Wow, it has been amazing year for me. So much has happened to me, both as a writer and a Witch and Magician that is seems difficult to unravel it all. Yet the year started off with a bang, and had many exciting developments. It also had one powerful disappointment, and that, of course, was the election results. I will briefly say a few words about that event, but mostly, I want to outline the amazing things that happened in the course of the year. Life has been good to me, and there is much to be grateful about, and people to be thankful for helping make this an amazing year for me.
I have been writing all year long, and what I have produced has been truly prodigious. During the year I wrote three books and submitted them to my publisher. These books will be coming out in the next two years. Titles for these books are Abramelin Lunar Ordeal (02/2025), The Magical Notary Art (04/2025), and Liber Artis Archaeomancy (Winter 2026). The manuscript for Liber Artis Archaeomancy turned out to have 217K words, so it will be a large and comprehensive work. Additionally, I have edited and revised Disciples Guide to Ritual Magick (08/2024), Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick (12/2024), and Practical Qabalah for Occultists (previously, Magical Qabalah for Beginners), which is likely to appear in print some time in Spring, 2026. I have completed six literary projects for the year.
However, during the year, I have seen six books printed and released, and these were in the following consecutive order, Sacramental Theurgy for Witches, Transformative Initiation for Witches, Mastering the Art of Witchcraft, Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick, Liber Nephilim, and Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick. My total output for the year 2024 has been ten books, written and edited both last year and this year. That is quite an amazing output. I am thankful that at present, there are no outstanding book projects awaiting me. I have completely cleared my occult book work-desk of all projects, so for the Yule period, I have been writing blog articles and working on the planing stages for next set of books. I have three books projects for 2025, although I will take my time planning, assembling, writing and producing these manuscripts, and then getting contracts and readying the documents for submission. Here is a list of three projects that I have planned for next year - they won’t be released until late 2026 and 2027.
The Gnostic Tetra-Sacramentary: Liturgies and Sacred Rites of the Magician Priestcraft
Since the system of magic that I espouse uses the Mass rite, Benediction, and other sacramental rites, I believe that producing a ritual workbook of the entire collection of rituals that I have used or planned to write should be developed as a manuscript and then published. The four Gnostic theurgical systems in the Order of the Gnostic Star, consisting of Thelema, Agape, Thanatos and Eros, each has a Mass rite, a Benediction rite variation, and other sacramental rites, such as the Rite of Naming, Gnostic Wedding, Exorcism, Excommunication, Requiem and the Holy Orders of Deacon and Pontifex ordination would be a part of this liturgical lore. Other ancillary rites would be included, such as the Gnostic Book of Seasons, Mass of the Great Goddess (full version), and the Rite of Beatification, and a Benediction rite to Santa Muerta. A full background to this Gnostic Sacramentary, and the use and obligations of rites of Priestcraft would be fully covered. This manuscript would likely be the first task that I would undertake for 2025 and would likely not be completed until autumn.
Ordeal XV: Rites of Luciferian Ascension
My previous book, Liber Artis Archaeomancy, focused mainly on the Angelic hierarchy and the magic associated with their invocation. However, a ritual magician must also traverse the paths of darkness and undergo the ordeals, and the challenges associated with the Devil in order to be truly and wholly spiritually evolved. One cannot avoid the darkness, especially the darkness of one’s own soul and being. Those who espouse the ways of light and who have not undergone and achieved victory and accommodation with their dark side can never be trusted not to unconsciously exhibit their negative ethos in a subtle and opaque manner. A true initiate must master both the Light and the Darkness to know and master themselves. Ordeal XV divides the darkness into the Gnostic Tetra-Sacramentary of Thelema, Agape, Thanatos and Eros, to develop the ordeals associated with the Involution Avatars Aiwaz/Astoreth, Lucifer/Promethius, Azrael/Samael, and Baalzebul/Pan Priappus. The fifth in this series is Sothis-Set, who are joined together with the four Involution Avatars to produce a tabernacle of darkness where the soul meets its ultimate challenges. This book contains all of the evocation rites and the Five-Fold Inverted Vortex, which is the heart of the chamber of trials. Included are the mystery rites of the Tabernacle of Sothis-Set and the associated Black Rites of expiation, purification, and release. The ordeals are introduced with a full set of background articles and analyses that explain in detail the nature of this ordeal, its purpose and ultimate conclusion. I will be assembling the material and writing this book from late 2025 to Spring of 2026.
