Origins of the Marseilles Tarot Deck

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

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

While I did not have much in the way of any historical reference, I just intuited that the Marseille Tarot deck was the earliest version that was obviously based on occultism, since the symbology had subtlety but remarkably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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frater Barrabbas 

Lighting A Candle in the Abyss

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frater Barrabbas 

Science, Religion and Magic - They are not opposed

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frater Barrabbas

Long Gap of Time

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frater Barrabbas

Year 2024 In Review

Wow, it has been amazing year for me. So much has happened to me, both as a writer and a Witch and Magician that is seems difficult to unravel it all. Yet the year started off with a bang, and had many exciting developments. It also had one powerful disappointment, and that, of course, was the election results. I will briefly say a few words about that event, but mostly, I want to outline the amazing things that happened in the course of the year. Life has been good to me, and there is much to be grateful about, and people to be thankful for helping make this an amazing year for me.

I have been writing all year long, and what I have produced has been truly prodigious. During the year I wrote three books and submitted them to my publisher. These books will be coming out in the next two years. Titles for these books are Abramelin Lunar Ordeal (02/2025), The Magical Notary Art (04/2025), and Liber Artis Archaeomancy (Winter 2026). The manuscript for Liber Artis Archaeomancy turned out to have 217K words, so it will be a large and comprehensive work. Additionally, I have edited and revised Disciples Guide to Ritual Magick (08/2024), Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick (12/2024), and Practical Qabalah for Occultists (previously, Magical Qabalah for Beginners), which is likely to appear in print some time in Spring, 2026. I have completed six literary projects for the year.

However, during the year, I have seen six books printed and released, and these were in the following consecutive order, Sacramental Theurgy for Witches, Transformative Initiation for Witches, Mastering the Art of Witchcraft, Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick, Liber Nephilim, and Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick. My total output for the year 2024 has been ten books, written and edited both last year and this year. That is quite an amazing output. I am thankful that at present, there are no outstanding book projects awaiting me. I have completely cleared my occult book work-desk of all projects, so for the Yule period, I have been writing blog articles and working on the planing stages for next set of books. I have three books projects for 2025, although I will take my time planning, assembling, writing and producing these manuscripts, and then getting contracts and readying the documents for submission. Here is a list of three projects that I have planned for next year - they won’t be released until late 2026 and 2027.

The Gnostic Tetra-Sacramentary: Liturgies and Sacred Rites of the Magician Priestcraft

Since the system of magic that I espouse uses the Mass rite, Benediction, and other sacramental rites, I believe that producing a ritual workbook of the entire collection of rituals that I have used or planned to write should be developed as a manuscript and then published. The four Gnostic theurgical systems in the Order of the Gnostic Star, consisting of Thelema, Agape, Thanatos and Eros, each has a Mass rite, a Benediction rite variation, and other sacramental rites, such as the Rite of Naming, Gnostic Wedding, Exorcism, Excommunication, Requiem and the Holy Orders of Deacon and Pontifex ordination would be a part of this liturgical lore. Other ancillary rites would be included, such as the Gnostic Book of Seasons, Mass of the Great Goddess (full version), and the Rite of Beatification, and a Benediction rite to Santa Muerta. A full background to this Gnostic Sacramentary, and the use and obligations of rites of Priestcraft would be fully covered. This manuscript would likely be the first task that I would undertake for 2025 and would likely not be completed until autumn.

Ordeal XV: Rites of Luciferian Ascension

My previous book, Liber Artis Archaeomancy, focused mainly on the Angelic hierarchy and the magic associated with their invocation. However, a ritual magician must also traverse the paths of darkness and undergo the ordeals, and the challenges associated with the Devil in order to be truly and wholly spiritually evolved. One cannot avoid the darkness, especially the darkness of one’s own soul and being. Those who espouse the ways of light and who have not undergone and achieved victory and accommodation with their dark side can never be trusted not to unconsciously exhibit their negative ethos in a subtle and opaque manner. A true initiate must master both the Light and the Darkness to know and master themselves. Ordeal XV divides the darkness into the Gnostic Tetra-Sacramentary of Thelema, Agape, Thanatos and Eros, to develop the ordeals associated with the Involution Avatars Aiwaz/Astoreth, Lucifer/Promethius, Azrael/Samael, and Baalzebul/Pan Priappus. The fifth in this series is Sothis-Set, who are joined together with the four Involution Avatars to produce a tabernacle of darkness where the soul meets its ultimate challenges. This book contains all of the evocation rites and the Five-Fold Inverted Vortex, which is the heart of the chamber of trials. Included are the mystery rites of the Tabernacle of Sothis-Set and the associated Black Rites of expiation, purification, and release. The ordeals are introduced with a full set of background articles and analyses that explain in detail the nature of this ordeal, its purpose and ultimate conclusion. I will be assembling the material and writing this book from late 2025 to Spring of 2026.

