Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's nearly 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've been tracing my lineages back as far as I can, and last week took my Martinist lineage back as far as they can be documented. The next step -- and it's the last step in the entire process -- involves a fair bit of speculation, but it's speculation backed up by some evidence. It's been suggested by some historians, Marsha Keith Schuchard foremost among them, that the mysterious Knight of the Red Feather who conferred the Templar lineage on Baron von Hund, last week's honoree, was none other than Charles Stuart, the Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scottish song and story. The claim is that in the years immediately before 1745, when the House of Stuart made its last (and disastrously unsuccessful) attempt to reclaim the British throne, Charles and his inner circle of supporters used various forms of clandestine Freemasonry to raise funds, engage in espionage, and gather arms and supporters for the planned rising. Baron von Hund's initiation was an incident in that process. Martinez de Pasqually, who was honored a couple of weeks back, also claimed to have a charter signed by Charles Stuart as the basis for his occult Masonic order. So it's possible that what lies behind one of the great traditions of Western occultism is a failed political intrigue that got picked up and repurposed by a couple of canny occultists. Stranger things have happened in the history of occultism.

...And with this, the rambling tale of the odd lineages that I've inherited comes to an end. Now I'll have to think of something else to use as illustrations to Magic Mondays!

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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!***

***Please note -- when Magic Monday is closed, IT'S CLOSED.  I just had to delete a flurry of attempted comments posted up to eleven hours after I shut things down. I do need some time to write and do other online chores, you know, so please don't keep trying to post after 12:00 am Monday night/Tuesday morning -- there'll be a new Magic Monday in a week, you know. ***

Comments

Re: CosDoc and Divination

[ecosophia]

That makes a great deal of sense, yes.

[francis_tucker]

Anam Cara... ditto?

Re: Prayer regarding surgery today

[(Anonymous)]

How did it go?

—Princess Cutekitten

[deketemoisont]

Do you think you could publish that in a blog of yours, please?

Re: Natal chart privacy

[francis_tucker]

After you've been practicing magic for as long as you have, are you able to tell when nasty magic is being directed at you (assuming said sorcerers aren't publicly putting out the call to mass curse JMG on such-and-such a day and time)? What's that like? You're sitting drinking tea any typing away at your next book when all of the sudden... "Someone is trying to curse me!" Is it like a Spidey-sense that tingles?

[open_space]

With what methods did you get better results?

Re: Natal chart privacy

[ecosophia]

It's difficult to explain. I've done daily meditation for many years, of course, and so I know the flavor and texture of my own thoughts. When a magical attack is in process, there's a sense of pressure in directions that aren't typical of my thoughts. I can then do various things, many of them equally hard to explain -- daily meditation has lots of benefits and some of them are fairly strange. But yes, I can usually get a clear idea of what's being done, what intention is behind it, and (often) what geographical direction it's coming from.

[ecosophia]

Working with planetary angels and intelligences, on the one hand, and working with elementals and the angels and governing spirits of the elements, on the other.

Re: Qs

[(Anonymous)]

I’ve encountered this belief before … mostly on Reddit. It feels to me very ungrounded (at best), possibly unhinged, possibly very dark. Exit via the *lower* realms? Really, now… does that not sound suspicious?

- Iguana

[ecosophia]

Depends on what you mean by that. I've seen the concept used well by people who took it seriously and weren't simply chasing tail, but yeah, it's also been misused in that way.

Re: What's in a name?

[hearthculture]

Went to a small music festival and ended up hearing a heavy-metal garage band of working-class Canadian teens called Death Lust. They were good. All about the juxtaposition and definitely-not-funny puns when going for the edgy band names... hmmm...
Candle Lashes
Waxing Goetic
Pen Tickle
Pothole Dodger
Corporate Sainthood

...maybe its time to start a band, does anybody play bass? ;)

Re: Cabala

[deketemoisont]

(From Wikipedia.)

"It is uncertain as to who was the first to invent soap. The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap-like materials dates back to around 2800 BC in ancient Babylon. A formula for making soap was written on a Sumerian clay tablet around 2500 BC; the soap was produced by heating a mixture of oil and wood ash, the earliest recorded chemical reaction, and used for washing woolen clothing."

(I didn't think Celts couldn't invent anything - chainmail comes to mind - but I do think soap didn't wait for any currently-known people to be invented.)

[(Anonymous)]

I am a CGD practitioner. For health reasons I was unable to complete the winter solstice ceremony and the following (second) ritual of Merlin's Wheel. When rituals that are part of a yearly cycle like these are missed, can you pick the sequence up from the next ones or is it better to wait until the following year to start again to keep things more balanced?

