Healing Spirits: Deluxe – Charubel (hellfire Club)

Description

 

The book we present to the world in its first complete facsimile edition is particularly important as it combines both a knowledge of the delicate healing plants and the active spirits that inhabit them. Sacred names with angelic properties are ascribed to each common herb, binding the worlds of the divine healing powers in the auric field of the healer with the physical properties of the plants themselves. Charubels work (originally appearing as a serial in the magazine ‘The Psychic Mirror’ titled ‘On The Psychology of Botany’) here connects the traditional herbalists work with that of the distant psychic healer and angelic or spirit work of the medieval grimoires.

As well as being a renowned country cunning man, Charubel was also the founder of a focused occult group known as ‘The Celestial Brotherhood’ which existed quietly under the more public name of ‘The British and Foreign Occult Society’.

Charubel was the head of this esoteric order and the father of a brotherhood that extended in a mystical sense to everybody on earth. He was personally gifted with a precise and rich knowledge of the spirits of the nature in our planet. All the sacred names and their hidden forces were believed to be known by him.

The famous astrologer Alan Leo became a member of this society and adopted the name ‘Agorel’. Each member of this society derived a mystical name from astrological significators, numerology and geometry. Some names were taken from Hebrew. The society had members all over the world and for much of his life he kept up lengthy and frequent correspondence with its members.

The Celestial Brotherhood, or as it was known to the general public, The British and Foreign Society of Occultists, was broadly similar in its workings to the Order of the Golden Dawn. It involved a system of progressive grades, professed to receiving teachings from hidden Adepts on the inner planes and practiced magical and quasi-magical rituals. Two of Charubels students and ‘Celestial Brotherhood’ members were John Yarker (Rites of Memphis & Misraim) and Major Francis George Irwin (an important member of the occult ‘Society of Eight’).

Charubels mystic society was first mentioned in July 1884 in the inaugural issue of ‘The Seer’ magazine, edited by Charubel himself, and later renamed as ‘The Occultist’. Alan Leo was a frequent writer for ‘The Occultist’. References were made in this publication to ‘The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’ ( a precursor to The Golden Dawn) operated by Peter Davidson and Thomas Henry Burgoyne. The connection appears to have ceased when The Occultist remained under Thomas and Davidson with Burgoyne introducing his own magazine The Occult Magazine in February 1885.

Thomas was already well known for his mediumistic work and for producing material phenomena when he wrote his first published work on the physical country of sacred literature. Other books followed including the ‘Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised’ whose psychic and magical symbols of the degrees of the zodiac went on to influence the Sabian system and the legendary ‘Volasfera’, another collection of astrological material with connections to the ‘Stregha’ or Italian folk witchcraft which has had such a profound influence on the cunning craft we know today.