[Main Blog Post] [Book] Thoughts on The Ancient City

[jprussell]

I've been hearing a lot about The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and I finally got around to reading it. Very short version is that it's a good and interesting book, but unless it intersects with some particular interests of yours, you might be fine with a summary. Here's my attempt at such a summary, with some thoughts on what I got out of it (and wanted to, but didn't).

As always, any and all thoughts are most welcome.

Comments

[causticus]

1. For sure, I'd love to hear about that sometime.

2. Oh yeah I'm also quite familiar with what JMG has had to say on this topic. Regarding the "keeping the etheric body (ghost) alive past its normal span" magical technology, my dollar store take is that such a practice made a ton of sense once upon a time in a culture and place when everyone had a numinous worldview and close relations with the land spirits and other nonphysical entities was the norm for a given tribe's spiritual authorities and other ritual specialists. In today's hyper-urbanized, uber-materialist society I simply can't see any context where this practice would be workable or desirable for Westerners. Even in small-scale, land-based societies it seems like a bad practice (hence the devolution of the practice into vampirism) unless its practitioners thoroughly understand the magical dynamics that underpin it, and most importantly, memorizing a "spiritual bestiary" that describes what the post-mortem human spirit guardian will be dealing with. I suspect that such magical knowledge was lost over time and that a lot of peoples kept performing some approximation of the original practices by rote, probably out of simple reverence to ancestral customs. Where some knowledge was retained, the practice became rife with abuse once the original intent was forgotten, i.e. witches and sorcerers hoarding the knowledge and selling their services to corrupt or ignorant tribal elites whom they could dupe into accepting the false promise of "immortality." Of course, all of this is very loose speculation on my part.

3. That all sounds like very good advice. These sorts of practices will have to be experimented back into workability and having a hefty set of guardrails in place is key.

4. As an aside, I think what "ruins" literal ancestor worship for for me is my tentative occult knowledge of reincarnation; that the dead don't actually linger around forever in the same "place" and with the same personality in a murky torpor of an afterlife. Nay, the individualities of our forebears move onto other incarnations, but their memories remain if we keep them in our memory; and that there are likely astral residues (i.e. shades or phantoms) of those deceased personalities which linger around somewhere for quite a long time. Simply keeping their memories alive and expressing gratitude for what they've done is my understanding of what ancestor veneration entails. And the closer the ancestor is to my own time and the more knowledge I have of their lives and stories, the more meaningful that veneration is going to be (I do realize this could possibly be a very self-centered way of looking at this).

5. I'm terribly sorry to keep recommending books to you, but there is once called Ritual Offerings which provides first hand, present-day practitioner accounts of how these practices work and are experienced. The book itself is a compilation of essays from various occultists on the eclectic/postmodern end of things. Fascinating accounts, though some of them come off the me as rather morally grey and potentially dangerous if done carelessly or for bad reasons. At least several of the articles are about ancestral practices, and one of the them is specifically on ATRs and after reading it I was forever turned off toward even investigating what those practices are all about; the author himself is refreshingly-honest about how utterly chaotic and dangerous it can be to mess around with. I got the impression that a lot of the spirits that tradition works with are rather grubby ones from the lower astral, and that practices themselves are of a mostly transactional nature; basically, people of very limited material means bribing dodgy spirits to give out numinous goodies.

https://www.amazon.com/Ritual-Offerings-Aaron-Leitch/dp/0998708127

[jprussell]

1. Alright, well, it's in the hopper!

2. That all basically jives with my impressions and the conclusions I've tentatively drawn from them. I suspect/hope that this is one of those cases where yes, there are potential benefits to the practice (if done all the way right), but maybe most/all of those benefits can be found in less risky ways (for "crop fertility" for example, some combination of: organic farming, permaculture, temple construction, "normal" prayer and offerings to Gods, and so forth).

3. That's the hope anyway!

4. Yeah, this is for sure a puzzler, and my tentative answers are not yet very satisfying. At its simplest level, I have "well, my tradition says to honor the ancestors, and the occult philosophy I study says we reincarnate, but other places in the world have faced this conundrum (Chinese Buddhists, perhaps), so that's weird, I guess, but oh well." Beyond that, there's what you talk about, that at a minimum ancestor veneration is a great way of cultivating awareness of where you come from and gratitude for everything you depend on that you didn't make yourself. More specifically, my current (unsatisfactory) way of squaring this circle is something like the following:

a) between incarnations, some amount of a soul's attention can/may be directed toward helping material descendants of the last incarnation. This would square with the advice in some traditions to give specific veneration for ~30 years after a life, but no longer. It would also likely depend on specific ancestor's level of spiritual development - if grandma is working through a lot on the astral plane, she doesn't have much attention for the grandkids on this plane, but if she got all that out of the way and is waiting for the next go-round, maybe she can send some positive vibes our way.

b) On a longer time horizon, some souls will wrap up material incarnation, and now that they have incorporated all of their lessons and can see/remember their past lives clearly, they might take some interest in helping out those of us still on the wheel. This might account for what happens to deified dead humans and culture heroes, at least partially.

c) As shared endeavors into which folks put time and energy, families would likely generate their own egregores, and worship/veneration would be a way to strengthen and improve these. I suspect this may be one of the major drivers for "the ancestors" as a collective focus of veneration, and that it would be strongest in societies where families have a strong identity (like clans), and weakest in more atomized, nuclear-family-focused cultures. For this piece of it, passing in and out of incarnation just means contributing (for good or ill) to that egregore for as long as you're linked to it, whether by incarnating within the family, or immediately after death, but the egregore itself could keep on existing - like an institution that persists even after the death of its founders.

d) The more personal, "figurative" sense that you talk about where specific folks "live on" in the memories of those of us left behind and influence us on a more personal level. Whether my mom is exerting any direct spiritual influence from the astral between incarnations, has finished incarnation and is functioning as a spirit who still thinks well of me, or has contributed the egregore I am still a part of by virtue of living in the Russell family, the way I am as a person has been shaped by her direct actions toward me as a person, and honoring that helps me to focus on where those influences have taken me.

5. Never apologize for recommending books! I may not get to all the books I want to read in this lifetime, but I like knowing what options to consider. That sounds like it might be interesting, and opens up a new avenue for exploration I hadn't considered: looking into writings by the parts of the occult scene I am not interested in to get counter-examples. I'll have to give that some thought.

Thanks again for your thoughts,
Jeff