Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

I'm going to be shocking and launch this week's Magic Monday a few minutes early, since I'm here on Dreamwidth,. (The picture is Thomas Taylor, the great Regency-era Platonist and worshiper of the Greek Gods, godfather of the modern Neopagan revival)

Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer, though it may be Tuesday sometime before I get to them all.

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 the button below to access my online tip jar. 

With that said, have at it! 

***This post is now closed to new questions. See you next week!***

Comments

[ecosophia]

That's certainly an option. Do some divination to be sure it's a good idea, and then spend some time meditating on the goddess and her symbolism; praying to her and asking her permission is also a good idea. Once you've done that, and practiced the SoP in its new form long enough that you can do it without thinking about making the substitution, you can go on to the grove work.

[ecosophia]

That is to say, they export ecological devastation, so that it takes place elsewhere, in the form of mining the fuel, polluting the atmosphere, and all the other considerable ecological impacts of generating the electricity. I'd also like to see the footprint of the nutrient production and the hardware needed to run the system.

As for spiritual qualities, it would be utterly dead. Plants receive their spiritual life from the sun and the soil, and if you grow plants separate from those, you're going to get "food" that only nourishes the physical body, and leaves the other bodies starved. I'd expect to see people who eat food grown in these conditions suffer from constant morbid hunger, and probably eat far more than their physical bodies need, because their etheric and astral bodies are desperate for the subtle nourishment that plant foods grown in more natural conditions normally provide.

Re: Passive and Active Paths

[ecosophia]

Did you by any chance read my essay a while back on the blog, about what I call the One Drop Fallacy? This is the notion that if something isn't all the way over to one side of a dichotomy, it must be all the way over to the other side. Your questions suggest that you're caught in that fallacy, believing that when I say that something is active it must be 100% all the way active with no receptive qualities at all -- which is not what I was saying.

Of course ritual magic has receptive elements and psychedelic practice has active elements -- in the real world, the One Drop Fallacy does not apply. The point I was trying to make is that there is an active core to the one path and a receptive core to the other, and these don't combine well -- the qualities that lead to success in one conflict with the qualities that lead to success in the other

Re: Interrupting discursive meditation

[ecosophia]

1) It's okay to break your meditation now and then, but as you develop skill in discursive meditation, you'll learn that you can hold onto your insights until your meditation period is finished. I hope you've already established the habit of writing down what you learn from each meditation session as soon as it's finished, because this will make remembering things easy.

2) That's a very common way of doing discursive meditation -- some people tend to get monologues, others get dialogues -- and the voice in your mind can be a vehicle for input from your higher self. Don't worry about what it is, just keep up with the practice and see what you learn from it.

Re: Planting by the moon

[ecosophia]

My guess is that planting by the Moon is common over much of the world simply because it works, and people whose lives involve close participation with the life cycles of crops and the cycles of nature will pretty reliably pick up on that.

Re: Cleansing bath cont.

[ecosophia]

Sure, that would be fine. Any clean salt is good, and a chunky salt that has larger intact crystals will have certain useful etheric properties.

[ecosophia]

It would depend on how intently you concentrated on the mental game. If you put enough focus into it, you could give them nightmares, for example.

[(Anonymous)]

“Consider a curse meant to bring misfortune on someone. This sort of magic has a long and ugly history behind it, and it works by setting up an intentionality that turns everything in the target’s environment into a source of harm... The risks are just as unpleasant, however, because magic is like raspberry jam; you can’t spread it on anything without getting some on yourself. Thus it’s proverbial that people who make a habit of destructive magic end up poor, despised, and marginal, because their workings have predictable effects on their own lives.” -Druid Magic Handbook by John Michael Greer, pg 23

[ecosophia]

1) That's no problem at all. It would be a problem only if you yourself had significant psychological issues requiring medication.

2) Ask the deities! I mean that quite literally. If they were worshiped in Roman Britain, they're used to having incense burnt to them -- frankincense was standard back in the day -- so get some incense charcoal and some frankincense, and offer some to the deities, one at a time. Don't kneel to them -- the old deities won't put up with that; do as the ancients did and stand in their presence. Ask them for their help and blessing, and ask them specifically to guide you to an understanding of how they wish to be worshiped and how they relate to the elements. Then pay close attention both to whatever verbal or nonverbal response comes into your mind, and to any unexpected events, synchronicities, and so on occur in the days to come.

3) Most of what's in the Encyclopedia of Natural Magic is Old World plants and trees, because that's what I could find material on. You should have no trouble using most of it in Britain.

4) Interesting. Thank you for the data points!

[ecosophia]

I really don't know for sure how the old process of deification worked on the inner side of things. It's simply the case that in a lot of polytheistic societies, somebody who did the kind of creative work Smith did would very likely have offerings made to her after her death, and if the people who made the offerings got good results, her cult would become more and more popular until finally she'd become a goddess of divination and creativity, with her own temples and priestesses.

As for Ruth Stout, have you considered making offerings to her?

