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: Astrological Calculations

[(Anonymous)]

I think typically people just use existing libraries for working with the Swiss Ephemeris.

There are a lot of unexpected astronomical concepts you'd need to learn and data format conversions you'd need to set up. There are also problems of principle: how do you define the relationship between the direction to a planet and the horizon given atmospheric lensing near the horizon? Can the horizon be different than 180 degrees, and in that case is the entire sky in first through sixth houses for someone who is underground, or in imaginary-numbered houses if that's what the formula for the visible horizon angle with atmospheric lensing would say for someone underground? How do you even define the "true Lunar node" beyond a certain degree of precision since the obvious way would require entire counterfactual moons which would have their own gravitational consequences? How do you define the direction to an object given relativistic light speed delays and gravitational lensing near the Sun? What if the object is behind the Sun: do you track the hypothetical gravitational path that would have been followed by non-interacting particle like a neutrino at near-light speed if it had come from the object, passed somewhere through the body of the sun, and ended up at the Earth? (that's the solution the Swiss Ephemeris uses) How do you project the precession of the earth when there are fractal wobblinesses involved? (even JPL doesn't have an easy good answer to this since it would have to involve probabilities, so everyone just uses a best-fit curve because it's not off by much on any reasonable timescale)