Today we we would like to introduce one of the new teachers here at Perseus Arcane Academy, Jake Green. He has a tremendous amount of experience that has been gained from some intensive training literally living and travelling with some very well known teachers from within the Franz Bardon community. The result of this is a clarity and understanding of the path of the Initiate, Sphere Magician and Quabbalist with the rare ability to teach the skills that allow others to gain the very same access and understanding to these teachings.
Before we begin the interview lets have Jake introduce himself and his new course in the following video.
Interview
PAA: Thank you Jake for joining us. Please could you share a little of your journey, how you came to this path and what you have trained in over the years.
Jake: I came into the Hermetic path when I was 15 years old. I’ve loved the idea Evocation since I was a little kid. Growing up, I went through catholic school for most of my primary education. A lot of Christian sermons were claiming things like Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh & Digimon would turn kids over to the occult at a very early age–– In my case, they were right!! All of my favorite forms of media were about summoning monsters or monster-related. Scooby doo. Or watching the Rugrats special where a Baby depiction of Moses drops his staff on the ground & parts the Nile river. As a very young child, I would draw monsters in my drawing book. I was all about monsters, dinosaurs, & sharks. When learning about animals or mythical monsters, I tried to understand “how many attack points does it have?” in reference to yugioh, a children’s card game where attack points= power. This type of lateral thinking quickly dissipated when I connected with real beings years latter. I also watched movies, like the Labyrinth & The Dark Crystal. Brain Froud, the art director of those films, is a gifted medium & his depictions of fairies in the films were strikingly accurate to the appearance & frequency of some of the faerie folk I met later on.
Before I was an adolescent, I had many, many encounters with nature spirits & other beings out in the wilderness where I lived. I had a leprechaun friend whom I would talk to sometimes for hours. He would stand in patch of tall weaves in the grass about 3 ft high. He’d turn them left or right to communicate yes/no. While I often couldn’t see him with the naked eye, here’s what was curious–– The entire area would be still with no wind, whereas the weave of grass that he stood on would move delicately or vigorously depending on the answer or question I presented. Additionally, he would send me telepathic messages. pendulum-like yes/no was very effective in training me to communicate & understand him. I quickly understood intuitively that it wasn’t any treasures or material object he has that were substantive or important, but what I learned, the teachings, the true friendship & knowledge that I gained out of that connection.
I have an unpublished memoir of 120-130 pages (20k words, a little smaller than a standard book) I’ve written about all my prepubescent experiences with ancestral land spirits, sasquatch, & various gnomes, sylphs, & magical experiences I was gifted by faeries. I’d be open to publishing if there’s any interest. Some stories are traumatic, others are very funny & involve me being at the the butt of many pranks!!
I cannot claim to be a natural medium–– rather it was my connection with the forest & the fact that my mom had fairies with her for her whole life that made it possible for me to connect with them. Being prepubescent makes all sorts of beings more willing to come out of the woodworks to connect for better & worse.
I still felt/saw spirits throughout my teens if I was traveling to really activated places, like New Orleans, old European cities & mountaintops, or in sacred regions in Hawaii. But it wasn’t as regular an occurrence. Between all my relationships with different beings, playing role-playing games like The elder-scrolls & travel, I unconsciously put those aspects together since travel awakens my spirit to psychic impressions more than anything else & the video games added fuel to the bonfire. 30 countries later, I still have the travel bug more than ever!
As an adult, I don’t see spirits if I don’t want to, unless they “knock on the door” of my crown or periphery sight. I mostly just stay connected with higher light realms since the value is exponentially greater.
Because of the organic relationships I developed with beings, faeries & spirits, I always hated how grimoire’s & books approached connecting & “dominating” them or asking them for unreasonable favors to materialize possessions, so I never followed the instructions of old grimoires. I also never connected with the beings of books like the goetica (with the exception of a few) because of all the negative hang-ups that I intuitively felt could happen. I’ve also never, ever asked spirits for anything material, only ever knowledge.
I discovered Franz Bardon first when I was a part of the Evocationalmagic.com (now StudioArcanis) forum, which has since been debunk. I notice it had a whole section dedicated to Franz Bardon & I found it quite curious so I investigated the book.
I started a website recently called www.Mysterycollege.com . One of my hopes was that serious practitioners that were apart of that forum & followers of Franz Bardons could find camaraderie there & at the Perseus Academy. I’m very shy with marketing myself, so I’ve mostly been focused on building the features. I’ve been playing around with achievements, gamification, and building a forum, which is a ton of work for a one-man crew (You know that too well, James!)
