1) Mercury retrogrades are fortunate for anything Mercurial that starts with "re-". I use them to revise manuscripts, reread books, research future projects, and generally to review where I am in my writing career and reorient my efforts. That works so well for me that these days I look forward to Mercury retrogrades -- that's when I get my best editing and research done. I don't find that this is especially influenced by Mercury's house and sign position, but planetary aspects are worth watching -- when a retrograde Mercury is in a hostile aspect to another planet, for example, a little more caution is wise.
2) I find Schopenhauer's arguments convincing here: what we have to go on is neither essence nor existence, but simply experience: "the world is my representation," and the subject referenced by "my" is simply one grade or manifestation of the underlying thing-in-itself Schopenhauer called the Will, which cannot be said to exist in any sense of "exist" that can also be applied to phenomena. That was the basis of Eliphas Lévi's magical philosophy, too, though he used an older way of talking about it in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. From this standpoint, both existence and essence are abstract labels we apply to different aspects of experience, and can be applied in different ways by different people, on the basis of their subjectivity. As for other occultists, they're all over the map; chaos magic, for example, might best be described as magic for existentialists, while the more Neoplatonist ends of magic are way over on the essentialist end of the spectrum.
3) I don't consider Pluto a planet, and so I don't count it when calculating lunar voids.
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branchandroot
Re: Qs
Date: 2023-01-02 07:16 pm (UTC)2) I find Schopenhauer's arguments convincing here: what we have to go on is neither essence nor existence, but simply experience: "the world is my representation," and the subject referenced by "my" is simply one grade or manifestation of the underlying thing-in-itself Schopenhauer called the Will, which cannot be said to exist in any sense of "exist" that can also be applied to phenomena. That was the basis of Eliphas Lévi's magical philosophy, too, though he used an older way of talking about it in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. From this standpoint, both existence and essence are abstract labels we apply to different aspects of experience, and can be applied in different ways by different people, on the basis of their subjectivity. As for other occultists, they're all over the map; chaos magic, for example, might best be described as magic for existentialists, while the more Neoplatonist ends of magic are way over on the essentialist end of the spectrum.
3) I don't consider Pluto a planet, and so I don't count it when calculating lunar voids.