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. Three 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. Over the last two weeks I posted two of those founders, and here's the third, usually neglected figure in that lineage, Moina Mathers. She was the sister of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, author of Creative Evolution. A capable occultist as well as a talented artist, she wads the first person initiated into the Golden Dawn, became one of its leading members, married Samuel Mathers, and remained the head of one of the surviving branches of the Order until her death in 1928. She was an extremely influential figure in early 20th century occultism, and several other lines we'll be tracing lead back to her.

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:  PayPal for now, but that'll be replaced by a couple of other options shortly. 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. See you next week!***

Comments

Animal posession

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

Are demons able to posess non-human animals? I know you've said how our ability to contact the demonic realm only comes from mistakes made by the human race, possibly in Lemuria many millenia ago, but two things stand out from this:

1) if we reincarnate from animal bodies to human ones, then back again, do demons retain the ability to contact and affect us?

2) In the Bible, the demon(s) Legion is driven out into a herd of swine, who then drown themselves. There are other instances in holy books and general folk tales of animals becoming possessed as well.

The reason I thought of this was because I was listening to a podcast where someone's animals appeared to become possessed by a demonic entity residing on a farm. The pigs were the first, and worst affected, becoming seemingly consumed with a bloodthirsty fury overnight. After the animals were put down, toxicological and microbiological causes were ruled out.

Humans generally seem to be alarmingly similar to pigs in many ways (such as the fact we can accept their organs and blood as transplants, human flesh is supposed to taste like pork and we can get many more diseases from them than other cloven-hooved animals) The fact that several cultures explicitly prohibit pork consumption, and by proxy, keeping pigs (as pigs have little value aside from their meat), makes me think that there is some uncomfortable connection between humans and swine back in our genetic heritage, more so than just the practical measures of preventing animal-borne disease. (And therefore, eating pork is effectively a form of cannibalism)

A friend who worked on a pig farm said that pigs have disturbingly 'human' eyes, and apparently bear grudges and have a far more spiteful nature than all the other farm animals he's worked with, though I did comment to him that maybe that's just because they are intelligent enough to hate being on farms more than other farm animals...

Mr. Crow

Re: Animal posession

[ecosophia]

Yes, under some circumstances, animals can be obsessed or possessed by demonic entities, though it usually takes human beings meddling with demons to bring that about. Pigs are more vulnerable than other animals, and there may be an uncomfortable reason for that; there's some evidence that the boundaries between species are far less rigid than current biology likes to admit, and hybrids between very distantly related species are rare but they do happen. There's an interesting theory, stabilization theory, that accounts for sudden jumps in the evolutionary record by way of cross-species mating -- and the scientist who's proposed stabilization theory argues that there's good evidence that our species came into being from a mating between a female bonobo and a male pig...

Re: Animal posession

[(Anonymous)]

Was he the original male chauvinist pig!

—Princess Cutekitten

Re: Animal posession

[ecosophia]

Funny.

I don't know if you've ever been around boars. They'll mate with anything concave, including auto tailpipes. So a point could be made...

Re: Animal posession

[(Anonymous)]

Pig and a monkey had a child mm hmm
Pig and a monkey had a child mm hmm
Pig and a monkey had a child
and it conjured demons from the other side
Pig and an monkey had a child mm hmm

-for the Burl Ives fans

Re: Animal posession

[(Anonymous)]

Woah! I've joked for years that humans are the result of aliens cross-breeding wild hogs with apes, but maybe I was actually onto something! (Minus the aliens) I'd never heard of stabilisation theory, thanks for the link. Do you reckon it could be behind some of the hybrid cryptids? You touched on hybrid creatures in your book Monsters, and whilst many may indeed have a supernatural origin, some seem to be just very weird mixes of a few extant species, and many have been reported for centuries. It would also explain why they seemingly appear out of nowhere and then disappear, and why a permanent breeding population would not need to exist. There's a half-explored field of quantum biology, where evolution comes on in pulses and leaps, rather than the slow, progressive model which is taught in schools. Based on how bacteria and viruses evolve, the quantum model seems to be far more accurate, and would make far more sense from an evolutionary perspective, to evade a predator/prey's defences more suddenly.

And by the way, the farm in question apparently had a coven of witches (the original, curse-slinging kind) for many decades, who raised a demon there, so... yeah. Human meddling.

Mr. Crow

Re: Animal posession

[ecosophia]

1) Your joke may be closer to the truth than most people realize, though I doubt aliens had anything to do with it. Boars are astonishingly sex-crazed even by male mammal standards, and bonobos are legendary for similar reasons, and, um, interspecies mating is tolerably common...



Besides, you have to admit that knowing that human beings are descended from a cross between swine and apes makes more sense of our species than just about anything else...

2) That makes perfect sense of the whole situation.

Re: Animal posession

[(Anonymous)]

Gurdjieff made claims about interspecies mating in All & Everything. I figured he was just trying to be extremely offensive; human females with various species. Maybe not.

Some years ago, my mom kept a pet banty hen. Once when I came to visit the little thing turned its back to me and raised its butt, etc. My mom, in all innocence, wondered why she was acting that way, and that she'd never seen her do that before. I figured it must have been a long time since the little banty hen had seen a rooster.