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 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!

[hippieviking]

Thank you, I will do that.

HV

Rashes

[(Anonymous)]

Hi HV,
I suspect a cold magic bath in the mornings will clean you up on the etheric plane I do this every morning and feel it does me a great deal of good.
Maxine

Re: Rashes

[hippieviking]

Thanks for the reply Maxine, what exactly do you mean by a cold magic bath?

HV

Re: Rashes

[(Anonymous)]

Hi HV,
I put 3 quarts of rain water out in my garden. I add gem stones to the water to make it more magical. I pick the stones by their magical abilities. I leave the water outside for 3 days and take a basin and a cloth out. I pour a quart of the water into the basin and usually add some rose geranium essential oil to the water. Rose G oil is an excellent de hexer.

I take a clean wash cloth and wash myself all over praying, Maiden protect me, mother cleanse me and crone help me to be wise. Of course, you will pick your own Gods and make up your own prayers.

Once I am washed, I take the used bath water to my hazelnut tree and give it to the tree as an offering.

I hope you find this helpful.
Maxine

[(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.

[(Anonymous)]

thanks you!

[(Anonymous)]

Not the OP:

But is it possible such negative thoughts aren't even internal to the person having them?

I have had some similar episodes in the past and found that dealing with them as though they were an outside entity worked wonders. Like, facing *the thing* (whatever it is) and being like: "I see you, I know what you are, I know you're not *me*," and calling on a higher power to give it the boot... well, some really freaky things happened with that (a totally not-supplied-by-me mental image of myself with a long spear, impaling something that at first looked human, but then on the end of the spear turned into a freakish bug-type thing), and they left me alone after that.

Or does the exact diagnosis not matter because affirmations accomplish the same purpose?

[ecosophia]

Of course -- many of "our" thoughts come in from outside. I find affirmations a very effective response to those as well. Certainly there are other ways to deal with them -- yours, for example -- and I'd encourage anyone who's having trouble with intrusive negative thoughts to explore as many options as come to mind. The important thing is to recognize that repetitive negative thoughts are actively harmful -- they have the same effect as affirmations, but in a bad way -- and it's important to take concrete steps to expel them from your mind and overwrite them with positive thoughts.

[(Anonymous)]

Just some examples of positive self-talk that I find helpful for countering negative self-talk about work:
"I always say the right thing to the right person at the right time."
"I maintain good relations with my boss and all my co-workers."
"I always do an excellent job at everything I do."
These seem to work well for me.

[ecosophia]

These are good examples and ought to work well.

One I used for many years was simply, "I am the master." I needed to overcome the emotional legacy of an autistic childhood, in which it very often seemed that I couldn't do anything at all to the satisfaction of other people; the idea of being a master, in the sense of a master craftsman or a master of a martial art, helped with that, and gave me the confidence I needed to master the things that mattered to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Forgive me if this is going into verboten territory, but I have to ask: is use of affirmations something good for children to do? I have an 8yo son who is so prone to negative self talk and emotional downward spiraling, I need to find some strategies for helping him cope with this.

[ecosophia]

Yes. Affirmations can be extremely helpful for children; so can almost any simple verbal spell. When I was a child, the proper response to a nasty insult from another child was:

"I'm rubber, you're glue,
whatever you say
bounces off me
and sticks to you."

It worked, too. Come up with a little rhyme that addresses whatever your son's main issues are, and teach him to repeat it to himself.

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.

Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle

[(Anonymous)]

I guess that means in turn that other solar systems can have lots of different planes, and that the 7 plane model based on the 7 ray interaction is of course, something to train the mind. In a solar system sense, there could be heaps of other planes, without beginning to think about other solar systems. I guess the divine sparks from a previous solar system just floated out there in the void, perhaps attached to Saturn, if Saturn was an old sun, as the cosmic tides turned and some new complex atoms came in, forming the new great entity. The original inhabitants of this bit of cosmic real estate were still here...

Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle

[ecosophia]

The seven-plane system is somewhat arbitrary -- other occult teachings identify 3, 4, or 5 planes, for example -- but it more or less mirrors the way we encounter the levels of being in this solar system. The demonic plane isn't really part of this solar system, it's a scrapheap that happened to be here when the solar logos got to work sorting things out. It's quite probable that the demonic beings were left over from the vanished system whose Sun is in some sense now Saturn, and came here with the material that became Saturn.

Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for your answers, this makes a lot of sense. I see now the apparent mercy in the new great entity that came here, in not wiping out the others. Perhaps even that new entity wasn't capable of that, or, stayed His/Her hand.

Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle

[charlieobert]

Your explanation may shed light on why it is so easy for sexual energy to be corrupted, and why it can be so difficult to do cleanly. When sexual energy arises from below it is all-too-easy for subterranean demons to hitch a ride.

Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle

[ecosophia]

Yes, and since demonic beings are especially good at tampering with our emotions, they have a particularly easy time with sex.

[(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...

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you !

[(Anonymous)]

I love that description of carney hucksters, shystering their rube marks out of their hard-earned wealth. Certainly, all their media barkers, endlessly rounding up the clueless to lure them into their perpetually breathless IPOs, fit that seedy carnival model quite well. The idea of those carney freaks, having foolishly managed to get themselves ensorceled by their own looting shell games, now fervently believing in their own tired spiel provides a glimmer of hope.

Despite all of the elaborate architecture of hype built up around their virtual nothing-burger, I imagine these would-be sorcerers will find themselves ignominiously rolled up in their tattered carnival tents, once their dreary circus is finally forced to move on. I find it delightfully rebalancing to envision our tech-bro titans' reign of digital terror imploding just as sponaneously and precipitously as our gender pitbulls' and identity-politics fetishists' terror reigns currently are.

- Christophe

[ecosophia]

My guess is we've got a speculative bubble and bust to get through first. Now that LLMs are running into hard limits, i.e., they don't work as advertised, I expect to see shares in the relevant stocks flogged relentlessly to get them out of the hands of their current owners and into those of as many chumps as possible, before the bottom falls out and the companies in question move inexorably toward their ultimate role as object lessons in speculative absurdity. Hang on!

[open_space]

LLM's are nothing more than statistics and pattern matching, and some that we've known for a few decades now. (Neural networks are a statistical model from the 30's) It's actually not that complicated even, its just that the scale is huge given that we have the infrastructure.

The black-box thing has been heavily inflated by the media with the party line "not even them know how it works", that sells very well. The fact the we can't tell through which pipe it decided to go, doesn't mean that we don't know with a lot of detail the topology of the whole piping system its built on, so to speak.

That said, that is relevant only for the people that develop them, outside of that, mostly by corporations, its treated heavily as a superstitious thing, which is why many are dropping them and its being used for what it is actually useful for (search and pattern matching).

That said, tech is easily influenced by magic too, anything that involves randomness is, so I can see it intersecting.

[(Anonymous)]

Instead of "scientific" versus "magical", the better framing here would probably be the distinctions between "engineering" versus "scientific" versus "alchemical" versus "magical". Science may be partly about public reproducibility, but here the point that matters is that it's about isolating causal elements.

I would call LLM training alchemical. (Or at least some material analogue of alchemical, if you define "alchemy" as coming to practical terms with non-material principles which you couldn't reductively understand even in principle, but which are still somewhat reproducibly accessible and manipulable and non-agentic.) There are a very large number of tendencies in the training data "materia", it's hard to even find a solid way of talking about what the tendencies would be or what the distinctions between them would be, the tendencies still sometimes have intelligibly reproducible net consequences as a gestalt nonetheless, and different manipulations affect different tendencies or pairings of tendencies in sometimes-intelligibly-reproducible ways (according to discoverable meta-tendencies possessed by those tendencies).

I would also call plant and animal breeding mostly alchemical, with the genes as the "materia". But on the continuum between "alchemical" and "scientific", it's less alchemical than LLM training, because there are relatively clearly-recognizable larger causal units like genes and paired chromosomes, and not just an opaque mishmash of nucleotides. Zymurgy is a bit more alchemical than plant breeding since yeast genomes are more confusing.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/13/the-omnigenic-model-as-metaphor-for-life is an exploration of how to cope with matters that are alchemical in this sense (though he doesn't call it "alchemical"). The essay starts from the concept of "polygenic traits" in genetics and then generalizes.

> One possible lesson here is that the sciences where progress is hard are the ones that have what seem like an unfair number of tiny interacting causes that determine everything. We should go from trying to discover “the” cause, to trying to find which factors we need to create the best polycausal model. And we should go from seeking a flash of genius that helps sweep away the complexity, to figuring out how to manage complexity that cannot be swept away.

(The businessman-generalist Jim Manzi has termed this concept "causal density", e.g. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/what-is-causality/257193/ .)

A closer analogue for "magic" in this context would be LLM prompting techniques, which have some points in common with magical practice. For example, if you specify in the text prompt of an image model "no elephants" in a context where it would have been surprising for an elephant/not-elephant distinction to come up at all, only sophisticated image models will reliably manage to avoid depicting an elephant. This is like the situation with affirmations.

Short-term political strategy in a democracy might qualify as "magical", but long-term strategy would come closer to being "alchemical", if the strategist is following the polls and cultural demographics to guess what actions had what long-term effects (without quite knowing why it had to be that long-term effect and not some other one). Perhaps "magic" is almost to "alchemy" what "engineering" is to "science": you're introducing a novel element of artificial control into a system you don't otherwise control to create a persistent effect, and there are enough recurring phenomena surrounding the fact of your intentional perturbation and the difficulties of creating a persistent desired effect that you might as well call it its own field of study. And often you need to do engineering to make instruments for science, just as many forms of alchemy-like study require magic-like manipulations. (I suppose magic and engineering are also somewhat more about purposive phenomena other than the practitioner, relative to alchemy and science respectively.)

In case this helps to understand the distinctions I'm trying to point to, I might associate alchemy with Netzach and science with Hod. (And then I suppose magic with Yesod, and engineering with Malkuth.) I think of Hod as being about structures of relationships between more-exchangeable and more-reproducible elements like letters or atoms or lambda-expressions, where that latent possibility of exchangeability and reproducibility had to be isolated by the work of Netzach and wasn't previously exposed.

If I actually knew more about alchemy, I might be able to come up with alchemical operations that LLM training would correspond to. However, it is notably already standard in the field to describe the operation of training a smaller, faster model, using information about the intermediate operations of a larger model, as "distillation". It's an operation that sometimes, for some purposes, improves the model's ability to generalize to unseen cases without retaining random inessential accidents from the materia, but sometimes instead just adds wonkiness and takes away the capacities with which the model might have grasped the point of a given pattern. Also, in a way, all LLMs are "distillations" of the training data in this sense, if you think of the training data as being a very primitive model consisting of a brute-force memorized version of itself.

As for reproducibility and determinism: you're not going to get the exact same parameters on the output end without making sure the initial random starting parameters and the digital approximate-arithmetic order of operations during the training process are exactly the same on the input end. That'd be like asking two communities of deaf children to come up with the same sign language, or two honey locust or contorted beech trees to come up with the same snaggles. What we would call "irreproducibility" is if different experimenters got consistently different performance using the same techniques on data gathered the same way.

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.

Re: Suicide of a lefthand path occultist

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry if this question seems dense, but what sort of corrective input could Dr. Aquino be expected to have received? What would be the wrongness that he would have to face? (fwiw, I’m not too intimately familiar with the man and his views)

Re: Suicide of a lefthand path occultist

[ecosophia]

I'm not too familiar with the specific beliefs of the Temple of Set, but Satanists generally tend to see the universe as ruled by a divine tyrant against which they are in justified rebellion. I imagine him blinking awake on the astral plane and finding out that there's no divine tyrant, no overbearing celestial hierarchy, and the spirits who are there to welcome him chuckle and say, "Relax. The only person who's going to beat you up here is yourself."

Re: Suicide of a lefthand path occultist

[(Anonymous)]

So does this mean he doesn't have to be worried about being devoured by whatever entity he pledged allegiance to during his earthly life?

Re: Suicide of a lefthand path occultist

[ecosophia]

It seems unlikely, based on what I know of Aquino's writings, that he pledged allegiance to any entity at all, other than his own ego. That may chew on him a bit, granted, but few of us escape that.

Not all Satanists worship a devil. Many of them worship themselves.

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.

Re: Magic and Literature, Magic and Opera,

[the_arcane_archivist]

Thank you

Re: Magic and Literature, Magic and Opera,

[(Anonymous)]

hey there... you might be interested in this book, which is on my list to read, but I haven't gotten to yet:

Money and magic :a critique of the modern economy in the light of Goethe's Faust by Hans Christoph Binswanger ; with a postscript by Iring Fetscher ; translated by J.E. Harrison.

"Although Faust is widely celebrated as a literary classic, few readers have appreciated its penetrating insights into the enduring social problems of the modern economy. Hans Christoph Binswanger looks at Faust through the lens of economics and enlarges our understanding of this epic by explaining Goethe's preoccupation with financial matters. Money and Magic interprets Faust as a warning about the dangers of pursuing endless wealth. It will be a valuable resource for Germanic and Goethe scholars, social and cultural historians, and economists alike."--Publishers blurb...

It's actually pretty short read, just 133 pages, so I should plan to get to it myself sooner than later.

Justin Patrick Moore

Re: Magic and Literature, Magic and Opera,

[the_arcane_archivist]

Thank you

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.

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[(Anonymous)]

I can't speak to money and magic (I'll leave that to JMG), but I recently finished reading David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" and found it very illuminating. It discusses the history and relationship of debt and money from an anthropological point of view.

Caldathras

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[(Anonymous)]

Wow. This may explain something that's dogged me for quite some time. After my father's death almost 30 years ago, my mother would regularly "gift" me and my sisters with several thousand dollars each year. Long story short, my parents' marriage was a mess, and Mom believed that with my father's death from cancer that the world would go her way. Whatever that was. It didn't, and she resented how well off my father left her. So, she throws money overboard on an annual (or more frequent) basis. Here's the thing: It stopped feeling like a "gift" quite quickly for me. I accept it, and thank her (which she prefers we not do - perhaps because it actually is NOT a gift). At this point, both of my sisters, who live several hundred miles from me, derive a significant portion of their income from her.

