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...

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

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

[(Anonymous)]

There's a technicality that might matter here. Eris is Discord. Mythologically, Eris might be a descendant of Chaos, and an avenue for the influence of chaos, but Chaos itself is something else.

I think of Gamergate as having been a warning shot. Gamergate was mostly a LARP of real political conflict. (The main consequences were just people getting fired, people getting horrible threats (even if they were also the sort of people who could have exaggerated the majority of them), somebody (my headcanon: Arthur Chu) calling in a bomb threat to disrupt some interviews that might otherwise have become the thin end of the wedge for the mainstream media coming to understand where Gamergaters were coming from, and (later) one of Zoe Quinn's other headgame narrative control abuse victims committing suicide.) If "we" (mostly the other side; noblesse oblige) had understood where the discord was coming from and what we were doing wrong, and corrected ourselves, we might have handled the subsequent much more destructive situation of discord powering the alt-right and Trump much better. Nothing I know of the Discordian experience of Eris suggests that this kind of influence would be out of character for her, even including inspiring Quinn to take her name, given how the dominoes from Quinn's relationship with Eron Gjoni were already set up.

On a semi-related note, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that the two most popular group conversation platforms are called "Slack" and "Discord", corresponding to the two half-joke religions SubGenius and Discordianism. There's an additional irony in that, so far as I understand, Slack is used more for workplaces (and perhaps organized activism?), and Discord is used more for gaming and subcultures, rather than the other way around.

One interesting thing about the Helldivers game is the player character faction "Super Earth", which is a parody of political cultures that justify their abuses by wearing the flag of Democracy. I'm not sure whether to expect political consequences I like or ones I dislike from part of a generation worldwide getting used to treating the idea of democracy as something whose political sacralization is just an ongoing joke. I suppose a Discordian attitude towards jokes does plausibly correspond to what it would take to reclaim the idea of democracy, once it's been so abused.

Notably, part of the package of ideas associated with the game is that Super Earth practices "managed democracy", and disvalues "unmanaged democracy". This is not so far from the influential dissident-right critique of modern democracy as having had all its free genuine power invisibly hoarded up by a self-appointed moral aristocracy subculture which has been driven mad by runaway cultural involution ("purity spirals", but also addiction to the political spoils from electorate dilution strategies), ungrounded by personal stakes or consequences: what could be called the Cathedral, or the Blob, or the professional-managerial class, or the human rights and development legitimacy clerisy, or the media-academic-government complex.

Also, and this is reaching slightly, but the term on Somethingawful for the style of post where someone makes a long explanation of all the wrongs someone supposedly did, which Eron Gjoni's post there qualified as, is "helldump", which starts the same way as "Helldivers".