Franz Bardon

Two accounts of Bardon are in circulation and they should not be mixed.

The documented one is thin. He was born on 1 December 1909 at Opava in Austrian Silesia, in a German-speaking family, in a town now in the Czech Republic. He performed as a stage magician under the name Frabato. He wrote three books of instruction, Initiation into Hermetics, The Practice of Magical Evocation and The Key to the True Kabbalah, which are unusual in the literature for being a graded practical curriculum, beginning with concentration, breath, and the equilibrium of the four elements, and refusing to advance the reader who has not done the earlier work. He was arrested by the Czechoslovak authorities and died on 10 July 1958 in Brno, in police custody, of pancreatitis.

The novelised one comes from Frabato the Magician, written by his secretary Otti Votavova and published after his death. It is a novel, and its publisher describes it as one: the battles with a Dresden black lodge, the escape from Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic, and the claim that Bardon was an incarnation of Hermes Trismegistus are its material, not the historical record. Some of it may draw on things he said; none of it is independently supported. It is nonetheless the source of most of what is repeated about his life, including by people who believe they are reporting fact.

Bardon's three textbooks make a claim no earlier occult author had quite made: that the whole of magical training can be delivered in print, to a solitary student, with nothing withheld. Initiation into Hermetics, the first and most admired, is a graded course of ten steps, each divided into training of spirit, soul and body: thought observation and one pointedness; conscious eating and breathing; accumulation of the elements in the body; the building of elemental equilibrium before any power is attempted. Nothing is left symbolic that can be made practical, and the student needs no lodge, no initiator and no belief, only the daily work honestly logged. The second volume, The Practice of Magical Evocation, and the third, The Key to the True Kabbalah, extend the course to spirit evocation and to a phonetic cosmic language, in the same manual like tone.

The books appeared in German in the 1950s, and their author, who had performed on stage as the magician Frabato, lived just long enough to see them in print: he was arrested in Czechoslovakia in 1958, where occult activity attracted the new regime's police as it had the old one's, and died that year in custody in Brno. The books survived him in exactly the way he designed them to, passing hand to hand without any organisation to protect or corrupt them, and more than one later system of self training quietly stands on his ten steps.