The Mayan Order Lessons
Feb. 4th, 2023 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
A remarkable (and also remarkably odd) resource has become available recently: the complete correspondence course offered by the Mayan Order, one of the more colorful American occult correspondence schools of the twentieth century. The Mayan Order -- that's its emblem on the left -- was the creation of Rose Dawn (mundane name Isabelle Taylor). Born in Indiana in 1898, she was a showgirl and singer in her youth, thus the "Rose Dawn" moniker -- that was her stage name. Later on she took up astrology and turned out to be very good at it. She and her third husband, William Perry Taylor, settled in Del Rio, Texas in the early 1930s, where she broadcast a daily program on the radio and launched a successful career as an astrologer by mail. In 1935 she and her husband proceeded to create their magnum opus, the Mayan Order.
This was a more than usually creative take on the standard New Thought-influenced occult correspondence course of the time. Members were attracted by magazine advertisements like the one below on the right -- yes, that's Rose Dawn as Supreme Scribe of the Order -- and paid a modest initiation fee and monthly dues. In return they got lessons by mail: 308 of them, if they persevered through the entire course.
The content of the lessons is an interesting blend of New Thought positive-thinking material, metaphysical philosophy, and American vernacular Christianity with an esoteric slant. Does it have anything to do with the teachings of the ancient Mayas? Not as far as I can tell -- but it's by no means certain that Rose Dawn knew this. In the early twentieth century it was a common belief in some parts of the occult scene that there would be no authentically American occultism until someone succeeded in picking up the contacts, as the phrase was, of the ancient Mayan mysteries. My reading of the lessons suggests to me that Rose believed that she had done this, and was in contact with an inner plane teacher who passed on to her a version of the ancient Mayan wisdom updated for the use of modern American students. Be this as it may, the entire collection of Mayan Order lessons is available for free download on the IAPSOP website:
http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/wing_lessons/mayan_order/
And also on Archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/MayanOrderRevelation/Mayan129/
Over and above the value of all this as a fine bit of esoteric Americana, this course (and many others like it) offered the kind of basic training in occultism that almost everyone in the American occult scene had a century ago and almost nobody has now. It won't be to everyone's taste -- notably, if you're not comfortable with a certain amount of Christian symbolism and teaching, this course will probably not be your cup of Texas tea -- but if that's not a barrier, you can provide yourself with an experience of a kind that few people have these days: simply download the lessons, print out one each week, read and study it, and do the exercises included. Six years later, you'll have a solid background in New Thought and a well-developed skill set in practices such as affirmation, concentration, and ritual, and you'll have that basic training mentioned earlier.
Regular readers will know that there's also the Order of Essenes lessons -- not to be confused with the Modern Order of Essenes material I'm passing on these days; if something less Christian and less ritualistic turns your crank, you can find the whole Essenes course here:
http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/wing_lessons/order_of_the_essenes_florida/
It'll be interesting to see if any more correspondence courses of this general type end up becoming accessible in the years ahead.
Brief Additional Note: as I noted above, Rose Dawn's material doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with the actual teachings of the ancient Maya. Maybe I need to repeat myself, because I immediately fielded a couple of trolling posts angrily insisting that Rose Dawn's material doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with the actual teachings of the ancient Maya. Why, yes, and reading comprehension is apparently a lost skill in some circles, too. Any further trollage along these lines will also be deleted.
Very Cool
Date: 2023-02-04 08:18 pm (UTC)Re: Very Cool
Date: 2023-02-04 08:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-04 11:56 pm (UTC)To the angry commenters, well, here is a Mexican born and raised student of contemporary Mesoamerican metaphysics who practices Druidical magic that thinks such comments are rather silly. Don Panchito below --a Mayan mystic who venerated God-- would probably have thought so too :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-05 04:05 am (UTC)I apologize for that.
Thank you, Open Space, for this information about Don Panchito.
I learn something every day.
