Toward Ecosophy

I don't know if this is true for other people, but whenever I work on a research project involving occultism, I start fielding those odd bursts of improbable coincidence that Carl Jung called "synchronicities." One of those landed the other day, courtesy of the IAPSOP archive of old occult texts. 

For years now one of my core research projects has been tracking down the traces of a lost tradition which surfaces in certain surprising places -- the writings of earth-mysteries doyen John Michell, the teachings of certain branches of the Druid Revival tradition, a handful of old books on animal magnetism, and more. The tradition, if I understand it correctly, works with two sources of energy:  one assoclated with terrestrial magnetism, the other associated with solar radiation. It might best be understood as a form of energetic alchemy, because these two currents are fused in a variety of vessels -- especially but not only in the human organism -- to create a third force that can be used in various ways. Created in the human organism, it gives rise to wisdom, revelation, and enlightenment; created in the land, by way of certain structures of stone and earth, it gives rise to agricultural fertility; it has other uses, not all of which I'm prepared to discuss. 

There were exercises meant to connect with those energies. I've found references to some of them, and included them in certain books of mine; I've also adapted other workings to do the same thing. But I wasn't expecting one of the exercises to show up in a pamphlet by a Spiritualist medium. 

Abby A. Judson was once a tolerably well-known figure in the Spiritualist circuit. In 1888, she learned a certain simple set of exercises from one Dr. H.W. Abbott, whom I haven't yet been able to trace.  Abbott claimed he'd been taught them by the spirit of a king of Atlantis named Osseweago; given the role of upstate New York as a hotbed of early American occultism, I suspect that the good doctor was having fun at Ms. Judson's expense. The exercises, as Judson notes in her book The Bridge Between Two Worlds, is primarily meant to bring the practitioner into contact with benevolent spiritual currents and chase off negative energies; she recommends it to mediums because it keeps noxious entities at bay.

I've done some experimenting with the exercises and modified them slightly; you can find Judson's original version via the two links above. Here's my current version: 

1. Stand facing north. Turn counterclockwise three and a half times, arms extended out to the sides, palms down, concentrating on the idea that unwanted energies are being thrown off as you turn. End facing south. 

2. Bring your heels together, shift your weight onto the balls of your feet, extend your arms to the south, spread your fingers slightly, bow your head and close your eyes. Imagine that you are being permeated with the magnetic energies of the earth. 

3. Turn clockwise to face the north. Then raise your arms up and out above your head and look up. Turn very slowly clockwise once around, while imagining life and blessing descending to you from the sun. You can say a prayer or spoken invocation as you do this. 

4. Extend your arms to your sides, palms down, and turn clockwise four and a half times, concentrating on the idea that you are wrapping yourself and your aura in the positive energies you have invoked. End facing south,. 

5. Sweep your "positive hand" -- this is usually the hand you write with -- palm down a few inches above  the palm and forearm of your negative hand, which is held palm up. Do this three times, sweeping the hand from wrist to fingertips. Then reverse, and sweep off the positive hand with the negative hand. 

These stages are, respectively: (1) throwing off inharmonious magnetism; (2) blending with the magnetism of the earth; (3) calling down beneficent influences from above; (4) gathering up and charging the aura; (5) sealing the aura. Yes, by the way, the possibility that these exercises might fit somewhere into the prehistory of Peter Kelder's Five Rites has occurred to me.

Note 1: Judson, like many writers of her time, uses the word "magnetism" to refer to what Mesmer called "animal magnetism," Reichenbach called "od," etc., etc., etc.  It's not the force that comes from physical magnets. 

Note 2: To make sense of "clockwise" and "counterclockwise," by the way, imagine yourself looking down at a giant clock face on the ground just beneath your feet. The way the hands move on that clock face is "clockwise" in terms of this exercise. 

My experiments with this exercise suggest that it functions as a banishing ritual, but it works primarily on the etheric level, where most banishing rituals work primarily on the astral. Judson suggests doing it first thing in the morning and then again at night; I've tried this with good results, and it does not seem to conflict in any way with the Sphere of Protection. 

