ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

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. Papus and Chaboseau, the honorees of the last two weeks, each got their Martinist lineage by a tangle of mostly forgotten figures, so we can jump straight back to one of the founders of the tradition, Louis-Claude de St. Martin. St. Martin was born in 1743 in an aristocratic family and became a student of the elusive master Martinez de Pasqually, learning the distinctive system of theurgic magic Pasqually taught. Later in life, after Pasqually's death, he focused more of his attention on Christian mysticism, studied Jacob Boehme's writings, and penned a series of influential mystical tracts under the pseudonym "The Unknown Philosopher."

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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

I believe most of them last, although it wasn’t mentioned explicitly. It’s a pretty vibrant community - I think relapses would be mentioned.

I think a big reason might be that most everyone continues with the practices after the event, so they continue to lock into and embody the new energetic configuration.

Also… many people report seeing entities throughout the room, so perhaps that might have something to do with it as well.

Quite the contrary, this is highly recommended. (By those GD teachers who understand the importance of discursive meditation, at least.) Everything taught in the GD tradition may, and indeed should, be explored in meditation.

To be clear, please note that I said that there is some ambiguity as to her "role," by which I meant "with regard to receiving worship from humans." Also, please also note that I contrasted that some heathens do and some heathens don't worship Hel, as a way of trying to make clear that views differ. I was attempting to make a "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive" statement - I was in no way condemning those who do worship Hel or suggesting that they shouldn't do so. I was addressing why some subset of heathens would have a "reason to avoid Her."

Personally, I don't currently worship Hel, and I haven't sought to build a relationship, but I try to treat Her with respect, and I'm open to the possibility that my practice may change.

Most welcome! Hmm, there's a thought - a pair of deities, one male, one female, for each day of the week could bring a certain balance. I, for one, would be interested to hear how it goes if you try it for awhile.

Thank you, again, for your replies. They've been quite useful.

"Every virtue is the midpoint between two vices." huh, interesting thought, any recommendations on expanding more of this?

Good evening, and thank you very much for taking questions.

(1.) Do you happen to know the earliest appearance of the
subtle bodies in western esoteric literature (after the Neoplatonists).

(2.) Is it likely that these ideas derived mainly from the
Neoplatonists or certain early church fathers, or were there also
influences from other traditions?

(3.) When did ideas about the subtle bodies from Upanishad or other
Indian thought begin to appear in western esoteric texts?

Thank you very much.

So they are still caught in what might as well be called the Piscean undertow. If my recollections are not mistaken, it was my understanding that you believed the Aquarian Age began in the late 1800's. If so, the transition appears to be taking a long time. Any idea when we will see the Piscean influences fade out and the Aquarian influences become predominant?

The transition typically takes a few centuries. There were still plenty of holdouts of Arian age religion long after the Piscean age began, and so I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Piscean holdouts for centuries to come.

Are there other ways to find one's elemental balances for froods like myself who don't personally sass that otherwise hoopy astrology?

1) Not off hand, no. The idea was certainly in circulation by the late 1700s, as Mesmerism assumed the existence of a "fluidic body."

2) While Neoplatonism and its Christian knockoffs were certainly influential, Western occultism began to absorb influences from points further east by the 12th century, mostly by way of Arabic occultism.

3) Direct influence from Indian sources begins with the first Latin translation of the principle Upanishads in 1801-1802. That was picked up by Western occultists almost instantly thereafter.

The classic source is The Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle.

Which is why I went so far as to say I did not ascribe such views to you or your compatriot. Thank you, though, for your clarity.

For what it's worth, I mean I haven't experienced this myself, but it's a commonplace among the Western Buddhist authors I read that practically anyone who gets far with certain kinds of meditative practice will eventually start "directly perceiving" that their brain was always attaching suffering to every experience, or something like that. I guess the idea is that, in uncultivated consciousness, there's never any point at which one is standing from the place where one could perceive the suffering as distinct from a possible background of not-suffering, so it never stands out.

It seems that the claim of "all phenomena are unsatisfactory" is meant to be first a technical claim about a purported truth about human consciousness that anyone could in principle verify with enough training, and only after that is it assumed to also validly imply a philosophical claim about the existential condition of all experiencing beings (so that existential nausea about this unsatisfactoriness could be considered a progress-milestone). So making an "I refute it thus", of people sometimes being happy, is sort of talking past the core claim without engaging with it. But at the same time, it seems like maybe there's a motte-and-bailey argument pattern going on, and it's important to challenge the connection between the motte ("nearly all humans have an unnoticed bad constant background level of suffering") and the bailey ("any state of experience more concrete than nirvana is intrinsically a sucker's game, net-suffering-wise").

Of course it's possible that the suffering, even if it is "directly perceived", is an observer effect -- an artifact of the meditative process used to allegedly train introspective perception up to that point, rather than something intrinsic to everyone including those who haven't practiced meditation.

