Magic Monday
Feb. 16th, 2025 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.)
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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!***
Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-17 09:04 pm (UTC)In particular it reminded me of the difference between Luciferic evil (defined by JMG as raw spiritual arrogance) and Ahrimanic evil (defined by JMG as sheer blind craving for sensory experience and material goodies). It seems to me that both forms of evil are being broadly exposed right now and having a spiritual frame for it helps me maintain agency rather than hopelessness when I recognize the sheer magnitude of the evil.
Additionally, in the thread I referenced above Jeff shared a link to an article by Brandon Smith entitled "To Understand The Globalists We Must Understand Their Psychopathic Religion." https://alt-market.us/to-understand-the-globalists-we-must-understand-their-psychopathic-religion/ The last paragraph:
"If you want to see something truly demonic, imagine a world in which all inherent truth is abandoned for the sake of subjective perception. A world that caters to the preferences of psychopaths with no ethical imperative. A world where the ends always justify the means. This is the luciferian way, and the globalist way. And no matter how much they deny it, the reality of their beliefs is visible in the fruits of their labors. Wherever they go, destruction, chaos and death follow.
This is a remarkable time for me to really put into practice JMG's instruction "pay no attention to what you don't want." I am doing my best to keep an eye out without letting what's going distract me from my own spiritual path.
I am curious if anyone else has been grappling with the concept of evil amidst this titanic shift we are in.
Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-17 09:59 pm (UTC)Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-17 10:59 pm (UTC)I'm about 2/3 of the way through a review on Alidair MacIntyre's A Short History of Ethics and most of the way through reading (with plans to review after) his After Virtue, which I can recommend as pretty good starting places, though, fair warning, A Short History poses more questions than the answers it offers.
If you do want to wrestle a bit with the concept of evil, but still in a "what can I do about this?" framing, Shadow Tech by Colin E. Davis might be interesting for a spiritually-friendly take (I have a review of that one available here, if you'd like to get a better feel for if it might be right for you right now: https://jpowellrussell.com/#book_thoughts_on_shadow_tech)
Cheers,
Jeff
Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-18 03:47 am (UTC)Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-18 12:26 am (UTC)Frankly, I find it more than a little concerning how many people in this forum seem ready to believe the worst about their political opponents at the drop of a hat. I suspect it's at least partly an example of "what you contemplate, you imitate" - many right-leaning people are starting to look uncomfortably like mirror images of woke lefties they've spent years fuming at, complete with the hyperbolic language and the tendency to regard every disagreement as a battle to the death.
Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-18 03:46 am (UTC)Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-18 12:52 am (UTC)One writer who has been delving deeply into the nature of the evil that has been so methodically wrought in order to keep us all mystified and captivated is Joshua Stylman. His article "The Pattern Beneath: USAID And The Architecture Of Perception" is quite fascinating (in all the meanings of that word, as in casts a deftly crafted counterspell.)
https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-pattern-beneath
Naturally, Stylman's gazing deeply into the very heart and praxis of his opponent has left him somewhat entranced himself (pay no attention to what you don't want, indeed!) If you can get past his repurposing of the tech singuarity into some sacred consensus-busting reclaiming of our instinctual pattern recognition, he has a lot of insight to offer. Yes, it's dressed up in a weird rapturous drag, but he has in fact decoded a fair bit of the tactics deployed in our beloved globalist's false-reality-minting schemes.
Most interestingly, Stylman makes it abundantly clear what a pregnant, paradigm-shifting moment we're in. It is worth considering how many people may be about to wake up in a way they haven't ever even allowed themselves to imagine possible. We could witness a sudden surge of interest in all things unseen, from deep religious wisdom to the most watered-down pop-psychology drivel. We could also witness the kind of frightening reversion back into cherished myths with a vengeance that we endured during the great Covid panic. Not everyone is enthusiastic about loosing their shackles, only to discover that their whole life has consisted of being distracted by shadows in a cave.
— Christophe
Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-18 04:11 am (UTC)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.
Re: Ways to Think About Evil
Date: 2025-02-18 04:25 am (UTC)Also, belief in blank-slateism, belief in materialism, and sociopathic personality are all orthogonal directions of possible variation. Steven Pinker is an anti-blank-slateist and a materialist. In my experience of the rationality movement, even though they are mostly materialist, they are very anti-blank-slateist about humans (that's exactly *why* we fear AI -- we're learning how to make bigger and bigger empty slates without knowing what trustworthy contents to copy onto them!). And they care a lot about Logos and cosmos and "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed", especially as these apply to the laws governing whether a given procedure of thinking produces truthful expectations or false ones. Even if they have a harder time tracking non-blindingly-immediately-obvious emergent implications of human nature like "you should be careful about polyamory, it only works for some people and requires a lot of work and foresight, especially if childbearing is going to be involved" without occasional recent painful object lessons. (They also weren't *that* slow to reject and expel some things that were closer to being clear-cut manifestations of Luciferian derangement, but it would take longer than I have at the moment to really explain that situation.)
Brandon Smith lumps these things together, which is to say he isn't very careful in constructing his conjectured through-line.