Writing of Ordeal XV

On June 13, I completed writing my latest book Ordeal XV. All that remains is to edit the manuscript, add citations, build a bibliography and an index list. The greater work of developing and revising the rituals has been completed, and it was quite an extensive amount of work. What I have written is now vastly more cogent, focused and directed towards achieving a specific end, which is the union of the magician’s shadow with their egoic persona. It is part of the preparatory work to becoming a master magician. I have already shared some of the introductory chapters as articles in my blog over the past several months, but I wanted to tell the tale of how I came to write this book. It is also a tale of how workings evolve over time, from highly personalized workings that are focusing only on a specific set of issues experienced at the time to become fundamental ordeals that cannot in some form be avoided by the evolving magician. This is one of those tales.

A basic premise in these kinds of workings is that a magician can fuse spiritual personalities or entities into a combined and unified being. This premise is based on how I perceive spirits, that they are very protean in formulation and that they can be merged with other entities. If a spirit can overlay itself when possessing a human being, then they can merge with other spirits to form a hybrid entity. This process of merging diverse entities into a single spiritual form has a long history, and it can be found particularly with pagan pantheons where a single master deity is shown to be a composite of many deities. 

There is a philosophic name for this process, and it is called Macranthropy. It is the creation of a meta-deity from a pantheon of many deities, allowing for the paradox of both focusing on a single unified deity as well as focusing on the individual deities within the pantheon. If this is a phenomenon associated within the pagan pantheons of earlier ages, then it is definitely something that can be developed in the practice of spirit conjuring in the present world. What I have discovered is that I can combine spirits into a single entity, and I have been doing this for decades. Yet I did not consult any authority to see if this could be done. Instead, I just approached it in an instinctive manner, and just assumed that it would work. And it did indeed work.

My first attempt at this type of merging spirits happened long ago in early 1981, and it was resounding success. My former High Priestess had put a death curse on me, and due to my sense of guilt at what I had done in that cult-like coven, I was not able to completely overturn it. When consulting my personal Goddess about this malady, she told me to evoke the Devil and turn my guilt, the curse and its associations over to him. As a precocious young magician, I developed evocations for three Demon Princess, who were Lucifer, Satan and Aiwaz, and performed them consecutively in a borrowed temple space of a close friend. I topped it off with another hybrid, and that was Sothis-Set. I was astonished at how successful this working was, and it became the model for an ordeal later on. So, I had three evocations, and I combined them into a single entity that I celebrated and implored to aid me in my plight, and celebrated it in my Tabernacle of Sothis-Set ritual and the corresponding Black rite. It was to this unified Devil that I sought deliverance from my guilt and retribution against my prosecutors.

What I didn’t realize is that combining these entities forged in that moment the nameless but fully empowered Shadow of myself, and it was that entity that purged me of my guilt and reversed the curse against the leaders of my former coven. It was so successful that my former leaders left the craft and became instead fundamentalist Christians, and I am certain that fear was one of the main drivers for their hasty conversion. They also moved away from southeastern Wisconsin back to their old home town of Dubuque, Iowa, where they set up their own church to dupe and indoctrinate another group of unknowing people. As for me, I was washed clean of my supposed sins and was able to move forward with my life, both in terms of my magic and my career. 

So, these rituals became the beginning part of my lore for Ordeal XV, and I continued to develop it for a time, even after performing it. I added another Demon Prince to the ordeal working, and that was Beelzebub, and I included the four different mass rites of Thelema, Thanatos, Agape, and Eros as the spiritual foundation for this ordeal. I wrote it up into a hardcover blank book, but it remained a personal ordeal and not part of the cannon of the later Order of the Gnostic Star. I had ironically relegated it to a lesser level of importance and so the rituals and lore were not further developed. I did perform the evocation of Beelzebub, but I found that he preferred to be called Ba’al Zebul or the Lord of the House of Heavens, as he had been named by the ancient Canaanites. 

All of the lore of that ordeal went into the book and there it remained, including the built out four variations of the Tabernacle of Sothis Set and the companion Black Rites. Because this ordeal was so controversial, especially for a ritual magician who was also a Witch (and therefore, denied that the Devil existed), this ordeal remained in my collection as an obscure system. I did type up these rituals so that they would be resident in my computer folder of rituals, and I even made an attempt to write a document to explain the necessity for this ordeal. However, I never promoted it and it remained one of the obscure and forgotten lesser ordeals in my collection. I didn’t really do anything further with this lore until only recently. So they sat there, on my computer, for some 30 years without even being examined except as a form of research. I did use a version of the evocation of Satan in my Liber Nephilim, or at least the planetary attributes, and I also used the methodology of joining spirits together (the four Seraphim and four Cherubim) in my ordeal, the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, which also became a published book.

