Origins of the Marseilles Tarot Deck

One of first tarot decks that I possessed was the Marseilles Tarot deck, although I opted for other more modern and artistic versions of the tarot soon after I started down the road of being a reader and teller of fortunes. I was introduced to the tarot by borrowing and using someone else’s deck, which was the Swiss Tarot deck, and then immediately I was able to read them without much study. For some reason the symbology spoke to me, and I was able to give others and myself accurate readings. Soon after, I was given my own deck to use, and that started a long term relationship that has had no interruptions. You see, I was sixteen when I got my first tarot deck and I was just beginning to become acquainted with Witchcraft and ritual magic. At the time, I had felt that I was discovering an important part of my own internal mystery, and that a deeper study over time only made the tarot even more powerful for me.

I used several tarot decks, particularly the Morgan Greer Tarot, but I wasn’t in awe of the designs or the artwork because it seemed abbreviated and omitted important symbology. It wasn’t until I saw my first copy of the Crowley-Harris Tarot deck that I was quite inspired and used that deck, after finally purchasing a copy,  exclusively for many years. Then a close friend introduced me to the Voyager Tarot deck back in the late 1980's, which I presently use today, although it is now out of print. I still work with the Crowley-Harris Tarot, and I also have a fondness for the Waite-Smith-Rider Tarot deck, especially the pip cards, which have vignettes depicting meaningful, visual attributes of the cards. However, I have never forgotten the Marseilles Tarot deck because I felt that it was the very first tarot that had occultic undertones. I had seen earlier hand painted tarot decks, or tarocchi decks, as they were Italian, and obviously based on the more basic playing cards that had become vogue during the early 15th century, when paper card stock and printing became available in the West.

While I did not have much in the way of any historical reference, I just intuited that the Marseille Tarot deck was the earliest version that was obviously based on occultism, since the symbology had subtlety but remarkably changed from all earlier versions of the Tarocchi decks. While the typical version of the Marseille Tarot deck displayed a kind of primitive or crude artwork, an earlier version of that tarot deck (Vachier Tarot de Marseille, 1639 CE) was graphically and artistically superior. For some reason, the later popular version of that tarot deck used the crude artwork, possibly to disguise the importance of the symbology, or to make it appear more harmless than it was. I suspected that the Marseille Tarot deck had its origins in the port city of Marseilles, probably in the early 17th century, and the artwork was produced by some unknown artist. I didn’t believe that the occult tarot was a creation of French occultists in the late 18th century, as modern academics such as Dummett and others had hypothesized. I didn’t have any proof as to when and where the Marseille Tarot had its origin, but I believed that it was older than the late 18th century. Little did I imagine that the actual history of the Marseille Tarot was being tracked down by a singular scholar, and that the true history would be even more interesting than what I had assumed.

Then I came across the book “Two Esoteric Tarots” where Caesar Pedreros interviews the authors and amateur historians Peter Mark Adams and Christophé Poncet, who discuss what they discovered when researching the sources and symbolism of the Sola Busca Tarocchi and the Marseille Tarot, respectively. These decks are artistically similar, and also unlike the other tarocchi decks of the time. Their painstaking research pushed the origin of these two decks back to the 1490's, where the Marseille tarot was the precursor to the Sola Busca tarocchi, and that the Sola Busca was likely modeled on the Marseille tarot. The style of the artwork and the themes employed in the trump cards appeared to localize them to Italy, which was at the forefront of art, literature, the rediscovery of Plato and the Hermetic Corpus in Europe, and the study of esotericism, natural magic and the occult. Perhaps the most illuminated thinker of that time is the one person who had translated both the Hermetic Corpus and Plato from the Greek to Latin, and that was Marsilo Ficino, who was employed as a scholar by the Medici family. While the typical artistically rendered tarocchi playing cards contained tropes and motifs that would later be used in the more occult versions, the imagery and content can be safely placed firmly in the mid 15th century. It was in that time that the advent of an occult version of the tarot had its birth.

