This is the earlier mentioned follow-up post to the interview with Walter Ogris, a master in the creation of highly effective magical amulets. In keeping the original interview dedicated to our conversation only, I saved a few thoughts on the specific spirits we discussed as well as my own personal story with his amulets for this post. 

At this point, let me call out that I do not know Mr.Ogris personally, nor do I have any benefit from him receiving greater visibility in the magical scene or simply more orders for amulets. What I am trying to focus on is the essence of why I created theomagica.com in the first place: to share traces of a living 21st century magic, that looks beyond the immediate wellbeing of its practitioner. The kind of magic that isn't self-centred, and yet equally not shy of expressing itself. Because that is what it takes to keep a tradition of art and craft alive.

So whenever I find someone who matches that bill - a magical adept not obsessed by their own ego - I am more than happy to ring all bells and turn all lights on them. Because whether we look back into the 'good old days' or into the mirror today: these people are damn hard to come by.

LVX,
Frater Acher 

THE MAGIC WE CHOOSE TO CREATE

Maybe I am telling myself a story? But to me people such as Walter Ogris represent a time we have almost lost today. Whether this time just had to end or whether we allowed it to slip away, I am not so sure about. Yet, I myself recall it as a time - not too long ago - when occult knowledge was passed on in person from teacher to student, instead of googled. It was a time when the PATH was written in capitals and that is how people committed their lives to it; a time when students and adepts were spread out across many countries and each of them accepted that walking this path came for a price called loneliness.

I am trying to look back on this time without judgement. Maybe I should say: It is neither better nor worse than ours today, but simply different. But what remains true, is that because of the specific conditions this 'old time' created it also brought out different qualities in people. And many of these qualities, I believe, we are at risk of loosing today. 

The time we live in is the soil within which we grow ourselves. We cannot uproot and transport ourselves back in time. But by listening carefully to what people like Mr.Ogris have to say about our tradition, we can make a more informed decision on how we one day want to pass it on to the ones that follow us. The hermetic PATH cannot exist without humans actively walking it. Its spirit is elusive, unless we 'turn it into flesh' through our bodies and deeds. This magical PATH depends upon us; it wants to be mapped out by our own traces and it wants to be passed on as a living tradition. 

Recent decades and centuries carried the risk that this PATH would turn into a corpse, because finding it in the first place and then living up to its Saturnian qualities filtered out most people who desired to walk it. Today the opposite is the case: we are living in a world where everyone can claim to walk this PATH without even moving by an inch. We are living in a time where boundaries, thresholds, milestones and initiations are lost - and yet without these no map can exist and every pattern will ultimately turn into a meaningless maze. 

The 360 Genii and their Talismans

Irrespective of the time that Mr.Ogris might represent to us, it is his actual practice we want to explore a little further. Next to personal consultations Mr.Ogris offers individually crafted and consecrated magical amulets. These amulets do not resemble anything I have come across on my own magical path. Where other amulets I have seen are the physical equivalent of a broad call for help out into the night-sky, Mr.Ogris works are much more alike to a surgical knife - cutting through the veil that is draped between us and a very particular set of spirits.

Since the publications of Wilhelm Quintscher and Franz Bardon these spirits have come to be known as the ‘360 Genii of the Earthbeltzone’ (die 360 Genien der Erdgürtelzone). Unfortunately outside of the tight boundaries of the German speaking countries, they remain almost unknown to this present day. This is even more surprising considering that the first mentioning of their 360 names stems from one of the original manuscripts of the infamous ‘Book of Abramelin’.

Through many years of work with these spiritual entities Quintscher and Bardon were able to understand their actual nature as well as their special relation to the human sphere. They began to realise that each of these spirits - as well as their counter-spirits - can be assigned to a single degree of the ecliptic, i.e. the apparent path of the Sun on the celestial sphere. This ring they described as a ‘belt’ formed around our planet Earth - and as any belt does it tames, provides tightness and structure to the sphere it girds. This belt that is formed by these 360 spirits or Genii has a particular meaning for our human lives - as it is these Genii who were deliberately set over us to teach, support and develop our human capacities, skills and faculties. 

Now, why does this matter? Anybody who has sufficiently worked with energies / spirits from the supralunar sphere, i.e. the forces beyond the gate of the Moon, will realise the significance of the above statement.

The forces of creation that reside beyond the sphere of the Earth don’t hold a concept of human live; they are tuned to create, destroy or maintain cosmic life instead. The human sphere simply is too removed from their field of being - and not surprisingly so, considering the massive expansion of space and multiple realms they are influencing, balancing, destroying or upholding.