Liber Nephilim Additum: Additional Rites of the Enochian Ordeal

While the book Liber Nephilim covered the basic rites needed to evoke the first two chiefs of the Nephilim angels, and also included the evocation of Lilith and other ancillary rites, other components of that working were excluded due to the limitations of the book size and length. There were quite a number of rituals and lore left behind. This book seeks to gather together all of the additional material that was not included in the original book. This book is broken into three parts, representing the topical areas that contained important but excluded ritual workings. The first part will contain the rituals for invoking the Enochian Bonarum, which I called the Binary Planetary Intelligences. I invoked seven consecutively to form a powerful planetary ordeal, with the eight workings invoking the ruling spirit Camara. Included would be diary entries of that ordeal. The second part would be the instructions and rites involved in the Enneagrammic Goddess Gateway working, representing the gate structure used in the Enochian Ordeals. The third part of the book would contain the additional rituals for the evocation of Turiel, Ramat’el, and Samael, the invocations of Seth and Enoch, the Enochian Mystery Vortex Rite, and the Convocation rites of Lilith and Enoch. The diaries for some of the workings would also be included. I may also consider including evocation rites for Lilith’s sisters and demonic queens, although there would not be associated diaries for those spirits. I would not begin to assemble, edit and write this manuscript until after Spring 2026.

***

So, those three project will take me into the middle of 2026, not including the final editing passes and other pre-production tasks. Much of this lore is already written, but other parts will need to written and everything will have to be revised and edited before it is ready for submission. We are looking at a lot of work that will need to be accomplished, and that will also depend on how things are going with me in terms of my health, day-job demands, and the likely relocation that will happen sometime in late 2025 or early 2026.

As for traveling and teaching this year, I attended the ConVocation convention last February and taught two classes. I taught a six-week series at Mama Luna’s occult book store in Richmond, based on the book Mastering the Art of Witchcraft beginning in April and extending into May. I attended and was the headliner at the Swamp Mystics mini convention in Tallahassee, FL. I also had a book tour in New Orleans in early November that was modestly successful, and I got to meet some exceptional folks who live there. I had wanted to revisit NOLA when I had first went down there in November 2023, and coincidentally, I was able to visit again almost a year later. I had promised myself to return, and that happened, thanks to the folks at Cross Crow Books.

For the coming year, I may teach my six-week class again, and visit a few more local occult book stores, I will certainly be returning to ConVocation this coming February, but I don’t have much plans beyond those events. The coming year will be one where I focus on the home front, since my wife is working out of town during the week days, and only is able to come home on the weekends. Because we have six cats and a dog, and my wife is absent during the week, it makes things more difficult for me to be away from home. That will change after we relocate, of course.

I will be relocating to a new home, and a priority for me will be getting a room for a permanent temple, and having a private outdoor location to host a grove would be a nice touch. I have been living in a small house since May 2018, and I have not been able to establish a place to work ordeal magic. I am planning on changing that situation, but the details of how that will happen, when and where, will have to be determined. There is a lot of magical work that I have left unfinished, so I would like to have the opportunity to finish these magical projects and formulate some a new ordeals. While I still have my health, I want to explore and experiment with new magical lore and additional magical ordeals. Of course, all of this work will feed into additional books, so that work will likely keep going until I can no longer write or have anything to write about.

All of these writing projects, relocating, getting temple space to work ritual magic, are quite exciting and makes me very happy and optimistic about my future. I have a great paying job, my wife is fully employed, and the future is looking to be very exciting. There is also the possibility of travel to Europe and Asia, and maybe even turning my literary talents to writing fiction once I finally retire. I hope to live many years yet to come, and there are still many adventures awaiting me. In January 2025, I will turn 70 years old, but I still feel pretty good for my age, and there may be many possibilities if I can manage to keep my health.

I am not happy or optimistic about the fate of our nation, since the election appeared to be about overcoming the status quo and exercising anger at the state of economy and at the sequestering that occurred due to the Covid19 pandemic at the ballot box. Since Democrats were nominally in charge during that period, especially the POTUS, people foolishly decided to punish them in the election. Over the last four years we have had a very competent presidential administration and until the mid-term elections, we have had reasonably good government. Now that a majority of the American people have voted to elect Donald J. Trump to another four year term, that period of seemingly good governance will evaporate. I am beside myself with concern and worry because despite all of the facts known about Trump, people still voted for him, somehow thinking that he will make things better, particularly with the state of the economy. As it will likely turn out, they will be proven wrong with a vengeance. Trump doesn’t represent either the middle class nor the down-trodden people who feel that the nation is no longer concerned with their difficulties, whether economic or social. Trump is a transactional politician who truly represents the oligarchic class, and it is they who impacted the election and ensured that he would be re-elected POTUS.   

