Book Review & Promotion: The Gentle Traditionalist

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I just finished reading Roger Buck's The Gentle Traditionalist: A Catholic Fairy-tale from Ireland, and I'd figured I might review and promote it here.

Geoffrey Peter Luxworthy or GPL, (Gentle Perplexed Liberal) a young Englishman, has fallen head-over-heels in love with Anna an English woman of Irish decent that he ran into at Cambridge on Valentine's day. GPL really loves this woman and wants to marry her, but there is just one problem, she's a New Age Nut! Anna is obsessed with the New Age Movement, she's constantly traveling around to these obscure New Age sites and babbling about things the GPL struggles to wrap his mind around. As things continue to progress however, Anna suddenly starts to become calmer, and not as obsessed in the past. Than one day, out of the blue, Anna reveals that she wants to become a nun, no, not a New Age Nun, A Catholic Nun! And not just a Catholic Nun, A full-blown, habit-wearing, Traditional Catholic Nun, attending the Old Latin Mass!! !

GPL was absolutely stunned! Then things get worse, after searching around for a Traditional convent moves to Monaghan, Ireland. Anna talks a lot about the atrocities committed against the Irish by Protestant England and how the Catholic Church has all these enemies, the whole thing sounds like an insane conspiracy theory!

GPL is confused, and very troubled, but he still loves Anna, and despite all the TradCat nuttiness, Anna still had a wonderful and attractive personality. GPL makes plans to propose to Anna on Valentine's day, their anniversary, he hopes that Anna's Crazy Catholic stuff can be put to the side, that she would just leave at Church and they enjoy their happily-ever-after at home. But on Valentine's day morning Anna refuses GPL's proposal, says she's looking at a possible Traditional Convent in Dublin and speeds-off, leaving GPL to wonder the Streets of Monaghan alone. As GPL walks around the empty streets, he suddenly comes across this odd sign on a door which reads:

I'm glad you found the book to your liking.

I think my own trouble with fiction, even philosophic fiction, is that it really takes an author with immense self-control to actually know all of the topics under discussion between their characters, map that on to realistic interaction, make the strongest argument for them possible, and while you read a non-fiction book on politics, history of religion, or something like that and tell whether the author blew certain key facts or not there tends to be a lot that has to be given on tolerance to a fiction author. That said I actually am looking to get into it now, just picked up The Glass Bead Game by Hess and probably will be reading Dostoevsky and Camus relatively soon but I have to keep in mind the periods they were written in, that the authors had a point that they were getting at, and that even at their stature they may have distortions to their lenses even if for nothing more than states of knowledge at their time of writing.

As for my own criticism of new age - it tends to be a lot of flashy pieces and parts that people have a difficult time making a cohesive whole out of and often enough worse, make people feel like they're better than other people for having what they have. It's entertaining when times are good but it doesn't amount to much in hard times and I can't imagine most people in a post societal collapse or civil war type of world huddling around Shirley Maclaine, The Secret, or channeled mediumship books for strength. It's not to say that there aren't systems and traditions that delve into similar contents much more seriously, just that yeah - new age is a bit like the Dollar Store cousin.

Not a big fan of traditionalist Roman Catholicism, or any sort of fundamentalism that damns other varieties of Christians to Hell.

A couple things on Meditations on the Tarot, first that it was his end-of-life magnum opus that he set to be published only after his death (1973) and per his request it was published anonymously - so both the original and current addition are by 'Uknown Author translated by Robert Powell'. I actually found out about this book because, early to mid 2013, I was reading a fair amount of Anthroposophy (Rudolph Steiner's core books, Sergei O. Prokofieff, Robert Powell, etc.) and Robert Powell had a chapter early in Sophia Teachings that gave his story on how someone had told him about Valentin's transcript and recommended that he do the translating.