Then, when I was recently talking to some folks at a pagan convention, I found out that the hot topic at the time was shadow work. It was a form of therapy where individuals, acting alone or in a group, or guided by a therapist, would engage with the dark half of themselves. This is because we are all coerced by society to behave within expected norms and to curb any other urges or behaviors that would be unacceptable. We are, therefore, all of us, repressed by our own sense of decorum and constrained to think and behave in a certain accepted manner. 

While we may leave behind beastly urges and unwanted primitive passions, we also typically repress our imagination and stifle our talents and unique abilities for the sake of conformity. There is a treasure house of powerful virtues and devilish impulses and desires within us, and as a collective archetype, it is an unnamed suppressed entity that C. G. Jung identified as the Shadow. To engage with this internal shadow is to relieve the egoic persona of various social and internal psychological pressures, and to gain abilities and insights that we had believed were not a part of ourselves. Thus, it is the path that ultimately leads to an internal, psychological wholeness, where shadow and ego merge together to forge an alliance. This is called shadow work, and it has become a very popular fad in today’s self-help literature.

When conducting research on the process of psychological shadow work and reading several books on the subject, I realized that our overall cultural shadow was the Devil, whether we believed in that entity in its various forms or not. I also understood that we all have our own internal devils and demons that we must somehow grapple and integrate into our egoic persona in order to be truly whole. However, most of the literature that was available did not address the obvious cultural shadow as the Devil, and they seemed to downplay the struggle and the danger of approaching one’s shadow, especially if it has been powerfully suppressed. While a few online authors discussed the importance of engaging with shadow work while under the care of a qualified therapist, others made it into a kind of New Age fad that practically anyone could engage in without any harm. I found this viewpoint specious, especially since Jung himself discussed how difficult and potentially dangerous such work might be to someone unprepared and inflexible to withstand the ordeal.

What I discovered when taking all this information into consideration is that I already had a magical ordeal that could be used for shadow work. This is because I had focused on the cultural Shadow known as the Devil, and believed that such an archetype would be the perfect emblem for any kind of magical based shadow work. I had equated the inner shadow to be analogous to the outer cultural shadow, and so it symbolized to me that our internal shadow is our very own personal devil. Using the approach that I had developed years ago as the forgotten Ordeal XV, I began to explore that idea, and the idea of the four churches or Gnostic Ecclesiae of the tetrasacramentary as the foundation for this work, I fully realized that redeveloping this ordeal would produce an intense and very successful ordeal of magical shadow work. 

That is when I began to develop the rituals for inclusion into a book, and revised the tone, perspective and approach so that the ordeal working would produce psychological transformative outcome of a powerful, integrative, joining between one’s internal shadow and the ego-based persona. Since I had undergone this ordeal so many years ago, and had added and developed it to a point, I felt that the final product would undoubtably do what I intended it to do. I used the theme of catabasis in the rituals describing ritualized descent into Hell, and I now feel quite good about the state of the manuscript, its revised rituals, and its controversial impact on my readers and the occult literary world.

I will sign a contract with Cross Crow Books to publish this manuscript, and before the end of August this year, I will submit the final version to my publishers. Since it takes at least a year or more for a book to go through the production process of editing, developing and printing a book, I suspect that it will not be released until early 2028. Until then, enjoy the articles I have written lately on this topic, and I look forward to final release of this amazing book.

Frater Barrabbas

Door into Summer

 

The Summer Solstice brings to my all of the wonderful and magical things that I have experienced during the summer months from my earliest recollections to now that I am an old geezer. This is interesting because summer magic is so different than what I have experienced as autumn and winter magic. I am a decidedly an autumn and winter kind of person, or at least late autumn and early winter. The dregs of winter before spring is a time where the magic of winter has completely disappeared and is just something that must be endured until rebirth of spring.

For me the start of summer was a release from the drudgery of school and the ability to be active outdoors without any kind of boundary or restraint. It was a time for vacations with my family, although that was a mixed bag of both good and bad, depending on the mood of my parents and how obnoxious we three kids were to each other. 

One of my earliest memories was when I was four and I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother when my father and older siblings had gone off to work and school. It was early June, before school let out. My mother did not work at that time, and so she was in her summer dressing robe and I was in my jammies, and the sun was brilliantly shining into the kitchen because it faced the east. Because the shades were down, the kitchen was cast in warm and beautiful golden light. A little later, I went outside to play while my mother began her daily chores. 

