My first book in the “For Witches” series was in print by 2017, but by then I had taken on a new job that readily took away all of the my free time. I stopped writing articles in my blog and I was traveling between Minneapolis and Richmond, staying there for three weeks and then going home for a long weekend. I was putting in 60 to 70 hours a week of work, and travel added to that time spent solely on work. I visited my wife and pet kitties for just 48 hours before having to travel back to work in Richmond. Needless to say, that whole project turned out badly for me on one hand, but having to leave it was a reward on the other.
I moved to Richmond to work on that project; but not only did I not get a dime from the company for making that move, I was also pulled off that project because those who had planned the time-line compressed what was two years of work into just eight months. I was punished for missing that time-line, even though it was completely unreasonable. Someone had to be blamed for the project going awry, so as the data manager, I was the one. Certainly, those who proposed such a truncated project time-line to the client couldn’t possibly be blamed for their mistakes, because they were upper management and immune to such accountability. Anyway, I was put on my old project and then had to prove myself for over a year later that I was worthy of keeping that job. It was a time of work and left me with little time for writing and even working magic. Getting booted off of that project was a blessing in disguise, and I went on to getting chosen for a new project where my skills and abilities were at least appreciated.
My work on the next book in this series didn’t start until the Covid-19 Pandemic began to manifest, but I had the concept and even a preliminary table of contents defined before the winter solstice of 2019. So, during the lock-down, I focused on writing my 6th book, and of course it took a lot less time than any of my previous writing endeavors.
This is how the book “Elemental Powers for Witches” was written and published, while the world labored with the first in a hundred years world pandemic. Tragically, many people died from that disease; but I had already begun something of a personal sequestering, so I just continued it and made certain that I had the preventive vaccinations when they became available. I was old, sedentary and suffered from allergies, so I figured that if I got Covid that it would likely greatly harm me, so I took all of the precautions, and luckily, I had been working from home since early 2019.
Here is the advertising text for that book.
Energy magic uses the power of Elementals, Qualified Elementals and Uncrossing mechanisms to fully empower practitioners and make them materially successful. This book seeks to bring that knowledge to the Modern Witch, making it accessible and easily added to the lore she is already using.
Since the 5th Century BCE, a system of mysticism, religious philosophy and magic was delivered to the world by the philosopher Empedocles, who brought us the knowledge and wisdom of the four Elements of Fire, Air, Water and Earth, and the Aether as Spirit.
Across the ages that knowledge was developed to become the energy model of magic that is used today to fuel material-based rituals. Until now, this methodology was exclusive to ceremonial magicians. This book seeks to take that advanced energy work and place it into the hands of the Modern Witch. These rituals were derived and formulated to be easily accessible to the modern practitioner and to fit what is already a part of their lore.
Energy magic is used to empower individuals so that they can at least feel that they have a chance of dealing with difficulties and adversity. It also gives them methods to address specific deficiencies or to counter adverse circumstances with positive ones. Energy magic is used to build up the self and turn potentials into realized goals. It focuses on the material world because it is the basis for all that occurs in our life and colors our experiences. Because the world is not fair, we need something to help us turn the world slightly to our advantage.
What energy magic is used for is to solve problems within yourself and the circumstances of your life in the material world. It is not only a body of magical rituals and techniques; it is also the way to approach a problem in order to resolve it. There are several steps that are followed when approaching a solution to a given desire or need, and these can be used to also sort out and pin-point the one thing that will open up your possibilities and resolve whatever issue you are facing.
This book was written for Witches, Wiccans, and Pagans who wish to enhance and formalize their approach to the energy workings for self-empowerment and material based magical workings. This book assumes some degree of knowledge in basic practices so it isn’t exactly for beginners, but it does make this type of magic, and the use of the energy and information models of magic, accessible and easily realized. It is also a sequel and companion book to the published work “Spirit Conjuring for Witches” so, certainly the readers who liked that book would likely also enjoy the sequel.
