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

[(Anonymous)]

a) I've had a somewhat odd observation that I've been mulling over lately: the dream of Re-enchanting the World followed a pattern I've come to recognize, since it pops up all over the place in the history of the 20th Century: it came on with a loud bang in the late 1950s and early 1960s with an enormous amount of hype; seemed like the wave of the future for a while; and then slowly trickled away, before completely imploding over the past decade and a half or so. In other words, it patterns as a Plutonian Phenomena. This got me thinking about it, because it seems like it shouldn't be: in fact, it's opposed to the Plutonian, but as I thought about it, a lot of things opposed to the Plutonian seem to pattern as Plutonian.

Television criticism thrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which fizzled out by the end of the 1980s; the counterculture of the 1960s; the Appropriate Tech Movement of the 1970s; the Transition Towns movement of the 2000s; New Urbanism in the 1990s. This seems to me to be a striking feature of the Plutonian: during his reign as a planet, he appears to have ruled over the attempts to resist his influence. This irony, however, unfolds logically from the nature of the planet: Pluto is the planet of rejecting the cosmic order, and during his reign as a planet, he was part of that order: so naturally, he ruled over attempts to resist the rejection of the cosmic order!

This also explains the somewhat odd way that so many people who, during the Plutonian Era, seemed to be resisting the Plutonian are now clinging to it so desperately, while many who seemed more Plutonian have let go, since they were actually less Plutonian.

Does this line of reasoning make sense to you? It has all kinds of weird implications I'm only beginning to tease apart, but if it holds then it is a very substantial realization and makes a lot of sense of loads of other things (ex: why so many occultists in the Plutonian Era veered into Plutonian things).

b) I've also been wondering about the moral collapse and the descent into demonolatry over the past fifteen years or so, and realized it ties in neatly with Pluto fading out: it's common when dealing with Pluto for people to pretend to believe in something, by expressing it in the most extreme form. As Pluto fades out, people are clinging to it, and trying to pretend they still believe there is no cosmic order. I can't think of any better way than by rejecting all morality, and summoning demons. It may not make the universe into ugly chaos, but it does a wonder in making their own lives into it....

[(Anonymous)]

Happy Alban Heruin!
A bit of Green Wizardry with apologies for the intrusion into the usual discussion of magic… hey… didn’t think through, did I? Anyway – In response to your question to me in your post, “The Twilight of Empire”, on 15 June: Yes, I’m already working my way through the recommended material. The Food Conspiracy Cookbook is available for free at archive dot org. That the first line of the dedication is my given name in all caps with an exclamation point is, I suspect, a sign that you’ve got me pointed in the right direction. Many thanks! As far as checking in with functioning co-ops…the Midwest has a few large ones, but neighbors divvying up staples and produce might be a lost art. For now…
Rhydlyd

[ecosophia]

1) That makes enormous sense. Pluto is all about rebellion and schism, and so it would follow that attempts to rebel against Plutonian influence would be, in effect, controlled opposition: "what you hate, you imitate" taken to a new level. The trajectory of beginning with a bang and ending with a whimper is typically Plutonian; so is the tendency to fixate on utopian fantasies rather than simply choosing something to do, and doing it. It'll be interesting to see, as the Plutonian influence fades out, if that habit fades with it.

2) Yes, quite possibly so.

[ecosophia]

Glad to hear it.

[jprussell]

Good evening,

To all who observe it, a happy Father's Day, and a happy and blessed early Summer Solstice to anyone who celebrates that! Otherwise, I hope your summer is off to a pleasant start, and thanks for sharing your knowledge here.

