ecosophia | 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!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.)

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