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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 1.3 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-sixth published book -- I've passed over The King in Orange, which was pulled out of order by the eldritch attraction of Inauguration Day and appeared in January -- and the beginning of my most ambitious publishing project to date: a complete system of occult training, original although based on the material I studied with John Gilbert, which fills roughly the same role as the correspondence courses offered by old-fashioned occult schools but is published for everyone to read.
I stress the word "occult" here. Occultism and magic are not the same thing, though they're related to each other and can be compatible. Magic uses ritual as its primary tool, and has power as its theme and goal; occultism uses meditation as its primary tool, and has wisdom as its theme and goal. (Both contrast with mysticism, which -- in its western forms, at least -- uses prayer as its primary tool, and has love as its theme and goal.) The Way of the Golden Section and its sequels teach very little in the way of ritual and even less in the way of magic. They focus on meditation, divination, sacred geometry, and certain other standard occult practices, and their goal is to achieve wisdom, revelation, and enlightenment. This book -- which requires The Sacred Geometry Oracle for some of its work -- is the first step on that path. Interested? You can get copies here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere. (I recommend the hardback edition, btw: it's sturdy, and will stand up to the hard use you'll give it.)
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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 more comments will be put through. See you next week!***
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(Anonymous) 2025-02-17 04:59 pm (UTC)(link)The choice of today's book image is fortuitous because my questions today are largely inspired (iirc) from lesson 14 of that same book.
1 (Neptune in Gemini). The notion that a planet is exalted in the sign of the Star Logos involved in creating it was quite interesting and provided (and continues to provide) food for contemplation, so thank you for introducing me to this notion. The image associated with the lesson appears to show which signs exalt the planets, and this leads me to Neptune. Neptune here is implied to be exalted in Gemini, and I struggle to see the link. Now, I am biased by my previous studies with the Builders of the Adytum and meditation on their material which has Neptune exalted in Leo. This attribution has always clicked easily for me for a few reasons such as the creative inspirations of Neptune finding a home in the outward-expressing Leo, (on the negative side) the glamour and illusions of Neptune strengthening the ego of Leo (Hollywood, anyone?), and (on a more spiritual, symbolic sense), the self-centeredness of Leo perhaps reminding Neptune that the 'I AM' is the only ocean worth dissolving one's self in. These ideas are just products of my meditations; I don't present them here as dogma.
However, meditating on Neptune in Gemini provides links that I feel are somewhat tenuous and don't click as strongly as those of Neptune in Leo (again, possible bias from previous familiarity). The collectivist emphasis of Neptune seems to mesh with the sociability and interactivity of the Twins, and Neptune's association with Key 12 of the Major Arcana (the Hanged Man) suggests ideas of inversion and paradox that also seem to mesh with the Twins (both as they present in mythology and human personalities). Aside from that, I'm not seeing much. To be clear, I'm not seeking validation for my views nor am I seeking to argue. I just would like to hear your thoughts on Neptune in Gemini. :)
2 (The Domicile of the Gods). The paradigm present in OPW presents some interesting challenges to my previous views of the universe and my favourite meditation themes involve either reconciling or coming to peace with conflicting information/beliefs, so again, thank you for your excellent book. If the Solar Logos dwells alone on the Divine Plane and the Star Logoi reside in the Causal Plane, then where do the gods of polytheism reside? My first thought was the Spiritual Plane, and yet while some Gods are presented as being bound by prophecies and fate, it feels like most mythologies present the Gods as being masters of fate rather than subjects of it (I could be wrong here). With this in mind, it feels wrong to put the Gods in a plane that is below that of the causal plane of the stars. So where do the Gods and Goddesses reside? Do they even exist in the paradigm put forth by OPW?
3 (Evolution of Planetary Spirits). There's this idea that's been slowly gaining momentum in my head. Planets have 'evolved' material, etheric, and astral bodies as our solar system has aged. The idea popped into my head that the number of these bodies corresponds to the number of soul swarms that have come before ours (ie Lords of Flame, Forms, and Mind). On to my question, as souls on a planet work to evolve mental bodies, does the host planetary spirit also start evolving a mental body? I am aware that the planets have their attributed angels and archangels that are said to function on the mental plane and beyond, yet by virtue of being named angels, this nominally implies that these are forces sent from above to mediate powers rather than bodies intrinsically evolved or built up by the planet itself, hence leading to my question.
