This Sunday the 15th at 21:00 GMT I will be on Witchtalk speaking with Karagan about demons.

Here is the text describing the show.

Numina is the plural of the latin term for the power of either a deity or a spirit that would be present in places and/or objects in the Roman religion. Demons (or the “immunda” or unclean “numina”)have a strange and obscure history. We do not know exactly where they come from and for some they don’t even exist. The fact is that in the history of magic, there are whole systems build to call upon these spirits and this is a fact…. One can even argue that most of the demonology that we can find in Judaism, was in fact carried from Persian Temples. Maestro Nestor’s interest in the occult stemmed from an interest in the darker aspects of magic during his teens, including Satanism, which he practiced until his early twenties. On a trip to New York things changed when during a book buying spree he encountered Cavendish’s The Black Arts and Waite’s The Book of Black Magic which introduced him to the grimoire traditions, and since then he has explored the right hand path traditions extensively. His work has previously been published on a variety of websites, as well as in Swedish language magazines
. His essay “Demons & Devils” appeared in the Both Sides of Heaven anthology edited by Sorita d’Este. He is currently engaged in working on a series of books on the practice of grimoire magic. See www.grimoiremagic.com for more information. On this show, we will listen to what Linus have to say about this particular intelligences and also learn why it is not a good idea to make pacts (contacts) with them! A WITCHTALK SHOW you will never forget! Linus biography written by Sorita d’Este for the anthology “From a Drop of Water” by Avalonia Books.

Click here to get to the page for the show.

Also make sure to vote on Witchtalk to get the highest position in the world. It is at number 30 now of podcasts.
Vote here.

Share on Facebook

Part 1 of this blog is now up and it is about what versions to buy or not buy of The Key of Solomon. It will be followed in a few days by Part 2 that will be about the Lemegeton and the Goetia. Will update this blog once the different parts are up.

You can watch the video on my youtube channel by clicking here.

Share on Facebook

In the next video blog I will talk about which books to buy and which you want to stay away from. This is a list of the books I will talk about. Expect it to be a few parts of the blog since youtube only allows 10 minutes at a time.

Pure Grimoires

Key of Solomon

Veritable Key of Solomon by David Rankine and Stephen Skinner
The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon by Joseph Peterson by Ebenezer Sibley and Frederick Hockley

Hygromantica (A translation of this is on the way)

Untrustworthy

Key of Solomon by Mathers

Key of Solomon by De Laurance

Lemegeton and Goetia

The Lesser Key of Solomon by Joseph Peterson
The Goetia of Dr Rudd by David Rankine and Stephen Skinner

Lemegeton – The Complete Lesser Key of Solomon by Mitch Henson

The True Grimoire by Jake Stratton-Kent

De Nigromancia by Roger Bacon

Untrustworthy

The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King by Mathers and Crowley

The pirated versions by Delaurance

Pure Crap

Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia: Sexual Evocation

Daemonolatry Goetia by S. Connolly

LUCIFERIAN GOETIA by Michael Ford

The Goetia Ritual Book by Kuriakos

The Goetia: How to summons these Spirits by Lightworker

Abramelin

The Book of Abramelin by Abraham Von Worms

Untrusted

The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage by Mathers

The Grand Grimoire translated Trident Edition

Also goes under the name Le Dragon Rouge, The Red Dragon

There is also a book that connects to it called Le Dragon Noire

Grimorium Verum

Grimorium Verum by Joseph Peterson

Grimorium Verum Trident Edition

The True Grimoire by Jake Stratton-Kent

Pure crap

The Grimoire Verum Ritual Book by Kuriakos or Lightworker

The Armadel

Untrustworthy

The Grimoire of Armadel by S. L. MacGregor Mathers

Pure Crap

The Grimoire of Armadel Ritual Book by Kuriakos

The Grimoire of Pope Honorius III

The Grimoire of Pope Honorius III – Trident Edition

Papal Magic: Occult Practices Within the Catholic Church by Simon (Contains a version of it)
The Grimoire of Saint Cyprian

The Grimoire of Saint Cyprian by David Rankine and Stephen Skinner

Picatrix

Picatrix-Oroborus Edition (translation from the Arabic text)

Picatrix Books I & II by Christopher Warnock, and John Greer (Entire translation for insane amounts of money on their website)

Heptameron and the Arbatel

Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy by Donald Tyson (includes Heptameron and Arbatel)

Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy by Stephen Skinner

Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy Oroborus Edition

Arbatel: Concerning the Magic of Ancients by Joseph H. Peterson

Sixth and seventh Books of Moses

Sixth and seventh Books of Moses by Joseph Peterson

Le Petite Albert
Le Grand Albert

Sworn Book of Honorius (planned release by Peterson

Le Dragon Noir

Share on Facebook

A great review-essay on grimoire publishing posted on Hadean Press Blog written by Jake Stratton-Kent.

