Falcon Books is presenting a series of interviews with seasoned Hermetic practitioners to offer not only their wisdom, knowledge and understanding, and an insight into their own journey, but also to offer inspiration to those on this path. The focus of these discussions are guided towards the spiritual seeker.
André Consciência is from Portugal and has been a dedicated Bardon practitioner for twenty-one years. He joined Fraternitas Hermetica (an order based on the works of Bardon) while still a minor and had an initiator that stood even after the order vanished. He also has worked with his old initiator for 20 years. He has experience of other magical systems such as, AMORC, Order of Michael’s Grail (with roots on Dion Fortune), Thelemic Golden Dawn and Astrum Argentum.
André teaches neo-shamanism and is also a playwright, poet, author, actor, founder of a publishing house with a music label attached, Abismo Humano He also founded the Theatre Company – CIA.Mefisteatro. He enjoys creative writing and is a practitioner of Chi Kung. But Bardon’ system has always been central to his practice.
He works as an artist (performer, actor with his theatre company and musician) and a published author on hermetic literature, namely a Portuguese title. Projecto Prometeus and the other is called The Way of Abrahadabra in which was intended to give the Abrahadabra formula the proper hermetic and Taoist methods and disciplines (stripping it away from the religious aspects of Thelema and all its folk rituals). Finally, he is also the head of three artistic and cultural associations.
Welcome to Falcon Books Publishing thank you very much for participating in this interview with us. Because of your extensive experience on this path.
- Falcon Books: Please you could share a little of your journey and how you came to follow Bardon’s work?
André Consciência: First of all, let me thank you for the invitation. It is an honour to be among like-minded friends. I will talk about how I discovered Bardon and, hopefully, share a little of my journey in the process. I come from a family with a history of the occult, spiritism, on one hand, witchcraft on the other. I grew up between suspicions of my home being hexed, incorporations and possessions, with all the bad and all the good that comes with it. What I soon came to realize is that there was not that much awareness of what was going on from the adults at that time, and mostly there was no clue how to take hold of it and control it in a preventive manner. After reading Allan Kardec and joining a spiritist center, I realized that the philosopher didn’t have the proper answer to the questions his own doctrine was manifesting. I was also becoming a full teenager, and the child in me was giving way to a larger spirit it didn’t seem to be able to contain. I was awakening to a lot of theories and memories which I would try to write, draw and organize, but I was losing control. To speed up the process, I fell in love with a young student from a Wiccan coven who soon died. Wicca wasn’t anywhere near to satisfy my thirst either, although I respect it, and the death my girlfriend brought opened up ahead of me as an even larger abyss of mystery. I had to take care of it. I started studying everything, from art to philosophy, to occultism, while insomnia was hitting hard under the persistent call of something unknown yet known all the while. I ended up accidentally joining a strange sect led by two persons who were feeding our fantasies the best they could, only to tell us it was all a lie, in the end, except the power and wisdom we had absorbed from out of those induced fantasies. Fine. I went on, strangely stronger than before, and now I was becoming learned at theosophy, Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, etc, and at the same time studying the hermetic works of Aleister Crowley. Theosophy had also brought me to meet the congregations of its most dream-like states, the new agers and their close relations with the ascended masters, along with their channelled techniques. But, to summarize it, I had three priorities at the time:
1 The philosophies of Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov and the Great White Brotherhood which I still hold in great account and where I had a teacher;
2. An old man I had met that claimed to be an expert concerning the ascended masters and their teachings
3 Lastly, understanding Crowley’s work
I had a student although I was still a minor, an artist who always seemed to be delighted to see me and to hear me, gazing longingly. I was full of light, radiant like the Sun, in opposition to what one might expect after the death of a teenage passion, teenage passions always being of an obsessive character in at least one or another aspect. I often felt that I was full of light because I was inspired and under protection, but what if I stepped beyond that spotlight into the dark? Was I not being like what I once had come to criticize? Was that safety, that light, mine, or was I just sitting under it? Then, my initiator appeared in an esoteric discussion group. He made it seem like I was losing my precious time. Crowley was confusing in his opinion, at least to the beginner, while more or less superfluous to the mature magician. The ascended masters, under the new age perspective, were astral vampires that he had met himself, and they were wearing the masks of true masters. He gave me the book Initiation Into Hermetics, by Franz Bardon, and told me to read it and tell him my thoughts.
I did read it. I found it of good quality and fascinating, while the old man who claimed to be an expert on the ascended masters would tell me: ‘it’s fine, if you want to ride a donkey when you already have a horse’. I decided to test that person who had given me the book. I told him the book was alright but had a major issue, and I asked him which element was the most important to master first. ‘Fire’, he replied. ‘Yes, that was also my impression after reading Bardon,’ said I ‘but the right answer is in the water, for it is through its love that the balance of akasha comes to be, then all other elements find harmony. The book is flawed’. I thought of myself as very smart upon saying it. Then he replied ‘nonsense, what can love do without the will to learn from it or to express it? If anything, without will, love destroys character and consciousness, being as the darkness before there was any light. Will puts everything in motion, it is the word of being, and it brings forth the radiance of love, but first, you must will it. What Bardon tells you is that to obtain the perfection of success in your mystical and magical pursuits, you need to apply the perfect method’. At this point, I thought he was smarter, and the perfect method was what I always found missing everywhere else. I came back after three days to say to him that he was right. He answered ‘Mind your steps, though. Once you come to know Divine Providence you immediately become a pawn and a king, and if you do not get a hold of your consciousness, you will always end up in the pawn’s perspective’.
I spent some time training the IIH until he introduced Fraternitas Hermetica to me and started to train me. But that was just the beginning of my journey, I explored many things on my own, and I was never really the standard ‘white lighter’. At each step, I would conquer I would only rest after meeting with its shadow instead of frightening it away and risking the dangers of ignorance. I think this multiplied the facets of my initiatic adventures.
2. Falcon Books: Could you share your insights of the Taoist path and how you have used it within your title ‘ The Way of Abrahadabra’?
