Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. 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.

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use the button above to access my online tip jar. If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain other gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I now have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online. 

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

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***  

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

John--

In a reply to another of the community in this week's open post, you commented that Steiner, too, fell into the trap of confounding the planes. In my (very) limited exposure to his work, he seems to delineate the realms of body, soul, and spirit reasonably well. Did you have a particular portion of his work in mind when making that comment? (I thought it might have been his Cosmic memory, which I have not gotten to as yet.) Would you see his work as a whole as suffering from this error, or only a portion of it?

--David BTL aka Smaragdine Pretentious Flobberworm

[ecosophia]

Steiner made the mistake -- very common in his time -- of thinking that the images of the prehistoric past he got from the astral plane ("Akashic records") were accurate images of material conditions in the past, which they weren't. (As far as I can tell, they were symbolic expressions of astral conditions.) He also ended up making some very weird claims in his late and famous lectures on agriculture, again by treating astral experiences as a reflection of the material plane. That's what I had in mind in terms of his confounding the planes. It doesn't vitiate his work in general -- far from it -- but it's one of the ways in which a reflective attitude toward his writings is much more useful than the sort of rigid literalism too common among mainstream Anthroposophists these days.

Steiner’s agricultural lectures

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this. I have a book that is a collection of Steiner’s lectures on beekeeping. I found it almost unreadable, due to some of the utterly ridiculous things he said. Some remarks by other beekeepers that are recorded (with his responses) seemed obvious attempts to politely inform him he was way off base, and he seemed to deliberately miss the point. I’m not sure if I still have the book - it has been a few years and I might have just tossed it in sell or donate pile it was so irritating. But if I do have it, I will go back and re-read it with the thought in mind that he might have been misapplying lessons from other planes to the material one. (No doubt some amount of meditating on it will be required!)
O.E.P.

Re: Steiner’s agricultural lectures

[ecosophia]

That seems about right!