Ogham Readings on Saturdays

Aug. 22nd, 2025 09:19 pm
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele



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 email -- 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 October 23 - November 6.

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.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal.  If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did 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.

Frugal Friday

Aug. 22nd, 2025 08:43 am
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
domeWelcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

Rule #5: don't post LLM ("AI") generated content, and don't bring up the subject unless you're running a homemade LLM program on your own homebuilt, steam-powered server farm. 

With that said, have at it!    
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele
Well, I have already lied... you can neither save nor destroy the planet. The Netflix TV series Love Death + Robots was a sort of comic book in cinematic form of CGI, animation, and puppetry presented as an anthology of short films. Much like the 1977 magazine Heavy Metal, its themes obsessively rotated around speculative sci-fi futures, sexuality, and violence. Love Death + Robots was especially fixated upon the leitmotifs of zombies, apocalypse, space travel, and the destruction of Earth. One semi-memorable episode featured tiny zombies overrunning Earth, causing a nuclear war, and blowing the planet into large chunks held together by a loose semblance of gravity. We humans have high opinions of ourselves and it seems our every fantasy these days is that we can destroy the Earth with one false move. Yet even catastrophic nuclear annihilation would result in a long nuclear winter and a reset where it is possible some humans might survive. Sure, their lives would be hell, but chances are their pale, etherically starved descendants might crawl up from underground cities like cockroaches to rule the planet again. Or not. It seems baked into the cake that humans will be gone entirely in a billion years. Ninety-nine point nine percent of life on Earth has gone extinct. We are a hardy species, but we aren't exactly tardigrades or jellyfish.

Humans are in love with the idea they have domination of Gaia, whether it is to destroy her or to save her. There is the delusion we can foment our hatred enough to make it substitute for action, or that if we aim one group against another, we can "save" ourselves from them. Paul Wheaton in his book Building a Better Backyard (Instead of Being Angry at the Bad Guys) puts it best:

"For each person who actually does write a letter or confront the bad guys, there might be a hundred people who simply develop an ulcer."


Building a Better Backyard is a must read and I highly recommend it as well as Permies.com, the website it often cites. I own a copy of the book that I am willing to lend by mail for free to anyone who wants it in the Continental US. That said, the book does descend into some regrettable Holier Than Thou awards, lauding various environmentalists for their "negative" carbon footprint because they go "above and beyond" according to the author as environmental influencers. Yet there is no such thing as a negative carbon footprint here on Meatworld. The main takeaway from the book is that we should turn instincts of anger that nobody is doing anything into personal, concrete action. Yes, I agree.

Environmentalism gets nowhere fast because it is so centered around shame. Though it feels good to point out hypocrisy in others, it does absolutely nothing as far as influencing the average person to change, especially when perfection is the goal. Case in point, Greta Thunberg, who has ricocheted from vegan climate activism to inserting herself in the Palestine situation. She's a perpetual child in more ways than one who believes that her anger makes a difference because she feels it so strongly. Her legacy will be a meme about impotent outrage.

In my upcoming book Sacred Homemaking, I emphasize the importance of starting small and where you are. The only way we are ever going to make positive change in this world will be if we discard perfection and appreciate and work with what we have right now. This means looking at what positive things we already have in place and building upon them instead of making a fetish of someone with a "perfect" approach. It means making do with what we have instead of freaking out, even when we are still making do with toxic inputs from industrial sources.

You may already be doing a great deal to help Gaia without realizing it, and you can use Sacred Homemaking's approach of building upon and amplifying the positive in order to go even further. This article will mention only a few bullet points, but I hope that it will inspire you to list what you are doing right and to pile up positive upon positive until your environmental beneficence is overflowing.

Living with family or roommates

The stigma of living with relatives used to be very strong. My husband and I lived with my parents no less than four times before moving to our little house in the western suburbs of Chicago, and each time we felt acutely judged by all and sundry, including ourselves. For him, it was deeply emasculating not to be the master of his own domicile. For me, it was profoundly painful not to have a space I could call my own. Yet the fantasy of an eco-cabin on the edge of wilderness is far more environmentally expensive than a shared house or apartment where people live cheek to jowl. For one, apartments don't require much climate control -- when my husband and I lived in apartments, we almost never turned on the heat in winter. For those who don't live out in the country, your close proximity to stores and work means that you're not driving anywhere near as much as your stranded rural counterpart every time you need something or go to your job.

