Haus der Luege : Noli Evocare Quod Reprimere Non Potes

Ave,

In my daily work, I've taken to using the LIRP instead of the LBRP to begin my ritual battery -- not as a replacement, but because of the way the ritual battery should work. I've been doing regular LBRP's for years now; my sphere of sensation is pretty well buttressed at this point. Regular magical work has increased my sensitivity to changes in my sphere so that I can tell when something Is off, which is major for me. I used to have to result to divination; now I use divination as a double-check, and find my own "scanning", my own intuition, to be accurate.

The reason I feel it is important to use the LIRP in the opening instead of the LBRP is that for myself the Middle Pillar Ritual is the heart of the daily practice, and the daily practice is on one level about increasing the amount/raising the signature of the LVX in my subtle bodies. I plan to invoke and increase with these rituals, not just balance and level. The Middle Pillar does the work of equilibrating and balancing the energies (through the vibration of the Holy Names of the Sephirah).....the LBRP, with the Rose Cross, do a fine job of closing everything down at the end. Performing the LIRP initially has had a positive effect on the Middle Pillar component of my personal battery, and upon my scrying as well.

This isn't, of course, my Order's teaching on the subject. Just what I find works in my personal practice.

I do feel that it's necessary to close with the LBRP, though-otherwise there is an open, leaky kind of feeling going on.

On another note-had what was basically a lucid dream last night. These have been happening more and more frequently over the last year. They aren't completely lucid, because I am not aware of being in control. I am aware on a level that I am dreaming, and I have complete recall of the dreams upon waking...which is definitely a new thing.

 I dreamt I attended a small clinic-temple, led by some sort of mystic monk (who appeared Eastern) that was about meditation and energy work in the middle of a city. The gentleman moved in a fluid and interesting way, and wore a sort of beaded headdress and had symbols painted upon his face. His robes were a burnt orange, and his acolytes wore golden-yellow robes.  People came to this gentleman for attunements, it seemed. I laid on the altar, and this fellow touched me and there was a fantastic surge of energy into my system that laid me out-I woke up still in the dream, but after 6 hours of dream-time had passed. Called my wife to explain why I didn't come home, and she told me she knew already as she had called the clinic. I asked the acolytes what this was, and they said "Tikkun". I saw the spelling in the dream as well, oddly enough. I remember thinking in the dream that perhaps this was some Thai or Cambodian (this is how the gentlemen monks appeared to me) occult system. I made a note to look it up after I awoke.

Turns out Tikkun is Hebrew, and means repair of, or perfection of...even more interesting. Not sure of what that means or what it's significance might be fore myself, but planning on breaking out the cards to find out this evening. I'm going to have to start writing these dreams down. It's like I'm living two lives at once. I've heard very little talk about dreams in Hermetic circles --our New Age mates talk about it all the time, though. I wonder we don't? It seems clear that these things are important. One of our wiser Fraters brought up their importance a while ago-- other than him I really haven't heard much about their import. Perhaps when one enters the Inner this is discussed more, as Rosicrucian literature is full of dream-like imagery.

 More occurred after that point in the dream, but this is what stood out.

In LVX,

AIT

Here's an odd story from New Zealand. A woman who was troubled by two ghosts came up with the clever idea of selling them in an online auction - and wound up with a winning bid of over £1300!

They were sold in two glass vials, plugged with stoppers and dipped in holy water, which Woodbury says 'dulls the spirits' energy.'

The two departed souls sold for 2,830 New Zealand dollars (£1,320) in an auction on the Trade Me site.

She said they were the spirits of an old man called Les Graham who lived in the house during the 1920s, and a powerful, disruptive little girl who turned up after a session with a spirit-calling Ouija board. Since an exorcism at the property last July led to their capture, there has been no further spooky activity in the house, she said.
So once you have received the bottles containing the ghosts, what would you do with them?

'To revive the spirit, i have been told that you pour into a little dish and let it evaporate into your house,' the auction description helpfully suggested.
Personally I've always wanted a ghost butler who could bring me drinks from the kitchen and help to clean up around the house, but I would want some serious proof that these ghosts were capable of moving physical objects before I would pay that kind of money, even for two of them.

The winning bidder is believed to be a New Zealand company that manufactures electronic cigarettes. It's unclear exactly why they want some ghosts.
I have a hard time believing that this company could do much with a couple of ghosts without a magician on staff to control them. But I suppose stranger things have happened, and maybe they are just looking for a ghostly janitor or something to clean up around the plant. After all, a ghost wouldn't draw a salary and would be immune to any dangers posed by hazardous materials.

The auction has proved to be an inspiration for a number of other savvy entrepreneurs.

Since the auction attracted media attention, several more ghost-related auctions have sprung up on the site, including one offering 'a once in a lifetime opportunity for one lucky soul to own an EVIL GHOST', and another offering several vials of coloured water that, the seller explains, definitely don't contain ghosts.
I wonder if any of these bidders would pay extra for vials containing demons? That might be a future business opportunity right there.

I thought that I would tell the tale of my spiritual and magickal origins, since this is probably one of the most interesting and compelling of all of my biographical material. Everyone wants to know how a person got started in his occult and pagan path. Where he learned about these subjects that he now uses almost reflexively. To understand my origins is to understand where I have come from and perhaps, where I am ultimately going. So here is the tale of my origins, full of truth, myth, some exaggeration and coloring due to the passage of time and many retellings. I hope that you find it informative and insightful - perhaps knowing me a little better than other occultists who would rather keep their life story a strict secret. I apologize in advance for the long length of this article.

Probably one of the most interesting stories in my repertoire is the one about my spiritual and magickal origin. One could say in a mythic sense that I came forth out of darkness, selfishness, a lust for personal power to combat an obvious self loathing and low self esteem. But I was just a goofy teenage witch learning about the gods, magickal powers and who my magickal friends and enemies were, all around the same time. I had no coven to guide me, or High Priestess or High Priest to teach me. In fact I had few books or other written resources and only an individual older friend who was also a non-initiate. I was about to begin my path as a kind of Trial by Fire. All of this occurred almost 38 years ago, back in what was for me a simpler and more optimistic time of 1972.

That was the year that Richard Nixon was president, the Vietnam war was escalating with U.S. aircraft dropping bombs in Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. There was an intense protesting of the war worldwide, others supported the war and the status quo, and it seemed as if the unity of the nation was in jeopardy of being pulled apart. It was a time of the radicalization of both the political left and the right, but for someone who was not yet old enough to be drafted and whose father was extremely pro military and a Republican, I was untouched by these issues. For me, the battle ground was between a newly risen pagan religion of witchcraft pitted against the rising of an evangelical social conservatism. Those times were different than now, but in some ways, they were eerily similar.

Having recently turned seventeen and messing around with the occult, paganism and magick, I was oblivious to much of these social upheavals. I was self absorbed and deeply involved in not only discovering who I was, but also searching for spiritual and personal meaning. Mine was a life bereft of spiritual meaning, since my father was an avowed agnostic who believed that religion was a blight on modern existence - one that should be eliminated. My mother was a gentle soul who had no intellectual taste for theology or philosophy, preferring to accept what society had established for spiritual truth. I was different, because I neither accepted my father’s beliefs nor did I accept the social norms for religious faith and practice. I heard a different drum beating than most of my contemporaries, but that was not either unusual or peculiar, since the late sixties and early seventies was a time of questioning orthodoxy in all fields and areas of life experience. It was a time of discovery and rediscovery.

Outer space was being conquered, but inner space was also being explored in a manner previously unknown. Science was poised to discover the inner powers of the human mind, or so we thought. Ancient disciplines, like astrology, alchemy, magic, yoga, tantra, and witchcraft were being re-examined with an open mind, and science was introducing a radical pharmacopeia that opened the mind to new dimensions. Even psychism and ESP were being studied and taken very seriously. It was the infamous period of the late sixties and early seventies, and although I was too young to participate in what was happening to the youth culture of that time, I was very much aware of what was going on around me in that regards, since it potently answered the emptiness that I felt within me. So I tried to be hip in my own fashion, seeking to grow up and pass myself off as an adult as quickly as possible. Some parts of me grew up very quickly, other parts remained quite adolescent. All of this jarring, uneven growth accompanied with an exploding self awareness was typical of the times.

Previously, when I was 15 in the summer of 1970, I had foolishly experimented with LSD, having acquired a small portion of a powerful dose of drug impregnated after-dinner mints, obviously based on the famous Owsley’s Acid. This dose had been freely given to me because I had helped some friends acquire this drug through a close intermediary. I had no idea what I had ingested, since I had not yet even experienced being stoned on marijuana. LSD was a thousand times more potent, as I soon discovered. I probably had gotten the maximum dose of a thousand micrograms, and the hallucinative  state lasted for a total of 13 hours. I managed to just barely cope with what I was experiencing, being left alone in my bedroom with no one to console or guide me. It was a terrifying experience, but I weathered the storm of complete dislocation with reality for hours.

I pretended to be sick so that my mother wouldn’t know what had befallen her son, making up the excuse that I had succumbed to a bout of mild food poisoning - nothing serious enough to warrant seeing a doctor. I managed to reassure my mother that all was OK, even though I weathered a storm of visual images that were totally unprecedented. I must have been made out of tough psychic stuff, because I made it through this experience without managing to loose my mind entirely. It was one hell of an initiation, and one that I was not interested in repeating for some years in the future. What it taught me was that reality is not iron clad or objective, it is in fact fluid, subjective and determined by many interpretations. The experience left permanent scars on my mind and in my visual capability - I saw tracers, auras and other odd phenomena from that moment onward. The occult world of the paranormal had been opened to me, and I was unable to close it. I stumbled around for a few days afterwards recovering from this powerful experience, but the impact on my mind was profound and permanent. This experience was probably responsible for most of my occult interests and the pursuit of all things paranormal.

The early seventies was a period when there was a lot of cheap and inexpensive books and magazines published about the supernatural, occult, mysticism, ESP, astral projection, hypnosis, and many other related topics. I was fascinated with everything having to do with the paranormal, and as I began to travel around with a marching band and later, a drum and bugle corps, I discovered some books here and there in the various cities that I visited. These occasional and rare acquisitions began to build up my repertoire of studies. When visiting a museum in Chicago, I purchased a book written by Gerald B. Gardner, but unfortunately, there wasn’t much that was useful in that book. It was full of history but contained no rituals for me to use. I also began to learn how to hypnotize other kids and how to put them into a trance state. I became something of a menace as far as other adults and parents were concerned, since I seemed to be able to elicit paranormal experiences in others. To the kids around my age, I was a pioneer and a hero. I finally got to show some basic hip intelligence and creativity that elevated my esteem in my peer group.  I was also very keen on astral projection and attempted many times to acquire this experience for myself, with limited results. I seemed more capable of helping others to experience these phenomena rather than get myself to experience it directly. I graduated from studying about paranormal phenomena and psychism to harder forms of occultism.   

Then I began to seriously explore the occult, but to facilitate that quest I needed more books. I attempted to borrow books on the subject from the local library, although it revealed little that was useful, since all of the good books seemed to be checked out and never returned. But finally, with a little cash and some digging around, I began to buy cheap books on the occult. Later I managed to buy some books that required some real savings to purchase. My book store of choice was an occult book store located in Milwaukee, on 615 N. Milwaukee Street, called Sanctum Regnum. Although I was chronically broke and had little money for books, I was inspired by the spooky accouterments of this store, right down to the throne in the back that opened up at the pull of a rope, to reveal stairs leading into a cavernous basement, containing an office, a ritual area and niches for Tarot readings. The owner of this store, Fritz, was also rather impressive and bombastic, looking and even acting a lot like King Henry VIII, with the red beard and corpulent body, and even dressed up to fit the part. His assistant was a lovely slender brunette named Jeanie, who was more accessible and friendly than Fritz, and who gave a lot of good advice and counsel to me.

The first two books that put me on the road to piecing together my practices of magick were Paul Huson’s Mastering Witchcraft and Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows, and then later I managed to buy DeLaurence versions of the Greater Key of Solomon and the Goetia of the Lamageton. There were a few other books that I used extensively, such as June Johns, The King of the Witches, and books by Israel Regardie, W.E. Butler, Gareth Knight, Dion Fortune, William Grey, and of course the master of them all, Aleister Crowley. I also got a copy of Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches by Charles Leland, Witchcraft from the Inside, by Raymond Buckland, and Witchcraft Today, by Gerald Gardner. As I stated previously, I was disappointed by Gardner’s book, since it had no ritual information that I could use. But the books by Paul Huson and Lady Sheba provided the necessary information for me to cobble together a workable magickal system.

At this early time, I also met an older woman who became my friend and ally in occult matters. She was in her early 20's, while I was just a mere teenager. She had been practicing as a solitary witch for a few years and was looking in vain for a coven to join, since Racine was not a hotbed of occultism and witchcraft. I think her name was Gail. She had a crazy younger sister named Marlene who was lustfully obsessed with me. I must admit that I found Marlene’s attentions not at all to my liking, so realizing that she was obviously overly zealous in her pursuit of me, I tried to avoid her wherever possible. Yet her good and wise older sister had mercy on me, kept me out of reach of her younger sibling, and refined my nascent abilities in self-hypnosis and trance mediumship. She also had a car and occasionally took me up to Milwaukee to visit my favorite occult book store. I can remember her waiting for me after school in her car and then we would drive the thirty or forty miles from Racine to Milwaukee on the newly minted interstate freeway system to visit Sanctum Regnum.

I was learning to become quite a competent psychic. Once I mastered how to enter into a trance state, I then learned how to run a seance that really worked. This feat both intrigued and scared the hell out of my school chums. I remember being invited to attend parties of the more hip members of my school for the sole purpose of running seances. One evening in particular, I performed a seance that produced remarkable results. A couple of people automatically went into trance and channeled the spirits of dead people. I even had some difficulty getting one of the individuals out of the trance state that he had entered, which did kind of startle me somewhat.

The fact that I was able to successfully produce paranormal phenomena made me at first quite popular. Then my classmates, after having had an exposure to these phenomena, became afraid of what they were experiencing. For me, it was all a powerful validation of what I had believed possible. It made me into a young man who possessed occult powers, to be feared and respected for having such arcane knowledge and abilities. I also demonstrated a virtuoso talent for reading Tarot cards, even though I had not read a single book on the subject. An admirer gave me my first Tarot deck, and I began to give accurate readings almost immediately. However, after I started studying the Tarot, I become a much better card reader, and this of course was the case for the rest of my nascent talents. Training and practice helped to discipline and refine what I was able to do.

My witch friend often criticized me for pandering after mental powers and magick spells, using them to build up my reputation and attempt to control others. I also had the gall of calling myself a witch and not even really practicing the religion. Yet my excuse was that I was a callow youth who seemed to know everything and did not listen to anyone, not even Gail. I suppose that I aroused her maternal instincts, since she did seem willing to indulge my abilities and cater to me. I can recall that she encouraged my abilities as a trance medium, giving me Nettle tea to aid in this activity. She never attempted to be anything other than my friend, guide and confidant, so to this day I have doubts that her interest in me was anything but platonic and idealistic. I was also the only person that she knew who was also interested in witchcraft and magick, so I was someone that she could talk to about these topics. As I said, occultism was rare in my native town.

At the same time, I also began hanging out with a group of people who idolized a local Christian psychic named Norman Slater, a resident of Kenosha (sister city of Racine, my home town), who was in his late twenties at that time. Norman taught a class on the paranormal at the local technical college in Kenosha county. From this venue Norman began to build up a reputation as a powerful psychic, however, he kept his real beliefs and intentions to his inner circle. When I met him, he was entering the peak of his career and already had quite a large following.

Norman was a peculiar man. He was short of stature, solidly built, and had what almost seemed a hallow of blonde curly hair, like some Roman general. His eyes were a blazing blue and seemed to often look through one. He would often squint his eyes at a person, looking above their head to examine their aura, which he was supposedly able to read like a book. He was not a remarkable man in regards to his height or appearance, but he did have a powerful charisma. His one defect was an odd speech impediment that made him mispronounce words in a peculiar manner. He also had a kind of squeaky voice, but this did not detract from his charisma. I suspect that Norman was of good Anglo-Saxon stock, but his background was obviously lower middle class, since he didn’t seem very educated or eloquent. His mannerisms actually seemed crude and almost a caricature. Norman said nothing about his past or his level of education. This part of his life history he kept quite secret, for obvious reasons - he wanted to be a man of mystery.

Within his inner circle, Norman was more outspoken. He preached that his psychic powers had revealed to him the actual source of the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. He believed that this mysterious location contained the remnants of the lost civilization of Atlantis, which is what he thought was causing all of the strange phenomena. Norman not only believed that he knew where these ruins lay in the shallow depths and coral reefs of the sea around Bermuda and Florida, but he had convinced others that these amazing discoveries could be found if divers were to explore areas that Norman would point out. Word of these revelations began to circulate the community, and Norman began to talk about these ideas in public. For the average person, this was exciting news, of course, and Norman made himself the head of a group of people who were going to assemble an expedition to discover the actual physical ruins of the Atlantean civilization.

Norman was a truly psychic and charismatic man who had a lot of strange and possibly delusional ideas about himself and the world, but he was also something of a confidence man. He coldly used the gullible people around him, accessing their money, skills and support. These people wanted desperately to believe everything that he said. So he promoted himself as a great prophet, keeping them spellbound with amazing psychic prognostications. What psychic powers he did possess could not be reliably used in this manner, so he obviously compensated by unabashedly manipulating other people and situations. I believe that a lot of Norman’s abilities were used to charm the people around him, to gain the trust and unwavering loyalty of his followers. Of course, being fascinated by anything paranormal, I was also attracted to this man like a moth to a flame, even if his spiritual beliefs were contrary to my own.

Over time, it became obvious to me that Norman was only interested in becoming famous. Such fame and notoriety would allow him to get other people to financially back his various projects. Already, he had backers who were sending him to Loch Ness, Scotland, to locate and reveal the Loch Ness Monster. This project obviously took money and connections, which Norman’s followers had abundantly supplied to him. Other projects were also discussed, the one big one was the expedition to the Bermuda Triangle. Norman and his supporters formed a group of young men and women to be trained and certified as divers, who would also act as his sponsored fund raisers and labor pool for whatever else was needed. I attended an early meeting where this expedition was discussed, and was hooked! I wanted to dive in the tropical seas and help the team find the ruins of the lost city-state of Atlantis. We were all quite thrilled at being the advance group of a very special expedition - history in the making and seekers of adventure.

Although Norman was a psychic and had to promote psychism and paranormal abilities in human beings, he was very strict about what he considered to be acceptable areas of exploration, and other areas that he considered forbidden. Norman believed that psychism was a gift from God, but he steadfastly denigrated anything that even remotely appeared to be occultic or deviated from Christian doctrine. So, Norman was very rigid and sectarian. He didn’t like or trust anyone who was not deeply Christian, as he  himself affected a pious Catholic faith. He believed and preached that he alone was unique amongst men in regards to his gifts, and could therefore dispense of his visions and insights as he pleased.

Norman seemed to be always psychically sensitive, nearly omniscient, but of course, he was deceiving his followers about the true nature of psychism. Used alone, psychic sensitivities are generally unreliable, requiring other disciplines and techniques to make them a truly useful tool. I believe that Norman did a lot of acting and pretending to build up his reputation of being a great psychic. To this day, I honestly believe that Norman never questioned his abilities or critically examined his rather prophetic and messianic pronouncements. Nothing that he predicted later ever came true, but his followers were quite in awe of him and believed that the end of the world (as we knew it) was at hand. Norman was the prophetic messenger, combining the artifice of an evangelical preacher with a lay person with psychic powers. The real truth was that Norman was deceiving everyone around him, creating a kind of vortex of illusion and glamor centered around his person.

As it turned out, Norman became for me the ultimate example of a Christian hypocrite, representing all that I learned to despise in that creed. The irony is that Norman was exactly the kind of person that I had aspired to be - a man of power and mystery. Probably because of the similarities between us, Norman seemed actually fond of me. He felt it was his duty to teach me that I was really a wicked boy who needed to be converted to the ways of Christ and bathed in the blood of the lamb, or else shunned. I, on the other hand, was not so easily fooled, or so I thought. Yet I ended my adventure with Norman by becoming the pure victim and fool, but then turned things around and became the instrument of fate, indirectly assisting in his downfall. Truth and objectivity was Norman’s greatest enemy, yet it only took a short while for these powers to catch up with him, destroying his organization from the inside. Yet because I was such a sucker for anyone with extra ordinary powers, I sought to follow this man as well. Strangely, Norman became the very instrument that forced me to become fully committed to being a witch and a ritual magician.

My involvement with Norman Slater and his group and my penchant for working risky magick forced an event to occur that changed my life forever. I usually note this time as the point of my true conversion into the religion of witchcraft. It was at this time that I was finally and quite forcefully brought into the spiritual path of witchcraft, although how that happened was really something spectacular, or at least it was for me. It was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. That lesson was this: that what you said about yourself and how you conducted your affairs must have some congruence if you were to remain intact while messing around with psychism, magick and occult spirituality. I didn’t understand that lesson. I also ignored the warnings that Gail gave me, thinking that I was somehow special, thereby being protected from my own stupidity.

I was fooling around with the Key of Solomon and the Goetia, trying to cobble together a cogent magickal system from these books. I even went out into the woods one evening in the summer of 1971 and attempted to invoke one of the Goetic demons. To my trance-trained eyes, I had even succeeded somewhat. Unfortunately, I forgot to use the magician’s triangle to constrain the demon, so he appeared to wander freely around, a giant ghost, inspecting the world and me, while I was trapped in my magick circle. I experienced a period of curious horror that lasted at least several minutes, although it seemed a lot longer. When the demon finally dematerialized, I hastily doused the candles, collected my regalia, covered my spoor and hastily left the area. But that evening’s experience did not teach me to stop fooling around with Solomonic magic, in fact it emboldened me, since the magick had indeed worked, albeit, in a dangerous and chaotic manner.

Discovering the Key of Solomon and the Lamegeton for the first time was an intellectual milestone for me, but I soon found the lack of practical ritual structures very annoying as well as the dearth of any kind of realistic instructions. Yet the talismans and sigils presented a great temptation for a young sorcerer to play with them, so it was only a matter of time before I got burned. I was ready to experience some real trouble in my life and for the first time, to taste true evil.

It was the spring of 1972, and on the night of April 11, I finally got blasted with my own magickal manipulations. I put together a session of black magick ceremonies that I performed for a few acquaintances who wanted to be amused by a magickal demonstration. I used a badly mixed system of new-age shamanism and hard-core Goetic magick. It produced a very nasty uncontrolled energy.

