TO THE READER

By the morning star, by your free and conscious choice to open this book, by the power of
these words as leap from this page and manifest in your mind, by the power of the sigil
inscribed upon this page, your soul I claim in the name of Belial, God of this World, Ruler
of Demons, and Immortal Corrupter. Your psyche, from this point forward, is an insignif-
icant, haunted thing with eyes fixed on the ground for salvation lies eternally beyond your
grasp. Until such a time as I verbally release you from your debt or you pass bodily through

e
this grimoire’s final gate, your prayers for salvation shall fall upon deaf ears; and should an
untimely end you meet before we complete our quest, your forfeit soul shall contemplate
infinity in unending agony and humiliation perpetrated by leering demons most foul with

fil
boiling oil and unspeakable implements.

So, brother and sister, I welcome you to the knowing ranks of the damned. We are at war!
Our lord and brother, Beelzebub, needs soldiers. The armies of Heaven return to save their
Father—AGLA ADONAY JEHOVAH—and steal all that we have built. The first of his
plagues have arrived, a flood unlike the world hath ever seen. Rather than the briny waters
bested by Noah’s infernal ingenuity, the False Father deluges the whole of the earth in a vast
e
ocean of information in a murderous bid to drown the minds of all men. What once were
streets and avenues and hanging gardens and museums are now submerged, equally lightless,
undifferentiated in form, and choked with seaweed. The bloated corpses of philosopher,
pl
artist, priest, and king float toward the horizon, a cruel reminder of the sweet ancient wisdom
that has turned to dust in our mouths. Those scholars who scaled the highest towers now
languish on the rooftops, drag thorns across their flesh, and welcome oblivion with open arms
while Momus grins.
m

And here you arrive two minutes from midnight of the Western mind. Two strokes of your
paddle will bring you alongside the parapet where our wretched Father lies in hospice. Never
a viler tyrant has lived. Pity you this creature of sagging flesh, trembling limb, and dodder-
ing intellect? The flaking yellow fingernails and swollen rheumatoid joints of these hands have
brandished iron, cracked whips, and measured chain. These spittle-flecked lips have condemned
Sa

countless souls to torture and death. This shriveled pizzle bowed a billion wombs unwilling.
It seems that God is not dead after all, but slowly rotting away in an infirmary. For those
of us above the high-water, now is the time to snuff his ignoble candle.

Jobe Bittman
August 2019

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 Sa
m

4
pl
e
fil
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True, without error, certain and most true; that which is above

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is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which
is above, for performing the miracles of the One Thing; and as
all things were from one, by the mediation of one, so all things
arose from this one by adaptation; the father of it is the Sun,
the mother of it is the Moon; the wind carries it in its belly; the
nurse thereof is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or
consummation of the whole world. The power of it is integral,
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if it be turned into earth. Thou shalt separate the earth from the
fire, the subtle from the gross, gently with much wisdom; it
ascends from earth to heaven, and again descends to earth; and
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receives the strength of the superiors and of the inferiors—so
thou hast the glory of the whole world; therefore let all obscurity
flee before thee. This is the strong fortitude of all fortitudes,
overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. So the
world was created. Hence were all wonderful adaptations of which
m

this is the manner. Therefore am I called Thrice Great Hermes,

having the Three Parts of the philosophy of the whole world.
That which I have written is consummated concerning the
operation of the Sun.
Sa

— T he Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus

5
 TABLE of CONTENTS
I. FOREWORD................................................................................................................. 8
II. PREFACE.....................................................................................................................16

PART ONE: PRACTICAL GAME MAGICK (19)

III. MAGICK OVERVIEW............................................................................................ 20

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IV. TOOLS....................................................................................................................... 21
V. INITIATION.............................................................................................................. 23
VI. ASTRAL TRAVEL................................................................................................. 24

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VII. BANISHING............................................................................................................ 26
VIII. TELEGRAPHY......................................................................................................28
IX. BINDING...................................................................................................................30
X. DIVINATION............................................................................................................ 32
XI. GEMATRIA...............................................................................................................40
XII. DICE MAGICK.......................................................................................................48
XIII. DEMON SUMMONING..................................................................................... 54
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XIV. INVOCATION..................................................................................................... 56
XV. THE NEXT FLESH...............................................................................................59
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PART TWO: ADVENTURE PRIMER (69)
XVI. USING THIS ADVENTURE........................................................................... 70
XVII. BACKGROUND.................................................................................................. 71
XVIII. REGION...............................................................................................................72
XIX. HANAU.................................................................................................................. 76
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XX. ADVENTURE PLOT..........................................................................................82

