Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

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.)

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 more comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Comments

Re: Ways to Think About Evil

[(Anonymous)]

Well, one thing you could do would be to pay attention to the originally justifying reasoning of the globalist system, to understand what elements would normally have been beneficial. Like with Dion Fortune writing about the strengths of national character that Germany might once again manifest for the world if Britain and the Allies managed to win.

One major element of neoliberal-global-institutions-ideology starts from David Ricardo's comparative advantage argument against barriers to trade. In the short run, if you remove barriers to trade (but still somehow preserve other institutions like property and absence of monopoly tactics) and shipping is cheap, the overall amount of wealth production (including spare time freed up because subsistence is easier) is supposed to increase. This works even if a people on one side of a former trade barrier is in less of a position to convert their time into wealth of any form than the people on the other side, as long as each side is relatively better at some forms of wealth production than others. (In the longer run there's some question of whether compounding effects from the creation of wealth on capital and human development outrace the effects from institutional corruption, monopolism, or absence of local full-production-chain industrial bases. Something like that, anyway; I'm not an economist.) I expect that a lot of people in international trade policy reasoned:

"Well, the people in thus-and-such third world country are more hard-working than Americans -- (what do you mean, 'and whose social-class prejudices and education-system manipulations is that the fault of'? why are you even bringing up the idea of supposed 'social classes' that have 'power relations' between them? isn't that an antimeritocratic and/or communist thing to be thinking about? and I thought 'power relations' were only things that existed between races, like between lighter-colored workers in first world countries and darker-colored workers in third world countries?) -- and those people are poorer too, which seems like an unjust historical accident. Since our constituents aren't looking very closely (and would have a hard time stopping us even if they were), let's ignore their provincial uneducated nationalist selfishness (and not notice our grantmakers' cosmopolitan financial system classist selfishness) and instead answer the mandate of justice, and get rid of trade barriers and also create institutions to efficiently continue negotiating away trade barriers further. That will cause more extractible wealth and power to be produced on both sides of the trade barrier. Which is an idea that sure is made out of some of the same pieces that the idea of 'causing the actual peoples on both sides of the trade barrier to have more genuine weal and power for self-determination' is!"

The thing is, some of that good intention actually goes through into results. Again, I'm not an economist, but it seems like Africa is a rising power now substantially because of interventions motivated by globalist ideology broadly construed. Even if there were a bunch of extractive arrangements as well -- there wasn't as much of a systematic effort to make local governments and economies persistently dysfunctional and puppeteerable, like the way colonial Britain set up overseer ethnicities to keep their colonies paralyzed with self-perpetuating racial hatred. And even though there wasn't proportionally a ton of thought put into how to do those interventions in such a way as to put more productive power in the hands of the analogical equivalent of an Allies as opposed to an Axis in any subsequent situations analogous to WWII, so now if China keeps getting worse they might be able to bring Africa along with them.

You could... also try to follow out the case for the ideas that Brandon Smith cites from e.g. Yuval Harari and then argues are synergistic with and symptomatic of Luciferianism. The crux of the argument, so far as I understand it (which Smith doesn't touch on at all), is: "When parapsychology experiments keep fizzling out and eventually returning null results after some number of years of attempted replications, sort of loosely the way one might in retrospect expect if the supernatural had been an illusion after all -- since of course when people designed the scientific method they were focusing on the goal of clearing away self-produced illusions -- and if the supernatural also carefully avoids being unambiguous(-absent-externally-unprovable-interpretational-context) or predictable outside of experimental settings as well, what does that say about the character of the people who conclude on that basis that the supernatural doesn't exist?" The fact that the universe keeps pulling the plug on advocates of the supernatural by forcing parapsychology experiments to cease replicating, when for decades and decades now it has had the option of instead pulling the plug on advocates of materialism by passively allowing the experiments to continue replicating like other real phenomena, suggests that there is something about its motives that almost nobody on the supernaturalist side is willing to talk about. If it's a benevolent soul-development-arranging power that's actively forcing parapsychology results not to replicate after a certain point (apparently because after that point they would get too compelling), then you could try investing your attention in the question of: what does that say the benevolent soul-development-arranging power would prefer for the equivalents of Yuval Harari and the UN (and for that matter the real non-conspiracy-theory-boogeyman transhumanists) and so on to be believing in and doing, and in what respects would it differ from what the current ones are actually doing? Construct a positive vision.