André Consciência: The Taoist methods are not as present on the Way of Abrahadabra as are the hermetic methodologies, nevertheless, they are more often similar than what is generally known. For instance, the Taoists have their own practice of rising on the planes and the Celestial Masters have accounts of astral travels to distant realms in search of the divine. Tao means ‘The Way’, the reason why the book was named ‘The Way of ABRAHADABRA’, yet The Way, or the TAO, and Abrahadabra are the same, for the final dynamism of Abrahadabra is translated as 0=2, 210, or NOX. NOX is the trinity of 0 composed of the Two Columns of the Temple of Solomon, the Pentagram, and Death, the magician standing between life as expressed by the duality of the columns and the death of dissolved duality, treading on The Way, that path of non-effort called the TAO, which brings us to the original meaning of Abrahadabra and to that eternal now which states ‘I create as I speak’. This is one way of formulating magical equilibrium. It also points out that through wisdom, love and will unify as a single consciousness, the akasha manifests, becoming electromagnetic. Abrahadabra’s number is 11, the number of the hidden sphere, while at the same time it amounts to 5+6, five being the number of the microcosmos, and six of the macrocosmos. While the hidden sphere is here as the blackness of Akasha – the union of individual and cosmic expressions and their further neutralization into zero – the state of no-mind at first presents itself as the interaction of its parts, the spiritual akashic violet that leads unto the blackness. When one examines the numbers and letters of Abrahadabra one gets the Crown, the Wand, the Cup, the Sword and, finally, the Rose and the Cross as the Pentacle. It is at the Rose and the Cross that the two become one, the one being the unveiling of the zero so that dualism is a path to non-dualism. At Liber Al Vel Legis we find this passage written by Aleister Crowley:
There is no doubt that Abrahadabra is a formula to the Tao, and I mean to say the Tao not as a discipline or a school, but a state and a being. The method in this formula is tantric and yogic, but also firmly hermetic. The Crown refers to the dominion of the mind over the phenomena it witnesses, the Wand refers to the resulting transformation of the womb of the mind into the tongue of the spirit, Will, in a magical sense, meaning a Will that comes from the faculty of consciousness. The Cup is given by the new awareness that consciousness brings when it turns its eye into itself: it is the witnessed vacuity of mind. Through such mastery of the mind, the Sword finally aligns the individual magician with the Tao, with the Akasha in its expression of Divine Providence, and this is where the Tao is yet The Way. Upon the symbol of the Rose and the Cross the individual and the cosmos merge completely to become the Tao, where the 2 and the 0 are equal. It is clear that Taoism had a great influence on Crowley, and I learned the Tao Te Ching first from Crowley’s translation of the work, as well as the I Ching. The magician following the works of Bardon will have no problem identifying with these brief explanations about the hermetic path. In Taoism, there is a place for the deification of certain disciplined men, that is, there is a place for the divine in all the structures composing a man, his soul, his body and his mind. Their immortals are as the immortals of the IIH, the ones who have attained a level of consciousness and equilibrium far enough to survive the corrosive aspects of the cosmos, being, instead, inhabited by it. In Taoism or Daoism, there are also the natural spirits and the deities that help the Taoist advance, and the methods to have the creative future flow backwards, which are, in a way, identical to the magical volt sent to the Akasha as taught by Bardon. All of this is explored in some way or another at the Way of Abrahadabra, yet mostly the book’s aim is to arrive at the Tao, to realize that the Way and the Tao are translations of one another. Ultimately, the Tao becomes an attitude, the way is the non-way, and it can be attained by any means.
I divide the book into four distinct stages, one for the perfection of one’s inner faculties and structures, two for the perfection of one’s outer faculties in relation to inner faculties, and the fourth for reaching beyond the outer and, consequently, beyond the inner, so that the Akasha permeates the practitioner and Divine Providence manifests through him on the world. Taoists also have a way of sending things into the Tao and getting things from the Tao according to the natural way – that is, in Bardonist terminology, to the Eternal Now – aiming for an endless source.
Because I do not believe oriental traditions can germinate in all their purity on the west, due to the east having silence as the most constant activity of consciousness and the west exactly the opposite, I try to push the trained consciousness beyond what it can possibly conceive, being that engagement, in this case, tricks it into crossing over the threshold of attachment.
The first three stages are symbolized by LVX, meaning Light. The L is the erected phallus, and it stands for an awakening of magical will, that is, the awakening of a will that comes through magical equilibrium. The V is the open kteis, and it refers to consciousness opening to receive the cosmos and the world opening to the influence of the magician. The X aligns L and V, micro and macrocosmos, forming a higher level of magical equilibrium. And finally, there is NOX, when the magician becomes the portal and no longer has to knock on the gates of power and virtue.
3. Falcon Books: Following this subject of Taoism, could you discuss the differences/similarities in terms of the energetics?
For example with a huge generalisation we have the Jing-Qi-Shen model, with the idea of transforming one substance into another, cultivation. Whereas in IIH we do not store we just immediately use the energy be it vital force, elements, fluids etc. How have you brought these two models together in your own practice?
André Consciência: Interesting. I have a tale yet to be published named Father Moon and the Desert of Di Yu which explores some of both. A taoist searches for the one they call Father Moon, which is said to live in a jade palace, for he thinks Father Moon is one of the taoist immortals. But it is actually an elemental of the earth element. This passage hints at the difference between both ways of seeing the world, but it is only a superficial difference.
I woke up in a comfortably furnished room with a jade table, several chairs and a large bookcase that covered a whole wall. Sitting at the table was Monpai, with his smooth, young face, moving at once tired and fast. “Why are you here?” He asked impatiently. I anticipated this dialogue, nevertheless a cold sweat pierced my mind. “Are you not the father of the West? And do you not hold the secret of eternal life and the entrance to paradise?” I asked boldly. The golden eyes on the damsel’s face penetrated my spirit. “I see you’re not like the others. There is purpose in you.” Monpai spoke in a nervous voice, a voice sung like the voice of a child. “But what you say about me can not be said of me alone” he concluded. “Yes… in my eastern culture there was a jade palace made by jade miners, there the Queen was a fierce goddess with tiger teeth, always ready to send plagues unto the world. But before the TAO she became benign, planting a peach tree that gave each Aeon the peach of immortality.” I argued. “I see, you came for fear of death. But how will I forgive you for invading my solitude?” He gestured with thin milky arms and delicate fingers. “Immortality I grant. A peach tree I do not have.” He pulled a flute from his shirt pocket. “I have a flute carved from the vertebrae of the world.” At that moment I nervously searched for my TAO cross in my own robes and stopped. Monpai shrugged, sensual as a lost breeze whirling in the snow. “I am not your motherly queen. I come from the period of the great formations of coal, generated in forests and exuberant marshes of a then tropical England. I’ve seen the seas swallow down the earth and continents become ice. I lived when on Earth there was only one Continent and the trees rose a hundred feet high in the Age of Amphibians. My flute has commanded one-meter arachnids and today commands mankind.” I meditated on it all. “Are you as a Yaoguai? An animal become powerful and immortal by virtue of being worshiped?” But Monpai laughed sweetly and dangerously at me.
In the depths of its ancient and pagan traditions, the west is wild and primal, the east is primal and gracious. But hermetism, being western, is still eastern philosophy going through a greek filter. It is a fine place to find balance between cultures. The Akasha in all its spectrum is ever beyond and ever-present and the way to approach it in its extensiveness is in the way of the TAO, the path of non-effort. The magician mingles with the unplanned patterns of the universe and, flowing, disappears, the gate of the Sun then opens and drops of TAO fall through, condensation. What the hermetic magician, in turn, is made of as a whole is the TAO directly connected with the primal and raw power of matter. That makes him a master over all the elements.
In hermetism, the element of light can be produced by transmission, which is the movement of electromagnetism through a body. This means that the body, material or shape should neither absorb the light nor block it. It is the essential method of the Tao and requires complete transparency as one completely flows with his environment, becoming the dance. Electromagnetic waves are as if they are a direct manifestation of the Akasha in the manifest world, and can be divided into seven forms of radiation, from the shorter and most saturated wave to the larger and most dissipated. But it can also, as in the example you give, be accumulated, and this brings me back to a story with my own initiator. At the stage in IIH when one is learning to concentrate the fluids of the elements, he said to me ‘I have something quite surprising to show you’ and he showed me a Dragon Ball Z video where Songoku was becoming a super warrior, storing vitality and then turning blond, with golden energy flowing all around him permanently. ‘What the Japanese are showing on television is to be your focus at this stage. It works as bodybuilding, first, you accumulate the vitality of the elements and you can only store so much, but with time you can store more and more. Eventually, if you can store enough moonlight on your astral body for the light to fall back into itself, you become the sun, and this method of transmutation is to dissipate half of your coming nightmares regarding the soul mirror as you progress”.
This is not too hard to explain outside the field of fluidic condensations. If one virtue of inspiration is pushed into becoming wise, it is closer to becoming a practical power to be applied in the world. If such wisdom learns to love, the most effect it will have on everything surrounding it. If it finally becomes a skill and a strength, it becomes fully present in the outside world. Likewise, if the magician takes a power and soaks it in love, this power becomes magnetized, and if he so continues to bring it closer to the Tao, that loving power becoming wise and then inspired, it is no longer just a power, but a portal into the spirit realm, a door to the kingdom of light and a torch of initiation. Bardon has also contemplated the transformation of virtues and faults on the soul mirror, but on the occasion, the magician is not yet quite experienced at manipulating the fluids.
