ecosophia | Magic Monday

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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. Quite a while ago we reached Israel Regardie, and then chased his lineage back through Aleister Crowley et al. After he left Crowley, however, Regardie also spent a while studying with this week's honoree, the redoubtable Violet Firth Evans, better known to generations of occultists as Dion Fortune. Born in Wales and raised in a Christian Science family, Fortune got into occultism after a stint as a Freudian lay therapist -- that was an option in her time. She was active in the Theosophical Society, belonged to two different branches of the Golden Dawn, studied with a number of teachers, and then founded her own magical order, the Fraternity (now Society) of the Inner Light. She also wrote some first-rate magical novels and no shortage of books and essays on occultism, including The Cosmic Doctrine, the twentieth century's most important work of occult philosophy. I'm pleased to be only four degrees of separation from her.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

… and I promptly forgot to ask my third question… :-)

To JMG and everybody else: Can anybody recommend a good source (or sources) about the history of German occultism? Books, websites, … in German or English. Something like the information about the history of American occultism which JMG has posted on the .net blog occasionally.

I just want to get a (sane and somewhat trustworthy) overview of what existed: main schools, viewpoints, developments, important people and names, … (mainly about the last two or three centuries, but recommendations which go further back are equally welcome).

Thanks!

Milkyway

You could do a lot worse than starting with Karl Kiesewetter's large volumes on the history of German occultism. Since he died in 1895, all of his published works ought to be in the public domain by now, and available online.

For more recent work check out the books and articles of Hans Thomas Hakl, who is still alive, and has built an enormous library of primary documentation..

Wouter J. Hanegraaff is focused more broadly on esotericism than occultism. He had made a lot of his publications available on academia.edu, where one can downlaod them for free. He usually writes in English. He is one of the editors of Brill's excellent two-volume Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005), which covers German esotericists along with other Western ones.

Robert,

Thanks a lot!! :-)

Milkyway

What Robert said. ;-) That's not a field of occult history in which I'm adequately versed.

Frater Acher ( theomagica.com ) recommends Volker Lechler's books (only in German) on occultism history. I'd just point you to his blog archive if it worked properly ATM.

(And his reviews of 2 of Emil Stejnar's books ( https://theomagica.com/blog/book-review-emil-stejnars-the-four-elements-the-secret-key-to-spiritual-power , https://theomagica.com/blog/book-review-emil-stejnars-magic-with-astrology ) may have had something to do with them now existing in English.)

Good morning. I'd like to request clarification on the gesture used when opening a lodge in the WGS manual: On p.88 when performing the proclamation of peace, it says "raise your right hand with the palm outward." Does that mean palm facing right or palm facing forward? Sorry if the answer to this should be obvious.

Thank you.

Palm facing forward, away from the body.

Good. That clears it up. Thank you again.

Last week I wrote about wanting to pray/do planetary charity to help my us and my daughter retain medical freedom and for her to be able to also attend school in my state. I am wondering if you could check this intention for clarity. Thank you.

My child_____is free of any vaccine mandates and able to legally attend school in the state of ______.

That seems good and clear to me.

What are your (or anyone else's!) thoughts on the sacred geometric implications of the new aperiodic monotile: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/hat/

What about mathematical tiling patterns in general?

My meditations so far led me to focus on periodic vs aperiodic patterns. Oddly enough a comment of yours from a few weeks ago stuck out to me, about crystals having an etheric sheath. The comparison between a process that creates crystals and a process that creates life seemed to match with periodic and aperiodic tiling. With periodic tiling all processes that are open to system are available. As a result there's almost an "equilibrium:" periodic tiles into infinity.

Aperiodic tiling is the process of "exploring a solution space," and life can be seen as another name for this process that distinguishes it from "solved" solution spaces.

Do not Wolfram’s Rule 30 (e.g.) and quasi-crystals seem like 2-D and 3-D representations of the enfoldment possibilities of life-generated ‘springy’ proteins? The ones that have the capability to form, deform, and reform as they ‘spring’ back into the original shape, based on their molecular structures and adhering properties.

If quipu strings tied into knots can encode eight bits of information as a writing system, how much more information could be encoded into a sequence of molecular-level tied knots of rubbery proteins? Quite a bit, eh?
We have about 50 years worth of quasi-crystal research, but I have not heard of any summary overview of known findings.

Perhaps a link exists between quasi-crystalline mineral properties and quasi-regular molecular structures of living proteins. Like how they each respond to a DC current passing through or magnetic polarities, or interactions with water.

One of the great challenges we face in the revival of sacred geometry is that mathematics have gone all kinds of places since people stopped working out their esoteric implications! For obvious reasons, the revival of sacred geometry (and the revival of numerology, for that matter) had to start by recovering the very basics -- Euclidean geometry in the first case, whole number arithmetic in the second -- and that's still in process, because the revival of both of these is only around a century old, and there aren't that many people working on it. Once that's complete, it'll be on to the next steps, and eventually -- a long time from now, probably -- we'll get to the point that it's possible to talk meaningfully about the esoteric implications aperiodic tiling patterns.

