It was a very interesting year for me, considering my writing endeavors with Witchcraft and ritual magic. I had completed my book “Talismanic Magic for Witches” and started to go through the process of revising it, submitting the final revised form to Llewellyn for production. I also wrote and completed “Sacramental Theurgy for Witches” and I will submit that project to Llewellyn by the end of February, where it will go through its revision process and ultimately into production.
I am presently writing the final book in that series, and that has the working title “Transformative Initiation for Witches,” and I should be done with that manuscript before the end of Spring 2023. There will be, once the last two books go through production and end up in print, five books in the “For Witches” series. The cover colors are related to gem-stone type hues, with the series represented by onyx, amber, amethyst, emerald and garnet. I am looking forward to walking into a lecture or a book signing some day with all five books under my arm. It is quite an achievement, and one that started in 2016.
Why did I write this series of books? I have put seven years of life into researching, developing and writing them, and they are all books with the traditional Witch or Pagan audience in mind. You might ask me the question, aren’t there enough books out in the public for the Witchcraft or Pagan community? Why do we need more of this kind of literature when the publishing world appears to be saturated with this media topic?
To answer this question you have to look at what is out there in the public domain. There are a lot of good books, but none of them cover the kind of advanced magical workings that my series touches on. The areas that I wanted to address in my books has to do with the magical and religious initiative of the individual Witch or Pagan seeking to perform more advanced kinds of magical workings that are just as cutting edge and relevant as what the ceremonial magical community are performing.
These works of mine will allow the Witch or Pagan to either access the work currently occurring in the magical community, such as with newly translated grimoires or historical research in the areas of magic and witchcraft, or to build their own independent comparable magical systems. It was my objective and hope that the reader of my books would work to build up their own magical system extended off of the baseline traditions of modern Witchcraft and Pagan magic. It is the path that I forged back in the late 1970's and early 1980's, and it is very relevant today, because I continued to develop these methodologies over the years. I have not been resting in my imaginary laurels. I have continued to reinvent my magic over the decades so that what I am presenting today is as fresh as it was back 40 years ago.
So, that is the answer to why I worked to write these five books. A deeper reason is that I had the pride and arrogance to believe that what I had started to develop years ago was an important contribution to the practice of Witchcraft magic, despite the absolute plethora of books in print now and for the foreseeable future. It is my legacy to pull together this lore and present it in an organized and accessible media for all other interested parties to examine it, and hopefully, to adopt some of it in their own workings. It is my belief and hope that such a prideful journey is not hopelessly corrupted by my own hubris, as is the case with many human endeavors to capture a lifetime of work in a series of books.
To answer the question of what I wrote, I can elucidate that answer here. There were, in my estimation, five different areas that were missing from the cannon of magical lore in the modern Witchcraft traditions. None of these methodologies are to be found in the traditional Book of Shadows. The five areas are as follows:
1. (Onyx) Spirit Conjuration including the acquiring of a familiar spirit and the mastery of the domain of spirit, ancestor worship, building a shrine of spirits and demigods, communicating with the spirits and accessing the spirit world, appropriating and making use of the old grimoires in one’s magic.
2. (Amber) Advanced Energy Magic - working with the four elements as the 16 Elemental Spirits and 40 Qualified Powers, developing energy structures beyond the cone of power to include the Pyramid of Power, magical Octagon, sigil creation, and other energy model of magic constructs.
3. (Amethyst) Talismanic Magic - working planetary and zodiacal magic, using the septagram to invoke and establish planetary intelligences, developing the mechanism to generate talismans, using the lunar mansions, zodiacal decans and septans, and performing celestial magic within a strict observance of the planetary day, hour and associated astrological auspices.
4. (Emerald) Sacramental Theurgy - enhancing the religious elements of Witchcraft magic to bring them into the ritual workings, godhead assumption reformation and full godhead personification, consecration rites of the mass, the benediction, and the Great Rite, creating sacred magical artifacts, animating statues or paintings with the essence of a godhead, operating within a sacred and magical grove, the assembling and performance of the Grand Sabbat.
5. (Garnet) Transformative Initiation - Differences between the scripted initiation rites and the process of psychological transformation, initiations beyond and below the tradition three, madness and enlightenment, dark night of the soul and its mitigation, the twenty-two stages of the hero’s journey as the cycle of transformative initiation, the stages of the heroine’s journey, harnessing the cycle of initiation to enhance and empower constructive forms of internal and external transformation, the key to spiritual evolution in the Witchcraft tradition.
These are the five areas that I address in the five books that are a part of the “For Witches” series of books. I believe that any Witch from any of the various traditions should be able to make use of the lore in these books and thereby enhance and expand their magical and liturgical work to include areas that are not typically defined in these traditions. The test will be relevancy within the tradition that one is following, the desire for more advanced methodologies and techniques of magic and the need to have a greater magical and liturgical impact within one’s mind, coven or group, or community at large. These books are not for everyone, and of course, some or all of them might not be relevant. However, for the typical magical practitioner who is also a Witch or Pagan, I believe that these books will help to build a more complete tradition, filling in the gaps that may exist in these practices.
While four of the books are under contract by Llewellyn, I believe that the fifth will also be published by them, since it is the last area not covered by the advanced lore that I have learned and mastered over the year. I expect to see all five books together in print by the summer of 2024, and I will then have completed my tasks, as I envisioned them back in 2016. While I did not anticipate five books in total, I knew that this series would fill in the gaps that I had to develop nearly fifty years ago. I am glad that my muse drew me through this intricate maze to help me produce these five books, and I look forward to when I can start writing other books in another series, to build on the legacy that I have established in my literary journey that started in 1992.
Frater Barrabbas
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