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 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

afterlife

[chaosfrog216]

Hi John!
Do you believe in an afterlife? if so, can you give any detail as to why, and what resources you take as inspiration for that belief?
In my research the idea of an afterlife very much predates the Abrahamic religions, yet those three religions seem to have a monopoly on the idea of an afterlife... The ancient Egyptians believed such things (as did some pagan Greeks), but I assume Moses took a lot of inspiration from the Egyptian religions because his entire youth was spent in the court of the Pharaoh. And I assume he then took those teachings with him after he left them, and used them to teach his people, the Jews, seeding some of these spiritual teachings he learned from the Egyptians into their culture. Am I wrong?
The train of logic we assume today is that many of these Jewish ideas, which then informed Christianity... and then came Dante, etc. etc. and the rest is history.
Also, what do the Druid's think of an afterlife?

I have also heard arguments, good arguments, that I am more in tune with actually, that the idea of an afterlife is more so swirling around the idea of "memory", that is theories of the Akashic records. And when someone passes away they become a part of this record, that can be channeled and accessed. How accurately? I'm not very sure...
I've also seen you post on this forum about the idea of "demons" we think of today, as the beings who existed in a universe before ours... which would mean that all these magical ceremonies, the incantations, the magical practices many people go through, most of it all, are just a means of accessing their memories. Am I on point?


Thank you!

Re: afterlife

[ecosophia]

Druidry includes the concept of reincarnation, which is the most widely held view about the afterlife worldwide. I accept it because I have a fair number of memories of previous lives. There's also quite a bit of research supporting reincarnation -- you might look into the writings of Dr. Ian Stevenson, who filled 14 books with case studies.

The Abrahamic religions have no monopoly on afterlife beliefs -- quite the contrary -- and Jewish ideas about an afterlife have very little in common with the teachings of ancient Egypt in the subject. As for the Akashic records, that was a hypothesis that has been pretty well disproven by the last century or so of occult experimentation. Sorry.