ecosophia: (Default)
John Michael Greer ([personal profile] ecosophia) wrote2023-04-09 11:16 pm

Magic Monday

Bligh BondIt's just on 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 or comment 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 hereAlso: 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.
Last week's honoree, Violet Firth Evans aka Dion Fortune, had the great advantage of coming of age when the British occult community was close to its apogee, and she had plenty of teachers. Some of them, such as Moina Mathers, have already appeared here; some of them, such as Maiya Tranchell Hayes, apparently didn't leave any photographs behind -- but there are several others, and this is one of them: Frederick Bligh Bond, who was the official church archeologist at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey between the two world wars, and discovered a whole series of lost features by digs that just happened to go to the right place. Then it turned out that there was no "just happened" about it; he was using spiritualistic methods to talk to the spirits of long-dead monks, who told him where to dig. The church threw a fit and dismissed him, but he went on to publish several volumes about his experiences, at least one of which can be downloaded for free (here). Dion Fortune studied with him for a while and also did trance work with him; her connection with Glastonbury continued to the end of her life, and in fact she's buried there.

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Bookshop logoI've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

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

Post Plutonian Tree of Life

(Anonymous) 2023-04-10 01:44 pm (UTC)(link)
Hi JMG, Just finished my 2nd read-through of The Twilight of Pluto. Amazing read and your reworking of the tree of life is real contribution to astrology. Thank you. I have read in Vedic texts that the material world is a reflection of the spiritual world. The metaphor used by the ancient Vedic priests was coincidently of a tree upside down, where the roots of the tree are up in the spiritual world, and the leaves down. Where the two connect, and the limit of what we can see from this world, is a oneness energy called the Brahma-jyotir, which sounds suspiciously similar to Kether, and the roots of the spiritual tree (the top in that world) is a concept similar to a spiritual Malkuth. I may be mixing my metaphors but, does the Western magical theory have a realm beyond this one we are in, where the tree of life flipped on its head with Kether as its starting point, and the point of connection between the worlds?
gullindagan: (Default)

Re: Post Plutonian Tree of Life

[personal profile] gullindagan 2023-04-10 04:28 pm (UTC)(link)
You got a source for that Vedic knowledge? Would like to explore.

Re: Post Plutonian Tree of Life

(Anonymous) 2023-04-10 10:07 pm (UTC)(link)
There's a mention of this sort of reflection at the end of the section on Da'at in Colin Low's "Notes on Kabbalah":

http://www.digital-brilliance.com/kab/nok/NoK.pdf

See also the discussion of the Four Worlds where various realms's sephirot are made to line up with various other realms' various other sephirot.