An Interview with Andre Consciencia

André Consciência is a Portuguese author, magician, and multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges the esoteric and the creative. A practitioner of Hermeticism and the magical system of Franz Bardon for nearly thirty years, he entered the Fraternitas Hermetica while still a minor. His experience extends across AMORC, the Order of Michael's Grail, the Thelemic Golden Dawn, and Astrum Argentum; he sits on the Inner Council of the Horus Maat Lodge and is a member of the OTOA-LCN. He teaches neo-shamanism and leads an active group of practitioners.

The interview that follows traces two arcs. The first is biographical: a childhood of unbidden mediumship, a family divided between Christian mysticism and traditional witchcraft, and a long apprenticeship through spiritist centres, Theosophy and Thelema before Bardon supplied a method adequate to what he already possessed. He is candid that none of it began in curiosity; it began in necessity. The second concerns the work itself. Consciência's books are systems rather than commentaries, and he is unusually forthcoming about their provenance — the commissions of his Lodge, the twelve-year oath discharged in The Lusitanian Grimoire, the intelligences who pressed their subjects upon him, and the kabbalist who taught him that a book may be an angel in disguise. He concludes with A Magical Study Series, accounting for each of its three volumes in turn.

Q: You've been a dedicated practitioner of Franz Bardon's Hermetic tradition for over twenty years. How did you first come to Magic, Hermetics and Franz Bardon's work, and what has kept you passionate about this path all these years?

Indeed, it is around 30 years of continuous practice, but I confess sometimes it feels like I've been at it for longer, or forever. There is so much less I remember from before starting practicing hermetics. It is interesting you put the question like "Magic, Hermetics and Franz Bardon's work". The other day they were replaying Kubric's movie "The Shining" in the Cinema and I went to rewatch it. There is a part where Dick Halloran tells the kid, Danny Torrance, that they have a thing his mother used to call "the shining". The movie (and Stephen King's book) makes clear the kid's father, Jack Torrance, has it as well. This shining is just another word for mediumship, although in Mike Flanangan's follow-up, "Doctor Sleep", it becomes something more, a sort of magic by excellence. Well when it comes to magic, since I remember, I had this "shining" and was practicing it most of the time involuntarily and sometimes voluntarily.

I could extract color vibrations from people's voices and words and reproduce them without word or voice, see and interact with the deceased and the elementals, have recurrent visions (some like fresh memories, some by being transported somewhere else) and so on. As well, on one side of my family there was a tradition of intense mediumship that led to specializations in Advaita Vedanta, that my grandmother, introduced to it by my grandfather, taught in India. Upon coming to Portugal she was met by Father Gregóri Verdonk, a Dutch missionary that had come to train a little army of exorcists among many other great achievements. They were called the White Priests because, as fathers of the Catholic Church, they would wear white instead of black.

Gegório made her his pupil and she became a wonder maker at the church who would work with many fathers afterwards. I worked with some of the white priests myself. My grandmother became an exorcist, a Christian mystic and a practitioner of christian witchcraft and took me as her pupil. All in all, it is important to add that many of this side of the family were adherents to the spiritist doctrine as arranged by Allan Kardec.

On the other side of the family there was a lot of St. Cyprian, Goetia and traditional witchcraft, but, while growing up, I had been taught to avoid that side of things.

I very soon joined a spiritist center but although I was quite young ended up finding them dogmatic and even narrow-minded. I engaged with a Wiccan Coven but found them to be quite lost. Then I had contact with someone from the Universal White Brotherhood (made famous by Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov and Peter Dunov) and shifted to this school and Theosophy altogether.

Hermetics (or rather Hermeticism in this case) I came to later, via Aleister Crowley and Thelema in general. I was combining UWB, the Thelemic Golden Dawn and A..A.. methods when someone introduced me to Franz Bardon (now Hermetics, properly speaking) and, little after, to an order based on his teachings called FH. At this point, although a significant time had passed, I was still quite young. What kept me passionate? What would be of me without it? Magic was burning bright and without following the techniques to handle its fire I would likely be dead by now. Not only this, the great need was no greater but smaller than the vocation.

Q: As a young person, you were even initiated into a Bardon-based Hermetic order while still a minor. What was it like to begin your magical training so early, and how did those initial experiences influence your journey?

It was like being graced with much needed oxygen. I was not exactly building abilities, but my abilities were hardly skills, as there was little control over them. I was finally making my abilities into skills and realizing the haunting power to it. This was in proportion to the talent of my instructor, Magnus Sarnarx (see Arcanum Hermeticum and The Great Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings) whom I consider to be undoubtedly one of the best. It makes little sense to highlight details of how the initial experiences influenced my journey: how does the base of a pyramid influence its shape? By determining it.

Q: Over the years you've studied many traditions – from classic Rosicrucian systems to Golden Dawn and Thelemic paths. How do you weave together these diverse influences into your own magical practice today?

