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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 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.
***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***
Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,
(Anonymous) 2025-03-31 02:13 pm (UTC)(link)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,
Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,
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,
Re: Silent Records, Geometry and the Horse,
(Anonymous) 2025-03-31 04:20 pm (UTC)(link)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) 2025-03-31 05:14 pm (UTC)(link)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,
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) 2025-03-31 11:22 pm (UTC)(link)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