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 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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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.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Comments

[ecosophia]

That would make a great deal of sense of the traditional lore, wouldn't it? I don't know of any work of occult philosophy that discusses the possibility, but it's definitely worth exploring.

[(Anonymous)]

Shouldn't cats also have individual souls? If there's any non-verbal animal that's individual, it's a cat.

-Translucent Jejune Octopus

[ecosophia]

Um, in what way did I or the commenter imply that they didn't?

[(Anonymous)]

I thought the commenter implied that by identifying Bast as the "group soul of cats." You've said that plants or primitive animals will typically have one group soul for the whole species. I always understood that to mean that not every single paramecium has its own personal soul, karma, etc. Humans don't have a group soul, do we, since each of us has an individual soul?

-Translucent Jejune Octopus

[ecosophia]

That's not at all the sense I or the commenter had in mind. Every living thing, right down to blue-green algae and other prokaryotes, has an individual soul. Below the human level, there's also a group soul or oversoul for each species, which expresses itself in the animal kingdom as instinct; it provides certain kinds of guidance to each individual and protects them from certain spiritual dangers. Human beings, and the other living things on the same level (cetaceans and elephants), don't have that -- we've reached the point in the process of spiritual evolution at which we get to sink or swim by our own efforts.

Cats, and some other relatively complex metazoan animals, are close to that level, and some individual cats have crossed the line -- the traditional lore is that those individual cast will be incarnate as humans in their next lives. The entire process by which some animals have come to live with humans and interact with them on a daily basis is, from an occult point of view, a way of accelerating spiritual evolution -- the souls incarnate in those animals have the chance to achieve reflective thought considerably sooner than they otherwise would.

[(Anonymous)]

I had wondered about this, because it has been stated that animals are exempt from karma but I had a particulary special cat (Merlin was his name and nature) who, like many cats enjoyed hunting and delibrately harming animals, he was killed under a neighbors house by another cat the same way he used to take his creatures. It seemed different and I wondered if he had actually individualised to the point that he was accumulating karma. Bless his kitty socks, I'm sure he's on to other adventures now.

[ecosophia]

Say what? Animals aren't exempt from karma; nothing is. Karma provides the raw materials through which souls at every level of being grow and develop.