Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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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I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

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!***

Comments

Re: Prophecy and choice

[ecosophia]

The entire question of free will is a muddle because most people assume that there are only two options, 100% free will or 100% determinism. Of course that's not true at all. Each of us has some freedom of will, varying by circumstances and personality; each of us also has some constraint on our will. In one situation you might have only a little wiggle room, because your freedom is sharply constrained by outside factors or by your own personality; in another, you might have much more freedom to act.

As for prophecy, well, that depends a good deal on what you mean by that. If you mean 9as per your example) religious prophecy, that's easy. The gods are eternal, and "eternal" doesn't mean lasting a long time, or even lasting for all the time there is -- it means outside of time. An eternal being can look at all of time at once. What you're doing today, what you're doing tomorrow, what you're doing twenty years from now, what the mighty chipmunk civilization is doing ten million years after the last human being goes extinct -- those are all equally present in the same timeless moment to an eternal being. Thus the Christian god, for example, knew exactly what Judas was going to do with his free will, and knows exactly what you're going to do with yours, not because it was set in stone at the beginning of time but because a being outside of time can see it all happen, right there at once. That's what Jesus was hinting at when he said, "Before Abraham was, I am" -- notice the present tense. That's the mark of someone who could perceive eternity.

Re: Prophecy and choice

[(Anonymous)]

I was idly speculating that given the principle of sufficient reason, free will / determinism might be solved by parallel universe theory between which out consciousness flickers as it experiences choices but the eternal gods see all worlds in a fractal of sorts which different birth charts etc.

Re: Prophecy and choice

[ecosophia]

Yes, you could probably frame things that way, too.