I get a lot of hits on my blog from across the realm of the Internet, many of which are from links on Facebook, Twitter, or RSS readers.  To you guys who follow me: thank you!  You give me many happies.  However, I also get a huge number of new visitors daily to my blog from people who search around the Internet for various search terms.  As part of a monthly project, here are some short replies to some of the search terms people have used to arrive here at the Digital Ambler.  This focuses on some search terms that caught my eye during the month of August 2014.

“trithemius azazel” — So, Trithemius, properly Johann Heidenberg or Johannes Trithemius, was a German Benedictine abbot, born in 1462 and died 1516.  He was kind of fantastic at everything, and is also known for mentoring Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim who wrote the Three Books of Occult Philosophy.  Trithemius had several works dealing with the occult, including a survey of “necromantic” works, a text detailing the history of the world as shaped by angelic entities, and his famous Steganographia, which appears to be a system of angel magic but itself hides a system of cryptography.  A much later work attributed to Trithemius appears in Francis Barrett’s The Magus called The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals, which is my go-to conjuration ritual; however, there’s no real evidence to suggest that this was Trithemius’ work, even though it bears his name.  The ritual is based loosely off of other well-known Solomonic grimoires, like the Key of Solomon and Heptameron, and the text itself focuses on conjuring the angel Michael (specifically the angel of the Sun), though the text also describes times to conjure the other planetary angels.  Azazel, on the other hand, though it bears an angelic-looking name, turns out to be nothing of the sort; this spirit does not appear in Trithemius’ works, and the name appears in Agrippa’s Scale of Four (book II, chapter 7) as the demonic prince of Air.  This is not a good guy; think destructive tornadoes, storms, gales that topple buildings and bridges, mindbreak-inducing doubt, and other mental or airy destruction, and you’ll have a grasp of what this spirit does.  I suggest working with Raphael, the angelic king of Air, rather than this spirit, and even then the only time you might want to conjure Azazel is to bind him out of your life for good.

“scrying with feldspar” — Same way you scry with any other material or medium: let your focus become absorbed in the scrying medium, and let your mind do the rest.  Feldspar is both a type of mineral as well as a group of minerals, and as far as I’m aware it’s not a popular stone in occult use.  Of course, there is labradorite, which is a type of feldspar, but that’s about the only variant I can think of that’s known at all.  Generally people tend to go with some variety of quartz, calcite, gypsum, agate, or even just simple glass, but labradorite sure is pretty.

“unfortunate hours planetary times” — Different texts will indicate good or bad times to do something; I recall that the Grimoirum Verum as well as the Greek Magical Papyri () have “calendars” that describe fortunate or unfortunate days.  However, when it comes to planetary times e.g. hours, it all depends on the activity in question.  For instance, starting a fight that you plan to win is better done on a Tuesday (day of Mars) than a Friday (day of Venus), since the latter doesn’t do well with fights at all.  Likewise, you probably shouldn’t start a fight on a Sunday (day of the Sun), since the Sun is about authority and rulership, and fighting against that usually doesn’t turn out so well.  Better than this, learn electional astrology; while planetary days and hours are a good rough and easy way to do planetary timing, actually timing them to fortunate or unfortunate alignments of the planets themselves is unequivocally better.

“rituwal instrucshins summin belsubub” — While I understand what you’re trying to communicate, and in that sense you aren’t failing the use of written language, I suggest you learn how to properly write, type, and spell before you dare to work with some of the more powerful demonic entities out there.  They appreciate a bit of finesse.

“st. sealtiel feast day” — So, Sealtiel a.k.a. Selaphiel is one of the Seven Archangels (depending on what tradition of Christianity you’re looking at), and is considered to be the angel presiding over prayer to God.  However, unlike Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, he’s not named in the Bible, and so while the Catholic Church is open to his existence, they cannot claim his existence as dogmatically real post-Vatican II.  As such, Sealtiel does not pass muster for licit veneration in the Catholic Church, and so doesn’t get a feast day from them.  However, the Orthodox Church gives him a bit more leeway along with the other archangels Uriel, Jehudiel, and Barachiel, and does officially venerate them.  However, the Orthodox Church also clusters all the archangels together into a single feast day that they commemorate on November 8, as a general feast day for all the angelic powers.  The Catholic Church has something similar, known as the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels or simply as Michaelmas, held on September 29.

“can my hga hear me” — At all times, on all days, and in all places, yes.  Your Holy Guardian Angel has always known you and always been around you

“rufus opus moon walk” — I’m not sure my mentor, Fr. Rufus Opus, is that smooth.  He’s charismatic, sure, but I wouldn’t bet on him being able to pull off a moonwalk that easily.  That is, of course, unless he wants to try it at Crucible Convention in front of everyone, in which case I’m all for that.

“can i combine the colors on a orisha necklace” — Please ask your local botanica’s resident Santeros and babalawos for authoritative answers on Santeria questions.  That said, as far as elekes go, I’m pretty sure it’s just one orisha per eleke.  Unless you’re doing something that’s eleke-inspired, don’t go combining the colors of different orisha on the same eleke, especially if those two don’t get along (like Yemaya and Oya).

“how to consecrate and charge a ring in naked” — The same way you’d consecrate a ring while clothed, except without clothes.

“magic square of saturn benefits” — The magic square, or qamea, of Saturn is a 3 × 3 grid of numbers, the numerological aspect of which makes it a very powerful Saturn talisman on its own.  You don’t need sigils or names or symbols or lead or what-have-you if all you have is the magic square; it all helps, sure, but the square is a potent realization of the powers of Saturn on its own.

“archangel michael invocation for orgonite” — None whatsoever, also ew.  I still stand by my conviction that orgonite is bunk; orgone technology generally isn’t, but orgonite is a crap interpretation of it all.  Trying to combine angels into this?  How would that work?  I’m not even going to fathom to what ends, but what would that do that literally any other invocation couldn’t?  I mean, the Catholic Church sure isn’t going to accept orgonite’s usefulness (nor should they bother), so they won’t be accepting canonical submissions for prayers, litanies, or blessings for orgonite anytime soon.

“how to tell if summoning asmodeus was successful” — A lot of people think that conjuration requires the physical and visible manifestation of a spirit in order to be successful.  I mean, many magicians nowadays think that’s the end goal of magic and the mark of a master, and it’s true that if you can get a spirit to that kind of manifestation, you’re pretty awesome.  I don’t think that’s the end result of conjuration, though; it’s the equivalent of a really nice party trick at a business conference.  The better criteria for judging the success of a conjuration are whether you were able to perceive them at all and, if so, whether the end you conjured the spirit for came around.  Perception can take place many ways; I’m much better at hearing, smelling, and just coming up with full thoughts than I am with tactile sensation or vision, physical or spiritual.  We have more than just the sense of sight; use all your senses and see what works best for you and how you best interface with spirits.  As for ends, well, why did you bother summoning the spirit in the first place?  Did you have a specific request to ask and, if you did, was the request fulfilled?  Did you get answers to questions you may have asked?  Did you receive confirmation over something you were unsure about?  If so, then I’d say the conjuration was a success.

“congo huge cock” — I’m not sure.  I mean, there is the cliché that African men are the most well-endowed, but I’m unsure about that, and specifically whether Congolese men more than others are the biggest on average.  Besides, I’m already spoken for, so I can’t really experiment and find out myself.  That said,

“how to cleanse and bless a home with holy water and sea salt” — I’m confused as to why you’d use both sea salt and holy water, since holy water is usually already salted and mixed with other herbs, resins, or perfumes (like rose water, hyssop, frankincense, myrrh, etc.) in addition to being prayed over.  It kinda sounds like you’re mixing Christian and pagan practices which, although not a bad thing, the use of holy water alone should suffice.  That said, I might recommend strewing the salt across your home (all across your home), leaving it there overnight, and sweeping it all up and out of the house from the back to the front the next morning while praying that all defilement and filth be swept away, then spritzing holy water from front to back across the whole house while praying for blessings to enter into your house.  The salt here acts as a sponge to soak up all the spiritual ick in the house; just be sure to be extraordinarily thorough in getting it all out!  Instead of using salt as a spiritual sponge, I might recommend setting a glass of jar in each room for the same purpose and dumped into the road the next morning, or using the salt as a layer of protection in each corner of a room along with an iron nail or a few pennies.

“interpreting triad in geomancy” — So, this is an aspect of the geomantic shield chart that, as far as I can ascertain, was first written about at length by Robert Fludd in his Fasciculus Geomanticae, but it may have been written about somewhere else before that and the information isn’t accessible yet; there are some parallels with Fludd’s technique (which he and John Michael Greer call “triplicities”) and some Arabic and African forms of geomancy.  The idea is based on the Witnesses and Judge; the Judge is made from the two Witnesses above it, and so form a triad of figures that indicate the past, present, and future of the overall situation.  We can apply that same logic to the triads of the Nieces and the Mothers or Daughters that generate them; thus, the First Triad is composed of the First and Second Mothers with the First Niece, the Second Triad with the Third and Fourth Mothers with the Second Niece, the Third Triad with the First and Second Daughters with the Third Niece, and the Fourth Triad with the Third and Fourth Daughters with the Fourth Niece.  As JMG and Fludd describe it, the First Triad describes the overall condition and state of the querent, the Second Triad describes the context of the situation of the reading, the Third Triad describes the places and location of the query and querent, and the Fourth Triad describes the people and their actions involved in the query.  It can help shed light on a Shield Chart, though I find that it’s not particularly useful if one also uses the House Chart; I almost never interpret the Triads in the Shield Chart for this reason.  It’s a useful bit of knowledge, however, especially if you prefer analyzing the Shield Chart as “the” chart, though both the Shield and House Charts for a reading answer the question the same.

“rubeus iching” — I got several search queries that focus on the geomantic figure Rubeus and the I Ching, a Chinese form of divination that uses eight trigrams (three lined figures) or 64 hexagrams (six lined figures).  Some people think that there’s a link between geomancy and I Ching because both use binary figures: geomancy uses 16 four-lined figures with either one or two dots in each line, and the I Ching uses 8 three-lined figures or 64 six-lined figures with either a solid line (single line segment) or a broken line (two line segments) in each line.  They do look superficially similar, but that’s about it; there’s no evidence to indicate that there’s anything to link the two in method or meaning.  Add to it that the earliest records we have indicate geomancy to develop between 900 and 1000 CE in the Saharan region of Africa, while the I Ching has its origins at least as far back as 100 BCE, if not as far back as 1500 BCE.  The I Ching is anywhere from 1000 to 2000 years older than geomancy, and in light of the fact that we have no evidence to link the two even by means of the Silk Road, trying to link the two systems is probably folly-in-action.  In that light, while you might be able to find a hexagram or trigram similar in meaning to Rubeus, it’d be coincidental at best and contrived at worst.

“greek alphabet oracle spread” — Now this is interesting: the use of a spread with the Greek alphabet oracle, or what I call grammatomancy.  Consider Tarot divination: you could draw a single card to get a single answer, or you could use several cards arranged in a particular way to get a more developed answer.  I actually go over several types of grammatomantic “spreads”, or what I call syntaxes, in my ebook on grammatomancy, which you should totally buy and look at.

There hasn’t been much talk here about the paths themselves on the Tetractys since we figured out a way to associate letters to them.  Largely, this is because I’ve had a hard time figuring out where to start.  I mean, I developed the whole mathesis thing out of a need to work with a Greek system of paths between the spheres on the Tree of Life, yet never actually did much pathworking or meditation on the paths themselves on the Kircher Tree (which, though it goes against my usual advice, I think was justified here).  I know that the paths describe a means of change and evolution from one emanation to the next, yet beyond that…it was hard to say.  Since then, I’ve been looking at the Tetractys and trying to figure out where to start.  Unlike the Tree of Life in qabbalah that so conveniently gives us Malkuth as the starting line for our Work, the Tetractys doesn’t have anything so readily apparent.  Then again, the answer was literally staring out at me from the middle of the whole thing, and it’d be a shame for me to ignore my own patron god Hermes at this point.  Starting with that brief moment of inspiration, I started from the middle of the Tetractys and worked my way out, and now I’ve ended up developing a way to traverse the sphairai on the Tetractys of Life in an ordered and coherent way.  Bear with me guys, because this post is going to be a little lengthy to get all my thoughts out.

So, we have our Tetractys of Life.  For simplicity’s sake, let’s ignore the letters on the paths and focus just on the existence of the paths:

First, let’s talk about having a single “path” (really, a network of paths between individual sphairai) that traverses the whole Tetractys sphere by sphere.  I propose the following schema:

1. Mercury
2. Air/Jupiter
3. Fire/Mars
4. Sulfur/Sun
5. Mercury
6. Salt/Moon
7. Earth/Saturn
8. Water/Venus
9. Mercury
10. Light/Fixed Stars
11. Monad
12. Darkness/Earth

Graphically, the paths on the Tetractys selected between these sphairai look like this:

I’ll bet you’re confused.  For one, we have twelve spheres listed, with Mercury being listed three times; shouldn’t we have to go through each sphere only once?  Second, we’re starting with Mercury and not the Monad; shouldn’t we start with the Monad being the All and the Source of all?  Well, sorta.  I’ll admit, my background in qabbalah was inhibiting me from running with this sequence of paths, but then, mathesis is not qabbalah, and the Tetractys is not the Tree.  In Hermetic qabbalah or Jewish kabbalah, we have a clearly defined start and end, a Source and a Destination, and either of them will be Kether or Malkuth depending on whether you’re going up or down the Tree.  However, while the Tree is like an elaborate map, the Tetractys presents us with something different, like a blueprint.  Instead of showing how things come to be in a linear fashion, the Tetractys shows the presence and building blocks of life present in all things; the Tetractys shows how things come to be in a nonlinear fashion.  There is no single end goal with the Tetractys; the Monad descends into the Tetrad, not any one of the four elements alone.  All the parts of the Tetractys must be constantly and repeatedly traversed to become complete both of ourselves and of the cosmos, encompassing all aspects of the act, process, and result of Creation.

As for passing through the sphaira of Mercury, let’s talk about what we’re doing on the paths first.  We start with what looks like the Mitsubishi logo around the Tetractys: three rhombuses each with one acute corner at the Mercury sphaira and the other acute corner at one of the distant corners of the Tetractys.  I’ll call each of these three sets of four sphairai a system, and each system focuses on a particular theme:

• The Hot System involves the active principles of Air, Fire, and Sulfur.  Processes of power, actively causing change.
• The Cold System involves the passive principles of Salt, Earth, and Water.  Processes of reception, passively receiving change
• The Cosmic System involves the encompassing principles of Light, the Monad, and Darkness.  Processes of cosmic stasis and unity.

In each case, we both start and end at Mercury, both astrologically and alchemically, being the center and present in nearly all things except the purest and most extreme of all elements: Earth, Fire, and the Source itself.  Everything else is connected with Mercury, so it makes sense that it’s the only one that can reasonably allow us to translate between the three systems. Yes, we can go from Water to Air (traversing the Cold and Hot Systems directly), Sulfur to Light (Hot and Cosmic), or Salt to Darkness (Cold and Whole), but a better balance can be preserved and future progress can be assured by always returning to Mercury.  If we spend some time in the Hot System, we should pass from Sulfur through Mercury to Salt, because Mercury is what naturally balances the two forces.  At the end of the Cold System, we pass from Water/Venus to Light/Stars; though it’s not immediately apparent how Mercury balances these two, consider the myth of Aphrodite being born from Ocean (Water) from the remains of Ouranos (Sky); the ability to create physically comes from supercelestial impetus and the latter is accomplished by the former, but also consider the endless horizon is the meeting point of the two realms.  At the end of the Cosmic System, we proceed from Darkness to Air; again, an awkward comparison to make, but recall that in the Poemander myth of creation, air is what separated the heavens from the mixed mass that would eventually become the Earth, and the ability to begin the process of rising and falling through the spheres is accomplished by means of air as an intermediary.  Mercury is a symbol of strong change, but not in a way that changes something into its direct opposite; rather, Mercury changes something into its complement, something that completes and links the two systems together.

The use of systems here isn’t just to provide a way to go through all the sphairai of the Tetractys in one go.  Rather, within each system are four sphairai and four paths, forming a kind of mini-tetractys within each system in a mini-cycle.  While one can traverse each system once to complete the whole Tetractys, I see it being worthwhile to cycle through each system several times to really grok and complete the work that needs to be done in each.  If we consider the three phases of alchemy (nigredo, albedo, rubdeo), then each system can be viewed as one of these stages, and it may take time for the Work from each phase to settle in.  Going through each stage of the work thoroughly requires several iterations; for instance, cycling through the Hot system four times would yield a pass each to focus on the ideas of Hot, Hot-Air, Hot-Fire, and Hot-Sulfur.  By cycling not only through the Tetractys as a whole but within each system on the Tetractys, we can begin to fully understand each force in its entirety and on its own terms.

All this leads to the cycle of paths that this “Mitsubishi” arrangement forms.  We start with Mercury then descend into the Hot System by progressing to Air, drying ourselves into Fire, and rarefying ourselves into Sulfur.  From there, we return to Mercury, cooling down and becoming pure Salt, degrading into Earth, then quickening into Water.  After that, we return to Mercury, ascend into the Light, achieve union or the image of the Source, then descend back down to Darkness.  From there, we repeat the process over again, returning to Mercury and heating up again into Air, cycling through the Tetractys infinitely and repeatedly, each time becoming more powerful with each sphaira and each time achieving more and more of the henosis that is the Great Work.  So, a full set of iterations to proceed throughout the whole Tetractys in this manner would involve a total of four stages that I tentatively call Initiations, progressing through the different systems or within the same system to obtain a deeper understanding of each force.  Keeping the same order within each system, the whole schema looks like this:

1. Hermetic Initiation
   1. Hot System (Mercury → Air → Fire → Sulfur)
   2. Cold System (Mercury → Salt → Earth → Water)
   3. Cosmic System (Mercury → Light → the Monad → Darkness)
2. Hot Initiation
   1. Hot System with a focus on Mercury (e.g. a deeper acquaintance of the Hot forces)
   2. Hot System with a focus on Air (e.g. seeing Air and how it relates and acts throughout the Hot forces)
   3. Hot System with a focus on Fire (e.g. same as above but with Fire)
   4. Hot System with a focus on Sulfur (e.g. etc.)
3. Cold Initiation
   1. Cold System with a focus on Mercury
   2. Cold System with a focus on Salt
   3. Cold System with a focus on Earth
   4. Cold System with a focus on Water
4. Cosmic Initiation
   1. Cosmic System with a focus on Mercury
   2. Cosmic System with a focus on Light
   3. Cosmic System with a focus on the Monad
   4. Cosmic System with a focus on Darkness

And, after this, we’d repeat the whole thing over again as many times as desired or as necessary until we achieve the Great Work.  Besides, by completely cycling through the whole Tetractys (at least in the Hermetic Initiation) starting and ending with Mercury, we hit Mercury four times, and four is a number mythologically sacred to Hermes.  And, if we consider all the Initiation passes together, we pass through the entire Tetractys a total of five times.

So, in this manner, we have a set of twelve paths traversing three systems within the Tetractys.  Each system is composed of four sphairai, all starting with and ending with Mercury; Mercury is then a liminal point between the three “worlds”, both starting and ending each set of paths within an system.  We constantly proceed from and return to Mercury as a central hub or nexus.  However, with our twelve Mitsubishi paths, we leave another set of twelve paths unused.  What are these paths?

These twelve paths never touch central Mercury or the extreme Earth, Fire, or Monad sphairai at all, but instead connect the six “middling” sphairai of Darkness, Salt, Water, Air, Sulfur, and Light.  Two cycles are presented here, shown by the hexagram paths (inner cycle) and hexagon paths (outer cycle).  Instead of having systems, we have one group of six sphairai that are each connected to everything but their complement (e.g. Salt and Sulfur, Water and Light) and four leftovers that are unconnected which would link everything else together.  Rather than getting us to henosis and the Monad, or alternatively to a fundamental understanding of how our cosmos works through Earth and Fire, these cycles keep us trapped, never able to each any extreme and never having the ability to reasonably transform ourselves into anything we need to progress.

Between the Mitsubishi paths and hexagram/hexagon paths, I think we have a distinction of how things progress within the cosmos as shown by the Tetractys.  The hexagon and hexagram paths indicate a cycle of reincarnation, always stuck hovering around and just under the things that truly break them out but never quite within reach; the one thing that can do that is Mercury, which they constantly rely on but never call upon. We’ll call these set of paths the Agnosis Schema, as opposed to the Mitsubishi paths which I’ll call the Gnosis Schema.  The Gnosis Schema connects all the sphairai together and in a way that encourages, well, enlightenment in almost a Buddhist sense of extinguishing the process of forced rebirth and reincarnation, freeing ourselves from the trap of maya or ignorance that keeps us in the cycle of being reborn without our control.  In other words, the Gnosis Schema allows us to be reborn by choice and free ourselves from this Hermetic samsara, which is a world of difference from the Agnosis Schema; we can deliberately choose to go to places that we’d never end up in involuntarily or by accident.  We continue around the Gnosis Schema as long as we need or desire to until that last iteration where we go to the sphaira of the Monad and stay there, never returning to Darkness to continue the cycle.  (And, of course, metempsychosis or reincarnation was indeed a belief of Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism, so I’m in the right here to bring that beast of a topic into this.)

So, going back to the Gnosis Schema of paths, we can use the order of them to figure out a numerical assignment from 1 to 10 of the sphairai on the Tetractys of Life.  Again, if we start with Mercury as the start, we assign it the number 1 and proceed along the Gnosis Schema paths in order, skipping over where Mercury is repeated:

1. Mercury
2. Air/Jupiter
3. Fire/Mars
4. Sulfur/Sun
5. Salt/Moon
6. Earth/Saturn
7. Water/Venus
8. Light/Fixed Stars
9. Monad
10. Darkness/Earth

This system of numbers is grossly different from that of the qabbalistic scheme of things, and rightly so.  We’re not describing a path of linear descent from the Source to the World, but a means of cyclical progressive process that continually builds one up further and further until they reach the Highest without having to go down lower anymore.  Described numerically, the Tetractys looks like the following:

Bear in mind that, although each of the sphairai are associated with some celestial heaven (from the Prime Mover to the World we live in), these numbers do not describe their level.  The celestial numbers of the heavens stay as they are, such that Saturn is still the third heaven (from the Top), and so forth.  If we were to compare the cosmological number of each of the sphairai (based on their planets) with the Gnosis Schema numbering (based on their alchemical force), we end up with the following table (which is an exercise in polyvalent thinking):

Note that two of the sphairai, the Monad and Mercury, are essentially the same when it comes to what their force is: the planetary force of Mercury and the alchemical force of Mercury are so close that they’re conceptually synonymous.  Likewise, the Monad is…well, the Monad.  There’s literally only one Monad in any system of thought here.  However, look at the numbers: we see two of the sphairai, those of Venus/Water and Darkness/World, have the same number in both systems.  While these are the exceptions to the rule, they’re exceptions worth noticing.  That Darkness/World is 10, the final stage in the emanatory process, is unsurprising; it is completion, it is the ending, it is the goal of creation to create the World.  Although it is present in the Dyad in contrast to Light/Fixed Stars and thus “comes first” before anything lower, the entirety of the World can only exist when all the other forces are present to give it life, animacy, and agency.  As for Water/Venus, it’s interesting that it’s kept the number seven between the two, that of essence and quality of life.  It’s low down on the Tetractys as part of the Tetrad, but all the same it’s vital to giving things animacy, as opposed to Darkness/World which is what is given animacy.

