Building A New Geomantic Elemental Oracle

Over the next several months I will be slowly and incrementally writing up the 256 octagrams that make up the Geomantic Oracle that I have invented. As I have previously stated, it is based rather loosely on the classical system of Geomancy. The Geomantic Elemental Oracle is a complete and comprehensive system of divination and magic that incorporates the ideas and structure of the I-Ching while maintaining a more western and elemental approach to this type of divination system. You can read my previous article here, and this should give you a pretty good background to what I am proposing to do with the Oracle.

I have to admit that it’s quite exciting to give birth to a new Oracle. I am not just following what has been established by tradition, even though there is a precedence for me to create such a divination system. Certainly, there is a need for it, and I feel a special calling to build it, even though it will take months or maybe even a year or more to complete. I believe that this massive project will be well worth the effort since the result is already turning out to be quite compelling. What I have decided to do is to share a completed octagram Oracle chapter here and in future articles so that you can see the results of my work. I think that you will be as excited about these fascinating octagrams as I have been in deriving and writing about them. Each chapter contains the Octagram, its attributions, keyword, and then a description, judgement and finally, an image. When completed, there will be 256 of them, and I suspect that they will run the complete spectrum of all possible human experience.

Here is the first one which I thought was interesting enough to share with you. If you have a moment, feel free to let me know what you think of it. Others will follow from time to time, but of course, you will only be able to find all 256 in a forth-coming book.

Frater Barrabbas


#30 Earth of Fire base qualified by Water of Water. Keyword: Seeing Deep Visions

Seeing Deep Visions indicates that a doorway has opened up so that the querent might be able to see deeply into the intrinsic nature of things. This is a very auspicious time that can have a momentous impact upon the querent. Many things have lined up in such a manner that the sage has a clear view of what lies far below, but this view is very temporary. Seeing must also be accompanied with perceiving, recognizing and understanding. It is important that what is seen is carefully examined over time, and it is even more important for the querent to seek out the guidance and counsel of other insightful minds, since what is seen may be obscure or even allegorical. The sage must persevere to fully realize this great gift of deep vision, and it will require effort and diligence to build that understanding and so not waste the momentous gift of seeing clearly and fully. 

Judgement - Seeing Deep Visions is a great gift, but it makes the sage responsible for understanding what is revealed. Thus, it is a gift and also a great challenge. Careful perseverance brings great good fortune, but wasting such a gift is the height of folly.

Image: Seeing Into the Well of Souls - thus the sage is given the boon of seeing into a greater depth than any previous insight. With this boon is also a challenge; will the sage take the vision as a blessing or as a curse? Only careful examination will further the blessings of wisdom thus acquired, but impetuousness will spoil the view.

Thoughts on Wealth and Magical Power

Spring has finally come to the Great White North, and the leaves are starting to bud. It is looking a lot nicer since the browns and greys of winter after the snow-melt and rains have become green with the promise of warmer weather and a verdant rebirth. Still, there are cool days and a quite a lot of rain, but at least it’s rain and not snow. Despite the fact that the warmer days of summer are approaching us again, I find myself overloaded with work, so I can only gaze at the wondrous changes through my window.

Presently, I have begun the arduous task of transitioning from my old job and role to one that is new. I need to focus on mastering new skills, dusting off knowledge and techniques long stale and getting up to speed with a completely different technology. These are delightful things for me to do because I always love new challenges and learning to master new technologies. I am grateful that my company is giving me this opportunity to re-tool, but I can hardly blame them. Finding people with my business knowledge is quite difficult, since what I do isn’t just limited to knowing how to use fancy technological applications. The fact that I also know how to write is also somewhat unique to an IT professional, so I can see the practical reasons why my employers want to give me the opportunity to retool. It’s far cheaper and faster to allow me to extend my abilities than it is to hire someone with all of the abilities that they require.

Thus, my work related on-the-job training and the massive workload will keep me busy for quite some time. This is why I haven’t been writing articles for my blog lately and why I am not likely to write much in the future either. I am just too busy making certain that I can continue to function as I have done previously in my career, and so manage to continue getting a good paycheck to put a roof over my head and food on the table. I am not wealthy but I am also not poor. I have been quite fortunate and I am grateful for what I have been able to accomplish in my life so far.

I know all too well that things can and do change, and the fickle finger of fate can just as easily afflict one with misfortune as it can seemingly award one with good fortune. I would like to believe that my magical abilities have helped to shape my fortune over the extent of my lifetime, but it could have also been my ability to periodically reinvent myself and to be fairly practical minded when it came to money and career choices. I like to think of myself as a man of magical power and arcane ability, since I am a witch and a ritual magician. Yet when it comes to talking about magical power and how that mysterious quality can impact one’s temporal and material reality, then things can become murky or even a bit confused. Allow me to explain what I mean by this statement.

There are essentially two basic kinds of magical workings that most ritual and ceremonial magicians might perform, and these consist of the works of thaumaturgy and theurgy. Thaumaturgy can be defined as essentially making things happen in the material world based on a combination of magical and mundane steps. Thaumaturgy is therefore mainly concerned with producing material effects regardless of the medium (such as energy, spirits, psychology, etc.). Typically, a thaumaturgical operation will be able to “bend” probability so that something that has a distinct possibility of occurring can be “willed” into becoming manifest. Theurgy, on the other hand, is concerned with spiritual insights, wisdom, occult knowledge and conscious illumination. Therefore, when magicians talk about influencing events through the application of magical rituals, they are usually talking about thaumaturgy. When they talk about transformations and transcendence, they are talking about theurgy.

In my book “Disciples Guide to Ritual Magick” I have discussed the nature and quality of the concept of magical power. I have maintained that it is a subjective phenomenon that has more to do with the experience of magic and its apparent meaningfulness. A powerful magical ritual is one that has profound meaning and significance for the magician. Magical power is therefore a metaphor for the emotional experiences of meaningfulness, profound significance, and insightful synergy that accompanies a successful working.

Of course, a working that fails to produce the desired effects could also appear similarly ground-breaking, but magicians typically remember their successes and try to mitigate or even forget their failures. I often refer to a magician recounting his or her exploits and successful magical workings as “tales of power.” They have a tendency of magnifying over the years and with the many renditions. (I suppose that the failed workings and misadventures would be called the “tales of folly.”)

A powerful magician is one who can not only get the desired results that he or she is striving to achieve, but does so in an obvious and profound manner. This is to say that really good magic always produces far more than just the desired outcome. It teaches, instructs, guides and ultimately leads one to a greater level of being than what might have been otherwise. What I am implying here is that thaumaturgy can and does lead the magician to theurgy, although not always and certainly not immediately.

Even so, magical power should never be confused with real power in the material world. While it is possible that the archetypal magician should be materially successful, perhaps even wealthy and widely influential, this seldom ever occurs. Why is this so? Why are magicians to be found in mostly the middle or lower classes and not amongst the wealthy elite? Shouldn’t magical power be synonymous with material power?

Anton Lavey once drily stated that real occult masters and men of magical power should reside in a station of life commensurate with their magical prowess, that is amongst the elite, and if they didn’t, then they were just a bunch of deluded frauds. I read this bit of hyperbole in Anton’s monthly periodical “The Cloven Hoof” and I can see that some folks have taken it to heart over the years. This belies the fact that Anton himself passed away leaving a very modest and meager estate behind him. He was also something of a steadfast atheist and didn't believe in any "occult powers."

