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.

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. See you next week!***

Comments

Ashes

[miow]

Dear John Michael
As an emigrant I face the following problem: what do I put in my Will about my ashes? I think my family, who all remain in my birth country, will not even think about it, they will repatriate my ashes. But I left for a reason and feel truly at home in my adopted country. On the other hand I don't want to hurt my family's feelings. So my question: does it matter where your ashes go after death?

Re: Ashes

[ecosophia]

It doesn't matter at all. Your body is constantly drawing in and letting go of matter -- within seven years, not one atom of the matter that currently forms your body will still be part of you, so if you've been here seven years you've already donated an entire body's worth of matter to the place you live now. What happens to the atoms that happen to be part of your body when you die is nothing to worry about.

Re: Ashes

[miow]

Thank you, that is reassuring. I need to re-read Dion Fortune's little book on death. So where the soul goes is not affected by where the bodily remains go?

Re: Ashes

[ecosophia]

That's correct. Fortunate, too -- otherwise, imagine the plight of the people who died on the Titanic, facing rebirth at the bottom of the Atlantic!

Re: Ashes

[(Anonymous)]

https://www.eoht.info/page/Turnover%20rate is a discussion of where that received wisdom "seven years" number came from -- apparently it comes from measuring atomic isotopes. But it's not like the atoms cycle through in something close to first-in first-out order. In chemical process engineering, one might say that different parts of the human body are in different places on a spectrum between a plug-flow vat and a well-mixed one. The "elution" of old atoms is presumably more like putting water through coffee grounds, and you'd basically have to take the slowest "compartment" (probably dentin), take the number of atoms, take the log base 2, and divide by the half-life of that compartment, to get the time when all the atoms would have been cycled through. I think that number would, in principle, come to about ten thousand years.

Separately, there's this awkward conceptual situation where the the way the physical universe is constituted doesn't seem to be sympathetic to the idea of an atom can be the "same as" or "different from" another atom at another time, given that they're the same isotope and so on. In the quantum mechanics, when you have a setup where have (say) two identical atoms at one time, and then you have two such atoms in the same two places at a later time, then whether those atoms count as having "stayed in the same places" or as having "exchanged places" seems to be more of a fact about what an observer finds it conceptually convenient to impute for other reasons, than it seems to be a fact about the atoms themselves. All the universe is tracking is which two places there could be atoms, not which place one atom is and which place a second atom is.