ecosophia | 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.

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So there has been a lot of chatter on the Internets about You-Tuber Rudyard Lynch, also known as the "Whatifalthistory" guy, posting ten hours of an autobiographical account on YouTube in which he slurped down huge mugs of a drug known as kratom while recording and related a lurid narrative of his life that included alleged parental sexual abuse and mind-warping mental abuse. The highlight of the whole thing was an account of an intense and brutal trip he took with a heavy-duty psychedelic plant known as Ayahuasca in which he communed with an array of spirit-beings including the Abrahamic God Almighty, the Devil, and the Norse deity Odin. Odin in particular apparently charged him with a grandiose mission in life that when one hears Lynch relate it, sounds like schizophrenic delusions.

Naturally, this generated a lot of backlash and concern in which Lynch's sanity was roundly questioned. Lynch took down the videos and the rambling "X" posts associated with them, the fruit-bat crackers craziness of which really has to be respectively viewed and read in order to be fully appreciated. In subsequent "X" posts, Lynch claimed to be "only joking" and trolling the online left, but having seen the choicest excerpts of these videos, I find that difficult to believe.

So one thing I came away with regards to tripping on intense psychedelics, is that it really seems to me that if one really is talking to spirit-beings in these supposed metaphysical adventures, that they may very well be demons at worst, as many conservative Christians are maintaining about Lynch's encounters, or at least the very sort of deceptive trickster entities about which Emmanuel Swedenborg cautioned his readers. Would you say that this is a fair characterization of what one is likely to encounter when one ingests intensely psychedelic substances?

Edited 2025-01-20 10:24 (UTC)

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.

Yeap, completely agree. Even if you do not get lost in the wilderness (the somewhat reputable places have people not commuting in the ritual to make sure someone can deal with those cases, at least in the material plane), you never know what kind of parasite will make the return trip with you. Once comfy in the office zoo, there's no way to tell what other shenanigans this thing could amuse itself with.

By the way, your "facilitator" comment made me think of a certain Disney character: https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Dr._Facilier

That would be an apt description! I met one Dr. Facilier who took very little care of the people that trusted him, used the spotlight to play very inadequate songs and feel like a rockstar while people were tripping their guts out. Only to hear him later talk in a low voice to the guy that owned the place if next time they could pack the place even more. Which was very inappropriate, people were already next to each other skin to skin. As far as I understand, in a proper ceremony, you need to be 2 meters away from anybody. Coincidentally enough, that is about the distance the aura spans from the body, to prevent contamination once everybody's mind have been blown open. In that same ceremony I was invited as a by stander, and I saw one mental pathology bounce from mind to mind, the weakest link taking in all the grubby emotions from everybody else... poor guy. He ended up mumbling to himself in pain about a grandma that wasn't his and a loss he didn't live while the owner of the trauma suddenly felt great and was dancing.

I agree on the somewhat, the only place I know that is good to do ayahuasca is in the jungles of Perú with a tribe where the medicine is brewed properly and fresh by an elder that knows what he is doing. Just as the only hands that is proper to receive hikuri is from a marakame... The couple places I know that do such things also have someone not participating, and a doctor.

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...

There is also the fact that if Rudyard Lynch's autobiographical account is mostly accurate (some people think the sexual abuse might be a drug-induced false memory), his probably-abusive mother was schizophrenic, and Lynch is at the age where schizophrenia, if it's nascently present, starts to fully manifest.

Oh, that's not good. I've seen heavy drug use trigger a psychotic break in a vulnerable person more than once.

In 2016 the son of an AFL coach here in Adelaide, murdered his father by stabbing him in the chest as he opened the front door.
I remember at the time there was talk of him taking part in Ayahuasca ceremonies, which may have precipitated his schizophrenia.
I think even now, he's still a mental wreck.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-25/cy-walsh-to-return-to-detention-over-mental-health-concerns/103020704

Ouch. I wish I was surprised.

It really is very sad. Lynch's a bright kid, not much older than my eldest, who has worked out of basic principles the same themes developed by JMG in his Archdruid Report days. As a result, his conclusions are often weird, but never far from the mark IMHO.
What upsets me the most is how people go on and assume his experiences while in use are invalid/fake. His recollections make sense absolutely to me, if you consider the caveat that this is a person who is seeking spiritual encounters while intoxicated... and probably has either dismissed or never heard about protection rituals. Even if higher powers are communicating with him, we will only be able to "tune in" to their channels at the "frequency" he's vibrating at the time... and of course, it is more likely that whatever is responding from the other side of the line is an inhabitant of the regions in the astral plane that this guy spends the most of his time at: no demons, probably, but neither a divine being is likely.

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