To share this week: I asked a while back if JMG had any knowledge of Oswald Spengler (of The Decline of the West fame) being an occultist, due to many references to occult and occult-adjacent sources. It would seem the answer is a pretty definitive "no", though. From page 392 of the 2021 Arktos edition of Volume II:

"The Isis-cult in Republican Rome was something very different both from the emperor-worship that succeeded it and from the deeply earnest Isis-religion of Egypt; it was a religious pastime of high society, which at times provoked public ridicule and at times led to public scandal and the closing of the cult-centres. The Chaldean astrology was in those days a fashion, very far removed from the genuine Classical belief in oracles and from the Magian faith in the might of the hour. It was "relaxation," a "let's pretend." And, over and above this, there were the numberless charlatans and fake prophets who toured the towns and south with their pretentious rites to persuade the half-educated into a renewed interest in religion. Correspondingly, we have in the European-American world of today the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American Christian Science, the untrue Buddhism of drawing-rooms, the religious arts-and-crafts business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for gropus and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment."

(Bolding mine)

As for a question, I was a bit late asking this on the last Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic post: 1) If I’m remembering correctly, you’ve characterized much (most?) of what occurs between incarnations as astral in nature, which implies some kind of (semi-?) persistent astral vehicle for the individuality. In Chapter 12 of the DaRoHM, though, it seems that some/all of our astral “body” is associated with the personality of a given incarnation and is left behind and no longer inhabited by the individuality/soul behind it.

So, I suppose my question is: what’s happening here, as far as we know? Does the astral “body” split into that which is left behind and that which stays with us? As we better reach the higher (mental, spiritual) planes, does less of our astral vehicle persist between incarnations?

Thanks very much for your time and care,
Jeff

Blessing Candles & The Lake

[cs2]

Happy Summer Solstice!

1. Does a tamer cream as opposed to stark white (switching to beeswax), or putting it in a lantern, lessen the efficacy of a blessing candle?

2. We have moved next to a large lake that is wild and powerful. I walk along the shore and she washes me clean etherically (at least that feels like what is happening). She also wipes away bad moods. Even when I'm back home, if I have angry thoughts (I didn't want to move here) the lake will pop into my mind, definitely from the outside. Someone (my HGA?) is telling me to walk at the lake and let it banish my anger. She is dangerous in a practical sense because she makes her own (severe) weather patterns and has a strong rip current, but on a magical level, is there anything dangerous to spending such close time with a lake like this? Thank you.

[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.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, thinking through both of these issues has made me feel very, very uncomfortable, because taken together, they suggest another possible explanation for what's happening with the vaccines. The first is that a very large number of people who should have known better have gone all in on the vaccines; while quite a few people who I wouldn't have expected to see through it have. What's striking though is that both the obviously highly Plutonian (ex: punk scene) and those who seemed to be fiercely resisting it (ex: the neopagan scene) have heavily gone into it; while the people who saw through it by and large seem to be weakly Plutonian.

This was also true of TDS, and further, whatever has happened since 2016 to drive the ongoing insanity seems to be heavily mediated by the Plutonian, and this suggests a very uncomfortable possibility to me: the elite classes have gone insane, in a peculiarly Plutonian fashion. It would fit, given the reality that during the Plutonian Era the competition for power went into overdrive, and became unusually ruthless and brutal, with the result that most people who hold power in current society are highly Plutonian, simply because no one else is willing to do what is needed to get it.

Pluto naturally rules the kind of thinking that goes along the lines of "If I can't have it, no one can!" and the willingness to wreck everything which is necessary for a functioning society since 2017 and especially since 2020 makes a lot of sense if the elite classes are no longer playing to win, nor even to keep power, but are now, perhaps subconsciously, determined to wreck as much of society as possible.

Pluto also appears to rule human experimentation, modern science, and modern medicine, so of course all three got caught up in this in the form of the vaccine crisis, but another key thing to note is that Pluto seems to rule Russian Roulette as well, based on the dramatic increase in popularity of the game when Pluto came into focus. The vaccine push can be thought of as playing a societal scale Russian Roulette; especially given that it looks like even the short term trials were fraudulent (another Plutonian thing!).

So, I think it's worth considering the possibility that the elite classes who run the American Empire have gone insane in a classic Plutonian fashion, and are now determined to use what remains of their power to destroy as much as possible on the way down.....

