Frater Barrabbas Author Literary Tour - Part 4 - Magical Qabalah for Beginners

 

After I had successfully placed four published books in the public domain, which is what DGRM and MARM consisted of at that time, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at writing a book that was not wedded to my previous opus, “Pyramid of Power,” since both of these books were a product of that original work. I also wanted to publish a book through either Weiser or Llewellyn, the biggest occult book publishers at that time. I felt that I would get a lot more notoriety being an author with books published in either of those publishing firms. These were my thoughts back in early 2010.

Since I personally knew the acquisitions editor for Llewellyn, having met her at Pantheacon gatherings and briefly talking to her, I thought that I would try my luck with that publishing company first. When talking to her, she told me that they were looking for authors to publish books in a “For Beginners” series, and one major unfilled entry that they had was the Qabalah. Of course, I sort of shuttered at first about taking on such a writing project, but then I realized that I already had a lot of writings on the Qabalah. As part of the background education for the Order I had written up some documents for the Qabalah and had passed them around to my fellow members. These documents were written poorly and did not have my current style of writing, so they would need to be revised and rewritten. However, that was better than having to start with no writings at all.

I was able to put together a table of contents quite easily to scope out what I wanted to write, but then I realized that not only were some of my ideas out of date, some of them contained information that was incorrect or inaccurate. I also lacked a standard set of practices and rituals, and I did not have a very good understanding of the history of the Qabalah. So, I began a period of research that lasted for several months while I also worked on rewriting the sections of text that I had previously poorly written. This has become the typical pattern when embarking on writing a book. What I think I know and have used for many years can be either stale or actually erroneous. I had a number of erroneous ideas and perspectives on the Qabalah that needed some deep research to bring them into a much more accurate presentation. It was an excellent learning situation, and I added considerably to my existing knowledge of the Qabalah as a result of that research. I submitted my first manuscript version in April 2012, and a month or so later, had my final version. The book came out in print in January, 2013.

Despite all of that rewriting and researching, I had to rewrite whole chapters of that book after I submitted it to Llewellyn. The marketing staff at Llewellyn had problems with the more advanced writing style and conceptual narrative that I used, and the subject matter was thought to be too complex or difficult for a beginner. What I didn’t want to do was write a book “Qabalah for Dummies” that was too simplistic to be useful for most occultists and ritual magicians. I wanted to write a book that presented the basic concepts to my readers, but also included more advanced ideas and practices for the more advanced student.

The book, as it was finally sent to the printers, took a middle ground between beginner and advanced students that I felt would be more engaging and interesting to someone who already knew something about the subject area, but wanted to proceed to a more advanced perspective. I feel that I was correct in taking that writing approach, although a few readers left negative reviews because they had assumed that the book was really a beginners guide. I don’t really feel bad about that, since the Qabalah is a very complex topic and if you are going to approach it as a magical discipline then simplicity and a shallow purview must be replaced with a more complex and deeper presentation. The Qabalah is not really a topic to be tackled by the uninformed nor the rank beginner, so it is in a similar position as Enochian magic or grimoire magic - it is not for actual beginners. So that is how the book “Magical Qabalah for Beginners” was developed.

Here is the advertisement for the book, as it is currently written on the back of the cover.

Discover the history and theory of Qabalah as well as its practical ritual uses. Explore the five basic but essential parts of Qabalah: the ten Sephiroth, the twenty-two paths, the Four Worlds, the Three Negative Veils, and the Tree of Life.

The Qabalah is the symbolic key to the Western Mystery tradition. Gain invaluable insights into all occult systems including high magic, Tarot, astrology, alchemy, hermetics, and more. In Magical Qabalah for Beginners, Frater Barrabbas shows ritual magicians, Pagans, and occult students how to incorporate the Qabalah into practice, using tables of correspondences, numerology, acronyms and formulae, sigils and ciphers, contemplation, and the theurgy of ascension. Now is the time to penetrate the mystical properties of Qabalah and make them work in your life.