As I have pointed out previously, there are three gaps in the magical practices of modern traditional Witchcraft, and these are spirit conjuring, advanced energy workings and talismanic magic. I had just written a book that comprehensively dealt with spirit conjuring from a traditional Witchcraft perspective, so I urged myself to write a book to fill the second gap.
Advanced energy workings represent the basic foundation of magical practices where I significantly extended the repertoire given to me in my initiatory tradition. I did that back in the 1970's not long after being initiated into Witchcraft. I had been working on the cone of power variations for a few years after being introduced to the concept when a version of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows was published by Lady Sheba, and when I had acquired the book “Mastering Witchcraft” by Paul Huson. I also had a copy of “King of the Witches”, which introduced me to Alex Sanders. With these books in hand I was able to put together my own system of Witchcraft based magic. By the time I was initiated on Candlemas Eve, 1973, I already had a system of magic, and I was starting to develop new rituals working with the energy model of magic.
Using an inverse perspective, I deduced that the opposite energy to the obvious masculine cone of power, and that was the feminine vortex. A vortex has a widdershins circuit, and instead of being polarized on the periphery like the cone of power, it uses a cross-roads to join the polarities into the center. The widdershins spiral around the circle performed by the operator is used to concentrate the energy and then push it down into a singularity, making a kind of stable magical black-hole. The vortex was the first variation of the cone of power that I had invented, and it was to be followed by other structures and rituals. Experiencing a vortex generated in a magical circle was a total game-changing stroke of genius, but actually, it was just an obvious step that no one had thought about so far.
While energy workings in traditional Witchcraft magic were a basic staple for the modern practitioner, it was based on a concept that was alien to medieval witchcraft and to ceremonial magic in general. The basic belief about magic was that it was the medium used by and propagated by spirits. Humans were basically powerless, although that was contrary to what the philosophers taught in antiquity. Yet their practices had been mostly lost and what remained was subsumed by the monastic orders of the Catholic Church. Where this idea about human energy came from was the East, and it became part of our western cultural heritage when the teachings of the Indian Yogis became available to the west, around the late 19th to early 20th century.
Studying Yoga became an important part of mastering the art of ceremonial and ritual magic, and many of the early practitioners of the 20th century sought out that knowledge of the East. With Hatha Yoga came prana-yama, yantra, trantra and Kundalini Yoga, and the concept of bodily energy fields that could be harnessed and projected through the breath (prana) became available to the West. It completely changed the way that magicians saw their magic, as evidenced in the writings of Crowley, Bardon, and many others.
Modern Witchcraft was a recipient in that chain of knowledge and it was used in the concepts of energy raising and projecting magical powers. Gardner pretended that this had always been a part of witchcraft from antiquity, except that there was no evidence of this claim and the witches of antiquity typically worked their art in solitary exclusion. It was only in the fever dreams of a handful of scholars who spread the myth of witches meeting in large groups to celebrate their sabbats and worship the devil in the mid 15th century. Gardner’s story about witches gathering together to work magic to prevent Hitler from invading England during the second world war, where even a few older members expired in the frenzied process, was very likely an urban myth.
All evidence seems to support the idea that most witches had practiced their art either completely alone or within small and discrete family traditions. Yet the witchcraft inquisition imagined large groups of witches flying on their brooms and drugged and hallucinating on their toxic ointments, so to them and much of the culture there were indeed large hidden covens working their evil deeds. Gardner took that fantasy and made it into a cultural phenomenon, and the eastern ideas of bodies raising and projecting yogic energy was quietly integrated into that body of practice. By the time that I and others in the early 1970's had joined the Witchcraft tradition, the idea of raising and projecting energy had been a standard part of the practice since Doreen Valiente had reformed it in the 1950's.
However, as a practice, the energy model of magic in modern Witchcraft was simplistic and undeveloped. There was the cone of power and that was about it. I was very much intrigued by the whole concept and set to work to expand and develop how this magical model was used in Witchcraft magic. This is how I came to develop the vortex, then the magical pylon, and then by extension, the pyramid of power, which is a much more sophisticated and nuanced version of the cone of power. Once I started on this path, I continued to work and develop more sophisticated rituals that made use of complex combinations of ritual structures to push the energy model of magic far beyond what I was given as a newly initiated Witch.
