Nick Farrell's Magical Blog
About Nick Farrell

About Nick Farrell

nick-farrell

Nick Farrell was born 1965 in Banbury in the UK. His family moved to New Zealand when he was six montsh old and at the age of three he started to suffer from terrifying dreams which appeared real. These visions lasted until he was 17 when he bought his first set of Tarot cards and suddenly found himself in a Golden Dawn offshoot called Builders of the Adytum. Nick started to read everything he could find on the Golden Dawn and Magic.

Nick moved to Hawkes Bay where he hooked up with the former members of the last surviving temple of the Golden Dawn, Whare Ra. In particular he joined the Order of the Table Round which was a side order of the now defunct Whare Ra temple. The head of the order was Percy Wilkinson who, along with Jack Taylor, had implanted the Golden Dawn’s initiatory formula over the top of the original ritual. Percy and a few of the other elderly Golden Dawn adepts shared a lot of ideas with Nick who at the time was not really that interested in the Golden Dawn and had signed up to join Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki’s Servants of the Light School. Nick moved to the UK to take part in practical work of the SOL and found himself being trained by David Goddard.

In 1997, Nick visited the US where he carried out a few workshops and renewed his friendship with Chic and Tabatha Cicero and joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn forming a Temple of that Group in Nottingham.  He followed the Cicero’s orthodox Golden Dawn curriculum from Neophyte to ZAM and passed all the practical and intellectual tests required by that order.

Around that time Nick wrote his first book Making Talismans which has turned out to be an esoteric classic. He moved to Sofia in Bulgaria where he wrote Magical Pathworking, The Druidic Order of Pendragon (with Colin Robertson), Gathering the Magic and Egyptian Shaman. He also began to work with the artist Harry Wendrich and his wife Nicola Golden Dawn Temple Tarot deck which is soon to be released.

In 2007 he wrote his first novel “When a Tree Falls“, which is an occult, fantasy based on his silly and at times black sense of humour. In 2008 he moved to Rome where he wrote two more books on the Golden Dawn “King over the Water” and “Mathers’ Last Secret“. Later that year he established the Magical Order of the Aurora Aurea which is a traditional Golden Dawn based order which already has five temples worldwide and a thriving correspondence course.

In 2010 he decided to take his order out of the Golden Dawn egregrore so that it could evolve into something which reflected his own magical direction. The Order has also become more focused on Europe.

He is the Editor of the Hermetic Journal which is a quarterly journal dedicated to ritual magic.

Brief Journalistic Biography
Nick Farrell the Hack!

In school I really did not know what I wanted to be.  While others were good at accounting, or languages I was only really any good at sailing up the nasal passages of teachers by asking too many questions. The closest thing to that was journalism, however at that point working as a journalist in New Zealand was impossible without some form of qualification from one of three schools. I applied to the year course of the Wellington Polytechnic and was turned down, probably because I was too young. Disappointed, I joined the staff training unit of the Department of Social Welfare. It was one of my more stupid moves which managed to damage my self confidence for several years. However just as I was about to be asked to leave I re-applied to Wellington Polytechnic and this time, in 1984, they let me in.

A year later I was thrust onto the journalistic world terrified. My first job was as a stringer in the Feilding office of the Palmerson North Evening Standard. While I was good at getting news and learnt a lot there, my self confidence was not good enough to consistently write well. I wondered if I should try my hand at PR and signed up to working for the New Zealand Post Office. I had been there a few days when they split into three divisions, telecoms, banking and NZ Post. Cheryl Robertson and I went into the Banking side and ended up on the head office restructuring team. There was no PR manager and we were left to our own devices. In my head we did pretty well, the only problem was that when the PR manager was appointed he managed to upset Cheryl and she decided to leave.  We both disappeared to the Napier Daily Telegraph, which put me in the heart of Whare-Ra territory and the Order of the Table Round. It was the best place to work in the world and I really enjoyed myself. Cheryl who I was living with at this point wanted to go to England for a couple of years and I came with her.

