In Pursuit of Mysteries

Ten Tons of Flax!

It is amazing the amount of drek that is on the Internet sometimes. I was thinking about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn today and my thesis. Since I put it up on Lulu as a free download, I happened to go there. I then made the mistake of doing a search there on
"Golden Dawn". Whoa! 83 items!

Of course, like anything in life, out of 83 items, 90% are probably of sub-standard value. I must say that I wasn’t overblown by the things I saw there though I did see a few things from friends or acquaintances of mine who are practicing magicians. Not exactly a center of scholastic endeavor, unfortunately.

I’ve been thinking of doing a paper on Golden Dawn ritual, mapping the Neophyte ceremony using the method of Frits Staals that Richard Payne makes us of in his analysis of the Ajikan in the Journal of Chinese Religion and his dissertation on the Goma. I’m not fully convinced that it is the best method but there seem to be no excellent or even good methods of analyzing different rituals and comparing them that aren’t simply long discussions of them. At least this method presents the data in a different manner.

I’ve been wanting to try to publish an essay or two in the field where I actually did my master’s and I figure that it wouldn’t hurt on my doctoral application to have a publication credit, if something I write is accepted and doesn’t take two years to show up. I am still surprised at how little actual academic work is done on the Golden Dawn, of all things.

I’ve also been considering trying to publish the Allan Bennett rituals that JFC Fuller copies down between 1906 and 1908. I have copies of most of this material from the Ransom Center in Austin. I would have to get their permission, because it is from their archive, but, as far as I know, given the date and history, it is all public domain outside of it being in a collection. Fuller’s handwriting is pretty clear and the illustrations are very well executed, as I’ve mentioned previously. Given the amount of work involved, I’m not sure that it would be worth the work to transcribe 400+ pages of Fuller’s handwriting in order to try to publish rituals of the 1890s Golden Dawn. I mean, it might sell all of 100 copies.

Passover Seder

One of my coworkers told me that I was weird the other day. Then he corrected himself to say it wasn’t that I was personally weird but that I did weird things. (Then he corrected himself again to say, actually, I was weird. Thanks, Sam!)

What prompted this discussion of weirditude? I mentioned that I was going to Passover Seder this weekend (tonight, in fact). My coworker thinks of me, if he does at all, in religious contexts as a Buddhist so it seemed very weird to him that I was going to seder. Also, as it turns out, he’s from Seattle and has never known any practicing Jews, from what I can tell. (I only knew one or two ever, and them through work, when I lived up there so it isn’t just him.)

R’s family is Jewish on her dad’s side so there is a certain amount of Jewishness around, strangely enough. Her father is non-practicing (never has practiced, as far as I know) but others in the family do practice. We were invited by a family member to attend seder and, while it seemed polite to come, it is also something that I enjoy. As a weird spirituality kind of guy (my master’s thesis is on the soul beliefs of a secret society…), I find the idea of attending religious ceremonies or events outside of my norm to be appealing. The anthropologist in me finds it fascinating and seder is, in and of itself, pretty interesting for both what it represents and how it has evolved.

It is amusing that a lot of Tibetan Buddhist, “occult”, or Neopagan ceremonies and rituals are kind of “ho hum” for me but something as “normal” as seder is interesting. I’m all turned about or something compared to some people. Of course, if I was invited to hear Pentecostals speak in tongues, I’d probably go to that too. Spirituality and people are endlessly fascinating as long as they aren’t the sort that feel a driving need to make everyone else believe the same way.

Of course, this always brings to mind the amusing story told by my old housemate, Stephen, about how he was invited to seder by his Jewish girlfriend and he didn’t know anything at all about Jews (this was in New York City). So, he showed up with some Chinese BBQ Pork slices, which he proceeded to offer to her father. Apparently, grandpa laughed his head off but dad was not amused… Luckily, we were assigned hardboiled eggs on this occasion.

Updated Post-Seder: Whoa! I don’t think I’ve seen people nearly shouting down family members while others read prayers in Hebrew in the background before. This was a character filled evening. We had the aged grandfather at the main table saying “Bin Laden!” in the middle of things at one point. We have references to “Uteran Slaves” (as in “Uterus”) during discussions of bondage and (largely metaphorical) slaves in the modern world. Our hostess telling one of the kids that he’d better be able to read the Hebrew (when it was his turn to read as it went around) because they’d spent $100,000 on his education, including Hebrew school. Lots of kibbitzing back and forth while the seder was going on. It was just madness in an amusing way at times. The thing was like a whirlwind moving across the seder ritual over time. After a few hours, we did get to eat, though!