If anyone else feels inspired to give this a try, I'd welcome feedback. It seems to be a very simple and effective way of cleansing the aura of etheric gunk and charging it with cleaner energies; if it also does this for other people, I plan on getting it into wider circulation. Thank you in advance for your help!

I field questions now and again about the origins of the material I put into my book The Druid Magic Handbook and my forthcoming two-volume set The Dolmen Arch, and they're questions I have a hard time answering in any satisfactory manner. The very short form is that after I became head of a nearly defunct Druid order in 2003, I got handed various documents, some of which had to do with the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA), some of which had to do with AODA sister orders such as the Order of Spiritual Alchemy and the Modern Essene Fellowship, and some of which had nothing to do with any of these but got sent to me anyway. 

It was a real gallimaufry, and one of the projects I've had in mind for a while now is getting more of it in order and in the hands of people who might be interested in it. The relaunching of the Order of Essenes correspondence course, a fine presentation of the best of the New Thought system, was part of that, and I'm delighted to report that that's been well received -- there's been a steady stream of students for the lessons, and some have already finished the first course with flying colors and qualified for the more challenging second course. 

The things that fascinated me most, though, were scraps of teaching that had to do with a system of Druid Revival philosophy and practice I'd seen referenced here and there. There's a system of correspondences that assigns things to seven symbolic Cantrefs, which I'd seen referenced but never described in a classic occult work by David Conway; there's an odd series of hints about Rosicrucian connections -- "the mistletoe on the oak is also the rose on the cross," and the like; there were portions of two lessons of an old mimeographed correspondence course, which I expanded into the Dolmen Arch course, soon to be published in book form; and running through the whole thing, there's a distinctive take on magical energies, which focuses on the interplay between the solar or cosmic current descending from the heavens and the telluric current rising from the earth. 

I'd also encountered that before, in hints and scraps. The late John Michell, who knew an extraordinary amount about occult tradition and wove any number of hints into The View Over Atlantis and his other books, talked learnedly about the two currents here and there, and explored their symbolic numbers. Some years back, my fellow archdruid Gordon Cooper succeeded in tracking down an odd series of essays from the early 19th century, "Letters on Tellurism, Commonly Called Animal Magnetism," which were written by Swiss mesmerist Gioacchino de Prati and talk about the two currents in some detail; and there are also things in Dion Fortune that suggest a knowledge of it -- when we get to the relationship between the Solar Logos and the Planetary Spirit in my monthly commentary on The Cosmic Doctrine, we'll get into that. 

Now I have another few scraps. 

For quite a few years now I've practiced a system of acupressure self-treatment called Do-In -- that's pronounced "dough-inn," and it's the Japanese version of the Chinese term Daoyin. Most of the books I have on it were published in America, and when they get into philosophy at all they mostly talk about the macrobiotic diet. There are a few books by French authors, though -- Jacques de Langre and Jean Rofidal -- that head off in their own direction. Both of them drop plenty of references to the Druids...and both of them talk at some length about the cosmic and telluric currents. 

The connection's not hard to trace. There's been a very large Druid Revival scene in France since the late 19th century at least, and it linked up in various ways with Asian and especially Japanese spiritual traditions when those reached Western Europe -- the macrobiotic teacher George Ohsawa and the controversial Breton nationalist Druid Neven Henaff even co-wrote a book on the health benefits of vitamin C, which was published in 1977. French Druid traditions adopted a version of East Asian yin-yang theory, using the Gaulish words samos and giamos ("summer" and "winter" respectively) for yang and yin. Thus de Langre and Rofidal had plenty of chances to learn a Druidized version of Do-In, and that's apparently what they did. 

So clearly whatever teaching de Prati knew in the 1830s was still known in France in the 1930s, in the US somewhere around that time (the mimeographed pages I got didn't have dates on them but I'm guessing from context), wherever John Michell got his knowledge in the 1950s and 1960s, and in French macrobiotic circles in the 1970s and 1980s. (I've also got a lead on some kind of neo-Templar tradition along the same lines, which identifies the solar and telluric currents with Sophia and Baphomet respectively, but that's a whole 'nother story.) 

Piecing things together, bit by bit...