With this post we continue a monthly chapter-by-chapter discussion of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Lévi, the book that launched the modern magical revival. Here and in the months ahead we’re plunging into the white-hot fires of creation where modern magic was born. If you’re just joining us now, I recommend reading the earlier posts in this sequence first; you can find them here. Either way, grab your tarot cards and hang on tight.
If you can read French, I strongly encourage you to get a copy of Lévi’s book in the original and follow along with that; it’s readily available for sale in Francophone countries, and can also be downloaded for free from Archive.org. If not, the English translation by me and Mark Mikituk is recommended; A.E. Waite’s translation, unhelpfully retitled Transcendental Magic, is second-rate at best—riddled with errors and burdened with Waite’s seething intellectual jealousy of Lévi—though you can use it after a fashion if it’s what you can get. Also recommended is a tarot deck using the French pattern: the Knapp-Hall deck, the Wirth deck (available in several versions), or any of the Marseilles decks are suitable.
Reading:
“Chapter Sixteen: Enchantments and Spells” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 333–340).
Commentary:
The antics of the Satanists and demonomaniacs discussed in the previous chapter in our text are not the only forms of occult evil with which the student of high magic will now and then have to contend. As we discussed back in the commentary on the Doctrine of High Magic, magical practices are widespread today, and not just in supposedly backwards or primitive social settings. They are at least as common, if not more so, in those supposedly rational, enlightened settings where everyone pretends to be above such things.
To some extent this is a function of the same sort of hypocrisy that surrounded sex in Victorian times—plenty of people do it, but nobody talks about it—but there’s a deeper level of evasion as well. Much of the magic being practiced in today’s industrial world is not marketed as magic. It’s marketed as spirituality, or as psychology, or as just a little game we’re all going to play; it’s decked out in many different modes of camouflage; but it’s magic, and tolerably often it’s evil magic of the kind Eliphas Lévi discusses in this chapter.
Two examples may help clarify what I mean here. Dion Fortune in one of her books describes the case of a woman who was what we would now call a rage junkie. When she was angry at someone—and she was almost always angry at someone—she would imagine the person as vividly as possible, and imagine herself screaming and ranting and pouring out her fury at that person. She had convinced herself that this was a good way of dealing with anger so it didn’t disturb her psychological health, and she went out of her way not to notice that the people she targeted tended to have horrible nightmares promptly thereafter, with a familiar set of symptoms: a feeling of a suffocating presence pressing down on the sleeper, and exhaustion and ill-health following promptly on waking.
What she was doing, of course, was a simple form of magical attack, using will and imagination to hurt the people she blamed for her anger. Fortunately for all concerned, all this came out at a retreat center run by Dr. Theodore Moriarty, Dion Fortune’s most important teacher, and he quickly recognized what was going on and put a stop to it. The same kind of magical attack takes place routinely nowadays, of course, and quite often it is nothing so straightforward as Fortune’s example. It’s far from rare, for example, for salesmen to go through similar practices the night before making an important sales pitch, focusing charisma rather than rage on their targets, and for the weak-minded or unprotected to be suckered as a result.
The same sort of working appears in even nastier forms in some New Age circles. I knew a man some years ago who was a member of a large New Age group, and attended advanced workshops in its teachings. His health was very poor, and he dealt with this by visualizing his health problems leaving him and going to other people who, according to him, needed those problems for the sake of their karma. Quite a few people he knew got very ill, though it’s fair to say that his health didn’t improve much.
He also tried to use similar methods to pressure a younger sister of his into moving in with him, with the idea that she would work full time outside the home, pay him a hefty rent, and still do all the cleaning, cooking, and other chores his health wouldn’t permit him to do! Fortunately for her, she consulted an occultist who was familiar with such things, followed his advice, and promptly moved to another state. It is interesting to note that shortly after she left, the brother had to go into a nursing home, where he lingered for a few years and then died.
Magical attacks along these lines are anything but rare in today’s world. They were just as common in Lévi’s time, and especially so in the French countryside, where medieval traditions of folk magic still survive to this day. A fascinating 1980 book, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage by Jeanne Favret-Saada, chronicles the author’s encounters with living traditions of witchcraft in western France. By “witchcraft” she does not, of course, mean Wicca; she means the real thing—spells and counterspells flung by one farmer or farmer’s wife at another, aimed at causing misery and death to the target, their children, or their cattle. The spells Lévi describes, using animal hearts, toads, wax images, and the like, are still being practiced today, and you can readily find spells meant to cause similar results in the catalogs of the less scrupulous providers of occult supplies online these days.
For every spell there is a counterspell, and the same online catalogs that bristle with D.U.M.E. (“death unto my enemies”) candles and other pieces of occult hardware with equally pleasant intentions are just as well stocked with uncrossing candles and kits for removing jinxes. It’s all good business for occult suppliers, who sell to both sides of these magical conflicts. Now and then such exchanges turn into magical arms races, with both sides frantically buying cursing supplies to strike down the enemy and protective supplies to keep from being struck down, and the occult supply house profits mightily while the shipping clerks chuckle.
In Lévi’s time there were fewer occult supply houses, but the same scenes enacted themselves in a more do-it-yourself mode, with both sides sticking iron nails in a raw cow’s heart, say, or urinating into a bottle full of pins and needles, or painstakingly copying out talismans from Le Petit Albert, in an ever more desperate attempt to defend themselves against the negative forces they felt looming over them. That their own actions were feeding those forces and guaranteeing that both sides would receive the resulting blowback was just one of the ironies surrounding these self-defeating conflicts.
There are better ways to deal with such things. Since Lévi has already advised his readers to take up the Conjuration of the Four and certain other protective rituals as daily practices, and urged them to work steadily on the mastery of their passions and thoughts through sustained work with imagination and will, he has no need to say more about dealing with hostile spells directed at students of high magic, though he does suggest what were, in his day, convenient responses to the evil spells discussed earlier in this chapter.
He also notes a few basic rules of occult hygiene. As he points out, if you are reasonable and just in your daily life, you will attract no justified curses, and unjustified ones are much easier to overcome, since they do not have the momentum of the universe behind them. It is nonetheless always wise to make sure that object links—that is to say, items that come from your body or have been in direct contact with it—are not easily obtained by potential enemies. It is also wise, as our text points out, to study human nature so that you can identify what form of weakness (which is what the word “vice” literally means) is behind any magical attack flung at you, and focus on the corresponding strength (the literal meaning of the word “virtue”). This is a much more effective practice than cynical modern thought would suggest.
What, though, of the apparent curses cast by genuine mages, however—the sort of thing our text discusses at the beginning of this chapter? This needs to be understood with some care. The genuine mage does not set out to poison the astral light, as the sorcerer does. Instead, he or she simply recognizes the logical consequences of causes that are already set in motion, states them aloud, and walks away. The consequences then follow. They are usually made much worse than they have to be by the efforts of the accursed to get out from under the curse without changing the actions and attitudes that are driving it toward fulfillment.
Forgiveness is a crucial ingredient in this process. In the language of a later generation of occultists, to forgive someone who has harmed you, honestly and wholeheartedly, is to break the karmic tie that connects the two of you. You will then each go on to receive whatever results your thoughts, words, and deeds have stored up for you. The ability to let go of past hurts is a skill that students of occultism would be wise to cultivate. This does not mean putting yourself in positions where you can count on being hurt again; it means recognizing that grudges and hatreds are heavy burdens, setting them down, and choosing your path thereafter based on thought and intuition rather than the fossilized emotional reactions of the past.
In the last pages of this chapter Lévi seems to veer onto a wholly different subject, and discusses androids. No, we’re not talking about C3PO or R2D2! The word “android” comes from the ancient Greek word androeides, “image of a man”; the feminine equivalent, for those who are interested, is “gynoid.” (The nongendered equivalent in Greek gives us “anthropoid,” which has a rather different meaning these days.) Androids were discussed at great length in medieval and Renaissance sources, and there’s been quite a bit of fussing in modern times about what those old writers meant when they gave detailed descriptions of what we’d now call robots.
As Lévi points out, traditional accounts of androids fall into three general categories, vegetable, animal, and mineral/mechanical. The root of the mandrake (Mandragora officinalis) was once at the center of a complex body of traditional European and Middle Eastern folklore in which its hallucinogenic properties and its role as the body of a guardian spirit both played roles. Several other plants, notably English bryony (Bryonia alba), saw the same kind of use in folk tradition. There was some interesting research into all this back in the late 20th century—I once had the chance to read a very thorough master’s thesis on the mandrake tradition, for example—but it has been neglected by more recent occultists.
Animal androids—well, there we get into traditions that remain largely secret to this day. The opus animalis in alchemy, the work with animal essences, gets very few mentions—there is a common recipe for oil of egg, which is a useful medicine for burns and certain illnesses, but that’s about it—and the magical and alchemical methods for creating a homunculus, as the animal android is called, are if anything harder to find than the methods of turning lead into gold. Lévi’s comments about animal-human matings are, as far as I know, not based on the traditional lore of magic or alchemy.
The mineral or metallic android is another riddle. Roger Bacon is only one of several medieval sages who were said to have made a head of metal that answered questions. How that was done is an interesting question, and raises all manner of questions about the possibility that the ancients had technologies well in advance of what current theories admit. These odd stories remain as a puzzle for future students.
Lévi’s suggestion, finally, is that all this was protective camouflage for the use of hypnotic trance on a human subject to give a spirit the opportunity to speak. It’s an interesting thesis, and various forms of mediumship are well documented in most cultures and periods of history. Still, it’s not too hard to grasp what Lévi is saying here. He is, as usual, speaking symbolically, and if the theme of this chapter is kept in mind his meaning is immediately clear.
The power of malefic magic lies precisely in its ability to dominate the will and imagination of its victim, in much the same way that a hypnotic subject’s will and imagination are dominated by the hypnotist. It’s possible to curse someone very effectually in this way, by placing some self-destructive pattern in the victim’s thoughts and feelings and then simply allowing that pattern to work itself out to its logical conclusion. The true mage gets the same results more simply, because so many of us carry such self-destructive patterns in our own thoughts and feelings One of the ways to understand magical initiation, in turn, is that it is the process of shedding such patterns so that the initiate can face the world in a less futile manner.
Notes for Study and Practice:
It’s quite possible to get a great deal out of The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by the simple expedient of reading each chapter several times and thinking at length about the ideas and imagery that Lévi presents. For those who want to push things a little further, however, meditation is a classic tool for doing so.
Along with the first half of our text, I introduced the standard method of meditation used in Western occultism: discursive meditation, to give it its proper name, which involves training and directing the thinking mind rather than silencing it (as is the practice in so many other forms of meditation). Readers who are just joining us can find detailed instructions in the earlier posts in this series. For those who have been following along, however, I suggest working with a somewhat more complex method, which Lévi himself mention in passing: the combinatorial method introduced by Catalan mystic Ramon Lull in the Middle Ages, and adapted by Lévi and his successors for use with the tarot.
Take the first card of the deck, Trump 1, Le Bateleur (The Juggler or The Magician). While looking at it, review the three titles assigned to it: Disciplina, Ain Soph, Kether, and look over your earlier meditations on this card to be sure you remember what each of these means. Now you are going to add each title of this card to Trump II, La Papesse (The High Priestess): Chokmah, Domus, Gnosis. Place Trump II next to Trump I and consider them. How does Disciplina, discipline, relate to Chokmah, wisdom? How does Disciplina relate to Domus, house? How does it relate to Gnosis? These three relationships are fodder for one day’s meditation. For a second day, relate Ain Soph to the three titles of La Papesse. For a third day, relate Kether to each of these titles. Note down what you find in your journal.
Next, combine Le Bateleur with Trump III, L’Imperatrice (The Empress), in exactly the same way, setting the cards side by side. Meditate on the relationship of each of the Juggler’s titles to the three titles of the Empress, three meditations in all. Then combine the Juggler and the Emperor in exactly the same way. Then go on to the Juggler and the Pope, giving three days to each, and proceed from there. You’ll still be working through combinations of Le Bateleur when the next Lévi post goes up, but that’s fine; when you finish with Le Bateleur, you’ll be taking La Papesse and combining her with L’Imperatrice, L’Empereur, and so on, and thus moving through all 231 combinations the trumps make with one another.
Don’t worry about where this is going. Unless you’ve already done this kind of practice, the goal won’t make any kind of sense to you. Just do the practice. You’ll find, if you stick with it, that over time the relationships between the cards take on a curious quality I can only call conceptual three-dimensionality: a depth is present that was not there before, a depth of meaning and ideation. It can be very subtle or very loud, or anything in between. Don’t sense it? Don’t worry. Meditate on a combination every day anyway. Do the practice and see where it takes you.
We’ll be going on to Chapter 17, “The Writing of the Stars,” on October 9, 2024. See you then!
I wonder, are there any tarot decks where the Trump I, II, and III cards use Donald Trump representations?
Greetings ADJMG!
FYI eating dozens of raw eggs a day was until
recently the prescription for those with severe burns. The high cholesterol content has anabolic effects and prevents muscle wasting. Today doctors prescribe anabolic steroids to accomplish the same thing.
Wow. This is so timely. I am a contractor and am finishing up a new fence at a fourplex. One of the neighbors and her husband are very nasty. Not the sexy fun kind either.
I had a mountain of F bombs thrown at me by the lovely complete strangers. Added too it a complete, and bazar lack of reason or willingness to find a compromise in the situation.
It evolved to me just completely ignoring them (physically anyways).
My mind of course kept rerunning the script over and over, even though another part of my mind knew to let it go and not to take it personally or seriously. I even said prayers for them.
I am fortunate to live next to a river that I go to with my daughter daily. I have a little ritual I do under water where I shake other people’s energy off me. That and my love for my child and family is a very good mix to cleanse the day away.
Is there anything in occult literature on the ability of bodies of water to cleanse the energy body?
Interesting read, thanks.
I enjoyed what you wrote about the power of forgiveness. I wanted to share a book I have found extremely helpful. It offers a forgiveness process that isn’t just commanding yourself to forgive but allowing yourself to speak and then release your pain and expectations about a person and then cleanse/refresh your energy body after that. It works on multiple levels and I wonder if some folks here might find it helpful.
https://maryhayesgrieco.com/product/unconditional-forgiveness/
„ It is also wise, as our text points out, to study human nature so that you can identify what form of weakness (which is what the word “vice” literally means) is behind any magical attack flung at you, and focus on the corresponding strength (the literal meaning of the word “virtue”).“
Could you give an example or two for how to apply this in practice?
