Beliefs

The Voudon Gnostic Workbook

the voudon gnostic workbook
Michael Bertiaux's 1988 system fusing Haitian Vodou, Gnosticism, and physics-flavored esotericism into a single machine-language of spirits.
Documented

Bertiaux and the Monastery

Michael Bertiaux, a Chicago-based occultist with a philosophy background, developed the Voudon Gnostic system through the Monastery of the Seven Rays (founded in the 1960s) and correspondence courses, published in collected form as The Voudon Gnostic Workbook (1988, Weiser). The system maps lwa onto an esoteric physics of 'points chauds', hot points, and meonic energies. Kenneth Grant championed Bertiaux's work, weaving it into the Typhonian corpus.

Assessment: Documented: 1988 Weiser edition; Grant's trilogies as the amplifier.
Stories

The diagram cult

The Workbook is famous for its dense hand-drawn diagrams, spirit-maps that look like circuitry, which circulate online as aesthetic objects divorced from the correspondence-course instruction they index. Practitioners insist the diagrams are instruments, not illustrations.

Assessment: A manual read as art.
Interesting claims

Spirit as technology

Bertiaux's wager is that any spirit system is a notation, and notations can be compiled: Vodou, Gnosticism, and quantum-flavored jargon are interchangeable syntaxes over one metaphysical machine. It is the most explicitly computational occultism prior to chaos magic's results-based pragmatism.

Assessment: The loa, specified.
Sources and further reading
  1. Michael Bertiaux, The Voudon Gnostic Workbook, Weiser, 1988
  2. Monastery of the Seven Rays correspondence courses, Chicago, 1960s-70s
  3. Kenneth Grant, Cults of the Shadow, 1975 (Bertiaux chapters)
Worth asking

If spirits can be described in notation, is that mysticism or a compiler?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+