Category Archives: Magick

Presenting at Babalon Rising 2026!

The weekend after next I will be presenting at the Babalon Rising Festival in Springville, Indiana. Babalon Rising is a great pan-Thelemic festival and I have presented there for the last couple of years. Here are the presentations I will be giving this year:

Thursday, 11 am. The Enochian Great Table.

The Great Table, also known as the four Enochian Watchtowers, is one of the most famous components of John Dee and Edward Kelley’s system of Enochian magick. The Great Table is the second received portion of the Enochian system following the Heptarchia Mystica. This presentation will cover the basics of my method for working with this portion of the system as outlined in my book Mastering the Great Table, and will include an Enochian ritual calling on the Kings of the four Great Table quadrants.

Thursday, 1 pm. Star Sapphire Class.

Most Thelemites are familiar with the Star Ruby, Aleister Crowley’s “improved” version of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. The Star Sapphire is the complementary hexagram ritual, corresponding to the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram. Crowley’s description of this ritual in The Book of Lies is short on stage directions and contains several points that are symbolic and require interpretation. This class will cover how to perform this ritual in a practical way and clarify Crowley’s vague instructions.

Friday, 2 pm. Revisiting The Equations of Magick.

Peter J. Carroll first published his magical equations in the 1992 book Liber Kaos. At the time, those equations offered an innovating approach to the understanding of practical magical effects. The chaos magick system is built around the ideas represented by those equations, and views magical results as arising from the manipulation of probability. As a Thelemite, my work is heavily influenced by several key chaos magick concepts, particularly in terms of calculating probability shifts and testing results. To that effect, I have spent the last thirty years or so refining Carroll’s equations based on my own results. This presentation will review Carroll’s equations as published and then present my own updates and reinterpretations of its factors for audience consideration.

Saturday, 11 am. Programming the Universe.

Using new technologies as metaphors for magick has a long history, from electricity in the early twentieth century to computer technology today. Computer programming, in particular, involves symbolic representations, sequences, and structures that give it much in common with the design of magical rituals. Building on my 2024 talk on Thelemic Thaumaturgy, this presentation will explore various advanced concepts that I have found as effective in magical ritual as in software design. As a professional software developer for more than thirty years and a magical practitioner for even longer, I have found that this overlap is especially useful for designing powerful practical operations.

Hope to see you there! It’s going to be a great festival. I also will have books available for sale in the vending area.

Ceremonial Magick Author Event at Magus Books

Tomorrow at 3:30 PM I will be appearing at a Ceremonial Magick Author Event hosted by Magus Books here in Minneapolis. I will be appearing with Roger Williamson, Joseph Peterson, and Taylor Bell. I have previously presented at events alongside Roger and Joseph, who are awesome. I am not as familiar with Taylor’s work, but I look forward to learning more about it at the event. This should prove to be a very entertaining and informative afternoon!

Magus Books is located at 1848 Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. Hope to see you all there!

Presenting at Grimoire Bazaar 2024

On Saturday, May 18th I will be presenting at Grimoire Bazaar 2024, a magical exposition and emporium hosted by Leaping Laughter Lodge of Ordo Templi Orientis. This event is part of Art-a-Whirl, an annual art walk and open studio event held in Northeast Minneapolis. The exposition focuses on the intersection of art and magick with a program of amazing speakers. My talk is titled “Encoding the Mysteries” and discusses the encoding of meaning in art, magical operations, and everything inclusive and in-between.

Tickets for the program of talks can be purchased here. If you are local to the Twin Cities or in the area that weekend I invite you to come and check it out. In addition to the talks, the lodge will be displaying works by various outstanding artists and hosting a collection of fantastic vendors over the weekend. This is going to be an amazing event and is not to be missed. I hope to see you there!

The What Magic Is This? Podcast Interview

I recently sat down for a discussion with Douglas Batchelor and Cliff Wigtil on Enochian magick for the What Magic is This? podcast. It was a good introductory discussion that covered how the system was received, how it works, and some of the nonsense about it in that has seeped into popular magical culture. If you’re interested in Enochian but not sure where to start, this discussion should prove helpful in that regard.

Enjoy!

