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Magic Monday

Sunday, May 31st, 2026 09:48 pm

It's a little before midnight and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

(The meme? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share. Besides, this one's such a perfect summary of certain points I've been trying to make in recent posts over on the blog...)

Buy Me A Coffee

Ko-Fi

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

I've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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

With that said, have at it!

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Yes, "And You And I"

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Bean Counters: the folly of transactional thinking, school sports, dieting, and hoe math

kimberlysteele

Sunday, May 31st, 2026 10:15 pm

Humans are not a very bright species, and we express our profound misunderstandings of the universe by attempting to tabulate the scores of everything in perceived existence. The prevalence of autism has not helped matters, as autistic people tend to have an attraction to quantification as part of their disorder. To fan that fire, autistic people like myself often suffer from autistic literalism as a side effect of autistic narcissism, which means that we think following directions to the letter or “playing by the rules” will steer outcomes towards what they would be in our ideal world. If I had a dollar for every time my autistic literalism has blown up in my face, I would be a very rich woman.

We are all on the spectrum in some sense, and the worst afflicted are not necessarily bean counters. A bean counter is a human being who has fallen into the trap of gameifying every interaction in his or her life, hoping that there is a system beneath it all that they can exploit and reap the eternal benefits. Most religions are built by people who have gameified their particular god or gods, firstly presuming that their deity is superior to all others (or in the case of monotheism is the only deity that exists) and secondly presuming they are God’s chosen people. Monotheism is especially plagued with literalism, and that is why we have Christians who waste their lives living provisionally in anticipation of the Second Coming and Jews who believe avoiding pork will help them in the afterlife. Religion, being a creation of human idiots grasping at straws, is not good at grasping the subtle, and the spiritual is the subtle. Religion bulldozes the subtle and its metaphors with obtuse virtue signaling and grandiose carnivals of unearned wealth and fake charity. Churches and temples are great as social clubs in a civilization that has lost its ability to create social cohesion, but as far as getting humans any closer to the Divine is concerned, they suck at the one job they are supposed to perform.

Bean counting for 5 year olds

If we have good parents, we are taught as children to trade good behavior for approval. We are nurtured and not left to our own devices when it comes to learning to go potty, how to clean up after ourselves, how to share with others, and earning an allowance. The trouble comes when we are forced into school, or at least it came when I was forced into school with a bunch of strangers who immediately hated me and determined that I would be cast in the role of Outsider for the next 14 years of my life. A blissful youth spent at home was broken on the rocks of girls who forced me to sit by the bus driver because I had never met them or their friends at age 4. At age 9, I won spelling bees and had a handful of pals but was so generally hated by my so-called “best” friend that she admitted that her mother hated my guts and did not want me to hang out with her anymore. Popularity was a game and I was its biggest loser. I felt alone at the time, not understanding that my experience was being played out in every classroom across the nation and the world. School was not about learning — just about everything I ever learned during ages 4-17 was learned on my own or via my parents. Reading? My mother taught me that. Arithmetic? That was my dad, who showed me how to add and subtract. Typing? I taught myself on an old-fashioned ink and ribbon typewriter with the help of a book. School was about learning to comply with absurd rules to please unhappy and bitter “teachers” who lived lives of quiet desperation while trying to make it look like they knew what they were doing. School was about becoming a good little drone who knew what to say in order to keep the peace.

School sports

One of the ways to become popular in school besides being born to obscenely rich parents was to excel in athletics. It was not enough to be fit and healthy; no, you had to be the one who could hit a softball into the subdivisions beyond the creek and down someone’s chimney. You had to run fast enough to prequalify for the Olympics. If you were a cheerleader, you had to be able to do flips in the air and to be tossed around like a hackey sack without landing on the ground with two broken legs. If you were not that — heaven forbid you were fat, uncoordinated, or just plain not into sports! — you were shunned as weak and pathetic.

Those of us who sucked at sports were tasked to prove our worth elsewhere. The other school clubs and activities beckoned: Join the debate team to word-battle with other kids! Enter the sonatina festival! Qualify for National Honors Society so you’ll have better chances of getting into college! Join Yearbook so you can be of use to the school with all that free time you have after 4 hours a night of homework! It was never enough to just be.

You don’t have to imagine the surprise of all those who were repeatedly told they would get good jobs after graduating college to afford spouses, a home, and a yearly vacation somewhere because they are living that surprise. Zoomers, Millennials, and most of Gen X labored under the delusion that by following the script of get-good-grades-then-degree, they would be rewarded with a job that paid enough to cover the bills and a few small luxuries. They thought they would have enough to raise a family if they chose to do that. As it turns out, my decision to not have children was the best economic decision I have ever made for myself. Had I landed with a husband who wanted children (there was a guy I had a crush on in college who probably could have gotten me to bear his children if it my love had been requited) we would have been very challenged when it came to affording the basics for them. Both spouses have to work these days outside of an extremely privileged echelon of the upper middle class. Everybody has got to hustle, and even then, it is almost impossible to make ends meet.

Most of the women and men who went to college got rug-pulled. This has not stopped the current generation from flooding into colleges and universities as if the past 30 years never happened. They still believe in the dream of flowing into a luxe life after serving up 4 - 8 of their most productive years. Dreams are hard to kill, and bean-counting depends on a dream in order to prop it up.

Dieting

The bean-counting mentality becomes literal when it comes to psychoses over food, otherwise known as dieting a.k.a. disordered eating as a result of an attempt to create order in eating. Wallis Simpson, the train wreck socialite 2x-divorcee who married Prince Edward, quipped “You can never be too rich or too thin” She said this despite being a horsey looking mid who suffered throat cancer (probably from a combo of smoking and starving) and dementia. She could have benefited both health-wise and looks-wise from gaining a few extra pounds, just sayin’.

Anorexics turn calorie counting into a bona fide addiction. It's a talent in its own right.

At its core, anorexia is and always has been a disease of privilege. Anorexia, which rarely happens to men and mostly afflicts affluent young women, is a disease of ingratitude. When we are surrounded by easily attainable, beautiful, life-sustaining food, it is a truly vile and perverse act to starve ourselves to death.

Semaglutide drugs have thrown gasoline on an already roaring fire, and I would guess that most GLP-1 drugs are being used by people who have no business taking them such as Demi Moore. Anorexia is about counting calories as if they were lepers. The anorexic would like to expel all lepers from the kingdom (some claim to do just this by becoming supposed breathatarians) but some lepers must be admitted so the kingdom does not die off entirely. Why? You can never be too rich or too thin.

Liv is gonna die

Liv Schmidt, probably about age 18

Elliot Rodger

There is a creepy, possibly pedophilic, foul influencer named Liv Schmidt who is only known in certain circles of social media. Schmidt is known for being kicked off of TikTok and other social media platforms for her abusive pro-anorexia rhetoric and malevolent bullying. If there is any better example of how to profoundly fail at life than Liv Schmidt, I have yet to see one. She seems like an absolutely awful human being who should be pitied for her emptiness in every sense of the term.

Liv Schmidt wanted to be a haute couture model but was allegedly too “fat” to be considered for runway work. Yet as a younger woman, she was absolutely stunning. Had she been born a decade earlier, she might have been a Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie and Fitch model, with all its attendant Jeffrey Epstein and Mike Jeffries-related problems. Her look was all-American. Schmidt, however, apparently has severe body dysmorphia. She reported in 2024 that she had lost enough weight to walk a “real” fashion runway. Since at least half of her content is AI slop, it is unclear whether or not she ever achieved her dream to strut down a designer’s catwalk.

Schmidt’s entire life revolves around how little she can eat. She is 24 and thoroughly emaciated. Her social media presence consists of hurling abuse at women whose legs are thicker than the girth of a cheerleader’s baton. She often takes selfies where she is seen “eating” a small portion of food with puffy, overfilled duck lips. She hosts an online club cringily entitled the Skinni Société, a subscription club where the seriously anorexic can get lifestyle advice from a pro. To Schmidt’s credit, she has become an expert at making her own body disappear. She was never a big girl, but now she looks like the Grim Reaper if he stole and wore the head of Elliot Rodger, the incel who took his own life after killing 6 people and injuring 14 in 2014. Schmidt’s constant, whiny vitriol towards “fat” women is reminiscent of Rodger’s rants about sluts and Chads. I’m not saying she’s a massacre killer waiting to happen; only that she is entitled and autistic. She also has the dead Rodger boy’s glazed eyes, puffer fish lips, and perpetual frown. Rodger filmed countless hours and wrote a boring, novel-length manifesto about how he was owed beautiful women because he was a “supreme gentleman”. He literally thought that because he wore brand name clothes, drove an expensive car, and was reasonably good looking that women should have been falling over themselves to ride his dick. He was too proud to hire a prostitute, and when he took his own life, he was supposedly a virgin.

