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Magic Monday

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. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) 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. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.

The image? That's the twenty-fourth card in The Sacred Geometry Oracle. Card 24, Progression of Roots, when upright tells you that the situation is unfolding into new territory and the old rules don't necessarily apply; when reversed, it amplifies this by warning you that you have no clue what's about to happen. The sun in the upper left corner of the image tells you that this card belongs to the final third of the oracle, which corresponds to Nwyfre, the principle of spirit and meaning. We've completed our passage through the first two of the basic root functions of sacred geometry -- √3, the principle of the vesica piscis and the equilateral triangle, and √2, the principle of the square and its diagonal -- and now we're working with the √5, the seed from which the Golden Section unfolds and resolves all back into unity.

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!***

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Hi JMG, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on the academic Nick Land, whose work has gained surprising traction in the past decade under the name "accelerationism"? The theory being that Capital is the creation of a demon entity that reorganizes human society at will, and that the acceleration of Capital will lead to a non-human future. Paradoxically Land embraces and celebrates this inevitability. It might be helpful to state that his work is a mix of Deleuze, Lovecraft Marx, Crowley, and presumably lots of stimulants.

It seems spiritually dangerous to recklessly communicate with random entities, if not completely evil to attempt to accelerate the end of humanity's annihilation (and perhaps concerning that it's birthed a whole adjacent 'movement' of cryptocurrency, political philosophy, and digital art).

Are these types of people simply the modern manifestation of the left hand path Faustian magician, albeit updated with modern garb of cybernetics and techno-capitalism?

I'm familiar with Land's ideas; last year, I think it was, the host of a podcast I was on mentioned Accelerationism and the CCRU, and I went looking for primary sources. Do you recall how often I've said that it's a really, really bad idea to mix ceremonial magic and drugs? This is why. Those of us who were around in the backwash of the Sixties used to meet people like Land tolerably often, folks who used lots of drugs and practiced various forms of pop occultism, and got caught up in some idiosyncratic ideology or other that resembles nothing so much as too much rat poison on the blotting paper. The technical term of the Mysteries used for such ideologies is "nucking futs." ;-)

Hello Mr. Greer,
My first question is about magic and the realms they work with and from. Would you say that by definition “High Magic” works with the Astral realm mainly, and influences that and the realms below it? Could Druid Magic function in that way?
And is the goal of High Magic the transformation of oneself, similar to the goal of Alchemy? Or is that the eventual goal of all magic in general?
Thanks,
E.S.

1) It depends very much on the system of high magic you have in mind. Golden Dawn magic, for example, is primarily astral, but the high magic of Franz Bardon is at least as much focused on the etheric plane as the astral. What makes something high magic isn't the plane it works on, but...

2)...the goal, which is indeed the transformation of oneself. The opposite of high magic isn't "low magic," by the way, any more than the opposite of fine arts is "coarse arts" -- it's fine arts and performing arts, and its high magic and practical magic.

I'd say social media qualifies as Coarse Arts. Damaged synapses aside you have to admit the influencers are quite inventive. Have a lovely week.

Adding this to my meditation on magic, myself, what to achieve/aim for. Thank you OP and JMG.

I've been reading your Encyclopedia of Natural Magic, and find that I get stuck on step 1, choosing the purpose for the working. The general protection amulet from the FAQ seems clearly useful regardless of my elemental balance. But one of the things I've found very helpful about the CGD work is that I don't have to already know what I'm lacking or in what direction I need to go to improve and balance myself. And natural magic seems not to have that feature. Do you have any suggestions for how to suss out a good purpose, or perhaps recommendations for other general purpose beneficial workings?

Something very simple like "giving a blessing to my friend" or "healing myself" is a purpose, and you can look up herbs and stones of healing or blessing and go from there, without getting into any more detail. Generally, though, natural magic is there for situations where you know what you need.

Hello JMG,

1. Is it common for magical practice (specifically, the GD system) to appear to cause severe anxiety and panic attacks?

2. If causation is not possible, could magical practice exacerbate a pre-existing anxiety issue?

3. In either case, should one continue with the practice? Is there any risk of a psychotic break or a chronic mental illness?