Yours truly is even mentioned for my work in Both Sides of Heaven.

“Both Sides of Heaven is another compilation, with a most impressive list of contributors (including ardent grimoirists Aaron Leitch, David Rankine, Stephen Skinner, plus Charlotte Rodgers and yours truly). There is much of value here, and I mention but two personal favourites. Gifted academic and occult practitioner Kim Huggens gives an excellent appraisal of the daemons intermediary role between gods and men in the Hellenistic era. Maestro Nestor shares a personal account of his liberation from a truly demonic pact made in his youth, which marked the beginning of his mature path as a grimoire traditionalist.”

By Jake Stratton-Kent

Click here to get to the entire text!

Share on Facebook

Do not miss the Podcast with the amazing David Rankine on Greg Kaminsky’s site occultofpersonality.com .  Make sure to check out all the other amazing podcasts Greg has done with different magicians while you are there.

Maestro Nestor

Share on Facebook

It was apparently OK to talk about the project and upcoming book from Avalonia Books. It is handled by the lovely witted or perhaps I should say wicked Kim Huggens who has been a contributor for Avalonia Books before and is a major tarot and hoodoo/voodoo practitioner. The book will be called “From a Drop of Water: A Collection of Magickal Reflections on the Nature, Creatures, Uses, and Symbolism of Water”. A topic that I found very interesting and something that you might not think about that hard until you actually get involved in a project like this.

My contribution is about the use of water in the grimoires and believe me when I say you do spend a lot of water in this kind of magic. Plenty of holy water is needed and you do take a lot of baths. I have found a lot of things that I have not thought about before but found now that I was intentionally searching for water associations. One of the things I found was in Idries Shah’s “The Secret Lore of Magic” was a description from the “Book of Power” that Shah has a translation of. It is a description of how to make the elixir of life or the water of life that I found interesting. Only problem is that you have to travel to Africa to find a stone in the deserts and it only exists in Africa according to the book. I have actually used the book of power before and performed a ritual from it to get two persons to fall in love with each other with great success to my friends delight.

I think this will become a very different and interesting book in the end. I will see if I can get Kim to tell us more about the project as the contributions starts to come in. Still some time before the deadline is over:)

Share on Facebook

This is the book that made me realize that I was not alone with many of my opinions. For a long time I felt rather alone and undermined on forums and places like that for how I believed things worked when it came to evocation and grimoires. Lisiewski changed all that not just for me but for many magicians of the old arts that have been oppressed for such a long time by modern ceremonial magicians.

It is a book that serves many purposes. First of all it is a guide in traditional grimoire magic and shows how to apply a traditional style to the grimoire Heptameron which is also included in the book. Now you can debate weather or not all the axioms he lays forward are really needed or not but at least it is a serious attempt of creating a sort of standard for working with the grimoires.  It is also explained in a very simple way without any of the cryptic stuff modern new age magicians are so famous for. This is the book I recommend that all new students on grimoire magic reads first of all. Then they can move on to the more complex grimoire translations out there by legends like Stephen Skinner, David Rankine, Joseph Peterson, Donald Tyson and many less known translators and editors.

If you can you really should try to get a hold of the few Journals called Howlings from the pit that he wrote that further describe his style of magic. He expands a lot on his theories regarding grimoire and old school magic in them.

Another thing I love about this book is how he totally bring down the modern new age magicians of today. He does it with undeniable logic and using their own theories against them. He gives both Alister Crowley and the Golden Dawn a well needed wake up call and also reveals some interesting information on what Israel Regardie really thought about the Golden Dawn system that most modern magicians praises to the sky’s today.

That I think is a very important message that this book has. New is not always equal to better. Many people seems to have taken this the wrong way and think he is against all development but that is not the case. He is a strong believer in what is called New thought. Not just Crowleys and Golden Dawns version of it. I personally believe he suspected the same as I have for a long time. That something went wrong with magic during the period of the Golden Dawn and Crowley and that what we have today is a very weak version of magic that you can even question if it actually is magic or if it is not more a way to reach self enlightenment. Modern magic seems to have forgotten what magic really is about and Lisiewski explains this in a very effective way in his book.

It is a very provocative book and I can understand that many people feel hurt by it since it is basically saying that most modern magicians today are not even doing magic. Still I think this is a book that every magician should read since it will challenge you and probably upset most readers. If you can not take that you really have no business doing evocations anyway in my opinion.

