Review - Modern Hermeticism by Erich and Alannah Brown

I originally met Frater Barrabbas back in 1999 when he was living in Minneapolis and coming around to Leaping Laughter OTO events. At that time he shared with me an unpublished manuscript detailing the system he had developed for his Order of the Gnostic Star entitled The Pyramid of Powers. The system drew elements from the Golden Dawn, Thelema, and Alexandrian Wicca, and represented a unique system of magick in its own right that was meaningfully different from its antecedents.

The Pyramid of Powers system was eventually reworked from that original manuscript and published as The Disciple's Guide to Ritual Magick and Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick, both currently available from Crossed Crow Books. While the Disciple's Guide is targeted at beginners, it still is an introduiction to a complex system of magick that may or may not make sense to rank beginniners without any background in magical workings. What the system still really needed was a sort of Modern Magick for the Gnostic Star system that would work for students who were just starting out.

I provide all this background because Modern Hermeticism appears to be exactly that book. It covers the system in a series of simple steps that build on each other, and thus makes it more accessible and approachable. Even so, it covers a lot of material, from the Qabalistic Cross up the full Pyramid of Powers ritual, which is not exactly analogous to anything in Golden Dawn/Thelema or Wicca. It also has a section on Enochian magick, which is explained in simple and straightforward language.

I don't personally practice the Gnostic Star system, so there are some points that I approach differently in my own work. The Enochian system, for example, is original but heavily employs the Golden Dawn arrangement of the system. As such, my approach based on Dee diary attributions is very different. Still, the Golden Dawn Enochian system and its variants are employed by many modern magicians who report good results with it. The system does not employ the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram to open and close magical fields the way I do, but instead uses some original ritual forms to accomplish the same objective.

The book also includes a lot of Jungian material, which I criticize often, but it seems like that's currently the case whenever any book on magick touches on psychology. It should be noted that while psychoanalysis is based on an entirely inaccurate model of the mind and brain, Jung's work on mysticism in particular is pretty good regardless. During his life he sought out mystical experiences and writes about them from a firsthand perspective in works such as The Red Book. This likely explains its popularity in esoteric spaces.

I do very much appreciate the lack of "spelling" (pronouncing YHVH as YOD HEH VAV HEH when vibrating) in their rendition of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, which is a bad instruction that gets repeated all over the place. Also, the material on working with the godhead and invoking godforms is excellent and gives great instructions for doing invocations. Finally, this is exactly the sort of thing that modern magicians should be doing - developing their own ritual forms and applications, and then subjecting them to peer review through publication.

If you are a fan of Frater Barrabbas' work, or just interested in seeing another way in which traditional ceremonial forms can be modified and worked with, check out Modern Hermeticism. It covers the material with impressive clarity without sacrificing any of the Gnostic Star system's depth and complexity. Even if you don't wind up working with the system, it also contains a lot of good advice that is applicable to magick in general and should benefit any practitioner.

Review - Glamour of the Spheres by G Antra

Glamor magick is usually thought of a niche discipline that involves projecting illusions into the minds of others in various situations. Whether to improve your overall general charisma, or to make yourself more attractive as a romantic relationship partner, the parameters of this art are limited to such circumstances. But this is false reductionism. Glamor magick is the magick of perception, and perception is the foundation of how we experience the world. As such, this art has many further applications that usually go unexplored.

Glamour of the Spheres by G Antra opens up the world of glamor magick to its full potential. G has presented on the subject at Leaping Laughter Lodge's Grimoire Bazaar in Minneapolis and the Babalon Rising festival in southern Indiana, and has considerable expertise in the field - along with an experimental, scientific approach to the work that I find many practitioners lack. It does no good to merely speculate on the effects of rituals, since as we all should know many "pretty patterns" in magick just don't work when subjected to real-world conditions. Emprical testing is essential, and as I have previously written I wish more practitioners would test their personal work like this and make it available for peer review.

Glamour of the Spheres mixes glamor magick with planetary magick, a refreshing combination that I have not previously come across. It covers the basics of planetary work, the attributions and powers of the planets, and glamor rituals for each of the planets. These are not limited to presence and appearance. For example, the "Lips of Mercury" spell that can be performed using lipstick or lip balm facilitates communication and helps each word that passes your lips be better understood and carry deeper meaning. This is perception, too, and goes far beyond mere surface attraction.

All these rituals are constructed using a system of energy work that I was exposed to when I first attended the Babalon Rising festival back in 2023. It focuses on energy going out from your projecting hand and returning to your receiving hand, which is an idea found in many systems of energy work. What's different, though, is how this energy work is integrated into the rituals themselves. A simple example would be holding your petition to the spirit (the energy you are sending out) in your projecting hand while you hold a talisman (which will receive the energy) in your receiving hand as you perform the ritual.

This is a very simplistic example and the rituals in the book make use of this technique in more involved ways. Having experimented with variations on this method over the last several years, I can confidently say that it has improved the effectiveness of my Qigong energy practice to a substantial degree. The traditional model of accumulating and then discharging Qi becomes far more effective when projecting/receiving becomes a more dynamic, flow-based process, like the difference between a static spark and an electric circuit. My practice did previously include application of some flow-based methods, but the version outlined in Glamour of the Spheres makes the process more explicit and deliberate.

For all these reasons I highly recommend Glamour of the Spheres. It is a fresh and expansive approach to a subject that is rarely covered in much depth, and even if you are a person like me who does not generally wear makeup or use cosmetics, the techniques can be adapted for rituals involving personal care products, articles of clothing, or even more traditional planetary talismans carried on your person. Pick up your copy today!

G Antra's Linktree can be found here covering Twitch, Instagram, Threads, and many other social media outlets.

