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 my fourteenth published book, and my first book on ritual magic that wasn't basically a rehash of what I'd learned as a Golden Dawn practitioner.  The Druidry Handbook, my ninth book (and one of my bestsellers), didn't talk about magic much -- its purpose was to help people make sense of Druid nature spirituality, which can be related to magic but doesn't have to be -- and I got a lot of questions from Druids, and people interested in Druidry, who wanted to know how to practice magic in a Druid context. This was my first answer. (We'll get to the others.) Looking back on this project, I'm pleased by it; it sets out a straightforward course of magical training and seems to work well for many students. It's still very much in print, and you can get a copy here if you live in the United States and at your favorite bookseller if you live 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 -- as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

respect

[(Anonymous)]

I'm looking for a positive affirmation to help stop others to treat me like crap and stop treating me like a door mat or punching bag. Getting pretty sabotaged at work lately. Maybe it's because the ship is sinking but there's a reason I'm getting pushed out the door first, and I'd like to take the lesson about the dangers of trying to please people and being too nice to whatever endeavors come next.

"I deserve respect" sounds kind of entitled

"I earn respect and demand people show it to me." Not sure I like the demand part.

"I set limits and do not tolerate disrespect?"

Re: respect

[ecosophia]

Okay, all three of these have problems. Saying that you deserve respect doesn't mean you will get it -- most of us deserve things we don't get. The same thing is true of "demand" -- doesn't mean anyone will consent to your demand. As for "do not tolerate," remember that the subconscious doesn't hear words like "no" and "not".

All this focuses directly or indirectly on what you don't want, not what you do. An affirmation I used with very good results handles the issue differently: "I am the master." Try that on for size and see how it feels.

Re: respect

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. Love it. Thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

I'm the cook who's been trying to bless the food I prepare in order to improve the quality of it.

a) I mentioned that one of the people I worked with was behaving in a very weird fashion, getting extremely hostile when I started trying to bless the food. You said it's likely he's someone with unpleasant vibes and reacting poorly to the positives energies I'm bringing in. For the past few days it's been as if something has switched and he has a new personality. He's a lot more pleasant, a lot nicer, and a lot less hostile with me. Others have also noticed this weird change. He also feels a lot less grubby and creepy, although I'm not sure if this is just because he's a lot more pleasant as a person now, or if I'm sensing something on the inner planes.

Do you have any idea what might be going on here?

b) I'd like to thank you for suggesting this practice to me. It seems to have a positive effect on the environment at work; ever since I started it, I've been getting a lot more positive comments on the food relayed back to me; and, on a more selfish note, this practice seems to be slowly, but dramatically, improving my life in general as well.

[ecosophia]

1) Fascinating. That's something that happens; we all have the choice to respond positively or negatively to the influences in our lives, and he may have faced up to that choice and made the leap to responding positively to your blessings. In that case, you may have just saved a soul from a lot of grubby lives.

2) Blessing is potent and positive stuff, and yes, it always affects the person who does it. That's one of the reasons why John Gilbert always used to encourage people to do it as much as possible -- the results for everyone, including the practitioner, are so good.

Astrology and Hexagrams

[(Anonymous)]

Hi! Two questions:

1: a dear friend, and I are thinking of beginning a project on the first day of Aries. I suggested this date because I did the chart and the aspect seemed good, but also I know that that is the beginning of the astrological year. My understanding is that the astrological new year is a good time for new beginnings and the start of new projects and adventures. Is that correct? Or is there something I’m missing?

2: How necessary is it to do Greater Hexagram consecration of talismans on the day of its correspondence? Can one create a talisman of Venus on a Wednesday, for example?

As always, many thanks!

Re: Astrology and Hexagrams

[ecosophia]

1) Yes, but it can also be a very rough day to begin things. If the chart's good, by all means -- but the energies of the new year can be tumultuous, so you'll want to brace for turbulence at the beginning.

2) The hexagram rituals can be done at any time. That's one of the secrets of Golden Dawn magic -- it accesses the levels of being above the astrological realm, and so is independent of time. You can give a little extra boost by also using planetary days and hours, or electing a chart, but you don't have to.

AI image generation

[(Anonymous)]

I believe I have found a new emanating of the void in our lives - AI image generation. In response to text prompts, those things will generate, often with high accuracy, just about anything that appears in human imagination. If this seems like the phrase in the cos doc that describes the void - "where men can be as gods" in the absence of constraints and limits, it reflects that. It is scary, addictive, and somewhat bottomless (no, I didn't plumb its depths).

I know AI has its limits, and won't last, but in the meantime I can see this thing ensnaring many minds in a new level of addiction.

Re: AI image generation

[ecosophia]

The AI-generated images I've seen are also weirdly soulless. No matter how photographically realistic they seem, there's an emptiness to them -- which is to say, yes, I think you're right. "So it is that all evolving force, whether in the universe or in the individual, having penetrated to fundamentals, looks across the great gulf fixed by Cosmic Law and sees the simulacra of its hopeless dreams promising fulfillment" -- that's how Dion Fortune describes it in The Cosmic Doctrine.

Re: AI image generation

[(Anonymous)]

I'm guessing the thing that does the reflection is the penumbra? And also guessing this is the point you tell me to meditate on that ;)

Re: AI image generation

[ecosophia]

Correct on both counts!

Re: AI image generation

[(Anonymous)]

It's not the ultimate void, containing nothing but infinite creative potential. Everything a Large Model AI generates is only a pastiche of elements from the material provided to its training phase. It doesn't come up with anything completely original, absolutely unprecedented, beyond recombined snippets of what was previously shown to it.

Depending on the qualities of the original art and the ingenuity of the prompt, this copy and paste job could result in a shuffling of some deep archetypal associations, the way a tornado can rip out some pieces of property and fling them around.

But a Large Model AI will never make something completely unlike the training material, something impossible to have predicted from what's been done before, the true mark of genius masterpieces of human creativity. Everything dumped in a pile by the tornado's passing was already present when it arrived.

Christopher from California

Re: AI image generation

[ecosophia]

The thing that fascinates me about AI imagery is precisely that it seems to be less than the sum of its ingredients. It's not just that it's a pastiche of existing imagery. It's a pastiche around an emptiness. The tornado doesn't just fling things around, it takes something away with it that ois never found again.

Re: AI image generation

[(Anonymous)]

My understanding is that the Void in the cos doc is not the same as the Unmanifest, which in her take resembles what we commonly believe to be the void, but is actually the infinite source of everything. And cant actually be understood at all. This is the nasty void we all have to experience on our own during the initiation of the nadir, which our host has indicated at times we may be passing through as a species. If so, the void like elements of our culture, like AI, and other things, make sense.