Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon: The Complete Review

Who Was Franz Bardon

Franz Bardon was born on December 1, 1909, in Opava (then Troppau), a city in Czech Silesia. His father, Viktor Bardon, was a Christian mystic, and according to Bardon's own account, the spiritual vocation was present from the beginning. The details of his early life are partly obscured by the hagiographic tendencies of his students, but the basic outline is documented. He worked as a stage magician and naturopathic healer in Opava and later in Prague during the interwar period.

During World War II, Bardon was interned in a concentration camp. The circumstances vary depending on the source: some accounts say the Nazis wanted him to use his abilities for the Reich and imprisoned him when he refused; others are less dramatic. What is confirmed is that he survived the camp and returned to Czechoslovakia after liberation. He resumed his healing practice and, between 1956 and 1958, published his three major works on Hermetic practice.

Bardon died on July 10, 1958, while imprisoned by the Czechoslovak communist authorities, who had arrested him for practicing healing without a license and for producing herbal tinctures (which the state classified as illegal manufacture of alcohol). The irony is characteristic of the era: a man who had survived the Nazis was killed by a bureaucratic regulation. He was forty-eight years old.

His three published works form a complete Hermetic curriculum. Initiation into Hermetics covers personal development. The Practice of Magical Evocation covers the work with spirits and planetary intelligences. The Key to the True Kabbalah covers the manipulation of cosmic forces through letter, sound, and vibration. A fourth book, Frabato the Magician, is an autobiographical novel published posthumously by his secretary Otti Votavova, and its factual reliability is debated.

What the Book Teaches

Initiation into Hermetics is structured with complete precision. It opens with a Theory section covering the foundational concepts: the elements (fire, water, air, earth), the Akasha (fifth element), the planes of existence (physical, astral, mental), the nature of the human being as a three-bodied entity, the principles of analogy and correspondence, and the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm.

This Theory section is not filler. Every concept introduced here becomes operational in the practical steps that follow. When Bardon describes the fire element, he is not offering a metaphor. He is describing a force the student will learn to accumulate, direct, project, and dissolve within their own body and consciousness. The theory is the blueprint; the practice is the construction.

After the Theory comes the Practical section: ten steps, each divided into three parallel tracks of exercise (Mental, Astral, Physical). The student works on all three tracks simultaneously within each step, and all exercises within a step must be mastered before proceeding to the next. There is no skipping, no partial advancement, no negotiation with the sequence.

The book closes with supplementary material on the practice of magic, the nature of the magical mirror (a tool introduced in the practical steps), and an appendix on "the mysteries of magic" that covers topics like levitation, telepathy, and materialization. These are not flights of fancy; Bardon treats them as natural consequences of systematic development. Whether the reader accepts these claims literally or symbolically, the training system remains coherent either way.

The Ten Steps in Detail

Step 1 begins where it must: with the mind. The Mental exercise is thought observation. The student sits quietly and observes the stream of thought without interfering, exactly as it arises. This is harder than it sounds. Most people have never simply watched their own thinking. The exercise reveals the chaotic, associative, largely mechanical nature of ordinary thought. The Physical exercise covers diet, morning cold-water ablutions, and basic body awareness. The Astral exercise is the creation of a "soul mirror": a written inventory of the student's positive and negative character traits, assigned to the four elements.

Step 2 advances thought discipline from observation to control. The Mental exercise is "vacancy of mind" (Gedankenstille), the ability to hold the mind completely empty of thought for a sustained period. Bardon's standard is ten minutes without a single intrusive thought. The Astral exercise continues the soul mirror work, now actively transmuting negative traits through autosuggestion and deliberate character modification. The Physical exercise introduces conscious breathing with prana (vital force) accumulation.

Steps 3 and 4 develop concentration and visualization to extraordinary levels. The student practices holding a single visual image with perfect stability for ten minutes, then does the same with sounds, textures, smells, and tastes. Step 4 requires the student to project consciousness into objects (a chair, a stone, a plant) and perceive from within that object. On the Astral side, the student begins accumulating elemental forces within the body: drawing fire into the right side, water into the left, air into the chest, earth into the legs. Physical exercises introduce ritual gestures and postures (asanas in the Eastern sense, though Bardon uses his own system).

Steps 5 through 7 represent the middle phase of the work. The student learns to project accumulated elements outward (creating balls of fire or water energy in the hands, for example), to work with the magic mirror for clairvoyant perception, and to create thought-forms (elementals) charged with a specific purpose. Step 7 introduces direct work with the Akasha principle. By this point, the student has spent years in daily practice and has developed capacities that the beginning student cannot even properly imagine.

Steps 8 through 10 are the advanced stages. Mental wandering (the projection of consciousness to distant locations while maintaining full waking awareness), astral projection (the separation of the astral body from the physical), the creation and charging of talismans, the preparation of fluid condensers (physical substances that hold elemental or Akashic charges), and finally, in Step 10, the conscious communion with one's personal concept of God and the ascent through the planetary spheres.