I expect others would be envious of me; tens of thousands of dollars over several decades for just sharing some DNA. I'd prefer a warm and loving mother with nothing to her name over what karma gave me: An angry, bitter woman who can't look at what her late husband left her without feeling the urge to shovel it (and him?) out the door. Even after he's long dead. She's mad at the world. It's nice to get a check, but it has a certain stink on it; like a cross between garbage and protection money. Our relationship is infrequent contact (her choice) and strictly surface communication when it happens at all. Boy oh boy, I hope I'm paying off some major karma navigating this with as much grace as I can muster.

Radiant Pooka

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[ecosophia]

I think it's more the person than the money in this case, but yeah, the money isn't helping!

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[(Anonymous)]

"It's nice to get a check, but it has a certain stink on it; like a cross between garbage and protection money." Perhaps you could accept the money, then give it away to a carefully chosen charity, without telling her?

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks! I'm married, and husband is delighted with the checks. So, we agreed some time ago that we'd give 10% to an assortment of our favorite charities and bank the rest. It's not ideal, but close enough.

Radiant Pooka

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[the_arcane_archivist]

New Age teachers prefer their followers to set up $1000/month autopayment arrangements

I don't know what they get out of it but that sounds like a rather expensive arrangement...

Unless they live there and that's rent and food.

Re: The spiritual nature of money

[(Anonymous)]

Money isn't wealth, it's a legal claim to wealth. Any time money is involved what matters isn't what's being nominally being done, nor even the money itself, but a third, absent, possibly not even actual, thing. Also, obtaining money is doing things only because you must so that you can have others do things for you *only because they must*. (Which I prefer to the alternatives I have actual experience with.)

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.

Re: Question about causation

[brendhelm]

Is this effectively what also happens during sleep and conscious trance - the brain's material-plane filter is "turned off" (or at least "turned down")?

Re: Question about causation

[ecosophia]

Yes, exactly. The brain has to rest, leaving the consciousness free to stray into the astral -- that's what we call "dreaming." If you pay close attention as you wake up and your dreams fade out, you can watch the filter coming into play.

Re: Question about causation

[xcalibur_djs]

Is that why dreams are often forgotten, disintegrating in sunlight? Is it because of the filter sliding back into place?
Also, losing sight of matter when you have a material body should intuitively explain why psychedelics are dangerous. I remember hearing stories of ppl falling off a dorm roof because they were going down the yellow brick road in the astral!

Re: Question about causation

[ecosophia]

Yes and yes.

Re: Question about causation

[(Anonymous)]

I've been using an affirmation: "I remember my dreams; my nightly visits to the astral plane." Now I do remember more of my dreams, but I can't help noticing how jejeune they are, for the most part. !

Re: Question about causation

[ecosophia]

That was why I wound up the project of recording my dreams after six months. I had a few really lively and interesting ones, but most of them were less interesting than casual daydreams -- not surprising, since I take good care not to let pressures build up in my unconscious mind.

Re: Question about causation

[the_arcane_archivist]

Psychedelic drugs (I do prefer the older term!)

Isn't psychotomimetic drugs the older term. Psychotomimetic - that produce a state similar to psychosis.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14094299/ (1964)

Re: Question about causation

[(Anonymous)]

I imagine this isn't standard teaching, but:

Even if the effect of the molecules on the neural correlates of mental activity had been, in some limited sense, entirely causally downstream of the effects of the molecules' higher-planar bodies on the mind's higher-planar bodies, still I would expect that some organizing force in our cosmos would have set things up such that this would never become unambiguously detectable by appreciable numbers of scientists using material tools. (At least, not so long as this detection would have ended up happening during the tropical-zodiacal aphelion or the Kali Yuga or whatever.) Maybe this organizing force would have worked by some prearranged harmony of carefully assigning the right higher-planar bodies to the right molecules in advance. Maybe this organizing force would have worked by making a patchwork of retcons, each patch being made only once it became clear that a discrepancy was otherwise going to be detectable. Maybe this organizing force would have worked by regulatory leaning on the greater elementals responsible for each molecule, telling them to start reining in the anomalies or face consequences. Maybe some combination.

Whatever this organizing force would be, don't underestimate its ability to arrange competing explanatory circumstances and even entire competing explanatory persistent structures of 'natural' phenomena, and so produce clouds of ambiguity around what might have otherwise been unambiguously supernatural effects. Even if psychoactivity of molecules turns out not to be one such effect.

