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 these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my sixth published book, Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings. These days books on investigating reports of monstrous entities are all over the place, but that wasn't the case in 2001, when this first saw print.  I happened to be doing a lot of investigation of certain entities in the Puget Sound area in the years just before then; I thought it would be interesting to get some of my experiences and ideas in print; the book was a pleasant project to write, and it sold like hotcakes -- and, er, I may have some very small share of responsibility for those books on sparkly vampires, because unless you happened to spend time in the stacks of old university libraries full of mostly forgotten anthropology publications, this was for some years the one place in print you could find out that there's a very lively werewolf tradition among the native peoples of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington -- you know, near Forks.   If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and here 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

Knee Vortices

[yogaandthetarot]



Thank you again JMG for The Secrets of the Five Rites. So much tantalizing historical info plus the practical aspects of a totally workable system of energy exercises.

Many a burgeoning yoga practitioner (me!) cut their teeth on the Ramacharaka yoga books back in the day when info was scarce. Because of your book, I dusted off my lovely “Yogi Publication Society” editions and re-read a bit. It’s rather charming how very accurate his ideas were.
I’m assuming there was not really access at that time to the actual Indic texts (like The Hatha Yoga Pradipika ) yet, he nailed the deeper dimensions of hatha practices and the cleansing actions (kriyas).

As for the chapter on the vortices from your book, I found the two knees vortices rather odd and interesting. I remembered a great Iyengar hatha yoga teacher mentioning that close observation of a persons legs gives tremendous insight into their personality patterns. Energetically, I would imagine distance of knees from pelvic floor gives good indication of center of gravity for one. I think there are other indicators with leg shapes, knees to feet, etc.

Just wondering if you had any more thoughts about those knee vortices?

I’m about half way through the book and savoring it (until your new ArielMoravec fiction book comes out)… any date yet?

Jill C

Re: Knee Vortices

[(Anonymous)]

This discussion is the bees knees ;)

Re: Knee Vortices

[ecosophia]

You're welcome! Atkinson ("Ramacharaka") was an impressive guy in his own strange way; he had very, very little to go on, but I've been told by quite a few yoga practitioners that he got a great deal right and very little wrong.

As for the knee vortices, have you gotten to the chapter on the chakras yet? There are a set of minor chakras extending down the legs:

https://www.indianetzone.com/19/patala_chakra.htm

The knee vortices are the sutala chakras, which are part of that set. Of all the talas (lower chakras) they have the least negative influence, and once purified they help awaken the muladhara chakra at the base of the spine in an indirect, gentle, and safe way.

As for Ariel's next adventure, The Book of Haatan, iirc it'll be out in the spring. The third volume, The Carnelian Moon, has been sent to the publisher, and the fourth, The House of the Crows, is about a third done -- I figured out while running errands today how to handle a particular plot twist in it...

Re: Knee Vortices

[yogaandthetarot]

Congrats and thanks again!