Going the extra mile


Get in the habit of both saying and "doing" thank you to the people you live with. During the four times my husband and I lived with my folks, I never left a room messier than I found it. During the last two year stint, I cooked at least five communal meals a week, plus snacks and treats the entire time. I made sure I was contributing even when I did not feel like contributing. As a result, living with my parents was an experience for which I was grateful and will always be grateful. I am especially grateful for the times with my father, who is no longer with us. I got into the habit of saying "thank you" as well. "Thank you" starts awkwardly, but once you are used to the habit and don't allow any good deed to go unrecognized or unthanked, you will find the energy reverberates through your life and dramatically improves it.

Eschewing junk and buying used


We have unofficially entered the era of paring down. Boomer excess with its fine china, curio cabinets, figurines, vacation homes, grounded boats, and storage facilities is giving way to a new age of thrift, re-use, and Make Do or Do Without. Whenever you buy used, whether it is cars, clothing, silverware, or furniture, you are giving life to an item that was headed straight for the landfill.

Going the extra mile

Join a local Buy Nothing group and give things away even if you don't want any of the stuff other members are offering. When you give an item away and free it to its destiny, you say to the Universe that you're not into hoarding and that you would prefer that others make use of your stuff rather than it rotting in your hoard. It's a middle finger to the accumulation Wendigo.

Eating less and eating homemade

Unless you are part of the high riding Bathroom Class that is currently helping to ruin everything with the copious help of private equity firms, you cannot afford to spend a dollar more on groceries than you're already spending. You're eating in most or all of the time, not for lack of desire to have a meal you didn't cook but because you cannot afford it. A meal at home, as basic as it may be, saves gas, labor, and food waste. If you cook your meals, have done the brave work of mitigating or ending your dependence on convenience food, and that may be an act of necessity but it is also an act of extraordinary willpower.

Going the extra mile


To increase your knowledge as well as your palate, learn to forage your local weeds. Learn which are edible and which are poisonous and everything in-between. Once when I was working in a commercial building, I forgot to pack a lunch and I had no money or time to make a meal. Luckily, it was summer and there was purslane growing in an area where there were not any pesticides being regularly put on the ground. I gathered a bunch of it and that was lunch. Purslane is a superfood, containing more Vitamin C than oranges and an array of Omega 3 fatty acids.

Phasing out commercial cleaners and personal hygiene products

One of the funnier parts of Sacred Homemaking is the inclusion of a recipe for a household surface cleaner that triples as a leave in hair conditioner as well as a noxious spirit repellant. It works to clean countertops, detangle hair, and to repel demons all at once LOL. Using natural cleaners and deodorants saves tons of money, reduces plastic waste, keeps toxic phthalates and dioxins out of the water and air, and promotes your health and that of those around you.

Going the extra mile

Make the homemade equivalent of one cleaning or personal product this week. In my case, I make my own hairspray out of sugar and water: it's simple syrup with some drops of eucalyptus essential oil for scent. Combine coconut oil, arrowroot or cornstarch, and a pinch of baking soda to make a simple deodorant that can be used anywhere on the body. Make the afformentioned triple use surface cleaner by combining one part vinegar to one part water with a dash of essential oils for scent. Always know that almost any commercial product you use can be replaced with a cheap, nontoxic, homemade equivalent.

Not having kids... or having them!


If you are one of the many people in my boat who chose not to have children, congratulations, you just did the most impactful thing a human can do to reduce their environmental "footprint". According to a 2008 study, adding a child to the planet can add up to 9500 metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Children come with a lot of stuff: diapers, toys, packaging, housing, and the eventual chance he or she will replicate by having more children!

