Any Info on Michael Morgan?

The Djinn have a positive function in creation. This is gnostic anti-earthness at work again. The older gods also have an important function.

Not having been able to finish an essay I’m trying to write on this subject, I just wanted to say a couple of things for people to chew on about the nature of ‘demons’, ‘gods’, whatever… there has been disinformation on this subject for far too long. This is what caused the idea of the ‘Luciferian mistake’ as Michael calls it, which is a divisive duality that has plagued the West ever since the 1st centuries ‘AD’, and which has contributed a great deal to the lack of earth-centredness in our spiritual culture in this hemisphere.

It’s been half a century since the cultural revolution in China, but people have not forgotten how the country was embroiled in unspeakable destruction – for members of this site I’m sure I don’t have to retail how they treated Taoist temples. I bring this up because the behaviour of the Red Guard at that time was absolutely the same as the behaviour of the Christians, when they first appeared.

In 386 the orator Libanius appealed to the Emperor to restrain them:

“They [the monks] are spreading out like torrents across the countryside; and in ruining the temples, they are also ruining the countryside itself at one and the same time. For to snatch from a region the temple which protects it is like tearing out its eye, killing it, annihilating it.”

The tide of annihilation could not in the end be stemmed, but there was an old guard of wisdom who kept up the pagan stream for a while before it at last went under – the Platonic lineage. I have been investigating a man named Iamblichus, who was one of these Platonists. We don’t know his name much now, and even until recently he was being more or less completely ignored by scholars, but at the time he lived he was called the ‘benefactor of the entire world’.

The reason he has been ignored until recently is that, unlike the other Greeks, he saw ritual and magic as central to philosophy and wisdom. This has made him beneath the dignity of our modern scholars to investigate.

He had arguments with other Platonists who insisted that a more theoretical approach alone was sufficient. For example, he excoriated a fellow-Platonist, Porphyry, who had achieved ‘Henosis’ (what would be called in this site ‘union with the Tao’) but who was still subject to bouts of depression; Iamblichus accused him of ignoring the reality of material existence.

According to Iamblichus, there was a hierarhcy in nature, *all* of which had to be respected. Not only the One and All, but the many gods, the angels, the heroes (which is a whole separate and very interesting subject) – and, importantly for the present discussion, daimons (what Morgan is calling Djinn), had to be worked with and understood. Simply to dismiss them was to dismiss the earth itself.

Thus one could have union with ‘God’ and still not be a true part of nature, which was the reason for Porphyry’s depression – his personal material existence had no meaning. I relate this strongly to the distinction Michael makes between ‘head enlightenment’ and ‘whole-body enlightenment’.

The methods of Iamblichus were Western and descended from the Greek mysteries and Egyptian religion. They involved western means as such – the use of herbs, theurgic rituals, magic, and so forth, as well as meditation. But interestingly, Iamblichus (like people on this site) treated *immortality* as the goal of spiritual development – and his definition of immortality was VERY VERY SIMILAR to Michael Winn’s.

Gregory Shaw describes the meaning Iamblichus gave to the word ‘Immortality’ in his book ‘Theurgy and the Soul’. This is a purely academic work really, so apologies if the language is a touch stilted, but I rejoice that an academic can write these things.

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By means of appropriate rites the theurgist directed the powers of his particular soul (mikros kosmos) into alignment with the powers of the World Soul, which gave him direct participation in the “whole”. He became a theios aner, universal and divine yet particular and mortal; in somatic terms this was the result of having filled the measures of his immortal augoeides soma, the soul’s “star body”…

The doctrine of the “soul vehicle” (ochema) in the Platonic tradition is essential… Referred to by Iamblichus as a vehicle or breath (pneuma), the perfection of this aetheric and luminous body effected the soul’s immortalization…

To the degree that a theurgist was divinized and assimilated to the Demiurge he necessarily shared the benign interest of the Demiurge in generated life, including his own. Any aversion he may have felt toward his mortal existence was therefore overcome by his experience of the “whole”, and his physical body became the nexus through which he expressed this divine benevolence…. In his person, he preserved a continuity between the “whole” and its “parts”, between the gods and man.

Iamblichus specifically faults the view of those who defined catharsis [spiritual progression – NN] as a withdrawal from matter. He says: “Some give greater value to freedom from material bonds, liberation from mortality, release from generation and similar *lesser goals* of catharsis.” The greater goals that followed were… unification with the creative cause, the demiurgic acitivity of joining parts of wholes, and the subsequent reinvestment of parts with the vitality of their universal sources….