Movie Review: To Dream of Falling Upwards

This is both a magick post and a movie review, for the film To Dream of Falling Upwards by Anterro Alli, author of Angel Tech and several other works on modern occultism. As I've mentioned previously, Hollywood movies tend to get magick hopelessly wrong. The usual practice is to replace the "science of the magi" with lots of flashing colored lights and garish CGI, with sigils flying all over the place and things exploding. Real magick doesn't work that way. It is less flashy, but deeper and far more profound than anything mainstream films usually address.

Here's some background before I get started with my review. Have you ever wondered why the world now has both New Falcon Press and Original Falcon Press, which look like they sell books from some of the same authors? That's a story unto itself - two weeks before the death of Christopher Hyatt, his estranged biological son somehow managed to get him to sign over the company. The folks who were previously running New Falcon along with Hyatt started up Original Falcon, and recounted their side of the preceding events here.

To be clear, I have no inside information regarding the veracity of these claims and am not trying to push one side or the other. I don't know if the legal issues are still ongoing or if they have been mostly resolved now, ten years later. If you really want to know, you'll have to read up on the situation and decide for yourself.

But the story as presented by Original Falcon is significant to my review because Alli loosely bases the setup for To Dream of Falling Upwards on it, replacing a publishing company with a Thelemic magical order. When the Chief Magus of the Temple of Horus dies, his estranged son takes over the order with plans to commercialize its teachings. Jack Mason, the Chief Magus' chosen successor, is thus cheated out of his rightful position and vows to take revenge. He performs a sex magick operation against the son and hires a Russian hit man to have him killed. The assassination succeeds, but Mason finds himself haunted by a demon that takes the form of the deceased son and must find a way to exorcise it.

Review: Defensive Occultism by Robert Rubin

Back in January Robert Rubin sent me a copy of his book, Defensive Occultism, to review. I read through the book when I received it, but only now have gotten around to writing up my review. My impression is that it is an excellent introduction to magical self-defense, especially for those who know little about the magical arts. Experienced practitioners will likely know much of the material, but everybody starts somewhere - and any experienced practitioner who doesn't know much of it probably should.

Robert Rubin is an occult investigator from the Philippines. As he describes it in the book, an occult investigator is kind of like a cross between a paranormal investigator and the ceremonial magick equivalent of an exorcist. When confronted with an individual who claims to be under psychic or magical attack, he investigates the situation and attempts to devise a solution that will resolve the problem.

It should first be noted that the book is mostly targeted to what I imagine would be Rubin's clientele - individuals who may have never given much thought to the existence of magick or paranormal phenomena, but find themselves confronting a problem that they can't explain. So it includes a fair amount of the sort of introductory material found in other beginning magick books regarding the reality of magick, and assurances that encountering paranormal phenomena does not imply mental illness.

That being said, as with the Roman Catholic rite of exorcism the first and in some ways the most important step for an occult investigator is to verify that an actual attack is taking place. Rubin correctly notes that many people who believe they are under psychic or magical attack are actually suffering from psychological problems or mental illness and would be better treated by a therapist or psychiatrist. When this is the case, clients are referred to the proper medical authorities.

In my experience, inclusion of this step tends to be one of the main differences between fraudulent practitioners and real ones. Every few months I see another story about a purported psychic who took advantage of a mentally ill client, telling them that their suspicions of being under a curse were absolutely correct and that the only way the curse could be lifted was by paying the psychic large sums of money or other valuables.

Review: The Big Little Book of Magick by D.J. Conway

I was sent a copy of this book to review back in March. Looking around the blogosphere, I'm thinking that the publisher must be plugged into our informal magick blogging circle because fellow blogger Rob was sent a copy to review as well. I recommend that you take a look at Rob's review in addition to mine, as he makes some good points about the book's weaknesses from the perspective of an experienced magical practitioner. He wound up not recommending the book, and while I agree with a number of his criticisms my impression is more positive so long as its target audience is taken into account.

Let me be clear - this is not a book that I would buy for two reasons. First of all, I am not nor have I ever been a Wiccan, and there are a number of assumptions in the book coming directly from that worldview which I disagree with, in some cases quite strongly. Second of all, I doubt that even an intermediate magical practitioner is going to find anything new or useful in it. Nonetheless, that's not who the book is aimed at. This is the sort of book that is intended to sit on a shelf at a bookstore and attract the attention of seekers who know nothing about magick or Wicca and want to learn about it from a very basic perspective. I don't know that many readers of this blog fall into that category, and the book is certainly not targeted at those of you who come here to read my articles on theoretical models of magick or advanced spellwork techniques.

What I like best about the book is that even if you know absolutely nothing it contains enough information to get you started practicing right away. The techniques that it covers are limited, but one of the things that bothers me about a lot of beginning books on magick is that in too many cases there isn't much "magick" you can really do with them aside from bits of psychological trickery here and there. You don't learn how to do effective magick by reading and studying, you learn how to do it by practicing. The four sections of the book - Altar Magick, Candle Magick, Pendulum Magick, and Healing Magick - give you techniques that are simple but which at the same time can be used to do some genuine magical work. Altar Magick tells you how to set up a basic ritual space, Candle Magick covers some very basic sorcery, Pendulum Magick explains a simple method of divination, and Healing Magick touches on introductory energy work.

Review: The Angelical Language, Volume I by Aaron Leitch

Enochian magick used to have a relatively small but devoted following. As a student of the system myself, I commonly joked back in the day that if I were to release a book on Enochian it would sell a thousand the first day as every Enochian magician in the world bought their copies the minute they were available and after that I would never sell another one. In the last few years this seems to have changed, as more people are becoming interested in the system.

Enochian even makes an appearance on the popular television program Supernatural as the language spoken by angels to produce various magical effects. Sadly, the show's producers adopted the ridiculous pronunciation method proposed by Wynn Wescott during the Golden Dawn days - drawing out the words by pronouncing each letter as its own syllable. Even though I've worked with the system for years it took me a while to figure out whether the angels were speaking real Angelic or some nonsense language made up by the writers that they were just calling "Enochian." Of course, I also make use of the Angelic language in my novel Arcana as I discuss here.

