TH2 - 16 November 2009

I. DA BACKGROUNDER. Some years ago the TH2 had the mischance of tuning in to a radio station, to one of those pretentious “Arts and Culture” programs on the CBC, Canada’s Fabianist broadcaster. It was covering an interview with an artist influenced (read deceived) by the deconstructionist movement. The hour was late, the body weary, TH2 was in bed, ready to sleep and enter into his own dreams, which are very deconstructionist–like in their imagery. Though TH2 forced himself to stay awake to listen to what this person had to expound on his so–called “art”. Why? Unknown. But TH2 must confess that he is periodically mesmerized by the proponents of this movement, in their seriousness and insistence of the “truths” of this philosophical abomination that has stunted so many intellects in the last few decades.

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Johnny P. Flynn - October 12, 2009

Wealth creation guru James Arthur Ray is under investigation for criminal negligence in the deaths of two participants in a sweat lodge last week. Is this the inevitable result of outsider appropriation of a sacred ritual, or is the story more complex? Our writer, whose own tradition includes the sweat lodge ceremony, explains the nuances.

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Bret Burquest - September 25, 2009

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, the founder of analytical psychology known as Jungian psychology.

As a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, he explored the psyche through an examination of dreams, mythology, religion and art. He also spent much of his life delving into alchemy, astrology and Eastern philosophy. Some of his notable achievements include the concept of psychological archetypes, synchronicity and the collective unconscious.

Jung emphasized the importance of harmony and balance. The process of “individuation” was the central concept of analytical psychology. For a person to become whole, it requires a psychological process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining conscious independence.

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“Debunking Dan Brown,” by the arrogant, fundamentalist-mocking pseudo-historian, the editor of Freemasonry Today, Michael Baigent; and “The Lost Symbol and the Browning of American Religion,” by Ben Witherington who offers a discerning look at Dan Brown’s own pseudo-history, and his twisting of the Bible.

SARA CORBETT - September 16, 2009

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

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An alchemist’s “magic door” stands in the middle of a Roman park

Atlas Obscura - September 15 2009

While this “magic door” is famous to Romans, it is barely noticed by tourists visiting Rome. But in the central district of Piazza Vittorio, inside the Park, the remains of an old Villa reveal a Magic or Alchemist Door, a portal into the real and secretive world of 1600s alchemy.

Full of symbols and inscriptions, it was built during the early 1600s by the Roman marquis Massimiliano Palombara, a member of a group of people known as “The Alchemists of Palazzo Riario,” who congregated around the Roman court of Christina of Sweden the Queen Regent of Sweden. Christina was an ardent supporter of alchemy and science and thinkers and science luminaries like Decarte and Athanasius Kircher were often found in her Italian court, along with alchemy enthusiasts like Massimiliano Palombara.

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DailyGrail - 08 Sep 2009

Q: Occult America traces the ways in which occult and magical movements shaped our nation—politically, intellectually, religiously, culturally, and even commercially. Why did the U.S. prove to be such fertile ground for occult movements? What are some primary examples of how the occult influenced American identity and vice versa?

Mitch: Alternative religious movements were entwined with America from its earliest days. In the mid-1600s, just as Europe was experiencing a backlash against occult and esoteric spiritual movements, the American colonies were developing a reputation for religious liberalism. When the town of Philadelphia was a cluster of only a few hundred houses, it hosted faiths ranging from Quakerism to the Mennonites to mystical offshoots of the Lutheran church. The year 1694 marked a turning point for the colonies (and, in many ways, the modern spiritual world) through what initially appeared a very modest event: At that time the first intentional mystical community reached North America when the esoteric scholar Johannes Kelpius led a small sect out of Central Germany to the Wissahickon Creek near Philadelphia. His magical brotherhood practiced its own forms of astrology, alchemy, numerology, Kabala, and esoteric Christianity. News of their “Tabernacle in the Forest” spread back to the Old World and served as a magnet for other occult and esoteric movements. By the early 1700s, admirers of Kelpius formed a new and larger commune at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. In 1776, the Shakers – who were once considered a very mysterious sect – broke ground on a settlement outside Albany, New York. That same year the nation’s first “spirit channeler,” a 24-year-old woman who called herself the Publick Universal Friend, began to preach across New England. Beginning in the early 1800s, a region of Central New York called the “Burned-Over District” became suffused with Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and various occult experiments. These movements helped solidify early America’s role as a safe harbor for religious innovation and eventually made the nation into a launching pad for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that swept the globe in the twentieth century.

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Erica Carle
August 15, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

THE SACRED FEMININE

The Da Vinci Code is a 596–page mystery thriller with very little story and lots of chasing, coding, deciphering, and hiding. I ignored it when it was first released. However, a dear friend was profoundly affected by reading this fictional contrivance, so I decided the time had come to check it out.

I did not read for pleasure since chase stories are tedious to me. Also, I resent fiction that is overly imaginative and not carefully researched when it is based on historical events.

Nevertheless, I leave to others the book’s questions about Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene. To me the whole idea is ridiculous, as is the idea that the Catholic Church has been killing descendants of Jesus for centuries. Besides, there are plenty of well-researched articles on the internet that point out the historical errors behind these claims in The Da Vinci Code.

But I have seen nothing in The Da Vinci Code articles and reviews that called special attention to the elements of the story that have disturbed my sleep for the past several nights.