The first step that I took was to qualify the undistinguished magical energy into specific qualities. The four elements seemed to be the qualities that I was looking for when it came to describing the magical energies that I sought to use. This pairing of magical energy with the four elements has a long history, and that the elements and the breathing cycle seemed to also be linked. This of course was the Indian concept of prana being merged with the western occult perspective of the four elements. Other practitioners had also made this connection, so that the four elements could be visualized as qualities associated with a certain kind of energy, color and quality and absorbed and projected out through the breath. The four elements could also be qualified with each other to produce sixteen combinations, which I called elementals. Each of these combined elementals also consisted of four pure emanations where an element was combined with itself. At the earliest time in my magical workings I worked with these qualities, but it required a more advanced set of ritual structures to generate them within the magic circle.
To generate an element one can use the invoking pentagram in an efficient manner, which was made public to many practicing magicians through the Golden Dawn writings published by Israel Regardie. Thus, there was the superior pentagram ritual, which I sought to emulate in a fashion. However, to invoke an elemental energy required a more complex ritual structure. The elemental octagon was the key to generating an elemental energy within a magic circle, and liking the shape and quality of that star polygon, I sought to deploy as my ritual pattern for energy workings. I used the four watchtowers and the four angles or in-between points to define the base (watchtowers) and qualifier (angles) of the elemental. To each of these eight points I set the invoking pentagram of the base element (watchtowers) and the invoking pentagram of the qualifying element (angles).
In the center of the circle I set the invoking pentagram to the nadir or infra-point for the base, and to the zenith or ultra-point, I set the invoking pentagram of the qualifier. I also joined the four watchtowers together to form a square, and the four angles to form another square, and then joined the watchtowers to the infra-point and the angles to the ultra-point. Then I stood in the center of the circle with my staff and drew the two elements together through my body and the staff. All that was required to project the elemental energy out into the world was to circumambulate the magic circle with spiral arc, starting in the center of the circle and arcing out to the periphery of the circle, circling three times past the northern watchtower and then projecting the energy with the staff outside of the northern watchtower, thereby exteriorizing it.
I also used a form of sigil magic to symbolize my objective or desire, and I used this to imprint the energy field when it was fully generated. I could have just imprinted it with my mind, but I found that a sigil was more effective. I started out just making a designed but automatic scribble on a piece of parchment while projecting my intention into it. I later adopted a more formal methodology for designing sigils when I was exposed to writings and artwork of that famed magician and pagan witch, Austin Spare. This was how I developed a ritual system to work with elemental energies, but I was not yet completed with this development process.
One approach that I developed was to make use of specific named elemental spirits and integrate them into my magical energy rituals. I used them as intelligent energy fields of empowerment and focused, projected beams of force to influence or even bend the laws of causality. I also incorporated this approach in my magic, making use of the 16 Enochian god-head pairs as derived from the four watchtower tablets and the Enochian calls. I then later matched up the sixteen elemental qualities with the 16 Grand Dukes from the grimoire Theurgia-Goetia and found that they were even more potent than the Enochian elemental spirits. The pairing of a spirit with an elemental quality produced a more powerful combination and helped to animate the elemental magical energy so that it had both power and sentience.
Another approach that I developed, and this was unique to my workings, was to pair an element with one of the ten sephiroth of the Qabalah to generate what I called the 40 qualified powers. Later on, I refined this working by using the Pythagorean definitions of the numbers 1 through 9 and 10, which I felt was more appropriate for a Witchcraft magical approach. When I used the Qabalah, I also qualified the four elements with the four Qabalistic worlds, making a very potent magical combination that existed fully within a Qabalistic domain. If you weren’t into the Qabalah, though, this methodology wouldn’t be as appealing. For this reason I adopted another more simplistic methodology that removed the Qabalistic qualifiers and just used the four elements and the ten Pythagorean mystical numbers. The forty qualified powers also matched up with the Tarot cards ace to ten of the four suites.
