Calends Meditations and Insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frater Barrabbas

Banner Year 2024 for Frater Barrabbas

The Winter Solstice is here, and as we celebrate the various holidays associated with this time of year, I often pause to reflect on what I have accomplished over the year and what I can look forward to in the coming year. Yet this coming year is very different for me than any previous year in the last decade or so. I have been working very hard with my new publisher, Cross Crow Books, since I was let go by Llewellyn, and by the end of year in 2024, I will have ten books in print with another one forthcoming early in the following year. That is, in my opinion, quite an accomplishment.

I am quite pleased with my work so far, and I am also pleased with the response that I have gotten from my publisher. It is quite a contrast from where I was with Llewellyn a year ago. Then, I had signed a contract for “Sacramental Theurgy for Witches,” but there was no sign of when or how that book project would get to the first stage, which was the ‘vision’ marketing meaning. It was then, in March that I received notice that Llewellyn had rejected my book and broke their contract with me. I was able to get another contract from Crossed Crow Books in a matter of days, and I have decided to work with them on my book projects. They treated me in an exceptional and courteous manner, which included face to face Zoom meetings to discuss strategies and approaches to marketing and promoting my books. They signed on to complete the five volume “For Witches” series, to republish my first two books, “Disciple’s Guide” and “Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick” after some revitalizing editing, a beginner’s book on Witchcraft named “Mastering the Art of Witchcraft” and two new books, “Liber Nephilim” and “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal.” I have signed contracts for all of these book projects, and I am about to get the first of these books in the next couple of weeks.

Additionally, the eight projects that I discussed in a recent blog and possibly whatever else I come up in the years ahead will likely be published by them. I have a home for my books, or at least as long as CCB continues to be in the publishing business. My publisher also have a contract with Weiser to distribute their entire catalog of books along with their own, so I will get the same distribution or more if I had continued being a Llewellyn author. That’s great news for me to enjoy and be thankful for in the coming year. Never even in my imagination would I have thought that I would get to see eleven of my books in print. What this means is that my long ambition to get my ritual tech out there in the English reading public’s hands has now come to fruition, and there will be more of these book in the next five years, if my health can continue to be as sturdy as it has been so far.

So, what is coming out into print and what are the dates that these books will be released in 2024? Let me look at the calendar and mark those dates when these six book projects will be available for purchase. As I said, it will be a banner year for the author Frater Barrabbas.

Here is the schedule, although it may be subject to minor changes. Rest assured that the books will out in print, although there could always be slight delays depending on the stages of type-setting, page layout, printing and binding.

“Sacramental Theurgy for Witches” - scheduled release date is February 6, 2025. I should be getting pre-release copies in the next week or two. This book is the one that I felt was the most important of the five books in the “For Witches” series. It was the book rejected by Llewellyn as unmarketable, so we shall see if their assumption was correct through the next couple of years. I seriously doubt that this book will do poorly in the occult book marketplace, especially since it is distributed by Weiser and it has three other books in the series to bolster it. I am probably biased about this book, yet only time will tell.

“Mastering the Art of Witchcraft” - scheduled release date is July 16, 2024. I had said often enough that I would never write a beginner’s book on Witchcraft, and here it is. There must be some irony here, as in you should never say “never” when considering some project. However, this book is radically different than any previous or near future book written on the subject, and it does honor to Paul Huson and his book, “Mastering Witchcraft” published in the early 1970's. That was an important book for me when it came out, and I am hoping that my book will be as influential as that book has been.

“Transformative Initiation for Witches” - scheduled release date is August 20, 2024. This is the last book in the “For Witches” series, and it adds additional initiatory lore to the practicing Witch and the Witchcraft community. The full set of five books covers the spectrum of ritual magic, liturgical and initiatory rites that are above and beyond the traditional Book of Shadows. I believe that armed with these five books and the base-line Witchcraft tradition that a Witch or Pagan will be able to master the art of ritual magic in a manner that I believe would make ceremonial magicians envious. Once that set of magical and liturgical lore is mastered, a Witch would be able to stand eye to eye with any person trained in a ceremonial magical tradition in the Western Mystery Tradition. I am also hoping to convince the Malliway Brother’s store to produce a slip case for all five books in the series, with some nice promotional eye-candy graphically printed on it for their store.

