With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival. Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend reading the earlier posts in this sequence first; you can find them here. Either way, grab your tarot cards and hang on tight.
If you can read French, I strongly encourage you to get a copy of Lévi’s book in the original and follow along with that; it’s readily available for sale in Francophone countries, and can also be downloaded for free from Archive.org. If not, the English translation by me and Mark Mikituk is recommended; A.E. Waite’s translation, unhelpfully retitled Transcendental Magic, is second-rate at best—riddled with errors and burdened with Waite’s seething intellectual jealousy of Lévi—though you can use it after a fashion if it’s what you can get. Also recommended is a tarot deck using the French pattern: the Knapp-Hall deck, the Wirth deck (available in several versions), or any of the Marseilles decks are suitable.
Reading:
“Chapter Fifteen: The Sabbath of the Sorcerers” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 315-332).
Commentary:
More than a century and a half has gone slipping past since Eliphas Lévi wrote the text we’re discussing in these book club posts, and a great many things have changed over that time. One thing that has not changed, however, is the way the popular imagination reacts to any discussion of magic. By and large, that reaction is primarily composed of greed and fear in varying amounts, with “what if I can use magic to indulge all my desires?” on one side of the balance and “what if someone else can use magic to mess me over?” on the other. In Christian and post-Christian countries, those two flow together with monumental predictability into the imagery of devil worship, the witches’ sabbath, and the Black Mass.
These days, Lévi’s portrayal of Baphomet, the idol of the Knights Templar, has an important role in that imagery. That shows exactly how little the popular imagination knows about magic, or for that matter about Lévi. What is Baphomet? Those of my readers who have followed these essays will already have grasped the answer to that question from Lévi’s own hints. Baphomet is the astral light, the great secret of the mages. His body bears the marks of the animal creation—horns, hooves, wings, scales—because the astral light is the life force; it is of both sexes because sexual polarity is governed by the astral light; it points up with one hand and down with the other because, as Lévi has pointed out repeatedly, the astral light is always polarized and always flows in two opposing directions at once; it has an upright pentagram on its forehead because the astral light can be controlled by the enlightened will; and it has a torch burning between its horns because unity of will masters the binaries of the astral currents.
But the astral light can also be portrayed in other, less frightening ways. Why this unnerving image? Because in the ancient religions, and in Christianity before it persecuted and destroyed the Gnostics who were its own inner circles of initiation, there were always two modes of theology and practice, one for the masses, one for the few. Our text uses the metaphor of the two goats from the old Jewish law, one sacrificed in the temple, the other driven out into the desert to carry the sins of the people away with it. The public worship was a valid path but a limited one. There was also another, deeper way, the way of the initiates, and that was always guarded by images of fear. Those images were always illusions, but they helped feed the popular habit of confusing the way of the initiates with devil worship.
Is there such a thing as organized devil worship? Of course, for a very straightforward reason. Now and again Christian churches fall out of the habit of practicing the love that Jesus called on his followers to express in their lives, and settle for hating evil as a substitute for loving God. When that happens, preachers pretty reliably start talking about devil worship, ranting in vivid detail about how devil worshippers engage in lurid sexual antics, fulfill all their basest cravings, and get back at everyone they hate.
The preachers who do this have never learned of the occult law that whatever you contemplate, you imitate. They also don’t seem to realize that the picture they’re painting will appeal to some people very powerfully indeed. So when Christian clergy rant about Satanic orgies, you can be sure that some of their parishioners are going to decide that this sounds like a lot more fun than sitting in church on Sundays. That being the case, sooner or later Satanic orgies are going to happen—and you can also bet good money that a certain number of Christian clergy will be involved in it right up to their clerical collars, since by and large they are no more immune from the lure of the forbidden than the members of their flock.
So the Satanic panics of history lead promptly to Satanic practice, as we’ve seen in recent decades. Magic in the sense that Lévi is discussing—“the traditional science of the secrets of nature, which comes to us from the mages”—has no connection with devil worship. Devil worshippers in Christian countries do pretty reliably dabble in magic, of course, but this is for the simple reason that most Christian churches forbid it. If the Christian faith had embraced the commandments of Moses a little more strictly and imposed kosher rules on its followers, bacon cheeseburgers would feature heavily in accounts of the witches’ sabbath.
Those accounts are pretty lurid, as those of my readers who’ve read some know well. They are not entirely the ravings of preachers who are projecting all their own suppressed desires onto the other guy, in the usual fashion Jung outlined so well. Lévi suggests that there were three other historical sources from which those accounts were drawn, three unrelated factors that have become garbled together in popular imagination to produce the shuddersome tales of tradition. The first was drug use; the second was Pagan and heretical religious gatherings in the Middle Ages; the third was actual devil worship. He was probably right about all three of them.
Let’s start with the first. Anybody who thinks that the Western world was innocent of drugs until the 1960s is suffering from a bad case of historical cluelessness. In ancient and medieval times a great many herbal hallucinogens were known and used across Europe, as the basis of a drug culture that probably had distant connections to archaic European shamanism. The drugs in question were a very mixed bag. Most of them are poisonous, some of them extremely so, which is why they were generally used by simmering them in fat and then rubbing some of the resulting unguent onto portions of the body, to be absorbed through the skin: the size, location, and permeability of the portion of skin thus treated could be used to control the dose fairly precisely.
These unguents were the “flying ointments” used by medieval witches. As we used to say back in the day, the people using them were getting stoned out of their gourds. Given appropriate set and setting, to use Timothy Leary’s preferred jargon, those who rubbed onto their bodies fats full of the active ingredients in Jimson weed, nightshade, mandrake, and other medieval drugs could probably count on the kind of trip that is echoed in the weirder medieval accounts of witches’ sabbaths. It’s interesting to note that some medieval investigators recognized this, and described witches who lay unresponsive in bed all night while, by their later testimony, they had been cavorting with their fellow witches on a mountaintop somewhere.
In terms of the second, the Catholic church was never the only religious option in medieval Europe. Gnostic sects had a significant presence, despite brutal campaigns of extermination directed against them, until the fourteenth century if not later; a steady drumbeat of heretical sects not connected with Gnosticism appear in the records of the Inquisition and elsewhere; and Pagan traditions lingered in isolated corners of Europe, and also filtered into Europe from points further east—Carlo Ginzburg’s fine books The Night Battles and Ecstasies are good introductions to the realities of medieval Paganism, which have essentially nothing in common with the inventions of modern Neopagans. All these groups needed to meet in locations not easily discovered by the authorities. Inevitably, though, details got out, and were added to the folk imagery of the witches’ sabbath.
Then there were actual meetings of people who worshipped the Christian devil. Again, those definitely existed, just as they exist today. Because their ideas of devil worship were pretty solidly based on Christian sermons meant to denounce it, and those sermons drew on a long history of previous denunciations as well as tidbits taken from whatever folklore was current at the time, there used to be quite a bit of continuity in the practice of Satanism. The most important factor, though, is that the people who attended these things were trying their best to be bad. Thus you can predict their behavior precisely by noticing what the authorities of the time spend most of their time denouncing.
This is a familiar thing in the history of ideas. Subcultures quite often set out to reject the belief system of the wider society to which they belong, even though they usually don’t have any real alternative in mind. What happens then, of course, is that they take the belief system they think they’re rejecting and accept all its presuppositions and basic beliefs, but reverse the moral dimension with a cry of “Evil, be thou my good.” Thus they reinforce the system they think they’re opposing. Thus when a faction of today’s angry atheists redefined themselves as Satanists and started prancing around statues of Baphomet, they were surrendering their mental independence to Christianity, and it’s a safe bet that once the devil schtick becomes boring—as it inevitably does—a good many of the people currently involved in the Satanic Temple and equivalent groups will start going to church.
We live at a time when that familiar trajectory is winding down, and the Satanic revival that gave Howard Stanton Levey aka Anton Szandor LaVey his fifteen minutes of fame, and hit its stride in the 1980s and 1990s, is crumpling in the usual way in the face of a widespread resurgence of traditional versions of Christianity. Lévi wasn’t so fortunate. In his day the Catholic hierarchy was far too busy scolding people who wanted free elections and civil rights to devote much time to demonstrating the compassion of Christ, and the Romantic movement of the time was veering predictably toward devildom, following the same trajectory that later on bridged the gap between the Summer of Love on the one hand, and Altamont and the Manson Family on the other.
Lévi seems to have foreseen something of what would happen, or at least guessed that a revival of Satanism would take place. He therefore did his best to trip it up in advance. He set out requirements for success in summoning the devil that make it clear just how absurd he thought the whole business was, and then counseled the would-be demonolater to devote fourteen days to a partial fast while, every five days, guzzling wine in which opium poppy heads and cannabis seeds have been steeped. (See what I mean about drugs?)
All the while, our would-be devil worshipper has to acquire a long list of mostly loathsome objects, most of which are very difficult to obtain and some of which would land him in serious legal trouble if he makes the attempt. Provided with all these things, he then has to go at night to some solitary and detested spot, as Lévi puts it, where he is expected to set up a magical circle including all the items he has hauled with him, and a few more Lévi thoughtfully didn’t happen to mention in advance. Finally, when all this is done, he recites one or more incantations Lévi is gracious enough to provide him, and waits for the devil to show up.
He will be waiting for a long time, since Lévi gave only fragments of the original rituals, which are very long and bombastic, to help the would-be warlock debase his consciousness to the level of frenzied confusion at which demons operate. Lévi also carefully left out all the technical details that assist the process. H.P. Lovecraft, who knew more than enough about occultism to recognize all this, used the incantations in this chapter as spells to raise the dead from their essential salts in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and they will be just as effective for this purpose as for the one that Lévi suggests.
Meanwhile, given the diet and the drugged wine, our poor warlock is probably suffering from a fair amount of discomfort due to severe constipation, not to mention the fact that it’s four days since his last dose of the drugs and he’s probably in withdrawal. He knows that if anyone catches him he can count on spending a good long while in the nearest madhouse, and if anyone figures out the nature of some of the items that he has brought with him, his chances of leaving it ever again are not good. There he sits, alone or with a couple of assistants, waiting for a devil who never gets around to showing, as the night circles slowly past and the first dim gray light comes up in the east. Let it never be said that Lévi was without a sense of humor!