The logical thing to do is to advocate that we humans go voluntarily extinct, right? Well, that has been tried before. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, founded by Les U. Knight (let's unite, get it?) is still floundering along to this day, despite having been a mess of interpersonal dramas since its 1971 origin. VHEMT envisions a genteel end for the human race where everyone gets a vasectomy or a tubal ligation and enjoys what is left of civilization as we voluntarily bring it to a screeching halt. It's the movie Children of Men, minus the panic, and it isn't going to happen. The implosion of VHEMT was predictable. I myself chose not to have children. I had myself sterilized in my early thirties. Nevertheless, what is right for me is not right for everyone. If you want kids, please have them.

As Whitney Houston crooned in her song, the children are our future. We cannot get by without them. If you do have kids, bless you. You are doing the world's most difficult job.  If you are blessed with children, please do your level best not to raise them as entitled, spoiled products of their age.

Going the extra mile


Embrace different strokes for different folks. If you chose not to have children, shut up and appreciate those who were willing to take on the hard work of parenting. If you do have children, shut up and appreciate those who did not and freed up resources so you and your children could live more richly. Whether you are childfree or childfull, appreciate people for their differences and realize that if everybody made the same choices as you, life here on Meatworld would suck a great deal more, not less.

If you are turning listless anxiety into real environmentalism, choosing to make small improvements instead of spinning your wheels worrying about the machinations of the "bad guys", then you have taken the first steps in the journey of ten thousand miles. Stop feeling bad about what you have not done or what you cannot do and smart small and where you are. Give thanks compulsively.

Earth will take care of herself... eventually. Your job is not to oversee Gaia but to keep yourself in moderation and balance. Stay humble and always strive for small improvements.










Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 209

Aug. 19th, 2025 09:19 am
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
the con is always the sameWe are now into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary all these years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health remain anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; public health authorities government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; new revelations are leaking out about just how bad the Covid vaccines are for human health; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules have been slightly expanded due to a recent discussion here:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.


5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button. 

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.


With that said, the floor is open for discussion.  

Magic Monday

Aug. 17th, 2025 09:23 pm
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
fear nothingMidnight is only a few minutes away, 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 image? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share.)

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. (I used to use PayPal but they developed an allergy to free speech, so I've developed an allergy to them.) If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here
 
Bookshop logoI've also had quite a few people over the years ask me where they should buy my books, and here's the answer. Bookshop.org is an alternative online bookstore that supports local bookstores and authors, which a certain gargantuan corporation doesn't, and I have a shop there, which you can check out here. Please consider patronizing it if you'd like to purchase any of my books online.

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

With that said, have at it! 

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

Ogham Readings on Saturdays

Aug. 15th, 2025 10:33 pm
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele



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 email -- 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 October 23 - November 6.

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.

I am currently trying to minimize my use of PayPal.  If you'd like to make a donation, I would be grateful if you did 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.

Frugal Friday

Aug. 15th, 2025 10:53 am
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
domeWelcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

Rule #5: don't post LLM ("AI") generated content, and don't bring up the subject unless you're running a homemade LLM program on your own homebuilt, steam-powered server farm. 

With that said, have at it!   

Three More Podcasts

Aug. 14th, 2025 05:20 pm
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
On the off chance that any of my readers are interested in hearing me talk, here are three more podcast appearances of mine that might be of interest. All three were good lively conversations, and the topics were about as different as I can manage! 

podcast 1Magnetic Memory with Anthony Metivier: 

https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/john-michael-greer/

The Art of Memory was the focus of this talk. 

podcast 2Pearl Snap Tactical with  Mark Booher: 

https://pearlsnaptactical.substack.com/p/the-warriors-path-through-collapse

We talked about myth, initiation, and how to learn from the heroic legends of the past. 

podcast 3The Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harris: 

https://content.blubrry.com/paranormalplus/The_UFO_Book-UFO_Encounters_228.mp3

We talked about my new book The UFO Book, and the UFO phenomenon generally

Enjoy!  

Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 208

Aug. 12th, 2025 10:11 am
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
science then and nowWe are now into the fifth year of these open posts. When I first posted a tentative hypothesis on the course of the Covid phenomenon, I had no idea that discussion on the subject would still be necessary all these years later, much less that it would turn into so lively, complex, and troubling a conversation. Still, here we are. Crude death rates and other measures of collapsing public health remain anomalously high in many countries, but nobody in authority wants to talk about the inadequately tested experimental Covid injections that are the most likely cause; public health authorities government shills for the pharmaceutical industry are still trying to push through laws that will allow them to force vaccinations on anyone they want; public trust in science is collapsing; new revelations are leaking out about just how bad the Covid vaccines are for human health; and the story continues to unfold.

So it's time for another open post. The rules have been slightly expanded due to a recent discussion here:

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry and its government enablers are causing injury and death on a massive scale. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its wholly owned politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you plan on making off topic comments, please go away. This is an open post for discussion of the Covid epidemic, the vaccines, drugs, policies, and other measures that supposedly treat it, and other topics directly relevant to those things. It is not a place for general discussion of unrelated topics. Nor is it a place to ask for medical advice; giving such advice, unless you're a licensed health care provider, legally counts as practicing medicine without a license and is a crime in the US. Don't even go there.


5. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. Also, please don't drag in current quarrels about sex, race, religions, etc. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

6. Please don't just post bare links without explanation. A sentence or two telling readers what's on the other side of the link is a reasonable courtesy, and if you don't include it, your attempted post will be deleted.

7. Please don't post LLM ("AI") generated text. This is a place for human beings to talk to other human beings, not for the regurgitation of machine-generated text. Also, please don't discuss large language models (the technology popularly and inaccurately called "artificial intelligence" these days) except as they bear directly on the Covid phenomenon. Here again, my finger is hovering over the delete button. 

Please also note that nothing posted here should be construed as medical advice, which neither I nor the commentariat (excepting those who are licensed medical providers) are qualified to give. Please take your medical questions to the licensed professional provider of your choice.


With that said, the floor is open for discussion. 
kimberlysteele: (Default)
[personal profile] kimberlysteele
The term 401(K) comes from the tax status of the earnings.  A 401(K) is a type of adjacent bank account that siphons savings away to play the stock market.  Supposedly this form of gambling is safe.  

Though the term Black Friday has come to be associated with Christmas shopping orgies in late November, the "black" part of the moniker used to apply to stock market crashes.  September 24, 1869 was one such crash.  It was said to be caused by two greedy investors named Jay Gould and James Fisk.  The investors bought obscene amounts of gold, driving up the price due to scarcity.  President Ulysses S. Grant tried to put a stop to the shenanigans by selling a large amount of the US Treasury's gold which in turn caused the stock market to crash.  More crashes came and went during the Belle Epoque until the Great Crash of 1929, which led to the Glass Steagal Act of 1933.  Glass Steagall was a set of banking reforms that put the kibosh on any bank's ability to use its customer's money to play the stock market.

Glass Steagall was repealed in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, which

"opened the door to an orgy of financial mischief so arrant and awful, and to a plague of corruption so broad and deep, that American life is now pitching into a long emergency." -James Howard Kunstler in 2015


The Bathroom Class

The middle class that President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to protect in 1933 is clinging on for dear life in 2025.  In one corner, we have the lower eighty percent comprised of the working poor and their dependents such as the elderly, children, the disabled, and those on welfare.  All of the above (or should I say below?) live hand to mouth and paycheck to paycheck if they are lucky enough to have one or more jobs and hustles.  Theirs is a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul for the last thirty years; an exhausting runaround of managing debts.  There is no "saving money" for the lower eighty percent.  It does not exist.  Every time they get ahead enough to maybe purchase a one month backup supply of off brand Kleenex, the car needs a three thousand dollar overhaul or a tooth decides to go full root canal.  Every time they go to the grocery store, the products either shrink in size or inflate in price.  A loaf of bread cost seventy five cents in 1992.  Nowadays a half loaf of bread costs $3.50.  Wages have not risen in a way that is anywhere near commensurate to what life costs.  Anyone who still works retail or fast food, and there are quite a few working retail and fast food, is making $13-15 dollars per hour.  I worked in the local shopping mall in 1990 and I made $12 an hour... that was considered poverty wages back then and bread only cost seventy five cents.  

