Two thinkers who never met, working from entirely different traditions with entirely different vocabularies — and arriving at the same place.
A few years ago, I read Frabato, a novel by Franz Bardon, and it fascinated me so much I had to read all his books afterward. A few days ago, I read Resurrecting the Mysterious: Ingo Swann's 'Great Lost Work' — and was astonished by how much these two thinkers share. They never met, worked in entirely different traditions, used entirely different vocabularies — and arrived at the same place.
Franz Bardon was an early 20th-century Czech Hermetist. His foundational work, Initiation into Hermetics, published in 1956, is a rigorous, step-by-step manual for developing the human mental, astral, and physical bodies toward conscious contact with the structure of reality. It is rooted in centuries of Hermetic tradition. He writes like a craftsman who has built the thing and is now handing you the blueprint.
Ingo Swann was a mid-20th-century American psychic, artist, and researcher. He created the term "remote viewing" at the American Society for Psychical Research in 1971, co-developed the CRV protocol that became the foundation of the US government's classified Stargate program, and spent the last decades of his life writing prolifically about the nature of consciousness, psychic capacity, and what he saw as humanity's suppressed potential. His posthumously published "great lost work," Resurrecting the Mysterious — written in the late 1980s and early 90s, discovered in a manila folder after his death in 2013 — is something else entirely: part manifesto, part archaeology, part self-anatomy.
They are reading from different maps. The maps describe the same territory.
Bardon's system rests on a foundational three-part structure of the human being: the Mental body — the plane of thought, ideas, accumulated knowledge, analytical capacity; the Astral body — the seat of feeling, emotion, desire, and resonance with external forces; and the Spirit — the point of contact between the individual and the divine source, the plane from which true will and genuine intuition arise.
Ingo, arriving from the opposite direction — empirical research rather than esoteric tradition — describes what he calls the Psychic Triad: Intellect (the organizing, analytical, context-building faculty), Sentiments (the feeling/sensing arm — he retrieves an older definition: sentio, "to feel, perceive, or think," tracing back to passion, meaning "to undergo," "to be acted upon by external agents"), and Intuition (the third arm, operating without reasoning or deduction — "the act by which the mind perceives the truth of things immediately, the moment they are presented, without the intervention of other ideas or without reasoning and deduction").
Lay these two systems side by side and the correspondence is difficult to miss. Ingo's intellect is Bardon's mental body. Ingo's sentiments — the resonance faculty, the passion-receiver — is Bardon's astral body. Ingo's intuition, that faculty which pierces the barriers of space-time and perceives directly without inference, is precisely what Bardon describes as the developed spirit's capacity for Akashic contact.
Bardon called it the Akasha. Ingo called it the Emerald Realm, or the psychic matrix. Both described it as the field in which everything that was, is, or will be exists without reference to time.
One place where Ingo goes well beyond Bardon is in his diagnosis of why this architecture has been buried for two thousand years. Bardon taught the system and acknowledged in passing that his books would meet resistance — but he didn't dwell on the sociology of suppression. He just handed you the tools and trusted you to use them.
Ingo goes after the root cause with both hands. He identifies what he calls the Great Anti-Psychic Barrier Reef (GAP-BR): the accumulated cultural sediment of two millennia of active suppression of psychic realization — through fear, punishment, ridicule, institutional exclusion, and what he calls "belief management." Four major forces in Western history — Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, Renaissance Humanism, and Scientific Materialism — each in their own way locked the door on the psychic realms and threw away the key.
The result is not just ignorance of the psychic. It is something worse: a deep, subconscious anti-psychic programming installed so thoroughly that it operates below the level of conscious control. Ingo calls these "inhibition images" — intellectual constructs that trigger automatic rejection of the paranormal before it can even be examined.
His proof-of-concept is a striking medical case study. In 1950, a sixteen-year-old boy named John, suffering from congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma — a structural skin disease considered incurable since 1904 — was partially cured through hypnosis by a doctor named Dr. Mason who thought he was treating warts. The cure worked because neither the doctor nor the patient knew the condition was supposed to be impossible. Within days of suggestion alone, John's entire left arm cleared from wrist to shoulder. But once Mason learned the true diagnosis — incurable, congenital, structural — everything changed. He found he could no longer hypnotize John at all. John became afraid to be hypnotized. Mason eventually abandoned hypnosis entirely.
Paracelsus had written it five hundred years earlier: It is always faith that works the miracle, and whether the faith is aroused by something real or something false, its miraculous power is the same.
The inhibition image — "this is an incurable condition" — was more powerful than the healing that had already begun. Not because it was true, but because it was believed. Ingo's argument is that this is exactly what the GAP-BR has done to human psychic capacity at a civilizational scale.
One of the most striking sections of Resurrecting the Mysterious is the opening Preamble, "The You," in which Ingo lays out in extraordinary detail the mechanics of what happens to the soul after death, through the between-lives state, and into reincarnation. This is where the Bardon parallel becomes almost uncanny.
