Calends Meditations and Insights

The year 2023 is coming to an end, and there is much to be thankful for and to acknowledge successes and also some failures. However, there is a great deal of potential awaiting me in the coming year, and I also suspect that significant outcomes will occur deciding the fate of our nation. I won’t talk about politics in this article, since I have already discussed that topic in a previous article. What I will focus on are the personal struggles that I have waged over the course of the year, and the outcomes that can be realized as specifically magical, spiritual, and metaphysical. I am also aware of the fact that I am getting older and more prone to illness as the years progress, and that I am in the autumn period of my life. I will have good days of brilliant sunshine and amazing clarity, and other times will be dark, gloomy, confusing and sad as I contemplate what I have failed to accomplish or what still evades me after years of effort.

Therefore, let me celebrate and commiserate the highs and lows of my life in the calends of the year 2023, and seek to see clearly into the coming year 2024 and beyond. As I have said, the coming year will be an important mile-stone for me, and one that I can celebrate as an amazing accomplishment by itself. My dream to make much if not all of my magical lore available for anyone who would seek to perform it is becoming fully realized. This was one of my spiritual and magical objectives set upon me by my personal Goddess and the agency of my Higher Self, one that I struggled for years to achieve. I lacked the writing skills to make this happen when first the mandate was delivered to me, and I had to spend more than a decade of writing to finally get to the point where I could actually write up this lore into books that were intelligible to the occult reading public. Few would guess that I was a poor writer, barely able to put my ideas down on paper unless it was a ritual. I couldn’t spell very well and my writing skills were awkward and clumsy. Over time, that changed, but I had a long way to go before I managed to achieve the level of writing that I now possess. It was a hard earned skill, that’s for certain.

So, I have six books coming out in 2024, and I should be thrilled by that fact, but in some ways I am not as excited as I should be. The reason for this blunting of my enthusiasm is simple. I have been sick off and on again since late September. It’s hard to get too excited when your health really is n poor shape. Some of this is because I have become more sedentary than I should be, but writing books and functioning as a data warehouse architect requires me to sit at my desk for long periods of time. However, that is just an excuse I should try to overcome if I expect to live through my 70's without any serious illness because I am doing so little to manage my health. What will ultimately happen is based on genetics, of course, but these potential diseases can be mitigated through exercise and getting out more often into nature, and traveling around this marvelous state where I currently reside. I have made promises to myself that I have not fulfilled, so now I realize all too well what will be my fate if I continue to procrastinate regarding getting more physically active. I caught a lower tract flu in late September, then got a really bad cold in October which mutated into bronchitis, and then pneumonia. Right now, I am recovering from pneumonia, and it is a hard slog to get back to having a reasonable healthy body. That series of illnesses are a warning to me that I better change my basic habits if I want to avoid more of the same, or even worse occurrences.

One thing that saddens me somewhat is that I don’t have a temple to work my magic and to celebrate my connection with the Deities and the mysteries of light and darkness, life and death. All I can do is meditate in a quiet space in my office. This is the first time in decades that I don’t have a temple, and it means that there is a lot of new lore that I could be developing, experimenting with new approaches to working magic, and engaging in new ordeals that have presented themselves to me as I have been writing up my lore. The last set of major workings that I performed was in 2017, prior to the change in my career that had me working and traveling to Richmond, VA, where I now live. The house that we bought in Richmond was new and well-built, but it lacked the space for a real temple, and the extra bedroom became an office for my wife so she could seek to expand her career and become the main contributor to our household.

My job status has stabilized and I can continue in my current role beyond 2026. I won’t have to deal with getting laid off or terminated anytime in the future, so at least that part of my life is in a good state. Still, I miss my old home where I had a large temple and an outdoor grove. That place is where I performed some of most significant magical workings of my life as a ritual magician, and that is saying a lot. What I realize is that my current home is likely a temporary location, and that in time I will find a new home that can accommodate my need for a temple.

