Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

I'm pleased to say that the work that occupied much of the last week is done, at least for the moment; I'm dealing with the impact of six initiation rituals -- it was a busy weekend! -- but things are well enough in hand that I can return to the usual round of things. With that in mind...

It's right on midnight now, 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. Last week's honoree was Aleister Crowley, Israel Regardie's second significant teacher. Crowley got much of his instruction from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and thus from figures we've already discussed in these Magic Mondays -- William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Mathers, and Moina Mathers. This week's honoree, however, was another potent influence on the Not-so-great Beast. Born in 1872, Allan Bennett left Christianity as a boy when he found out how children were produced -- yes, this happened tolerably often in Victorian times. He became an agnostic and a skilled electrical engineer, but his spiritual yearnings led him first to the Theosophical Society, then to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; it was in this latter period that he became a teacher of Crowley.  Finding Hermetic magic unsatisfying, however, Bennett studied Buddhism under teachers in Sri Lanka and became a monk there,  taking the name Ananda Metteya. He was a major figure in the transmission of Buddhism to the Western world and helped launch the first Buddhist missionary activity in Britain. His health was never good, and he died in 1922 after a protracted illness.

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

Comments

Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,

Thank you, as ever, for hosting these Magic Mondays. This week I have three questions for you regarding the FHR.

1. I am currently working on the opening/closing of the Temple and I was wondering if there were any specific visualizations involved in the purification of the Temple by the four Elements.

I am asking because I had some spontaneous mental imagery while clearing and cleansing the Temple according to the ancient ways.

After walking with the fan around the Temple, in my imagination a faint yellow(ish) glow lingered around the fan when I took it back to the altar. When I took the fan from the altar again to clear and cleanse the Temple a second time during the Closing, I sensed the yellow glow was still there. So after walking around the Temple with the fan it seemed to make sense to raise the fan again to the east to send the energy back to its abode, and I saw the glow vanish. (This applied to all four elements, btw, not only to Air.)

To put it differently, I felt that in the Opening the energies of the elements were invoked into each symbol prior to walking around the temple, while in the Closing the same energies were banished from the symbols subsequent to walking around the temple.

My question: is such a mental imagery appropriate? I’m still at the beginning of my practice of the opening/closing ceremony, so I’d like to know if this makes sense before giving it a chance to stick around, i.e. to become a "stable" part of my experience with the ceremony. (And if you think this is but nitpicking, by all means let me know and I’ll make sure I don’t bother you again with petty details.)

2. Speaking of Opening and Closing, I don’t recall seeing a Temple form of that ceremony, i.e. with all Temple officers, in the four FHR volumes. In other words, I now know the ritual procedure to open and close a Temple of the FHR on my own, but I’m not sure how exactly this should be done if I were together with other officers.

This said, I realize I’m not anywhere near needing such a ceremony, as I am a Candidate working on my own, but I thought I should ask, for the sake of completeness.

3. In your discussion of numerology last year you noted that many readers of the commentariat with birth number 8 found that the description did not fit them, which led you to conclude that the description might need some updating. Did you have a chance to gather sufficient information to revise your description of birth number 8?

Thank you for your time, and sorry if I'm asking too much after the intense weekend you just had!

R.

Re: Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose

[ecosophia]

1) You can certainly do that, but there's no specified set of visualizations you have to use. My imagination is more tactile than visual, for example, so it works best for me to feel wind blowing around the fan, heat radiating from the incense, and so on.

2) Oof! That should have been included, and wasn't. I'll see if I can find time to write one up and revise Book 3 accordingly.

3) I"m still studying that; I've made arrangements to get some good books on ancient and medieval number symbolism, but other factors have gotten in the way of the week or two of intensive study I need to put into that.