Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's getting on for midnight, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. The picture is of Cyril Scott, who was both a lifelong Theosophist and occultist and a brilliant Romantic composer born at the wrong time. His more than 400 musical works were unfashionable during the heyday of atonal music, and at his death in 1970 he was widely ignored in the musical world (though his music has had a major revival since 2000); his books on occultism and alternative medicine were more enthusiastically received within the occult subculture, and The Initiate and its two sequels were practically required reading in the scene when I first got involved in it. (Here's Scott playing "Lotus Land" on the piano.)

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 -- and yes, this means you. See you next week!***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

you wrote recently (https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/62629.html?thread=5193893#cmt5193893):

"A bit of clarification may be useful here. There are many different sets of disciplines that can be used to follow the Path. Some of them are dangerous; some require pretty much all your waking hours; some involve giving up a lot of things that most people prefer to include in their lives -- and if you do these things, assuming you don't crash and burn, you can make a great deal of progress on the Path relatively quickly. "

My curiosity is piqued -- what are these other disciplines?

I imagine the dangerous might be shamanism; the ones involving all one's walking hours might be monasticism; the one involving sacrificing beloved things asceticism.

How does mysticism fit in to this picture? Devotion to a deity? Devoting oneself to making art?

[ecosophia]

I'm certainly not prepared to give you an encyclopedic list, as there are quite literally thousands of different spiritual paths. If you want some examples, though, a dangerous method is kriya (kundalini) yoga, which can kill you stone cold dead if you make the wrong kind of mistake. A method that requires all your waking hours is one of certain kinds of contemplative prayer, which are done constantly -- when the books say "pray without ceasing" they mean it. A method that involves giving up things most people want in their lives is any of the various ways of redirecting sexual energy, which require total celibacy.

As for the other practices you named, yes, those are other practices. As I noted, there are lots of them, and they don't fit into any simple or straightforward taxonomy.

[(Anonymous)]

1) What do you do if you get stuck going in circles while journaling? I’m engaged in what I recognize to be provisional living, based upon the notion that giving up the internet will somehow magically fix everything. My subconscious will insist I need to address the fact I use the internet before I should deal with anything else since either I can’t address it or it will fix itself once I quit the internet, and then come up with all sorts of clever reasons why I shouldn’t take any of the steps I’d need to in order to reduce my internet use. It often won’t even discuss other issues, insisting internet use needs to take priority over everything else.

So far, I’ve had no luck with changing the way I use internet, and I feel like I’m making no progress anywhere else either, because my subconscious will loop back around to the fact I use internet too much before I get very far. At this point, I’m tempted to take the nuclear option and get rid of home internet entirely.

I’ll be able to get enough internet access that I will still be able to do everything I need to do, but you’ve suggested we avoid doing anything with the knowledge we gain, so I’m a little hesitant. It will be quite the shock to my system as well, but my subconscious mind doesn’t seem to want to address anything else, so I think this may be a necessary step. If nothing else it may be enough to inform that part of my subconscious I’m serious and will be changing my life, and so it had better get on it too.

2) If the subconscious can’t hear negatives, might part of why Google seems to have become exceptionally sleazy be because their motto, “Don’t be evil” is heard by everyone who works there’s subconscious as “Be evil”?

3) I’ve been reading a book on the history of the internet and found it rather striking that the massive shifts which got underway in the early 1980s got started then. This was the point where PCs became common. This was also shortly after the introduction of video/arcade games, and this suggests a connection.

What sprung to my mind is that the internet is more interactive than TV, and so it may be more efficient at spreading cacomagic than that earlier technology was. If this is the case, then plenty of people who were unaffected, or minimally affected, by TV’s cacomagic could be susceptible to the internet's. This may thus explain the massive cultural shifts of the early 1980s, as people who hadn’t fallen victim to TV-based manipulation fell victim to internet based control.

Does this line of reasoning make sense, and do you know sources which discuss the matter of the occult implications of screen based technology?

4) Last week I asked about the utopian fantasies on the internet, and I think I have to disagree with your answer that it’s just a matter of it being intangible: I think there’s at least two other factors which feed into it. The first is that it’s “Progress”: it’s a technology which we created within living memory, and so of course it’s good, because technology is always good and perfect and blah blah blah.

Second, I think a lot of corporate and government actors are encouraging it, so I think a huge amount of cacomagic is being used to support the illusions. This would make sense, since it offers unprecedented capacity for surveillance and control, and so they’d love to have access to it.

Of course, the advice to avoid it is still fairly good, but as mentioned above, that’s something I need to work on a lot!