Somewhere along the line, Schmidt was told that the only way she could be worth more than the powder to blow herself to hell was via being emaciated. She reports that her mother was the original Skinni club member, which shows us that eating disorders run in families. Like Rodger, she seems to have been a child who was never told “No” unless it pertained to having a full slice of birthday cake.

Fake and gay

Schmidt has shaved her nose into a Michael Jackson fishbone. Because she is dysmorphic, she cannot stop getting work done despite her first nose job being quite terrible. She is now on her second or third. Her nose, however, is a masterpiece compared to her botched lips. Her pout looks like a female baboon’s ass if it was able to frown, and it is all the more disconcerting paired with the fake blonde hair, empty eyes, and horrific fashion choices on the bundle of sticks she has made out of her body.

Also, Schmidt is likely a closeted lesbian. There is photographic evidence that indicates that she has groomed and possibly molested a female 15 year old member of her Skinni Société. I will be talking about the gayness of anorexia in a future article.

Like Elliot Rodger, Schmidt’s entire existence is bean-counting and scorekeeping. Because she has enjoyed a great deal of privilege in her lifetime, she feels she is owed more and more as long as she lives up to the tortured image of privilege she has created in her brain. Every fat-shaming posts she makes makes claims that the “fat” who cannot lose weight are always, always eating too much. Lack of self control = fatter than Starvin’ Marvin Liv = you must be eating too much. Never mind that some people are genetically thinner than others or have diseases or medications that result in weight gain; nah, it all boils down to how much you’re willing to starve yourself like Liv.

Why we are all probably going to die alone

I recently stepped in it when I posted on TikTok about how I don’t nag my husband to do dishes. I explained that he does the dishes more frequently than he used to because instead of bitching or going on housework strikes, I thank him when he does do chores. The women of TikTok went into attack mode, saying that it was sad that I was gentle parenting my husband and that I obviously don’t know how to communicate with the man I have been married to for 26 years. One woman said that she was affirming her choice to be perpetually single via my video.

Whatever. They were triggered by my soft approach and my unwillingness to see myself as a commodity to be traded. When people divorce, they do so because of a long list of offenses committed by their spouse that amounts to physical, emotional, and spiritual debt in their minds. One divorcee I knew saw the writing on the wall when her husband started saying “That’s a divorceable offense!” in regards of some terrible thing she said in an argument or chore she was unwilling to do. He had been tabulating her unworthiness since the honeymoon or before it. The main excuse women use to divorce their husbands nowadays is that he is a man-child. He is not able to earn enough money and he does not help enough with the housework and child-rearing, so they kick him out and become single mothers, come what may. They try for alimony and usually get it, or at least they get what is known as a lump sum or all-at-once payment for their troubles. The main excuse men use to divorce their wives is that she has become unsexy or that she no longer puts out. Never mind that she has given him healthy children and put her own needs and wants on the shelf to care for those kids; she’s no longer hot, so it is time to trade in her moody ass for a girl who is about five years older than his children.

So of course a woman who has gone the Way of the Lone Harpy sees my nonconfrontational treatment of the other adult in my household as deficient because she would much rather see me join her Hate Club where all men are stupid doofuses who cannot do anything right. Tonight my supposedly-terrible husband insisted I open a new package of shredded lettuce for the tacos I made for dinner because as the woman, I should not be made to suffer the insult of eating old, slightly wilted lettuce. He ate the old lettuce on his tacos because “that’s what guys do” according to him. (I tried to get him to throw the old lettuce away, if you’re curious) This is the sort of sweet, chivalric interaction the Lone Harpy does not get to enjoy, and in my opinion, it is her loss. She will die as she lived — utterly alone.

I say this and I fully anticipate dying alone. My husband is 14 years my senior and as I mentioned earlier, I chose not to have children. People have children partially because they hold out hopes that those children will repay them by caring for them in old age. I certainly have put in my fair share of care for my aging parents. Nursing homes, however, are full of old people crying and moaning to go home. They are too far gone or senile to understand that home has been sold off by their children who almost never visit. Filial piety is not what it used to be, especially in America where most kids move far, far away from their parents the moment they are grown.

When people turn relationships into transactions, it all becomes hoe math. Hoe Math is a snarky guy with an eponymous channel on the internet (we never see his face) who draws flow charts of people ranked on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness. Women, who he calls females, used to date in their own range, for instance, a female 5 would date a 4-6 male. Nowadays, every woman from 1-10 only dates the hottest guys fro 8-10, leaving the 1-7s like poor old Elliot Rodger in the lurch. Hoe Math, though it claims not to be serious, is a perfect example of how the autistic brain attempts to reconcile human behaviors into rational units that can be stacked and organized. The Hoe Mathematician thinks he is dealing blows to the slutty femoids who choose Chad over him — never mind that Chad actually attempted to treat her like a human being and not an animated doll. When he finally pins down a femoid and makes her into his wife because she checked enough boxes, he is ironically blindsided when she dumps him for someone who is less enthralled by his own, tiny, narcissistic world.

I am not going to go into it here about how gratitude and generosity break the rules of negative bean-counting due to their sublimating effect. I have many other essays on that. Here are two of them:

The Glad Game

How to Attract the One: Advice from an Old, Married Woman

I will leave you with the observation that bean-counting should be saved for actual accounting, such as in the scrupulous avoidance of high interest credit cards. We humans are simply not intelligent enough (present company very much included) to see the ripples in the pond and how they intersect. Better to go with thankfulness and thoughtfulness than to be absorbed into the fray of retarded bean-counting.

Life is unfair and difficult for human brains to understand. Count on it.

Tags:

(no subject)

denise

dw_maintenance

Sunday, May 31st, 2026 10:00 pm

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

(no subject)

denise

dw_maintenance

Sunday, May 31st, 2026 08:59 pm

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

Ogham Readings on Saturdays

kimberlysteele

Friday, May 29th, 2026 11:56 am

I am happy to read your Ogham free of charge -- that's how I hone my divination skills. Please limit your reading request to four or fewer Ogham cards: though this can take many forms, here are some common ones (all of them are basically combos of 4 cards):

-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading

-four questions about four separate items that require one answer (card) per item
-a one card reading to answer a specific question and a three card for a more nuanced question
-Two separate readings, two cards a piece exploring the positives and negatives of two different choices

I am happy to do Ogham readings confidentially via emails -- just email me at k steele studio at gmail during the allotted time/before deadline. I cannot answer health questions. If you have a question about health or another sensitive, private matter, provide a bunch of non-identifying information and the Ogham will be able to figure it out even if I don't. I'm serious... the Ogham actually tend to "know" things without me being privy to what is going on.

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

I take reading requests from whenever this post goes up on Friday night until 8pm US Central Time Saturday.

For a more in depth look into how I read and interpret the Ogham's symbols, please visit my website druidogham.wordpress.com.

Thank you for your generous donations. They often buy cat food and litter, groceries, and take out burritos and sandwiches for my Mom and me. If you would like to donate, please do it here:

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

Tags:

ogham,
readings

JMG on The Dangerous Maybe

ecosophia

Thursday, May 28th, 2026 03:52 pm

I was delighted yesterday to be back on The Dangerous Maybe podcast with hosts Michael Downs and Bryce Nance. This was the same podcast that hosted my recent conversation with post-chaos magician and accelerationist philosopher Nick Land, and they wanted to have me back on to talk about my most savagely denounced book, The King in Orange.

This was a weirder conjunction than you may think. Mikey and Nance come out of the same sort of avant-garde Marxist background that gave rise to the Situationist movement, which I've been discussing and critiquing over on my main blog. Apparently that scene has been moving in interesting directions of late, as they were intrigued by the class analysis at the center of The King in Orange -- the division of American society into investment, salary, wage, and welfare classes -- and how the bitter conflict between the salary and wage classes played out in the election and the subsequent career of Donald Trump.

