ecosophia | Magic Monday

Current Mood: weird

Entry tags:

Magic Monday

It's getting on for midnight as I type this, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. This week's classic of Western occultism, since I've been indulging in Ross Nichols' poetry of late, is The Cosmic Shape, published in 1946, which contains his brilliant essay "An Examination of Creative Myth," which discusses the need for nature-myth and ritual as a counterbalance to the artificialities of modern life, and his related Arthurisn poem-cycle "The Cosmic Legend," as well as other poems of his and his fellow poet James Kirkup. He clearly discussed these ideas with his good friend Gerald Gardner; those ideas ended up playing a central role in the creation of Wicca as well as the transformations of 20th-century Druidry. Here's a bit from "The Cosmic Legend":

I have made my ceremonies; the crisis
comes. None may reproduce, no water flow,
until the sword is from its sheath pulled.
Only I, the medicine-man Gawain, instructing
at midnight Galahad, the pure one of
spring -- only I can save you, faithless
with the fallen leaf. I prove to you,
O my dead people, once again that
I alone am your strength.

In the first ray beating touching on the centre altar-stone
to the eye prepared at vigil-end, the vessel of the sun,
cup and heart, to Galahad.

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. 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. 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.

~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- and yes, this means you. See you next week!***

And don't forget to look up your Pangalactic New Age Soul Signature at CosmicOom.com!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Following hard on the heels of the supermoon eclipse justice working, Michael M. Hughes has posted a justice working of his own: https://medium.com/@michaelmhughes/black-lives-matter-a-spell-for-justice-80cc3c760763?source=---------4------------------

what do you think that the major effects of this spell will be both in the world at large and in the lives of those who cast it?

1) Do you know anything which looks at which sect Uranus and Neptune belong to, or is something I'll need to develop myself?

2) I'm starting LRM, and have found most of it intuitive, but every time I do the breathing relaxation exercise, I feel the need to void my bowels. Is this normal?

3) You've mentioned things are returning to normal in Rhode Island. I live in Canada, and things are emphatically not. My city has just shut down a restaurant for having the audacity to allow people to wait on its patio. Do you have advice on how to stay sane when it's fairly clear that the country you live in has gone insane, and “normal” won't be returning any time soon?

4) Since advertising is a corrupt form of magic, I figure it's not out of place to ask a few questions on the topic. I've started doing research into the 1950s, and part of that is I'm currently reading The Hidden Persuaders, and have found it raises a lot of questions. Some of them are for further research, but I've got a few I'd like to ask here:

a) Something that strikes me is that the Myth of Progress in the modern, highly toxic and bizarre form, took shape in the post-war world, and it seems like a logical extension of one of the core messages of advertising: “Old is bad, New is good!” Do you think there's a connection, or am I over-analyzing it?

b) How does one keep themselves clean from it? Banishing rituals, journaling to identify and remove the hooks already in, and avoiding exposure all seem like good first steps, but are there other things worth doing to keep clean?

c) I'm also noticing that a lot of the ideas which our comfortable classes have seem to be those of the 1950s, but more extreme. This raises the question of is this why the 1950s hold such a potent place in our collective consciousness, and why it's so hard to find anything which talks about it in any sane manner? At some level, people notice that their thinking is the same as the 1950s, and since the past is evil, they can't stand that?

d) I've also noticed our chattering classes thinking can be described as “1950s thinking, minus any nuance”. Do you think advertising has created essentially a feedback loop? Our chattering classes get their thinking from the ads, and the ads are made by the chattering classes. Each generation of ad is thus further and further from the underlying reality, which has changed anyway....

5) I've noticed a few religions have an issue with male masturbation making people ritually impure, but not female masturbation. Since it's come up here before that male masturbation is more effective at releasing etheric stuff, do you think there's a connection? If so, would taking a cold shower after masturbation be a good idea?

This is surprisingly clean for Hughes -- much less posturing and handwaving than his usual spells, and much less diffuse in its formulation. He's apparently more open to learning from his mistakes than I expected, which is good to see.

