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 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...

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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

MM Queries

[denebalgedi777]

Hi,

It has been a while since my last visit to MM, so here goes.

JMG, I know you have done return and transit charts against natal for your own life, so your experience here is valuable:

1a. If you have a solar return chart, and the lord of the ascendant is retrograde, does this mean the significations of that planet as lord of the year are weakened?

1b. But suppose it is a malefic, and it is also in an angular house and trine with a benefic, might that, in fact, mean that it's less harmful?

2. Do you make use of the lunations (new and full moons) for transit charts against natal? If so, suppose there's a new moon chart -- is it good from new moon to new moon? And likewise, would the full moon chart be good until the next full moon? Or should they be good for only the periods of waxing and waning respectively?

The reason I ask this is that it seems that the two phases have essentially different symbolism so that separating them into their own periods makes sense, but I'm not sure, and I can't find a lot of literature about this.

3. I have probably mentioned that I always had vivid dreams, but since practicing meditation and some rituals, they became more lucid. I suppose this to be a side effect of that practice -- I assume this is a normal outcome of such practices?

Since I recall dreams better now, I have noticed there are parts of the inner planes that have the same names as those on earth but with very different geography. I also better understand JMG's statement about some astral visions being genuinely predictive of things in waking life, and some being less useful.

4. As an aside, I strayed somewhat but not completely from spiritual practices for a while and noticed that that trend almost exactly corresponded with the long transit of Mars in Gemini. I am guessing there was some kind of karmic lesson I needed to learn here.

Best,

Deneb

Re: MM Queries

[ecosophia]

1) I treat it as an ordinary debility.

2) This is the kind of thing where you really need either to put some serious work into chart synthesis or talk to an experienced natal astrologer. You can't make sense of an astrological chart in this sort of "this-means-that" fashion.

3) It's common, certainly.

4) For some people, Mars in Gemini manifests as distraction.