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 sixty-first published book and my third anthology of short pieces, including all my best essays from my post-Hermetic period (the Hermetic essays were released earlier in my 2019 book The City of Hermes). It's probably the best one-volume introduction to the whole range of my ideas and interests, for anyone who wants to risk plunging down that N-dimensional rabbit hole.  It also includes my most widely cited essay, "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse." On the off chance you're interested, copies can be purchased here if you're in the United States and here 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 next week!***

Comments

Re: Heathen Beginner books

[jprussell]

Fair enough, and thanks for the counter-points. I'm not familiar with the current version of The Troth nor Our Troth, so I can't speak to them and am glad someone else who can brought them up - I'll have to look into them for some broader perspective.

Also, fair point on the "pre-work" needed for Nine Doors of Midgard - I found my way into Heathenry via the Runes, so I had read and worked with those other books before checking it out, and I might have over-estimated the newcomer-friendlieness of NDoM's "on-ramp."

And the UPG point for Krasskova and Kaldera (not familiar with Stinson) is also fair - they could be clearer on what comes from their own experiences versus what's grounded in lore/archaeology/reconstruction. Personally, I've found the fact that they address the personal and experiential side of Heathen religious practice valuable enough to mostly be okay with that, but that's another place where my own prior more academic non-religious familiarity with the material might have given me some tools someone wholly new might not have, and so I might have not given it enough weight.

As for the socio-political stuff, yeah, I mostly also tried to steer clear of that, as I think it's largely distracting from finding a relationship with the Gods. Krasskova and Kaldera have some very strong views on those matters, obviously, and a lot of that is implicit in some of the material in their two books I mentioned, but I appreciated the way that the two books I mentioned laid out "here are things a lot of modern Heathens argue about that are tangled up in both religious and political things" without explicitly saying "and this is the right way" (at least as I remember it, it's been a couple of years since I read either). That strikes me as helpful for working out how much you might want to engage with or avoid such hot-button topics, and how to evaluate writers who have definite views on them.

Anyhow, as I said, thanks for providing the OP with a different opinion and some other options, I hope he or she finds it useful.

Cheers,
Jeff