Interview with André Consciência Discussing The Hermetic Grade of Jupiter

Exploration of Hermetic Thought
Theurgy, Magic & Science

I would like to welcome André Consciência who is a prolific writer and artist on many magical subjects. Who also teaches at Perseus Arcane Academy. He has authored numerous works, including The Path to IPSOS Volumes I and II, The Way of Abrahadabra, A Guide to the Elementals, and Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun. His writings often explore the intersections of Hermetic philosophy, magical practice, and inner transformation. As the founder of the theater company CIA.Mefisteatro, André has written and produced plays such as Twilight Circus and Sapho’s Bone, blending ritual, myth, and performance. He is also a musician and poet, with a body of work that reflects his Neoplatonic sensibilities and commitment to artistic expression as a spiritual path.

Welcome André and thank you for answering my questions.

FBP: In The Hermetic Grade of Jupiter: Book I, you present Jupiter not merely as a benefic planetary force, but as the intelligence that organises the laws transmitted by Saturn into operative reality. What led you to frame Jupiter in this specifically structural and functional way, and how central is that definition to the entire Beyond The Veil of Illusion Series?

AC: Tradition led me. I am not, in this instance, saying something structurally new. This is what Hermetic Tradition tells us regarding the planets and also what Kabbalah tells us with the corresponding sephiroth. This correspondence between planets and sephiroth is, as well, present in Franz Bardon’s ‘The Key to the True Quabbalah’ when it comes to Number Quabbalah. In fact, 1 is essential, 2 is polarized essence, 3, which is Saturn, is the principle of relation generated by 2, and 4, which is Jupiter, organizes relation into structure or, in other words, extracts, from relational patterns, rule. Reality only becomes real through reference, and without rules there are no references to hold on to.

2. This volume feels both visionary and rigorously practical. When you began writing this new series, what was your primary intention: to transmit a current, to train practitioners, to systematise your own long-term work, or to correct misunderstandings in modern hermetic practice?

AC: This series came by transmission. I was not looking to systematise my own long-term work, as most of what is in the book is new to me as well. I was not looking to correct misunderstandings in modern hermetic practice, I think my book is likely more modern than what is called modern hermetic practice. The aim was to transmit a current to train practitioners into transmitting that current too.

3. FBP: How does The Hermetic Grade of Jupiter: Book I differ in intention, structure, and expected transformation from your earlier books published by Falcon Books Publishing—especially titles such as A Guide to the Elementals, A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah, and A Guide to Stellar Magic and Astrological Mysticism?

AC: A Guide to the Elementals is a grimoire on magical evocation, A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah is focused on how Quabbalah works throughout the spheres, and a Guide to Stellar Magic and Astrological Mysticism is a work on astrology that is operational through magic, not only in setting the conditions beforehand, the magician is to learn to move the stellar currents at will. The Hermetic Grade of Jupiter aims to offer a training system on this very Earth that is based on the direct influences of Jupiter. It is hardcore Hermetic Training but kind of next level. I confess I’m not always sure of the original intention or would rather not risk assuming I own it, this book is the first one that was given me without any invitation or at least a mature agreement on my end. The structure is less grimoire-like, more in tune with Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun. Now, the expected transformation is set to a very high level. Basically, the magician will be operating from a level substantially above the frequency in which all others exist. In a way, it could be compared to hacking the system.

4. FBP: The book introduces and develops key conceptual engines such as “Favourable Circumstance” and “Permissive Law.” Did these emerge first from direct magical experience and only later become language, or did naming these principles actually sharpen and deepen your practical results?

AC: Both things happened simultaneously. When allowed, the beings speak to me in ways that when the word arrives it is already practiced: it changes the soul by reproducing the mechanisms and knowledge of certain methodologies, and their effects take place automatically without the intermediary of actual action. Word and action are one, especially beyond the veil of Illusion (from the Sun upwards).

