Toward Ecosophy

It's nearly midnight and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. 

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

The image? I've been fielding a lot of questions about my books recently, and I thought it would be worth going back over them here, as I did some years ago, and talking a little about them. This is the current edition of my fourth book, Earth Divination, Earth Magic, originally published in 1999; it's on its second publisher these days, and had kind of a wild ride. Geomancy, for those who don't know, is a system of divination using four-digit binary numbers; it is not the same thing as feng-shui (風水), the Chinese art of placement, which sometimes gets given the same label.  Knowing the bad habits of the original publisher, I warned them not to market the book as Wiccan feng-shui; in their infinite wisdom, of course, that's exactly what they did. A big printing duly went out to Wicca shops all over the country, and nearly all the copies got sent promptly back once the proprietors discovered that it was not, in fact, Wiccan feng-shui. It thus became the first book of mine to go out of print. I didn't know enough about publishing back then to get it back in print with another firm; that had to wait a while, and in the meantime -- well, that'll come up for discussion when I talk about my second geomancy book. This one is a good solid book on geomancy, and in its new incarnation it's proven just as popular as the other one; you can get a copy here. 

(Yeah, I know, a day late. Yesterday was a little frantic.) 

Welcome to Frugal First Friday! This is a monthly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up on the first Friday of each month, and each will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course. 

There has been talk about releasing these posts in print format.  In case that turns out to be worth pursuing, please note: if you comment on this or any future Frugal First Friday post, you are giving permission for that comment to be included in print or other editions. This means, for those of you into the legalese, that by posting something in the comment thread you are granting me non-exclusive reprint rights to your comment, and permitting me to transfer those to a publisher or other venue. Your contribution will have your name or internet handle attached, your choice. 

I also have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed. One change from the earlier frame is that if you produce goods or services yourself, and would like to let readers know about them, you may post one (1) (yes, just one) comment per month letting people know, with a link to your website or other contact info. The other rules ought to be familiar by now. 

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #3: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

Rule #4: don't post LLM ("AI") generated content, and don't bring up the subject unless you're running a homemade LLM program on your own homebuilt, steam-powered server farm. 

With that said, have at it!      

I'm far from sure how many people in the occult scene today have any idea just how scarce decent occult books were half a century ago. Yeah, I know, I sound like one of those geezers going on about how we had to walk two miles through the snow to get to school, and it was uphill both ways, blah blah blah -- and you kids get off my lawn! Seriously, though, between the stock market crash of 1929 and the first wave of serious occult reprints at the end of the 1970s, if you wanted anything that wasn't mass market schlock, you had to haunt used bookstores and write to hoodoo supply shops with names like Mar-Lar and Ty-Rad to get much of anything, and even then there wasn't much. 

This book was one of the exceptions. It's a very odd volume and it has an even odder history behind it, but for a while there it was the only source in English for the magical philosophy behind Martinism. 

Martinism? Well, that's a story in itself. The short form is that a very strange man named Martinez de Pasqually showed up in the south of France in the 1750s with a remarkable system of magical and spiritual training that reads like medieval Gnosticism. He taught some of the most influential mystics and occultists of the time. One of them, Louis-Claude de St.-Martin, reworked the material he'd gotten from Pasqually, combined it with other traditions of mostly Christian mysticism, and passed on an initiation to his students. In 1891 Gerard Encausse, who wrote about magic under the pen name Papus, reorganized the tradition into an organization, the Martinist Order, which spread all over Europe over the years that followed. It was especially popular in Russia before the Revolution, which meant that a lot of Martinists died in Siberian prison camps once the Communists took over. (No, the Martinists weren't especially political;  Communists just like to round up people who believe in anything other than Marx, and shoot or imprison them. It's one of their more reliable habits.) 

Before things got ugly, Georgii Ossipovich Mebes was one of the major figures in Russian Martinism, and wrote a fine book, now available in English translation as The Encyclopedia of Occultism. Later on, a copy of this book -- then very rare -- came to a young Polish occultist named Mieczysław Demetriusz Sudowski. After various adventures, which included a stay in India studying with the famous holy man Ramana Maharshi, Sudowski settled in Australia. Mebes' book was decades out of print and the rights were unavailable, since its author had died in a Soviet prison camp and there were no next of kin. So Sudowski, who'd taken the much less unpronounceable pen name Mouni Sadhu, translated Mebes' book into English and used it, with attribution, as the core material for a book of his own, The Tarot. 