The problem here is twofold. First of all, you use black candles to curse, not to invoke justice, so he's got his usual problem of thinking that symbols mean whatever he wants them to mean, not what they actually mean. So at best, the person who does this is calling on the harshest form of eye-for-an-eye retributive justice, Saturn in a bad mood rather than the restorative justice of Jupiter; at worst, it's a malevolent curse with a little rhetorical window dressing -- and that, with strict retributive justice, is also going to manifest itself without mercy or forbearance in the lives of the people who do this working. If they are perfectly just in all their thoughts, words, and deeds, they'll be fine -- but how many human beings can live up to that standard?

The second problem, of course, is the usual issue that he's splashed this onto the internet, so that everyone who disagrees with his political agenda knows exactly what he's doing and can work magic to mess with his spell. I'm not going to explain how, as I don't think throwing gasoline on an already blazing fire is a good idea, but there are plenty of ways to monkeywrench a working like this and see to it that its effect boomerangs on the people who follow his instructions. I'd expect, to begin with, that the people who committed arson and other crimes during the recent riots are going to have a much harder time staying out of prison than they otherwise would...

Is the material taught in the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids compatible with the classic golden dawn work stream of magical practice?

Or a lot of the people involved will find themselves victims of criminal cops.....

Hello JMG,

Continuing the geomancy discussion from last week, if that's okay.

1. The Mirror

An update on my thinking regarding "The Hinge", as I dubbed the figure with the postulated meaning of "that central thing shared by Querent and Quesited" last week. I have discovered that there is one more pair of similarly constructed figures that have a predictable relationship with the rest of any Geomancy chart.

Whereas the Hinge is the diagonal that stays immobile and unchanging as the other figures revolve around them, what I'll at least for now call "The Mirror" is the other diagonal of the square. The Hinge was created by the diagonal which is made by M1F (1st Mother's Fire Line), M2A (2nd Mother's Air Line), M3W (3rd Mother's Water), and M4E (4th Mother's Earth), and this is always duplicated in the Daughters (D1F, D2A, D3W, D4E). What I later realized is that the opposite diagonal (M4F, M3A, M2A, M1E) also repeats; however, the corresponding Daughters (D4F, D3A, D2A, D1E) are not the same identity, but rather the *mirror reverse* identity: a Mother Puer means a Daughter Puella, a Mother Cauda Draconis means a Daughter Caput Draconis, a Mother Carcer means a Daughter Carcer, and so on. So the Mirror figure is actually a pair of identical twin figures, and always comes as a pair.

In the Hinge visualization I used last week, the 4x4 grid of the Mothers can be spun like a four sided 2d diamond on the axis of the two corners (the ones I called the Hinge) in order to see both sides of the situation-- the Querent's, and then spun on the hinge to reveal the Daughters/Quesited's position, which are the same position of dots seen from the backside and at a 90 degree rotation (with corresponding shifts in elements). In doing so, the corners of the remaining two corners form a diameter which traces out the circumference of the circle that encompasses entire matter. This diameter is both Mirrors, and unless it is a symmetrical figure (Via, Populus, Carcer, or Conjunctio), its value will be one of two geometric reversals depending on which position you are viewing it from. (I see shades of the Cosmic Doctrine here: Mothers/Daughters as Ring Cosmos, a Ring Chaos that creates the axis/hinge, and the Ring-Pass-Not traced out by the Mirror).

Thus the Mirror figure describes that part of the question on which the Querent and Quesited are coming at from the most diametrically opposed perspective-- although, if the it's a symmetrical figure, they still see basically the same thing from their respective viewpoints.

Now I note that there is no guarantee that any of these three figures will otherwise appear in reading. Thus how do they meaningfully relate to the question at hand? Well, I think maybe I got a big clue on Friday, which was the first daily geomancy divination I did where I was taking both the Hinge and the Mirrors into account. On Friday, my Hinge was Rubeus, my Right Mirror (corresponding to the Querent) was Cauda Draconis, and my Left Mirror (corresponding to the Querent) was Caput Draconis. In the actual chart, the only one of these figures to appear anywhere was Cauda Draconis. I struggled as to what this could mean, if anything... after all, no Rubeus appears in the actual chart, so by definition those energies are not likely to play out in the day's events, right? And then you posted the latest "Magic Fail" Dreamwidth piece with its discussion of the eclipse... Ahhhhh. The Draconi in this case were, literally, the nodes of the moon, and Rubeus was the moon in eclipse.

