ecosophia | Magic Monday

Midnight is almost here, 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 341,928th 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. This was my fifty-righth published book, and the last contribution (so far) to the Cthulhu mythos to come from my keyboard. I hadn't planned on writing The Seal of Yueh Lao at all, but there were too many loose ends left hanging when I'd wrapped up The Weird of Hali, and this story took shape as I considered them. It's the shortest of my tentacle novels, a quiet little coming-of-age story with Asenath Merrill, the oldest daughter of the central character of The Weird of Hali, as its protagonist, and a tangled web of events borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers for its mainspring. All in all, it worked surprisingly well. If you're interested, you can get a copy here if you're in the US and here elsewhere.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi JMG, I was thinking about sigils and I remembered the strange S glyph that every kid in the 90s drew in school. If you haven't seen it, here it is:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/S-cool.svg

This symbol has been drawn countless millions of times on notebooks, binders, backpacks etc., and what's most interesting is that no one can figure out the origin. It's taught by children to other children, and it's appealing for the reason that you can easily draw it by starting with two sets of three parallel lines, made even easier if you have notebook or graph paper.

You've mentioned before how sigils are vulnerable to counterspells by people who know what the letters stand for creating another reading that mocks or denies the original. If someone could convince children around the world to draw this symbol without giving away its meaning to them, could it fuel a powerful sigil working? Particularly since the symbol is drawn by people around the world out of enjoyment, not mass-produced as a form of advertising or merchandise.

I also just found that in 2020 a guy trademarked the symbol to sell goods with it. Given the symbol's status in the public consciousness what do you think will become of an effort to control its use for profit? If it is indeed a sigil created for a specific purpose, can you foresee any particular backlash to the trademark?

Fascinating. Since I was out of school long before this became fashionable, I hadn't heard of it.

1) Yes, that could be very potent.

2) That sort of thing happens all the time. The results depend on how attached people are to the symbol in a noncommercial context. If collective consciousness rejects the commercial use, the company that uses it will probably go broke.

This was a world-wide phenomenon, I did it too and never knew why or when. It was just taught to me one day and as you say and I liked the geometric feeling of tracing it when I was either bored or needed to put my mind somewhere else in class.

I guess children also get to figure out magic by themselves.

Oh my, this brings back memories. I’m pretty sure it was a cousin who taught me that, and while I remember thinking it was cool, it also unsettled me for some reason and I always felt a little guilty drawing it myself.

Interesting. I also felt unsettled by it. I recall being taught how to draw it by an eager classmate, and then avoiding ever drawing it again myself.

In contrast, I remember happily drawing three dimensional cubes over and over when I learned that around the same time.

Huh, I was always told it was the "Stussy 'S,'" as in the popular-in-the-90s skater clothes brand, so it had an explicit link to commerce, at least among the kids I knew. I suppose that wasn't accurate, though!

Cheers,
Jeff

I definitely remember this. It may have roots in the graffiti culture of the 70s/80s, but that's just speculation.

Magic Monday

The mystery of the Cool S

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