Banner Year 2024 for Frater Barrabbas

The Winter Solstice is here, and as we celebrate the various holidays associated with this time of year, I often pause to reflect on what I have accomplished over the year and what I can look forward to in the coming year. Yet this coming year is very different for me than any previous year in the last decade or so. I have been working very hard with my new publisher, Cross Crow Books, since I was let go by Llewellyn, and by the end of year in 2024, I will have ten books in print with another one forthcoming early in the following year. That is, in my opinion, quite an accomplishment.

I am quite pleased with my work so far, and I am also pleased with the response that I have gotten from my publisher. It is quite a contrast from where I was with Llewellyn a year ago. Then, I had signed a contract for “Sacramental Theurgy for Witches,” but there was no sign of when or how that book project would get to the first stage, which was the ‘vision’ marketing meaning. It was then, in March that I received notice that Llewellyn had rejected my book and broke their contract with me. I was able to get another contract from Crossed Crow Books in a matter of days, and I have decided to work with them on my book projects. They treated me in an exceptional and courteous manner, which included face to face Zoom meetings to discuss strategies and approaches to marketing and promoting my books. They signed on to complete the five volume “For Witches” series, to republish my first two books, “Disciple’s Guide” and “Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick” after some revitalizing editing, a beginner’s book on Witchcraft named “Mastering the Art of Witchcraft” and two new books, “Liber Nephilim” and “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal.” I have signed contracts for all of these book projects, and I am about to get the first of these books in the next couple of weeks.

Additionally, the eight projects that I discussed in a recent blog and possibly whatever else I come up in the years ahead will likely be published by them. I have a home for my books, or at least as long as CCB continues to be in the publishing business. My publisher also have a contract with Weiser to distribute their entire catalog of books along with their own, so I will get the same distribution or more if I had continued being a Llewellyn author. That’s great news for me to enjoy and be thankful for in the coming year. Never even in my imagination would I have thought that I would get to see eleven of my books in print. What this means is that my long ambition to get my ritual tech out there in the English reading public’s hands has now come to fruition, and there will be more of these book in the next five years, if my health can continue to be as sturdy as it has been so far.

So, what is coming out into print and what are the dates that these books will be released in 2024? Let me look at the calendar and mark those dates when these six book projects will be available for purchase. As I said, it will be a banner year for the author Frater Barrabbas.

Here is the schedule, although it may be subject to minor changes. Rest assured that the books will out in print, although there could always be slight delays depending on the stages of type-setting, page layout, printing and binding.

“Sacramental Theurgy for Witches” - scheduled release date is February 6, 2025. I should be getting pre-release copies in the next week or two. This book is the one that I felt was the most important of the five books in the “For Witches” series. It was the book rejected by Llewellyn as unmarketable, so we shall see if their assumption was correct through the next couple of years. I seriously doubt that this book will do poorly in the occult book marketplace, especially since it is distributed by Weiser and it has three other books in the series to bolster it. I am probably biased about this book, yet only time will tell.

“Mastering the Art of Witchcraft” - scheduled release date is July 16, 2024. I had said often enough that I would never write a beginner’s book on Witchcraft, and here it is. There must be some irony here, as in you should never say “never” when considering some project. However, this book is radically different than any previous or near future book written on the subject, and it does honor to Paul Huson and his book, “Mastering Witchcraft” published in the early 1970's. That was an important book for me when it came out, and I am hoping that my book will be as influential as that book has been.

“Transformative Initiation for Witches” - scheduled release date is August 20, 2024. This is the last book in the “For Witches” series, and it adds additional initiatory lore to the practicing Witch and the Witchcraft community. The full set of five books covers the spectrum of ritual magic, liturgical and initiatory rites that are above and beyond the traditional Book of Shadows. I believe that armed with these five books and the base-line Witchcraft tradition that a Witch or Pagan will be able to master the art of ritual magic in a manner that I believe would make ceremonial magicians envious. Once that set of magical and liturgical lore is mastered, a Witch would be able to stand eye to eye with any person trained in a ceremonial magical tradition in the Western Mystery Tradition. I am also hoping to convince the Malliway Brother’s store to produce a slip case for all five books in the series, with some nice promotional eye-candy graphically printed on it for their store.

