“Frabato the Magician”
For some reason, I found Bardon’s books on magic and the occult fascinating, and tried to find out something about his life. Of course, in the 20 years since there has been much more research, and a very extensive website dealing with all matters about him and his work. But one paper I wrote, even though superseded, seems to still be being passed around so I’ll at least make it available with some of my own notes and observations…if I can find it.
Meanwhile, I notice (as of today at least) that Paul Allen’s comprehensive web site on all things Franz Bardon still seems to be alive:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/6243/
He apparently hasn’t added anything or changed it since 2002, but it is still the best place to start. Who knows how long it will be available? As long as geocities doesn’t need the disk space or have some technical problem, maybe that data will last there a long time.
(Incidentally, the stuff I wrote about Bardon and his first book “Initiation into Hermetics” still seems to be at http://www.geocities.com/franzbardon/timscott.html but a lot of what I’ve written has been superseded by better work elsewhere. Shoot, that thing goes all the way back to 1991.)
New(er) editions of his books
Reading Bardon’s books in English was always an ordeal. I don’t know what language they were originally written in, given that Bardon was Czech. But I do know that whatever the quality of the German that the Dieter Ruggeberg editions were, their translations were not very good. You could eventually figure out the meaning but it wasn’t easy by any means.
In the late 1990s, a publishing house was set up called Merkur Publishing, which reprinted the books in nice quality new editions, with new translations and sparse but useful new footnotes sprinkled throughout the text. I have been going back and forth comparing some of English of the original translation and the Merkur edition in IIH. There’s really not that much difference. But the occasional footnotes are useful.
As of now (Feb 2009), at least his three major books (Initiation into Hermetics, The Key to the True Qabalah, and The Practice of Magical Evocation) and what I think is his minor one (Frabato the Magician) are surprisingly all in print and available from Amazon. (They’re not cheap though…they’re offering the first three for US$114.85.)
