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 (or lack of same)? At this point I've traced Juliet Ashley's lineage back as far as photos and documentation extend. John Gilbert's other main teacher, Rev. Matthew William Shaw aka Rhodonn Starrus, is a tougher proposition. Born in Pennsylvania, he became a Universalist minister, serving in a church in the Allentown, PA area.  In 1952 he and two other ministers of the Universalist Church, Revs. Omar Zasluchy and Owen Symanski, left the church to protest the upcoming merger between their denomination and the Unitarian Church. (They believed that the Unitarians planned on taking over the congregations,  churches, and bank accounts, and then discarding every element of Universalist teaching and tradition; as it turned out, they were right.) In 1952, the three of them were duly consecrated as bishops by Bishop Robert Monroe of the Liberal Catholic Church, and founded the Universal Gnostic Church (UGC). Rev. Shaw had already founded the Modern Order of Essenes as a healing order associated with his church, and took it with him into the UGC. In 1972 he relocated to the Boulder, CO area where he became a friend and associate of Dr. Juliet Ashley, and received initiation into the orders she headed -- the Order of Spiritual Alchemy, the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Ancient Order of Druids in America -- while she became active in the Modern Order of Essenes and the Universal Gnostic Church.  John Gilbert described him as a gifted teacher but a strict taskmaster, who demanded the best from his students and usually got it. 

I have yet to find a photo of the man, or accurate information on his birth and death dates -- I gather from what John told me that he died sometime in the 1980s. I have also been unable to find much of anything about Bishop Robert Monroe of the LCC -- there were plenty of schisms in the LCC's history, and he apparently ended up on the wrong side of one of them, so he's just a name in a few old lists at this point. I hope to be able to get more information on him, on Matthew Shaw, and on the early history of the UGC as things proceed. 

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. 

With that said, have at it!  

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I asked the question last week that got that answer, to the effect that you need to do a lot more than the basics to get power. The thing is, I’m doing the course in Paths of Wisdom verbatim. I’m not very far into it at all though I’m putting a lot of effort into being precise with the practices. It’s that plus a daily planetary ritual, with the beginning BOTA material thrown in. It ends up being probably a little less than two hours a day, not counting affirmations. I also might add that I bought a Jupiter talisman from Chris Warnock; I haven’t even consecrated it yet though I do have a relationship with Jupiter through a particular love of his energy, natal chart factors, and my weekly invocation of, and offerings to, him, which are very similar to the consecration ritual outlined in the pamphlet that came with the talisman.

Where the incongruence lies is, in a matter of weeks, ever since getting the upper hand of that older bartender, I have found myself utterly slammed with expansive, nearly LSD-like states of consciousness—except there’s no sensory distortion and I feel *more* functional, rather than zonked. I feel unusually strong, healthy and bursting with confidence in a way that I could not have imagined mere weeks ago. There is a feeling of control over situations, paired with said confidence—which is of a solidity and intensity I haven’t experienced since early adolescence.

For instance, I did nothing but walk into my work the other day and got an unprompted remark, “you’re giving off some crazy energy, I think it’s going to make be a really good day.” (I do try and set the atmosphere for the rest of the day when I go in, as I get there first, and had been thinking about this.) And the other day, from a manager: “why is there so much masculine energy in here right now?” People who intimidated me not long ago feel easily dealt with now, and the change has felt unnaturally fast.

There are too many factors at play for me to really tease out what is causing what, but can you comment on why I might be experiencing these phenomena in conjunction with “basic” practices, when I have less than a year of Western occultism under my belt, and little magic as-such?