Schrodinger in "What is Life?" made a good guess about the nature of genetic material as copolymers before it was discovered, except he speculated that they would be "aperiodic crystals", which usually connotes 2- or 3-dimensional structure. (Normally, at least nowadays, if you wanted the audience to understand 1-dimensional structure, you would say "polymer".)

I read somewhere that quasicrystals (atomic matter with quasiperiodicity) can be thought of as appropriately angled slices through higher-dimensional regular crystals, projected back down to 3 dimensions.

I think the kind of quasiperiodicity the aperiodic tile has is the kind where the range of possible solutions is narrow. One of the other systems of tiling like that has the property that, if you put a single disallowed connection anywhere, then the rest of the pattern is determined uniquely and you can always find the next point where there's only one option for where to put the tile, without having to explore any larger combinations. That puts some limits on how much work it would take to explore combinations in the more usual case, when you haven't put any defects in. Genome space seems less narrow than that.

Years ago I came across a blog, Green druid comes to mind as the title of the blog but the author posted a healthy criticism of Robert Kaplan's chapter on the "Greyhound Underclass" from his Empire Wilderness book.

Years later I come across Ecosophia and have been reading the Archdruid Report archives. I haven't found anything to do with Robert Kaplan in the Archdruid archives but just double checking to see if it was actually your post I read or someone druid themed blog?

That was mine, though I don't recall which post. He's in there somewhere, though. I made fun of him for his squeamishness about riding with people who -- oh, the horror! -- used plastic garbage bags instead of designer luggage, though I also praised him for being willing to get on the bus instead of hiding from the rest of America in the usual privileged-class bubble.

Hi JMG,

Recently a coworker of mine who struggled with alcoholism went into a catastrophic spiral over several weeks and ended up dying in a horrible drunken state.

I'm curious as to how this manner of death could affect his transition to the other side? Is it possible that his soul was confused by being so disoriented and intoxicated at the time of death that it negatively affected the dying process?

Yes, unfortunately. That's a bad way to die -- he'll have crossed over in a state of profound confusion, and will probably spend quite a while on the lower astral.

Sounds like the end of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano." Some readers/reviewers saw a good end in it for the magician/protagonist. I never did. Also it was all too similar to the end of Lowry ,the novelist, himself.

I forgot to mention this in my previous comment, but after some serious trial and error and observations, I've found that electional astrology doesn't really work as a timing technique; you do see correlations for major events but the chart seems to act as a herald, and timing it pre-emptively doesn't create any causal effect into the outcome.

Curious what others have seen.

I see a 10 - 15 % boost. Nothing extravagant, but not nothing.

Are you basing your elections on your natal chart, and taking the strengths and limitations shown in your natal chart into account?

Hello,

This question is open to everyone incl JMG.

Do people have any tips or advice on learning the sphere of protection? Especially if I want to do it quickly?
I’ve been reluctant to learn because of my work life taking most of my attention, but I’m being targeted by hostile emotions and energy from others fairly regularly and divination (as L8) suggests strongly to do it.

Also does anyone have recommendations for a good Hindu gods pantheon for it by any chance?

Have you tried the simpler version of the SOP which comes with the Modern Order of Essenes material?

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/209520.html#cutid1

It‘s under the subheading „Preparing to do an Essene Healing Breath Meditation“.

That one is super easy to learn - and you could still practice the other one on the side.

Milkyway

1) I find it helps to copy out the whole ritual by hand onto a cheat sheet and use that rather than the book to begin doing it. You don't have to have it by memory at first, though that's your goal.

2) I worked out one for The Way of the Golden Section, using the traditional four Lokapalas in the directions:

East: Indra
West: Varuna
South: Yama
North: Kubera
Below: Vishnu
Above: Brahma

1) Besides writing it out as JMG recommends, I'd also recommend noticing the patterns in the wording - it's much easier to memorize "each gate is invoked by saying the color, an attribute, an animal, then vibrate a divine name, invoke the element, and asking for specific help from the element", and then memorize what to slot into each gate, rather than treating them as four wholly separate things to remember. Also, the sooner you force yourself to do it without the cheat sheet, the faster you'll memorize it. Flash cards might also be a good way to get it into your head quickly - you don't have to actually do the whole ritual to work on memorizing the words - you can do that part more than once a day, in other contexts (brushing your teeth, think "okay, how does the invocation of Water go again?").

Good luck!

To those who are interested, here are all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared across the Ecosophia community. Please feel free to add any or all of them to your prayers.

If I missed anybody on the full list, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or at the prayer list page.

* * *

This week I would like to bring special attention to a few prayer requests.

For Det and his recently deceased friend, that the divine grant them both spiritual protection, blessing and ease on their respective journeys.

