Temple of the Cosmos

I have been reading Templeof the Cosmos by Jeremy Naydler and he hits some rather important points which some neo-pagans might not like much.

The book looks at what the Ancient Egyptian worldview would have actually been and how this could have led to many of religious ideas.  What Naydler accidently does is put a spanner in the works of would be neo-pagans who wished to create a modern form of Egyptian worship with their worldview.

If Temple of the Cosmos is to be believed to get a real Egyptian religion you would have to short circuit many of the modes of thinking of modern life.  Naydler believes that the world that the Ancient Egyptians had was one where their myth, time and material universe were intertwined.  All actions around you were your interaction with the divine myth.

For example when the Ancient Egyptians built a statue to the gods they were not worshiping an idol that they had made.  Their mind-set was such that the statue really was the God or Goddess.     When they looked up at the sky they saw the eye of Horus looking down on them. Nature mimicked the myth of transmutation and initiation.

This is great stuff.  Sometimes the book gets a bit lost in academic verbiage and its point gets missed because Naydler has fallen into saying something that actually sounds more complex than it actually is.   Practically we see that there are huge problems for people who want to adopt a way of life or magic which mimics the Ancient Egyptian mind-set.  It cannot just be that you like cats and wear tons of Egyptian-style jewellery.  You have to be able to apply Egyptian myth to every aspect of your life and not just that which is fluffy.  It is one thing to look into the night’s sky and see Nut stretched over you, it is quite another to see your boss as Set.

Naydler also makes it clear that much of the real spirituality behind the Ancient Egyptian mind-set was down to the actual movements of nature.  The colours of Osiris, for example, become more meaningful when you know the colours of the Nile when it floods.

Where is your Pharaoh now? 

The Ancient Egyptians regarded their Kings as important parts of their religion.  How can you equate your modern politicians with an incarnate God?  It would be difficult to fit David Cameron or Silvio Berlusconi into any scenario where they would be worthwhile let alone divine.

The problem that modern people have is that they have become disconnected from all forms of myth or any gods.  In the West, we can blame science for this, but we can also see that the Ancient Greeks had a role in rationalising away much of this mind-set.  The Ancient Greeks at the time of Homer certainly still had it.  The odyssey is packed full of myth woven into “fact”.

There are some important points to note for magicians too.  In magic there are a lot of references to the Secret Tradition.  What if this tradition was never really secret at all, but a mind-set which was forgotten. 

Reading through this book you can see that magical technology reflects some of these ideas.  The idea that a priest was not just wearing the mask of a God, but really was that God, is something that many Golden Dawn magicians need to understand.  It might be that we can only duplicate the Ancient Egyptian mind-set within our ritual space, but it is there that we should be doing it.

We should be striving to make sure that whatever we are doing in our ritual space is real, we should not just believe it to be true, but know that myth has overcome any form of “reality” as we know it.  This is closer to the Ancient Egyptian way and could be one of the forgotten secrets.

Anyway I recommend this book for those who, like me, like to root their magic in Ancient Traditions. But it is also useful for those who want to understand the core of magical methods.  Those who think that they have past lives with their cats in Ancient Egypt and put their religion as Ancient Egyptian on the census form might be a little disappointed.

Roman Salt

I have been doing some research into the Roman Goddess Vesta and I found something that might be interesting for those who follow the Western Mystery Tradition. 

Salt usually makes an appearance in magical ritual in connection to the North and it is often linked to the idea of purification of the material nature.

Although this was a traditional
image of Vesta she was more often j
just seen as being fire.

New agers like to write off Vesta as the goddess of the hearth and concentrate on her cooking skills.  This makes her into a paragon of housewives.   But she was a lot more than that. She was a fire goddess and as such was the sacred element that held Rome together.  She was one of the first  Roman Goddesses and when her sanctuary closed Rome fell to bits and was replaced by the more Christianised Byzantine Empire.

Vesta had salt in her rituals, but it was not the same sort of salt we put on the table.  It was called Mola salsa.  This salt was used in most different Roman religions.  It was made by taking Farro wheat and toasting it.  Mixing it with salt and then grinding it to a fine flour.

The making of the salt had to be done with reverence and once something was marked with the flour/salt it would be fit for sacrifice.  Apparently the vestal virgins would make a big batch of it in June.

Making it was an interesting process in itself.  The wheat takes a lot of heat before it turns brown.  It is a process much like Vesta herself.  You can see the fire entering into the Wheat (thanks to the modern grill pan).  She purifies the wheat before it is added into the salt.   

I made a small amount.  Half a cup of wheat to two tablespoons of salt.  The Salt had been pre-consecrated in another ritual and the whole lot was made in a coffee grinder.  The result is a brown salty flour with a smell which is a bit like baking.