Summer ends and blends into autumn, and there will be three more books released during that period for the year 2024. At this point in the year, I will have published everything that I sought to publish on the art of ritual magic as practiced in Witchcraft. However, that perspective was not how I started out as an author, and additionally there is an accumulation of 30 years of lore that I have only just begun to write up and get published into books. The magical order that I helped to found back in the 1980's was the mechanism where I was able to funnel what I had ordinally developed in the 1970's, and since those strategic years, I had continued my work and developed ever more advanced and sophisticated ritual magical lore. Only this year have I started to assemble manuscripts that will contain the more advanced lore that I developed in the 1990's, 2000's and 2010's. As I said, I have been busy over the last 30 years, and the books that I will produce will contain the bulk of that lore.

“Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick” - scheduled release date is September, 2024. This is the first book that I wrote back in 2006, and it represents my attempt to distill in a simplistic manner the kind of ritual tech that I was performing at that time. I have talked about my very first book that I wrote, named “Pyramid of Powers” that was never actually published. This book was a simplified and condensed version of that work, and it had the benefit of offering to the student a set of basic rituals to be used, based on a kind of paganized Christian Grail mythos. While I had moved on from this work and the second one in that series, other occultists have told me that it was a valuable book and should be kept available. It is a beginner’s book for magical practitioners, so I felt that it would be useful to republish it after some extensive editing, and my publisher happily agreed with me. So, in September, this book will become available again in a newly revised edition with a new cover. Like my other books, it will be distributed much more widely and likely gain a greater share of readers.

“Liber Nephilim” - scheduled to be released in October, 2024. This is the first book in a new series of books that I will be publishing that contains the more advanced lore that I had developed previously but had never made available to my reading public. I had proposed that the source of the Enochian system of magic was originally from the fallen angels known variously as the Watchers, Sons of God or the Nephilim. I have had a long and fruitful relationship with these angelic spirits, and they had urged me to write up their lore and their revelations for the occult reading public to examine. It is a task that I had put on the back-burner for decades, but finally I had the time and opportunity to pull together all of the materials and rituals that I had and to produce a manuscript that could be published. I think that this book will be quite controversial, but it will help to promote the lore and reveal the identities of the Nephilim to the occult community. This book, unlike any of my previous books, will be sold in soft and hard cover editions. There will also be a custom hand bound collector’s edition produced in the following year.

“Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick” - scheduled to be released in December, 2024. This was my second book published, and it was a repackaging, revising and rewriting of my original book “Pyramid of Powers.” When it was originally released, it consisted of three separate books, and then a few years later, it was pulled together into a single volume, which turned out to be the most satisfactory approach to publishing it. It became known as the omnibus edition, and unknown to me, it had quite a small and loyal following. I have, over the recent past, received some praise and accolades for publishing this book, although like the first book, I had passed it by to publish a book on the Qabalah and then a book on conjuring spirits using a familiar spirit for the Witchcraft community. That was the first book in the “For Witches” series. This book will be edited and printed with a new cover in December and then more heavily distributed. Hopefully, more readers will be able to acquire this book and perhaps build their own base-line magical and religious tradition, since that is the stated purpose of this book.

I am already working on the book “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal” and I should have that book edited, with citations, graphic insertions, bibliography and an index list in the next three weeks. I have already talked about that book recently in my blog, so I don’t need to say anything more about it here. While I cannot know for certain when this book will be released, I suspect that it will likely be released either February or March, 2025. I will have celebrated my 70th birthday by then, but I will still have at least six or seven book projects that I will be working on. This book will be my eleventh book published since the first one appeared in print in 2007. It will be the second of my high ritual magic series of books, and it, too, will be available in soft and hard cover editions as well as a hand bound collector’s edition. I am looking forward to when it is finally in print.

This schedule of events represents for me the release of six books, seven if you count the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, to occur over the course of a single year. That is quite an accomplishment, and one that I am happy to report to you. My hope is that I will be able to hear from my readers over the next few years, letting me know how they have used this material that I have written and published, and what kind of experiences they got when employing it. That could almost be enough folks some day to have a one time convention of interested parties to discuss and present this lore as one of the viable paths for Witches and Pagans practicing ritual magic.