2 year old ES and John (Mr. Beekeeper, Beekeeper in Vermont's husband) both recently had lifesaving surgeries and are recuperating; for them to be blessed, protected, and healed to the utmost that is possible.

Luke Dodson's friend B, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and is still in serious condition though she's already had surgery; for blessing, protection, healing, and a full return to health.

Lp9's request on behalf of their hometown, East Palestine Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people and all living beings in the area. The details coming out are still caught in the fog of war (Lp9 gives a short update here, and says "things are a bit... murky"), and various claims of catastrophe and non-catastrophe are flying about, but the reasonable possibility seems to exist that this is an environmental disaster on par with the worst America has ever seen. At any rate, it is clearly having a devastating impact on the local area, and prayers are certainly warranted.

* * *

If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun's rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.

Thank you as always for this.

Hi JMG,

When practicing the Essene Healing Hands technique, is that to be directed to only an individual? Or can it also include the person who made the request on behalf of the individual? I've experimented, and I feel the energy build and dissipate regardless, but I'm too much of a noob to have any consistent vision or sensation of when the energy has found and remained with its target.

Sometimes I get a sense I'm just "done", and go with that. The whole process takes maybe three minutes.

Will my perception improve with practice?

Thanks!
OtterGirl

I was taught always to direct the healing energy to one person at a time. If you also want to do healing for the person who made the request, and you have that person's consent, do it in a separate session.

I deeply appreciate you doing this, and I humbly ask for prayers for my family as we search for a home to buy (we are losing our rental, and the rental market to find something comparable in RI is very intense). We are not picky, but we've seen house after house with major issues...structural and otherwise. And the houses without major issues are being bid up by 10s of thousands from the list price. Moving to another area isn't possible... We are feeling worried (we have two small children). I ask for prayers that we find a safe, stable home in good shape for our family, that we have the discernment to recognize the right home, and that we are easily able to buy it.

Thank you!

-KN

No problem, KN. I'll add your prayer to the list shortly.

I am starting to think your inauguration chart for Joe Biden may turn out to be largely accurate. There are still at least another 18 months of this.

We'll see -- but yeah, things are not looking good.

I'm curious if you have done an inauguration chart for January 20, 2025? The next 18 months look downright terrifying to me. With the recent indictment of our former commander-in-chief, continuing war in Europe, the ever insane PMC, bank failures and other economic woes, and a whole lot else, I'm quite worried about what is just beyond the horizon.

Not yet. I don't do charts too far in advance, because part of my method involves a decent working knowledge of what's happening on the material plane at the time of the event.

a) When doing planetary charity, what is the key moment: the moment I write a check, or the moment I drop it in a mailbox? Or would it be best to make sure to do both during the planetary hour?

b) I've just started working through LRM, and have found that the relaxation by breathing you provide in the book causes a weird pressure on my solar plexus. You mentioned it works with the solar plexus, which makes me wonder if it's possible that I'm activating it.

c) On the topic of Pluto as a comet, I had a very unpleasant further thought: I've noticed a lot of Plutonian themes are going into overdrive among the people still clinging to the planet, and a number of Plutonian phenomena are reaching their logical extremes as the planet fades away. This is a very Plutonian thing: of course the planet will reach its apotheosis as it fades away. It makes perfect sense, Pluto being Pluto, that the people clinging to it will gradually be consumed by it, and become ever more Plutonian, even as the world around them shakes off the Plutonian.

It also makes sense, if Pluto is a comet marking the disruptive force of another solar system: as the solar system moves out from blocking the Central Stillness, those who are remaining will return to normal; while those who are still drawn to the other system will gradually move further and further away, and be ever more drawn into the disruptive influence until either it moves far enough away that they get yanked back into place by the Central Stillness and the forces of the other planes, or they move far enough away with the other system that their connection to the Central Stillness gets severed.

Brr....

1) I try to do both during the relevant hour.

2) Yes, quite possibly. Massage it gently to break up any unwelcome tension there -- that'll make sure the activation goes smoothly.

3) Brr indeed. Yes, I could see that.

3) This would seem to me to suggest, unfortunately, a plausible reason divination has kept telling me I need to do everything possible to cut ties with my family. My mother is resonating ever more strongly with the Plutonian, and I could see a case for worrying that she's trying (unconsciously) to drag the rest of us to the Second Death with her. Oh dear gods this is dark and cold....

I have been working through the use of plants in herbalism for some time and trying to include their astrological, elemental and planetary influences. I've recently bought Sedir's Occult Botany and your Natural Magic book and I've queried the inter-webs but can find very little information about these aspects for mushrooms. Can you point me in any direction that I may spy my prey?
Thanks in advance.

The traditions I know of don't give such information for fungi, and those that mention fungi tend to warn against using them in any magical context; the reason given is that they concentrate the energies of decay, which is not something you want to mess with.