For once I was actually a bit afraid, particularly when one of the women in my group of voyeurs took an athame and tried to stab me with it. She was obviously tranced out, perhaps even mildly possessed, since her movements were stiff, slow and ineffectual. I was never really in any danger, but the incident unnerved me. I quickly caught her arm and removed the athame from her hand and put it back on the altar, telling her to sit down and behave, which she seemed to do, although with some obvious wild-eyed nervous trepidation.

This event was followed by another more frightening event. All of a sudden the candles were simultaneously and inexplicably extinguished. The nervous woman at that moment completely lost her nerve and briefly screamed. There was some fumbling in the dark to relight the candles and see what had occurred. The woman was sitting on the floor with a look of complete terror on her face. She babbled that she had seen something that looked like a demon, but to this day I don’t know what she saw when the lights briefly went out.

I was also quite puzzled by how the candles had gone out in the first place, since there were no windows open in the room and no one had detected any perceptible breeze or current of air. However, it seemed that I couldn’t proceed any further with the working, since whatever focus or raised energy had been developing had obviously and quickly dissipated. That scream had ended the magickal working right then and there. My acquaintances had experienced more than enough from my little demonstration. They were quite convinced that I was a very “far out” guy, but way too far out for their tastes. My demonstration did not amuse them, so they hurriedly left, never to return. (In fact, some of them actually sought to steadfastly avoid me, spreading gossip that I was a practicing Satanist.)

At that moment my friend Gail arrived to visit me, walking into my room while the participants were quickly stumbling for the door. I can imagine that she was somewhat amused by the looks of fear and paranoia that greeted her as she entered my room, being briefly jostled by those who were eagerly leaving. Soon we were alone in an awkward silence, amidst the obvious stench of incense and the artefacts of illicit magick. When she was ensconced on her favorite chair in my room, she remarked on how obnoxious the spiritual atmosphere felt in my temple area. I demurred at first to explain the situation, but she pried it out of me after a short while. I tried to laugh it off and even managed to amuse her a bit. She laughed, more at me than with me. Then she said, “You have much to learn, little one, and you dare a great deal.”

Then she bade me go into a trance to determine the nature of the problem. I did as she asked and discovered that I had finally created a profound spiritual crisis for myself, unbeknownst to me, the first of many. I was standing on a threshold, a kind of slippery slope. I had pushed the forces of my own duplicity and selfish lust for magickal power too far. I worked the powers in the name of the goddess, but denied her a reality in my life. I had two choices in front of me. I either crossed the threshold, paid the price for my foolish actions and went on as a true witch, or dropped my dark practices before I caused myself greater damage. I was hooked on working more magick, so I chose to become a real witch and to undergo the ordeal of death and resurrection, although I did not know what my immediate fate was to be. How strange it was, that the day was Palm Sunday, the week before Easter Sunday. Since I had abandoned the church, I was no longer aware of the spiritual significance of the season. I only later realized how strange was the coincidence of these two events.

As I went into that trance, I was pulled down very deeply into it, and felt as if I were falling into a great pit of darkness and desolation - it took a while for me to hit bottom, too. As I stood in the very bottom of that pit of stygian gloom, I saw the silhouette of a great black cat enter into my space. It had large amber eyes and a loud purring noise emanated from it. I did not feel comforted by the appearance of such a large cat, for I sensed from it a great menace. Then I heard an angry whispering voice and a silky dark presence came over me. The voice was feminine and the whisperings of her words sounded like the wind blowing dead leaves. This was my first encounter with the Goddess and she was quite angry, calling me a fool and an idiot.

I had allowed Norman Slater, a few weeks previously, to defame her by name (Goddess = Devil) without defending her, when he publically spoke in an auditorium to my whole highschool class, condemning all forms of the occult, especially magic and witchcraft. Afterwards, I was silent when it came time to ask questions or make remarks, being wholly mesmerized by those psychic powers. I was in Norman’s thrall and that is what angered the Goddess more than anything. The entire experience of meeting a deity, to feel it riding my body, was quite astonishing to me. However, before she departed, a period of psychic stasis was laid upon me, and I was cursed so that I would be unable to work any of my psychic talents for a week. Then I would experience the transformation that I had previously tried to avoid, becoming a true witch of the Goddess and thereby earn her forgiveness. So ended the trance session and the atmosphere was completely cleared up; but in fact the energy became empty and stale, and all was placed in a darkness of deprivation. I was blinded and powerless, so I meekly awaited my fate.

The next few days were uneventful, but also frustrating for me because I was psychically blind. I was off from school for the Easter holiday, so I attended a going away party for Norman Slater on Thursday (April 15). He was traveling the very next day to Loch Ness, Scotland, to reveal to the public for the first time, the truth behind the mysterious beastie known as the Loch Ness Monster.

We all thought that we were seeing the arrival of the miraculous times and that evening, Norman stood before everyone in a haze of golden candle light, went into trance and made many pronouncements and prognostications, telling us that the hour of judgement had drawn near. Our expedition was the trigger of this event, since we were about to discover the awesome remnants of Atlantis. That discovery would cause the end of the world due to the many relics of a future and as yet undiscovered technology. Norman melded his obvious occult beliefs with those of the Bible, making himself the first prophet to declare that the end times were now here. We were all suitably stunned and in awe of him. We felt privileged to be a part of his inner court. Then we proceeded to celebrate in a quiet and friendly fashion. Not long into the evening I started to feel kind of giddy. I had my first unfortunate experience becoming drunk, and much of what occurred later that evening was forgotten in an alcoholic haze. For such a pious group, they allowed minors to consume alcohol, and several of us took advantage of this opportunity. I apparently, over did it, consuming enough to get fairly smashed.

Norman used my moment of vulnerability to take me to task, first to mock and ridicule me in front of the others, and then later in his garage flat, to reveal several of my most wicked past lives. This was his opportunity to apply some real pressure to me, to change and convert my obvious occult and pagan practices. He had already planned on such an occurrence, since his followers were ready to denounce me, but I unknowingly had made myself available for some old fashioned brain washing.

He put me through a kind of informal Karmic tribunal, which was attended by a few of his key followers. I was cast as an evil young man - and of course, it was all absurd. Norman went through a recitation of all my previous past lives, all of which had been evil and diabolical. I was a spiritual miscreant. He even acted out one of my murders in a former life in ancient Egypt. Where I had felt powerful and privileged, I was brought down to the lowest level imaginable. However, I was also very stubborn and far less malleable than Norman had anticipated. All Norman accomplished was to make me feel very badly about myself.

I ended up finally sleeping on a couch at his garage apartment. Although I was physically unmolested, I was emotionally and mentally raped by the experience, and my identity and ego were dashed upon the rocks of despair. On good Friday (April 16), I dressed in the previous day’s clothes and accompanied Norman to the airport with his official entourage. I was chastened, feeling pretty sorry for myself, and perhaps even seemed repentant in the eyes of Norman and his clique.

When I finally got home that evening, I knew immediately that I was really unrepentant. I was actually quite angry at what had been done to me, particularly the more I thought about it. When the seven days were finally over, all of the powers and abilities came back to me. I invoked the Goddess again and she rode me with jubilation, praising me for my steadfast ways. It was then that she began to teach me the real art of witchcraft magick. But first, she had a task for me to perform. It wasn’t long after my humiliation that I ritually cursed Norman and his group, being shown how to do this by the Goddess herself. It felt exhilarating and empowering, so from that moment onward, I was  drawn into a battle for the honor of my Goddess. It must have worked quite well, because when Norman returned from Scotland he had nothing to show for activities. There was no revelation of the Loch Ness monster, and the press ridiculed him as a fraud and a confidence man. Other factions of the press got a hold of his story and what he planned to do in the Bermuda Triangle and made a laughing stock of him. Norman was just too vague about the details of the whereabouts of the Altantean ruins. There was also no scientific corroboration for his many claims. A remnant news article of the time can be found in a Miami Herald newspaper piece on Norman Slater, dated August 1972. (By this time, he was already in decline.)

My magickal war with Norman was actually precipitated when some of his followers at school had threatened my life in front of bystanders. I had, of course, left the inner circle and had denounced Norman to my peers. They said that Norman’s powers would seek me out and destroy me because I was evil and in league with the devil. I told them that we would see who was the stronger psychic; me, standing alone, or Norman and his group. As it turned out, by the end of the year Norman’s great plans and his group had fallen apart. There were investigations of tax evasion and improper use of funds, Norman had become erratic and chaotic, and then succumbed to illnesses and various sicknesses. He spent two long sessions of time in the hospital, although to this day, I don’t know what was causing these illnesses. Norman’s fragile world was falling to pieces and as members quit and left his group, his powers seemed to grow more feeble and weakened. This led me to believe that perhaps Norman’s powers had been syphoned off of his followers, like some giant bloated tick.  However, I was relentless in sending bolts of magickal power to combat and defeat this man - I sought no more than that. I never attempted to be unjust or to physically hurt Norman. 

Some time later, when his mission had failed in disgrace and bankruptcy and all his followers had left him, I turned my back on that evil, vile but broken man, and went into the protective custody of the Goddess. Since then, I have never had to personally use magick to harm anyone, even though at the time that I did it, it was to protect myself and others from this psychic villain. A man who readily exploited others in the name of Christ.
 
I had bravely passed the test and was received into the Goddess’ heart and soul. She possessed me and made my life full of wonder and realization. To celebrate this transition, she named me on two separate occasions. The first name was Barrabbas, because I was a holy rebel and her magickal son, and the second name, Tiresius, she gave to me because she sought to show me my masculine and feminine sides blended together.

She began to teach me magickal rituals and lore, communicating to me through trance. She showed me how to practice them, to worship her divinity and how to be like the Gods. As I seemed to become her mortal consort, I lived my life with her inside my head and heart, listening to her whispered words of compassion and insight, and glorifying in her visions of power and majesty.

It was thus that I suddenly discovered I already knew how to use the rituals and talismans from the various occult books and grimoires that I now possessed. I used these and her insights to create the first structures of the magickal system whose foundation I use today. The origin of this system was the illumination of the Goddess guiding my hands and senses to a greater understanding of magick. I was a goddess intoxicated young man, and wandered through life as a ghost, living only for the magickal worlds of spirits and gods. What I needed was a good sexual grounding, but unfortunately I was still a virgin. I had offered myself to the Goddess as a virgin, and the offering was most heartily accepted by her.

However, I had gained a powerful alliance and alignment with the Goddess of the Witches, so it was only a matter of time before she guided me to a real coven. Until that time, I was to have a number of remarkable adventures, some of them good and some revealing a greater darkness in the occult world that I had entered. I had a basic magickal system that seemed to work, but the greatest revelations would occur later on that year, in the golden autumn of 1972, a time that I would fondly remember for my whole life.
Frater Barrabbas

This is an article that appeared in Rending the Veil - Yule Edition. I thought that it would be good to place the raw article here for my readers to examine, since it is a continuation of my exposition of practical magick.

Yule - the wheel of the year turns; yet everything appears to stand still in the frozen icy world. Thoughts during this season turn to the past as we examine and reflect on everything that has happened -- from joys to disappointments.

We make promises to ourselves “New Year’s resolutions” aimed to fix the flaws and invigorate the positive within ourselves.

Timing is everything. That is probably the greatest lesson to be learned from the year’s successes and failures.

In the realm of magick there are many considerations to make, such as when to work magick, when to pause and when to plan. We can examine our natal charts to determine trends, consult calendars that tell us the cycle of the moon and what sign the sun is in. We can divide the day and night into planetary hours, seeking some kind of insight as to when a given event is auspicious. Timing is everything, but in the practice of magick there is little said about when we should or shouldn’t work magick. Are there auspicious times? Does it even make a difference?

With all of these factors to ponder, we ignore one important consideration and that is the personal cycle or wheel of fortune of the magician performing the magick. Even the most optimal and auspicious signs and portends will avail magicians nothing if they ignore important factors about their own waxing and waning material fortunes. Magick done during a weak trough in the personal fortune of the magician will produce nothing or it might even cause losses and misfortune. Perhaps the most important knowledge that magicians can possess is that which will enable them to work magick on their own material circumstances, and knowing their own timing is critical to that kind of working.

In the many years that I have worked magick I have discovered purely by accident that certain times of the year are better for material based magick than others, and that there is a pattern to this cyclic process.

What I discovered is that there is a personal wheel of fortune that systematically turns so that half of the year has the potential for material gain and the other half is better used to plan and position oneself for more optimal times, when action can be met with success. The year is cut in half, and one half fosters increase and the other, decrease. It may not be that the poorer half of the year actually experiences losses or setbacks, although this certainly can occur, rather the richer half of the year seems to effortlessly assist one in the pursuit of material gain and personal advancement.

It’s analogous to breathing -- inhalation represents internalization and re-grouping, and exhaling represents external activity and successful outcomes. Both are required for the cycle of breathing to be complete. This is also true of the wheel of fortune.

The simplest way to determine this wheel of fortune is take one’s birthday and add exactly six months to it. So if you were born on January 5, (as I was), then your halfway date is July 5. So the two most important dates are the natal return and six months later, which would be a point where the sun would be 180 degrees from its natal position. I am a Capricorn according to my natal sun sign, so my annual halfway point is under the sign of Cancer.

I have found that my time of increase begins after the halfway point in the year. From there it proceeds to climax at my birthday and then declines until the halfway point is again achieved. For me, the best time to plan and reorganize is during the winter, after the holidays and before the summer. After the summer vacation period, I am ready to start putting into action everything that I have learned and determined in the previous six months. This is how my wheel of fortune works.

A few years ago I experienced a terrible economic downturn and the resultant massive debt almost forced me into bankruptcy. However, with an open mind and a willingness to do whatever it took to legally regain my fortune, I performed a large series of Elemental magickal workings, starting in June and proceeding for three months. At the climax of these workings, I also invoked and charged several items with the talismanic elemental, Jupiter of Earth, during the lunar mansion called the Star of Fortune (or Al Sad Al Su’ud  #24 The Star of Fortune, Capricorn 25̊ 51ʹ - see Celestial Magic by Nigel Jackson,  pp. 82 - 96). In addition, I put together a list of specific material objectives that I wanted to accomplish and crafted them into magickal sigils, which I charged. In the intervening months, I was able to accomplish all of my objectives.

All of these events helped me to completely transform my financial situation. In fact, the magickal workings are still continuing to aid me, often from unexpected sources. Because I worked this magick at the most important pivotal point in my wheel of fortune, it had a profound and incredible effect on my material situation. Once I discovered this pattern and realized it, I decided that it was the most important piece of self-knowledge that one could possess.

How do you determine the greater wheel of fortune for yourself and learn about your own important personal timing? The first thing that you do is to find that halfway point in your yearly cycle and note it down.

Then look at the past several years and see if you can see a pattern as to when important material advancements occurred for you. It won’t be perfect, but I think that you will find that one of those half year cycles is more auspicious than the other, which is better for planning and regrouping.

The period from the halfway point to my birthday is the most important time for material advancement. However, for others it may just the opposite, from their birthday to the halfway point might be auspicious. I don’t believe that one pattern should fit everyone, but you should at least examine all of the things that have happened to you in the past and make some kind of judgement as to what part of the year is better for advancement, and that will reveal the time that you can work magick to aid that advancement.

An astrological examination of the transits of the Sun to the natal chart Sun show that a conjunction aspect for the birthday and an opposition aspect for the halfway point are clearly delineated as auspicious points in one’s astrology. The Natal Sun is compared against transiting positions of the Sun in the paragraphs below.

Transit Sun conjunct Natal Sun aspect: This is the Solar Return, when the Sun returns to the position that it had when one was born. This aspect represents new beginnings, the ability to perceive the whole year ahead as if one were standing upon some metaphorical ascent and looking across time at the events for the coming year. It is a time of receiving new impulses and perspectives as the old year gives way to the new. (See Planets in Transit: Life Cycles for Living by Robert Hand, p. 55.)

In some ways a birthday is a lot like a personal New Year’s day, symbolizing the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year.

Transit Sun opposition Natal Sun aspect: This aspect represents energies in life reaching a culmination, events causing realizations, revealing a critical point of success or failure. Situations judged to fail now appear to fail. The way to success opens up and is revealed. It is necessary for one to change course or redirect one’s self. (See Planets in Transit: Life Cycles for Living by Robert Hand, p. 58.)

The halfway point is a place of judgement and evaluation, where one thoroughly examines all of life’s activities, especially those that bear upon one’s fortune. Those efforts that are failing should be either drastically adjusted or ended. Those that appear to be gathering momentum for success should be steadfastly continued. New opportunities may also arise that will need to be judged as to their worth and a change in course may be called for to take advantage of them.

If one reads these two aspects correctly, then my cycle of the wheel of fortune would seem to fit them. However, it would also fit if one experienced the greater fortune on the first half of the year instead of the second half. It really depends on the individual to determine his or her own personal cycle, and once realized, it should be used to one’s greatest advantage. What is clearly indicated is that these two points in the calendar are very important to working material based magick.

Frater Barrabbas


Bibliography

Hand, Robert (1976) “Planets In Transit: Life Cycles for Living”,  Para Research Inc., Gloucester, MA

Jackson, Nigel (2003) “Celestial Magic - Principles and Practices of the Talismanic Art”, Capall Bahn Publishing Sommerset, UK

This is another biographical piece that I produced about an event that powerfully impacted and shaped me when I was a youth, many years ago. This occurrence was practically forgotten by me, but resurfaced as a result of the invocation of Seraphiel, whom I had previously connected with, probably in December 1972. The spring of 1973 was the beginning of some dark times for me, although at the time, I was not aware of how it would profoundly impact me. This event produced a kind of fork in the path of my destiny, one full of wonder and speculation.

The time was the end of the year 1972, and the place was a small southeastern Wisconsin town called Racine, nestled up next to the mighty lake Michigan, a fresh water lake that seemed endless, giving a complete and unbroken view of the eastern horizon - at least from the golden sandy beaches. The lake was a powerful geologic force, since it kept the area warmer in the fall and cooler in the spring and early summer. Lake Michigan was barely able to sustain wading let alone swimming until late summer, since it remained frigidly cold for most of the duration of the short summer months. Because of the lake, Racine was frequented with rolling fogs and damp mists that would blanket the neighborhood and make visibility almost negligible.

In addition to the fog and mists that would emerge from the lake, the land itself had many peculiar qualities - it had once been a major religious site for the previously indigenous Potawatomi Indians. The whole area had once been covered in many spectacular mounds, some of which contained the burials of the honored ancestors. Most of these had been plowed over by settlers, so only a few of the mounds still existed. The old center of town had once been a major religious shrine, now it was completely built over with eldritch homes, strange twisted trees, streets and ivy covered buildings. Walking around this part of town one becomes aware of the subtle layering of ages and times, mostly now long forgotten.

Overlaying Indian holy sites and burial grounds is not an uncommon phenomena in the Midwest, but it seemed that such a desecration had an unfortunate impact on the future of the town, which had started out as a peaceful settler’s village back in the 1840's. The Root river passed through the middle of the downtown area and meandered through it, splitting the town into two sections. The south side was the oldest part of town and also the place where the burial mounds were located in more profuse numbers. The old settled part of the town was built on top of one of the most sacred sites for the Potawatomi Indians, who had been driven from their land and later moved to reservations in Nebraska. I often wondered if this act had any impact on the citizens living there now. Rumors told that a series of unsolved murders had occurred in this area over the span of many decades, but it was just rumors. I doubt that anyone would either sense or realize what had been done to that part of town over 130 years ago. That remained for the occult sensitive, such as myself and my friends.

The place that was probably the most tenebrous was the area south of what was later known as the Gateway technical institute, but was then known as Parkside, an extension of the university system, soon to be moved far south into a full blown university. Following Main Street south past the university extension, starting from around 9th Street, past East Park, all the way down to De Koven Avenue and hugging the lake front is an area populated with large old homes, and during the evening, it’s inhabited by even stranger vibes, especially when a fog comes in from the lake. The whole area seems haunted, especially at night, when I and my friends would tool around this area in an old car. Main Street would abruptly end and a barely paved road went down to the lakefront at a place that could only be described as menacing, forlorn and deserted. Perhaps once there had been a pleasant beach there, in fact we called it the 17th Street beach, but it now contained the ruined foundations of a pavilion and rows of giant boulders of limestone and slabs of concrete that looked like huge grave markers, placed there to break the waves and keep them from ablating the coastline. There were also a series of dilapidated storm fences set up to keep the sand from blowing into the town. It was a place that was infrequently visited, and one that was harsh, cold, and soulless even on a good day. During the winter large sections of ice would pile up on the beach making it even more of a forbidden area, and treacherous terrain to walk on as well.

In 1972, two education PhD candidates, who had been teaching high school in town for many years, got permission from the school district to found their own experimental high school. It would be a kind of “free” high school that would not have the regimentation of a typical school, even though it would still require passing classes and acquiring credits, thereby having at least a nominal curriculum to follow. Although unnamed for a time, it became known as Walden III - the students and the faculty had a hand in choosing the name. This school also allowed for a greater degree of student freedom to delve deeper into particular studies and enrichment courses. There were far fewer students than a typical highschool in the area, these were all hand picked from existing junior and senior classes of the three city high schools. This low ratio of student to teacher encouraged more interaction between them. The school district gave the school use of an old but serviceable building, known as the McMinn building (the original high school for the town) located on the corner of 6th Street and Lake Avenue. This was very close, I might add, to that more unusual part of town. Being located at that school allowed my friends and I proximity to a part of town that was miles away from where we lived. It would prove to be providential, since I became quite familiar with that area.

The autumn of 1972 was probably one of the most glorious times in my life. I had changed from a typically regimented high school to Walden III. There I was allowed to pursue my artistic and occult interests to a degree that would not have been tolerated in a normal high school. I had also come out as a witch in my previous high school and the harassment that I received at the hands of my fellow students was almost too much to bear. So I had talked my father into letting me switch to this school. Typically, individuals who enrolled in this school were borderline drop outs or scholastically troubled individuals. I fit neither of these types, other than my issues with being a public witch. There are a number of stories about that wondrous magical autumn that I had at that school, but I will leave all that for a different story.

Needless to say, my favorite friend and companion was a young man named Scott Malueg, who assisted and aided me to create an entire magickal system almost from scratch. We had few books and materials to aid us, but we had a boundless imagination and youthful exuberance. Our many adventures are etched in my memory. It was a time of almost limitless possibilities. Then after the Christmas season, I learned that my good friend Scott was moving out of town before the second semester would barely even start. He departed during the cold winter, his family loading up a converted bus with all their belongings and headed down to Jalisco, Guadalajara, in Mexico. His father was pursuing some mining deal down there, but later it amounted to nothing. However, I was left alone with my magical work undone. Luckily for me, I had my two other good friends, Bob and Mark to fill in the gap. Bob also had a car, an old faded red ‘65 Rambler American that he could use whenever he wanted to. We spent a lot of time in that car driving around for no good reason, just looking for trouble or creating mischief. Unfortunately, we got more than we bargained for.

