ecosophia | Magic Monday

Current Mood: watchful
Current Music: Jethro Tull, "War Child"

Entry tags:

Magic Monday

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. Given the events scheduled tomorrow, I've pulled this one forward out of order; it's my 65th published book, the one that got me banned from science fiction conventions (despite 18 SF and fantasy novels currently in print) and dropped like a hot rock by most of the Neopagans I know. No, it's not a work of science fiction, nor does it have much to say about Neopaganism. It's a discussion of why the policies embraced by a bipartisan consensus of the elite classes in the US made the rise of Donald Trump or somebody like him inevitable. Yes, it also talks about magic -- the magical manipulations that were used for fifty years to silence any attempt to talk publicly about what the policies just mentioned did to the working classes in the United States, the magic wielded by a motley band of (mostly) young men living in their mothers' basements who marched off to the Meme Wars beneath the banner of a cartoon frog, and the magic attempted by the so-called Magic Resistance, whose attempts to cast death curses and other equally pleasant spells at the people they hate did a lot to bring about the events of last November and the days immediately before us.

That is to say, it's just a little controversial. ;-) On the off chance you're interested anyway, you can order a copy here if you live in the US and at your favorite online shop or full service bookstore if you live 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 further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi JMG and others,

I am wondering about a certain difference that I perceive between on the one hand Christian and Islamic (I live in Europe, they are most visible here) institutions and more spiritual or occult movements and people on the other hand. I don't necessarily have a prejudice against one or another.
The thing is that in my perception the churches and mosques here actually put a lot of effort in helping the disadvantaged like homeless, refugees etc. A lot of volunteers work towards that. It's clear that there is also a lot that isn't as ethical in those groups, but I do believe they are rather honest in that aspect (at least the volunteers are definitely)
On the other hand the spiritual and occult side seems to me much more self centered (as in focus on individual growth and almost no helping the disadvantaged) and also more money oriented (like I said, churches are definitely not perfect in this, but they do seem to really help people without asking something in return here, not even going to a service). I do know multiple people within a wide spectrum of spiritual and religious practice and I see this aspect first hand a lot.
Interestingly enough I also know a lot of lets say socialist atheïst people and they usually really don't like spiritual and or occult practices for this reason.

Is this something you believe to be true or know the reasons for the way this is perceived this way?

Okay, time travel in the literal sense probably is not what I'm getting at with this question, but is there any form of magic or ritual that is intended to place one's mind or spirit in a prior time period so that one can work on various issues stemming from that time? I've seen a few such books pop up in my suggested purchases on sites like Amazon, and I'm wondering if it there's anything to such ideas.

Stealers wheel says it best
https://youtu.be/N8i1oxyQo08

I'm glad to be stuck in the middle with you:^)

Edited (spelling) 2025-01-20 14:54 (UTC)

That makes a great deal of sense to me. One of the problems I see in current treatments for depression is that depression isn't a single condition but a whole galaxy of different mental, emotional, and physical conditions with a broadly similar clinical presentation. When it's emotionally rooted, the depressed state (as John Gilbert liked to point out) is a layer of camouflage over anger, which is itself a protective shell over fear, shame, grief, or some combination of these. But there are also "depressed" people who suffer from food allergies and can transform their emotional state dramatically by using an elimination diet to figure out what's triggering them, and "depressed" people who have simply absorbed self-defeating beliefs and can be promptly and permanently cured by helping them change their belief system.

Putting them all on antidepressants, irrespective of the details, is bad medicine -- but there's no shortage of that nowadays, of course.

Thank you! It's a great song.

Thank you for this as always.

1) Start with the Pagans who invented theurgy -- Iamblichus and Proclus. Gregory Shaw's books Theurgy and the Soul and Hellenic Tantra are good introductions.

2) Sure. Elementals have no individual connection to the divine plane. They share in a collective connection. They are capable of achieving an individual connection and becoming entities capable of evolution, but they don't start out that way -- they start out as simply self-perpetuating structures created by the Lords of Flame, which have gradually evolved varying degrees of consciousness. It's part of our work as human beings to help them become individualized; we do that partly by giving them a template they can copy, but there are also esoteric traditions (notably the Rosicrucian and Druid traditions) that work with the elemental creation directly to help them on their way.