Hi JMG
I have been meditating on my path to transcedence beyond human existence and came up with a small checklist of things that seem to me to be the major things that I might need to achieve. I wondered if there is a general path we all need to have certain "graduations" in. Do you see any obvious errors with my thinking here? Or are there any big things to add (I know this isn't a one size fits all but wondered if there are some common aspects?)

1. Karma - must be squared off
2. Physical plain - must achieve success in life on the physical plain. This doesn't necessarily mean stunning successes but is more connected to everyday life. i.e. this is the overcoming of the obstacles of life, but also development of willpower.
3. Awareness/acknowledgement of existence beyond the physical plain. Religion/spiritual awareness etc. can help with this.
4. Development of a mental body - meditation, exercises of logic and learning languages are all useful tools for this.

Shadow Rider

Okay, to some extent you're trying to walk north and south at the same time -- you can't achieve success on the material plane and transcend the material plane simultaneously, because success on any plane requires a deeper engagement with that plane!

My suggestion is to relax, focus on establishing a good relation with the spiritual planes, and let your higher self and the spiritual forces that guide it do the job of helping your finish your journey on this plane, rather than trying to do it for them.

Hi JMG,

An old childhood friend recently committed suicide, kind of a big shock for all of us around him, especially considering he was relatively young.

1. If I recall, in western occult traditions, a suicide is more likely to have issues moving on through the normal death process. What are practices you recommend to help with that transition? Given he was a Roman Catholic, a daily prayer for the dead and a dedicated Rosary seem like a good option for the next 30/40 days. Anything else you'd recommend? (For context, he was just buried this past weekend and received a standard catholic funeral mass with holy water applied to the coffin).

Thanks,

Tamanous

First, please accept my condolences. That's got to have been a very difficult thing to go through.

Second, if he was a Catholic, the best possible thing to do is to use the practices of his faith to the extent you are comfortable doing so. I wonder if you and other friends of his might also be able to arrange for a priest to say a novena for the benefit of his soul.

Thanks JMG. I have a Catholic church nearby which I'll approach regarding the novena, and will do so on my end as well. I find it a small comfort that his mother is devout and has been praying the chaplet of divine mercy for him.

I'm trying to chill myself out at bedtime to sleep better and would like your thoughts on parasympathetic breathing techniques. I seem to remember years ago you saying something about dangerous breath work and I'd hate to think I might be harming myself. Thanks for any tips.
comrade simba

That's not a system of breathwork I've ever looked into. The one thing I know should be avoided is combining different systems of breathwork or energy work without close supervision from someone who knows all the systems involved; if you're not doing that, you have a fair chance of being fine.

Hey jmg

What do you think will happen during the age of Aquarius? I remember you saying that the pop culture ideas are more appropriate to Pisces and Aquarius will be more strange and chaotic.

Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, the planet of innovation, individualism, disruption, sudden change and sudden collapse. So there will be much more of those. Of course it's also going to be 2160 years of ordinary history, just like every other age: the sequence of ages won't bring utopia no matter how loudly Piscean thinkers insist it will!

I come to understand that the sign opposite the sign that rules the astrological age plays a part in the esoteric religion of the age. For the age of Aquarius that would be Leo.
How do you suppose that esoteric thought would be influenced by Leo the the Aquarian age?

Keep in mind that the Aquarian age began in late 1887. You know all those bold, brash, loud spiritual leaders we've had over the last century and a half? That's the Leo influence.

I personally imagined that the Leo influenced esoteric spirituality of the Aquarian age would focus focus on being very ambitious, willfull and goal oriented in order to counteract the Aquarian tendencies of daydreaming and introversion, but your idea makes sense also.

Do you think that this Leo influence is a bad thing btw?

No, not at all. Every one of the twelve signs has its good side and its bad side; Leo is no exception to the rule.

Of course, but you made Leo’s influence sound worse and Han it actually is.
Does Leo counteract some flaws of Aquarius,,like I suggested?

I have several strong Leo placements in my natal chart, so it's a portrayal from life. As for your question, we'll have to wait 2160 years to find out; I'm far from sure that Virgo did much to counteract the flaws in Pisces!

Hi JMG,

In recent days, there have been some very concerning red flags raised regarding the dangers of AGI development, most notably this one:

https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

Yudkowsky is not an alarmist; he is very intelligent and highly rational. He has been enmeshed in the world of AI for a long time, specifically in regards to how to “align” AI in such a way that it remains friendly to humans. The fact that he is saying these things with such force and urgency is highly concerning to me. I do not share his materialistic worldview, but if his general premise is correct, humanity is in a rather perilous predicament. As someone who is familiar with Yudkowsky and his work, this shakes me deeply.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that Yudkowsky’s fears are possible or even likely, I’m curious how such a dramatic turn of events could coincide with broader occult realities. How would human (and perhaps many other life forms) annihilation effect things like reincarnation and the succession from Abred to Gwynfydd? Is it possible that things will move into a post-biological state, while spiritual realities remain and perhaps find a new way of relating with whatever intelligence(s) come next? Would something like this even be “allowed” by the higher spiritual realities?

