The Real Death of Dr. Joseph Lisiewski

By Mark Stavish

Edited by Alfred DeStefano III

Copyright 2016

It has been eight weeks since the death of Dr. Joseph Charles Lisiewski on July 2, 2016, one week past the traditional allotted mourning period and series of prayers offered to assist in his transition to a better existence – an existence he neither truly believed in nor cared about, as  Lisiewski had no interest in notions of “life after death” or “reincarnation.” This is demonstrated in his novel Night Shadow, which concerns necromancy, although not in the context of a magician raising the dead, but rather of a magician being raised from the dead. Indeed, his entire life’s work was dedicated to the perfection of time travel so that he could go back in time and start his life over again at the age of twelve, thereby avoiding the magical path in its entirety. Like so many who had gone before him – his teacher and friend Israel Regardie included – Lisiewski found that magic often takes far in excess of what it gives in return. For him, that was a lifetime and more.

            The question many of you have at this moment is: does it have to be that way? Does magic always have to be loss and suffering? The answer is a difficult one, and in fact is answerable only on an individual basis. For this, we need to look at Lisiewski’s life, what drove him to occultism, what he expected to get from it, and the lessons we might learn from his experiences.

            The post-World War Two coal regions of Eastern and Central Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s are where Lisiewski was born and grew to manhood. This was a difficult existence ruled in many ways by the Roman Catholic Church and collapsing coal and rail industries, with  high rates of alcoholism and various other forms of abuse. It was – for those with some money, smarts, and talent – a place that could be either a pleasantly quiet middle-class life or a place to escape from for broader horizons beyond the Blue Mountains. However, without brains, talent, or money, it could just as easily be a prison for the mind and soul, where each day was the same as the last until you died.

            Lisiewski had no money, but he had brains, talent, and ambition, and with it sought his way out. Magic would be the tool that would catapult him to greater opportunity and a success that demonstrated to those he left behind his greatness – his natural superiority. You see, Lisiewski was fond of stating that when he was still a child the school counselor told his parents that he was of marginal intelligence and would “make a good plumber's assistant if he worked hard.” To rise above such low expectations and achieve a graduate degree in Chemical Engineering, later furthering his work with a doctoral program in physics, was Lisiewski’s great achievement in many ways – but it was not enough. The rage he had over his early upbringing was clearly expressed in his novel The Altar Path, wherein the town of Defiance, Pennsylvania, is wiped from the map by an act of black magic – in many ways making Lisiewski’s story a cross between the Tibetan Milarepa and Faust.

            The last time I saw Lisiewski we sat down in his living room, he on a couch and I on a rolling desk chair opposite him with a table between us. The table was covered with material he was working on. He asked me to get a book for him. It was The Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and East Indian Occultism, and the Book of Secret Hindu, Ceremonial and Talismanic Magic by L. W. de Laurence. Inside was a slip of paper; written on it in faded ink by a much younger hand was an outline of ceremonial evocation. This was the book he and his friend had used to perform their now-famous evocation, the first of many that would propel Lisiewski down the occult path and his friend into the military and priesthood.

            After discussing that very first operation we talked about The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy and a few related topics, specifically which systems of magic he believed worked (and why), which ones did not, and the reconciliation of inconsistencies in various manuscripts. He then presented me with a copy of The Magus by Francis Barrett and several books on the Shem-Hamaphoresch. All this was in addition to a complete set of Lynn Thorndyke's History of Magic and Experimental Science which he had given me the previous day. This particular set was an ex-library copy from the Lamar Community College, Lamar, Colorado. He told me I could take any books I wanted, but I did not take anything.

            The straightforward, guns blazing, no-holds-barred approach Lisiewski brought to his writing he also brought to his relationships. He was a true Aries, his birth sign: everything was an offensive to be launched, a battle to be won. He often asked how it was that we remained friends for so long, to which I replied, “Because I accept you as you are.”