This last year has also seen a number of new non-fiction books released on Enochian magick. Aaron Leitch, author of Secrets of the Magickal Grimoires, has put out what seems to be the most ambitious of them, a two-volume hardcover set issued by (believe it or not) Llewellyn, which as a publisher seems to be drifting away from its previous stance of targeting every book released at 12-14 year old girls. So far I have only read volume I of the set, titled The Angelical Language, Volume I: The Complete History and Mythos of the Tongue of Angels. Generally speaking the book is quite good, especially as a complement to Geoffrey James' Enochian Evocation, which covers some of the same material. However, there are also a few caveats that I think anyone interested in practicing Enochian magick as Leitch proposes need to be made aware of.

The best thing about the book is that Leitch makes a good case for using the Angelic Calls with the leaves of Liber Loagaeth and is the first author I've seen who outlines a workable system for doing so. I highly commend him for putting all this material together. I know how difficult a task it is firsthand, as I worked on something like it for myself years ago but found it too frustrating and difficult to assemble in a satisfactory manner. There are some quibbles that I have with his formulations, but the overall idea is great.

Among those quibbles is his attributions for the Calls, in which he attempts to classify Calls 4-7 as a grouping when I think most reasonable readings of the first 18 Calls classify the first two as a group followed by 4 groups of 4, making the first grouping 3-6, the second 7-10, the third 11-14, and the fourth 15-18. This isn't necessarily that big a deal - as Leitch outlines the system the leaves and Calls correspond so that even if you decide to attribute the Calls differently you don't need to mess with the system itself.

A much bigger problem is that Leitch assumes that since he believes the Calls to be related to Liber Loagaeth they must therefore NOT be related to the quadrants of the Great Table. In my opinion this constitutes sloppy, either/or thinking. Especially since Leitch includes decent textual support for the idea that the Loagaeth operation is essentially mystical and not practical in nature, it seems much more logical to me to suggest that Loagaeth would represent the mystical side of the system while the Great Table represents the practical magical side - and both use the Calls, which serve as a sort of "bridge" between the two aspects of the system. This is supported by Dee's explicit linkage of the last 30 Calls with the Parts of the Earth via the Aires, which Leitch acknowledges once but then essentially dismisses.

The book also includes his pronunciation key for the Calls, which is the same as the one he published on his web site. I already critiqued that article here. Interestingly, in the introduction to The Angelical Language Leitch thanks a number of people who were working with Dee's pronunciation notes back in the late 1990's - you know, the ones who "passed over Dee's pronunciation notes in silence" according to his web article. So he must be familiar with their work, and I find it rather confusing that he would characterize it as he did. The statement in question is not repeated in the book, so perhaps Leitch has revised his stance since the publication of the web article.

Beyond this the book gives a decent overview of Dee and Kelly's operations with more textual support than I've seen elsewhere, even in Lon DuQuette's Enochian Vision Magick which is probably the best book on Enochian magick that I have ever read. I would be glad to have it in my library for no other reason than its outline of the Loagaeth operation. But you need to take its interpretations with a grain of salt - as with Donald Tyson, a lot of Leitch's conclusions from the material are much shakier than he makes them out to be.

Want to buy your own copy of The Angelical Language, Volume I by Aaron Leitch? Order from my Books and Media page and you can help support Augoeides.

Review: She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror edited by Tim Lieder

Even though I write fiction, these days I read a lot less of it than I used to. But this story collection caught my attention (really, how could it not with a title like that?) and I was willing to make an exception. I found my time well-spent and I think that this collection represents just the sort of fiction readers of this blog will enjoy.

This particular anthology is a collection of horror stories based on stories found in the Bible, and it's as entertaining as it sounds. You don't need to know the stories on which they are based to enjoy these tales, but if you're someone like me who has read the Bible cover-to-cover it's even more fun to look at the original stories and in most cases see just how few modifications were required to make them fit soundly into the horror genre.

It begins with the story of Ruth told from the point of view of a vengeful demon and ends with a Jesus-as-vampire tale, an idea that I honestly thought had been completely done to death (so to speak) until I encountered the author's fresh and original take on it. In between you will find Daniel cast as a prophet for a modern multinational corporation, a retelling of the story of Jonah inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and much more.

All in all, this is a great anthology for those interested in the esoteric and horror fans alike.

Want to buy your own copy of She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror edited by Tim Lieder? Order from my Books and Media page and you can help support Augoeides.

Review: Bad Reviewers Write Bad Reviews

One of the reasons that Red Wheel/Weiser rejected my Operant Magick was that they were concerned the material in the book was too advanced for a general audience. That is, they felt a rank beginner who knew nothing about ritual magick would be confused by some of the ideas presented therein. This is in fact probably the case, and I was very clear about it in the introduction to the book. I even recommended that rank beginners start with some sort of introductory book before moving on to mine, carefully explaining that the book did assume some level of familiarity with the concepts of ritual magick.

Personally, I have little interest in writing some sort of introduction to magick book with a whole chapter devoted to "is magick evil?" or other similar nonsense. Anybody who worries that magick might be evil and needs reassurance shouldn't practice it - such individuals are either too bound by religious conditioning to get much out of the discipline or are simply too stupid to comprehend many of the basic concepts that must be understood by any successful practitioner. An individual of the first sort might be able to practice magick successfully, but only after working through their conditioning loops and hopefully replacing them with more adaptive ones. An individual of the second sort is best off leaving magick alone entirely.

