Daoist Chinese wizards were invoking Saint George

[MorganBlack]

Everybody:

 

[Asteriskos]

Wow, eclecticism is pervasive!

 

[MorganBlack]

Behold! Syncratism!

And this rather fits here, and puts a different spin on things.

Western weebs: "Ooooh! The power of Asian magic! Chi-balls!"

Meanwhile, in Asia: "Ooooh! the magic of the Western spiritual systems!!"

Japan imported Western systems, along with Freemasonry.
The great Zen teacher D. T. Suzuki translated mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, calling him "the Buddha of the North."
And they got paranormal magazines and Colin Wilson's excellent book 'The Occult. '
Schoolkids got notebook Ouija boards.
Oh, the irony.

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[Soror Epihania]

Wisdom and power are wisdom and power, whatever religious, cultural, or social context they're nested in. I'm not surprised that Chinese and Japanese practitioners have integrated Christian and western esoteric stuff. It's a reminder of the richness that western esoteric traditions still hold once we stop yearning after 'exotic'-seeming knowledge and take up what's been left to us.

 

[Asteriskos]

All this was inevitable! There's even a magazine that more or less wants you to believe that, called "Cosmopolitan"!
What was once a Planet is now a Village, the cross-pollination is Unbelievable?

 

[MorganBlack]

Yep yep. Not to flatten all myths into bland universalism, but you go back not that long ago and we're the same people, but who have forgotten.

See the Sanskrit chair at Harvard, Prof Michael Witzel's book:

The Origins of the World's Mythologies

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St. George, is the same mythic patterns for Mars we all tell each other about.

Prof Witzel reconstructed the timeline for us starting with an Out of Africa mythological system dating back 100,000 years, mapping our shared mythic story: Father Heaven/Mother Earth, the separation of sky and earth, the flood, the final destruction . He argues these features survive today in all major religions. They resonant for us all.

And the Thor/St. George parallel is well documented. In the Scandinavian North, St. George's fight the dragon at the same time commemorated Thor's fight with the Midgard Serpent. .The Slavic St. George, the Slavic god Gerov -- whose feast fell around St. George's Day - was explicitly said to be "called Mars in Latin."

The old Mars pattern - and none of the astrological "high gods" - never go away. They get a baptism and a new name under a new cosmic understanding.

 

[Asteriskos]

Interestingly, parallels like that have fascinated me for a long time. There was more going on in antiquity that scholarship has yet to reveal,
"If", the scholars recognize something of esoteric value for what it is. Sadly, that's not always the case, at least at first.

 

[goldenprawn]

I applaud their broad-mindedness.

 

[Firetree]

Chinese wizards invoke St George ??? Thats the guy that killed a dragon , yeah ? And did you know how the REAL Chinese 'wizards' feel about dragons ?

I can't say this is a 'happy marriage ' !

 

[Veracity]

I mean, if it works, it works? People have always traded in everything, including beliefs

 

[MorganBlack]

I can't say this is a 'happy marriage ' !

That's not how that myths works here. You have to find the part of reality the different cultural myths are the poetry that pre-scientific people used to map reality.

The Dragon of the West , in the Christian tradition is a symbol of primordial chaos like the Egyptian Apep (also spelled Apophis) and maps almost exactly onto the Leviathan/Tiamat/Satan symbolic pattern.

It / he (?) is eternal enemy of Ra, the sun god, and the thing the Solar Hero slays. The ancient Egyptian called this Isfet - chaos, disorder, falsehood, destruction. We might throw in mental illness here, so the Dragon becomes entropy, disorder, chaos, de-coherence , irrationality, falling apart, hysteria, madness, losing oneself. The illness is the issue, not the symbols.

But in Chinese Taoism, the dragon is the opposite, and is the symbol of heaven's order itself - that brings rain, that winds through the clouds in the pattern of the Tao, that the emperor claims as his symbol. All fine. They are allowed their own symbolic language in their own culture.

That said, are some some destructive dragons in Chinese mythology , and Western myth occasionally has wise or neutral dragon, but the main archetypal function is the one above.

 

[Firetree]

Indeed ... they ( Chinese dragons ) can be destructive but that is usually the result of inappropriate interaction , making them angry or neglecting them ... I'd say invoking St. George might do it .

There is also the issue of the connection with sexual energy ; the traditional Chinese system didnt have the 'shame' that the west did about that .... which might have something to do with the two different views of dragons (in the main ) .