Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's a little after 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 picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me. Before Gladys Plummer, last week's honoree, became head of the Societas Rosicruciana in America, her husband George Winslow Plummer was the head of the order. For all practical purposes, he was also the founder; his teacher Sylvester Gould, whom we'll discuss next week, started the ball rolling, but Gould died suddenly in 1909 and Plummer picked up the pieces and went from there. Plummer was an enthusiastic Freemason and had received Rosicrucian initiation from Gould, but not a complete system of teaching or initiation; he created those by close but not uncritical study of the Rosicrucian and occult literature of his time, and tried to find common ground between occult teaching and science. He was also a devout if eccentric Christian, and ended up being consecrated as a bishop in an independent church with connections to the Orthodox churches. Though I don't share his religion, he's one of the role models from whom I've tried to learn.

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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 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. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Esoteric Baptism Link and Seven Laws Question

[(Anonymous)]

Possible origins of the seven (or so) principles:
https://pansophers.com/kybalion-hermetic-brotherhood-of-luxor-origins/
http://www.maat.sofiatopia.org/ten_keys.htm

Re: Esoteric Baptism Link and Seven Laws Question

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this. I'd be a little more convinced by the first if the author gave some evidence for his claim that Atkinson was an HB of L member -- I don't find that improbable, but "because we say so" is less convincing than it might be -- and I'd be a lot more convinced by the second if the author addressed the fact that you can find those same seven principles in any mystical teaching you care to name -- for example, finding it in Buddhist literature would be a piece of cake...

Re: Esoteric Baptism Link and Seven Laws Question

[(Anonymous)]

I guess the author of the first article really liked the Kybalion but doesn't want to admit it before proving its "authenticity" :)

Re: Esoteric Baptism Link and Seven Laws Question

[robertmathiesen]

On historical grounds I am greatly inclined to doubt that Atkinson was ever a member of the H. B. of L., whether in its original form, or in its later offshoot, based in Denver. Of course, he may have read The Light of Egypt (1889; 2nd edition in 2 volumes, 1900), written by one of the two heads of the original H. B. of L., Thomas Henry Burgoyne. But that is hardly the same thing as being a member of the organization.

The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (or Light) was active in the US only during the years 1884-1886. In 1886 it became widely known that Burgoyne had been convicted of fraud in 1883 and had spent a number of months in prison in consequence. (Burgoyne's original surname had been Dalton.) Most of the Brotherhood's early members resigned their membership in consequence of the public scandal.

During those years Atkinson was is his early 20s, and was busy establishing himself as a businessman and a lawyer in Pennsylvania, as well as courting the woman whom he would marry in 1889. He had not yet suffered the health crisis that led him to investigater New Thought doctrines toward the end of the 1880s

Despite the scandal and setback of 1888, Burgoyne did continue his work as a teacher of occultism, at first in Denver, CO, and then in (northern) California. He may have continued using the name of the H. B. of L. in his dealings with his relatively few students for a while. But Atkinson seems never to have lived in Denver, and to have visited (southern) California only briefly around 1903. So it seems unlikely that the paths of the two men would ever have crossed. And most of Atkinson's prodigious number of published books seem to have no real points of contact with either Burgoyne's books or the teachings of the H. B. of L. as we now know them from their publication in the book by Joscelyn Goodwin, Christian Chanel and John P. Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (1995).

Of course, the "inner circle of Pansophers" may simply be passing in all sincerity what someone else told them long ago.

Re: Esoteric Baptism Link and Seven Laws Question

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this! I also don't notice any significant overlap between Atkinson's work and The Light of Egypt, the later version of the HB of L material -- quite the contrary, that book (and the HB of L generally) reject reincarnation and have a lot of frankly rather snotty things to say about Indian teachings, where Atkinson is extremely comfortable with Hindu teachings and iirc affirms reincarnation.