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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 picture? I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me. Last week's honoree was Israel Regardie, the man who kept the Golden Dawn tradition from ending up in a dumpster like so many other occult traditions in the bleak middle years of the twentieth century. Regardie's first teacher was George Winslow Plummer, founder and longtime head of the Societas Rosicruciana in America (SRIA), who's already been introduced here. His second, much more famous teacher, however, was Edward Alexander "Aleister" Crowley, self-proclaimed messiah of the New Aeon, mass media-anointed Wickedest Man in the World, and problem child of the early twentieth century British occult scene. Regular readers will know that I'm not a fan, but Crowley had a substantial influence on Regardie and also on a wide range of other occult teachers and their scenes. Now that all his writings are out of copyright and becoming available for free download on various sites, it'll be interesting to see what happens to his legacy.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
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Dear JMG,
For the past few years and as the world went upside down, I did some good progress in developing my intuition, getting better at ritual and divination and keeping a steady practice as much as I could in order to develop my spirituality. It's not been perfect and certainly not an easy ride with some spooks in the process. Not as easy to come to terms with a wider reality as one might think! I certainly came to magic very eager to experiment the stuff that riddles books and conversations on the occult. When it happened, even at my beginner level, that eagerness went away rather fast! So much for a Mab-like enthusiasm! That's taken time to process and fit into my psyche and my life, but still very much a work in progress and I suspect that might be a life-long task to handle.
I think I must've come here to your corner of the internet almost every week for quite a bit now and I've become acquainted with some of you and have very much enjoyed talking to the author of these strange books and many times, in retrospect, showing too clearly how much work I need to do on myself and my life to match my talk since I jump all over the place. All that has been good for me and certainly a refuge of sorts but something that I had to come to terms this week was that I also have an external life and one that I do not like very much at all and its rather messy. It's an okay life, but it is not what I want.
It is this latter part that presently I have struggled with because I know that there is more to life and there are many, many things that can make my heart and my sense of accomplishment fuller, especially since I have always taken a joy on admiring and looking at the work of 'the big ones' and the ones that have come to be remembered as the best on what they did. Oh, is getting there much harder than what teenage me might have thought. In trying to make myself believe that I can be like that without effort I have become arrogant and feeling that I am entitled to a clear path to greatness. What a mistake. I grew up comfortable enough to develop skills, educate my mind and dream in a relatively safe environment, but boy do I lack the discipline, the valor and temper to get there as I am and that is being reflected to me just now with a clear sense of discomfort.
I want to change my situation for sure, but if I look at myself, in this chasing of a mad dream, I have damaged and cheated myself so right now I need the life that I have and I cannot run away from it. Not in the occult and certainly not in all these little vices that we have in order to run away from facing the hard questions. Sitting in a desk, having to deal with somebody else's bad day and doing work to pursue somebody else's goals is crude to me, or at least is for the kid that still resides in me. Facing it makes it clear just how hard it really is to go and have a life of true fulfillment created by myself. That really does show me how hard it must've been to be where you are right now! I admire that very much.
These are some long and winding few paragraphs of perhaps just sharing some of what it has been for me, but I wanted to share them because I have come to seeing this more clearly thanks to my practices. Now I want to put these to work on changing myself not just developing skills.
1) So, I would like to start things with an affirmation to help me face and keep working on my spirituality and on my outer life. I wonder what do you think of 'I have the courage and the discipline to face the situations that come to me and craft the life that I want for myself. I am the master.' Is that too vague?
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