Second of the readings, and the direct sequel to the holy daimon. That post read Frater
Acher’s first volume and found a guide that is met
rather than mediated — unowned, pointed outward, no seat in it, and no
check outside the practitioner either. This is the volume Acher wrote
next, and it turns the same claim onto the institution:
the antagonism is not between one experience of the divine and another,
but between any unmediated encounter and organised orthodoxy. It is the
inverse of the owned cosmos — and it is
the metered practice that the cosmos that refuses said the
apophatic refusal still needed.
Status. This post reads one source. The quotations are verbatim from the digital edition, checked character for character against the file and cited in the notes; the reading of them is an inference, offered as one. The book’s cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims that a daimon or an Olympic spirit exists. No living author is diagnosed. The criticism below is of a structure — orthodoxy as a single mediated route to the divine — and of no church or people, and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.
Holy Heretics is by Frater Acher, published by Scarlet Imprint in 2022, illustrated by Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal, digital ISBN 978-1-912316-68-7.1 It is the third volume of a cycle, and its Introduction says so in the same breath as its method:
“It is best for those genuinely committed to a path of wisdom and personal evolution to harbour a healthy mistrust towards what we think we know and who we think we are. This is the spirit in which this book was conceived, as the third and final volume of the Holy Daimon cycle.”1
Its structure is two books, and the structure is the argument.2 BOOK I · MYSTICISM runs Pseudo-Dionysius and the path of unknowing; the Heart Prayer, through the Desert Fathers and the Hesychasts; Symeon the New Theologian, Evagrius Ponticus and Hildegard of Bingen; the Granum Sinapis; and the Theologia Germanica. BOOK II · MAGIC runs The Call, The Olympic Spirit and The Rite of the Olympic Spirit — where the reader is handed a working ritual. Each chapter of the first half ends the same way, and the Introduction says why: “Each chapter, therefore, ends with straightforward instructions on how to approach your own heart space”.1 It is not a history with exercises appended. It is a manual whose historical half is the training.
One counterweight belongs here. The chapter on the Desert Fathers documents what the early Church’s turn to worldly power cost, and its evidence includes the Church Fathers’ own anti-Jewish polemic, quoted at length. This post does not reproduce those quotations — what matters is what the book does with them:
“Let us be mindful where we place our own feet on this journey. What will we use as the basis of our ascent? Are we ready to place ourselves in the hands of divinity, rather than placing our feet on the face of another man or tradition?”3
and then states the rule outright: “a genuine mystical path requires neither the debasement and humiliation of others, nor the debasement of everything that does not fit into the confines of our magical circle”.3 That is this post’s finding too: an inward discipline turned outward as a rule for everyone else. The poison is not a property of any people. It is a move a structure makes.
The Introduction does not hide its argument. It begins from the epigraph — Sheikh Mahmud Shabistari’s Gulshan-i Raz, 1317 CE, whose closing lines end “Each one speaks the language native to the level he has reached, and it is hard to understand what he says” — and cashes it a few lines in: “In this world where we each possess a unique shard of truth, hasty judgement is the enemy of wisdom.”4 Then the thesis:
“the source of so much hostility in our shared history does not reside in the difference of one man’s experience of the divine as opposed to another’s, but in the ever antagonistic forces between any unmediated experience of divinity and all forms of organised spiritual orthodoxy. The true mystic — like the true magician — irrespective of whether he or she emerges from an Egyptian, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or any other paradigm, will always be perceived as a threat to organised spiritual institutions.”5
Note what that does not say. The antagonism is not doctrinal, and no experience is called truer than another: the hostility is located between a kind of event and a kind of organisation. The reason follows: Western mystics and magicians “all share one thing: the antisocial stench of the primal goēs”, and their way of life “posed a threat to any kind of codified, mediated and sanitised form of spirituality. […] It is in this direct experience of the spirit that we stand united as holy heretics.”5
The reading is this post’s, and it inverts the owned cosmos. That post described a frame that names an endpoint and stations a mediator at it — and the mediator is not an abuse of the frame, because a named endpoint is a place and a place is occupiable. Holy Heretics describes the same architecture from the far side. A mediated route is a claim about where the divine comes through; a direct encounter is evidence that it came through elsewhere. That is not a disagreement, it is a devaluation of the route. The heretical charge is not what the mystic says. It is that the mystic came back.
