![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Magic Monday
It's just shy of midnight, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. The picture is of Elias Ashmole, one of the great figures in the British tradition of alchemy. An extraordinary scholar interested in just about everything, he was among other things fascinated by alchemy, and put together and edited several important collections of English alchemical documents from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A capable astrologer, he was also one of the first people known to history who joined a lodge of stonemasons without being in the building trades, and his initiation is thus one of the early mileposts in the emergence of Freemasonry. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. 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.
I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use the button below to access my online tip jar. If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.
***This Magic Monday is now closed -- and yes, this means you. See you next week!***
water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
I have a few questions this week, if that's ok.
1) on a prior MM I asked about whether there were pitfalls to meditating my way through the elemental correspondences of the Ogham fews and coming up with my own interpretations (Answer: no, but crosscheck results with reality). This week I'm contemplating water. In the DMH you mention that Druidry has its own interpretation of water's meanings compared to other systems, so I wonder if it's problematic if my meditations lead me toward the more common ways water is understood (if it turns out that most of what I've subconsciously picked up about water comes from those other traditions) or if, in the context of Ogham, I need to more closely adhere to "druidly" understandings.
2) as I was honing my affirmation sentence, it occurred to me that a useful step (maybe?) is the "packing" of the terms I'm using, by which I mean that I carefully explored and explicated what I meant by every word in the affirmation. This allowed me to keep a pithier sentence than would've otherwise been possible had I tried to verbalize the more extensive meaning of what I'm trying to affirm. Is this an accurate take on it? So long as I KNOW what the words mean, is that what's important?
It also made me think of the mantrayana practice of using "seed syllables" that appear nonsensical but that are imbued with layers of deep meaning that practitioners "unpack" as they work with them. Someone at some point had to pack them up though, and while English is nowhere near as elegant as Sanskrit and Tibetan (it certainly doesn't lend itself to sonorous chanting in the same way), maybe we'll get there someday! Maybe that's what my prayer beads are hoping for anyway (since I'm using them for my affirmation rather than for Om mani pedme hung).
3) Can you (and other readers) point me in a direction for how to go about searching for origin and creation stories and theories that do NOT rely on the universe being created from nothing. You'd conversed with Lady Cutekitten about the Judeo-Christian belief that God created all from nothing and said not every tradition supposes the same thing - is there a term I can use to do some googling? Is this a discipline of study? I'm curious to know what's at the beginning of other traditions' beginnings.
and 4) for more research-direction assistance. Is there a Western occult tradition that works with (or considers, or philosophizes about) time? I've got a story with a main character who needs to learn the mystic or occult ways of working with time and if I don't have to invent all of such traditions out of my little newbie brain, I'd be more likely to get the story a little closer to being finished. I'm good at springboarding off of details, so if there's even just the merest hint of concepts of time in a tradition somewhere, that'd be helpful.
Likewise, is there a Western analog for Feng Shui or place/placement 'divination'? Obviously geomancy isn't the term (though some use it), but I don't know if we have such a term or practice. Do we?
Many thanks, as always.
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
2) Yes, very much so. When you've taken the time to contemplate what a word means and how it links to what you're trying to achieve, your subconscious has no trouble responding accordingly.
3) Well, how about Hesiod's Theogony, the Kojiki, and any suitable account of the Norse origin myth? More generally, what I'd recommend here is that you go pick up some volumes of mythology from your public library, choosing myths from as many different parts of the world as you can, and see what they have to say.
4) In the West, astrology serves as the esoteric science of time. The Chinese are a little more explicit about it, the I Ching being their main textbook. You might consider reading Hamlet's Mill by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend for a glimpse at the older, deeper dimension of this. As for a Western equivalent of feng-shui, we used to have one, but it's one of the things that had to be let go of when the Western occult traditions had to go into survival mode for all those years, and only a handful of scraps survive; you'll find some of them in old Greek medical writings and in Vitruvius' book on architecture.
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
2) also okay! And onward.
3) then piecemeal it is. It sounded too good to be true that there might be a survey of a sub discipline of ontology dealing with different conceptions of what's a priori the creation of all else.
4) astrology still confuses me and it's so tempting to lean toward the I Ching (for which I have great respect) as the story has a Chinese element... I'll have to mull it over as this character isn't himself Chinese and is a complete outsider to that tradition. I'll look into finding Hamlet's Mill though. Thanks for this.
Pity about our lost "feng shui."
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
(Anonymous) 2019-12-09 06:25 pm (UTC)(link)I thought your own Secrets of the Temple explored the Western ideas of placements of structure somewhat (haven't bought it yet) and I wonder if the more philosophical side of Freemasonry might have some hints, though those would presumably be as Christian in nature as the Cathedral builders were.
BoysMom
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
As for Freemasonry, there's a lot of material in the higher philosophical degrees, but unfortunately not that.
