Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

A quick question re Moon talismanry and related operations: Given that the Moon's gender reliably changes across cultures, being generally male in ancient Assyrian, Anatolian, Arabic-Islamic, Indic and various Native American contexts but generally female in Greek, Incan and Javanese ones, for example, there seems to be a fundamental gender ambiguity in radically cosmopolitan, melting-pot environments. This includes in the first place the Islamic: in Arabic the Moon is strictly grammatically male, in classic Harranian and Indian style, yet overlain with Hellenic female attributes too -- hence his/her status as almost a second Hermes/Mercury in the Ghayat al-hakim/Picatrix. This ambiguity only becomes more intense in the early modern era of Moon-decked empires, when he/she becomes the ultimate Persianate symbol of the divine Beloved. In my own talismanic and devotional practice, I similarly experience the Moon as male, female and hermaphrodite, equally empowering for battling and for boozing, though also with a strong trickster-transformer vibe Coast Salish-style :)

Such cultural syncretism is par for the course in human-god relations, as you've shown. In the case of the Moon specifically, however, is it better practice to formally code-switch genders in invocations depending on situation, instead of just stringing them together as I currently do, Picatrix-style? Should Selene be invoked separately from Sîn?

Thanks as always for Magic Mondays!

[ecosophia]

You'd have to experiment and find out. Deities, planetary and otherwise, tend to have their own very personal reactions to such things.