The upper twenty percent has many names: Professional Managerial Class, salary class, stockholders, laptop class.  They are truly in a class to themselves.  Unlike those below them, they feature retirees who do not have to work until they die.  They are shareholders and trustees.  They enjoy safe neighborhoods with good schools that are perpetually on the up and up, with older, more modest homes being gutted or outright demolished for spacious new construction and the latest in countertop trends.  They always have luxurious, new bathrooms.  We might as well call them the Bathroom Class because they have more luxury toilets per person than any clique in history.  As much as I castigate them, I count the Bathroom Class among my friends.  Many of them are hardworking, helpful souls.  Many of them have earned their retirements, and the only difference between them and the non-Bathroom class is that they actually have money to retire.  Whatever virtues the Bathroom Class might possess do not hide the fact that investment dividends are not earned wealth.  Investment is speculation for financial gain.  Speculation for financial gain is gambling.  Unless the investment is a personal and uncontracted agreement of trust, it is what the Bible calls usury.  The repeal of Glass Steagall and a list of other factors means that investing in the stock market, including with the "safe" 401(K), is playing fast and loose with the meager pennies of the lower eighty percent and their earned wealth. That sort of usury may not hold any consequences in the present incarnation where all subsist in a spiritual Dark Age of ignorance and Greed as God, but it does not bode well for future incarnations as things balance out.  

Most investment dividends come indirectly or directly from private equity firms such as Blackrock and Blackstone.  These firms are corporate goliaths that control the media, drive up home prices, and perpetuate the System of child trafficking that keeps the world trapped in low vibrational consciousness.  There is nothing inherently good about the System or the private equity firms that keep it running.  

Quiznos and Smashburger, a Tale of Private Equity

In the early 2000's, Quiznos was the fastest growing sandwich chain in America.  Though I always thought their sandwiches were mediocre, my husband loved their new (at the time) concept of roasting the sandwich under a broiler before adding the final lettuce and sauces.  Quiznos, like many fast casual strip mall restaurants, was a franchise.  Each store was run by someone who had bought into the franchise with his or her own money and in return gained the suppliers, the name, and the opportunity to up their class status by ostensibly becoming a business owner instead of an employee.  Quiznos took off and its franchises began popping up on every corner.  There were approximately 4500 Quiznos franchise locations at the restaurant's peak. Sometimes a Quiznos would pop up across the street from another Quiznos, literally within three to four hundred yards, as if they were competing gas stations.  The private equity firm that owned Quiznos not only allowed this, they encouraged it, wantonly pitting franchisees against each other in a race to the bottom. My husband noticed that our local Quznos degraded in quality, often running out of ingredients, skimping, or substituting with poorer quality food.  Little did he know what was going on in the background.  The private equity firm allowed many Quiznos to cannibalize other Quiznos, following the catastrophic failures and losses with a promise to reform, which was (of course) a fake out.  The private equity firm lured its surviving franchisees into an exclusive supplier contract, which at first brought back affordable purchasing for those left standing.  If you guessed the private equity firm also owned the supplier and promptly jacked up prices so more franchisees went under, you guessed correctly.  Once Quiznos was fully cannibalized and transformed from the leading sandwich seller to a barely-there also ran of closed restaurants and broken dreams, the private equity firm consolidated and sold off its debt, offshored the profits, filed for bankruptcy on all except the intellectual property, which it kept.  These ill-gotten gains from Quiznos franchisees's hard work, sweat, and tears was repackaged and used to open a fancy burger chain called Smashburger.  It was like Quiznos never happened for all except the franchisees.

Young couples who wish to buy homes and start families nowadays cannot because a private equity firm has either already bought the house and turned it into an eternal rental or Blackstone has raised the overall price of housing around the globe.  I am reminded of a scene in the first Resident Evil movie, a film about an evil Umbrella corporation that unleashes a zombie virus.  In one scene, a group of characters is forced through a laser room where they must play a macabre version of twister to avoid lasers slicing off various body parts.  Spoiler alert: in the end of the laser room scene, the cleverest guy gets sliced into neat little cubes when the laser turns into a mesh.  It is the movie equivalent of a brute smashing the chessboard because he was losing the game.  Private equity is the Umbrella Corporation.  It owns the laser room and it does not like to lose.  

