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!***
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 04:00 am (UTC)I started doing the preparatory work in the Art of the Sword book a couple of weeks ago, gradually working my way through the exercises, movements, relaxation and breathwork. I then developed a rather obnoxious rash that showed up on forearms and then spread over my trunk and legs, it was rather like a heat rash. I can’t come up with a single possible physical factor that would have caused this and it’s not a normal thing for me. What had changed was that the rash showed up within a day of the beginning the second breathwork practice, the one where you practice a few repetitions of the complete breath and then bring a breath into the chest and move it back and forth from the upper chest towards the diaphragm. I kept doing the practices for a couple of days and the rash didn’t improve. I stopped the practices and after a day and half the rash started to go down and has been improving since. Now, four days after stopping the practices it’s mostly gone. I’m well aware that etheric/chi work can result in physical effects and strongly suspect the rash and the breathwork were linked. I intend to ease back into the practice again as I was enjoying it and I think it will serve my purposes well in a number of different ways. My question then is (and I am definitely not asking for medical advice in any way) do you have any advice or thoughts about restarting the practice?
Thanks,
HV
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 04:13 am (UTC)Rashes
Date: 2025-03-31 04:14 am (UTC)I suspect a cold magic bath in the mornings will clean you up on the etheric plane I do this every morning and feel it does me a great deal of good.
Maxine
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 04:17 am (UTC)Have an excellent week, everyone!
I've been having negative thoughts for quite some time, usually about the same topic: "being the inconvenience at work" or "nobody likes me for some reason" or "they want to fire me from work for some issue." Yes, I realized I deliberately created this in my mind. These thoughts come to my mind every day.
And I also noticed that these thoughts create synchronicities, bad situations, coincidences, meaning they become reality. I co-created and manifested this reality of mine in a short time.
I also think about the future. What might come next...
I'm not sure I believe in the theory of good affirmations, like: "I'm a nice guy," "everyone likes me." I know it's a fallacy (because some like me, but not everyone).
1. What could I do beyond positive affirmations?
2. And I also think about the future. How to dissolve these already created and established thought-forms that could cause a very negative reality for me?
Thanks in advance!
Last piece of the demon puzzle
Date: 2025-03-31 04:22 am (UTC)I had a more serious question in relation to some of the discussion last week. You helpfully sketched out how demons, or debased spirits exist, even from before our solar system's establishment, because they aren't spiritually advanced enough to move on, or, in a rare few cases, get advanced enough to renounce their own spiritual basis and undergo the unknown death. There's a strange cosmic mercy in all that, which is both spooky and sort of heartening, those debased unbalanced entities may one day get out of that state.
It does leave me wondering though, if they have physical bodies, at some point some entities (maybe the lords of form?) must have spun off a separate plane for them, and that must have been a conscious decision to protect us and other swarms from them. That might explain the "keeping alive externally" descriptors that come through in the kaballah.
I know it's not good to tbink too much about that end of existence, but a vague fear I had was that if there was one of those nasty lower planes, there could be others, we don't know and shouldn't. Perhaps the fear of a second lemurian deviation sits in me somewhere.
Anyway, the question was, did that demon plane get established by the early swarms, or did it just evolve sort of naturally too?
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 04:24 am (UTC)Furthermore, the one really effective way to counter negative self-talk is positive self-talk, so get at it. Whenever you catch yourself thinking one of those patterns of negative self-talk, repeat a positive affirmation twenty times, then and there. Keep doing this. You'll find that it really does work.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 04:28 am (UTC)Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle
Date: 2025-03-31 04:30 am (UTC)2) To judge by what little has been written about them, demonic entities have what might be called sub-physical bodies -- bodies belonging to a plane even denser, more resistant, and more clumsy than physical matter. Our bodies compare to theirs the way that etheric bodies compare to ours. Their plane wasn't created by the early swarms; it was already there, as a kind of scrapheap of existence left over from a previous cosmic cycle, like an ancient crypt with a recent building built over the top of it. If the Lemurian deviation hadn't happened, we probably wouldn't know about their existence yet.
Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle
Date: 2025-03-31 04:40 am (UTC)Re: Rashes
Date: 2025-03-31 04:41 am (UTC)HV
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 04:41 am (UTC)HV
Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle
Date: 2025-03-31 04:47 am (UTC)Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle
Date: 2025-03-31 05:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 07:18 am (UTC)I apologize for bringing this topic up here.
Do you consider large language models closer to magic than actual science ? I do not see the explanatory power of traditional sciences there. Instead a large amount of data are fitted into a black box, and then the results somehow magically come up. Sometimes even the reviewers are surprised that the models work the way they work. Also, another effort to train a model may not give us the same set of parameters inside the black box.
Where do we draw the line between a system working magically and scientifically established methods with reproducible experiments?