As far as we are concerned, the use of this sort of salt merges the bread and salt of the 0=0.  If we were to use it instead (eating it) we would be fusing fire and earth and setting our old selves aside for sacrifice (which is an important part of the 0=0 communion).   Now I am not suggesting replacing the traditional bread balls and salt within the Golden Dawn rite, but all this might give you a clue where the tradition came from.

 

Playing at Magic

There was a time, in the English language, where you could only dabble in the occult. The implication was that no matter how seriously you took your magical path, as far as the real world was concerned you were only mucking about. The idea of “dabbling” mean that if something went wrong in a magical experiment, it was down to you not taking it seriously.

One of the downsides of the modern age is that beginners have access to more information than they used to and this makes “dabbling” much easier than it was before.

As a result you find views being forged which are based on reading books by “new age experts” or “fantasists”. This type of person shows up on web groups saying that the “know nothing” but at the same time often pontificating at great length in vacuous New Age statements. They usually finish their posts with phrases like “my two cents” as if to hint that they are not really sure what the hell they are talking about, but they will say it anyway. They are also fond of trying to take people down a peg or two if they are disagreed with.

Voodoo has become the new black
when it comes to magic

In addition you can usually tell if someone is playing at magic by their tendency to do a lot of different systems, often employing them all at once. They universally have Reiki degrees, often have trained in a form of martial arts, like Chi Gung or Buddhist (usually Zen) techniques. Weird fashionable magical ideas pop up, in the last few years it has been Voodoo.

But not one of them has focused on a training system to be any good at it, and none of them amounts to much when it comes to magic.

On one web group there was a recent discussion about Goetia, which is another hot topic amongst those who do not understand it. They were talking about a technique which involved sticking Goetic demons into spirit pots. This is a voodoo technique and means that you lure the spirit into a pot with a promise and it will do your bidding.

Rock me Asmodeus.

While I get that this might work with weak, terminally stupid, astral demons, or ancestors, I cant see how it would work with Goetic demons. I had an image of some magician asking Asmodeus, King of the Nine Hells, embodiment of the seventh deadly sin of lust willingly going into a bean tin. Think about it, how can you stuff the concept of lust into a peanut butter jar? When someone with a little more experience pointed this out, he was told that such magical techniques were successfully worked in Brazil, so that was the end of the matter. Even if that were true, it does not mean that they have bottled real demons as if they were preserves.

Part of the problem is a literal idea of magic which most people get kicked out of them by experience, but the rest is simply because they do not think about what they are doing. They are playing with what sounds cool, rather than doing real magic.

The number of people out there who say they have had no teachers, but have actually experimented with heavier ceremonial magic techniques is frankly alarming. It shows, amongst other things, a level of arrogance and a belief that they are so important that training within an esoteric school is not necessary for them. They have the answers already because they have read about it. But it is not as if they have really studied, or done regular meditation work to reach that state. After playing around with systems they did not completely master, they have just moved onto something else.

Ways you can tell if someone in a web group is playing at magic

1. They use out-of-date flowery language in web posts.

Today we will teach you how to mix your traditions until they are light and
fluffy and do what you want them to do.

2. They mix traditions and systems.

3. They use esoteric terms without understanding them.

4. They interpret magical teachings literally.

5. They mention UFOs, or conspiracy theories alongside occult teaching.

6. They refer to their “past lives.”

7. They use books and references instead of personal experience.

8. When personal experience is used as a reference, it is usually conventional, literal, and could have been read somewhere.

9. They write long posts with extensive quotes from other people to give their words authority.

10. They use long sentences which contain phrases that they think sound good, but don't actually mean anything.

11. They revise basic magical techniques without understanding what goes on behind them.

12. They say what they think the web group wants to hear, and will attack who they thing the web group wants to attack. Often they will praise the leader of the web group highly.

13. They often complain that they cannot do practical work because their house is too small, or they are disturbed by their children or spouse.

Pah, Christians, Jews or Pagans, they all taste like Chicken

14. They attack other religions, normally Christianity, because they are trying to rebel against their upbringing.

15. They often try to mention science, particularly things like quantum physics so that they can demonstrate their intellect without having to talk about magic which they know nothing about.

16. They admit that they don't belong to a school, or have a teacher, or if they do it was a group that did not last long, or treated them badly.

17. They go into detail about the nature of their contacts with angels, demons, secret chiefs, God etc.

18. They ask for help from the rest of the group to carry out magical operations, under their directions, for the good of humanity.

19. They recount how they are being magically attacked or been psychically vampired by someone.

20. They take personal umbridge when people disagree with their latest theory. Often “telling the person off.”

21. They think this list and article is all about them.