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

JMG - I've finally got round to reading through your excellent essays in Ecosophia about Enchantment, the Myth of Progress and Consciousness through the works of Wilber, Gebser and Barfield. Thank you for very informative and thought-provoking pieces.
My question:
Evolution is non-teleological. However, succession is, in some way, progress. That's to say, when pioneer species colonise a barren landscape (cooled lava flow, for ex.) they give way to - and give rise to - increasing complexity towards, eventually, lush, rich, entangled ecosystems. Could it be that people tend to confuse increased complexity, biodiversity and bioabundance with progress-towards-a-goal? And could this, then, give rise to the conflation of evolution with progress, and the idea of progress-of-consciousness?
Also, can evolution be consciously driven? I ask because I found in Frederic Myers the idea of the imaginal as an indication of our greater evolutionary capacities. Then wind forward and I found in Barbara Marx Hubbard the insistence that we can, somehow, 'speed up our evolution' (or some such...) in some kind of spiritual sense. What do you think? Is Hubbard barking up the same teleological tree as Wilber et.al.?
Lastly - thank you! You cited Robert Anton Wilson’s 'The Persecution and Assassination of the Parapsychologists as Performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science under the Direction of the Amazing Randi'. This is the first time I've found you referring to RAW. You and he make excellent bedfellows (excuse the metaphor!). RAW, though, was also convinced that humans are destined for some greater expansive cosmic consciousness and that we can drive forward our evolution. His correspondence with Timothy Leary and his affinity with Leary's Starseed mission seems oddly similar to the Wilber-Gebser-Barfield rap. Or perhaps not. I'm not entirely certain.
Thanks again for you tireless work and generous teachings.
Victor

IMHO, Frederic W. H. Myers should be ranked among the most important occult theorists of the 19th century, yet he is almost forgotten today, and does not figure (to the best of my knowledge) in any history of occultism and esotericism.

Myers developed the very important insight that every adult human has not one self, but multiple selves that work (for most people) somewhat in harmony with one another during a person's lifetime, and that these selves function best in a person's life when they are not wholly integrated with one another.

The same insight was developed at the same time by Charles Godfrey Leland. I don't known whether Leland and Myers had read one another's seminal works, or whether each man came up with more or less the same insight independently of the other. Certainly each elaborated it in a different direction from the other. Leland ended up with a theory that posited (among other things) the existence of alternate minor selves of the opposite gender from the gender of the person's own physical body.

Both men have had a huge influence on my own occult / esoteric theory and practice.

1) Yes, very much so. The rise of a civilization is a successional process -- that was one of the central points of my 2005 paper on the collapse of civilizations -- and during the rising part of the curve, it's quite common for people in the civilization to convince themselves that it's all upwards from here. Then they find out the hard way that what goes up must come down -- a lesson we're learning now.

2) She's barking up the wrong stump. It's very fashionable to confuse evolution with progress and then to insist that we all ought to join together to progress as fast as possible -- it's a rehash of Marxist rhetoric in a New Age vein. Bleah.

3) I've been a fan of RAW's work since I bought the Illuminatus! trilogy in the late 1970s. That doesn't mean that I agree with all the things he believed, but I'm enough of a Discordian to find that entertaining rather than annoying. You might find this old post of mine interesting:

https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2016/12/the-fifth-side-of-triangle.html

Or this more recent one:

https://www.ecosophia.net/slack-an-irreverent-proposal/

Magic Monday

Evolution - progress

Re: Evolution - progress

Re: Evolution - progress