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. 

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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!***

Comments

Change crystallization

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,

I've been looking at the way how are changes are sometimes forced onto systems and I'm seeing a certain pattern.

For the sake of example, let's imagine we are trying to make some state to become more democratic. We have a power to constantly talk about how democracy is good and beneficial, but we don't have a power or capacity to force everyone to behave the way we want (or maybe we don't know how exactly how people should behave on an individual level for society to become more democratic). So we bombard people minds with democratic propaganda, and for a time it works - the society indeed starts to slowly become more and more democratic as it absorbs the values. But then at some point as we push it, a sort of crystallization happens: part of society becomes ultrademocratic, while the remaining part becomes very distanced and often moves in the opposite direction of what we want. Further pressure towards democracy that we apply channels towards the ultrademocratic part of society, and never reaches the remaining part, and no amount of direct pressure could shift the balance between the part that is affected and not affected.

Don't take the example too seriously - this is just some example I lived through, and the society parts may be not just groups of people but spheres of life (e.g. someone can be pro-democracy on public, but against it in private life and so on). Similar things I observed pro/anti-vaccines, pro/anti-war and even on a lower scales in organizations or even individual life.

My question to you is -- is there anything you could recommend to read / learn on how to control the process -- e.g. prevent crystallization from happening if I don't want it to happen, accelerate it when I want it to happen, what to do when it already happened etc?

Thank you very much!
Oleg S

Re: Change crystallization

[ecosophia]

Dion Fortune talks about this in The Cosmic Doctrine, in symbolic terms. When you push too hard, too fast, and in too linear a direction, you inevitably get this kind of resistance. It requires a gentler, subtler, more patient, and less linear approach to move any complex system in a desired direction. You also have to be honest about your own intentions; if by "democracy" you mean a system in which your ideas are privileged over other people's, why, you can count on people who disagree with your ideas deciding to reject your agenda by rejecting the label you've given it.

Re: Change crystallization

[(Anonymous)]

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.