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,

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

Magic Monday

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