The pandemic made my relocation to Richmond quite complicated, since it forced me to be sequestered for two years. Since I have allergies and I am elderly, I felt that it was prudent not to expose myself too much to the public except where necessary, such as going to stores and buying groceries or other needed items. Due to the demands of my job, I had not started to reach out to the community and get acquainted with the Witches, Pagans and Occultists living in my community when the pandemic occurred. I did attempt to work with a local OTO body, but the body master was a control freak and unable to allow the members of the group to share their knowledge and experiences, and this turned out to be something that I decided not to invest any further time. I did meet a few interesting people, and I have continued to be connected with them, but overall, I have failed to make any important impact on my community.

I am living in the same location as other many other folks, many of whom are beginners, but I am unknown to them, and that is wholly my fault. I was slow to get out from the pandemic sequestration, and I have not yet become a known personality in my community. You would think that with as much knowledge and experience that I have to give to others that I would have, by now, made inroads into my community and made myself available to teach and share with others what I know. That hasn’t happened yet, and it is one of my failures.

What I can at least take consolation from are my book writing projects and the fact that I have a new publisher who treats me like a Rock Star. I am hoping that sentiment continues into the next year, and there is no reason to think that it will change. Blake and Wycke Malliway, and their publishing company, Crossed Crow Books, understand that I am at a point in my writing career where I can produce new books quickly and efficiently, particularly because I have three decades of material to assemble, edit and pull together into publishable books. While Llewellyn trained me for a decade on how to write occult books, the CCB publishers are the one’s that are reaping what I learned during that period of indenture. It seems sad to me that a year ago I was still solidly a Llewellyn author, and although they still have four of my books in print, I cannot rely on them to publish any of my new manuscripts because they are so outside of what they typically publish. So, CCB will acquire the benefits of my mastery of the art of writing occult books and it is my hope that they prosper accordingly. The books that I write in the coming years will contain the magical workings and techniques that I am most excited about, since I have now established a foundation of work for all to use in order to make this newly available lore accessible and useful.

For the coming year, I am planning on making an appearance at Convocation in Ann Arbor, MI, which is happening on February 22, 2024. I am going because my publishers are paying for my travel and accommodation for this event. They have also taken care of my registration and set me up to teach two classes there. I will write another article to give more information about this event as we get closer to the time when it will be held. I am quite amazed that my publishers have afforded me this privilege, and it only shows that they have a great deal of reguard for my work and what I am seeking to share with my reading public. Llewellyn would never have spent that kind of money on me, even though they are a much larger company. In fact, I found that Llewellyn treats their authors rather cheaply, and this has been a factor for decades. Maybe it makes some business sense to be this way, but it is much more a corporatist mind-set that is all too common in our post modern world. So, I am glad that I am considered a valuable author and treated well by my current publishers.

Other travels for the coming year would likely include a return to New Orleans with an emphasis on marketing my books. I would like to travel there sometime in October or November after my book “Liber Nephilim” has been released, and make that a focus of my trip. I was enthralled with NOLA, and it seemed like such a very Witchy friendly place. I have some friends who have occult contacts in that town with Witches, healers and the local chapter of the OTO. I intend on making the most of being there and meeting with as many people as possible. I will seek to do some book signings and maybe even a couple of classes. I have discussed this possibility with my publishers and seems likely that they will also be interested in traveling there at the same time and see if the witchcraft oriented stores would stock more CCB books on their shelves. I think that event would be quite amazing, and I look forward to exploring it for the coming year.

Another amazing event that has occurred to me is that I have met the owner of a local occult bookstore who is interested in working with me and also getting trained and initiated as a Witch. It was something that I had not been looking for and it just dropped into my hands. I won’t name any names or identify the store, but all I can say is that this person is strikingly knowledgeable and mature in her work as a Witch and a Pagan. Being the owner of an occult bookstore has the option of meeting nearly everyone in the community who is following this path, so it would be likely that through this person, I might be able to finally connect with my community. There is a great deal of potential that might happen through this chance meeting, but until my health improves, I cannot spend the time to determine how it will work out, so I must wait until the coming year and the holidays are over. Then, if I have healed up sufficiently from my bout of pneumonia, I should be able to move forward with developing this relationship and helping this person gain whatever I have that can aid the process of self-validation and enrichening the path of Witchcraft with advanced forms of ritual magic.