Frater Barrabbas

Frater Barrabbas Author Literary Tour - Part 2 - DGRM

The first book that I managed to get published was entitled “Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick” which was published in 2007. It took me around a seven months to write this book, so I had started in early 2006 to write this work. What I did was take a number of the chapters from the Pyramid of Powers manuscript and use that body of text to pull together this book. I also included additional texts and qualified the rituals with a pagan Arthurian-Grail theme. 

It was in early September 2006 that I got a referral from an online friend for a possible publisher for my newly written book. That referral was to Taylor Elwood, an accomplished author himself, who was embarking on a new publishing arm of an independent publisher named Immanion. This was the beginning of a long and very fruitful friendship, and Taylor was not only an inspiration to me but also a mentor who helped me navigate the complex world of internet media.

Here is the official plug for that book.

The Disciple's Guide to Ritual Magick is a book written for the beginning occult student who seeks the integral practice of a ritual magician. This book presents concepts and insights found in no other book on the subject. Frater Barrabbas believes that all magicians seek enlightenment and gnosis, whether they know it or not.

Since Magick is the Yoga of the West, then it follows that it should be as comprehensive and complete a spiritual discipline as the various practices of the Eastern traditions. This means that the practice of Magick must be expanded and broadened so that it is as much a full spiritual discipline and means to gaining Gnosis as any other spiritual system.

This book is an attempt at making magick a comprehensive discipline that affects all aspects of life. To aid this quest, Frater Barrabbas not only expounds upon the philosophy of magick that is a part of most occult teachings, but he also provides a grimoire of seven rituals that the student can use to build a complete magickal discipline.

The grimoire allows for the magickal operations of material acquisition and uses the Pyramidal Pylon and the Vortex as the sources of magickal power. The Lunar and Solar Mysteries chart the inner and outer spiritual worlds of the magician, and the Mystery of the Self is used as a mechanism of self-initiation. As Frater Barrabbas writes: “For it is my desire to make the student and reader of this book into an accomplished ritual magician and an initiate..”

One of the more intriguing aspects of the grimoire of seven rituals is that it is written with an occult context, and that is the Grail Mythos of the Western Mystery Tradition. Although everyone probably knows the stories about the Quest for the Holy Grail, King Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table, there are powerful allegorical undercurrents and occult threads in these tales, that when realized, can become translated into life changing experiences for the magician.

Frater Barrabbas has been working and teaching new forms of Magick for over 35 years, and assisted in starting a magickal lodge where this discipline was taught and practiced. The rituals in the grimoire are based on the rituals that were used by this order, whose lore is also modeled upon the Grail Mythos. These rites were tested by seasoned magicians and certified to produce the effects that they promise. Frater Barrabbas has written these rituals and the accompanying curriculum so that Magick might experience a renaissance in the new millennium.

We believe that you will find this book both compelling and challenging. It is the first foundation for the practicing ritual magician, and one that is necessary for the ultimate attainment of knowledge, fulfillment and wisdom through the revelation and gnosis of Magick. The second work in this series is a trilogy entitled Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick.

While it had taken me five years to write my first book, it only took me seven months to write my second book. This is because I had cannibalized the Pyramid of Powers to write that second book, so I had plenty of material to work with and to rewrite into a new approach for individuals who were interested in building their own system of magic. While I had used the Grail mythos to qualify the basic seven rituals included in the grimoire portion of the book, they were the basic seven presented in the Pyramid of Powers.

Those seven rituals consisted of the following rites, which I believe represent the basic set of rituals that anyone would need to build their own ritual magical practice.

1. Circle and temple consecration rite
2. Pyramidal Pentagram rite (pyramid of powers rite)
3. Rose Ankh vortex rite
3. Godhead Assumption rite
4. Lunar Mystery rite
5. Solar Mystery rite
6. Self Initiation rite
7. Magical Tool Consecration rite

What was missing was a stand-alone ritual for the western and eastern gateway rites, but these were included as a part of the lunar and solar mystery rites, so everything that was needed to put together a basic magical system was there in that book. However, since I had qualified the rituals with the Arthurian Grail mythos, with paganized Christian undertones, the book would have a limited audience. As a book, it was not a best seller, but it did help me realize the possibilities of writing non-fiction books. I did have help in putting this book together though, since the artwork was not my own but that which was provided by two good friends.

