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.

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 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

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

Okay, this is a very complex matter and ties back into archaic mystery traditions that are very poorly understood these days. The very short form is that it's a bad idea to do this unless you have some very specific reasons for doing so -- and no, being nervous about death isn't one of them.

Under normal circumstances, when you die, you go through the normal after-death process and then reincarnate. This is appropriate and healthy, and keeps you from getting stuck in a personality rut; when you're ready to make the transition to not dying, that happens, and you stop incarnating into a physical body in a natural manner. Until you've reached that point, you're not prepared to function in a nonphysical body for more than brief periods, and you can mess yourself over good and proper by trying it.

A very long time ago, in the days of the long barrows, people from certain lineages used to voluntarily be buried alive in order to pass into nonphysical incarnation for a certain period, and serve as spiritual guardians of a place or a community. That was a duty and a sacred burden. Later on, with the rise of a warrior aristocracy and the replacement of the long barrows with round barrows, the same methods were hijacked by kings and nobles, and used in an attempt to cheat death. The results were not good. Over time, people stopped putting up with that -- the spread of cremation and the abandonment of mound burial are markers of this process -- and the techniques survived in a hole-and-corner fashion in the practices of vampirism. The people who entered into the earth in the long barrows were sustained by their own spiritual power; the kings and lords who were buried in round barrows (and, ahem, pyramids) were sustained by sacrificial offerings; those who practiced vampirism didn't receive offerings, so they had to steal life force from victims, usually killing them in the process.

So my advice is to focus on your own spiritual development and enter into the Unseen when you've matured enough to do it properly. The alternatives usually end in a real mess.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[(Anonymous)]

Ok, advice received, I'll just focus on what I wanted to do anyway, which is making spiritual progress. Thanks for the detailed answer!

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[(Anonymous)]

This reminds me very much of the material in Peter Mark Adam’s book The Game of Saturn, wherein is detailed what may have been a ritualized attempt of certain powerful individuals to return life after life, death after death, in order to maintain their control over the wealth their families had accumulated. It’s a creepy but fascinating story.

Given that there are some very powerful and exceedingly wealthy individuals who occasionally wander out into the sunlight to tell the rest of us what’s wrong with us, and how they’re going to improve us (even if it kills us), and that some of these individuals appear to be made of balsa wood and crepe paper, almost as of they’ve been cheating death for so long that Death finally just gave up, one can’t help but wonder what sort of means are employed (beyond the best life extension technologies money can buy), to keep these ghoulish-looking people outside of the tomb.

I can’t help but draw a connection between these ideas, and what JMG wrote in his last Ecosophia entry, and some creepy gnostic ideas. For a sort of consideration of the overlap between technology and the malevolent side of occultism, here’s a neat video interview of Joaquin Flores

https://youtu.be/aCV24UTPgKY

… wherein Flores suggests Elon Musk is a sort of Archon, entrapping the light-essence of the deceased in some sort of artificial medium. I don’t think Flores is speaking metaphorically. The title of the less-than-twenty minute video is Joaquin Flores: Elon Musk Serves The Dark Forces. Make of it what you will!

Anyway, thanks. Have a great July 4 holiday.
Casey

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

I'm pretty sure the individuals in question are using some fairly creepy biomedical means to prolong their lives, but I'd be astonished to learn that they know the first thing about magic, much less the exceptionally demanding disciplines required to stabilize the etheric body indefinitely. The few of them that I've seen in person -- at a distance -- had auras with the same balsa wood and crepe paper quality as their physical appearance. I don't envy them their experiences when the biomedical gimmickry finally fails.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[(Anonymous)]

Will this merely be dying completely unprepared for it, or is there something worse waiting for them?

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

It depends on what they've done to prolong their own lives, and how many people suffered as a result.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you This answers the question I had about the sokushinbitsu, of Japan. People report that area feels "good", as in the spirits and souls of the mummies present aren't predatory, like vampires. So this means that they powered themselves on the strength of their own spiritual achievement.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

An excellent point! I've never been to Senninzawa, more's the pity, but everything I know about the sokushinbutsu points to their status as one of the last surviving examples of the pure ancient tradition; they left the cycle of incarnation for wholly unselfish reasons and did it the right way, by an extraordinary feat of self-discipline and spiritual power.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[booklover1973]

As far as I know, the goal of Taoism is not to become a vampire, But might it be that the Taoist practices which were mentioned, are risky in that there is a risk to become a vampire after death, although that is not the intention of Taoist light body practices? Can you elaborate?