Liber Nephilim Additum: Additional Rites of the Enochian Ordeal
While the book Liber Nephilim covered the basic rites needed to evoke the first two chiefs of the Nephilim angels, and also included the evocation of Lilith and other ancillary rites, other components of that working were excluded due to the limitations of the book size and length. There were quite a number of rituals and lore left behind. This book seeks to gather together all of the additional material that was not included in the original book. This book is broken into three parts, representing the topical areas that contained important but excluded ritual workings. The first part will contain the rituals for invoking the Enochian Bonarum, which I called the Binary Planetary Intelligences. I invoked seven consecutively to form a powerful planetary ordeal, with the eight workings invoking the ruling spirit Camara. Included would be diary entries of that ordeal. The second part would be the instructions and rites involved in the Enneagrammic Goddess Gateway working, representing the gate structure used in the Enochian Ordeals. The third part of the book would contain the additional rituals for the evocation of Turiel, Ramat’el, and Samael, the invocations of Seth and Enoch, the Enochian Mystery Vortex Rite, and the Convocation rites of Lilith and Enoch. The diaries for some of the workings would also be included. I may also consider including evocation rites for Lilith’s sisters and demonic queens, although there would not be associated diaries for those spirits. I would not begin to assemble, edit and write this manuscript until after Spring 2026.
***
So, those three project will take me into the middle of 2026, not including the final editing passes and other pre-production tasks. Much of this lore is already written, but other parts will need to written and everything will have to be revised and edited before it is ready for submission. We are looking at a lot of work that will need to be accomplished, and that will also depend on how things are going with me in terms of my health, day-job demands, and the likely relocation that will happen sometime in late 2025 or early 2026.
As for traveling and teaching this year, I attended the ConVocation convention last February and taught two classes. I taught a six-week series at Mama Luna’s occult book store in Richmond, based on the book Mastering the Art of Witchcraft beginning in April and extending into May. I attended and was the headliner at the Swamp Mystics mini convention in Tallahassee, FL. I also had a book tour in New Orleans in early November that was modestly successful, and I got to meet some exceptional folks who live there. I had wanted to revisit NOLA when I had first went down there in November 2023, and coincidentally, I was able to visit again almost a year later. I had promised myself to return, and that happened, thanks to the folks at Cross Crow Books.
For the coming year, I may teach my six-week class again, and visit a few more local occult book stores, I will certainly be returning to ConVocation this coming February, but I don’t have much plans beyond those events. The coming year will be one where I focus on the home front, since my wife is working out of town during the week days, and only is able to come home on the weekends. Because we have six cats and a dog, and my wife is absent during the week, it makes things more difficult for me to be away from home. That will change after we relocate, of course.
I will be relocating to a new home, and a priority for me will be getting a room for a permanent temple, and having a private outdoor location to host a grove would be a nice touch. I have been living in a small house since May 2018, and I have not been able to establish a place to work ordeal magic. I am planning on changing that situation, but the details of how that will happen, when and where, will have to be determined. There is a lot of magical work that I have left unfinished, so I would like to have the opportunity to finish these magical projects and formulate some a new ordeals. While I still have my health, I want to explore and experiment with new magical lore and additional magical ordeals. Of course, all of this work will feed into additional books, so that work will likely keep going until I can no longer write or have anything to write about.
All of these writing projects, relocating, getting temple space to work ritual magic, are quite exciting and makes me very happy and optimistic about my future. I have a great paying job, my wife is fully employed, and the future is looking to be very exciting. There is also the possibility of travel to Europe and Asia, and maybe even turning my literary talents to writing fiction once I finally retire. I hope to live many years yet to come, and there are still many adventures awaiting me. In January 2025, I will turn 70 years old, but I still feel pretty good for my age, and there may be many possibilities if I can manage to keep my health.
I am not happy or optimistic about the fate of our nation, since the election appeared to be about overcoming the status quo and exercising anger at the state of economy and at the sequestering that occurred due to the Covid19 pandemic at the ballot box. Since Democrats were nominally in charge during that period, especially the POTUS, people foolishly decided to punish them in the election. Over the last four years we have had a very competent presidential administration and until the mid-term elections, we have had reasonably good government. Now that a majority of the American people have voted to elect Donald J. Trump to another four year term, that period of seemingly good governance will evaporate. I am beside myself with concern and worry because despite all of the facts known about Trump, people still voted for him, somehow thinking that he will make things better, particularly with the state of the economy. As it will likely turn out, they will be proven wrong with a vengeance. Trump doesn’t represent either the middle class nor the down-trodden people who feel that the nation is no longer concerned with their difficulties, whether economic or social. Trump is a transactional politician who truly represents the oligarchic class, and it is they who impacted the election and ensured that he would be re-elected POTUS.
