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: Thoughts on Pluto

[(Anonymous)]

Re "vibing harmoniously", there was that one 1973 book "Minerva or Pluto: The Choice is Yours", if you haven't at least read a summary yet. Once the nature of an instability has been understood, it becomes an avenue for control. Pluto is generally thought to be exalted in Leo.

Re corruption, DNA is, for understandable reasons, pretty hard to purposefully alter much without destroying the cell entirely. However, sometimes you want to do that. Most mutations are harmful changes, but all beneficial changes are mutations. Maybe the important thing is to screen the changes afterwards for long-term effects.

Re coming to terms with the transpersonal planets more generally, you might be interested in the tarot of the surreal fabulist going by the pen name Uel Aramchek. It started as an idle art project series of tweets, which ended up adding an additional "octave" of trumps. Because of his particular artistic priorities and tastes relating to modernity and horror, the trumps end up referencing (in my reading) certain collective processes corresponding to the individual processes from the ordinary trumps. Most of these collective processes are dysregulated and consequently malefic, I guess because they don't have enough "somebody home" yet to animate them in a responsible and reflective way. Sometimes great leaders do a little of that. Sometimes we try to achieve this by "running studies" and have experts who use those studies to guide public policy, but there seems to be some kind of inadequacy with that process.

https://laysfarra.com/tarot.html

For example, The Fool becomes "XXIII: The Network, representing the crossing paths of a thousand fools at what each each thought was the end of their journey." The Tower becomes "XXXIX: The Black Iron Prison. A tangled heap of crash-test dummies fills the space between a radio tower's haphazard trusses."

(There were plans to add the other cards, but I don't know what happened with that. I half-remember for myself imagining Certificates for Coins, Firearms for Wands, Styluses for Swords, and for Cups I think it was Bottles? I think the planned project had Pills instead.)

Re lingering contamination: Materially, the important thing about radionuclides is that enough of them burn out neither quickly (so that contaminated items become safe to use again within a predictable time) nor super slowly (so that the effects are outpaced by forms of turnover that were going to happen anyway).

Re the mechanism of action: The dissident right used to argue that the left (of their time) was unjustly farming influence and power from a process of antinomian burning of those parts of the cultural commons which were norms of restraint. The claim was that the left was repeatedly following an emergently self-reinforcing tactic of accumulating activists and donors by associating its subcultures and institutions with the individual-level short-term libertine gratification from breaking free of conservative subcultures and institutions, especially in colleges ('monasteries for progressivism'), while refusing to pay or even acknowledge the systemic costs that would be inflicted on everyone later on. There's a converse argument that the right refused to pay or even acknowledge the costs of individual-level suffering and ruin resulting from the restraints they coerced people into internalizing, while profiting by gaining tithes and self-flagellating supporters. But the point I wanted to get to is that the argument on the right-wing side provides a little bit of possible mechanism for how your proposed Pluto would be able to act.