- Cicada Grove
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-05 06:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-06 01:09 am (UTC)Welcome, there will be more about Don Panchito ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-05 02:58 pm (UTC)JLfromNH/Turquoise Disoriented Tick
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-05 04:17 pm (UTC)Some years ago I'd read an article in National Geographic that implied there was minimal Christianity in the Mayan heartland. Open Space's comment spurred me to research the matter, and Wikipedia begs to differ with NatGeo:
"The Maya religion is Roman Catholicism combined with the indigenous Maya religion to form the unique syncretic religion which prevailed throughout the country and still does in the rural regions prior to 2010s of "orthodoxing" the western rural areas by Christian Orthodox missionaries.
"Beginning from negligible roots prior to 1960s, however, Protestant Pentecostalism has grown to become the predominant religion of Guatemala City and other urban centers, later to 2010s that almost of all Maya of several rural areas of West Guatemala, living rural areas were mostly mass converted from Catholicism or possibly Maya religion due of various reasons to either Eastern or Oriental Orthodoxy by late Fr. Andres Giron and some other Orthodox missionaries, and also smaller to mid-sized towns also slowly converted as well since 2013."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_peoples
- Cicada Grove
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-05 06:54 pm (UTC)It's quite reasonable to be careful about such things now -- that's one of the reasons, for example, that when I became head of AODA I insisted that we were going to be honest about the Druid Revival's origins and not try to trace them back to a Celtic antiquity they don't have. (The Irish in particular have had to deal with hordes of "plastic Paddies," Americans who've built an ersatz identity out of pretending to be Celts, and a good many Irish people I know are utterly sick of that.) But that doesn't justify trashing people in the past who had no way of anticipating our current ideas.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there -- and making sense of its legacies requires the same sort of caution and courtesy in dealing with the past as you need when spending time in a different culture.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-06 01:53 am (UTC)It's a very complicated issue. Personally, it can be really annoying when people take it as a joke, as many tourists do and start yelling bad Spanish while drunk for example or like the Irish example below or when people with foreign money start building resorts on their lands using their traditions as wall art like an amusement park. At least that's what bothers me. There seems to me there is a bunch of pressure in the first world to think it's their responsibility to save people. Like someone I know who said: I dislike Switzerland because they don't get into wars with other countries that are being unfair like we do. Ugh. With the benefit of being foreigner on such issues I see that a lot of it comes from wanting to be the hero on one hand or trying to feel better with feelings of guilt because there is so much pressure today about not being labeled 'bad colonizer' and little to do with the actual cultures they are romanticizing on the other.
That said, there is a lot of good things that come with such awareness that stem from being respectful and I am sure Cicada Grove fits this latter.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-06 12:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-06 02:20 am (UTC)I wouldn't like to take over JMG's post with these matters but I will say that it is a weird and eclectic mix of a bunch of modern techniques adapted to fit what we have from the Codexes that spans from traditional dance to Wiccan witchcraft to ceremonial magic on one end and on the indigenous knowledge of the tribes that are left like the Wixarita on the other. For example, we use a subset of thirteen energy centers on the major joints called cuecuellos mainly for healing but others use the equivalent of chakras to fit an illustration of energy centers from Codex Borgia with it's own distinct symbology. There aren't books about it to my knowledge. What comes to mind is Don Miguel Ruiz's: The Four Agreements and his sons books as they resemble New Thought with some Toltec color in it, I've heard of Carlos Castaneda's books about Don Juan but haven't read them so I cannot really recommend any literature, it's all coming from my teacher. Canal Once did a video series on some of the legends called 68 voces 68 corazones you can find on youtube dubbed into English that I liked very much though.
I have no problem with the Mayans and Christians...
Date: 2023-02-05 05:25 pm (UTC)-A Spaniard.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-05 05:49 pm (UTC)To clarify, would this course of study be incompatible with a polytheistic worldview and practice? I'm not talking about adding or changing anything in this course of study (I know that's a bad idea), but would it preclude continuing to worship other deities (in separate rituals and practices) while completing this course of study?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-05 07:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-06 02:17 am (UTC)