Franz Bardon

The teaching

Taught from his three books, Initiation into Hermetics, The Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key to the True Kabbalah.

The elements and the two fluids

Bardon teaches that everything created comes from akasa, the ether, the causal world beyond space and time, which the faiths call God. From it come four elements, which are not common fire, water, air and earth but universal principles. Fire is heat and expansion, and its force he calls the electric fluid. Water is cold and contraction, and its force is the magnetic fluid. Air is no true element but the mediator between them, taking warmth from fire and moisture from water. Earth, born last, binds the other three and gives them form, and with it come space, measure, weight and time: it is the four-pole magnet in which all the others work.

Each element has an active and a passive pole, a building side and a destroying side; good and evil, he holds, are human names for these. The human being is the universe in small. In the body the head belongs to fire, the chest to air, the abdomen to water and the whole frame of bone and flesh to earth, while akasa is hidden in the blood and the seed. Health is the harmony of the elements in the body, and the same harmony in the character he calls the magic equilibrium, without which no further step is safe.

The rule of the training

His course runs in ten steps, and each step trains the mind, the soul and the body together, for training one alone, he warns, upsets the balance and brings danger. Nothing is to be hurried: a step is left only when it is mastered, and a person of average gifts may take a fortnight to a month over the first. The student keeps a fixed hour for practice until it becomes a habit, is kind and tolerant to others and hard on themselves, keeps silence about their path and progress, and records every exercise in a diary.

The first step: watching the mind

The first mental exercise is to watch the mind. Sitting or lying relaxed, with the eyes closed, the student observes the train of thoughts for five minutes as a silent onlooker, neither following them away nor pushing them off, and without falling asleep. It is done morning and evening and lengthened by a minute a day, until ten minutes pass without the thread being lost.

Then come three more. The first is to keep work thoughts out of the home and home thoughts out of the work, and to do everything with full attention, a habit to be kept for life. The second is to hold one chosen thought for ten minutes against all others. The last is to hold the mind empty, with no thought at all, for ten minutes, awake and in control.

The mirrors of the soul

The first work of the soul is to know itself. In a private diary the student writes every fault they can find, without mercy and without excuse, at morning and night for a week or two, until the list is as full as it can be made. Then each fault is given to an element: jealousy, hatred, vindictiveness and anger to fire; frivolity, boasting, squandering and gossip to air; indifference, laziness, negligence and instability to water; melancholy, dullness and irregularity to earth. Each element's list is divided by strength into the faults that rule, those that come less often, and those that come only now and again.

The same is done with the good qualities: courage, enthusiasm and firmness for fire; joy, diligence, kindness and optimism for air; modesty, compassion, calm and forgiveness for water; endurance, conscientiousness, sobriety and punctuality for earth. The two lists are the black and the white mirrors of the soul, shown to no one. They show which element rules the character, and the work of the next step is to weaken the strongest faults by self-control, by suggestion and by building their opposite virtues, until the elements stand in balance.

The body, the breath and the food

For the body he gives a plain morning rule: brush the skin until it glows, wash in cold water, or lukewarm for the sensitive, rub dry, and keep the body supple with a few minutes of exercise. Breath, he teaches, is a matter not of quantity but of the idea it carries. The student sits relaxed and breathes in slowly through the nose, picturing a quality such as calm, health or peace entering with the air and passing into the blood; seven calm breaths morning and evening are enough at first, one more is added each day, and the practice never runs past half an hour. He warns against the forced breathing of other systems, and the house adds that the breath is never held or strained.

Food is taken the same way. Before a meal the student fixes the same wish into the food, eats slowly, without reading or talk, in the conviction that the wish is entering the whole body, and treats the meal as a sacred act, as the Eucharist is. Water, which holds an impression best when cold, is charged with the wish before washing. One wish at a time, he says, for whoever chases two hares catches neither.

The steps that follow

Later steps build on these. The student learns to hold an imagined object, sound, feeling, scent or taste for five minutes each, counting lapses on a string of beads; to give suggestions to the deep mind in the present tense at the edge of sleep; to breathe through the whole skin; to place consciousness in an object, an animal or a person; and to draw the elements into the body and send them out again. The last steps teach travel of the mind and of the astral body, the magic mirror and, at the end, conscious communion with one's personal god.

The house teaches these as his book gives them, as stages of concentration and imagination, to be stopped at once if they bring dizziness, pressure, fear or a sense that the world is unreal, and not for anyone with a history of psychosis.

Evocation and the letters

His second book is for the one who has finished the first. Within a circle, with a triangle outside it for the being called, the magician calls by their seals the spirits of the elements, the three hundred and sixty heads of the zone that girdles the earth, and the beings of the planets. Only one who has gained the balance of the elements may attempt it, he holds, and he warns against seeking power from demons. The house teaches it only as what the book holds.

His third book gives the magic of the letters. Each letter is a force with its own colour, musical note, element and feeling, and the student learns to sound it in the imagination, first in the mind, then in the soul and at last in the body, until it can be spoken with all three at once; letters are then joined into formulas, a language of power whose claim, like the rest of his course, is his own.