While some will blame the Democratic Party for completely misunderstanding and misrepresenting the will of the people, there were many who did vote against Trump and the Republican Party. There was also a significant group of people who could have voted but didn’t vote for various reasons. Would they have made a difference? Possibly, but we will never really know. People were angry about inflation, which was caused by a post-pandemic economic recovery and also corporate greed. People were also angry about being forced to wear masks and about the confusion associated with the nature of Covid19, that it was a new kind of virus and not enough was initially known about it. Of course, when Trump was president, he allowed, through his inactivity and lack of planning, over one million to die, and also helped to spread misinformation about various cures and that masks were ineffective. Biden’s administration pushed forward the actual plan that not only helped to reduce the effect of Covid19, but also ensured that the economy was able to recover with less troubles than other countries in the world. The fact of the matter is that president Biden got little positive press for cleaning up the mess that Trump left behind, and spent two years undoing what Trump had done in his four years as president.

Our main stream press is owned and operated by the donor class, and after just a few months, they had basically written off Biden and his presidency, and proceeded to ignore all of the good that he was doing in favor of pointless criticisms and blame for whatever was not immediately fixed and made efficient once again. They created a hostile environment that helped to tank Biden’s favorability while white-washing and sane-washing Donald Trump. The press is mostly responsible for Biden’s poor popularity, since they focused on what was not working or wrong and seldom mentioned all of the things that he and his administration had accomplished, which was probably more than what any recent president had achieved.

Whatever troubles happened domestically, Biden and the Democrats had mostly fixed. International crises, such as the invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza and Lebanon, were more difficult to manage, as foreign policy typically is to any administration. The crisis in the Middle East showed that the government of Israel was not interested in working with the Biden administration, even though they had the complete support of the U.S. I abhor Hamas, Hezbolah, and the Houthis for their terrorist activities and starting and intensifying the conflict with Israel, but I also abhor the government of Israel, who have become terrorists in their own way. It is a no win scenario, and I cannot blame Biden too much for supporting Israel, since not to support them would have been political suicide during an election year.

However, as it turned out, the donor class and the oligarches did not want either Biden or any Democratic candidate to win in 2024, since they believed that a more friendly and transactional Trump would be a better replacement. I believe that the only thing that I am critical of regarding Biden is that he shouldn’t have sought a second term and thereby allowed a younger and more energized political group of Democrats to be weeded out and ultimately selected through the primary process. Having a democratic process occur during the year 2023 and 2024 for the Democratic Party might have eclipsed the effect that Trump was having on the electorate with help from the media moguls. Whether that would have been sufficient to defeat Trump at the polls is debatable, yet considering that Harris came close to defeating Trump with only 100 days to campaign indicates that it could have happened that way. Still, thinking about the possibilities doesn’t change the reality that in January we will be getting a second dose of Trump and his MAGA miscreants.

For some reason people have written off the dangers of having someone like Trump in charge of our nation for another four years. I am thankful that he can’t run again, and that many who came out to vote for him this time might not have voted at all if it was someone else running without his celebrity status. However, I believe that he will cause a lot of damage to our nation and the world at large based on his various statements about domestic and foreign policy. Additionally, it seems that Trump’s choices for cabinet members and close advisors represent a wealthy group of oligarches whose role in government will represent a massive conflict of interest. Trump is very transactional, and for his wealthy supporters, the pay-off will be their ability to grift the nation and make it all legal and acceptable. We, the people, are in for a rough four years, all because of a large number of ill-informed and misguided individual voters.

A Canadian journalist has pretty much defined our moment with the following quotation.

“There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.” Written by Andrew Coyne

While I have a certain amount of excitement for my own personal future, I am quite aware that many others will not be doing so well. It is my hope that the incoming administration and the trifecta of their control of the government shows them as over-reaching, overly ambitious, incompetent and overall, a failure to make any significant changes. That is my hope for my nation in the coming years. I also hope that a lot of people think about what they have done to vote for Trump and the Republican Party, knowing that these people care nothing for those who aren’t wealthy or members of the oligarchy. Maybe having some painful experiences will be a good lesson in how to use their vote to help their own interests instead of listening to pundits and politicians who lie, cheat, steal and who pretend to be compassionate to the powerless and the advocate of the under-represented. Republicans, as a rule, represent a status quo that is all about the donor class, and no one else.

Frater Barrabbas

 

 

 

 

 

 

Traditional Witchcraft Covens - Still A Good Idea?

 

My path in Witchcraft has been a decidedly crooked one, and it has been one that would seem to paint traditional initiations and traditional covens as a questionable source for one’s engagement and advancement in its practice. I had a four year tenure in the archetypal “Coven from Hell” back in the late 1970's, where I witnessed my High Priestess and High Priest go over the deep end and assume tyrannical powers over their coven members. I saw two large and well attended covens get whittled down to just a small single coven, and from there, a complete collapse. My former HP and HPs left Witchcraft and became fundamentalist Protestant Christians, and my former HP wrote an infamous book titled “Wicca: Satan’s Little White Lie,” which I have fully debunked in previous blog postings. If anything, my first coven experience was a lesson in occult despotism and the fallacy of self-elected leadership in BTW covens. You can find the first in the series of threads about my experiences here.

