Introduction: Support Angela’s Symposium

Dr Angela Puca: Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca, and I’m very pleased to invite you to the live stream Symposium or the general Symposium if you’re watching this after the live. I’m a PhD and a religious studies scholar, and this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, esotericism, paganism, Shamanism, and all things occult. As you know, my videos are always based on peer-reviewed academic research, and I’m in the field of anthropology of religion, so part of my work is also to be in dialogue with practitioners. I’m always very pleased to have practitioners on this channel so that you can have both the perspective of an academic when I interview academics, and the perspective of a practitioner, because both, of course, are valuable and have their place. So, before we start and introduce our guest, I’d like to remind you that this project of delivering free academic knowledge and bringing you amazing guests can only exist thanks to your support. So, if you have the means and want to support my project, you can find all the ways in the links in the bio everywhere. You can support me via PayPal, Patreon, Ko-fi, YouTube memberships, super chats, in any way—anything is appreciated—and also sharing my videos around so that the Symposium can grow will be massively, massively appreciated. Now, let’s bring on our fantastic guest for today, who is Frater U∴D∴. Hello, and how are you today? First, I should mention that he’s asked to be off camera, so that’s going to be fun, of course, but so that people know well.

Meet Frater U∴D∴/ Frater V∴D∴

Frater U∴D∴: Hi Angela, I’m pleased and honoured to be here. I follow your stream not regularly but on and off, depending on the topics you’re covering, and I’m happy to be here.

Dr Angela Puca: Have you enjoyed my work on the channel so far?

Frater U∴D∴is a fan of Angela’s Symposium

Frater U∴D∴: I absolutely have, yes. You come highly recommended and rightly so.

Dr Anela Puca: Thank you so much, and I’m very pleased to have you here. You’re a very big name in the esoteric world, so I’m honoured that you’re here to converse with us. Since people really like a backstory, can you tell us how you got into magic and what your own path in magic is? How did you get into it and, you know, what has your path been like?

Frater V∴D∴’s Backstory – early start

Frater U∴D∴Well, it started off basically with an uncle of mine. I mean, there’s no real magical tradition in my family or anything, you know, no spooky grandfather or great aunt who would foresee the future or anything, but this uncle of mine, I mean, he was rather young, fairly young at that time, and he was involved in management things, and so he discovered yoga. When I was nine years old, he was ranting about yoga all the time, and he got me interested.

So, I actually bought the book he recommended on yoga. My father was in the German diplomatic service, and we were just being posted to Khartoum, Sudan, and we did this by ship, on a freighter, so I had a lot of time on my hands. I started digging into that book and started, you know, doing some yoga exercises and very basic meditation, and that’s essentially what set me off. I also got a book about auto-hypnosis and started dabbling with that a bit, and from then on it never really left me. I mean, yeah, there was the odd hiatus, or I mean, at nine you don’t really do this systematically, so there would be a lot of times when I wouldn’t address the issue. Also, it was a question of sourcing, but then later on I discovered, you know, good old charlatans like Lobsang Rampa, and I tried to get anything on the occult or esoteric subjects available to get my hands on it, mainly books, and that’s how it got started.

Frater V∴D∴’s Backstory – University & OA Spare

Now, I was really interested in Eastern philosophy more than anything else. I wasn’t really aware of a Western tradition of what they call Western esotericism these days. This only came later when I was in Germany when I started with my studies at university. I was actually looking for a topic for a dissertation for my doctorate originally in English literature, and I discovered that people like Aleister Crowley and others had actually delved into occult subjects in fiction, and so that essentially became my excuse. I went to London, and at Foyles Bookshop, as it happened, they had just stocked up their Aleister Crowley library, and I basically bought the entire library they had available there. I returned to Germany, and now I had a big excuse why I was going to really dig into occultism, and yeah, basically, it started from there. Later on, I started getting more interested in the Western tradition, got interested in people like Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley (I mentioned already), and others. Mainly, it was the UK-based input because the German tradition was quite different and not as easy to get hold of at the time. Until back in 1979, I was still officially studying at university, but for various reasons, two friends of mine, a couple, and I decided to set up an esoteric bookshop in Bonn, Germany, where I was living at the time. So that got me going even more, and within the confines of that bookshop, we eventually set up the Bonn Workshop for Experimental Magic with a lot of people, around a dozen or so, who were interested. Some were practitioners, some were absolute beginners or just getting into this stuff, and so we had regular sessions and did a lot of experimental magic. Initially, I dabbled in sigil magic like Austin Osman Spare proposed it, and that’s what got me hooked finally once and for all, and well, I’ve been at it ever since.

Dr Angela Puca: And what made you gravitate towards Chaos Magick?

Frater UD & Chaos Magick

Frater U∴D∴ Chaos Magick actually came about when a German friend of mine, who was part of that Workshop for Experimental Magic as well, discovered Liber Null, the English edition, and he gave me a copy of that. I was really, really very impressed by that kind of approach. Before that, I had started to, you know, kind of conceptualise magic. Now, to make this clear, this is my language, this is my terminology; you won’t find it necessarily in other people’s books or papers on that. I started to distinguish two types of magic: dogmatic and pragmatic magic, which is to say dogmatic magic, to put it in an academic way, is more or less an essentialist magic. Well, there’s a true way to do things, and there’s a false or wrong way to do things. There are true metaphysical tenets, and there are false ones, whereas pragmatic magic takes a less Eurocentric approach and says, well, look, there’s this German saying that there are people living behind the hills as well, and that’s what I did. I said, well, look, if you do a love spell, let’s say in the Hermetic Tradition of the Golden Dawn, you’ll use Venus, for example. If you do planetary magic, for Venus, you use the correspondences like the number seven, the colour green, the metal copper, and so on. Do it on a Friday and whatever, you know the drill.

And whereas, let’s say, people in Cambodia or in the Congo or in Brazil do love magic too, they don’t know or use Venus, they don’t use copper, they don’t use the colour green, or maybe they use something different. They may not use copper for a metal and not do it on a Friday. If we assume that they’re just as effective as we are, the pragmatic approach is that it can’t be due to there being some, you know, Venus essence in the metal copper or in the colour green. It must be something else that works there, and so pragmatic magic only has one single dogma: if it works, use it. Now, when I discovered the approach of Chaos Magick as outlined in Liber Null, which was all I had at the time, I thought, well, hey, this is exactly what I’ve been thinking and actually writing about all the time. This actually covers a lot of my initial thoughts. It was quite a different kind of approach and a different terminology, and very original in its own way, absolutely. I’m not saying this just, you know, I felt I was being rediscovered—not at all—but I thought this was a very pragmatic approach towards things. It gets rid of a lot of cultural and historical ballast, and I like it.