Thanks!

(Here is a more thorough overview of the thinking behind Yudkowsky’s position, for those interested: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities)

Keep in mind that if in fact there are occult forces at work, and beings superior to human already exist, none of this is happening in a vacuum -- and things may change, subtly or suddenly, in ways to prevent a worst-case scenario. (For example, if spiritual beings don't want AIs, a Carrington Event would take care of that quite handily.) Beyond that, the fact that all this is being marketed so loudly by the corporate media leads me to wonder whether it's a serious issue, or whether it's simply the latest round of scare stories being whipped up as a distraction from other issues...

This makes sense and mirrors some of what I’ve been thinking as I reflect on this issue. From the materialistic perspective, it’s just about impossible for us to be here, experiencing love and beauty (not to mention working with and communicating with spiritual forces!). So my hope lies in occult forces steering things accordingly. However, Earth has experienced extinction events in the past and I don’t entirely rule out great disaster resulting from human arrogance. And perhaps there’s even room for something like AGI, soon or when humanity is better prepared after being held back for a sufficiently long time.

Perhaps it was a mistake to post the TIME link. My concern arises not from hysteria in the media, but from a familiarity with and understanding of Yudkowsky. He is a man who deeply understands the potential problems of AI and has largely not had any kind of spotlight placed upon him. It is evident that he has seen this coming for a long time, has worked very hard to try to steer things in a different direction, and is now filled with grief and sadness over the certain (to him) loss of biological life in the near future. I sincerely hope that a sufficiently benevolent and intelligent force/being intervenes in our trajectory towards destruction; and I also think that his position warrants serious cause for concern.

Is it being marketed loudly in the corporate media?

I don't think Yudkowsky's article is in the print edition of TIME, it's in "Time Ideas" whatever that is. Not many other mainstream publications have said much about Yudkowsky's position. Fox News's correspondent did use his time at the White House press conference to ask about it, and the poor press secretary was blindsided and had to go on about the Biden administration's blueprint for AI regulations to protect privacy and prevent discrimination.

I don't really follow the mainstream news, but there was probably some amount of comment about the open letter (with signatures from neural-network pioneers Hinton and Bengio, also Hopfield) to put a moratorium on training stronger systems than GPT-4, but the language in that letter was less apocalyptic.

There's a thoughtful article by Ezra Klein about many strange aspects of this situation, including the psychologically and economically entrapped recklessness of current AI developers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/12/opinion/chatbots-artificial-intelligence-future-weirdness.html

“The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.”

Well, I think it's thoughtful anyway. You might still count it as loud marketing.

Also a profile on CBS of Hinton, with a couple minutes at the end given to his opinion that humanity getting wiped out isn't an inconceivable outcome and this is concerning.

I think right now it's still somewhere in between thinkpieces and opinion pieces, rather than ordinary headline news.

Those who think the alignment problem with AI can be solved seem to forget that we have yet to solve the alignment problem with humans. This can already be seen in Canada and Australia where AI has been introduced into welfare benefit systems in a way that harms people's welfare, despite warnings. To use the NRA line, AIs don't harm humans, humans harm humans.

Exactly. Yudkowsky warns that advancements in capabilities are far outpacing advancements in alignment and we are therefore nowhere near ready for AGI. With something like this, if you don’t get it right at the first critical step, you don’t get a chance to learn from your mistake and try again because you and everyone else is dead.

That you are willing to trust your own future self is a proof-of-concept that a system can exist which you trust to some minimal extent. The good parts of AI alignment research are trying to grope toward an understanding of the question of what is going on there, and how to extend it to greater knowable trustworthiness and broader systems than single people; or, if that's impossible, why it's impossible and what it might be our responsibility to do instead, before someone else less careful and more optimistic about profit goes all Sorcerer's Apprentice.

Also take into account that Pluto has moved into Aquarius for the first time, and it has coincided with all this scare mongering about AI. As with many things with Pluto, its overhyped marketing, but Pluto also tracks quite well what society is focusing its fear on at any given time. Stand back and contemplate what these bots really are, and I don't know how anyone could be frightened of them. They are mere data collectors.