I also had some good reviews from a few individuals who read the printer’s galley version, and these were included in the book. I guess that Llewellyn had to have some kind of good word, or ‘bon mot,’ for my book to get people excited or curious enough  to purchase and read it. The book “Magical Qabalah For Beginners” is still in print, and has sold over 4,000 copies. It is also available in Polish and Russian.

All of that research, writing and rewriting served an important purpose. It made me much more knowledgeable about the Qabalah than I had ever been in the past. As a system, it is complete and without the need for any ancillary practices or studies. You can be a magical Qabalist, but it would seem that being a Qabalist and a ritual magician might be either redundant or a contradictory approach to an applied occultism. That was one thing I discovered.

Writing that book also had another curious effect on me. I lost my passion for the Qabalah when I discovered that to truly function as a Qabalist you had to have sacred scriptures to act as your foundation. Qabalah is not practiced in a vacuum. It should always be focused on revealing the occult truths and magical capabilities within that sacred literature. Also, such a practice elevates the linguistic paradigm of mystical and magical practices, basing it on the power of words and their companions, numbers. I found that lacking a sacred literature was a real deficit in the study and practice of the Qabalah. That lessened my interest in the Qabalah, and I found other magical practitioners were coming to the same conclusion.

It seems almost blasphemous to say that I believe now that the Qabalah is over utilized and contrived in its current occult formulation. One of most important things that I have said about the Qabalah is that the mystical Jewish community created the Kabbalah to add and augment the Talmud as an esoteric commentary on the Tenach, or Hebrew Bible. That is what the Zohar represents to the Jewish study of the Kabbalah. It is the crown jewel, since from that commentary and analysis much of the mystical and magical elements of Judaism has its roots. It is a mystical, occult and magical Talmud, founded on the sacred writings of the Jewish Bible.

If a religion has a sacred body of writing then a Qabalah can be fashioned to develop and gather occult insights into the mystical foundation of that religion. This is true of religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism. Thelema has Liber Al, the Book of the Law, so it would qualify as well. Qabalah is founded on a sacred written language, so Hebrew, Greek, Latin (Vulgate), Arabic, Farsi, Sanscrit and English would represent that sacred language. Since Liber Al is written in English there is a place for an English Qabalah, too.

What is missing in this list is a language and sacred book for Witches and Pagans. While the Chaldean Oracles probably comes the closest to functioning as a kind of sacred writ for modern Pagans, there is nothing for modern Witchcraft. The Chaldean Oracles exist as quoted fragments related by other contemporary and later authors and no complete version of the full text has been found. It is possible (but doubtful) that Neoplatonism might be the answer for a mystical and philosophical discipline that could be reconstituted and used by modern pagans, yet it is even less likely to be relevant for practicing Witches.
 
The same could be said about the ancient Egyptians, since nearly all of their sacred literary work contains a large volume of magical spells with only some myths and stories passing down through the ages to us. What was sacred to the Egyptians was magical spells that could obtain for them immortality and life beyond death, and they seemed to mix religion and magic quite freely, so there never was anything like a Bible for the ancient Egyptians. In fact despite the dominance of Amun-Ra in the later dynasties of ancient Egypt, there was never actually a single unified religious faith throughout the history of that land, until Christianity came, and then later, Islam.

The lack of a definitive sacred book is also likely true with many of the ancient western polytheistic religions that academics have examined. Books may have been written for priests to perform priestcraft (although little of any of that remains today), and the absence of such an organized clergy in the Greco-Roman period made the Jewish Tenach that appeared after the end of the Temple period a unique contribution to organized religion, especially when it was translated into Greek. Christianity followed suit, the Gnostics were prolific writers of sacred texts, and so did Islam later on.

Zoroastrianism and Hinduism have had a religious literary tradition for nearly 3,000 years, and the Zend Avesta and the Vedic texts are probably distantly related, both linguistically and doctrinally. Zoroaster reformed his creed, and the Vedic texts were complimented with books called the Upanishads. It might be difficult to formulate a Qabalah for those two faiths, but it would not be impossible, as the later heretical cult of Zurvan attempted to do with Zoroastrianism.