Jing Qi Shen works with essence, vitality and spirit, just as hermetism works with the elements, vitality or the fluids and the akasha. The three treasures are also moral virtues that connect the Taoist to the akasha and its phenomenal aspects on the eternal now. In IIH, the Jing, being the qualities, are breathed in, and this is the Qi, nurturing the Shen as soul and mind and bringing it forward as the spirit or deity, while traditionally the essence is turned to breath and the breath to spirit, which is very much the process taught by Bardon on breathing qualities and vitality into the blood and from the blood into the astral and mental body. Then, traditionally, the spirit is refined into emptiness. And this is exactly also what my initiator has taught me, to use the breathing exercises to create magical volts out of myself, refining the electromagnetism that comes out of the quadripolar volt into the akasha. The Qi can also be seen as the body – mental, astral or physical – and the Shen as willpower, but in any case, all these variations are telling us the same tale, and this tale is almost omnipresent in Initiation Into Hermetics.
4. Falcon Books: This interview will focus more upon PME and KTQ rather than the early steps of IIH, But before we move on what advice would you give to students of IIH based on your own journey?
André Consciência: Act on the IIH with rigour and according to its indications but think of it with intelligence. What I have come to realize is that at each step Franz Bardon is giving us elements to form a language so to speak and the rules of its grammar, but becoming fluent in a language depends on its creative use. It is said that to really learn a language one needs to start thinking in that language. Almost any exercise at IIH can combine with any other, and this is how you begin to understand Bardon on a dynamic level. Men and women of western cultures get bored easily, they need entertainment, but there are so many ways on which you can engage with IIH as you progress that the only real reason remaining for the sincere aspirant to quit is lack of imagination, and imagination too can be trained.
Most of the students I had under my supervision gave up when it came to obtaining an empty mind. Many successful magicians have noticed this issue and have made suggestions. I will add that if it is too hard, try mastering the previous exercise in many different ways. Eventually, imagine a single star in a night sky with nothing else on it. Then, remove the star. You will trick your mind into thinking you are fixing your thoughts on an image as you are used to, but what you are really doing is uniting with silence and allowing it to take over. Also, do something to learn about silence if it is lacking in you. For instance, there are cromlechs that I go to here in Portugal that will literally silence your thoughts without any effort on your part having to take place. If you fix your thoughts long enough on such landscapes while you are standing on them you will end up obtaining their qualities.
The soul mirror is the second when it comes to having students quit. Those who actually managed through mastering their thoughts turn their backs at this period. Nobody likes to be judged, although we judge ourselves all the time as if someone else is doing it. Try not to think of your faults as sins and things to be ashamed of. Add psychology to the disciplines and transpersonal psychology. Communicate with your vices, listen to them with active listening, let them feel understood. Encourage their passive and docile loyalty and have them never lie to you or try to trick you. Engage with your virtues as well, fix your thoughts on them and realize their dance and their elemental grace. Virtues and strengths are not just obligations, they are muses and sources of inspiration. If you feed a virtue well enough it will eventually submit the vices under its supervision. Then comes the question of the balance between the elements. You have not only the quantity of qualities at each element to think about, but also the intensity of each quality. If qualities are lacking at one particular element, you can create them. Meditate on them, breathe them in and out, and eventually practice those qualities on your interaction with the world and on your daily life. You can start by playing the character of one who has the quality you are trying to create. First you write down the characters file, the traits the character has, what led him to have such traits, and what his ambitions are. You can even add in his tastes and his appearance in order to enrich imagination. When you play that character it will eventually teach you about its strength and virtue through gnosis, that is, through a knowledge that is not only intellectual but also sensorial and emotional.
Your birth chart might bring you some new clues on the subject if you are learned in astrology. You can balance the birth chart not so much by trying to erase the aspects you dislike but by filling it with balancing traits, and you will have the graphics to help you on this mission. If you are not learned in astrology or if you do not believe it, it remains that we grow up under the stigma of being of such and such sign, and we eventually adopt its traits. But we, as magicians, can balance a sign by invoking another, that is, by having another sign form inside of us that balances the first.
If you manage to succeed, remember that your work concerning the soul mirror is not over nor will it ever be. I have seen those with greater training, greater experience and greater success than me eventually falter. The defect of great magicians is often pride, a blind pride, and its servant is an obsession towards control and perfection. That is why it is important to keep yourself in check, even if you now have all the tools to beat your weaknesses, you can still be deceived.
After a while, it does you no good to obsess about the soul mirror constantly, and it becomes a block in itself. It is sufficient to find some form of routine. For instance, once a week breathe in the elements that constitute your magical equilibrium as shown on the soul mirror, and out your weakness. It also helps to locate the positive traits in your body and have the vitality flow between them. At zones of the body where the tensions of the defects and vices lay, you can perform a good oily massage and dissipate such tensions through transfering your conscience to the affected muscles. At new moons and full moons watch your thoughts, feelings and bodily impulses, and if you have crafted your magical hat as teached at PME, use it at this occasion. You will realize how most of your thoughts and feelings aren’t yours but automatic responses to automatic responses. Still, sometimes you might be visited by a thought that is your mission in this life, or by an emotion that connects with your soul throughout all of your lifetimes. Be that as it may, your vices and weaknesses will flee from your divine vigilance. Yet this will also give you true authority over them. At solstices and equinoxes fix your silent concentration on the traits of the soul mirror, if your weaknesses are hiding something they will reveal it, and if your virtues have guidance to give it will be given. But finally, when the year is turning, write down a new soul mirror from the start.
By updating one’s soul mirror one can keep track of what keeps coming back and what not. In terms of health it is important to take note that, for example, if loneliness keeps coming back again and again it might not just be a case of melancholy, but a symptom that one is not dealing correctly with how he relates to other people.
Thirdly, there is the densest form of astral travel, or, as I like to name it, the etheric projection. While the magician has to concentrate great amounts of energy he really has to let go at the same time, or he will keep coming back to the physical body. Transferring one’s consciousness into the blood and projecting from out of it might help.
5. Falcon Books: How significant is the process of moving from Step 8 of IIH into PME and KTQ?
André Consciência: That depends on the goals of the magician. One can imagine the IIH as High School, the PME as the University, and the KTQ as a Master’s Degree. High School is good enough to have you go about in the world as a working man or woman, and in this case, a man or a woman working for the manifestations of Divine Providence. Someone who has completed high school can always go to the university, where he will learn many wonders that he, at least before the internet, would not have the means to find out for himself. Believe me, the entities at PME have perspectives that we can hardly access by other means, and it takes years of exploring the spheres as learned at the IIH to find intelligences so solid and of such high degree. Our mundane universities are full of proud and frustrated teachers, but not this one, not this sacred university. At KTQ you learn to speak in exactly the same language of these intelligences, your word becomes the Shekinah, the holy dwelling of Divine Providence.
That being said, I am not sure if I am truly suited to answer this question. I was presented to PME little by litlle while I progressed. When I trained fixing my thoughts I was given a pen and told to think of a light expressing absolute victory while gazing continuously at that pen. When I was finished the pen was shining in the dark. I was told that it was by similar methods that I would later consecrate the sword as a magical weapon. To help me through the steps I was sometimes given an intelligence of the moon sphere, of the zone gridling the earth, or an elemental, depending on the nature of the lessons to be obtained on that step. I was to fix my thoughts on the sigil while emptying the mind, an astral fluid would start to flow and I was to breathe it or travel on my mental and later, on my astral body to activate it. Obstacles to the soul mirror as major issues at home or the strong nightmares that kept me from sleeping year after year, etc, were pacified at the intervention of those entities and, finally, my dominion over the elements in what concerns the soul mirror was crowned by the consecration of the corresponding magical tools by the means at my disposal at that stage, although I would keep coming back to them with new acquired methods. I was teached to meditate in the center of the circle about the center of the circle, and also about what every other magical tool given at PME was veiling. This was part of my process through IIH, but although I made fluid condensers and talismans that would connect me to the wisdom of certain elementals and certain entities of the moonsphere, I only evoked a being into the triangle on the physical at step 9. I admit I was also given some cosmic letters while perfecting my skill to concentrate the elements, so that I would know the elements’ full composition and, once skilled at the akashic trance, what combinations were to connect the different elements with their akashic source, by such means keeping the process of breathing or nourishing the element going on by itself.