Accepting people and things “as they are” is not something Lisiewski was able to do, even when that acceptance was to be applied to himself. Of course the desire for change is what propelled him to some significant degree of academic and occult achievement – otherwise you would not be reading this article. However, this desire for achievement, accomplishment, and success – all important goals – were tainted by anger. This anger infected everything he did and poisoned not only his personal and professional relationships, but also himself. He would frequently burst into obscenity-laden tirades that bordered on Tourette’s Syndrome. Several times I simply put the phone down and walked away, or would interrupt him and tell him to stop, as such behavior did neither him nor me any good. You see, what really killed Joseph Lisiewski was not cancer from a lifetime of smoking (something he did even when I was visiting him) nor damage to his liver from a period of alcoholism, but anger, a rage so palpable that in the end it exhausted him and left him with only the contents of his own mind.

Now before anyone rushes to judgment or claps their hands in glee, take a warning from Lisiewski’s life and accomplishments (which were many).  In the end he died in pain, both physical and mental – a pain that might have been foreshadowed in his nearly unreadable novel Geometries of the Mind, a tale of descent into madness, in which the back jacket copy reads, “[Lisiewski] takes the reader on a terrifying journey into the depths of one man’s mind who dared to play God.”  In his Water Work and experimentation with the Homunculus, this is not far from the truth.

It would be nice to point to Lisiewski and say he was the exception: misunderstood genius, occultist who was “human, all too human.”  But in the end, he is too often the norm. If we look at his peers and many in the occult circles he ran in during the 1960s through 1980s --  even into the 1990s -- we see too many common denominators among the authors of that period,  particularly those authors of a small group who were associated with the Golden Dawn, the OTO, AA, and associated streams of eclectic magic often focusing on demonic evocation.  Despite their intellectual brilliance and flare for language (particularly sarcasm), far too many of them smoked, drank, were obese, ate poorly, and died of cancer or accidental overdose, financially broke and leaving their families with little or nothing other than bills to pay. All of this happened a decade or more short of the expected lifespan of the average American male. Thus, if you want to be miserable, broke, and dead by sixty or sixty-five years of age, follow their real-life examples, not just their published ones.

Anger is destructive to the mind, brain, and body. Nothing can be built on it that will last. While Lisiewski managed to have the achievement of experiencing Knowledge and Conversation with his Holy Guardian Angel, he could not achieve his True Will, because his will was divided by anger. To achieve his True Will, he needed to reconcile what modern magicians call the Pillars of Mercy and Severity, particularly of Geburah and Chesed. This can only be done with great personal courage and strength. More importantly, it requires love. Love is essential for bridging this illusory divide. Like nearly every one of his peers, and many now in the occult community – particularly its most vocal leaders – Lisiewski chained himself to the Pillar of Severity. We see the same in those of lesser caliber, with their incessant bickering, name calling, and nit-picking at ritual minutiae. Ultimately we see the results of this in their failed relationships, be it with fellow lodge members, professionally, or even personally.

The Path of the Tower is the lesser reflection of the Path of Strength that Lisiewski sought to cross but failed.  It is critical for our health and wellbeing that we learn to have meaningful relationships of a social, professional, and personal nature. To achieve this goal, the powers of Netzach need to be integrated into our life. For too many people, failure to achieve a genuinely loving relationship with others is masked in isolation, the false Path of the Hermit, rather than in its actual reconciliation. In some ways this is still preferable to the nearly constant arguing, bickering, and moralizing (of all sorts) that contaminate modern magical movements. Sarcasm – the verbal weapon of choice among the brilliant but emotionally immature – is veiled anger, no matter how funny it may appear at the moment. It is a way of slapping someone when the speaker has neither the ability nor the courage to do so physically in person. Sarcasm increases problems in life, it cannot solve them; it is intellectual pride. This is important: verbal sparring and even combat are vices of Hod, of Mercury, of the Mind, that must be overcome if lasting awareness of these other areas of life symbolized by the “Middle Triad” of Spheres on the Tree of Life are to be integrated into our life and not be the forces that explode it or end up cutting it short.

I am simply reminded of the sad and short obituary that appeared for Lisiewski after his death, made poetic in comparison to the even shorter one posted by one of his (and my) current publishers. One would think that after a lifetime of occultism a bit more would have been said about his life rather than the apparent desire to simply forget it and move on. But rage does that:   it turns relationships of a lifetime into a passing comment between webpage updates.