PAA: You have spent the last few years intensively pursuing your path. Can you share some of the highlights over the last few years? It must have been a wonderful experience being able to live and travel with some of these teachers.
Jake: I’ve spent tons of time with some of the best Franz Bardon practitioners around–– some are well-known & others who don’t reach out for the limelight. One of my favorite moments was going to the grave of Franz Bardon with Bob Smith & another member of our community Fabio in Opava, Czech Republic. I’ve had the pleasure of practicing & traveling with Bob full-time in many different countries across three different continents. Not a “spiritual” story, but a funny/shocking one. We rented a car from Prague & drove it across the country until nightfall. We were trying to “Czech” into hotels, but many were uninterested in hosting several foreigners. The Eastern side of Czech Republic is entirely different the western part (ie: Prague) We were even asked to leave by a dodgy hotel 1-hour outside Opava. The attendant of the hotel didn’t speak English, so a lady of the night who was there to get a room with her client was translating for the attendant, “sorry, there is no room available for you.” In hindsight, it is a very good thing that we left that town & didn’t stay there.
Franz Bardon’s grave was quite magical and quaint. People leave little stones & crystals there & then it appears that the crystals become very charged this way. I haven’t tuned in to seeing whether it’s one of his serving spirits doing the charging or if Franz does this himself. I took a quartz crystal someone placed on his grave & it was charged very strongly, even though it was probably recently placed there within the last few months.
Once you reach a certain level of momentum with Evocation, Invocation & Kabbalah, peak experiences happen with far more regularity so it is difficult to call out the best ones. This week as of writing this I’ve had a blast playing around with two-letter kabbalah combinations & integrating them with my morning affirmations & Visualization practice. Today I connected with some light realms while reading a book, which was happening in the background. Yesterday When I played Doom 3 in VR on my Occulus headset, I later felt some saturnian energies that were knocking at my crown & I politely declined. Doing this work is an amplifier of good & bad opportunities, so you’ve got to be extra conscientious of the media & information that you consume. Some people I know who are advanced simply cannot handle violence, horror, or reading the news because of their heightened sensitivity. One of my well-known friends in the community often watches anime for hours while streaming non-dual light! (I don’t recommend this approach if you haven’t been practicing for decades like he has) In other words, you can play & enjoy life as a normal human being with this work & still have extremely profound effects on a day-to-day basis.
I recently watched a youtube documentary on consumerism & western cultures’ obsession with ‘newness”. The conclusion of that 90 minute documentary was that to combat the shallowness of western culture, the best antidote is to instead be a consumer of profound depth in fewer things (knowledge, consumer purchases, & community-oriented purchases.) For me, this translated to my experiences of gaining expertise in the Initation, Evocation & Kabbalah processes.
That all said, there is a very important balance between treating all of these practices with the greatest level of the highest degree of sacredness & being able to apply the teachings during the most mundane activities. Most teachers adopt the attitude of sacredness because it is the best attribute for personal practice & the highest level of transmissions/teaching, at the cost of scaring off most students who’d feel inadequate. While if I talk only about media, games, & comedic encounters while traveling that may communicate too little reverence & take away the punch power to the teachings when transferring these lessons. At this stage for me, the best way to balance is to communicate both of these polarities so that people can find the middle ground for themselves & accept their own light & dark natures.
PAA: You are known for your work with Sifu Mark Rasmus, being the co author of the very successful Backdoor into Hermetics. Can you talk about how your work with Mark assisted you in each of the books of Franz Bardon, IIH, PME and KTQ?
