ecosophia | 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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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

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

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

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

"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?

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

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.

Edited 2025-03-31 20:03 (UTC)

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.)

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