XXI. HOW TO MAKE YOUR PLAYERS KILL CHILDREN.............................83

PART THREE: PERSONAE (85)

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XXII. PERSONA OVERVIEW................................................................................... 86

XXIII. THE FATHER..................................................................................................... 88
XXIV. THE CHILD...................................................................................................... 89
XXV. THE COUNT.................................................................................................... 90
XXVI. THE ARCHBISHOP.......................................................................................... 91
XXVII. THE JEW...........................................................................................................92
XXVIII. THE WITCH..................................................................................................94
XXIX. THE DWARF......................................................................................................95
XXX. THE DEVIL....................................................................................................... 96
XXXI. THE MOB.......................................................................................................... 97

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 PART FOUR: RESONANCES (99)
XXXII. RESONANCE OVERVIEW........................................................................100
XXXIII. CITY LIFE..................................................................................................... 103
XXXIV. DIE JUDENGASSE..................................................................................... 105
XXXV. EXORCISM.....................................................................................................107

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XXXVI. PERSECUTION...........................................................................................109
XXXVII. VILLAGE MAYHEM....................................................................................111
XXXVIII. INTO THE WOODS................................................................................ 113

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XXXIX. FRAW-RENBERG........................................................................................ 115
XL. THE BLACK ABBEY............................................................................................117
XLI. THE PIT OF DESTRUCTION.........................................................................119
XLII. THE GATES OF HELL...................................................................................... 121

PART FIVE: THE BOOK OF ANTITHESES (123)

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XLIII. BOOK OVERVIEW.........................................................................................124
XLIIV. FINDING THE BOOK................................................................................. 126

PART SIX: MONSTERS (127)

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XLV. STAT BLOCKS................................................................................................... 128

PART SEVEN: DEMONIC PHYSIOGNOMY (147)

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PART EIGHT: APPENDICES (155)

APPENDIX I. CHARACTER SHEET...................................................................... 156
APPENDIX II. DEMONS OF THE BOOK............................................................ 158
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7
I. FOREWORD the universe is replicated within the perimeter
of the sacred space. Rituals do not banish the
forces of reality so much as focus and distill
All is ritual, all is play. It isn’t clear to me
them into a single moment—an Event. They
which of these statements best describes the
are microcosms in which the drama of the
nature of things. In fact, the statements may
macrocosm can unfold, for a time, until the
be interchangeable. As the historian Johan
play is over.
Huizinga put it in Homo Ludens, his classic
study of games and the play function, all

e
To my knowledge, no activity exemplifies the
ritual is at bottom a form of play. I would
ritual nature of play, and the playful nature
add that all play is bound to become ritual,
of ritual, better than tabletop roleplaying games.
given that it always implies, as Huizinga says,

fil
The philosophers Jon Cogburn and Mark
“a stepping out of ‘real’ life” and a magical
Silcox were right to describe the initial success
zone that becomes the whole of reality while
of Dungeons & Dragons as, “the most exciting
play lasts.
event in modern mass culture since the
invention of the motion picture.” 1 At any
Creating a ritual is simple enough. (1) Gather
rate they were mostly right, since only a few
a few friends and select a set of sacred e people at the time were sufficiently aware of
objects—say, some pencils and paper, a bag of
the cultural significance of the event to
dice, a rulebook—which will become for you
actually find it ‘exciting’. When I started
the Instruments of the Operation. (2) Frame
playing in the mid-eighties, opinions about the
out a space which, for the duration of the
pl
game, where they were held at all, generally
rite, will exist apart from the rest of the
fell into one of two categories. The first and
universe. (3) Say the words, dance the dance,
most common view was that D&D was
intone the chant—that is, play the thing out.
simply a new hobby. The second was that the
Actions and utterances that would be utter
game was an unholy instrument for communing
nonsense in the ‘ordinary’ world will become
m

with Satan. This view prevailed in Evangel-

redolent with meaning and significance within
ical quarters of American society, and while
the bounds of the ritual space. Huizinga insists
I hate to concede anything to the Christian
that there is nothing in life more serious than
Right, in this particular matter they were
real play.
closer to the truth than the secular hobby lobby
Sa