So we talked about that, as well as magic, frog gods, tentacled horrors from the dawn of time, and the Freudian implications of all those women flinging their dildos at symbols of the Trump administration in a recent protest -- I mean, come on, ladies, do you really think the rest of us wouldn't pick up on that? -- and had a lively two-hour conversation on the subject. Check it out here:

https://youtu.be/xk4g1hFkDVw?si=Ik8HEpl0pZcUFert

Or here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk4g1hFkDVw

Current Mood: upbeat
Current Location: Carcosa
Current Music: something by Erich Zann

Tags:

Testing needed in advance of code push!

denise

dw_maintenance

Thursday, May 28th, 2026 04:10 pm

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

The fragility of Information: Practicing systems thinking (Part 3)

claire_58

Thursday, May 28th, 2026 09:33 am

We live in a time of rapid change and uncertainty. The 50 year failure of the environmental movement has left us with a tangle of interconnected problems. Ecosystem destruction; freakishly high levels of pollution of the land the water and the atmosphere; and resource depletion combine to create a looming crisis of epic proportions. We are faced with increasing political and economic instability and it’s clear that there will be no large scale co-ordinated efforts to address any of it.

This blog is about what we can do, as ordinary people in families and small groups, to create lives worth living; to build a future worth having; and to be a force for renewal and regeneration in our much depleted world.

It is almost impossible to write about information without making reference to the internet and the information age. Ironically we may have already passed peak information. The rise of LLM’s (AI) and the era of Deep Fakes means that much of the “information” available to us must be viewed with skepticism. The info-sphere is filled with drama and click bait. Mis-, dis-, and mal-information. (aka inaccuracies; lies and propaganda; and truth inconvenient to the authorities) has made sorting out what’s real and worth our attention difficult.

While the internet remains a useful tool (the sheer volume of people making content on various internet platforms make it possible to learn skill or find out anything about anything), what concerns us here is how information can be understood in the context of systems and systems thinking. More specifically, how we can use an understanding of the movement of information to maximize our ability to navigate an uncertain future.

This is the third post on Practicing Systems Thinking. Whole systems are made up of Energy, Matter, and Information. Each of these has a different pattern of movement and depletion. Tracing the flows of each is essential to developing an understanding what is happening in the system. Understanding how they move makes it possible to catch and store resources and make the best possible use of them.

Information is a key limiting factor in all systems. It is also the most perishable. Information moves erratically and is easily lost or corrupted. Good accurate information is essential to the success of any project. Lack of information or misinformation can have severe negative consequences in decision making or system design.

First a distinction must be made between “data” and “information.” The difference is meaning and intention. Data can provide information if you can interpret it. It’s meaningless without context and significance. Intention is what gives it both.

If you are walking through an unfamiliar neighbourhood the street signs and landmarks are information. As you look around your brain will scan the trees and shrubs on the boulevards, the houses, and the landscapes around them searching for anything unusual to mark the territory. Most of what you see will not register. The plants themselves, as well as birds, the clouds in the sky, and other animals roaming the area are irrelevant “noise.”

If you are walking through the same neighbourhood with a bag in your hand and an urban foraging guide in your pocket, the plants in the landscape will have your full attention. The houses, streets signs, and random creatures all recede into the background. Your brain automatically filters out and ignores irrelevant data so you can focus on what matters.

The difference between information and data is intention.

The second point is that information is fragile. It is easily lost if not used and easily corrupted if not preserved and carefully passed on.

There was a time when anyone over the age of 11 could read a clock face and count out change. Now counting out change is unheard of and many young adults have never learn to tell time other than digitally. These skills are not important but the same story can be told about many once common skills. Try finding your way around without GPS or Google Maps. Or predicting the weather without checking your phone.*

Preserving information has always been an essential aspect of the development of human societies. Written languages have been developed many times and in many places around the world and non-literate cultures take passing on information very seriously. In “The Memory Code” Lynne Kelly documents the many traditional practices and memory aid technologies used by Australian cultures and shows how widespread these thing were throughout the ancient world.

As modern people we have a wealth of information at our fingertips.** The problem is our information storage system is the most fragile ever created. “The Cloud,” is a fantastically inaccurate description of an enormous network of very solid and massive data centres.

The system is incredibly complicated; relies on multiple redundancies at every stage of the process to maintain data; and has an insatiable appetite. Data centres in the US alone consume energy(168 billion kWh annually), materials (228 kt/year to produce components ), and water(100–200 billion gallons per year) at an phenomenal rate.

The tech bros and political elites will probably do their best to keep the it running as long as possible but it’s very likely that the easy access we enjoy today will be an early casualty of the long descent.***

Right now because we are still in the process of discarding the most recent ways of storing information the thrift stores and charity shops are full of books on any kind of hobby or practical skill you can imagine. Collecting books strategically is well worth considering. Books on practical skills like cooking, gardening, and doing repairs as well as books on ecology, weather guides and field guides to your local ecosystem, etc should top your list.

More importantly you may want to consider training your brain to store and retain information. According to Kelly’s most recent book The Knowledge Gene, one of our most unique human traits is our ability to encode information. For over 70,000 years**** people all over the world have used our uniquely human skills in music, art, spatial abilities, story and performance to store and convey knowledge.

Electronic data is effervescent; books and paper burn and decompose; clay tablets crumble; stone cracks, breaks, and is eroded by wind and water. Yet the Kalamath people in Oregon tell a story about the clash of the gods that created Crater Lake that contains accurate descriptions of geological events nearly 8,000 years old. Oral stories kept by Australian cultures describe the ocean level rise that goes back to the end of the last ice age.

Ironically, art, music, and story telling, our most ancient art forms, are the most durable way to store information.

*These are vital survival skills for non-industrial people. Before computers street and road maps were readily available in gas stations and convenience stores and asking strangers for directions was commonplace.

**Finding information has never been easier. Sorting it, understanding it, determining its accuracy is another story.

***If you doubt this you may want to think deeply about the meaning of “sustainable.”

**** The actual genetic mutation that makes this possible may go back as far as 600,000 years.

The Story of Devavrata

mystical_mountain_9

Wednesday, May 27th, 2026 04:28 pm

Last week I told the Welsh story of Llyn y Fan Fach – the mountain lake which was home to the fairy of medical knowledge and who became the mother of a long line of famous Welsh healers. In that post I had noted that when I read that story it immediately reminded me of another legend, but one of a different time and place. So, here it is. This story is from the early chapters of the Indian epic poem the Mahabharata – a family feud of five millennia ago that was also a battle of darkness and light. The parallels between the two legends I find to be chilling.

One day, King Shantanu, scion of the Lunar Dynasty, was walking by the Ganges River when he saw an incredibly beautiful maiden, whose superhuman loveliness intoxicated his senses. The king was so enamoured by her beauty that he at once asked her to marry him. He put his heart, love, his entire kingdom and wealth, his very life itself, at her feet when he made this request.

The maiden replied to the king, “O king, I shall become your wife. But I will do so only under three conditions: (1) that neither you nor anyone else should ever ask me who I am or from whence I come; (2) you must not stand in the way of whatever I do, good or bad, nor must you ever be wroth with me on any account whatsoever; and (3) you must not say anything displeasing to me. If you act otherwise, I shall leave you then and there. Do you agree to these conditions?

The infatuated king vowed his assent. Soon afterwards, the mysterious maiden became his wife and lived with him as queen.

The heart of king Shantanu was captivated by his wife’s modesty and grace and the steady love that she bore him. The royal couple lived a life of perfect happiness, oblivious to the passage of time.

In due time they were blessed with a newborn son.

When the child was born, the queen took to the child to the shore of the Ganges River and cast it into water – immediately drowning and killing the newborn. She then walked back to her kingdom with a smile on her face. Shantanu was aghast with horror. He could not believe what he had just seen but he stopped himself from asking his queen any question, mindful of the promise he made to her. He wanted to ask, but he dared not.

