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

[aldabra]

Hi JMG,

You talk in Ecosophia this week about the lack of spiritual connection to place. I feel this very strongly. I'm still close to where I grew up, but my family isn't, and I'm in insecure rented accommodation and may have to move again at short notice and on someone else's timescale.

Cambridge, England. Sprawling urbanisation. Our closest current yuppie-flat development has this as the public art centrepiece:

http://www.trumpingtonlocalhistorygroup.org/sitebuilder/images/HobsonSquare_4835_0517-351x227.jpg

It's meant to reference Bronze Age postholes, but what it says to me is dead, burnt, twisted old-growth forest. The art-bollocks says "Hand scorched and rubbed down with wire brushes to produce its final finish, the sculpture is made from misshapen chestnut wood"; the wood was imported from Scandinavia. It's capitalist conquest of the natural world. If I was a spirit of place I'd have buggered off somewhere else or given up by now.

How do you reconnect with the local spirits when they've been erased by development? Are there still even spirits to engage with? Even the trees have all been individually deliberately planted within living memory, and they will each be removed and replaced by a different tree according to remote bureaucracy.

Also, local archetypes: we've got 800 years of hallowed history of academic abstraction. We're rational materialist central. We're liberal internationalist, with high rates of migration and immigration of people who are coming for the intellectual environment and the career development, and have been displacing people who are here because of place or family for generations now. We're as post-nation-state as you get anywhere, and about to get beached as the tide goes out. Before that there were Anglo-Saxons and Normans and Vikings and Romans and Celts.

How do you untangle archetypes of place from archetypes of population, when you're 800 years displaced from anyone who knew the archetypes of place? The land itself was different 800 years ago; it's drained fenland.

I think there's something very toxic and post-Empire underlying specifically-English politics, and Cambridge is somehow detached from it by not being specifically-English. I can't tell how to get any kind of a handle on it.

Also, I know you've moved again recently; do you find it uncomfortable and disorienting to leave one spiritual place environment permanently for another? Does it take adjustment? Do you choose where to live based on the spiritual or the physical?

Thank you,
Aldabra

[ecosophia]

In my experience, cities can have very potent connections to spirits of place, but only if they're old and haven't had all the old buildings replaced with glass, concrete, and steel. In a place like Cambridge, the spirits have withdrawn into the Otherworld, which is why such places have that peculiar dead brightness you find nowhere else, a sense that all is surface and the depths have gone away. All you can do is spend what time you can in other places, until you can finally go somewhere else.

Moving for me is always a wrench, but I pay attention to spiritual as well as material conditions in relocating, and I make a point of learning the local ecology and the local myths and legends once I settle in the new place. It takes about a year for me to really get comfortable in a different area.

Some remarks...

[(Anonymous)]

Aldabra,

just taking the freedom to say something here, hope you don't mind...

re spritually depleted areas... I know what you mean. I am living in a rural area in Germany where all forest had been harvested approximately 150 years ago. Spruces had been planted in large scale, while especially beech (during the roman era, this area was renown for its dark beech forests full of bears and wolves) and oak are native. We still have such leaf forests, but hardly any tree older than 150 years. You can feel the difference when walking in dense, almost "industrial" spruce forest, in the much more comforting leaf or mixed forests or in one of the rare parts of the forest that are at least partly older than 150 years. The small towns in our area (usually not larger than 6k inhabitants) are somewhat close to starvation regarding anything spiritual, and as far as I can tell idiocy and dumbness is the only reason for that, since those towns had not been destroyed during WWII. Anything is just seen as an industrial good and valued and valued only for its cheapness by a large part of the people here. However I also have lived in a medium sized German city for a few years which felt very very different to the towns here in a positive way.

Regarding England... I'm just back from a trip to England (our 2nd so far). We have been staying in Wiltshire and Cornwall. During our first trip a few years ago we also traveled further to Wales and from there to Ireland. What I can tell from the little that I have seen so far is that Britain feels very different from most part of continental Europe (not talking about the M25, though ;) ). To visit so many easy to reach places that feel so alive and healthy and magical you will need quite some traveling in Germany... And one thing that I regard as very special are the trees. Nowhere else have I seen so many very old trees in such a short time than in England (and Wales). Even in medium sized cities.

So even if the place where you live is spiritual wasteland, maybe you can find some comfort in the thought that there are a lot of truly magical places and beings not too far from you...

Cheers,
Nachtgurke

... and a question

[(Anonymous)]

Dear John,

when thinking of the above, a question came to my mind regarding "reenchanting the world"....

When I walk in forests that are young and (as I know) had been completely chopped off 150 years ago, I can sense some differences... a) dense "industrial" spruce forest, trees planted in a grid like manner, b) local trees like beech or oak, planted in a grid like manner or c) young forest but more or less left alone - they all feel very different....

... we have an area of approximately 2000 m², which was just "lawn" as we took it. During the last few years we have done a lot on this area, planting a variety of trees and bushes (fruit and nut trees, haw- and blackthorn, etc.), leave the meadow growing and cut once, maybe twice a year. Insect population and variety have hugely increased during the last years. Yet my feeling is that not only plant, insect and animal life is increasing in the place but also something more is happening - which leads to my question: Is it possible to do cause some kind of enchantment to a place by the actions I described above? If so, what are the differences to the things you can achieve using ritual magic as described e.g. in the Druid Magic Handbook?

Nachtgurke

Re: ... and a question

[ecosophia]

What you're doing is allowing Nature to do some reenchanting all by herself, which she will gladly do when given half a chance. The results tend to be slower but more thorough than those accomplished by ritual magic; of course, from my perspective, the best option of all is to combine the two, and use appropriate ritual work (guided by divination) to help Nature do what she does best.