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-ninth card in The Sacred Geometry Oracle. Card 29, The Dodecahedron, when upright tells you that spiritual forces are involved in the situation; when reversed, it warns you that you will have to embrace personal change in order to deal with what's happening.. 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 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

[andrewskeen]

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Picatrix. The astrological techniques are extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of medieval cosmology most of the praxis will go over a typical reader's head. There's also al-Qurtubi's polydeistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his esoteric commentary--his personal philosophy draws heavily from al-Kindī's De Radiis Stellarum, for instance. The practitioners understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these allusions, to realize they're not just apropos--they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Picatrix truly ARE idiots--of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the insight in Picatrix's existential aphorism, "Matter is a coadunation of the elements ordered for the reception of form," which itself is a cryptic reference to Calcidius' Middle Platonic commentary on Timaeus. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as al-Qurtubi's genius unfolds itself across Picatrix's pages. What fools... how I pity them.

And yes by the way, I DO have a Venus sigil tattoo from bk II ch 10. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only--and even they have to demonstrate they're within range of my operative magical ability (preferably lower) beforehand.



Original here.

[ecosophia]

Funny. For what it's worth, I don't think that people who dislike Picatrix are idiots; they may simply not find that way of practicing magic appropriate for them, and that expreses itself in the emotion of distaste.

On the subject of the Picatrix

[neptunesdolphins]

Is it dangerous? I keep hearing that it is. Or is it a matter of how much magic you are comfortable with? I am a magic wienie, so I get the feeling that it is beyond me.

Re: On the subject of the Picatrix

[ecosophia]

It's dangerous -- deliberately so. It was written for people who already had an extensive education in philosophy, astrology, herbalism, and magic, and there are deliberately boobytrapped recipes that will drop you stone cold dead if you follow them -- a potion to protect you from evil spirits, for example, which is made of bitter almond kernels. (Yes, that's spelled "cyanide" in plain English.)

Many old books are set up with protective boobytraps that way; I'm thinking of the alchemical text that leads you through a complex process, resulting in several ounces of crystals, which you're supposed to pound up in a mortar. The recipe produces a highly unstable gold fulminate, and the first time you bring the pestle down, you and your laboratory will be blown to kingdom come!

Re: On the subject of the Picatrix

[(Anonymous)]

What's the point of these booby traps?

Re: On the subject of the Picatrix

[ecosophia]

To keep idiots away from things they shouldn't mess with.

Re: On the subject of the Picatrix

[(Anonymous)]

So better dead then?

Re: On the subject of the Picatrix

[ecosophia]

It's not the approach I would have chosen, but it's the approach that was traditional among occultists in ancient and medieval times.

Re: On the subject of the Picatrix

[(Anonymous)]

Given just how much of a mess really poorly thought out magic can cause, I think a case can be made for it...

Re: On the subject of the Picatrix

[ecosophia]

No doubt, but I prefer gentler approaches, such as making foolish people misunderstand what magic is about and go do something else instead.

Inteligence

[(Anonymous)]

What is needed to understand ancient books is culture, not this abstraction you call "IQ";That is only a convenient, quantitative and abstract term akind to Megabytes.

Culture, on the other hand is similar to a layer of fertile Earth. Any ideas planted there will develope and come to full flower,and if you let them, will propagate themselves and become part of your inteligential flora.

I recently followed our host advice and reat "Eros and Magic".Since then, and without conscious effort, a lot of ideas had begun to rose, related to the book but also to the everyday world.

Inteligence is not a procesor, but a living structure.