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

Good Evening,

I hope this week is off to a good start for everyone here and keeps on that way.

To Share: While doing some research, I stumbled onto a new sub-section of a site I already knew: Germanic Astronomy (http://www.germanicmythology.com/ASTRONOMY/GermanicAstrology.html) on the Germanic Mythology site (http://www.germanicmythology.com/index.html). Overall, the site is a collection of both primary and secondary sources, and is one of the most extensive I've found online. The astronomy section tries to reconstruct pre-Christian Germanic starlore (mostly "what did this constellation represent?"), largely by relying on comparative mythology. Like most comparative mythology, the discussion ranges pretty much from "yeah, that seems like an obvious parallel" to "let's pull out a star map and speculate wildly," so, approach with some discretion. If nothing else, I believe it will be a fruitful source of themes for meditation.

To Ask: Mostly for JMG, but interested to hear any thoughts from the commentariat as well: what areas of the western occult tradition do you feel are neglected that you'd like to see get more attention?

Thanks to JMG for this space and to those who contribute to it, and my well-wishes and blessings to anyone willing to take them.

Cheers,
Jeff

The list of neglected fields in Western occult tradition is so long I could fill a good-sized post with the list. The current occult scene is aware of maybe ten per cent of the total tradition, and the other ninety per cent is forgotten or fragmentary. How many people know their way around occult musical teachings in their ancient, medieval, or Renaissance forms? How about the interface between astrology and healing, or between astrology and architecture, or between astrology and warfare? How about the esoteric Western martial arts? The site you listed, exploring Germanic astrology, is a good step in another mostly forgotten direction -- there's an immense body of European esoteric starlore distinct from the astrology imported from the Arab world in the high Middle Ages, and very little is known about it.

The neglected branches of occultism that matter most to me right now are the ones I'm working on relaunching via the Golden Section Fellowship: sacred geometry, classic occultism, Western internal alchemy, the interface between occultism and what's been clumsily labeled "earth mysteries," and the temple tradition I've been chasing down for all these years, for starters. Those aren't necessarily the most important of the lot, just the ones that fascinate me most. There are hundreds of others.

"between astrology and warfare" - how much has anyone known about that, and would medieval Latin be the language for that? (Among European languages, but if anyone wants to talk about other civilizations, I'm all ears.)

Medieval and Renaissance Latin would be good, Arabic and classical Persian would be better. I've read here and there that there used to be quite a bit of lore on the subject -- sensibly enough, since planning a propitious time to start a war would have been one common task assigned to court wizards.

Something I'm interested in, and have trouble finding info on is rites of passage. Religion has plenty of info on child rearing and youth training/indoctrination, but the western occult path of self-knowing, will training, and initiation appears to mostly assume adulthood as a starting point. I understand that to a point and understand JMG's recommendations on protecting youth and allowing their various channels to open on their own; annnnd, when my own worldview is shaped by this learning and my own daily is founded on daily spirtual cleansing/banishings and meditation - my children are naturally curious and interested in the occult teachings I work with/from; and when they ask questions about how the universe works, my answers are often as full of my esoteric learning as anything I learned in academic classes.

From various anthropological sources, it seems that many indigenous peoples tightly controlled how and when stories were told to children, often leading into various initiations and rites of passage. This feels like desperately needed knowledge in this time when most youth are bombarded with story (sometimes hours of it daily) but without coherent message or worldview. These stories are supposed to form a foundation upon which youth build a realized adult self through elder-guided self-exploration, will training, ethics formation, and initiation.

I feel overwhelmed trying to hold-back/reign-in the flood of stories, while feeling like my own ability to educate is underwhelming. I suppose I am also trying to save my kids my own pain at finding so much of what I was taught as a youth (in terms of patriotism, religion, public schooling) to fall apart as it faced actual scrutiny.

I do my best to form a foundation with natural sciences, logic, and observation, memory, and will training games (like Kim's game.) With all the various education materials of antiquity, and the myriad homeschooling curriculums and resources available now, it would be lovely to find more guidance from history in how to prepare children for life in the world from the perspective of western occultism.

This is a question I've given some thought to, and one complicating factor as I see it is that in traditional societies, once you passed your rite of passage, everyone treated you as the new category (even if a bit provisionally - being a newly minted "man" was not the same as a more established one, but it wasn't a child). In a society like ours that lacks common standards, you might run into the problem of celebrating the adultness of your child, and then him or her being treated like a child by neighbors, employers, the government, and so forth.

That being said, judging by my own life and other folks I know, a big part seems to be taking responsibility for your own decisions, especially big, irreversible ones. In my own case, I didn't feel much like a grown-up until I joined the army against my parents' wishes, but after doing so, I've related to them (and the rest of life) as much more of an adult.

I'm not sure where exactly occultism comes in here, though, other than a handy storehouse of rituals and a path for taking spiritual responsibility for yourself.

Lastly, I hesitate to bring this up because it is so divorced from modern life (with good reason!), but a book I've mentioned a few times on here before, The One-Eyed God by Kris Kershaw, argues among other things that Odin is the Norse version of an Indo-European God who was the leader of the coming-of-age warbands that seem to have been a feature of Indo-European society and of which you see reflexes in such diverse places as the berserkers, the Spartan Krypteia, Indian myths, and Celtic Bardic schools. Roughly, the idea is that adolescents went through a phase of being outcasts from normal society in which they learned what they needed to know to be adult men in their tribe, which included fighting and religious lore. At the end of this phase, they got reintegrated and got to be normal, adult members of the tribe and they put the wildness behind them.

Assuming you don't want your children to go steal from your neighbors and kill people, some of the potentially transferable ideas seem to be:
1) Flagrantly breaking unbreakable rules: These groups would sneak around and raid and kill and such like. The point back then was that adult men in the tribe might have to do these things in war, and so you had to get past the "follow the rules because you were told to" approach and instead learn to decide when to follow rules and when to break them.
2) Learning to be a part of a non-familial group: There are different social dynamics in being a follower, comrade, or leader, and these groups helped young men learn those.
3) Learning the lore, rituals, and other things needed for religious practice: I suspect this was a necessary counter-balance to the first point. If you're going to start being expected to make decisions on a firmer basis than "because someone told me to", you need a better understanding of your place in the cosmos.

Anyhow, again, all of that is likely more anthropological than occult, and might all be stuff you've encountered before, but hopefully, something spurs some thoughts or further investigation.

Cheers,
Jeff

Magic Monday

Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism

Re: Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism

Re: Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism

Re: Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism

Re: Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism

Re: Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism