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 (or lack of same)? At this point I've traced Juliet Ashley's lineage back as far as photos and documentation extend. John Gilbert's other main teacher, Rev. Matthew William Shaw aka Rhodonn Starrus, is a tougher proposition. Born in Pennsylvania, he became a Universalist minister, serving in a church in the Allentown, PA area.  In 1952 he and two other ministers of the Universalist Church, Revs. Omar Zasluchy and Owen Symanski, left the church to protest the upcoming merger between their denomination and the Unitarian Church. (They believed that the Unitarians planned on taking over the congregations,  churches, and bank accounts, and then discarding every element of Universalist teaching and tradition; as it turned out, they were right.) In 1952, the three of them were duly consecrated as bishops by Bishop Robert Monroe of the Liberal Catholic Church, and founded the Universal Gnostic Church (UGC). Rev. Shaw had already founded the Modern Order of Essenes as a healing order associated with his church, and took it with him into the UGC. In 1972 he relocated to the Boulder, CO area where he became a friend and associate of Dr. Juliet Ashley, and received initiation into the orders she headed -- the Order of Spiritual Alchemy, the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Ancient Order of Druids in America -- while she became active in the Modern Order of Essenes and the Universal Gnostic Church.  John Gilbert described him as a gifted teacher but a strict taskmaster, who demanded the best from his students and usually got it. 

I have yet to find a photo of the man, or accurate information on his birth and death dates -- I gather from what John told me that he died sometime in the 1980s. I have also been unable to find much of anything about Bishop Robert Monroe of the LCC -- there were plenty of schisms in the LCC's history, and he apparently ended up on the wrong side of one of them, so he's just a name in a few old lists at this point. I hope to be able to get more information on him, on Matthew Shaw, and on the early history of the UGC as things proceed. 

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:  PayPal for now, but that'll be replaced by a couple of other options shortly. 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. 

With that said, have at it!  

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

Comments

Re: Writing, I-Ching

[(Anonymous)]

I studied I Ching yeeeeears ago while I was simultaneously practicing Ba Gua--this was my impetus for checking it out. I learned it by doing it, you get a better acquaintance with the trigrams and hexagrams vs. just reading it cover to cover.

I used BBQ skewers in lieu of yarrow stalks--I went to Chinatown, asked if they had any yarrow stalks and the guy behind the counter was like, "You believe in that stuff?!?" The yarrow stalk method has a different probability distribution than coins and the slow pace is nice. I used the Wilhelm translation. I would light some incense, pass the skewers and book through the smoke and ask King Wen, Duke Dan and Confucius for guidance. Not sure if I did a reading every day but would do a few sessions a week.

Like tarot or anything else, you will get hexagrams that come up repeatedly. Get to know the trigrams, they form an extended family and each hexagram is an interaction between the two personalities. Again, regular readings will help you get to know them. The extra matter in the Wilhelm edition is worth reading as you get hungry for it. The commentary in there is attributed to Confucius, it's really four on the floor and pragmatic. And yet Confucius is also deeper than people usually give him credit for, I think he just gets a bad rap for being stodgy because he lived the Chinese maxim "Confucian at the office, Taoist at home."

There's a Cleary-translated Taoist I Ching focused on internal alchemy and other editions out there, the Wilhelm will give you a good foundation before dipping into that other stuff. There are different deep structures that people have come up with for the order of the hexagrams, there are different woo woo-ier takes on what they mean, there are systems where you see something happen in nature then do a reading on the spot based on the time and location (the 8 trigrams get mapped onto the joints of your three middle fingers so you like eenie meenie miney moe around the circle to get your hexagrams), etc. etc. etc. Just get a copy of Wilhelm, do regular readings and meet the trigrams on their own terms, if you stick with it you will pick up more and more as you go.

Re: Writing, I-Ching

[realmscryer]

Thanks for this. I have a copy of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation so can get started.

Re: Writing, I-Ching

[(Anonymous)]

For those who feel the probabilities matter, but find yarrow stalks are unavailable or inconvenient, there is a method that still uses three coins but has the same probability distribution as the stalks. You can find it in "The I Ching Handbook: Decision Making With and Without Divination" by Mondo Sector pp.45-48 (which were visible on Google Books when I had a look).

Re: Writing, I-Ching

[(Anonymous)]

IIRC Wilhelm studied with people from a particular school of interpretation (shortly before it was lost due to the changes in China at the time). He didn't seem sufficiently skeptical of their implied claims to have the true deep meaning of the symbolism, relative to all the other schools that some random Westerner might accidentally have preserved the interpretations of instead.

I thought Blofeld's translation was much more unobtrusive and less full of questionably-deserved heavy portentuousness, and it has most of the traditional other stuff in it too, plus some useful notes for Western people to orient to some of the Chinese presupposed attitudes.

I Ching in the original Chinese is on Wikisource, and you can just look up the characters on Wiktionary or other online dictionaries like MDBG or Youdao if you think an ambiguity might not have been preserved into the English translation that would have been important for your enquiry.

(Though, in some sense, the accidents of which interpretational traditions or translation shoehornings reached you historically are also part of your sortilege, even if those events are at least for most purposes already in the past.)

I once read on the personal website of a weird person (they were like this otherkin-before-the-term-had-become-common for a fantastical Jack Parsons sort of past life of aliens who thought using blood made of molten lead or something) something about good results from appreciating hexagrams better by imagining them up across the space of your torso, or appreciating trigrams by imagining a current flowing up through narrow and wide spaces.