Bardon's three textbooks make a claim no earlier occult author had quite made: that the whole of magical training can be delivered in print, to a solitary student, with nothing withheld. Initiation into Hermetics, the first and most admired, is a graded course of ten steps, each divided into training of spirit, soul and body: thought observation and one pointedness; conscious eating and breathing; accumulation of the elements in the body; the building of elemental equilibrium before any power is attempted. Nothing is left symbolic that can be made practical, and the student needs no lodge, no initiator and no belief, only the daily work honestly logged. The second volume, The Practice of Magical Evocation, and the third, The Key to the True Kabbalah, extend the course to spirit evocation and to a phonetic cosmic language, in the same manual like tone.
The books appeared in German in the 1950s, and their author, who had performed on stage as the magician Frabato, lived just long enough to see them in print: he was arrested in Czechoslovakia in 1958, where occult activity attracted the new regime's police as it had the old one's, and died that year in custody in Brno. The books survived him in exactly the way he designed them to, passing hand to hand without any organisation to protect or corrupt them, and more than one later system of self training quietly stands on his ten steps.