ecosophia | Magic Monday

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 not be put through. 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 eighty-first published book, the third entry in my series of occult detective novels starring eighteen-year-old Ariel Moravec and her adept grandfather Dr. Bernard Moravec. As I think I mentioned here already, I didn't intend these to be young-adult novels -- I simply wanted a protagonist who was in a good situation to begin occult training, and had plenty of entertaining problems of her own. Nonetheless I was delighted a while back to hear from a reader whose young daughter, a fan of these novels, has begun calling them "Nancy Druid stories."

In this third installment, Ariel and her grandfather are caught up in a mystery surrounding a strange artifact from pre-Roman Italy, a bronze plaque with wolves and an inset moon of carnelian. The Heydonian Institution wants it for their collection of ancient magical items, but somebody else is after it, too -- and circumstantial evidence suggests that the somebody in question might just run on all fours and bay at the moon on certain nights. As Ariel researches the truth behind the old myth of the werewolf she hurtles toward a dangerous confrontation on the night of the full moon...

Copies? You can get them here if you're in the US and here elsewhere. Owoo!

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday post is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hi JMG, do you think that a person's intelligence and cognitive ability roughly scales with the development of their mental sheath? I was interested to read that IQs in the mid-high range, 120-130 are associated with higher social status while the really high IQs at 140+ are inversely correlated with social status and income, often due to such people having difficulty relating to others. You've mentioned that the mental birth tends to distance a person from society as they develop toward an existence that transcends incarnation. Thanks.

There's some correlation but it's not close. There are plenty of people with very high IQs who have very little capacity for reflective thought and self-knowledge; they've simply developed a lot of skill in manipulating words and images, i.e., astral forms. There are also people of quite modest IQs who have achieved a great deal of self-knowledge and capacity for reflection, and are well on their way to the birth of the mental body.

As for the IQ thing, I resemble that remark. ;-) There are, in my experience, at least three factors involved. First, average people are acutely uncomfortable with the very intelligent and will quite often close ranks against them, shutting them out of status and income. Second, many very intelligent people are smart enough to see through the wealth-and-status game and deliberately walk away from it, realizing that the benefits are not worth the costs. Third, high-functioning autism of the type that used to be called Aspergers syndrome very often yields high intelligence and low social skills, and the presence of a lot of us Aspies in the 140+ contingent tends to skew the results!

I'm posting this anonymously because there is nothing tackier than a public IQ brag, but this is something that I can speak to from experience.

I come from a family in which extremely high IQs are very common. That includes my father, myself, and my younger brother. And I have a second brother, the youngest, who also has a high IQ, but probably in the 130 range.

Here are things that my father, my middle brother, and I, have in common. All of us are highly creative. All of us had a hard time functioning as young adults. All of us got involved in criminal activity at a young age. All of us were involved in countercultures of various sorts (beat, hippie, punk, that sort of thing). All of us struggled with drug addiction at various points.

Here is something which separates me from my father and my middle brother. I began practicing magic and meditation when my life was at it's lowest point. I took to it *immediately,* and got profound and life-changing results from the very first day. Moreover, there was a strong sense of familiarity to the practices, despite never having worked with magic (in this life) before. And that familiarity seemed not only to come from me but from the powers I invoked, as, for instance, the archangels in the LBRP: It was very clear that they recognized me and seemed pleased to see me again.

And here is a difference between the youngest brother, who I suspect is in the 130 range, and the rest of us: He was much more successful from a career and finance perspective, from a very early age, and never got involved in criminal activity or any sort of counterculture.

At this time my younger brother has clawed his way into a "successful working class" lifestyle, and I'm fairly well off financially-- but we're in our 40s, and in my case this came very late and is partly the result of having married well. I can say from my own experience that there were two factors which kept me in serious poverty for much of my life. On the one hand, I simply couldn't understand a lot of the things ordinary people did. I failed my initial driving test-- the written test, which everyone passes-- 4 times, for example. On the other hand, there were a lot of "ordinary" things that simply had no appeal to me whatsoever. In this 20s my youngest brother, the successful one, did things like managing a fast food restaurant and working for the city. I found spending long periods of time living in the wilderness and in hippie communes far more appealing, and did that instead. And my father, the 160 IQ genius? His life is a dumpster fire of his own making.

I've probably gone on too long for a reply post, but let me add a couple of final things.

1. On the one hand-- based on this limited sample size-- I do think that there is something to the idea of a correlation between "very high IQ" and the "mental sheath." But it seems to be more like "development of the mental sheeth can be associated with a high IQ," rather than "A high IQ means development of the mental sheeth."

2. At the same time, "high IQ" really does seem to indicate a particular sort of intelligence-- or a couple of particular sorts-- rather than "intelligence" in general. There are other sorts of intelligence. I once read an anthropologist's description of being shown a small plant by a !Kung tribesman in South Africa. The plant was the size of a little seedling and was located 7 miles away from the camp, out in the desert. It takes a very strong intelligence to remember how to find a 4 inch tall plant seven miles away. And yet the !Kung have some of the lowest "IQ scores" on the planet! Clearly, then, IQ measures a sort of intelligence (or a few sorts: I have basically no capacity for spatial reasoning, for example).

3. I want to point out that that word "intelligence" is related (obviously) to the word "intelligible." And "the Intelligible" was how the Neoplatonists described what modern occultists call the Mental Plane. And so it may be that measuring intelligence (of any kind) shows an individual's *potential* for working with the Mental Plane, but not the actual fact of their having "developed the mental sheath." I can also tell you that, contra certain dogmas, intelligence can be increased, it can fail in those who don't use it, and I've seen clear evidence of the development of the ability to function on the Mental Plane in people who might not have genius IQs but who practice meditation and do things like teaching mathematics or studying languages for a living.

I don't know if this adds much to the conversation, but my experience is that it is very difficult to know someone's intelligence based on their circumstances or level of success/failure.

However, the way they succeed/fail and the way they justify them generally speaks volumes. "Stupid" self-destructive people simply blow their brains out. "Brilliant" self-destructive people do so using the most intricate, Rube-Goldberg machinations involving multi-faceted levels of complexity that would befuddle Sherlock Holmes.

There are some exceptions, however. For example, Nikola Tesla was brilliant, yet he failed in a simple way (gave away the rights to his patents).

Thank you for this comment. I have noticed something among more than a few occultists is when their aptitude for the esoteric gets applied to other subject matters it is much less astute. I lowered my reading time because I was turning it into a know-it-all, noticing how much of my knowledge from books did not correlate to reality. I also noted people that really seem to be on point in any given field had a lot of successful hands on experience. E.g. A very successful stock trader vs an academic economist. Books smarts vs street smarts, but there are so many different other ways to classify intelligence as you pointed out. It also got me thinking about how much we can really know deeply in one lifetime.

John, I think Galbraith's book The Great Crash is a good example of this IMHO

It's unfortunate that English only has one word for knowledge; many other languages have two, one for abstract knowledge and the other for know-how. Yes, Galbraith's book is a great example of the way that these aren't interchangeable!

Magic Monday

Intelligence and the mental sheath

Re: Intelligence and the mental sheath

Re: Intelligence and the mental sheath

Re: Intelligence and the mental sheath

Re: Intelligence and the mental sheath

Re: Intelligence and the mental sheath