As the years passed, the queen gave birth to six more children and each one she cast into the river as soon as it was born and killed it. Shantanu, grieved as he was, asked no question and bore the pain with restraint as he had given his plighted word. He often wondered who she was, wherefrom she had come and why she acted like a murderous witch; yet he still loved her deeply as she was the paragon of feminine virtue in every other respect and was still flawlessly beautiful.

When the eighth child was born and the queen was about to throw it into the Ganges, Shantanu could not restrain himself any longer.

He cried to her, “Stop, stop! You heartless woman. Why do you do this wretched act? Why do you what no mother would? You are as insane as you are beautiful.” With this outburst, he also restrained the queen on her murderous mission.

“O great king,” she replied, “you have forgotten your promise, for your heart is set on your child, and you do not need me anymore. I go. I shall not kill this child but first listen to my story before you judge me. I, who am constrained to play this hateful role by the curse of the great sage Vasishtha, am the goddess Ganga, adored by gods and men. Vasishtha cursed the eight Vasus to be born in the world of men, and moved by their supplications said, I was to be their mother.

[Time for a detour! The Mahabharata is famous not only for stories-within stories, but even stories-within-stories-within stories! Time to explore the background story of the eight Vasus. In Hinduism, the Vasus are attendant deities of Indra, king of the gods. The name ‘Vasu’ means 'Dweller' or 'Dwelling'. They are the eight elemental gods representing aspects of nature and are numbered among the thirty-three gods of Hinduism. Their names and respective meanings are: Anala, which means “living” or “The Fire”; Dhara, which means “support” or “ The Earth”; Anila, which means “The Wind”; Aha, which means “Space”; Pratyusha, which means “light” or “The Sun”; Prabhasa, which means “The Sky”; Soma, which means “The Moon”; and Dhruva, which means “The Stars”.]

Ganga continued: “One day, these eight Vasus were traveling on a holiday with their wives when they came across Sage Vasishta’s ashram. Outside the ashram, they saw “Nandini”, Vasishta’s divine cow. One of the wives was taken in so much by the beauty of the cow, that she requested her husband, Prabhasa, to bring the cow to her. Prabhasa replied ‘Dear, we are gods. What use do we have for cows or cow’s milk? Even though it is Nandini, whose milk gives everlasting life, we are already enjoying immortality on account of being gods. Most importantly, Sage Vasishta is very fond of Nandini, and it would be improper on our part to violate his integrity.’ Despite many attempts by Prabhasa, his wife did not yield. She made imploring requests and melted Prabhasa ‘s heart. He agreed and thus, the eight Vasus took Nandini and her calf by force and disappeared before Vasishta returned to the ashram.

“When Vasishta returned and found Nandini missing, he, through his divine vision, saw all that had happened and cursed the eight Vasus to be born as mortal humans in this world. And for a god, who enjoys all pleasures and immortal life in the heavens, to be born in this world and live the life of a man with the pain and suffering we go through in a lifetime is a horrible experience.

“When the eight Vasus came to know of this curse, they ran to Vasishta and fell at his feet asking for his forgiveness. Vasishta said that the curse cannot be lifted and has to follow its course. But the effect of the curse can be reduced. He said to them, ‘Go request goddess Ganga to be your mother on earth and ask her to relieve you of your birth as soon as you are born so that you may return to the heavens without long years of suffering.’ I grant this softening of the curse to the seven of you who supported Prabhasa in his act of stealing. However, since Prabhasa was the one who actually stole the cow, the curse will remain in full effect for him, and he will have to live his full lifetime on earth like a man. But he will live a great life and be regarded as one of the best souls to have ever walked the earth. Saying this, Vasishta went back into meditation.

“Relieved to hear this, the Vasus approached me and requested me to be their mother on earth and throw them into the river as soon as they are born. I agreed and came to earth and became your wife to carry out this task.

“I bore them to you, and well is it for you that it was so, for you will go to higher regions for this service that you have done to the eight Vasus. I shall bring up this last child of yours for some time and then return it to you as my gift.”

After saying these words, the goddess disappeared with the newborn child.

After this catastrophic change in his life, King Shantanu gave up all sensual pleasures, and he ruled the kingdom as an ascetic. But one day, while walking along the banks of the Ganges River, he saw a young boy who shone like a resplendent god. The child was amusing himself by casting a dam of arrows across the Ganges in flood, playing with the mighty river as a child would with his indulgent mother. Standing still in amazement at this sight, the king saw the goddess Ganga reveal herself to him. And she spoke thus:

“O king, this is that eighth child that I bore you. I have brought him up till now. His name is Devavrata. He has mastered the art of arms and already equals in prowess the greatest warriors of this age. He has learned the Vedas and other sacred teachings from the sage Vasishta and is well versed in the arts and sciences known to Shukra [the god Venus]. Take back with you this child who is a great archer and hero as well as a master of statecraft. Then Ganga blessed the boy, and after handing him over to his father, she disappeared.

King Shantanu was overjoyed with this turn of events and soon declared the youthful prince Devavrata to be the crown prince.

Four years passed by. One day as the king was wandering on the banks of the Yamuna River, he smelled a fragrance so divinely sweet that he sought for its source; after some searching, he traced it to a maiden so lovely that she seemed to be a goddess. A sage had conferred on this girl the boon that a divine perfume should emanate from her, and this fragrance was now pervading the whole riverside and forest surrounding it.

From the moment that the goddess Ganga had left him, the king had kept his senses under control – but the sight of this divinely beautiful maiden burst the bonds of restraint and filled him with an overmastering desire. On the spot, he asked her to be his wife.

The maiden said to the king, “I am a fisherwoman, the daughter of the chief of the fishermen. May it please you, Sire, to ask him and get his consent.”

King Shantanu went to the chief of the fisherman, who was an astute man. He said to the king, “O king, there is no doubt that this maiden, like every other, has to be married to someone and you are indeed worthy of her. Still, you have to make a promise to me before you can have her as your wife.”

Shantanu replied, “If it is a just promise, I shall make it.”

The chief of the fisherfolk said, “The child born of this maiden should be the king after you.”

Though almost mad with passion, the king could not make this promise, as it meant setting aside the godlike Devavrata, the son of Ganga, who was entitled to the crown. It was a price that could not be thought of without shame. Shantanu therefore returned to his capital, sick with baffled desire. He did not reveal the matter to anyone and languished in silence.

Devavrata noticed the change in his father’s demeanour and one day asked him, “My father, you have all that one’s heart could wish. Why then are you unhappy? How is it that you are like one pining away with a secret sorrow?”

The king replied, “Dear son, what you say is true. I am indeed tortured with mental pain and anxiety. You are my only son, and you are always preoccupied with military ambitions. Life in this world is uncertain and wars are incessant. If anything untoward befalls you, our family dynasty will go extinct. Of course, you are equal to a hundred sons. Still, those who are well-read in the scriptures say that in this transitory world having but one son is the same as having no son at all. It is not proper that the perpetuation of our family should depend on a single life, and above all I desire the perpetuation of our family. This is the cause of my anguish.” The father prevaricated, being ashamed to reveal the whole story to his son.

But Devavrata was wise and resourceful. He realized that there must be a secret cause for his father’s poor mental state and questioning the king’s charioteer, came to know of his meeting with the fisher-maiden on the banks of the Yamuna River. He went to the chief of the fishermen and besought his daughter’s hand on his father’s behalf.

The chief of the fishermen was respectful but firm to the prince. He said, “My daughter is indeed fit to be the king’s spouse; then should not her son become king? But you have been crowned as the heir-apparent and will naturally succeed your father. It is this that stands in the way.”

Devavrata replied, “I give you my word that the son born of this maiden shall be king, and I renounce in his favour my right as heir apparent.”

The chief of the fisherman said, “O best of the Bharata race! You have done what no one else born of royal blood has done till now. You are indeed a hero. You can yourself conduct my daughter to the king, your father. Still, hear with patience these words of mine which I say as the father of the girl. I have no doubt that you will keep your word – but how can I hope that the children born of you will renounce their birthright? Your sons will naturally be mighty heroes like you and will be hard to resist if they seek to seize the kingdom by force. This is the doubt that torments me.”

When he heard this knotty question posed by the fisher-maiden’s father, Devavrata, who was bent on fulfilling his father’s desire above everything else, made his supreme renunciation. With arms upraised to the father of the maiden, he declared, “I shall never marry and I dedicate myself to a life of unbroken chastity.”