And: Does Dr. Moravec apply this principle in the Book of Haatan? I so, I can‘t quite see how, and would also appreciate a pointer on this.
Thanks,
Milkyway
Related to this post, the butler in WoH 2 was one of my favorite characters! Very well done. This chapter had my mind full of strange thoughts as I went to sleep last night.
The Order of Spiritual Alchemy work came to mind as I read your comment. A lot of shedding there. I hope to get back to it. Even though the preliminary publicly published work was no cup of tea, I found that it did do the job of shedding -which in turn opened things up. And life gives plenty of opportunities to practice the Breath of Acceptance and Breath of Forgiveness.
So much was in this chapter. The idea of studying the forms of weakness behind what magical attacks get flung at you is very instructive. Applying the power of the grindstone (Netzach) in one’s own life by developing the opposite virtue is great advice.
It is true that we get entangled with anyone we would do magic against. These astral turf wars between magicians end up binding them together into a knot that eventually unravels both of them. By the same token, if we do not wish to get entangled with the magic of advertisers, etc., then it is best to try to minimize contact as best it might. I wish other states would follow the lead of Maine and ban billboards. It’s so refreshing to be there and see none (refreshing in other ways as well -the presence of the salt air itself seems to be magically cleansing on the etheric level, as may be true elsewhere along the ocean).
I do feel sorry for all those toads in France and elsewhere. I wonder how long we’ve had these primal associations of toads with magic. It seems to go back quite a ways.
Lot’s more to think about from the text and commentary.
Hi JMG,
Thanks for the post and the series. I have a question about the conversion of 3d conceptuality to rational understanding. Say you’ve taken great strides to understand some symbol. You can sense the 3d conceptuality around it. And say compared to the 3d conceptuality, your discursive understanding lags behind to a significant degree – it circles around the meaning but never nails it down concretely. I’ve been thinking about this, and I suspect there will never be a smoking gun conversion of the abstract meaning behind the symbol into a discursive nugget that you can now brandy about and say “I finally understand this!”. From what I understand, the plane of concrete consciousness is too compressed to contain all the meaning of a symbol. And while writing this, I’m concluding the best we can do is retain the discursive elements of the symbol in memory and allow them to serve as a framework for experiencing the 3d conceptuality/meaning behind the symbol. It strikes me that there is no such thing as rational/discursive enlightenment from a spiritual perspective and any such enlightenment (the historical period of The Enlightenment comes to mind) is a farce. That’s why the mental plane is the plane of wordless understanding.. Does this sound right to you? This rings personally true to me, but I suspect a confirmation would remove the subtle trace of doubt that lingers, but I’m happy to be told I’m wrong.
Anonymous, not that I know of. I considered at one point designing a funny tarot deck with 22 Trumps in it, but I never went ahead with the project.
Dashui, er, I’m missing how this connects to the theme of this post. Help me.
Travis, you’ve rediscovered (or remembered from a previous life) one of the world’s oldest and most widely practiced rituals of purification. The Japanese version, which I’ve done, is called misogi shuho — you immerse yourself in cold water and recite certain mantras, and it strips away tsumi and kegare, the two classes of spiritual contamination Shinto recognizes. Agamemnon and his warriors plunged into the ocean in the first book of Homer’s Iliad to purify themselves before making a sacrifice to Apollo. So, yes, it’s a known thing, and a very good practice.
Jacques, thanks for this.
Milkyway, if somebody is attacking you magically because they’re angry, you can make your defense much stronger by forgiving them and letting go of any grudge you might otherwise carry. Similarly, if someone is trying to manipulate you through desire or fear — these are two sides of the same emotional pattern — the more you can settle into a state of equanimity, the state of desirelessness and fearlessness, the more useless their magic will be. I didn’t stress Dr. Moravec’s defensive methods in The Book of Haatan — we’ll get into that later on when he’s teaching more advanced work to Ariel — but his unbroken calm is one of his most potent magical weapons. Hostile magic simply doesn’t affect him.
Justin, I wondered if anyone would catch that! I had no idea what Michaelmas was until quite late in the writing process. Your other points are quite solid; I didn’t know that Maine bans billboards, but I’m glad to hear it.
Luke, perhaps you can explain to me what you mean by “3d conceptuality.” That’s not a term that I know and I’m by no means sure what you’re trying to say.
Hi JMG,
Sorry I meant “conceptual three-dimensionality” from the bottom blurb of these posts..I understand it as the phenomenon of experiencing abstract meaning. Sorry again, I bunged those word embarrassingly.
“Forgiveness is a crucial ingredient in this process. In the language of a later generation of occultists, to forgive someone who has harmed you, honestly and wholeheartedly, is to break the karmic tie that connects the two of you. You will then each go on to receive whatever results your thoughts, words, and deeds have stored up for you.”
Thank you. I am going to have to say farewell to an old, negative acquaintance and this helps me prepare for it.
From what I can tell, would-be witches and ill-wishers have to find sympathy in their victims in order to do their dirty work. They are like radio dials that have to tune into a certain frequency. If they can’t find the frequency, they don’t get anywhere. They find the most direct kind of sympathy by obtaining bits of your body via your hair clippings, fingernail clippings (ewww), or skin cells, a.k.a. sympathetic magic and/or they target astral sympathy through the world of images. If a hateful hater tries to attack a person who doesn’t have any genuine hate in them, the intention is going to bounce.
Unrelated question: I believe there’s a book about the middle ages that talks about how Jesus’s Christ’s followers were able to cure the victims of possession by simply walking into a room. I know this book had a female author — it could have been Valerie or another V name but I am not sure. Does this sound familiar? I owned this book for some time, did not have a chance to read it, lended it to someone, and never got it back. TIA
Hm. There is a ternary somewhere in there, isn’t it? The attacker, the attacked, and what the attack is about? (Or the attacker, his goal, and how he wants to achieve it?)
Maybe like this:
1. the attacker (e.g. acting in anger –> counter with forgiveness)
2. the attacked (e.g. being manipulated through desire or fear –> counter with equanimity)
3. the goal (e.g. to get something from the attacked –> counter by focusing on giving something else instead of focusing on not giving what is wanted?)
The last part doesn’t feel quite right yet.
Countering through the “attacker” angle requires a good understanding of the attacker (difficult in a random attack). Countering through the “attacked” angle requires self-knowledge and a clear grasp of the situation. And countering through the goal requires a solid understanding of the attack and of what is going on.
And they could also be combined, couldn’t they:
An attack in anger to get something? –> give something else in a state of forgiveness and mercy.
An attack in anger through fear/desire? –> Forgive and then focus on something else.
An attack through fear/desire to get something from the attacked? –> give something else in equanimity (what?).
Again, this feels close, but not quite right yet. What am I missing?
@Travis, not to mention the washing away of one’s sins, and baptism, etc, in Christianity. Water is powerful medicine both within and without…
“Forgiveness is a crucial ingredient in this process.”
This also made me think about the Octogon Society and the grades of the Order of Spiritual Alchemy. In case anyone is hesitating, I diligently followed the instructions for the first grade and obtained lasting results. Definitely worth consecrating a few hours per week over a few months. Thank you! https://octagonsociety.org/octagon-society/
Evidently the medieval Liber Vaccae has a number of these processes for workings that result in human/animal hybrids, however the work seems rather gruesome and grimy. Which, per your point about malefic magic (and its blowback to the unwary), perhaps was the point…
Axé
Lots to marinate on here. Protection magic gets a lot of ink, but I think you made a pretty good case that magical self-defense begins with making sure you aren’t unconsciously slinging around curses and harboring grudges. I know that when I was younger and angrier I must have done my fair share of inadvertent cursing without even knowing what magic was whenever people hurt me, and though it’s hard to remember details I’m sure a lot of my youthful misery was in the form of blowback from being unable to forgive certain offenses.
So if we believe we are under magical attack, before even breaking out the LBRP or red bag amulet, we should probably take an inventory and make sure we aren’t thinking ill or being resentful, and thus enjoying our own blowback.
I’m working through the Cos Doc again, and of course this also reminds me of Fortune’s advice to meet the threat head on with enough force to stall it, but then to walk away and do something productive (forgive and move on) while your adversary spins their tires deeper into the same mud.
Luke, thank you for this! With that piece of the puzzle in place, I can respond to your original comment. Yes, exactly; this is what Lao Tsu was talking about when he said “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao” (or, in modern English, “A process as it is described is not the process as it exists”). You’re also quite correct about the great mistake of the so-called “Enlightenment,” and all the attempts before and after it to make intellectual acceptance of a conceptual formula fill the place of personal gnosis of meaning.
Kimberly, yes, exactly. The author you’re trying to remember is Valerie Flint, and the book is The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. I should see what else she’s been up to; that book was first-rate.
Milkyway — you knew I was going to say this, right? — this all strikes me as a great theme for meditation. I don’t intend to get into further details, as I don’t talk about my own protective methods.
Marco, that’s one of the reasons the spiritual alchemy practices are so useful — by clearing away a lot of unprocessed emotion, they make you much less vulnerable to magical manipulation. I’m delighted to hear that you’ve had good results with it.
Fra’ Lupo, I wasn’t aware of that. Ick.
Kyle, excellent! Two very good strategic principles.
Ever-wise and amazingly-prolific Archdruid, I found myself wondering about something you cautioned against: to ensure “…items that come from your body or have been in direct contact with it…” are not allowed into the grasp of potential enemies. How would you classify an autograph? These are items sought by admirers of a particular person or their accomplishments; if given freely do autographs have any potential for being used in magical attacks? “Asking for a friend” 😉.
Great. Thanks for that. Much to meditate on. I will look more into the info you shared.
@Larkrise: also not to mention that existence itself is some sort of play between, darkness and light in the debts of waters..
Hi John Michael,
I grew up in a single parent household where my mother was a very angry person, and learned over those years how to take evasive action to that emotional barrage, as you’ve pointed out – and quite correctly – is also the case with martial arts. Why confront that energy? It is easier to let it slip past to the side and wash away in the emptiness, or be reflected back at them. Nowadays I walk away from such folks.
All this reminds me of nothing more than the fight against this, or the fight against that. Sure, if people want to waste their energies. I’m sure you’ve heard such talk as well? And interestingly things are getting far more brittle of late as I’ve lost two friends this year, purely over differences of opinions and beliefs. Hmm. As an interesting side story, in one of those incidents the person was more or less demanding why wasn’t I as upset about the abstract subject they were discussing with passion, and how come I’m not fighting (it keeps coming back to that, huh? 🙂 ) for blah, blah, blah. I choose where to direct my will, others can do what they want in that regard. Mastery in this case is the crucial element don’t you reckon?
Anyway, you see it playing out in really practical issues like, the for example: the fight against weeds. Say what? That’s what I think about the subject anyway, as I prefer to concentrate my energies on growing the plants I’ve chosen, but work within the observed results, then try again. It’s not hard… Well, maybe it is hard? Dunno.
Bizarrely, about four years ago I came under a magical attack from an individual, and it annoyed me. A good lesson to ensure the will is focused appropriately and defences are kept sharp. I’ve often wondered whether people were bored and angry back then, but oh well, moving on. Dunno. It was weird.
Cheers
Chris
Huh…I looked up misogi shuho on youtube. Very interesting. Along with the underwater shaking, using my hands I do a very similar thing where I throw water up in the same circular fashion over my head and off to my sides. I don’t know what im doing or why I started doing it, but i have the feeling or notion that it is cleansing my energy body…whatever that means. Perhaps you are right. Some knowing that is forgotten. or perhaps some spontaneous accessing of what is.
Hi JMG,
I didn’t watch the debate but read some recaps. Sounds like the magic that Que-mala laid on Trump offered him opportunities to run his unhelpful habits just like one of the examples from this chapter. He just could not help himself. Let this be a lesson to all!
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
May Tyler and Monika’s newborn baby Isabelle, whose bowels were not moving properly at birth, be blessed with a well functioning digestive tract and be free of colic going forward.
May Falling Tree Woman’s son’s girlfriend’s mother Bridget in Devon UK, who has recently started to sit up and converse after more than six weeks of bedridden tracheotomy following a life-threatening fall from a horse, be blessed and healed and returned to full health.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Heather’s brother in law, Patrick, who is dying of cancer and has dementia, go gentle into that good light. And may his wife Maggie, who is ill herself, find the strength and peace she needs for her situation. (Update on Patrick’s condition here)
May Neptune’s Dolphins’ husband David, who lost one toe to a staph infection last year and now faces further toe amputations due to diabetic ulcers in his left foot, be blessed and healed, and may the infection leave his body for good.
May Rebecca, who has just been laid off from her job and is the sole provider for her family, quickly discover a viable means to continue to support her family; may she and her family be blessed and sustained in their journey forward.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
“It’s possible to curse someone very effectually in this way, by placing some self-destructive pattern in the victim’s thoughts and feelings and then simply allowing that pattern to work itself out to its logical conclusion.”
The image of The Tower; is this just one such self-destructive pattern placed in the victim’s thoughts and feelings? Quite a synchronicity, at any rate.
Not to get off subject, but Thoth, or possibly…Hermes Trismegistus’s, story of witnessing creation seems to have much in common with the Christians (mystery witness?) creation story. Was this a divine diss on the Hermster by the Bible directing Rabbis?
Thank you JMG. I just ordered the book. Here is a list of the books Valerie Flint authored before her death in 2009:
Honorius Augustodunensis – Imago Mundi (1982)
Ideas in the Medieval West: texts and their contexts (1988)
The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (1991)
The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (1992)
Honorius Augustodunensis (Authors of the Middle Ages, 6) (1995)
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece and Rome (1999)
Hey JMG
That mention of witchcraft in the French countryside reminds me a bit of the British witch T.C. Lethbridge befriended, who died due to blowback from one of her own curses.
Also, I have published that Sci-fi article I mentioned previously. It is the longest thing I have written on substack to date.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jlmc12/p/breaking-sci-fis-useless-monomania?r=e0m1f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Bryan, oh, it’s an object link all right. Occultists who know what they’re doing banish over their autographs and signatures generally, to break the connection and keep them from being used for nasty magic.
Chris, excellent. Yes, exactly; “what you resist, persists,” as psychologists like to say. It’s better to turn at the right moment so that it goes tumbling past you, all the way out past the Ring-Pass-Not and into the Void.
Travis, I thought that might be it!
