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 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.

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 all next week!***

Comments

Re: End of Year Lookback and Anything Learned/Excited about for Past/New Year?

[brenainn]

That's very interesting. Most of my deity statues are solid, and not easily hollowed out. Can one make an agalma by fixing the statue to a hollow base that is filled with appropriate resonating materials? Is there a specific ritual or set of rituals one must use when creating an agalma?

Re: Modern Order of Essenes Healings

[open_space]

I would be grateful to get another round for whatever I need the most healing right now. Thanks again!

Affirmations, Willpower, and Sundry Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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!

[not_gandalf]

Perhaps doing a ritual work where you create a barrier against unwanted intrusion, a clearing of the space around you, and an invocation of Light and harmonious energies (ie, a SOP, for example), would be helpful. It seems to me, just off the cuff, that one or both of your parents, either intentionally or nconsciously, is beaming stuff at you, and this is bouncing in and effecting your divinations. See if doing a clearing and protecting thing of some sort would help.

Re: End of Year Lookback and Anything Learned/Excited about for Past/New Year?

[ecosophia]

1) I don't know whether this would work or not. This is an ancient technique that I'm reviving on the base of very limited textual evidence; it's all experimental, and so trying the hollow base would be a worthwhile experiment.

2) Put the synthemata (the magically effective substances) into the agalma during the day and hour of the ruling planet; that seems to work quite well.

Re: Essenes and Octagon

[ecosophia]

Drop me your email address, either via my email (if you have it) or in a comment marked "not for posting," and I'll email you a copy when it's ready.

[ecosophia]

You can certainly do the rituals in your imagination, and I'd recommend that -- it's a useful practice in its own right, and it'll prevent you from losing any ground during the aftermath of your surgery. You might consider asking Tunesmyth to include you on the prayer list, btw -- some readers have had very positive effects from doing that.

Re: End of Year Lookback and Anything Learned/Excited about for Past/New Year?

[open_space]

1) What is physiological alchemy?

2) Regarding agalmata. Are they consecrated via a similar method as the Egyptian ritual of the opening of the mouth?

Re: Essenes and Octagon

[not_gandalf]

Yes, Please and thank you! I have already printed out the MOE and bound it for use, and also put a copy on my eReader. The Octagon material would also be great to have as a PDF.

Diagram tradition in esotericism

[(Anonymous)]

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

[guillem66]

Kylec, i'm very sorry for what you have lost. I had intruders into my property, too, and i know how awful the feeling is. I do hope that better happenings come your way soon.

Guillem.

Re: Hermes/Thoth

[ecosophia]

1) Yes. You have the choice to accept or decline.

2) All these things are also contexts for trickery. Writing is the basis for fake credentials and deceptive propaganda; learning is as often as not learning how to cheat; fraudulent alchemists are more common than honest ones, and the ability to convince the mind in the absence of facts is a basic element of many kins of magic. Mercury is the god of ambivalence, of things that can be used for good and evil alike.

3) No. Thoth is a moon god; Hermes corresponds to the planet Mercury. Thoth doesn't have the reputation for trickery, either.

Re: Human Design

[ecosophia]

Thank you for this. I'll take a look at it when time permits.

Re: Planetary charity for finding new place

[ecosophia]

Rentals are ruled by the Moon.

Paying the Troll toll

[xcalibur_djs]

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?

Julius Evola

[(Anonymous)]

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?

[ecosophia]

The "encyclopedia" was originally issued in 2000 under a different title. As for the others, it's always possible I got something wrong, you know.

Re: Hermes/Thoth

[(Anonymous)]

Hello,

(Not the OP),

Question for the OP:

Did you do anything to encourage Hermes to contact you? For example, do you have a daily practice of some kind that might have grabbed his attention?


I'm very interested in this topic. I hope you don't mine me asking.


Thanks in advance to you and JMG

Re: If I may ask a few questions about the circumstances in which you stopped watching television ..

[(Anonymous)]

I loves Iolchak, and it was popular, but the writers ran out of monsters.

—Princess Cutekitten

Re: The failure of spirituality

[ecosophia]

First of all, you're quite right. A lot of people who think they're in touch with profound spiritual wisdom are mindlessly parroting the messages of the corporate media. The last decade has been an acid test for the ability of spiritual traditions to help people rise above the mass mind, and a great many of the traditions active in the Western world have failed that test utterly, often in the most humiliating ways.

I do have a theory about why this is, though it'll doubtless offend some people. The forms of meditation practiced in most spiritual traditions in the modern West teach people to shut down the thinking mind. Whether they're chanting mantras, practicing mindfulness meditation, or what have you, they're all teaching themselves not to think, and it's not surprising that in fact, they've learned not to think.

Classic Western occultism, by contrast, teaches discursive meditation, which engages the thinking mind. In discursive meditation you don't silence your thoughts, nor do you observe them floating past while making no attempt to assess them -- you examine them, study them, take them apart to see how they work, and put them back together in various ways. That develops skills that enable the practitioner to see through the kind of cheap thoughtstoppers marketed by the corporate media. There may be other tools that make this happen, but discursive meditation is the one I know.

Re: Planetary alignments

[ecosophia]

Nope. Planetary alignments happen fairly often, and they don't mean a thing astrologically.

[ecosophia]

Hmm! I haven't used the Marseilles deck, so I wasn't aware of this.

Re: Amulet follow up

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Interesting -- thanks for this.

Re: Modern Order of Essenes Healings

[(Anonymous)]

I need all the help I can get! I have hepatitis.

—Princess Cutekitten

Re: SGO and the icosahedron

[ecosophia]

It's quite simple, really. The polyhedrons that are made of triangles are in order of density: water is denser than air, so has 20 triangles as distinct from air's 8, and air is denser than fire/heat/energy, so has 8 triangles compared to fire's 4.