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 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

[jenniferkobernik]

Thank you!

For anyone interested: Mostly what toads seem to need is shelter in a shady spot that doesn’t receive direct sunlight. It should be bottomless so that they are not prevented from burrowing into the dirt (or, less ideally, it can be something with a bottom partially buried and then infilled with dirt, like a flowerpot on its side half-buried). A few bricks topped with a flat stone or piece of wood will do. A perennial source of water for breeding is ideal, but they can travel some distance to this when the time comes (up to 2 or 3 miles in some cases). A saucer or shallow puddle nearby is also appreciated. Their shelter should have some leaf litter on its floor for bedding material. You can even put a toad light out to attract bugs for them, although I probably won’t, as I don’t like having artificial lights about. They can apparently live for over a decade and will often return over the long-term if they find a nice shelter!

JMG: It occurs to me that I haven’t read much about these sorts of magical properties of animals (as compared with plants or stones, say). Is there a source you would recommend? Or do you know of any other animals (less elusive than the basilisk or tard!) who share this property of absorbing noxious magic with the toad? Is it any animal of Saturn? Levi lists hoopoe, squid, and mole as being associated with Saturn. I’ve also heard that black animals, burrowing animals, and cats belong to Saturn, but I’m not sure how reliable that is. Levi lists cats as being ruled by the Moon, not Saturn.

[ecosophia]

There's a lot of medieval lore about animals, but nearly all of it presupposes killing the animal and using parts of its body, and for wholly personal reasons that's not lore I'm willing to spread around. I don't think the energy-absorbing power of toads is an effect of their Saturnine nature, for what it's worth. In the traditional lore of natural magic everything has two categories of effect, one that derives from its correspondences and one that is specific to it and it alone. (For example, emerald is a stone of Venus and has the general effect of amplifying all Venus's influences, but it has the specific effect of encouraging lasting love.) As far as I know, the power of toads to soak up nasty magic is specific, not generic.

[jenniferkobernik]

Urk. Yeah, I’ve seen a bit of that, and even as someone who’s pretty comfortable with the messier aspects of turning animals into food, I’m not interested in seeing that make a comeback.

Thank you, that’s very helpful. I’ll appreciate the toads for their uniqueness and focus on inviting them in. I built one toad shelter today and will try to build at least one on Saturday; we’ll see how it goes!

[methylethyl]

Hildegard Von Bingen compiled a *lot* of medieval lore on animals in her *Physica*. A lot of it is, of course, pretty inscrutable to us non-medieval folk.

She says of the toad:

"The toad has in it some great heat and some bitterness. Just as dangerous winds come forth with lightning and thunder and hail, it has some diabolical art in it. It seeks its home on land, under the earth. It has some association with humans and is sometimes dangerous." She then goes on to detail a ghastly-sounding remedy for scrofula involving the toad's liver ;) Also, she says toads produce basilisks.