Thus, there is a lot of potential on my horizon for the coming year. A lot of good change is coming my way, and I am looking forward to meeting it with all of the positive energy that I can muster. I am an optimist by nature, so feeling down or depressed is always a temporary state for me. There is much to be thankful for in the closing of this year, but also very much to look forward to in the coming year. Thinking about it all energizes me and makes me feel a lot more happy, just in time for this festive season.

Bright Blessings to One and All this Winter Solstice Season 2023.

Frater Barrabbas

Writing Abramelin Lunar Ordeal

 

Recently, like over the Thanksgiving holidays, while I have been struggling to recover from a low grade diagnosis of pneumonia, I started writing and assembling the book “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal,” which is the eleventh book that I written since 2006. Like Liber Nephilim, there was a lot of material that had already been written, and I had sorted that material out so I could pull it into my manuscript. Therefore, it only took me around two weeks to complete the manuscript, but now I will need to fully edit it, insert footnotes and citations, insert the proposed artwork and diagrams, produce the bibliography and the index list. I have also signed a contract with Crossed Crow Books to publish this book, and I will need to submit the manuscript before March 1, 2024. Of course, I will be able to complete all of this work well before the due date. While I was able to use a lot of material that I already had, I also added a lot of new text and completely revised the rituals. This will be another book available in soft and hard covers, as well as a deluxe hand bound collector’s edition.

What I needed to write up that was missing in my blog posts or documentation was the background and motivation for developing an alternative method for manifesting ones Holy Guardian Angel, also known as the person’s Atman, or Godhead. I refer to this entity also as the Higher Self, agreeing with the Theosophists, who also saw this as the inner deity, but contradicting Crowley and other magicians who saw the HGA as separate and independent of the person. I don’t agree with that perspective, and because as a Witch I am intimately familiar with my own internal godhead and its ultimate nondual link to the Unity of All Being, known to the Neoplatonists as the One, I believe that everyone has within them a deity. Most of us are unconscious of this being, and some of us make contact with such a being nearly impossible (those who might be considered as soulless). There are many names for this entity, but it is the God of our head, as the African Traditional Religions call it.

The traditional Abramelin ordeal, as encapsulated in Mather’s French translation, outlined a preparatory phase required to obtain the ultimate objective of knowledge and conversation with one’s Holy Guardian Angel. That period of preparation was focused on the extreme piety of prayer, meditation, fasting, purification, total abasement, and atonement covering a period not less than six months, where the final month was spent in complete sequestration. In other words, the preparation was wholly religious and mystical and lacked any kind of magical operations. The environment and one’s person were to be kept clean and ordered, the prayer room or tabernacle needed to have eastern and western windows and a floor covered by sand, with a small altar. This period of absolute concentration on the objective could not be interrupted and then restarted. It had to be a continuous period of religious and liturgical obligations that intensified as the final period of sequestration occurred. Many have attempted this working, and some have succeeded and others have failed, and some who have succeeded have made it a point of pride and accomplishment.

However, this is not the only ordeal that can assist the operator in achieving the K and C of the HGA, and in fact, there are many other operations available to magicians to use, either from the older grimoires or from new approaches (such as the Beatification rite found in Sworn Book). Additionally, this six month working was not the final word, since an older and more complete version was recently translated and published from an original German manuscript. This version proposed a working lasting 18 months, and consisting of a solar cycle with the Passover and Feast of the Tabernacles as the pivot points. The older manuscript appeared to be more Jewish in its cultural perspective, and I believe that it represents the more accurate rendition of this important preparatory working. This new version doesn’t contradict anyone having used the older and shorter version, but I would imagine that the longer version of the working would be even more effective in helping the operator achieve their objective. It also demonstrated that the cycles imbedded into the working consisting of three six months periods of the solar calendric cycle of Jewish holy days. When I read that and understood what it implied, I believed that it was quite a revealing discovery, making the overall working more meaningful.

