Review: Frater Acher and José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal, Clavis Goêtica: Keys to Chthonic Sorcery, West Yorkshire, England: Hadean Press 2021, ISBN: 9781907881527

by Craig ‘VI’ Slee

Publisher’s Note: The reviewer received an advance digital copy of the book. The original subtitle The Keys to Chthonic Sorcery has since then been updated to Keys to Chthonic Sorcery for similar considerations as given by Craig.

I admit to being skeptical when a book claims to be “The” key to anything. Frankly, this reviewer does not really get on with singular narratives, preferring multiple lenses and lines of thought, from which emerge actual experience and practices. Definite articles trouble me in the uncanny world of the occult and magical. At the same time, “terms of art” both rhetorical and magical exist for a reason. 

So, when Frater Acher and José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal present us with a volume entitled Clavis Goêtica: The Key to Chthonic Sorcery, it is perhaps important to note that plenty of grimoires refer to themselves as “The Key to X” – such as the Clavis Inferni. This work partakes strongly of what has gone before, which is not to say that it is a regurgitation. Rather, it is a clarification; a guide and a glossary diffracted through the prism of personal ritual practice, historical research, and painstakingly intimate relationships with spirits. 

This is the sense in which it is a key, and for those of us who perhaps might prefer the weight of multiple keys kept in our fists as we move into darkness, we are invited to relax our grips a little – or perhaps even to open our hands completely. 

The authors do not shy from acknowledging from whence their work comes – perhaps the most influential stream of thought comes from the work of Jake Stratton-Kent. Stratton-Kent, who contributes a foreword to this volume, delivered Geosophia: The Argo of Magic to the world in 2010, and in the process exposed the chthonic roots of much of so-called Western Magic. 

Geosophia was seminal in many ways, not least because it suggested that while magic in the West was not an unbroken lineage or transmission, it nonetheless had archaic roots which reached deeper than previously expected by occulture. It arrived into a sphere which derived much of its identity from the 19th century and its attendant colonialist ghosts, with all its exoticisms, assumptions, and orientalisms – and stirred those and elder shades into howling an even older song. 

This song was one of ever-emerging upwelling – again and again the dead and the spirits of the underworld would stream upward to encounter the humans who would perhaps wish they’d stay quiet. Again  and again, Geosophia suggested, the goêteia – the sorcery – which underlaid the unexamined history of so-called Western occulture, was that of the goês. The so-called “goetic” spirits and their grimoires, upon which luminaries so important to occulture had grounded their own ideas and lineages were nothing of the sort. 

The goês is the practitioner, or as Acher puts it: “[T]he gravedweller and skull-speaker, [which] quickly became replaced with the fashionable Persian loanword of the mage.” (p. 9)

The authors acknowledge the earlier works, those of Burkert, Ogden, Johnston, et al – academics and classicists who Stratton-Kent also refers to in Geosophia. In the eyes of this reviewer, it is particularly important to do this as a form of noting ancestry of thought and practice. Only by seeing where we have come from may we be able to discover how and in what form the goês may emerge today. Clavis Goêtica is not a reconstructionist work – it does not seek a One True form of Chthonic Sorcery – whatever that term may mean to the reader. Rather, it presents us with history, case studies and practices. What we divine from these is between us and the spirits, as it were. In the words of Frater Acher: 

The real-life as well as spiritual experiences made as part of these journeys, to me at least, hold the same ontological reality or fragility as the very coffee cup I hold in my hands right now. The chthonic spirits with whom I had the chance to commune and collaborate could not be less interested in human psychology, academic publishing standards or magical lineage for that matter. If anything at all, they hold an active interest in restoring and maintaining the tides of nature – and putting us humans to good work in the spheres of reality that they cannot reach themselves as easily as we do. Neither natural exploitation nor transmutation is their interest, yet if we were to regain their trust, interspecies symbiosis might be. (p. 10)

I. Ancient Goêteia

The first chapter of this volume was originally published on theomagica.com in 2017, under the title Goêteia - explorations in chthonic sorcery and is still available for those who wish to give themselves a taste of the book’s grounding thesis before taking the plunge and purchasing this work from Hadean Press.

