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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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

Cult of Bitcoin

[(Anonymous)]

Almost two weeks ago I was listening to a podcast featuring a true-believing Bitcoin maxi who brought up a bunch of points about how decentralized crypto can defund forever wars, tame predatory bankers, and most importantly stop a bunch of bureaucrats from stealing money from my savings account with inflation. The next day Elon started shooting his mouth off and the price began to slide, so I decided to learn more and see if this is a worthy investment at a discount or just a collapsing bubble.

I do not understand the nuances of the code, but the following 10 days of nonstop attacks from legacy media, China, and even the Pope convinced me that this must be a dangerous revolutionary technology worth a second look. The natal chart appears to have been elected with that exact purpose in mind, leading some to speculate that the mysterious founder had some astrological chops.

https://astroinsightsblog.wordpress.com/2021/01/25/bitcoin-comes-of-age/

Finding out about the upcoming eclipse square with Saturn and Uranus made me feel queazy about the money I put down, but by the time I learned about that it was already too late and the fever had swept me down river. Has there ever been a speculative asset before where the investors would rather lose all their money than surrender and capitulate? It occurred to me that as someone brought up in Christianity this made me feel like I was living in the book of Exodus, where Satoshi is Moses leading us out of debt slavery, delivering the blockchain tablets to follow, and mysteriously disappearing along the way after infighting broke out.

Twitter is where we gather for inspiration, and oddly enough the hashtag is full of religious iconography with even Kek making multiple appearances (my favorite is the haloed version with a deeply sympathetic face supporting a struggling Hodler). Faith is rewarded, weakness is despised, and "to the moon" sounds a whole lot like the promised land. Alt coins are the Levantine false gods trying to lead the chosen people astray, and Pharaoh FUD's army is still hot on our heels.

Now when facing establishment pundit's accusations of being a cult some of the more prominent maxis have actually started deliberately embracing it, as if to say "Hell yeah, if being in a cult means believing in something bigger than the next quarter in a dying financial system then we are a cult!"

The effect on me was profound as I have never invested in anything in my life that I cannot hold in my own hands. It was the promise of financial gain mixed with a sense of purpose that kept me up at night obsessively researching. I realized that I was in an altered state and asked my wife to remind me to not put more down than we are prepared to lose. It would suck if it went to zero (or the grid failures win out sooner than expected) but at least it meant I resisted slavery and did more than just go along to get along. In that respect I am far less fearful than normal.

After a modest amount of occult training it is clear than something more is at work here and I wish to understand it better. Even if turns out to be a good call it still bothers me that I did not recognize what was going on it at first and found myself under the influence.

Re: Cult of Bitcoin

[ecosophia]

Many thanks for a glimpse inside the Bitcoin world. I'm pretty sure that cryptocurrencies are vastly overinflated in price, and that the heavy pressure against them in recent weeks has been part of a frantic attempt by the establishment to stave off a truly gargantuan speculative bubble that could do a 1929 on the world economy. I understand the desire to make something outside of the current travesty of a financial system, however! As for your question about true believers in speculative assets -- yes, it happens quite often. If you haven't read John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929, drop everything, get a copy, and read it three times before you invest another penny in anything at all.

It's quite possible that Bitcoin and other cryptos will turn out to be an important innovation. Keep in mind that many of the companies whose stocks went to the Moon in 1929 and then crashed disastrously, wrecking the global economy, were also selling important innovations. Just because the basics are sound doesn't mean that it can't be catastrophically overinflated in price...

Re: Cult of Bitcoin

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks so much for the sobering message. The spell is broken, and now when I look at Twitter it does not have the same effect as before. It is good to have Druid friends!

I did read the Galbraith book a couple years ago at your recommendation and laughed the whole way through, but not laughing now. Definitely time to read it again.

As far as where we are on the bubble chart, the institutional investors are now getting in on the action so there is probably some more top side before it melts down. Thanks to the coordinated FUD campaign limiting the all time highs I might have a chance of getting out what I put in, depending on how things go with these next eclipses. This is not the sort of thing I would usually have the stomach for, but maybe in that sense it makes good practice by being forced to step outside of my comfort zone. Certainly better than blind faith.

Apparently there are lessons to be learned.

Re: Cult of Bitcoin

[(Anonymous)]

As you research these currencies, I would really like to recommend you look at the energy consumption requirements of bitcoin in particular and the ecological implications of that. As far as I can tell (though I am no expert), all the cryptocurrencies fundamentally rely on an increasing rate of consumption of some resource to function. That is, for a fixed number of people making a fixed rate of transactions with a fixed technology, the rate of energy use of bitcoin, for instance, will continue to grow without bound. "Proof of work" currencies consume energy as their resource (remember in physics work = energy), while "proof of space" currencies consume disk drives and therefore physical resources (rare minerals, etc.) If there *is* something occult going on with them, it's far from clear to me it's ethically wholesome.

Re: Cult of Bitcoin

[(Anonymous)]

The counter argument would be that our national currency is called the petrodollar and is backed by violence. PM mining is also not a very eco friendly endeavor, and most of the supposed green technologies do not live up to the hype. It begs the question if we are not supposed to live with extravagant wealth, which always seems to come at some sort of cost. Maybe crypto has a place in the future however, as citizens of China, Iran and Venezuela are using it to escape oppression.