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/andre-consciencia/) book, *[Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Soul-Mirror-Sphere-Sun/dp/1838459871)* and it gave me an idea. I have read deeply in various magical disciplines including shamanism, and so hit on soul retrieval and recapitulation as two techniques that could help me here, but I wanted to use a real mirror, not an imaginary one.  I will talk more extensively of mirrors and their uses in subsequent questions, so here I will only tell you how I constructed and then used this new mirror. It is white and designed specifically to help me with this additional purification. I chose an 8” disk of selenite, which is a gentle moon stone that can enhance spiritual awareness and purity, and I had a frame laser cut for it from birch, which is a wood known for its spiritual use in cleansing.  The first time I used this white mirror I began by invoking the Godhead, and enclosing my being in an egg of Akasha to protect myself on the journey. That is important, by the way. It is sound practice to begin any work you do using your mirrors or anything else in later steps, really. Otherwise the practice of travel, what the witches in olden days called ‘flying,’ can be quite dangerous. When I had constructed the mirror, painted it with the compound condenser and then charged it to the purpose, it was ready. In the first session, my consciousness entered the mirror through its depth point and used it as a portal through time. I traveled the sea of years and went far back in time to locate hidden shards of my soul and retrieve them. On the wings of this intent, I came to a dark and boggy place where I beheld the first of many of these barely-remembered early traumas.  It was an ugly place, this noisome memory, but this time I was armed with my current level of gnosis (maturity) and the light of Divine Providence showed forth from me. I had come in power and light. The darkness receded and the event revealed itself in stark detail with nothing hidden. Tears flowed and the fists of my spirit body clenched. Again, I felt the cold rage that arose from this child within – rage, resentment, the desire to strike back, to have vengeance, and saw how I had put up walls of pride and desire to please as childish defenses. And worse, I perceived a more subtle thing that I cannot say more about.  Then I saw it writhing, this astral larva, struggling to stay hidden, to burrow more deeply into the noisome swamp of that memory. But it could hide from me no longer. It was the root cause, the hidden emotion from which arose these other toxic things. It was the larva of shame and I realized it had been feeding on me for decades.  When as a child this blanket of shame covered me again and again, parts of my soul fled in terror and hid deep in the shadows of my unconscious mind. I beheld one such shard illumined by the Divine light and I reached out with loving feelings of safety, love, joy and peace. I asked this shard to come to the light, to rejoin me and make my soul whole again. I felt it rise as a mist and enter my astral body. When this was done, I used the sword of the Divine Word to dissolve the larva into nothingness. It is a letter formula given to me in a dream for just this work. I did this memory by memory over many hours and a number of mirror-sessions. This is how soul retrieval works for me. It may well work differently for you should you choose to attempt it when faced with stubborn shadows. There are other ways to do it than mine, though, so you should read up on it. Consciência’s book on the soul mirrors is a good place to begin but there are many books out there on these shamanic practices of active introspection. James Endredy comes to mind. He is trained by Huichol shamans and presents other techniques you may find more useful than mine.  Now, let us consider an example of *recapitulation*. This is different than soul retrieval, and if anything, a bit more difficult. It is when you go back in time and take back the power you lost, either from those you wronged, or from those who have wronged you. This power is a form of vital energy that is your birthright, but that you cannot use until you take it back. In the first case, you search your memory for times when you have bullied someone, betrayed someone who trusted you, inflicted pain, acted evilly, been mean spirited, or otherwise hurt someone. Then you go through the mirror and relive that event in detail, remembering everything possible about it. You may well be surprised at how much you can remember. Then put yourself in the other person’s place and feel what they felt. Experience their horror in your inner vision – their pain, anger, frustration, anguish, whatever they may have felt, depending on what you did.  After remembering, experiencing as much as possible, really feeling it, you then use your Pillar of Volition, the Divine Will to call any personal power you lost in the event to return to you. Sometimes it may be a shard of your soul that hid in shame from the perfidy of your own actions. As I did this operation time after time, these pieces of returning power usually appeared as wisps of white mist that fly toward you and are absorbed into your astrosome.  After this, apologize to the shade of the person wronged, and surround them with Divine light. Finally, make the image dissolve, crumble into nothingness, be dismissed as if it never happened. And – this is important – never think of it again. If you catch a thought, dismiss it immediately. This is what repentance actually is – you relive the event, regret it, repent of it, forgive and release, and then move on. You have the rest of your life to live, after all. The procedure for someone who wronged you is a bit easier, except that not only do you want to feel again the raw emotions you experienced in the event, but try also to see the other person in light of their own pain. What were they going through that may have caused them to inflict pain on you? Is there a story behind it? Here you are using the God-powers of omnipresence and omniscience together – to know and love anyway.  As you ascend on the Initiatory Path, you will find it is much easier to perceive such things, to read the auras of others even in memory of shades long past. When it feels like you are done with the memory, take back the power you lost, then forgive and release the person. This is important, this forgiveness. It is not for the other person but for you because if you hold a grudge then you have made yourself a slave to that grudge. Forgive and release, and as you release, allow the memory to crumble into nothingness as if it never happened.  Now comes the challenge. Don’t think about these events again. I know I’m repeating myself here, but whenever one of these memories comes to mind, dismiss it. You may either allow the cloud of the memory to float away without engaging it, or if you are more mature, simply banish it. Either way it is only a shadow that has no more power over you unless you allow it power by engaging it.    I will end this with a word about the cosmic letters Bardon presents in KTQ. The letters all do magical things, but they also serve as a very real aid to the deep introspection necessary to achieve the soul- and mind-purity you must have for doing powerful works in metaphysics. I’m going to address the letters and what I have discovered about them in subsequent questions, so enough said here.  ### Start a Course on Perseus We have FREE courses available [here](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free). ***If you would like to get started with any of our paid courses then use the following coupon code to get 20% OFF: Coupon Code: 20%OFF*** [See Courses](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/courses) ## 3 · Healing & Service **PAA: Should every Hermeticist learn healing, or is it a specialized calling? How do you gauge readiness to apply magical healing without harming yourself or the recipient?** I would suggest that it is a specialized calling. There are many types of healing and I will flatly state that healing is only a subset of the shamanic or pastoral duties that I believe fall to Initiates in all metaphysical disciplines.  For example, we can have imbalances at the physical, emotional and mental levels. At the physical level, we may be born with certain defects, such as some deformity or an organ that doesn’t quite work the way it should. Or we may come down with a cold or be diagnosed with some form of cancer. You also may find yourself disabled in some way after an accident or the onset of a debilitating illness.  Emotionally we may be affected by the loss of a loved one, the ending of a relationship, layoff, traumatic stress, a whole variety of phobias, or be depressed over some other temporary adversity that arises.  We can also be so hurt by life we become bitter, cynical or chronically angry. These strong negative emotional states can manifest in physical illnesses. For example, a person I knew was so bitter and full of anger they ended up coming down with leukemia – their bitterness had poisoned their mind and soul, and eventually manifested in a poisoning of the blood.  The Bardon path grants us awesome powers, but what of responsibilities? It can be quite uncomfortable for most people to think of those, yet I strongly suggest that we Hermeticists do in fact have responsibilities to our fellow humans. The Hermetic Initiate may find themselves called to help in a time of trouble, strengthen faith, give comfort, light the fires of hope for those who may be in despair. A number of Hermeticists I have great respect for have alluded to these duties.  We had better believe that the old proverb ‘to whom much is given much is expected’ is true. As I say, we very seldom talk of those expectations in this community, but I am sure many reading this are nodding for they sense and may even perform such duties. I think Andre Consciência is really on to something good with this concept [neo-shamanism](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/journey-to-the-spirit-world-exploring-neo-shamanism).  Hermeticism definitely has a shamanic element which manifests in many ways. Valentin Tomberg says anonymously in [Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meditations-Tarot-Journey-Christian-Hermeticism/dp/1585421618), that our role as Hermeticists is to be *guardians of the heart*, to provide good and loving service to the life and collective soul of the people. I paraphrase here, but I cannot articulate a better way to state this shamanic mission.  These duties are many and permeate our relationships at home, at work and in our neighborhood. We are shepherds in a very real sense. For an example of this, we can begin with the duties of a Hermetic Initiate in the face of the death of a loved one. Now, as Hermeticists, we are well aware that what we call death is merely the casting off of the clay vessel and subsequent entry to a realm in which one is no longer constrained by space, time, or the necessities of physical survival. But often the grief experienced by those left behind is paralyzing because they do not know these things. They just know their pain at the passing of someone they love. In such situations, even in his or her own family, there are two sets of duties that the Hermeticist may perform.   It is said that tears cleanse, and they do. People must grieve, but the Hermeticist can make themselves quite useful in helping people grieve and come to acceptance of the loss. Readers will know that in 1971, American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote a seminal book called ‘[On Death and Dying](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Dying-Doctors-Nursess-Families/dp/B001VJIJOS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=LJ06R45F040T&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.fmQsEg3pwdKREJU0HFOxNYBPCKyoM9fLK7NQu45GDAd97qyX1U8xF15Rlprn2big6n8nkP5YbKBP9QKLI5mjMsNkfkscCD29AwpNdFX_pN3Lypxlum_HU6_iAe8Sjc7JrrX3n6dx-teLnbxySZTKFRllbErZkbXP0vlEQpxW3zqd0Furfbz99OvFBMd3oq2Y-HG-SXkk1EN1zaQp8_YhkTYhW3wObgZwLKXRBerJsF4.nwG714T5ktlNrkEIFlARQvccv09GVBYKqolo8C4asFw&dib_tag=se&keywords=On+Death+and+Dying&qid=1747219390&s=books&sprefix=on+death+and+dying%2Cstripbooks%2C121&sr=1-1).’ In this book, she spoke of grief as a process, and this process came to be known as the *grief cycle*.  Later, it was discovered that this grief cycle happens with any loss of anything important to us – a job, a relationship, one’s home or anything else we hold dear. I won’t elaborate on the stages of this cycle because that is easily researched, but I will say that the Hermeticist can do this work in the physical, astral, mental and Akashic realms to aid those who grieve, depending on level of need.  Sometimes, consolation can be as simple as being present with a gentle touch or hug. Or listening to reminiscences of fond memories or participating fully in wakes, celebrations of life or traditional funerals. These rites of passage are not done for the sake of the deceased, because they have no further need. Rather, they serve as rites of passage, or permissions, for those attending to grieve one last time and then accept the loss and move on with their own lives. Other cases may be a bit more troubling. A newly deceased elementar, which is [Mouni Sadhu’](http://www.mounisadhu.com/)s word for the departing astral, mental and spirit bodies of a newly deceased person, may become confused and refuse to move on because of unfinished business.   **PAA: Here is a true story of how a Hermeticist with whom I am acquainted assisted a confused elementar.** The story involves a young woman we will call Kay. Her beloved grandfather passed away. He was a genuinely good man, so he had no problem finding the light and moving on, but he mysteriously appeared to Kay in dreams over a number of years for she is quite sensitive and possesses a great deal of the ‘touch.’ Finally, he learned to communicate from the beyond, and came to her in a dream where she answered her mobile and he spoke to her from a beach saying, “We are all connected.” Now this was profound, but the story becomes even more curious. His wife, Kay’s grandmother, known as Gram, passed after a long battle with stomach cancer. The problem was, the elementar that was Gram in this life stuck around, appearing to Kay in dreams several times a week over a period of months.  In the dreams, Kay would find herself at either the former city home or summer cabin of Gram and see her wandering around confused, trying to touch things, searching. And the beloved grandfather would be in the dreams, trying to beckon Gram on, but Gram’s elementar could not see him.  Our Hermetic initiate worked with Kay to develop two rite of passage ceremonies to help her Gram move on. The particulars are not important but mainly these rituals involved a loving recitation of fond memories, and then an exhortation for Gram to move on and meet the shade of her husband, who was waiting for her in the beyond.  Kay performed the ceremonies at the location of each house at agreed upon times so that the Hermeticist, who was not present, could perform a ritual of elemental influence simultaneously in support of Gram moving on.  In such a working, signs are always given signifying success. The sign at the city home is that both Kay and her cousin, who participated in that ceremony received frissons in which they got goosebumps. In other words, they felt the ‘magic.’  At the location of the mountain home, Kay went on a hike afterward, and the sign given was a single columbine flower blooming early in a meadow. Gram has not appeared in any dreams since, and a simple divination done by the Hermeticist indicated success. Gram had moved on.  Before entering the branch of social science I pursue now, I was trained as a mental health and vocational counselor, and did it for around 12 years. Philosophically I come at healing in the mental and emotional realm with the belief that people are basically healthy, and if there is an imbalance, then a simple intervention may bring them back to functionality if not full mental health. This isn’t always true though, as I learned in some cases. We do not speak of it much here, but people may also be attacked spiritually. For example, Perseus just published an [interview](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-exorcist-to-hermeticist-a-journey-through-spiritual-warfare-and-magic/) on its blog with a Hermeticist who is also an exorcist. Such spiritual attacks may originate externally, either from astral larvae or people so toxic they suck away your very life force to feed themselves. These people are emotional vampires. Dion Fortune wrote a whole book about being mentally and emotionally attacked over a period of time by a person she worked for. Many reading this will be nodding as well, because there are few adults who have not been bullied or dominated in some way and at some time at work or in a relationship. It is rare but a person may be attacked magically. You should note that in such cases, the attacker may not even be aware they are doing it. Some people are just really powerful in the sense they are magical without intending to be. Others consciously intend the magical attack. People may also be possessed, not by a larva, but by some demonic entity from the abyss. No matter how curious you are, there are places in the astral realm where it is not wise to venture. What is the ancient warning? Here be dragons. Later, I will speak of turning one’s ‘isms’ into ‘wasms.’ It is possible for a person to go so far down some social media rabbit hole that they become a walking conspiracy theory. This also is a form of illness or imbalance that renders the victim incapable of responding to any new event or person except through the lens of their own ‘ism’.  So when I work with healing of heart and mind, I read the aura, or perhaps the karma, of the person in question first. See, all this work you did on the soul mirrors in Steps 1 and 2 of IIH, and your subsequent work with the letters very much widens this spiritual perception. Tanya Robinson just published a very good interview with William Mistele on her Falcon Books blog where he touched on this very subject. When you learn to understand what is in your own psyche through this painstaking soul-mirror work, you find you are much more perceptive of these energies in others. But I digress. The question is when do you know you can apply magical healing without harming yourself or the recipient? You have to have connected to your personal Godhead, as Bardon has you do in the tenth step of IIH. If you have not successfully done this, then it may not be wise for you to attempt magical healing. Remember when I said earlier that certainty can be the enemy of truth? This applies very much in this situation. I do not think I have the words to explain this beyond saying that if you are ready then you will know. And I don’t ever work to heal someone without their permission, though I will work with the elemental forces to amplify the voice of someone’s conscience without their knowledge because this is lawful – you are not interfering with their free will.  **PAA: Where does the boundary lie between healing karma-appropriate illness and interfering with someone’s necessary lesson?** To my mind, the objective of magic is in the larger sense to restore balance, either in the micro- or macrocosm. Some healers such as Stylianos Atteshlis, known as the Magus of Strovolos or Daskalos, knew how to get the permission of Divine Providence to take the karma of someone he was healing onto himself, leaving the patient completely well. Daskalos would then work through that karma, dissolving it with the light of his own purity of soul and Oneness with God.  I have to say at this point that I am not yet at this level and may not even achieve it in this lifetime. Healing physical maladies is not something that has been given to me. That said, since completing IIH and working with the letters for nearly a year and a half, plus all the other studies I have done, I can say that I have become much better at perceiving the analogous connection between a physical illness and its root in the soul-mind, but again am nowhere near being able to relieve someone of their own karmic burden and take it upon myself to work through.    As I said before, if you are ready to do this you will know. If not, don’t try.  One other thing. Remember the gifts God gives – wisdom and mercy. Sometimes if someone is really hurting, I will attempt healing but leave it up to God, asking for mercy. If it doesn’t work, so be it. But sometimes it does. It never hurts in these situations to try. ## 4 · Mindsets & “Isms” **PAA: You’ve said Hermeticists should turn their ‘-isms’ into ‘wasms.’ What common mental idols had to die for you, and what replaced them?** Since I practice Hermeticism through the lens of Christianity, I will begin with this quote from the book of Galatians: *I am crucified with Christ. Henceforth it is not me who lives but Christ who lives in me*. That is the essence of connection with God – you must let God in, invite God to live in you. At first the experience is fleeting, but then after time it is not. What happens then is that it creates a well of inner silence inside you that is filled with this God-ness. This well becomes a deep source of comfort and strength. My occupation has compelled me to amass ‘wonk-level’ knowledge of economic and social policies in terms of what they do on the ground as opposed to the rosy picture often put forth by their adherents. I had to work very hard to ‘crucify’ these ego-attachments and fears to get to my current state of maturity.  An ‘ism’ is an ideology, but if we are Hermeticists then we have embraced what some have called a primal religion or spiritual path – Hermeticism, whereby we systematically take control of ourselves and our destinies at the material, astral, mental and spiritual levels. Hermes was called Thrice-Great or Trismegistus because he is the archetype of mastery over our own fears and earthly ego-attachments so that the Higher Self can be joined with Divine Intent. Reflect a moment on the old parable of the five blind men who encounter an elephant. One grabs the tail and says that the elephant is like a piece of rope. Another feels one of the elephant’s legs and says no, it is like a tree. The third takes hold of the ear and tells the first two they are both wrong because it is like a fan. The fourth feels the elephant’s side and tells the others they are all crazy because it is like a wall. The fifth happens to feel the elephant’s tusk and says no, the elephant is like a spear point. Who is right? What is the truth? Each one perceives only the part they grasp onto and ignores the rest. In the parable, each man becomes convinced the others are lying and they actually come to blows over it.  *This is what ‘isms’ do to us*. We look at everything through the bias of our own particular ‘ism.’ Consider our current sorry state of polarization. Any time you hear some deluded soul forcefully touting their own ideology, awaken your inner Observer and reflect on what they are saying. Though it may make you feel a bit uncomfortable, particularly if you agree, you should be asking whether the ideology the person is spouting actually benefits that person, or if it benefits someone else. And what about you? How does it affect you and your loved ones. In Latin, the question of who benefits is ‘cui bono?’ This is an extremely useful question to ask when faced with one of these ‘isms.’ This is how to free yourself from being indoctrinated to think in the way the cable ‘news’ show or radio talk show host is telling you to think. Instead ask who actually benefits from what they are saying. In the United States, nearly all the cable and network media are publicly traded. You can buy stock in all of them if you want. FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post – all publicly traded. Why is this important you may ask? Because publicly traded companies in the US operate on a legal doctrine called ‘shareholder primacy’ which was established by a 1919 Michigan Supreme Court ruling against Henry Ford in favor of the Dodge Brothers. Here is the technical citation so you can look it up yourself: Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich 459; 170 NW 668 (1919).  In this case, the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford *had to operate the Ford Motor Company in the interests of its shareholders, rather than in a manner for the benefit of his employees or customers*. In other words, shareholder profits are king and rule over every other consideration in corporate governance. This is why many corporations act sociopathically. The back story is interesting, too. Ford wanted to build more cars so he could sell more cars and make more money. He got the idea somehow of mounting a conveyor belt on his factory floor and pulling each chassis along that belt while his factory people stood along the line and each one put on one or two parts. An assembly line.  I know we have all heard this part of the story, but there is more. It seems Ford reasoned that if he had raised his factory output exponentially then he needed to expand his market, otherwise the new cars would pile up without buyers. So he started in his own backyard by giving his factory people a big raise so they could afford to buy the cars they built. Good thinking, right? The Dodge Brothers, who machined parts for Ford, didn’t think so. They sued on the basis that paying excessively high wages to his workers deprived them of profits to which they were *entitled* as shareholders. And they won.  Interesting story, right? So how does this play out with cable ‘news?’ Well, NBC is owned by Comcast, ABC by Walt Disney Company, CBS by Paramount Global and FOX by Fox Corporation. This means the fiduciary responsibility of all their senior news producers is always and only to generate shareholder profits. There is nothing at all in the charter about ‘truth’ in news.  Truth in news content was governed by a law Ronald Reagan killed in 1987 which was called the Fairness Doctrine. It was created after the second world war to ensure that propagandists like Joseph Goebbels would not be able to propel demagogues to power in the United States. My father fought in the second world war. He was wounded in the Battle for New Guinea in 1944-45 in the Pacific Theater. At least I think he was. There was a purple heart in his box of medals but he wouldn’t talk much about it.  So what’s the point here? You must open your eyes and realize you cannot count on cable news, talk radio, podcasts or other social media to just give you the truth. Instead you have to dig through the biased message of each, consult a number of other sources, compare them, decide who is credible and who is not.  Because what is the truth? [Robert Monroe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe) tells us in his second book on astral travel, called *[Far Journeys](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Far-Journeys-Trilogy-Robert-Monroe/dp/0385231822)*, that life for us humans in this world is a ‘compressed learning experience,’ and the side-stories he introduces to drive this point home all have the theme of releasing all fears and ego-attachments so you can truly free yourself and move on. Think of the world’s religions – all provide guidance about living your life purely so you can leave here upon the death of your physical body and not be compelled to return in another incarnation to work out unfinished karma.  Bardon says in IIH that this is a magical/mystical path and that one cannot have one without the other and remain balanced. In the Epilogue to that book, he says, “Anyone who seeks the path to God should take Christ’s words to heart, the words of the great Master of the Mystics: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ These words should be a sacred command for every seeker who is on the spiritual path.” Last, *and this is quite important*, we may benefit by considering the difference between the upward spiral of evolution and the downward spiral of involution as it applies to our discipline of Hermeticism. Both Valentin Tomberg and Mouni Sadhu discuss these concepts in their respective books on the Tarot. Essentially, evolution is the upward spiral of ascent of one’s spirit to higher realms while involution is the downward spiral, or descent of one’s spirit to lower, denser realms.  In fact, Mouni Sadhu goes so far as to say, > “Involutionary tendencies, sometimes occurring in evolutionary beings (for example, humans) are unnatural for them and against the law of evolution which binds men. Therefore, tendencies such as attachments to material things, sensuality, and so on, are an EVIL for those beings.” > > > > > > Sadhu, Mouni. The Tarot: The Quintessence of Hermetic Philosophy (p. 45). Aeon Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. So if you attach yourself to some ‘ism’ out there that is designed to put you in conflict with others so you don’t notice something else that is happening, then you have taken an involutionary path straight down the rabbit hole offered by whatever ‘ism’ you have embraced. Again, cui bono? To my mind, the only ‘ism’ that is worth embracing is Hermeticism, the magical-mystical path wherein we ascend to become god-men and god-women, to ‘Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’ So it is a good idea as part of your introspective purification to take a truthful inventory of your ‘isms’ and turn those that do not serve you on this path into ‘wasms.’  **PAA: How do you stay ideologically nimble in a world that rewards strong labels and hot takes? ** By freeing myself from my own set of ‘isms’ and remembering that this is a mystical magical journey whose objective is freedom from inner fears and ego-attachments.  To answer this question properly we must address two things. First, we must speak of the laws of Saturn because as airplane pilots are fond of saying, “Whatever else is happening, fly the plane.” You have to take care of earthly business, you know? The bills won’t pay themselves. Second, we must address the concepts of quality and quantity in the context of the Hermetic discipline.  The most succinct definition of Saturn’s laws I’ve seen is in Judeo-Christian wisdom literature where we find the statement, “You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.” Pretty clear, right? It is from Chapter 3 of Genesis. We seldom talk about the Moirai, or the Lords of Saturn if you prefer. So let’s do it now. I often shake my head when I see books about money magic or sex magic. Many people buy them, for sure, because they sell the quantity of material gratification without addressing the quality of the mystical path. This world presents us with many distortions of basic survival, and many unfortunates are trapped by circumstances, desperate, broke, simply horny or wanting a nice car or house or (fill in the blank).  This truth may seem harsh, but if I think I’m going to ‘magic’ myself into a fat bank account, a cushy job, a nice shiny new car, or someone’s bed, I will find that approach is futile at best. Such things seldom work and if they do work the price may be a bit more than I would be willing to pay.  I was lucky because I learned about these laws early in life. When I was 15 and my dad taught me how to drive, I asked him if he would ‘help me’ with a car. He said not only would he not give me any money to buy a car, he would not pay for insurance, maintenance, repairs or gas. “If you want a car,” he laughed, “get a job!” Since I wanted a car I got a job and I’ve worked full time for nearly forty years, including through graduate school. The real truth that all of us must face is that we do not need magic to feed, water, clothe, shelter and transport ourselves. We have to make a mundane effort to do so. Only when we have successfully met this basic requirement of physical survival on this plane can we lift our eyes and begin ascent to the mystical/magical realm. This is the joy and burden of practicing Hermeticism.  Now let us address the twin concepts of *quality and quantity* on this Bardon-path. In IIH, Bardon says this is a magico-mystical path, and he lays out the coursework to address both. I think of this as being akin to traveling a dirt road or old wagon path. These paths have two ruts worn deep by wheels. One represents the mystical or spiritual path, which is our spiritual quality as a human being. This is why we begin with the soul-mirrors – it is how we work on elevating our spiritual quality to allow us to eventually perform magical acts that actually work.  Let’s not forget either, that Bardon says in IIH that the objective is to connect with the Godhead and other deities and that the magic (quantity) is simply a byproduct of that. Every step of IIH and your initial studies with the letters in KTQ address this issue of quality, which we can also read as mind- and soul-purity. After working this path for a number of years, I have concluded that there is a positive correlation between your purity and the power of your magic. In non-mathematical terms, as your purity grows, so does your magical power or quantity on the path.  We will address this concept of quantity in the questions below.  ## 5 · Tools of the Trade **PAA: Magic mirror training: what daily drills refine perception without frying the nerves? ** My nerves are generally pretty steady because I have always had guts. I have experienced much adversity in life, and have worked under tight deadlines for many years. Like anything else, you form a habit. What’s the old saying? *The harder I work the more luck I seem to have*. That is not always true of course. One must also work ‘smart.’ And sometimes even that doesn’t work and we suffer. That’s just the way it is.  As one who is often asked to research and educate people around complex issues, I have found that approach is everything. Working successfully through IIH is no exception.   The thing is, when I constructed my first mirror, I didn’t even know what it would do or how to use it. Oh, I constructed it, but I did not see the need for many of the things Bardon suggested in his discourse on the mirrors in the late steps of IIH. I only learned how to use it later after some trial and error and even now I cannot claim complete mastery. I made this first mirror from an 8” disk of polished obsidian and a circular pine frame I had laser cut for it. Pine is linked to spiritual purification, while obsidian has fiery properties because it is volcanic glass born from great heat and pressure. It is quite protective and enhances mental clarity.  