Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting toward 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, past Chosen Chief of OBOD Philip Carr-Gomm, received most of his training in Druidry from Ross Nichols, who is this week's honoree. Nichols was a poet, a watercolorist, and an educator, as well as a good friend of Gerald Gardner, the inventor of modern Wicca. He became a member of the Universal Bond, one of the most active Druid organizations in Britain, in 1954. Ten years later, during a dispute over the leadership of the UB, he founded an order of his own, first called the Bardic Order of Druids and thereafter renamed the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, which he headed until his death in 1975.  He was the author of three books of poetry -- Sassenach Stray, Seasons At War, and Prose Chants and Proems -- as well as The Cosmic Shape, a programmatic essay on nature spirituality with a set of poems attached, and The Book of Druidry, which was published after his death.

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

Comments

[ecosophia]

Yes, it's complex.

Your question about blowback is interesting. I've never heard of anyone having trouble with that when it comes to job magic -- though I have noticed writing opportunities coming my way when I did something to help a friend find job opportunities. You have to be very careful with love magic, of course, but then that blows up very easily: focus on helping the client become more lovable, which is the only effective love magic anyway, and the blowback won't hurt you...

Earth

[(Anonymous)]

You mentioned spiritual visions that see heaven not on earth, but not as out there, beyond, rather earth as the focus of heaven. Would I be right in thinking of the man in this weeks picture as a source, or are there also other strands in the thread? Regards and happy 1st of May. Celadon as translucent crispy orc

How to train the memory

[(Anonymous)]

Hello Mr. Greer,

You have written before that an aspiring mage should cultivate their faculties of imagination, will and memory (I think there may be a fourth faculty that I can't recall).

In light of this, can you recommend any courses, books, training materials, teachers or techniques to work on memory in particular? It is a weak point for me.

Thank you in advance,

Charlie

[hearthculture]

WTF Ritual (Wonky Thought Flush)
-when encountering thoughts that are vexing, perplexing, or just not fitting well within your tree of knowledge:
-take a deep breath, and while holding it, mentally tell yourself that if the current thought is valuable it will come again; then release your breath while seeing the thought flow away.
-Now extend your arms to the sides and make "whoosh" sounds while whirling around until your current train of thought has been thoroughly flushed out of your mind.
-return to stillness and do the four fold breath while envisioning your tank filling back up, your balance and potential for new thoughts restored.
-use regularly to preserve sanity, and when other present similar ideas, feel free to subtly recommend this ritual with its acronym "WTF?"

[(Anonymous)]

I imagine that the production of a meaningful physical history might, in a few ways, be like a large-scale gardening/landscaping project mixed with one of those stunts where the fans in an arena are given different colored cards to hold up that form words or images at particular times. In that analogy, incarnation as a rock might be like an entry-level job doing basic garden maintenance for a part of the project that's relatively static.

Re: Ecosophia Prayer List, Week of May 1

[hippieviking]

I will keep this in mind. Our daughter who got stuck in the NICU didn't have any social issues, they couldn't pry me out of the room, much to their chagrin. She did get loaded with a large amount of antibiotics and for the next several years it seemed like her immune system just wasn't anything like as effective as her sister's or the rest of the family's, but she finally seems to be getting through that. Here's hoping your daughter will grow past her troubles.

Thanks,
HV

Re: Earth

[ecosophia]

No, that's something that comes out of Rudolf Steiner's work, involving projective geometry -- you might want to have a look at the work of Olive Whicher and George Adams along these lines. Happy Calan Mai!

Re: How to train the memory

[ecosophia]

William Walker Atkinson's book Memory Culture is long out of copyright and available on archive.org and other online archives; that might be a good place to start.

it's just before midnight EST, hopefully this works...