At Walden III, I had the reputation of being the high school witch and practitioner of magic. I dressed the part, wearing an English bowler derby hat and playing my flute in the hallways. Once I even donned my magician’s robes and traipsed around the corridors. I had started learning to play the flute, it seemed that I had some talent, since it didn’t take me long to learn. I was also experimenting in painting with oils and acrylics and filled up reams of drawing pads with various sketches of nearly everyone and everything. I also had a pretty decent hand at using pen and ink to draw portraits and produce fine calligraphy. If I was not engaged in drawing, I was attempting to write stories and pursuing my occult studies with a kind of abandon. Many weekends were spent working magic of some kind, and other note books were filled with occult experiments. I even set up my bedroom as a kind of occult magical temple, quite capable of performing all sorts of magical experiments (if only I knew how). My friend Bob set up a temple in his bedroom as well, so we often performed rites in either place, depending on what our parents were doing at the time. My bedroom consisted of the entire attic of the house, converted into a bedroom, which afforded me with a lot of privacy.

So my reputation at school was pretty well established. If anyone wanted to know anything about the occult, magic or witchcraft, they only had to talk to me, not that talking to me was particularly easy or comfortable for people. Generally, the other kids left me alone, having determined that I was driven by a mono-mania and lacking basic social skills, I was not one to chum around with unless one was willing to engage in other more nefarious activities. One thing that I did have in common with my school chums is that we were all experimenting with drugs of various kinds, although I was limited by my access to the more harmless variety, such as marijuana and hashish. These were plentiful, if you had money, but not having much money, they were more often rare delights for me rather than normal activities.

It was during the long months of winter that our tale really begins. I was deeply absorbed in my pursuits, so much so that I was practically oblivious to what was going on around me. There were others around me who were engaged in occultism and mild forms of witchcraft, and perhaps even a few who were exposed to much darker pursuits, such as Satanism. We were all really young kids, so the depth and profundity of these pursuits were actually quite superficial, meant as trendy interests and involvements with anything that was “counter culture” or of shock value to our parents. This was not the case with me, however, but with most others it was a superficial adventure.

Anyway, I remember one late afternoon I was painting in my make-shift studio when someone came by briefly to disturb my reverie. The door was open, so I was slightly aware of what was going on in the halls. An attractive young woman came past the door with a couple of her friends. I had never seen this woman before, but her friends were students with whom I had a slight acquaintance. I went up to the door to see who it was, and one her friends said, “This is that guy I was tellin’ you about.” She then looked me in the eye and smiled a shy smile, and said rather directly, “I gotta go, but we need to talk!” I took this brief conversation in, and before I could reply, she and her friends had gone. I thought to myself, “Okay, nice looking petite girl wants to talk to me, so I hope that she does.” Normally, my peer group didn’t want to talk to me about the occult or witchcraft, so this was a rare event, and one that I remembered quite well, even years later. This is because the woman who spoke to me and told me that we needed to talk was named Tina Davidson. She may have told me her name in parting, but I didn’t remember it. I just remembered how lovely she looked and how bold and self assured she seemed. A power to be reckoned with in a small package, I had thought.

This happened in March 1973, probably almost 37 years ago. The reason why this moment was etched in my brain is because of what happened soon afterwards. March was dreary, cold, foggy at times, it seemed that Spring would never happen. I had all but forgotten that some cute young woman had talked briefly to me and promised to talk more later. I was absorbed in the difficulties and troubles of my own life, and had little time or interest to be concerned with anyone else’s troubles. Yet for some reason, I began to feel a kind of dread, causing the joy of my new occult discoveries to darken and fade quickly away. It was as if time were holding its breath for some reason, and little happened that was either pleasant or stimulating for me.

Then on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 27, there was a seemingly terrible commotion in the hallways. It was subtle, some young women were crying and talking about some horrible incident, then there was a kind of hush throughout the hallways of the old school. I went around to pique my curiosity and discovered that some girl named Tina had been horribly murdered. She had been missing for ten days now and her naked body had been found at the 17th Street beach area. She had been brutally murdered and then stabbed in the throat and chest 61 times. I was shocked by the news, but it didn’t seem to be anyone that I had actually known, so it really didn’t affect me, or so I thought.

A day or so later, Tina’s friends accosted me in my studio and told me that their dead friend had been trying to get a hold of me. Not being a member of the school (she was only 15 years old and too young to enroll), she had been banned from coming into the building, having been caught hanging around with her friends on more than one occasion. Her friends were absolutely terrified that some group of Satanists that they all knew about had performed this horrifying deed. I then was shocked and dismayed to hear that this lovely, shy, petite but tough young woman, who had been trying to see me and who had briefly talked to me, had met such a terrible end. Her two friends, one was named Peggy and the other was called “Cricket” invited me over to their home to meet with them and their friends, to talk about what they were all going to do. They wanted me to magically protect them from this group of young thugs. I agreed, so I found myself over at their place, a basement bedroom and living room that had a lace and black silk doorway. These women, of course, wanted revenge and justice, but my magical abilities were certainly not up to the task. All I could do was console them and offer forms of magical protection.

Then I went home, deeply troubled by what I had experienced. In the days following, I discovered that I was having terrible nightmares - scenes of the grizzly murder occurred as if I were the one being murdered. I also had all sorts of strange sensations and thoughts that were definitely not part of my normal mental regimen. I soon realized that I was being possessed by the spirit of this dead woman. I was obsessed by her, and her image and thoughts seemed to penetrate my very being - to the core of my self. I was no longer one person, I was now housing two people, although my normal self maintained a strong dominance, thankfully.

I began to have conversations with Tina in my temple, since that seemed to be where I could sort all of this out and hear and properly sense the other “soul” possessing me in a distinct and clear manner. Tina told me that she was afraid and confused. She knew that she was dead, but she didn’t know what to do next. Of course, neither did I. So we were both stumped by this strange occurrence. A few days later, I confided to a friend who had occult leanings and some experience about what was going on, and he suggested using the Tibetan Book of the Dead to help the spirit of Tina find its way to the other side. I would act as her guide. This friend even lent me the book, edited and written by Timothy Leary (The Psychedelic Experience), so I crafted a spell to guide Tina beyond the threshold of the living into the domain of the spirit world. I did this to help her, but also to help myself be released from this quasi possession. The version of this spell was written in a notebook that I still possess today. I don’t know the exact date that I performed this rite, but it was accomplished some time in early April, almost exactly a year later from when I officially began my path and alignment to the Goddess of Witchcraft. (Obviously, another story.)

I recall performing this ritual quite vividly and the vision that I had is still accessible, almost as if it had happened yesterday. I saw myself walking with Tina to a great veil of light that stretched in all directions from the ground of what seemed like a desolate wasteland with a strange city in the hidden distance. We were both wearing magical robes and walking hand in hand, like lovers. She parted from me, then walked up to the veil and turned to face me one last time. She said “Don’t seek to avenge my death. It was done by no one I knew in life. I wish for peace and happiness to all - forget this bitter event and live life to its fullest. Know this - that I did find you at last, and now I am going to my final place of peace. We have met and joined briefly together, so maybe that’s what might have been had I lived, or perhaps more. What’s done is done and nothing can change it. I leave with a tear and a smile.”

So saying that, she passed beyond the veil and I saw and felt her presence no more within me. She was truly gone and the spell had been very successful, even more than I had anticipated. I felt almost abandoned, as if there was a gaping hole left in me, like someone very dear and important was gone forever. I puzzled over her words, only dimly remembered until recently. I drew a colored picture of this vision that I saw of her standing before the veil and made a painting of it later. It was an astonishing occurrence, even for one as young and inexperienced as I was. I believed that if Tina had not been murdered that something wonderful and romantic might have happened between us. Who knows, maybe she might have been the mother of the children that I never had. It’s a possibility whose forced negation powerfully shaped my destiny. Instead of finding a life partner at an early age, I wandered from relationship to relationship, with many years in between them. However, that allowed me the maximum amount of time and focus on my personal practice of ritual magick, witchcraft and occultism. I was able to follow my impulses without being responsible to anyone but myself. Such a long period of personal freedom and following my occult muse had both its benefits and costs.
Tina was very likely the victim of a serial killer, since she sought no vengeance or retribution against the one who had killed her. She had been hitchhiking in the area and was picked up by this man, a one in a million chance, since if anyone else had picked her up, or if she had been delayed or not there, someone else might have died instead. She said that she didn’t know who killed her, but released from the cares and worries of life, she did not want to dwell on it. She had implored me not perform any magick against her killer and had implied that the group of Satanists she had known had not been responsible for her death. I promised not to perform any magick against her killer, but I stubbornly believed that the young group of Satanic punks were responsible.  I was not alone in that belief.

Her friends had been absolutely terrified, thinking that this group Satanic thugs had been the perpetrators of the murder, who would thus seek to strike again. They sought me out to aid and comfort them, and I did what magick I knew and could share with them. There were no further incidents, since the event of the murder appeared to have broken up the Satanic group, probably because they no longer were able to meet. Faced with true evil, they had capitulated. If they had actually done the deed, one of them would have told the police later on at some point, to ease their conscience, but to this day, the murder has never been resolved. Even a police detective visited me in my school studio, talking to me about who I thought might have murdered Tina. I am sure that my thoughts and opinions were quite bizarre and unusual to him. He probably got some of the same information from Tina’s friends as well. But all for naught, since the real perpetrator was never discovered and brought to justice.

I held on to my belief that the Satanic gang had done the deed, as did Tina’s friends. During this interlude, I met and briefly befriended some of Tina’s closest friends, including a beautiful dark haired and brown eyed woman who was slightly older than me named Cricket. She was originally from Salem, Massachusetts, and her mother still lived at the address of 9 Gallows Hill road. Being older and also hip to magic and witchcraft, Cricket was kind of the leader of this group, although Peggy had a very strong and determined personality as well, acting as a kind of den mother for a group of young women.

A dim recollection of mine is going into a bar with Cricket and a friend of hers to see where the Satanic punks gathered. I recall Cricket pointing them out to me with a certain amount of personal venom. She even got out of the booth that we were sitting in and went over to where several youths in dark clothing and leather jackets were sitting on stools before the bar, and said something to them which I didn’t hear. The supposed leader got off of his stool and stood before Cricket, saying something to the effect, “We had nothing to do with that!” I also vaguely remember him looking quite distressed and shouting at Cricket, “Stop telling people that we did that! Stop talking to the cops!” I also thought Cricket may have said something like, ‘What are you gonna do about it if I don’t?” Then the leader backed down, and just said, “Just cool it! We didn’t do it!” Even though at the time I had disbelieved their statements of innocence, today I must state that they were probably telling the truth. Nothing about their actions seemed to indicate anything other than shock, horror and dismay at what had happened to Tina.

I hung around with Cricket for several weeks, and I must admit that I really was a bit infatuated with her. She was brave, street smart, savvy and very much a free spirit - like Tina, she was a petite woman with a lot of power. I loved her Boston accent, her direct manner and her warm heart. Then her and a friend hitchhiked down to Nashville to see some friends and get away from the coldness of the tardy spring in Wisconsin. She came back, but I suppose the wander-lust had set in, and it was apparent that Cricket was done with Racine. Before summer could begin to warm up the cold and bitter weather, Cricket left to return to her old haunts, so I lost an important friend and possible ally in my religious search for a coven of witches. Tina’s other friends split up and went their separate ways, so I soon lost the sodality of their fierce and devoted company.

However, my friends Bob and Mark were a great solace and refuge for me. We traveled around in Bob’s old car, dropping LSD (which we had recently acquired), smoking pot and behaving quite strangely. We would use the drugs to enter into an underworld, a negative image of our own home town and found all sorts of unusual places, like a hidden drainage valley that went on for miles in the northwest part of town, and the desolate beach area off of 17th Street, where Tina’s body had been discovered. The beach had become haunted with a horrific reputation and vibes that were dark, brooding and terrible to behold, particularly when altered by drugs combined with a potent imagination. We would occasionally go there to futilely try to overturn whatever evil power had found a home there, but only time would dissipate the memory and the effects of that terrible event.

Many years have passed since that time. I fully realize now that my belief that some punks practicing Satanism had been responsible for Tina’s murder was a complete fabrication. No one ever knew who had done the terrible deed, and the police had recently put out a post on their web site to see if anyone could still possibly help them solve the case. My psychic impressions recently attempted to sense if that perpetrator was still at large, but I felt nothing, as if the murderer had himself been killed or died in some other altercation. The case is long cold and all possible threads to the killer are irretrievably lost. You can find the police case website at this location, along with several other unresolved murders that have happened in that city.

I still believe that there is a tangible negative emanation coming from below the town in the southeastern side of Racine, due to the demolished Indian burials and sacred ceremonial sites, but that’s just my opinion. Yet I will never forget that event in 1973 and everything else that followed as long as I live.
Frater Barrabbas

Using magick to try and influence politics is common in some parts of Africa, and apparently in Uganda some enterprising magician decided at some point to cast a spell on the headquarters of the country's National Forestry Authority. Various items related to the spell were recently discovered in a plastic bag hidden in the ceiling of a senior manager's office.

The juju, as the stuff is locally known, was stacked in a plastic bag in the ceiling. The offices house the acting director of finance and administration, Hajati Aidat Nandutu.

It was not clear who hid the fetishes in the ceiling and for how long they had been there.

...

According to the acting executive director, Hudson Andrua, the items were discovered by a carpenter who was on routine office maintenance.

On close scrutiny, the plastic bag contained mysterious herbs, coffee beans wrapped in dry banana leaves, brown powder, dead fireflies and bats.
Here's a helpful tip when placing talismans or other magical items that this magician seems to have been well aware of - drop ceilings are great for concealing just about any sort of magical item. People seldom give much thought to the ceiling, so usually your item or items will remain undiscovered until the area above the drop needs work or maintenance.

The intention of this particular spell is hard for me to divine without a better understanding of African folk magick and the symbolism of bats, fireflies, and so forth in that particular magical system. Bats are associated with Saturn in the Western system which might suggest some sort of curse, but it's very possible that in African magick the meaning could be different. And why the Forestry Service? Did this particular magician hope to obtain some sort of concession for logging?

The Ugandan Forestry Authority has ben embroiled in scandals recently, so perhaps the spell was indeed a curse. Seeing as it's hard to say how long the items had been in the ceiling it might even be an old curse that is working well beyond its original objective.

Controversy hit the forestry body recently leading to the suspension of three senior managers. They are Damian Akankwasa, the executive director, Paul Drici, the director of plantations and Ernest Kaddu, who heads finance and administration.

Akankwasa was suspended by President Yoweri Museveni to pave way for investigation into the source of the sh900m which he said had been stolen from his bedroom. Drici was embroiled in a bribery scandal while Kaddu was suspended indefinitely over allegations of “improper financial management”.

The office in which the fetishes were discovered was occupied by Kaddu.

The forestry watchdog has also been accused of irregular allocation of concessions in forest reserves in Katugo in Nakasongola, Lendu, Mwenge and Nakawa, where the agency’s headquarters are located.
If the spell turns out to be recent it might be worth taking a look at who benefited the most from those irregular forest reserve concessions and see if any of them hired a sorcerer leading up to the concessions being awarded. Personally I can't think of any other reason someone might want to hex the Forestry Service, unless this was related to some personal issue with the particular manager whose office was targeted.

It is now sixty days since I completed the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, and I am still waiting to perform the last piece, which is the Bornless One Envisioning rite. I celebrated a very powerful Full Moon rite the previous evening and not only received further insights into this working, but also was able to reconnect to the previous ritual structures and their impressions. The temple still powerfully resonates with the achievement of that amazing ordeal, since the base ritual structures consisted of vortices, which in their sealed state retain all of the energies and intelligences that were raised during the seven week working. I only have to consecrate the space and say a Mass of the Goddess in order to experience harmonic resonances emanating from the sealed ritual structures. I am not yet ready to unseal these structures and continue with this ordeal, yet the information that I have received last night would seem to substantiate that pause.

I also wanted to tie some loose ends up and share with you a new rendering of the picture of Seraphiel that I drew probably some time in December 1972. My friend and associate, Rekhetra, produced this art work based on the original colored drawing that I did so long ago. It looks much more vibrant and interesting, having been redone by an accomplished artist. You can see more of her artwork here.




Since I completed the primary ordeal in December, there has been a lot of internal processing going on, but only some outward indications that I am making some definitive progress towards my ultimate goal of at-one-ment with the Godhead as the Unity of All Being. I believe that this process will be slow and evolving, with some intermittent but astonishing breakthroughs occurring over time. As all of the super-archangels seem to have said to me, this is not the end of my spiritual path nor even the ultimate goal - it is merely the beginning of a more advanced and empowered stage.

One thing that is occurring with me that seems very clear is that I am pulling all of the very powerful and strategic threads of my past together into a mosaic of the present. In order for me to determine the nature of the my destiny, I must know where I have been and why. I must understand my own story in an intimate and magickal manner so that I may realize the hidden forces that compelled me through my life’s spiritual process. So far, the most compelling parts of my life are what happened in 1972 and 1973, representing when I established the foundation for the magick that I work today.

While the techniques that I use to assemble my ritual lore were developed during the 1980's and 1990's, my actual beginnings occurred in the previous decade. Parts of my life’s story have resurfaced after many years of neglect and forgetfulness, undoubtably due to the impact of the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal. A friend of mine confided to me that the Abramelin ordeal is not a working that can be resolved just by performing the required actions and observances for the required period. Often, the ordeal does nothing more than powerfully facilitate and impact the internal spirit of the magician when it is completed, while the other facets of the process may take months or years to finally achieve full realization and mastery. He also told me that in order to know one’s ultimate destiny, one must first have complete recourse and understanding of the past. The past is the key to the future, so this is why I have become so haunted by occurrences that happened over thirty years ago.

Last night (February 28) was a strikingly beautiful full moon that mystically reflected on the ice and snow, it created a vista of soft brilliance, since it was a cloudless night. The moon turned the evening’s darkness into a spectral landscape that seemed almost a dim reflection of a brilliant day. One could have easily navigated without any illumination whatsoever. In this mysterious and wondrous night I performed the Mass of the Goddess and sought to reconnect to that magickal ordeal completed two lunar cycles previously. I not only succeeded in reconnecting, but I was amazed at how potent the atmosphere of the temple was after all of that time. I was able to sense a connection with all four of the Seraphim, Cherubim, the Element Godhead of Water and my HGA/Higher Self. All of these spiritual entities are very much alive and fully active in the temple, waiting for me to engage in further action.

What I received from this melange of spirits was that I will need to perform two more iterations of the Bornless One invocation rite, but not until my greater wheel of fortune moves from being retrograde to going direct. This won’t happen until July, so any future workings will have to wait at least until then, and more likely the following autumn. I must also continue to work on pulling the most important parts of my past out of my living memories and weave them into a unified expression of who I am and where I have been. This is the required foundation for determining the nature of my personal spiritual destiny. I believe that I will have to perform the Bornless One invocation rite once to establish this baseline of my present lifeline, and then start to work on projecting it forward into the future. This action will produce many visions and begin to break up my present time line, allowing me to perceive and project a future destiny that I will be able to unerringly follow. Once that future is fully visualized, I will perform the Bornless One invocation rite for the final time.

That is what was communicated to me last night and I believe there is much to ponder and think about. I have never been much for believing in any kind of predestination or being tied down to a fixed future, so I will also have to think rather deeply about how one can project a future destiny and still retain a high degree of flexibility. Since it is probably impossible to collapse causality, I still may be able to build the rest of my life into an ideal by consistently following an empowered spiritual plan. Sort of like living a self-fulfilled prophecy. That doesn’t mean that I will be immune from accidents or any other kind of unexpected occurrences, but that such occurrences will neither deter me from my ultimate goal nor obstruct my path in any manner. Even death will not deter me, since it will only hasten and complete the overall process of my life. Thus I will achieve my goal of obtaining union with my Godhead no matter what happens in the future. If I leave behind a legacy of enough teachings, rituals and lore, then others will not only be able to know what I did and how I got there, but they will be greatly aided in erecting their own spiritual apotheosis. Both tasks represent my true will, so whatever happens to me, both tasks will be accomplished, whether I complete all of my writings and teachings or not.

I was quite pleased and very happy with the results of my simple magickal workings the prior evening. There is so much more to come, and I look forward to it. I also look forward to sharing some of this knowledge with you, my readers, as well.
Frater Barrabbas

Conservative Christians have a real weakness for conversion stories, the more lurid the better. Since the 1970's a number of individuals have come forth claiming to be former Satanist or Wiccan leaders who were "born again" and now preach the Gospel. They then write supposed accounts of the shocking practices they and their followers once indulged in and how anyone following their former path must be brought to Jesus in order to be saved. One of the most famous of these individuals is Mike Warnke, who published a book entitled The Satan Seller in 1973. It chronicled Warnke's introduction into Satanism, the depravity that followed, and his eventual conversion to Christianity.

Further detailed is Warnke's participation in sexual orgies, alcoholism, and drug dealing; his rise in the ranks of Satanism to the level of "high priest"; presiding over Satanic rituals including magical spells, summoning demons, ritual sex including a ritual kidnap and rape; the attempt on his life — a heroin overdose — that left him angry and disillusioned; his heroism in Vietnam; and how he found Jesus and came home as an evangelist. The story ends with Warnke living happily in California with wife Sue Studer. In fewer than three months after the release, The Satan Seller had become a religious best-seller.
The only problem with this over-the-top tale is that Warnke was a fraud. He was brought down by fellow Christians in the pages of Cornerstone magazine, which in 1992 published a series of articles exposing numerous episodes detailed by Warnke that could never have occurred. The authors of the series spoke to friends and acquaintences from the time he claimed to have been involved in Satanic occult practices and none of them could confirm his stories. It still makes me wonder, though, what really did go on that prompted Warnke to publish his account? Was it all made up in pursuit of a bestselling book or was there some truth behind the exaggerated tales? If only a real occultist could have been there to offer some commentary and perspective.

