Magic Monday
Aug. 27th, 2023 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
It's nearly 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've been tracing my lineages back as far as I can, and last week took my Martinist lineage back as far as they can be documented. The next step -- and it's the last step in the entire process -- involves a fair bit of speculation, but it's speculation backed up by some evidence. It's been suggested by some historians, Marsha Keith Schuchard foremost among them, that the mysterious Knight of the Red Feather who conferred the Templar lineage on Baron von Hund, last week's honoree, was none other than Charles Stuart, the Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scottish song and story. The claim is that in the years immediately before 1745, when the House of Stuart made its last (and disastrously unsuccessful) attempt to reclaim the British throne, Charles and his inner circle of supporters used various forms of clandestine Freemasonry to raise funds, engage in espionage, and gather arms and supporters for the planned rising. Baron von Hund's initiation was an incident in that process. Martinez de Pasqually, who was honored a couple of weeks back, also claimed to have a charter signed by Charles Stuart as the basis for his occult Masonic order. So it's possible that what lies behind one of the great traditions of Western occultism is a failed political intrigue that got picked up and repurposed by a couple of canny occultists. Stranger things have happened in the history of occultism.
...And with this, the rambling tale of the odd lineages that I've inherited comes to an end. Now I'll have to think of something else to use as illustrations to Magic Mondays!
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
***Please note -- when Magic Monday is closed, IT'S CLOSED. I just had to delete a flurry of attempted comments posted up to eleven hours after I shut things down. I do need some time to write and do other online chores, you know, so please don't keep trying to post after 12:00 am Monday night/Tuesday morning -- there'll be a new Magic Monday in a week, you know. ***
Eye of the Tiger
Date: 2023-08-28 04:03 am (UTC)A few years ago a stuffed animal came into my possession. It was a gift from my out of state mother to my oldest daughter, who wasn’t much more than 2 years old at the time. It was a green cat with a striped pink tail, flowers embroidered on its side, it was, in a word, odd.
As my daughter grew, more and more toys accumulated in our living room. One day, my wife told her that if she wants new toys, some old toys have to go. A bag was put together and to my surprise, the green cat was included. I normally love taking donations to Salvation Army but this time I was hesitant, I felt a Toy Story type of sadness. I should have trusted my instincts for it wasn’t long after that trip, my daughter started asking for the green cat. My wife and mother in-law would dodge the question. When I had enough of that and stated the truth, it was tears and sadness.
I searched online for the same cat with absolutely no luck. I ran back to Salvation Army, discovered their second floor but no green cat. In my searches online, I came across a very charming tiger, a Dream Pet from 1977. I was hypnotized and beyond certain that this new toy could replace the old. The purchase was an ordeal and in retrospect, possibly my first sign. The wait was only a few days but it felt much longer. When the tiger showed up in a repurposed cereal box, I felt triumphant. When my mother in-law saw it, it was an emphatic NO, do not gift that to our baby.
To the Chinese, the tiger represents too much power, he is also considered a guide to the dead. To have such a thing in your possession, you have to be stronger than the force it represents. According to the rough translation I was given, to exert a stronger will can bring great benefit, to be weaker brings misfortune.
For now, my planned surprise gift is no more. That night, after my disappointment, my neighbors cat startled me with her glowing eyes at our back door. I put the tiger up in my office/laundry room and sure enough, a light popped out, and the kitty litter went flying while I was cleaning the box.
Next day I saw a tiger on my daughters iPad and not long after that she had a tummy ache. At this point I’m about to acquiesce and let the tiger go. But before I do, I consider this episode a challenge.
My question is, what practice makes one’s will stronger than a tiger? Meditation, SoP? Any thoughts are appreciated.
Re: Eye of the Tiger
Date: 2023-08-28 04:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 04:08 am (UTC)You've mentioned the The Druid Magic Handbook and the Golden Section Fellowship are compatible. Does this mean one could do any of the workings you would do in an open grove from the The Druid Magic Handbook in a lodge of the Golden Section Fellowship instead? I know the DMH says grove rituals from other traditions can be used, but I don't know if that counts the GSF lodge., although there is mention of groves being similar to lodges in the book.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 04:16 am (UTC)The Line of Work for the WotGS
Date: 2023-08-28 04:23 am (UTC)I’m getting excited about my results with the WotGS. You mentioned last week, I think, that magic could be a part of this Way.
