Toward Ecosophy

A few days ago I spent some time reading Dion Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine, looking for material to help explain polarity magic -- yes, I've got a manuscript on that subject in process. In the process, though, I reread a section that might just explain the weirdness of the times in which we live.

Some background will be necessary. In Fortune's cosmology there are seven Cosmic planes. Our solar system, and every other star system in the universe known to astronomers, is on the seventh of these planes.  The six other planes are composed of varieties of matter our senses cannot detect -- yes, it's been pointed out that this corresponds rather closely to the "dark matter" today's cosmologists have to postulate in order to explain the results of their experiments. (Fortune got there first -- The Cosmic Doctrine was originally written, and circulated in mimeographed form, in the 1920s.)

The other six Cosmic planes have their own star systems.  These, like the systems in our plane, are seen as revolving around a common center, which Fortune calls the Central Stillness. The attraction of the Central Stillness holds the whole vast system in balance, in the same way that the gravitational attraction of the sun holds the solar system in balance. In Fortune's cosmology, of course, we are not just talking about astrophysics, but spirituality as well, so the balance in question is spiritual -- and it affects the intelligent inhabitants of any planet that happens to have them.

Here's where the complexity comes in. The Cosmic planes aren't actually separate in space -- they're all present right where you're sitting now -- but it helps schematically to think of the other planes as closer to the Central Stillness than our seventh plane is. When a star system of one of the other planes passes between our solar system and the Central Stillness, metaphorically speaking, it replaces the influence of the Central Stillness with its own attraction, and things get weird.

You can tell which Cosmic plane is the source of the disruption, in turn, by paying attention to which of the sub-planes here in the seventh Cosmic plane get shaken up. There's a straightforward correspondence between Cosmic planes and sub-planes:

First Cosmic plane --> Upper spiritual plane, governing relations with the Divine
Second Cosmic plane --> Lower spiritual plane, governing relations with meanings and ideals
Third Cosmic plane --> Upper mental plane, governing abstract thinking
Fourth Cosmic plane --> Lower mental plane, governing concrete thinking
Fifth Cosmic plane --> Upper astral plane, governing the emotions and the arts
Sixth Cosmic plane --> Lower astral plane, governing the passions
Seventh Cosmic plane --> Physical plane, the realm of physical and etheric matter

With this in mind it's not too hard to sketch out what might be happening.

First, sometime around 1900 a star system on the fifth Cosmic plane got close enough to our solar system to start having a disruptive influence. It was after this that the arts abandoned millennia of focus on beauty and started pursuing deliberate ugliness instead; it's also when a lot of human relationships started getting problematic in odd ways. People's aesthetic and emotional lives got very strange and stayed there.

Second, sometime around 2016 a star system on the second Cosmic plane did the same thing. It was after this that a great many people suddenly lost the ability to relate their actions and words to their supposed ideals -- when civil libertarians started rejecting the idea of free speech, people who'd spent years insisting that natural healing methods were better than corporate medicine turned on a dime and insisted that everyone had to get the latest and most inadequately tested product of Big Pharma, Green parties in Europe abandoned their longstanding pacifism and started baying for war with Russia, and so on.  People's grasp of meaning and value got very strange and stayed there.

My working guess is that the first process peaked sometime in the early 1960s and has been fading out since then -- it's not accidental, in other words, that modern art remains stuck in place only because of institutional inertia, and most of the really interesting new trends in art and music involve returning to classic technique and its forms. My guess is that the second process, which is much faster because it's on a higher plane, peaked sometime in 2021-2022, and has just started to fade out -- though I'm less certain of this.

This is a hypothesis from which predictions can be made.  If I'm right about the first part, the collapse of interest in what used to be modern art will accelerate in the years to come, and nearly all of what's been produced during the Age of Ugliness will be stuck in warehouses if it isn't simply consigned to dumpsters. Older forms of art and music will be revived by new artistic movements, and everyone will shake their heads and wonder what they were thinking back then.

If I'm right about the second part, we're going to hear a spreading silence when it comes to the extreme claims and actions of the last few years. As the influence of the second Cosmic plane system passes off, a good many people will be embarrassed and shamed by their actions; human nature being what it is, most of them will do their best to pretend that it never happened, and may respond with frantic rage when their behavior gets brought up.  If the consequences of those actions turn out to be as bad as some of them seem to be, that may make things very, very brittle for a while. But of course we'll just have to wait and see.