Personally, I feel it appropriate to comment on what the Gnosis/Agnosis Schemas mean for the individual letters of the paths themselves.  For instance, note that all the Air paths (letters Υ, Φ, Ψ, Σ, Δ, Μ) are all part of the Agnosis Schema, as well as the other fixed signs (letters Φ, Κ, Ν) as well as the other elemental paths (letters Χ, Ξ, Θ).  The twelve letters that belong to the Gnosis path are Ο, Ζ, Π, Ε, Η, Λ, Τ, Ω, Α, Β, Ρ, and Ι, which are the six non-fixed non-Air signs and the six non-Jupiter planets.  However, all I’ve done so far is figure out which abstract paths to take regardless of their letters; I fully expect my Tetractys of Life to have its letter-path assignments change over time as I fine tune and explore the system deeper.  The system, as of now, is coherent and structured, which I like, but who knows whether it’s actually valid and practical to use.  That’s what further writing and scrying is for, and now that I have an actual path to pathwork, I think that process should begin soon.

Last time we discussed how we might traverse the Tetractys of Life in pathworking through two sets of paths, collectively termed schemata:

• The Gnosis Schema consists of 12 paths that link every sphaira on the Tetractys in a pattern not unlike the Mitsubishi logo, looping around through three systems of four spheres each, passing through Mercury multiple times.
• The Agnosis Schema consists of 12 paths that link all but the Mercury, Monad, Fire, and Earth sphaira together in two cycles, the hexagon and hexagram paths around the Mercury sphaira.

The big difference between these schemata is that the Gnosis Schema allows one to see into the deepest and highest reaches of the cosmos, as well as the Source of the cosmos itself, for theurgical and henosistic purposes, allowing us the choice of reincarnation as we desire until we reach our final henosis with the Monad.  The Agnosis Schema, however, keeps us trapped in a Hermetic samsara of sorts, always flitting around like bats in a cave around real Life and yet just out of reach of real Truth.  In other words, as long as we’re trapped in the Agnosis Schema, we’re not making progress to the real ends of the cosmos where the real treasure lies.  We need to make that schematic leap from Agnosis to Gnosis, and as we discussed before, it all starts with Mercury.

The question is, though, how do we make that leap?  Mercury is at the center of the Tetractys of Life and is connected to all the sphairai but the most extreme ones, that of the Monad, Fire, and Earth.  However, it’s only in the Gnosis Schema that we can get from any of these “middling” sphairai (Darkness, Salt, Water, Air, Sulfur, and Light) to Mercury.  The Agnosis Schema has these middling sphairai all connected to each other but not to Mercury, Monad, Fire, or Earth.  As long as we’re on the Agnosis Schema, we’re barred from attaining access to those spheres, and if we can’t even get to Mercury which is the closest and most easily accessible of them all, how can we even consider being able to get to the Monad?

Thus comes in an idea that’s also present in the Tree of Life, though I’ve seen it far more in Hermetic qabbalah than Jewish kabbalah.  That idea is that of the Veils, though there are two sets in qabbalah, one of two and one of three.  The former set is the one I’m talking about: the Veils of Paroketh and of the Abyss.  In the Tree of Life, the Veil of Paroketh separate the sephiroth from Tiphareth and up from Netzach and below.  The Veil of the Abyss (or, more commonly, the Abyss) separates the sephiroth of Binah and above from Chesed and below, often with the Abyss itself represented by the “false” sephirah (se-faux-rah?) of Da`ath.  The former veil of Paroketh is illusory; there is no real separation between the personal world (represented by the lower four sephiroth) and the interpersonal world (represented by the higher sephiroth), except that of our own making.  By tearing down the veil of our own making, or at least by temporarily parting it, we gain access to higher spiritual truths.  As long as we continue thinking that the world must follow the rules we conceive to be law, and as long as we refuse to accept the universe and the cosmos on its own terms, the veil remains firmly in place.  Leave all that behind, and the veil is easily parted.  The comic series Promethea by Alan Moore gives this scene in bloody detail: on the Kircher Tree, the path that links Tiphareth with Netzach (transcending the Veil) is associated with the letter Nun, given to Scorpio and Tarot trump XIII, Death.  In order to attain new life in the Sun, the protagonists must die, literally rent apart and completely dissected.  It was all an illusion, however, but a painful one all the same to dismember.  By dismembering our preconceptions, we remember the truth of the world.

The Abyss, on the other hand, is much more of a problem on the Tree of Life.  To keep it very simple and brief, almost to the point of a lie, the Abyss is the division of the mundane and the spiritual; it’s the gulf between what the world should be and the world that is damned to be, the mirror between what is and what Is that cannot normally be transcended.  It’s the purpose of the magician or theurgist to transcend this gulf and attain divine understanding, wisdom, and finally the crown of all that exists and not-exists.  It’s a dangerous thing, especially since the Lightning Bolt Path on the Kircher Tree doesn’t actually have a path where it should between Chesed and Binah.  All the same, the Abyss must be transcended and crossed over, and it’s no easy thing.  Some people never do and get lost in it, while others spend a long time in dark places only to come out a completely different person (which is quite the goal of the whole thing).  Going back to Promethea, as opposed to a few pages where Promethea and Barbara crossed the veil of Paroketh, a whole issue was devoted to their crossing the Abyss, and it wasn’t a pleasant or rational part of their journey.

A similar case exists with making the jump from the Agnosis to the Gnosis Schemas.  While we’re stuck in our cycle of mindless and uncontrolled rebirth, we lack the ability to achieve true life, power, and knowledge.  At any stage on the Agnosis Schema, we have the option of going to the sphaira of Mercury or to the nearest extreme sphaira (the one of the same system which belongs to the one one is already in, e.g. if one is in the sphaira of Salt, the nearest extreme sphaira is that of Earth).  However, making the jump from the Agnosis Schema to Mercury on the Gnosis Schema is most important, even though one could feasibly start their path at any point on the Tetractys.  Mercury is the most preferable starting point, because Mercury is a figure of balance and allows one to start with equal footing and a clean spiritual slate; further, given the road-opening, guiding, and quickening abilities of this sphaira, starting with Mercury is arguably the best choice and continuing along the Gnosis Schema paths as normal.

Still, the process of getting from any of the middling sphairai to Mercury is, itself, crossing an abyss of sorts.  It’s not because there’s no path that exists (because Mercury is connected to all the middling spheres), but because the types of path are so divergent from the normal roles of Mercury.  The Agnosis Schema seeks to circumvent Mercury however it can, while the Gnosis Schema leads right to Mercury time and again.  The first abyss we must cross in order to get to Mercury from any of the middling sphairai is that of desire: we must first seek out Mercury, we must first seek the path to take before we even take it.  Once there, we have suddenly jumped to the Gnosis Schema.  As one of the prayers in my gnostic work goes, “in order for us to understand the gnosis, we must first seek a firm foundation”; Mercury provides us with that foundation.  We must first seek our guide, our protector, our initiator to assist us in our real work.  Finding that guide and opening the door is just the beginning to it all; it might be that your guide is Hermes, your Holy Guardian Angel, a yidam, or some other tutelary spirit, but something that guides you along the Gnosis Schema as it applies to you is just about crucial to starting the Work.

But, once we get to Mercury, what then?  If we stay where we are, we’ve crossed the abyss only to be stranded on an island.  If we forget that, hey, we have a cosmos to explore (and then some), reveling in our initiation and fact that we can go anywhere without actually doing so, we end up back on the Agnosis Schema.  But wait!  There are no paths connecting the sphaira of Mercury to anything on the Agnosis Schema, so we end up trapped there.  We end up in a one-node loop; rather than running around in circles, we end up twisting in the wind.  Being trapped in Mercury is always dangerous, not just after our first initiation into the Gnosis Schema, but because we risk this every time we return to Mercury on the Gnosis Schema.

• We go through the Hot System and we return to Mercury, thrilled that we’ve overcome our obstacles on that part of the cosmos, yet end up burning up too much with joy and think we’ve accomplished and are in charge of everything.  Only by recognizing our inability to act fully within the cosmos and our ultimate nature as finite, non-omniscient, and manipulatable creatures and allowing ourselves to be acted upon can we free ourselves from the Agnostic sphaira of Mercury.
• We go through the Cold System and we return to Mercury, feeling confident that we understand how things are affected by others in the cosmos, and end up passively waiting for true action to happen to ourselves when we need to accomplish it ourselves.  Only by realizing that we still need to play an active role in the cosmos do we free ourselves from the Agnostic sphaira of Mercury.
• We go through the Cosmic System and we return to Mercury, catching a glimpse of the Source and really grokking important truths about creation as a whole.  After this, we end up with what Fr. Rufus Opus elegantly calls “insufferableprickitis”, or “Moses Off The Mount Syndrome”.  After all, when Moses came down from the Mount and jamming with the Lord, his face was so radiant and glowing from the divine interaction that he wore a veil to mask himself.  Without wearing the veil (and this isn’t like the veils we discussed above), we come across as a holier-than-thou (even if it’s true) douchebag who thinks they know everything because they had one brush with God.  In this state of pride, we think we’ve done everything there is to do and are confident that we’ve attained the Great Work, when all we’ve done is made a loop around the cosmos once.  We end up stuck at the Agnostic sphaira of Mercury until we realize that there’s still so much more, that no finite amount of practice can truly equate infinite gnosis.

All that being said, while getting to Mercury can be a bitch of an abyss in and of itself, and while visiting Mercury has its own dangers that turn it into a deserted island isolated from the rest of the cosmos, when approached properly and respectfully, Mercury becomes a bridge from something into its complement.  That’s Mercury’s role, after all; to balance things out between opposites.  Mercury is placed between Sulfur and Salt, Light and Water, and Darkness and Air.  We continue on our path of the Gnostic Schema by traversing Mercury and transforming ourselves from one thing into its opposite.  Mercury is not only our beginning but our constant transformation; it is only in the extreme sphairai of the Monad, Earth, and Fire do we have no choice but to continue along our path of Gnosis and keep going in one direction or another without immediate recourse to Mercury.  Mercury, in a sense, is our “home away from home”, our place of respite between systems as well as our nexus of transformation between systems.

We can fall into the Agnosis Schema at any stage of the Gnosis Schema if we linger too long or if we lose our way; with Mercury as our guide leading us away from and towards our cyclical destination, that shouldn’t ideally pose a problem, but we humans (and, for that matter, all entities) are constantly fighting against what we should do, even if it’s a subtle and instinctual reaction.  If we stray from our path even a little bit, we lose our way; if this happens at the Monad or the sphairai of Fire, Earth, or Mercury, then we end up stranded until we loosen ourselves up and make ourselves capable of further progress, or until we strengthen our resolve and continue along the path of transformation.

It’s not that we fall by fate from Gnosis into Agnosis or vice versa, but it’s a choice we make, even if we’re unaware we’re consciously making it and the repercussions of doing so.  Tying the sphaira of Mercury back to its mythological counterpart, Hermes is the god of guides and guide of gods, men, spirits, souls, and heroes.  If we choose to progress along the Gnosis Schema to accomplish the divine imperative given to us, then ouranic (heavenly) Hermes will lead us on; if we choose to linger or abandon that quest, then chthonic (underworld) Hermes will lead us to Styx and leave us there until we dig ourselves out again.  It’s dangerous falling back into Agnosis, especially if we’re at one of the extreme spheres, since we may not be able to find our way back.  Of course, the rules change a bit once we achieve henosis and union with the Monad, where we can freely choose to leave the Tetractys completely and enjoin what becomes of us with the Infinite and Simple, at which point we’ve completed our path and ended up exactly where we need, and no longer need a guide to continue our path.  That said, that’s the endgame, and chances are we’re nowhere near that stage of spiritual evolution yet.  If you were, then I hope your divine prerogative includes something more than reading one magician’s ramblings on the Internet.

This post is going to be a little winding and wending around several topics we’ve gone over recently about the Tetractys, paths, and the like, so I apologize if it’s not as coherent as the others; this is half-exposition, half-exploration, so I hope you have some caffeine handy.  Not too long ago, I had an idea of analyzing the internumeric/arithmetical relationships of numbers as presented by collections of the Monad, Dyad, Triad, and Tetrad in the Tetractys.  This was combined with a geomancy-influenced approach to analyze specific combinations of these numbers which resulted in a deeper understanding of the principles and qualities of the numbers 0 through 10:

0. Emptiness
1. Individuation
2. Relation
3. Harmony
4. Form
5. Growth
6. Order
7. Essence
8. Mixture
9. Realization
10. Wholeness

Each of these has a whole explanation about how they’re arrived at and what they mean on a deeper level, but the one-word name for each works pretty well.  However, we could link pairs of these principles or qualities together, balanced around the number 5.  In a deep sense, both the upper number (less than 5) and lower number (more than 5) reflect the same attribute, with the upper qualities reflecting more of an internal nature and the lower qualities more of an external nature.  Those metaqualities are:

• 0/10: Being
• 1/9: Becoming
• 2/8: Variation
• 3/7: Accordance
• 4/6: Structure
• 5: Growth

The diagram illustrating this from before can serve as a good reminder of how these things are all linked together:

In a deep sense, the ten qualities described by the ten numbers of the Monad up through to the Decad can be described in another Tetractys: instead of eleven qualities (Monad through Decad plus Mēden, or Nothing/0), we end up with six metaqualities: Becoming, Variation, Accordance, and Structure, preceded by Being and succeeded by Growth.  However, I personally feel that Being and Growth themselves, as metaqualities, are the same: one cannot be (being) without coming to be (growth), nor can one become (growth) without existing enough to become (being).  So, in reality, we have four qualities assigned, yet again, to the Monad, Dyad, Triad, and Tetrad, with another quality given to the “hidden pentad” which forms the threshold between one iteration of the Tetractys and the next.  In essence, we end up with a fractal of meaning for the Tetractys, with tetractyes within tetractyes, tetractyes all the way down.

Anyway, backing up again to the Decad from the Tetrad, I think I figured out a connection between these qualities and the order of the sphairai established from the Gnosis Schema discussed from before.  In case you’ve already forgotten and don’t like rereading old posts, the Gnosis Schema is a series of 12 paths that lead to every sphaira on the Tetractys, first starting at Mercury, then Air, then Fire, then Sulfur, then down to Earth and back to Mercury, then up to the Monad and back again to Mercury.  It’s like the Lightning Bolt Path on the Tree of Life in qabbalah/kabbalah, although this Gnosis Schema is cyclical instead of linear.  This is in contrast to the Agnosis Schema, the set of twelve paths formed by the hexagon and hexagram in the Tetractys that eternally circle but never connect to Mercury, as well as the extreme sphairai of the Monad, Earth, and Fire.

Looking at the Gnosis Schema, the sphairai can be uniquely numbered in the same order as the paths lead to them, skipping over Mercury as it’s repeated:

1. Mercury
2. Air/Jupiter
3. Fire/Mars
4. Sulfur/Sun
5. Salt/Moon
6. Earth/Saturn
7. Water/Venus
8. Light/Fixed Stars
9. The Monad
10. Darkness/World

The only annoying thing is that the numbering in this manner isn’t contiguous; you can’t go from 4 to 5 without passing over 1 again.  It’s not ideal, but it’s one possible system all the same, and I make no claim to any of this being ideal or correct right out of the gate of development.

So, here’s a different idea.  Instead of just limiting ourselves to counting the sphairai uniquely, why not count them contiguously?  In other words, on the Gnosis Schema, after we go from Mercury (1) to Air (2) to Fire (3) to Sulfur (4), we go back to Mercury (5) to Salt (6) to Earth (7) to Water (8), then back to Mercury (9) to Light (10) to the Monad (11) to Darkness (12), then return to Mercury (13) to begin another cycle.  Since we like numbers 10 and less, let’s reduce them all by taking the remainder of a number larger than 10 when we divide it by 10.  So, if we have the Monad given the number 11, the remainder of 11 ÷ 10 is 1, the remainder of 13 ÷ 10 is 3, and so forth.  So, when we started out with Mercury at 1 when we began our first pass through the Gnosis Schema, we ended up with Mercury at 13 (3).  If we try it again, we end up with Mercury at 25 (5), and again at 37 (7), again at 49 (9), and the next schema would start it at 61 (1).  It takes five complete passes around the Gnosis Schema for us to return to the same number (or reduced number, which is the same in this line of thinking).

So, if we were to chart out a comparison between the schematic numbering of the spheres compared to the pass number of the spheres, we’d end up with the following chart (ignore the System column for now):

Incidentally, as it takes five complete passes around the Tetractys for us to reach the same number we started at, I had suggested earlier that we go through Four Initiations (Hermetic, Hot, Cold, Cosmic) that would collectively focus on each force within its own system, or a tetrad of forces extending from the Mercury sphaira out to one of the outermost sphaira:

1. Hermetic Initiation
   1. Hot System (Mercury → Air → Fire → Sulfur)
   2. Cold System (Mercury → Salt → Earth → Water)
   3. Cosmic System (Mercury → Light → the Monad → Darkness)
2. Hot Initiation
   1. Hot System with a focus on Mercury (e.g. a deeper acquaintance of the Hot forces)
   2. Hot System with a focus on Air (e.g. seeing Air and how it relates and acts throughout the Hot forces)
   3. Hot System with a focus on Fire (e.g. same as above but with Fire)
   4. Hot System with a focus on Sulfur (e.g. etc.)
3. Cold Initiation
   1. Cold System with a focus on Mercury
   2. Cold System with a focus on Salt
   3. Cold System with a focus on Earth
   4. Cold System with a focus on Water
4. Cosmic Initiation
   1. Cosmic System with a focus on Mercury
   2. Cosmic System with a focus on Light
   3. Cosmic System with a focus on the Monad
   4. Cosmic System with a focus on Darkness

In other words, the Hermetic Initiation would be one whole pass through the Tetractys (12 sphairai).  The Hot Initiation would cycle through the first third of the Gnosis Schema four times (4 sphairai × 4 = 16 sphairai, 12 + 16 = 28); the Cold Initiation would cycle through the second third of the Gnosis Schema four times (another 16, so 28 + 16 = 44); the Cosmic Initiation would cycle through the last third of the Gnosis Schema four times (another 16, so 44 + 16 = 60).  All told, we’d hit sixty sphairai before returning ultimately to the Mercury sphaira at 61, itself reduced to 1.

However, notice that as we’re undergoing the Hot, Cold, and Cosmic Initiations, we’re simply looping around four of the sphairai four times, always starting at and passing through Mercury before going to the next set of initiations.  We can assign the numbers 1 through 4 to each of the spheres within each system, which is what the System column in the table above shows.  And, if we can assign certain groups of sphairai to a certain number, then we can see what comparisons and qualities come out of that analysis:

1. Mercury
2. Air, Salt, Light
3. Fire, Earth, the Monad
4. Sulfur, Water, Darkness

It’s interesting to note that, although Mercury is central to the Gnosis Schema and the Tetractys generally, it forms its own group, always in the worlds but never of the worlds; this, to me, only reinforces its liminal nature as both abyss/boundary and bridge/transformation even more.  The second and fourth groups should look similar to us: they’re the paths we’ve assigned to the letters associated with Air, based on planetary, elemental, or zodiacal symbolism.  The Dyadic systemic group is connected by Air, Jupiter, and Spirit; the Tetradic systemic group is connected by the zodiacal signs of Libra, Aquarius, and Gemini.  Since the Dyad is more about relation/mixture (which speaks to me more strongly of the fixed stars and the zodiac signs) and the Tetrad more about form/structure (more about discrete forces that constitute bodies and action), I question now whether I should swap these associations so that that the Dyadic system is given to the signs of the Zodiac and the Tetradic systemic group is given the forces.

The Triad systemic group, however, is composed of the three outermost and extreme sphairai of the Monad, Earth, and Fire.  They cannot be connected to each other without going through either Dyadic or Tetradic systemic sphairai, nor can they be connected to central Mercury.  However, the Triad is based on harmony and essence, and if nothing else, these three sphairai represent the ultimate foundations (in their own ways) of the cosmos: pure active manifesting force (Fire), pure passive manifested matter (Earth), and the Source of everything and everything in between (the Monad).

Anyway, all this is getting away from the main point I wanted to make: is there a way to link the ten sphairai of the Tetractys with the qualities of the Decad?  Well, the straightforward way would be to associate the ten qualities with the ten sphairai as we numbered them uniquely based on the Gnosis Schema:

1. Mercury — Individuation
2. Air/Jupiter — Relation
3. Fire/Mars — Harmony (??)
4. Sulfur/Sun — Form (?)
5. Salt/Moon — Growth (???)
6. Earth/Saturn — Order
7. Water/Venus — Essence
8. Light/Fixed Stars — Mixture (?)
9. The Monad — Realization
10. Darkness/World — Wholeness

Some of these make sense, and some really don’t.  I mean, what really catches my eye that sets me off is the association with the Pentad (Growth) with the sphaira of Salt.  I mean, sure, in its astrological sense of the Moon, this sphaira can reflect the notion of growth as much as it would atrophy, increase as well as decrease.  However, the alchemical notion of Salt is not what I’d consider resonant with growth; on its own, Salt is fixed, stable, and dead.  Without either Sulfur to cause change or Mercury to receive it within the vehicle of Salt, growth is simply a moot point.  Then again, without the body provided by Salt, growth can’t happen, either; growth can only happen after a body is present.  And, as our Tetractyean studies indicate, growth (Pentad) can only arise in things with bodies made from the four elements (Tetrad).  So maybe this does make sense.  Maybe the other sphairai with question marks have similar occult reasons as to why they can correspond to the quality of their numbers, but it requires some thought.

Another way to consider the qualities as related to the sphairai is not the “essential quality” of the sphairai (based on their unique schematic numbering), but based on the number we arrive at a sphaira based on the passes through the Tetractys using the Gnosis Schema.  For instance, on our first pass through, Mercury is sphaira #1 and thus associated with Individuation; on the second pass, it’s #3 and associated with Harmony; on the third, it’s #5 and associated with Growth, and so forth.  After five passes, we start over again.  Note how the sphairai of Mercury, Fire, Earth, and the Monad (the Monadic and Triadic systemic sphairai) only ever receive odd (active) numbers in this method, while the middling sphairai (the Dyadic and Tetradic systemic sphairai) only ever receive even (passive) numbers.  This system is much more complicated than the straightforward one we just discussed, but it also reflects a system of constant evolution and development that requires several passes through the Tetractys in order to fully grasp the entirety of each sphaira, both in terms of its alchemical/planetary force as well as its numerological qualities.  I might contrast this with the preceding method as how a planet in astrology has both essential dignity (determined solely by its degree in the Zodiac) and accidental dignity (what else is going on around the planet relative to itself).

