Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is just a few minutes away 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 sixty-ninth published book, and I'm annoyed to say it's currently out of print, even though it's been in print for only a little over two years; the original publisher, Llewellyn, dumped it a short time ago without warning or explanation even though there were still hundreds of copies in the warehouse, and the new publisher, Aeon, is waiting on my revisions and edits before bringing out a new edition.  There are still copies of the original version in the sales pipeline for the moment, but if you want a copy you'll either need to move fast or wait a year and a half or so. 

This started out as a sequel, more or less, to my earlier volume The Secret of the Temple. As so often happens, though, it spun away into unfamiliar territory, touching on the Gnostic origins of the Grail legend and the survival of the ritual at the center of that legend into relatively recent times. In the process I worked out the Greek gematria of the Grail stories, explored the fascinating history of a region on the border between England and Scotland that may have been the last surviving Pagan sanctuary in western Europe, and was able to draft a reconstruction of the original Grail ritual itself. It was a wild ride. My Bookshop store is out of copies and so are some other venues; if you want a copy, you'll have to see what you can find online or off. 

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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!***

Comments

Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

Hello JMG! A few Magic Mondays ago, you wrote that the laws of physics were patterns laid down by the Lords of Flame.

This implies that the laws of physics are different in other solar systems that have different Solar Logoi and different minds emanating from them.


Moreover, what we see of the wider cosmos might just be the Solor Logos' conjecture on what those other star systems could be like from the limited information He recieves from those other Gods and therefore unreliable.

If so, what modern modern astronomy says about the universe beyond the solar system (i.e. earthlike exoplanets, stellar life cycles, the Big Bang, neutron stars, black holes, spiral galaxies, etc.) is not true or at least in doubt.

Patrick

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

Oh, it's worse than that. What we see of the wider cosmos is a set of inkblot patterns that scientists attempt to interpret on the assumption that the laws of nature are the same everywhere. That routinely lands them in all sorts of trouble -- when, for example, red shift measurements imply that distant galaxies are moving faster than light, or when it turns out there's no way to make measurements of cosmology fit into a single model. It's a real mess.

I’m glad to hear that

[(Anonymous)]

It makes me happy to hear that there’s no way to make measurements of cosmology fit a single model. I like the business about red shift too. Confounding assumptions that are basic to The Science is a fun thing for the universe to do,

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

I'm imagining the Solar Logos receiving strange signals from other Gods and putting up a background of inkblot patterns to shield His creations from the real, unfiltered influences. Some of the "stars" might not even correspond, however loosely, to anything outside the mind of the Solar Logos.

Patrick

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

Some occult teachings, including Dion Fortune's, have it that the Solar Logos has delegated this to twelve star logoi, who have the job of corralling the influences from outside the solar system into what we know as the twelve signs of the zodiac. It's apparently a full time job!

Re: Other Solar Systems

[anonymoose_canadian]

This has a somewhat odd potential implication: if the Star Logoi are managing it on the fly in real time, then it's possible that they respond in part to what we expect to see. They might simply go "Huh, this is what you expect to see? Here you go!"

This could help explain the odd way that historically different cultures could look at the night sky and see such different things out there, even in cases where it should not be possible for such dramatic differences to exist. If everything out past the edge of the solar system is in part a mirror reflecting what we expect to see back at us, then the night sky could be literally different at the most basic levels from one or culture or time, to another...

Re: Other Solar Systems

[the_arcane_archivist]

It seems that some physicist are trying to see gravity as an entropic force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

Also microgravity anomalies might be explained by the fact "something" is controlling gravity. I think the Sun might be responsible and steward for life on Earth, Sun can control pretty much everything with gravity end electromagnetism. Earth is like a big sensor.


There are fringe stories in astrophysics where Saturn was an old sun... this make for interesting implications. Also a friend of this community: fossil fuel (oil and coal) is seen as ancient sunlight.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

That's fascinating about Saturn -- this is also something you'll find in occult writings, including Dion Fortune's. She taught that Saturn was the sun in the cosmic cycle before this one.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

That’s not the only discrepancy. A long time ago I read about some people that discovered that something called the “Alpha constant” seems to vary across the universe.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100909004112.htm

https://physicsworld.com/a/alpha-might-vary-across-the-un/

J.L.Mc12

Re: Other Solar Systems

[olafsson]

I'm trained in Physics to the MS level - my first reaction to reading this information about the observed red shift of some galaxies implying they are moving faster than the speed of light was that its nonsense! Then I looked at the link and learned something new.

Going a little further, if the "laws of physics" are local, what might the ramifications of this be when considering religion, and monotheism?

