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

[brenainn]

Do you happen to know of a good book, or similar resource, that discusses (preferably fairly and objectively) Joseph Smith's occultism? He's quickly emerging as a potent spiritual force in my life, and I feel it'd be helpful to dive into that aspect of his history.

For what it's worth, I'll soon be writing up an article for my mostly defunct Dreamwidth journal on my experiences with Carl Jung. In short, I now firmly believe Jung has attained to divine status. That's what my experiences with him (and these are among the most powerful spiritual experiences that I've had) seem to be telling me.

[ecosophia]

The two classic books on the magical side of Mormonism are The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology by John L. Brooke and Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn. As for Jung, that doesn't surprise me at all.

[robertmathiesen]

There are two editions of Quinn's book, and they are significantly different: to dig really deeply into Joseph Smith's occultism, you'll need to consult both editions. The first edition (1987) included massive documentation of every claim Quinn made, citing many very obscure sources in lengthy footnotes. The second edition (1998) had more of Quinn's own further research, but to make room for that added material, much of the documentation had to be cut back. I would recommend starting with the second edition, and then consulting the first edition's footnotes as well on any point that seems particularly relevant to your own thoughts.

One can find both editions of Quinn here and there online, and also Brooke's volume. Brook is less interested in outright magical practices than Quinn, but more interested in American hermetic philosophy and alchemy of Smith's era and earlier. (Early America was very far from being a strictly Protestant Christian land. There was an enormous amount of occultism and mysticism going around, especially in the rural parts of the country, away from the surveillance of the higher-ups. Academic scholarship is just beginning top scratch the surface of what was there.)

In short, Quinn and Brooke complement one another nicely.

[(Anonymous)]

Do keep in mind that Smith wasn't exactly straight-edge. At least toward what would turn out to be the end of his life, as I understand it, he started going behind his other followers' backs with alleged secret revelations licensing secret polygynous liaisons with already-married women. His early career as a treasure-diviner also raises questions about how uniformly sincere he was at the time; at the least, from what I remember, it seems as though he didn't give his divinatory intuitions the kinds of common-sense "moral hazard" pushback that a responsible person would normally give when there was a strong circumstantial case that the intuitions were under the steering of unconscious wishful thinking and a desire to be able to conveniently keep justifying fleecing the client. Also, there are those troubling points about some of the passages from the alleged independent clairvoyant translation of the golden plates being weirdly close to the decisions made by translators of corresponding passages for the King James Bible, down to most of of the italicized words and phrases that had been introduced to indicate interpolations that the translators had needed to make in order for the sentences to work in English, without any record of Smith giving any sign of understanding that he was adding italicizations for a similar reason.

And there's the thing where somehow everyone in Mormonism came away, decades down the line, with the impression that of course archaeology and anthropology were going to confirm the real, physical, historical existence of a Nephite people, rather than that the postulated dragon in the garage that had full well already proven to be invisible, inaudible, and non-respiring would of course also prove to be permeable to the flour that they were unsuspectingly throwing into the air archaeology and anthropology would instead only prove to show exactly the same things they would have shown if Smith had invented the Nephite record as some kind of conscious or perhaps unconscious con. While revelation is mysterious, normally you would very much have thought to expect that the forces responsible for transmitting a revelation to John Smith would also have full well had both the motive and the means to inform him that he had a responsibility to inform his followers that the entire Nephite history only ever happened in, at best, some kind of alternate parallel or deuterocanonical timeline, quite lacking in physical causal potency over anything other than prophets' brain activity in the canonical timeline.

(Unless that degree of commitment to the bit had seemed, to those forces, to be intrinsically necessary, as part of what we ourselves can see to have been an in-retrospect-obviously-foredoomed bid to actually make our canonical world one in which wacky things like the Nephite migration were possible? After all, something a little bit like that, but many orders of magnitude less ambitious, does seem to have worked out for Quetzalcoatl.)

So, if you're going to be spiritually downstream of Joseph Smith, you'd want to be on the lookout for the same kinds of issues as with Enochian magic, which was downstream of the similar figure Edward Kelley.

Sometimes I wonder if there are particular people who are picked in advance as being empowered to give revelations, and only afterward does it shake out whether they keep sufficiently to a path of virtue, or whether they become too corrupt for the revelations to be safe to deliver through them on net, or whether they become an inconvenient in-between amount of corrupt where their revelations are still empowered but the (somehow apparently) obligate (and why???????) materialist-retrospection "cover story" for the revelation is some sort of slightly complicated and perhaps substantially unconscious but otherwise seemingly obvious fraud.

If you haven't already read about the whole pile of conventions in Tibetan Buddhism regarding people like Joseph Smith who allegedly dig up or clairvoyantly view treasures containing novel revelations, that's probably also a very important thing to know about. See the following comment from six months ago:

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/285320.html?thread=49409416#cmt49464456

Notably, whatever's going on in Tibetan Buddhism is at least mature enough that they typically know to seal away a lot of the revelatory quasi-history in a (conveniently largely epistemically-inaccessible) underworld naga civilization. (Huh. That's another connection to snakes, after Quetzalcoatl.)

[ecosophia]

That's an interesting thought -- Joseph Smith (and many equivalent figures) as a sort of western Tertön.

One approach to The Book of Mormon that I haven't seen tried yet is the symbolic one. It's quite common for people who recognize the emotional and psychological power of a sacred text, but also recognize its historical inaccuracies, to interpret it as true but only in a symbolic sense, as "things that never happened but always are," in Sallust's neat phrase. It seems to me that The Book of Mormon would be entirely amenable to that approach, and the amount of genuine wisdom that could be extracted from it is limited only by the ingenuity and effort of mystics.