The magical tradition of course has found many ways of contacting these 'outer celestial spirits' nevertheless and achieving brief states of union with their divine forces. These are the moments when - I guess, especially male practitioners of our art? - like to feel as kings of the worlds or at least of the living-rooms they are performing their art in. What they are really doing, though, is bloating their egos with forces we were never meant to hold within our delicate human psyche. The price the practitioner pays often goes unrealised - and yet it follows promptly in form of either mental or physical backlashes. Just like a drug addict the practitioner, however, doesn’t realise this negative recoil for what it is. Instead s/he gears up to plan for their next celestial rite and to receive another shot of divine energies into the arm - until their human shell is so fragile it either breaks or collapses. That sounds a little dramatic, you think? Well, maybe it does. But like many I needed to learn this the hard way and was simply lucky to go cold turkey before it got the better of me…

The above illustrates the major difference when working with the Genii of the Earthbeltzone. Here is the thing: Imagine these particular spirits as 360 little masks that sit on a ray of light which forms a ring around our planet. Each mask is alive in its own right - a true spiritual being. Through the front of the mask, the side that is facing Earth these spirits can talk to us, aid us, and help us on our PATH. This side of the mask has been designed to interface with human beings!

On the other side of the mask, though - it’s dark side that we don’t get to see - each spirit is connected to a raw creative force that stems from the vast expanse of space beyond our tiny human realm. Thus every mask has two interfaces - one that is tuned towards teaching humans and one that is tuned towards the intake and absorption of a particular kind of creative power. The genius of this design is both simple and yet incredibly powerful: Due to the fact that there are 360 of these Genii each one of them can be incredibly precise. Each genius can concentrate on very few skills only and teach us to master these really well. They are true specialists of a kind  - not generalists - and for any complex job they love to work as a team.  

MY PERSONAL STORY

You think that sounds too good to be true? Well, maybe. I am clearly not here to argue as I myself wasn’t convinced through debating this subject - but by what happened to me. I first got to experience the power of the 360 Genii of the earthbeltzone - mediated through the work of Mr.Ogris - when I came out of surgery from cancer. Not exactly when leaving the hospital, but it wasn’t more than a few months later. It was at the time when the mood-swings set in, when suddenly in bright daylight from one moment to the next I felt completely exhausted, tired and worn out. Of course this isn’t abnormal after having survived such kind of severe illness. But the beauty is that we as magicians have different life-choices than Jack and Jill. We don’t need to accept either-or situations, we can do both. So I gave myself plenty of time to recover, leaned into the support of my loved ones when I needed it - and also asked Walter for his help through two amulets specific to my situation.

A few days after Walter had received all my details and asked me to now simply wait for him to do his work, I was walking into our bedroom to go to bed. Another mood-swing had just hit me and I felt weak and unstable in a way that I had never known of myself. I remember exactly what I did in that very moment: I was closing the curtains, pulling them shut - when suddenly a huge, warm presence wrapped me into itself - like a fish that finally had been thrown back into the ocean. The experience came without any premonition. And yet I could feel an immense presence of beings around me - that simply held me in their circle and wished me well. The first thought that came to my mind was ‘family’. While I had never experienced family in this way, this was the word my subconsciousness threw out: this is exactly how it must feel to be surrounded by people who know you inside out and simply wish you well, who are prepared to do anything for you and yet are so relaxed knowing that everything will turn out just fine. Only once before had I met a spirit in the Inner Library and he had the same effect on me. It’s a presence in which all sorrow disappears as if put under a bright light. What struck me most, though, was the suddenness of the experience? In a single instant a source of strength, of resilience and vitality had opened itself up right within me, that for some reason I had completely blocked out before. Like a single flipped switch - suddenly the source was opened and a warm, benevolent and yet immensely powerful presence of multiple beings surrounded myself. I went to night that bed in a very calm spirit and without the fear of losing contact to this presence again. It was as if I had turned blind on an older brother who had always been around to protect me - and from one moment to the next my blindness had gone. I guess, you don’t lose connections easily that run through your blood?

The next morning I sent an email to Walter and thanked him for having started the work on my amulet the night before. He replied in surprise, confirmed what I must have guessed and stated that I seemed to be ‘very sensitive’. Indeed he had started to work on my amulet the night before at the time I had gone to bed. 

Since then it has been more than a year and I have learned so much about and through the help of the six Genii I am now connected with. However, I have only twice experienced this state of anxiety and weakness again. And each time did I realise in retrospect that I had taken off the amulet while shaving and forgotten to put it on again.  

See, both the beauty and horror of magic is that we really don’t need to worry about whether or not it works. If anything, we should worry about our skills to leverage it in a way that makes life a better place.