5) One of the few things I managed to get my subconscious to say that offers an avenue for improvement is that I stay up late because I never remember my dreams and so worry about what it is that’s so bad I need to forget. I’m planning to avoid reading Creepypastas since they often have that as a theme, and I don’t want to encourage the idea, but I also think that remembering my dreams would help solve this, and also offer potential for growth, so that's the avenue I'm planning to pursue.

What I have come up with so far in terms of improving my ability to remember my dreams is a dream journal, and an affirmation: “I remember my dreams”. I’m fond of this one because even if my subconscious interprets it metaphorically remembering my dreams is a good thing to do!

Does this affirmation sound like a good one, and are there other steps I can use to make it more likely for me to remember my dreams?

[ecosophia]

1) Put the journal away for a week. Tell your subconscious that it needs to stop being such a one-note Johnny. Try again a week later, and if you get the same result, drop it for another week. Repeat. You may be using "do something about internet use" as a way of evading other issues.

2) That certainly seems to be the way Google takes it in practice!

3) It's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't know anything that's discussed it.

4) So noted.

5) You may want to visit your local library and find a book or two on dreamwork. There's quite a bit in print on the subject; it's not a field I've studied, but it's certainly an option. Yes, the affirmation ought to do well.

[(Anonymous)]

Does it make sense to learn about Cabala extensively if you don’t have the intention to start practicing operative magic?

[ecosophia]

Are you at all interested in mysticism? The Cabala can also be applied to that.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I had a follow up to a question I asked about invoking Jesus throughout the SoP. If I were to invoke Jesus with appropriate titles at each direction, would it be “Jesus” alone that is vibrated, or should I also vibrate the titles? I assume only Jesus.

I know different strands of occult teaching differentiate between a Yeheshua and Yehoshua. Should I just vibrate Jesus or one (or both) of these other versions of his name? I’m not sure the significance of either so I don’t want to unwittingly do something I’m unaware of.

Thanks,
David

[ecosophia]

That's why I'd suggest vibrating "Jesus," just the way you'd pronounce it in a prayer or what have you. Yes, you just vibrate the Name.

Crops

[(Anonymous)]

If you live on a site with very little sunny land, that is also hilly and rocky, are there any magical practices that could be used to "tilt" things a little bit, in conjunction with respect for the land and common sense, towards producing a garden or fruit trees? I did sing to my apple tree I planted this winter, and I also walk around barefoot (this is supposed to help tell the soil what plants you could use around), but I haven't done anything else, and my one magical practice besides natural magic practices of traditional sort is the Middle Pillar exercise. I'll also try to consult the Druidry Handbook, but if this sparks a thought, I'd be grateful to hear and learn. Thank you. PS. I have a copy of the The Secret of the Temple, but I don't know that I'm up to constructing my own chapel, although there are plenty of rocks to do it with, I guess.

Re: Crops

[ecosophia]

Spend a lot of time outdoors on the land, sitting on the ground or walking slowly. Open yourself to messages from the land, and listen to them. The land will tell you what you need to do.

[neonvincent]

The commenters at Ecosophia.net didn't seem to mention the magical working on behalf of Marianne Williamson, so I'm doing so here, as this seems to be the venue for reporting on working magic for political ends. Here's the relevant paragraph.

The person organizing the occult task force — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely about it — said a group of 13 chaos magicians, witches and energy workers were performing synchronized “gestures” to help Williamson get airtime at Tuesday’s debate and in the race to follow. “The whole orb gang community is tapping into the power of memes to reflect back on, and multiply, the sort of pulsing undercurrents of our collective unconscious,” the person wrote in an email.

In the next paragraph, the article also mentions “Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump” by Gary Lachman. First, what do you make of this and second, have you heard of Lachman and his book?

[ecosophia]

1) Not surprising at all. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out -- they clearly have a much better grasp of magic than the soi-disant Magic Resistance, as they've chosen a clear, tightly focused, and positive goal for their working.

2) Yes, I've read it. It's a typically shallow piece of journalism. Lachman knows enough about magic to avoid the more obvious howlers, which is pleasant, but he's too deep in TDS to really get a clear sense of what's going on. Oh, those evil Russians!

[causticus]

Hello JMG,

1. I believe last week you mentioned something about North America being divided into a number of "magical regions" or something along those lines. You said that New England and the areas of the Northeast east of the Appalachians have a similar energy to the British Isles. I wasn't quite sure how far West you thought that expanded however. (a) What about the Great Lakes region (where I live)? What sort of energies predominate there? (b) Do you have any hunches about what the other magical regions of the US or North America might be like?