Elemental Equilibrium: The Foundation

If there is a single concept that defines Bardon's system and distinguishes it from virtually every other Western magical curriculum, it is elemental equilibrium. The idea is straightforward: every human being is constituted by the four elements in a particular proportion, and this proportion is reflected in their character. A person with excess fire will be choleric, impulsive, domineering. Excess water produces sentimentality, indecision, emotional dependence. Excess air creates instability, superficiality, scattered attention. Excess earth manifests as stubbornness, materialism, lethargy.

The soul mirror exercise (Steps 1 and 2) requires the student to make an exhaustive written inventory of their character traits, both positive and negative, and then assign each trait to its corresponding element. The result is a precise map of one's elemental imbalance. Once the imbalance is identified, the student works systematically to correct it: strengthening deficient elements, moderating excessive ones, until all four are in approximate balance.

This emphasis on character work before power work is Bardon's most important contribution to Western occultism. Many systems teach techniques for accumulating subtle energy, but few insist so explicitly that the practitioner's character must be in order first. The parallel with psychotherapy is obvious: you would not give a volatile person access to explosives. Bardon extends this logic to the subtle forces. Balance first, then power.

The elemental equilibrium work is also the most psychologically honest part of the system. It requires the student to look at themselves without flattery, to admit to cowardice, jealousy, laziness, cruelty, vanity, and all the other traits that people prefer not to acknowledge. The soul mirror is a form of radical self-assessment. Many students find this step more difficult than any of the later "magical" exercises, precisely because it demands honesty rather than technique.

The Akasha Principle

The Akasha is the fifth element in Bardon's cosmology, but "fifth" is misleading because it is not on the same level as the other four. It is the source principle, the undifferentiated root from which fire, water, air, and earth emerge. Bardon describes it as the subtlest and most powerful of all forces, the principle of cause and effect itself, and the medium through which all genuine magical operations ultimately function.

In practical terms, the Akasha is associated with trance states, with the space between thoughts, with the moment of transition between sleeping and waking. It is the void that contains all potential. When a practitioner works with the Akasha, they are operating at the level of causes rather than effects. This is why Akasha work comes late in the system (Step 7 and beyond): it requires the stability of elemental equilibrium and the concentration capacities developed in Steps 1 through 6.

The Akasha principle has correspondences in other traditions. In Hindu philosophy, it corresponds to Akasha (space or ether), one of the Pancha Mahabhuta (five great elements). In classical Western alchemy, it corresponds to the quintessence (quinta essentia), the fifth essence beyond earth, water, air, and fire. In Hermetic philosophy, it corresponds to the All, the Nous, the undifferentiated source from which all differentiated reality proceeds.

Bardon's unique contribution is making the Akasha operationally accessible through a graded training sequence. Other traditions mention the fifth element; Bardon teaches you how to work with it, but only after years of preparatory development have made such work safe and meaningful.

Bardon vs. the Kybalion

The comparison between Bardon and the Kybalion illuminates the difference between two approaches to the same tradition. The Kybalion (1908), attributed to "Three Initiates," presents seven Hermetic principles (Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, Gender) as philosophical propositions. It tells you what the principles are. It offers intellectual understanding.

Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics (1956) takes these same principles and converts them into a training system. The principle of Mentalism (the universe is mental) becomes the thought observation and vacancy of mind exercises. The principle of Correspondence (as above, so below) becomes the practice of working simultaneously on mental, astral, and physical planes. The principle of Polarity becomes the elemental equilibrium work. The principle of Vibration becomes the practices of accumulating and projecting elemental and Akashic forces.

Neither text is superior to the other in absolute terms. They serve different functions. A student who reads only the Kybalion will have intellectual understanding without practical ability. A student who reads only Bardon will have a training program without the philosophical framework that makes sense of it. The ideal approach, within the Hermetic tradition, is to study both: the Kybalion for the map, Bardon for the territory.

The Hermetic Synthesis Course at Thalira integrates both approaches, providing the theoretical framework alongside practical exercises drawn from the broader tradition.

The Three Bodies: Mental, Astral, Physical

Bardon's anthropology (his model of the human being) is tripartite: every person consists of a mental body (the spirit, the realm of thought and will), an astral body (the soul, the realm of feeling, desire, and character), and a physical body (the realm of action and material existence). These three bodies interpenetrate and influence each other, but each operates according to its own laws and is developed by its own type of exercise.

This is why each step in the system has three divisions. The Mental exercises train the mental body: thought control, concentration, visualization, and eventually mental projection (sending the mental body to remote locations while the physical and astral bodies remain). The Astral exercises train the astral body: elemental equilibrium, character development, the refinement of feeling and desire, and eventually astral projection. The Physical exercises train the physical body: breath work, gestures, the accumulation and direction of vital force through the physical organism.

