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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.

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

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Start with the classic prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, which you can find here:

https://aleteia.org/2022/05/11/prayer-to-st-michael-the-archangel/

If you belong to one of the sacramental Christian churches, the St. Michael rosary prayer is also very traditional:

https://7sorrowsrosaries.com/pages/the-saint-michael-rosary-prayer-chaplet

Beyond that, you'd want to talk to a priest or minister who's comfortable with special devotions to saints, and get some advice from them. Most of the sacramental churches have plenty of resources along these lines.

That suggests too many tacky jokes -- not least since it would then require the measuring device to be an onanometer...

This is about the Essenes, and trying to forgive or whether or not to forgive. And do certain persons even deserve forgiveness?
There is a person. He is my brother really, same mother same father, 10 years younger.

And he is a murderer. He was almost convicted 35 years ago, and would have been if the lawyers hadn’t cleverly split the cases, confused the jury, amd jave the, questioning: who was the actual murderer? But later they closed that loophole (for other cases), in general by refusing to split such cases.

In my family we all denied it happened. My brother wasn’t the one, he was just there by accident, in with the wrong crowd etc. And for the early years I subscribed to that belief, and for the entire 35 years, since the first murder, the remainder of the family has. And it has corrupted them.

After possibly doing something evil such as murder, whether accident or intentional, a person has a choice they can either decide what they did was wrong, a bad accident or whatever and try to make amends or be betyer for the rest of their life. Or they can double down and refuse to accept they ever did anything wrong, and become more and more of what they already are.

I still supported my brother and believed in him even though he did many things I did not agree with, I forgave him for them.
Ten years after the first murder, my brother murdered my best friend (out of jealousy of me, plus other reasons), who was working for him, while I was away at a writer’s conference in New Orleans.
I am not 100% sure my brother murdered him, and it wasn’t till about 10 or 13 years later that it finally clicked that he probably did.
But even if he did not physically murder, and he probably did, he was responsible for his death.
My brother and my friend, his name was LJ, he was born with an adumbrated arm, no hand, I believe it was caused by Thalidomide, but I am not sure, LJ and my brother had a dispute over work. My brother brought 2 thugs to meet LJ, and they all beat him. This much my brother acknowledges. But here the story diverges.
According to my brother after beating LJ , he dropped LJ on Granada Avenue about 1:15 pm, LJ got out and stumbled down the railroad tracks. Then apparently lay on them, and was run over by a train about 1:45 pm. Judged a suicide.
But LJ would never commit suicide. He strongly believed God would send him to Hell and the devil..
But every time I had looked up the train death in records I couldn’t find it and couldn’t figure why, until 13 years later, I found the death not at 1:45 pm but 1:45 am, the next day. And then it hit me, this was consistent with the previous murder, where they had beaten a man to death for more than 12 hours.
I went on to read there were a lot of suicides on that track for about a month or two in that same time period.
A few years later, my brother’s ex suicided. (They were always fighting over their son.) I knew her. She was very feisty and willful, and she had 3 children she loved and I definitely don’t believe she would suicide.
I came into hard times in 2008. My brother offered me a computer tech job In his business, I didn’t want to take it, but the woman I was living with, thought it would be a good idea, so I did. (I had shielded her from my brother and his darker side.)
I thought my brother’s business was a real business but it was really only a front for a bunch of illegal businesses, a sort of money laundering. And although there was work there was no real concern with making money. My brother’s friends or associates were all thugs or con men or abusers themselves.
But my brother did have employees, real employees, about 25 of them. It began to seem to me that the only real reason for this business aside from the laundering, was for the pleasure of tormenting the employees.
He paid every week, at 5 pm Friday. Banks closed at 6. But every single employee that came in was shortchanged. If the employee had earned 500 he was perhaps paid 350. Of course he/she argued, there were words, very often the arguing lasted very long. This delayed the payment to the other employees. Most of them didn’t get paid early enough to make it to the bank before six.
Listening to the employees scream argue, yell and howl, was like listening to the sinners being tormented by demons in Hell. I really couldn’t take it. I began going out for a walk for an hour or two. But my brother revelled in the torment.
I have always been a person who forgives farily easy. And it has caused me much trouble in life. I have forgiven and forgotten what has been done to me many times in life and then the same person does the same thing to me again, and then again.
Nevertheless I am old now and have been forgiving every person I know, every person I think has wronged me, as well as myself.
I have found I have to do it over and over again, with the difficult people. That what I thought was complete forgiveness was incomplete. As if there are many persons in my personality and some forgave and some did not. Mostly it is my mother I have difficulty with. I believe she was a true psychopath. My father was kind and loving and he could forgive and forget anyone and anything if you gave him five minutes, but he had a terrible temper, and if he caught me within five minutes. I would receive a terrible beating. I do not really forgive that, but I have long ago forgiven him.
Anyway the point of all this. How do you forgive a person like my brother? More importantly: Should you forgive? I probably could but should I? That is a real sticking point. I am in no danger from him now. I do not live near him. But it is partly that the family made excuses for him, forgave him, not just the worst but perhaps even the more trivial, that allowed him to become what he is.
And so it seems he should not be forgiven, we should never have forgiven him. And then he might not have become what he did, or if he did, might not have got away with as much as he has.
So, can it be right not to forgive someone as a corrective? Or as a protective of oneself or others? (He hurt my son and some others because I allowed him to be close to us.).
But sometimes I think he was defective from the start, a psychopath, like my mother, from 2 years old, from the very beginning and it did not matter what we did?
Can that also be true? And if true, should I forgive? And if I don'[t or shouldn't forgive how should I deal with it?
I am having trouble with this.