I tend to suppose, on top of that, that our apparent materiality is sort of a source of inspiration or grounding for higher planes, like a constrained writing exercise or a carefully researched historical fiction, or a well-kept set of accounting books. So assigning higher-planar bodies that were too inconsistent with the effects that lower-planar bodies would produce might defeat the purpose, even if there's (currently, in our era before large-scale simulations of neurons) a lot of leeway like "well we can't prove DMT was really supposed to do something other than visions of machine elves".

Also, the very act of taking psychoactive drugs might be seen as a sort of a magical act, whose echoes are "I want to be having a different subjective experience, I am dissatisfied with what the bottom-up processes of perception and interpretation are doing for me". Which might reflect back as "I want my experience to be altered away from what bottom-up situations a more 'realistic' material universe would 'by rights' have generated for me", if materiality turns out to be a kind of extended form of perception or interpretation produced for the sake of coming to terms with some other, harder set of constraints. I tend to find that weird prank-like circumstances land on me if I am excessive with a certain otherwise-therapeutic substance, in such a way as to suggest that those circumstances would not have been set up around me if I hadn't been intoxicated, because it wouldn't have pressed the same buttons. That may not be exactly exactly the same thing, but it could be a result of something like "oh, you want your experience to be trippy, do you?"

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. ;-)

Re: America's Stonehenge

[(Anonymous)]

Went there when I was a kid: lotta controversy about whether it's "real" ancient site, or mostly constructed by whoever owned the property last. Maybe some of both. Fun field trip either way.

If you ever roadtrip up that direction, think about checking out Breakheart Reservation in Saugus, MA. I've never read anything 'mystical' about it, but boy does that place have vibes.

Re: America's Stonehenge

[ecosophia]

I'll keep that in mind!

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.

Re: Night planetary hours

[(Anonymous)]

It has a few interesting nuggets, lots of geometry, some congruence with your own Druidry Handbook concerning the circles of the world, some mentions of runes that I have found helpful because my candidate project is to integrate runes with the DMH material. Lots of Celtic mythology, some naturopathy.

What prompted me to dig for this book was a memory of a passage about the "Bardic A". The author claims that the "Bardic A" (the music note) is 432hz and he derives lots of numerology and gematria on that basis. It seems to me like retro-fitting and probably not very "Bardic"; it's not like he mentions a tuning fork or bell unfortunately as I was hoping. The author also wrote a book about the Grail, but that never landed in my hands.

Re: Night planetary hours

[ecosophia]

Hmm! Interesting. I gather Raymond Lautié is someone I need to know more about.

Re: Night planetary hours

[(Anonymous)]

Me too! I have had a hard time finding information about him. I know he worked with naturopath Andre Passebecq and they published health related books, but my google-fu did not churn up much else about him.

Re: Night planetary hours

[jprussell]

The next day starting at sunset appears to have been how the ancient Germanic folks understood things, which we have in a few holdovers like "Christmas Eve." I've given some thought to trying to embrace this, as I worship the Germanic Gods and do a daily devotion for the God of each day (the Sun for Sunday, the Moon for Monday, and so forth), but when I've explicitly done anything by planetary hours, I've used the standard 24 hour approach.

Sorry not to have more to offer, but it might be worth exploring.

Cheers,
Jeff

Re: Night planetary hours

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Jeff,

I remember reading about the start of the day at sunset in Nigel Pennick's Practical Magic in the Northern Tradition.

In your process were you considering doing different devotion at night like I mention? Like "Tuesnight" devotion to TYR on a Friday night? I am meditating a bit on what it means to have a different ruler for the night.

This prompts me to ask, did you think of correspondences between the Germanic names and the Latin names, and the gods and planets they represent? I am finding interesting that only Saturn remained in the set of names in English as the non-Germanic god name.

Thanks for you thoughts,
JML

Re: Night planetary hours

[jprussell]

In my case, I only really got as far as "hmm, it's after sunset now that I've gotten to my daily prayers, should I light a candle and pray to the God of the day the calendar/clock still says it is, or the God of the next day?" (e.g. it's after sundown on Sunday, should I pray to Sonne or Mone?). Thus far, I haven't experimented much, and have mostly stuck with the calendar day.

And as for the Interpretatio Romanum of the Germanic Gods to the days, I have settled on using the name of the day in English, and have left it somewhat ambivalent whether the heavenly body associated with the Roman deity is directly/somewhat/not at all associated with that God(dess), other than where it's obvious (the Sun and the Moon), though with some leaning in to trying to find the association of the planet with the God (for example, looking for ways that the traditional associations of the planet Mercury are reflected in Woden, or Jupiter for Thunor).

