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 magical altar. In the traditions of the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose, this can be any flat surface large enough to hold the four working tools of the elements, the four elemental candles, and the two pillars. In ritual, it represents the world -- meaning here both the microcosm of yourself and the macrocosm of the universe. A ritual itself forms a mesocosm that mediates between those two extremes and is capable, within the limits of magic, of making changes in either or both.

As the image above suggests, an altar can be very, very simple.  A lot of mages I know, in and out of the traditions John Gilbert taught, have used the kind of little folding table I grew up calling "TV trays" as altars -- they're convenient to put up and take down, and can be stored folded up for the many times when you're not doing ritual. Throw a colored cloth over it and you're good to go. Black is standard in most Golden Dawn-derived traditions, representing the opaque world of matter, but you can use other colors for specific symbolic purposes.

Of course you can get much fancier than the simple FHR approach; the image on the right shows a Golden Dawn altar kitted up for a ritual, and the one below shows a Martinist altar similarly bedecked. In magic, as in most things in life, you can get as simple or as fancy as your heart desires.

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- as in, NO MORE COMMENTS WILL BE PUT THROUGH. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Land acknowledgements

[ecosophia]

I've been watching the whole "land acknowledgment" business with a raised eyebrow for some time. Since the people who do it aren't giving back the land or doing anything else to address the matter, aren't they simply rubbing the noses of the native peoples in the theft? Something along the lines of "We won, you lost, nyah nyah nyah," but with a facade of fake politeness?

Re: Land acknowledgements

[(Anonymous)]

There's something very, very weird about it. I live in Canada, where it has caught on in a very real way, and the people doing it genuinely seem to think it does something. I grew up in a managerial class, and so I've picked up on the art of recognizing when there's some ulterior motive; and here, I haven't picked up the faintest whiff of it.

I haven't been able to make any sense of it, but I'm confident that whatever it is is weirder than it seems to be; and it already seems pretty weird...

Re: Land acknowledgements

[ecosophia]

That's interesting -- and spooky. I wonder what they think it's doing...

...and whether they might be saying, in effect, "and we'll be gone soon, so you can have it back."

Re: Land acknowledgements

[(Anonymous)]

Not that anybody is going to do anything about it, as you say, but the whole idea raises the question of how far back we should go. If we give land back to the native Americans, can I have my ancestors' land back from whoever is living there now?

Take the successive invasions of the British isles for example. The Romans came, then the Angles and Saxons, then the Vikings, then the Normans. And we know nothing of whatever waves of migration there might have been before that.

I don't know much detail about the pre-Columbian political history of North America, but I would guess that the distribution of land among various groups was rarely static for very long. Native American tribes did not just exist in a steady state from the beginning of the world until 1492. Or after 1492, for that matter.

Re: Land acknowledgements

[(Anonymous)]

In Australia it is similarly getting weirder. I could get on board in the early days with the idea of opening events with a welcome to country, or starting a meeting acknowledging the traditional owners, if it meant increasing awareness of who the local traditional people are and creating real life interactions. But mostly it’s become a canned generic statement that is intoned without any feeling or connection. And the “Always was, always will be (Aboriginal land)” repeated everywhere like a mantra is starting to give off a creepy vibe, maybe like a horde of growling zombies making its way toward me.