Matt, interesting.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Phutatorius, the Tower is twofold. On the one hand, yes, it can represent self-destructive patterns; on the other, it can represent the shattering of rigid structures of consciousness so that freedom from self-destructive patterns comes within reach.
Travis, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Book of Genesis both come out of the same bubbling cauldron of eastern Mediterranean spirituality and ladled out similar patterns from the soup.
Kimberly, thank you for this!
J.L.Mc12, do you remember which of Lethbridge’s books that’s in? I’d like to cite it. Thank you for the link.
Hey JMG
I first read that anecdote in a compilation of supernatural articles called “Out of this world”, and the article that talked about the witch was by Colin Wilson. Colin Wilson also mentions that the witch was a Neighbour of Lethbridge.
First context; back in the Old Country where my family comes from, a place that modern ‘educated’ urbanites would call ‘backwards’, the topic of today’s post wasn’t/isn’t something for the university perfessers and his students, nor something seen as empty ritual like modern-day Catholic Mass with its dwindling band of celebrants, it was and maybe still is front and center in daily life especially for the women-folk, but not just them.
When I went there to visit what I first felt was the weight of time. The place just looks and feels OLD. You go up some of those narrow roads in the country-side where ruins poke out of the ground and you feel like there’s always eyes on you. There’s probably the bones and encampments of Erectus and Antecessor and Neanderthal and Sapiens the hunter and then Sapiens the early farmer. A lot happened there.
When my parents and grandparents got to this side of the pond, they did have some help from family that had been here for decades, and also from close neighbors, most notably Mr and Mrs F.
Mr F was employed in a local mill, Mrs F allegedly ran a house of ill repute where the guys could buy Mr F’s bootleg drink by the glass or by the bottle.
For all their outward friendliness they were really not nice people. You may have guessed that already. At first I didn’t know to be scared of them, I used to go and visit with my grandmother with nary a worry. But my mother started doing counter-spells to ward off the Evil Eye placed on me by Mrs F.
It seems I ran afoul of Mrs F’s grandson who from an early age was proving to be a useless nitwit. He was not my enemy nor rival, he was just a gentle, ineffectual knucklehead and it drove Mrs F nuts. And Mrs F was angry that I was showing him up academically and by a wide margin.
And so my mother would get a bowl of water and put a drop of oil into it. And she would get several kernels of corn and pick up each one and say a prayer in Latin while holding it. And then she would drop the kernel into the water. When she had done all the kernels she would then wash my face and hands and arms with the water. This ritual was periodically re-enacted for years. That was many, many years ago.
Also many years ago, my cousin took me to an ancient Catholic church that was built over a house used by the earliest Christians as a place of worship and as a hideout from the Romans who didn’t like them much. The priest took us through a door underneath the altar and down a dark and narrow set of stairs to a small room that was 2000 years old if a day. And I’m telling you, the hair was standing up on my forearms. That place was as haunted as can be, the air just electric with unseen people watching us down there. I hardly heard a word the priest said. There were other things too that the modern and the hip and the scientific would scoff at. Let them.
The Our Father prayer said with reverence, focus, and attention is quite cleansing and protective when linked to a felt connection to the Father, throw in signing yourself with the cross thereby placing yourself under the blessing and protection of the blood of Jesus, saying in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, raising your hands in the name of Jesus, anointing your forehead with blessed oil, perhaps burning some frankincense based incense, and lighting a blessed candle. Yes, forgiveness, equanimity and not holding on to bitterness, blessing instead of cursing is foundational.
Our Father which art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us
And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, and the glory, forever and ever
Amen
If you want, please join us in saying the Pledge of Allegience beginning today the 11th of September, so that the astral pyramid of America’s national symbols may be strengthened.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God(s), indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
So, I am in the midst of a situation where I may be subject to the sort of unconscious magical attack you describe with the rage junkie. My former lover, the mother of my children who she is losing custody of, is constantly spewing vitriol, hate, and ill will towards me. She isnt intentionally casting anything at me, being a fundamentalist adherent of the chirch of atheism. Nonetheless, her own direct communications and reports by mutual acquainatances reveal an unremitting hostility, an absolutely obsessive focus on seeing me suffer, imprisoned, and destroyed.
Funny enough, my lawyer has offered me much the same advice you do here – dont respond to her emails and tirades, dont fire back despite her numerous court filings, which have become so excessive the court employees now believe her to be unwell. Sit back, be unperturbed, practice patience and avoid responding.
This has been an excellent chance to learn almost zenlike patience. Forgiving her is hard – she has not only lashed out at me, but her own daughter, who I’m now taking care of. After years of fearing and hating her, I am desperately trying to disentangle myself from her energy and avoid fighting her fire with fire, returning her hate with hate.
So I have a couple questions for you. I am currently trying to do regular sphere of protection rituals. Is that sufficient, or do I need a stronger cleansing ritual? What about protective talismans for myself, her daughter, our children? Any recommendations?
Is a it appropriate to try a banishing ritual on her? I dont wish her ill, I just want her out of my life and the house we co own where I pay all the bills and cant return to, like its haunted by some dark spirit. I’ve heard of the folk magic practice of hot footing someone – but would that be exactly the sort of thing you recommend avoiding, as it would lead to further entanglement? Is the key to try and banish her entirely from my thoughts?
Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for all the incredible insight you provide the world on this wonderful corner of wisdom in the midst of this age of mass confusion.
It’s just occurred to me that the 2 minutes of hate in Nineteen Eighty Four is a mass malefic ritual. Eric Blair, writing as George Orwell, would know, as he apparently was once involved in a nasty magic ritual involving a figurine of an enemy, whereby they were going to stab the thing in the heart, but backed off and got the leg instead. The enemy apparently still broke their leg. Thereafter he was terrified of the unseen, but obviously, was pretty aware of it.
The hidden traditions of alchemy are both scary and fascinating. Maybe those two emotional states are flip sides of the same thing.
What bothers me is that vague sense that sort of work is malefic, as in the medieval approach wasn’t too bothered about the ethics of browbeating spirits into the objects they made. I wonder then if your Michaelmas was legitimate, that spirit chose to be incarnated in that artificial body.
There may be an overlap with the temple technology here, in creating the right etheric conditions for such work.
Although I certainly don’t intend to try.
“His health was very poor, and he dealt with this by visualizing his health problems leaving him and going to other people who, according to him, needed those problems for the sake of their karma. Quite a few people he knew got very ill, though it’s fair to say that his health didn’t improve much.”
Oh my…, what a stupid and wicked idea! (Yes, a person can be bad and stupid at the same time)
While I was thinking about some of my own conflicts of will, with what Levi wrote about the need to “hurry to recognize and expiate your faults”, I realized that the process of enchantment that happens between people, as described in this chapter, might also happen between the inner personalities of a single self.
(By personality I mean a deeply set frame of ideas and beliefs that one uses to make sense of perceptions, to justify actions, and which provide a kind of cloak of some role.)
Based on events out in the world, I might have a number of personalities that come to the forefront to shape my actions at any given time, and I wondered whether it was possible that the person who cursed or enchanted me some time in the past may actually have been myself. It would seem that realizing and untangling these things might be good practice for dealing with enchantments made by others.
Dear Mr Greer
How does one handle anger without it having a negative impact on the person you are angry with. I could repress it, but don’t think that is a good idea. I am not as extreme as the rage woman, but have had a lot of trauma in my life and experience a fair amount of anger as a result. I am more likely to make up victimhood stories in my imagination involving the person I an angry at and then then imagining some kind of revenge. I suppose victim hood is a good way of avoiding taking responsibility for your emotions. The underlying causes of my anger are fear and possibly grief.
I am working on myself. However, even the best of us experience anger. So how does one stop it magically affecting the other person and building up negative karma for oneself.
Yours sincerely
Jasmine
Ah yes. Zoroastrianism I assume.
These stories with their dark waters and bursting forth of light, sure sound similar to being inside a dark watery womb, then being kicked out…
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this. I should be able to chase it down.
Smith, thank you for this! I’m glad your mother had the good sense to keep doing protective magic. I didn’t have anything like that kind of background growing up, and have long wished that I did.
BeardTree, that’s a classic piece of Christian magic. One of the esoteric orders in which I’ve had training taught that as a method, and had a lot of symbolism around the seven requests in that prayer.
Paedrig, you have the chance, through patience and as much forgiveness as you can manage, to break the karmic tie that connects you with your ex. Yes, a daily sphere of protection will help a great deal; when you banish in each of the four directions, you might banish all resentment from yourself. Protective amulets might be useful — the one described in the Magic Monday FAQ here is a good choice. As for hotfooting and the like, I don’t recommend that at all. Let her do it to herself, as she will; keep yourself protected and distant, and don’t respond to her nastiness, and once any last karma has worked itself out, she will go spinning out of your life and will not return.
Peter, yes, and it’s also a very accurate portrayal of the way that media is used to whip up hatred in our time. I certainly won’t argue if you connect the two. As for Michaelmas and the tradition he symbolized, the better grade of mage invited spirits instead of browbeating them, and got a much better grade of spirit as a result.
Chuaquin, wickedness is always stupid. It’s sometimes clever but it’s never actually smart.
Jbucks, interesting! Yes, that sounds like an angle worth exploring.
Jasmine, in the traditions in which I was trained, anger is seen as a secondary emotion; the fear and grief you’ve noted are the real feelings that have to be dealt with, and until they’re dealt with, you’ll default to anger. The Octagon Society methods, which I’ve mentioned before and which are available for free download, include methods for processing old fear, grief, and other emotions that drive such things. I really recommend this approach, in case that’s not obvious!
Travis, Zoroastrianism was another form of it. It wasn’t a single tradition — that’s why I likened it to a cauldron in which lots of things were simmering away.
The Order of Spiritual Alchemy has been mentioned repeatedly as an excellent method to clear away old, unprocessed emotions and thought patterns. I’d like to bring another order to people’s attention in this regard, namely the Modern Order of Essenes, which is also a great complement to the OSA.
The MOE is a system of spiritual healing which can be applied to oneself or to others – but first and foremost, it does have a significant impact on the person who practices it. In the context of processing and clearing old emotions etc, some very helpful practices are included in the MOE material of the first grade, the Apprentice grade. Especially the Blessing Walk has a lot of effect if practiced somewhat regularly, and it can very well be done as standalone practice, i.e. without going deeper into the MOE.
For people who want to dive a bit deeper, going up to the Apprentice level attunement would be good, and then making a daily habit of the relevant practices. Or, if you’d like to dive deeper still, the Bridge of Love (included in the lessons for the Master grade, i.e. third grade), is very powerful, whether applied to others or to oneself, but of course it requires the commitment of working up to the Master grade. (It’s not recommended to start it out of context, without the preparatory work.)
All the MOE material can be found here:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/modern+order+of+essenes
and the Blessing Walk specifically is here:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/208136.html
For some reason, the MOE always draws the short straw and is hardly ever mentioned – which is a shame. 🙂
Milkyway
“…anger is seen as a secondary emotion; the fear and grief you’ve noted are the real feelings that have to be dealt with, and until they’re dealt with, you’ll default to anger. ”
So when we look at collective rage, it is good to know that behind it is collective fear and grief. It is “easier” (except in any way that really matter) to stay angry than to deal with those troublesome feelings and the process of going through the stages of grief.
Hi JMG,
I hope you are well.
I am just finishing reading the third of four “The Ring of Nibelung” being named “Siegfried.”
Graphic novel/comics
DC Comics
1989
Adapted by Roy Thomas
Art by Gil Kane
Color Art by Jim Woodring
Lettered by John Costanza
Books 1-4
ASIN B001NDAXLE
I find no ISBN.
I recommend this set of graphic novel. It works for me. I got a Used set of 4 fairly cheaply.
Thus far, reading three of the four books/chapters, there is a heckuva lot of anger in the story/stories. I am having a hard time because characters have no redeeming traits. They are all murderers. No problem that the characters go off on someone and kill them, for some flimsy reason. There is a lot of disrespect between characters, like Siegfried towards Mime, a dwarf, even though Mime was Siegfried’s surrogate father; Mime is only half-bad.
Is the lesson “Never get angry”? Translate that to, for example, if one finds oneself forced into slavery, don’t ever get angry towards your enslavers? Righteous Anger is not allowed?
What I have read/seen so far in Nibelung, there is nothing I like about the storylines. What is the moral of the story? Why did Richard Wagner make such a big deal of “the story of kill, kill, kill” — sometimes killing when it makes no sense at all?
💨Northwind Grandma💨📔🫤
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
“So when we look at collective rage, it is good to know that behind it is collective fear and grief. It is “easier” (except in any way that really matter) to stay angry than to deal with those troublesome feelings and the process of going through the stages of grief.”
I think this is very important in today’s society when people all across the west are dealing with the loss of their way of life due to economic decline, loss of social status, and mass immigration from the third world.
Milkyway, thanks for this.
Justin, fear, grief, and shame are the three emotions that usually lie beneath anger. You’re absolutely right that this is a crucial issue in collective rage. That can never accomplish anything, because it never deals with the fear, grief, and shame that define what’s really going on.
Northwind, that’s not in the operas. Graphic novels sometimes take liberties with the plot.
Yiğit (offlist), I’ve already told you that you don’t get to post off topic questions. If you keep it up you’ll be banned.
@JMG (#39):
T C Lethbridge’s neighbor Witch was the woman he calls “Mrs. N.” in his Ghoul and Ghost and his Ghost and Divining Rod. In the latter book he says that she “was an adept of the art of magic and had studies it intensively for seven years before she came to live at Hole Mill.” In Terry Welbourne’s T. C. Lethbridge: The Man Who Sat the Future (20110), chapter 12, she is identified as Nancy Norris, a long-term student of Dion Fortune’s, and the circumstances of her death, shortly after cursing a local farmer’s cattle, are told. Norris was also an artist, writer and poet. Interesting …
Dear JMG and commentariat,
I would like to share a tiny, but important part of my life-story. I was being targeted by my own father, who was using only his will, alcohol and my own openness and openness of my friends – or perhaps our naivety. Also, he used a technique on a par with hypnosis as follows: he invented a lie concerning me, not him /that is how I know for sure it is a lie/ and spread it forcefully all around me (family members, friends and even strangers) and at the same time tried to convince me that this lie was true; he told me, clearly, loudly and repeatedly: “You wanted to commit a suicide.” I only responded, in my naivety trying to calm him down, “No, I did not.” Sometimes supporting my claim with arguments, which he did not want to hear, nor did he accept them. My “black thoughts” started appearing when he launched this attack (I am not going to speculate much why he did it; some sort of his own inner insecurity, perhaps?). Fortunately, I responded simply by learning to meditate, and later started the occult studies with the sole – and clear intention – of healing myself. I had no idea what my father was doing until quite recently; and even so my best response was – and is – to cut myself off his influence. Even though I understand what he was doing at an intellectual level, I am still having very hard time accepting this behaviour as real. You know, hypothetically and from stories and books I know there probably are people who behave in evil, destructive ways, but I do not understand why on Earth they would do it and admittedly perhaps do not want to understand at this point…
I like to see the evil as a force and background (twisted) patterns which enable movement and dynamics and complexities finally resolving into harmonies – a sort of initial dissonance before it tunes itself into a complex harmony. This is the biblical “the mourning shall be comforted” for me. Even if it is not easy to deal with such pain, the experience may strengthen and – hopefully – make me less naïve and wiser.
