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A short summary of the most important errors of Franz Bardon.
Contents
The errors contained in "The Practice of magical Evocation" (Hembergers criticism)
Errors, discrepancies and criticism according to Paul Allen.
The errors contained in "The Practice of magical Evokation"
The errors that are best known are the ones contained in Bardons 2nd book, "The Practice of magical Evocation".
They were published already elsewhere in a number of sources, nevertheless I want to summarize them also here. The following comes most probably out of Hembergers work.
The so called beings of the sphere of Jupiter are "in reality" spirits of the Saturn sphere. Bardon used here as source Quintschers Kabbalit. An indication are the signs of Saturn and the rings of Saturn all over the diagrams of the "Jupiter-entities" in PME. As final proof you must compare Bardons PME and Qintschers Kabbalit.
According to Quintschers Kabbalit there exist not 15 Saturn Genii as Bardon claims, but only 12. The same source indicates, that in Bardons PME are missing all contrary beings (negative spirits), for example the 12 negative spirits of the Saturn, or the 72 negative spirits of the Shemhamphorash (Bardons mercury spirits) as given by Hercumius. If this is really an error is disputable; probably Bardon intentionally did not add the negative counter-spirits, what he states plainly in his PME (see note between 65 "Dosom" u. 66 "Galago", 360-EZS).
Because of Bardons confounding the Jupiter with the Saturn spirits there are missing all "real" Jupiter genii; furthermore one must, according to the same source, be in possession also of the Mars-spirits that are missing in Bardon PME; they can be found in the Piccatrix.
Bardon used also a number of Quintschers "earth zone"-spirits and by doing so he made some mistakes, the author of that source insists. It is also possible, that Bardon made some improvements or adjustments. Anyway: the colors in the diagram of Sata-Pessajah are wrong and Bardon forgot to add, that it is a entity of the Sirius. Instead of "Nablum" (1° cancer) one must use the name "Nabhi", the diagram shown in PME is not the right one. Eliphas Levi gives the right spelling for the 11. spirit of the Shemhamphorash (Bardons Mercury spirits). It must be "Lauviah" and not "Leviviah". Furthermore Morechs diagram is wrong, the true one is contained in Quintschers work.
Hemberger (Dr. Klingsor) affirms in his book "Experimental-Magie" (page 242 f), that an entity and his negative counterpart (the evil spirit) are associated like the two poles of a magnet, and that without the knowledge of the negative counterpart no true evocation is possible. Bardons PME is therefore practically useless. Hemberger states further, that this fact has been confirmed by the Fraternity of Saturn through systematic experiments. My personal opinion is, that I don't think, that any member of the Fraternity of Saturn was capable of the abilities as required in IIH, especially the more advanced ones. I think, that it's indeed possible to work only with the positive spirits, if one has good abilities. Otherwise all Hebrew kabbalistic mystics had to work also with the spirit/counter-spirit, a concept for which one cannot find any proof in the original kabbalistic texts from the Renaissance. (But one can prove of course the contrary, that Hebrew mystics used to a large extend only the positive angels, discarding the negative ones.)
Errors, discrepancies and criticism according to Paul Allen.
In the years of studying Bardons system I did notice a number of quite serious mistakes and/or misconceptions in Bardons work, which I will summarize here briefly.
Bardon took the 360 "spirits girdling the earth" completely arbitrarily out from his source, the Abramelin (Hammer edition 1725). If there had been exactly 360 spirits in Abramelins list, then one could reckon, that Abramelin just wrote down his list with the wrong epithet "demon" for his spirits, an error corrected later by Bardon. If we should follow this line of argumentation, is not sure. Because Abramelin states PLAINLY, that all spirits are just servants of the chief-demons like Satan, Lucifer and so on. Bardon can therefore be accused, that his second book is on demonology.
But it's not the case, that Abramelins list contains only 360 names. There are more than 360 entries, and therefore some names on the list didn't fit into Bardons concept of 360 equally distributed spirits "around" the earth-zone. (One spirit name [Faturab] in the middle of the list has been overlooked by Bardon.) Here we must definitely speak of arbitrariness. This arbitrariness has been taken even one step further, because Bardon uses some of the names at the end of Abramelins list for his names of the spirits of the element of air. Now this is just to much. Here we can't be lenient anymore! Of course, those students of Bardon who cannot stand any criticism about their Magus-Guru will find a legitimization also in this case. (Humans are always very inventive and creative when it comes to find pretenses to justify something. E.g.: "The earth has the shape of a disc"; why ? After all a sphere is nothing other than a "thick" disc expanded on all sides and the sides bent "down" a "bit" until all sides touch each other everywhere. If in the center remains a hole you must only make your initial disk a bit "thicker". The earth is a disk: Quod erat demonstrandum.)
