Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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. 

PayPal tip jar link

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use the link above to access my online tip jar. (Dreamwidth is having trouble with crosslinks to other sites these days, thus the absence of the usual button.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I now have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

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

Comments

Re: Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism

[jprussell]

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