Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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.

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

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.

With that said, have at it!

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I hope those who celebrate the solstice had a wonderful day; and for those who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas!

Now that I'm distancing myself from my upper middle class family, I'm noticing that a lot of what I used to take for granted is ridiculous. One of the more extreme examples of this is the wretched excess that goes into the way my family has always celebrated Christmas, including things like trips across the world, extreme consumerism, and a host of other extremes. this is problematic enough in and of itself, but I can't help but note the contrast here between the wretched consumerist orgy that I've seen called Greedmas, and the traditional Christmas. In fact, Greedmas seems to revel in all of the deadly sins but pride and wrath; and both tend to appear at the dinner table. Despite just how anti-Christian the entire thing is, most people insist that Greedmas is Christmas, and that it is somewhere between absurd and evil for Christians to suggest that there's a problem with how the holiday is celebrated.

Am I right to think this is a very dangerous thing to do, and it runs the risk of offending Jesus?

What sort of things tend to happen when a society offends a god like this?

[ecosophia]

Christ seems to be a very, very difficult god to offend. His dad was traditionally short-tempered, but the fact that he hasn't fried an entire generation of liberal clergy with well-aimed lightning bolts for their blatant unbelief and Pharisaic self-righteousness suggests to me that either he's fantastically patient with his followers or he's given up on them as a bad lot!

[ecosophia]

That said, it seems horribly disrespectful to me. I think we should give Christmas back to the Christians, and encourage people to keep Greedmas to do it on some other day.

[brenainn]

If I may, I suspect he (Jesus) will leave them to the karmic consequences of such greed and stupidity. Consider his parable of the wise who heed his words being like those who build their homes on firm foundations that withstand storms, while the foolish build their homes on sand and see them toppled. A society built on rapacious consumerism is bound to topple. I also suspect that, given his compassionate nature, he'll be around in those days to offer succor and healing to the survivors living in the post-industrial dark age.

[not_gandalf]

It's been awhile, and I'm mostly on the Hellenic pagan wavelength now, but I'm going to slip on my amethyst ring for a second and say something about this Christmas thing:
So the idea is that God gave Christ to the world as a gift, the gift that offers the world a way out of its fallen state to the New Jerusalem. That's also what is being represented by the gifts of the Magi. So. just my little, little opinion here, but the right way to approach this is the Dion Fortune way of visualizing and *working toward* what you want to accomplish. So, instead of getting swept up in the tidal wave of bad feeling about the consumerism of Christmas, just give gifts, meaningful gifts, that come from you as an impulse of the heart just to give something to somebody because it will make them happy, with no other expectation of anything. Only the generous outflowing that, you know, really is a theurgic gesture of imitation of God's unbounded and loving generosity in giving gifts to God's creation. Just the same impulse and flow of the Blessing Walk in the MOE instructions. And just because to give makes you happy, because it makes them happy. It doesn't have to be diamond rings and sable coats. It just has to be the honest expression of your inner wish to give something to someone to make them even just a little bit happier. And, of course, f**k the people who are trying to tell you that it's not meaningful if it isn't a big ticket item. Given with thought, care and love, a Pez dispenser might be a great gift.
Sorry to go on. I just re-read "A Christmas Carol" and I think this might have been a large part of the point, and I'm feeling strongly about it this year...