Christophé’s historical search and journey led him to Italy, based on the supposition that an enterprise such as creating an occult tarot would have required designers, artists, engravers and printers, and it would have been a costly endeavor that would have taken a few years to have produced results. It is likely that Ficino oversaw the design of the tarot, along with Cristoforo Landino, and the artistic inspirations can be traced to Sandro Botticelli, whose known artwork like the House of God and the Devil as illustrated in the Landino version of the Dante’s Divine Comedy resembles the tarot trumps of the same name. Other possible contributors were the Veronese artisan and artist Felice Feliciano, and the engravers, printers, and the family that bankrolled this endeavor, the Medici, probably with other allied wealthy backers. This endeavor was kept strictly secret and discrete, since such a publicized endeavor would have come to the notice of the Inquisition. Once the playing cards were fully developed, we can imagine Ficino’s Academe would have developed methods for using them, playing “Platonic games”, as obliquely described in one of Ficino’s works.

While this is all supposition because no records of this endeavor exist, there are too many points in common to the artists and the scholars involved to dismiss it. Since the Sola Bosca Tarocchi was developed soon after the Marseille Tarot, and it appeared to borrow a number of formulations from that tarot deck, and its noted place of origin, Ferrara, is nearby to Florence, even though it was produced for the exclusive purview of a wealthy and eccentric Venetian nobleman named Marin Sanudo, it was an early part of the family of occult tarot decks. The Marseille deck was an illuminating, upbeat, and an optimistic work, while the Sola Busca was darker, grotesque, and distinctly antinomian. 

What we have, then, is the place of origin and a time for the first occult Tarot to be conceived and produced, although its origin was in Italy instead of Marseilles. Still, the greatest esoteric and occult minds of the Florentine intelligentsia helped to create this Tarot deck, and it found its way into the public, and likely entered France via the Mediterranean port of Marseilles. The whole purpose behind allowing the occult tarot to spread into common usage was to seed the populous with the occult and Hermetic/Platonic imagery so as to communicate them with any who was insightful or educated enough to recognize and interpret these symbolic forms. It was a book of imagery that would spread the impressions and teachings of Renaissance enlightenment through the medium of the ancient symbolized wisdom of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism.  

This form of communication allowed for its developers to express very heretical beliefs and ideals without the possibility of being identified and severely punished by the church, which would have been their fate if they had published these ideas in books. However, over time, the actual occultic meaning of the cards became obscure and then lost, and the use of these kind of cards was centralized to only a few locations, most notably, France.

The French have always seemed to have been enamored with the Marseille deck since it first came out, and savants of the late 18th century recognized the arcane nature of the Tarot and heavily speculated on the meaning and the source of the cards. It was Court de Gebelin in 1781 who famously pointed out that the Tarot seemed to have its origin in ancient Egypt and embodied a secret teaching, and whose numerous writings ultimately made the Marseille Tarot famous and popular once again. Other and later occultists, such as Eliphas Levi and Papus lionized the Tarot and sought to link it with the recently popularized Qabalah. 

When the secret order of the Golden Dawn took the Marseille Tarot and redeveloped it, with an honored place along with their writings and teachings on the Qabalah, it bloomed anew, and when that literature was finally published and made public, it produced an explosion of interest in the Tarot, and therein began the process of designing and artistically rendering new and more modern versions. Crowley had already published his own versions of this Golden Dawn literature on the Tarot, and even designed his own version and commissioned Frieda Harris to paint it, although it was never published as a deck of cards until thirty years after his death. A Golden Dawn version of the Tarot had been designed by Waite and artistically executed by Pamela Cole Smith. Later versions of the Golden Dawn Tarot appeared, although long after the original order had passed away. In the 1960's and 70's several new versions of the Tarot appeared, and every decade since has seen many more published. 

Still, it is important that occultists reintroduce the symbolic context that was originally incorporated into the symbology of the Marseille Tarot. Christophé  Poncet and Peter Mark Adams are working to that very end. Christophé  will be publishing a singular work identifying and describing the symbology of the Marseille Tarot, and Peter Mark Adams has written a book titled “The Game of Saturn” where he sought to unravel the symbology of the Sola Bosca Tarocchi. Both authors admit that their work is in its initial stages and that some of the symbology hidden in the tarot may never be fully understood. 

What I have found fascinating is that much of the original intent of the Hermetic and Occult Tarot has been preserved in the basic symbology that seems almost universal, inspiring our modern imaginations, and the continual use that this divinatory tool has undergone for centuries makes it a living spiritual being. We may never know all of the original symbology and the knowledge employed behind it, but we will invent and derive what we do not know, so long as the Tarot is being used to peer into the unknown that veils our souls and our greater destiny. Its spirit is there to teach and guide us, if we can only learn to listen and apprehend its subtlety. 

