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

Qs

[(Anonymous)]

Morning JMG and folks! (btw oops, i posted this on last week's thread by mistake, apologies)

Had a couple of questions.

1) Things are clearly going off the handle a bit (middle east, more open anti-semitism on the left and right, religious extremism, other weird stuff like a doom cult hijacking the most promising AI company Open AI). I divined whether what's happening right now is similar to the possession by wotan that happened to the germans and it suggested yes.

I wanted to ask more about this. Is this some sort of psychic projection of pain and resentment from socio-economic conditions that shows up as external phenomena (demagoguery, extremism etc)? Some sort of supply that gets created by latent emotional demand for a powerful release of tension?

Or is are there actual spiritual, or wider energetic factors at play?

2) How does one turn one's power drive (that shows up disguised as other phenomena such as care, love, aggression, ambition but its secretly selfish and expansionary in nature, and contains a type of hunger or lack) into something like a genuine drive for wisdom, freedom, or love that is not self seeking (but can use an ego to operate in the world)?

Re: Qs

[ecosophia]

1) There are spiritual factors in play. Wotan in 1933 wasn't just a personification of the pain and resentment of Germans -- as Jung pointed out, Wotan is an archetype, a center of potent forces on the inner side of existence, that can sweep people along with it and lead them to a destiny they had no intention of pursuing. Yes, we've got similar forces in play now.

2) Awareness is the universal solvent. It's purely because people conceal their desire for power from themselves that the power drive infects everything else. Make it conscious, decide deliberately how and where and when to express it -- for it has a place in life, and there are good things that can be done with it -- and it will stop infecting other things so they can function more honestly.

Re: Qs

[(Anonymous)]

One thing to note about the Wotan archetype is that you can find other examples of historical figures in Germanic history who fit it very well.. The oldest I know of is Arminius, aka Herman the German, who defeated the Romans by ambushing them at Tuetoburg, ending Roman occupation east of the Rhine. Circumstantial evidence points to a character similar to Wotan: only Roman weapons were found at the believed site of the battle, indicating that Arminius had used his time being raised and trained by the Romans to revolutionize the German's tribal style of warfare; he used trickery and deceit, also like Wotan. Also like Hitler and Charles XII of Sweden, his own followers both planned and succeeded in assassinating him. He apparently wanted to unite more tribes and invade Roman territory, which I believe his followers realized was going to lead them straight into Ragnarok.

With Charles XII, we see the same story. Similar to Hitler, he never married and insisted he was "married to the state". He had no children and it's not even clear he carried on any romantic relationships at all, if I recall correctly. Like Wotan, Hitler, and Arminius, he was not just the leader who revolutionized a new style of warfare, he then proceeded to fight a war with all of his neighbors, pushed too far, and then even till the end refused to negotiate, even when offered very favorable terms. In the end, he apparently recruited half of Sweden's male population to fight his wars, most of whom did not survive. The Swedish empire he created collapsed after his mysterious death. He was shot in the face with a musketball while leading from the front, and it's very possible that his own men shot him, who finally had had enough.

The problem with the Germanics, as we're seeing today, is that they are so hidebound to their current rule set that see even moderate reforms or rule-breaking as being the first step to total chaos. I've dealt with them. Good luck trying to convince them to lay off the unlimited immigration policies, or that maybe that they should lay off the Ukraine war and Russophobia just a bit. This means that the defects in their system just build and build until, well, the situation can't be salvaged anymore. And then Wotan appears. This is why they both fear and admire him, because he lives by his own set of rules and can create a new order, which they on their own cannot. A few years ago, some German comedians made a film where one of them dressed up as Hitler and went around Germany talking to people. Older people especially started to treat him as though he were the real thing, and said that they wanted him (Hitler) to come back. They vented their grievances about the current state of Germany with respect to the culture and migrants.

I apologize if this amounts to a hijacking blog post, so feel free to delete it. I've just had these thoughts for a while and saw an opportunity to express them.

Re: Qs

[(Anonymous)]

Have you found a way to gently help people become more aware without causing shame and aggression? (esp when they ask but even then people dont react well sometimes).

Re: Qs

[ecosophia]

I wish. No, it's only those who want to become more aware who can be helped to become more aware. Anyone else will respond as though you'd attacked them.