Needless to say, I have often sensed a bit of snobbery and a sneering quality of prejudice from the quips and comments made by middle class white male magicians who like to look down their noses at those who are materially below them, including those men or women of color who are not part of the supposed elite of middle class magicians. Of course, whatever material stability one has these days has been bought dearly for the price of actual material freedom, since the typical working stiff can’t afford not to have a job and a career in order to survive. There are some lucky few who make a living offering their occult services for a fee, but the rest of us have to work a mundane job in order to make a living, and that takes us away from what we would rather be doing with our time. However, those magicians who are doing well money-wise have managed to leverage their middle class roots and privileges into a stable material existence, but this could change at any time. Misfortune occurs every day and happens to everyone at some point, but those who are rich and powerful are less impacted by it.

Additionally, look at the general population of the U.S. and see who is most engaged with the practice of magic. The number of middle class magicians and their potential middle class clients is quite small compared to the rest of the population of middle class folk. This is not so in the lower classes, particular the ethnic minorities and non-white people living in urban areas. There are far more magicians operating in these communities and people who will engage them for a modest fee than in any other community or class. When you think about it, doesn’t that really make sense?

When upper class people seek retribution for a wrong that they experienced at the hands of someone else do they go see a magician or a root conjuror? No, they go see their lawyers and sue the crap out of their would-be perpetrators, or they pull some influential strings and cause all sorts of woe to those sorry bastards who have wronged them. They don’t need any magic because their money and influence is all the “magic” that they ever need, and it usually protects and empowers them quite well. They can afford to be rich assholes when we would never consider behaving in that way. The rest of us poor schmucks have to make do with intimidation, physical threats and perhaps even violence, and if that can’t be done, then we either have to lump it or perhaps engage in some magic either on our own or by hiring a magician, witch or root conjuror.

 

For this reason, the very powerful, well connected and wealthy elite have viewed the practice of magic, particularly thaumaturgy, as disdainfully irrelevant. To them the religious status quo has always been an integral part of their outer social image. They might be interested in oddities or attracted to novelties, but in most cases, when they indulge in such matters they are just considered harmless wealthy eccentrics. They actually don’t deviate too much from social norms because it’s bad for business. So for this reason magic has always been and always will be the proclivity of poor and powerless people because they don’t have the means of throwing their weight around, whether by material power or by the threat of violence. They are, in a word, the little people that the rich and powerful treat with indifference or scorn. I count myself as part of that faction of “little people” regardless of my paycheck, since misfortune could easily take away everything that I have materially achieved in my lifetime. There is little difference between the urban poor and myself, at least when compared to the mega-rich, so I should always consider my material interests when voting. You can bet that I don't vote for Republicans or Libertarians.

Do my words bother you? Do you feel the need to dispute what I am saying because you think magicians should be powerful in all areas of their lives? Well, then, here’s a little test. Compare your vaunted material power and swagger to that of the Koch brothers and see how it stands up. I am certain that you will handily lose that comparison. They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to buy the supposed democracy that we live in, and they are gradually succeeding. For instance, instead of talking about what we need to do about climate change and how we should mitigate its dire effects, we are instead talking about whether or not it is real. The scientific consensus is that climate change is practically a fact, agreed to by over 97% of scientists. The global ice caps are melting at an unprecedented pace and it is obviously due to the high levels of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere. How did so much carbon-dioxide get into the atmosphere? Simple, from the massive burning of fossil fuels. Heavy mechanized farming has also greatly contributed to the green-house gas effect. Still, we have the majority of conservative politicians and media pundits denying that climate change is even happening, and all too many people are foolishly agreeing with them.

This is only one of several conservative themes that are completely absurd yet nevertheless are being seriously played out in our country, pitting lies and hyperbole against scientific fact. Modest gun control as a form of second amendment abrogation is one, Obamacare as a national disaster is another and voter fraud is still another. Not to mention the supposed fake scandals that are being acted out by the Republicans in Washington against an administration that is boringly bereft of scandal. Why is this happening? Does the fact that the Koch brothers own a major share of the fossil fuel industry have any bearing on why the conversation about climate change is stale-mated by those who outright deny its reality? As Bob Dylan sang: “Money doesn’t talk, it swears.”

Progressive policies tend to assist the many for the sake of taxing the wealthy few, and so they are a method smoothing over social and economic inequalities. They don’t in any way discourage anyone from becoming wealthy, and in fact, they greatly assist in social and economic mobility. However, such policies have been demonized by those who wish to enlarge and expand economic inequality. Want to guess who is pushing such ideas into the political consensus? The Koch brothers and their mega-rich allies!

To humorously misquote Ronald Reagan, let me boldly tell my fellow Americans, “Rich people aren’t the solution to our problems, they are the problem!”

We magicians and witches are natural subversives working against the established order. Whatever you have is just waiting to be taken away by the .1%, so struggling against the system, whether clandestinely or openly, is the only way for us to survive. Thinking that we have powers to directly influence the world that we live in is a time honored illusion indulged in by middle class magicians. We can, in the end, only influence ourselves, and even then we are not immune to misfortune. So, don’t be fooled into thinking that you are safe from economic calamity, because you aren’t.

Even great magicians have their ordeals, difficulties and times of hardship. Misfortune has always been the true test of one’s character, personal strength and personal empowerment. Therefore, it is better to admire the magician who comes from a poor family and succeeds than to admire some arm-chair magician who has never had to struggle and fight for what he has.

Frater Barrabbas

Revision of Geomantic Elementals

(Newly made geomantic sticks)

This article is taken from a new book that I am writing about Geomantic Elementals. I decided to share it with my readers to get some feedback about this new way of approaching Geomancy that is very different than what is considered traditional. I am often accused of taking traditional material and profoundly changing it, but I believe that I usually have practical reasons for doing this. Here is my story about how I am approaching Geomancy, and how I intend to repackage it so that it is analogous to other systems of divination and magic. You may disagree with what I am proposing to do, but I hope that I have stated my intentions clearly enough so that you might realize the implications of what I have discovered about this venerable and antique system of divination. 


Introduction

When I was just 18 years old, so many years ago, I had a vision of a system of divination that was based on but differed profoundly from the traditional divination system known as Geomancy. I had been playing around with Geomancy ever since I first got a copy of the book “Mastering Witchcraft” by Paul Huson. I also found it later in the book “The Magus” and Regardie’s “The Golden Dawn,” and since I had made myself some nice geomantic sticks out of ebony in my highschool jewelry class a couple of years previously, I wanted to make use of them. (I still have those same geomantic sticks today, even after nearly four decades of time and use.)

However, for whatever reason, I found the system of single and double dots and the limitation of having just 16 permutations for performing a reading awkward and much too sparse. In order to perform a rigorous and in-depth reading you had to cast enough characters to fill the twelve houses of the old-style astrological square houses diagram, or work with the overly complicated shield chart with 15 place settings. This was done no matter what kind of reading was deployed, whether highly detailed and long term, or just short term and brief. You could also just throw a single character or two, or three to answer a question, but even that was just not enough.

I found this methodology paradoxically a bit too complex on one hand and too limiting on the other. Since I also had recourse to other systems of divination that were easier to use and could produce a deeper and more meaningful reading, I felt that Geomancy wasn’t as useful or as readily available to me. I was, however, particularly impressed with the I-Ching that I had just recently learned, and I was disappointed that Geomancy wasn’t as powerful as that system. Certainly all of the attributes were there in Geomancy as compared to the I-Ching, but they just weren’t arranged in a manner to take full advantage of having the most amount of attributes for a divinatory system. I found myself relying on the Tarot and the I-Ching for my divination needs, and I only used the geomantic sticks to answer yes or no questions, which they seemed pretty good at doing.

Just for my own amusement back in those early days, I had decided to try to approach Geomancy in the same manner as the ancient sages did when assembling and composing the I-Ching. How I did that was to take the instances of two dots or one dot for each of the four levels of the Geomantic character and make them into solid bars and broken bars, just like in the I-Ching.

