Getting started
Hermetic Companion is built around one idea: the work is done daily, and what is not recorded is soon lost. Everything else in the app serves that.
Your account
Sign in with email and password, or with Google. Your practice record lives in your account, so it follows you between phone, tablet and desktop.
Install it as an app
The app runs in a browser, but installing it gives you a home-screen icon, a full screen without browser chrome, and offline access to what you have already loaded.
Turn on encryption first
Before you write anything you would not want read by anyone else, go to Settings → End-to-end encryption and set a master password. Your journal, counters and mirror notes are then encrypted on your device before they are stored. See Privacy & encryption for what this protects and what it costs you.
Your master password is never sent anywhere and cannot be recovered or reset by anyone. If you lose it, encrypted entries cannot be read again. Write it down and keep it somewhere physical.
Today
The first screen answers one question — what is being asked of me today, and have I done it?
The measures
Four figures run across the top:
Today's working
The checklist beneath is the day's practice. What fills it depends on you:
- By default it lists the practices of your current step on the path chosen in Path, in the order Path lists them. Switch path, and Today follows.
- If you have set an active daily ritual, that ritual's exercises replace the list. See Rituals.
Each row shows the intended duration and, where one is running, the streak you are holding. Press Begin on any row to start it — the order is a suggestion, not a gate. A completed row shows the time it was logged.
A ritual that spans the day is listed under Morning, Midday and Evening, with every sitting on its own row: a practice done morning and evening has two rows, and your second session of it today ticks off the second. The part of the day you are in is marked now. All-day habits show Kept today instead of a timer.
Once the evening's sittings are done, or from 18:00, the list ends with Evening review, which opens a journal entry with the day's questions to answer, among them which open tasks will weigh on tomorrow.
Tasks that are due today or overdue appear as their own rows, headed Tasks due, between the practices and the evening review. The square settles one; Tomorrow puts it back a day. They are not counted in the day's practices.
Quick actions
Begin next practice starts the next unfinished sitting, in the part of the day you are in first. Log manually records a session you did away from the app. Record opens Write an entry, Log a feeling and Log a sensation, which go straight to the journal, Add a task, and Evoke a feeling.
Rest days
Mark rest day, in the Current streak box, sets today aside deliberately. A rest day holds your streak rather than breaking it, but does not count toward the total — the number stays a count of days actually worked. Press it again to undo.
Consolidation is part of the work, and a tool that cannot tell a chosen pause from a failure will eventually punish you for resting well. Use it honestly and it stays meaningful; use it to paper over drift and you have only deceived yourself.
Elemental register
A thirty-day count of the Mirrors traits you have observed, by element: each one you tag on a journal entry or note in the Mirrors, split into white (strengths) and black (weaknesses). Feelings and sensations are not counted; a mood is not an element. It is a reading of where your recent self-observation has actually pointed, not a judgement.
The side column
Practices
The full library of exercises, searchable and filterable by step. Each practice carries its guidance, a suggested duration, and your own history with it.
Practices opens on the path chosen in Path and the step you are on. Above the list are two quick ways in: the practices of your active ritual, and the five you practised most recently. Each row says when you last practised it, and the practice's page shows where it sits in the path — its step and Clark's schedule note — and the times your ritual sets it.
Running a practice
- Open the practice and read the guidance.
- Press Begin session. The page scrolls to the session panel, with the length already set — for thought control, as Bardon builds it, a minute longer each day — and the reason beside it. The clock follows the real time, so a locked screen does not lose any of it, and the screen is kept awake while it runs.
- If you want to count how often attention wandered (or repetitions), open the counter; it is saved with the session and charted on Progress. Leaving with time on the clock asks first.
- Rate the session and add a note. The note becomes a journal entry linked to that practice.
All-day habits — conscious food and water, attentiveness, the morning routine — are not timed: the practice's page offers Kept today instead, with Undo.
