Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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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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. See you next week!***

Comments

Q

[(Anonymous)]

Robert, what else do you recommend on Whorf and his theories? And any adjacent thinkers and writings on this theme (the only that I intend to read is Wittgenstein) you could suggest?

On "Language, Mind, and Reality.", is the version you've posted on Archive.org better?

Thank you!

Re: Q

[robertmathiesen]

(1) There's not much scholarship to recommend about Whorf's own theories, which have generally been badly misconstrued by later linguists who did not do the careful reading needed to grasp exactly what Whorf himself was claiming. In particular, later linguists have mostly argued for or against what they call the Whorf (or the Sapir-Whorf) hypothesis, which was first formulated by Henry Hoijer. Hoijer wanted to construct a formulation that could be subjected to empirical proof or disproof. He accomplished gthat goal, but only by glossing over the complexity and subtlety of Whiorf's own thought.

Not too many decades ago an Australian scholar named Penny Lee undertook the enormous task of going through almost all of Whorf's writings, unpublished as well as published, to find out the full complexity and subtlety of his thought. Her book is titled The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (1996). I havenb;t had time to read through it carefully, but it looks far more worth reading than anything else written about the subject. Be warned: it's not an easy read.

(2) The text of "Language, Mind, and Reality" that I posted on archive.org consists of scans of all the pages of the original article as it was published in two successive issues The Theosophist in 1942, shortly after Whorf's unexpected death on July 26, 1941. I was glad to find copies of those two issues of the magazine for sale some years ago, before the whole magazine had been scanned and put online by IAPSOP [The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals]. Since Whorf's article was published in an occultist journal, hardly any professional linguist ever read it. So I scanned my copies and put them online.

Eventually, in 1956 John B. Carroll published a volume of Whorf's Selected Writings on linguistics (with the MIT Press). He included "Language, Mind, and Reality" as the last item in this volume, but he was exceptionally careless with the text of that article, changing a few words here and there, and even leaving out a sentence or two (possibly by accident). Carroll's flawed text, however, was the only one that professional linguists had easy access to. (Most professional academics in the 1950s wouldn't have been caught dead reading any occult magazine.) And Carroll never mentioned that he had changed Whorf's own text here and there in his edited selection.

Re: Q

[(Anonymous)]

Great, thank you!