While I had admired the Abramelin working, I knew early on that I would never have the resources or opportunity to perform it. Once out of college, I became a working stiff, and I never had the luxury of being able to take an entire month off from work, not to mention equip, pay bills and feed myself. This working was always beyond my means, so I could read and study it, but I couldn’t actually try to perform it. I knew that starting something like this would require me to complete it, so I declined to figure that out and instead sought out other methodologies for obtaining a kind of magical enlightenment. When the new version came out and showed that the working should actually last 18 months with three months of sequestration, I felt that it was even more completely out of my reach. However, the pattern of three six month periods using a solar calendar cycle gave me some ideas for developing an alternative approach.

As anyone who knows me or has read my writings will tell you, I am not someone who believes in following the stricture of any tradition. Years ago I had developed my own tradition and it had served me so well that I was able to pass it on to others. That was the magical lore of the Order of the Gnostic Star that I had helped to found back in the 1980's. This has allowed me the freedom to develop my own mysteries, ordeals and magical workings, building a path that one could follow and undergo conscious and spiritual evolution through the methods of ritual magic. I am not the only one who has developed their own magical system, since in order to perform ritual magic in the modern age I believe it requires one to build a system that is personally meaningful and that has a practical and relevant basis in the current times. Therefore, I have always felt it to be my prerogative to adopt and adapt magical lore from the past into my personal magical system when such lore is needed, but mostly avoid engaging with it.

So, when I discovered that the Abramelin working consisted of three six month periods, spanning a year and six months based on the solar calendar, I wondered if this same ordeal could be adapted to work within a lunar period of one and a half cycles, or around 40 days. Since the moon was much more important to me than the sun, due to my Witchy bias, I saw this as a possible replacement. The shorter duration would need to be filled with a more intensive regimen of ritual work, because the period of sequestration would only be three days. What I had to do was to fill that period with the most powerful workings I could develop that would lead operator to undergo a full conscious transformation and personal transfiguration.

What I needed was an environment that contained a holy tabernacle (similar to the sandy floored temple in the traditional working), and I came up with the idea of invoking all of the angels of the Seraphim and Cherubim in a four week period, which I had previously determined to be four angels for each group, and fuse them into an octagon vortex to br joined with the elected Element Godhead, which would generate a highly charged and sacralized environment. I added to that a three-part gateway that included the western and eastern gateways (double gateway of initiation) and a crossing gateway using the northern and southern nodes and the ultra-point for the gateway of ascension, opening up the operator to the absolute spiritual plane.

Upon that foundation, I decided to use my revised version of the Bornless or Headless One invocation rite that had an ascent up the pyramidal steps of the four Qabalistic Worlds to a fifth temple at the top of the pyramid structure where the Bornless One invocation was to be performed. Since I had determined that the Bornless One invocation was a surrogate rite to acquire the K and C of the HGA (according to Crowley and others), I felt that the combination of ritual layers would lead the operator to experience a powerful transformation. I also incorporated other rites, both from the PGM and the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkruetz, to assist in the merging the expanded conscious state of the HGA into the mind of the operator. I had developed all of this lore and decided to test it out during the holiday season of 2009.

What I discovered when I performed this ordeal, from November 2009 through January 2010, was that it not only produced the expected results, it had a profound and permanent effect on my life. From that moment forward I was no longer the same person. The ordeal worked as I had envisioned it, and I also posted edited versions of my diary entries to this blog. There were complexities to my experience with this ordeal, and in fact there was an important ritual that was missing, which I was able to add and perform in 2011 to complete it. I now had a variation of the Abramelin working that was lunar based and that would produce, if faithfully deployed, a similar kind of transfiguration including the revelation of the HGA. I made these rituals and writings available to my brothers and sisters in the Order of the Gnostic Star, but none in the Order attempted to perform this ordeal.

