ecosophia | Magic Monday

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.

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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!***

Current Mood: calm

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From:

jprussell

Good Evening!

As always, thanks very much for your time and effort answering questions and facilitating further discussion. It is truly a wonderful resource for those of us who don't know anyone local to talk about these things with.

To Share: I've recommended Eirik Westcoat before, but this time let me recommend his book Eagle's Mead. Like his other book I recommended (Viking Poetry for Heathen Rites), it is largely a collection of poetry written in modern English following the metrical/alliterative rules of Medieval and older Germanic poetry, but rather than a collection of liturgical poems, this book contains poetry that he worked out while following the initiatory path laid out in Nine Doors of Midgard, and so is more explicitly magical as well as personal. Perhaps of interest to folks not as interested in the Germanic Gods, it includes some material related to the Grail myth, an area that Edred Thorsson has done some work to link with the Runes (mostly through some of the later, less-often-seen additions to the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc), and the system that Westcoat follows was laid out mainly by Thorsson.

Question: For JMG, or anyone in the commentariat willing to share, do you have any recommended resources on prayer as a practice, whether polytheist, Christian, or whatever else? I've started looking particularly at the Rosary as an example of a form of contemplative prayer that has been widely used for a good, long time, and I suspect it might be usefully adapted as a source of inspiration for prayers to other deities.

Cheers,
Jeff

Edited (Fixed broken html bold tag) Date: 2022-07-18 04:03 am (UTC)

From: (Anonymous)

When a Pagan Prays: Exploring Prayer in Druidry and Beyond by Nimue Brown.
I found this book had quite a bit of train the mind utility.

Cerridwen: Celtic Goddess of Inspiration by Kristoffer Hughes.
Just started reading it. Might be a good template for your work.

Rhydlyd

From:

jprussell

Thanks very much for these!

From: (Anonymous)

I'm a bit surprised you found "When a Pagan Prays" to be useful. It's one of the very few books I've literally thrown across the room. The chapter "Prayer Doesn't Work" in particular seemed to ooze with contempt and hatred toward people of faith. I bought the book assuming it would be all about the history of prayer in pagan cultures and the reclamation of prayer for contemporary pagans, but as the ending suggests it's as much a chronicle of the author's evolution from loathing to (reluctant) engagement with prayer (and her realization that she'd been a victim of spiritual abuse). No doubt it's a much more amiable book for people with an irreligious or atheistic background like the author, than someone like me who never questioned the existence of Gods, only the tenets of monotheism. For me it was so impious I had to purify after reading it, and I'm not hyper-sensitive to miasma. FWIW.

--Sister Crow

--Sister Crow

Re: Eagle's Mead and Prayer Resources

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2022-07-18 05:48 pm (UTC) - Expand

Re: Eagle's Mead and Prayer Resources

From:

jprussell - Date: 2022-07-18 07:32 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

ecosophia

Ceisiwr Serith's A Book of Pagan Prayer is quite good, and my co-written book Pagan Prayer Beads has some material on rosary practice you might find helpful.

From:

jprussell

Thanks very much - I've found both helpful in the past, but I likely ought to revisit with some of my changed practice and perspective.

From: (Anonymous)

Last winter, I bought a Northern Tradition set of prayer beads from Raven Kaldera via his website. They are handmade and come with two and a half pages of short prayers.

I appreciate he’s controversial, but have no problem with that, as the beads are beautiful (I bought wood) and so are the short prayers that correspond to each bead.

It takes me about 15-20 minutes to pray each bead, and I do it every night. At this point, it’s from memory. I’ve found this practice very rewarding.

Best to you,
OtterGirl

From:

jprussell

Glad to hear it! I've been interested in those prayer beads for a while now, but I've held off on the notion of "Is buying these really what I most need to do right now?"

I'm glad to hear from someone who has gotten good use out of them.

Thanks,
Jeff

From: (Anonymous)

I can think of a few ways Raven Kaldera could be contoversial. Which ones did you have in mind?

Re: Eagle's Mead and Prayer Resources

From:

causticus - Date: 2022-07-18 04:09 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

neptunesdolphins

Me too. I had him construct two sets for me - one for Roman Gods and one for Jupiter. I had composed the prayers. I use them daily as well. So I second using his service.

From: (Anonymous)

I may be able to help you, what do you need to know about the rosary?

