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-ninth published book, and those readers who have been following this journal for more than a few years already know a fair amount about it. It's a practical manual of political and economic astrology or, to use the traditional term, mundane astrology. Its intention is to teach people how to cast and interpret charts to predict the future of any country they desire. It's only been out for a little while, but initial feedback suggests that it does the job tolerably well. Interested? You can get a copy here if you're in the United States and via your favorite online or brick-and-mortar bookshop elsewhere. 

(I'm almost out of books to summarize here -- I have one more book that's been published since this came out, and two more that might be out in time. I have some amusing ideas about what else to do once I've finished the whole sequence -- but all in good time.)

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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 again when I return from hiatus in mid-June!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Not the OP, how do the realms relate to the planes? Are they something additional to the planes, or best thought of in the plane system, as in, another plane below, or above the commonly understood ones.

[ecosophia]

That's a good question to which there's no easy answer. The planes are simply the different modes through which we experience the cosmos -- the material plane is the cosmos as we experience it through our ordinary senses, the etheric plane the cosmos as we experience it through our sensitivity to the life force, and so on. The subnatural, natural, and supernatural realms, by contrast, are distinguished by scale -- we interact with the supernatural via the heavens in their vastness, and with the subnatural via the quantum realm. How do they relate to one another? I'm not yet sure.

[(Anonymous)]

This is a very interesting discussion—thank you all, and especially JMG!

In case it’s relevant—maybe, maybe not—in the book I’m currently writing about orlog, wyrd, and the Norns, one chapter covers what I call the quantum nature of the Norns’ work. Given JMG’s suggestion that the subnatural may equate to the quantum realm, it’s an interesting thought that by working through the subnatural realm, supernatural beings, the Norns, serve as a bridge between subnatural and supernatural, in the process shaping our human lives in the middle, the natural realm.

To briefly summarize the specifics, I’ll describe each Norn’s role in turn, as I see it.

Verdandi, the Norn of “What is Becoming”, of the very instant when potential becomes actual in the Midgard realm, works in the quantum field of wave function collapse. Her act of observing each being, event, phenomenon, as it comes into manifestation in Midgard serves as a catalyst for the process of Becoming. Her act of observation causes Schrödinger’s cat to collapse from a probabilistic state into a state of deadness or aliveness when the box is opened. Her supervision of Becoming also causes each thing that comes into being to take on its own Eigenstate, its individual characteristics, of which that being’s or event’s orlog or wyrd is a part. I see Verdandi, a supernatural being, as the midwife bringing about birth from the quantum realm—perhaps the subnatural realm—into what we call the natural realm of Midgard: very much a bridging function.

The name of the Norn Skuld comes from the word ‘shall, skulu, sceal’ but not primarily in its form as an auxiliary to a future tense. Rather, the old meaning of the word most often relates to obligation, debt, consequences, or necessity. Rather than implying a future tense, it generally implied a continuous present, something that is obliged to happen or should happen on a regular basis. I see Skuld’s role as recognizing and acting upon the debts, obligations, consequences that arise because of entanglements between all of us, all our deeds, relationships, actions, events, phenomena of Nature, everything. Quantum entanglement, and all entanglement, is the necessity that she responds to. What happens to one particle happens to all other particles that are entangled with it, creating complexities that she is obliged to deal with through orlog and wyrd.

Urdh or Wyrd is the Norn of “What-Is,” of everything that has happened, which continually creates and shapes the substrate for What-is-Becoming. What-is-Becoming arises from that substrate and is shaped by it, at the same time that each thing which Becomes reshapes the substance of What-Is. The effect and impact of the past upon each of us, and upon larger groups and cultures, depends a good deal upon our understanding and interpretation of the past as we know it. As you and many have discussed, JMG, all human knowledge is necessarily subjective, and yet we have ways to approximate an objective view. The past shapes the present in both subjective and objective ways.

For example, living in a country in a state of war, living through it, and continuing with life afterwards. There are / were many objective effects of this war, and many subjective effects, all of which were interpreted and reinterpreted in different ways, from different points of view, based on differing experiences and biases. These form part of the histories of the countries involved, which then shape aspects of their cultural identities. Later revisions of history may create significant changes of interpretation and thus different perspectives on identity and history.

