Magic Monday
Feb. 16th, 2020 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
It's a little shy of midnight, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. This week's classic book of Western occultism is The Kybalion, the most enduring of the many works that blended occultism with New Thought. (New Thought? That's the classic American movement of self-help through mind training that emerged after the Civil War as people started paying attention to the way that thinking shapes experience and emotions affect health.) It's the original source of the Seven Hermetic Principles -- the Principles of Mentalism, Correspondence, Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, and Gender -- and of many other core concepts of 20th century American occultism. According to the cover, The Kybalion was written by "Three Initiates;" in fact, it was written by one, the redoubtable William Walker Atkinson, one of the most influential American occultists of his time. If Hermes can be Thrice Great, no doubt Atkinson can be Thrice Initiate...
Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed -- and yes, this means you. See you next week!***
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-17 06:23 am (UTC)2) Very glad to see it.
3a) Well, the answer I was going to give was "What a wonderful set of themes for meditation!" but your answer is close enough. ;-)
3b) Nope. As a rule of thumb, different symbolic systems are no more interconvertible than the grammars of different languages. (Rule-of-thumbly, systems symbolic different than of different languages the grammar intercomvertible no more are...)
3c) Here are two pies of equal diameter. I have cut one of them into eight pieces and one into seven. Which of the eight pieces are left out of the pie that's been cut into seven pieces?
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-17 06:08 pm (UTC)I know there's no direct correlation (besides the pie), but couldn't you syncretize the 7 elements into 8 holidays by having the Spirit Above aspects of the 4 elements for the light half of the year and the Spirit Below aspects of the 4 elements for the dark half of the year?
There's a few complications: Spirit Within gets represented by the practitioner, you'd have to give a light aspect to one equinox and a dark aspect to the other even though they're balanced, and I'm not sure what procession of the 4 elements would be best to use, but it seems workable.
What I can't tell is whether your response indicates that relating the SoP elements to the holidays is a pointless task, or laughingsage is just going about it in the wrong way.
This is something I've been wondering about myself, but I'm waiting for your Mysteries of Merlin to drop so I know what a year-based ritual system looks and feels like before experimenting too much.
The only year-based ritual I have now is tree meditation, since trees tend to embody the essence of the current season very beautifully.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-17 06:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-02-17 07:16 pm (UTC)Interesting pointed question, with broad applicability. I should add Sam Loyd's famous "Get Off the Earth" puzzle (seen here) or more likely, one of its more modern less racial-caricature-y equivalents, to my ever-growing "Tools for Magical Education that No One Thinks Of as Tools for Magical Education" list.