ecosophia | Magic Monday

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Magic Monday

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

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

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

Oh, it's worth rereading just because it's so bad. Are you familiar with The Eye of Argon, the worst fantasy story ever written?

https://ansible.uk/misc/eyeargon.html

People read it aloud competitively -- the goal is to get through a whole page without giggling hysterically. It wouldn't surprise me if "A Mown Lawn" got the same treatment down the road.

A talisman of the Moon would be a good choice, then.

Yes. Like all the planes, the etheric plane can be divided into seven sub-planes or regions. The instincts come from the densest regions, close to the material plane, while the passions are from the less dense regions closer to the astral plane.

No worries. Sometimes the harder things to describe are the most basic, especially things we perform almost exclusively by muscle memory.

Sure. Here's a book by William Walker Atkinson (under one of his pseudonyms) on the subject:

https://archive.org/details/panchadasi_thehumanaura/

Yep. Fifth house it is.

Thank you!

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!

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

Yes, there are. Tawny agate, chalcedony, jade, jet, lapis lazuli, topaz, and turquoise all are credited by tradition with the power of dispelling hostile magic and negative energies. If they start looking dull, wash them thoroughly with cold water to renew their powers.

I'd rather not name it, as it was sent me by a publisher who probably wants a favorable review. They're not going to get one, but I don't want to go to the other extreme.

Prayer is fine. Yes, that's what I meant.

1) Yes, you can just go ahead and do it.

2) Whipping yourself up into a frenzy is one way to do magic, but to my mind it's not a very good way. Clear, calm, focused awareness, at least in my experience, is a better way -- and unlike the favored practices of chaos magic, you don't end up with sticky fingers.

Just relax and do it. It's much simpler than you seem to be making it out to be.

1) All but one of those are too low. If it's not at least 50% alcohol you'll have a very hard time setting the caput mortuum on fire.

2) Shape and dimensions are all I had in mind,.

3) Ffordd as judge always means that things are going to change, but if you have two good figures it's going to change for the better. Pobl as judge means that not much is going to happen -- it often means a collective situation you may not be able to do much about.

1) Yes, that's very much what it suggests to me.

2) No, but then I don't know many people who drink energy drinks.

1) Do it in your mind. That's a useful practice anyway.

2) It's very common. it takes a while for most people to start developing the ability to perceive the inner planes, and until that happens it often seems like it's doing nothing. Keep at it; don't change a thing.

Annwn, literally "not-world," is the level below Abred, the raw material of existence. Ceugant, literally "empty circle," is the level above Gwynfydd, which the Divine alone can traverse.

1) Jung was obsessed with the fourfold pattern and thought that threes were unbalanced. The old schools of sacred geometry and the old builder's guilds, the ancestors of Freemasonry, were divided between ad quadratum ("by the square") traditions, which used four as their basic number, and ad triangulum ("by the triangle") traditions, which used three. So it's an old quarrel.

2) You can certainly do this. You might look into the Pythagorean tradition for examples.

3) Nope. Have fun!

1) That's my take, at least.

2) No, kundalini awakening is a biophysical process involving the nervous system and endocrine glands. Don't confuse the planes!

3) Certainly Jung thought so. He warned, though, that you cannot understand the Self. You can encounter it, but you can never understand it.

Yes, exactly. Once your mental sheath starts playing a significant role in your inner life, the manipulations of the media stop working on you, because it becomes obvious that they're empty and meaningless -- there's no "there" there. As for mental level awareness, it's not very common, because people who achieve any great amount of it no longer need to incarnate in physical bodies and go do more interesting things.

Oh, sure, but keep in mind that most people don't think. They simply react. I wonder what would happen if you worked out a way to use Rook cards for divination...

That strikes me as a very good one. Coopting and rewriting existing thoughts can be very effective.

The goal of Golden Dawn practice is to achieve adeptship. An adept is a human being who, through spiritual and magical practice, has brought his ordinary conscious self into full alignment with his higher self and the guardian angel set to guide him, and has enormous (but still finite) powers of healing and blessing.

Different systems have different goals.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 6 of 8

Magic Monday

no subject

Re: Aetherodynamics of the Written Word

Re: Magical healing

no subject

Re: Sphere of protection

Re: Energetic boundaries

Re: Geomancy

Re: Energetic boundaries

4 elements

Re: A bullet as a healing tool

no subject

Re: Dull book

Re: Invoking the gods

Re: Workin' hard

no subject

no subject

Re: LBRP

Re: Categories of Existence: Abred, Gwynfydd, Annwn?, Ceugant?

Re: Quaternio

Re: From last week

Re: Mental development and MSM awareness

Re: Good kids play Rook

no subject

no subject

Re: 4 elements