ecosophia | How Not To Do Magic, Yet Again

I really had resolved not to do any more posts on the antics of the self-proclaimed Magic Resistance. Their workings, being poorly designed, ineffective, and splashed all over the internet, made a good teaching opportunity for a range of magical basics, but we covered those points in some detail and moved on.

But the electronic equivalent of flyers are popping up in occult-themed corners of the internet proclaiming a "Global Working for Justice" on the so-called "supermoon" tomorrow, June 5th, and either they've moved much deeper into epic fail territory than I realized, or something rather more troubling is going on. Yes, that's the flyer on the left.

Let's start with the basics. First, magic gains power from unity of focus, so a working intended to protect, heal, and bring justice, all at once, everywhere, isn't going to have any measurable effect anywhere. Second, magic -- like any strategic activity -- can be countered if the other side knows in advance what you're doing, and the countermoves needn't be obvious to be effective.

There's also the fact that workings for justice are notoriously chancy. Justice is not whatever you want it to be. If you yourself are not strictly just in your thoughts, words, and actions, and you do a working for justice, that working is going to manifest in your own life first. and your life is going to blow up. The most likely countermove to this working, in fact, would focus on that -- "let the people who call for justice be held to account for their own injustice" would be simple to do and, given current mores, viciously effective.

But there's something considerably more dangerous going on here.

A "supermoon," in case you were wondering, is a full moon that's a little closer to Earth and thus a little larger visually than your ordinary full moon. They happen quite often and they have no occult or astrological importance. However, the full moon of June 5th has a rather more important distinction, because the moon will be eclipsed. Eclipses aren't whatever you want them to be, either; five thousand years of astrological experience have shown that eclipses are malefic -- they focus the same kind of destructive and chaotic energies as the last three days before the new moon, the "eld of the Moon" known and feared for centuries as the typical time for really nasty magic.

Eclipses happen when the Moon is at one of the two nodes of her orbit. This one is happening at the south node, which is called Cauda Draconis (the Tail of the Dragon) in Western astrology and Ketu in Hindu astrology. In both traditions it brings trouble, sorrow, and suffering. This is not a place you want the Moon to be if you want to do a working for protection, healing, and justice.

The catastrophic mismatch between what this working is supposed to do and the nature of the astrological influences that will affect is so striking that I'm really wondering if someone has laid a very clever trap. The people who take part in this working are not going to achieve their ends, and if their magic has any effect at all, that effect will most likely be to bring powerfully malefic energies to bear on their own lives. It strikes me that some clever, malicious, and well-educated alt-Right mage may have deliberately set out to get the Magic Resistance to call down malign energies on itself. (I'm guessing that if this is the case, the person in question is a Traditionallist -- the references to Spiritualists in the text suggest that, because Traditionalists are generally very down on mediumship.)

One way or another, if any significant number of people pile into this latest stunt, the results will not be good...

Current Mood: appalled

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From:

tamanous2020

Hi JMG,

It seems to be a recurring theme since 2016 for the leaders and members of the occult/neopagan/alt spirituality groups to engage in this sort of stark mistake when it comes to magical workings (with there being rare exceptions like yourself).

Besides kek chaos magicians working quietly from the sidelines, do you have any thoughts on why people who should know better are making such basic mistakes? Has TDS and the failure of progress so undermined their rational minds that they throw themselves into boondoggles like this?

And as someone relatively new to the occult/magic, it does feel a little disheartening to see so many prominent people acting in a polarized manner when a major point of practice is to "know thyself". But I spose that's human beings for you.

From:

ecosophia

Partly it's that a vast number of people in the pop-spirituality scene have bought into the bizarre notion that magic is whatever they want it to be. That's partly the influence of the shallower forms of chaos magic, but I think there's more going on here than that. It's all very reminiscent of the Ghost Dance, and of all those other times that people in various parts of the world fled into a warm comforting delusion to hide from an unwelcome reality.

How Not To Do Magic, Yet Again

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