Once I did that it dramatically and completely changed the Geomantic characters into something much more eloquent and powerful, at least in my opinion. A solid bar consists of two dots and its polarity is masculine and it represents “yes” when performing a simple oracle. A broken bar consists of one dot and its polarity is feminine and it represents “no” in a simple oracle. Two solid masculine bars represents the element Fire and two broken feminine bars represents the element Water. Because the element Air is masculine, it has a solid bar on top and broken bar below it, and the element Earth, which is feminine, has a broken bar on top and a solid bar below. Thus I was able to determine the four elements through the use of two positions of either solid or broken bars, or a combination.

That’s all well and good, but the next thing that I did turned out to be quite surprising. Looking at the sixteen Geomantic characters in their new form of solid and broken bars, I was able to determine for each the combination of elements that they contained within their structure by using the key definition for each element. The use of solid and broken bars made these Geomatic characters look more like I-Ching trigrams, except these were specifically elemental quadragrams, consisting of an element qualifier and an element base. Just like in the I-Ching, I found that the new structure lent itself to combining these quadragrams to formulate octagrams. Now instead of just sixteen Geomantic figures, there were 256 octagrams representing a complete oracular system, just like the 8 trigrams producing 64 hexagrams in the I-Ching. 

(Example of the Elementals of Water)

Not only that, but I had also determined that with just four throws of my geomantic sticks, I could build up an octagram and also determine if any of the eight lines were changing from broken bars to solid, or solid to broken. This new attribute of changing lines gave me a total of 2,048 total attributes. Therefore, using this methodology that worked so well in the I-Ching, I had produced the potential of a massive, powerful and completely comprehensive system of divination. What was required, of course, was to produce a “Book of Changes” where all of these attributes would be covered at least enough to actually perform readings. On that last task I faltered, since it would have required too much time and a steady discipline to complete. However, now decades later, I feel that I should revisit this system and produce a Geomantic Elemental Book of Changes and bring Geomancy divination into the post-modern age.

Now most people who know anything about Geomancy would probably ask why I would  do this and therefore, radically change an already existing and perfectly vetted traditional system of divination? Who was I to change something that had been effectively used for centuries before the Tarot became popular and replaced it? There are a number of occultists who are attempting to bring the age-old practice of Geomancy back into vogue, and I believe that those who have a fondness for antiquarian occult practices would find my rather radical and creative approach to the subject of Geomancy nothing short of disrespectful, presumptuous and even disgraceful. 

Add to that the obvious fact that what I have derived has little in common with the traditional meanings of the Geomantic characters. Anyone who is knowledgeable will be able to quickly determine that what I have proposed is a radical departure from what is traditional and accepted. At that point I will likely be pilloried by my critics for messing with established tradition and they will undoubtedly say that I was “hoisted on my own petard” because I had produced such a monstrosity.  I can hear them yelling for the tar and feathers, too. However, allow me to continue to describe my approach and maybe I can postpone the immanent demise of my reputation.

My approach to Geomancy is first and foremost based on the sixteen Elementals, which we can also find in the sixteen court cards of the Tarot and also subtly represented in the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching. There are sixteen Geomantic characters, so why wouldn’t they be applicable to the sixteen Elementals? What I have found is that the Geomantic characters aren’t at all the same as Elementals and that means that Geomancy is a separate and distinct system that doesn’t relate (except very obliquely) to any of the other systems of divination. 

I found this discontinuity to be strange, but it’s really a matter of either accepting and maintaining what is traditional or looking at an old system with completely new eyes. I chose to do the latter because I wanted a system of elemental divination that was directly related to other elemental systems of correspondence. Perhaps the reason why I had abandoned Geomancy so many years ago was because it didn’t relate to any of the other systems that I was using. A stand-alone system is a lot weaker than one that can be integrated into a larger network of correspondences - or at least that is my opinion.

What I am proposing is analogous to those other systems of divination, but it is also unique, in-depth and comprehensive. Why would someone use my proposed system of Geomantic Elementals when they could use the Tarot or the I-Ching? I believe the answer to that question is to be found in the large number of attributes that Geomantic Elementals contain. If you want an in-depth oracular reading then your oracle better have a lot of attributes in it in order to be comprehensive and thereby to duplicate, in some manner, the vast diversity of the material world.

I believe that the traditional system of Geomancy doesn’t have the kind of depth which is needed in order for it to be a comprehensive oracle, so I proposed adding new levels and dimensions to it so that it could be comprehensive. I also believe that Geomancy became unpopular because it was unwieldy, unrelated to other divination systems and because it was far too thin to be a comprehensive system. Even though I am proposing a radical departure from traditional Geomancy, I believe that it incorporates the best features of the Tarot and the I-Ching. Even so, I will call this new system Geomatic Elementals instead of Geomancy, just so no one confuses what I have written compared to what is traditionally accepted as Geomancy.

Additionally, Geomantic Elementals can be used to perform passive oracular readings or active magical workings. An Octagram consists of two Elementals, so it functions as a hybrid binary or dual Elemental force, which should allow for a lot of magical possibilities and outcomes. In fact such a deep system would be able to respond to any kind of need for a material manifestation, which Elementals are quite effective at producing. Now that we have the hybrid system of dual Elementals, there is the ability to generate a precise magical power that is much more versatile, efficient and effective.

Since I have equated the Geomantic characters to the sixteen Elementals, I can also use the Elemental Enochian Calls to summon them. The method of invoking a dual Elemental would be to use Elemental Pylons set to the four Watchtowers and four Angles, thereby drawing them into the center of the circle at the Ultra-point and Infra-point and thereby generating a fusion at the heart of the center of the magic circle. So, a Geomantic Octagram consisting of a dual Elemental is both a divinatory oracle and a precise magical power. What I am talking about here is a complete system of magic as well as a deep system of divination.

Frater Barrabbas

Passing of Another Giant

I meant to get this article out in a more timely manner, but life has intervened and it remained unpublished until now. Many apologies for that tardy action on my part.

***

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

“Moreover, he hath left you all his walks,

His private arbours and new-planted orchards,

On this side Tiber; he hath left them you,

And to your heirs for ever, common pleasures,

To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves.

Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?”

Julius Caesar, Act II, William Shakespeare

Another founder has passed from our ranks, and we are left a little bit less than we were. So it is with the death of Donald Michael Kraig (March 17, 2014), as it was with the death of Isaac Bonewitz just a few years previous, and our ranks have thinned ever more. The works and contributions of Donald Michael Kraig were significant because he was one of earlier writers and proponents of Golden Dawn magic and also of a form of western Tantra and sex magick. Like Isaac, Don will be missed and what he might have contributed to the movement that he helped to build will forever be lost to the occult community.

I didn’t know Don very well. I met him at a few gatherings in the past and we probably had a couple of exchanges. He was a friendly man with a great sense of humor, and a wry wit, which I had come to know more from his blog articles and comments than actually talking with him. Don’s two large literary achievements will far outlast his shortened life and he will soon become more of a paragon of positive achievements and respectable annotations than the positive or negative sentiments of those who actually knew him. This is the process of becoming a legend and a venerable spiritual ancestor, a transitional stage that wipes the slate clean of any critical or negative opinions. Don is now well on the road to becoming a spiritual ancestor to all of those who continue to read his books and follow his teachings.

It is never good to speak ill of the dead, and it is also, more or less, pointless. However, Donald Michael Kraig was successful because he was generally loved and admired by many occultists, not to mention his overall good reputation within the community. He will be greatly missed because of what he might have accomplished had he been able to live another 20 or more years. The same is also true about Isaac Bonewitz. Both of these giants will leave large gaps in the productive and accumulative knowledge of paganism and magick, and it will probably take several individuals a number of years to finally contribute what these two great individuals would have contributed had they lived longer lives.

