ecosophia: (Default)
John Michael Greer ([personal profile] ecosophia) wrote2023-06-11 11:36 pm

Magic Monday

Rene ChambellantIt's getting toward midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) 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 hereAlso: 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. 

The picture?  I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn.
I've taken the lineage of OBOD back as far as I can, and now it's time to jump to another initiatory lineage, the Martinist Order. It's bad form (and forbidden by the obligations of initiation) to reveal the name of your Martinist initiator, even indirectly; thus I'm going to leap over the last several steps in my Martinist filiation to this gentleman, René Chambellant, whose title as a Gnostic bishop was Tau Renatus. Born in 1907, he was an oral surgeon by trade, and spent many years in central Africa teaching oral surgery and dentistry at a college in the Congo. He was initiated into Martinism and numerous other esoteric orders by Robert Ambelain, one of the great figures of the modern French esoteric traditions; in 1944, after the Gnostic patriarch Constant Chevillon was assassinated by the Nazis, Chambellant became the head of l'Eglise Gnostique Universelle, one of the major French Gnostic churches of the time. Several important Martinist lineages received their initiation through him.

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With that said, have at it!

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

Agnic Incursion upon Cannabis Grow

(Anonymous) 2023-06-12 11:22 am (UTC)(link)
Hi JMG, this is a bit of an unusual question but I'm at my wits end. I don't know if you've explored the occult dimensions of cannabis growing, if so I have a question about the grow I'm running.

It's an aeroponic array with computer-controlled LED lighting and irrigation. The lights have been positioned in a pattern consistent with Devi-Krishnamurti mandala designs in order to channel the energy of the Sahasrara chakra, and the alignment of the power train and cables was chosen in accordance with feng shui principles to promote the flow of chi through the grow space along dragon meridians. The aeroponic system, in its capacity as distaff couterpart to the lighting system, is shaped to attune to the Swadhistana chakra, arranged in an intersecting spiral pattern derived from the kshetram of the Perur Shiva temple in Tamil Nadu. The reservoir tubes are aligned in such a way as to carry energy from the main water tank (located at the eastern edge of the room to channel the power of Qinglong, guardian of the east and sovereign of water from Daoist cosmology) into the room following the pattern of Erinite ley lines.

My question is: in your experience, can Sahashrara and Swadhistana energy act in harmony in a grow space with only minor modulation through the Daoist zodiac or will these forces require additional interceding factors in order to promote a healthy crop? The Sahashrara/Swadhistana combination was chosen based on consultation with our Vedic adviser but he apparently mixed the wrong drugs at Burning Man and is currently in a psychiatric facility. I also spoke with the healer I see when visiting LA and she recommended that we modulate the energy flow using a refractive orrery of crystals attuned to the sidereal mansions of Vedic astrology. However, we're already hanging three chalcedon stones from the lighting system to acknowledge the other three Daoist guardians and one of my assistants walked into one and chipped a tooth last month so I don't know if I want 12 more crystals suspended in the grow area.

The issue of energetic balance came to a head last week when we had a small fire break out in the grow room leading to the loss of a couple plants. I suspect the incursion of Agnic energy may have resulted from the imperfect balance of cosmic and water forces manifest in a Sahashrara/Swadhistana combination. My partner says the assistant who was working that day probably overloaded an outlet when he plugged in the power supply for his TV and Nintendo Switch but I already told him not to play video games at work and I know he's a responsible guy, he's been clean for three months now.

I appreciate any insights you can provide. Namaste.

Re: Agnic Incursion upon Cannabis Grow

(Anonymous) 2023-06-13 02:45 am (UTC)(link)
I wish I knew how to communicate how hare-brained all this stuff you treat as natural and unproblematic is. It's like if someone was trying to emulate a PlayStation game with a Nintendo 64 emulator, which was compiled for Linux, but they were trying to run it on a version of Windows that was compiled for a PC x86 processor, which they were trying to use on a Macintosh with a 680x0 processor, installed on an IDE external hard disk which they had "connected" to the SCSI port on the Mac using a custom-soldered RS232 cable, and the Mac had a power adapter designed for American 120V which they'd hammered into shape so they could plug it into one of the live pins and the ground pin of a European outlet with 240V, and also they custom-soldered a token ring network coaxial cable to "connect" the AppleTalk port on one end to a Ethernet switch on the other, and also they were trying to insert the PlayStation disc into the floppy disc drive, and also then they told you they had an HDMI monitor they wanted to use and were considering pulling out the internal display connection and soldering A/V cables to some of the pins...