I don't know what to make of this possibility. My current guess, from the reports I've read, is that there are some kinds of quite avoidable suffering that normally any human has, from their brain attaching suffering willy-nilly to not getting all sorts of things they want, as a sort of commitment device -- the same way one person might commit to retaliating against another for not giving them what they think they deserve, just using internal mechanisms of retaliation:

https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/07/core-transformation.html

But there might be another kind of "suffering" associated with having erroneous anticipations, or with having attachments to possibilities (perhaps possibilities that one couldn't have known at the time were infeasible), as in the Predictive Processing cognitive-science paradigm for how brains push themselves to navigate spaces of possible combinations of future details when selecting actions. If that kind of "suffering" is part of what an advanced meditator discovers, I'm not sure how much this should be counted as suffering. Conceiving of that as "suffering" might be like conceiving of water as always finding higher altitudes "uncomfortable" and that that's why it flows downward whenever there's a downward to flow to. Extending that conception, to the idea that all concrete existence is a web of undertows that tries to ensnare all experiencing beings into a sea of suffering, might be like extrapolating to the idea that being at the earth's surface is torture for water and it's a moral emergency that all the water on the earth isn't at the earth's center.

While I was looking for the previous link I found another link that was about the question of whether the introspective experience of "dukkha", conceived as one unified treatable form of suffering, was just such an observer effect:

https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/12/dukkha-created-vs-discovered.html

Hey jmg

Along time ago I floated the idea of a divination system based on cellular automata to you on this site, and you said I should go ahead with it.
At the time the only CA I was aware of was the 2D game of life, which was so complicated to work with manually that I quickly gave up on a divination system based on it.

A couple of months ago I learned about 1D cellular automata such as rule 30, and quickly realised that such a CA would be simple enough to do by hand. I went back to the divination system idea and you could randomly place a counter on a magic square, such as the Lo-shu/square of Saturn, generate a pattern and read off the numbers covered and interpret them via numerology.
It would be a system somewhat similar to I Ching or geomancy, but I have not actually used it yet.

J.L.Mc12

(oops, sorry, including "Do you have a citation?" in a reply made more sense when I had been expecting to post that reply sooner)

Er, no umpty-screen angry rants, please...

Last year I got suddenly swept up into studying Christianity, but it is definitely not your garden-variety, Standard Sunday School Doctrine type of Christianity!

My Bible study buddy has taught me several principles:

1) Context is key. Who said the thing, who are they saying it to, where are they when they are saying it, what's around them when they are saying it? Job 38 is vastly different from Matthew 1 for this reason.
A good study Bible is invaluable for this. I am using Zondervan's "Archaeological Study Bible", which is now out of print, but their "Cultural Study Bible" may do the same things and it's a more recent NIV translation.

2) Dig into the original language, the meaning of the original words (Hebrew, Koine Greek or Aramaic) to see what the verse >really< says. There are a few red pills in the Bible that make translators twitch, and they'll paper them over. (Try Psalm 82, Job 38:6-7 for starters.)
To do this you want a good interlinear Bible.
My favorite is: https://biblehub.com/interlinear/
In the search field at top, type in the book, chapter and verse you want to look at and you are off to the races. (Hint: the Hebrew reads right to left.)

3) There are very few books >about< the Bible that are any good, and a lot of them will lead you right into the tall weeds. The Bible itself is plenty of material to keep you busy for a long while.
A couple of "outside books" that are at least somewhat helpful are:
- "The Unseen Realm" by Michael Heiser (h/t to the Ecosophian who put me onto him)
- "Beyond Radical" by Gene Edwards

4) If your current god(dess)(es) are taking good care of you, then they are on the team of the good guys. Spoiler: Heiser makes the case that all the other gods are the children of YHWH. Some rebelled and so there's a war on. The others are working with YHWH. So ask your current god(dess)(es) what you should do-- if you should move to Team YHWH or stay with them.

FWIW a few weeks ago I had a brief vision of meeting Odin at an outdoor cafe' table.
After expressing my awe and admiration at "gods who hang on trees to bring us gifts" (referring to both him and Jesus), he smiled and told me, "Continue your studies, little one". So he is OK with my Bible study.

Best of luck, wherever your path takes you.

- Cicada Grove

I don't know if you'll see this since you didn't post with a subscriber account. I consider myself a Christian, I'm getting more and more polytheist by the day, and I don't plan on giving up Jesus anytime soon. Perhaps you meant "one cannot be a polytheist and an orthodox Christian"...

Other forms of divination can help, and so can simply reflecting on your own habits of thought (air), will (fire), emotion (water) and sensation (earth).

Interesting. Give it a try and see what results you get!

Thanks for encouragement!

Btw, how do you go about developing a new divination system from scratch? Is it just tinkering or is something more involved?

My two cents...
(You'll need at least five more bucks to even get a cup of coffee)

Tiw as an Anglo Saxon sky god is a partial fit. And the justice and debt honoring he portrays with fenris is a testament to that.

Njord is also a fit but not at all because of his rulership of the sea, but because he is father of freya and Frey gods of fertility and life.

Tinkering followed by relentless testing: does it give meaningful, accurate answers? If so, you've got something worth using.

Oh, wonderful, thank you so much! That is most interesting.

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Magic Monday

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Cellular automata divination

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