Frater UD Translates Liber Null

So, what I decided was I wanted the German public to be aware of this book, and so I tried to get in contact with the author, but that turned out to be futile. As I learned later on, it wasn’t possible because he was actually touring the world at that time, you know, as a backpacker essentially, and so he wasn’t available. So I translated the book anyway and put in a passage right at the beginning with a request for the owner of the original copyright to please contact me so we could settle terms and so on, because I didn’t just want to pirate it. I actually set up my own publishing company for Liber Null, basically for Chaos Magick. Later on, when Peter Carroll returned to England, he was made aware of this. I was living in Berlin at the time, and he wrote me a fairly, well, let’s say, not very angry but not exactly happy letter, which I can understand from his point of view. He couldn’t read German anyway, so he probably didn’t get to read that passage I put in as well. I was just, you know, pirate copying his stuff. So, I responded immediately and apologised, of course, explained the situation, and invited him to come to Berlin, which he did. So we spent a very long weekend there discussing things almost 24/7, and we finally agreed on terms. I actually paid him his royalties, as would you, and then we agreed to hold a seminar together in Germany on Chaos Magick.

Founding of the Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros

We did, and in the course of that seminar—it was in West Berlin—we formally founded the Illuminates or The Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros. The IOT had been in existence virtually before, but it was never really a formal entity. So what we did now was we actually set it up as a formal entity, you know, with a constitution and things like that. And that’s how it went on and became a roaring success in the German-speaking world, at least. Right until that break we’ll probably talk about later on, about 80% of the members were from the German-speaking countries.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, that’s so fascinating to hear you talk about this. You know, these are things that I’ve read in books, and having you here describing how it actually happened, it’s impressive. It must have been quite a time, I mean, to be there, you know, regardless of how things ended up.

Frater U∴D∴: Oh, it was, it was actually. I mean, both of us, I mean, Peter Carroll and I, weren’t spring chickens actually, but it was still, yeah, we had quite a wild time, especially while it lasted, and there was a lot of fun. A lot of fun was had by all, as they say, and it really worked out fine for quite a while. Lots of people were really very much taken in by it, and I think it actually changed quite a lot of people’s lives. This antinomian approach to things, you know, it wasn’t this kind of stuffy occultism where you had all these hierarchies and invisible Masters telling you what to do and especially what not to do. Chaos Magick was born really out of the punk and post-punk culture in the UK essentially. I mean, there were many other influences on it, of course, and that was really reflected in the entire approach. So it was one big joke on the one hand, I mean, having lots of fun, but of course, there was this pragmatic element to it also: if it works, use it.

I mean, so we would work, let’s say, with comic strip kind of entities and just pretend they were real and then do rituals around that. And if it worked, hey, great. So we knew it wasn’t really about digging into ancient Greek and Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, and Babylonian lore and what have you, which was all fine. I mean, nobody was told not to do that, but a lot of what we did was tongue in cheek on the one hand and very much results-oriented on the other, and it panned out, and lots of people had a lot of fun with it.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, and I mean, how, I mean, just out of curiosity, because you said you would also try with comic strips and see, let’s try and work with this character and see if it works or not, but would you also work on finding a pattern? So, say for instance, you would do magic using a certain character and then another one and then another one, and in some cases it would work and in others it wouldn’t work. So would you try to find a pattern of what made it work as opposed to the instances when it didn’t work?

Identifying Patterns in Chaos Magick

Frater U∴D∴: Well, I’d say some of us probably did, but if so, they didn’t really document a lot about it. But we’re not, you see, actually, I mean, yeah, you’re absolutely right about detecting patterns, and that’s part of my early articles which I then published in German, usually in Unicorn Magazine or later on, when that came about, in English in Chaos International. But basically, you see, we were actually raised on people who had told us there were patterns, you see. And so we took a look at that. So we weren’t really that interested in finding out whether there’s a Voodoo, let’s say Lwa, which might equate to Thor in Norse mythology or to Ares with the Greeks or whatever. People who are interested in that sort of thing would obviously do it, but we were more interested in other kinds of patterns, like what I mean is, is magic about trance in the first place? And we said yes, it probably is to the best of our knowledge. So what kind of trances are there, or what in Chaos Magick is called gnosis? And so we experimented with that kind of stuff. But it was also highly syncretistic in the sense that we would maybe use rock music during a ritual addressing.

Well, I’ll give you one example. We didn’t do a Saturn ritual; we did an entropy ritual. And so this was basically, you might say, a kind of applied patternisation by saying, well, Saturn is also something which you might find in the concept of entropy. So rather than, let’s say, if you want to hex someone, do a death spell or whatever evil thing you’re up to on someone, yeah, you could use Saturn perhaps, or you could use the concept of entropy, you know, making them stop living or whatever. And it’s more than just about terminology; this is a very important point because actually at that time, there was a big, big thing, you know, a big hype about paradigm shifts. And so that was what it was all about; it was really about shifting paradigms most of the time rather than trying to find common denominators, let’s say, within mythology or theology or cosmologies or whatever.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, I guess when I talked about patterns, I meant more patterns of efficacy rather than patterns of relating, you know, finding correspondences like relating a specific deity to another colour or to a number. I was thinking more about if you were experimenting, and I’m assuming one of your aims in your magic practice was for the magic to be effective. Would you just randomly try different things and then try to identify patterns to see what would make magic work? I mean, what were the essential components so that it would work?

Frater U∴D∴ – Five Models of Magic – how they came about

Frater U∴D∴: Essentially, yes, though perhaps not always in a very systematic manner, but essentially yes. That’s where my five models of magic actually came from. We found that, well, there are various ways to skin a cat, as the English saying goes, and there are various approaches to it. As I said when I elucidated pragmatic magic a bit, I mentioned that a Voodoo guy or Mambo will go about this thing in an entirely different manner than someone in the Hermetic or Rosicrucian tradition, or someone who will just do a sigil according to the system or method of Austin Osman Spare. We found that, well, okay, for some people, some kinds of approaches or models, you might say, might be more efficacious than others. Some people will find that if you work with spirits, it is easier to do healings, whereas others will say, well, no, I prefer an energy model to conduct a magical healing because it works better for me. It doesn’t mean it must work better for you or anyone else. So, it wasn’t relativist in the sense that anything goes, except for anything goes as long as it works. That indeed was the basic tenet, and that, of course, is not what traditions are all about.

And so that’s where the iconoclasm and, you might say, antinomian attitude or even conceit, if you will, came about and what it was based on. People would have to find out on their own what worked best for them, and nobody could tell you that this is the best technique to work with. It may be for me, it may be for 20 other people, but it may not be for a hundred other people who are reading this or listening to us or trying it out. So it doesn’t really give you any absolutes, but that’s the whole point, really. That’s why one of the battle cries of Chaos Magick has always been, as Robert Anton Wilson put it, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” So no holds barred, and truth is a very relative kind of concept. In terms of efficacy, this was all about results-based magic. This wasn’t about any highfalutin metaphysical, you know, higher development of your soul to attain the Divine or whatever. People who are interested in that kind of thing were perfectly free to do so, but it didn’t really feature a lot in Chaos Magick itself.

Is Frater UD still a Chaos Magician?

Dr Angela Puca: Would you still consider yourself a chaos magician?

Frater U∴D∴: I wouldn’t say, let’s put it this way, I do view Chaos Magick as a subset of pragmatic magic, which is not a hierarchisation. I’m not saying pragmatic magic stands above; it’s just a more general term where Chaos Magick fits in neatly. If you ask me whether I am a pragmatic magician, yes, I am, and I still am.