When I was done with it, I set it on the table in front of me. It sure looked cool. I was real excited, but alas, I had no idea how to even use such a mirror so it just sat there and languished for several months. Bardon goes on at length about these mirrors in Steps 8 and 9 of IIH and devotes a whole section to it in the Practice of Magical Evocation, but I’d stare into it and see nothing. I had to train it. Over time it allowed me, through the transfer of consciousness into it, to use it as a portal to engage in mental and spiritual travel. I learned many things through this process and certainly developed my ‘clair’ skills. The pieces finally began to fall into place, and I found out these magic mirrors are really useful. In Step 8 I had a wonderful initiation from the spirits of the plants when I created and tested each of the tinctures, which Bardon calls ‘fluid condensers.’ Several of these spirits appeared to me strongly in dreams and even spoke to me. I was initiated into the plant consciousness by the spirits of the 14 herbs that Bardon combines into the ‘compound condenser.’ They seem a form of earth spirit, perhaps akin to gnomes.  So, when things began arising from my shadow, naturally I went into my fiery obsidian mirror for this new purpose of additional soul purification. It worked grudgingly and I got the definite message from it that it did not particularly like being used in this touchy-feely fashion. An aside – interestingly, the plant spirits also made it known to me that I could ask when I had need but discouraged me from overdependence on them. One actually said to me in a dream that I would be better served doing my own work in a specific case.  So I made the selenite and birch mirror mentioned above to address the further purification, and it works well for its purpose. I am certain I will construct other mirrors for different purposes moving forward, but the need has not arisen as yet. Both mirrors are revealing their respective personalities to me as I go.  **PAA: Fluid condensers—what actually happens under the hood, and how do you troubleshoot a condenser that “feels flat”? ** I love this question because very few people talk about these tinctures or how to use them. And Bardon is pretty skimpy with his instructions on how to charge the condenser to actually condense the ‘fluids.’ I shook my head at this, asking myself what this verb ‘condense’ actually meant. Still, when I got to the point where I was ready to make the condensers, I thought, “Oh good! Tinctures! Here’s something I’ve really been looking forward to!”  So Bardon starts off saying that we can merely gather the 14 herbs to be used in the compound condenser, toss equal parts in a jar and cover them with grain alcohol to macerate for six weeks. No! I’m not doing that, I thought. That just seems sloppy to me and disrespectful to the plant spirits.  Then, he said there was another better method. Great! But this method still called for all 14 herbs to be unceremoniously tossed into a pan, covered with water, boiled a half hour after which the solids are strained out and an equal part grain alcohol and some aurum Metallicum is dumped in. Nope. Not doing that either.  Finally, he presents what he says is the best way. OK, now you are talking. Let’s do it right, with the proper respect. This ‘best way’ involved decocting each herb following the steps immediately above, but individually, one herb at a time. So I did this with a respectful process I worked out. Soon I had a nice little row of 14 four-ounce jars, each filled with a tincture.  I stared at them. Now what? What does it ‘condense?’ Is merely making the tincture enough, or is there some magical procedure, some ritual of intent that must be undergone to power up the condenser?  A bit of research seemed quite in order here. So I looked up the metaphysical or spiritual properties of each herb and wrote it all out. Some are quite powerful. Acacia, for example, and tobacco, and violet surprisingly so. But all have their own specific powers. Like the poplar – I live in an area where aspen trees are common so I used aspen leaves.  But again, how to gain a working familiarity (gnosis) with each tincture and its spirit? After some meditation I hit on an approach that seemed sound.  Before even creating this ‘compound condenser’ from equal parts of the 14 individual tinctures, I needed to get to know each one separately to understand its spirit and what that spirit would bring to such a compound.  *Approach is everything in this or any other worthwhile endeavor*. Figure out what you are going to do, when you will do it, and in what sequence – make a plan, gather the resources and then work the plan. Execute. My approach was to put a couple of droppers of tincture in 2 ounces of distilled water, then ingest it after prayer. This was done each night prior to bed. First, I would drink the solution, then silence myself and just perceive with all senses. How did it feel? Any physical sensations? Did any feelings or thoughts arise?  Then I would go to bed and enter dreamtime. Needless to say, I created a Word document for each tincture (and some others I made as well), and here is the experience I had from the Withy or Willow spirit, which initiated me into the plant consciousness in a Bardon sort of way: *To begin, I ingested a dropper full of tincture I had made from willow bark, wood and leaf in a couple of ounces of filtered water, then went to the room where I do magic. I assumed the throne asana posture, and silenced my mind so the willow could whisper its secrets to me.* *In the stillness, I felt it as a great tree growing rapidly throughout my body, and that growth happened through the circulatory system. It was more of a flowing than a growing, and its coolness flooded all through me. I felt like the spirit of a great tree, and my blood ran through its root, trunk and branch. * *The willow weeps, and through that mourning it comforts. It is a mighty healer that sings and whispers age-old secrets. It grows along river bottoms and was called Withy in days past. Willows do not have taproots, but instead their roots spread wide and are fairly shallow. The branches grow upwards in the light, but the leaves seem to be bowing back toward the earth. * *The coldness I felt in my lower abdomen told of its correspondence to the water element, and I became acutely aware of my flowing blood. I found myself contemplating the rhythm of my heart, and the blood coursing through my arteries, veins, and capillaries. I thought of how the plasma carries fire and air through the body. That energy I think of as the healing light of Christ came to mind and tiny flames of violet danced behind my closed eyelids. * *Willow is very powerful, but gentle at the same time. A loving tree spirit, it is a sort of wounded healer, a Chiron that comforts and offers guidance through dreams. * *Deep feelings of love, kindness and mercy came upon me. Life, wholesomeness, healing and peace flowed through my body with my blood, just as sap flows through a willow. It touched the spirit, soul and body. Such powerful healing energy! I felt the Withy Spirit become my ally at that moment. * *Before Sleep* *Part of testing a fluid condenser is to see if it does anything to make the onset of sleep any easier, and once sleep has come, will it induce dreams, deepen them, open the way for guidance to come? To ascertain this, I again took a dropper of the tincture in a couple of ounces of water prior to going to bed. * *Sleep came reasonably quickly, and the resulting dream was one of the most powerful I have had in some time. I know it was a direct communication because of the symbols the willow spirit used. There were two footprints in gray dust. They were the footprints of an astronaut who walked on the surface of the moon. One was a full footprint, and the other looked as though another footprint had been superimposed on the front half. This was the print of my foot. When I came awake briefly and then laid back down, the experience continued as a lucid dream. * *Much was revealed to me. I cannot say more, but it was ecstatic and initiatory in the fullest sense of those words. This was one of most powerful external communications I have ever experienced from the spirit world. During the lucid dream portion, the dark violet light of Akasha was strongly present. It was very intense and left me in no doubt it was the willow spirit speaking to me. * *Depth-Point Test* *The depth-point is the spiritual fulcrum of any object or being, including yourself. It is the Akashic gateway leading to that non-dual realm where all is one and one is all. * *To conduct this test, the next day, I took the jar of willow bark, leaf and wood condenser, held it and went to its depth-point to ascertain if there were any other things the willow spirit would reveal. * *I began by expressing profound gratitude because of the dream experience. The willow spirit responded and instructed me in a specific working I could use to create magical influence through the water element to raise the consciousness of several policy makers around the sacredness of biodiversity and its importance to all life on the planet. It will be a pleasure for me to do this using the willow bark fluid condenser. * Now let us address the follow-up question about what to do if a fluid condenser seems ‘flat.’  All of these condenser spirits have shared things with me, but some communicate in more straightforward ways and others more subtly. When you get to the point where you are doing this work, you will find you are far more sensitive, able to perceive a great deal more. You notice many things and can discern among these things what may be meaningful. So, if the spirit does not visit you in the dream, that does not mean it will not communicate. I experienced this with both the aspen leaf and pumpkin seed tinctures. I didn’t think the word ‘flat,’ but did feel a certain disappointment that those spirits did not appear in dreamtime as the others did. Still, one must be patient, and not lust after results. So I silenced myself in meditations during the days following those experiments, and sure enough, insight came on how to use both in interesting ways, and what each would bring to the compound condenser.  Several of the plant spirits told me how to use their respective tinctures for works of elemental influence, which are a great favorite of mine in terms of useful magic. It is important to remember that all of creation is conscious. Never forget this – stones, crystals, soil, trees, plants, fish, clouds, the sky, all of it. The earth itself is conscious. The spirits are ever with us, and willing to communicate, most of them, if we learn how to perceive their messages, which often come in symbols or omens. I cannot stress enough the importance of simple humility in your interactions with other beings. It is good to have respect for everything – your tools, the tinctures, all of it. These are different intelligences but like you, they also have a right to be here, and like you, they all have a function within the great web of life.  I will cover charging the compound condenser, and the mirror for that matter, in the next question. **PAA: Talismans & tool consecration: your step-by-step charging protocol and one memorable success story. ** There are amulets and talismans, and they have different functions. The amulet is a ward, which takes us into the realm of protective magic. For example, in the newly channeled Human Design/Gene Keys rubric I am a reflector which means I’m a mirror. Not surprisingly, based on my natal astrological chart, I had no self-defined energy centers. I am blank inside and if I do not guard myself, when I enter a room all of the emotional and mental energy in that room will come upon me. When I was younger this was quite overwhelming.  Years ago, I obtained a hag stone from Ireland. This is because my paternal ancestors were Irish Catholic peasants on a potato farm in Roscommon about fifty miles from Galway Bay. I made it into an amulet that protected me from being barraged by these energies. For charging this amulet, I used a mix that is called Abramelin Oil, which is made from calamus, myrrh, galangal and cinnamon in a carrier oil, usually olive oil, and I add another special ingredient that is secret.  The charging process involves the use of candle flame and incense, prayer followed by focused meditation on the amulet, then anointing it with the oil. In this case I also used planetary hours in the ritual because I wanted it to be a powerful ward of these feeling-infused thought forms that would barrage me.  I performed the charging ritual three times, once during the hour of the Moon, once during Mercury and a final time during Venus. Why? Because in the triangle of Personality – Yesod (Moon), Hod (Mercury) and Netzach (Venus) represent the air mixture of emotions and thoughts through which we govern our actions, and certainly through which we perform magic. This amulet served me well, but after a time I found I didn’t need it any more except on occasion. Perhaps its power rubbed off on me, or maybe I grew spiritually beyond the need for it. I am holding it now and can still very much feel its power.  As to talismans, they either serve to attract something to you, or to amplify something coming from you. So how you charge a talisman depends on what function you want it to fulfill. The talisman or amulet doesn’t necessarily need to be a permanent thing either. I often use the Psalms as talismans, because they are quite powerful in spell work, particularly if a certain outcome is desired. Warning – do not use the Psalms to get something selfish, only when righteousness is on your side and you throw it to the mercy of Divine Providence. A conjure woman I know says don’t do this unless you’re ‘right with God’ and you want to do something lawful.  Lawfulness is a vital ingredient to any charging of any amulet, talisman, tincture, compound condenser or magical tool, period. There are spiritual laws that govern Hermetic operations. Do not break these laws in your magic.   So, in the case that I’m using a Psalm, I will write it out on a piece of parchment, anoint it with the appropriate tincture or oil, and if it is an amulet, I will power it with strong protective intent and keep it until I perceive it is no longer needed. Then I will burn it and allow the ashes to go back to nature. If it is a talisman, I will limit its time of life to coincide with a certain desired condition and then put it in a drawer. When the condition happens, I will again burn the paper to ash and let it dissipate.  But I had a special amplification talisman I wanted to make from a quartz point I have and consulted Orova the Gnome about it. I can say more about this in the next question.  As a last word on talismans I will say this. Crystals make great and powerful talismans but research the properties – both physical and metaphysical of the crystal or rock you wish to use, because you want to work to its strength. For example, a quartz point amplifies things or can store things.  Also, customize the charging rituals. Think through what you want the talisman or amulet to do and work to that purpose using the laws of analogy.  As to the tinctures, you must work with their respective spirits to charge them to amplify, or *condense* your focused intent, juice it up, give it more power. In the days of the old V-8 muscle cars, people used to do all kinds of things – dual carbs, fuel injectors, racing gears and glass packs. Again, you must work out a respectful procedure that works for you and the tinctures to charge individual condensers or compounds.  Magical tools are also conscious in their own way, particularly after charging. Don’t let anyone touch your magical tools or else you will have to purify and recharge them. And respect the tools. Take care of them. Get them nice wrappings. I have lined cloth pouches for mine, silk or satin and colored appropriately.  I have a magical sword which was made in the early 19th century by Nathan Starr, the first weapons contractor for the US government. I have charged it over time with the powers of the letters, as well as both the liquid and solid compound condensers. I did this by drilling a small hole in the wood of its handle, spooning in a tiny bit of both the liquid compound and the solid (planetary metals) condenser you also create in Step 8. I sealed it carefully with wood filler and sanded it smooth. Then I performed a charging ritual to activate the condensers.  I’ve also done this with my wand, which is an 18-inch rod of ebony – I center-drilled it lengthwise three inches from each end and inserted a piece of copper tubing with the compound fluid condenser sealed inside with putty. Then I drilled a small hole in the center of the wand and sealed in the solid compound condenser. I have also charged it with the fire letters though I am not quite finished. This does take a bit of time to do right.   I’ll leave this question with some really good advice that applies here. I had a professor in grad school many years ago who told us at the end of the term, “We have gone over many theories of counseling. They ALL work, all of them. Pick one and learn it really well. Only after this can you become ‘eclectic.’ Also, remember that you cannot ever be Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, Alfred Adler or Carl Rogers. You can only be yourself. In the end, you will become your own theory.”  