We can pass by the hideous ritual that Lévi describes at the end of the chapter to remind readers just how revolting and ineffective this sort of diabolical pseudomagic is in practice. The point our text makes, and it is a valid and important one, is that such things have nothing to do with the kind of magic that Lévi is trying to teach. Demonolatry, as he has explained several times already in our text, is strictly for those who don’t have what it takes to learn and use high magic, the magic of light. The mage achieves self-mastery and through this, attains mastery over the astral light. The demonolater, incapable of self-mastery, tries instead to bargain with the images of the astral light and eventually becomes their slave. Humanity being what it is, there will always be those clueless enough to follow this latter path, but Lévi has taken some care not to encourage any additions to their number.
Notes for Study and Practice:
It’s quite possible to get a great deal out of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by the simple expedient of reading each chapter several times and thinking at length about the ideas and imagery that Lévi presents. For those who want to push things a little further, however, meditation is a classic tool for doing so.
Along with the first half of our text, I introduced the standard method of meditation used in Western occultism: discursive meditation, to give it its proper name, which involves training and directing the thinking mind rather than silencing it (as is the practice in so many other forms of meditation). Readers who are just joining us can find detailed instructions in the earlier posts in this series. For those who have been following along, however, I suggest working with a somewhat more complex method, which Lévi himself mention in passing: the combinatorial method introduced by Catalan mystic Ramon Lull in the Middle Ages, and adapted by Lévi and his successors for use with the tarot.
Take the first card of the deck, Trump 1, Le Bateleur (The Juggler or The Magician). While looking at it, review the three titles assigned to it: Disciplina, Ain Soph, Kether, and look over your earlier meditations on this card to be sure you remember what each of these means. Now you are going to add each title of this card to Trump II, La Papesse (The High Priestess): Chokmah, Domus, Gnosis. Place Trump II next to Trump I and consider them. How does Disciplina, discipline, relate to Chokmah, wisdom? How does Disciplina relate to Domus, house? How does it relate to Gnosis? These three relationships are fodder for one day’s meditation. For a second day, relate Ain Soph to the three titles of La Papesse. For a third day, relate Kether to each of these titles. Note down what you find in your journal.
Next, combine Le Bateleur with Trump III, L’Imperatrice (The Empress), in exactly the same way, setting the cards side by side. Meditate on the relationship of each of the Juggler’s titles to the three titles of the Empress, three meditations in all. Then combine the Juggler and the Emperor in exactly the same way. Then go on to the Juggler and the Pope, giving three days to each, and proceed from there. You’ll still be working through combinations of Le Bateleur when the next Lévi post goes up, but that’s fine; when you finish with Le Bateleur, you’ll be taking La Papesse and combining her with L’Imperatrice, L’Empereur, and so on, and thus moving through all 231 combinations the trumps make with one another.
Don’t worry about where this is going. Unless you’ve already done this kind of practice, the goal won’t make any kind of sense to you. Just do the practice. You’ll find, if you stick with it, that over time the relationships between the cards take on a curious quality I can only call conceptual three-dimensionality: a depth is present that was not there before, a depth of meaning and ideation. It can be very subtle or very loud, or anything in between. Don’t sense it? Don’t worry. Meditate on a combination every day anyway. Do the practice and see where it takes you.
We’ll be going on to Chapter 16, “Enchantments and Spells,” on September 11, 2024. See you then!
I take it the ouroboros is another symbol of the astral light? Or rather, that the astral light is one of the things it symbolizes?
Greetings ADJMG!
Something that I have been thinking about, we have this view of the classical philosophers, sitting around in a toga using the Socratic method. But if you look at their personal life, most of them were mystery religions initiates, which there is some evidence meant you were tied face down, and administered a snake venom enema that produced a near death experience and would kill you if you didn’t get the antidote., thereby being “born again”. Jesus himself came from this world. Paul also talks about being immune to snakebites.
Luke, that’s correct. The Ouroboros can be used to symbolize any self-sustaining or circular process; in alchemy, it’s used to represent the process of repeated distillation, in which the liquid that’s distilled off is poured back on what’s left behind, those two are then allowed to process for a time at modest heat, and then distilled again — thus the serpent swallows its own tail. But it can also be used to represent the self-sustaining currents of the astral light.
Dashui, er, where did you get that thing about the snake venom? I don’t think I’ve encountered that claim before — and it would be quite a complex process to do that to a thousand people at once in the Eleusinian mysteries, you know…
I think this same “evil, be thou my good” thing shows up in a lot of ways with the New Atheists, who effectively invert all the claims of Conservative Christianity; they just don’t take it in a spiritual direction. This would help explain why once they set the tone of the Atheist movement, many in it would go all in on demonolatry, and also why so many would not think the inherent contradiction between being atheists and invoking demons mattered: consistency is, after all, claimed by many Christians as a virtue!
Since the word Satan means adversary, accuser, and is derived from a Hebrew word opposer, Satan worshipers in turn can be considered as worshiping their own worst enemy. This gets them caught up in “resistance” mode, and the accuser becomes the accused.
Speaking of the devil, these days in popular culture he often appears as wearing the suits of the business man. Not a coincidence methinks! John, didn’t you have a kind of folk devil in Stars Reach, dressed up in a posh three-piece suit?
I just posted a comment, but as soon as I posted that one I had another very weird thought: a lot of things that are otherwise truly baffling about contemporary society makes a lot more sense if two different groups are both declaring the other group’s evil is their good. Some of the more crazed Fundamentalist Christians, for instance, who have chosen to embrace illogic and extreme rhetoric, are almost an inverted mirror image of the kinds of angry atheists that have existed for a long time in American society. If this weird tangled mess has been going on for as long as it seems it might, I suppose it would go along way toward explaining how modern societies have gotten so weird….
Taylor, the “New Atheists” (about whom there’s nothing new at all — they’re mouthing clichés that were already gray with dust in Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s day) are a great example. They were the inverse of the old fundamentalism, which was did exactly the same trip on scientific materialism — thus the obsession with Darwin and treating the Bible as a geology textbook. It’s precisely when atheists started going in for explicit demonolatry that actual atheism dropped dead, and was replaced by a return to explicitly Christian ideas.
Justin, I did indeed. He’s called Dell — my rounded-off circa 2475 AD version of the word “Devil,” a being in whom believers in the faith of Mam Gaia aren’t supposed to believe in but everyone does anyway. He appears in an old-fashioned business suit and promises you whatever you most desire in exchange for something he gets to pick later on, which of course is always the thing you value more than what you got from Dell. Trey sunna Gwen talks about making a “Dell’s bargain” with Jennel Cobey.
Taylor, excellent. Excellent! Yes, very much so — it’s so easy, if you’re not really sure what you believe any more, to point to somebody you think is bad and say, “Well, what I believe is not what those people believe!” So you get into a hall of mirrors situation where each side is trying to be the exact opposite of what they think the other side is. That can spin completely out of control — as it has done, of course — until some outside shock inserts a third factor and causes the whole thing to crash.
I suspect that most, but not all, self-styled “Satanists” are just trolling Christians. You have to understand that Christians believe that they have the one true religion and all of the others are not only wrong, but deliberate counterfeits created by the devil to mislead people away from Jesus. There are no Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, or Jains — there are only the Satanists who know and concede that they worship the devil and hate God, and those who refuse to admit it to themselves or others.
Now you can argue against this absurd premise until your face turns blue, but there comes a time when you see that argument is a waste of breath and it’d be simpler and more amusing to simply agree with the Christian that yes, you do worship the devil. By simply agreeing with their accusations and then so-whating them, you deftly evade their attempts to villify and shame you into kow-towing to their theocratic tyranny.
And this doesn’t just work on Christians. I’ve had great fun from proudly proclaiming that yes, I am a Nazi, a misogynist, a homosexual, and a andrenochrome guzzling lizard-man. If you stop being defensive and are willing to let fools be fools, life isn’t so bad.
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Heather’s brother in law, Patrick, who is dying of cancer and has dementia, go gentle into that good light. And may his wife Maggie, who is ill herself, find the strength and peace she needs for her situation. (Update on Patrick’s condition here)
May Falling Tree Woman’s son’s girlfriend’s mother Bridget in Devon UK, who has recently regained consciousness after a week of sedation following a life-threatening fall from a horse, be blessed and healed and returned to full health.
May Neptune’s Dolphins’ husband David, who lost one toe to a staph infection last year and now faces further toe amputations due to diabetic ulcers in his left foot, be blessed and healed, and may the infection leave his body for good.
May Rebecca, who has just been laid off from her job and is the sole provider for her family, quickly discover a viable means to continue to support her family; may she and her family be blessed and sustained in their journey forward.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Tyler A’s wife Monika’s pregnancy is high risk, and has now successfully entered the third trimester; may Monika and baby Isabelle both be blessed with good health and a smooth delivery.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
John, I imagine you’re very familiar with James Blish’s epic Tetrology: “After Such Knowledge” (Issued in individual books as Dr. Mirabilis; Black Easter; The Day After Judgement; and A Case of Conscience).
What is your opinion of the general realism of the demonology and “magic” described in the books? Obviously, even to me, it seems a lot more “realistic” than the magic in Harry Potter, but is it — in broad strokes — reasonably plausible and well done? Did Blish do an acceptable job of researching and representing the Western Occult traditions?
I gather you don’t believe in anything at all like a “Satan”? Does that mean you don’t believe in anything like a clear hierarchy of gods on a good/evil scale? I’ve been following you for a almost two decades now, although I haven’t read anywhere near everything you’ve written (you are sort of like an elemental force of writing to me). I’ve gotten the idea that you aren’t nearly as clear about the existence of “gods” as you are about things magical in general. Is that fair to say?
I would be fascinated with any “deep dive” you might write, or have written, about the whole subject matter of gods, devils, any hierarchy, and how the whole thing fits together in your current understanding framework. I did try to follow most of your review of “The Cosmic Doctrine”, but that was a bit too abstract for me to digest it properly.
Finally, circling back to Blish’s “After Such Knowledge”. Could something on that scale possibly be involved in the utter madness which seems to have gripped the Earth, and humanity specifically, in recent years? As I am sure you know, the Eastern cultures often share a broad vision of the Kali Yuga, ruled by the demon Kali, which they say we are currently in the middle of (with only a few hundred thousand years left to go). As the world around me has become rapidly less and less “real”, I find myself increasingly drawn to the theory that most of what we regard as “real” was always just a shallow construct and — apparently — more than a bit of a deception, if not an outright lie, to begin with. Any comment about the Kali Yuga or the dilemma of the world in general? You don’t seem particularly worried about mere nuclear war; maybe that would be too blunt an instrument for Kali?