Jake: Mark taught me about all the various hidden aspects of the Franz Bardon framework that are not publicly available. The irony is that even when publishing an advanced esoteric book like Franz Bardon did, it is still in many ways, “exoteric.” Exoteric means that these books were developed for the public OF HIS TIME. I can only image that Bardon had his Esoteric & inner circle practice where he could share energetic transmissions & help students gain abilities at a far more advanced pace then they would’ve on their own. Books are just far too limited. In traditional esoteric circles in Western Europe, people would visit their teacher in short spurts to get the attunements & get back to practicing on their own. The myth of a solitary practitioner isn’t helpful & I don’t encourage it. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I just stayed alone in my room and bashed my head against my copy of the IIH text, only repeating the observing & rising of thought exercise over and over and over again & being sorely disappointed…
It is unfair to expect anyone to learn calculus on their own using a textbook, especially if they didn’t know how to add, subtract or knew what they should focus on reading. How discouraging would that be? Where would they know where to start? Attunements give you all the energetic information to make these instinctive calculations for magical practices so that they “just work.” In a post-enlightenment westernized world, Magic, akasha, light, universal principles, Esoteric Dharma teachings & Quabalah are much more conceptually difficult to comprehend because there is virtually zero consensus of belief in society that supports you on this path. Our perceptions of reality are largely guided by what our societies dictates we can see & no one is immune to their environment. What wants you to psychically evolve is your spirit & nature itself, which is why I believe getting direct transmissions, as well as practicing in the forest with plants & trees is the fastest way to grow & have breakthroughs in your practice.
The beauty of technology today is that we can transfer far larger bandwidths of data than text. A text file is kilobytes (1,000s of bytes, ) whereas video is often gigabytes (billions of bytes.) The extra bandwidth carries Way more information for our intellect, feelings & spirit to discern nuisance. With videos, I’ve been able to help students far more than I would have with using books alone. Additionally, instead of reading & subvocalizing the words of a book in the voice you’re projecting onto the author, we can instead see each other eye-to-eye (albeit parasocially.) You can see a human versus a mythologized author, which really helps with getting a realistic feel for our soul mirror work & normalizing the hermetic lifestyle. If we feel that we are too separate from the possibility of getting truly competent in the framework because we worship our heroes too much, then we are missing out on so much. I’ve had at least a dozen people who have met me in person & who’ve read the Backdoor into Hermetics back-to-front & are often surprised to find myself being an easy-going goofy guy when not actively practicing or teaching. The author personality or teaching personalities are just one of many dimensionalities of being that we have. I can say the trait of a strong sense of humor is characteristic in the best practitioners I’ve met.
All the advanced hermeticists I’ve met who have been highly competent magicians who I’ve seen with my own eyes demonstrate wild abilities are also very human –– in both their strengths & flaws. That’s why the practice of self mastery isn’t about reaching total perfection as projected by our egos, but about attaining equilibrium with all of our attributes
It is my belief that if Franz Bardon were alive today, he would do transmissions via video as well to help accelerate student’s progress massively.
PAA: What are some of the main challenges you see students get stuck on? What would be the solution to these challenges? For example we often see questions about how to attain the emptiness of mind, visualization, and depth point. Any tips for attaining these important IIH skills?
Jake: One example I see students get stuck on is the gap between doing the initiation text & doing Evocational magic & invocation. For example, Bardon had a student who he started working with & initiated into Evocational magic after 3 DAYS of working with him.
Emptiness of mind
Visualization
Depth point
The best thing is to practice these exercises with trees & plants. If you can learn to connect with plants, they will do all of the heavy-lifting for you for developing all of these traits in record time.
Don’t be afraid to apply the exercises to your own unique path & needs–– the Initiation into Hermetics book isn’t a bible; it is a training manual & skeleton framework to be further built out through direct experience & your own path. Backdoor into Hermetics provides a lot of unique ways to approach the book using your own intuition & getting the same results at an accelerated pace.
A lot of people get caught up on the first few steps of the book because Bardon said not to progress if you did not do all of the proceeding exercises perfectly.
The reality is that I haven’t mastered every single one of the above steps perfectly, at all times. Neither has Bob, Mark, or anyone else that I know of––We all have extreme competence in some areas, & less so in others. Everyone has strengths & weaknesses and the most optimal way to find your strengths to lean on is to keep progressing in the book despite those instructions.
With Evocation for example, some spirits I see like 4k, others I can only feel them through my clairsentience. There are literally infinite variations of clairfaculties that all work slightly differently on varying levels of reality. Depending on the reasons we incarnate & due to our natural proclivities, we all have a natural tendency to have strengths in different areas. I for example get very clairvoyant connections with Saturn, whereas I don’t often connect very clearly with water spirits other than clairsentience. Bardon for example found it very difficult to connect with Air spirits, where I have a very strong resonance with Sylphs & find them to be exceedingly friendly to me, despite their shy tendencies.
This is why in my latest course I have plans for people to connect with all of the various spheres in our solar system so that they can find what works best for them. I have various protective mechanisms working on the backend so that people don’t harm themselves. Unsurprisingly, great harm has happened to many, many students who did the evocation work in Bardon’s system & far more frequently in other Western/Eastern systems without being initiated into the right frequencies & universal principles to guide & protect them.