1. Will your upcoming two GS books incorporate some magic instruction?
2. Will they include work on higher bodies and/or the higher self (I would love this)?
I was reading a book on Tarot by an early theosophist, and he implied that magic was the evocation of spirits, and alchemy was work with the elements.
3. Does so-called High Magic do much summoning of spirits?
Thanks! I’m grateful for your efforts to help us every week!
Take care.
A Lodge
Date: 2023-08-28 04:29 am (UTC)I have been doing the SoP without ever opening or closing the Lodge.
Is the establishment of a Lodge necessary or helpful for Work? Especially later on in one’s path?
Re: The Line of Work for the WotGS
Date: 2023-08-28 04:32 am (UTC)2) Yes, though that's primarily in the third volume, The Way of the Secret Temple. The energy work included in the initiate's version of the Sphere of Protection in the book you've got is preliminary to that.
3) Theosophists were obsessed by the notion that magic was all about evoking spirits. They were quite wrong, and a good close reading of Eliphas Lévi would have taught them that, but they weren't listening. No, the evocation of spirits is not very important in high magic. It's something you can do with the tools of high magic, but there are many other ways to do practical magic with those tools; in terms of the core of high magic, the work of self-transformation, the only spirit you're working with is your own higher self.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 04:32 am (UTC)I'm learning the Essene way of forming an SoP and have a technical question. Forming a sphere consists of 7 steps. I am clear on steps 1,2,3,6 and 7. I understand step 4 - breathe out 7 times seeing the light slowly expanding until it surrounds you. Step 5 says, "Each time you breathe in, feel the unconditional love of the universe filling you." Is #5 talking about the same 7 breaths as #4? Breathe in feeling love, breathe out to expand the light, do one set of 7. Is that correct?
Kirsten
Re: A Lodge
Date: 2023-08-28 04:33 am (UTC)Re: The Line of Work for the WotGS
Date: 2023-08-28 04:35 am (UTC)Can you please recommend a good introductory book on high magic?
I appreciate it!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 04:37 am (UTC)Re: The Line of Work for the WotGS
Date: 2023-08-28 04:40 am (UTC)https://octagonsociety.org/archives/fhr/
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 04:42 am (UTC)Do you know where Waite got his card meanings for the Minor Arcana from for his deck? Before his deck, almost all decks over the past few hundred years didn't have detailed images for the Minor Arcana. The Sola Busca deck did, and Waite may have been influenced by those Minor Arcana, but it isn't like the card meanings would have been so easy to decipher. In his creation of his deck and in his Pictorial Key to Tarot, do you know how he came up with those card meanings for the Minor Arcana?
I find reading Waite a bit difficult to totally get exactly what he is trying to say sometimes, perhaps I am just not smart enough, maybe there is some British humor I am not fully getting like when he rags on other occultists in that book. HAHA What is that? But from what I gather from his Pictorial Key to the Tarot book, unlike others during his time, he didn't see the Tarot deck as coming from any ancient occult school such as from Egypt, nor did he think it had any true relation to the Qaballah. This surprised me as I would have thought him of all people, were fully into this idea of Tarot being a version of the Qaballah, some ancient wisdom from Atlantis or Gypsies or something. but if he just saw it as the true origin being just a card game, I suppose the Qaballistic framework of the cards, which many occultists of this type of occult system tend to follow, ironically the Rider-Waite deck would not have been designed like this, right? That's funny.
Thank you for your time!
Orphic Hymn to Apollo for SATB Chorus
Date: 2023-08-28 04:44 am (UTC)The score on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TWMhkzS_5w
Download sheet music at the Musescore notation site:
https://musescore.com/user/59410345/scores/11955949
Re: Orphic Hymn to Apollo for SATB Chorus
Date: 2023-08-28 04:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 05:05 am (UTC)2) Waite was up to his eyeballs in the bitter quarrels that tore the British occult scene apart at the beginning of the 20th century; he was a Christian mystic and was dead set against the practice of magic; and his ragging on other occultists was motivated by both of those. If you have trouble understanding Waite, don't fret about it -- he was one of the worst writers of his time, and never could say anything in a single short word where a sesquipedalian sequence of periphrastically obfuscatory syntactical assemblages would do. ;-)
3) The tarot deck was invented in Italy around 1415 by Marziano da Tortona, secretary to the Duke of Milan. That's been known by European art historians for more than a century, and it's frankly embarrassing that so many occultists in the English-speaking world never got the memo. That doesn't mean it was originally just an ordinary game. It came out of Renaissance Italian intellectual culture, which was saturated with occultism, and was devised as a game that the children of the aristocracy could play, and in the process absorb the effects of magical images. Waite was fluent enough in European languages that he knew about the real origin of the tarot, which is why he didn't buy into the usual stuff about Egypt or Atlantis or what have you.
