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

[joshuarout]

Interesting, I was discussing this with a colleague just last Wednesday, in the context of cleansing and purifying a place as separating and disconnecting it from undesirable influences. If an undesirable person leaves my place and I don't wish them to return, I make sure to rid the place of any of their personal concerns, especially anything that they've used often enough to have their 'imprint,' or has their body fluids. Using such a personal concern to forcefully attract or manipulate a person without their consent is counter to ethical magical practice, but two friends or lovers could deliberately establish such a connection.
Likewise, if I move away from a place and don't wish to return, I make sure not to leave any such things, and to deliberately disconnect from anything left there. I'm careful about wearing anyone's used clothing or shoes. I speculated that perhaps opportunities to travel to a new place could be opened by sending one's own personal concern to a trusted accomplice in the target region, to affix in a spot conducive to travel connections, but I've not experimented with that.
Such ideas are found Southern conjure and folk magic. My grandfather, a Southern Christian folk practitioner, used to send people cloth torn from shirts he'd wear while praying intensely, to conduct a blessing energy, perhaps influenced by Acts 19:12. Likewise in certain Tibetan lineages, inner offering pills made in a sort of homeopathic way, using substances including fragments of clothing worn by realized gurus, or other objects of theirs; some of them go back hundreds of years. These are placed in alcohol, then the yogi tastes drops of it each morning, to connect with the lineage blessings, spiritual realizations and attainments of the masters of a particular lineage or practice transmission. Muslim Sufi orders use the khirqa initiatory cloak to receive the baraka or blessing of the master, and connect a disciple to the spiritual genealogy of their orders: 'by donning a garment that has been worn, or even touched, by the blessed hands of a master, the disciple acquires some of the baraka, the mystico-magical power of the sheikh.' So physical contact with objects may have many uses!

[(Anonymous)]

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