A similar case is that of Bill Schnoebelen, the author of Wicca: Satan's Little White Lie which was published in 1990 by Chick Publications - the folks who make those little comic-style tracts. In it Schnoebelen makes claims that are in many cases more extravagant than Warnke's - that he was the leader of several covens involving hundreds of people while simultaneously serving as a Satanic High Priest and high-degree Freemason. All this despite the fact that the Church of Satan was never particularly organized into any sort of network like the one Schnoebelen describes - all you had to do to become a member for life was to send Anton LaVey a hundred bucks - and that the "High-Grade" Masonic degrees he claimed to have been initiated into were invented by hoaxster Leo Taxil.

As it turns out, I do know a real occultist who was a member of Schnoebelen's coven in the mid-1970's - the blogosphere's own Frater Barrabbas, who has recently published a series of articles talking about his time in the group and what Bill Schnoebelen was actually up to during the time in which he claimed to be a great and powerful Wiccan/Satanist/Freemason. I highly recommend that you check it out. It's a very informative series, and gives some real insight into the mind of a man who seems to have wanted to become a cult leader, but just wasn't very good at it and finally decided to persecute his former religion instead.

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part 3A
• Part 3B
• Part 4A
• Part 4B
• Conclusion

Stories like these are good lessons for anyone seeking spiritual authority. Even small amounts of power and adoration can cause an inflated sense of one's own importance, and this is a sense that can profoundly mislead those who mistake it for license to engage in manipulative or outright abusive practices and behaviors.

Ave,

I haven't read the Wedding in years, and felt inspired to do so this morning. When I read it previously, I knew that it was full of evocative imagery and enjoyed that without penetrating it one bit -- but this was before I grew to practice Spagery . When I first read it I didn't speak much of the Alchemical language; this has changed (although not by much). Not that any of the actual processes or the application of such described within this manual (it seems more and more to be exactly that as I read it again, this time bookmarking pages and feverishly jotting down notes about possible interpretations, the vast majority of which are undoubtedly wrong)  have become clear; I just know enough to know there is more going on than I know. Awesome. There do seem to be quite a few Biblical references/allusions which took me aback for a moment. I recalled a comment by a Frater of another Order who mentioned biblical studies being part of his Inner Order work--which I thought was quite strange at the time. I'm in the Golden Dawn, and our Justified God in the Outer is Osiris....it's easy to forget that in the RR et AC, it's Yeshua that's revered. The GD and RR et AC get lumped together, but they are definitely different Orders as far as aim and structure go, from what I understand.

 Perhaps the Bible holds the key to understanding this text? This would be somewhat ironic for me, as the Bible itself has been so thoroughly abused by modern Christianity--to promote all sorts of non-Christian foolishness-- that the tome itself has become difficult to respect. Not that I doubt there's wisdom in it-it's the Bible, after all...but what a mess! Which translation of which books in which Bible are of use? The Chymical Wedding itself gives us clues (see here for an exegesis that makes some sense, although it stops short at delving into actual process) but even then, understanding seems to be a matter of inspiration-or possession of a Key, of the very information that the Inner guards so closely.

It does seem to me that the processes described (involving de-feathering lovely birds and heating deceased royalty using the reflected light of the Sun, and more of the like...nothing that makes a lick of sense if we are only referencing a way of viewing things) are the processes that the various Inner Adepts allude to in reference to Inner Alchemy and the Great Work. Hidden in plain sight...I've gotten to the point where the authenticity of a purportedly Alchemical text is, in my own limited view, reliant on how teeth-grindingly close I can come to understanding it without that Eureka moment. Le Sigh.

Anyway, it bears study. I'm sure the RR et AC gents have a full grasp on it....I'm going to keep studying, and hope that my turn with the Key comes. Labore, Labore, Labore.....


In LVX,

AIT

This is final part and conclusion taken from my long article, “Are Witches Dupes of Satan”, which I wrote as a response to a book published by my ex-high priest, Bill Schnoebelen. The book was entitled “Wicca; Satan’s Little White Lie,” and it has bedeviled the witchcraft community ever since it was first published by Chick publications. This is where I examine Bill’s real motives for writing his book. I reveal the real person behind the edifice - a person who is deeply flawed, troubled, and even mentally disturbed. This is a person that we should pity if it were not for the damage that he has wrought upon the occult community.

When I read Bill’s book, it became obvious that he was very bitter and even angry about his past failings as a Wiccan High Priest and occultist. He portrayed himself as a man who was betrayed and corrupted by the dark agencies within the Witch Cult. No matter how altruistic or righteous he behaved in his role as a spiritual elder, guide and teacher, he was bound to fail. He now believes that the true faith was lurking behind that failure, that God had brought him through the darkness, despair and the evil corruption of his Wiccan and Satanic adventure for the sole purpose of making him an instrument of persecution and accusation against the adherents of a threatening and pernicious creed, which even today is corrupting young people and leading them into the uncompromising embrace of the Devil. Bill’s message is very clear, if you’re a Witch and you aren’t a deliberate devotee of Satan, then you are merely the unwitting dupe of a terrible Satanic conspiracy. Bill’s Christian ministry specializes in bringing one time members of the craft back into the fold of the faithful. He and his wife have assisted hundreds of individuals to cope with their broken and destroyed lives, rebuilding them with the salvation, love and grace of Jesus Christ.

Of course, I myself have never met anyone who had ruined their lives and their families by being involved in an earth based religion. In fact, I would find it rather strange if such things happened. What Bill is saying is that people who get involved in Wicca or Neopaganism also become drug addicts and criminals in a cavernous underground of human suffering, malicious deeds and dark soulless activities, too horrible to even mention (even though he mentions them at every opportunity). Yet there is absolutely no proof that any of Bill’s accusations are true. In fact, most of what he relates in his book either didn’t occur or has been so exaggerated and distorted as to be barely recognizable. Bill is telling a very dramatic tale, one that Stephen King would surely envy. The truth is far more humbling, boring and sad. That tale is how one individual who was gifted with so many talents, failed at everything that he tried to accomplish. However, Bill’s path should be an object lesson to us all, so we can now discuss the fatal mistakes that destroyed his dream of a Wiccan Camelot.

Bill is very bitterly opposed to Witchcraft, Paganism, magick, and the host of New Age occult practices and beliefs, as well as the perennial philosophy itself. Bill has turned his back on the adventure of self-discovery and the revelation of his own divine and spiritual heritage - one that all of humanity shares. In fact, Bill has become the nemesis against all forms of liberality, whether it be the so-called liberal press or the liberal political establishment, which supports a social agenda of secular humanism as a means to protect individual rights and religious practices from government interdiction.

He identifies secular humanism as the lax and overly tolerant social malaise that allowed dangerous forms of liberality to be promoted, including Witchcraft and Neopaganism. Bill has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of the new moral force in our society, one that will over-turn the rot instigated by secular humanism. However, this is really a rejection of liberality based upon Bill’s personal, spiritual and moral bankruptcy. It’s a way to explain that failure in a manner that allows him to deny any responsibility (“the Devil made me do it!”).

Bill and Sharon were responsible for exploiting and hurting the people who followed them. Because of their corrupting influences, they actually caused a few of them to fall into ruin and self destruction. It took Bill’s former coven members years to shed the stigma and the bitterness of the fall. I know this to be true, for I was one of them. Bill, himself, also reaped some of the bitterness that he sowed. Perhaps that may have changed him if he had taken full responsibility for it all.

However, Bill responded to this fall from grace by seeking a quick solution, so he first sought out the Mormons. Then when that did not deliver him from the crushing demands of his own petty ego, he found the one path where he could enjoy the status of a superstar and cash in on all of his years of occult study and practice. The earth based spiritual traditions could not give Bill the respect he required nor support him in the kind of lavish life style that he would feel was due to someone of his lofty rank, so he switched his spiritual allegiances until he found an organization that gave him what he required in life. This was no dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus as Bill would like us to believe, but a purely calculated move to accomplish and fulfill his material ambitions.

Such notoriety as Bill has acquired has its costs, as a reformed spiritual pervert, the leaders in Bill’s adopted spiritual community will certainly keep him under scrutiny in case of any observable relapses. Bill will never be wholly trusted by his new partners, since his list of infamous crimes and practices makes him tainted in eyes of good Christians, who never wavered in their faith to the exceptional degree that Bill did. He will be a controversy and will never really be accepted by these people. This is because they believe that no matter how dramatic a conversion to the true faith one experiences, the crimes of the past must still be accounted for. There is no guarantee of complete forgiveness by the Lord, no matter how pious one is from the moment of conversion to the end of one’s life. This also has all of the characteristics of the life story of a traitor, a person who, for whatever reasons, has cashed in on his former allies. He is never wholly accepted by his new allies and he is despised by his own people. For the rest of his life, he is never trusted nor wholly believed by anyone. Such a life is a lonely one and it’s a good thing that Bill has his faithful wife Sharon to keep him company for the long years ahead.

The final lesson in the tragedy of the life of Bill Schnoebelen is one that is both profound and deep, one that requires a great deal of wisdom to understand. Perhaps if Bill had spent more time trying to understand the spiritual wisdom of his own path in Witchcraft, he would have matured past the point of his own egoic excesses. But it is more likely that Bill would never have learned this subtle point, even if he were still involved in Witchcraft today. Bill’s most egregious failing is that he mistakenly believed that in order to grow and become enlightened, he had to submit himself to the darkness, in other words, he had to abrogate his will and open himself to whatever dark influences moved him. Bill believed that this was the only way to master his spiritual path. Because there was no one around to show him his error or dispute this aspiration, Bill got to experience the full measure of bitterness, perversity, darkness and despair that such a foolhardy act ultimately achieves.

We are taught that when we practice magick and intense forms of occultism, we should never practice alone. That a person should be subjected to the judgement of his or her peer group and in this manner, avoid the pitfalls of ego obsession and the distortion and bias caused by one’s inherent imperfections. Through others, we learn to objectify our own spiritual process and keep it from falling prey to dark unconscious motivations and personal power trips. The greatest lesson in Bill’s fall is that we do not submit ourselves to darkness. We should always submit ourselves to the highest spiritual love and instead, master the darkness and translate its fear and ignorance into acceptance and insight. What is sacrificed when an occultist gains the subtle domain of nondual consciousness is the petty ego, its infantile needs and false idols of selfhood. These are the things that the true aspirant renounces, offering them up to the ultimate and unknowable spiritual truth.

Bill was never able to give up his egoic pursuits. Even now, he continues to build an empire for his empty and shallow self to occupy. He has failed the ultimate test of adepthood, and for him, there will be no further growth until he is ultimately humbled and experiences the long overdue death of his petty ego. I, for one, will not wait for that day, since I believe that it will be very long in coming, if it ever comes at all.
Frater Barrabbas

This is part four - the second half - of a four part series taken from my long article, “Are Witches Dupes of Satan”, which I wrote as a response to a book published by my ex-high priest, Bill Schnoebelen. The book was entitled “Wicca; Satan’s Little White Lie,” and it has bedeviled the witchcraft community ever since it was first published by Chick publications. This is the fourth part, which discusses and analyzes Bill’s book, particularly those accusations that are most difficult to explain to outsiders and most troubling.

Bill says in his book, “If it quacks like a Satanic duck, then it is a Satanic duck!” - and he is referring to several characteristics of Witchcraft that would seem to lend a little credence to his accusations. We, who are practitioners of the new earth based religions, know that we don’t worship Satan, but we also know that aspects of our mysteries appear to be shrouded in darkness and that they take place in an underworld, the Lord of which, seems to bear a superficial resemblance to the Christian Devil. The Horned God as the Lord of Darkness, whose emblem is the inverted pentagram, seems to be a simulacrum of the Devil, despite whatever spin we might want to give him. He appears as a man and goat joined into a composite creature, who is animal, man and also a god, and although this is an archaic image of proto-man that is older than recorded history. It is also a new image for a new God. The animal-man-god is an archetype for a higher than normal state of human consciousness, called by Ken Wilber, the centauric state of conscious development - signifying the mind state of the Body-Mind (Sanscrit - Tanamana).

The Horned God is also represented as the cycle of living, dying, and being-reborn-again aspect of the Deity that sympathizes and identifies with the ephemeral condition of all life, which is within and beyond life, emerging as the transcendental Spirit. Thus the God of the Witches is both old and archaic, but also very new and emblematic of the coming age of (truly) spiritual  humanity, (as opposed to religious humanity - our current phase). We have become ourselves an image of God. We must discover this image and know it as the source of spirit within us.

The images and meanings that I have presented above about the Horned God would seem to represent something altogether different than what we know about Satan, the Christian Devil. And that is only the beginning of the differences between Christian Evil and Neopagan Mysteries. It’s the difference between those who fear and avoid the darkness and those who cautiously learn to master it. This act requires some courage and even daring, a very centauric quality.

Everyone who is even moderately spiritual knows that the highest state of being is empowered by love and that hatred, anger and violence are the destructive forces that negate and dispel all forms of conscious union. The Horned God represents the heroic, mortal and immortal quest of all humankind, the quest for the source of our spirit and its awakening and revelation through us. The centauric aspect of God is represented as the sacrament of life itself, fully blessed and fully lived in the bliss of eternal love. And that is the God of the Witches!

In the underworld, where all the mysteries take place, we encounter the divine Mysticon, and through it, we are initiated (transformed) and return to the world of light, reborn and regenerated. The cycle of light and darkness are the transformations that occur in our life, but our darkening times are not to be confused with times of despair and dissolution, nor do they obscure any guilt or malfeasance. As we progress through life, we alternately open and close ourselves to the world around us. The times of opening up are times of light and the times of closing off are the times of darkness. It is only in the times of darkness, when we are closed off from the outside world, that we may experience the mysteries of our own soul and spirit. And also, it is an error to remain in the darkness, for we must enter into the light and translate our newly acquired wisdom into life affirmations and aspirations.

The underworld ordeal is only half of the equation, since it requires an entrance into the world of light and love to complete it. The cycles of conscious evolution are easily stimulated by the cycles of nature, the light and dark phases of the Moon and the stations and seasons of the Sun. So it is that physical life itself initiates us, and our spiritual connection with the Absolute guides us to that ultimate and great event; where the Goddess as archetypal woman and the God as archetypal man join together in the sacred union that expresses the Union of All Being - the origin of all Divine Emanations (as the Qabbalists would say). The eternal cycle of light and darkness in the spiritual and physical domains becomes like the House of God. It is the symbolic Temple of the Human Spirit and all things perceived and realized within it are the dreams of the gods. It is astonishing to me that anyone could ever consider such a domain as this one composed exclusively of evil and sin. Such a mental bias boggles the mind! But then knowledge has always been the enemy of religious fanaticism. So the taint of evil is removed from the underworld where the mysteries are revealed!

The inverted pentagram, depicting the face of the goat, has long been associated with Satanism, and indeed, it was used as the emblem of the Church of Satan. The name Leviathan (actually a demonized Tiamat, the World as Goddess) is emblazoned on the emblem. Lurking within the symbolism is the visage of the Templar God, Baphomet. There is undoubtably an overlap between what would be considered Christian Satanism and another discipline, Chthonic Paganism. There is a striking difference between them, although to the eyes of a Christian, the differences are subtle. It’s far easier to lump them all together as being Satanic.

The Christian Devil is not an ancient deity that goes back to the beginning of time, as Elaine Pagels has demonstrated quite ably in her book, “The Origins of Satan.” The concept of the Devil as adversary to God has evolved over the last two millennia. Only Islam and Hasidic Judaism share this theological concept with Christianity. Bill states that the Devil is as old as time itself and he points to what he calls the oldest book in the Hebrew Bible, which is the Book of Job, to reinforce his arguments. Bill places the age of the Book of Job at 1,500 B.C.E., but this is quite absurd and very poor scholarship, for the Book of Job has been dated to no later than the 6th century B.C.E., during the time of the Babylonian captivity. Bill is off by a mere millennia, as are a lot of his arguments.

According to scholars, the Devil evolved from an angel who acted as the tempter and tester of mankind and was an instrument of God, not an adversary. It was not until Judaism was exposed to the dualism of Persian Zoroastrianism that the concept of fallen angels, powerful daemons and the Devil began to be developed into a by-product of the Hebrew religion. Nowhere in the Hebrew scriptures is the concept of Satan as a deadly adversary of God supported, since God is one and indivisible. In Islam, Satan is seen as the great trivializer, a being who is comically depicted as always trying to ape God, and who does a poor job of it; so he is consigned to engaging in minor mischief. It would be a grave error to give too much importance or power to Satan in the various practices of Islam. Only in Christianity is the Devil given so much importance and power. His role has been the primary justification for the incarnation of Jesus and the bestowal of the powers of the Holy Ghost, to cast out demons who are sent against humanity by the Devil. Yet there is even a false Christ, known as the Anti-Christ, who forces the final conflict between evil and good, which is the Apocalypse of the Book of Revelations.

But the forces of evil are always at a great disadvantage and the scales are tipped considerably to the side of God, since he is considered omnipotent and omniscient and incapable of being defeated. One has to wonder why there is even a character like Satan to defy and antagonize the one true God, unless God himself had made it so, creating and deploying the Devil like some amusing side story to keep the common crowd interested in the evolving narrative of the Gospels. It is without any doubt that those who actually give homage and worship to Satan must also be engaged in the eternal dialectic of good and evil within the context of Christianity, since the concept of Satan as imperfect adversary only exists in Christianity. It could only be the seduction of perversity that would cause anyone to ally themselves with a being and a force that was so obviously going to be defeated, and whose works are easily overturned by the faithful and by the will of God. Only a Christian could find any value in worshiping the Devil in this manner, and then, usually hedging his bets with forgiveness and absolution before death makes a present of his soul to the Evil One. This is a reoccurring theme in Christian stories depicting the plight of individuals who are tempted by Satan.

To us pagans or witches, such a context of beliefs and theology about the Devil would be meaningless, since we don’t subscribe to the dual world view of Christianity and we don’t believe in a unified force of evil. How we interpret the world from a spiritual stand-point represents how we operate in that world.

One could deduce that all of the evil perpetuated in the world comes from a common source, which would be supernatural and embodied in an almost godlike being, acting against the authority of God and the common good. One could also deduce that evil in the world is perpetuated by humanity, not as a unified whole, but as isolated chaotic instances of mankind’s ignorance and brutality; the animal aspect of humanity without the quality of the god aspect to enlighten and ennoble it.

The Devil is an immortal angelic being who has fallen from grace and acts as God’s adversary. The Horned God is not immortal, since he dies and is reborn each year and represents the life of the land. These two beings could not represent two more different aspects of godhead, and so we must consider them as distinct and part of two completely different theologies and world-views.

Christianity has used their definition of the Devil as a kind of scape goat, placing all the dark aspects of their Deity, including the mysteries, into the hands of the adversary of God. In this fashion, they have made their highest deity the principle source of all good and light and taken from him any blame for the evils of the world. So the God of the Christians is the God of light, love and compassion; the Devil is the repository of all that is gross, dark and negative. This is quite different than Chthonic Paganism.

Chthonic Paganism is the realization of the dark side of the deity as an aspect of the mysteries. It consists of the transformations and the power of death itself, the cessation of all life, but also the amplification of the domain of spirit. In Neopaganism and Witchcraft, there is no need to split the deity into light and dark, good and evil, since all of these represent the common cycle of human existence. So to the Neopagan, the deities are the source of light and darkness, life and death; but humanity and also the chaotic nature of chance (fate) take the blame for accidents and human engineered calamities. There is no evil entity driving these cataclysms, only the folly and tragedy of human existence. Since there is no Devil in Neopaganism and Witchcraft, the concept of deity is not split between light and darkness, so there is a possibility for such an adherent to experience the unified aspect of the Deity, which would be impossible in protestant Christianity.

Also, since we believe in the immanent aspect of the Deity, we are also not barred from merging our own minds and spirits with that of the Gods. However, the Christian Devil is also a convenient device that keeps Christians from getting too close to their deities, and acts as a profound divisive power that allows some to claim that they are saved while condemning others as unbelievers and unredeemed, planting the seeds of fear that urges religious conversion and persecution. We who follow the earth based spiritual traditions have no need for such a device, since we are content to live in peace with our neighbors, who may or may not share our faith. We don’t seek to change the world and we don’t proselytize our faith. We believe in a world of plurality, so we see deities everywhere and use tolerance and compassion to guide our dealings with others who worship differently. Therefore, to us, either all religions are correct or none of them are correct, since they all seem to stem from a common experience of the spiritual dimensions of consciousness.

We should also write a small paragraph to dismiss the analogies between Lucifer, the Devil and the Solar God of the Witches, which appear many times in Bill’s book and represents one of his primary theses. He has stated that Witches and Nepagans worship a solar deity called Lucifer, who is really the Devil. It is easy to cast this aspersion on the followers of Wicca before a Christian audience, who use the name Lucifer as an alternative to the name Satan, although once again, they are not even remotely the same being.

The name Lucifer is a Latin appellation, which means Light-Bearer (Latin - lucifer), and is a title given to Helios-Apollo, the Sun God of the Greeks and the Romans, as well as an appellation of the Morning Star, Venus. How this name came to be confused with the Devil is an interesting tale, but it is based on an error of translation. The source of this mistranslation is found in the book of Isaiah, who poetically describes the fall of a great prince (Isa. 14:12-15), as a euphemism for the day star, son of the dawn, who is cast from heaven. The word luminous falling star was translated from Hebrew into Latin (of the Vulgate), as Lucifer, so this appellation became the name of Satan, who was cast down from heaven after failing in his rebellion against God. However, Isaiah never meant to confuse the fall of an arrogant prince, filled with his own self importance, with something of greater theological importance, such as the fall of the Devil.

Ever since that translation error, Lucifer has become another name for Satan, but we can see the error and the misuse of this appellation. All of the Witches I have met use the name Lugh to name their solar god or some other Celtic or pagan variation, and I have never met any witches or neopagans who have used the name Lucifer for their solar deity. Micheael Bertiaux used the name, so do a lot of Theosophists, who have corrected the translation error and use it in its literal definition as Light Bearer. Michael also used it to classify Satanists who were more progressive and Promethean in their philosophy, calling them Luciferians. Bill also uses this term in his book, but he is unable to really stick the name Lucifer to the practicing witches of his tradition (we used the name Lugh), so his entire argument about this name, that it is the “smoking gun” or proof that witches worship the devil, is completely erroneous.

The final and most disturbing theological argument that Bill uses in his book is that we who have converted to earth based spiritual traditions from various forms of Christianity are still subject to its rules and judgements, irregardless of our present faith and beliefs. This, of course, is based upon the supposition that Evangelical Christianity is the only true faith. If one has not declared Jesus Christ as his true savior, then that person is destined to a final spiritual perdition.