Well, if we were to use the essential qualities of the sphairai, we also know that we can combine pairs of the qualities into metaqualities that subsume them, like how Relation and Mixture are both aspects of Variation.  In that sense, we can combine pairs of the sphairai as below:

• 1/9: Mercury/The Monad — Becoming
• 2/8: Air/Light — Variation
• 3/7: Fire/Water — Accordance
• 4/6: Sulfur/Earth — Structure
• 5: Salt — Growth
• 10: Darkness — Being

Thus we have four pairs of sphairai and two sphairai left over.  Coincidentally, these leftover ones have the qualities of Growth (Pentad) and Being (Decad), and I mentioned above that I feel like these two numbers (with Mēden/Nothing as 0) could be paired together as well as one metaquality, say “Reality”.  Of the other four pairs, only one pair has a path between themselves (Air and Light); as both these sphairai fall under the banner of Variation, it could indicate that it is by means of Air (which gives sense to sound, distance, and sight) and Light (by which we see, are seen, and Work) that such variation can be reckoned and worked with.  The other three pairs (Mercury and the Monad, Fire and Water, Sulfur and Earth) lack such a path.  Moreover, these three pairs lack a path in different ways:

• There’s a clear space for a connection between Mercury and the Monad, but this connects the central sphaira with one of the outermost, which is not allowed.  However, the geometry of this path would mimic that between Darkness/Water and that between Light/Air.  I interpret this to indicate that although the motion needed is possible to make for this path (geometry exists elsewhere), the “distance” to the Monad from Mercury is too far to make.  They’re both Becoming, but at such different stages; one is conception, the other manifestation.
• Fire and Water are on the same rank of the Tetractys (within the Tetrad), but are separated from each other by the sphaira of Air between them.  No direct connection can be made; either one goes directly through Air, or rises to and falls from Sulfur to get to the other.  Both these forces represent the metaquality of Accordance, and thus need something else to accord with, since these two forces are diametrically opposed to each other.
• There’s a clear space for a connection between Sulfur and Earth, but this would connect one of the outermost sphaira with one of the middling ones on the far side of the Tetractys.  No other path like this exists, and the disparity between the two is great enough to be geometrically disallowed.  This indicates that, although they both represent Structure, they represent them in two completely different and unrelated ways, an internal, dynamic, and spiritual way (Sulfur) and an external, static, and material way (Earth).  I’d compare these two things to the cardiovascular system and the skeletal system; both are needed to organize and arrange the human body just so, although the former is fluid and quick while the latter is fixed and solid.

While I’m not sure how far to take this analysis of numerological qualities/metaqualities and the sphairai on the Tetractys, it does offer me more food for thought as I explore them and the paths that connect them more.  Besides, these give me interesting ways to think about the sphairai on the Tetractys; it’s not inconceivable that these qualities can be used as names for the sphairai themselves, much as the qualities of God are used as names for the sephiroth on the Tree of Life; instead of Victory, we have Essence (or, in Greek, Ουσια).  Alternatively, they could just be called by their force (Water, Υδωρ) or their systemic number (Heptas, Επτας).  While this post seems, in retrospect, to be more mental exercises in analysis rather than digging out occult secrets, there’s still plenty here to chew on as I contemplate and delve deeper into this system-in-development.

Alright, I’ve been a little stumped about how to begin with my delving into exploring the Tetractys by means of the Gnosis Schema.  I mean, I know the general process of scrying and pathworking, but just starting right with that seemed to rush things to me.  I felt like there should be some preliminary stage, some opening of the ways first to gain permission and access to the mysteries itself: an initiation.  To that end, I devised a fairly simple ritual of self-initiation to lay the groundwork for future pathworking and cyclical ascent on the Tetractys with Hermes as guide and teacher throughout the cycle; although I can say that I devised the thing, I also incorporated many suggestions and edits from Hermes himself.  The intent of the ritual is, no matter where one may already be in the cosmos (consider the uninitiated and those who are unaware to be on the Agnosis Schema), to snap oneself to the gate of the sphaira of Mercury on the Gnosis Schema.  It opens the way and clears the path for one to begin the real journey of mathetic theurgy.  Anyone can do it on their own, though a different ritual would be more appropriate with a proper teacher or mystagogue (mystery-initiator) present.  In lieu of that, this ritual of self-initiation calls upon Hermes himself as mystagogue to initiate one into the Work to be done.  In that sense, it’s hardly self-initiation, but it is a solitary ritual all the same.

I made sure the ritual was alright with Hermes before I attempted it.  Granted it’s a little long and the prayers are a bit much to memorize on short notice, but I wanted to have there be a little ritual drama involved to help one doing the ritual alone get more emotionally present and powerful.  I originally planned to have this ritual only be done on one day with one day of preparatory fasting, but after consulting Hermes on it, he suggested that it be done over multiple days.  I didn’t intend for it to be done over ten days, which I consider a little much for casual practitioners, but then, I try to be more than casual with my Work.  I asked for shorter durations, but Hermes gave the most positive response to it being done over ten.  So there’s that.  It makes sense, considering the holiness of the Decad, but it is what it is.  As I went through the ritual myself, since this was the first time it’s been attempted, I made adjustments and tweaks to the format from how it was originally planned, working with Hermes the whole way through to ensure that it works properly.

I got all the needed supplies and tools, and then proceeded through the ritual for ten days starting at the Noumenia (first day of the lunar month, day after the New Moon), performing the ritual every day at sunrise with an evening meditation.  I made tweaks and adjustments to the ritual as I found things that were incongruous, badly phrased, or weird, and the ritual is now in more-or-less a final form.  I completed the ritual as planned, celebrated with Hermes, broke my fasting (thank the gods), and now…

Well, I was going to share it with you.  I swear I was, and I still have the post saved as a protected draft.  Still, Hermes has suggested otherwise, and despite my usually-obstinate desire to share rituals and knowledge with you, dear reader, I think I agree with him.  Mathesis is still a new system, and I’m the only one who’s exploring it at the moment.  If others want to engage in this, they’re going to need guidance and a space to talk about things, and there’s simply not enough I can do just yet to help such initiates out, and the whole system would likely fall apart because some dumb young idiot upstart (me) thought it’d be a good idea to disseminate a new ritual in an unexplored occult field.  I will publish the ritual of self-initiation eventually once I get enough of these studies under my belt, and I do have other rituals, meditations, and visualizations planned to share with you, dear reader, if you’re still interested in the work of mathesis.  That said, now is not the time for that.

However, just because I can’t share the ritual with you doesn’t mean I can’t share the overall gist of the ritual with you, or why such a ritual is needed.  As mentioned above, before we make the snap to the Gnosis Schema in our occult lives and travels, we’re stuck on the cycles of reincarnation and ignorance of the Agnosis Schema.  In order to begin our evolution and progress in mathesis, we need to first achieve access to the Gnosis Schema, and so we need to get to there from the Agnosis Schema.  If the Gnosis Schema is marked by gnosis, illumination, and light (such as those of the burning fixed stars), then the Agnosis Schema is marked by ignorance, blindness, and darkness (the planets and forces that absorb light or emit it in a lower, more controlling way).  As long as we’re stuck in the Agnosis Schema, we’re stuck in ignorance, blindness, and darkness; it covers our world, it infests our bodies, it blinds our senses, and it diminishes our minds so that we can’t perceive or live truth in our lives.  Thus, we need to do two things to fix that:

1. Get rid of the darkness that binds us in blindness and ignorance.
2. Fill ourselves with light that frees us in illumination and gnosis.

Both of these things are required for initiation.  Just getting rid of blindness and ignorance is not enough, since we have no light of our own to preserve ourselves from being blind or ignorant, and can fall right back into the darkness from which we flee.  Just filling ourselves with gnosis and illumination is not enough, either, since as long as we’re in the darkness and ruled by it, gnosis and illumination can have no hold within us and, though we may have flashes of insight, it won’t last and we stand to lose it as soon as we get it.  Thus, the ritual of initiation needs to have two parts to it, one that gets rid of darkness of ignorance and one that fills with light of gnosis.

Moreover, a large part of the ritual focuses on relying on Hermes.  After all, this is a ritual of self-initiation, but as mentioned before, one calls upon Hermes as the one who leads into the mysteries, but it’s more than that.  Hermes is the one who helps us get rid of ignorance and fills us with gnosis: in some regards, he’s almost a figure of salvation, a Hermēs Sotēr who delivers us from the prison we’re stuck in and a Hermēs Mystagōgos who leads us into a new world.  The ritual involves intimately and wholly relying on Hermes until we ourselves are empowered enough to walk with him instead of being carried by him.  We’re not just following him or becoming a student of his; it goes a lot deeper than that.  Partially it’s that Hermes, in his planetary form as Mercury or alchemical form as Quicksilver, is the only force that we can best access from the Agnosis Schema and the one who can connect to most of the others, and acts as the launchpad for reaching the furthest reaches of the Gnosis Schema.  Hermes takes a central role in mathesis in many senses, not just in the sense of being in the middle of the Tetractys.

Something else I want to mention is that the ritual does not actually put us into the sphaira of Mercury on the Tetractys.  Rather, it only drops us off on the road leading to it, setting us onto the path to the gate of the sphaira of Mercury.  If one looks at the Gnosis Schema of the Tetractys, all of the middling sphairai lead to Mercury, so it doesn’t really matter which road we take at first; we can get our bearings straight once we’re in the center of the Tetractys.  This ritual of self-initiation prepares the way, opens the gates, and clears the roads so that one explore the odoi (paths) and sphairai, yet it itself is not an exploration of either.  That comes later, with more ritual, scrying, pathworking, maybe even conjuration or other rituals that I’m working on.

In the future, once I get enough to speak about to guide others in mathesis, I’ll start disseminating the ritual of self-initiation to those who’d be interested and have my approval to do so.  I’ve even got ideas I’ve been hashing out to make a ritual of initiation with a proper mystagogue and candidate with similar themes and taking a different route than repeating the same ritual over ten days, but that’ll come much later if/when I ever get students who’d be interested in learning under me.  I do not forbid you, dear reader, from beginning to explore the Tetractys in your own way, but I’d feel more comfortable knowing that I can help you out first before you running off and potentially screwing yourself or your understanding up.  Initiations are no joke, after all, and I’m treating this with the solemnity and respect it deserves.

I mentioned in the ritual of self-initiation that one should carry out the 10 days of ritual, plus the day immediately preceding these, by observing a type of fasting and behavioral restrictions.  I call this the Mathetic Rule of Observance, which consists of six rules to restrict one’s actions and intake of food during mathetic rituals.  They’re based on Pythagorean and other spiritual practices; although the rules can be added onto and be made more strict or modified in special cases to accommodate certain situations, the minimum rules to follow are six in number:

1. No harm to any being.
2. No sexual activity.
3. No lying or speaking ill of anything or anyone.
4. No consumption of meat or beans.
5. No intake of stimulants.
6. Wine may be drunk in moderation.

Essentially, these are rules to help with rules of purity for rituals.  Many magical traditions and rituals have their own rules of purity, usually stopping at “fast from everything for at least half a day” or “no sexual activity for three days” for a certain period of time; other spiritual traditions and paths, like Buddhism, have precepts that one should follow to prevent oneself from committing impure actions that’d come back to bite them in the ass afterward.  I often don’t make use of these restrictions, and it’s something I’ve been meaning to try out more in my own work.  Generally, unless it’s mandatory I do so, I simply try not to eat, have sex, or masturbate for at least an hour before ritual, but there are exceptions, and I want to make mathetic exploration and ritual such an exception.

So why purity?  There’s a lot of confusion around purity, and many rituals have no need for it at all; some tantric, ecstatic, or LHP traditions almost necessitate the use of indulgence in many ways, if not outright amorality and antinomia.  This even applies to some ancient Mediterranean traditions, especially those honoring Bacchus, Orpheus, and other ecstatic mystery cults.  That’s less the case, however, for Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, which were focused more on controlling the body to better free the spirit within.  By keeping the body operational and focusing on it just so that it can survive healthily, keeping it satiated without indulging it, one can better focus on elevating the spirit and ascending to the higher realms in a way both easier and worthier of the objects of adoration and exploration, like the Good, the Monad, or what have you.  Plus, keeping rules of purity like this can prevent the body, soul, spirit, and mind from being contaminated by things that would continue to bring them down.

Pythagoreanism had a litany of rules one had to follow in order to remain in the Pythagorean community, the rules for which far surpasses most non-monastic rules of asceticism I’ve ever seen.  Some of them were pretty big: strict vegetarianism, wearing white clothes, and the like.  Others were trivial and detailed, like:

• Do not touch a white cock.
• Do not pick up what has fallen.
• Do not cut fire with a sword.
• Do not look in a mirror beside a light.
• Do not step over a yoke.

Some philosophers have explained these rules as being strictly metaphorical; for instance, one rule says “do not eat the heart”, which would literally mean not to eat the heart of any creature (which would have been redundant, considering one’s vow of vegetarianism), but is sometimes explained as not to be consumed by envy or malice, but to share with others sympathy and love.  That kind of thing, you know?  Many of the rules were likely intended to have a double meaning, such as “decline walking in the public ways, and walk in unfrequented paths”; it’d be hard, especially if one is to live a life free from violence and worldly concern, to maintain that kind of mindset when walking in large public byways with the chaos and bustle of towns going on around you; likewise, it’s hard to focus on the philosophical and eternal truth of the cosmos when you’re stuck thinking about the things everyone else thinks about.  I mean, as magicians, how many times have we rolled our eyes seeing the trash that’s being hawked on magazine counters and at the aisles of supermarkets about the latest celebrity’s latest breakup with their latest husband, especially after we just do a ritual pondering the powers of the stars or elements?

While one can have as many extra rules and restrictions one would like, the minimum rules I’m establishing for mathetic practice are six.  Each one is important, and each has profound effects on the body and spirit alike to help one with ritual.  While these are definitely more Apollonian than Dionysian, and while I fully recognize and respect the need for balance between the two, the system of mathesis as a whole leans more towards the former than the latter.  To that end, here’re some short explanations why each rule is in the Mathetic Rule of Observance.

1. No harm to any being.  This pretty much goes without saying.  Everything in the cosmos is born for a purpose, and everything in the cosmos has a bit of the divine within them.  Yes, fighting happens, and sometimes war is inevitable; conflict is a part of the world.  However, unless one is a soldier (in which case, on active duty, one probably doesn’t have much time for deep philosophical and theurgic works generally), it helps to refrain from causing harm to others.  Causing harm can lead to one being caused harm, not to mention that causing harm can distract one from a holy purpose and disrupt their thoughts and internal balance, which only sets one back.  If conflict is inevitable, there is almost always a way to resolve it without causing harm; aikido is something that focuses on this.  Yes, joint locks and throws are a thing, but this method of martial arts focuses on ending fights without causing harm.  For people of a philosophical and theurgic mindset generally, chances are that fighting is not on the day-to-day to-do list.  Besides, not all harm is physical; emotional and spiritual harm can also be exacted upon others, such as through manipulation, guilt tripping, deception, cursework, or having others do harm on your behalf.  All of that should be refrained from as much as possible.
2. No sexual activity.  Honestly, I do not consider sex to be an inhibitor in and of itself to spiritual practice; nor, for that matter, did Pythagoras, though he too had some restrictions on it.  I personally find sex to scratch a really good itch, and I know many people use sex for magical purposes.  However, mathesis isn’t that kind of magic, and if we want to ascend spiritually, then denying the body this is a better thing than not.  By denying the body sex, we build up more power inside and prevent ourselves from getting distracted by worldly needs.  Sexual power, when contained, is fantastic to reroute and use for some powerful experiences, and by using it in sex (especially for procreation or mere enjoyment), we use it and get rid of that power for another purpose and cannot reclaim it.  Emissions from sex are on the same level as that of spit or blood; they’re not impure or waste products of the body, but they belong to the body and not to the spirit.  Let the body be empowered through sexual denial, and it can be repurposed for the spirit in mathesis.  Besides, sex with others during a mathetic ritual can potentially contaminate the body from the other person, which would then spiritually inhibit you from a purer working style.
3. No lying or speaking ill of anything or anyone.  In some ways, this is a clarification of rule #1, no harm to any being.  While rule #1 focuses on physical and emotional harm, this rule focuses on logical and communicative harm.  By misleading others, we encourage falsity and deception in the world, and when we’re focused on trying to better ourselves with the power of truth, we end up undoing the work for others that we’re trying to do for ourselves.  Add to it, by speaking ill against others, we engage in “walking in the public ways”, getting involved with gossip, rumors, and other sundry matters that we have no business engaging in, especially when the less we’re involved generally, the better.  Lying, by the way, includes all forms of exaggeration and diminution: boasting pridefully about one’s accomplishments or modestly trying to conceal them are both negative things to do that would break this rule.  After all, humility is not modesty; being modest is to diminish yourself (reverse exaggeration), while humility is saying things as they are without embellishment.
4. No consumption of meat or beans.  Our bodies need to survive for as long as we live in this world; without our bodies, we cannot live.  It’s that simple.  To live, we need to eat.  It’s that simple.  However, we are what we eat, and if we kill animals to feed ourselves, we become more animal than human and require death to live.  While I love me a bacon cheeseburger or a KFC Double Down sandwich, for the purposes of mathesis, we want to avoid anything that would harm the transmigration of souls.  If we kill something to eat, we kill the life of a body with a soul in it, and since we could very well be the next soul to inhabit a cow for slaughter, we probably don’t want to be eaten when we would rather live instead.  Likewise, for a similar reason, Pythagoras taught that beans should never be eaten or touched, and even walking through a field of beans was taboo.  This is due to the appearance of the bean to resemble a human body: Pythagoras taught (probably) that beans and humans shared the same source or material, so to eat a bean was akin to eating human.  Add to it, beans contained the souls of the dead, and to this day bean dishes are usually called for in most funerary rites across the world.  To be surrounded by souls of the dead is counter to our goal of attaining a soul of life in imperishable truth.  From a more practical standpoint, meat and beans are exceptionally heavy foods that weigh down the body and soul alike.  For deeper spiritual practice, we need to have the body be sated enough without becoming heavy and world-bound.
5. No intake of stimulants.  That’s right: abstinence, as far as possible, from caffeine, nicotine, cocaine, and any kind of stimulant.  For caffiends like me who complain about there being too much blood in my caffeine system, this rule is pretty much the worst possible punishment, but there’s a point to it.  By stimulating the body chemically, we try to pull as much energy out of it artificially as we can, and that only temporarily.  Oftentimes, while a good jolt might be just what the doctor ordered, overreliance on them is extraordinarily common.  Further, by getting the body overpowered, it can also dominate the faculties of the mind; rather than having the body heavy with food into lethargy, it gets heavy with heat into physical action.  Both inhibit the spirit from working properly within the body; add to it, the spirit can best function off the body’s natural energy without having it altered through chemical stimulants.  Besides, if I can go a few days without energy drinks and cigarettes for an initiation, you can, too.  That said, Hermes is definitely a god of stimulants, so this is probably the least important of these rules, especially considering the late-to-bed and early-to-rise nature of the ritual.
6. Wine may be drunk in moderation.  Just as stimulants can be damaging to the natural flow and processes of the body, intoxication can do the same in reverse.  Any drug, drink, or substance that dulls the senses is as damaging to those that oversharpen them or demand more out of them than one could normally provide.  Wine, however, is a staple of ritual, and is important in many Hellenic and Mediterranean rituals; it’s infeasible to except wine from this, only because it has its uses.  Yes, it can dull the senses, but it can also soothe one into relaxation.  Further, it is proper to offer and share wine with the gods and among ourselves, both as sacrifice and as a gift.  Thus, wine may be drunk, but only in moderation; it should not be consumed to get drunk.  When drinking, alternate glasses of wine with twice as much water, and neither drink too quickly nor greedily when you do so.  Moreover, this rule exhorts one to moderation generally: extending this rule, we can say that one should eat only enough to be sated but never full, sleep enough to be rested but never lethargic, and internet enough to be informed but never distracted.

Now that the rules have been explained, I’m not limiting the Mathetic Rule to just these six rules.  You can add on whatever you wish

• Do not wear black clothing.  This would be difficult for me, but I can pull it off all the same through a judicious use of my wardrobe.  However, consider the color black.  We see things as particular colors because light reflects off them in a particular way based on what light is absorbed by the material; things that appear red absorb light that is not red, for instance.  Things that appear white reflect all colors at once, absorbing nothing; white is a symbol of not only purity but of purification.  Black, on the other hand, absorbs all colors; it takes in all things and holds them there.  Black does not reflect, but sticks to things.  When in mathetic practice, wearing black should be avoided generally, since it absorbs things like negativity and filth and holds onto them, causing them to better contaminate you.  After all, you can’t generally see the stains on your clothes when you’re wearing black, and you have no idea how filthy you get until you finally take them off.
• Do not eat root vegetables.  This is an extension of two major rules above, not eating beans and not causing harm.  Beans bear a specific resemblance, according to Pythagoras, to human beings and the potential for life itself, especially due to their growth in the ground where the dead live underneath.   However, this rule is an influence from Buddhist monastic restrictions, where one cannot dig holes.  This is because animals, even insects and small creatures, live in the earth, and by digging holes for planting or for setting posts or beams, one risks injuring and killing them.  Digging up root vegetables to eat not only risks killing the plant, but also all insects around the dirt and soil where the plant is buried.  Further, the ground is where we put our dead; it is, quite literally, dirty.  Root vegetables are tied to the earth, and by eating the earth we keep ourselves earthy.  This is less than helpful if we want to ascend and rise up out of our world.
• Do not eat cooked food.  This is an extreme dietary restriction, seeing how much of our food needs to be cooked either thermically or chemically, in order to be safe and edible.  Mind you, this includes cooking by heat as well as by chemical application.  In other words, one can only eat fresh fruits and vegetables; cooked grains, stews, and even processed sugars cannot be eaten with this rule.  By eating only fresh, live vegetables, you inculcate a desire for life within you and subsist on only that which helps keep the body satisfied without bringing it down in any way.  The only more extreme dietary restriction I can think of is to simply fast from all food entirely, but that’s often not helpful, either.  In fact, I think this rule should only be done for a maximum of ten days unless you can specifically train yourself to subsist healthily on this, especially with the restrictions on meat and beans or (perhaps) all root vegetables.
• Do not steal.  I think this goes without saying.  Don’t take what’s not yours, since that can bring harm to others and cause harm to yourself, spiritually or physically.  Besides, without something being officially yours, you don’t know where it came from, what kind of contagion it might have, or whether you need it.  Indulging one’s avarice and greed is not something good for mathetic practice.
• Do not accept things directly handed to you.  This rule is from Santeria practice of the so-called “iyawo year”.  When Santeros make ocha, or are accepted into the priesthood, they must undergo a year of initiation where they can only wear white and have a number of restrictions placed upon them.  This one means that you cannot accept things that are directly handed to you; they must be placed down before you can pick it up.  (There are exceptions, of course, but those don’t have to apply here.)  If you’re trying to remain pure, then you need to keep away from impurity.  If other people are impure, they can give you their impurity and contaminate you.  Passing you something is a way to transmit that contagion by means of the object being passed over.  This can make shopping exceptionally awkward, admittedly, but this is just an example of what kinds of practices you can add on to enforce and encourage purity.
• Do not be completely in the dark.  This is based on some rules of ceremonial magic where one should never pray in the dark, but always with a fire or light present; the Pythagoreans themselves had a similar rule involving their mysteries.  Light encourages truth, while darkness conceals it; further, in darkness, you never know whether there’s someone around you to harm you or eavesdrop.  If you want to remain in the light, then you need to always remain in the light; never be in a completely darkened room or space.  Always carry a light or candle with you, sleep with a candle or nightlight on, and similar acts can be done to ensure that there’s always some light around you.

So, what happens if we break one of these rules?  Does that invalidate our efforts or negate the power of the ritual?  It can, but it doesn’t have to.  These rules of observance are only intended to encourage one to focus on spiritual work; they’re precepts, not obligations or commandments, and are meant as a rough guide to help us manage our physical actions while we attempt some really powerful spiritual actions.  Should we break a rule, go back and admit your fault to anyone who was affected by it, and offer to help clarify or fix any problems that result from them.  Otherwise, if nobody external to ourselves was affected by our fault, accept what you did and move on.  Dwelling on our “transgressions” is potentially worse than having committed them in the first place; we did what we did, it’s in the past, accept it, and don’t let it happen again.  Fearing what we may have done affecting us negatively in the future distracts us from the work at hand.  There’s no prescribed ritual or prayer to forgive or confess breaking any of the rules above; if you want to, admit fault in your private prayers, either to some savior god or to Hermes or whatever, and ask for help and guidance to keep you from doing it again.

