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

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.

[ecosophia]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

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.