Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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 and George Cecil Jones, who were introduced over the last two weeks, this week's honoree was a teacher of Aleister Crowley. Theodor Reuss was a German occultist and Freemason who, like our past honoree Sylvester Gould, was a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, the successor order of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (HB of L). He founded and headed the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a magical lodge originally envisioned by Austrian occultist Carl Kellner, which passed on the occult traditions of the HB of L and certain specific teachings that originated in another of our earlier honorees, African-American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph. Reuss passed on the teachings of the OTO to Crowley and eventually made him the head of the OTO in the English-speaking world, setting off a cascade of events that would make a first-rate melodrama or a really good tell-all book. Since I'm not a member of the OTO, my only connection with any of that story is that one of my teachers was taught by a student of a student of Reuss...

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With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,
If you've been following the events in Ukraine at all, you might have seen coverage of the increasing use of pagan rune-based symbols on the Ukrainian side. This isn't new: the extreme nationalist/neo-nazi movements in Ukraine have been using them for years, but now they seem to pop up everywhere on uniforms and even at official functions.
These symbols were, of course, extensively used by the Nazi Waffen SS as unit symbols. The Wolfsangel, for example, was the symbol of the Waffen SS Division "Das Reich," which not only murdered its way around the Eastern Front, but committed brutal crimes in France in 1944 after the Landings, most notably the infamous massacre of the population of Oradour-sur-Glane. What's extraordinary is that French TV recently broadcast a sympathetic portrait of a female Ukrainian sniper whose uniform prominently displayed this patch.
In answer to criticism, pro-Ukrainians have said that these runes long predate the Nazis and anyway they've been used for decades by rock groups and in popular culture generally, so they have no significance.
My question is, is there anything going on here? Does the use of runes associated with the Waffen SS have any real life consequences? What could be the implications for western nations of uncritical support of forces that use these symbols? Is there a chance of some kind of magical blow-back?

[(Anonymous)]

I have no idea about magical implications, but both sides use symbols to troll each other. The Russian side uses Soviet symbols (hammer and sickle) to troll Ukranians, the Ukranians use Third Reich stuff to troll the Russians.

Many Eastern Europeans (except Poles) don't see the Third Reich negatively. They see it as a fighter against Communism which then lost.

Using Nazi insignia serves a dual purpose. First, you can recruit gung ho guys from all over Europe to fight for you, secondly those governments then get rid off troublemakers. Franco used the same method when he sent Spanish volunteers to fight in Russia. He got rid off hardcore National Socialists while at the same remaining neutral.

[(Anonymous)]

>>>>Many Eastern Europeans (except Poles) don't see the Third Reich negatively. They see it as a fighter against Communism which then lost.<<<<<

You are plainly wrong. The wrath that Nazi Germany brought all over Europe isn't forgotten even now that most of that generation passed. It was also done with a custom dose of humiliation for each nation, and such memories of being designated as Untermensch (lesser human) don't fade so easily. Secondly, Nazi politics of war were not designated to fight communism - that's a delusion cultivated in certain alt right circles.

[ecosophia]

Yes, there's a lot going on there magically speaking. One of the bitter ironies of the last century is that the victors in the Second World War, by defining Hitler's regime as their favorite label for evil incarnate, guaranteed that Nazism would have a long and powerful afterlife -- all that emotional energy being poured into the swastika and the other Nazi symbols, by people hating them and using them as emblems of what they hate, ended up charging them with even more energy than they had before and during the war. (Compare those emblems to those of Italian Fascism. What kind of emotional reaction does this generate in you?)



So you've got a set of very powerful symbols charged with the energy of hatred, which is potent stuff. The Russians, in response, are using Soviet symbols -- another piece of evidence that somebody in the Kremlin understands magic, since it wasn't the Nazis who won the war, after all. That wasn't accidental; the Wotan-energy Hitler invoked and embodied inevitably leads straight to Götterdammerung, and so the Russians are using symbolism against symbolism to help the Ukrainian forces along the familiar route.