[(Anonymous)]

I have no experience with magick, but I've been reading this blog with interest for awhile. Materialism is essentially the belief that only those things you can directly measure or observe are real; if you can't measure/observe it, it must not exist. That's a very narrow-minded and minimalist way of understanding the world, so I'm open to possibilities outside the scope of modern science, such as magick.
I'm thinking of experimenting with this, and I've read up a bit, especially regarding rituals of Greek religion, which involved burning sacrifices, pouring libations, ceremonies, etc. So, let's say I wanted to assist a certain faction in the world, and drew their symbol on paper, burned it under the full moon, and poured a libation, while wishing them well -- does this sound like an acceptable working, or am I off-track? As I said, I'm a rank beginner, and these powers may be potent; I don't want to fool around or take excessive risks if I can help it. TIA

[(Anonymous)]

Far more than merely your subconscious is involved in providing the symbolic messages of your dreams. Your unconscious and your superconscious also participate to greater or lesser degree, depending on the nature of the challenges your larger Self is currently trying to resolve and learn from. The most powerful of your dreams will contain messages directly from your higher self, your guardian angel, or divinities with whom you’ve established a working relationship.

From the perspective of interpreting the symbolic messages of your dreams, “the context of what’s going on in your life” will always include everything that’s affecting you physically, etherically, astrally, mentally, and spiritually as well. If you relate to your dreams as poetic metaphors, which always point to the most pressing situations your larger Self is dealing with and occasionally reach out towards your conscious awareness for assistance, it becomes much easier to disentangle from the literalist, rationalist interpretations so favored under our current materialist worldview.

All of the astral parasites, imbalances, and demonic influences presently most destabilizing you will be represented in your dreams. Likewise, all of the blessings, balances, and angelic influences presently most centering you will also make an appearance. The same goes for any etheric and spiritual balances and imbalances affecting you.

Dreams are rich tapestries, creatively depicting the current and ever-changing state of our souls. Their symbolic, poetic dream language is actually the lingua franca of the various parts of the soul, allowing the soul’s myriad parts to coordinate, cooperate, and keep current on which parts are being attacked and which are miraculously recovering. All of our unnoticed and unremembered dreams tell the ongoing saga of our nightly struggles, as our many selves, on their many planes, succeed or fail in clearing away their blockages, opening their pathways, and healing their wounds. It’s only a tiny fraction of our dreams that occur just before our conscious awareness reawakens to catch a fleeting, confusing glimpse of them. Our conscious self, not being a part of the soul, is nowhere near as fluent in dream language as the deeper parts of us are.

As for dreams happening on the astral plane, they certainly do. As well as on the etheric, spiritual, etc... The etheric, emotional part of us is the part that does the actual dreaming. The astral, imaginative part of us is the part that translates those mood-scapes into dream language. The spiritual, mystical part of us is the part that can sense patterns far beyond us and weave clues about them into our dreams.

The either-or binary you created can be easily reconciled by recognizing that dreams always stand both for something else and for themselves. That’s the beauty of symbolic, poetic metaphor; it can stand for so many different things. Each part of the soul unpacks the meaning of their common dream language differently, corresponding to each one’s realm, plane, dimension, viewpoint, aptitude, history, etc.

A very worthwhile exercise to develop the consciousness’ fluency in dream language is to try to read dreams from as many of the soul’s perspectives as possible. They could be a recounting of actual experiences that we have forgotten — children really do experience houses haunted by ghosts and demons! They could be the ebb and flow of waves of unresolved emotions swirling within us. They could be the most imaginatively creative metaphors, always pointing to something unknowable. They could be the mind’s attempt to make sense out of whatever conundrums it has been contemplating. They could be the Self’s attempt to turn the previous day into mythic story. They could be the soul’s attempt to picture tomorrow before it comes to pass. They could be how the higher self draws all the other selves back into it in order to bring us back into balance. They could be how our guardian angels send us messages from the gods. Or could they somehow be all of those different things at the same time?

— Christophe

Re: it's just before midnight EST, hopefully this works...

[ecosophia]

That's not going to accomplish much. Magic is like classical music; if you want to do it, you need to buckle down and put in a lot of training and practice. The secret is that it's not the physical action that does the magic, it's the focused consciousness that works through the physical action -- and you need to develop a range of unfamiliar skills in order to be able to direct your consciousness with power and have effect.

Re: it's just before midnight EST, hopefully this works...

[(Anonymous)]

I see, thanks! That gets to the heart of the matter. I'll have to research and practice further, but that at least is something I'm capable of, being an autodidact of sorts.