Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is almost here 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 seventy-second published book and the beginning of a new fiction series. I'd spent years being frustrated by the way that fantasy fiction ignored real magic and fixated on Harry Potter absurdities instead. Once I finished my tentacle novels, that had the inevitable result and gave rise to the first of a series of novels in which all the magic is the stuff real human beings in the real world can encounter. Ariel Moravec, the protagonist of the series, is an eighteen-year-old girl who goes to spend the summer with her grandfather, an occult initiate who spends his time investigating paranormal happenings. Before long she's caught up in one of his investigations, centering on legends of a colonial-era witch and a cascade of very real and vicious spells in the present day...

There are two more novels in the series already in print, a third in press, and a fourth currently being written. It's turning into a very entertaining series to write and, I hope, to read. If you're interested, you can get copies of The Witch of Criswell here if you live in the US and here if you live elsewhere. 

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

Comments

[hippieviking]

JMG,

I started doing the preparatory work in the Art of the Sword book a couple of weeks ago, gradually working my way through the exercises, movements, relaxation and breathwork. I then developed a rather obnoxious rash that showed up on forearms and then spread over my trunk and legs, it was rather like a heat rash. I can’t come up with a single possible physical factor that would have caused this and it’s not a normal thing for me. What had changed was that the rash showed up within a day of the beginning the second breathwork practice, the one where you practice a few repetitions of the complete breath and then bring a breath into the chest and move it back and forth from the upper chest towards the diaphragm. I kept doing the practices for a couple of days and the rash didn’t improve. I stopped the practices and after a day and half the rash started to go down and has been improving since. Now, four days after stopping the practices it’s mostly gone. I’m well aware that etheric/chi work can result in physical effects and strongly suspect the rash and the breathwork were linked. I intend to ease back into the practice again as I was enjoying it and I think it will serve my purposes well in a number of different ways. My question then is (and I am definitely not asking for medical advice in any way) do you have any advice or thoughts about restarting the practice?

Thanks,
HV

[ecosophia]

Traditionally a skin rash surfacing that quickly in response to any form of breathwork means that your body is having trouble handling the detoxifying effects of the breathing exercise. You should set aside the second breathwork practice for now and just work with the first breathwork practice (and the other exercises) for the next six months or so, to give your body time to clear out the energy channels and free itself from toxins. Take it easy and listen to your body's needs!

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG and commenters,
Have an excellent week, everyone!

I've been having negative thoughts for quite some time, usually about the same topic: "being the inconvenience at work" or "nobody likes me for some reason" or "they want to fire me from work for some issue." Yes, I realized I deliberately created this in my mind. These thoughts come to my mind every day.

And I also noticed that these thoughts create synchronicities, bad situations, coincidences, meaning they become reality. I co-created and manifested this reality of mine in a short time.

I also think about the future. What might come next...

I'm not sure I believe in the theory of good affirmations, like: "I'm a nice guy," "everyone likes me." I know it's a fallacy (because some like me, but not everyone).
1. What could I do beyond positive affirmations?
2. And I also think about the future. How to dissolve these already created and established thought-forms that could cause a very negative reality for me?
Thanks in advance!

[ecosophia]

Okay, you've bought into a common misunderstanding of affirmations. If they were true, why would you need to say them? They're incantations, not statements of fact -- and just as negative self-talk tends to be self-reinforcing and becomes your reality, so does positive self-talk.

Furthermore, the one really effective way to counter negative self-talk is positive self-talk, so get at it. Whenever you catch yourself thinking one of those patterns of negative self-talk, repeat a positive affirmation twenty times, then and there. Keep doing this. You'll find that it really does work.

