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 Eighteen: Potions and Magnetism” (Greer & Mikituk, pp. 355-363).
Commentary:
There are chapters of our text that modern readers can examine in perfect comfort, serene in the conviction that the subjects Lévi discusses are nothing anyone has to worry about nowadays. Our medical knowledge has advanced far enough since his time that nobody has to worry about being accidentally buried alive, for example, and even our Satanists are pretty small beer compared to their equivalents in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Then we turn the page and slam face first into something that has far more relevance to today’s life than most of us like to think about.
This chapter belongs to this latter category. It begins innocently enough with a fine bit of literary atmosphere, brandishing imagery from classical Greek and Roman authors. These, as my more literate readers will be aware, used Thessaly in much the same way that cheap modern horror writers use Transylvania, as a cliché for anything scary. It’s true, mind you, that magical practitioners in ancient Thessaly seem to have known, as their equivalents in rural areas all over the world have always known, how to use locally available substances to affect consciousness. There are plenty of naturally occurring drugs that will lower inhibitions and stir passions, and plenty of others that will raise inhibitions and quell passions. These are among the basic working tools of rural folk magic everywhere.
A certain degree of folk knowledge of neuropsychology underlies all this. The two categories of effects just noted are functions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems respectively. These are the two parts of the nervous system that aren’t dependent on the brain for their operation. The sympathetic nervous system is a net of nerves connecting the vital organs, coordinated by little lumps of nerve tissue called plexi, of which the solar plexus is the largest and most important; it keeps your organs working in the normal way and activates the biological appetites—food, sleep, and sex. The parasympathetic nervous system is a smaller but equally influential nerve net, centered on the vagus nerve, that rides herd on the sympathetic system and damps down its effects when blood and energy have to surge to the muscles or the brain.
These two are the yin and yang of the human nervous system. Stimulate the sympathetic system and the physical passions become more insistent while the muscles and mind relax; stimulate the parasympathetic system, and the physical passions fall silent while the muscles and mind snap to attention. There are plenty of drugs that can do either of these, and plenty of other methods that do them just as effectively: a caressing hand will stimulate the sympathetic, for example, while a sharp tap with the fingers will stimulate the parasympathetic. Tricks to activate one or the other play quite a substantial role in the toolkit of the old-fashioned witch, but they are rarely more than the foundation on which the practitioner builds.
The key to the old magic of Thessaly, and of a hundred other lands, is that the ebb and flow of activation between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems takes place below the ordinary level of consciousness. I say “ordinary” because you can learn to be conscious of that ebb and flow, given a certain investment of time and practice, but most people never put in the work they would need to achieve this, or see any reason to do so. That leaves them vulnerable to one of the odder habits of the human mind—its insistence on seeing passions as effects, not causes. This allows the witch to insert a false cause into the equation and get a desired effect.
Consider a man who wakes up angry. Quite often this happens because his dreams have stirred up memories of past events that left him feeling frightened, grieving, or ashamed—it’s another odd habit of the human mind that it often flees from these feelings into anger, which is less uncomfortable to experience. As he stomps around the place in the gray light of dawn, his strongest desire (though it’s usually an unconscious one) is to find something onto which he can project his anger, so he can vent it. He’ll find something, too. Watch what happens next, though: he’ll insist with perfect sincerity that the target of his anger is the thing that made him angry. It’s not—far more often than not, the anger came first, and found a target on which to earth out—but unless he learns to observe his own mind, he’ll never notice this.
Now consider the way that the same effect empowers the witch’s love potion. Let’s suppose that the man we’ve just discussed is heterosexual but uninterested in a particular woman, and that woman wants to manipulate him through sex anyway. All she has to do is make sure he drinks something that stimulates the sympathetic system; then she does something to catch his attention in some way. Even if he doesn’t like her, if she’s got even the most rudimentary skills at the art of seduction, odds are he’s going to mistake the activation of his sympathetic system for sexual arousal inspired by her presence, and there’s a good chance that they’ll wind up in bed. If she knows what she’s doing, she can use this effect over and over again, and convince him that he’s crazy in love with her. He’s not, but his own lack of self-knowledge leaves him hopelessly vulnerable to this kind of manipulation.
Of course men can and do run the same kind of operation on women quite frequently, and it also happens tolerably often with gay and lesbian couples. People also do it to themselves, as witness the phenomenon of “beer goggles.” Alcohol is a powerful stimulant for the sympathetic nervous system. People drink it to give themselves permission to do what they want to do in the first place, but think they shouldn’t. So they wake up the next morning in bed with someone they’d normally consider unacceptable as a partner, and blame it on the beer. The unspoken reality in most such cases is that both participants in this transaction have highly inflated expectations of the kind of partners they can reasonably expect to attract, and have to cast a beer-fueled spell on themselves to get realistic about their options.
This kind of doublethink is embarrassingly common among people. Lévi points this out wryly with his discussion of the attraction many women feel toward “bad boys.” It’s a source of quite some amusement in male circles that so many women these days insist angrily that this attraction is a nasty masculine myth. Anyone who sits in a corner at a singles bar, sips a beverage, and watches the goings-on without getting caught up in them can settle the matter by direct observation. The denials just referenced are all the funnier in that old-school feminists, at least, used to be very well aware of the equivalent pattern on the other side of the gender divide.
The virgin-whore dichotomy, as this latter pattern was sometimes called, was a precisely comparable divergence between the way men said they wanted women to behave and the way they actually wanted them to behave. Social mores being different in those days, what happened much too often is that men married the “good girls” who did what men told them to do, and then cheated on the good girls with the not-so-good girls, producing a cascade of dishonesty, dissatisfaction, and misery on all sides. The same result is just as inevitable the current way around, as a great many former “nice guys” who tried to conform to what women said they wanted, and a comparable number of thirty-something single mothers who can’t get dates and wonder where all the good men are, can testify.
The same kind of cheap sorcery exploiting the gap between desire and reality, though, takes on an even more important form in contemporary life. Identical patterns of manipulation to the ones we’ve just been discussing are used in advertising of all kinds; that’s how advertising works. It’s in no way incorrect, in fact, to say that the economies of the developed world are powered by primitive witchcraft. Look at any advertisement you wish, especially but not only those in video format, and it’s easy to spot which of the two nerve nets they’re trying to stimulate: the warm fuzzy feelings of the sympathetic system are triggered by one set of stimuli, the cold prickly feelings of the parasympathetic system by a different set.
The goal of this kind of witchcraft is essentially the same as with the form we’ve been discussing. It’s just that instead of trying to convince you that you’re sexually aroused by someone who wouldn’t normally attract you, they’re trying to convince you that you want to buy a product, pay for a service, or elect a political candidate who normally wouldn’t attract you at all, by associating the thing they’re trying to sell you with the sympathetic reaction, or the opposite of the thing they’re trying to sell you with the parasympathetic reaction. The gimmicks used for this are utter clichés, and once you spot them you’ll find it impossible to miss them.
The gimmicks in question, please note, are anything but omnipotent. There are two ways that they fail. The first is that the target of the spell has to be unreflective enough not to notice the spell. If the target keeps any degree of mental balance, recognizes what’s going on, and doesn’t fall into the trap of associating the nerve reaction with the ideas or images that are being provided as a fake explanation, the spell fails; it really is as simple as that.
Yet there’s an even more catastrophic mode of failure, which is when the person who’s casting the spell becomes its victim. “Getting high on your own supply,” to use a current bit of internet slang, is fatal in this kind of magical work. If you fall under the sway of your own spell, you lose the ability to realize when it’s not working, and thus become incapable of adapting it to changing conditions. Thus your magic becomes predictable and easily evaded, just as you lose the ability to notice that people are evading it.
As I write these words, the political trajectory of the United States has just been turned on its ear by exactly this effect. One party’s supporters became so high on their own supply that they lost the ability to remember that the warm fuzzy feelings they assigned to their candidate, and the cold prickly feelings they assigned to the other, were artifacts of their own propaganda and would not be felt by anyone who hadn’ t been affected by it. As a result, their propaganda became clumsy and hackneyed, and they became the only ones on whom it had any effect at all. Their attempts to sway public opinion failed, but they remained incapable of perceiving the possibility that it could fail, and so they walked blithely into an epic electoral disaster serenely convinced that they were sure to win.
How this will play out over the months, years, and decades to come is an interesting question, in more than abstract terms. As a lesson for the aspiring student of magic, though, the 2024 US election is worth close study. Set aside your own political opinions and passions, dismiss for a moment the substantive issues that were up for debate, and simply pay attention to how each side tried to associate their candidate with sympathetic nervous system reactions and the other side with parasympathetic reactions. Notice how this was done, who it affected, and who shrugged off whose efforts how easily. You can learn a great deal from this.
You can learn at least as much by studying successful and failed advertising campaigns for products, or by sitting back in the corner of a singles bar with a drink in your hand, as mentioned earlier, and watching the antics of the other people there in genial silence. In each case you’ll see the same effects being deployed over and over again, in different contexts, by different means, and with different degrees of competence. Learn those effects, and you’ll gain an invaluable gift, which is the ability to choose whether to respond to them or not.
More broadly, there are two kinds of magic, which our text describes as the way of the magician and the way of the sorcerer. The magician masters the influences of the astral light in himself or herself, and by doing this gains mastery over those same influences in the wider world. The sorcerer tries to control the influences of the astral light in the wider world without first learning to master them in himself or herself. The sorcerer thus always risks falling under the power of his or her spells—the real meaning of the Faust legend—while the true magician is free of that risk.
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 19, “The Magistery of the Sun,” on December 11, 2024. See you then!
Hi JMG and kommentariat. When I’ve read about the effects of alcohol in bad sexual “choices”, I’ve just remembered Shakespeare quote…alcohol provokes desire but it takes away performance (if I remember well this quote in English, which isn’t my mother language).
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.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May baby Gigi, who may be suffering from side effects of medication prescribed during pregnancy, be healed, strengthened and blessed. May her big brother Francis also be blessed and remain in excellent health.
May May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
May Ram, who is facing major challenges both legal and emotional with a divorce and child custody dispute, be blessed with the clarity of thought, positive energy, and the inner strength to continue to improve the situation.
May FJay peacefully birth a healthy baby at home with her loved ones. May her postpartum period be restful and full of love and support. May her older child feel surrounded by her love as he adapts to life as a big brother and may her marriage be strengthened during this time.
May Leonardo Johann from Bremen in Germany, who was
born prematurely two months early, come home safe and sound.
May all living things who have suffered as a consequence of Hurricanes Helene and Milton be blessed, comforted, and healed.
May Tyler’s partner Monika and newborn baby Isabella both be blessed with good health.
May The Dilettante Polymath’s eye heal and vision return quickly and permanantly, and may both his retinas stay attached.
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 Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
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.
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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.
This is a fairly timely post given some of the weirder changes in political rhetoric going on right now. I hope I’m wrong, because things could get extremely weird for the next couple of years if I’m not, but it looks like the Democrats are doubling down on the Trump and everyone who supports him is racist, sexist, and evil with a side of evil sauce, but with a new twist.
One of the more fascinating things about the last decade or so is the rise of talk about “implicit bias” into the mainstream, which is the idea of subconscious attitudes that shape behaviour in ways the people influenced by them remain unaware. The first thing I find so fascinating is just how close it gets to the kind of occult material discussed here; and even though most people talking about it back away from many of the implications of it, there is a ton of important material here that validates a lot of occult traditions.
The other part of what makes this so interesting is that many of the people who are making these claims never once seem to stop to notice these apply to them as well: it is usually only other people who they are willing to discuss here. The wryly amusing fact that nearly all the research done finding implicit racism is a powerful psychological force use datasets drawn from left-leaning minds has not been lost on me; but it runs deeper than that. These findings apply across the board, not in the extremely one sided fashion they are so often applied now.
