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Magic Monday

Midnight is breathing down our necks 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 is my sixth-fourth published book and sixteenth novel, and it's a sequel to my first novel, The Fires of Shalsha. Like that earlier novel, Journey Star is set on the second planet of Epsilon Eridani, which in the story was colonized two centuries back by a generation ship from Earth; like the earlier novel, it starts with a standard sort of conflict between seeming good and evil, but doesn't stay there. Having villains who are bad just because the heroes need someone to scorn and annihilate makes for dreary fiction; maybe, just maybe, even the most monstrous actions can be justified or even necessary in the eyes of those who do them...

And that's all I'm going to say about this strangest (so far) of my novels. All things considered, I think it worked fairly well. If you're interested, you can get copies here if you're in the United States and here if you're 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!***

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The comet I interpreted last year indicated that there would be a vast slaughter of the aristocracy, and we do seem to be seeing that just now. Other than that, no, but that's not surprising. Astrology predicts the natural order of events, and as I noted in The King in Orange, what's happening now is quite precisely supernatural: a divine power has intervened (or an archetype has been activated, if you want to use Jungian language) and thrown everything into confusion. The Changer is among us, the Left is behaving exactly as I predicted all those years ago, and nothing will ever be the same again...

I might be poking my nose at things I was not meant to poke. But I find imagery and concept of the Changer ?pleasant?, well not unwelcome.
1.) was he invited to act in the US, or did he decide to work of his own incomprehensible reasons.
2.) Where would one go to find out about “the big fish” swimming in the depth of the place one lives in?
3.) is, were, it safe to work with such powers? Or does one live them be unless they start making waves. And then one does the best to surf the wave.

Incidentally; There is a clique of German speaking mediums here, mr. E Fischer among them, who posted some weeks ago, that he saw “dark energy being over Europe and US”. And that it seems to flow away in the times to come. “Naturally” in a “waterfall” in german speaking Europe. And in “a black hole ringed with light” in the US. His interpretation was, that “the forces of light” are helping the process in the US. Might be connected.

0) I also find the Changer a welcome presence: challenging, always, but welcome. When I found that image of Coyote, who's the Changer in most of the dryland West, dancing and playing the Native American flute, my gut-level response was to bow very deeply and welcome the presence of God.

1) I know a lot of people, especially working class people who've been having their faces ground into the pavement by the bureaucratic-managerial class, have been praying their hearts out, asking for God to do something about the situation. It seems very possible to me that they got what they were asking for.

2) Read the old legends and folktales of the region where you live. The gods/archetypes leave their tracks in such places.

3) Gods are never safe. C.S. Lewis understood that: "Aslan is not a tame lion." If you invoke them, you get what they decide to give, which is not necessarily what you want.

4) Interesting. Well, we'll see.

0) that is a strong and precise reaction. I do not share it. But then I have never been to North America and maybe lack the connection. I get the same feeling I get with looking at those Japanese images of fox spirits; a positive force/spirit of indefinite power. Treat with respect and try to listen to what it said.

1-3) So such a thing is not uncalled. For what it is worth, I do hope this change turns out well for the US. For all of you. Let it change to reinvent itself. :-) I could easily imagine a possibility for such.
Incidentally, does Yeats idea of calling on the spirits of the land mean the same thing?

0) Understood. I was born and raised on this continent and have only briefly traveled off it; my ancestors have lived here for many generations; and so I'm attuned to it.

1-3) Yes. Most Americans don't know about land spirits -- all they know how to do is pray to the Christian god. The message still gets through.

Wow! This whole conversation makes me giddy with happiness! So if I understand correctly, as an American, and one whose family has been trickling in from Europe since the 1600s, I'm attuned to the Changer because my people are buried in this land in vast numbers? Family story has it that we've Narragansett ancestors; a story that predates such tales being considered fashionable, so I'm inclined to believe it. Regardless, is there a way to honor the Changer that you would recommend? So far, I'm just standing in awe of what I see unfolding around me, and praying to Thor to bless and protect those who work to make this nation the best it can be for all citizens.

One more question, if I may: Could the growth of Heathenry in this country be at all related to a sense of relatedness among the Gods of this land, and those of Northern Europe?