Last piece of the demon puzzle

[(Anonymous)]

Who is this Harry Potter character you talk about in the context of your Ariel Moravec novels? It's that ridiculous Bertie Scrubb I didn't like, and his silly pony pals. ;)

I had a more serious question in relation to some of the discussion last week. You helpfully sketched out how demons, or debased spirits exist, even from before our solar system's establishment, because they aren't spiritually advanced enough to move on, or, in a rare few cases, get advanced enough to renounce their own spiritual basis and undergo the unknown death. There's a strange cosmic mercy in all that, which is both spooky and sort of heartening, those debased unbalanced entities may one day get out of that state.

It does leave me wondering though, if they have physical bodies, at some point some entities (maybe the lords of form?) must have spun off a separate plane for them, and that must have been a conscious decision to protect us and other swarms from them. That might explain the "keeping alive externally" descriptors that come through in the kaballah.

I know it's not good to tbink too much about that end of existence, but a vague fear I had was that if there was one of those nasty lower planes, there could be others, we don't know and shouldn't. Perhaps the fear of a second lemurian deviation sits in me somewhere.

Anyway, the question was, did that demon plane get established by the early swarms, or did it just evolve sort of naturally too?

Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle

[ecosophia]

1) Ha! Thank you.

2) To judge by what little has been written about them, demonic entities have what might be called sub-physical bodies -- bodies belonging to a plane even denser, more resistant, and more clumsy than physical matter. Our bodies compare to theirs the way that etheric bodies compare to ours. Their plane wasn't created by the early swarms; it was already there, as a kind of scrapheap of existence left over from a previous cosmic cycle, like an ancient crypt with a recent building built over the top of it. If the Lemurian deviation hadn't happened, we probably wouldn't know about their existence yet.

[(Anonymous)]

hello JMG,

I apologize for bringing this topic up here.

Do you consider large language models closer to magic than actual science ? I do not see the explanatory power of traditional sciences there. Instead a large amount of data are fitted into a black box, and then the results somehow magically come up. Sometimes even the reviewers are surprised that the models work the way they work. Also, another effort to train a model may not give us the same set of parameters inside the black box.

Where do we draw the line between a system working magically and scientifically established methods with reproducible experiments?

[ecosophia]

I don't see it as magic, because magic doesn't use black boxes either! As Eliphas Lévi points out, the difference between the competent mage and the bumbling sorcerer is that the mage knows exactly what he's doing and how it works, while the sorcerer fumbles his way through a spell by rote.

Thus the word you're looking for is "superstition." The builders of LLMs, in their primitive, superstitious reverence for Progress and Science, are going through motions they don't understand and getting results that baffle them.

There's another way of looking at LLMs I find even more useful, though, which is to see them as the kind of fraudulent games that played such a role in old-fashioned carnivals. "Look! I put data in, and pull all these wonderful things out!" It's come out more than once that what was really behind some supposed computer-based device was a big room full of underpaid workers in Mumbai...

Suicide of a lefthand path occultist

[(Anonymous)]

I was saddened to learn recently that Michael Aquino, the infamous founder of the Temple of Set, died from suicide in 2019 (I believe it was related to a recurrence of cancer). What would be the post-mortem experience of someone who was so dedicated to Satan/Set and followed the left hand path so intently in their earthly life?

Re: Suicide of a lefthand path occultist

[ecosophia]

It depends entirely on his reaction to discovering how wrong he was. In his life as Michael Aquino, he developed quite a few positive qualities, such as strength of will, the courage to ignore public prejudice, and so on. When he found himself permanently out of his body and the spirit of Howard Stanton Levey (aka "Anton Szandor LaVey") showed up, sat him down, and said, "Um, Mike, I've got some news for you," did he deal with it, or not? If he did, he'll go on to whatever next life his karma requires. If not, he may be curled up in a ball somewhere on the astral plane refusing to deal with things, in which case it may be a while before he incarnates again.

Magic and Literature, Magic and Opera,

[the_arcane_archivist]

First this question is not literally about magic yet it is about magic in literature. More so, literature and poetry as other arts are magic by definition.