Anyway, I would like to ask about one strange thing; I carry within me “an image” of my father’s personality (as I do of myself and several other people and animals), probably astral in nature, unique to him, and very good – had my father behaved up to that image, my life would have been easier. How do I best understand the difference between the reality and the image? (In a sense, the image seems more real than my real father…)
Thank you.
With deep regards,
Markéta
I wonder about pledges whether of allegiance to any thing or entity or spirit
Are they considered in the same category as binding oaths and vows? If so are they ‘safe”
I recall that the Friends, whom I greatly admire, would not commit any vow,s believing that they imprint on the astral fabric. But I don’t know where I heard that. It is possible to uplift the consciousness or devic powers that form the Soul of a nation, a city, or a polity I guess.
@Justin Patrick Moore and Anonymous, re: anger being “easier”
One of the things I’ve read is that anger inspires action, fight or flight. Fear tends to be paralyzing. Sadness/grief tends to be sedentary (not the best word, but close). When something is “wrong”, someone wants to “do something” and anger motivates that, while fear and sadness tend not to. So one way to address/resolve the fear is to do something.
@Anonymous #43
I’m seriously worried about the United States. There is so much hatred (class hatred, ethnic hatred, religious hatred, etc) that has been suppressed in the past few decades because of American prosperity and social views. But the United States is losing its prosperity, and all that hatred is just bubbling under the surface waiting for the right match to explode. And because this hatred has been suppressed for so long, when it comes back it will end up being a hatred revolution like the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and lead to terrible things like ethnic cleansing or religious persecution.
@Marketa,
On the last Open Post, @earthworm recommended https://www.hazrat-inayat-khan.org/php/views.php?h1=8, specifically the 3rd part of vol 1, on the Soul (though I read the preceding sections and don’t remember exactly where I read this part).
The part that might help you understand the difference between the reality and the image is how it describes how the Soul forms a Body in each plane… basically, it acts like a magnet, pulling some “stuff” toward it and repelling some “stuff” away from it. (“Stuff” being the substance of that Plane, so in the Astral Plane, the Astral Light, in the Etheric Plane, the Etheric Light, etc.) The Divine Light has to go through your Bodies to get to your Soul, and it gets reflected off your Bodies to be seen by other Souls.
Perhaps your “good” image you have of your father is you pulling all the positive thoughts you’ve had of your father and incorporating that into your Astral Body and all the positive emotions you’ve had of your father and incorporating that into your Etheric Body. The Divine Light, Astral Light, Etheric Light… anything that gets to your Soul is traveling through your Bodies, being refracted or distorted or whatever other light metaphor works for you.
As for what is real… are you the reflection of your Soul on your Bodies? Or are you your Soul? And then consider what types of things your father’s Soul has pulled toward him to construct his Bodies. Is he those things, or is he the Soul trapped inside the Bodies he has built?
Not specific to your situation, but just in general… Thinking about things this way has helped me understand how to forgive some people who I’ve struggled to forgive. Somewhere, buried deep under a morass of ugly thoughts and emotions is a Soul who cannot see even a glimmer of Beauty. I don’t want to be around those people, but I recognize it must truly suck to be them. And that it the beginning of forgiveness.
Robert, thank you for this! That’ll make it much easier to track down. Norris may be worth following up on — though if she slid far enough to start casting curses, anything she wrote will want to be weighed with care.
Markéta, that’s fascinating. I’m not at all sure what to make of the image you describe — you may be capable of seeing the best potential in someone, which is a gift, though as you note it has the downside of feeling the gap between that and what any of us actually achieve.
Aidawedo, it’s not something to do lightly. Every magical act imprints itself on the astral plane; in a real sense, once you do something with magic you can’t take it back — which is one of the reasons I urge people to do divination and think hard before doing any magical working! But a pledge of allegiance, serious as it is, is a choice that can be worth making.
Everyone,
There have been some comments about the Octagon Society/Order of Spiritual Alchemy. For my AODA Adept project, I am developing an oracle based on spiritual/microcosmic alchemy. (The oracle doesn’t tell you what is going to happen and it doesn’t tell you what to do. Rather, it tells where you are in terms of processing your thoughts and your emotions and suggests what virtue to practice.) I have been beta testing it on volunteers from the Open Post and MM. If anyone here would like a reading, you can contact me through Dreamwidth or the webpage https://druidalchemist.com/oracle or email hello @ druidalchemist.com.
(And someone on Open Post emailed me to ask if the readings cost anything. No! They are free, but I would appreciate feedback so I can improve.) Thank you for considering!
I’m reminded of Eisenstein’s Sith Allegory.
RE: American hatred
When Americans discover that the USCCB and Catholic Charities are some of the organizations behind the Haitian mass immigration into various small cities all across the Midwest like Springfield, Ohio, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an increase in anti-Catholic sentiment throughout the United States, as well as many Catholics leaving their faith over this scandal.
Similarly, when they discover that Jewish organizations like the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society are helping bring Haitians into the United States and that Alejandro Mayorkas, the current Secretary of Homeland Security, opened the borders and have connections to the HIAS, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an increase in anti-Semitism in the United States.
@JMG (#52):
You’re very welcome! Please do let us know what further information you can find about Norris, and also whether Welbourne got right what little he did say. A quick preliminary search didn’t turn anything else up about her, but I didn’t spend much time looking.
BTW, I mistyped the title of Welbourne’s book. It should have read T. C. Lethbridge: The Man Who Saw the Future — not Sat!
Markéta #47
WOMBS R US
You are not alone being a kid who had a parent acting in horrid ways towards a kid. It happened to me. My “biological mother” (call her ‘Hazmat’) laid a years-long groundwork of slander ruining all possibility of my finding, or making, a friend on her father’s side of the family, a gigantic family living merely ten miles away, while I was a teenager. She was an alcoholic. Hazmat’s misbehaviors seriously started when my father died when I was 15 — my dad had functioned somewhat as my protector. But even earlier, I, age 11 (the year JFK died): the situation was tense due my dad largely absent being away at sea as a merchant marine. Among other things, she called me stupid, no good, and a thief, among other things that wore me down. Hazmat hounded me with criticism.
After age 15, I barely hung on emotionally — I felt a silver thread, not even as thick as a cord. I could not manage more than a D-average in high school, being how much I dodged Hazmat to survive. Back then, domestic abuse of kids was fairly common. Only in the 1970s, did abuse of kids become a thing, but even then, nothing changed.
I barely graduated high school. Hazmat forced me to go to college (a disaster). At the end of the first year of college, I took a stand and dropped out. At age 19, I moved from upstate New York to Los Angeles, and started a regular meditation practice, similar to you; I had to meditate or die. At age 20, I hunkered down seriously at a west coast community college, attaining B’s and some A’s. At age 21, Hazmat manipulatively stole the second half of the college-fund inheritance I was to receive from my dad — monies which would have seen me graduated from college. Between 22-29, I scrounged through colleges as best I could, in dire straits, finally graduating in 1984 with help of my husband.
Around age 30, 1982, I divorced Hazmat. I knew it was the end: there was no possibility whatsoever that she would love me — I gave up trying to win her affection. Admitting THAT it was over was a big blow. Looking back, the best I could do wasn’t very good. I tried to heal my marrow alone. I never drank alcohol but was sorely in need of counseling, which I didn’t get until 1992, when I had what in the old days was called “a nervous breakdown.”
By 1982, I had married. Except for one phone call I made regarding genealogy, I never spoke to Hazmat again (nor had any other sort of exchange). She died in 2006, and had she been buried, I would have danced on her grave (she was cremated).
After 1982, she never contacted me either, which I found interesting. Neither of us wanted the other to be in their life. As far as I am aware, she burned or shredded the collection of family photos she had in her possession, including a photo album dated 1910, probably to ‘punish’ me. I think she bitterly resented that I had had a mind of my own, where I defied her to the end. My older brother, however, was not so lucky: she broke his spirit by his late teens. He had a poet’s delicate soul who, for some reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t fight back. I am pretty sure he was autistic, but in the 1950s and 1960s, no-one knew what that was. He never let me help him, although I was also in the dark as a teenager.
I spent a quarter of a century having washed as much of an influence I could of her, off me. It feels like I reincarnated into her womb out of desperation because it was either her or nobody. I guess in 1952, there weren’t enough wombs to go around. I don’t know why I couldn’t wait a year or two, to find a better female, someone with a lick of compassion.
Hazmat was a “devouring mother.” She ate her offspring. Her lineage died out with her. In bucking me, she killed off any possibility of her lineage continuing. I think that is partly why genealogy has interested me so much: because her actions over a lifetime pre-empted the existence of her having descendants. The buck stopped here. Why would anyone having experienced such a childhood as mine EVER want to have kids? She never asked herself that, or if she had, she didn’t care. Alcohol always came first — what is it about alcohol?
I never got into occult studies, partly because I suspected the occult was complicated, and I would screw up. I had already been through a lot, and the occult felt like too much of a risk. Maybe I lacked confidence. I felt I needed to leave those worlds remain unknown. I would only make matters worse by doing it wrong. Meditation gave me mostly what I needed: balance; some confidence; and affording me a sense that I would be alright. And here I am 70-something.
Interesting that during the heydays of American affluence (1950s to early 1970s), I saw none of it. I was mired in a family which was keen on my demise. I survived by a hair’s breadth.
I couldn’t make this stuff up.
One thing is my husband and I have made our little two acres all native plants. We “goned the lawn.” This summer is the first year we haven’t been plagued with flies and tens of millions of box-elder bugs. Native plants have supported hundreds of species of native insects. Birds love that. Coming through are songbirds, wild turkey, raccoon, skunk, opossum, groundhog, squirrel, chipmunk, ground squirrel, mole, vole, bats, fox, coyote, raptors, and deer. Wild animals I spy are what keep me going. I like the robin, chickadee, blue jay, finch, junco; this season, a BIG ‘murder of crows.’ I feel fortunate. Skunks are hilariously comical when they walk “arseholes forward.”
So here I sit in Wisconsin, an unpolluted place, to contemplate what young’uns (young ones) will experience over their lifetimes during de-industrial decline. I will do what I can to help young’uns. It is not my life anymore — it is theirs. I try to live lightly on the land, but not very successfully.
Every now and then, I perceive evil within myself. JMG, you said multiple times, we are all a mix of good and bad. I see the possibility that I could change into a Hitler — it really is not all that hard to switch sides. Watch for it.
So there you have it. Me and Hazmat. My ability to judge wombs sucks. Have I learned the lesson of choosing a restorative womb? Have I learned to wait for a quality womb rather than any-old-womb passing in the night? Have I learned that if I choose a rotten womb like Hazmat’s, that it is better to die as an unborn fetus than get born to another woman just like her?
Have I learned to BE a good womb, able to nurture a child for twenty years?
💨Northwind Grandma💨👍🏼❤️👎🏼🖤
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Random. Thank you for sharing the description of a soul’s various bodies. Very helpful.
@JMG(#8) “Dashui, er, I’m missing how this connects to the theme of this post. Help me.”
Perhaps @Dashui’s(#2) fascinating comment about burn victims’ prescribed consumption of raw eggs was in response to the sentence “…there is a common recipe for oil of egg, which is a useful medicine for burns…” in your paragraph starting with “Animal androids.”
Hi JMG. So if I remember correctly regarding a recent comment, maybe on a magic Monday, you suggested that the bacon cheeseburger option is effective for defending against magic attack. Was that just a joke? Or actually helpful?
KAN, that allegory strikes me as utterly brilliant.
Robert, I’ll certainly see what I can turn up. I somehow managed to get the title right, btw!
KayeOh, interesting. Yes, I suppose that might have been what he had in mind.
Shadow Rider, it can be surprisingly useful against weak-to-middling magical attacks. Eating meat grounds you in your material body, which after all is made of meat, and so if you need to decrease your sensitivity to subtle influences, a double bacon cheeseburger or any other carnivore’s delight will do you a lot of good. I bet you never thought that the famous Original Lolcat —
— was offering you magical advice, did you? 😉
“Forgiveness is a crucial ingredient in this process. In the language of a later generation of occultists, to forgive someone who has harmed you, honestly and wholeheartedly, is to break the karmic tie that connects the two of you. You will then each go on to receive whatever results your thoughts, words, and deeds have stored up for you. The ability to let go of past hurts is a skill that students of occultism would be wise to cultivate.”
This is why the woke movement / critical race theory is so toxic, because they promote a worldview where there is no forgiveness available to break any karmic ties, so they are always tied to past injustices against themselves or their own people.
Hi JMG & all,
I am in the process of gathering old clothes together to donate to our local thrift shop– It seems somewhat possible to me that someone who receives my old clothes could use them as a physical link to me. I have a vague idea for a ritual– Thanking the clothes for their service, asking a blessing on those who receive them– Would I need more than that, or do you know of any different or additional ways to break links with donated personal items?
BTW, the practices of the Modern Order of Essenes have been a great help in my personal life and a help to others around me. Thank you so much for taking the time to bring these teachings into availability!
Dear JMG, RandomActsOfKarma, Northwind Grandma and commentariat,
Thank you for reading (and the three of you responding to) my comment.
RandomActsOfKarma, thank you. I do not have trouble forgiving people. In a way, I forgive “as I go” – very quickly, and usually if asked forgiveness I would not know what for; yet there are difficulties with this approach, too. I am learning not to be blind, so to speak, to evil; yet not see evil as evil, but see it more creatively.