Rating honestly
Sessions are rated from Unacceptable to Excellent. The rating is for you alone, and its value depends entirely on your honesty. A record of uniformly excellent sessions tells you nothing; a record that tracks your actual state will show you, months later, exactly which conditions produce good work.
Your own practices
Create custom practices with their own name, guidance and duration, assigned to whichever step they belong to. You can also override the guidance text of a built-in practice — useful when working from a particular teacher's phrasing.
Path
The curriculum itself, step by step, with each step's physical, mental and psychic exercises laid out together as Bardon groups them.
Each step carries its introduction, detailed guidance, and reflection questions to sit with before you consider it complete. You can set a target date for a step and log practice directly from the exercise list.
How far into the step
Your current step shows which week and day of it you are on — Week 3, day 17 — counted from the day you began it. Begun on shows that day. Until you set it, it is the day the step before was marked attained, or failing that your first session in one of the step's own practices (ones no earlier step already holds). If you began before you started logging, change it; use your first session goes back to the counted date. A step you have attained shows roughly how many weeks it took.
Each exercise shows on how many of the last seven days you practised or kept it. In a step begun less than a week ago it counts only the days since you began, so three days in reads 3 of the last 3 days, not 3 of 7.
Step One by Clark's weeks
Rawn Clark's workbook brings Step One in over four weeks rather than all at once, and the standard ritual follows it, so Today asks for this week's work only. Every day: the affirmation with the breath on waking and falling asleep, the brush, cold water and rough dry, and exercise. Morning and evening, the sittings build up:
The all-day work — food, water, attentiveness — is kept from Path through the whole step. To see all of Step One's sittings from the first day, as Bardon gives them, press Show the whole step on Step 1 in Path; Pace by Clark's weeks turns it back on.
Coverage and attainment
The step shows two different things, and the distinction matters.
Your current step — the one that fills Today's working — is the step after the last one you marked attained. Only attainment moves you on: practising every exercise of a step once shows in Path (You have practised every exercise of this step) but does not advance you, and a curious session in a later step moves you nowhere. Until you mark a step attained, Today stays on it.
Beside the Attainment box, What the app has seen of this step opens the evidence to weigh before you decide: for each exercise, how many sittings, how many in the last 28 days, the longest sitting, the share rated good or better and when it was last practised — for an all-day habit, on how many of the last 28 days it was kept. Where an exercise has success criteria they are set beside it. Exercises with nothing the app can see are marked as yours to judge. It is attendance and your own ratings; it cannot show that the results have taken hold.
If you marked a step too early, Revoke undoes it. A step you have marked attained carries a ✓ on its tab.
Each path keeps its own progress. Attainment, start and target dates belong to the path they were set on — attaining Step 3 of Initiation into Hermetics says nothing about Step 3 of a blueprint — and your current step is worked out on whichever path is chosen.
The step's daily ritual
The Path says what to work on; a ritual says when and in what order. Each step shows how many of its exercises your active daily ritual includes, and exercises in it are marked In your ritual. Build ritual from this step opens the ritual builder already holding the step's practices — arrange them, set durations and time blocks, and save. The new ritual appears under Rituals, where you can begin it or set it active.
When you mark a step attained and your daily ritual is still that step's work, the step offers to build a ritual for the next one. Earlier exercises do not simply end when you advance, so it lists the current ritual's practices and lets you choose which to carry forward; nothing is chosen for you. The new ritual becomes your daily ritual when you save it, and the old one stays under Rituals. Press Not now to leave things as they are.
Bardon is explicit that one does not proceed until the results are genuinely established. No amount of logged minutes demonstrates that. The app therefore counts what it can count and leaves the judgement where it belongs — with you, the reflection questions, and an honest reading of your own record.
Blueprints
Blueprints are training plans you build yourself: an ordered set of exercises with your own durations and guidance, for when you are following a schedule that is not the built-in curriculum — a teacher's syllabus, a personal regimen, or a period of concentrated work on one faculty.