Summer ends and blends into autumn, and there will be three more books released during that period for the year 2024. At this point in the year, I will have published everything that I sought to publish on the art of ritual magic as practiced in Witchcraft. However, that perspective was not how I started out as an author, and additionally there is an accumulation of 30 years of lore that I have only just begun to write up and get published into books. The magical order that I helped to found back in the 1980's was the mechanism where I was able to funnel what I had ordinally developed in the 1970's, and since those strategic years, I had continued my work and developed ever more advanced and sophisticated ritual magical lore. Only this year have I started to assemble manuscripts that will contain the more advanced lore that I developed in the 1990's, 2000's and 2010's. As I said, I have been busy over the last 30 years, and the books that I will produce will contain the bulk of that lore.

“Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick” - scheduled release date is September, 2024. This is the first book that I wrote back in 2006, and it represents my attempt to distill in a simplistic manner the kind of ritual tech that I was performing at that time. I have talked about my very first book that I wrote, named “Pyramid of Powers” that was never actually published. This book was a simplified and condensed version of that work, and it had the benefit of offering to the student a set of basic rituals to be used, based on a kind of paganized Christian Grail mythos. While I had moved on from this work and the second one in that series, other occultists have told me that it was a valuable book and should be kept available. It is a beginner’s book for magical practitioners, so I felt that it would be useful to republish it after some extensive editing, and my publisher happily agreed with me. So, in September, this book will become available again in a newly revised edition with a new cover. Like my other books, it will be distributed much more widely and likely gain a greater share of readers.

“Liber Nephilim” - scheduled to be released in October, 2024. This is the first book in a new series of books that I will be publishing that contains the more advanced lore that I had developed previously but had never made available to my reading public. I had proposed that the source of the Enochian system of magic was originally from the fallen angels known variously as the Watchers, Sons of God or the Nephilim. I have had a long and fruitful relationship with these angelic spirits, and they had urged me to write up their lore and their revelations for the occult reading public to examine. It is a task that I had put on the back-burner for decades, but finally I had the time and opportunity to pull together all of the materials and rituals that I had and to produce a manuscript that could be published. I think that this book will be quite controversial, but it will help to promote the lore and reveal the identities of the Nephilim to the occult community. This book, unlike any of my previous books, will be sold in soft and hard cover editions. There will also be a custom hand bound collector’s edition produced in the following year.

“Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick” - scheduled to be released in December, 2024. This was my second book published, and it was a repackaging, revising and rewriting of my original book “Pyramid of Powers.” When it was originally released, it consisted of three separate books, and then a few years later, it was pulled together into a single volume, which turned out to be the most satisfactory approach to publishing it. It became known as the omnibus edition, and unknown to me, it had quite a small and loyal following. I have, over the recent past, received some praise and accolades for publishing this book, although like the first book, I had passed it by to publish a book on the Qabalah and then a book on conjuring spirits using a familiar spirit for the Witchcraft community. That was the first book in the “For Witches” series. This book will be edited and printed with a new cover in December and then more heavily distributed. Hopefully, more readers will be able to acquire this book and perhaps build their own base-line magical and religious tradition, since that is the stated purpose of this book.

I am already working on the book “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal” and I should have that book edited, with citations, graphic insertions, bibliography and an index list in the next three weeks. I have already talked about that book recently in my blog, so I don’t need to say anything more about it here. While I cannot know for certain when this book will be released, I suspect that it will likely be released either February or March, 2025. I will have celebrated my 70th birthday by then, but I will still have at least six or seven book projects that I will be working on. This book will be my eleventh book published since the first one appeared in print in 2007. It will be the second of my high ritual magic series of books, and it, too, will be available in soft and hard cover editions as well as a hand bound collector’s edition. I am looking forward to when it is finally in print.

This schedule of events represents for me the release of six books, seven if you count the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, to occur over the course of a single year. That is quite an accomplishment, and one that I am happy to report to you. My hope is that I will be able to hear from my readers over the next few years, letting me know how they have used this material that I have written and published, and what kind of experiences they got when employing it. That could almost be enough folks some day to have a one time convention of interested parties to discuss and present this lore as one of the viable paths for Witches and Pagans practicing ritual magic.