My current hypothesis is that the Hinge and Mirror are like the revolving carousel stage on which the action is played-- the Querent starts at stage right and approaches the interaction from the perspective of the Right Mirror figure, and the Quesited starts at stage left and approaches the same stage from the opposite Left Mirror perspective. The result of the question is the choreography that they play out on the stage, around the Hinge. Just as in any theater or dance performance you have ever seen, sometimes the events as staged will heavily utilize a set; some plays, on the other hand, simply have a set, and don't really involve the actual set pieces in the story that is told on that occasion. I posit that the Hinge is the center of the stage, and the Mirrors its arches at the wings defining the boundaries of the action. A chart which uses the same figures as the Hinge and Mirrors in a lot of places are like a play where the set dressings play a big part in the specifics of the story line. A chart which doesn't have these figures is like a play where the backdrop is there, and sets the scene, but doesn't really inform it significantly.

I'm still developing these themes. Does everything up to here seem reasonable to you?

----
2. The Triplicities

As I'm trying to eschew House Readings for a few months and do a little bit of Shield Chart basic training, I've been trying to wrap my head around the geomantic triplicities. One place I found some discussion on them was over at Sam Block's blog, although he calls them "triads" to avoid confusion with astrological triplicities: https://digitalambler.com/2015/03/21/on-the-geomantic-triads/

His discussion traces your description of triplicities in your books to Robert Fludd's "Fasciculus Geomanticus". Now, I want to make clear that I like Sam Block's writing and get a lot out of it, but it seems to me that when he tries to summarizes your descriptions of the triplicities there, he does so incorrectly. Also, he provides his own translation of the relevant passage in Fludd, but then summarizes it in a way that doesn't follow for me based on the translation he gave. Assuming that Block's translation is correct, though, Fludd's description also doesn't exactly match up, in my view, with the summary *you* gave of triplicities in "The Art and Practice of Geomancy", either! Though perhaps Fludd wasn’t your source. So, may I ask:

Was Fludd's "Fasciculus Geomanticus", in fact, your original source for information on the Triplicities? If not, then what was your source of information? And if it was Fludd, were you aiming to directly convey the information Fludd covered, or were you modifying it at all based on your own experience?

I'm working through the completion exercises for the first grade of the Dolmen Arch. I have a couple questions:

1) am I correct that these take the place of the daily discursive meditation temporarily, or should I be doing both?

2) how do I know when I have completed them? Is there a range of how many repetitions this generally takes? I'm on completion exercise 1, which I feel pretty good about, but looking ahead to exercise 2 I forsee a difficulty: I still can barely visualise at all. Can I complete the exercise by non-visually imagining that I am doing it, or is it only complete if I successfully visualise looking at my body from the outside?

Many thanks for Magic Mondays!
-Bewilderness

Grover, I didn't forget your question to me last week about twin reversed mothers and daughters. I'm still mulling it over. I feel that my answer might in large part depend on how I come to interpret the Triplicities, which I haven't settled yet in my mind.

I went over all of my old divinations thus far. It turns out I vastly overestimated how many mirror+reversed mother/daughters I’d seen— in fact, since I began geomancy practice last October, I’ve seen a grand total of 4 twin mother/daughters, 2 of which occurred since your MM post 2 weeks ago, and 3 mirror+reversed twin mothers, 2 of which occurred since your MM post (which accounts for why I assumed they must be more common). So thanks for the synchronicity boost! :-)

I didn’t follow the math discussion here last week close enough to calculate probabilities here, but my guess based on my own data is that it’s roughly equivalent to the probability of pure twinning.

Definitely his most coherent working. Which makes it all the worse for those who use it.

1) I haven't seen anything exploring this. Have fun!

2) Some people experience this at first. Try doing the exercise 15 minutes before you do other practices, so you can get that out of the way.

3) Use the craziness as an opportunity to train your mind. When you encounter it, spend a moment thinking about why it's crazy. Once you've learned the Tree of Life, identify which sphere it represents in an unbalanced form. Once you know your way around the planets and the elements, identify it that way as well. Treat the craziness as a worthy opponent, one who can challenge you.

4) All of these are superb themes for meditation! Or, for that matter, for ordinary reflection. Nothing that you've suggested seems at all out of line; I'd encourage you to keep exploring all of this, and see where it takes you.