Okay, data point for you... the same thing happens to me; in my case it's questions about personal relationships. Yes, this is something I tend to freak out about regularly. I sit and stew about this or that relationship and get myself all worked up into tizzies and snits. The difference is, my witnesses and judges give me unfavorable readings, and when I disregard them and go ahead and do the thing anyway, everything always turns out okay. And yes, other readings regarding issues about which I don't have strong emotional reactions, they always turn out more or less spot-on. Weird.

The East Indians, I think, talk of both sheaths and bodies within. Frawley speaks of three bodies — physical, astral, and causal — in Indian philosophy; Gurdjieff speaks of one more, the Divine Body.
In occult philosophy (I’m just starting on The Occult Philosophy Workbook), how many bodies do they speak of?
Is the etheric body equivalent to the astral body; and if not, would they both have channels?

Thanks for your help,

E.S.

Thank you. I hadn't seen the "classic prayer to St. Michael the Archangel" before. Those words are incredible - very much capturing the spirit I've been feeling these past couple years. I will work with that - thanks!

Archdruid,

Which planet corrisponds to the will?
To clear mindedness?
And to concentration?

I was thinking sun, mercury, and Saturn. Any thoughts?

Hmm! Thanks for this -- a useful data point.

There are many ways of sorting out the subtle bodies. In the one I use, we have three bodies -- a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body -- and a mental sheath, which will be a mental body when we've finished evolving it. The etheric and astral body are not the same, and the etheric body has channels of the kind I'm discussing; the astral body has its own structures, which are different.

These are not questions anyone else can answer for you. You, and you alone, can decide whether it's appropriate to forgive him, or better to simply acknowledge what he was and what he did, and let go of whatever emotional burdens you picked up from being around him.

Mars is the will, the Sun is mental clarity, and yes, Saturn is concentration.

This is a question I've given some thought to, and one complicating factor as I see it is that in traditional societies, once you passed your rite of passage, everyone treated you as the new category (even if a bit provisionally - being a newly minted "man" was not the same as a more established one, but it wasn't a child). In a society like ours that lacks common standards, you might run into the problem of celebrating the adultness of your child, and then him or her being treated like a child by neighbors, employers, the government, and so forth.

That being said, judging by my own life and other folks I know, a big part seems to be taking responsibility for your own decisions, especially big, irreversible ones. In my own case, I didn't feel much like a grown-up until I joined the army against my parents' wishes, but after doing so, I've related to them (and the rest of life) as much more of an adult.

