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

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.