Thanks for all your sharing of your knowledge and opinion through the years. You have certainly made my last twenty years of existence a lot more interesting. Of course, lately, a bit more boring and positive would be okay!
-Gnat
Unfortunately certain factions of right wingers have been quick to equate Levi’s drawing of Baphomet and Satanism. I have seen a meme going around (that I am unable to find at the moment online) that shows the picture of Baphomet and says something to the tune of “this is who they worship and this is why they want kids to be transgender”. They also tend to tar Freemasonry with Satanism in the same fell swoop, dragging in the founding fathers of the US and depicting them as devil worshippers.
Of course the hypocrisy here is that a right winger who posts a Baphomet is transgender meme is often a dyed-in-the-wool materialist who has not exactly picked up the cross like Jesus.
Polarity at work, indeed! The need for redemption is necessarily tied to The Fall, as part of “the prodigal dynamic” (or the “Sin-redemption circuit”), and nothing brings about a return to The Good quite like a chastening encounter with the lack thereof, as I suspect Levi was aware (CF any Satanic panic in history). But I suspect the juxtaposition of (evil) daimons and Christ is not a bug, but a feature, of the system: after all, the primary power Jesus invests the disciples with is authority over unclean spirits, so demon-busting is presumably a fundamental characteristic of that path.
That said, there remain seldom-articulated echoes even in mainstream Christianity of the integrated ascending/descending interaction: the emptying out of the Divine into the material plane (incarnation, descent), through death (the Way of the Cross) and a return to heaven (ascent).
For my part, I have little doubt about the existence of malign spirits out there who are bent on corruption; my suspicion is that magic done without adequate spiritual preparation (that is, casual magic) offers a good possibility that one’s intellect can be hijacked by said creatures…thus the admonitions against it (even though it’s clear in the history of the Church that some were practicing it sub rosa).
Axé
Hello Mr Greer,
A very interesting essay, and I apologise for barging in without having read the previous entries in the series. The background of the Baphomet image is new to me, and I find the history of the concept fascinating. It seems like the taboos in Christianity regarding anything vaguely connected with the occult, and especially towards goat imagery, are a typical return of the repressed. Freud would have a field day! But it remains unclear why less benevolent aspects of the Deity have been expurged from the religion in the first place. After all, God of the Bible does not behave as today’s mainstream Christian representatives would want Him to behave, and, for example, even discusses with Satan in the story of Job.
This is especially puzzling as some other major religious traditions, like Buddhism and Hinduism, explicitly acknowledge fearsome and terrible aspects of the divinity. Temples in South and East Asia typically house fierce and frightening representations of figures in their respective pantheons. How did Christianity move in what appears to be an unusual direction in global terms?
Years ago I ran into group of older teen age boys who decided to play we are Satan worshippers with me in mockery of my Christianity. It didn’t bother me for I didn’t take them seriously knowing it was a pose except for one. It wasn’t an act for him. He looked like an emaciated death’s head. And after the others moved on he told me quietly “He doesn’t like me talking to you” I knew in my bones he was in relationship with an entity that wasn’t good for him.. I was saddened and have prayed for him now and again over the years. Getting all upset over some one’s belief system that is not yours can be a sign that on some level you are not secure and at peace in yours.
Hi John Michael,
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that if a person fails to take charge of their own will, others may do so. And those others may well include underworld things of dubious morals.
You got me thinking with this essay, and I’d be curious as to your opinion? In many ways, the sorcerer is like the consumer, whereas the mage fills the role of the producer. Hmm.
Cheers
Chris
Excellent post, JMG. I really appreciate this.
I’ve met more than a few ardent atheists who embraced the Baphomet symbol. They proclaimed the symbol to be explicitly meaningless except for the rage they produce in Christians. A few I knew were big fans of putting up large Baphomet statues next to Christian figures in their crusade to banish all pro-Christian public art (fans of moving into a community and suing the city to remove their statues as well). I’m glad to know there was a reason besides mockery behind the symbology in the image after all.
Sybok, sure, but they used to do that without embracing the identity they were assigned by Christianity. Getting sucked into the role they give you may seem very funny now, but historically, it tends to end with reabsorption into the tradition you’re rebelling against.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Gnat, I am indeed familar with those. They’re good fiction, but wildly unrealistic as a depiction of magic. Blish pulled a bunch of stuff out of the writings of A.E. Waite, who was a devout Christian, and then cranked up the special effects to eleven or so for the sake of the story. As for gods, I take it you haven’t read my book A World Full of Gods, which argues for the real existence of many gods. I don’t see them as a hierarchy. moral or otherwise, but as a vast and intricate community of superhuman entities whose moral compasses vary over quite a wide range. With regard to the Kali Yuga, every generation thinks that it’s dealing with the worst that history has ever been; my study of history leads me to think that in fact, things are always about as bad as they are now, and about as good; the habit of seeing the past (or the future!) through rose-colored glasses is comforting but not helpful.
Kimberly, yes, I’ve seen the same schtick. Myself, I note that George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Paul Revere were Freemasons, while Hitler, Lenin, and the Ayatollah Khomeini all banned Freemasonry in their countries as soon as they seized power. Given the choice, which of those two sides would you want to be on? Me, I’m with Washington…
Fra’ Lupo, malevolent spiritual entities certainly exist. That’s why I recommend protective rituals and regular invocations of the Divine to anyone who wants to practice magic, precisely to chase such critters away.
Soko, it’s really a puzzle. As recently as the Renaissance, Christians were comfortable with the terrible aspects of Christ. Here’s Christ flinging the damned into Hell as the Virgin Mary cowers away in terror, courtesy of Michelangelo:
BeardTree, I’ve seen the same thing — and I agree heartily about belief systems.
Chris, excellent! Yes, exactly.
SirusTalCelion, it really is a shame, because the Baphomet emblem has a lot to teach as an instructional emblem, and the faux-Satanists have no clue.
“and in Christianity before it persecuted and destroyed the Gnostics who were its own inner circles of initiation…”
I’ve been reading a lot about Gnosticism lately. Do you have any book recommendations related to the subject? Please let me know. There are things about Gnosticism I really appreciate, but I can’t relate to how they saw the universe as a torture prison created by a blind idiot God. But I must admit, their denunciation of Yahweh makes a lot of sense. The vast difference between that old storm god and Jesus is very visceral. Do you think Jesus taught Gnostic teachings?
Recently I have perused a book called ‘Practicing Gnosis.’ I haven’t finished the book, but in the first chapter it discusses Celsus’ polemic against Christianity. At one part, Celsus mentions a diagram composed of 10 circles joined within a larger circle which represents the soul of the universe. There is also the mention of a ritual of initiation called “The Seal” where the initiator called “Father” confers the seal upon the initiate, the ‘Youth.’ At one point the Youth states “I have been anointed with a white oil from the tree of life.” Celsus also claimed that Christians made a lot of references to a tree of life. Of course, in his rebuttal written 70 years later, Origen claimed that Celsus was not referring to Christians at all, but heretics.
I’ll never look at Baphomet in the same way again. 🙂
The “evil be my good” syndrome is very familiar to me from past and present Russian politics: from leftist revolutionaries embracing the most extreme and absurd antinomian positions since that’s what the Imperial government and its allies accused all of their enemies of wanting anyway, through many anti-communists (including, naturally, Party officials) rushing to embody every propaganda stereotype of a capitalist and/or a reactionary whenever they could get away with it, to the great 90s Stalin cult revival that happened largely on the grounds of “liberals hate him” (indeed, their sermons about him resembled the ones you bring up here; there is, of course, much to hate, but when attacks grow so hysterical and disconnected from reality, they start to backfire no matter who you attack). It feels like a curse, though I suppose no curse is necessary?
There’s a lot to mull over in High Magic– This chapter reminded me of Jung’s discussion about integrating one’s shadow, but the dark rituals described would take someone in the opposite direction of what Jung was talking about. I believe you talked about this before, something like– ‘People know that a real man is perfectly capable of many things, including violence, taking revenge–He simply chooses not to do them.’ Where is that quote from?
Do we know if the Gnostics had any teachings on integrating one’s shadow?
@JMG
I wanted to ask you about a thing that I practice; specifically, I want to ask you if what I do is an example of discursive meditation or not; and if not, how it can be improved. So here goes –
I had mentioned in your recent essay on music that I have studied vocal music in the Hindustani (North Indian) Classical Music tradition, under my grandfather, who’s a musicologist. While I am not currently learning from him, I do 40-45 minutes of singing practice everyday, to keep my vocal chords “well-oiled” and generally speaking, to be in touch with the tradition, its myriad benefits being one important reason.
My practice goes like this – I spend the first 5 minutes simply singing the regular octave of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa variety, so as to get my “system” warmed up and ready; kind of like what people do in a martial arts class prior to actually practicing the technique. This done, I select a raga that I want to practice, and sing what we call an alaap – an alaap is a slow exploration of the raga in question, and there’s no rhythm involved; the only instrument that I use is a tanpura or drone, so as to ensure that I’m not going off-tune. The alaap is not something that can be rehearsed; indeed, all you are doing is singing practically extempore, with the only three conditions being that 1) you are singing in tune, 2) you are not taking long pauses to catch a breath; instead, you are breathing using a special technique that is subtle enough to make it impossible for anyone who is not familiar with Hindustani music to realise that the vocalist has paused and taken a breath, and 3) you are strictly singing only within the framework and limits allowed by the raga in question.
This is where I think it’s analogous to discursive meditation. To be a bit more elaborate, I’ll lay it out:
1) Special breathing technique: analogous to the rule in discursive meditation that you have to avoid taking pauses for more than a moment, and keep the flow going, no matter what.
2) Singing extempore/spontaneous improvisation: analogous to the DM practice of thinking about, and exploring the subject/theme of DM from all angles, and seeing where it takes you. A deeper version of brainstorming, where you’re just exploring the subject , and seeing what insights come out of it.
3) Sticking strictly to the raga/operating ONLY WITHIN the framework and limits defined by the raga: analogous to the DM practice of keeping your mind focused on the subject in question; while you can take a train of thought about the subject in question, it should not lead to a situation where you’ve digressed to the point that the subject is no longer at the centre of the contemplation.
4) using a drone/making sure you’re not singing off-tune: analogous to the DM aspect of critically evaluating any ideas/thoughts that come up while contemplating the subject, and making sure that they are logically coherent, at the very least.
I would like to know your views on this; specifically, if this analogy seems okay to you. I would also welcome any suggestions to improve on this.