Moving from IIH to PME and KTQ can be significant in that neither the PME nor the KTQ are more of the same. They are truly an addition to IIH. Still, completing Initiation Into Hermetics is award enough and, on an essential level, one will be no less without touching the PME and the KTQ.
6. Falcon Books: Though PME is a very private journey is there anything you can share? Such as the beings you met, the differences between the spheres and anything that took you by surprise?
André Consciência: Everything took me by surprise and still does. I only had five full materializations, flesh and bone. These are materializations where even if you try you cannot see past the intelligence, physically and not only physically. One was with the greek deity Pan according to Bardon’s method. The second was something near to an accident. The third was with my own guide according to Bardon’s method. The fourth with Bardon’s method and N’Aton. The fifth with an entity from Abramelin and Bardon’s method.
At such a level of density Pan appeared to me as an absolute nightmare, everything froze, including my mind, but in the aftermath he boosted the natural power of having the elementals respect me as an authority even as one of their own. This evocation changed the constitution of my body in the space of a few months, especially my legs, but all for the better. The second time took place at a forest on an abandoned monastery I was allowed to explore. After months of working ceremonies on the space and having placed a grid of fluidic condensers buried beneath the ground something like a humanoid lizard, that had not been evoked, appeared. It gazed at me for ten seconds and disappeared. During the time span of the experience nature went completely silent, including elements such as the wind, and my mind instantly not with the silence of the silent monkey, but the silence of no monkey at all, if you can understand the metaphor. Even my heartbeat stopped. Yet, this time I was fully present. With my guide or Holy Guardian Angel I dedicated him a whole summer, and eventually he would often become fully materialized, but at the end of the time I had planned for the operation the instincts of my body were afflicted by the irrational eminence of death. Finally with N’Aton, the personification of the collective consciousness of humanity as flowing from the best possible future, the operation, aiming for global change in the present, was entirely pleasant. The only strange phenomena was that when I finally left the cave the mountain was on fire and deep smoke. Lastly, with the being from Abramelin The Mage I realized that although the psychic saturation in the air would be unbearable to almost anyone, I was totally at ease and in full dominion of my faculties. I tried full materialization only five times, and upon realizing that I had come to my own sense of perfection in the matter I left it behind so far.
Most of the other evocations appear to be in the flesh, that is why we train each sense at IIH. But if you become distracted or try to look beyond the being, the being becomes more or less holographic or eventually a presence distorting the air. This method is fine and safer and, according to the laws of the triangle, still gives the intelligence power to act on the physical realm. Of this, for the sake of brevity, I will give one example of a frightening nature. Although I had perfect and positive results with intelligences from Saturn, I once conducted an operation where I asked one of them to show me the roots of my fear and to teach me how to deal with it. While he appeared at first in the appearance of a very fresh and very ancient holy man, he became horrendous after, and kept being horrendous until having come to the conclusion that I had obtained what I had asked for. He gave me some rules to follow on my communications with him and I also settled my own rules. He obviously never failed, but I once failed in keeping with the method and a scream like the ripping apart of the veil between the spheres was heard, one of my cat defecated and died of a heart attack, the other cat ran away to never come back. My dog, which was outside, died on the next day from a similar heart attack. The intelligence would try to have me break the circle: I eventually had a motorbike ride in through the chamber I was using, the noisy motor, the flashlight on me and someone looking as if I was doing something forbidden, but there was no way for a motorbike to get in that space and I refused to believe it. Eventually the noise and the light went to the background of my attention, finally to disappear. Or, if I would suddenly fear that something would happen, it would come to happen in an immediate time span. I remember fearing for no reason that the two guys in front of me at the bar would start fighting and one broke the glass on the head of the other and there was blood at my feet. Or fearing a thunderbolt would fall near me and having one fall on the house next to me in seconds, breaking its wall. Happily, the house was under construction and had no inhabitants. This eventually became a nihilistic period for me, it was the only time that I thought I would fail miserably. The things I believed in all started to show a different face on their own. I would sleep all day and night. But through my disbelief I started having wonderful dreams, and one day I woke up to realize that I didn’t need to believe anything, for everything was there anyway, like a timeless garden to be a part of. I felt a deep spring in me and strangely the entity assured me that was all I needed to know, and was again of a benign disposition. The next day I dreamt with a girl, and on that day I met a girl exactly as the girl in my dream. As she invited me I started to go out more and to live again a life as natural as possible and certainly more natural than before. But, contrary to what had happened with Pan, this operation had ill effects on my legs and I took one year to recover them to full health.
There are dangers on a psychological level by the influence over the physical plane from lesser entities. I once worked with a negative intelligence from the sphere of the moon with the intent to get rid of my emotional delusions in a way that the rational analysis of the soul mirror wouldn’t reach. For such an operation I allowed for contact in dreams. The intelligence would give me prophecies during my dreams of betrayals to come from my dear ones. They were all nonsense, and still they happened every time right on the day that I would wake up to. In my dreams, the entity would then become a clown and laugh at me, but I started to realize that the mime was like me yet dressed and painted as a mime. Eventually, after the entity had tried to give me, from her mouth, a green serpent that I hypnotized with my wand, I dreamed that I was inside the mime and looking at me as I really am, and while I had the mask it was the person’s face in front of me that was an illusion. I offered that person to the cosmic void. On the next day, me and the intelligence came to the conclusion that the job was done and the process concluded.
Although the entities Bardon obscures, such as the entities of Mars and Saturn or even the air elementals – sometimes causing great confusion and dispersion to the non enlightened mind – can be hard to take on, the others have the minds of guides and, if abused, will give no harsher punishment than that of a good teacher. The important thing to keep is that the magician is no longer just the magician when evoking them to the triangle, he is divine, charged with omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and immortality and keeping with his akashic trance. I also believe there are few human beings capable of abusing flesh and bone materializations without very dangerous possible side effects on the physical level. Aside from that, constant evocation even if not as dense, may cause dependency on the magician and not only that, may become as a drug that will have him hallucinate outside the operation or lose contact with the human world, it being that most of the things one learns in the context of magical evocation are difficult to translate into the mundane human experience.
At any rate, good communication with the beings at PME is made of surprise, of the heart and mind and of the body expanding, and so, one is surprised all along.
