Duncan Barford

The intimate personal journals of two occultists practising western magick to achieve “The Great Work” (also known as “awakening” or “enlightenment”). With its humour, honesty, and down-to-earth approach, extending beyond the cult following it gained after its original publication in the late noughties, The Baptist's Head Compendium has proved itself a seminal text and indispensable guide to anyone suspicious of or disillusioned by magick purely as a tool for personal power or material gain. Sharing the details of their discoveries – and mistakes – in the process of making them, Chapman and Barford demonstrate how magick is a genuine spiritual tradition leading to enlightenment. They have their minds blown and the strangest experiences of their lives! By holding nothing back, but sharing all results and methods, the reader is equipped to embark on their own exploration of magick as a path to spiritual awakening. Originally published as a trilogy, but long since out-of-print, these books are now available for the first time in a single volume, revised and updated with new introductions by the authors.

The intimate personal journals of two occultists practising western magick to achieve “The Great Work” (also known as “awakening” or “enlightenment”). With its humour, honesty, and down-to-earth approach, extending beyond the cult following it gained after its original publication in the late noughties, The Baptist's Head Compendium has proved itself a seminal text and indispensable guide to anyone suspicious of or disillusioned by magick purely as a tool for personal power or material gain. Sharing the details of their discoveries – and mistakes – in the process of making them, Chapman and Barford demonstrate how magick is a genuine spiritual tradition leading to enlightenment. They have their minds blown and the strangest experiences of their lives! By holding nothing back, but sharing all results and methods, the reader is equipped to embark on their own exploration of magick as a path to spiritual awakening. Originally published as a trilogy, but long since out-of-print, these books are now available for the first time in a single volume, revised and updated with new introductions by the authors.

A Dark Song (2017) is a cult movie that presents maybe the most realistic depiction ever of ceremonial magick.Its heroine undertakes "the Abramelin ritual", an occult process for summoning her Guardian Angel, so that it might grant her stated wish to meet again with her murdered child.Yet the ritual depicted in the film is not entirely fictional. It takes its name from an actual magical working, once attempted by the notorious Aleister Crowley, and undertaken by real-life occultists to the present day.This book explores their experiences. It examines what the real-life Abramelin ritual is and the way it works. And it answers the question of how A Dark Song offers such a realistic representation of magick when angels and demons are not supposed to exist in reality at all.

Using occultism to understand the paranormal sounds like diluting water or burying earth, but in this thoughtful and unusual book Duncan Barford draws on a deep familiarity with modern magick to provide a valuable toolbox of concepts for exploring the relationship between consciousness and the paranormal.Writing in an accessible and humorous style, Barford examines intriguing first-hand accounts of poltergeists, telepathy, communication with the dead, religious phenomena and astral projection. The essence of his unique exploration is that the paranormal does not happen only to special people and on rare occasions. In fact, to experience the paranormal we need simply turn our attention to the nature of our consciousness itself.