It looks like the spell has started to evolve from “Everyone opposing us is motivated by evil” to “Everyone opposing us is motivated by evil; and we have Science showing when someone tries to claim they oppose us for any other reason it is because they do not actually know what motivates them!”
our culture has made many “bad boy” and “good girl” tropes that play on our desires and sell them back to us as movies and shows.
women like werewolves and vampire movies because of their instinct to “tame” the alpha male! their “perfect” man is a cruel, powerful, and uncaring monster to the outside world and kind, soft and obsessed with them. And for men they want an undiscovered princess, a women who is confused, high status and way more beautiful than she thinks she is, that somehow is both craving for male attention and managed to avoid it until you have arrived.
fun post, thanks!
“The first is that the target of the spell has to be unreflective enough not to notice the spell.”
The trouble here is that people often don’t have a sense whether they are truly reflective or not.
I read (somewhere!) that ‘educated’ people are often more susceptible to propaganda than the ‘uneducated’ partly because they think whatever education they have arms them with enough reflective capacity to allow them to defend themselves against propaganda.
Apparently the “the mark of maturity is the withdrawal of projections” (Jungian therapist Marion Woodman, I believe), but it appears this withdrawal of projections isn’t a matter of withdrawing them completely, but more a matter of becoming aware first of one’s crudest projections, only to reveal ever more subtle degrees of projections, and this process may not ever end because we are humans with physical and emotional bodies.
This is more complicated because of how related abstract thought in general is with the act of projection. Indeed, one way to define a projection might be as the unconscious use of an abstraction in the service of emotions or instincts. I’ve observed, in myself and in others, how seemingly rational statements or arguments are made in discussions about politics, for example, but there’s this hazy emotional core underlying them. That doesn’t guarantee that the conclusions are faulty but it likely increases the chances they are, and the main thing I’ve found effective to handle this is not to refine my arguments but become aware of that underlying emotional core.
I’ve been reading and thinking a lot on this topic in the past few months, and one of the threads I’ve come across is, for example, how the capacity for self-deception can, without great care, increase the further along the spiritual path you get. Which has been quite sobering to consider especially because I am still working on the more crude projections I engage in. This would seem to be one of the dangers Levi has been pointing out when working with the astral light!
“Stimulate the sympathetic system and the physical passions become more insistent while the muscles and mind relax; stimulate the parasympathetic system, and the physical passions fall silent while the muscles and mind snap to attention.”
Yet, drugs that decrease sympathetic activity *sedate*. When under effect of a strong sympatholytic drug, a patient undergoes sedation…but of a peculiar kind: the mind operates almost independently of the body – he or she reacts, consciously, when stimulated, but otherwise remains in a dream-like state.
Of course, I do not expect exactness from a hundred-years old text written by a layman. Should we understand that under the effect of such drugs the mind gets focused in itself because it has been temporarily unburdened from the body?
It seems like academics are really high on their own supply. I mean, I I know the professor in Animal House was really stoned. Not only was he high on his own supply, but he they take regular skinny dips into the student pool. What they are toking has really gone to their head. The problem with repeated bong hits is you don’t have time to come back to reality.
The acceptance of ones place in the biological/sociological pecking order seems to happen better within smaller groups than it does within a very large population. So in small groups ( village, small isolated town, college, bar at closing time) our brain does a better job of assessing our prospects with the other sex given the observable pool to choose from and the competition.
I think the internet has really messed this up. It has effectively presented men and women with an infinitely sized dating pool. Our primitive social brains have trouble grasping our place in the pecking order in such a situation and as a result successful dating and pairing seems to be way down from the pre-internet past. I am tool old for this new era and met my wife within the compact confines of a remote University in the pre-internet age. But I am told by younger people that internet dating is a mess.
Slightly above average women ( on a physical attraction scale) think of themselves as perfect 10’s and demand to meet only the most handsome and wealthy men. While average looking men with fat wallets think of themselves at the top of the dating pool. There is no hands-on biological give and take. The false, contrived and glitter enhanced world of internet dating sites distorts and eliminates the subtle social signals we need to effectively find our place in the biological world.
Chuaquin, there’s that! In modest amounts, though, it does the one but not the other.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Taylor, oh, that’s rich. Still, “maybe you should check your own implicit biases” may turn into a useful tool in response.
Alex, and nobody ever stops to wonder whether these tropes are being deliberately marketed to keep men and women angry and upset at each other. Lonely, depressed people do more compulsive shopping than happy, contented people…
Jbucks, excellent! Yes, that’s one of the core differences between intellectual and spiritual development. You can learn and learn and still remain completely clueless about your own projections. Since archetypes are the raw material of thought, as I see it, we literally can’t think at all without projecting — but we can learn to be conscious of our projections, hold them lightly, and be ready to change them: to use them rather than being used by them. Intellectual education won’t do that, nor will the more ideological kinds of spiritual training; it takes meditation and reflection.
Bruno, drugs are blunt instruments and don’t reliably mimic the natural responses of any of the body’s systems.
Eagle Fang, there’s that!
Clay, yes, very much so. I’m not greatly looking forward to dealing with that when I begin dating again; I plan on staying offline for that aspect of my life, however.
“These two are the yin and yang of the human nervous system. Stimulate the sympathetic system and the physical passions become more insistent while the muscles and mind relax; stimulate the parasympathetic system, and the physical passions fall silent while the muscles and mind snap to attention.”
Ah, that is delightfully synchronous given what I’m currently experimenting with!
In this morning’s practice I needed to adjust the vagus breathing to a less rigid and longer form and spent about an hour working – very noticeable were the effects on channeling the ‘creative’ energy to ‘charge’ the blended cauldrons – the effects have stayed with me the whole day.
Taylor,
Once upon a time in my early twenties, I took one of those implicit bias tests that are used in social science research and meant to demonstrate unconscious racial prejudice on the part of the taker. It was essentially a lot of very rapid-fire images (many images per second) of black people and white people all mixed to gather, and I had to click on buttons that essentially represented “good” and “bad” for each image without having time to consciously notice the person’s race or expression. I believe the buttons were green and red, but I can’t recollect their actual labels. The result was that I am apparently implicitly biased ever-so-slightly in favor of black people (I’m white). It was clear at the time that that wasn’t the result it was meant to demonstrate! I am often tempted in conversations about racial politics to earnestly discuss my attempts to overcome my unconscious anti-white biases as revealed by that test, but so far have resisted.
““Everyone opposing us is motivated by evil; and we have Science showing when someone tries to claim they oppose us for any other reason it is because they do not actually know what motivates them!””
That meshes rather well with the current fad of “there is no free will” rattling around the psychological spheres.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2398369-why-free-will-doesnt-exist-according-to-robert-sapolsky/
On a different topic, Much of Levi involves meditation, as in formal meditation. For those who do not engage in formal meditation, what substitutes for it? What counts as informal meditation? The BC comic from a couple of weeks back involved fishing. How about weeding the garden? Or reloading ammunition like yesterday? Does any repetitive low mental effort activity give the same general effect? For that matter, when I was working on the Phud I would often go out to the Forestry Department’s demonstration wood lot for some archery practice. That was a welcome break from the highly abstract research project.
I’ve never seemed to need formal meditation, attempts to do so generally result in a nap. Ideas and concepts are generally bouncing around in my head in a Brownian motion sort of way. Some of the linkups resulting from that were very helpful in my career.
Excellent!
The perceptual manipulations of witches and advertising moguls are being studied by some psychologists. In a 2021 Lecture at Cambridge, Jordan Peterson said, “You don’t see objects and infer meaning; You perceive meaning and infer objects.”
That phrase is worthy of serious meditation! It helped me understand that the ‘Implicit Bias’ folks are trying to inject their own meanings into my perceptual mechanisms as a means of control;
It also helps me prevent mistakes at work–Suppose that it is my job to confirm that HCTZ tablets have, in fact, been put into a patient’s medicine vial labeled HCTZ. If I am aware that I am using an internal set of meanings to infer the objects before me, I will also know that when the ‘Mint’ drug manufacturer puts the same minty-green label on all the types of drugs they make, they are increasing the danger that my tech has selected the wrong stock bottle. Add to my set of meanings, ‘Mint means danger of wrong selection’ and my accuracy of check is improved.
And isn’t “…You perceive meaning and infer objects” another way of saying “Magic is the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will”?
For the interested, here’s a textual summary of Peterson’s talk:
https://thecritic.co.uk/how-do-we-perceive-the-world/
and the video of the full talk;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HgSnS-z4JU
Thanks again for this blog series, JMG.
British observer here. First off, thank you to our host and the education he’s graciously and tirelessly offered for so many years now. I think even a total ignoramus like myself eventually can get some of the basics right. Viz. once you see the curtain raised on Oz, you can’t forget seeing what’s been revealed behind it. Step 1 truly is ditching the Telly Belly Bunkum box.
But I digress from what I wanted to comment on: The utterly insane reaction from a sizeable part of the US electorate on losing in 2024. I first thought what I was seeing being reported was just isolated instances: people videoing themselves crying, screaming, issuing threats of violence, disavowing family and lifelong friends for voting Trump, women shaving their hair, getting tattooed, POC maga hat wearers getting physically assaulted by little old white ladies for not acting like they demand black people should, sex strikes, hysterectomies, the list goes on! But they keep on coming to the extent I must conclude these OTT reactions to a democratic vote (more or less as democratic as any other afaik) are *widespread *.
So given your explanation of incompetent sorcery above, JMG, I can only conclude that what we are witnessing is true damage to real victims. These people really DO believe the sky is falling. They really DO believe Trump is ‘literally H…ler’. I laughed at what I saw at first. It just all seem so comically absurd! But now I am profoundly sad and sorry for these people. They have been brainwashed. They are the victims of their own side’s bad magic. All the warm’n’fuzzy is gone for them, they got hit with all the cold’n’prickly their side threw out. Brrrr.
@Alex Thurber #4
I always thought the werewolf concept, at least in the Lon Cheney movies’ version of it, was a projection of womens’ cycles onto a man– Which of us men, living with a woman, has not occasionally gotten his head bitten off when his partner is in that time of the month?
I think many women who have that understanding of Lon Cheney werewolf movies might feel justifiably smug about them. “Hmph!” they might say, “It’s not just Lon Cheney–Give any man a monthly cycle, and they couldn’t manage.”
Have there been successful female werewolf movies? I can’t think of any…
I used to think that the vampire concept was a representation of the Rentier or Professional Managerial Class, secretly sucking the life out of others to prop up their own lifestyle. Prince Vlad Dracul and many other royal families fit that description.
But the Twilight series, about a teenage vampire who falls in love with a normal girl, is plainly about growing into sexuality. She desperately wants him to bite her neck, but the consequences! She knows (for now) she shouldn’t. He desperately wants to bite her neck, but (for now) loves her too much to take advantage. Who hasn’t been there?
John, yes: that’s also true about alcohol…
“as a great many former ‘nice guys’ who tried to conform to what women said they wanted”
This was a timely chapter for me, magical education aside.
My parents spent a fair amount of effort teaching me as a young child to be a nice guy. I understand why, they were hoping to avoid teen pregnancies and other unpleasantness. Beyond that, they displayed a continual contempt for normal male behavior.
But I was a janegirl by nature, shy and sensitive, and they forgot to include any instruction on how to pursue a romantic relationship. I imagine they felt I would be fine and figure it all out. It… didn’t work out that way. So now in middle age I’m trying to recalibrate and figure out when it’s appropriate to be a gentleman and when not.
As I was reading this Bob Marley’s 3 little birds came on and it occurred to me that his choice of 3 is significant and I had never really thought of it in that song. But in fact to stay outside the drama of the conflict of 2 is actually much harder than it sounds.
