Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

Midnight is upon us 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-sixth published book, the second workbook and fifth volume in the Golden Section Fellowship sequence of occult training textbooks. Earth mysteries, for those who aren't familiar with the term, is a catchall label for all the strange things associated with ancient ruins, folk traditions, places where paranormal things happen much more often than usual. The book on the right, John Michell's visionary masterpiece The View Over Atlantis, was my introduction to the field back in the day, as it was for so many other people -- it didn't hurt that the cover art was by Roger Dean, more famous for all that hallucinatory Yes album cover art -- and this book is partly my homage to Michell and a vanished era, partly a guide to integrating earth mysteries studies with occult training, and partly -- or mostly -- a hands-on guide to finding the weirdness in the place where you live. You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and here elsewhere; I recommend the hardback if you're doing the course, because you're going to put a year of hard use into the book. 

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I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here. 

 

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!***

Comments

Re: AI """spirituality""" ?!?

[(Anonymous)]

This might be a good place to say something about the curious relation between the magic squares that appear in the original version of the Abramelin working, on the one hand, and the grids of cross-wiring strength numbers that appear in modern deep network training practice, on the other? The vulnerabilities, and the harms that get through them, can be loosely likened to the harmful consequences that the Abramelin book suggests will befall those who attempt to pursue the powers it describes without following the disciplines and purifications it prescribes.

From my point of view, the magic squares superficially look like "just" geometric arrangements of letters of some word or short phrase that's vaguely semantically related to the intended effect. Since, on that picture, anyone could invent those, the efficacy presumably comes from somewhere else.

I assume that the mainstream occult explanation of that "something else" would be, the efficacy would come from the particular subjective states and transformations and interpretation-habits produced in the practitioner during the magical operation, and the corresponding subjective states etc. of his supernatural circumstances that were entrained with the practitioner and changed along with them.

But from my point of view, a significant part of the efficacy might be coming from a sort of groove worn or shadow cast by phenomena in foreseeable futures or alternate timelines. "A square or triangle of letters, taken from a word with semantic associations with the desired effect, and arranged into a grid" is almost exactly the kind of symbol you would use five-odd centuries ago to refer to modern deep networks in a dream-like way. (If you'd wanted the symbol you were conveying to be more exact, you'd have needed to communicate talisman designs which included multiple grids with successive words or short phrases each, and somehow indicated that the grids were to be stacked together or linked with pipes or roads or threads, or joined edge-to-edge in such a way as to create a path that turned a 90-degree corner through each grid.)

Of course, this speculation only works if there was some kind of deep-network-based technological phenomenon in futures/alternate timelines visible from five-odd centuries ago that was potentially causally efficacious in marked and benefic ways such as the Abramelin book describes, and not just in plutonian self-defeating and malefic ways.

Re: AI """spirituality""" ?!?

[ecosophia]

That's intriguing, but I don't know anything like enough about computers to know whether it makes any sense or not! Occult philosophy is quite complex enough for me, thank you. ;-)