Magic Monday
Jul. 23rd, 2023 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
It's just past 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 via slightly less evasive routes. Last week's honoree, Dr. Gérard Encausse, who wrote about magic under the pen name Papus, didn't act alone in reviving the Martinist tradition and founding the Martinist Order; he had the capable assistance of this man, Augustin Chaboseau. Papus and Chaboseau were medical students together, and were startled to discover that each of them had received the Martinist initiation by way of two different lineages. They each initiated the other, and thereafter worked together to preserve and transmit the Martinist tradition. Chaboseau's wife Louise was famous in her own right as a leading French feminist, and one of the first female pharmacists in France.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***
Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-24 04:40 am (UTC)This week I bought a pair of lottery tickets and spent some time fantasizing about what exactly I would do if I won payouts of various sizes. As I did so, I 'felt' a question that boiled down to "Hey kid, you wanna win the lottery, or do you wanna be lucky?" After thinking about it, I answered I'd rather be lucky.
My tickets came back without a single number matched across 10 plays. However, I felt a burst of energy that helped me see a few things I wanted to change around the house, sort out a few things about my job, a deity I have an on again off again relationship with called me up, and to top it all off I thought of someone who might want a piece of junk collecting dust on my shelf and they agreed to take it off my hands for a small amount that was still a lot more than I've ever won in the lottery!
Thinking back, I also remember a similar situation a few years ago when I bought a ticket and tried using an affirmation I made up for non-specific 'luck' but with the expectation that the luck would come as lottery winnings. When I got home from getting the ticket, the kitchen pipes had broken at my rental, which ended up being the last straw that got me to buckle down and break myself out of that living arrangement and go somewhere better. I didn't win anything of consequence from the ticket, and it took a lot of work to dig myself out of the hole, but looking back, that was a lucky misfortune all things considered.
I've been thinking about what's happened and I'm a bit on the fence about this entity. The 'luck' is coming in the form of me seeing ways to do extra work and realizing my capability to do the extra work. At the very least, the force feels more balanced than imbalanced. However, shortly after, I had a few visions of a spirit I work with being accosted with a disembodied hand with a knife. It was easily turned aside and the spirit laughed at the assault, but it was still a new bad thing that came along with all the good stuff.
Regardless, I'm concerned about the ethics. While my tickets were just letting the machine pick the numbers, the 'deal' seems to be "these numbers will win nothing, but you'll get alternate fortune." There could theoretically be other people who have the same numbers and therefore necessarily cannot win now either. I can't be sure if they're getting compensated equally, or if they were equally approached, or if the potential number space is so large I don't really need to worry about duplicating someone else's winning draw, but it reminds me of Ender's Game where Ender mentions the setting's warp drives use so little power that he's worried he'll look out the window and see the stars going out since there's no such thing as a free lunch. I don't think a bit of life reshuffling is going to put out the sun, of course, but I'm still cognizant I'm part of a system that I can't keep track of and there's a subtle connection to be aware of that I'm not sure what to do with.
This also suggests the entity and the knife may be two separate things. I seem to recall you mentioning a long time ago that there's a lot of "give me the jackpot" lottery magic floating around to the point that it cancels itself out, and perhaps by agreeing to give up my share of luck, I've crossed someone with incidentally similar numbers and drawn some sort of reprisal conscious or not. Perhaps the voice was even a comedically ill-advised attempt at "stealing" my lottery luck that backfired through shared numbers - if someone bought a ticket and cast such a spell with the ticket involved, the shared numbers would provide an obvious link between us which could have been monkey wrenched by some other entity who walked away laughing and tipped me some luck for my unwitting involvement. Might have to divinate on that.
Regardless, I have my doubts that this type of magic is repeatable. I think it works by starting with the expectation and fantasy of Fortuna Minor and giving it up via spiritual intercession for Fortuna Major, which you then ground out in your life for whatever small but sure profits you can manage. Might be in the same category as a green candle spell. However, if I go in intentionally seeking Fortuna Major, there's nothing really being given up since I wouldn't be sincerely charging my illusion of winning to be sacrificed and the odds of winning themselves are so low in the first place that the material value of not winning is negligible. Also, Fortuna Major is always all around you, so why go out of your way wasting good money on the ticket if your desired result is gains through personal effort?
And, of course, I know Discworld is just a novel, but I feel there's also a grain of truth in that bit where all efforts to call up Lady Luck on command fail messily because that's not how luck works.
I'm thinking that sorting through all the fantasies of winning in meditation might be a more ethical and repeatable means of lottery 'luck' magic. The illusion of all the winnings feels like it compartmentalizes life changing success behind a passive one in a million chance the same way fantasy novels compartmentalize being exceptional behind bloodline or innate "specialness" - you can't be cool until an inciting incident which you may not be qualified for in the first place. Sorting through the illusion to pick out what one really wants and then drawing a line of causation from one's present life to something small and attainable that gives a bit of whatever the fantasy fulfills might bring similar fortune to this Unwinning the Lottery-mancy in a cheaper, more repeatable, package. Granted, I doubt I would have thought of some of the knock-on effects I experienced, and some of the fortune I received was synchronicity based, so they're subtly different spells.