2. I'm on a spirituality chat server that has a lot of Gnostic Christians. Some of them have expressed an interest in magic and seem eager for some entry level ritual work to do. What sort of practices should they pursue? I'm thinking the GD system would be ideal but some of them don't like the idea of invoking YHVH. Are there Gnostic-themed substitutions that can be made to the LRP?

3. You've often warned about mixing pantheons when it comes to ritual work. But how did people like the Greeks of the Hellenistic era pull that off so frequently? They seemed to have incorporated other cultures gods left and right into their own eclectic mix and invented new ones outright, like combining Apis and Osiris into Serapis, as one famous example. Or taking the Iranian god Mithra and Hellenizing him into Mithras and adding on a whole bunch of new attributes and myths that wasn't associated with the original god. Or claiming Thoth and Hermes are the same god (are they?)

[ecosophia]

1) I've only lived or spent significant time in a few corners of North America, and can't speak to those areas I don't know. West of the Appalachians the energies are very different, but how exactly they flow in the Great Lakes region and how that's subdivided is something that would have to be sensed by those more familiar with the region.

2) That depends very, very much on what kind of Gnostic Christians they are and which Gnostic scriptures they consider authoritative. If they're Valentinians I can help them very readily, because the first six powers of the Ogdoad relate very directly to the six directions of the SoP (the seventh and eighth powers are the archetypes of the Church and the Human, and so are present in Spirit Within). If they're some other kind of Gnostic it would depend on how they understand the Aeons of the Pleroma and what names they give to them. Why not have 'em drop in on a Magic Monday so we can discuss it?

3) The ancient Greeks knew a lot more about gods than we do. Once we get to their level of knowledge, we can do the same thing.

Getting unstuck

[(Anonymous)]

If I may pass on an exercise to side-step a thinking routine in one's writing: use the other hand for writing. Sometimes suggested for basic writing students who think themselves into a rut, but also a technique possibly useful for older humans who want to keep their brains working:, use the non-dominant hand.
Added variety: try writing mirror script, like Leonardo Da Vinci.

[(Anonymous)]

"Many, many lifetimes of supreme cluelessness. Basically you have to become so obsessed with your own ego and its cravings that you're not willing to allow anything in the cosmos to be greater or more important than it...including your own higher self. A person who pursues that path ends up rejecting the basis of his or her own existence -- because your higher self, after all, is who you actually are -- and so stops existing."

How does rejecting the higher self cause it to stop existing? I can reject my hands, but they don't go away because I choose to insist they can't exist, so this line of thinking doesn't make sense to me.

Also, another issue I see is that I can't figure out how anyone could pursue that path and not have sense beaten into them before they reached the end of it....

[ecosophia]

The higher self exists as a manifestation of spirit, and if the possibility for independent manifestation is closed off permanently by the misguided free will of the lower self, the higher self dissolves back into its source in spirit, and the lower self finishes up that life and then, on death, blinks out of existence once and for all. As for how they can do it without getting a clue, it's fairly rare, but that's the nature of free will -- we do have the power to decide to crash and burn, and if we choose to do so, nothing and nobody can keep us from doing it.

Non-material mess

[(Anonymous)]

From what I can gather, nobody seems to know much about the astrology of the fungal kingdom, so I've been experimenting. On this last full moon, while she was still on the waxing side, I racked my 5-gallon carboy of mead (made in a 3rd-quarter Virgo moon in January and fermenting very slowly, as one might expect for such timing) over a rotting mango that smelled absolutely delicious. Like the best wine you've ever rolled through your nostrils; I literally couldn't help myself.

This must have been the driving force for what happened that night; I can't come up with anything else that could've sent our house "spirit" into such a tirade. I hope I didn't ruin the mead.

It wasn't a quiet night. Full moons can be that way of course, but it was an especially active night, even though the dogs were completely silent. Naturally we blamed it on the cat...

What we found when we woke up was pretty wild though. First thing I noticed was the burner I make coffee on every morning: as I lit it it flamed up high, as if the gas orifice had been changed to the natural gas setting and we were burning propane. We weren't of course. I had to turn it down below 4 to get the flame low enough to hit the kettle, when I normally set it to 5. Strange but not a big deal.

Next I went to get milk for said coffee but couldn't find it in the fridge. I knew we had some though, and eventually found it in the pantry - still cool, as if it had been there for only a couple hours, not room temp yet. Well now this is starting to get odd.

But then I took the coffee into the living room and there in the middle of the floor was a ball of yarn my wife had just bought and prepped to make a bathmat with. There were two identical balls in her knitting basket when we went to bed; one of them was still intact in the basket, the other strewn about the floor in one giant knot.