That's one of the reasons why a proper ayahuasca ceremony --which is true also for hikuri of the wixrarita, and all the sacred plants of power I know-- needs a cleansing and blessing of the participants, a central consecrated fire that under absolutely no circumstance can be extinguished and constant prayer and chanting by the shaman or an assistant. Otherwise you can't raise your consciousness to the proper level and once you have bursted the doors open, anything could come in. Which is why I constantly tell tourists that under no circumstance you should go with a "facilitator", given that they are mostly clueless of this fact and then she you get the people that snap or runaway into the jungle or mountains to never be found again.

That could be fun. I've already mentioned these statues more than once over the last ten years or so:

But of course there's more that can be said about them, and of course the meme warriors are already doing their level best to say it:

I'm glad that isn't a question, because all I can do is smile and nod and say, "Keep at it." One of the things that appeals most to me about Western esoteric spirituality is that there isn't one fixed truth that everybody realizes -- instead, every one of us experiences a different facet of a truth that transcends human consciousness.

I appreciate this conversation about depression since it has a devastating impact on so many people. I was taught to think about depression that is emotionally root in a way similar to what JMG shared above, a depression of the life force, so in a twisted way when at the time the strategy of depressing oneself develops, it's meant to be self-protective. As someone who struggled with low level emotionally rooted depression for decades, I can say that for me it helped tremendously to develop a healthy capacity to feel anger and healthy protest.

From an esoteric perspective can we think about it as contracting our etheric field? I ask because regular practice of the SOP has also helped me a lot, a practice I find gently expansive.

A Midwestern Doctor wrote an informative piece on depression - https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/how-big-pharma-sold-depression-and-1c0

1) Not only am I not a stockbroker, I have zero personal experience with investments, and most of my secondhand experience with investments has consisted of watching people lose their shirts and land in bankruptcy courts because they bought into a bubble and lost everything when it popped. Given that stocks are near all-time highs, if I got a legacy like that one I'd cash it out immediately and put the sum into money market accounts in two different banks, but that's not investment advice -- it's just what I'd do.

2) Nothing you can do will make up for lack of sleep. The best magic you can do is to arrange for your toddler to spend a night at a sleepover with a family member or friend you can trust, and let yourself sleep like a log. Also, make sure you're getting adequate nutrition, and consider scheduling a massage every week or two. Sometimes material plane methods really are what's needed!

You could tell your consultant, with your criteria, that chi is the same as water and the wind, not a separate source from whatever sprouts Life at every moment. Just as he keeps having electrical pulses that keep his heart beating and lungs pumping, there is a subtler aspect of that electricity that can be handled by pressure in the same way that a subtler aspect of muscles can be handled by massage to clear blockages, tensions and stimulate bloodflow. That chi, is the same breath that God breathed into man, so the source is no other than God himself, understood to a great detail by a different culture from a different time just as ours understands modern medicine, surgery, etc. Its just a different word for "the breath of life".

Genesis 2:7 NIV 7 Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

1) My take is that the archetypes are active, for us, on the mental plane -- they reach all the way up the planes, of course, but the mental plane is where we contact them -- and the Self is the point of integration of the archetypes. That being the case, yes, individuation and the building of the mental sheath are the same thing.

2) Yes. Choose a deck you won't be using for other purposes, one with good memorable images. Memorize the sequence of trumps, working at it until you can call them to mind clearly in order. That gives you what Giordano Bruno called "subjects" -- the permanent images you keep in memory.

