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. I'm currently tracing my Martinist lineage.  That's rendered complex by the Martinist tradition that one does not name one's initiator, so we'll have to go back through less evasive routes. Last week's honoree, René Chambellant, became head of the Eglise Gnostique Universelle on the death of his teacher and consecrator, Constant Chevillon, whom I'm honoring this week. Martinist, Rosicrucian, Freemason, and Gnostic bishop, Chevillon was born in 1880, showed remarkable intellectual gifts in youth, but went to work in the banking industry while devoting his free time to occult and spiritual pursuits. He wrote seven books and many essays about Gnostic theology and practice, and his integrity and spiritual qualities won the respect not only of his fellow Gnostics but of Catholics and nonreligious people. In 1944, he and other leading citizens of Lyon were taken hostage by the Nazis in revenge for activities of the Resistance, and shot to death. He is considered a saint and martyr by most modern Gnostic churches; the day of his martyrdom, March 22, is his feast day.

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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.

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

John Michael wrote

Yes, martial artists do this from time to time -- and the Russians are doing it right now on the southern front of the Ukraine war.

Could you elaborate on that?

Certainly on the material plane, the Russians have been doing a very effective job of using Ukraine to lock NATO and the American Empire into place, while forcing them to expend a lot of their munitions stocks in ways that will seriously constrain their options down the road in Taiwan, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere.

[ecosophia]

Right now one of the defining battles of the 21st century is raging in Zaporizhia Province in southern Ukraine. The Russians spent the last nine months or so building defensive lines and getting an enormous amount of artillery and other weapons systems in place; then they waited for the Ukrainian army to come to them, as (for complicated strategic reasons) it had to. The Ukrainian offensive began on the night of June 4; it's still continuing, the Ukrainians have lost an astonishing number of tanks, armored vehicles, and soldiers, and they haven't even reached the first of the heavily fortified Russian lines. But they're locked into place; if they stop the offensive they lose the initiative and the much larger Russian armies can launch their own assaults anywhere along hundreds of miles of frontier.

In this case, from an occult standpoint, the battle on the material plane is locked, while the battle that matters -- the struggle on the planes of mind and emotion -- is very much in motion. The latest news reports in non-Western media (the only sources to trust in cases like this) are that Ukrainian army units are starting to surrender en masse to the Russians, since it's that or follow orders that are certain to get them killed. If that turns out to be true, and the same sentiment spreads, the collapse of the Ukrainian army and the end of the war may not be that far away.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I've seen reports of large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers, up to entire infantry companies, surrendering en masse, as well as reports of officers being fragged by their own men. In one case, a Ukrainian battalion commander was apparently killed by one of his captains when he ordered them to attack Russian defensive positions, after the battalion had already suffered heavy losses from previous failed assaults. There have been increasingly common reports of units refusing to go into battle and of Leopard 2 crews sabotaging their own tanks because they know their chances of survival against Russian artillery, minefields and helicopter gunships are very low. I am reminded of how the morale of the Imperial German Army collapsed after the failure of the Spring Offensive in 1918 and of what happened when Admiral Hipper tried to order the High Seas Fleet to sea in October 1918, resulting in a munity that ended up with most of the battleships and city of Kiel being taken over by angry sailors, and which ultimately led to revolution breaking out all over Germany.

[ecosophia]

Unsurprisingly, those were also the examples that came first to my mind. That's the normal endpoint of a First World War-style conflict, and of course that's exactly the rulebook the Russian army started using as soon as it became clear that current technology makes blitzkrieg as outdated as a Macedonian phalanx.

But we'll see what actually happens.