I have several more books in my get-to stack for these posts, and will get to them shortly -- well, in and among all my other projects! -- but here's one that definitely deserves a shout-out. Most of my readers will be familiar by now with the writings of Dion Fortune, aka Violet Mary Firth. Not many people are familiar with the writings of her teacher, the remarkable Dr. Theodore Moriarty. (No, not that Dr. Moriarty -- though I'm waiting for a Sherlock Holmes fanfic to make that equation someday.)

Moriarty was the original of Fortune's fictional character Dr. Taverner, the hero of her occult detective short stories. (That's him below on the right, with two friends.) He was one of the least publicity-hungry British occult teachers of his day, and he never published a book during his own lifetime, but several book-length collections of his lectures were circulated in typescript among his students. Those have been hot properties in the occult scene for a good long time now. Fortunately some of his most important writings have just been published. Here's the blurb:

"Now available in print for the first time, The Mystery of Man by Theodore Moriarty.

"Theodore Moriarty (1873-1923) was Dion Fortune's first esoteric teacher, and is widely believed to have been the real-life inspiration behind the protagonist of her collection of short stories, The Secrets of Doctor Taverner. Approaching the centenary of his death, Holythorn Press is delighted to announce the first-time publication of The Mystery of Man, containing selected lectures from Moriarty's course for his private students as well as an extensive introduction by the editors.

"Covering Evolution, Anthropology, Psychology and Comparative Religion from an esoteric standpoint, these lectures are complex and profound, and will be of interest to students of Theosophy, Hermetics, Rosicrucianism and Esoteric Psychology. In addition, they are of special relevance to students of Dion Fortune and the Western Mystery Tradition.

"The detailed introduction by James North explains the background and context to Moriarty's philosophy, their connection with Dion Fortune's teachings and the question of their continuing relevance today. The editors have also endeavoured to correct the misinformation about Moriarty's biography and give a fuller account of the facts of Moriarty’s life, his work as an alternative healer, and his esoteric school."

Interested? You can get a copy here.

One of the interesting concepts you'll find in the writings of occultist Dion Fortune is the concept that every action leaves a "track in space" that tends to pull other actions along its own course. Usually that doesn't accomplish much, but when an action is repeated over and over again, the "track in space" becomes very deeply rutted and begins to exert an appreciable influence on any action moving in more or less the same notional direction.

(Yes, this is another way of talking about the concept of morphogenetic fields that Rupert Sheldrake introduced in his book A New Science of Life. The parallels are exact enough that I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that Sheldrake had studied Fortune's The Cosmic Doctrine -- though it may instead just have been a matter of her concepts forming a track in space that he followed...) 

At any rate, the concept we're discussing has highly practical applications in occultism, and I've recently had the pleasant experience of encountering one of them. 

Longtime readers of mine know that several years back, as a result of one of those absurd series of chance discoveries you couldn't get away with in a novel. I finally located a 19th-century Welsh book that gave the symbolic meanings of the Coelbren of the Bards, the quasi-runic magical alphabet created by eccentric Welsh genius Iolo Morganwg for his revival of Welsh Bardic and Druid traditions. Of course I turned that discovery into a book, The Coelbren Alphabet -- that's what writers do, you know ;-) -- but in the process I made myself a set of Coelbren sticks and spent a while casting divinations with them, to make sure I understood the Coelbren oracle and could explain it to readers. My experience with the Coelbren at that time was that it made a decent divination system, fairly clear and accurate, but not really exceptional -- for example, I got about the same level of clarity and accuracy from it that I got from Ogham divinations. (Admittedly I've done a lot of Ogham and get good results with it.) 

Fast forward three years. Earlier this month, I finished up a cycle of work with my forthcoming Sacred Geometry Oracle and the spiritual practices connected with it, and returned to the Coelbren and the system of Druidical magic I introduced in The Celtic Golden Dawn. (I've got some serious projects in process for that system -- more on this later.) That involved using the Coelbren again for daily divinations -- and I ended up blinking in surprise, because every morning's divination was crisp, instantly readable, accurate, and relevant, more so than just about any oracle I've worked with. Mileages vary, of course, but that's been my experience. 

Obviously this didn't happen because I'd been doing lots of practice with it. Instead, I think it's a matter of tracks in space. During the time I spent doing Coelbren divinations earlier, the Coelbren was practically forgotten, and as far as I can tell nobody anywhere was using the old meanings John Williams ab Ithel put in the rare book of his that I found. Since then, my book has come out, and it's had modest but decent sales -- so there have been some thousands of people casting and interpreting Coelbren readings, laying down tracks in space. Chalk one up for Dion Fortune and Rupert Sheldrake, and for morphogenetic fields...