4) Not at all. The Rider-Waite deck is Cabalistic from top to bottom; it was created for Waite's own magical order, the Rectified Order of the Golden Dawn. Remember that Renaissance Italy was where the Cabala was first adopted by magicians outside the Jewish community. Later on, after Waite's first order blew up, he launched another order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, and had another artist, John Trinick, make a different set of images for the tarot trumps. You can find some images of the Trinick deck here:
https://mythcrafts.com/2019/05/21/a-e-waites-second-tarot-the-waite-trinick-deck/
Weight/scope of daily geomancy readings
Date: 2023-08-28 05:21 am (UTC)I'm also experiencing having my interpretation of a daily reading that seems like a slam dunk turning out to be flat wrong. (Ex: on day 3 of my son not being brought to me for parenting time, I figured Aquisito in 1,5; Puer in 4,9; Puella in 9,12; and Albus in 7 with Fortuna Major as the judge seemed like a sure sign of his being returned to me. That instead happened the next day.) How did I read that so wrongly?
Also, what does it look like in a daily chart when something really big is happening? I'm seeing where Carcer in 8 is accompanied by my feeling painfully, achingly alone, but nothing bigger than that. I'm also seeing a chart dominated by one or two positive figures, where nothing really appears to happen that day.
Having learned musical instruments and languages, I know progress comes in fits, starts, and plateaus. Is this a sign I need to begin the discursive meditation described in the text? Did I just answer my own question? Probably.
My most profuse thanks to you, JMG, for your prodigious writings and research, and providing us this forum for exchange.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 05:31 am (UTC)1) Is there any literature Waite could have drawn upon for his Minor Arcana card meanings you could point me to?
2) That's a good one! I feel when I read Waite I am following a deep plot, excited for the great reveal and then after the plot unfolds, I am not sure what the reveal was. It's funny how he will give a compliment but then be like, "yeah but this guy had no clue what he was talking about". He was "was dead set against the practice of magic"? WOW!
3) Do we know for certain that there weren't Tarot decks before that deck in 1415, or maybe in some other part of the world that is lost to time? I thought the oldest deck we have access to was the Sola Busca one?
4) In the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Waite pretty much debunks it had ancient origins, "it has no history prior to the fourteenth century, when the first rumours, were heard concerning cards." He says his deck is a "rectified" deck. He sure likes that word, "rectified", huh? So is it accurate to say that he did not believe any Qabalah link with Tarot, so he made his deck to be a Cabalistic deck? That would make more sense. I am guessing here he is basically saying Levi and Court de Gebelin didn't really know their stuff well enough to make any kind of Cabalistic claim with the Tarot, "The Tarot and the de Gebelin hypothesis he took into his heart of hearts, and all occult France and all esoteric Britain, Martinists, half-instructed Kabalists, schools of soi disant theosophy--there, here and everywhere--have accepted his judgment about it with the same confidence as his interpretations of those great classics of Kabalism which he had skimmed rather than read."
Cool pencil drawn images on those crds in the link you gave me.
Thank you a lot for your time and great responses here!
Puppy vision
Date: 2023-08-28 05:45 am (UTC)My stepdaughter is having her first baby this October and is coming home to live with us as the dead-beat Dad wants nothing to do with the baby he has engendered.
Because of a number of tragedies in my childhood involving a niece given up for adoption at the age of 6 months by my teenaged big sister and that sister's suicide in our house a couple of year later, I have never been keen on babies. I was only 10 when she died.
I was surgically sterilized as a young woman because I was so afraid of getting pregnant and I have never wanted a baby.
