Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's a little 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 seventh published book, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I'd gotten irritated about the lack of decent reference works on occultism, and Llewellyn, the publisher I worked with in those days was enthusiastic about the idea of helping to fix that. It was a fun project, and includes a certain number of quiet and rather abstruse jokes; there are other occult encyclopedias available these days but this one still stands up fairly well -- though I'd make a lot of changes if the publisher was interested. (This also turned out to be the last book I did with Llewellyn for a long while, due to some issues involving their treatment of another project of mine.)  If you're interested in the encyclopedia, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite book venue 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

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG, Sara, readers.

JMG, you mentioned Hitler being an occultist. I haven’t read whichever bio that was in. My question is, was he any good at it?

I have read Hitler’s Master Of The Dark Arts, a Himmler bio by Bill Yenne, which I can recommend to anyone with an interest in WW II, occultism, or both. Very well written. I have a sort of proprietary interest in WW II as my parents and uncle lived through it and my dad participated in the end of it (the draft board’s idea, not his).

—Princess Cutekitten

[ecosophia]

Your Kittenship, Hitler's occult involvements have been a subject of endless controversy down through the years. I haven't yet seen a really competent discussion of it in a bio of the man -- most biographers don't know enough about occultism to recognize it if it rode past them stark naked on a unicycle -- and most of the books on the occult dimensions of Nazism are sensationalistic in the extreme. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism, one of the few exceptions, talks about literally everything except Hitler's own occult activities! If you read accounts written by the people who knew him early on, though, it's very clear what he was studying.

As for whether he was any good, like most self-taught occultists he was a very mixed bag, extremely skilled at some things and very weak in other directions. When time permits I'll take a look at the Yenne book -- thanks for the heads up.

[(Anonymous)]

None of Hitler’s biographers understand what he saw in Eva Braun, who was uninterested in politics—maybe she too was an occultist and they worked well together?

—Princess Cutekitten

[ecosophia]

That's an interesting possibility. I've known some aging gay men, however, who ended up quite unexpectedly falling in love with a much younger woman; I've often thought that this was pretty much what was going on with Adolf and Eva.

[open_space]

I have no idea what's in it, but today at the library the title caught my eye so I'll share it. The title was Hitler and His God: The Background to the Nazi Phenomenon by Georges Van Vrekhem. Since it was at Quest Bookshop, I assume it is at least partially into the occult side of things.

Btw, I wanted to share something with you about Healing Hands, Our Lady of CK.

You can drop a comment here: https://open-space.dreamwidth.org/17205.html

[not_gandalf]

In my wasted youth, the book I read about this in was Trevor Ravencroft's "The Spear of Destiny". This book had some definite Anthroposphical leanings to it, and Ravenscroft did a sequel called "The Chalice of Destiny" which I seem to recall had some actual exercises in it, like the review of the day in reverse order, which was the first place I ever saw that written up. Not sure if he was historically reliable, but, for 17 year old me, he sure was interesting...

[booklover1973]

There are a few things I know about Hitler's occultism: He was into Ariosophy, a white supremacist version of Theosophy, and he read voraciously the writings of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and the periodical "Ostara". These things are described in the book "Hitler's Vienna."