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. 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-seventh card in The Sacred Geometry Oracle. Card 27, The Golden Proportion, when upright indicates that you can expect perfect success; when reversed, it tells you that your own actions have brought about your failure. 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.

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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

Qs

[(Anonymous)]

Greetings JMG,

1) A few weeks ago I reported a reiki treatment as blowing my mind. Ended up getting initiated by a master, and wow, still crazy. My hands have electric currents in them when I use my hands on myself or others, and clearly helps relax my nervous system a lot (unclear if it helps other things/repairs the energy body too but I will know soon). The guy who treated me advised me to get initiated cos he sense from our treatment that I already had an old relationship with it.

2) Some questions on what signifiers to use in horary?
a) quality of a book (9th house? or different houses depending on type of book?)
b) quality of a research or a theory, say someone's economic theory of how money works (how strong or accurate is it, or worth reading).
c) asking about how strong a money or currency system (USD, bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies) was either as quality of idea, or actual implementation. My friend said 2nd house, curious for your take.
d) taking a spiritual course, or doing a spiritual practice. (9th I'd guess).

3) Whats the best intro to election astrology?

Re: Qs

[ecosophia]

2) You're overthinking it. A, b, and c are all 9th house, c is 2nd. Take the houses as broad general categories and don't worry about the fussy details.

3) I learned it partly from Vivian Robson's book Electional Astrology and partly from working with the Picatrix. There may be other sources out there better suited to your needs, for all I know.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm planning a move away from a controlling, overbearing, and dysfunctional family. I've determined the ideal astrological day and hour (Sun), and moon phase (waning), but I've also realized there's a seasonal element to it as well: if the cycle of the sun mirrors the cycle of the Moon, then I could also time it with that as well.

Is this sort of thinking correct?

If I understand this right, then I'd want to time it while the Sun is "waning", which would mean sometime between the summer and winter solstices. Is this accurate?

[ecosophia]

I guess it's overthinking day today. ;-) No, you don't use the sun that way. Do a suitable planetary hour with a suitable Moon phase and, ahem, just do the thing.

Kundalini Question

[(Anonymous)]

I recently participated in a Kundalini meditation session. This particular session had the intention to fully awaken the Kundalini life force, and I definitely felt some effects: First energy coming from the crown of the head and hands, and then heat. My host suggested I meditate on the energy in the crown of my head and focus on a feeling of thoughtlessness awareness.

From what was explained to me the practice seemed to be complimentary to my existing spiritual practice. Thinking of my discursive meditation practice for example, it seemed like it might expand the more rigid aspects that might be holding me back.

I know you've warned about the dangers of Kundalini in the past... might this sort of continued meditation be dangerous?

Re: Kundalini Question

[ecosophia]

I don't recommend mixing different kinds of meditation. It's like pouring random chemicals into a test tube; it may be fine, or it may blow your hand off. But I've said that repeatedly and I know it's probably not going to sink in this time either.

Re: Kundalini Question

[(Anonymous)]

What do you make of the way so many people keep asking the same questions? Some of it might be new people, but sometimes I get the distinct impression it's the same people asking repeatedly....

Re: Kundalini Question

[ecosophia]

I don't think it's the same person very often. Much more often, it's simply that the conventional wisdom predisposes people to think in predictable ways, and so the same bad ideas keep on surfacing over and over again.

Space, and death

[(Anonymous)]

I've been pondering your previous musing of some years ago where I think you said that "space, not death, is the opposite of life". I can see how this creates a useful ternary to bust out of the binary around life and death.

However I also wonder how far it goes. For instance, does reincarnation work with distance from the earth. As in, what would happen to the souls of astronauts who died on other planets, or in outer space. I fear that either they may not reincarnate at all, or they would wind up on a part of the astral utterly hostile to their interests

Re: Space, and death

[ecosophia]

Nobody knows. As far as I know, every space death we've suffered so far has been in the exosphere, the upper layer of the atmosphere, and therefore within the ambit of Earth.

