The profile of Steven Rrivkin can be found in the Who's Who archive at Dragonskull.
Steven Rivkin,
a.k.a. Stefan Dardik.
| "As
Stefan Dardik I was born into the strange and occult from an early
age.Strange dreams and psychic experiences in childhood drove me to find
explanations in occult studies. Finding only more questions and odd bits
of knowledge and lore, I eventually moved on to more pragmatic things.
Along the way, I paid visits to many mystical sites - Stonehenge, the
Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, and many of the temples and pyramids
of Egypt. Ancestral graveyards, old Salem and even the Vatican have been
among some of these travels.
Our family tradition holds that we descend from the 1700’s Jewish wizard the Baal Shem Tov who was said to have great magical powers while also being a Holy man. The only known painting of the Baal Shem Tov has a strong resemblance to myself. Strange but true. Given my influences I was attracted to the great weird storytellers of the 1930’s such as H.P Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith as well as others. Famed Weird Tales magazine featured many of these writers. No longer interested in serious occult study, I became interested in entertainment magic. I was writing stories in the vein of my favorite authors but then I started to add magic to the stories. This was not sudden but a gradual process influenced by the Magick writings of Tony Shiels, Tony Andruzzi and the even older writings of Annemann, Stewart James and others. Gradually I became a Bizarre storyteller and expert in spirit and séance magic as well as other esoteric abilities. I could speak of true experiences I have had with ghosts and other even stranger happenings but I must save those tales for another time and place. For some years now I have been releasing séance manuscripts and various invented magic tricks such as Geek Eye. Geek Eye is where one apparently pulls an eye from their head, tendril and all. I demonstrated this item at the last World Magic Summit held in Washington DC a few years ago. I am primarily a local boy to the Washington DC area but I have performed on one cruise as well as presented at Jeff McBride’s Mystery School. Séances have been my interest for many years. I currently am working to finish my book on séance secrets as well as another non-magic book about our family and my Hollywood cousins most notably my Uncle Bernard Herrmann, the famed Hollywood music composer. My dream is to open a private Museum of the Occult here in the Washington DC area. The core beginning of the museum would be my own collection of old séance equipment and ceremonial magic items from around the world. My real name is Steven Rivkin, the result of several name changes in our family history. Dardik is my original family name, which I use as a stage name and for some of my writings." |