What about exceptions to the rules?  No set of rules is one-size-fits-all unless it’s a set of universally applicable platitudes that don’t actually say much.  For instance, consider the no stimulants rule.  Some medication for conditions like ADHD are by their nature stimulants, and allow people to focus better in a way that is constructive to spiritual activity, even actually sleep properly.  Some people require animal protein in order to digest other foods properly, though these are a very small minority of people.  The overall meta-rule here is that, as much as you can, you should stick to these minimum rules as best as you feasibly can given your circumstances and situation; the more you can stick to them, especially if you can stick to all of them, the better.  If you can’t stick to one rule for a necessary reason, find a new rule similar enough to substitute it with.  For instance, if you require stimulants in order to maintain regular mental functions, try a “no refined sugar” rule instead.  If you’re required to work in a field where harm is a very high possible outcome, minimize it as much as you can and substitute it with “no idle talk”.  Other rules, however, are pretty much universal: don’t lie, don’t exaggerate, don’t diminish, don’t condemn, don’t indulge.

Again, this Rule isn’t a set of commandments.  There’s no community to shun you, no authority to excommunicate you (at least, not yet).  They’re there to help you in the spiritual work, not to establish a set of negative commandments (“thou shalt not”) to prevent you from living or exploring the work.  Given the focus of mathesis, it helps to restrain the body so as to let the spirit soar, but if you can successfully balance a physical and spiritual life while striving for the spiritual, then chances are you already live by a sufficient set of rules on your own without having to adopt these.

I apologize to my readers for not having given you warning on the blog, but last night I went on the air for the first time on Candelo’s Corner (podcast list here).  Candelo’s Corner is a radio show hosted by Candelo Kimbisa and Malik Kimbiza, two elders of the Palo Kimbisa Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje, a Cuban-Congo ATR.  Apparently, the release of my recent ebook Vademecum Cypriani caught Candelo’s eye, and so he wanted to bring me onto the show.  We jammed for a bit about what I do as a Hermetic magician, as a Cyprianista, and as a reader, and I gave a handful of readings to people who called in, including Candelo and Malik themselves!  And yes, I was just as surprised as them when my readings hit the spot, apparently, and I even got embarrassed by my godmother who decided to call in and torture me with her praise.

I only got details for the link and time, like, a few hours beforehand even though we had planned it, so I did kinda sorta spam my Twitter and Facebook with the link, but forgot to update my blog.  If you want to listen in, have a listen of the show courtesy of Blog Talk Radio.  You’ll get to hear my delectable voice give readings, and even (at one point) pontificate about my style of delivery.  Listen in, and keep listening to Candelo’s future shows!

Oh, and yes.  Nsala malecu.

As might be evidenced by the ritual of self-initiation, one is basically making oneself into a student of Hermes in the study and exploration of mathesis.  In Greek, we might be calling ourselves οἱ μαθηταί τοῦ Ἑρμοῦ (hoi mathētai tou Hermou).  We’re basically taking him on as teacher, guide, if not even a patron for the purposes of exploring the Tetractys and, depending on how far we take this, the study and practice of theurgy generally.  This is a really big thing, and although it might be expected that Hermes should have a central role in mathesis, we’re getting really involved with him really fast.  We’re begging him to release us from darkness and ignorance and to lead us through to light and knowledge, taking us from the Agnosis Schema to the Gnosis Schema.  We’re bringing his influence and presence into our most personal and deepest of spheres and forging an intimate connection with him.  We are supplicating him and putting ourselves into his hands, putting all our trust in him.

Think about that.  We’re putting all our trust into Hermes.  Hermes is the trickster god of the Greeks, the one who steals, lies, and shits (literally) on the other gods.  We’re relying on him to keep us out of agnosis when he lies to the other gods and disguises himself so he can’t be seen.  Rather than asking “is this wise”, it might be more proper to ask “why the fuck are we trusting him?”

It’s not because Hermes is my own patron god and I’m trying to proselytize or prostitute him out to others (though it’s not like he wouldn’t mind).  Consider: the sphere of Mercury, Hermes’ sphaira, is in the center of the entire tetractys.  Mercury is the center of all the extreme sphairai (αἰ ἔσχαται σφαῖραι, hai eskhatai sphairai) and the middling sphairai (αἰ μέτριαι σφαῖραι, hai metriai sphairai), and connects to all the middling sphairai in a single locus.  Astrologically speaking, Mercury is the only planet without a sect; he is neither diurnal (with the Sun, Jupiter, and Saturn) or nocturnal (with the Moon, Venus, and Mars), but is changed based on whether he’s occidental or oriental of the Sun.  Alchemical mercury is the mediating force between the pure action of Sulfur and the pure materiality of Salt.  Plato’s Timaeus has the third principle of Existence mediating between the two principles of Sameness and Difference.  Mercury is, all at once, a distillation of complementary forces (Light and Dark) as well as a source (Air and Water), and Mercury is the mediation between opposing forces (Salt and Sulfur, Light and Water, Dark and Air).  Mercury is as much “being between” as much as it is “being transformed”.

Indeed, it’s because of Hermes’s role as neutral and shifty guide that Hermes will not accompany us within the sphairai themselves.  He waits outside the gates of each sphairai, just right outside the threshold, and once we cross that threshold from the sphairai to the paths, the οδοι (odoi), we’re back in his hands.  He leads us up and down the paths, always flitting between and among the sphairai but never entering them.  Hermes is the guide; in a sense, he is the god of the roads and he is the roads, but roads are only ever between destinations.  Once we reach our destination, however temporary, we’re off the road and out of his hands.  However long we remain at our station, we are not traveling.  Hermes will accompany us for as long as we need to travel the paths, but he will never accompany us beyond the gates of where we’re going.  The road is between destinations, and words are between people and meanings; Hermes is the interpreter and transformer, but never the one that is interpreted or transformed.  He is the messenger, but we are the message.  The message depends on the messenger to deliver it from its source to its destination, just as the sender and receiver rely on the messenger, too.  We are the thing to be interpreted, transformed, delivered, guided, led.

That said, when you’re not part of any one realm of existence and are capable of flitting to and fro between them, it’s not hard to make the trip from “casual tourist” to “curious thief”.  Hermes, after all, is the divine thief who stole Apollo’s cattle literally right out of the crib.  One possibility that I’ve yet to explore is what might be called the “lost in translation” issue.  Consider: if we’re messages being delivered, or words being translated, something is going to have to change between point A and point B, the sphaira from which and the sphaira to which we proceed.  What is it that changes?  When we speak to one another, the message usually gets across pretty clear, although some nuances I intend to communicate might be lost and some nuances I never spoke get substituted instead.  Sometimes the entire word is wrong, sometimes the entire message, and there needs to be backtrack to make sure everything makes sense.  This isn’t necessarily the fault of either speaker or listener, or for that matter the two sphairai between which we travel, but the choice of the message itself.  Every message is different; some messages are worded better, some are intended for specific ears, and so forth.  When Hermes leads us to a new sphaira, he becomes a cross between a guide on a highway and a highwayman, taking something from us.  Whether it’s an aggregation that makes us human or bound to this world, or whether it’s simply borrowing something from us and rearranging us, or a toll we have to pay or sacrifice is unknown to me just yet; I’m not even sure whether anything needs to be taken, but it might make sense given his mythology.

Which leads me to another aspect of Hermes that I haven’t been too familiar with, that of Knife-holder and Argos-slayer.  Hermes himself, when I was going over the ritual with him, liked the ritual in large parts but wanted something added.  I had difficulty understanding why; after some thinking and discussing with him, he said that “there is no initiation without cutting”.  A blade of some sort, then, is necessary; as for why, I recalled that “of the golden knife” is one of the epithets of Hermes but I didn’t know the story why.  That story is the slaying of Argos Panoptes, the many-eyed giant and favored servant of Hera, set to watch over Io when she was transformed into a cow by Zeus (Metamorphoses, Book I, chapter 8):

The head of Argus (as with stars the skies)
Was compass’d round, and wore an hundred eyes.
But two by turns their lids in slumber steep;
The rest on duty still their station keep;
Nor cou’d the total constellation sleep.
Thus, ever present, to his eyes, and mind,
His charge was still before him, tho’ behind…

Now Jove no longer cou’d her suff’rings bear;
But call’d in haste his airy messenger,
The son of Maia, with severe decree
To kill the keeper, and to set her free.
With all his harness soon the God was sped,
His flying hat was fastned on his head,
Wings on his heels were hung, and in his hand
He holds the vertue of the snaky wand.
The liquid air his moving pinions wound,
And, in the moment, shoot him on the ground.
Before he came in sight, the crafty God
His wings dismiss’d, but still retain’d his rod:
That sleep-procuring wand wise Hermes took,
But made it seem to sight a sherpherd’s hook.
With this, he did a herd of goats controul;
Which by the way he met, and slily stole.
Clad like a country swain, he pip’d, and sung;
And playing, drove his jolly troop along…

Hermes eventually lured Argos to sleep after singing to him and telling him enough stories, at which point Hermes kills Argos with his golden knife.  In this way, the watcher of Io was taken care of, and Hermes led Io out of this danger though some might say out of the frying pan and into the fire.  Argos with his many eyes (some sources say 100 or 10², some say 4, where the numbers should strike you as portentous for all this) keeps an eye on and guards Io, keeping her from being free, although it is the will of Zeus that she be freed so she can accomplish great things, including being an ancestress of Herakles.  Of course, the ghost of Argos also chases after Io once she’s freed, pursuing her as far as Egypt around the Mediterranean.  Only then is Io transformed back into a human.

We can see something of ourselves in this story.  While trapped in the Agnosis Schema, we are unaware of our true nature to some extent and are trapped by the forces around us; we cannot be free as long as we are trapped.  We have things to do, and even the gods want us freed…or, at least some of them.  But there are bigger problems than simply being stuck in our weird form; there are things watching over us, wanting us to stay where we are and doing their level best to keep us there.  Argos might be considered an archonic figure for us, watching over us with his many eyes, understanding and being of the nature of the Tetractys (10² or 4 eyes) though operating solidly within it.  For as long as we’re trapped in Agnosis, we cannot reach Gnosis.  The gods must send Hermes to us, and we must seek his help, in order for this archon-guard to be slain so that we can be free and follow Hermes to our salvation.  Thus, the knife: the knife is to cut the darkness, freeing ourselves from the hold it has upon us.  With the knife of gold we set ourselves free with the help of Hermes, but the knife’s use doesn’t end there.  After all, Argos’ shade pursued Io; even in death, the spirit of the archon will still try to bring us back to Agnosis, luring us off the path of Gnosis at any given stage.  As long as we’re staying stationary in the sphairai of the Tetractys, we are at risk; we can take temporary shelter, but if we stay too long then Argos catches up and takes us back to our prison.  During our travels on the odoi, we are fleeing in ways that Argos cannot follow, but we cannot live or stay on an individual path.

All this leads me to one last thing: if there are days sacred to Hermes, and Hermes is sacred in mathesis, is there a day sacred in mathesis?  After all, we decided that the ritual of self-initiation should be held on the first day of the lunar month, so why not consider it?  In my lunar grammatomantic calendar, Hermes is given to the letter Zeta, so the seventh day of the month is sacred to Hermes in this practice.  Traditionally, however, Hermes was given the fourth day of the month in the Attic calendar for monthly observances, and the Homeric Hymn has his birthday as the fourth day of the tenth month of the lunar year, starting with the first new moon after the summer solstice.  The fourth day of the tenth month.  Four and ten.  The Decad represented by the Tetractys.  Cute, innit?  This day is Hermes’ birthday, the day into which our guide was born to bring joy and power among the gods and the worlds, and is therefore fitting for us to honor.  Perhaps, in the future, initiation rituals should be timed to this date or around the yearly Hermaia, or similar observances held to honor this trickster god in this Hermetic system.

So, all this is just some extrapolation from mythology and basic understanding of Hermes on the paths.  It’s not so much that we should be trusting the tricky little fucker, but that we don’t really have a choice; the tricks he plays on us are as much as part of the journey as is traveling down the odoi themselves.  The Work must be done, and there’s so much more to find out.  We can make the jump from Agnosis to Gnosis; now we need to figure out what’s going on with the sphairai.  The first one we’re brought to is that of Mercury, which is one we’ll be visiting the most, and it’s the sphere most closely associated with Hermes.  But if Hermes does not enter into any sphere, what kind of nature does this sphaira have?  What can we find out and learn about these sphairai and how they relate to the other aspects of the Tetractys, to mathesis, to magic, and to the world generally?  Let’s find out, shall we?

Not that long ago, one of my good friends and colleagues Ahmadi Riverwolf (who also founded Bones and Stars, the paranormal investigation and spiritual consulting group I’m in), gifted me with something rather nice and unique: an old fashioned terra cotta oil lamp.  Bless her heart, she didn’t know what it was for and had been using it as an incense burner for years.  She had been cleaning out her house one day and found this old thing, then decided to give it to me.  I practically came with excitement over it.

Once I got it and finished cleaning it out from the old incense remains, I decorated it a bit, writing on certain prayers and symbols and…well, kinda left it unused.  I mean, who the hell uses oil lamps anymore?  They’ve been out of vogue generally in the Western world since the eletrification of both urban and rural areas, and the really old style of oil lamp like this one is best known to be used in the antique and classical Mediterranean and Middle East.  I’ve never seen references to oil lamps being used outside of the Greek Magical Papyri, if that gives you any indication of how old these things are, but I know that lamps hold a special significance in many religious and spiritual communities beyond simply acting as a source of light or a spot of remembrance.  To that end, I did some research, experimented with the use of oil lamps, and now I find it to be an invaluable addition to my ritual toolset.  Here are some guidelines and suggestions I’ve found out and read on for using an oil lamp like this, both generally and for ritual use.

On the lamp:

• There’s usually at least two holes on the lamp: one for the wick at the spout or nozzle of the lamp, and one on the main chamber to fill the oil.  Don’t get the two confused.
• Some oil lamps can be suspended with chains.  Be careful when you suspend them that they’re held in a stable position, won’t be bumped into, and won’t set the ceiling or its support on fire.
• When setting the lamp down on a surface, be sure that it’s heat-proof or has something to insulate the lamp.  Although the lamp itself shouldn’t get hot, try to use precautionary measures whenever you can.
• Many traditional oil lamps from the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East have religious designs on them, usually a Chi-Rho logogram or a Hebrew seven-branched menorah.  Pick one that suits your faith, or find one that has a generic design if you don’t want an overly religious lamp.
• If you’re using an old lamp, make sure it’s clean by washing it with rock salt and rubbing alcohol, shaking the salt around inside.  Rinse well with clean water.
• Newer lamps, such as those from the Victorian and 1900s, often have a glass chimney to keep the flame safe from wind as well as to keep it contained, as well as to collect soot.  Some chimneys are decorative and have shaded or frosted glass; try to use clear glass chimneys so you can see the flame clearly, if at all.  I recommend not using chimneys, personally, or lamps that use them.
• Feel free to embellish and decorate your lamp!  Write spells, words of power, prayers, or characters of particular entities on the lamp using heat-safe paint or permanent marker.  I suggest the Orphic Hymn to Fire (Aither) in Greek, personally, but it’s up to you.
• Many of these lamps are made of terra cotta or ceramic.  Be careful with them, since they can break fairly easily.  Bronze and metal lamps are more resistant to damage, but not by much.
• Old oil lamps are meant to be low and shallow, not the long and large ones known from more recent centuries which use fast-moving oil.  Oil lamps with long, elaborately curved nozzles aren’t really meant to be used and are likely to be merely decorative.

On the wick:

• Unless you have a wick holder that can be inserted into the lamp, just push the wick into the nozzle while twisting it.  It’ll go in easily enough either way, insert or no.
• You don’t need fancy wicks from a craft store for the lamp; cotton balls work fine.  Most cotton balls are actually rolled up, so if you unroll them you get a large fluffy “sheet” of cotton.  Roll this between your hands into a thick strand of cotton.  You have a wick!  One large cotton ball can be rolled into a long enough strand to produce two wicks easily, maybe three if you’re being stingy.
• For a brighter flame, soak the wicks in strong salt water thoroughly, then let dry.  The sodium makes the flame burn a brighter yellow.  Try experimenting with other mineral or metal salts to get the wick to burn different colors, such as green, red, blue, or white, but be careful of any noxious fumes these might produce.
• Instead of using cotton balls, use low thread count natural fabric.  The plus of this is that you can write incantations or signs on the fabric which will burn with the lamp as the oil flows through it.
• The purer and cleaner the wick, the less soot it’ll produce.  Try to use 100% clean cotton, linen, or hemp whenever possible, and never use synthetic fabrics.
• Put the wick in before the oil, and let the wick sit in the oil for at least five minutes before burning.  The wick needs to soak up enough oil so that it can start burning the oil immediately instead of burning down the wick.
• Clip the most burnt part of the wick off with scissors before igniting the oil lamp again.
• If the wick is too long and too far away from the oil reservoir, it won’t be able to draw oil up fast enough to burn at the edge of the wick.  Be sure the wick is close enough to the nozzle spout to prevent overburn of the wick.

On the oil:

• Be sure to not overfill the lamp with oil.  Fill the lamp until it’s between 3/4 and 5/6 full; you may need to test out proper measures by filling it up with water and seeing how much water you put in with a measuring glass.
• You can use olive oil, vegetable oil, sesame oil, or even liquified ghee for the lamp if you want, but I prefer pure olive oil.  You don’t need to burn extra virgin olive oil unless you’re rich and insist on basically burning your money away.  Mineral oil might also be good to use (and is just about mandatory in Victorian era oil lamps), but olive oil is traditional.  Vegetable oil tends to smell bad and leaves residues that need to be cleaned out, but can be used in a pinch.
• The purer the oil, the less soot it’ll produce.  Try to use clean oil whenever possible, and keep the flame away from walls or pictures so that soot doesn’t build up on them.  Unless, of course, you want to collect lampblack for making other things, which is totally doable and preferred from an oil lamp.
• The purer the oil, the less residue it’ll produce on your walls and the room you use the lamp in.  A small amount of residue is unavoidable, but using cheap and dirty oil will leave a distinctly greasy feeling in the air and on the walls.  Either keep the windows open or expect to have to repaint the room in a few years when your rent is up.

On the flame:

• Although the flame burns the oil, it also slowly burns away the wick, too.  Use tongs or tweezers to pull the wick up and down to manage both the size of the flame as well as how big the flame becomes; the more wick is out, the bigger the flame gets.
• The smaller the flame is, the longer the fuel will last.  Big flames not only use more oil, but also burn more of the wick up.
• The bigger the flame is, the faster it’ll produce soot.  Burn the wick at a low flame to prevent a notable trail of soot from rising from the flame.
• Never leave an open flame unattended.  Obvi.
• Keep the flame away from flammable substances and surfaces.  Duh.
• When putting out the flame, use a candle snuffer or a clamp that can close around the burning part of the wick completely.  Do not blow the flame out, since this can blow parts of the wick away onto the surrounding area (which themselves might have enough oil in them to still be on fire).

On ritual use:

• Before making use of the oil lamp in rituals, figure out how much oil you need to last for a certain amount of time.  Fill the lamp appropriately with a measured amount of oil, let the wick soak, light the wick, and adjust the flame to get a decent height, then time how long it takes for the oil to be used up completely.  Small amounts of oil are okay for short rituals, so long as as the wick is soaked in oil enough to be lit.  In my experience, a 1.5″ flame using 3 tablespoons of oil takes about three hours to burn up.
• Most Renaissance magic calls for the use of candles and not oil lamps; consequently, I can’t find any Renaissance or Hermetic consecrations for an oil lamp or a flame burning upon one.  A Catholic blessing of fire might be used when lighting the lamp if you want to go a Christian devotional route.  For the more magically inclined, the conjuration of the fire from the Heptameron or the Trithemius conjuration ritual, both of which use variants of the conjuration of fire for incense from the Key of Solomon (book II, chapter 10), can be used as well if not better.  You might also adapt the consecration of candles from the Key of Solomon (book II, chapter 12) for consecrating the lamp itself as well as the oil and wick to be burned.  One of these days, I might experiment with writing up my own and sharing it.
• Many parts of the PGM specify a lamp “that has not been colored red” (PGM I.262, inter alia).  This is because one of the colors of Set or Seth-Typhon is red, and many parts of the PGM didn’t particularly want to call on him through the use of his colors or symbols.  When painting a lamp, be sure to use only red ink or paint when working with this destructive god; otherwise, use black or any other color if possible.
• For rituals, experiment by adding in magical oils into the fuel.  You don’t need much; if you normally use 2 tablespoons of olive oil, use 1 3/4 tablespoons olive oil and 1/4 tablespoon magical oil.  This can be useful for specific rituals, or you can just mix olive oil with holy oil and use that as a general consecrated light. Be careful when burning magical oils; not all magical oils are made from natural ingredients, and some oils may not burn well or may produce noxious fumes when burned.  Experiment outside first using a small amount of oil.
• Although oil lamps are referenced throughout the PGM, few consecration rituals are described for one.  PGM I.262 says that the wick should be made of cotton and have the ABERAMENTHO formula written on it (ΑΒΕΡΑΜΕΝΘΩΟΥΘΛΕΡΘΕΞΑΝΑΞΕΘΡΕΛΘΥΟΩΘΕΝΕΜΑΡΕΒΑ) for the purposes of lamp divination with Apollo. PGM II.1 says that “a lump of frankincense” should be put into the wick of the lamp before going to bed for the purposes of a dream divination before saying a particular prayer; in the same section, the lamp should be set on a lampstand made from virgin oil with a bit of the oil poured onto the stand itself.  Other parts of the PGM say that the wick should be taken from the corpse of one who has died violently or be made of a particular type of reed.

One particular ritual involving an oil lamp from the Greek Magical Papyri is PGM VII.359, which induces a dream oracle or prophetic dreams.  One is to take a strip of clean linen and write on it ΑΡΜΙΟΥΘ ΛΑΙΛΑΜ ΧΩΟΥΧ ΑΡΣΕΝΟΦΡΗ ΦΡΗΥ ΦΘΑ ΑΡΧΕΝΤΕΧΘΑ (an Egyptian or Coptic phrase, no doubt, involving some sort of darkness or “khōūkh”).  Roll up the linen to make a wick, set it in a lamp, and light it with pure olive oil.  In the evening just before going to sleep, while “being pure in every respect”, light the lamp using the linen wick and say the following prayer:

ΣΑΧΜΟΥΝΕ ΠΑΗΜΑΛΙΓΟΤΗΡΗΗΝΧ, the one who shakes, who thunders, who has swallowed the serpent, surrounds the moon, and hour by hour raises the disk of the sun, ΧΘΕΘΩΝΙ is your name.  I ask you, lord of the gods, ΣΗΘ ΧΡΗΨ, reveal to me concerning the things I wish: …

Then go to sleep and you will be given answers in your dream.  The PGM is full of these types of rituals, including ones that involve Eros (PGM VII.478), Anubis (PGM VII.540), Hermes (PGM VII.664), and others.  Others, like PGM XXIIb.27, make use of repeating a particular incantation to a lamp until it is extinguished just before bed to get a yes or no answer in sleep; they ask for a particular image (“water and a grove”, “rivers and trees”, etc.) for an affirmative answer and another image (“water and a stone”, “fire and iron”, etc.) for a negative answer.  Some Demotic spells use lamp divination in conjunction with a virgin boy to act as a seer, while many other spells use lamps to constrain or compel someone to act in a particular manner.  Generally speaking, and with many exceptions, the use of a lamplight gave the power of one to see what cannot normally be seen, either by our own eyes in daylight or by our mind in the subconscious world of sleep; on occasion, the lamp was considered a connection to divine entities by which one could converse or cause to act and cause change in the world.