Perhaps one of the best chapters in the book, and the one that makes it a useful addition to your library, is where I used the writings of Ken Wilbur, particularly his book “Eye of Spirit” and the book “Atman Project” to build a chapter named “The Search for Spirit: An Exploration of the Higher Mind” (part 1, chapter 3). I not only defined the concepts of transformation, transcendence and teleology, I had also mapped the levels of higher consciousness, which would be far beyond the experience level of the basic forms of magic, as outlined in the rituals in the book. 

However, some of the more advanced magical workings that I had performed in the past produced these kind of conscious states, indicating to me that the more advanced forms of magic can cause one to experience transcendence, and ultimately over time, enlightenment. While this chapter might represent the results of a kind of magic that is far beyond the kind of workings this book espouses, that one chapter explains the whole process of being a spiritual seeker and how magical and spiritual work can culminate in a higher baseline of normal consciousness. That is something to contemplate as one begins and proceeds through the magical path of transformations and inspired illumination.

Anyway, each of my books has some real treasures and some actual wisdom to impart to the reader, even if the magical tech is not particularly impressive.   

Frater Barrabbas

When Ignorance Is Bliss

I decided to post a quick piece on the oft quoted line “When ignorance is bliss” for the appropriate day of April Fool’s. This was taken from my book “Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick” and it concerns the question about who is a spiritual seeker. Both concepts are appropriate for the day, so I am including them here for you to read. May we all be wisely foolish, and foolishly wise. It is often stated that spiritual seekers are one part romantic optimist, and three parts, lunatic.


It’s my theory that people who are true spiritual seekers are actually sensing something about the world that many others don’t, and what they sense is the domain of Spirit encroaching on our mundane world. How else can we explain why someone would reject their own creed and family faith for something wholly and completely alien to them? Why would someone need to seek for something that is not defined nor part of a normal religious cannon if they did not sense that there was something actually out there, waiting to be discovered? Seekers are more sensitive and intuitive, and they are not afraid of where their thoughts and feelings may take them. Seekers seem to be almost fearless in their pursuit of what must be for them, a thing both unknown and unknowable. For most people, their encounters with the spiritual domain are limited to when they are born and when they die, and perhaps an occasional encounter when they have a near death experience or someone dear to them dies. Most people seek to avoid contact with the unknown, the paranormal, and the supernatural, wishing to bury themselves in their humdrum daily affairs as a method of self-protection. But for those who are seekers, whose spiritual path includes a discipline of working magick and seeking gnosis, their encounters with the paranormal are more frequent, even deliberate, and become a part of their not-so ordinary existence, and often these experiences can and do have a profound, transformative, and life altering effect.

The path of the spiritual seeker is one that is difficult, dangerous, and often filled with disappointments. There are no guarantees that seekers will find the fulfillment that they desire, but it's guaranteed that they will experience rejection and ostracization from their peers. To seek what is indefinable and mysterious is perceived by others as folly at best, and at worst, they are threatened by it.

There is an old popular saying, originally penned by the 18th century English poet Thomas Gray (Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton), “No more; where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” This saying has been eulogized by later poets, quoted by various pundits, and even partially quoted by rock stars (Ignorance is Bliss - by the Ramones), but it boils down to one main issue - that it's better to be ignorant of one’s fate than partially aware or foolishly motivated. The search for spiritual knowledge is a very serious undertaking, and must be carefully promoted, lest one engage in self-delusion and even madness. Seekers choose to assault the underpinnings of their sense of what is real and objective, in order to realize what transcends reality and objectivity, the domain of Spirit itself. So we must be warned of the hazards on the path of the spiritual seeker, and pursue our objectives in a guarded, disciplined, and careful manner; knowing that once we begin this path, we shall find it of infinite breadth and endless in scope. The following poem by Alexander Pope amply illustrates this point. (One is reminded of the drinking associated with Omar Khayyam’s poetry.)