Let me proceed I followed your Ring Cycle and how it is about more than a love story and Opera I think I stumbled upon another case, where this might apply: "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

This looks to me that is more than about a love story and is more about class struggle and zeitgeist. I think Goethe use struggle a lot more before Marx let me expose my hypothesis:

I think Goethe's Werther yearning for Lotte is more about some sort of class struggle and most of the same themes that appear later in the Ring Cycle, is more about middle and lower middle class aspirations, much like the Ring Cycle. It is supposedly based on Goethe's life but I think it downed on Goethe pretty early the irony of the etymology of the names of the name of those involved in this tragic affair. Werther ('Worthy Warrior'), Lotte as struggles, Wilhelm('Will Defender') as Werther's true will that he is unable to follow because of the obsession with the struggle (obsession tant akin to having a black magic spell on him). Etc Where names didn't fit he made his own like Albert ('Noble').
Goethe knew Italian very well and I think he knew what he was doing:

lotta f (plural lotte)

1. (literal or figurative) fight, struggle
2. conflict
3. (sports) wrestling

I think my thesis might be confirmed about the follow ups having the same themes:
Thomas Man's Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns (1939)
Ulrich Plenzdorf.The New Sorrows of Young W.
etc
But the book is known to have influenced pretty much everything from Opera to Dostoevsky. I personally think is indirectly almost everywhere even in movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Forest Gump. In Forest Gump might not seem because the nobles here are slicky hippies but there were plenty of "nobles" on the hippie scene, sons of wealthy, some even ended up being famous too like Jim Morrison. Maybe who ever made Forest Gump wanted to show that only an extremely lucky ignorant idiot could survive this. Which to an extent also the protagonist of Eyes Wide Shut is.

Do you think there's something to it or I am just seeing too many patters? BTW Since you know Wagner very well do you think is influenced by Goethe?

Re: Magic and Literature, Magic and Opera,

[ecosophia]

Good heavens, yes. Goethe was perfectly aware of all this -- it helps to be one of the world's greatest poets, playwrights, novelists, biologists, and literary critics, not to mention a capable politician and administrator, fluent in the gods alone know how many languages and au courant with effectively all ancient and modern Western literature up to his time! Was Wagner influenced by him? You won't find a significant German cultural figure until 1945 or so who wasn't influenced by Goethe. So I think you're definitely on to something.

The spiritual nature of money

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG, while pondering the nature of money and relationships an idea sprang into my head and I'd be interested to know what you think. Many people have said that money has a negative spiritual resonance, which is why many New Age teachers prefer their followers to set up $1000/month autopayment arrangements rather than invoice them for individual classes. However, I'm starting to think that rather than being generally negative, the resonance of money is specifically -caustic-.

Money is a spiritual solvent, in other words, tending to dissolve bonds between people and things. Relationships seem to be more fragile and fleeting the more they involve money; it's often said that prostitutes are "really paid to go away afterward" and couples that spend huge sums on lavish weddings are known for quickly breaking up. When making a purchase, making a payment in full signals the completion of the deal and a breaking of ties between the seller and buyer, while delayed payment creates an unpleasant karmic entanglement between the parties.

This idea clarified many things to me. Environments and groups that strongly focus on making money are seen by many as dull and uninteresting; in creative industries, it's often said that the more money is involved in a project the less interesting the result will be. The presence of money corrodes away many aspects of things, leaving only certain forms that are particularly "acid-proof." Consider the spare glass-and-steel appearance of a modern office building and compare it to the Silver City from The Neverending Story, which sits in the middle of an acid lake.

While money in general may be caustic, the act of borrowing it has the opposite effect, creating a sticky bond between people that needs an act of repayment to dissolve it. People without enough money to spend can find themselves tightly ensnared in such bonds. Borrowing or stealing items you can't afford also causes unpleasant karmic ties. So the best use of money on a spiritual level amounts to having enough to avoid entanglements like debt but not so much that it prevents you from having any non-business-patterned relationships. One can imagine having children who must call your assistant to book an appointment to see you - such relationships are unlikely to be healthy.

