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? I've decided to trace, as far as I can, my own occult lineage in photos. We're still tracing Juliet Ashley's end of the lineage. Two weeks ago I posted an image of her fourth teacher, Arthur Edward Waite, the Golden Dawn alumnus who passed onto her the rituals that became the foundation for the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose. Waite, in turn, got his knowledge from the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Last week I posted an image of one of these, the redoubtable William Wynn Westcott; this is Westcott's partner and rival in the project, Samuel Liddell Mathers. Another Freemason with a passion for the occult, and like Westcott a genuine scholar and mage, Mathers didn't have the organizational skills to keep the order together once Westcott stepped down from the leadership, and the Golden Dawn promptly blew itself to pieces in the squabbles that followed. Mathers remained in charge of one of the fragments thereafter, and he and his branch of the order will appear again once I get into some of the other ends of my lineage.

PayPal tip jar link

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 link above to access my online tip jar. (Dreamwidth is having trouble with crosslinks to other sites these days, thus the absence of the usual button.) 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.

***This Magic Monday is now closed--as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Current Mood: productive

Page 1 of 4 << [1] [2] [3] [4] >>

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

From: (Anonymous)

I post here regularly but didn’t want to leave a name on this one. The events described have been stuck in my throat for about the past seven Magic Mondays.
For practice background, I just began doing the course laid out in Paths of Wisdom four and a half weeks ago. On the recommendation of a more experienced occult practitioner I’ve also joined BOTA and begun its course, following work with the Sphere of Protection that began last December and included Cabala. Toward the end of my time with that routine, things were culminating with periods of alternating tension and release followed by an opening out into something. I’m not good with picking what details to include in my records so it’s not fully clear what was happening; it would be pretty hard to put into words anyway.
This, in turn, was preceded by about two years’ meditative work in the revived Kashmiri Shaiva tradition an various other experiments with religion and mysticism.
Not long ago I got promoted to a bar position at work and experienced a kind of clumsiness and felt dysfunction—with long strings of things going wrong—that I am not used to. I brushed it off as adjustment stress, until I noticed that whenever one guy I work with was present, not only were all the staff intimidated by him, but he had a tendency to take out his frustration on the young, nice, and naive. He is smarter and older than all the management, and I was his target type—unsuspecting of malice and tending to assume I’m responsible when anything around me goes wrong—until what I’m about to describe came about. It felt as if, since the promotion, a powerful spotlight were shining on me and every mistake I made. I assumed this was my own projection.
This man—let’s call him Jed—has a peculiar effect on naive young women, where they just seem to go out of whack after any significant interaction with him; and I’ve observed him tell the individuals involved—and others who might be threats to his job if he got on their bad side—blatant lies. Naive young men, on the other hand, just think he’s the coolest thing ever. I’m a gay man with not much work experience, so while I don’t fall into either of those categories, I share some characteristics with both.
Among the things I started to get scrutinized for was breaking glassware; it would just slip out of my hands or I’d bump into it in the most unexpected ways in the midst of trying to complete a self-imposed huge list of tasks I was allowed to believe was reasonable. The more anxiety I’d have about this, the more it would happen, the worse Jed’s attitude would be with me, the more in-the-right he’d seem, and the more incompetent I’d feel. At some point (I have to wear an earpiece) he forgot I was on mic and started blaming me unfairly over radio for an unfinished task to an impressionable supervisor, who has say over who gets laid off during the autumn staff cuts. (Previously he’d put picture in Slack of a dangerous mistake along these lines, in what I think was an attempt to get me fired). That was the last straw; I went upstairs and told him, without sass, that I hadn’t had time for it with everything else that’d been going on. All of a sudden his demeanor switched, like night and day, and he got very nice and pacifying—I’d never confronted him before.