This brings me to the whole point of my article, and that is that the most productive and insightful periods of life occur (in my opinion) during the golden years, which occur on and just after one’s retirement. It isn’t a time when individuals take a vacation from all aspects of life, in fact, it’s just the opposite. As long as one retains a certain amount of good health and has the material means to survive and live a long and productive life, then the period of the 60's through the 80's should represent the achievements of one’s final and greatest works. Mr. Kraig was only 4 years older than me, so we are both part of the same generation. Yet at my current age and level of experience, I can already see how so many things that I have worked on, researched and developed over the last decades are connected in amazing ways, and how they might be improved and given a final formulation if I am granted the time to do so. I have, therefore, achieved a certain breadth of vision and a perspective consisting of many years of experience that will allow me (hopefully) to complete the work that I started when I was a nascent teenager.

It is my hope that all of my various occult and magical projects will be able to be completed and resolved to the highest level of elegance and efficiency that I can make them. Since I am a Capricorn by birth, being able to finish everything in life is an important higher objective for me. I have already gotten to the point where I can perceive how things are connected together, and also how they might be developed to a final level of completion. It’s helpful to have many years of experience to be able to gain insights into one’s own work, to step back and see it from a greater perspective. I must admit that when I was a lot younger I couldn’t see the forest for the trees, and my work often seemed to be disjointed and not at all connected. Now I can finally see the connections, so I have learned to see the “forest” of my occult work from a greater perspective than each individual “tree.” My only hope is that I be granted enough time to do something about this wonderful vision.

Will I finally get to that point of completion which is in my nature to seek? It is my fervent hope, but how I live my life now (and take care of myself physically) will determine whether or not I will survive into my 80's, although genetics does have a hand in longevity. I only wish that both Donald and Isaac could have lived well into their 80's because I believe that this same process of reflection, insight and experience would have made their final achievements so much greater than what their shortened lives have bequeathed to us who remain.

Even so, I am grateful for the work that they did and I look forward to the decades ahead when others will come forward and push their work to the next level. I also hope that our remaining elders live much longer, prosper, and help the pagan and magical community achieve its ultimate goals of legitimacy and profound depth.

May we all live in the blessings of good health, wealth and life regenerated. 

Frater Barrabbas

Magick and Crossed Aspirations

When I attended a lecture that Ivo Dominguez Jr. gave on “Karma” at Paganicon, he touched briefly on a condition or situation where the goal that someone is seeking to realize can be rendered impossible simply because they are at crossed purposes. This condition of being crossed could occur because someone close to the one who is seeking that objective is secretly working against it, that the objective is desired by others and there is competition, or that one’s own mind or desires are at cross-purposes with one’s external objective. Ivo compared this situation to a wagon being pulled by different people in different directions, and in some cases the handle that one person is pulling would have more than one branch attached to it, and each branch was getting tugged in still another direction by forces within. The net result is either that the wagon is stubbornly stationary or it can go in a direction that we consciously don’t want it to. Regardless, the outcome is not what is expected nor desired, and the reason is called being at cross-purposes, or being “crossed.”

In the lore of Hoodoo magic this is a typical malady that a conjure man or woman has to deal with in order to help a client. Usually, it takes the form that someone has jinxed or even cursed another person so that their luck and good fortune evaporates. From that moment on, everything that they do or try is thwarted by some unseen or unknown adversary. Such a person has been cursed and crossed so that they will remain locked in a downward spiral of bad luck, missed opportunities and the constant occurrence of maladies, catastrophes and suffering. The conjure man or woman has to break the jinx or curse afflicting their client, reverse its affects and then clear and open the way for forward progress, so that their client might retrieve the accumulation of blessings denied them. It is a rigorous process and it typically assumes that clients so afflicted are being crossed by someone outside of themselves, whether that individual is close to them or not. Therefore, one who is crossed has been jinxed or cursed deliberately or even unwittingly by someone who is envious or covetous, thereby ensuring that the source of misfortune is always external to the victim.

The Hoodoo world is full of negative and positive magic wielded by conjure men and women or unsuspecting spiteful individuals, all of them warring against each other for the sake of third party clients, and that anyone’s hold of good fortune and luck is highly precarious. In the privileged world of the ritual or ceremonial magician, such drama is usually absent. As a ritual magician and religious celebrant I have had very few opportunities to counter curses or jinxes cast by other people. This means that most of time I am free to work magic on any objective I desire and should expect a reasonable return for my work. Thus I live in a world that is peaceful, free of the dynamic exchanges of negative and positive forces, and placid with the boring expectations and occurrences of a happy mundane existence. I have no recourse to blame outsiders for anything that might happen to me. Whatever happens is either my responsibility or accidental and totally beyond my control.

Even so, crossed aspirations can and do happen even if no one is behind them except our own hidden selves. We often see ourselves as singular unified beings with typically singular aspirations, but this, of course, is an illusion. We are actually a conglomeration of different and even conflicting personal desires, self-images, identities, and each of these different personalities has a somewhat different and distinct set of aspirations, emotions and desires. If we seem to be acting as a single being with a single purpose, then that is just the mask that we wear at the moment. We are multiple beings where perhaps one or two attributes rule over the rest, but those dominate traits can and do change over time. When someone that we haven’t seen in a long time tells us (whether pleasantly or as an insult) that we haven’t changed a bit, they are obviously and completely wrong. Different people might actually see different masks on the same person and think that they are actually seeing that person for who they are. Yet human nature is very complex, and people are of more than one mind, opinion or feelings about nearly everything. We work hard to create a mental fiction of ourselves so that we are somehow singular and unified in purpose, but it is in fact a fiction. If you don’t believe what I am saying, then just examine your own Astrological natal chart and you will see how internally conflicted and contradictory you truly are. And all of us are so collectively blessed and cursed by this malady.

With this little and disturbing fact in mind, you can see how easy it is for anyone to be at cross-purposes with themselves. In fact, when the magic fails to produce the outcome that we expect it should, or that the opposite occurs, or perhaps even something catastrophic happens, then we should use our expertise with divinatory tools to determine if we are at cross-purposes with ourselves. Such divination may reveal that the performing of magic had little or no bearing on the issue, or that the probability was so small that a slight bending would make no difference. It could be that the magician failed to perform the most important corresponding mundane actions or that the target was faulty or lacked clarity. As Chief Dan George famously said in the movie “Little Big Man,” to his adopted son, “Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Still, if a magician has been attempting to achieve a specific goal and has failed to do so over a period of time, even when it appeared that the odds were very much in her favor, then it’s time to look at the possibility of crossed purposes. When a magician is crossed regarding a specific material objective, whether it is money, a good job, a stable home or a relationship partner, then any attempt to achieve that objective will fail.

How do we know when we are being crossed? What are the indicators? The key to discovering this situation is a combination of divination and meditation. Divination will show you if your objective can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time. A big clue that one is crossed is if the divination that the magician has performed results in a confusing or inconclusive reading. For instance, if you do a Tarot card reading on the desired objective and it shows no conclusive outcome or produces a reading that makes little sense, then you should consider the possibility that you are crossed. Further Tarot card readings might help to identify what is crossing you or give you additional information; but it can just as easily continue to show you nothing.

At this stage, the magician uses a combination of contemplation and meditation to perform a process that I call “self-scan.” This is done by emptying the mind of everything, especially that specific issue that is vexing one, and then over a period of time when the mind is at rest, begin to ask questions about the nature of the objective. What I have discovered is that the outcome from performing a self-scan can reveal if one has conflicting desires that render the overall objective null and void. That’s when questions such as “Do I really want this outcome?” or “Do I want to assume the responsibility for following this path?” should be asked, and the answers carefully examined. The revelations produced from a self-scan session can be used to spearhead further divination on the subject matter. Over time, the magician will find out what is really going on inside of him and whether or not the objective is worth pursuing.