Out of any magical practice, evocation & invocation have the most pitfalls and have caused people the most problems karmically & individually in their lives out of any from of practice. This is why the transmissions I provide are the most vital aspect of my new work.
PAA: How important is physical training when it comes to building skills in IIH.
Jake: The biggest thing about physical training is that it increases your total reservoirs of energy & your ability to conduct energy outside of yourself. Some people overplay the need to physically exercise–– the simplest approach is to just jump on a trampoline for 15-30 minutes a day & you’ll be able to do everything I can. Run some air element while you’re doing it, the letter Z & some of your favorite workout sounds & you’ll love to exercise in no time!
If you’ve gotten 8 hours of great quality sleep, are breathing properly through the diaphragm throughout the day, eat high quality food, do an intense workout in the morning & are drinking 3 litters of high quality water on a regular basis, then your practice sessions are going to improve dramatically. Add this with vial breathing (pore breathing), then the first exercises will be far more manageable. On top of that, do an invocation of the Mercury Shchemorah angel Vehumiah (who I give you a transmission of in the course so you can start the IIH process with them) & you’ll literally double the time of unbroken concentration in the beginning exercises using a stopwatch. And that’s just through invoking & ignoring all the physical factors.
What’s more important than physical training is the soul mirror work. I’ve been recently reviewing The Universal Master key every evening before I go to bed & every morning before I begin my day.
I have an unreleased kabbalah course I’ve already produced that’s 9 hours long that includes transmissions for every single letter key, but I’d like to see the response I get from the Evocation/Invocation course before I decide to release it –– Either as a standalone, or as a potential combo package deal with the evocation course.
Because I’m at a stage where I have a strong proficiency in the Initiation System, Evocation system, And Kabbalah, I find that the most important differentiator in the strength & quality of my experiences isn’t how much time I put into practice. Instead, I find that raising to my highest level of attunement, & working diligently on my soul mirror everyday is what is giving me exponential growth at this stage & everything else are just fun bonuses that happen out of the day because the work is super enjoyable! I want everyone to be able to experience the framework this way since I know how lost people are with the system. If they could feel the way myself, Bob, or Mark felt, they’d do it because it is super fun & entertaining for the sprit & six senses, rather than because they felt an existential anxiety of failing at this system & thus failing at maximizing this incarnation itself. I only say this because I felt this way when I first started the Franz Bardon system & I was “stuck” on the first step for years.
The truth is that nobody is inescapably stuck–– most people who approach this work may have advanced proficiencies in other steps, but many wouldn’t even know because they havent’ tried anything else. As someone whose natural tendencies are extremely high in air as my predominant element, vacuity of mind isn’t my strength & being still isn’t! My mind moves at a mile a minute & I am always thirsty for knowledge & am addicted to learning new information. But I also get High-quality results out of the practice because I release on the idea of being distractible altogether because I can invoke strong levels of energy that suck my attention into whatever I’m practicing. This is why I encourage people who are even still on step one or to of the franz bardon training to join the course––– We create the right conditions for you to succeed from the first step.
Once you’re connected with various aspects of extremely refined light, universal hierarchies, working with multi-letter Quabbalistic formulas throughout your day & you’re equalized with all the planetary sphere’s the work all comes back down to enobling the soul.
PAA: Can you share some memorable moments from your training? What stands out in your memory as truly transformative moments.
Jake: For peak experiences with the fire aspect, I recently did a 12 hour meditation sit with Nathan from the group. We built up a massive reservoir of akasha & light. We were too equalized to feel it at the time since you get used to working with energies, but when students entered our circle after the session afterwards, they were shocked & quickly unnerved with the build-up of energy that took place.
Peak experiences with the water aspect have been releasing old traumas & rediscovering talents & different reservoirs of energy. I’ve never met a magician or spiritual practitioner who had a perfect childhood & I’ve not met a Bardonist who had a particularly great childhood.
I really enjoy spending time raising up into light realms that I have no labels or names for. This year I’ve connected a lot more with Budhistic Deities & frequencies. For me, it is one of my most high value practices is to equalize with the energy of light realms & keep raising up the vibrational ladder. One of my first encounters with this was when I used psychometery with the BDK edition of Lotus Sutra & quickly I awakened to some brilliant light streams connected to that book. All The names of those Buddhas, beings & light realms stated in that book are highly accessible & cost nothing to gain from accounting-wise. For those taking my course, I’m happy to add some content related to this type of work upon request. There’s some parts of working & raising through vibrational scales of light mentioned in the Automatic Writing portion of the course.
