Magic Monday
Nov. 26th, 2023 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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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!***
Re: Fictional monster
Date: 2023-11-28 12:57 am (UTC)Re: Fictional monster
Date: 2023-11-28 01:54 am (UTC)1) I recently read a series of articles where the author mentioned reading Monsters as a teenager, which spurred his interest in weird stuff, and then the bulk of the article was about creepypasta, specifically Slenderman. In a comment, I let him know that you had put out an updated edition discussing tulpas and the creepypasta connection. It's rather long, but pretty entertaining (though the pop culture references are thoroughly millenial):
- first post, mentioning Monsters: https://yakubianape.substack.com/p/creepypasta-al-dente-prologue
- second post, where I thought the chapter on tulpas was relevant: https://yakubianape.substack.com/p/creepypasta-al-dente-tall-dark-and
2) As a writer of fiction, what steps do you take to make sure your invented characters/beings don't become tulpas?
Thanks,
Jeff
Re: Fictional monster
Date: 2023-11-28 04:21 am (UTC)2) There's not much I can do about it. My characters become very real to me while I'm writing stories about them -- to the extent that they'll sit down with me and explain where I've got something wrong about the story. (Jenny Chaudronnier did that, for example; I was trying to figure out, early on in the process of plotting out the Weird, who she was going to end up marrying, and she finally sat me down and said, "Look, haven't you realized yet that I'm asexual?") Once the stories are finished and in print the characters go away, but I'm pretty sure they're still out there.
The thing to keep in mind is that this happens with every writer, and some of the tulpas that result are very robust. For decades after Walter Gibson died, the New York brownstone in which he lived was haunted by the figure of a man in a cloak and a hat, with burning eyes and a spooky laugh. That was The Shadow, of course; Gibson had imagined him so vividly that he'd made a lasting imprint on the astral light there.
Re: Fictional monster
Date: 2023-11-28 02:05 am (UTC)I'm hoping that prayer and banishing will get rid of it, but it's a very creepy thing...
Re: Fictional monster
Date: 2023-11-28 03:09 am (UTC)—Princess Cutekitten
Re: Fictional monster
Date: 2023-11-28 04:22 am (UTC)