By entering into the community of the gods as one of its bodies of light, the embodied soul was no longer alienated by matter – nor passionately drawn to it.
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Notice here the use of the word 'demiurge'; Christian Gnosticism uses this word and that is where most who now know it will know it from.

The Gnostics were early Christians and they contrasted the the 'evil demiurge' responsible for the creation of matter with the 'Good God' who lay outside of it. They created a separation, a duality, which influenced many Platonists but by which Iamblichus refused to be tempted. To him nature and earth were still paramount, the very index of spiritual development. The daimons were important functionaries in creation, moving their individual pieces of it as they must; neither they nor the material world they made should be ignored – on the contrary, the greater one's enlightenment the more one would celebrate and parttake of it.

The idea of the Demiurge as a good being would have been incomprehensible to the Gnostics; the idea of daimons as positive likewise; the idea of nature and the body as good likewise.

Iamblichus may have been hailed as a saviour, but the gnostic doctrine of matter-as-evil won out. It just won, and it eradicated all that had come before. The temples were burned, and the connection of spirituality with earthly things, with daimons, spirits-of-place, and so forth, came to be seen in the west either as pathetic supersition (when it was deemed harmless) or else as evil and a matter for being burned at the stake (when it empowered the individual against the political church hierarchy).

All earth-based spiritualities went into hiding. Natural magic was anathema. Daimons became demons, to be shunned. The lesser goals of catharsis were pursued, the greater forgotten. One may find in Iamblichus' list of 'lesser' cathartic goals all the aims of conventional Buddhism, for example. Buddhism, like Islam and Christianity, is a revisionist religion, designed to turn people away from living with nature. That the way might *follow* nature, as Taoists feel, is to such systems abhorrent. There is accordingly, in the eyes of such religions, no good reason for a human being to be born or to exist. The best that can be done is to correct the mistake.

All this is in the past. The old gods and demons are returning – I am not the only one to think so, and they are not at all as political propaganda has led us to believe. The Djinns are amongst them. They do not in the least wish free will to fail – they do not have the power to do so, not the ones I have met. It is *human* abuse of contact with them that led to the problems of power and dominion with which they have become associated – for humans are more powerful than demons and always have been.

The perpetuation of the worldview in which nature, daimons, the body, sex, and the material dimension are seen as evils which must be escaped is something that anyone who believes in being both human and happy should condemn. Our own illusions are all we must escape. As Michael Winn says, the Life Force gives us what we ask of it. If we ask for this material dimension to be a barren and hopeless prison which we must exploit to survive whilst we find a way to escape it, that is what it will surely become. But we don't have to believe this. Looking at the news any day of the week surely gives us information as to where such beliefs lead.

Phew! An essay in itself I guess, sorry about that…. Anyhow, hope it provides some food for thought.

Best to all, NN

N,
I gave a thumbnail sketch that left out details relevant to your essay – which is excellent, but possibly mis-directed against Michel Morgan’s new line. He is, however, very Christian and gnostically oriented on some levels, and so some of your criticism may apply.

But the twist in Morgan’s latest thesis is that the local God / Prime Creator of this physical earth and cosmos (not sure how far out that extends, its not made clear) created mortal humans as part of the process of recovering from a gall too fast too far into density that they couldn’t re-expand. This God supports this physical world, and supports sexual coupling and reincarnation as part of the process of re-evolving back up to a more expanded state. This god maintains and supports this physical creation.

The Djinns are described as the major part of Primordial Heaven, who allowed “God” – also a Djinn, but young one and a strange one, with ideas about free will and love – a corner of creation to experiment in as “God” wished. The vast majority of the Djinns were essentially indifferent to God-Djinn creating whatever S/he wanted, as long as it didn’t impinge on their reality/hierarchy/structure.

This is where the anthropomorphizing in Morgan’s book wears a bit thin, and begins to sound like a Star Wars script. Morgan claims ONE of those older Djinns wanted to cause our local God-Djinn to fail, to further his own position with the Ruling council of older Djinns. And thus interfered with God’s creation of physical earth and human evolution, already begun by Lucifer and God.