And the counterweight, in the body. That a direct encounter will always be perceived as a threat is a claim by a party who has had one, about what institutions do, and it is not checkable from inside the book. It is reported as what the book states about a structure, and it draws no conclusion about practice: a person can be inside an institution and have the encounter.
The book’s strongest exhibit is a case, and it is the case the blog’s own framing predicts. Symeon the New Theologian wrote down his experience of the divine light in the tenth century; the book states the institutional consequence flatly:
“If salvation did not need to be mediated by a priest and through the collective experience of church service, then the very foundations of the Roman Catholic Church were at risk. […] [T]o propagate spiritual techniques that were open and accessible to the lay practitioner was to implicitly challenge the Church’s mechanisms of social control and institutional spiritual power.”6
The outcome is why the book chose him: “the Holy Roman Empire considered Symeon’s hymns the work of an apostate, and in the West today they have fallen into oblivion.”6 Against a lineage it sets a record — the tradition “is not kept, confined or curated by any kind of manmade orthodoxy, but by the account of a personal, deeply transformative experience of divinity’s darkness as well as its piercing rays of light.”6
The counterweight is already in the corpus, and it binds here. The owned cosmos wrote the distinction this post must not lose: what matters is not mediated versus unmediated but open mediation against closed mediation — several routes against one, a mediator accountable outside themselves against a mediator who is the reason you cannot get through any other way. Holy Heretics is itself a mediation: a printed manual with a prerequisite. “I would advise against skipping ahead and delving into the section titled MAGIC. Contrary to common assumptions, the practice of advanced magic should not precede but instead follow periods of intense mystical training.”1 So the book’s “unmediated” is narrower than it sounds: the encounter is unmediated in that no office stands at it, but the route to it is mediated by a book, and the book sets a gate. What it is against is a mediation that closes — the foundations were at risk precisely when the other route worked.
The cosmos that refuses named the apophatic frame — a correspondence with no nameable endpoint — and ended on a finding that hurt: the refusal “is not self-enforcing”, because a claim to stand in the unnamed place is unbeatable. Its conclusion was that the safeguard lives in a practice, not a frame. Holy Heretics’ opening chapter is that practice, named and cited. Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and On the Divine Names open the book, and the book states what the negative way is for: rather than assembling an archive of cognitive insights about divinity, the Areopagite used hymnal prayer to “immerse oneself entirely into a state of agnosis, i.e. not-knowing.”7
“Agnosis is a path towards oneness with the superessential divinity; it is a path that never ends, a journey that can never entirely succeed — for if it did, we would lose everything of our own gestalt, that is to say, the defining features that make us us.”7
Then the two sentences that make this the frames series’ specification, in the book’s own voice:
“a path of agnosis has no interest in debating spiritual truth with any other confession; for philosophical debate would be the precise opposite of its own practice. Most obviously, unlike the classical magician we described above, a path of agnosis is utterly useless to increase personal agency or to enlist practical help from other spiritual beings.”7
That is a criterion, not a mood, and it is what the refusal needed. The apophatic move fails when someone claims the unnamed place as a credential, and this version carries an internal disqualifier: it does not increase your agency and it does not get you help. The claim to have arrived is therefore not merely discouraged; it is inconsistent with the practice’s stated product. There follow the exercises: attention carried down from the lips to the mind to the heart; the “heart space or heart flame” as “the actual crack between the human and divine world, from which the light comes in”; the Theologia Germanica’s “whyless (warumlos) and wayless (weglos) path”.7
The counterweight is stated by the book itself, up front: three negative results at once. That is the opposite of the genre this blog usually meets, and by the book’s own account it is not a method of protection.