What this simple requirement does is leave modern Pagans and Witches out in the cold when it comes to the Qabalah. We have no sacred writings and no sacred language, so the very foundation of a Qabalistic system would evade us. The Tree of Life glyph, based on the Hebrew alphabet and numbering system, would be somewhat useful; but as a model of eschatology it is limited and not very insightful to a pagan or a witch. I have found that the three or four layered world perspective of traditional Shamanism more useful as a model of the natural and spiritual worlds than the Tree of Life. Additionally, the Hebrew Kabbalah does not use the Tarot as a method for characterizing the twenty-two paths, and if a Christian-Greek alphabet were used then two more pathways would have to be derived in a Christian Tree of Life glyph representing that system.

What is left, then, are the many tables of correspondences, based on the 32 paths (Sephiroth and Pathways) or their various sub-structures. Many of the full 32 path-based tables of correspondences are somewhat awkward and not particularly useful, while the ones that are based on the numbers 4, 7, 10 and 12 are much more useful since they can be readily used to build correspondences for the elements, planets, prime numbers and the signs of the zodiac. These tables are also handy for building correspondences for the full Tarot deck, which is probably one of the most powerful magical systems in use today. It stands by itself and doesn’t need the Qabalah to give it meaning and purpose.

Then we come to the topics of Gematria, Notariqon and Temurah. Gematria is the numerological method for equating numbers with words through the art of adding up the letter number values as found in a Hebrew word. Using the Greek alphabet might also be helpful, and there is an association of number values to Greek letters, since they were once used to write numbers when the Hindu-Arabic system of numeration had not yet been invented. It was likely the Greeks who developed this methodology and the Jews found it eminently useful in their Kabbalah.

The key to Gematria is to develop a book of words (Sepher Sephiroth) that has all of the relevant words found in the sacred text attributed to their letter numeric value, and the book is ordered by numbers to group them together. Without such a book, the process is not as revealing and it has the fault of being quite narrow, showing where connections make sense while avoiding those that make no sense whatsoever. A perusal of Crowley’s book Sepher Sephiroth shows that while some numbers have interesting connections, others are practically meaningless in their obscurity.

While I have found Gematria to be a clever curiosity, I have never found it as a useful method of proving a semantic correlation between word concepts. Authors like Kenneth Grant have over-used Gematria to formulate occultic proofs that are as flimsy as the paper they are written on. I think that Gematria has been overused by Grant and some others, since it should only focus on strategic religious terms, and then it also suffers from the noise of correlations that are irrelevant or meaningless.

Notariqon is the art of building and exploding acronyms and Temurah is the art of letter substitution. I have used Notariqon in building letter and word formulas to bind the segments of rituals together into a seamless whole, but it is just a process of building clever acronyms - there is nothing sacred or mysterious about it. These letter number technologies are interesting and at times, clever, but I have not found them very insightful. Perhaps if I had a sacred text to use them against I would discover all sorts of amazing and fascinating mysteries, but I don’t have such a book and so the greater appreciation of the Qabalah is unavailable to me.

After all of these considerations, I do still find the Qabalah useful and since I have incorporated it into my magical workings, it is still relevant to me. Yet I have found that the overuse and even abuse of the Qabalah to be disappointing. There are many other mystical and occult systems to use in the workings of magic. Sometimes not using any system will yield results that are more straightforward and less convoluted than having to add a thick and sometimes awkward layer of Qabalah to a magical working or process for esthetic reasons. These are, of course, just my opinions.

The book “Magical Qabalah for Beginners” is not only recommend by me, the author, but also by other occultists. The large number of sold copies should be an indicator that this book is worth having and reading. It is, however, not really for beginners, despite what the title of the book says.

Frater Barrabbas    

Frater Barrabbas Author Literary Tour - Part 3 - MARM

My second book project was to resurrect the Pyramid of Powers and to present a more advanced approach to magical tech than DGRM. It was given the title name “Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick,” and it is largest body of published work by me so far. I had wanted to use the chapters and rituals not covered in the DGRM to give my reading public a more neutral magical system that could be used to construct a personal magical system. That was my sole purpose for writing books back in those days. I wanted to give to my reading public the magical tech and tools to build their own basic system of magic. I believed that if I could make that an attractive approach then perhaps it would also attract individuals to become members of our order, the E.S.S.G.

