ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

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!***

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Came across a book that might be of interest: 'The Tameless Path - Unleashing the Power of Invasive Plants in Witchcraft' by Kamden Cornell (2024, Crossed Crow Books, Chicago). The author explores planetary magic, recipes & spells, botany, etc., etc. Extensive bibliography including books (JMG - one of your books is listed!), articles, websites; the list cites scientific journals, along with materials relating to the culinary arts (for example) and a whole slew of occult topics (alchemy, astrology, lycanthropy, shapeshifting, witchcraft, and more.) I have only glanced at the book so far, as I've a lot of other books on my to read pile.

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

Hello JMG--I believe you've posted on the significance of the Neptune-Saturn conjunction in Aries next year, but I don't recall where that would be. Could you point me to it, or do a brief recap of the significance of the conjunction at 0 deg. Aries?

Many thanks.

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

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

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.)

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.

I learned it from studying with Cat Yronwode of Lucky Mojo Curio Co. -- I'd check her books on the subject. Aunt Clarice is an urban hoodoo doctor of the classic type, and her magic is largely drawn from my studies with Cat.

That's certainly one of the options -- not being a bodhisattva (which takes a lot of further work) but interacting with humans who are still incarnate. It's quite common for people who complete their human lives as part of some school of occultism, for example, to end up after death helping to manage the inner side of that same school.

It's Gwynfydd, by the way, pronounced GWUN-vuth.

Anything you do to benefit women, arts, and crafts can be an offering to Venus. Donate some time as a volunteer, if you like, and certainly play music as an offering to her -- you might do that every Friday for seven Fridays, and play love songs.

The Litany works for different people in different ways. I was originally inspired to write it by working with an equivalent book by William Gray, which was keyed to his idiosyncratic version of the Tree of Life; what inspiration led him to write the original version is anybody's guess now, as he's long since gone. I've worked with it in several ways, and other people have rung their own changes on it. Thus I'd encourage you to try approaching it in different ways and see what works best for you.

Hmm! Interesting. Thanks for this.

"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?

Anything that happens at 0° Aries is a reset button in astrology. When the Sun reaches 0° Aries, that's the spring equinox, the beginning of a new astrological year. When an outer planet conjunction happens there, or within 4° or so of the beginning of Aries, it marks a new age of the world, and the slower the planets, the more important the change of ages will be. A Neptune-Saturn conjunction in that location, especially since it's literally 0°, is huge. (The only outer planet conjunction that would pack more clout is Uranus-Neptune, and that hasn't happened at 0° Aries in recorded history.)

The last time Saturn and Neptune were in the beginning of Aries was 593 BC. That marked the beginning of the Axial Age -- the birth of philosophy, formal mathematics, and prose literature, the emergence of the first democracies, the spread of literacy outside the scribal classes over much of Eurasia, the birth of scriptural religions, and much, much more. We're heading into another change of equal magnitude, or even more intense, since this one is closer to the zero point of Aries than the one 2618 years ago. Hang onto your hat!

(I haven't posted about it yet. I plan on doing so this year.)

I see, thanks.

The inner side of religions on higher planes sounds interesting; it reminds me of the Medieval concept of the Church Militant and Church Triumphant. I guess if there are parallels and continuations of the material world on the astral and above, it would make the transition that much easier. Maybe being a bodhisattva is overly ambitious, and is something that would come along much further than graduating to Gwynfydd. Either way, I'd like to know how the whole human experience turns out, or at the very least the current Aryan cycle of civilization.

Okay, will do. Thanks for you help!

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

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!

Hi JMG,

I've recently entered the early stages of the Builders of the Adytum course, and find its practical approach to setting and achieving one's goals to be attractive and refreshing. In particular, I enjoy its insistence upon distilling one's desires into a stepwise ordering of concrete and achievable goals. However, what I struggle with is this: while my larger goals and desires are plain to me, it is easy to doubt and second-guess the steps that I choose to reach them. Are they the correct moves? Given that, through these studies, I am seeking communication and wisdom from Superconsciousness and my Higher Self, it is easy to imagine that, given a choice in first steps toward a goal, my Higher Self would choose differently than what my current state of consciousness may conceieve.

The BOTA course (at least in the early lessons that I've encountered) don't address this question directly, though from its general context I have some guesses about how to tackle it. I'm guessing you've encountered this question from others, whether in reference to the BOTA coursework or not, and I'm wondering how you generally advise on it.

Many thanks!

balowulf

If I remember my history of science correctly it was believed until well into Renaissance times that vision was accomplished by the eye sending out "rays" to the object being seen so that vision was a sort of touching at a distance with an invisible energy of the body. I don't think this belief was overthrown until Newtons work on optics, although I could be wrong on that.

It did occur to me that such a belief might play into the idea of bad luck for breaking a mirror, since a mirror that you have looked and seen your image in might be thought to hold some of your energy and that that energy would be lost or harmed if the mirror is broken. Of course, this superstition would have had to have arisen after the advent of glass mirrors since polished bronze or other shiny metals used for mirrors would be very difficult to accidently break.

I have also joked that the behavior of contemporary celebrities and politicians suggests that "primitive" fears of one's soul being captured by cameras might have a foundation.

Rita

Several MMs ago, you said that when the energy shift then pouring into the upper astral starts cleansing the lower astral, things would get real hairy on the physical plane?

While I am a beginner who knows very little about the planes, I imagine the lower astral sludge will become some sort of etheric poison, which would manifest as disease epidemics and crop failures. But after those effects fade out, mental health in general will improve, or be less bad than it would otherwise, since the lower astral will be less murky than it is right now.

Am I on the right track?

Patrick

Yes and yes.

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.

First of all, keep in mind that what you're getting now is very basic. It's not the last word in any of this -- it's meant to give you a taste of how to start going about fulfilling your dreams, and also to raise questions that will be answered later on. For now, simply do your best, work out the steps that seem to make sense to you, pursue them, and learn from the experience. There's much, much more to come.

1) I am struggling to recall the exact place I read it, but I wanna say this idea comes up in Aristotle's *De Anima*-- that perception happens by an act of the eye, not by passive reception of outside stimuli.

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Page 7 of 9

Magic Monday

Book on invasive plants

Re: The spiritual nature of money

Neptune-Saturn conjunction

Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,

Re: The spiritual nature of money

Re: Night planetary hours

Re: Bri

no subject

Re: Graduating from human life

no subject

Re: Litany of the Tree

Re: Book on invasive plants

Re: The spiritual nature of money

Re: Neptune-Saturn conjunction

Re: Graduating from human life

Re: Bri

Re: The spiritual nature of money

Re: Question about causation

Builders of the Adytum Coursework

Re: Why must they stare so loudly

When the great shift reaches the lower astral

Re: Question about causation

Re: Internal Monologue

Re: Builders of the Adytum Coursework

Re: Why must they stare so loudly