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)]

Hi JMG,

Thanks again for hosting these Q&As. I've begun basic magical practice and have had some good results with divination so far. I'm also working on perfecting a financial day trading method using technical analysis. What types of divination do you think would be particularly good for improving my odds? I'm thinking of something that gives more yes/no type answers than the open-ended interpretations of systems like the tarot.

My aim isn't to use divination as my sole basis for trading, but rather to augment an existing method. Could geomancy (and your associated book) be of help here? I would be asking questions such as "will the movement that just started continue in the direction it's been going or will it reverse itself?" so something that's quick and reflects the short term is best.

[ecosophia]

The classic method is astrology; as J.P. Morgan said, "millionaires don't use astrology, but billionaires do." There are entire schools of trading based on astrology, and there's a secondary market in that once you know stock market astrology, lots of people want to learn it and will pay for the privilege. That said, geomancy would be entirely workable for the same purpose; I don't know of any modern practitioners of market trading that use it, but it was certainly used for financial and economic divination back in the day.

[(Anonymous)]

Astrology could work for longer-term trading, but I was thinking of stuff to answer a couple questions a day. Is there a workable astrological method for those short time frames?

[ecosophia]

Of course. Each company has a foundation chart -- the standard rule is you cast a chart for local noon on the day and place it was founded -- and you track transits across that chart. So when the Moon is trine the Jupiter of the foundation chart for one company, and square the Mars in another, you buy the first and sell the second!

[ivn66]

93,
This is a rather synchronistic post for me to be reading at the moment. Might our host recommend a good book to get started with along this line?
93 93/93

[ecosophia]

Louise McWhirter's Astrology and Stock Market Forecasting and Sepharial's The Arcana or Stock and Share Key are both considered classics, and are tolerably easy to find.

[(Anonymous)]

Former lawyer here with a word of caution: using divination of any sort for any kind of financial trading is illegal in much of the world. It's a weird one too, because the laws tolerably often explicitly state it doesn't matter if the method works at all; so if you use this, be very, very careful about who know it.

[ecosophia]

Interesting. Thanks for this.

[(Anonymous)]

Are there actually laws stating you can't, for instance, draw tarot cards to decide whether to place a trade? Have laws like that ever used to prosecute someone who mentioned doing it? I can see such a law being applied to diviners and psychics who advertise paid services providing stock tips but how is it supposed to be enforced on individuals who do it themselves?

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, in many places around the world. In some cases it's part of anti-witchcraft laws (such as much of the Middle East); in others, there is a legal presumption that it's actually a cover for insider trading and it becomes the diviners job to prove it wasn't, a task which is often impossible; and others, such as Canada, just have the blanket prohibition.

Enforcement, at least what I saw, works the same way as practicing medicine without a license. Most of the time, done on a small scale, there's no real enforcement because it's not possible to detect when it's happening. But when it's done by a big name, or someone gets a lot of money from it, then the law can, and quite often is, used on people who admit to using divination.

[(Anonymous)]

Huh. I wonder to what extent that was because at some point lawmakers judged it to be bad for everyone for people to be connecting magical practices to lottery-like market outcomes, and to what extent that was because divination can be used as a cover story to launder information for purposes of insider trading.

[(Anonymous)]

Compared to (say) financial astrology in support of underlying-value-based trading, divination in support of technical trading might be more subject to the principles that cause backlashes or other negative effects reported from magic to get money out of nowhere, win lotteries, or win game shows by luck. To avoid these effects, you may need to find certain deep threads of meaning in how securities markets work and make those threads sufficiently central to your trading practice.

Securities markets can cause more wealth to exist in the future than would otherwise exist, by efficiently allocating things like resources, capital, labor, and shareholder voting attention, and providing legible and reduced-risk prices for making decisions about future production tradeoffs. Securities markets do this mostly by creating an economic mechanism where people who change an existing allocation or set of price signals in a better direction tend to get some of the wealth thereby caused, incentivizing them and making them more able to have such influence in the future, and people who would tend to change allocations or price signals in a worse direction tend to have less wealth afterwards and are less in a position to have such effects in the future. So, insofar as that theory works in practice, securities markets are distinct from things like lotteries.