“and then counseled the would-be demonolater to devote fourteen days to a partial fast while, every five days, guzzling wine in which opium poppy heads and cannabis seeds have been steeped. (See what I mean about drugs?)”
Oh John, what a strict diet! However, there’s no problem: the would-be demonolater would use an enema soon or later, of course!
JMG,
Three questions, if I may:
1. With the use of the Baphomet image, was Lévi relating to the Templars or to the Gnostics?
(I just happened to re-read the Secret of the Temple and that got me wondering. Could there be any relation there? Or was „Baphomet“ a common occurrence in the occult literature before him?)
2. I suppose „images of fear“ which guard the way of the initiates have the straightforward purpose of scaring off the people who aren‘t serious about the path. But do they also have some other, less straightforward, purposes which couldn‘t be achieved with milder images?
3. Piggybacking on Ecosophy Enjoyer‘s question (#18), I‘d also appreciate pointers to literature, but specifically about the part „the Gnostics who were its own inner circles of initiates“.
Thanks,
Milkyway
(I‘m only loosely following along with your essays, and my copy of Lévi‘s is, as of yet, unread – apologies if the answers are covered in his text, and in this case, please just tell me to come back once I‘ve read the book… 😉 )
There is a lot of symbolism in the Bible that cast goats and snakes in a negative light. For Christians, something about horns, hooves and scales really seems to, uh, get their goat.
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.” Matthew 25 31-33
I’ve heard this verse interpreted as those who don’t accept JC as their savior (not talking about John Cage in case anyone was wondering) will get separated like the goats, therefore goats equal bad.
In Leviticus 16 6-10 we find this intriguing verse:
“Aaron shall offer the bull as a sin offering for himself, and shall make atonement for himself and for his house. He shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting; and Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord, and offer it as a sin offering; but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel. ”
Azazel was the scapegoat (referenced in the essay) but later came to be seen as a fallen angel.
“The priest shall dash the blood against the altar of the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting, and turn the fat into smoke as a pleasing odor to the Lord, so that they may no longer offer their sacrifices for goat-demons, to whom they prostitute themselves. This shall be a statute forever to them throughout their generations.” -Leviticus 17 6-7
“goat-demon” is here translated from the Hebrew sa’iyr שָׂעִיר , commonly known as a satyr in ancient Greek and Roman paganism.
At the same time goats are considered clean meats by those who follow the dietary strictures laid out in Leviticus (as I did in the Church I grew up in). I’ve heard goat curry is really good! And of course they were sacrficied in the temple, but over all there was the negative association with them, due to the theiromorphic gods of other cultures.
I don’t need to get into the snake here…
I was thinking last night, are there Satan worshippers in Islamic countries? People who invoke Iblis and Shaytin?
Same for Judaism? Are there those who rebel from these religions by going to the polar opposite the same way they do in Chrisitianity?
For that matter, are there equivalents to this type of behavior in Eastern religions? It seems that polytheism, in allowing for a greater number of deities to be venerated, sidesteps this issue. Not everyone who is Hindu is going to be going to the Kali temple all the time, I guess. And not everyone is going to become an Aghora. I don’t know enough about Hinduism to know if Hindus themselves think of Aghora’s as “extreme” or “dark” on the spectrum of sadhus. Certainly the break even Hindu taboos, but many see them as holy at the same time.
Are there Buddhists who rebel and worship demons? From what I’ve heard, again not knowing enough about Buddhism, that in some Tibetan monasteries there are demons -or at least underworld chthonic beings, which might not be the same as what is thought of as a demon in the west- who are used as guardians for the monastery / temple. This might just be a matter of translation.
In Japan anime and manga the word demon gets used a lot as well but it again seems to refer to underworld beings that might chthonic and telluric, not necessarily demonic. (I did the Underworld work as outlined by R.J. Stewart and in some of McCarthy’s work and found it be very grounding and strengthening -so there is a difference, though I know some Christians would get scared at this too.)
I certainly understand the capacity to curse and practice what might as well be called black magic here is possible anywhere on the globe, and that there are spirits there as well one might not want to associate with. But are there cognates to satanism in these other world religions?
BeardTree made the comment that “Getting all upset over some one’s belief system that is not yours can be a sign that on some level you are not secure and at peace in yours.”
Do you think that is true for people who are not obviously upset, but just extremely curious?
I have always attempted to avoid discussions of politics and religion at work and it amazes me that people are willing to ask about my beliefs at work. (And not just new people. Sometimes it’s people I’ve known for years…)
Well, JMG and kommentariat, I have some thoughts about Satanism:
1-When I was I child, an old Catholic priest told me that Satan was a very fierce dog; however, he was in chains, so you only could be bitten by him if you went nearer to him. I think this metaphor is good…
2- In his novel “The Elementary Particles”, Michel Houellebecq says that Satanists are indeed full time materialist atheists. Well, “Houe” is well known for his controversial and dubious assertions, but I think in this “satanic” topic he nails it…
3-It’s curious that in Islamic worldview there’s a monotheist God (Allah) and a Devil, but you won’t find Muslim Satanists not at all…Demonolatry (If I’m not wrong) looks like a Christian epidemic…
4-Anton La Vey lived until 67 years old; well, it isn’t a very old age if you think in a possible pact with his “boss”…
JMG, so here’s a question (or several): where exactly did the Templars learn what they knew about the astral light?
What do we know about the Templar magic? What methods did they use to work with the astral?
Did they really bring this knowledge to Freemasonry?
I have difficulty seeing all these perspectives on devil-worship, from actual earnest devil worship to secularist activist Satanism (a la the Church of Satan) to fundamentalist scare-mongering to misunderstandings and libels against pagans and occultists, as a much more than dried husks blown on the gales of pop culture. Yes there are noisy factions but does anyone under fifty care about any of them? Is there any image or symbol (actual or falsely imputed) of devil worship or demonolatry that isn’t far more widely associated today with video game characters, amine villains, and heavy metal music? All kinds of things might change by or during the coming dark age, but right now there’s a wide variety of Baphomet plushies for sale. What terrifying image drives away the uninitiated or ignorant? Maybe the thumbs-down “dislikes” symbol?
Enjoyer, the Gnostics were a much more diverse movement than many modern accounts suggest. The cache of documents from Nag Hammadi were the library of one particular Gnostic monastery belonging to a fairly hardcore Johannite sect, which was deep into the whole “the world is a black iron prison” vibe. Other sects within the movement were less into that — some much less so I recommend Stevan Davies’ The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom as a good intro, and Bentley Layton’s The Gnostic Scriptures as the best collection of original sources. As for Celsus, yep — the Tree of Life was a Gnostic diagram most of a millennium before it found its way into Judaism, and it was Pythagorean before the Gnostics got to it. I cover some of that in an upcoming book.
Daniil, those are great examples. Thank you for this!
E. Goldstein, I don’t recognize that quote, though I agree with it. As for the Gnostics, we have only the most fragmentary scraps of their practices due to Christian persecution, so nobody’s really sure what was or wasn’t part of the system.
Viduraawakened, it certainly has all the hallmarks of a meditative practice, and since India is pretty much the homeland of meditation — I’m pretty sure that records of meditation there are older than anywhere else — that comes as no surprise. I have no particular advice, but then I don’t tend to advise meditators on their practice — if you practice regularly, the practice itself will teach you.
Chuaquin, an enema won’t always do it. In the 19th century people routinely died of constipation.
Milkyway, Lévi was specifically referencing the Templars, though he — and a great many other people, including me — saw the Templars as having adopted Gnostic traditions during their time in the Holy Land. yes, there are connections to the temple technology; the records of the Inquisition insist that the Templars believed that Baphomet made the crops grow. As for the images of fear, good — I’d recommend meditating about that. I’ve given some sources on Gnosticism in my response to Ecosophy Enjoyer above.
Justin, I’m not familiar enough with Jewish or Muslim traditions to know whether there’s an equivalent to Satanism. In Japanese esoteric Buddhism there’s certainly an equivalent — there’s a whole body of texts that teach how to invoke and pray to spirits who are at best morally dubious, in order to get worldly wealth and power. The Daten or Dagini rite is one of the better known of these.
Chuaquin, to judge by the Picatrix, religiously dubious magic in Muslim countries seems to focus on Pagan worship of planetary spirits, rather than invoking Shaitan as such. Of course anybody caught doing that was executed back in the day, and those laws are still in force in some Muslim countries.
Ecosophian, we know frack-all about what the Templars taught and practiced. The Inquisition, not to mention an assortment of European monarchs, were quite thorough. There’s solid evidence that surviving Templars in Scotland brought something into Freemasonry — there are scraps of knowledge about the Temple Mount that the Templars knew (we know this because of archeological traces) and the Freemasons knew (we know this because of explicit references in certain rituals) but nobody else knew until 1968, when Israeli archeologists found certain tunnels. What else they might have brought — well, that’s a mystery, and it’s not one the Masons know any more. Did you know that it’s a central element of the Master Mason degree that we no longer have the True Word and the real secrets of a Master Mason, but are in search of them?
Walt, I see you don’t lurk on current Christian forums much. There are a lot of people under 50 — and in fact, under 20 — who take this stuff very seriously indeed.
The so-called Resistance is at it again:
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/spellcasting_101_an_illustrated_step_by_step_guide
Thanks for this John… I’m not looking to go start practicing it, at all. Just wanted to know from a comparative religion standpoint. Humans gonna human -and some of them are going to use magic and contact spirits for power regardless of tradition.
I did a tarot reading for a new friend recently and she had been dealing with figuring out her path forward while acknowledging rejection of her fathers way and hurt about his failings without getting trapped into a polarity opposite reactive path forward-against. Similarly my son is always trying to figure out what I am so he can be the opposite and that has gotten hard for him. Anyway, something that she said made me jump up and get the copy of Cosmic Doctrine I had just got from an online thrift bookseller and read to her the first paragraph about the forces of evil in opposition to the prime current. And she gathered immediately how it is not pushing 180 degrees back at the prime (like red and blue saber fields in Star Wars or some lesser wizard movie) but at 90 degrees and thereby creating spin and motion and that *this* is the utility of Negative forces. I was so excited how the newly arrived book/thought/reading served her and *me* as I muddle through raising my kids.
