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

[(Anonymous)]

I'm in the process of writing a novel where a plot point is that a means is discovered to avoid radiation poisoning, prompting a trip to Mars, and the people sent on this trip slowly get sick and die; despite the fact that there's nothing physically wrong with them, all the tests show them to be in perfect health, they slowly get weaker and then end up dying.

I've realized that this sounds a lot like etheric starvation, which seems like a real risk with long distance space travel. The ISS is supplied with food regularly, has regular turnover, and is close enough to Earth that it might still be within the etheric bounds of our world in a way a spacecraft heading to Mars isn't.

1) Do you know any sources I could look at for what it looks like when someone's etheric body is starved, in case it suggests other details for the story?

2) Is it possible that etheric starvation plays a role in the way astronauts are so often extremely weak when they return from trips to orbit? This would be in addition, of course, to the effects of zero gravity, radiation, and other factors.

[ecosophia]

Okay, first of all, what's your explanation for their sickness and death within the novel? In real life you can get away with something just happening for no reason, but fiction has to be more logical than that. If you're going to make it a matter of etheric starvation, of course, you'll need to make sure that by the time this comes out, the reader knows plenty about the ether and the etheric body.

1) Read up on vampirism. Victims of vampires are good examples of what etheric depletion looks like.

2) That's an intriguing hypothesis, though I don't imagine it'll be tested any time too soon!

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry to butt in here, but in response to (2), I think there has been some indirect testing. NASA has done quite a lot of bedrest testing to calibrate their human experiments on ISS, and to my understanding there's no real discrepancy-- muscle wastage in orbit is about what you'd expect based on measured activity level. (Those human experiments are really the main reason that boondoggle has ever had to exist, after Shuttle-Mir showed Space Industrialization was never going to pay-- to throw some guinea pigs up into orbit for months or years and claim it was a 'stepping-stone to mars'. Which is rubbish, because serious mission proposals tumble or spin the ship so the astronauts weren't too weak to do real exploring when they got to the surface. ISS should be testing long-term effects of that motion on the inner ear, but they won't because it's a subsidy dumpster, not a serious enterprise. Even Skylab did better in that respect, since the Astronauts did test jogging around the walls 2001-style.)

Also, it doesn't take sci-fi magic to get to Mars without radiation poisoning-- you just need to wrap your astronaut's habitat in several meters of water. Does it take sci-fi magic to get all those many, many tonnes of water into orbit, along with enough fuel to move them, without bankrupting the entire western world? Why... yes, yes it does.

All that said, I like OP's etheric starvation idea. Since radionics seems to hint at a link between the electromagnetic and the etheric, and ISS is well within the Earth's geomagnetic field, you can easily justify in the narrative the idea that ISS is within Earth's etheric body (or whatever it is that planets have).

--Tyler A.

[ecosophia]

Fair enough. Thanks for this!

NoCents

[(Anonymous)]

Ill figure out these profiles someday.

Re: etheric connections

Actually the tabletop rpgs of the 80s have some writing frameworks (theyre essentially designed as writing aides). Shadowrun posits a turning of the age with a return of magic on the Mayan calendar. They speculate that the astral plane is based in the field of life. It has interesting effects, like the earths energy itself providing a floor, so that flying astral bodies cant easily travel through the earth itself.

Mage, the 80s version, speculates that each planet has its own distinct astral sphere. It reminds me of a ray bradbury story about how different senses for martians require different spiritual practice to maintain balance (I believe the missionaries were christian in thevstory)

Perhaps the difference isnt strictly "worse". Not just because it makes for a good twist or redemption arc. Maybe instead of just being far from home they are also finding something else across the gulf.

In reality, solar forces keep us here, as has been referenced here. But in the 70s star trek even (the next gen episodes about two planets with drug addiction) it was seen as redemptive too.

For more lore grounding, I forget the guys name but the "father of soviet space medicine" who ran the laika experiments has great wuotes on the fear of the void.

And he insisted cosmonauts brought booze to space. Iirc theres pics of marijuana on the iss. Jungian stuff.