ecosophia | Magic Monday

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 noted below, 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 about getting goodies from spirits are also 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. As I mentioned last week, once I found a publisher willing to bring out my fiction, a lot of it found its way into print in a hurry, so we're going to be in tentacle territory for a while now. This was my fifty-second published book, and it's another tentacle novel, but it's not a part of the core Weird of Hali sequence. The Shoggoth Concerto came slithering up out of my subconscious while I was hoping to get the rest of the Weird published but things weren't looking especially promising; I thought that an independent novel set in the same fictional cosmos might be able to get a hearing at one of the big publishers...and then I started writing, and it turned into the oddest of my many odd books.

You know all those stories about someone who has brash new innovative ideas and gets bullied by the defenders of tradition? This is a story about someone who wants to do something traditional and gets bullied by the avant-garde, which is of course much more common these days. It's also about love, memory, magic, and shoggoths, and to my taste, it's still the best of my novels. I did submit it to a big publisher; I actually got a personal response, which is rare, saying that it was too quiet and too weird -- those were the editor's exact words -- but that if I wanted to write something more publishable I could send it directly to her. I rolled my eyes and found someplace else to publish, as bending the knee to the shallow fashionable clichés of big-brand fantasy and SF is the last thing I wanted (or want) to do. If shoggoths or classical music appeal to you, you can buy a copy of The Shoggoth Concerto here if you're in the US and here if you're elsewhere.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi JMG,

I’ve been recently listening/watching content related to Catholic exorcism rites and the priests keep making the point that any practicing of magic will lead to interacting with demons. Druids were specifically called out too. I think their contention is with using your will to enact change vs using God’s will to do so.

Would you mind responding to these charges or link me to where you have previously addressed this?

Hi... I think this is a problem (but I'm not Catholic). Catholics aren't the only ones who do exorcisms... It's common in a number of other religions, who by their nature, work with different spirits.

Catholic exorcisms also frequently cajole and berate spirits (some of which might not be demons, but could be other beings that are causing problems with humans... it's a big world out there). Anyway, since its a topic that interests you, I can't recommend enough Josephine McCarthy's book on excorcism, The Exorcist's Handbook, which approaches the topic from a magical point of view, and a point of view not exclusive to Judaeo-Christian worldview.

She talks about it on this podcast: https://occultofpersonality.net/podcast-100-josephine-mccarthy/

JPM

Yes, Catholic priests have been making such claims for some centuries now. The Catholic faith has a lot of good points, but important elements of it have been twisted out of true to support the Vatican bureaucracy's craving for power and wealth. Making up nasty claims to defame other religious and spiritual paths has unfortunately been par for the course for them for a long time. If, as Jesus said, "By their fruits shall ye know them," I'd point out that the Catholic hierarchy was still sending people to be burned at the stake not much more than three hundred years ago, and only stopped when the civil authorities put an end to it. Another saying of Jesus comes to mind -- you know, the one about the mote in your brother's eye and the beam in your own...

In response to the specific charge they're waving around, it shows an embarrassing degree of cherrypicking. Are there occultists who insist that magic is all about bullying the universe into giving you whatever you want? Of course there are. There are idiots in every tradition, including mine -- and theirs. The magic of light focuses instead on changing yourself, and on calling on high spiritual powers to help with that process of transformation. I recommend my book Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth if you want a more complete discussion of these points.

Mystery Teachings is one of my favorite books by yours. I gave my copy to my adult daughter... not sure if she read it or not. In any case, I should get another one for myself at some point.

I love this: "The magic of light focuses instead on changing yourself, and on calling on high spiritual powers to help with that process of transformation."

I'm going to use that idea when next I have an opportunity.

Thanks for hosting this discussion.

JPM

For further thoughts along these lines, I might also recommend our host's response to a post by Paul Kingsnorth a few years back on magic as participation, rather than magic as control: https://www.ecosophia.net/the-way-of-participation-a-response-to-paul-kingsnorth/

Cheers,
Jeff

Of course not all types of magic involves the dealings with demons. The most obvious example is Natural magic, or the science and art of using the magical energies that exist already into the things that exist in Nature. It that stance of the RCC was truth, you could go to Hell by drinking your daily cup of morning coffee, or taking yearly vacations to the beach, or eating Chicken soup every time you are down with a cold!!!
(Two out of three of those are natural species used in homeopathic remedies, btw: Coffea tosta & Natrum muriaticum. I am not sure anyone has done the probing experiments with Gallus domesticus, but I would not be surprised it will show effects in the upper respiratory track when somebody gets around to do it).

I will also not put my hand on fire to defend what the high hierarchies of the Vatican think, say or do.

But, taken with a grain of salt, it is not such bad advise at all. Keep in mind that individual exorcists are posed to clash with the grubbier half of the magical communities. People who get enlightment and blessings will rarely go to seek the help of the Church's professional pest control services, after all.

Furthermore, what I have learned from personal experience is that people who break the taboo of not dealing with the occult are, more often than not, gullible fools (myself included). And since the development of the kind of magic that lets you develop the subtle potentials of the human condition is ALWAYS marked by the trifecta of 1) Hard work, 2) Delayed gratification, and 3) Self knowledge, it was impossible for the marketplace to be flooded with the kind of doctrines that ignore at least one (and probably all) of those safeguards.

So, let's say you go to a yoga class. More likely that not your teacher is going to be a flake; and if she is not you will have to do a 2nd roll on your will-force to not quit on your fist month and go shopping for the flake next door. If you land at Flake studio, you will deal with a bunch of other students who each believe the weirdest of things, and everybody is required to believe everything every other weirdo believes, out of politeness. A Satanist in such a group is like a fox inside the hen-house, and you should do well to stay away at least until you develop a minimum degree of self awareness that would let you know your mind is being played with.

So, because I have a strong, self-serving, emotional interest to do so, I prefer to see the prohibitions from my Exorcists as the training wheels of spiritual development. You cannot truly learn while still using those, but they'll spare you a few falls early on.

My thought on this is that it simply depends on the definition of the English word Magic. If Magic is defined as making deals with demons, then all magic is demonic and all non-demonic practices are non-magic.
If Magic is defined as the art and science of changing conciousness in accordance with will, then prayers are magic, particularly the Lord's Prayer (Thy will be done). No priest would ever say to not pray, therefore that is self evidently not the definition they are using of Magic.
So that is how I solve the question for myself, by the definition.

There are an awful lot people using different definitions of words to get what they want these days. I realized during mass Sunday that I now have a flinch reaction to the word Justice. This is . . . sub-optimal.

BoysMom

Agreed. You can twist almost everything to mean whatever you want by applying generous amounts of Semantic Terrorism. And sub-optimal is an understatement. I prefer a much more poignant, and Iberic, label: sub-normal.

Back to the original question, do not deal with demons, do not deal with dead people, be extremely careful with magics that claim to work with "angels", "ancestors" or other supposedly benevolent beings. Build up your own strengths: grow sound of mind and body (including your life force). Put a tea-spoon of philosophy per pinch of magic ritual.

Magic Monday

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