Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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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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 either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com.

With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

Indigo Children Prediction

[claire_58]

I’ve been meaning to ask about the “Indigo Children” prediction that floated around sometime before and after the turn of the century. I have no idea how it got started or by whom.

It seems to me that the barebones prediction, stripped of all the grand flourishes about how fabulous, talented, and enlightened these incoming souls were supposed to be, was essential quite accurate. As I recall it was basically that a cluster of souls was 1) supposed to be born (or had been born?) for a short period of incarnation 2) who would have a dramatic impact on society and/or change the world in some lasting beneficial way.

The Indigo Children prediction has been on my mind as very high mortality rates in that specific demographic have featured in the unfolding c0vid debacle. Now, with the impact it (c0vid) seems to have had on events in the current US election cycle, strikes me that this is is very much what was predicted; minus the fantasy about how it was all supposed to come about. Given the dropping birthrates, even the bit about it these souls being only temporarily incarnated seems pretty accurate.

I don’t really have a question, I just wondered what you might think about these speculations.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[ecosophia]

I have very mixed feelings about that whole business. On the one hand, it does happen from time to time that groups of souls come into incarnation together for various reasons. On the other...

In every single case I ever encountered of a parent claiming their child was an Indigo Child, the child was being raised by an egomaniac who was projecting her (it was almost always her) fantasies about being specially special with extra special sauce onto the poor kid. It's bad enough when parents do this to kids in some ordinary way -- Joe's going to grow up into the basketball player I could never be, Emmy's going to have the musical talents I wish I had, et cetera -- those are painfully common and result in a lot of misery. But it's potentially much worse when the parent burdens the child with fantasies of supernatural power and a gargantuan mission. I bet a lot of those poor kids desperately wanted to leave home and become fry cooks or something else utterly normal and unremarkable.

The whole thing was invented by New Age writer Nancy Ann Tappe, btw, back in the 1970s, and got picked up and marketed by various other New Age entrepreneurs.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[(Anonymous)]

I confess to having enjoyed Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, "The Days of Rice and Salt," which is an alternate history novel involving a group of 5 or 6 souls who reincarnate together a number of times over a thousand years or so. I was unaware of the indigo children prediction, and I don't know if it influenced this novel or not.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[ecosophia]

It was a nice gimmick for a novel, and one I've considered borrowing in different contexts.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds intriguing; I hope you do.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[ecosophia]

Stay tuned. ;-)

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[ivn66]

I agree with our host. I grew up getting more or less regularly doused in that special sauce, even before my household became aware of that particular shade of blue labelling, and I can remember very early memories of tearfully begging my parents to just let me be average. The Indigo thing doesn't seem to me to be much beside that particular form of parenting painted Woo all over.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[ecosophia]

Yeah, I was tarred and feathered with the label "gifted" from an early age. How that worked out is that no matter how well I did, it was never good enough -- "living up to my potential" was a club constantly used to beat me -- and anything I achieved immediately became the minimum that was acceptable thereafter. I responded by becoming a complete slacker in my teens -- since I wasn't going to get any positive response for anything I did, why try? -- and had to break myself of that habit in my 20s.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[(Anonymous)]

Oh man, this is me to a T. I've finally started breaking this habit in my late 20s; do you have any advice for how to accelerate the process of breaking this habit? Thus far, what seems to be working for me is pursuing spiritual practices in complete secrecy: mastering the Golden Dawn is requiring a lot of work, and no one is judging me for it, so I can pursue it without some of my psychological issues.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[ecosophia]

It was Golden Dawn magic that did the trick for me -- that, and my marriage. (I owe Sara far more than I can ever say; her confidence in me was an immense source of healing and strength in that struggle, among many others.) I wish I had some more general recommendations to offer, but I really don't.

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[jprussell]

Not JMG, but in case it helps, a few thoughts on what has seemed to help me some, though I'm not where I'd like to be.

I mitigated much of my teenage and 20s leanings towards slacking by having a pretty good relationship with my parents (so I actually cared that they wanted me to do well in school), and then by finding extrinsic-motivational systems aligned with stuff I actually cared about (I studied subjects I genuinely liked in college, and then I joined the Army for my own reasons). The plus side was that outwardly, I got stuff done and did well, the downside was that eventually I ran out of extrinsic-motivation frameworks I cared about enough.

So, occult work has been helping me learn discipline not because I'll get in trouble or get rewarded for being disciplined, but because I value the results myself. A few other thoughts that have helped/are helping along the way:

1) "The Divinity of Interest": I think this particular phrase came from Jordan Peterson, but basically, if you learn to pay attention to what you actually care about, what grabs your attention, what you do for its own sake, you can start to work with that. Maybe right now that's video games and booze and porn (or whatever else), but maybe scratch at what about those grabs you (besides the obvious, of course). Take video games. Maybe it's the achievement. Maybe it's strategy. Maybe it's competition, or challenge, or exploration. Whatever it is, see if you can find ways to get that that are closer to "productive" for values of productive you actually care about.

2) Small Wins: it can help to identify incremental steps that are more achievable, shoot for those, and celebrate when you get them. Start chaining them together, and you're getting somewhere. Take daily meditation. Maybe you'd like to get to doing it for 20-30 minutes every day, but if you're starting from zero, meditating for five minutes once a week is still doing better. The trick is not to get too comfortable with the incremental steps, but not beat yourself up for staying with them for as long as you need to. Easier said than done, I know.

3) Find a Community that Supports You: Different folks respond differently to peer expectations - for some, its' the make-or-break between success and failure, for others it's a non-factor. But for most folks, it's at least a little helpful for motivation, and if nothing else, it can be practically helpful. That's one thing I've found so helpful about these Magic Mondays - reading about what other folks are doing, asking questions, sharing milestones, and the like have certainly helped me stay on track, so maybe it could help you as well.

Whatever you end up doing, good luck, and hope some of this helps!
Jeff

Re: Indigo Children Prediction

[claire_58]

Thanks for this. I have had the same thought about the weight of projected hopes on children. I never really ran into people who where fully into the "my children are extra special with a special, extra-special destiny" myself or if I did I didn't ever have much contact with them.

I guess even random chance will yield accurate predictions some of the time.