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
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