The book’s load-bearing structure is not the refusal. It is a meter, and it arrives as a quotation before it arrives as a claim. The Heart Prayer chapter’s §V carries Paracelsus as its epigraph:
“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; but the dose makes it that a thing is not a poison. — Paracelsus, Septem defensiones”8
The book then applies it, in the passage where the historical argument and the safety argument turn out to be one argument: “As wiser, independent practitioners though, we know that everything is a poison; it is the dosage that defines its effect.”8 What follows is a hard reading of the desert ascetics — the fasting, the irons, the graves — and then the sentence that makes it a safety claim rather than a polemic. The failure was not the extremity. It was the export: “[T]he radical attitude required for a period of intense spiritual retreat was disseminated and propagandised as the new God-given blueprint for all of human society. […] [I]t quickly became a new fanatical orthodoxy circumscribing everyone’s everyday lives.”9 The rule for a practitioner is the same at the scale of one person:
“There is no problem – in fact, there is a lot of benefit – in leaning into an extreme lifestyle for a period of time. But when the rituals are done, we centre ourselves again in a more balanced approach to the world.”9
This is the safeguard the blog calls a metered pace, named here as a pharmacology. The safeguards found the traditions writing gradualism into their practice — anupubba-sikkhā, the lam rim; the Western column found the same requirement as a syllabus, in Quareia’s “slow, careful steps”. Holy Heretics states the rule underneath — the same act is a remedy at one dose and a poison at another — and draws the half most manuals omit: the extremity is bounded in time, but also in scope, and the return is part of the operation.
Counterweight. The meter has no external setting. The dose is judged by the practitioner, in a book with no gate, no supervisor and — §6 — no referral: a specification the reader must keep, which is the cosmos that refuses’ finding restated.
Here is the negative finding, stated as carefully as the holy daimon stated its own. The word “safeguard” does not occur in the digital text of Holy Heretics — a case-insensitive search returns 0 hits. The clinical referral is likewise absent: no “therapist”, no “psychiatrist”, no “mental health”, no “psychosis”, no “clinical”, no “go see” and no “seek help” in any form. The hits for “therapy”, “physician”, “medical” and “doctor” are a therapy-room metaphor, the antidotum Mithridaticum, historical physicians (Paracelsus, Celsus, a Pavia court physician), Hildegard’s title of “doctor”, and a Gospel line (“no master nor doctors”). Within this text, there is no route out to a clinician. A search shows only what it indexes, so the claim is scoped to this file.
What the book warns about instead is named, and it is not nothing — three instances, two of them from the book’s own front-matter chapter summaries. The institution’s poison: those summaries say it — “Takes a stark look at how the apocalyptic theology of the Desert Fathers became the poison of Christianity”, and “Stands as a reminder to trust your own path and not to fall for the poison of orthodoxy.”10 The second is later spelled out as a rule about universality, not doctrine: the danger “begins when we take what worked for one person and that person’s unique conditions and turn it into a recipe for everyone”.9 A named misperception: of Evagrius Ponticus the contents speak of “the gnostic misperception of the mystic’s path as an eternal state of war”10 — inner conflict read as a permanent war, framed as an error rather than a state to be managed. A case of harm, printed in full: the book relates what the anonymous author of its source did with the experience, and does not tidy it — “an autobiographical account of a dangerous state of boundless melancholia triggered by contact with the Olympic spirits.”11 And its discernment criterion states the fifth safeguard this blog recorded, as its own rule: “The highest teaching of magic is to understand what should be accepted from an attending spirit, and what should be rejected.”12
But the structural finding is this, and it is the sharpest in the reading. Mapped against the safeguards’ five, Holy Heretics carries three and lacks two. It has the metered pace, stated as a dose; ethics first — “a genuine mystical path requires neither the debasement and humiliation of others”3; and the teacher who points past himself — “True empowerment is giving the student just enough to enable them to undertake their own journey.”13 What it lacks is a plural community and a discernment procedure read by someone else. And the book says why, about its own cast:
“All of our ancestors on this path have been lone workers, whether in the deserts, in their cells, or amongst their communities, walking their own version of the narrow path.”5
So “we stand united as holy heretics” is a class, not a body. The unity is shared experience, and a class of isolated practitioners has no member who can read another’s state — the one safeguard this blog’s model says cannot be located inside the person having the experience. The book supplies the instrument the frames series asked for (a criterion, in §4) and not the one the corpus says is required (another reader). That is the split, and where this reading lands.
