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

Baphomet

[(Anonymous)]

Hi, JMG:

It seems like you can't pick up a book on the history of occultism without seeing a picture of Eliphas Levi's Baphomet, with a variety of explanations of what it is and what it represents. I'm wondering your opinion on this entity, if it even is an entity. I know it's come to represent the Devil for some. For others, it represents occult wisdom. I know some witches associate it with Pan. (My local witch shop has a Baphomet statue for sale, and I know the owners are not Satanists). Is it an egregore? And what would be the result of invoking this being? I have no intention of doing so but have known people who have.

Thanks!

Re: Baphomet

[(Anonymous)]

I've had some small experiences with him after a talisman with his image was hung around my neck during a meditation about Solomon's Temple with the instructions to meditate on the meaning (I was flipping out when I looked down and very clearly saw what it was). I would say he is very strong medicine only to be taken 'by prescription ' as it were. He is a very saturnine being that can help a would-be occultist get out of their head and into the rest of their body. He is also the divine androgene uniting male and female, spiritual and material. Of course, many have used that image for less 'idealistic' purposes so I think that mudies the water a bit...

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...