My friend, who had been so common sense about the covid debacle and was a comfort for me in difficult times, suddenly called me all distressed about ‘racism.’ I was quite surprised she couldn’t see the drama from a more balanced view, but then again it takes significant awareness of what you are bringing to the table to see it. Thank you to you (and Bob!) for helping me to start to see.
Not for nothing did the Desert Fathers adjure dispassion, or regulation of the appetitive (desire) and incensive (anger) aspects of the soul…not true detachment or apathy, but rather a discernment of how these can be easily stirred up and led astray (by demons, in their case).
One bit of interest from the recent desultory results: the Blue side seemed to recognize at some point that they ought to project “joy” with their chose candidate, to try to conjure up…something positive, I reckon. Where it went amiss, I guess, is how out of step it was with the lived reality of many in the country, and how such a fantasy of (big quotes) “joy” might perhaps look instead to those experiencing harship…and interesting if desultory attempt, if nothing else.
Axé
@Emmanuel Goldstein, #15
Well, regarding female werewolf movies, Ginger snaps was a moderate success that spawned two sequels and a cult following in the early 2000s. While the sexual element is there, I think the central theme is the coming of age of two suburban kids that are thrown head-first into a merciless world. The adults in their lives are either bumbling fools or self serving jerks, therefore useless. In order to survive, the protagonists have to piece together a new world model out of the unreliable information available from slightly older, not as clueless kids.
I’ll ask pardon from our host since this is not immediately relevant to this weeks theme (though I think it fits in the general topics we are exploring together).
Hi John Michael,
Oh yeah, know thyself, then choose and act consciously.
When a particularly unpleasant chunk of such mud was thrown at me last week, I responded by telling them that ‘I’m not emotionally invested in the outcome’. Done, end of story.
Man, I’ve been watching people and the media lose their minds over your election for the past two months, and it surprises me to see how great a percentage of the population don’t want to put the time into learning how to protect themselves from this most basic of tomfooleries. And! You can see that the media has fallen for their own spells and are now busy signing their imminent demise notices – bubble land must be a nice place to live! Those articles over the past few months with the polls suggesting that the outcome would be close, should have their authors and editors face some pretty harsh consequences, lest the bad habits continue, with even worse consequences. They’re not there to set the tone, they’re there to report upon the tone – they’ve got just one job. The same thing happened in 2016, Brexit, and err, the Voice referendum down here. Makes me wonder what else they’re getting seriously wrong, don’t you reckon? 🙂
Have to laugh, Witches for Patriarchy, or was it against the patriarchy, oh well, I now forget, they’re probably the same people hyping up some sort of weird sex strike which I saw reported upon in the media recently. Like what the? It all sounds very deeply weird. Anyway, I don’t have time for such nonsense, and so didn’t bother reading the articles. 🙂
It’s a funny old world out there dude! I’m of the opinion that irreverence is a good response to this particular subject.
Cheers
Chris
@Clay,
Have you ever watched any of Hoe_math’s videos? If you are trying to understand the dating climate out there, his insights are useful. (I’ve been out of the dating scene for 30+ years, but I am trying to understand my daughter’s life.) The video that (I think) relates to what you are describing is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh0hj9ZD9FY&list=PLkKRC7A4ub5VF_hbQcJTarycebW6lUswm&index=9. (For those who don’t watch video, you can drag the video slider to look at his diagram, but I’ve been unable to find any of his diagrams available for free on the Internet.)
@Miow,
Perhaps if they keep the cat hats off after they shave their heads, they might get some more light to their pineal gland…
@Emmanuel Goldstein,
Re: werewolves as a projection of women’s cycles onto a man… Ha! But also, Hmm…
There’s a whole genre of meme videos produced to support Donald Trump that illustrate this principle well: they’re all a sequence of disconnected images backed with hard rock or triumphant orchestral music that goes: “Jet plane! Army men! Fireworks! American flag! Donald Trump 2024!”
Absolutely no attempt at telling a coherent story, just a series of visual and musical emotional triggers, with the target displayed at the end for the payoff.
First, thank you, JMG, for clarifying the point that that “the anger cones first; the object comes second,” or else is deliberately searched for, or projected onto the current object of the media’s “10 second hate.” And how very closely the Sympathetic nerve system mapped onto the Romantic Era mindset.
Is there a difference between people whose Parasympathetic nerves divert energy to the brain and those who divert it to the muscles? As a double Capricorn with Mercury in Sag and Moon in Gemini, mine seems to get diverted to the brain, hence to the mouth (or keyboard,) but whose muscles are in nearly as bad shape as the systems connected to the plexi – food, sleep, and sex.
In the Tarot card, you have the Crab, the dog, and the wolf. Does the Crab symbolize the Parasympathetic system types? You’ve already discussed the Wolf back in the Ring Cycle post, the Dog being the Guardian version of the Wolf.
This may be way OT: But here it is; delete if you see fit.
Headline from one of the Pocket Posts, from “Aeon.” “Say Goodbye to the Information Age; it’s All About Reputation Now.” Subhead: “We’ve begun to evaluate and trust the source rather than the message.”
Do you think women liking “bad boys” has anything to do with (most of) them having female astral bodies? If there’s anything the bad boys are good at, it’s creating lots of fun, excitement, and drama. Which seems like something a female astral body would find to be quite stimulating? “Nice guys” aren’t going to be all that good at creating emotional fireworks.
Clay, very true about those dating apps and social media platforms! Of course, those site are presenting only the illusion of an infinitely sized dating pool. For the average man, it’s endless scrolling of women will never swipe right on them (unless they’re looking for a free food date); even most of the ugly ones will not give them the time of day. For the average woman, they get access to a short list of men in their town who would ordinarily be way out of their league; i.e. are very good looking, and present themselves as having money and leading fun and exciting lives. The problem is, the “top” men on those sites are usually only interested in these average women for sex, and then promptly moving onto the next one who foolishly thinks she just landed “the one”….well, because these guys have lots of options and thus they can. Yeah…I think we need to go back to the old days when one’s courtship pool was very local and restricted to small family/church/friend circles.
Seems like social media and much of the internet is a giant web of sorcery.
Hello, I just got home from a Week in the hospital. Would appreciate prayers, healing, and so forth.
One of Dion Fortune’s “Dr Taverner” stories describes some occult mischief done by means of gift bouquets in which a moonstone and a somewhat vanilla-like scent had been included, with the result that the recipients became vulnerable to telepathic ill-wishing, and then became confused and suicidal. The scent is derived from the tonka or Tonquin bean, which has been used as an adulterant for vanilla, but which can have irritant properties. One aspect of the perfumer’s art is to combine scents in such a way that the sweet or pleasant serve to mask some more potent but less acceptable, thus slipping the latter under the threshold, so to speak, of consciousness.
It is interesting that many of the scents Levi mentions (eg, almonds) are not regarded as particularly powerful nowadays. It may be that we are less sensitive, or that the scents are more synthetic and do not have the complexity of natural scents, or that we have so many distractions that it takes something more than a sweet irritant to worm its way into our thoughts and moods.
Some scents can also have direct effects on the nervous system, mimicking to some extent the effects of neurotransmitters, but that is perhaps a topic for another time. I will say that Levi’s account of the way that deliriants and so on affect consciousness really does foreshadow the “set and setting” formulation of the 1960s. Whether any of the researchers who developed that formulation had read Levi is hard to say, since, if they did, they were probably not inclined to advertise it. It was much more respectable to cite the Tibetan “Book of the Dead” than to admit having read a 19th century French magus.
Earthworm, delighted to hear it.
Siliconguy, the key is reflective attention to your thinking, so you think about your thoughts. A daily walk in which you reflect on some chosen theme, and keep your mind focused on that theme, is a good substitute.
Emmanuel, excellent! I’m delighted to hear that Peterson is teaching this. I would say that magic is the art of deciding which objects you associate with which meanings.
Miow, it really is sad, and yes, there are human tragedies happening right now as a result of the blowback of Democratic propaganda. Brrr indeed.
Cliff, ouch, I’m sorry to hear you have to go through this.
Tamar, I take the fact that you’re mentioning me in the same breath as Bob Marley as a profound honor. Thank you!
Fra’ Lupo, I’m not sure that anyone, even Harris, actually felt the joy the marketing people wanted her to project. Even before panic set in, it was a profoundly joyless campaign.
Chris, oh, granted. A good belly laugh is helpful.
Kfish, thanks for this. Yes, that’s a good example.
Patricia M, the variations in sympathetic nerve activation — well, that’s an interesting issue the old lore doesn’t address. I’d say the dog, who is the guardian, is the parasympathetic, while the wild wolf is the sympathetic; the crayfish represents the ductless glands, which are far more primitive and basic than any of the nervous systems.
Corax, hmm! That’s an interesting suggestion, and a plausible one.
Your Kittenship, positive energy incoming. Heal promptly!
LeGrand, hmm! It didn’t occur to me that Lévi was talking about set and setting, but of course you’re quite correct.
@JMG – thanks! And blushes – yes, that was a crawdad, not a crab.
@Princess Cutekitten – condolences on hospital stay, best wishes, and blessings.
As usual, a fascinating and helpful commentary.
After rubbing my eyes, however, I consulted more than one reference work and believe you have interchanged the customary meanings of “sympathetic” and “parasympathetic.”
See, for example,
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/23266-parasympathetic-nervous-system-psns
@Patricia Mathews,
Another way of looking at the dog and wolf:
From the Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine:
“If you would operate by means of our bodies, take a fierce grey wolf, which, though on account of its name it be subject to the sway of warlike Mars, is by birth the offspring of ancient Saturn, and is found in the valleys and mountains of the world, where he roams about savage with hunger. Cast to him the body of the King, and when he has devoured it, burn him entirely to ashes in a great fire. By this process the King will be liberated; and when it has been performed thrice the Lion has overcome the wolf, and will find nothing more to devour in him. Thus our Body has been rendered fit for the first stage of our work. Know that this is the only right and legitimate way of purifying our substance: for the Lion purifies himself with the blood of the wolf…”
The wolf represents Saturn; the dog represents Mars. In Lambspring, the wolf and dog fight (and eventually become one), representing lead changing to iron. To me, Mars is definitely the Sympathetic Nervous System. I have not considered how the Crab fits… it can regenerate limbs, so sort of Saturnine. It can live in water (so subconscious and emotions), but it can live on land (but also in burrows, so underground, too) so conscious and unconscious. Hmm. I will be thinking about the Crab today…
“A comet in the 11th house predicts a great slaughter and destruction of the aristocracy … Combined with the placement of these sightings in Virgo, it is likely that the impending election will lead to a great many officials, elected and otherwise, losing their positions. This comet also suggests that in the near future, there will also be major changes in the institutions that shape American public life.” — JMG see: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/302694.html
It seems the slaughter was pretty much Right on target, and with the positions being announced for cabinet, etc. it only looks many more will be circling the drain in the swamp. Certainly getting high on their own supply didn’t have the desired effect.
This brings me to a question that might be kind of witchy and related to the genius loci of Washington D.C. Considering it was built on an actual swamp, how might the land their in DC effect the mind of the swamp things and creatures from the miasmic lagoon who continue to haunt its halls in modern times?
I think they could certainly use more toads, since those cleanse negativity on the etheric level if I recall correctly from a recent magic monday. Kek will be Kek.
If advertising is like a sorcerous information war, and if you end up imitating what you are contemplating, than another shift in the transition is taking place now with, no joke, The Onion getting Info Wars in a bankruptcy auction., as I’m sure you all will have heard. Now that the layers have been pulled back and peeled we can see The Onion poised to become the new purveyor of conspiracy theory, and perhaps some of Alex Jones ideas vindicated as true in the coming bureaucratic banishing ritual.