Personally, I’m switching out the use of consecrated candles for my rituals with the use of an oil lamp with consecrated oil for the same purpose.  In any given conjuration ritual, for instance, I might have several candles burning, but there will always be one specific candle that I consecrate to shine forth the light of the Infinite.  It’s that candle that I’d like to replace, since that’s the one candle I need at a minimum; everything else is decoration.  Plus, given the adjustability of the flame, I can get more light out of an oil lamp than I can a candle.  This is especially nice given the preponderance of biblical and Hermetic references to the use and symbolism of lamps; plus, the sheer use of an oil lamp gives a ritual a much different feel and charm that brings things closer to how the ancients did.  I use pure olive oil for the fuel mixed with a bit of holy oil for general rituals, though for small amounts I like to mix in vision oils or planetary oils in a clean lamp for rituals that could really use the kick.  If I ever start up a collection of oil lamps, I plan on using one just for conjuration rituals, and using another to burn for my ancestors with a specific oil blend burning as an eternal flame offering for them to elevate, pacify, and appease them; other oil lamps can be used for similar purposes with other spirits quite easily.

Given the affordability and availability of old-style oil lamps, both modern replicas and old-world antiquities, it’s not hard to get a good oil lamp for yourself in your own Work.  I strongly consider the use of them, especially given how easy they are to maintain.

In the midst of all this mathesis stuff, I hope you, dear reader, haven’t forgotten that I have other things to chew on my metaphysical plate.  The past few months have been busy with developing the Tetractys of Life and mathetic rituals, but I’ve also been tackling other projects and problems as they’ve been coming up.  As I’ve started working with Saint Cyprian of Antioch this year, that amazing patron saint of magicians and all those who “work with both hands”, I’ve been making weekly offerings to him as well as other ex voto offerings as we exchange work for Work.  This time of year, the end of summer and start of fall, is important to the good saint; the Feast of Saint Cyprian of Antioch is coming up on September 26, which falls on a Friday this year.  The date is also important, as it’s the yearly festival of Venus Genetrix for the Romans, and since the lady is also important to me, it’s a day I really have to prepare for.  I’m planning a party for myself and many of my friends in honor of Saint Cyprian, which is nice since it’s on a Friday, but I have plenty of preparation to do in the meanwhile.

For one, today marks day one of the Days of the Cyprians.  As it turns out, there are two Saints Cyprian: one from Antioch whom we all know and love, and one from Carthage.  Saint Cyprian of Carthage is another Saint and Martyr of the Catholic Church (one who is officially recognized, no less) who lived in the third century AD, the Bishop of Carthage for about ten years, and eventually was persecuted and martyred under Emperor Valerian I.  He was famous in his day for being a classically trained orator from a rich family who turned to Christianity and became an important theologer and writer in early Christianity.  In fact, before Augustine and Jerome, Cyprian of Carthage was known as the Christian writer, and we can attribute the phrase “there is no salvation outside the Church” to him.  Of course, he’s not very commonly known nowadays and is only kinda dimly remembered by most of the Catholic Church, and I can’t really find anything he’s patron outside of being the patron saint of North Africa.  However, although the two saints are often conflated with each other, Saint Cyprian of Carthage is sufficiently different to have a different prayer medallion from Saint Cyprian of Antioch, as can be seen below.  Saint Cyprian of Antioch has his crosier and book, while Saint Cyprian of Carthage has his crucifix and (what looks like) palm fronds.

Saint Cyprian of Antioch’s feast day is September 26.  The feast day of Saint Cyprian of Carthage, however, is September 16 (yesterday).  These two feast days are spaced nine days apart, and nine is a number sacred to Saint Cyprian of Antioch.  These nine days are sometimes called the Days of the Cyprians, starting today.  Some devotees and followers of Saint Cyprian of Antioch use these days for special devotions, charitable actions, and powerful works in honor of Saint Cyprian of Antioch, and I plan on doing the same starting tonight.  My household and I are doing novenas to Saint Cyprian of Antioch, seeing how we all work with occult powers in distinct ways that often focus on the dead and on our ancestors, as well as to ask for his blessings in the coming year.  And given the excitement and development we’ve all been through this year, we could probably use his help more in the coming year!  Besides, the closer I work with Saint Cyprian, the more things I can do are revealed to me, especially with me falling fairly solidly under his patronage.

I also want to use this period to do something special for Saint Cyprian of Antioch, too.  Many saints have their preferred offerings, this type of flower or that type of drink, but in general saints love acts of charity: giving to the poor, helping the disenfranchised, and generally doing good works for others.  With that in mind, I had an idea for a bit of a contribution of sorts, and I need your help with this.  Long story short, pitch in some cash for me to donate to people who are badly off, and you’ll get entered into a raffle for something in return.  I hope you consider pitching in, since this is a way we can all help out and earn the blessings of the good saint together.

Here are the rules:

1. Donate money, no less than US$3.00, to my PayPal account using the button below (not the one on the sidebar unless you just want to give me money without getting anything in return).  I suggest $9 or amounts in multiples of 9 (27, 81, 90…), since this is a number sacred to Saint Cyprian of Antioch.
2. Every person who donates money will have the Chaplet of Saint Cyprian prayed in their name and have petitions made to Saint Cyprian on their behalf when I make devotions to him that night.
3. Every person who donates will be eligible for one of nine prizes (see below), with the winners chosen randomly by noon US Eastern time on Friday, September 26.
4. When going through PayPal, please be sure to write “Saint Cyprian of Antioch, pray for us” in the instructions, along with your mailing address, any special petitions to be made to Saint Cyprian of Antioch, and whether you wish to remain anonymous in the final fundraiser thank-you.  If you’re unable to provide instructions through PayPal, please send me an email from the same address you sent money through PayPal.  If you do not do this, you will not be considered for this contest.
5. You can donate however many times you want or however much you want, but you’ll only be entered into the raffle once.
6. These rules are valid starting with this post and ending at 9 p.m. US Eastern time on Thursday, September 25.  Donations given after that point will not be considered for this contest.

On Friday, September 26, the Feast of Saint Cyprian, I’ll announce the winners of the raffle.  There are nine prizes you can win, but if fewer than nine people donate, I’ll only be giving out free geomancy readings as prizes.  The prizes, assuming at least nine people pitch in, are:

• Free geomancy reading ($20 value)
• Free geomancy reading ($20 value)
• Free uncrossing and blessing ritual ($50 value)
• Free half-long consultation on your choice of topic ($50 value)
• Free hour-long consultation on your choice of topic ($90 value)
• Table of Practice with Tetragrammaton crystal ball stand ($60 value)
• Chaplet (prayer beads) of Saint Cyprian, made with yak bone and amethyst beads and a saint medal, consecrated under Saint Cyprian of Antioch ($50 value)
• Carcanet (ritual necklace) of Saint Cyprian, consecrated under him and made with glass, yak bone, and semiprecious beads ($60 value)
• Large purple-sheen obsidian stone, a beautiful polished piece for scrying or offering to the gods or saints ($50 value)

On Monday, September 29, I’ll send out all the prizes and start talking to people about scheduling their readings and consultations.  I’ll go ahead and donate the entire sum of money accrued through PayPal to the charitable organization the Malala Fund which empowers girls through education and helps Pakistani, Kenyan, and Syrian children and refugees, and named after Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl activist who was shot by Taliban extremists, survived to world acclaim, and has been working since to improve the condition of life for girls and children across the world in extreme conditions.  I’ll be keeping none of the money for myself; it will all be donated in the name and honor of Saint Cyprian of Antioch, and I’ll post a giant thank-you to everyone who donated (if you want to remain anonymous, say so when you donate, but I will not report on how much individuals donated anyway).  The more people who donate, the more money can be raised and given to charity, so help spread the word and get more people involved!  I’ll be pitching in some seed fundraiser money, too, but I won’t be entering myself into the contest.

If you don’t want to enter into the fundraiser, then at least take these upcoming nine days to build up a relationship to Saint Cyprian of Antioch.  Pray his chaplet, donate to local charities in his name, pray his novena, or just pray to him and light a candle for him.  If you need resources for prayer or ritual, you could always check out my Etsy page and buy my translation of the Book of Saint Cyprian or my collection of prayers to the good saint, including four separate novena prayers.  There are lots you can do to honor this saint, all culminating with his feast day on Friday, September 26, including giving free readings, charitable magical work, donating to food banks, and so much else to help support those who need it.  If you have nothing else to do, join me in reciting this prayer nightly during the Days of the Cyprians to Saint Cyprian of Antioch:

Hail, holy Saint Cyprian of Antioch!  Theurge and thaumaturge, sorcerer and saint, mage and martyr and mystic, pray for us, now and at the hour of our deaths.  May we come to honor and help the least among us, those deprived of good and those oppressed by the depraved, and lift them up to aid and shelter them as we look after ourselves.  May we come to love our neighbors as ourselves, regardless of appearance, origin, faith, or habit, and thereby come to honor and love all mankind as children and brethren of Almighty God.  In Christ Jesus, please intercede for us, Saint Cyprian of Antioch, and help us help each other.  Keep us safe from all harm, those who live comfortably in houses and those who walk homeless in streets, those who have plenty to eat and those who haven’t eaten in days, those who pray assiduously and those who lack all faith, those who make curses and those who break curses, those who heal and those who need healing, those who invade and those who defend.  We are all human and subject to the afflictions of humanity; help us, Saint Cyprian of Antioch, that we may tend to each other in a spirit of brotherhood and love that you show for us who cry out to you.  By lifting our eyes up in praise of God, help us rise to holiness we desire that we may honor the Lord; by casting our eyes down in humility to God, help us acknowledge the crimes we commit that we may rectify them.  Open our minds and hearts to the light of truth shining in eternal darkness, and show to our souls and spirits the darkness of wisdom hiding in blinding light.  As you worked with both hands to attain the will of God, help us to work with both our hands may we strive ever towards the salvation of ourselves, all mankind, the world, the universe, and the cosmos.  Through Jesus Christ, the Son of God, redeemer of humanity, amen. +

The big thrust of this whole mathesis thing was to develop a graphical outline of the structure of the cosmos, both macrocosmic and microcosmic, and allow for the use of letters as vehicles of transformation between different states on the cosmic map.  We decided to use the Tetractys as our overall map, and found a set of 24 paths between the ten spheres of the Tetractys.  Each path was then assigned to one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet (excepting the obsolete letters digamma, qoppa, and sampi), and boom, we have our graphical cosmic map.  Thing is, all this was experimental and an exercise in logic and extrapolation; it’s been largely untested, but it does provide a neat way to arrange the letters on the Tetractys.

I’ve been feeling comfortable with the assignment of the spheres on the Tetractys to the ten forces: the Monad or Source, light or activity, darkness or passivity, alchemical sulfur, alchemical mercury, alchemical salt, fire, air, water, and earth.  Mapping these forces to their cosmological equivalents, likewise, was fairly straightforward.  What I haven’t been completely comfortable this whole time with, however, was the assignment of letters to the paths themselves.  I’ve guessed from the beginning that, no matter how logical my original assignment was, chances are it wasn’t going to be a permanent assignment.  I all but definitively knew that at least some of the letters on the paths were going to change, and I’d leave it to until I actually got around to exploring the Tetractys through ritual and scrying to change them.

Somewhat ahead of that predicted schedule, however, I asked Hermes and asked for some guidance about the upcoming trips on the Tetractys paths, but unfortunately he was unusually tight-lipped; this was definitely something I would have to explore when the time came.  He did say he’d help open some doors in the meanwhile to help me get a feel for what’d be coming up, however, so I went back and took another close look at what I’ve been discussing since I first laid out how I assigned the letters to the paths.  This time, however, I kept the distinction of direction and the Gnosis/Agnosis Schemata in mind, and started over from there.  I ended up with a wholly new way to assign letters to the paths and, although I’m still feeling a little unsure, this has a much different feel than the first arrangement, and it’s one I conceptually like more.  I warn you, in this post I’m going to be using lots of gaudy color, and since we’ve already been through this kind of analysis once before, I’ll be a little more rough when explaining things.

So, in the Gnosis Schema, we have twelve paths that go around the Tetractys, hitting the sphere of Mercury four times and every other sphere once:

The Agnosis Schema, on the other hand, has the twelve remaining paths that only connect to the non-Mercury middling spheres:

Consider that the Gnosis Schema is an orderly array of paths, a sequence that follows a strict ordering.  The Agnosis Schema, however, has no such inherent order, and has criss-cross of paths that allow for wandering around without a plan, so to speak.  If we start with these two ideas, we have two sets of twelve paths.  We have 24 letters, which are divvied up between four elements, the meta-element Spirit, seven planets, and twelve zodiac signs.  We can divide the letters and their corresponding forces, likewise, into two groups of twelve: the twelve zodiac signs/simple consonants, and the twelve forces/vowels and complex consonants.  The zodiac signs follow a particular celestial order, and while we can ascribe orders to the elements based on density or planets based on distance from Earth, we also recognize that the elements shift among themselves and the planets move around from place to place.

So, if we assign the twelve zodiac signs to the twelve paths of the Gnosis Schema, in the order that we proceed from Mercury to Air to Fire and so forth, we end up with the paths in the same order as the twelve signs of the Zodiac, as below:

Alright, easy part’s over.  We still have the twelve paths of the Agnosis Schema to set out, and this is where things get a little more complicated.  First, let’s review what we know about the letters and their stoicheia again:

• There are two sets of forces: zodiacal and energetic.  Zodiacal forces are the 12 signs of the zodiac, and the energetic forces are the four elements, the meta-element spirit, and seven planets.
• There are four elements of the forces: fire, air, water, earth.
• There are three modes of the forces.  In the zodiac forces, these are manifested as cardinal (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn), fixed (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius), and mutable (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, Pisces).  In the energetic forces, these are manifested as the ideal (the four elements Fire, Air, Water, Earth), the empyrean (the planets of the Sun, Mercury, Moon, and spirit considered as a planet), and the ouranic (the planets of Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn).
• We can link the ideal mode of the energies to the fixed mode of the zodiac signs, the empyrean to the cardinal, and the ouranic to the mutable.
• There are four groups of three zodiac signs and four groups of three energies based on element.
• There are three groups of four zodiac signs and three groups of four energies based on mode.
• There are thus six forces (three energetic and three zodiacal) for each of the four elements.
• There are thus eight forces (four energetic and four zodiacal) for each of the three modes.

Drawn out in tables, we see the following:

We know what the letters and their corresponding forces look like for the Gnosis Schema, and we can use that to help guide us with a bit of geometrical innovation to figure out what the paths on the Agnosis Schema should be based on the geometry of element and mode.

Let’s focus on the elements of the zodiac signs first.  If we divide the twelve Gnosis Schema paths up by element, we get the following four figures: three paths for the Fire signs, three for Water, three for Air, and three for Earth.  Below are the paths color coded such that red paths are Fire, blue are Water, green are Earth, and yellow are Air:

The Fire and Water signs both emanate out from the central sphere of Mercury, while the Air and Earth signs emanate out from the three extreme spheres of the Monad, Fire, and Earth.  Note that if we look at the Fire set of signs and Water set of signs separately, we can draw an equilateral triangle that connects the outer points of their paths.  These would give us another three paths for both the elements of Fire and Water to complete the set, which forms the hexagram in the center of the Tetractys, a symbol renowned as the mark of combining fire with water.

As for Air and Earth, on the other hand, it gets a little less clear.  We know from the elements themselves that Air likes to connect and bridge gaps, while Earth likes to close it on itself and separate.  Thus, let’s give Air the three paths in the middle of the outer edges of the Tetractys, trying to reach and form one large triangle, while Earth gets the three paths in the corners of the Tetractys, trying to form three small triangles.  Just as the Fire and Water paths intersect with each other to form a cohesive union, the Air and Earth paths must be joined together (though they don’t intersect) in order to form complete wholes on their own; the triangles that the Earth paths form are completed by Air, and the larger triangle that the Air paths form is completed by Earth.  Thus, we have three more paths for Air and three more paths for Earth:

Note the interplay of elements for the paths with this.  The central hexagram joins Fire and Water together, with one triangle belonging to Fire and the other to Water, and if we include the zodiacal paths that connect the vertices of the triangles, we end up with a 2-dimensional birds-eye look of two interlocked tetrahedrons, one pointing up (Fire) and one pointing down (Water).  The hexagon around the hexagram alternates Air and Earth, and with the six zodiacal paths inside the hexagon, we end up with a 2-dimensional view of a cube facing one of its corners, with its 12 edges bounded by the elements four times each.  Each of the elements comes in contact with all the other elements at least once each by means of the paths on the Tetractys, forming a completely yet regularly mixed whole.

Now we need to figure out the modes of the paths, and this is where things get a little less geometrically clean.  We already know the modes of the zodiacal forces, after all, and if we plot them out by cardinal, mutable, and fixed, we end up with this weird “broken W” shape rotated each way around the Tetractys.  Let’s use orange for cardinal paths, purple for fixed paths, and pink for mutable paths:

Remember, though, that these are for the zodiacal forces on the Gnosis Schema, while we need to figure out the energetic forces on the Agnosis Schema.  Both the Gnosis Schema and Agnosis Schema have four paths for each of the three modes, and we’re trying to divide up the twelve hexagon/hexagram paths of the Agnosis Schema into three groups of four.  We did this a ways back when we were discussing the meditation of the divine name IAŌ on the Tetractys by making three rectangles that orbited the central sphere of Mercury:

We used a similar method to complete the division of elemental forces based on zodiacal mode, but now I think that method was somewhat misguided since it conflated the two, and further it never really resolved the association of the hexagram paths of Air to their forces in a clean way.  Instead, let’s talk about what I mean by the energetic modes of Ideal, Empyrean, and Ouranic:

• Ideal energies are the pure elements themselves, their most high and abstract concepts and overall form to which the other energies are associated.  These are the four elements of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth.
• Empyrean energies are the four forces of the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, and Spirit.  The three planets here are those that are those represented by the Triadic rank of the Tetractys, associated respectively with Sulfur, Salt, and Mercury.  These are the high holy forces of Light/Sameness, Darkness/Difference, Motion/Existence, and Spirit/Emptiness.  Although “empyrean” literally means “on fire” and often refers to the abode of the gods/God, I’m using it here to denote a different kind of “heavenly planet” from…
• Ouranic energies are the four forces of Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.  These are the other four planets that are represented in the Tetrad rank of the Tetractys, and associated respectively with Fire, Air, Water, and Earth.  Unlike the empyrean forces, the ouranic forces (also meaning “heavenly” but in a sense closer to “celestial” rather than “divine”) are not planets associated with the process of alchemy, but planets associated with the materials of alchemy, the four elements.  They’re in a sense “lower” than the four empyrean forces.

We have three modes of energetic forces, and we also have three modes of zodiacal forces.  We’ve already established from before that the fixed signs are closest to the elements themselves, so we can associate the zodiacal mode of fixity with the energetic mode of ideality.  Carrying the idea (pun unintended) through, the zodiacal mode of mutability might best be associated with the energetic mode of ouranicity, which leaves us the zodiacal mode of cardinality which can be associated with the energetic mode of empyreality.  This allows us to associate the zodiac forces with the energetic forces quite nicely and cleanly:

Although my previous attempt to assign the modes to the three elements of Fire, Water, and Earth may have been misguided, I do like how I assigned the three rectangular sets of paths to the three modes.  Thus, the vertical rectangle with short horizontal paths is still given to the fixed/ideal mode, the diagonal rectangle with short down-right paths given to the cardinal/empyrean mode, and the diagonal rectangle with short down-left paths given to the mutable/ouranic mode.  We thus end up with the following combinations of paths based on their mode:

Putting it all together, we now know the mode of every path in the Tetractys:

When we combine our knowledge of what element each path should be along with what mode it should be, knowing already whether it’s a zodiacal force (on the Gnosis Schema) or an energetic force (on the Agnosis Schema), we end up with a new Tetractys of Life with the appropriate letters on each of the 24 paths:

Overall, I like this version of the Tetractys more; it has a different “ring” to it, something a little clearer and smoother, but I’m still unsure as yet whether it’s the right one.  Only exploration and testing will show that out, and whether any adjustment (or outright rewriting) is needed.  What’s interesting, though, is how this might affect our exploration of the Tetractys in a structured way.  Note that we’ve assigned the Gnosis Schema paths to the twelve signs of the zodiac.  The Zodiac is the belt of stars that the Sun and all the other planets travel through over the course of their orbits, and we make one revolution through the Zodiac every year.  Thus, we have a sort of solar schedule for how we travel through the paths: for instance, we make the trip between Mercury and Air during Aries, Air and Fire during Taurus, Fire and Sulfur during Gemini, Sulfur and Mercury during Cancer, and so forth until we end up back at Mercury while we’re in Pisces.

The association of the Zodiac with the Gnosis Schema paths, further, divides the year up into three periods, one for each of the Initiatory Cycles as mentioned before. the first four signs (from the start of Aries to the end of Cancer) to the Hot Initiation (Mercury, Air, Fire, Sulfur); the second four signs (start of Leo to the end of Scorpio) to the Cold Initiation (Mercury, Salt, Earth, Water); and the last four signs (start of Sagittarius to the end of Pisces) to the Cosmic Initiation.  Of course, this is slightly adrift from our notion of having four seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, but we do go from a period of cold to hot (heating the year), a period of hot to cold (cooling the year), and a period of just cold (darkest and coldest point of the year).  It’s not hard to make associations between these three quasi-seasons with the three Initiatory Cycles, but of course, my living in the Northern Hemisphere is coloring my views somewhat.

Of course, I don’t think we need to follow the Sun in the Zodiac as we follow the paths in the Tetractys, but it does imply that there’s a natural flow, a cycle that’s inherent in the mechanics of the cosmos.  Consider the three empyrean planets of the Sun, Moon, and Mercury: the Sun only ever goes in one direction through the Zodiac, as does the Moon; Mercury does go retrograde fairly often, but its retrograde periods are also extremely short compared to all the other planets, and is so close to the Sun that it basically is taken along with it.  Spirit, the other empyrean energy, is both lower than and amidst the planets themselves, providing the space and nature for them to exist and coexist at all.  Between the Sun, Moon, and Mercury, there’s a natural flow that pretty much only ever goes in one direction, and that’s around the Zodiac in its proper order.  As the Sun and Moon pretty much define nearly all the natural cycles down here on Earth, it suggests that there’s a natural flow and pull for ourselves to be taken along the Gnosis Schema ever onwards towards gnosis and henosis.

However, we get trapped and caught up by the forces of the other planets and elements, which gets us tangled up and going against the natural flow and rhythm of the Gnosis Schema.  We get swept up in a particular planet’s influence, we get brought down by a particular element’s effects, and we generally get caught up in long periods of retrograde motion and muddled manifestation of forces that keep us from flowing naturally with the cosmos as we should.  In aikido terms, the more stressed we are, the less ki can flow through us; in quasi-Thelemic terms, the more we focus on our temporary will, the less we naturally enact our True Will.  If we could simply incorporate the powers of the planets and elements without being subsumed or dominated by them, we could live with the natural flow of the cosmos to attain our true destinations and ends.  Of course, because of the various influences shining down upon us and emanating from within us, we have to struggle to constantly align and realign ourselves with the natural flow of things.  We have to constantly be on guard so that we don’t fall from Gnosis back to Agnosis; we have to constantly keep ahead of the ghost of Argos so we don’t become trapped once more.

