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. 

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!*** 

Comments

[ecosophia]

Not that I've ever heard of.

[ecosophia]

I don't recall ever encountering anyone who had that experience. It must be interesting!

Re: Amulet and herbs

[ecosophia]

Those would be perfectly suitable, since your goal is to burn through this situation and get out of it. You might also consider evoking an intelligence of fire and asking for advice and help.

[ecosophia]

It's quite simple. Increasing light exposure to the pineal gland increases mental focus and clarity and decreases the influence of instincts and the subconscious on conscious thought. Decreasing light exposure does the opposite. Your gods apparently think you need a very clear mind just now.

Re: multiple divinatory systesm

[ecosophia]

If you're going to use the Golden Section system, you need to be prepared to put one year of intensive work into the Sacred Geometry Oracle, since that's not just a divination system -- it's the core symbolic system around which the GS work revolves. If you want to focus on the tarot for now, my recommendation is that you set the Golden Section material aside for a year or so, and consider instead doing the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose material for that time; if you use the Sphere of Protection for your protective ritual, all the work you do in the FHR will be compatible with the GS work, and you'll be able to move through that promply and effectively when you take it up later.

[ecosophia]

I have no idea. How would you measure it?

Re: combustion

[ecosophia]

Ahem. I'm not a natal astrologer, and I have a deep-seated dislike of making a fool of myself by talking about something I haven't studied.

Re: Lunar eclipse

[ecosophia]

Just take it easy tomorrow and don't begin anything that matters. The inconjunct is an aspect of frustration, so if you start any projects under that aspect you'll end up frustrated and unable to complete them.

Re: Happy Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

1) So that came from Whare Ra! Thank you for this. I learned it from the Societas Rosicruciana in America (the other SRIA), which has it on their website. It's a nice crisp ritual.

2) At the Seeker grade there's a lot of flexibility, as you're expected to be -- well, Seeking. ;-) Simply plug in the SoP in the relevant place in the ritual, doing the simplest form to start with, and add in the elemental callings as you get to them. You should be sure to learn the whole ritual before you go on to the next grade, however.

[ecosophia]

Ahem. Yes, well, boys will be boys, or something like that.

Now you know why I stay strictly away from the online occult scene.

[ecosophia]

Several reputable biomedical researchers have suggested, based on the way that vaccinated people just keep on getting sick over and over again, that the vaccines (or at least the mRNA ones) can cause immunodeficiency comparable to AIDS, though with different specific symptoms. (The vaccines appear to mess with a different set of T cells.) People who talk about that and aren't adequately careful about their terms sometimes oversimplify it as "the vaccines cause AIDS."

[ecosophia]

Thanks for reposting this!

1) If you have access to it, my book The Druidry Handbook gives a great deal of practical advice on meditation; until I have time to write a book specifically on Western meditation, that's the volume I'd recommend. It should answer most or all of your questions.

2) The most important thing to keep in mind while studying any of these writers is to take it slow, a sentence at a time. There's much more packed into each word than most modern writers can manage. Go slow and think through everything they say.

Re: Pondering Trump and the Orkneys connection

[ecosophia]

That's a fascinating speculation. Beyond that, no thoughts in particular.

[ecosophia]

It is indeed.

[(Anonymous)]

We have a total lunar eclipse over Aus tonight - is this usually a good or a bad omen astrologically speaking? What does it usually symbolise, anything personally I should look for?

Re: SOP on a plane

[ecosophia]

You can certainly do it on the plane; I've done this quite often.

Positive energy en route!

[(Anonymous)]

If time is more flexible on the inner planes, then is it possible the collapse in ethics was related somehow to The Magic Resistance's work, even though that happened years later?

[ecosophia]

Fra' Lupo got there ahead of me, but there's much, much more. Joscelyn Godwin has written quite a few good books on the subject -- I recommend especially Harmonies of Heaven and Earth. You might also look into older books on music theory, and anything you can find about the monochord -- the instrument that was used until modern times to teach music theory using geometry:

Re: Lunar eclipse marks 8 billion people

[ecosophia]

I tend to agree with Brendhelm. Given the sharp rise in crude death rates in every country that's gone whole hog for a certain something or other, we may not get there yet -- or ever.

Re: Observation

[ecosophia]

They weren't posers.

Certain kinds of magical and spiritual workings require vestments, but serious occultists put those on when they start their work and take them off to put on ordinary clothes when they're done. When you see somebody who goes capering around in funny clothing all the time, you're safe in assuming that they're mostly interested in getting attention, not in anything more serious.

Re: One more geomancy question

[ecosophia]

I generally do so, but your mileage may vary.