It's a bit of a mixed bag. Sadhu, as we might as well call him, had the attitudes you'd expect from a mystically inclined Roman Catholic occultist, and it shows -- the section in one chapter about the horrible fate of masturbators is a masterpiece of unintentional comedy. (I wrote about that in an earlier blog here.)  Alongside such entertainments, however, is a great deal of very solid occult philosophy from Martinism and the continental European occult tradition generally. It had a very strong influence on me; if you want to know where I got my habit of resolving binaries into ternaries, for example, you're looking at the book right now. 

The Tarot is available these days in a sturdy hardback edition from Aeon Press, with artwork much less gawky than the ink drawings one of  Sadhu's friends contributed to the original volume. Me, I still treasure my battered old copy, but that's because it has so many memories gathered around it, and those tend to be typeface- and layout-specific, at least for me.  Now that Martinism and the French occult tradition generally is finding its feet here in the US, it's worth keeping in mind as a relatively easy, usually thoughtful, but occasionally hilarious intro to an unfamiliar branch of the occult sciences. 

I was delighted to receive, via yesterday's mail, my hardback author's copies of The Life Force Workbook, the last of the seven volumes in the Golden Section Fellowship sequence. This volume rounds out a project that I first sketched out in the mid-1990s, and originally tried to get started in 2001. t's been a long and rocky road since then, with plenty of delays and one bitter disappointment, which adds more than a little to the sense of satisfaction I feel now. Now that it's complete, I want to talk a little bit about what it is, why it's so important a project to me, and why it offers the decidedly quirky take on occultism that it does. 

When I first began studying occultism in the 1970s, the field embraced a giddy exuberance of subjects and themes. Magic and divination, which have come to be treated as the be-all and end-all of occult studies in more recent years, rubbed shoulders with the whole panoply of alternative perspectives: lost continents, ley lines, yoga, breathing exercises, fad diets, natural healing methods, radionics, pyramid power, and the list just keeps on going. Some of this was straight-up quackery, but there was a lot that wasn't; some of it was seriously useful, and a lot more was at least entertaining. 

The 1980s brought retrenchment in that as in so many fields. In place of the wild diversity of perspectives of the previous decade, a particular mode of pop-culture Neopaganism (the version promoted so efficiently by Margot Adler, Starhawk, et al.) seized the collective imagination, and became something of a mental monoculture in what was left of the alternative scene; very nearly the only alternative history that mattered any more, for example, was the one in which the Pope personally burned nine million witches at the stake in Salem. (I exaggerate for effect, but only a little.) Outside the Neopagan movement, ceremonial magic became a central interest; this had impressive upsides, notably the revival of the Golden Dawn tradition and the beginning of serious work on translating and republishing older occult texts, but it also involved a dramatic narrowing of options.  

It was during this period, in the mid-1990s, that I first started brooding over the idea of a system of occult training and self-initiation that embraced at least a few of the themes of the broader field of the 1970s. I was already moving toward the fringes of the scene -- I'd put in most of two decades on Golden Dawn ceremonial magic by then, but I'd moved from there to studying the teachings of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, a Druid Revival order that embodied some of the older vision, which got me plenty of hate from the Celtic Reconstructionist faction of the Neopagans.  I started collecting some of the books that had influenced me earlier in my studies; and I started to explore the possibility that occult training could be done using bodies of lore that weren't restricted to magic, divination, and dancing around in a circle stark naked while chanting "We All Come From The Goddess" and hoping to get laid. ;-)

At the time I was also in the middle of my first serious studies of sacred geometry, and all that coalesced into a series of spiritual experiences where I saw a sequence of geometrical forms as the basis for a divination oracle and the foundation of a way of occult training. That became the basis of The Sacred Geometry Oracle, and it would have become the basis for a complete system along the lines of the current Golden Section Fellowship...except for one awkward little detail. The publisher I worked with in those days did editorial and marketing decisions via committee, and when The Sacred Geometry Oracle came before the committee, one of the members had just watched the movie The Matrix and came back burbling with enthusiasm, insisting that a deck that I'd intended to use as the basis for a sequence of books including earth mysteries and green spirituality ought to be done in an urban-noir style full of rusting metal, corroded concrete, and glow-in-the-dark neon. 