So, you can never be the same as another magus. You can only be you. All your charging rituals need to grow from your own gut, your own heart, manifest through your own Word, Breath and the fire of your will. By charging these things you make them your allies, enter into a living and growing relationship with them.  ## 6 · Working with Spirits **PAA: How did you know you were genuinely ready for full evocation, and what red flags still make you hit pause? ** I have said that everything is conscious in its own way so we are never alone within the unity that is Divine Providence. What we must speak of here is Bardon’s concept of magical authority. In the Practice of Magical Evocation, he says, > “By exactly observing the guidelines which have been recommended here in regards to the appropriate attitude and the preparation of all magical instruments, the magician calls forth within himself an extremely strong state of manifestation of belief, will and all the attributes of the law. By so doing, *he thereby increases his magical authority* considerably and hence exerts the necessary influence upon a being or a power so that the desired results or effects are actually realized.” Bardon, Franz. The Practice of Magical Evocation (p. 24). Merkur Publishing. Kindle Edition.   Valentin Tomberg also addresses magical authority in his chapter on the Emperor in his Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. In it he states that magical authority stems from becoming an instrument of the Divine will and so gain the ability to perform sacred magic. This authority, he says, is the synthesis of mysticism and gnosis – concentration without effort, work as play fueled by inspiration that arrives on the wings of Divine Breath.  If you have not yet developed this authority then you are not ready. When you interact with spirits, your own worthiness is a very big deal. Evocation is akin to calling up a powerful person. When they answer, you’d better have a good reason for the contact. And, in mundane life this works a LOT better if you have first warned the person, communicated the subject matter you wish to talk to them about.  I do not evoke spirits very often because sometimes insight from them will come after simply meditating on their sigil with your question in mind. With the example of Orova the Gnome, I invoked the Godhead, created the protective circle of Akasha and supplemented this with a cotton rope I have soaked in salt water and then charged with protection that makes the physical circle. I then placed his sigil, drawn by me, in my Triangle of Evocation. I set up my obsidian mirror on a stand within the triangle and entered the Gnome realm while simply meditating on my question.  In this case, with my question of supercharging a quartz point to amplify a certain intent, I didn’t feel that forcing him to appear to me would add anything. The objective is the answer to the question, not the appearance of the spirit, right? That’s true most of the time. So I just went in there, stated my question and waited. Orova did communicate with the image of the cover of Andre Consciência’s book, A Guide to the Elementals. Of course. I opened up that volume and read what Orova had communicated when Andre evoked him. Cool. Everything I needed. I’m good.  It is important to remember that there are probably billions of spirits around, elemental, planetary, angelic, demonic, not to mention the powerful collective egregores, which themselves are conscious in a way. Each one of these travels in its own lane, has its own specific job.  Thus, most information needed can be obtained by either actively reaching out through focused meditation to various entities, with the answers coming in a variety of ways. Sometimes the spirits who have become your allies may send you information through omens. For example, I was driving north one day, and saw the shadow of a bird flying on the road in front of me, pacing the car (I was in a residential area, so going slow). I pulled over and saw the bird was a magpie, flying north. This was a communication from a certain spirit to inform a problem I was working on, and it came to me without my having to ask. This is akin to the quantum physics property of entanglement. The ally heard my desire and simply sent me a message.  What we are talking about here are two important aspects of magical authority: geniality and heightened perception. First of all, have you ever seen a powerful entrepreneur work a room? This is geniality. I know a venture capitalist who is so skilled at doing this it is like magic. He puts people at ease, makes artful small talk and gracefully elicits information on opportunities to invest in new ideas and innovations. As Hermeticists, we also need this geniality with our tools and with the spirits that have agreed to be our allies.   Heightened perception is an aspect of wisdom and the god-powers of the four Pillars of the Inner Temple. It is a gift that was given to me through prayer. I pray each day many times, and this is a prayer I say daily, which has been and is being answered on a daily basis: *O Lord Jesus Christ, let me perceive as You do, speak with Your Word, breathe the Breath of Life. Let me love with Your heart. Let me be an instrument of your Will upon this earth to awaken humanity to the presence of Divine Light. I am a pure and humble vessel without fear or attachment. In the womb of Silence let us be One.* God always answers prayers like this.  **PAA: Alternative ways to collaborate with spirits before classic triangle-and-circle evocation—what methods keep it safe and productive? ** Besides the communications you can receive through heightened perception, I quite often will gain insights through dreams from my ancestors, guides, HGA and the Christ spirit. As you gather more spirit allies around you in mutual service to Divine Providence, you may also ask their realm to share insight with you in dreams. I do this by using the obsidian mirror to enter the realm I’m seeking insight from and state the question/desire. Then I retire for the evening and sometimes the answer will come in what I call dreamtime.  But spirit communication is organic. It is like looking up at the clouds, seeing a butterfly or a covey of mourning doves, a flower, the sylphs playing in tree branches. If you learn to pay attention the spirits are communicating constantly. You only need listen. In Step 1 of IIH, we learn an exercise called ‘thought control’ wherein we awaken the Observer (Higher Self) and simply notice ideas that float through the clear blue sky of our mind. Later Bardon introduces mindfulness and then focused meditation, wherein we contemplate a certain idea, thought, feeling action. Take that a step further and focus your meditation on a question you are trying to answer. The universe will communicate with you and you will pick it up with your heightened perception.  Be careful, though, because the message that comes may not be quite true or straightforwardly understandable. Part of heightened perception is the virtue of discernment. Hold up each insight and look at it through the lens of the Divine Laws. Read up on any symbol or number you receive. All these may have meaning. Analogy, cause and effect, polarity, gender, vibration, and so on. If you have connected with the Godhead as a guardian of the heart and collective soul of humanity in good and loving service, you walk in power and light in any realm. A special forces soldier I know well is fond of saying, “Remember the mission!” ## 7 · The True Kabbalah Frontier **PAA: For someone who’s completed Initiation Into Hermetics, what preliminary training bridges the gap to reliably shaping Akashic letters? ** I nearly did not begin work on the letters at all. When I first read the book, maybe ten years ago, I was very put off. I felt like the title, Key to the True Kabbalah, was misleading at best, because there is nothing in the book about the Tree of Life, either the involutionary bolt of lightning or the evolutionary path of the serpent. He doesn’t even talk about the Sephirot. And the letters are from the western alphabet. Where are the Hebrew letters? Why did he not use those? What use is this? With a sense of indignant disappointment, I put the book on a shelf where it gathered dust.  Until I received a strong intuitive urge to open it again and look a bit more carefully.  What happened is that I had gotten stuck in Step 8 of IIH. I’d done the condensers and made the mirror. But then I was given a major work project that had me working 80-hour weeks for a month, and when I was on the home stretch, I got COVID. There was little time for anything but basic daily prayers.  My hiatus from Bardon work ended up being around six or seven weeks long, and when I opened IIH back up, I found myself flailing around, trying to get back in the swing of it. I became convinced this was why I caught COVID at that time – something was lacking in me, some immaturity that was making it impossible to go further. Generally when something bad happens, some adversity arises, I express gratitude to Divine Providence and ask what I should be learning from it. The answer seemed to stem from something that was lacking in my soul-mind purity. The problem was an unhealthy pride arising from my shadow. I discussed this in a previous question so I won’t belabor it, but th fact remined I was also having a crisis of faith in my own magical authority, my own ability to finish the Hermetic Initiation.  I just felt empty and a feeling began nagging at me that this whole thing was a crock, a useless bunch of exercises that had no real purpose. Instead of the term ‘mission creep’ coined by NASA scientists, I was experiencing a crisis of mission-lessness. I marveled at my stupidity for throwing myself down this whole magical rabbit hole and studying years and years – for what? Why? Was the cosmos laughing at the fun joke it had played on me? But then, as so often happens in dark nights of the soul such as this one, light shined back through and it illumined KTQ. I got the strong feeling there was something in there that could help.  So I opened it up in Kindle because I cannot read the tiny font in books any more, called up the little magnifying glass icon and typed in ‘faith.’ I opened one of the search links and read the words, “In the mental world, this letter vibration corresponds to the state of manifestation of belief. The Kabbalist who is able to call forth the vibration of the letter K in the mental body will achieve a state of manifestation in which any thought, any wish, will at once become a reality in whichever plane the Kabbalist wishes it to be realized.” Bardon, Franz. The Key to the True Kabbalah (p. 132). Merkur Publishing. Kindle Edition. K it is! I had no clue what I was doing but I read all the sections about K and then began working with it intending to strengthen my faith. This led me to extensive research into the intersection of science and faith, and I ended up repeating the litmus paper pH testing done with bowls of water charged with the certain elements. I reread David Hawkins’ Power vs Force and several of his subsequent books. I read Masaru Emoto’s books. I found an author, Nisha Manek, a physician practicing neurology, who wrote a brilliant book called [Bridging Science and Spirit: The Genius of William Tiller’s Physics and the Promise of Information Medicine](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bridging-Science-Spirit-Information-Medicine/dp/1950559009/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3L868RY5V4C8N&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.pcvOSEQcg2ulTJFEa-y9aw.0wts569zSZUbvLsWNboEJLZjU7w0Ai3VTOcpd6PX3DE&dib_tag=se&keywords=Bridging+Science+and+Spirit%3A+The+Genius+of+William+Tiller%E2%80%99s+Physics+and+the+Promise+of+Information+Medicine&qid=1747224248&s=books&sprefix=bridging+science+and+spirit+the+genius+of+william+tiller+s+physics+and+the+promise+of+information+medicine%2Cstripbooks%2C346&sr=1-1).  In a spirit of play, I worked with a colleague to try and replicate Emoto’s experiments with how water forms different crystalline patterns when it is charged with various intent. I used glass petri dishes, filled them with one tablespoon of water, charged each with a specific element and then froze them. I proved I could create a ‘face’ of each element that showed in the crystallization patterns of the various dishes and then replicated it.  So I had my faith back.  **PAA: Bardon’s letter keys: in plain language, what does “vibrating a letter” accomplish inside the microcosm and in the outer world? ** I will address vibrating the letter a bit later, but first I must say KTQ is a difficult book. It really is. Bardon put it together so you begin from the bottom up without  understanding the big picture first, which is not how I learn. So I read it and reread it. I took notes. I made spreadsheets showing the attributes of each letter. It did not help there are blinds in the book. For example, in Step 1 of KTQ, the letter F is assigned to the water element, but in Step 4, Bardon says it has the elemental attribute of earth. Same with the letter H. In the first step, he assigns it to water, but then in Step 4 it is fire. So…which is it? What? And why is there no E note assigned to the letters? What does the color vibration do?  To answer these nagging questions, I thought it would be a good idea to determine an approach I could use to really learn the letters, from macrocosmic big picture down to the microcosm.  After experiencing failure with several approaches, I hit on a way that was right for me. I began by fleshing out the Excel document I’d made earlier where the first tab had a table showing all the letters, their elemental attributes, the organs associated with them, the musical notes, and the color, which I coded using Microsoft’s RBG (Red, Green, Blue) numeric scale. I always want to use my senses, so I translated each musical note into Hertz, which is how you find tones on YouTube. I also have a tone generator on my mobile ([Phil Rice made this helpful suggestion](https://philrice.substack.com/)).  Then I put in four more tabs where I copied and pasted what Bardon said each letter does at the Akashic, mental, astral and material levels. Just starting with this made me feel like I was armed with the necessary knowledge to begin, but how? I created a Word document for each letter. I colored the page using the RGB scale assigned to the letter, put in the note, elements, organs and a link to the YouTube Hz tone. Then I copied and pasted in what the letter did at all four levels, and then created a rubric for each meditation session – a heading with date, level (Akashic, mental, astral, material), begin time, end time, duration in minutes, the planetary hour of the session. I learned how to calculate Agrippa’s planetary hours from a book by the late Joseph Lisewski but I have an app that does it easily on my mobile. And then notes below for each session. I created another tab in the spreadsheet to track the number of minutes I spent with each letter on each level. I did not know if the planetary hour made much difference, but thought I’d put it in anyway. I learned how to calculate Agrippa’s planetary hours from a book by the late Joseph Lisewski but I have an app that does it easily on my mobile. This level of overkill is part of my nature, but if you reflect on it, such thoroughness is akin to dressing for a social event. You can be overdressed and people will be cool with that, but if you’re underdressed not so much. Plus a thorough approach allows focus with single minded intensity, a real concentrated effort. Why do it at all if you’re not going to go full out? So I began doing it. I started this January going through each letter at the Akashic level until I felt like I was through. I ended up spending a total of 5,792 minutes (95.9 hours)  on the KTQ alphabet at the Akashic level, an average of 213 minutes or 3.6 hours per letter. These Akashic meditation sessions happened between January 21, 2025, and April 30, 2025. I do it every day and have become comfortable with sessions averaging fifty minutes.  I am now done with that and on May 4, 2025, I began cycling through the alphabet again at the mental level. Note – good idea to take the letters in order because they seem to build on each other in a cumulative effect.  As to chanting them, the Golden Dawn made a big deal about vibrating letters and when I was doing those rituals for a time I didn’t get it.  But then I read Robert Monroe’s work on hemi-sync tones for astral travel and begin listening to those. Plus a Hermetic colleague is musically gifted and I consulted her. And then I understood! When I meditate on a letter, I have the tone playing through headphones and I chant the letter in resonance with the tone. This allows me to really feel the letter, begin to understand its personality.  Then, I began experimenting with visualizing geometric shapes in the letter’s color and movement concurrently with the auditory vibration. You can read more about this process, if you wish, in Mouni Sadhu’s The Tarot. He calls these moving shapes tourbillons or whirlwinds. It is the moving structure of Kabbalistic magic.  Finally, with one of the letters, as I was chanting the shape seemed to come from me and fill the universe. I think this was the first experience with what Bardon calls tetrapolar pronunciation. Seriously cool. **PAA: One experiment with a single letter that surprised you—what you tried, what happened, and what you’d change next time. ** So, what I have I found out about these letters so far?  