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

The Taoist internal alchemy is another survival of the pure ancient tradition, but it's properly reserved for capable and experienced practitioners who have a reasonable chance of success. Keep in mind, however, that China has one of the world's richest and most grisly traditions of vampire lore; clearly the debased side of the tradition is also present and accounted for.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[booklover1973]

Another question: Why is it that you cannot funtion more than a relatively short time, and even mess you over, when being in a non-material body before you have achived the developmental stage at which it is the right time to leave material incarnation behind?

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

Because you haven't developed your other bodies enough. It's very much like being born when your physical body isn't mature enough to survive outside the womb.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[causticus]

Would you say this practice was probably something properly understood during the Age of Taurus (and perhaps earlier) then got corrupted during Aries? Or did the corruption happen during Taurus and the practice ended up being the great error of that age?

Interestingly, it seems like it was during the latter age (Aries) when the concept of Kingship got blown way out of proportion and we got stuck with the vulgar concept of "God Kings"...i.e. a man who received the status of a "living god" just by virtue of his royal birth. So by that, the operative reasoning would be that if a man had the status of "living god" then his current personality should life on indefinitely.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

Good. The Taurus-Aries boundary is in fact about when things started going haywire; in Britain, for example, round barrows start to appear after 2500 BC, but really hit their stride once the Bronze Age arrived around 2000 BC.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[milkyway1]

Do the long vs. round barrows actually have any significance/meaning in this, or is it pure coincidence that the habits changed around the same time? I.e. does form matter in this case?

Milkyway

PS: A very interesting discussion and explanations - thanks to everybody for asking, and to you, JMG, for your patient and detailed answers! :-)

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

I suspect form matters, but since we don't know the operating principles behind the different classes of barrows -- I'm researching that, but the information is very scant -- it's anyone's guess just now.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[robertmathiesen]

That's absolutely fascinating about the long barrows vs. the mound barrows! It aligns neatly with the little I know about archeological work on the barrows, chiefly from reading Aubrey Burl's books. (Burl does mention one fairly clear case of burial alive to protect a tribe, but it was found in Ireland and in connetion with a hill fort.)

Can you point me toward any other published work, whether presented as factual or written under the cover of fiction, that develops this idea more fully? Or it it mostly your own inferences from archeological findings?

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

RJ Stewart has an essay titled "The Tomb of a King," which is iirc included as an appendix in The UnderWorld Initiation, which gives some details of the older tradition; Carmen Blacker's The Catalpa Bow has a chapter on the sokushinbutsu of early modern Japan, who followed the same tradition. I also used Burl extensively as a resource, and of course the extensive scholarly literature on Egyptian funerary traditions and on vampirism covers much of the later material. That said, yes, there's a lot of personal inference involved.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[robertmathiesen]

Thanks for the pointer to Stewart's essay. When I read it today, I realized that I'd read it before, but forgotten. I think pretty highly of Stewart's work in general. He very good at teasing out the esoteric lore hidden in the Scottish and English traditional ballads.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

No question, Stewart's good. His writings have pointed me toward any number of things I'd otherwise have missed completely.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[(Anonymous)]

A piece of interesting info for y'all: the Tibetans would definitely agree with you that if you're spiritually advanced enough results like this happen as a byproduct. I suggest looking up the very recent (September 1998) case of Khenpo A-chos' rainbow body.
Although the sokushinbutsu discussion has got me wondering, would it be okay if I engaged in this kind of practices with a bodhicitta motivation when I'm old?

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

If you devote the rest of your life to the necessary hard spiritual work of preparation, sure. Are you familiar with the sokushin-jobutsu techniques? After a life of intensive Buddhist meditation and other forms of spiritual work, they systematically starved themselves to death over a fixed period of several years, at first eating very small amounts of carefully chosen foods and then eventually fasting completely, so that they finally died of hunger on the last day of the period in a state of complete enlightenment. That's what it takes.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[(Anonymous)]

My bad, I stupidly failed to mention that I don't intend to go the whole hog in this lifetime, not after your wise and carefully considered advice!
I was thinking along the lines of only partially building a Body of Light for two reasons: this-life benefits in easier lucid dreaming and astral projection (as Between the Gates suggests) and to plant wholesome karmic seeds for my future incarnations. Yes, sooner or later I'll naturally stop being reborn in a material body, but I figure greasing the wheels of Nature can't hurt.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[ecosophia]

Oh, if you're just planning on strengthening your astral body so you can experience lucid dreaming and astral projection, that's another matter -- it's perfectly safe. One of the problems here is that the label "body of light" has multiple meanings, which are not interchangeable.

Re: Generating a Spiritual Body

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, and the confusion isn't helped by the fact that the ritual to build the immortal Body of Light (not the astral body) if done only occasionally is useful for astral projection.