Now start using it with grocery lists and the like. Assign one item (one "adject," in Bruno's terms) to each trump: say, a carton of milk to the Fool, two pounds of codfish to the Magician, and so on through your list. Reimagine the images with the items included -- the Fool is drinking from the carton as he walks, the Magician holds a codfish in his upraised hand and there's another on the table, and so on. (Make it silly -- the images will stick better in the memory.) When you go to the store, leave the list in your pocket, call the trumps to mind, and see how many items you remember. (Check the list before you head for the checkout line.) Find other ways to use the cards as memory subjects, remembering always to turn things into vivid mental images that can be made part of the card images in your mind.

That's an interesting idea -- depression as a contracted aura. You'd need to check with a good clairvoyant or two, but it certainly makes intuitive sense.

That whole topic makes me just so angry and yes, that is a layer around the misery that can be both experienced and caused by a "depressive" person which is put on this medication and that medication over decades to NO effect whatsoever, well maybe except for the person to become obese and develop various other health problems that make life even more miserable. I know a few depressive persons very closely and have observed and partly shared their fate over the years. I've suffered some truly horrible episodes myself, for which I would have gotten the stamp "depressive" if I had cared to go to a doctor. How anybody can maintain the belief that antidepressants work as a treatment of the - as you have rightly pointed out - galaxy of wildly different conditions that all get labeled "depression" is unfathomable to me.

There are healers out there who are capable to help a depressive person and I'm sure that some of them are MDs. But the other rather sad part of the story is - at least that's my experience - that in many cases it might not be possibly to really help a depressive person at all - something has to come from inside and some are maybe not ready or capable or strong enough to make the leap at that moment. It's so very weird - one thought that can be said in one sentence can make all the difference - but for how long do many have to wander to find it?

Greetings,
Nachtgurke

Speaking for myself, I like this balance. I can, through my church, make some meaningful contributions to the disadvantaged in my community. In my occult practice, I can focus on my own needs. Nothing wrong with that, and I think those "socialist atheist people" dislike that because they tend to be extreme collectivists. They're essentially the secular equivalent of a dogmatic, fundamentalist monotheist.

That's certainly a plausible theory, and it's very close to the one that John Gilbert included in his writings for the Modern Order of Essenes. This is from the Apprentice papers:

"Underlying every physical ailment known to humanity is an emotional issue. Resolve the emotional issue and you heal the physical ailment. Typical emotional issues include anger, anxiety, grief or sorrow, resentments, blame, shame or guilt.

"Underlying every emotional issue known to humanity is a mental block. Resolve this mental block and you heal the emotional issue. This mental block is usually associated with denial and not accepting life, self and others, not forgiving self and others, and not being lovingly kind to self and others.

"Underlying every mental block known to humanity is an intuitive (psychological) error. Resolve this intuitive error and you heal the mental block. Most intuitive errors have to do with ignoring our intuitive insights or doing the opposite.

"Underlying every intuitive error known to humanity is a spiritual disconnection. Resolve this spiritual disconnection and you heal the intuitive error. Spiritual disconnections happen when we separate ourselves from the Divine. All spiritual disconnections are real. Everything else is a symptom. Physical ailments, emotional issues, mental blocks and intuitive or psychological errors are all symptoms. These symptoms tell us we are distancing ourselves from the Divine. We are separating ourselves from the Divine. The teachings of the Modern Essenes are designed to help us reconnect with the Divine.

"All healing is spiritual healing. When we distance ourselves from the Divine, we cut ourselves off from the spiritual energy we need to survive as vibrantly healthy, mentally alert, emotionally stable, psychologically sound, intuitive human beings. This lack of spiritual energy is the cause of all our psychological (intuitive), mental, emotional and physical ills. Once we restore our connection to the Divine and start replenishing our spiritual energy, we heal. We heal on every level of our being. This healing is called spiritual healing. The end product of all spiritual healing is spiritual health. Abundant spiritual health is our goal."

https://octagonsociety.org/archives/modern-order-of-essenes/

Edited 2025-01-20 16:33 (UTC)

To share, for those who wonder what HOGD, TSW or R+C mean, a list of abbreviations used on Ecosophia. And for those who wonder what books came before I separated out the list of books.

It's a good day to discuss "The King in Orange". It greatly improved my understanding of politics. Thanks for writing it!