About the spheres, it may be important to notice that at IIH Bardon walks us through the abilities they offer as seen from Malkhut. Beyond that, each sphere can be as vast as the planet Earth in terms of variation, or wider, and to limit them beyond Bardon’s or for example William Mistelle’s descriptions can be fatal. Yet, as a most imperfect guideline, one may have it that the sphere of the moon teaches of that which moves mind, body and matter in terms of cycles, automatisms and self-regulations, or of the magnetism wrapping it all into a transcendent state or fluid. Mercury is thought of as splendour on the hebraic traditions, this means that it is not entirely intellectual. A rabbi would have the student understand the Torah from the glory that emanates from its passages. And it is through glory that the transcendence of the moon sphere becomes articulated into a system or a language to be spoken and understood. While this glory is still as a ghost, a reflection, art gives it a solid body of light which not only encloses the splendour into, literally, a holy mass, but also opens up the gates of the sun. The erotic devotion that it requires is absorbed from the sphere of Venus. The deliverance it provides brings the magician to cross the veil of illusion, the veil of Paroketh, his own ego – that is, the survival instincts of his own automatisms. And then he steps unafraid into the gates of the Sun, where he knows himself through all his life times, past and future, and at the same time creates himself. This is the magician’s individuality that was being obstructed by the “ego”, it is as the electromagnetic body of his consciousness in its purest state and from this point of view the individual needs no self in order to be and to be contained. He still has to have enough willpower to put it into practice on a cosmic level, for he is now as a creative block of Divine Providence, and of such disciplines as great as to move the sun speaks the sphere of Mars. At Jupiter the individual attains to the double consciousness, he is not only the individual but, simultaneously, the collective consciousness of all the sunlike beings, the company of the stars, for he has reached outside. Finally, there is Saturn, the whirlwind of destiny upon which such collectives act. Saturn is not only the sphere of limitations and their liberating initiations, it is also the sphere where these stars go to dream and to create the world anew.
7. Falcon Books: Do you prefer to mental travel to explore the PME or to do physical evocations?
André Consciência: There is more of mental travel than there is of evocation, for I never evoke a being without first moving to his sphere to meet with him. I do not prefer a method over the other.
8. Falcon Books: Could you tell us a little more about your teacher and how it helped you work your way through Bardon’s?
André Consciência: My teacher was maybe one of the most puzzling miracles that I have witnessed. He gave me a lot for many years and was never selfish or vile, not once. Such an example is already the greatest talismanic – in the sense that each of us is as a talisman to the other – help one might need. Then, he was the most creative magician that I have had the honor to meet. I do not mean that on an artistic level, but speak of creativity applied to the hermetic disciplines instead. Intelligent could be a more exact term. He saw keys everywhere that I didn’t, nor anyone else that I know or that I have come to read and, most surprisingly, they were the correct keys. With his help, going through the IIH was not that penance that so many seem to talk about, it was probably the most engaging experience that I ever lived. Also, he knew when to vanish. Once he vanished for three or four years, but it always felt like he was doing it on a perfect timing. We often worked and meditated together, and once I had worked with him my enlarged capacities would no longer diminish. At some point of our progress we were a lot like team mates, anchoring on each other to potencialize practices that we were pursuing individually before and after. If I was to speak of all he taught me I would have to write a book, but then again, it wouldn’t be my book to write. Most of all he made each step at IIH into a number of steps, since each step would benefit from the next in order to be perfected and reconstructed. This actually made it easier and faster, not longer and harder.
It remains to say that he didn’t base himself on hermetics alone, he studied the norse traditions and the Eddas, Sufism, Ninjitsu and Taoism.
9. Falcon Books: I wonder if you could share with us more about the Horus Maat Lodge?
André Consciência: The Horus Maat Lodge is a lodge for adepts, it does not have a training system of its own but, while accepting a myriad of traditions and its methodologies, it does have its own praxis. It focuses on the magick of Maat, as a counterweight to the explosive Horus. While Horus is a liberating light, consuming all limitations, Maat is balance and justice. Her virtue is Truth, whose power is that of constant transformation and evolution. In this paradigm Horus becomes the white globule of Maat, eliminating tyrannic structures to give truth and balance a natural space to manifest and grow. We function as a decentralized but seriously organized cyberlodge. The lodge has forty years and we have adepts from many corners of the world, divided in nexuses, and from many traditions, from Thelema to Vodoun, wiccan priests and priestesses to gnostic bishops, members of the martinist orders, members of the AMORC, chaos magicians, etc. We consider art to be magic too, for it works in its own discipline with the symbols and the invisible planes to bring change into the world, and give the solid artist the place of a rightful Adept. As stated in the Chart of the Horus Maat Lodge, we are tolerant except of intolerance and bigotry. I would say most of our ethics can be summarized at “Priesthood: Parameters and Responsibilities”, by Nema. A common inspirational book is Liber Pennae Praenumbra, where Nema channels Maat and describes her visions, revealing N’Aton as a possible healthy future for the planet, he representing the double consciousness of the sovereign individual who is fully telepathic and empathic, the reunion of every human being in such a state being the evolution of the species. This is an evolution where nuclear warfare or warfare of any kind will not be possible, and where through the collective consciousness as accessed by the individual everyone will be able to feel and communicate with Gaia – meaning nature, the earthzone and the elemental kingdoms – as well as to understand the intelligences of other planetary spheres and constellations. Thus, the environment will be safe. Our aim is to become talismans that preserve and potencialize this kind of change. Our magical word is IPSOS; meaning “by the same mouth” and, in my own understanding it implies, among other things, instant balance between the inner and the outer, being that our words and actions towards others are also swallowed/suffered by us, the reason why it would not make sense to commit to injustice and to lies. The works of Nema herself seem to give particular importance to the Tao through the dancing of the masks and the black flame, the purifying flame of the empty mind. The dancing of the masks implies also the practice of ascending in the planes: that is, when your vision and understanding becomes obstructed on a plane you rise to a higher level and start perceiving and acting through it. The levels are disposed through the Tree of Life and are similar to the astrological planetary spheres described by Bardon. Dancing the masks also implies that to bring truth into the hearts of the many we come to meet in life one has to become truth in many languages. On an ultimate level, it is the black flame, the empty mind turned into a fluidic and dynamic element, that is being masked by its elasticity to take on different forms and reflect the truth.
10. Falcon Books: Regarding working through IIH which aspects did you find the most challenging and why?
André Consciência: While I did ascend in a spiral to meet with my guide as teached by Bardon, this was not my first close encounter with him. I followed the procedures that were being given by the F. H. where, through a certain method, you meet with a personification-plasmification of your own astral substance, or better yet, something between your own astral substance and the Soul of the World as put by Giordano Bruno. This personification is knowledge itself and takes many forms and guises. It is only after you get it under perfect control and out of the way that the guide will appear crystal clear, as if one had removed the scales from one’s eyes. While there are some valid methods given by adepts from the school of Frantisec Bardon to check whether the intelligences or elementals being contacted are real or products of the imagination, they are never bullet proof. Many of the beings that I had come to meet while working with the Tatwas were just this plasmification that stands as a bubble between one’s self and the world. I started running through my magical diaries from years past and the number of such cases started to grow page by page.
The real challenge is truly knowing something. We are trained to manipulate mind, body, the soul and the senses into some form of hypnosis that allows us to cross the bypass that binds us to the most mundane realities. But what does it mean?
Eliphas Levi, in his “The History of Magic”, in a way seems to turn against the truth of magic, exposing the fevers of astral intoxication and its final products of hallucination and self-deceit. He tells us that the astral light is the devil himself. Aleister Crowley tells of a great number of self-claimed adepts who are but neophytes blinded by the shining images of the moonlight, he considering the phenomenal world not that important altogether only to fall into a greater pit, the abyss of the void and its own non-phenomenal hallucinations. It is no wonder that, at Crowley’s tradition, in the matter of validating some sort of absolute truth, the paradox that resolves the problems of magic is in Kether then, or at the grade of Ipissimus. When the magician reaches the highest form of himself he is just a simple man and no more. At The Way of Abrahadabra I close the book by telling the reader that, if he has gone through all the exercises, he has experienced so much that he can finally remain at peace again as a simple, mortal man. The great worm of hell formed out of curiosity will no longer blind him and attack him with fever and delirium. Goodness, he has earned being a common man for the first time in his life now. While I feared this kind of conclusion for the whole of my journey, I rejoice in it today.