Frater U∴D∴: But on the other hand, I’m a bit loath to go for isms these days because, frankly, I’ve had too much of that, you know, been there, done that, no more need for that [ __ ] in my life. So whenever people come up, you know, with the latest revelation that this is the way to go and only this or anything else is just [ __ ], all I can say is yawn and say, come off it, mate. I’ve been there. I mean, I know what you’re talking about, and I know why you’re talking about it in this way, but believe you me, there’s more than that.

Dr Angela Puca: I see. So would you elucidate a bit more on the five models of magic?

Frater U∴D∴: Initially, this was an article I published, which I wrote in English and published in English in Chaos International. And basically, what it tries to do is to give you a rough outline of different approaches to magic. They are rough, though not entirely, not precisely chronological to some extent, but that’s not the point. This is not really about the history of magic and five esoteric models. This is more about five ways to address magic and come to terms with it and make it work for you.

The Spirit Model of Magick

So the first model is the spirit model. What does that entail? Basically, it’s a view of the world where everything, you know, has a soul or is in one way or another inspirited. There are spirits around which are really separate discrete entities, like people, like animals, like all living beings. They may be invisible, but they’re there, and they are responsible for conducting magic or making magic work. So what a spirit model magician does—most shamans are, by the way—what a spirit model magician does is he or she addresses spirits, visits the spirit world, gets acquainted with them, makes friends with some, makes enemies with others, this, that, and the other, learns to abide by their rules or by their requests, and so on, and basically handles spirits, is a spirit handler in a way. And so if someone comes to that sorceress or that shaman and says, well, you know, hey, my horse is sick, could you do something about it, they may come and then look at the horse and say, well, yeah, there’s this evil spirit in there, and we’ve got to exorcise it, and once we’ve exorcised it, we may put another protective spirit in there if the spirits are okay with it, and then the horse will get well. And that’s how they work. And so everything is explained basically by the workings of spirits. This is probably the oldest type of magic, in as much as we are historically aware of it. We cannot be 100% sure, but there’s a lot of plausible indications to adopt that view.

The Energy Model of Magick

I think the next model roughly comes about, let’s say, with Mesmer, at least as far as the West is concerned. Mesmer was interested, I mean, it was pre-French Revolution, late 18th century. He was about magnetism. He discovered what he perceived as this force, this life force called magnetism, animal magnetism. He was quite a bit of a showman; he was very successful, and he conducted healings and types of what we would today probably term stage hypnosis and things like that. From then on, it spilled over, and you find Reichenbach speaking about Od, you will find Bulwer-Lytton using Vril, anthropology discovers Mana in the Polynesian context, and this, that, and the other. And so suddenly, the energy model says, well, we don’t need spirits. What things are about is actually a choreography of energies. So if that horse is sick, there’s probably some energy problem with it, you know, like Chi in China and so on. I’m mentioning this because, obviously, Chi in China or Mana in the Polynesian culture are a lot older than Mesmer. So I’m just talking about Western esotericism and how they discovered this kind of thing. I’m not saying that people pre, let’s say, 1200 didn’t use energy in their magical approaches, but as a model, or you might say as a big paradigm, it really hit the West basically in the 19th century and onwards. So that energy worker will maybe go to that sick horse and treat it with anything—it could be acupuncture, it could be hand healing, or whatever, or what later on came to be famous, but that was way after World War II, as Reiki or whatever. So the point being that everything is really being explained as the workings of energy.

You have precursors in the humoral therapies and alchemy and so on and so forth. What I’m basically saying with my five models of magic, what I’m trying to do, is really not about, as I said, about the history of magic in a chronologically sound and historically proven manner; it’s just a rough chronology, if anything.

The Psychological Model of Magick

After that comes the psychological model. Well, in the 19th century, people like Freud and Boyer and some precursors too, and in a way even Mesmer did that to some extent. And Freud, the young Freud, was very much into hypnosis, let’s not forget. And they discovered psychology, or the psi, you might say, what Freud terms the subconscious. His pupil, student Jung, later on called it the unconscious. And so the psychological model—and we have a very, very strong indication of a magician actually using that—his name is Austin Osman Spare, this English occultist and world-class artist, I must say, who discovered Freud. And he discovered or developed, or whatever however you might call it, a system of creating magical sigils, and basically this was psychological. His approach was psychological. Freud, of course, wasn’t about magic at all; he was about therapy. And he said, well, complexes, for instance—in a very simplistic way, putting this in a very simplistic way, don’t let’s not go over the top here—but so in a very simplistic way, Freud put it that, well, you know, there are some traumas, for instance, which get suppressed by the conscious because they’re too painful to live with. So they get suppressed into the subconscious, and stuff that’s suppressed in the subconscious tends to emerge again if you don’t do something about it.

So that’s what psychoanalysis is all about. Where there was id, there should be ego. In future, that’s the whole tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis. Now, what this basically says is that stuff that gets suppressed actually manifests itself, albeit in a manner you don’t want it to, you know, like when you get a neurosis and you keep washing your hands 20 times a day or something because you’re afraid of germs or whatever, or that’s the rationalisation you put to it. And so, and this was Spare’s genius, what he actually said was, well, in that case, let’s invert the process. If you want something to happen, let’s suppress it first. So what he did was create a sigil based on a statement of will, a sentence like, let’s say, “I want this horse to be healed.” He made a glyph of that and then he would suppress it, get into a trance, usually masturbatory, but there are other ways of that as well, like his death posture and other methods. Anyway, he would get into a trance to kind of, you know, inoculate the unconscious with that sigil.

And why a sigil and why not just the straight sentence, as they would do in cubism, for instance, or positive thinking and so on? Because there’s this concept Freud introduced, the concept of the censor, which will actually prevent you from voicing stuff that might be contrary to some moral issues, conventional moral laws as postulated by your superego or whatever. So in order to basically smuggle through this thing via the censor, what Spare did was encode it in a sigil, in a glyph, and then it would be in the subconscious, which because it was suppressed, would make it come true, would make it actually manifest in the outer world. So that’s the psychological model. It doesn’t really explain how this works, as the energy model does or the spirit model would. It just says, well, it’s somehow the unconscious, the psyche will actually make this stuff manifest. It doesn’t explain the mechanics, so it’s basically a kind of an intermediary model because it doesn’t really offer any dedicated explanations on how the mechanics actually work.

But anyway, that’s the psychological model. This actually became quite popular in Western esotericism and Western magic as well, right up into the ’60s, where people, you know, authors like Dion Fortune or William Gray or others, or Colin Wilson or whoever, they would tell you, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, they would tell you, well, you know, when you use green for Venus and seven and copper and Friday and whatever, this is basically just a kind of programming your psyche. Venus being connected, let’s say, to love matters and beauty and arts and whatever, and so whenever you start, you know, using a Venus instance, which you’ve trained your psyche to kind of, you know, liaise with the Venus concept and use the colour green and seven green candles and what have you, then your psyche will be able to actually conduct something on that Venusian current or whatever you’re trying to achieve. So that is essentially a kind of psychological programming which really predominated Western magic for quite a while. Now, that is the psychological model.