We speak of many traditions but that is false. There may be many schools, not many traditions. Most of the schools follow the same tradition. But by learning different languages you become good at something that integrates them all, something called language itself. Think of J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien learned Latin, French, German, Middle English, Old English, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh, and Medieval Welsh. It was all still philology. Then, he created Quenya, Sindarin, Adûnaic, Rohirric, Khuzdul, Black Speech and Entish. You see, he created these languages first, and the characters and the worlds came to give them speech. This is the tradition of Thoth.

Q: For readers meeting you for the first time: what were the key turning points that took you from curiosity into a serious Hermetic magical practice—and what did each one force you to learn the hard way?

I was never curious. I was trying to survive. It was a matter of life or death, sanity of insanity. When I saw Hermetics worked flawlessly by virtue of universality, I grabbed it with nails and teeth. Still, I learned that with greater power comes greater responsibility. That magic, by nature, is never egoistic. It may aid in self-preservation, justice, and so on, but when practiced with unjustice it immediately blows in your face, since the alchemist cannot be but the laboratory.

Q: If someone new to magic were interested in exploring your books, which one would you recommend they start with first, and why?

Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun (Falcon Books Publishing). The Way of Abrahadabra (Black Moon Publishing), or The Dragon Tarot (Black Moon Publishing). These are books that take you as a beginner and walk with you towards adepthood. The first is influenced by Franz Bardon's "Initiation Into Hermetics" and trains magic in all steps with mystical introspection and soul mirror techniques, so as to have magic empower the ennoblement of the soul and this ennoblement releasing the magical siddhis in a feedback loop. The second is influenced, but less directly, by Thelema, and is an original grimoire of universal methodology into the awakening of all creative and regulative fundamental magical faculties. The third is a book that teaches by initiation via the arcana, in which each card has initiatory practices, invocative methods and evocative methods, so that one is really initiated in principle through the Tree of Life, spheres and paths between spheres. Then it teaches to use the tarot as a collection of 72 magical tools that compose also an army of servitors. As well, the final chapters form a grimoire that introduces the practitioner into European and Asian dragon traditions.

Q: You have written extensively and many of your titles logically move on from previous titles like a web of interaction. These in many cases are not just opinions in book form they are entire systems and new grimoires for the modern age. Can you reveal a little about where the inspiration for these books comes from?

Yes. Quite frankly, I follow what Franz Bardon suggests when he tells us not to teach magic or interfere unless asked to. My first books in English on this topic were "Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun" and "The Way of Abrahadabra". I was asked to write these books by The Horus Maat Lodge (of which I am an Inner Council member). By following the Lodge Mandalas/Working Zonules to the end, I reached the point where it instructs, among other things:

"Own Holy BooksOwn CultOwn Rituals and symbolsProducing Art – of many types.Creating Own Alphabet of Desire"

and concludes

"By this time the aspirant should be working his or her own unique path and creating his or her own unique magickal system as well as actively helping others to further their evolution."

I am still working on it, but the two books I mentioned gave back to the two schools that had a major influence on me, and Through the Soul Mirror found continuity in A Magical Study Series while The Way of Abrahadabra in The Path of Ipsos and The Inner Gateways of LAM (Esoteric Pillars). Some books are asked of me by Divine Providence or/and particular beings that express it. For instance, when I was passing through Nenad Talerman's "360 Heads of the Earth Zone: The First Step to Divine Providence" and revisiting old friends I was asked by one of the beings within to write A Guide to Stellar Magic & Astrological Mysticism.

I didn't think I knew enough about astrology and declined, but the intelligence, Balachman, kept insisting by different means until I could hardly go to sleep without his visitation. When asking Divine Providence about Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun I was given the help of Igigi, who curiously works with beasts, suggesting the ennoblement of our soul is the ennoblement of our relationship to the beasts within (and without). For A Guide to the Elementals, Aschmunadai provided me with the necessary anatomy of the book, the spirit then rushing to infuse it. The Path of Ipsos is still the same work I started in The Way of Abrahadabra as part of the mission bestowed by the Horus Maat Lodge, and it returns the favor to dear Nema Andahadna (author of Maat Magick), who is very much missed in the times we live.

To wait for human intervention bears equal importance. For instance, Tanya from Falcon Books felt a book about the ennoblement of the soul was missing at the time and asked me what I would think of writing one. I took it as a sign to start Through the Soul Mirror. And a good sign it was, for I think this area is one of my main talents, with my love and amateur but intense study of psychology. It opened the door to one of my most successful ongoing courses, Magic & Mystical Introspection. The Dragon Tarot was moved entirely by human intervention, with the freemason plastic artist and director Manuel Almeida e Sousa asking me to create a book for the tarot he had just drawn. The Inner Gateways of LAM was asked of me by another adept and artist following my work, still vaguely, something, he would say, on the Aeon of Set. This request would be but an initial seed.

The Lusitanian Grimoire comes from an oath I made during initiation into a grade of an order, and out of duty. It took me 12 years not to write the book but to complete the task of which it is only the last segment. I vowed to open tunnels to the revival of the pre-roman Iberian deities, and insert them within the more recent tradition of the Ars Goetia.

