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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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!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The centrality of sexuality to human experience varies. The same is true of every other aspect of human experience -- for example, some people are intellectuals and some aren't, and that's just the way things are. Since we all have many lives to explore the nature of human existence, it seems quite reasonable that some of us would set sex aside for a life or two in order to concentrate on other things. My contact with asexuals suggests to me that they're not amputating anything; forcing themselves to have sex would be unnatural to them as doing without it is to most of us.

(The word "asexual" has only one "s," by the way; adding an extra one gives it embarrassing connotations in English...)

Thank as always, specially for the correction; not being a native speaker, I'm prone to committing errors every now and then. It took me a moment, but I get what you're saying, btw.

JMG and commenter,

One might also consider that not all cultures have been as obsessed with sex as contemporary Western culture seems to be. In many cultures it is routine to have times during which one is expected to refrain from sexual contact. In fact, we are in the last weeks of one such, Lent. Sometimes it was a particular partner--one's pregnant, post-partum or nursing partner and menstruating women were commonly avoided. Orthodox Jews still follow such restrictions. Of course, this left males in some cultures free to resort to the other wives or concubines or to lovers or paid partners or even male partners depending on the culture in question. However, some taboos covered all the possibilities: refraining from sex during or before ceremonies or important tasks such as hunting, fishing (especially at sea), boat building, making or working on hunting or war weapons are examples. And it wasn't that long ago that high school and college coaches advised their male players against sexual activity before a game--some may still do so. I think most people these days assume that celibacy is the greatest challenge of the Catholic priesthood, but I have read some who claim that obedience is more difficult.

Of course, earlier cultures did not have commercialized images of sexualized bodies constantly available.

Rita

Magic Monday

Re: Asexuals

Re: Asexuals

Re: Asexuals