The Information Model of Magick

And then comes the information model. The information…

Dr Angela Puca: We are at the fourth one, right?

Frater U∴D∴: Yeah, yeah, thank you for pointing that out, absolutely. So first is the spirit model, second is the energy model, and third is the psychological model. The fourth one now is the information model. The information model is a post-World War II concept. It is not really spoken about in Chaos Magick, but there’s a lot about information and quantum mechanics in Chaos Magick anyway, so it does relate. Personally, I formalised it later on in what I termed cyber magic, but that was an entirely experimental approach. Anyway, what is the information model about? The information model says, well, matter itself is dumb. What it needs to actually create a form or function or whatever is information. For example, if you set your TV screen to white noise, you’ll have a chaotic runabout of protons, or photons in this case, that are not ordered in any way. In order to be ordered, they need an information input, which is called the TV channel. The TV channel actually gives that chaotic screen information on what to do, and suddenly you see faces, you see a film, or you see animated pictures and whatever. So it’s basically all about information. The information model then tells you that, well, magic is really, or can be—not only, but can be—about information. Try and get information, like if you want to learn a foreign language which you’re not familiar with and you know someone who does, how about that person transfers their information to you, not by teaching you the grammar and making you learn 200 words every day, but by, you might say, copying a neural network that is related to that specific language in that other person’s brain. As I said, it’s a conceptual and very much experimental way, but there are, let’s say, magical approaches where you can actually use it with some effect. So that is the information model.

Now, number five, number five isn’t actually really…

Dr Angela Puca: Wait a second, before you move on to number five, I have a question so that I better understand the information model. Is it like giving a prompt to reality, the information model, like using the right information to affect the change?

The Probabilistic Model of Magick

Frater U∴D∴: Yes, yes, very much so. And, okay, what I might add isn’t related to the five models of magic, but it is part of Chaos Magick. Chaos Magick has always adopted a very probabilistic view of the world. So in a probabilistic or quantum physics model, there’s always, you know, let’s say a proton or an electron or whatever—let’s say a proton—or an atom even. Let’s not make it too granular. An atom, for example, in a car’s exhaust, in the stream coming from the exhaust, the hot air and all the other dirty stuff in there, any particle there has, at any given moment, a choice of, let’s say in a very simplistic manner, to move right or left in the next millisecond. And so the probability may or may not be 50% for one or the other. It may not be 50% because there might be a strong stream coming from the right side pushing that particular particle to the left rather than to the right, or it might come from above and it will go down or whatever. So, one definition of Chaos Magick, of magic in Chaos Magick, is bending the arm of chance. And one way to go about this might be to actually input some information which tells that matter how to behave or what to do next. And so, yes, that is the basic concept behind it. Thank you.

So what is the fifth model? Now, the fifth model isn’t really actually a model. I call it a meta-model because all it says is use whichever model seems the most adequate to you. It’s still important to have it because what it does is, you know, it cuts short the attempt to say, well, this model is a little bit better, this more effective, or actually we can do without the other three because I found that this model is the one to go for. No, the meta-model says use whichever seems the more promising to you personally. It’s a very individual thing. It might actually work if you say it to a group as well. If you as a group can work better in the spirit model, go ahead. If you feel that the energy model is more adequate, then use the energy model. So in the end—and that might be an interesting point as well—I ended my article with a dialogue, and I’ll just recite it from memory here.

Summary of the Five Models of Magick

Frater U∴D∴: Are there spirits? Yes, in the spirit model there are. But what about the energy model then? In the energy model, it’s all about the choreography of energies, no spirits needed. And the psychological model? The psychological model focuses on programming your psyche in whichever way in order to affect changes in the material world and in the other spirits. In the information model? In the information model, all you have are information clusters and structures. But are there spirits or not? In the spirit model, there are, full stop. So this basically, you know, actually averts the cognitive dissonance some people might have, especially since most people are always on the hunt for absolute truth. What this essentially does—it’s one of the critiques of Chaos Magick—is they want to stop asking questions, they want to be told that’s the answer, and that’s it. And what this dialogue, in a more or less humorous manner, tries to convey is that, hey, it never ends. You want to ask if there are really spirits in the spirit model? Absolutely. But what about this really? Well, yeah, it is real for the spirit model, and that’s where it ends. So don’t try and insert spirits into the information model; there’s no need for spirits in the psychological model, and so on. Now, I will admit, of course, that there are instances where people have been mixing stuff. For example, shamans may work with spirits and they may also work with energy aspects or concepts in their practical work. This happens, true. But what I was trying to do with that article, with that concept of the five models of magic—which, by the way, is my most plagiarised piece of them all; lots and lots of people have copycatted that with or without giving credit, never mind about that—but it seems to have made a mark within Chaos Magick at least. Again, there are many ways to skin the cat, and we are best advised if we’re interested in effective magic and not trying to go for any essentialist absolute truth, as, for example, do the traditions.

Nihilism and Magick

Dr Angela Puca: I’m thinking in philosophical terms, ontologically more specifically, which is, in case you’re not familiar with philosophical terms, the branch of philosophy that studies what is real, what is there. I was thinking, so these models and this way of thinking about magic, does it underlie a form of ontological nihilism? As in, by nihilism, I mean that nothing exists or, you know, nothing exists in absolute terms?

Frater U∴D∴: If you want, I’ll be happily prepared to answer that question, but would you answer my question first? Would you consider existentialism to be nihilist?

Dr Angela Puca: It depends on the form of it. It depends on the existentialist. But let’s say take people like Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegaard. Would you say they are nihilists?

Frater U∴D∴: I think that often nihilism is used in different ways. So in the way that I’m trying to use it is more in ontological terms. For some, some people would use nihilism as there is no meaning, as an absence of meaning.

Frater U∴D∴: Yes, Mainländer did that, yes, but he was probably the only real nihilist in existence. The point I’m trying to get at and get your question now. Postmodern philosophy, for instance, I mean, many people say that, well, this is all nihilism really, or relativism. I wouldn’t say so. What, for example, the focus—it’s been overdone a lot, I’ll concede this—focus on narrative, which is so much evoked to this day. What does it say except that, well, there are various ways to view matters and there’s no certain way to determine whether this is the truth and the be-all and end-all. And I mean this literally, the end-all of things, like the point from when on we can stop asking questions because we found the answer, the final answer. If you call that approach nihilism, fine by me. Nihilism, in my view, in an ontological manner, is saying, well, there is no such thing as truth, there is no such thing as absolute, everything is basically chaos, yes, but in a disorderly way. I mean the opposite of chaos from a Chaos Magickian’s point of view. The opposite of chaos isn’t order; the opposite is entropy, which is an entirely different thing. You might even argue that entropy is the absolute manifestation of order because nothing else will happen in entropy. But again, iconoclasm isn’t necessarily nihilistic. Not that I mind the term nihilism; I just think it’ll shortchange us a bit if we abide by it. So if you are antinomian, yeah, your detractors, your opponents may call you nihilist. They did that a lot in, let’s say, scholasticism and even in the early antique Gnosticism era. You look at the apologists, you know, the church fathers, patristics, when they tried to discredit Gnostics and many Gnostic schools and teachers and teachings. But apart from that, if you leave polemics aside, if you use nihilism in a real, in a serious manner…

