Bardon's Electric and Magnetic Fluids and the Polarity of the Cards

Electric and magnetic fluid is Bardon's name for the two currents he taught a student to feel running through the trained body, one active and outward, one receptive and drawing in. The Four Elements in Bardon's Training and the Four Suits covered the four elements this polarity moves through; this part looks at the fluids themselves, and at how the same active-receptive pairing runs through the Thoth deck's own cards.

Two Currents, Not One Force

Bardon describes the electric fluid as warm, expanding and projective, the force behind every act of will, speech or outward gesture. The magnetic fluid is cool, contracting and receptive, the force behind absorption, healing and quiet attention. Neither fluid is better than the other in his system. A student who can only project burns out; a student who can only absorb never acts. The exercises in Initiation into Hermetics train a practitioner to call up each current separately, feel it in a specific hand or side of the body, then let the two balance again before moving on.

Why Polarity, Not Opposition

Bardon is careful to frame electric and magnetic fluid as complementary rather than opposed, closer to the two poles of a single current than to a contest between good and bad. Tradition holds that he drew this framing from older Hermetic and mesmerist sources on animal magnetism, reworked into his own numbered exercises. The same complementary pairing appears across the Major Arcana's early cards: The Priestess holds the magnetic, receptive pole, still and listening, where The Emperor holds the electric, projective pole, structure asserted outward onto the world.

The Empress Between Two Poles

Between those two sits The Empress, a card that reads, on this framing, as the point where electric and magnetic fluid meet and produce something neither pole makes alone: growth, fertility, a form that holds because it was shaped rather than forced. Bardon never discusses the tarot in these terms. The comparison belongs to readers who hold both systems side by side, offered here as one useful lens, not as Bardon's own doctrine.

Reading Polarity in a Spread

A reader who has practised even briefly with Bardon's two fluids gains a plain diagnostic question for any card drawn: is this card's energy electric, pushing outward, or magnetic, drawing in? A spread heavy with outward-pushing cards and thin on receptive ones often describes a situation starved of patience; the reverse often describes one starved of nerve. Holding that question steady, the way Bardon's training insists a current be held steady before it is released, turns a scattered handful of cards into a readable current of its own.

Polarity Without Dogma

None of this requires accepting Bardon's full physiology of fluids running through named points of the body. What is worth keeping, Who Was Franz Bardon? The Hermetic Teacher from Opava's own path suggests, is the discipline of noticing where energy moves and where it rests before naming what a reading means. The next part of this series turns to Bardon's second book, the practice of magical evocation, and to the Thoth deck's own gallery of spirits and figures summoned onto the cards.