Cat right? Um...no. This was a mess that no animal could have made. We didn't really realize just how dastardly a tangle it was until my wife started trying to untangle it a few days ago. She spent her entire knitting time for 3 days working through this scramble. It was knotted in ways that are impossible. Knots tied in the middle where there was no way to make that work, fibers crossing and entangled with each other in impossible ways, and...yarn from different parts of the ball with fibers spun TOGETHER - literally run through each other, impossible to separate without damaging the yarn.

The only explanation that makes any sense to us, if that's what you call it, is that the yarn was taken into a non-material plane and scrambled about thoroughly, then brought back into the material plane. There is literally no way ANYONE, even with opposable thumbs, could've done what was done to that yarn in the physical plane.

Quite a night! Any thoughts? Have you or anyone else here had similar experiences? Certainly a new one for me...

Tripp

Re: Non-material mess

[ecosophia]

Impressive but not unheard of -- poltergeist phenomena on that scale have been documented. You probably need to figure out what to do to get the house spirit less peeved at you, though.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG

Is a nation’s bad egregor conducive to lots of mass murders?

[ecosophia]

Yes, but in this case I suspect massive overprescription of psychiatric meds is a more significant factor. You might be astonished to learn how many mass murderers were on meds that have violent uncontrollable rages as a common side effect.

[(Anonymous)]

The DMH mentions that one can learn to direct vibrations but gets no more specific than that.

Once I got good enough at vibration that I seemed to be able to control its location, I started directing it to my fingertips for the first six gates, and eventually to the tip of my wand once I enchanted one. (For AWEN I vibrate the syllables in the womb, heart, and third eye centres because I noticed that the nature of the syllables seems to inherently direct them to those places.)

I believe I picked up fingertip vibration idea from a friend who teaches Golden Dawn magic, back before I had the luzury of Magic Mondays. Is this an appropriate vibration strategy for DMH practice?

Also, if I may ask, how long and with what intensity of practice did it take you to develop your visualisation skills to different levels? (I am at the level of can kind of vaguely visualise sometimes with my eyes closed or in darkness, with occasional detailed moments. This after 20 months, having started at no imagery or colour whatsoever)

Many thanks!
-Bewilderness

[ecosophia]

1) Yes, and that's pretty good for someone who's only been doing this for 20 months!

2) I'd have to go back to my old practice journals to be sure, but as I recall it took about four years of regular practice to start getting bits of detail and color.

Do astral cats have astral fleas?

[(Anonymous)]

The discussion of astral cats here last week was fascinating. But it makes me wonder, do astral cats have astral fleas?

We had a flea problem at our primitive cabin for a couple of years, off and on. When you have mammalian pets in such a chemical-free low-tech environment it's tough not to. We didn't even have a vacuum of any kind until the last year or two we were there when we got a Bissel Li-ion stick vac designed for pets. It changed everything in the pest control department.

I haven't seen a flea since we moved into town at the end of February. But I still feel them on my feet and ankles all the time, 5 months later. They're never there of course, but that doesn't seem to be making the issue fade away.

Got any good recipes for an astral flea bomb??

Tripp

Re: Do astral cats have astral fleas?

[ecosophia]

No, that's one I've never heard of before!

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG -

I have an opportunity to apply for a position at my work with more responsibility and a much-needed increase in salary. I asked the question: “How will things turn out if I get the x job at x,” and got this chart:

Judge: Fortuna Major
Left Witness: Puer
Right Witness: Via
1st Mother: Caput Draconis
2nd Mother: Tristitia
3rd Mother: Populus
4th Mother: Carcer
1st Daughter: Tristitia
2nd Daughter: Laetitia
3rd Daughter: Laetitia
4th Daughter: Puer
1st Niece: Conjunctio
2nd Niece: Carcer
3rd Niece: Carcer
4th Niece: Acquisitio

I read it as favorable - difficult at first, but ultimately a good result, with Carcer in the 10th house meaning that getting the position will bring stability to my financial situation. Thank you in advance for any insights you might have to offer.

Dave

[ecosophia]

Did you cast it as a house chart or a shield chart?

