ecosophia | 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 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.

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~~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!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Recently, I visited Greece and returned with a small icon of St. Panourios. I am not Orthodox but I was visiting a religious store to pick up some gifts and souvenir items.

The icon for St. Panourios appealed to me and while I was at the register the nice ladies there started telling me about the items I purchased. When I admitted I didn't know who the saint was, one of them looked amazed that I could go through life and not know this saint!!. "You don't know??".

St. Panourios is the saint of lost items. This belief started when his icon was discovered intact after a monastery was looted by raiders. There is also a tradition of baking a cake associated with him.

Link below for full details.

When I travel I hide certain items at home, just in case and take notes on where I put them. Sometimes I hide them two well. There was one item I didn't take a note for, I was looking around but later, when I unpacked the icon, I placed it right next to where I found the item. Later, I hung the icon on a book shelf and I found records and paperwork that I had long forgotten about.

As I'm not Orthodox I'm not sure how they go about asking the saint and giving thanks to the saint. Anyone one that has insight into that I would appreciate it. I'll research but always best to hear from those that know.

Many Greeks take their icons seriously and when one visits a church, you'll see the faithful give the icons two kisses, just like kissing someone on both cheeks.

https://orthodoxwiki.org/Phanourios

The name is Phanourios, starts with an "F" sound. Generally the way that works is, you need to find something, you can't find it (like, I have done this when my toddler lost my car keys. Had been missing for days. Really really needed them back), so you say a prayer to St. Phanourios. He is very helpful. After you find the lost item, you bake a Phanouropita ("Phanourios" + "cake/bread" but in Greek bread is "pita") and you take it to coffee hour at church and share it with everybody. This is how you say thank you. If you are not Orthodox, I suppose you could bake the Phanouropita and... figure out someone else to share it with, out of gratitude to the saint? It is not hard to find recipes online. There's different ways to bake it but it's basically some variation of a spice cake.

There is some fun trivia about St. Phanourios. There's not a lot of evidence that he actually existed, and it's possible the found icon was an icon of St. George that somebody mis-read. Nobody really knows. But if it was really St. George, he seems happy to help you find your lost things, even under a pseudonym ;)

Thank you and thanks for the recipie. Looks like I need to start cooking!

Here's a typical Phanouropita recipe:

https://www.196flavors.com/greece-fanouropita/

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.

Magic Monday

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