To match spiritual qualifications or specific entities to each of the 40 qualified powers became more difficult. I had a matrix of the four elements and the ten spiritual attributes, but assigning them to spirits became more difficult. My first approach was to give the element of Fire abstract qualities, Deities to the element of Water, Angelic groups to the element of Air, and terrestrial animals to the element of Earth, emulating the attributes of the four Qabalistic worlds. I later assigned the ruling angels of the 36 decans to the attributes and elements covering the first through the ninth for the four elements, and then assigned one of the four elemental Kings to the final four. That assignment appeared to work out quite well, since the energy component of the qualified power was dominant over the spirit attribute, so there was no need to actually conjure the associated spirit. I just had to acknowledge and call the spirit as part of the process of generating this kind of elemental power.
The ritual structure for the qualified power used a simple pyramid structure where the four watchtowers (or angles) were set with the base element via the invoking pentagram, and the watchtowers were connected to each other with lines of force, and also connected to the zenith where an invoking pentagram of spirit masculine or feminine was also set. The energy was intensified and fused into the center when the practitioner walked an invoking spiral from the periphery of the magic circle to the center. This pyramid energy field then was charged with the projected invocation of the spiritual quality and it signs or symbols, and then resultant energy was exteriorized through a banishing spiral walked by the practitioner from the center of the magic circle to the outer periphery, where the energy was projected and released.
Since this was a rather simple ritual structure, I had introduced it in my first book, Pyramid of Powers, as a way to learn how to ultimately work elemental magic. As I experimented with this ritual working I found that it had its own sophistication and generated a very potent energy field. Joined with a vortex, it was just as useful and powerful as elemental magical workings, since it joined an element with a godhead attribute to produce a very spiritualized energy. I have kept this working along with elemental ritual workings as the basic work-horses for my magical practice.
Of course, there is much more that I developed using the energy model of magic, and these workings that I have discussed here (and in my book) were really just the beginning of a very fundamental and important process in developing magical workings that had both a spiritual and a material impact. I would find later on that using energy fields and even geometric prismatic energy structures in my rituals would give them a more materialized impact, both on me as the operator, and on the overall magical objective. It certainly allowed me and others who shared in this technique of magic to feel this kind of unleashed power in a tangible manner.
Getting back to my book, I have taken these basic elements of working energy magic and expounded on them, presenting a number of ritual examples for the student to borrow and develop. I not only showed the components of these rituals and explained how they work, but I also demonstrated how there was a continuity with the Pythagorean practices and the philosophy and magic of that Greek master, Empedocles. I also put my version of an uncrossing ritual in the book, which I felt was an important addition because it helped the practitioner to overcome internal and external blockages when elemental magic failed to produce the desired results.
The energy system of magic has a long history, going back to ancient Greece and probably beyond that. Some of these methodologies were probably developed by shamans in prehistoric times, and continued to be practiced by various individuals. The philosophers of antiquity knew and practiced these methods of energy generation and projection, but this knowledge was lost during the dark ages. They were likely never written down, or if they were, they were kept secret and disappeared when Christianity began to dominate the western world. They only reappeared when the west discovered the teachings and practices of the Indian sages.
Yet it was the Golden Dawn that took that arcane knowledge from the east and brought it back into western magic. It then spread from there to occupy a place of importance in many different traditions of magic in the west. Some traditions, like Bardon’s system of magic, borrowed the techniques straight from Indian practices mixed with a bit of western perspectives. We must be indebted to all of these different traditions that have given us the system of energy magic that we now possess.
What I have done in my book is present to my reader an expansion of the energy system of magic as it applies to Witchcraft and Pagan practices. I believe that it is an excellent starting point for anyone who seeks to add a high level of materialization, sensations and probability bending energy into their magical practices.
Frater Barrabbas