To very briefly summarise, it is the chapter’s suggestion that the goês essentially becomes a daimon; that is, the goês is transformed by their relationship with the spirits and, much like the Idaean dactyls of Ancient Greek Myth is seen as offspring of, or descending from the Great Mother – the earth itself. Placing the goês within such a mythic context (or indeed their being placed there by the spirits) renders them a numinous figure. It is this which allows them to operate according to the manner of that nature, rather than being necessarily tied to a particular orthopraxy: “We can see that the definition of a goês is much more aimed at a state of being than a particular practice.” (p. 22)

Acher makes clear that these figures were not particularly accepted as time went on. Indeed, their almost uncivilized nature placed them on the margins due to their ecstatic mode:

Critically, however, the term góos was not only used to describe a particular spiritual (burial) practice, but more importantly to describe the actual experience it induced in the living who observed such performance [...] [A] spontaneous, uncontrollable, ecstatic practice, loosely framed by ritual structure, aimed at the realm of the dead, and deeply disrupting to the social sense of normality and order. (p. 18-19)

While this is a throughline that makes sense, this reviewer does want to call attention to one of the examples used to illustrate the logic of goês as origin for the terminology of the practice of sorcery:

Traditionally Londoners are the people who have taken residence in London. That is, the act of living in Londoncreates the boundary of this group. Anybody moving out of London permanently would have a hard time claiming they’d still belong to this particular group. Now imagine a situation where this logic was inverted: imagine the term Londoner being applied to an ambiguous group of people irrespective of where they lived – or what they actually did. In other words: wherever these people chose to live, whatever they chose to do, London would be with them. (p. 21)

At first, this analogy seems self-evident. The reality is more complex when one considers that those who were “born and bred” in an area are still, by the traditional logic referenced here, often considered to remain as that no matter where they go. The politics of locale, ethnicity and nationality aside, this reviewer finds the subsequent implication fascinating, for it is not precisely the act of living which creates the boundary, but the place acting upon the human. Thus, such an act is not solely anthropocentric – the genus loci, in this example, could be said to make the human into the proverbial Londoner. Therefore, even the traditional logic conceals the shadow-presence of the goês, waiting to emerge. In this sense then, the decentralisation of the human echoes the historic narrative Acher is discussing, with the goês operating on the margins, in caverns, forests and edge lands.

Is it therefore possible, following such logic, that chthonic sorcery is an axiomatic descent from the usual human position betwixt heavens and earth? No longer solely operating in the middle-world, one originates from the underworld? That is to say, the goês operates in non-human manner, as daimon, just as we have said. 

Acher states:  

Thus the Ancient Greek had no problem at all in seeing cohesion in the term daimon where we might see contradiction today: it both represents a class of mythical spirits as well as ancient human beings that once were believed to have walked the earth. If applied to a certain category of daimones, such as the Idaian Dactyls, it thus at the same time describes an ancient historic tribe as well as a current class of spirit. (p. 32)

We would ask the reader to bear the above questions in mind for the rest of the review, precisely because the notion of sorcery as an attack or undermining of human notions of power, causation, correct moral order and the like, has an extremely long history, and is relevant in many countries, even today.

While bearing this mind, we find ourselves advised by the author to “[L]eave our flats, our houses and towns, our crowded places of people and city-lights.” (p. 38) Clearly, the key is to find a spot where the ordinary flow of human life is at a low ebb, to allow space for ourselves to connect to the other than ordinary-human. Yet in some senses, Acher has an embarrassment of riches that many of us do not – to be able to work in a cave in the Alps is a goal many of us will never reach! 

This reviewer wonders if perhaps the work might have benefitted from consideration of the marginal spaces found precisely within our cities beyond the somewhat passing mention of cemeteries. Then again, given the personal nature of such a work as this, it may be perhaps a little too much to cover all the bases and give all the answers and options available. Regardless, it is clear that despite a surface resemblance to an urban-wilderness axis, in the realms beneath, it is the spirit inter-and-intra actions which are key.