Now, at a Portuguese sect of Perennial Wisdom I met a certain kabbalist that showed me books (or even pages) can be angels in disguise. His sect had temples for these tomes, some kept for centuries hidden except to the eyes of those about to be initiated by that particular Celestial whose body was the book. You would enter, bow, gaze into the pages and start Knowledge and Conversation. There were, of course, methods to enliven this experience. And what is more, some of these books bear children by the impregnation of their initiates, who then give light to new works of a similar power.

These books, of course, were written in Hebrew, but there is a Portuguese Kabala. I figured, then, and considering also the English Qaballa of Crowley, the wanderings of Hegel, Foucault, Lacan and Ludwig Wittgenstein, that such a thing could be applied to any language, alphabet and, consequently, literary manifestation. Strangely, when I read the work by The Temple of Babalon Choronzon, called "The Book of Numbers: Volume 1: Ufos, Aliens, and Ultraterrestrials" I was immediately impregnated with The Inner Gateways of LAM. It was now but a matter of writing it. I wrote it all in a row, hardly sleeping. It still is one of my favorites.

A similar thing happened with my upcoming Beyond the Veil of Illusion (Falcon Books Publishing), in which I was reading a kabalistic book and was visited by the first head of Jupiter, Malchjdael. I was wondering, with the book laid by my side, how I had spent my money on such a basic thing and proceeded to enter vacancy of mind when annunciation arrived. The pages became something else entirely and I started seeing a script behind it, certainly hidden from the author himself, that, together with my consultation with the beings of The Practice of Magical Evocation (Franz Bardon), namely of the Sun sphere, the sphere of Jupiter and the sphere of Mars, dictated the whole structure of what was to come. Something of the kind happened with my newest work, yet to find a house, in which I was looking at a book of curiosities about occult symbology, written by people that do not really know these sciences conceptually and technically speaking, and the book, humbling me, came to life, revealing an entire system that, supported by certain operations of alchemy, aims to function as a sort of actionable language of languages.

Q: Your A Magical Series is a deliberate three-book arc. What can you tell us about this series? What were your aims in writing it? Can you introduce us to each book in the series.

The idea behind the three-book arc comes from a mastermind not often praised as deserved: Tanya from Falcon Books Publishing. In my head I would write a sequence of books connected to the Franz Bardon school of thought and magic, of which the first is truly Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun. The sequence, however, wasn't very explicit, and there is a deep difference between the format of Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun and the three books in A Magical Study Series, not only in style and content, as when it comes to the graphism of Tanya, also an important part of the content and of the inner life of the releases themselves. That being said, to understand how volume one in A Magical Study Series, A Guide to the Elementals, came to be, we may think of the documentary My Octopus Teacher, by James Reed, or his Chimp Empire. James revolutionizes wildlife documentaries by following up close the animals in their day to day life, in their intimacy and even emotional vulnerability.

I had seen My Octopus Teacher and decided to go to the beach, transfer my consciousness to the sea and study the Undines, clairvoyantly, for whole days and nights. When I could take the resulting ecstasy no longer, I moved to the forest to study gnomes or earth elementals, and so on. I had, obviously, my tool of the craft, the magical diary, filled from hour to hour with the documentation of everything I was witnessing. There were authors writing about the elementals and very well, like William Mistelle, but the methodology was entirely different, and only Paracelsus had come close. So, I set myself to make a book out of the things I had documented, finishing it with direct interviews in the triangle of art not to the elementals I studied during this adventure, but those named by Franz Bardon and Wilhelm Quintscher plus some of their subordinates. There is also introductory material on how different cultures deal with the sprites throughout history and an explanation of the mechanisms of communication with the sprites that some other aficionado of the cognitive philosophies of Giordano Bruno could have thought of, but did not.

A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah sheds light on something that nobody was or is writing about, actual Sphere Quabbalah, one of the most prevalent words in Bardon's "The Practice of Magical Evocation", although it is never explained or even described. I found the ten tones of Bardon's Quabbalah correspond to the 10 Spheres and that the letters make a cosmic elemental map throughout this Tree of Life, thus opening way to the sphere or cosmic elementals as well. The book, however, came to me when I was teaching tonalism in a music class, and it reveals a superior form of Quabbalah that is musical and not just vocalized, that is, it can be used with whole compositions and musical instruments. It offers all means to the cosmic letters, such as asanas, geometries, magical devices, hand-gesture quabbalah and so on. It also teaches how to do and activate magical squares with Bardon's cosmic language and how to solve Stejnar's cypher in a way that is mystical and operational instead of just theoretical.

I thought these discoveries would be a good offer to Bardon's school considering all that I had learned and received from it (it was a Bardon's school offering to itself)).

Finally, A Guide to Stellar Magic & Astrological Mysticism touches upon a problem that I have seen almost everywhere. The Practice of Magical Evocation by Franz Bardon is not simply a grimoire, it is an astrological system, plain to see and yet seldom seen if at all. Also, the hermetic approach to astrology is a practical one, and one that must necessarily presuppose the magician is meant to have a hold of his stars. Said like this, it may appear a simple feat, but this book is bigger than the other two combined and contains much more material. The one who is capable of operating in its scope, who masters their chart, balances it and recreates it according to objective, commands thus the planetary beings by the very nature of the magical current. This magician will certainly be unmatched.

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