I've known a lot of people down through the years who insisted that they were achieving profound spiritual states by taking drugs. Not one of them ever achieved much of anything; those that made predictions were invariably wrong, and those that claimed some high spiritual status nonetheless spent the rest of their lives acting like drug-addled losers rather than wise spiritual masters. Now maybe I've just been unlucky, and there really are people who achieve the summit of enlightenment by doing drugs, but until I meet one my opinion is that they're just stoners babbling nonsense.

It may well be that demons or deceptive spirits are involved now and then, but again, what I've seen suggests to me that the "entities" in question are no more real than the tap-dancing Day-Glo purple spiders encountered in slightly less exotic drug trips...

Though I agree with JMG's core point above that "depression" is an overly broad label, one book that I found helpful in rethinking the particularly emotionally-rooted kind (and the unhelpfulness of the overly broad label) was, appropriately enough, Rethinking Depression by Eric Maisel. It takes a largely existentialist materialist view, which jived with where I was when I read it, but might be less helpful to me (or, I assume, most here) these days, but I figured I'd share it anyhow. Maisel's main contention is that the label "depression" compresses and flattens the deeply human experience of sorrow, hopelessness, and despair.

Anyhow, hope this is helpful to someone, and my blessings to any who will have them,
Jeff

Honestly, your client reminds me of those fundamentalist Christians who won't put up a Christmas tree or use the word "Easter" because they're "Pagan." It is more laughable than anything else. I just hope they don't end up with any notable amount of power in the coming years.

Yes, that's more or less correct as I understand it. Death is a complex process; first the soul sheds its material body, leaving it to shut down and decay; then, within a few days, the soul sheds its etheric body (the body of prana or life force), leaving it to disintegrate. Once it's past this latter step, which is called the Second Death by occultists, it's on the astral plane, the plane we normally experience in our dreams, and there under normal circumstances it processes its memories of the life just finished and absorbs their lessons.

That process doesn't require help frm the living, strictly speaking -- there are angels and helping spirits on that plane already -- but help from the living is valuable. Praying for the dead is of great benefit to them, and so are traditional rituals. If that isn't done, there's more of a chance that the soul may refuse to process its memories and flee from them, and in that case, yes, it tends to reincarnate very quickly in a complete muddle. That's what happened to me the last time around, and it helped make the first half of this life a steaming mess.

As for being in spirit, it depends entirely on how you spent your last life. The process of dealing with your memories includes experiencing them objectively, without the filters of self-interest and self-justification; you get to see exactly what you did and how it affected other people, and you experience the emotional and cognitive states your actions brought about. If you hurt a lot of people -- well, that's where the idea of hell came from. If you helped a lot of people, that's the source of beliefs in heaven.

1) It feels to me as though everyone's holding their breath, waiting to see what happens!

2) No, you're realistic. I cast a mundane astrology chart for Trump's second term...

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/311834.html

...and no, we're not going to get a new era of peace and harmony, or a golden age. It's quite possible that some serious abuses will be corrected, but it's going to be a real slog getting there.

As far as I know, it's simply epic incompetence and corruption on the part of California's one-party government, combined with the increasing desertification of the California coast driven by a changing climate.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 2 of 10

Magic Monday

no subject

Time Travel Magic?

Re: The King in Orange

Re: The Stranger Side of Ketamine

Re: The King in Orange

Re: Ecosophia Prayer List

no subject

Re: Psychedelic Entities

Re: The Orange Monk

Re: Meaning

Re: The Stranger Side of Ketamine

Re: Handling investments

Re: Akupressure / -puncture and Christians / source of Ch‘i

no subject

Re: The Stranger Side of Ketamine

Re: The Stranger Side of Ketamine

no subject

Re: Esoteric causes of disease, books and recommendation.

no subject

Re: Psychedelic Entities

Re: The Stranger Side of Ketamine

Re: Akupressure / -puncture and Christians / source of Ch‘i

Re: Afterlife

Re: Quiet and sanity

Re: Occult dimensions to Cali fires