1) No.

2) Yes.

3) Yes, you should keep doing the practices, and I also suggest that you consider doing some daily journaling for a while. Write at the top of the page, "what scares me about Golden Dawn magic" and then let yourself write whatever comes into your mind, without editing or censoring anything. Do that daily for a couple of weeks and see if you can get to the personal issues that are helping to drive this.

1) You've emphasized the role of effort and will in magical training, but you've also said that forcing the imagination is a bad idea. I find that my imagination tries to thwart me when I push it in a certain way during ritual, and that sometimes simply naming the forces I want to imagine and letting the astral take shape works better, although there are usually some features of the astral forms and processes (invocation, banishing) I perceive as imperfect. How much imperfection should one tolerate?

2) I have an SOP/meditation/divination practice and invoke the planetary deity of the day and some others. I don't know where to go from here as I am not sure whether I find the comprehensive systems of ceremonial magic available to me appealing. Yet I've enjoyed seeing my life get really stirred up and then begin settling into a shape a lot more to my liking since starting practice last December. Need I worry about a plateau if I don't work my way through a system?

1) Make the effort but don't get hung up on it.

2) You'll experience many plateaus as you pursue the work; that's normal. Each one will feel hopelessly monotonous and pointless right before you break through to a new level.

Hi JMG,

1. In the past you mentioned a exercise that would move unwanted sexual energies to other parts of the body (or something along those lines). Would you happen to remember what this exercise was?

2. I recently read Plato's work Euthyphro. How would you define piety?

1) There are half a dozen of them. All of them work by visualizing the sexual energy moving up from the genital center to some other energy center in the body, where it does something else. Experiment and you can come up with one that works for you.

2) Look it up in a dictionary. Socrates' verbal boobytraps always annoyed me.

Thank you!

You've said that the higher and lower self become the same person through sustained spiritual practice, or just facing the challenges of embodiment, over many lifetimes. I take it that it's once you reach this point you don't have to be stuck in a body anymore. Yet my intuition is that perfect alignment of the selves is impossible from my observations of longtime spiritual practitioners, where I can see their higher self and lower self still both expressed. For instance, someone who is great at sensing the spiritual realm and clearly has an understanding of it beyond mine, but has an excessive need for closure when it comes to difficult events in their personal life and the world around them. It's unfathomable to me that the two selves could ever become perfectly one, in anyone. Might they just become one enough, and then the soul moves to the next stage?

Longtime spiritual practitioners aren't the people I'd look at with this in mind; if you're still practicing, that shows that you still have work to do. Have you ever met one of those people who are just perfectly themselves, who don't make a public point of whatever spiritual practice they do and don't teach except maybe now and again by example? Those are the ones I'd suggest as examples.

Good evening JMG,

Thank you for allowing us to ask questions.

If someone in your family is being "stalked" by an entity, how would you protect your family from being potential "victims"? Is there a ritual that you can do to protect the family unit without involving adult children but still including them? I am currently work in the Celtic Golden Dawn system.

Once you get to the Druid Grade work, you can make and consecrate protective amulets that will chase off hostile entities. Until you get to the Druid Grade work, you might consider looking up some natural magic to help.

Any advice for doing political magic?

Both local and if I wanted to help friends in other nations.

My advice is to concentrate on blessing and strengthening the things you want to encourage, instead of trying to tear down what you don't like. Dion Fortune's The Magical Battle of Britain is your textbook here. Also, if your understanding of the political scene here and abroad is based on the corporate mass media, you're better off not doing political magic at all, because you're being lied to. Not just a little bit, either...

Seeing the post on planes makes me think, where does one place electromagnetism? Or gravity? Or radiation? Or light for that matter? These don’t seem to be purely physical, but certainly do affect the physical plane. But I have a hard time putting them in the etheric plane too. Where’s the dividing line between these two planes?