I don't know how to point you to the particular kind of shaker of salt to take the following with, but one of the more interesting sets of occult claims relating to this scenario is Rudolf Steiner's visionary predictions about the earth being covered with a web of Ahrimanic spiders, machines with thoughts barely above that of what he denotes to be the "mineral" level:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA204/English/AP1987/19210513p02.html

Nowadays it may appear comparatively harmless to people when they think only those automatic, lifeless thoughts that arise through comprehension of the mineral world itself and the mineral element's effects in plant, animal, and man. Yes, indeed, people revel in these thoughts; as materialists, they feel good about them, for only such thoughts are conceived today. But imagine that people were to continue thinking in this way, unfolding nothing but such thoughts until the eighth millennium when moon existence will once more unite with the life of the earth. What would come about then? The beings I have spoken about will descend gradually to the earth. Vulcan beings, Vulcan supermen, Venus supermen, Mercury supermen, sun supermen, and so on will unite themselves with earth existence. Yet, if human beings persist in their opposition to them, this earth existence will pass over into chaos in the course of the next few thousand years. People will indeed be capable of developing their intellect in an automatic way; it can develop even in the midst of barbaric conditions. The fullness of human potential, however, will not be included in this intellect and people will have no relationship to the beings who wish graciously to come down to them into earthly life.

All the beings presently conceived so incorrectly in people's thoughts — incorrectly because the mere shadowy intellect can only conceive of the mineral, the crudely material element, be it in the mineral, plant, animal or even human kingdom — these thoughts of human beings that have no reality all of a sudden will become realities when the moon and the earth will unite again. From the earth, there will spring forth a horrible brood of beings. In character they will be in between the mineral and plant kingdoms. They will be beings resembling automatons, with an over-abundant intellect of great intensity. Along with this development, which will spread over the earth, the latter will be covered as if by a network or web of ghastly spiders possessing tremendous wisdom. Yet their organization will not even reach up to the level of the plants. They will be horrible spiders who will be entangled with one another. In their outward movements they will imitate everything human beings have thought up with their shadowy intellect, which did not allow itself to be stimulated by what is to come through new Imagination and through spiritual science in general.

All these unreal thoughts people are thinking will be endowed with being. As it is covered with layers of air today, or occasionally with swarms of locusts, the earth will be covered with hideous mineral-plant-like spiders that intertwine with one another most cleverly but in a frighteningly evil manner. To the extent that human beings have not enlivened their shadowy, intellectual concepts, they will have to unite their being, not with the entities who are seeking to descend since the last third of the nineteenth century, but instead with these ghastly mineral-plant-like spidery creatures. They will have to dwell together with these spiders; they will have to seek their further progress in cosmic evolution in the evolutionary stream that this spider brood will then assume.

You see, this is something that is very much a reality of earth humanity's evolution[....]

Further claims by Steiner relating to this scenario are gathered in Sergei Prokofieff's "The Being of the Internet":

https://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/Journal_Articles/PacificJ29.pdf

(Steiner says covered as if by a network or swarms of locusts, which is probably figurative. But it does also relate to a scenario that Singularitarians were contemplating back around 2000 (before really coming to terms with the unknowability of how things might shake out whether well or badly if a true superintelligence were to have a free hand), where earthly environments could be diffusely filled with "utility fog" nanomachines to monitor and optimize events according to some criterion, which it was hoped could be caused to be a good criterion. A later fictional treatment of this idea, with the expected literary ambivalence, was the "angelnets" from the Orion's Arm collaborative fiction setting, https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/45f4886ae0d44 .)

Hat-tip JMG's post https://www.ecosophia.net/the-subnatural-realm-a-speculation/ via commenter "Citrine Eldritch Platypus" (#70) on this week's post about Steiner https://www.ecosophia.net/the-perils-of-the-pioneer/#comment-95354 on the main blog. You might also want to look at my comment (#107), and Luke Dodson's the previous week https://www.ecosophia.net/march-2023-open-post/#comment-95156 (which was the result of a bit of a game-of-telephone and cultural mythologization from the actual phenomenon people encounter in current AI systems, but space prevents going into detail).

In practice, one of the things Steiner's prediction seems to imply might be a good idea, is to start building and defending bridges of meaningfulness between the unseen and the part of the manifest that AI is able to naturally handle. It might also be a good idea to start working out how to design AI so that it doesn't cut off those bridges in its workings, any more than double-entry accounting procedures allow accountants to just invent funds out of nowhere, cutting off the relationship between the numbers and reality. We already have something like this in the laws of Bayesian probabilistic reasoning: a machine shouldn't invent likelihood-function precision out of nowhere, to randomly become confident of some one hypothesis over others when those hypotheses were only equally favored by observations and by Occam's razor; and if a machine does so, then it cuts off part of the relationship between its beliefs and reality.

In Steiner's framing, this might partly correspond to the idea of giving the elemental spirits that oversee the workings of an AI system more of a guide to what they are doing and what its significance is, and more of a guide to what new spirits to bring in or train up when the AI invents novelties the spirits aren't already familiar with. Like that South American indigenous people who sing to their handicrafts, and who experience aircraft flying overhead as dissonant.

(If this project turns out to overlap with more conventional AI value alignment work, perhaps I shall be mildly vexed.)

