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

Spiritual development

[(Anonymous)]

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

Re: Spiritual development

[ecosophia]

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.