The Thelema Now! Podcast Interview

Last week I sat down for an interview with Harper Feist for the Thelema NOW! podcast. We covered some of the material in Mastering the Thirty Aires and my general approach to magick as a practical science involving the activity of consciousness and quantum information. The interview is available here.

Enjoy!

The Magick.TV Interview

Yesterday I sat down for an interview with the folks at Magick.TV. We talked about my experience with Enochian magick, the approach I take to teaching it in my books, and the differences between how common ritual forms are traditionally taught and my operant field method.

My thanks go out to the folks at the channel – it was a fun interview and hopefully one that will prove informative to viewers as they develop their magical practices.

Enjoy!

Magick Without Fears Interview

This last Thursday I sat down the Magick Without Fears podcast for an interview that covered a lot of material related to my magical work, Enochian and otherwise. I was trying to figure out how to do a direct link to it, but that’s turned out to be more work than I expected so I’m just linking to the main page. You can click here or on the image to get to the site where you can listen to the interview. This was another fun conversation – it’s always nice to connect with other practitioners and share notes, even virtually.

Enjoy!

The Rufus Opus Interview


Back in May of 2017 I was interviewed by fellow magick blogger Rufus Opus as part of his ongoing interview series. We mostly covered esoteric topics related to my non-fiction works on Enochian magick, though I got a couple mentions of the fiction in there as well.

It was a great conversation, and you can click on the embedded YouTube link above to listen. Enjoy!

Featured on Thelema NOW! Podcast

This week my introductory lecture on Enochian magick is featured on Thelema NOW!, the official podcast of US Grand Lodge OTO. The Thelema NOW! homepage is here, and a direct link to the podcast is here.

The prepared text of my lecture was published over on Augoeides back in January right after I presented it, but one of the things about checking out the recording is that I don’t always stick to my prepared talk one hundred percent. Also, I usually allow people to ask questions throughout my presentations, and the answers to those are not included in the prepared text.

Enjoy!

Staring At Goats

In Arcana the Central Intelligence Agency operates a top secret “Magick Office” that developed out of the remote viewing experiments that started in the 1970’s. Last weekend I saw the film The Men Who Stare At Goats which draws its inspiration from actual paranormal experiments conducted by the United States Army beginning in 1979. The film is based on a BBC documentary series called Crazy Rulers of the World by Jon Ronson and his accompanying book from which the film takes its title.

This last week I tracked down a copy of Crazy Rulers of the World and was surprised at how many events from the film appear in nearly the same form as they do in the documentary with only the characters fictionalized. As the opening quote of the film states, “More of this is true than you would believe.” Apparently this is indeed the case, and it makes the conspiracy theorist in me wonder if this is just the material that the government was willing to declassify what else might be going on. Could there really be a CIA or Army Magick Office?

One of the more interesting sections of the documentary, at least to a ritual magician like myself, was Ronson’s interview of Guy Savelli, the man who claimed to have stopped the heart of a goat through the psychic power of “remote influencing.” In the following transcribed section Savelli explains to Ronson how he did it:

“I picture a golden road going up in the sky, and I, because I’m Christian, I picture that the Lord is up there. And I picture myself walking up into the arms of the Lord and I picture His arms around me. And when He does it I get a chill inside of me and I know it’s right. So I did that, and I’m kind of asking for a way to knock this goat down.”

Savelli thus starts out with a godform assumption just like any ritual magician would. So far this sounds more like kind of a freeform spell than how psychic power is usually described by parapsychologists.

“So it comes to me that, probably, there’s this one picture that we have of Saint Michael the Archangel with his sword in the air like that. So I got that picture in my mind and I kind of sent it over with my mind to where the goat was. In my mind I pictured that Saint Michael got this sword and was going through the goat and knocking it down to the ground.”

So the resulting paranormal effect was accomplished by conjuring an Archangel! That’s magick, folks, and I’m willing to bet that if this really worked at all ceremonial forms would substantially improve its effectiveness. If I were an Army official who knew anything about Western esotericism and heard someone describe their powers to me in the way that Savelli does, the very next thing I would do is start rounding up funding for a Magick Office!

I suppose in the end you can never really can tell, since fiction does occasionally veer surprisingly close to the truth. But I’ll be as amazed as anyone if it comes out twenty years from now that sure enough, the Magick Office was for real.