I am André Consciência, a Portuguese Hermetic magician, writer, teacher and artist. I live in Alentejo and have been practising magic since I was thirteen.
Franz Bardon was my first systematic entrance into it. While still a minor, I met Fraternitas Hermetica and my initiator, Magnus Sarmarx. The order eventually disappeared, but I continued working with him for more than twenty years. This gave my early training a continuity that is difficult to obtain by moving from one system to another.
My history also includes experience with AMORC, the Order of Michael’s Grail, the Thelemic Golden Dawn, A∴A∴, the Typhonian OTO, the Horus-Maat Lodge and OTOA-LCN. I serve on the Inner Council of the Horus-Maat Lodge and remain active in OTOA-LCN. Some affiliations lasted and others belonged to a particular period, but each entered the work in some manner.
Practice and magical research
Bardonian Hermetics remains one of the clearest structural bases of my work. It did not remain the only one. Over the years, the work extended into Maat Magick, Thelema, neo-shamanism, specializations in elemental, planetary and stellar magic, spirit work, magical speech, visionary practice and ritual art.
I combine systems when practice reveals a real connection between them, or when one trains a faculty that another assumes without properly developing. Finding the exact operation shared by two apparently different methods is useful.
By magical research I mean research performed through magic, set upon discovering something. An experience is repeated. Its conditions are altered, and psychology matters to me. Even if someone evokes a spirit in a form that can be perceived by everyone present, it has not yet performed its complete magical function if nothing has happened within the human being.
The books
Most of my books appeared when a body of practice had reached the point where it could be given to another practitioner.
The Way of Abrahadabra concerns initiation and the attainment of adepthood, grade by grade. Through the Soul Mirror to the Sphere of the Sun approaches the maturation of the magician through introspection, the transformation of character and solar work. The Path of Ipsos gives what has been attained a wider experimental playground.
A Guide to the Elementals and The Lusitanian Grimoire concern the elements, elemental beings, ancestors and the powers of the land. A Guide to Sphere Quabbalah, A Guide to Stellar Magic and The Inner Gateways of LAM extend the work into planetary, stellar and ultraterrestrial regions. The Dragon Tarot: The Inner Circle and the Triangle turns sixty-two magical tablets into an initiatory and divinatory instrument.
The Hermetic Grade of Jupiter, The Hermetic Grade of the Sun and The Hermetic Grade of Mars belong to the Beyond the Veil of Illusion series. Other practical works form the Magical Study Series.
The books were made to strengthen one another, sometimes in obvious pairs and sometimes through connections that only become clear after practice.
The available editions can be found on the Books page.
Teaching
My principal courses are hosted by Perseus Arcane Academy. They include Magic and Mystical Introspection, Introduction to Magic, Ceremonial Magic and the Bardon Tradition, Journey to the Spirit World: Exploring Neo-Shamanism and Elemental Magic: The Foundation as Taught by the Elementals.
The teaching begins with faculties: attention, silence, introspection, character, elemental equilibrium, imagination and the soul mirror. From there, it can proceed into invocation, evocation, magical speech, planetary and stellar spheres, visionary practice, the Aeons and adepthood.
I can give a method, correct an exercise and provide examples from my own work. Eventually, however, the student must produce a genuine question that could not have been given to them. At that point teaching ceases to be the repetition of the teacher.
Perseus hosts the courses, enrolment, lessons and student communication. My complete Perseus Arcane Academy profile contains the detailed curriculum, interviews, course conversations and guest writings.
I also founded the School of Visionary Hermeticism for work requiring another form. Its purpose is to help practitioners carry structured training into an original magical creation: a grimoire, a system, a body of research, or teaching of their own. A student should eventually be able to do something the teacher did not prescribe.
The Thothic Dialogues
The Thothic Dialogues began with a question: how can the human mind participate in Divine Mind?
They borrow the dramatic form of the Corpus Hermeticum while forming an entirely new sequence. I question Thoth and he teaches me. The answers were first drafted from my thought and afterward verified or corrected through contact. The finished text preserves both parts of that operation.
The sixteen dialogues proceed from the vacancy of mind through imagination, elemental equilibrium, divine images, consciousness transfer, union, the magical Word, law, time, freedom, spiritual beings, theurgy, death, evil and the transmission of knowledge.
At the summit of the operation, image, human centre and divine intelligence cease to appear as three. Dialogue becomes possible again when Wisdom differentiates within itself as question and answer.
The complete sequence is freely available in The Thothic Dialogues.
Theatre, music, art and publishing
Magic has never remained confined to books for me.
In 2017, I founded Cia. Mefisteatro with Eunice Correia. Our work includes theatre, performance, puppets and animated forms, object theatre, miniatures, literary creation and workshops. Memory, literature and rural life frequently enter the productions. I compose music and design sound for the company, alongside my musical work principally released as Babalith.
I also work with visual art and ritual objects. Wax Throne and Fairy Lap was commissioned, published and acquired by the Municipality of Moita.
Through Star Lore Publishing, I have worked as an editor, designer, compiler and translator as well as an author. This has allowed me to participate in books from the other side: deciding how a work should be constructed, illustrated and made physically present.
I hold a Ph.D. in Metaphysics and a Doctor Honoris Causa in Literature. These facts belong in a biography. They do not prove a magical claim. For that, there is the practice and whatever consequence it produces.
Contact
Questions about my books, articles or independent work can be sent directly to abbabalith@gmail.com.
Questions concerning course enrolment, subscriptions or the Perseus student platform should be addressed through Perseus Arcane Academy.