As a consolation for the doubtful pilgrim who is walking on his path, remember that the most important thing is not how absolutely real in all perspectives something is, but if it works and the proof of success: ultimately, you become a better person.
Aside from that, with a teacher or without it, until you become mature not only as a magician but as a regular person with a body that keeps changing until it dies, this is a very lonesome path, and it gets lonelier as you progress. An important part of your life and of your identity becomes unpronounceable. This can only be counterbalanced by something Nema said “the hard work is in polishing one’s perceptions. This is why I say that 90% of Magick is trash-removal”, or, as an ex-girlfriend of mine from a druidic order put: “I dream of becoming a human. There are just a handful. Most of the people tend to think of themselves as divine”.
11. Falcon Books: There are some practitioners who attempt to work with Bardon’s 2nd and 3rd books before finishing IIH, what are the dangers of doing this?
André Consciência: Firstly, if you have no knowledge and no power it’s all just child play. Playing is good for your health, they say. But if you do have some power and knowledge, once you have come to a fair amount of dominion over the elements there is no danger in working with the magical tools, but they are at their best once the magician has trained with the four divine qualities. For the circle, while it can not hurt, it is at its best once akashic trance is mastered. The hat is best used when the magician has control over his mind and his mind has become a beacon of light through the workings of silence. The triangle makes sense after the magician has learned to master his body and his hold of his situation in physical life, as well as in the mental sphere and in astral projection. It makes sense to use the lamp after having mastered clairvoyance, the incense after having clairalience, etc. The danger is that if the magician uses the weapons before mastering what they represent it will be harder for him to believe in their strength. But depending on the magician and of his influence over the astral fluids etc, the weapons can work the other way around, solidifying the capacities he has been searching for. Once the soul expands it does not contract, the old labyrinths, once solved, don’t return to being labyrinths.
Concerning the intelligences, there is no danger in using some source of inspiration. But if the magician tries to have them on the triangle before he is prepared, or before he has learned the proper methods, meditations and magical equilibrium, he will probably be working with a densification of the astral light that, if the magician’s concentration on virtue is not irreprehensible, will probably harbor astral larvae. He won’t die specifically from it, for to be under the dominion of astral larvae one just has to wish for it, no magic is required. It is preferred that, unless the magician has a teacher, he refrains from using the PME altogether until reaching a proper step at IIH. Above all, if he must use it and he has the skill to actually succeed in obtaining more than a pipe dream, he is most firmly to stick to intelligences of the zone gridling the earth – avoiding the monarchs – and some intelligences of the sphere of the moon. Bardon’s intelligences are, as I said, mostly guides of a gracious nature, but even ballet being gracious, it can damage the tissues of the untrained dancer if he pushes too hard or tries to go beyond his ability. For instance, a talented beginner using intelligences from the sun sphere has little chances of succeeding, at least without lowering the beings vibration very substantially, but if by some miracle he was to succeed with strength and dignity, he would find his ego shattered instead of asleep, leading to different breeds of psychosis.
KTQ, in my opinion, has no dangers at all. Most people are capacitated to think in abstract terms, in symbolic terms, and on an emotional level. They are less able to think with the body and, because of it, won’t be able to obtain the powers from the letters, only the virtues. The cosmic letters will come to the practitioner to the extent of his maturity, no less and no more, but, just as with regular meditation, they can help anyone progress.
The untrained person can try then to articulate the letters between many combinations and yet unless he is a skilled philosopher of sorts, an artist, a poet, or maybe a programmer he is to do it at absolutely no avail.
Still, I once met an oriental master who told me the KTQ should preceed IIH, for the magician would have fixed all the necessary virtues even before starting the work of Initiation Into Hermetics.
Although I have hinted at some potential dangers and mistakes, one is to avoid fear, remember that esotericism protects itself from harming the fool exactly by being incomprehensible to him.
12. Falcon Books: For someone who is untrained using the tripolar method how effective is KTQ and can it cause harm if they have not finished IIH?
André Consciência: Just as the west uses yoga mostly as gymnastics and makes it ingenuous, so would the practice of the KTQ become innocent to the untrained, no more than some periodic mental exercising and emotional relief.
13. Falcon Books: Some of the dangers of the following occult path is that the training in some systems are unbalanced and there can be a tendency to focus on seeking out answers outside of ourselves rather than through personal development. In your experience working within occult circles have you found this to be the case and what are the consequences?
André Consciência: I haven’t found this particular problem at the Bardonist tradition yet except for a grand initiator having the students strengthen their vices in order to make it a matter of life and death – as I consider our relation with our defects a neverending story, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me unless you want to be a rock star. Nevertheless, this picture you just painted seems to be the most common case in many other paradigms. Depending on the context, you either have the initiators imposing themselves and vampirizing their students, or the students obsessing about their “gurus”. On the first scenario, you have claims of sexual abuse at Ordo Templi Orientis and, with the rise of the alternative right at the Astrum Argentum, which was originaly built to prevent communication between students and adepts in order to avoid abuse of authority, you have at some structures an almost military paradigm, coming from initiators that don’t even know how a pentacle can be built and have ascended through the grades out of political strategy and that are, at best, intellecuals. I know cases at masonic lodges where the initiators brag of having had their probationers piss themselves during rites of initiation. After bragging to anyone willing to listen, they have a good laugh.
It also works the other way around. At a certain time of my life I worked on a center of alternative and holistic therapies. I had many male students humiliate themselves before me, for my displeasure, and the more I told them to be sovereign and whole and to stay standing even before the face of death the more they would bow like creeping vampires. This led me to abandon them eventually. Female students would often “fall in love” and try all sorts of seductive moves. These are the “spiritual tourists’ ‘, they come to you because they want some exotic experience of surrender. If I was Charles Manson, they would surrender just the same and end up doing God knows what just for the thrill. In the best case scenario, they eventually get bored or satisfy their touristic drive for adventure and leave by their own foot.
In another episode I came to learn with a shaman from an amazonian tribe. I went with a group of other caucasian men and women. As we would work with substances like Ayahuasca, Peyote and San Pedro, some of the members of the group started to become obsessed about the idea that they had to prove themselves to the shaman, for the shaman’s personality was very strong and his gaze seemed to know all. Ayahuasca would then always reveal this unbalance which was a sort of aggressive shame. The shaman did everything in his power to drive those members away, begging them to take a breath and come back under another state of mind or move on with their lives, yet they kept coming, thinking they had to prove themselves harder than ever. One eventually tried to pull off his face and the shaman had to knock him out. This is the last I heard of the group.
What seems most surprising is when you have sects of actual trained adepts who turn their eyes to political power and cultural monopoly. They no longer remember their cause. They just want everything and are willing to destroy anyone to get it, like dragons sitting over a useless mountain of treasures. I was pursued by such sects, life threats included. Well… The occult is a vast abyss. You can learn to build your divine lamp and make a star, become a sun, or you can stumble in the dark for adrenaline. The world is dangerous, and at most occult organizations the blind lead the blind the best they can. Hermetic wisdom has become a source of inspiration, but its actual laws are out of fashion. The consequence is that the occultist joins not only ignorance in its either devotional or rebellious choirs but also its expressive side, stupidity, in detriment of what human enlightenment there is left.
Many of these unbalanced paths can still hold some mysteries that the well trained magician, under the guidance of magical equilibrium can “steal” for himself and, beyond that one has to understand that a lot of traditions are solely for adepts or else for certain cultures and genetic strains, i. e. I never heard of Indians having trouble with Ayahuasca. They, at certain tribes, grow up with it, generation after generation and use it as medicinal water.
14. Falcon Books: How important was soul mirror training regarding your own path and what approaches did you find to be the most effective?
