Clavis Goêtica – Frater Acher and José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal (Hadean)

Description

The structure of this book is similar to the one of Holy Daimon (Scarlet Imprint, 2018): It begins with a foundation in history, then moves on to accounts of modern practitioners and concludes with detailed tactical instructions, focussing on the tradition of divining-skulls or teraphim.

Thus we start out by looking into the mirror of our ancient past. Understanding the Ancient Greek mythological sources, that are woven into the very words and practices of this craft, is a necessity before we can attempt to stride out on our own path. The first chapter explores the historic origins of primal goêteia, and was first published in 2017 as Goêteia – explorations in chthonic sorcery on theomagica.com. Particular emphasis is placed upon the role of the Idaian Dactyls, the role of the Great Mother and thus the sensitive function of the goês as an intermediary agent between the Promethean offspring and the primal mother-consciousness most easily accessed through cavernous mountain-wombs.

Following these historic foundations, we touch upon the author’s own goêtic practices over the previous decade and critical learnings derived from it, only to correlate the latter to the practice of two goês from High Medieval and Early Modern times. The title of this book, Clavis Goêtica might shine in a different light, once we hear the story of the Rosicrucian adept and white-goês Johannes Beer, and his particular way of using goêtic keys to commune with the spirits of the underworld.

In the final third of this humble volume leads one to work with a Necromantic divination rite whose current manuscript stems from the 18th century, yet whose original roots reach far back into our magical past. This goêtic grimoire not only presents us with an authentic ritual of kephalomancy, i.e. divining from a human skull, but provides an exemplary account of illustrating the shamanic nature of the work of the goês. As we will see, unrestrained by the flawed social morality of their (and still our) time, the practitioner of the Ars Phytonica is invited to establish a juncture between heaven and earth, between chthonic and celestial realms, by means of their direct communion with a host of spiritual beings as well as a simple mantic skull.

José Gabriel Alegría went beyond the outstanding iconographic contributions to this volume by also including his own written reflections on the Ars Phytonica, in his most succinct essay ‘Of Talking Heads and Solar Skulls’.