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Great White Brotherhood

To: alt.magick
From: rmartin (personal email)
Subject: Great White Brotherhood
Date: 49940701

Quoting: |tyagi and |>rmartin

|>if you are serious about finding the Great White Brotherhood, 
| 
| why do you presume I have not already found it?

Good point, but for the purposes of This Particular rhetorical face of
yours who is demanding to see the Great White Magicians stating point
blank that they do in fact speak for the Great Work, I think it's
justified.  Cf your post 3 Jun 1994, Friday at around noon on the A:.A:.

Your other faces may or may not be in more or less communion with Them,
but for now they are involved in other conversations.  I will meet this
one of yours who wants to see Magicians on his own terms, with one
glaring exception (see below).

|>You would like Kierkegaard.  His dominant metaphysical categories are love
|>and silence.
| 
| I'll keep this in mind, thanks.  I've enjoyed Kierkegaard, at least what
| I've read to date, and I will surely look for JCrowley's _Aegypt_, since
| I liked _Little, Big_ so very much.  The Mystical Body of Christ has many
| forms, flows through many strains of Christianity.  I think that some
| may equate it with the Holy Spirit, but this is beyond my understanding.

AEGYPT is fun, but almost as rare as the NECRONOMICON.  It is the hermetic
equivalent of LITTLE, BIG, so yes.

The Mystical Body of Christ, in my experience, deriving primarily from
John (who loved paradox algebra:  the Word = the Messiah = God = WITH God
= Father = SON =....), has been equated with as many things as possible
over its life and death.  Possibly the most useful discussion on bodies
and Christ that I know of is Norman O. Brown's LOVE'S BODY, which is a
sort of Dionyso-Christian Freudian text.  Lots of ecstates going on there.

The Body is the Church, and the Empire, and Heaven, and the Mass, and the
Incarnation, and the Communion of Saints, and is also sometimes Paul's
Christ-body which can in turn be equated with alchemical perfection of the
flesh.  Rad stuff.

|>So I worry that you will not find the Mystical Body of Christ with fanfare
|>and ostentations.  
| 
| so much worrying.  take some time for yourself.  enjoy life.

Oh I do, but I enjoy rhetoric too.

|>Find the Knights of Infinite Faith among the policemen
|>and housewives.
| 
| no kidding.  well, if I were looking for them, I'd be doing things much
| differently, let me tell you.

Good point, here's where I lose touch with this voice of yours, who is
looking for pillars of fire.  Because, unfortunately, this voice of mine
is on a Simplicity kick, its argument presupposes that there is no such
thing as ostentatious true magic, hence the "worry" above.  This voice has
nothing to tell you about magicians who are as fire.  It has no words for
them, and reads all references thereto as "Knights of Faith."

|>And as for the great White Magicians, was it Eco who concluded that all
|>true Rosicrucians are invisible by definition?
| 
| So I've heard.  I'd love to know the logic which supported this conclusion.

This may be historically rooted in a number of fields.

(1)  The Mirror (The Vessel).  "Magick" preassumed as a null category,
"Mysticism" is all.  The interior spiritual advancement of a person may be
judged only proportionally to the degree to which they have effaced all
outward signs of personal Will to difference.  I.e., the Teacher can be
recognized only insofar as s/he walks and talks just like the most mundane
of us.  The magician is a mirror of the Universal, with nothing to
distinguish it.

We see this in some mystical Christendoms, and in zen and some Sufi texts.
The Sufi/mystical Christendom reinforcement may then have passed into more
mainstream hermetism in the Enlightenment, finally to AMORC.

(2)  Mirror-Image:  Perfection is by definition impossible in
earthly, mundane contexts, and you are never going to find any
Real Alchemists.  HOWEVER, you are also convinced that Real
Alchemists exist, and so it is only a matter of getting them to manifest
into that which they cannot manifest into:  your everyday life.  Perhaps
the place set aside for Great White Brothers, then, is the ABSENCE of
place (white being the absence of earthly color), and so you have GWBs if
not HGAs occupying every unseen silence between mundane shapes and faces: 
the invisible order, which is a paradox to be savored in faith.

The fairies (as opposed, perhaps, to elves) exist in all the spaces where
"we" are not.

This is a Jews for Jesus messianic view, because it also looks toward an
Incarnation that is impossible, but which nonetheless happens.  The
Messiah (or Great Magician) has not come, will never come, and still we
are Jews.  This can be also found stemming from Boehme and the birth of
the Stone, into Hegel, and finally into Marx and the Revolution
(especially in the "Revolution-that-will-never-come" of Walter Benjamin,
in which Moses and Marx are joined).  From there, it travels into academic
philosophy, eventually arriving in Norman O Brown's paradox ecstasies,
Eco's word games, and J Crowley's dream of Rosicrucians. 

(3) Economics.

The miraculous can only manifest within the visible world.  There is no
other.  Because the visible world IS ALREADY the divine Will, outward
signs of grace and "advancement" are unnecessary.  The Prophet is Plain
Folks. "Miracles" take place, interceding in the mundane Willed order,
only to answer differences between what the Divine Wills and what the
Divine Wants.  The universe has a limited economy of reality, and parcels
it out to those who will not squander it on party tricks:  company agents
for God. 

This is a more orthodox Muslim view, perhaps a synthesis of the Mirror and
its Image.  We see it in al-Ghazzali's discussions of the difference
between Prophets (who are Everyman, with miracles allotted only to point
us to the Message, never to the messenger) and Saints (who are the Message
in their lives).  Working on texts for this.  You'll love it.

Remarkably, it has resurfaced in the unpleasant role-playing game MAGE, in
which the world is strict with her endowments and parsimonious with
her gifts.  Feh.

Best on such cursory chatting, Z

Hint 2:  Lamas look upon the number of simultaneous conversations they can
have at once as a sign of attainment.

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