My negative experiences with hierarchical coven structures continued when I became a High Priest and elder of an Alexandrian coven in Minneapolis. While I had no interest in functioning as a tyrant in any way imaginable, my partner, Thea, had other ideas in mind. She ran the coven in a despotic manner and made my allegiance and deference to her as a means to bind me while she ran roughshod over the members of our coven. Finally, when the coven had enough of this kind of childish and tyrannical behavior, they had the audacity to confront her about it, with my support. That made her resign her position as leader and to break up with me for not supporting her, even though she was completely in the wrong about how she was treating people. She left the home that I had provided her and officially resigned as High Priestess, while heaping scorn and recriminations on us all. Within a week we had replaced both her and myself with new leaders, but even then, having the power to make unequivocal decisions with little or no input from the coven members, made the new order only slightly better than the old one. Within two years, the coven had disbanded and was no longer functioning.

What these experiences have taught me is that there are problems with the type of leadership that a traditional coven employs, and that it takes very mature and accessible leaders to successfully run a coven that is durable and self-sustaining over time. While such a coven structure can work and be maintained, it is too susceptible to abuse and forms of ego-driven despotism. There are no checks and balances in a hierarchical coven structure, and the High Priestess and her partner, the High Priest, are the sole authority figures in the group. The only recourse that a member has is to leave the coven and either practice alone or form another group. I have found that individuals who have had to leave a coven because of a clash with the leadership often form a new coven that has inherited the same problems as the old coven. They just seem to exchange the old tyrants for new ones, and little is actually learned.

Don’t get me wrong, because there are good covens out there in the various communities that have lasted a long time, but these, unfortunately, are the exception rather than the rule. A good and well functioning coven is hard to find, but they do exist, and I have met a number of fortunate individuals who were members of such groups. It would seem that human nature is such that there is a tendency of individuals who lack personal confidence and who have little power over their lives to seek out positions of power within a coven group and then to rule the members in a tyrannical manner. It is, unfortunately, a problem of structure and human social dynamics that make a traditional Witchcraft coven hierarchy into a microcosm study of human despotism. Wherever you have two unelected leaders assuming power and authority over a group of novices mixed in with very few initiates with no checks or balances on their rule, then the temptation to take advantage of this social situation will be great. If the leaders are emotionally mature and know themselves and their limitations, and have humility and compassion as their ruling principals, then the coven will be managed and guided with wisdom and equality, instead of deceit and delusion. That, of course, is the ideal, but considering human nature, it will fall short of the ideal, or completely miss it.

Democracy is the missing ingredient for coven management, at least in my opinion. It is what has made Blue Lodge Masonry build and maintain lodge organizations that have lasted for generations. Leadership is rotated and decisions for the lodge are made through the artifice of voting. There are, therefore, checks and balances built into the organization. Within a small group like a coven, democracy is established by group consensus, and leaders are rotated or even elected to assume temporary roles within the group. However, an elected leader assumes a role that has certain responsibilities, but the group is ruled by consensus. Leadership roles then have all of the responsibility and none of the power associated with traditional coven leadership roles.

While there are many definitions of consensus, I have found that the best approach for any group decision is that it has a majority of the members in favor with none opposed. That means the group will decide to undertake certain directives and employ individuals to help make them realized, whether formally or informally. A major directive requires a formal vote, and simple decisions can be implemented with an informal vote. Any disagreement would need to be resolved before the group could move forward, regardless of whether the decision was determined by a formal vote or just an informal agreement.

What I am describing here is what I have called a “Star Group,” and I feel that it is the only kind of organizational structure that a small group or coven could assume to ensure that everyone is treated equally and fairly, regardless of individual experience or level of achievement. Each member represents the facet of a group star, and that they come together to forge a unified group with a combined purpose and direction. No one is has any greater authority, value or role significance than anyone else in the group, even despite the differences in knowledge, experience, initiatory achievements or community status - all are equal in the eyes of the Gods. Leaders are chosen to manage and direct certain events and activities, but authority is vested in the group. Leadership roles can be designated and rotated annually, or they can be chosen for specific activities. Everyone participates and there are no divisions or barriers placed between individuals within the group. All decisions are determined by consensus, and everyone has a single equal vote.

Star Groups are the optimal group structures for any small organization that seeks to engage in specific activities in a completely fair, equal and democratic manner. They are not prone to despotic rulership or the exploitation of lesser experienced members by more senior members. They typically have a high rate of individual satisfaction, and they guarantee equal engagement privileges amongst the members of the group. Additionally, they have the ability to resolve differences, or if that becomes impossible, then to formulate new smaller groups out of the old group. A Star Group allows for separations and mergers without having to damage the group or make it ungovernable. It allows for the possibilities of a group to have amicable separations and for groups to continue to grow and evolve over time, something that a traditional coven is not likely to experience. I have found that a Star Group is the only kind of organization that I would join and happily participate in, and that I would avoid, at all costs, either joining or running a traditional coven. That is my predilection based on my personal experiences, and it shouldn’t keep anyone from joining a coven if they so wish.

