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 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.

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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

Astrological dance

[vitranc]

Hi JMG,
There is talk on the webs of a strange behaviour of the two planets Saturn and Neptune. Not only are they to have a conjunction, but they cross into Aries sign together, have a conjunction, then they both become retrograde and go back to Pisces sign, and then cross a second time for another conjunction.
A nice jig.
Do you have any thoughts on Saturn-Neptune conjunctions?

Best regards,
V

Re: Astrological dance

[ecosophia]

All the outer planet conjunctions are a big deal. It's not a surprise that these two are doing a retrograde dance together -- that's normal, given the relationship between the Earth's orbit (which generates retrogrades) and the much greater orbits of the outer planets -- but the fact that they're conjunct the first time at 0° Aries is a huge deal.

0° Aries is the beginning of the zodiac, the reset button on all the greater and lesser cycles of time. Any outer planet conjunction within the first four degrees of Aries punches that button. Jupiter and Saturn conjoin there every 960 years or so, and that's the beginning of one of the great cycles of history -- the last one was in 1604, so we have another five or six centuries to wait until it happens again. As for a Saturn-Neptune conjunction at dead-on 0° Aries...that hasn't happened before in recorded history. The closest match I can find is a conjunction at 2° Aries in 593 BC, which marked the birth of philosophy and scriptural religions, the transformation of literacy from the prerogative of a small class of scribes to something that many people learned, the invention of democracy, and a cascade of other changes all through human society and culture.

That makes sense. Saturn represents the ground rules, the basic framework of hard limits and proven structures on which society rests. Neptune represents the deep mind, the realm of dreams, visions, and the collective unconscious, and it has a dissolving and transforming effect. So we can expect significant shifts in those basic ground rules after the conjunction in 2026. That doesn't mean utopia is about to arrive, and it doesn't even mean those changes will be fast -- Saturn and Neptune are both very slow-moving planets -- but changes there will be.

Re: Astrological dance

[vitranc]

Ok, I had to look it up because the blogs that I read said 2025.
So Neptun transits to Aries this March, alone, Saturn follows in May and because Saturn is faster they meet in 2 degrees Aries in July.
Then they both reverse and separate, because Saturn is faster, and go back to Pisces.
And February 2026 they both meet and pass to Aries within 1 degree from another.
That is a good point about 593 BC. I wonder how the people back then saw it?

Interesting times, interesting times.

The closest that I can imagine is WoH: Chorazin; Owen getting a reading from Sallie Eagle. Where she looks up from the cards and says: „… but nothing stays as it was.”
The fourth book, and twelve chapters later. Fittingly we are talking about Neptune.

Re: Astrological dance

[ecosophia]

I don't know that anyone's gone back to find the Chaldean and Persian astrological records from that conjunction! The Weird of Hali reference is apropos, since Shub-Ne'hurrath is Saturn in one of its aspects, and Cthulhu is as Neptunian a Neptune as ever Neptuned...

Re: Astrological dance

[vitranc]

So just spitballing here:
If someone would find a tarnished antique sword, a black book of spells. And invite a friend with a rose gold family heirloom ring, to which she has an extraordinary attachment.
And then go to some seaside vantage point somewhere on the east coast on 14. February 2026 at about 8:00 and ritually cleave a clay fashioned five pointed star in half.

Things might get interesting 🤔.

Re: Astrological dance

[ecosophia]

I'd want to be there, just to watch!

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

Well... alright, then. So, what would you like to see come out of the Saturn-Neptune conjunction this time? As far as I can tell, the universe is not at all averse to taking requests, even from puny humans like us. We should each probably begin brainstorming a wishlist now, in order to get it sufficiently whittled down and focused for our prayers to stand a chance of making any difference by the time the conjunction arrives.

Changes in the ground rules of the collective unconscious, the birthplace of influential dreams and visions, would be quite the magical transformation (in the Fortunian sense.) Those changes will inevitably unfold in accordance with the greater wills of the universe, but lesser wills do somehow manage to exert a tiny pull on greater wills. With this type of conjunction promising such sweeping changes in consciousness, there’s an awful lot of will to get in accordance with, and not a lot of time to do it in!

Given the truly creepy number of vision-starved tiny wills currently focused on no real change to the status quo, perhaps our willing a little visionary counterbalance to their visionless inertia could make an oversized difference. Certainly offering our prayers up to any currently disregarded greater wills could have far-reaching outcomes. For those who feel up to it, a little concerted effort on shifting the fulcrum between the visionary and the visionless could quite possibly knock our prayers right out of the park.

A little imagination, a tiny dream, a wee bit of vision can become the decisive point around which the whole universe turns. All that is required is for us to align our tiny wills with the greater wills around us. And let us not forget to give thanks for the crucial passive inertia to which so many have now chained their vital will, thereby providing the essential opening needed for our own tiny dreams to be able to shake the cosmos. (As always: Results may vary. Author makes no guarantees or warrantees of any kind. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Etc.)

I have to admit, trying to imagine anything as sweepingly transformative as classical philosophy or democracy or widespread literacy is a daunting challenge. I tend to be more preoccupied with things like reupholstering a chair, or making guacamole before the avocados go bad. Somehow, I can’t see Saturn and Neptune conjuncting just to help me with my guacamole problems! Setting aside the dubious importance of perfectly ripened avocados, I guess it’s high time for me to up my game in the dreams and visions department. Anyone have any suggestions for visionary transformations of the underlying patterns of the collective unconscious that Saturn and Neptune might actually consider to be worth praying for?

