Since my self-initiation with Hermes, I’ve adopted something of a daily ritual practice that generally works with the forces I’ve been describing here.  It’s nothing too in-depth and nothing too difficult, but it does tie in a lot of both mathetic and grammatomantic practice (which is really what I was aiming for this whole time).  None of this is stuff that’s relegated to initiates of mathesis, either, and really anyone who’s interested can tap into this emerging current by engaging in a similar practice; ideally, I’d have anyone interested before initiation do a daily mathetic practice for some time well before I’d even consider initiating them to help them get adjusted to the forces and symbols of mathesis.  Still, a lot of this practice is stuff I’ve gone over before or at least mentioned, so it’s good to tie it all together into a coherent and cohesive practice.  Plus, it’s good for me to at least try out different things to do to see what works and what doesn’t, so that when I get around to teaching others this or writing a book or something, I can be more authoritative in what can help an initiate or seeker (or, to use my hypothetical school’s terms, the gnostai or hypognostai).

Now, I do a lot of ritual and magical work each day, so it’s interesting to see what exactly is mathetic in nature and what’s not; general awareness meditation, for instance, definitely helps with mathesis but itself isn’t mathetic, as is my routine energy work, but I don’t want to bring either of those into this discussion.  When it comes to mathetic practice, I do something like this each day, along with a rough minimum estimate of the time I spend on each and when:

1. Invocation of the Tetractys and Tetractean meditation (15 minutes first thing in the morning)
2. Meditation on the letter of the lunar date (15+ minutes in the morning)
3. Daily grammatomantic divination (5 minutes in the morning)
4. Offering to the god of the lunar date (optional, 5+ minutes preferably in the morning)
5. Invocation of Hermes for sleep and dreams (5 minutes just before going to bed)
6. Recollection of the day’s activities (5+ minutes when going to sleep)

So, let’s walk through each act of the day and when it’s done.

1.  Invocation of the Tetractys and Tetractean meditation.
This is something I was doing during my 10-day period of self-initiation, and Hermes has instructed me to maintain this practice.  Every day, usually in the early mornings, I pray the Invocation of the Tetractys and meditate on the Tetractys itself.  In doing this, I keep my practice focused on the overall symbolism, structure, and current of mathesis as it revolves around the Tetractys and the power of the numbers One through Ten, or the Monad through the Decad.  As I mentioned before, the Invocation itself is a specific prayer I’ve adapted from Pythagorean practice:

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!

As for the whole process of invocation and meditation, the process goes like this:

1. Brief breath awareness meditation to slow the breath and calm the mind.
2. Invocation of the Tetractys.
3. Clap ten times slowly, counting from one to ten as I clap.
4. Perform the Tetractys visualization meditation.
5. Brief breath awareness meditation to slow the breath and calm the mind.

2.  Meditation on the letter of the lunar date.
Like the ancient Greeks and most people before the widespread adoption of the Gregorian calendar, many people used the passage of the Moon around the Earth to time their months (and some people, like the Jews, Hindus, Chinese, and Muslims, still do this).  A lunar month has either 29 or 30 days, and each day of the lunar month can be ascribed its own Greek letter for divinatory and ritual purposes.  I described such a lunisolar grammatomantic calendar before,  and I’ve found it to be a tremendous help in my ritual practice generally and mathetically since I’ve developed it.  In a similar fashion to the symbols of the Mayan 20-day cycle calendar, every day of the lunar month can be given an overall “feeling” based on its associated Greek letter.  I meditate on the letter of the day, both in terms of phonological and symbolic nature of the letter.  The process I generally use is pretty straightforward and is a form of scrying or contemplation, though one could definitely experiment with using astral travel and trancework to do the same.  The meditation is similar to the Tetractean meditation, though since this usually comes right after the Tetractean visualization meditation, I’m already usually pretty calm and focused enough to jump right into the meditation.  But, if not, I start the whole process over:

1. Brief breath awareness meditation to slow the breath and calm the mind.
2. Intonation of the name of the letter, seeing the form of the letter clearly in my mind as a standalone image.
3. Various pronunciation techniques of the sound letter, feeling how the letter feels in my mouth and lungs, how the air passes through my mouth and nose, how the letter sounds when paired with other letters (vowels and consonants together), etc.
4. Another intonation of the name of the letter, seeing the form of the letter clearly in my mind, but this time emblazoned on a veil.
5. Contemplation of the symbolism of the letter by walking through the veil into the “world” of the letter, noting what images, scenes, powers, and spirits are associated with the letter.  Once this is done, I walk out from the world taking the same path I took to get to where I was and pass through the veil once more.
6. Another intonation of the name of the letter, seeing the form of the letter clearly in my mind as a standalone image, but this time “breathing in” the letter to harmonize my sphere with it.
7. Brief breath awareness meditation to slow the breath and calm the mind.

3.  Daily grammatomantic divination.
Yes, of course, grammatomancy.  People who follow me on Twitter or my page on Facebook know that, whenever possible, I make a Daily Grammatomancy post, where I do a random daily divination using grammatomancy.  Specifically, I invoke Apollo and Hermes, the gods of divination, and ask the query:  “For myself and for all who come in contact with my words, on this day, on this very day, how best should we mortals live our lives in accordance with the divine will of the immortal gods?”  The query is phrased so that it’s as general as possible as a kind of newspaper horoscope-esque forecast for my readers and subscribers, but it works, and people have commented before that the advice I give through the daily grammatomantic divination has hit the nail on the head, more often than not.  My descriptions are, of necessity, shorter on Twitter than on Facebook, but (here’s a secret) I tend to customize the Twitter forecast based on my overall intuition while my Facebook post is more generalized but also more generally in-depth; as a bonus for those who follow my page on Facebook, I also talk about the lunar date letter.  By doing this, I understand what’s expected of me in the world, and how to respond to the different forces that the world presents me with every day.  If the lunar date letter meditation helps me understand what’s going on in the world around me based on the lunar date, then the daily grammatomantic divination helps me understand how best I’m to respond to it and act with those forces.  And, if you’re unaware of the divination method of grammatomancy, then you should totally buy my ebook on the subject from my Etsy, because a lot of mathesis is built up on the occult symbolism of the letters and I’ve already written at length about it in there.  Besides, while my Daily Grammatomancy posts can help, doing a daily divination with this system can help you specifically instead of being part of my general audience (awesome though you are).

4.  Offering to the god of the lunar date.
Based on the letter of the lunar date, I’ve also developed a method to arrange my offering rituals and worship of the Greek gods as well as a bevy of other spirits based on the lunar calendar; I’ve written about my lunar grammatomantic ritual calendar before, too, though I’ve refined the associations of each letter/day with the gods much since then.  The idea is that, as part of the symbolism of each letter in grammatomancy, we can ascribe a particular god or a set of gods to each letter based on their stoicheia (elemental/planetary/zodiacal force).  So, for example, if the day is ruled by Gamma, and we know that Gamma is associated with Taurus and Taurus with Aphrodite, then Aphrodite should be honored on the day of Gamma.  Now, I don’t make offerings to all the gods, though it certainly wouldn’t hurt; lighting a simple tealight and an invocation to honor the god of the day would probably be a good practice generally.  However, I do work closely with several gods, including Hermes (duh), Aphrodite, and Hephaistos, and it’s on the days ascribed to them that I break out the incense and wine and make a good offering to them, including praying their associated Orphic and (short) Homeric hymns, and generally spending time with them and asking for their blessing or doing work with them specifically.  In general, it’s best to do offerings to the gods in the morning at sunrise, though some gods prefer other times like midnight or noon, and generally my schedule isn’t flexible enough to allow for that, so I make offerings at some point in the day of the god.  As for the purpose of this practice, although not required, it’s good to get in good with all the gods above and below and develop good relationships with them.  Piety is a virtue for its own sake, and by living in accordance with the gods (as indicated by the lunar grammatomantic date and daily grammatomantic divination) and honoring the gods, we become closer to them, earn their blessing, and generally live better lives by and because of them.

