ecosophia | 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. Quite a while ago we reached Israel Regardie, and then chased his lineage back through Aleister Crowley et al. After he left Crowley, however, Regardie also spent a while studying with this week's honoree, the redoubtable Violet Firth Evans, better known to generations of occultists as Dion Fortune. Born in Wales and raised in a Christian Science family, Fortune got into occultism after a stint as a Freudian lay therapist -- that was an option in her time. She was active in the Theosophical Society, belonged to two different branches of the Golden Dawn, studied with a number of teachers, and then founded her own magical order, the Fraternity (now Society) of the Inner Light. She also wrote some first-rate magical novels and no shortage of books and essays on occultism, including The Cosmic Doctrine, the twentieth century's most important work of occult philosophy. I'm pleased to be only four degrees of separation from her.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello JMG! I Hope you're doing well, and thank you once more for doing this.

Did masonry ever had it's own "Israel Regardie," someone who published all the "secret rituals?" How close to the magick of the freemasons is the Golden Dawn material itself? Is it true that the purpose of the Memphis-Misraim rites as modified by John Yarker is to achieve "self deification/godhood" much like so called "left hand path" modern magicians claim to be doing?

Thanks!

1) Good heavens, yes. The rituals of Freemasonry have been published so many times you could fill a small library with the resulting volumes. The oldest one I know of saw print even before the first Grand Lodge of England was founded in 1717! You can find the results in any large online archive.

2) Okay, we need to cover some basics here. Masonry doesn't include magic. It's a set of traditional initiation rituals with a complex history, including some very rich esoteric symbolism and some material dating back to the Knights Templar, but from 1717 on those rituals have been the property of a men's club that by and large has no idea what they mean or what to do with them. A lot of occultists down through the years became Masons because they wanted to get access to those rituals and symbols -- that's a good part of the reason I became a Mason, for example -- but you don't learn magic in a Masonic lodge. That's why so many of those same occultists ended up founding organizations outside of Masonry -- the Golden Dawn is a good example of this -- so they could actually practice magic in a lodge.

3) Not in anything like the same sense. If you'd like to find out for yourself, Yarker's rituals were published a long time ago:

https://archive.org/details/Secret_High_Degree_Rituals_Masonic_Rite_Memphis_-_J_Yarker/mode/2up

Thank you! :)

Magic Monday

Masonry's "Israel Regardie!"

Re: Masonry's "Israel Regardie!"

Re: Masonry's "Israel Regardie!"