II. Examples of Western Goês

To illustrate this, we are presented with several folkloric examples which are considerably more recent than Ancient and Archaic Greece. The 12th century work of Cesarius of Heisterbach contains a short tale of a man who made it his habit to pray for the spirits of the dead as he passed them by in the cemetery, and when he is attacked by robbers, those very same souls he prayed for came to his defence and drove away his attackers. This tale is depicted on various bone-houses and ossuaries throughout the following centuries, and the author takes us through the ins and outs of the image, with a new depiction by José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal (see below), pointing out links with the Papyri Graecae Magicae, or PGM while simultaneously reminding us that this is not an attempt to trace an unbroken lineage or tradition:

[I]nstead of arguing for a direct line of transmission, we’d like to consider the option that similar practices evolved in different European cultures and times from the actual first-hand experiences of their members. Goêtia was never learned from books, rarely from other men and most commonly from the spirits themselves. Therefore, a goêtic topos should not be limited to an indicator of possible transmission pathways for oral knowledge through time and cultures. Instead, it should be understood as practical knowledge directly derived from the craft itself [.] (p.51)

From there, we are treated to a mention of Norse necromantic lore and the practice of útiseta, or sitting-out, both in the context of myth via the god Odin, but also in reference to law-codes etc., which latterly forbade such practices. This reviewer also notes there are multiple other mentions of mound-sitting as method of gaining knowledge in Norse literary corpus, including the poem Hárbarðsljóð – a flyting dialogue between Thor and a disguised Odin, which contains Thor’s surprise at Odin referring to learning his biting words from “the old men of the forest.” The thunder god says that this is a strange description for burial mounds! Likewise, in Völsunga saga, Rerir, father of Völsung, sits on a mound when praying for a son, and there is at least one other case of a mortal poet learning his skill from sitting on the mound of a deceased master poet. 

That the author did not reference these others is by no means a problem – it is enough to provide these basic examples, for after all, much can be gleaned by digging deeper into such things. This is the particular excellence of this volume – at less than 150 pages, it contains enough material to engender many other hundreds worth of research depending which one were to tackle, and its bibliography alone is a treasure trove of sources.

Acher’s tracing of these themes leads to a discussion of the way they and related ones were embedded in folklore, even becoming part of Catholic traditions – providing, he suggests, encouragement for the modern goês and a path through the folkloric heart of that belief system, rather than avoiding it.

This reviewer isn’t Catholic or Christian (though raised mid-high church Anglican) and so one wonders if, within the idea of a Western Christian overculture – which, at least in the Anglosphere, roots itself largely in Protestantism – the current vogue for so-called folk-Catholicism is another form of exoticism for many. Obviously, for large portions of the history of the West, Roman Catholicism was the major game in town. Protestantism is a relative latecomer after all, and in many areas of Europe, folk-practices survived reformationist zeal to some degree. Yet, the folk-traditions post-Reformation still contained magical practice - see my previous review of An Excellent Booke for Paralibrum as but one example. It is thus curious to note that the ritual aspects of Catholicism and its folk expressions seem exotic to many, while at the same time Protestant angles seem somewhat neglected by occulture.

Having said this, Frater Acher is not dealing with the historic Anglosphere. Rather, the case studies and translations that follow are German. For those of us who are English-speaking monoglots, exposure to other histories and forms is, and should always be, educational. Acher’s previous works including the Holy Daimon series, published by Scarlet Imprint, have already elucidated much to the English-speaking world which was previously concealed – so when the author speaks of the “white-goês” Johannes Beer we can be sure that even if such content  is not entirely new to the reader, it is handled with aplomb and respect towards the material in such a way as to be thought provoking.