I wanted to publish the Pyramid of Powers, but a number of chapters had been used in my book DGRM, so I couldn’t see just publishing that material again. All those chapters that had been used in that book now had to be rewritten with new material. I researched and wrote new chapters with a more advanced approach regarding magical practices. For instance, instead of the more simpler approach to personal mental discipline and meditation that I had used in my first book, I extended that lore by including an approach to using the training material in Franz Bardon’s book “Initiation into Hermetics” since I had very much treasured and used the exercises contained in that book at various times.

That approach was what I used to develop the chapter on Mind Control (book 1, chapter 5). I also made this approach when rewriting all three books, and since the writing style was of a previous and poor quality, it required a lot of work to make these books as readable as the first one already published. My live-in girlfriend (who I later happily married) had the unfortunate task of acting as the primary editor for these books. Some of the chapters were so poorly written that she had quite the task to help me rewrite those sections so that they informed the reader instead of confusing them. She helped to make my writing more accessible and easier to grasp, and that had to happen to each of the three books before they could even go to press.

Since the Pyramid of Powers was broken into three volumes, I had decided to publish it as three separate books. The first book went into print in 2008, then the second in 2009, and finally, the third in 2010. What originally seemed like a good idea to publish the revised Pyramid of Powers in three separate books turned out to be a bad idea, since it was difficult to keep all three books listed in Amazon and elsewhere. Later on, we consolidated the three separate volumes into one omnibus edition (2013), which is how it looks today.

Here is the advertising blurb for that set of books, now incorporated into a single book.

This is a new Grimoire for a New Age for the magickal explorer willing to seek out that ‘love which moves the sun and the other stars.’

The omnibus edition contains all three volumes of Frater Barrabbas’s acclaimed Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick series; a comprehensive work on how to create a personal magickal system.

While suitable for readers already having a few years’ experience with magick, the series is also ideal for diligent practitioners of any level who seek to develop a complete, customized magickal system.

Volume 1's ‘Foundation’ establishes the basic practices and sets the magician on the path to knowledge and experience. Volume 2's, ‘Grimoire’ is based upon a set of nine rituals used to build up a complete Wiccan or Pagan ritual magick regimen, including elemental magick within a seasonal and monthly periodic cycle, and volume 3's ‘The Greater Key’, presents a system of correspondences that the magician builds up with his or her own personalized symbology.

Together, these volumes present a thorough and enlightening system that will enrich the magickal lives of any dedicated practitioner.

The three-fold structure of the MARM volumes is based on the requirements of the basic semi-experienced student. The first approach is to establish a foundation of knowledge that will make the rituals comprehensible to the reader. The foundation would include the topical areas of four elements, ritual structures of magical power, mental discipline or mind control, magical topology, magical ritual structures, ritual performance, transformative initiation, and the five mysteries of light and darkness, life and death. Everything that a practitioner might need to know and understand before attempting to master the actual rituals was included in this first volume.

The second volume was the presentation of the nine rituals that made up this system of magic. All of the rituals presented in that book were spiritually neutral, with predetermined gaps and blanks that were meant to be filled in when the student embarked on the path of developing their own personal system of magic. What I was proposing to my readers was that they could and should learn how to write their own rituals, using the basic templates that I provided in my book.

Additionally, my approach to magical tech was to use a set of rituals to build ritual workings, so those rituals could also be reused in other magical workings. This was a kind of modular approach to working magic, where some of the elements of the ritual would be customized to align the working to a specific kind of magical power for a specific material objective. This is the methodology that is used in the magical order the E.S.S.G. All of the ritual workings consist of basic ritual structures that are pulled together with some elective attributes chosen to build a specific magical working for a specific purpose.

These are the nine rituals that represent the basic body of modular and reusable rites that are used to build the rituals workings of a basic magical practice. Let me list them here, and as you can see, there are a few more than the seven used in the book DGRM.

