The Arbatel Experience: Completing a grimoire cycle

the arbatel experience: completing a grimoire cycle by FRATER ARCHER

The following pages have been written to give proof that the self-initiatory practice of the grimoires is still alive today - and in fact presents a path accessible to anyone who is not afraid to put in the required work and accept the related risks.

When a friend an I decided to perform the full ritual cycle of the Arbatel in 2009 both of us had ten years of practical magical training and theoretical education behind us. The only reason for stating this is to emphasise how strong one's foundations should be before one begins to work face to face with spirits that represent the living soul of planets within our solar system. While we had been trained as lone practitioners for more than a decade under supervision of an excellent and highly capable teacher, of course even our fundaments proved to have many cracks and missing stones. In magic, like in many performing arts, the practitioner themselves is the only safety net.

The implications of this fact obviously are significant: Once we decide to enter into communion with a certain spirit, there is no one who carries responsibility for its consequences but us. While many people are trigger-happy these days and open to take such risk, unfortunately there is very little understanding of how significant these consequences can be: on our mental wellbeing, on our physical health, on the land we live in and even on the loved ones who form members of our spiritual body...

Looking back - with one more ritual remaining for completion - neither of us any longer are sure that indeed this way of ascend is either the most balanced nor scalable one. Our human constitution simply is not meant to be exposed to the powers and consciousness one encounters on this path. While each ritual certainly was proof to us that such ascent is possible, we were confronted again and again with the most essential question: Is it necessary?

Life is asking a lot of questions from each of us - and it is putting a lot of initiatory experiences right in front of us. It actually might well be that life holds its own way of helping us to ascend on this magical ladder? We might have simply looked in the wrong direction - or barked up the wrong tree ourselves? The problem might not be to find a secret path of ascent - but to begin to understand what life truly is asking from each of us already. Aiming to understand the existing questions in our lives could result in much more growth and balance than shaking 'the tree' to throw more at us - while our ears remain deaf.

It is with such openness - and a lot of questions on my mind - that I am sharing the following six ritual accounts with you. Each one of them is flawed by my own shortcomings as a magical practitioner still mostly deaf to spirits and life. Yet each of them is flawless as an expression of their time as well as a desire to better understand the very spirits that form our lives.