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.

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

Comments

Re: The destruction of Atlantis

[(Anonymous)]

If I may ask -- is Atlantean influence the reason why the Celts seemed to have more of the occult figured out than other societies? Also, I read Greek sources which claimed Atlantis, during its decline, bred centaurs & mermaids/sirens, I wonder how true that is...

One of my favorite games is Chrono Trigger, an RPG that came out for the SNES in 1995. It's a lighthearted, fun adventure full of time travel, fantasy tropes, colorful characters, and saving the world, and it's honestly pretty amazing. However, there's one arc later in the game that is a bit more serious in nature, and I'm referring to

(spoilers ahead)
the Kingdom of Zeal, a magical kingdom that existed in-game around 12000 bc, and floated in the sky above an earth in the grips of an ice age. For much of their history, they lived off sustainable elemental energy, but then they switched to siphoning off the magical power of the main villain, an alien parasite buried in the earth (who is the final battle for the player). Their leadership got corrupted by this potent energy, and in an attempt to achieve eternal life, they built a temple under the ocean to extract ever more power from the creature, leading to it waking up, nuking their civilization out of annoyance, then going back to its slumber. There were survivors, but the magical kingdom sunk beneath the waves, the lands were changed by a massive tidal wave from the crash, and humans mostly abandoned magic from then on, although they never quite lost the potential -- the player characters need their natural abilities re-activated from an outside source.
(spoilers end)

I could go on, but I've given you the main jist of it. What's strange to me is that a classic video game from the 90s could so accurately portray the Atlantean myth, even lining up with occult knowledge you've shared that's not mentioned by the Greeks. Rather strange, I should think!

--xcalibur/djs

Re: The destruction of Atlantis

[ecosophia]

1) Yes, that's what Dion Fortune taught, certainly.

2) It's not strange at all. Atlantis has a massive presence in popular culture, and occult teachings about Atlantis are all over the place. Did you know that Robert E. Howard's stories about Conan the Barbarian were heavily influenced by Theosophical writings about prehistory? So was a lot of the other early to mid-20th century fantasy literature, including Tolkien.

Re: The destruction of Atlantis

[(Anonymous)]

I see, thanks!

I'm familiar with Tolkien, and having read the Silmarillion, there was an unmistakable resemblance between the Atlantis myth and the story of Numenor & the Second Age. I'm not as familiar with Conan, but I've gathered that the Hyborian Age drew on similar mythic roots as Middle-Earth.

--xcalibur/djs