Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's a few minutes before midnight, so we can launch into 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 mine only to a limited degree. Most of it was the work of my wife Sara under the pen name she used then, Clare Vaughn. We sent it to the publisher with the authorship as "Clare Vaughn, with John Michael Greer." The publisher used to make a big deal about being feminist, liberated, etc. -- but somehow that didn't extend to giving a female author the credit she deserved, at least in this case. So my name got put first, where it didn't belong. (We also had to deal with a sustained attempt by an editor to sandbag the book; turned out the editor had a friend who was writing a similar book, and wanted ours to fail.) There are reasons I haven't placed anything with that publisher for years. Nonetheless, Pagan Prayer Beads came out very well. Yes, it's about exactly what the title suggests: how to design, make, and use prayer bead strands and rosaries for the deity or pantheon of your choice. The publisher's kept it in print, too, which is more than I can say for some publishers; if you're interested, you can get a copy here if you live in the United States and at your favorite book retailer if you're 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. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I don't want to get too close to the banned (as of the most recent notice anyway) topic, but since you went to the trouble to paste that, it suggests you find it puzzling, so here's my standard way of articulating what's going on there in Kabbalah in case it helps.

I associate Yesod with unconscious processes of construction of perceptions, perceptual habits, intuitions, and simplified communication conventions / assumptions / interfaces (in this case, the interfaces are internal, though Yesod also covers things like signaling between animals or contract negotiations). I associate Netzach with unconscious processes of construction of motor synergies, motor learning, purposiveness, tenacity in conflicts, and the drive that discovers and tests the building blocks used by Hod and Yesod. I associate Hod with things like reasoning tasks. Playing a board game inefficiently can be done with just operations that are stereotypical for Hod, like backwards reasoning over states of play from winning and losing outcomes. But in a player who is using their thinking capacity efficiently, there's a lot of cognitive work being done that corresponds to Yesod, for intuitively developing and recognizing qualitative board patterns, or higher-level strategic concepts like development, moyo, or aji. And the whole premise of someone trying to use their thinking capacity efficiently depends on some initial shaping and some ongoing guidance that correspond to Netzach.

If you could dissect the cognition in a sufficiently well-tuned, well-tweaked, and well-refactored efficient way to play a board game, I think it would be hard to tell where activities corresponding to Yesod, Hod, and Netzach began and ended, as these activities would all start to appear as different situational manifestations of a common principle. Maybe that commonality would correspond to having good fluidity on the paths between them.

In re paths: Sometimes I read about some apparently exciting directions of mathematics, involving abstract structures of higher-order relationships -- that is, relationships between relationships -- that came from investigating the topology that results from gluing together geometric figures like points ("0-simplexes"), lines ("1-simplexes"), triangles ("2-simplexes"), tetrahedra ("3-simplexes"), and so on. Sometimes I wonder why I only ever see Kabbalistic discussions of the sephirot (corresponding to 0-simplexes) and paths (correpsonding to 1-simplexes) on the diagram, plus analogies between the four worlds, between the triangles of balancing within the worlds, and between the departing path and the returning path. I wonder why nobody ever seems to talk about other higher-order structures, like second-order paths: paths between paths. (Maybe only some pairs of paths would even have relevant second-order paths between them, the same way nobody just draws paths between all the sephirah.) Though I suppose it's all academic for me, if I don't yet understand either even just the first-order paths (from the Kabbalah side), or algebraic cohomology theory or homotopy type theory or whatever (from the mathematics side), to make the connections.