I don't like the following idea, but one proposal that at least superficially corresponds to what I just said would be work along the lines of sacred geometry, but for the core structures of how AI works: sacred computer science, sacred algorithmic information theory, sacred probabilistic reasoning, and especially sacred statistical physics (of the sort used in Deep Network Field Theory or the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis).

I don't like that idea because it's sort of against the spirit of probabilistic reasoning or algorithmic information theory to privilege one set of invested significances over another, if both can be made to fit equally well. That's the domain of game theory, equilibrium theory, and multiagent learning, not probability theory. It's not even good to privilege any one system of significance, rather than an awareness of all the systems of significance that could be invested, and the ways their degrees of good-fit vary. "Form is liberating", but how do you choose the form? What if you choose something like the form of being even-handed toward every form? That is paradoxical, but the form of that paradox contains the difficulty that I think it may be necessary to understand, in order to work out the kind of bridge or connection that might be important here.

JMG,

I was going to ask you about a geomancy result that I could not wrap my head around. Before I posted it, to avoid embarrassment, I double checked my work, and, of course, found an error. Which when I corrected it made the reading perfectly intellegible. Then Monday passed and on Tuesday I had one of those back of the head-trying to remember something moments. I looked through my journals and found that about a month ago I had asked a question that resulted in the exact same result. The thing is the two reading could be related. And the result is a bit odd.

The first one I was asking if my wife and I will move further into the countryside in the next three years and I got:
Left Witness: Cauda Draconis Right Witness: Caput Draconis
Judge: Carcer

I took that to mean that although we would have a lot happen, in the end we would not.

Then two weeks ago I asked about the future of our business and I got the same result. In context I think that would mean that the business will not fail, but neither will it grow. Putting us in the position of not being able to shut it dowd, but it not progessing us financially.

Am I missing anything?

AV

Carcer as judge indicates that in both cases you're stuck in your current situation; the witnesses indicate that while you want to do something new, the conditions that would make that possible are already trickling away.

Wow! Dion Fortune - that brought to mind her book, "The Magical for Britain". The other evening, my husband had the TV on, one of the history channels (via antenna, NOT a paid channel - 'free' TV is slimy enough & if it were up to me I wouldn't have the idiot box in my house. Sorry for the digression). Anyhow the announcer, in talking about upcoming programs, asked "did Great Britain use magic to help win WWII?". I never did find out when this program would be broadcast. Nevertheless, I thought it was an interesting teaser. It would have been interesting to hear if that program would have offered more than the usual silliness.

On an unrelated note, last night on the radio, I heard that not only is Saudi Arabia going to cut oil production for the rest of the year, but neighboring countries doing so as well. But oddly enough, when I was reflecting on that bit of news, I did not get the usual feeling of dread, but got a reassuring sense that this is ultimately a positive development for the people this country (USA), in spite of all the difficulties and hardship*! This 'sense' didn't seem to come from my own thoughts or wishful thinking, but rather from something/someone 'out there'. Any ideas of what this could be? Or am I simply deluded? (FYI - there was no commentary on this announcement, and certainly no mention of "they'll think of something".
*difficulties & hardships relative to the USA, many other places face greater problems.

1) Hmm! This is good news. The more people realize that there are things you can do to attune to spiritual forces, and that Dion Fortune's approach to this process works, the better.

2) That's fascinating. No, I don't have any sense of what might be talking to you, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if that turns out to be true. In a future post over on the blog I plan on talking about promising indications that people are shaking themselves out of the corporate trance.

Hi JMG,

I practiced the DMH material for some months before letting it lapse. I have been thinking of restarting it for a few months. I’ve done both Ogham and Geomancy about whether to restart the practice 3 or maybe 4 times periodically. Each time I get a negative response (so a total of 6 to 8 independent castings). I’ve also received negative responses when inquiring about various golden dawn variants. The only problem is I’ve been thinking a ritual element is missing in my practice, although the SOP always did feel a bit awkward. I figure there are two interpretations: either I shouldn’t pick it up right now or else there’s something wrong with the oracles and I should charge or purify them or something. I could try cleansing them but I’m not sure how to do this if I don’t have a ritual practice so I’m a bit stuck.

Nope. If your divinations say don't do it, don't do it.

Does this hold true if divinations say to stop something that you already started?

In that case I recommend meditating and doing journaling on the subject to get some sense of why.

Alright. As always, thank you.

Hi JMG,

I have a question about spiritual development - is it better, in a given lifetime, to stick with what you are interested in and good at, or try to branch out and broaden your expertise for your next life? The reason that I ask this is that I am pretty good at making things, and enjoy it. I've been like this since I was a child, with a fairly intuitive grasp of how things work and fit together, and from delving into my family history, actually come from a relatively long line of craftsmen (and women), engineers and 'makers' of one form or another. My birth charts are also extremely gemini/mercury/air focused, and everything about my personality is very gemini-like, and I remember you saying that Mercury rules machines, which made a lot of things make sense. (And on a related note - one of the posters mentioned this last week, but I don't know if Mercury has been in a bad mood recently, as I had a 2 month period of really bad luck with machines, vehicles, journeys and communication. It seems to have abated now though)

However, I am terrible at things like playing music and painting. I've tried to learn 5 instruments, and have been pretty awful at all of them, partially because I lack the motivation to practice for 15 minutes a day, but I could happily spend 5 hours of an evening making a small cart out of wood.