“A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring

These shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
But drinking deeply sobers us again”

(An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope)

A religion that accepts and promotes spiritual seeking is also advocating that their adherents undergo spiritual evolution. The constant exposure to paranormal worlds and the domain of Spirit causes the seeker, in an earth-based religious tradition, to undergo continual transformation, and thereby realize the very highest states of consciousness - those of the subtle and causal levels of being. Such a faith would believe that the barriers between Deity and humanity are very porous and thin, since the congregant often assumes the qualities and characteristics of their personal deity - the God/dess Within. It naturally follows that those individuals who engage in an earth-based spirituality will ultimately evolve into enlightened seekers, known as the magi of a new Aquarian age, and this event will come to pass by default, as a consequence of the simple nature of consciousness.

Frater Barrabbas

Reasons for Practicing Ritual Magick in the New Age

The following article was a chapter that was completely yanked from my book “Disciples Guide to Ritual Magick” although I have found that it is still relevant and an important piece even today. I wrote it back in around 2005 when the nation was mired in two wars, economic uncertainty and extreme political polarization. Even though we have a different president in the Oval Office today, not a lot has actually changed. I don’t fault the administration for this lack of real progressive progress - it seems to be more an affliction of our nation and its media than who is president. Be forewarned, the following is something of a rant, which is why it was pulled from the book.

So here we are in the much vaunted twenty-first century, a time that heralds a new age of technical and spiritual enlightenment. We would expect to find a high-tech utopia, with space exploration just another means of traveling and human outposts in orbit around the Earth and on the Moon. We would also expect to find talking computers that think, particle beam weapons and hand-held laser rifles, robots and androids, and a world-society virtually clear of disease, famine, disaster and war. The fruits of automation should have made the problems of poverty and social inequality obsolete.

Yet the new millennium that has recently started has not materialized any of the promises made by the high tech prophets of the sixties and seventies, nor has it actually succumbed to the total destruction of the doomsayers of the same period. Every age has its prophets of utopia and doom, and every age is lived in the usual manner. The results of this crooked progression seem to indicate a staggering course somewhere between utopia and doomsday. However, in the present era, we are engaged in a period of change that will prove to be more daunting than at any other time. It is a time where we should approach the world and its mysteries open minded and unprejudiced if we are to ally ourselves with changes that are required to ensure our survival as a species. It is now becoming obvious that we can no longer live our lives in the banal and oblivious manner that has been done in the past, and that we need to fortuitously adapt to new pressures and plot a new course based upon our accumulated knowledge and wisdom if we want our future progeny to be able to see the next millennium.

We, the people of Earth, have entered the twenty-first century with hardly an acknowledgment that anything has actually changed in the last half century, other than our technology. We have made this lintel-crossing so distracted by the past that it is almost as if we had made it facing backwards. The proof that we seem to be regressing rather than evolving can be found in the events of any day, printed in the local and international news, seen on satellite, cable television or the internet, or even heard in the biased and ignorant pronouncements of our peers.

Thus we might appear to others outside of our troubled world. We are prone to fighting bloody wars amongst ourselves, perpetrating acts of extreme terrorism on innocent victims, practicing forms of ethnic genocide, engaging in sectarian strife, economically and politically exploiting minority populations (colonialism), living in self-absorbed shells, callously indifferent to other people’s suffering (except in the event of natural disasters, when we become ridiculously generous), and in all, behaving sometimes more like barbarians from an earlier age than a maturing planetary culture.

We must, of course, grant that only a minority of individuals are behaving in this manner and getting all the press, but the rest of us have not yet really become cosmopolitan or world-conscious, either, even though we live in an ever shrinking world, dominated by the engineering phenomena of a sophisticated science. Our world is buffeted by a media storm that produces a blizzard of information. We have become unwitting captives of an ever advancing high technology driven by avaricious multi-national corporations, whose only devotion is to Mammon. It would seem that our humanity is something that can be easily misplaced in the hurry to adopt modernity and throw out the old ways.

