Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's 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. Along with Louis-Claude de St. Martin, last week's honoree, the inner circle of pupils of Martinez de Pasqually included this week's figure, Jean-Baptiste Willermoz. A very active Freemason, Willermoz played a central role in cleaning up the mess left by the implosion of the Strict Observance (the most important Templar order in 18th century Europe) and created a new order with its own rituals, the Rectified Rite, which survives to this day. Much of what became the ritual of Martinism came from Willermoz's hands.

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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

[(Anonymous)]

My greetings JMG

I will need a short story time here :D

In the past I was involved in demonolatry (let's call it the mistakes of my young years). I ended my practice (already several years ago), thanked those spirits and said goodbye to all the "gifts" I received from them. I cleansed myself properly and quietly practiced natural magic, some alchemy. Some time ago I became interested in Druidism and started my practice using your books (which are fantastic, by the way). In my demonolatry days I took initiations on the witch path. Despite my lack of active practice, the initiation changed something in me, something very fundamental (my astral shell to this day looks quite...devilish?).

And here are my two questions:
1. is it normal that I still feel something like attraction to the chthonic dimensions? (Not to demons or the dead, but simply to the underworld).
2. in spite of my lack of practice of ,,witch'' stuff, is it normal that I continue to feel the influence of this initiation on me?

With best regards
~L

[ecosophia]

Magic is for keeps. Yes, it's normal that you'll continue to feel a certain draw to those things; once you practice the rituals, and especially once you receive initiations, you have those contacts for the rest of this incarnation, and traces of them will remain into future incarnations. That doesn't mean you have to submit to that attraction and renew those contacts; it just means that you're going to have to put up with that connection.

This is one reason that it's wise to be careful about what kinds of magic you practice!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for your answer. Would be wise to try to get to know closer some kind of celestial forces (to balance this chtonic pull) or would be wiser to just accept fact that this happened and stick to the more telluric/alchemical/natural paths of magic?

[ecosophia]

I'd definitely encourage you to work with celestial forces as a source of balance. The religious practice of your choice -- Pagan faiths work as well here as any other -- would be the classic solution.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, my! Looking devilish on any of the planes would tend to point to having invited in a demon to dwell within you. Since dabbling in demonolatry is quite likely to cause that (if a preexisting possession didn't itself cause the dabbling in the first place), you might want to ask whatever divinities you are on good terms with whether or not you are host to a demon and, if so, what you can do about that.

Exorcists being hard to find nowadays, you might find therapeutic journaling about past traumas and whatever fixed attitudes, fears, defenses, etc. those locked in place to be a useful technique. The Octagon Society practices that John Michael detailed on this blog can be very helpful for loosening a demon's grip or even healing enough for the demon to flee on its own. Of course, the latter is an extremely challenging undertaking! Until and unless we clear away the horrors and insecurities that caused us to invite in a demon in the first place, we'll stay stuck with them. That would be the downside to exorcism. While some people do have the ability to cast out others' demons, without ever addressing the fears that caused the victim to invite that demon in, they will just get lured into inviting another one in when similar stresses occur again.

By the way, there are all sorts of demons out there that can infest people, with some being quite benign, some quite weak, some transparently obvious, and some terrifyingly horrid. Also, most of the kind of demons you would have been calling on in demonolatry would have been orders of magnitude more powerful than the types that tend to infest us. The facts that you're here asking John Michael for advice and that you experience your initiatory influence merely as an attraction to the chthonic realms would both point towards any demon you might have dwelling on the friendlier end of their spectrum.

Since your astral body is the one with the devilish affect, if you do have a demon, it's probably of the astral type. The most salient characteristic I've picked up on of the astral type of demon is aggressively competitive status obsession (oh, yes, there are quite a lot of that type infesting humanity at the moment!) Your writing style doesn't come across at all as being a status-obsessed jerk, so this too would point to a more benign demon if you do have one. Also, it is kind of hard to imagine a competitively controlling demon being at all comfortable with you practicing druidry, but who knows, maybe it’s hoping to prop itself up at the head of some druid lineage for an ego boost. After all, it really is very hard to make any sense out of demons’ logic.

— Christophe

[(Anonymous)]

JMG - based on the original commenter's (not mine) mention of chthonic attraction, and (IIRC) your mention of the Ars Goetia being a use of the telluric current: what's the relation, if any, between demons and the telluric forces/beings you don't recommend against interacting with?

[ecosophia]

They're unrelated. The telluric powers are native to this part of the cosmos -- they relate to the planetary spirit of Earth the way the solar powers relate to the Solar Logos. Demons are an intrusion from outside our reality; they belong to a universe that died before ours were born, and we wouldn't have any contact with them at all except for certain mistakes that were made long ago in the course of human evolution. I wrote a blog post about that:

https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-the-lemurian-deviation/