Create a blueprint, add exercises, and work from it as you would the Path. Blueprints can also be imported, so a plan can be shared or carried between accounts.
Rituals
A ritual is a fixed sequence of practices performed as one unit — the shape of a working day, held steady so that the shape itself stops costing you decisions.
Building one
Press New ritual, give it a name and description, then add exercises. Each exercise carries a practice, a duration, and a time block — morning, midday or evening. The same practice may appear in more than one block.
Frequency
Every ritual declares how often it is meant to be performed:
When a ritual falls due
Frequency is not just a label. Each ritual records when you last completed it, and the Rituals list shows where it stands — Due today, Due in 3 days, or Never performed. Any ritual that is currently due appears under Rituals due on Today, so a weekly or monthly working cannot quietly slip out of sight.
The cadence is rolling rather than calendar-based: a weekly ritual kept on a Sunday falls due the following Sunday, not on the next Monday. Weekly counts as seven days, monthly as thirty.
The active daily ritual
One daily ritual at a time can be made active. Press Set active on it, and from then on Today's working lists that ritual's exercises instead of the step-based list — so the day's work is the ritual you have committed to, not a generic curriculum list.
Press Active again to stand it down and return Today to the step list.
The standard ritual
The built-in Standard ritual is active by default until you choose otherwise. It holds the practices of your current step on the chosen path and moves on with you: when your current step advances, so does it. For Step One of Initiation into Hermetics it is a hand-arranged day across morning and evening, brought in by Clark's weeks unless you turn that off (see Step One by Clark's weeks under Path); for other steps it starts from the step's practices in the order Path lists them, all in the morning block. If you want your own arrangement, or to keep earlier exercises going, build a ritual of your own.
Rituals and the path
Each ritual shows which step of your path it works on and how much of it — Step 2 · 5 of 8 exercises — measured against whichever path is chosen in Path. A ritual that shares no practice with your path reads Outside your path. Practice done in a ritual counts toward the step's coverage like any other session.
Ritual mode
Opening a ritual gives you the day's briefing — the exercises grouped by time block, with what remains. From there you work through them one at a time, with instructions before each and a rating after, and a summary at the end of the day.
Editing and deleting
Edit and Delete sit on each ritual row and are always visible, including on touch screens. Deleting the active ritual returns Today to the step-based list.
Timer
Two modes
Countdown for a fixed session; Stopwatch when you want to sit until you are finished and record however long that was. Set an intent before you begin — it is a small act, and it changes the session.
Preparation
A preparation countdown runs before the session proper, so you can settle before the work starts. A bell marks the beginning and the end. Set its length in the timer's settings, or to zero to skip it.
Sound
Binaural beats with four presets — Deep focus (14 Hz beta), Schumann (7.83 Hz), Astral relax (4 Hz theta) and Void (2 Hz delta) — with master and binaural volume under your control. Binaural beats require headphones to work at all: the effect comes from the difference between the two ears.
Breath pacer
A small brass mark pulses at the rate you set in breaths per minute. Follow it with the breath and it will hold a rhythm for you without occupying your attention.
Repetition counter
For exercises that are counted rather than timed. Tap to increment, −1 to correct, Reset to clear.
Full screen
Turn a phone to landscape during a session and the timer becomes a large flip clock, readable across a room, with the screen kept awake. Tap to pause or resume; rotate back to leave. A clock mode is available when you want the time of day instead.
Afterwards
When a session ends you are asked to log it. In practice mode it is attributed automatically; from the free timer you can search for the practice it belongs to, or leave it as a general session.
Visualize
Training for the plastic imagination: hold an image in the mind's eye, clearly and without wavering, after the eyes have closed.
How a session runs
- Ingestion. The image is shown. Study it.
- Retention. The image disappears. Close your eyes and hold it.
- Evaluation. Grade what you actually saw — Vague, Partial or Clear — and the next image follows.