Two weeks ago there was a discussion of someone who did do something in relation to lotteries, but it was okay because they weren't very invested in winning and their intention was that the winner be the person who needed the money, and if they won they donated the results to charity:

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/241113.html?thread=42219993#cmt42233049

The potential effects here are mixed. The supernatural effect is to make the "market" more efficient and wealth-producing in terms of people's personal circumstances. But there's still all the overhead of running the lottery that isn't really producing value as such. And, off to the side of this interaction across the lottery, there's still all the other people in the lottery losing money on the basis of false hopes, and those people's avoidable suffering and incremental ruin. Further up that thread, JMG says: "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."

So, if you focus less on questions like "are these stock movements over the next little while going to be the equivalent of a winning lottery number?" and more on questions like "would my making this trade cause more wealth to be produced directly, and would that wealth go toward the right people?", you should be more protected from the negative effects of trying to make yourself one of the people that wealth goes toward.

If you do much applied math, one way to get a conceptual feel for this current of wealth-production-increasingness is to think about the gradients of the cost-to-go in a hypothetical optimal control problem describing all the variables in the market across time. (If you do much deep learning, this is sort of like the backpropagated derivatives of a deep network's performance, except instead of network layers it's points in time.)

Of course, the price signal structure in a market economy is only partially aligned with the interests and well-being of humans or other beings: market entities usually also represent concentrations of the usual incentives to profit in disregard of harmful externalities, subvert laws, keep people in the dark so they'll buy craved semblances instead of fulfilling substances, capture regulators, consolidate to get alpha from risk-buffering in a way that compounds advantages against smaller entities, and so on. For that matter, even just the goal of having more wealth is itself only partially aligned with human interests and well-being. So after magic that gets you wading sufficiently deep into the current of wealth-transferring effects of a securities market, eventually you would want to include balancing effects. But then, of course, there's still a reason why activities and people are specialized toward particular distinct purposes.

Another thing about markets, is, normally, there's a bit of a fight between market participants who did some of the groundwork to make wealth producible, to make sure they're the one the resulting wealth goes to. For example, if two sufficiently capitalized traders do the same analysis of fundamentals on an obscure company, the one who makes the corrective trade first is the only one who gets the money. That's partly a directly useful, meritocratic effect (that trade happening sooner is slightly better for everyone else, and people who aren't likely to be first shouldn't expend the effort) and partly a sort of necessity of the system (people shouldn't depend on castle-in-the-air schemes that make the market pay out in unsustainable ways, even if it would be "fairer" risk-wise). I don't understand what principles govern potential negative effects of divination to win that kind of contest, other than to say that it seems like a Martial situation.

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting, what do you think about forex in this context? Trades are made based on the value of one currency relative to another, so fluctuations in the value of a pair can have wide-ranging implications based on which currencies' value ratio is changing. One currency gaining in value relative to another isn't always a good thing for the people using that currency. For example, export economies don't want to have a currency that's too valuable relative to their main import customers. It seems hard to tell what's most aligned with human well-being in this case.

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds like a good question, but yeah, I don't really know enough political macroeconomics to really guess the principles by which someone would be doing good by arranging for the people in one country or another to have trade vs. currency deficits, or thwarting or assisting government interventions in such markets to do that. But it does seem like that would have to be something that a properly chosen per-trade or per-repositioning divination was indirectly taking into account anyway.

I don't have hardly anything in the way of relevant experience, I'm just highlighting some of the ways that principles I do know would connect in ways that other people might not know to think of.

[(Anonymous)]

(continued)

Now that I've thought about it a little more, I guess the first thing to check would be: if you imagined a typical situation where someone knew where a currency exchange market was going to be some months in advance, but didn't make the corresponding trades, would there be some small marginal effect where some small increment of extra wealth would tend to fail to be produced over the next few years, because resources (or liquidity?) weren't correctly allocated as much or as far in advance as they could have been, across the countries in question? (Then you could think through well-being effects after thinking through that wealth effect.) I don't have great economic intuition here, but probably the situation with countries will prove to be analogous to a situation where there were companies that had unusually fluid mechanisms for issuing or selling stocks.