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, and at this point we've reached a genuine man of mystery, Jacques de Livron Joachim de la Tour de la Casa Martinez de Pasqually. Nobody knows when Martinez de Pasqually was born or where he came from; what's known about him is that he showed up in southern France in 1754, taught an extraordinarily rich system of Gnostic esoteric philosophy and practice to a circle of pupils that included Louis-Claude de St.-Martin and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, and then sailed away to the Caribbean in 1772 and reportedly died there two years later. The image I've posted is one of the very few portraits of the man.

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With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

Sub-natural contamination

[(Anonymous)]

I find myself wondering about the internet, and varying degrees of sub-natural contamination.

I like your hypothesis that the internet is itself somehow possessed-- it explains its obsessive draw, the awful interactions, and the unseemly nature of so much 'content' floating about on the web. That said... is the internet special in that regard? I think it may be.

Look at writing, for example: take a typewriter, a fully analog device. Take a wordprocessor. There's no real difference in the writing experience. The editing experience, yes! Very much so! But just writing draft on a typewriter or a draft on a computer... having done both, I can't tell the difference in my work. If the subnatural realm contaminates, it's very subtle. While fashion and the general level of education have lowered the content of popular books to some degree, I think that's more recent than the use of computer word processors. You can't often tell when in the 1980s a particular author picked up a word processor by looking at their oeuvre, or at least, I cannot. (Occasionally the prose improves due to the ease of editing, or their production went up, or you see where they mentioned it in an interview somewhere or the end-notes of the book-- but in terms of "oh, there is now demonic influence in this author's works", I just don't see it.)

In fact, aside from the internet, I cannot think of where the contamination of the sub-natural is particularly obvious. I can list many counterexamples OTH where the introduction of digital technology hasn't changed much at all. And yet! The shift from letter writing to Usenet and BBS immediately led to new heights of piracy, pornography, and the invention of the flame war. I don't see that dramatic shift anywhere else. Maybe I am missing something. Does anyone have other examples?


If you can agree (at least provisionally, hypothetically) agree that the internet is the real problem, not the underlying microchips, that leads to a few (very speculative!) questions:

1) Might it be possible, if the whole thing does not come crashing down, to exorcise the internet, or perhaps later on to exorcise what's left of packet-radio etc networks people might put together?

2) Any guesses if the possession will be able to move to isolated machines as the great network comes crashing down? (My intuition is we'll get more gremlins, but that's about it.)

3) Is there any protection one might put on a computer to keep the subnatural influence of the internet spilling out into it? I'm sure a personal protection ritual will do much to keep the gunk off the practitioner, but not every member of a household will have such practice. Dunking everyone's phones in a bucket of holy water will surely fix the problem, but not in a way they'd be happy with. Is there anything of that nature (via natural magic or religion) that might be accessible without years worth of occult practice?

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[ecosophia]

1) Perhaps, but it would require a massive amount of effort -- probably a worldwide coordinated exorcism with thousands of competent participants.

2) Almost certainly not. It requires a certain amount of complexity to provide a vehicle for demonic influence, which is why they don't generally possess rocks.

3) A daily protective prayer (for Christians, the prayer to St. Michael) or a sacred object placed on the computer might help. Sprinkling it regularly with holy water is something else that comes to mind.

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[(Anonymous)]

re:
2) The comment "certain amount of complexity" probably explains why putting microchips in cars hasn't led to fuel injectors getting demon-ridden: those are too simple. A worldwide network of personal computers was not too simple, even in the early days, so attracted the possession we see.

Actually, the most complicated home computers probably could become demon-ridden in and of themselves, now that I think about it. being not that much more interconnected inside than the very early internet. Apparently if you've a high-power PC you can run the equivalent of ChatGPT or one of the creepy art-generating AIs like Stable Diffusion at home.

re:
3) This could bring a whole new meaning to computer icons, at least for the Orthodox Christian denominations. ;)

It also occurs to me: there are both water- and oil-cooled computers, for enthusiasts. Perhaps having the coolant blessed would be worthwhile.

