Review: Frater Acher, Holy Heretics, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2022, ISBN: 978-1-912316-67-0 (hardcover)

by Craig ‘VI’ Slee

Holy Heretics is the latest volume in Frater Acher’s Holy Daimon cycle from Scarlet Imprint. It’s an interesting project to review a book which is part of a larger whole when you have not read the others. However, I was assured, when agreeing to review it, that Holy Heretics equally stands alone. For the most part, this reviewer would agree with such an assertion. One does not need to have read the rest to gain something from this book.

Yet, to be quite clear, this isn’t a break from Acher’s other work – I have reviewed some of that here for Paralibrum. Holy Heretics is very much an eddy in a particular stream (the Cycle) which feeds into a river (Acher’s whole authorial oeuvre). This needs stating at the outset – if one does not “get on” with the author’s conceptual framework, then one will inevitably miss out.

Note that this is not the same as saying that one has to agree with everything in the book. Merely that without connection, this book is merely a useful historical overview with some practical exercises in developing mystical and magical perception, as well as some excellent translations of German texts not previously (as far as I am aware) available to the English-speaking occultist.

Lest it sound like I am damning with faint praise; I’m going to invoke the spirits of etymology here:

mere (adj.) late 14c., of a voice, "pure, clear;" mid-15c., of abstract things, "absolute, sheer;" from Old French mier "pure" (of gold), "entire, total, complete," and directly from Latin merus "unmixed" (of wine), "pure; bare, naked;" figuratively "true, real, genuine," according to some sources probably originally "clear, bright," from PIE *mer- "to gleam, glimmer, sparkle" (source also of Old English amerian "to purify," Old Irish emer "not clear," Sanskrit maricih "ray, beam," Greek marmarein "to gleam, glimmer"). But de Vaan writes "there is no compelling reason to derive 'pure' from 'shining,'" and compares Hittite marri "just so, gratuitously," and suggests the source is a PIE *merH-o- "remaining, pure."

The English sense of "nothing less than, in the fullest sense absolute" (mid-15c., surviving now only in vestiges such as mere folly) existed for centuries alongside the apparently opposite sense of "nothing more than" (1580s, as in a mere dream). – Online Etymology Dictionary

Both the absolute and the nothing more exist side by side in a paradox of language where they appear as each other’s negation, or at the very least seeming opposition. Yet as Frater Acher writes:

As ‘seekers of understanding’ we are not here to judge, but to learn how to allow all paradoxes to exist simultaneously. [...] In the world of creation there is a mask behind every mask, until we find ourselves standing at the edge of the abyss. (p. 186)

So it is that an apparent damnation above may actually be a mask that reveals because Frater Acher writes with very deliberate care for the reader.

The structure of the text, with its two Books of Mysticism and Magic, serve as easily recognisable masks for anyone who reads it. In a sense, this is a book about character, in terms of the symbols we use (and which also use us) to contour our perception and experience. It is also a study in contrasts, in order to explore what the author calls “the rainbow path” (p. 12) – which requires seeing through and behind caricatures. Whether those caricatures are those of the fanatical Christian extremist, the dissolute pagan, or the saintly hesychast, all are examined here with remarkable even-handedness.

To quote the opening epigraph from Shaikh Mahmud Shabistari’s 14th Century Gulshan-i Raz:

Each one speaks the language native to the level he has reached, and it is hard to understand what he says. (Quote on page prior to p. 1)

Frater Acher seems to understand this very well. One only has to look at the wonderfully open contents list: each section has its own description or blurb which serves as both clarifier and hook for the curious reader. Combine this with wonderful illustrations from frequent collaborator José Gabriel Alegría Sabogal, and it is clear that the whole approach comes from a place of elucidation - making lucid, or clear. To find the shine (my coining) in all the things he discusses.

The exercises Acher describes are all designed to enhance one’s relation with that shine with which we are, in his view, co-creators. I use the word shine precisely because it can be seen in terms of reflection, or that which gives off (or is itself) light.

For those of us with complicated histories with the equally complicated beast we characterise as “Christianity” it may be hard to reconcile the “dissonance and tension” (p. 4) we experience when confronted with the cracks in our pre-conceptions and understandings.