[(Anonymous)]

In July's open post on the main blog, Florida Druid brought up Scott Alexander's post about the difficulty of getting an AI to learn to distinguish outcomes one would have actually wanted from outcomes one wouldn't have wanted, in situations where the AI might find it easier to learn to distinguish outcomes one might have been fooled into wanting from outcomes one might have been fooled into not wanting:

The basic problem is that we want to teach it to accomplish a particular goal (e.g., “guard a diamond from potential thieves”) but we’re really training it to “get warm fuzzies / avoid cold pricklies from the human trainers” instead. If the easiest way is to collude with a would-be thief to trick the trainers into thinking the diamond is still there, that may be what we get.

But trying to train or select people to have ethical beliefs has the same problem. Instead of giving your training examples or screening tests to an "alien" intelligence, you're giving the examples or tests to inborn human nature. Human nature is in fact plenty "alien" itself, once you really see the discrepancies between the things it's doing and the things an untrained introspection might have told you to expect it to be doing. During the formation of a person's character, the person sometimes experiences rewards (intrinsic or extrinsic) for supporting an ethical principle. At those times, what features of the ethical principle is the person's brain picking out as the things to build up a commitment to?

My working model is that some people's brains tend more to build up commitments in terms of an underlying structure of principles of morally-valent justification and meta-justification. The features those brains pay more attention to are tests for whether or not a principle derives support from particular other abstract principles. Other people's brains tend more to build up commitments in terms of particular morally-valent categories of people, and in terms of the actions that mark one as a member or non-member or ally or opponent of those morally-valent categories. The features those brains pay more attention to are tests for whether or not supporting a principle would tend to cause one to be positioned as a member or ally or opponent of one of those categories.

The thing about these two sets of features is that it's hard to distinguish how much a person's brain has set up their commitments in terms of the one set of features versus the other, even to the person themselves. As long as the same social groups stay positioned as supporting the same principles, it's hard for someone whose commitments are social in nature to imagine supporting different principles. They just voice support for the principles and imagine that they're actually supporting the principles, rather than doing some sort of abstract social mimicry, because they never had any experience in terms of which the two motives could be distinguished. It's only when the person's brain receives visceral confirmation that the social groups have changed their principles that the person gradually finds betraying their old "principles" and voicing new ones to be the most natural thing in the world. And in the process, they also start finding it natural to join up into coalitions to shove the actually principled people out of power; left to their own devices, after a few key swings of principles, they've made sure that every source of political and social power is only held by people whose only deep intuitions about the idea of "principledness" are in terms of how voicing principles relates to motivating coalitions.

And, indeed, sometimes those power-holders are sociopaths. Like the thief in the example analogy, who is colluding with the AI to put up a picture of a diamond in front of the surveillance camera, a sociopath can consciously collude with a coalition's social reward processing to make them feel good about taking the right side while indulging their drive to directly or vicariously exercise punitive power. They don't even have to be sociopaths; a normopath who's developed their intuitions enough in that direction can do the same thing without having to engage in any conscious bad faith.

This problem would be so much more morally convenient to think about if the people who were actually capable of principledness could be better trusted to pick the right principles, but inconveniently, they're comparably fallible in a different direction. Usually it's the socially oriented people who push an impractical principle out of power. And sometimes there are pathologies built using the worse aspects of both kinds of people. Ultimately I suppose the two kinds of fallibility are instances of the same thing, whatever that is. Something for those who like conceptual alchemy to investigate, maybe.

I don't understand how to relate to a world where human nature is like this. There's a bit of poetry somewhere that goes something like, if you are a human, be good; if you are a beast, just be beautiful, with the implication that if you try to be good like a human you'll just hurt yourself and give people false semblances of safety (like half-dog half-wolves who confusedly lash out to instinctively seek dominance in their cohabitating humans' moments of weakness), without actually producing enough global benefit for it to be worth it. If I can't tell someone who uses the social style of justification to be good, what can I tell them? It feels like degrading them to the status of an animal. But then sometimes I have to do things that feel like degrading someone who uses the conceptual style of justification to the status of a malfunctioning robot. Sometimes it feels like I myself am only barely grasping what humanity would even mean in the metaphor, and having to purposefully fall short rather than become overextended and collapse and do worse damage in the long run. And perhaps that kind of knowing acknowledgement of limitations contains the first adumbration of something essential to the next stage.

I have read that these considerations relate to the distinctions between Robert Kegan's developmental stages 3, 4, and 5, in which successive layers of motivation that were previously involuntary subjects become voluntary objects.

[illyria2001]

Ok, that makes much more sense!

[ecosophia]

Between us, my wife and I own about two thousand books. Of those only a small number are rare or even slightly unusual, and no, I don't keep books I don't think I'll use again. I haven't made arrangements for my papers yet, though it's on the agenda -- I did some research before the Covid business disrupted everything, and it's on my get-to list.

Here in Rhode Island, btw, every library in the state is part of a single library system and you can borrow anything anywhere and have it sent to your local library. Nobody has to run the ILL system -- you do it through your library card account online. The same is also true in Maryland, where I lived until 2017.

Re: viewing lunar eclipse

[ecosophia]

Not at all. I've watched many of them, beginning when I was a child.