The Pure Land is Around Us

For my class on Esoteric Buddhism at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, I have been reading materials in Tantric Buddhism in East Asia. This is a collection of essays edited by the professor for the course. The topic matter of the collection is fairly obvious but one of the essays in it was particularly interesting. This was James Sanford’s Breath of Life: The Esoteric Nembutsu. This is the same James Sanford that wrote one of the few works on the Tachikawa cult in Japan, an organization that was later suppressed because its (seeming) heretical ideas.

In his essay, he discusses some of the esoteric understandings of the nembutsu practice in Shingon and Tendai and their influence on the various Pure Land religious movements that started up during the Kamakura period and later (when there was a great diversification in Japanese Buddhist thought and organization). For those that are not aware, the nembutsu practice is where Buddhists chant the name of Amitabha, a Buddha who presides over a “Pure Land” or Land of Bliss (a sort of Buddhist heaven where everything is well and it is easy to practice Buddhism). In the Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra, Amitabha/Amida promised that any that called on him would be reborn in this land after death, which would remove the barriers that this unclean world offers to Buddhist practice. Thus, those reborn there would become enlightened by practicing there in ease. Pure Land practices exist throughout Buddhism from Tibet through China and then regions that derived their lineages from either of these. The funerary rites that I had done for my father with his remains were Tibetan and their goal was the release of his consciousness to be reborn in Sukhavati, which is a Pure Land.

There eventually arose a number of Buddhist organizations or cults (in the proper sense) that made the Pure Land practice of chanting the nembutsu (either “Namu Amida Butsu” or “南無阿弥陀仏”) into their primary practice. The idea being that in these degenerate times, the best that one can hope for is to be reborn in a better place because it is so hard to truly practice and become enlightened. The Institute of Buddhist Studies is run as an academic program but also a seminary for the Jodo Shinshu branch of Pure Land Buddhism, which is organized in America as the “Buddhist Churches of America“, so Buddhists that you know may very well be Pure Land Buddhists, even here in America.

The practice is, itself, quite simple as it involves chanting the above over and over again (though there are nuances to its practice depending on school). When this became an exceptionally popular practice, it was heavily practiced in both Shingon and Tendai but they had their own, more esoteric understanding, of the meaning of the chanting, linking it to the breath and life, and to the realization of the Pure Land in this world. It turns out that these understandings had an influence on the Pure Land schools outside of both Shingon and Tendai, some of which were considered rather unorthodox or even heretical. I had not previously been aware of this.

Sanford quotes a number of texts but I found this bit interesting, which is quoting the apocryphal Rennyo Shonin Hisho (The Secret Book of Saint Rennyo):

Due to the loving kindness of Sun and Moon, Water and Fire, of all beings, both the sentient and nonsentient, even down to the grass and trees, there is not one but that participates in the virtues of water and fire. The Western Paradise is spoken of as being ten trillion worlds away, but when darkness is dispelled by the single, thought-free heart, the moon of the Single Heart of the Western Quarter appears at once. This is to know that the Pure Land fills all ten quarters of the heart. When we say, “Namu Amida Butsu” or “Namu Muryoju Nyorai,” Amida is nowhere else but here… Amida is in my four limbs and head… When one contemplates the Pure Land of Amida as Mind-Alone, neither the Pure Land nor the befouled world is anywhere but here.”

The interesting bit, to me, is the self-identification of the practitioner, who is chanting, with Amida. Instead of Amida Buddha being elsewhere or another being, he is the practitioner. The Pure Land is, itself, the world all around you. The latter, by the way, is the understanding that I had been taught within a Tendai framework for this. The identification of the self with deity is a core practice in esoteric Buddhism in all of its traditions as well.

This unification of the deity with the self and the other world with this world brings to mind the various antinomial movements of Europe which saw Heaven as already being present on Earth or that the Second Coming could be understood on another level as being an event that was not to occur in the future but in a kind of eternal present if the individual realized it. Since the group that Sanford drew the text from, the Hiji Homon, was considered a marginal and heretical group, the parallels seem to be strong in some ways. Of the various antinomial groups in Europe, very few survived to current times (the Quakers, the Amish, and the Mennonites) because of the active suppression of them as heretical.

All in all, this was fairly interesting.