I suppose that pondering the image on Trump XVIII is a mental plane activity; a search for meaning. I notice that there are six points of interest, the moon, the wolf, the dog, the tower with one opening and the tower with two openings, and the lobster/crayfish. A six pointed star? And the moon; is it eclipsing the sun? All those golden rays coming from behind it? And the lobster/crayfish; is it facing into the card or out toward the viewer? It seems to have its arms/claws wide open in a gesture of inclusion, much like the body language of Hillary Clinton or the ever-popular Barney the Dinosaur…
Cliff
I was really affected by your reply to John post.
I am in a similar situation.
I hate the term “janegirl” with the passion of a billion exploding stars! And i know whenever you react so strongly to a term there is something important to unpack. I am so glad that, that term was not in use when i was a kid. Because i would have been labeled that. I hate that term because it implies (to me) that being kind, caring and empathetic are bad things for a man to be. Frack that shale!!!!!!!
Being kind, caring and empathetic are three of the finest quality a human can have. They are divine gifts.
Please don’t reject what could be the best part of you.
Instead, you might want to think about what other qualities that you have that you should strengthen.
For me I am working on Courage and Confidence. Both of these are traditionally associated with men (but there are plenty of women with those qualities). Courage is important because i have been burned several times before and it has been very painful, so i had become scared of trying. And being scared can come out many different ways, angry, cynical, distant, bitter etc. None of those are attractive behaviors.
Having courage means you recognize the danger and potential pain that you are putting yourself in but you do it anyway because being alone kind of sucks, and most people find meaning in their lives because of the relationships they have with others.
And have confidence in yourself, for me, realizing i have already lived through my worst fear: Falling madly in love and then being rejected. I lived through it, it wasn’t pleasant. If it happens again, I know i will get through it but this time i will not retreat to being scared hermit. I have confidence that i am a good person. Even if i spend the rest of my life alone i am determined not to let that break me. If i do spend the rest of my life alone, the likely reason for that is I need to learn a very important lesson in this life. I am going to freaking learn that lesson this life!!!!
Good luck Cliff.
“Taylor, oh, that’s rich. Still, “maybe you should check your own implicit biases” may turn into a useful tool in response.”
I’m not sure the kind of person who will insist Candace Owens is motivated to support Trump by internalized racism and misogyny can be reached. Some of them probably can, but at this point I am quite convinced that a lot of people are going to go to their graves unable to let go of their firm beliefs that anyone who does not agree with them must be evil, no matter how crazy the arguments need to become.
Jennifer (#11),
I did a fair amount of those tests as well, and always got amusing results. What struck me the most though is that each time I did the test, I got very different results. It does not seem to be replicable on the individual level, which raises all kinds of red flags about using it for anything important.
SIliconguy,
I’ve suspected for a few years now that part of what drives the rejection of free will is a guilty conscience. I know a lot of people who say free will is an illusion, and all of them have betrayed their stated ideals. I suspect that the free will is fake thing is nothing more than the “I had no choice!” argument made by people who did horrible things and are trying to justify it, just on a far grander scale.
Miow,
I grew up in a suburb of Ottawa, capital of Canada. Culturally, we are just a northern extension of the US, and we tend to lean very far left, so a lot of people I know are suffering mental breakdowns right now. To give just one example, someone I was friends with in high school is a gay man who is now terrified that at some point in the next couple of years Trump will invade Canada in order to round up all the gay people here and have them all tortured and executed. Apparently he is seriously considering suicide to avoid this fate.
Brr about sums up how I feel about it all.
Gray Hat, interesting. I’ll look into it.
Eagle Fang, I think the choice of Washington DC as the site for our national capitol will turn out to be one of the worst mistakes in this nation’s history. The earth energies there are stagnant, murky, and unhealthy. If I thought there was any chance of getting a hearing, I’d go onto RFK Jr.’s suggest-a-policy site and suggest that the national capitol be moved to a new site somewhere in the southern Ohio River basin, maybe on the Indiana-Kentucky border, while DC should be given back to Maryland and turned into a historical monument.
Phutatorius, good. Keep working on it.
Taylor, oh, you’re probably correct. Plenty of people went to their graves in the wake of the 1932 election convinced that FDR was evil incarnate.
Maybe there will be room in the budget if stuff gets cleared out for some geomancers.
I’ll put in a request for that on the RFK Jr. thing. It is at least worth starting a conversation about and injecting the idea out there, as in your fiction. I will encourage anyone else who cares to join me to do the same.
For the sake of downstate Illinois I would rather carve out Chicago from Illinois and make it the capital of the United States. Then Illinois politics won’t be so dominated by leftist Chicago Democrats.
With respect to the dog and the wolf — I rather think that the identification of the two canids on the card as dog and wolf was a French innovation, if only because of the very old French kenning (to use a non-French term!) for twilight, “between dog and wolf”.
This emphasizes the twilight (rather than midnight) quality of the card, and thus of the state of consciousness that it suggests — twilight awareness, in which one supposes that one is not asleep, but in which one is clearly bemused, bedazzled, or beglamored . States or trances of excited fascination (as in games of chance) can go a long way toward impairing judgement even without the assistance of alcohol or other drugs. And anesthesiologists often induce “twilight sleep”, in which the patient is responsive and even articulate, but afterward amnesic for the proceedings. It’s interesting that among the things forbidden in the bedroom Levi mentions datura stramonium, which is a source of some of the drugs first used to induce twilight sleep.
It is an old piece of occult lore than drugs are most effectively used in magic in small (physiologically effective, not homeopathic) doses — just enough to tint ordinary consciousness. without swamping it. (Occult microdosing, as it were — but with set and setting playing a much stronger role.) As with incense, just enough to activate state dependent learning will do. In the proper context, a small sip of communion wine can do something that chugging the bottle cannot.
@Alex Thurbur #4, @Emmanuel Goldstein #15
The “male monthly cycle” is more likely to be a product of married men going without sex for a few days a month — much more common before oral and other non-procreative sexual activities were normalized.
The first thing that Trump promises to do when he gets into office is to create yet another bureaucracy called the Department of Government Efficiency, which will probably end up being as useless and inefficient as any other government bureaucracy.
Not looking so good for those who put their hopes on Trump to reduce government bureaucracy. The United States doesn’t need to create another department in order to reduce bureaucracy, it needs somebody willing to eliminate positions and entire departments.
I believe you have gotten the sympathetic and parasympathetic flipped. Sympathetic is for threat response and similar activation of the skeletal muscles and cognition. Parasympathetic is for rest, digestion, sexual arousal and similar.
JMG, I heard once that Washington has been chosen as the capitol of your country precisely because it is so unsanitary and barely livable. Back then it ensured that politicians didn’t spent much time there!
JMG, I was particularly struck by Levi’s phrase: “The excessive fear of a thing renders it almost always inevitable.” I and others have noticed sizable amounts of fear galloping about within the heads of folks upset (an understatement) about the recent US election: a sweep of the Presidency, House, and Senate, with movement towards the Republican side even in places like I inhabit (California.) That fear seems to not respect national boundaries; our friends and acquaintances in Europe seem if anything equally in the grip of said fears. The sales staff (media, intel agencies, NGOs, and so forth) must be beside themselves. What a choice: pump up the fear even more and make your captive audience even more dysfunctional, or tone it down and see your demographics dwindle. Keep all that up, and the purveyors of fear seem destined for the apocryphal fate of the criminal judge, Nicolas Remigius, mentioned in the text, but this time around for real! Messy!
So the sympathetic / parasympathetic divide is similar to the food / threat binary that you’ve talked about in previous writing?
To be blunt, I think there’s a certain amount of consent to getting carried away, at least at first. The emotional payoff is exciting and to stop looking at the advertising or the propaganda means giving up the interesting stimulation that they provide.
And now I’ve just realized why so many political Twitter accounts break up their tweets and memes with cute animal posts. It’s a warm, fuzzy emotion generator placed right next to a mention of their special person to get people associating those feelings with the candidate!
Also, the study of signs and how they get their meanings is called semiotics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics
Eagle Fang, a good geomancer or two could do wonders for this country!
Mark, er, no. The only city that would make a worse capital for the US than Chicago is Los Angeles. My suggestion? Cut Chicago loose as its own state.
Legrand, that’s interesting about the dog and wolf. As for microdosing, that makes a great deal of sense — a low dose remains well below the threshold of consciousness, so it can influence will and action without being noticed.
Anonymous, au contraire. The two heads of D.O.G.E. are receiving no salary and they’ve apparently already drawn up a list of over 200 government agencies for deletion. It should be something to watch.
Andrew, thanks for this.
Bruno, unfortunately it stopped working a long time ago, once politicians evolved gills…
Bryan, thank you for this. Yes, exactly — the current situation is a very good example of Lévi’s dictum at work.
Kfish, yes, it is, and yes, you’re right — the power to refuse consent is always with us.
“The United States doesn’t need to create another department in order to reduce bureaucracy, it needs somebody willing to eliminate positions and entire departments.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_team
“A tiger team is a team of specialists assembled to work on a specific goal, or to solve a particular problem.”
I’ve been on a few of them over the years. They disband as soon as victory is declared.
Choosing the deadweight is easy, getting Congress to cut out the Department is the hard part.
JMG, a curious datapoint for you on the Trump phenomenon. I am in New Zealand and work with a company owned (and mostly staffed by) a very conservative Christian group that among other things strictly prohibits members from any social media.
I got the surprise of the week yesterday when I visited one of the company offices and found some of the younger staff had pinned a Trump/Vance sign on the wall. When I light-heartedly queried it I got a very enthusiastic tale about how their social group had been celebrating Trumps victory and some of their encounters with disapproving (older) locals.
I admittedly walked out a little dumbfounded – it was my first real-life experience of the power that is the Trump phenomenon. I got the distinct sense that this is much larger than both the man himself and the US. It also reinforced to me what you have noted elsewhere that if Trump dies in office this is going to be a generation-defining movement. Or it well might be that already.
Bruno #44 and JMG #48,
The way I heard it, Washington was chosen because it was right in the middle between the Northern states and the Southern ones. And in that respect, it served admirably. During the Civil War, the capital of the US was actually on the border—directly across the river from the Confederate state of Virginia. It was also so unpleasant (because of mosquitoes and general swampiness) that most government officials spent as much time as possible back home. John Kennedy once said that Washington had all the charm of a Northern city, and all the efficiency of a Southern one. (For non-Americans, that means “none” and “none” respectively.)
Then someone invented air conditioning, and everything changed.
Hi John Michael,
Man, it’s gonna be a wild ride! Far out. I’m watching events from a respectable distance, and see the future for Down Under mostly because we have the similar core problems yet to deal with. Still, with three thousand million to cut annually, there’s got be some easy fat to trim in all that don’t you reckon?. Hmm. I must say, this will certainly impact upon asset prices in some markets, oh yeah. But this was always going to happen one day. Certain choices were made back in the late 1990’s which baked today into the cake. I didn’t get the course chosen back then, and I still don’t get that story now. Once I was a manufacturing accountant, and watched the demise of local industry, and nowadays in small business, I work like a dog and ensure the businesses get their value for money from me. My experience is not equally shared, no way. Things are about to change. Hmm.
Now – and you started this particular line (respect!) – but here’s a quote that some will find to be ironic: Dr. Ray Stantz – Personally, I liked the University. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.
Revenge can be putting certain groups of people out of work, and err, to be genuinely ironic, those geographical areas recently showed their true colours, and they were blue. An unwise act to do so, because they’ve announced that their futures votes don’t matter. They don’t need to be appeased. Very, very foolish.
Cheers
Chris
I agree that Chicago should be its own state. While I’ve enjoyed visiting Chi Town, I wouldn’t want to live there. I think a better capital would be somewhere along the Ohio river or with close access to it. That’s where the Moundbuilders had their “capitol” after all. Chillicothe used to be the capitol of Ohio, actually… and that is where the famous Mound City complex is. In a more distant future there will probably be a capitol city around one of the Great Lakes since that will become the central hub for North America.
Yes, a good geomancer or two could do wonders.
