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

Q

[(Anonymous)]

Greetings folks!

Does anything have a good theory why there’s a slow revival of religion (Christianity mostly but seeing some Islam and Judaism too) going on in the western spheres with intellectuals / intellectual adjacent people like Paul knightsnorth and nick land (who is Christian now as funny as that is).

The whole thing feels slightly hokey and on the nose so I’m trying to understand what’s driving it.

Re: Q

[ecosophia]

Good heavens, yes. Oswald Spengler predicted it a century ago in The Decline of the West. When a civilization's Age of Reason winds to a close, as it always does, you get what Spengler called the Second Religiosity -- a revival of old religious forms as a defense against the inner chaos set in motion by the failed Age of Reason. We're seeing that right now. Since scientific rationalism has failed so miserably to bring the shiny Tomorrowland future its publicity agents promised, and scientists have become little more than paid shills for corporate interests, a lot of people are fleeing to older religious forms as an alternative to complete nihilism. You'll see a lot more of that as things proceed.

I didn't know that Nick Land had joined the crowd heading back to Christianity, btw, but it doesn't surprise me at all. I've been predicting for years now that it's precisely the people who make such a big deal about being edgy and antinomian who will be first in the church doors as things proceed. The same thing happened in France at the end of the 19th century; have you ever read J.K. Huysman's Là-Bas, the most famous novel of Satanism in its time? Huysmans ended up as a more than usually devout Catholic...

Re: Q

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah I thought the Land thing was funny. Accelerationism /dark enlightenment /Nietzscheanism without a spiritual integration really takes people to a dark place, and i think the polar shift back is some sort of stabilising over-reaction as you say (the alternative being a mental breakdown).

(And applies equally for people who were more on the enlightenment ideal track such as Kingsnorth).

Yet, these people seem to overreacting to the negative psycho-emotional experience they've gone through, and thus their return to old forms doesn't seem creative/generative, and more defensive, sometimes even aggressive.

Given that we are entering a new age (of aquarius), shouldn't we see new religions or major reformations of the old forms (incl Christianity) with new creative and spiritual energy? What are your thoughts where/when we might see truly new inspired forms of divine ideas?

Re: Q

[ecosophia]

Of course it's defensive. They're fleeing to familiar forms, rather than going out into the inexpressible to find something new and relevant to the present moment; that's standard. The new faiths of the coming deindustrial dark ages probably exist already, but they're little fringe traditions scattered here and there with tiny circles of passionately devoted followers -- just like Christianity was, say, when Rome hit its Second Religiosity and built gargantuan temples to its Pagan gods.

Re: Q

[(Anonymous)]

Based on what you read about the Second Religiosity, does it also include a return to pre-Christian forms in the case of the Faustian civilization? The question about ancient Egyptian deities below made me wonder. If you are contacted by deities from older traditions, how should you handle that if you are looking for something new and relevant to the present?

Re: Q

[ecosophia]

That's a different thing entirely. Sometimes it's just an antiquarian oddity, but sometimes a very old religion can be revived in ways that are well suited to a new era -- as the worship of Osiris was in late New Kingdom Egypt, for example. If you're contacted by deities from an old tradition, they may just be the thing that's needed again...

Re: Q

[(Anonymous)]

In this Spengler scheme, is France a distinct civilization from the US? I thought the entire west would be faustian, and therefore the end of the age of reason and the start of the second religosity would be around the same time everywhere (as compared to what you're saying about 19th century France, although modern day France perhaps isn't having the same religious revival as the US is right now, so the discontinuities are a bit prominent in this thesis.)

Re: Q

[ecosophia]

In Spengler's scheme, western Europe is all one civilization. North America isn't really part of it, but it's absorbed a lot of it via what he calls pseudomorphosis -- the process by which a younger people which has not yet developed its own civilization borrows (and misunderstands) one from an older civilization. As for France, oh, it's having a religious revival all right, but it's not the same religion. Islam is expanding into France very rapidly these days and will absorb what's left of French culture in due time.

Re: Q

[(Anonymous)]

Funny you say this pseudomorphosis is happening for North America; I had some realisation there on where stuff could be headed (the chaos of the next decade or two starts a new synthesis for the development of freedom which also spiritual emanates from the land here, which has its origin in greece and rome and made its way here via UK and France).

Re: Q

[ecosophia]

Every place that has Western or pseudo-Western societies, other than Western Europe, is in a pseudomorphosis right now. Yes, that means most of the world is in that condition; different regions will throw it aside at different paces.

Re: Q

[(Anonymous)]

I have something rather interesting to add to this: I am in the field of private education. The model I work in is Montessori. I track a lot of the news in education, and the dynamic of the collapse of the Age of Reason and a kind of Second Religiosity is being played out there, too. Conventional public education is collapsing right now on several fronts. For one thing, absenteeism is skyrocketing, up around 25% in many places according to my impression. No one wants to teach in these places anymore, and many teachers that don't leave the profession altogether are setting up mircoschools, homeschool pods etc. Moreover, in reaction to the whole CRT and transgender business, many dissident educators are calling for a return to either Christian classical education in a desks-and-rows format, or to what cells and bells education education was in the 1960s. What that looks like is cells and bells, telling the kids to shut up and sit still in their seats, do the old-fashioned worksheets, and if they don't kick them out of school. Now that system worked after a fashion (especially once you weeded out the genuine troublemakers in addition to kids who simply weren't cut out for it), but it's also the exact system that got us to where we are! That system was dehumanizing, and Leftists (for lack of a better term) took advantage of it to propose their fake "improvements". It's basically a Second Religiosity. I'm not sure if Montessori is a part of that same trend, as it certainly isn't new and is seeing a revival of late. It certainly has a lot of good ideas, but also a few bad ones and some limitations.

What I suspect instead, is that the future dominant models of education are happening on the fringes in microschools, homeschool pods and private schools that are experimenting with mixtures of Montessori, forest school, apprenticeship programs and a host of other ideas to make something new.

Re: Q

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Yes, that's exactly the same dynamic, and yes, I'd guess the microschools and home schooling outfits are creating the next education while traditionalists are fleeing to the past. That's fascinating.

Re: Q

[kimberlysteele]

I run a group called Speakeasy Illinois that is/was devoted to promoting freedom of choice establishments. I started it with a co-founder (she is the mother of 5, I am childless by choice) in early 2021. It has about 10K members, a few thousand of whom are active. There were at least four microschools founded by Speakeasy members in 2021-present, and existing microschools saw their ranks swell considerably. There are small religious schools, usually Protestant, plus lots of "learning centers" which are basically home school supplements. One place founded by one of my members in 2021 holds school in a big old barn in the semi-country.

One of my private music students and his father mutually decided upon his exodus from public school and into homeschool right as he turned 12 in 2022. My co-founder's five children were all homeschooled in the early years and are now entering private Catholic school as they hit their teens. For the most part, Catholic schools did not partake in the nonsense of the Covid era. One of my most gifted music students is now enrolled in Catholic school at age seven after being homeschooled in the early years despite the family being only nominally Catholic. Public schools in Illinois are still pushing the Covid vaccine and others -- they're not forcing it because they cannot seem to ram it through; people can get out of it with exemptions. Though there is no shortage of public school children in northern Illinois, what seems to be different now is that people realize they have a choice.