From a Gnostic standpoint, this set of paths makes even more sense than the one before.  While we’re trapped in this world, we’re subject to the seven heavens of planets and their associated archons, which clothe us in misunderstanding and agnosis; they give us false notions of how the cosmos works, as well as how we ourselves work.  But, once we break free of them outside the realm of elements and planets, we enter into the realm of the fixed stars, that starry Eighth Sphere, where we proceed into gnosis.  Quoth the Divine Poemander:

First of all, in the resolution of the material body, the Body itself is given up to alteration, and the form which it had becometh invisible; and the idle manners are permitted, and left to the Demon, and the senses of the body return into their Fountains, being parts, and again made up into Operations.  And Anger, and concupiscence, go into the brutish or unreasonable nature; and the rest striveth upward by Harmony.

And to the first Zone [planet] it giveth the power it had of increasing and diminishing.  To the second, the machinations or plotting of evils, and one effectual deceit or craft.  To the third, the idle deceit of Concupiscence.  To the fourth, the desire of Rule, and unsatiable Ambition.  To the fifth, profane Boldness, and the headlong rashness of confidence.  To the sixth, Evil and ineffectual occasions of Riches.  To the seventh Zone, subtle Falsehood, always lying in wait.

And then being made naked of all the Operations of Harmony, it cometh to the Eighth Nature [sphere of the fixed stars, realm of the Zodiac, etc.], having its proper power, and singeth praises to the father with the things that are, and all they that are present rejoice, and congratulate the coming of it; and being made like to them with whom it converseth, it heareth also the Powers that are above the Eighth Nature, singing Praise to God in a certain voice that is peculiar to them.  And then in order they return unto the Father, and themselves deliver themselves to the Powers, and becoming Powers they are in God.  This is the Good, and to them that know, to be desired.

Thus, while we’re trapped in this world, we cycle chaotically and confusedly around the cosmos without real understanding of how it works, no matter how much we jive with the planetary and elemental forces.  It’s only once we recognize them for the powers that they are that we break free of them, traveling among the fixed stars themselves.  Even in agnosis, there is learning; we need to be aware of what the elements and planets do to us before we can truly break free of them and shed ourselves of their influence.  Once we know how to work them and how to get rid of their influence while remaining in control of them, we then proceed to rise above them to gnosis and understand what the whole cosmos is really about.  Planetary and elemental magic can only get us so far; they cannot get us to the most extreme parts of the cosmos (or, in this model, the outermost spheres of the Tetractys) nor can they get us to a point where we’re balanced and able to go in any direction we want (the sphere of Mercury).  It’s only by making the leap from agnosis to gnosis that we can do that, but even then, we must be on our guard; we can slip and fall back into agnosis by dwelling too much on any one energetic force, allowing it to entrap us once more.

Personally, though I don’t expect this to be the final draft of the Tetractys with lettered paths, I think it’s definitely an improvement, and unless Hermes opens up any more doors in the meanwhile, I expect this to be the system of letters and paths that I’ll use.  If nothing else, it goes to show that there really isn’t just one way to attribute letters to the paths; then again, without having come up with the notion of the Gnostic/Agnostic Schemata, this set of lettered paths wouldn’t’ve been possible.  Still, even using the Schemata as our base, we could still attribute each cycle of Initiations to one of the three groups of energetic forces instead of the zodiac signs, perhaps by giving the empyrean energies to the Hot Initiation, the ouranic energies to the Cold Initiation, and the ideal energies to the Cosmic Initiation.  There are many ways to arrange the paths systematically, so it’s unclear without testing it to see which one works best, if any at all even really matter.  To that end, let’s see how well this particular system can be used.

Based on the revamp of the Tetractys of Life with all its newly relettered paths, I had a thought about what the differentiation of forces between the Gnosis Schema (paths associated with the zodiac signs) and the Agnosis Schema (paths associated with the elements and planets) would mean.  From the post redoing the lettering of the paths, I commented that:

Thus, while we’re trapped in this world, we cycle chaotically and confusedly around the cosmos without real understanding of how it works, no matter how much we jive with the planetary and elemental forces.  It’s only once we recognize them for the powers that they are that we break free of them, traveling among the fixed stars themselves.  Even in agnosis, there is learning; we need to be aware of what the elements and planets do to us before we can truly break free of them and shed ourselves of their influence.  Once we know how to work them and how to get rid of their influence while remaining in control of them, we then proceed to rise above them to gnosis and understand what the whole cosmos is really about.  Planetary and elemental magic can only get us so far; they cannot get us to the most extreme parts of the cosmos (or, in this model, the outermost spheres of the Tetractys) nor can they get us to a point where we’re balanced and able to go in any direction we want (the sphere of Mercury).  It’s only by making the leap from agnosis to gnosis that we can do that, but even then, we must be on our guard; we can slip and fall back into agnosis by dwelling too much on any one energetic force, allowing it to entrap us once more.

In other words, we should only make the leap from Agnosis to Gnosis once we understand what it is we’re dealing with.  In order to fully be able to reap the benefits of the powers of the zodiacal paths and make the trips from sphaira to sphaira, we need to already have the powers of the elements and planets supporting us in a way that we control them and not the other way around, or at least on such a level where we’re at least equals with their forces.  This is no easy task; it took me several years of conjuration of the elements and planets, scrying and harmonizing and understanding the forces, before I even dared attempt a conjuration of the angel of the fixed stars to gain a glimpse into that sphere.  Without the planetary and elemental work behind me, I could not have been able to successfully parse together the new information and power I received, as well as understanding how it manifests through all the lower forces.

In that sense, perhaps this jump into scrying the odoi (paths) and sphairai (spheres) on the Tetractys isn’t meant as an introductory or novice activity.  In fact, if I were to teach mathesis as a lineage or as a school of occultism, the division between the powers of the Agnosis Schema and those of the Gnosis Schema suggest an outer circle and inner circle of students.  The outer circle would be those who have not yet made the jump from Agnosis to Gnosis, still remaining in the paths of the elements and planets.  They would be focusing on rudimentary magical skills, understanding the basics of divination and conjuration, understanding the spirits of this world in all their forms, education on the various forces of the cosmos and how to work with them, and the like.  All this would prepare them for the real work of the Gnosis Schema, the theurgy and ascension and subtle powers that they can only really understand after they have all the basics down.

In some ways, it’s a lot like martial art training.  Sure, you start with a white belt and proceed up the ranks to a black belt, and from the perception of non-black-belted people, getting your black belt is like a crowning achievement.  It is huge and a notable thing to obtain, don’t get me wrong, but it’s certainly not the be-all-end-all of the work.  In fact, all the training and testing leading up to the black belt is mere preparation; with the black belt, you finally become a real student and the real education begins, but only once you get that first rank in being a black belt.  In a similar way, being in the outer circle focused on the powers of the Agnosis Schema is a lot like working towards your black belt, just trying to learn the basic moves and motions that allow you to do more complex and natural motions and forms later on.  The initiation into the Gnosis Schema is like being presented with the black belt, but only the first degree of it; the real meat of mathesis lies in the Gnosis Schema, where the more profound power and knowledge lies.

Sure, you might have that black belt, but how good of a black belt are you?  As a black belt in a martial art, there’s always more training to do, more perfection of techniques, more refinement of motion, more fluidity and grace to be developed.  There truly is no end, and even the founder of a martial art themselves will constantly practice.  Hell, even the Buddha Shakyamuni was constantly in meditation after he achieved nirvana; yes, he was enlightened completely and utterly, but he still felt the need to meditate.  Even though he had attained the end of samsara and dependent arising, he still meditated.  Why?  Because there’s always more Work to do; he still needed better ways to teach, more things to delve into, more things to know beyond knowing or not knowing.  Even in his death and passing into paranirvana, the Buddha is thought of to have gone past all going-past into a state of gods-know-what.  It’s not an ending.  There’s never an ending.

Likewise, the process of going through the Gnosis Schema is cyclical.  You might have made one complete circuit around the Gnosis Schema, or you might have made a hundred; that hundred-first time can still get you more power, more knowledge, more gnosis that you didn’t get the first hundred times around.  And this isn’t limited to the schemata of mathetic theurgy, either; even in qabbalah with the Tree of Life, once you attained Ipsissimus and reached the sephirah of Kether, you could either keep going up into the Infinite Light and discovering more of the Infinite, or you could bring that light back down to Malkuth and start the process all over again.  It’s cyclical.  There is never truly an ending, neither in qabbalah nor in mathesis, neither in martial arts nor spiritual arts.  Trying to ascend to the gods or to the Divine Source itself is the most important and gravest undertaking, and to try to attempt it while alive is even more difficult.

So, if (on the off, distant, and unlikely chance) I were to start up a school that could teach people magic and the occult, let’s say I call it the Disciples of Hermes, or simply the Mathetai (from the Greek phrase οι Μαθηται του Ερμου, hoi Mathetai tou Hermou).  The mathetai, collectively, are those who study the occult science and philosophy under the overarching framework of mathesis.  I might actually divide it into three circles, not just two, based on the topic of study and where they are in relation to the schemata of the Tetractys, along with an extra division for people who aren’t involved at all:

• The Agnostai (οι Αγνωσται, lit. “the unknowing”, sing. agnostes) are those who aren’t involved in mathesis, the occult, religion, or spirituality generally.  They’re on their own and are outside the reach and teachings of the Mathetai, either willingly or circumstantially, and are not initiated or educated in any sense of mathesis.
• The Hypognostai (οι Υπογνωσται, lit. “those who are under knowledge”, sing. hypognostes) are those who have begun studying magic and the occult generally.  The focus here would be on an understanding of basic occult philosophy, the forces, spirits, and how to work with all of the above.  This covers all the basics, from conjuration of spirits and proper worship of gods to talismany and divination.  Basic meditation and prayer work would be taught as well, but only as a simple practice in simple ways to help the development of the Hypognostai in their other studies.  In this stage, one is still on the Agnosis Schema, but they begin their awareness of being caught up in it despite being prohibited from being taught about the schemata or deeper mysteries of the Tetractys.  Most of the material here can be taught from books, prepared documents, and demonstrations, usually under the direction of a teacher or more advanced student.
• The Epignostai (οι Επιγνωσται, lit. “those who are approaching knowledge”, sing. epignostes) are those who have shown enough skill with the skills of the Hypognostai and have begun the process of synthesis and analysis (putting together and taking apart) in order to reform themselves into a proper stage of purity and self-awareness.  The focus here is on developing the skills of meditation and prayer and using them to continue the mastery of the skills of the Hypognostai, as well as developing them for their own sake to develop a firmer mastery of the mind and body itself.  Although still on the Agnosis Schema, the stage of epignosis is the process of forming the bridge from the middling sphairai around that of Mercury so as to begin the process of gnosis itself.  At the end of this stage, when the epignostes is ready, they are prepared for initiation into the Gnostai and the process of traveling the Gnosis Schema.  This stage is marked by more intense oral and practical teaching and less on books, although some research may be required for more difficult refinement of the skills of the Hypognostai.
• The Gnostai (οι Γνωσται, lit. “the knowing”, sing. gnostes) are the ones who have entered into the mysteries of the Gnosis, having demonstrated enough mastery of the skills of the Hypognostai and Epignostai to be fit to travel along the Gnosis Schema with or without guidance.  A special connection between them and the gods, as well as of the Monad, is forged and they are allowed to penetrate into the deepest mysteries of the Tetractys.  Deeper meditation, theurgic rituals, and astral travel and inhabitation of the gods within the body is explored as well as to begin teaching other mathetai, as well as other mysteries that would never be told to anyone who hadn’t already attained a particular level of spiritual development and growth.

In a sense, the three circles are modeled after the “three parts of wisdom” as described by Hermes Trismegistus in the Emerald Tablet: the three sciences of alchemy, astrology, and theurgy.  In this instance, the science of alchemy would be given to the Hypognostai through the transformation of lower materials into higher ones, either metaphorically or actively; the science of astrology would be given to the Epignostai, who must understand the connections between above and below in order to ascend between and around the worlds while harnessing their power; the science of theurgy would be given to the Gnostai, who work towards the Source and Divinity itself by building upon both astrology and alchemy.  In a sense, though, alchemy is also given to the Gnostai, since the twelve signs of the zodiac (and, correspondingly, the twelve paths on the Gnosis Schema) are associated with twelve common processes of alchemy, and thus the cycle begins anew.  Being inducted into the Gnostai, after all, is by no means the end of the journey, but truly the start; everything before that is just preparation.

While there’d be no formal levels beyond that of the Gnostai (though a fifth and hypothetical circle could be proposed, the Metagnostai, those who are beyond knowledge, could be set up for divine or heroic entities who guide and nurture the school as a whole akin to the Secret Chiefs of the Golden Dawn), I’m sure it might arise that there’d be an Archignostes (ο Αρχιγνωστης), a “first gnostes” or teacher of teachers in the Mathetai, or the Aristognostai (οι Αριστογνωσται), the “best gnostai” or council of senior gnostai who govern and instruct the school as a whole, both in terms of judging the capabilities of particular students as well as organizing teaching and management for the school.  Of course, parts of these responsibilities might be delegated to the Epignostai, but the teachers (bless their hearts) have to both manage spiritual and worldly responsibilities with this.

Of course, I’m letting my imagination run freer than a tabletop RPG gamer drawing up a new character sheet just before a campaign.  Mathesis is still brand new and largely unexplored as a magical system, I’m still barely into my own practice generally and mathetically, and here I am already planning on not just taking a few students but setting up a whole school for it.  I have plenty on my plate before I even try to attempt any of this sort of dissemination of wisdom to the world who so badly needs it, but at the same time, who can say what’ll happen but the gods?  Maybe in another ten or twenty years or so, secret societies and orders will be a thing again, and maybe I’ll have just enough under my belt to actually start helping others in studying this.

A large part of my devotional activities focus on working with the Greek gods.  This goes well beyond Hermes, of course, though he does take up the major focus of my work between the new field of mathesis as well as being the god of guides and a guide of gods, men, spirits, souls, and heroes.  I also honor Aphrodite, who’s arguably my celestial mother in astrological terms, as well as Hephaistos for my crafting work, and Dionysos because he came into my life for an as-yet unclear purpose and who am I to turn down He Who Comes?  There are yet other gods I honor and work with, enough so that it helped me out to develop a ritual calendar for making monthly offerings based on lunar cycles and grammatomancy.

One of the gods who made that list is the hearth goddess Hestia, lady of the hearth flame and arguably the definition of domestic deity, whose name itself literally means “hearth”.  Hestia is a daughter of Kronos and Rhea, of the same generation of Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, and Hades.  She is probably the least dramatic of all the Olympians, not having many stories of her exploits since she didn’t really have any, and the only one that comes to mind is how she got her position as goddess of the hearth.  Basically, Apollo and Poseidon both wanted her hand in marriage, but she wanted nothing of them nor of marriage in general, and so begged Zeus to remain a virgin all her days; Zeus agreed, and instead of giving her in marriage gave to her the hearth of the gods and, thus, of all mankind.  And since in older times the hearth was the focal point of domestic life, providing warmth and light and food and protection for the family, Hestia became the goddess of all of these.

Moreover, as the household hearth was also often the shrine to nearly all the other household gods, as much as it was in Greece as it was in Rome, Hestia presided over all offerings and worship made at her hearth.  Indeed, since she was both first-born of the original six Olympians as well as last-born (recall how Zeus ripped out or forced his father Kronos to vomit his other children, and how Hestia was eaten first and therefore escaped last), it was custom for Hestia to receive both the first offering and last offering made at any ancient Greek ritual.  Going to a scale larger than the family, Hestia was often viewed as the goddess of the city hearth itself, with a central fire from which all other hearts burned and took their fire, and from which other colonies of a given city could trace their hearthfires back to as well.  Even more unusual for a Greek deity, she had no processions of her own, no parades to celebrate her; as the hearth was an immovable part of the household, so too was Hestia’s worship and honor solely situated on the hearth itself.  In spite of Hestia’s lack of epic poetry or exploitations, she’s kind of a big deal to the ancients.

I associate Hestia, according to Agrippa (book II, chapter 14), with the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, and thus with the Greek letter Rho according to the stoicheia of the letters.  Her day is the 21st day of the lunar month, which I would normally set aside to make special offerings for her as I do the other gods, but Hestia is different in many ways.  In fact, up until earlier this year, I didn’t really honor Hestia at all.  Sure, there was the genius domus and genius loci, the spirits of the house and land where I lived, and I referred to them as “children” of Hestia and Gaia, and worked with them to make my residence better for myself and my neighbors.  That said, there was no real hearth to the place; it was a second-story apartment in a suburb of DC, our living room was nearly bare and only my roommate spent any amount of time in it, and our kitchen was small and cramped.  It was only when I moved to my new house this year that I decided to formally welcome Hestia into my life and my new house, especially since this new house has an actual wood stove placed against a stone wall with built-in stone shelves.

Now, before I proceed any further, let it be known that while I work with and honor the Greek gods, I am not a Hellenist in the sense of belonging to Hellenismos, the Greek neopagan reconstructionist religion.  I do not follow all the rules and customs that survive to us from ancient writings, nor do I follow the rules and customs of other Hellenistic communities; I generally do my own thing, inspired by the rules and customs as well as by my own experience and interactions with the gods themselves.  After all, times and cultures change, and it’s a given that most traditions change with them.  I’d love to make more offerings of piglets and pigeons to Hermes and Hephaistos, for instance, though I need to build and consecrate a proper altar outside for that, and most neopagans would revile me for even entertaining the thought of blood sacrifice, though I have nothing against it.

Though I live with my fiancé and our mutual close friend, none of us are particularly into cooking large meals.  When we cook at all, we tend to cook for our individual selves, and regardless of whether we cook for ourselves or for all of us, we do it in the kitchen with our fancy modern stove and oven and microwave and cooking supplies.  We don’t use our woodstove to cook (though we may experiment with it foolishly come the winter), nor do we keep it burning (we’ve not used it yet and should probably get the chimney cleaned first), nor do we rely on it for warmth (we have a HVAC system for that) nor for light (since we have electric lightbulbs and not torches or firepits).  We live out in the country, so there’s no big municipal center with its own central hearth, since hearths and common grounds both are generally missing in most of modern urban, suburban, exurban, or rural America.  Even if there were a local community hearth fire, I strongly doubt most people in this neck of the woods would think to honor an ancient Greek goddess with any amount of reverence.  Most of how the ancient Greeks honored Hestia simply doesn’t work for me, and indeed, most of the relevance Hestia had to the ancient Greeks is missing for me.

Still, that doesn’t mean I should just ignore Hestia; she’s an Olympian for a reason, after all, and although many of the amenities of houses have changed, the things for which she stands never have.  We still need light, heat, and food, which Hestia provides through an old-fashioned hearth or through modern lightbulbs and HVAC systems and ovens.  We still need shelter, protection, and a place to call “home”, which Hestia abundantly provides.  We still need a place to gather and celebrate our lives and rituals, which Hestia allows us to do.  Hestia, though she is the goddess of the hearth which is becoming rarer and rarer to find these days in active use, is also the goddess of the home generally, and we definitely have one of those.  It is thus right for me to honor Hestia, giving her a spot to call her own, her own simple shrine in the place she’d feel most comfortable and honored: right by our fireplace.  At the very minimum, I acknowledge her every day as the goddess of the hearth, house, and home itself, and thank her for letting me live there and watching over the house.

Still, I don’t honor Hestia as the ancients did, nor how Hellenists tend to do.  For one, Hestia is an outlier to me; she was one of the original Olympians, yes, but recall that there are 12 Olympians.  There’s Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Hephaistos, Ares, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, and Demeter, who form 11 of the 12, but there’s both Hestia and Dionysos to deal with.  Although we don’t have a surviving story that says as much, it’s believed that Hestia gave up her seat at the table of the Olympians to give to Dionysos when he was (re)inducted into the Olympian ranks; Hestia did this to prevent upsetting a balance or causing drama, always the arbiter of peace and prosperity in the home, and took her eternal place by the hearth of the gods.  Likewise, I have my temple room on the other side of the house from the hearth where I do all my spiritual work, with all my shrines and altars and prayer tools.  Hestia, on the other hand, is separated from all that, kept by the fireplace in the living room, isolated from both my spiritual work as well as that of my fiancé and housemate.  My gods are not the household gods, and they’re kept in their own little temenos apart from the public spaces in the house.

Further, while my other gods get their monthly offerings (or, depending on the god, weekly), and although Hestia has a day set aside for her in my lunisolar grammatomantic ritual calendar, I do something different and make offerings to Hestia much more frequently.  I buy novena-like 8″ glass-jar candles from the dollar store near where I live in bulk, and they last about 5 days each; I keep one burning for Hestia at her shrine, and when it goes out, I light her another one along with making her an offering of wine, oil, and incense, and sing out her Orphic Hymn and (short) Homeric Hymn.  The only other shrines I light this type of candle for are my primary devotional altar (which serves as a symbol of the Eternal Infinite Light of God) and for my ancestors, though neither shrine gets special offerings when I light them a new candle (the ancestors have their own trimonthly schedule of offerings).  Hestia gets a large amount of attention from me every five days or so, amounting to about six offerings a month, which is more than the other gods.  Even Hermes gets weekly offerings in addition to his larger monthly offerings, so about five offerings a month.

That said, I’ve only recently started up the process of making an obligatory initial offering to Hestia before the monthly offerings of my other gods.  Before I do any offerings to, say, Zeus on his day of the month, I set out a small amount of wine and oil by her image, thanking her for allowing me a place to live, love, rest, relax, and honor the gods, then I go back to my temple and resume my usual song and dance.  This doesn’t apply to my weekly offerings; those I find more intimate, casual, and off-the-cuff with individual deities I share a very close relationship with, and not everyone gets both a weekly and monthly offering.  Overall, making a preliminary offering to Hestia is a nice gesture, and it helps me prepare myself mentally to do anything else with the gods.  Sure, it’s a little more wine and oil spent, but it’s worth it.  I don’t, however, make her an offering after my other monthly stuff; it suffices for us that she get the first pour of wine.  Plus, this only applies when I’m working with the Greek gods; different traditions necessitate different rules, and some traditions (like Santeria) specify that one of their deities must be fed first; in order to prevent a conflict of interest when one might arise, I keep Hestia before offerings to Greek gods and other deities before gods of their own kind.  (This is one of the problems with having your fingers in so many spiritual pots.)

When it comes to food, well, none of us are big cookers or bakers, though we are known to prepare some large dishes from time to time, or host an occasional dinner party.  When we produce a large amount of food (and I’m talking something substantially more than a pot of macaroni and cheese for an after-work dinner), we set aside small portions for our ancestors, and I set aside another small portion for Hestia.  After all, if the hearth is where food is cooked, then it can be argued that the kitchen is one such hearth for us, and since Hestia allows us a home to live in and cooked food to live on, it’s proper to honor her too.  This follows no schedule, of course, beyond whenever we happen to make a large amount of food or bake a loaf of bread.  When it’s time for the food to be removed, a day or more after I make the offerings, I do with the food the same as I do all the other spiritual offerings; throw it into the pit in my backyard.  That way, we feed the land with the actual material food, which in turn provides more for us both materially and spiritually and helps out the fae and other flora and fauna, both physical and metaphysical, in our area.  In other words, we compost.

Of course, Hestia isn’t the only household spirit we work with.  As I mentioned, we have a big fae population where we live out in the woods, and we feed the fae once in a while, perhaps giving them offerings of their choice (usually red wine and berries with whipped cream).  Plus, in addition to Hestia, I also have a household guardian, a coywolf spirit I’ve been working with for some time now.  The coywolf gets offerings along with Hestia, and a smaller candle lit just for her.  If we get other spirits who decide to take up residence with us as household spirits or guardians, we’ll likewise honor them in a similar way; that said, I don’t exactly intend to call on them the same way as I did the genii I did in my old flat; Hestia and the coywolf guardian suffice for my needs.  It’s not like I need to ask them for much, either; they keep the household running safely and soundly, and all goes well.  When I offer a candle to Hestia, I often dress the candle with oils that encourage peace, prosperity, and fortune in the home for me and my housemates.

