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Magic Monday
It's just before 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 1.1 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 image? I field a lot of questions about my books on magic these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book on the left is the current edition of my fifth published book, The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic. I got tired of the torrent of wildly inaccurate books on herb and stone magic, and decided to write one based entirely on medieval and Renaissance sources -- granted, it helped that I'd gotten fairly good at reading Latin by the time I got to work on it. I wrote this before I studied hoodoo with Cat Yronwode, or it would have had much more traditional American conjure in it. It's still a solid book, and one I use myself whenever I need to look up the magical properties of an herb or what have you -- and it's the oldest of my books that's still with its original publisher, for whatever that's worth. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite bookstore if you live elsewhere.
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With that said, have at it!
***This Magic Monday is now closed -- as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***
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(Anonymous) 2023-11-20 08:23 am (UTC)(link)1) In the mid- to long-term future, it might be a good idea, if your town or local community has enough people with the skills that help coping with whatever the future holds in store. In the little rural town where I live, there are a lot of houses that are currently inhabited by one or two elderly people, which means that in two decades from now, most houses will change their owner or remain empty. I was asking myself whether it would be a good idea to work for the village finding the people it needs to make our community thrive or at least weather the storms as good as possible. There's obviously a material side to things which we have already started working on, but I have the feeling that this is a quest which could particularly benefit from magical assistance.
a) The ethical question: Is it appropriate for me to do such a working? It will be next to impossible to get consent from the villagers because it will largely impossible to communicate to them what I am trying to do. On the other hand, I am an elected representative (though not the mayor) of the village, if that helps.
b) The practical question: This whole working will take a few years. Right now I am doing a regular SOP, divination and meditation, not more and I will have to learn the necessary magical skills one my children are old enough. So there's plenty of time for preparatory work. Can you give a broad hint what level of magical skill and experience I will have to aim for to successfully undertake such a working?
2) My last question https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/252680.html?thread=44424712#cmt44424712 turned out to be rather complicated. I'm still thinking a lot about "definitions". The words Individuality / Higher Self are used in a rather manifest way since you can interact with them. From Fortunes definition, it sounds rather unmanifest, very much like the tracks in space with the matter carving and filling them washed out. Likewise, Fortune seems to imply a very iterative approach to things ("one evolution after another"), though it seems to me that there might be parts of our evolution that might have reached equilibrium and are already part of the Individuality, while others haven't. Which would make the Higher Self as an entity that seems to teach you more plausible since in Fortune's definition you would not be able to learn anything new from it, if I understand it even remotely correctly.
Ok, I hope that wasn't too much ;-) Thanks a lot!
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
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1b) It's less a matter of when you could start as it is one of when you have enough skill to get some results. Divination is your best bet for figuring that out.
2) Well, to be precise you don't interact with your Individuality; you are your Individuality -- you just don't know it yet. You interact with your personality, which is the temporary frame of habits of consciousness and action your Individuality uses to function in this incarnation. The difficulty is that we confuse ourselves with our personalities, and then think that we-as-personality have to interact with these abstract Indivualities floating out there somewhere! So what you can learn from your Individuality is who you really are -- "the face you had before your mother and father were born," as Zen masters like to put it -- while it's the personality that's the vehicle for learning within an incarnation.
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(Anonymous) 2023-11-20 09:53 pm (UTC)(link)How could that happen? I suppose deep thinking is not listed as a common cause for heart problems but on the other hand you mentioned that magical practice could be problematic if one has a weak heart, with the GD style being more difficult to handle than DMH. So is there an occult perspective on this?
Thank you again,
Nachtgurke
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