If the magician decides to pursue the objective even though he or she is not fully aligned internally in order to make it possible then a process of uncrossing must be engaged. Here is where the Hoodoo conjure folk can show ritual or ceremonial magicians a thing or two about overcoming obstacles and achieving goals regardless of adversity.

Much to my regret I can say without embarrassment that I experienced just such a crossed purposes situation that lasted for decades. I just couldn’t figure out what was going on and whatever divination or magical ritual workings that attempted to perform just never seemed to produce any results. Had I known about this potential issue of crossing that plagues nearly everyone at some time then I would have been able to resolve it much more quickly than I did. As it turns out, I fumbled along for many years until I intuitively determined what was going on and managed to rectify it. What was that crossed purposes situation that bedeviled me? It had to do with successfully finding a lover and lifetime partner for a long term relationship. Allow me to briefly describe what I went through.

Many years ago I fell in love with a woman that despite all my desires, intentions and attempts otherwise was never meant to be successful. We all have had these kinds of thwarted desires and deflected amorous objectives, and most of us get over them and continue to successfully find that one person who does love us and want to form a long term relationship. However, for me it was an unhealthy obsession that lasted far longer than it should have. I am not completely at fault here, but I should have been able to see the wisdom of the moment and disengage myself from this woman to look elsewhere.

Even when I had completely resigned myself to the true futility of such an objective, my obsession had created an internal process that had a life of its own. While I sought for the companionship of other women around me, part of me was still pining for this woman even though I knew she was impossible to achieve. I had unwittingly created for myself a powerful crossed-purposes type situation, and this marred and handicapped me completely regarding finding a relationship. The obsession had to be starved over a long period of time before I had any luck at finding a potential mate. Whatever magic I worked to resolve this situation did nothing to alleviate it, and in fact there were plenty of clues written in my magical diaries from that time, both from a magical and divinatory perspective, that I had compromised myself. I was in a trap of my own making, so it required me to understand this fact before I could find an exit.

Only after a long period of time did I finally realize what had happened to me, and only then, was I able to resolve my issue. Still, I could have resolved it so many years ago had I understood the pernicious nature of being at crossed purposes, and that uncrossing is an important tool and technique even for the practitioner of high magick. 

Hoodoo techniques for uncrossing vary considerably amongst different conjuring doctors and their various traditions, mentors and personal tastes. However, an archetypal Hoodoo methodology for uncrossing consists of the following steps, although there are many variations.

1. Divination to identify nature and source of crossing.

2. Bathing, foot washing, blue baths (Reckitts Crown Blue), vigil candles, prayers and psalms

3. Curse/Jynx Reversing - reverse candle burnt upside down, enemy binding, mirror magic (reflecting and returning the curse), mirror box/coffin with charged and bound enemy doll, further bathing and cleansing (removing jynx/curse).

4. Road Opening - vigil lights (road opening candles), use of Van-van or road opening oils for final cleansing and preparation to retrieve lost blessings. Prayers, psalm reading, receiving blessings from root doctor or church, or both.

5. Lucky spells to activate and achieve lost/stolen/blocked objective.

A magician could, if they have a facility for Hoodoo, develop their own low magic technique using the above five steps. Still, what can the ritual or ceremonial magician do to counter a situation where they are at crossed purposes with themselves? How can they use the tools already at their disposal? I feel that I can apply the knowledge that I have of high magic and Hoodoo uncrossing and therefore propose a series of steps and magical actions that magicians can use to uncross themselves.

The following nine steps can be performed if magicians suspect that they (or their clients) are at crossed purposes with themselves. These nine steps can be grouped into three major magical workings, to be performed at different times but in close proximity to each other.

1. Self-scan - determine through a combination of divination and meditation sessions the nature of the crossed-purpose issue. Meditation should consist of emptying the mind (contemplation) and then focusing on specific questions about the nature of the problem. The results from this step are used to assist and facilitate the next step. The magician can also discover if there really is a crossed purpose issue producing a blockage or thwarted objective. (1 step combined/alternating)

2. Cross-roads divination session: During the dark of the moon, the magician will, in her temple, erect a cross-roads tying together the four circle angles within sacred space. In the center where the four angular directions meet, the magician will use a black mirror (peering through an image darkly) to retrieve an image, name and phrase associated with the specifically identified obstruction found in step 1. Once this image and name/phrase is discovered, the magician will produce a sigil symbolizing that obstruction on parchment with the pen and ink of the art, and then consecrate and charge it. (3 steps)

3. Validate crossed-roads divination results with another self-scan session. Make certain that the charged sigil resonates with the energy of the obstruction. It is possible that more than one obstruction may exist, and the magician may have only identified the dominate one. It might be necessary to repeat step 2 if other issues are uncovered in this step. Once all of the issues are identified and symbolized by blessed and charged sigils, then the magician may continue with the next step, which will be performed just before the moon is full. (1 step combined/alternating)

4. Perform cleansing exercises, a meditation vigil and a ritual bath prior to performing the main rite for Opening the Way, which is to be done that evening. (1 step)

5. Cross-roads Opening the Way rite: Magician erects a cross-roads tying together the four circle angles within sacred space. A small cauldron is placed in the center of the circle, and the magician takes the sigil(s) in hand and focuses intently on them, discussing and reviewing the nature of the crossing associated with each one, tearing up the sigil, and then when all of the pieces are in the cauldron, burning them together. Take the resultant ashes and use them draw an equal arm cross on the forehead with the left index finger (sign of the Lenten abnegation), then proceed to the Northern Watchtower and perform the “opening of the portal gesture” therein. Proceed into the Northern Watchtower and turn to face the south, reading off a series of affirmations and intended objectives that are now free to be acquired. Then seal all of the nodes and the working is done. As an additional empowerment, the magician can place one or more (metal) talismans for the appropriate planetary intelligence or godhead in the Northern Watchtower prior to the working in order to facilitate and charge the affirmations at the end. (These should be touched and focused on when entering in the Northern Watchtower. (3 overall steps)

Once the above workings are completed, and after the moon has passed full, the magician should perform some divination to check on the efficacy of the working. He should notice a profound alteration in consciousness and feel completely resolved as if the obstruction was overcome and nothing further can thwart his intentions and objectives in this matter.

Five of the most dramatic parts of this overall uncrossing working are the black mirror scrying, the blessing and charging of the sigil, and the burning of the sigil, wearing the ashes on the forehead and then performing the opening portal in the North, representing the opening of the place of darkness to the light of one’s renewed aspirations. These five ritual actions will symbolically destroy the sigil of the blockage, mark one’s self for their passing, and then open the gateway of material achievement and thereby remove the obscuring darkness of the crossed purpose that has been blocking the desired achievement. The magician can also perform specific workings after a successful uncrossing to assist in the acquisition of the objective, and this time there won’t be a possibility for crossed purposes blocking the outcome. 

Variations on this working can be performed without altering its overall impact, but I believe that this high magic technique of uncrossing should give the ritual or ceremonial magician the mechanism to remove and eliminate obstructions. May you always be uncrossed and unobstructed when pursing your objectives, but if not, then you can uncross yourself. 