I objected to this. I was told, in so many words, to shut up and get with the program, that the publisher knew what they were doing and my concerns didn't matter. So an ugly, mangled version of my deck came out, and of course it flopped. I shelved the broader project and hoped that it might be possible some day to get back to it. By then I'd been suddenly landed with the job of taking a Druid order that was six inches from death on a slippery slope and getting it up on its feet again, and other concerns had to wait. If you want to know why my books on Druidry from that period all appeared from a different publisher, though, now you know. 

Time passed, the rights to The Sacred Geometry Oracle finally reverted to me, and after a few false starts I was able to place it with my current primary occult publisher, Aeon Books. It duly came out in a new and attractive edition, and found an audience. So I pulled out my old papers on the broader sequence, blew the dust off them, and went to work -- and here we are. 

It's not exactly the series I had in mind back in 1996, but that's because thirty years have passed since then and I've learned a few more things about occultism. The basic concept is unchanged. There's a divination deck, The Sacred Geometry Oracle, which provides a core tool for the system and a set of symbols that can be used throughout; there are three manuals of training, The Way of the Golden Section, The Way of the Four Elements, and The Way of the Secret Temple, which are meant to be done in order, and which provide the student with a solid guide to a path of occult training based on meditation and divination rather than ceremonial magic; and there are three workbooks. The Occult Philosophy Workbook, The Earth Mysteries Workbook, and The Life Force Workbook, which can be done in any order, and can be taken out of their current context and used in any system of occult training that makes use of daily discursive meditation. If you do the whole thing systematically you'll have seven years of robust occult training under your belt by the time you're finished, not to mention a good solid grasp of meditation, divination, certain kinds of ritual, pathworking, internal alchemy, occult philosophy, the folklore and metaphysical dimensions of the area where you live, and the suppressed sciences and arts of the life force. Not a bad education, all things considered! 

Oh, and the methods I use are fully compatible with all the teachings I received from John Gilbert, including the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose and the Modern Order of Essenes; with my Gilbert-derived Druidry work, including The Druid Magic Handbook; with The Dolmen Arch; with the Cabalistic material I introduced in Revisioning the Tree of Life (and two sequels currently in process); and with the practices covered in The Secret of the Five Rites and The Philosophy and Practice of Polarity Magic. I didn't actually set out to create the required reading list for bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in occultism, but all things considered it's not that far from that. 

One other thing. These are not the only things from the colorful old occultism of the 1970s that are worth recovering. They're simply the things that struck me as most interesting and most useful as part of a system of training. Nor is there anything especially magical about the 1970s -- there were even giddier things in the occult scene of the 1920s, and some of those deserve at least as much attention as the material I've assembled. If any of this leads you, dear reader, to go plunging into the garish paperbacks of an earlier day to revive some other forgotten bit of weirdness and apply it to your own occult studies, I will bow with joined palms in your honor. 

I'm delighted to announce that the first wave of submissions for Technonomicon: A Book of Forbidden Technologies was even more substantial than I'd hoped. The contributions I've already received amount to just short of 30,000 words, or about a third of the way to the length I had in mind. I haven't yet written my contributions -- I had some other things to get out of the way first! -- so once those are in, we'll very likely be to the halfway point. 

(If you're wondering, dear reader, what on Yuggoth I'm talking about, the following blog post and journal entry should clarify things: 

https://ecosophia.net/a-tome-of-forbidden-technologies/  

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/376728.html  

Thank you, and we now return you to your regularly unscheduled entry.)

Even so, there's room for much more. I've tentatively divided the book into the following chapters: Views, Home, Family, Food, Health, Words, Tools, Farm, Craft, Fun, and Woo. "Views" is for overviews -- longtime reader Inna's description of what she learned growing up in the Soviet Union is there, for example. "Words" is every kind of communication. "Woo" is anything spooky, spiritual, or occult. Each of the chapters has at least two entries; none of them are anything like complete. 