On the world full of gods, I found this recently and thought you all would like it. I love the way of thinking of gods as far away and present at the same time and intervening in your decisive moments when it serves their archetypal goals! Translated out of German, by Walter Otto originally, a much older work https://olddarkgods.com/p/theophany-part-one
Incidentally the day after I found that Substack I went and saw a tiny high school age local theater company performing ‘the lightning thief’ up at the altar of our Presbyterian church. Community building and navigating adolescent-parent relations with the support of the gods!
It has indeed been a while since I spent time on Christian forums, but I have no doubt they’re still vociferously anti-Satan in all his mighty manifestations (primarily drugs, games, sexual deviancy, Democrats, and rock music, but not neglecting e.g. teenagers who scrawl pentacles on their backpacks).
Earlier this summer I went to a rock concert, and apparently the band had recently been targeted as Satanic by some prominent Christian activists, the same ones who have organized public burnings of books and recordings. There were announcements throughout the performance that a mob of Fundamentalists led by a popular televangelist might be coming to shut the concert down. Those warnings were part of the performance itself, of course, but everyone understood the band was commenting on the imminence of the more general threat.
Correction: forgive my brief memory lapse, but it wasn’t earlier this summer, it was forty years ago. And even then I found it ironic that the only presence the fanatical “Dr. Righteous” had at that particular event was entirely created by the band themselves. (Yes, it was Styx. I have taste but I never claimed it’s good.)
The overall trend I’ve experienced since then is a gradual but fitful damping down of panic on all sides. There might be people somewhere still throwing CDs on bonfires (if they can find any; maybe burning vinyl albums has made a comeback instead) but I doubt many are torching their digital devices or earbuds. Debate over public schools seems more about the restrooms than the classrooms. There’s increasing anger but diminishing conviction.
I suppose I’ll have to go back a-lurking on Christian forums to see if Satan in his skibidiness is really up to any new tricks. And if so, what new repressed desires those might represent. A backlash against prepping maybe? (If God wanted you to survive it wouldn’t be the End Times, bro!)
Justin Patrick Moore,
I think the general pluralism and lack of hard duality in the extant oriental religions precludes them from ever stirring up an anti-religion like Satanism. Even the Agoris you mentioned do not really oppose orthodox Hindu religions, they only offer an alternative path to moksha that may suit some people better than the more traditional one of abstinance.
The only exception that MIGHT exist to this trend is Islam which we know drew much of its beliefs from Christianity — one of the most dualistic religions ever. There is a book I read a few years ago, The Black Path, written by a man who claims to have served as a French officer in Algeria until he stumbled upon a violent ceremony of Iblissiya (devil worshippers). The book propounds to relate the teachings of a heretical Sufi sect founded by a Chiekh Azzeddine who, as youth, suffered from all the classic symptoms of a Shamanic initiation until he submitted to the djinn that was tormenting him and agreed to transmit its teachings. His teachings seem to combine Gnostic cosmology with a traditional African praxis of animal sacrifice and spirit possession. Allah is a demiurge figure who rebelled against the Haawiya (in Islam, the lowest layer of Hell, but in Azzeddine’s teachings, the uncreated absolute reality) and created this world as a perverse science experiment. Shaitan isn’t a creation of Allah, but a denizen — perhaps the personification — of the Haawiya who seeks to liberate humanity, punish Allah, and reintegrate his aberrant creation back into the Absolute. Practicioners are encouraged to cultivate relationships with the spirits through acts of ritual chanting, prayer, and blood sacrifice — welcoming spirit possession and anything else that would serve to erode the Ruh (false ego) and strengthen the Wahsh (literally “beast”, but believed to be the true, uncreated self).
It’s a very interesting book and yet I have grave doubts as to its authenticity. The author offers to corroborative evidence to back up his claims, no photos (other than some public domain material). It’s very much along the lines of Carlos Castaneda material. Even more worrisome is that the book was published by Martinet Press, a well known FBI honeypot operated by a convicted felon. Keeping all that in mind, it remains the only book I am aware of that addresses devil worship in Islam and it is, of course, a very fascinating read.
Justin Patrick Moore says:
August 15, 2024 at 8:06 am
There is a lot of symbolism in the Bible that cast goats and snakes in a negative light. For Christians, something about horns, hooves and scales really seems to, uh, get their goat.
As you say and as my priest usually explains in all his sermons, the language of the Bible is symbolic and is adapted for people from other times but also from other places, that is why it talks about shepherds of the vine and snakes.
I have verified that the snakes. cause terror among the Arab immigrants I know, I suppose that in the countries where they come from they are terribly poisonous from what I understand is the symbolic representation of evil in the Bible.
That said, I would also like to point out that I believe that Christianity, which I know as Roman Catholicism, actually through
Syncretism has incorporated many of the European pagan traditions into its corpus.
Logically some things can be incorporated, for example, in the mythology of where I live, one of the main goddesses was called Maju, Maia or Mari, so it is quite easy to associate her with the virgin Mary, so if a shepherd made a offering or telling stories about Mari, there would not be such a problem, however, another of the main gods Sugoi/Sugaar, which is basically a giant snake that can take human form, is something symbolically incompatible with Christianity.
There was also a tradition that black goats were fertility amulets which I suppose suited the Spanish inquisition very well due to their accusations (the greatest auto de fe of the inquisition was given here in zugarramurdi and the word for witch meetings). . in Spanish it is coven which is actually a Basque word that literally means goat meadow)
Finally, I am sure that in this area the accusations of witchcraft were more political attacks and theft of wealth from the accused than accusations based on faith.
“the Tree of Life was a Gnostic diagram most of a millennium before it found its way into Judaism, and it was Pythagorean before the Gnostics got to it. I cover some of that in an upcoming book.”
Looking forward to the upcoming book.
Because of my Mormon upbringing, gnosticism is particularly interesting to me. There’s a lot of resemblance between Mormon beliefs and some gnostic beliefs about obtaining keys to pass the archons. There’s a lot of other resemblances too. Too bad the church leadership have long steered away from any interesting theological discussion. Now the only thing they do is beat the constant drumbeat of obedience and conformity.
A quick image / paintingto share since it is Levi week:
The Way of Silence by Frantisek Kupka
https://www.wikiart.org/en/frantisek-kupka/the-way-of-silence
Thanks as always for this book club, JMG.
As the kids say, you are the GOAT.
I’ll show myself the egress.
@Ecosophy Enjoyer (#18): Seems like some of those denunciations of (some) Gnostics point to a failure to integrate the harsher side of the Divine, as per Soko’s comment, much as some modern sects that emphasize one hypostasis at the exclusion of another. For the Christian, the same god that slays the firstborn of Egypt is the same who will suffer on the cross to redeem all the earth—the Ancient of Days enthroned alongside the Son of Man. I will sing of mercy and judgement—not mercy alone, nor only judgement.
It’s only when this shadow fails to be integrated within that the process of demon-ization—of finding evil outside, in and among others—begins.
Axé
Hi John Michael,
Thanks! The old timers used to quip that: ‘what you own, tends to own you’, and so I would avoid consorting with such low lifes in order to gain tools for the purposes of power and advantage. The sorcerer may enjoy more excitement in their lives than I. 🙂 Anyway, I’d lack the experience and competence to handle such err, things, and would promptly be turned into a tool myself. Never good. There are much better paths available, although they do involve continuous work, and the goals are different.
Man, woke up to a thunderstorm this morning. The storm produced a decent dump of rain, and was over again pretty quickly. Spring is here. How are you doing?
Cheers
Chris
Eagle, proving again that as every electrician knows, Resistance is the most efficient way to turn useful energy into waste heat.
Justin, understood. It’s just not something I’ve looked into.
AliceEm, delighted to hear it — and thanks for the link.
Walt, no doubt. Since I’ve been watching the emergence of our culture’s Second Religiosity I’ve been paying attention to forums far removed from the increasingly dilapidated fundamentalist movement. By the way, I played a Styx album this afternoon, while doing page proofs…
Enjoyer, it startles me that more dissident Mormons don’t look into some of the other LDS denominations, which could very readily serve the same function that the independent sacramental movement plays for many dissident Catholics.
Justin, that deserves posting here:
Monster, funny. I’ll take that as a compliment nonetheless. 😉
Chris, autumn seems to be arriving early here in southern New England; overnight temperatures are down around 60°F, and we had a classic autumn storm come barrelling down out of the north. It was welcome, since we’ve got a lot of smoke in the air from various large sections of Canada that are currently on fire.
I read this post and was wondering whether similar phenomena of antinomianism and “Resistance” appeared in other cultures.
I think the only example I can think of off the top of my head are the Aghoris in Hindu culture. Even then, the similarities are limited. A comment is too short to explore the background of Aghora Tantra, but it seems to me that, while the [i[practice[/i] of Aghora Tantra is antinomian with respect to orthodox Brahmanical society, its ultimate aims, to draw closer to the Divine, are actually quite aligned. Aghoris are only the most antinomian case of ascetics, meanwhile, for others who reject the Brahmanical models of success (marriage, wealth, children etc), they can join any number of less extreme ashrams and other groups or be a wandering, begging sadhu, in a path older than the Buddha and accorded its own form of respect.
In traditional Chinese culture, those who rejected the Confucian norms of society could go and join a Buddhist or Daoist sect, or simply be a hermit, which even today continues to some extent.
Maybe as a society, offering alternate paths that have their own kind of dignity, even if not accepted in the conventional sense, is a way to channel this “misfit” energy?
On another note, JMG, I look forward to your future book about Gnosticism. I think it was in your work somewhere where I saw that the classic “tree of life” diagram was first found in a Chinese Daoist text about a century before it appeared in Jewish Cabala. I searched a little bit about this and found that it seems to be an independent creation by Zhou Dunyi, actually a Neo-Confucian, albeit influenced by prior Daoist models: https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1007&context=phil_fac&httpsredir=1&referer=
There’s a very useful book on Gnosticism by April DeConick, The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today.
The core thesis of the book is that the “New Age” is latest manifestation of the Gnostic current. This may sound rather popularizing; indeed, the book is written in a rather colloquial style, as though worked up from lectures given to undergraduates, and it uses some computer-derived metaphors to make some of its points. However, it contains a very detailed study of as many Gnostic groups and traditions of the second century milieu as she could find — including close readings of the testimonies of the heresiologists, and some very plausible reconstructions of particular groups and their teachings. She also deals with surviving Gnostic groups from that period — Mandaeans etc.