Acher clearly shows us the horrors and self-abnegation that some of the early Christian mystics performed upon themselves and others in their pursuit of the divine. At the same time he also illustrates a narrow and cracked path which has much in common with the noetic perceptions of earlier peoples – see my review on Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination for further links and parallels if you so desire.

Acher’s broad overview of the Desert Fathers and their practices traces a realisation of noeisis via the heart – an organ that is much more than a simple pump as we would have it. He highlights the work of 5th Century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who “in contrast to the Platonic tradition…challenged the notion that divine insight (gnosis) was accessible by the rational-cognitive mind alone.” This, after positioning the idea of “Christian mysticism as essentially applied Neoplatonism” (p.10) allowed a theurgic turn to enter and mix with the core of the young Christian cosmology.

In a sense then, the Areopagite introduces an apophatic streak into the mix – it is this kind of knowing-which-is-unknowing that allows the light to get into the crack that is the human heart. It is the light that appears in the darkened cell of the monk and hesychast, the shine in the absential field of the so-called Abyss. This is the heresy spoken and observed by the Holy Heretics of the title. So, in that spirit, perhaps we might challenge that the idea of the Platonic tradition’s rationality was solely a “cognitive” one. Perhaps that is a potential modern assumption reflected back? After all, the logos remains an obscure term – as does the nous, as outlined in my above-mentioned review. Might it be, that reason was in fact, thoroughly unreasonable as far as we moderns are concerned?

Regardless, it appears as if the Areopagite’s ideas were highly influential, providing a participatory pathway with the divine, enhancing the already pre-existing tradition of prayer. Acher’s later points about differences between Western and Eastern Christianity are well taken. They themselves are cracks in the character of our often Anglocentric, (Roman and Protestant) Western-Christianity-infused worldview.

Prayer is, in this context, a decentering of the human, to allow something else to appear - a theophany. 

Now, even when the monk is not attending to the prayer, the prayer is attending to the monk. (p. 46)

It is this theophany which allows theology – the becoming divine. More properly, for the Christian, it allows for the salvation of Christ to be manifest within them, to return to pre-lapsarian connection with divinity.

As we shall see, it is also important to point out in this context that the original meaning of the word ‘theology’ described nothing less than the process of theosis, the process of attaining deification. (p.26)

As Acher points out, therefore mystics often run the risk of heresy as far as Christianity is concerned – direct contact with divinity often bypassed the Church and undermined its claim to sole authority. Yet, as the author suggests in Book II Magic it is precisely this potency that practitioners may seek – the goes-as-daimon, to paraphrase.

So rather than holding Christianity as an exemplar, this book actually traces the “heretical” rainbow shine which is occulted within a structure which was in many ways profoundly harmful, fanatical and destructive. This is not a question of “perennial” truths or philosophies across traditions.

Rather, what Acher seems to be elucidating is an approach which embraces and acknowledges the ubiquity of the daimonic, as it breaks and leaks through human structures and worlding-processes. The examinations here are discussions of human responses to that fact. So then, there may be an alternate universe where this book exists with significant examinations of, say, Zoroastrianism!

Perhaps this is why he is able to quote prog rock stalwarts TOOL via the lyrics of Maynard James Keenan, and bring in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy – while also giving us translations of Theologia Germanica, Paracelsus, and discussions of Hildegard von Bingen?

Certainly, synthesising these requires skill in order to prevent it becoming a scattershot grab bag of ideas. Yet there is a clear throughline throughout the text, gleaming and shining before seemingly disappearing in another table of mediaeval virtues and vices, running unseen, only to emerge in a discussion of things as apparently varied as the ins and outs of  German Protestant theology and the ritual applications of bells and liturgy.

As a reviewer, I will not lie and say this was an easy book for me – bits of it were only academic to me, being far from my own life and practice. I often wondered where the author was going – only to find my attention snared a couple of paragraphs on, forcing me to backtrack and read more closely the parts my mind had skimmed. I mention this, not out of criticism, but as a positive fact. Put bluntly, Acher’s vision is clear enough to carry through any lapses of inattention on the part of the reader.

