by Frater Barrabbas

This is a new Grimoire for a New Age for the magickal explorer willing to seek out that terrible ‘love, which moves the sun and the other stars’.

This book is the first in a series of three volumes that present to the reader for the first time a complete technical manual for the mastery of ritual magick. The first volume erects the basic occult foundation for the intermediate student, expounding upon the techniques and methodologies that are required to build a personalised system of ritual magick.

The author, Frater Barrabbas, has been working and teaching new forms of magick for over 36 years and assisted in starting a magickal lodge where this discipline was taught and practiced. He is the author of Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick.

As Frater Barrabbas writes: ‘Ritual magicians seek to know and define the world of spirit, and don’t rely on the conjectures of others to realise this search. There is always more to learn, new insights.’

Frater Barrabbas empowers readers through the creation of their own personal magickal system – a system free of limitations, bounded only by the imagination.

Frater Barrabbas Tiresius has been practicing ritual magick and studying the occult since his teens, having by now accumulated over thirty-five years of experience. He has a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics (a suitable degree for a magician) and works as a database administrator and application analyst in the insurance and medical benefits industry. Frater Barrabbas began his occult vocation as an Alexandrian witch, being initiated and trained during the mid seventies. However, he has always been expanding his spiritual field of inquiry, and he has studied Yoga, the Qabbalah, Astrology, ancient history, theosophy, philosophy and psychology. His accumulation of knowledge and experience has caused his personal spiritual beliefs and practices to expand to include both forms of Gnostic Christianity and Neopaganism.

Frater Barrabbas has been described as a pragmatic practitioner of ritual magick. Although he has studied occult traditions of the past and found much in them to respect, he is not a prisoner of them. Frater Barrabbas believes that the occult traditions of the West, known as the perennial philosophy, must be constantly updated and made relevant to the current age. It is his mission and ambition to modernize and establish ritual magick as the principle tool of spiritual achievement in the next century. Frater Barrabbas follows a tradition of creative innovation begun by Dr. John Dee, who profoundly altered the practice of magick in Renaissance England, and continued by MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, who brought the practice of magick into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively.

In 1986, Frater Barrabbas and a handful of occultists in Kansas City formed an occult organization for the propagation of ritual magick called the E.S.S.G. (Egregore Sancta Stella Gnostica). It was the task of writing a common liturgy and grimoire of rituals that honed Frater Barrabbas’ skills of translating his extensive knowledge of ritual magick into a form useful to others. The Pyramid of Powers series represents the first product of that literary distillation, and he has since written many other documents, including his present work, Disciple’s Guide to Ritual Magick. Frater Barrabbas has sought in both the organization of the E.S.S.G. and in these various writings the most efficient method of training the individual magician. For without a complete development of the abilities to write, perform and analyze the results of ritual magick, the magician cannot plumb the psychic depths of the collective unconscious nor attain the vistas of sublime spiritual realization. Frater Barrabbas believes that unless individuals master the techniques of ritual magick, they cannot consider themselves magickal adepts of the Western Mystery tradition; thus without a thorough knowledge of magick, there can be no magicians. Frater Barrabbas has dedicated himself to the promotion of the practice of ritual magick as the Western method of Yoga, and as the tool for the future development of Western Spirituality.