A rising tide raises all ships, but it devours any who cannot afford a boat.  I know many people who regularly go on fabulous international vacations and who have trained their children to embrace the same grandiose lifestyles.  These people are not the direct trustees of private equity firms, but their wealth is private equity money all the same.  Private equity is invested in almost every major company at this point.  It is rarer to find an area of life where private equity is not in the process of cannibalizing wealth.  When people derive income from investing, they give the private equity firms more license to roam free and unchecked in their cannibalistic benders.  Since private equity is the latest form of wendigo, no amount of misery or destruction will ever be able to glut its appetites.

When Covid rule descended and small business owners like me were cannibalized so that more wealth could be transferred to the Bathroom Class wendigo, stockholders sat in their well-apppointed homes and ordered food delivered to their door while bingeing on Netflix, Hulu, and online games.  The Bathroom Class benefited from Covid rules and the lower eighty percent footed the bills and did the work once again.

They Say the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

I could be wrong but I don't see things going well for some of our current high riders in the far future.  The infuriating bit is that for now, those who choose to enjoy wealth that was earned by those they considered beneath them are not about to change status.  The consequences of human behavior seldom if ever play out at the human scale... at least not immediately.

I believe that everyone who does serious spiritual work eventually comes to the realization that there is a Law of Wealth that exists for humans and perhaps any species that develops an extremely abstracted wealth system.  The Law of Wealth states that the person who amasses and keeps unearned wealth merely agrees to earn that wealth in a future lifetime.  There are a ton of mitigating factors that get thrown into this seemingly simple karmic equation.  Generosity, for instance, sublimates by exponents.  If your actions were compulsively generous in one lifetime, you can manage to repay major chunks, if not all of your unearned wealth.  Generosity pays with compounding interest of the soul.  If you fill your life with good works, gratitude, and humility, you can rectify a massive amount of "bad" karma.

As I have speculated and hypothesized in other essays, I believe many human-incarnated souls are going to wind up in animal forms as the current Holocene extinction is followed by the next great explosion of life on Earth.  The unique part of our era is its prolific number of incarnated human souls.  In the stripe of Hermetic Druidry to which I subscribe, this means that there are many formerly animal beings running aroud the planet at the moment.  The cycle of evolution is not just for matter, it is for spirit.  I was standing by my piano one day when I asked a wandering entity "What's it like to be a god?" The being, which I believe was a god though it's anybody's guess which one, gave a cryptically comical answer:  "It is like turning an amoeba into a pianist".  In other words, it is a long, slow process in geological scales of time to gradually complexify a spark of life in a tiny amoeba and put it through existence after existence until it is a human being who can manage a piano sonata.  When a being gets to the pianist stage, it is a true coming of age.  Not that the pianist is the final event in the chain -- of course not! -- but what has occurred is that cellular consciousness has become animal consciousness and then human animal consciousness.  This takes many, many trips around the sun.  The addition of fine motor skills such as music means that layers of sediment have built to mountainous heights.  The etheric body became an astral body and now the astral body develops a mental sheath.  Gods went through this process long ago, possibly in other universes.  They earned their mental bodies (body is a terrible, inadequate, and primitive word for the phenomenon of which I speak) as well as spiritual bodies that are much more intricate and masterful than our fledgling mental bodies.  Some gods deign to take an interest in human slugs like you and me.  From my experience, they are far more likely to interact with those who do not presume to speak for them personally or through a book or to be on equal footing with them, but I digress.

With such an excess of human-incarnated souls as we have now, we have a natural excess of humans who were wild or domestic animals fewer than a hundred years ago, which is not much in the span of geological time.  Though I believe vaccination and its aluminum adjuvants has been the primary gasoline on the autism dumpster fire, there may be other, deeper reasons why so many autistic people are being created.

