ecosophia | Magic Monday

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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 sixtieth published book, the second volume of the sprawling study course in Druidical occultism I assembled from fragments, scraps, and a lot of William Walker Atkinson's more obscure writings, as chronicled in the intro to last week's Magic Monday. The Lesser Mysteries comprise four grades, the Greater Mysteries three more, finishing up with the grade of Gwyddon Rhydd or Free Loremaster, which brings with it the right to teach the system. There's a modest but significant number of Free Loremasters running around these days, and some of them do in fact teach; most students of the Dolmen Arch, however, simply learn it from the two books. One way or another, if you're interested, you can find copies for sale here in the US and at your favorite online or brick-and-mortar bookseller 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.

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

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

Threaded | Flat

Hello Mr. Greer,

Recently I have been developing a strong interest in back woods wilderness hunting. There are three elements of this that relate to magic, and I would like to know if you can point me in the right direction to sources that detail what I should or should not be doing, magically speaking, while in the deep woods.

The first thing involves offerings to the land. I know Native Americans used to do things like offer tobacco before the hunt. That no longer seems relevant in a world where the product is dirt cheap, and honestly, I don't want to support the tobacco industry anyway. Can I substitute something like removing garbage from the land scape near where I live (although I don't know how far the reach of that activity would span)? Or a different sacrifice? They allegedly grew so close to the land that animals would appear and allow themselves to be slain. Presumably this is not because the land "needed" tobacco, but rather because the consciousness directing a particular species was impressed by a sincere desire to respect the land. That's all well and good but figuring out how to appease these immaterial minds is less than straight forward. Well, at least it is for 21st century folks like me.

The second thing is much more defensive than relational. The deep woods is the last bastion for large scale cryptic activity. You are probably also aware that thousands of people go missing in our national parks, and that there is a correlation between regions with underground cave networks and large numbers of missing persons. This creates an interesting problem. If there are beings that are killing or kidnapping humans who spend a lot of time underground one has to wonder how to protect oneself. Are there protection rituals specially designed to deal with these kinds of threats? Or do general protection spells work just fine?

Finally, is there a substantial difference between protective prayer vs magical ritual?

Thank you for your time.

I want to put together a planetary heptagram ritual, and I was hoping to get your take on a couple of things...

1. There are a few of different ways of assigning the planets to the points of the heptagram-- one places the Sun on top and follows the order of the days of the week; the other that I've seen places Saturn on top and follows the order of the spheres. In Circles of Power you presented still another order, based on the flow of planetary colors around the outside of the circle. Do you have any thoughts on the different effects of each of these?

2. The Golden Dawn prefaces planetary rituals with the Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram, which is specifically a banishing of Saturn but also uses the astrological order of the elements. Do you think that a general planetary banishing is necessary? And if so, is it necessary that it be a ritual of Saturn? That makes a certain sense, but I can see basing it on the Moon as well. But I wanted to see if you had any thoughts.

A very happy new year to everybody, and especially to you, JMG - I hope it'll be a good one for you. :-)

Two offers today, one for MOE practitioners and one for everybody:

1. I'm going to perform a formal blessing again this week and am grateful if people sign up for it, as this gives me a chance to practice:

https://thehiddenthings.com/weekly-blessings-53

2. For MOE practitioners: I'm offering two opportunities for Master attunements on Sunday, January 19th:

https://thehiddenthings.com/moe-master-attunement-2025-01

I've decided to offer two time slots this time, to accommodate people in other time zones. Important: I will only perform one or both of these if at least one person lets me know they will participate at the respective time!

In general, if you practice the MOE material and would be interested in other attunements (Apprentice or Healer), I'd appreciate some feedback about which one is relevant to you. These attunement offers are a bit like flying blind - I have no idea which attunements are even needed or wanted. So any kind of feedback would be great. :-)

Milkyway

Happy New Year to all.

Thank you very much as always, JMG, for Magic Monday.

Apologies if this is vague.

A dead family member has left behind a messy situation which has caused division. These people are not fighting each other for money, however. The deceased was an intelligent person who had some mental health problems, who could be very contradictory and lacked understanding of certain areas of life. They sometimes did and said things with consequences that were, and are, the opposite of what they said they wanted or felt, including repeatedly and over long periods of time. You could say that they did not seem like a single "will". If, in life, appealing to them and explaining things was a very hit-or-miss affair, is their soul or spirit also disjointed and inconsistent?

I have never had any interest in ouija boards, and I seem to be impervious to ghosts, experiencing nothing when sensitive people nearby have. I think I just envisaged trying to have a chat with the deceased in my head like a pathworking or prayer. But is there even any point when a person was like this?

