Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
The Soul Mirrors
Build an exhaustive, brutally honest written inventory of one’s own faults and virtues, sort each into the four elements and into three tiers of severity, and use the resulting two ‘mirrors’ to find and correct the elemental imbalance in one’s character.
Bardon’s soul mirrors: In a private diary, spend 1-2 weeks listing every fault you have, down to the finest detail — honestly, no excuses. Sort each into Fire / Water / Air / Earth (or “indifferent”), then rank each element’s faults into three tiers (strongest → occasional). Do the whole thing again for your virtues. You now hold two mirrors — a black one of vices, a white one of virtues — that show which element rules you. Keep them updated for life, and work the tier-one faults first.
What it is
This is the psychic (soul-training) work of Step I of Franz Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics, run in parallel with his Step-I thought-control.
Where thought-control trains the mind, the soul mirrors train self-knowledge. The practitioner compiles, in a private “magic diary,” an exhaustive list of every fault of character — down to the finest nuance — then a matching list of every virtue.
Each trait is then sorted into one of the four elements (fire, water, air, earth, plus an “indifferent” column for the uncertain) and ranked into three tiers of severity. The result is two “mirrors”: a black mirror of vices and a white mirror of virtues.
Read together, they reveal which element dominates the character and where it is out of balance — and that map, Bardon says, is the indispensable basis for every later magical step. As a standalone practice it is simply one of the most rigorous structured self-inventories in the Western esoteric canon.
The Method
Bardon lays out the procedure in clear stages (Step I, Magic Psychic Training). Use a private diary; show it to no one.
- Collect the faults (week 1). Devote a few minutes morning and night (and any spare moment in the day) to self-criticism. In quiet meditation, replay past situations and remember how you behaved and where you failed. Record every weakness — “down to the finest nuances and variations.” Bardon is emphatic: “Be merciless towards yourself and do not embellish any of your failures.” Note each fault the instant you spot it so none is forgotten. He observes that gifted students have found hundreds of distinct faults; thoroughness is the measure of good introspection.
- Extend if needed. If a week doesn’t exhaust the list, spend a second week until the inventory of faults feels genuinely complete.
- Sort each fault into an element. Make a rubric (column) in the diary for each of the four elements and assign every fault to one. Bardon’s own examples: - Fire: jealousy, hatred, vindictiveness, irascibility, anger. - Air: frivolity, self-presumption, boasting, squandering, gossiping. - Water: indifference, laziness, frigidity, over-compliance, negligence, shyness, insolence, instability. - Earth: laziness, lack of conscience, melancholy, irregularity, dullness. - Indifferent: any fault you can’t yet place — assign it later as discernment grows.
- Rank each element’s faults into three tiers. Within each element column, sort the faults into three groups: (1) the biggest — those that influence you most strongly or are triggered by the slightest occasion; (2) those that occur less often and in lesser degree; (3) those that arise only now and again. Do the same for the “indifferent” faults.
- Repeat the whole procedure for your virtues. Build the matching white mirror: list every good quality, sort into the four elements, again in three tiers. Bardon’s examples — Fire: activity, enthusiasm, firmness, courage, daring; Air: diligence, joy, dexterity, kindness, optimism; Water: modesty, abstemiousness, fervency, compassion, tranquillity, tenderness, forgiveness; Earth: respect, endurance, conscientiousness, thoroughness, sobriety, punctuality, responsibility.
- Read the mirrors and keep them living. The two mirrors now show which element predominates on the dark side and the bright side. Keep adding traits as they surface during later development. In Step I the task is to see the imbalance; the actual rebalancing (transmutation by fighting and fostering traits) is the work of Step II, but it begins from this map. Bardon frames the ongoing work as, over the following months and years, steadily reducing the tier-one faults one by one. (Sourcing note: the “merciless toward yourself,” the element examples, the three-tier ranking, the one-to-two-week timing, and the black/white “psycho-mirror” terminology are all Bardon’s, faithfully paraphrased with short quoted phrases from Step I of IIH.)
Source & Lineage
The exercise is the Magic Psychic Training of Step I in Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics (Der Weg zum wahren Adepten, 1956), the first volume of his three-part Hermetic curriculum.
Bardon (1909–1958), a Czech Hermeticist and stage performer, built the whole system on the tetrapolar magnet — the idea that mind, soul, and body are each governed by the four elements plus akasha — so self-knowledge is cast as discovering one’s elemental constitution.
The deeper lineage runs through Western contemplative self-examination (the Christian examination of conscience, the cataloguing of vices and virtues) and resembles, in form and spirit, the “searching and fearless moral inventory” of later twelve-step practice — though Bardon’s elemental sorting is his own signature. → (Franz Bardon node).
The Traditions' versions
Examination of conscience (Christian/Ignatian) — nightly structured review of one’s faults; the devotional ancestor of Bardon’s diary work.
- Fourth-step moral inventory (12-step) — a written, fearless catalogue of one’s defects and assets; strikingly parallel in method and intent.
- CBT thought/trait records & schema work — written self-monitoring and categorisation of recurring patterns as the basis for change.
- Jungian shadow work — making the disowned, “dark” side conscious so it can be integrated rather than acted out.
- Yoga’s yamas/niyamas self-assessment — measuring oneself against an ethical grid as preparation for higher practice.
- Gurdjieff self-observation — dispassionate cataloguing of one’s mechanical features.
Common refinements
Self-attack instead of honesty. “Merciless” should mean unflinching, not cruel. The goal is clear seeing, not a beating. Pair every dark-mirror session with the white mirror so the picture stays whole.
- Stopping at the black mirror. Bardon requires both. Skipping the virtue inventory leaves a distorted, demoralising self-image.
- Vagueness. “I’m sometimes lazy” is useless; record the specific situations, triggers, and frequency so it can be tiered and worked.
- Treating it as a one-off. The mirrors are living documents — add traits as they surface for years.
- Forcing premature element labels. Use the “indifferent” column; let placement clarify with time rather than guessing.
- Skipping the diary. The written, dated record is the mechanism. Doing it “in your head” loses almost all the benefit.