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. 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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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

[ecosophia]

Yes, very much so. Any natural death, in which you have ample time to separate from your physical body in the normal way, clears away the burdens of the old body. That kind of death -- say, dying in bed from old age, having made your peace with the Divine and the world -- also makes it much easier to retain consciousness through the dying process, which makes the time between lives easier and tends to produce a better incarnation to come.

Wheel of Rebirth

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

I have a somewhat related question. It seems that in the western esoteric traditions, the view is that once you reach the human level, you pretty much stay there and don't regress. Buddhism takes a different view, as shown by the famous picture of the wheel held in the demon's teeth, saying that beings have been wandering in samsara since beginningless time. As this website explains, a person who reaches human level might stay there for ten or even a hundred lifetimes, but if they don't aspire towards liberation, eventually their karma is going to catch up and they'll take rebirth in one of the other six realms, possibly animal or otherwise. What's your view on this and why the discrepancy?

https://puredhamma.net/working-towards-good-rebirths/how-buddha-described-chance-of-human-rebirth-in-suttas/?highlight=rebirth

Re: Wheel of Rebirth

[ecosophia]

One of the differences between the Druid teachings I follow and some other Western esoteric traditions is that Druidry does in fact recognize that souls can mess up badly enough to "flunk out" of human status and be reborn in animal forms. There's a Welsh tradition that someone with the second sight can see the cydfil or future animal form of someone who's headed that way, like a ghostly animal walking alongside them.

That said, the Druid teachings don't hold that souls have been wandering in samsara since beginningless time; while time has no beginning, swarms of souls have descended into material embodiment at intervals and worked their way up to what amounts to angelic status. We belong to the fourth such swarm in this part of this solar system, and no matter how badly we mess up, the pressures of karma drives each of us along the path toward Gwynfydd, "the luminous life," the condition of the awakened.

Who's right? Ask me that when we get there. ;-)

Re: Wheel of Rebirth

[(Anonymous)]

I always had some feeling that no matter what happens - no matter how far humanity "falls" as it were... this was the fate of the souls that had incarnated in human form even if only once... - That God as it were has already "won" but the winning condition maybe too horrific for the human soul to accept...