Acher gives us the tale of Beer encountering spirits inside a mountain, and the magical events that follow. He notes: 

The impressive singularity of Beer’s white kind of goêtia is that it aims to unite forms of magic that historically are considered to be at odds, if not polar opposites: Beer is a chthonic spirit worker of the empty hand. He roams the forests and mountains, speaks to the wilderness, allows his mind to become one with the land and thus knows how to read in the book of nature. Yet at the same time he is the inversion of the famous magician Johannes Faust. None of his magic is orientated towards his own or other people’s gain. Instead of striking a pact with the spirits of the underworld, he comes to understand them, and to speak to them of the light of God. (p. 61-62)

Obviously, Beer is operating within a Christian cosmology wherein God as highest good is a given. Likewise, various references Acher makes to Divinity and Oneness within this book may be understood to be based on personal experience, historical context, and terms of art. At several points throughout the text, this reviewer’s position as recovering student of philosophy caused me to wonder what these terms fully meant in this context, which I clearly did not entirely share. 

This is a minor quibble perhaps, but one that could perhaps be rendered slightly clearer, though given the text also contains personal understandings and cosmological structures it is perhaps unsurprising that differences of opinion between reader and author occur. Certain ideas such as the notion of spirit-human relations and free will, as expressed by the following seem to provide humanity a somewhat privileged position: “Rather than stealing the fire from them – we were meant to teach the spirits how to apply the burden of free will wisely.” (p. 64)

This position is by no means new, or surprising. It is however, quoted here to illustrate the point that the assumptions of every practitioner are based on worldview and experience. The personal component of the work has been referred to, above, and before in this review and it is important to repeat, I feel, so that differences in ontology or cosmology do not cause the reader to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  

Whether or not one agrees completely with the author’s experience is moot – this book is born of the working practice of human and spirits. That is as factual as these things get, as far as this reviewer is concerned. After all, one does not need to follow the Nicene Creed to spot the necromantic and chthonic themes in Christ’s descent to and subsequent harrowing of Hell a.k.a. the Underworld. 

Thusly, despite differences, one can say that Acher easily illustrates the role of the goês as daimon-working-with-other-daimones. Beer clearly does so for the benefit of all as primary motivation. Other goês may (and probably did) differ in the motivations for their mutualism, but it is that flow between parties which is of greatest import.

III. On Talking Skulls

This brings us to the Ars Phytonica – an 18th Century German text Acher translates for us involving the usage of a skull for divinatory purposes. Here, the goês is the “skull-speaker” referred to earlier in the text. After presenting us with the rite, the author makes the point that, in this context, there is a “dichotomy of divinatory tools” (p. 78) involved when dealing with mantic skulls – a distinction between ritual tools and the skull itself which serves as vessel for the spirit.

Acher leads us off on a grand chase encompassing the Jewish Teraphim – plus folkloric reference to the usage of the skulls of child prodigies (as well as their spirits) being employed for mantic purposes. Those of us familiar with the PGM will note similarities with the usage of young boys as diviners – as does Acher.

We are treated to a mythic grounding of ritual tools used in such rites; the knives and other implements, and their place in relation to openhandedness; the linkage of Ars Phytonica to Delphi and Python. In this reviewer’s view the whole section on mantic skulls would be worth the book price alone, purely for reference purposes. Yet we would be doing a massive disservice to José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal if we did not now mention how the illustrations produced here enliven the text – wonderful evocative images which contain a sense of both past and future in equal measure.  

Furthermore, the final essay which Sabogal has given us – Of talking heads and solar skulls: a personal commentary on the Ars Pythonica and Goeteia – provides important commentary, a portion of which I shall quote here instead of proverbially underlining and marking with exclamation marks:

In the Ars Pythonica, such a vague and timeless ghost can be found, remarkably incarnated and well defined, transformed not into a theology, but into a magical modus operandi. The present work of transcription, translation and contextualization makes a wonderful contribution in bringing this piece into the light and showing how it has deep roots in antiquity. But even with this, the skull ritual may seem extremely atavistic – I want to argue that it is not. Just as there was no primordial or primitive religion from which all the others derived, there was no “age of magic” prior to the age of religion, and magical skulls never truly went away. (p. 129)

For this reviewer then, this sums up the central theme of the whole book. Neither magic nor the spirits “went away”. They have always been here; it is down to us to listen and respond. For this reason, this book stands as an example of listening to that chthonic song, sung to us via text here, but more importantly, out in the world itself. It is a treasure borne out to us from the roots of mountains, and we all benefit.