Re: Blessing Candles & The Lake

[ecosophia]

1) Not at all. I use beeswax candles by preference fo rthis.

2) Not as long as you're respectful. You seem to have established a good relationship with her, and as long as you respect that, that relationship should be a blessing for you. What you've described, btw, is the way the ancients felt about deities generally...

[ecosophia]

That's quite possible, but if that's the case, you can expect it to play out in typical Plutonian fashion -- that is, it has begun with grand proclamations and every appearance of sweeping all before it, but what will happen next is that it will falter, stumble, and end in a whimper of failure.

[(Anonymous)]

In which case, if the elites are insane, then the likelihood of a vaccine induced die off is a lot lower than it seems. So, oddly enough, we're better off if they've gone insane in this particular way...

[ecosophia]

We can certainly hope so.

[(Anonymous)]

1) This also adds another level to the sheer nastiness of the Plutonian Current, that even those who saw it for the brutal, ugly, horrific mess that it was ended up getting sucked into another manifestation of it...

Mundane Astrology

[k_a_nitz]

(1) I've subscribed to your subscribe star and as part of working through the lessons I've drawn up a work-in-progress 2022 Aries Ingress and Cancer Ingress for Wellington, New Zealand (both at my site if any NZ readers are interested). The Cancer Ingress was quite fascinating as 7 of the houses had planets in their rulership. Now, the Aries Ingress applied for the whole year, and the Cancer Ingress applied for the nine months, thus modifying the influence of the Aries Ingress. So for the next ingress, what guidance would you give for thinking about its influence relative to that of the Aries and Cancer ingresses? Should one be given more weight than the others?

(2) On the translation side, I am about a third of the way through Carl du Prel's edition of Immanuel Kant's Lectures on Psychology - du Prel's introduction makes a very strong case for Kant having arrived at some very esoteric views, and that Kant's interest in Swedenborg was driven by his desire for evidence to back up his own intuitions. If you or any readers are really keen on seeing an English translation of any other untranslated German works published before 1925 by authors who died before 1951 (i.e. out of copyright in most countries), then I can add them to my list for next year.

My hands

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,
I have been practicing magic including a daily SOP for 8 years now and have had really surprising benefits from it. At least, I was surprised.

This last year or so, I have noticed a sort of full feeling in the palms of my hands and a slight tingle. I was afraid it was a symptom of illness so I really got to grips with my blood sugar and am only eating one meal a day and that, very low in carbs. My hands feel the same even though I have experienced many other health benefits.

Is this tingling an effect of my magical practice?

Pink Pestilent Neanderthal

[(Anonymous)]

Not all Plutonian Phenomena ended in a whimper of failure in the short term: the Russian Revolution and Nazism both come to mind here: they both accomplished a great deal before slamming into disaster and imploding. So I'm not sure that we can be so confident that if the elite classes are determined to wreck as much of society as possible things won't get very, very ugly for a few years, especially if we drew a bullet in the society wide game of Russian Roulette we just played....

[ecosophia]

Except that they didn't see it for what it is. In classic Plutonian style, they projected their own shadow onto the world and then tried to rebel against it, which guaranteed that they'd simply bind themselves closer to it.

The world has always been a mess. Go as far back into history as you want, and you'll find good and evil, beauty and ugliness, horror and wonder, brutality and gentleness all tangled up with one another, twined together tightly within each individual human heart and thus muddled up inextricably in the world as a whole. All through the Piscean age, people have chased the fantasy that we can dispense with that, pile all the evil into one place and get rid of it, and have only the good stuff...and you see how well that's worked. Pluto simply rubbed our noses in it. Now that the Piscean age is over, maybe we can stop making the same mistake...

