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.

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

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

Comments

Potency of Latin mass

[(Anonymous)]

You’ve mentioned before how the Latin Mass of the Roman Catholic Church had a magical potency to it that was lost when it was changed to English. Can you please briefly recap the reasons for this, or link to the original post? I wanted to share with a Catholic friend, but I’ve searched for your explanation and can’t find it.

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[(Anonymous)]

Obviously not JMG, but there are two main explanations:

From an outsider's perspective, the Catholic Church painted itself into a corner in its theology of ritual and started to lose its institutional knowledge of how to intelligently construct and operate a rite. To be perfectly blunt, the people who composed the Tridentine mass knew what they were doing. The people who composed the Novus Ordo didn't. If you are willing to throw around particularly nasty allegations, it may also be that the invocation of benefic divine forces may have caused discomfort in some members of the church hierarchy, so they intentionally watered things down to accommodate their own lack of piety.

From an insider's perspective, two very strange things happened at the council of Trent. First, the full spiritual authority and force of the catholic church were brought to bear to make a binding resolution that anyone who tries to translate the mass into vernacular is an excommunicate heretic. The second is that it was the first ecumenical council to include both a bible and a copy of canon law on the altar, instead of just a bible. The second Vatican council never repealed the canons from the council of Trent, but they did try to translate the mass into vernacular. By their own standards, that would make the entire Catholic Church hierarchy excommunicate. Secondly, binding themselves under the auspices of the Bible includes provisions for both screwing up and being forgiven. The canon law has no such provisions, there are rules, and there are punishments. After Trent, lapses and failures that were once part of the normal process of coming back to god's grace became explicit failures and corruptions of a specific legal code. The Catholic Church has, by its own standards, basically succeeded in shooting itself through all three feet and all four cheeks.

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[ecosophia]

The problem with the current Catholic Mass isn't that it's been translated into the vernacular. The problem is that the committee that created it rewrote the Mass in ways that violated more than a millennium of church teaching and tradition, and gutted the spiritual dimensions of the ceremony. The new mass is called the Novus Ordo in Latin, and you can find reams of good theological critique if you're interested. Here are a few good discussions:

http://archives.sspx.org/SSPX_FAQs/q5_novus_ordo_missae.htm
https://onepeterfive.com/why-do-people-have-a-problem-with-the-novus-ordo/
https://unavocecanada.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ottaviani-intervention.pdf

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[tamanous2020]

As an aside to this, two questions came to mind.

1. Given the old rituals had a more potent power, I'm guessing that current catholics would find greater benefit attending the Traditional Latin Mass and utilizing pre vatican 2 prayers/practices?

2. This is for the commentariat. How is the Orthodox Liturgy in comparison, for those who've attended it,to the catholic services (old and new)?

Tamanous

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[brenainn]

1. I've been to both traditional and Novus Ordo parishes. The effectiveness of NO sacraments is minimal. What I experienced in receiving the traditional forms of the sacraments was mind-blowingly powerful. It seems as though there are at least two Jesii operating under the banner of Roman Catholicism: a very powerful and active one in the traditionalist movement, and one that might as well as be a purely human-created and driven egregore.

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[ecosophia]

1) I know several former Catholics who dropped out after the Novus Ordo mass came into general use. They all say that the power went right out of it, and the ceremony became an empty shell of itself. Draw your own conclusions.

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[ritaer]

Many years ago, it may have been before Vatican II, a friend gave me some Rosicrucian literature to read. According to this reading the Rosicrucians predicted the downfall of the Roman Catholic Church if the mass was performed in the vernacular. If I recall correctly, they posited that the repetition throughout the world of the same words in the same language created a powerful force. I don't recall what they labeled this force.

It just occurred to me that in Scriptural terms the Latin Mass recreated the condition of humankind before the Tower of Babal, with the Church and its sacraments serving as a replacement for the tower that was intended to reach the heavens. God destroyed the original tower because it was the product of human arrogance, thinking they could do it on their own. But since Jesus was commissioned to create a path to heaven for humankind the Church and the sacraments he is believed to have instituted could renew the attempt with God's blessing. So Vatican II essentially repeated the original curse of dividing humans through language. I wonder whether this notion that popped into my mind is actually present somewhere in Catholic theology.

Rita

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[(Anonymous)]

One intriguing factor I see is that prior to the Council of Trent, the mass, ordination rituals, etc were all different in different places; there was an enormous amount of variation in all of the rites of Medieval Catholicism. There wasn't even a single official version of the bible either, with debate occurring about which books to include, which language to use, etc. Then, the Council of Trent decided to try to codify things, including the ritual forms of the church, and in symbolic terms I suppose it could be said that they tried to recreate the Tower of Babel.

I wonder if the radical reduction in the power and authority of the Church around this time, and the way it seems to have stepped from one self-imposed disaster to another since then, is related...

Re: Potency of Latin mass

[robertmathiesen]

The change to the Novus Ordo was much more than a change in language (from Latin to vernacular). To my outsider's eyes, the Novus Ordo feels very heavily "Protestantized." (An ordinary Protestant Sunday service has in it a good deal of the schoolroom, instructing the congregation and building community among them far more than enabling them to approach the ineffable mysteries of the Divine.) And, when compared to the magnificent Byzantine Sunday liturgy in even a small parish church, even the Roman Catholic Vetus Ordo (the old Latin Mass) looks like a marked simplification of how the early church once to celebrated the Eucharist.

Interestingly enough, at least in the Slavonic version of Orthodoxy, the building where the liturgy is celebrated is formally called a Temple (Храм), not a Church (Церковь). The extreme conservatism of the Byzantine ritual practice makes it a likely place to look for remnants of our host's Temple Tradition, too.

As for the use of Latin vs. vernaculars in worship: Liturgical Latin is what is technically called a "sacral language," that is, a formalized language different chiefly in its style and vocabulary from any and every vernacular language. Sacral languages are a world-wide cultural phenomenon, and they do not need writing. Traditional aboriginal cultures that did not use writing very often (always?) have them, too. Hardly anywhere except in the modern Western world do people use their every-day, informal vernaculars when they deal with the Sacred. This seems to be hard-wired into the human organism.

(Sacral languages are used even outside of a strictly religious context, for example, sacral English in the rituals of Freemasonry.)

There is a great deal of scholarly work on sacral languages. For the Latin case, I would particularly recommend Christine Mohrmann's brief book, Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character (1957), which you can download or read on archive.org.