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Magic Monday
It's almost 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 and the teachers who influenced them in turn. Like Allan Bennett, who we discussed last week, this week's honoree was a teacher of Aleister Crowley. George Cecil Jones was the man who introduced Crowley to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and later on helped Crowley found the Argenteum Astrum (Order of the Silver Star, or A∴A∴), the first of the two magical orders the Not-so-great Beast headed during his lifetime. (The other, the Ordo Templi Orientis or OTO, will be discussed next week.) Jones was a working chemist and metallurgist as well as a serious student of the occult. He practiced the magical virtue of silence more effectively than most of his contemporaries, however, and very little seems to be known about him.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?
So, the very short answer to "why Idun?" is because she told me to :) The longer explanation is that some of my strongest spiritual experiences, including the one that smacked the materialism right out of me, involved Her. Through prayer and meditation, I got the impression I needed to put together a more formal prayer practice, then that it should include beads, then that it ought to draw on the Rosary more heavily for inspiration. Along the way, I've gotten intuitions that Idun's links to the World Tree (made explicit in Odin's Raven Galdr, which is of contested age/provenance, but also from one of Snorri's kenning's given for her, "Seed of Yggdrasil") is something I should lean into. As for "what links Idun and Woden?", again, I'm drawing heavily on my own experiences here, but I find the theory that Bragi is a hypostasis of Odin at least intriguing, and I find some of the similarities between the Idun myth and Odin winning the Mead of Poetry highly suggestive. I think there's something about linking all of this having to do with inspiration, initiation, and overcoming death.
All that being said, I think your analysis of why Frigg makes a good fit is spot on, and your rough draft for a "Hail Frigg" is wonderful. At some point in this project, I'm thinking about working out how to go about customizing things for the deities that work best for you, since my own take is highly idiosyncratic. Something more specific than "just do what works for you!" but also more open-ended than "just plug in the right names, but keep everything else the same".
Cheers,
Jeff
Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?
Annnnd, I appreciate the narrative and explanation, and I understand your poems better with this backstory. Perhaps what I'm feeling critical of is that your relationship is so embedded into the poems that they feel more like a praising or orphic hymn than the Hail Mary. (I actually like them more thinking of them this way - particularly the first and the third.)
I've been thinking through my reactions to your "Hail Idun"s in light of this new info, and reframing my thoughts with Idun in the place of Frigg.
Another shot at what I see as more in line with the Hail Mary, because I believe it better explains my view than I can if I continue pontificating.
Hail Idun,
Yggdrasil's Seed,
Wife of verse,
Mother of rejuvenation.
Blessed Idun,
The Gods renewer,
Bless me with bravery,
That I may meet you in Valhalla.
Thank you for the conversation; I'm full of thought and inspired.
Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?