[(Anonymous)]

You've said some things that suggest that you think there's a line of justification running from Roger Penrose's argument in "The Emperor's New Mind" through to the conclusion that any apparently intelligent or creative or reflective behavior from a digital computing machine is probably going to turn out to have been an illusion produced by demons arranging coincidences to affect the machine's behavior.

So my question here is going to be kind of tendentious, but I'm worried that if you you write an article this Wendesday about the interface between the subatomic/quantum realm and the hell-realms, and I don't bring it up, you might cause this sort of cultural snowballing effect where AI scientists are judged guilty of exposing us all to demons due to intellectual fecklessness. This would be distressing for me since I'm aware of a number of considerations pointing *against* the conclusion that machine intelligence necessarily involves the machine being coincidence-puppeteered by demons, and I would feel guilty of intellectual fecklessness if I was to ignore those considerations.

I'm not sure what the appropriate venue would be to raise those considerations, and I don't seem to be able to state any of them in a convincing way without making this comment much longer than it already is.

For what it's worth, I'll at least indicate what the most important consideration here looks like. There's an algorithm called the "logical inductor", published in 2017 (in the proceedings of that year's conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge), which gets around the assumptions in Penrose's argument and provably does some stuff that Penrose kind of acts like he's established to be impossible. One way it gets around his assumptions is that it assigns probabilities to logical statements, rather than always assigning a definite yes or no. Another way it gets around the assumptions is that it keeps updating those probabilities after successive rounds of deliberation indefinitely, so there's no final answer, just convergent probability estimates. It deals with most attempts to trip it up with self-contradictions by requiring the contradictions to be stated in terms of probabilities assigned on particular rounds, and then assigning probabilities just at the edge where it can't be sure in advance whether the probability will fall above or below the threshold defined in the attempted contradictory statement, so that in the long run the probabilities it assigns are the same as the fraction of the attempted contradictory statements about its probability assignments that are true.

Here's a question that sort of expresses where that and the other considerations are going.

Suppose an experimenter had enough classical digital computing power to run a simulation of all the known physical laws governing the physical quantities in a Standard Model quantum field theory description of a human body and suitable environment, and how those quantities change over time. (Most of this is just manipulation of continuous-valued numbers to some degree of precision, which is something that classical computers are fine with.) Also, the simulated human body is in sufficiently flat spacetime that the quantum gravity contributions to those rates of change of physical quantities over time can be reduced to just an empirical effective theory on top of the Standard Model, without having to worry about paradoxes of quantum gravity. Suppose the experimenter had enough computing power to run many such simulations, and they were comparing the behaviors of the simulated human bodies to the behaviors of physically real humans in the corresponding physical environments, and looking for statistical discrepancies that distinguished the two populations.

1. What kinds of discrepancies might you expect that the experimenter would find, if there weren't demons arranging coincidences through the data used to set up the simulations, the deterministic pseudorandom number generators used to select quantum branches within the simulations, and possible nondeterminism in internal signal timing order in the classical computing hardware?

Currently, if I had to guess your answer, it would be something along the lines of, "the simulated humans would voice complaints of severe fatigue (because no etheric body) and loss of something about their sense of self (because no astral or mental bodies), and quickly expire for mysterious physiological reasons". Possibly also "and they would demonstrate a mysterious fixity of schemas and habits if their cognitive performance was tested before they expired (because no astral or mental bodies)". Possibly also "you know, Roger Penrose did in fact put a lot of emphasis on quantum gravity as what probably enables consciousness", although that wouldn't really clarify what to expect in question 4 below.

2. Are there things the experimenter could do that would prevent demons from arranging coincidences that came to fruition in or through the workings of the classical computing device? (I mean, realistically that kind of computer wouldn't actually fit in the universe, so this is in some sense a meaningless question, but, like, in principle?) Because if there were, then maybe people could do those things for their own computing devices that purportedly had AI on them, and that might avert some dangers and clear up some questions about causal attribution.