5) Yes and yes.

I recognize this working from Magic for the Resistance, and so I know for sure that there are alt-right mages who've already done workings to ensure they threw a monkey wrench into this. Considering one of the ones I know about, if you have a lot of white people casting it, particularly with the line, "I ask for repentance for the sins of my ancestors and for forgiveness of my own racism and offenses," this will get very ugly.....

That too.

Hi JMG -

Three questions for you this evening:

1) Does the amount of experience a person has with divination determine the accuracy of the result? In other words, if I, having no experience with geomancy, cast a chart, will the chart give an accurate answer to my question even though I may not be able to interpret it correctly?

2) I’m doing the green candle spell to earn more money, and I’ve had the experience that the first opportunity that came up conflicted with a job commitment that was already in place, so I wasn’t able to take it. No other opportunities have come up since. Did I nullify the spell?

3) I’m looking at protection and money magic on Lucky Mojo. Are the spells there generally safe for people with no magical experience?

Thanks, as always for giving your time.

David

Yeah, I expected that. It continues to be one of those epic face palm moments for me...

...that he published all of his rituals in convenient book form, so that everyone who wants to mess with him can pick up a copy, analyze all his strategic and tactical vulnerabilities, and work up nasty counterspells at their leisure. That's just so jawdroppingly stupid!

1) Well, I'll be back in a few months to report what I've learned! Even if I'm wrong, getting a conversation going will be very helpful.

2) That's what I came up with as well. Nice to know I'm doing it right! ;)

3) Thank you.

In a certain sense. The tradition that became OBOD started off as an outer court for one branch of the Golden Dawn, and there are still significant echoes of classic GD practice in the OBOD system. That doesn't mean you can muddle the two ritual systems together -- it requires a great deal of knowledge of both systems to find the places where they can mesh. On the other hand, you can practice your GD exercises in the morning and your OBOD exercises in the evening, and make serious progress -- I did this straight through the three degrees of the OBOD course.

My personal favourite is the fact that people are binding the people trying to bind Trump to never to be able to repeat his lies, exploiting that line in the working. It's very hard to explain why something is a lie if you can't say the lie in the first place!

1) This all seems worth further exploration; the proof of the pudding, of course, is what kind of results you get with it.

2) No, I didn't get Fludd's Fasciculus until some years after I wrote my first geomantic book. I honestly don't recall where I got the triplicities originally -- it was quite a few years ago and I've read pretty much all the geomantic texts available in English, French, or Latin.

1) You should be doing both.

2) When I was teaching this as a correspondence course I encouraged students to give a week or so to each of them. As for "non-visually imagining," this is quite adequate for all forms of magical work. Don't assume that you have to create a seemingly objective image in front of you!

3) That's probably good advice in general, right? Considering our societies are always crazy these days....

5) It also occurs to me this could be a good discipline to cut down on porn: "It'll feel good, but then five minutes in ice cold water.... No, it's not worth it"

That sounds like the 'Pede sense of humor!

Not to mention harmless blow back: how often do Trump supporters need to be able to repeat Trump's lies?

3) Why, yes. Josephin Peladan wrote an entire book on the subject, and one of these days I'm going to do the same thing.

Dear JMG,
Happy birthday and I wish you many happy returns of the day.

I was meditating and a question for you popped into my mind. I was wondering if putting working tools and similar out in the moon light is good for them and a way to nourish them. As I thought that, I had one of those pleasant little shivers up my spine which I usually take as a positive response. What do you make of moon bathing tools?

On a different subject, I was thinking of burning a black candle to Saturn as I did a little ritual last Saturday at the hour of Saturn (thanks so much for the article on timing spells!) asking him to protect my house. If a black candle is used to curse, what would be an appropriate offering to Saturn?

Also, my niece the sculptor made e a wooden statue of Priapus and it is in the garden. The strawberry crop looks to be going into legendary mode. I have read somewhere that Priapus likes offerings of fruit and flowers. Do you know of other offerings he traditionally likes?

Many thanks,
Maxine

It also strikes me as an example of wisdom: accepting Trump's weakness, and using an opposing working to transform it into a strength....

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 13

Magic Monday

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Geomancy Conversation

no subject

Re: Geomancy Conversation

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Geomancy Conversation

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Happy Birthday

no subject