Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting toward 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 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. At this point I've finally gone as far back into my Rosicrucian lineage as I can without repeating earlier images -- the other great source of Dion Fortune's lineage, of course, is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and its founders and major figures have already been honored here. So it's time to leap back to square one and start talking about the other end of my Druid lineage -- the one that goes through the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD). That was the first Druid order I joined, and the source of much of my early Druid training -- and it exists at all because of Philip Carr-Gomm, this week's honoree.

Philip was a young man on the fringes of the London occult scene when he began studying with Ross Nichols, whom we'll discuss in an upcoming post. (That's Philip with the colossal hair in the photo on the right, being initiated into OBOD on top of Glastonbury Tor.) Years later, after Nichols' death, he made the same mistake I did, asked the surviving older members about reviving the order, and ended up being talked into becoming its Chosen Chief.  He proceeded to launch an international correspondence course, write a series of first-rate books on Druidry, and in the process turned OBOD into the world's largest Druid order. He retired from the office of Chosen Chief in 2020, and has been writing books on other topics since then.  Did I imitate him when I became Grand Archdruid of AODA? Whenever I thought I could get away with it, you bet, and it inevitably worked.

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I'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.

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

Comments

[ecosophia]

Okay, let's unpack this a little at a time.

First, one of the things that's odd about the current fixation on pronouns is that you don't use them when talking to the person in question -- only about the person in question. In English our second person pronoun, "you," is genderless; only in the third person do we get into "he," "she," "it," et al. So it's not about being polite to the person, it's about the person trying to control how other people talk about him/her/whatever.

Second, you're quite correct that there's something to male and female that isn't limited to the material body. In occult philosophy it's taught that human beings have multiple bodies, each on its own plane of being; these bodies each have their own gender; and they aren't all the same gender as the material body. In most (though not all) cases, they alternate -- thus a person with a male material body will usually have a female etheric (life energy) body, a male astral (emotional) body, and a female mental sheath, and a person with a female material body will usually have a male etheric body, a female astral body, and a male etheric sheath. (The soul, the center of consciousness that inhabits these bodies, has no gender.)

Third, the "uncanny valley" is a real thing. You get some people whose subtle bodies aren't arranged as described above, and they feel different. That's one of the factors behind "gaydar" and the like; a great many gay men, for example, have female instead of male astral bodies, and if you're at all sensitive, you can perceive that as a difference in feeling.

As for your friend, well, since I have Aspergers syndrome I'm not the right person to ask for advice on how to deal with people!

[(Anonymous)]

What does it mean to have a female mental sheath? Does that mean the male mind is receptive to ideas, whereas a male mental sheath generates them?

[ecosophia]

Not ideas so much as inspirations. Have you noticed how often male artists, writers, composers, etc. need female companionship in order to create? That's the female mental sheath, needing to be fertilized by its counterpart.