Frater U∴D∴: I mean, I would say we’re probably not, as humans, we aren’t even hardwired to conceive of real nihilism because there’s always something we conceive, even if it’s the nothing. Personally, I’m far more with Dvaita or Samkhya philosophy, saying, well, or even Gnostic philosophy. If you ask me what I personally believe, I’ll say I’m an agnostic Gnostic. And this isn’t just a play on words. I’m agnostic in the sense that I’m dead sure that there’s more to the world than we all know about or are being told about or have been told about throughout the millennia. But I’m agnostic in the sense that I do not believe that we are capable of ever grasping it all, that we won’t ever find the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything, be it 42 or whatever. We are not capable of doing that. So all we can do is basically muddle along and make it up as we go along. But I’m not convinced that materialism alone is the answer to it, but neither am I convinced that theism or polytheism or pantheism or whatever isms there are around—and there’s plenty of them—constitute the final answer to things. I think things are far more complex than we can grasp.

Frater UD an Ontological Agnostic

Dr Angela Puca: So you’re an ontological agnostic?

Frater U∴D∴: Yes, if ontology is the branch that studies and investigates what is there, what is actually there beyond our perception and so on, then I’m an ontological agnostic in that sense, I would say.

So yes, in a way. And below that level, let’s say on the mundane level, I’m with Dr Sledge on that. I mean, really, one of my favourite bloggers. He said, well, he’s more of a Marxist dialectic materialist. Well, so am I, but that’s quite another issue. Unlike Dr Sledge, I’m really delving into practice and I’m really a practitioner, so I don’t view all these things just from an etic point of view or from the academic kind of, I won’t be touched by that stuff, kind of, well, in inverted air commas, objective kind of view. And so yes, I’m fine with saying that ontologically I’m an ontological agnostic. Yeah, that’s true.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, and hi to Justin if he is watching this. He’s a friend.

Frater U∴D∴: Yeah, I saw your interview with him, and Justin is really great, yeah.

Dr Angela Puca: So yeah, I’m pleased with this philosophical adventure, but I guess now we can move more into, I don’t know, the Ice Magick War. I found that you haven’t watched my video and my short impression of you and Peter Carroll. Maybe it’s a good thing.

Frater U∴D∴: Something I’m going to look up right after this, yes. So what do you want to know?

The Ice Magick War

Dr Angela Puca: Oh, I want to know your perspective on it. What was the Ice Magick War and what happened?

Frater U∴D∴: Well, what happened was that, okay, I’ll go back about one year before it all, well, as they say, the [ __ ] hit the fan. I met someone who was a German martial artist who was able to display a lot of martial arts effects, which up to then I had only been aware of from, well, more or less Chinese and maybe some Korean and Japanese legends. I’m not a martial arts expert, but I’m not quite unfamiliar with it either. And not only that, he also had a very, very great amount of things to say in terms of philosophy and ontology and this, that, and the other. So, long story short, he became my teacher. Now, I had a bit of an issue with that because I was a teacher myself. I mean, you know, I did seminars and ran workshops and wrote books and stuff. And this stuff which I was confronted with in this manner was so alien to anything else, nothing in tradition which ever related to it. So I said, well, I need, you know, this child needs a name, if only to disavow it in public or to say, well, that’s what I’m doing but I can’t talk about it or something, but, you know, just it needs a name.

So he and I agreed on using the term Ice Magic. Ice, why? This is not about fire and ice, as a lot of people tend to think. No, this is about combustion. The only way you can measure temperature is heat; you cannot measure cold physically, it’s impossible. And so the ice I’m talking about is actually something that doesn’t really exist. It’s not about frozen water, as opposed to flaming fire or anything. In Ice Magic, the definition of magic is quite different from what you may be used to from Western traditions. It’s saying magic is doing the impossible. Now, of course, that’s impossible in itself, otherwise it wouldn’t be the impossible, from which you can infer that magic is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that you have to give up on attempting to master it anyway.

Frater U∴D∴: I was very much impressed by that. The whole experience has actually changed my life, and at that time, I was still head of the IOT, the Magical Pact of the IOT, for Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Independent of that, I had actually announced that I was going to step down from that post in a year’s time and that I would recommend that both Austria and Switzerland become their own independent national sections. Up until then, they were what we called, tongue-in-cheek, satraps of the German section. This was all public knowledge and so on.

Then, shortly after that, I had this experience with my teacher, and I started to inform people about this within the pact, within the IOT, because, hey, they were my magical buddies. They were my peers. They were people who would listen to me, who were interested in what I was doing, and I was interested in what they were doing. So we spoke about it. For some reason, Mr Carroll kind of latched on to something. I don’t know what really happened there. I mean, you’d have to ask him. In his mind, he probably has an answer which I will not agree with, but whatever. Long story short, he had suddenly this fantasy that I was trying to take over the IOT, that I was actually in the fangs of some right-wing nut, creating a cult of my own and trying to funnel the IOT membership into that specific cult. All of which I could say is just one big load of rubbish. I have some…

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, let’s avoid power language because YouTube is shy.

Frater U∴D∴: Just, yeah, okay, sorry. But, all right, so I’ll say it was rubbish. In any case, objectively, it was not true. And actually, a year after, when we met again, we had these yearly meetings of the Pact, usually in an Austrian castle here or there. I actually stepped down from my post just as I had announced one year before, and the Austrian and Swiss sections became independent national bodies within the IOT with their own heads and everything. For some reason, Mr Carroll, it became an obsession for him, and he tried to excommunicate me and some of my so-called followers. He couldn’t even name them by name. I mean, how do you excommunicate people whose names you don’t even know? Actually, by the statutes of the IOT, he was in no position to do so. Long story short, he invented a tall story about how I was attacking him magically all the time and was trying to destroy the IOT and this, that, and the other. He just simply wouldn’t stop. That’s my view of these Ice Magic Wars, meaning magical wars, which are an entire figment of his imagination. I didn’t actually have to do anything. Even if I had wanted to, it wasn’t actually necessary because he behaved in a manner which made it totally unnecessary.

Frater U∴D∴: What it actually ended up with was that about 80% of the IOT left the Pact. We then set up, after that happened—it wasn’t my intention—but after that happened, we actually set up what we termed Revolutionary IOT, or RIOT. I did not lead it or anything; I was there, yes, but there were other people who were leading it. I was simply a member of that, and that was it. That is something that Mr Carroll, to this day, tries to tout as his big victory over the forces of right-wing evil. He became all nationalistic about it, saying things like, you know, “Knowing my Germans, I read Clausewitz, so I knew how to go about these things,” and stuff like that, which by today’s standards is positively racist. And that’s a big word I’m not taking back, I’m sorry, but that’s how it went. Again, I have a lot of suspicions about why this came about. I knew about his personal situation, but I’m not going into that because whatever happened, I still respect his privacy in these terms.

