ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

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.

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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!***

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Ouch. An hour of Mercury on a Wednesday is the best day to order such things, but it may not be enough to overcome a deliberately difficult bureaucracy, and I'm not familiar with a form of natural magic that will work in this specific case. In the US you might be able to sic your local congressional representative on the bureaucrat, but I don't know if the TD for your constituency has similar powers.

One of the reasons I was glad to have the chance to write The Druid Path is that by then I'd learned that a less intensive approach to training works better for many people!

Making an amulet is like cultivating a relationship -- it's a very personal thing, and not something that can be done to a recipe. (That's why so many people have such poor luck with such things.) If you feel that topaz and vervain is a good combination, go for that -- but I recommend taking your time, feeling your way, and if possible interacting directly with the herbs and stones you have in mind. Let them tell you how to work with them!

That's an interesting way of thinking of it! If your school was in the US I'd assume that the tablet salesman had bribed the school authorities -- that's how such things normally happen here -- but I don't know if that's true where you are. But yes, it's going to make your students less attentive and guarantee that they'll learn less.

As for your general question, crossing the nadir doesn't require a specific set of skills to be mastered -- it's simply a matter of coming to grips with the limitations and possibilities of the material plane, grappling with them, and being formed and transformed by the experience. No two evolved beings have exactly the same skills, btw, because no two of them have had exactly the same experiences in their lives in matter.

Here are all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.

If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.

* * *

This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.

Tyler A's wife Monika's pregnancy is high risk; may Mother and child be blessed with good health and a smooth delivery.
May the surgery for Yuccaglauca's mother Monica's malignant mass be safe, successful, and conclusive of the matter.

May Frank Rudolf Hartman of Altadena California (picture), who is receiving chemotherapy, be completely cured of the lymphoma that is afflicting him, and may he return to full health.

May Kyle's friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.

Lp9's hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.

* * *
Old guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.

If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun's rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.

Each house has two different sets of meanings. There's the meaning that it has by itself, and the meaning it has in relation to other houses. The 8th is the house of death, change, and magic -- that's the meaning it has by itself. It's also the house that follows the 7th, and so it functions as the 2nd house of the 7th -- thus it represents another person's money and property. That's true of every house, btw -- the 4th house, for example, represents the money and property of your siblings if you have any, since it's the 2nd of the 3rd; the 6th house represents the money and property of your children, and so on. Yes, it gets complex!

If the 8th house is coming up, I'd tend to think there's money or property involved in the dispute between the brothers, possibly (since the 8th is the natural house of Scorpio) money or property they aren't talking about...

Sure. Orgasm releases tensions and stress patterns in the etheric body, and when those interfere with thought, it's a source of clarity. Aleister Crowley used to use it deliberately to get into meditative states -- he called it "eroto-comatose lucidity." Wikipedia has a surprisingly good article on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroto-comatose_lucidity

Some powerful people are like that. I'm not sure why, but it leaves me utterly uninterested in having anything to do with them.

Spend a little while paying attention to your thoughts. Do they take the form of words? Images? Secondhand sensations, like memories? All these are phenomena of the astral plane. What makes thinking complex is that those words, images, or what have you are attempts to express a pattern of meaning, and meanings belong to the mental plane. So thinking at its best bridges the gap between those two planes.

As for your awareness of physical sensations, you become conscious of a sensation when the nerve impulse is converted to an astral perception.

You can certainly do a SoP with the intention of banishing hostile intentions, and get good results. You might also consider, though, right after the open house, mopping the floor using hot water in which a cup of vinegar, a quarter cup of salt, and a tablespoon of good hot red pepper has been dissolved. Start mopping at whatever place in the studio feels most central and important to you, and end at the front door. A floor wash, which is what this is called, is an old hoodoo method to purify a space of evil influences.

This is hilarious—thanks to both of you for sharing a delightful moment!

Winifred

Bribery is certainly an option - but I don't think that it was even necessary, unfortunately. In Germany we seem to have the habit of jumping on the rear end of a train where the front is already traveling in the opposite direction. But it's us, therefore success is guaranteed, of course.

I asked about the Nadir because Fortune writes about something where you seem to be only "halfway over" which seems to be undesirable. But I guess from your answer and my own feelings towards the matter that "following something to it's logical conclusion" is what it needed? Not to be satisfied with the 80% you can accomplish in 20% of the time but to go all the way until you know the work is done?