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

1) Red shifts in excess of the speed of light have been an ongoing scandal in astrophysics for a while now. (My guess is that it'll turn out that the red shift is caused by some factor other than acceleration, but we'll see.) Did you know that for a period in the early 20th century, every measurement of the speed of light came in anomalously low? That's why the speed of light has been defined as 186,282 miles per second -- can't have mere data messing up our pretty theories! ;-)

2) Oh, occultists got there a long time ago. According to occult philosophy the Sun is the material body of the God of this solar system, but his jurisdiction only extends out to the heliopause, after which it's somebody else's problem. There's also a Supreme Being, and the Seven Great Logoi before its throne, but they govern the whole cosmos and have little to do with anything so minor as individual star systems. There are, by the way, seven cosmic planes in this model of the cosmos; ours is the seventh, and all the others are just as full of star systems as ours. It's been suggested that when cosmologists talk about dark matter and dark energy, they're groping their way toward an awareness of the matter and energy of these other cosmic planes.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

This thread is making me feel rather small. :)

Re: Other Solar Systems

[walt_f]

1a. Modern cosmology has 99 problems but redshifts in excess of the speed of light aren't one of them. As an analogy, consider an analog oscilloscope, in which an electron beam sweeps horizontally across the screen at frequencies (and hence speeds) that can be set over a range of many orders of magnitude. At the fastest settings on a high-quality 'scope, the beam sweeps across the screen at faster than the speed of light. That's possible because the moving glowing dot, the intersection of the electron beam with the plane of the screen, isn't an actual moving thing. No particle of matter or quantum of energy actually moves horizontally across the screen at all. Similarly, you can move your gaze from one star to another in a fraction of a second, even though the two bodies might be hundreds of light-years apart. Your gaze isn't a moving object either. Expanding space is more complex (especially to describe mathematically as physicists and cosmologists describe it) but it likewise isn't a thing, particle or wave, that moves through space.

1b. A measured speed of light will be "anomalously" low in anything but a perfect vacuum, and a perfect vacuum doesn't exist, even in the deepest space or most expensive particle accelerator.

2. As Creationists and others have been pointing out for decades, you can't change certain of the laws of physics (such as the gravitational, fine structure, or strong force "constants") very much and still have e.g. stars and galaxies. Much discussion of this can be found under "fine-tuned universe" or "fine-tuning argument."

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

1) Did you read the link to the science blog I included above? Red shifts showing apparent velocities in excess of the speed of light do in fact exist, and have been a scandal in cosmology for decades.

2) That is to say, our elaborate mathematical models will only imitate observed experience if we tweak them in very specific ways. That tells us much more about our capacity for modeling than it does about the cosmos.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for asking this, it is something I've wondered about for a while now. I kind of figured that beyond the Oort cloud was stuff that the Solar Logos could only know about indirectly, glad to hear that makes some sort of sense to someone outside myself.

It always baffles me how sure a lot of cosmologists are about the universality of physical laws when Voyager 1 is the furthest we've ever sent a probe to collect empirical data and it hasn't even left the front yard, metaphorically speaking.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

A couple pop science books I've read admitted that the notion of the laws of nature being universal is (or started out as) a philosophical preference.

Patrick

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

The universality of physical laws is an axiom, not something that anyone ever proved. It wouldn't startle me unduly if they turned out to be variable in small ways even on so small a scale as the surface of a single planet.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

If you read Rupert Sheldrake you would know that Newton's gravitational constant G isn't actually a constant, but has daily and seasonal variations.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

Which of his books is that in? I've read some of his work, but not all of it.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[geoffg]

Or even a single test tube. I know from personal experience that DNA in particular is a very finicky molecule, and I would be the least surprised if it ended up being localized changes in something like charge values or something like that.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG, most of this is way over my head, but is this relevant to your comment?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_Geoid_Low

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

This is fascinating to consider, thank you for this. I’ve just started mulling over whether the scientific approach of measuring everything is a sort of plunder — demanding exchangeable “data” from everything everywhere, much like imperial tribute in the form of taxes. Now we’re so drunk on an abundance of this exotic data, we are entirely disconnected from any meaning it might have in its own context, and we’ve become numb to any meaningful, intuitive connection with our own context. For example, people who assume they’re in need of treatment because tests came back with x result, despite the fact they have no symptoms and are getting along just fine otherwise. It’s probably time to demand less from “out there” and figure out how to do best with what we have *right here*. Lots to meditate on here, thank you.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[ecosophia]

Oh my. What you're suggesting, if I may reframe it a little, is that science is engaged in a kind of commodification, reducing all experience to quantitatively measured data the way that our form of economics reduces all value to quantitatively measured money. Yes, that's something that deserves a lot of meditation -- thank you!

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

Even more-so, the data is _sampled_.

Either taken on a single day, or at best across a few days/weeks/months/years/decades. Certainly nothing beyond the extent of the existence of modern science. All the gaps and periods outside the sample period are then assumed static (default assumption) or statistically infilled if some sort of gross variation is evident.

I think the shear audacity of doing this infilling and assuming it means anything at all somehow buries rigorous analytical thought on how absurd it is. Very much like a naive extrapolation of a exponential process, the intuitive answer that feels correct is fundamentally missing the point.

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" has got to be one of the most astute phrases ever coined in relation to our so-called civilisation and its obsession with quantifying.

Re: Other Solar Systems

[(Anonymous)]

With your rewording, it is plain to me my initial musings must have been inspired by your Ring Cycle essays. Thank you again for all you do, your writings are a treasure trove.