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? 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. 

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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!*** 

Comments

[ecosophia]

1) Yes, it's normal. There's quite a range of common etheric effects from exercises like this one.

2) Venus, since she governs all green plants.

3) Franz Bardon's system, as given in Initiation into Hermetics and his other books, has an etheric focus. There aren't many others in English, though if you read German there's plenty of material in that language.

[stcathalexandria]

They were flying lighted drones over Philadelphia that spelled out "Abortion = Freedom" last night. It was supposed to get out the vote for the election. It made me sick to look at it. A thousand different things they could do with lighted drones and choosing that was some kind of choice.

[ecosophia]

An interesting speculation. Hmm.

[ivn66]

Excellent, thank you both.

[ecosophia]

Wim Hof's methods get brought up here every so often, so yes, I've heard of them. ;-) Cold running water purifies you etherically and it also helps strengthen and focus your will. Lots of cultures worldwide use it as a means of spiritual cleansing, so if that appeals to you, by all means.

Combust Hours of the Moon

[tunesmyth]

Happy Monday! Thanks as always for this forum.

I've been the Vivian Robson book on Electional Astrology that you linked here a couple of times. One of the factors in there which was previously unknown to me is that of "combust hours" of the moon-- a cycle of hours wherein the moon's energies lose their force. For those unfamiliar, the first 12 hours of a new moon, according to this way of thinking, are actually *not* useful for starting new things. The following 72 hours are fine, but then once again there is another 12 hour "combust" stretch. And so on, cycling through so that every 3.5 days, exactly the first seventh of the time is combust and thus less than ideal for Election purposes. I'd heard before--perhaps from you?-- that some consider the first visibility of the moon, rather than the actual New Moon, the best time to start something new place. This May account for it. (And for why some things that I attempted to start exactly on a new moon never got off the ground.)

(1) Is this something that shows up in Horary, Mundane, or other forms of astrology that you know of?

(2) Robson doesn't go into any details, but as it's called "combust", I'm guessing there is some kind of lunar timing system going on here similar to the planetary days and hours? Where the first 1/7 of the cycle is the "12 hours of the sun", perhaps, accounting for why it might be called "combust"? I'm just making a guess here. Do you know any more about it? Is it tied into lunar mansions (which I haven't gotten to yet)?

Re: Psychiatry and magic

[ecosophia]

From the occult point of view, the material plane is the plane of effects; the causes are all on higher planes. Thus the chemical imbalance in your brain, while quite real, isn't the source of the trouble; that's something on a higher plane. My advice remains the same. There are other things you can do in this life, and if magic has to wait until your next incarnation, that's simply the way it is.

[ecosophia]

I have no idea. You'd have to do experiments to find out.

[stcathalexandria]

What she is experiencing was one of my nightmares when I had children. Prayers incoming for her!

[ecosophia]

Delighted to see this -- a good classic delineation. No, I don't use AstroDienst -- I have an old copy of SolarFire, a good workmanlike horoscope program.

Re: weird question

[ecosophia]

Some people radiate nasty energies. The old word for such people was "witch." (It didn't mean "Goddess-worshipping Pagan" until a handful of 19th-century intellectuals redefined it.) Have you considered other forms of protective magic? Any good book on natural magic will give you plenty of options.

Re: Judson Exercise

[ecosophia]

You're the second person to ask that this week! (The other was in the Covid open post.) You'll find the instructions here.

[ecosophia]

Not that I've ever noticed.

Re: Ephemerides

[ecosophia]

Yes. Any ephemeris that gives the location of the Moon in the tropical zodiac is fine.

Re: CosDoc-Cosmoi

[ecosophia]

1) Yes -- and even in the Cosmos as a whole, what spins out along the angle of the Ring-Chaos simply becomes part of the basic substance of the Unmanifest.

2) The mage creates mesocosmoi -- cosmoi intermediate between himself and the Cosmos. (That's what a ritual is, for example.) The mystic aligns with the forces of the Cosmos. The occultist understands the tides and flows of the rings and rays so as to act in the opportune place at the opportune time.

3) Yep. We live in a far vaster and stranger world than our culture likes to pretend.

Re: Holy water

[ecosophia]

1) It's adapted from a consecration given by Eliphas Lévi.

2) Meditate on them!

[ecosophia]

Eclipses are always bad omens, but this one won't affect you unless it happens to be in aspect with something in your natal chart.

[(Anonymous)]

From the government's perspective, which is in this case trying to follow the natural inherent laws of accounting, charitable donations are just income that passed through your hands without crossing a taxability boundary. In terms of a figure-and-ground paradigm, this means the taxability is the figure and the other monetary flows are the ground.

If you want to choose another framing, where the pre-refund withholding is the ground and the refund is the figure, you should do so with the conscious knowledge that that's your choice of framing.

Recognizing which people and accidents are contributing to create your perceptions about figure and ground is, I imagine, one of the elements of freedom of mind.

Re: Combust Hours of the Moon

[ecosophia]

I have no idea where Robson got that. I've never seen it elsewhere. There may well be some kind of timing system involved, but it's not known to me.

[d_mekel]

I can't recall where I heard or read it, but it was in regards to suicide and reincarnation. If you commit suicide, you are reincarnated pretty quickly and have to continue the trials you already were on. Does that sound familiar or is written somewhere?

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting, among firearms aficionados, there are several guns that are half jokingly described to as having 'soul'. These firearms are usually designs that are built up with some hand fitting to make the individual parts work together.

Notably, the AK is put together from a box of parts mostly by feel using a hand operated press and a drill. Thus each AK is built up from one critical test gauge, with the rest of the process guided by eyeballing the straightness of the parts, and the feel of the individual parts pressing upon the others.

Recently domestic manufacturers have begun to use jigs to build up AKs with little human interaction other than placing the parts into the jig. Handling examples of these new firearms belies a more sterile feeling when manipulating them.

[ecosophia]

Not familiar at all. The teaching I learned was that people who commit suicide have to hang around until their normal time of death would have happened, and only then go on to the afterlife. It's very dull, and also fairly miserable.

[ecosophia]

That makes perfect sense to me. The few times I've had the chance to fire a genuinely handmade gun, it was like handling a living being.

Re: Holy water

[(Anonymous)]

I have been, that’s why I asked.

I think that there is some symbolism involving the sephiroth and alchemy in it, but I have not figured out a perfect symbolism yet.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, yes, they are definitely going to try to get much worse in the very near future. Fortunately, their time is coming to its close, so they won't be seeing much success from here on out. Soon enough, our ever-increasing disobedience to their self-conceived divinity will be more than they can even bear to contemplate. Since we impudently refused to play our assigned role as their worshipers, they will simply withdraw their "divine" blessings from us... and our world will suddenly improve considerably!

They will quickly find reality to be far too disobedient to their whims to go on paying any attention to it whatsoever -- let's face it, many of them already have. That's when they will turn fully inward in their uncontrollable rage and protective insularity. With their wagons then fully circled, they will go on cursing, killing, and summoning against their own exclusively. After all, we unworthies defiantly refused to play by their rules (based order).

For those of us on the outside with any interest in their bizarre antics as they implode, it will make for quite the spectacle. Hopefully, someone will document their denouement for posterity's sake, as there will be much to learn about the precise mechanisms by which magical blowback destroys those who foolishly dabble with demons, offend the oracles, and LARP the gods.

- Christophe