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

Re: Q

[(Anonymous)]

Interest rates are just how a private property market economy navigates certain naturally occurring tradeoffs, wherein you make a sacrifice of options that are slightly below your personally-market-clearing rate of return in order to free up resources for options that are slightly above your personally-market-clearing rate of return.

If you have to overcome interest-based finance, you might need a system of practice with a way of organizing and incentivizing a community's productive labor and capital allocation over time, that demonstrates itself to be better at benefiting from that kind of natural wealth-producing option, in a virtuous and balanced way, than the financial system is.

To give some idea of what this could look like: In an imaginary universe, where you had people who really understood on a visceral level how tradeoffs over time worked, and where they all had a consistent idea of how much they all cared about themselves and their beneficiaries now and in the future, you could get a situation where those people were naturally as productive as if they'd been lending and borrowing at interest, without any lending or borrowing at interest. What would normally have been a default on a loan in our universe would then, in that imaginary universe, just be an understandable failure from someone who was genuinely trying the-right-amount-of-hard. Not just in how hard they were working, but also in how carefully they were thinking through possibilities and realistically planning around long shots and misfortunes, and, in the long run, in how attentively they adjusted their habits of paying attention to some aspects of the world and not others, given the effects on what wealth-affecting possible outcomes they noticed. But then, all of that is like saying "in an imaginary universe where Communism worked". In our universe, if you tried to arrange people that way without either market discipline or a lot of non-obvious cultural technology, the enterprise would fail on many levels of kybernesis simultaneously. The usual economic terms are "free-rider problem" and "principal-agent problem", and there's also the sociobiology/ev-psych "coefficients of relatedness" to consider.

There's a little bit of social science about why a few communes succeed and most fail. Supposedly there was a finding where religious kibbutzim with more hours collectively spent in communal religious ritual time per week were more likely to succeed than secular kibbutzim. But I didn't find a citation. I did find that papers liked to bring up the question of what it does to a kibbutz or other kind of commune to be in implicit competition with an external market economy. That literature might be a good place to start reading, to understand what you'd have to get right.