Long Gap of Time

 

It’s been several months since I posted any articles to my blog, and maybe a few folks were wondering what happened to me. Well, a lot has happened on numerous fronts. First of all, I have relocated to a new home in Williamsburg, I have been writing a new book, and things have gotten really busy at my day job. The relocation has soaked up around two months of my time, and the fact that I am writing a new book has also taken me away from writing articles. Let me tell you about these interesting new events in my life.

As dismal and upsetting as the Trump 2.0 administration has been, I have tried to limit the amount of time that I would normally take reading the news. There is just far more bad and disturbing things going in our country and in the world today than what anyone other than a rightwing fanatic could stand, and to keep my sanity, I am instead picking and choosing the news that I read, ensuring that I am informed but not made angry and distressed from what I read. In late December I wrote an article that talked about taking a great leap from the year 2024 to 2025, but it seems more like the nation has fallen into the greater abyss, where gothic horrors hobnob with demons and monsters. Because I don’t have a government job, and because AI hasn’t made my work obsolete, I am somewhat insulated from these negative changes. I am witnessing my 401K fluctuate and I will need some luck in selling our old home in Richmond, but otherwise, I should be able to survive these changes, at least I hope.

I am, however, happy to report that I am making great strides working on my latest book project, which is titled “The Gnostic Tetrasacramentary” and contains all of the gnostic mass rites and liturgical ceremonies that have been a part of my magical regimen for decades. This book project will end up producing two volumes, since there is just such a large amount of rituals and ceremonies that I want to give to my reading public. Since I have published the books Liber Nephilim, Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, and soon to be published, the two volume set of Liber Artis Archaeomancy, and all of them require mass rites and liturgical ceremonies as an ancillary suite of practices, I felt it important to produce a book that includes all of those rites. 

I also spent time writing about the four gnostic churches that I use in my magical work, my approach to modern gnosticism, the sacred solar and lunar calendar, and how all that integrates into a system of theurgy. The first part of the book comprehensively explains my approach to employing the mass rite and its associated ancillary rites into a magical priestcraft practice. The second part contains the various rituals and ceremonies that I have used to facilitate a functioning public church, with mystery rites based on the sun and moon, the calendric grail cycle, and rites for the life cycle of the congregation, such as naming, handfasting, requiem and other rites and devotional exercises.

Writing this book has been a slow process, at least for the introductory parts, but I will be able to recommence work on this book project and complete it by the fall. There is also the final editing for my two volumes of Liber Artis Archaeomancy, and the republishing of my book on the Qabalah with a new title. While the previous two years have seen several new books being published, the next couple of years will be more modest. I have three more books in the planning stages and they won’t become actual book projects until either late this year or the next year. I believe that they won’t be in print until the following year (2027), so there will only be three book projects that will produce printed books next year. However, there will be two volumes for Liber Artist Archaeomancy, and two volumes for The Gnostic Tetrasacramentary, and one book for my republished Qabalah book, and that adds up to five books altogether.

If you are wondering how I can write all of these books in such a short period of time, then I can reveal that much of the material used in my books has already been written, especially the rituals and ceremonies, and the devotional discipline. While I am writing expositions and explanations to accompany these rituals, and I am revising the rituals and bringing them into compliance with my current writing skills and occult knowledge, much of the work of developing this lore was completed back in the 1980's, 1990's and the early 2000's. I consider it my spiritual obligation to publish these books so that my legacy is assured and my methodologies will be added to the public knowledge of ritual magic and its practices and spiritual obligations. I am fortunate to have a publishing company who is willing to take on these books projects and bring them into printed copies, and I am grateful for that opportunity.

One of events that I am quite happy about is that I have relocated to a new home in Williamsburg that will be able to house a fully functioning temple and possibly an outdoor grove. I have been without a temple and a grove since I moved from Minneapolis back in 2018, before the pandemic. The last major magical working that I performed was for the Summer Solstice of 2017. I am eagerly looking forward to this coming autumn, when the weather cools down and I will start up my magical workings once again. I am so delighted that this opportunity will once again become a staple in my life process. I have deeply missed having a temple in which to work my ordeals, and there is a lot of unfinished work and a number of ordeals that need to be renewed, particularly the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, for one, and some continued experimentation in Spiritual Archaeomancy, engaging with the transdimensional vortex gateway workings. I am really looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with these ordeals, but also just being able to say a votive mass and meditate in sacred space will do my soul a great deal of good.

While I stood on the precipice last December, examining all of the possibilities that confronted me, I hardly knew what was going to happen. I am glad that things are turning out to be fortunate for me so far this year, but I am also saddened and also angry at the political turn of events afflicting our country. Will we survive the malice motivated onslaught of the authoritarian rightwing MAGA-Republican political movement that is seeking to destroy our republic, or will we witness the end of our democratic government and the beginning of an entrenched oligarchy fueled by rightwing fanatics? This year and the next will determine what direction we will ultimately be dragged, and how successful the Trump regime will be in erasing the American aspiration of democracy and representational government. They have another 18 months to get it all done, and if they fail to implement their agenda by the end of next year, then we can look to the Democrats to shift the nation to the left, restore some semblance of democracy and neuter the current administration. That is my hope for the future, so that the American dream of democracy will not fail and be fully restored when a new Democratic president takes office in 2029.