The idea that every book needs to be accessible to everyone, regardless of background, has resulted in an occult marketplace that is glutted with beginner-level material. Practitioners like myself have complained for years that there are no advanced or even intermediate level books being published on a regular basis. My goal in writing a more advanced book was to fill this gap. Certainly there must be enough serious practitioners in the world to support the sales of at least a few titles! Since all of the beginner titles are in competition with each other, it seems to me that you might be able to sell more books as the author of one of five available advanced books rather than one of five hundred available beginner books. Basic economics, that, but I was unable to convince the folks at Red Wheel/Weiser that this justified publishing the book. Perhaps they were really just worried about seeing book reviews like this one.

Some background - Frater Barrabbas is a friend of mine who recently published his second book, Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick, Volume 1: Foundation, an actual intermediate-to-advanced level title broken up into three volumes of which this is the first. As far as I can tell this reviewer picked up the book expecting it to be a beginner's guide, got all confused when, well, it wasn't, and proceeded to slam it on that basis.

What is needed is a clear, welcoming book that sets out the basic principles of ritual magic at the beginning, moving coherently through the most useful techniques such as breathwork, visualization, yoga, and the direction of energy, and giving plenty of practical exercises to do along the way. We need a sensible guide that leads you through safely, securely, and with a solid foundation in common sense understanding of why these things are as they are.

So is the reviewer's point that the hundreds of books in print covering this material from a beginner's perspective all suck? Every single one of them? I find that pretty hard to believe - I've come across at least a few that I consider decent for what they are. But unfortunately making a book "clear" and "welcoming" often has the added effect of dumbing down the material.

This is everything that Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick is not.

But do we really need 501 beginner-level books rather than 500?

Never before have I emerged from a book on this subject so confused and alienated – even after reading Crowley!

As far as Aleister Crowley goes, I don't know what the reviewer found confusing but a lot of Crowley's stuff is not that difficult. You can actually train yourself to become a competent ritual magician with a copy of Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae, all of 13 pages long in print, and the tables from Liber 777. There's more advanced material in his works, of course, but those two texts are really all you need to get started on your practices.

The title of this book, by Frater Barrabas

Note that the reviewer didn't even read the book closely enough to spell the author's name correctly. It's BARRABBAS.

suggests to the casual observer that it is a beginner’s guide of some kind, or is the first in a series of books that will focus on giving the reader a solid foundation of practice, theory, and experience.

In fact, it isn't, as the quick Amazon search that the reviewer obviously neglected to do would have revealed. Frater Barrabbas' first book, Disciple's Guide to Ritual Magick, is in fact the "beginner book" of the series. From the reviewer's comments and background it's clear that she should have started the series there.

However, I found this title extremely misleading as throughout the book Frater Barrabas writes about techniques and theories that he barely touches upon: they are briefly mentioned, almost like one might name-drop a famous author you know very little about but whose name sounds impressive in your work, but not discussed at any great length.

One might think that "mastering" in the title would suggest that the book is not for the "casual observer," but to be fair the occult market is full of books with similar titles that promise all sorts of "mastery" and then open with yet another exposition of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Furthermore, I would point out that much of the material "touched upon" is (1) in the beginner book, which the reviewer clearly did not read, and (2) is mentioned briefly because if every technique mentioned in the book was given the full "beginner book" treatment the damn thing would be over a thousand pages long. Furthermore, toward the end of the review we find this comment:

Overall, Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick presents material that is not new (although Frater B. declares it to be in his Foreword, in which he also states that the material in the book was “too advanced” to be published ten years ago…)

And yet the reviewer expects the book to be totally comprehensible to a beginner with no background in ritual magick? Or does the term "advanced" not mean what she thinks it means? For the record, there is a fair amount of original material in the book, but perhaps the reviewer was too unfamiliar with the Golden Dawn/Crowley school of ritual magick to realize that. I found this comment telling as well:

For instance, the chapter entitled “Ritual Performance” looked promising, and I was hoping to read a thorough examination of how to make ritual look pretty, sound effective – the theatrics of magic. Indeed, Frater Barrabas mentions it briefly at the beginning of the chapter, but the rest of it is taken up by stuff that should have been discussed earlier in the work: ecstatic dance techniques (should have accompanied the section on trance), drawing lines of force, and circumambulations

Ritual magick is not psychodrama and it's not theater, despite some overlap between theatrical and magical methods. Way too many people in the occult community make that mistake. Magick is a technology that you use to produce specific results - change in conformity with will. It's not something that you put on for your friends so they can tell you how cool and magical you are. Combining the various energy-raising techniques and methods for drawing lines of force is exactly what "ritual performance" should consist of. It doesn't really matter how a ritual looks or sounds to an outside observer as long as it gets the job done.

So when I finally do get my book published, is putting up with bad reviews like this what I have to look forward to? Probably. Hopefully as more intermediate-to-advanced books become available reviewers will start to figure out that these books need to be reviewed by an expert in the field. I mean, this particular reviewer is a 24-year-old Pagan Tarot reader who practices Vodou. That gives her expertise in ritual magick how? You would never see anything similar going on with academic or scientific writing, and once we get past the "beginners only" mindset of the major publishers I hope that the review process for magical writing will evolve along the same lines.

UPDATE: I appear to have started a trend. Two more counter-reviews along similar lines have shown up here and here. Maybe one of these days publishers will finally figure out that there's a market for more advanced material.

Want to buy your own copy of Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick by Frater Barrabbas? Order from my Books and Media page and you can help support Augoeides.

Review: Advanced Enochian Magick by Frater W.I.T.