A counterweight, because the book is not merely silent. It prints its sources’ failures and asks the reader to check their own projections rather than the other party’s: the skills it presumes include “to realise the Other for what it is, rather than seeing our own projections in it”.14 That is a record offered as a mirror — and a record is not a companion. A century of other people’s failures can be read alone. It cannot read you.
The book’s second half publishes a working ritual — a second instance of the finding made in the operative master. That post’s boundary sentence was “the sources publish it”: the operational material is in print, and the withholding there was a decision not to republish a technique, not the removal of a secret. Holy Heretics meets that description from the other side. Its contents describe:
“Introduces us to and provides a full English translation of Paracelsus’s little known Arcanum arcanorum, an advanced magical ritual to conjure the Olympic spirits as well as one’s holy daimon through the use of magical bells.”15
And its own account of what it is doing with that text is the point of interest, not an alarm. It rebuilds the rite from fragments published separately, and says so:
“[T]hese fragments, which four hundred years ago were deliberately hidden by adepts in separate texts”, are conjoined to “present a complete and workable version of the Ritual of the Olympic Spirit. […] It will avoid the deliberate pitfalls and traps that our ancestors set up to protect this secret of secrets, and yet remain faithful and authentic to the spirit of its original sources.”16
The obstacles in the older texts were protective by design — the book says so — and this book removes them, in print, while stating that it is removing them. It also states, unprompted, that it does not hold everything: the rite’s starry names “will only work if passed on personally to the magician by the spirits, and which will ‘expire’ after 140 years”.16
And the rite carries its own counterweights, inside the ritual text — the opposite of what this blog expects from a conjuration instruction, and both against over-claiming:
“no fantasising. You simply shift your attention to what is already there.”17
“It is not upon you to demand anything. You are only the voice that utters the call and the spirit that upholds the sphere. Focus on the great presence of your mind in this sacred space, not on any kind of outcome or success.”17
And one sequel detail. The holy daimon’s counterweight was the first volume’s own metaphor — a surgeon and a camera, “the ‘true will’ of the camera is really the will of the doctor” — an asymmetry that book states and does not resolve. This one’s closing intoned prayer states the relation the other way: “Through it I behold the presence of my daimon, and my daimon beholds me.”17 Beholding both ways, in a book about what mediation costs — and closing on something small enough to report exactly: “wash your hands with water and salt, and go to bed without speaking to anyone.”17
The counterweight. This is a conjuration manual: not evidence that the rite works, and not a licence. What can be reported exactly is the form — a method published openly, named as a reconstruction, with the older text’s designed concealment disclosed, and an explicit refusal to demand an outcome. A point of interest, not of alarm: a genre the blog has met only as a manual of influence acting in the other direction.
Four corrections.
First, the Western column needs a sharper subject. Its §4 is the one headed “The safeguards, written by practitioners for practitioners”, and its finding is that the Western material is the most useful of the three bodies for that reason. Holy Heretics sharpens who those practitioners were: they were heretics against their own institution. Symeon’s hymns were “the work of an apostate”; the Desert Fathers’ own theology is the “poison of Christianity”; the tradition the book recommends is “not kept, confined or curated by any kind of manmade orthodoxy”. The Western column is not the Church and not the order, so the West’s own move — to write the safeguards into the training — is true of Quareia and the Golden Dawn, and not of the material Holy Heretics assembles.