On the same day or a proximate one—unfortunately I haven’t been keeping much record of all this—I was drinking a beer and venting to another co worker, and right when I got to something like the phrase, “…lets all of the blame fall on me,” he, several stools away, very slowly turned his head and looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
At my work employees get enormously charged with etheric energy during specific high pressure moments, when there are thick crowds. This is quite palpable and makes it hard to think straight. At these times I dimly observed what looked like Jed offloading his accreted “tension cloud” onto staff around him. I am among the most naturally absorbent there and realized that, if my observation was correct, I had been getting a large portion of his vented gunk. It clicked that over decades of doing what he does for a living, and trying to get the upper hand in restrictive life circumstances, he’d become expert at seeing into and dissimulating people, as well as manipulating psychic energy flows, in enterprise. Meanwhile I plop down in the midst of his realm carrying the energy of intensive daily magical practice, which he’d probably never encountered before; of course he would find my vibes threatening.
I then wrote a critical, but honest and unincendiary review of him that I knew he, the establishment’s owner, and management would see and left my name on it—something he must have thought was beyond me. This changed things. The tables turned and all of a sudden the incompetent feeling lifted, I felt overwhelming confidence, and the scrutiny stopped. Jed fell ill, and when he came back to work, he remarked that he hadn’t left his house in three days.
Concomitantly I felt a potent sense of freedom to act and expansion of self, as well as power; it felt like I had the level of influence he’d had previously. I wanted to use it positively; staff often come in recovering from nights out, on little sleep, or both, so a little deliberate presence, let alone assertiveness, goes a long way. I have to try hard to resist getting carried away with the feeling, when I do have the upper hand—the struggle between us is ongoing, and we have whole series’ of subtle interactions every time we work together. It’s exhausting. If I let down my guard I’ll feel the same diffident, off-kilter state beginning to descend; during shift change, for instance, when I’m about to get off and Jed’s just coming in, I’ll find myself spilling or breaking something when the team synergy and workflow up until then had proceeded without the least hiccup. Whenever he comes in, the whole vibe changes. I can’t see him altering his MO after 20 years.
At least one other person at work I’ll call Ted, who’s in a different department and exercises a similar kind of hypnotic influence over those around him, has done something similar to me (getting everyone, including myself, to suddenly see me in a negative light) in the past, when I worked with him. I didn’t know what it was at the time. He reminds me of a younger Jed, and I broke whatever he was doing in the same way, by talking about it out loud. The organization’s chart has a combust mercury. I felt him acting up again today as of late, I’ve finally felt comfortable prattling with him like I do others. Today I felt a switch and it seemed ill-received, followed by a sensation like a film of diffident queasiness descending over my experience of the world. His attacks, if that’s what they are, feel more depressive and not as much like a clumsy off-kilterness—and there are different but related reasons why he’d have it out for me. Right after I went home I did the banishing pentagram ritual—the feeling left. So I cast a long overdue geomancy chart under Chashmodai on “am I being psychically attacked?” Puer in the first and eigth houses, passing to the tenth. I could not have gotten a clearer confirmation of my conclusions after weeks of feeling it out. Several other figures translate and I’ll have to sus out what they’re doing, but that image alone hit me like a slap in the face. Is this seriously happening??
For the question--I have now been doing the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram for a little over the month, and am having trouble telling whether I am left more open when I go to the work on days I do the invoking form. Is it equally protective? Also, how do you maintain power once you have it? There is a sense of the faucet being turned on and off. And my biggest concern--how do you avoid getting carried away with it and thwarting yourself?

From:

ecosophia

First, yes, this kind of thing happens all the time. Seriously, All. The. Time. It's normal, and in societies less clueless than ours, it's recognized and everyone knows how to deal with it.

Second, at this point I'd recommend going to the banishing version of the LRP every day and adding in the Middle Pillar exercise. That will strengthen and protect you considerably. Once you've got that down, start doing the Rose Cross ritual once a week as well. No, the invoking form of the LRP doesn't protect you in the same way. Maintaining power -- well, that takes a lot of practice, and one month is barely a start. As for not getting carried away, here again, practice!