That's why I differentiate between the material and etheric planes. If you do that, the seven sub-planes of the material plane work out as follows:

7th (lowest): solid matter
6th: liquid matter
5th: gaseous matter
4th: electromagnetism
3rd: gravity
2nd: weak nuclear force
1st (highest): strong nuclear force

In every set of sub-planes, the lower three have the nature of substance, the middle one has the nature of energy, and the upper three have the nature of space. It all works rather nicely. Then in the etheric plane the lower three sub-planes are the chemical ethers, the middle one is the life ether, and the three higher are the light ethers.

Thanks, J.M.G.
You are one of my “go to” authors for many things; another favorite of mine is the Hindu thinker, David Frawley.
He says (and I am not sure I would agree) that the astral body is “electrical” in nature, and the soul is “magnetic” in its nature.
Does this somehow sound feasible to you?
Thanks,
E.S.

That's a fine old bit of terminology from 19th century occultism! I've never been sure how literally to take the labels, but it would be worth experimentation.

I just had the strangest Tarot reading just now. On a whim I decided to do a divination on the U.S's proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

I phrased it like this when I typed it out on Wordpad.

****

Q: Situation of U.S. war support to Ukraine for the rest of 2022 (up to Dec. 31, 2022)?

With a 3 spread layout.

1. Where U.S. is now
2. Where U.S. is to go
3. The means

I shuffled a LOT. Then cut the deck then turned one of the 3 cuts upside down while re-stacking.

Card No. 1 - The World R

Card No. 2 - The Emperor

Card No. 3 - Death

This is odd. It is very rare for any of my divinations to give more than 2 Major Arcana in a spread. Most of the time I don't even get one major arcana. It's rare that I get two. This however is a first for me - three major arcana cards in a row. I think I remember reading somewhere (maybe it was at Biddy Tarot's website) that a divination with a preponderance of major arcana is indicating significant change, much more so than with court cards or pips.

JMG...how would you read this spread (or anyone else who wants to take a crack at it)? Given how I worded the question I'm unsure if this is a favorable, unfavorable or neutral spread for the U.S. in its proxy war with Russia? Of course I asked about "war support" - not the outcome of the war itself. But I do wonder about that third card, Death. Which is why I'm turning this over to JMG and the MM Commentariat.

If I were to Rorschach "in-an-eye-blink test" this spread I would see it as U.S.'s leadership role in the world will "die" after Dec. 31, 2022 and it will be a direct result of what actions the U.S. GovCorp takes vis-a-vis this proxy war it's having with Russia in support of Ukraine.

Edited 2022-05-31 02:47 (UTC)

That's fascinating. Since Death is the means, it's by passing through Death that the US will eventually become the Emperor, the Aries-force of springtime energy for the future. You're right that the US must clearly let go of its role in the world to do this.

Did anyone ever manage to turn lead to gold? If so, is rhe result on display anywhere?

—Princess Cutekitten

There were several examples of transmutation in the 16th and 17th centuries that were attested by witnesses, but no, the gold isn't on display anywhere. It was generally converted into cold hard cash.

Salutations, JMG!

First something that struck me while walking through a leafy section of our local college; your theory about Neptune being assigned to Kether seems strengthened by the structure of astrology in general. Namely, the 12th house is normally assigned to Pisces on its cusp, and thus is ruled by Neptune. What is more Kether than the 12th house of mystery and the Unseen Realms! Not to mention, the 12th house is the final one before the Ascendant restarts the Zodiac, and that finality is similar to Kether's in the Cabala. If you already wrote this in the book, apologies, because then I missed it.

First question, have you considered what Neptune should be properly called, if the Greek mythological framework is upheld? I thought your suggestion of Prometheus for Uranus in a podcast appearance (and maybe in the Twliight of pluto, though I don't remember) was entirely appropriate. Have you had any idea about what Neptune should be called since then? I think a goddess of the sea would be extremely appropriate, but I can't think of any with the grandeur necessary for such a mystic and exalted influence. Unfortunately, all the Olympian goddesses are also very distinct from it.

