ecosophia: (Default)
John Michael Greer ([personal profile] ecosophia) wrote2025-04-20 10:39 pm

Magic Monday

w4eMidnight is almost upon us and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note:  Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted.  If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 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.  And further:  I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

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.  This is my seventy-fourth published book, the sequel to The Way of the Golden Section, an adaptation of some aspects of John Gilbert's version of the Golden Dawn system to the Golden Section Fellowship. What that means in practice is that this book, The Way of the Four Elements provides a sequence of rituals, meditations, exercises, and practices keyed to the four elements of ancient magic and philosophy, which unfolds over the course of a year and builds on the material given in the earlier book. Rituals for the solstices and equinoxes, and the making and consecration of the four elemental working tools of the tradition -- the book of air, the wand of fire, the cup of water, and the pentacle of earth -- are among the things included. Interested? You can get a copy here in the US or here if you live elsewhere. (I recommend getting the hardback edition; if you do the work in this volume, you'll put heavy wear on your copy, and the hardback will stand up to that.) 

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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 either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) 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
 
Bookshop logoI've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed, and no further comments will be put through. See you next week!***

(Anonymous) 2025-04-22 02:07 am (UTC)(link)
I have something that's like that where the mental entities are structures of tradeoffs and tensions and potential sensitive triggers and constraints of one thing being in sequence after another, like you would get in figuring out how to do a two-person yoga position or finesse a tricky social situation or modify a computer program to protect it against hacking. I think that might be closer to the original "language" of proto-consciousness, at least in vertebrates, than the more-commoditized thing with words that humans normally do. (In Kabbalistic terms, more Netzach than Hod.)

But if you have that same problem, I don't have any advice for you except to do something that I did, which is learn a lot of sciences and other symbolic systems (Kabbalah might work) to help you identify a bunch of structures of things that are analogous to each other. Because then some of the things will be analogous to parts of your thoughts, and you can reference those things in order to express yourself figuratively. (Some core parts of the mental entities might be directly analogous to parts of heuristics for combinatorial optimization and statistical pattern-matching and game theory, but those would have a very steep learning curve before they could ever help you express yourself.)

Or are they, like, structures of jumbled related impressions and interlocking considerations and associations and possibilities, without so much of a focus on representing conflicting aspects of tricky problems? Well, in that case some of the same advice still applies. I guess I get those too but it just never seemed like a problem.
scottyc: (Default)

Re: Sphere of protection

[personal profile] scottyc 2025-04-22 02:12 am (UTC)(link)
No worries. Sometimes the harder things to describe are the most basic, especially things we perform almost exclusively by muscle memory.


Re: Energetic boundaries

[personal profile] boccaccio 2025-04-22 02:20 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you!

4 elements

(Anonymous) 2025-04-22 02:23 am (UTC)(link)
Is the end goal of working with the 4 elements the same in every system? To balance the elements? Just different methods (for instance, the highlighted book versus the methods in CGD)

Or does the end goals differ based on the method and system ?

Thank you!

Re: A bullet as a healing tool

(Anonymous) 2025-04-22 02:24 am (UTC)(link)
Hi J,

You can read about The Wounded Healer archetype in Carl Jung's writings.

The Wounded Healer both heals and wounds, and can teach you about how and why you do both.

Live from Pelican Place,
Christine Clifford

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