SOP

[(Anonymous)]

I think it is so very sensible of you to limit Magic Monday to 24 hours. I personally would have posted a panicked question every day this week as I felt my way into beginning divination and SOP as per the DMH. As it was I had to calm down, re-read, meditate, pray and debrief with my partner to manage the highs and lows, the dreams, the divinatory revelations.. as a spiritual path, this exploration of Druidry so far has been on a par for me with other major emotional crises on the scale of giving birth and falling in love. I am utterly exhausted! And at the same time charmed and rather terrified that the universe really does appear to be listening. And responding. Ask and you shall receive..
Divination is the most beautiful and frightening practice I have ever engaged in. It really is as if a divine finger is pointing silently and inexorably at some deep places inside me that I have been uncomfortably reluctant to visit until now. It appears I am a fixer-upper and could use some work. I am still getting over the shock of that revelation. I mean, I knew it, but I hadn't wanted to investigate too closely. Now I am being faced with it on a daily basis. However, even though I come to my wonky, home-made deck of cards every morning with trepidation, I really look forward to it. The SOP, on the other hand, continues tricky.
It's annoying because I thought that creative visualisation was my thing, and turns out this particular manifestation is quite difficult. Firstly, it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep that sphere visible. It wobbles. My mind wobbles. The sphere disappears. It comes back. It spins, sort of, but only in one direction.
Three questions:
1.Is this SOP experience normal? Am I doing it wrong or do I just need practice?
2.I have experimented with my hands and a ball. I think, that if the whole sphere was spinning in three directions at once, that the sphere would end up turning at every angle possible in a clockwise direction. Is that right? Or am I aiming at visualizing three separate bands of light circling the sphere in the three different directions, sort of like string around an orange?
2.a. Why is the spinning sphere more effective? Is it because it demands a higher degree of concentration/visualisation?
3. My 14yo daughter is very interested in the occult. She wants to be a witch. She is a very intelligent and emotionally mature young woman, but relentlessly curious. I want her to be safe in her investigations which obviously I can't police, although I can advise.. I would like to introduce her to the SOP. In your opinion, is fourteen (and well into puberty) a safe age to start doing this kind of magical work?

Regards, and thanks,

Blueday Jo

Re: SOP

[ecosophia]

1) It's absolutely normal. I suppose that someday I'll meet someone who doesn't go through that sort of thing, but it hasn't happened yet.

2) It's a sphere spinning at every angle possible in a clockwise direction.

3) I don't know; it just is.

4) If her periods have settled into a stable rhythm, it should be okay.

etheric hands

[(Anonymous)]

I had something cool happen in ritual practice this week. I had just done my normal series - CC, LBRP, CC, MPE, CC - and as I was visualizing my way back down to normal size I was moving my hands to sort of "push" the landscape around me outward. As I did I could "see" my arms and hands, all 10 fingers clearly. At first I thought maybe my eyes were slightly open, so I shut them more tightly, but my arms and hands were still there, quite plainly.

I assume I was in a heightened state of awareness and seeing my etheric double? It's happened again since, but I notice that when I put my focus on seeing them I can't. I'm such a toddler, always wanting to play...

Tripp

Re: etheric hands

[ecosophia]

It might well be your etheric double -- and yes, once you start trying to force it, you block your access to the awareness. Relax, and let it happen when it wants to happen.

Take 2: Those &$@ love spells AKA how to win enemies and drive people away

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

I lost internet access last week, when you asked a clarifying question and I couldn't answer.

My query: "Any recommendations for breaking up or dissolving love spells in which one is the target? The caster is completely obsessed with me and very troublesome and I am not sure how sad I will be when he dies. Any suggestions?"

You asked in response: "What's your background in magical practice? Also, do you have a relationship with a deity or deities?"

To that I reply...I have very little formal training. I have a great rapport with plant spirits who are generally eager to work with me and to help, and I have studied a little natural magic (again, no formal training). I have experimented with planetary magic with interesting results--I have had a modest introductory training in some principles.
I have cultivated a relationship with Saturn, Jupiter, Amitabha Buddha, Tara, Kuan Yin, Avalokiteshvara, Vajrapani, Oshun, Archangel Michael (not a deity, but did volunteer to help me with some things and has been helpful). I think that's it!

Gratefully,
So Tired of Being Bothered

Re: Take 2: Those &$@ love spells AKA how to win enemies and drive people away

[ecosophia]

Get a dark blue or indigo-colored candle and some storax incense. On Saturday, at one of the hours of Saturn, burn some of the incense on charcoal and recite the Orphic Hymn to Saturn. When you finish reciting the hymn, ask Saturn to put an end to the love spells in question. Place the whole matter in his hands. Do this every Saturday until you get definite results.

You may go through a period when you're not especially sexually or romantically active, while this is in process. It's not blowback, it's just that Saturnine energies tend to encourage solitude and celibacy. Once it's all taken care of, you can do a working to Venus to balance things out.