Media saturation has caused us to be aware of everything that is happening anywhere in the world, no matter how trivial or irrelevant, and this saturation has caused us to become cynical, cold and indifferent. Despite our startling wealth of advanced technology, we have not really changed as a people. We still can act in an unenlightened and brutal manner. These are strange and terrible days that we live in, and the utopian hopes of the future, that were so much a part of the millennial fortune telling of the sixties and seventies, seem so foolishly optimistic and naive today. The world appears more dangerous now than it ever did during the cold-war era. However, these are the stresses of a changing world; the future is still indeterminate and needs a great deal of compassion and open-mindedness to become what the utopian prophets predicted decades ago.

In such a stressful changing world environment, it would seem unnecessary, even silly, to talk about occult metaphysics, and practicing ritual magick in particular, when what seems to be needed in the world is a dire perspective of sobering realism. The study and practice of magick appear more like activities of the distant past, an anachronistic romantic belief system held over from the high middle ages, and not a cutting edge new world paradigm. Its relevance today in our chaotic post-modern world seems laughably small, and perhaps, as Carl Sagan would have had it, we would be well served to leave behind all of these erroneous philosophies and embrace the completely rationalistic world-view of science. If such a movement occurred, they say, the world would be a much brighter, more enlightened and better place.

Pundits can point to religious sectarianism and fundamentalism as the sources of what ails our age, and throw in all of the esoteric studies and quaint beliefs of the New Age with them, consigning them all to the dust bins or trash heaps of the ages. But I believe that the pundits are quite mistaken, and that the late Carl Sagan and his crowd do not understand the spiritual issues of the human soul nor its needs in these troubled post-modern times. Albert Einstein once said, "We will not solve the problems of the world from the same level of thinking that created them." Thus science and analytic thought will not solve the problems created by science, they can only be solved, in my opinion, by Gnosis.

The reason why so many people are seeking solace in the more conservative religious ideologies today is that they find themselves at a cross-roads, facing a great transition, and there appears to be no great wise men to help make this passage safely. The nature of this transition is that humanity is undergoing a major progressive shift in consciousness, although many people are not yet aware of it. Many more people live in the same impoverished and unrealized state that their ancestors endured ages ago. The steady and tenacious changes brought on by high technology are invading and changing even remote areas of the globe, overturning family traditions and tribal identities in its wake. Now that this time of change has arrived, many fear it, for many different reasons. Although they cannot understand what is happening to everyone and everything, they feel very uneasy about it and what the future might bring. Old ways of living and thinking are being altered and even destroyed on a global level, and little, other than the high tech crass consumerism offered by the West, is proffered as an alternative way of living.

We are afflicted by the loss of graceful naivete, and no matter how hard we strive, we cannot regain our lost innocence nor those times of past glory. It has become ridiculously obvious that we must change as a species in order to survive. We must fulfill the next level of conscious development that is unwittingly upon us or perish. We have entered a very dangerous period of human development that seems almost completely dysfunctional, and so the troubadours of the 60's rock and roll groups (King Crimson) are shown to be prophetic, for they called this time the age of the “21st Century Schizoid Man.”

However, modern occultism has shown an alternative perspective to these troubled times, and it dismisses them as merely the disturbances of an inner awakening. We had no idea that the genii unleashed by modern high technology, without an associative high tech spirituality, could cause our eventual extinction. This is truly along the lines of the myth of Atlantis and the rampant soulless technology that caused its demise supposedly ages ago; but ironically it is actually a myth of our own near future. We should heed this myth and learn to moderate our technological prowess with spiritual understanding, compassion and a willingness to adapt both our material and spiritual expectations to the realities of the post modern world.

Perhaps becoming spiritually conservative in these unstable times appears to be the obvious antidote to the crisis caused by this newly emerging nemesis that is slowly and subtly spreading throughout the world. World change is profoundly upsetting the various orthodox sects of the status-quo and threatening life as we know it. Yet adopting a neoconservative religious ideology is but a short-sighted solution, which in the end causes more problems than it solves. There is another way to co-opt these changes into one’s spiritual life, and that way is through practical occultism. Because unlike the ultra-conservative and orthodox creeds, the disciplines of practical occultism do not advocate narrow and exclusive opinions about the nature of Spirit, nor do they encourage any kind of dogma or religious superstition. They also do not strip away the spiritual dimension from human nature, as the secular humanists and followers of scientism seem to advocate. They actually follow a middle path, which is to include spirit with science and technology, along with personal devotional practices and techniques for acquiring higher states of consciousness. In a word, occultists represent more clearly what this new century will become in regards to religious practices and beliefs about the nature of Spirit.