This tripartite model has deep roots in the Western tradition. It corresponds to the Platonic division of the soul into reason (nous), spirit (thymos), and appetite (epithymia). It corresponds to the Pauline distinction between spirit (pneuma), soul (psyche), and body (soma). It corresponds to the alchemical triad of sulphur (the active, fiery principle), mercury (the mediating, fluid principle), and salt (the fixed, material principle). Bardon draws on all of these traditions without citing any of them explicitly. His approach is practical, not scholarly: here are the three bodies, here is how you train each one.

The practical consequence of this model is that Bardon's system is genuinely holistic. Unlike meditation-only systems (which train the mental body and neglect the other two) or energy-work systems (which train the physical and astral bodies but neglect the mental), Bardon's curriculum addresses the complete human being. This is one reason practitioners report that the system affects every area of life, not just the hours spent in formal practice.

Scholarly Reception and Commentary

Academic engagement with Bardon's work has been minimal compared to other figures in Western esotericism. Bardon wrote in German, published in the 1950s in communist Czechoslovakia, and died before he could establish an institutional framework for his teachings. He belongs to no university, no established school, no recognized lineage. His work circulated through small publishers and personal networks for decades before reaching a wider audience through English translations.

The primary secondary source is Rawn Clark's A Bardon Companion, which provides step-by-step commentary on all three of Bardon's practical books. Clark approaches the material as a practitioner, not an academic, offering detailed guidance on each exercise, clarification of Bardon's sometimes compressed instructions, and insights from his own years of practice. The Companion is freely available online and remains the standard reference for English-speaking Bardon students.

Within the academic study of Western esotericism, Bardon is occasionally mentioned in surveys of 20th-century occultism but rarely receives sustained analysis. Wouter Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) places Bardon within the broader context of post-Theosophical practical occultism. Marco Pasi's work on Aleister Crowley occasionally references Bardon as a contrasting figure: where Crowley emphasized ceremonial ritual and Thelemic philosophy, Bardon emphasized internal development and systematic gradual training.

The growing interest in Western esotericism as an academic field (centered at the University of Amsterdam's Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents) may eventually produce more scholarly attention to Bardon. His work represents a unique case: a complete, systematic, graded occult curriculum without parallel in the Western tradition, created by a practitioner who had no academic credentials and left almost no biographical paper trail.

Among practitioners, the reception is more extensive. Online communities dedicated to Bardon's system have existed since the earliest days of internet forums. The consistent testimony is that the system works as described, that it is extraordinarily demanding, and that most students abandon it somewhere in the first three steps. Those who persist report significant changes in concentration ability, emotional regulation, and perceptual sensitivity, regardless of whether they accept the magical framework literally.

Hermetic Roots

Bardon's system is Hermetic in the precise sense: it descends from the tradition associated with Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic corpus. The correspondences are specific. The principle that the human being is a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm (the foundation of Hermetic philosophy since the Corpus Hermeticum) is the structural principle of Bardon's entire system. The student works with elements because the cosmos is composed of elements. The student develops mental, astral, and physical bodies because the cosmos has mental, astral, and physical dimensions. What is above is below; what is below is above.

The elemental theory that Bardon employs has roots in Empedocles (5th century BCE), was systematized by Aristotle, transmitted through Arabic alchemy, and entered the Western magical tradition through Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533). Bardon's particular version of elemental theory (with the Akasha as fifth element and the electric/magnetic fluid polarity within each element) shows the influence of Central European folk magic, Paracelsian alchemy, and the tradition of practical Kabbalah that flourished in Prague and the surrounding regions.

The Kabbalistic influence is present but subordinate in Initiation into Hermetics. It becomes central in Bardon's third book, The Key to the True Kabbalah, which deals with the creative power of letters and sounds. In the first book, the Kabbalistic elements appear in the theory of correspondences, in the structure of the elemental system, and in the underlying cosmology of emanation (the idea that reality proceeds from a single source through stages of increasing density, from Akasha through fire, air, water, and earth to physical matter).

Who Should Read It

Initiation into Hermetics is for the practitioner, not the scholar. If you want to understand Hermeticism intellectually, read the Corpus Hermeticum, the Kybalion, and Antoine Faivre's academic surveys. If you want to practice Hermeticism, there is no more systematic starting point than Bardon.

The book assumes no prior training but demands enormous self-discipline. You will need to establish a daily practice schedule and maintain it for months (at minimum) before noticing significant results. You will need to be honest with yourself during the soul mirror work. You will need patience with the vacancy-of-mind exercise, which most students find intensely frustrating before it becomes natural. You will need the willingness to spend time on exercises that seem impossibly simple (sitting and observing your own thoughts) before the system reveals why these foundations are necessary.

Readers who are interested in the relationship between Bardon and the broader Hermetic tradition will benefit from studying the Hermetic corpus alongside the practical work. The Emerald Tablet's "as above, so below" is not merely a slogan in Bardon's system; it is the operating principle of every exercise.

The best approach is to read the Theory section in full, then begin Step 1, and only read the description of Step 2 after you have genuinely mastered Step 1 (not after you have attempted it for two weeks and decided it was "close enough"). Bardon's own instruction is clear: do not read ahead. The temptation is strong. Resist it.

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