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

[(Anonymous)]

Funny you should mention it, as I've also been puzzling over this.

I've encountered the land-acknowledgement thing in PMC work circles, and find it a bit weird.

On one hand, one could dismiss it as just the usual vacuous virtue signalling, along with all the things that go with it, like pointedly calling Columbus Day "Indigenous People's Day," putting one's pronouns in one's email signature, keeping up with the "euphemism treadmill" (the latest seems to be using "enslaved persons" instead of "slaves" and all the trans language like "birthing person" instead of woman, etc.). None of which have the slightest impact on actually making anything materially better for anyone, but which are stridently embraced by the PMC set - presumably because they're easy ways to feel like one is a "good person" without having to actually do anything meaningful at all, while also signalling to all and sundry who is in the "good" club vs. the "bad" club.

On the other hand, there does seem to be something a little extra-weird about the land acknowledgement routine, insofar that it's so specifically "this and not that," if you know what I mean. Why land, specifically? Why no "acknowledgements" of any things else, like, I dunno the exploited labor that made your clothes and computer, or that mined the lithium for your electric car battery? Why no acknowledgement even of more "politically correct" causes like, I dunno, the men who died fighting for the North in the Civil War, which conflict the PMC set believes whole-heatedly was entirely about slavery? There are any number of things they could virtue-signal about, so why LAND, in particular?

I've been wondering about this one for a while now. And yes, my wondering includes an occult dimension, which is why this comment is at least tangentially relevant here.

Re: Land acknowledgements

[daveotn]

Well, I think you answered your own question there. Acknowledging land theft admits to some long-ago sin that's over and done with; acknowledging the slave labor in your cell phone or the CO2 emitted to get you to your conference requires you to make some change. From my reading, this is one of the main, persistent gripes Native groups have in the US - everyone is willing to admit that the colonial days were exploitative, but no one remembers that the Indians are still here, often stuck on reservations with lousy support systems and in need of 21st century help. Lest I get too far off of occult topics, the land acknowledgement strikes me as very similar to the expression of sin at the beginning of Catholic mass - beating your chest and asking for mercy as the price of admission.

Re: Land acknowledgements

[(Anonymous)]

How do you think they'd react to someone self-describing as birthingpersonerastic?

(The only illegitimate sexual category?)