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

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With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

Re: Planetary charity question

[ecosophia]

You can have a relationship with it so long as you don't get any personal benefit from the donation. For example, you can make repeated donations to the same charity with good effect.

[ecosophia]

Interesting. I don't know anyone else who has that effect, so I'm not sure. Anyone else?

Re: Clairvoyance

[ecosophia]

This sort generalized psychism is quite common, and tends to run in families -- ask your friend if her mother has similar experiences (it's usually passed down in the female line). Because it's inborn, it's entirely safe. The kind of psychism that can become psychologically problematic is induced -- either deliberately induced via magical practices, or accidentally induced by psychological trauma or the use of drugs. She should be fine.

PS1) Not really. It sometimes happens that souls are born into such a family because they will benefit from occult training from an early age, but you also get children of occultists who have no interest in, or talent for, occultism at all.

PS2) Before the Communist takeover, I'm pretty sure the FRA (Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua) had a presence there, and it would not surprise me if the big US R+C orders such as AMORC were active there also. It was a pretty cosmopolitan place.

[(Anonymous)]

Does this mean that at the end of the universe, some spiritual beings survive the destruction, or actively create new universes. Presumably the latter would mean merging with the unmanifest and then starting out again?

[sh1njuk1]

Thank you very much! It's reassuring to hear that my instincts were correct :)

Re: Guided meditations for pathworking

[ecosophia]

Well, what does the course (or Newcomb himself) recommend?

[ecosophia]

No. Beings don't create universes; universes create beings. The beings who become demons in a new universe were the evolutionary failures of the last universe, the ones who got themselves so deeply wedged into imbalance that they couldn't unstick themselves even when everything else drew back together rejoicing into unity. So there they sat, gnawing themselves in the void for immensities of time, until the new universe finally got far enough along for beings to contact them -- and they've made our lives more, er, interesting since then.

[ecosophia]

I think pretty much everybody has.

Re: Have I cursed myself?

[ecosophia]

I tend to be very careful not to give to charities that do a lot of advertising. Small local charities that put nearly all their money into their causes are a much better place for donations.

Re: Playing cards

[ecosophia]

There are several different ways to interpret the ordinary 52-card deck, and that's one of them.

Re: Western Ceremonial Magic End Goal

[(Anonymous)]

Is there a way to laser-focus ourselves on our Divine Spark, or is this a shortcut we shouldn't take because the path through our Individualities is crucial to being able to do this?

And, are there other ways than magic to efficiently do the work of fully developing our Individuality?

Re: Election

[(Anonymous)]

What would qualify as a significant planet? Is Jupiter always considered significant because of its Greater Benefic status even when it is in its fall?

[ecosophia]

1) Take your time. Learn about different paths, read about them, attend talks or workshops if you can, get a sense of what's out there. Over time you'll get a clear sense of what appeals to you.

2) Modern industrial culture has taught you to be afraid of self-deception whenever you start to look at your own inner capacities -- it's part of the game of keeping you dependent on the corporate machine. Relax. Any well-designed spiritual path will teach you the skills you need to stay sane.

Re: 4-Fold Breath and Cabalistic Cross

[ecosophia]

Yes. In fact, most of magic belongs to the category of things that you can't understand except through experience.

[ecosophia]

They used to be treated very, very seriously by astrologers. I've found that they're very important in mundane charts, too.

[ecosophia]

1) It's been standard occult teaching for a long time that an amputated limb is amputated only on the material plane, and that "phantom pain" and other phenomena of the same kind relate to the etheric body.

2) It's been so long since there was a large population of eunuchs in Western countries that I don't think the information was preserved. One of the upsides of the current transgender phenomenon is that we now have plenty of eunuchs among us, so it should be possible over the next couple pf decades to find out.

Banishing etiquette

[flanerieoconnor]

Hi, JMG- I'm a couple of Magic Mondays behind in my reading, and today came upon the thread from two weeks back where you mentioned that you wouldn't recommend performing a straight Golden Dawn LBRP in the woods, for instance, because it starts from a premise of banishing the element of Earth, which is not exactly courteous to any local nature spirits. Having done exactly that a number of times over the last couple of years, I immediately felt retroactively rather mortified. Hoping to avoid similar missteps in the future:

1. If performing a standard LRM-style daily practice while in a public place outdoors (LRP, MP, discursive meditation), would you advise using the invoking Pentagrams rather than the banishing ones, and find time at another point in the day to do the banishing ritual?