Dr Angela Puca: I understand that. It’s a bit sad that you ended up parting ways because of your history, but I guess it happens to all of us that we share something important and then we part ways with people.

Frater VD and the the Fraternitas Saturni

Frater U∴D∴: Well, it wouldn’t be the first magical order to be hit by a schism, would it? I was also a long-time member, still a member, of the Fraternitas Saturni, and I actually took a leave of absence within the Fraternitas Saturni for a while, a couple of years, all agreed upon and so on by the Grandmaster and whatever, because I wanted to prevent the same thing happening within the Fraternitas which had happened in the IOT. I mean, what had I actually done? There was only one single question I had really posed within the IOT: does it work? And what do you define by it working? Is a 99% success rate equal to working? Is a 1% success rate? For me, 99%—sorry, it’s still failure.

What is Successful Magick

Dr Angela Puca: If you adopt that, for you 99% is still failure?

Frater U∴D∴: Yes. Why is that? Because magic is either about power, the power to do, or it isn’t. So if it fails, it’s not magic. Full stop.

Dr Angela Puca: Would it not be ineffective magic?

Frater U∴D∴: I don’t see a point in calling it ineffective. If gravity didn’t work occasionally, would you call it ineffective gravity? Well, maybe you could, but I don’t see the point in that, not with a term like magic. That’s why I say it’s more important, it’s more precise, to say magic is doing the impossible. Hey, but that’s not possible. Yeah, true, but is that a reason for you to give up on it? It isn’t for me anyway. And that’s not the same as saying, well, you know, 500 years ago people thought we could never fly, and now we can. I say no, we still can’t. We use aeroplanes or rockets or whatever. Yeah, true, but we can’t fly. And so what about teleportation? All we got was astral travels. To me, it goes much further than that, very much more granular, but this is not our topic tonight. So I’ll just leave it at that anyway.

Frater U∴D∴: But, you know, the point being—that’s why I mentioned it—if you ask that kind of question, you’re not liable to make a lot of friends because the question is, does it really work? Because, I mean 100%, because if it’s not, then it doesn’t work. And people don’t take too kindly to that because they feel that I’m telling them what they’re doing is [ __ ], which is not the case. That’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is that, well, you might want to review your standards and what makes magic effective. How can a practitioner who wants to operate magic ensure that it is magic, which to you equates to being effective? Well, there’s only one way to go about this: do it and see. See if it works or if it doesn’t. Then it probably is the point, being that at the end of the day, why are you concerned with this? Hey, I know where you’re coming from; hey, this informed about 80% of my life as well. Does it work, or am I just fooling myself? Is it coincidence or what Carl Jung calls synchronicity?

I mean, synchronicity just describes stuff; it doesn’t explain anything. But, you know, yeah, that’s what our Bonn Workshop was all about. Hey, is this magic or is it not? But why are we asking this question in the first place? Why? Yeah, again, because we want an absolute model. We want to say, yeah, that’s magic, and now we can stop. Our efforts are done with, and we’ll reap the rewards. We’re basically magical pendulums now.

Dr Angela Puca: Have you identified any foundational elements for magic working to be effective? I know that you’re about experimentation and that everybody should experiment and see what works for them. But in your personal experience, are there certain foundational elements that need to be in place so that the magic is effective?

Frater U∴D∴: Well, within a relativistic paradigm, there is a conventional paradigm. And what do I mean by that? I mean that which says, for example, 51% is better than 50%. And if it works 51% of the time, and, you know, accepted science tells you it should never work at all, so that’s a hell of a lot more than science will. If that’s the relativistic paradigm, I’d say, well, for many people, I have found that, for example, magic as proposed by Austin Spare, which I have written a book about myself, seems to work best, at least initially. It is what hooked me onto magic because the effects were really quite spectacular. And again, from this relativistic point of view, I’m saying that because for me too, from a certain point onwards, sigil magic would sometimes work and sometimes it wouldn’t. So I can’t say it actually works by my present-day standards. But at that time and then, I’m not asking people to adopt my standards. I’m just telling them what mine are. So, yes, sigil magic is very good, in my experience, at least with hundreds of people who visited my seminars and so on, as a very good intro into practical applied magic.

Frater UD and Theurgy

Frater U∴D∴: What I’m talking about here is strictly results magic. I’m not talking about the metaphysical stuff I mentioned before, where it’s about, you know, developing your soul and becoming divine.

Dr Angela Puca: Theurgic magic.

Frater U∴D∴: Yeah, theurgic magic.

Dr Angela Puca: Well, theurgic magic.

Frater U∴D∴: You might define it in this or that way. You might also define theurgic magic as forcing the gods to do something in your favour. That would not be the same thing, but yes, in the spiritual sense, or what I would say is actually religion. It’s not magic proper. What I’m talking about is results-based magic, which basically wants to affect changes in the world which are not possible to affect by other means, apparently. So if you switch on a light, you know, by turning the switch on the wall, that’s not magic, even though actually, by Aleister Crowley’s definition, it would be, you know, causing change in effect by…

Dr Angela Puca: The act of affecting change in accordance with will.

Frater U∴D∴: Yeah, exactly. But anyway, other people will say, yeah, by using altered states of consciousness and so on. No, but anyway, this said, there are different characters, temperaments. I mean, some people just love rituals, for instance. They love—I did for quite a while, maybe that was my originally Catholic upbringing, I don’t know, but I was quite happy with rituals and incense and chanting and noise and this, that, and the other. Others don’t; they’re more of a minimalist brand. They might adopt what you might say is a Neo-Shamanist or a Western Shamanism kind of approach to matters or stick strictly to the energy model and work with Reiki or with Kuism and then positive thinking, New Thought, and that kind of stuff, which Donald Trump seems to be into, according to Gary Lachman anyway. So there are various approaches, and what I try in my High Magic books is actually to offer you access to various approaches towards magic because there’s no one-size-fits-all. And of course, this is based on this relativistic paradigm that, well, if science tells you it should be 0% efficacious and you find it’s 1% efficacious, science… I’d still go by that. I’d just say, hey, don’t be that humble and go further. But that is, again, my way of going about things, and I’m not saying that others should follow.

Starting a Magical Career with Sigil Magick

Dr Angela Puca: I see, so people really should start with sigil magic in a way?

Frater U∴D∴: At least for most people. There’s a few—I’ve experienced that as well—there are a few people who tried and tried, and it just wouldn’t pan out for them. Too bad, so go for something else instead.

Dr Angela Puca: And what is Ice Magic? We’ve talked about the Ice Magic War but not so much about Ice Magic. I know that it is not available in English and you said there is no set date for its English publication. So at the moment, it’s only in German, which is one more reason to talk about it at least, you know, insofar as you are willing to.

Frater U∴D∴: I just thought for a moment you were going to say this was one more reason to learn German, but okay.

