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.

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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!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello and thanks for taking questions like this.

I have been practicing geomancy, using your book as a guide, for a few years now. During that time my marriage fell apart in the most horrible way and I'm now going through a terrible divorce. I originally got into geomancy to help navigate through difficult times in my marriage and to get a second opinion.

Looking back through my notebook, I noticed a curious pattern. When I asked questions specific to keeping my family together, I got mostly unambiguous positive answers. My questions were all formulated with a clear "If I do XYZ will it lead to keeping family together/rekindling romance/happy relationship with wife?" format. Sometimes I'd get no for an answer and I wouldn't do it, but mostly I got very clear YES! answers, and then I would do the thing I was asking about.

Well, none of the positive results I was after ever happened, despite the very encouraging readings. In fact the opposite happened, we never got better despite my efforts, and my wife turned on me viciously. This pattern of 180 degree wrong answers isn't repeated in other area, and in fact some things geomantic readings revealed have been quite astonishingly revealed to be accurate, including things to do with my wife. I'm not an expert, but I feel competent much of the time.

So my question is, what the hell? What is going on where my readings are generally useful and accurate, except in one area, where they were totally 180 degrees wrong? I don't think I misled myself with bad questions or biased interpretations. It's like some force messed with my readings on this one subject, consistently, for years. I'm trying to question myself on this to see if I'm missing something and need to make changes in how I do divination.

That's something that happens to some people -- always in a context where strong emotions are involved. I know two people who can't get accurate readings about employment; both of them have strong emotional patterns that get stomped on by questions dealing with getting or keeping a job. In both cases, too, it's the same pattern you had: seemingly favorable readings that never pan out. Since geomancy has had to be reconstructed form texts -- the living tradition in the Western world was broken off at the end of the Renaissance -- I don't know why this happens, but it's clearly an issue to watch out for.

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.

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

Magic Monday

Misleading divination

Re: Misleading divination

Re: Misleading divination

Re: Misleading divination