Lisiewski, however, is not alone in this situation. I am reminded of several well-known authors of books on demonic evocation, and of one in particular who was said to have been able to evoke every kind of angel and demon. When he died – I am told “in his own waste with no one to claim the body” -- no obituary of any kind appeared, and those who knew him are to this day unable or unwilling to say any more about him than “he came to a bad end.” 

Yet, the Splendor Solis (a book of alchemy often compared to the tarot because of its twenty-two plates) finishes with a blessing: that the alchemist should come to a “good end.”  That is: our lives are to be happy, healthy, prosperous, long, and a blessing to ourselves and others. This blessing is, in simple terms, helping ourselves and those we encounter to actualize their potential, their fullness of Being. While anger can point to things that need to be cleared for that to happen, in itself it is not the tool that makes it happen. It is the sword that cuts the undergrowth; it is not the spade that digs the earth nor the plough that makes for planting the seeds. Anger, self-righteousness, and pride are a powerfully destructive trinity that must be transformed before they destroy us – and destroy us they will if we do not bring the Three Daughters of Sophia (Faith, Hope, and Charity/Love) into our life.

            This moral principle is even more important today, as we see the notion of magical curses and hexing taking center stage in certain circles – the idea being that it is not for personal gain or revenge, but for “justice.” Several forums have been held wherein the discussion centered on the question of hexing being appropriate or not. For an adept of any worth this is a simple question with a simple answer: if you have to ask, then it is beyond you. By this we mean that for every action there is a reaction, a result (karma if you will), and if you do not understand the effects of your actions then they are beyond your capacity to perform without great risk of injury and harm to yourself and others. Everything we invoke or evoke must first work in and through us. We cannot escape the fruits of our actions. If you seek to invoke Justice, then be prepared for Justice to act in, on, and through you as well.

            This leads us to the discussion of Pride, the worst of sins, as it is the hardest to overcome. Pride is considered “Luciferian” or “Satanic” because it is not the Divine Pride of the Vajrayana practitioner who seeks to express his or her fullest potential, nor pride in a job well done as we teach our children. Instead, the Vice of Pride separates us from our fellow beings – not just humans, but all classes of beings – and in our mind and action places them in a defined position of servitude in relation to us, regardless of their actual hierarchical rank.

When we separate occult practices too distantly from basic moral and ethical principles, we lose sight of the interconnectedness of all the cosmos. It is this cosmos wherein our magic takes place. Contemporary magicians, regardless of what system they are practicing, need to pay close heed to these words if they wish to accomplish their goals through metaphysical means.

In closing, perhaps it is best to remind ourselves of 1 Corinthians, 1-13:

If I shall speak with every human and Angelic language and have no love in me, I shall be clanging brass or a noise-making cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and I know all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so that I may remove mountains, and I have no love in me, I would be nothing. And if I should feed everything that I have to the poor, and if I hand over my body to be burned up and I have no love in me, I gain nothing.

Love is patient and sweet; love does not envy; love is not upset neither puffed up. Love does not commit what is shameful, neither does it seek its own; it is not provoked, neither does it entertain evil thoughts, rejoices not in evil, but rejoices in the truth, endures all things, believes all things, hopes all, bears all.

Love never fails; for prophecies shall cease, tongues shall be silenced and knowledge will be nothing; for we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when perfection shall come, then that which is partial shall be nothing. When I was a child, I was speaking as a child, I was led as a child, I was thinking as a child, but when I became a man, I ceased these childish things. Now we see as in a mirror, in an allegory, but then face-to-face. Now I know partially, but then I shall know as I am known. For there are these three things that endure: Faith, Hope, and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.

At some point I will say more about the last evocation Lisiewski performed: its results, what he experienced, and my destruction of his magical tools. Suffice it to say that during their destruction by fire, a terrific downpour was building immediately above me which I barely escaped; for six months afterwards I suffered from severe tendonitis in my right elbow. You cannot touch evil and get away unscathed – but it can be purified.  

Remember always that Love – be it Eros, Philo, or Agape – is the key to magical realization; by doing so, may each and every one of you come to  a “Good End.”