ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

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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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

This strikes me as very appropriate and workable. Go with it!

Hum, that's a a very interesting thought. I wonder though, when you say, "...even the smallest positive actions in my own life on a small scale have a deep sense of satisfaction and reward even if the immediate emotional hit isn't much," is part of the pushing of cheap thrills of all sorts to dull your awareness of the more significant but subtle experience of these?

For myself, I know I can end up missing so many of the more subtle experiences if I don't take the time to really look for them.

Apologies, I missed this in the last comment but I wanted to ask if I want to divine whether the healing breath meditation would be good for me, L9 or does it become a L5/L6 q?

(i'm interested in learning to get my body to relax on command since I have a lot of stress to deal with at work)

If that part was from J source, Harold Bloom's "The Book of J" speculates that J was a woman with a womanly eye for a particular kind of irony, who gathered and edited together the Israelite folklore she liked best. I only read a little of the book a long time ago, but what I vaguely remember is that the instances Bloom pointed to as "ironic" included stories containing dependencies of God's actions on human actions which one would have expected from the logic of the setting should be impossible or nonsensical.

Oh, touché! But there were one or two mudras I used to use when I couldn't go back to sleep in the middle of the night. I'd happily do any similar GD exercise if you could recommend one.

I just listened to you on The Dodcast, discussing the Grail ritual and megalithic tombs and how the idea of communicating with those buried and mummified apparently was quite common around the world. I'd say that somehow ties into it, but I haven't quite worked it out yet. May be weeks before I see the connection properly, but I did want to suggest I see a germ of another possibility of a causal connection.
Something along the lines of the psychic waste land of dead materialism and "progress" killing magic from the world. I believe a similar situation can be found in any late-stage civilization, when the hollow, empty forms from the past are still around, but no one really believes them any more. The time before Spengler's second religiosity. If that is different from Sheldrake's ideas.

Bruce

Hi JMG,

Given Easter just occurred, I spent some time meditating on Christ's Harrowing of Hell. According to Church teachings, as he progressed through Sheol/Hades, he rescued trapped righteous souls all the way back to Adam and Eve, allowing for them and future dead to proceed to Heaven directly post expiration.

Q- Would the following interpretation be in line with a western occultist view?

A) Jesus was able to establish a sort of astral "track in space" where devotees could go to post death as they go through the normal death process etc.
B) Given time/space is more a structure of consciousness, this action from our perspective might also look like it extended backwards into the past as much as the future.
C) That this action was possible given Jesus was a magical adept with a completed mental sheath and retained his sense of self post death. Not to mention his potential linkage/connection to a deity acting through him.

Thanks,

Tamanous

JMG, I am grateful for your continuing kindness in answering all these questions, and hope you will give me some guidance on my glass bead oracle project.

It occurred to me that there are 5 singles, 8 dyads, 8 triads, 4 tetrads (in triangles with 4 points), 1 square and 1 cross with 5 points in the arrangement of the beads, which match the SOP directions with spirit within at the centre. I hope that makes sense. I can't draw it out for you, but if you wish I will create a page and get some diagrams on it.

When I get an unbalanced dyad (both reversed), for example, I realized that I can bring in a third point (any of the 3 others which are balanced) to use in meditation to resolve the unbalanced dyad. For example, if both mind and body are unbalanced because I'm fretting over some physical symptom and going off the deep end about it, I can bring in water, which taps into intuition and the subconscious to explore what's really going on (and get a sense of how the mind can make the body sick), I can bring in fire, which may use will to override the nonsense, or I can bring in the higher self to resolve the issue. Each one is a different method of dealing with the situation by which I can learn more about myself as I proceed, how the various parts of me are connected and how they affect each other.

When the oracle gives me a triad or a tetrad, depending on which bead is upright and which is reversed, the oracle tells me which connections, or paths if you will, I should explore in my understanding of the situation.

I am finding that the meanings of the readings are taking on a much richer interpretation because I am connecting layers of me as I develop this.

When I get singles with everything else reversed, it tends to mean something very specific: the white one means "Trust your higher self. Help from the spiritual world"; the green one only usually means "You need to focus on the material/physical world", "pay attention to your body, rest." When white is combined with green, that generally mean "Healing" and "Blessings".

My question relates to whether the exploration of the connections is somewhat what the Kabballah does. I know next to nothing about the Kabballah, and wondered if it, or another similar system does the same thing? When you talk of pathworking on the Kabballah, I'm assuming one is exploring parts of one's psyche? I realize the Kabballah is a much richer system with an incredibly rich history, but I was wondering if there was a parallel. For some reason, I have no desire to master the Kabballah, if that is relevant, but I would like to know if what I'm doing is similar. Actually, the Tarot does the same thing, right? Except that it goes well beyond the higher self.

Thank you so much for your time!

That kind of mismatch and contingent arbitrariness bothers me too. But maybe it's like learning a language, or inventing a language, or developing a legal system of laws and precedents, or developing an industrial economy's repertoire of standardized part types and specifications, or evolving a biological system of hormones and signaling molecules. Not something you can do perfectly in advance (insofar as that could even mean anything), and yet not something you can simply do without either.