Frater Barrabbas 

Lighting A Candle in the Abyss

 

This is my third blog for 2025, and I must admit that by the end of March, we knew that the Trump administration would do a lot of damage in the next two years. This is because they are already at it, taking a blow-torch and a chain-saw to the administrative state that so many people rely on. What is happening is pure Project 2025, and it is everything that the Democrats warned us it would be. They told us these things would happen, but a strategic part of the population didn’t listen. So, they voted in the worst person to ever occupy the Oval Office. Trump 2.0 is fueled by retribution, grievance, callowness, and greed. Elon Musk, the unelected co-president, is seen to be the front man to ensure that the wealthy donor class are the absolute winners, and the rest of us will just get screwed over. Any suggestion that Elon will give up his power and leave the oval office is patently false - he has too many vested interests to keep track on.

Speaking of graft and corruption, it would seem that Trump has no inhibitions about showing the nation and the world that he can be bought and sold. His bit coin introduction is garnering him billions of dollars, and the Qatari flying palace 747 plane gift will fall to him when he leaves office, not to mention all of the quid pro-quo transactions, and the pardons for purchase, the pro-bono lawfirm extravaganzas not to mention the tariffs, with their off-again and on-again impulsive changes, the associated stock market ups and downs, and those insiders who are profiting off of it. Compared to his first term level of corruption, we are seeing a landslide of graft and corruption on a scale unimaginable in a public servant, let alone a president. Throw in the tax break for billionaires, and you got an administration that any uber wealthy person would have to love and call their own.

Still, those who are being hurt by this administration, or will be hurt, include many of the fools who voted for Trump and his lick-spittle Republican panderers. Voters wanted a change, they wanted the economy to improve  so they could financially get ahead, and where the price of eggs would drop. They collectively fear the “Other,” and they feel it’s okay to callously encourage officials to hurt the helpless and powerless, such as immigrants, people of color, gays, lesbians and trans-genders. What will happen is actually the inverse of all these peoples’ hopes, since everyone will get to experience a deep economic recession, the abrogation of laws, the elimination of the safety-net, and rampant inflation. That will come back on those who voted for Trump. There won’t be any government assistance to mitigate these disasters, and if an avian-flu virus pandemic hits us, we will be thoroughly screwed. The only thing that these voters will see that would give them some measure of satisfaction will be in the cruel treatment of migrant workers, undocumented immigrants, legal asylum seekers, and even documented immigrants and green card holders. As ICE begins its sweeping deportation exercise, many will be swept up, including those who are citizens born in this country. The prices of everything that undocumented workers do, from picking fruit and vegetables, to cleaning, fixing, painting and building, will suddenly be too expensive.

It is obvious that much of this change in direction will harm whole groups of Americans, and not just the people that racists and bigots impugn. Everyone, except the ultra-wealthy, which is the “donor” class, will get hurt by the cruel actions and mindless fumbles of the current Trump regime. We were warned, but the majority of people still voted for Trump. Now all of us will suffer because of the blind stupidity of this ignorant majority. The Republicans have around two years to do what they will to wreck the country and install an authoritarian regime, and then, if they are unsuccessful, they will likely lose their majority in the House and possibly even the Senate. Local elections will turn against them as well, and even some red states might finally be liberated from Trump intoxicated, craven Republican politicians. However, if they succeed, then we are in for a long dark period of American history. Whatever happens, it will be a long, long two years, and even if the house and senate are turned, the wreckage to our nation and even to the world will take its toll on millions of people. It will takes years, if even the damage can be fixed, and the world will continue on without American’s shining light of liberty and democracy to guide them, however imperfect. 

When a person makes an emotionally based decision, like voting for a president, it’s difficult to admit that they were wrong. They will dig in, make excuses, blame everyone else to assuage their guilt, and never admit that they aided and abetted the worst sort of people to win an election. All of this horror show has arrived on the national scene and is unveiling itself for everyone to see, and there is nowhere to run and hide from the fact that quite a number of people acted in a selfish and stupid manner last November. I will feel compassion for everyone’s confusion, fear and pain, but I won’t forget nor forgive what a group of really knuckle-headed people did when they voted to elect Donald Trump for a second term.