As for Saturday, aye, that's the rub. Some Heathens I've read that do a daily devotion along these lines treat Saturday as a "free day" to honor whichever God is most important to you who doesn't have a day. Others look for closest equivalents to Saturn mythologically (Mimir is one candidate that came up in a recent discussion, but I've also seen Ymir, though both bring up the question of whether you're comfortable offering devotion to jotnar, or some jotnar and not others, and so forth). I have erred more on the former side - I dedicate Saturday to Idun, as She is important to me personally, and she has some of the same connotations of the "softer" side of Saturn - relaxation, death and rebirth, fertility and growth, though Her being so clearly associated with "youth" stands in pretty stark contrast to Saturn's association with old age.

Overall, it's not a riddle I feel like I've wholly unravelled yet, but I reckon that regular devotion is a good idea whether it's technically "right" or not.

Cheers,
Jeff

Re: Night planetary hours

[(Anonymous)]

For us Hindus, the day begins at sunrise, and I completely ignore the Western "midnight". Do you account for daylight savings time? What if the government suddenly introduces a uniform timezone for the whole country, like in India or China? The Western day, like the Western year, is artificial and has little to do with any physical or spiritual realities.

Re: Night planetary hours

[ecosophia]

The Western planetary day begins at dawn, irrespective of clock time. I use a book, Llewellyn George's Perpetual Planetary Hour Book, which gives the time correction for every city and town in the United States so that you can change clock time to solar time and begin and end your planetary hours at the right time. (Yes, I know there are apps that can do this. I prefer to do it the old way.)

Re: Night planetary hours

[(Anonymous)]

Interestingly, both Jews and Catholics start the day at sundown (well, we know where the Catholics inherited it from!) which is why there are many Christmas services throughout the sects of Christianity which are held on Christmas Eve night.

It's also how Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday dawn, becomes three days in the tomb at Easter, when a strict accounting by modern hours would put it closer to one and a half days. But that wasn't how days were counted at that time and place.

BoysMom

Re: Night planetary hours

[anonymoose_canadian]

I've seen hints of Hellenistic astrological practices which worked with treating day and night differently. I haven't looked at this in any kind of depth, so I'm not sure of anything beyond the fact it looks like it once existed.

Re: Night planetary hours

[not_gandalf]

Hmm. If I recall correctly, in the Philosophers of Nature the planetary day begins with sundown of the day before. Also, in the LPN, you would have 24 hours, but the hours would be determined by looking at the actual length of time between Sunrise and Sunset, divided by twelve, for the length of the hours of the day, and from sunset to sunrise, to determine the hours of the night. Still 24 hours, but the lengths of the day and the lengths of the hours would vary.

[(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.

[(Anonymous)]

Well that's a relief!

I've noticed in every book Ariel has a concern of magical ethics that is brought up for consideration, and then the plot moves on leaving the question open for the reader. For instance, she wonders whether it is appropriate for her to do a spell that results in her getting something. I was wondering if Ariel is ever going to get a dialogue with a more experienced practitioner on one of those ethical questions. I expect they're left as a theme for meditation, but I'm always left wanting her to have someone to humanly connect with about the concern, take the question seriously, and I would expect leave her with more questions than answers but also a sense that the questions are very important to wrestle with.

[ecosophia]

Good. You're paying attention.

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!

Re: Neptune in Aries

[neptunesdolphins]

So it has no relation to the eclipses of the Moon and Sun in Aries this past month?

Various bloggers are saying this is spiritual warrior energy, and paradigm shift. What are they reacting to?

I have Neptune in Libra along with Venus and Saturn, so it really doesn't affect me? Nothing in Aries. Does it only affect people who have Neptune in Aries or Aries people?

I did have a bad reaction to the two eclipses, but then again I have been having bad reactions to them for the past few years.

Re: Neptune in Aries

[ecosophia]

The eclipses have effect. The presence of Neptune has an effect, as it does in any chart. What I'm saying is that the fact that Neptune is passing into Aries doesn't allow predictions to be made from that fact alone.

Re: Neptune in Aries

[brendhelm]

Not JMG, but -

My personal take on it is that the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Aries is a bigger deal simply than Neptune's ingress into Aries (they seem, to me, to mark geopolitical "beats" or some other such cycles). The main effects of Neptune entering Aries, I think, are that:

- Solar seasonal ingresses and eclipse charts during this period will no longer have Neptune in the sign of its rulership. This especially affects the Aries ingress over the next couple of years, since the Sun-Neptune conjunction will still be in orb but now in Aries rather than cross-sign Pisces/Aries. This will have the most immediate effect on those areas whose Aries ingress was in cardinal signs (which happens to include Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Tehran), since the Cancer ingress with Neptune fully in Aries will be "active".