Thanks as always,
OtterGirl

1) The gods of this land have been relatively standoffish toward those of us who came here from Europe, and I'm not sure this is a good time to push that issue. If the legends are anything to go by, when they're ready to talk to us, they'll do so. In the meantime, the respect and caution suitable to all holy things is certainly called for; awe and prayer are always wise, of course.

2) The Heathen gods do seem to have naturalized here very well. I suspect part of that is because they were worshipped here long before the bulk of white settlement, if only in scattered settlements in the far northeast.

(not op) Can you point me to where I can read some of these legends? I understand it may be hard to recall where you read them or something like that, so no biggie if you can't.

I got them mostly from books in university libraries; you might see if you can find a copy of Arthur Ballard's Mythology of Southern Puget Sound, which has the story of Dukwibal the Moon, or Edward Sapir's Takelma Texts, which includes the story of Daldal the dragonfly. Other sources are linked here:

http://www.native-languages.org/transformer.htm

Edited 2025-02-11 01:47 (UTC)

To piggyback of off or this; How does one discern the mythic from the made up in such stories? I am asking since where I live there seems to be quite a lot of fairytale invention going on. I just looked up a collection and looking at the index, I saw that several stories were of 19-20 century make. Some politically motivated. How does one sort the sand from the gold nuggets? To use a scene from one of them.

Incidentally, in the collection I found a lot of classic greek stories, how do the Greek myths fit into the sense of the land, not in Greece? (Classical Greek stories like Seven against Thebes, Oedipus and Antigone,…)

Neither of these are easy questions, and I don't really have an answer to either of them. I tend to rely on old stories told over a broad territory, across cultural and linguistic boundaries, but it's a makeshift rule of thumb.

(not the OP) Have you ever read the works of Paul Brunton? I believe that somewhere in "A Search of Secret Egypt" he mentioned a story about during the decline of Ancient Egypt, as the priestly class was becoming more materialistic and corrupted, the gods withdrew. At/near the end, one scribe went to pray to a god for forgiveness as a last hope, but by then the gods had completely abandoned the ancient Egyptians to their fates.

I believe he also claimed to have slept overnight in the great pyramid and experienced very powerful djinn who were deliberately trapped in them millennia ago.

Are either of these possible/plausible?

I haven't read Brunton; he's been on the get-to list for a long time, but there's always been something higher up on that same list. As for the two stories, I have my doubts, if only because just about everybody in the occult scene in Brunton's time had their own canned stories about Egypt. Still, I suppose his could be true.

There are quite a lot of folk here in Rhode Island with Narragansett ancestry, including even many who look and can pass as "white," and don't tell outsiders about their partial Narragansett ancestry. Do you know much about your more distant ancestors in Rhode Island, e.g. their surnames or where in the state they lived? Did any of them have Tefft* (or something that sounds like it, e.g. Tift) as their surname? or farm in the southwest part of the state?

(* The first and second generations of Teffts in RI were one of the few European-ancestry families who lived in very close contact the Narragansetts at some distance from other European settlers. Both of the second-generation Tefft men were fluent in Narragansett. One of them also married an indigenous woman and even fought on the side of the Narragansetts against the European settlers during King Philip's War. He was captured by Colonial troops, and was hanged and quartered.)

As regards your number 1 response the bureaucratic- managerial class may have discovered that the old time religion spirituality of the deplorable/garbage class may have trumped their quasi Buddhist/mindfulness and squishy liberal Christianity spirituality.

Trumped indeed!

Yes, and that's always the way things work out. In ages of reason, the elite classes of every civilization embrace pallid, watered-down pseudoreligions which mostly serve them as mild tranquilizers and venues for onanistic self-glorification. Then the gods show up on the side of the deplorable classes, who are unfashionable enough to actually believe in something other than their own collective ego, and the elite classes are inevitably caught with their pants around their ankles.

Re 3: Since gods are never safe, that suggests that the rise of a society's rationalist phase is in part an attempt to make the world safe by excluding them.

On the one hand you have the mental machismo (if not masochism) of atheists like Bertrand Russel who portray their views as a brave acceptance of a world without hope or meaning, and on the other hand you have those like Carl Sagan who are quite eager to be rid of the "demon-haunted world" of religion.

Hmm.

Exactly. Elite classes in ages of reason redefine religion as an opportunity for worship to be directed at themselves; you get the posturing braggadocio of the Bertrand Russells, the shrill inquisitorial rage of the Carl Sagans -- "How dare you worship any god other than me?" -- and all the other flavors of the self-admiration of the privileged.