This all relates to Urdh’s domain of What-Is: what *really* is, here? There is the objective Past, which we can never completely comprehend, and a multiplicity of subjective Pasts which would be impossible for us to understand in its entirety, and then there is all the reinterpretation that goes on, and all of this is impactful and relevant to us as humans, to Midgard, and to the Deities involved with humans and Midgard.

The way I try to philosophically sort my way through this confusion is by understanding Urdh’s work with What-Is as an expression of the quantum phenomenon of wave-particle duality, as in ‘light is both a particle and wave.’ Whether it manifests as a particle or a wave depends on the design of the experiment one is conducting to observe it. I liken the objective past to a particle, and the subjective past to a wave. There are more-objective ways to study the past, such as archaeology or geology (which still depend on subjective interpretations, but not entirely on them), and very subjective ways of studying the past such as clairvoyant work or ancestral-spirit contact. And there are a great many ways that lie in between those extremes, like various approaches to studying history or anthropology, or one’s own family history.

The What-Is that Urdh lays in layers of orlog in the Well of Wyrd is not only the objective past but also subjective past, because what she and all the Norns focus on is *significance* rather than strict factuality. Their shaping of orlog is based on meaning: the meaning that deeds and events have for them, for us, for the Gods, for Midgard’s wyrd as a whole. The substance of her weaving is both wave and particle, subjective and objective, and takes its meaning therefrom. This both / and nature of her weaving of reality partakes of the nature of the quantum realm as does the work of her sisters.

If, as you suggest, the subnatural realm consists of or includes the quantum realm, then I see the Norns as the midwives and mediators between subnatural, supernatural, and natural realms. And not incidentally, their weavings result in layers of orlog, wyrd, fate being laid in the Well and nourishing the World-Tree: the containers of Time and Space. This involvement of orlog in turn is relevant to what you’ve written in the articles you linked to your comment above, about the consequences of paths of evil, the quantum nature of cyberspace, etc.

As always, many thanks to you and the commentariat for these discussions!

Winifred Hodge Rose

[ecosophia]

I'm delighted by a quantum analysis of the Norns! It's not really related, but this makes me think of that amazing essay by Poul Anderson, "Uncleftish Beholding," in which he writes about atomic physics in the English we would be speaking if there had been no Greek or Latin influence on our language:

https://msburkeenglish.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/uncleftish-beholding-aka-atomic-theory.pdf

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks so much for this link—it is delightful! I’ve read books written by strict reconstructionist Anglo-Saxon Heathens who’ve done the same thing, though not about atomic theory, and greatly admired their endeavors. I’d love to write like that, but fear I’d lose most of my audience if I did!

Winifred

[jprussell]

It can be a lot of fun! Anderson also wrote a story called "The Tale of Hauk" entirely in Anglo-Saxon-derived English which fits the Vikingish subject matter rather well. For my part, I sometimes try to write without words derived from origins outside of Old English, but it can be exhausting to do thoroughly. But I find it to be good practice for being more concrete in my writing - most of those fancy Latin and Greek words are for abstractions.

As for what you shared on the Norns, thank you for this! I'm greatly looking forward to the book.

Cheers,
Jeff

[(Anonymous)]

That does sound like fun, Jeff—I’ll have to look for it.

As for the book, it’s moving along well and is maybe 70% - 80% done, but I keep seeing more things all the time, not to mention trying to resolve at least some of the contradictions that come up and handling ambiguities but not over-handling them. Plus I’m just thoroughly enjoying writing this book and don’t want to rush through the experience and everything I’m learning from it!

Winifred

[(Anonymous)]

To me, you just made them all sound present: perfect, continuous, simple (habitual).

[(Anonymous)]

That’s a good way to put it— very nice!

Winifred

[(Anonymous)]

As you may be aware, there's a controversy in physics as to whether to treat "wavefunction collapse" as a physically real phenomenon in itself, as opposed to it just being a calculation convenience for the sake of relating to some more obscure process by which the rules of quantum state-evolution push realness around and separate some real classical-universe-perspectives where one thing happened from some other real classical-universe-perspectives where another thing happened, or something like that.

