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

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,
Thank you for your condolences. It really has been difficult days and nights.

When you refer to “our fourth swarm”, what exactly would that be? What would the previous three be?

And thank you very much for the advice. Tomorrow I will contact the Catholic parish she attended.

[ecosophia]

The swarms -- that's occult theory about how souls descend into manifestation. According to the theories I work with, we -- that is, the souls who inhabit human bodies -- are part of the fourth of seven swarms of souls who will enter into manifestation in this solar system over the course of its history. The first entered manifestation when the solar system was just a dust cloud, and had the task of shaping it into planets and kindling the sun; when they finished their work, they became the Lords of Flame, also known as the angels.

The second swarm descended after that, made the worlds suitable for whatever kind of life would flourish on each of them, and kindled the spark of life; when they were finished, they became the Lords of Form, also known as the devas. The third swarm, who followed, picked up the spark of life and, on this planet -- we don't know enough about the others -- got life to the point of multicellular life forms that souls could fully inhabit; when they were finished, they became the Lords of Mind, also known as the intelligences.

We took it from there. When we're finished, every living thing on earth will be at least as intelligent as we are now, and we will become the Lords of Freedom -- what other name we might be known as hasn't been mentioned in the sources. Then the three future swarms will take it from there, with results we can't even begin to imagine. That's the story of evolution as told in one branch of occult philosophy.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh my God!
Yes, I remember that you already described this panorama here. Sorry for the lack of memory!

[(Anonymous)]

>every living thing on earth will be at least as intelligent as we are now
Even unicellular life? It is weird to contemplate panspermia under this thought, and also what might exist on other planets. This gives me Olaf Stapledon vibes.

[ecosophia]

Ah, I should have said "every complex multicellular living thing." Individual unicellular life won't be at that level, though they may form dispersed life forms -- for example, every blue-green alga in a pond may be part of a single conscious individual.

[(Anonymous)]

In Through the Gates of Death Dion Fortune (to whose The Cosmic Doctrine I believe this branch of occult philosophy is related) implies that unicellular life will eventually go out of manifestation (and some forms of it are already overstaying their welcome), for what it's worth.

[ecosophia]

A very good point!