The author gives a very sympathetic account of what various Gnostic groups and teachings were trying to do, and compares them to the New Age currents. Despite this, I gained a very clear sense of why the grumpy old heresiologists (and Plotinus as well, although she somewhat soft-pedals the latter) were exasperated by the Gnostic phenomenon. Simply, they knew better than anyone else — including each other. And they had long initiatory ladders to prove it. On her account, these groups began with visionary founders whose systems attracted disciples — but it’s hard to say what it is that disciples received, other than a chance to participate in graded, expressive communities, and perhaps receive the ultimate secrets on their deathbeds. Remaining ancient Gnostic groups, for example the Mandaeans, have a cosmology, a hierarchy, and a hierarchy of teachings; it is not at all clear that they have a technique of creating or transmitting transformative experiences. There are abundant records of theurgic, and mystical, methods: but within the context of Gnostic texts?
Hello, John Michael.
In the opening and closing ceremonies of the Paris Olympic Games, many people think that a lot of satanic symbolism has been used.
Also, in the last Eurovision music festivals some satanic type performances have been contemplated, which in the case of Ireland were especially blatant, with an inverted pentagram in the center of the stage and represented by a witch with horns.
In recent years we have been systematically attending these types of events at international shows. Many people think that all this is part of a strategy of the satanic promoters of the 2030 Agenda.
What do you think of all this?
John, yeah that image is in the public domain. I’d like to see if I can get a print of it. Thanks for posting it. I learned about Kupka in the book “Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage” by Simon Shaw-Miller which I highly recommend. There is a fair amount of esoteric content littered throughout. I read it for my research into Joseph Matthias Hauer on which there is a chapter. The author attributes the image to theosophy, and I am sure Kupka was steeped in that, but it seems likely he also read Levi. I learned there is a whole subset of Cubism known as Orphic Cubism or Orphism. He was born in the Austria-Hungarian empire and studied in Prague and Vienna -that whole area at the turn of the 19th century and the art movements there -like the Viennese Secession are becoming increasingly interesting to me. I figured there must be something like this in Islam. Since it has a strict legalism, it would seem there would be heretics who would flip it backwards. Sounds like not the kind of thing I’d be interested in, but what JMG call’s the “edgelords” of the occult “community” might think is cutting edge.
@Sybok: Thanks you for chiming in. This is fascinating, especially, to me, the part about FBI honeypot publishers (CIA does same). I was reading about these, I think in “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” -and since John had brought up Manson as kind of a cumulative point for all the orgies and drugs, yeah, seems totally related.
@Achille: Very interersting stuff. Goat meadow = coven in the Basque language? I had no idea. Yeah, some stuff does seem to work with syncretism and others do not fit. I have heard your country is a beautiful place. I’ve heard there were some different gnostic / heretical strains of Christianity in Basque… such as the Heresy of Durango. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and these beings from your land.
Many years ago I worked at a B&N. A couple, maybe 20 years old or so, asked me where to find the Satanic Bible. The woman did the asking. I took them to the section and as the man was paging through the book, I offhandedly said that I couldn’t understand the Satanic Bible. It seemed like a big temper tantrum. Christian candles were white, so we’ll make ours black. We’ll turn the cross upside down, just out of spite.
Then the guy slipped the book back on the shelf and the woman silently mouthed, ”thank you,” as they walked away. I wasn’t particularly interested in religion at that time. I had no intention of dissuading him. I was just making conversation as we waited.
Alvin, exactly; the amount of antinomianism in any society depends on the narrowness of the acceptable range of norms. If there’s a socially acceptable way of being a rebel and a nonconformist, most people dissatisfied with the existing order of things will take it. It’s only in societies that lack such an acceptable escape hatch that you get the full-blown antinomian schtick — as I call it, the “Rebel without a Clue” syndrome. As for my book, it’s on the Cabala, not Gnosticism as such; yes, I’m familiar with Zhou Dunyi’s work, but I’d point out that a lot of esoteric ideas traveled back and forth along the Silk Road — that’s why there were documented Buddhist misisonaries in Alexandria in the 2nd century BC, a Nestorian Christian monument was put up more than a millennium ago in the Japanese esoteric Buddhist center at Koyasan, and Joseph Needham made the very plausible suggestion that alchemy may have originated in China and traveled from there to India and the West. The origins of the Tree of Life are in Greek Pythagorean teachings; it’s documented in Gnostic literature from the 2nd century AD; thus it’s quite plausible that versions of it traveled east to influence Zhou and his predecessors.
LeGrand, thanks for this. I think DeConick may be right, not least because so many New Age groups also treat having the right information as the key to it all — listen to me channel the Ascended Master Tofu, and you too will become a sixth-density illuminated being!
Pedro H, I didn’t watch the Olympic games, and I don’t watch Eurovision, so I don’t have an educated opinion on the subject. I’d point out, though, that one of the dreary predictabilities of the people who think of themselves as the cultural avant-garde is that they’d never think of rebelling against the beliefs of today’s media-dominated mainstream culture, but they’re constantly rebelling against the beliefs of their grandparents, under the delusion that this makes them relevant. I suspect that’s a lot of what’s going on here.
Justin, hmm! Let me know if you find a source for prints of it; I could definitely handle having that on a wall.
Jon, nicely done.
The seller FabVintagePosters on Etsy seems to be offering this among their selections:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1218508548/frantisek-kupka-fine-art-print-the-way
You can get it in different sizes and formats.
I’ve been thinking, without any conclusions, about what Levi wrote in this chapter here:
“If God can be defined as he who necessarily exists, can we not define his antagonist and his enemy as he who necessarily does not exist?
The absolute affirmation of good implies the absolute negation of evil; in the light the shadow itself is luminous.”
There is a heck of a lot of consequences to different definitions of that difficult word ‘good’, which can slip very deeply into someone’s unconscious belief system and shape that person’s actions further ‘downstream’ (to mix metaphors). I could be cheeky here and say that the definition of ‘good’ is quite a profound magical act!
In the Corpus Hermeticum the ‘good’ is defined in this way: “He who gives all and takes nothing is good”, and the only being who can do that, the text says, is God. Therefore God is the only thing that can be good, and calling anything else at all good is “blasphemy” (I’m sure I’m missing something from the text, though).
In a way, taking these definitions alone, Levi and the Hermeticum lay out the terms of what ‘good’ means in a way almost exactly opposite to one another. Or do they? Do these just blend in together and make the exercise of trying to define good a completely useless one? Both agree that God is good, but one says that the good is therefore in everything, and the other says that the good can’t be in anything except God.
They both apply a blanket definition over our experienced reality which is simultaneously meaningful in that it can guide one’s actions, but meaningless because it groups everything in our reality entirely into one definition or the other, which makes it impossible to distinguish either way.
I’ll keep at it! 🙂
@JMG – “the beliefs of their grandparents?” My mind promptly jumped to a sarcastic song from RENT …..”hating dear old mom and dad…..” Of course, the characters in RENT, those who survived the 80s, are pretty well up in years themselves these days.
Canadian smoke reaching RI? From the Canadian prairies? Wow.
@Justin Patrick Moore – “From Wagner to Cage…..” there’s a rapid slide downhill for you, ending by crashing into a snowbank.. OF course, Anna Russell and Bugs Bunny did a nice number on Wagner.
And – what a wonderful painting!
@JMG #41 – I don’t know anything about the dissident Mormon sects except for the polygamist cults that infest the Arizona-Utah border and make even the Taliban look good by comparison. Though IMO the mainstream Mormons are tough enough to ride the upper parts of the Long Descent in better shape than a lot of other (saving the drying up of their homeland) except the Amish.
Hi all – the Ave. of the Sphinxes painting posted here is synchronicity for me. I didn’t see the painting posted until just now, but last night I watched a Discover channel show called Mythical Beasts, all about – you guessed it, The Sphinx, and the archeological digs at the Ave. of the Sphinxes! What it means, I have no clue, but I’ll keep my eye out.
I just came home from lunch, where I found a large gray feather, nearly a foot long, newly shed, next to my driveway. The sphinx has wings…
“By the way, I played a Styx album this afternoon…”
I’m not surprised. After all, it’s a grand illusion and deep inside we’re all the same. (Same… same… same…)
Wow, so the Dakinis are morally dubious? They are portrayed very differently in a modern feminist form of Tibetan Buddhism… though I’m imagining you don’t have much good to say about those…
@jbucks #49,
In my understanding of the Hermetica, only God can be (the absolute) Good, but then God is in everything – so the gap between them and Lévi might not be as big…
Milkyway
If only I had thought to check the index for the image of Baphomet earlier in the book when I read the chapter Tuesday night … I kept trying to see what Levi was talking about in the image that is in this chapter and failing miserably. But as you laid it out in your post, I can see how much influence this image has on the occult philosophy in your OPW and on the Sphere of Protection in AODA. Not that I would have figured that out on my own ahead of your laying it out, but at least I would have seen each of the things Levi mentions in the image.
I think that one reason for the scary image, beyond causing those who aren’t ready to not start practicing magic due to fear, is to remind those who choose to follow the path of magic how much is at stake. As you point out in your discussion of the pentagram in OPW, power in the hands of humans, such as that gained from working magic, is rarely safe. The pentagram on Baphomet’s head represents not just the power the mage can wield but also the absolute responsibility the mage takes on in wielding it. Exercise that power in an irresponsible way, and the mage not only hurts themselves and others more thoroughly than is otherwise possible, the mage also accumulates the kind of karma that takes many more lifetimes to work through than the average person spends to work through their karma.
This is true for occultists as well, as I learned when I worked through the OPW. At the same time that practicing occultism is potentially a quicker path to wisdom, revelation, and enlightenment than not practicing it, when done without also practicing the virtues and taking responsibility, it becomes a quick path to accumulating the kind of karma that takes many more lifetimes than the average person to work through.
Justin, thanks for this!
Jbucks, excellent. Definitely keep at it.
Patricia M, yep. The sun was blood red when it set today because of all the smoke in the air. As for Mormon sects, there’s another end of the spectrum — there are liberal Mormon denominations as well.
Dana, I hope you picked up that feather and put it on your home altar!
Walt, I think it’s mostly that when I gaze in the looking glass, I think to myself, “You’re not a child any more.”
Njura, most modern feminist scholarship on the subject is based on the dogmatic assumption that all female spirits everywhere are morally perfect, and anyone who disagrees is a (insert your insult of choice here). In Japanese esoteric Buddhism, the dakinis are cannibalistic demonesses who used to grab people, tear them to gobbets, and eat them. Fudo Myo-o, the great wrathful deity of Japanese Buddhism, decided to teach them a lesson, gobbled them all up, and wouldn’t let them out of his belly until they promised to mend their ways. They still eat human flesh, but only after their meals have died of natural causes, and Fudo taught them a mantra to protect people who are dying so that the other categories of flesh-eating demons don’t get them first.