So 1) Is using lottery tickets this way an established form of magic? It feels like something Hoodoo might have experimented with.
2) What is your take on the ethics of the lottery number entanglement situation?
3a) Is a balanced result from a working an indicator of a balanced force behind it, or does one still have to be on one's toes?
3b) Does the knife and voice being separate theory have legs?
4) How grubby is all this lottery magic anyhow? I play the lottery for a bit of sport when the jackpot goes to the moon in the sprit of probable loss but all in good fun with at least a few dollars going to fund social projects, but the more I imagine the astral situation around the lottery with all the greed and desperation, the more my imagination slides towards the maelstrom of Dante's 2nd Circle of Hell or worse.
Re: Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-24 05:32 am (UTC)2) Very mixed. I tend to avoid such things myself.
3) Yes and yes.
4) Extremely grubby. It's been my experience that when people play the lottery in anything but the most casual way their lives grind to a halt and any luck they might have had trickles away. That's true of any attempt to get something for nothing, but lotteries seem worse than most. That said, buying the ticket and deliberately giving up the chance at winnings might have odd and productive effects -- but I'd recommend careful divination and reflection on the subject.
Re: Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-24 06:09 am (UTC)1) I guess that makes sense as most of the attention around lotteries is getting money, people typically ask for money when they don't specifically know what they want, and now that I think about the grubbiness of lotteries, if you actually know what you want, there are probably far better ways of getting it.
4) What kind of odd and productive effects would you predict?
The most productive thing I could think of would be being part of a spell for a gambling addict to shatter the glamour around gambling for them in some way.
And theoretically, if as you say the lottery tends to drain people's luck away, then given there's no such thing as 'away' it stands to reason that the luck has to go somewhere. Paying in with no expectation of getting money out might allow tapping into that luck as a payout instead, but I'm guessing you'd tap into the karma and grubbiness as well and it probably wouldn't be worth it.
In any case, I'm probably going to replace casual lottery play with my aforementioned meditation on getting from where I am to what I want, and if I need more luck, there's candles, planetary charity, and yet more meditation for that ;)
Re: Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-24 05:19 pm (UTC)The one person I know who plays the lottery without problems always prays that the winnings will go to someone else who deserves it, and when he gets any kind of cash payout, even a little one, he donates it to a charity. He enjoys the game, in effect, and his luck in the rest of life is always quite good.
Re: Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-24 08:05 am (UTC)I don't think it's buying the ticket what works, but the refusal of Minor Fortuna. I am, by most measurable standards, very unlucky with dices, cards, and anything involving randomness. So I refuse to pay lotteries. I don't even want gifted tickets.
In return I have enjoyed a very balanced life of good things happening when I worked for them, bad things happening when I was lazy, never big fortune or misfortune.
It's as if by refusing Fortune, I was embraced by Justice.
Re: Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-24 01:04 pm (UTC)Re: Lottery Magic For Not Winning The Lottery
Date: 2023-07-25 12:03 am (UTC)I don't know... I've been thinking about this kind of thing occasionally for a long time, however informally, and it's hard for me to see the intention of "I pick whatever the number is that will come up" as different from the intention of "I control the variable which is 'whether or not the number I picked is the number that came up' to have the value 'true'", and that in turn doesn't seem that essentially different from the intention of "I control what number comes up".
I'm not sure how to explain the intuition quickly, but it might help to consider all the possible timelines in light of things like the butterfly effect, and think through which ones would be made more likely or less likely if your intention to pick the numbers that would come up succeeded, and then think through which ones would be made more likely or less likely if you instead intended to pick some numbers and then have them come up. The "random" chance that propagates through your thought process, into your decision about what to try to make the future look like, is not clearly different in kind from the "random" chance that propagates through the space and time leading up to the random number generation.
(Also it might help to study the abstraction called "structural equation models", to help formalize how these two forms of random chance could be separated: structural equation models show various ways of carving up a partly-random situation into a deterministic part and random inputs feeding into the deterministic part.)
I have a hard time seeing how those two forms of "random" chance could be caused to line up, one way or another, without there being some kind of intelligent mediator or infrastructure or something to make that happen. And if it has intelligence, it might also have consciousness or otherwise end up with independent opinions about whether it likes what you're attempting. Or maybe just opinions about whether what you're attempting is somehow self-contradictory on a broader scale, so that it might as well just start deterring you now (e.g. in order to be maximally helpful given what you will foreseeably have ended up wanting later). You might think it's just "scrying" or "dowsing" or whatever, "just" perceiving some underlying fact, but it would clearly be weird for it to be a simple minimally-processed mechanical linkage from the future fact to an intuitive perception, so probably there's something going on under the hood that you don't know about.