Frater Barrabbas

Are We Becoming Medieval?

 

As I read the news each day with a certain sobriety and sometimes, despair, I see our age becoming contaminated by perspectives, beliefs and opinions that would have been normal in the dark ages of the 12th century, but has no real place in our post modern world. Often, I feel that some of my fellow citizens are quite ignorant, misinformed, selfishly motivated, self-absorbed and incapable of seeing any higher purpose in life outside of their narrow communities. This is not the majority of the citizens of our nation who are so indisposed, but enough of them to either vote to end our representational democracy or not even bothering to vote at all.

What really concerns me is the ascension of racism, bigotry, religious sectarianism, overall stupidity that appears to plague primarily individuals who espouse to be politically conservative. They seek to completely overturn the very thing that makes our country unique, and that is the inherent principals of civil equality, democracy, religious freedom, freedom of the press, and personal civic responsibility. What they seek to replace it with is autocracy, oligarchy, and minority rule by a Christian Nationalistic political entity. They seek a kind of medieval religious theocracy consisting of white Christian power-elites and their favored minions, dominating a disenfranchised public of minority races, non-white ethnicity, minority religious adherents, and those who are not part of the cis-gender and heterosexual population. It has often proven to be true that those who part of the disenfranchised other are often persecuted, discriminated against, exiled, and when that can’t be done, even exterminated.

When I was a young man, there were many politically fringe groups on both the left and the right political sides who were readily dismissed by mainstream political organizations of both conservative and liberal perspectives. These were the members of the John Birch Society, Neo Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, survivalists, gun-nuts, and other groups who sought to overturn and subvert our nation’s principles of civic equality. They had one common foundation, and that was a form of Protestant Christian nationalism. Yet these groups were vilified, mocked and shown to be basically against the majority who did believe in civic equality and other principles sacred to a republic. When I was a Witchling, I paid them no heed, but I was aware of certain aggressive Christian movements in my youth culture, such as the Jesus Freaks and the Moonies. However, the incident of Jones Town showed that any kind of religious extremism led to very unfortunate circumstance and should be avoided by all as a pathway to personal destruction. I had to fight against the intrusiveness of some fringe Christians, but otherwise, these groups were not something that I encountered or had to contend with at that time.

That was back in the 1970's, but in the 1980's Christian fundamentalism became popular along with Reagan Republicanism, and I noticed that some of these disaffected fascist groups were becoming more legitimate. Klan members and skin-head Nazis were not welcomed, of course, but that would unfortunately change over time, as the conservative political movement was revitalized in the post Watergate era by a form of religious nationalism. What I didn’t know was that this rebirth of popular conservatism in the 1980's went hand in glove with Dominionists and Evangelical Fundamentalists who saw the critical need to reform American in a manner that they thought agreed with their religious beliefs and perspectives. Through the 1990's and into the 2000's, this engagement with Christian Nationalism became ever more firmly entrenched in conservative politics. Still, the mixing of religious absolutism and national politics has always been a toxic brew, and the founders of the United States sought to eliminate that possibility by ensuring that the institutions of the government were separate from the church and completely secular to deal equitably with all people regardless of their faith. That separation was being challenged in a pernicious manner by the conservative-based Christian Nationalists.

I have always found that Christian fundamentalism deals with an obviously complex world in an overly simplistic fashion. It is based on the premise that Protestant Christian values and beliefs are absolute truths that cannot be denied or refuted. It promotes one set of ideas over all others, and denigrates all other religious traditions as false and inspired by the Devil. I have been told too often by individuals who are drunk on this delusion that because I am a Pagan and a Witch that I will be condemned to eternal hellfire if I don’t repent and become reborn in Jesus Christ. I can argue that their faith doesn’t contain any absolute truths, and is only subject to the context of their beliefs, which are completely different than my own. I am steadfast in this belief, but Christian fanatics to whom I have revealed this bit of truth act as if it beyond their mental abilities, and perhaps it is. There are no absolutes in the religions of the world except one, that they are based on a common human experience. This means that the world religions are either all valid, or none of them are valid. One religion alone cannot be the sole arbiter of truth.