Greetings and thank you!
Nachtgurke

Believe me, she knows quite well how I feel about this :-)

Just a random gift this week for those interested - a translation of a chunk from the beginning of Wilhelm Mannhardt's Forest and Tree Cults. It includes a long discussion of the Germanic tribes' penalties for chopping down sacred trees (pretty gruesome). And another chapter is also up of the Textbook of Magical Thinking on prayer.

1) Good heavens, no -- Earth is not just the material plane. It's a basic principle of existence that operates on all planes, including the highest. You're also not seeking a state of imbalance, all Fire and no Earth -- it's simply that in many incarnate people, Fire is the weakest of the elements. Plato says somewhere that we have one part of fire, two of air, three of water, and four of earth; one way to think of the work is that you have to get all four elements up to four parts, so you need to develop a lot of will, quite a bit of intelligence, and some sensitivity.

2) Since most people have so little will, habit is valuable to strengthen it. Eventually, when you no longer need it, you can do without it.

Your explanation helps me make sense of a lot of behavior I see around me. To put it bluntly, it seems like a lot of people just don't think. If that is the case - if their thoughts have no coherent, thought-out pattern of meaning and purpose tying them together - then a lot of human behavior is just reaction to whatever sorts of patterns happen to have astrally formed in their minds.

I'm not excusing myself here - there are parts of my life I seem to be reasonably coherent and self-aware, and there are other parts I don't have a handle on that seem like a formless, unaware and reactive mess.

Am I correctly understanding what you're saying here?

I was 38 when I was entered, passed and raised a Mason in Doric Lodge #92 in Seattle. I'm currently a 32° Knight Commander of the Court of Honor in the Scottish Rite, a Knight Templar in the York Rite, and also a Knight Mason and a Holy Royal Arch Knight Templar Priest. My Masonic experience has been something of a mixed bag, as any interaction with a group of people is bound to be; I've found some lodges well worth participating in, and others a complete waste of time. All in all, though, it's been worth doing.

This stuff works! The saints are real spiritual entities and they're just as powerful and effective as, say, the gods and goddesses on whom many of them were modeled.

1) Mars likes decisiveness. Make up your mind about how you want to do it, and then do it.

2) There I can't help you. Anyone else?

They were originally published as four separate books, like this:

So you can do them in any order you like.

Edited 2024-01-30 00:01 (UTC)

Something I worked out that's sort of adjacent to being an alchemical analogy: If you want to mix a slightly hard-to-wet powder into water without the mixture getting lumpy, one thing to try is to start with the powder, and then introduce the water gradually and mix it until you have a thick slurry. That way, the slurry responds close to the same way to stirring as a lump of powder does, and so the slurry can deliver shearing force through to the lump and smear it out until it mixes. If you start with the water and dump the powder in, the powder forms clumps, and your stirring energy just gets dissipated in the liquid part of the mixture, without producing any shearing force to take the clumps apart.

This is something a lot of occult writings mention. What you're doing -- bearing up and living the best possible life despite a difficult medical condition -- is burning off karma, not storing up more of it. The fact that you've already found a way to mitigate the condition through the conscious action of disciplined control of your diet shows that you've already gotten the upper hand over the karmic burden, and it should be over and done with by the end of this incarnation. It's possible that you may find an opportunity to help other people, possibly by sharing your experience with others who have the same illness; that would be worth doing, as it will create positive karma to tip the scale the right way. But in your place I'd be confident that my future incarnations would be free of the karmic burden.

Exactly! One of the points of human incarnation is to learn to think. The fact that we need to learn how to do that implies, of course, that we don't start out with that capacity and have to develop it a step at a time. Yes, most human behavior is pure astral reaction; the only thing that differentiates it from animal behavior is that animals have instincts from their group souls to guide them, and we don't.

Yes, very much so. Following through is essential.

Be careful. If you're trying to change your wife's behavior against her will, that could blow up in various ugly ways.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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Magic Monday

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Re: amulet for friendships

Re: Evolution & the Nadir

Ecosophia Prayer List

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no subject

Re: Ice cold vibes

Re: Conscious thought and the astral plane

Re: Protecting a space during an open house.

Re: Questions about bestsellers and full moons and bugs

Re: Evolution & the Nadir

Re: Physical/psychological cross-effects (affirmation)

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Re: Strengthening of the will

Re: Conscious thought and the astral plane

Re: Freemasonry

Re: St. Phanourios

Re: Q

no subject

Re: Change crystallization

Re: Chronic Illness and Karma

Re: Conscious thought and the astral plane

Re: Evolution & the Nadir

Re: Physical/psychological cross-effects (affirmation)