Northwind Grandma, thank you for your story! Sadly, I suppose there are a bunch of kids, abused by parents who for some reason cannot or are not willing to treat them better. I think your approach is wonderful – and in fact, effective in cutting abusive or “black magic” ties; i.e. turning your heart, your attention somewhere, where it is needed, wanted, and appreciated. Seeing and nurturing beauty. Perhaps feeling deeply sorrowful about not being able to achieve having harmonious family in this world – which feeling I share with you and see in it the formative quality to meditate and co-create (individually and partially collectively) a notion of such a family. I believe you will have one, based on this notion, in a more welcoming setting.
JMG, thank you. I thought it was a gift, though I hoped for some advice how to deal with the gap, and how perhaps to nurture and use it. I am developing it, and like you wrote, there are always the two differing perceptions: one “good”, one what actually happens. More and more often I have these perceptions when I walk in the woods, through the town, etc. – I sort of see and feel the beauty and tinkling love of the living force(s) and I sort of see and feel the hurt and dying, which to me are visible signs of developing new patterns and values, so far hidden. These new patterns I vaguely sense intelectually, but do not perceive. It is the little distortions, which are “the most painful/scary/ugly”, for it is very disturbing to see something that might have been very beautiful and is not. (To my mind, there is nothing scary about non-differentiated, little-differentiated or chaotic things.) There’s huge hope that consciousness/attention can deal with those, if the capacities are more developed. Seems easy, but “deal” in this respect is a very complex act and process, I do not have yet the capacity for.
Recently, I had an idea I might use my gift to “karmic cleansing”. Could you, please, tell me, if you see a flaw/flaws in it? Eg, the malevolent magic. There are many causal threads connected to such a behaviour. They are spread over time and space, and they are many, some bad, many neutral, and some possibly/potentially good (perhaps not fully accessible from here). Such behaviour causes pain. If I accept the pain, but do not act on it; I recognize one of its sources intellectually but ask myself some useful questions as to what other causal influences there are and might be and possibly delve deeper into understanding of how they work – perhaps creating a story, where these are not wholly “evil”, but also, say useful, or neutral, even good, I might just be able to thwart the attack by redirecting the energies and calling on (and into the conflict) energies which will be accepted by the black mage (beauty, joy…) even if he will not know their source… or rather the redirection. He will not connect them with the former behaviour, but with something else – depending on the story and on him. As for me, I also need to be able to bear and heal the pain without intertwining it with others and/or stories. Going to a doctor is not thus an option for me while doing this work, since it supports the hidden causal threads influencing the dynamics of the underlying processes. Nor is a speculation what the pain “really” means; it is to be accepted and creatively healed.
Deep blessing to you, JMG, if welcome and those readers who will welcome it,
Yours,
Markéta
@Scotty,
I am glad the description was helpful! I have been working on a more detailed write up (with pictures!). If you are interested, it is posted here https://druidalchemist.com/anatomy/.
@JMG, re: magical advice:
Fixed it for you.
https://druidalchemist.com/lol-cat/
Hi John Michael,
Firstly, I’ve been blown away by the sympathy for the Sith allegory. It’s true though, a simple binary is held firmly in place merely to occlude the ternary and beyond.
Speaking of which, have to laugh, I learned martial arts for many years so that I didn’t have to fight, not because I wanted to fight. The Jedi did seem to get into a lot of scraps. 🙂 As a young bloke, I was suddenly thrust into a school environment which was to put it mildly, aggressive. To not know how to fight was a weakness that others exploited, and in magic things are no different. People will be people.
The story as to how I got past the waiting list and into the Dojo was pretty funny in hindsight – I just walked in and spoke about the after school fights, and the Sensei took me in. Who knew there was a waiting list to get in? The guy was a total master in many styles, and Saturday mornings, he’d open the Dojo to any and all comers, then take them on just to improve his skills. Like everyone else there, I had to pay the fees for the training and upkeep, and work hard, but it was an interesting experience. But primarily I learned how to fight so as to avoid fights. Hmm, yes. The techniques were largely focused on channelling an opponents energy away.
Man, you know, for years I’ve thought about the concept of forgiveness, and to me that word really doesn’t sum up my own process. The generally understood meaning of the word paints an otherwise picture, yes, yes it does. For your interest, I can’t speak for others however, the emotions attached to the circumstances requiring forgiveness can be let go of, but the lessons are incorporated into what I describe as my world-view. And when I become aware that a person can perform an act which requires what may be described as forgiveness (and not necessarily even directed at myself) thereafter the person gets treated with that possibility in mind. The colour of their soul becomes known. I do believe that people can change, grow and make amends, but any claim to such a state without hard work under their belt is mere puffery in my books. Dunno, it’s a really complicated word that and it is one in which we all view differently. Am I off the mark here? And do you have any suggestions as to a workable approach?
Cheers
Chris
” Eating meat grounds you in your material body, which after all is made of meat, and so if you need to decrease your sensitivity to subtle influences, a double bacon cheeseburger or any other carnivore’s delight will do you a lot of good.”
Oh, oh, bad news for vegetarians and especially vegans…
John, what would vegetarians do for resist magical attacks?(I understand that if you don’t eat meat anymore, you’re more weak for that kind of attack, because you’re more sensitive to subtle influences…).
@Kyle: I hear you about inadvertent cursing through the medium of teenage anger. I still like punk music. But I have to limit it to special occasions, or if I just want the visceral energy, as it does have that power to rouse. Thanks again for the MOE work you are doing.
@Milkyway: I do like the MOE work too. I went through the first three attunements, and it remains a part of my practice. I hope to move forward, with that and OSA, but I am working on some other things. Strangely enough doing the work opens up the space to do more. I think MOE definitely does have an application in the context of this Levi chapter. Cultivating the blessing mindset puts you into the daily practice of shifting your attitude towards the opposite of whatever vices and vitriol you may encounter being flung around from the exigencies of daily life. Thanks for championing MOE! I think we need a mascot, maybe not the character from the Simpsons. But MOE puts me in mind of a gritty working class guy from Cleveland, and I like that ; ) I guess MOE could be a bartender, hearing peoples problems. But instead of being bitter like the guy in the TV show, MOE would be wise and offer encouragement and good energy instead.
@ Randomactsofkarma: I think you are correct in stating fear has the tendency to paralyze, and depression has the tendency, once paralyzed, to slow you down, to immobilize even further. Anger can motivate. In my own life, all of them have been channeled into creative activity at some point or other (though I don’t believe, in general, that you need to be fracked up emotionally as a person to be creative -though I admit the Romantic in me was much aligned with that idea in my youth). Thinking of the collective rage we see, the action that is taken though, often ends up being just a siphoning off of that energy and flinging it at convenient targets. If somehow people could look at what scared them, and what they are ashamed about in the situation, and the grief they feel because of things, many outside of personal control, we could maybe focus on other courses of action. But its complicated, and people get mesmerized by the Spectacle which creates emotional and cognitive feedback loops amplifying anger and outrage. Just some additional thoughts.
Hope all are well!
Abc, yes, very much so. It’s not only toxic but also self-defeating, because the more they pile on the hate and rage, the more energy they give to their targets. Any competent martial artist knows how to redirect the other guy’s energy to defeat him; the same thing can be done just as efficiently with subtler energies.
Random, ha! Thank you.
Chris, that word “forgiveness” gets reinterpreted in slippery ways. Abusive people like to insist that forgiving them means letting them keep abusing you, and no, it doesn’t. Forgiveness means letting go of the emotional burden of anger and resentment we all carry against the people who have harmed us. It doesn’t mean pretending that the harm didn’t happen or that the person in question won’t do it again, given the opportunity. It’s like the concept of unconditional love. I appreciate the samurai who pointed out that it’s quite possible to love somebody unconditionally at the very moment that your sword goes through them on the battlefield. There are plenty of nasty people in the world; sometimes you have to fight them; sometimes, if you’re a samurai, or Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, you may have to kill them — but that doesn’t mean you have to hate or resent them.
Chuaquin, if you can eat cheese and eggs those will help. If you can’t, you’re going to be vulnerable, and you simply need to accept that and do a lot more in the way of protective magic. Heating spices and foods such as garlic and peppers will help to some extent, but not enough.
@Justin Patrick Moore, not surprisingly, I was into punk music and to some extent metal when I was a teen and into my early twenties. Now, I still have a nostalgic fondness for certain songs, but for years I’ve been unable to listen to it except rarely and in passing, usually when other people put it on. I think that has a lot to do with the releasing of some of those angers that made me resonate with it. Nowadays I listen to a lot of folk and roots music with beautifully-crafted lyrics. Some of it is kind of dark, but it lacks the anger. I must have shifted to dealing with the more primary emotion of sadness, though I also notice I gravitate most towards the songs that have notes of beauty and hope in them at the end, so that’s a good sign.
Hm! I never thought of it, but your comment makes me wonder what we can tell about our emotional evolution by the music we preferred at different times in our lives.
“Welcome to a new year of Defense Against the Dark Arts. In past years you’ve learned the basic protective charms, amulets, and potions; protego, expelliarmus, expecto patronum ; and the all-important dodging-the-frack-out-of-the-way. But this term, now that you’re mature Sixth Years, you’ll be coming to grips with some of the deeper, more powerful, and more challenging defensive arts, such as gratitude, understanding, and forgiveness.”
A muffled groan came from the back row where Neville was sitting. Hermione looked confident, having already read the year’s textbook. But Harry and Ron exchanged confused glances. “I was hoping this year was finally going to be about firearms,” Ron whispered.
JMG #61
> Eating meat grounds you in your material body, which after all is made of meat, and so if you need to decrease your sensitivity to subtle influences, a double bacon cheeseburger or any other carnivore’s delight will do you a lot of good.
Thanks for this. Hmm. Interesting. I would never have guessed.
Over the last month, I have taken to frying up five to six strips of bacon to start my day. My sense of well-being has *definitely* improved, and I wondered why. Not that my health is ACTUALLY better (although I suppose that is possible), I just FEEL better.
I feel guilty because bacon feels like such a luxury, or even wasteful. But, then again, farmers and their families eat a slab of ham or sausage in a hearty breakfast every day (at least that is the goal). I don’t feel entitled to having a “slab of bacon” every day — rather, I feel bacon is a gift granted by the meat gods.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🥓🍴
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hello JMG,
Thank you for your insights! In your response to Paedrig (#32) you wrote, “you have the chance… to break the karmic tie…” Would you please elaborate as to what IS a karmic tie?
Walt, you forgot the really potent baconus cheeseburgerus incantation. More seriously — well, slightly more seriously — one of the reasons I loathe the Harry Potter franchise is the slackjawed idiocy that governs its approach to evil magic and evil generally. Embrace that way of thinking and you’ll be fighting evil for the rest of your days, because your own actions will generate it.
Northwind, it really does work. In macrobiotic theory — yes, I did the macrobiotic diet back in the day, and still use some of the basic ideas (and some of the recipes) — meat is yang, salt is yang, and aging or curing something makes it more yang; thus bacon is the yangest of the yang, the crisply fried essence of the active, dynamic, concentrating energy. Since most forms of nasty magic (including advertising) work by making you more yin (that is, more passive, responsive, and diffuse), bacon helps.
Kirsten, a karmic tie is a connection between two souls that’s fixed in place by bad karma on both sides. It comes into being because two people have done ugly things to each other, and it guarantees that they’ll keep on being reborn in situations where they have to interact with each other, until at least one of them works off the bad karma without generating more of it. The best way to keep it going is to insist that the other person is responsible for it all and therefore your actions are justified…
“…bacon is the yangest of the yang, the crisply fried essence of the active, dynamic, concentrating energy. Since most forms of nasty magic (including advertising) work by making you more yin (that is, more passive, responsive, and diffuse).”
This is interesting, because in the teachings I have been exposed to, Yang would be active, dynamic but EXPANSIVE energy (which requires the balancing influences of Yin for CONTAINMENT), while Yin would be passive, responsive, but CONCENTRATING energy (which requires the balancing influences of Yang for MOVEMENT).
I must have a little think about this.
PS – Disclaimer: the above statement should not be construed as finding fault with bacon in any way! 😉
@Kyle: Speaking of roots music and old-time stuff which I also like, I just finished this article about the banjo player Matokie Slaughter. She’s fantastic. I think you’ll like her.
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/who-was-matokie-slaughter
That’s a good point. I’m pretty ominivorous when it comes to music, but I certainly tolerate a lot less harsh noise and punk sounds than I used to, but some of it is still fun (to me). But to your point, I am much more careful with how I modulate myself with music than I used to be. When I was very depressed in my late teens and early twenties I listened to a lot of Current 93 and dark folk music, some of it traditional. I was very much enraptured with the melancholy. As with the punk, I still like it, but am just careful when putting it on.
I’ve also been digging this group, Tele Novella, from Texas. They have a psychedelic-folk-pop sound -and great lyrics. A bit on the saturnine side, so even though I love it, I will only listen to them here and there. The new album, Poets Tooth is quite striking.
https://telenovella.bandcamp.com/album/poets-tooth
But these days I listen to mostly ambient electronica and instrumental guitar music. I can have it on in the background when I’m writing and the lyrics don’t effect my flow of words, and I tend to go for the soothing variety. I just discovered the work of the late Ohio “unguitarist” Rick Dietrick who is typical of the kind of thing I like in that area.
Thanks again for working on my poets tooth.
@Random #64
I pride myself on being able to dive into the details but again, you are blazing the trail. 🔥
Thank you. I look forward to reading and digesting your post.
I knew there must be another good reason for grilling scotch fillet (aka ribeye) for breakfast every morning
E. Goldstein (whose post back at #63 landed in my spam filter for some reason), wash your clothes in cold water with a little salt thrown in before you donate them. That’ll clear the etheric connection and make them useless as object links. Your ritual will also help!
Scotlyn, this is one of the main differences between the macrobiotic tradition and Chinese yin-yang theory, and yes, it’s been a subject of much debate over the years. The macrobiotic idea seems to be that concentration equals heat and dispersion equals cold — that’s certainly true in physics.
KAN, that’s another way to get the same effect. Steak and eggs is the American equivalent, and a very fine breakfast it is.
Thank you for your answer, John. By the way, I’m not really a strict vegetarian. In fact, I like real cheese more than the vegan “cheese”.
Fair enough – and thank you for explaining that.. I shall take that on board and take a look. The macrobiotic tradition is one I know little about.
I am descended from long lived Midwest pig farmers on both sides back to great grand fathers. My dad’s favorite breakfast was steak and eggs, a big slice of my mom’s apple pie with its wonderful flaky crust made with lard, a glass of orange juice, and coffee with a touch of condensed milk. Most days bacon or pork sausage substituted for the steak and buttered toast with a good jam for the pie. So needless to say the recent discussion topic warmed my heart .My father was definitely well grounded with a good disposition. He recently passed at age 91.