How does this perspective sound to you? Thanks as always for hosting these Q&As.

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[ecosophia]

That seems very reasonable to me. Money is a system of abstract tokens from which every real quality has been stripped away; in effect, each unit of money is a gap in reality, smaller or larger depending on the denomination, and if you insert too many gaps into any relationship, it would make sense that it falls apart.

Question about causation

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I have a question about how causation works between the planes of existence. In particular, I’m wondering about how physical things seem to be able to affect the mind.

You have taught that causation moves down the planes: for example when the life force of the etheric plane affects the physical body on the material plane. If we consider psychoactive chemical substances and their effects on the mind, is that an instance of a physical thing causing a change in the etheric and astral bodies of the person who consumes them, or is it that the astral and etheric qualities of the psychoactive molecule come into contact with and affect the astral and etheric bodies of the person who consumes them, with the physical phenomena of cellular absorption and neurotransmitter modulation being simply the final result downstream from higher causes? In other words, is it the change in consciousness that causes these brain changes rather than the other way round?

Re: Question about causation

[ecosophia]

The brain is a filter which keeps consciousness focused on the material plane, so that we can do our work here and learn from it. Psychedelic drugs (I do prefer the older term!) temporarily disable the filter, so that things come into consciousness from the non-material planes. They don't create anything -- they simply make it temporarily harder for the user to retain a focus on the plane of matter, so that things happening on other planes intrude into consciousness for a while.

America's Stonehenge

[(Anonymous)]

Have you ever been to America's Stongehenge in Salem NH? Any theories or thoughts on it? I have been there and have definitely felt some strong energy swirling on the grounds.

Thanks!

Re: America's Stonehenge

[ecosophia]

I'd like to go up there sometime, but I've never had the chance. Maybe somebody with a car will decide they want to do a road trip with a Druid in the passenger seat. ;-)

How to get better at tarot?

[(Anonymous)]

For years I've been using geomancy as my go-to divination method. I've tried tarot on and off, but found it quite arbitrary compared to geomancy. I got your book "The Door of Tarot" which has helped me a little bit, but sometimes I still feel like there are so many possible ways to interpret a card even with the Simple Tarot method.

I asked the question "How do I get better at tarot?"
I got reversed 1 of cups.

So immediately 2 different interpretations came to my mind, previously I wrote down the meaning of the Aces as "Imagine" following Simple Tarot, with Cups dealing with Water, emotions, receiving, so I could interpret this as "Do not imagine, just look at the cards directly", or "I have trouble with imagination as it relates to emotions, try to resolve that". I am not sure which one is more appropriate, or if it's something else instead.

Re: How to get better at tarot?

[ecosophia]

If I'd drawn that card as a one-card reading, I'd take it literally -- overturn your cup, empty your mind of preconceptions, and just pay attention to what the card appears to be saying to you at that moment.

Night planetary hours

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I was looking through a book I pulled out from storage, Le Druidisme by Raymond Lautié from 1984, and saw this diagram, https://postimg.cc/5j38qxm6, which reminded me of your article in Trilithon about the The Fourth Quaternio, https://aoda.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/TrilithonVol4_2017.pdf. I thought it might be nice to share.

I have a question regarding planetary hours. Do people work with planetary nights? For instance, after sunset Monday becomes "Frinight", with the first night time hour being propitious for Venus.

Thanks,
JML

Re: Night planetary hours

[ecosophia]

Hmm! I think I'll have to find a copy of that book:


As for nights, no, in every system I know of, a planetary day lasts for 24 hours.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm almost afraid to ask, but have the Deities of Narrative Causality put any manuscripts of a full Bored of the Rings-style satirical version of Bertie Scrubb and the Pony Pals on your metaphorical desk or are we safely limited to Ariel's passing encounters with the series?

