---
title: "Further Questions with Alexander Moore"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/further-questions-with-alexander-moore/
date: 2026-02-14
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction This interview is a follow to the Perseus Conversations episode featuring Alexander. There were some things he mentioned in that first chat that I felt would be great to..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
tags:
  - "Franz Bardon"
  - "Hermetics"
  - "Magic"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ChatGPT-Image-Feb-14-2026-03_51_09-PM-1024x683.png
word_count: 3947
---

# 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.**

---