Frater Barrabbas

Peregrin’s Reply to Christian Magicians

Peregrin Wildoak responded to my article that took issue with his article about Why Christians Make Better Magicians. His response was rather harsh, but I expected that. I suppose that anyone who disagrees with Peregrin, according to him, must be mentally deficient and not up to the task of proposing an alternative perspective. He was not interested in posting his critique on my blog because he felt that I have provided a hostile environment for him to present his ideas. While one commentator on my Face Book link to the article I wrote did disparage Peregrin, I didn’t refute or delete what he said. I didn’t agree with it, but I felt that everyone has a right to their opinion, and that is also true of Peregrin himself. For that reason I decided to post and comment on Peregrin’s response so that all opposing views to what I may say or think are herein represented. It also allows me to clarify my points, but what Peregrin wrote doesn’t in any manner change my opinion about what he or I originally wrote. I agree to disagree.

What does seem to be operating here is a clash of different perspectives based on geography. Peregrin lives in western Australia and I live in the midwestern US. Australia, Canada and Britain are probably three of the most non-sectarian areas in the world. Other areas that are so blessed are Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, not to mention Japan. There are probably a number of countries where being an occultist, pagan or even a Christian magician has no cultural stigma or much cause for concern. However, that is not the case in the U.S., as a perusal of the daily news will easily reveal. I live in a nation that is polarized by sectarian differences and where Christians routinely bitterly remark about how they are oppressed by the secular government and various institutions. Some even go so far as to blame the decline of the US on liberal attitudes towards gays, pagans, witches and occultists. We do not live in a liberal culture, although there are pockets of liberality that still exist in this nation.

Occultists, magicians, pagans, witches and other minorities are typically discrete about their activities in the U.S. Some have come out of the closet, but this is still a nation where individuals can lose their jobs or their children because of their religious affiliation. From Peregrin’s perspective, religious organizations and churches have little political power and the overall religious climate is sane, peaceful and highly tolerant. In the U.S., the opposite is true. Churches wield considerable political power (even though there is supposed to be a separation of church and state) and there is an ongoing cultural war that is sectarian and religiously intolerant. There are liberal areas in the U.S. where religious toleration is allowed to thrive, but there are also many other areas where religious intolerance, bigotry and racism still thrive, even violently so. My world is one where it is better to be discrete than open about one’s personal spiritual perspectives, particularly if they are quite outside what is generally accepted as orthodoxy in this nation.

So, what we have here are two very different perspectives, and the glaring differences between them can be shown to have their origins in the cultures from where we differently speak. Anyway, allow me to present Peregrin’s rebuttal to what I previously wrote. 

Frater Barrabbas has responded to my deliberately provocative MOTO post, ‘Why Christians Make Better Magicians’ If you are at all interested, have a look – though I will admit I had to muster up some effort myself to read through it all – other fish to fry, I guess?

I’m not gonna respond on Frater’s blog, as that has proved a hostile environment to sensitive little moi, and his Facebook post has folk summing up the weight of the arguments by simply declaring me a ‘freak’. So here are just a few points and then I’m done with it

The main thrust of Frater’s argument is the question of being able to be an openly practising magician and a member of an established (not esoteric, new age or ‘Gnostic’) church. Well of course this is not possible in many circumstances, and of course very possible in other.

Two words: Gareth Knight. Another two: Peregrin Wildoak; the priests and laity of my church are fully aware and accepting of my magic. Oh, more words: Anthony Duncan; a Canon of the Church of England. I’d even wager these two: Bob Gilbert. And two more: Whare Ra, which included Priests and a fucking BISHOP in its ranks. It all depends on the time, culture, magician and church.

Now ALL of these very faithful and theologically accepted, folk practised magic just fine while being involved in mainstream church life and duties. So I really am unsure what Frater is on about. As for the Catholic catechism – well, anyone who has ever spent time with Catholic priests and nuns knows that this is often simply a background while they get on with activities and ideas contrary to it.

I am unclear, but it seems Frater has not actually read or understood modern Christian magicians like Gareth Knight, nor the theology of people like Canon Anthony Duncan.

Frater writes: “It is my opinion that an esoteric or occult version of Christianity is the only kind of spiritual faith that would allow for a simultaneous practice of magic; but esotericism and occultism are not limited just to Christianity. Esotericism and occultism are, by definition, pan-religious, so someone who is an occultist or an esotericist would not be confined by Christian theology. They wouldn't be considered even nominally Christian, either.”

Thanks for your opinion, Frater, but it does not cohere with FACTS. There ARE Christian magicians who are members or CLERGY of mainstream, non-esoteric churches. In fact from the view of traditionalism, espoused by Guénon and others an exoteric, regular, mainstream and outer practise of our inner and esoteric faith is ESSENTIAL.

To declare “someone who is an occultist or an esotericist” not “even nominally Christian, either” is a bit presumptive. Again, there ARE plenty of Christian magicians – and these people ARE accepted by others in their church as being REAL, not nominal, Christians. I’m a case in point. So really telling me my lived experience is wrong, and that of my parish friends too, is just … well I’m not sure what it is.

Frater’s statement, “Even Catholics have been steadily removing the magic from their liturgy and practices since Vatican II.” is interesting. Clearly he is using his own terms here to describe Catholic liturgy, not that of the Catholic’s themselves. Not sure what to call that either. Of course, NO orthodox catholic theologian and few Catholic or Christian magicians would say there was ever ANY magic in Catholic liturgy. I think what Frater means – and which he erroneously calls magic – is liturgical ritual and symbolism. However, this is not and never has been magic. And Christians magicians are generally clear on the difference between sacramental and magical ritual, which again is one reason why many can a happily be an exoteric Christian at church and an inner esoteric Christian on their own or in their practise group. If one is not clear on the difference, please read Antony Duncan and Gareth Knight.

‘Nuff said? Thanks

Now that you have had the opportunity to read Peregrin’s response in its entirety without any interrupting rebuttal from me, I would like to respond to a few of his comments here.

First off, I have indeed read nearly all of Gareth Knight’s books. I have found him to be one of the most pagan friendly Christian occult authors and I can readily see that he and I have many points in common. However, having read Gareth Knight’s books, I can say that his perspective on magic, Qabalah and the occult is suffused with Theosophy, Western Occultism, and even a kind of nascent Paganism bundled together with a Christian spiritual perspective. While Peregrin might consider Gareth Knight to be a mainstream Christian, I have a problem with what seems to me to be obvious themes, such as his belief in a feminine spiritual element that he has called a Goddess, which is contrary to mainstream Christian doctrine. Mr. Knight may consider himself a Christian, but because his works are so accessible to Pagans it would seem that his teachings would have to be classified as occultic and esoteric. I have classified Gareth Knight’s writings as such and I can say that some of his ideas have certainly shaped my thoughts and perspectives on magic, even though I am not a Christian.

Peregrin then goes on to say that there are indeed occultists and magicians who are members of the clergy of some very liberal churches. There is also a Theosophical Christian church called the Liberal Catholic Church. I have never denied that this was a fact. I even possess one of these lineages that link me to the Old Catholic tradition in England. He has stated that some of these clergy magicians are Christians in good standing in their respective churches. Of course, we are talking about the Anglican Church of England, which has become quite liberal over the decades, just as the Unitarian church in the U.S. has been a bastion of liberal religious perspectives. All of this is true, even though the Anglican Church has specific cannon laws against practicing magic, divination, paganism or occultism. These laws are obviously not enforced, but that is not true of Roman Catholicism and many other denominations. This is also especially true in the U.S., where such activities would be grounds for a clergy member’s dismissal.

The point that I wanted to make in my article is that if you carefully examine the Old Testament and the New Testament there are plenty of verses that condemn magic, divination and witchcraft and any extra-theological derivations. We can start with Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live.” and work our way through the entire Bible and build a pretty strong case against magic, divination or occultism. Then there are the church cannon laws that specifically condemn magic, occultism, divination and the like and compare them to “Satan’s works and pomps” as renounced in the Baptism rite. When I said that a true representation of mainstream Christianity was opposed to magic and occultism, this is represented by what is in the Bible, cannon law and even in the liturgy. 