Years ago Gerald Schueler wrote a book for Llewellyn entitled An Advanced Guide to Enochian Magick as a followup to his first book, Enochian Magic. Schueler was one of the early authors to try and put together a set of books that would allow beginners to start practicing the Enochian magical system, but his work suffered from a number of significant flaws. The "Advanced" book consisted mostly of a recounting of Aleister Crowley's The Vision and the Voice along with Schueler's largely Theosophical interpretations of each aethyr vision. The book included some more complex rituals in the back which, I have to say, for the most part did not work. And yes, I started out working with Schueler's books, so I did try them out. Now Frater W.I.T., author of Enochian Initiation, has published a new similarly-titled book that is a real improvement over Schuler's failed effort. Entitled Advanced Enochian Magick, it is now available from Outskirts Press.

I wound up really enjoying the book, but there are a couple of things that put me off at first glance. The book is subtitled "A Manual of Theory, Training, and Practice for the Novice and the Adept." My first question was why an "advanced" book would include "novice" level material. It seems like a bit of a contradiction, though I've seen this sort of thing before, like with Jason Newcomb's introduction to the Goetia subtitled "A Simple Advanced Key." If it's simple, what's advanced about it? Furthermore, as I read through the early chapters of the book it pretty much felt like everything I was reading was material that I'd seen before - basic Golden Dawn rituals, Timothy Leary's eight-circuit model, the Qabalah, and so forth. But basically what is going on here is that W.I.T. is laying out the magical language that is necessary to understand the more complex rituals later in the book. If you already know this material, you can skip ahead.

The most valuable material in the early chapters is the set of recommended practices for both beginning and more advanced magical practitioners. It is not really new material, but I've seen few books that outline the practices so concisely or make it as clear that there really is quite a bit of work involved in being a magician. It's not a discipline where you can read a few books and then go around proclaiming yourself an expert without ever casting a spell or maintaining a daily ritual practice, which I've seen all too many people do. While I recommend a slightly different sequence of rituals based on my operant field model, the practices outlined by W.I.T. will work fine - and actually doing them will put you head and shoulders above about 90% of the people out there who claim to be magicians but in fact do little to no work.

It should be kept in mind that this is not a "novice" level book, despite the subtitle. The "novice"-level material is laid out with basic instructions, but there is little of the hand-holding that you tend to find in real beginner books. For example, you won't find a whole chapter dedicated to answering the question "Is practicing magick evil?" If you know nothing about magick and are picking this up as your first book you are likely to come away a little confused. You should probably read a few introductory books before you pick this one up if you're just starting out, but for people who are already practitioners looking to learn the Enochian system these straightforward explanations are nice. Given this, I think that W.I.T. oversells the potential power of magick in a way that is unnecessary for its target audience, people who are already practicing magick and understand its usefulness, though I do like seeing an author who doesn't shy away from advocating objective paranormal results.

It is the second half of the book that really shines, once it has covered all the background material and gets into the substance of the Enochian ceremonies. Here we find more material along the lines of the material covered in Enochian Initiation, a complex set of rituals accompanied by accounts of magical results. If every magician did this with the ceremonies he or she performs and published the results we would be well on our way to establishing a knowledge base for magick that is similar to what we find in the physical sciences, and in my opinion establishing such a knowledge base should be the goal of every magician. Secrecy about techniques and results helps no one, and does nothing to make the magick itself more powerful or relevant or meaningful.

Frater W.I.T. approaches Enochian magick from the Golden Dawn perspective as far as attributions and techniques go, much as Aleister Crowley did. I am not going to offer a line-by-line analysis of the rituals in the book simply because in my own Enochian practice I've eliminated many of the Golden Dawn elements and am more of a Dee purist, though I also use attributions from Crowley's The Vision and the Voice and incorporate Thelemic rather than Christian symbolism. I use the 1587 reformed Tablet for my model of the Watchtowers which attributes EDLPRNAA and RAAGIOSL to different directions, I don't use the truncated pyramids for the squares, use a different order for the Angelic Keys, and so forth. That being said, as far as I can tell the rituals follow the Golden Dawn model well and I do know a number of magicians who claim to get really good results with that system. Some of his ideas, such as evoking multiple angels at once, are actually more in keeping with the original Dee system, and as that's the way I usually work Enochian magick I can vouch for it as a very effective practical technique.

The self-initiation ceremony in the book's final chapter is a particularly interesting and powerful piece of magical work. A version of it was published in Enochian Initiation, but this new version includes some additional symbolism and I find it hard to believe that anyone could work through it without getting some sort of tangible result - at least if they've done the work leading up to it. Initiation ceremonies are one of the aspects of the Enochian system that appears to be missing when you work through the diaries and other source documents, and this ceremony or something very similar to it seems like a good way to fill that gap. I've heard of the occasional "Enochian Order" offering some manner of initiation, but as far as I know no groups of this sort have managed to last more than a few years or accumulate more than a handful of members. The Enochian system may just not be suited to such a group structure for some reason.

For magicians working with the Golden Dawn/Thelemic Enochian system (that is, probably most Enochian magicians these days) this is a good book to pick up, especially for the later chapters which show how to put together and perform large and complete Enochian rituals. Such rituals are rarely published anywhere and they serve as good examples for serious and involved practice of the Enochian system. Furthermore, working with multiple angels has proved to be very powerful in my own magical work and this is a technique that is not addressed or usually even mentioned in the books that I've seen on the Golden Dawn Enochian system. As with Enochian Initiation, I wish more magicians would publish this sort of material so that all of us could collaborate more effectively, and I congratulate Frater W.I.T. for his efforts along these lines.

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Review: A Haunting Seasons 1 and 2

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I had a chance to watch seasons one and two of "A Haunting," a television series produced by the Discovery Channel about encounters with ghosts and other paranormal manifestations. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm a real fan of shows like this and I'll watch and enjoy just about any sort of paranormal documentary. Not only do I find them entertaining, but I often take away bits of folklore that might someday prove useful in my magical practice.

