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.

The illustration? Another Rosicrucian diagram from the SRIA. At the center is the Sun, or rather the Solar Logos, surrounded by the planets and shining down its sevenfold ray onto the Earth. Above it are the spiritual hierarchies to which it belongs; around it is the demarcation between manifestation and the Unmanifest; and the line above the circle marks the archetypal forces that, in our system, manifest as the planets. 

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With that said, have at it! 

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

According to a 1992 Psychology Today article (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199207/bright-lights-big-mystery) there significant differences between the near death experiences reported by different cultures:

"* Many of the Africans interpreted the event as somewhat evil; half thought the experience signified that they were somehow "bewitched." Another called it a "bad women."
* Among 400 Japanese NDErs, many reported seeing long, dark rivers and beautiful flowers, two common symbols that frequently appear as images in Japanese art.
* East Indians sometimes see heaven as a giant bureaucracy, and frequently report being sent back because of clerical errors!
* Americans and English say they are sent back for love or to perform a job.
* Natives of Micronesia often see heaven as similar to a large, brightly lit American city with loud, noisy cars and tall buildings."

Do you have a sense of the occult reason for these divergent cultural and regional afterlife experiences?

A Strange Encounter

[(Anonymous)]

I had an interesting experience the other day: I was out for a walk and my thoughts turned to the Norse gods -- in think in relation to the virtues they exhibited -- and my thoughts wandered briefly to Loki as a kind of outlier: even when he does things with good outcomes, they're either done in a bad way or for bad reasons and the gods suffer as much as they benefit from it.

I had a sudden feeling that I needed to drop this line of thought, and I tried to get back to the other gods, but I felt a presence wanting me to acknowledge it. I got the sense that it was Loki. I told it to go away but it wouldn't. I should have invoked a holy symbol then and there but I felt that if it really was Loki then he's a god and it wouldn't do any good anyway (I now recognize that this was not exactly my thought). So I went along and soon had the thought: I can recognize the bad in the good things he does, why should I not recognize the good in the bad things he does?

As I thought about this, something still felt off. I felt hot, muggy, and a little confused, which I knew to be signs that I was dealing with a malign spirit. But hey, it was a hot and humid day. I struggled with whether or not to follow up on the thought and whether I was dealing with a god or something else.

I thought multiple times about tracing the sign of the hammer in case it was something malign but was stopped by a thought that I shouldn't do that and it wouldn't do any good. Finally I decided if this really was a god I was dealing with, he shouldn't mind me invoking a holy symbol, and so I did. The presence vanished immediately.

I'm not sure precisely what I encountered or what it means. Was it a demon pretending to be Loki, or Loki pretending to be a demon?

[(Anonymous)]

Do you know what kinds of effects wearing synthetic fabrics have on the subtle bodies? They feel weird and dead, and this seems like it can't be healthy...

[ecosophia]

The notion that everyone gets the same sort of afterlife experience is far from universal in world religions. As I see it, there are two factors involved. The first is that the mind normally assembles its view of the world according to culturally generated patterns, and this carries over into the afterlife. The second is that the next world is just as complicated and diverse as this one, and different areas of the theosphere vary according to your religious involvements and the spiritual terrain of the land in which you live.

Re: A Strange Encounter

[ecosophia]

It's very hard to say, but it was certainly not a positive being. Next time it happens, draw the hammer symbol right away!

[ecosophia]

You'd have to talk to a good clairvoyant to get a sense of exactly what they do, but I know the feeling. I wear natural fibers pretty much all the time, for exactly that reason.

Tired and Sad

[(Anonymous)]

Eleven weeks ago I lost a tooth I had been hoping to save. It was my third such experience in the past few years and I was bitterly disappointed. In fact, due to circumstances involving an incompetent public dental system and many weeks of ultimately pointless buildup, I was devastated.

But I did expect to recover after a while: a week or two, a few weeks at most. But that has not happened. Instead I have experienced more or less they may.

Last night online I heard a reading from a speech by Rudolf Steiner in which he mentions that a severed body part remains connected with the corresponding portion of the etheric body. And then I remembered prior discussions here and elsewhere concerning phantom limbs and their connection with the etheric body. And so I wonder: might the loss of a tooth, or indeed of several, coupled with conditions of great psychological stress, have depleted me etherically in some way? If so, what if anything can I do about it?