As Devavrata uttered these words of renunciation, the gods showered flowers on his head and the air reverberated with the word “Bhishma! Bhishma!” (‘Bhishma’ means one who undertakes a terrible vow and fulfills it) From that day forth the prince was known by the name of Bhishma. This son of Ganga then led the fisher-maiden Satyavati to his father.

Soon afterwards king Shantanu wed Satyavati and in due course, two sons were born of them. The Lunar Dynasty was secured.

Bhishma maintained his terrible vow throughout his extremely long life and served as chief advisor to three generations of the royal line. He fought as a general in the Mahabharata war that raged between the two clans of his grand-nephews (the Kauravas and the Pandavas). Near the end of the war, Bhishma was pierced by so many arrows that he looked for all the world like a porcupine; and when he fell, he lay upon a bed of the arrows that had pierced him. But Bhishma had been given the boon of dying at the time of his choice – and he chose to die on the day when the Sun turns northward, indicating that those who die will be able to break the chain of reincarnation. However, doing so meant that he had to lie on that bed of arrows in the middle of the battlefield for 46 days, with an arrow for a pillow, stoically bearing the agony of his innumerable injuries, and consuming nothing but water. And while waiting for the day to die, he gave blessings, words of wisdom and advice to the victorious Pandavas after the war finished; and he taught them some sacred verses (the Thousand Names of Vishnu) for the sake of mankind, which are recited in India by millions to this day.

The Story of Devavrata and The Maiden of Llyn y Fan Fach: two different legends, separated by so much time and space; so different in details, but so similar in essence! How can this be? No doubt some scholars have tried their utmost to delineate some ancient cross-cultural exchange between the Celts and the Indians of old. I have read of such things, including claims that the ancient book of Hindu laws (the Manu Smriti) and the oldest known code of Irish laws are nearly identical, but I have not bothered to try to verify it. Even if true, I find such scholarship to be tedious and tendentious. Besides, if I looked carefully enough, no doubt I would find some similar legend from other parts of the world!

No doubt there are other scholars out there who are more than happy to explain what these variations on a theme of human male interacts with a female water-spirit who imposes strict marriage conditions and then bolts when such conditions are inevitably violated, but graces humanity with some super-human “really” means. And, depending on the scholar’s point of view (or hobby horse, as the case may be) some logical explanation will be given. To be honest, I find the scholastic habit of vivisecting myths and legends to be violent and unnatural.

In my opinion, these traditional stories are meant to be closely read or listened to, reflected upon, learned “by heart” (which is not the same as “by memory”) and incorporated into one’s character. The fact that they have stood the test of time means that there are great truths contained in them, like burning embers cloaked in the ash of a fire. But if one removes the ember, it quickly turns cold and dark. I like to keep them “burning” in situ, where they belong, and warm myself with them. The fact that these old stories echo across the traditional cultures around the world tells me that they teach essential lessons of what it is to be human and also record situations in which interactions with some kinds of powerful and intelligent beings – who always play by their own rules – sometimes result in the birth of a cultural hero. Beyond that, I keep my intellect out of this. Besides, a world without beautiful, unsolvable mysteries would be an intolerable place to live in!

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Led Zeppelin, "Kashmir"

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Book Club, The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, Chapter 2: KARMIC CLUMPING

kimberlysteele

Tuesday, May 26th, 2026 10:38 am

The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 was published in 2016 and is a scathing satire of current events. The Mandibles is about one extended family's journey through the collapse of the American petrodollar and how they adjust (or do not manage to adjust) to reduced living circumstances. Various family members in the Mandible clan are counting on inherited wealth via the death of their old grandpa when the rug is pulled out from underneath the American economy in the fateful year 2029, 100 years later than the Great Crash of 1929 that set off the Great Depression. The dollar, now worthless, is replaced by a currency called the bancor from which Americans are vengefully excluded. Inflation and money printing leads regular Americans down the garden path trod by Weimar Germans and millennial Argentinians.

In the second chapter of The Mandibles, Florence, the lower-middle class granddaughter of the Mandible clan is on the (video) phone with her well-to-do sister, Avery. In this conversation, we are introduced to Avery and her family. Florence, as we saw in Chapter 1, is a bit of a black sheep, having chosen to live in what Avery considers a slum with her common law husband, Esteban and a young son she had from a one night stand before she met Esteban named Will. Avery, of whom it is directly implied got the good looks in the family, is married to Lowell, a professor of economics at Georgetown. For those not in the know, Georgetown University is -- in real life and the novel -- a prestigious Boston school. Lowell is a tenured professor there, which means that Avery and their children have never worried about money or making ends meet a day in their lives. Avery speaks to Florence, who is doing the dishes, while reclining on her posh furniture in her beautifully-decorated living room. She gloats to herself about clearing out her collection of old books, smugly delighting in her virtual library and dismissing paper books as junk. We learn that she is a self-styled therapist with a coterie of clients, most of whom are elderly. Avery has three high school age kids: two sons named after search engines, nerdy Goog and Bing, and a promiscuous daughter, Savannah.

The women discuss their brother, Jarred, who has recently bought a small farm and named it the Citadel. Though neither of the sisters saw it coming, their brother, who until age 35 has lived at home and been a college dropout and general failure at life, has gone full doomsday prepper. They gawk at the idea of him doing subsistence farming in upstate New York, wondering how on earth he will ever manage it.

The subject of conversation changes to the US changing its country code to 2 before the area code, which is Shriver's subtle way of bringing the focus back to collapse. The US is no longer Number 1, and Avery quietly resents this symbolic alteration while Florence errs on the side of thinking it is a benevolent change. Meanwhile, upon learning that the spigots have been turned off in her neighborhood for an indefinite period of time called a "dry out", Florence sends Esteban and Will to get bottled water. Of course in Avery's elegant quarter of Boston, the taps never run dry.

Lowell arrives home, all but demanding Avery get off the phone with her sister. He worries aloud about news of the collapse of the dollar in Europe and the bond market doing sketchy stuff. He and Avery discuss Lowell's colleague at Georgetown, Vandermire, who has been predicting apocalyptic collapse for years and who seems perversely gleeful that it has finally arrived, despite being in a poor position to celebrate if collapse goes down.

He wakes up in the morning to go to work and there are ominous signs that Vandermire's lurid fantasies of collapse could be blooming into reality this time, and that collapse seems to be directly gunning for him and his family.

---

I feel like we have all worried our entire lives about the collapse that many of us see as baked into the cake, where the tremendous debts that have been racked up by the American government come home to roost. We have all been taught to live provisionally in some way, and only elites like Avery and her family have been able to relax all this time while enjoying the best life has to offer. Yet it's not Avery's level of money or comfort I envy; it's the privilege of never worrying about what on earth you're going to do if the car breaks or the furnace peters out. For I like to tell myself a tale that if I had the amount of wealth Avery and Lowell possess in the novel, I would spend it more wisely. I suppose I have been somewhat wise, far more like Florence. Yes, spoiler alert, Avery and her posh family are about to be taken down several notches, both where economics and pride are concerned.

Though I don't own my home outright like Florence, it is the smallest, cheapest mortgage on the block because the house is teeny-tiny and old. Like Florence, the neighborhood is decidedly lower middle class. We bought the house in such a state of extreme disrepair (it was the only mortgage for which we could qualify) that it would not be livable if my husband was not hyper-competent at all things building. That said, I don't see myself as doing "great" in a true catastrophic collapse, nor would I want to if all my neighbors were suffering more than I was.

The contrast between the way Avery lives compared to her sister Florence is glaring, yet Florence does not seem unhappy. Avery is happy as well, but her happiness is smugness, a fragile state that could topple like a house of cards at any time. In one telling paragraph, we begin to see the chinks in Avery's armor as she rants to Florence about a certain type of doomer thinking that pisses her off:

"But I see the same thing in my elderly clients all the time. They have different obsessions, of course, we're about to run out of water, or run out of food, or run out of energy. The economy's on the brink of disaster and their 401(k)s will turn into pumpkins. But in truth they're afraid of dying. And because when you die, the world dies, too, at least for you, they assume the world will die for everybody. It's a failure of imagination, in a way -- an inability to conceive of the universe without you in it. That's why old people get apocalyptic: they're facing apocalypse, and that part, the private apocalypse, is real. So the closer their personal oblivion gets, the more certain geriatrics project impending doom on their surroundings. Also, there's almost a spitefulness, sometimes, I wear, for some of those bilious Chicken Littles, imminent Armageddon isn't a fear but a fantasy. Like they want the entire planet to implode into a giant black hole. Because if they can't have their martinis on the porch anymore then nobody else should get to sip one. They want to take everything with them--down to the olives and the toothpicks. But actually, everything's fine. Life, and civilization, and the United States, are all going to go on and on , and that's really what they can't stand."

