ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.

The image? I've decided to trace, as far as I can, my own occult lineage in photos. We're still tracing Juliet Ashley's end of the lineage. Two weeks ago I posted an image of her fourth teacher, Arthur Edward Waite, the Golden Dawn alumnus who passed onto her the rituals that became the foundation for the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose. Waite, in turn, got his knowledge from the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Last week I posted an image of one of these, the redoubtable William Wynn Westcott; this is Westcott's partner and rival in the project, Samuel Liddell Mathers. Another Freemason with a passion for the occult, and like Westcott a genuine scholar and mage, Mathers didn't have the organizational skills to keep the order together once Westcott stepped down from the leadership, and the Golden Dawn promptly blew itself to pieces in the squabbles that followed. Mathers remained in charge of one of the fragments thereafter, and he and his branch of the order will appear again once I get into some of the other ends of my lineage.

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***This Magic Monday is now closed--as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1) That's irrelevant. If you want to invoke him, invoke him.

2) What makes a god "legitimate"? If you invoke a deity and get a response, that's the only legitimacy you need.

(1) Well, I don’t know that it is irrelevant. I don’t care if a particular deific mask was discovered last week or 15,000 years ago, but I do care who or what is picking up that particular phone call. I can’t tell who is responding to Hu when I call, so I wondered for more information on him.

(2) Whether or not ‘that god’ is an egregore that is a channel to a being that exists on the noetic plane. As opposed to ‘a god’ that is a glorified servitor wanting to get fed.

So I was curious if, in your experience of Hu Gadarn, you would consider him more of the former rather than more of the latter.

Edited 2022-11-07 05:35 (UTC)

1) You have no way of knowing one way or the other who's on the other end, and history is no help. I've commented here that people who invoke Jesus seem to be getting a wide range of different beings, some of whom are decidedly malefic. The antecedents of Hu are very uncertain, like so much in the Druid Revival tradition; we simply don't know where Iolo Morganwg got the tradition that he was the great Druid god, or what he might have been called in past ages, if anything.

2) Fair enough. My experiences with Hu the Mighty suggest that there's something much more than an artificial elemental there.

Thank you so much, those are both extremely helpful responses.

Not OP, but related:

How can one tell if they are speaking to a god, or a reasonably powerful demon or other malevolent mimic?

By the advice they give you and the deeds they do on your behalf or at your behest.

What Robert said!

Also, pay close attention to your emotional state after you interact with them. Demons leave behind a very distinctive emotional trace, a kind of murky, excited confusion. Positive spiritual entities such as gods and angels, by contrast, impart a clarity and an expansion of consciousness. Once you learn to recognize these traces, they're very distinctive.

I asked if I should respond to your post and drew Beith. I guess that’s favorable.
Yes, he is a god. I was very shy when I took up observing the holidays using The Druidry Handbook. While working my way through Alban Arthuan, I thought to myself, “If I do this very quietly, Hu won’t notice. He’s not really my god.” Then I had that little change in perception that tells me somebody is talking to me. Hu stood up from behind his desk, stuck his head out his office door, and shouted, “Yes, I am!”.
And, as Kipling said, it was just so.
John, UPGs and attempts to describe them aside, might you have a title or two to suggest? Also, you had what looked like a lodge image of Hu disembarking a coracle in one of your posts some time ago. Might it still be around somewhere? It eludes my online searches.
Many thanks.

1) How's your French? Paul Bouchet's Hu Gadarn: Le Premier Gaulois is the one thing that comes to mind, though it's got a lot of Bouchet's personal experience in it.

2) Sure thing:

1) Malheureusement, je ne parle pas Français.
2) Many thanks!

Paul Bouchet is one of the French authors whose works I wish someone would translate into English! His father René Bouchet is another -- and then, of course, there's Robert Ambelain, who's written voluminously on many occult topics, and whose books would be a massive asset to the Anglophone occult scene.

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