My faith is backed by many decades of experience, but it resides within the context of my religion. I would never use those experiences as a means to negate the religious experiences of anyone else if they practice a religion that is decidedly different than my religion. Those who do not adhere to a religious perspective are not subject to it, whether throughout their lives or in the supposed after-world. An atheist is not afflicted by either my religious beliefs nor the religious beliefs of anyone else in the world. That is how things really work, so for some Christian to tell me that I am in error and that I am going to hell because of my faith, I can dismiss them as profoundly misinformed. I am at peace with this perspective of world religions, and with the firm knowledge that my faith is as legitimate as the faith of anyone else.

However, the dark times appear to coming upon us in this sad nation of political and spiritual turmoil. We had to endure four catastrophic years of a Donald J. Trump presidency, and it appears that we are once again poised on the precipice of the fall of democracy as he seeks to regain the powers of the presidency for a second, and likely, final time for us all. It would seem that the astonishingly incompetent, ignorant, racist, bigoted, corrupt, and autocratic tendencies of this man are considered not only as celebrated bonifides, but he is considered to be a Christ-like personality sent to redeem our nation, at least in the eyes of Christian Nationalists. He has also brought into his following all of the nasty far-right fringe politics of the Klan, Neo Nazis, Birchers, and sectarian Christian Nationalists and allowed them to occupy  the forefront of his political movement. This event has transformed the current Republican party into the Party of Trump, and even when he is finally gone, that legacy will continue to live and perhaps, even thrive.       

I am inspired to vote again next year to help make certain that Trump and his party of fascists will be denied the power that they crave. I will tell all my occult and Witchcraft friends and allies not to vote for  party because our freedom to worship and to practice as we see fit will be in jeopardy. In this coming electoral year, like 2020, we will be experiencing an existential threat to all that we hold dear regarding our representational democracy, because Trump has declared himself to be the final candidate solution to what he and followers think is wrong with this nation. What he and his red cap followers seem to miss is that he and his Republican cult worshipers are the malady that afflicts our country.

It is not liberals, the Democrats, the Deep State, the immigrants, the gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, queer folk of all strips, not to mention those who are not conservative Christians, like Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Neopagans, Witches, occultists and esotericists of all types that are to be blamed for the crisis confronting our nation. It is Trump and his cultists who the very serious problem facing us, and we who not part of this crowd (and are the majority, I might add), should vote them out of power to such a degree that the Republican Party will cease to exist. That is what I am advocating, and I believe firmly that anyone who votes for these clowns are themselves the true enemy of the people and the government of the United States.

If by some chance, we succumb to our own selfishness and not relieve the nation of this threat through our votes, then I suspect that our ability to vote will begin to be diluted until it disappears, making the U.S. into another autocratic state. At that time, I will likely have to move to another country, probably Canada, to continue to live, believe and practice my faith and magic as I see fit to do. Such freedoms will disappear in American, and I am certain that I will be part of the population that will be rounded up and sent to a concentration camp to be worked to death or exterminated.

Think that I am joking about this possibility?  Am I spouting too much hyperbole? The door to autocracy was briefly opened on January 6, 2021, and then shut, but it was a near thing that might have ended our democracy. That was just a dress rehearsal for what it coming in 2025.  As members of a minority religion and its practices, we are a vulnerable people, and Christian Nationalism sees us as a threat to their beliefs and to the kind of nation that they seek to build. We are also expendable, and few will protest or seek to intervene when the Trump black-shirts come to arrest us and relocate us to what will be our final destination - an early grave. These red cap fanatics, these MAGA adherents will have no scruples when it comes to attacking their presumed enemies, and the Christian Nationalists will be setting the tone and establishing their targets of interest. At that time, we will likely be doomed.

However, if we en-mass go out and vote against these evil and corrupt politicians and deny them their offices of power and privilege, then we can start to push back against the blight that infects our land. I don’t seek revenge or retribution for the masses who have been suckered into voting for Trump and the Republicans, I only seek to assist in their education and to help them acquire some compassion for people who are different then them. Yet if they deny themselves this rebirth of knowledge and insights, then they can crawl back into the rural quagmires where they came from, bereft of power and civic consideration.

