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. 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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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

Astral pollution

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I would like to know if there is a case to be made in analogizing the emotions of envy/jealousy aroused or enhanced by social media (from the earliest gossip columns to Instagram/TikTok/etc.) in the astral plane, to industrial pollutants in the physical plane, where both categories skyrocketed during the industrial era.

I'm trying to understand better the astral plane and what "pollutes" it.

Thanks,
Eugene

Re: Astral pollution

[ecosophia]

That strikes me as a valid comparison. Envy is only one of the pollutants of the lower astral, though. Hatred, fear, deliberate dishonesty, all kinds of negative emotions pool on the lower astral and become a thick emotional sludge there.

Re: Astral pollution

[(Anonymous)]

Not the OP, could I ask a question related to this? Are negative emotions also divine, and thus exist on the higher spiritual planes as well? For example, Ares / Mars has some negative qualities associated with him, as does his children Phobos and Deimos. Or Eris, Nemesis, and so on.

In your book A World Full Of Gods there is a section on the problem of evil, where you argue that the problem of evil is only a problem in monotheistic religions, and in polytheistic religions you can pantheons as the Greek pantheon where the negative emotions have deities associated with them. What I don't understand is how then negative emotions exist on the lower astral, say, rather than being divine powers on the the upper planes.

Re: Astral pollution

[ecosophia]

Remember that we don't experience the gods directly. We experience them on our own level of being. Mars as a power on the spiritual planes has no negative emotions connected with him, because emotions don't exist above the astral plane -- that's the plane of emotions. Yet as his influence descends through the planes, it takes various forms on those lower planes, and some of them are negative.