André Consciência: The soul mirror can have its own shadow, its name is restriction and, with time, it becomes a magical blockage itself. This can happen especially if the magician has not learned to think in equilibrium. When I talk of thinking I am not referring solely to the mind, for I usually say that each body has its own head. I, more or less, speak of this at The Way of ABRAHADABRA, and might as well cite it, if you would be so kind as to bear with me.
The Pentagram stands not only for the primal elements as we have come to learn them from the greeks as it stands for the perfection of men in that it represents the right disposition of his parts, either they be his physical, emotional, intelectual, imagetical or spiritual components. The figure radiates the perfect equilibrium of a human being. The Pentagram also stands for the number 5, Mars, the God in Motion, and motion implies unbalance. And this, in turn implies that the absolute can only move and become something by the balance of men, his elements being in a state of perfect love in regards to one another and that harmony flowing through the perfected art of Conscious Will, for from the point of view of the absolute even harmony is unbalanced, while from our point of view, order is our bridge to divinity. The pentagram also ensures by equal proportion of its parts that there is no element missing or too much of an element, for such a case is the fountain of disease in whatever plane it may occur.
Andre Consciencia, The Way of ABRAHADABRA
We learn to use, in this grade, the scale of 4 and it’s balance at the 5. Although at the macrocosmos the 4 stands for the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas and energy, and the 5 is the cosmos, on the consciousness of men, or at the passive centers of activity in the brain, the 4 is instinct, cognition, memory and intuition, and the 5 is that which results from the balance of the four, because balance will move consciousness forward while unbalance will keep it moving in circles. While the 5, it being the spirit or the akasha, once generated, stands for itself and commands the 4 by introversion, the 4, by extroversion, make up the constitution of the 4 planes to which men is restricted, being them the physical, the etheric, the astral and the mental.
Another key may be applied in which the 4 is multiplied by the 3, the 3 being intellect, emotion and the conjunction of the 5 senses which is as the reflection of the number 5 on a physical dimension. This key sets cognition, intuition, instinct and memory on each of the three, making it 12 and, by consequence, forming the signs of the zodiac. If the magician was to follow in the presented direction of thought he would have the following analogies:
The world of the senses would have Aries as instinct, Taurus as memory, the Gemini as cognition, Libra as intuition. This would mean that the instinct to react is at the core of our senses, while the instinct to persevere is their memory, their cognition comes through duality and their intuition through harmony.
The world of emotions would have Cancer as instinct, Leo as memory, Virgo as cognition and Scorpio as intuition. In turn, this would mean that the instinct to feel is rooted on the will to connect, our emotional memory is rooted on our sense of individuality, and that our feelings come to awareness by a search for well-being just as our emotional intuition, having no logic to be based upon, builds on the need to test.
The world of thoughts would have Sagittarius as instinct, Capricorn as memory, Aquarius as cognition and Pisces as intuition. In that context, the intellect would have adventure as it’s instinct, structure as it’s memory, innovation as it’s cognition and imagination as it’s intuition.
Even though we are still introducing this grade, the magician or future magician is to take from it his first test on mnemonics, the art of magical memory. He is to meditate on this table of correspondences until it becomes perfectly natural to him. But, although the cunning practitioner will be able to use the previous analogies during the course of our path to adepthood, the author himself will not be applying them in the methods to be teached. This is not to take the importance out of memorizing this table, for unless the magician memorizes it in such a way that it becomes intuitive, he knows it by instinct and it moulds his perceptions, the magician will find a missing link on his magical chain or at his magical structure, and his operations are hardly going to succeed.
In addition, by learning his mnemonics the magician will become naturally apt to work the correspondences to come during his exercises.
Now let us examine the pentagram further. Concerning the elements, at the left we have air at the top and earth at the bottom, at the right we have water at the top and fire at the bottom. The right column is the column of force and the left is the column of matter. Force is condensed at the heavens as water, to descend it must become pure energy, fire. Matter is condensed on earth and to ascend it must become subtler, air. Now, earth and air do not influence each other directly, their vertices do not touch at the pentagram, just as water and fire do not touch. Instead, fire and air influence each other mutually, just as air and water, water and earth. Air and water influence two elements each, but fire and earth influence only one other element, for one is the densest and the other the purest. Such a diagram shows that force and matter are mutually dependent in order to achieve their most sublimated states, but the densest state of force can influence both its purest state and the finest kinds of matter, just as sublimated matter can influence the most condensed forms of force and the grosser kinds of form. Akasha, or the spirit, is in direct touch with fire and earth, so that it is equally rooted at the densest and at the finest modes of existence. This means that left to himself and without the secret wisdom Men is only able to touch the divine as he experiences extremes. To understand it in human terms, as this grade concerns the microcosm rather than the macrocosm, we would have to say that the spirit touches the senses directly and the will of the regular men, while that very same will is able to conduct the mind and to be hypnotized by it, and the senses are able to reproduce feelings or be caused by them. Emotions, in turn, can also cause thought patterns while these very same patterns can reproduce emotions back. The realm of thoughts and the reign of feelings are cyclic and circular, but the Will and the senses are, outside the realms of spirit, what men can most rely on. This means that we have attributed will to fire, thoughts to air, emotions and feelings to water, the 5 senses to the earth. Or, roughly speaking, to the fire the analogies of heat and the concentric forces, to the air the analogies of openness and lightness, to the water the analogies of fluidness and coldness, and to the earth the analogies of everything solid, heavy and rooted. The elements move by accumulation. For instance, there was heat on the face of our planet, and that counts as one magical element, it is, therefore, the 1. From heat and the atmosphere came the winds, and the winds are the 2. We say these elements are magical because they are animated, and consequently the first and second sources of animism. From the heat, the atmosphere and the wind do the waters awaken to start their tides, and the waters are the 3. Apart from the earth being molded by them, from the heat, the atmosphere, the wind and the tides the earth is awakened by genetic life! This is the 4. And where there is conscious life there is that which we may call the aura of a planet, its astral trail, an electromagnetic field that suspends time and space around its source, and that is the 5. In this key, the atmosphere is the zero, the circle around the pentagram. Another way to say this is that Will shone on consciousness, and that from the interaction of the two the mind itself was born. There was energy dormant that was moved by the interaction of them three, and therefore there were emotions. Finally Will, consciousness, mind and emotion come to fill the centers of the body and breathe life into it. The magician may take the time to memorize these correspondences before he goes on reading.
Now one can position any attribute at each of the elements, given that the akasha remains untouched and the proper filtration is applied at the other elements. Let us choose four random qualities. We put force at the place of the earth, we place brightness at the place of the water, darkness at the place of the air and matter at the place of fire. To fire, matter is actually destruction or rather its material form is destructive. To air, darkness is as ignorance. To water, brightness is as fascination and to earth, force is work. Now this can be easily translated into one of the following ways or into the other:
Destruction leads to ignorance, ignorance to fascination, and fascination to slavery. Or, the slave starts to regain his individuality through fascination, and by the curiosity it evokes he recognizes his ignorance in order to destroy his chains. The Pentagram is actually the sign of the free men, for the magician who has learned to properly meditate on its diagram understands that nothing is a dead end and that every flow can be directed and redirected on the focus of his choices.
Still, the magician’s work is not the same as the work of the regular individual. The magician’s job is to find magical equilibrium, so that when will, mind, feelings and senses all work as one, the spirit, which is placed at the top of the pentagram, is reproduced as the quintessence at its center, leaving every element in touch with one another as well as with the divine.
