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? This photo's been doing the rounds for a few days now in some of the weirder corners of the internet. I decided it needed to become a meme. If you don't get it, by all means ask!)

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With that said, have at it! 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG, I asked you a question about geomancy house charts last week and I may have been a bit imprecise. I wanted to know whether the first house is usually taken to represent "how you are right now" or "how you will be." I.e. if I ask a question about something I intend to do and the first house is Carcer, should I take this to mean "you have been in the state of being confined or limited" or "you will be confined or limited due to your course of action?" Thanks.

[ecosophia]

It depends on how you phrase your question. Most often, though, the figure of the querent (1st house) represents present conditions, the figure of the quesited represents your goal, and the presence or absence of a mode of perfection, the nature of the mode if there is one, and the specific figures involved in it tell you how you get from one to the other. You can also add the querent and quesited together and interpret the resulting figure as a guide to their interaction.

In the shield chart, the right witness gives you the past, the judge the present, the left witness the near future, and the reconciler the far future, so you want to use a shield chart if the time factor is important to you.

[rhydlyd]

Hey - My favorite Three Dog Night track!
While AghaRTA is a jazz club in Prague, is there more to Aghartha than the usual accusation that it was an entirely fictional shuttlecock for occult club politics?

And

I took your suggestion and read a bit of a romance novel from 1994 and then a current one.
Wow. There does seem to be a spiritual crisis reflected here.
The first was a basic 1980s soap opera with a happy ending dressed up in Regency costumes. An eye-watering disconnect of plot and setting, but nothing unexpected... especially the happy ending.
The second was like a Changer story... sort of - a young woman crosses the Land of Happy Motoring in "The Sixties," has mechanical sex, well removed from romance with no emotional interaction or procreation, every few pages. Most importantly, she does not change a bit from the first page to the last.
I've started Puget Sound Mythology by Ballard, so the heroine unchanged stands out against the hallucinatory backdrop... but... do you think I'm overreading and overreaching to suggest the romances marketed to middle-aged anti-Trump AWFELs marks a movement from an unwillingness to change and become an inability to change? What happens next?

As a counterpoint, I'm noticing the warband is cognizant of the wrecked landscape they navigate. Bushcraft - making useful things out of sticks and rocks - is a popular hobby as are several others that involve salvage and found objects. Tinkering a giant wrecker back to life, for instance, and pulling cars from ditches just for fun after a snowstorm suggests that a rather complex philosophy is forming... which makes me wonder about the way the warband is approaching traditional religion - are those institutions being reinvigorated or salvaged and repurposed?

[ecosophia]

1) Agharta is the product of a long strange story. It started with a Frenchman named Louis Jacolliot, who claimed to have received via a conveniently untraceable Hindu adept the secret history of the world, much of which revolved around a city named Asgartha -- yes, that's Asgard from Norse mythology tweaked a little bit to make it sound Hindi. Various people picked it up and ran with it from there, blending it with scraps of legend from various sources. It certainly served as a shuttlecock in the occult scene, especially in France, but it's taken on an odd solidity in the realms of the imagination.

2) Interesting. That's not a style of current romance I've encountered, but you're right that very often in current romances, everyone and everything else changes so the heroine doesn't have to. I don't think that's accidental.

3) Almost certainly some of each!

[rhydlyd]

1 - How long until an industry as lively as Finding Noah's Ark develops?

2 - Playing to the audience, I suppose. Depressing when cross-referenced with related trends like lonely men, unemployed men and the attraction of single men to traditional religions.

3 - You mean getting the warband to build me a henge out of Concrete slabs cut from old Brutalist buildings is almost within my grasp?!?

[ecosophia]

1) It's probably too exotic for that, alas.

2) Nah, give it a few more years. Once the AWFLs realize that nobody cares and they're going to die alone and unloved, I expect quite a few of them to change their tune.

3) Gods, I hope so!

Hmmm most peculiar...

[(Anonymous)]

Most DuckDuckGo search hits on "Agharta" are fairly convential hits about "it's a fictional kingdom underground", but then there is this page that claims it's been adopted by white supremacists:

https://www.bluesquarealliance.org/command-center-insights/agartha-how-an-old-myth-found-new-life-online/

I think maybe the space reptiles wanted company, or maybe a nicer place to live than the doghouse.

- Cicada Grove

Re: Hmmm most peculiar...

[ecosophia]

No doubt! The thing is, there isn't much that the stiff-arm brigade hasn't messed with.

[(Anonymous)]

Hey JMG,

I hope I am not misconstruing/misunderstanding your previous comments, but I think you said before that basically our population undulates based on what is going on in other planes, and that most people have pathetically small amounts of actual agency (whereas the "overself" on other planes has much more impact on our day-to-day lives).

Despite this, you also vent (too strong of a word) that people have done nothing to solve or even ameliorate very obvious future problems such as oil supplies, environment, etc.

I guess the question then is whether "we" could have done anything about it to begin with?

(Consider this as a philosophical question, not a legal argument of a Defense lawyer)

[ecosophia]

That's a very complex question. Most people have very little agency, but even the people who do have a significant amount of agency have gone out of their way to do counterproductive things in the current situation. "Vent" isn't too strong of a word; at some points I've been profoundly frustrated at the way that even the people who might have done something useful chose to do the opposite.

[gnosticlombe]

Happy Magic Monday,

Thank you JMG for offering this space consistently as a space for learning and discussion!

I will be offering daily Essene Healing Hands as well as the complimentary Chi-Rho reiki healing (recovered from newly discovered details on John Gilbert’s old practices) for peace and healing of the world for the remainder of the year.

It you would like to receive these healing energies, please respond here, message me directly or if you’d prefer not to share publicly simply attune yourself to these currents through mediation-healing will intentionally be sent out to those wishing for healing that are united in this way.

All the best,
Matthew

[athaia]

Who are the creepy-looking guys surrounding Trump? Non-USian, I'm totally out of the loop.

[ecosophia]

I have no idea what they were originally, other than the products of digital gimmickry. I'm quite sure the photo was faked. Some people claim that they're extraterrestrials, others have their own opinions; I decided to have fun with some old occult teachings.