Summer time was idyllic, with the kids on the block playing games all day, going to the park and doing artwork or playing board games in the park building,  riding bikes, and being fully outside from morning to late afternoon, when we had to return home for supper at exactly 5 pm or receive punishment. After supper, we went out again and did not return until after the sun had set. Twilight was the perfect time to play hide and go seek or kick the can. It was all very magical, in a childish but wondrous way.

Despite those magical times when I was a child, as an adult ritual magician I have typically worked my greatest magic during the autumn and winter. In fact, after Summer Solstice, the magical order and temple that I helped to found closed because the members saw summer as a kind of recess from magical workings. The temple would close for the periods of July and August and not reconvene until September. However, summer is a magical time all unto itself, and I would be disingenuous if ignored what it has to offer. It is not a time to be cooped up in a temple, of course, and it is a time where magic and pagan liturgy would be shifted to the outdoors. In a grove, whether a part of my home, or at a pagan retreat, I have had many amazing experiences being fully immersed in nature. Yet nighttime is preferred by me over daytime, which is just my preference, since the magic of living and thriving occurs every single day during the summer months. This is because global warming has turned summers into periods of deadly heat, and only the shade and the evenings give folks a refuge or respite from the untenable and blazing sunlight.

From a mythic and pagan liturgical perspective, the boundary between spring and summer occurs when the light of the sun has reached its apotheosis. In the northern latitudes, vegetative life has fully awakened and the growing season has commenced. In northern Virginia where I live, summer weather actually occurs in May, so that Beltane is more like summer with leaves and plants resplendent and fully matured, and the flowers of spring have already faded away.  Still, the moment of the apotheosis of light that is the solstice, points to a mystical fact that darkness, death, and the wasting tides of winter are not permanent. The light shines through the gloom and illuminates the hearts and minds of the people of whatever religious stripe or creed, since it does not discriminate. Trees, plants and animals seem to rejoice, simply because there is the beginning of an abundance of food in various forms, whether warm sunlight and gentle rain, edible plants, and the fullness of life to prey upon for those who are predators. Summer is also light-hearted, adventurous, outgoing, flirty, downright sexual, and a paean to all things of the flesh and blood. It is also a sign post for transformative ascension, illumination, and conscious enlightenment. To occult neopagans, such as myself, the Summer Solstice is the beginning and the end, the moment of the highest spiritual and magical accomplishment, and the completion of all the work that occurred from autumn through winter and spring.

One of the ordeals that I developed, based on the writings of Jean Dubuis, was the Talismanic Portae Lucis, or Gateway of Light. A central magical operation within Mr. Dubuis’ occult system was a process whereby a person could achieve a direct connection and rapport with the powers and intelligences of the Supernal Triad. He called this the Experience of Eternity, and it was a necessary step for a magician to achieve the proper connection and linkage with their higher self. 

While Dubuis focused on the generation of talismans via the passive and auspicious method, and integrated spagyric alchemical medicine into the working, I found another way. What I did was develop a comparable methodology that used only talismanic magic to achieve a similar sort of powerful ascension and alignment. I generated metallic talismans for the Moon, Sun, and Saturn as the pathway from Yesod, to Tiphareth, and then to Binah on the Tree of Life. I used a metallic talisman for Mercury to represent myself as the theurgist. These talismans contained all four elements for each planet, representing a condensed magical artifact of four talismanic elementals fully active within it. These four artifacts were highly charged, consecrated, and then had four consecutive talismanic elements projected into them. They generated a powerful magical machine, and I used these talismans in a ritualized variation of the Portae Lucis on the exact moment of the Summer Solstice in the year 2012. Five years later I repeated that exercise, and both times were absolutely mind blowing.

I have annotated this entire journey through developing the Portae Lucis in my blog, and I think that you might find it interesting. I did this working back in 2012, which was 14 years ago, but I believe that it is worth sharing. I posted ten articles about my adventure, and you can find them in the following links.

Link 1 - beginning.
Link 2 - First working - Talisman of the Sun.
Link 3 - Second working - Talisman of the Moon.
Link 4 - Third working - Talisman of Saturn
Link 5 - Fourth working - Talisman of Mercury
Link 6 - Ordeal Preparations
Link 7 - Portae Lucis - part 1
Link 8 - Portae Lucis - part 2
Link 9 - Additional workings
Link 10 - Fifth Year Anniversary
 

I believe that the ordeal of the Talismanic Portae Lucis is where I truly opened the door into summer in a manner most becoming to an adept ritual magician. These experiences should be incorporated into a book, and someday they will. Right now, they are buried amongst nearly 500 blog articles, but they can be found just by using the index search for Portae Lucis. I decide on this Summer Solstice of 2026 to resurrect them here for you to read and examine.

Frater Barrabbas