First of all, they are transformative. While you may begin your study of them with the idea of making them do magical things in accordance with your (higher) will, that is not what they did initially with me. I have come to believe these letters are each conscious in a certain way, imbued as they are with characteristics at each level, and as you chant the letter, immerse yourself in its energy, you are fed spiritually, and gain insight into additional purification work you still need to do.  These letters, then, aid you in continuing the initial purification you completed in the first two steps of IIH. I found this to definitely be true at the Akashic level and in my early work at the mental level. Here is a direct quote from Bardon on the letter C at the Akashic level that illustrates this point:  > “The C vibration symbolizes the mystery of self-spiritualization and, at the same time, the great mystery of transformation. Whoever masters this mystery well shall comprehend and recognize the profundity of the Eucharist and its aspects and will master all the practical methods relating to the Eucharist. From the Hermetic point of view, the practices mentioned in my first book, Initiation into Hermetics, in the chapter dealing with the magic of water, belong to the practical application of the Eucharist in its lowest sense. In the Kabbalistic use of the letter C, however, the point in question is a higher aspect of the Eucharist, for it has to do with the transformation or incorporation of a divine idea, a higher virtue, into a certain form.”  So there it is. These letters are a gift to the serious Hermeticist that can help with the final purification of the astrosome so that it is completely clear, unblemished by any spots of darkness, even tiny ones. When this condition is permanent, Bardon hints at the astral level of some of the letters, the astral-mental body then becomes ‘mummified’ or immortal so that you walk whole into the next realm. I’m still working out that part, so this verbiage may be clumsy.  The Initiate can then become a clear mirror that can shine forth (project) magical intent powered by the clear light of Divine will. But you have to allow the letter to work on and in you first before it will let you use it to do stuff. Quality first, then quantity after.  The letters helped lead me to discover these dark and hidden places, and I have already spoken of the white mirror processes I’m using.  Well, wait a minute, you may be asking, what about levitation, mastery of the electric and magnetic fluids, charging tools and the like? I have been allowed so far to use the letters to charge my magical tools and some talismans, but I have not thus far been permitted the maturity to levitate objects or move a compass needle with a magnetic-fluid charged finger. Yet.  But this is the thing about magic, isn’t it? It grows within you organically, first in quality and only grows quantitatively within you as your quality matures.  Why? Because as [William Mistele said in his latest interview with Tanya Robinson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35-NPC-31AI), what Bardon was getting at was to help you, if you work very hard, take on the powers of an earth-zone spirit while still in your current incarnation.  That’s heady stuff. Now I will end with a final thought from the perspective of an ongoing journey that has taken just over 16 years of solid study.  I’m human. So are you. Each of us is deeply flawed, experiences self-doubt, makes dumb mistakes, and a number of Initiates may carry around karmic loads from past lives that rival the fetters the ghost of Jacob Marley dragged along in Dickens’ *Christmas Carol*. I cannot ever be Agrippa, Levi, Bardon, Sadhu, Tomberg or anyone else. Instead I can only be me and you can only be you. So be genuine. Formulate a mission that addresses your own ‘why’ on taking this difficult and dangerous path. Work to your own strengths. Work these things out as I have done. You will fail many times. When you do, get back up, put a smile on your face, roll up your sleeves and climb back in the ring. Don’t ever give up.  And, lest you fear that your efforts won’t be up to snuff, here is quote from a speech given by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 that sums it up pretty well.  > *It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.* **PAA: On behalf of myself and the entire community, thank you—we truly appreciate you. This interview stands out as not only one of the most inspiring I’ve ever read, but also one of the most practically helpful for students of the Franz Bardon tradition. You’ve shown that genuine effort and consistency can carry you all the way to the summit. Your thoroughness in IIH has borne its fruit in KTQ. ** --- --- # What’s the difference between an elemental, planetary spirit, zodiac entity, or akashic being? Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/whats-the-difference-between-an-elemental-planetary-spirit-zodiac-entity-or-akashic-being/ --- What's the difference between an elemental, planetary spirit, zodiac entity, or akashic being? Well, at a basic level, it deals with what part of reality the entity is choosing to manifest at, but we'll get to that in a second. ## Elementals Fundamentally, an elemental is an entity that is created out of one of the fundamental elements. The ones most commonly referred to are fire, air, water, and earth. Now, these entities are generally not very intelligent and tend to perform various functions that deal with the ambient environment, such as a water elemental might be involved with the movement of underground water through underground rivers and springs. The more intelligent beings at the elemental level are sometimes referred to as elemental lords. Now, what's important to keep in mind when dealing with elementals is that they do not have a spirit or soul, so to speak. So while they have a life, when they die, they dissolve and return to the element from which they were formed. Also keep in mind, because they constitute that thing out of which creation is formed, they can actually be quite powerful if not terribly refined, and they are often a good source of information. A highly enlightened being, however, can elevate one of these elementals to the point where they actually develop a spirit and can reincarnate as other creatures do. This is a fairly rare occurrence, but it does occasionally happen. ## Planetary Spirits Now, what are the planetary spirits? The planetary spirits are largely intelligences that are associated with the different planets — the Moon, Venus, Mercury, the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, so on and so on. These intelligences, if you will, are often a good source of information regarding the various functions associated with the planets. And the functions associated with the planets are fairly well understood. As a result, the kind of information is very much flavored by the planet a spirit is associated with. Now, these planetary spirits are also dual in nature, which means they can be positive or they can be negative. As a general rule, however, the positive or negative association of an entity is generally more a reflection of what's going on with the practitioner who is invoking or evoking that entity. This is the reason why paying careful attention to things like spiritual hygiene and not engaging in negative acts or using narcotics before practice are very important. This is also why you want to wear clean clothes, brush your teeth, maybe put a little oil on your beard, burn some incense, engage in practices with non-dual light before invoking the entity, as it lessens the chance of invoking a negative aspect or reflection of that entity. Now, the kinds of information that a planetary entity can provide largely has to do with the practitioner. Entities in general provide information based off of a process of reflection. So the entity will make contact with you, or you will make contact with it. It will see who you are, and then it will provide information in accordance with that. This is the reason why medical doctors tend to get medical information when they contact the spirit world, engineers get engineering information, so on and so on. Now that said, the planetary entities are largely astral in nature. So being astral, they live in a timeless place. As such, they can exist for long periods of time. So according to Dr. Stephen Skinner, the entities of the Lemegeton or the 72 spirits of the Goetia, for example — their names have largely not changed since the time of Greek antiquity. They are very old. Now, also being astral in nature, the egregoric buildup around them can be quite pronounced. This is, simply put, the buildup around a given entity that comes from people working with it over time. So these entities can also bring a lot of baggage with them, even if they bring a lot of skill. Now, just as their name intelligence suggests, these entities have access to a lot of information. In theory, they have information relevant to any given topic from the time of its creation to ultimately when that development ends — so far into the future in most cases. Now, your ability to act upon the information provided by a planetary intelligence is limited by the technology available to the timeline in which you exist. So as a practical matter, if the information they're providing you applies to something that is relevant more than about 10 years in the future, it will really just appear as something that is along the lines of science fiction because you won't have access to the tools necessary to bring that item into reality. It'll either be too expensive, or they simply won't be available. And I've talked at length about this before. ## Zodiac or Stellar Entities So that's a little bit on planetary intelligences or spirits. Now we get into the issue of zodiac or stellar entities. These tend to be a little harder to contact, part of which is a practical matter: distance. These zodiacal constellations are a very long way away. They are also generally mental in nature, which means getting that 4K or 8K HD picture of what they look like is a little more difficult. Also, because they are all stellar in nature, they tend to have more in common with angels than anything else. Now, being mental level entities, you can in fact generate a negative aspect of these entities if you try really hard. But keeping in mind, as mental level entities, you actually have to work at this. So using your normal rules of esoteric hygiene and running some non-dual light greatly lessens this possibility. Additionally, when you're working with these entities, they're going to tend to provide you information that is in line with your path of development and not much else. This is a good thing because, honestly, as mental level entities, providing you actionable information that applies to the physical world around you isn't really what they do. Additionally, when working with them, they can provide a tempering aspect to engaging the planets, which is why you'll have something like, say, Aries at a zodiacal level that's involved with Mars. In this case, the astrologers kind of get it backwards — Mars doesn't really rule Aries so much as Aries tempers the behavior of Mars when engaged in an evocation or invocation type aspect. Additionally, what you want to keep in mind with these zodiacal entities is they're relatively easy to work with if you have access to the right technology. If you don't, well, that's a different story. ## Akashic Level Beings Finally, we get to the issue of akashic level beings. Akashic level beings are a little bit tricky because in theory they exist beyond spatial constraint, as is illustrated by the astral and temporal restraint. So here's the hard thing about that — in theory, there should be very little out there. In practice, as anyone will tell you, akashic level beings do in fact exist. Now, that said, they tend to be a little difficult to work with if they're engaged with outside a religious pantheon-type expression. So Furo Mio from the Shinto pantheon in Japan is an example of an akashic level being. Now, these entities tend to have a lot of information and a lot of power involving Akasha. However, in general, bringing them into the physical isn't very easy to do — with one notable exception. These are entities born of Saturn, because Saturn has an Akashic-type energy associated with it. Interestingly enough, all of the outer planets such as Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto do as well. Now, akashic level beings can be either positive or negative in alignment because Akasha is that thing out of which the positive and the negative both spring. So they can be a handful. For what it's worth, banishing them can't be done using Akasha by itself. For the most part, you need to either use the EN letter combination or solar energy to banish one of these entities. As a result, they can be powerful and quite tricky to deal with — even if they don't deal with things associated with the near-Earth realm, they can, however, be very important towards your personal development. ## Non-Dual Entities Now, that covers the first four levels of reality — but wait, there's more. You also have non-dual entities. These are entities that exist largely at the Nirvanic or Godhead level — what some people call non-dual light. They are typically very hard to see, very hard to contact, and difficult to work with because when you're truly immersed in non-dual light, bringing something back to this world tends to be rather difficult. It's not impossible, and they tend to have a lot to do with your life's purpose. Now, there's one caveat to all of this — when entities are engaged at the non-dual level, they tend to be very clean. That same entity when engaged at, say, the astral level can appear quite different and have a variety of negative attributes. Why? Again, this goes back to the issue of egregoric buildup over time around that entity. Some people are known to say "few spirits, many masks." This is an indication of the fact that a non-dual entity at its heart, where it's very clean, can manifest a variety of different ways depending upon the sociocultural context in which that entity has manifested in the past. So if this sounds confusing and a bit tricky — well, it is. That said, if you'd like to learn more about this, please get in touch via contact@perseusarcaneacademy.com or if you would like to get started for free then check out our free courses [here](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/collection/free). Lastly if you would like to be able to do some of the things SixtySkills talks about in his videos/post then you can see 30 minute previews of the [Master Course](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/tS1Tn) curruculum [here](https://sixtyskills.com/sixty-skills-curriculum/). --- --- # School of Visionary Hermeticism Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/school-of-visionary-hermeticism/ ## Introduction At Perseus we offer a range of education from our in-depth interviews with many being from 5-10k words to our free courses that allow new students to start building a foundation with absolutely no cost. We then have more serious in-depth curriculums for those that wish to build specific skill sets based on the experiences of our teachers. These are all very much one way traffic in that you are provided with the material and then have to get on and do it. Now what you will see here with The School of Visionary Hermeticism is that it is a format that is built on a two-way traffic system. Teachings are provided and students need to do the work and obtain their own results in order to progress to the next semester. The school is led by Andre Consciencia and is the result of ongoing discussions between Perseus and Andre. ## About the School The School of Visionary Hermeticism is a specialized learning institution dedicated to exploring the mystical, philosophical, and esoteric traditions. It offers a structured curriculum for seekers interested in personal mastery. Drawing from magic, mysticism, and philosophy, students align with universal principles through technique and theory. The school’s courses range from foundational spirituality and philosophy to advanced magical practices like ceremonial magic, quantum magick, and shamanism, paired with scientific principles and creative exploration. ### Mission The School of Visionary Hermeticism aims to guide persons to connect to Hermetic principles and share their knowledge through creative expressions like grimoires and magical systems, eventually integrating them as teachers. The School of Visionary Hermeticism doesn’t promise answers. Instead, it offers keys to doors you may not yet have noticed and the knowledge to open them. For those willing to explore, to reflect, and to engage, the question is not, “What will I learn?” but rather, “Who will I become?” This is the heart of the School of Visionary Hermeticism: a place where the seeker transforms into the seer, and the seer into the visionary. ### The Learning Curve Students ground themselves in universal wisdom by connecting to humanity and the evolution of thought. Here, introspection becomes the mirror through which the seeker gazes into the world and finds the self reflected back. Deepening the process, esoteric practices, astral exploration, and elemental integration guide the student into the heart of Hermeticism. Then, students are led to the dance of Hermetic elements with quantum forces. ### The Method What sets the school apart is its fusion of structure and freedom. Every course is meticulous yet invites each student to bring their individuality into the fold. The student is not a passive recipient but an active co-creator. *In the curriculum below you will see two courses in each semester, these are completed at the same.