Many years have passed since that tremendous occurrence, and the effects of that ordeal still are having an impact on me. After I completed that working, I came up with new and creative ideas, and my writing efforts were and are stimulated and guided by my Higher Self, or HGA. I may not have conscious contact with this Godhead at all times, but it is there when I focus on it or when I need help. I owe it most of the creative work that I have achieved in the years since, and this contact has allowed me to more accurately look into my spiritual foundation and my past steps and to judge what I have done and where I must go, so that I might know my future path as it leads me to the end of life and beyond.

So, we come to my recent work, and I can say that the ordeal that I have prized above all of my previous workings will now appear in a comprehensive book. The documentation that I wrote years ago for members of my Order has been revised along with the rituals that I performed. The blog posting of my diaries will be gone over and synchronized where appropriate with my actual diary entries, and the book will aid anyone who wants to test my hypothesis that there is a viable and practical alternative to the traditional Abramelin working.

My book will have the title: “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal: An Alternative Magical Journey” and it will likely be released sometime in March 2025. It will represent my last book for the time being, but I will have eleven books in print by then, and it will be sufficient until such a time as I am able to rewrite and package the other books that I have planed in the future.
 
Here is the book synopsis that will be used to market the book.

Over a hundred years ago MacGregor Mathers published a book that introduced to the magicians of the 20th century the magical ordeal penned by an obscure German Jewish occultist. That book was called “Book of Abramelin the Sage” and contained an arduous preparation practice that lasted six months manifesting the Holy Guardian Angel that would instruct and guide the adherent. The book contained many magical squares of notorious potency. To use them, the magician had to undergo many months of prayer, meditation, fasting, purification, abasement, and a period of complete sequestration. Another version of this working, recently published, had the working last for eighteen months with three months of sequestration.

Many magicians attempted this arduous task, some succeeded and some failed. This working was typically beyond the means and resources of your average magician. This was the challenge to achieve the knowledge and conversation with their Holy Guardian Angel. However, Frater Barrabbas took this challenge and used it to forge a whole new magical ordeal. He decided to base it on a lunar cycle instead of a solar cycle, crafting an ordeal that could be accomplished in seven weeks with three days of sequestration, thus making its performance more practical.

Frater Barrabbas sought to create a powerful series of magical workings that would produce the promised state of transfiguration and manifest one’s Holy Guardian Angel. He used invocations of the four Seraphim and Cherubim in a four-week period, along with the Element Godhead, to produce a holy tabernacle of godhead and angelic intelligence. He chose a revised version of the Bornless or Headless One invocation rite of GD fame as the apex. He plumbed the PGM to extract three more rituals to add to Bornless rite. These rituals and more he has written into a book, including the diaries entries where he performed this working back in 2009 to validate it. All of this lore and instruction are encapsulated in the book “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal,” a unique and profound contribution to the art of ritual magic. Now, the Sacred Magic of Abramelin is available using a new, condensed paradigm.

If you want a taste of what this book might contain, you can examine these past blog postings that I put into a single web page. These are my thoughts, comments and my highly edited diaries associated with the working when I performed it back in 2009. There are no rituals nor any background documentation, so that will be reserved for the book itself. Also, the book will contain the mostly unedited diaries from my Liber Spiritus.

Here is the blog link to all of the earlier postings. You can find it here.

Frater Barrabbas

Changing Fortunes and Beginners Book

 

The month of March certainly was a wild ride for me. Paganicon was a great experience and also one that was personally very meaningful to me. While I was exposed to a very hostile winter like Spring, I enjoyed the warmth of meeting old friends and making new ones. I met a few people who would play a key roles in my changing fortunes as a writer. Things that I had thought were reliably set turned out to be capriciously overturned. It seemed that I had been inspired while at the convention to try to write a beginner’s book on Witchcraft magic, but I had doubts that Llewellyn would want to publish such a book.

