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.

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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

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

Lately I've been pondering social pathologies that have been linked to "magical thinking." Utopian ideologies whose proponents keep pushing them despite a long record of failed implementations, cargo cults believing in various panaceas for all society's woes, etc.

It occurs to me that some of these problems could be linked to the application of esoteric tools of thought by people who don't have the knowledge or context to properly use them. Traditionally, esoteric knowledge has been gatekept in various ways; degrees of initiation in occult societies, monasticism, exclusive apprenticeships, etc. Are we experiencing the consequences of occult thinking being applied in a careless, piecemeal fashion such that these old social conventions were designed to prevent?

For example, occult thinkers have asserted "Reason is not the only means by which truth may be found, there are other experiential pathways we can follow to broaden our understanding." Postmodernists say "Reason is an oppressive social construct and truth is merely the product of temporal power, and we can change the world at will by changing how we speak." The latter assertion reflects a dim understanding of the former along with a heaping dose of wishful thinking.

In particular, while today's prominent anti-rational political streams share an idea that symbolic rituals can transform society, they lack any kind of spirituality and their metaphysical framework is rudimentary at best. It's interesting because many of these ideas are seen on the political left, and in decades past the left was associated with significant amounts of "woowoo," tarot cards, astrology and the like, but the contemporary left that has more fully embraced postmodern ideas appears nearly devoid of spiritual thought.

It all seems akin to children playing with matches. Are there any historical analogs you can think of - incidents where poorly understood occult methods were used with disastrous results? It seems that the propagation of vampires may be reflective of this - you've written that the original spirits inhabiting long barrows were elders who bound themselves to the physical world after death to continue guiding their people, but the later vampires inhabiting burial mounds were simply kings and nobles who used the old knowledge to cheat death and become parasites of the living. Is there any evidence that the traditional frameworks restricting esoteric knowledge were motivated by problems such as these?


An addendum: It's also occurred to me that the lack of spirituality in postmodern politics may only be an outward appearance. Along with things like the "Magic Resistance" and the infernal rituals hosted at Catland Books in Brooklyn, I've heard multiple references in "progressive" circles to this book:

https://scriptus.gydja.com/the-book-of-sitra-achra-a-grimoire-of-the-dragons-of-the-other-side-n-a-a-218/

This grimoire of demonic magic specifically describes the powers it invokes as anti-thought and aimed at dissolving reality. If this is the spiritual framework underlying the above political movements, it's no wonder they want to keep it as private as they can.

[lukedodson]

I recognise the name of the Misanthropic Luciferian Order - the main guitarist/vocalist of the Swedish death-metal band Dissection was heavily involved, if I recall correctly. When I was quite immersed in that style of music as a teen, I remember reading interviews with him and thinking he was clearly batsh*t crazy - all this stuff about the dark gods dissolving the entire Cosmos. Very Plutonian. He had previously served a prison sentence for the random slaying of an Algerian man, and killed himself in 2006.

As I recently spoke to researcher William Ramsey for a podcast about this topic, something also struck me as being very reminiscent of the Order of Nine Angles, a genuinely bizarre and astonishingly influential Satanist group with links to neo-Nazism, Islamism, and various murders and terrorist attacks from the 90s up to the recent past. Sure enough, according to an article on the Spiritual Life website, "the MLO incorporated elements from the Order of Nine Angles, the Illuminates of Thanateros and Qliphothic Kabbalah." (https://slife.org/theistic-satanism/)

With all that in mind, it's interesting to hear that progressives are also getting into the MLO. Satanism seems to be an area where the extreme-right and the woke-left overlap...

[ecosophia]

This is a huge issue. On the one hand, yes, a vast amount of what's going on these days is a function of once-secret patterns of esoteric thinking getting splashed around in popular culture and inevitably misunderstood. That always happens to some extent in the twilight years of a civilization, as institutions break down or become hopelessly corrupt, but it's happened in our time to an unprecedented degree -- well, unprecedented in recorded history, at least. (If there's anything real behind the Atlantis legend, it would make sense of some details of that legend if something similar happened then, too.) It's also quite correct that traditional rules of occult secrecy were motivated by the desire to keep matches and dynamite out of the hands of careless children.

On the other -- well, demonolatry is another form of the same thing. It's for people who can't hack the true magic. You get people who want to practice magic but won't accept that it's about changing themselves rather than changing the world, or in some other way refuse the demands of the path; instead of doing the work themselves, they get other entities to do things for them.
Demons are always willing to do that, and equally willing to flatter and wheedle those who call on them, until they get the summoners into a vulnerable situation -- which they always do, being smarter than we are -- and start to tighten the screws.

Thus you always get an era of demonolatry in the wake of an era when occultism goes public. The original grimoires were what happened when some Christian priests who learned how to practice exorcism were unwilling to gain spiritual power through the hard but effective way of mystical practice, and settled for trying to get demons to do favors for them. In the same way, in the wake of the Rosicrucian era, you had the fad for grimoires in early modern Germany; in the wake of Lévi and the French occult revival, the era of diabolisme that inspired Huysman's Là-Bas; and now, in the wake of a genuine golden age of occultism in the US and Europe, we've got the usual era of demonolatry to scoop up the failures.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you think this is a Neptunian phenomena? Neptune breaks down boundaries, and is a planet associated with delusion and confusion, and it seems to me that given the nature of the planet, it would also rule occultism; so if occultism has shifted to a Neptunian phenomena, then it would follow that it would end up public, open, and a mess of misunderstanding and confusion...

I suppose this is a theme for meditation, isn't it?

[ecosophia]

Modern popular occultism is Neptunian. Notice the way it popped into being promptly after the discovery of Neptune in 1846 -- Spiritualism surfaces in 1848, Lévi publishes his first volume in 1854, and away we go. Occult lodges, by contrast, are Uranian -- they really became a major force in the runup to the discovery of Uranus in 1782 -- and folk magic is Saturnine and thus has been around most of forever. So, yes, the pattern we're discussing is Neptunian, but there are other ways of practicing occultism that don't suffer from the same kind of disastrous blowback.