JMG and Gray Hat #30
A bit stream of consciousness here but…
While the sympathetic is linked with flight and fight and parasympathetic is linked with food and sex, since they are both parts of a larger system, isn’t it also a a matter of finding the dynamic balance / tension point where one wants to work?
And that failure to do that, as JMG suggested, leaves one’s ‘state’ to be open to manipulation?
I can see what Gray Hat means about the way you have written it but it also occurs that perhaps the accepted medical descriptions don’t tell the whole story – so busy trying to reduce everything to a mechanistic view that it is forgotten that there is a lot more going on.
While sympathetic is about ‘action’ in terms of flight and fight, parasympathetic and sexual activity/energy is also about action; and, from a meditation perspective, I have found that vagal breathing produces a clarity of thought that is superior to the sympathetic adrenal rush where fear can actually reduce perception – so, a sympathetic response that sets the body to flight or fight is a different kind of ‘action’ than a parasympathetic ‘action’ where a calming of the mind can give wider potential perception/action.
The two parts are not discrete but recognised as two apparent parts of the ANS (Autonomic Nervous System) and the oversimple illusion is, yes, there are seeming separate/opposites, but. they are not separate and are rather polarities of a whole. And that the interesting story is how we ‘tighten the strings’ of the parts, what music that activates and the dance that then ensues?
Trying to reduce everything to a binary doesn’t seem such a smart plan for complex systems… but human limits mean we seem to be stuck doing that as we bump up against what we can comprehend without any understanding of what’ is actually going on and when we cannot comprehend what the ‘it’ actually ‘is’…
Marvellous and vexing tension that gives way on a rueful laugh. 😉
@LeGrand Cinq-Mars,
I was not aware of the kenning “between dog and wolf”. I shall have fun meditating on that. Thank you for sharing.
In The Hall of Homeless Gods, it’s made clear that Jerry Shimizu is a dog – Mrs. Taira’s loyal dog, but also with a protective streak that Sophie Ames brings out in him; she needs protection and she trusts him, unlike the harder Habitat and Shoreside women. That’s what he loved about her. But – it’s also clear that as a boy citting school to go to Shoreside, he was more like a wolf.
It occurred to me that boys of a certain age – some boys, that is – are wolves by the very fact of adolescence. In Medieval and Early Modern England, “Unruly apprentices” was a phrase commonly heard.
I can’t speak for girls, having grown up among respectable people in the 1950s, and not having much in common with the other girls, nor had any knack for making friends, but the 1980s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” comes to mind.
Cultures that take advantage of that fact and put them under the guidance and discipline of tough older men who train them, usually strenuously, and challenge them, also come to mind. Ours is no such thing, especially in the upper middle classes: none of my grandsons nor grand-nephews even played team sports. Don’t ask me why. They certainly did in my day! Theirs is another sort of discipline, the one Ariel Moravec describes in “Witch of Criswell,” that her sister is so good at, and that you described in “The King In Orange.”
(“Ave Imperator!” as of last Wednesday.)
A lot to meditate on.
Siliconguy, here’s hoping, because that’s exactly what the federal government needs right now:
Daniel, thanks for this. I’ve heard similar things from other countries; Trump has become a larger-than-life figure, the golden warrior against the bureaucratic-managerial state. I’m not sure where all this ends up, but it’s wild to watch.
Hosea, granted. At this point, though, we don’t need something midway between North and South, we need something midway between the old eastern states and the rest of the country.
Chris, a wild ride indeed! My rough estimate is that the US government could shed 40% of its staff, focusing on upper management, without anyone outside the DC Beltway noticing the difference. It could shed 80% of its staff without anyone but the bureaucrats themselves and the DC-area economy being negatively affected. I don’t imagine the cuts will go that deep, but they could. As for the universities, the two most useful things Trump could do is get the federal government out of the student loan business, so that people who want to go to college on borrowed money have to prove to a bank that they have some chance of paying it back, and make student debt dischargeable by ordinary bankruptcy. Over the following five years, half the universities in the United States would cease to exist, and that would be a very good thing.
Eagle Fang, I could see a point to making Chillicothe the new capital of the US. Why not get there ahead of the geomancers! 😉
Earthworm, thanks for this.
Patricia M, thanks for this. The dog/wolf binary does seem to be typically male — I’ll let the distaff side discuss, if they wish, whether there’s a comparable binary for women. I think it’s there, though. Do you recall the bookWomen Who Run With The Wolves? I noticed back when it was popular that most of the women who raved about it seemed more interested in jogging with their poodles…
“Eagle Fang, I could see a point to making Chillicothe the new capital of the US. Why not get there ahead of the geomancers! 😉”
Is that Chillicothe, Ohio? Not too far from there is Point Pleasant, W. Va. at the confluence of the Ohio and the Kanawah Rivers. Not a bad location, and they have Mothman! It does flood now and then.
@jim #35:
Thank you for the kind words. Yes, courage and confidence are precisely what I’m working on. I’ve spent too much time being angry, terrified and brittle, even while I was trying to be a nice guy, and it always led to poor results.
Also, I only ran into the term ‘janegirl’ a while back, right here on Ecosophia. I’m not over the moon about the term, but it’s a precise mirror of ‘tomboy,’ so I can’t quibble too much. And it describes young Cliff perfectly.
Tone deaf headline of the morning from NPR,
“RFK Jr. wants to ‘Make America Healthy Again.’ He could face a lot of pushback”
To me that says some people want other people as sick (and profitable) as possible.
Did no editor notice this interpretation? Or is NPR that beholden to Big Pharma money? I think I know the answer. I’ll just continue ignoring NPR.
Two other suggestions for the new capital of the United States: St. Louis, Missouri and Cairo, Illinois.
@Phutatorius.
Yes, Chillicothe, Ohio. I’ve been to both places, Chillicothe several times. Point Pleasant just once, but it is rather pleasant. They have a nice river walk and a flood wall with some great historical murals.
Marietta, Ohio would be another interesting location for the capitol. It was kind of the main site for the Anglos who came and settled the Northwestern Territory when it was still that. The people came and encountered the Mounds and it all rather amazed them, and they knew a great culture had been there before them.
@Richard
I visited Cairo IL a few months ago. It’s devastated from a flood a decade ago, and has been given up on by almost everyone.
Being a liberal Chicagoan, I’d look forward to Chicago becoming it’s own state. We wouldn’t have to fund the downstate schools and farms. Today, the state sends funds to every school, but they only provide 2/3 per pupil to Chicago that they do to every other pupil in the state. Cities are wealth engines, and if the rural areas want to discard them, it’s fine with us.
I was going to say some nice things, but since everyone is being so nasty, I don’t think I will.
With respect to sympathetic and parasympathetic: of course these are very general characterizations of a much more complex situation, but useful enough for many purposes. (Just as “arm” and “leg” can become rather complicated when one considers suitably fine-grained structures, comparative anatomy (quadrumana!), adaptations made by people born without arms, and so on. Even so, for many general purposes, “arm” and “leg” will do just fine.)
One useful generalization is to think of the sympathetic nervous system as the realm of the adrenergic neurotransmitters, and the parasympathetic as the realm of cholinergic neurotransmitters. The first are salient in fight/flight responses, and involve drying of secretions, suspension of digestive tract functions (eg diminished intestinal peristalsis), contracting of peripheral blood vessels, and so on; the second are involved in relaxation, and involve increased flow of secretions, nausea, dilation of of peripheral blood vessels, and so on. But in some realms, like that of (make) sexual response, there is more than one phase, first adrenergic, then, as climax approaches, cholinergic (thus the delaying effect of amphetamines on ejaculation); the changeover is a nice problem in coordination between the two systems.
But the first level of complexity is that there are two sides to each system: excitation and inhibition. One can add a neurotransmitter (or block its breakdown, or reuptake), or one can block that neurotransmitter. For example, one way to deal with nausea is to block the cholinergic side; another way is to amplify the adrenergic side. So there are four possibilities: adrenergic amplification or inhibition, and cholinergic amplification of inhibition. And the effect of inhibiting one side can look like the effect of stimulating the other.
But this is in turn a highly simplified account that leaves out only the fine details of neurotransmitter physiology, but all the other products of endocrine glands and their effects and interactions, and the constant homeostatic efforts of the body as a whole. As one can see with attempts to control blood pressure, where the body often enough finds workarounds to get the blood pressure back to its improper level. A lot of the complexity of the systems involved first becomes apparent when interventions based on a superficial account turn out not to work quite the way the theory says they should!
It seems that the 13th edition of Goodman & Gilman, Pharmacologic Basis of Therapeutics, is in the public domain, and available on PDF form at https://archive.org/details/GoodmanAndGilmansThePharmacologicalBasisOfTherapeutics13thEdition2017 . While it’s probably overkill for most purposes, it’s worth dipping into from time to time. Back when it was the fifth and six edition, we got quite a bit of mileage out of it. I haven’t followed it since then, but it’s probably still pretty useful.
Dear JMG,
I’d be interested in some occult-infused political economy analysis of the role of Elon Musk. In X,
Musk owns a massive “sentiment machine”, a sort of digital crystal ball which seems capable of both monitoring sentiment and shaping it – at the very least at the margins. If you accept this premise, this seems to me to be in accordance with your and Fortune’s definition of magic: changing consciousness at will.
I believe this question is in line with the theme of your excellent essay, because whilst I call X a “sentiment machine” – you could just as well see it as a machine for manipulating, with visual imagery and story, the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems of its users.
Again, if you accept this premise, what does it mean to have a 🧙♀️ sitting at the heart of power?
Hi John Michael,
I believe that we are about to find out exactly how many cuts can be made. What’s interesting about the approach, is that it’s a different way of tackling inflation, as is reducing and/or reversing immigration. Reducing the expansion of the money supply will have that effect, and these folks have set themselves up as easy targets. It is a level of foolishness which I do not comprehend.
When everyone is expected to pick up the tab for a bueracrats income, you’d think they’d at least display a bit of awareness of the realities. But then it’s been said elsewhere, and no doubts Mr Levi has remarked upon this, but in order to do unpleasant things, the hate emotion is usually employed towards that end.
Speaking of such things, you may have missed this particular bit of Australian weirdness: Peter Dutton ramps up pressure on Kevin Rudd, after Trump names critical aide as deputy chief of staff.
If I may so humbly suggest, the term diplomacy, is in some ways a bit like comprehending the term ‘community’, as in learning to live with the annoying idiot in your local area. Some of the things our former prime minister said were not very nice, the cheeky scamp.
Anyway, back to inflation. I keep track of all regular bills, and have done so for 15 years. On average, the bills have increased by 4.5% annually. When I hear official pronouncements that inflation is a much lower annual figure, and yet the same folks are sending me bills which are observably higher – the word ‘lies’ pops into my head.
Is the same thing happening over in your part of the world?
Cheers
Chris
@Patricia Mathews #24 @Random #31,
Oswald Wirth in Tarot of the Magicians explains the concept behind La Lune (XVIII) as “exploring at our own risk and peril the immense space which the Moon lights up only in part and very imperfectly” .
The way is treacherous and the path is marked by drops of blood where other’s have blazed the trail before.
A marsh is encountered and “Far from turning away in disdain from the marsh of instinctive faith, the wise man tries to penetrate the mystery of it. In the Moonlight the crayfish is perceived which “devours everything that is rotten”. The crayfish keeps the marsh clean enough to prevent foul odors.
Wirth also goes on to say that “In the crayfish astrologers recognize Cancer, the home of the Moon.”