(oops - sorry, can you delete the other version of this comment with the editing error?)

Are there general principles about how to navigate the inflection that the egregors of the groups that a devotional representation's artist came from might give to devotional practices? This reminds me of that discussion the other week (I can't find it now?) about how intermediate-planar human constructions like symbols and ideas can facilitate contact from higher planes, but can also distort or color that contact in ways that might go unnoticed. I suppose furries are not clearly more dysfunctional or corrupt than the mainstream culture, especially depending on what you emphasize or de-emphasize; arguably there would be more issues with Christian devotional artwork from people only a few degrees removed from the Holy Land Crusades or the Albigensian democide. And one of the benefits of diversity is highlighting things for reflection by contrast. And having a blurry line between artistic practice developed for devotional artistic subjects versus erotic ones didn't seem to slow the Greeks down much. And the divine inspires and invests its presence in what it will.

This also reminds me that I had been considering somehow acquiring an image for devotions to Whoever it is whose will is conveyed by the details of the tricksy situation around Psalm 22 and the Crucifixion (Mt 27:35,39,46; Mk 15:23,29,33; Lk 23:34; Jn 19:24) and our limited access to surviving manuscripts, with like four different parallel or simultaneous versions of what is going on with Jesus's hands and feet depending on how the broken Hebrew ka'ari yaday weraglay (Masoretic) or kaaru yaday weraglay (Dead Sea Scrolls) or ōryxan cheiras mou kai podas mou (Seuptuagint) is rendered: one where his hands and feet are literally like a lion, one where there are gouges accompanied by tiny archaeologist's surveying posts and ropes or a tiny plow indicating that some kind of furrowing or layer-breaching excavation had been performed, and so on to catch various other plausible proposals for what the text had been, or what the divine intention for how we were to interpret the situation had otherwise been. (And maybe also where all this was happening to some other crucifixion victim, and Jesus was somewhere else, only getting lots cast for his clothes and having onlookers shake their head at him and invoking the first line of the psalm, but without having anything retrospective-prophecy-fulfilling happen to his own hands and feet -- I wasn't really clear until now on the fact that Ps 22:16/17 isn't actually itself referenced by those Gospel texts which survived.) But I'm quite at a loss as to how to find someone artistically competent who could treat the artistic subject of the facially absurd situation with adequate gravity and respect. (Maybe a properly devoted Discordian?) It feels vaguely like it would be a profanation somehow if I were to attempt it myself; perhaps that is what I would need to work on? And maybe artistic competence is of only peripheral importance here? Are you supposed to only make devotional representations using tools that you carefully never use for anything potentially profane, and maybe also consecrated ones just to be sure? There's also the issue about the subject being someone being executed in a torturous way, which seems hard to have appropriate attitudes about just by itself.

(there is an inconveniently ready joke answer here, which would be, "if someone has basically a lion for their hands and feet that's a theriomorphism, so commission Kyoht -- obviously!". though that does not necessarily do any better on the "profanation" front, also I don't know them but I expect most working artists wouldn't appreciate the grief)

Not that I know of. Invoking the deity in question seems to help, but it's not a guarantee.

Something you said the other day in response to a comment that suggested that binding Trump to the Tower card was a dumb move as he might very well be the lightning (which has interesting Changer/instigator connotations too!) made me wonder if all these things can shake up the astrology of Trump's swearing-in ceremony. There's a lot going on ...prayer, blessings, "curses" on the rebound, Gods/archetypes... and if the "stars incline" is it possible a) to see an astrological "forecast" having to sit one out while other forces take charge? and b) more rhetorically - if yes, perhaps that's what's behind some cases of astrological predictions not playing out?

Well, we'll have to see, now won't we? ;-)

Is such a thing even possible? Or the inverse: how would we even know? :D. Waiting through these four years is going to feel like an eternity if these three weeks are anything to go by.

Is it possible for the gods to overrule astrological trends? Sure. Individual human beings can do that -- if you've got a transit that makes you liable to injury, for example, and you stay home that day and are more careful than usual, it can slide right by without you suffering any harm at all. But yeah, these four years may be a very strange time.

Wow! Many thanks to you and the assembled wizardren for a supermarket-full of food for thought.
Like many people in Flyover Country, I am very grateful that things are finally changing and will never be the same again.

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