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: Basic ritual magic and children

[(Anonymous)]

Another question from me:

I've been reading ch3 of your "Paths of wisdom" (couldn't help myself and jumped a bit ahead on theory) and it struck me as odd and interesting how the Cabala seems to invert the sexual polarity between the two principles of substance and essence. My background in this is some Pythagorean theory (the male-coded monad as essence and the female-coded duad as substance, albeit strictly speaking both are genderless), the perennialists (female quantity and male quality), Hindu male purusha and female prakriti. In all of these cases, the force equivalent is female, whereas the form equivalent is male; whereas in the Cabala the force pillar is the right (male) one, whereas the form pillar is the left (female) one. What is the reasoning behind this and what (if anything) should I make of it?

On the other hand, the way the characteristics ascribed to these two principles in your book as force-outward focused and form-inward focused seem to match up with the male/female coding.

So I'm wondering how to interpret this - one interpretation is that all of this is arbitrary and what matters is the way you interpret it, but that's just explaining away. Another way is to look at sexual polarity even within the principles themselves - that both form and force have qualities of both male & female... The third is that maybe it's just a matter of how these things are labeled and its more important to look at the actual meaning than the name...

Thanks again for taking your time to answer these questions!

Re: Basic ritual magic and children

[ecosophia]

1) I deleted your first question for the reason explained right up there in the first paragraph of the post. If you'll go back and read the FAQ again you'll find all your questions about doing magic around children answered in simple declarative sentences. If you don't understand those sentences, read them again, and don't try to finesse it -- they mean exactly what they say they mean.

2) Good! You've noticed that there's a difference. It's quite deliberate, and it's meant to encourage you to think about the difference and meditate on it, until you understand what it's trying to teach you.

Re: Basic ritual magic and children

[(Anonymous)]

I applogize for the inappropriate question, I was unsure whether a room inside a home qualifies as a different "place" or not.

I'm still not exactly sure, but from your previous reply, I'm guessing a separate room doesn't in fact count as a different place, which I'll take into account.

Thank you for the reply!