An initiation into a coven or group is little more than an acknowledgment that the individual who undergoes it is able to assume the obligations and responsibilities that the initiation grade entails. Traditional Witchcraft initiations are typically inner court ceremonies that empower and constrain an individual with oaths, allegiances and the assumption of a role and an identity within the group. Internal transformations can also occur simultaneously, but they are not guaranteed. It is only through an individual practice and discipline that a practitioner can achieve personal transformation and spiritual evolution. A coven cannot provide a member with this kind of achievement, but it can help one to develop a personal discipline and practice, and to guide and show by example what can be achieved through magic rituals and ceremonies. Transformative initiation is guided by both suffering and by ecstatic release, which are symbolized by the scourge and the kiss. Both scripted initiations and transformative initiations are an intimate encounter with the Deities and the individual, where the ordeal of psychic death and rebirth are fully enacted.

Since initiations are so profoundly personal and subjective, and they require a level of trust and intimacy that is beyond mere friendship, it must happen in an environment that is free of fear, coercion, and that can allow for the full empowerment and temporary ascendancy of the initiate. A badly run coven will likely be unable to provide this kind of environment to its members who undergo initiation, making the possibility for a true transformation impossible. Initiation ceremonies in such a group are performed not for the benefit of the member, but for the edification of the leaders, to enable them to assume greater power over the candidate. Therefore, real growth and transformation requires an equable social arrangement in the coven for it to occur, and lacking that will certainly make such an achievement much more difficult. If it happens at all it will be through the individual practice and discipline, and if that activity is prohibited by the coven leaders, then there would be little reason to persevere in such a group. 

I discuss scripted and transformative initiation in my book on the subject, and it goes into much greater detail. If you wish to investigate deeper into this subject, then I would recommend my book, "Transformative Initiation for Witches," and you can find it here.

My advice to anyone who wants to form a coven or who is seeking to join one is to always to get to know the individuals in the group before making a commitment to join. If someone wants to start a coven, then I would advise them to ensure that there is some kind of consensus and rotating leadership positions installed in the group instead of assuming the role of authority figures regardless of one’s level of maturity or motivations. I believe that a traditional coven structure is too easily abused, and it readily leads to tyranny, coercion, and the exploitation of its members. Not all traditional covens are so corrupt, but the only way to find out is to cautiously get to know the leaders and engage socially with the members. Beware of coven leaders who seek potential members to quickly decide on whether to join or not, or who have sequestered the members from engaging socially with a prospective entrant. There are no NDA legalities binding members from speaking to outsiders, and if such a rule is in place, then you would be well advised not to join that group.  

We all need to protect ourselves from exploitation and the social tyranny of bad groups and organizations. The only solution is group consensus and rotating leadership roles. Our path in the art of Witchcraft magic is difficult and arduous enough without having to deal with unelected authority figures and social exploitation within a magical or Witchcraft group. A badly run coven could potentially thwart a true seeker and push them back into a mainstream religious faction, or make them into cynical critic of all things pagan and magical. Those of us who are knowledgeable and are initiates have a responsibility to those who are just starting out to give them whatever aid and assistance we can and to also respect them as human beings with an equal right to be a seeker as anyone else. We should be open, accessible and willing to share with others who might find a great value in following the path of magic and paganism. Starting out on such a socially divergent path is a very difficult decision to make, so we who already know should do what we can to help make that decision both rewarding and fulfilling.

Magical and pagan seekers are rare, especially those who try to make it their life’s path, so the least we can do is to be encouraging, respectful and friendly to them.

Frater Barrabbas

 

 

 

 

Qabalah and Magic - When Combining them is Good

I have completed making edits and modifications to my book project, “Practical Qabalah for Occultists” and I have signed a contract with Crossed Crow Books and submitted the manuscript as part of the contractual obligation. This book is a republishing of the Llewellyn book “Magical Qabalah for Beginners,” which they decided not to republish and thus, returned the rights to me. I had the last manuscript version of the book in MS Word and also the galley PDF, and went through the manuscript and made updates to it so that it would more closely conform to the galley version, and also to make some additional changes, such as gender pronouns and other minor tasks, like capitalization consistency, etc.

What I found was that after all these years since 2012, I didn’t need to add or revise any of the content. Additionally, the text of the manuscript was written incredibly well, and in fact, it was probably some of the best writing that I have used in any of my books since that time. I guess it was a combination of passion and inspiration that made the writing of that book turn out so well. In some cases, I found the text to be almost lyrical, especially when describing the twenty-two paths. Going over the book with a fine eye for editing, I found that it was an excellently written book, and I was surprised that Llewellyn had made the decision to cease its publication. I am certain that CCB will be happy to take the revised edition and add it to their catalogue, perhaps sometime in late 2025 or early 2026.

Needless to say, this book represents a comprehensive background and practice of an occult version of the Qabalah, made relevant to Pagans and Witches and anyone else who is not of the Abrahamic religious faiths. What that means is that the book promotes a practice and methodology that doesn’t require anything additional. It is a complete and whole spiritual and mystical discipline by itself. There are magical aspects in the practices shown in this book, but they are more like theurgy than ceremonial magic. In fact, there really isn’t any ceremonial magical components in the book. The significance of this statement is that the Qabalah stands by itself, without any other practices or metaphysical attributes needed to make it a complete discipline.

Here is a quotation from my book, taken from the last chapter.

In the Book of Abramelin, the author, Abraham the Jew, tells his youngest son that he is giving him the wisdom of his knowledge of magic (in the book that he has written) because he must give the knowledge of the Qabalah to his eldest son. So it would seem that he has deemed to divide his wealth and wisdom between his two sons and the eldest receives, of course, the greater share. When I first read this passage, I was quite astounded, since it seemed to say that the knowledge of the Qabalah, in and of itself, was superior to the knowledge of magic. Here is the passage, found in the first book, chapter 9 (p. 34), where Abraham tells his son Lamech:

“The art of wisdom has its foundation in the secrets of the highest and in the holy Kabbalah, which belongs to your eldest brother Joseph, and not to you.”

 It would seem, then, that knowledge of the Qabalah is not only greater than the knowledge of magic, but that through it, one could gain everything that magic would give and more. According to the Book of Abramelin, a mastery of the Qabalah is superior to the knowledge and practice of magic, and between the two, it is the greater prize by far. This concept becomes even more amazing to us when we consider that the purpose of the Book of Abramelin was to successfully invoke and manifest one’s Holy Guardian Angel.

To complete a practice of the esoteric Qabalah, one only needs to engage deeply with one’s religious faith, whether that be Wicca or some form of modern Paganism, and to use the practices in my book to build a complete religious, mystical and theurgic discipline. Ostensibly, an occultist can use my book and not have to perform any other magical rites to project their theurgic magic into the world.

So, if this is true then how do we employ the Qabalah into our ritual or magical ceremonial practices. The actual truth of the matter is that high forms of magic typically rely on an intrusion of the Qabalah to be merged with it so that it might have a greater impact in both the material and spiritual worlds. These forms of magic need the Qabalah, but the Qabalah doesn’t need any forms of ritual or ceremonial magic to achieve its objectives. Additionally, I have written five books on advanced ritual magical practices that can used by Witches or Pagans that doesn’t incorporate the Qabalah. That means that a Witch or Pagan could perform rituals of invocation, evocation, elemental magic, talismanic magic and sacramental theurgy without having recourse to the Qabalah. What that demonstrates is that the Qabalah is a distinct discipline, and that a magician can employ the Qabalah into their magic, but that choice is completely optional - there is no requirement to do so.

If employing the Qabalah into the practice of ritual or ceremonial magic is completely optional, then when would it be useful or optimal to combine it with the practice of magic? One of my complaints, and the reason why I wrote the “For Witches” series of books without any recourse to the Qabalah, is that I find that it has been overused. Not every ritual has to include Qabalistic attributes. Even the Golden Dawn did not always flavor their rituals with the Qabalah, although they did more often than was necessary, in my opinion. Yet I find that the Qabalah is used in a lot of rituals these days, as if to give them the authenticity that they might lack without it. My approach is to use the Qabalah when it is appropriate to do so, and then only when the function of the Qabalah is critically important to the working. Overuse, in my opinion, makes the Qabalah redundant, and diminishes its importance and its potency. Let me define where using the Qabalah is appropriate, then we can focus on where it would be redundant.

Tree of Life and the Four Worlds as a Map

The Inner Planes, as the domain of the World of Spirit, is actually formless and cannot be mapped or understood by any kind of model or structure. Since everything is related to the One in that domain, when truly apprehended, it appears as a unity without any differentiation. It is beyond conscious apprehension, and it defies the rational logic of language or the structures of the mind. It is like a mirror, and it reflects back to us our beliefs, religious signs, symbols, and metaphors, and the logical structures that we use to help define what it is. Yet none of these artifices approximate the true nature that it expresses. It is the great singularity, and beyond it, is the greater emptiness. Even the Qabalah, with its ideas of Ain Soph Aur can only dimly approximate the true nature of this phenomenon. This is true with all of the various religious, esoteric or occultic approaches to understanding the One that is the source and the ultimate object of all conscious beings. However, the protean flexibility of the One allows us to use models and language to stimulate and engage with this Unity, and we can therefore use the models, symbols, constructs and various glyphs to emulate our experience of it. But, we must never fail to understand that the models and linguistic artifices that we might use will always fall short of truly defining it.

The Qabalistic Tree of Life represents a model of the emanations that generated the many lights of consciousness from the One through a mathematical sequence of the numbers 1 through 10. This model uses the Pythagorean base-10 approach to describing the waves of emanations, but certainly other systems of numeration could be used. While numbers represent the emanations that flowed from the One to the Many, there is also a circuitous pathway for the Many to return to the One, and that is represented by the 22 Pathways that connect the 10 numbered spheres or containers of the light of the One. These Pathways are given the attributes of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, symbolizing that the means to regaining the apprehension and absorption of the One is through the holy literature of the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible.