Sophia Teachings was actually a neat book for me on several levels, first that I'd wondered how things like Proverbs 8 and the Book of Wisdom didn't push people to ask some pretty big questions about the divine feminine and whether something that was authentic to the bible wasn't getting hand-waved out for purely doctrinal reasons. The other part of it of course were the kinds of experiences I was having in 2013, which seemed to peak around the time when I read Manly P Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages and got to the chapter on the Bembine or Isiac Tablet. At the risk of saying something that might sound really heretical (although probably not much worse than Jacob Boehme's thoughts) I do think that a lot of the Mary sightings or encounters are palpably real but they're in line with something much older and broader than Jesus's mother or even any of the wisdom goddesses who were revered through the region at the time. There was some attempt to address her adequately in The Metamorphoses of Apuleius and while I don't remember Carl Jung saying anything explicit about the cosmic feminine I'm sure he'd have a lot to say about Isis, Sophia, Yahweh Elohim (eg. Binah), Mary, etc. being a part of a grand archetype.

To say all of that in a lot fewer words - similar core concepts but a very different, even open-source, approach to them.

Well, as far as body, soul, and spirit this is one of those areas where I'm somewhat uncomfortable as to whether anyone has any idea what they're talking about.

To tell you what I keep hearing from various sources you have something like this: your mind is generally operating in and through the brain, however there is something all the way at the back, which is you as well, but it's much larger in stature and would remind you of something like a being of angelic flame. Some people call this the higher self, some people call this the first layer of the 'superconscious', others call this the capital 'E' Ego, Jung called meeting this being Individuation, and it's the same light being who John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila were writing about their contacts with (it shows up strongly in John of the Cross's poetry). I don't exactly know where the next particular terminology came in to view historically but from the Hermetic Golden Dawn forward (through all the diaspora orders as well as Thelema and Crowley) it's been called the Holy Guardian Angel, and working toward contact with it is working toward an experience often referred in in occult/esoteric circles as 'Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel'.

AMORC (Rosicrucian Order) suggests that the perfect, untarnishable, and really permanently 'unfallen' part of yourself is shaping and perfecting a being in something like a bay or inlet within its own structure which is being refined of a still subtle but yet grosser matter. They refer to that being that is getting shaped as the Soul Personality and to the higher element as the Human Soul. As far as I can tell the Soul Personality (getting sculpted) and the Holy Guardian Angel, higher self, etc. are the same thing and that matches, I think, the sort of calm, blissful, and impartial being that people experience themselves as when they go into an NDE (near death experience).

I've been in Builders of the Adytum for as long as I've been in AMORC, I actually like the monographs and knowledge in their system a bit more however Paul Foster Case and Ann Davies tend to stick with the tarot and the Tree of Life and focus a bit less on the particulars of that question whereas AMORC will give you that, almost front and center, but without a lot of supporting context. I know it might be confusing if I keep trying to draw in references to the Tree of Life because if your not familiar with it it might not mean much, just know that there are three triads and these I think do accurately represent what we're discussing - the top triad being something like the unfallen trinity within a person, the Soul Personality being what's getting shaped, and of course the third triad is the personality we experience with the last sphere at the bottom - not having a triad - represents the physical world and human body.

I also have to be careful if I use the word 'unfallen' (aside from it sounding like an Endless Space 2 reference) because to read the Corpus Hermeticum, Kore Kosmou, Divine Pymander, or anything like that you get the sense that it's not a story of sin and salvation but rather free energies roaming the universe, becoming fascinated by what they see below in the form of planets, the planets and materiality taking even more fascination with them, and the two become bound together and those original free-floating energies get so lost in play that they forget that they're playing. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the doctrine that's behind Ishtar's descent through the seven gates into the underworld (Manly P Hall covers this one really well) where with every gate, representing the spheres of the seven planets or seven Elohim, she has to take off part of her vestiture of power until she's in the underworld, before her sister Ereshkegal naked and powerless but none the less there to save her lover Tamuz, Ereshkegal kills her immediately, she's resurrected, and returns back through the gates with Tamuz.