Dr Angela Puca: Yes, well fair enough. Yes, there is definitely one more reason to learn German, so people, you have a—

The Book eismagie: erste einblicke by Frater VD

Frater U∴D∴: Why? Because in—okay, this may be a subjective way of putting it, but I really had to reinvent the entire German language to write that book. Why did I write it in the first place? For a simple reason: when that break in the IOT came about, there were lots and lots of people who were very, very disappointed in what was happening. They were basically on my side; they were in sympathy with me. They thought that what Carroll and his minions were doing was absolutely unacceptable, but they still didn’t know what I was doing. So what I did very early on, regretting it to this day maybe, is I said, look guys, I can’t really talk about it because, you know, it would take the better part of a month just to get the basics down. So what I can promise you is I’ll write a book on it which will give you a brief outline. And with that, I did. It’s called “eismagie: erste einblicke,” or “Ice Magic: First Insights,” and it’s only been out in German. It’s not available anymore, so you have to get it on the second-hand book market. There is a pirated version out there. It’s easy to recognise because it uses capitals. As you know, in German we use capitals, for example, for nouns and names and stuff or the beginning of sentences and so on. Mine doesn’t. My version doesn’t; it’s all in lowercase for a reason. But anyway, I do have a contract with Theion Publishers to publish a bilingual English and German version with them someday, but there’s no date set because, as I said, reinventing the German language for that makes it all the more difficult to translate that stuff into English unless you want to use every other term and then have 15 footnotes to it, which basically renders it unreadable for most people. So, it’s not an easy task.

Ice Magic in a nutshell

Frater U∴D∴: So what is Ice Magic in a nutshell? It is, let’s say, a minimalist approach to magic, drilling down to the essential drive for precision. For example, when you say, “I don’t know what magic is,” and somebody else says, “Well, magic is about changing the world in alignment with your will by, let’s say, altered states of consciousness,” I’d say you are the precise speaker and that other person isn’t because that other person doesn’t know what they’re talking about, whereas you are admitting that you don’t know what magic is, and that is precise.

So I’ll give you one example, just this one single example. Take puppet magic, where you make what some people call voodoo magic. It’s present in Voodoo as well, but it’s actually older than Voodoo. It’s been around in the Middle Ages, in Roman times, in Greek times, and so on. So anyway, what do you do? You create an effigy or a puppet or a little doll or whatever mannequin of, well, someone, let’s say your target. You might use various effects on, you know, various approaches or techniques of coupling that puppet to your target person, like using some body fluids from them if you’ve got them, or some hair or a photograph or whatever, or baptising the puppet in their name or whatever. There are various approaches to that, and then you proceed to stick a pin into that puppet. Why? Because you know about acupuncture and you want to do remote acupuncture to help them get well from some ailment they have. Now, I know most people didn’t expect that. They think, “Oh, this is all about death spells.” No, it isn’t. It can be, yes, but it isn’t. The point is that if you stick that needle into that puppet, it is supposed to work by sympathetic magic and whatever. It’s supposed to work on the real person in some mysterious ways.

We have the models of magic to explain that, or at least describe it. And then, well, in an ideal world, that person gets well. The problem is, can you actually pin that puppet? Can you actually lead that needle to the exact point which, for example in acupuncture, is fairly important, right? If you hit that exact point. And if you’re in doubt about that, take a piece of paper, mark a little cross on it with a pencil or a ballpoint pen, take a pin, put the piece of paper on the table, rest your elbow on the table so you don’t tire, and take that pin between, let’s say, your thumb and your forefinger, and then try to hit the middle point of that little cross you put there, that mark. Do that 100 times, and then hold that piece of paper against a light bulb and see how many times you’ve actually hit the exact same spot. And I’m not going to tell you how many times it will be, because all it will do, or can do, and that’s what I invite you to do, is question that, concede that you’re actually able to lead a pin and hit a mark in a controlled manner. So if you can’t even do that, how do you expect that puppet to affect healing with that target person in that example? This is just, as I said, a very simplistic example; it goes a lot further.

The Three Pillars of Ice Magick

Frater U∴D∴: But what Ice Magic does, just to give you a summary, is address three what I call pillars. These are just didactic pillars; it’s not because these are essential pillars, you know, which have been in an invisible tradition from 50,000 years ago or anything like that. No, this is merely for didactic or pedagogic purposes. It addresses body function and motor control. I’ll give you one example: there’s a German word called “motorik,” and in English, it translates to “motor control” or “motor function.” But it is more than that, so I had to invent an English word for that to make it actually say what it’s supposed to say: “motorics.” This is basically, you might say, the art and science of motor function, of how the body works, of how you move, and what rest entails, and this, that, and the other. This is one pillar.

The other pillar is what I call conversation control, or rather the leading of conversation. In German, this is about how you talk to others, how others talk to you, how you react, how this comes about, how people try to influence one another, how they try to influence you, what to do about it, this, that, and the other.

I’ll give you one simple example. This is just, you might say, a product of what you will find out when you deal with it in a concerted manner and a serious manner. You’ll find out that people will only ever talk about themselves, even when they pretend to talk about something else. So if somebody says that you are, let’s say, a thrifty person, you can bet your derriere on it that he will be a fairly thrifty guy telling you that. They’re projecting, but that’s just one minimal, very, you might say, trivial, almost, thing you learn from that.

And the third pillar is what I call social combat, or “sozialer Kampf” in German. This is about how to deal with the societal world. For example, let’s say you’re driving your car, and suddenly there is a traffic control. Two policemen stop your car, asking for your license and your car papers and whatever. Now, what I’m talking about in terms of social control is everyone is actually acting according to the pressures that are set upon them. This may be in a physical way, like we’re dealing with gravity all the time trying not to fall, but there are also societal pressures. Let’s say you have an appointment, and that’s a pressure on you. Now, this stupid traffic control will probably make you come late. That’s a pressure you’re under. Now, this policeman who’s asking you for your driving license and who might look at your car and walk around it, basically causing that very unwelcome delay, he or she (if it’s a woman) is under their own pressures. They have a boss, they have their regulations, and they have so many cars to control per day, otherwise they get into deep water, and this, that, and the other. Now, when you say, “Well, could you please hurry up? You know, I have this very important appointment, blah blah,” what you’re trying to do is tell them how important and how dominating your personal pressures are. Now, guess whose pressures that other person will be more interested in: yours or theirs? Once you realise that, you can come to a different way of handling things. I’m not saying that you won’t incur a delay, but there might be different ways of handling this, even ways where, at the end, someone watching it from afar would say, “Hey, how the hell did she do this? Magic?” The guy saluted her and then let her drive off without even looking at the driving license or whatever. This, again, is the third pillar of Ice Magic.