-- The OP, who forgot to use a the fun cosmic name generator again.

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[ecosophia]

Blessing the coolant strikes me as a good idea!

-- Sepia Grotesque Hamster

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[(Anonymous)]

I remember seeing an anecdote, perhaps copied from a Usenet post, about a significant internet disruption that followed within a few hours of an experimental exorcism a few people tried in I think the early '90s. I don't know how I would find that anecdote again now.

There are publicly available language models of the same tier as ChatGPT 3 or 3.5 that you "need" a high-powered PC for, but most image generation models "fit" on ordinary recent-specs gaming PCs. But a lot of this constraint is to do with how much fast and well-connected memory a PC has. Any of these models can still be run even on a potato-specced PC, if you're willing to put up with very long generation times and a lot of reading and writing to non-volatile data storage, for intermediate calculation results too large to fit in fast primary memory all at once. For that and other reasons, I think your conjectured rule for guessing the threshold for possessability would put the threshold lower than you think it does.

I myself wouldn't think it would be a matter of complexity exactly. I would think it would have more to do with three other factors:

- How easy it would be for the spirits in question to try to sell a line about how some living humans or other beings involved had consented to something.

- How central the random events "in" the system are, causally, to the kinds of outcomes the spirits in question would have wanted to cause more of. But the question of whether a random event is "inside" or "outside" a system is actually kind of subtle, and probably this isn't quite the right way of organizing thoughts about it.

- Maybe, how much the complexity involves causal interactions that are removed from and unfamiliar to the normal flow of causes and effects in the natural world, so that there's less of anything like elementals or devas laying claim to the sphere of those interactions, to be in a position to keep a clean house?

And it might be some other factors, or some history we don't know. I've seen a claim here that pigs were more vulnerable, without having seen any such claim about ecologically comparable species like black bears or catfish.

Also this use of "possession" seems a bit imprecise; in a lot of cases a better metaphor might be "investment" or "claim of dominion".

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[methylethyl]

I have, for some time, been contemplating getting a small icon of St. Evagrios, to put on the computer.

He had some fairly pointed things to say about acedia, which seems to be one of the major players in the pathology of the internet.

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[ecosophia]

That strikes me as a very good idea.

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[(Anonymous)]

I am 100% in favor of dunking everybody's smartphones in holy water, for the good of humanity.

When do we start?

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[ecosophia]

Sounds like a good idea to me. Perhaps we can find some priests to create whole vats of holy water for the purpose. ;-)

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[(Anonymous)]

I hear they are making waterproof smartphones now so the holy water will probably need to be doubly blessed and maybe from Lourdes for good measure. The problem as always is the loose part that's operating the smart phone to begin with (you know, the same one as behind the steering wheel?) We may have to dunk the owners too.

I'm also wondering that if the long threatened - er - long prophesied Carrington Event materializes if the solar fire might burn away any negative spirits infesting the Internet or our equipment. I believe the Book of Numbers in the Bible has something in it about both water and fire being purifying.

JLfromNH/Periwinkle Berserk Scarab

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[ecosophia]

Oh, waterproof smartphones should certainly be purified by fire. I think putting them in a heap, dousing them with diesel fuel, and setting the heap on fire would do the trick. The users should be dunked in water; perhaps an old-fashioned ducking stool would be suitable.

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[(Anonymous)]

I took a riff off a technique you've mentioned for 'severing' people's attraction to TVs, pulled a small sharp paring knife out of my kitchen drawer, and stationed it under my keyboard with the edge pointing toward the monitor.

Since then, those websites (such as Reddit) that are infested with ads have lost all attraction for me. Mostly I frequent this and the Ecosophia blog, a couple of Christian sites for research, and occasional web-searches on DuckDuckGo for answers to questions.

- Cicada Grove

Re: Sub-natural contamination

[ecosophia]

I'm very glad to hear this.