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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 picture? I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me. Sylvester Gould, last week's honoree, was an active member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, one of the more interesting occult orders of the late 19th century. (After many reorganizations, it's still around as the Church of Light aka Brotherhood of Light.) The H.B. of L., as most people called it back in the day, was founded by two British occultists, T.H. Burgoyne and Peter Davidson. The photo is of Burgoyne. It's also the photo of another gentleman, one Captain Norman Astley, who took over the reorganized H.B. of L. in America from Burgoyne, married another H.B. of L. adept -- the remarkable and talented Genevieve Stebbins -- and helped Benjamin Williams aka Elbert Benjamine aka C.C. Zain re-reorganize the H.B. of L. into the Brotherhood of Light aka Church of Light. Yes, Burgoyne and Astley were the same person. It's a complicated story. But Burgoyne and Peter Davidson, whom we'll be talking about next week, were among Sylvester Gould's teachers -- and behind them stands another and a considerably stranger figure.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
Re: Ley Lines
Leys were discovered in the early 1920s by Alfred Watkins, a British antiquarian. His book The Old Straight Track is very much worth reading. He held that leys were an ancient system of land navigation, from the days when travel was on foot and Britain was mostly trackless wilderness; stone markers and various other guideposts were set up in places where they could be seen from far off, so that people could find their way from one isolated village to another. Over time, that gave rise to a network of more or less straight trackways covering much of Britain.
Many years later, in the 1970s, John Michell and other earth mysteries researchers got into the act. By then people had started noticing that certain spiritual phenomena move in straight lines over the landscape, and in a few cases there seems to be something like an energy current, which can be detected by dowsing and other methods. From that, the modern concept of leys as energy channels was born -- Michell's book The View Over Atlantis is the one to read here.
More recent research has more or less split the difference between those views. The trackways Watkins traced are one part of the picture; then there are natural flows of energy through the landscape, of the sort that feng-shui masters track; then there are traces of ancient technologies of various kinds and dates that made use of these "earth currents" -- my book The Secret of the Temple talks about one of those.
I'm glad your relative is talking about Stone Age technologies -- that's definitely a step in the right direction. The New Age scene for a while was full of claims that leys are everywhere, and all kinds of maps got splashed around, tracing "leys" that were nothing more than somebody's brain farts. There were some very interesting old technologies that worked with the earth currents and have left traces in various parts of the Earth's surface. Like everything else having to do with prehistory, though, they're found in some places and not in others.
Re: Ley Lines
Re: Ley Lines
(Anonymous) 2023-01-03 01:32 am (UTC)(link)Re: Ley Lines