1. Consecration of the Magick Temple
2. Consecration of the Magick Grove
3. Pyramid of Power rituals (used to invoke one of the 40 Qualified Powers)
4. Rose Ankh Vortex ritual
5. Gate of Transformation
6. Assumption of the Grail Spirit
7. Ritual of the Lunar Mysteries
8. Ritual of the Solar Mysteries
9. Prefect Initiation Ritual

In addition, there were also rituals for tool (hallows) consecration, a divination vortex, mystery rite of the higher self and an elemental invocation rite. There were also chapters to outline the concourse of forces for the Qualified Powers, explain the quality and issues with godhead assumption and how to approach a transformative self initiation. The chapter that examined the foibles and profundities of godhead assumption (book 2, chapter 12) was probably one of the real gems in this volume, but the whole book with its nine rituals was something unique and highly useful amongst the available books on ritual magic.

The third volume was the ‘key’ that would guide the practitioner in developing a set of tables of correspondence that would be used to customize the body of rituals so that they would represent the spiritual and magical perspective of the practitioner. Those tables were the key that had to be developed first. The whole purpose to these three volumes was to instruct the practitioner into how to develop and deploy their own personal system of magic. In this volume I went over all nine rituals and showed where and how to modify them to produce a more personalized magical rite. The basic set of rituals thus customized would act as the essential foundation for further magical experimentation and developing ever more effective and complex magical lore.

This book, then, is for someone who already has a basic level of magical knowledge and experience and who wanted to develop their own magical system. This, then, is the first step of the magical system builder, and once such an approach to ritual magic is understood then it only whets the appetite for further development.

Yet further progress would require the ritual magician to research more advanced methods of working magic, to explore the mechanisms for a fully developed magical system working with elementals, then talismans, evocation and finally the more advanced systems of Enochian magic of the Nephilim, Sacramental Theurgy, Tessarenoi, Abramelin Lunar rite, Archaeomancy, Talismantic Portae Lucis, and the Heptarchical (7-fold Stellar) Hierophantic Mysteries. That list represents what has been already developed in the grimoire of the Order of the Gnostic Star.

Frater Barrabbas

Frater Barrabbas Author Literary Tour - Part 2 - DGRM

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

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

Here is the official plug for that book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frater Barrabbas

Frater Barrabbas Author Literary Tour - Part 1 - The Beginning

 

 Logo Pyramid of Powers

 At the time of this article I have written a total of seven books. Five are in print, one is at the printers and one is in manuscript form waiting to be submitted to the publisher. In the Spring of 2023 I will have all seven books in print and I will be likely developing yet another. That’s a lot of books and materials on the occult, magic and Witchcraft, you might say. What is driving me to write down everything I know about these topics? I can safely say that there seems to be a spiritual force that is inspiring me, and also my methodology for working magic is quite different than the ceremonial magician or the traditional Witch. I am something of an anomaly, a hybrid between various modern traditions of pagan religion and the practice of ritual magic. I have gone through many phases of my work and practice, but the books that I have written represent the later fruits of my work and do not represent all of the places where I have been nor my original path.

There was a time when I heavily engaged and studied Gnosticism, and there are still some elements of that topic which appeal to me, but I have pretty much rejected the antinomian perspective that nature is somehow corrupt and negative. I am just too much of an optimist to have such a dreary attitude towards nature, and life itself. I could never ditch my sentimental attachment to the natural world, and after all these years I stand in awe of everything that I have seen and experienced within the spectrum of nature and natural habitats. I certainly haven’t seen everything, and in fact I am less traveled than many; but still nature is something that I feel deeply attached to and will not forsake what I feel is intrinsic to my faith as a pagan and a witch. Gnosticism was sort of a fad for me, and I am much less passionate about it than I was 30 years ago, back in the early 90's.

The topic of Qabalah is another one of those areas of occult study that I was deeply engaged with over the decades but now it is less interesting to me. I have even written a book on the topic, and some have said that it is one of the better books in print. Yet after writing that book and doing all of the research that was required to accurately represent it in a completely cogent manner, I discovered that the Qabalah was not actually very relevant to my work as a ritual magician and a Witch. I will write another article about that book and why I came to find the Qabalah a useful methodology but not the panacea that other occultists believe it to be.