It appears that Bill’s numerous previous conversions do not affect him in any way, since he is now on the one true spiritual path. Yet there is a great flaw in this argument. On the one hand a person may convert to Evangelical Christianity, all other previous faiths that one might have followed before are wiped out and they do not cause any kind of adverse judgement on that individual. On the other hand, if one converts to another faith, particularly non-Christian, then one is in grave error, but even so, according to Bill that conversion doesn’t count. We are either followers of the one true faith (and saved), or we are damned to perdition. Once again, Bill has to have it both ways! His conversion is valid and mine is invalid because I did not convert to the one true faith. Of course, we have dealt with this issue previously and it’s ridiculous to even consider Bill’s flawed argument that his faith is the only one that is correct and true.

So we need to examine his logic that conversion wipes the spiritual slate clean. If we accept this logic, then not only are conversions to Witchcraft and Neopaganism valid, but so is Bill’s conversion. So we can say with confidence that all conversions are valid, from one religion to another. This would mean that Bill cannot be judged as an apostate and oath-breaker in regards to Wicca, since he is no longer a witch. It would also mean that we can’t be judged as apostate Christians, since we are no longer following the Christian faith.

However, we can judge Bill for the spreading of lies and the instigating of hatred between followers of his own branch of Christianity, and those of us who are following the earth based spiritual traditions. Bill is also spreading lies about Mormonism, Catholicism, Masonry, and other various legitimate systems of the occult. For these crimes against us, we can judge him most harshly; for we have not in any manner either attacked Bill and his faith, nor have we spread lies about him and his religious practices. Yet Bill attacks a great many people and their faiths in a premeditated and vicious manner. Bill uses the false logic that his faith is the correct one. Even when using lies to condemn us, he is not perjuring himself, since to combat the Devil, all methods and tactics are reasonable.

We have proven that this logic is egregiously in error, so can question the nature of Bill’s faith, his truthfulness or lack thereof, and the motives that drove him to persecute us. We have shown that his motives are quite selfish, since they are wholly about his own self aggrandizement, that Bill aggressively seeks power, authority and wealth within his community. This is all done at the expense of a people who represent a small harmless minority, who at one time were his spiritual peers. Bill has shown that he is not only grossly distorting the truth, but he is also helping to create divisions in our spiritually heterogeneous society. This alone is a great and terrible act of spiritual treason. The fact that these dubious works are also materially rewarding for him, makes Bill and his business partners seem like an evil force of selfish callousness infecting our society. Perhaps the public should look for Satan hiding amongst the money, power and greed in Bill Schnoebelen’s With One Accord Ministry. 
To be continued....

Frater Barrabbas

Ave,
So last night, after a day of forcing myself to be patient and complete creating my fire wand, I set about consecrating and empowering it. The patient part is important-nothing screws up a magical tool like hurrying up. I made mine from scratch using a dowel purchased from Home Depot, a Dremel (I love that tool!) for carving out the flame tip, and brightly beautiful paints for it's adornment. I used metal-flake paint for the metal bits. I have yet to drill a hole and stick a magnet up the center.....mostly because I just plain don't see the point. Can't be an allusion to polarity, as Fire is Electric and not Magnetic traditionally. Sticking a big 'ole magnet right up the center of a tool built for working an Active/Electric element produces some cognitive dissonance for me. This may be a holdover from previous-century views on Magnetism as an occult force (Mesmer, and all that jazz). I'm no GD scholar, however--I'm not sure there is a deeper reason than tradition. Any of you Elder Fraters/Sorors out there who do have some info on this are welcome to share! I'd love to be enlightened, and am currently woefully ignorant as to the point of the magnet. Having consecrated the wand and used it, and found it to work perfectly, I'm going to avoid the magnet bit until I have greater understanding about that part. 
I conducted the GIRP Fire, forming Pentagrams, calling down the Hierarchy, and creating the Vortex through Circumambulation. Drew a circle around the Wand on my altar (which had been previously purified and consecrated with Water and Fire) and set about projecting the red, fiery LVX into it. Sealed the energies/connections into the wand with the Sign of Silence, and then took it up. The flashing colors were vibrant--in my dark, candle-lit temple the wand seemed to have a soft glow. After having gotten some experience consecrating telesmata, there is a certain 'feel' to a thing that has been consecrated. A presence-the things has 'weight'. The Wand was very heavy, and appeared subtly aglow. The flashing colors had an interesting effect on the Hebrew Letters-they glow a bright Green against the Red, and when attention is turned to a particular letter it appears to dull. Color and light, and the way they play about in our perception are wonderful tools for creating meaning and change. It's interesting because there are a number of physical explanations for why I may perceive a glow while in a trance working in low light.....none of which matters. That perception is a side-effect of a long chain of carefully planned actions/states of mind, and not the result. 
I'm definitely comfortable at this point with working with the fiery energies, and am continuing to see the side effects of working with this active and creative force in my life. That's the litmus test-if you aren't seeing any side effects of working with an energy in your life, you're either not doing it right or not looking closely. More often than not it's the later; as we develop as magicians we become more aware of the subtle interaction of these energies in our lives. You have to have the eyes to see. When I first began, only the big traumatic changes could get my attention. As I've grown as a Magician, I notice the subtle signs and act on them-- I get the feeling that in Theurgy one is given the opportunity to learn a lesson first subtly, and then in increasing density and impact....until that lesson is learned, or you lay smashed underneath it. The best part about being more sensitive, and Listening....being slightly less ignorant than I was before.....is that I don't always have to learn a lesson the hard way, and the boat of my life rocks less as I balance a force. 
I started a business a while back--after I invoked BITOM-- and realized I needed to take action to create the kind of working life I wanted to lead. I've spent most of the intermediary period creating the business itself-portfolios, website, cards, documentation (contracts and the like)..etc. After beginning to work with Fire, everything just started to go. I've been connected to clients and opportunities, and put in the position where I had to choose actively that I Wanted this work, that I was open to opportunity-it's been quite an experience. 
In LVX,
AIT
  

This is part four - the first half - of a four part series taken from my long article, “Are Witches Dupes of Satan”, which I wrote as a response to a book published by my ex-high priest, Bill Schnoebelen. The book was entitled “Wicca; Satan’s Little White Lie,” and it has bedeviled the witchcraft community ever since it was first published by Chick publications. This is the fourth part, which discusses and analyzed Bill’s book, which is more a reflection on his delusions and escape from madness than it is a critique of witchcraft and occultism. (I apologize in advance for the length of this article, but there was a lot of material to cover.)

One of the first things that Bill mentions in his book is that one year after being elevated to the Wiccan High Priesthood, he was told by his initiators that Witchcraft was not all that it seemed. That Witchcraft is actually a manufactured religion (and therefore not really an old religion at all). He also proposes in his book that Wicca is actually a Satanic cult, with “Satan’s hoof-prints all over it”, and that anyone who is a member of this cult is part of the conspiracy, wittingly or not. He has also stated that all of the upper hierarchy of the various Witchcraft traditions are hard-core practitioners of Satanism - or are “card carrying Satanists”, referring to the membership cards that the Church of Satan sent out to its paying members. Bill even credits his salvation to an unknown woman who wrote on his posted check to the Church of Satan for his membership dues, “I will be praying for your soul”, as the single most effective Christian magic that brought down his entire house of cards, and eventually assisted him in finding his way to the right and only true spiritual path, Evangelical Christianity.

Bill presents a large body of personal experiences to back up his claims, but it is rather obvious to me, someone who was there during his period of ascent and decline, that much of what he presents is false or misleading. For instance, in the above arguments, Bill stated that in 1974, his teachers and initiators informed him that Witchcraft was a contrived religion of recent derivation. However, it was only years later that practitioners, such as Aidan Kelly, or historians, like Ronald Hutton, began to investigate the claims of Gerald B. Gardner and others about the legitimacy of the various traditions of Witchcraft. No one except historians knew about the cunning men and women of England, and the actual historical antecedents of Witchcraft were heavily mythologized. Bill never mentioned in his teachings these points, since he affected the guise of the true believer. He taught that modern witchcraft was a derivation and reconstruction of an ancient faith and this was the party line.

So it is highly doubtful that Bill was told this bit of information in 1974. It’s possible that some of the founders suspected that their claims of practicing the Old Religion were probably misleading, and perhaps even Jim Baker had these doubts and expressed them to Bill; but at the time, such doubts would have been speculative at best and no alternative theory would have been produced. Also, Bill was the only Witch I ever knew who also was a “card carrying” member of the Church of Satan. Positions in the church were bought and sold by the Church of Satan, and were basically meaningless as far as indicating any kind of occult knowledge or spiritual power. So when Bill speaks of the Satanic element within Wicca, he is speaking of his own perspective and his own personal path.

The incident with the returned check from the Bank did actually happen, and Bill showed the returned check to me and a few other members. We all thought it was funny at the time, but we also thought that Bill was kind of crazy for joining the Church of Satan, even if the monthly newsletter, the Cloven Hoof, had good articles in it. It seemed a ruse or a joke at the time, and we hardly believed that Bill would take any of this seriously. Later on, Bill began to bring Satanism into the fore-ground of our practices, but I can verify that he was the only Witch or Neopagan that I have ever met who thought that Satanism was standard practice for witch covens. I, for one, did not include any of that material in my practices, since I found it to be ridiculous and juvenile.

Did Bill’s occult empire collapse as the result of that woman praying for his soul? The timing was pretty far off, since Bill wrote that check in 1977, and did not experience the calamities that he claims he did until many years later. Bill had problems keeping jobs, so when he was no longer getting a monthly stipend from his parents, he began to experience fiscal hardships. However, by 1978, he was living with members of the group and had to move whenever he had finally alienated them completely, which happened frequently. Things of course stabilized at some point when he moved to that large old three story house, although it was filthy and needed a lot of cleaning and amenities before it became liveable (and the labor to make it liveable was provided by Sharon and a few other members of the group).
 
Bill also claims that Aleister Crowley was directly involved in the writing of the book of Shadows and formulating the initiations of Gardnerian Witchcraft. This claim was made by Francis King, and has been disputed and proven wrong by a number of historians and individuals who were involved with Gardner. While Gardner did indeed meet with Crowley during his last year of life (May, 1947), these were formal visits, and there were only a few of them. Gardner did receive the material for the O.T.O., Man of Earth series of initiations (M.M.M. - 0 through 3rd degree), and also other materials, which he used to fashion the early rituals of his Witchcraft cult, either because there was scant ritual lore with what he had received from the New Forest Coven or because Gerald had not yet created that lore.

Crowley’s involvement in Witchcraft was nonexistent and those who claim otherwise have no proof to back up their statements. Also, while Aleister Crowley was at times excessive and self-destructive in his personal pursuits, he was also a very complex and mysterious man, evading self-definition even within his own biographical notes, not to mention the attempts of numerous writers to pigeon-hole him. However, his writings remain as a great legacy to all occultists, but his personal life is a warning to those of who cannot learn to find a middle ground and a balance in their lives.

Such a warning was certainly ignored by Bill, who seemed to follow every excess that Crowley was reputed to have done, but in a limited and feeble manner. Bill never had the courage of his convictions that Aleister Crowley had. Bill also often misquotes Crowley’s Thelemic axiom, which is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!” - and he always fails to follow it up with that most important response, which is “Love is the Law, Love under Will!”. It seems that this was a critical omission by Bill and represents his most profound error. That the occultist submits himself not to the perversity of darkness nor dissipation, but to the love of the Deity itself. The phrase “Love under Will” represents that the love of the Deity is tempered with the knowledge of one’s true self, and one’s true spiritual vocation. Only so armed can a person choose his own path or do what he truly wills to do. Gardner’s Wiccan Rede, “An it harm none, do what thou wilt”, although similar to Crowley’s axiom, is actually quite different. Gardner was seeking to suggest to his followers that they forswear deliberately hurting others with their intentions and their magick and to peacefully coexist with others - this certainly was not the intent of Crowley’s axiom.

Bill also states that the only kind of morals or ethics that are legitimate are those found in the doctrines of Protestant Christianity. Anyone else who tries to “wing it” on their own, or follows the dictates of a “made-up” religion like Wicca, become liable to satanic seduction and find themselves engaged in a morass of contradictions that leads one profoundly astray. If we follow Bill’s logic, then anyone who does not follow Christian morality will ultimately end up practicing murder, fornication, become addicted to alcohol or drugs, engage in drug pushing, child pornography, prostitution, and a host of other terrible crimes. It reminds me of the anti-drug propaganda, that a single joint of marijuana will cause one to become a heroin addict.

This, of course, is really ridiculous. If Witchcraft really caused people to egregiously break the law, then the authorities would be rounding up witches and punishing them for their lawlessness and their heinous crimes. This has not yet happened, of course, because as a group, we are fairly law abiding, as is everyone else. Human nature is such that we aspire to be good and moral, and at times, end up failing to meet that sublime goal, irregardless of whether we are Christians or involved in some other religion. However, all religions were at one time made up by someone or some group of people, perhaps inspired by spiritual sentiments and insights, but always derived by mankind for various reasons. There isn’t only one spiritual truth and there isn’t one true religious path or tradition. Human nature requires plurality, so we as members of the human race must use compassion, understanding and extreme tolerance when making judgements about the spiritual practices of other faiths and traditions.

There is a reason why our nation has strongly defended the separation of church and state and has assiduously defended everyone’s right to practice their spiritual beliefs as they see fit. Although many fundamentalists condemn this as a form of wicked secular humanism, these rights and conventions protect them as well as those who practice earth based religions, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and many other sects and religious traditions. The wisdom of our founding fathers speaks great volumes for their unselfish devotion to personal rights, and it speaks against those who would want to change the nature of our secular political regime. We need only to briefly mention that many upright and seemingly sanctimonious leaders or followers of the fundamentalist Christian movement have been involved in sexual scandals, fraudulent use of funds, child molestation, the assassination of abortion doctors, various acts of terrorism, and many other crimes, both lesser and greater. One only has to think of Jones’ Town, or David Coresh in Waco, Texas, to realize the price of religious extremism. The majority of Christians are law abiding and express their faith modestly, so we would be foolish to judge the whole movement by the excesses of a small minority. Yet this is exactly the kind of sloppy logic that Bill uses to judge those who are followers of earth based religions.

Another fallacy mentioned by Bill in his book is that he tells his Christian audience about his connections with the upper hierarchy of the Witch cult, and that he eventually becomes a member of that hierarchy. Although there are some elders as well as some founders, High Priestesses and High Priests, there is no hierarchy in our religion. We are a profoundly unorganized religion, and anyone who claims to be the highest authority is quickly disputed by one and all amongst those who consider themselves witches and pagans. The fact is that there is no hierarchy in the various traditions of Neopaganism and Witchcraft, other than what is found in the small groups, covens and various loosely led organizations, allows them to be very protean. Leaders are often criticized by their members and seldom get much respect, groups often lose their members, and these ex-members become leaders of groups themselves. It is almost chaotic, but one would expect that from a newly formed religion whose total population is far less than a million in the U.S. Most of the individuals in that population are practicing solitaires or members of very small groups.

To claim  that Witchcraft is a Satanic conspiracy would require a solidly organized cult with a hidden but powerful elite, and this is exactly the claim made by Bill. Of course, it’s all a fantasy and Bill certainly knows that to be the case. He was never able to gather together a large group and found that there were many competing organizations around him who never gave his claims of personal godhood much credit. Few outside of our tight group had ever heard of Bill while he was practicing his brand of witchcraft. All anyone has to do is go to a sponsored pagan festival, local gathering or a meeting of COG, or some other organization, and discover how disunified we are as a spiritual tradition. But our diversity is really our strength, for we represent a religion that is being built from the bottom up, instead of the top down, as most religions have formed.

Perhaps someday there may be some kind of ecumenical society of earth religions, but I wouldn’t bet that it happens soon, and when it does occur, it will have the greatest difficulty trying to put together any kind of representational creed or shared philosophy. Unlike Bill, I actually put together a five state pagan festival in the mid 1980's in Kansas City, called the Heartland Pagan Festival. Getting twenty or so organizers to agree on a single commonsense point was at times almost impossible. The gatherings were considered highly successful if there were no major disputes between groups or individuals, and that almost never occurred.

Another interesting point made by Bill was about how witches and pagans were always sending curses against each other for various petty reasons, that magick would allow a practitioner to perform all sorts of harmful acts, unless of course, a faithful Christian deflected it or God intervened to nullify it. Bill also states that magick is not scientific, that it is a sort of hit and miss phenomena, meaning that it is no more effective than chance. Then with the same breath he says that magick is only partially effective because either good Christians or God himself block it.

Of course, Bill professes a belief in angels, demons, evil spirits and the manifestation of the powers of Satan himself, which are not only unscientific beliefs, but actually rather mediaeval in character. Bill can’t really have it both ways! Either magick is a fantasy or science is really blind to the nature of supernatural phenomena. However, Bill doesn’t seem to understand that his own beliefs are very antithetical to science, especially his stand against evolution, not to mention all of the hard sciences that have supported the fact that the universe was not created in seven days, but evolved over billions of years.

Bill also doesn’t seem to really understand that magick is not merely a means to causing change to occur in accordance with one’s will, as facetiously stated by Aleister Crowley. Magick is far more complex than that. It’s very subjective, like meditation and prayer and is supposed to be used to unite the individual with the Godhead. Even Crowley makes the statement that the Great Work (union with God) is the only true purpose of magick. Bill himself taught this in his classes, acknowledging that the progression of the practice of magick goes from simple forms, such as spells (which have a propensity to fail), to greater forms, such as illumination and the obtainment of cosmic consciousness (which ultimately work). Also, many Witches are not very skilled at magick and seldom does any spell work very effectively when cast by the untried and the beginner. This is due to the fact that few truly understand the components of magick or how it works.

Often I find that healing spells, money magick, and other magical practices are not much more than wishful thinking. Magick seems to be more a process of sending out care, compassion or moral support to others who are sick or indisposed or otherwise dealing with misfortune. Magick requires an external action in the real world on the part of the practitioner in order to ensure that it is effective. The morality of working magick on someone with or without their permission is a moot point if what is done has relatively no effect whatsoever, except in the minds of the practitioners.

I have also had to deal with many individuals who claim to have been cursed or magically attacked, and in the end, they are shown to be deluding themselves. Perhaps only two out of ten of the practitioners of the new earth based religions in our nation really know how to work negative magick, or any kind of magick, for that matter. Bill’s cute saying that “curses were flying around the air in Milwaukee thicker than a swarm of Midwestern mosquitos” is quite ridiculous, since there weren’t that many witches in the Milwaukee area and most of them were associated with our group. Keep in mind that we never amounted to more than a dozen or so faithful members of the inner core (who would have been at least competent to cast curses), so such statements are pure fantasy on Bill’s part. 

In my thirty years of practicing magick, I have only experienced two separate events where I was attacked, and both of them happened in Bill’s group. Sharon was an experienced practitioner who knew how to curse someone, so when she cursed me, it seemed quite effective, although I had a guilty conscience for leaving the group and that made me an easy target. Candice tried to hurt me with magick, but once again, I felt guilty for behaving badly towards her, and one could say that both of these occurrences were the product of my own imagination. However, both individuals also knew how to work magick effectively. I can’t say that about most of the people I have met who claim to know how to work magick. So these arguments made by Bill have to dismissed as imaginary stories, along with most of what is written in his book about magick.

Context is very important to understanding how and why things occur, and Bill delights in removing the context from his stories so that they fit nicely with his theories. But one of the most important things that anyone reading his material must understand is that the median age of the members of Bill’s two covens was around 26 years old, in other words, we were all very young adults, some of us attending college or just trying to start careers and families.

Bill states that all of the marriages ended in divorce, except for his marriage to Sharon, and this is mostly true (there were a couple of exceptions). However, the married members of Bill’s covens were young, most young marriages fail in these modern times and for various reasons. He never states in his book that he sought to have sex with all of the women in the two covens and that he encouraged a kind of extreme sexual liberality in the group. This certainly would guarantee a high divorce rate for those in the group who were married. However, all this took place during the seventies, which was a time of experimentation and liberality in regards to sex, drugs and social living situations, and this was occurring among a lot of young people, not just those who were practicing witchcraft.

An entire generation was experiencing exactly the same kinds of things. Certainly we weren’t all being seduced by the Devil, it was just the nature of the times that we lived in. Many who managed to learn and grow during that time realized later that some societal norms actually protect people from themselves. But those of us who were young had to find out about it the hard way, therefore, we had to experience the pain for ourselves and perhaps that was the folly of our generation. We didn’t blindly do what tradition dictated we should do.

Bill also states that people lost their jobs and had problems with financial stability, they had difficulties with authority figures and were being evicted from apartments. He adduced all of this to the influences of Satan imbedded in his Wiccan tradition. However, once again, we were all young and not very responsible, so those kinds of things happened to a lot of people, but also at the same time other people were quite successful. In many of the instances where Bill cites the terrible misfortunes that seemed to plague anyone who practiced witchcraft, he is just remembering much of his own personal experiences.

One of Bill’s biggest problems was that he was not inclined to work for a living and preferred to study the occult rather than attempt to build a successful career for himself and support his wife. Bill spent a lot of time and money on his occult pursuits and did not spend much time developing a means to pay for it himself. One can easily expect such a way of life to be filled with disappointments and failures, but none of these failures or disappointments can be chalked up to the Devil. They are more the results of an immature and feckless individual. Bill used his parent’s generosity to build for himself an occult empire, working at mindless jobs or part-time work in order to have the time for studying all of the various traditions that he was involved in simultaneously. When his monthly support ran out, Bill moved in with his coven members and proceeded to take financial advantage of them. Yet all the while making his victims feel as if he were doing them a great favor by living with them.

These situations almost always ended with recriminations and bad feelings between Bill and those individuals that he had moved in with, arguments over bills not paid, disputes over property ownership, and finally those individuals were either expelled from the group or lost most of the prestige that they had gained by inviting Bill, Sharon and Rick to live with them. This cycle happened several times, and at the end of each of them, Bill had to look for a new place to live.

Bill spent a whole chapter of his book criticizing several statements that were written by Laurie Cabot in her attempt to define the practice of Witchcraft, or the “Do’s and Don’ts of Witchcraft”(page 51). These definitions are very loose and do not represent any known tradition, so they aren’t really an official statement, as Bill claims, and because they are so vague and generalized in content, they are actually more confusing than helpful. There are a few points that are completely acceptable to most witches, such as the assertion that witches don’t worship Satan and that witches are concerned with ecology, but the rest of it is so poorly written that it is rather embarrassing.