I found a job at the Windsor Express which lasted for a year before a recession meant I was made redundant. For a year I did several joke jobs, including an estate agent, a travel agent and finally a computer operator for Windsor Castle (where I was sacked because “they didn’t appreciate my sense of humour). I realised that while I was quite good at journalism, I was not much good at anything else, so I joined the Slough and Windsor Observer. This was where I learnt a lot about journalism and writing. It was there that my self confidence stabilised and I pretty much could handle anything. I was made News Editor and finally deputy editor. While I was doing this I was filling in a few freelance shifts for the British tabloids. Not many, but enough to realise I didn’t like it much. However they did teach me one important thing, which appears in my novel, Tree Falls. That is that it is not the facts which are important as much as the story. That does not mean that a story is made up, although some are, but there are certain components which make up a story and if a news story does not have them, it is not ‘news’.

I left the Observer and ended up working for a local paper in Chalfont St Peters, but I really had enough of local papers, and besides nothing was happening in Chalfont St Peters and no one wanted to admit it. A friend of mine suggested I should write for the technology press as it paid more cash and it got you out of the country quite often. I worked for Network Week for a year before I worked out I could do the same thing freelance. This would not only get me more cash, but also it would give me the freedom to write other stuff.

For about five years I wrote for Computing, Network News, and a few other titles. However the industry changed and I became interested in working online. I moved to Bulgaria and was filing news to various online magazines, such as VNUNet.

Then I joined Mike Magee’s online tech magazine theinquirer.net. I would file six stories a day and have time to write my occulty books. The Inquirer is more aggressive and opinionated, but it was there I developed a style of my own, which has slowly filtered into my books. Later I joined www.Fudzilla.com and the IT Examiner.com which had a similar ethos. Lately I have been writing for Mike’s latest project Instant News which is like the Inquirer for real news.

My journalism career has meant that I have seen some interesting sights, been shot at, had death threats gone to parts of the world I would never have seen. It is also a good earthing for all the imagination stuff that occultism tends to throw up.

Nick Farrell journalist only has similarities with the one who is involved in occultism. They both need each other and it would be nice if they were totally integrated, but they cannot be completely. While we are both a bit cynical and look to shove one-liners into everything we do, the journalist likes to wind people up more. Apple fanboys have been a target over recent years. Apple is no better or worse than any other evil company who wants to make a buck, but it has somehow convinced people that it is superior. Its cult of emotionally immature Apple fanboys police the Internet screaming their religious doctrine of superiority found in owning an expensive gadget to any hack who dares say that there is.

21 Comments

  1. matthew kolasinski

    Nick, i don’t really know you but i did know Nita Hickok and counted her as a dear friend though we’d not been in touch for a few years now. i ran into someone recently who was looking for serious help with some paranormal issues and i thought of Nita. Found her web site was down. Did a search and turned up your page at http://www.nickfarrell.it/nita-hickok-has-died-2/
    So sorry to hear that, what a wonderful person. Thank you for posting that. Not cheery news but i’d certainly want to know.

  2. Michael

    Hi Nick, Nice piece on why you don’t use the kabbalah. I’ve been looking at it and scratching my head for a long time. I get how things mercurial, jovial, saturnine etc, to the strains of Holst, could be pigeonholed under glyphs for those modes but much of the 777 stuff seems arbitrary or wilfully obscure. My background is Jungian and as such I think there are basic universal archetypes common to us all as evolved primates, analogs of instinct elaborated on from amoeba to vertebrate to 21st century homo twitterus, but I could never really justify the time in rote memorising Crowley’s or anyone else’s neural net of associations. Filing the symbols of 25 years of my own dream journals say, seems like a much better use of my time and energy. Any thoughts on using the tree or any other filing system to this end? Is the idea learn lots of attributes in different domains… metals, animals, planets, weapons, colours for each sephira etc and thereby ‘triangulate’ the essence of the category? To take an analogy again, something like dewey or the supermarket aisles, the overarching classificatory system is explicit. While you *may* remember or commit to memory that Karl Barth is in 230.123ba or that kerrygold, and gold top milk are in aisle 9. The initial ordering, the superordinate category, for either finding what you want or shelving it, is 200’s Theology or ‘Aisle 9, Dairy’. etc : ) General, overarching to specific exemplifications of that class. I see something like this in the idea of mythologists use of mythemes, or Aarne Thompson classification for folktales. Any thoughts on using the kabbalah or pagan systems in this way?

