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

Discursive Meditation

[(Anonymous)]

I'm wondering what I should pick up as a set of themes to begin practicing discursive meditation with. I still haven't settled myself on a tradition to start working with, so I wouldn't feel right picking a tradition-specific text. I'm also aware that I don't need a "text" to work with, but I personally start things off better with more concrete foundations in front of me.

I have been debating taking up poetry as the material for meditation. Would it be appropriate to pick up an anthology or a collection from a single author and work through a poem a day?

Part of my inspiration for working with poetry, aside from having been an English major in college who took a lot of poetry classes, came from an urban fantasy series of novels called The Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne. I don't know if you're familiar with it (and I'd be 60/40 about recommending it), but part of a druid's training in that series involves memorizing the body of work of a poet to anchor a "headspace" in a language. That, of course, is not what I'd be trying to attempt, assuming something like that is possible - but it had me wondering if it would be better to work on a single poet at a time or if working more broadly across a canon might be better.

Best regards,

-Jean-Pierre.

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.