A couple of months ago, my husband and I were in the local town, sitting in a little park eating a picnic. I said, "Next year, we can bring our kid here to play on the swings."
A moment later, a very young small puppy came racing up the hill toward us. The puppy was all whiskers and enthusiasm. I saw the puppy very clearly and it was acting like a normal puppy. It shot under our picnic table and I looked under the table because I wanted to pet the puppy. It was not there. It had vanished.
I have seen visions but usually in dreams or on waking but this puppy happened in broad daylight. Since then, I have started to think the baby might be like a puppy, that it might be fun and nice.
Do you have any thoughts on the matter?
Maxine
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 06:01 am (UTC)2) Reading Waite is like getting one scene out of one of those really complicated novels where there are dozens of conflicts among the characters, and you don't have any way of knowing what they are!
3) There's zero evidence for any earlier tarot, and documents from the period indicate that Marziano da Tortona invented it. Sometimes it really is that simple. The Sola Busca deck was created around 1490 -- there are quite a few tarot decks older than it is.
4) What Waite is saying is that the tarot didn't start out Cabalistic. (I think he was wrong, because the Cabala was well known in early 15th century Italy.) It became Cabalistic when people like Lévi, Oswald Wirth, and Waite himself reworked the deck so that the symbolism fit the Cabala. Waite was bitterly jealous of Lévi, by the way, thus the smack he laid down in that quote -- Lévi had access to Frankist Cabalistic teachings from Poland by way of his teacher Hoene Wronski, which Waite didn't have access to, and that's what's behind Waite's insistence that Lévi didn't know Cabala.
Re: Weight/scope of daily geomancy readings
Date: 2023-08-28 06:05 am (UTC)2) The most common mistake made by students of any divination system is taking a reading to mean something much bigger than it actually is. How often do really big things actually happen to you?
3) Yes, I think you just answered your own question. ;-) Some people also find, however, that geomantic readings are inaccurate on certain subjects for them; my wife, for example, is a very talented geomancer, but her readings on any subject having to do with money and income reliably turn out inaccurate.
Re: Puppy vision
Date: 2023-08-28 06:05 am (UTC)(Publish at your Discretion) blog promotion included.
Date: 2023-08-28 06:09 am (UTC)I’m looking for answers about a subject I am definitely ignorant of.
I’m mostly Gurdjieffian and Tibetan Buddhist in orientation and have devised a personal approach to higher self development which you can find here:
to-be-able.blogspot.com
I am excited to incorporate the WotGS in my path. I love that the SoP works with the elements, but I am looking forward to work on the higher self, too.
My own approach (in the blog) basically identifies the higher self with the higher bodies: astral, mental, and divine in Gurdjieff’s system. Work on perfecting the higher bodies is the same as work on one’s self. In my next blog installment I plan on addressing the aspect of mind, as viewed by the Tibetans.
Interested in your thoughts on the blog, and its relevance to the GS system…
All the Best
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 06:23 am (UTC)1) If Waite's Minor Arcana meanings were influenced by Golden Dawn and Golden Dawn's Minor Arcana Meanings were influenced by Book T who I believe was written by McKenzie, I am still curious whomever wrote the Book T, where he got his Minor Arcana card meanings from.
2) Classic! You said Waite was against magic, so Divination with the Tarot Waite would not consider Magic I take it.
3) Great info, thanks! I take it you do not subscribe to the theory put forth by Wilfred Houdouin that the Tarot of Marseille was designed under the geometry of the Metatron Cube. I guess humans see what they want to see.
http://tarot-de-marseille-millennium.com/english/#:~:text=The%20Tarot%20of%20Marseille%20is,world%2C%20translating%20a%20universal%20cosmology
4) So interesting! Waite had all this wisdom but still had such strong negative emotions. Maybe there is some old British humor in the beat downs he has in that book that comes with the Tarot decks. It is amusing.
Thanks a million!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-08-28 06:24 am (UTC)1. Do we know the causal force behind the relationship between Zodiac sign and personality? For instance, someone close to me is a Capricorn and fits the bill 110%. Do the stars "cause" this? Or is it something else? E.g. souls wanting to experience the Capricorn personality somehow all get assigned to certain birthdates beforehand?
2. Do marriages have any sort of continuation post-death? Does the bond between two people persist in any way?
Thanks so much.