Bill has chosen his victim wisely, since this list is so poorly and unprofessionally written, one could easily ridicule its arguments, and he eagerly takes up the task. Laurie Cabot is not known for being a good spokesperson for Witchcraft. Some even think that she is an overly eccentric and flamboyant witch with very little depth. The list looks like it was written in a committee where a lack of decisiveness would have omitted many details. A larger ecumenical gathering of Witches would probably have rejected some of the points presented or redefined them within a more specific context. However, a larger group of witches would probably have not been able to agree upon a single common definition of their faith, and this would demonstrate that witches are very diverse in their practices and unable or unwilling to agree to any kind of uniform theology or liturgy. Since there is no hierarchy in Witchcraft, there are no accepted official representatives to determine the cannon of the Wiccan creed. Thus anyone can consider themselves a witch, even someone who is obviously a Satanist, or someone who has just read a few books and is self-dedicated. This is an unfortunate circumstance, but one that witches have learned to deal with over time. Freedom and independence from organized religion sometimes has its cost.

Bill talks about the “Burning Times”, the period of the reformation when witches and heretics were burned or executed by the Church. Bill denies that true Christians, who would be judged by Christ for their deeds, could ever have authored such a horrible holocaust as the Burning Times. Bill’s argument is that Christian people who are evil or do wicked things cannot be “true” Christians, and of course this argument is quite false. There are numerous instances depicted in the Bible where murder is actually pleasing to God, especially when godless infidels are the targets. What Bill is really saying is that Christians who don’t worship as he does are not real Christians (page 86), so the Catholics who persecuted other Christians or witches weren’t really Christians at all, but actually pagans pretending to be Christians. The same is true of the early Protestants and Lutherans, who were still tainted by Catholicism. This absurd fact, stated by Bill, would  remove the blame from the true Christian faith for all the evil deeds perpetrated by deluded men in its name.

However, as I recall from my researches, the inquisition did not really torture and execute heretics. That was done by the civil authorities. The inquisition acted as the interlocutors who sought confessions and recantations of heresy, even if it occurred at the moment of death. The inquisition was interested in saving souls and acted for the good of the accused, or so they thought. Their motives and their faith were strongly Christian, since there is no other way to define them, and these men saw themselves as the instruments of God, doing the will of Jesus Christ in the world. In recent years the Pope himself apologized for the killing of innocent men and women as heretics, especially the Jews. That sounds very Christian to anyone who has ears to hear. Religion and politics are the affairs of men, and as for the affairs of God, who could even competently speak of such things?

We can see in Bill’s motives towards heresy the same kind of outward sincerity and goodwill disguising an extreme form of malice and evil intent as that held by the Inquisition. Although Bill says that he doesn’t hate people who practice Witchcraft and Neopaganism, that he only wants to lovingly show them the error of their ways, he does accuse them of performing immoral acts and capital crimes. This kind of inflammatory slander could potentially inspire one of his band of idiotic followers to assault and even murder someone who is publically identified as a Witch or Neopagan. The same thing has happened to doctors who perform abortions, and therefore, it is only a matter of time before someone, acting on the lies that Bill is spreading about witches, takes matters into his own hands.

We are, therefore, confirmed, that by his hateful and deceitful words, Bill is really performing unchristian like actions towards people who worship differently than he does. So ironically, Bill must be considered as much a nonchristian as he considers the Catholics to be, and this logic is derived by his own definition of a Christian. You shall know them by the fruits of their labor, indeed! Bill is really a kind of modern day Torquemada.
   
Bill talks a lot about the necessity of sacrifice and the use of blood in the magical practices of modern Witchcraft. Although we did use a drop or two of our own blood on rare occasions, we did not use larger amounts, and we did not ritually sacrifice animals or other people. Bill was obsessed with gothic horror and loved the image of the vampire. He even created a vampiric lineage of magick, which he called the Nosferatu; but only a few members of the group saw any merit in it and it was more of a trendy thing than a serious practice. Once again, whatever Bill did, whether in actual practice or in his vivid imagination, somehow he has deduced that all witches must be doing the same thing. But this is quite erroneous. I have not met a single witch who uses anything more than a drop of their own blood to seal a ritual, and most don’t even bother to do that any more.

Diabolic forms of magick required the use of blood when making a “pact with the devil”, but this has little to do with modern witchcraft. The adherents of Voudoun or Santeria are required to sacrifice animals as part of the traditional and customary practices of their religions. People living in the third world still kill and butcher their own animals as a preparation for food, so killing an animal for the gods is not such a big deal to them. This would have been true world-wide before the advent of modern refrigeration and mass production, and people living close to the land in rural settings would have thought nothing of killing and slaughtering an animal prior to cooking and eating it.

Today, we are far removed from the process of preparing our own meat, we instead purchase it already prepared for cooking or even purchase it already cooked at fast food restaurants. Therefore, modern witches would find it difficult to sacrifice animals, since that would not be a normal part of their daily lives. As for any form of human sacrifice, that is not at all a part of any normal system of magick, even in third world countries. Witches do not either commit or condone murder, and Bill’s arguments about a “Church of Murder” are the kind of dangerous slander that might actually cause someone to think otherwise.

Bill tries to demonstrate how absurd the Wiccan three-fold law of return is, particularly if it were used as a form of ethical conduct and the means of deriving secular justice. He goes on rather absurdly to show that if you must return good or bad three times greater than how it was received, then the world would be quite an outrageous chaotic mess, particularly if people focused on returning evil thricefold (and he states quite unequivocally that this is the mind-set of most witches). However, once again, Bill either pretends not to understand the essence of this saying or is demonstrating his ignorance. What the expression “..thou mayest ever give as thou receive it, but ever triple.” actually refers to the metaphysical concept that as everything is connected to everything else, so your actions towards others will cause a greater reaction back towards you. This means that the sowing of evil shall reap three times the intent of that evil, and sowing good will also reap three times that intent of good.

We don’t really know where this concept actually came from, but if we take it as a suggestion, along with the saying, “An it harm none, do what thou wilt”, then we should abstain from doing ill, since it will be amplified and return even greater harm to us. We should, therefore, do either good or nothing at all. Retribution has a very high price, but doing good for others causes a greater goodwill. Also, the context of the of the above statement is the Alexandrian/Gardnerian initiation ritual for second degree, where the High Priest or High Priestess who has performed the initiation must receive three times the scourging that he or she gave the candidate, and because it is under the auspices of the triple Goddess and the underworld, this might explain the nature of that triplicity. At any rate, Witches don’t live by the law of vendetta, since they know that as a minority religion, they are liable to stir up persecution for themselves as well as their community whenever they do anything unlawful and are caught.

Bill also talks about how he performed a spell against a man who was sexually using female members of the group, and caused him to become permanently impotent. Likewise, he also states that he performed a ritual to punish a young girl for stealing the jewelry of one of the coven members, and she fell down a flight of stairs and became a paraplegic. He tells these tales to represent how he practiced the three-fold law of return. I don’t remember Bill ever talking about these incidents when I studied with him, and he certainly would have talked about them a lot if they had occurred, so I must judge them to be fictions.

When Bill was really into his role as a gothic vampire, he used to read the obituaries in the news paper and would comment about all of the people that he had killed recently and whose notices had appeared that day in the paper. We thought that Bill was either being facetious or was showing us how deluded he had become. I now realize that Bill lived so much in his imagination that he had very little idea what was real or what was imaginary. It appears that Bill’s age-old problem with determining facts from fantasy still seems to have its grip on his otherwise intellectual facade.
 
In conclusion, Bill judges the followers of Wicca and Neopaganism in his book with the principle assumption that his deity is the one true deity, that his faith is the one true faith. All other faiths and religions are indefensibly false and all their claims and beliefs are invalid. This also includes many other Christian denominations, most notably, Catholics (by far, the largest denomination), and Mormons (one of the fastest growing denominations). What Bill is basically saying is that his denomination of Evangelical Protestant Christianity is the only true and valid religious belief in the entire world, i.e., and these beliefs include offering one’s self exclusively to Jesus Christ, the literal interpretation and absolute inerrancy of the scriptures, the imminent and physical Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, resurrection and atonement. Also, in regards to the literal interpretation of the Bible, and particularly for English speakers, the King James Version of the Bible is the only acceptable translation (all other Bibles be damned!).

So, essentially, the rest of the people on our planet are left out in the cold with their spurious religious beliefs, so they will be subjected to the wrath and eternal scorn of the one true God, cast into the flames of hell forever unless they repent and immediately accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior, just like Bill did back in 1984! But really, that old line of sectarian babble has been used many times before. It is so obviously incorrect, arrogant, conceited, and also rather ignorant. In many ways, Bill hasn’t changed in thirty years! He is still a true believer (as well as a hypocrite), and he is completely “a hostage of his own PR”, just like he was when I first met him. Only this time, it’s fundamentalist Christianity that Bill is peddling, not the occult sciences, Wicca, Gnostic Christianity, Voudoun, Thelema, Vampirism, or Satanism. So, it is through Bill’s personal bias (and not the grace of God) that he has determined that all the other religions (and even sects of Christianity), are false.

Whatever arguments one could possibly make to defend one’s faith in a logical manner would have to cross the infinite chasm of Bill’s primary premise (that he is correct and most everyone else is wrong), this is impossible, of course. It makes it a lot easier to dismiss other people’s spiritual beliefs and to denounce them as a product of the wiles of the Evil One. His logic is stated simply: “This belief cannot be supported by a literal interpretation of the Bible, ergo, it is not of Jehovah or Jesus, the Holy Ghost, or from the scriptures, so it must be from the Devil.” In this manner, he is able to dismiss other religious beliefs as false, therefore, by definition, they must promulgated by Satan himself.

One could almost imagine a simultaneous conversation with Bill and Cotton Mather, receiving exactly the same responses in regards to Witchcraft and other (suspect) sects and practices, especially any form of Popery. Such heresies as these would be judged by these two men as being of the same satanic cloth. What we have here is not a “man for all seasons”, but a closed minded fanatical sectarian pseudo authority figure, who is seeking to cause division and strife between people of different religions and sects. Doesn’t that remind you someone, like Osama Bin Ladin, perhaps? Would that make Bill’s Evangelical Christian religion a kind of American Taliban? However, the greatest sin that Bill illustrates in his writings and his public rants is the sin of pride; for he assumes that he is saved by Jesus Christ and forgiven of all of his past sins and excesses. I think that he is engaging in wishful thinking (or “whistling in the dark”, as he would say).
To be continued...

Frater Barrabbas

Some of you may be asking yourselves why I am suddenly posting so much biographical data, particularly about things that happened over 30 years ago? I must apologize if these articles appear kind of boring or irrelevant. However, I am feeling the need to put my story out there, since it concerns a period of time where a lot of the pagan and occult disciplines have their origin. The ‘60's and ‘70's were a formative period for all of the major paths of occultism in the Western Mystery Tradition. It is a period that saw the revitalization of practices, beliefs and studies that had been neglected for decades, especially the period from the 1930's through the 1950's. Humanity was highly distracted by first, the Great Depression, then World War II, and the following cultural stasis of the early cold war era. It took the impact of the counter culture to really change the way people saw the world and its possibilities. We are still affected by that time even today, whether we realize it or not.

When I was teenager, the counter culture was in full swing, spawning a number of resilient offshoots, such as the revival of Eastern mysticism, the scientific study of the paranormal, and a revival of Western occultism. Neopaganism and wicca were brought into the mainstream of popular culture during that time. My interests and pursuits of the study and practice of ritual magick and witchcraft were nothing more than trendy outliers of a time of exploration and experimentation. So one could say that I was one of many who were engaged in a religious resurgence that has produced today one of the fastest growing religions in the U.S., and possibly Europe as well. Those were formative years, today is the net result of what they produced, and the future will probably see these new religions become more established and part of the fabric of religious life in the West. They were exciting times, but today is also just as exciting. However, by knowing what happened in those bygone decades, we may be able to understand the movement today and possibility determine where it’s going in the future.

For me, the successful performance of the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal has unlocked my past and made it more available to me than at any previous time. Many things that I had forgotten or put away as not relevant to me today have reentered my mind with a vengeance. I seem to be reliving one of the more strategic times of my life, which was the years 1972 through 1973. What happened then seemed to forge the very foundation of my spiritual and magickal pursuits today. Such a continuity would seem strange to most people, but I have been practicing intense forms of ritual magick for many decades, so it could be that events in the past have a certain power or activity if they were also periods of intense magickal phenomena. I have verified that this is the case, so those times are powerfully impacting me today.

Therefore, in sharing past events and parts of my life with my readers, perhaps they will see analogies to their own path and processes. There is something to be learned from my history, and also something important to remember. To forget and lose the past is a terrible loss for a group or even an entire culture. Our stories should be preserved, so that someday in the remote future, others will be able to trace the origins of our practices and beliefs that have their source in the 60's and 70's. So this is why I am telling the story of my life and experiences - so everyone will know where we’ve been and what we have gained in the long passage of years.

My reason for telling the story about Bill Schnoebelen and the revelation of my four year sojourn with his hellish coven is also an important way of not only preserving the past, but ensuring that the truth about such a controversial individual is known in the occult community. Bill is now claiming to have been an important member of the underground organization called the Illuminati, a claim that has become a touchstone for the popular imagination, particularly since Dan Brown’s book and the recent popular movie. The fact that this claim is not only preposterous, but that all of the high (Palladian) masonic initiations and material that Bill acquired was from a single and completely disreputable source, a man named David DePaul from Wheaton, IL. I can make this statement because I was there, I knew this David, and also knew that he was a poor misguided delusional person who actively practiced a form of raw Satanism. Bill has a made a big deal out of this connection, but the person in question had no official degrees nor was he wealthy, powerful or had connections with powerful individuals. In a word, he was an impoverished nobody with delusions of grandeur. From this source, Bill built his bonafide that he was initiated into an ultra secret cabal of the Illuminati.

Good thing there are people around like me who know the truth and can state that Bill is once again a purveyor of confabulated baloney.
Frater Barrabbas

This is part three - the second half - of a four part series taken from my long article, “Are Witches Dupes of Satan”, which I wrote as a response to a book published by my ex-high priest, Bill Schnoebelen. The book was entitled “Wicca; Satan’s Little White Lie,” and it has bedeviled the witchcraft community ever since it was first published by Chick publications. This is the third part, which details the implosion of Bill’s covens and the descent of his followers into a kind of temporary madness. The covens had become a cult and what followed is typical of the failure of a cult.

The year of 1977 was the high water mark for the two covens, especially Sophia, which, due to efforts of the younger members, including myself, had drawn in a lot of new people. Our group and our way of spiritually growing seemed to be the golden way, and others wanted to be a part of it, too. But of all the new members, few of them stayed - and I was really trying to figure this all out when perhaps the first glimmerings of the fall became noticeable. I saw that when someone disagreed with Bill on some fundamental point, they were soon forced to leave the group. Few of those who left were central to the group’s activities, at first, but I did notice it, since a few of them had been friends of mine. One young woman took Bill to task for being a narrow minded tyrant, although Bill had sought her affections, she left the group, and I remember her telling me that we were all like a bunch of sheep. (Ba-a-ah!) Another long term member, who had gone to live in London for several months as part of a job related relocation, who even got to be a guest in Alex and Maxine Sanders’ coven, was cast out of the group a couple of months after he returned for supposedly practicing black magick. Bill claimed that he had tortured a cat or had used its blood in a ritual. I never knew the accused’s side of the story, but later on I kind of wondered what had really happened. The event was remarked upon in Bill’s book, as were many other stories, a few of them true, and others, false.

The downward turn began when Bill and Rick started to argue and antagonize each other, creating an environment of tension; there were also a few divorces and a few doomed weddings, too. It was a rocky time for the group. Then, two men entered into the sphere of the group mind who had a strong influence on Bill and us, both were from Illinois. This, coincidentally, represented the time when our group began its demise. We had all read Kenneth Grant’s book, Cults of the Shadow, and Bill even contacted one of the magicians highlighted in the book. His name was Michael Bertiaux. Bill and Michael began an eager correspondence,and found they both had much in common.

In the late Summer of 1977, we traveled down to Chicago to hear Michael Bertiaux orate to the local Theosophical Society (although some members of that organization had completely banned him from speaking). We had dinner with him and listened to his very strange ideas about occultism. He was an unusual man, with a full and bushy black beard and glittering dark eyes; but his head was as bald as a newborn child’s. He was squat and dumpy, but very charming in an old-world sort of way. I thought that his ideas were very creative and interesting (sort of like my own), but I also felt that he had no compassion nor any humility whatsoever. (That’s why he and Bill had so much in common!)

Bill went down to Chicago with another member named John to work magick with Michael and they received the first of Michael’s Vodoun initiations. John was terrified by Michael, but soon after Bill went down by himself to visit Michael and received more initiations from him. I even accompanied him on one of these trips to work magick with Michael. My first and last experience working magick with this man was quite unpleasant. I found myself unable to trust him. Michael attempted to terrorize me and made several sexual advances, which only made me angry. Bill did and said nothing in my defense, which puzzled me at the time. Bill was being politically astute, since Michael had a warehouse of occult material. You can just imagine, then, the kind of new occult material that suddenly made its way into our group! Rick detested this man and his magickal ideas, but others found him interesting and even participated in these magickal workings.

The other fellow who arrived on the scene (later in 1978) was an avowed Satanist who called himself Orias (David). He was a greasy, short and thin young man with unkempt black hair, prematurely balding, and the traces of a goatee. Few of us really liked this man (we sneered at his avowed sloppiness), but Bill embraced him as a brother and invited him to work with us. As expected, Rick was aggressively against the admittance of this young man into our group, but that only made him more endearing in the eyes of Bill. I myself felt some pity for this guy, because he was poorly educated and came from an obviously poor blue collar family (he supposedly grew up in a Catholic orphanage). Orias also had some astonishing delusions about his own self-importance, so he probably did fit in quite well with the rest of us, although we wouldn’t admit it at the time. Orias brought the practice of Satanism out from mere speculation and into the mainstream of our workings and Michael infected us with the metaphysics of the Qliphoth, Vampirism, Diabolism, Chaos magick (of the Lovecraftian variety) and dark forms of Vodoun magick. It is my assumption that Orias provided Bill with all of the fancy Satanic initiations and the Paladin (90̊) Masonic degree that he has later claimed to have gotten from some master in Chicago (actually, Wheaton, Illinois), although at the time I knew nothing about it nor did I inquire. Orias’s form of Satanism did not appeal to me nor did I ever feel compelled to work magick with him. Orias disappeared in early 1980 and I had heard later that he had been involved in a traffic accident that almost killed him. I guess being the “Son of the Morning Star”, as Orias called himself, did not exclude him from mortal accidents and misfortune.

This was the same guy who Bill identified in his book as the Satanist from Chicago with all of the money and political connections. I have later learned that there were some initiations and associations that took place after I left the group, so Orias must have resurfaced from his near fatal accident. It is from Orias that Palladium Masonry was derived, probably as a collaborative effort between Bill and himself, even though this system of Masonry had been publically declared as a hoax. The Rites of Memphis and Mizraim were definitely from Michael Bertiaux, who had a plethora of occult materials, which he used to extort favors from his followers. I found little useful lore from this line of inquiry, but Bill pursued it as he did all avenues of occult exploration, 20 miles wide and half an inch deep.

The year of 1978 was obviously one of decline and also stasis. We managed to keep things together, but we had lost a lot of members. People were dropping away from our group, so Bill and Sharon decided to close the group to new members. A few new members had joined previously, but we were all so self-absorbed in our little circle and so intoxicated with our power trips that we even neglected to teach them much of anything. There were new initiations to go through, since Bill had created a complete occult system based on the Nosferatu. He also had systems for Voudoun magick and developed other Gnostic based magickal systems, too. He even developed a complete system of magick, a mass and ordinations based solely on the Superman mythos. I witnessed him saying a mass, and making the sign of the “S” in the air, which he said was the symbol of the House of Jorel. Of course, he did that after seeing the remake of the movie Superman, which came out around that time.

It was a time when I matured enough to take my Catholic studies seriously and begin to study for the priesthood, which I finally earned in June of 1979. Bill had been consecrated by Michael Bertiaux as a Gnostic Bishop (on July 23, 1978 - five years after his supposed first consecration from Ely), and this allowed him to function as an autocephalus Bishop, although, I suspect that Michael had expected Bill to function as his titular representative for the state of Wisconsin. Bill’s lack of cooperation with Michael’s aspirations probably was the pretext for their later bitter parting. 

In the late summer of that year (1978), I traveled with Bill to see his parents and learned about the shared lunacy that he and his wife had derived about his origins. They both believed that Bill wasn’t really a normal person, he was actually an extraterrestrial female who had invaded and inhabited a young male body. This is why he was clumsy and kind of inept about common sense things. Bill even showed me the place where it all started, a playground near his home (where a space ship came down and sent the female alien into his body); and he firmly believed, without question, that he had an important mission on this small planet, and that someday he would return to his home in the stars, bringing his faithful followers with him.

I went along with it all and I was nice to his parents, but privately, I thought that this story was highly improbable. Later, I thought that it was definitely crazy. But it did explain all of Bill’s eccentricities in a nice and tidy manner, but the real reasons for Bill’s affectations had more to do with his humble mortality than an extraterrestrial origin. However, that summer, I believed that I was probably closer to Bill than anyone had ever been, or ever would be again, other than his wife Sharon. I could sense in him a very confused and lonely man. When he dealt with his parents, his lack of successes and accomplishments was glaringly obvious to them, and that was a source of silent shame. Bill sensed that I saw his weaknesses, too, and I am certain that from that moment on Bill become suspicious of all my intentions towards him.

The autumn of 1978 began with a period of decline that continued into 1979, with Bill, Sharon and Rick having moved several times, and they finally settled into a large old three story house, painted a ghastly shade of turquoise blue. Money was tight for them and I even had to help them get jobs where I worked, first in the security business and then at the local newspaper; but I avoided the mistake of living with them or giving them money. I was still attending college and my grades were not particularly great, especially since I had chosen a very difficult and obscure major (linguistics). Also, the occult activities of the group siphoned off a lot of my spare time. In early 1979, Astreas was disbanded and its few remaining members became a part of Sophia, which was also dwindling. We began to work some really strange magick and then, a final confrontation occurred between Bill and Rick, which had the effect of Rick being ejected from the group and from the home he shared with Bill and Sharon. No one defended Rick, and even Sharon had to let him go, although reluctantly. Bill had started rumors that Rick was being groomed as his replacement, and of course, those members who were left could not abide one of their own becoming the leader of the group.

After Rick left, the magick that we worked quickly became even darker. I remember one evening when we worked a curse on an unknown blonde woman who had breasts but no pudenda. This female apparition had been haunting Bill’s dreams, but he was certain that she was real and sending evil curses against him. Bill made a fith-fath image of her and we performed a ritual based on the seven bowls of poison and the seven seals of the Apocalypse; a formulation that I had rather jokingly suggested to Bill and one he eagerly developed. Afterwards, Bill killed the fith-fath and delivered his deadly curse. I sensed that this woman did not exist in real life, so I wondered where the curse was directed.  But this was not the only strange rite performed at that time.

