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: Regarding the increased use of hidden potential

[jprussell]

Not really occult, but if would like a few more options, here are some to consider:

1) The "Psmiths" write very interesting book reviews, and the husband of the duo is pretty into math, so many of his reviews touch on it from a more intuitive, deep-understanding way. The latest by him touches on the efforts of an early "AI" researcher to teach kids math using a computer programming language, but along the way he links to other relevant reviews and includes a discussion on how much of "intelligence" is innate versus can be developed and so forth: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-mindstorms-by-seymour-papert

2) Mind Performance Hacks and Mindhacker by Ron and Marty Hale-Evans are collections of techniques for doing various cognitive tasks better, from memory to coming up with novel ideas to focus and more. Their stated goal is to come up with the skills to "be a mentat," though there's less focus in these books on raw calculation than Dune implies for the mentat.

3) Though they tend to be less focused on mathematical models specifically, there's a whole literature on "mental models" for improved clarity in thinking and decision-making. The concept was at least partially pioneered and popularized by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner, so often the presentation of such assumes you're looking for useful ways of thinking about business, but many are generally useful. The blog Farnam Street has done a lot on them and has published a series of lovely books explaining the most useful ones.

4) The short essay "A Mathematician's Lament" by Paul Lockhart was written by a research mathematician turned math teacher about how the way our culture teaches math stifles all of what is beautiful and interesting about math, and proposes some better approaches. Lockhart has also written some other books on mathematical concepts, like Arithmetic and Measurement, which I understand as trying to get at what these fields of math are doing at a foundational level, but in a way understandable to non-specialists, but I haven't read them yet, so I can't speak to how useful they might be.

5) Though he went publicly dark a while back, Eric Weinstein (brother of his by-now better known brother Bret Weinstein) is a mathematician by training and thinks he has come up with a "theory of everything" that solves various inconsistencies/problems with the mathematical models of fundamental physics. I've listened to some of his talks on the subject, but they went waaaay over my head. I mention him because he has said that his way of approaching math and thinking about it is very different from almost every other serious mathematician he's met, so perhaps his explanations or descriptions of intuitions could spark some novel approaches.

6) Rather tangentially related, but The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin is a lovely book on the process of learning a field deeply, drawn from his experiences as first a youth chess champion, and then a world champion at Tai Qi Quan Push Hands. It's not about math, but he tries to derive principles about learning that apply across fields. It's very abstractness might be a help in this case.

Hope these help, and good luck in your pursuits!
Jeff