The source of the chaos in our world today stems from the disintegration of the old systems of religious thought and spiritual faith. The old religious systems can’t even begin to deal with the issues of the post modern age, and human nature, being what it is, requires some kind of spiritual system of belief. So the old religious systems, as a method of self-promotion and survival, are manifesting themselves as a counter movement to the threats and fear produced by a very natural progressive evolution of consciousness pushed forward by high technology. The current world religions, many of which are now undergoing a conservative redefinition, cannot survive the on-going spiritual change occurring in the human species, and so if they are to aid us in our future quest, they will most certainly have to be represented in the future as esoteric religious systems, or they will have to be discarded as archaic and irrelevant. Surely the esoteric Christian, Jewish Qabbalist, and Islamic Sufi represent more advanced and benign versions of their faiths, as Zen, Vajra and Vendanta, represent more advanced versions of the creeds of Buddhism and Hinduism. One has only to examine the more fundamentalist versions of these religions to see how inappropriate they are in the new millennium.

In the western world there are new religions that are being created. They are derived as modern forms of ancient earth-based spirituality, most notably, Wicca and Neopaganism, and they promote the teachings and practices of self transformation and self realization. When the old systems of religion have finally passed away, especially in the West, then these new religions will be able to grow, allowing humanity to finally emerge into the dawning of a new age of spirituality. Until that time, we have entered a dark age of spiritual transition that forces us to exist in a dangerous, precarious and tenuous relationship with each other, made all the more worse by the incendiary actions and beliefs of a minority of religious extremists.

My reason for stating that these esoteric versions of the various orthodox faiths represent a more advanced, sophisticated and futuristic spiritual path is that they promote self-transformation and spiritual transcendentalism. As a people, the residents of this planet are nearing a time when the only relevant religions will be ones that advocate personal development and the fulfillment of the full-potential self, rather than sectarian exclusivity or literal interpretations of religious scriptures.

If we cannot make this transition, then the world is on the long painful path to destroying itself. This is obviously true, since esoteric religions promote tolerance and peaceful coexistence, and the orthodox faiths preach intolerance and sectarian strife. Although there are many cultural and spiritual differences between people living in different parts of the world, we are one species of humanity. We must learn to respect one another and live together in peace, where every person is allowed to pursue their spiritual vocation, either in large organizations, in small groups, or alone, in spiritual retreat. The old orthodox religions are unable or unwilling to allow this kind of peaceful coexistence or flexibility, so we must either evolve out of those creeds or they will ultimately destroy our world. It takes little imagination to conceive of a scenario where some extremist sectarian group would use nuclear or biological weapons to eliminate others who did not share their beliefs, or to deeply scare the rest of the world into adopting their limited vision.

It is ironic that this scenario of nuclear or biological world terrorism is more likely to occur today than at any previous time in the last century. We see today that religious extremists are involved in combating world-progress, calling it the evils of the liberal secular society, even as this very same world-progress attempts to eliminate social discrimination, poverty, disease and the devastation caused by natural disasters. These same groups, who talk of preserving the heritage of their spiritual values, also perpetrate astonishing acts of mindless and cold-blooded violence, or even worse, cause the world to quietly regress into a feudal stupor. Even during the “coldest” period of the cold war, the world was not so terribly dangerous as it is today, since in those times, sensible pragmatists and realists held the atomic triggers of world destruction. Such are the times we live in, that religious fanatics and sectarian madmen might be able to wield those triggers today instead of those cautious men in the past, who managed to avoid the extremes of the cold war legacy - total world destruction.

So it would seem that occult philosophies and practices are strangely more relevant today than at any previous time. It is the obvious long term solution for integrating the expansion of consciousness that is beginning to emerge in the human species. The progression of conscious development will no longer be something to fear, nor will it be the exclusive property of a small privileged elite. We should embrace these changes, and with the shift of consciousness that they promote, forge a new creed and spiritual philosophy for each and everyone. The direction of this movement, as fostered by the perennial philosophy, has been determined by the new faiths of the Western Mystery tradition, which has its roots in Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Alchemy, Astrology, the Qabbalah, and ritual and ceremonial Magick.

