ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

It's almost 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 and the teachers who influenced them in turn. Like Allan Bennett, who we discussed last week, this week's honoree was a teacher of Aleister Crowley. George Cecil Jones was the man who introduced Crowley to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and later on helped Crowley found the Argenteum Astrum (Order of the Silver Star, or A∴A∴), the first of the two magical orders the Not-so-great Beast headed during his lifetime. (The other, the Ordo Templi Orientis or OTO, will be discussed next week.) Jones was a working chemist and metallurgist as well as a serious student of the occult. He practiced the magical virtue of silence more effectively than most of his contemporaries, however, and very little seems to be known about him.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

First, to share, I've been really enjoying getting into the Golden Section Fellowship work. I feel like I'm able to focus on it and put more energy into it than any other system I've tried in the past. I did have a bit of a hiccup this week, with getting pulled in a lot of different directions, so I didn't do the whole of it, but I managed to do the SoP every day, even if somewhat rushed, so I'm resetting and getting back in the habit. It feels good to be able to pick myself back up and get back on train after that. In the past I probably would have said, "well, I messed up, I'll try again later", so being able to give myself a bit of a break and just keep it going feels nice.

Also, musical interlude, go to youtube and look up a song called "Hi Ren" by an artist named Ren. I wasted a lot of time watching reaction videos to it. Not my style of music, really, but if you look at it as performance art, it's beautiful.

Now, my question. I really want to do the Solar Plexus exercise standing up. I'm used to doing taiji and qigong that way, so it feel right. To date I've avoided it, because it's "against the rules", but is there any reason not to?

Thanks as always,

The Dilettante Polymath

sorry, forgot the word „attunement“…

As I slowly work my way through the GSF manual I have more questions, if I may:

1. When banishing, is it important to banish only imbalances in each specific element or I can ask an elemental powers to help banish all (other) imbalances?

2. When I read the whole book from cover to cover before getting into practices I have noticed some discrepancy in the description of the color of Nwyfre and would like to clarify it before it comes to initiation stage.
On page 8: “It can be imagined as clear air full of light; its color is gold, and its symbol is the circle.”
On page 90 wrt to drawing a circle surrounding the lodge: “ As you do this, imagine the cauldron drawing a line in pure white light.”

My question is about the color of the circle - gold or white? Maybe I missed something somewhere but I cannot find it :(

Thanks

If I may:

It's not a specifically magical practice as such, but one method is to pay attention to one's peripheral vision which activates different parts of your brain and help you become more attentive to your surroundings.

I just commented over on the main Ecosophia blog about a technique I learned from Thomas Schorr-kon, a student of Tom Brown Jr's, for activating this quickly:

Spread your arms wide enough that you can just see your hands in the far corners of your eyes. Raise them up as you inhale, and lower them as you exhale. Pay attention to the movement of the hands up and down. Do this for a few minutes at least.

If you think influenza is a light illness, you are conflating it with something else. The flu makes people weak, achey, feverish to the point of being unable to arise from bed, and it usually lasts from 4 days to a week. Your body actively digests muscle tissue during that time, and (especially elderly) people will often be physically weakened afterward and take months to recover the strength they had prior to the illness.

I have a clear memory of the first time I had flu as a child, and consciously wanting to die. This is a pretty common feeling when one is that ill.

It's possible you have never experienced an illness this painful. May you continue to be so blessed.

--Ms. Krieger

Interesting...I wouldn't have a mirror in my bedroom and in fact avoid looking in them after sundown, but I always put it down to one of my own peculiar superstitions...I don't altogether trust them!

I watched the exorcist as a teenager and I found it very scary indeed. I still find it quite scary but not as much and generally enjoy and admire it as a film. It is the only horror film that gives me bad dreams occasionally - especially if i re-watch it. Does this mean anything or is it just one of those things? Also have you seen it and did you find it scary?

Almost every clause of the Ave Maria is about relationships between the mortal and the divine, either calling to mind relationships that are in good condition, calling to mind relationships that are in lamentable condition, or petitioning for help to restore them, or calling to mind the distinction. It seems unlikely that an adaptation would have much power without taking that as a starting point. Have you worked out what either the equivalent relationships or a corresponding theme in a Heathen context would be?

I'm glad you found the post interesting, I did as well.

As for the excerpt, I think he's choosing what he hopes will be a reasonably relatable example for the broader point that the experience of pain/discomfort/suffering in the moment is not at all the same as the memory thereof. Specifically, I think there might be a few things going on here: 1) folks really do differ in how "tough" they are, whether due to life experience, disposition, or whatever - maybe you've suffered worse and so being sick doesn't seem so bad!, 2) there's likely a bit of hyperbole for comedic effect and/or to garner sympathy going on, both by the writer and by folks who are sick saying things like "I don't want to live!", 3) many folks use "flu" for any illness worse than a cold that primarily presents as respiratory and stomach problems, whereas I think he's referring to actual influenza, which can range from "I had a mild fever and a stuffy nose" all the way to "I can't eat, my whole body aches, and I can't really sleep because I'm shifting between feeling freezing cold and burning up due to a high fever." I suspect he means more the upper end of the spectrum there (I've had a flu like that, and while it was miserable, I didn't "want to die").

More broadly, even if that fragment is more extreme than I would characterize that situation, I do know that I've had situations where I consciously know "this too shall pass", but it's hard to really *believe* that and accept it fully in the moment of suffering. Then, looking back, I remember having those thoughts, but they seem ridiculous in hindsight. Like that flu I mentioned - I was on a business trip, and so stuck in a hotel room and miserable for a few days. I remember *that* I was very uncomfortable and not liking it, and I remember that time seemed to pass very slowly, but now in hindsight, those experiential aspects are fairly week and vague.