"A Haunting" features dramatizations that are essentially somewhat hokey, so if you're not a B-movie fan like me you might find them distracting or downright annoying. However, they are pretty well-done for the genre and the show manages to be more interesting and entertaining than most of the other paranormal shows that I've seen the Discovery Channel produce. The incidents dramatized on the show follow the familiar "haunted house" narrative. Usually a couple or family moves into a new home and encounters small, unexplained disturbances. These escalate until the homeowners are compelled to take action, which usually means calling in paranormal investigators, priests, mediums, or all of the above to resolve the haunting.

One of the main things that I took away from the show is that paranormal investigators are useless. Seriously. I don't know if that was the producers' intention, but the tactics that they use to resolve the haunting usually fail. The investigators spend a lot of time documenting things like temperature shifts and odd occurances, and do research to find out the "reason" for the haunting. Here's a news flash - this idea that spirits haunt a house for some external reason and that once get what they want they will just leave is a literary device, not any sort of factual observation. Spirits stay in a place because they want to stay, and they usually are not about to be talked out of it or appeased.

At the same time, priests are called upon in a number of the cases to bless the house or expel the spirits and that usually doesn't work either. In fact, it tends to make the spirits mad and often the manifestations increase. While there's nothing wrong per se with the Roman Catholic magical system, this show pretty much confirms my suspicion based on my own studies that the Church doesn't have many people in it these days with real magical talent. Furthermore, the intercessory structure of the rites implies that such ability might not be required, except that to perform effective magick you just do need it and there are no workarounds.

Mediums present the opposite problem. You would expect someone who studies ghosts to have a reasonable grasp of magical techniques, but with mediums that doesn't seem to be the case. Aleister Crowley referred to spiritualism as "low-grade necromancy" for a reason - most of the mediums on the show practice the "yoo hoo, come and get me" school of invocation. No circle, no ritual forms, nothing that might allow them to control the spiritual energy that they are trying to summon up. And, no surprise, they often get themselves into trouble and have to break contact with the entities, and they generally can't talk the ghosts into leaving. The trouble with mediums is not a lack of talent, but a lack of skill. Unlike magicians, they seem to rely solely on intuition and raw ability. This lack of discipline makes their powers unreliable at best.

So I suppose you can see where I'm going with this - to expel a ghost you need a magician who has both natural talent and a disciplined spiritual practice. Such an individual can get rid of a ghost with a simple banishing field - the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram followed by the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram, which will flatten all spiritual influences in the area where it is cast. You do need to make sure that the anchor, the point in the house from which the spirits emanate, is within the field, but other than that it's pretty easy. If you can't find the anchor spot, set up a matrix of talismans around the entire property to extend the banishing field and you should be able to shut down any paranormal activity within its boundaries.

So, you might ask, am I willing to put my money where my mouth is and clear ghosts from a house? Sure! In fact, if you have a poltergeist that can actually move stuff around get in touch with me. I have this idea about binding it into a crystal so that I can have it bring me sodas from the refrigerator when I'm hanging out on the couch watching TV. I mean, my magician friends would be so impressed!

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Review: Ritual Versus Ceremonial Magick

A while back I received a copy of Joseph Lisiewski's Ceremonial Magic & The Power of Evocation as a gift from a fellow magician who bought it based on the promotional description and of course the cover art, which is just plain cool. When I read through the book, though, I found it absolutely infuriating. Lisiewski is convinced that the only kind of magick that can ever work has to be performed by following one of the old grimoires to the letter, without making any changes or innovations to the ceremonial forms. He even goes so far as to equate someone who spends years learning and perfecting modern magical forms to the sort of idiot who makes statements like "I set up my magical circle when I put on my belt" - simply because Golden Dawn magick is not a literal reproduction of a grimoire text dating from before 1350.

As I thought more about it, though, I realized that part of my reaction was due to the fact that what Joseph Lisiewski and I do magically are fundamentally different - Lisiewski is a ceremonial magician whereas I am a ritual magician. To most people, and even the majority of practitioners, “ritual magick” and “ceremonial magick” are synonymous. However, there is an important difference between the two terms. In a magical and/or spiritual context, ritual is defined (http://www.dictionary.com/) as:

1. an established or prescribed procedure for a religious or other rite.
2. a system or collection of religious or other rites.
3. observance of set forms in public worship.
4. a book of rites or ceremonies.
5. a book containing the offices to be used by priests in administering the sacraments and for visitation of the sick, burial of the dead, etc.
6. a prescribed or established rite, ceremony, proceeding, or service: the ritual of the dead.

Ceremony, on the other hand, is defined somewhat differently in the same context:

2. a formal religious or sacred observance; a solemn rite: a marriage ceremony.

The difference between the two is that a ritual consists of the necessary instructions for performing a ceremony, whereas a ceremony refers to a specific performance of a given ritual. Ceremonial magicians like Lisiewski work from grimoires. They do not write or develop their own rituals, but rather adhere as closely as possible to the ritual as specified in the text. The reason that Lisiewski's book is annoying to me is not that it is wrong, exactly, but that he covers ceremonial methods while asserting that they are the only possible way that anyone could get magical results. Also, his condescension toward anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't help matters. While there is nothing wrong with practicing ceremonial magick and ceremonial techniques work for many magicians, for me such an inflexible approach is not particularly compatible with Scientific Illuminism as it tends to enshrine past magical techniques as unchanging dogma.

A ritual magician looks deeper into the mechanics of magick and designs ceremonies based on his or her understanding and insight. In my own professional field of software development, the difference between a ceremonial and a ritual magician is similar to the difference between a coder and a designer. Purely ceremonial magicians like Lisiewski are essentially technicians – they know their rituals and understand when and how to use them, and possess the technical skill to produce good results. Ritual magicians work at the level of liturgy and rubric, creating and testing new magical forms in order to buildup a repository of innovative magical techniques that can address new problems beyond the scope of the old grimoires, or address the same problems more efficiently and effectively.

