Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's a little before midnight 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 meme? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share. Besides, this one's such a perfect summary of certain points I've been trying to make in recent posts over on the blog...)

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!

Comments

[rhydlyd]

The game of badger in the bag in The Mabinogion Tetralogy is more than a bit confusing with its various specific details. I’m pretty sure I’m looking at a combination of ritual, alchemy and allegory… but and as usual – I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at or what’s important. Might you or the commentariat have some pointers for interpretation?

Also, Lud-in-the-Mist by Mirrlees and A Voyage to Arcturus have arrived to me. Have you any thoughts or pointers about these titles? Much of what I’ve found is gush about their influence without any thought about how they do it or what those influences might be. Naturally, I’m curious about what might have been stuffed under the rug.

Many thanks!

[ecosophia]

1) There's a lot going on in that section, but the core of it is an old and brutal habit. Have you ever heard the phrase "giving someone a hiding"? Back in the day, when a group of men wanted to beat someone up really thoroughly but not kill them, they'd wrap the person in a cowhide and then hit them with sticks over and over again. The cowhide kept the blows from being fatal, but the victim would end up severely bruised. "Badger in the bag" is a medieval Welsh version of the same thing: you force someone headfirst into a leather bag and then beat the bejesus out of them. On that basis, yes, a great deal has been overlaid, and much meditation is recommended.

2) Delighted to hear it! Both of these are early fantasy novels, which helped keep the fantasy genre alive between the death of William Morris and the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring. Hope Mirrlees was a fascinating person, the partner of classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and a good friend of Virginia Woolf, and this was her one fantasy novel; it had no influence at all until Lin Carter reprinted it in the 1970s, after which quite a few fantasy authors read it and took inspiration from it. (Neil Gaiman's a particular fan.) A Voyage to Arcturus is a much stranger and richer work, early science fantasy with a heavy layer of philosophy; it influenced CS Lewis considerably -- you can see its fingerprints all over the first two volumes of his planetary trilogy.

commune with the aliens

[chaosfrog216]

Hi John!
Hope all is well, and firstly Id like to thank you for all the attention you give here and thank you for listening to this silly question of mine.
Since we've recently gotten some confirmation from the government about alien existence, Id like to know what does the magic community think of this? There are a few things about it Id like to address, be it that the mainstream religious communities seek comfort and shelter in their books and dont think outside the box so much.
Alister Crowley, im not really a fan of his work but Im attentive to some things he did in the Giza Pyramid (in getting his book written via some telepathic communication method with an entity), and the being "Lam" he drew, it looks awfully like a grey alien. I've done a lot of research on the alien topic, and there are a handfull of psychics like Joe McMoneagle who was a remote viewer for the Army in the Stargate program who said he had an encounter with a UFO which burned him via radiation and he developed his psychic powers after that...
So people say that these aliens communicate via telepathy which is by and large the general consensus of people reporting contact... and many psychics I've spoken with (a few Rosicrucians actually) say that telepathy is possible and they have done it with other humans, but it takes practice.
So my big question I guess is to ask you if in your opinion are all these religions, magical practices, prayer and altered states of consciousness... could they be somehow just a means of communicating with these aliens via telepathic means that mainstream society has not discovered yet?
Crazy question, but is it not crazy to learn that aliens exist in the first place?
Well, if you could just talk alot about all of that, and just go into ideas you have and speculations and everything you can give me because I know you are a very learned man on the topics of magic, but not sure if you know much about the alien world... is there a cross-over perhaps?

thanks so much!
Eric

Re: commune with the aliens

[ecosophia]

Okay, first of all, there really isn't a "magic community" -- these days the occult scene is divided into many different factions that disagree about almost everything, so I can only speak for myself here. Also, and oddly, most occultists these days don't seem to be interested in UFOs and other anomalous phenomena; I'm kind of odd in that I study both.

That said, let's proceed. People see genuinely strange things in the sky; that's been proven beyond reasonable doubt. (The pseudoskeptics who reject that aren't reasonable.) It's been fashionable since the 1950s to assume that these strange things in the sky are spacecraft from other planets. That assumption's been challenged by some of the best researchers in the UFO field -- Meade Layne, John Keel, and Jacques Vallee among them -- and to my mind the challengers make a better case. So while there's certainly some form of nonhuman intelligence involved in these strange things, we have no evidence that they come from other planets and quite a bit of evidence that they don't.

They've always been here, in fact, at least as long as human beings have, and quite possibly longer. If you have the chance, check out Jacques Vallee's book Passport to Magonia, which shows that all the things that are currently said about aliens were being said about elves and spirits a thousand years ago.

Telepathic contact with nonhuman intelligences is something that occultists have been doing all through recorded history, by the way. One of the things we've learned about them in that time is that not all of them tell the truth. Some are whopping liars; others exist in a kind of dream state and simply mirror back to us what's in our own minds. So from an occult point of view it's fair to say that these beings exist, they've been interacting with us for thousands of years, and the interactions are sometimes helpful but more often deceptive.

Oh, and it's also clear that the US government, for whatever reason, is shoveling smoke on this subject. Thirty years ago we had cameras that could read license plates from orbit. The blurry, smudgy images they're releasing are not the best they can get -- and that raises all kinds of questions about why they're issuing those and nothing better.