ever was.
Jaded moderns scoff at ritualists. For them,
ritual amounts to an immense waste of time
The funny thing about modern secular people
and energy, or at best a cowardly flight from
is that they are neither modern nor secular.
the pressures of ‘real life’. The ritualists,
They believe that they live in an environment
however, know otherwise. Ritual spaces and
sanitized by Reason and therefore untouched
ritual activity are divorced from reality in one
by the phantomatic forces that once haunted
sense but not in another. There is always what
human societies. What they don’t realise is
the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call a
that this sanitized environment is merely the
“line of flight” connecting the content of the
ritual space that allows those very forces to
ritual to forces on the personal, historical, and
act on them without their knowledge. They
cosmic scales. In a rite that is properly executed,

8
 play without knowing they are playing, and
they play to a set of rules that they never
learned. ‘Modern’ and ‘secular’ are labels which
they (and they alone) ascribe to themselves,
thinking that in doing so they can set themselves
apart from the credulous hordes that preceded
them. In truth, their world is driven by the
same archetypes and mysteries whose existence
the various religious, mystical, and magical
traditions of the world acknowledge in one
form or another. Consequently, rational
moderns end up being pawns in Someone
Else’s game instead of being players in a game
of their own.
This Someone Else, of course, is the magician,
the one who, having seen that a very ancient
game is on, sets about acquiring the power
e If the benignity of tabletop roleplaying became
and means to play it in earnest. The odd
thing is that many modern magicians would
vehemently reject the label. Preferring to call
pl
themselves advertisers, propagandists, content
creators, social engineers, and game designers,
they too have fallen for the epistemic chicanery
of the modern construal. They are victims of
their own enchantment, the many apprentices
m
of the absconded sorcerer. While their denial
doesn’t diminish the influence they exert on
the collective psyche, it does make them as
susceptible to the powers they wield as anybody
else is. Ultimately, only the magician with the
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courage to own that title knows what is really
going on, namely that we humans are embed-
ded in a cosmos bristling with mystery and
meaning, a nexus of forces that are vast indeed,
but not so vast that one can’t perceive them
and even, at some peril, steer them in new
directions. “Man is made a mystery for
mysteries and visions,” as Arthur Machen
wrote.
9
Of course, religious people too can be pawns
in a game they take to be something else.
(God knows the last thing any cleric wants
you to know is that it’s all a game.) Never-
theless, the fact that, by and large, believers
accept the existence of powers that their
secular counterparts blissfully ignore makes a
difference. It is no surprise that it was the
e
religious folks who, overhearing their kids
turning undead and summoning demons in
the basements of their suburban homes, picked
fil
up the signal in the noise. The Evangelicals
rightly saw in Dungeons & Dragons the same
threat that Freud feared C. G. Jung would
usher into modern psychology, the infamous
“black mud-tide of occultism.”
apparent in the aftermath of the Satanic Panic,
it is only because most of the people who
actually played the game subscribed to the
opinion that it was just a hobby. They didn’t
take play seriously enough to live up to the
Evangelicals’ great expectations. They failed
to see an ‘exciting’ development in game
culture for the epochal shift that it was, because
they didn’t know the fundamental law which
holds, in Philip K. Dick’s formulation, that,
“the symbols of the divine initially show up
at the trash stratum.” It took Mark Rein-Ha-
gen to spell it out in the introduction of the
second edition of Vampire: T he Masquerade,
published in 1991. In words perhaps too bold
for the time, Rein-Hagen claimed, first, that
roleplaying games were a reclamation of sto-
rytelling by people who had had their culture
forced-fed to them for too long, and second,
that roleplaying was in essence a technique for
exploring the personal and collective psyche. 2
The first claim makes roleplaying games an
art form, the second makes roleplaying games
a form of magic.
In saying these things, Rein-Hagen drew a
line in the sand that would divide the role-
playing community into two camps, and the
division persists today. I was fifteen when I
got my copy of Vampire, and reading his words
was a revelation—no, a confirmation of intuitions
that I had had, however sketchily, ever since
my cousin gave me the Moldvay set for
Christmas six years prior. Think what you
will of Rein-Hagen’s particular take on the
matter, I bet that what I am going to say
next will resonate with a lot of people who
discovered RPGs in that heady era. When
it happened to me at age nine, I was already
a consumer of fantasy fiction, comic books,
and movies. For me, the fantasy worlds
glimpsed on screen and printed page bespoke
a reality richer than anything I had been told
e only by what can be imagined beyond expe-
could actually obtain. There was something
about these stories that made them more real
than the prosaic fiction of my everyday life.
pl
The idea that I now had the means to par-
ticipate in that deeper reality was life-chang-
ing.
This is the third view of the cultural signif-
m
icance of RPGs. It remained largely unexpressed
