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.

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 next week!***

Comments

Book publications

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe a strange or obvious questions about your books:

1) When the overs change from one edition to the next, what is the reason/who initiates it? And do you have any say and/or final say in how the covers appear?

2) Is there any chance that your books would ever be packaged into sets (based on theme) for purchase instead of individually? Or does that require a certain volume of sales, or would it otherwise hurt your existing sales?

Re: Book publications

[ecosophia]

1) Authors have no control over the cover and other packaging issues; tolerably often they don't even have any input, and even when they do, it's often useful for them to keep their mouths shut and save their energy for more productive arguments. My books have appeared tolerably often with covers I dislike.

2) That's an intriguing idea; I don't know of it being done in recent times, however. Is there a particular set you'd like to suggest?

Re: Book publications - sets

[emily07]

All your fictional "sets" come to mind: WOH and Salsha, WOH especially because it continues to teach me, last week for example it finally occured to me that how a prophecy-gift evolved: through sights that are at first maybe entertaining but rather odd or interrupting to something that is a help sometimes to something that can be used as one might use any other tool one has more or less mastered. And it occured to me that that is also the way e.g. clairvoiance et. al. might develop.
I also wonder if getting the differnt path books but that are on one path in a "set" but I wont know how to do that. DA purchaser might not benefit from the book on the start of the list and vice versa.

Re: Book publications - sets

[ecosophia]

You might consider dropping an email to the publisher of my novels and suggesting it -- publishers, especially small ones, pay more attention to customers' suggestions than a lot of people realize. As for the nonfiction, hmm -- if the "sets" involve more than one publisher, that won't work, but any of them that have the same publisher might be worth contacting.

Re: Book publications - sets

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I am not sure how interested/interesting other people would find this idea, and you may not want to mix this type of idea with your site, but maybe dedicate a single post to such ideas that we can discuss over a week instead of by Monday night deadline?

If there is any reasonable consensus, I would be pretty happy to write to the publisher and even pre-order such a thing as a way to thank you for all you've done by way of responses, etc.

But I may be in a very tiny minority--unless there is ample room for discussion, I can't know either way.

Re: Book publications - sets

[ecosophia]

I'll consider a Dreamwidth post on the subject sometime this coming week.