The practice of ritual and ceremonial magick represents the technology of gaining those higher states of consciousness and using them to change oneself and the world. A magician practicing such a regimen will experience a constant periodic immersion in these higher states, and this will also cause a continual transcendental transformation to occur. A regimen such as this will eventually cause the permanent establishment of super-consciousness. A practitioner of magick experiences a series of transformations that cause him or her to evolve from the normal adult level of mental-egoic consciousness into the transcendent levels of psychic, subtle and the causal states of consciousness.

Magick is the method of achieving transcendental enlightenment in the Western Mystery Tradition, as Yoga is the method in the Eastern traditions. There is also a differentiation made in the West between the path of the Mystic and the path of the Magician. Both paths use the same methodologies, but their objectives are completely opposite. We will need to identify what is the Western Mystery tradition, what is the perennial philosophy, and also define what is magick and how it is used, to prove our previous statements. The urgency of such actions cannot be said with greater emphasis - we need to change our whole way of looking at the world, and how we see ourselves living within it.

After two thousand years, we are still deeply haunted by this tenet, and it causes us to live with a guilty conscience, where pleasure and material satisfaction are somehow sinful or indicative of ungodliness. Even now we are seeing a battle between secular humanists, who advocate accepting physical existence as the only reality, and orthodox sectarians, who believe that physical existence has no real value. Both perspectives are correct, as far as they go, but also wrong, in that they both miss an important point, that the duality of spirit and matter is actually an illusion. It is the earth-based spiritual systems that bring spirit and matter together into a unified perspective, which allows for an intimate experience of spirit within nature. This appears to be the best approach for our post modern era, and if it is allowed to grow and evolve past its infancy, it will assist the West in progressing to the next great conscious evolution.

The future holds many promises and challenges, and perhaps the greatest challenge of all is the necessary change to our economy and way of life. Our economic world is based on the premise that there will always be an abundant supply of cheap oil. This assumption will prove to be false, since we have already used up all of the oil that is more easily acquired, and what is left will require ever greater resources to harvest. We will be forced to shepherd our resources in a manner not seen in our current age or the previous, and this will create a whole new spiritual perspective, too; for no longer can we use the resources of the world as if they are ours to dispose of whatever the cost.

Also, Western Christianity, particularly the more fundamentalist kind, has always turned a blind eye to ecological concerns and conservation, since what is in the physical world is devalued compared to the spiritual world. This attitude is also found in Islam, as well as other religious systems of the east and west. It would benefit the world and humanity specifically for all of us to develop a more spiritual perspective that included the ecology of the planet, so that material things are put into the proper perspective and no longer devalued except as commodities to be exploited. This also means that we will need to be more cautious about our future development, weighing the long term costs against the short term gain - something that we seem to be completely unable to do at the present time.

If we fail in this important endeavor, then the predictions of the doomsayers will come true, and our world will collapse into a post technological apocalypse. We will need to be creative, open minded, very resourceful, and visionary in order to overcome the challenges of the next hundred years. It would also seem that our spiritual perspective also needs to be adjusted as well, since the current spiritual status-quo has little to guide us in regards to the proper management of planetary resources. An earth based spiritual tradition would probably be the best solution, since it would change our minds in how we view the earth and our place within it.

Thus our world is faced with profound changes, whether we seek them out or not, and we will have to change and adapt with the times if we are to survive. It is important to consider that we will need to not only change our way of life, our manner of governing ourselves and the way that we live and make money, but we will also need to change our spiritual perspectives. The old times and their religious creeds have become spent and there is little left in those bankrupt ideologies to help us make this great transition. What is required for this lintel age are the new faiths, based on earth spirituality, and a new way of living and being. It is time for us to gain entrance into the domain of Spirit. In that sublime state we will be able to express the joy of that transition as a paean to the new millennium. Yet the tool we will use to gain that entrance will be the practice of a new transcendental magick, used to drive a new age and a new era.

Frater Barrabbas