Do you have any other recommendations?

I have been a regular SOP practitioner for several years.

I was just scrolling through the experimental subscribe star posting for Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas, and saw this bit about the effects of a comet in Virgo - "It also warns that the officials of some government will be driven out of their offices en masse; they may be imprisoned or forced to flee their country, and will not regain their positions, their influence, or their wealth."

In the last little bit I've seen news stories about the ouster of the governments or leaders of South Korea, Syria and now Canada. I'd say your experiment is showing pretty good results so far...

Hi JMG-
A few questions-
1. I’ve recently started doing a daily affirmation. One of the things that I do as a part of it is to write it out on a piece of paper. How should I dispose of the paper when I am done with it, so as to not undo the affirmation?
2. In last week’s Magic Monday, it was more or less stated that the will is an inexhaustible source of energy. Could one use the will as a source of energy, is it advisable to do so, and if so, how would one go about doing it?
3. Someone close to me said that I end up getting whatever it is that I want. I’m sitting down and looking around at my life, and realizing just how true that it is, and I’m getting freaked out by this. I don’t know how consciously I’ve been wanting things up until this point, but it seems to me that one should be really careful and judicious in what one wants and just how hard that they want it. Also: one should take the time to discern what one really wants, deep down inside. Best summed up by this quote that I read some years ago:
“Everybody ultimately gets the life that they want.”
4. I’ve been working my way through W.W. Atkinson’s Personal Power series. The books are available for free at this website, thought that I’d share it here for anyone who is interested:
https://nevillegoddardbooks.com/william-walker-atkinson-personal-power-series-12-books
As always, Thanks!

I thought the following might be of interest to some people here.

I recently came across a book by the art historian Conrad Rudolph called The Mystic Ark. Actually, it's two books -- a small paperback (First I Find the Center Point: Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor's “The Mystic Ark” Transactions, American Philosophical Society, vol. 94), and a fairly massive translation of and commentary on The Mystic Ark text (The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Both are not cheap, especially the latter, but worth a look if one can get them through a library.

There's a web site at https://mysticark.ucr.edu/. Conrad Rudolph also worked with a team to re-create the original diagrams (https://mysticark.ucr.edu/the-illustrations/mystic-ark-diagrams/) There's a lot more on the web site. and some of the diagrams are gorgeous, and well worth a look. The diagrams were actually printed out, wall-sized, for a museum exhibit, and there's a nice picture of Rudolph standing in front of the mural (http://mysticark.ucr.edu/wp-content/uploads/largefiles/Fig-22-4096.jpg, and https://mysticark.ucr.edu/the-illustrations/mystic-ark-diagrams/). The image files are all available for downloading, by the way.

There are several points that the author/editor/translator doesn't cover, but that are probably interesting to us.

Rudolph strongly criticizes Mary Carruthers' claim that The Mystic Ark is an example of an art of memory system, and in a certain sense he's right, in that it's not a set of place-holders to be used in the art of memory, but a fully-stocked database that was meant to accompany and contain the contents of lecture-series dealing with the ark of Noah as a kind of summary of history, theology, and spirituality. A modern analogy (though an impoverished one) would be a power-point deck made to accompany a set of live lectures.

But, on the other hand, it is a memory engine of the sort Carruthers describes so well, in that it allows the user to held "in a single vision" a complex manifold of material -- and deal with it creatively.

Briefly, the main diagram was an attempt to link four levels of reality, the history and structure of the cosmos and the microcosm, and the story of Fall and Reintegration. It was used as a way of maintaining mental focus -- and for a lecture series that laid out how to understand and use the diagrams and all the collected lore. The images were supposed to be very striking and inspiring, richly colored, and full of information, tying everything into a common structure.

Most interesting, perhaps, is that the lecture series was presented at "dinners" at which members of the monastery or college would listen, look, and discuss. It was intended to help rise up the levels from the material and historical to the spiritual and transformative. The diagrams and texts were meant to be (and were) copied and presented elsewhere by other lecturers, in the context of group meetings and discussions.

(Current esotericists are actually familiar with something very similar, but using the Tree of Life -- a very simple diagram that can be richly elaborated (for example, with sephirotic and telesmatic images, and so on). In other words, the Tree of Life, or similar diagrams, could be used in the same way. And of course the Tree does contain a vast amount of lore -- but with a large, mural-sized version, it could be quite the center for talks and discussions.)