I have basic skills in HOGD rituals, adapted to Hellenic deities: the LBRP, circulatingq the light, invocation of the Sun, and my Hellenic answer to the Rose Cross. I believe they are sound adaptations.
I also have some acquaintance with the Tarot, of which I asked a few questions in my haphazard twenty-questions way:

Q: Am I thinking along the right lines in this matter?

A: VIII of Pentacles

Q: is there anything I can do about it?

A: V The Hierophant

Q: Is anything being done against me through my lost tooth, perhaps even magically?

A: Queen of Wands

Q: What is the best possible outcome?

A: XXI The World


My recollection of how I formulated the last question is imperfect and may be off a bit.

Should you happen to have any constructive comments or suggestions, I’d be very glad.

[cutekitten]

I’m betting we’ll all find out the East Indians are right, but we’ll all be required to take diversity training for all the various other ideas of the afterlife, even so.

[(Anonymous)]

Regarding your Hall of the Homeless Gods translation project -
Shirakawa-gō keeps coming up in my normally random screensaver, so your Hall of the Homeless Gods translation project post feels like a synchronicity.
(Of course, I don’t know what to make of it – as usual.)
Anyway – I ended up with a big bucket of questions about such a shrine that all point back to how do gods, people, and places relate to each other.
So… what’s a shrine? What does it do? How do druids relate to them?
Rhydlyd… er… Puce Jocular Aardvark, rather.

Re: Tired and Sad

[ecosophia]

In your place I'd perform the equivalent of the Rose+Cross ritual daily, and offer incense and prayers to whichever healing deity you feel closest to; the Hierophant as answer to your second question suggests that. It doesn't look as though anyone's using the tooth to get at you, for what it's worth.

Golden dawn

[(Anonymous)]

A few newbie Golden Dawn related questions:

1. What is the better material for a robe from a practical point of view: cotton or silk?

2. I understand that GD banishing rituals can disenchant magically charged items. How can one prevent that from happening?

3. This is more esoteric, but what actually happens when I banish or invoke an element in the LRP? If I inovke Earth does that mean e.g. I'm improving my health, or am I asking to run into more situations related to health. Because it makes a difference.

[ecosophia]

A shrine is a place that enshrines some object that forms a link between the divine and the human world -- in Shinto this is called a goshintai; in Christianity, it's a relic, and it has other names in other traditions. Because it has such an object, the shrine makes access to divinity easier than it is elsewhere.

-- Crimson Squamous Pangolin

[ecosophia]

There's an old joke about a guy who dies and goes to heaven, where he's greeted by St. Peter. The saint shows him around the various realms of heaven -- here's the heaven the Catholics go to, the one the Jews go to, the one the Hindus go to, and so on -- but then he gestures for silence and he and the dead guy tiptoe past one of the doors. Once they're well past it, the guy says, "What was all that about?" St. Peter says, "That's the Baptist heaven. They think they're the only ones here."

Re: Golden dawn

[ecosophia]

1) Cotton. Silk blocks magical energies, and you want the energies to flow through you in your ritual work.

2) Wrap the objects in silk or linen to preserve the charge. You want to do that anyway with any consecrated item.

3) When you banish or invoke an element with the pentagram rituals you either disperse the elemental force or you draw more of it toward you. The effect on your health will depend on your current state of elemental balance -- if you're way over in an Airy direction, invoking Earth will pull you back toward balance and better health, while if you're inbalanced in an Earthy direction invoking more Earth will make it worse.

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Mr. Greer,

I was hoping you could answer the following questions.

1. In the Weird of Hali Tree of Life (https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/44066.htm) there are objects listed outside the spheres (The Ring of Eibon for example). What are these referring to? Are they paths?

2. I would like to start commemorating certain people in my life who have died by lighting a candle in their memory. I was wondering if it is best to do this on the day of their birth or the day of their death?
I also was thinking of writing their name on a small piece of paper and putting it in front of the candle then burning this before the candle dies. Would burning the paper invoke the wrong idea?

Thank you for providing this forum.

Re: Tired and Sad

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you! Will do.