One thing that strikes me, in addition to the imbalance of warm-fuzzy and cold-prickly emphases between the two campaigns, is that one of the effects of being “high on their own supply,” in combination with demonizing the other side, is that the Democrats seem to have lost sight of what actually evokes the warm-fuzzy and cold-prickly reactions in most of the electorate, to the point of actually reversing them and thus providing the Republicans with ready-made cold-prickly propaganda. I am thinking of such obvious, easy targets as drag queen story hour, the mobile abortion truck at the DNC, gender transition for minors without parental knowledge, the intervention of the media and the legal system on behalf of a single candidate—instances where Democrats had invested so much energy in defining something as good that they didn’t seem to realize that its more extreme manifestations were actually disturbing and alienating to many people. Also, many of the things that they pointed to with pearl-clutching horror are things that actually evoke feelings of unity, pride, and patriotism in many Americans. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it happen (I think the early 2000s Republican party was pretty prone to this as well), but it had an eerie, self-reinforcing delusional quality that I haven’t witnessed before.
In addition, it occurs to me that their emphasis on cultivating fear of the other side had the effect of weakening themselves and their supporters, as fear generally does. Fear can be a powerful motivator, especially in the short term, but people who spend years cultivating weakness, fear, and social conformity in themselves are not generally proactive, successful people. But people who have embraced not just a positive vision of what they’ll accomplish, but an identity of getting things done regardless of whom it might offend or what the experts and conventional wisdom have to say about it—well, it’s to be expected that they’d have more electoral success.
Phutatorius, I like it. Point Pleasant, home of Mothman and the federal government! That little northward spike of West Virginia between Pennsylvania and Ohio would be a good place for the capital anyway.
Siliconguy, it fascinates me that they apparently never thought about what that implies.
Richard, I’d be happy with either of those.
LeGrand, thanks for this, and especially for the reference.
Boy, it was once absolutely standard for every emperor to have a court wizard. In that sense, we’re reverting to the norm.
Chris, very much so, yes. On paper, the inflation rates for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 here in the US were 1.4%, 7%, 6.5%, and 3.4%. In reality, the cost of most necessities doubled during that time.
Jennifer, bingo. That’s one of the pervasive problems with evil magic — the sorcerer falls under the influence of his or her own spells and loses track of reality, with results that we’re seeing right now.
To play off Lèvi’s discussion of sexual politics, there was also something about the Democrats’ approach that reminded me of the dark side of the proverbial “nice guy” or clingy suitor, constantly demanding affirmation and attention and then viciously lashing out when they didn’t get it, blaming the object of their attempted seduction rather than their own undesirability. It’s as unappealing in a political party as it is in a potential date!
I think the US Capital should be somewhere near the mean center of the United States:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_center_of_the_United_States_population
In 1800 the mean center would have been somewhere around central Maryland, so Washington D.C. would have made sense at the time. However, by 2020 the mean center has moved to somewhere in southern Missouri, so Washington D.C. doesn’t make sense anymore.
This chapter brings to mind Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. The average Renaissance mind was anything but primitive. Their intellectuals would run circles around ours, I think.
There does not seem to be an end in sight for Democrats determined to chuff their own stuff. Disney is attempting to put out a live-action-with-heavy-CGI reboot of 1937’s classic animated Snow White this March. The woman playing Snow White has been battering the general Trump-voting public with an I Hate You vibe for at least the last year. To my mind, it’s more of the same: thinly veiled and sometimes bald wishes of harm on Trump supporters. They have fallen under a spell, for sure, and it is their own. I did not foresee how they would get their &sses handed to them in early November; I thought they would be able to pull the same sort of manufactured “win” they did in 2020. It’s utterly fascinating seeing the mayhem they have caused their own party due to blowback: they are the ones who projected Trump into his current god-emperor status. If they had not tried to kill him, he never would have gotten up in front of the flag and yelled “Fight!” Something shifted that weekend and I remember knowing deep down that he had been touched. I did not think it would sweep him into office though.
I did not think I would live to see Hollywood fall — yet that is exactly what is happening now. Again, this has been caused by Democrats shooting themselves in both feet. One bloodied appendage was the Me Too/Pussy hat movement (celebrity women who regretted the casting couch process and feigned innocence about it) and the other mangled hoof was the trans rights/rainbow people ick-fest. They were the ones who alerted us to the perversions of their own party! Nobody would have noticed or cared had celebrities not relentlessly shoved ritual Satanism and sex shop kink down our throats for the last 8 years. Please don’t get me started on how their self-authored Covidiocy/quaxxine debacle combined with dirty politics thrust former Democrat RFK into the highest medical position in the land. A small faction of them seem to have caught on to negativity-focused magic not working but the whopping majority of them are still foaming at the mouth, shaving their heads, and throwing hexes. Will they ever learn?
I would like to thank for yoyr description of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems – I was looking at them and trying to manage them incorrectly. I have always thought of the sympathetic as the excitory system – excited passions, thought, muscular tension. I have always viewed the parasympathetic as the relaxatory system. But now I can see its not so simple – each system excites some parts, relaxes others. And examining myself and my moods, I can see this is true, or rather more accurate than my previous model of myself. Thank you for this – I’ll meditate on it.
I would also like to make a note and ask a question about the whole good/bad boy/girl dichotomy. So, in my last 2 relationships, I played both roles and got very different reaults. When I was actually being a wildly reckless criminal, I attracted and was in a relationship with one of the prettiest, sweetest girls I’ve ever met – but she had no drive or self confidence, was a nervous wreck. After my wild life crashed and burned, I decided to turn things around, work hard, and be a good, responsible adult, I attracted the mother of my children, who I’ve been on and off again with for years. She is confident, driven, assertive, controlling- and one of the most selfish, dishonest, manipulative, shameless women I’ve ever met.
I have this funny feeling like if I want the third time to be the charm, I need to find someone between these two extremes. Which would entail finding a balance within myself and my life between the two extreme roles, extreme energies I projected each time, thus attracting an equal and opposite extreme partner. So if I balance these energies within myself, then I might attract a balanced partner.
Would it be accurate to say the good guy and good girl energy tends to be the energy of Venus? Softness, gentleness, comfort, agreeableness, estrogen energy… Wheras the bad boy and bad girl energy is very much the energy of Mars. Defiance, rebelliousness, asserting individuality, ego, testosterone energy…
So, I need to try and embody both of these energies – assert myself without being am ass. Give of myself, but dont buy a house 3 months into the relationship like I did last time. On top of thay, maybe I could make talismans to both Venus and Mars – they are both visible at night right now.
And then a thought appears to me – I already have an energy I have called upon, unbalanced. I made a talisman to Jupiter, a pentacle of solomon. What’s the opposite energy to Jupiter? The energy of Saturn… which we had spoken about working with.
Mars and Jupiter are well aspected in my chart – venus and saturn arent aspected well or badly. All these planets are visible in the night sky right now – a key advantage of working nights is the ability to stargaze during and after work. So, do you think I should work with my Saturn next – meditate and contemplate my limitations, failures, and life lessons, maybe make a talisman of lead on saturnday… and then move on to venus and mars? Copper and iron are far harder metals to work with, after all…
In a strange bit of synchronicity, as I read chapter 18, Potions and magnetism – both the chapter of the book and your book club – I discovered a bramd new band online named… Magick Potion. Their debut album – Magick Ootion – came out a week ago.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f77pvJropy4&t=577s&pp=2AHBBJACAQ%3D%3D
They look and aound like something out of the 70s! They’re a trip, man. Hope you enjoy. Any advice on how to manage the flows of energy and how to ciunterbakance the opposing fkows would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for all your guidance!
Cliff and Jim, re: dating strategies–
At the end of a date, if you are wondering if your date is romantically interested in you, try this;
Taking her right hand with your right hand, kiss the back of her hand simply and quickly, then let go and glance at her face. You have sent her a signal that is lower intensity than trying to kiss her on the lips, but still a clear message. If she looks shocked, rolls eyes and/or seems a bit disgusted, laugh it off; perhaps she is not that into you. If her face flushes and she beams a smile, likely she is interested, and you should ask her out again. And of course, if she also looks like she wants to get hugged, kiss her too!
Hey JMG
On the subject of the greatest method of sorcery in the modern world, social media, I have some interesting news. Our current Labour government intends to ban social media for anyone under 16 years old. It has unsurprisingly generated a lot of intense responses in my country, and while many agree that it is a good idea in theory, they are unsure and suspicious of how exactly it will be enforced.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/nov/07/australian-government-to-legislate-social-media-age-limit-of-16-but-cant-say-how-platforms-will-enforce-it
Also, somewhat related, I have published a commentary on “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that explores something I mentioned in the comments once, the subtle references to Dozenalism.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/glimpses-of-dozenalism-in-tlon?r=e0m1f
Hello JMG and commentariat, given that sexual misconduct allegations and indeed liability for sexual abuse are no bar to high office, I am intrigued by the furore over the appointments of Gaetz and Hegseth on these grounds. Surely that ship has sailed — what do people expect?
“the sorcerer falls under the influence of his or her own spells and loses track of reality, with results that we’re seeing right now.”
That happens often in totalitarian regimes, but in “democracies” like ours, too.
@Scotty,
I wonder if “devouring everything that is rotten” is a play on putrefaction, too. Hmm. I shall ponder. Thank you!
Jennifer, good gods. That hadn’t occurred to me but you’re quite correct, of course.
Jack, I’d slide it a bit east to deal with the difference in population distribution, but I could certainly deal with a capital in Missouri.
Kimberly, Couliano’s book has been a major influence on my thinking, of course. As for whether any of them will get a clue, I doubt it. That’s the curse of the Changer: they will keep doing the only things they know how to do, more and more stereotypically, until oblivion swallows them.
Paedrig, the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea, so the opposite of the bad-but-strong Mars man is the good-but-weak Venus man — and yes, both types tend to attract equally dysfunctional women. There are other alternatives, of course. The Sun and Jupiter are better male archetypes in this context.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for both of these.
Larkrise, because the Democrats have double standards, of course. They love to denounce Republicans for things they pardon in Democrats.
Chuaquin, it happens in every kind of society and every kind of governmental system. I think it’s one of the basic patterns of human existence.
Dear JMG, you say: “it was once absolutely standard for every emperor to have a court wizard. In that sense, we’re reverting to the norm”.
Using your strawberry jam rule of thumb, do you have a sense for the rebound this emperor and his court might experience? Or is it knowable only in hindsight?
Yours kindly,
Boy
Kimberly @72: “…and the other mangled hoof was the trans rights/rainbow people ick-fest. ” Could that be made into an acronym? TRRPIF+ or some such?
A last note about philters — in case you all have missed it, it seems that there may be something like concrete evidence of at least the late Egyptian use of psychotropic brews —
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-78721-8
Interesting mix — though it’s not possible to say whether this findings represent residue deposited over several different uses.
Not surprising: there have been all sorts of reasons for suspecting something of the sort, but this is an indicator of what might actually have been used.
Hi JMG,
Following your answer to Paedrig, how would you detail a Sun-type man and a Jupiter-type man
Kind regards,
Boy, it depends entirely on how the wizard uses his powers. If he uses them to benefit the empire and bless its people, the blowback is beneficial — consider John Dee, who was Elizabeth I’s court wizard and by all accounts a genuinely good man; I suspect part of the reason the Elizabethan period was such a triumph for England was the raspberry jam from his magic. If he uses those powers to aggrandize himself and hurt other people, on the other hand, the blowback can be pretty grisly; I might mention the name Heinrich Himmler here…
LeGrand, fascinating. (Ahem; I bet that brings back old times…)
Foxhands, the solar man is charismatic, strong-willed, and proud, generous to his friends and to defeated enemies, the kind of man whose sense of self-respect is strong enough that he won’t stoop to cheap or low behavior. The Jupiter man is (literally!) jovial and fun to be around, but he also likes to help and protect others who genuinely need it; he is overflowing with good spirits and virtuous acts.
JMG, A few weeks ago I speculated that one of the reasons for the lack of effectiveness of the Harris Campaign was that given the tilt of the Democratic Party it had probably been stacked with huge numbers of very woke staffers.