I have hope for the coming year, but I am also looking at Canada as a last ditch refuge from the American Nightmare. Our nation will either reject fascism as it once did in the 1930's, or become another medieval failed nation-state, like so many others that are falling in this so-called century of enlightenment and post modernism.

Frater Barrabbas

Writing Abramelin Lunar Ordeal

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frater Barrabbas

Writing of Liber Nephilim

 

Many years ago, back in 1990, I started on a magical journey that led me to evoke the four chiefs of a body of fallen angels named the Nephilim by some, but who were known as the Beni Elohim, or Sons of God. They were a part of the angelic host known as the Watchers. How did that journey start out? Where did I get the idea that these angels even existed and were an important part of the occult and magical lore from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, Dr. John Dee, Enochian magic and to the 20th century Golden Dawn, Thelema and to the present century. There was no documented evidence to even support such an imagined connection and lineage. Did I make all of this up, and perhaps this is why many magicians, occultists and the scholars of the Enochian system of magic found my claims to be unsupportable and possibly irrelevant?

How it started was when I was in college studying Classical Hebrew, and someone turned me on to Genesis, chapter 6. I had not been much of a Bible scholar prior to my studies of the Hebrew Tenach, so I was unfamiliar with this odd chapter and what it signified. This was also the time when I was a member of the Alexandrian coven from hell in Milwaukee, and what I was studying in college was both inspired and echoed in the coven. That’s because this coven was a particularly high-magic group, which was engaged in developing the Golden Dawn material and scant grimoire magic that was available at the time. I found in the college library a copy of “A Dictionary of Angels” by Gustav Davidson, and that book gave me a list of the Nephilim angelic chiefs and pointed me to the apocryphal “Book of Enoch” where I began to study whatever had been written about these fallen angels. At the time, I had not yet determined either how to access them or if that was possible or even desired. They were a curiosity because I did not find these fallen angelic spirits listed in any of the grimoires that I had access to.

Some years later, I was studying the Enochian system of magic and had gotten a copy of Meric Causabon’s book that reproduced a number of John Dee’s diaries. While I had studied all of what was available on Enochian Magic at the time, most notably the books by Crowley and Mather’s Golden Dawn, there was little else available except the raw diaries themselves, which I now was able to study. One item that caught my attention was when Dee stated that he was seeking the wisdom of Enoch when engaging with Edward Kelly in their famous scrying sessions. This is why the system of magic that they uncovered in these sessions was called the Enochian system of magic.

However, since the Book of Enoch that I had studied linked that patriarch with the Nephilim, and that Enoch had acted as an intercessor between Yahweh and the Nephilim, I felt that there must be a connection of some kind between the Enochian system of magic and these fallen angels. While Dee never made such a connection, I saw it as a striking possibility. I also found where the whole process of the revelation of the Enochian system of magic was begun. It started in the early scrying sessions where Dee and Kelly conferred with same the four Archangels who were reputed to have imprisoned and sealed away the angels of the Nephilim, according to the Book of Enoch. That was an odd coincidence, and I sensed that if I invoked and approached these same four Archangels who had sealed the mysteries and magic of the Nephilim that perhaps they would allow me to access them and begin to retrieve what I believed was additional Enochian magical material.

Now many of those occultists and ceremonial magicians who were working the Enochian system of magic believed that the cannon of lore began and ended with Dee’s diaries. While Dee did engage in additional scrying sessions after the defection of Kelly, these sessions were a pale imitation of what had previously been produced. Thus, the period when Dee and Kelly were engaged in these scrying sessions represents the whole universe of Enochian lore. What occultists and magicians were doing was refining and perfecting what was already developed and written down by Dee, but not inventing or producing anything new. This fact was surprising to me since one would think that getting back in touch with the spirits that Dee had communicated with centuries ago would be something that anyone who sought to work this system would have done once they knew the lore sufficiently to perform an invocation.