@Justin Patrick Moore,
“Immobilizing” to describe sadness is a good word. I have added that to my notes. 🙂 I agree that sadness and fear can be channeled into activity, though for me, I think the activity is usually (subconsciously) intended to be a distraction. I very much agree with you that if people could step outside of their emotions long enough to recognize what is causing the emotion, they could focus on the cause rather than a convenient target.
@Scotty,
Thank you for the kind comment. 🙂
Regarding the spiritual/psychological effects of abstaining from meat: what happens to a country when a significant percentage of its population are vegetarians? In India, between 39% – 44% (depending on which survey you believe) of its 1.4 billion people are vegetarian: do you see widespread effects of avoidance of meat in that culture?
Hi John Michael,
Your writing goes places, thanks for sharing your gift with us all. 🙂 Now, if after reading your essay, you made the throw away claim that we’d be travelling the intellectual ground from say, I dunno, the Sith to Cheeseburgers, I’d have snorted in disbelief! But here we are… It’s heady and fertile ground for thought.
Thanks so much for your thoughts in relation to the concept of forgiveness, as it has been something I’ve observed people abusing over the years for their own ends, and that’s a bad thing because the concept is a useful tool for restoring balance.
As an entirely different perspective to the cheeseburger 🙂 , vegetarians would be well advised to surround themselves with err, vegetation. There are magical resources in such an environment, but it is also a very high cost space and involves lots of work and mutual obligations. Dunno, it’s just different, that’s all.
Cheers
Chris
The stories of automata are indeed curious — and people were continuing to produce them, in some sense, well into the 19th century. Poe’s essay on Maelzel’s chess player describes one example. Then there is the prophetic speaking head described by Reginald Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft.
(On the other hand, the cultivation of the art of memory could also lead to the development of a “mechanical man” within the practitioner, as suggested by the studies of Mary Carruthers, who focuses on the art of memory as a form of cultivated creativity. DP Walker speculates, if I remember correctly. that one aspect of Ludovico Lazzarelli’s magic involved embedding some autonomous spiritual energy into a person, rather along the lines of the Hermetic method of animating divine statues.)
To come back to the more macabre side of things, in That Hideous Strength, CS Lewis describes the oracular Head of the NICE very much as an object animated by a demonic presence. Lewis seems to have been quite conversant with medieval magic, and his remark that magic and science grew out of the same soil refers not only to the quest for knowledge, but especially to the effect of the possible effects of training oneself to overcome “naive” reluctance to deal with dead bodies, grotesque transformations and mutilations, abominable couplings, and so on, of the sort described in the Picatrix and other texts, and also proposed and contemplated by the coolly objective scientists of his own time. (CF Ilya Ivanov’s attempt to create human/ape hybrids.)
A lot could be said on this subject! But, briefly, once one comes to see conventional limits as mere superstitions or taboos to be superseded by the quest for knowledge, it’s not always easy to know whether or where to stop, or to provide a clear rationale for not following the maxim, “if it can be done, it should be done.”
And to the point – today’s Pocket had an article about a woman with IBS (which I also have) who went on a prolonged vacation and threw her gluten-free-etc diet out the window (one of those “nuts to this noise” moments I’ve had, myself, and have often had good results with in other fields) and realized she was symptom-free. She then realized it was stress, and identified the stressors, and took to having a 10-minute lie-down regularly, doing absolutely nothing. And I’ve certainly had enough stressors these days. This is so closely related to the anger issues – “not what you’re eating, but what’s eating you,” I thought it worth posting here.
Chuaquin, I had to eat vegan cheese for a while due to my late wife’s food allergies; it’s frankly loathsome, so I sympathize! The rise of the strict vegan diet is actually fairly recent as a social phenomenon — when I was young, most vegetarians used cheese and milk, and many used eggs, as a way of adding protein to their diets.
Scotlyn, it’s eccentric. The only reasons I still use the concepts are (a) I was exposed to them at an impressionable age and (b) they work quite well, so long as you don’t get caught up in the flight to purity that doomed the movement.
BeardTree, your dad’s favorite breakfast sounds like exceptionally good eating to me. The older I get, the more skeptical I am of claims about what lifestyles are healthy; my father drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney until quite recently, and his diet has never been anything but working class American with some working class Japanese food thrown in by my stepmother; he turned 86 this year, is still going strong, and would be doing even better except for the nasty consequences of an operation his doctor talked him into having.
Yavanna, I’ve never lived in India and have no firsthand knowledge of the country, so I’ll leave that to those who know what they’re talking about.
Chris, that’s certainly an option! If you’ve got room for plants in the space surrounding your house, there are certainly things you can grow there that make life really hard for practitioners of nasty magic.
LeGrand, all of this is especially entertaining to me because I just finished reading Robertson Davies’ novel World of Wonders, in which a fake automaton plays a major role; it’s a card-playing carnival automaton, powered by a child inside, who looks vaguely Chinese and so of course is named Abdullah. The history of fake marvels interfaces in fascinating ways with the history of real occultism!
Patricia M, thanks for this. It makes a great deal of sense.
Speaking of Faustian magic, some people may remember E.M. Butler, whose “magic trilogy” (her name for it) concluded with a book on Faust. (https://archives.libraries.london.ac.uk/resources/EMB.pdf, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_Marian_Butler).
Butler wrote many other things, including two short novels (with somewhat occult themes), some substantial studies in German literature (poorly received in Germany), and brief. very readable autobiography, which describes, in addition to her education, her World War I experiences on the Russian and Macedonian fronts (could she have run into Lilias Hamilton, who was running a field hospital somewhere in the area?), and her attendance (if I remember correctly) at Ascona conferences. One rather wry, but not unsympathetic, chapter is devoted to a visit she made to Aleister Crowley at Netherwood.
She’s definitely a figure in the history of occult scholarship, one who shouldn’t be forgotten.
Yeah, the mystery of health and the body. An accomplished practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine told me she could have two patients with the same symptoms or condition and after using the TCM diagnostic system the patients could end up with different treatment protocols. We are more complicated and diverse than cars. And my father quit his daily two packs of unfiltered cigarettes at age 70 and quite his excessive whiskey drinking at 80. He had Covid at age 88 and was only more tired than usual and quickly recovered. In his early 80’s he was told after testing that a characteristic of his heart was like that of a man in his 20’s. But in the last two years of his life part wear out time of brain and body arrived. The downside of this is that I may live long enough to see some rough times because of Dad’s genetics, I never smoked and am a quite moderate drinker and follow what I call my carcass maintenance program.
I would like to follow up on your answer to Cris:
“If you’ve got room for plants in the space surrounding your house, there are certainly things you can grow there that make life really hard for practitioners of nasty magic.”
What would a half a dosen such options be? We’re moving into an old cottage and one of my first acts will be a planting spree.
We certainly need more trees.
Best regards,
Marko
Mr. Greer, so good to hear about your father! My grandmother, my mother, and three of her four sisters all lived to be 97 and they all drank like fish, only more so! My grandfather on my dad’s side smoked cigars and a pipe for many many decades and died at 95. But they also all were quick to forgive and knew how to let go of things that bothered them. Oh, and my mother’s other sister is still alive, she will be 100 this December! It seems as if the sanctimonious ones, with their “perfect “ diets, and judgmental attitudes don’t live nearly as long. Why do you think the whole vegan thing took off anyway? When meat and animal protein is so tasty and makes you feel so good? Is it just virtue signaling? I’ve just been wondering, is all. I grew up eating lots of steaks because my dad raised a steer every year. And we all drank raw milk because my mom, an RN, thought it was the healthiest. And none of us kids has ever had any allergies. I’m just wondering why it all changed.
And now my son is thinking of making his own bacon, saints be praised!!
Considering that Snape was the Defense professor in Harry Potter’s sixth year, and he never got over the bullying from Harry’s father and his friends nor the rejection from Harry’s mother, I’m not sure if he can teach his students gratitude, understanding, and forgiveness. It would have required Snape to be a different person who has gotten over his past problems, and then he wouldn’t have been so hated a professor in his 18 years of teaching and his relationship with the trio would have been more positive, with many consequences in the storyline already in the first year.
That being said, I’m not sure if any of the Defense professors in the canon could teach such things. Maybe Remus Lupin, but he was a werewolf and his secret got exposed at the end of the third year, so he wouldn’t have been able to continue teaching into the sixth year regardless. For the others, you had in order a Voldemort-possessed person, a fraudster who steals people’s identities and achievements, an unrepentant Death Eater who had daddy issues, a tyrannical bureaucrat who used torture methods on students and then went on to work for Voldemort, and Snape himself, before Defense was canned and simply replaced with the Dark Arts in the seventh year. And Voldemort cursed the Defense professor position itself in the 1960s after he applied for the position and was rejected, so the fact that things like gratitude, understanding, and forgiveness were never taught in Defense, in the years Harry Potter was a student, may have simply be one facet of Voldemort’s curse. What an effective curse Voldemort placed on the teaching position if this is the case, to prevent an entire generation of students from learning good techniques of defending from evil.
Now, while the Defense professors may have been hopeless in the canon because of Voldemort’s curse, Harry did have private lessons with Dumbledore in the 6th book. And the biggest disappointment has to be Dumbledore, because he was supposed to have been the best wizard in all of Britain, and thus know about these things like gratitude, understanding, and forgiveness and be able to teach them to Harry in his private lessons as a way to counter evil. But Dumbledore never did teach Harry that stuff; otherwise Harry would have appreciated Snape and Malfoy and the Dursleys a lot more in that 6th year than he did in canon, and not carried all that resentment towards them. Instead the private lessons with Dumbledore is all about Voldemort’s Horcruxes and how Harry needs to track down and destroy the Horcruxes before finally killing Voldemort, and using underhanded methods to wheedle the truth out of Slughorn like a grimoire practitioner.
Also Dumbledore could have taught his right hand spy Snape how to get over his past resentments in all the years that Snape was teaching at Hogwarts, but he never did.
From a magic and spiritual perspective what’s the opinion of hermits. People that never marry or have had a girl friend? As in life long aloneness? Nearing my mid fourties, yep that’s me. No sex nothing, ever.
I can answer part of the question myself, always seemed to be sensitive and getting the brunt of other peoples energy. Always felt very flawed and that there was something wrong with me cause I saw other people in relationships but my own frequency never seemed to match anyone elses, my own energy strange itself.
Life has also made me cynical, so has watching the nature of humans beings.
Is my seemingly perminent disposistion justified? Can magical development as in inner work break the pattern of this hermit, or is it written in stone by the cosmos—the Absolute having already had all dies cast? It’s perported that we have some degree of wiggle room but to overcome such cosmic forces seems absolutely Hurculean. I see this personally as a Gordian Knot of self, an aspect of inextricable conditions of being a human animal.
In my wager against all odds of cast dies I offer up the great question to the Absoute, “My lord, why thoust cast thy art in cemented fixture to such pithy degree?”
About the grounding effects of food… two things which seem to work for me (albeit to a lesser extent than meat) are, don’t laugh, chocolate and Earl Grey tea.
With the tea, I suspect it might be connected to the tanning agents it contains. If this should indeed be the case, other plants which contain tannins might be worth a try, too. (I’ve never consciously noted the effect with red wine, but that might simply be because I drink tea much more often, and trying red wine doesn’t usually occur to me at certain times of the day… 😀 )
As for the chocolate, I’m not sure if it’s the sugar, the combination of sugar and fat, or something to do with the cocoa. Since cocoa also contains a certain amount of tanning agents, the latter would make sense.
In any case, I’m not sure if this works for everybody, but it seems to do so for me. Not quite a replacement for meat, but definitely better than nothing. Besides, there is no harm in trying chocolate and Earl Grey for a good cause, is there?
@JMG: “If you’ve got room for plants in the space surrounding your house, there are certainly things you can grow there that make life really hard for practitioners of nasty magic.”
Would you happen to know if there is any literature which goes deeper into this?
Milkyway, who is right now taking one for the team by doing a chocolate + Earl Grey field test 😉
@Patricia Matthews,
About 40 years ago, when I was a young teenager, my mother took me to the family doctor because of some distressing symptoms I had. The doctor’s diagnosis? I was internalizing stress and I needed to relax.
As a young adult who had recently entered the work force, the symptoms reappeared with a vengeance. Off to a new younger doctor, who this time diagnosed me with IBS. Various prescriptions were offered, none which really helped. I bought a teach-yourself-yoga book; I’ve decided it wasn’t the yoga so much as the deliberately imposed calm for 30 minutes a day, but my symptoms improved tremendously.
Fast forward to a few years back, after my 50th birthday. My insurance strongly encourages a colonoscopy at that age. After, the doctor asked me if I knew I had ulcerative colitis. Ha, no I don’t, I said. I internalize stress.
So my family doctor of 40 years ago knew way back when that it was stress. (I think he must be 90 years old now. And he still is my parent’s doctor.)
JMG, A possible answer to the question of how India being a nation many vegetarians handles the magical weakness that comes from such a diet. Most of my Neighbors are originally from India ( Intel Engineers) and are also practicing Hindus. All the ones that I know are also vegetarian Hindus, as there are also chicken and fish ( never beef) eating Hindus.
The answer to this question hinges around the magical ( or macrobiotic) properties of Butter. I have seen all of my neighbors bringing home very. large quantities of butter from the market which they use with large quantities of spice, especially garlic that you can smell from neighboring houses. We also have a couple of Indian families in the local community who make and sell ( at the farmers. market) Jars of clarified butter ( GHEE) in the traditional way. I have taken to purchasing and using this Ghee to good effect.
If the effect of eating lots of butter cooked with lots of spices gives some of the grounding of meat than we have our answer.
@Milkyway: Dont forget the bergamot in your Earl Grey! It has an uplifting and calming effect.
As for chocolate, it is one of the New World power substances along with tobbaco. Both have a long history of ritual use and do indeed ground after powerful magic
LeGrand, now there’s a name I’d half forgotten. Thank you; I’ll see what of her works I can scoop up.
BeardTree, or your carcass management program may decrease the wear and tear on your parts…
Marko, among the best protective trees are rowan, hawthorn, birch, and laurel. As for herbs, be sure to have some angelica, mugwort, and St. Johns wort growing on your property.