— Christophe

Re: Astrological dance

[ecosophia]

I suspect what happens will be as utterly baffling to me as philosophy or democracy would have been to your average Bronze Age scribe. In fact, I'd prefer that -- human intelligence isn't all that impressive, and I'd much rather leave it to Saturn and Neptune to come up with something interesting themselves!

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

I don't remember if I actually went through with saying this the last time the topic came up about half a year ago, but, in case you hadn't already been aware of this way of connecting some of those dots: there's a certain development already halfway off the ground, which combines elements of capital-intensive material mechanicality with dreamlike readiness to produce illusions and grave systemic challenges in maintaining grounded meaningfulness, and which also might become a means by which dreamlike novelty, incoherence, and wishes could all flow through into material manifestation. And a number of observers close to this development are expecting it to be epochal, somewhere in the range of "comparable to the industrial revolution", "comparable to the oxygen catastrophe", and "comparable to the emergence of life".

I don't know, maybe you don't like hearing about that, but that observation seems like an important starting-point to include in speculation. I know you're expecting the whole phenomenon to blow itself up and choke itself off in a Plutonian way, but what if that still leaves a Minervan remnant?

For my part, if I knew that the development wasn't going to get any farther than Piscean dreamlikeness, so that it would not extend also to include Mercurial precise cunning, planning, and strategizing, or Solar coherently focused intention -- at least, that it wouldn't do so other than in net-benefic ways, anyway -- then that would be a big load off my mind. (It would also mean you had been right, at least as regarded what ended up happening in practice.)

Re: Astrological dance

[ecosophia]

Well, we'll just have to see, won't we?

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

Anything that takes that much hope-charged jargon to describe is unlikely to go anywhere except a self-policing echo-chamber. Likewise, anything claiming to be "already halfway off the ground" is likely to stay exactly where it has claimed to be, for precisely as long as the funding holds out.

— Christophe

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know why you call it "hope-charged jargon". I think if you count, word by word, the things you're somehow coming away with the impression that they're "jargon", you'll be surprised how many of those words are better fit by my hypothesis about how I was choosing which words to write, which is: "presenting, in a detailed but compact way, the specific elements of the relations between the phenomenon in question and the astrological entities it might be related to", those astrological entities being Saturn, Neptune/Pisces, Pluto (and Minerva), Mercury, and the Sun.

Also, the way you say that makes it seem as though you think I'm using astrological justifications to buttress my hope, and then in turn buttressing the astrological justifications with complicated jargon so I can get lost in the details and miss how the picture doesn't make sense. No. What?

This came into focus for me, in this form, far before I was really giving any attention to astrology. (Also it's mostly dread rather than hope.)

If you want complicated jargon, look at the arguments over the Church-Turing thesis. Ask yourself why the Universe goes so far out of its way to give skeptics so much ammunition, in the form of "decline effects" and "evasive psi" in parapsychology, which is the one place where you would normally have thought to expect science to discover that the Church-Turing thesis was false if the Universe wasn't playing unexpected games with humanity's states of knowledge. And then ask yourself how safe you should feel about your certainty that the Universe will abruptly stop imitating that same semblance of materialism being true, just at the point where people start leaning a lot harder on certain implications of the Church-Turing thesis.

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

Just spitballing, but you might benefit by reading Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". But maybe that's just something about Saturn and Neptune themselves, rather than about a millenium-scale change whose transition would have been facilitated by their contact.

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

Could this be that prediction of yours that something would happen in 2026 that would change some fundamental values that have been held for 2000 years?

If so, I wonder if it may actually be a discovery related to the historical Jesus, that in turn creates huge ructions at the heart of the mainstream Christian tradition.

Re: Astrological dance

[ecosophia]

That's an interesting speculation. The conjunction's going to change fundamental values that have been held for more than 2500 years, though...

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm, then I wonder if it might be a reset of some of the stuff that came out of the axial age. That would make sense,basically resetting things properly for the age of aquarius.

As to how that might present itself to us tiny humans I have no idea. Will just have to roll with it.

As always, occult training helps.

Re: Astrological dance

[(Anonymous)]

If TPTB thought it was really important for people to wholeheartedly believe in and practice Piscean religions, while still fitting those religions with figurative "explosive bolts" so that for some post-Piscean people or times those religions could easily collapse to appear retrospectively to have been nonsense, then that just goes to make me wonder what kinds of Aquarian nonsense I might have to somehow reconcile myself to proactively going along with, or else be liable to get adjusted the same way by forces on the same scale.

Re: Astrological dance

[vitranc]

There have been talks about this in the German language blogs. And the way it is phrased is, that this might have different effects on people with occult/spiritual practices, and those without. The reasoning is, that transsaturnians firstly work collectively, and secondly that their power can have negative manifestations for the unprepared. Neptune is both the planet of mysticism, but also delusions.

I have been drawn to your post about Karma, especially the part about personal and collective karma.
Could we see something like the masses being flushed along, and some individuals using this in other ways? I am not formulating this right, but it is early in the morning.