That story represents an ancient doctrine that we were celestial beings who, as we descended that staircase of seven steps or seven spheres we received 'gifts' which were really burdens or tests related to that particular planet (ie. from highest to nearest earth: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon), and as we accrue more of these gifts as we go down through the planets we become increasingly drunken and forgetful, where after we've passed the moon and are in Earth's orbit we're staggering and barely conscious, and by the time we're incarnate we're completely ignorant and without knowledge of who we are or where we came from. Obviously this is ancient cosmology, it doesn't at all fit what we know of the solar system, and it's part of why I rarely take these stories too objectively other than paying attention to the core principles or ideas that they seem to be getting at.

I don't know if that helps any but I would say that I can't speak for all Hermetic traditions that are out there as I don't think they have a completely unified take on soul, spirit, and matter (aside from what seem to be repeating tenets which I mentioned above), and something that's much closer to traditional Christianity, like Martinism for example, might have a fair amount of divergence to what you might find if you were in Crowley's A.'.A.'. and studying the Tree of Life (with The Beast as Chokmah and Babalon as Binah). The most important concepts will remain the same but different traditions will have different emphasis on different thing and some will have more mainstream Christianity and core tenets from that woven in whereas others will be more strictly philosophic and synchretic in their approach to the Kabbalah/Qabalah and ascent of the Tree of Life, carrying out the Great Work within oneself, etc.

TBH I don't know. The bible seems really ambiguous on this, aside from some reference in Hebrews 4:12 suggesting that soul and spirit are things that can be separated. That still raises the question that since this gospel is often attributed to Paul it might stand to reason that this is another case of Hellenistic Platonism/Neoplatonism pervading the New Testament. If one does take Paul and John as valid reformers of Judaic tradition then we're headed back to something similar to a Christian Cabbalistic perspective which takes us right back to Tomberg and Meditations on the Tarot.

That's the trouble with most mainstream views of religion though, ie. they generally leave most of the really important components relatively incoherent and then often raise the question of heresy when a person does try to make them coherent in a cosmological fashion (this happened with Jacob Boehme among the 16th/17th century Lutherans and Teilhard de Chardin also had plenty of jabs of that sort taken at him).

This is where I think Catholicism - going forward -could use some type of reform movement that keeps all the reverence, keeps the very Renaissance type of art, keeps some form of the Tridentine mass almost like a group incantation of sorts, and the eucharist should be kept because it's an extremely important edible talisman (Tomberg talks about this with Key 3: The Empress in MOTT). At the same time it should push the meditation techniques, work with models like the Tree of Life or John of the Cross's drawing of Mt Carmel (which looks strikingly similar) and work at being a place where its adherents are challenging themselves directly at spiritual growth and higher learning of that sort. I do worry that if it remains just a social club, even with mass and eucharist, it'll be losing adherents and the way our culture is going I also don't think that watering things down, like with Vatican II, was a helpful approach - rather it makes it feel like everything else, you get increasing numbers of Catholic churches feeling like nondenominational churches with the family on their guitars.

The additional trouble is they have deposits and dogmas that are inviolable, papal decisions are considered infallable (worse ossification than our legal precedents in the US). I think this would actually take there being a body, something like the Liberal Catholic Church or some sort of St. Cyprian oriented church doing their own heterodox thing, getting a pretty nasty article written about them in newadvent.org for being kabbalistic, masonic, or theosophic in underlying structure, and hopefully they'd grow on their own merits as people become increasingly skeptical that buying things on Amazon.com or getting the next latest tech gadget will help them resolve internal challenges. If they grew well enough and showed all signs of having high integrity and a strong grand lodge structure overseeing that integrity it could work. Unfortunately the old church could not agree with what they're doing unless they openly shattered the deposits and dogmas. Since they painted themselves into that corner as early as the 3rd or 4th century I highly doubt that they'd be able to do much more civil than not declare any member of this other church excommunicated or not declare membership a mortal sin and high risk for demonic possession. As of right now they're trapped being the spiritual/religious equivalent of D.A.R.E., as are most modern schools of Islam.