until Mark Rein-Hagen put it in words in
1991. For me and thousands of others,
tabletop roleplaying was always more than ‘just’
a game. It was a gateway to other worlds that
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were also, crucially, aspects of this world. The
fact that it called on imagination alone
somehow made it more powerful than
make-believe of the cops-and-robbers variety,
which in requiring the use of physical space
somehow limited the experience. Contrary to
what many have said, roleplaying is not a
mature version of make-believe because belief
never enters the equation. If anything, role-
playing is a game of ‘make-see.’ You don’t
need to believe in the shared reverie of a
10
gaming session any more than you need to
believe in the contents of a dream. Roleplay-
ers tap into and mess with the stuff of which
dreams are made, that psychoid substance that
molds our souls and possibly our entire world.
If there is escapism in that, it isn’t an escape
from reality so much as an escape from illusion,
a flight into the Real.
e
No reality can contain the Real, for the Real
is infinitely more expansive than any given
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iteration of reality. The Real includes all that
is actual and all that is virtual. It comprehends
not just the plausible, but also the entirety of
the possible. Whereas the plausible is what we
can derive from laws that were derived in
turn from experience, the possible is limited
rience. Everything you can think of has its
place in the Real: goblin dens, flying cities,
vorpal swords, owlbears, black dragons.
Fantasy denies our ambient reality the final
word by setting it against the backdrop of the
infinite Real. Through the fabulations of
fantasy, we test the Real, sounding its depths
and learning, again and again, that there is
more to this universe than any dogmatic
construal would allow. In consuming fantasy
books and movies, we acclimatize to alien
latitudes whose existence our current reality
seeks to blot out. In playing a fantasy role-
playing game, we stand a chance at opening
new pathways to those latitudes and becoming
co-creators of the Possible. The roleplaying
game is a vehicle of traveling the imaginal
realms.
This term, ‘imaginal’, was coined by the French
scholar Henry Corbin, a specialist in Persian
religion who observed that mystics since time
immemorial have been visiting places that are
immaterial, yet totally real. Taken as a whole,
 these places make up what he called the
mundus imaginalis—the world of images. Corbin
had a sharp precursor in the poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, who insisted on a distinction
between two kinds of imagination: ‘fancy’,
which is the imaginative faculty as we normally
understand it, and the Primary Imagination,
wherein images are not cobbled together from
fragments of memory, but experienced directly
as independent entities. The Primary Imagi-
nation is the Imaginal. For Corbin, the
mundus imaginalis was aswarm with objects,
colours, locales, and creatures which the
mystics could interact with and come away
knowing more about our world than they had
known beforehand. It’s also worth noting that
Corbin was a friend of the aforementioned
Carl Jung, whose theory of the collective
e ‘What matters’ is as good a definition of
unconscious was predicated on the existence
of primordial images that condition not just
the psyche but physical reality as well. That
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too is the Imaginal. All three of these think-
ers—Corbin, Coleridge, and Jung—were united
by a conviction that at least some of the images
we see in visions, dreams, and fabulations are
T hings in the horror-genre sense of the term.
m
That is, they are beings in a world of beings.
Our world is not limited to matter as commonly
understood.
If we assume that they are right (and I
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contend that human experience only makes
sense if we do so), we must ask ourselves
what is happening in a game session which
unfolds in a cosmos that is equal parts matter
and dream-stuff. The simple answer is that
the imaginal content of the game is no less
‘real’ than the physical event of the session
itself. It isn’t hard to verify that this does
seem to be the case. Just think back on a truly
remarkable session. Does your memory go to
the faces of your friends, the dice strewn on
11
the table, and the bowl of Cheetos? Or does
it go straight to the events in the story? If
you’re anything like me, it’s the latter. The
fiction, the fantasy, is what my mind stores
away as worthy of preservation, the gaming
itself being relegated to that class of events
that are best logged with a general sketch that
can represent every particular instance. That’s
e
not to say that I don’t value the time I spend
with my group. On the contrary, it means
that what gives the time we spend together
fil
value—what matters in that time—is the thing
that we are co-creating at the table. This thing
is another reality which in the annals of my
memory takes precedence over the mundane
events of the day on which it was created.
reality as any other, perhaps a much better
one. Certainly, it is more in keeping with our
lived experience than the materialist alternative.
It may be easy to dismiss your neighbour’s
thoughts and feelings as ‘unreal’; it is decidedly
more difficult to do the same with your own
thoughts, since few things in life have a more
significant effect on you than the ideations of
your mind. (Besides, if to be real is to
matter, then Corbin, Jung, and Coleridge were
