It's coming up on midnight, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. The picture is the best image I could find of that force of nature, T. Galen Hieronymus, inventor of the Hieronymus Machine and electroshamanic cult figure extraordinaire. He's one of the many people in modern industrial society who discovered the thing you're not supposed to discover, the thing Carl von Reichenbach (last week's occult poster child) called Od -- the thing that Chinese martial artists call qi, Hindu yogins call prana, Druids call nwyfre, and characters in my fantasy novels call voor. Yes, we're talking about the life force. Hieronymus called it eloptic energy, because he found that it behaved like electricity in some ways and like light (i.e., optically perceived electromagnetic energy) in others, and he built a series of remarkable electronic contraptions to work with it. Legendary SF editor John Campbell discovered, in turn, that the Hieronymus Machine still worked when you swap out the electronic components for a paper circuit diagram, proving that Hieronymus had invented the world's first tunable talisman. Yes, I have one in my study... It's coming up on midnight, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. The picture is the best image I could find of that force of nature, T. Galen Hieronymus, inventor of the Hieronymus Machine and electroshamanic cult figure extraordinaire. He's one of the many people in modern industrial society who discovered the thing you're not supposed to discover, the thing Carl von Reichenbach (last week's occult poster child) called Od -- the thing that Chinese martial artists call qi, Hindu yogins call prana, Druids call nwyfre, and characters in my fantasy novels call voor. Yes, we're talking about the life force. Hieronymus called it eloptic energy, because he found that it behaved likeectricity in some ways and like light (i.e.,ally perceived electromagnetic energy) in others, and he built a series of remarkable electronic contraptions to work with it. Legendary SF editor John Campbell discovered, in turn, that the Hieronymus Machine still worked when you swap out the electronic components for a paper circuit diagram, proving that Hieronymus had invented the world's first tunable talisman. Yes, I have one in my study...

Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer, though it may be Tuesday before I get to them all. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here

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With that said, have at it!