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 twenty-first published book, my second published book-length translation, and my third co-written project.  It's also one of my most famous projects. How to describe Picatrix?  The easiest way to explain it is to say that it's a fabled book of forbidden magic written by a mad Arab sorcerer in the early Middle Ages, packed with strange incantations that can call down eldritch powers from the heavens when the stars are right. You know, the Necronomicon!

The big difference is that Picatrix is quite real.  It was a manual for professional wizards penned in Muslim Spain in the 11th century by an anonymous Arab author about whose sanity I don't propose to speculate, and it does in fact teach invocations for calling down stellar and planetary powers using astrological magic when the heavens are in an appropriate condition. In its Latin translation, prepared in the 13th century at the court of Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile, it was immensely influential in occult circles all through Europe until the end of the Renaissance, but until Chris Warnock and I got to work on it, there had never been a usable English translation of the Latin text.

Chris and I spent years slogging through the awkward half-Spanish medieval Latin of the text and turning it into readable English, but it finally saw print (via Chris's house press) in 2010. It's been enormously successful, both in terms of sales and as a pair of shock paddles applied to the once-prostrate form of classical astrological magic, which is now once again a widely practiced tradition; it's one I still practice from time to time, though it's not my usual approach to magic. It's only fair to say that this is emphatically not a book for beginners, and requires a good solid knowledge of medieval astrology, Platonic philosophy, and herbalism. If you're up for it, though, you can get a copy here.

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--as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: The destruction of Atlantis

[(Anonymous)]

(Different Anonymous)

If Atlantis was very advanced technologically speaking and didn't use oil (or at least didn't manage to blow through the entire world's oil supply that was created over hundreds of millions of years over 200 years), why does peak oil necessitate an irreversible decline in civilization for us?

Re: The destruction of Atlantis

[ecosophia]

Because we've become so dependent on it. If we'd followed the good advice we received in the 1970s, and began retooling our technology for sustainability when we were still using only a fraction of the fossil fuels we use now, we could have made a transition to a steady state technology that would have been viable for many centuries. We didn't. Instead, we made our technology and infrastructure ever more dependent on larger and larger inputs of fossil fuel. Now that it's depleting fast, we no longer have the energy supply or the resources to meet the costs of transition, so down we go.

Think of it this way. If you inherited ten million dollars and were smart, you'd invest it and live off the interest without touching those ten million dollars, and you'd be set for life. If you weren't smart, you'd say, "Whee, ten million dollars!" and start spending it, and before you know it you'd be on the brink of running out and being poor again. Fossil fuels were our ten million dollar investment, and we weren't smart...

Re: The destruction of Atlantis

[(Anonymous)]

Not OP

I have thought of the modern world's predicament in a very similar way, however I don't think it would be quite fair to say that the fool is back to where he started after burning through his fortune. He undoubtedly not only had experienced and learned a lot of things he never would of previously been able too, he would also be able to keep some of the things he bought with his squandered fortune. Likewise there is a fair bit that our descendants will be able to keep once everything goes back to pre-industrial energy levels, such as knowledge of physics and abundant metal scrap.

J.L.Mc12

Re: The destruction of Atlantis

[ecosophia]

Maybe so, but unless he's careful he'll have habits he has to unlearn, and he might have damaged his liver and picked up an STD or two in all those wild parties...