—Princess Cutekitten

From:

jprussell

Through meditation I've gotten the impression that some kind of regular, fairly structured prayer might be a helpful part of my spiritual development. I was raised a rather lukewarm protestant, went through a phase of materialist atheism, and have found my way into a religious practice with the Germanic Gods that so far seems to be working rather well for me. As such, I have almost zero knowledge of the rosary or other Catholic prayers, besides what I've seen in movies.

With the very little research I've done so far, the following points have struck me:
1) Like the Lord's Prayer, the rosary in English was composed by folks with a good ear for poetics but also for maintaining the spiritual significance of the translation
2) The Rosary has a very solid and deep structure: it begins with two prayers re-affirming the overall religious view of the universe of the church (Apostle's Creed and Our Father/Lord's Prayer), moves into three Hail Marys on the broad Marian themes of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and then proceeds into the mysteries being contemplated in this session, which collectively cover the whole Catholic liturgical calendar, and then closing prayers.
3) The actual length of saying the Hail Marys spaces out how long to spend on each aspect of the mysteries being contemplated. The very fact of getting the prayer to the point where you can recite it while also actively thinking about something else strikes me as likely a pretty powerful technique
4) The very nuanced interplay of repetition and novelty strikes me as very likely spiritually robust (for example, you're saying the same Hail Mary over and over again, but thinking about different aspects of the mysteries, and different mysteries on different days of the week, but you come back to them every week, and so forth)

All of which is to say that I think studying the rosary will do me some good in coming up with prayers to my own Gods, but I'm so new to all of this that I would very much appreciate if anyone can point me to "oh, St. So-and-So did a thorough analysis of the Rosary" or "Such-and-such academic looked at the Rosary and Buddhist bead-prayers and found the common structural elements". If not that, then any experience with what the rosary/other contemplative prayer has done for folks, what has worked for them, and so forth, would be most welcome.

Thanks much!
Jeff

Re: Eagle's Mead and Prayer Resources

From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2022-07-18 08:31 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

emmanuelg

Hi Jeff & all,

There is a short book,
"The Practice of the Presence of God" which collects some of the discursive meditations of Brother Lawrence, a Christian monk who lived in the 1600's. IMHO, well worth a read, and widely available in print, and free online.
Here's a link for the interested;

https://d2y1pz2y630308.cloudfront.net/15471/documents/2016/10/Brother%20Lawrence-The%20Practice%20of%20the%20Presence%20of%20God.pdf

Smaragdine Discombobulated Mosquito / EG

From:

jprussell

Thanks very much for this, it does look like a worthy model of devotional practice to study.

From:

hwistle

You might want to check Kaye Boesme's work. She's a Platonist Polytheist who blogs here: https://kallisti.blog/

She has also written a guidebook on How to worship gods from a Platonist point of view, including chapters on prayer and ritual, you can check it here: https://kayeofswords.github.io/soulsinnerstatues/

Manuel

From:

jprussell

This looks extremely helpful, thank you! I'm still exploring Platonism, but what I've looked into so far has been a helpful supplement to my practice.

From: (Anonymous)

As a resource for thinking about prayer in general, the short, but quite dense, section from the Catechism of the Council of Trent "On Prayer" is a helpful resource:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_catechism_of_the_Council_of_Trent/Part_4

For the Rosary specifically, I would recommend St Louis de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary--available in translation online at:
https://www.ecatholic2000.com/montfort/rosary/rosary.shtml

(I've been finding the discussion of Levi to interact with this book somewhat--I probably should not be surprised, as they are both French Catholics, and only a century apart.)

In my personal experience, the Novena to Mary, Undoer of Knots (which is based on the Rosary with some added prayers and meditations) is remarkably effective, and works very well with the planetary hours (think about what the central need is so far as you can tell, and pray the Novena starting in the day and hour of the appropriate planet and each day in that planet's hour.) I'm not sure if that is prayer, or magical ritual--they blur together a bit for me in that case.

SamChevre

From:

jprussell

Thanks very much for these! I had put The Secret of the Rosary on my list after someone mentioned it in a previous MM, but the section from the Catechism of the Council of Trent is exactly the sort of thing that I wouldn't even have known to go look for, but from skimming looks like it will be very helpful.