So, when I actually do make offerings to Hestia, what is it I seek from her?  I mean, honoring the gods in and of itself is a virtue that should be inculcated, but in my Hermetic and Hermaic mind, nearly all worship and honor is a transaction.  Of course I honor her because she’s Hestia, but I also honor her to ask for her blessing.  When it comes to Hestia, I think my goals are pretty straightforward: I want to live in a place that is safe, stable, and secure from those who would try to harm me intentionally or unintentionally; I want to live in a place that helps me obtain peace, prosperity, and protection from the world, both natural and humane; I want to live in a place that gives me tranquility and takes away tension.  I want a place where I can live, learn, love, rest, relax, study, store my belongings.  I want a place where I don’t have to be evicted or come under threat of it.  I want a place that won’t be destroyed by plague, earthquake, fire, or flood.  I want a place where I can be warm when it’s cold, cool when it’s hot, dry when it’s raining, fed when I’m hungry, rested when I’m fatigued, and safe when I’m persecuted.  I want a place to call home.

Of all the sacred places in ancient Greek thought, from Gibraltar in the West to the Indus in the East and all the shrines and temples in between, probably the most sacred one of them is the oikos, the home itself, which itself is the sanctuary beyond all sanctuaries and temple beyond all temples, the one to which we ourselves belong.  Hestia has much to provide for us, even in our day and age.

Just as an FYI, today is your last chance to make a donation to the Saint Cyprian of Antioch fundraiser I’m holding!  Today is the ninth and final day of the Days of the Cyprians, and also the last day to make a donation and get in on this charity I’m holding for the Malala Fund.  Hurry up, because today’s your last chance; specifically, as of this posting, you have 10 hours left!  We’ve raised almost $800 so far, which is amazing, but let’s see if we can’t get it closer to a nice, round $1000!

Just in case you missed it the first time around, here are the rules:

1. Donate money, no less than US$3.00, to my PayPal account using the button below (not the one on the sidebar unless you just want to give me money without getting anything in return).  I suggest $9 or amounts in multiples of 9 (27, 81, 90…), since this is a number sacred to Saint Cyprian of Antioch.
2. Every person who donates money will have the Chaplet of Saint Cyprian prayed in their name and have petitions made to Saint Cyprian on their behalf when I make devotions to him that night.
3. Every person who donates will be eligible for one of nine prizes (see below), with the winners chosen randomly by noon US Eastern time on Friday, September 26.
4. When going through PayPal, please be sure to write “Saint Cyprian of Antioch, pray for us” in the instructions, along with your mailing address, any special petitions to be made to Saint Cyprian of Antioch, and whether you wish to remain anonymous in the final fundraiser thank-you.  If you’re unable to provide instructions through PayPal, please send me an email from the same address you sent money through PayPal.  If you do not do this, you will not be considered for this contest.
5. You can donate however many times you want or however much you want, but you’ll only be entered into the raffle once.
6. These rules are valid starting with this post and ending at 9 p.m. US Eastern time on Thursday, September 25.  Donations given after that point will not be considered for this contest.

Yes, you read that right, there’s a raffle involved and sweet prizes!  Go check out the original post I made on the fundraiser for what they are.  If you haven’t donated yet, please do so!  If you have already donated but want to help out more, share this link and spread the word!

Hail, Saint Cyprian of Antioch, saint and sorcerer, theurge and thaumaturge, mage and martyr and mystic!  On this holy day we venerate you, blessed and faithful servant of God; hear our prayers, receive them, and present them to the Lord for our sakes and for the sake of the healing, salvation, and redemption of all humanity before and through God.  Intercede for us in our hour of need and at the hour of our death, and help us walk the path of righteousness in the dark and in the light, with hands both on our left and our right, through Christ our Lord, amen.

By sharing in the ways of the Apostles,
you became a successor to their throne.
Through the practice of virtue,
you found the way to divine contemplation, O inspired one of God;
by teaching the word of truth without error,
you defended the Faith, even to the shedding of your blood.
Hieromartyr Cyprian, entreat Christ God to save our souls.

You abandoned ungodly darkness, becoming a light of truth;
You were illustrious as a pastor;
You were glorified in contest:
O righteous Father Cyprian together with godly Justina,
Intercede for us before God the Creator of all!

You turned from the art of sorcery to the knowledge of God,
and were shown forth as a skilful healer for the world, Cyprian, inspired by God.
Together with Justina you grant cures to those who honor you;
with her, pray to the Master who loves mankind that He may save our souls.

(troparia and kontakion from the website of the Orthodox Church in America)

Yup, it’s the Feast of Saint Cyprian of Antioch today, and you know what that means: PARTY TIME!  I’m throwing a celebratory party tonight for my friends and colleagues to honor the good Saint Cyprian, now that my household’s novenas are complete and the time of Saint Cyprian has come upon us.  If you haven’t made any prayers or works yet with Saint Cyprian, then today’s your day, so get off your ass and start preparing yourself to do just that!  Today’s basically a Cyprianista Christmas, and one of the best days of the year for magicians, sorcerers, necromancers, and all kinds of occultists.  Probably the biggest thing I get to look forward to is, after today, I can finally take a break from all the Cyprianic work I’ve been doing and take it easy for a few days to focus on a few loose ends and other projects before Crucible Convention 2014 (which you should totally come to if you’re anywhere near the Princeton, NJ area to hear me and many other highly-regarded magicians talk).

Of course, my dear readers will also know that I’ve been holding a fundraiser in honor of Saint Cyprian these past nine days, and I am floored by what I’ve been privileged to witness.  After all the donations and link-sharing, you guys have raised a total of $944 from 49 different people for the Malala Fund, which empowers girls through education and helps Pakistani, Kenyan, and Syrian children and refugees, and named after Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl activist who was shot by Taliban extremists, survived to world acclaim, and has been working since to improve the condition of life for girls and children across the world in extreme conditions.  I’ll be arranging the donation first thing on Monday, since my plate is a little full for today, and I’ll also be raising money tonight at my celebration of the Feast of Saint Cyprian to augment what people have donated online.  Besides, this will also give me enough time to let my paycheck come in so I can donate some extra of my own, too, so I can round up the total sum to a nice cool $1000.

With that, I’d like to publicly thank and honor you guys who helped chip in for this fundraiser in the name of Saint Cyprian of Antioch:

• Mondo C.
• Sacha B.
• Kevin M.
• Ocean Delano
• Michele M.
• Ahmadi Riverwolf
• Papa Newt
• Ty B.
• Narkaios Alepou
• Charles R.
• Daniel
• Nathen S.
• Pallas Renatus
• Alexander R.
• Richard
• Jon P.
• William T.
• Mary B.
• Andrea M.
• Joshua B.
• Devin M.
• George T.
• Kemal Y.
• Christopher C.
• Israel D.
• ♊+天死
• Steve N.
• Lee C.
• Kevin K.
• Julio. C. O.
• Doc Firment
• Kelly M.
• Susan M.
• Ericson P.
• Andrew Watt
• Joe W.
• Others who have nobly chosen to remain anonymous (don’t worry, Saint Cyprian of Antioch and God know the work you did, even if other people won’t)

And, since (way) more than nine people donated, I’m thrilled to be able to do my drawing for the prizes I mentioned in the fundraiser post.  I did the drawing at the altar of Saint Cyprian himself earlier, allowing him to pick the winners, so  I’ll be contacting you guys today by email letting you know who won and what you’ve won; to those who won the geomancy reading or consultation prizes, you’re free to use them immediately or schedule them whenever you like in the future.

Guys, thank you for helping out with this.  I am truly grateful, humbled, and flabbergasted that I have such noble, charitable, and awesome readers and visitors to this blog.  From the bottom of my heart, thank you, every one of you who donated, spread the word, and helped out in this effort.  May the blessing of God the Father, of God the Son, of God the Holy Spirit, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of Saint Cyprian of Antioch, of Saint Justina, of Saint Theoctistus, and of all the saints and angels above, below, and upon the Earth illumine, protect, and guide you both this and every day of your lives and into eternity.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a party to set up for.

As you might be aware, dear reader, today is the Feast of Saint Cyprian of Antioch.  As you also might be aware, I’m having a party later tonight in his honor, and besides getting a bunch of my friends and colleagues together to drink and have a good time, I also plan on honoring the good saint by having people who may not work with him a starting point for asking for his blessings by having a large public altar set up to him where people can write petitions out and the like.  Towards the end of the party (or, simply put, around midnight, depending on how late people want to stay and drink), I’ll lead a communal prayer for all of us to ask for the good saint’s blessings in our lives and formally give him all our petitions by burning them with a bit of his oil and some rum.  (Gotta have at least some flair for the dramatic in my parties, after all.)

Thinking about what I might do for the communal prayer, however, led me to inspect some of the prayers and rituals to Saint Cyprian that I’ve been collecting.  My Chaplet of Saint Cyprian of Antioch is nice, though the repetitions of the Glory Be and the like might not be to everyone’s taste.  However, I realize that the structure and wording of my chaplet is very similar to other Catholic prayers, notably the litany.  A litany is a series of successive supplications made to a saint or holy figure, and I’ve used several for the angels and archangels before in my work (especially the Litany of the Holy Archangels by Rev. Dn. Michael Strojan).  In that light, I rethought the use of my chaplet and decided to rewrite it and format it as a Catholic-style litany, complete with the usual prayers at the beginning and an oremus (“let us pray”) at the end.  However, I also decided to add on a bit to the prayer, since today is also technically the feast day of two other saints who are closely associated with Saint Cyprian of Antioch:

• Saint Justina, the Christian girl whom Cyprian tried to get to fall in love with Aglaias.  She stood steadfast in the face of all of Cyprian’s magic, however, and warded off every attack from him, all his demons, and the Devil himself by making the sign of the Cross and through constant prayer and fasting.  Once she got word of Cyprian’s conversion, she rejoiced and made many charitable gifts across Antioch (which really needed it after Cyprian kinda blew it up), and eventually became a friend to Cyprian in Christ.  Once Cyprian became priest, he made her a deaconess; once he became bishop, he elevated her to an abbess in charge of a convent.  They were both tortured together, however, and eventually executed together by beheading.  Many Orthodox icons of Saint Cyprian also feature Saint Justina.
• Saint Theocistus was a Roman, sometimes known as a soldier, who was present at the execution of Saint Cyprian and Saint Justina.  He saw how these two saints were being tortured even though they were innocent, and despite all the measures the Romans used against them, nothing actually hurt them save the beheading themselves by the grace of God.  At the beheading of the saints, Theocistus had a change of heart and proclaimed his faith in Christ, kissing the feet of the body of Cyprian.  However, he did this in the presence of the officials who had just executed Cyprian and Justina, and so also was condemned and executed on the spot for his conversion.

Saint Theocistus, of course, is a relatively minor figure compared to Saint Justina, and she’s a relatively minor figure compared to Saint Cyprian, and since Saint Cyprian isn’t really considered by the Catholic Church to be a saint anymore, none of these three make their rosters.  However, the Orthodox Church still venerates them all, and gives them all the same feast day (though they use October 2 instead of September 26).  I figured it was fitting to write a litany for Saint Cyprian that also included sections for Saint Justina and Saint Theocistus, so following the usual format of the litany, here’s what I wrote.  Yes, it’s basically a standard Christian prayer, so if you’re not on good terms with Christianity, you may not find it worthwhile, but then again, you probably wouldn’t be working with a Christian saint anyway.

First, before the litany proper, it’s usual to make a common supplication to God.  The litany is usually led by a priest; his parts are said in upright typeface, while the parts of the congregation are in italics.  When doing the litany alone, however, one prays all parts.  The beginning supplication:

God, come to my assistance.  Lord, make speed to save us.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
Amen.

The litany proper:

Lord, have mercy on us.  Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, have mercy on us.  Christ, have mercy on us.
Lord, have mercy on us.  Lord, have mercy on us.
Christ, hear us.  Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.  Christ, graciously hear us.

God the Father of Heaven, have mercy on us.
God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.
God the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us.
Holy Trinity, One God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary, pray for us.
Holy Mother of God, pray for us.
Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us.

Saint Cyprian, born to pagan parents, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, dedicated to the god Apollo as a child, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, taught sorcery in Olympos, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, taught illusion in Argos, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, taught witchcraft in Tauropolis, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, taught necromancy in Sparta, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, taught enchantment in Memphis, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, taught astrology in Chaldaea, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, master of all the occult arts, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, magus residing in Antioch, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, approached by Aglaias to seduce Justina, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, unleashing demons of lust upon Justina, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, unleashing demons of deception upon Justina, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, unleashing the Devil himself upon Justina, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, wringing disaster on Antioch against Justina, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, casting deadly illness upon Justina, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, all magic defeated by the prayers of Justina, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, seeing Truth and rebuking the Devil and his snares, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, burning his books in sacrifice to God, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, confessing repentantly for his sins before all Antioch, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, baptized in the name of the Blessed Trinity, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, made priest within a year by his zeal for holiness, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, made bishop to lead all to divine virtue, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, condemned to death by the Romans, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, beheaded and departed into Heaven, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, entering into the communion of the holy saints, pray for us.
Saint Cyprian, preserving us from all evil arts and acts, pray for us.

Saint Justina, virtuous maiden, pray for us.
Saint Justina, chased after by the world, pray for us.
Saint Justina, pursued by demons, pray for us.
Saint Justina, defending herself by the sign of the Holy Cross, pray for us.
Saint Justina, celebrating at the conversion of Cyprian, pray for us.
Saint Justina, gracious friend to Cyprian, pray for us.
Saint Justina, made abbess by Cyprian, pray for us.
Saint Justina, slandered by the Romans with Cyprian, pray for us.
Saint Justina, becoming a martyr in Christ with Cyprian, pray for us.

Saint Theocistus, soldier of the Romans, pray for us.
Saint Theocistus, turning his heart to Christ, pray for us.
Saint Theocistus, witnessing the execution of Cyprian and Justina, pray for us.
Saint Theocistus, kissing the corpse of the martyrs Cyprian and Justina, pray for us.
Saint Theocistus, declaring his faith in Jesus Christ because of Cyprian and Justina, pray for us.
Saint Theocistus, executed for his forsaking of the world, pray for us.
Saint Theocistus, ennobled for his conversion to God, pray for us.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, spare us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, graciously hear us, O Lord.
Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Christ, hear us.  Christ, hear us.
Christ, graciously hear us.  Christ, graciously hear us.

Pray for us, Saint Cyprian, Saint Justina, and Saint Theocistus, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray:
O God, who sent the Holy Spirit to preserve Saint Cyprian from darkness even while he dwelt within its midst, grant in your mercy that you enlighten us and inspire us.  May that the life and martyrdom of Saint Cyprian teach us to abandon wickedness, heal us to be free of sin, and bless us through Jesus Christ + to walk in the light of truth.  By the intercession of Saint Cyprian, Saint Justina, and Saint Theocistus, lead us to a true conversion of heart that we may use both our hands and all our power in service and sacrifice to Your Presence, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

May you all have a blessed Feast of Saint Cyprian, and may he with his saintly companions smile upon you and intercede for you in all your prayers!  Hail, holy Saint Cyprian of Antioch: mage, mystic, and martyr ; sorcerer, sage, and saint; theurge, thaumaturge, and theophoros!  Together with Saint Justina and Saint Theocistus, pray for us, now and at the hour of our death.  Amen.

I’m sure most of us have heard, at least at one point when we were growing up, that when we’re angry and about to fly off the handle, that we should calm down before we act rashly.  One common way to cool off when we’re emotionally heated is to count to ten: take a deep breath, count from 1 to 2 to 3 all the way up to 10, then breathe deeply again, and by that point we should have calmed down enough to act at least a little more rationally and reasonably instead of like the geomantic figure Puer on caffeine.  Turns out that this little counting trick is good for other things, too, and I’ve adopted it as a basis for a short but powerful mathetic meditation exercise.  We’ve already described at least one method of mathetic meditation before by meditating on the letters by means of sound and by means of symbol, and we’ve alluded to meditating on the structure of the Tetractys, but now I’d like to make that latter part more specific.

First, let’s talk about breathing.  Breathing is the ultimate means of meditation for the vast majority of us: by simple awareness of breathing, we calm the mind, we cool the body down, and we take control of our spirit for deeper contemplation.  It’s hard to overestimate the full power of the breath, since with the breath we control our bodies and selves in a deep way; Jason Miller even says that a magician who can’t control their breath is no magician at all.  What I like to use as the basis for breathing in meditation is something that’s called the fourfold breath.  While sitting with the back straight but relaxed, such as in a chair, lotus position, or seiza position, close or relax the eyes and proceed with the following:

0. Exhale completely, breathing out from your center.  This is the preliminary emptying breath; it might help to make a soft popping noise with the mouth (“peh peh peh peh peh”) to completely empty the lungs.
1. Inhale into the center deeply, filling your lungs from the bottom up.  Count to four at a slow and natural rhythm.
2. Hold the breath without closing the throat.  Count to four.
3. Exhale completely, emptying your lungs from the top down from your center.  Count to four.
4. Hold the lungs empty without closing the throat.  Count to four.
5. Repeat from #1 as necessary.

This is the basis of the fourfold breath that other authors, such as John Michael Greer and Jason Miller, have used in their meditative and contemplative work, and I’ve used it before in my meditations on the geomantic figures as well as for devotional meditations using the Trisagion prayer.  It’s a great way to start off any meditation session, and a great meditative tool in its own right which can lead to deep insights, if not complete enlightenment a la the vipassana tradition in Buddhism.  Before proceeding with the actual mathetic meditation below, give this a try for a few sessions lasting at least five minutes each.

Once you’ve got the hang of this simple breathing meditation, let’s proceed with the actual meditation exercise.  When you’re relaxed and rested, recite an old Pythagorean prayer called the Invocation of the Tetractys.  I plan to use this prayer before any mathetic exercise, so it’s a good and short prayer to memorize and keep handy for all such meditations.  I’ve adapted the prayer from an older form, and the one I use is this:

Bless us, divine Number, you who enform gods and men!  O holy, holy Tetractys, you who contain the root and the source of all eternal and eternally flowing creation! For the divine Number begins with the profound, pure Monad until it comes to the holy Tetrad, then it begets the mother of all, the all-comprising, all-bounding, first-born, never-swerving, never-tiring, holy Decad, the keyholder of all!

Perform ten fourfold breaths as above to calm the mind and settle the body and spirit.  Next, perform another ten fourfold breaths, but this time we’re going to do something different on the exhale:

1. On the first breath, intone the number “One” in your native language, breathing out from your center (or vibrate it, if you’re into that).  Visualize a single point in your mind and hold the image.
2. On the second breath, intone the number “Two”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a second point beneath and to the left of the first with a single path linking the two.  Hold the image.
3. On the third breath, intone the number “Three”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a third point to the right of the second, with two new paths linking this third point to the prior two.  Hold the image.
4. On the fourth breath, intone the number “Four”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a fourth point beneath and to the left of the second, with two new paths linking this fourth point to the second and third points.  Hold the image.
5. On the fifth breath, intone the number “Five”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a fifth point to the right of the fourth, with two new paths linking this fifth point to the fourth, second, and third points.  Hold the image.
6. On the sixth breath, intone the number “Six”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a sixth point to the right of the fifth, with three new paths linking this sixth point to the fifth, second, and third.  Hold the image.
7. On the seventh breath, intone the number “Seven”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a seventh point beneath and to the left of the fourth, with one new path linking this seventh point to the fifth point.  Hold the image.
8. On the eighth breath, intone the number “Eight”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a eighth point to the right of the seventh, with five new paths linking this third point to the seventh, fourth, second, fifth, and sixth points.  Hold the image.
9. On the ninth breath, intone the number “Nine”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a ninth point to the right of the eighth, with five new paths linking this third point to the eighth, fourth, fifth, third, and sixth points.  Hold the image.
10. On the tenth breath, intone the number “Ten”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a tenth point to the right of the ninth, with two new paths linking this third point to the ninth and sixth points.  Hold the image.

So, each breath is associated with a particular stage of construction of the Tetractys of Life, proceeding in the order of the images below:

In your mind, you’ll’ve constructed the structure of the Tetractys of Life, all ten sphairai with all 24 paths between them.  After the ten constructing breaths, perform another ten fourfold breaths intoning nothing, just holding the image of the Tetractys in your mind, letting yourself become absorbed in its structure.  Once the tenth breath is complete, perform one last fourfold breath.  On this last breath, let the image dissolve into your breath on the inhale, disseminating throughout your body on the exhale, and exhaling a clean, pure breath at the end.  The meditation is complete.

I like the idea of using one’s own native language to count; it’s a linguistic curiosity that thinking of numbers and using them in speech takes place in a different part of the brain than other types of prose or poesy, and it’s a mark of innate fluency when you can instinctively count in a different language other than your native one.  In using your native language’s words for the numbers, the meditation becomes a little easier on the mind and makes the whole experience more natural and intuitive.  However, if you want to be a little more mystical, you could also use “Monad”, “Dyad”, “Triad”, “Tetrad”, and so on up to “Decad”, so it’s up to you.  I prefer the use of the simple native counting numbers, personally.

Now, the above meditation process is fairly straightforward, and I find it good for people who haven’t yet gone through the ritual of initiation into mathesis, a kind of “outsider” meditation that anyone can use who may want to begin work with the Tetractys.  It’s simple and clean, and it works.  However, I don’t particularly care for the order of how we visualize the sphairai above, since it feels a little awkward, especially in light of how we traverse the paths on the Gnosis Schema of the Tetractys, so more advanced mathetists may want to try a slightly different visualization.  The process is overall the same and starts off with the Invocation of the Tetractys and the initial ten breaths, but there are a few changes once we get to the construction breaths, where we use twelve breaths instead of ten:

1. On the first breath, intone the number “One”, breathing out from your center.  Visualize a single point in your mind and hold the image.
2. On the second breath, intone nothing.  Hold the image.
3. On the third breath, intone the number “Two”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a second point beneath and to the right of the first with a single path linking the two.  Hold the image.
4. On the fourth breath, intone the number “Three”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a third point to the right of the second with a single path linking this to the second point.  Hold the image.
5. On the fifth breath, intone the number “Four”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a fourth point to the right of the first with three paths connecting this to the first, second, and third points. Hold the image.
6. On the sixth breath, intone nothing.  Hold the image.
7. On the seventh breath, intone the number “Five”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a fifth point to the left of the first with two paths connecting this to the first and second points. Hold the image.
8. On the eighth breath, intone the number “Six”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a sixth point beneath and to the left of the fifth with a single path connecting this to the fifth. Hold the image.
9. On the ninth breath, intone the number “Seven”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a seventh point between the sixth and second points with five paths connecting this to the sixth, fifth, first, fourth, and second points. Hold the image.
10. On the tenth breath, intone nothing.  Hold the image.
11. On the eleventh breath, intone the number “Eight”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a eighth point above and to the right of the first with four paths connecting this to the fifth, first, second, and fourth points. Hold the image.
12. On the twelfth breath, intone the number “Nine”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a ninth point above and to the left of the eighth with a single path connecting this to the eighth point. Hold the image.
13. On the thirteenth breath, intone the number “Ten”, breathing out as above.  Visualize a tenth point to the left of the eighth point with six paths connecting this to the ninth, eighth, fourth, fifth, seventh, and fifth points. Hold the image.
14. On the fourteenth breath, intone nothing.  Hold the image.

