Magic Monday
Mar. 30th, 2025 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
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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***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***
Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-03-31 07:32 pm (UTC)I was wondering if you could shine some light on the subtle/energetic dynamics that occur when a person is being observed by another. I'm trying to come to a better understanding of why some people, like myself, become discombobulated the moment another person is directly watching them.
For me, I can say that it feels as though there's a force being sent out through the eyes of the other that presses on me in a manner similar to the weight of gravity. This force also grows exponentially more unbearable as the number of people who are observing increases.
Of course, I assume I'm also adding to this 'pressured' feeling, albeit unconsciously, so there's much journaling and self-reflection happening on my end already, but it doesn't seem to be entirely "in my own mind".
Additionally - Could this same dynamic help to explain, at least in part, why direct eye contact with another person can feel so overwhelming (at times)?
Thank you
Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-03-31 07:41 pm (UTC)That aside, I've never seen a discussion of this in occult philosophy, which is strange. The effect is known -- one popular occult school back in the day used to have students use the effect to prove to themselves that mind-power is real -- but the mechanism hasn't gotten the discussion it deserves in any source known to me. Anyone else?
Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-03-31 09:09 pm (UTC)J.L.Mc12
Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-04-01 12:26 am (UTC)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
Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-03-31 10:11 pm (UTC)1) I can't remember where I read this, but apparently in the early days of scientific explanations of how light bounces off things and enters the eyes as passive receptors, it flew in the face of what was most folks' obvious, intuitive understanding of what was happening in vision: the looker shot something out of the eyes to the object being viewed, perhaps with a "bounce back," perhaps not. Of course, the thing I read was written from a materialist perspective, and so spent some time head-scratching at how such a backwards understanding of what was really happening could seem so intuitive and obvious to so many, but now that I've gotten into the weirder side of things, I wonder if there was something to the old view that's rejected by the materialist interpretation.
2) Again, this is mostly from a materialist perspective, but I've come to see it as a parallel/alternate explanation, rather than something mutually exclusive with an occult view on things. I teach public speaking, and it's so common as to be nearly universal for folks to be made nervous by speaking in front of an audience. In fact, most of what makes someone a good public speaker, is just getting over the discomfort produced by being the center of attention of many people, and speaking comfortably (as I tell my students "all of us talk every day with very few problems, so why do we get weird when folks are watching us?"). An evolutionary-psychology perspective is that for most of human history, we likely lived in relatively small groups, where an audience of, say, 20 or 50 folks would be a significant portion of all of the humans you're likely to ever know in your life. In such small groups, reputation is extremely important, and how well you share your thoughts and what you propose others should do would be a big part of that. So, the argument runs that when we face a large(ish) audience, parts of our brain automatically register it as "very significant to my survival/reproductive chances," even if in a modern context it might be of far less weight.
A further wrinkle that's slightly less speculative since we have anatomical evidence for it is that humans are made to show where our attention is to other humans - our visible sclera (whites of the eyes) are not found in other animals, even our closest relatives, the great apes. These make it much easier to tell, even from a fairly great distance, where we're looking. This suggests that for one reason or another, it is/was important for us to be able to tell where other folks are looking, which is further supported by how important most cultures treat things like eye contact (when to do it, when to avoid it, and so forth).
As I said above, my current view is that the above is likely correct, but not exhaustive in explaining what's going on. At any rate, I hope you find it interesting and/or helpful.
Cheers,
Jeff
Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-04-01 12:41 am (UTC)Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-04-01 01:52 am (UTC)Re: Why must they stare so loudly
Date: 2025-04-01 03:59 am (UTC)As for the other point, being looked at means being causally influential, which means being more party to any existing web of causal constraints in your supernatural circumstances.