Re: Potion likely effects

[ecosophia]

That's a fine intention. You set out to change yourself, which is always the strongest sort of magic you can do. Yes, you can tinker with elemental balance in a potion or other magical working -- as you've discovered, it can work very well.

Re: Discursive Meditation

[ecosophia]

Poetry would be fine, and I'd recommend an anthology of poems by different authors to start with, though after that you could certainly work through a book by just one poet. I'd recommend the anthology simply because it would give you different styles of thought to work with, and keep you from getting too used to a single way of thinking.

[ecosophia]

That was certainly my experience!

Re: Christians praying for you

[ecosophia]

It's a form of magic, and if it's done with concentration and firm belief in its efficacy, it can be quite an effective one. On the other hand, since you know that she's doing it, you can pay attention to your thoughts and feelings, and when you notice her magic having an effect on you, you can just go, "Oh, there she goes again," and dismiss it.

Re: higher-self powers

[ecosophia]

Good question. I don't think anyone knows for certain what powers the higher self can exert when it chooses to, but it might be that, or it might be a spiritual being with whom you have some kind of karmic tie.

Re: SoP and the Middle Pillar

[ecosophia]

Yep. The SoP and its expansions works with the energy currents of the subtle body, just as the LBRP and MP do -- but they work with those things in different ways, and so it's not a good idea to mix them. If you're having good results with the SoP, stick with that.

Re: color symbolism

[ecosophia]

It's really fascinating to watch. Have you noticed that as that happened, the Democrats turned into the party of the elite and the Republicans started becoming the populist party? Now we've got Democrats praising the CIA, insisting that freedom of speech is a bad idea, and blaming everything on Russia, the way Republicans did in 1950. Flip the colors, flip the opinions...

[ecosophia]

Everything that lives practices magic all the time.

Re: How to ask divination questions

[ecosophia]

Different oracles require different approaches. The I Ching thrives on open-ended questions and doesn't like yes-or-no questions; by contrast, geomancy doesn't handle open-ended questions at all well, but gives crisp, intelligent, accurate answers to yes-or-no questions.

Oracles are like people. I'm sure you know people who just like to sit and chat, and other people who want to know what you want from them so they can provide you with a straight-up response.

As for asking things of the universe, I'll consider that; a post on magical intentionality could be interesting to write.

Re: More Heathen LRP data points

[ecosophia]

Thanks for this. I'm glad your wife is having good results from journaling; that's helped me a lot at various times. I'm also glad to hear that you're having good results with the Heathen LBRP! I'll be posting a Heathen version of the Middle Pillar exercise as soon as the current Mercury retrograde is over.

Finally, thanks for the data points. Those are worth knowing.

Re: Anthroposophy

[ecosophia]

The main pitfall I see in Anthroposophy is a tendency to cultlike behavior based on treating Rudolf Steiner's every word as infallible. Steiner was a fascinating guy and a very good clairvoyant, but he had his problems -- as does every human being -- and like every other writer, myself very much included, he needs to be read thoughtfully, not slavishly.

That said, the course of training he gives in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment is very sound, and if you combine it with discursive meditation on such basic Steiner texts as The Philosophy of Freedom, it'll take you far.

[ecosophia]

Nope. If you do magic to harm someone -- which is of course what a hex is all about -- the energies of harm will manifest in your life too, period, end of sentence.

Re: Awen and Aum

[(Anonymous)]

Excellent; I’ll look it up when I get a moment. Thanks!

Bogatyr

Re: Nwyfre vs. Biology

[ecosophia]

Scientists have come up with a great many complicated mental models to try to explain how the physical body works, starting from the dogmatic conviction that it all has to be a biochemical machine in which everything is caused solely by material processes. It's quite possible to come up with a system of models complex enough to account for that, just as it was quite possible to come up with a set of astronomical models complex enough to account for how the sun, moon, and planets move, starting from the dogmatic conviction that the earth is stationary and everything in the skies move around it -- but the fact that you can create such a system, and make it account for everything, doesn't mean that the system is true.

To the occultist, the body isn't set up to work on its own. All physical matter, whether or not it belongs to a living body, is shaped and directed by patterns of etheric force, which in turn are shaped and directed by patterns of higher levels of being. It's not that etheric forces have to "mess with" our physical bodies -- etheric forces create and sustain our physical bodies at every moment, and what scientists see as physical causes are, from an occult point of view, physical matter responding to etheric patterns. DNA is a double helix because the atoms that form it are drawn into a helical pattern of etheric forces, and so on.

Re: Intro to Occult Philosophy

[ecosophia]

1) I don't recall that discussion. Can anyone else remember it?

2) The universe isn't logical. Catholic theologians who try to make it logical are stuffing it into a Procrustean bed of rationalist dogma. Occultists know better; we're trying to train minds rather than inform them, so we use a range of different metaphors depending on the needs of the situation.

3) Did you click through the link in the last "Kek Wars" post? It includes links to a whole series of Changer stories from different Native cultures. As for "the" Trickster, archetypes are far more fluid and elusive than that; to say that Coyote and Loki have a certain number of features in common does not mean that they're in any sense the same being.

4) You're most welcome.