Second, the row about a curriculum gets a third shape. The Western column’s “a curriculum is a safeguard” was already qualified by the holy daimon, which is not a curriculum. Holy Heretics is a book with a prerequisite — BOOK I gates BOOK II by instruction, and nothing enforces it but the reader. The corpus therefore holds the row three ways: a graded syllabus (enforced), a book with no gate, and a book with a stated gate and none. The requirement survives all three; the guarantee accompanies it in one.
Third, the cosmos that refuses has found its practice, and should say so. That post concluded that the refusal is “necessary and not sufficient”, that “No property of a cosmology is self-enforcing”, that “the safeguard lives in the practice rather than in any cosmology”. Holy Heretics is that practice at book length, answering the sharpest objection — the claim to have entered the unnamed place — with a criterion instead of a warning. The conclusion is supported and bounded in one reading: the practice exists, with an internal criterion, and it still leaves the practitioner the only reader of their own state.
Fourth, the operative master gets an instance that does the opposite of what the post predicted. That post could not republish a technique because it is useful to an operator and useless to the target. Here a practitioner republishes a rite — and the asymmetry holds, because a rite is not gauging: it hands over a procedure for the practitioner’s own ascent, not a method of reading a person and finding the vacancy. That is the line the corpus can now draw, cleaner than “the sources publish it”: publishable is the operation addressed to the person doing it, not the appraisal aimed at someone who has not asked.
A reading holds one source whole — its thesis, its structure, its exercises, its omissions — and asks what a blog that has quoted sources for years now has to change. What this one says is a split finding, and the split is the honest result.
This is the strongest practice-side object the corpus has met — the apophatic refusal turned into a metered discipline, with a criterion rather than a mood, and three of the five safeguards stated in its own voice. And it is missing precisely the safeguards that require a second person, which it does not conceal but states. So: a practice can supply its own criterion, and a criterion is still not a second reader.
Marking: a reading. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from the digital text of Frater Acher’s Holy Heretics (Scarlet Imprint, 2022; eISBN 978-1-912316-68-7), checked character for character and cited in the notes, including the Shabistari and Paracelsus epigraphs as the book prints them. Absences reported as search results: “safeguard” returns 0 hits in the file; “therapist”, “psychiatrist”, “mental health”, “psychosis”, “clinical”, “go see” and “seek help” return 0; “therapy”, “physician”, “medical” and “doctor” occur only in the historical chapters and the antidotum Mithridaticum material, itemised at §6. Inferred, as this post’s — §2’s reading that the book’s antagonism is between an event and an organisation rather than between doctrines; §3’s reading of the book’s “unmediated” as narrower than it sounds, and as a claim about closed rather than open mediation; §4’s finding that the agnosis passage supplies the criterion the cosmos that refuses said the refusal lacked; §5’s reading of the dose as the metered-pace safeguard named as a pharmacology; §6’s mapping and its split finding — three of the five safeguards present, and exactly the two that require a second reader absent; §7’s reading of the published rite as a point of interest rather than an alarm; and the four corrections in §8. The gap is real and is not resolved here: this book contains no clinical referral, where the Western column records a Western curriculum that writes one into the lesson, and what it warns about instead is the institution’s poison, a named misperception, and one printed case of harm. That is a structural description of a text, not a finding about a person. The cosmology is not endorsed — the post takes no position on whether a daimon or an Olympic spirit exists — no living author is diagnosed, the criticism is of orthodoxy as a structure and of no church or people, and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice.