A final point. For the Mystic Ark diagram, substitute a "trestleboard" diagram, with its associated lecture. Imagine exhibiting the trestleboard as a large mural in the context of a light dinner, or brown-bag lunch, to a group of initiates, and, after the lecture, opening the floor for discussion, in a kind of group discursive meditation.

Is it not possible that something like the monastic or collegial practice exemplified by the Mystic Ark material managed to find its way into the practices of fraternal initiatory organizations, and so continue on, in diminished form, even to the present?

Smaragdine Senex

Trolls have a long history, and have been repurposed to describe various disruptive behavior patterns in online communities. But there's one bit of folklore that sticks out, the idea that trolls live under bridges and demand that you pay a toll. This is something that you've referenced as well iirc, in regards to your policy on trolling, which I have to say is quite reasonable and effective.

But I'm wondering, what is the origin of trolls under bridges demanding a toll? This whole thing seems to be of genuinely vintage origin, dating back to at least the medieval period, if not earlier. There could be mundane symbolism, ie early forms of rent-seeking and control of traffic, but are there occult roots to this as well?

I recently discovered Julius Evola, and he wrote a great deal on magic, among other topics. Have you read any of his books, and if so, do you think they're worth reading?

This one is probably for JMG and his entire audience, as it sounds kind of obscure to me: Does anyone know if there is some magical power to having a chestnut in front of the entrance to one's apartment door? My Filipino neighbours have had a chestnut on the floor in the recessed part of the floor in front of their hallway door for as long as I can remember, maybe months or years, and yet the building manager vacuums the hallway every week. So either somehow the manager is ignoring the chestnut, or if the manager is throwing it out, my neighbours are replacing it. They seem like nice people, the only thing remarkable that I know of about them is that the adult son is a very successful player type.

Hi JMG

I hope you're well.

I have just started doing the DMH Grove ritual. I've been looking through MM threads on the subject and discovered the following that surprised me:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/139182.html?thread=16658350#cmt16658350

In it you recommend that in doing the SOP within the Grove the elemental gates should be drawn in the grove quarters. The DMH doesn't mention this, and I've just been doing the SOP as normal, centred on me, but facing South.

Can I confirm that you meant to recommend by contrast:

1. Physically walk to the Grove edges to invoke the gates, and
2. Draw Spirit Below/Above over the altar rather than oneself (Spirit Within has to still be centred on oneself I assume),
3. Make the altar the centre of the circulating sphere?

It sounds like a powerful way to do it if so, mirroring the circumambulatory Grove opening.

Thanks
JH

Can anyone help me out with this?

Many years ago I remember reading a short story where a boiler tender on a steamship starts to worship the furnace as a god and eventually offers up his employer/slave master as a sacrifice. I would like to read it again and assumed it was a famous short story by Joseph Conrad or somebody like that. I can't find reference to it anywhere on the internet.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Earlier today, I read that there is an energy center at my solar plexus, that transmits energy to other parts of my etheric body.

For a couple months, I have been doing the CGD version of the LIRP/LBRP and all that time was imagining the sun shining at the level of my solar plexus,not inside my body at my solar plexus. Should I change my visualization during that part of the ritual?

Hi JMG,

Hopefully, this is somewhat cogent.

I have been integrating with my own organically developing occult practice key ideas from Robert Mathiesen's recently published books. I have been experimenting with "emptying" myself (in a somewhat apophatic style) and "going beyond" to the essence of whatever I am contemplating, very much as I used to do at an etheric level with energy work. I will at times experience a kind of dual perspective. A sharing of perspective between myself and an other. Could be a book, cloud, whatever. Sometimes done in meditation other times out walking. A dual non-duality maybe? Physical and mental distance for example are no longer meaningful.

It appears to also happen with relationships or connections between things. The relationship between a book and my watch for example. Or a sailboat mast and a house on an overlooking bluff. The relationship itself being as much a thing to experience this dual non-duality with as the individual objects.

This got me thinking about how much of my life has been about working with patterns. Healthcare data analysis, math, programming, etc.... Even astrology finally opened to me once I began looking at an ephemeris as a source of data filled with number patterns.

What happens in a model where reality (or at least the reality I am capable of sensing in some manner) is a web and I am a node in that web? My inner work intensifies or grows in some manner the node that I am. Work with the other nodes in the web and even the patterns of connections themselves as entities in their own right might grow stronger. Effecting change in myself rippling out along the patterns of the web of creation.

So many patterns! Infinitely many!

Out of these experiences, my practice is evolving. More accurately, maybe, my approach to my practice is evolving. Emptying and going beyond when contemplating astrology themes for example has been quite exciting. Likely, the same can be done with alchemy, sacred geometry, knots, weaving, writing, tarot, and much more.