[(Anonymous)]

Hello,

I have two question for this Monday:

1) When doing the SOP, the light descending during the Opening is bright white, but the light ascending from the Earth is golden, and when the two mix, the effect is like sunlight in late afternoon. Is the light ascending supposed to be white, too, in other words, am I doing this wrong? I didn’t consciously (as far as I remember) make it golden when I started doing the SOP, and now it appears that way all on its own.

2) I want to start with discursive meditation, and it occurred to me when reading the instructions that I’ve been doing this for a long time, but in writing. Is it imperative to do it solely in your mind, or is journaling an acceptable method, too (for the record, I’m willing to try it without the props and expect it to be quite the challenge)? And can you read up on the subject of your meditation beforehand, or are you supposed to start with only what you know and can conclude yourself? (That's technically a third question, oops...)

Periwinkle Amorous Llama

[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?

People Who Aren't People

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG, I have a friend with highly advanced energetic senses. She tells me she can sense health problems in people and other, less definable spiritual qualities. One thing she told me in particular is that there are "people who aren't people" roaming the world. They look like people but she perceives no human energetic signature from them at all. I asked her if she'd ever tried to identify or investigate one of these "people" upon seeing them, but she said she finds them very unsettling and had a strong intuition that doing so would be a bad idea.

Does this square with anything you or any readers have experienced? Could these be something disguising itself as human, or actual humans subject to some kind of possession or who are able to etherically mask themselves in some way? Thanks for hosting these Q&As.

[booklover1973]

This is a very Druidical way to describe the world!

An Easy Simple Meditation

[(Anonymous)]

So I’ve settled back into practicing a form of meditation I learned a few years ago from Tony Mierzwicki’s book “Graeco-Egyptian Magick.” You sit and envisage the seven traditional planets about you, each in turn: the Moon before you, Mercury to the left, and so on. Jupiter is in the heart center and Saturn overhead. While you imagine each planet as an appropriately colored luminous sphere, you chant each of the Classical Greek vowels as long as you can sustain it, one vowel for each planet. I’ve found three cycles of this practice is the basic minimum, seven is about my limit.

For a year or two I practiced this, then went off it in order to try discursive meditation. That’s where I went off the rails. I couldn’t do it. As soon as I try to think discursively about some symbolically rich image - say, the Fool from the Rider Waite tarot - I lose interest. My mind is much more interested in images themselves, and how beautiful they are - their vibrant colors, how they are composed - rather than in what they symbolize or represent in some allegorical way. So my meditation practice went to hell.

While visualizing the aforementioned planetary spheres, I sometimes think of the attributes of the gods appearing within them, or - more rarely - their faces or figures. They seem to glow in my mind’s eye. But I don’t particularly look for meanings in them. If the gods feel disposed to send me some such realization, I’ll be paying attention.

I suppose this may mean that I won’t be recollecting past lives any time soon, or growing a mental body all that fast, nor ascending in a rush up the great chain of being. But then I never asked to become an enlightened being in this lifetime. All I ever wanted was to make nice pictures and find some gratification in doing so.

When I visualize the sphere of Venus, I imagine a sphere of rose quartz. At first I felt this a bit too pink-bubbly; but when I visualize her in green, the other obvious option, it makes me think of leaves of infested plants I’ve seen and I get images of giant insects. So I’m sticking with rose quartz.

Tony says to picture Saturn as black. But in terms of visualization a black sphere hanging in the blackness of space is a non-starter; so I picture Saturn as a deep indigo, rather like a black light in an old-time poster shop.

The location of Jupiter at the heart center reminds me of the hyper cube at the center of a tesseract. I fancy some kind of more-than-three-dimensional spatial matrix is being referenced here.

[ecosophia]

The Russian Revolution was the bang, the long slow decline of Communism into irrelevance and collapse was the whimper. Nazism, for its part, wasn't a Plutonian phenomenon but a Uranian one -- remember that none of the other planets went away when Pluto was discovered! As for how things will unfold, why, you've made your prediction and I've made mine; we'll see who turns out to be correct.

[ecosophia]

Well, what else did you expect from a Druid? ;-)

[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.