How much do you personally think about collapse, and have you centered your life around the possibility of collapse? Has this caused problems in your life? What wins do you think you might have achieved from prepping, if any?

What will you do if it real collapse happens and you are thrust into Weimar Germany conditions? What if that never happens? What will you do if the US or whatever country you are in goes on like the proverbial blister in the sun?

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Magic Monday

ecosophia

Sunday, May 24th, 2026 10:16 pm

It's a little before midnight and so it's time to launch a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism, and with certain exceptions noted below, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question or comment received after that point will not get an answer, and in fact will not be put through. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 341,928th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.3 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says. And further: I've decided that questions about getting goodies from spirits are also permanently off topic here. The point of occultism is to develop your own capacities, not to try to bully or wheedle other beings into doing things for you. I've discussed this in a post on my blog.

(The meme? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share. Besides, this one's such a perfect summary of certain points I've been trying to make in recent posts over on the blog...)

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I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use either of the links above to access my online tip jar; Buymeacoffee is good for small tips, Ko-Fi is better for larger ones. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Sergio Enniconi, "Theme from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly"

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Ogham Readings on Saturdays

kimberlysteele

Friday, May 22nd, 2026 10:01 pm

-a single three card reading for the week or month and a one-off, one card reading

Please note I take time off during Solstices and Equinoxes for Druid stuff and because sometimes I simply need a break.

My next planned break is from June 18 - July 5, 2026.

http://buymeacoffee.com/kimberlysteele

Your prayers of blessing to the deity/deities of your choice are welcome whether or not you can donate.

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Universal Gnostic Church: On Stranger Tides

ecosophia

Thursday, May 21st, 2026 12:48 pm

One of the people currently studying for the Universal Gnostic Church ministry -- tip of the bishop's mitre to Gnosticlombe -- did some digging into the literature of the Independent Sacramental Movement, the tradition of free-range bishops with apostolic succession to which the UGC belongs. In the process he found something quite unexpected.

One of our many lineages of apostolic succession comes to us via that astonishingly colorful figure Bishop Michael Bertiaux, author of The Voudon Gnostic Workbook and presiding bishop of the Neo-Pythagorean Gnostic Church. Bertiaux's lineage entered ours in 1993, when one of the bishops of his line consecrated Bishop John Gilbert sub conditione -- at that time there was some question about the origins of the UGC's original lineage, though that's been cleared away since then.

Bishop Bertiaux was an indefatigable collector of lineages and initiations, which he passed on to his students -- a worthwhile task at a time when many such traditions faced the risk of extinction. One of his many consecrations, however, came from a figure even more colorful than he is.

William C. Conway was born in 1865 in Redondo Beach, California, where he spent most of his life, and died in 1969 at the age of 104. He was raised in the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) church and became a bishop in the Aaronic priesthood and a high priest in the Melchizedek priesthood. In the early 1950s, however, he broke with the Salt Lake City branch of the Mormon movement to found his own independent Mormon church. He had connections with Native American spiritual teachers in Mexico, and somewhere -- I have not been able to trace the details yet -- made contact with the Druid Revival, whereupon he founded a Christian Druid church called the Ancient Irish Church of IESU.

In 1954, this remarkable figure consecrated his student Roland Merritt Shreves as a bishop of his church, and in 1967 Shreves and Michael Bertiaux exchanged consecrations. Follow it down from there and the UGC has inherited Conway's lineage -- as well as that of the Latter-Day Saints, though admittedly in a schismatic and heretical form.

The Mormon tradition is among the most colorful and complex of homegrown American religious movements. Alongside the church based in Salt Lake City, there are many dozens of smaller churches in the Latter-Day Saints tradition, which differ from the Salt Lake City church in various ways, some minor, some much more significant. Two good scholarly studies, D. Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View and John L. Brooke's The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology 1644-1844, provide solid evidence that Christian occultism had a major role in Joseph Smith's life and the founding of the Latter-Day Saints faith. I'd been interested in the esoteric dimensions of the traditions, in an outsider's sort of way, for many years...and now it turns out that I, and the rest of the clergy of the Universal Gnostic Church, were schismatic Mormon elders all along and didn't know it.

I'm not at all sure what to make of this, but I thought my readers -- and even more, present and prospective members of the UGC -- would like to know about it. Strange days...

Edit: It gets better. Conway was also a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis and its Gnostic church, the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. He received the XI°, the highest degree in the OTO, on January 1, 1945. I wonder where else he'll turn up as I keep digging!

Current Mood: bewildered
Current Music: Paul Winter, "Icarus"

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The Movement of Matter and the Problem of Plastics: Practicing Systems Thinking (part 2)

claire_58

Thursday, May 21st, 2026 09:14 am

This is part 2 of an in-depth look at the elements that compose all whole systems. This series of post connects to and builds on the posts on managing our personal resources here and here. If you haven’t read part 1 you can find it here. Start reading from the beginning here.

Each of the three types of resources Energy, Matter, Information has a distinctive pattern of movement within the system. Understanding the movement of matter is essential for understanding the twin predicaments that shape our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren: pollution and resource depletion.

Matter is messy and hard to control. It moves in circular patterns. The thing you tossed over your shoulder yesterday is likely to turn up on your path (or your dinner plate) tomorrow.

Matter is solid, visible and touchable, in a way that energy and information are not. You can pick it up and examine it. You can see the wear and tear or dirt and grime. You can wash and repair and reuse but at a certain point you have to decide whether it’s useful life is over.

Good care and moderate use can keep material possessions functional for a long time but most things have an end point when they are no longer useful in their current form.

The circular movement of matter continues long after it’s thrown away.

In the last 50 years massive amounts of biological and geological resources have been extracted and turned into consumer goods. Waste is produced at every phase of the process: extraction, transportation to production facilities, processing, packaging, transporting to market or consumers. The packaging is thrown in the garbage immediately and the product it contained may follow in as little as 6 months.

Waste plastic collects in giant gyres in the ocean where it is slowly beaten into tiny fragments by the waves. Or it degrades on land into microscopic particles. In either case these micro-plastics are taken up by plants and animals. They contaminate the food web and bio-accumulate in the larger creatures, including our food crops and animals, and inevitably in our bodies.

The secondary economy, the economy of human production, has always relied on the capacity of the primary economy, the larger ecosystem, to accept and neutralize the waste products of human manufacturing. As long as human production remained small scale; widely distributed; and relied on natural materials; waste management was rarely a problem.

Natural materials from biological sources degrade relatively quickly and easily into the soil or the water and the biosphere has evolved over millions of years into a complex interactive system where any form of waste is a resource for another part of the system.

As large scale industrial processes began to take over the secondary economy in the early 20th C, using chemicals previously unknown, or uncommon, to process petrochemicals into synthetics materials, the costs of dumping waste products in to the environment began to rise. By the mid-century they started to come to public attention in the form of ecological disasters with devastating human health consequences.

Between 1962 and 1970 Dryden Chemicals Limited dumped more than 9 tonnes of mercury waste from their paper mill into the English-Wabigoon River in Northwestern Ontario. In 1974 Japanese researchers confirmed the devastating effects of mercury poisoning on the communities of Grassy Narrows* and Whitedog. “Minimata Disease” was named after the Japanese village where the neurological damage caused by mercury poisoning was first discovered in 1956!

The Love Cannel, a neighbourhood in upstate New York infamously built on land saturated with 19,800 metric tonnes of chemical waste from the dyes, perfumes, and solvents used in the production rubber and plastics by the Hooker Chemical Company between 1940 and the mid 1950’s clearly demonstrated the devastating and deadly effects of “Better Living Through Chemistry”**

Despite this and other tragedies, the clear connection between industrial toxins, cancer, genetic abnormalities, and autism, which should have led to dramatic changes, has been largely ignored. Fundraising for “cancer research” continues while cancer rates rise and the highly paid researchers blithely ignore the obvious.