The forces in question are, one supposes, more flexible than that, but I don't know how else to convey how disorienting it is to try to follow all this stuff whose unproblematic juxtaposability you take for granted. The experts (or, more likely, middle-of-the-road professional practitioners) you are consulting with probably don't have the experience needed to make engineering judgements about the interacting systems; it's hard enough to make good judgements even within just one system, or to notice when you're missing something.

The only kind of "expert" with knowledge relevant to your current setup that is likely to be accessible to you is an experienced chaos magic practitioner, and unless they had an uncanny intuition for how to make space for the elements to interact safely, maybe they would tell you to tone it down too.

Also, running lighting and irrigation through particular geometric patterns is just, like, a static invocation, it doesn't necessarily have much power or flexibility by itself. I'm not sure cables that have electric power going through them are that healthy for this kind of purpose either, even assuming that the geometric arrangement of conductive cables that didn't have electrical currents might have been useful for something.

Like JMG said in the other thread ( https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/236505.html?thread=41517785#cmt41543385 ): "It's like trying to carry on conversations in two different languages at the same time -- things tend to get garbled." If everyone knows what they're doing, then maybe it works, but...

You're mixing, I'm not even sure how to count that many subsystems:

- a chakra-associated energy
  - specified by a manadala
    - as part of the Devi-Krishnamurti system
      - invoked with a geometric shape of where the lights are
- chi
  - according to theories of feng shui
    - along dragon lines (previously existing ones? identified how? with what degree of confidence?)
      - using cables carrying electrical currents (????)
- another chakra-associated energy
  - specified by patterns found in a kshetram (i.e. not from the same system of mandalas as the mandala)
    - invoked with a geometric shape of where the plants are
- "energy"
  - according to an "Erinite" theory of ley lines (never heard of this, but it sure sounds like a different system from feng shui!)
    - including a directional association to invoke Qinglong
      - using a pattern of water tubes
- other directional guardian influences
  - using hanging crystals
    - (why all chalcedony? is it supposed to be general-purpose like frankincense or something?)
- seriously considered the suggestion of Vedic lunar mansion influences
  - using 12 more hanging crystals
    - in a "refractive orrery" pattern
      - (that's, like, 50 degrees of freedom in the design, how would you even begin to calibrate the crystal sizes and alignments and orrery gear ratios if you can't perceive the forces or ostensible "refraction" events involved in the first place, and also they're qualitative and symbolic and substantially observer-dependent?)

You should probably surrender some of your attachments to your ideas about how your intentions interact with the forces that are interpreting your invocatory actions.

More generally, having true beliefs is like tending a garden, or at least a crystal garden. And you seem like the kind of person who would figuratively let too many volunteer plants or crystals grow in the wrong shapes and places, without correctly transplanting, pruning, or destroying them. And not all of the volunteers are even useful plants/crystals; some are weeds, or parasitic side reactions, like if the useful polymorph of calcium carbonate is aragonite and you're getting the calcite polymorph instead, in which case you should remove the calcite seed crystals and re-dissolve them and change the conditions in the growth medium.

You may be figuratively experiencing your crystals being numerous and well-defined and vivid, and be proud of the many, many sharp edges your crystal growth medium is able to maintain. But that isn't, in this case, a marker of success. (If you learn the correct spelling of a bunch of words that are hard to spell correctly, and then go out of your way to artificially include lots of those words in your writing correctly spelled, likewise that doesn't make it into good writing.) Ideally, the influences on the garden from your observations and reflections should be controlled in focus and magnitude, so that the sizes of the things in the garden within gradually come to only match the strength of the information arriving from the garden without, and not outgrow it. Your beliefs arising from the state of the garden within, on what might happen under given circumstances in the garden without, should be proportionately unconfident, with betting odds neither too long nor too short. If that's not happening, then your actions flowing back from the garden within are likely to create a dysfunctional garden without.