Although we have ten points to construct as before, there are twelve stages total in the Gnosis Schema, where we cross over the central sphaira of Mercury multiple times.  Once we complete a system of three points on the Tetractys around the sphaira of Mercury, we return to the central sphaira and prepare ourselves for the next system.  Thus, once we complete a system and return to the first central sphaira of Mercury, we spend an extra breath just focusing on what we’ve constructed so far.  After this, we do another ten fourfold breaths to hold the whole completed Tetractys of Life in mind, dissolving the image on a final, eleventh breath.

I think this meditation exercise, the latter Gnostic Schema form of which I used during the ten days of my ritual of self-initiation, helps in developing an intuitive and innate understanding of the Tetractys, or at least plants a seed for the further growth of which as one develops in the study and practice of mathesis.  With the Gnosis Schema variant of the meditation, it’s interesting to see how the paths develop along with the sphairai, which itself can help one with seeing how the Gnosis Schema develops a full understanding based on earlier foundations of practice as one traverses the Tetractys in this manner.  It can help to use this meditation before any work in mathesis as a preliminary preparation, perhaps starting not with the sphaira of Mercury but the sphaira one is currently “at”, such as if one has progressed to the sphaira of Salt, one begins with constructing the Tetractys there and proceeding to the “second” sphaira of Earth, then the “third” sphaira of Water, and so forth, again pausing whenever one reaches the sphaira of Mercury.  One can further enhance this meditation by adding on the letters, numbers, and stoicheia of the paths into the meditation, perhaps spending another breath per each path that develops as one constructs a new sphaira in the visualization.

Hail, Saint Cyprian of Antioch: mage, martyr, mystic; theurge, thaumaturge, theophoros; saint, sorcerer, sage!  Pray for us who are alive and dead, now and at the hour of our death.  Through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

Now I need so much sleep.

You’d think that, from the past few weeks (months?) on this blog, the only two entities I work with spiritually are Hermes and Saint Cyprian.  A quick glance around my temple room indicates otherwise, of course, and I have healthy and strong relationships with a bevy of angels, theoi, and saints, not to mention the Divine itself.  Still, at least as far as mathesis goes, it seems like the only god I’ve been talking about is Hermes.  After all, we start with the sphaira of Mercury in the Gnosis Schema, and the initiation ritual into mathesis makes Hermes into our guide, if not our salvific figure, in being released from the Agnosis Schema into gnosis.  So what happens with all the other gods?

Well, let’s backtrack a bit and talk about Hermes a bit more.  When I went to the conference on Hermes at UVa this year, I learned quite a bit (see my first, second, and third posts for what was discussed).  One of the things that had struck me was the prevalence of herms, the four-sided pillars with a bust of Hermes at the top and often a phallus on the pillar, in many devotional scenes of work.  No matter the god that was being worshipped, it seems like herms were always present in devotional settings of ritual or sacrifice, as if they were a terminal to interact with the gods.  Given that some of the herms depicted the caduceus or other Hermaic paraphernalia, it’s unclear whether all of these herms are actually Hermes or if there were some non-Hermes herms out there.  I’m unsure either way, but it would make sense if Hermes was each and every herm and, thus, present in each and every rite of sacrifice and worship.  After all, Hermes is the messenger of the gods, but also their interlocutor; he is the one who ferries information between the world of mortals and the world of immortals, as well as sacrifice and praise.  Heck, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes even states that Hermes is the god who invented fire for sacrifice:

…Then, after he had well-fed the loud-bellowing cattle with fodder and driven them into the byre, close-packed and chewing lotus and began to seek the art of fire. He chose a stout laurel branch and trimmed it with the knife ((lacuna)) . . . held firmly in his hand: and the hot smoke rose up. For it was Hermes who first invented fire-sticks and fire. Next he took many dried sticks and piled them thick and plenty in a sunken trench: and flame began to glow, spreading afar the blast of fierce-burning fire.

And while the strength of glorious Hephaestus was beginning to kindle the fire, he dragged out two lowing, horned cows close to the fire; for great strength was with him. He threw them both panting upon their backs on the ground, and rolled them on their sides, bending their necks over, and pierced their vital chord. Then he went on from task to task: first he cut up the rich, fatted meat, and pierced it with wooden spits, and roasted flesh and the honourable chine and the paunch full of dark blood all together. He laid them there upon the ground, and spread out the hides on a rugged rock: and so they are still there many ages afterwards, a long, long time after all this, and are continually. Next glad-hearted Hermes dragged the rich meats he had prepared and put them on a smooth, flat stone, and divided them into twelve portions distributed by lot, making each portion wholly honourable. Then glorious Hermes longed for the sacrificial meat, for the sweet savour wearied him, god though he was; nevertheless his proud heart was not prevailed upon to devour the flesh, although he greatly desired. But he put away the fat and all the flesh in the high-roofed byre, placing them high up to be a token of his youthful theft. And after that he gathered dry sticks and utterly destroyed with fire all the hoofs and all the heads.

Add to the fact that Hermes is instrumental in sacrifice, Hermes was often known as almighty or παντοκρατωρ, “all-ruling”.  Sometimes this word was used to flatter a god being praised, but in Hermes, this isn’t too terrible a description.  The thing about Hermes is that, even though we know he is the god of messengers and of trade and this and that, Hermes is not just any of those things.  To be fair, no god is just one thing or another, but Hermes is especially the jack of all trades because he had no one sphere of influence; he was involved in everything.  This is why it’s surprising that it’s uncommon to find actual temples, or τεμενοι, dedicated to Hermes, not to mention a scarcity of cults that were often given regularly to all the other gods.  I mentioned this when a particular theme of talks dawned on me during the second day of the Hermes conference, that in working with Hermes, we gain the ability to approach and interact with all the other gods:

Hermes, although an Olympian, is certainly not among the important ones, but he’s still a vital god to work with and crucial in day-to-day living.  Hermes has no temple, because he’s in every temple; he has no rites, because he’s in all rites; he has no expertise, because he’s an expert in everything.  Hermes is the go-between that leads us on in anything and everything; he is the road between destinations, but is not the destinations themselves.  He only leads us along the roads, but the road is where we spend most of our lives and times.  The presence of Hermes is required by man to work with any god, and is required to communicate to man from the gods.

However, just as Hermes is god of the roads, he’s also the god of opening the roads, which is essentially what the ritual of mathetic initiation is about: opening the path to the Gnosis Schema from the Agnosis Schema, and proceeding onward from there.  This is fitting, because Hermes has told me that he will not lead me into the sphairai themselves, only along the odoi.  I have a few inklings here and there as to why that might be, but if we consider each sphaira to be a destination, an abode, then chances are it’s where a given divinity or family dwells.  They’re not places of exchange or trade, that’s for sure, else Hermes’d be all up in there.  It’s not a theater, either, since Hermes was often found in plays and can be considered a god of both comedic drama and cajoling song.  The sphairai are places of rest or respite, a pause where we must make the choice to leave, picking up the path again when we contact Hermes to get back on the road.

So, either we don’t need guidance in the sphairai themselves, or we do and Hermes simply isn’t going to be it for us.  It would logically follow that another entity would step in at that point, and to logically follow that, it’d be the other gods.  We only ever work with Hermes on the odoi of the Tetractys, never in the sphairai, and this includes the sphaira of Mercury (even to my own confusion).  Thus, although Hermes is a crucial figure in mathesis, helping us out during times of transition (which is where most of the work is focused), he is of necessity not the only one we work with.  Instead of considering the sphairai the destinations and the odoi the transitions, we might consider the sphairai to be transitions or changes in direction between the individual odoi.  After all, if each of the odoi on the Gnosis Schema is marked by a letter associated with a zodiac sign, then the sphairai are the cusps of the signs, the thresholds between the last degree of one sign and the first degree of the next.

Given this solar image, it makes me wonder whether the sphairai are intimately connected to the god Apollo in a way I hadn’t considered before.  After all, it would tie in with what Hermes said before about not entering into the sphairai themselves.  If Hermes is the god who can literally go anywhere, then why on earth wouldn’t he go to a particular place, and what would that place be?  Hermes himself tells us in the Homeric Hymn again:

Then the son of Leto said to Hermes: “Son of Maia, guide and cunning one, I fear you may steal form me the lyre and my curved bow together; for you have an office from Zeus, to establish deeds of barter amongst men throughout the fruitful earth. Now if you would only swear me the great oath of the gods, either by nodding your head, or by the potent water of Styx, you would do all that can please and ease my heart.”

Then Maia’s son nodded his head and promised that he would never steal anything of all the Far-shooter possessed, and would never go near his strong house; but Apollo, son of Leto, swore to be fellow and friend to Hermes, vowing that he would love no other among the immortals, neither god nor man sprung from Zeus, better than Hermes: and the Father sent forth an eagle in confirmation.

Hermes does not enter the house of Apollo.  Apollo is associated with the Sun, and the sphairai are the cusps, the thresholds, the stations of the Sun as it progresses through the zodiacal odoi.  Apollo, further, is the Μουσηγετης, Muse-leader, the head of the nine Muses.  Together, Apollo and the Muses are ten deities, perhaps one for each sphaira of the Tetractys.  So who are the nine Muses?

• Kalliopē (“Beautiful Voice”), muse of epic poetry
• Kleiō (“Make Famous”), muse of history
• Eratō (“Lovely”), muse of lyric poetry
• Melpomenē (“Celebrate with Song”), muse of tragic drama
• Ūraniē (“Heavenly”), muse of astronomy and astrology
• Polyhymnia (“Many Hymns”), muse of hymns and devotional speech
• Euterpē (“Giving Much Delight”), muse of song and elegaic poetry
• Terpsikhorē (“Delighting in Dance”), muse of dance
• Thaleia (“Blooming”), muse of comedic drama

And if I had to guess off the top of my head which deity goes with which sphaira:

• Monad: Apollo (leader of the Muses and source of art)
• Light: Ūraniē (dance of celestial bodies)
• Darkness: Terpsikhorē (dance of terrestrial bodies)
• Sulfur: Kalliopē (poetry of action)
• Mercury: Euterpē (poetry generally of all types)
• Salt: Eratō (poetry of affection)
• Fire: Polyhymnia (godly works)
• Air: Thaleia (joyful works)
• Water: Melpomenē (sorrowful works)
• Earth: Kleiō (factual works)

Of course, this is a fairly late list of Muses and their attributes, but it’s an idea all the same.  Even if this little path of association leads us nowhere, it does show that the Tetractys is full of gods, not just of the individual zodiac signs but of everything.  The Tetractys, after all, is the “enformer of gods and men” and present in us all, so why not all of us within it?  I’m sure, over time, a more coherent theogony and theology of the Tetractys and mathesis will come together, and it’s still really early in the game to determine who goes where or what sphaira means what power more specifically than “salt” or “fire”.  I can definitely say, however, that mathesis will lead us to work, in at least some respect, all the gods of this world.

After all, “this world” is the world below Olympos, the cosmos under the rule and sight of the gods.  Every city, every forest, every river, every stone, every person is presided over by a god big or small.  By traveling the paths on the Tetractys, we come to be exposed to all parts of the cosmos, not just the parts that humans live in; we live in only one part of the world, though we have the ability (with practice and the blessing of Logos and Nous and all that good stuff) to go anywhere and everywhere.  In mathesis, that’s quite the point; we need to do that, instead of just getting stuck in a the fraction of the cosmos we know as the human world.  It is only by becoming all that we can become, knowing all that we can know, going all where we can go, and doing all we can do that we experience everything and in every way.

And while it’d be hubristic of me to say that we can conquer the world, we can certainly become unified with it and, while not escaping it (for who can escape the All?), we can certainly come to the All and be with it.  Note that I’m saying the All, and not the One or the Monad; these are generally the same concept and used interchangeably in philosophy, but it’s a slightly different nuance I’m using here.  Consider the Tetractys as a mountain, with the peak at the top.  This mountain is that of Olympus, the center of all divine activity and from which all rules, edicts, and cosmic decisions are made.  By ascending and descending Olympus, we come to know the gods and interact with them (assuming they allow us and they allow Hermes to guide us, lest we get struck by lightning on the way).  However, it is only by integrating all of them into ourselves, and by them all of the cosmos, that we can live in perfect accordance with them even when they themselves conflict.  After all, the Dyad isn’t just two Monads acting independently, but it’s the relationship between them that makes them into a Dyad.  Likewise, we should aim for acting as that which makes the ten monads of the Tetractys into a Decad, a complete whole, and nothing less.

Personally, this is starting to sound like a weird mix of Stoicism, Hermeticism, Buddhism, and Taoism.  Let’s see how it’ll turn out.

I get a lot of hits on my blog from across the realm of the Internet, many of which are from links on Facebook, Twitter, or RSS readers.  To you guys who follow me: thank you!  You give me many happies.  However, I also get a huge number of new visitors daily to my blog from people who search around the Internet for various search terms.  As part of a monthly project, here are some short replies to some of the search terms people have used to arrive here at the Digital Ambler.  This focuses on some search terms that caught my eye during the month of September 2014.

Before I start with the actual search terms, I’d like to point out that September is generally the month of Virgo.  And yes, if you’ve kept up with the other Search Term Shoot Back posts, then you can probably guess that I’ve gotten a large number of queries involving the Greek god Hermes, the Zodiac sign Virgo, men, and huge dicks.  These search terms are a thing (though I can’t fathom why).  I can’t really speak to whether Virgo men generally have huge dicks; I have my reasonable sample size of them (that I’ve sampled in more than one way, ohhh my), of course, and I can’t draw any good conclusions one way or the other.  Hermes is a god, and generally speaking everything involving the gods is big, so, yeah.  Anyway, onto the more legitimate queries!

“how the moon affect the invocation of angels?” — In my experience, not much, but it depends on the angel you’re calling and for what purpose.  The only times astrological phenomena have negatively interfered with my conjurations of the angels is during periods of Mercury retrograde, when the voices of the angels tends to be more distant or unclear or I might get the wrong spirit in the crystal, but it’s a problem that’s easily worked around.  I’ve also noticed that the angels of the zodiac tend to like being conjured when their sign is rising or culminating, but that’s another issue.  Rather, the Moon affects the purpose of conjuration.  Generally, you want the waxing Moon to bring things into manifestation or achieve worldly ends (since the Moon is reflecting more of the Sun’s heavenly light to the Earth), and you want the waning Moon to take things away from the Earth or achieve spiritual initiations (since the Moon is reflecting more of the Sun’s light away into the heavens).  The Full Moon is good for opening up clear communication and all matters generally, while the Dark Moon is good for obscurity, binding, and hidden matters generally.  I haven’t noticed Void of Course Moon affecting conjurations themselves, but again, consider it as part of a larger project rather than in conjuration alone.

“crucible omnimancers” — The Omnimancers are good people who do good work, and I’m hanging out with them this coming weekend at Crucible Convention 2014 in Princeton, NJ.  More than that, I’m speaking there this year on my mathesis research!  You should totally come by if you’re anywhere in the mid-Atlantic US region during this weekend of October 4.  Not only will you get to meet me and the Omnimancers, but you’ll also get to meet a slew of other awesome people and magicians!

“the great book of saint cyprian pdf download” — You can do so for $10 off my Etsy!

“roman alphabet with english translation” — Technically, English already uses the Roman alphabet.  We use the same letters, generally speaking, as the Romans did for Latin, and have for at least 2500 years or so.  We’ve developed a few extra letters since then (J which is a variant of I, and U and W which are variants of V), and other languages written with the Roman script have developed others (like Nordic and Germanic languages, which use Æsh, Þorn, Eð, Ƿynn, among others).  Still, for a comparison between how the Romans used the alphabet and how we English-speakers use it, compare their corresponding pages on Omniglot.

“greek god sigils” — The Greeks didn’t use sigils for their gods; they may have used special characters to represent the language of the gods or the barbarous words of magic, but they didn’t have seals or sigils like how we developed them for the angels.  The more traditional way is to use isopsephy, or Greek gematria, to reduce their name to a number and use that as an esoteric symbol for them, or you might use my Greek Sigil Wheel to make a sigil for them much as how the Golden Dawn uses their Rose Cross wheel for Hebrew sigils.

“venus conjuration to bind someone to love you in angel magic” — So, while I understand what you’re trying to say, the way this is phrased irks me.  Technically, Venus is not an angel, so you can’t directly use Venus in angelic magic.  Venus is either a Roman goddess or an astrological planet, magically speaking.  Depending on your mythology and theology, you might consider the goddess Venus as an angel or deity subservient to the One, but this is somewhat rude and a little brusque when approaching her.  Instead, you’d want to contact the angel presiding over the sphere of Venus, whose name is Haniel (in Cornelius Agrippa) or Anael (in Pietro d’Abano’s Heptameron).  That’d be the spirit you’d be conjuring.  Second, binding someone to you in love magic does work, but logistically speaking, if you have to compel someone to stay with you, it’s probably not that great.  It’s like how the saying goes, “love is like a fart; if you have to force it, it’s probably shit”.  Rather, while Haniel (or Saint Cyprian, for that matter, since he’s known for love spells) can do love-bindings, you’d be better off smoothing things out so they’d willingly want to stay without the need for compulsion or impelling them, or using Venereal energies to put you in the right place where you’d find the truly right person for yourself.  But hey, if you know what you want, by all means, reach for it however you want.

“joseph lisiewski vs poke runyon” — I’d pay to see this cagematch.  If I recall correctly, Poke Runyon was in the Army, so if his radio show and magical lifestyle haven’t kept him too sedentary, I’d put my gold lamen on him (even if he can be delightfully crotchety).

“the greek way to bless your house from spirits” — So, an ancient Greek household would have three principle gods: Hestia (Lady of the Hearth), Zeus Ktesios (Zeus of the Property), and Hermes (protector from thieves).   What you’d do is have a small herm, a square pillar with a phallus on the shaft (heh) and a bust of the god on top and place it at the gate or entry to the property; this represents Hermes, and he’d watch out for thieves and robbers and keep them away; after all, he rules and leads them, so he can also lead them away from your house.  You’d have Hestia’s shrine set up at and as the hearth of the home, and a bit of every meal as well as a bit of every sacrifice made to any other god was always reserved for her both at the beginning and the last of the worship.  Zeus Ktesios watched over the property in general and its prosperity, but specifically over the pantry, and he’d have a special ktesios jar made as an offering to him as a matter of prosperity.  I really should get around to making a herm for my house and driveway one of these days, and I’ve already written about Hestia earlier this month; I haven’t gotten around to experimenting with Zeus Ktesios yet or ktesios jars, but I may in the future.  Beyond that, it helps to do a monthly cleansing ritual on the Noumenia or on the date of the new moon itself by sprinkling holy water around the house, lighting incense, and making offerings to one’s ancestors and household spirits besides Hermes, Hestia, and Zeus.  I keep thinking that there’s a ritual to get rid of unclean spirits by throwing beans and the like from the entry of the house outside into the street, but I may be conflating traditions here.  Generally speaking, if you have a good relationship with Hestia, Hermes, and Zeus, your house is basically going to be protected and blessed.

“isidore seville chaplet” — Chaplets, or a short prayer rule often done with a set of prayer beads, are an excellent devotion that the Catholic Christian tradition uses, and I’ve written up chaplets for the archangels Jehudiel, Barachiel, and Sealtiel as well as for Saint Cyprian of Antioch before.  However, not all saints and angels have their own chaplets, and there’s no set rule on how to pray them or make them; they’re basically personal devotions.  The most common form of chaplet is the “niner” chaplet, which consists of a medallion of the saint, three sets of three beads, and sometimes a crucifix; you pray the Lord’s Prayer, the Glory Be, and the Hail Mary on the three beads of each set in the honor of and seeking the intercession of whoever is on the medallion.  You can use this as a chaplet for Saint Isidore of Seville who, as far as I know, doesn’t have a specific chaplet form for himself.  I may get around to writing one up one of these days, however, since he’s the patron saint of the Internet and is pretty important in most of our modern lives.

“how big is the magical circle to be draw by trithemius” — Interestingly enough, Trithemius (really, Francis Barrett, since this ritual historically wasn’t likely to have been written by the pre-Agrippan Christian abbot) doesn’t specify how big the magic circle should be.  He specifies that the Liber Spirituum (Book of Spirits) must be about seven inches long, and that the crystal ball should be about an inch and a half in diameter, but those are the only concrete sizes he offers.  Presumably, the magic circle should be large enough to comfortably fit two people, one to conjure and one to scry, though I’ve only needed space enough for the altar and myself.  Thus, a circle about 6′ in diameter should be made at minimum if you’re including the altar in your circle, like I do under Fr. Rufus Opus’ instruction; alternatively, if you’re like Fr. Ashen, you might want the altar outside of the circle, in which case you don’t need as big a circle.  The most well-known size of circle is that from the Lemegeton Goetia, which specifies a circle 18′ in diameter, which is huge.  The rule of thumb I’d go by is, so long as you have enough space to expand your arms without breaking the circle and as long as you have enough space to hold all the gear you need, you have a big enough circle.

“big grids penis image” — …I don’t even.  Like, what, are you looking for low-resolution pictures of penis?  Do you have a video compression fetish?

“saint cyprian nine days novena” — Yes, there are novenas for this good saint (as I’m sure many of us are now aware, now that the season of Saint Cyprian is done), and you can find a collection of them in my Vademecum Cypriani ebook, which you can buy off Etsy for US$9.00.  Just a note, however: traditional practice says that, when you’re timing a novena to a saint’s feast day, you normally coincide the final day of the novena with the feast day itself.  The process is a little different for Saint Cyprian, since people culturally do his novenas on the nine days before and not including his feast day (the Days of the Cyprians, the nine days between the Feast of Saint Cyprian of Carthage and the Feast of Saint Cyprian of Antioch).  Generally, time the final day to the feast day itself.  However, both of these rules are superseded by the more important rule of novena timing: whenever you need to do one.

“st cipriani evil saint magic” — I detest the notion that the saints can do “evil magic”.  They’re saints; by definition, they’re holy, and what’s holy is not evil.  That said, depending on how you ask, they might be more lenient to granting certain favors.  I mean, some of the saints are morally flexible.  Some are so morally flexible as to be part of a philosophical Cirque du Soleil.  After all, when you have the power of God to intercede with, theodicy becomes less a problem to puzzle out and more a resource to exploit for profit/prophet.

“hours and days for conjuring oriens” — Oriens is commonly known as a demonic, daemonic, or hellish king of spirits in the East (his name means “East” in Latin), and Cornelius Agrippa mentions him in his Scale of Four as a prince of spirits associated with Fire under the archangelic king Michael (book II, chapter 7).  Since Oriens is a sublunar spirit, planetary days and hours don’t need to be used for him, though since he’s associated with Michael who also happens to be the angel of the Sun, you might consider days and hours of the Sun for him.  Beyond that, though, I don’t think there are any special times associated with this spirit beyond what you might need for other works involving him (cf. the moon/invocation query above).

“enochian angels seals, digital-ambler.com” — You won’t find any of those on this site, I’m afraid.  Partially it’s because I have my hands full with so much other stuff, angelic and otherwise, but mostly it’s because Enochiana freaks me the fuck out.  I honestly can’t say why; it’s not the stories that people have told about furniture getting upended by Enochian angels (that’d actually be kinda awesome), or how people go crazy (they probably already were), or whatever.  Something about Enochiana just wigs me out and makes me uncomfortable, and I’m not sure why that is, nor do I particularly care to explore the reasons.

“can i use solomon seal drawing to summon spirits” — Absolutely not.  The Seal of Solomon is used to bind, constrain, and constrict spirits, like keeping them trapped in a prison.  You do not use it to summon them.

Alright.  Now that September is done and the Season of Saint Cyprian with it (though of course there’s always more Work to do), now I get a few days of rest before heading to Crucible this weekend.  Hope to see you there!