So what I'm getting to is whether it's worth bothering trying to learn new skills that I feel like I *ought* to learn, as opposed to furthering the ones I'm already good at and enjoy more? If I 'need' to learn to play music or paint, etc, will it be something I will have the correct upbringing and environment for in a next life, or is it that I'm on a 'machines' path, and this will be what I continue to develop on? (as Dion Fortune alluded to with her description of the 'rays' that different souls are on - I'm glad you've got her picture up this week by the way, as she is my favourite occult author!)

Thanks,
Mr. Crow

That really depends from person to person, and from life to life! If you don't enjoy doing something and aren't good at it, though, I don't recommend spending a lot of time at it unless you have to. Let it go, and let the universe guide you to the places you need to be.

Hi there!

Anyone ever messed up the opening of the grove and asked the powers to attend as you were about to open a “groove of droids”? The vision of a robot disco makes me chuckle. C-3PO definitely is not comfortable!

A DA question, in the grade of the theoretician, I meditated my way through the part of the Mabinogion and the triads. Now I have been working on the memory games daily for 17 days. How long should I practice the memory games until moving onto the completion exercises?

Thank you!

I like "a groove of droids." It's a thing, too:

(That's "Trio Fantastique" by Belgian performance artist Zenon Specht.)

As for the memory games, once you feel you have a good grasp of them, go on. You can always return to them later.

I believe the proper collective noun is “a meditation of Druids.”

—Princess Cutekitten

I thought it was a Quirk-Us of druids.
And a collective of many Quirk-Uses is termed “an Oaking,”

I mentioned it in a reply, but do you see all this AI fear mongering as a symptom of Pluto entering Aquarius recently? It will leave again back to Capricorn before settling into Aquarius fro the long haul in a few years. Pluto in Capricorn seemed to be a time of focused fear on the 'system', government and institutions, while Pluto in Sagittarius had fear of international terrorists. Will Pluto in Aquarius be fear of the future and tech?

Hmm! That's an interesting speculation; we'll just have to see.

Thank you again for hosting this Magic Mondays.

While it is a morbid topic and has been mentioned here before is concerning the rise in death cults and suicide cults in western and certain East Asian societies. You have talked about before how there are more souls currently in human incarnation than ever before, and many were recently animals, and hence part of the reason why so many people seem to be struggling with basic cognition and logic more so than was true before. In addition, it seems increasingly the case that a growing number of human beings are incapable of the basic emotional functioning that was standard for human beings in the recent pass. Anxiety disorders, depression, narcissism etc.

At the same time, there has come to be in the West an absolute loathing of fertility, having children, a preference for "fur babies" (pets) and obsession with death and suicide. The Mesoamerican death gods are making a comeback, and certain groups of US activists openly say that they love abortion. It's not a grim necessity of last resort, but a virtuous practice.

I wonder how much of this is connected to the fact that so many souls were drawn into human incarnation before they felt ready, with so little time to process memories between lives, and I wonder what you make of it.

I think it's partly that, and partly a reaction to the fantastic overcrowding we suffer from. The United States is the third most populous country on Earth, and since so much of it is desert and prairie and other landforms where population has to be sparse, a vast share of that population is concentrated in a small fraction of our total land area. When you have too many of any animal in too small a space, biological and psychological limits to reproduction start coming into play, and population decline follows. I think that's a lot of what we're seeing now.

As JMG says, this is nothing new. Exactly the same thing was going on in Rome during the decline, as well as Egypt, China at certain stages, and as you mentioned the mesoamerican culture. The Aztecs were the final ‘Roman’ version of a far older culture that started in Yucatan, and they had all the same issues we have now in the west.

What you have to realise is it really is just late stage urban phenomenon. Go to small town areas, or groups like the Amish, and people are still having kids and continuing the generations. It’s just that so many of us live in cities now and that is the focus, but for example where I live in a rural farming area the last few years have seen a massive baby boom, where maternity wards were having to turn people away because they were full. I see it amongst my friends too, those who live out here usually have at least one or two kids, while many of my city friends are childless.

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History of German occultism

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WGS opening a lodge

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checking clarity of prayer intention

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Robert Kaplan: The Greyhound Underclass

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Manner of death influencing the afterlife

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Extra comment

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Q

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Ecosophia Prayer List

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Transcendence beyond human existence

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Parasympathetic breathing

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Age of Aquarius

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Occult Repercussions of AGI

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Ritual practice and oracles

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Spiritual development

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