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)]

Apologies if this has been covered before, but I'm curious about some of the major patterns of things happening around 2005-2006, which, from what I understand was the time that global oil production peaked and the first smartphones were released. I've read (on one of the many great substacks linked to here, unfortunately I can't remember which one, or maybe it was Mary Harrington's), that young people's mental health, especially young women's, has taken a nosedive since about the time that smartphones and social networks both entered the scene, which makes sense to me. One thing that troubled me in particular was seeing a steep drop-off in the amount of time young people spend in person with friends; obviously the lockdowns made that amount drop even more, and it doesn't seem to be recovering very well.

I was wondering if there's any correlation between these two things that could be revealed or explained by astrology or some other system like the planes being discussed in the previous post (I'm so new to astrology I don't even quite know how to frame the question, to be honest). I just have this sense that since about 2006, people's social lives have been fragmented and ripped apart...much has been said about the silos and echo chambers; less about the astral sludge that people are subjected to as a result of using these technologies with no spiritual hygiene, so to speak. It seems like there is this technological behemoth that favors madness that came in with smartphones plus social networks specifically...right at the same time that the ability to fuel that behemoth began to wane for good. Someone in the previous thread made a comment about the Pisces fish pulling in two directions, and comets with two tails...anyways, I'm just struck by this sense of a pull in two directions and wondering what greater forces are at play here.

—Andy T.

[ecosophia]

That's an intriguing question. I hadn't yet started serious study of mundane astrology in 2005-2006, but it's interesting that that's when you see things really starting to fly apart. From my perspective, it's been a gradual process; there have been certain periods when it really got weird and sick, notably the early 1980s, the run-up to the 2012 Mayan Fools Day business, and especially from 2016 to the present, but I've seen a gradual descent into more and more craziness over time.

[(Anonymous)]

I remember the early ‘80’s, but not fondly. The government seemed bent on wrecking everyone’s life, and as far as I could tell, hardly anyone objected or even noticed. And here we are.

—Princess Cutekitten

[(Anonymous)]

I'd be curious to hear more about that, how the government was wrecking things for people then...does it feel worse/like more of an overreach than what has been happening during the past couple of years?

—Andy T.

[(Anonymous)]

The early ‘80’s can be summed up in 3 words: “Government is bad.” Citizens were told this endlessly, by people who had expended considerable money and effort to join the bad government, which they proceeded to loot where they could ,and wreck everywhere. All that decaying infrastructure around you? The neglect began in the early ‘80’s. Good citizenship was discouraged. “Greed is good” was another 3-word saying popular then. Private equity was born in the ‘80’s, to mature into the monstrously destructive force it is today. The Private Sector was a god. Pretty much every problem you see today, with a few exceptions, was born in the ‘80’s.

Many citizens have never lived under functional Federal or state government and have no idea what that was like. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than what we have now.

—Princess Cutekitten

[(Anonymous)]

When I see those two events as examples of a descent into craziness, they feel much more parallel than in opposition. I was in high school then and starting to have some of my first experiences of spiritual opening and awareness, so I think I was just especially sensitive to the uptick in ambient madness brought on by the new technologies then.

—Andy T.