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Magic Monday
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. Both of the last two honorees, and most of the other Martinist lineages in existence, were also taught and influenced by this man, Robert Ambelain, a prolific writer and occult scholar whose work extended from astrology and Freemasonry to Druidry and Martinism. Ambelain was born in 1907; he became an astrologer in the 1920s, proceeded to become a major figure in the Martinist scene and a bishop in one of the French Gnostic churches, played a central role in reviving several defunct occult orders, published 42 books, and earned the Croix de Guerre for his service to France during the Second World War. He died in 1997.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
If you ever want to see a mainstream US Christian squirm, ask them about the story of Jesus and the rich young man... IMO that passage is right at the heart of what it means to be a Christian, but it is also extremely difficult for most Christians (myself included!).
It's fair to ask, when somebody makes generalizations about "Christianity" (Girard or anybody else), which Christianity they're talking about-- There are a bunch of them, they all claim to be the "real" one, and they don't all believe the same things, emphasize the same things, or practice the same things.
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
That said, even in Orthodoxy, it's not like we're all *good* Christians. It's a process we're engaged in, not a destination we've arrived at. Real Christianity is whatever the saints are doing. The rest of us aren't there yet.
The relevant question is: which Christianity is Girard talking about? Medieval Catholicism? Modern US Protestantism? Eastern Christianity? Christianity as it affected law and culture in late medieval to early modern Europe? Christianity under the Turkish yoke? Zwingli in Geneva? Luther? The church itself, or just its influence on governments and culture? It's quite irritating to be included in blanket generalizations about "Christianity" by people who are really only talking about... Western Europe since the 8th century? Maybe?
I don't want to motte-and-bailey the thing, but... it is helpful to be more specific than just "Christian"... particularly as most people, when they make such generalizations, are talking about Catholicism in Europe or Protestantism in the US (the rebellions teenage child of Catholicism in Europe), since those are the two largest cultural influences in the western world, that can be termed Christian. But they're not the same thing. I'll not be the first to point out that churches in America, Catholic and Protestant alike, tend to resemble each other more than they resemble any of their Euro forbears. So is that "Christianity" or is that more properly termed "Americanism"? I notice people who make blanket claims about Christianity almost never mention the Pentarchy-- Rome and Jerusalem if you're lucky, but never Alexandria, Antioch, or Constantinople. "Oh they got conquered by the Muslims so they're not culturally relevant" is a valid argument I guess, but once you edit out every part of Christendom that isn't culturally relevant by current Euro-centric political dominance standards, what are you actually talking about? It's a subset-- yes, the most politically dominant subset as of the current year (but not as of 450AD) and in the English-dominated world, but still... be more specific? Orthodox are a bit tired of being blamed for the inquisition. Murder of Hypatia? Totally fair. Inquisition? No. That wasn't us. Crusades? They fracking sacked Constantinople. Nuff said.
Are we just talking about people who claim the Bible as their sacred text? That'd be the broadest possible definition. While there are certain very, very broad things that maybe can be said about "judeo-christian culture"-- I'm not sure any of them apply to the whole swath of Bible-readers out there, and more often than not, sweeping claims about judeo-christian culture veer into subtly or overtly racist territory, using "Christianity" as a basis for making claims about the superiority of Europeans over everybody else (imagine Copts in north Africa looking across the Mediterranean going "uhhh... what?"), as though the religion had come from Helsinki or Dublin, and was the gift of Europe to the rest of the world.
It's a bit like... say you're part of a huge family, all of whom have the same surname, "McCracker", right out to sixth cousins who live on another continent and whom you've never met. But because you have the same last name, you're guilty-by-association of absolutely everything your same-surname relatives have ever done, and perhaps also get unwarranted credit for stuff they've done. Possibly, you'd prefer that people specify what branch of the family, when saying things about what the "McCrackers" have done.
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
My apologies if my question was overly broad! Hanging out around here has certainly shown me that there's a lot of variety in "Christianity."
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion
Girard... eh. I did mention potlach cultures below. They seem to have solved the problem independently. I'm not convinced that Christianity-- the Bible adopting cultures/religions-- really did solve it though. Certainly it's something we work on, but with varying degrees of individual success.
From what I've read of the witch-burning trend, it had quite a lot to do with envy, and perhaps not that much to do with witchcraft. I've read fairly convincing arguments that it may have been, at least in some places, *primarily* about punishing members of the community who were perceived to have either gained wealth at the expense of the community, or gained wealth and not fulfilled an obligation to share largesse with the community (eg inheritance, business success). Ill-gotten gains, improperly hoarded. Envy. Moderns naturally read this as irrational, because we tend not to band together and murder people for not sharing the wealth... but I don't think Christianity can be the explanation for either the witch-burning or the lack of it, in that case. I'd sooner credit geographic and social mobility for the decline in neighbor-on-neighbor violence. When people stop living their whole lives within 10 miles of where they were born, knowing the same people all the while... the Joneses don't loom so large. You might move away from them eight or ten times-- voila! Now you don't have to kill them. There are some downsides to that, of course, but maybe that's one of the pluses?
Re: Effects of Shipping Costs and Girardian Memetic Contagion