Heather, like every social phenomenon, the vegan movement had many causes. Some people really do thrive best on a plant diet, and once the vegan option went public they gravitated to it. Some people were more sensitive than others to animal suffering, and were drawn to it for that reason. Some people, I’m sorry to say, were drawn to it because they wanted to feel morally superior to others. Some — well, once the whole alternative scene collapsed over the course of the 1970s, a lot of people felt guilty for abandoning the things they’d claimed to believe in, and becoming vegan was a way they could convince themselves that they hadn’t completely sold out. And there were other reasons as well. You’re right, though, that being sanctimonious and judgmental is bad for your health — and I’m delighted to hear about your son’s ambition. Bacon is a noble achievement!
Anonymous, well, you know the series better than I do; I bogged down fatally about a quarter of the way into the fourth volume, when the Death Eaters came parading along to fulfill every cheap cliché in bad fantasy, and never went back. It’s utterly typical, first, that gratitude, understanding, and forgiveness never entered into the curriculum; second, that the only way to resolve the plot was for the Good Person to kill the Bad Person under the delusion that everything bad was the Bad Person’s fault and would vanish in his absence; and third, that the bad people were bad because they all had traumatic childhoods, and if only some well-meaning middle-class therapists had talked to them none of the bad stuff would ever have happened. What a vapid, one-dimensional, utterly dishonest way to look at the world!
Insight, about 1% of the population is naturally asexual. It’s one of the standard ways to be human, and there’s nothing at all wrong with it. (One of the characters in my novels — the sorceress Jenny Chaudronnier, who’s one of the two main protagonists of the series The Weird of Hali — is asexual.) The sort of hypersensitivity you describe is apparently fairly common among asexuals, and may be part of why some of them aren’t comfortable with sexual relationships. If you’re comfortable with that, go with it. If you’re not, you have a long road ahead of you, and occult training will only be part of that, but the amount of wiggle room you have isn’t fixed — you can expand it by changing how you relate to yourself and the world.
Milkyway, do varieties of tea other than Earl Grey have the same effect? If not, it may be the bergamot rather than the tannins. As for plants, my book The Natural Magic Encyclopedia covers the basics, and the books in its bibliography cover more.
Clay, that’s certainly a possibility to explore. Is cheese much eaten in India?
Butter shows up here and I run across this
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/other/doctors-and-health-experts-are-changing-their-minds-about-whole-milk-and-cheese/ar-AA1q5Mu9
“One study, published in 2016, found that consuming milk and dairy products was associated with a reduced risk of childhood obesity, improved body composition and weight loss in adults, and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, particularly stroke.
“The totality of available scientific evidence supports that intake of milk and dairy products contribute to meet nutrient recommendations, and may protect against the most prevalent chronic diseases, whereas very few adverse effects have been reported,” the study concluded.”
“Many scientists who study dairy fat and dairy foods have come to the realization that dairy fat isn’t harmful and may even be healthy,” says Mozaffarian.
He wrote a paper six years ago that looked at 16 studies around the world that measured the levels of blood biomarkers produced by consuming dairy products. “We found that higher levels of dairy fat biomarkers were significantly associated with lower risk of diabetes—a 20% to 30% lower risk,” he says.”
Then there is also vaccenic acid, the trans-fat that is actually good for you, also found in dairy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccenic_acid
JMG, Justin,
Good point about the bergamotte. I like Earl Grey, so that‘s usually my go-to. I had considered the bergamotte as the „culprit“, but somehow that didn‘t feel right – but this is just a gut feeling, and I might be wrong. I‘d have to give it a try next time I need some grounding..
For what it’s worth, when I wrote the comment, the thought „bitter plants might also work“ popped into my head. Since bitters increase digestion and other bodily functions, that‘s not too far off. Maybe that‘s why I also felt it might be the tannins.
All good questions – I‘ll just have to keep trying… What a hardship! 😉
Milkyway
JMG,
Yeah, it was clear that Harry Potter and co had failed to defeat evil when Rowling came out with an eighth book a few years ago called “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”, where twenty years after the events of the first seven books, Voldemort’s daughter was pissed off that they killed her father, and so she decided to travel back in time to alter the timeline so that Voldemort never died.
And about the Horcruxes – those are pieces of Voldemort’s soul stuck inside certain inanimate objects. So one would have hoped that defeating Voldemort and his evil would have involved some kind of restorative magic which would join back all the pieces of Voldemort’s soul into one unified whole again. But that never happened – they just focused on destroying each piece of Voldemort’s soul.
JMG, the gals I dated that I was attracted to either had other interests in love that they made clear or there was always some sort of mismatch that lead me to believe that I just wasn’t for them or vice versa. Eventually I just gave up, everything was always really awkward. I think it’s an overall compatibility thing, I’m not the one to entertain, and if a guy doesn’t have that? Bets seem to be off, at least that’s what I found. The human equivalent to a male bowerbird I failed misereably at.
Mugwort! I knew it was a good plant. I love its smell and like the Herb Angelica have always been attracted to it. It’s called mugwort because it was a common beer additive before hops took over. I stopped by an artisanal brewery in California once and saw they had a mugwort flavored beer. I ordered a mug, drank it and then told the bartender I could see why they switched over to hops back in the day. Moderate alcohol use is part of my carcass maintenance program I rotate through Czech style lagers, my homemade mead, red wine occasionally, and my homemade Angelica liqueur. My son is a stellar beer brewer winning silver and gold medals in competition. He is a cold water immersion advocate having a tank chilled to 39 degrees in his ultimate man cave. When I visit we take turns taking dips , with a Viking metal song “In My Sword I Trust” playing. I come fully alive and dance exultantly to the music. At home I do cold water showers. Carcass maintenance can be a joy. Most splendid metal music,get to the middle at least where the band breaks into clear lyrics – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2WqQY_xSSM
Addendum: It just occurred to me that coffee has helped in some instances, too, although that was mostly decaf lately. Not sure if caffeinated coffee might be too much for some people when one is a bit wobbly already.
Twinings Earl Grey was the recent Queen Elizabeth’s go to tea all her life.
@JMG, Yavanna and others
Re: vegetarianism in India
The figure of 39% of India’s population being vegetarian is somewhat misleading. The reason being that this indicates only those who are very strict vegetarians, to the point that they’ve *never* eaten any animal flesh at all. This figure includes Jains, many religious Hindus (especially from mercantile communities), some Sikhs and some Buddhists too.
The remaining 61% of the population do not necessarily consume meat everyday. As a non-vegetarian myself (I eat seafood, chicken, mutton (in India, “mutton” refers to goat meat, and not lamb) and pork), I can say with confidence that most meat-eaters in India eat meat not more than a couple of times a week – this includes many Indian Muslims and Indian Christians, too. I myself eat meat only on weekends, and that too only for one meal on each of the 2 days – if there’s a festival on the weekend, then by default, I end up eating vegetarian food on those days too. So, most non-vegetarians in India are occasional meat-eaters, unlike in the West, where meat-eating is a daily thing. I don’t know if this is close to vegetarianism or not, but I think it is somewhat similar to what some call the “flexitarian” diet.
Also, in India, “vegetarian” means what Westerners call “lacto-vegetarianism”. ANYONE who consumes eggs is considered a non-vegetarian, thus leading to a situation where even a person who strictly avoids eating animal flesh but consumes eggs for protein intake is considered a non-vegetarian.
Regarding veganism, well, most Indian vegetarians have not even heard of it, and those who have, consider it as a fad, and its adherents are largely put in the same bracket as the Western hippies of the 60s-70s. Vegan products are available, but only in big metro cities, and there too, only in some supermarket chains. I personally don’t find the need to indulge in veganism; even a Jain friend of mine doesn’t consume vegan food – this is especially interesting as some of the more religious people in the Jain community adhere to a narrower version of lacto-vegetarianism, in which they avoid onions, garlic, and potatoes, among others.
Personally, I do agree with the idea that veganism is a useless fad, at least in India. With the huge array of cuisines we have in India – Indian restaurants in the US mostly focus only on Punjabi cuisine and Mughlai cuisine, but there are so many others – I don’t see why getting nutrition should be a problem. Indians consume a lot of dairy products – just go to your favourite search engine and look up the vast array of dishes that can be made with “paneer” or cottage cheese – so, even if you’re a vegetarian, nutrition shouldn’t really be a problem. I’m far more worried about the fact that the grains and vegetables that Indians eat are grown using agrochemicals, than about getting nutrition via sources other than animal flesh.
As an example of a lesser-known Indian cuisine, I’d like to suggest Rajasthani cuisine, which is my favourite cuisine (disclaimer: I’m not ethnically from Rajasthan), as it is full of delicious and nutritious food options for both vegetarians as well as meat-eaters, as can be seen here: https://www.timesprime.com/blog/food-of-rajasthan-10-rajasthani-dishes-that-you-should-try-in-2023-103140445
Siliconguy, nice to see common sense slowly trickling back in.
Milkyway, it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. 😉
Anonymous, the secret is that the Harry Potters of the world depend on evil. Their lives are nothing unless they have evil to fight, so they’re constantly doing their best to make sure there’s plenty of evil around. That’s why Christian fundamentalists and wokesters alike are so arrogant, angry, and bullying — they do it so they can drive people away from their belief systems. If everyone agreed with them, where would they find evil to fight? So they go their merry way, basking in the glow of their own imaginary goodness, while they manufacture one Lord Moldywarp after another to battle.
Insight, duly noted. Since I’m autistic, I’m not exactly the right person to ask for advice about this!
BeardTree, mugwort’s a powerful plant with many uses. If the mugwort beer was too bitter, btw, they used too much of it — in milder doses it’s actually pretty good.
Viduraawakened, thanks for this. It interests me that most Asian cuisines use meat that way — the Japanese food I more or less grew up with, and still cook much more often than not, uses meat to a much smaller degree than Western cuisine; though animal foods do feature in most meals, the amounts are usually pretty modest. I’ll see if there are any Rajasthani restaurants locally — we’ve got quite a collection of Hindu temples here in New England, so the Indian-American population ought to be large enough to support a wider range of cuisines!
JMG, thank you.
I was just inquiring and wondering if being a hermit seems to be not that uncommon of a thing in the area of spiritual studies, esoterisism, magic etc. Historically there seems to be some of it but in the modern age, doesn’t seem that it’s covered all that much. Allen Watts sort of did a talk about it years ago briefly covering the subject. I was curious to see how common it is. These days it’s as if everyone is on their own island so to speak. I did not intend to go off track too far concerning the topic.
I think it’s more common than people want to admit. Thus some of us find ourselves places like here looking for insight.
I have to remind myself I’m a guest here, and that some things are just flat out not easy to answer. Me honestly, I’d rather be something in a much better state than residing within are particular group of beings called humans.
Just going to leave it at that hopefully.
Anonymous (#1) said:
I wonder, are there any tarot decks where the Trump I, II, and III cards use Donald Trump representations?
Funny you should ask and the answer is…
Why yes there is!
You can find the Donald Trump Tarot deck (all 78 cards) here:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1756619453/trump-tarot-deck-cards-funny-78-card?content_source=ed81140dba349189248609b202dc6079ae996290%253A1756619453
And you can watch Alicia Wicker, Tarotist of Moon Moth Manor actually using them for a tarot divination question about Trump himself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9yS0lXVq2c
I nearly fell out of my chair laughing my head off when she busted out that deck!
I was wiping tears away I laughed so hard seeing them. Somebody out there knew there was a market for it and sure enough decided to be the supplier.
I don’t usually comment on these posts because I haven’t taken the time to read Lévi, but this time there is a rather striking synchronicity.
I am reading The Marques of Bolibar by Leo Perutz. It is a story set during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. Two regiments of German soldiers are wiped out by the will of the (unarmed) Marques. He sees the weak points in the characters of the German officers and plans on using these weaknesses. Even though they know exactly what he is planning to do, they find themselves swearing to fulfil his wish, and while the Marques himself dies, the Germans are still unable to escape what he has determined them to do. Among all men in the two regiments, only one officer escapes to tell the story.
The book contains nothing supernatural at all, but it seems a striking illustration of what you call a curse by a genuine mage.
Insight, these days it’s pretty common, actually.
Panda, ha! Funny. Thank you for this.
Aldarion, interesting. I may have to see if that’s available in any language I know.
Hi John Michael,
Yeah, defence is not a bad option, but then last time I checked, not going on the offence is also a pretty good life choice as well. 🙂 Although sometimes a dude has to nip problems in the bud. Much depends upon the circumstances, and like you I don’t tend to announce my plans in advance.
Different plants, and also different arrangements of plants will work down here than the ones you’ve mentioned, but overall the methodology itself is what counts. Hey, it snowed here yesterday. That’s the first snow in about four years, and it provided a nice light dusting. Fingers crossed that the stone fruit crops, particularly the almonds and apricots, survive. At the moment the fruits are tiny little things which is what you’d expect at this time of year. Should know how things roll on that front in another week or two.
It is hard not to note that the western Europeans are trying to drag you guys into a massive proxy war with the bear. Historically such actions have never ended well, and the results are in for sure. With approval for Ukraine to fire long-range Storm Shadow missiles on the horizon, Russia threatens war with NATO nations. A lot of Australian blood has been spilled on that continent over the past century or so, and nowadays we go where the US says to go, but still do we really need to be involved? It interests me that early on in this conflict there was a lot of public support, but as the conflict has dragged on, I’m not seeing that on display nowadays. Dunno. I’m of the opinion that western Europe will lose this one, any which way they choose to go.
Cheers
Chris
Hello Mr. Greer,
I have given away old things of mine to Goodwill for over a decade now without knowing that I should have cut my connection with those objects before donating them. Is there anything I could do now to cut the link?
Thank you!
Dear Quin, and wonderful Ecosophia community that prays for people on Quin’s prayer list,
Just an update that my brother in law, Patrick, passed away early this evening, listening to Mark Knofler, his favorite. I am hoping he is with his older daughter, who passed away 21 years ago at the age of 10. My heartfelt thanks to all of you who prayed for him. He was a kind, gentle, generous man.
Thank you all again, and especially you, Quin, who organizes the prayer list for us.
Heather
Chris, yeah, Britain in particular has been trying to get us into that fight for quite a while now. I get the impression that investment firms in the City of London invested way too heavily in Ukrainian farmland and are flailing around desperately trying to prevent a complete loss. The thing that makes me shake my head is that it wouldn’t take too many hypersonic missiles — of which Russia has no shortage — to sink the entire Royal Navy in an afternoon.
