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

[hearthculture]

I wrote an essay long ago identifying modern investment culture as the point of failure (root of evil..?) of modern western civilization.
If I remember correctly my reasoning went:
-Investment in modern times is not deciding to hitch your pony to a person or company you believe in, instead (for most people) it is lending money at interest, or usury, at best, and gambling at worst; and that shift becomes even more stark because we are forced by multiple retirement systems to put portions of our money into investment instruments (401k, etc.) that are supposed to support us when we are too old to work, or just decide that leisure is more fun than work.
-There are roles for elders to be productive without heavy labor (childcare, teaching, storytelling, cooking, among many many others.)
With retirement accounts, elders don't have to be elders and they don't "need" their children, allowing for further destruction of family units and further fractioning along political, religious, and other lines.
-Retirement and other forms of investment/usury allow for a false sense of self-sufficiency (when the sufficiency is actually produced by others obfuscated by many financial layers.) That sense also leads to delusions of grandeur, selfishness, and fractioning of families and society.
-When you have entire classes of people reliant on investment income to live, companies can morally justify profit seeking over the safety and well-being of their workers and customers. (If profits aren't at 10% or higher, the granparents won't eat next year!)
-Workplaces can doubly be more heartless and exploitative with their workers, and not have pushback, because those workers are promised that it will only last till they are 50/65 when they can retire and get all the rest they were denied for 40 years.


It went other places from there, but that's the gist. I imagine one of the turning points in Usury being a topic to it being sacrosanct was the implementation of social security and other mandatory retirement plans that made every citizen culpable for a form of usury.

[deketemoisont]

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