While I never disputed that a Christian could perform magic and occultism, I did state that it would represent a contrary direction to many mainstream churches, and that to deal with this dissonance, a Christian often becomes more aligned to esoteric and occult doctrines to alleviate this dissonance. (By comparing himself to Gareth Knight who presents himself in his books as an obvious mix of Christianity, Theosophy, occultism and even paganism is to make the case that Peregrin’s Christianity is not pure and canonical.) 

However, Peregrin is correct in assuming that if a church and its members have no qualms about either lay members or clergy being occultists and magicians, then there would be no external stresses whatsoever. This should be understood as being more rare in the U.S. than it might be in Britain, Canada or Australia. Even so, it behooves one to be discrete in the U.S., and likely other places in the world where there is a lot less religious tolerance. (I would love to see Peregrin visit the U.S. and be quite open about his beliefs and practices to the congregants of a Southern Baptist church. He would very likely be ejected with a certain cold hostility usually associated with dangerous apostates.)

I found this remark from Peregrin rather astonishing. He said, “As for the Catholic catechism – well, anyone who has ever spent time with Catholic priests and nuns knows that this is often simply a background while they get on with activities and ideas contrary to it.” I have spent some time with Catholic priests (but not with nuns), and while they are all human beings subject to human frailties, I have never heard them talk about occultism or magic, or for that matter, indicate that they took their vows and responsibilities lightly. As representatives of the Catholic Church, those that I have met are quite straight laced and they always talk the “church party line.” 

Peregrin seems to be hinting that priests and nuns engage in illicit activities, but I would find that highly unlikely. Of course, I haven’t met any Catholic priests in Australia, but here in the U.S. they represent a strict regimen of observance, despite the fact that a minority have disgraced their “cloth” with criminal activity. About the most controversial thing that I have ever heard a priest talk about was his study of Teilhard de Chardin, whose ideas he admitted as being uncanonical but still rather Catholic. I wonder what Peregrin has gotten up to himself that he would know what priests and nuns are doing when not engaging with their duties? (Sounds to me like sectarian slander.)

Peregrin is also correct that Christian theologians have never admitted that their liturgies were ever magical, but even so, they have quietly worked to remove the possibility of anyone working “magic” using their church liturgy. The symbols and ritual actions are still there, but the Latin language has been replaced with the vernacular and there is far less an emphasis on a literal interpretation of the Body and Blood of Christ as having actually and physically been transubstantiated. They would call it a “superstition,” which is the canonical Catholic perspective on extra-liturgical practices. However they would find my use of the abandoned Tridentine Mass as a specific and powerful magical rite as a vile and vicious blasphemy. I do see these liturgies as being suffused with magic and I have not been beyond appropriating them for that purpose. Since a number of the old grimoires employ church liturgy in the blessing and consecration of tools, and even in the five steps of performing an evocation (not to mention the actual invocation verbiage), I would have to state unequivocally that liturgies have been used as magic rituals for centuries.

This brings me to his final pronouncement “And Christians [sic] magicians are generally clear on the difference between sacramental and magical ritual..” which I feel is either patently naive or simply a lie. All anyone has to do is examine what is going on in Voudoun, Santeria, Palo, Hoodoo, and (drum-roll) Michael Bertiaux’s magical occultism to see that there is a profound blurring between religious liturgy and magic. I suspect that this kind of revisionism and mixing of forms will continue to occur into the future whether or not Peregrin admits it. It should also be noted that this is a natural phenomenon that has been going on for millennia. Religious liturgies are one of the more important source materials for personal magic. It has always been so and probably always will be so. This is why there is so much expropriation going on within religions and across religious boundaries. While Peregrin maintains that he and other Christian magicians know and obey the boundaries between their magic and church liturgy, there are many more who have and continue to cross this boundary without any qualms or trepidations. I would have to include myself in this crowd, so I have to refute Peregrin’s last point as being completely false.

Anyway, let it not be said that I don’t give opposing views a proper place in my blog. That being said, I did find Peregrin’s critique to be rather pompous and arrogant, as if the rest of us are sadly below his intellectual prowess. He has made some legitimate points, but overall, I would say that he really missed the whole point of my previous article.

Frater Barrabbas 

Do Christians Make Better Magicians?

Back in December, Peregrin Wildoak wrote an article in his blog “Magic of the Ordinary” where he argued that Christians make better magicians. You can find it here. Reading it kind of reminded me of the old joke that used to get passed around (and found its way onto lapel buttons) that expressed something like  “Italians Make Better Lovers,” and you could put whatever ethnic group you wanted into that expression to make yourself feel proud of your ethnic tribe. I think that Peregrin has used the same approach in his article and while some of his arguments are interesting and thoughtful there are some profound flaws in his arguments as well.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in his article to lump all Christians together into one big massive group and not to differentiate them. Still, I suspect that Peregrin had a mostly esoteric brand of Christianity in mind when he wrote up his article, or at the very least, that the Christian magician would have to be broad-minded and of an esoteric cast in order to practice magic in the first place. Christian magicians would have to adopt this perspective so as not to succumb to the cognitive dissonance that they would experience when exposed to the many pronouncements in Christian churches and organizations against such practices.

While Peregrin opines that the Christian magician must go against the basic grain of Christian theology and social consensus in order to be a magician, he also ignores the fact that most of the Christian population would find such a digression to be very troubling. He says this little statement to bolster his argument: “You are flying against the wind in both contemporary egregores and you have to be pretty clear and be able to examine, refine and explain your point of view, beliefs and practices really, really well.” Of course the obvious response is that to be considered a good Christian and allowed to worship unmolested amongst one’s peers, a Christian magician would be better served to not explain his or her point of view to anyone. Here’s where keeping silent has its advantages and it should be adhered to for some very good reasons.

Peregrin also dismisses the established boundaries between what would be considered orthodox laws and beliefs about magic and occultism in Christianity. According to what he wrote adopting an obvious heterodoxic extension would allow a Christian magician to acquire a peaceful coexistence between these two conflicting perspectives. About these boundaries, Peregrin says: “The general exoteric Christian doctrines are so limiting and many of its spokespersons so stupid, to be able to accept Christianity AND be a magician is no small feat.” So basically, to lay his foundation for a general acceptance of magic and occultism within the body of the Christian teachings, Peregrin refers to those who would passionately disagree with his basic premise as “stupid.”

What that means, according to Peregrin, is that there are a lot of stupid Christian spoke-persons who have preached against deviating from accepted doctrines and tenets down through the ages and into modern times, beginning, I believe, with St. Paul himself. (Such as what Paul wrote in 1 Timothy 4.1: “We are expressly told by inspiration that, in later days, there will be some who abandon the faith, listening to false inspirations, and doctrines taught by the devils.”) Perhaps St. Paul anticipated Peregrin’s arguments for being a Christian magician. Still, it’s my opinion that to cavalierly dismiss these objections in order to practice magic and adhere to an orthodox Christian faith is to sweep quite a large number of important objections under the rug as it were. I imagine that it would be difficult to walk around such a metaphorical room and not trip over that huge mound of objections protruding from the center of the carpet on a regular basis.

A couple quotations from Catholic Catechism should pretty much set the standards for how mainstream religions reject magic and divination, even though this is something of a mild rebuke. You can find the source document online here if you really want to check whether I am fabricating these claims or not.

“Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.”

“All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it. Recourse to so-called traditional cures does not justify either the invocation of evil powers or the exploitation of another's credulity.”

