---
title: "Interview with Frater IAC: Franz Bardon, Tactical Magic, Introspection & the Hermetic Path"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/interview-with-frater-iac-franz-bardon-tactical-magic-introspection-the-hermetic-path/
date: 2025-07-30
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "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..."
categories:
  - "Franz Bardon"
  - "Interviews"
  - "Western Traditions"
tags:
  - "Energy"
  - "Franz Bardon"
  - "Meditation"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ChatGPT-Image-Jul-27-2025-12_51_49-PM-1024x683.png
word_count: 5816
---

# 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.**

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## Community Platform