Magic Monday
Feb. 26th, 2023 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
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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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 10:35 pm (UTC)Accidental malevolence
Date: 2023-02-27 10:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 10:40 pm (UTC)2) Thank you for this -- no, I hadn't seen that. The guy in question clearly has a room temperature IQ.
3) They have no memory. All that's in their minds is what's put there by the people who create them, deliberately or otherwise. That's why egregors don't learn from their mistakes, and very often keep on doing the same thing over and over again despite an unbroken track of failures. Kind of like the US government...
Re: "Hail Idun" Variants, and Any Questions of Which to Ask More?
Date: 2023-02-27 10:40 pm (UTC)So, the very short answer to "why Idun?" is because she told me to :) The longer explanation is that some of my strongest spiritual experiences, including the one that smacked the materialism right out of me, involved Her. Through prayer and meditation, I got the impression I needed to put together a more formal prayer practice, then that it should include beads, then that it ought to draw on the Rosary more heavily for inspiration. Along the way, I've gotten intuitions that Idun's links to the World Tree (made explicit in Odin's Raven Galdr, which is of contested age/provenance, but also from one of Snorri's kenning's given for her, "Seed of Yggdrasil") is something I should lean into. As for "what links Idun and Woden?", again, I'm drawing heavily on my own experiences here, but I find the theory that Bragi is a hypostasis of Odin at least intriguing, and I find some of the similarities between the Idun myth and Odin winning the Mead of Poetry highly suggestive. I think there's something about linking all of this having to do with inspiration, initiation, and overcoming death.
All that being said, I think your analysis of why Frigg makes a good fit is spot on, and your rough draft for a "Hail Frigg" is wonderful. At some point in this project, I'm thinking about working out how to go about customizing things for the deities that work best for you, since my own take is highly idiosyncratic. Something more specific than "just do what works for you!" but also more open-ended than "just plug in the right names, but keep everything else the same".
Cheers,
Jeff
Re: The Number of the Accountant
Date: 2023-02-27 10:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 10:41 pm (UTC)Re: Mirrors
Date: 2023-02-27 10:44 pm (UTC)Re: Ecosophia Prayer List
Date: 2023-02-27 10:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 10:57 pm (UTC)Will1000
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:20 pm (UTC)2) I think I might be doing a lot of that... I tend to feel emotions very real and powerfully. I know this will sound very silly and childish but how does one practice doing things without an emotion? I would like for me to control them not the other way around and after several notebooks of journaling it's clear that is one of my main if not the main barrier for me right now. It sounds very helpful to be able to do or not do (or imagine) things without it depending on them feeling good or on it be difficult because of you hating them. Working on an affirmation to start changing my life has proven to me just how fickle I am in that sense. If I didn't like the occult, I wouldn't have been able to do daily practices at all I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:26 pm (UTC)2) There's no easy way. Choose little things and work on doing things calmly, just because you choose to do them, without emotional involvement. Work up from there.
Re: GSF Solar Plexus Exercise
Date: 2023-02-27 11:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:31 pm (UTC)I think you wrote a whole series of post on training the will and sounds very much like what I recall from them. I think that's it, I have a very dispersed and contradictory will.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:35 pm (UTC)I often burn incense to the planetary deities and sometimes also coloured candles, depending what I have at the time. Last Thursday morning, I was convinced it was Friday and did these for Venus, also with the focus of green candles, Friday and money. I realized not very long afterwards and later burned storax for Jupiter.
Does it help that both planets are benefics?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:38 pm (UTC)I have also just posted about doing one of these on the wrong day.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-27 11:40 pm (UTC)My Saturn Return agrees! I know I can have a good life, even a great life and I want to grow strong enough to go get it, even though right now I clearly don't feel that I am capable of doing it or what it looks like.
On thought processes
Date: 2023-02-28 12:07 am (UTC)My question concerns the way that thoughts occur, namely, that at times I have multiple thoughts that coincide each other in time. For example, when I was younger I fell into the habit of counting to fall asleep--most times I would count to 4 repeatedly. I came to notice rather quickly that while counting to 4 in my head I would have other thoughts appear alongside the counting of numbers. 1..2...3..4 repeatedly with other thoughts spread out on top of the repeating beat. The thoughts would be my own, some kind of tangential reflection upon the day or your run of the mill wondering. As I got older and still habitually continued the practice, sometimes counting would lead into more or less lucid dream states, some of which reflected the thoughts that coincided with the counting.
My first question is if there is anything in occult literature that mentions any such practice. My second question is if you think there would be any possible deficit or problem (or benefit) arising from the habit of having "split" thoughts such as these.
It does not always occur only with counting and words such as I have described before I sleep. At times in meditation I have found that multiple strings of word thoughts arise simultaneously and I have to work harder to focus. I have found that raising what I might call the amplitude, or force, behind the willed thought I choose to enforce more or less reduces the other thoughts and allows me to focus.
This has been a curiosity of myself (which funnily enough sometimes I think about in the aforementioned time before sleep) that I thought I might ask you about.
Thank you as always for your time and consideration,
J.
Amulet
Date: 2023-02-28 12:09 am (UTC)I have a question concerning your red bag amulet.
Is is possible to use a red paper packet instead of a bag, like some Asian talismans? Or would the paper be too much of a etheric insulator for that to work?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-28 12:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-28 12:32 am (UTC)Would you mind elaborating on why you're not a fan of the not-so-great-Beast Aleister Crowley? What do you think of the Book of the Law?
(no subject)
Date: 2023-02-28 12:32 am (UTC)