We performed Luciferian Masses, where Sharon would urinate into a bowl and Bill would use it to aspurge the temple, preparing for the manifestation of the devil. We also performed a rite where Satan was drawn down into Bill’s naked body laying upon a marble altar. Sharon took a concoction of bee pollen, honey and other herbs, and poured it over Bill’s genitals. While he laughed in trance, sounding like some huge dummy, she went down on him, offering him some intense fellatio while we stood around the alter, stationed in poses of extreme pious adulation. In my mind I was wondering why in hell was I there, but I let it pass, since it did not seem as strange as anything else I had seen. I even received an initiation into the Nosferatu, with Bill licking my chest, preparing it to be cut with a scalpel (a small incision), but my wound was too shallow to bleed, and so the initiation was kind of a bust.

I was coming to the end of my tolerance for the dissonance that I felt belonging to the coven, and also the magick that we were working had little or nothing to do with my own spiritual processes. I secretly knew this, so I was building a magickal system to replace the one I was practicing with Bill and Sharon. I was feeling repressed and constrained by Bill’s huge ego. Everyone was leaving, particularly important friends of mine. They began to tell me about things that I had refused to see. The truth was that I was not important to Bill, I was only a friend of convenience. I was being used emotionally and spiritually. I had helped Bill get jobs to pay for his excesses, but the time for receiving recognition and initiatory accolades from him had ended. We began to quarrel a lot and our differences grew more irreconcilable. My friends were causing me to see Bill as he really was, which caused my dream of spiritual ascension to begin to fade as well.

I had gotten my ordination and was now a Priest. When I visited Michael Bertiaux in Chicago (to return a friend of his who had visited us), he offered to make me a Bishop. I, of course, declined the offer, but it made me think that Bill was holding back from me the one last achievement that I had aspired for, the Gnostic Episcopacy. However, that elevation was never going to be offered me, for I am certain that Bill had decided that he had to keep me down in order to control me, just as he had done to others. So it was only a matter of time before I left the group.

How I left the group was really simple, I stopped going to their gatherings and functions, starting in June, 1980. I had to see Bill three or four times a week at work, which was unfortunate, and I began to really loath and despise this man. I also saw that my coworkers made fun of his posturing and pontificating, and I joined in with them. I had lost all respect for Bill and my adulation for him was forever destroyed. It was the end for me, but I did mange to pass out of his life in a blaze of glory. I wrote him a letter that was filled with the truth, and it was quite a bitter and harsh critique and rebuke of Bill and his ways. Because of this “missive”, Sharon supposedly worked some black magick on me, seeking to protect her husband from his once close friend and now mortal enemy. I imagine that she focused together all of her anger, wrath and hurt, and forged a pretty formidable death spell that she then sent against me.

A current member of the coven who was also a close friend of mine alerted me that Sharon had announced her intention to kill me, and I on the other end did feel a great darkness descend upon me; but it passed me by after a few months, since I laid low and did nothing to aggravate it.  But my remorse and guilt for my behavior in the group and my fall from grace had far outweighed the impact of any deadly curse, in fact it made the curse darker and more bitter still. At that point I had lost my driver’s license, lost my job (I was a driver for the morning news paper), and had to move back in with my parents. I had gotten my college degree, but there were no jobs. This was because by the autumn of 1980, there was a bad recession ruining the economic landscape, quelling the buoyant economy of the late 70's, and it only got worse in 1982. Perhaps these trials were the result of Sharon’s death curse or just my bad luck. I felt sad, full of darkness and bitter, but I didn’t die. Instead I got to deal with my darkness the old fashioned way, by striving through it.

This was the beginning of the darkening time for me and also for many other former members. Yet it was also one of the most creative and productive times in my occult career. I was burned by those four years spent in the coven from hell and I spent the next couple of years paying for it, until I found my redemption and turned the corner to a new path and a new spiritual perspective. But unlike Bill, who became a fundamentalist Christian and got to walk away from all his responsibilities, I continued my occult spiritual path and took full responsibility for all my supposed sins done during those times. Where Bill can claim to have followed the path of magick and Wicca for sixteen years, I have followed it now for nigh well over thirty years. I am not a Satanist and I am not a dupe of Satan. But to prove that, I must examine Bill’s arguments, and also examine the god image of the Horned God, the God of the Witches. At least now you know what kind of people he and his wife were, so you will be more able to judge Bill’s arguments for yourself.
To be continued.....

Frater Barrabbas

This is part three - the first half - of a four part series taken from my long article, “Are Witches Dupes of Satan”, which I wrote as a response to a book published by my ex-high priest, Bill Schnoebelen. The book was entitled “Wicca; Satan’s Little White Lie,” and it has bedeviled the witchcraft community ever since it was first published by Chick publications. This is the third part, which details the implosion of Bill’s covens and the descent of his followers into a kind of temporary madness. The covens had become a cult and what followed is typical of the failure of a cult.

The chronology of the two covens and their social events can be easily broken into three periods, the idyllic period of progressive works and self discovery, then a period of stasis and excesses, and finally the period of decline and corruption. As stated previously, the idyllic period lasted from the time that I was initiated to first degree until the time when I was initiated to third degree. Perhaps I would have noticed that there were problems already evident in the group had I been looking carefully, but I was too happy and gleefully studied and practiced all that was set before me. At that time, problems in the group were few, the dissidence was rare, and we all got along, more or less. But as I think about it in a deeper context, the seeds of the future troubles were sown before I ever got into the coven of Sophia.

Bill liked to hold court in his home, sitting in his favorite chair with one leg missing and supported  by a cinder block. He would be fed and given drink by his loving spouse, and pontificated from his precarious throne on many erudite points of occult lore. Truly, though, Bill’s knowledge of the occult was astonishing and it seemed as if he had an encyclopedia for a brain. I learned a great deal sitting on the floor before that over stuffed chair, and I also did a lot of growing, learning and mastering of the occult arts myself. We studied the Golden Dawn, the essential folklore and philosophies of earth based religions, both past and present, the Qabbalah, Astrology, Alchemy, Yoga, the Hermetic techniques of Franz Bardon, ancient Egypt, the Arthurian sagas, the Mabinogion, classical and world mythology, religious history, and beginning, intermediate and advanced magick. There was nothing phony about Bill when it came to his understanding of these obscure studies and he loved to expound upon them, inspiring us with his zeal for these subjects. He was patient and careful in his teachings, this made them very authentic and caused all of us to respect his knowledge and point of view.

He seemed to know everything, but in fact, he really didn’t know everything. We just sort of assumed that he did and Bill did not dissuade us in that error. The whole domain of positive occultism was available to one and all to study and learn, and I was ecstatic at both the content of the classes as well as the experience gained through the various magickal workings. I couldn’t seem to absorb enough of it or fast enough to satisfy my craving. I had become something of an addict for magickal powers and abilities. I discovered far more than I had ever imagined. If this had been the sum total of my experiences and if Bill had been as humble and open, loving and giving as he pretended to be, then perhaps these covens would have been the greatest crucible for the entire tradition of Alexandrian Witchcraft; but in fact, it was a false modesty and a great power trip for him.

Bill would often say, when pursuing some perk of his office, that “rank doth have its privileges”; but he never really seemed to understand that spiritual authority is a kind of emotional opiate that ruins most occult groups. However, during this period of training and learning, we were all brothers and sisters of an elite inner court, presided over by its King and Queen. As the leader and lightening rod for the spiritual group, Bill would often enter into trance and consult with his highest guides, Ambrosius or Parlemanon, and these entities would always bolster Bill’s decisions and judgements.

Sharon was more humble in her manners, but she also had  delusions about herself and Bill, and we all became a part of that delusion as time went on. She secretly thought herself as Mary, the mother of Christ reborn, and Bill was Jesus Christ, reborn this time as her beloved spouse.

I experienced the first year of the annual cycle of Sabbats as a succession of revelations, and each full moon Esbat during that period was performed with magick that profoundly impressed me with its power. This is because each new rite was more intense than the previous one. I had entered a whole new world of magickal powers and entities unlike at any time in my previous studies or workings. I also grew very close to Bill and Sharon and they encouraged my interest in them. I was sort of the trouble maker and bad boy of the group, but actually, I was very loyal to Bill and to the members of my coven; but that did not stop me from competing and trying to out-do everyone in the group. I, of course, could not out-do Bill or Sharon, for to even think of that would be to cross the line of proper decorum.

The group was very intimate, since we practiced our craft in ritual nudity, or sky-clad, as we called it. I saw others engaged in a kind of casual sexual intimacy with each other and I felt alone and aloof. Perhaps Sharon sensed my alone-ness in the group, we started a brief affair and that only drew me deeper into the core of the group’s soul. However, before things could go too far between Sharon and myself, another man came into the group, fresh from a disastrous divorce, who fell deeply in love with Sharon and became her lover and companion. That man was Rick, who I variously loved, hated, envied and pitied. He was a remarkable man, a romantic poet and an Irish nationalist, as well as a gifted passionate warrior. Where Bill was awkward, Rick was lithe, strong, dashing and athletic. Rick believed in the principles of free love that were an integral part of our group, so he also became romantically involved with other women in the group. I continued to be a bit of an outsider and was jokingly compared to Loki or Judas, but I didn’t mind too much. I was gaining an enormous amount of lore and adding it to my burgeoning collection. However, Bill did not particularly like being eclipsed by Rick; yet at first he graciously invited Rick to live with him and his wife. They even shared the same bed and all this was done perhaps to control Rick and keep an eye on him.

I had joined the group as a solitary practitioner who had been self-dedicated a few years earlier. I had been studying for five years before I met Bill and Sharon, so I was already established on my magickal and spiritual path. I used the information provided to me to build up my own personal magickal system. This preoccupation with my own system was perceived as a kind of joke amongst the other members, who chose to work their magick through the coven; but Bill and Sharon encouraged me. To this day, I don’t know why they did that. I even went so far as to write my own version of the Golden Dawn rituals and performed them for Sharon in the autumn of my first year, at Hallows, to convince her that I was worthy to receive third degree. I had gotten second degree in around six months, but I was told that third degree would take longer to achieve, even though I did achieve it two months after my first anniversary in the group.

The first year was so magickal and beautiful that I could hardly imagine that anything could possibly go wrong. But there were indications that things weren’t going too well in the group. Bill was having a torrid sexual affair with a odd but shapely redhead who was a member of Astreas, named Candice. She had the strange habit of never locking eyes with anyone who talked to her. This was a sad defect, due to her being beat senselessly by her father when she was a child, her eyes could never focus directly on anything. But despite these handicaps, and the accompanied low self-esteem, Candice compensated by affecting a huge ego, and stealthily sought to replace Sharon as High Priestess. Bill, of course, encouraged her at first, but then would side with Sharon and they would both find a way to humble and punish Candice. Apparently, she later went crazy, and this is briefly spoken of in Bill’s book about some unnamed misfortunate woman; yet he didn’t mention that his mind games and power trips were probably the root cause of that madness.

Candice believed that everyone should respect and obey her, being a senior member of Astreas (and Bill’s lover), and this of course caused the two of us to cross swords, since I was not about to respect anyone unless they proved to me their worthiness. I had my own power trip to feed as well. It was easy for me to torment Candice, to mock and challenge her false claims of greatness. When Bill and Sharon tried to get her and I into some kind of romantic liaison, it was a terrible disaster. She even worked black magick on me when we ran afoul of each other, although it was not done very effectively. My complaints about this to Bill and Sharon went on deaf ears, since they indulged all of our ego trips, so long as we continued to indulged theirs. After a while Bill and Sharon gave up on trying to hitch me up with someone in the group, and that was probably a good thing.

In the spring of 1976, Bill asked if he could meet my father and seek entry into the Masons. I agreed and introduced him. Of course, Bill did not talk about any of the other things that he was involved in. He presented himself as an earnest candidate. I, myself, had thought about joining this organization, but I felt that it would be too confusing to belong to the Masons and also practice Witchcraft. Bill had no problem with this, being supposedly wiser and more intellectually gifted than I. The local blue lodge had a dwindling membership to deal with, so he was eagerly brought into the Masons. Throughout that year Bill went to meetings and went through the three degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft and Master Mason. Bill was also  given a role as junior deacon, but after attending some meetings, he opted out of this responsibility, saying that the blue lodge work was boring and not very constructive. My father was not pleased with this sudden decision and abdication, since he had sponsored Bill to be a member in the first place. I had nothing to say about this event, of course, since that would reveal things about Bill to my father. None of the members of the lodge ever knew what Bill did in his spare time nor did they realize that he was simultaneously treading many other spiritual paths.

In the summer and autumn of 1976, the group began to explore a new direction, and that was the gothic domain of the vampire. Bill was a crack pulp fiction writer, although unpublished for some reason, part of the time that we spent in studying the coven lore was also spent reading his stories. Then he began to write his grand opus whose characters were actually members of his two covens. The story took place in Europe, in a period of the recent past. We were painted as characters associated with a romantic and gothic notion of the vampire, and this was before Anne Rice wrote her fictional works on the subject. So the occult concepts of vampirism began to play within the group, although in a rather gothic and romantic manner, and not, at least yet, in a negative one. Of course like puppets on strings, we danced to this new strain of strange music without protest or even a thought to question it.

Later that year, Bill began to put together his vestments and ceremonial regalia for an even stranger event. He was to be ordained an Old Catholic Priest. Previously, I had met a man who was an initiated witch, but lived out of town, and he joined the group from time to time for Sabbats (he usually worked with Astreas). This man was named Ed (Edward M. Stehlik), and he was also a priest in the Old Catholic Church. We thought it quite a coup at the time having a priest in our group, not knowing what was about to happen, that he was to be subsequently elevated to the Bishopric of the Midwest diocese of the Old Catholic Church.

So in January of the next year (1977), I was asked to play my flute for the ordination ceremony that took place in central Illinois, where Bill was elevated to the priesthood by his friend, Ed, and the retiring Bishop of that diocese. It was a very strange time indeed, since I was not fond of Christianity and I found the Catholic liturgy to be quite foreign. Everyone greeted the new priest who was smiling in his satiny new vestments, tailor made by Sharon who was something of an amateur seamstress, not knowing that he was also a witch and an occultist. It was one of the strangest experiences that I had in the group up to that point, but it was only the beginning of even stranger deviations. However, I was able to appreciate the rituals and some of the very pagan theology of Catholicism. This became another avenue that I studied, as did everyone else. Then, by that spring, we were wearing our cassocks and habits like good little acolytes and nuns, and learning to decipher the breviary and say the holy office.

Of course, not to be outdone, Bill also started at this time an association with the Church of Satan, and paid his money to be elevated in that organization. I remember actually liking the writings that were produced in the monthly news letter, called the Cloven Hoof, and the books that Anton published were also interesting, but the rest of it seemed to be a kind of silly carnival act. Bill was easily able to rationalize it all, of course, but we lesser souls began to find a lot of lapses of credibility in what he was doing and saying. But I didn’t mind too much, because as a Witch, Satanism seemed more my kind of religious style than being a fake Christian, even though the two religions were really very similar in some strange way. I was receiving all of this from my most admired and beloved teacher and friend, so it must all mean something, and it would be wise and prudent to follow suit. I just hadn’t grown enough to figure it all out as Bill had. So, as you can see, I was still a loyal member of the group and a true believer.
To be continued....

Frater Barrabbas

Criminals in the British town of Barnstaple had better watch out. Christ is on the beat, and apparently he's getting results.

A police officer has put his faith in prayer to catch criminals. Inspector Roger Bartlett believes divine intervention has brought down the crime and number of road deaths in his area.

The staff officer with 23 years’ experience arranges quarterly prayer meetings in Barnstaple, Devon.

He first asked Christians to pray for the crime detection rate in 2007, which at 26 per cent was one of the poorest in the area.
With a little help from Jesus, the crime detection rate quickly improved, road deaths dropped, and criminals found themselves strangely unlucky - just as if a spell had been cast over the area. Which, in effect, it had.

‘Now Barnstaple currently has a detection rate of just over 40 per cent of total crime, which is one of the highest in the country,’ said Inspector Bartlett.

A serial burglar was arrested ‘in very unusual circumstances’ three days after a prayer session and serious road accidents fell from 97 to 32 in a year, he added.
Prayer and magick are very much the same, differing mostly in terms of technique. If crime is a problem in your area this just shows you can deal with it regardless of your spiritual beliefs. If you're a magician or Pagan, cast a spell. If you're a Christian, pray. You can get good results either way.

This is part two of a four part series taken from my long article, “Are Witches Dupes of Satan”, which I wrote as a response to a book published by my ex-high priest, Bill Schnoebelen. The book was entitled “Wicca; Satan’s Little White Lie,” and it has bedeviled the witchcraft community ever since it was first published by Chick publications. This part focuses on Bill’s origins and his history up to the time that I met him.

Bill Schnoebelen was probably born in the Summer of 1949, in an eastern Iowa town (near Waterloo), and described himself as an archetypal Leo, so he was probably born around July or August of that year. (A court record concerning the "Matter of the Change of Name of WILLIAM RICHARD SCHNOEBELEN," filed in the District Court in Dubuque County, Iowa, dated October 8 , 1973, gives his date of birth as "August 24, 1949.") His parents were moderately conservative middle class, and his father part owned a tire store (East Central Tire Co-op?) and auto repair center. Bill’s father was very charismatic and knew many of the county’s residents, since he owned one of the biggest stores in the area, and many people sooner or later found themselves there to buy tires or get their car fixed. I believe that Bill’s father lacked a college education, but was very successful in business and well regarded by his community. Bill’s mother did graduate from a Catholic college and was her husband’s intellectual superior. I suspect that she felt a duty to enlighten her husband, but he was not interested. So her attentions naturally became focused on her child.

Bill was an only child, possibly born when his parents were in their early thirties. Bill grew up with all the benefits of a moderately wealthy family and went to Catholic schools and associated with other upper class Catholic families. Bill’s mother doted on him and treated him as if he were a very special child. As an adult this kind of treatment was still evident, though not always tolerated by his father, who sought a more well-rounded perspective of life for his son. Bill was somewhat gifted intellectually as a child, but was awkward and clumsy, even when he matured as a man. I doubt if Bill participated in athletic sports, choosing to pursue intellectual pastimes instead. Bill dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest and even played at saying mass as a child. He also tended to be more interested in hanging out with his parent’s adult friends than playing with children. Because of his mother’s overly protective nature and the fact that she amplified his self-worth, Bill grew to manhood expecting to do great things and to become someone of importance. Since he was given whatever he wanted, Bill never understood the value of things or that the achievement of greatness required hard work and personal sacrifice. Even as a man, Bill expected to be given his station in life, with all of its perks and possibilities. He never understood that his parents position in life was the result of a great deal of hard work and consistent effort.

Bill attended a Catholic liberal arts college called Loras College, located in Dubuque, Iowa, and graduated in 1971. “He was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Loras College — a Catholic school in Dubuque, Iowa. The president of Loras College has sent us a letter which claims Mr. Schnoebelen graduated from that school on ‘May 16, 1971.... with a major in music and a minor in education.’ (Letter dated February 9, 1988) In a letter dated February 2, 1988, Robert L. Ferring, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Dubuque, said that after Schnoebelen graduated he ‘did indeed teach for two years in a Catholic High School in this Archdiocese.’” See Salt Lake City Messenger online edition - “Covering Up Syn” - no. 67 -

Bill claims that while at college (and away from his mother), he began to sour on his desire to become a priest, instead discovered the liberal youth culture of hippies, rock and roll, alcohol, drugs and sex, which he embraced with relish. He also met his future wife, Sharon (her married name at that time was "Sharon Mullen", and her maiden name was "Dura"), whom he met at a drug rehabilitation center where he had volunteered as a drug counselor. What Bill and Sharon were doing there is something of a mystery, since Sharon was not at all squeamish about using drugs, particularly marijuana. Bill also was known to partake of it from time to time.

When exactly he met Sharon is a mystery, but by 1973 they were studying the occult and witchcraft together. Bill related that he first started dating Sharon’s younger sister, but when they broke up, Sharon caught Bill’s eye, and he began to date her instead. Sharon was subsequently divorced, later telling us that she had her two children taken away from her by her ex-husband (or perhaps she allowed the separation for the sake of following her spiritual path). What Bill was doing for a living after he graduated is unequivocally stated above, and being a teacher allowed him some freedom. He took the entire summer off in 1973, going down to Arkansas to study under a man named Barney “Ely” Taylor, who was the grand master of a form of Druidic witchcraft. Ely ran an organization called the Mental Science Institute, so from that group, Bill received the bulk of his knowledge of herbs and folk magick and probably his basic occult knowledge. Later, Bill claimed that Ely also had a church organization called the Gallo Roman Catholic Church, where he had received a Bishop’s consecration, but didn’t know what it was at the time That date was July 23, 1973, an important date as we shall later see.

At the same time that Bill and Sharon were being trained as Druidic Wiccan clergy, they also contacted Jim Baker, High Priest of the coven Du Bandia Grasail, who was the principal representative of the Alexandrian Witchcraft tradition in the United States. Bill probably found a reference to the Baker’s post office box in one of Hans Holzer’s books, and so began to write to him, seeking yet another lineage. This was probably a form of insurance, just in case Bill ran afoul of Ely, which he did in less than two years. Ely Taylor ran an autocratic organization and was the sole authority on all things. It was probably here that Bill learned to be an autocrat himself. On Candlemas, 1973, Bill was initiated in Boston  to the first degree in the Alexandrian tradition. During the summer of that same year, he was initiated into Ely’s group; in the Autumn, he was raised to second and third degree in the Alexandrian tradition by a woman named Astraeas, and in 1974, he received his last initiation from Ely Taylor. I suspect that Bill had parted ways with Ely by the middle of 1974, since he legally married his handfasted (but not previously legally married) wife in May of that year. Perhaps that was due to the necessary abandonment of all of their spiritual connections with Druidic witchcraft. Bill mentioned that he had handfasted Sharon when they were in Arkansas together in the summer of 1973. By the early autumn of 1974, Bill had moved to Milwaukee to start teaching and initiating students into Alexandrian Witchcraft.