Categories
Difficulty
Three presets govern how long you get to look and how long you must hold:
Choose Custom to set both durations yourself. Shuffle can be turned off if you would rather work through a category in order.
Clarity over time
Each finished session records its average clarity out of three. Beneath the categories you will find Clarity · last sessions — one bar per session, oldest to most recent, with your running average. This is the measure that matters: the practice is working when the bars rise and hold, not when you simply do more of them.
Expect it to move slowly, and expect it to fall on days when you are tired or scattered. That is information about your condition, not a verdict on your capacity.
Fasting
An intermittent fasting timer, for those who treat the discipline of the body as part of the work. Protocols: 16:8, 18:6, 20:4, 13:11, or a custom window of your own.
Start the fast and the remaining time appears on Today, so you can see it without opening anything. Your fasting history is kept alongside the rest of your record.
Fasting is not appropriate for everyone. If you are pregnant, diabetic, taking medication, have a history of disordered eating, or are otherwise unsure, speak to a doctor rather than to an app.
Journal
Bardon asks the student to keep a record from the beginning. The journal is that record, and it is the part of this app that will matter most to you in a year.
Writing
Entries can be written freely, or generated by a session you have just finished. Each can carry a title, the traits you observed, and tags.
Voice notes
Record spoken entries when writing would interrupt the state you are in. Audio is held on your own device rather than uploaded.
Feelings and sensations
Two structured loggers, each arranged on the same two axes — energy high or low, pleasant or unpleasant:
What you log is filed as a journal entry. The point is not the label; it is that you looked.
Finding things again
The journal has its own timeline and search, and entries also surface in global search (⌘K).
Mirrors
The soul mirrors are the foundation of Step One and, for most students, the hardest part of the work. The app's role is only to hold the record steady while you do it.
Black and white
The black mirror gathers your weaknesses; the white mirror your strengths. Both are built by honest, repeated observation over weeks, not in one sitting. Traits are assigned to their element and ranked by severity, as Bardon directs.
The codex
Each trait accumulates a record: how often it has been observed, when it was last seen, its peak, its recent trend, and your notes on it. A temporal analysis shows when a trait tends to appear — frequently the most useful thing the mirror will tell you, because it points at the conditions rather than the fault.
Strengths against weaknesses
Traits can be rated against one another, so you can see the balance you are actually carrying rather than the one you assume.
A mirror that flatters is worthless, and one kept in a mood of self-punishment is worse. Record what you observed, as you would record the weather.
Tasks
The kingdom, the ordinary world and its obligations. An unpaid bill or an unanswered letter will disturb a meditation more reliably than any occult cause, and this is where you put them down.
One list, and a quick add
Everything open is one list in the order it will need you: Overdue, This week, This month, Later, then No date. Each task shows when it is due in words (Thu 15 Oct · in 5 days), and the domain is a colour and a filter: the chips above the list offer only domains that have something open.
At the top, type a title, choose Today, Tomorrow, Next week or no date, pick the domain, and press Enter. A day chosen this way means the end of that day, so a task due today is not overdue at midnight. Priority, repeats, reminders and a checklist are for More options…, which opens the full form with your title already in it.
Categories are yours to define and manage. The soonest and overdue items surface on Today, so nothing has to be held in memory.
Settling and reopening
Press the square beside a task to settle it (swiping it right does the same). Below the list, Settled shows what has been done, newest first; a task settled many times is one row with its count. Reopen puts one back, for a settle by mistake. For a repeating task this also removes the next one made when it was settled, so there is a single copy.
Putting things down from anywhere
Add a task under Record on Today opens the same one line. Content shared into the app from another (a message, a page) first asks whether it is a Journal entry or a Task; as a task its first line is the title and the rest is kept with it.
A task that is due today or overdue offers Tomorrow and Next week on its card, to put it back without opening the form.