[(Anonymous)]

One both for you and for the floor: One thought that's come to me in my meditations/ruminations* is that, amusingly/obnoxiously, in one specific area one of the classic Progress thoughtstoppers has a grain of truth. Namely, astrologically speaking there is a major distinction between the Long Descent and most previous dark ages**: Uranus and Neptune should be live astrological influences for at least part of the Long Descent. (I could easily see one or both planets being forgotten later on in the Long Descent as people start not to care about astronomy, if the astrologers of the future don't save the knowledge, but that should take enough time that both planets should be active during the early stages of the decline.) How do you think those two influences might affect the course of the Long Descent?

* - thinking about a subject while pacing is an old and favored pastime of mine, and I'm still not entirely sure where to draw the line between that and walking meditation...
** - the decline of Qing China and to a lesser extent the Ottomans might count as previous civilization declines influenced by Uranus and Neptune.

- pretentious_username

[(Anonymous)]

Uranus and Neptune form a polarity, so at a societal level over a long enough time scale (and centuries is long enough!), they don't matter: they effectively cancel each other out. So, although it does change things on the small scale, it doesn't matter too much.

[(Anonymous)]

Did it as a shield chart first, then filled in the house chart from that.

[ecosophia]

Okay, now go back and do it again starting from the Mothers, and check your work. You made several serious mistakes in adding figures together.

Two questions on geomancy, one on discursive meditation and elementals

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for hosting this question thread!

Three questions:

1. Does it make sense to generate the data for the Mothers of a geomantic chart, but not draw them or the rest of the chart until later? I am asking because, when it comes to daily readings about the day, I would like to evaluate them and compare them with my interpretation *without* the reading itself affecting how I will behave during the day.

2. Recently, when casting a shield chart about whether a recent flight of mine would go well, I got a reading (Left Witness Populus, Right Witness Carcer, Judge Carcer, Way of Points leading to Via) that seemed indicative of delays; and admittedly there was a delay, but a completely inconsequential one of about twenty minutes (which is perfectly common when it comes to flights, and really nothing to write home about). I am guessing that the issue is that my question was too generic, and the reading told me about the most noteworthy (if barely) event of a completely normal fight? Should I have asked something like "will I be able to arrive in my room at my hotel in with all my baggage by tonight?" instead?

3. Is doing discursive meditation/astral traveling as one is trying to get asleep a bad idea? I am asking because of a somewhat concerning experience I had a few days ago. Long story short, I could not sleep so I tried to do that with the idea of perhaps "meeting" some Elementals - not to ask them anything specific, just to get to know them and perhaps get a better feeling for how the elements affect Geomantic readings. In it, I contacted - or dreamed to contact, I transitioned into sleep at some point - a "fire elemental" whose name, when I asked it, was strongly similar to "Ahriman" (a concerning fact, especially considering that a previous part of the "dream" involved me cleaning a fire temple from soot and from some nasty-looking worms and then lighting a torch from it). At that point, I got worried and asked him if he wished me ill and if he had anything to do with Ahriman, at which point I got "kicked out" and the dream ended abruptly.

I immediately did a SoP, prayed, declared that

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Thanks for hosting this question thread!

Three questions:

1. Does it make sense to generate the data for the Mothers of a geomantic chart, but not draw them or the rest of the chart until later? I am asking because, when it comes to daily readings about the day, I would like to evaluate them and compare them with my interpretation *without* the reading itself affecting how I will behave during the day.

2. Recently, when casting a shield chart about whether a recent flight of mine would go well, I got a reading (Left Witness Populus, Right Witness Carcer, Judge Carcer, Way of Points leading to Via) that seemed indicative of delays; and admittedly there was a delay, but a completely inconsequential one of about twenty minutes (which is perfectly common when it comes to flights, and really nothing to write home about). I am guessing that the issue is that my question was too generic, and the reading told me about the most noteworthy (if barely) event of a completely normal fight? Should I have asked something like "will I be able to arrive in my room at my hotel in <City> with all my baggage by tonight?" instead?

3. Is doing discursive meditation/astral traveling as one is trying to get asleep a bad idea? I am asking because of a somewhat concerning experience I had a few days ago. Long story short, I could not sleep so I tried to do that with the idea of perhaps "meeting" some Elementals - not to ask them anything specific, just to get to know them and perhaps get a better feeling for how the elements affect Geomantic readings. In it, I contacted - or dreamed to contact, I transitioned into sleep at some point - a "fire elemental" whose name, when I asked it, was strongly similar to "Ahriman" (a concerning fact, especially considering that a previous part of the "dream" involved me cleaning a fire temple from soot and from some nasty-looking worms and then lighting a torch from it). At that point, I got worried and asked him if he wished me ill and if he had anything to do with Ahriman, at which point I got "kicked out" and the dream ended abruptly.