My opinion, as half-presented in the following earlier comment, is that the only reasonable way currently on the table for something like the single-universe picture of wavefunction collapse to be real in itself is if something -- e.g. as represented by Norns, in your imagery -- is using considerations outside of physics to decide that one (or more) timeline(s) should have (more) experiencedness or significantness invested in it(/them) than the others, and if in addition the thing outside physics is also having its "experiencedness criterion" work in a way that's more or less compatible with the regular operations of quantum mechanics. (The alternative would be that the thing-outside-physics was pulling out choices of subjective experience from the quantum-physical states in some other way, that were to "cut against the grain" of how quantum mechanics normally worked.) I'm sorry that comment (and to some extent this one) aren't very well written.

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/308210.html?thread=52905458

In some ways, the fact that two superposed possibilities on the quantum level resolve during a measurement into two distinguished outcomes on the classical level is no more surprising than the fact that a wave which bounces off a wedge-shaped breakwater separates into two wavefronts. In the analogy, the existence of the apparatus that makes a measurement corresponds to the fact that the initial wave is aimed at the breakwater. The physical structure of the breakwater itself, in the analogy, corresponds to the structure of amounts of required energy associated with the different states passed through during the measurement. The measurement process corresponds to the wave interacting with the breakwater. There is a physical calculation technique that is used to track the quantum process which corresponds to the separation of the wavefronts; the phenomenon which this technique centrally describes is called "decoherence".

Having "wavefunction collapse" be a real thing, in the metaphor, would correspond to having someone pick one of the points in one of the wavefronts, apply some criterion to figure out what other points count as "the same wavefront" as opposed to "a different wavefront", and go in with a huge bucket and scoop up all the water from the crests of the other wavefront and use it to fill in the troughs in the other wavefront, as though it had never existed. Also, whoever was doing this would have to be careful to do so in a way that didn't produce any detectable disturbance in the evolution of the other wavefront. This doesn't really seem possible to do without intelligence: what constitutes "part of the same wavefront" as opposed to "part of a different wavefront" is primarily a question of the subjectivities of the beings encoded by the shape and location of the wavefront, and it would be weird for a blind physical process to be able to make such a distinction reliably. So, in some sense, any physicist who supports the "objective" version of the Copenhagen interpretation, where wavefunction collapse is a physically real phenomenon, is kind of conceding the question of the supernatural from the get-go and just doesn't understand that they're doing so. Even with intelligence, it seems like a little more ham-fisted than one would expect from a being with such power.

I appreciate the way that when you discuss wave-particle duality, you do so in a way where the whole universe would be the particle. That is, in fact, the key to beginning to understand what is going on in the subjective appearance of wave-particle duality seeming to be a thing. If I'd gotten to this comment earlier I would have said more to relate your presentation of Urdh to the Bohmian formulation of quantum mechanics, in which the wavefunction is made of a bunch of universe-particles pushing each other around plus also one of the universe-particles is randomly singled out and labeled "real", even though it can't have the dynamics it does unless all the other universe-particles are also there to push it and each other around.

To correct a confusion about the strictly quantum version of entanglement, as opposed to any supernatural phenomena that might piggyback off some of the same structure: In the many-worlds perspective, entanglement is not a mysterious phenomenon. It's just a relation by which you can control which possible worlds near you end up getting tied off with with which possible worlds near someone else, even though you can't control which possibilities themselves go realized or unrealized. This is why you can use entanglement to share randomly generated secret information but not send messages.

[(Anonymous)]

I think this provides a good way of beginning to grapple with it. If the planes are our perception of the cosmos, or, for basically all of us, our potential future perceptions - given that we haven't developed on all of them, but our potential is latent here. Even when we do fully develop, we are, as the Norse may say, still in Midgard. There's a vast realm of non-human things (each with their own plane perceptions), which is the supernatural. That's the whole rest of the cosmos and probably the Unmanifest too. Then there's the really small stuff, the sub-natural, although that doesn't quite explain it either. Almost all modern physics insists that looking at really small things will explain the big things, then wonders why it doesn't. Looking at big things doesn't explain the small things.

If occult teachings are right, the big things are more powerful and important than the little things (so Einstein, Maxwell, Newton and others win over the quantum physicists), but the little things still exist, but won't be consistent across space and time. That does make some sense.

Ultimately this stuff is utterly alien to humans. It's why we struggle, I struggle, to map it to our reality Lovecraft was right, there's tentacles out there.

[ecosophia]

This is one of the reasons I find myself returning to Lovecraft despite his awkward features. He really did grasp, when he was at his best, just how tentacularly alien the universe really is!