At the time of this article I have written a total of seven books. Five are in print, one is at the printers and one is in manuscript form waiting to be submitted to the publisher. In the Spring of 2023 I will have all seven books in print and I will be likely developing yet another. That’s a lot of books and materials on the occult, magic and Witchcraft, you might say. What is driving me to write down everything I know about these topics? I can safely say that there seems to be a spiritual force that is inspiring me, and also my methodology for working magic is quite different than the ceremonial magician or the traditional Witch. I am something of an anomaly, a hybrid between various modern traditions of pagan religion and the practice of ritual magic. I have gone through many phases of my work and practice, but the books that I have written represent the later fruits of my work and do not represent all of the places where I have been nor my original path.
There was a time when I heavily engaged and studied Gnosticism, and there are still some elements of that topic which appeal to me, but I have pretty much rejected the antinomian perspective that nature is somehow corrupt and negative. I am just too much of an optimist to have such a dreary attitude towards nature, and life itself. I could never ditch my sentimental attachment to the natural world, and after all these years I stand in awe of everything that I have seen and experienced within the spectrum of nature and natural habitats. I certainly haven’t seen everything, and in fact I am less traveled than many; but still nature is something that I feel deeply attached to and will not forsake what I feel is intrinsic to my faith as a pagan and a witch. Gnosticism was sort of a fad for me, and I am much less passionate about it than I was 30 years ago, back in the early 90's.
The topic of Qabalah is another one of those areas of occult study that I was deeply engaged with over the decades but now it is less interesting to me. I have even written a book on the topic, and some have said that it is one of the better books in print. Yet after writing that book and doing all of the research that was required to accurately represent it in a completely cogent manner, I discovered that the Qabalah was not actually very relevant to my work as a ritual magician and a Witch. I will write another article about that book and why I came to find the Qabalah a useful methodology but not the panacea that other occultists believe it to be.
What I wanted to discuss is that my literary career started many years before my first book was ever published in 2007. We are talking about a span of time from around 1991 to 2007 when I published my first book, based on some of the material that was in that original work. My first attempt at writing was a book I named "Pyramid of Powers," named after the ritual I developed to project a masculine energy field, similar to the cone of power. The reason why I wrote this book and for whom were individuals who had joined the magical order of the Gnostic Star and found the beginning rituals to be a bit too difficult to readily master. Two of my acquaintances from when I had lived briefly in Dallas had decided to adopt the rituals of that order into the regimen and become initiates. They visited me a couple of years later after I had moved to Tallahassee, FL.
However, concepts that I took for granted, such as the vortex, using the cardinal directions and the angles, the pylon, the western and eastern gateways seemed based on an underlying magical technology that they had never seen before. They didn’t have me around to show them how these rituals worked, and they were more experienced than their friends and potential members. If my two friends couldn’t explain what a vortex was and how it was able to work then they couldn’t explain that to their friends. They asked if there was some kind of underlying documentation that they could read and study in order to understand how to employ these rituals. In fact, they said if I could provide them with a set of rituals that were more basic and easier to understand, along with a body of lore to give them background, then they could master these rituals and ultimately begin mastering the lore of the order.
Of course, what they were asking for didn’t exist, and in fact, because I had been the main teacher and the developer of this lore, the mother temple in Kansas City had ample opportunity to hear me explain and even demonstrate how these rituals worked. Since this lore was also developed gradually level by level with the participation of the group, there wasn’t any need for me to provide simpler rituals for beginners to introduce them to these concepts nor any deeper explanations to describe how they functioned. It was a strange experience for me to explain how a vortex worked to my friend “Fish” from Dallas who understood the cone of power, but was unable to fathom how a vortex could possibly function without causing the energy field of the magic circle to collapse altogether.
I had to scratch my head for a bit on that one, but was able to explain that the vortex was established inside a magic circle, and that the circle functioned as a sacred boundary, and whatever occurred within that boundary didn’t violate or interfere with the proper external magic circle. Learning to work with these concepts, at least for a beginner, was something of a leap of faith. My friends told me that while I could explain these concepts to them and even show them how they worked when they visited me in Tallahassee, they would find it quite difficult to explain it to their colleagues.
It was at that point I realized that the ritual lore of the order needed a set of beginner rituals and a thorough explanation of how they worked so that one might be able to later learn and operate the more advanced rituals in the order. That was my inspiration, and I set to work on it immediately after my friends had left to return home. I would write up a complete set of lore that was easier to understand and operate, and in fact, it would resemble a more ritual magical version of what I had been using in my days as a Witch priest and coven leader.
Once I started with this task, I discovered that it was not as simple as just writing a series of rituals. I had to explain the whole basis of my ritual technology, and my writing skills were woefully inadequate to accomplish that goal quickly. While I may have written my last book in around 80 days, I could hardly be able to write what would become a three volume book in that kind of time. I took me five years to write my first book, and it was not very well written either. I was organized enough and had a good chapter structure to follow, but my ability to write was rudimentary, and my earlier writings were barely readable. I had to learn how to write non-fiction, so it was a long and torturous writing process for me. I begged some friends to help me edit that work, but even then it was poorly written and did not have the kind of easy access and readability that my books and articles have today.
I can recall printing out all 500+ pages of the three volume book and taking it to Kinkos and having them make books with colored covers and a spiral binding to hold the pages together. I still have a couple of copies, but it was at least good enough to help individuals learn about my magical technology and to then have the understanding and background to make use of the many rituals and ceremonies that were part of the legacy of the E.S.S.G. or the Order of the Gnostic Star. Completing this task whet my appetite for writing and in the process made me a good enough writer to actually consider writing a book on magic and getting it published. It is typical that the first book that we write takes years to produce, but never gets published. That is not exactly what happened to me, but overall the book Pyramid of Powers was never actually published, at least in the format that it was at that time. More on that in the next couple of episodes of the Frater Barrabbas literary review.
Since I had written a massive three volume book, I did have a lot of material already written up to serve as the source for future books. I would need to rewrite sections, add new sections and remove other materials, but my first book would serve as the source for my next two books.
Frater Barrabbas
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