ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's getting on for 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 wooden disk. In the traditions of the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose and the orders and systems related to it, the disk or pentacle is the emblem and working tool of elemental earth. The disk is traditionally painted or decorated with a symbol the individual initiate considers sacred, whatever that happens to be -- I saw pentacles made by Christian initiates that had an image of Christ on the cross on them, for example, surrounded by Christian holy names and words of power. The disk can be used as a means of magical protection, imposing the unyielding solidity of the element of earth between the initiate and any hostile magical force

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

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 -- in other words, no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There is definitely a heck of a lot more to it than any display of support of the LGBT community! Any minority foolish enough to let itself be weaponized into a wedge with which one of our myriad looting factions of élites can then break into our valuable cultural riches, contentiously laying exclusive claim over them for that now-captive minority, has lost track of what real support actually looks like. The underwriting of a viciously divisive PR over-saturation campaign to force potent gay-rights symbols to become so rampantly pervasive that they lose whatever positive potency they once had and get rapidly transformed into knee-jerk triggers of rage and bigotry in a majority of the population is really not a supportive act by any means.

As a card-carrying gay man, brought up in the lesbian community of the 1970's by my big old bull-dyke Mom, I am endlessly surprised by just how repellent today's gay activists (as well as the billionaire puppeteers pulling their strings) have succeeded in making the once-encouraging rainbow flag. At this point, I now find all the gay-rainbow-branded merchandise as stomach churning as the use of the ill-defined, overly-broad, made-up term "queer". Yeah, I know, I'm showing my age, but in this context I am quite proud of that antiqued patina. It provides me with durable magical protection against all the ubiquitous propaganda, gaslighting, and muddling of definitions being so abusively deployed in the current culture wars.

The rainbow flag as a gay symbol came from Jesse Jackson's "Rainbow Coalition", which also included blacks, women, latinos, and so many others, back when Jackson was running for US president in 1984. After that election, gay activists jettisoned the diversity of that broader coalition by claiming its rainbow flag exclusively for gay rights. Today, that appropriated flag has somehow managed to co-opt even the most unrelated display of the colors of the rainbow. Socks, belts, suspenders, t-shirt decals, and even rainbow-themed crosswalks have all gotten lumped into the manic signalling frenzy.

Fortunately, those abstracted signals and representations have become so totally divorced from the reality most folks live in that this whole grotesque over-reached appropriation of the rainbow is sure to implode quite messily in short order. Once neo-Nazis, BLMers, white suppremacists, and other intolerance groups start jumping onto the rainbow-appropriation bandwagon, gay activists won't be able to jump off fast enough! What will they then do with all that rainbow-themed merchandise they decorated their entire lives with, I wonder?

Who knows, maybe gay pride could even go back to just being about gays feeling proud about themselves, instead of relentlessly trying to make everyone else feel unnecessarily ashamed about themselves. Maybe walking on a rainbow crosswalk could go back to just being a way to get across the street. Maybe everyone could love the way they love and walk the path they choose, with or without attention-demanding belts and suspenders.

As for any of us (other than leprechauns) walking on any rainbows, they're just refracted light. It's like walking on sunshine... and don't it feel good? Walk on all those rainbows with pride, and feel alive, and feel the love, and feel the love that's really real!

— Christophe

Huh? The rainbow flag dates back to the 70s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_flag_(LGBT)#Origin

Interesting. For decades I've heard that Jackson was using the rainbow flag before gays were, but that could easily be revisionist history, written by one minority jockeying for position with another minority. By January 1972, Jackson was already describing his Operation PUSH as a "rainbow coalition", although his National Rainbow Coalition only got formalized during his first presidential run. See:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101022210347/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,879017,00.html

Photos with a very young Jackson show that Operation PUSH, founded in December 1971, was using four of the colored bands of the rainbow in its early branding. See:
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/zQVRbo2RdayVbQ

However, I can't find any photographs that show any of Jackson's organizations ever using full rainbow flags that were in any way similar to the gay-pride flag. My guess is that a once-popular arguing point regarding Jackson's rainbow coalition and its use of rainbow imagery predating the gay community's use of the rainbow flag ended up morphing over time until it settled into its simplified apocryphal form of "Jackson used the rainbow flag first." I stand corrected and apologize for gullibly perpetuating that urban legend.

— Christophe

Yeah, middle aged gay man here. I am allergic to the rainbow flags (old and new) and find almost all of gay culture the very inverse of spirituality and virtue. Some gay men are ok (most notably my spouse who is awesome) but for whatever the reason the culture seems to be infested with negative energy. I wish that were not so.

Magic Monday

no subject

History of the Flag

Re: History of the Flag

no subject