- Neptune in Aries means Mars is now exalted through mutual reception in Pisces. Since Aries comes right after Pisces, this has the effect of effectively doubling all "Mars in Aries" periods and makes it twice as likely that a "Mars in Aries" signal will appear in any ingress, eclipse, foundation, or natal chart.

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.

Re: Dreams about the recently dead

[(Anonymous)]

My mother passed away suddenly, unexpectedly in 2008. Though she had health issues, it was still quite the surprise. She visited me a few times afterwards in dreams. Still every once awhile. Even in the past five years I had a few vivid dreams of her that had a just-so quality where she communicated something important to me. I had no doubt it was a communication from her. How that works with where she may be now, I'm not totally sure, except to say the astral plane isn't bound by the same rules of time.

Yet in the immediate aftermath it was those dreams that, while not taking away my grief, made it more bearable. Others have followed from other relatives and people I know who passed since then. I can't say all my fears of death are gone, but these dreams, alongside meditation and occult practice, they have changed how I feel about it for the better.

Justin Patrick Moore

Re: Dreams about the recently dead

[(Anonymous)]

OP here:

Whether I take it as a literal capital-S Sign-from-beyond or not, it's a mixed bag :/ Previous dreams about a different deceased relative left me in rather acute distress about their status in the afterlife. I do not actually *want* those to be a reflection of reality. But I think it's entirely possible they were.

Re: Dreams about the recently dead

[(Anonymous)]

That's not an experience I have had in my dreams of the departed. If those were my dreams however, I would spend at least little time praying for the departed (we don't need their permission anymore) or doing something along those lines. It might still be a telephone call from beyond, but one that asking for help, more than showing the comfortable new digs and activities they are getting up to. -JPM

Re: Dreams about the recently dead

[(Anonymous)]

I do, of course, still pray and light candles for that one.

Re: Dreams about the recently dead

[revert2mean]

FWIW I'd say that was a real visit and they're reassuring you they're fine, much better than they were here. I realise that will make the other dreams more upsetting.

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...)

Re: Internal Monologue

[xcalibur_djs]

My understanding is that we use pointers towards the mental plane. For example, the number seven, or 7, VII, 七, and so on, are material/astral symbols or signposts pointing the way towards the higher, mental meaning of that quantity. Hopefully I'm on the right track.

Re: Internal Monologue

[ecosophia]

Yes, though you can just as easily see them as condensations or concretizations of the mental plane content on the next plane down.

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.

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[https://openid-provider.appspot.com/bryanlallen]

Excellent! I’ve not commented before on your music notes, but have thought many times “Wow, JMG listens to a lot of the same music I do, but I NEVER see a mention of Genesis.” Glad to hear that’s being addressed!

There’s a LOT to explore in that music space. The earliest guitarist for Genesis was Anthony Philips, who suffered from stage-fright, dropped out, but who has many excellent solo albums (Private Parts and Pieces 3 is a particular favorite.) The initial lead singer Peter Gabriel is an AMAZING musician, quite quirky, and is still producing great music (I/O most recently.) The guitarist who replaced Philips, Steve Hackett, is astonishingly great. His first solo album featured themes derived from the tarot; the song “Shadow of the Heirophant” is very noteworthy (by “Shadow”, the implication/message is “reverse”.) Hackett departed in the 1970s but has gone on to be the shining light of performing earlier Genesis classics; worth looking up public performances his group has done recently. Phil Collins is/was world-class as a drummer (he’s quite ill now), yet became, almost by accident, additionally the lead singer after Gabriel departed; Collins has gone on to be one of the most noteworthy and successful singers in all of rock. Tony Banks is an extremely talented keyboardist and composer, really the core of Genesis, and has in later years written several quite excellent symphonies! Mike Rutherford, bass & guitars, shares with Banks a core position in Genesis, and has also branched out in interesting directions with his solo-career group “Mike and the Mechanics.” There’s a lot of excellent music to explore in Genesis and its various spin-offs!

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[ecosophia]

There is indeed. My first venture into that end of music, courtesy of a thrift shop (as usual), was Steve Hackett's solo album Voyage of the Acolyte in original vinyl, which I bought on the basis of its obvious references to the tarot (at $2.99 a piece, I can risk being whimsical!) and instantly loved. Copies of the Genesis albums And Then There Were Three (on cassette) and We Can't Dance (on CD) followed, and most recently the three-CD Platinum Collection; I await more discoveries.

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[(Anonymous)]

Just a thought on #3 - I can't find it now, but there's an interview somewhere (maybe 15 years ago) in which John McLaughlin talks about what he wished New Age music could have turned into. It was a little like what you're describing, I think: a skillful melding of diverse musical worlds. I tend to see his work as a type of musical alchemy. "Universalist initiates" for sure, in some of those groups!