We shall illustrate further. The reader may find that the four qualities we have attached to the elements form by their natural flow a sentence. The keyword to the sentence shown above is freedom/slavery, for neither freedom nor slavery were placed at the elements but they are the meaning we can extract from the position of their given attributes. Freedom/slavery is a dualistic keyword, just as it is dualistic for the spirit to be attached to fire and water. So, while when the regular men think of freedom they think in terms of ascending to freedom or of losing freedom the magician does not think in that manner, for he is at that spot at the center of the pentagram. At the fire he would place light, at the air he would place liberty, at the water he would place love and at the earth he would place life. Such as it is, from life he would come to love, from love to liberty and from liberty to light, such as from light to liberty, from liberty to love and from love to life. All the attributes are in harmony and a quintessential part of each other, and this happens because the qualities are directly connected to the elements they were given and are at their original source.
Surely, we could change the scale of the keyword and still keep our magical equilibrium. If we change the scale of freedom to it’s grade at the fire, the spiritual word or keyword becomes light. It is as focus on the fire element, direction at the air element, devotion on the water element and victory on the earth element. We could go on forever and not lose elemental balance and magical equilibrium. By this we illustrate what it is to think, act and live with magical equilibrium at one’s side.»
Through such means the magician can more easily move in many directions and explore without losing his magical balance. But I, eager to explore, suffered slightly from restriction before I had the idea for this key, for to express the most vibrant virtues one has sometimes to play and dance and an heavy armour won’t do for such occasions.
Then there is that even the soul mirror being the best device for introspection I have found so far inserted on a magical system, the applied philosophy is not an exact science, and it takes practice for one to understand that sometimes too much of a certain quality is becoming a weakness and some weaknesses were strengths we were afraid to acknowledge. For instance, psychology tells us that anger is the first step to healing, so, what can we make of it? To work with the soul mirror one has to apply sensibility, intelligence and wisdom, and if one isn’t sensible, intelligent and wise, one might end up becoming repressed by it instead. Maybe exercising one’s sensibility, fluidity, intelligence and wisdom should be a warm up for the bellic approach the soul mirror might require of us.
Some left hand traditions speak of a natural way, and that the body, if left to itself, knows its own balance and a way to bring mental and emotional harmony. While Aleister Crowley, a man with a right and a left hand formed in psychology, might have had – or not – the ability to do this successfully in order to call himself the solar beast, most magicians from the left hand path don’t have a single clue on how this can be done. While Anton LaVey, smart as he may have been, spoke of “indulgence instead of abstinence”, indulgence itself solves nothing of the origin of human unbalance. Psychology tells us that pathologies come from fragmentation, in order to protect itself from fracturing as a whole some parts of the psyche, when faced with trauma, are separated from memory and memory, in turn, tries to assimilate them back by associating them with other phenomenal objects of the mind. Just as the fibers of a muscle, when wrongly entwined, cause pain, limitations and unbalance on the body, so do the fibers of the mind. By acting, a body tries to escape an unbalanced mind, but it is as a lost animal on an artificial labyrinth. The mind must clear, so that the beast might find its proper forest and take good care of the mind. Between the body and the mind, the astral is important, that is why exercises of conscious breath come handy. The astral fluids have emotional intelligence and, by default, are not trapped by the body nor by the mind: as any other water, they seek balance and answer to intuition.
15. Falcon Books: What would you say about this statement, ‘our outward success in life is a reflection of inward success of our practice, ‘As Above So Below’’?
André Consciência: Ah! But there are two sentences there, surely connected but maybe not the same. About the first sentence I would say that it is mostly correct, although maybe not entirely correct at the present level of human evolution. While our work upon ourselves surely molds most of the things around us or how they interact with us, some of it doesn’t reach outside. There could be two reasons for this, one being that the universe, by its own nature, only reacts to us to a certain extent, and the other being that there is so much of us that we do not know, that these parts are left out and so the outer seems to act partially of its own accord.
To the second sentence now: I met a very wise christian poet and philosopher. He used to tell me that “as above, so below” is not the same as “as below, so above”. He was of the opinion that heaven would only open of its own accord. To him, gnostics and hermetic magicians believed otherwise, in that they thought they could manipulate the process, building their own babel tower, and for that alone they had already corrupted the experience. To him, heaven was a gift, not something one conquers. I don’t have any smart argument to overthrow him, just that the hexagram stops midway. When we earn at least paradise, then heaven descends of its own accord or, truly deserving something always comes with a surprise, a miracle factor, and that is the element of the soul expanding, the heart that beats without asking for permission: we just have to live and organize our lives.
Organizing life: Giordano Bruno tells us that if we change the stars then we change the Earth. He literally did this job as a magician. The concept was that by changing the archetypes one can program the reality of the world at large. Now this was a man living down on earth changing heaven above to change the earth below. He, as a christian monk and later an hermetic magician and philosopher, would still agree with my friend the christian poet, but did already outsmart him. And, by principle, Bruno and I would agree with you, that the inner connects above, and the outer below. But he and I would then open our eyes as wide as there is light and darkness and look outside at the Soul of the World in all its vastness. Eventually, we would see heaven alone, heaven and the adorer.
Alas, esoteric tradition shows a strike of light upon the tower of babel and the holy flames thereof.
Now, while what I just said would make a fine closing line, this unity of two presented, what if we acknowledge yet that maybe the sentences at the question form up a single quadripolar magnet composed of Above, Below, Inner and Outer, whose electromagnetic force is as invocation/evocation? Again, I cite a small passage from The Way of Abrahadabra, a charade that aims to bring insight into a unity of four, and hints at a level not directly talked about by Bardon in that true vigilance is beyond the conscious and the subconscious/unconscious. While at first the conscious is spoken as a tool against the unconscious or the subconscious, it is still a reaction to the subconscious/unconscious, therefore impulsive and reactive. But when at IIH the magician actually starts to work with the four divine qualities, there is no way for reason alone to grasp them.
A Charade for the Magnetic Mars, Sphere of Eternal Renovation
Invocation
A star falls as a seed
And rises as a tree of life
Now the dead will rise to greet
A sky most bright.
Evocation
My name is
The Star Sapphire,
I was about to write
“Evoked action”.
This number is 4876, We were with you from the beginning to get to the other side’.
The first poem a star, is referring to an original life-force or a cause – is invoked unto the magician and his channels are activated while his light scales up renewing his body. The lore here implies also that everything in connection with our inner structures may be born again at its image. It is about the act of renewal that starts from the inside out and makes the magician a portal of magic and creation. While the second poem has a different source. In Jewish mysticism a sapphire, being the color of heaven, always stands for celestial structures, supernal energy and divine knowledge. In the poem the poet is about to write “evoked action”, so that he actually evokes the action of writing and the poem thereof. But he tells us his name is the star sapphire, implying that his action comes from the heavenly realm of causes. When an action comes from the dimension of original cause rather than from a reactive point of view, it brings with it eternal renovation, so that through it the initiate of this sphere is to be recognized.
16. Falcon Books: Is there anything else you would like to add?
André Consciência: I would like to add that the writings of William Mistelle were of great help and inspiration while I was completing IIH. Homage to him, who is an author at Falcon Books. I will also add that I am reviewing the book following The Way of Abrahadabra, and one of its missions is to address modern science in the light of magic. I feel that magic stopped at the renaissance, and even then it drank from Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt. We have come to learn so much since then, and to read so many new pages on that Book of Isis called Nature. Why is it that magic didn’t follow? While some chaos magicians and some maatian magicians draw from quantum mechanics, how did we come from Ancient Greece directly to quantum science? What of everything else that is in between?
17. Falcon books Publishing: Lastly, I wonder if you could tell us about your next title Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun?
André Consciência: Eventually you will see news on «Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun», and it will make the soul mirror itself a dynamic system of initiation into magic and mysticism. It may have the guidance of the heads of the sun, and the mission to have the magician connect directly with the source of all virtues.
Thank you André very much for participating in this interview and offering such in-depth answers.