On a more serious note and trying to avoid spoilers, in Carnelian Moon, is the business with persons in a magical state moving a physical object a reasonably documented phenomenon or did the story get a bit larger than life for dramatic purposes?

[ecosophia]

1) Fortunately not. Mind you, Bertie Scrubb stories would probably sell like hotcakes -- Harry Potter ripoffs are all over the kiddie-lit bookshelves these days, and some of them read like their authors are channeling Frank and Matilda Osbert, the notional authors of the Bertie Scrubb series -- but if any such thing ever showed up on my computer screen I'd perform an exorcism.

2) Every magical action in the Ariel Moravec series is something that can actually happen. Dense etheric structures can move physical objects -- that's what's behind poltergeist phenomena, for example.

Neptune in Aries

[neptunesdolphins]

I am hearing all sorts of discussions about Neptune in Aries. Do you have any insight beyond the last time this occurred, the U.S. Civil War happened?

Re: Neptune in Aries

[ecosophia]

I'm far from convinced that an outer planet transit into a new sign, without reference to anything else in the heavens or on earth, communicates anything useful astrologically. It's more or less the mundane equivalent of newspaper sun sign astrology!

Dreams about the recently dead

[(Anonymous)]

I know you're not a dream person, so for anybody who wants to chime in:

How much credence do you give to dreams about the recently-dead? Are there any criteria for determining if it was just suggestion burbling up from recent events in your sleep like most dreams, or something meaningful from/about the deceased?

Had one recently: no content in the dream that wouldn't have been readily supplied by musings on the deceased, but... before the dream, I was quite sad about the death, and it was making me all weepy and choked up. And after, I have been completely unable to feel sad about it. Not rational: nothing changed.

The deceased in question had a lifelong severe disability and had never been able to talk, only able to communicate in sort of broad vocalizations indicating happy, sad, pleased, uncomfortable, that sort of thing. Easy for an outsider to write off as "nobody home" but a cheerful, vibrant, and intelligent personality was obvious to anybody who'd spent time around them. You could tell a sneaky deadpan joke, and they'd always be the first in the room to laugh: one saved up jokes for this person. Who doesn't like someone who laughs at your jokes? Anyway, about a week after they passed, I dreamt I had a clear, fluent, totally natural conversation with this person, and they told me a really funny joke (that I so wish I could remember!). And irrationally am not sad anymore. It was the change of feeling that struck me more than the dream itself: plenty of dumb sappy platitudes were said at the funeral along the lines of "X is an angel now and can *fly*!" (barf) that were not at all comforting. One is inclined to see this as a little contact with something real, because it so dramatically relieved sadness.

(shrug)

I know there probably aren't any solid answers to that one. But thought I'd throw it out there and see if relevant insight bounces back ;)

Re: Dreams about the recently dead

[ecosophia]

I don't know of any solid answers to that kind of question, but tradition has it that this is one of the most common ways the souls of the recently dead manifest themselves to the living. Make of that what you will.

Internal Monologue

[(Anonymous)]

Would you consider the internal monologue or mental voice to exist on the astral or mental level? Or can it go between these? Apologies if this is a dumb question.

Re: Internal Monologue

[ecosophia]

Oh, it's astral, but it can reflect mental plane material now and again. Remember that astral phenomena appears to us in the forms of the senses -- words that you could hear if somebody spoke them aloud, images you could see if there was something shaped like that in the room with you, and so on -- while the mental plane is the plane of meanings, values, and intentions, which can't be perceived directly but can flow into forms given by the senses. (Think of the way a meaning can flow into a spoken or written sentence...)

Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[(Anonymous)]

To Share / Discuss:

1. Silent Records has become one of my favorite independent music labels. They started in the 80s and went into the 90s. Label owner Kim Cascone then moved on to other things in the oughts, including his Subtle Listening workshops. There is a lot of esoteric content throughout the label, including the recordings, but also the artwork and titles. Those who have ears to hear will pick up on many of the alchemical cues. For my latest feature article for Igloo Magazine I wrote up a history of Silent Records, with a brief overview of their first era and then a focus on the reboot, and all of the guitar drone and guitar ambient they've released.

https://igloomag.com/features/heavenly-silences-and-earthly-noise

Here is a quote from Kim about the stellar influences in his label that I used in my article: "Sometimes what comes in a flash unfolds over a long period of time. Such a flash came to Silent Records label founder Kim Cascone one winter night as a kid. 'I remember sitting in a snowbank and looking up at the stars. I spotted the blue star in the Orion constellation and gazed at it for a long time. Suddenly I had a flash, like one of those speed-collages in a film where hundreds of events all race past in a split second. I call this ‘my download’ & have been unpacking its meaning ever since.'"

2. The Golden Section Ratio and Horsemanship:
I had some of my own unpacking to do with regards to imagery seen in a scrying of the Golden Proportion glyph. I was wandering what some of the images might mean... Then I discovered how the phi ratio relates to horse hooves:

https://www.oksnhc.com/blog/the-geometry-of-the-hoof-and-the-hoof-print-trim

This got me thinking about how the horse shoe is often used in folk magic. If the Golden Section can produce harmony where it is put, than having a horse shoe over a doorway inside a house might be one of the reasons why that particular bit of folk magic works.

I also found this essay on sacred geometry, dressage, and horsemanship:

https://www.kipmistral.com/sherry-ackerman-figures-of-the-manege/

Hail Epona!

3. I was having a discussion over the weekend with some friends over the merits of Genesis as a band compared to the solo work of Peter Gabriel. (I like his solo stuff better.) The soundtrack to the Last Temptation of Christ, titled Passion, is a favorite of mine. Excellent "world music" before that meant something icky, some derierre detritus you'd hear in a bland giftshop or dumb stupid coffeehouse.
Trumpeter Jon Hassell came up with the term "fourth world music" (also the name of the album he did with Brian Eno). Hassell described fourth world music as "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques." The film itself (I haven't read the book it was based on...) could have even been more gnostic than it was and that would have been cool.

Hassell had studied with Stockhausen, among others. Stockhausen had been an advocate of world music himself. These ended up sounding very different from the drek later marketed as such. The spiritual impetus behind world music was given birth to by shortwave radio and telephonic lines of transmission.

The modus operandi behind fourth world music is at work in the universalist and eclectic spiritual scene (no need for electronics there, but radionics would be cool). Chaos magic was like a grab bag of tricks stripped of tradition. Yet the universalist initiate, through the study of sacred texts, practices and teachings from around the world is now in the presence of true diversity.

As Stockhausen noted, he didn't want to make a mere mishmash of sounds from around the world, fusing them together inadvertently. His musical idea was to intermodulate them, to let the sound of one effect the sound of another. In the hands of someone like Peter Gabriel and Jon Hassell these aspirations towards world or fourth world music came to fruition. (Not necessarily in a direct line to Gabriel)... but you can see how a skilled musician can incorporate different styles to create a masterfully vinted blend of not just grapes, but others fruit fermented together in new wineskins. The mage can do the same. Drawing all the influences together into their isolated sphere, and releasing new combinations out into the world.

Justin Patrick Moore

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[ecosophia]

Justin, fascinating stuff. I've just been getting into Genesis of late, courtesy of some lucky finds at the local thrift store, and enjoying them a great deal; I'll keep an eye out for Gabriel's solo work.

[(Anonymous)]

Can I send you a private PM with a question via my Dreamwidth account? I think the question isn’t appropriate for a public forum.

[ecosophia]

Yes, but it may be a while before I can get to it. Mondays are busy for me.

Ecosophian conference - London to Glastonbury train/transport

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG and readers,

I'm looking to meeting those of you who are attending the conference at Glastonbury in June. I haven't seen any further information since about details, so wanted to see if anyone will be travelling from London? I will be and (cheaper) advance tickets are now available to purchase so it may be good to start discussing so we can plan it.