Plastic production has increased dramatically since Dupont coined it’s slogan and the main effect of the limited environmental regulation enacted in North America was that manufacturing and manufacturing jobs were exported to poor countries without environmental and safety regulations. (The social cost of throwing the working class here into abject poverty in an attempt to move the toxic mess over there is another story.***)

The environmental movement has also ignored the obvious. Over the last 50 years it has consistently let industry off the hook. The main focus of action has been on personal responsibility and consumer focused recycling programs. Essentially, trying to mop up the flood while steadfastly ignoring the running tap in the bathtub.

The problem of plastics has continued unabated and pollution levels have risen to the point of very nearly overwhelming the capacity of the environment to contain it.

Unfortunately, the feed stock for plastic production, ethylene, is a waste product; a by-product in the production of valuable fuels: diesel for industrial use; gasoline for cars and trucks; and jet fuel for air travel.

Ethylene cannot be used as fuel and getting rid of it is a problem. In many areas there are regulations restricting the amount that can be flared off, that is, burning it and dumping it into the atmosphere.

New plastic is cheaper than recycled plastic because the raw material is virtually free. The recycled product simply can’t compete. Collecting, transporting, cleaning, sorting, and reprocessing existing plastic of many different types and colours costs more than producing perfectly clean new plastic pure enough to be considered “food grade” in any colour you want.

Meanwhile the circular movement of matter continues, as it does.

The reckless extraction of raw materials has ravaged enormous areas of land. Mine tailings leaking into river ecosystems have contaminated drinking water and annihilated fish stocks. Our “recyclable” plastic waste is dumped offshore onto poor countries. Industrial waste from manufacturing goods for the North American market in China, India, and elsewhere, contaminates the atmosphere we all share and poisons the water used to grow crops we all eat.

Matter moves in circles. Carefully guiding the cycles and transformations makes it useful and keeps it useful for longer. Reusing, repurposing and recycling materials is ideal but there is a limit to how many times most things can be reused or recycled.

Everything eventually degrades into the land, the water, or the air and the cycle continues.

*More than 50 years later the fish in the river are still unsafe to eat; the people of Grassy Narrows are still suffering the effects of the persistent toxicity; corporate liability laws are unchanged; and the government has still not stepped up to do what is needed to clean it up.

**The slogan used by Dupont Chemicals from 1935 to 1982

*** Arguably a very important one since our current political instability can be traced directly back to the widespread immiseration that resulted.

The Maiden of Llyn y Fan Fach (The Lake of Little Peak)

mystical_mountain_9

Wednesday, May 20th, 2026 02:45 pm

Once again, I return to retelling an old Celtic legend. As some may guess from the title, it is a Welsh tale. The story is a rarity, in that it is a faery-tale that feels very ancient, yet it also includes an account that goes right to fairly recent history. I have found a few “fun facts” [FFs] related to the story, which serve as footnotes at the end. The story goes as follows:

In the Welsh kingdom of Dyfed, near the village of Llanddensant, there is a peak called Black Mountain that has a little lake near the summit called the Lake of the Little Peak (Llyn y Fan Fach). [FF1]

Close to the village there lived a farmer’s widow with her one surviving son; her husband and all her other sons had died in war. The widow made sure that the son learned only the arts of farming, so as to prevent him from going to war and suffering the same fate as his brothers. With the son’s help, the farm prospered and eventually they had a sizeable herd of cattle.

To prevent over-grazing of their land, the widow used to send their herd to the slopes of Black Mountain, by the shores of Llyn y Fan Fach, in the summers. The son grew to be a strapping young man; it was he who tended to the cattle. One summer evening, while watching over the cattle near the lake, the son heard a sweet female voice sing by the lake. He looked around and saw a beautiful young maiden sitting on a rock at the lake’s edge! Amazed, the son took in all the details of the maiden, from the top of her head down to her dainty slippers with gold threaded laces.

Being raised with good manners, the son offered the maiden barley bread and cheese to eat. But the maiden laughed, and said to him, “Hard-baked is your bread. It is not so easy to catch me!” And she immediately dove into the water. The son waited for her to resurface, but she did not. He found the incident to be very puzzling.

After this encounter with the beautiful “maiden of the lake”, the son lost focus on his work. His mother noticed this change in his behaviour and asked him what had happened. He told her about the mysterious maiden of the lake.

The next day, the son returned to the lake while tending the herd and looked for the maiden, but he searched in vain. As evening settled in, he saw the cattle wander onto a precipitous edge of the lake, so he got up to rescue them – when he saw the same maiden seated on the shore of the lake.

Tongue-tied (as so many young men tend to be in the company of a beautiful woman), the youth offered the lake-maiden the unbaked bread that his mother had given him, deliberately unbaked due to the lake-maiden’s reaction to the hard-baked loaf the previous day. But again, the maiden laughed, and said to him, “Unbaked is your bread. I will not have you!” And once again she dove into the waters and did not re-emerge.

Once he got home, the son told his mother about his second encounter with the mysterious maiden and her rejection of the unbaked loaf of bread. Being clever in the ways of the land, the mother was certain that some kind of enchantment was connected to the mysterious maiden. And, so, she lightly baked a loaf of bread (a ‘middle way’) and gave it to her son to eat the next day.

The following day, the son went back to the lake, but by this time he was so focused on looking for the maiden along the shore of the lake that he paid no attention to his herd. Cattle were again scaling the precipice – but this time they were slipping off the edge and into the lake, and drowning! But he did not even notice it at the time. By the time he realized what was going on, half of his herd had drowned in the deep waters of the little lake. The son was devastated by this loss caused by his foolish inattention. Despite his loss, the lad could not bear to leave the lake without first seeing the beautiful, mysterious maiden.

Evening came, but there was still no sign of the maiden. And then, just before dusk had faded into the blackness of night, he took one last look at the lake, and there he saw a wonderous sight: all of the drowned cattle were well and were swimming to shore! Looking closer in the dim and quickly fading light, he could see that the cattle were being herded out of the water by the maiden.

The son offered the lake-maiden some of the lightly-baked bread to eat and confessed his love to her. This time she took the bread, and said to him, “True-baked is your bread; indeed, I will wed!” However, the maiden stipulated one condition which he must agree to before marrying: that he not be negligent of her, and that if he strikes her three times without cause, she will return to the waters of Llyn y Fan Fach and never return. Naturally, the besotted youth agreed to her condition on the spot.

But then the lake-maiden said another strange thing: that he must first pass a test before they marry – and then she promptly dove into the lake. A moment later, the calm lake surface bubbled furiously and out of it appeared a large, noble-looking spirit with the maiden to his right, as well as a second maiden that looked identical to his left!

The noble-looking spirit said to the youth in a pleasant voice, “Have I been told correctly that you want to marry one of my daughters?”

“You have, sire,” replied the youth. “Unless I do, it is no better for me to live than to die.”

“Very well. I agree to your union with my daughter, but only if you can correctly identify which of these two is the one you are in love with. If you love only the shell of the girl, you will not know which is which, for they are both alike. But to really love someone, you must love beneath the outward appearance.”

The youth looked and looked, but the two maidens were identical in every way! Beads of sweat came on his brow, but he could not choose. The noble-looking spirit asked the youth a second time. And then a third time. But the youth was silent in terror of making the wrong decision.

Then one of the maidens slipped her foot a bit forward out of the water, and he could see that the laces on the slippers were different from the laces he remembered on the feet of the maiden that he loved. He found both his courage and his voice. “This is she,” he said firmly as he reached out a hand towards the girl who had not raised her foot.

The noble spirit of the lake was pleased. “You have chosen correctly,” said he. “Be a kind and faithful husband to her, and I will cause you to thrive. You will have, as a dowry, as many sheep, cattle, goats and horses as my daughter can count without drawing in her breath. But remember, mortal: if you are unkind to her or strike her three times without cause, she shall return to me and she will bring back all her goods with her.”