Share on Facebook

After reading a bit more then half of the book I decided to not read more of it. You find your self constantly skipping between times and the grimoires he is talking about. Would have been much better if he would have talked about one book at a time and not all of them at the same time as it is now. The structure of the book feels more like a lack of structure and I fail to see what the chapter names has to do with the content of the chapters.

Also I think his definition of what defines a grimoire is very different from mine since he seems to bunch many magical books that I do not feel belong to the grimoire tradition at all in to it.

His talk about the grimoires being astral magic makes no sense to me either. Astral magic is when you work on the astral plane. The grimoires on the other hand is designed to take spirits from the astral plane to the physical so it hardly qualifies as astral magic.

The material it self seems mostly correct though but because of the lack of structure I just cant continue reading it.

I have also asked my self for who this book is written. It is to complex for beginners and to unstructured for the scholars. The magicians usually wants something more specific then this. So who was the main target for the book?

With a good structure of the text I think this could be a good book though but as it is now I would not recommend it.

Share on Facebook

Even though this book was made as an effort to disprove witchcraft it still holds genuine information on how magic was practiced in the 1500′s. For the grimoire magician it is actually a small treasure. Even if that part only takes up a very small portion of the book it reveals such things as protective circles not seen anywhere else. It describes a very early version of the Goetia for example and suggest that the lion skin girdle could also be made in Harts skin. That is buck skin for those of you that did not know that. Might not sound all that exiting for most people but for a grimoire magician that is a real find.

It offers much in the way of those sort of things and also gives us an idea how people actually worked the material in England at that period of time. As a book to disprove witchcraft I do not consider it that good but to show on how magic was practiced it is a great resource.

Share on Facebook

A while ago Sorita d’Este posted a link to a place where you can buy traditional tools for the Goetia. Click here for that link. As usual the lion skin got mentioned rather fast since that traditionally is one of the hardest objects to get. They do sell that in this store though. What made me think was a reference to Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft on page 241 we can read “…and he must have s drie thong of a lions or of a harts skin, and make there of a girdle…” Harts being Buck skin. So at least Reginald Scot believed it could be replaced with Buck skin. A buck meaning a deer. So why did he chose a deer as a replacement? Was he aware of the symbolical meaning that a lion had?

If look at the lion it self it represent such things as strength, royal cities, fortification and guardian of holy things. If we look at a deer it symbolize grace, beauty, speed, divinity, and fertility. So I guess it has speed instead of strength, it is divine so that could replace the holy aspects as a guardian, in a way I think we can connect it to royalty as well since it was often illegal to hunt these animals on royal ground. Making it almost reserved for royalty and noblemen. It can hardly have fortification unless you consider the horns perhaps. The dear is also connected to the Celtics and were given supernatural powers in their myths. This is omething I know very little about so I will let someone else fill int gasps about that if they want to.

I think this actually makes sense. If we consider that Reginald Scot was from England a lion must have been very exotic and the same goes for the people he was getting the information from. So they looked for animals that were around them and used symbolism to try and decide what to replace it with. What would interest me is to see what material might have been used in other countries as a replacement. Could we here in Sweden perhaps have replaced it with bear skin? Polar bears on Iceland? Tasmanian Devils in Australia? Would be very interesting if some documents on the Goetia would turn up that were used by magicians in other countries with another fauna.

Well that is it for today. Now it is time to go back carving sigils in to a candle!

Share on Facebook

First of all I am mainly talking about western traditional magic and high magic now. What I am about to explain does not apply to the eastern techniques since they have had this thinking for a long time. Nor does it apply on the so called sympathetic magic or nature magic.  Nor are all modern magic like this. I talk here in very generalized terms.

Anyway if we look at traditional western magic it has changed from being an outer process to an inner process. One of the big reasons for that is probably when Crowley changed the definition of magic. Crowley meant that magic was the art of causing change according to once will. It is very much alike the older definition with one exception that before Crowley it meant that magic was the art of causing change according once will with help from spirits. This thinking is supposed to come from Zoroastrian magic. Not exact quotes but this is the basic meaning of the two definitions.  So magic went from something that was an outer process that we needed help from spirits to perform. Meaning that the magician in it self did not really have any magical powers but was only able to function with the knowledge on how to manipulate spirits of different kinds. In a way they did have power of their own but it was in form of deep knowledge and Now in Crowley’s definition he has moved the power directly to the magician it self, making magic an inner process not at all depending on any spirits to be able to perform magic. The magic went from us believing in the spirits to us thinking they are just a part of our own psyche.