I'm not sure where exactly occultism comes in here, though, other than a handy storehouse of rituals and a path for taking spiritual responsibility for yourself.

Lastly, I hesitate to bring this up because it is so divorced from modern life (with good reason!), but a book I've mentioned a few times on here before, The One-Eyed God by Kris Kershaw, argues among other things that Odin is the Norse version of an Indo-European God who was the leader of the coming-of-age warbands that seem to have been a feature of Indo-European society and of which you see reflexes in such diverse places as the berserkers, the Spartan Krypteia, Indian myths, and Celtic Bardic schools. Roughly, the idea is that adolescents went through a phase of being outcasts from normal society in which they learned what they needed to know to be adult men in their tribe, which included fighting and religious lore. At the end of this phase, they got reintegrated and got to be normal, adult members of the tribe and they put the wildness behind them.

Assuming you don't want your children to go steal from your neighbors and kill people, some of the potentially transferable ideas seem to be:
1) Flagrantly breaking unbreakable rules: These groups would sneak around and raid and kill and such like. The point back then was that adult men in the tribe might have to do these things in war, and so you had to get past the "follow the rules because you were told to" approach and instead learn to decide when to follow rules and when to break them.
2) Learning to be a part of a non-familial group: There are different social dynamics in being a follower, comrade, or leader, and these groups helped young men learn those.
3) Learning the lore, rituals, and other things needed for religious practice: I suspect this was a necessary counter-balance to the first point. If you're going to start being expected to make decisions on a firmer basis than "because someone told me to", you need a better understanding of your place in the cosmos.

Anyhow, again, all of that is likely more anthropological than occult, and might all be stuff you've encountered before, but hopefully, something spurs some thoughts or further investigation.

Cheers,
Jeff

The only thing that comes immediately to mind is that in February of 2012, Neptune entered Pisces with Uranus in Aries and moribund Pluto in Capricorn. The last time it did this was in 1848, with Uranus also in Aries and still-undiscovered Pluto in Aries as well. A lot of utopian fantasies and longstanding systems breaking down, and numerous revolutions in that period as well.

Worth noting that Neptune entered Aries "for good" on April 14, 1861... almost exactly when the US Civil War started.

I don't think Neptune in Pisces alone could be causing all that, but it may be a contributory factor.

I've always had claustrophobia, for as long as I can remember. There's nothing in my life which suggests I should have this fear, but it's hardwired into my personality for some reason, and it's especially bad if I'm feeling cold. Recently, at work, I had to grab something from a walk in freezer, which was extremely cramped because it was overfilled as a result of a mistake on the most recent order, and had a flash of what felt like a memory.

I can clearly tell that it was not part of my current life, but the memory was of being locked in a small and very full walk in fridge. The fear and cold were vivid, in a very different way from daydreaming normally feels to me, much more like a memory.

a) Does this sound like a past life memory to you?

b) If that is a past life memory, what kind of factors could cause a past life memory to spontaneously surface like this?

I have no way of knowing whether it's a past life memory or not. You can determine that by keeping the imagery in mind, and seeing if any other images surface that seem to be connected with it. If it's a past life memory, any number of things could cause it to surface; a really traumatic death the last time around can leave behind such memories, for example.

Good point, new adepts don't follow neither internal nor external ethics.

I see ethics everywhere, in every system, I see ethics in the XX Tarot card too:

If you change the way you view and value things, things that were dead for you will start to become alive.

besides there is XI card and VII has some sort of discipline, XIV too

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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Magic Monday

Re: Way of the Warrior

no subject

Forgiveness and the Essenes, Not exactly magic, but the power of relations, and excising it

Re: Misleading divination

Re: Channels

Re: Way of the Warrior

planetary correspondence

Re: Misleading divination

Re: Channels

Re: Forgiveness and the Essenes, Not exactly magic, but the power of relations, and excising it

Re: planetary correspondence

Re: Germanic Astronomy and Neglected Occultism

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject