readoldthings

 In The Gospel of Matthew Chapter 5, Verses 38 to 48, Jesus says:
Here we come to some of Jesus's best known and most easily ignored words. 

They are not easy words, and following this path is not easy. But I believe that what Jesus is teaching here is the very highest sort of spiritual development-- and spiritual warfare. Let's illustrate that point by example.

The Magical Battle of Britain

Beginning in 1939, the English Occultist Dion Fortune led a series of magical workings designed to ensure a British victory in World War II. Her method was fairly straightforward-- she and her circle would send out a letter and a theme for meditation once a week to all the members of their organization. On Sunday, the recipient was to open the letter and study its contents, and then, at 12:15-- that is, at high noon on the Day of the Sun-- to face London and enter into meditation on the theme indicated.

At one point, Fortune received a letter urging that she and her group carry out magical attacks on German leaders. Her response is worth careful study:


Fortune was not a pacifist and did not demand that the British lay down arms. She did insist, however, that the spiritual work to be done in aid of the war effort consist entirely in works of healing and blessing. And why?

Note her opening line: "Nothing and nobody is altogether evil." This is because-- to state the very obvious-- everything which exists is. That is, it has being. Being is derived from the One, which is the same as the Good and which we also call God. Therefore, to exist at all is to possess a kind of goodness. The work of the true initiate, then, is not to destroy things, because to destroy is, necessarily, to rebel against God. 

Healing is a very different thing. To heal literally means to make whole. Wholeness is another way of saying oneness; every whole consists of a unity of parts, and that unity is an expression of oneness and is therefore derived from the One. If Germany exists, it is because God wills that it exists, and God does not will evil. If Germany is acting evilly, then the solution is to heal Germany, not destroy it. A regenerated Germany rising up in strength and greatness is a Germany expressing Oneness, Goodness, and Godliness through a particular filter-- the filter of the German nation. 

The Magical Battle of America

I very often think of these lines with regard to the present political impasse in the United States. What would happen if partisans on either side of our divide were to say to one another, "We do not wish to destroy you, but to perfect you?" This country consists of many different subdivisions-- regional, ethnic, religious. What if we had a politics which said "Blacks, Jews, WASPs, Irish and Scots-Irish, Italians, Apaches, Germans, Mexicans and Scandinavians; New Englanders, Appalachians, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, High Southerners, Deep Southerners, Westerners, Mid-Westerners, Californians, Cascadians, and the Cubans of Miami; Protestants, Catholics, Jews again, Mormons, Pagans, Wizards and Radicals; Rednecks, Hippies, Yuppies, Cowboys-- each of these is a particular expression of Americanness, and America is a particular expression of Godliness. We are all in this together, like words in a sentence spoken by God. Without exception, all have sinned and fallen short and owe repentance to God and one another; all have triumphed and achieved greatness and are worthy of celebration. All have their own particular struggles, wounds of the past and besetting sins, but we can lean on one another, and all of us can lean on God. We will not force the values of Berkeley onto West Virginia or Charleston onto Minnesota, but we will instead support each in leading the life proper to it in its own proper place, so that each may achieve its own greatness."

How would that change our political discourse?

A Story

Some years ago I was living in a house with 4 or 5 roommates. We were all friends and got along well with one another. Then we had a very bad falling out, and we came to hate one another. It was so bad that I couldn't be in the house alone with them. I got off of work at 5:00, but my girlfriend, who lived with me at the time, got off at 7:00; I would wait downtown for her, so that we could go home together. 

One day I left work and I was feeling extremely angry. It was the kind of anger that doesn't go away, no matter what you do. And I tried everything-- think about something else, take deep breaths, you name it.

I wandered into a coffeeshop, thinking that a cup of chamomile tea might at least calm my nerves. I sat down with my tea, and I remembered that chamomile is a Solar herb and used in rituals of blessing and spiritual protection. That gave me an idea. 

The coffeeshop had a single-use bathroom with a door that locked, and it was relatively clean inside. So I took my tea into the bathroom, locked the door, and did the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Afterward, I stood in the light, surrounded by flaming pentagrams and the four archangels, and I felt compelled, I do not know by what, to say the Lord's Prayer. At the line "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us," I stopped, and found myself repeating the line over, and over, and over. Then I finished the prayer and took up the chamomile tea. I dipped my fingers in it, and drew crosses on my forehead and on the backs of my hands. 

Then I went back to my seat and entered into meditation, resolving to meditate until the tea on my head and hands dried completely.

In meditation, I visualized each of the roommates that I was angry with, one at a time. I pictured the entire conflict as clearly as I could from their perspective. Once I had a clear sense of their perspective, I called their image to mind again and said "I understand that you can only be who you are. I am sorry for my part in our conflict, and I forgive you for yours." I then thanked them for the friendship that we had at one time, released the image, and moved onto the next person.

When I entered the coffeeshop I was so angry I was shaking. By the time I left I felt like I was floating in an ocean of golden light.

Strangely enough, when I finally got home, my roommates greeted me politely, for the first time in weeks, as though nothing was wrong.

I won't tell you we became friends again after that-- We didn't and we couldn't. But the fight was over. 

Likeness

Jesus tells us to be perfect, as our father in Heaven is perfect; this is how we become children of God. Remember that he has used this term before, in the Beatitudes. And remember that, from our perspective, things are not like one another by coincidence. If something is like another thing, it is because it is participating in the very being of the thing that it is like. By becoming like God, we ourselves become Divine. "Therefore," says Plotinus, "Let each become godlike and beautiful who wishes to see God and Beauty."

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 20 through 28 reads as follows:

Pharisees and Sadducees

Unless we are more righteous than the Pharisees and Sadducees, we shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But who are the Pharisees and Sadducees?

Historically, these were two sects within Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism of Jesus's time. The Sadducees tended to come from the upper classes; the Chief Priest and the High Priests were Sadducees, and they had a majority in the Sanhedrin, the ruling court or parliament of Israel. The Pharisees also had power in the Sanhedrin, but came from a more modest social background; the First Century Jewish historian Josephus tells us that they were widely supported by the common people.

For our purposes, we are more concerned with the role of the Saducees and Pharisees in the myth that is the Gospel than in their historical reality. From that perspective, the important points are these: The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife or in the existence of spirits of any kind. (Notice that they were members of the Upper Class, and had power within both the priesthood and government-- parallels to the modern world very obviously suggest themselves). The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in the realty of the spiritual world. But they emphasized strict adherence to the rules of the Old Testament, especially the purity laws-- Later we'll find them condemning Jesus for performing miracles on the Sabbath, for example.

We can think of the Sadducees, upper-class materialists who controlled the priesthood and much of the government, as akin to today's atheist or non-religious upper class Social Justice liberals, and the Pharisees as akin to our middle-to-lower class right-wing religious fundamentalists. The parallel is not exact, but it is useful for our purposes, as we will see presently.

The Pythagorean and the Orphic

The late Platonic philosopher Proclus tells us that there are two methods of approaching theology in a symbolic manner, the Pythagorean and the Orphic:

In other words, the Orphics symbolize the divine through Myth, the Pythagoreans, through Math.

In the modern world, we probably aren't used to the idea that mathematics has any relationship to theology. Indeed, the two are often opposed to one another, with "Math" set alongside "Science" and the two together opposed to "Religion." From a Platonic perspective, this makes very little sense. After all, what do mathematical formulae describe, but immaterial realities which constantly shape and uphold the material world? In the physical world, no perfect right triangle exists; the perfect right triangle, whose dimensions are described exactly by the Pythagorean Theorem, exists in ideal form alone. And yet it constantly shapes the world of our experience, and knowledge of it gives us the ability to shape that world.

Myths are the same. As Sallust wrote, they are stories which "Never happened, but always are." Saturn was never a real guy who sat down with a fork and a knife and ate his children; if he had, his story would simply be a horror, and there would be nothing we could learn from it. If we understand that Saturn is Time, and his children are the seconds, minutes, hours and days of our lives, then we can understand something about our world and the way it functions.

The same is true of Christian myth. The Garden of Eden, the Fall, and Noah's Flood; the entire saga of the Old Testament; and now the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, are all, whatever else they are, myths. As works of journalism or history, they may also be more or less accurate-- or they may not be. It doesn't matter: As myths, they describe the immaterial processes which shape our lives and our souls now, regardless of what happened 2,000 years ago. 

This is very important when it comes to passages like these, in which Jesus gives particular moral imperatives. From our perspective, the important thing about the Gospels is that they are myths. When Jesus gives teachings like these, he is playing the part of The Lawgiver, a particular form of a figure common to many mythologies.

The Pharisaic, The Sudducean

Both the Pythagorean and the Orphic methods of understanding the Divine can be debased, and when they are debased, they do an enormous amount of harm. In both cases, the cause of the debasement is the same, and we can call that cause Literalization. Pythagorean formulae or Orphic stories are taken by the Literalizer as descriptions of, or prescriptions for, life in the physical world, rather than descriptions of processes in the Eternal World.

We can call the degradation of the Pythagorean Method the Sadducean Method, and degradatation of the Orphic Method the Pharisaic Method. In the Sudducean Method, beings in the material world are mistaken for numbers in the ideal world; in the Pharisaic Method, myths from the ideal world are taken as descriptions of the physical world. In both cases, the Literalizer often attempts to force the physical world to conform to the Ideal World, often with dreadful consequences.

Knowing the Pythagorean Theorem will give you the measurement of a right triangle, but you will be incorrect if you expect any particular right triangle in the physical world to be perfect; all of them are off, even if by only the tiniest bit. That mistake won't cause much harm, but there are ways that Sadducean Method, applied to human beings, can be very harmful indeed. We see this especially in the reduction of individual human beings to statistical aggregates in modern political rhetoric. Indeed, this is the essence of modern identity politics, whether of the Left Wing (Communist, "Social Justice") or right-wing (Ethnonationalist, Nazi) varieties. 

The reduction of the human being to a statistical aggregate is one of the hallmarks of modern political ideology and, indeed, of modern politics in general. Its fruit is genocide. Nor are its worst features limited to the political Left. 

The Pharisaic Method is equally destructive. The Christian tradition, as we have said, has its own body of myth, beginning with the Garden of Eden and proceeding through the life of Jesus and his apostles, and his eventual return. But its stories about the fate of the soul after death are also myths. The traditional understanding of Hell as a prison in which unrepentant sinners are tormented by fire and demons is a very useful way of understanding what happens to our psyches when we wallow in our own bad behavior and evil thoughts. As a literal description of an actual place in which a supposedly good deity tortures people in a way that would gladden the heart of Ted Bundy, it is a moral abomination, and its promulgation is a form of psychological torture. 

Keep all this in mind when Jesus discusses punishments and hellfire.

A Story About A Bible

Before we continue I want to tell a story.

This happened about 4 years ago. One night I was lying awake reading Eliphas Levi's Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, and I came across his discussion of thoughts, and the way that our thoughts and feelings can affect others at a distance. Levi writes:


As I read this, I thought about the passage in the Gospel that we're discussing today. In particular, I was thinking about Jesus's insistence that even to think lustfully about a woman is to commit adultery with her. That always seemed a little over the top to me, and, of course, in my youth it was more or less a form of torture-- if there is a 14 year old heterosexual boy that doesn't look lustfully at women, I've never heard of him, but of course the priests insisted that God was going to send us to hell for it. (There's that Pharisaic Method again, in all its glory-- and it's not like the priests didn't do any lusting themselves; you can read the Grand Jury report here.)

So if Jesus wasn't just being a jerk or control freak, what could this passage mean? Could it be that he was saying just what Levi was saying-- that our thoughts and feelings can affect others at a distance? If so, the passages about having already committed adultery with a woman you're lusting after are completely literal.

Well, anyway, I thought these things, and then I fell asleep.

The next morning I left the house to walk to work, my work being only a few blocks from my apartment in those days. As I stepped onto the street I kissed my hand and held it toward the Sun, saying a small prayer of gratitude to him for the light of the day. I continued on. After another block or so I came across a book, lying open, face down in the street. 

The book was a Bible.

I picked it up, and in rapid succession, my eyes fell upon the following two passages:

I can't imagine that even the most thoroughgoing Pharisaic fundamentalist could believe that the second passage refers to actual birds flying through the air and telling the king that you're mad at him. No-- King Solomon is teaching the same principle which Jesus is teaching here, and which will later be discussed in detail by people like Eliphas Levi. Our thoughts can affect people at a distance, and we must be very careful with them, lest we become murderers or adulterers, with all the consequences that entails. 

Occult Anatomy

We have bodies which are not made of matter. Contemporary occult theory, which is ultimately an elaboration of ancient Platonism (which is itself an elaboration of still older traditions), recognizes between 2 and 6 levels of existence above the physical, depending on how you divide them. We exist on all these levels, and have fully formed bodies on three of them. 

The physical body you know. Occult theory recognizes the subtle body or etheric body, which consists of the vital energies; you can find details on this in any text on Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine. Above the etheric body is the the astral body, which consists of the thoughts, emotions, and mental representations. The astral body is also what is known as the soul. 

Above the astral body is what is sometimes called the "mental sheath." This is what is called the nous in Platonic thought, and it is what Jesus and John are telling us to change, that we may dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven. Somewhat confusingly, the mental body isn't a body of thought; thought is astral. It exists at a higher level than than thought. Why is it called a "sheath," rather than a body? Because at our current stage of spiritual evolution, we don't have a fully-functioning body on this level. Saints do, though, and that's why they are able to affect change in our material world. The idea that they "pray to God for us" is mythic language; it means that, at the level of nous, which is also called Intellect or Divine Mind in the texts we've been looking at, they are always united to God, the First Cause, and it is ultimately through the First Cause that any change happens. 

Space, distance, and time exist at the material level. At the highest level, the level of the One or God, there is no space, and there is no time; this is what is meant by Eternity. Between the physical and Eternity, time and distance become less and less relevant. Our thoughts and feelings, existing at the astral level, are only affected by distance to a limited degree. Thus a strongly formulated thought, charged with passion, can affect another person. When Jesus says that you have already committed adultery with a woman by lusting after her, he isn't being metaphorical; when he tells you that anyone who is angry with his brother is already guilty of murder, he's just telling it like it is. To direct evil thoughts at others is to curse them, and curses always carry their own consequences. We can understand those consequences as imprisonment and hellfire: the soul addicted to sin becomes hardened against the outside, and trapped in the burning heat of its own negativity.

These are fundamental principles of magic and of magical ethics in particular, and this is what Jesus is teaching us here.