I get the impression that the British government hasn’t quite noticed that a little bitty island with a weak military and no munitions industry left to speak of is not in a position to pick a fight with a continent-sized nation with a huge military, a huge munitions industry, and good friends in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang. (According to Wikipedia, Britain right now has 196,543 active personnel in its military, while Russia has 1,320,000, Iran has 610,000, North Korea has 1,280,000, and China has just over two million.) I hope Britain doesn’t discover the problems with this disparity the hard way.
Ennobled, there’s not much you can do now. If you practice a daily banishing ritual, however, that should help a great deal.
Heather, please accept my condolences. That’s got to be hard for you.
Anonymous and JMG, heh. The joke I was trying to make was how absurdly out-of-character for the entire Harry Potter universe such a Defense lesson in e.g. gratitude would be. Their wands are basically sidearms, after all. ( There’s a plot point about Harry’s mother’s love and sacrifice at her death creating a protective spell on the infant Harry that saves him a few times, but Harry’s just the passive object of that magic. I don’t recall him ever expressing any particular gratitude for that act, just sullen resentment of his resulting life circumstances. Which is understandable, but he’d be a more plausible hero with both.
The more serious point is how counterintuitive it would be for, I believe, most people today to learn that gratitude, understanding, forgiveness, sympathy, humility, etc. are magical defenses according to occult tradition. Yet the clues are all around. There’s an old aphorism about how much harder it is to cheat an honest person. The Lord’s Prayer only requests as much divine forgiveness as we forgive others.
I’d suggest understanding etc. have the same role in magical conflict that a balanced stance has in martial arts.
In previous posts I had speculated that the reasons for the recent ” deer in the headlights” bewilderment of the democrats was that the smart people left town, or that the assassination failed leaving them with no plan B.
But todays post brings up another possibility. They have long flung unlimited amounts of hate , malice, and perhaps dark occultism at Trump. In the past he had responded with nearly equal ( hard to equal the dark thoughts coming from Hillary and her crew) amounts of ridicule, spite and promised vengeance.
But since the assassination attempt he seems to have become a much more ” Zen” Man in Orange. Perhaps the brush with death was profoundly mind altering for him, or perhaps some of his new partners and advisors have brought with them at least a rudimentary knowledge of the occult. RFK junior seems to be a student of Stoicism so it is not impossible he has also dabbled in the occult. If so his brush with death or new advisors seem to have made him approach his enemies with a kind of pity or amusement, lacking in the past.
As a result the slings and arrows both in the form of real attacks and dark energy seems to be bouncing off and not effecting him. But this has the effect of leaving the dems dazed and confused. The episode with Joe Biden and the Maga hat seems to bear the hallmarks of very effective magic.
Naomi Wolf’s latest substack post is so on-point for this – quite a synchronicity.
JMG, I have undiagnosed dyslexia. I have poor memory as well with certain things. I can sympathize a bit with autism but don’t believe I have that.
There is basically no way around slow reading for me, none. Podcast and audio books.. sure they help but sitting down reading instruction for training, you have to believe me it’s a serious and major undertaking. I was held back in school. I developed very slowly, so I’m a bit of a dumb dumb with some things, but in other areas I seem to just know
certain things without trying. I built my own personal computer before I got a drivers license and I got my drivers license almost two years late.
That being said, I have really enjoyed The Druid Magick Handbook and have felt it worth a lot of hard work and effort so far.
Please can you repeat how cutting connection with objects is done? Thank you
Kan (#122)
Very interesting. Scandalous though it is, there’s a long Judeo-Christian tradition, on both sides of the official divide: not only on the Jewish side (as with Paul Levertoff), but also on the Christian side (as with Christian Kabbalah). There are, of course, many people on both sides of the divide who denounce the very idea of a “Judeo-Christian tradition”, but the two streams of tradition seem to haunt each other. And, as in all hauntings, they can manifest as dread, horror, or longing.
Another example of tracks in space.
Walt, that’s a helpful comparison. What’s more, just as deepening your stance in martial arts practice increases your capacity in actual combat situations, deepening your understanding has a similar effect magically.
Clay, that’s an intriguing possibilty. I’m wondering also if all those statues of Trump meditating are having an effect on the guy…
KAN, thanks for this. It’s interesting to watch her venture one tentative step at a time into a larger world.
Insight, interesting. I also have ADD and some other neurological issues, but in my case it worked out the other way — I’m very good at manipulating words and symbols, and very poor at making or building things. I never got a driver’s license but that’s because lousy eye-hand coordination and very slow reaction times do not make for good driving. (Fortunately I realized this in the school Driver Ed classes, instead of discovering it by wrapping a car around a telephone pole or something.) I’m glad the book is proving useful to you; don’t worry about how long it takes you. Most people don’t take enough time reading and studying my technical occult books.
Njura, if it’s clothing, wash it in cold water with some salt thrown in. If it’s not, it probably hasn’t been in sufficiently intimate contact with you to be a functional object link.
Dear Milkyway,
Should you ever decide to lead a larger-scale research project concerning grounding effects of Earl Grey and chocolate, count me in, please! I would be an enthusiastic volunteer, esp. in the chocolate department… I can come up with interesting research questions already: When is chocolate grounding effect the strongest? How is it influenced by astrological timing of eating said chocolate? Of weather? Of astral weather? Would dark chocolate work better for Saturnian energies? Would milk chocolate bring in with delicaticous balance the energies of Venus? Would dark chocolate make us invisible to dark arts?
If you are ever interested in the research, you know my email address. In fact, I have already started. I ate a bit of chocolate. So far, the effects long at least as it is melting…
:o)
Markéta
“Fingers crossed that the stone fruit crops, particularly the almonds and apricots, survive.”
I can’t speak to almonds, it’s way too cold here for them, but apricots are pretty hardy. When I have trouble with them it’s because it’s too cold for the bees to fly and pollinate them.
As for Britain, losing the revenue from the London financiers practice of Advanced Swindling Theory will add to the downward pressure. In driving terms they have lost traction and the best they can do is try to aim the car so it does as little damage possible and center the wheel so you hopefully don’t bend the front suspension when you go off the road.
In naval terms the ship is sinking so the captain looks for a beach to intentionally ground the vessel. How does one intentionally ground a country?
@Milkyway: coffee, for sure. It’s another New World power substance: Coffee, Tobacco, Chocolate…
I know tobacco has a bad rep, and I don’t smoke cigarettes, but I always do love a good whiff of one when someone first lights up (going into the house of a heavy smoker is a different matter). (And I did smoke cigarettes from age 14-21). I do have the occasional cigar or bit of pipe tobacco when on a camping trip or something, about a few times a year. Otherwise I just use fragrant pipe tobacco or sacrifice a cigar as an offering to the land. At least here in the U.S. the land seems to like that tobacco.
Louis Martinie has talked about sharing some of his coffee in the morning by pouring a bit out on the ground as an offering before he has his first drink.
I read the Naomi Wolf Substack concerning her intense visionary experience of Jesus. JMG, one reason I respect you is that you respectfully recognize that the Christian experience isn’t an empty fantasy but an encounter with a powerful spiritual reality, though we may differ on our interpretations and understandings of that Living Spirit. I wish we would all have the attitude of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, a devout Protestant Christian, who said he would welcome Muslims and their mosques in the Rhode Island colony if they would live in peace with their neighbors.
Thank you KAN for posting the link to Naomi Wolf’s latest essay. I hope my response is not too off topic.
It reminded me of a family story told of my great, great grandmother (my maternal grandmother’s grandmother.) The granddaughter (if I remember correctly) of an Irish man married into French-Canadian stock, she was by all accounts a seer, told fortunes, talked to the dead, came back and talked to the living after she died (asking for a mass to be said), made predictions, and for some time before she died, people around her could see a glow of light emanating from her.
In any case, at some point she made a prediction for the future: that a day would come when a woman who could bear a child would be treated like a queen because it would be so rare.
Given that this was said probably 100 or more years ago, it must have been hard to believe in the days when women had 10-15 kids (especially the French-Canadians). When I began hearing of the damage the covid-19 foxines did to women’s reproductive organs and probably the young girls’ living today when they reach their childbearing years, I remembered the old family story. Oof.
-Myriam
Hi John Michael,
Your comment piqued my curiosity, and I turned up this interesting article: How much money does Ukraine owe, and to whom
Hmm, bond issuers seeking yield perhaps?
Cheers
Chris
BeardTree, as a polytheist — and what I suppose would have to be called an evidence-based polytheist, who derives his views on the gods from the records of human religious experience — it would be absurd in the extreme for me to claim that all the other gods exist but Christ does not. I’ve known people whose integrity I trust who have reported experiences of Christ’s presence and love that were every bit as powerful and life-changing as the experiences other believers have with their gods and goddesses. That being the case, I cheerfully admit the divinity of Christ; I simply don’t believe that he and his dad are the only god there is — and the same logic that leads me to recognize their divinity requires me to affirm that of all the other gods and goddesses as well. It’s a big, busy, lively universe out there, and there’s room for a lot of gods.
Myriam, here’s something odd. One of the things that came up when I was writing my novel Star’s Reach, which is set about 450 years from now in what used to be called America and is then called Meriga, is the way that women who bear children are treated. Since a lot of people are sterile due to the long-term effects of chemical pollution, they’re paraded through the streets in great honor and get to join a politically powerful society of fertile women, called Circle. “Like a queen” isn’t too bad a description. I didn’t come up with that consciously; most of Star’s Reach was written intuitively — I’d imagine sitting down with the main character, Trey sunna Gwen, and we’d tip back some beers together and he’d start talking. So Trey and your great-great-grandmother apparently saw the same thing…
Chris, yep. Spengler’s chuckling to himself in the afterlife, watching the struggle between plutocracy and Caesarism playing out exactly as he predicted.
Coffee as a new world power substance?
Coffee free coffee is in the news. Or maybe it should be called Advanced Coffee Substitute, even more so in England.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gv0rvx0dvo
Personally I find coffee perfectly vile so it’s a habit I never got into.
Re rural magic, there is a short story by Saki – AKA Hector Hugh Munro – about this called ‘The Peace of Mowsle Barton’. A man named Crefton Lockyer decides he’s had enough of the noise and fumes of London and moves to a village called Mowsle Barton where he hopes to spend his latter years enjoying the tranquillity of village life. Once there, he finds that village life is anything but tranquil and is instead a place mired in anger, resentment and petty jealousies, with the villagers constantly casting malicious spells on their neighbours. Kettles won’t boil, fires won’t light and “suspicious looks, sulky silences, or sharp speeches had become the order of the day”.
One day, sitting near a pond he notices to his horror that the ducks on the water are upending themselves and drowning, then he notices an old woman nearby repeatedly muttering ‘Let un sink as swims’, whereupon he rushes back to his lodgings, packs his bags and, longing for crowded music halls “where an exuberant rendering of “1812” was being given by a strenuous orchestra”, makes haste back to London.
You can imagine that many rural villages were much like Mowsle Barton and quite possibly some of them still are.
Hm, a field study about the effects of chocolate, Earl Grey and red wine… I can see the potential. The main difficulty will be to find participants for the control group… 😀
Riffing off Myriam’s post but off-topic, so delete if necessary. Regarding Circle in “Star’s Reach”…I had assumed it was an upper class thing, since Trey described growing up on a farm with his mother and father, and also mentioned that Tam (the mother of his son) would never had gotten into Circle if it had come out that a ruinman was the father. I wonder if the Merigan upper classes are less fertile, perhaps something similar to the PMC of today being more likely to be vaxxed?
About “coffee is a New World power substance,” wasn’t coffee discovered by the Arabs long before we reached the New World? Or, at least, those parts of it where coffee can be grown; I’m not counting Portugese fishermen or Viking colonists in the North.
OT: The new Atlantic is in, and OMG. First major article is on judicial independence as a long-standing Good Thing, threatened by Biden’s proposal for term limits on the Supreme Court (agreed – that’s a a bad idea)… except! That now, the Court seems to be in Trumps’s pockets, so it’s judicial independence is Bad Thing. Article followed by another “Omigawd, my neighbors are hard core Trumpsters, weep, wail, clutch pearls, faint, and/or have a truly operatic fit of The Vapors! Victorian language chosen deliberately to reflect the similarities thereof. Note the cover, in very dark tones, of Trump driving a horse-drawn carriage(!) containing a circus elephant. Now I know what happened to the souls of all those tightly-corseted Victorian ladies obsessed with purity.
Regarding the projection of rage: over on Reddit, there are many subforums for advice, where people tell their stories about conflicting with other people and ask for advice or judgment. Often these stories get thousands of comments, many pouring out rage on the ‘villain’ of the story. Occasionally the poster gets the ‘villain’ label and the commenters’ rage directed at them. The ‘villains’ are always unnamed.
Could this outpouring have a similar effect to a deliberate magical attack, or is knowing and visualizing the target necessary?
Re: my last comment – not as OT as it looked. Because the 2nd article in The Atlantic revolved around the way a nearly apolitical wife and mother has become an obsessed rage monster after her activist daughter was shot my a policeman on January 6th. And since has sacrificed everything else in her “Justice for my daughter” crusade – her marriage, her former life, and her happiness.
Milkyway,
The control groups for red wine are easy to find – those who are sober and don’t drink any wine. As for tea – many Americans don’t drink tea so they can be the control group.
Bacon, Saki is always worth reading! (“Sredni Vashtar” was one of my favorite stories when I was a child; I’ll let you guess why.) I don’t recall reading “The Peace of Mowsle Barton” before, though, and I’ll have to remedy that shortly.
Milkyway, I’ll volunteer for the control group. I don’t care greatly for any of those.
Roldy, Circle is for respectable folks, meaning from the middle of the working class up; Trey’s mother was a member, though in rural areas it’s much quieter, meeting in somebody’s home once a week or so. Ruinmen aren’t respectable — that’s why their guild halls are always outside the city walls — and Tam would have been in trouble because ruinmen have to deal with toxic wastes and radioactive substances often enough that there’s a lot of prejudice around that. (I modeled it on the Japanese prejudice against hibakusha, survivors of the atomic blasts and their descendants — everyone feels sorry for them but nobody wants their kid to marry one.)
Patricia, funny. You may be right; on the other hand, that may simply be how the more useless members of privileged classes behave when their privilege starts trickling away.
Kfish, it’s not an effective magical attack, but it does tend to poison the astral atmosphere and make things nastier for everybody.
Patricia M, I didn’t think it was OT — but thanks for the context.