Ingo describes several levels of post-death existence, broadly corresponding to the degree of psychic development the individual achieved in life. The least developed souls have no activated psychic awareness — deprived of the physical senses they depended on entirely, they effectively go dark, lingering near the place of death without even the awareness that they exist. The more developed are able to navigate the between-lives realm, but without developed psychic awareness to guide the selection, the process of reincarnation is essentially random. True reincarnation — as distinct from mere re-embodiment — requires sufficient psychic strength to impress past experiences into the new brain-plate during fetal development.
The highest-developed souls can navigate the death and between-lives process with awareness and even choice. Some may elect not to re-embody at all. And some — those who have achieved genuine psychic liberation — may choose to remain in a position where they work quietly to raise the overall psychic quotient of humanity, invisible because the Equalizer would otherwise identify and neutralize them.
The Equalizer is Ingo's term for the social mechanism by which human hierarchies maintain stability — and specifically how this mechanism turns against psychic development. Every pyramid structure requires belief management: keeping the masses' beliefs aligned with the pyramid's interests. Psychic realization is a direct threat to this because it sees through managed beliefs. Bardon's system describes exactly the same mechanics, only from the practitioner's perspective rather than the sociologist's.
Ingo makes a distinction that matters enormously to anyone practicing RV, and that Bardon also makes in different words: the difference between second-hand knowledge and first-hand experience.
Our Western culture, Ingo observes, is uniquely saturated with "armchair intellects." We learn almost everything second-hand — through texts, lectures, reported experiments, other people's conclusions. Second-hand information enters the intellect and gets stored without fundamentally changing the parameters of the mindset. You can read extensively about the paranormal and remain psychically illiterate. First-hand experience, by contrast, actually changes the psychological and psychic parameters of the mindset.
He calls this psychic literacy: not just knowing words and concepts, but having the background experiential context from which those words draw their meaning. This is identical to Bardon's requirement that no step be approached theoretically. Every exercise in Initiation into Hermetics is designed to produce first-hand experiential knowledge, not to convey information about it. What matters is the changed capacity.
Here is where Ingo's work takes a turn that Bardon never made. In his 1992 essay in Fate magazine, Ingo's central argument is not really about ETs — it is about a common denominator: all contactee and abductee experiences share one feature, and that feature is telepathy. The ETs communicate psychically, scan human mind-contents, and communicate in ways that bypass language entirely. This means, Ingo notes, that we have a psychic substructure capable of receiving these communications — otherwise none of it would work.
"Come on, guys. We could at least try to meet psychic power with psychic power."
He goes further. The relationship between our cultural suppression of psychic development and the ET possession of advanced psychic capabilities may not, in his view, be coincidental. The evidence suggests our species may have been mind-entrained to attack and destroy our own psychic capacities. If the sentiments function as resonance receivers — genuinely susceptible to external agents — then the possibility that this susceptibility has been used against us is not a wild claim. It is the logical extension of everything he established in Resurrecting the Mysterious.
Bardon's system, notably, includes extensive work on psychic self-protection: the development of mental and astral solidity that makes the practitioner's inner space genuinely their own. This is treated not as exotic, but as necessary groundwork.
Eight Martinis Issue 18 includes the full transcript of the Moon Recon Phase II session from April 29–30, 1999, conducted with Bob Durant as monitor. Ingo had first remote-viewed the Moon in 1975 during the classified government program — an experience recounted in Penetration. In 1999, he returned.
The transcript runs across three sessions over two days. Targeting crater Aristarchus, Ingo arrives above it, describes intense heat, and makes contact with entities insulated in glowing atmospheres. He is enclosed in a "green bubble" and asked what he wants. A second session goes underground into a vaulted space with purple light, liquid water, and a large circular chamber. A female entity appears — she has seen him before.
What emerges is a hierarchy the entities call thinkers: beings whose function is psychic reception and projection. The cadets — those in the dormitory with silver-colored plates in their heads — can only receive. The entity who previously ejected Ingo is a different class: he can both receive and project, is approximately 450 years old, one of only twenty of his kind on the Moon. He is "an energizer" — he projects and energizes inputs.
Ingo's response when this entity materializes: "Guess what? I'm back." The entity smiles.
The third session targets a large spherical craft, partially buried in the lunar surface. When Ingo approaches, it scans him — reading his previous contacts and verifying his authorization. It then asks, in the approximate equivalent of a question: "Which language do you want to speak?" He answers: Earth English, modern. A portal opens. What follows is a data dump — massive amounts of compressed information. Fragments: an exodus and migration in progress. The lunar colony has been there approximately 30,000 years. The Moon is a military outpost on a migratory route. The entities need what Ingo can only translate as "essential protoplasm" — biological material from Earth.
The library locator then asks whether Ingo wants his own corresponding system activated. He is, in essence, being offered an interface upgrade. He declines for now — overwhelmed, needing to process what he already has.