Frater Acher, Holy Heretics, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2022 — illustrations by Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal; eISBN 978-1-912316-68-7 (digital). Read directly from the digital text (479 KB extract, jumbled page order, collapsed whitespace); every quotation was verified character for character against that file, with the source’s typographic apostrophes and quotes rendered as ASCII and its whitespace normalised. Also from the Introduction: “harbour a healthy mistrust towards what we think we know and who we think we are”; “as the third and final volume of the Holy Daimon cycle”; “Each chapter, therefore, ends with straightforward instructions on how to approach your own heart space”; and “I would advise against skipping ahead and delving into the section titled MAGIC. Contrary to common assumptions, the practice of advanced magic should not precede but instead follow periods of intense mystical training.”↩︎
The two-book structure is the book’s own contents listing, which is also the source of the chapter summaries quoted at §6. Book I: “On Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and the Mystical Path of Unknowing”; “A Most Daring Operation: The Heart Prayer”; “Being in Both Worlds at Once”; “INTERMEZZO The Granum Sinapis”; “Theologia Germanica”. Book II: “The Call”; “The Olympic Spirit”; “The Rite of the Olympic Spirit.” The Introduction states the division of labour between the halves.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book I, the heart prayer chapter, §V, immediately after the block of patristic quotations. This post names the presence of that block and does not reproduce it; the reading drawn from the passage is this post’s.↩︎
Holy Heretics, front matter and Introduction. The epigraph is credited on the page to “Sheikh Mahmud Shabistari, Gulshan-i Raz, 1317 CE”; the line quoted at §2 is its penultimate statement-line (the book prints the epigraph as a series of separate lines, the last of which is “You, the seeker of understanding, you must strive to learn the meaning of what they say.”). The Introduction’s own sentences: “Our experience of divinity is as individual as the knowledge derived from it.”; and “In this world where we each possess a unique shard of truth, hasty judgement is the enemy of wisdom”.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Introduction: the thesis sentence (“the ever antagonistic forces between any unmediated experience of divinity and all forms of organised spiritual orthodoxy”); “will always be perceived as a threat to organised spiritual institutions”; “all share one thing: the antisocial stench of the primal goēs” (the book prints goēs with a macron over the e); “any kind of codified, mediated and sanitised form of spirituality as represented by the major churches and institutional orders”; “It is in this direct experience of the spirit that we stand united as holy heretics.”; and, quoted at §6, “All of our ancestors on this path have been lone workers, whether in the deserts, in their cells, or amongst their communities, walking their own version of the narrow path.”↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book I, “Being in Both Worlds at Once” §II, on Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022 CE) and his Hymns: “If salvation did not need to be mediated by a priest and through the collective experience of church service, then the very foundations of the Roman Catholic Church were at risk.”; the sentence on “the Church’s mechanisms of social control and institutional spiritual power”; “the Holy Roman Empire considered Symeon’s hymns the work of an apostate, and in the West today they have fallen into oblivion”; and the passage on a tradition “not kept, confined or curated by any kind of manmade orthodoxy”. This post describes the structure the book reports and makes no finding about any church.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book I, chapter I, on Pseudo-Dionysius: the agnosis passages (“a state of agnosis, i.e. not-knowing”; “Agnosis is a path towards oneness with the superessential divinity; it is a path that never ends, a journey that can never entirely succeed – for if it did, we would lose everything of our own gestalt”); the anti-agency passage (“a path of agnosis has no interest in debating spiritual truth with any other confession”; “a path of agnosis is utterly useless to increase personal agency or to enlist practical help from other spiritual beings”). The heart space is from the Introduction — “the heart space or heart flame”; “the actual crack between the human and divine world, from which the light comes in” — and the Theologia Germanica chapter gives “the whyless (warumlos) and wayless (weglos) path”.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book I, the heart prayer chapter, §V — the epigraph crediting Paracelsus, Septem defensiones: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; but the dose makes it that a thing is not a poison.” The book’s application, two paragraphs in: “we know that everything is a poison; it is the dosage that defines its effect.”↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book I, the heart prayer chapter, §V, on the Desert Fathers: the export of the retreat discipline (“disseminated and propagandised as the new God-given blueprint for all of human society”; “it quickly became a new fanatical orthodoxy circumscribing everyone’s everyday lives”); the rule for a magical cycle (“There is no problem – in fact, there is a lot of benefit – in leaning into an extreme lifestyle for a period of time. But when the rituals are done, we centre ourselves again in a more balanced approach to the world.”); the mirror passage (“Better to leave no mark at all, unless you are prepared to be seen naked by the ones who will follow”); and, quoted at §6, “The danger, as we saw in the previous chapter, begins when we take what worked for one person and that person’s unique conditions and turn it into a recipe for everyone” — which is itself in Book I chapter III (“Being in Both Worlds at Once”), § I, as its own wording (“as we saw in the previous chapter”) indicates. The chapter draws on Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums; this post quotes the book, not Deschner.↩︎
Holy Heretics, the book’s own contents summaries, quoted verbatim from the front matter: “Takes a stark look at how the apocalyptic theology of the Desert Fathers became the poison of Christianity.” (Book I, chapter II, §V); “Stands as a reminder to trust your own path and not to fall for the poison of orthodoxy.” (Book I, chapter III, §I); “Grounds us in the dangerous legacy of Evagrius Ponticus and the gnostic misperception of the mystic’s path as an eternal state of war.” (Book I, chapter III, §III). These are the author’s framing of his own chapters, which is why they are cited as such.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book II, “The Olympic Spirit” §V, in the list of what the Arcanum arcanorum leaves unstated: “an autobiographical account of a dangerous state of boundless melancholia triggered by contact with the Olympic spirits”; and “If not carefully kept in balance, such rampant desire for continuous spiritual ecstasy would seem to have negative consequences for the practitioner.” The same list notes the rite will “‘infect us with angelic vision,’” and is “likely to make the operator feel ill for many days”. Reported as the book reports it; this post makes no finding about anyone’s mind or health.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book II, “The Olympic Spirit” §V, quoting the Arbatel among the passages the book treats as “practical ritual advice disguised in such a way that the uninitiated reader will mistake it simply for Christian moralising”: “The highest teaching of magic is to understand what should be accepted from an attending spirit, and what should be rejected.”↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book I, the Theologia Germanica chapter, on the two extremes of training (Loyola’s Exercises against the Theologia Germanica) and the middle the book recommends: “True empowerment is giving the student just enough to enable them to undertake their own journey.” Also: “The art of travelling the rainbow path lies in not tipping over to either extreme”.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Introduction, on the travelling skills the book presumes of its reader: “to willingly manoeuvre our hearts into a silent, non-judgmental space; to realise the Other for what it is, rather than seeing our own projections in it (whether fears or desires)”; and, in the same passage, “the risk of forgetting where we stand ourselves”.↩︎
Holy Heretics, front matter, Book II contents summary of “The Olympic Spirit” §IV. The text is printed as “Paracelsus’s Magical Instructions, or Arcanum arcanorum”, following Franz Spunda’s 1923 edition from the seventeenth-century Vienna manuscript; the book states that the title is Spunda’s own and that the text travelled for centuries as part of the Pseudo-Paracelsian corpus. The Introduction frames the final section as “a form of baptism into the spirit and living presence of the cosmos”, relating to “the act of restoring the Olympian spirit within man”.↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book II, “The Olympic Spirit” §V: “these fragments, which four hundred years ago were deliberately hidden by adepts in separate texts”; “present a complete and workable version of the Ritual of the Olympic Spirit”; “It will avoid the deliberate pitfalls and traps that our ancestors set up to protect this secret of secrets, and yet remain faithful and authentic to the spirit of its original sources.” Also from the same section, on the withheld starry names: they “will only work if passed on personally to the magician by the spirits, and which will ‘expire’ after 140 years.”↩︎
Holy Heretics, Book II, “The Rite of the Olympic Spirit” §VII — the ritual text itself: “no fantasising. You simply shift your attention to what is already there.”; “It is not upon you to demand anything. You are only the voice that utters the call and the spirit that upholds the sphere. Focus on the great presence of your mind in this sacred space, not on any kind of outcome or success.”; the closing prayer, “Through it I behold the presence of my daimon, and my daimon beholds me. I am Thou, and Thou art I, one in a pattern of fate, one in a spark of divine fire, one in a seed in divine earth.”; and the final instruction, “wash your hands with water and salt, and go to bed without speaking to anyone.”↩︎