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 that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 267,446th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.2 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-third published book, and we're back in The Weird of Hali. This book had the longest and most roundabout genesis of all my tentacle novels. I'd originally planned for the sixth book in the sequence to be set in Greenland, and I wrote six drafts of that novel before realizing that there was too much story to fit into the limits I'd defined for the Weird. So I set the Greenland story aside -- it appeared later, much amended and with different characters, as A Voyage to Hyperborea -- and wrote this one, drawing heavily on the handful of stories Lovecraft set in New York City.

Justin Martense, the central figure in The Weird of Hali: Chorazin, became the viewpoint character in this story, and gave me the chance to explore a heroic fantasy with a very unheroic main character; I later did the same thing to an even greater extent with Toby Gilman, the main character of A Voyage to Hyperborea, who's even more of a dweeb than Justin but rises to the challenges before him in his inimitably awkward way. If you're wondering why I put dorky characters into these two books, why, it's the same reason I made an utterly unheroic sixty-year-old college professor coping with terminal cancer the main character of The Weird of Hali: Dreamlands; I'm bored to tears by the specially special protagonists -- and did I mention that they're special? -- who infest so much fiction these days, and wanted to explore the much more interesting (to me) situation of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. If that turns your crank, why, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here 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.

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hello,
As I get older, and watching the previous generations go, I have a big question about the phenomenon of dementia, in the many forms it takes. Some may have entirely functional bodies, only the brain is rotten, some are entirely incapable of anything. I notice I tend to perceive dementia a form of punishment. I do not know what they are being punished for. This theory may be wrong, as my cat reached 18 years, she started having all kinds of weird symptoms, that I only afterwards realized matched pretty well with dementia. I can't think a cat would be getting a punishment for some wrongdoing, but what do I know of cat ethics? But I would like to find a better perspective on the phenomenon, as there is a lot of different levels of forgetfulness, confusion and anxiety going around now. What is the inner significance, or is there any? Of course, dementia forces you to be passive - although some people in care homes are extremely actively trying to get out to go "home", often a childhood home that does not even exist.

There are instructions for the dying we know from many cultures, books of the dead, which require some capacity to consciously direct attention. The soul will be feeling lost, I assume, if the consciousness is gone. Would you have anything to say about this?
Kristiina, today taking the shape of Écru Funicular Flea

I don't think dementia, or any other illness, is punishment. It's simply a breakdown in the body's ability to serve the purposes of the soul. Back before I got into print, I used to work in nursing homes, and tended a lot of demented patients. My take is that what happened in their case is that the astral body broke down, so that there was an interruption between the soul and the lower bodies -- intermittent or partial in the case of those who are confused and forgetful, complete in the case of those who go into a vegetative state.

As for the dying process, most people die without the chance to focus their attention; it's very common for people to be asleep or unconscious at the time of death. The instructions in the various Books of the Dead or artes moriendi (that's the medieval Latin term for them) are for those fortunate cases where the dying person remains conscious -- though it's wise to read the instructions aloud to the dying person even if he or she seems unconscious, because hearing is the last sense to go and sometimes the message will get through anyway.

Not the OP, excuse me for interjecting.

1) What kind of practice can be used to strengthen the subtle bodies and prevent them from breaking down prematurely? For the etheric body, I guess it would be something like Hatha yoga or Tai Chi? For the astral body, my guess is discursive meditation and/or a contemplative hobby like calligraphy or aesthetic gardening?

2) Are there any Western artes morendi translated to modern English? The impression Bardo Thodol made on the Western occultism in the early 20th century implies they were either utterly forgotten by then, or were associated with dogmatic Catholic/Orthodox Christianity, and thus unappealing to occultists of the time.

1) There are many different sets of exercises to work the etheric and astral body. Almost anything that involves exercise and deep breathing will activate the etheric body; almost anything tht involves imagination and will working together will activate the astral body.

2) Not that I know of. They were very Christian.

Do you have a recommendation for a particular Book of the Dead?

I wish I did. I may want to do a modern ars moriendi one of these days.

Magic Monday

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