ecosophia | 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 and George Cecil Jones, who were introduced over the last two weeks, this week's honoree was a teacher of Aleister Crowley. Theodor Reuss was a German occultist and Freemason who, like our past honoree Sylvester Gould, was a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, the successor order of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (HB of L). He founded and headed the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a magical lodge originally envisioned by Austrian occultist Carl Kellner, which passed on the occult traditions of the HB of L and certain specific teachings that originated in another of our earlier honorees, African-American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph. Reuss passed on the teachings of the OTO to Crowley and eventually made him the head of the OTO in the English-speaking world, setting off a cascade of events that would make a first-rate melodrama or a really good tell-all book. Since I'm not a member of the OTO, my only connection with any of that story is that one of my teachers was taught by a student of a student of Reuss...

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

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!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I lost my glasses about 6 months ago. We took the house apart with no luck. I figured I had knocked them off my night table into the wastebasket, then obliviously emptied same the next day, especially since frequent appeals to St. Anthony did not lead either of us to the glasses. I kept putting off getting new ones in hopes of finding them. This was not a big problem as I’m old enough to be getting farsighted, though I do need them to read grocery-aisle signs.

Now. The other day I was kneeling atop my bed dusting. My glasses fell onto, and bounced off, the back of my heel. The angle was such that they had to have fallen straight down. If you’re wondering how I knew it was my glasses, I can only assure you that nothing in this world feels like a pair of glasses falling from the ceiling and bouncing off your heel.

Any idea how this could happen?

—Princess Cutekitten

The traditional explanation was that such things were taken by the fairies. Having had things like that happen to me, too, I tend to think there's something to that particular tradition!

Is more to this tradition? I've had similar things happen that prevented regular activities from occurring and then, weeks later, the item would return in a place I could not have missed. It's happened several times throughout my life.

I got the impression that disrupting the routine was the point. Though I wasn't sure who the beneficiary of that interruption was, there was a sense that some calamity was averted.

Have you had things fall out of the air? Did you see it? Unfortunately I was facing the other way, but the angle of the bounce told me they fell straight down. I wish I had seen it.

—Princess Cutekitten

No matter which way you faced, it would have fallen behind you. They're clever that way. In my case, it's usually sitting on a table rather than dropped from someplace, but Sara and I do our best to maintain good relations with them.

Do you have any advice on how to maintain good relations with faeries?

We had a friend stay with us for a few weeks. We gave her a house key, which she said she left on the corner of the dining room table. We looked for days and couldn't fine it. A few weeks later I was standing by the table and heard a 'clink'. Looking down, there was the key. There was also a cat standing there but for the life of me I don't know where they would have found it...

Such things happen quite often here: sometimes they are returned - found in a most unlikely or even impossible place - and sometimes they just vanish forever.

There's usually a disinct element of humourous mischief in it (different to the unpleasant and malevolent haunting of 20 years ago) to which I now respond:

'Oh, that was a good one, very funny! Really, a master-stroke! But may I, please, have it back?'

I consider it's best to share the joke. There's certainly an element of intelligence in it, not merely random disappearances.

To my delight it occurred recently, while I was in the room, to a highly scientific friend, a Professor of Medicine at Cambridge University with zero interest in the occult, and left him open-mouthed but unable find any rational explanation other than an invisible, joking 'house spirit'.

The dog sometimes seems to watch something invisible to me, but never shows any sign of fear.

I reason that a house with a pleasant joker in residence, or even just passing through now and then, can't be a terribly bad place to live.

'More things in Heaven and Earth....' etc!

Sounds like those fairies are pretty busy!

—Princess Cutekitten

How do the fairies that play such jokes around the house differ from the house spirits/gods like the Scandinavian Tomten or the Roman Lares? Are they the same?

I've had this happen before a few times, my real question in the deep mysteries of life...

Is there a sock goblin? Lol I have no explaination for the slow disappearance of the families sock supply, they just gradually diminish and I have to top up every few months. I'm sure there's a logical explaination, I've dug around my dryer etc, to no avail.

Some washers will wash socks right over the edge of the drum and down into the sewers, or so I've read. But yes, socks are the kinds of things that might attract the attention of fairies, being small and often interestingly colored.

Socks are the larval form of wire coat hangars.

a practical suggestion: try pinning pairs of socks together with a large safety pin.

I once lost a banana in a 150 square foot dorm room. 4 people searched for over an hour and finally found it between the couch/bed cushions. I can only blame my own talent for losing things and not the fairies on that one.

That said, many years later in 2016 when my husband and I bought our current little house, I started putting out bird feeders and water for miscellaneous wandering animals. The first winter there was snowy and blustery. We were storing birdseed on the rickety old front porch and I had the S hook for one of the feeders in my hand. I was on the steps when the S hook slipped and fell into a crack between two of the steps. I knew there was no freaking way I was retrieving the hook until spring, so I made do with some hairbands and heaven knows what else and put the filled bird feeders back up that way. I did not tell anyone about the missing S hook or where it was. I just chalked it up to life being annoying. The next morning, I got in my car to drive to work. I felt something on my behind. The S hook was on my car seat. The car had been locked the whole night! I am convinced it was the fairies.

Magic Monday

An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question

Re: An Oddball Question