Franz Bardon
Franz Bardon (1 December 1909 – 10 July 1958) was a Czech occultist, author, and teacher of Hermetic philosophies. His specialties included ritual magic and the invocation of many different types of spiritual entities, including planetary intelligences, planetary spirits, angels and demons.
Bardon's scholarship of the Kabbalah and his expansion of its core principles has established his legacy as one of the most important occult figures of the 20th century.
Biography
Franz Bardon was a reclusive individual and much of his life remains obscure.
He was born in Troppau (Opava), Austrian Silesia, the eldest of 13 children. His father, Viktor Bardon, was a mystic. As a youth, Franz sought enlightenment through gnosticism and eventually felt an advanced soul entering his body (as possession or channeling). This experience provided him with his first magical initiatory experience.
In the 1920s and 1930s he worked as a stage magician under the name "Frabato." He also became an accomplished practitioner of real magic.
In 1932, he married Marie, with whom he had a daughter (Marie) and a son (Lumir).
World War II
In 1941 he was arrested by the Nazis and after refusing to assist Hitler magically, was imprisoned in a concentration camp and tortured. He escaped his execution when the Allies bombed the camp where he was confined. He escaped and spent the rest of World War II (1939-45) in hiding.
Career as a writer
He returned to his hometown after the war, continuing his occult work and writing the books for which he became well known. While studying, he made his living as a healer using alchemical preparations. Throughout the 1950s, Bardon set about the task of writing his three books as serious texts from the aspiring magician who did not have a teacher or working group. He wrote in Czech and his finished manuscripts were translated into German and published. English translations became available at the beginning of the 1970s.
His three most influential books were:
- Initiation into Hermetics (1956)
- The Practice of Magical Evocation
- The Key to the True Qabalah
Arrest and death
Bardon was arrested in 1958 by the Czech government for publishing occult materials. He subsequently died from pancreatitis on 10 July 1958 while in the custody of police.
Writing style
Bardon's works are most notable for their simplicity, their relatively small theoretical sections, and heavy emphasis on the practical use of magic with many exercises. His robust training programs were written with the intention of allowing students who wished to practice magic the means to do so if they could not study under a teacher.
Initiation Into Hermetics
Initiation Into Hermetics (1956) provides step-by-step instruction in the form of practical exercises. These exercises are aimed at developing body, soul and spirit.
- Mental exercises of the Spirit (or abstract mental being) begin with simply observing the mind and progress from there, with each subsequent exercise building on the previous.
- Astral exercises of the Soul focus on systematically cataloging the positive and negative aspects of the self and, later, transforming and purifying the negative aspects into positives.
- Physical exercises of the body stress physical health and development as well as the integration and use of the physical body and physical environment.
The Practice of Magical Evocation
The Practice of Magical Evocation is Franz Bardon's second volume of The Holy Mysteries. In magical terms, the book is a practical guide to the proper evocation of and communication with divine entities existing in the atmospheric zones surrounding planets, stars, and moon as well as in the earth itself. Included with the names and descriptions of the various entities are a collection of previously unpublished magical sigils for the 72 Kabbalistic angels, as well as an account of ancient Kabbalistic astrology.
He believed that magicians could communicate with these spirits through careful ritual techniques combined with meditation to enter a deep state of altered consciousness.
The Key to the True Kabbalah
In The Key to the True Kabbalah, Bardon demonstrates that mysticism of letters and numbers – the "true Kabbalah" – is a universal teaching of great antiquity and depth. Throughout the ages, adepts of every time and place have achieved the highest levels of magical attainment through the understanding of sound, color, number and vibration as embodied in the Kabbalah. This book, the third in Bardon's texts of Hermetic magic, is a practical guide to attainment.
The idea behind this work is that the True Kabbalah should be viewed (and utilized) as a method of empowering the letters of the alphabet to create magical effects through their combination.
Legacy
Bardon was assisted by his long-time student Dieter Rüggeburg, who published both the German and English editions of his several books and continued to keep them in print. In the 1990s, a Franz Bardon Foundation was established and for several years issued a newsletter, but appears to have disappeared as the decade came to a close.
His children, Lumir and Marie, still live near Opava in the Czech Republic. Lumir became a physician and wrote a biography of his father titled Memories of Franz Bardon (2004).
In a 1977 interview, musician Daryl Hall (of the duo Hall & Oates), admitted to having interest in metaphysical concepts and claimed to have "devoured" the books written by Aleister Crowley and Franz Bardon. At the time of the interview, Hall was collaborating with musician Robert Fripp, from the band King Crimson, whose music was used in the opening credits of the occult horror film Mandy (2018).