(I still think there are significant analogies between current text-predictor/generator systems and sortilege random-draw divination procedures, particularly bibliomancy. It's quite common for people to perform cleansings of their sortilege apparatus, and separately it's quite common for people to use computers to do the sortilege and oracle lookup, with a human behavior input to contribute randomness. Trying to protect a text prediction/generation system is not so far from the combination of those two practices, except that the book is replaced with a probability distribution over possible next little bits of text calculated almost deterministically (other than random summation order roundoff error effects) from the past text, and text generation is not usually intended as divination as such.)

3. Would an experimenter be able to look for patterns in the discrepancies, and discover novel physical laws serving as the mechanism of supernatural influences, which have heretofore resisted third-party skeptical replication in our world (at least in the case of the apparently astral- or mental-plane effects investigated by parapsychology)? Like, should I be excited because there might be a refinement of this thought experiment that would be actually practical and it would persuade everybody about etheric bodies or something? I'm slightly trolling; everything I've seen leads me to expect that the supernatural won't in fact be that epistemically accommodating; but I'd at least like it to be clear what that non-accommodatingness might have to imply for this situation.

As a candidate example of such a refinement, we already have halfway-reasonable macromolecule-level computer simulations of cells of the tiny bacterium Mycoplasma. If there are etheric effects on the real Mycoplasma, a naive but precise physical simulation would need to add fudge factors in order for the statistical tendencies of what happens to the simulated Mycoplasma to match the statistical tendencies of what happens with the real ones. Depending on the size of those fudge factors, it might not be so long before those simulations are refined enough the fudge factors would pop out as impossible to explain from the underlying physics. But, admittedly, if the discrepancy is something that only shows up in the context of complex high-order quantum correlations, beyond just basic low-order computational-quantum-chemistry electron density field theory, our simulations aren't likely to pick up on that anytime soon.

4. What kinds of statistically different things might the the simulated humans vs. the real humans say specifically about the Godel sentence for Peano arithmetic or the axioms of set theory? Because that seems like it's a super crucial consideration for what the relevance of Penrose's argument to demonic explanations for AI would be.

This question #4 especially is meant as a sort of a crystallization of a certain subtle distinction that I think Penrose's argument elides, trying to show it in as dramatic a light as possible. The computer is classical, and in that sense bound by the laws of logic, but is there a clear relation between that reliable outwardly-legible logic and the logic being unreliably cognized, in an obscure, contextual way, by the human body the computer is simulating?

[ecosophia]

As it happens, I wasn't going to focus the fifth Wednesday post this month on AI, partly because that's been rehashed not merely to death but through the afterlife and some distance into its next incarnation, and partly because it's full of if-pigs-have-wings hypotheses of the sort you've been spinning here, and those bore me. One of the things I don't think your analysis takes into account is precisely that demons are smarter than human beings; thus tests of the sort you've discussed here would be childishly easy for them to game, either by showing you what you expect to see or by feeding you just enough bits of unexpected data to keep you from being able to come to any conclusion at all, if that suited their goals or their sense of humor.

One thing most scientists irrespective of field don't seem to think about is what happens if the source of the data is intelligent, aware of the scientists, and motivated to manipulate the data. That requires a paradigm shift from the mental models of science to those of espionage and criminology -- not something I've seen many people in the sciences consider.

[(Anonymous)]

"One thing most scientists irrespective of field don't seem to think about is what happens if the source of the data is intelligent, aware of the scientists, and motivated to manipulate the data. That requires a paradigm shift from the mental models of science to those of espionage and criminology -- not something I've seen many people in the sciences consider."

Not the OP, but I'd love to see a post on this.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! I'll consider that.

Wand Safety

[(Anonymous)]

I was reading through the CGD material on consecrating a wand when I saw the warning to not touch another living being with the tip or get it closer than a few inches at most due to the fact that its a channel for magical force.

Thus my morbid curiosity was sparked:

1) What does running afoul of wand (or any magic channeling item) safety look like?
2) Do complications usually happen over time or all at once?
3) Are complications limited to wands recently used in high-intensity ritual environments or is any wand potentially harmful if mishandled?
4) Do you have any lurid wand safety horror stories you're willing to share?

