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.

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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

[diletpoly]

JMG and Commentariat,

I hope everyone has had a good couple of weeks since last I posted, and either had or will have a Happy Yule, Merry Christmas, Joyous Festivus, Happy Hanukkah, or whatever you celebrate.

JMG, I'm wondering if I painted myself into a corner as I plod slowly towards initiation in the GSF. I thought I'd be ready for the initiation ritual early next year, after I finish working through the SGO exercises, but in re-reading the preparatory material, I realized that I switched my divination method to geomancy in March of 2024, having done daily divinations using SGO from February 2023-February 2024. Since I've done more than a year of divinations using SGO, I'm sure I would pick it back up quickly, but I'm conscious of your admonition to practice a divination method for a year before going on to another. Is that exclusively? I could easily see myself doing the initiation with the SGO, and a general "how will my day go" daily with geomancy on the same day, but I don't know if this is a bad idea?

It's also worth noting that I crave initiation, and I know it, so it's been my habit to come up with excuses not to initiate, or to push it off, so I suspect that's what I'm doing here.

So, I guess the actual question is, which of these two courses of action would be better:

1. Refresh my memory on the SGO symbol set, then initiate as soon as that is done and I'm otherwise ready.

2. Finish out a full year of daily divinations using geomancy, switch back to SGO in March, and do daily divination using it for some period of time (a week, month, quarter, or year?) and then initiate.

As I said, I'm inclined to delay, but not for any good reason, so I'd tend towards #2, with a 1 month delay before initiation, but I suspect I'm being overly cautious.

PS: I once again composed this in OneNote, since I intended to ask it on the Dec. 16th MM, but I believe I've taken the odd formatting issues into account and it will translate to dreamwidth correctly.

[ecosophia]

Nah, you're overthinking it. You followed the instructions exactly -- you worked with one system of divination exclusively for at least a year, and then you went on to another. That doesn't mean you can't occasionally go back and use the first one! In the long run, you'll probably have a whole series of oracles you can use whenever you like -- that's where I am, for example.

If you feel unsure of your prowess with the SGO, you can certainly cast a couple of readings with it just to get back in the swing of things, but I think you'll find that you can pick it up and get good results with it right away.

[diletpoly]

I suspected that was the case. "He overthought it" will probably end up on my tombstone, so par for the course. But thanks for the confirmation. I'll probably do a few SGO readings just to make sure I feel good about it, but proceed.