Magic Monday
Dec. 3rd, 2023 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
It's a little before 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 1.1 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: 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 image? I field a lot of questions about my books these days, so I've decided to do little capsule summaries of them here, one per week. The book above on the left is the current edition of my seventh published book, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult. I'd gotten irritated about the lack of decent reference works on occultism, and Llewellyn, the publisher I worked with in those days was enthusiastic about the idea of helping to fix that. It was a fun project, and includes a certain number of quiet and rather abstruse jokes; there are other occult encyclopedias available these days but this one still stands up fairly well -- though I'd make a lot of changes if the publisher was interested. (This also turned out to be the last book I did with Llewellyn for a long while, due to some issues involving their treatment of another project of mine.) If you're interested in the encyclopedia, you can get a copy here if you live in the US, and at your favorite book venue if you live elsewhere.
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***This Magic Monday is now closed -- as in, no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 06:09 am (UTC)Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 06:23 am (UTC)2ndly, if say I did a working to consecrate a talisman or a tool before I started geomancy and I wanted to confirm the consecration, would we actually let the reading tell us or should we trust our abilities and let the results brought about by the talisman be its proof?
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 06:59 am (UTC)2) In that case I don't recommend casting a reading at all. The consecration is an act of will, and faith that it worked is part of that same act of will.
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 07:03 am (UTC)Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 08:27 pm (UTC)It's crucial to keep in mind that magic is not omnipotent. Especially in the early stages of training, there are a lot of things that your magic won't be able to accomplish yet -- or at all. That's why divination is valuable as a guide, and it's also why it's essential to focus on the basic daily practices of the system of magic you're learning, and on other workings for the purpose of magical and spiritual development. Those are the exercises that will build strength and skill in magic so that you can eventually accomplish great things.
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 08:36 pm (UTC)I now only have two talismans in operation one of which I'm sure is not working, the other I casted a reading for but could not come to an interpretation owing to my introductory skills with geomancy. Of course, I just need to continue learning geomancy and the answers will pour forth.
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 09:22 pm (UTC)In my own experience, magic behaves like a living, sentient (though impersonal) being. As such, it may choose to withhold its favors from one person or another, whether temporarily or forever.
It was with this fact in mind that a wise Renaissance magician wrote many centuries ago, "To work magic is nothing other than to marry the cosmos" [Magicam operari non est aliud quam maritare mundum]. A marriage, if it is not simply another name for a rape, requires at a minimum uncoerced consent from each living, sentient party; and almost always it will have been preceded by a substantial period of mutual courtship. Magic doesn't seem (to me at least) to be anything like a technology that one can learn to master, and then expect always to get one's desired results by "pushing the right buttons on the machine."
Assuming I am right, could you live with this necessity, and humbly court the magic that you hope will consent to marry you?
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 11:20 pm (UTC)Thank you Robert, I like this.
I also think that is also why magic keeps refusing to work on a dead, cold and rude setting such as a controlled lab, where it is cut off from everything else and expected to work every single time the same way.
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-05 12:42 am (UTC)I think you're quite right: that's why you can't ever get magic to work consistently under cold, boring laboratory conditions. It's not willing to be your obedient laboratory subject -- what would it get of any value to itself from such a relationship?
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-05 02:02 am (UTC)Magic and nature really do seem to open up and unfold in endless mysteries if you yield to her, instead of the other way around.
What is more reasonable if one ought to marry the cosmos, which is vastly bigger than us? To make it work according to our ideas or set them aside and listen?
And now I am in that space again. Thank you.
A couple songs:
Rising
Nada Aradhana: an offering of sound
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-05 04:43 am (UTC)Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-05 04:57 am (UTC)I studied mathematics and physics for 3 years in university and it was a hell of a lot of fun. It taught me how to think in sequence and find holes in my argumentation. Once it did it's job though, and found out the science and scientists I admired did something else, I found something better. Occultism, after all, has what I was looking for in science.
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-05 03:20 am (UTC)And the inconsistencies seem themselves to be empirically too consistent for that. If such circumstances that would cause the magic to work consistently were there to be found, one would think someone would have found one of them by now. The line of hypotheses I see as most promising is instead the hypotheses where the relevant facet of the cosmos is at least also always keeping an eye to the potential future consequences that might result if the findings were too positive or consistent (and therefore too easy to distinguish from e.g. file-drawer effects) for too long.
(Also, not that this matters very much, but my impression is that strictly speaking the "labs" have typically been more like furnished offices, temporarily claimed conference rooms, reading rooms in libraries, etc.)
Re: Geomancy
Date: 2023-12-04 11:20 pm (UTC)If you are doing Picatrix stuff, you might check out what Christopher Warnock has to say about the talisman being a line of communication with the spirit. I.e. it's a relationship, not a machine that just does what it's designed to do.
My other comment is from my own experience of talismans "working." For me, the "effect" often shows up as opportunities for self- improvement. A particular book might come to my attention, or in some other way the path forward might become clear - but then I have to put in the work to make it happen. The barriers might fall, but I still have to walk the path.