Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is almost here, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.2 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.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week.  This was my fifty-righth published book, and the last contribution (so far) to the Cthulhu mythos to come from my keyboard. I hadn't planned on writing The Seal of Yueh Lao at all, but there were too many loose ends left hanging when I'd wrapped up The Weird of Hali, and this story took shape as I considered them. It's the shortest of my tentacle novels, a quiet little coming-of-age story with Asenath Merrill, the oldest daughter of the central character of The Weird of Hali, as its protagonist, and a tangled web of events borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers for its mainspring. All in all, it worked surprisingly well. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.

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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, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

[ecosophia]

Delighted to hear this!

Yes, especially here in the US, Pragmatism is an often unrecognized core in our alternative spiritual traditions. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but The Varieties of Religious Experience was the textbook I had to study prior to ordination in the Universal Gnostic Church, the oddball fringe church in which (until a few days ago) I was the one remaining active bishop.

There have been periods in American occultism in which the usual dubious claims of ancient roots were brandished around much too freely, but these days it's quite common -- and not just in the Druid Revival -- for people to admit freely that what we're practicing is rooted in the 18th century, or the late Renaissance, or the magical revival kickstarted by Eliphas Lévi, or even some more recent period. What matters, after all, is not "how old is it?" but "does it work?"

[(Anonymous)]

I was not aware of that! That is absolutely fascinating. Apologies for my ignorance, but the Universal Gnostic Church... this is a distinct organization from the Gnostic Celtic Church that's associated with the AODA? I would love to know more, as I don't think I'm done writing papers on this topic -- my professor seems very enthusiastic about what I wrote in the first one.

My paper was largely a response to thinkers like Loyal Rue and Bron Taylor, who say they are very interested in understanding and developing religious responses to the way that humanity is currently living wildly out of sync with the natural world, but who also seem rather content to ignore the work that's already been done towards that end in movements like the Druid Revival. My argument was essentially that, not only does Druidry have a massive head start on what they say they want, but also that the way its accomplished this head start - especially in recent decades - seems (to me at least) to be rooted in the kind of Jamesian Pragmatism that you exemplify in the Coelbren book.

Thank you very much again!

Ryan M.

[ecosophia]

The Universal Gnostic Church is the source from which the Gnostic Celtic Church was derived. It's one of many little independent sacramental churches in the Western world these days. You can learn more than you want to know about it in these posts of mine:

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/238538.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/239168.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/240034.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/240647.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/241528.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/242234.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/243016.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/244182.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/245490.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/246145.html
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/248074.html

Loyal Rue -- now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. His book Amythia was important in the development of my thought, though not in a way I think he'd appreciate. His insistence that modern people suffer from a toxic lack of myths was one of the things that helped me grasp how the narrative of progress has become our culture's great mythos, with faith in progress as our established religion. (I wrote about this in my books A World Full of Gods and After Progress.)

More generally, he also helped me grasp the poverty of a purely naturalistic view of religion, and helped me grapple with the way that modern perspectives on religion generally are crippled by the failure to deal with the hard fact that religion is first and foremost as the body of human knowledge and practice about dealing with gods -- whatever those commonly experienced but poorly understood phenomena might be. It was from watching his gyrations, and those of several other writers, that I realized any study of religion that ignores gods is like a study of hunting that insists that game animals cannot exist, and then tries to explain what people are doing with bows and guns out there in the woods during that ritual period known as "deer season."

Mind you, I don't recommend trying to tell this to your professor! Anthropolatry is far too mandatory in the modern academy for that to be a good idea.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, many thanks for these links! I'll be certain to read them.

Loyal Rue is a fascinating figure to me. He's useful in academic contexts, as his stances anger no one so much as the members of the academy who insist that religion is a relic from the past that humanity ought to move on from. And his functional definition of religion is helpful for showing how consumerism is also an established religion in the West -- something he himself goes to great lengths to do. But I can absolutely see why he had the impact on you that he did. His arguments that religion is something evolutionarily hardwired into humans, with benefits for both the individual and society -"By the power of myth I become whole and we become one" as he says in the book of his we were assigned to read this semester - is compelling to me, and as I said, it's helpful for arguing back against those who think humanity is destined to jettison religion just as soon as the Enlightenment finally takes... but he never makes the next step of asking "yes, but *why* did we evolve to be religious beings?" Too much to ask him to take the disciplinary leap from religious studies to theology, I suppose...

I've just purchased "A World Full of Gods" for my Kindle, and I'll look forward to starting it later tonight! Many thanks again for both this conversation and our previous one.

Warmly,
Ryan M.

[slclaire]

The Universal Gnostic Church (UGC) and the Gnostic Celtic Church (GCC) are distinct but related independent sacramental churches. Briefly, the UGC grew out of the efforts of three dissident ministers in the Universalist Church who left that church before the Unitarian-Universalist merger and started the UGC. Each of them eventually received consecration and apostolic succession. One of the three, Matthew Shaw, became a member of and then the fourth Grand Archdruid of AODA, and he consecrated ex offico AODA's other archdruids of the time, so that the UGC became a sister order to AODA. They in turn passed on consecration and apostolic succession to later archdruids, including JMG when he became Grand Archdruid and me when I became Archdruid of Water.

While JMG was Grand Archdruid of AODA, he and the other archdruids created the Gnostic Celtic Church, a daughter church of the UGC specifically (and only) for AODA members, with rituals adapted to the spiritual expressions of AODA. You can find out more about GCC here: https://aoda.org/aoda-structure/gnostic-celtic-church-gcc/teachings-of-the-gcc/

JMG has recently revived the UGC as an online seminary. You'll find more info here: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/universal+gnostic+church. I've recently completed the curriculum and have been awarded the title of bishop in the UGC, as you'll see in one of the entries. I'm also a priest in the GCC.

If you want to know more, email me: purpconegrp (the usual sign) gmail.com

Bishop Claire

[(Anonymous)]

Bishop Claire, thank you very much for this very helpful explanation and these links to more! I may very well take you up on your kind offer to email... was the dissidence of Matthew Shaw and his colleagues specifically about the UU merger, or about some other issue? This is all incredibly interesting to me, both as a practicing Druid and as someone interested in the academic study of religion.

Warmly,
Ryan M.

[slclaire]

According to the Gnostic Celtic Church Manual (available on Amazon) that JMG wrote for the GCC, the very limited documentation that survives from the UGC's origin doesn't include the specific reasons for the split. It's likely that the prospective merger had a lot to do with it because other Universalists are known to have expressed dissatisfaction with the prospective merger and some of them left their church when the merger took place.

Bishop Claire