One in-between option is to develop an eye toward something like what software engineers call "technical debt": temporary commitments that will need to be reworked later if that whole part of the system is not to eventually become unsustainable and have to be thrown away entirely.

Good Afternoon,
After being questioned and finding myself stumbling through a overly long and complex explanation, I've been reaching for an analogy for the physical, etheric, and astral bodies in order to more simply explain them.

Please check my work on this attempt: The physical body is like a car, a complex system that is inert material but has potential capability. The astral body is like a driver whose imagined destination, and intention to get there, have the potential to provide the car with direction. The etheric body is like the fuel - turning the car and driver's potential into active capability; and it is also the throttle, steering gear, and gauges - an interface for the driver to exert their will while understanding the inner state of the car. All three are necessary for purposeful locomotion, and there is constant feedback coming from both the driver and the car, but always mediated through the gauges and steering and powered by the fuel.

Much modern suffering happens because we live in a dualist context of body vs spirit, with some people walking around refusing to acknowledge the usefulness and purpose of their "car," while others live in their "cars" so fully they deny there is a driver, and everybody who seeks a middle way without guidance (occult/esoteric teachings) often ends up driving their "car" around without calibrated gauges or throttle controls, sputtering about with poor quality fuel and stinky smog coming out of their tailpipe.

To extend this, the mental sheath is like a travelogue of maps and experiences that the driver records and refers to, until at some point the documentation is so complete that the driver ceases bothering to drive at all and moves on to other activities (transitioning from physical incarnation into a mental body.) Another problem we face is that increasingly we as a society are no longer taught to make our own travelogues (personal gnosis,) but instead referred to mass produced maps, which have no local flavor and are often out of date.

Science gives us car repair manuals, religion gives us motorist laws and seasonal racetrack days, and occult training spans the gamut from driver's ed, to vehicle maintenance and fluid changes, to cartography class.

(Before I subject others to this analogy,) does this track with your understanding?

I'm certainly open to thoughts and corrections from the commentariat as well.

Thank you as always for this space and your guidance. :)

To get pedantic about it, the word "occultism" comes (via the adjective "occult") from the Renaissance Latin phrase philosophia occulta, the hidden philosophy or the philosophy of the hidden forces or factors in the cosmos. "Esotericism" comes from the Hellenistic Greek esoterike, "belonging to the inner" -- usually to an inner circle of people, as distinct from outsiders. So they really do mean pretty much the same thing.

a different plane? Could you elaborate? Maybe lower astral versus higher astral?

I'll gladly do so, if you can send some way of identifying you to the email address on my reply above with healing specifics, if any, that would make it possible for me to send some energy your way. A picture, something hand written, like your name, or anything else that would help me focus on you might do the trick.

The GD doesn't have such exercises; you have to proceed far enough to be able to make basic talismans, at which point you can do a talisman of the Moon and solve the whole problem.

Sheldrake may be talking about the same thing in different language. I need to catch up on his latest books!

The only thing I would have done is change the terminology and the numerical symbolism a little.

Hmm. I'll consider it.

Depends on where you draw the lines between the planes. Cheap romance novels titillate the emotions the way pornography titillates the passions; in Dion Fortune's scheme, yes, the first of those is upper astral and the second lower astral.

Ha! I've been immortalized. ;-)

It's not a matter of continually making someone's life better. If you feel you've wronged someone, do something specific to make things better for them, as soon as possible, and then let it go and go on. As for what kind of improvement, why, that depends on the situation. Gauge it depending on what kind of mistake you're dealing with.

1) Use something different. The elemental symbols should only be used when you want to invoke the elements.

2) I recommend reviewing your earlier entry and then going out of your way to find something different. Getting in a rut isn't helpful.

3) Do it in your imagination. That's useful training.

In any shield chart reading for a yes/no question, the answer is given by seeing whether there's a majority of favorable or unfavorable figures in the judge and witness positions. You've got two of the most favorable figure there is, and one neutral. That's a strong "yes."

To some extent you're just going to have to muscle through it. I assume you've already figured out why you find quantitative measurements so attractive and appealing; that being the case, you'll simply have to keep making a sustained effort to silence that voice and do what you know you need to do.

She's got a welcome surprise waiting for her once she's on the other side. Part of the process of the afterlife is seeing the entire life unfolding in detail, in complete objective accuracy. That's a miserable experience to those who have overinflated egos, as they get to see exactly how badly they behaved and so on -- but those with very negative self-images get to find out how inaccurate those images are. That's why so many religions tell you to dwell on your sins while getting ready for death -- partly it helps you process some of your life in advance, but partly it makes for an easier experience when you get to the other side and get to see your life from a less biased standpoint.

The Circles and Planes are apples and oranges. It's a mistake to confuse them.

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Magic Monday

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Re: Astral effects - porn and culture war etc

Missed this

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Re: Magic and Morphic Fields

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meditation paths for self improvement

Re: Impactation and sublimation

A car and a driver walked into a bar...

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Re: Astral effects - porn and culture war etc

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Re: Magic and Morphic Fields

Re: Random odds and ends

Re: Random odds and ends

Re: Astral effects - porn and culture war etc

Re: An Abecedary of Occultism

Re: OSA & vows to help others

Re: Greetings!

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Re: Three Circles and Three Planes