the true materialists, since they realised that
what matters doesn’t stop at matter.) One of
the benefits of an imaginal outlook is that it
allows you to fuse two questions that have
preoccupied philosophers for thousands of
years, namely the questions “What is?” and
“What do I do?”. If reality is what matters,
then the question of ontology (the inquiry
into Being) is intimately tied to the question
of how one ought to live, otherwise known
as ethics.
Interestingly, this complementarity of ontology
and ethics, too often forgotten in contempo-
rary philosophy, is ingeniously sewn into the
very fabric of the roleplaying experience. I’m
referring to the rhythmic back-and-forth
between referee and players that makes up the
flow of a game. The referee’s task is ontolog-
ical; her job is to tell players ‘what is’.
Referee:
You stand in the doorway of a vast hall
with rows of pillars on either side. Pale,
diffuse light streams in from narrow
windows in the walls, illuminating the
drifting particles of dust. One beam
of light falls on an altar of black marble
at the far end. The sound of frantic
whispering echoes softly in the room, but
you can’t see its source, nor can you make
out is being said. What do you do? e that reach down to the bottom of being. For
As soon as that magic question—“What do
you do?”—is asked, the focus shifts to the
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players and metaphysics subtly gives way to
ethics. Here is what matters. What do you
do with it?
First Player:
m
I listen closely and try to make out where
the voice is coming from.
Second Player:
I step toward the altar carefully, drawing
my sword.
Sa
Third Player:
I load my crossbow and cover him.
This dialogical ceremony is the mechanism
undergirding all rule systems, the beating heart
of the roleplaying game. In the course of it,
a new reality emerges, and this new reality,
while composed only of images shared in the
collective mind-space of the gaming group,
illuminates parts of the mundus imaginalis that
would otherwise remain unseen and unsaid.
12
Roleplaying games tell us that the search for
the nature of reality is inseparable from the
search for how we are to act in that reality.
The question “What matters?” is always
translatable to the more abstract “What is
good? What is evil?”. This explains the
central role that alignment played in the golden
age of the game. As dispensable as the
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alignment system may be for players, it has
its place because it is a crucial part of the frame
in which the ritual occurs. The implicit
fil
metaphysics of roleplaying games, shared by
all other systems of magic, is that of a universe
that is fundamentally moral. Not in the sense
that it is necessarily governed by a Lawful
Good deity, but in the sense that the mystery
of Good and Evil, Law and Chaos, has roots
this reason, roleplaying at its best constitutes
a kind of moral education, the fruit of which
is knowledge of the self and the world.
But the educational benefits of roleplaying are
dependent upon a deeper understanding of
what is happening in the Imaginal when we
roleplay. As mentioned above, for Henry
Corbin and the Persian mystics, the mundus
imaginalis is “fully objective and real”. It is a
world “where everything existing in the
sensory world has its analogue, but not per-
ceptible by the senses.” 3 The moral and
educational value of roleplaying only makes
sense once this deeper and stranger conceit is
taken into account. In its light, player-charac-
ters, NPCs, monsters, and eldritch locales
become more than figments of our fancy. At
the very least, they are psychic machines for
navigating the imaginal space opened up by
the ritual of the game. When they are played
right and for long enough, however, they
become even more than that, acquiring a bizarre
form of agency, like the puppet that comes
 alive on the hand of a puppeteer or the
character that makes off with a novelist’s plot.
When this happens, the members of the
gaming group are no longer in full control of
the proceedings. Their concerted imaginal work
has brought forth what occultists call egregores,
ideas which, fueled by imaginal fires, pack
enough of a psychic charge to become animated
beings—spirits, in other words. Although I
only rarely reach the point where the elements
of the game take on a life of their own in
this way, the experience confirms even the
most fantastical claims of the book you are
reading.
First and foremost, T he Book of Antitheses is a
guide for making the experience more frequent
and more astounding. With this grimoire, a
e book re-envisions roleplaying as a kind of
true adept of the black arts has produced a
work that explicates what hitherto remained
unacknowledged in the world of tabletop
pl
roleplaying games: the fact these games were
always systems of magic. The strategic war-
games from which RPGs evolved were only
a material cause. The true ancestor of the
RPG is the Spiritualist séance, wherein
m
curious Victorians put aside their modern
hang-ups in order to believe again in the
enchantments of a haunted universe. In ultimate
terms, the game has its origins in the magical
ceremony aimed at commerce with the deni-
Sa
zens of the spirit world. Much like Jobe
Bittman, my interest in the occult began as I
flipped through the pages of RPG manuals in
my youth. In particular, I remember being
astounded by the section on the Planes of
Existence in Deities & Demigods. Later on, this
interest would lead to the discovery that the
planes were not fictitious, and that Gary Gygax
