Slumming in the City of Hermes

In the wake of the passing of John Gilbert, one of my teachers in occultism, I've been tasked with helping to see to it that his work doesn't get lost. That's involved making sure I have a good set of his papers and passing them onto the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), the one organization he was active in that's thriving these days; it's also involved going back over the work in those of his other involvements I shared; and since in occultism, any study program worth doing is worth doing more than once, it's got me doing a second pass through the training program and degree system of what he called the Magickal Golden Dawn. 

It's not the name I would have given that system, for what it's worth, and that's not just because I dislike the Crowleyite habit of flinging a half-random "k" into a perfectly fine English word. According to the story I was told, Juliet Ashley -- third Grand Archdruid of AODA, friend of Manly P. Hall and Edgar Cayce, and all-around early 20th century American occultist -- stopped in Britain in 1939 on her way back from Zurich, where she'd been studying Jungian psychology. She somehow talked Arthur Edward Waite into giving her some kind of authorization to found an American branch of the Fellowship of the Rose Cross, Waite's offshoot of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and duly founded the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn using Waite's rituals in Philadelphia in 1941. The order evolved, as orders do, and had modified its rituals considerably by the time John Gilbert was initiated into it. After Ashley's death, Gilbert then launched his own organization, working his own version of the rituals. Magic per se had no role in Waite's order, and not much more in Ashley's and Gilbert's order; the Sphere of Protection ritual, the rituals of consecrating the elemental working tools, and the rituals of initiation were the only ceremonial workings in the system when I learned it. 

Instead, the student was expected to learn and practice meditation, to do an extensive series of elemental scryings and pathworkings, and to learn and practice three systems of divination. According to the rules when I joined, there were seven options -- astrology, tarot, geomancy, runes, numerology, palmistry, and "oracles" (this last was a catchall for the whole range of divination systems not covered by the first six categories). You could learn three from scratch, or work on developing more skill in three of them, or do some combination of those. My first time through, I took up astrology and worked on developing my skill with geomancy and the ogham, but I decided this time to do three systems I haven't studied before -- and one of those is numerology. 

Numerology has a bad rap in serious occult circles. Everyone's cool about magical number theory -- you can't get far in traditional Western occultism without getting into numbers -- but the kind of numerology that involves adding up your birth date, the letters of your name, and so on? Most serious occultists roll their eyes at that. Since I've been writing at length about American popular occultism, however, I decided to give it a try. 

Ahem. 

Just as a helpful example, let's consider the year 2020. If you add up the digits -- that's standard practice -- you get a year number of 4. A 4 year is supposed to be a difficult year in which nothing goes right and steady plodding is about the best you can do. Sound familiar? 

So I'm having a lot of fun just now learning my way around numerology, and am considering other branches of folk occultism that haven't had the good press that astrology, tarot, and other recherché systems have had. It promises to be entertaining, if nothing else. The moral to this story, if there is one, is that class prejudice may be just as useless in occultism as it is elsewhere...

Magic Monday

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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***