ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

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!***

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Start growing it when Ronald Reagan was in the White House; that's what I did. ;-)

Hmmm, well I would suggest that Periods in which magic becomes popular, then, are periods when more people than usual are excluded from whatever mechanisms their societies provide for seeking redress of grievances. is pretty clearly suggesting more than day-to-day affairs! After all, if it’s day-to-day stuff, well, everyone from paupers to kings and Tsars does that! No need to mentiion the exclusion etc.

Of course, different readers will bring different interpretations to a particular piece of text. In my younger days I spent a lot of time in, or near, apartheid South Africa. My work brought me into contact with literal neo-nazis at a time when the AWB were shooting, and with old-school communists, at a time when the ANC was banned and future leaders of the West were still demanding that Nelson Mandela be hung as a terrorist. Talking about people being excluded, etc, has pretty personal associations for me, which are far from being academic or abstract.

I wonder if your friend is afraid of success. A great many people are these days, for a variety of reasons. An energy parasite might also be involved, of course.

You might try banishing over the sigils once you've finished with the divination.

And you're forcing every other situation into that one paradigm. Got it.

Yes, the set I give in the DMH is balanced; that's why I gave it. ;-) As for practices to improve the clarity of responses to prayer, sure -- pray a lot, and when you pray, do at least as much listening as talking.

Packshaud, I'm really appreciating your contributions here today. Thank you. @--}---

We humans do grow ornamental plants indoors in pots and they still do most of the things their nature requires without ever feeling the breeze or being visited by an insect. I think the best case would be that the sunless plants would be like pet cats who were raised from kittenhood indoors and never allowed outside even for a moment. I have known such cats, and if they have a lot of human love and maybe the company of another cat, they grow used to their condition and come to be fearful of the outdoors, but in my opinion these confined cats are missing some of their essential catness. This is a controversial opinion--where I live, none of the private adoption organizations will allow someone to adopt a cat or kitten unless they promise never to allow it outside.

Thank you, on consideration I agree that this was exactly what I was doing.

Thinking about why I framed the question this way, and fell into the One Drop Fallacy, it is in part due to a conversation with a close friend who practices a more psychedelic path. I tried to describe to her your characterization of the paths as active and passive, and she objected to the notion that her path necessarily be passive. On the contrary, self-described psychonauts often believe they are blazing untrodden trails, a far cry from a passive mindset. I wasn't able to find a way to explain in meaningful terms why you held this opinion-- beyond the single conversation in the forest you described-- as I myself didn't really understand. From there sprung various leaks in my thinking, and I used the One Drop Fallacy to attempt to patch them.

Having now found the source of the leak, I believe, I will ask a different pair of related questions... on a different Magic Monday. Thanks always for your time and attention!

Platonic wave! lol. Yes!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Brilliant! 😄

In that case I shall devote my efforts to acquiring a vicious chihuahua (not too hard to find) that will chew to bloody shreds the ankles of anyone who tries THAT again.

I wonder now if the obesity crisis, to the extent it actually exists, is occurring because so much of our food is grown in ways that make it spiritually dead, and so they're overeating to try to get the etheric/astral nutrients they need...

If I may make a suggestion: how about a working to get the lawn decorations back? As long as you haven't stolen anything (or, if you have, take actions to fix it), that should work well.

(sgage here)

I started mine when Richard Nixon was in office. Never shaved it off since, though it's been longer and shorter as deemed appropriate at the time. I don't think it was ever as long as yours, though!

So here's an example, if I'm reading you right, of why exclusion matters: for a very long time, I only used magic or divination for situations involving my love life. Not because it was the most important thing for me, but because it was the only thing I didn't think I could do "myself". I was a cishet white girl, from an upper-middle-class background, in good physical and mental health, first at a college and in a major where I barely had to work and then in a relatively good economy. (In retrospect, I maybe should've done more magic re: jobs back then, but that's another issue.)

Most people of my age and background, at the time, were pretty confident that financial stuff, health stuff, and so forth were either matters we could handle under our own power or things that would work themselves out in time. Magic plus material plane stuff is extra effort--to say nothing of finding out how to do magic in the first place--so I suspect that, if most people can handle the day-to-day stuff with more straightforward resources (money, resumes, antibiotics, the ability to spin a good line of BS on a research paper) they don't even bother looking at magic, much less trying any.

Exactly. Magic takes work, and it's work you do in addition to the regular material-plane effort needed to seek your goals. (One of the standard ways to fail at magic is to do magic and then sit on your glutei maximi waiting for something to drop into your lap.) That's why, aside from those of us who are drawn to magic for magic's sake, most people just rely on the material plane stuff they're going to do anyway.

I'm remembering either a movie or a TV show where someone comes in and yells at a bruja (I think) because she burned a candle to get him a job, and he didn't. She asks how many applications he's sent, and he replied "I was supposed to send applications?" and...yeah.

Even now, as a practitioner, I find myself reluctant to go to magic for stuff I can otherwise get materially or that isn't a matter of survival. I used it for my dad's heart surgery, for example, but I never thought to do so for any of my multitudinous root canals--it's a standard procedure with little risk, and if I want to have fewer of them, I could always eat less sugar. Similarly, I'm not inclined to do much magic in my current job search, because I figure that if I don't get a job, I'm not meant to/someone else needs it more, but if I didn't have the resources I do, I'd probably feel differently.

Pickling salt is also pure, without anti-caking additives. But it is finer grain than kosher salt.

That’s a great idea! I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it myself! Thank you! I’ll report back on the results.

The change of red standing for Republicans came after the hotly disputed 2000 election, where the red, white, and blue electoral map got shown ad nauseum on TV. Before 2000 they rotated the colors, after 2000 they were fixed. Of course this could reflect deeper things...
Berserker

Hi

Regarding the book query. I think this may have been, 'The Secret Teachers of the Western World' by Gary Lauchman.

Jez

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Magic Monday

Re: Beard magic

Re: Magical successes?

Re: SoP, Color meditation, and energy parasites

Re: Lingering Influence

Re: Magical successes?

Re: Balenced pantheon of gods

Re: Planting by the moon

Farming under an electric sun

Re: Passive and Active Paths

Re: Lingering Influence

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Beard magic

Re: Magical successes?

Re: Magical successes?

Re: Magical successes?

Re: Cleansing bath cont.

no subject

Re: color symbolism

Re: Intro to Occult Philosophy