Second, I was reading Sex and Civilization by Amaury de Riencourt. One of his hypotheses was that civilizations destroy themselves or stagnate by over-suppressing one of masculine and feminine energies, far, far more often the feminine. Therefore, feminism-esque movements for women to be equal in the public square (which apparently happened in Greece, Rome, and the Abbasid Caliphate) are both a cause and a symptom of decline, as it is basically a tacit acknowledgement that yang/masculinity is so overvalued that women seek to take on its roles rather than demanding respect for yin based ones. As a Uranian-dominant and a modern, this struck me as both a little terrifying, and quite apt given the evidence of women's unhappiness in modern society. Something I also thought about was the increase in social complexity ala Tainter; societies add complexity in response to crisis, creating economic but more importantly SOCIAL complexity, which women thrive at navigating. However, once women begin to have a definite advantage in this way, it may also be a marker that society has reached or will soon reach the point of diminishing returns for adding new systems or elaborating on previous ones. Social complexity is also a killer of traditional mores, which would explain both why women take on a more traditionally masculine way of being, and why they seem to excel at it once they do, much to the chagrin of men.

Okay, this is long, but the point is, I realized that more of the planets were masculine than feminine after the discovery of the five new ones in the age of civilization's beginning, whereas before that, it was just Sun and Moon, one masculine one feminine. The Sun, Mercury-sort of, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are Masculine, while the Moon, Venus, and Neptune are feminine. Could this be the reason why civilizations tend to become over-masculine as they evolve? (note, these questions in this paragraph are all rhetorical) Could this imbalance of astrological influences multiply over time, causing the Saturnine, Jovial, Solar, and Martial influences to express themselves with further and further strength as civilizations create grand superstructures? Could the very creation and dramatic collapse of those superstructures, the flaming out of civilizational supernovas, be a reflection of a cosmic imbalance that prioritizes the influence of the masculine in a vaccuum, but inevitably leads to overreach because of its dominating presence? Is a sort of grand, long-lasting version of "combustion", the state of the sun burning away another planet's influence, the necessary cosmic balance of energies to produce civilization? I wonder if this some sort of terrible lesson for us to learn as a species, that imbalance does not pay in the long term, or if is a temporary period of flux where the masculine exhausts itself, and the feminine is released as a rejuvenating force and that dominates another long era of human existence. Perhaps the winding-down period of the human species will either have as its beginning the discovery of two new feminine planets, or one or two masculine planets will be destroyed by a terrible cosmic disaster that also wrecks the earth's ability to support civilization in an even more permanent way than climate change.

Okay, this is too long, haha. Feel free to ignore it, your time is valuable after all. That said, if you do end up reading it, do you have any thoughts about the purpose or effects of this grand cosmic imbalance that coincidentally seemed to present itself right when civilization came about? Do you think this will ever change, or is humanity stuck with a rather lopsided series of energies to work with for the rest of our existence?

-Derpherder

1) I had that well in mind, though I didn't put it in the book. My nominee for a proper name for Neptune is Rhea the Titaness, whose title is "Mother of the Gods" and whose name may mean something like "She who Flows."

2 etc.) That's a fascinating speculation. My guess is that as our species matures, some of the planets will be assigned different genders. I could see the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Prometheus/Uranus as the male planets, the Moon, Venus, Demeter/Saturn and Rhea/Neptune as the female planets, and Mercury as the ambivalent and ambisexual mediator among them: that would be a stable arrangement, energetically speaking.

She who flows! Magnificent! I love it. Also, the reassignment is apt, I didnt think of that but should have!

-Derpherder

Here's a new creepy development: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/03/business/lab-grown-human-milk-biomilq-health-climate-hnk-spc-intl/index.html

What kind of effects do you think lab grown milk would have on infants?

I suspect it would have roughly the same effect as any other kind of infant formula, but I'd be very slow to recommend it to anybody...

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Magic Monday

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Influences: Inner and Outer

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Choosing natural magic purpose

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Effort and Perfectionism

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Forgive me if I asked this before: Political Magic

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Planes

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Tarot Reading on U.S. War against Russia in Ukaine

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Various

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