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-seventh published book, a study of the utterly unfashionable approach to sexual energies in magic that Dion Fortune and her fellow occultists of the Society of the Inner Light pioneered. You can always get a lot of interest by telling people to engage in orgiastic excess, and curiously enough, you can also get a lot of interest by telling people that sex is bad and God will spank them for thinking about it. Suggest something in between these extremes and nothing like so many people want to hear about it. Be that as it may, this is a practical handbook of magical practices that use redirected, sublimated erotic energies; the participants sit several feet from each other, usually with an altar in between them, and stay fully clothed. How dowdy? Nonetheless the methods work extremely well, and I give full details. If you're interested, you can get copies here in the US and here elsewhere. 

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

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

Time to read the manual…

[simplefire]

Hi JMG & All – Many thanks for this forum, and for all that share so generously on it!

I’ve been practicing the SoP for a year or more now, and have followed my interpretation of our host’s advice to pay attention to what works and evolve the practice for myself based on those experiments. This has probably led to my SoP – and perhaps its practitioner! – becoming a bit eccentric over time.

Some of the eccentricities seem fine and work well… for example my habit of 'gathering the spectrum' by drawing in the six coloured gates to brighten the ball of white light before expanding the sphere is probably a bit atypical, but seems to work well for me, and cause no harm.

Other divergences might have unintended consequences though. For example, for a while I was visualizing the Orange Gate of Spirit Below opening to a stack of lower planes, figuring that if there are higher planes above, there are probably lower ones that we have evolved out of to get to this point, and they have their own contributions to make. I backed off this approach after reading some of the discussion here around demons and their origins in denser/previous universes, and deciding that I don’t want to be inadvertently inviting one to fly up my wazoo from whatever underground parking level they hang out in!

Long story short, It is time for me to read the instruction manual: Gods, spirits, planes, elementals… I need to learn more about the worldview behind the SoP so I can practice it safely and effectively.

Specifically, I want to give back to our host by purchasing two or three physical books written by JMG that are compatible with the SoP and John Gilbert’s legacy, and that cover the basic foundational principles.

What three or four JMG books you would recommend for someone whose daily practice will likely remain confined to the SoP, but who wants to understand the broader context and traditions around it?

Re: Time to read the manual…

[ecosophia]

There aren't three or four such books, at least not yet. There's one: The Druid Magic Handbook. Another volume, The Occult Philosophy Workbook, might also be useful to you as a guide to the overall worldview.

Re: Time to read the manual…

[simplefire]

Thanks JMG – I will start with those two!