Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's midnight, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. The picture is of George Washington Carey, another American occultist too rarely remembered today. One of the major figures in the end of homeopathy that uses the twelve biochemic cell salts, he worked out a detailed system of spiritual and physical healing using those twelve remedies, assigning them to the signs of the Zodiac. For much of the twentieth century, most of the correspondence courses offered by occult schools included lessons on the cell salts lifted with or without credit from Carey's work, and the kind of old-fashioned health food store that catered to alternative spirituality as well as alternative diets inevitably had all twelve cell salts in stock. (Longtime Seattle residents may recall the charming Mari-Don Healthways store on 45th street in Wallingford; that's where I got my first cell salts, back when I was first learning to use them.) The wheel below on the right, which can be found in various places online, is one of Carey's creations. 

Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer, though it may be Tuesday sometime before I get to them all. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

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 the button below to access my online tip jar.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed to new questions. See you next week!***

Comments

[ecosophia]

Harner's system is basically a simplified form of scrying in the spirit vision, without a coherent symbolic system to give it meaning or anything else to keep it from descending into what Israel Regardie used to call "astral tourism." It's entertaining, no doubt, but that's all it is.

Real shamanism -- and I encourage you to read actual accounts of trad shamanic practice to get a sense of the differences -- is not something you choose, not something you control, and not something you imagine. The spirits choose you, they take you away to their realm, and you don't just imagine the flesh being ripped from your bones and your organs replaced by pieces of crystal -- you experience it. Meanwhile your family keeps watch over your comatose body and wonders whether you'll survive, because sometimes people don't. If you come back, you live forever after in both worlds at once, and that means that you face serious dangers other people don't, because the world of the spirits isn't just inhabited by friendly animal helpers, it has things in it that can and will kill you.

That's real shamanism. Do you see the differences?

[(Anonymous)]

This sounds an awful lot like an experience someone I knew had. She was “abducted by aliens”, and had all sorts of weird things happen to her. Do you think shamanistic experiences feed into the aliens craze (as one source of many)?

[ecosophia]

Excellent! Yes, exactly. As Jacques Vallee pointed out a long time ago in a very good and unfairly neglected book, the UFO phenomenon is among other things what happens when you take ordinary human interactions with spirits and interpret it through a mindset that says that the only nonhuman intelligent beings around must come from another planet.

[(Anonymous)]

Can you recommend a good book on real shamanism?

[ecosophia]

Mircea Eliade's Shamanism is still the classic.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you!

[(Anonymous)]

I see where you're coming from, thank you.

Now, for these things in the spirit world that can kill you... is it likely to run into those when practising say stuff from the DMH?

[ecosophia]

No, for two reasons. First, in ceremonial magic, the spirits don't take you into their world; you remain in the human world, but are capable of interacting with the world of spirits in less dangerous ways. Second, if you're taking the DMH work seriously you're doing the Sphere of Protection daily, and one of the reasons for that is that it keeps hostile critters at bay.

[(Anonymous)]

Ok, one more reason to keep a steady practice.
Thank you for your answers and your books!

[(Anonymous)]

Do ceremonial mages ever get taken to the spirit world?

[ecosophia]

I suppose it's possible, but I've never heard of a case. We tend to interact with the spirit world on our own terms, and in less hazardous and more efficient ways.

[robertmathiesen]

I am strongly inclined to think that what can loosely be called the "spirit world" is a whole collection of "The Other Places," and that the environments in some of these Other Places are inherently lethal to human beings, while some others among them have inhabitants that regard humans and/or their spirits to be tasty snacks. Some of the Other Places may indeed be safe to visit, but I would not care to go exploring in general without some sort of very experienced guide, who moreover would probably not be a human at all. -- And yes, in principle, a predator from one of the Other Places might look for prey here, if it was even aware of Our Place among the vast multitude of Places.

[ecosophia]

That's very nearly a classic shamanic cosmology. Most shamanic traditions divide the world of spirits into some number (usually 7 or 9) upper worlds and as many underworlds, and many of them are typically stocked with critters that think humans and/or their souls are flavorful and crunchy. The shaman can go there because he has one or more guardian spirits, who in fact are almost always nonhuman, but even so it's a risky business.

Among some of the Puget Sound native peoples, a group of shamans will get together and basically raid the Otherworld, traveling there via a magical canoe. It's a community event -- you have a longhouse in perfect darkness dozens of drummers pounding intricate rhythms with drumsticks on a long wooden board, the shamans sitting in a line as they would in one of the big Salish dugout canoes, and for hours they paddle their way to the spirit world, get whatever they came for (for example, the soul of a sick person), and bring it back with them. It's a dangerous journey, and the spirits always fight to hold onto whatever they've taken. Reading accounts of the ceremony always reminds me of Taliesin's poem Preiddeu Annwn:

"Three freights of Prydwen were they that went with Arthur;
Save seven, none returned from Caer Sidi."

[robertmathiesen]

I didn't know that about the Puget Sound natives. It makes good sense to me: strength in numbers and all that ...

Otherworld Raid

[(Anonymous)]

Very intersting! Actually this description sounds very similar to a videogame I am about to start playing called "Hellbade: Senua's Sacrifice"... the createors strike the game up as a commentary on psychosis back in Senua's time, but perhaps her story is something else...

description lifted from wikipedia:

"Inspired by Norse mythology and Celtic culture, Hellblade follows Senua, a Pict warrior who must make her way to Helheim by defeating otherworldly entities and facing their challenges, in order to rescue the soul of her dead lover from the goddess Hela. In parallel, the game acts as a metaphor for the character's struggle with psychosis, as Senua, who suffers from the condition but believes it to be a curse, is haunted by an entity known as the "Darkness", voices in her head known as "Furies", and memories from her past. To properly represent psychosis, developers worked closely with neuroscientists, mental health specialists, and people suffering from the condition."

The beginning of the game starts with her in a canoe traveling to the Otherworld with the severed head of her lover hanging from her belt, of whose soul she is intent on rescuing...

With some digging, of interesting note, it appears Senua is is derived from Senuna which is apparently a Celtic Goddess that was unknown until a 2002 discovery of some votive offerings found in Hertfordshire...

[(Anonymous)]

The sense of duality in shamanism, of being in two worlds and being in conflict with the spirits of the otherworld sounds.....Plutonian.

What with Pluto being the planet of the splitting of the self, and of death and rebirth. I wonder if the plutonian era was an example of shamanism at the collective level?

[ecosophia]

Hmm. The difficulty there is that shamanism was around long before Pluto was discovered. Which planet do you think ruled it back in the day?

[(Anonymous)]

Mercury? The planet that is its own opposite?

So perhaps Pluto absorbed some Mercurial energy, as well as the suspected Martian and Saturnian...