Thanks again,
Jeff

From: (Anonymous)

I've posted about this before, but I love this Heathen reworking of the Rosary:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/pantheon/2010/05/retooling-the-rosary/

--Sister Crow

From:

jprussell

Thank you for this! I just knew Krasskova would have something like this, but I couldn't find it with some quick web searching. Northern Tradition for the Solitary Practitioner has some sections on using prayer beads, but it's mostly examples rather than a discussion of how to work out your own, what elements are important to include, and so forth.

Cheers,
Jeff

From:

causticus

I'd love some decent resources on this too! I've noticed that internet searches tend to turn up a whole lot of bad information. For example, searching for "contemplative prayer" turns up results mostly from frothing-at-the-mouth Protestant fundamentalist websites which do nothing but denounce the practice in the tone of shrill indignation (i.e. how DARE people have their own spiritual experiences!!) for being "unbiblical." The vastly more sane Catholic and Orthodox explanations of this practice tend to be buried beneath those obnoxious and unhelpful results.

This actually has me thinking of a potential project: to put up a website that explains these practices in a positive and informative manner, and uses an assortment of keywords to bump these articles up in the search results. Articles would also contain links to helpful books and other resources on these topics. It seems like there's a lot of very beneficial practices from the old sacramental churches that have been almost left for dead and can be very easily reclaimed and repurposed myriad spiritual persuasions.

From:

jprussell

Well, I don't know how SEO-friendly it will be, but I was planning on at least putting together the resources shared here into a post for Sane Polytheism.

From:

methylethyl

It should be fairly easy to unearth Orthodox sources for contemplative prayer, if you just add some search terms like "Jesus prayer" "Orthodox meditation" "way of the pilgrim"... there's even a book by Frederica Matthews-Green on the Jesus Prayer, that might be helpful.

From:

brenainn

Can anyone recommend a good book (or online video) that helps one learn how to write poetry in "the metrical/alliterative rules of Medieval and older Germanic poetry"? My relationship with the Anglo-Saxon gods is really starting to bear fruit, and I'd like to begin composing my own prayers and poems to them.

From:

jprussell

Eirik Westcoat's Viking Poetry for Heathen Rites includes a good how-to discussion at the beginning of the book on the different meters and what they were used for.

For the very basics, suitable to Old English/Anglo-Saxon poetry (there was much more variety recorded in Old Norse poetry than in Old English):
1) Each line is divided into two "half lines" with a caesura between them. Some authors render this as two separate lines, others with a large space at the caesura, and some with no visual indication at all. In speech in modern English, it usually works best as just barely a pause. These pairs of half-lines are the basic unit that the rules apply to.
2) Each half line must have two fully stressed syllables, but can include more unstressed syllables (minimum four syllables total)
3) The first stressed syllable of the second half line must alliterate with the first, second, or both stressed syllables of the first half-line in the pair
4) The second stressed syllable of the second half-line of the pair must not alliterate with the first stressed syllable in the second half-line, but may optionally alliterate with one of the stressed syllables in the first half-line
5) All vowels alliterate with each other
6) Consonant clusters that are spoken as one sound (like "sk", "sp", "th" and so forth) alliterate with themselves, not with the first letter (for example "skill" and "sketch" would alliterate, but "skill" would not alliterate with "sound")

Here's what looks like a pretty decent discussion with plenty of footnotes if you want to explore further: https://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Tutorials/old-english-metre-a-brief-guide

If you're looking for some good examples, besides Westcoat's works (which also include some other Old Norse-inspired meters that have more complex rules, but with a core of "stress and alliteration"), Tolkien has some good stuff: his translation of Beowulf is mostly rendered in prose, but the book contains some poems composed in the style. His Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is also entirely written in the very similar Norse meter called fornidhslag.

Lastly, not on the subject of meter, but if you are interested in constraining yourself to Germanic-derived words in Modern English, Plain English by Bryan Evans is a wonderful resource, as is the Anglish Moot wiki (https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf). Certainly not a requirement, but I find it a fun creative constraint, and I enjoy the sound of Old Englishy words.

On the other hand, if you're looking to compose in Old English rather than modern English, Wordcraft by Stephen Pollington is rather helpful. It's mostly a brief dictionary, but it also includes thematic groupings of words, for example words that have to do with "starting" something or words that have to do with "thinking", so it also functions a bit like a thesaurus. Also, not on poetry specifically, but Pollington is my favorite writer on Anglo-Saxon history and religion, and I unreservedly recommend as many of his books as you can get a hold of.

Cheers,
Jeff

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