The Magick of Franz Bardon
and the Contemporary Magician By Dean Balsamo With all the trappings, delusions and hype fueling our media-gorged society, it's a wonder anyone can come by genuine knowledge of magical practice. In this climate, even venerable magical societies are compromised, neutralized and gutted of their original impulses. There are many books, and the Web-like experience of sorting through all the dross before hitting something feeling like gold. Then again, no one's saying you can't just start using Enochian keys. But most practitioners agree some fundamental grounding in the evocational arts might make the difference between successful contact and none, or worse, disaster. Ironically, as bleak as this picture sounds, contact with a living hermetic tradition is readily available. It is in the work of Franz Bardon and his systematic approach to training the magical faculties. Nothing in print rivals Bardon's discourse on magick. No does anything compare to his information on evocation and Kabbalah, because nothing else approaches the fullness and practical nature of his texts. Bardon's series contains three volumes, Initiation Into Hermetics, The Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key To The True Kabbalah (Merkur Publishing, Salt Lake City, Utah). They provide practicing alchemists with a means to answer every conceivable question and meet every being they are likely to encounter. Experienced practitioners immediately recognize Bardon's words as those of an adept, because Bardon speaks the language of the tetrapolar magnet, Tetragrammaton. It is the fundamental undertone of his works from beginning to end. Born December 1, 1909, near Opava in the present day Czech Republic, Bardon received the spirit of a high magician into his body at age 14. He went on to participate in all the important events belonging to the latter days of the German magical revival. His frequent and detailed references to Tibetan magick indicate Bardon had esoteric contact with some of the 20,000 lamas said to be in Germany at the time (see Berger and Pauwell's Morning of the Magicians). Frabato the Magician, Bardon's spiritual autobiography (Merkur Publishing, Salt Lake City) says the Thule Lodge, infamous for the sponsorship of members like Hitler and the industrialists, was simply the outer organ for a group of Tibetan black magicians. It also indicates that Hitler used a number of doubles on various occasions as camouflage. The Nazis discovered Bardon when one of his students failed to destroy correspondence with him. Hitler then offered Bardon high positions in the Third Reich in exchange for his magical help in winning the war and for information regarding the other 98 magical lodges connected to Bardon's. Bardon refused, was imprisoned, and suffered shackles and operations without anesthetics, among other things. After four years in prison, Bardon was scheduled to die, but his prison was bombed, allowing him to escape. Back home in Opava, he practiced as a Naturopath and Graphologist in addition to teaching Hermetics and writing these books. During a Communist purge in 1958, Bardon was arrested and falsely accused of not paying taxes on the alcohol he used in his treatments and of making treasonous comments about the ruling regime in a letter to someone in Australia. Bardon died on July 10, 1958, under unusual circumstances in a prison hospital in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Although first published some 40 years ago, Bardon's volumes read contemporary, foremost because of his intentions. The system of training and practical magick detailed here, means to lead the student to initiation without the help of a personal teacher, master or guru. He wants you to go right to the source, Akasha. And isn't the experience of direct revelation at the core of the Aquarian impulse? Bardon wants you to have the magical foundation of a lifetime. Everything a student can possibly imagine, including comments about sex magick is in Bardon's books. There is no cult of personality because Bardon keeps his concentration squarely on the timelessness of the magical arts and their successful practice leaving the personalizing of the path up to the practitioner. A 20th Century man, Bardon is acutely aware of the demands on the Western person's time. Readers often find comments like the following from a lesson on the accumulation of the Earth Element within one's being: This exercise is practiced by a great deal of Tibetan lamas mostly in such a way that they begin meditating on a lump of clay, dissecting it and going on to meditate again on it. The genuine magician knows better how to approach this element, in a much simpler way, and master it without the help of such a difficult meditation process.
pg. 83, Initiation Into Hermetics Sounding like a Fourth Way teacher Bardon reveals his plan of action: Let us now turn to the practical side of the initiation. We must always be aware of the fact that body, soul and mind are to be trained simultaneously, for otherwise it would be impossible to maintain the magical equipoise.
pg. 51, Initiation Into Hermetics The first volume, Initiation Into Hermetics, is a system of exercises devoted to training the faculties one needs in the practice of magick. The book is divided into Physical Training of the body; Magic Mental Training and Magic Psychic Training in accordance with the various kinds of bodies a human can create and possess. The beauty of this system becomes perfectly clear when working with Bardon's system of evocation and magical practice of Kabbalah detailed in the later books. In calling intelligences for instance, success is proportional to how well the practitioner creates a simultaneous presence in his mental, astral and physical spheres, all illuminated by the Akashic presence inhabiting your chosen ritual form. You are learning to speak as God. Your presence is everywhere. As Bardon says, To speak Kabbalistically does not mean speaking with one's mouth or intellect, but to have a `tetrapolar mode of expression.' (pg. 65, The Key To The True Kabbalah) Tetragrammaton: what more is needed to insure the fullest communication with any being you meet? Any reality you name? Physical training includes the mystery of charging the breath, conscious reception of food, the magick of water and Elemental magick. Magick mental faculties work with things like observing the automatic nature of our thoughts, space magick (the ability to transplant consciousness into the center of any form), and the practice of clairvoyance with the help of the magick mirror. The | 
