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. I'm going to jump back here a bit because I managed to trace down another significant figure from a lineage I've already discussed. Bishop Richard, Duc de Palatine was an Australian spiritual teacher and Gnostic bishop who played a crucial role in bringing the alternative sacramental movement to the United States, and strongly influenced both of the bishops who consecrated John Gilbert. Born Ronald Powell in 1916, he became a member of the Theosophical Society and then a bishop in the Liberal Catholic Church. After the Second World War he moved to Britain and founded the Pre-Nicene Christian Church, one of the major fountainheads of Gnostic Christian spirituality in the English-speaking world, and later traveled widely in the USA and elsewhere, teaching students, ordaining priests, and consecrating bishops, until his death in 1977. I've recently had the chance to study more of his writings and have discovered that he was much more influential a source for the Gnostic material I received than I'd realized -- so he's this week's honoree.

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With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

[ecosophia]

That's certainly one possible interpretation.

Re: Working with the Qlipoth

[ecosophia]

That strikes me as a very good characterization.

Uranus Return

[(Anonymous)]

I've been hearing a lot about the US's approaching Uranus return, and how in the past it coincided with the revolutionary war, the civil war and the second world war. Have you written something about what to expect on your paid astrological blogs?

[ecosophia]

That specific combination doesn't seem to work well for most people. Other combinations of practices don't seem to have that problem.

Re: Invoking and Banishing

[ecosophia]

I didn't mean it as a chastisement. It was simply the clearest way I could make the point, which answers each of those questions.

Re: Working with the Qlipoth

[(Anonymous)]

Well then, no wonder I feel a strong draw to this! (Neptune is within half a degree of my ascendant, and aspects literally every planet in my chart)

Re: 5 rites

[jprussell]

I asked a similar question back in July and there was some good discussion around the cold shower question: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/188526.html?thread=31688814#cmt31688814

Re: Baphomet

[ecosophia]

Lévi didn't intend to create an entity, or even an egregor. His drawing is a pantacle -- that is, a symbolic design meant to represent the universe:



It's still worth study and meditation. The difficulties came in because, first, it was picked up by clueless Christian zealots who wanted to shriek "The Devil! The Devil!" Then it was picked up by clueless Satanists, who as usual got all their ideas from the Christians; and then it was picked up by clueless Neopagans; and from all these sources it entered popular culture, and developed an unusually tangled egregor. All this gets in the way of its meaning.

Baphomet is the material universe in its two expressions, physical and etheric. It is birth and sex and death, it is life in incarnation, it is Life. Its secret is concealed in its name; if you write Baphomet in Hebrew letters and put it through the Cabalistic process known as Temurah, in which one letter is replaced by another letter according to some fixed scheme -- the scheme in question is called Atbash, and it's the most widely used form of Temurah -- it comes out as Sophia, Wisdom. So the material universe is the veil that conceals divine wisdom. That's the secret of the Templars, fwiw...

[ecosophia]

1) The tuning of A has strayed all over the place during the last half dozen centuries. In the Renaissance, A could be anything from 370 to 567. In the 18th century, 420 became more or less standard, and it's gradually crept up from there, because a lot of conductors like a sharper tone. You might see if you can find some early music played to a 420 A, and see what you think of it.

2) If you've completed the first four grades in two years you're doing fine. One student of the course just finished the whole sequence after seven years. I'm glad you're finding it useful!

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Thanks for both of these.

Re: Duc De Palatine?

[(Anonymous)]

Btw, "Duc de Palatine" may not necessarily be a title of nobility. It may well be a title in an unknown neo-chivalric order, fashioned after the twelve paladins of Charlemagne - given that many of the neo-Gnostic societies are intertwined with neo-chivalric orders.

[ecosophia]

1) Any women's charity -- for example, a battered women's shelter -- is suitable, and so is any charity that supports art or music.

2) Whatever you're inspired to do.

3) Nope. Planetary charity isn't strongly influenced by your natal chart.