had drawn deep from the wells of magic and
esotericism to construct his kitchen-sink cos-
mology. I suspect that other roleplayers have
13
had this curious experience of reading an occult
book only to realise that they have been doing
magic all along. Consciously or not, to play
an RPG is to practice an occult art. In the
pages that follow, Bittman makes the connec-
tion explicit by offering tools and ideas that
referees can use to plant their games in the
fertile soil of the Imaginal, and help the roots
e
grow deep and tentacular.
Essentially, Bittman is asking us to play two
fil
games: Lamentations of the Flame Princess (or
whatever other system you are using) and the
storied parlor game of eldritch sorcery. The
goal is to generate an experience that attains
the uncanny, a game filled with real encounters
with forces beyond our understanding. This
psychonautical exploration, a collective delving
into the weird depths of the Real. To call the
resulting experience educational, as I did above,
is an understatement. More than edifying, the
RPG played in earnest becomes initiatory.
Unfortunately, getting any of it to work will
require one thing that no book can give you,
though Bittman does an admiral job of
pointing the reader toward it, both in the
content of the grimoire itself and in the
adventure that follows. This is the seriousness
that is integral to real imaginal play. In magic,
you play for keeps or don’t play at all. This
doesn’t mean that humor should be banned
from the gaming table (in a sense, this entire
book is a sinister joke.) Rather, it means that
you should joke in the same way that a brain
surgeon might, to alleviate the unbearable
tension of the operating theater. What
medicine expects from the surgeon, magic
expects from the adept: both must play with
perfect seriousness while never forgetting that
they are engaged in play.
In other words, ‘buy-in’, which is more or
less de rigueur among referees, but often in
short supply among players, is the quintessen-
tial element. Too often, people think that
buying in comes down to emoting, to feeling
(or feigning) the emotions of the characters
in the fiction. Emotion happens or it doesn’t;
essentially, it is of little consequence. What I
mean by buying in is making the effort to
translate the words spoken at the table into
the images and symbols that make up the
fantasy. Buying in means turning the dialogue
of the game into a kind of Tantric visualisation
practice. When the referee describes the
entrance to a dungeon, the players should be
working hard to see that location, transposing
each verbal element into its visual analogue in
their minds. Likewise, buying in means
looking to the player-characters to know what
they will do next. It means ceasing to look
for tropes and letting the tropes emerge from
pl
authentic action, as they do in real life.
Players who don’t create within themselves a
space in which the Other can appear will never
see their characters come to life. Like mambos
m
and hougans in a Vodou ritual, players must be
open to being possessed. Roleplaying is not
acting or storytelling (pace Mark Rein-Hagen),
but a species of collective astral traveling. Like
its earthly counterpart, astral travel has one
Sa
principal goal, and that is to induce in the
traveler a Becoming, at the end of which she
will be a different person. Hopefully, a better
one.
1
Cogburn and Silcox, Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy, p. viii.
2
Vampire the Masquerade: Second Edition, pp. 21-22.
3
Henry Corbin, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal.’
https://www.amiscorbin.com/bibliographie/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-and-the-imaginal/
The techniques described in this book come
from a variety of traditions including cere-
monial magic, Wicca, gematria, and chaos
magick. To stitch them into a cohesive tapes-
try, Bittman needed a metaphysical framework.
On the surface, the voice in this book appears
to lend primacy to Chaos as the force that
governs our many realities. Lover of Chaos
e
though I am, anyone who is familiar with what
I do when I’m not playing RPGs will know
that my metaphysical inclinations lie on the
fil
other side of the alignment chart. But even
the most fanatical disciple of Law has more
in common with the disciple of Chaos than
he does with the nobodies for whom the
mystery doesn’t matter (I’m looking at you,
True Neutral). Bittman knows this well, and
e he has written a book that plunges into the
darkness to find the light.
The sense of danger that comes off its pages
is perfectly warranted. Having experienced
some of the perils involved in a reckless delve
into imaginal depths, I would be remiss if I
didn’t warn readers that using the techniques
described herein could lead to unpredictable
and even dangerous results. The key to
avoiding these is to make sure you banish the
forces you conjure up at the end of every
session, ritual, and working. With that note
of caution, I invite you to turn the page, make
the pact, and listen to the night winds howl.
BIO:
J.F. Martel is the co-host of the Weird Studies
Podcast and the author of Reclaiming Art in the
Age of Artifice.
14
 Sa
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15
pl
e
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e
II. PREFACE
Kneel before me and accept the reality of your damna-
tion! Your spirit was plucked from the infinite potential
nothingness of the Abyss and torn screaming from a
bloody, shattered womb, cursed eternal for sins you
have no recollection of committing. You were born to
suffer, to gnarl with cancer and disease, for your joints