I don't expect that these are novel or unique realizations. As such I am curious about others works in this direction. Anything or anyone you or others might point me towards?

Thanks,
Eric

I finally finished my second draft of a book I’ve been working on for several years, Sacred Homemaking. I am in the market for a good proofreader/editor. The book is about cultivating a relationship with the spirit of place in your home via various modes of magic and prayer.

It is about the same length as Marie Kondo’s book, The Art of Tidying Up.

I came across an intriguing (to me at least) fact several days ago. 2025 is the sum of the cube of each primary number 1-9. Do you sense any meaning or significance in that for the year ahead?

Greeting JMG,

Are the Solar and Telluric Nwyfre exercises as presented in DMH compatible with the initiate's SOP as presented in the WGS occult manual?

Thanks again for hosting Magic Monday!

Archdruid,

Currently writing this from the Emergency Animal Hospital, my cat Bandit was apparently shot over an hour ago. I fear the worse.

Update: It turns out the wound was from a large dog that the neighbors just let roam the area.

Long story short, lot of bad stuff has been happening from pets dying to family passing.

Lot of Christian friends are praying for me but it seems the more they pray the worse things get for me. Have you ever heard of something like that happening?

Edited 2025-01-07 02:11 (UTC)

JMG,

Do you know if planetary charity works when given on behalf of another (with consent or for whom you have the authority to consent, such as a child)?

Hi JMG,

I’m currently in Grade V of the Dolmen Arch course. It is truly excellent—thank you for producing it!

I’m intrigued by the lore surrounding the Folk of the Path of Descent and I’d like to learn more. Can you point me to some resources for further study?

How important is the seated posture for discursive meditation? I have some pre-existing injuries that make that posture hard to adopt.

Hi JMG and everybody here!
I hope that 2025 be a good year for all.

I have recently physically moved office in my work. I'm now the next office of the CEO of the enterprise. This person is a heavy tobacco smoker. The floor is always covered with smoke. The rules of non-smokers don't apply here and I'm wondering if there is some kind of amulet or special work I could do for protecting myself from smoke. I'm using a facemask but find it not that useful. I was thinking of lighting up incense of some kind.

Please, I could use some information about this!

Hi JMG and Fellow readers,
A nice lady I am acquainted with is being slandered on my little island. She asked me what to do about it and among my suggestions was that I should make her a red-bag amulet. We met today and I gave her the amulet, tying it around her neck in the names she chose of Kwan Yin, Kali Ma and the Virgin Mary.

I think there must be very strong magic in these amulets as I felt a great deal of tingles right from my feet travelling up to my head. She didn't feel anything. I had this experience the last time I gave a friend an amulet.

Maxine

JMG,
I injured my lower back several weeks ago - bulging disk pushing against a nerve. I have constant pain and discomfort. Needless to say, this condition is monopolizing my life. It is rather difficult to focus on much else. I had Quin add me to the Prayer List and have been working with a chiropractor, who has only been performing very mild therapy so far. I would like to avoid regular doctor (drugs, or surgery, or both). Anyway, today, I realized that I should be performing an affirmation. So, I devised the following: "I am strong and healthy." Does this seem like an appropriate focus or can you, perhaps, suggest a better one?
Thank you,
WILL1000

Dion Fortune on her Practical Occultism in Daily Life, on the chapter of karma says:

It is open to anyone who can rise above a self-centred attitude to do what the initiate does, and invoke the Lords of Karma. Before he ventures upon this, however, he must have reached the point in spiritual development where he desires the good rather than the pleasant-the ideal of perfected character in preference to the pleasure-pain principle When his heart is really turned towards the ideal, the Dark Angel which according to Qabalistic tradition stands behind his left shoulder, becomes an initiator and shows him the Path.

What is she referring to when she says the Dark Angel? I first thought that she might be talking about the sephirah corresponding to the shoulder location, but it doesn't seem to be that to me.

Threaded | Flat

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Magic for the Wilderness Outdoorsmen

no subject

MOE Master attunement; blessing offer

appealing to the dead?

Comet experimental deliniation

Affirmations, Willpower, and Sundry Comments

Diagram tradition in esotericism

Paying the Troll toll

Julius Evola

Chestnut In Front of Door

Grove ritual SOP

Help me track down this short story?

I may have been doing the LRP wrong...

Pattern Magic/Mysticism

Proofreader/editor needed for Sacred Homemaking

2025

Exercise Compatibility

Prayer… Hurts?

no subject

Folk of the Path of Descent

no subject

Protection against tobacco

Magical Amulets TSW

no subject

no subject