So, my supposition was to embark on a whole new trajectory and therefore identify the Nephilim as the source of the Enochian system of magic, if indeed there was a connection. For some reason, I emotionally felt that this was an undeniable fact, and acting on it, I began a series of magical workings and ordeals starting in 1990 to seek that link between the Enochian system of magic and the Nephilim. Instead of researching the materials that existed or any other that might be in some unknown collection, library or museum, I decided to perform rituals invocations to get the information that I sought straight from the source. It does surprise me that no else has thought of doing this kind of operation, at least none that I have heard about. Since Dee and Kelly got their information from the spirits, why not invoke those same spirits and get them to reveal yet more new lore? Anyway, I suspect that my approach was quite unorthodox, since we must assume that no one can replicate when Dee and Kelly accomplished, or can we?

If you ask the spirits a pointed question, in most case they will give you an answer. However, if you don’t ask them a question, such as who were the Nephilim and how can I get in touch with them today, then I believe that the spirits will not give out that information voluntarily. It is part of the multiple layered mysteries surrounding some spirits, particularly those angels who fell to earth because of their love of mortal women, and by extension, humanity. I had to pointedly ask the question, and when I did only then was the mythic-based truth revealed to me. I got the four seals (to access the Nephilim) and the blessings of the four archangels that I invoked. They informed me that the angels known as the Nephilim were sequestered by their own will, and that the archangels only assisted them. That was intriguing to me, so when I specifically went through a process of evoking four of the chiefs of the Nephilim what I discovered completely surprised me and also inundated me with new lore. They told me in their own words that not only were they the secret authors of the Enochian system of magic, but there was far more material available that hadn’t been revealed to Dee and Kelly.

That’s not all that was revealed to me during those workings. I also discovered that the supposed mortal women that they fell to earth to mate with were actually the daughters of Lilith, who had their own powers and magical lore, and became the witches and demon queens of infamous Jewish folklore renown. What I had inadvertently stumbled across was a massive store of various kinds of metaphysical, magical, occult and witchcraft lore that was, for all extent and purposes, completely untapped. It was waiting for someone or some group of people to explore, develop and disseminate it to the world. The volume of lore was too great for me to independently derive and develop, but because I was so isolated in my pursuit and what I was working with was outside of the boundaries of known and expected lore, there were few to none for me to share this lore and the connections that they implied. I was the only one who actually worked with these spirits over the following decades, even though I made this lore and the associated rituals available to my brothers and sisters in the Order of the Gnostic Star. The chiefs of the Nephilim begged me to publish this ritual lore and the background mythology to the public in a book, but I either did not have the time nor the skills required to effectively take on such a writing project.

Now, after have written and published nine other books, and having the time, I assembled the relevant material that I had collected over the years and selected what I thought would be best to include in a book that contained both an introduction to my ideas, the mythology, rituals and experiences based on my diaries from the time. This new book that I will be publishing and should be out in October 2024 will likely become a major contribution to the practice and development of the Enochian system, or it may produce a whole new tradition based wholly on new material. Will those who purchase it build the rituals and perform the working to experience what I experienced over 30 years ago? Only time will tell how this book is received, and what effect it will have. Can it be used to change the foundation for working with the Enochian system magic? Should this new lore even be called Enochian anymore? This might be the inauguration of a new magical tradition, to be named after the Nephilim instead of Enoch.

I encourage my readers to purchase this book when it is released and then read it over to discover what I experienced years ago, and then decide what to do with this ritual lore. How shall you proceed? Do you take the sanctioned path or the unsanctioned path? Should you evoke the chiefs of the Nephilim and find out what they know, see if it matches what I have said it does regarding potential new magical and occult lore. That, of course, is the way to test my hypothesis, and I wait for the time when there are other magicians out there who have experienced what I experienced and who want to talk about the future of this path. I look forward to that day.

Frater Barrabbas

Why the Energy Model of Magic is Important

 

Since the grimoire-only crowd and their ritual tech has become quite popular, they have espoused a spirit-only model of magic. That approach has given short shrift to a perfectly acceptable, and I might add, useful model of magic, which is a major part of a number of different, albeit, modern systems of magic. While it is true that the learned and literate of the previous age believed that humanity lacked any kind of personal power to effect the world around them, we now know that this is no longer the case. Human beings have a greater potential to effect the world around them, and they also have an innate magical power or energy to be able to do so. These ideas about human energy have come from Eastern metaphysical traditions, but there is evidence that the philosophers of antiquity believed in the potential for humans to generate and project power or energy if suitably trained.