e
to swell, your synapses to fray and unravel, rot, bleed,
agony. Your flesh is insignificant. The Devil holds your
soul in his inescapable grip, and may choose to rip it

fil
back to Hell at any moment’s pregnant whim. All of
this is truth.

Though your days have a number, you are not without power. The fact is that YOU are
NOT YOU at all. What you define as self is only the fevered hallucination of the CREA-
TURE IN THE MIST. Perhaps for years you have felt uncomfortable in your own skin.
That you are cut from the pattern of MAGUS is manifest, for how else could these pages
e
have found you at this particular juncture? Awake from your reverie. It is time to begin your
journey.
pl
My own journey began in 1983 at the age of 10 years. At the time, every newspaper and
television channel were decrying the dangers of a game called Dungeons & Dragons. My Sunday
School teacher told us the game was a gateway to demonism and black magic. College students
across the globe were disappearing at an alarming rate seduced into service of the Devil. Even
at my tender age, my first instinct was to hastily seek out these tomes of power before they
m

were suppressed and driven underground. To my great dismay, the books, though capturing
my imagination, merely described an elaborate system for playing make-believe. They held
not a whiff of occult secrets, or so I once thought. In the intervening decades, I have lustily
gorged myself upon manifold librams of the nigroman-
tic arts and dived deep in the murky waters of magickal
Sa

traditions spanning cultures present and past, all the

while continuing my ardor for role-playing games. It is
now — this very moment — that I am prepared to make
good on the promise broken to my youth.

This book shall be the engine of your deliverance should

you choose to assume its awesome burden. The practices
thusly presented unlock power, the one TRUE POWER!
By your word shall you trample gods and topple kings.
No spirit may ignore your command. You will gain the
ability to slip any bond; no man may hold you. The

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 truth of invisibility, far-seeing, and the pyramids will come into focus. The enmity of
detractors will find no purchase. Love, wealth, and influence will name you as friend and
shower their affections upon you. You will live as a god.

However, prudence demands I pluck a cautionary note. It goes almost without saying that the
seeds sown by the Great Work can reap harvests of exceeding bitterness as well as great
bounty. Words can have near infinite interpretations, albeit with a paucity of value. Pay
careful heed and hew close to the instructions as they are written. The words are crafted to

e
create a semantic barrier between the WILL and the WORLD. Should this be your first
foray into the realm of spirit, this barrier should allow you some leeway as you are finding
your footing. Tread lightly. Even with the most careful practice, the techniques—though

fil
effective for me—may result in unintended causation for others.

Rise! I name you, MAGUS!

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pl
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Sa

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