Numbers, letters and words, waves of emanation and paths to unity, are the attributes of the Tree of Life. Yet there is also the finite structure of the Tree, and its placements of the ten emanations, and the relationships between them via the paths, that show its remarkable utility. These components can represent the structure of the Inner Planes, approached from the manifestation of individual consciousness and the ensouling of material beings from the unified and mysterious source. They are given various symbolic attributes, consisting of the four elements, the seven planets, the twelve signs of the zodiac, the thirty-six decans, the seventy-two quinians, the trumps of the Tarot, various Deities and metaphysical concepts of all religions throughout the world, and colors, perfumes, incense, gem stones, metals, minerals, herbal medicines, and every conceivable mental attribute and material element in the world of humanity. The Qabalah unites everything within its structure of emanations and paths.

Additionally, the Four Qabalistic Worlds also represent a map of the Inner Planes, since it is a four-fold definition of the Emanations and Pathways of the Tree of Life, collecting the myriad of attributes within the four worlds of the Absolute, Creation, Formation, and Manifestation, where the One became the consciousness of the Many. Organized within these four Worlds are the various residents, both of spirit and mind, which would represent the Godhead attributes, Super Archangels, Archangels, Angels and Demons, and the spirits of the Earth and the Underworld. These domains of consciousness are populated by various entities, as the emanations and paths are refracted through the Four Worlds, producing a more comprehensive spiritual map of what is largely a domain that is wholly and completely unified into a single expression of Being residing within infinite emptiness. The importance of the Qabalah is that is gives a structure and order to something that has no order or structure, but through the Tree and Worlds, we can apprehend in a small part of the truth, and thereby gain a significant spiritual perspective of the whole.

Another important factor is that the many different attributes of the 10 Sephiroth, 22 Pathways and the Four Worlds can be placed into tables of correspondence, thereby giving intrinsic meaning and comparative commonality to very different associated elements. Each Sephirah and Path has other attributes that help to give it meaning, such as the planets or signs of the zodiac, and to these are associated colors, gem stones, metals, plants and herbs, various Deities from other pantheons, and a host of other attributes. Singularly, they are not as meaningful except when combined and grouped together where they gain their greater importance.

For instance, a simple list of spirits in any order by itself is not as meaningful as when it is placed within a matrix associated with attributes of the Tree of Life, and fixed within one of the Four Worlds. Then each spirit in the list inherits a whole catalogue of attributes and a spiritual hierarchy to help qualify it, including a sigil to specifically identify it. When performing an invocation of a spirit and using this kind of table or matrix to characterize and qualify it, then that operation is what I call invoking through a grid or matrix, and it produces the best results because the spirit is fully defined before being summoned.

Therefore, the Tree of Life, the Four Worlds, and the tables of correspondences represent a significant methodology for defining the Inner Planes, characterizing various hierarchies of spirits and giving individual entities an identity, function and purpose. Defining the Inner Planes in this manner makes them accessible to the practicing magician, and gives a disciplined methodology to the mystic who seeks to regain that once state of One that is the source of all. The Qabalah functions as a universal repository of all religious and spiritual symbols, and embodies a spiritual discipline for both the mystic and the magician. It provides a roadmap through a world that has no distinctive geographic features, habitations, roads or pathways, milestones showing the distance traveled, nor does it contain any idea of a destination, since to enter that domain is to unwittingly and immediately arrive at one’s objective.

Arithmology - Number and Letter/Word Manipulation

Determining and defining the domain of the Inner Planes is one of the features of the Qabalah, however, it is not the only important and valuable technique. Since the Emanations are numbers and the Pathways are letters, then it would be obvious that mathematics and literature would be the products of these attributes. Although the Qabalah is limited regarding mathematics, it would be conceivable that any mystical system of numeration would be readily expandable to include geometry, algebra, trigonometry, differential and integral calculus, linear algebra, and beyond. However, the numbers are not only quantities, but they have an intrinsic esoteric value, so that working with them, and with alphabetic letters, which have their own intrinsic meanings, to form equations can be understood as having an occult value as well as a mathematical value. Still, this is beyond our consideration here, since we must limit our discussion to the traditional Qabalah and my profound lack of mathematical expertise.

Systems of arithmology in occult studies within the Qabalah include the practices of Geomancy, Notariqon and Temurah. Additionally, there are the tools of magic squares equating letters and numbers, the inherent numeric values associated with the letters of the alphabet, and the use of alphabet wheels that allow for the production of linear vectors representing the sigil of a name or phrase. Branching off of that methodology is the modern mechanism of generating sigil or glyphs from lettered names or phrases. Each of these techniques serve a magical and occult purpose, and they are used to expand the power of numbers, letters and words.

Gematria is a system of number substitution for letters, where the numeric values of the letters in a word are added together to get a total value. The value for specific words and phrases is then compared in a compilation called a Sepher Sephiroth, a book of numbers. The basic premise in Gematria is that words and phrases that have the same numeric value must be strongly related. This technique is most useful when the occultist has a body of written lore or holy scriptures upon which to apply, extracting occultic relationships between different words and phrases. It is less useful for someone who doesn’t have sacred writings, because then the words subjected to this kind of scrutiny do not have the context of holy writ to build meaning. I have found Gematria to be interesting, but I have found that some occultists overuse it, such as the manner that Kenneth Grant has employed it to announce as fact the most tenuous connections through Gematria. Without any critical alternative proof or corroboration, Gematria alone does not satisfy the need for deriving solid occult knowledge. This is, of course, my opinion.