While some will blame the Democratic Party for completely misunderstanding and misrepresenting the will of the people, there were many who did vote against Trump and the Republican Party. There was also a significant group of people who could have voted but didn’t vote for various reasons. Would they have made a difference? Possibly, but we will never really know. People were angry about inflation, which was caused by a post-pandemic economic recovery and also corporate greed. People were also angry about being forced to wear masks and about the confusion associated with the nature of Covid19, that it was a new kind of virus and not enough was initially known about it. Of course, when Trump was president, he allowed, through his inactivity and lack of planning, over one million to die, and also helped to spread misinformation about various cures and that masks were ineffective. Biden’s administration pushed forward the actual plan that not only helped to reduce the effect of Covid19, but also ensured that the economy was able to recover with less troubles than other countries in the world. The fact of the matter is that president Biden got little positive press for cleaning up the mess that Trump left behind, and spent two years undoing what Trump had done in his four years as president.
Our main stream press is owned and operated by the donor class, and after just a few months, they had basically written off Biden and his presidency, and proceeded to ignore all of the good that he was doing in favor of pointless criticisms and blame for whatever was not immediately fixed and made efficient once again. They created a hostile environment that helped to tank Biden’s favorability while white-washing and sane-washing Donald Trump. The press is mostly responsible for Biden’s poor popularity, since they focused on what was not working or wrong and seldom mentioned all of the things that he and his administration had accomplished, which was probably more than what any recent president had achieved.
Whatever troubles happened domestically, Biden and the Democrats had mostly fixed. International crises, such as the invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza and Lebanon, were more difficult to manage, as foreign policy typically is to any administration. The crisis in the Middle East showed that the government of Israel was not interested in working with the Biden administration, even though they had the complete support of the U.S. I abhor Hamas, Hezbolah, and the Houthis for their terrorist activities and starting and intensifying the conflict with Israel, but I also abhor the government of Israel, who have become terrorists in their own way. It is a no win scenario, and I cannot blame Biden too much for supporting Israel, since not to support them would have been political suicide during an election year.
However, as it turned out, the donor class and the oligarches did not want either Biden or any Democratic candidate to win in 2024, since they believed that a more friendly and transactional Trump would be a better replacement. I believe that the only thing that I am critical of regarding Biden is that he shouldn’t have sought a second term and thereby allowed a younger and more energized political group of Democrats to be weeded out and ultimately selected through the primary process. Having a democratic process occur during the year 2023 and 2024 for the Democratic Party might have eclipsed the effect that Trump was having on the electorate with help from the media moguls. Whether that would have been sufficient to defeat Trump at the polls is debatable, yet considering that Harris came close to defeating Trump with only 100 days to campaign indicates that it could have happened that way. Still, thinking about the possibilities doesn’t change the reality that in January we will be getting a second dose of Trump and his MAGA miscreants.
For some reason people have written off the dangers of having someone like Trump in charge of our nation for another four years. I am thankful that he can’t run again, and that many who came out to vote for him this time might not have voted at all if it was someone else running without his celebrity status. However, I believe that he will cause a lot of damage to our nation and the world at large based on his various statements about domestic and foreign policy. Additionally, it seems that Trump’s choices for cabinet members and close advisors represent a wealthy group of oligarches whose role in government will represent a massive conflict of interest. Trump is very transactional, and for his wealthy supporters, the pay-off will be their ability to grift the nation and make it all legal and acceptable. We, the people, are in for a rough four years, all because of a large number of ill-informed and misguided individual voters.
A Canadian journalist has pretty much defined our moment with the following quotation.
“There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.” Written by Andrew Coyne
While I have a certain amount of excitement for my own personal future, I am quite aware that many others will not be doing so well. It is my hope that the incoming administration and the trifecta of their control of the government shows them as over-reaching, overly ambitious, incompetent and overall, a failure to make any significant changes. That is my hope for my nation in the coming years. I also hope that a lot of people think about what they have done to vote for Trump and the Republican Party, knowing that these people care nothing for those who aren’t wealthy or members of the oligarchy. Maybe having some painful experiences will be a good lesson in how to use their vote to help their own interests instead of listening to pundits and politicians who lie, cheat, steal and who pretend to be compassionate to the powerless and the advocate of the under-represented. Republicans, as a rule, represent a status quo that is all about the donor class, and no one else.
Frater Barrabbas
No comments:
Post a Comment