That's where we're presently at due to the degraded state of the Republican party. That's the result of what Republican voters chose. Republicans primaried Trump and Republican voters PURPOSELY CHOSE HIM. Today, there's not a single Republican legislator who will choose country over party. None! This is because they all fear the MAGA voters, who will turn on them unless they continue to swear allegiance to their Dear Leader, Donald J. Trump. Cross the boss, and they could be primaried at least, or even violently accosted or assassinated. Which brings me to propose that these times and this turn of events be given the acronym FAFO.  People voted for Trump as a joke, or a protest, or to put a thumb into the eye of the so-called liberal establishment for everything that the government has done from the pandemic until just last year. This acronym is revealed as the phrase “Fuck Around, and Find Out” and we are living it every day that Trump is in office.

We’ll see how this plays out. I hope and pray that we as a nation can recover from this terrible and foolish self-inflicted wound. Will we still have a republic in four years? Will the Trump regime’s mendacity and incompetence ensure their failure? I truly hope so, since the future peace and prosperity of the world relies on the American people to fix what they have broken, since not to do so will ensure that the future will be dark, desperate, and dangerous.

Do you think that as Witches, Pagans, and ritual magicians, this has nothing to do with you? That politics is irrelevant to our work in the magical religious arts? What happens to the most vulnerable in our society is a reflection on what could ultimately happen to anyone. As members of a small minority, we are a vulnerable group of people, especially to the empowered and active hoards of Christian Nationalists. There was a time when heretics were publicly executed, and in a period of chaos and the abrogation of civil society, those times could return. We have been warned, and may we yet be part of the resistance and the solution rather than the victims of the political storms to come.

Frater Barrabbas 

Science, Religion and Magic - They are not opposed

 

A common myth and misconception about magic is that it is opposed to science, and somehow the two approaches to reality are completely different and inimical to each other. I believe that this myth has been propagated by individuals who are trying to debunk anything that would be considered occultic or metaphysical. Those who are spreading this myth tend to be scientists and the sober representatives of an ordered and rational society. Their belief that magic and the occult are superstitions that should have been discarded from the body politic two centuries ago is based on an erroneous assumption that somehow science is superior to religion in general, and occultism in particular. It’s the old trope of rationalism and the perfection of logic vs. irrational and superstitious beliefs based on ignorance (of scientific facts). 

This is, of course, a false belief that is certainly contrary to the history of the origins of science, and that instead of being opposed to the gradual establishment of the scientific method, magic played a role in its development and evolution. In the Renaissance, magic and science were intertwined so much that modern scholars believe that they functioned as a unified perspective, where gradually, science grew out of and completely replaced the rationalism that magic brought to early scientific endeavors. At the present time, magic and occultism still represents a rational and disciplined perspective of the material and spiritual worlds, perceived as being united and indivisible, something that the discipline of science has rejected because spirit cannot be quantified in an empirical manner. While popular pundits for science would like our post-modern society to drop magic, occultism, and the supposed irrational attributes of religion, along with the perpetuation of mythic beliefs and religious world views, they remain stubbornly entrenched and viable within the human condition. There must be some reason for that phenomenon.

The reason that society hasn’t discarded all of the irrational and mythic beliefs, deposed forms of religious immersion, and dropped magic, spirituality and occultism after the supposed triumph of science and technology is because human beings are not robots. As organic beings, we have intense emotions and feelings, we engage with those around us and our social sphere within an emotionally charged bubble, we are moved by personal and cultural myths, we fall in love, get angry, fight with each other, start wars, make peace, and propagandize our relationships with everything in our world view.  We are hardly the rational and logical, stoical and self-disciplined mass of people that some think we should be, like the propaganda spread from scientists and their media proponents. We have the ability to function rationally and to discipline ourselves to behave within certain socially acceptable parameters, but we can also act thoroughly irrational and express ourselves in an unpredictable and emotionally charged manner. We are human beings, and we cannot be adequately quantified, qualified, or predicated. As Number 6 said in the series The Prisoner, “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!”

Since we are an irascible species, we cannot be defined, or to define the world, in a purely scientific and empirical manner because our humanity always intervenes. Still, there is no real struggle between the rational and the passionate of life’s experiences, because we need both to function as human beings. This brings me back to my statement that once magic and science went hand in hand, and for occultists and practitioners of ritual magic, they still do. 