A better approach, in my opinion, would be to admit that a Christian magician is going against basic doctrine in order to find greater truths, even though such a divergent path is fraught with spiritual dangers and warnings from the scriptures themselves. Magic and the occult are not topics that a good Christian lightly undertakes, and cherry picking those elements in the doctrine and scriptures that are encouraging while ignoring the many warnings and condemnations is nothing short of fatuous. The truth is that Christianity is principally against the practice of divination and magic, or for that matter, the adoption of occult philosophies. Some practices (like astrology or healing through the use of sacraments) are considered grudgingly acceptable, but adopting any kind of philosophy or spiritual practice that would inherently contradict Christian doctrine would be considered completely unacceptable.

A modern Christian magician walks a very fine line between what is an acceptable magical practice or one that is specifically condemned. Some churches are more open minded and accepting of external practices and beliefs (such as the Unitarians) while others are quite strictly against them (such as Protestant Evangelism, Mormonism, Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity, Lutheran and Episcopalian Protestantism, etc.). Even the Church of England has made strict pronouncements against the practices of magic, divination and occultism, although they might not be strictly enforced. Thus a Christian magician not only moves against the grain of the foundational Christian faith, but he or she also ultimately stands alone (or in a distinct minority) and if prudent, silently so. This is why most Christian magicians that I have heard about or know espouse a Hermetic or Esoteric/Gnostic Christian religious perspective, since their practice of magic is typically unacceptable to most mainstream Christians.

That being said, this revelation appears to collapse Peregrin’s arguments that he has made because Christian magicians are not part of the mainstream variety of Christianity. They can use the themes and tropes of Christianity in their magic (as can many of us who aren’t even Christians), but they are really outside of the faith from a mainstream perspective. Therefore, they can’t claim to have solidarity with the established Christian faith nor reap the riches of its centuries of religious heritage and thereby gain its inherent spiritual grace.Solidarity is a two way street, and mainstream Christians would reject being bedfellows with Christian magicians.

Christian magicians must become revisionists and apologists for their practices and beliefs, since the body of Christian scripture and thought condemns their practices. Only a few centuries ago Christian churches would have accused magical practitioners of being heretics or apostates and would have dealt with them severely. This is no longer the case, but there is an inherent stigma for anyone who professes to be a Christian and practices magic, at least as far as the mainstream churches are concerned. It is my opinion that an esoteric or occult version of Christianity is the only kind of spiritual faith that would allow for a simultaneous practice of magic; but esotericism and occultism are not limited just to Christianity. Esotericism and occultism are, by definition, pan-religious, so someone who is an occultist or an esotericist would not be confined by Christian theology. They wouldn't be considered even nominally Christian, either.

There was a time, however, when magic and Christianity found a common but tenuous thread. Back in the Renaissance and even somewhat later, Christian magic was well represented by the traditions associated with the grimoire manuscripts and a handful of published works. If we examine this material, both the manuscripts that are now being published and the republished works from that time we will see a form of Christian magic that was pretty much comprehensive. While Europe waged terrible sectarian wars between Catholics and Protestants, the grimoire tradition was based ostensibly on Catholic traditional magical ideas and practices.

What was omitted from most of these works was the world view of Catholic magical practices that included the Mass, Benediction, votive offerings, idol worship, the basic methodology of discursive meditation and the whole of the monastic tradition of prayers, fasting, purification and consecration. It could even be conjectured that vestments, talismans, magical tools and special character sigils written on parchment (or etched on metal) were all extensions of the basic sacramental systems that were a normal part of Catholic practice. I have also shown in a previous article that the basic spirit invocations employed by magicians (and written down in the old grimoires) was based on a reverse application of the classical rite of exorcism.

It would seem that Catholic rituals and practices provided a basic foundation for the corpus of ceremonial magic, even though such practices would have been condemned by church authorities. While some like Ficino and Bruno sought to bring in the old Gods of Pagan Hermeticism, perhaps to augment or even replace Catholic theology, others just added them to the accretion of practices and beliefs that were already in vogue at the time. A case in point is the 16th century incorporation of the Olympian Spirits into planetary magic, such as was done in the grimoire, the Arbatel.

Therefore, with this in mind I can make the case that the origins for ceremonial magic are to be found in Catholic liturgy, since these rites and beliefs were available to nearly everyone, whether they were Protestant or Catholic, during the epoch of the great grimoires. However, the minds of the individuals that practiced these rites and wrote the grimoires of this period were not those of the progressive free thinkers of their time. This is particularly true since the intelligentsia of the 17th and 18th centuries had already passed over the practice of magic and considered it a quaint superstition when it had reached its zenith of popularity.

Since most of the oldest copies of the grimoire manuscripts in libraries and museums today were actually produced during the 17th and 18th centuries, we can conclude that this time period represented the high water mark for the public’s preoccupation with ceremonial magic. This interest lasted into the first half of the 19th century where it became the proclivity modern occultists. However, I can say with some authority that the spiritual demand made upon those practicing ceremonial magic at that time was to engage with their base religion in an extremely pious manner. Magicians from that time period would have represented the most conservative adherents of their religion on one hand, and the most daring, arrogant and hubristic practitioners on the other hand. Even so, it was not until the late 18th century that magicians were completely safe from persecution for practicing Christian magic, and by then, it was already becoming a dying tradition.

How ironic it is today that only the most esoteric and free-thinking religionists would ever consider performing the rites of ceremonial or ritual magic. This should indicate to everyone that the times have certainly changed people’s beliefs and spiritual practices. It would also seem to indicate that the time of the great grimoires is long past and it is likely that the mental context that these individuals employed to practice their art is also extinct. What we have left is a massive collection of various materials all of which have lost their cultural and religious context. Those who practice magic today, whatever they think they are doing, are actually in the process of creating something new that didn’t exist at all in the epoch of the great grimoires.

If magicians consider themselves Christian magicians, or Pagan magicians, Witches, Theosophists, Thelemites, Demonalators, or whatever, they are actually representing something that bears little or no resemblance to what was practiced anywhere from three to five hundred years ago when ceremonial magic was culturally relevant. Because all modern magicians had to recreate and redefine their magic so that it would function in the post modern world, they have all started at the same place, which is a veritable ground-zero of materials, practices and beliefs representing countless ages of accumulated knowledge. Still, all of that knowledge is useful only to a point, since to build a working system of magic requires the facile ability to experiment, adapt and to create.

Thus, no one magician, whether Christian or Pagan, has any kind of advantage and cannot represent themselves as a continuous line of initiation and practice drawing from the very source of their religion. The heritage of magical practices of the past belong to everyone equally today and no one can exclusively claim them as belonging to their religious creed. 

Modern mainstream Christianity is a religion that has rejected magic as unacceptable and it has also intensely resisted any theological revisionism based on esoteric perspectives or general occultism. Even Catholics have been steadily removing the magic from their liturgy and practices since Vatican II. Magic and Christianity can no longer be considered analogous spiritual systems, and we who are practitioners should understand and accept this fact. Whatever our spiritual foundation, we will never be accepted by mainstream adherents of Christianity. They will always see us as being antithetical or even completely hostile to their accepted traditions and theological tenets. Of course, this should not be a surprising revelation to anyone, particularly we who are magicians.

While Peregrin can talk about his solidarity with mainstream Christians and how he stands in alignment with the greater heritage of Christian belief and practice, the truth is that we who practice magic are all completely at odds with adherents of mainstream Christianity today. We actually have more in common with each other than differences, and certainly we have far less in common with mainstream Christians. So if we are wise we will join together in solidarity despite our minor theological differences to protect our inherent rights and civil liberties. Only in this way can we guarantee that we will be able to practice our beliefs without interference or persecution, as well as advancing our art for the coming age of trials.

Frater Barrabbas