The secret of all temple ceilings lies in knowing how to balance the effect of opposing forces. Any roof is held in place by its own weight pushing down as well as the strength of the walls holding it up. (p. 89)

The balance Acher talks about here is, contextually, different to many people’s idea of balance-as-equilibrium. This is not balance as some perfected unmoving state, but a moving, homeostatic vitality.

The forces here are not held in abeyance by each other. Instead, they are active agencies doing as they will. The temple is not unmoving isolate stone, the cathedral is not cold beauty frozen in place for the glory of God, untouched by the world. The temple lives dynamically, the cathedral fluxes like a forest full of viridian vitality.

Even notions of opposition begin to break down when we begin to realise that each polarity is an extremity – a hyper-manifestation, if you will, imbricated with its so-called opposite.  Each needs the other.

Similarly, none of the nine virtues […] could shine in the illuminated way Hildegard of Bingen presents them, if not contrasted and counterbalanced by their sibling vices. Their radiant beauty is a direct function of their nocturnal opposites. (p.89)

Acher takes Hildegard’s Virtue of Divine Service and its oppositional Vice of Witchcraft and explores the processual field of tension which apparently lies between them. In an act worthy of Edwardian sorcerer Austin Osman Spare, Acher takes “the sacred inbetweenness concepts” (Kenneth Grant, Cults of The Shadow, Letchworth: Frederick Muller Limited, 1975, p.198) and “between the wolf-headed shape and the storm cloud” (p. 93) gives us his vision of a path which glimmers with rainbow shine in the darkness of the corvid’s wing.

As a book of practice Holy Heretics is straight forward, and as a reference work it is full of translations and quotes which may feel a little too long for some. Yet as the author takes us through the Black Death and its subsequent historical context and changes, into the world of Grund and Abgrund, the hooks may catch you again, even if perhaps some of the terminology is unfamiliar to those not well acquainted with the wonderful peculiarities found in non-English tongues.

To operate on and within the ground of one’s soul (Seelengrund) requires perceiving it in and through the world – to embrace one’s ontology as not being apart or separate but intrinsically woven-with the world. The German mystics Acher discusses existed in a time of turmoil and corruption – perhaps in some ways not so different from our own, which is a paradoxically soothing thought, given the world in which we are today.

Those mystics’ ideas of service were to bring the divine back to their community – which may inspire those of us practitioners who are working to break the spell of so-called disenchantment which hangs over everything. (Albeit that such disenchantment has always holes in it because the numinous has no truck with it, and leaks everywhere, leaving spoor if you know where and how to look.)

Here, the terms Lebemeister (“life master”) and Lesemeister (“book master”, p. 121) come into play. For it is perhaps an amusing irony that this book is published by Scarlet Imprint, one of the first so-called talismanic publishers. A master of living books, or books of life, which exceed the boundaries of simple commodity and object to reveal an enlivened vitalistic cosmos seems like a good ground for the practitioner to operate from. Just as Paralibrum means Beyond the Book, it is the agential excess which is hidden and beyond the view of most non-practitioners – the occult in occultism.

This is where spirits come in. The first part of the book, Mysticism details the training to achieve an awareness of a living agential world, but the second, Magic deals with the rituals and contexts to allow relationality and proper protocol. Here, Acher outlines the processes and principles behind usage of special ritual bells to call upon the OIympic Spirits and one’s holy daimon, as well as their related magical inks. I leave it to the reader as to the value of the rites involved. Suffice to say that the throughline present in the book continues here deep into Paracelsian territory.

Acher deploys a keen historical ritual analysis here, before going deeper into the Olympic Spirits and Paracelsian cosmology. There’s a richness here which this reviewer has rarely seen regarding Paracelsus – and once again Acher has done all of us in the Anglosphere a favour presenting everything so clearly. Though it may be a recurrent refrain in my reviews, I believe the bibliography will be useful on its own.

As a project of elucidation of thing perhaps previously unknown or scattered work, Holy Heretics has a potential to be a soulgift for many and Acher should be applauded for that, if for nothing else. I expect many practitioners to be grateful for years to come.