Frater Barrabbas

Another Lammas Milestone - A New Temple

On August 1, 2010, a new temple of the Order of the Gnostic Star was duly chartered and established by a group of five individuals, which is the required minimum quorum. The new temple is officially known as the Binah-Ge Temple #2, which resides in the southeastern corner of Massachusetts. I am not only quite happy and proud that I can make this announcement, but it also brings up a couple of important points that I would like to discuss here. Anyway, let us all congratulate this group and the inauguration of their new temple! A great spiritual and magickal adventure awaits them. Soon they will be experiencing many amazing new things, since in addition to receiving a charter, they also got the Order’s first three years worth of ritual lore. Once they get through all of that, then more lore will be forthcoming. It will lead them from the first degree all the way through the seventh, all of which has been completely written and vetted over the last twenty years. I suspect that it will take them a number of years to master all of this lore, and while they are learning, they will be building up their own individual as well as collective magickal systems. I envy the wondrous visions and discoveries that await them, since that is what I and other members experienced many years ago.

The important points that I want to bring up at this time is that the Order of Gnostic Star is an active order with a complete set of magickal lore. That lore is available to groups who have the required minimum number of five members. I have made this statement before, but around a month ago, a group actually did contact me and requested to receive a charter for establishing a new temple. I have received these requests before, but usually after I point out the basic requirements as written in the Bylaws, potential members get cold feet and don’t bother to continue to correspond with me. This time the group spokesperson had not only read the Bylaws, but informed me that his group met the basic requirements. Those requirements are pretty basic, and they are easy to verify as well - even at long distances. They had five members who had been practicing ritual magick for at least a year together. They also had the requisite collective temple space. Over the period of couple of weeks, I got separate emails from each prospective member of the temple and even talked to their spokesperson on the phone a few times. I was convinced that they had met the requirements, so there wasn’t anything further to do other than issue them a charter.

Amazingly, I didn’t even have a template for a charter, since there wasn’t much need to produce one over all these years since the last temple folded. I consulted a facsimile of the old charter for the Isis-Sophia temple #1, but that didn’t prove to be useful either. So I used my imagination and inspiration and put one together, based on what I knew had been done in the past. The final result was quite impressive and looked very official, if I do say so myself. Now if anyone else asks me to present them with a temple charter, I will have one ready to go.

This, of course, brings me to my next important point. The Order of the Gnostic Star has become reconstituted! There are now at least two temples in formation. The first and the original mother temple, Isis-Sophia, is being reassembled with a combination of old members and new. A quorum of three elders is now fully established, ready to engage the public through the edifice of the greater Order. However, there is no grand lodge and there is no overriding hierarchy, only individual and fully autonomous temples. What this means is that we can now guide and help any small group of individuals to form their own temple, provided they meet the requirements. It also means that once a temple is chartered, it becomes fully autonomous. No one who is not a member of that temple may make any group based determinations. A group can ask for advice or guidance, but all decisions are theirs alone to make. In addition, all internal group decisions must be determined by consensus. That group dynamic ensures that the elders will never be able to dictate policy to any temple, so a decision to give a charter to a temple is serious business. A charter thus will be duly given once a proper group is validated. Included with a charter is the lore, which is the first three years of rituals and documents. These will be delivered on electronic media for the group to learn, master and use to forge their own systems of magick. All of this is done at absolutely no cost to the group who petitions the Order. Our generosity has an important cause in the greater scheme of things. We expect the new group to show generosity and openness in its turn. So there aren’t any hidden costs, strings, obligations or any additional requirements or expectations in this offer. It is given freely and openly to the greater occult community. As far as I am aware, there isn’t any other magickal Order that runs its business in this fashion - at least none that I have ever heard of.

The members of the Binah-Ge temple are a collective of witches and pagans from various source organizations. They have done their time in groves, covens and community based organizations, and they know the basic elements of ritual and ceremonial magick. They are a fairly experienced group of individuals, and I am very pleased to have made their acquaintance. I am also happy to have been of service to them, assisting them in finding the lore and the pathway to a full mastery of the Art of Ritual Magick. I am still traveling that path myself, and I have n’t finished it, so like them, we are travelers on the same basic path - the Western Mystery Tradition. I believe that in the years to come they will contribute some astounding new lore, discoveries and new techniques in ritual magick. They may come up with some really cool themes for their liturgical practices and seasonal rites, and I hope that they share some of these new directions with me and other members of this magickal family. Time will inform me whether or not I have made a wise choice in giving magickal lore to this group. I suspect that it was a wise choice. 

So, here we are, my fellow readers of this blog, ready to broach the final four questions. Are you interested in such an organization as the Order of the Gnostic Star? Do you have a group of at least four other individuals besides yourself that you can assemble to work rituals and ceremonies on a periodic basis? Do you have a room or space that can be dedicated to this work? Are you presently involved in witchcraft or paganism? If you answered yes to all four of these questions and want to engage in some cutting edge ritual magickal lore, then drop me an email and let me know. I will happily engage all serious inquiries. You can email me through this blog.

Your humble servant -

Frater Barrabbas