I immediately did a SoP, prayed, declared that <that entity's name> was not allowed to be in me or feed on me and neither was any harmful entity, and then prayed some more; and since then I cannot say I experienced any negative effect, so I suspect that the matter is closed. But still, in hindsight, in my half-asleep state I played along more than I should have and missed some earlier warning signs (for example, in a previous part of the meditation I was asked to drop some coins on a grave that was of some relevance to that entity - that alone should have told me that it was likely no fire elemental at all); and if I had kept playing along even further after missing the name, I suspect that things could have gotten unpleasant...

Re: Two questions on geomancy, one on discursive meditation and elementals

[ecosophia]

1) Half the point of doing a reading is so you can use it to guide your actions. Thus, no, I don't recommend casting the Mothers and then not interpreting them; that's like asking the hotel to give you a wake-up call on your cell phone and then turning your cell phone off.

2) Yep. Another thing to keep in mind is that most novice diviners blow readings way out of proportion. Carcer shows up and it's, "Oh no! I'll be thrown in jail!" -- and what it actually means is that one of the elevators at work is out of order and you have to wait five minutes for the other one to show up.

3) Some people do that as a way to cultivate lucid dreaming as a tool for inner plane experience. I've never done that. What I do is right before going to sleep, I read the text I'm going to meditate on the next morning, and then let my mind rest on the core idea from the reading as I doze off.

[(Anonymous)]

Last week I was thinking about what seem to be limitations in magic. First, there are plenty of spectacular failures, gruesomely so when people have tried to make themselves immune to bullets (tales of Boxer Rebellion aren't pretty). Second, there have been attempts to test psychic powers in laboratory conditions, and as a rule, the more rigorously controlled the test was, the less likely it was to find anything. Some of those were run by people who wanted to prove the reality of powers, so that can't be the issue. I don't know if anyone tested magic as such, but it seems at least plausible that the results would be similar.

Now, bullets have their trajectory determined to a very high degree when they are fired. The changes to that are also linear, so a little gust of wind will change it only a little, and actually throwing it completely off course or stopping it would require quite a bit of force. Most other systems in this world are non-linear, so a tiny change now can result in big effects later (the classic butterfly effect, basically). Calculating these changes is a complete pain in the fundament, and in any case impossible in the long term without perfectly accurate data, but they too operate according to rules. It's possible to postulate non-mathematical ways of understanding them, or superintelligences capable of getting close to perfect data and crunching the numbers.

As for scientific experiments, an ideal one controls for as many variables as possible, so it can look at what happens when you change the one being tested. If extrasensory perception and other such things operate through these variables instead of being independent of them, and the experimenter uses his will to keep them as stable as possible, grounding this in the physical setup of the experiment, it seems logical that the effect would vanish.

I'm really just spitballing here, but might we be dealing with something that operates through small, unobserved changes in chaotic systems with a lot of unknown variables? I could also go "argle gargle collapse of wave function when observed argle", but my eyes start rolling uncontrollably when people try to give magic a pseudoscientific veneer, and while I didn't just slap a quantum sticker on it, I went close enough already.

[(Anonymous)]

If I may... I have studied and worked extensively with defense magic (shields, blessings, amulets, banishings). Magic, like everything else has limits, but usually (and this is MY opinion, based on my experience) people force defense magic to fail because it is often too successful. Let me explain, lets supposed that someone is targeting you and you make a protective amulet. The amulet will not stop a bullet, but it can cause a small twitch of the wrist, a headache, a gush of wind that throws dust into the gunslinger's eyes, a pigeon to fly in front of the bullet, a bee to sting him/her.If they're using a sniper rifle and there's even a minor error in adjustment the bullet can fail. The amulet can end up being so successful that you convince yourself that you're invulnerable and start taking more risks. There's always a limit. You spoke of the Boxer rebellion. That is a classic case of too much success. The Boxer rebel usually had a spell to make sure that whoever shot at him wouldn't be able to hit him. That spell would probably be successful at mid-range and with one, perhaps two, at the most three shooters, and that is already a stretch. Now imagine three thousand men, cramped in a Beijing street. The person that is shooting at them may fail, but the bullet for each one of them will probably hit the guy on their side and vice versa. Not nice.On the other hand we have a much more successful example of protective magic recently. During the Vietnam war, the Tiger battalion from Korea was deployed in Vietnam. A significant percentage of the members of that batallion had magical protection tattoos that were supposed to make them invulnerable. All of them returned home without any injuries... How was that possible? For one reason or another the batallion was always barred from engaging the "enemy". They spent all the war in the barracks.

