Initiation into Hermetics: Bardon's Ten Steps and the First Trump

Initiation into Hermetics is the book that made Franz Bardon's name, and it reads like no other occult manual of its time. Instead of lore or history, it gives a student ten numbered steps, each one a test of a single faculty: thought, feeling, breath, the senses, the will. Who Was Franz Bardon? The Hermetic Teacher from Opava told the story of the man who wrote it; this part looks at what the book actually asks a reader to do, and where its first step touches the same ground as the first trump of the Major Arcana.

Franz Bardon's biography names 1956 as the year of first publication, in Czechoslovakia, before later English editions widened its readership.

Ten Steps, Not Ten Lessons

Bardon built his system as a ladder. Step one trains the student to hold a single thought without drifting, for minutes at a time, before any other exercise begins. Step two adds control of feeling, step three the breath, and so on through the physical body, the astral body and the mental body, until a student who has honestly done the work has touched all three planes Bardon's system assumes a person is built from. Nothing is symbolic here in Bardon's own telling. A step is finished when the exercise succeeds, not when the student feels ready to move on. That plainness is part of why the book still has defenders: it offers no mystique to hide behind.

The Weight of Step One

Short sentences describe a task that is much harder in practice than on paper. Hold one thought. No other thought may intrude, not for a long breath, not for a passing sound. Most readers fail this within seconds the first time they try it honestly. Bardon treats that failure as information, not discouragement: it shows exactly how untrained the mind already is, before any claim of power is made. A tarot reader will recognise the same opening note in The Fool, a figure stepping forward with nothing fixed yet, no story written, only the capacity to begin.

From Raw Will to Directed Power

Once a step is genuinely finished, Bardon's method turns outward: the same trained will that could not hold one thought now directs attention, then breath, then the subtler forces his later books describe as electric and magnetic. The trump that captures this turn is The Magus, tools laid out on the table, power present but not yet spent on any one purpose. Initiation into Hermetics never mentions the card by name. The parallel is a reader's observation, not Bardon's claim, and it is worth stating plainly as an interpretation rather than as something the author wrote himself.

A Method That Resists Shortcuts

What separates Bardon's ten steps from a simple self-help list is the refusal to let a student move forward on a feeling of progress. Each exercise has a concrete test: hold the thought for a set time with a witness if needed, feel the four elements in the body as distinct sensations, not as a mood. Tradition holds that Bardon expected total honesty from a student working alone, since no teacher stood over the exercise to catch a shortcut. That honesty is the real cost of the book, more than the hours it asks for.

What a Reader Takes from the First Step

A tarot reader does not need Bardon's full ten steps to use his first one. Sitting with a single card, holding it as the only object of attention for a timed minute before reading anything into it, borrows exactly the discipline step one trains. It turns a quick glance into something closer to the steadiness The Fool and The Magus both ask of a beginner at the threshold of the Major Arcana: attention before claim, readiness before power. The next part of this series follows Bardon further, into the four elements his training treats as literal forces and the four suits that give the Thoth deck its own elemental grammar.