Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is just a few minutes away, and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and 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.  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.  And further:  I'm going to draw a line, a hard one, under questions involving the evocation of spirits. Down the road a bit I'll be doing a post on the blog about why that's far less important than it's been made to look, and how the way of occult initiation takes a radically different path; in the meantime, I'm tired of fielding repetitive questions from people (or, quite possibly, one person using many sock puppets) that rotate gyroscopically around that one habit.

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-ninth published book, and remains far and away the most successful of my books from the peak oil era. Its genesis, like most of my other peak oil books, began on the blog I ran in those days, The Archdruid Report, with a series of posts on the appropriate technology movement -- one of the most promising of the movements of the 1970s ecological scene, which attempted to craft advanced technologies that could work within the limits of sustainability. Though it was erased from collective memory by mass media and corporate interests, it produced quite a few useful technologies, and this book was my attempt to bring those back to the attention of those who might use them. Given the steady sales of this book, I still have hope. If you're interested, 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, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Occult & astrological history, part II

[ecosophia]

My guess is that it's something that never quite had the chance to be born -- a large-scale religion rooted in late Pagan Neoplatonism, the sort of thing that the emperor Julian tried to midwife, and that ended up becoming the basis for nearly all later Western occultism.

Re: Occult & astrological history, part II

[(Anonymous)]

Why do you think the circle people would've been less violent?

Re: Occult & astrological history, part II

[ecosophia]

Oh, they would have been just as violent; invading peoples generally are, irrespective of their religion. The differences would have been twofold. First, the people of the circle wouldn't have tried to stamp out the traditional cultures and religions of the people they conquered. Second, they would have had a radically different attitude toward nature -- the entire ideology of "Man's Conquest of Nature" has deep Christian roots, derived from the Pauline teaching of the World and the Flesh as two of the three enemies of the Christian, right up alongside the Devil. Lacking that, some of the actions that are bringing the Fifth World to an end wouldn't have happened.

Re: Occult & astrological history, part II

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you that's very interesting.


1) Are you suggesting that the current chaos in the world is karmic from these actions?

2) Do you think that the specific Christian doctrine was explicitly designed to be an expansionist religion and differs from the historical teachings of Christ, ie, it was hijacked politically? (this is something I've had the vague intuition of I'm not sure).

Re: Occult & astrological history, part II

[ecosophia]

1) I think it's more complex than that, but that's certainly a factor.

2) Successful religions aren't designed -- they emerge, for good or ill, from the experience of a people. Much of what made Western Christianity so savagely opposed to nature for a time emerged in the wake of the hideous 14th-century subsistence crisis in Europe -- the Black Death was only the peak of a century of famine, economic crisis, internecine warfare, revolution, and general chaos -- and its aftermath. Thus you see very different attitudes toward nature in the Orthodox, Coptic, and other non-Western churches, as they had their own historical experiences. In a very real sense, the age of European empire was the backlash from a tremendously difficult age of troubles in Europe. More on this in an upcoming post!

Re: Occult & astrological history, part II

[ritaer]

This isn't exactly a magical question but a follow up on questions of what kinds of empires different cultures have. Was discussing this very question with a friend and my take was that US conquered and destroyed (for the most part) the Indians because most of this section of N. America was seen as suitable for settlement and cultivation of the European type--grain farming, cattle and sheep herding. Incompatible with hunting cultures or with those who were farming their own way. The British and other Europeans in tropical Africa and Asia were interested in exploiting rather than settling because the tropical climate and diseases were hard on the whites. So send in enough soldiers to keep order and enforce the taxes, suppress unacceptable native practices such as polygamy, suttee, cannibalism, etc. but with the whites usually intending to take the money and go home. Need the natives to work the plantations, mines, lumbering, so you don't kill them. Both forms of empire were based on a Christian idea that the earth and its products belonged to the righteous. Does this make sense?

Rita

Re: Occult & astrological history, part II

[ecosophia]

Yes, but there's another factor involved. The peoples in Africa and Asia were already used to Old World diseases and so didn't have the quite literally apocalyptic death rates of the native peoples of the Americas and Australasia. Much of both American continents was being farmed when Europeans arrived, and if there hadn't been a 95%+ dieoff of the native peoples, very likely the history of the Americas would have been much closer to that of Asia, with a very fragile European colonial system over the top of a vigorous and numerous native population.