* *One semester is 6 months*. --- ## Curriculum --- ## How to Join As you can see the teachings are very involved and really cover every subject you could hope to learn, setting you up upon completion of the 3rd Semester as someone with true ownership over the material and ready to start the next phase of your journey in helping others. **Cost:** The cost for each semester is $349, this includes materials, examinations, one on one discussion with Andre. Each semester is planned for 6 months but you may spend longer if you do not pass on the first attempt, private community (planned Q2 2025). Payment for this school is by WIRE transfer only. Due to popular demand we opened this up - Semester 1 will determine the seriousness with which students approach the work. [Join the First Semester Here](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/the-school-of-visionary-hermeticism) --- --- # From Exorcist to Hermeticist: A Journey Through Spiritual Warfare and Magic Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/from-exorcist-to-hermeticist-a-journey-through-spiritual-warfare-and-magic/ ## Introduction We’re honored to share this powerful and personal interview with a former exorcist - Frater B - whose path led from traditional ministry into the world of Hermetics and Franz Bardon’s teachings. With deep experience in spiritual warfare, inner healing, and the unseen forces behind magical practice, he reflects on years of service, the mentors who shaped him, and the metaphysical training that helped make sense of it all. Whether you practice magic, meditation, or ministry, his story offers a rare look into a hidden side of spiritual life, something that most of us only really know from the movies not real life like Frater B. If you enjoy this interview then please do let us know in the comments and if you think others will find it interesting please share it with them. --- Table of Contents - Introduction- Background and History - Entry into Magic and Spirituality - Becoming an Exorcist Explore The Three Transformations – Full Course, No Cost- Modern-Day Practice- Support and Resistance - Support from Magical Arts - Major Experiences & Tips for Others - Questions on Hermetics Learn About Sixty Skills ## Background and History  **PAA: What were some key experiences in your early life that influenced your decision to pursue magic and exorcism? ** I had an experience as a young man that I can only describe as a spiritual attack, and that might be the single biggest reason my journey led me down a different  road. I was newly 18, and I kept having these visitations from a terrifying, invisible presence at night. I could hear screaming that no one else could hear, sounds of tearing metal, it was a full-blown manifestation. I remember small objects flying around the room, the sound of footsteps, and that sense you get of a nearby person breathing on your neck. Worst of all, I would scream, and no one in my family could hear it, or at least, they didn’t wake up.  Actually, that wasn’t the worst thing. I still remember the urgent need to reject this new reality, where the supernatural was very real, and malevolent. I was even aware of my mental gymnastics, trying anything to restore a sense of normalcy. I remember that the spirit seemed to be aware of that: during pauses between attacks I would almost convince myself none of it was real, and that’s what it seemed to be waiting for. Then the attack would begin again, but with even more intensity.  I spent a few nights that way, just transfixed with terror, and when I brought it up to trusted adults, it was almost as if they couldn’t understand, and they definitely couldn’t retain the memory of the conversation. I thought I was going crazy.  I finally ran across a Catholic priest who took me seriously. “It’s no big deal, we deal with this a lot,” he said. “I can come out to your house, but it’s easier if I just show you how to do this yourself.” He gave me some simple instructions for how to bless oil and use it to seal the door and windows in my room. That was the first peaceful night I’d had in what felt like forever.  I managed to put it out of my mind until I went to University that fall, and the whole thing started up again. I panicked at first, but then I remembered I was sleeping in an unsanctified room. I repeated the priest’s instructions, and the spirit left me alone after that.  > Fr. C was truly a gifted man. Supremely confident and deeply holy, he could literally tell you your sins by looking at you, and could frequently give you messages from the Holy Spirit. Many times he would stop and say “the Holy Spirit says you were praying earlier about such-and-such a topic, and the answer is…” He was invariably right.  > > Frater B **PAA: Can you describe any significant mentors or figures who guided you in your journey? ** I felt a call to ministry some time later in life, after spending years trying to be “normal.” Early on, I found that spirits often “manifested” (showed signs of their presence) around me. This eventually led to my being mentored by Father C, who was the exorcist for our diocese. When I was a transitional deacon preparing for priesthood, I followed him on nearly every supernatural call he performed: probably between a hundred and two hundred were instances of spirit activity.  Fr. C was truly a gifted man. Supremely confident and deeply holy, he could literally tell you your sins by looking at you, and could frequently give you messages from the Holy Spirit. Many times he would stop and say “the Holy Spirit says you were praying earlier about such-and-such a topic, and the answer is…” He was invariably right.  I was one of two deacons in his care, and he trained us to do our jobs remarkably well. It was a great deal like military training: we were taught to do specific things under specific circumstances, for specific reasons, and to justify why we made our choices. It was funny, though: Fr. C didn’t allow many questions. There was no discussion about the underlying metaphysics, for example. Why did the spirits we dealt with behave as they did? Why were they vulnerable to certain things? We were discouraged from asking any question that began with “why.”  I know that the official answer is that the “why” questions lead to answers that can create an obsession with the supernatural, which the church discouraged. We were there to do a specific job in a specific way, and there was no room for error or speculation. It was really clear--if you paid close attention, and I did--that the training was not meant to make us like Fr. C, whose breadth and depth of education went far beyond what we were given.  ## Entry into Magic and Spirituality  **PAA: What specific events or experiences sparked your interest in the magical arts? ** Maybe the easiest way to answer this question is to point to my education under my mentor priest. He passed away abruptly from the onset of a serious illness, and I’m not sure if it was by natural causes or the result of a spiritual attack. Everyone I knew from those days likewise passed away or disappeared, and it deeply bothered me that I never achieved the same depth of understanding that Fr. C evidently had.  **PAA: How do you define spirituality in the context of your practice? ** Spirituality is awareness of unseen realities. ## Becoming an Exorcist  **PAA: What training or preparation did you undergo to become an exorcist? Were there any particular cases that solidified your resolve to perform exorcisms? ** I probably answered most of this question, but I can go into more detail. By the way, we never, ever used the “e word;” I only say “exorcism” or “exorcist” with people who aren’t in church ministry and might not understand the terms “spiritual warfare” or “inner healing and deliverance.” As far as our preparation, we were given a thorough basic training: ask this, ask this, ask this too, and then say this or that prayer based on the answers. It was formulaic, but for simple cases, it worked remarkably well. In most situations, our authority as priests was enough. It was interesting that there were certain instructions or cautions that you might never have come up with on your own: they were the result of generations of exorcists getting better and better at the craft over time.  We never, for example, made what Fr. C called “a reviling accusation.” He pointed to the book of Jude, verse 9, where the archangel Michael doesn’t dispute with Satan over the body of Moses, but simply says “the Lord rebuke you.” We were never angry, insulting, or derogatory towards spirits we exiled, and we never had conversations with them: in fact, we were trained exactly how to shut down all communication with spirits right off the bat. The attitude the successful priest would take was nothing like the movies: no passion or spiritual struggle. It was nothing personal: our job was to send unclean spirits away or stop their depredations on the faithful, and it was nothing personal.  For their part, I think the spirits took it in stride too: the emotional backwash I felt from them (if I felt it at all) was something like “ah well, it was nice while it lasted.” They seemed to treat it like a write-off, like a cost of doing business. They would take advantage if we failed to dot all our i’s or dot our t’s, of course, but they didn’t seem very surprised by our showing up and doing our jobs.  I’d like to point out that we didn’t just cast spirits out of people. That’s a flawed model for what happens during spiritual warfare, anyway. We were just as frequently interfering with hauntings or “poltergeist” activity as we dealing with inner healing and deliverance situations.  ### Explore The Three Transformations – Full Course, No Cost Unlock the SixtySkills curriculum for ***free*** and gain clarity on how different energies influence manifestation, transformation, and enlightenment. Without this understanding, progress remains uncertain and hard to replicate. With it, you can consciously direct and harness energies to achieve your goals. [Learn the Three Transformations](https://courses.perseusarcaneacademy.com/b/gCeAN) ## Modern-Day Practice **PAA: In what ways has the perception of exorcism changed in modern society? Do you find that people today are more open or skeptical about the practice of exorcism? Is this something that is widespread among particular religious institutions or very much underground. ** This is a great question, although I can only answer it partially. I’m out of the practice of this ministry, professionally, so I can’t answer how perceptions have changed among churches. I suspect there is the same amount of skepticism there has always been: stories of the victims of unclean spirits are all well and good in the Bible, but isn’t that sort of macabre and outdated now? Most people would just strongly prefer not to think about these kinds of things, much less talk about them.  Within the church, the practice of spiritual warfare is very, very rarely discussed: most bishops rose to their position by being very able politicians, and good politicians avoid unpopular subjects. Most dioceses have someone like Fr. C, I think, although we never spoke with or corresponded with a similar team from another diocese.  I was a junior member of the team, so I wasn’t privy to everything, but I think it generally worked like this: a parish priest would run into something he didn’t know how to deal with, and would make a call to the bishop (probably the suffragan, like an assistant bishop, to keep the bishop’s hands clean). He (or someone under him) would brief Fr. C, and then we would go handle the situation. Fr. C made his report afterwards, and that was that, unless we had to do a follow-up. You can imagine that the fewer people who knew the details the better, both for reasons of parishioner confidentiality and diocesan deniability.  > Even the people you help--no matter how grave their need was in the moment--would prefer to never see you or think about the experience of spiritual warfare again. It’s necessary--somebody has to do it--but it doesn’t make for a rewarding ministry experience. > > Frater B ## Support and Resistance  **PAA: Have you faced any challenges from religious institutions regarding your work as an exorcist? What role does community support play in your practice, and how has it impacted your work? ** I have worked under several denominational banners, and one similarity is that very, very few religious organizations will openly discuss spiritual warfare. Bear in mind that for most tithing churchgoers, the church is a social community where they go to get support for their challenges in life, and to be reassured they are in the good graces of the Divine, not to hear unsettling stories about supernatural evil. It’s just not good business to bring it up, and the senior leaders of any religious organization spend most of their time trying to keep the insurance premiums paid and the lights on. Spiritual warfare is a radioactive topic in nearly any mainstream church, and there are clergy in every denomination who flatly deny it is even relevant anymore.  It’s the kind of thing you leave off your resume, frankly.  Even the people you help--no matter how grave their need was in the moment--would prefer to never see you or think about the experience of spiritual warfare again. It’s necessary--somebody has to do it--but it doesn’t make for a rewarding ministry experience. After a harrowing or intense spiritual experience, you can almost watch the former sufferer’s worldview beginning to close in around the memory of the experience. Many won’t ever think of it again unless they’re specifically reminded, and some can’t remember it. It’s really interesting--and unsettling, frankly--how efficiently the average person’s mindset and memory adjusts to downplay or even remove an unpleasant brush with the supernatural.  ## Support from Magical Arts  **PAA: How do the principles of Hermetics influence your approach to exorcism? Can you discuss any specific techniques or rituals from magical arts that you find particularly helpful in your practice? ** With regard to Hermetics, the major takeaway for me has been an understanding of the metaphysics that underlie the behavior of nonorganic entities. This is really the education Fr. C had, although the Lord knows where he got it. It’s easy to conjecture about a secret school, somewhere in the Vatican, but honestly, I think he was a student of Hermetics. There are too many echoes in the SixtySkills curriculum of things I remember him saying.  I think that many of the spiritual self-defense techniques taught in the SixtySkills curriculum probably do work, but (as you know) under stress, most people tend to revert to the practices they’ve used the most. In the rare occasion I now have to deal with a spiritual warfare situation, I still use the training I got from Fr. C. But my understanding of *why* that training works as it does has been invaluable, and that’s why I’ve never regretted becoming a private student.  ## Major Experiences & Tips for Others  **PAA: What is one of the most challenging cases you've encountered, and what did you learn from it? Have you had any experiences that profoundly changed your understanding of spirits or possession? ** **PAA: What practical steps would you recommend for someone who believes they are being affected by negative spiritual energies? ** Well, as a priest, my advice to the church faithful is to go to your parish priest and ask for help. I don’t know for sure that a trained person will be available, but I hope so.  For those who don’t have access to a trained person, and can’t reach me for help, I advise you to do the commonsense things suggested by your intuition. If you’re dealing with a “haunted” home, bless some oil, and anoint the windows and doors. Throw out any suspicious new possessions, and ask your kids some hard questions about any new friends or activities. You may have to play detective a bit, but you’ll often discover the cause. You’d be really surprised to learn how many people bring home ancient Aztec ceremonial relics from a vacation in Mexico, or similar, and never make the connection between their new acquisition and the spiritual activity in the home. Spirits can “ride” objects, and can be transferred from one person to another in various ways, which is the semi-secret meaning behind the Levitical cleanliness laws in the Old Testament. Often, a short interview with the family reveals that the problems started the day after a middle-school sleepover, or similar, when the kids tried a ritual in the basement as a joke. Sometimes that kind of play is harmless, and sometimes not. So invite any spirits to leave by whatever means are at your disposal (I use the Trinitarian formula, but that’s my background), and seal the home with the blessed oil. This is sort of the spiritual equivalent of first aid. If it doesn’t work, or it only works temporarily. you’ll have to find someone like me to come in with more refined practices. I’m more or less retired, but I’m happy to help wherever I’m needed.  “Possession” is a really rare situation. It is really rare to run across a case where the individual’s will is entirely subordinate to an outside entity, partly because it would be pretty extraordinary for an entirely “possessed” individual to submit to inner healing and deliverance. So where individual connections to unwanted entities are concerned, my first advice would be to sever any negative relationships, whether those be relationships with people, drugs, alcohol, or sexual practices. I only have professional experience counseling Christians, so my advice is they command any unclean spirits to leave them in Christ’s name, and they pray that the Holy Spirit seal their soul and spirit bodies to prevent the return of any harassing spirits. This works about 70-80% of the time.  Our process was a great deal more involved, and much of it was based on a spiritual interpretation of Matthew 7, along with some traditional practices. They’re not secret, per se, but I find most people aren’t interested in hearing the technicalities. If the simple approach above doesn’t work, or only works temporarily, it’s best to find a trained person to help. Even a well-meaning priest or other clergy without specific training can make a mess of situations like that.  **PAA: For those interested in exploring magic or spirituality, what foundational practices would you suggest they start with? ** Without question, the best practices are Franz Bardon’s initiatory practices, and the best way to learn them is the SixtySkills curriculum. Ritual work is designed to bring a practitioner along a specific path to a specific spiritual destination, and can certainly work as intended. But what if your desired spiritual destination isn’t the place the ritual leads? In my case, I needed an understanding of the underlying metaphysics that made the practices I learned as a priest effective, and I needed a spiritual toolbox to accomplish spiritual tasks I *hadn’t *been trained to do. The SixtySkills curriculum has delivered on both counts.  ## Questions on Hermetics  **PAA: How did you first come across Hermetic teachings, and what impact have they had on your spiritual journey?** I first heard about Franz Bardon searching for answers on the internet, and then I ran across 60 Skills.  **PAA: How has Franz Bardon's work specifically shaped your understanding and practice of magic, and what key teachings from his writings do you find most impactful? ** Bob frequently says “God makes systems, not exceptions.” I think about that a great deal. Most of the received wisdom within religious tradition has lost the ability to replicate the wonders performed by the founder. I think it’s fair to say that the early church father St. Jerome recognized that while the ministries of the apostles reflected much of Jesus’ wonderworking power, few of the apostles’ successors were able to do the same in his day (347-419 AD). It seems the apostles’ skillset wasn’t replicated faithfully, and that’s a huge incentive to study Bardon’s initiation, for me.  > Bob’s approach is one of the most efficient and effective I have ever seen.   > > Frater B **PAA: In what ways have the teachings from Sixty Skills contributed to your magical practices, and how do they differ from or complement the principles found in Bardon's work? ** The SixtySkills curriculum is a modern evolution of the mid twentieth-century practices in Bardon’s most important works, shaped by contemporary pedagogy and personal testimony. I don’t see it as separate from the Bardon corpus; maybe an interpretation? In any case, it took me around two years to master the skills of IIH as a private student (Perseus Edit: A Private student of Bob - Sixty Skills), which exceeded all my expectations. I doubt I would have been able to finish the coursework in Initiation without the improved pedagogy and streamlined approach in the Sixty Skills curriculum.  A side note: Bob doesn’t consider himself an especially gifted teacher, but I beg to differ. Priests often have church jobs outside the parish structure, and I spent 13 years teaching in a classroom (and earned the Master of Education degree, in addition to my divinity studies). Bob’s approach is one of the most efficient and effective I have ever seen.   **PAA: Is there anything else you would like to share?** The interview brings up a lot of memories, and makes me think of the friends and colleagues I’ve lost. I never made a decision to step away from inner healing and deliverance ministry, but my ministry role was reassigned after Fr. C’s death, and it just became a thing of the past for me. When I think about all the frightened, hurting people we helped, I sometimes feel a sense of responsibility to the world and the universal church: I don’t know that Fr. C has any other living successors, and I have no idea how well the church is managing this very real need. I sometimes wish there were an opportunity to perform this ministry again, or train others to do what I once did. I don’t know if the training I received is lost to the world, the way the apostle’s power wasn’t transferred to the next generation of church leaders. I feel a sense of responsibility, but I don’t know what to do about it. It’s in God’s hands, I suppose. “All shall be well, and all shall be well,” as St. Julian of Norwich said. And I trust that’s true. Still, I miss it sometimes. **PAA: Thank you very much for sharing your journey with us. ** --- --- # A New Light in Ancient Traditions: Inside the Egyptian Masonic Order UK Source: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/a-new-light-in-ancient-traditions-inside-the-egyptian-masonic-order-uk/ ## Introduction I’m very grateful to share this interview with the Grandmaster of the Egyptian Masonic Order UK. For those of us outside the world of Freemasonry, this conversation offers a rare window into the depth and richness of practical esoteric work available within some Masonic organisations. Founded in 2020, EMO UK is a new Order rooted in an ancient tradition—drawing from the mystical lineage of the Memphis-Misraïm Rite. With a strong emphasis on inclusivity, spiritual development, and authentic ritual practice, the EMO offers a modern gateway into the Western Mystery Tradition while honoring its sacred origins. If you enjoy this interview then please let us know in the comments and share it with others you think would also enjoy it. At the end of the post, we have provided links to learn more about the Egptian Masonic Order UK. --- ## Interview ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/SAIS-Logo-1.jpg) ## Historical Foundations of Egyptian Masonic Tradition  **PAA: A New Order in an Ancient Tradition: Your website describes the Egyptian Masonic Order UK as “continuing the Ancient Mysteries of Initiation in an organisation free of discriminatory views – a new Order, in an ancient Tradition.” For those unfamiliar, what does it mean to be a “new Order” in such an “ancient tradition”? How would you introduce the EMO to someone in terms of its historical roots and what sets it apart from other Masonic bodies? ** We describe ourselves as a new Order firstly because we were established in 2020,  and secondly, because we fully embrace contemporary values in terms of equality,  inclusion, social compassion and unity. Although our Egyptian Masonic Rites are of  venerable age, and some of ancient origin, we have formed an organisation which we  hope will embrace love and respect for these Masonic and Arcane Traditions, whilst  being an actively welcome space for interested people of all genders and backgrounds. The main difference between the EMO UK and other Masonic bodies is our  commitment to the highly esoteric and mystical traditions of Egyptian Masonry.  **PAA: Origins of Memphis-Misraïm: Memphis-Misraïm is noted as a Masonic Rite formed by merging the Rite of Memphis and the Rite of Misraïm in 1881 under General Garibaldi. The Rite of Memphis was founded in 1838 by Jacques Etienne Marconis with a 99-degree system, while the Misraïm Rite dates back to the 1700s with alchemical and occult influences from figures like Count Cagliostro. How do these origins and historical figures shape the EMO’s current practices and identity? In what ways does the Order honor this rich Egyptian Masonic heritage today? ** We have always believed that Freemasonry works not only as a Fraternity and  Sorority, but as a formal gateway to the more esoteric aspects of Western culture;  specifically the Western Mystery Tradition. Our illustrious forebears clearly believed  the same, and so much of their work involved a conscious development of the Egyptian  Rite to support this deeper purpose. In the EMO UK, we preserve faithfully the Ritual  Transmissions that we have received, and arrange our Order accordingly, as well as  continuing the research and developmental works made by our Masonic Ancestors into  the esoteric and alchemical aspects of Masonic symbolism.   **PAA: Ancient Mystery Traditions: The EMO’s Masonic Culture page suggests that the mysterious origins of the Egyptian Rite span many ancient traditions — from the temples of Memphis, Thebes, and Heliopolis in Egypt to the Mysteries of Eleusis in Greece, Hebrew Qabalah, Druidic practices, African mysticism, Gnostic gospels, and even the Vedas — all ultimately pointing to “One Mystery and One Great Work.” In what way does the EMO incorporate or pay respect to these diverse ancient sources of wisdom? Do you see the Order as carrying forward a universal mystical tradition that underlies all those paths? ** Yes, we are certainly a form of what has been termed the Perennial Tradition, seeing the Many as aspects of the One, and understanding that Mystical Ideas and Sacred Geometries are perpetually recurrent. We believe there is a spiritual unity behind the phenomenology of human psychic and psychological experience, which we see as shining through the diverse manifestations of the mystical traditions of the world.  However, we have a very particular approach to these diversities, which we term the Roots of the Tree. The differences matter, for various reasons – not only in terms of cultural development, environment, and historical impact, but also in more subtle terms of collective consciousness, and the psychic field upon which these Traditions vibrate.  For us, there are Spiritual Forces at work in these distinct cultural forms (although they have always cross-pollinated), most constructive, some destructive; we call these Currents, and we are careful not to mix them together, even though we encourage their comparative study. We are a universalist tradition, but we are not randomly eclectic in the execution of our Works.  **PAA: Esoteric vs. Mainstream Masonry: Freemasonry often traces its symbolism to Solomon’s Temple or medieval stonemasons, but EMO emphasizes a more openly mystical, Hermetic heritage. Historically, what led to this Egyptian Masonic tradition diverging from mainstream Craft Masonry in its focus? How does that history influence your practices today – for instance, in rituals or study emphasis that might differ from a typical Masonic lodge? ** The integration of Egyptian, Hermetic and alchemical references into the Egyptian  Masonic Rites may be found in the Higher Degrees beyond the first Three Craft  Degrees, but as the Rites of Memphis-Mizraim evolved, they began to favour the  traditions of Osiris and Thoth, as well as those of Seth and Solomon in every Degree.  The Egyptian Rites are derived from the Continental Masonry of Italy, Spain and  France, rather than Anglo-Masonry which is more commonly known in the English speaking world, so they have always had a more esoteric and alchemical heritage. The  Egyptian Rites of the EMO UK still retain the classical mythos of Craft Masonry, according to the Landmarks, and much of the Ritual is identical - it is more an issue of  addition and integration, rather than subtraction or modification, especially in the first  Three Degrees, and those Degrees up to the 33rd.  ## Spiritual Teachings and Esoteric Philosophy  **PAA: The “Interior Temple”: Your site mentions that Esoteric Masonry concerns itself with the construction of the Interior Temple of Hermes, Seth, and Solomon. Could you elaborate on what “building the interior temple” means for a member of the EMO? How do your rituals or teachings guide initiates in constructing this inner temple, as opposed to just working with the symbols externally? ** We cannot reveal much about this process, but there is a personal and transpersonal aspect to our Interior Temple. There is the *Lesser *Temple of the Human Body, the *Greater *Temple of the Masonic Lodge, and the *Supreme *Temple of the Cosmos. Each of these has a particular structure, and all three are analogically and geometrically integrated. If we say to you that each has more than one aspect to its form, function and  existence, we have already said too much.  > From the very first Degree, the practical exercises in our Openings, Rituals and Closings reveal a direct psychic and spiritual *mechanism*. > > **- M. I. Bro. Darren Rose, Grand Master, EMO UK** **PAA: Elevating Consciousness: The EMO tradition emphasizes the goal of elevating one’s consciousness beyond the material — “to a Higher Life and a more subtle state of existence,” helping initiates “access the infinite potential of the human Mind, Soul and Spirit.” What kinds of practices or experiences within the Order help facilitate this elevation of consciousness? How might participating in your rites or studies gradually change a person’s spiritual awareness? ** From the very first Degree, the practical exercises in our Openings, Rituals and Closings reveal a direct psychic and spiritual *mechanism*. This *mechanism *is only faintly gleaned at first, but through the beautiful symbolism and graduated development of the Degrees, the Candidate is woken steadily, in manageable stages, from a state of relative slumber to one of expanding wakefulness and a consciousness of the Subtle Forces at work in our Rituals. Many of our Members have attested to the profundity of their experiences with us, not only in the Lodge of Egypt, but through the consequences they experience in their everyday lives. The expansion continues, on and on, as the Egyptian Rite Degrees are understood as more than mere ceremonial trappings. It is wonderful to watch!  **PAA: Alchemy in Masonry: Alchemy appears to be a cornerstone of the EMO’s higher teachings. How does the Order approach the teaching of Alchemy to its members? Is the alchemical work mainly symbolic and spiritual (internal alchemy), or do members engage in any practical or laboratory-style alchemical exercises as part of their journey?** We commence our Alchemical Works in the Sanctuary Degrees, specifically the  College of Masters. First, we teach the theory and language of Alchemy, which is useful in itself as a tool for analysing the Masonic process. Then we commence Preparatory Internal Works through our *Puncti Philosophorum *which is an Occult Transmission exclusive to our Order, alongside the creation of Tinctures, Elixirs and Electuaries.  Then, once the Hermetic Senate is achieved, the Members are taught Spagyrics, and then Plant and Mineral Alchemy follow after this. We have certain laboratory techniques given to us, which allows the Member a choice of Paths, and this then evolves into the Great Work. We also conceive of the Degrees of the Order as a reflection of the Great Work, with Degrees 1-33 as the Black Work, 34-66 as the White Work, and 67 to 99 as the Red Work, with the *Citrinitas *stage between 87 and 90 as the Arcana Arcanorum, and the Chrysoprase or Philosophical Gold as the Degrees from 91 onwards.  **PAA: Integrating Hermetic Sciences: Beyond Alchemy, EMO integrates other Hermetic disciplines such as Qabalah, Theurgy, and Astrology. Could you give an example of how these esoteric sciences are incorporated into the lodge work or study program? How do these studies enhance the Masonic experience on a spiritual level? ** Masonry has always been fundamentally rooted in the Qabalah – even a casual analysis of the Passwords, etc. reveals this to be true, as does the understanding of Masonry as a Solomonic tradition. In Anglo-Masonry, the Craft stops at the Third Degree, and everything else *beyond the Craft *is seen as an independent Body for the Master Mason to investigate. In the Scottish Rite (with which we share many similarities, including an Astrological framework) and the French Rite, as in our Rites of Memphis-Mizraim, the Higher Degrees remain an integrated part of the Rite. This necessitates an increasing comprehension of *all *the influences from which the Rites were formed, including Theurgy, Astrology, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Hellenism, and Hermeticism. Naturally we don’t expect our newest Members to launch at all this straight away, especially in the first Three Degrees, so our Curriculum is designed to assist everyone to study and learn, regardless of their initial level of understanding.  Then, they can progress at their own pace.  **PAA: The Great Work (Magnum Opus): In your view, what is the Magnum Opus or “Great Work” that the Order guides its initiates toward? Is there an ultimate spiritual goal that members work to achieve, and how is this concept presented within your teachings? ** For us, the Magnum Opus is a complete and synthesised Reintegration with the Divine Source, with the Universe, and with every aspect of the Human-Divine Constitution. This is both internal and external, psychic and psychological, material and spiritual. It is what we term the *Uttermost*. No single set of practices, however complex, could be enough on their own, because applying a prescriptive or descriptive apprehension of the Great Work through language or symbols alone will always fall short. The Alchemical and Esoteric Keys are essential for unlocking the Gates which bar the Way, but the Key is not the Gate, and the Gate is not the Garden, nor are any of these the One who walks therein. All an Order such as ours may do is present the Key, point the way to the Door, and give signposts in the Garden. One must have Gold to make Gold, and so one must understand the potential for the *Uttermost *within oneself before any true progress is possible. ## Organizational Structure and Rites  **PAA: Lodge Structure and Progression: Could you outline the basic structure of EMO for us? What is the significance of the Symbolic Lodge of Egypt stage, and how does progression into the Grand Sanctuary of the Holy Isles occur? ** The Symbolic Lodge of Egypt is exactly like a Craft Lodge of Anglo-Masonry in  almost every way. It has the same Masonic Symbolism, the same Signs, Tokens and Passwords, the same ritual structure, the same Geometries, the same order of progression, the same Officers, the same Masonic Tools, and so forth. It presents Egyptian Masonry in a general and ‘symbolic’ sense to the Members, so they have a foundational understanding of the Masonic Temple. The Grand Sanctuary then operates like a combination of the Mark Master, Royal Arch, Rose Croix, etc. in presenting higher level concepts and symbols, evolving from the first Three Degrees and opening up the mythology and allegory of Egyptian Masonry further. The main differences between Classical Anglo-Masonry and Egyptian Masonry are the spiritual mechanisms operating in the Lodge of Egypt, the radical symmetry of the Lodge arrangement, the use of Incense and Sacralised Water to cleanse the Lodge, the mixed gender membership, the use of Alchemy and Theurgy, and the *inclusion *of Egyptian, Osirian and Isiac references and imagery.** ** **PAA: Ninety Degrees of Memphis-Misraïm: Memphis-Misraïm famously includes ninety degrees, organized into categories like the Lesser Mysteries, Greater Mysteries, and Arcana Arcanorum. How does a modern Mason navigate such a complex system? Is advancing through many degrees a lifelong journey, and how do they build upon each other? ** In practice, we use the Key Degrees of the system as steppingstones through the complexity of the Rite, and as anchors for our Masonic Consciousness. The Great Work  *is *a lifetime’s pursuit, as it should be for something so utterly transformative and  compelling, but the Ninety-Nine Degrees of Memphis-Mizraim are designed to build  upon each other as you suggest; they also preserve the stability of the Candidate at each  stage of their Path, so they can move on, or stay put, according to their innate capacity.  There has never been a *quick *path to Spiritual Evolution and the expansion of the Soul, as I’m sure your readers will realise, but the Egyptian Rite is designed to give an occasional boost to the Psyche at certain stages. With persistence, one’s progress speeds up naturally.  **PAA: Inner Orders and Allied Traditions: EMO maintains Inner Traditions like Chivalric Orders, Martinism, Theurgical Guilds, and Hermetic Circles. How do these inner orders fit into a member’s journey? Are they optional specializations, or are they integrated with the main Memphis-Misraïm path? ** In practice, our Inner Orders function more like optional specialisations, so that if any group of EMO UK Members has a collective interest in one of our Inner Orders, they can work those Rituals, study their accompanying Lessons, and gain a complementary understanding of the Great Work from that perspective. Each of the Inner Orders is aligned *horizontally *within our Memphis-Mizraim Degree structure, creating a level of equivalence and reference, but this is the only way in which they are  integrated into the Memphis-Mizraim Path. The Orders themselves operate as separate bodies under the umbrella of the EMO UK.  **PAA: Inclusivity in Membership: EMO accepts candidates of all genders, ethnicities, orientations, and faiths. How has this inclusivity shaped your Order’s culture and dynamics? Does working together across genders and backgrounds bring particular strengths to the esoteric work? ** It certainly does! At one of our recent Festive Boards, we counted nine languages around the table, each toasting each other’s health together. There was no better feeling, especially in the current atmosphere under which we labour during this period in history. This served as a reminder of our humanity, mutuality and empathic unity, and the diversity has only benefited the quality and subtlety of our Rituals. We honour our differences, but this is easy for us, because we all share a common and unifying love of the Mysteries as taught in our Order. The Curriculum also encourages comparative study and sharing, which reveals so many more similarities and connections. For us, this is how one returns to the Substantive Root of who we are on this Planet.  **PAA: Secrecy and Transparency: Members sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement to protect Order secrecy and Member identity. Why is formal secrecy still important today, and how do you balance confidentiality with welcoming and informing new seekers? ** We are lucky enough to hold Transmissions which have been secret for a long, long  time. We are aware that the current era is one of open declaration, the demystification  of certain subjects, and a healthy suspicion of Institutions – this is to be expected; we support an openness and collectivism in the spiritual community. We share openly about our Organisation, our Rite, its structure, its subjects, its principles, its hierarchy, and its intentions. However, there are some *occulted *techniques which are only beneficial when  passed from one person to another, or to a smaller group. Some of these techniques have  Keys, which are written or concealed in certain documentation, or which are *invisible *without a practical demonstration and – in many more cases than you might think – a *direct communication*. Our Order secrecy is mainly to protect these Keys, and the identity of those who wish to seek them anonymously. There is still an important psychic and psychological protection in secrecy and silence, which makes confidentiality an essential part of life.  ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/9th-Protections-7.jpeg) ## Personal Development and Initiation Path  **PAA: Spiritual Haven for Growth: Your Grand Master describes EMO as a “private Spiritual Haven” for those striving to evolve their spirituality and knowledge. What personal development opportunities does the EMO offer to members? ** The EMO UK is still a very young and relatively small Order, so there are some unique opportunities to get involved in a practical way, as an Officer or a Member, or by starting a Triangle or Lodge with us. We have Senior Masons joining who are encouraged to share their expertise and wisdom with us and assist the Order in its work  and development. There is so much room for growth, as well as a great storehouse of  esoteric knowledge, documentation and technical exposition, all of which continues to benefit every Member. The energetic impact of the Rituals is remarked upon frequently.  Even as Grand Master, I have continuous “a-ha” moments, and love to share them. It never stops. I do wish to make our Order a Spiritual Haven, for the Soul’s road is hard, and good friends are few.  **PAA: Curriculum and Study: Every degree in your system includes private lectures, study planners, and even video lessons. How does this structured curriculum benefit members compared to more traditional lodge models? ** In Classical Anglo-Masonry, the motivation to study (or not) remained with the individual. Not all Masons shared the same intellectual enthusiasm or ability, so perhaps this approach allowed the men to choose how far to pursue their Masonic education.  However, Anglo-Masonry still asks that one advances one’s Masonic Knowledge every day, so there has always been an understanding that education was intrinsic to self-improvement. We require our Members to develop intellectually, philosophically *and *spiritually, so study is inevitable. Because we realise that not every person interested in these esoteric subjects has been blessed with the same educational opportunities in life, we constructed the EMO UK Curriculum to offer some support and organisation along the way. Everything is given in digestible amounts, and in due order, so that nobody gets lost, discouraged, or overwhelmed.  **PAA: Practical Esoteric Work: From the 4th Degree onward, members engage in practical esoteric exercises like Alchemical practices and Theurgical rites at home. How are these practices integrated into daily life, and how do they contribute to internal transformation? ** Most Masonic Lodges meet around 8 to 10 times a year, and often less than that. This is not enough exposure to the Subtle Forces to produce the desired long-term transformations. Even with additional study in the Higher Degrees, the daily and weekly development of one’s Energy Bodies is crucial. We instill the importance of this straight away, so that the Candidate realises what is required to begin the purification of their Interior Nature and the gradual generation of the Philosophic Stone. The practices themselves range from 5- or 10-minute daily exercises, to full Theurgical Rituals to be performed once or twice a week. A private space at home will suffice, and the tools required are minimal for the most part.  **PAA: Challenges and Pilgrimages: Higher degrees require significant personal quests, sacred pilgrimages, and esoteric research. Without revealing anything confidential, can you share an example of what such a task might entail, and how these challenges foster spiritual growth? ** There are certain Times, and certain Places. Once the Seeker has learned to read  Cycle, Tide, Current and Atmosphere, and to utilise certain Keys therein, they will find their Pathway drawing them *onward*, and *through*. This is the proper method for Pilgrimage, and its contribution to spiritual growth is clear.  **PAA: Transformative Impact: From your experience as a leader, what transformations do you most commonly see among initiates? Are there certain milestones or degrees that tend to be especially profound for members? ** Certain Degrees are most certainly profound in their impact, and so predictable in their effects that some aspects are written into the Handbooks and Rituals themselves.  As I stated previously, there are Times, Places and Keys. All any Degree Ritual may do is prime the ‘personal atmosphere’ of the Candidate to be more open to these phenomena, but it is the Intelligence of Nature and the Divine Spirit working in concert with the Human Soul which accomplishes the effects. The Key Degrees are sometimes the milestones, but not always. Typical transformations I have observed and been told  about by our Members include sudden shifts in life circumstances which remove  illusions or blockages; increased mental and psychic perception; strong energetic  sensations in the body; lucid or predictive dreams, inter-group telepathy or echoing of  thoughts; constant synchronicities involving our Symbolism; resolution of longstanding  personal conundrums or conflicts; strange moments of luck or serendipity; increased  confidence and enthusiasm, greater self-awareness and self-command; healing crises  and resolutions; stable spiritual contacts, feeling closer to Divinity, and so forth. ## Cultural Values and Modern Practices  **PAA: Principles of Light and Equality: EMO operates by the grand principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity/Sorority. How do these principles manifest in your daily culture and community traditions? ** Liberty we see manifested in the universality of our Order and its Rites, allowing our Members the freedom to explore different aspects of the Spirit. Equality we see manifested in our mixed gender policy and our commitment to diversity and social compassion. Fraternity and Sorority is manifested in the laughter and wonder that spills forth from the eyes of my Brothers, Sisters and Fellows when, overflowing with the Spirit, they realise that the Holy Grail is *within *them. This is LIFE and Life given more abundantly.  **PAA: Inclusive Language and Identity: EMO corrects gender bias in ritual language and respects preferred pronouns. Why was it important for the EMO to make these updates, and how has this inclusive approach affected the lodge environment? ** The updating of ritual language was a simple grammatical correction which has not  affected the Masonic Rituals in any significant way, mostly involving adding Sister and  Fellow alongside Brother, or saying “they are” instead of “he is” or “she is” so the  Candidate can be any gender; the characters and mythologies are the same, with some  additional mythological variations in the Higher Degrees which centre women and  female characters and matriarchs as well. Rather than a political decision, or an  arbitrary attempt to ‘meta-modernise’ the Tradition, it was simply about being fair and compassionate to anyone who may wish to join us, and to bring all genders into the  Light of Masonry *together*. By the way, everyone in our Egyptian Lodges wears the same formal black attire expected in other forms of Masonry, so if anyone is  paranoically expecting a colourful jamboree of Hippy-style abandon, they will be disappointed. We are diverse, but we are also Masons!  **PAA: Zero Tolerance for Bigotry: EMO has a strong stance against hate-speech, bullying, and divisive politics. How do you foster a harmonious, family-like environment among such a diverse membership? ** Harmony and Good-Will have happened naturally because of the wonderful nature of our Egyptian Rite, the sound structure of our administration, and the joyful and intelligent Members we have attracted. Equally, we perform background checks, and we do not hesitate to remove *anyone *who proves to be divisive or hostile, and we make no apologies for this. We seek to maintain Harmony and Good-Will at all costs, and we believe that this fosters intimacy and trust, without transgressing the due bounds of the individual, who must remain accountable.   **PAA: Modernizing the Craft: EMO has embraced digital materials and eco-friendly practices. Are there other ways EMO has innovated while still preserving the sacredness of the ancient rites?**  Thank you for framing our approach so eloquently! We still like to have a beautifully dressed Temple, fragrant incense, candlelight, stirring music, and a highly charged psychic atmosphere. We still encourage the Opening of the Inward Door – for us, this is the heart of the Sacred and the true purpose of the Ancient Rites, regardless of how elaborate or simple they were. It is typical during the early stages of one’s spiritual Path  to place great importance in elaborate costumes, baroque tools, lavish spaces and  expensive artifacts, but at best, these can only ever serve as *telesmata *for the Invisible  Mystery which, once grasped, sings forth in the simplest meadow, or beneath the curve  of a wave; one carries it *around *and *within *oneself, until the Temple is consecrate  wherever one dwells. O, Nice Things Are Nice – as a certain amusing burger-themed cartoon song has said – but our Art and Science in the Western Mystery Tradition become increasingly complex at first, but then increasingly minimal as they evolve. What continues to increase is LIGHT, both spiritual and metaphysical.  **PAA: Appeal to Seekers and the Esoteric Community: Many seekers from other Masonic and occult groups are drawn to the EMO’s mystical approach. In your view, what draws them most strongly, and how does EMO relate to the wider esoteric and Masonic world? ** I believe that the EMO UK provides a unique synthesis of the venerable traditions of  Egyptian Masonry with the potency and sanctity of a Magical Order. We have our  fraternal-sororal society and spiritual community, which is slowly growing, but we also  have the Curriculum, Rituals and Exercises to support individual development too. We consider Masonry to be universal, so we welcome visitations to our Lodges from any confirmed Master Mason of good report, regardless of their Masonic Obedience. We love receiving applications from non-Masons and complete beginners too. We are both practical *and *mystical, Masonic *and *Hermetic, and we are motivated by LOVE – love of the Mysteries, love of Egyptian Masonry, and love for each other. What more is there, I ask you?  - M. I. Bro. Darren Rose, Grand Master, EMO UK ![](https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/IMG_5675-1024x683.jpg)- M. I. Bro. Darren Rose, Grand Master, EMO UK (Photo Credit G. Jenner) **PAA: Thank you very much for your time in answering our questions.** --- ## Further Information ##### EMO Website ##### EMO Tradition ##### EMO OrderEMO Degrees ##### EMO Curriculum ##### EMO Ethos ##### EMO Culture --- --- Generated from RankReady