Another very dubious concept of Bardons system are the so called "quantity keys" of the 72 Schemhamphorash genii (Bardons Mercury spirits), that Bardon adopted from Athanasius Kirchers "Oedipus aegyptiacus".
In the time of Athanasius Kircher it was commonly accepted that the world (in the shape of a disk) must be divided into 72 regions with 72 tribes, following the Aristotelian concept of the perfect symmetry and order of creation. As "world" they thought only of our earth, which they believed to rest in the center of creation. The planets like Saturn Mars etc. were called "wandering stars", they didn't know, that those are planets like our earth. The suns, which we name "stars" today, were called "fixed stars", because they thought that these "lights" are solidly fixed onto the "canopy" of heaven.
Because everything was ordered symmetrically, they thought that the earth can be divided into 72 regions, with 72 tribes and languages, which have different names of God, always composed from 4 letters, as Kircher tried to convince his readers. This system worked fine for a number of widely used names of God (because the languages had often a common root), for example: Deus (Latin), Zeus (Greek), [Jupiter (Roman) was discarded as not fitting into Kirchers rigid system], Gott (German) and so on. Kircher tried to press all names of God for ever "tribe on earth" into this arbitrary system.
That he was quite "creative" in some cases, you can see if you check the diagram yourself. Everyone familiar with Kirchers opus knows very well, that Kircher, as the highest authority on Egyptian hieroglyphs of his time, gave to the hieroglyphs a, as he said, "inspiratively" received but in reality completely invented explanation of the meaning of the hieroglyphs, and that he translated Egyptian texts this way in a completely wrong manner, what became apparent centuries later, when the "Rosetta stone" was found and the correct translation of Egyptian Texts became possible. In the same dogmatic way Kircher fooled around with the different names of God, adding, and subtracting letters as he liked.
And then comes Bardon and takes this complete obsolete system of Kirchers four-lettered names of God, only because it fits well into his system of the four-lettered kabbalistic key in relation to the 72 spirits of the Mercury sphere.
That is in my opinion highly dubious and complete nonsense.
Now we are coming to some "minor" errors of Franz Bardon.
People on the planet of Venus: normally it is excused in that Bardon meant the "astral" plane and not the planet of Venus.
Inspiration = oxygen, expiration = nitrogen. In the theory part of IIH. The assimilation process in the human body and the expiration of carbon dioxide was very well known even at the time of Franz Bardon. The amount of nitrogen in the inspired/expired air remains the same.
(All people, who rely on Frabato as a true source for Bardons biography should think a moment about the scene in Frabato where a friend of Bardon, after a heavy rainfall, is very envious, because Bardon knows everything about every field of knowledge on earth ... )
Especially disturbing I found always: the conscious part of our mind as being located in the cortex, the subconscious in the cerebellum. Bardon: "... the seat of the normal consciousness, which is located in the cerebrum, and the subconscious, the opposite of normal consciousness, which is located in the cerebellum." (Introduction IIH, new Merkur edition.)
Such a nonsense is really disgusting. I won't go into the details here, if you don't understand, please check out the relevant textbooks. That Bardon thinks of the conscious part of our mind as the opposite of the subconscious is an addition to the infantile conception of the conscious/subconscious relation. And that with more than 50 years after the publication of Freuds "Traumdeutung", and the almost enzyclopedic amount of C.G. Jungs publications. I can't really understand how someone could write such things in the fifties of the 20th century.
In the first step of IIH Bardon explains, that when one uses autosuggestion, only positive sentences must be used. But in his examples of this principle he makes himself the error to formulate negatively.
If the reversal of character attributes to the elements of water and earth are really an error, as Stejnar points out, is not yet sure. Some astrologers use the same system as Bardon in his first book (but most don't).
These are some points, that come spontaneously to my mind when I think about Bardons errors. Probably I forgot some. On the other hand, I'm not the person who looks pedantically for errors in Bardons work. If I find other errors by chance in the future, I will add them here.
Epilogue
I will keep this epilogue and resume very short and concise.
Although one can find serious errors in Bardons work I have nevertheless the opinion, that his system is the best one published until now.
I can therefore not at all share Hembergers view and that of other critics of Franz Bardon. Those people are in my opinion not intelligent enough that they can see the real relevance of Bardons system.
And, last but not least, I'm not sorry at all about the fact, that this article will displease some people, who are trying to establish Bardon as the new Messiah.
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