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]

I think you're onto something very important here. "Social justice," after all, has nothing to do with justice -- it's an ideology of hatred in which the practitioners claim that the virtue of their cause is so obvious that anything they do, no matter how sleazy or brutal, is justified because their victims are so bad. The Covid true believers screaming that anyone who didn't get vaccinated should be rounded up and put in camps were engaged in the same sort of thing: blind rage and hatred directed at socially approved targets. The craving for control is part of that, but I suspect another part is the toxic ideology of mandatory niceness that's been enforced so strictly in the corporate world: huge numbers of people are frantic for an opportunity to vent their suppressed rage and hatred, and social justice, Covid craziness, and the mania for curses are all opportunities to do that.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, and I think what you’re talking about may also help explain why this woke stuff is so incredibly popular among women. After all, it’s mostly women calling themselves feminists who complain about the “patriarchy” forcing women to be nice and submissive who then turn around and behave as though women being exclusionary, or refusing to accommodate people, or not just passively accepting what we are told are all mortal sins. Look how JK Rowling has been treated, among many other examples.

Modern feminists often blame men for all violence but in my experience women can be psychologically brutal and are just as prone to bullying behaviour. This fake social justice keyboard warrior stuff is the perfect outlet allowing women (and men too) to bully and abuse from a position of physical safety while still telling themselves they’re just being nice or being kind of being open minded or standing up for people. All the bullying is just “holding people accountable”. It’s honestly terrible.

It disappoints me and part of me will always be shocked by how pervasive this terrible and, yes, hateful ideology has spread even though I was pretty brainwashed by it when I was younger. I feel like faith in the Gods and study of philosophy and deeper spiritual and magical practice helped save me from it years ago now and yet I see so many spiritual people and occult practitioners falling deeper and deeper into it all the time. Their magic and faith and politics are all so entwined and that’s why I wondered about the role of blowback. I think this is going to get worse before it gets better as things socially get more and more tense. It’s going to go very badly if the magical resistance actually convinces a wide number of people that occultists can curse and/or kill using magic with seeming impunity.

I’m just glad this forum exists where I can say “hey cursing people and summoning demons actually isn’t super cool” without it being a super controversial statement.

[ecosophia]

Anybody who thinks that hierarchy and bullying are purely male phenomena has never watched an old-fashioned women's lodge in full spate. It's incredibly vicious -- and yes, social justice culture is a very close equivalent.

[(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