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
What's your basis for saying "the Judeo-Christian belief that God created all from nothing"?
Here is the opening of the creation story in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible. The translation I am quoting from is the 1999 Jewish Publication Society Hebrew-English Tanakh.
[Verses 1-3] "When God began to create heaven and earth--the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water--God said, 'Let there be light'' and there was light. . . ."
[Verses 6-8] "God said, 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water. ' God made the expanse, and it separated the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse Sky. . . . "
[Verses 9-10] God said, 'Let the water below the sky be gathered into one area, that the dry land may appear.' And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters He called Seas. . . "
The word here translated "water" is mayim, the ordinary Hebrew word for water. It's not some special cosmic substance.
Pretty clear statement here that there was boundless water in total darkness before the first act of Creation. Or rather than say "before", the beginning of events in time was the creation of light by divine command. Before should be in quotation marks because there were no events or separations between one thing and another to mark duration or change.
There also is a simple statement that the sky was made from the pre-existing water (which sort of makes sense since rain sometimes falls out of it). Finally, the translation of Verse 9 seems to suggest that the ground was there all the time, only covered up by the sea. I don't read Hebrew well enough to know whether that is the clear meaning of the original.
The ensuing verses say that the earth brought forth plants, animals and human beings, and the waters brought forth birds, animals, sea monsters and creeping things by divine command. The only objects mentioned in this creation story which do not arise directly or indirectly from water are the sun and the moon.
I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that the idea that God created the world from nothing arose later, perhaps under the influence of Greek philosophy.
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
Hmmm
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
(And I don't have to tell you how sloppy Christian theologians are with the exact meaning of the Hebrew text...)
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
(Anonymous) 2019-12-09 11:53 am (UTC)(link)For 3), you might want to consider looking into Bernard Haisch's The God Theory. The postulate is that the universe was not "created from nothing," but rather parceled out from infinity.
- Barrigan
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
My DW post on akasha and prana
Also, Hindu mythology says (*IIRC*) that the universe is always substance and energy, and changes form every-so-often, but there is no creation or destruction. I don't have a reference at hand for that, though, and may not be including nuances.
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
(Anonymous) 2019-12-09 04:50 pm (UTC)(link)In the beginning of God’s creation of: Heb. בְּרֵאשִית בָּרָא. This verse calls for a midrashic interpretation ... It teaches us that the sequence of the Creation as written is impossible, ... as our Rabbis stated ... But if you wish to explain it according to its simple meaning, explain it thus: “At the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, the earth was astonishing with emptiness, and darkness…and God said, ‘Let there be light.’” But Scripture did not come to teach the sequence of the Creation, to say that these came first, for if it came to teach this, it should have written:“At first (בָּרִאשׁוֹנָה) He created the heavens and the earth,” for there is no רֵאשִׁית in Scripture that is not connected to the following word, [i.e., in the construct state] [[Rashi now proceeds to give examples from the Hebrew Bible where "בָּרִאשׁוֹנָה must mean "In the beginning of" or "In beginning" the act of creation]] ... so, [if you say that Scripture indicates the order of creation] be astounded at yourself, for the water preceded, as it is written: “and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the water,” and Scripture did not yet disclose when the creation of water took place! From this you learn that the water preceded the earth. ... Perforce, you must admit that Scripture did not teach us anything about the sequence of the earlier and the later [acts of creation].
https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/8165/showrashi/true
When one picks up a modern translation of the Bible, one will sometimes read something like this:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth
which is a bit of a fudge, but then we have Rashi's reading at least footnoted
Or When God began to create [the heavens and the earth]
Rashi's initial argument is philological: What is conventionally translated "In the beginning" has to be translated, not as "in the beginning" (when there was absolutely nothing else), but as "in the beginning of" [God's creating, etc.] In short, according to a medieval Jewish authority, the Hebrew text does not support creation ex nihilo.
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
(Anonymous) 2019-12-09 06:59 pm (UTC)(link)Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time
I had a rudimentary Jewish education which from time to time I try to improve. Now that you've shown me that Chabad has put some Rashi up on the Web, I will look for it when a Biblical question comes up.
My remark about Greek influence had Maimonides in mind, but I haven't studied him, so only expressing a possibility.
One of the general differences between Judaism and Christianity (IMO) is that while Jewish scholars are ready to wring the juice from a text by discussion, speculation, storytelling, allegory, mysticism, gematria and so on, the Doctors of the Church go straight to issuing an authoritative pronouncement about things that no human being can know for sure. The reason for this, I think, is that since the destruction of the Second Temple, the organizational structure of Judaism is based primarily on collaboration, whereas the structure of churches imposed by Roman emperors was strictly hierarchical. You get hierarchies whenever a religion gets tied closely into support of the political state.
Re: water, affirmations, "in the beginning," and time