Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just on 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 or comment 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. Last week's honoree, Violet Firth Evans aka Dion Fortune, had the great advantage of coming of age when the British occult community was close to its apogee, and she had plenty of teachers. Some of them, such as Moina Mathers, have already appeared here; some of them, such as Maiya Tranchell Hayes, apparently didn't leave any photographs behind -- but there are several others, and this is one of them: Frederick Bligh Bond, who was the official church archeologist at the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey between the two world wars, and discovered a whole series of lost features by digs that just happened to go to the right place. Then it turned out that there was no "just happened" about it; he was using spiritualistic methods to talk to the spirits of long-dead monks, who told him where to dig. The church threw a fit and dismissed him, but he went on to publish several volumes about his experiences, at least one of which can be downloaded for free (here). Dion Fortune studied with him for a while and also did trance work with him; her connection with Glastonbury continued to the end of her life, and in fact she's buried there.

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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

Re: AMORC

[ecosophia]

My contacts with AMORC members, with a very few exceptions, have been pleasant and cordial; the one complaint I've heard about the organization itself (this from former members) is that the teachings are kind of lightweight for the price. If you also have the benefit of group membership, however, and can afford the fees, it's a reasonable option.

Re: Magic and Morphic Fields

[ecosophia]

Good. I have another possible causal link to offer, though I'm going to save that until we get to that point in the current sequence of blog posts on enchantment. But yes, I think there's a case to be made for actual changes in the nature of human experience between ages of magic and ages of reason; more on this in due time!

Re: Hello

[(Anonymous)]

Sonkitten was having nightmares a while back. Vinegar chased them away and they haven’t come back.

—Princess Cutekitten

Re: Rosary Compatability

[ecosophia]

Last I heard,* the DOGD had a number of Christian members, including at least one who prays with the rosary. It requires the sort of open-minded attitude toward the Divine that a lot of occultists had back in the day -- a recognition of the fact that you can approach sacred realities in different ways without one being right and all others being wrong -- but if you can do that, you should be fine.

*I say "last I heard" because I'm no longer head of the DOGD -- I passed that role on to three senior students at the winter solstice just passed, so they can have fun with it. Just at the moment, I'm delighted to say, I'm not the grand panjandrum of anything at all!

Three Circles and Three Planes

[(Anonymous)]

Greetings, generous host:

I was re-reading the Druid Philosophy lecture in Grade 4 of the DA, which first mentions the 3 circles of manifestion (Abred, Gwynfydd, Ceugant) and then the 3 planes (material, astral, spiritual). I rather thought the circles should correspond to the planes, but in the further details on the planes, only the upper level of the astral sounds like Gwynfydd--the halls of light. So is the rest of the astral plane part of Abred? Or are the circles and planes like apples and oranges, describing different things?

Thanks very much for any light you can shed here.

Re: Temple technology update

[(Anonymous)]

Yes I will split it out into the physical and leave the rest for another paper.

[ecosophia]

Use journaling and meditation to get down to the core issues that are driving those problems, and take action to change whatever it is that needs to be changed.

Re: Cutting Connections from a bad relationship

[iprescott]

Hi JMG,

She threw her wedding ring set out of the car window, when I was driving down a highway, and mine followed right after. There is no way to recover it.

Re: Daydreams

[(Anonymous)]

Yo Maxine, in my early 20s I fell deeply in love with a young lady. Managed to get engaged,move to Calgary but it came apart and she moved away. Like you I managed to achieve a good life but I still have very strong memories of her even 45 years later. Currently in Art school doing classical portraiture and pulled several pictures of her as a subject to paint. Well it's taken four tries so far to try and capture her elfin aura.
Someone raised this bond of souls question and John wrote he's working on a book that discusses this. So I'm looking forward to reading this and coming to some sort of peace/acceptance we might meet again.
Longsword

Re: Post Plutonian Tree of Life

[ecosophia]

In Western occultism Kether is the starting point of the Tree, and the whole material world is in Malkuth; the planets are reflections of the spheres in the material world, and so belong to Malkuth as well, so (for example) Venus is the reflection of Netzach in Malkuth, and the Sun is the reflection of Tiphareth in Malkuth. So there are ten entire worlds in the Western theory, and the other nine are all more spiritual than this one!

Re: Random odds and ends

[ecosophia]

1) That's a point that will have to be sorted out by further research, as Tarnas's findings do seem to conflict with mine.

