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

Ghostfear and Cursefear with Kids?!

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG and all,
My kid (5+ year old) is very afraid of curses and ghost and me -having browsed through our Hosts Monster-book etc. find it difficult to say wholeheartedly: Nay my Child fear not, there are no things as ghosts and curses.
What do parents here tell their kids? And what do you do? Especially since our kid is in the difficulty, that it hears from other kids the canned version and sometimes thinks his peers as trusworthy as its mother in things like these. On top of which there still are Christmas…whatsists…cobolds/Trolls enacted by the parents of these kids that are mildly annoying (glueing shoes to the ceiling…) I e.g tell the kid that the vinegar under our bed protects and that it can ask Jesus (the kid is baptized) for protection, whilst listening to His answer, But ist does not seem to alleviate the fear.

jmg; I‘m wondering if the fear of curses and ghost might have something to do with his past live(s), how could I go about finding indication if that is so?

Re: Ghostfear and Cursefear with Kids?!

[ecosophia]

1) Fear isn't necessarily a bad experience, and a focus on ghosts and curses may be how your child is dealing with something else from a past life. Comfort your child as best you can and let him grow through this stage.

2) I don't recommend trying to find out the details. Let those surface naturally, if they ever surface at all.

Re: Ghostfear and Cursefear with Kids?!

[milkyway1]

If I may… If there are any older relatives who have died already, but whom the kid had a good relationship with (e.g. beloved grandparents), then talking to them or asking them for help might also work, and this is something that your kid can do all on their own. (It could even work with late relatives whom your kid hasn‘t personally known, but which are being talked about often and remembered fondly in your family. Kids pick up on such stuff, and might feel a strong connection.)

Milkyway

Re: Ghostfear and Cursefear with Kids?!

[(Anonymous)]

I reassure mine that they are safe, our house is safe and we are looked after. I also distinguish the difference between real on the material plane and spiritual reality and when they are older they can explore that more. So there isn't really going to be a monster under the bed but if we feel scared we can have a cuddle and talk and renormalize how we are feeling. My older two seemed to attract disruptive influences at night and needed me to go in sometimes but my youngest is much more impervious.

Re: Ghostfear and Cursefear with Kids?!

[kimberlysteele]

I disagree with you -- ghosts and curses absolutely exist. The good news is that ghosts are not all bad (actually very few are bad; I am a former atheist who talks to dead people on the regular) and curses are fairly easy to guard against.

Maybe print out some bedside geometrics for your little one. They act as demon traps, hence traditions from every culture, including American culture, of putting symmetrical repeating designs near the people and animals they would like to keep safe.

Here is my article on it: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/26916.html

Here is an article that goes into more detail: https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/114992.html