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.

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

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

Demonic parasite

[(Anonymous)]

This one’s a bit of a doozy, and I apologize in advance for the length.

For almost my entire life I’ve had a significant energetic blockage in my neck/at the base of my skull. This blockage involves a debt of grief that I owe myself, and causes me to become dissociated from myself and the world.

I have completed the Dolmen Arch with good results.

I have at least one malicious entity feeding on me. This started in childhood. I did not become aware of the entity until after finishing the DA.

I was doing some non-DA work to try clearing up some of the issues at the nape of my neck. In the process I encountered an entity who, according to the exercise, ought to have been a projection of my subconscious. I got some off vibes, and didn’t trust it. The entity showed up as a demi lich from D&D. (Basically a wizard who has been a revenant so long that they are now a floating jeweled skull with tremendous magical powers. In the fictive D&D universe, the key to defeating a lich is to find and destroy its phylactery, which contains its soul).

I had a session with a shaman to resolve some other (but I realize now ultimately related) issues I was having, and while he was exploring my soul parts to get me in contact with my child-self, we found a malicious entity pretending to be my child self. The shaman was very surprised to find the entity where he did, and had never seen a demon so well hidden so deep in someone. This entity showed up as a plague doctor. I suspect this is a separate entity to the lich living in my nape. We banished the plague doctor successfully.

As far as I can tell, the lich’s agenda is to prevent me from paying the aforementioned debt of grief that I owe myself. It prevents me from processing said grief. I don’t know what the lich gains from this. The lich is capable of suppressing my memories of it, which is why it took so long for me to recognize it for what it is. (Thank the gods I keep a magical journal and record my dreams). It also affects my contacts with my spiritual allies, tainting them with a sense of malice, and with gruesome imagery. The lich has stated that it “wants my soul” and “needs my life”.

I’ve had another session with the shaman where I asked him specifically to look into my nape. I hadn’t yet realized the full importance of what I have going on there, so didn’t mention the lich to the shaman.

What the shaman found when investigating the blockage in my neck was a past life where I was hanged as a witch. I take others’ reports of my past lives as metaphor until proven otherwise, but this may have something to it. My grief seems to be held over from a past life. I have an intuition that the literal skull from the hanged past life may have been/is being used for some kind of magic, and that this may be part of the problem.

While working through the Dolmen Arch, I had what felt like an extraordinarily long and difficult struggle with the watcher at the threshold, with episodic deep depression. This struggle never got any easier on average, though it did wax and wane. I wonder how much of the struggle was the watcher, and how much was the lich, particularly as I periodically felt like I was being “blocked,” or like my magic wasn’t “plugged in”.

My spiritual practice has been palliative, but not curative.

So, my questions:

1. What do you make of the situation? How is it that such a situation could persist through the Dolmen Arch? The course definitely “worked”, and my spiritual development proceeded accordingly.

2. How do you recommend I proceed?

Re: Demonic parasite

[(Anonymous)]

OP here. I mentioned that the lock is able to distort my connection to/communication with my spiritual allies. This includes an archangel, so whatever is going on, it’s either quite powerful and/or quite deeply rooted in me.

Re: Demonic parasite

[ecosophia]

1) The Dolmen Arch isn't omnipotent. It gives you a set of tools you can use to make changes in your life, but it doesn't guarantee perfect success by the time you finish the course!

2) It sounds as though the shaman has a fairly good handle on things. You might consider doing more work with him. Beyond that -- well, this sort of thing can take a good long time to resolve, especially if it's rooted in problematic magical activity in a previous life. Keep up your practices and keep invoking positive energies.

Re: Demonic parasite

[(Anonymous)]

Fair enough, and thank you.

I wonder if some of my wording was a bit ambiguous. When I say the skull might have been used for magic, I mean the skull from the body of mine that was hanged might have been used by someone else.

If a human skull is used for magic, is there any reason to believe that could effect current incarnations of the being who previously wore that skull?

Thanks

Re: Demonic parasite

[ecosophia]

That's a fascinating question to which I don't know the answer.