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.

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

Re: Woke turning to Islam

[(Anonymous)]

My read on this is, "(1) for most people, the impulse towards wokeness derives from a signaling instinct oriented in such a way that it gives the person an unconscious experience of reward when the person behaves in a way that will make the person look to their peers as though they are as unrelated to conservative un'educated' working-class and lower-middle-class Christians as possible; (2) the instinct in question quickly picks up on how conservative Christians credibly think of Muslims as enemies; (3) the signaling instinct therefore decides to start rewarding the person for behaving in a way that will make the person look to their peers as though they are allied with Islam". I don't feel like there's necessarily much to be surprised about, even if enantiodromia is also a thing.

The surprising thing is how long it was still possible for there to be a version of wokeness that was about distancing oneself from things according to principles, like "harms to thus-and-such peoples vulnerable under kyriarchy are bad; therefore, distance yourself from Christians and Muslims because of how they are apparently in favor of such harms", rather than about distancing oneself from things according to unconscious reasoning about strategic social class positioning, like "conservative Christians are working-class and lower-middle-class and are uneducated; therefore, act as if you 'believed' that harms to thus-and-such peoples vulnerable under kyriarchy were 'bad' when it's Christians supporting those harms, but be sure to still actually support Islam anyway, even when it's also supporting those harms, because of how Islam is obviously conservative Christians' bugbear." Maybe this kind of transition is just naturally what you get, when a movement recruits too many followers, and the center of gravity of what kind of mentality its followers are sustainably able to base their judgement in shifts from the upper astral to the middle astral.

I guess my interpretation might mean that a good campaign to counter a dangerously uncritical "woke Islam" tendency could be to publish statistics about the kinds of Islam that are believed by less-educated, conservative, working-class, and lower-middle-class Muslims in Islamic countries, versus upper-middle-class ones. I mean, depending on if the numbers actually told the story you needed.