What I wanted to discuss is that my literary career started many years before my first book was ever published in 2007. We are talking about a span of time from around 1991 to 2007 when I published my first book, based on some of the material that was in that original work. My first attempt at writing was a book I named "Pyramid of Powers," named after the ritual I developed to project a masculine energy field, similar to the cone of power. The reason why I wrote this book and for whom were individuals who had joined the magical order of the Gnostic Star and found the beginning rituals to be a bit too difficult to readily master. Two of my acquaintances from when I had lived briefly in Dallas had decided to adopt the rituals of that order into the regimen and become initiates. They visited me a couple of years later after I had moved to Tallahassee, FL.

However, concepts that I took for granted, such as the vortex, using the cardinal directions and the angles, the pylon, the western and eastern gateways seemed based on an underlying magical technology that they had never seen before. They didn’t have me around to show them how these rituals worked, and they were more experienced than their friends and potential members. If my two friends couldn’t explain what a vortex was and how it was able to work then they couldn’t explain that to their friends. They asked if there was some kind of underlying documentation that they could read and study in order to understand how to employ these rituals. In fact, they said if I could provide them with a set of rituals that were more basic and easier to understand, along with a body of lore to give them background, then they could master these rituals and ultimately begin mastering the lore of the order.

Of course, what they were asking for didn’t exist, and in fact, because I had been the main teacher and the developer of this lore, the mother temple in Kansas City had ample opportunity to hear me explain and even demonstrate how these rituals worked. Since this lore was also developed gradually level by level with the participation of the group, there wasn’t any need for me to provide simpler rituals for beginners to introduce them to these concepts nor any deeper explanations to describe how they functioned. It was a strange experience for me to explain how a vortex worked to my friend “Fish” from Dallas who understood the cone of power, but was unable to fathom how a vortex could possibly function without causing the energy field of the magic circle to collapse altogether.

I had to scratch my head for a bit on that one, but was able to explain that the vortex was established inside a magic circle, and that the circle functioned as a sacred boundary, and whatever occurred within that boundary didn’t violate or interfere with the proper external magic circle. Learning to work with these concepts, at least for a beginner, was something of a leap of faith. My friends told me that while I could explain these concepts to them and even show them how they worked when they visited me in Tallahassee, they would find it quite difficult to explain it to their colleagues.

It was at that point I realized that the ritual lore of the order needed a set of beginner rituals and a thorough explanation of how they worked so that one might be able to later learn and operate the more advanced rituals in the order. That was my inspiration, and I set to work on it immediately after my friends had left to return home. I would write up a complete set of lore that was easier to understand and operate, and in fact, it would resemble a more ritual magical version of what I had been using in my days as a Witch priest and coven leader.

Once I started with this task, I discovered that it was not as simple as just writing a series of rituals. I had to explain the whole basis of my ritual technology, and my writing skills were woefully inadequate to accomplish that goal quickly. While I may have written my last book in around 80 days, I could hardly be able to write what would become a three volume book in that kind of time. I took me five years to write my first book, and it was not very well written either. I was organized enough and had a good chapter structure to follow, but my ability to write was rudimentary, and my earlier writings were barely readable. I had to learn how to write non-fiction, so it was a long and torturous writing process for me. I begged some friends to help me edit that work, but even then it was poorly written and did not have the kind of easy access and readability that my books and articles have today.

I can recall printing out all 500+ pages of the three volume book and taking it to Kinkos and having them make books with colored covers and a spiral binding to hold the pages together. I still have a couple of copies, but it was at least good enough to help individuals learn about my magical technology and to then have the understanding and background to make use of the many rituals and ceremonies that were part of the legacy of the E.S.S.G. or the Order of the Gnostic Star. Completing this task whet my appetite for writing and in the process made me a good enough writer to actually consider writing a book on magic and getting it published. It is typical that the first book that we write takes years to produce, but never gets published. That is not exactly what happened to me, but overall the book Pyramid of Powers was never actually published, at least in the format that it was at that time. More on that in the next couple of episodes of the Frater Barrabbas literary review.

Since I had written a massive three volume book, I did have a lot of material already written up to serve as the source for future books. I would need to rewrite sections, add new sections and remove other materials, but my first book would serve as the source for my next two books.

Frater Barrabbas