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. I'm currently tracing my Martinist lineage.  That's rendered complex by the Martinist tradition that one does not name one's initiator, so we'll have to go back through less evasive routes. Last week's honoree, René Chambellant, became head of the Eglise Gnostique Universelle on the death of his teacher and consecrator, Constant Chevillon, whom I'm honoring this week. Martinist, Rosicrucian, Freemason, and Gnostic bishop, Chevillon was born in 1880, showed remarkable intellectual gifts in youth, but went to work in the banking industry while devoting his free time to occult and spiritual pursuits. He wrote seven books and many essays about Gnostic theology and practice, and his integrity and spiritual qualities won the respect not only of his fellow Gnostics but of Catholics and nonreligious people. In 1944, he and other leading citizens of Lyon were taken hostage by the Nazis in revenge for activities of the Resistance, and shot to death. He is considered a saint and martyr by most modern Gnostic churches; the day of his martyrdom, March 22, is his feast day.

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

Comments

Oswald Spengler's conceptual three-dimensionality?

[team10tim]

Hello JMG,

I've been wrestling with Spengler lately and I think that I have figured out how intuited so much. I wanted to run it past you.

Over on your other site going through Levi's High Magic you have a tarot exercise. Meditating through the tarot gives a "conceptual three-dimensionality." So, do you think it's plausible that Spengler did the same thing with history? And if so how?

There are established methods for meditating through the tarot, the tree of life, or books like Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine and Levi's High Magic. But how does one go about breaking new ground with this method? Are there any known tricks? Or is the approach the same as the work, ie meditate on it?

Re: Oswald Spengler's conceptual three-dimensionality?

[jprussell]

Not JMG, but I've been thinking about Spengler a lot lately. I can think of at least two things Spengler did that are similar to the Lullian method from the High Magic book club posts - 1) using "morphology" and the organism metaphor, and 2) comparing "contemporary" periods from different Cultures.

For 1), simply looking at a culture and going "what if I thought about this like a living thing with a life-cycle, what would I figure out?" A whole host of meditation fodder falls out of that - what is the equivalent of adolescence? Do cultures reproduce? Can cultures get sick? And so forth.

For 2), once you've settled on a life-cycle, like Spengler did, you can take that frame and test it out on different cultures you know about, again, giving lots of fodder for meditation: hmm, what did Caesarism look like in China? In Egypt? Did the Mesoamericans even get there, or was it interrupted by the Spanish? What's the world image of Ethiopians?

I reckon you could get a lot of meditation out of just those two. And that's before you try to combine Spengler with other cyclical thinkers :)

Cheers,
Jeff

P.S. Tooting my own horn a bit, but here are the posts I wrote trying to distill Spengler a bit, in case they're helpful or interesting: https://jpowellrussell.com/#understanding_spengler_s_decline_of_the_west_bit_1

Re: Oswald Spengler's conceptual three-dimensionality?

[team10tim]

Hello Jeff,

Funny you should mention that.. I read your posts on Spengler trying to get a better handle of Decline of the West. Excellent work by the way.

I was trying to figure out if the USA was going to send NATO into Ukraine. I wrote it up on substack and cited and linked your Spengler analysis. JMG, I cited Twilight's Last Gleaming too, with a link to
https://bookshop.org/p/books/twilight-s-last-gleaming-updated-edition-john-michael-greer/9743815

https://team10tim.substack.com/p/a-nuland-surprise

"A Nuland Surprise?

The Ukrainian offensive will fail, which bring us to moment of the greatest danger. Can the USA accept defeat or will it escalate?"

So, hat tip to both of you.

Re: Oswald Spengler's conceptual three-dimensionality?

[jprussell]

Hah, thank you for the kind words and the link! I will check out your essay shortly.

If you do end up meditating on either Spengler or else directly on the historical events and themes that he addresses, I'd certainly be interested in hearing what kinds of insights it brings you.

Re: Oswald Spengler's conceptual three-dimensionality?

[ecosophia]

1) Good! Yes, in a certain sense, that's exactly what he did. Spengler was strongly influenced by Goethe, who used to understand things in nature by studying every form a given organ or structure took in different species -- here's a bat's wing, here's a human arm, here's a whale's flipper, here's a wolf's foreleg, and all of a sudden it becomes clear that they're all variations on a common theme and can be understood in relation to that theme. Spengler did the same thing with history: here's the fall of Rome, here's the fall of Han dynasty China, and so on down the list of dying empires, and all of a sudden the same realization comes into play. That's not wholly unlike Lull's combinatorial method.

2) The approach is the same as the work. You figure out how best to meditate on something by meditating on it.

Re: Oswald Spengler's conceptual three-dimensionality?

[team10tim]

Thank you.

I did know about Goethe, because you have written about it previously. Someone in the commenteriat suggested that western civilization could have taken science in the direction of Goethe's morphological comparison instead of the reductionist scientific method. I was meditating on how/why Spengler's insights were more profound than Toynbee's even though A Study of History is much more comprehensive when all of the pieces came together.

Incidentally, I've starting writing a substack in part to improve my writing. I didn't cite you for everything because it would have been cumbersome. But I do appreciate your work, so hat tip for introducing me to Spengler, Toynbee, Twilight's Last Gleaming, the term 'senile elite,' the myth of progress, discursive meditation, and a long list other odds and ends.

Re: Oswald Spengler's conceptual three-dimensionality?

[ecosophia]

You're welcome and thank you.