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 thirtieth card in The Sacred Geometry Oracle. Card 31, the Sphere, when upright tells you that the possibilities before you are much bigger than you realize; when reversed, it tells you that you're completely missing what's going on. 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: A woman's voice

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Rose,
I thank the Gods for your comment. Now I know I am not alone here! No Doctor or priest on my two little islands has spoken against the expansion of MAID and few people seem to have heard about it. The ones who have heard about it don't seem to care. They seem very like the Good Germans.

On the other hand, Trudeau's popularity is quite low now. If we can get him out of office, MAID might be turned back and disability payments increased. I have read articles from disabled Canadians who applied for MAID to see if they could get any better services. No! They can die or lump it.
Maxine

Re: Occultism in Daily Life

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this.

Re: Calculating Sidereal Time

[readoldthings]

Hi there,

If JMG doesn't mind a bit of self-promotion, I offer natal readings on my Etsy site here:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/secretfiremagicshop

[(Anonymous)]

JMG had no choice but to give up reading for Australia—he kept forgetting to turn the charts upside down.

—Princess Cutekitten 😊

[nebulous_realms]

I figured as much. Thanks! These would be great meditations to aid me in learning geomancy, that's for sure.

Re: Trauma and mysticism?

[ecosophia]

The traditional advice in the occult literature I've studied, if you've got something like a dissociative condition due to childhood trauma, is to encourage you to see a good Freudian or Jungian psychotherapist. I have no idea if that's an option for you, but the books I know of seem to think that a dissociative condition is nothing to mess with.

[jprussell]

Entirely non-magical possibility: do you keep your incense in direct sunlight? Sunlight and/or heat can cause oils to go rancid, which can make for bad smells.

Hope it's an isolated problem!
Jeff

[ecosophia]

Discursive meditation is, in my personal experience, the single most useful thing you can do to master any branch of occultism, full stop end of sentence.

Druid lineage

[(Anonymous)]

Theres a big debate in traditional circles about whether and how a spiritual lineage must keep alive historical transmission. Obviously I know your position and share it magical or spiritual traditions can fold up in hyperspace and wait for spring it's useless to insist on historical continuity. That said are there any historical hints that druidry actually did manage to keep some historical flickers or embers going? It's hard not to hope for it even though Druid revival has it's own magical bona fides. Also and btw...is it normal to have MP or SOP trigger barking dogs in the distance at certain key points like the final sphere for instance? Thank you! Celadon as Fuchsia Crunching Dragon

Re: Trauma and mysticism?

[leahkiser]

Thank you. Not sure I have insurance for that, but I'll look into it.

Re: Druid lineage

[ecosophia]

1) The connections between modern Druidry and the ancient traditions are very faint. The main linkage is by way of bardic schools in Wales and Brittany, which hadn't quite died out yet when Iolo Morganwg reinvented the whole thing and gave the old bards a new venue through which to pass on their teachings. Far more significant are the Druid Revival's roots in Renaissance Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, which is why it popped up when it did, not long before Thomas Taylor relaunched Pagan Neoplatonism in a big way into Western consciousness.

2) Dogs perceive the nonphysical, and when they're not used to magic, yeah, they bark.

Re: Trauma and mysticism?

[jprussell]

Not magical/spiritual directly, but Tim Ferriss talks about his childhood abuse, dealing with depression and dissociation through much of his life, and what worked for him to get to a better place in this interview. The same page also includes a list of a lot of different resources for folks dealing with similar challenges, maybe something on there can help: https://tim.blog/2020/09/14/how-to-heal-trauma/

Best wishes,
Jeff

Re: The sound of effort

[(Anonymous)]

Not OP

Can you elaborate on how and why society does that, and is our society the only one that does that?

[(Anonymous)]

No, more of a solatic. Or Jupiteritic.

[grokrathegreen]

Its very hot where I live this month. So, I started digging a pit house so I can have a decent place for an afternoon nap. So while I was doing this I got to thinking about 'Ghost Riders in the Sky', and about how nice and cool it is in my hole, while the sky is hot and brutal. Anyway I was thinking about conceptions of the afterlife from Christianity where a good afterlife is about and a bad one is below, and all of a sudden it seemed so very strange. Yet in Ghost Riders the devils afterlife which the cowpoke is frightened by is 'that range up in the sky, chasing the devil's herd across that endless sky'.