Reminders for tasks
Choosing a day in the quick add offers Remind me that morning, 08:00. Tick it once and it stays ticked, so every dated task you put down that way reminds you that morning; it is skipped when the morning has already passed. In the full form the reminder can be set at the deadline, 30 minutes, an hour or a day before, or the morning of. A reminder follows the date when you put a task back.
Repeating tasks
When you settle a repeating task the next is made for you, with its checklist unticked. Choose what it is counted from: The due date keeps the calendar (rent on the 1st) — settled late, the next one is the next date still ahead, and missed ones are skipped, so it is never born overdue; When I settle it counts from the day you did it (a check-up every six months).
Progress
The evidence. Sessions, time practised, days practised, average rating, minutes per day, your most practised exercises, a breakdown by step, what you have done outside the curriculum, the ratings you have given, and twenty-six weeks of activity.
Illumination and rank
Light accrues as you work: 10 for a session plus 1 per minute, 5 for a journal entry, 5 for maintaining a daily streak and 50 at seven consecutive days. Ranks follow the traditional grades:
These titles mark time spent with the app. They are not initiatic grades, they confer nothing, and no one but you is counting. Treat them as a pedometer treats steps.
Settings
Export your record periodically. It is your work, and a local copy costs you nothing.
Privacy & encryption
A practice journal is among the more private things a person keeps. This app is built accordingly.
With a master password set, your journal entries, counters and mirror notes are encrypted on your device before they are stored. What reaches the server is ciphertext. Your master password is never transmitted, so no one operating the service can read your entries — and equally, no one can recover them for you.
- Voice recordings are kept on your own device rather than uploaded.
- Exports let you keep your own copy at any time.
- Deleting your account removes your data.
Genuine end-to-end encryption means there is no back door — not for an attacker, not for the operator, and not for you. Losing the master password means losing the encrypted record. Keep it written down somewhere physical and safe.
Offline & mobile
Installed as an app, Hermetic Companion opens and runs without a connection. Practices, the timer and what you have already loaded remain available; entries made offline sync when you are next connected. Sessions run on your device, so a lost signal will not interrupt one.
Home-screen shortcuts jump straight to Start Timer, I am feeling…, Voice Note, Practices and Training Plan — press and hold the app icon.
If you have granted permission, reminders arrive as notifications whether or not the app is open.
Turning notifications on
In Settings → Notifications, press Enable and allow when the phone asks.
On Android, once installed to the home screen from Chrome, the app holds its own notification permission, apart from Chrome's (Chrome's site settings then say managed by Hermetic Companion). If notifications never arrive, open Android Settings → Apps → Hermetic Companion → Notifications and allow them; check too that Chrome's own notifications are on. This is the usual cause after a new phone or a reset, when the app looks enabled but nothing shows.
Daily notifications
Under Settings → Notifications you can switch on up to three a day, each at a time you choose. They are off until you do, and each goes only when there is something to say:
None is sent on a planned rest day, and none twice. They follow your ritual and Clark's week, and they are checked against what you have actually done, even a sitting done without opening the app. Titles in them are those of the built-in practices; your own are called your own practice.
On keeping the work
A few things worth saying that no feature can do for you.
- Same time, same place. Decide once, then stop deciding. An active daily ritual exists precisely so the question does not arise each morning.
- Short and unbroken beats long and sporadic. Ten minutes daily will take you further than an hour on Sundays. The streak measure exists to make that visible, not to shame you.
- Write it down the same day. The detail you are certain you will remember is exactly the detail you will lose.
- Do not rush the steps. The curriculum is cumulative, and later work rests on earlier work actually being established. The app can tell you what you have attempted; only you can tell whether it has taken.
- Missing a day is not failure. Failure is not returning on the next one. Begin again without ceremony.
None of this — the counts, the ranks, the streaks — is the work. The work happens in silence, unrecorded, and is known only to you. These are instruments for keeping honest, and instruments should be picked up when useful and put down when not.