In medieval Japan, riffing off this legend, sorcerers worked out ways to summon dakinis to get worldly favors from them, and that evolved into the cult of a mostly evil goddess, Dakini-ten or Dagini-ten, who was associated with female fox spirits — the belles dames sans merci of Chinese and Japanese legend, sexual vampires who would drain men of their vital essence — and could be summoned and worshipped to get worldly power and luck. The downside — a big one in traditional Japanese culture — is that none of the benefits you got would be passed on to your descendants or your family.
SLClaire, excellent. I considered including Baphomet in the OPW, but decided against it because (a) it’s such a cultural hot button these days, and (b) there are other ways to do the same thing. If I ever decide to do anything with the Templar lineages I’ve received, though, Baphomet’s going to be an unavoidable factor.
@Justin Patrick Moore, @Dana, and others pondering the Sphinx:
I have recently learned that the Sphinx’s brother is the Nemean Lion of Herakles’ fame. (They were the children of Orthros and either Echidna or Chimera, depending on the author. https://www.theoi.com/Ther/KuonOrthros.html) Another author distinguishes between the Egyptian Sphinx (who represents Wisdom) and the Sphinge, which is the “sphinx” of Oedipus fame (and that it is the Sphinge, not the Sphinx, that is the sister of the Nemean Lion) https://www.greekmyths-interpretation.com/en/genesis-greek-mythology-interpretation/typhon-echidna-greek-mythology-interpretation/?highlight=sphinx.
The Way of Silence seems to be the path of Wisdom. But now I wonder if Levi knew of the Sphinge (whom the author linked above interprets as ‘perverted wisdom’ or the ‘spiritual ego’), because that means I need to revisit my Oedipus and the Sphinx meditation from way back at the beginning of the book…
Yes JMG I sure did. Synchronicity is fun.
I think that there will be more alternative mormon groups going forward because of the strictness of the church and because it is constantly withdrawing support from communities. It’s rapidly becoming spiritually and emotionally impoverished. When I was a kid there was a lot of community dinners and roadshows and plays and campouts. Now you aren’t even allowed to cook food in the kitchens anymore!
There is actually a Mormon kabbalist group that I have looked into but I didn’t join. While I am culturally Mormon, I don’t believe the claims anymore. The guy leading it calls himself a prophet, and in mormon splinter groups it’s usually only a matter of time before someone brings back polygamy. No, I’m much more comfortable on the hermetic path.
P.S, Hermeticism is really similar to Gnosticism, isn’t it? It’s like gnosticism without the pessimistic outlook of the world.
Since we’re discussing the Sphinx, here’s a poem I read… thirty years ago. I’ve forgotten the name of the poet, sadly, but the poem has stuck in my head, word for word, ever since:
Die Sphinx
Wer sagt, dass mein Lächeln
geheimnisvoll sei?
Sand ist Sand. Sand ist einerlei.
Wüsten voll Tod, Wüsten voll Leben
Das Zahllose ist es, was zählt.
Alle Antworten sind schon gegeben
Nur die rechte Frage fehlt.
BeardTree, how could there be such a sinister plan, that could hide such a lamb, such a caring young man, under the illusions of “satanism”?
JMG, I did a double-take when you pointed out that Baphomet is pointing his right hand up and the left one down. I worked on Essene Healing Hands for a while in 2022-23, but then stopped. But since then, I have developed a habit of resting my right hand on my chest, over my heart, and my left hand on my left thigh or my lower abdomen when I sleep on my back. It just feels “right” to me, energy-wise. Hmmmmm…
My Bible study buddy and I wrestled for awhile with Isiaiah 45:7, in which YHWH says “I create shalom and I create calamity.” (Normally translated by English Christians as “I create good and evil.”) ‘Shalom’ is when things are going well, and “everything under the sun is in tune” (mixing my rock groups here). ‘Calamity’ is like when things go tremendously ‘agley’ for the mouse in Robert Burns’ poem “To a Mouse”. It occurred to me that since YHWH created everything, it’s useful to step back, look at the larger picture, and understand that what happens is not about us only. I pointed out to my study buddy that the locusts in Joel 2 were having a great time until the Israelites prayed to YHWH for intercession; then things looked up for the humans and got bad for the locusts.
My study buddy also points out regularly that the idea of absolute, abstract concepts such as ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘terror’ etc come from Greek philosophy, such as Plato, and were alien to Israelite thought. The Israelites thought very concretely, he says, and ancient Hebrew language was based on actions, not insubstantial concepts. We say “a pencil” and Israelites called it “thing that writes”, for example. He says that the “Alexandrian School” of Christianity sought to integrate Greek philosophy into Christianity.
The resulting attempt to interpret ancient Israelite scriptures through a Greek-philosophy lens (massive culture clash there) may account for some (or most) of the crazier stuff that gets done/said in the name of Christianity. This mindset tweaks English translations of the Bible to this day. I look up verses in the ‘interlinear’ section of BibleHub.com and routinely find spots the translators paper over. Check out Acts 16:16, for example, both in ‘biblehub.com/interlinear’ and in your favorite English-language Bible.
JMG, thanks for the fascinating explanation about Shingon. It seems that in Japan the Dakinis never converted to become enlightened “wrathful” protectors of the Dharma, as they are said in some Tibetan traditions.
Just curious if you came across the American mystic Richard Rose. I can’t seem to stay away from his work. Also ordered a book by Franz Hartman – Magic, White and Black. Seems not many people are familiar with him, he was around from 1838 to 1912.
I first ordered your Celtic Golden Dawn book, felt like it went over my head then aquired The Druidry Handbook read through it and am now doing a deep dive of The Druidry Magic Handbook. I may eventually be able to do a full study of The Celtic Golden Dawn but for now my work with The Druidry Magic Handbook needs to be thorough and complete, it really has been a good template for my path. In terms of discursive meditation I’ve now been hammering the subject of self definition and feel like I will be stuck on that for a long time and is very adequate as a subject after the relaxation stage, then color breathing and finally the subject of meditation. I’ve not become a member of the AODA, I’m strictly a solitary practicioner, for some reason my intuition always switches me off from any kind of group work.
@Milkyway: Yes, true, that makes sense! If I recall correctly, in the Hermeticum the distinction is made between God, the principle by which everything is caused, and the cosmos, that which is caused. Which would indeed imply that God is part of everything and show that Levi and the Hermeticum basically agree on the point.
What fascinates me is where the value judgement ‘good’ is placed by either author upon this conclusions of this logic because a great deal of the many other arguments of either text rests, like a house sitting on a foundation, on this judgement. Or at least it appears so to me at the moment.
@Viduraawakened, that was a very interesting description of your musical meditation and answered some questions I have had when reading Virgil’s Eclogues. Musical meditation may have been invented in India, but it seems to have been known in Antiquity in Europe, too!
See line 8 and line 82 of Eclogue 6, though the English translation unfortunately is not very faithful. I would translate them as
line 8: “I will meditate a rural Muse on a slim reed of oat”
line 82: “Everything which, when Phoebus Apollo once meditated and told the laurel trees to learn, happy Eurotas heard, he [Silenus] sang”.
Also line 2 of Eclogue 1:
“You meditate a forest Muse on a slim (reed of) oats”
We discussed this here quite a while ago!
@jbucks (#49), if I may be so bold: it’s my sense that we never directly experience The Good (which is God alone, and almost by definition inaccessible), but only proximate things that are good (this wine tastes good, etc.). Everything else, then, is some manifest diminution of that original, transcendent Good…and some states are more fallen away than others. The elevation of any one of these lessers goods as if it were The Good, then, could be construed as blasphemy (or idolatry).
Thus the furthest falling away from The Good and Being is not some jabbering, perverted beast, but the void.
Just my take.
Axé
Hi John Michael,
Interesting, and glad to hear that you received the rain. The official start to spring down here is the first of September, but that’s really more of a guide than what happens in reality. We tend to have six seasons, rather than the more usually agreed upon four. However, like your part of the world, spring seems to have arrived early here. Last week was downright warm and sunny (for winter) which was very nice, and today is a very typical spring storm. It’s rained all day long but isn’t quite what you’d describe as being cold. There’s a garden festival in a town to the north of the mountain range celebrating the daffodils. Usually when the daffodils are blooming, the weather is rather wet in these parts.
For your interest, we haven’t heard much in relation to the Canadian fires this year. Usually the local news follows this topic (also those fires along the west coast of your country), despite it freaking people out during the middle of winter. Still, the summer months down under are replete with smoke from out of control fires. Once you’re out of a major city (and the Canberra fires in 2003 proved that’s not always the case) you’re at risk of fire. It’s always seemed weird to me that there is such a lack of preparation for these incidents.
Cheers
Chris
Enjoyer, so noted! As for Hermeticism, yes — the spectrum extends from Platonism, which is philosophical and relatively optimistic about the world, through Hermeticism, which is occult and has a mixed view of things, to Gnosticism, which is a religion and many branches of which were very negative about the world. They were all part of the same broad movement.
Athaia, thank you for this! It’s a fine poem:
“…All the answers have been given;
Only the right question is lacking.”
Cicada, okay, this is getting colorfully synchronistic. Care to guess which album is playing as I type these words? As for Bible passages, note that the one you cited is in koine Greek, and it still has some not-to-be-translated bits in it! Greek is less abstract than it’s been made to look by later intellectuals…
Njura, nope. All Fudo did with them is get them started on the path of learning virtue, so that after many lives they will have built up enough merit to begin the path to enlightenment.
Insufferable, I haven’t read anything by Rose yet but I know people who speak very highly of him. As for Hartmann, he was a Theosophist, and like a lot of the second string Theosophists he’s been almost completely forgotten these days. I’m glad to hear that the books are working for you — and there’s absolutely no requirement to get involved with a group if you don’t want to.
Chris, I expect the smoke issue to be a continuing issue, since climate belts are shifting and that means areas currently covered by forest are turning into prairie. In North America, that change usually involves fire. It’s a natural process. Yeah, you’d think more people would be ready for it.
JMG has recommended more than once Stevan Davies’ The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom, which I bought and read some time ago. In this context, I would like to point out another of those verses which Cicada Grove refers to, where all the translations paper over a difficulty.