My friendliest deity is Helios, both by horoscope and by personal predilection. I asked Apollon for help with this beforehand, and felt very let down by him. On the other hand, maybe something even worse might have happened as a result of the root canal I was hoping to receive. It’s not as though the gods are likely to feel obliged to explain themselves to us.

Bronze knives

[weilong]

I was looking for non-ferrous knives for harvesting herbs for natural magic, and found this (page is in Japanese, but nice pictures):
https://native-works.shop-pro.jp/?pid=147176743

This full-time mountain man/part-time metallurgist claims to have reproduced the kind of bronze that the Greeks used for weapons (apparently, the normal brown bronze doesn't hold an edge well). Kind of expensive, but I thought it was interesting. The other bronze knives that I have see seem to be more decorative than functional.

If I may ask, what do people use in the way of non-ferrous blades for harvesting magical herbs? There are ceramic kitchen knives these days, and I suppose I could file the edge of a copper sheet.

Occult Philosophy of Imagination, Ancestor Worship, Grab Bag Questions

[jprussell]

Good evening,

My first two questions are inspired by diving back into Cosmic Doctrine after a long hiatus paired with a newly awakened religious practice. The last few are hopefully less involved. As always, I'm happy to hear from the commentariat as well.

• From your previous writings and my tiny experience with occult philosophy, my impression is that "imagination" is the combination of two different capacities on the astral plane: perceiving things that are already there and manipulating/crafting things. My question is: is there a difference in how "real" things on the astral plane are? For example, I would imagine that a God's presence in the astral is entirely "really there", something that has been part of the shared imagination of many people for a long time (like, I don't know, Disney Princesses?) might be "somewhat real", and things that I just think up on a whim and never come back to might be totally ephemeral. Is this at all an accurate way of thinking of things?


• Potentially related to the above: how to reconcile changing historical patterns of belief and worship with the exterior/"objective" reality of the Gods? An example from the tradition I'm most familiar with: from linguistic and comparative mythological evidence, it seems pretty likely that the Indo-Europeans worshipped a "Sky Father" who was king, used lightning as his weapon, and had some kind of role in guaranteeing right action in a social context. Later Indo-European-derived cultures have Gods that clearly derive from this Sky Father, but are also clearly differentiated from each other (Zeus/Tyr/Indra/etc). Any thoughts on such change/splitting besides that I ought to meditate on it?


• How does ancestor worship square with reincarnation? In /The Cosmic Doctrine/, Fortune warns about messing with the recently deceased, unless it is to help them on their way: would honoring my mother count as the kind of interference that would keep her from going on to where she needs to go?


• You've said before that Golden Dawn systems and trance work don't play nice together: what makes that the case? Also, does this apply to all ceremonial magic systems, or just GD-derived ones specifically?


• I'm reading a book (Neolithic Shamanism by Raven Kaldera and Galina Krasskova) which talks about "centering" and "grounding" exercises. For centering, they recommend the Four Fold Breath, and for grounding, an exercise where you visualize a root growing from the energy center at your perineum down into the ground and into the core of the earth, drawing energy up and pushing it back down. 1) is the "centering" and "grounding" terminology generally useful, or idiosyncratic to this book, and 2) if it is generally useful, is the Middle Pillar exercise a "grounding" exercise?


• In /World Full of Gods/, you mentioned the kind of universalizing Mircea Eliade and others engaged in with some skepticism - would you mind sharing your full view on Eliade and how useful his writings are from the standpoint of a believing/practicing polytheist in a particular tradition?


• In some previous Magic Mondays, you've talked about breath exercises as "where the rubber meets the road" - are there other breath exercises compatible with the GD tradition besides the four-fold breath? If so, any advice on how to incorporate them with a daily practice of LBRP, MP, Meditation, Divination?


• Besides The Cosmic Doctrine and The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, do you have a "top ~5-10 works of occult philosophy"?


• Are there any other bloggers and/or living authors on things occult and occult-adjacent that you can recommend?

Many thanks,
Aquamarine Transcendent Goblin

[ecosophia]

1) No, they're additional attributes of the Spheres they are placed next to.

2) Their death day. That was their birth into the afterlife, and since they no longer have the body that was born on their former birthday, it doesn't have much connection to them any more. Yes, you can offer up a name paper that way.