2. In the same thread, you mention that the CGD LBRP was designed to be less hard-edged than the classical version, and that the SOP is gentler yet. Out of curiosity, where would the BRC (Banishing Ritual of the Cross) you've posted here a couple of times fall on this same continuum? And would you say it's broadly compatible with the system found in LRM/POW/COP (for example, could one perform the BRC to banish in a situation where one didn't want to banish Earth per se, then the LIRP and Middle Pillar), or would using the two together make for an awkward mix? I've used the BRC from time to time with what seem like good results, but I've thus far made a point of doing so at a different time of day, not as part of a sequence of other Golden Dawn-style practices (I asked you about this some time ago, and you responded that use of the BRC in the morning, followed by an LIRP in the evening seemed workable...)

Thanks much!
-NPM

[(Anonymous)]

This might be an inane question, but is what appeals to me a good guide?

[cutekitten]

Thank you!

[robertmathiesen]

Coincidentally[?--ha!], we're also just now seeing renewed public discussion of the cause(s) of the so-called "Havana Syndrome." That always seemed to me to be caused by some fairly advanced new military technology, which was developed by some other nation and tested by it on US diplomatic and military personnel (since about 2015). My first guess as to that other nation would Russia rather than China. If so, then counter-measures that could be effectively deployed against that vast nation would probably be a matter for the US Navy working in (or rather, underneath the surface of) the Arctic Ocean. Whole lotta ocean-based testing going on, methinks ...

[robertmathiesen]

I read them when they first came out, and put them on my to-keep shelves. I agree, they're really interesting.

Garrett was somwhat famous in California circles for having read the Church of England funeral service in full regalia over Tom de Long (Gwydion Pendderwen) 's car when it finally breathed its last in front of Garrett's apartment up on Bernal heights in San Francisco.

Re: 6 Questions

[(Anonymous)]

1. That is a mind-blowing idea to me. Is there any other technology they had that would be explained by that?
6. I used to occasionally guess what the next song on the radio was going to be, like a musical zener card. My dad could (accidentally) do that with phone calls, he'd think of somebody for an unrelated reason and then a few minutes they'd call.
If you consider signal latency, (OP, is your playlist randomized on a server or locally on your computer?) the premonition could be happening instantaneously when the signal is sent (dialing a phone, starting a song), and then a while later the signal catches up.
This would be interesting to experiment with but if my tests with zener cards are any indication, I don't have much parapsychological skill (at least not at the moment).

[violetcabra]

Hi Brenainn,

Since I'm both a eunuch and an occult practitioner I can share some details from my experience. First, it doesn't appear to have much effect on magical ability, at least on the level of the mental or astral plane. That means practically that my body can serve as a conduit for magical energies. Furthermore, if I formulate an intent with conscious will I've had good success helping it to come on down the planes into form. So it appears that a person can live as a eunuch and still work with magic.

As for etheric or astral energies, certainly something subtle does happen. I've known other post-operative trans women or eunuchs and they always strike me as different than those who aren't cut. Frankly, eunuch's have something eerie energetically going on. Relevantly, way more of the eunuch trans women I've known have serious spiritual lives than non-eunuch trans women.

Probably Mercury rules eunuchs along with other people who don't fit cleanly or well into either "male" or "female." All of this said, what I'm discussing are all humans who freely choose to become eunuchs rather than people who had it occur through some other means such as surgery or an accident. I'm not sure how much the elective aspect of it might be important. For this reason I feel reluctant to write on the general category outside of trans related concerns.

Re: A gift from a tree?

[cutekitten]

I have always thought plants have souls and strongly suspect they think, though not in the way we do. It’s known they “talk” to each other with pheromones.

That being the case, this seems like an excellent time to air my long-held theory that, properly understood, science and religion are two sides of the same coin. This has not been a popular idea in the U.S., where I live, for the last 50 years. I feel I will be vindicated, though!

Re: Magic places

[open_space]

Certainly. Tepoztlán and Teotihuacán are both still cities and thus why I named them. But I agree, if cities were not so mindlessly placed we would all be better. Good thing a GD mage can also work with energies not tied to a specific geographical place ;-). Also, though the etheric crud caused by the masses in Machu Pichu muddles it something is still there, specially at sunrise.

I wonder if the knowledge to create such meeting points of energy still survives in the western tradition, JMG? I'm thinking of how the greeks breathed life to some statues or how the Hindus establish the Murti. Radionics sound useful for this, per a comment you made to me some time ago.