[ecosophia]

I'm probably not the best person to ask about this, as I don't mix sex and magic -- I enjoy both, but each in its proper place! Randolph's system is the most widely used approach to sex magic in the modern Western world, and most other systems that aren't borrowed from Asia are based on it. If that kind of thing interests you, and you're up for correspondence training, the organization Randolph founded is still around -- the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis can be found online at https://soul.org/, and they can provide you with detailed instruction and mentoring in Randolph's methods.

Re: Mercury and Neptune Conjunction

[ecosophia]

To the best of my knowledge it's the latter -- that kind of symbolism was very popular back in the day.

[homeopathic_meditations]

Glad to help, and I think my grand father would have approved too. May your patient be blessed

Re: Invoking and Banishing

[hearthculture]

I appreciate the clarification; and I quickly realized that you did not intend it that way - it really was informative to have the answer repeated because it set into my mind that "serving as a focus for my will" has multiple applications and implications. Thank you again.

[ecosophia]

First of all, the ancient Gnostics weren't all world-hating dualists. Some were, of course, but others had different beliefs. The Naassenes, for example, held that the world was as good as a material place could be, and encouraged initiates to pass through Greek agricultural mysteries (such as the Eleusinian mysteries) as part of their training.

What unites all Gnostics is, as the name suggests, a focus on gnosis. This is knowledge, but not book-learning. Bentley Layton, one of the best modern scholars of Gnosticism, translates it as "recognition." A metaphor may help. Imagine that you had a passionate year-long romance with someone who was in the witness protection program. Every "fact" your lover told you was a fiction, so in one sense you know nothing about her -- but in another sense, you know her very, very well. That latter sense is gnosis. That's the kind of knowledge gnostics seek to have of the spiritual world: not dogma, not book-learning, but personal experience. A spiritual path that seeks that experience is a gnostic path.

[ecosophia]

I'm not sure yet. I have some further posts on the subject of enchantment to write first.

Re: geomantic house for scholarships

[ecosophia]

That's a third house question. Always choose your house based on the end, not the means!

[ecosophia]

I'd do it as a multihouse question, with Oxford in the 1st, the Stratford actor in the 7th, the poems in the 3rd, and the plays in the 5th. Note which of the first two perfects with the latter two.

Re: Uranus Return

[ecosophia]

One of the reasons why there are so many bad astrological predictions these days is that people try to make them on this kind of single-factor basis. You have to look at the whole chart to see what you can expect! For that reason -- and also because traditional mundane astrology doesn't use planetary returns -- no, I haven't written about it.

Re: SoP Banishing with Spirit Above

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you! Chop wood, carry water. Makes sense!

I've been doing some more thinking about the whole business of banishing in Spirit. Is part of the the reason we avoid banishing Spirit Above/Below/Within similar to why people seeking to command angels and other higher beings are wasting their time? We don't have any authority or power over them, so there's no point in trying to shove them away with banishment on the one hand, nor would it make any sense to command one entity of Spirit Above to do anything to any other similar entity. We can just hang out an invite and hope someone shows up. Doing more is likely to be some combination of ineffective and offensive to Bigger Things.

I also understand on the Tree of Life, Spirit Above/Below/Within are across a discontinuity from the realms of the four Elements, so I suppose even if we did have powers at that level, banishing in those realms is likely to have effects that would be very real but difficult to appreciate in their entirety at our current level of spiritual development. If the room is dark, you should probably put the hammer down.

Is any of that on the right track?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm currently in early labour with my first child. If anybody wishes I'd appreciate prayers for a positive, safe, natural and timely birth.

[drakonus]

I’ve been running into more demons lately.

Anybody else seen an uptick?
Probably from September last year to current.

Any suggestions on banishing them?
When I banished recently my wife wanted to stop me because she felt a demon’s presence which I think I picked up from a guy at work who is a Satanist. The guy is late 20’s- early 30’s previous drug addict, ex homeless, ruined family looks 50. All of which is to say he seems about rung out.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,
Do the legends about Prester John encapsulate anything related to Western esoteric lore? What do you think was the real motive behind the spread of those legends in Medieval Europe?