At about that time magic also changed its shape in other manners as well. It went from being a way to gain things like money and so on to become mostly about finding your self. Ideals that former were to be find in mainly eastern magical forms suddenly became the ultimate goal for the western magician as well. It started to be all about either becoming like a god your self or to be as close to god as possible. Finding and attaining your so called HGA was all of a sudden a primary goal for many magicians. It went from being a way to gain earthly things to a sort of self discovery method. It can sometimes be hard to see what the difference is between some magical orders and being in to Scientology or taking yoga classes. To me Yoga, Ki and the likes are not magic. It is energy manipulation mostly.

Now all modern magic is not like that but many are. Is there modern magic that is effective? Of course there are. So why make it more complicated and practice traditional grimoire magic? There are even modern ways to work the grimoires that work good. Well several reasons. One of the main being that most modern magic has been highly influenced by the grimoire tradition even if they are not aware of it. Even Wicca (can be read about in Sorita D’Este’s Wicca: The magical beginnings). So to understand much of the modern magic you really need to study the older one as well. Another reason is that grimoire magic is hard so if you can work traditional grimoire magic you have a very solid base to stand on and from there you can develop the magic further. It is is also highly effective if done right.

For me there are other reasons as well. I just fell in love with the actual art form and consider it to be one of the highest arts of magic you can ever achieve. So it is also a challenge for me and at the same time something I want to preserve in its original shape. I do other types of magic as well. Sometimes I even mix in some new age thinking to the more personal style of magic I practice. I am also a fan of root magic Santeria style even if I do not work it in a traditional way there.

Share on Facebook

I am sitting here only 4 hours after I received Avalonia Books A Collection of Magical Secrets that is translated by Paul Harry Byron with introduction and commentary by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine and find my self having read it in one sitting. It is a rather small book at only 161 pages but those are some extremely interesting pages.

The first of two parts of the book deals with something that is often called “experiments” in the grimoires. It is shorter and often easier ways to obtain things then doing an entire evocation in a grimoire. It deals with things from ways to not get shot, find treasures, curing diseases and all kinds of wonderful things. One thing that struck me was how similar some of the “experiments” are to the Swedish Black Art Books that circulated around Sweden in the 1700’s to the 1800’s. Some of them are very alike but do not use as much Latin and the Swedish material is more connected to the Swedish way. It feels though as if much of the Swedish Black arts Books must have lent ideas from the grimoire “experiments” since it draws from older sources. I wonder if not folk magic that was practiced in the 1700’s to 1800’s are not more related to the grimoires then many modern magicians care to admit.

The second part is more like a divination technique to get in to a sort of ecstasy stage of mind where deep Cabalah secrets will be revealed to you. This is something I have not worked with before but the descriptions are very straight forward so I think I will actually give it a go when I have the time.

This was a great presentation of a material that is often overlooked and underestimated. It is nice to see that people care about giving the public access to these more unusual materials that David and Stephen keeps bringing us. I believe this will become one of my favorites rather soon as I get more in to it. So this is defiantly 5 stars out of 5 possible!

Share on Facebook

While I have been working on my book and also talked to people about the subject of Grimoire Magic I have noticed that there are a lot of confusion on what Traditional Grimoire Magic really is. Even experienced magicians seems to think that as long as you work with the spirits in a grimoire you are doing grimoire work and can call your self a grimoire magician. Also there seems to be some idea that traditional grimoire magic can mean whatever style if its been along since the times of Golden Dawn and Crowley.

This is not the case. Just working with the spirits of a grimoire will far from qualify you as a grimoire magician. Lets say for example that you are a Golden Dawn member and chose to work with the Goetia Spirits and you then use techniques such as the LBRP and Bornless ritual in your work. Then you are doing Golden Dawn work and not Goetia work. If you are a Demonolator and use the spirits of the Goetia and treat them as your best est buddies you are doing Demonolator work and still not Goetia work.

For you to be called a Grimoire Magician you will have to work with the Grimoire and use the system described in said Grimoire. Traditional Grimoire Magicians follow every world in the grimoire to the end and make no changes. What I was describing earlier could at best fit in to the category of modern Grimoire Magic but even that is not a good fit. Within the modern Grimoire Magician I would place people like Poke Runyon and his work with the triangle as mirror instead of as a point of evocation. People who mixes different grimoires and such things. What I described earlier I would in those cases call  Golden Dawn magic or Demonolator magic. Only thing they have in common with the grimoires are the spirits used.

So now I have an entire chapter in my book explaing this in much more detail to try and make this clear for once.

Maestro Nestor

Share on Facebook