The fundamental problem with the "pure ceremonial" approach is that even the grimoires written before 1350 must have come from somewhere. The Renaissance "Faustian Grimoires" are almost certainly fakes - they came out after the Faust legend became popular and detail remarkably similar ritual procedures to those found in the fictional account - so an earlier cutoff date is not completely out of line, but for earlier grimoires some ritual magician must have sat down and put the text together. I see no reason why a magician who lived during the Middle Ages would necessarily be able to write a better ritual than I can, given the sheer volume of information that the modern world makes available to me as sources.

It would be truly fascinating to see how these Medieval ritualists complied and tested their texts. The Enochian system of John Dee and Edward Kelley enjoys a fearsome reputation among modern magicians, perhaps because it is literally the only example we have of a complex magical system where the actual transcripts of the spiritual operations that led to its creation are available. This leads to a lot of controversy among practitioners, but it is also a goldmine for ritual magicians everywhere - the building blocks of the system are laid out for study in their original context. The system is also by most accounts particularly effective, maybe because of all the innovations that this open structure enables or maybe because the older grimoires have been degraded by centuries of copying errors.

In the end, it is more Lisiewski's exclusivist attitude that makes his book less worthwhile than it might otherwise be than any particular technical errors. He includes an annoted version of the Heptameron, a famous Medieval grimoire, and gives solid instructions on how to use it. I prefer ritual magick to ceremonial magick simply because I'm essentially a hacker by nature and I'm always looking to enhance and improve my techniques. On the other hand, a ceremonialist will probably that find the book does have some useful advice as long as he or she ignores the pontification.

Want to buy your own copy of Ceremonial Magick and the Power of Evocation by Joseph Lisiewski? Order from my Books and Media page and you can help support Augoeides.

Review: Enochian Initiation by Frater W.I.T.

Originally posted on 11/2/2006 on the previous version of this blog. It's good publicity for a fellow OTO brother who self-published this excellent piece of magical work.

I just finished Enochian Initiation by Frater W.I.T. and found it to be a fascinating piece of magical work. It is exactly the sort of magical research that I have contended for years that our community should be publishing. Except under certain specific circumstances (like initiation rituals that are designed to surprise the candidate in some way) secrecy is not terribly useful in magick, despite a great deal of prejudice in favor of keeping magical teachings hidden throughout the history of the Western Esoteric Tradition. If even a dozen or so magicians a year could publish a collection of magical diaries like this every year we would be well on our way to building a collection of techniques and practices that would be effective for many people.

The book is made up of two sections. The first is a collection of magical journal entries spanning five years, from 1999 to 2004. During that period the author invoked all of the Kings and Seniors who inhabit the Watchtowers of John Dee and Edward Kelly's Enochian system of magick twice. The first round of invocations was done quickly, more to get a feel for the nature of the energies involved, and the second was slower and more deliberate, done with the intention of fully assimilating and integrating the nature of each King and Senior. The second section of the book consists of the temple rituals used in the invocations along with commentary on them.

The author works from the perspective of the Golden Dawn elemental mappings for the four quadrants of the Watchtowers, and uses the Golden Dawn order for the Angelic Keys or Calls. I've explained some of my concerns about those attributions in other articles, but it is also true that a number of modern magicians have observed that the Enochian system adapts well to various symbolic mappings. Whatever intellectual criticism can be leveled against the Golden Dawn system, it is basically coherent and has been used for many years. From the journal entries in the book, it clearly works, at least for the author. Many of the visions described are quite profound and seem to follow the general order of unfolding realization described in many spiritual systems, not just Western Esotericism. Looking at the cover of the book I also realized that if you place the quadrants of the Reformed Tablet as they appear in Dee's 1587 diagram and use the Golden Dawn elemental attributions for the Kings, they follow the order of the points of the pentagram. I spent years studying the Reformed Tablet and never made that connection.

As an interesting observation, here is another magician who has figured out the Operant Field. The author uses Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to open his rituals and moves on to the Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram rather than the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram recommended by Donald Michael Kraig and many other modern magical writers. In my experience, following the LBRP with the LIRH is much more effective for any sort of practical magical work, and most of the skilled magicians that I know use the invoking form of the Lesser Hexagram as well. Also, the author went ahead and developed his own Thelemic keyword analysis, which is a step that our ritual group took as well. It's helpful to do that because the standard Golden Dawn version represents the aeonic formula of Osiris while Thelemites work with that of Horus.

The only real criticism of the book that I can put forth is that I would have liked to see more examples from the author's life that could clarify how well these rituals actually worked. Especially toward the beginning of the book the author keeps talking about how he invoked one angel or another "to excellent effect." In my experience, it is not that difficult to perform a magical ritual that "feels good." To be sure that a ritual is working, you need to look at your life and see if unlikely things that support the objective of the rite or are in some way related to it are really happening. Of course, since the author published the book under a pseudonym he probably wants to remain at least somewhat anonymous, and that would preclude the inclusion of detailed personal information beyond the workings themselves.

In short, the book is excellent and I recommend it to any serious ritual magician, especially anyone interested in the Enochian system. At some point in the future my magical working group may try working through the Kings and Seniors and see if we get similar results.

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Review: The Key to Solomon's Key by Lon Milo Duquette

Freemasonry is probably the oldest fraternal organization in the Western world and certainly the oldest of any significant size. At the end of the Nineteenth Century the Masonic fraternity brought together the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who assembled what I believe to be the most impressive Hermetic magical system of its day. In movies and media, Masonry has been long associated with occultism and esotericism, and one might reasonably conclude from those accounts that Masons do indeed practice something like the system of magick published by Israel Regardie in his account of the rituals of the Golden Dawn. That assumption would be profoundly erroneous.