Banishing

[(Anonymous)]

Questions about what specifically to banish.

1) I might have worked out my own answers to a couple of things on the subject of banishing negatives, while writing the questions. Would like to run these by you and others anyway. Banishing debt? I think this might be fine, as it's useful to cultivate an attitude that debt is something to avoid, but it should also be supplemented by positive workings for money and opportunities. However banishing an illness rather than positive working for good health seems like it might be a bad idea, because firstly being ill involves being alive, and one way for it to stop might be to not be alive, and secondly the issue of bad side effects as found with some medicines.
What else is there to watch out for in the idea of banishing negatives?

2) Banishings that involve things that people do and say. How does this work with the ethics against magic to control people? Whether one is banishing a person generally? Or if they are less feasible to cease contact with totally, but the goal is to hear from them less, or that they behave differently, where the usual requests and discussion made little impact?

Re: Banishing

[ecosophia]

1) Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will, and you'll have more success banishing things the closer they are to consciousness. Banishing debt rarely works, because debt is an effect, not a cause -- it's an effect of spending more than your income will permit. Banish carelessness, wastefulness, and the attitude of entitlement that says you should have something whether or not you can afford it, and debt will go away promptly. In the same way, don't banish illnesses, banish states of consciousness that encourage you to get sick.

2) Here again, don't banish the person, banish your reaction to the person. Banish your vulnerability to their games; banish the emotional triggers they exploit. Change your consciousness, and they'll go away once they no longer get what they want.

Three rays of light

[(Anonymous)]

Dear archdruid,

The Three Rays of Light spread is seemingly performed differently in the Coelbren versus the Ogham - The meaning of the second and third rays are switched (in the Ogham, outcome is the rightmost ray, in the Coelbren it is the middle ray).
Is there a particular reason for this, or is it just a measure to avoid overly rigid interpretation of how a three rays of light spread is meant to be read?

Yours in Druidry,

Brigyn

Re: Three rays of light

[ecosophia]

Good; I was wondering if anyone would catch that. It's one of my various maneuvers to make life difficult for would-be fundamentalists who might be tempted to say, "JMG says to do it this way!" Yes, but I also say to do it the other way... ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

Dear JMG,

After completing the complete basic SOP recently, I decided to spend a couple of weeks solidifying it before moving on in the DMH to the grove ceremony. While I do that, I am trying to learn about the Druid gods described in the DMH and Welsh mythology in general, and so I started reading the Mabinogion. I'm still learning about all this, hopefully these questions aren't too dumb:

1. Do you have any more information about Hu the Mighty? I found out that Hu came into prominence during the Druid Revival, so he won't be in the Mabinogion, but maybe more info exists about him elsewhere?

2. Is Lugh (Lleu?) a diety that modern Druids follow at all?

3. Are Celi and Ced, which seem to be powers which represent oppositional yet complementary forces (the solar and telluric currents, male and female, etc) similar in any way to yin and yang in Taoism?

4. Also, for when I eventually get to the grove ceremony: is the grove ceremony a daily practice?

Thanks very much, as always!

[ecosophia]

1. Not a great deal. He's discussed here and there in old Druid Revival sources; here's a fine old image of him striding onto the shore of the Island of the Mighty at the beginning of time:

2. Depends on the Druids, of course. A lot of Druids who are into the Irish traditions revere him.

3. In a certain sense, but Yin and Yang aren't deities, you know.

4. Most people do it once a week.

[(Anonymous)]

The reincarnation cycle requires people to do everything and experience everything (or at least a representative sample). So that would include both committing and being the victim of multiple bad things. That seems like a particularly sneaky Catch-22 style double bind as the cosmic cycle requires you to do bad things, but still lands you with bad karma for doing them. :) But is there a limit to how bad a thing you would ever have to do in order to learn from the experience? Is there a cutoff point beyond which you'd just be doing something nasty and racking up bad karma with no extra wisdom to show for it?

It also gives new meaning to the popular RPG justification/excuse "I did it for the XP!" :)

[ecosophia]

Well, keep in mind that most of those experiences take place before you get to the human stage; you killed and were killed, and went through the whole range of other grisly experiences, long before you became a human being, under the guidance of instinct. In theory, a soul that reaches the human level could make the right choices more or less by accident from the start, and get through the human level without adding to the toll of grisly experiences; in practice -- well, human beings are what they are, and I doubt it ever happens. So whatever ugly activities you engage in as a human being are, strictly speaking, unnecessary.