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've decided that questions involving the evocation of spirits are permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

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 was my thirty-sixth published book, and to my mind it's the best of the books that came out of my decade of blogging on peak oil. I decided in 2013 that it was time to tackle belief in progress, the secular religion that dominates the modern Western world, and talk about where that ersatz faith came from, what role it plays in our problems, and why it's collapsing around us. That's what After Progress accomplished, and I think it did so very well, covering ground that extended from ancient mythology to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Inevitably--the books of mine that I consider my best work always sell very poorly--it was the least popular of my peak oil books, and went out of print sooner than any of the others. It's currently available only used or in ebook form, though that should change next year.

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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 more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Good morning, JMG,

My brother in law's father passed away a couple months ago and he is working through his grief experience. I plan on encouraging him to journal to help him through. The spiritual alchemy work is likely too tough for him right now, but is there some advice you can offer to get him started on journaling about his grief (or other topics)?

Thank you!

[ecosophia]

Sure. You're wise not to recommend spiritual alchemy to him just now -- that's intense enough when you don't have something else stressing you! As for journaling, the crucial thing is to write down everything that comes to mind without censoring or editing it. Just sit and write for fifteen minutes a day and don't let the pen stop moving. If all he can think of to write is "I don't know what I should be writing about and this is really boring and why am I wasting my time at this..." that's fine. Just let the thoughts spill out onto the paper, and see where they lead and what they want to say.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if you've heard of the tradition on 4chan of noticing when a comment is assigned a sequential ID by the server that's round or has a lot of repeating digits in it.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-three-triumph-of-the-frog-god/#:~:text=repeating%20digit

If it changes anything, yours ( https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/288898.html?thread=50000002 ) is the comment in this thread closest to being assigned number fifty million by Dreamwidth; it's only off by two.

[(Anonymous)]

Whoops, sorry, I looked a little harder, and apparently each Dreamwidth journal has its own starting numbers that gets subtracted from the post ID numbers and the comment ID numbers. So that was far from being the fifty millionth Dreamwidth comment. Presumably it was just almost the fifty millionth comment since the journal's numbering started.

But then, maybe the mechanism of operation of omens and divination techniques means that they're generally relative to the interpretations the recipient would produce at the time, or maybe the interpretations that
an onlooker would produce later, or that the recipient would produce later once they'd looked up the convention for interpreting the symbolism, or maybe the states of consciousness or habit that the recipient or an onlooker would develop afterwards in consequence of their interpretations.

288898 and 50000002 look sort of like separating conjunctions, where 288888 (or 288889, rounding up) and 50000000 would have been like exact conjunctions.