Frater U∴D∴: And this again is just a very, very brief glimpse into it. All in all, it’s a very complex matter when viewed from a didactic point of view, from a, let’s say, structural point of view. All it ever does is call things into question until they cannot be questioned any longer. When people ask me how I rate progress, let’s say, with my students in Ice Magic, I say, well, I grade progress in the ability to answer forward-leading questions, to actually pose forward-leading questions, rather than say, okay, this is where it’s at, this is the absolute truth. Well, put it in question and then go on from there. Because the way I view it, sorcerers, no matter the gender, are always at that verge, at that limit between the possible and the impossible. Once you’ve done something that’s impossible, it is impossible no longer, so it’ll be the next impossible thing to tackle. So basically, it never ends, and that is one way you might say, viewing the divinization of man by actually toppling the gods and assuming their place instead. Thank you, that was very, very interesting. And yeah, it can only be more than just a teaser, I’m afraid, but that’s due to the complexity of it all. Essentially, you end up putting everything you’ve ever been about and learned and known and thought was true for you or for others or the world into question, and it doesn’t ever stop really.

Pirated copies of Frater UD’s Book

Dr Angela Puca: I see, that’s very interesting. Also, our moderator Andrew is a German speaker. So he was, I don’t know if you can see on screen now, but he was mentioning this link that I cannot click on now because I’m in the streaming studio, but yeah, it’s interesting. I hope that just—

Frater U∴D∴: What I’ve just seen right now, he seems to be linking to the pirated version of my book. Thank you very much for that.

Dr Angela Puca: Sorry about that. Well, at least you checked.

Frater U∴D∴: I’m sorry, but I can’t condone this. I’m a professional author. I mean, this is my way of earning a living, and I am not about piracy. Sorry.

Dr Angela Puca: No, that’s fine. I mean, he likely didn’t know, but it’s good now people know. So basically, the only version that is available is the pirated one at the moment?

Frater U∴D∴: Well, I’m not calling it available. If you say that somebody has stolen something from you and it’s available on the market, well, that’s your way of putting it. It wouldn’t be mine.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry.

Frater U∴D∴: It is stolen property, let’s put it squarely. That is what it’s about. And I’m very much for copyrights.

Dr Angela Puca: So yeah, I agree that’s very important and certainly not condoning it or supporting that in any way. I understand that. Actually, I’ve outlined how to detect the pirated version, and actually, yeah, in the link he put there, there’s capitalization, so I don’t even have to click it to know about it. So there we are. Unless he just capitalized it because it’s a habit, but the book is NOT capitalized on Google Books. I don’t know. I can’t click on it at the moment. I’m just guessing, just taking a guess that maybe the link is to the version that doesn’t have the capitalization of the title. Maybe it’s just what he put there because he’s used to capitalizing.

Frater U∴D∴: Shouldn’t be, because I didn’t give Google Books any permission to do that either. So what the hell.

Dr Angela Puca: Okay, so it’s fine. We can move on. So let’s look at some super chats before we wrap up. Thank you Vocatus for your support and same to Mark. And Max has a question: how long did you study with Helmut Barthel and what influence did he have on Ice Magic? I’m not familiar with this person.

Frater VD and Helmut Barthel

Frater U∴D∴: Well, that is the name of my teacher that I mentioned. Couldn’t really put that in specific dates, I mean, we were on speaking terms for the better part of two years approximately. But after initially meeting with him, I visited him a few times and then he called it off, told me that was it, which was basically a test. He admitted to it later on. So for about a year and a half, I kept phoning him, telling him where I was, asking him to return my call if he felt like it, and I never heard anything from him during that time. Until one day he did, and from then on, you might say formal studies began. And as I’ve pointed out, we agreed on my using the term Ice Magic on the understanding that this was my term, that this was not what he was doing, but on the other hand, without his input, Ice Magic would never have come about.

So that’s the second part of the question. And so, I’m not saying that Helmut Barthel is doing or ever did Ice Magic, but it was, you might say, the essence of what I drew out of that period when he was my teacher. I actually put that in my prologue to the book, that this is my doing, any faults in that are mine and not his. This book wasn’t even sanctioned by him or anything. So that basically answers the question, I guess.

Dr Angela Puca: Yeah, it definitely does. And Hank here, I think he’s referring to when you said that if magic is not effective 100% of the time, it is not magic, and he asks if my computer doesn’t power on one out of 100 times because of a burnout, does it mean my computer doesn’t work at all?

Frater U∴D∴: Well, your computer isn’t magic, is it? So that is more or less irrelevant to that. But you’re making an interesting point in one respect because when we say, well, 51% success is better than 50% or 49% or zero, we are actually doing nothing but adopting the usual, you might say, technical, technicist, or even scientistic—not scientific—scientistic paradigm. And if magic is about doing the impossible, and I’m not going to explain now at length why I think that because that would take us another day or two or three, then these paradigms simply can’t apply. Just like saying, well, we can’t fly; all we have to do is board an airplane. Well, the airplane can fly for a while, and we can sit in that airplane for a while, true, but we ourselves cannot do it. It’s impossible for us, at least in our present state. We might one day perhaps develop cyborgs who are able to do that, you know, attach a jetpack to our biological mass and this, that, and the other. Well, that’s another thing, and it still doesn’t mean that we can fly. By “we,” you mean we as humans as we are, and so it simply doesn’t apply to stuff like that. And this said, when you look at industrial production lines and so on, and you’ll see, you know, even in high precision instruments, they’ll tell you, well, this instrument is precise plus or minus 0.01%. So it is not precise, right? Because otherwise you wouldn’t have that margin, and that basically says it all in my view, or it has a degree of precision.

Dr Angela Puca: So is there anything else that you’d like to cover that we haven’t covered yet before we wrap up?

Frater U∴D∴: Well, I think if you don’t have any further questions or remarks or whatever…

Dr Angela Puca: I’m fine to call it a day.

Frater U∴D∴: Okay.

Dr Angela Puca: So where can people find you if there’s any place where they can find you, or would you just direct them to your books?

Frater U∴D∴: Well, yes, I would do that, obviously.

Dr Angela Puca: It’s a question that I normally ask my guests because most of my guests tend to have social media platforms or, I don’t know, websites or things that they want to promote in a way, but maybe you’re not the right person to…

Ralf Tegtmeier (Frater U∴D)∴on Social Media

Frater U∴D∴: Let’s put it this way: the only social media platform I’m actually currently on a regular basis is Facebook. So if you look for Ralph Tegtmeier, you should get me under that name there. But I don’t maintain any, at least nothing related to esotericism or magic or whatever. I don’t maintain any websites or YouTube channels or anything like that.

Dr Angela Puca: Okay, so that’s fine. Thank you again so much for being here today. It was a very intriguing conversation. We covered so much ground, and there will be subtitles for people as well, like I always put on subtitles so that it’s easier for people who have difficulties with hearing or maybe are in a situation where they cannot listen to the audio. The same goes for chapters, especially for long videos; I think it’s useful to have chapters in videos so that people can skip to where they’re interested in listening. Thank you so much for being here again. It was really a pleasure to have you on Angela’s Symposium.

Frater U∴D∴: Thank you very much for having me. The pleasure was all mine as well. Thank you.

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Dr Angela Puca: So, we have reached the end of this interview. I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you liked it, don’t forget to smash the like button, subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, and activate the notification bell so you will always be notified when I upload a new video or I’m live or do anything on YouTube. I hope that you also share this video with your friends or any of my videos so that the Symposium can grow. Thank you all so much for being here. I hope that you all stay tuned for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.