Best regards,

Vivek

Re: Ecosophian conference - London to Glastonbury train/transport

[ecosophia]

There's a Dreamwidth forum set up for making such arrangements:

https://glastonburyarrangements.dreamwidth.org/

See you there!

Horse Hooves and Golden Ration

[(Anonymous)]

Here is a bit better of an explanation of the horse hooves and their relationship to the golden ratio:

https://innovativeequinepodiatry.blogspot.com/2017/04/hoof-mapping.html

By the way, my I Ching reading for the day was Hexagram 13, Fellowship...

Together with Phi studies, the Golden Section Fellowship has been on my mind.

JPM

[(Anonymous)]

i just wanted to share an article i saw
posted:

Secret CIA files claim Ark of the Covenant has been found

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14534941/cia-document-sacred-ark-covenant-chest-found.html

[ecosophia]

Yes, I read about that. It was found by psychics working for the CIA, so it's anyone's guess what's actually there.

Bri

[(Anonymous)]

I've been stuck on the first meditation in the Celtic Golden Dawn, because I cannot manage to get a seed to sprout. I've tried several different seeds (including but not limited to a pea and a bean), and tried both cloth and paper towels, which I've kept wet throughout the day, so far to no effect. Do you have any advice?

Re: Bri

[ecosophia]

How long did you leave them?

blessing offer; Carnelian Moon questions

[milkyway1]

Hi JMG,

I hope you've had a good weekend! :-) An offer to everybody today, and then Carnelian Moon-related questions [spoiler alert!!].

1. I perform a formal blessing each week and am grateful to everybody who signs up, as this allows me to practice: https://thehiddenthings.com/categories/weekly-blessings

+++ SPOILER ALERT CARNELIAN MOON +++

2. JMG, might an artefact like the plaque still have enough "occult vibes" clinging to it, to make it possible to distinguish between genuine and replica by occult means? In cases where this would be worth a try, what methods would be suitable for this task? (psychometry came to mind, but I suppose there'd be others, too)

3. What are the inherent dangers of investigating an occult artefact by psychometry (or similar means)?

4. And how could they be mitigated?

Thanks, as always, for hosting MM and answering all the questions! :-)

Milkyway

Re: blessing offer; Carnelian Moon questions

[ecosophia]

2) Occult means are always a little uncertain. Imagine for a moment a replica of an ancient plaque that was made in 1942, and charged by the maker -- using the methods of talismanic magic -- with imagery and energy relating to ancient times. Anyone who wasn't a first-rate psychic would be likely to think it was ancient.

3) Depends on the object. Some things are charged with very negative energies, and you don't want to attune to those.

4) Use material means first...

[(Anonymous)]

Since I know you often keep track of odd trends going on, I wonder if you've heard of the whole "reality shifting" thing? I only heard about it recently, but it's a trend mostly involving GenZ that started on Tiktok during the covid lockdowns and now has several subreddits dedicated to it, one of which has over 100,000 members. The idea is that there are an infinite amount of parallel realities and it's possible to shift your consciousness into one that's more desirable. It's kind of like "The Secret" but instead of manifesting whatever you want here, you script another reality and then shift to it, the idea being that you don't actually create it, as all realities already exist, you just shift your awareness into it. Some claim to be able to do just that.

Most of the reddit posts are either people who are trying but have been unsuccessful, but some claim success. Some are describing small "Mandela Effect" type changes that could very well just be lapses in memory. Some sound like they're probably just vivid lucid dreams. However there are a few who claim to have spent long periods of time in alternate realities, and that it felt just as real as normal life, passing reality checks that rule out lucid dreaming.

I look at this with plenty of skepticism, and the whole ideology behind it seems like wishful thinking to the extreme, but I do think that at least in some of the cases there is something real going on there. I'm agnostic about the possibility of actual parallel universes, but even if there are parallel universes out there, I doubt that all of what we think of as fictional universes are actually real somewhere as the reality shifters like to claim. I just think of all the ways that fictional stories often contradict themselves and are internally inconsistent. I wonder if some of those who claim to reality shift have found a way to make the astral plane feel that much more real than most people are able to? Any thoughts?

