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 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 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.

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

Comments

Re: In the Dreamlands

[tunesmyth]

Eagle Fang, I'm not sure whether this is worth even sharing, but I'll just mention the synchronicity that as I read this, I just finished an email to someone who had just dreamed of me and my family, in which I mentioned taking my daughters to their 7-5-3 ceremonies (they are 7 and 3) at a Shinto shrine this past weekend. The shrine happens to be a shrine on a hill with a couple of smaller sub shrines on the path up; overall it is much more modest than the hill your dream describes, although the main sub shrine is an outlet of Kompira, whose main shrine Kotohiragu in Shikoku would be one contender for a grand shrine more in the mold of what your dream described, and happens to be the site where I and another regular on this site received training toward our licenses as Shinto priests. All of this may have nothing at all to do with you and your dream, of course... (And is your name a Karate Kid reference?)

Re: In the Dreamlands

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Tunesmyth.

Wow... as I will mention to JMG both my wife and I just read the Hall of Homeless Gods, which has a bit of Shinto stuff in it. My wife is not religious. She was raised without religion, and has always had a hard time with the way it is presented here in the states. It has caused some conflict in the past, especially as I am practicing occultist. That has gotten better over the years though, especially as I talk about it less and do more (privately).

I will have to look up these places you talk about. I've always wanted to go to Japan, and Shinto has been an interest I return to periodically, though not ever studied in depth, but I feel an attraction to the whole approach.

That's fascinating about being a Shinto priest and the 7-5-3 ceremony and your own dream.

I know (I think!) the other commenter you are talking about.

All I can say is the synch gives it some added punch.

Yes, my name refers to Karate Kid. I liked the way Sensei Lawrence stepped away from Cobra Kai to create his own thing and loved the name. And I like how he later merged with Miyagi-Do.

Thanks for sharing your dream.

Eagle Fang Warrior 5000

Re: In the Dreamlands

[tunesmyth]

Hi Eagle Fang,

I see that my grammar left room for misinterpretation-- to be clear, it was a friend's dream featuring my family; but the 7-5-3 ceremony this weekend was real.

As an ex-atheist myself, who was also raised without religion, I'll just offer my own opinion that when people don't feel an urge to connect with the subtler sides of reality, it's generally what is right for them at that point in their journey, and it's best not to urge them in any particular direction. I understand that things are made more complicated when there develops such a misalignment in worldview with someone who is otherwise sharing your own life journey as your partner.

Regarding our host's beliefs regarding Shinto's potential to flourish in North America, although I'll allow that some heavily mutated form of it might make inroads. The difficulty-- but I suppose, depending on how things progress, potentially a benefit as well-- is that historically, Shinto has not been a proselytizing religion. Arguably it's not even a religion at all. I recently spoke with some Mormons who were mystified by Shinto's basic lack of dogma and doctrines (which basically amount to "stay clean, purify your surroundings, connect with divinity" but which provides no formal structure to teach any of this). Basically Shinto provides a ceremonial structure for positive interaction with the spiritual world, including forces indifferent or hostile to humanity as much as those that work with or love humanity. I suppose there is even some way that Shinto could eventually come to fit around other existing religions in the way that Buddhism fits around Shinto-- giving a ritual structure around which positive relationships can be formed with the local Kamisama. Certainly practitioners of Shinto generally see no inherent problem in also giving respect or worship to the deities and holy people of other cultures.

I can't speak for your wife as she's on her own journey. Perhaps it's appropriate just share that in my own case, my sterile agnostic (but basically atheistic) view of the world did not let much oxygen into my universe, and I felt there wasn't much meaning to the world. It was really reading JMG and being impressed by his general reasonableness on matters both spiritual and mundane that gave me license to go ahead and just attempt a spiritual experiment of my own. I picked Shinto as the vehicle for the experiment because I was in Japan; and I believed, as in the parable of the 6 blind men and the elephant, that even if any religions were right, it would be ridiculous to assume one had all the answers and the others had none. To my surprise, my experiment was wildly successful, showing me personal evidence that completely convinced me that there was more in Heaven and Earth than could be dreamt of in my philosophies, and so, here we are nearly 12 years later. Shinto happens to be the first door that opened when I knocked on it; and one of the things I appreciate about it is that is absolutely no pressure from anywhere for me to treat it as the be-all end-all.