The development of a full etheric body is the precursor to the development of the astral body, which is the body that animals are working on and the one upon which humans have a fairly decent grip.  Complex astral skills include written language, architecture, philosophy, music, computing, and large scale urbanization and warfare.  None of these phenomenon make humans any better than rocks, trees, animals, or bugs, but they indicate we may be more skilled in the astral plane than some of the previously mentioned things.  

So if you've made it this far in a long essay by a fringe occultist who talks to her toilet, you may be one of those who feels surrounded by stupid people.  Please keep in mind many of those people were quite literally cows, sheep, birds, cats, mice, crocodiles, fireflies, and squirrels a mere five to one hundred years ago and keep sympathy in your heart.  Like you, they are doing the best they can.  Energy is neither created nor destroyed.  It only changes form.  This is true for soul sparks of billions of animals who die are are quickly reincarnated as humans in the frenetic, overpopulated schedule of today.  

There is nothing wrong with being an animal.  It is neither inherently better nor worse than being a human.  Though our Faustian culture wants to push us to see reincarnation as success or failure where the superior human "wins" by ascending to non-embodiment, the kind of Buddhism and gnosticism that craps on all incarnation as essentially worthless is toxic.  Human life is hellish.  Being an animal is also hellish.  Both are also heavenly.  It depends on where you focus.  In my own case, human blackness and despair had me wanting to end my life.  I have fond memories of being a goose.  I was flying with my flock, the wind lifting my wings and my beak straight ahead.  We knew where we were going.  

As this era of overpopulation recedes like a tide -- and I would argue this is already happening -- some souls will bubble off into non-incarnation, stepping off into a new set of responsibilities that likely do not include anything like holding down a job or harvesting food.  This is not to say they won't have responsibility; I am almost certain they will and those could be difficult to handle.  In my own case, if I ever leave incarnation (I do not believe this will happen anytime within the next six hundred years at the minimum) I think I will become a Bodhisattva.  If I go back to being a cat or a goose as I was thousands of years ago, I don't foresee having a problem with it.  

I have spent a few years looking into what might happen to the vaccinated in their afterlives, and I was recently intrigued to find a couple of other people who are doing the same thing, Bernard Guenther and Thomas Mayer.  Guenther and Mayer are both heavily influenced by the work of Rudolf Steiner and hold him in high esteem.  Steiner had odd things to say about vaccines long before they were as de rigueur as they are today.  He said that vaccines will be responsible for the retardation of spiritual development in many humans and I believe he is correct.  Guenther and Mayer mainly that they can cause separation, detachment, and damage to the subtle bodies and they can make it much more difficult to engage in spiritual work.  For many years, I have had dim perceptions of the same phenomena. Guenther and Mayer speculate that recipients of Big Pharma protocols like MRNA vaccination and chemotherapy face becoming earthbound in the afterlife, which is to say that their etheric and astral bodies seem to end up tethered to the incarnation in which they vaccinated or became inundated with drugs via chemotherapy for an unusually lengthy period, but not forever.  Because these speculations are about the dead and based on unreliable communications with them, nobody knows if any of it is true and there is no way of proving it.  

From my own experience of communicating with the dead, I believe there is a glut of possibilities in the afterlife for the average Joe and Jane that is so vast, a retard like me could not hope to speculate it with any accuracy.  Obviously this has not stopped me from trying.  One possibility is that a large number of human-incarnated souls will return to non-human animal incarnation as wilderness subsumes Gaia.  Another possibility is that many souls will choose the accelerated evolution of spiritual work and become an army of non-incarnated beings themselves, having evolved beyond the need for physical manifestation.  

A Special Kind of Stupid

Somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of the world's population vaccinated, and many who did either died while still in the salty phase of trying to force and coerce others into the vaccination pyramid or are still pushing the vaccine narrative today.  Due to the nature of vaccination dislocating the subtle bodies as well as the karmic consequences of forcing others to do what you want (you will be in turn forced to do what you don't want to do) it seems logical that many vaccinated individuals will become earthbound after death.   But even they have the possibility of being redeemed and spared depending upon their vibe and openness to change. 