The couple were married and, endowed with big herds of animals, they took a farm at Esgair Llaethdy, a mile away from the village of Myddfai. There they lived very happily and had three handsome sons.

Then, one day, the family was invited to a baptism. But the maiden of the lake was reluctant to attend. Her husband was puzzled. In his annoyance, the husband tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to hurry up. Immediately, she turned and reminded him of the strict condition of their marriage and that he had struck her for the first time.

On another occasion, a wedding was to be held in Myddfai and the family was invited. But at the wedding, the lake-maiden was inexplicably doleful. In order to cheer her up, the husband jokingly slapped her on the back; instead, she seriously reminded him that he had now struck her twice.

From that time onward, the husband was very careful not to hit the lake-maiden by accident or even in a playful mood.

Years passed by; their sons grew into young men.

Then, one day, the family was invited to a funeral in Myddfai. Amidst the mourning, the lake-maiden was in the gayest of spirits and at a most inappropriate moment, she burst out in laughter. She so shocked her husband that he tapped her sharply on the arm, and said to the lake-maiden, “Hush! It is wrong that you should laugh.”

Turning to her husband, the lake-maiden said, “Mourning at birth, because of the death of the soul in the Otherworld; sadness at a wedding, for it is the start of travail; joy at death, because of the birth of a soul in the Otherworld. Now, the last blow has been struck, and our marriage is at an end!”

The lake-maiden left the funeral and went straight to their farm near Esgair Llaethdy. There she claimed her goats, sheep, cattle and horses – even four oxen who were yoked to a plough followed her, pulling the plough along! – and all the animals followed her across the Myddfai mountains to Llyn y Fan Fach, and into the lake, where they all disappeared under the waves. All that remained was the furrow made by the plough pulled by the oxen. Locals say that the furrow is still visible to this day as testimony to the truth of the event.

The husband followed the lake-maiden to the lake, where he saw her vanish into the waters. Distraught, he kneeled at the shore and apologized for his stupidity and ignorance and cried for her to return to him. Then, in despair, he threw himself into the lake. But the waters of the lake threw him back ashore. He tried twice more; and each time he was repelled back to the shore. And the voice of the noble spirit of the lake spoke to him. The voice said, “You are not worthy to enter here!” The husband did not return home and was never seen again in Myddfai or anywhere else in Cymru.

The three sons missed their mother dearly and never lost hope of seeing her again. For years, they frequently walked to the shore of Llyn y Fan Fach and looked for her, but in vain.

But one day, the eldest son, named Rhiwallon, saw a young maiden at a pass called Mountain Gate, on the side of Black Mountain. The maiden approached him and said, “Rhiwallon, it is your mother.” He wept with joy at the sight of his mother. She told him that he and his two brothers have great work to do in the world.

“What work would that be, mother?”

“You will be a benefactor to the mortals, relieving them from their pain and misery and healing them from their diseases.”

“But, mother, my brothers and I have no knowledge of medicine. How can we do this work?”

The lake-maiden the handed Rhiwallon a bag which contained a great book full of prescriptions for all known ailments. She further said that if they paid strict attention to the book, all three sons, and their descendants, would become great healers for a thousand years. She also promised to visit him and his brothers once more to give them further instructions. She then vanished. [FF2]

The spot where she met Rhiwallon was called Llidiad y Meddygon – The Physicians’ Gate – and it is still known by that name today.

Later, true to her word, the lake-maiden met her three sons at Pant-y-Meddygon (the Hollow of the Physicians), where she showed them many healing plants.

The three brothers grew to become the most skilled healers in all Cymru. In recognition of their great contribution to the health and welfare of the nation, they were given high rank, lands and privileges aplenty.

The fame of the physicians of Myddfai lasted for many generations. The last in line was the physician John Jones, who died in the Year of Our Lord 1739 (less than three centuries ago) – the last male descendant of the Maiden of Llyn y Fan Fach. [FF3]

Maybe I am weird, but every time I read this faery-tale – or even contemplate it – I get goosebumps!

All over the world, traditional cultures have stories to explain how knowledge of medicine came to mankind, and nearly invariably the stories attribute this knowledge to a Divine source. I have read more medicine-origin stories from five continents than I can count; but none of them have matched the poetic beauty of the story of the Maiden of Llyn y Fan Fach.

Much of faery-lore portrays the “fair folk” variously as cunning, sly, deceitful, grudge-bearing, dangerously enchanting, and even harmful or fatal to humans who break the age-old rules and customs of interacting with them. But not all tales portray them this way. This story conveys the message that they possess great practical wisdom that can be extremely beneficial to humans; further, that they can even be extremely generous to humans! – but there are always rules to abide by and whenever (it never seems to be “if”, does it?) the human breaks the rules, the “price” that is paid is high. Regardless of their motivation, the “fair folk” always have the upper hand, and they don’t suffer fools lightly – ever.

But what amazed me the most about this story when I read it for the first time is its close resemblance to one of my most favourite legends – one from far, far away and a long, long time ago. I’ll tell that legend next week; no spoilers!

Fun fact #1: Llyn y Fan Fach is a real lake, located in the Brecon Beacons National Park. It is approximately 10 hectares in size, situated on the northern margin of the Black Mountain in Carmarthenshire, South Wales. The lake lies at an altitude of approximately 1,660 feet, immediately to the north of the ridge of the Carmarthen Fans.
Fun fact #2: A collection of treatises on humours, medicinal herbs, and similar topics in the typical medieval European tradition attributed to Rhiwallon was included in the Red Book of Hergest, a 14th-century manuscript collection, under the title Meddygon Myddfai. A second manuscript of herbal remedies attributed to Rhiwallon's family, which was brought to light in the early 19th century, was said to have been copied from one in the possession of John Jones, the last male descendant of Rhiwallon.

Fun fact #3: David Jones of Mothvey [Myddfai], surgeon (d.1719) and his eldest son John Jones, surgeon (d.1739) are both commemorated on a gravestone located in the porch of St Michaels, Myddfai. They have been identified by local folklore as the last two members of the family of physicians in the direct male line from the Maiden of Llyn y Fan Fach.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Led Zeppelin, "Stairway to Heaven"

Tags:

celtic myths,
wales

New York talk video

ecosophia

Tuesday, May 19th, 2026 08:42 pm

My talk last Saturday at the Psychic Salon

in New York City was video-recorded live and is now up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure. The subject is "The Spiritual Destiny of America." Those of you who've been following me for a while will have heard some of this already, but I welcomed the chance to pass on the vision to others, and the talk was followed by a good lively discussion. I also had the chance to meet fellow occultist Angel Millar for the first time, which was very welcome.

The venue, Caravan of Dreams, is apparently the oldest vegan restaurant in New York. I'd had lunch with some regular commenters at a Ukrainian restaurant before the event, so didn't have any of the food, but they make a fine mango lassi.

Check out the videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouzVTkwuqzc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITAWumwHuCo

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Al Stewart, "Broadway Hotel"

Tags:

Divination Offering

open_space

Monday, May 18th, 2026 09:23 pm

Two woman practice ceromancy, the divining art of reading molten wax

Sometime has passed and I am thrilled to be able to offer these again. The post will open either Sunday or Monday and will be open for a week. So, if you have a question, I'll be happy to ask the tarot about it. That said, divination is like weather forecasting not a tablet of truth handed down from above. The conditions that divination taps into are in constant flux, the same as atmospheric pressure and the Moon. There might also be some profound readings, but by and large, given that most of us have ordinary lives, the readings have an ordinary tone. Only ask questions for which you want to know the answers. I will post a reply to your question, but please feel free to converse or ask more about it from different angles after the fact!

Thanks for stopping by!

If you wish to make a donation for the readings in order to provide a cup of something warm to the diviner in turn you can do so through Paypal by clicking the pentacle.

Even though questions about medical, legal or spiritual issues are okay: any actions taken from the information of the readings are entirely the responsibility of the querent. Divination is part of a spiritual practice and does not replace nor pretend to be professional legal or medical advice nor psychological counseling.

May 2026

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Universal Gnostic Church: On Stranger Tides

The Movement of Matter and the Problem of Plastics: Practicing Systems Thinking (part 2)

The Maiden of Llyn y Fan Fach (The Lake of Little Peak)

New York talk video

Divination Offering