As a long time ritual magician with decades of experience, I can tell you for a fact that I do not readily succumb to conspiracies, urban myths, superstition, nor unwarranted religious beliefs. I am, in a word, innately skeptical. I am also open minded, and also grounded within my experiences, willing to accept what I sense and perceive as a fundamental part of my reality. I have to experience something in order to accept it as a fact for myself, but I am very curious about our world and the people who populate it. That curiosity and an open minded approach, guided by skepticism and a need to objectify what I experience in a highly subjective environment (magic and occultism) makes me closer to a scientist than a religious adherent who passionately believes their creed is true without any objective proof. That alone makes me pragmatic in my approach to magic, and I regularly subject my ideas and aspirations in that field to experimentation. In fact, regarding the functionality of magic and its practice, I accept nothing and test everything. What that means is the lore that I use is subject to experimentation, review, revision and even discarding unworkable rites and ceremonies that no longer serve their purpose.

There is a rationality underlying my work in the magical arts, as well as a discipline and a regimen of praxis that is always under constant development. I create new rituals to fill certain functions, test them, refine them, experiment with inspired ideas and constructs, and then revise older rites and ceremonies, or retire them as no longer useful. I function, albeit in a very subjective domain, as a kind of scientist as well as a creative artist. I believe that anyone who seeks to practice magic and engage with the philosophy and metaphysics of occultism also needs to be skeptical, objective, rational, mindful, and even a bit empirical in their approach to this art. This practice is an art, by the way, and I don’t consider it either a hard science or a soft science. I am engaged in a performative art form that has the power to transform my mind and ecstatically inspire me with visions and insights, which I call gnosis. Yet I also seek to apply objectivity and rationalism to what I do and the subjective nature of what I experience, because I am skeptical even of my own visions and what I learn from my intercourse with various spirits and entities.

Having made these various arguments about how I am both an artist and a scientist in my approach to magic and occultism, I can make some generalizations about the discipline of ritual magic and about ritual and ceremonial magicians. Science, without considering the human factor and its inherent limitations, that is, without magic, is a soul-less and unprincipled discipline that can only ultimately destroy human life on this planet. I know that is a pretty stark pronouncement, but when science and technology are employed without any ethical restraints or humanistic considerations, it will produce monsters and unleash forces or produce toxic materials inimical to human survival. Humanistic principles, ethics, insightful laws and wise leadership are the guard rails to ensure that science and technology proceed in a manner that benefits not only humanity, but life on this planet in general. Pure and unfettered science and technology are a danger to continued human survival without the intervention of humanistic principles. The arts and social sciences should be the inspiration and guide-posts to building a profitable and humane future.

Similarly, magic without science is also problematic. It is the epitome of pure absurdity, where one passionately believes nearly anything however irrational without recourse to objectivity or disciplined thought. Someone who approaches magic in this manner is more than just a fool; they are advertising their descent into madness and delusion. It is a state of mind where urban myths, conspiracies, fabulous lies are taken as truths however great the cognitive dissonance. While this state of mind might allow someone to be functional and not be institutionalized, engaging in magic and occultism with this kind of mental malady will only help them to step across the border between sanity and insanity. In my many years of practice, I have met individuals who were so impaired, and what they achieved was a tragic end to their fruitless pursuits, as they were either institutionalized or became suicidal. A fellow magician once told me that he thought that practicing magic would never cause anyone to go insane unless they were already on the boarder line between sanity and insanity. Because 1 out of 4 individuals suffer from some kind of behavior health issue then taking a sober and rational approach to the practice of magic is probably a good idea.

Another thing that I have experienced over the years is that some people find themselves wholly incapable of being able to sense the subtleties of the magical or spiritual world. I can see into the spiritual domain and have conversations with the entities within that world, and also engage with the forces and energies that reside there. I have an intuitive ability to expand my imagination that allows me to sense the domain of spirit. I have also practiced and honed these skills over decades of time so that they are a natural part of me. Probably one of the factors for me to have this ability is that I am very susceptible to emotional empathy with other people and even animals (I have a menagerie of pets). Perhaps I am wired with more mirror neurons than the average person, if that causes one to be too empathetic, and I have a natural aversion to opening up to strangers dues to this sensitivity. While I have these tendencies, I have met others who lack it entirely. What I have found is that it is fruitless to try to teach someone magic who doesn’t have this innate ability to emphasize with others and also use their imagination in a free and creative manner. I also find that such individuals have difficulty emotionally relating to religious practices or sensing the presence of deities in churches and temples. A person who does not have these sensibilities can only approach religion with either a steadfast fixed belief (without any corroboration) or to be an atheist who cannot fathom anything immaterial like spirituality. 

