About Frater Barrabbas Tiresius

rater Barrabbas Tiresius has been practicing ritual magic and studying the occult since his late teens, having by now accumulated nearly fifty years of experience. He has a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics and has had a long and distinguished career in the high-tech industry. He began his occult vocation as an Alexandrian Witch, being initiated and trained during 1976, and developed his magical expertise combining the methodologies of classical Gardnerian Witchcraft with the Golden Dawn system of ceremonial magic. He is always expanding his spiritual field of inquiry and has studied Magic, Yoga, Qabalah, Tarot, Astrology, ancient history, theosophy, philosophy, psychology and numerous other related subject areas. His personal spiritual beliefs and practices also include forms of Pagan Gnosticism and Hermetic Magic.

Frater Barrabbas has been described as a pragmatic practitioner of ritual magic, which he distinguishes in his writings from ceremonial magic. Although he has studied occult traditions of the past and found much in them to respect, he is not a prisoner of them. Frater Barrabbas believes that the occult traditions of the West, known as the perennial philosophy, must be constantly updated and made relevant to the current age. It is his mission and ambition to modernize and establish ritual magic as the principal tool of spiritual achievement in the 21st century. Frater Barrabbas follows a tradition of creative innovation begun by MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, and continued by Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, Franz Bardon and Alex Sanders, honoring and studying those who brought the practice of magic into the twentieth century.

In 1986, Frater Barrabbas and a handful of occultists in Kansas City formed an occult organization for the propagation of ritual magic called the E.S.S.G.(Egregore Sancta Stella Gnostica), aka Order of the Gnostic Star. It was the task of writing a common liturgy and grimoire of rituals that honed his skills of translating his extensive knowledge of ritual magic into a form useful to others. The lore of the Order of the Gnostic Star (E.S.S.G.) has well over a hundred rituals and many other articles that cover the full spectrum of ritual magic, from Elemental Magic, Celestial Magic, to Theurgy and Archeomancy. Yet this lore was deemed too advanced for the mass market, so he wrote other manuscripts to build a bridge that would allow intermediate students of magic to develop their skills in order to master the lore of the Order. The Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick series represents the first product of that literary distillation, and he has since written many other books and articles, including his first published book, Disciple's Guide to Ritual Magick.

Frater Barrabbas has sought in both the organization of the E.S.S.G. and in these various writings the most efficient method of training the individual magician. For without developing the abilities to write, perform and analyze the results of ritual magic, a magician cannot plumb the psychic depths of the collective conscious nor attain the vistas of sublime spiritual realization. Frater Barrabbas believes that unless individuals master the techniques of ritual magic, they can't consider themselves competent magicians.

Simply put, without a thorough experiential knowledge of magic there can be no magicians. Frater Barrabbas has dedicated himself to the promotion of the practice of ritual magic as the Western method of Yoga and as the tool for the future development of Western Spirituality.

 

Frater Barrabbas Tiresius