Some thoughts on Franz Bardon's second book "The Practice of Magical Evocation"

[Decio Mure]

Some time ago I happened to respond on a topic regarding what is the origin of the spirits that are presented in Bardon's second book, my answer had not been comprehensive though.

Well, now accidentally I have learned about the origin of these spirits, thanks to Stephen Skinner's comparative work "The complete magicians tablets."

Let us see what he writes:

It is appropriate that the Column of Franz Bardon's spirits as recorded in his book The Practice of Magical Evocation falls here, as Bardon drew many of his spirit names from the German text of Abramelin, specifically his Zodiacal Spirits and his Spirits of Air. His other spirits he drew from Agrippa, the list of the fixed stars, the Shem ha-Mephoresh angels, sometimes encoding them with a simple alphabet replacement code, sometimes just copying them as they appear in the original source. 'Mars spirits' were actually spirits of the Decans, and you can easily verify this by looking for example at Skorpia (which is the spirit of the first Decan of Scorpio, or Sagitor (which is the spirit of the first Decan of Sagittarius), and neither of them are Mars spirits.

The perplexing thing is that although Bardon undoubtedly knew their origins, he mixed up their planetary attributions, so one use of this Table is to show where he really derived his spirit names from. An example of this is his use of the 12 zodiacal spirits as 'Jupiterian' spirits. Or his use of the names of the Fixed stars in an enciphered form as 'Spirits of the Sun.' I would like to think that this was the result of poor editing rather than deliberate concealment, but it is too endemic in his book to think so. Maybe he simply just wanted to protect the dabbler from any practical results, although attributing the 72 Shem ha-Mephoresh angels to Mercury seems an odd way of doing this. Nevertheless, once the spirit names are corrected and allocated to their correct planetary spheres, then his instructions in practical evocatory technique are amongst the clearest ever written in the 20th century.

I would like to draw attention to the fact that the 360 zodiac spirits and the air spirits are taken from the Book of Abramelin, a grimoire from the 1600s. The spirits in the grimoire are all subordinate to deities considered Satanic, Demonic, or Infernal: Lucifer, Satan, Baalzebu, Astaroth, Asmodee, and even Kore (one of the names the Greeks and Romans used to refer to Persephone/Proserpina) curiously appears there.

Two of these spirits even appear among the demons listed on JoS: Apollyon and Aglasis.

If this were not enough, Aglasis in Abramelin's book appears with the name Aglafos or Aglafys, while in Bardon's book it appears with the name Aglasis, a name coming from the Grimorium Verum (which is also the first among the grimoires that have come down to us to retain the seal of Satan).

Considering the way Bardon talks about Demons in the first part of the book, it is an absurdity that he then includes more than 360 of them among the entities he proposes to summon.

All this shows:
- That the names of the spirits did not come from his personal astral experience;
- that Bardon did not have full knowledge of the material he was compiling and was converting it indiscriminately into RHP as has already been suggested by High Priestess Maxine Dietrich here.

Source:
Stephen Skinner's book, which can be accessed and downloaded from Archive
https://archive.org/details/StephenSkinner-TheCompleteMagiciansTables-2007/page/n205/mode/2up?view=theater
Consult in particular:
- the tables of the Book of Abramelin pp 205-206
- the tables of The Practice of Magical Evocation pp 208-210
- the notes on the tables pp 373-374

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

[Carvik]

Some time ago I happened to respond on a topic regarding what is the origin of the spirits that are presented in Bardon's second book, my answer had not been comprehensive though.

Well, now accidentally I have learned about the origin of these spirits, thanks to Stephen Skinner's comparative work "The complete magicians tablets."

Let us see what he writes:

It is appropriate that the Column of Franz Bardon's spirits as recorded in his book The Practice of Magical Evocation falls here, as Bardon drew many of his spirit names from the German text of Abramelin, specifically his Zodiacal Spirits and his Spirits of Air. His other spirits he drew from Agrippa, the list of the fixed stars, the Shem ha-Mephoresh angels, sometimes encoding them with a simple alphabet replacement code, sometimes just copying them as they appear in the original source. 'Mars spirits' were actually spirits of the Decans, and you can easily verify this by looking for example at Skorpia (which is the spirit of the first Decan of Scorpio, or Sagitor (which is the spirit of the first Decan of Sagittarius), and neither of them are Mars spirits.

The perplexing thing is that although Bardon undoubtedly knew their origins, he mixed up their planetary attributions, so one use of this Table is to show where he really derived his spirit names from. An example of this is his use of the 12 zodiacal spirits as 'Jupiterian' spirits. Or his use of the names of the Fixed stars in an enciphered form as 'Spirits of the Sun.' I would like to think that this was the result of poor editing rather than deliberate concealment, but it is too endemic in his book to think so. Maybe he simply just wanted to protect the dabbler from any practical results, although attributing the 72 Shem ha-Mephoresh angels to Mercury seems an odd way of doing this. Nevertheless, once the spirit names are corrected and allocated to their correct planetary spheres, then his instructions in practical evocatory technique are amongst the clearest ever written in the 20th century.

I would like to draw attention to the fact that the 360 zodiac spirits and the air spirits are taken from the Book of Abramelin, a grimoire from the 1600s. The spirits in the grimoire are all subordinate to deities considered Satanic, Demonic, or Infernal: Lucifer, Satan, Baalzebu, Astaroth, Asmodee, and even Kore (one of the names the Greeks and Romans used to refer to Persephone/Proserpina) curiously appears there.

Two of these spirits even appear among the demons listed on JoS: Apollyon and Aglasis.

If this were not enough, Aglasis in Abramelin's book appears with the name Aglafos or Aglafys, while in Bardon's book it appears with the name Aglasis, a name coming from the Grimorium Verum (which is also the first among the grimoires that have come down to us to retain the seal of Satan).

Considering the way Bardon talks about Demons in the first part of the book, it is an absurdity that he then includes more than 360 of them among the entities he proposes to summon.

All this shows:
- That the names of the spirits did not come from his personal astral experience;
- that Bardon did not have full knowledge of the material he was compiling and was converting it indiscriminately into RHP as has already been suggested by High Priestess Maxine Dietrich here.

Source:
Stephen Skinner's book, which can be accessed and downloaded from Archive
https://archive.org/details/StephenSkinner-TheCompleteMagiciansTables-2007/page/n205/mode/2up?view=theater
Consult in particular:
- the tables of the Book of Abramelin pp 205-206
- the tables of The Practice of Magical Evocation pp 208-210
- the notes on the tables pp 373-374

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Yeah, it was very good that Maxine warned us about how Bardon STOLE the work of true, satanic occultists, and corrupted it with the typical yadayada the enemy loves.