[(Anonymous)]

The Christian parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) mentions the master being rightfully angry that the third servant didn't at least leave his money with a bank to be lent out at interest. For some reason, either whoever was proscribing usury thought of whatever the thing was that they were proscribing as being different from that, or the contradiction with that part of scripture just sort of got fuzzed out of awareness somehow.

(This is a little bit of an anomaly in need of explanation, really, since usury was dogmatically defined as a "mortal sin" -- i.e. a choice so evil as to justify torturing that human soul literally forever leaving that human soul to its putative original existentially inherent fate of rightly earning a literally infinite amount of torture. Now I know that Catholic moral theology was kind of trigger-happy with the eternal torture punishment abandonment-to-one's-fate justification -- even missing Mass on a Sunday, or one of a dozen-odd other designated holy days sprinkled throughout the year, without a serious reason, is defined as also being an act so evil as to justify punishing abandoning someone to a literally infinite amount of torture -- but still. And for centuries and centuries, Catholic teachers were almost the opposite of careful to distinguish usury from the thing Jesus is recorded as having spoken favorably (within the frame of a parable) about. Even Aquinas, famous for engaging with theologically inconvenient points, doesn't touch this one with a ten foot pole ( https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~Matt.C25.L2.n2071 ). The Vulgate reads "oportuit ergo te mittere pecuniam meam nummulariis et veniens ego recepissem utique quod meum est cum usura", but Aquinas's paragraph headers are just "Oportuit ergo te pecuniam meam committere nummulariis" and "Et ego veniens recepissem utique quod meum est". Maybe he's using a Vetus Latina translation or one of his own?)

From what little I've read, for a long time it was thought of as normal to charge 20-80% interest per year as a way of recouping the risk of non-repayment in a world with a less developed set of market and state institutions for identifying, tracking, and sharing information about individual borrowers. That might be part of it. (I wonder if anyone engaged in the somewhat saner practice of having a large up-front financing charge for the risk of non-repayment and then a more reasonable, opportunity-cost-proportional interest rate going forward.)

I'm going to present the case for why Jesus could have spoken about lending at interest favorably.

From one point of view, a loan at interest isn't repaying the lender for doing no work; it's repaying the entire lending market for doing the administrative work of figuring out which use of some given capital results in the most production later. Now, this implies that maybe loan profits should be restricted to match how much money would have been retained by the owner of an estate or business concern who had put in the work on equivalent decisions, versus paid to the owner's employees. And I don't know how one would make that happen within a lending-at-interest system.

In other ways, a loan is the manifestation of the underlying logic of ultimatums like: "I can do productive work X (or let go of an amount of wealth X I got in exchange for prior productive work) at time T, to produce enough capital that you will have accumulated 2*X amount more of production twenty years later, so long as you'll agree to let the law make sure I get my slice of the pie later. If you won't agree to that, then the deal's off, I'm going to spend time T going fishing / playing golf / swimming in my money bin instead." If enough people feel that way, and loans are illegal, and the people don't have something else such as their family's future to plow produced capital into, then the 2*X production later won't happen.

This capital can compound over generations, and since that's an exponential effect maybe it's very important. Although then you get into some contentious questions about whether and when more wealth or population is even better, given whatever the longer-term context is that makes situations like "wealth" or "population" in the foreseeable future more or less valuable. Within Christianity, there's this command about "be fruitful and multiply", and it's not clear from the context of the command what the points are at which you're supposed to start trading away fruitfulness and multiplication for the sake of other things.

But then, if we decide to allow lending at interest to get this exponential effect over generations, we end up with situations where more and more of the pie goes to financiers and the finance system. So long as the slices-of-pie that are on offer include perpetuating one's own wealth and power into the future, why wouldn't the people and collectives with the wealth and power be the kinds who would hold out for those offers? (And if you forbid loans, then more and more of the pie instead goes to merchant families, I guess. But more slowly.)

Re: A case of magical manipulation?

[deketemoisont]

(Maybe not for publishing?)

You don't want to say "fracking", but he sure got a lot of money out of tapping that well!

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, do you have an opinion on the Law of Attraction? I never could make it work. Positive thinking is great, but just thinking about whatever I wanted without actually doing something as well was no help.

Has anyone here had success with the Law of Attraction? Maybe I was doing it wrong.

