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 picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me. Sylvester Gould, last week's honoree, was an active member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, one of the more interesting occult orders of the late 19th century. (After many reorganizations, it's still around as the Church of Light aka Brotherhood of Light.) The H.B. of L., as most people called it back in the day, was founded by two British occultists, T.H. Burgoyne and Peter Davidson. The photo is of Burgoyne. It's also the photo of another gentleman, one Captain Norman Astley, who took over the reorganized H.B. of L. in America from Burgoyne, married another H.B. of L. adept -- the remarkable and talented Genevieve Stebbins -- and helped Benjamin Williams aka Elbert Benjamine aka C.C. Zain re-reorganize the H.B. of L. into the Brotherhood of Light aka Church of Light. Yes, Burgoyne and Astley were the same person. It's a complicated story. But Burgoyne and Peter Davidson, whom we'll be talking about next week, were among Sylvester Gould's teachers -- and behind them stands another and a considerably stranger figure.

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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 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. See you next week!***

Comments

Qs

[(Anonymous)]

Greeting JMG and others, and a happy new year to everyone.

A few questions for you:

1) What is your advice for what to do in a mercury retrograde? And generally do you find that your experience of it is affected by the house/sign position of mercury?

2) Would you be able to share what the occult, as well as your personal views, on the essentialism vs existence idea?
With Schopenhauer, you would lean towards the latter would be my guess, but I am curious what neoplatonism has to say (which I dont know a lot about), since Plato's own ideas seem the other way.
Mulla Sadra is the other source I've found on this with a distinct view from modern existentialists.

3) Last week you said you use void moon rules; just want to confirm if you incl the other planets such as pluto in that list of major aspects?

Re: Qs

[ecosophia]

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.

Re: Qs

[(Anonymous)]

What about Mars retrogrades?