Chipped teeth and small fires may be just a warning. Psychiatric hospitalization is a bigger warning, if one aimed less at you. (Though, note well: so far as you understand, the way he got there was by *mixing* the wrong chemical influences! If you want a better fate than your teacher, succeed at the virtues he failed at!) Forces are ending up in the wrong places. Maybe invoke fewer, or all from just one system, or more weakly or with more uncertainty, and give them more license to ground out by some safe path if it turns out the thing you wanted didn't actually make sense in the contexts that only they currently can perceive. (In your place, if I had the budget, if I didn't walk back any of your other infrastructure-based invocations, I would at least go out of my way to replace the temperature control system with one of those ones that uses water run into the earth and back for its thermal reservoir.)

You should be self-aware about this, and regard the whole garden with a sort of bemused detachment that keeps there from being any drama about it. That might help the garden prune itself more, since beliefs grow towards emotional investment.

I guess there's also the question of whether your customers are observing appropriate taboos and sacrednesses given all the weird charging that you're doing on your plants. You might want to make an outgoing process that makes your plants more predictably safe for ordinary human amounts of fecklessness.

Someone here mentioned once that there is a temple of Saturn in India still. The Western tradition says that cannabis is a Saturnine herb. Also that there are strong Shaivite contemplative traditions around cannabis. Maybe you should switch over to full Indian techniques and then follow more of whatever is going on with those two things.

Re: Agnic Incursion upon Cannabis Grow

(Anonymous) 2023-06-13 04:03 am (UTC)(link)
I have grown cannabis.

I also do other organic gardening, food growing.

My thoughts are that you should be treating the growing of cannabis entirely differently than this techno mumble jumble you described ! cannabis is a living plant. The best for living plants is giving them a great natural environment to grow. The soil should be built up via natural means, manured, mulched, etc... it should be full of all the great soil biota and lifeforms. Use good water. If it is city water, can you put it from the hose into 5 gallon buckets and leave for a day to let the chemicals dissipate ( chlorine will dissipate into the air) and so then the water will not disturb ( low level poison) the soil life. You can also aerate the water if it is especially dead. While I have not used the biodynamic preps in cannabis growing, obviously they would be a great thing to do. You can even use flow forms to aerate the water. I do not aerate the water anymore than naturally happens as it leaves the hose when I hand water, that aerates as you go to some degree, it helps.

Modern cannabis has been bred so that it is a rather brittle plant, the outside work, wind and sun helps with this, does help to strengthen, but as the plants grow you have to not water the plant itself, but next to it, as you can break branches. On the other hand, I noticed the double dream would have partially broken branches that would set out roots where they bent down that much and made soil/mulch contact.

Other great things to do, which I did not do, would be to have earth tubes or such for bringing in energies, nearby alter, etc...

What I did do was have lots of goat stall cleanings on the soil, nice and deep and was using a raised bed that had this treatment for many years. The soil was alive. The sun and air were good and real and alive and there.

I do not use cannabis with THC, I was growing it out for someone who needed it, but the results were fantastic. The plants were good, the yields were great and the product from what I was told was as good as far as flavor and medicinal potency.

I did need a few years ago some CBD cannabis, and I made sure to make my own salve with CBD cannibis that was also sky grown on acreage that had been in organic production for 20 years. It was legally commercially grown in Oregon. I did not know of any like that locally. Some reports I have heard of local commercial indoor grows sound pretty scary to me, not natural and I think would not be as good for the user. Mold, etc... in the green houses amongst other things.

You will never have the same product in a hydroponic grow in a greenhouse, and this is even more important with medicine as food.

It will never be as spiritually connected in that artificial environment, trying to treat the plants as machines, no matter how you lay your power cables.

And, yes, fires due to overloading circuits are a well known issue with peoples artificial grow operations

Get in tune yourself with God and Nature. Meditate on what plants need and the real harmony


- Atmospheric River