The late Zakir Hussein once said that when the first Shakti record came out, nobody had a clue how to categorize it. Even with no electronics, something like "Fourth World" probably would have been a better fit than just "Fusion" ... possibly the only category less descriptive than "World" or "New Age."

Sorry if this is getting off topic. I have to check out that Peter Gabriel record!

Noodles

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Noodles...

John McLaughlin would know! I love some Mahavishnu Orchestra, and the Miles Davis records he played on...

Zakir Hussein is great too.

Ambient music of course has a direct through-line to Erik Satie and his concept of Furniture Music. I suppose ambient can be seen as one of his magical creations.

...but for the World and Fusion stuff, I think there could have been a more ritualistic vein of it.

It's interesting to think of genre and such. Some in the millenial and zoomer gens have gotten interested in the whole are of New Age music...

JPM

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[jprussell]

A rather silly tangent: a musically-inclined friend of mine used to like to subtly troll folks by proposing a conspiracy theory: Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel are really the same person. He'd ask in a very leading, implicative way: "think about it, have you ever seen both of them in the same place at the same time?"

For anyone following along not familiar, the joke, of course, was that Collins and Gabriel were both members of Genesis at the same time, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the shared history, their solo work has certain stylistic qualities in common. That and the inherent ridiculousness in expecting direct, personal experience of two folks that most people had only ever heard in recording (at least by the time he was making this joke, in the late 00s).

Cheers,
Jeff

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

[(Anonymous)]

Ha! That's hilarious Jeff... You're very right of course, I never have seen them in the same place at the same time. Not even in a music video! It just goes to show that there are more yeti spawn dopplegangers out there beamed onto planet earth by JHVH-1 than anyone might care to admit!

Their own respective dopplegangers, Phil Gabriel and Peter Collins, probably have had good solo careers in their own right.

Hope you and yours are well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-KbqRDcEnQ

[(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.

[open_space]

Do you have any thoughts on the methodology used by remote viewers? I strike me as fascinating and that a little magic could make it more effective.

[ecosophia]

I'm not familiar with the methodology used by that specific remote viewer, if that's what you mean. Generally speaking, yes, remote viewing can be improved by doing it within a banished space and using magical training to improve focus and clarity.

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?

Re: Bri

[(Anonymous)]

At least a couple of days, in some cases three to four days.

Re: Bri

[ecosophia]

Then they were probably pretreated to keep them from sprouting. You might try seeds from a garden store.

Re: Bri

[(Anonymous)]

Alas, that's what I did! Some of the seeds were from a seed packet purchased from a garden store, one was from my home's garden, and one from a gardener friend. Admittedly the seeds from the garden store may have been old.

Re: Bri

[ecosophia]

How very odd. I wonder if you have too much chlorine in your tap water, then. Get some fresh seeds; pour some water into a bowl and leave it to stand for 24 hours uncovered, so that the chlorine can evaporate. Then soak some seeds for an hour, thoroughly moisten several pieces of cloth, put the seeds in the cloth, and keep them moist with the water from the bowl for a week, checking daily.

Re: Bri

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, will do. Thanks for you help!

Re: Bri

[(Anonymous)]

I used a bean from a sprouting mix. I tried some store bought dry beans which never sprouted for me. My guess is a lot of beans and peas from the shelves are treated or undergo some process that make them hard to sprout. Good luck !

Re: Bri

[(Anonymous)]

Store-bought lentils (which are a type of bean) sprout easily, but not if you soak them for too long (the 24 hours in the CGD book worked for me).

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...

Re: blessing offer; Carnelian Moon questions

[milkyway1]

Gotcha, thanks for explaining! :-)

[(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...

[(Anonymous)]

Re: "They'll shift realities, all right, out of the material plane and into the after-death state..."

This brings to my mind a rather lacerating comment that is probably better suited for the covid forum— and has probably already been said there many time by others.

Seriously, though, "reality" does seem a bit shifty to me sometimes.

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.

Re: Norther Roman Empire

[robertmathiesen]

Heavens, yes! That the capital of Russia (Moscow) is the third and final "Rome" has been a major part of Russia's self-identity ever since the late 1400s and the 1500s. (The first Rome was Rome itself, the second Rome was Constantinople, which fell to Muslim armies in 1453.)

Here is how one Russian writer, the monk Filofei [Philotheos], exhorted the Russian Tsar [the title comes from the Latin word "Caesar"] in the early 1500s:

"all the Christian kingdoms came to an end and came together in a single kingdom of yours. Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there will be no fourth. No one shall replace your Christian kingdom."

This exhortation has been quoted over and over again since the 1800s in Russian schoolbooks on the history of Russia, to the point where it has become deeply embedded in Russians' consciousness of their historical destiny.

Re: Norther Roman Empire

[mediawakeboard]

Thank you very much

I suppose, one of these days I will have to plunge into Spengler