Suicide of a lefthand path occultist
Date: 2025-03-31 07:37 am (UTC)Magic and Literature, Magic and Opera,
Date: 2025-03-31 07:51 am (UTC)Let me proceed I followed your Ring Cycle and how it is about more than a love story and Opera I think I stumbled upon another case, where this might apply: "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
This looks to me that is more than about a love story and is more about class struggle and zeitgeist. I think Goethe use struggle a lot more before Marx let me expose my hypothesis:
I think Goethe's Werther yearning for Lotte is more about some sort of class struggle and most of the same themes that appear later in the Ring Cycle, is more about middle and lower middle class aspirations, much like the Ring Cycle. It is supposedly based on Goethe's life but I think it downed on Goethe pretty early the irony of the etymology of the names of the name of those involved in this tragic affair. Werther ('Worthy Warrior'), Lotte as struggles, Wilhelm('Will Defender') as Werther's true will that he is unable to follow because of the obsession with the struggle (obsession tant akin to having a black magic spell on him). Etc Where names didn't fit he made his own like Albert ('Noble').
Goethe knew Italian very well and I think he knew what he was doing:
lotta f (plural lotte)
I think my thesis might be confirmed about the follow ups having the same themes:
Thomas Man's Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns (1939)
Ulrich Plenzdorf.The New Sorrows of Young W.
etc
But the book is known to have influenced pretty much everything from Opera to Dostoevsky. I personally think is indirectly almost everywhere even in movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Forest Gump. In Forest Gump might not seem because the nobles here are slicky hippies but there were plenty of "nobles" on the hippie scene, sons of wealthy, some even ended up being famous too like Jim Morrison. Maybe who ever made Forest Gump wanted to show that only an extremely lucky ignorant idiot could survive this. Which to an extent also the protagonist of Eyes Wide Shut is.
Do you think there's something to it or I am just seeing too many patters? BTW Since you know Wagner very well do you think is influenced by Goethe?
The spiritual nature of money
Date: 2025-03-31 10:01 am (UTC)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.
Question about causation
Date: 2025-03-31 10:53 am (UTC)I have a question about how causation works between the planes of existence. In particular, I’m wondering about how physical things seem to be able to affect the mind.
You have taught that causation moves down the planes: for example when the life force of the etheric plane affects the physical body on the material plane. If we consider psychoactive chemical substances and their effects on the mind, is that an instance of a physical thing causing a change in the etheric and astral bodies of the person who consumes them, or is it that the astral and etheric qualities of the psychoactive molecule come into contact with and affect the astral and etheric bodies of the person who consumes them, with the physical phenomena of cellular absorption and neurotransmitter modulation being simply the final result downstream from higher causes? In other words, is it the change in consciousness that causes these brain changes rather than the other way round?
America's Stonehenge
Date: 2025-03-31 11:13 am (UTC)Thanks!
How to get better at tarot?
Date: 2025-03-31 11:45 am (UTC)I asked the question "How do I get better at tarot?"
I got reversed 1 of cups.
So immediately 2 different interpretations came to my mind, previously I wrote down the meaning of the Aces as "Imagine" following Simple Tarot, with Cups dealing with Water, emotions, receiving, so I could interpret this as "Do not imagine, just look at the cards directly", or "I have trouble with imagination as it relates to emotions, try to resolve that". I am not sure which one is more appropriate, or if it's something else instead.
Night planetary hours
Date: 2025-03-31 12:15 pm (UTC)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
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-31 12:48 pm (UTC)On a more serious note and trying to avoid spoilers, in Carnelian Moon, is the business with persons in a magical state moving a physical object a reasonably documented phenomenon or did the story get a bit larger than life for dramatic purposes?
Neptune in Aries
Date: 2025-03-31 01:27 pm (UTC)Re: Last piece of the demon puzzle
Date: 2025-03-31 01:28 pm (UTC)Dreams about the recently dead
Date: 2025-03-31 01:28 pm (UTC)How much credence do you give to dreams about the recently-dead? Are there any criteria for determining if it was just suggestion burbling up from recent events in your sleep like most dreams, or something meaningful from/about the deceased?
Had one recently: no content in the dream that wouldn't have been readily supplied by musings on the deceased, but... before the dream, I was quite sad about the death, and it was making me all weepy and choked up. And after, I have been completely unable to feel sad about it. Not rational: nothing changed.
The deceased in question had a lifelong severe disability and had never been able to talk, only able to communicate in sort of broad vocalizations indicating happy, sad, pleased, uncomfortable, that sort of thing. Easy for an outsider to write off as "nobody home" but a cheerful, vibrant, and intelligent personality was obvious to anybody who'd spent time around them. You could tell a sneaky deadpan joke, and they'd always be the first in the room to laugh: one saved up jokes for this person. Who doesn't like someone who laughs at your jokes? Anyway, about a week after they passed, I dreamt I had a clear, fluent, totally natural conversation with this person, and they told me a really funny joke (that I so wish I could remember!). And irrationally am not sad anymore. It was the change of feeling that struck me more than the dream itself: plenty of dumb sappy platitudes were said at the funeral along the lines of "X is an angel now and can *fly*!" (barf) that were not at all comforting. One is inclined to see this as a little contact with something real, because it so dramatically relieved sadness.
(shrug)
I know there probably aren't any solid answers to that one. But thought I'd throw it out there and see if relevant insight bounces back ;)