Well, I should warn you - this might be the most foolish post I shared yet. For one, because the two reports of magical experiments from the 1920s which I have translated for you don‘t shed a very positive light on our art and ancestors. In fact, they are probably amongst the worst examples of how to practice magic. As so often the anonymous magician involved seems to have held sufficient half-knowledge to be dangerous - dangerous all at the same time to himself, to his scryer, to the beings he worked with as well as to his own cat.
Read MoreVolker Lechler’s biography of Heinrich Tränker opens a profound new perspective on our magical past as it emerged in the early 20th century. Based on the life and work of Tränker as its central hub the book paints an equally broad and incredibly accurate and detailed picture of the origin stories of many of our current magical orders and how they were formed by the personalities and human weaknesses of their founders.
Acquiring such knowledge and understanding of one’s own tradition’s history is so much more than satisfying academic or historic curiosity. It enables today’s students of magic to consciously realise the human errors woven into the tapestry of tradition they learn from.
Read MoreHow do you review a book that begins to dismantle the myths of an entire tradition? A tradition that depends so much on the numinous, the ill-defined such as Western Ritual Magic. A tradition in fact that was only able to develop in the absence of books like this.
Such books are the results of decades of research, countless hours, weeks and months in old archives, of reading, re-reading and cross-referencing handwritten notes, letters and biographical evidence left behind by their now famous authors. Such books begin to replace myth with fact and craving for a mythical past with the knowledge of what truly happened. It is books like these that make the busts of our ancestors tumble and threaten to reduce them to what they truly were - people who struggled to understand the path of magic just as we do today. Yet, maybe even more drastic to some, books like these threaten to make entire lodge egregores tumble and fall - in the bright light of historic facts, in the mirror that reveals our ancestors’ flaws and lies born from their desire to recreate a romantic past rather than recognising it for what it was.
Read MoreBefore you learn how to sit still, before you learn how to breathe, before you learn how to cast a circle, before you even learn how to focus your mind, ideally the very first thing you learn is how to look. That is: How to look into the talking mirror of your inner contacts and listen to what they tells you. For most of us in the Western Tradition this talking mirror is the Tarot. What you see in it depends on what you put in front of it - which question, situation, sickness, being, vision or dream. However, whatever it is you expose to this mirror its answer will be unapologetically straight forward.
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