Some other sources of Bill’s occult instruction were derived from some curious organizations. He participated in the correspondence course from the Frost’s Church of Wicca (although we do not know when), and also belonged to and received correspondence courses from another organization called the Church of the Eternal Source (CES, founded by Don Harrison), an eclectic organization dedicated to the modern recreation of the Egyptian religion. Bill was involved with a spiritualist church (ADL - Alliance of Divine Love), and was supposedly ordained a spiritualist minister after taking their correspondence courses. Whether that occurred or not, Bill and Sharon were accomplished trance mediums. They knew how to use hypnosis quite well, so it is likely that they were ordained in a spiritualist church. But Bill never spoke about these affiliations. Bill has also claimed recently to have been initiated into the Gardnerian tradition of witchcraft, achieving the second degree before 1970. He never mentioned it to me and it clearly doesn’t fit the evolving pattern of his twisted path. It was also probably too early in his spiritual career at that point anyway.

Bill bought every occult book that was in print at the time. He had many new first editions, including the Weiser edition of Aleister Crowley’s Equinox, and numerous others, all kept in pristine shape - a grand occult library that was the envy of everyone. The many books he collected, traveling by plane and car, taking an entire summer off to pursue his occult studies, all of this cost money, and Bill was never very good at making money. I believe that after completing college, he worked as a poorly paid school teacher. Later, he lived on a monthly stipend that his parents gave him to help support himself and Sharon. When that finally ended, several years later, Bill began to exploit his students for money and support. His mother allowed and tolerated Bill’s religious eccentricities, since she believed that he would one day return to the proper faith. I also doubt that Bill told her much about what he was up to, sparing himself her estrangement. Bill’s mother was unhappy about his lack of direction and his inability to find a steady career, but his father quietly paid the bills and indulged his son in whatever he wanted to do.

Sometime in 1974, in the town of Dubuque, Bill probably started the coven that was named Astreas, which probably had only two or three members. It may have started earlier, but no earlier than the autumn of 1973, when Bill was elevated to the second and third degree, and Sharon to the first degree of Alexandrian Witchcraft. This group laid the ground work for what was to follow. By the autumn of 1974, Bill and Sharon had moved to Milwaukee, and only one of their coven members followed. How this migration occurred is a mystery to me, but in his book, Bill states that over 40 individuals wrote to him and begged him to move to their city, even assisting him in relocating. Since I was around at that time, I recall that when Bill and Sharon first came to town, they were sponsored by a man named Fritz, the owner of a local occult book store called Sanctum Regnum. That sponsorship may have started with an introduction from someone else. Perhaps someone was referred to Bill through the Bakers, started a written correspondence with Bill, then invited the two of them to visit Milwaukee, taking them both to see Sanctum Regnum, where they were introduced to Fritz. Bill was also involved in the Church of All Worlds, supposedly knew the Zells, and it may have been that avenue that attracted Bill to Milwaukee.

A young man who was trying to start a CAW grove was a friend of Bill’s, they even worked at the same steel and iron recycling plant. I met this man while attempting to find a suitable occult group, when I first started college at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and for a brief time was involved with his grove. A woman that I had a brief affair with was managing Fritz’s store and was one of the first members of Bill and Sharon’s transplanted coven, her name was Joan, and the time was late 1974 to early 1975. I also attempted to crash the Halloween party that Fritz and the coven of Astreas put on in 1974, but I was ejected without getting to come in and meet the people (Fritz made certain of that). I spent some brief moments being mollified by my apologetic girl friend before leaving for home.

I would also guess that the second coven (Sophia) was started sometime in mid 1975, perhaps because the members of Astreas had all been given at least second degree. They then sought to practice more advanced techniques of magick, which would have been impossible with beginners present. Sophia was started with all new members, so when I joined it in early 1976, very few of the several members had received second degree yet. Sophia grew very quickly and by the middle of 1977, it had almost 25 members. But it also dropped back down to a dozen or so members by 1978. My ex-girl friend, Joan, had apparently gotten all three degrees, married a guy who owned a farm in the Madison area and I never saw her again. She contacted Bill and Sharon on occasion, but after two years into my training, she was never mentioned again. Also, by the time I entered into the coven Sophia, Bill and Sharon were no longer on speaking terms with Fritz. It became quite difficult to visit my favorite occult book store and also be a member of the coven, so I stopped going to Fritz’s book store.  This was a typical pattern for Bill and Sharon, for few of their important social connections ever lasted more than a couple of years.

When I “officially” met Bill and Sharon for the first time at a Solstice party in December of 1975, they were calling themselves Christopher P. Syn and Alexandria Pendragon. For Bill, this was an actual legal name change (as indicated above), but Alexandria probably didn’t change her name from Sharon, since there is no record of that legal action. It is pretty obvious why Bill chose this unusual name for his mundane and magical name, since it is a fictional hero, the Reverend Dr. Christopher Syn, or Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, created by the author Russel Thorndike, and acted by Patrick McGoohan in a 1964 Disney film. The character Dr. Christopher Syn is a mild mannered vicar during the day, and a feared outlaw at night, dressed in the guise of a scarecrow, harassing the King’s press men and tax collectors, and aiding local smugglers during the late 18th century in the boggy areas of the Romney Marsh. When I visited Bill’s parents, I was told not to call him “Christopher” in front of them. Obviously, they were not too keen on Bill’s unusual identity change, and I am certain that they knew about it, too.

The Solstice party and Sabbat was a smash hit for me. I got a private audience from Bill, where he went into trance and told me a number of things, but more importantly, that I was an important person with a lot of magical talents and “karmic” connections to both Bill and Sharon, so I should be a member of the coven. I was also invited to attend the next meeting, which was a private Esbat of the members of Sophia, and this would allow the coven to determine if I was a right”fit” for the group. I was very thrilled to be invited to my first Alexandrian Esbat for the full moon of January (17th or 18th) 1976, which was quite successful and enjoyable, and then, after being unanimously elected by the coven, invited to be initiated to the first degree, on Candlemas, 1976. Little did I imagine that I had just walked into the lion’s den and was about to be subjected to the greatest scam that modern Witchcraft has ever produced. Bill’s mother had produced a monster, but she would never admit it to herself or anyone else. The rest of us had to find out the hard way.

He was a painfully awkward man, and even made light of the fact that he often tripped over things and was generally unsteady on his feet. Bill had many peculiar habits, and was fond of wearing practically nothing when in his home, playing with his scrotum without any self-consciousness. He also habitually picked his nose and often spat while he talked. He was devoted to his wife Sharon, but he also believed that he had the right and obligation to sleep with whomever he wished, and his wife took the same position as well. So the group featured a variety of bazaar social scandals and weird kinky happenings, and a number of divorces as well.

Bill was of middle height (he says 5' 11", but it was more like 5' 9.5"), and often sported facial hair. He was thin when I first met him, but began to grow heavy and bloated while I was a member. Bill attempted to become something of a body builder, but could never be consistent enough at it to accomplish much, other than putting on a bit of bulky flab. Bill had a kind of unkempt naturalism about his habits and hygiene and I experienced many moments of disgust in his company.

Sharon was very romantically devoted to Bill, acting as his servant and staunch protector and defender. No one ever said anything very critical about Bill in front of her. Sharon was a decidedly homely woman, with bad teeth and a poor self esteem, but she could make herself look quite beautiful, for she was endowed with a graceful form, long dark hair, dark eyes, and a Mediterranean complexion. Bill could look dashing and was at his best when costumed as one of his favorite characters (Sherlock Holmes, Vlad Dracula, etc.), but we had to take him seriously or face his wife’s protective anger.

So you have two moderately gifted individuals who were probably very insecure, having found a venue to expand their egos unchecked into the stratosphere, and a bond of mutual admiration that kept the whole thing going for years. Such hubris hides from the truth and the light, and so in darkness and isolation we were kept, to keep the delusional dream from collapsing.
To be continued....

Frater Barrabbas

This is part one of a four part series taken from my long article, “Are Witches Dupes of Satan”, which I wrote as a response to a book published by my ex-high priest, Bill Schnoebelen. The book was entitled “Wicca; Satan’s Little White Lie,” and it has bedeviled the witchcraft community ever since it was first published by Chick publications. Since Bill was my teacher and mentor, I felt that I should respond to his accusations, and also give a very lively picture of his life so others may know what kind of hypocrite he really was. Bill is stilling shilling his baloney to various Christian organizations, so it is prudent that I publish this rebuttal for all to see -even including Bill himself. There are others out there who know a lot of personal information about this clown, and to make public pronouncements and be in the public face as he has done opens one up to fact checking and revelations such as this one. Enjoy!

I have finally decided after two decades of silence to write about my experiences being a student and friend to the now notorious reverend Bill Schnoebelen, the pastor of the With One Accord Ministry. A man who was once a Wiccan High Priest and now has become the arch-antagonist of the Neopagan and Wiccan communities throughout the land. I will attempt to assist my brothers and sisters of the Craft in trying to understand how a person who had reached such a high level of spiritual achievement in our tradition would suddenly quit and join the squelching ranks of the converted and rehabilitated Christian fundamentalist movement. It is my role as lineage holder of this most troubling branch of Alexandrian Witchcraft to write about my personal experiences with this man, illuminating and finally explaining the mechanisms of his disturbing apostasy.

Much of what Bill relates in his writings has an element of truth mixed in with the mytho-poetry of personal and religious drama, which is distilled from outright fabrications, delusions and distortions. The mixture of fact and fiction is probably the most disturbing aspect of his writings, but only to those of us who felt compelled to read his ranting pronouncements against the practices of Witchcraft and Neopaganism. Of course, we who have found authenticity and legitimacy within the practice of nature religions and eco-spirituality are not the only enemies of Bill Schnoebelen and his assembly of sanctimonious clowns. The Masons, the Mormons, the Catholics, biblical scholars, religious historians and philologists, the liberal press, and occultists in general, as well as fans of Harry Potter and Dungeons and Dragons have been equally smeared and slandered with the accusation of Satanism. Bill is obviously playing to his elected audience, but his book, “Wicca, Satan’s Little White Lie”, was also written in an attempt to convert adherents of modern witchcraft and paganism.

The intellectual caliber of this tome sets a low bar for the reader to cross, and Bill makes many supposedly salient points that are easily dismissed, since they are based either on Christian superstitions or are obvious fabrications. However, there are also arguments in the book that are based upon a very intimate knowledge of our tradition and a few are difficult to dismiss. Bill deceives through the art of crafting clever arguments, spouting a panoply of toxic propaganda that only the most virulent arch-conservative would love and gleefully approve. The fact that fundamentalist religionists are using the social conservative wing of the American Republican party to promote their agenda is both sobering and very troubling to those who are not so religiously disposed. (But that is another matter altogether.)

However, since I was fortunate, or unfortunate, to know the author of this media pogrom very intimately, I believe that I can shed a great deal of light on his inner workings. I can not only show the nature of the lies that he has woven tightly together with the facts, but also attempt to understand his flaws and explain why he left our tradition to find sanctuary within the most conservative branch of Christianity, which is Evangelical Protestantism. Such a transformation, being so illogical, boggles the mind and must be explained. Otherwise we might have to admit that we are also wrong, that once a person becomes a Christian (is baptised), he is always a Christian, regardless of whether or not he has converted to a new spiritual path. So the question is whether we are modern witches and pagans or simply apostate Christians who will be judged harshly by the one true God when we die, and therein cast into the abyss of fire and brimstone, to be tortured for all eternity by Satan and his fallen angels.

Yet since I knew Bill very well and walked with him on his spiritual path for four years, I was able to realize the fatal flaws in his character. I can actually understand why he opted to change his religion in a dramatic and annoying fashion. I believe that Bill saw himself as a “man for all seasons”, and sought to know intimately all of the paths of spirituality available to a modern seeker. Such a spiritual career could only be forged by a megalomaniacal personality. Indeed this is the primary flaw that obsessed and possessed Bill throughout his whole life, and it is most pronounced in his various arch-conservative statements today.

A problem arises when one engages with so many spiritual paths at one time, in that there is little time to deeply plumb the depths of each path thoroughly, so one is left with only a superficial sense of the inner workings of these various systems. We who are engaged in the many earth based spiritual  traditions can at least find some satisfaction in the fact that Bill was not involved in his tradition of witchcraft and magick long enough to really spiritually mature within it, and that his rant against witchcraft is really based on a shallow understanding.

Since I was there during the climactic period of his study and practices, I can act as a witness to what really happened. I can help the members of my tradition peel away the lies from the facts and reveal the real person, warts and all. I can also reveal the real events that actually took place, however delusional and foolish. Instead of seeming to be a virtuoso in the area of the study of alternative and occult systems of spirituality, we can  see Bill as he truly was, a haunted seeker who never found what he was looking for, and a man who required adulation from his followers as well as respect, power and money.

Bill talks as if he was the primary source of all the witchcraft lineages in the Midwest, and that he personally initiated hundreds of individuals into his branch of the craft. He talks of traveling from town to town, with over 200 witches in tow, proselyting the so-called Gospel of Witchcraft throughout the five State areas of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota. Of course, none of this even remotely resembles the truth. It also does a great disservice to other groups and individuals who were forging their own paths either before or contemporaneous with Bill’s groups, and who have continued their studies and practices in a faithful manner to this day.

He actually founded only two covens, these were named Astreas, and Sophia, and both were located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There were probably only around 35 to 40 individuals who were initiated by Bill and his wife, Sharon, and many of these never made it beyond the first degree. There were probably only around a dozen individuals who were initiated into the third degree, representing a small and isolated group of practitioners, not the venerable institution of hundreds of followers and many covens that Bill claims to have spawned. Bill’s foray into witchcraft and paganism was a modest accomplishment at best, but his Wiccan organization had completely collapsed by the time he became a Mormon, sometime in 1982, and most assuredly was gone by 1984, when he converted to evangelical Christianity.

Bill’s occult spiritual path ended as did his pursuit of personal power and ultimate authority, in spiritual, material and moral bankruptcy. We can consider his conversion a great favor in disguise; for Bill was far more troubling as a witch and magician than he ever will be as a fundamentalist preacher. He can make a living off of the most intellectually challenged  group of people in our nation and tell his stories and spread his lies with the full approbation of his publishers and public supporters. I, for one, would not want to be considered a political and intellectual bed partner of Jack Chick. This is quite a come-down for Bill, to be associated with the most radical of anti-intellectual sects, since he always regarded himself as one of the intellectual elite. Yet it can be easily seen that Bill has found his niche, a place where he is respected, empowered and paid, and can achieve all this without having to really work for it. He has also wiped clean his conscience and can function happily without any of the haunting guilt that normally accompanies hurting, deceiving and shamelessly manipulating and exploiting one’s friends and followers. I can verify that no one who was ever taught and initiated by Bill and his wife, Sharon, would ever recommend them or consider them in a positive light, such was the negative fallout from their tenure as Wiccan High Priest and High Priestess.

How ironic it seems today that the coven that I entered into on February, 1976 (Sophia), was guided by a man and a woman who seemed the paragon of spiritual teachers, sacrificing their own time and resources to teach, morally guide, initiate and practice the new faith of witchcraft with their brothers and sisters. The first year that I belonged to this group seemed like the most idyllic and empowering period of my life. By the time I had been elevated to third degree, I had matured considerably in regards to my knowledge and practice of magick; since this was the time when I was building the foundation of the current magickal methods and practices that I use today. Yet by the fourth year, the group had become so negative, corrupted, self-absorbed, and egotistical, that one would barely recognize it as the same group of people. We were drunk on our own power trips, thinking of ourselves as the elite of the traditions of Witchcraft and magick, and no one was more intoxicated and corrupted than Bill and his wife, who continued to run their covens as if they were specially elected by the Goddess and God to do so. The ideal coven had become the coven from hell, and it was shocking that in such a short time, we all experienced a profound fall from grace.

I have asked myself this question many times, “What caused this decline and corruption, and how did it occur?” Bill relates in his book that he succumbed to ever greater excesses of darkness and evil, but he points out that it was the intrinsic nature of this spiritual path that was to blame. Yet we didn’t do anything that was not part of the mainstream of the youth culture of the early 70's. We took drugs, we experimented with sexuality, and we explored all of the forbidden knowledge of occultism and its practices, but so did many people who were neither witches nor pagans.

Bill proceeded to involve the whole coven in his personal magick and his personal pathos, seeing himself as the ultimate authority in all situations, and perhaps this is where things went wrong. However, we did not indulge in child pornography, rape, murder, larceny, kidnaping, torture, animal sacrifice, blood drinking, and shooting up strange evil drugs. Bill claims that this is what witches do, that he whole-heartedly participated in them, and it’s possible that he did indulge in some of the milder of these practices. Yet the more outrageous were realized exclusively within the confines of his imagination.

In the end, I had to leave this group to escape the delusion and madness. I wandered for a few years as a spiritual exile to find solace and redemption for the guilt that I felt by being a party of this terrible fall. I needed to be released from the bondage of this group if I was going to continue to evolve and spiritually mature, and I believe that many former members came to this exact conclusion as well, and then they subsequently left. There were a few tortured souls who remained with Bill until the end, and they received the final insult and abuse when he converted to Christianity and condemned all of his former teachers, co-religionists, and students as either “card carrying” Satanists or naive followers of a Satanic conspiracy.

To trace this unhappy spiritual passage, we have to examine Bill’s unbelievable trail of  multitudes of initiations in numerous organizations and traditions, and find the place where it all began. Since I did not meet Bill until late1974 (briefly), and then again in the winter of 1975, I was not there when Bill decided to become a witch and follow the occult path of earth based spirituality. But I did get to spend a lot of time with him, and even a couple of days at his parent’s home in Jesup, Iowa, and heard all the tales of his youth and how he got into the craft. But what I was never privy to were the specific dates of his initiations, these were kept secret. The most amazing thing that I discovered when examining those dates was that Bill received his first degree in the Alexandrian tradition a mere three years before I did, even though he acted as if I were the eternal chela to his many years of spiritual mastery and magickal ascendency.

From the tales, lies, half-truths, and very probable occurrences, we can state the story of Bill’s life with some credibility. We begin this narrative by making some guesses at Bill’s early life. I am assuming that my guesswork would at least be more accurate than those made by someone who had never associated with him, but only Bill knows what really happened. Perhaps if we speculate in this manner, using my memories and Bill’s own words from his various public statements, we can build a pretty good character profile of this man, and determine what went wrong with Bill in his pursuit of wisdom and enlightenment. This will serve us well, so we can avoid all of the terrible mistakes and pitfalls that he and his wife made, causing an idyllic coven to become the coven from hell.
To be continued...

Frater Barrabbas

“Evoking demons, let me count the ways.”

After much research and study I have found that there are at least several ways in which one may approach the evocation or conjuring of Goetic demons - the famous 72 spirits that are part of the Goetia of the Lemegeton (Lesser Key of Solomon). The basis of this variation has to do with one’s personal spiritual perspective and practices. Obviously, a Thelemic magician is going to perform this operation differently than a Christian magician, or a pagan witch, or even a demonolator. Each different type of magician will have a different methodology and belief system as to how this operation should be accomplished. I suspect that there are probably other variations as well, since the moment something is stated about ritual or ceremonial magick, someone comes along to propose either exceptions or additions. Nevertheless, here is my opinion on this topic. I have chosen seven different categories that I believe represent the majority but not all of the variations.

The list represents a gradation from the morally and ethically aligned Christian white-magician magus to other forms of spiritual alignment, such as that adopted by neopagans, down to the demonolator and Christian diabolist, who are powerfully aligned to the demonic hosts. The list is a study of a progression from what could be called white light to forms of dark magic. 

1. Christian magus who practices only lawful forms of magic. Commands and evokes demonic spirits as hostile entities, forcing and coercing them into performing marginally ethical deeds, through the power and authority of the Christian God, Jesus, saints and archangels. The magus spends a great deal of time in pious religious activities and must maintain a high degree of spiritual and moral rectitude. The ambiguity of even trafficking with demons makes the magus susceptible to potential infernal corruption and charges of heresy by the religious status quo. 

2. Christian who practices Afro-Brazilian/Cuban/Haitian religious and magical traditions. He has a double allegiance to both the Christian pantheon and the Loas or Orishas, and must maintain a balance between them. Normally, specialists perform evocations of demons for either themselves or clients, using the virtues of the Christian pantheon and African demigods to balance demonic workings. Demons are usually treated as emissaries of chthonic deities, and as such, require a more respectful handling and dealings. Use of demons represents an ethical ambiguity, and some practitioners consider it black magic or an illicit European practice, others have no problem with their use.

3. Neopagan who practices a form of either Thelema, Wicca, Hermeticism, Egyptian/Greek/Celtic reconstructionism or some other variation where the pantheon is not chthonic. Practitioner performs a godhead assumption and through that guise, performs the evocation of demons. Summoning demons is considered to be an unusual activity, therefore, of a variable risk; where some are deemed good and some are dangerous. They are typically treated with respect and carefully applied to for very specific kinds of workings.

4. Neopagan who practices a form of Chthonic paganism, establishing a specific cult of dark magical practices. Such an individual may be a follower of traditional witchcraft (non Gardnerian), Afro-Brazilian/Cuban/Haitian paganism or one of the reclaimed pagan traditions from antiquity. Demons are considered to be servitors of the chthonic godhead and are summoned/evoked through their power and authority.

5. Spiritually neutral - the practitioner can be of any spiritual tradition, but performs the evocation of demons through a matrix and hierarchy of angelic spirits. Demons are defined as part of a spiritual hierarchy that includes angels, with the corresponding belief that demons and angels are just two halves (light and dark, yin and yang) of one common spiritual source (unity of being). Demons are treated with respect because they represent possible stochastic forces, but are dealt with as individuals, just like the angels. This hierarchal system is based on astrology, since the demons are thought to be inverse powers/intelligences associated with the zodiacal decan and quinarian.

6. Demonolatry - the practitioner has completely reclaimed the entire system of demonic and infernal spirits and elevated it to the level of godhead and spiritual emissaries. The godhead may be occupied with chthonic pagan deities or variations on obvious satanic deities. All such spirits are treated with reverence and given offerings, oblations and orisons. This system can actually be more religious than magical. Demons are never evoked or ever coerced - they are bribed to do the bidding of the operator.

7. Christian diabolist who practices forms of black magic and may either worship Satan or has a binding pact (lawful agreement) with him. Commands and evokes demons through the infernal hierarchy, treats demons as servitors, who must do the will of magician because of the pact. The pact can be an elaborate agreement or it can be as simple as a blood bond. There is little need to maintain any degree of ethical conduct or sanctity, since the diabolist is free (and even encouraged) to indulge in all of his darker urges.

So these are the seven categories of demonic evocation that I have come across either talking to individuals or reading alternative materials. Like I said, there are probably other variations as well. For myself, I would fit into categories 3, 4 and 5, being a practitioner of Wicca, chthonic paganism and working through a neutral spiritual hierarchy.
Frater Barrabbas