Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight as I write this, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Let's start things out with a quote again: 

 

"Discipline has long been interpreted as self-control, or as some would say, "the overcoming of the lower nature.' The difficultiy is that such words as 'conquest' and 'overcoming' suggest an entirely inconsistent aggressiveness of technique.  The true metaphysician is not a wearied man wrestling with his lower nature; rather he is poised and relaxed, achieving through realization instead of conflict.  Avoid the process of suffering your way into a spiritual state." 

 

That's from Manly P. Hall's Self-Unfoldment by Disciplines of Realization, arguably Hall's best book and one of the classics of the Golden Age of American occultism. (The image to the left, on the other hand, is one of Augustus Knapp's splendid illustrations for Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages.)     

Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. (Any question received after then will not get an answer, and will likely just be deleted.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

 

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- see you next week!***

***AHEM. THIS POST IS CLOSED. Please quit with the political bickering!***

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

For about a decade I practiced Tarot, and found that I could get reliable results if I were to meditate on the meaning of the cards as they applied to my life. What I could never quite get while working with the Tarot were straightforward "yes/no" answers.

About three years ago I went over to geomancy and have been amazed with how on point it is and how it gives straight-forward "yes/no" answers as a matter of course. I've seen folks get similar levels of "yes/no" type answers working with Ogham, and of course Horary Astrology, but not with other systems of divination as far as I can remember.

I'm curious JMG and commentariat, do you know of other divination systems that can give reliable, accurate and straightforward "yes/no" type answers as a matter of course?

[ecosophia]

Geomancy is in my experience the gold standard for yes/no divinations. I get the same sort of crisp, no-nonsense results from horary astrology, but it's not anything like so easy to learn. Ogham, Coelbren, the runes, and similar systems of sortilege (that's the fancy technical name for oracles where you draw one or more items from a fixed stock of symbols) can be very precise for some people, not for others. Tarot? In my experience, it's an extraordinary rich and flexible oracle if you want to see the whole picture, but you won't get a straight yes or no from it for love or money.

There are tens of thousands of other divination systems out there, most of which I haven't worked with. Some of them may be as good at yes/no questions as geomancy, for all I know.

[booklover1973]

Do you have an idea what it is why numerology does give only arbitrary results in contrast to other divination systems?

[(Anonymous)]

This is going to sound like a joke, but you can always flip a coin and take heads as "yes" and tails as "no."

Unlike geomancy, it won't give you a sense of why the answer is what it is.

[(Anonymous)]

Just to riff off that idea a bit, you can use coin flips to generate geomantic charts. Heads is active, tails is passive. Either flip a single coin four times to generate each of the mothers from top to bottom, or take four coins of different denominations to represent each of the four lines in the figure, then toss them all at the same time.

[ecosophia]

I call this the 41 cent geomancy oracle -- you take a quarter, a dime, a nickel, and a penny and toss them all at once, assigning the results with the quarter for the top line and the penny for the bottom. It works quite well.