![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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!***
Re: Astrology?
(Anonymous) 2025-02-11 02:59 am (UTC)(link)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)
Re: Astrology?