[ecosophia]

I've tried to stay well away from that whole giddy scene. The whole Mandela Effect business has always struck me as a testimony to the failings of human memory -- it was Steve Biko, not Nelson Mandela, who died back then, for example, but few people outside of South Africa remember Biko, so memory blurs and shifts accordingly; I also recall the BerenstAIn Bears, but I noticed even in childhood how many people mentally edited the name to fit more familiar patterns. Add in the conviction that it's possible to jump to some parallel universe that's more to your liking, and you've got the makings of an absolutely top-of-the-scale collective psychosis.

There's a scene in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in which a prophet leads his followers to the sea, having convinced them that the waters will part and let them pass through safely. Singing his praises, they walk after him straight into the water. After a while, the first drowned corpses start bobbing to the surface. I could all too easily see something similar happening in this case; "In an alternate reality, the sea isn't there! We can shift into that reality!" They'll shift realities, all right, out of the material plane and into the after-death state...

Short comment

[denebalgedi777]

Hi All,

I'll keep it brief this week with one question and one comment:

Question: In geomancy, if you were asking a question about whether someone would be seen again in a voluntary organization or if they have left for good, would this be an 11th house query? This is one case that's kind of ambiguous because the 3rd house also can concern associations and social circles as well.

I also have a question about an ambiguous reading I received but I will leave it to next week for lack of time.

Comment: Having got to the point of learning the SOP, it seems to me that despite being less intense than the the LBRP+MP, it still feels like a very powerful ritual to me. Especially when you visualize the heavenly and telluric currents joining to erase the negative energy in your area, it gives a definite sensation of "altered consciousness" for a little bit. Maybe that will subside as I do it for a longer period of time.

Best,

Deneb

Re: Short comment

[ecosophia]

1) I'd treat that as an 11th house question. I tend to see 3rd house as more a matter of family and neighborhood.

2) I've noticed the same thing. It's quieter than the LBRP, but very potent.

Norther Roman Empire

[mediawakeboard]

JMG,

It is fashionable to compare the US to Romans. But, recently, after a bit of reading and listening on Byzantium, I noticed lots of similarities between Russia-USSR and Eastern Romans.

• Both rely heavily on a strong man being in charge of a sluggish but extremely powerful bureaucracy
• Both have a kind of "walking meat-grinder" approach to war
• Orthodoxy has a very important role in propaganda and ethos
• both are autocratic, but you can be "elected" to the top if the right people support you (as opposed to monarchy and democracy)
• red and gold flag of USSR ))

I must confess it is a very vague feeling of kinship.

The question I would like to ask you is

• Are there books on the group souls you would recommend?
• You mentioned prophecies about a new civilisation on Volga in this century. By theosophists, if I recall correctly. Where can one read more about that, without plunging 100% into Madam Blavatsky?

Also, from here in Ukraine it does feel like some ancient barbarian stuff is being invoked. Runes, chants, rumored sacrifices, etc.

Thanks, Andriy B

Re: Norther Roman Empire

[ecosophia]

I wish there was more readily available material on group souls! Dion Fortune talks about them in a few places, and I've triangulated between that, Oswald Spengler, and my own impressions based on a lot of reading of history and mythology. I agree with you, for whatever this is worth, that Byzantium put a very deep imprint on Russia, at least as deep as the Roman imprint here in the US; it's almost as though once the Roman Empire split in half, the two sides drifted geographically apart, and the west ended up on the far side of the Atlantic while the east ended up in the Dnieper and Volga basins.

As for the prediction, here again, the only place I've seen references to it is here and there in Theosophical literature -- never in detail. Most of what I've written on the subject is my own work, rather than references to older teachings.