God goes to war against the older Djinns, and destroys the one djinn who was out to cause him to fail.
A peace in heaven ensues, in which God has to allow the other Djinns equal influence in God’s “free will ” cosmos, otherwise it would not be truly free will.

So its not clear if the daimons N is speaking of are the same Djinns, who don’t want a successful functional earth. But in any case, I agree with the basic premise of N, that a counterforce is what gives movement, and even Morgan posits that the humans who evolve here are HIGHER than the beings who never “fell” into physicality. These aspect of the local God are now resentful and jealous that the “fallen” humans are re-immortalising themselves to a higher level of awareness than those who never “fell”.

I am not defending any story, just clarifying the way it is presented. I don’t know of any way to verify any of this.
m

NN,

i really dig your essay.
i am curious what you would think of this website:
http://www.metahistory.org/
the primary author there suggests that they way gnosticism is typically described by scholars, etc. is in fact disinformation, largely based in the writings of their opponets (the church). he links gnosticism to pre-christian europrean indigenous traditions and the mystery schools. he suggestions gnosticism is not about a duality of creation, but a epistemological/noetic one. it’s a pretty unusual view.

-C

see for example Freke/Gandy on Gnosticism. Not a bad site they have there but not quite my taste. I like ‘beyond the tyranny of belief’ as a tagline – they should read some Chaos magic, it might liven them up!

Seriously, the split between Gnosticism and what became the mainstream church was in my opinion not the same as the split I am talking about between gnosticism and paganism.

Gnosticism was a chaotic movement with very few common elements – the only main one was rejection of paganism really. A similar movement occurred in Hermetics with Hermes rather than Christ as the central figure. These were mystical movements with many weird and wonderful characters and theories in them. However the main tenet was always that there is a necessity to escape physical creation as evil, and ‘God the Father’, a male figure, always had primacy.

The Church, meanwhile, removed all the elements of mysticism from Christianity and substituted a literalist interpretation of the New Testament scriptures, primarily for political ends – it was never a mystical movement. The instigator of its offical adoption by the Roman Empire, Constantine, deliberately avoided converting to Christianity himself until his death so that he could continue to sin until the last possible moment.

There was certainly a huge amount of disinformation about Gnosticism on the part of the church. But that was due to political rather than mystical disagreements – the great welter of bizarre theories in gnosticism was an easy broad target for those with the political muscle to back up their theology. They crushed dissent.

The end result of this turmoil was control of spirituality in the hands of a political priesthood, with the old ways burned to the ground. And the big change between the old ways and the new was always that the natural world had changed from being something to be amongst, be tested by, grow and develop a relationship with, to something for exploitation and the generation of pain and sin, period. It was frustration with and the desire to escape from life.

I do not for a minute suggest it wasn’t necessary to rejuvenate spirituality. The old pagan ways had in many cases fallen off from their old brilliance. Even the Platonists (apart from Iamblichus) were getting lost in theory and abstraction. It was time for change to sweep through. But babies were thrown out helter-skelter with the bathwater.

NN

It seems that at some point shortly after the life of jesus, western spiritual evolution was hijacked into supporting the “dissolve yourself” path rather than the “individuate yourself” path, would this be the result of higher forces at play, humans own inner resistance, or both?

I didn’t consider the larger cycles of the star houses, so we spend 2160 years in each constellation right? I wonder how that plays into the Star tribes, that michael W mentions in his lectures (other than the idea of the virtue qualities from each direction)? would be nice to have some clarity on that.

In daoist cosmology there are 10 celestial stems and twelve terretrial branches, so this is reversed (the twelve constellations), and all of them seem to fall into the four directions, so maybe we crossed from one of the four directions into the next as well, another reason for the psychic shift? Here is some generic info on the chinese astrological structure for anyone interested:

Chinese constellations
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chinese constellations are the way ancient Chinese grouped the Stars. It is very different from the western constellations, due to the independent development of ancient Chinese astronomy.

Ancient Chinese skywatchers divided their night sky into 31 regions, namely Three Enclosures (ÈýÔ« san yu¨¢n) and Twenty-eight Mansions (¶þÊ®°ËËÞ er shi ba xi¨´). The Three Enclosures occupy the area close to the North Celestial Pole. The stars in the Three Enclosures can be seen all year around.

The Twenty-eight Mansions occupy the zodiac region of the sky. They can be considered as the equivalent to the 12 zodiacal constellations in the Western Astronomy. Contrary to the Western Astronomy, the Twenty-eight Mansions reflect the movement of the Moon in a lunar month rather than the Sun in a Solar Year.