Notariqon is the art of building and exploding acronyms. I have found this technique to be very useful, since I have used it to construct magical formulas where letters, words and declarations are expressed at certain ritual point intervals (like the four watchtowers or angles, or any combination), and then a combined formula word is derived when the letters and words are joined, causing the circle nodes that they represent to be unified. These formula words can be words unto themselves or they can have no meaning other than representing the holistic expression of the letters set to the circle points. All my advanced ritual workings use this mechanism so that the layers within a series of rituals are sealed and expressed in a unified manner, and the final expression of the working is where the first letters of each formula would be used to build a formula that would define the working as a unified structure.

While I use Notariqon to fashion and build acronyms and explode them as words that represent meaningful phrases, it is likely that a Qabalistic practice uses sacred writings would focus that methodology on deriving and building deeper meanings within the text of the scriptures. Since I don’t have that feature in my religion, I can use this technique in a more creative and free-flying manner. I still generate deeper meanings and themes when I employ it in my rituals, but it doesn’t tie back to any scriptures, which would give such constructs even more depth and meaning.

Temurah is a system of letter substitution, function primarily as a set of ciphers where the Hebrew alphabet is broken into two columns of 11 letters, and the association of one letter to its pair is the how letters are substituted. There are a total of 24 different ciphers that can be developed from this mechanism, where the alphabet is split in two and realigned to produce letter pairs. This technique can be used to uncover occult aspects of words or phrases, or it can be used to either disguise writings or to discover coded messages that used this technique to hide their true meaning from the profane.

Another technique of Temurah is used to substitute letters for numbers so they might be used to draw sigils and seals on magically numbered squares. This technique is called the Aiq Bkr or Qabalah of Nine Chambers, since it is a table of nine cells that contain like numbers distinguished by their factor of ten. Thus the first cell would contain the numbers 1,10,100, for the letters Aleph, Yod and Qoph, and if a Qabalist had to fit the letter Qoph into a magic square for Jupiter, whose max number is 16, then they would have to exchange it for a Yod to use the number 10 in the square.    

Aiq Bkr requires the use of what is known as magic squares, and these squares are associated with the seven planets, from Saturn (3), Jupiter (4), Mars (5), Sun (6), Venus (7), Mercury (8) and the Moon (9). Magic squares are used to create sigils and seals for spirit names that fit within the category of one of the planets. Magic squares, however, is a system unto itself, and represents both a Qabalistic discipline and a system of magic.

Since Temurah employs a system to derive sigils and seals for spirit names using magic squares, then any other methodology used to produce the same product could be loosely associated with this discipline. Thus, the use of alphabet wheels to draw sigils, and the system that Spare developed to produce sigils and glyphs would also be a part of this occult technology.

The systems of arithmology are important to the practice, research and determination of meaning in the study of the Qabalah, but they are also very important in the writing and development of magical rituals and ceremonies. Since I have applied this methodology to most of the magical rituals that I have devised, especially the advanced rites, then this is a technique that is most useful and universal to my approach to ritual magic. I don’t use Gematria, but forms of Notariqon and Temurah are ubiquitous in the magical technology that I employ.

When to Use the Qabalah

This brings us to our final considerations about when it is appropriate to employ the Qabalah in ritual magic. First of all, I use forms of Notariqon and Temurah in nearly all of the my magical rites. If we consider the use of occult acronyms, both their expression and exposition, and the use of various types of sigils, then I make use of these techniques everywhere, but they just aren’t obvious or deliberately Qabalistic.

Where I employ the Tree of Life and the Four Worlds is wherever I need to work with a map of the Inner Planes. There might be other approaches to determining these kind of structures and their seemingly limitless tables of correspondences, but when I am performing any kind of invocation, evocation or in some manner, traversing the Inner Planes through my magic, then I will employ the Qabalah directly in my rituals, and add significant details and depth to my working that it would otherwise not possess.

If I am working simple of forms of magic, such as elemental, basic spirit conjurations, simple forms of talismanic magic, sacramental theurgy, or initiation ordeals, then I don’t have to use the Qabalah. This is why I was able to write the five books in the “For Witches” series without any recourse to the Qabalah. However, any complex magic that is being worked through a symbolic grid or that requires a spiritual hierarchy, or is traversing the Inner Planes will use the Qabalah, and my more advanced magic, which employs these methodologies, does indeed make extensive use of it.

This is the rule that anyone who would use the Qabalah in rituals and ceremonies should apply to their work. I would recommend using the Qabalah only when you need it, otherwise, I would recommend sticking with simpler methodologies so as not to overuse it. Overusing the Qabalah is to make it less meaningful and significant in one’s magical work, and I would advise you, my reader, to avoid that pitfall.

Frater Barrabbas