Does your branch of occult lore have anything to say about the, er uh, topography of afterlifes? Is the Christian bias quirky to itself, or it is part of a larger current?

[ecosophia]

The "Ghost Riders in the Sky" are the American equivalent of the Wild Hunt of European folklore. There's an entire tradition of the saved being below and the damned above, and other afterlife geographies as well. It's not simple!

Re: The sound of effort

[ecosophia]

Watch the way children are treated in school when they behave like children -- i.e., lively, active, and noisy. Western societies do this because the point of school is to mass produce interchangeable parts for employment. Other societies by and large have different habits.

Re: Twilight of Pluto and Music

[brendhelm]

I'm reminded of the Uranian undercurrent present in Metallica's "The Unforgiven" - "New blood joins this earth / and quickly he's subdued" etc.

The oversoul goes insane?

[team10tim]

Hello JMG,

Eike had a great insight on the last open post, that the collective unconscious of the west might be having a mental breakdown (or possibly an astral breakdown) and the notion matches what I see in an intuitive and parsimonious way. I have three questions about the idea.

1) could a catchy collective unconscious be responsible for Oswald Spengler's rise and fall of cultures/civilizations? That is some collection of ideas, narratives, and emotional convictions forms a egregore that is useful and appealing and its adoption by large groups and development forms the basis of a great culture?

2) is it possible that Faustion culture is going have a much greater problem dealing with its own demise than previous cultures because it is predicated on the infinite and the limitless? What I mean is that other great cultures could have become senile and lost their appeal, but their core tenets weren't directly contradicted by empirical evidence, they just becames less useful and less appealing, but Faustian culture is about to have its core tenets directly refuted by exactly the sort of empirical evidence that Faustian culture is supposed to embrace. I imagine that is going to be more mentally and emotionally challenging for people living through it than other great cultures had in their twilight days.

3) is the crud in the astral weather consistent with an egregore that is having a mental/astral breakdown? Further, does that mean we are slated for something even dumber than the Trump/Russiagate, woke hysterics, covid hysterics, Ukraine hysterics?

Thanks,
Tim

Re: The oversoul goes insane?

[ecosophia]

1) There's a difference between an egregor and the collective unconscious. That said, the role of the egregor of a society in its rise and fall is of great importance. When Western civilization was strong, its egregor was intensely appealing, which is why (for example) our ugly and dysfunctional clothing styles got picked up almost everywhere in the world. Now that Western civilization is cracking, the egregor is no longer anything like so attractive.

2) Cultures vary in how much reality testing their egregors get. The Roman empire imploded precisely because some of the core tenets of its egregor were decisively contradicted by events -- it was central to Roman ideology that Rome had been given perpetual rule over the world, but nobody told the Visigoths. Its cultural implosion followed promptly. That example does seem very similar to what we're going through now.

3) Two good questions I can't answer. I'm not sure if anyone can.

[(Anonymous)]

Great !

Thanks again,

Sapienter Si Sincere

Re: The oversoul goes insane?

[(Anonymous)]

2) Is it possible for an egregor to end up "committing suicide" for lack of a better way of putting things, and dragging those who are influenced by it towards their doom? It seems like sanctioning Russia, alienating India and China, forcing untested mRNA vaccines on people, and a string of other bad decisions make a lot more sense if what's happening is Western Civilization trying to go out with a bang, but being unable to admit to itself that this is what's happening.

More broadly, a lot of the weirdness since the end of the 1970s makes a lot of sense if it's essentially a larger scale version of the kind of person decides to take advantage of an opportunity to wallow in excess and destroy their own future, because they've decided (subconsciously, in many cases) that when the consequences come, they'll just end their life.

Re: The oversoul goes insane?

[ecosophia]

I don't know if it's possible, but yes, that's what it looks like!

Re: The oversoul goes insane?

[(Anonymous)]

If this is what's happening, then it provides a potential, and very troubling explanation for why so many people's intuition is saying that most of the vaccinated will be dead soon: even if the vaccines don't do them in, they'll find something else to do it....

Re: Umbrella superstition

[methylethyl]

I'm just American, and I was *always* told this. I don't actually believe it, but it's so ingrained that I freak out a little when my kids open one in the house!

Though... there is something to it when little kids go opening umbrellas inside: stuff gets knocked off the table, people get bumped... and then if allowed to play around with it, the umbrella gets broken.

Perhaps that was started as a way of keeping umbrellas intact!