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See also: Davis Livingstone’s “The Agenda Behind the Da Vinci Code“

Teresa Burns - Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition No. 16, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2009

Last issue, two articles under the larger title William Shakespeare’s Green Garland explored the possibility that “Francis Garland,” a man who seems to barely exist outside of his presence in John Dee’s diary and angelic workings, but who according to Dee witnessed Edward Kelley’s grand transmutation,[1] could be a pseudonym for the man we now call William Shakespeare.

As the first of those articles noted, Dee refers to several “Garland” brothers in his diary—Francis, Edward, and Robert—and mentions a fourth “Garland,” Henry. None have ever been positively identified. No extant archival records show a payment to or letter from any of these men, yet they clearly are presented by Dee as acting as couriers. No civic record yet located lists their names. In fact, with only two or perhaps three significant exceptions which I mentioned in that essay, all of the references to a “Garland” connected to John Dee or Edward Kelley have as their source the writings of John Dee.

That article, “Francis Garland, William Shakespeare, and John Dee’s Green Language,” its timeline comparing Francis Garland’s activity to that of William Shakespeare, and a related analysis of a poem perhaps written by Edward Kelley to a “G.S.” who may have been “Gulielmus Shakespeare,” were all written to test out two clusters of hypotheses concerning John Dee, Edward Kelley, William Shakespeare, and Francis Garland.

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Jay Dyer - June 26, 2009

Yes, I admit it, I went to see Transformers 2. It was so bad I was hoping it would transform into a different movie. But what can you expect from Michael Bay. While this movie had almost nothing good about it, there are a couple conspiratorial/esoteric elements worth mentioning. Shia Labeouf’s character moves off to college and happens to fall in with a band of annoying preppy, frat-boy “conspiracy theorists” who run a website devoted to exposing the truth about government coverups. This was clearly a reference to yours truly (just kidding). What is interesting about this was the portrayal of the “conspiracy.” The theorists had been speculating along with others about the existence of aliens among us. What we find out is that the “alien Transformers” are really ancient deities with super advanced technology and they are among us - some protecting, others seeking to destroy. But between the hour-long explosions and the 75 trademark Michael Bay lense flares, we can perceive a deeper meaning.

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Dennis L. Cuddy - June 29, 2009

In one of my recent columns, I referred to President Obama speaking at the University of Notre Dame. People were surprised that a Catholic university would give an honorary degree to a president who supports the right of women violently to kill their preborn babies by abortion. However, one must remember that the University’s former head, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, was head of the population-controlling Rockefeller Foundation for a number of years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Fidelity editor E. Michael Jones said he met Prof. Sam Shapiro of the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, on July 4, 1984, and that Shapiro’s wife who taught at Indiana University South Bend, was a strong supporter of abortion-rights. Jones also related that Shapiro told him of his concern that Prof. Gloria Kaufman, Shapiro’s wife, had “demonic energy” and was a witch.

On ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” (June 4, 2009), actress Heather Graham (reared as a traditional conservative Catholic when she was a girl) told Kimmel she and some friends recently had been engaged in witchcraft, casting spells to elect Obama as President among other things. Her long blonde hair and manner reminded me of Billie Burke who played Glinda, the supposedly “good witch” in the movie The Wizard of Oz in 1939.

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The Israel Supreme Court is the creation of one elite family: the Rothschilds. In their negotiations with Israel, they’ve agreed to donate the building under three conditions: the Rothschilds were to choose the plot of land, they would use their own architect and no one would ever know the price of its construction. The reasons for those conditions are quite evident: the Supreme Court building is a Temple of Masonic Mystery Religion and is built by the elite, for the elite.

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From morris dancers in mirror shades to green activists getting in touch with their spiritual side, paganism is going mainstream. Cole Moreton reports on a new national faith

Cole Moreton - 22 June 2009

Look out, here come the pagans. It’s late May in central London and a man dressed as a tree, a witch in a velvet robe and a woman pretending to be a raven with a long black beak are dancing through the streets of Holborn, with several hundred others, moving to the rhythm of a dozen loud drums. They could wake the god of thunder with their noise but it’s OK, the people at the back with the broadswords and shields are followers of Thor. This is a parade to celebrate pagan pride, and it would be wise not to get in the way.

“We are moving into a new time,” says the leader, brandishing a huge set of antlers. “We are becoming more accepted. Paganism is reasserting itself.”

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Gyllene Gryningen - May 14, 2009

This essay was inspired by a some words coming from Samuel Robinson regarding the Stella Matutina teachings of implement handling, which he claims didn’t at all originate in the Golden Dawn but came directly from Rudolf Steiner. This intriguing comment made me want to look into this subject as most information, and especially of that kind which calles itself the “oral teachings” of Whare Ra, almost has become gospel because of it being disseminated in litterature. As I started to collect facts and doing my research, this project just grew larger and larger, as I was able to extract information from my main sources, i.e. The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923 (1978, Samuel Wiser, York Beach) by Ellic Howe, Ritual Magic in England (1887 to the Present Day): The Golden Dawn & Other Magical Orders (1970, Neville Spearman, London) by Francis King, Secret Rituals of the Golden Dawn (1973, Aquarian Press, Denington Estate) by R.G. Torrens and Ordo R.R. et A.C. (1976, R.A. Gilbert) by Arthur Edward Waite.

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