Since I have a strong sense of the spiritual reality, religion is naturally a practice that I find important and significant in the practice of magic. Religion and magic seem to easily go hand in hand together, similarly to science and magic. It would seem that the ubiquity of magic is the real factor here, because it appear to go together with any discipline. However, I have found that my religious practice, which is melded into my practice of magic, making them one and the same, forces me to adopt a spiritual discipline that determines my overall life direction and guides my choices with ethical considerations and adherence and fidelity to my alignment to my chosen Deities. While I may not have a set of Ten Commandments or other dogmatic rules and strictures guiding my actions, I do have a strong sense of right and wrong as established and inspired by my religious worship. I believe that religion and magic should be in a strong alignment with each other, just as the rational and quasi empirical approach of science should guide the mental discipline of practicing magic. However, my religion is the core of my magic, and with me, they are indivisible. My Gods and Goddesses walk with me in my religious and magical life, but I also approach what I experience with a bit of skepticism and objectivity. The key is to balance the two approaches and to find a peace midpoint where they all meet and function as a very productive and insightful life process.

That said, I must make another pronouncement, and that is a magician without religion is a particularly monstrous individual. Such an individual is without the ability to emphasize with others and engage with spirituality and Deity, but they have developed an intuitive capacity to use magical energies, to enchant others with their false glamor and their fictional persona, and project their will into the world to powerfully influence others and to bend reality to benefit only themselves. 

You might be wondering if such an individual actually exists in the world, and they do indeed exist, almost too numerous these days to discount it as an impossibility. You will find them as very successful hucksters of all kinds, con artists, propagandists, peddlers of crank cures and remedies, and perhaps the most successful of all of these individuals is Donald J. Trump, who is currently the nightmarish POTUS imperiling our country. Trump is a masterful and powerful magician, or so one of my close friends has pointed out to me and I have become a believer. Trump has gained this knowledge intuitively and implicitly through learning to manipulate the media, beginning when he was the star of his own reality TV show, the Apprentice. He is a man completely without any empathy, callous, pathologically narcissistic, but he has managed to convince a large population of dupes that he is a great leader who can solve all our nation’s ills. He holds large rallies in order to vampirize the emotions and adulation that he produces and then uses that power to enchant and gaslight the voters of this country. I would call that a succinct definition of a magician, but of a sort that I find monstrous and dangerous, not only to me individually, but even to the world at large.

If I were to classify the kind of magicians functioning in the world today, it would be those who engage both science and religion, those who lack science, and those who lack religion. Of the three, only those who have found a balance between science and religion are the true practitioners of magic, while those who lack science are harmless cranks, but those who lack religion are dangerous exploitive hucksters and con artists. It seems a narrow path to follow, and discipline, objectivity, empathy, and mindfulness greatly help the practicing ritual magician. However, it is a pathway that also has a lot of creative and productive output, and it allows for a great deal of variances in practice. Such a ritual magician is both harmless to others (but not weak and ineffectual) and yet helpful and inspiring to others with their wisdom, gnosis, and artistic perspectives. Still, keeping a balance is a good thing to achieve, and it takes advantage of the powers and insights of the art of magic without falling into the abyss of delusion or fecklessly catering to the complete exploitation of others.   

Frater Barrabbas

Long Gap of Time

 

It’s been several months since I posted any articles to my blog, and maybe a few folks were wondering what happened to me. Well, a lot has happened on numerous fronts. First of all, I have relocated to a new home in Williamsburg, I have been writing a new book, and things have gotten really busy at my day job. The relocation has soaked up around two months of my time, and the fact that I am writing a new book has also taken me away from writing articles. Let me tell you about these interesting new events in my life.

As dismal and upsetting as the Trump 2.0 administration has been, I have tried to limit the amount of time that I would normally take reading the news. There is just far more bad and disturbing things going in our country and in the world today than what anyone other than a rightwing fanatic could stand, and to keep my sanity, I am instead picking and choosing the news that I read, ensuring that I am informed but not made angry and distressed from what I read. In late December I wrote an article that talked about taking a great leap from the year 2024 to 2025, but it seems more like the nation has fallen into the greater abyss, where gothic horrors hobnob with demons and monsters. Because I don’t have a government job, and because AI hasn’t made my work obsolete, I am somewhat insulated from these negative changes. I am witnessing my 401K fluctuate and I will need some luck in selling our old home in Richmond, but otherwise, I should be able to survive these changes, at least I hope.

