Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just after 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? A basic wand. In the traditions of the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose and the orders and systems related to it, the wand is the emblem and working tool of elemental fire.  It is properly made of wood, in which -- as any camper knows -- is the seed of fire, and it may be shaped, colored, ornamented, and gussied up in whatever way the individual mage desires.  Once it is made and consecrated, it can be used to direct magical energies. In addition, any time you need to focus and strengthen your will, take the wand in both hands, close your eyes and imagine yourself surrounded with flames. This will give your capacity to will a definite boost.

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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.

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- as in, no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

This one is part of the discussion from the Karma post, regarding the soul of Mr. Hitler, but adjacent enough that it's better here. What would you think is the effect on the soul of the once-Adolf-Hitler, that he has been deified to at least the same degree as Haile Selassie by huge numbers of people in parts of India and less numerously throughout the weirder part of the Western neo-nazi scene? Are the people doing that just worshipping Wotan/Odinn/Vishnu in a non-PC way, or are they literally worshiping a dead man with a lot else on his plate right now? What's going on here?

[ecosophia]

That's a very complex question. Human beings do become objects of worship quite frequently, of course, but then so do a lot of other things and beings; I've wondered what it would have been like for the souls of the sacred crocodiles of Egypt to get the kind of adulation they did! But Hitler...we're talking about a figure who's seized the world's imagination to a degree very few others have. So simple an abstraction as this --


-- identifies him instantly. One of these days, when I'm ready to have a very large number of people melt down completely, I plan on doing a post about Hitler as archetype, and discuss the way that people who've used him as the archetype of all evil have given his image an extraordinary amount of power.

[(Anonymous)]

Throwing my vote in to see that as a fifth Wednesday post!

[ecosophia]

Bring that up again in November and we'll vote on it.

[(Anonymous)]

Great gods above! Here we go again.

[(Anonymous)]

You and many other occultists have emphasized the importance of doing workings that strengthen what is good rather than attacking what is bad. The post-WWII West has completely missed this lesson since so much of its identity is focused on not being like Hitler's Germany. Role models come and go and are often cannibalized to make way for new ideological trends but the central devil figure is omnipresent. There's the famous Wikipedia Hitler challenge where you go to a random article and see how many articles you have to click through to reach Hitler's, and of course there's the famous Godwin's law as well.

What does it do to a culture when its symbol of absolute evil is omnipresent and treated with hushed reverence while its symbols of good are murky and fleeting? Imagine a version of Kemitic religion where all the temple paintings and hieroglyphs were dominated by a giant image of Apep offset by slapdash renditions of the gods, and if every pharaoh introduced a completely new pantheon and cancelled the old deities for being problematic? Who's really being worshipped in this situation?

[ecosophia]

I think you've answered your own question!

It's a crucial point, of course. Ever since the 1930s, the Western cultures have been so busy being against this or that bad thing that they've mostly forgotten to replace it with anything good. Partly that's because it allows the profound corruption of our societies and the West's blatant and brutal exploitation of the rest of the world to be swept under the rug, but it has deeper elements as well. If you focus all your efforts on fighting evil rather than creating good, your efforts inevitably multiply the evil so you always have more of it to fight, and since your whole attention is on evil -- why, the old maxim "what you contemplate, you imitate" applies...

[(Anonymous)]

It’s a great deal of shadow projection too. Who dropped the atom bombs? Who has done equally atrocious things in subsequent wars? “But, but, but… Hitler killed *six million* Jews! Bad bad bad!” When you refuse to confront your own shadow, dark corners loom large and every little thing makes you jump.