ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's 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, and at this point we've reached a genuine man of mystery, Jacques de Livron Joachim de la Tour de la Casa Martinez de Pasqually. Nobody knows when Martinez de Pasqually was born or where he came from; what's known about him is that he showed up in southern France in 1754, taught an extraordinarily rich system of Gnostic esoteric philosophy and practice to a circle of pupils that included Louis-Claude de St.-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, and then sailed away to the Caribbean in 1772 and reportedly died there two years later. The image I've posted is one of the very few portraits of the man.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Good Evening,

As many of us bring our summers to a close, I hope you find chances to enjoy friends, lovely places, and any flexibility you can find in your work schedule.

To Share: I'm still working through Maria Kvilhaug's /Seed of Yggdrasill/, but we had a trip with friends this week, so instead of keeping on with my review just yet, I have a collection of some Heathen prayers I say most every day. As always, I welcome hearing how this might be helpful to you, or what works for you in the same ballpark: https://jpowellrussell.com/#a_few_daily_prayers

To Ask: For JMG and the commentariat: has anyone come across comparative treatments of the Persephone and similar myths? For example, in Germanic myth, some folks like Maria Kvilhaug have compared the myth of Idhunna's capture by Thjazi to Hades taking Persephone. If anyone has come across a discussion of similar possible parallels, most of all if it's more wide-ranging than only Persephone to one other myth, I'd be very thankful for a pointer to it. Linked to this, even a good discussion of the Persephone myth alone would be great.

As always, thanks very much to JMG and everyone else here for all that you do.

To any who will have them, I put forth my blessings and best wishes,
Jeff

I'll have to hand this one over to the commentariat, as I haven't done that much with comparative mythology.

Ah, too bad - I had hoped that you had come across some stuff in your research for The Ceremony of the Grail, given some of your comments in podcasts about links with the Eleusinian Mysteries. Thanks anyhow, and hopefully some others will have some thoughts to share,

Cheers,
Jeff

I've been looking into this after I got side-tracked on my original research on the radiotechnology component of the grail myth. There's a bunch of fascinating articles by a Russian scientist and Egyptologist Scariatin "Enel", who undertook work in the 30s and 40s on the Egyptian Mysteries. The links to those papers disappeared some months ago, but I was lucky enough to download them. My take is that the Eleusinian mysteries are a survivor of the Egyptian mysteries, and the Egyptian mysteries themselves came from a much older culture that perhaps originally developed the temple technology. These are the mysteries that Herodotus was initiated into, and of which "he said no more".

The Egyptian version has a fascinating account of pyramid grain, with substantial powers. That's where I clicked on the link to the grail, as otherwise, the concept of a "grail" at least as found in northern European accounts, is absent.

I'd be fascinated to read those papers. It's quite plausible that the Eleusinian mysteries might have come from Egypt -- the contributions of Egypt to archaic Greek culture are considerable, and usually downplayed by Western scholars.

They are out of copyright, or not ever sure they were in copyright so I can send them to you. What email address is best?

Post a comment here marked NOT FOR POSTING with an email address you use, and I'll contact you with (and from) an appropriate address.

Jeff,

You might check out "The Dream and the Underworld" by the late Jungian psychologist James Hillman if you haven't already. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you want, but he gets into various myths of the underworld as he uses it to explore dream interpretation and the like. It's a short volume.

Best of luck with your quest.

Justin Patrick Moore

Thanks very much for this! That sounds promising.

I don't have specific comparative sources for you, but the comparisons I have read in the past have been to other myths about goddesses descending to the underworld and returning.

The best known of these is the Sumerian myth of the Descent of Inanna. Samuel Noah Kramer was (I believe) the first scholar to translate it into English. I just did a search and found translations and summaries of it online. I recommend reading at least part of a translation in order to get an experience of Sumerian poetic style.

There is a Wiccan myth of this kind, first published in Witchcraft Today by Gerald B. Gardner in 1954. Here is a good link to the text with some explanatory notes https://www.ceisiwrserith.com/wicca/legendofthedescent.htm

Gardner wrote that he did not know the source or how old it is. One of my teachers has a theory that it, or its earlier source, is a Neoplatonic allegory about the soul's journey.

Careful study of Gardner's oldest surviving handwritten book of texts of "The Wica" (as he called the Witches he encountered) shows that parts--including the three degree rituals--of it were carefully copied by him from a somewhat earlier manuscript in another person's (Dafo's) calligraphic handwriting. This manuscript has the title "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical," and Gardenr seems to have begun his work on it sometime in the middle 1940s. "Inanna's Descent" was available in modern translations (in fragments) from Assyrian and Sumerian from 1914 onward, so Gardner's text could easily have been inspired by the ancient text.

I was just about to say the Descent of Inanna...although she goes of her own accord and by her own agency, rather than being abducted.

Thanks for this - I hadn't thought about Inanna, since as Illyria2001 pointed out it lacks the abduction part, and also since I was focusing on Indo-European myths. That being said, casting a wider net might turn up some interesting stuff.

And I really wouldn't have thought of a Gardnerian Wiccan myth, so thanks for that as well!

Hello Jeff! Thanks for getting my brain thinking about this.
Ok, in the Ramayana, Sita is abducted by the demon king of Lanka, Ravana. Lord Rama is assisted in her rescue by his devotee Hanuman.
Hanuman!!

::Facepalm:: I was thinking to myself "man, I wish I knew Indian myth well enough to know what a likely parallel might be there" and I didn't think about Ravana at all, despite the fact that I played Ravana in a video my friends and I made for a high school world history assignment.

Thank you very much for pointing that out!
Jeff

Glad it helped! I always enjoy your comments. And how great is it that JMG created this wonderful platform for our exchange.

Jill C

Magic Monday

Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work

Re: Daily Heathen Prayers and Question on Persephone Myth Comparative Work