I returned to Richmond resolved to get my fourth book in the “For Witches” series, “Sacramental Theurgy for Witches” into the production with Llewellyn and fulfill my contractual obligations. Folks at the Llewellyn HQ seemed to love the print out copies of the illustrations, so I thought that everything was all set. I just needed to hear back from my acquisitions editor about any revisions or fixes that would be required for the manuscript. Little did I realize that things were about to abruptly change.

Ten days after I had returned home from the convention, and still touched by the glow of what had happened to me there, I received notification from my Llewellyn acquisitions editor that Llewellyn staff  had met in their vision meeting and decided that they didn’t want to publish my book “Sacramental Theurgy for Witches.”  They got the impression that I was trying to urge the Witchcraft community to adopt my own idiosyncratic practices and drop their tried and true ones, and I was trying to sell revised practices that they already had been using. In their opinion, this was very different from the previous three books, and they just couldn’t see any profit in publishing this book.

While it is true that I had sought to reform the basic traditional coven practice where the High Priestess ran the coven and also channeled the covenstead Deity, because I saw it as a conflict of interests and a means of giving too much power to her over the other members of the coven, the rest of the book contained nothing but new practices, many of them cutting edge for the Witchcraft community. It almost seemed as if the staff at Llewellyn was talking about another book than the one I had written. It was a surprising superficial judgement on a book that I had felt the Gods and my spirit muse inspired me to write. Llewellyn, therefore canceled my contract, which also halted the publication of any of the other books in that series.

Needless to say, I was devastated. Not only had I written that book, but another one had not even been pitched yet because I was ordered to slow-go presenting new manuscripts to Llewellyn. I would not likely be able to pitch the last book in the series, which was titled “Transformative Initiation for Witches.” Now, I had talked about these two manuscripts with friends and interested parties at the convention, and they were keen on seeing them in print. Same is true with my fan base on Face Book. Many people were looking forward to seeing these two books published. I was briefly at a loss about what course of action I should take to continue to move forward.

One thing that I want to point out is that Llewellyn is in the business of publishing books and making a profit. They have been publishing occult books for a very long time, and they are successful enough to have their own building and adjoining warehouse, and a large staff of editors, marketing folk, artists, clerks, and warehouse workers. They are a friendly group of people and I liked everyone that I met at the HQ meeting in March. Still, they are a business, and in canceling my contract, they made a business decision. I had been one of their authors for over ten years, so that is a long time for a business relationship to last. Publishing companies typically drop and add new authors at a frightening frequency, so my relationship was unique in that regard. While my acquisitions editor may have rejected my current selection of books to publish, she did not close the door on our relationship. The fact that I don’t agree with the marketing decision that Llewellyn made in regards to the books I wanted to publish doesn’t mean that I am at crossed purposes with them. It’s just business as usual. Who knows, maybe they are correct about my books, but I kind of doubt it. Only time will tell who is correct.

However, in my experience, when one door closes another always opens. In fact, I had met two really amazing men at the convention who had their own publishing company. They were at the convention to help promote one of their authors (Alaric Albertsson), and I happened to meet them just before my book signing was to start. They knew about my work and they were impressed enough to tell me that if I ever wanted to publish a book, they would be happy to talk to me about it. At the time, I felt I had obligations as an author to Llewellyn, and I was expecting to write a few more books for them in the future. Still, I chatted with them for a bit, got their business cards and said that we might consider doing business in the near future. They discussed with me the possibility of picking up the book Mastering the Art of Ritual Magic from Immanion Press and adding it to their publishing company catalog. These two gentlemen were Blake and Wycke Malliway, and their publishing company was Crossed Crow Books. I liked them a lot, but I never thought that I would be doing business with them so soon.