2) Not off hand, no.

3) I talked about it back a while ago, when I made a bunch of information on radionics machines available to people. If anybody had gone to work with that material and built machines to do so, I would have gone ahead and founded the Fellowship; it would have had three degrees of initiation, all focused on radionic practices. Apparently the demand wasn't there, though, since nobody got back to me -- so I shelved it.

4) I was considering a Druidified version of the Order of Spiritual Alchemy (OSA) materials. Once John Gilbert died and I was tasked with keeping his legacy alive, I decided to just go ahead and relaunch the OSA instead.

Re: Cutting Connections from a bad relationship

[ecosophia]

In that case you've already disposed of it, so just do the letter and throw it into the river.

Re: Hello

[(Anonymous)]

Oh I was just worried that using L9 for some of these more natural workings (hoodoo bath, vinegar) may give the wrong divination answer, it sounds like you're saying it is okay even though you use L8 for them.

Thank you.

Re: Hello

[ecosophia]

I'm glad to hear this.

Re: Hello

[ecosophia]

That's correct.

Re: Children knowing the chakras

[robertmathiesen]

'I just guessed it": "guessed" is the only word she knows that came even a little bit close to what she did as she considered the chakras.

She was probably aware on some level that the word "guessed" didn't really fit what she was doing. That's almost certainly why you couldn't get any more out of her -- she didn't know how to explain it in words.

There are so many unusual abilities (and other things) like this for which there are no words in English (or other Western languages). As she gets older, and comes to rely more and more on language as a means of thinking, and as a replacement for doing, she'll probably lose or suppress all her abilities for which she has no words. (That's one of the really negative things about growing up and learnign to talk around anything: your language can become a prison cell in which you will live the rest of your life.) You might explain to her how inadequate any language is as a pattern for life, and encourage her to pay attention and cultivate things for which there are no words -- and also not to talk much about such things with outsiders.

As Maurice Sendak said in a drawing he did. "I remember my childhood vividly. I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let the adults know I knew ... It would scare them." This is very wise counsel for any child of youer daughter's age when it comes to unusual abilities. (Sendak's was memory and insight. Other children may lack that particular ability, but have other unusual abilities instead.)

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have any advice for how to go about resonating less strongly with Pluto? It seems to me that most of the straightforward approaches could end up dragged into Plutonian forms and might even be counterproductive.

I was adopting a "wait until it stops" approach, but I still resonate at least as strongly with Pluto as I did in 2006, and given the discussion last week about the possibility of Pluto as a giant comet, at this point I'd much rather take an active approach.

[ecosophia]

I'm very glad to hear this!

[ecosophia]

Ritual isn't really well suited for this kind of purpose. You need to dig down into yourself and figure out why you cling so tightly to your parents, and then let go. The methods of the Order of Spiritual Alchemy (available here) might be a good place to start, since you're quite correct that this can't be dealt with by the surface levels of the mind, where the intellect functions.

Re: Random odds and ends

[(Anonymous)]

Not the OP, on 4) - out of curiosity, what would you have done differently with a Druidified version of the OSA? Is there anything in the current OSA that conflicts with any of the Druid practices in your books?

Re: Random odds and ends

[(Anonymous)]

3) Hm. I see the topic of radionics coming up again and again in comments, so something about it must be fascinating to a lot of people…

Would you maybe consider turning your thoughts into a Wednesday post over on the other site? This could fulfill two purposes: talk some more about radionics (and/or reach an audience which hasn‘t read the dreamwidth series) and maybe get some people to take action, and also to teach, on a meta level, how to structure such an occult course/fellowship.

Both might be useful (and transferable!) skills for a lot of people…

Milkyway

Re: Dion Fortune and QBL Paths

[ecosophia]

She didn't write about the Paths; in her day it was radical enough to write that much about the Spheres! For what it's worth, that was why I wrote my first book, Paths of Wisdom -- to provide information on the Paths, and the other aspects of the Tree Fortune didn't explicate.

[lukedodson]

Thanks, I was never satisfied with Wouter Hanegraaf's eccentric definition of "occultism".

Re: Children knowing the chakras

[robertmathiesen]

Also: What our host said!

Re: Astral effects - porn and culture war etc

[ecosophia]

Good! Yes, you've experienced the effects of corrupt magic in both cases. If you want a female equivalent of porn, btw, check out cheap romance novels -- they're the same kind of mechanical stimulation of automatic responses, just on a different plane.