JMG, spellcheck wanted to change “positive thinking” to “positive 🦏 rhino,” so there’s another silly band name for you. I suggest you have the Positive Rhinos play on a double bill with the Charming Onions.

—Princess Cutekitten

[(Anonymous)]

I am an utterly lapse Catholic. I go into church every chance I get, when I know not another soul is around, which is pretty all the time. I pray in my own way, often bordering on polytheism but with all the saints on the glass, it just makes sense. I have yet to practice much of anything regarding magic. Tried my hand at SoP but it felt odd and my inner Catholic quickly killed my joy, like only a good catholic can. I'm definitely not done and will try again one day. I was an alter boy as a child so having that view from the front, I enjoy and appreciate ritual but it seems like a large gap to cross. What really drives me to something different was the church's reaction to covid. When the faithful needed them most, the church really dropped the ball. Thankfully it's not a complete lost cause and from to my visits here, I came across, Let No One Fear Death which is a treatise by Orthodox Catholics on the reaction to covid; of course demons are mentioned. The occult seems like the best possible place for me right now, it's what makes sense in world gone mad.

[(Anonymous)]

If there really is a supernatural force at work here, then it may even all have been intentional. It never quite made sense to me that the True Believers could hold control of the narrative so well, except for when it came to allowing so many side effects of the vaccine to come out.

That possibility also reframes the "I'd rather die" reaction some people had to the shots in a far more troubling light: if whatever was behind it couldn't get them to take the shots, maybe it could still push some people into serving it's ends by pushing them to the opposite extreme....

Re: Atoning / clearing karma for stealing

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks JMG.

Would paying back the same amount be sufficient or should I multiply it?

[pleiadesdreaming]

What's a good way to consecrate a copper sickle for magical herb harvesting? I'm familiar with natural magic (obviously) and am working through the WotGS currently.

Re: C19 re-hysteria, mercury retrograd

[brendhelm]

Not JMG - My suspicion is that it's part Mercury retrograde, part Pluto's regress into Capricorn trying to reactivate the old themes.

Re: Healing unintentionally

[(Anonymous)]

(Not OP)

For the record, for my part, I object to any confident attribution of demonic higher self stand-ins to Bill Gates, or even to Anthony Fauci. Gates is kind of selfish but also strongly oriented to realistic physical patterns of cause and effect, and I know of nothing he's done that's not explained by taking a technocratic materialist position seriously. I regard that as inculpable, so long as there has been no paradigm of parapsychological research that clearly breaks the pattern of failing replication after a decade or three like all the others. Fauci has perhaps by degrees unconsciously covenanted with some kind of crazy elite-overproduction respectability-spiral egregor that has been gradually divorcing itself from physical cause and effect as a convenient form of costly virtue-signal to distinguish the priest caste from the scientist/engineer caste, but there are plenty of scenarios that result in doing that that don't involve having a demonic higher self stand-in.

Re: Choosing a system

[hearthculture]

I've had the Druid Magic Handbook for a decade and never progressed fully through it. I've had the Golden Section Fellowship for two years and made it partway through, with that practice rekindling my interest in the DMH. I've also done extensive readings outside of these, both of JMG's work and others, and adopted multiple other religious and occult practices. It's a big mess, and I look back knowing that in the same time period of bouncing around, I could have in the same time (or less!) worked through each system in it's entirety. Yet, I don't regret it - each step I've taken has made future steps easier, my will has gotten stronger, and nothing I've learned has proven obsolete just because I read something new or turned down a different path. I've recently committed to working through the Celtic Golden Dawn in its entirety, and each time I read about JP Russels or someone else's work with the DMH or Dolmen Arch, I still wonder what I'm missing. You will not likely know what works for you till you do the work. (The fallacy of picking perfectly is that you can't know what's best for you till you have some familiarity with the processes and concepts in general.)

If I've learned anything it's that the books are great reading, the ideas are exciting and illuminating, annnnnd the practices require time and commitment, and there is no work around to that. Whichever book you choose, what's written in it is the least part of what it offers, they are beautifully designed roadmaps to paths that are worth walking. The more I practice, the longer between times that I return to the book for further steps. This is to say, I concur with JMG - pick something, stick with it, and it will be to your benefit no matter what ends up being "best" for you.

Re: What's in a name?

[ecosophia]

Funny. Thanks for these.

Re: Atoning / clearing karma for stealing

[ecosophia]

In your place I'd round it up to the next reasonable figure: for example, if it was just a couple of dollars, send a five; if it was a little more than that, send a ten, and so on. One bill will get through the mail more safely than a wad of cash.