5. FBP: Your approach to transmutation and soul work is especially striking because it does not read like a purely moral exercise—it reads like a technical preparation for Jovian embodiment. How do you see your “Mirror of Transmutations” work relating to, extending, or differing from more standard Bardonian soul mirror approaches?

The traditional soul mirror and ennoblement of the soul attitude is one of a man who lives under the weather, and wrestles with the effects of the weather continuously to keep his house and health in order. The Jovian method exists from above the clouds. You learn to soar that high, above the weather, and the idea, by changing the seat of consciousness and perception, is not to fall back (which is always possible).

6. FBP: The movement through the twelve Jovian grades gives the book a deeply initiatory structure. How should readers understand these grades in practice: as symbolic contemplations, objective states of attainment, working phases, or all three at once?

AC: They are contemplations because they teach Jovian theoretical philosophy. They are objective states of attainment because they teach Jovian applied philosophy. Initiation is not a phase. The doors always disappear behind you.

7. FBP: You repeatedly connect Jupiter to real-world order—legality, justice, social harmony, institutions, and the organisation of life. Was it part of your intention to restore a more civilisational dimension to hermetic practice, rather than leaving it as a private mystical pursuit?

Hermeticism was never solely mystical. It was taught in the universities, and it went so far as to have a Pope adopt it. Hermeticism was always civilizational. It works the individual in his microcosm and the world in its macrocosm. It remained civilizational even after Giordano Bruno’s death and further persecutions by Scholasticism and the Church. Hidden in secret sects, we got most of our social reforms from Masonry and similar hermetic orders, before Marxism took the reins against vicissitudes in the elitism of such societies.

8. FBP: In chapters dealing with enlivening the three kingdoms and working across the planes/spheres, the book suggests a form of magical participation in reality that goes far beyond imagination as “visualisation.” How do you train practitioners to distinguish true hermetic imagination from fantasy, projection, or self-deception

AC: I have been asked this question a thousand times and every time I adopt a new way of answering it, although always to the same conclusion. This time I will tell you that one starts by self-deception, because one must be hypnotised by the practice, mesmerized even. This will strengthen the principle of faith and omnipotence. This self-deception is consciously interior, we know we are creating a state that changes the surrounding environment. It is not truly delusion (it holds no inner contradiction) and not truly deception because we still discern between inner and outer worlds. Now, we apply the interiorized principle to the outside world, and here lies projection.This is quite necessary for magic. Surely a magician is trained to enliven his or her imagination and intention in all senses and planes, and give it true life. Here comes fantasy. Self-deception in itself is not very powerful, but once projected it starts to make real-life changes. When it becomes fantasy, it creates a source of inspiration that is difficult to extinguish. Since we, magically trained, and quabbalistically trained, are the strongest pole, the world starts to become in our image. This must come from the world now, and it is the culmination of hermetic imagination.

9. FBP: Your treatment of the will of creatures and enlivening presence implies that the hermetist eventually affects the environment by being, not merely by performing techniques. What inner thresholds must be crossed before presence itself becomes magically operative?

AC: None. Many can be crossed to optimize presence. But even any inanimate object has presence. And the quantity of presence is irrelevant, as a single drop of it is already the source of all magic. Even the environment must first be, or else it cannot be an environment. Becoming conscious of this is the key, for all else is the veil of illusion.

10. FBP: The sections on Original Fire and the Principle of Light are some of the most expansive in the book, and they seem to move the reader from planetary work toward universal principles. Is this expansion from the planetary to the cosmic a defining feature of the Jovian grade in your system?

AC: In hermeticism, contrary to classical gnosticism, the planetary is, by nature, cosmic. In gnosticism the planets are understood as a distortion of the cosmos, but in hermeticism they function as the organs of the cosmos. The Principle of Light is essential to understand this, for it is the Principle of Light and Original Fire that distinguishes between before the veil of illusion and beyond it. This is why Bardon talks of the planets as light oscillations: the light is the universal principle behind all cognition and must be cognized or else cognition of the (elemental) objects will obstruct it. It is a defining feature, and will find greater amplification in The Hermetic Grade of the Sun, Book II.