Does this mean that a malevolent person brooding with lots of emotion about, say, another one’s (or their own) demise, divorce, you name it, can set events in motion that accomplish said scenarios?

Wow, thanks so much for your kind words, the resources, and most of all for the variants!

1) Sprung rhythm sounds promising! I'll have to see if I can get it to play nice with the strict(ish) stressed-syllable count requirements of Galdralag I'm using here. If not, it will almost certainly be helpful in more flexible meters like Anglo-Saxon Long Lines.

2) The varied repetition is a good suggestion, and one that these versions made insufficient use of, it seems. In Galdralag, there's a tendency, but not a requirement, for the last two lines to be variations of each other, sometimes with as little as one word changed, and the idea of changing *only* a synonym might be productive.

3) Thank you for the Eastern "versions" - I had encountered brief mention of them, hadn't looked to them as directly for inspiration, though maybe I should.

4) Thank you *very much* for the scansion and the suggestions. To make sure I'm reading your scansion correctly, you're using "/" for a stressed syllable and "_" for an un/less-stressed syllable?

Before this, I hadn't really written any poetry since some terrible blank verse in high school, so it's been a lot of fun to learn more and suggestions about techniques to consider are most welcome.

Thanks again,
Jeff

I'm not sure if this answers your question exactly, but a while ago I stumbled upon this women who creates rituals

https://rebeccafox.substack.com/ have not personally tried any but the video I saw was speaking of the first one here, https://rebeccafox.substack.com/p/the-descent-of-peter

She has spoken of her work in a few places, easy enough to find.

Can't speak at all to the merit of this approach, but interesting to see someone trying to develop rituals this way

Can a red bag amulet be closed with a simple elastic ring instead of sewing?

Yes, that happens quite a bit. This is one of the reasons why it's a good idea to practice some kind of protective working daily, and to concentrate on energies of blessing and healing -- the sheer amount of nastiness in the lower astral these days, generated by such activities, is a real issue.

Er, the flu sometimes has this effect. The severity varies quite a bit from case to case, and also from person to person.

Archdruid,

What are the magical properties of granit and what is its corrispondence?

Im working through the OSA training for the second time, and had a thought. Is it possible to work through our experiences with the archetypes of father and mother wherever we are asked to process our feelings/memories about them? I ask because some of the problems I havent arent related directly to my mom, dad, or siblings but with how society promotes those archetypes.

Regards,

Syfen

1) No, I haven't read the book. I avoid New York Times bestsellers on principle.

2) You have my permission to ask about one book per monthly Open Post. I can get irritated by that, but usually it's when somebody pelts me with that sort of question repeatedly.

I don't see this conflict going nuclear. Partly that's because all sides in a nuclear war lose, leaving the neutral nations to run the world afterwards -- thus Biden's handlers will be aware that if they start lobbing nukes at Russia and China, that guarantees the end of the US as a nation and hands the future over to India and Brazil. Partly, though, it's because the Russians are being very canny. They seem to have realized that they can win this by maintaining slow, steady pressure on Ukraine and NATO, never giving anyone an excuse to escalate, while bleeding Ukraine's military and NATO's economies dry. If you're concerned to prevent the risk of nuclear war, prayer is certainly a good choice.

I worked that out in a series of meditations in 2012-2013, and WGS is the first book I wrote since then that deals with the three Druid elements.

To speak of "malefic energy" is a bit of a misnomer, though it's a convenient one. The energy itself isn't malefic, nor is it benefic -- the astral light, which is of course what we're talking about, is ethically neutral and carries good and evil intentions with equal facility. So a protective talisman of the sort I was discussing doesn't get rid of energy (which you can't do anyway), it disrupts and dissolves the malefic patterns in the astral light. Those patterns don't "go" anywhere -- that's like asking where the information in a data file goes when you hit "delete."

That's really quite odd. Which book are you reading? I've never encountered any claim along those lines before.

Daily meditation is the best practice I know for this purpose. You might also do workings of any convenient variety to invoke Mercury, since that's the planet of the mind.

It's quite simple, though as usual "simple" isn't the same thing as "easy." First, you need to practice ritual work for years, working with various rituals, until you understand how they work. Second, you need to do practices to develop your ability to perceive nonphysical forces directly. Once you've done those two things, it's tolerably easy to begin experimenting with new ritual forms, since you can perceive whether they work or not.

Thank you for this as always.

1) I have heard very mixed reports about the Modern Mystery School; your mileage may vary, but it's not something I'd recommend.

2) The occult scene these days is a very, very mixed bag. Most of the worthwhile schools keep a low profile for a variety of good reasons, and nearly all of them want to see some evidence that you're serious about being interested in magic, because very few of the people who sign up for any course of magical training are actually willing to put in the work. On average, 90% of the people who sign up for a training course in magic drop out without ever completing a single exercise; this is something I've heard from dozens of teachers, and I've also found it to be true myself.

This is why I recommend that you choose a book that provides a good course of basic magical training, and follow that course exactly as written -- without leaving anything out or making any modifications -- until you've finished it. This will give you a good solid background in the basics of magic. It will also be something you can mention to a serious occult school, which will make the interviewers go, "Okay, this one's actually serious about it."

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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Magic Monday

GSF Solar Plexus Exercise

Re: Modern Order of Essenes

GSF question

no subject

Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?

Re: Mirrors

The Exorcist

Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?

Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?

no subject

Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?

Re: on developing rituals

no subject

no subject

Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?

stone and word

Re: Have you read this book, and if so, may I have a comment?

Re: WW3

Re: 3 become 7

no subject

Re: Mirrors

no subject

Re: on developing rituals

Re: Ecosophia Prayer List

Re: advice for the unexperienced