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: 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.