Magic Monday

[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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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

[(Anonymous)]

Good morning JMG!

Are there any recommended magical practices for developing general perceptiveness and helping become more observant? I assume there's no getting around some good old fashioned practice of awareness and attention, but since perception and observation are so tightly linked to consciousness it also seems like the kind of thing that would be amenable to some magical nudges.

[lukedodson]

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.

[ecosophia]

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.