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: 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...