Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just past 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 taking a momentary break from chasing down photos of my lineage. Today is the spring equinox here in the northern hemisphere, one of the holy days of the Druid calendar, and this is a photo of the spring equinox sunrise as seen from an ancient stone chamber at South Royalton, Vermont -- one of many astronomically oriented megalithic sites here in New England. The photo's courtesy of New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA), which was gracious enough to send it around yesterday morning.

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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

A few Alchemy related questions

[(Anonymous)]

In the past you recommended to take the Jean Dubuis Spagyrics course, and I indeed started working through it. You also gave me good advice in this forum about choosing a crucible. I found the course instructive, and made progress into making my first Elixer. Unfortunately, after this experiment, the course goes into distillation, and I currently lack the funds to build the necessary set up.

1. Do you, or anyone else who may be reading, have recommendations about alternative material that instead of going into distillation right away, continues teaching about elixirs? I was thinking maybe continue in this path until I can get hold of a distillation set up.

2. After reading about the theory of Spagyrics and trying my hand in it, I realized I was already doing something like that in the garden. There is a method of natural farming that is very popular in the organic gardening community those days - knf. It teaches you to ferment plants (preferably wild plants that grow in thriving ecosystems), to produce incredibly bioavaliable fertilizers. There are other methods that resemble calcination to obtain phosphorus salt from beef bones as an alternative to relying on the mined stuff. On top of that, something that is pretty much elixers for plants is also used. Do you think knf could be alchemy hiding in plain sight?

3. I started getting back into homebrewing after many years in haitus, and I want to make herb beers - gruits. To those who are interested, I found a book I plan to buy called "Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation" by Stephen Harrod Buhner. But, sine I already started asking alchemy questions - you mentioned in your writing that homebrewing is also essentialy alchemy, but modern brewing books treat it more like science. I tried searching for writings that deal with the alchemy side in Archive.org but was not successful, so I thought I'd ask you or any of the readers if they have other reading recommendations for my research?

Again, thank you for sharing your knowledge and answering questions, I could not get into alchemy without your advice.

Re: A few Alchemy related questions

[ecosophia]

1) You might consider Mark Stavish's book The Path of Alchemy, which has a lot of low-cost practices. Equally, though, distillation gear is not hard to get if you know where to look; American Science and Surplus has distillation trains for sale (and good ones -- that's the source I've always used):

https://www.sciplus.com/lab-still-40056-p
https://www.sciplus.com/essential-oil-distilliation-unit-53893-p

2) That sounds extremely alchemical to me. I'm not at all familiar with knf -- where does it come from?

3) I wish! Brewing is an alchemical art, but I have yet to find any serious discussion of the overlap between brewing and alchemy. If anyone else has a book to suggest I'd love to hear about it.

Re: A few Alchemy related questions

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you, I will check them out! I am planning on getting a distillation train as soon as some financial issues get resolved, but would like to take advantage of the time I have before that happens. But I definitely want to get into distillation, besides its importance to alchemy it sounds like a neat skill to acquire.

My understanding is that knf, which stands for Korean Natural Farming is actually a set of techniques from Japan which were picked up by a Korean student who moved there (hence that name), who incorporated brown sugar based fermentation methods he was familiar with from the Korean kitchen, as used in Kimchi for example.

Re: A few Alchemy related questions

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this -- I'll look into knf.