INGENIUM: The Alchemy of the Magical Mind

By Frater Acher. Design & artwork by Joseph Uccello.

TaDehent, 2022

Written for the magical beginner just as much as the long-term practitioner, INGENIUM: the Alchemy of the Magical Mind, is Frater Acher’s most radical book yet. A beautiful book that is both a work of magic and a work of art with the illustrations of Joseph Uccello, Ingenium reaches through common misconceptions in western magic and shines a light along the path of genuine respect for beings and ways of being. INGENIUM takes the reader on a journey not to find magic, but to become magic.

The book begins with a concise outline of the Western Way of the Adept, using the infamous Four Demon Kings to illustrate what authentic spirit-practice demands. It then moves into a practical exploration of Radical Otherness - a concept that provides a crucial and necessary counterbalance to the psychologization of magic in the West since the times of the Golden Dawn. The third gift within the book proceeds to lay out the essential Inner Tools of Magic within the body of the practitioner. Frater Acher outlines the authentic and highly animistic magic of Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541), and has translated these related practices for the first time to an English-speaking audience. INGENIUM concludes with a highly personal chapter in which Frater Acher recounts how the practice of the preceding chapters has taken shape in his own life, including magical diary entries recounting the period after he first connected with his Holy Daimon.

Frater Acher combines research and practice, authentic source material and heretical independence to outline a lived path of Western Magic that is at once ancient and in need of re-paving with each step.