ecosophia | Magic Monday

Current Mood: busy

Entry tags:

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.

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!***

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

Good Evening,
Most etheric exercises seem to be physical exertions. Does this mean sports are etheric and have effects on the etheric body? It almost seems like a live sporting event is a ritual in which so much etheric energy is stirred up that it can even be a vicarious etheric ritual to viewers of the sport.

Is this a reason behind your inclusion of a physical art (like TaiChi/Aikido ) in the WotGS curriculum - because it is an etheric work that helps balance all the astral work in the curriculum?

Does the etheric somewhat mediate between the astral and physical just as the occult mediates between science and religion - is that analogy worth pursuing?

Blessings and well-wishes to all who desire them.

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.

I'd love to hear more about these interactions if you'd be open to sharing any :)

I recently completed the first lesson on the etheric plane in OPW. As I was working through the themes I kept recalling the models of the claimed covid virus. It looks very regular, resembling a crystal. That got me started musing on the possibility of viruses having etheric sheaths but not full etheric bodies. If they have etheric sheaths, it would fit with what I remember learning about viruses many years ago, that they don't seem to be exactly living, yet they can commandeer cells to make copies of themselves. If viruses have etheric sheaths, that would explain this kind of borderline behavior between the living and the not-living. What are your thoughts along this line?

I also began to wonder if the mRNA material in the injections might also have an etheric sheath and if so, what implications that might have for their effects on humans. Vaccines in the past, I understand, contained dead material, so would have their effects on the material plane. If an injection contains an etheric sheath that can affect the etheric plane, I worry about the potential for unusual events to occur if the etheric sheath affects the etheric body of the person who receives it. Does this make sense to you?

Yes in all three cases. I see you're paying attention!

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.)

1) That's a fascinating possibility. The material I put into OPW dates from before anyone knew what viruses were -- until the electron microscope had gone through a couple of generations of development, all researchers knew for sure was that they were contagious but you couldn't see them with an ordinary microscope -- and it turns out that viruses are in fact complex crystals. They would be good candidates for a transitional stage between the mineral and vegetable realms.

2) Some vaccines have always contained live material; the first vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, contained live cowpox viruses. But you're right that that's always at least a little risky.

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.

Hi. I have been doing your LBRC and Christian-converted middle pillar for a while now (I forget how long ago you posted it), and now I'm going through the Modern Essenes lessons and I have a few questions.

1. The location of the sphere above the head in the Essenes Master Healer lesson is slightly different from where I've been putting the corresponding sphere of the MP: the Essene location interpenetrates the head while I had taken the MP sphere to be completely above it. Should I adjust one of these positions to match the other, does it not matter, or are they incompatible for some reason?

2. The Foundation sphere is quite a bit higher than the genital sphere from the MP (and the diagram in Regardie's book). I was a bit surprised by that because I thought the MP was supposed to correspond to the tree of life middle pillar. I take it there are multiple ways to map the tree of life to the body? Is there any significance to the differences?

3. Is the Essene Master Teacher grade the same as the Essene Master Healer?

4. For the Essene Master Teacher you say to go through the Gnostic lessons. For those, you need an alb. Does this have to be something that says "alb" in the description, or can it be any white robe, eg a bathrobe, which are quite a bit cheaper?

5. In the reflexology practices, rather than physical pain or tenderness I often come across what seems like a more psychological tenderness or reluctance for certain points. I presume I should treat that as for physical pain/tenderness?

Thank you!

1 & 2) There's quite a bit of flexibility in where to put these centers; different versions of the Middle Pillar locate the centers differently, for example. You can adjust as you wish, or simply use different points. (This is true of most systems of energy centers.)

3) No. The Master Teacher grade is the fourth level and gives the ability to perform attunements for others.

4) Any white robe will do.

5) Yes, very much so.

Alright. As always, thank you.

Sorry, one more question: for the life of me I can not get muscle testing to work. I always get the same response; for instance with the finger pulling one the left-hand loop breaks but the right hand loop gets stuck on the left index finger so there's not complete separation. Should I keep at this, is there something I should be adjusting, or should I substitute some other form of divination such as the sacred geometry oracle (which at least gives me varying answers!)? Thanks again.

:) Thank you.

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?

Muscle testing works very well for some people, so-so for others, and not at all for still others. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't, and you don't need to keep hammering at it. The important thing is that you tried it.

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?

1) I did catch that from the comment above but I still found it fascinating to imagine the other planets with incorporeal inhabitants! It's very trippy when I find that just how many things are alive, it seems everything is...

2) So perhaps like a transplanar organism if you will. Hehe this really fills my mind with funky images.

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!

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,”

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 8 of 8

Magic Monday

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

Ritual Sport

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

no subject

Viruses and ether

Re: Ritual Sport

Re: History of German occultism

Re: Viruses and ether

Re: Occult Repercussions of AGI

no subject

no subject

Re: Ritual practice and oracles

no subject

Re: Ritual Sport

Re: Age of Aquarius

no subject

Re: Age of Aquarius

Re: Age of Aquarius

Re: Star Logoi

Re: Age of Aquarius

no subject

no subject