There is a special set who embody the rejection of spiritual evolution.  For instance, I have often said Sean Combs, also known as Diddy, seems doomed to reincarnate on a comet.  When I gave it some thought, I could easily see him ending up earthbound, almost content in that state because his etheric body would be able to wander its local area (provided he was not cremated) and vampirize people much like he did when he was still alive.  Diddy's astral body is most likely to remain earthbound, which will give him plentiful opportunities to enter nightmares and wreak havoc.   There are plenty just like him.  This is why everyone needs a banishing ritual.  Those who reject the Light at the end of human life and its companion, the Darkness of Judgement, stymy and delay the reincarnation process.  The Earth is currently teeming with formerly human spirits of this nature who could not let go and who also cannot pass into the next realm: that is how we get the most common of negative hauntings.  All of these stuck spirits had a choice.  They were shown (as you will be shown) a glimpse of the higher planes without so many blinders.  Like you, they were given a choice to go towards the light, which represents the higher self along with the higher selves of their particular soul swarm.  The cosmic ushers known as Bodhisattvas were there showing the path towards a natural progression of lives.  Their souls were given the chance to rest and digest the hard lessons of Meatworld among friends.  

Souls like theirs rebelled in the worst sort of way in life and they continue the path in death.  Having betrayed their soul swarm while in Meatworld, they run away, thinking there is someplace else to go.  As in life, they try to take the lazy way out in death, believing themselves to be entitled.  It is at that point where they are thrown to whatever demons they are tied to via the bargains they made while alive.  Demons, infection, disease, and narcissism overlap.  One leads to another.  For instance, a propensity towards alcoholism may be exacerbated by a little voice inside the future alcoholic's head whispering "Have another drink... it will be fine".  If you think that voice always came from the person's own head every single time, you are too naive to be helped.  Before long, the alcoholic's benders make her prone to both physical and nonphysical infection: disease.  On the more subtle planes, she is host to colonies of etheric larvae that feed off her diseased energy. She is also a vector of astral infection as she pleads for others to join her alcoholic astral pyramid in the form of drinking buddies.  Her energy is hungry and wants joiners.  

Unearned wealth is the ultimate addiction, which brings us full circle to the private equity firm CEO owner of Quiznos and Smashburger.  It's not that his human soul will ever amass enough power to become a demon, nor will that happen for Diddy after he dies.  As much as a power and money hungry human wants to assume the mantle of a superbeing in life or death, the hungry human is never going to be the owner of the casino.  Instead he will be merely another player.  The following, like the rest of this essay, is pure speculation.  The CEO of Quiznos/Smashburger (there have been several) is going to have the usual reception by their soul swarm shortly after dying.  They will be given a brief glimpse of rest and bliss before being sent to feel all that they put others through, and to sort wheat from chaff when it comes to the lives they touched.  If they had many good works that we know nothing about, those will be taken into account and balanced against the wealth they stole from their franchisees.  The balance between those things and their attitude towards it will determine where they will spend time between lives.  I believe people with obscene amounts of unearned wealth cannot hope to balance the scales in their favor, and it is also my belief that the CEOs of private equity firms will spend an inordinate amount of time earthbound and caught in a limbo as a result of running from accountability.  They will act in death as they did in life, avoiding responsibility for what they have done.  They are going to be against the natural law that forces them to earn every penny they stole, and that will mean finally becoming empathetic to emotional pain of the sort they inflicted and a lineup of existences as everything from a sweatshop slave to a dray horse.  Earn it back, earn it back. They will haunt the earth as hungry ghosts until they incarnate as humans in a much different and harder era, and they will not be born as queens and kings.  If they don't get enough redemptive human incarnations in before the Holocene era wraps, they will be reincarnated as non-human animals for the foreseeable future.  If they piss off the gods and powers well enough, they just might end up having to start over as plankton.  Now you see why I want nothing to do with unearned wealth!  I could be wrong, but I also could be right.



 






Magic Monday

Aug. 10th, 2025 09:37 pm
ecosophia: (Default)
[personal profile] ecosophia
it remainsMidnight is only a few minutes away, 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 image? I've finished the sequence of my published books; while I decide what I want to do next, I have some memes to share.)

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With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

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