I am a Mason myself, a Past Master of Braden Lodge #168 in Saint Paul, and currently serve as Chaplain. I happen to be lucky in that my lodge has a number of members who share my interest in esoteric practices, but for the most part Masonry is about fraternity. The initiation rituals are beautiful (especially the Master Mason degree) but at the institutional level modern Masonry has nothing to do with magick or occultism. There are no secret Masonic rituals aside from the degrees themselves, secret blasphemous practices, or even coordinated conspiracies. Hollywood producers would find regular Masonic meetings hopelessly dull, with motions to pay bills and accept minutes of the previous meeting.

Lon Milo DuQuette is one of my favorite writers on the Western magical tradition. His work is practical and his writing style is funny and engaging. Interesting, he is also a Mason and like me serves as Chaplain of his lodge. The Key to Solomon's Key connects the story of the building of Solomon's Temple as it is told in the Masonic degrees with the European tradition of Solomonic magick as recorded in the Goetia or Lesser Key of Solomon, one of the most popular of the European grimoires. A friend of mine commented that there "wasn't a whole lot" to this book, which worried me a bit. Could Lon have actually written a bad book? I've read most of his work and enjoyed it all. The answer, of course, is that the book is excellent, but it is not primarily intended for experienced ritual magicians.

Reading through the book I can see why my friend didn't find it very useful - the first half of the book talks briefly about the history of the Knights Templar, the rise of the Masonic fraternity, and the basic narrative of the Masonic degrees. The second half is an introductory overview of Goetic magick targeted for the novice who knows little of the system. Between these sections, Lon discusses the basic principles of ritual magick, again targeted for beginners. For a serious ritual magician who has been practicing for a long time, the book is more like a "Magick for Dummies" than an arcane volume filled with the ancient magical lore of the largest esoteric fraternity in the world, and anyone coming to the book with the latter expectation will probably be disappointed.This is not a book that is intended to push the discipline of magick forward in terms of metaphysics or techniques.

Lon does put forth the intriguing theory that the Knights Templar were able to become so powerful so quickly in Europe because they found documents in the ruins of the Temple at Jerusalem that demonstrated the Bible was not historically accurate or at least disputed, which is an idea that I had not previously encountered. The idea makes sense given the political position of the Church during the Medieval period, and such discoveries were made elsewhere during this century - namely the Nag Hammadi Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also postulates that this led the Knights Templar to encode some of this information in the Masonic degrees and lectures.

The book does overstate the absence of historical evidence related to David and Solomon, in that it states that there are no inscriptions or archaeological records documenting that they even existed. In fact, there are a handful of inscriptions naming David. Less evidence for the existence of Solomon has been found so far, but archaeological investigations continue. I personally think that David and Solomon likely existed, but that the vast majority of stories about them were embelished and that the lives of the real people on which they were based probably had little in common with the biblical narrative. Much material that appears in the Torah was only written down during the second temple period following the Babylonian Captivity, and it is interesting to note that the story in Exodus has more in common with the escape from Babylon than it does any documented events in Egyptian history. Similarly, the stories of the early kings of Israel could have been exaggerated to enhance the apparent greatness of the Israelites' ancestors and justify their claim to most of Palestine. In fact, Palestine was mostly a collection of city-states during the period in which David and Solomon were supposed to have reigned, and their actual "empire" may not have extended much further than Jerusalem and the immediate surrounding area. If the Templars indeed found documentation proving the relative insignificance of Israel, the Church would indeed have been very interested in silencing them to prevent anyone from questioning the biblical story.

According to this hypothesis, the greatest Masonic secrets of all are essentially critical thinking and freedom from dogmatic literalism regarding the Bible and other spiritual texts. When the Masonic fraternity was founded there was no public schooling and much of the information in the lectures would have been new to the aspiring Mason, whereas a modern person finds much of it familiar. Moving beyond literalism points in the direction of the universality of religion, which is one of the Ancient Landmarks of the Craft. The main argument against Masonry put forth by conservative Christians is that Masons pray together to open and close meetings even though they may be of different faiths, and anyone in the lodge who is not an evangelical Christian is worshipping a demon or the Devil himself. Incoherently, these are the same people who advocate prayer in public schools - you would think that praying at a public school function would be subject to the same criticism.

Lon's overview of the basic principles of magick should not be new to an experienced practitioner, but it is explained in clear language that does not require a technical magical background or esoteric vocabulary. This is one of Lon's biggest strengths as a writer (besides humor, of course) - explaining complex ideas in simple, practical terms. There has been a lot of pompous metaphysical speculation put forth over the last hundred and fifty years or so as "things you need to know before you try any real magick" and this section of the book really cuts through the nonsense. I think I may have a couple of small technical quibbles (so small and technical, in fact, that I can't be sure they're quibbles until I talk to him) with Lon's explanations, but they will give any beginning magician a really good start.

The overview of Solomonic magick will allow a would-be magician to get started right away without buying any other books, which is nice. It is again introductory, though, and has little new material for magicians like my friend who are long-time practitioners of Goetia and know the system well. It makes for an excellent handbook, though, and even though I am not that familiar with Goetia I could pick it up and do an evocation using only the material presented within. If I ever get really serious about working with the Goetic system I will need more, of course, but it makes for a good start.

The brilliance of this book is that its target audience seems to be Masons with some interest in magick but no real practical experience. Most Masons are open-minded about spirituality and have at least been acquainted with the power of ritual in their initiations, so it seems reasonable to think that many of them might be interested in a book like this. It starts off with the history of the Knights Templar that is familiar to most Masons and then slowly moves into the territory of ritual magick, which few Masons practice, and finally into a practical exposition of the Goetia. In addition, I have encountered one or two ritual magicians who are more interested in Masonry after reading it, which may be a secondary audience.

The bottom line: for a beginning magician, especially one who is already a Mason, it is excellent. It is, however, an introductory book and experienced magicians should expect to find a lot of things in it that they already know.

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