PAA: People may or may not know about your work with Reiki and your hugely successful Udemy course. Could you tell us about this, how it evolved and how the experience perhaps contributed to your current courses?
Jake: Through the reiki courses, I was able to teach many students from all over the world on the topic of energy healing. I also received countless amounts of positive responses from people who were able to successfully receive the transmissions through video! I read hundreds of messages from people providing me feedback on transmissions. There was a spectrum of people who felt it very intensely & would cry, whereas some would just feel some warmth in their hands & would pick up the skill after a second session. I can count on two hands people who messaged me saying they couldn’t feel energy at all no matter how hard they tried. For them, I recommended seeing a Reiki master in person to initiate them. Out of a course with so many people, having such a small failure rate gave me the confidence to find a solution to the chief challenge that is preventing students from succeeding from the Franz Bardon Framework & prevented myself from “getting it” as a beginner––– getting transmissions for the energies of Franz Bardon’s work & our planetary hierarchy.
PAA: Moving on now to your new course which I think is going to surprise many people in the sheer amount of information and detail that is included. The course is extremely detailed and has some aspect that are truly unique. Could you tell us about the course, what made you create it and what makes this a very special opportunity for those that want to learn.
Sure! When I first started making courses & publishing content, Bob Smith & I were super tight & discussing how to help give the Franz Bardon framework a 2.0 update for the 21st century. We had a heart-to-heart & were both very concerned about the karmic repercussions of sharing the knowledge, insights, & transmissions that we had. We both knew of the possible consequences of magicians who make the wrong pact or do things that get them locked into what Bob calls, “ the Saturnian box.” Upon checking my own karma & carefully conversing with spirit guides, it seems that this wouldn’t happen as long as I tread carefully & share info in complete earnest for the benefit of the next generation of practitioners. I shared this insight with Bob & we both encouraged each other to create content for the Franz Bardon community. Not long after, we filmed the Building the Ball course. I was the cameraman & help setup the original logo, file uploads & course description while he taught the course. We’ve also worked together on some other projects as well that can be discussed in further interviews.
During our discussions, we would often talk about Prometheus. According to Greek myth, Prometheus was a God who brought fire from gods at mount Olympus out of compassion for the people. As a consequence, he was chained to a location, only to be pecked at by birds until his eye sockets wore out, over & over again each day for eternity. We both came to the conclusion that this narrative was powerful, but was also for a different generation of people.
So to start our journeys sharing this knowledge, we’ve both adopted the attitude of prometheus & the concept of sharing “Promethean fire” that is to focus on sharing the energetic transmission & knowledge despite any spiritual repercussions placed on us. Luckily, none of our concerns came to fruition & sharing has been a net positive experience for both of us & the people we’ve shared with.
This whole course is dedicated to the younger version of me who struggled & struggled with the Franz Bardon framework & wanted more than anything to finally “get” it to work for me. I’m gifting this course to my past self & to all the future students who wont’ have to struggle for years & years like I did. I know how painful it is to feel like the work is completely insurmountable. All I want is for people to experience & awaken their true potential from the start instead of suffering like I did. That is why I am so open about my personal shortcomings & my own challenges as a practitioner. I personally learn & resonate more from teachers through both their humility–– having success, despite having shortcomings.
I’d like to do seminars on the topics twice a year. I’m open to doing online seminars or in-person depending on the feedback that I get for this course & book projects I release.
If you want to stay in touch with me, I go by “Jake” in the facebook forums. You can go to mysterycollege.com & subscribe to my newsletter. I’ve also got a youtube page by the same name. I’ll be sharing some early access content of my next book on the site, so check the site regularly for updates!
And check out my newest course at the Perseus Arcane Academy, I love what the Perseus Academy is doing with democratizing access to all of this insider’s knowledge from different practitioners.
PAA: Thank you Jake for sharing so much with us. I look forward to us having more discussions in the future both here on Perseus and over on the Mystery College.
Learn more about Jakes Course: The Evocation Masterclass
Useful Links
Thank you, Jake, for so openly sharing your path and approach to Evocation and Invocation.
You’re welcome! It was a pleasure doing this interview with Perseaus!