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

[ecosophia]

Thanks for spotting the Spengler quote. I'd forgotten that, but it's utterly in character, and shares both his strengths and his weaknesses: that is to say, he's right to recognize the identity between late classical occultism and late modern occultism, and wrong to dismiss both movements as cavalierly as he does. As for your question, the astral body persists for quite some time after death. The first death, the death of the material body, starts the process of leaving incarnation; the second death, the shedding of the etheric body, usually happens a few days after that. That's when the real work of the afterlife begins, because the soul is then embodied in its astral body and mental sheath, and has to process all its experiences during life -- and this takes place on the astral plane, through the astral body. In the course of that processing, the astral body dissolves, its forces returning to their sources in the different sub-planes of the astral, but all its experiences are passed on to the soul and become part of the enduring knowledge of the individuality, the part of you that survives from life to life. Once that's finished, the dead person spends a more or less brief time in contact with the mental plane, and then descends into incarnation again, picking up new astral, etheric, and material bodies in the process.

[jprussell]

Thanks very much! Your comment on Spengler and your answer to my question both make good sense.

So, while the soul is processing its last life's experiences astrally, the astral body remains as the "ghost" that is called forth by necromancy/spiritualism?

And just to be absolutely clear, this means that once the Individuality has processed the previous life, it has a Mental sheath and no other body until it descends into incarnation again?

[ecosophia]

1) Yes.

2) Yes. The mental sheath is the seed, so to speak, of the first of our permanent bodies -- when we've finished our evolutionary journey, we human souls will have three permanent bodies, mental, spiritual, and causal, surrounding the Divine Spark that is the essence of ourselves.

[open_space]

How would Levi's anecdote of the evocation of Apollonius of Tyana work? I reckon Apollonius would've been busy unto other things by the time having already shed the astral body.

[ecosophia]

Lévi explains in that chapter that you can also access reflections in the astral light, which are distinct from astral corpses. For anyone long dead, a reflection is normally what you get.

[open_space]

Oh nice, I haven't gotten to that chapter yet just had heard of the anecdote. Thank you.

Another Doctrine Chap 13 Question

[(Anonymous)]

If I read Levi correctly and followed this thread correctly, once dead, the soul is gone and we can only:
- access reflections in the astral light
- interact with an astral corpse (until it dissolves)
- interact with "larvae" or other entities that, at best, are very corrosive to us on the material plane.

In her "Through the Gates of Death", Dion Fortune states (Chapter 11) "When we call back the spirits of the departed to tell us of their experiences in the Heaven world.."

This heaven period has to happen after the first stop in the purgatory dream state and my understanding is that the soul would have to leave the astral corpse first before entering purgatory then the heaven state.

Is this a difference between Fortune's and Levi's understanding of the afterlife?

Re: Another Doctrine Chap 13 Question

[ecosophia]

Yes. Fortune was strongly influenced by Spiritualism, which Lévi abhorred.