You might consider that whether one follows the spirit-only model or the energy model, the psychology model, or the stochastic chaos model, or the information model that it doesn’t really make much difference in the magic that is deployed. Additionally, most modern systems of magic employ more than one model simultaneously than only electing to use one model in isolation. Yet the question remains about why the energy model of magic is so important in the kinds of ritual tech that I employ? What do these techniques give to the magic that I perform?

First of all, the energy model of magic is tied to the breath and movement of the operator. The regulation of breath appears to alter the states of consciousness that one assumes, and movement brings to the ritual bodily projected energy, both thermal and bio-electric. These physical energy types are very minute, although the thermal energy of a crowd of people can be significant in an enclosed space. However, it is the altered state of consciousness combined with physical movement that makes magical energies perceptible to the magical operator. Add to that mixture of altered conscious mental state and bodily exertions the various occult symbology and tight ritual structures and you will get a potent output of energy that is tangible and perceptible. By itself, the energy model can promote an empowered will-base magical working that can and does have some limited success in bending the probabilities for an expected outcome. Combined with other models of magic and this methodology becomes a very potent and successful tool in adding magical power to working and making spirit workings assume a more tangible manifestation.

For instance, my ritual tech for projecting an elemental power toward a given objective uses the energy model to create a pentagram-based octagonal elemental vortex, along with invoking an elemental based spirit, sealed with a sigil symbolizing my objective. That combination of energy, spirit and information models of magic, with an implied psychology model (developing specific mind-states along with the spiritual intelligence of the Elemental Spirit) produces a ritual tech that can bend probabilities much readily than the energy model alone.

I also perform my workings under a godhead assumption and in alignment to my personal deity, thereby making the working into a form of theurgy. The octagon structure gives a structure to the generated energies, and the inward and outward spirals compress and release the imprinted energy field that is imprinted by the sigil and guided by the Elemental Spirit. This represents succinctly and all-model approach to performing a simple magical effect on an outward material condition. The more elaborate ritual tech that I employ uses even more complex ritual structures and layers them within the same working area of the eight-node magic circle. The greater energy concentration will produce materializations, especially if more exalted spirits are involved, such as Angels or Demons. In fact, combining these models into a single working makes it more effective and the objectives, whether material or spiritual,  more likely to be achieved.

As you can see, a multi-model magical approach that uses an advanced energy model of magic is much more effective and produces a greater range phenomena than if a magician were to adhere to just one single model, such as the spirit-only model used in traditional grimoire magic. I think that this single model approach to magic is very limited and far less effective. For the spirit-only model it relies on a mind-set and belief system that is more relevant to the 16th century than our post-modern times. This is particularly true for European and American systems of magic and the underlying modern metaphysics that is used in its foundation. The energy, psychological and informational models of magic are more modern by far, but they also have a historical provenance that spans other cultures and times.

What I have found is using the advanced energy model of magic in all of my ritual workings and ordeal makes these processes more intense, tangible and objective to co-workers. They manifest energies that can be felt and experienced even by those who have little experience with magic. A vortex used in a temple space, even when sealed, will continue to resonate on some level and be felt by others who might enter the temple where such magic has been performed. It gives greater emphasis to all magical operations and makes visual apprehension of the magic possible. I have trained myself to see the lines of force when they are drawn, including magical devices, gateways, pylons, vortices and energy compression spirals and energy exteriorization spirals. This allows me to perceive and experience the magical phenomena as it is being generated. I cannot conceive of a better way to gauge a magical operation than to have this ability to sense and perceive it, and the advanced energy model makes this all possible.

Want to know more about the advanced energy model in magic and how to employ it in your own magical workings? My book “Elemental Powers for Witches” is an excellent book that explains the energy model, its historical precedence, but more importantly, how to work this kind of magic and produce tangible results. It even discusses how to learn to see and sense this kind of magical power, and how it can be integrated into an evocation to make the spirit more perceptible and objective. I cannot recommend this book more emphatically then to state that the advanced energy ritual tech is what I have used in all of my advanced ritual workings. If you want to make such future books of mine such as “Liber Nephilim” and “Abramelin Lunar Ordeal” (available in 2024) accessible, then the book “Elemental Powers for Witches” is a critically important source to read and study.

Frater Barrabbas