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

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

I'm sorry to see Lindsay picking up Eric Voegelin's use of gnosticism as a polemic term; he's got a distorted understanding of the nature of gnosis, and it weakens what might otherwise be a solid critique. As for the religion of progress, that leads into interesting territory. One of the things that happens routinely in the late stages of a civilization is that worship increasingly gets directed away from actual divine powers and toward egregors -- that is to say, collective representations created and charged by a culture, with no connection to the transcendent.

The classical world was full of those -- temples to the emperor, temples to abstract qualities such as Peace and Fortune, and so on. Progress is one of ours, though there are others; Dialectical Materialism had quite a few worshippers back in the day, nations have their temples, and half of what went wrong with pop-culture Wicca is that while the old traditional Wiccans worshipped deities, the pop Wicca launched on its way by Starhawk and Margot Adler worshipped an egregor, "the Goddess," who was basically nothing more than the projected self-image of Second Wave feminism. One problem with egregors, in turn, is that their emotional and spiritual charge depletes, they turn into clichés, and after a while it becomes painfully clear to everyone that there's nobody home. The other problem is that their followers so often make promises the egregors can't keep.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[brenainn]

I wonder if that might not also be something that happened with the so-called "Religious Right" in the United States? The Jesus, or Jesii, they worshipped was an egregor built in their own intolerant, neocon images?

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

That's quite possible, and it would explain why they also guttered out in the usual way.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[jprussell]

Huh, very interesting. Can egregores ever act as vehicles for actual divine powers?

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

Yes, and in fact that's how religion works -- the egregor of a deity becomes a vehicle for the divine power. What sets a real religion apart from the kind of thing we're discussing is that real religions are born out of religious experience: people have personal encounters with a divine power, their experiences become the template for an egregor, and the egregor becomes a meeting ground through which the divine and the human interact. In a fake religion, the egregor is created by human beings for human purposes, and the divine never comes into the picture at all.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

How can one tell if a particular religious organization is dealing with an authentic deity or a (hu)man-made egregor? Or is that something that only comes apparent with the passage of time (which is little aid to earlier worshippers)?

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[tamanous2020]

Interesting! That explains why movements who utilize religion as the vehicle of a political cause (whether it's neo-conservative/woke christianity or say white nationalist who take to Norse drag) end up having such a poor record of producing either mystics or even spiritually changed laypeople. They're not even trying to dial up the right god(s).

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[causticus]

So I'm guessing this is why proper symbolism and ritual protocol is so crucial when trying to connect with divinities through the vehicle of a traditional religion? That the symbolism is baked into the egregor that formed when the religion-in-question first became a thing?

Could this also be the secret behind the "don't mix pantheons during ritual workings" advice you often give?

Also, is this why it's a good reason to treat a deity from one tradition as different from a deity in another tradition despite them possibly being one in the same, from an intellectual standpoint? For example, if I suspect Hercules, Thor, Indra, and Hu Gadarn as actually being the same god.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

Just out of curiosity, what was the other half of what went wrong with Wicca?

(Hey! A 5-W phrase!)

—Princess Cutekitten

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

Lousy ethics. Too many people were embarrassingly ready to chuck their ideals at the drop of a pointed hat.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[miow]

Tangential to this answer: So if I wanted to connect with, say, Jesus or Mother Mary, then if I start attending Catholic services the Catholic church egregor will assist me to connect? Faster than if I tried it on my own? Likewise if I want to connect to Cernunnos, spending time in the woods, perhaps the egregor of the wood may lend a hand? (Just trying to make sense of some recent phenomena)

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

It would depend very much on the individual Catholic building and congregation. Some of those are well connected; others are pure egregor. The same rule applies to Cernunnos -- not every wood is a sacred wood.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. No wonder it’s hard to figure out a deity when there is none. Thank you. This will provide much material for meditation.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

It's nice to see someone else grousing over Eric Voegelin's misuse (in my opinion) of "gnostic." I noticed JHK using it pretty frequently, but I've largely stopped paying attention to his ranting over that past couple of years. My preference over the years has been Hans Jonas.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

Voegelin has some good things to say, but his distortions of gnosticism don't help -- and of course the modern Gnostic movement has to field endless amounts of misplaced criticism from people in the intellectual-conservative end of things whose sole exposure to the concept is Voegelin's misstatements.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have advice for how to tell if you're working with a divine energy or merely an empty egregor?

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

Does it challenge you, or simply pander to your emotions? That's usually a good test.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

"A projected self-image of Second Wave feminism. Does this include Doreen Valiente?

Iridescent Exogenous Moth

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

I'm not going to name names!

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this thought. Perhaps it goes some way to explaining my intuitive dislike of the current Christian refrain that “God is love”, which strikes me as something that can be used as empty justification for whatever current “progressive” movement is en vogue.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

That's certainly one problem with it! I find it repellent because it's so one-sided. The Divine is also wrath, and grief, and pain, and joy, and cataclysmic power, and a still small voice whispering in the most silent moment of the night...

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

"The Divine is also wrath, and grief, and pain, and joy, and cataclysmic power, and a still small voice whispering in the most silent moment of the night..."

Thank you. This is going in my today-book

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[team10tim]

Would Columbia, Lady Liberty, and Uncle Sam also count as egregores? And if so, is there a way to to utilize them in a more productive way?

I ask, mostly for Columbia, because the druids invented their own gods and then found that those gods did in fact respond. Either way, what would be some best practices for working with Columbia for the good of the country?

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[ecosophia]

Just because it's an egregor doesn't mean that it's useless -- just that its power doesn't reach all the way up to the divine level. If you work with such things, work also with the divine, in whatever form speaks to you most.

Re: “Queer Gnosticism”

[(Anonymous)]

If enough people do this, working with divine powers and a specific egregor, could it form a link between the egregor and divine powers where none existed before?