Re: Bronze knives

[ecosophia]

I have a little bronze sickle, which has always been sharp enough for my needs.

Banishing

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG and fellow readers,
Three weeks ago, I asked how to stop being disturbed at night by annoying spirit visitors. You wrote, "Banishings." I always used to go outside in the garden to do my SOP but started doing the banishing in the bedroom and from the very first night, we both slept much better. The last 3 weeks have been uniformly peaceful.
Thanks very much,
Maxine

[(Anonymous)]

You might recall I asked you about developing a relationship with Beli, and that I had the very strange experience of having a string of attractive women invade my personal space. Not unpleasant, but odd. I can see why some Druids have developed sex clubs, but that’s really not for me, so I asked Beli how to properly use the energy that I’m picking up. This past week, a string of female co-workers that I rarely see stop me to talk shop. Also, I’ve turned into the person the warband of just-outa-high school boys ask when they actually need to know something. And I’m reading The Quest for Merlin, so the sound of one penny dropping accompanied my typing “warband.”
So… seems that Beli is helping me with my big stumbling block – people. I’m not sure what to make of all this, or if I should do anything besides keep burning incense and discussing matters with him as if he were sitting in the room with me…
Your advice on how to proceed is welcome.
Puce Jocular Aardvark

[(Anonymous)]

Hello JMG,

1. I've just started Self-Initiation into the Golden Dawn Tradition by Chic & Tabatha Cicero, and early on, they introduce the so-called Vibratory Formula. I'm wondering whether all Words of Power should be vibrated or intoned using the Vibratory Formula? For reference, the VF is described as follows:

“The student should first imagine a glowing white Light above the head, and then visualize this Light descending to the level of the heart. The letters of the name to be vibrated should be imagined in white within the heart center. Then the name is slowly pronounced so that the sound vibrates throughout the chest cavity and is felt throughout the entire body. The student should imagine that the sound reaches into every corner of the universe.

2. Is it possible to become a successful magician and/or mystic without paying attention to dreams, performing dreamwork, keeping a dream journal, etc.?

3. Related to the above: what is the role of dreamwork in the context of the Western Inner Tradition? Did the ancient Hermeticists, Gnostics, Neoplatonists or Qabalists place any importance on it?

[open_space]

Good evening JMG!

I've been thinking about how Levi says that at the heart of occultism there is Science. I can't but agree with him, for it seems to me that through occultism one seeks transcendence through knowledge just as a devout Christian seeks it through love. One thing I can't unpack however, since there are still many hooks of the omnipotence we are taught to believe as trained scientists (with a lower case s, of cóurse) and that is that there is something that gives the illusion of simplicity when explained. How can I avoid been arrogant with the matters of spirit and balance it with true knowledge instead of being proud about knowing?

Re: Occult Philosophy of Imagination, Ancestor Worship, Grab Bag Questions

[ecosophia]

1) Two factors influence how "real" an astral form is. The first is how much time and effort has gone into building it up; the second is whether or not something from beyond the astral plane uses it as a vehicle. The image of a god has the reality is does because it's the vessel for a real entity from the spiritual planes, and also -- if it's a traditional image -- because worshippers have built it up with their imagination and devotion over the years.

2) You ought to meditate on it. ;-)

3) In many cultures you pray to an individual ancestor only for a certain fixed period after death -- say, thirty years -- and after that it's just "the ancestors" collectively that get prayers. That makes sense, since back the day you could count on having plenty of time out of incarnation. These days, not so much!

4) When I say "Golden Dawn" I don't mean all magical systems. Nor do I mean all trance-based systems -- the specific prohibition is against letting yourself be hypnotized. That messes with the developmen of the magical will.

5) "centering and grounding" are standard Neopagan practices. No, the Middle Pillar isn't the same thing.

6) Not when you've already asked five other questions! That would keep me busy for half an hour.

7) Er, no. Meditation is where the rubber meets the road. The fourfold breath is useful as prep for meditation. Other breathing exercises? Not so much.

8) All of my books on the subject. ;-)

9) I don't follow any occult bloggers. I mostly read books by dead people, remember? Not many of them are blogging...