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. Last week's honoree, past Chosen Chief of OBOD Philip Carr-Gomm, received most of his training in Druidry from Ross Nichols, who is this week's honoree. Nichols was a poet, a watercolorist, and an educator, as well as a good friend of Gerald Gardner, the inventor of modern Wicca. He became a member of the Universal Bond, one of the most active Druid organizations in Britain, in 1954. Ten years later, during a dispute over the leadership of the UB, he founded an order of his own, first called the Bardic Order of Druids and thereafter renamed the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, which he headed until his death in 1975.  He was the author of three books of poetry -- Sassenach Stray, Seasons At War, and Prose Chants and Proems -- as well as The Cosmic Shape, a programmatic essay on nature spirituality with a set of poems attached, and The Book of Druidry, which was published after his death.

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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.

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

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

Comments

[ecosophia]

What Robert said. ;-)

Animals are perfectly capable of making conscious choices. They can learn, remember, and feel; they don't have the capacity to process abstract concepts, but if you've ever seen a dog perk up when somebody uses the word "walk," you know they're capable of thinking in concrete terms! Plants also choose, though they do it more slowly -- understandably, since they haven't yet developed an astral body. As for minerals, souls in that state are getting used to being in matter; yes, they move through the mineral state more or less in parallel with other souls in their sub-swarm.

[robertmathiesen]

As for stones, the anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell worked with the Northern Ojibwa for very many years. Their language distinguishes grammatically between two kinds of nouns, which correspond roughly--but only roughly--to our notions of living versus non-living beings. And stones are treated grammatically as living beings in the Northern Ojibwa language.

So Hallowell reports that once he happened to ask an old Ojibwa man, "Are all the stones we see about us here alive?" The old man considered the question for a while, and replied, "No! But some are."

[Hollowell, "Ojibway Ontology, Behavior and World View" (1960).]

So even such distinctions as our own culture makes between living versus non-living, animate versus inanimate, are not self-evidentl, but are drawn differently by different cultures. And it is not merely an arbitrary grammatical difference between languages , but a difference in the perception of the world in which those speakers live. And I, for one, am not willing to say that "we" are right and all the others are "wrong." The Ojibwa, IMHO, do experience stones, or at least some stones, as living beings. This sort of thing impells me to be very humble about the special adequacy of our own world view.

[ecosophia]

I really need to read some of the literature on Native American ontology one of these days! I've seen references to the Hollowell article, but never actually gotten into that end of the literature.

[robertmathiesen]

There is a small number of anthropologists who are taking this sort of thing quite seriously, and are also applying it to account for the real, documentable efficacy of magic and divination in traditional cultures. The names that come most readily to mind in this connection are Paul Stoller, Bruce Grindal, Barbara Tedlock, and Edith Turner. Barbara Tedlock is one-quarter Ojibwa; her grandmother was a traditional midwife, herbalist, dream-prophet, etc.

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this. Academia.edu, here I come... ;-)