My shock and sadness at Llewellyn canceling my book contract was only a brief ordeal, since I reached out the very next day to Blake and asked him if he would be interested in picking up the rest of the “For Witches” series, since Llewellyn had already rejected the latest one in that series. To my surprise, Blake was immediately interested, but wanted to know why Llewellyn had canceled my contract. After reviewing the brief email that my acquisitions editor had sent me explaining the reason for the rejection, and meeting with Blake and his acquisitions editor Becca, they decided to not only pick up the last two books in the “For Witches” series, but also wanted me to write a beginner’s book as well. Just a mere five days after receiving the cancellation from Llewellyn, I had signed a contract with Crossed Crow Books to write and publish three books. So, I was quite amazed and happy with the results.

Now, as you know, I never wanted to write a beginner’s book on Witchcraft. I felt that there were a large volume of media available to the public in the form of books, web pages, YouTube lectures, ritual presentations, and a plethora of people wanting to sell tools, robes, candles, incense, perfumes, witchy garb, talismans and amulets, and other materials too numerous to mention. Yet when I perused many of these offerings in my researches, I saw that nearly all of the educational offerings were limited or incomplete in one manner or another. None of these books, lectures or presentations would prepare someone to be able to pick up my five-book series unless or until they had spent years going over this material and experimenting with it, or by chance, if they got initiated by a coven and spent a few years in that traditional organization. Indeed, there wasn’t a convenient bridge to the “For Witches” series for a beginner to cross.

So, the question proposed to me at the convention by more than a couple of individuals was if I wrote a beginners book, what should I write into a book that would get someone efficiently to the point where they could start working with the “For Witches” series of books. That was the challenge presented to me, and when I got home from the convention and was diddling around with ideas for this book, the entire table of contents for it seemed to manifest out of thin air. My muse was once again active! This occurrence happened before my contract with Llewellyn was canceled, so I was seeking a way to pitch this book to them until I had the rug pulled out from under my feet. The Malliway brothers helped me to solve this conundrum, and that is when the book “Mastering the Art of Witchcraft” or MAW for short, was born.

It seemed as if I was destined to write this book. What I wanted to do was to present both the liturgical and magical sides of Witchcraft for someone who was practicing as a solitary practitioner. That is the path that I presented in my “For Witches” series, which are magical practices that should be done by the independent Witch, whether in a coven or functioning as a solitary Witch. I also wanted to establish the basic practices, tools, meditation techniques and promote to the beginner the idea of building their own lunar and solar calendar, mapping out the full moon esbats and eight sabbats. As for the magic, a simplistic version of the energy model of magic was a good place to start, and I also threw in simple negative and positive vortex ritual patterns to use along with a slightly more complex cone of power. I also added in the basic binding rite, poppet magic rite and the rite to evoke the four elements combined within the flesh, blood and bones of the operator for an enhanced ritual of self-empowerment. These three rites had been in my Book of Shadows for decades, although they were not oath-bound material.

What I had determined is that if someone were to take this book, copy and embellish the rituals and practices written in it, and then armed with the lunar and solar calendar, practice these for a two year period, then that person would be prepared to study and use the “For Witches” series of books. In the final chapter, I included a list of books and topical areas of study that a person would need to round out and deepen their abilities and understanding. Everything that I wanted to say in this book just fell together, and writing it was almost effortless. I completed writing the book in around three weeks. That has to be a record for the amount of time it took for me to write a book, and the whole process was very inspired and magical. At 44K words, it is not a large book, but it is, in my opinion, substantive.

I also had a meeting with Crossed Crow Books staff and my manuscript “Sacrmental Theurgy for Witches” should be in print and available in February 2024. The other two books will follow, and hopefully, by the late autumn next year, all three will be in print. With the five books in the “For Witches” series in print, and this new book “Mastering the Art of Witchcraft” I will have the means of training a Witch and a practicing ritual magician from the perspective of a beginner to acclaimed mastery. I think, although I might be wrong, that no other author can make such a claim to fame. What I will need to do is put together a series of classes and maybe record them and put them on a YouTube channel. However, I also have other book writing projects that I would like to explore, such as my ideas for the book “Liber Nephilim,” which I will likely explore either later this year or early next year. I will definitely keep you posted.

Frater Barrabbas