I am, however, happy to report that I am making great strides working on my latest book project, which is titled “The Gnostic Tetrasacramentary” and contains all of the gnostic mass rites and liturgical ceremonies that have been a part of my magical regimen for decades. This book project will end up producing two volumes, since there is just such a large amount of rituals and ceremonies that I want to give to my reading public. Since I have published the books Liber Nephilim, Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, and soon to be published, the two volume set of Liber Artis Archaeomancy, and all of them require mass rites and liturgical ceremonies as an ancillary suite of practices, I felt it important to produce a book that includes all of those rites. 

I also spent time writing about the four gnostic churches that I use in my magical work, my approach to modern gnosticism, the sacred solar and lunar calendar, and how all that integrates into a system of theurgy. The first part of the book comprehensively explains my approach to employing the mass rite and its associated ancillary rites into a magical priestcraft practice. The second part contains the various rituals and ceremonies that I have used to facilitate a functioning public church, with mystery rites based on the sun and moon, the calendric grail cycle, and rites for the life cycle of the congregation, such as naming, handfasting, requiem and other rites and devotional exercises.

Writing this book has been a slow process, at least for the introductory parts, but I will be able to recommence work on this book project and complete it by the fall. There is also the final editing for my two volumes of Liber Artis Archaeomancy, and the republishing of my book on the Qabalah with a new title. While the previous two years have seen several new books being published, the next couple of years will be more modest. I have three more books in the planning stages and they won’t become actual book projects until either late this year or the next year. I believe that they won’t be in print until the following year (2027), so there will only be three book projects that will produce printed books next year. However, there will be two volumes for Liber Artist Archaeomancy, and two volumes for The Gnostic Tetrasacramentary, and one book for my republished Qabalah book, and that adds up to five books altogether.

If you are wondering how I can write all of these books in such a short period of time, then I can reveal that much of the material used in my books has already been written, especially the rituals and ceremonies, and the devotional discipline. While I am writing expositions and explanations to accompany these rituals, and I am revising the rituals and bringing them into compliance with my current writing skills and occult knowledge, much of the work of developing this lore was completed back in the 1980's, 1990's and the early 2000's. I consider it my spiritual obligation to publish these books so that my legacy is assured and my methodologies will be added to the public knowledge of ritual magic and its practices and spiritual obligations. I am fortunate to have a publishing company who is willing to take on these books projects and bring them into printed copies, and I am grateful for that opportunity.

One of events that I am quite happy about is that I have relocated to a new home in Williamsburg that will be able to house a fully functioning temple and possibly an outdoor grove. I have been without a temple and a grove since I moved from Minneapolis back in 2018, before the pandemic. The last major magical working that I performed was for the Summer Solstice of 2017. I am eagerly looking forward to this coming autumn, when the weather cools down and I will start up my magical workings once again. I am so delighted that this opportunity will once again become a staple in my life process. I have deeply missed having a temple in which to work my ordeals, and there is a lot of unfinished work and a number of ordeals that need to be renewed, particularly the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, for one, and some continued experimentation in Spiritual Archaeomancy, engaging with the transdimensional vortex gateway workings. I am really looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with these ordeals, but also just being able to say a votive mass and meditate in sacred space will do my soul a great deal of good.

While I stood on the precipice last December, examining all of the possibilities that confronted me, I hardly knew what was going to happen. I am glad that things are turning out to be fortunate for me so far this year, but I am also saddened and also angry at the political turn of events afflicting our country. Will we survive the malice motivated onslaught of the authoritarian rightwing MAGA-Republican political movement that is seeking to destroy our republic, or will we witness the end of our democratic government and the beginning of an entrenched oligarchy fueled by rightwing fanatics? This year and the next will determine what direction we will ultimately be dragged, and how successful the Trump regime will be in erasing the American aspiration of democracy and representational government. They have another 18 months to get it all done, and if they fail to implement their agenda by the end of next year, then we can look to the Democrats to shift the nation to the left, restore some semblance of democracy and neuter the current administration. That is my hope for the future, so that the American dream of democracy will not fail and be fully restored when a new Democratic president takes office in 2029.

Frater Barrabbas