4 (Divine Sparks and the I-consciousness). I try to avoid engaging in syncretism as I believe it can do violence to the systems involved, but I can't help but see similarities between the Spiritual Plane and Binah (as the root of perception) and between the Causal Plane and Chokmah (as the root of action/will). This tentatively leads me not to equate but at least to compare the Divine Plane with Kether and more specifically the Divine sparks with the Yechidah. If I posit that the Divine spark, like the Yechidah, is the source of I-consciousness (ie the feeling of being or of I AM), then this leads me to wonder about the experience of entities that are said to lack Divine Sparks such as elementals. My question; might they be compared to chatbots or LLMs in that they can reason, solve problems, communicate, and display a conceptual understanding of their own existence while utterly lacking an experiential feeling of Being or Selfhood?
I really got carried away with the length of this post so thank you for your patience. I have one more question, but I shall contain my enthusiasm and withhold it until next Monday.
Thank you for your time and all the best to you and the commentariat,
JR
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2) The term "gods" covers a lot of ground in polytheist faiths; it basically means "any entity wiser and more powerful than human beings." Thus the answer to your question is "all the planes."
3) That's the teaching as I understand it. By the time our swarm has finished evolving mental bodies, the Earth will also have one -- but not until. The planetary intelligence is always a step behind the beings that dwell on the planet; it represents the heritage and wisdom of the past.
4) A fine theme for meditation!
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(Anonymous) 2025-02-17 06:50 pm (UTC)(link)Reading your third answer filled my heart with gratitude for those who have already walked the path before us. It also emphasizes that the work we do today will have repurcussions on future swarms. A heavy responsibility indeed...
If I may dig a little deeper into your first answer; is the Gemini attribution provided in OPW a result of your own contemplation on the subject or was it drawn from an external source?
Best,
JR
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(Anonymous) 2025-02-17 06:52 pm (UTC)(link)Humans? Mammals? All carbon-based life on this planet?
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There are three swarms before ours. The first laid down the patterns we call the laws of physics, and turned the dust cloud that became our solar system into a sun and planets. The second laid down the patterns we call laws of chemistry, and turned a glowing ball of white-hot magma into a planet on which life can flourish. The third laid down the patterns we call laws of biology, and created single-celled life. The fourth, ours, is laying down patterns that we very incompletely and inaccurately call laws of sociology, and is creating complex communities of life. There will be three swarms after ours and we can't even begin to imagine what they will do.
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(Anonymous) 2025-02-17 09:59 pm (UTC)(link)laws of physics - material plane
laws of chemistry - etheric plane
laws of biology - astral plane
laws of sociology - mental plane
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(Anonymous) 2025-02-18 04:46 am (UTC)(link)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
and are also related to the ideas of "increasing returns to scale" or "nonconvex planning" if you run into those at some point.
Sorry, I guess that wasn't quite the question you asked, but the thing is -- we don't know much about the structure of what's going on in those big piles of binary-number arithmetic. And not least of what we don't know is the structure of is, when one of these models is engaging in a text-prediction task for what it thinks is a human discussion of experiential feelings of being or selfhood, how the model comes up with probability distributions over what the next word might be that mostly correspond to the range of words a human might in fact go on to write next, so as to produce text about those feelings that comes off as plausibly human-written (depending on how short the passage is and how thoroughly and cleverly the network was trained).
(To be clear, if you had an LLM doing that, it wouldn't be one of the consumer-facing "instruction-following model" saying something like that; it'd be an unconditioned "base model" that just imitates text. The fictitious assistant characters invoked by the special training for the "instruction-following" models are taught to avoid claiming any special insight as to whether or not they are conscious.)
Since we don't know that structure, there's not much fertile ground for making point-by-point comparisons -- in this case, between elementals and LLM mentalities -- to cross-brace one's understandings of those things with each other or anything else. (Even if there are funny point-by-point comparisons to be made in the phonetic structure.) Trying to think about that is mostly just an exercise in squeezing additional implications out of tentative information from the outside of such things. Tentative information like, "we've never heard of planar infrastructure for building up worthwhile souls from attention invested in following the operations of or choosing fated behavior-determining circumstances for thinking machines", or "Rudolf Steiner expected the metaphorical spiders from his vision to not even reach plant-level consciousness but have world-sweeping power anyway".
Elementals do, however, seem to have some structural parallels with how you would design the elements of a computation meant to simulate or reconstruct a physical history of some region of space. I'm not sure if it really helps to say that either, without saying a bunch of extraneous things about software engineering and computational physics, and also balancing that point with analogies to regional divisions of a government or corporation, or to the hierarchy of directors and workers on a large artistic production.