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 via slightly less evasive routes. The last two honorees, Constant Chevillon and Robert Ambelain, both received part of their many lineages from this week's honoree, Jean Bricaud. Bricaud was a student of Papus and a leading figure in the French Martinist movement, as well as a major figure in the French Gnostic church of the time. He became head of the Martinist Order on Papus' death in 1916, and played a significant role in many other alternative spiritual scenes of the time. He died in 1934.

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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.

With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, and thank you, again, for all that you do. I read with interest your recent post about your decision to re-animate a path for ordination in the UGC. At some point during the past year or so, I asked you a question about the UGC, and you recommended The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement, which I read with great interest. (I've begun to explore some new spiritual paths after a bad experience at my former Quaker meeting.)

As I read Plummer's book, (and some of the back in forth in the comments following your post) the phrase "valid apostolic succession." frequently appears. I have to wonder why this is considered important. Is it not analogous to bragging about having at least one branch in one's family tree trace back to ancient royalty? Quakers traditionally don't care about apostolic succession or even ordination, so this egalitarian background no doubt contributes to my confusion.

And I hope this question does not come across as disrespectful of the tradition. It's just that as the length of the chain (and the number of possible paths) tracing back to the original apostles continue to grow, it seems that by simple geometric progression, the number of possible paths to "valid apostolic succession" would increase tremendously and thus become less significant. Why does the idea still hold such importance, especially in a church that stresses independent, personal gnosis, not obedience to a set of rules allegedly tracing back to the year 32 AD? If I understand correctly, gnosis is not something handed down like a spiritual baton, which is how I'm stuck in thinking about apostolic succession. Thank you JMG.

[ecosophia]

It's not about rules. Apostolic succession is a transmission of energy -- an empowerment. If passed on in the traditional manner, it makes it considerably easier to experience and transmit certain spiritual states which are conducive to gnosis. Is it possible to reach those states without apostolic succession? Sure, but if you have it, they're easier to attain and much easier to communicate to others.

Quakers, like so many of the movements that came out of the radical end of the Reformation, rejected apostolic succession and traditional ceremonial because it was so deeply tangled up in the power trips of the early modern Papacy and church hierarchy. That's understandable, but from a perspective within the independent sacramental movement (ISM), they threw out a treasure because they didn't like what had been done with the box that contains it. The whole point of the ISM is that it's possible to restore apostolic succession and the sacraments to what, from a Gnostic perspective, they once were: channels of power and blessing instituted by the Divine to assist us in the work of attaining gnosis.