Some reports are filtering out that Kamala was not able to stand up to her legions of woke gen z staffers, and thus even poorer than normal decisions were made. This seems believable as reports of general chaos within Kamala’s VP staff due to her poor management skills abound. Reports of her campaign spending to seem to verify that things in the Harris campaign were being run by a legion of privileged Wellesley and Vasser girls who were used to limitless credit cards from daddy.
@Larkrise, Those objecting to Trumps Nominees could care less about the sexual allegations. They are just red herrings to use to block their nominations because both of these folks scare the deep state and the swamp to death. They can’t stand up in the. media or in congress and lament that Pete and Matt are bad because they will root out dishonest law fare weasels or corrupt pentagon rackets.
You will notice they couldn’t use the sexual allegation card on Tulsi, so they have to fall back on the ridiculous, worn out and discredited Putin Puppet allegation.
On election magic and the warm tinglies Vs cold fuzzies (as you used to call them IIRC):
Trump’s most effective ad this campaign used this slogan: Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you. They found that it convinced the most swing voters and spent the most on it, more than all other ads combined, from what I read. It seems that the Kamala campaign wracked their brains trying to think of a response but couldn’t find one, I guess because it’s ultimately true, Kamala is indeed for they/them in all senses of the word — not only trans illegal immigrants, but “Them”, the other, the minorities who see themselves in opposition to the majority, regardless of ethnicity, those who see themselves as whatever other before they are American.
I can’t seem to find the original ad on YouTube anymore but I remember seeing it at some point, they probably Shadowbanned it, which hopefully becomes a thing of the past soon. There is a second version still up featuring Charlamagne the podcaster saying he doesn’t want his tax dollars spent on trans surgery for illegal immigrants.
__
On a slightly different note, there was this meme floating around Twitter about various enemies of Trump getting “imprisoned in crystals”. It sounds kind of out of left field.
I could only find a reference to Trump’s crystal collection and the Elder Scrolls game series where you can trap defeated monsters in soul gems.
I suspect this might be a silent instance of memetic magic on behalf of Trump.
Eliphas Levi’s discussion of how a woman falls for the ‘bad boy’ is also relevant to the Trump campaign: first she is outraged by his transgressive behaviour, spends all her time obsessing about how bad he is, then spends all of her time thinking about him, then falls in love. It seems the lesson here for charismatic people is that it’s more important to get people thinking about you than actually liking you.
The Neuro-Linguistic Programming people back in the day promoted propagandistic techniques to use on oneself: one was to think of an unpleasant task, then think of a cookie, over and over. Eventually the positive cookie-feelings attach to the task. Advertisers call it association; does it have a specific name in the occult tradition?
JMG #84
“…the solar man is charismatic, strong-willed, and proud, generous to his friends and to defeated enemies, the kind of man whose sense of self-respect is strong enough that he won’t stoop to cheap or low behavior. The Jupiter man is (literally!) jovial and fun to be around, but he also likes to help and protect others who genuinely need it; he is overflowing with good spirits and virtuous acts.”
For the solar expression, do you think it appropriate to swap out ‘proud’ to:
“the solar man is charismatic, strong-willed, and compassionate, generous to his friends and to defeated enemies, the kind of man whose sense of self-respect is strong enough that he won’t stoop to cheap or low behavior.”
Some might think that compassion is wishy-washy, to my mind, fierce compassion is anything but; and I am reminded of the words of Paul Brunton:
“To meet the assaults of vicious human beasts with sympathetic nonviolence in the optimistic belief that this attitude is not only morally correct but may also change the attacker’s character, is to deceive oneself.”
So with those two archetypes, one might have the potential for compassion and joviality hand in hand with fierce compassion and thunderbolts when required – yet each aspect is underpinned by love of Life?
@ Clay Denis #85
“Some reports are filtering out that Kamala was not able to stand up to her legions of woke gen z staffers, and thus even poorer than normal decisions were made.”
I’m thinking that this was the year that the Democrats turned into that joyless small town full of curtain-twitching, finger-wagging, busybodies that everyone ran to the big, bad, dangerous big city to get away from. Given that in such a small town, the main currency is reputation, and there is no delight higher than trashing a reputation, I reckon that all those who’ve run away (openly or secretly) to that big, bad, dangerous big city that the Republicans have turned into, are not going to be paying much attention to the gossip*.
Ms Harris would have struggled indeed to get free of the wee gossip-net tightly encircling her under these circumstances. May her future goings and doings bring her joy!
* AKA “cancelling rumours”
correction to above…
I meant to say:
“the main currency is gossip, and there is no delight higher than trashing a reputation”
@ LeGrand Cinq-Mars,
Thanks for the link to Goodman and Gilman’s! I was a grad student in pharmacology and I was thinking of buying a textbook to review some of the basics.
(I might still since I met and occasionally dealt with the editor of another pharmacology textbook back in grad school. I used the older editions then, so I’m curious to see how they stack against each other.)
Clay, now I’m really looking forward to the tell-all books about her campaign. Given her reported difficulties with staff management, those rumors seem very plausible to me, and an insider view of her campaign would make a fine resource for how not to do, well, anything. (Except waste money and fail.)
Alvin, it was “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies,” but the principle is the same. Yeah, Trump’s people did a very crisp job of handling the public this time, and that catchphrase in particular was a stroke of genius. As for “trapping people in crystals,” not even editors of KnowYourMeme seem to have been able to figure it out. It fascinates me, because in the Native American myths of the Changer, what happens to the hostile beings who get transformed by the Changer is that whatever they were doing when he found them, they keep doing that forever. I referenced that in my book The King in Orange…
Kfish, a good point! As for the emotional-association thing, traditional occult lore doesn’t have a name for it, because it used to be something everyone learned in early childhood. It’s only in our time that adults have to do that kind of remedial education!
Earthworm, no, pride as such is central to the solar personality — it’s his great weakness, just as wrath is the great weakness of Mars and gluttony of Jupiter. (Yes, all the seven deadly sins have their planetary correspondences.) Other than that, though, yes, exactly.
@jmg #57 ‘women who run with wolves’ jogging with poodles did have me rolling in the kitchen this morning. As some of you who have seen me here before may recall, I have Pitt-coydog triplets in my life. I had done some online work with a group ‘the shadow side of the feminine’ during COVID that served me well and I ran into that ‘wolves’ group and well I guess there is kind of a smug energy here sometimes but could it be at least in part because we are actually kind of badass. Anyway, re:werewolves and menstruation, I just got the third and most powerful female pack lead of the triplets sterilized because when she went into heat, not only was her sex drive LUNAtic, her brother fought with both my two old dogs and the third runt sister at different times. It just generated so much energy, this adapted-to-modern-world-system-somewhat-at-least household could not handle it. When you actually activate ‘the wild’ ‘the savage’ like… it’s not a metaphor and I had to reattach Bobo’s foot. So, be careful what you wish for. But then again, it was a hard decision. It’s not for nothing that the ‘wild’ is romanticized.
Thanks again for the blessings upon our heritage food festival, it was a great success and prepared to grow!
@earthworm – it really strikes me that you wanted to get rid of pride from the solar personality; maybe that’s part of your core challenge to accept it!
—-.—
So, once I got through the basic follow-ups from the festival I set in my house and drank coffee and read the whole of ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ finally yesterday and it really is good. Anyway, a piece of it feels particularly relevant to this discussion: he describes this uncertainty that humans feel that animals don’t have to feel because they are talking in direct signs like ‘my hair is bristled up’ while we are using words with always ambiguous meanings. But then again, @ Emmanuel Goldstein #74 we can always maintain our awareness of the flushing face beneath the words! Or the light resonant touch that Levi recommends!
What are the great weaknesses of the Moon, Mercury, and Saturn?
JMG #93
Thank you – Fascinating – I’ll leave a follow-up question for Magic Monday!
Interesting quote from elsewhere that seems to fit in here too.
“Another thing that was so weird about the Covid response, though, was that the left seemed to have a deep psychological need for Covid to be an apocalyptic catastrophe on a par with the Black Plague of the Middle Ages, even though it very clearly wasn’t once you shook off the mainstream media’s hypnotic spell (which, unfortunately, took some of us a while). Why was this? I think that the Myth of Everlasting Progress that is the primary existential motivator of urban liberals was clearly failing, and Covid authoritarianism was a sneaky if not very subtle way of keeping the power of this existential myth propped up. (“And then the people bowed and prayed, to the Covid God they made.”)”
Also myth related was a mention that the UK’s aircraft carriers are not working properly and they can’t afford to fix them. One or both might be scrapped. Also in war games drones keep sinking them. To keep the carriers alive they need more escorts than the UK can afford.
I don’t know about the British destroyers, but the US destroyer’s vertical launched missile systems can not be reloaded at sea. They need to be tied up in port for that operation. Furthermore the destroyer tenders that could have been used for this in any safe anchorage were all scrapped decades ago. In WWII the Japanese used Truk as a refueling and rearming base and the US used Ulithi for the same purpose.
Hi JMG,
Thank you very much for your answer. It opens a great perspective away from the Mars – Venus duality offered by the mainstream.
Following your answer to Earthworm, could you list the planetary correspondences for the seven deadly sins ?
Kind regards,
AliceEm, oh, no argument there. The energy that surges through the sexual centers, whether we’re talking about canids or hominids, is overwhelming stuff, an ocean compared to the mudpuddle of the conscious mind. I also know women who are, as you say, seriously badass — but they aren’t the suburban SUV brigade I saw reading Women Who Run With The Wolves.
Anonymous, see immediately below.
Foxhands, of course! The traditional correspondences are these:
Sun – Pride
Moon – Envy
Mercury – Avarice
Venus – Lust
Mars – Wrath
Jupiter – Gluttony
Saturn –
AvariceSlothIf you ever have trouble recalling all seven, the acronym I learned was PEG’S LAW – Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Avarice, and Wrath.
AliceEm #95
I can appreciate what you mean; and I can see the point of emphasising such a weakness in order to guard against it.
What interests me is the other end of the polarity that would balance the tendency towards pride and avoid trouble..
i.e. is humility an aspect / polarity of the solar personality that can be developed within the archetype, or do people use other planetary correspondences or approaches to achieve the aim of finding dynamic balance or to mitigate potential trouble? I really don’t know but as I don’t work with planetary archetypes, my question is likely better suited for ‘Archetypes 101’!
Hmm, avarice is twice on that list. I’d have said Envy is Mercury’s sin and Sloth the Moon’s (as a Cancer Moon, I feel qualified to have an opinion about this :D).
Many thanks JMG,
I noticed you wrote Avarice for both Mercury and Saturn. Should one of them probably be associated to Sloth ?
Kind regards
Hi JMG,
Hi GMG,
Mercury – Avarice, Saturn – Avarice, no Sloth? It must be a typo. Would you please clarify?
Inna
Hi John Michael,
Doing the same thing forever is probably a deserved fate for those who play such games.
Did you see this? Joe Biden allows Ukraine to use long-range US-supplied ATACMS missiles on targets in Russia, prompting threat of world war
There’s a lot of things wrong with that action. At what point does dementia become insanity?
Cheers
Chris
Okay – Saturn – Avarice as miserliness – Ebenezer Scrooge. Mercury – Avarice as Greed – desire for a quick buck. Sloth? (Ah! Earth.)
@Scotlyn #90 – an excellent picture of that kind of town is found in Dion Fortune’s novel “The Sea Priestess.” And later, we see quite a different sort of town, our hero having packed up his things and left.
She also had a telling comment about certain kinds of cheap writers unable to handle characters of the opposite sex: the men depicted by writers of cheap romance are “like no man who ever wore trousers – in fact, men on whom trousers would be wasted.” Their male counterparts, of course, write about women who fulfill male fantasies …. I’ll have to look up the exact quote, but I think we all know some of the worst offenders on the scene today. I ended up laughing my head off.