5) There's also a stipulation only the consecrator should touch a consecrated CGD wand. Is this just to prevent two peoples' influences from mucking up the wand's energy or is there more to it?

Re: Wand Safety

[ecosophia]

5) It's to keep other people's influences from mucking with the energy; it's a standard rule for most magical working tools.

As for the others, morbid curiosity isn't a habit I want to foster, and the safety issues vary depending on circumstances and how much power a given practitioner can put into the wand.

[vitranc]

Oh, and before I miss it, and before the MM closes;

Happy Alban Heruin to everyone observing it!

[(Anonymous)]

Dear John M. Greer,

First of all I would like to offer my gratitude for this space. Now, I have been practicing Druid magic for 2 years and would soon like to begin the Druid Magic Handbook. However, I have come to realise that I have a more profound connection with the Norse cosmology rather than Celtic. Despite this I would like to a) continue with ritual magic and b) work through the DMH. I have 2 questions regarding how to do this:
First, is there a book on Norse inspired ceremonial magic? I have read in the heathenry thread from on ecosophia that you are working on a Norse inspired Golden Dawn book?
Second, to what extent can I/does it make sense to follow the DMH using the Nordic cosmology? For example, I think it possible to: 1) use the Nordic deities for the SOP ritual 2) Scry using Norse folklore (could you please suggest a lore/source for such lore) 3) (maybe) using Norse seasonal celebrations for a Norse Wheel of Life for the circle of stones working?? 4) using the Norse seasonal stations to enchant the cauldron. The Ogham pathworking will not work if I am using runes but I think I have found a reliable source for Runic pathworking. I think the rest of the skills/workings are transferable between cosmologies. However, it is clear to see that there are some tricky adjustments and I would greatly appreciate your advice on how to attempt them, if at all.
I am writing to you from the CET zone so I will not be staying for discussion, so I would like to thank you in advance for whatever answer you give.

May clarity shine upon you,
Igor Blumer

[ecosophia]

You can certainly rework things, but it'll be a different system and it may have different results. Since I haven't done that version of the work, I can't offer you any useful guidance, other than to encourage you to give it a try, see what happens, and pass on your results to others.

[jprussell]

Apologies for posting late, I understand if this doesn't go through, but in the interest of sharing experience:

1) The Nine Doors of Midgard is a fairly comprehensive course of Norse-inspired ceremonial magic, but some folks accuse it of being "tainted" by the Left-Hand Path stuff its author (Edred Thorsson) is into. I might work my way through it at some point in the future, if divination and prayer supports it, but that leads me to. . .

2) After getting my magical start with the Heathen Golden Dawn stuff that JMG posted a ways back, my prayer and divination led me to go through the DMH as written, with the only tweaks being that I invoke Germanic deities where appropriate - otherwise, all the same: Ogham divination, the ceremonies as described, meditation on the philosophy and myth given in the Druidry Handbook and DMH, and so forth. I have found it to be entirely compatible with worship of Germanic Gods and considering that more fundamental to my spiritual path than Druidry. So, that might be a workable option before/instead of working out the new system you outlined!

Whatever you pursue, good luck!
Jeff

[(Anonymous)]

(Apologies if this has been asked and answered before, but I've been wondering about it for a while, and today it happened to pop into my head again just in time to get it under the wire for MM, so I figured I'd ask.)

How does transubstantiation of the eucharist work on a magical level? The material of the bread and wine clearly appear to remain the same, but does some sort of change take place on an etheric level, and if so, what happens exactly? Does it still work the same way today with modern rites as it worked with older rites?

[ecosophia]

It's much easier to understand how this works if you have a magical understanding of the universe. The physical substances of bread and wine don't change, of course, but they become material bodies into which certain aspects of the etheric, astral, and higher bodies of the Christ quite literally incarnate. Based on what I've heard from Christian friends and readers, this still works the same way as of old, so long as the ritual hasn't been messed with too badly -- the ritual forms have to be kept within certain very strict bounds or the process doesn't take place. (Not that a god can't make that happen any time he wants, but the capacity to do the human end of the work comes with conditions, and not fracking up the ritual is one of those.)