  3. Azor

    Hi Nick
    I thank you for the wealth of knowledge that you kept on spreading.
    I wanted to comment on your old post about usage of LBRP instead of LIRP.
    Here is what is going on with my life.
    I have been practicing Magic on my own learning from Golden Dawn books and videos.
    I’m a family guy who has lost a job and its getting harder and harder the more I do the LBRP life kept on getting bad.
    For the first two weeks I started the LBRP and LIRP at night in bed while at sleep my body will vibrate as if I’m plugged at high voltage of electricity and see my body expanding I was taken by fear open my eyes….
    A week after I was doing the Middle Pillar done with that went to bed same thing happen this time I open my eyes then I was vibrating like electricity passing through out my body and when I open my eyes my body was getting to float in the air ( levitation) so I held the bed and that was it.

    Is this normal for doing the LBRP and the LIRP+MIDDLE PILAR?

    can the LBRP defend us from witchcraft attacks?
    Can the LBRP or LIRP break or free us from any witchcraft curse casted or binding done to me?
    My aunt is a witch doing evil to family members where people loosing their life jobs, money and pain. Etc….
    Witchcraft in Africa isn’t what it is in western world.
    NB: I practice magic alone for now:
    In mornjng
    I do the LIRP followed by the LIRH and the middle Pillar exercise.

    Afternoon i do:
    Middle pillar

    Night:
    LBRP+ LBRH+ MIDDLE PILLAR.
    what are your thoughts?
    Any advise on my experience above and help?

    Thank you all.

  4. Eve Sinton

    Dear Nick Farrell, I have come across you after looking for information about The Golden Dawn and Whare Ra. My parents were involved with Whare Ra and I spent a lot of time there as a child, often unattended while they disappeared ‘downstairs’ to a secret place. I am the daughter of Frank and Yvonne Salt. I would be interested to hear from you. Not to further my knowledge of the esoteric, but maybe process what I still perceive as negative influences I would like to dissipate.

  5. Marine

    Hi Nick! I am going to Egypt in a couple of month and when I travel I like to meet with different shaman/healers to discover their capacity/culture. I am definitely going to read your books before I go, but maybe would you have some recommendations of people I should meet while I am over there?
    Thank you very much for your answer!
    Marine

  6. Victoria Bonnell-Wilburn

    Hi Nick! My name is Victoria and I’m a practicing Gnostic. I believe I read a comment somewhere that you reconstructed the Rite of Ascent from the Second Book of Jeu in your 2017 edition of The HERMETIC TABLET. Is this true and if it isn’t, would you know where a good reconstruction of the Ritual exists?

  7. Carlos Martínez

    Hello Nick,
    Nice to meet you.
    I am Carlos from Venezuela.
    Sorry my English is very bad but I will try to be as clear as possible.
    ever since i came across your blog i have felt that the paradigm with which i understood reality has collapsed, i am a member of bota and i have always felt uncomfortable with the idea that my thoughts and my subconscious generate everything that happens to me in my life . but I have seen several articles of yours and you talk about pathworking and visualization in magical work. The truth is that I don’t know what to believe anymore, I don’t want to believe anymore in what I learned in 7 steps but at the same time I have those ideas deep in my unconscious, I no longer believe that the mind has power and if it does, it is limited. but brother sincerely I need a sincere answer from you. What do you think about the power of our mind, our thoughts and visualization? I’m really confused

    1. Hi Carlos
      Seven steps is based on Case’s own take on the New Thought movement, which is a magical atrocity similar to the Kybalion. Thoughts and imagination are important in magic, but there are many factors that result in the universe we are surrounded by. Astrology, governments, religion, cultures and families. No matter how well you visualise you are not responsible for those sorts of issues

      1. Carlos

        thanks nick, I really think that the new thought has poisoned almost all of modern occultism. thank you for sticking to the old principles, when i have enough money to travel i will surely try to enter your order.

  8. Carlos Martínez

    I also have another doubt nick, I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder and the belief that everything in my life was a consequence of my thoughts made my mental condition worse, it was a lot of pressure and effort to think positively all the time, having said that, what did you do do you recommend real spirituals given my condition? I think I am looking for a way where man is subordinate to God or the gods and no matter what he thinks they manage his life.

  9. Ola Sundberg

    Dear mr Farrell,

    Thank you very much for you well written and interesting book “The Shem Grimoire”, it gives a lot of good background information and knowledge that are not present in the new wave of “quick fix do it your self magic”-manuals of magick.

    What I am looking for is if there are any correspondences between the 72 “Shem” angels musical notes? Is that anything that you have seen on your journey?

    Best regards,
    Ollie

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