JMG—looks like you accidentally put avarice in twice and left out sloth.
“Biden Allows Ukraine to Strike Russia With Long-Range U.S. Missiles”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-atacms-missiles.html
I noted several rather ominous posts last Magic Monday, and I wonder if they weren’t about this. What do you think, JMG? It looks to me as if they’re doing anything they can to sabotage Trump’s entrance into office next year.
Athaia, Foxhands, Inna, Patricia M, and Jennifer, yeah, I was in a hurry and got sloppy. Saturn is sloth, of course. I’ve corrected the list.
Chris and Untitled, the “defense” industry is desperate to keep the gravy train rolling. It’ll be interesting to see how the Russians handle their response.
Mr. Greer, you mentioned RFK’s suggest a policy website in response to Eaglefang’s comment about Washington D.C. Seeing that so much of the collective mindset is in transition right now, have you considered suggesting tax deductibles for money spent on energy saving home improvements? Or public money for trolly cars? If there was ever a time to promote green wizardry at a federal level, this is it. I feel like someone like you with a couple paragraphs and links in your weekly blog posts over the next couple months could get hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people to support such a proposal. That might be enough to get RFK and by extension Trump’s attention. I don’t know if you have any interest in supporting this kind of thing, but I hope you at least consider it.
Joe Biden authorizing the Ukrainians to use long range American missiles to strike deep in to Russia reminds me of a famous scene in the legendary Bruce Lee martial arts movie, ” Enter the Dragon.” In the scene Bruce Lee’s character is set up to fight the Evil Boss’s Henchman , Ohara, in the martial arts tournament. It is the intention that Ohara will kill or maim Bruce Lee and keep him from snooping around the Boss’s sinister Island.
The fight does not go Ohara’s way and he is beaten badly by Bruce Lee. So in desperation he picks up a glass bottle and smashes it to create a lethal weapon with which to kill Bruce Lee and make his boss happy. This of course brings dishonor on Ohara, the tournament and forces Bruce Lee to react in an appropriate way. Ohara gets one good blow in ,slashing Bruce Lee’s chest with the bottle. Bruce lee then drops Ohara to the ground with a mighty kick, ( and then in the most famous martial arts move of all time ) Bruce lee leaps high in the air and comes down on Ohara with a crunch ( Ohara is not shown). Bruce lee’s face is twisted in pain and determination as he hates being forced in to killing Ohara.
Ukraine is like Ohara, picking up a broken bottle in a fight they have lost and could have walked away from. This will not change the outcome, but will piss off the Russians and insure the Ukraine ends up like Ohara.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/17/biden-ukraine-russia-missiles-north-korea-response
“The source said Biden’s decision was communicated to Ukraine around three days ago.”
“”Enabling Ukraine to strike high-priority targets throughout Russia could put Kyiv in a better position for potential negotiations, including by incentivizing Moscow to agree to a moratorium on strikes on critical energy infrastructure,” John Hardie, deputy director of FDD’s Russia Program, told reporters.”
It’s quite possible Ukraine has already used those long-range missiles to strike inside Russia before the official announcement was made (it makes little sense to announce such a thing beforehand, after all), and the last night massive strike on what’s left of Ukrainian energy infrastructure was the response.
@Chris #104 I think Biden’s dementia has made him vulnerable to the insanity of his behind the scenes handlers. If the missiles land in Russia I think the Russian response will be various cyber attacks and perhaps physical sabotage of American infrastructure by agents inside the US. Praying the missile attacks will be stymied somehow.
OT: “Clueless.” https://www.axios.com/2024/11/18/consumer-confidence-trump-republicans-white-house?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Brent Halligan has given a link to Axios on Missiles for Ukraine. See above for ow much in touch with reality Axios is.
Again, highly OT: but —-
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-last-glimpses-of-california-s-vanishing-hippie-utopias?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
Hi John Michael and BeardTree,
You’re probably right, and I get the distinct impression that some unfriendly warning shots were indeed delivered.
Stupid to escalate this total loser of a situation.
Cheers
Chris
Stephen, might I suggest that you get involved there? It’s open source, and your voice will be just as likely to be heard as mine.
Clay, I hope it doesn’t come to an Ohara drop. Kiev’s a lovely city by all accounts and it would be really unfortunate if it and all its inhabitants were turned into radioactive ash.
Brent, it astounds me that these alleged experts are so stunningly stupid about Russia. No, that won’t make Russia more interested in negotiating. It’ll make Russia more interested in wiping Ukraine off the map. Have these slackjawed, drooling morons read one single word about Russian history and culture?
Patricia M, thanks for both of these. This is one of the main reasons I don’t bother with US media — it’s just plain dumb.
Chris, I see it as a desperation move. A grand strategy of world conquest is being flushed down history’s toilet, and the neoconservatives who made that strategy their misbegotten life mission are frantically trying to keep it from going away forever.
Thanks to Patricia for the hippie commune article.
The theme of bad foundations jumped right out at me. Foundations often get skimped on because they are not sexy, they are expensive, and they just sit there. That’s the point people miss.
They just sit there, and stay sitting there no matter what. If the foundation fails to just sit there, whatever you built on top of it will fall down. That concept does not stop at architecture.
In a change of topic, the first snowfall of the year has arrived. Highway 20, the North Cascades Highway, closed for the year as of yesterday.
It’s time for an extra hot cup of tea.
Brent and John: I think these “Russia experts” are so fooled by their own Russophobic propaganda that it makes them say and do stupid things like provoking more and more against Putin, the Russian army and Russia civilian people. Could be called a book case of self-induced hypnosis?
Corax #25 says: “Do you think women liking “bad boys” has anything to do with (most of) them having female astral bodies?”
There’s also an explanation from evolutionary psychology: women evolved to want a man who’s reckless and aggressive enough to protect “his” woman from violence by other men. The tradeoff is that he might also be violent towards her, but as long as he doesn’t hurt her much, that’s a tradeoff she might be willing to make in a primitive and dangerous situation.
Long-range missiles into Russia: I was also baffled by this: is the Biden administration willing to risk WWIII to make Trump look bad, or are they just stupid? I have heard a theory that although Russia has nuclear weapons, probably none of them are in working order anymore. While that’s plausible, even one nuclear weapon is enough to reduce Kyiv to radioactive ash.
From The Atlantic: “How the Ivy League Broke America,” by David Brooks. Subhead: “The Meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.” John – Mr. Brooks has rediscovered just about everything you wrote about our elite in “The King In Orange.” “Did We Get a Better Elite?” His answer is, “No.” His “Six Sins of the meritocracy” pinpoints everything you said in “The Pallid Mask” except the part about The Rescue Game.
His “How to Replace the Current Meritocracy” – “Humanize and Improve it.” and build a school system that sounds a lot like the education kids got in your “Retropia.” Including paying more attention to vocational and technical education, “to train them to build things, not just think things.” And invest more in civic groups and support economic policies that bolster the industrial sector.”
This from the house organ of The Establishment! Jupiter and Minerva! He’s single-handedly rediscovered a large chunk of what you’ve been saying, and they published it!
Chuaquin, that’s a good working diagnosis. The West’s “Russia experts” have been so consistently wrong that I’d like to encourage the incoming administration to replace them with a flipped coin; that will be right 50% more often!
Yavanna, the West consistently underestimates Russian weaponry. As we’ve been finding out in Ukraine, they keep their arsenal in good working order. The thing I’d suggest here, though, is that it’s not just a matter of Biden’s handlers looking bad. The neoconservatives had no smaller target in mind than the conquest of the planet. The idea was that if Russia could be broken up into smaller, weak states, those could then be absorbed by the EU along with Canada (which is practically an EU satrapy already); then, after the same thing was done to China in the second half of this century, the expanded EU would swallow everything else and turn into a global government, run by and for corporate interests.
It’s the wet dream of the WEF, the goal that the kleptocratic elites have been salivating after for decades. The crucial step in that plan, though, was the defeat of Russia, and the crises that led to the Ukraine war were engineered by the West with that goal in mind. Now Russia’s in the ascendant and Trump’s taking office in the US. The whole plan is in ruins, and the only thing that could possibly save it is a war between Russia and NATO which, in the neocons’ fantasies, the West will of course win. So yes, that’s what they’re trying to bring about.
Patricia M, heh heh heh. (Rubs hands together while chuckling.) This is why I stay out here on the fringes and write essay after essay for apparently small and powerless audiences. It’s funny how much power fringe ideas have. A fringe subculture of teenage boys daydreaming about space travel in the 1920s put bootprints on the Moon forty years later. Will my ideas be that successful? So far, it’s looking good.
Your Kittenship (offlist), you accidentally posted to last week’s post. Positive energy incoming!
Assuming that the capitol doesn’t get moved, is there anything that can be done to improve stagnant or unhealthy earth energies in a place? Or is what you’ve got what you’re stuck with?
‘Canada (which is practically an EU satrapy already)’
There is close to nothing left I recognize as Canadian culture here in central Ontario. Our Prime Minister and party has betrayed us on several fronts and they have been kept in power long enough to make it count. To add insult to injury he refuses to resign, and its shameful… historically low polling. Its sad, but its more than that. The cities of Central Ontario are just places now, the feeling is gone. The convoy brought it back briefly but it is gone from this province. Our children cannot find work in the cities, the nicest rural areas swallowed by the rich and the foreign, the spirit has fled I guess to the hinterlands.
The answer to my query as to what can be done about it was the ten of wands and I can only carry so many sticks at once.
“Heal first the intelligence of the sick person. The cause of all enchantments, the venom in all potions, the power of all sorcerers is found there..”
The old man of Europe isnt going to heal anytime soon and the British Crown as our ‘symbolic’ power wieghs heavily on the land and people.
Jennifer, it requires major changes to the landscape. To give Beijing a suitable energy condition, for example, the emperors of China had to build a new hill north of the city! It’s usually easier just to move the capital.
Ian, that’s really sad. I’m sorry for you and other Canadians.
Regarding nuking Kiev, it is far more likely that in the unlikely event that Russia does nuke something it will be a whole lot further from Russia than Kiev – more likely to be close to the border with Poland or somewhere beyond the border … like Rammstein.
So, this last comment might be too late to the party – and I eagerly await the next discussion party about the elections – but I hope you respond, because the discussion my comment set off has given me a few insights.
So you suggested that I bypass the mars-venus dichotomy entirely – I’ve tried each extreme, after all, and seen the results! Instead, I choose a third option, the third principle that balances and overcomes the binary. Make either the sun or Jupiter that overarching principle, the ideal I work for beyond the swing of mars and venus.
I immediately know which principle I’m making the goal – I naturally am jovial and generous, I recently made the talisman to jupiter, and my sun, being in aquarius, isnt well aspected anyway.
Any advice on how to make myself more Jovian? Meditations, mantras, music, anything of that sort? I’m struggling between two options for dealing with the house I own with my ex – part of me wants to force the partition sale, tear everything down and get my money back. The Martian option. Part of me wants to find some way to accomodate her – give her what she wants, let her keep the place. The venusian option. So, what’s the Jovian option…
Your guidance is always appreciated!
JMG,
I am curious about the difference between your above list of the sins associated with the planets and Levi’s list. Starting on pg. 84 he lists:
Sun: faith/pride
Moon: hope/avarice
Venus: charity/lust
Mars: strength/wrath
Mercury: prudence/sloth
Saturn: temperance/gluttony
Jupiter: justice/envy
Whereas you list envy rather than avarice for the Moon, avarice rather than sloth for Mercury, sloth rather than gluttony for Saturn, and gluttony rather than envy for Jupiter. Frankly your list makes more semse to me, but I’m curious about its derivation and how it came to differ from Levi’s if you’re willing to elaborate. Is this just another instance of Levi not having as much good information to work with regarding astrology as we do today? Thanks!