So I'm appealing for more entries. One thing that's largely missing is basic stuff. Most people younger than me, for example, have no idea how to make coffee in a percolator. Most have no idea about the basic skills of gardening, or even how to cook from scratch. Things that you think are too simple to bother with are probably going to be the most popular entries of all. 500-1000 words is a good length, but I'm flexible on either end of that. 

Also, several people sent in articles about their favorite hand tools. Those are great! I'll be writing one -- I've had and used a Yankee drill for decades, and it's been insanely useful -- but I'd like many, many more. What is your favorite hand tool, dear reader? Describe it, explain what it does and how to use it and where to get it, and tell the world why it's so wonderful. 

As before, entries can go to jmg (at) technonomicon (dot) org -- some version of Word is preferable, but if that doesn't work for you, I can adapt. Let's finish making this happen. 

As many of you will already be aware, these open posts on the Covid fiasco and its aftermath have changed from weekly to monthly; message traffic has decreased far enough at this point that weekly posts get too few comments, but there are still plenty of people who want access to a forum for discussion on that topic not dominated by either of the two heavily promoted narratives -- the medical-industry party line or the conspiracy-culture party line. My current plan is to post a new one of these on the first Tuesday of each month, and keep it open and active until the next one goes up.

So here we are. The rules are the same as before:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.

5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button. 

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.    

It occurred to me a few minutes ago that events may just have taken a turn I didn't expect, and should have. It's one thing to be blindsided by events; it's another thing, and a mortifying one, to realize that you had all the necessary pieces of the puzzle in your hands and still didn't manage to see how it all fit together -- or rather, in this case, how close it was to falling apart. 

Back in 2013, in a series of posts on The Archdruid Report that ended up becoming raw material for my book After Progress, I described faith in progress as the established religion of our time. That suggestion fielded a lot of pushback, mostly among people who thought of "religion" as something only primitive people believe in and wanted to shield their own belief in progress from comparison with it. It didn't help that I pointed to Communism, among other things, as another example of a secular civil religion, since back then Communism was a fringe ideology that nobody in American society believed in. 

I still think I was quite correct to identify blind faith in progress as a civil religion, and indeed the established orthodoxy of modern American society. What I should have realized, and didn't, was that it would collapse suddenly and not slowly, the way Communism did. 

That's what we're watching now, in real time. 

Over the last few weeks popular rebellion against the next duly anointed strides in the onward march of progress has come surging in off the fringes and started seizing the headlines. Grand juries have begun refusing to indict people who chop down Flock cameras. Tech journals are admitting in print that most people distrust AI, not to mention the sleazy corporations that are pushing it on the rest of us, and are even drawing connections between that distrust and the soaring popularity of old technologies and "old school cool" among young people. Comments like the one I've posted on the right have gone from weird to normal. 

All this caught me completely by surprise. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, I was laying the groundwork for an anthology of old tech, the Technonomicon, in the serene conviction that it would be a fringe publication with the same kind of readership among outcasts and rebels that most of my other books have attracted. I'd even noticed that the frantic pushback I used to get when I mentioned that I don't own a television or use a cell phone had gone away, replaced by a sort of wistful envy among people who'd begun to notice that most technologies introduced since 2000 or so had made their lives significantly worse...and I'd somehow failed to draw the obvious conclusion. 

I suspect part of what happened was the very substantial revival of interest in actual, theistic religion that's been building in the US for the last few years. People who turn to the Divine, however named or described, to meet their religious needs don't need to do it in a hole-and-corner fashion by loading theological expectations on progress. Part of it, too, is the simple fact that so much of the latest technology really does suck, and that so much of it makes no secret about giving all the benefits to overpaid techbro billionaires while piling all the costs on the rest of us. 

One way or another, though, here we are, with faith in progress collapsing around us the way that faith in the gospel according to Marx imploded a few decades ago across the Eastern Bloc. If I'm right, we're going to see those same techbro billionaires flailing around like the leaders of Communist parties after the Berlin Wall came down. It should be entertaining. 

Beyond that? Well, we have a future to build, and with any luck it can be less embarrassingly stupid and toxic than the one that techbros and corporate enablers tried to push on us. I'll do my best to get over my embarrassment and see if I can offer suggestions. In the meantime, the Technonomicon project continues, please read this blog post if you missed it, and consider contributing essays and ideas via this post here on Dreamwidth.