The Three Enclosures and the Twenty-Eight Mansions are further divided into 283 asterisms. Each visible star is assigned into one of the asterisms. Some of the asterisms only have one star. Traditionally, a star is named by combining the name of its asterism with a number.

1 Three Enclosures
2 The Twenty-Eight Mansions
3 The Southern Asterisms
4 Chinese Star Designation

Three Enclosures
The Three Enclosures are the Purple Forbidden Enclosure (×Ï΢ԫ), the Supreme Palace Enclosure (̫΢ԫ) and the Heavenly Market Enclosure (ÌìÊÐÔ«). The Purple Forbidden Enclosure occupy the northernmost area of the night sky. From the viewpoint of the ancient Chinese, the Purple Forbidden Enclosure lies in the middle of the sky, and is circled by all the other stars.

The Supreme Palace Enclosure lies east and north to the Purple Forbidden Enclosure, while the Heavenly Market Enclosure lies west and south. The Three Enclosures are separated by “walls”, which are asterisms with their shapes resembling their namesakes.

The Twenty-Eight Mansions
The zodiac is listed below,

note: all translations of the names of the Xiu are done literally, they may not be the true and original meaning

note 2: the name following the tranlations are the approximate location of the Xiu on the western skymap

four symbols
(ËÄÏó) “Xiu” (ËÞ)
name pinyin lit. translation vicinity in western sky

The Azure Dragon of the East
(–|·½Çàýˆ) ½Ç Jiao Horn Spica (alpha vir)
¿º Kang Neck Virgo
ص Di Root Libra
·¿ Fang Room Libra
ÐÄ Xin Heart Antares
β Wei Tail Scorpius
»þ Ji Winnowing-basket Sagittarius

The Vermillion Bird of the South
(ÄÏ·½Öìȸ) ¾® Jing Well Gemini
¹í Gui Ogre/Demon Cancer
Áø Liu Willow Hydra
ÐÇ Xing Star Alphard
ˆ Zhang Growth Crater
Òí Yi Wings Corvus
ÝF Zhen Strongly (as of emotion) Corvus

The White Tiger of the West
(Î÷·½°×»¢) ¿ü Kui Legs Andromeda
Šä Lou Bond Aries
θ Wei Stomach Aries
êÄ Mao Hairy head Pleiades
®… Bi Net Taurus
õþ Zi Turtle beak Orion
…¢ Shen Three stars Orion

The Black Tortoise (or Xuan Wu) of the North
(±±·½ÐþÎä) ¶· Dou Dipper Sagittarius
Å£ Niu Ox Capricornus
Å® N¨¹ Girl Aquarius
̓ Xu Emptiness Aquarius
Σ Wei Danger Aquarius/Pegasus
ÊÒ Shi Room Pegasus
±Ú Bi Wall Algenib Pegasus

The Southern Asterisms
The sky around the south celestial pole was unknown to ancient Chinese. Therefore, it was not included in the Three Enclosures and Twenty-Eight Mansions system. However, by the end of the Ming Dynasty, Xu Guangqi introduced another 23 asterisms based on the knowledge of western star charts. These asterisms were since incorporated into the traditional Chinese star maps.

Chinese Star Designation
Ancient Chinese astronomers designated names to the visible stars systematically, roughly more than one thousand years before John Bayer did it in a similar way. Basically, every star is assigned to an asterism. Then a number is given to the individual stars in this asterism. Therefore, a star is designated as “Asterism name” + “Number”. The numbering of the stars in a asterism, however, is not based on the apparent magnitude of this star as in Bayern designation, but rather its position in the asterism.

For example, Altair is named ºÓ¹Ä¶þ in Chinese. ºÓ¹Ä is the name of the asterism (literally the Drum at the River). ¶þ is the number designation (two). Therefore it literally means “the Second Star of the Drum at the River.

Some stars also have traditional name, often related with mythology or astrology. For example, Altair is more commonly known as Å£ÀÉÐÇ or ǣţÐÇ (the Star of the Cowherd) in Chinese, after the mythologic story of Cowherd and Weaver Girl.

These designations are still used in modern Chinese astronomy. All the stars using the traditional name in English are routinely translated with traditional Chinese designations, instead of the translation of its catalogue names.