Ralph Tegtmeier


Ralph Tegtmeier, also known as Frater V∴D∴ and Frater U∴D∴ in all, God, is a German occultist, a longtime member of the Fraternitas Saturni, and co-founder of the Illuminates of Thanateros.
Horst E. Miers in his Encyclopedia of Occult Sciences cites him as the "founder of Pragmatic Magic" whose "works are characterized by an outstanding conciseness". According to Miers,
While the initial impulses of Pragmatic Magic can be verified as early as Spare and Staudenmaier, its consistent implementation in the German speaking realm was only effected by Frater V∴D∴ who also introduced the term.

He features prominently in Gerhard Mayer's field study of 13 contemporary magicians where he is referenced both under his public magical name Frater V∴D∴ and, perfunctorily anonymized, as Isbrand.

Background

While residing in Bonn, Germany from 1979 to 1981, Tegtmeier ran an occult bookstore named Horus. In conjunction with the bookstore, an experimental magical group that became informally known as 'The Bonn Group' was formed. During this time Peter J. Carroll's Liber Null was translated and published by Tegtmeier under his Edition Magus label.
In the late 1980s, during his active participation in the order, Tegtmeier developed the concept of cyber magic. He was also the second-foremost proponent of 'ice magick', second only to the creator of ice magick, Helmut Barthel. In the early 1990s, Tegtmeier was involved with a schism from the Illuminates of Thanateros, an event known as 'the ice magick wars'. Tegtmeier has been uninvolved with the IOT since then, and has distanced himself from Chaos Magic as represented by Carroll.
Ralph gave his first public account of the schism in an interview with David Rietti, which was published in 2006 in the UK-based occult magazine, The Oracle. There, he states that, while the altercation between him and Carroll and the subsequent schism positively occurred, the 'ice magick war' itself was an entirely delusionary event that never actually took place except in his detractors' imagination. Ralph also states that during said schism, 80% of the order's membership left the organization, setting up an alternative organization, disputing his opponent's claim that the order was actually saved. Contrary to that inflated statistic, Peter Carroll himself has stated that only the German and Swiss divisions of the order split off, and together they constituted about 30 percent of the total IoT membership.
In his self-published book eismagie. erste einblicke Tegtmeier is radically critical of conventional magic and its shortcomings, calling for a deconstructionist approach stripped from cultural, historical and societal bias. He promotes an alternate definition of magic as "doing the impossible".

Personal life

Tegtmeier is currently CEO of a privately held internet marketing and software development company specializing in natural language generation, search engine optimization and related services.

Written works

Under the name Frater U∴D∴