The Moon Recon sessions are not protocol RV in Ingo's strict sense — he acknowledged as much. What they are is something closer to what Bardon describes in the higher stages of Initiation into Hermetics and The Practice of Magical Evocation: direct psychic contact with non-human intelligences, conducted by a practitioner whose psychic structure is developed enough to sustain it.
The cadets — beings who can only receive, essentially sensor arrays — correspond to what Bardon would call undeveloped intuition: the faculty present but operating only passively, registering incoming signal without the capacity to project. The 450-year-old projector — shape-changer, capable of beaming his physical particles and reassembling them elsewhere — corresponds to what Bardon describes in the upper steps: a being who has mastered both mental and astral planes to the degree that physical limitation is largely optional.
And critically: Ingo's tone in 1999 is entirely different from his alarmed 1992 essay. He is negotiating, joking, persistently requesting what he wants, being met with something that functions like collegial recognition. This is the arc Bardon describes: the practitioner who arrives in fear meets hostility or expulsion; the practitioner who arrives in equilibrium is received differently. The entity who previously ejected Ingo now smiles at him.
Ingo's 1993 Fate essay reveals something important about how he held all of this simultaneously. Remote viewing, he insists, is a protocol, not an ability. It consists of five elements: a subject, active ESP abilities, a distant target, the subject's recorded responses, and confirmatory positive feedback. Remove the feedback, and what you have is "something else other than remote-viewing." He was explicitly critical of people using the RV label for unverified psychic impressions.
This is the same Ingo who spent two days communicating with entities on the Moon in sessions with no conventional feedback mechanism. He knew this. He acknowledged the AOL (Analytical Overlay) problem throughout — the constant risk that his extensive reading was generating overlays indistinguishable from genuine signal. He flags specific data points precisely because they seem like things he wouldn't have generated ("essential protoplasm — that's not me"), and treats others more cautiously because they match things he already knew.
What Ingo demonstrates is not that protocol doesn't matter. It is that a developed practitioner working beyond the edges of what conventional protocol can reach needs a different kind of integrity: the capacity to hold signal and noise simultaneously in awareness, track the quality of contact in real time, and be honest with himself about what he is actually perceiving versus what his mind is supplying. Bardon calls this discernment — and it is the accumulated result of years of rigorous self-examination.
Both Bardon and Ingo describe a field or realm that is the ground of all existence — not God in any religious sense, but the substrate from which all things arise and to which all things return. Bardon calls it the Akasha principle. Ingo calls it the Emerald Realm.
"The psychic matrix 'contains' all that was, is, or will be. In the psychic matrix, all life is and is without time or reference, save how life is forming and un-forming to reform again."
Both agree that this field is not separate from ordinary reality — it interpenetrates it. The practitioner does not leave the physical world to access it. They develop the capacity to perceive what was always already there. And both agree on what blocks that perception: not distance, not mystical unworthiness, not divine punishment — but accumulated fear, and its cognitive residue. Bardon calls it elemental imbalance. Ingo calls it clogged sentiments and inhibition images. Same mechanism, different vocabularies.
For RV practitioners, this has concrete implications. The sentiments — Ingo's second arm of the psychic triad, Bardon's astral body — are the primary reception faculty. If those sentiments are clogged with accumulated fear, social conditioning, or the GAP-BR's two thousand years of anti-psychic sedimentation, the signal-to-noise ratio degrades at the source. You can have perfect protocol and still get mostly noise, because the instrument itself is distorted.
Bardon's elemental work — the systematic examination of fire, water, air, and earth qualities in one's own character, the honest inventory of passions, weaknesses, compulsions, and blockages, and the sustained effort to bring these into balance — is, from Ingo's perspective, the cleaning of the sentiments. The preparation of the resonance faculty for accurate reception. This is not mystical. It is, in Ingo's framing, deeply practical.
Read together, Bardon and Swann offer something neither provides alone. Bardon gives you the structure: the clear architecture of development, the specific practices, the cosmological map. Ingo gives you the context: why the structure was buried, what the suppression looks like from the inside, what the sentiments feel like when they are genuinely resonating with something non-physical, and decades of empirical documentation — laboratory-tested, government-funded, protocol-verified — that the structure is real.
He also gives you the Moon sessions: two days of live transcript showing a developed practitioner operating at the outer edge of what the psychic triad can do when its three arms are genuinely working together — navigating non-physical contact, tracking signal against noise in real time, being met with a kind of recognition by intelligences that apparently notice when a human consciousness arrives with coherence rather than fear.
Ingo's own comment at the end of the April 29 session captures something essential. He and Durant are sitting with the transcript, astonished, and Ingo says:
"I don't see how my little imagination could have concocted all that. I always have to examine that issue."
That is the practitioner's discipline. Not credulity, not dismissal, but sustained, honest examination — held together with the genuine willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads.
Both Bardon and Ingo arrived at the same place from opposite ends of the same road. That convergence is, itself, a kind of evidence.