ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's just a few minutes to midnight, so we can launch 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 was my eighteenth published book, and it happened via a chain of accidents that still has me fielding baffled questions. Here's what happened.

My first book on geomancy, the fourth book I published, was released by a certain rather clueless publisher. I warned the marketing people there that they needed to make sure that their sales staff didn't get confused and think that it was a book on Wiccan feng-shui. Sure enough, their sales staff got confused and marketed it to all the little witch bookstores that thrived in those days as a book on Wiccan feng-shui. Once they got their copies and found out that it was a book on a somewhat fussy Renaissance method of divination, of course, they shipped their copies back to the publisher with irate letters; as a result, Earth Divination, Earth Magic became the first book of mine to go out of print.

Fast forward to 2008. Hot on the heels of the success of The Druidry Handbook and The Druid Magic Handbook, I tried to place Earth Divination, Earth Magic with Weiser. They weren't interested in a reprint but said they'd be happy with a new book on the same subject. So I wrote them a new book that covered exactly the same ground as Earth Divination, Earth Magic, and they snapped it up. Much later, Aeon Books picked up Earth Divination, Earth Magic and brought out a new edition. And that, my children, is why I have two books on geomancy from two different publishers covering exactly the same material, in head to head competition with each other. Most prolific authors end up with some such bizarrerie in their backlist sooner or later...

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello, hope you're doing well. I'd like to ask a few simple questions:

1) I've been trying to learn discursive meditation and the SoP from the Fellowship of the Hermetic Rose (I felt like I was really needing a ritual of protection and some sort of consistent daily practice), and I came upon this passage

"Breathwork stimulates the vagus nerve, which has a range of effects on the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine glands; if you do it clumsily, you can mess up your health. (I learned that the hard way, and it took about five years for me to get things back to normal. You don't want to go there.)"

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this breathwork gone awry and how you fixed it, or point to some place where you have previously discussed it. Seems like useful knowledge, y'know, just in case.

2) Is the SoP meant to feel in a particular way? I feel like I'm doing it wrong, though I'm trying to follow the instructions for the opening and closing (still none of the middle bits yet). I ended up with the Christian evocations mostly because of personal familiarity, so I wonder if I have to find some evocations that work a little better for me.

3) I've been unsure whether to ask this because it felt a little silly (and a bit like trying to make myself feel more important than maybe should be the case), but it's worth a shot anyway: I've been following the discussions in the last few Magic Mondays, and I recalled that as a kid I used to see some like "little figures" in the dark, kinda like little shapes floating around (one particularly memorable case was seeing little skulls and getting real freaked out, and hiding under the covers). Eventually it stopped as I grew. I wonder if anyone has had similar experiences and if there is any sort of metaphysical significance to it (I've never thought of myself as particularly sensitive, so I always discounted it as some sort of childhood phenomenon without great importance). My memory is full of holes due to lots of (sadly necessary) repression, so it's hard to evaluate how often it happened anyway.

4) I did the numerology birth number thing for fun and ended up with 11. Does this mean I'm meant to be an occultist, or at least drawn to the occult sciences?

1) Ordinary rhythmic breathing, such as the fourfold breath, won't mess you up -- that's why I teach it. The trouble I had was with advanced qigong practices I was taught when I was qualifying as a taijiquan instructor; I don't recommend mixing those with any Western esoteric practice.

2) Nope. The SoP is subtle and it's very personal; don't worry about how it's supposed to feel, just keep on practicing it. The subtle senses will awaken gradually.

3) That's extremely common. Most children have a fair amount of clairvoyance, but get it bullied out of them by parents and teachers as they grow up. No, there's nothing especially important about it -- just the subtle senses that all human beings are born with but our culture can't handle.

4) It suggests that you may have certain kinds of potential. It doesn't predict whether you'll do anything with it.

Thank you as always for the straightforward answers. The "Sane Occultism" spirit of your answers is very much appreciated by those "wading in the shallow end" like me.

On another completely unrelated matter, I've begun watching the X Files on my spare time, and I was wondering what do you think about it, if you've watched it at all. Is it entirely inaccurate or are there some very real bits of truth inbetween the (understandably) embelished parts?

I haven't watched a television show in my adult life, so I can't help you there.

No problem! Thanks anyway, it was just a passing thought. I wonder how it feels like not watching TV for so long; must be quite liberating.

As I see it, you can have a television, or you can have a life -- take your pick.

That... sounds about right. Thanks for the advice.

I have started to practice the SOP again and it has morphed from how you teach it - should I train myself back ? I also missed a week due to intense illness usually I feel like I am failing is it ok to just pick up again

Just pick it up again and keep using your method. Most people who use the SoP modify it to fit their own needs -- it seems to be very forgiving of that.

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