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: Reincarnation of historical figures

[ecosophia]

Ah, you've brought up one of the big skeletons in the closet of modern occultism.

In the first half of the 20th century, most occultists in the English-speaking world were politically conservative. The popularity of occultism on the far left from the late 1960s on was not completely unprecedented -- the Theosophical society had close ties to the socialist movement in the late 19th century, for example -- but as Marxism took over the far left, its hardcore atheist ideology became pervasive all over the leftward end of things, while occult groups became popular on the right. Some of the biggest occult organizations in the US back in the day -- the I Am Movement, for example, let by Guy and Edna Ballard -- were very conservative. Burks Hamner, whose Essene teachings I've studied and circulated, ran for Congress as a conservative Republican in 1936, and turned to teaching New Thought after he and the GOP generally were trounced in that election. And of course there were also a lot of occultists on the extreme, goose-stepping end of the right: William Dudley Pelley, the founder of the Soulcraft occult school, was the head of a large American fascist organization in the 1930s.

So when the far left took up magic in the wake of the collapse of the New Left at the end of the 1960s, it was a remarkable cultural flip-flop. (It wasn't the only one; environmental conservation had been a right-wing cause before then -- that's why the GOP was responsible for creating the first national parks and passing a lot of other early environmental legislation.) The new occultists of the left-wing counterculture were horribly embarrassed by their right-wing forebears, and so swept their existence under the rug wherever possible, and the few survivors of that era -- Manly P. Hall, who loathed the counterculture and said so in no uncertain terms, was one -- were left completely baffled, as baffled as that arch-conservative J.R.R. Tolkien was when the hippies adopted his books.