11. FBP: In Jovian Love and The Ray of Love-Wisdom, you describe a form of love that is clearly not sentimental or merely personal. How should serious practitioners verify that they are contacting genuine Jovian/Cosmic Love rather than psychologically elevated emotion or devotional self-suggestion?

AC: Dichothonomy exists so things can eventually become complete, not to blindly sever them from each other. Obviously, a human being must marry devotional self-suggestion with psychological elevated emotions before even thinking of arriving at the level of Jovian Love, since this love is devotional and psychologically elevated. It is unconditional, detached, and all-penetrating.

12. FBP: Your chapter on evocation through Jovian love reframes evocation around qualification and resonance rather than dependence on external tools alone. Do you see this as a corrective to technique-heavy occult culture, and what do you think modern practitioners most often misunderstand about readiness for evocation?

AC: What you are talking about is a matter of thaumaturgy against theurgy. My true aim is not really to correct thaumaturgy. As I usually say, thaumaturgy always works, but often what it does is a light spectacle for the blind that are unable to interact with light at all. This is also a metaphor for the veil of illusion and the Principle of Light that stands beyond the veil of illusion.

13. FBP: The book also carries a strong ethical and ontological demand: that without holiness and love of knowledge, the work collapses into “magic tricks and sleight of hand.” How do you define holiness in the specifically Jovian sense, and how can readers test whether they are truly maturing in it?

If they stand at all times immersed in the fire of unconditional love that receives the four divine ecstasies, this is holiness in the Jovian sense. This is not so easy and requires one’s magical equilibrium to be true, for truly you will see in all others, and even in objects and events, God, infinite spirits, the Wheels of the Chaldean Oracles. Even your self will be one of these spirits and you will see it separately for this love does not share of the nature of obscuration. All things are clearly distinguished from one another in their infinite spirits but also all is God, yet also all is distinguished from consciousness and consciousness remains unmolested, the center of the miraculous gravity of Jovian Love.

14. FBP: The language of “profound knowledge and profound wisdom” suggests a culmination that is not merely intellectual mastery, but a transformed mode of participation in reality. In your experience, what are the first unmistakable signs that a practitioner is moving from study into genuine Jovian wisdom?

Knowledge is made of will towards things, intelligence to process them, and perception to understand them. In profound knowledge attention moves from the objects to the source that permits them: will towards will, intelligence processes intelligence, perception understands perception. Wisdom combines power over conditions and intellectual ability to harmonize this power. Profound Wisdom is, in turn, a purifying purity that deconditions, and the intellect becomes the self-awareness, responsibility, and control of maturity.

15. Looking ahead within the Beyond The Veil of Illusion Series, how should readers understand the role of this Jupiter volume in the larger arc of the work? What foundation is being built here that becomes essential for the later volumes—both technically and spiritually?

When we look to develop elementally, we look up. In the Earth we mingle with the elements, in the Moon we mingle with the astral fluids that compose the elements, in Mercury we mingle with the intellectual faculties that stand as principles behind such astral fluids, and in Venus we begin to mingle with the Principle of Light. Beyond the veil of illusion, but yet below the so-called abyss, we detach even from this light so as to remain within consciousness and work the light as our new element, and in order to develop we must look down this time. Jupiter brings the archetypes that build the essence of all our structures and without which there would be no intellectual faculties, since these faculties operate on those principles. The Sun gives those archetypes a divine life that is sovereign, but first we must build the Jovian structures. Just as Venus stands as a last frontier before beyond the veil of Illusion, so does Mars intermediate between Jupiter and the Sun by providing the means for a divine expression and action that integrates both original law and original life in a single direction. By doing so, it grounds the whole work.

Thank you very much for your interview!