Proverbs 8:22 ) is usually translated as “(Wisdom speaks: ) The LORD brought me forth/formed me/created me/possessed me as the first of his works, before his deeds of old”. However, if you click on the link 7069 above “qa-na-ni” (possessed me), you will see that it is never translated that way anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, but always as a variant of bought/got/purchased.
In other words, a straightforward translation would be:
“(Wisdom speaks:) YHWH acquired me at the beginning of his way, before his deeds of old.
From ages back I have been established, from the start, before the beginnings of the earth.”
That sounds more like Odin in the Edda than like Genesis…
@RandomActsofKarma: very interesting about the Nemean lion. You might be interested to know that Josephine McCarthy has called the path if initiation as The Path of Hercules with its trials and tests that forge the practitioner into an adept.
The story of the Choice of Hercules by Xenophon also seems to be illustrative o this dynamic
@JMG
Thank you for your reply. Regarding this being possibly an Indian invention – not surprising, as both the Hindustani and Carnatic classical music traditions are ultimately rooted in the Sama Veda, which is the 2nd oldest of the four Vedas. As for the practice itself teaching me with time, no arguments there – I think of this as something that is intended to train my mind and vocal chords, in a way similar to the Dion Fortune quote you have stressed on about “training the mind, not informing it”.
@Aldarion
Thank you for your reply. Your point about musical meditation being practiced in Classical times is interesting, and entirely possible – after all, full-scale exchanges between India and Greco-Roman society really took off when the Mauryan emperor Ashoka sent Buddhist missionaries to Alexandria and other parts of the region, including even Athens; and it’s very likely that this form of meditation made its way there. Then there’s also the possibility of convergent evolution…
The verses from Virgil that you shared are themselves interesting. That said, there’s a bit of a difference in an alaap and the method you shared, which is: an alaap doesn’t use any actual lyrics; instead, it uses syllables like “noam-toam”, “ritah-tanah”, etc. which are meaningless – the idea behind this is that the focus should be on the music more than the lyrics, so such syllables are used as “placeholders”, this enabling the vocalist to concentrate on the music and not the lyrics.
Sorry, the reference to link 7069 will be unclear without the interlinear display of the verse.
Could it be that Tibetan Dakinis are different beings than Japanese Dakinis nowadays? As far as I know, there is no one deity with a fox or jackal; instead they come in five colours, according to the Buddha families. Many practitioners work with them to transform the emotion one Dakini specializes in from its base form to its wisdom form.
JMG – Here’s a bit of synchronicity that seems slightly on-topic. I was watching a math video, about “The Tank Problem”. In essence, if you have a set of items with consecutive serial numbers (e.g., enemy armor), how can you estimate the number of elements in the set (size of enemy forces) by checking (capturing) as few elements of the set (tanks) as possible?
Consider drawing a few items, and note which one has the smallest number. Then the actual number of items in the set may be estimated as “the largest number drawn, plus the smallest number drawn”. In the video, the mathematician explains that the “zero to smallest value seen” interval is likely to be close to the “largest value seen to largest value in the set”, but the TEXT on the screen says “AS BELOW, SO ABOVE.” Such a concise rule; I think I’ve heard it somewhere before!
@viduraawakened: Yes, line 82 in eclogue 6 seems to refer to Phoebus meditating by singing actual words – though this is not entirely clear. The others refer to an oat reed as an improvised musical instrument. Playing it would surely occupy the mouth, so there is no question of syllables, meaningful or not.
The other two occurrences in Latin poetry dug up in 2019 were
But I meditated song on the glimmering (reed of) oats,
me [Apollo], the son of Latona and Jupiter.
and
… to meditate as companion together with dear Achilles
the strings of the lyre…
@Njura #74
The dakini are a class of demonic witches. Many of them were tamed and converted into religious protectors by the Buddhas of the past. The five female wisdom deities, including their wrathful forms, are emanations of the cosmic Mother of the Buddhas.
@Justin Patrick Moore,
I will definitely look up Josephine McCarthy and study her interpretations. My current thinking is that Herakles represents the Solar Path (as described by Oswald Wirth), but Warren’s interpretation is adding another dimension to that (which means my understanding will need some updating!). Once I finish studying Warren, I will be seeing what McCarthy can teach me. 🙂
Thank you so much for the recommendation!
“Cicada, okay, this is getting colorfully synchronistic.” Could be some of us just have too much time on our hands.
Speaking of spiritual evil, maybe getting into archon territory here. I was on a long lay over at O’ Hare airport in Chicago in the late 1970’s. I decided to go on a walk outside. As I was going along I felt what I can only describe as a wave of spiritual evil strike me from behind. I turned around and fifty feet behind was Henry Kissinger with two body guards. I took an immediate right. The other time I experienced that same sense of evil was in 1993. President Bill Clinton was going to eat at a restaurant in our California town. I witnessed from close up his car along with the attendant cavalcade of secret service agents as they were arriving at the restaurant. I felt the same cloud of spiritual evil. There are bad boys out there I believe.
JMG,
Thanks for your earlier reply about the connection to the temple technology, among other things.
When the Templars were persecuted, there must have been a lot of people involved on the persecuting side, and I’d be very surprised if some material/knowledge wouldn’t have survived through the ordinary means of human behavior: e.g. if some of the persecuting party wouldn’t have kept material of the Templars for themselves, instead of burning it or handing it to the church; or if some nobles wouldn’t have let some papers disappear in their own private libraries, hoping to gain power or money from the Templar techniques; or if some nobles with certain sympathies for the cause wouldn’t have been handed some secret knowledge by the Templars; etc etc.
Lévi must have been widely read in occult things, and he lived closer to the Templars than we do. It’s not at least possible that he might have encountered some material related to their practices, including the temple technology, e.g. stumbled across something written, or copies of it, or heard things from other people.
Thus I’ve been wondering if there might be something in this chapter alluding to the temple technology. Alas, somewhat ambitiously, I bought a French copy of the book a while back, and it’s mainly still unread because the poor remainders of my highschool French need some brushing up before I tackle it in earnest. 😉 However, I’ve fought my way through a first read of this chapter 15 in the past couple of days, and while I’m sure I’ve missed a lot (and probably got some things wrong, too), I’m also fairly sure that there are at least no obvious references of the temple technology (subtle stuff might be another matter).
Not a big surprise, I guess – you would have noticed it if Lévi had written about it. And he himself might not even have been interested that much in this technology (or at least less so than in other occult things), i.e. even if he had seen or heard something about it, he might not have deemed it important enough to write about it. Still, I figured I should at least try to read the chapter before continuing a discusssion… But it looks like this is a dead end. Well, at least I got started with reading French… 😉
One completely unrelated question, though: That story of his about the German association… am I getting it right that he’s talking about a pug dog? And why, of all dogs, a pug dog? *scratches head in bafflement* Or is that one of Lévi’s jokes?
Milkyway
@LeGrand Cinq-Mars #43,
Do you happen to be the same LeGrand who commented on the last MM about life force practices in the Neoplatonic/Hermetic tradition? If so, I’d be very interested in learning more about this. Could you give me a few pointers (references to primary or secondary literature, keywords to search for, …), or maybe write a few lines about it?
Since this is leading a bit far away from this week’s topic, maybe on the next Open Post? (or I can be reached via email through my website, if you click on my name above) Thanks! 🙂
@jbucks #65,
Hm. Maybe two different viewpoints onto the same scenery – both equally “true”, but one more useful as the other in certain contexts?
Milkyway
“The King in Orange” your book, first chapter A Season in Carcosa; Demoncrat National Convention; gratitude
Off-topic. I don’t have the foggiest idea whether you will want to put this missive through. Kindly remind me what blog URL I can go to where you talk about the election (I never caught the URL😵💫).
I am re-reading The King in Orange. I need it bad. It is such of your writings that is keeping me sane.
Even as little exposure I have to the mainstream media, every few weeks, I get sucked in. I don’t partake of much mainstream media but my husband does, and he influences me. He needs to vent. He accepts the mainstream media hook, line, and sinker. He is an avowed Democrat. So, I need to de-program myself, shaking off mainstream media detritus now and then. I need to just leave him be to his own beliefs, but at the same time, after reading your stuff for twenty-years, feel okay in my knowledge that I don’t share his outlook (and avoid fights with him).
I watched a good deal of the Republican National Convention three weeks ago. Starting today is the Demoncratic National Conference,—non-stop, full-on propaganda. This is the honeymoon period for Demoncrats. I will watch (a tad) to see if I perceive KomodoHarris falling into the same pit as HilarityClinton did eight years ago. After this week, reality again sets in for Demoncrats (where they insist that what they WANT to happen isn’t actually what HAPPENS). I have to laugh reading the parallels to 2016 HilarityClinton compared to 2024 KomodoHarris. I am grateful that you figured this stuff out ahead of time, and have shared your musings for posterity.
I just need to get through this week unscathed. Then the long haul of two months where all Tramp has to do is make fun of KomodoDemoncrat. To him, it will be two months of FROLICKING. He doesn’t have to do anything more than jab Komodo occasionally (like her pro-Okraine stance), in the right spots, at the right times, to get her to veer off much like poking the snout of a shark to get the shark to turn in a different direction.
I feel like the sleeper cell waiting invisibly until the time comes where I drive to the polling place and vote for Tramp. It really does not matter what Tramp does for these two months, or does not do,—Komodo is simply a younger, darker, better-turned out version of Hilarity. The Demoncrats don’t “get it” in 2024 any more than they got it in 2016. Now in 2024, eight years later, I know better to vote for Tramp (in 2016, I had voted for Hilarity).
I would have never put two-and-two together had it not been for your many-splendored writings. Thank you‼️
💨Northwind Grandma💨👐📖
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Speaking of synchronicities,
A song by Hazmat Modine finally showed back up in my you tube feed.
They spelled the name differently
Bohamut, it is a catchy tune.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n7UoRmDZlk
@beardtree, speaking of Chicago. Can you imagine the sense of spiritual evil you would feel if you entered the United Center in the Windy City this week.
(Full off topic) John, yesterday the smoke from the Canada fires reached Northern Spain. Dawn sun was red, and the “Super”Moon, too.
It’s my understanding that a number of the gnostic schools seem to think the serpent offering knowledge is the helpful spirit while the jealous creator who wants humanity to stay ignorant is the adversarial one – where does that kind of gnosticism end and satanism begin?
@Fra’ Lupo and @Milkyway: Apologies for the late reply! I appreciate the further food for thought as I continue to reflect on the issue along with the useful points you raised. Thanks again!