5.  Invocation of Hermes for sleep and dreams.
This is another thing Hermes has instructed me to do, but unlike the rest of the daily activities, this is to be done just before retiring to bed for the night.  Just before bed, I go before Hermes’ shrine and invoke his darker, nighttime aspects of Hypnophoros and Oneirodōtēs, Sleep-bringer and Dream-giver, since these are jobs that are ascribed to him and, specifically, his caduceus.  Dream work, eventually, is going to be more important for me, which kinda sucks since my dream skills (recall, lucid dreaming, etc.) are shit.  However, I have noticed in the past that by going before him before sleep (and getting a decent amount of sleep, mind you, at least six hours) greatly increases the chance of vivid and remembered dreams.  To that end, Hermes has instructed me to approach him every night before going to bed as a way to formally close the day.  I take this time to touch base with Hermes, get out any urgent matters from my heart and mind to him, and perhaps ask for a specific omen in my dreams if he’s feeling gracious enough to grant me one.  As I rise the next day, I spend a few moments before doing anything else reviewing my dreams, whatever I can remember.  One can pray the Orphic Hymn to Terrestrial Mercury (Hermes Chthonios), which I usually do, but I also fine-tune my prayer with the following:

Hail, Hermēs Hypnophoros, you who bring sleep to weary eyes!
As I lie down, Hermēs, close my eyes with your wand and send me sweet sleep,
that I may rest tonight for a new day tomorrow, for this day is done.
Give me deep sleep, Hermēs, that my body may be rested and healed from this day’s work!
Help me preserve myself in darkness by ever walking in waking light, even in sleep, even in rest, even in healing.

Hail, Hermēs Oneirodōtēs, you who send dreams upon those who sleep!
As I sleep tonight, Hermēs, open my mind with your wand and send me dreams,
dreams that I remember, dreams that I know to be dreams as messages of the gods.
Give me true dreams for Truth, Hermēs; do not give me lies for lies, nor lies for truth, nor truth for lies, but truth for truth!
Help me come to understand the truth, reality, and power of the world, of the cosmos, of the universe, and of the gods.

Hail, Hermēs Nyktios! Hail, Hermēs Hypnophoros! Hail, Hermēs Oneirodōtēs! Hail, Hermēs Diaktoros!

6.  Recollection of the day’s activities.
Once I lie down in bed, I do something I picked up from John Michael Greer’s Learning Ritual Magic, but which was also done in a similar way by the old Pythagoreans themselves as well as other philosophers.  What I do is I walk through each event and action of the day, starting with going to bed and going backwards to the beginning of the day.  That way, I go from the most recent to the most distant memories of the day, walking them over and chewing on them to review my actions, whether I did things I was supposed to do, didn’t do things I was supposed to do, did things I wasn’t supposed to do, or didn’t do things I wasn’t supposed to do.  The same goes for things said or not said, thought or not thought, and the like.  Not only does this help out one’s memory skills, but it also plants the seed in the mind at a vulnerable time (drifting off to sleep) to improve one’s physical and mental actions in the future.  Generally, I tend to fall asleep well before I get to the beginning of the day, but according to JMG, the mind will keep going on its own; I don’t know about that, since I sometimes get distracted on tangential thoughts when I get to the threshold of sleep, but maybe that’s true.  If, however, your memory is so good that you get to the beginning of the day after everything else and you haven’t gotten to sleep yet, then return again to your dreams of the previous night (since, after all, they were things that happened, too!) and keep going from there to the previous day’s events, and so forth, until you get to sleep.

Now, this is just how my daily mathesis practice is shaping up to be; there’s nothing to say that I won’t add stuff to it in the future as I get deeper into this current, especially as I start working with the sphairai and odoi of the Tetractys.  For instance, it was also a habit of the Pythagoreans to take daily walks in the morning, and while I’d love to do that, I live out in the country where there are no sidewalks nor parks, just roads and fields in which I’d probably arouse suspicion by walking around in at 5 a.m. from the farmers; to substitute this, I might just do some light aerobic exercise, tai chi, yoga, or aikido katas to get the blood flowing and to wake up the body and mind.  Other magical practices often include a daily banishing ritual or energy work exercise, and I do plan on writing a mathetic version of both, but those are a little advanced while all the above is basic enough for anyone to pick up and start applying immediately.  Once I get to more magical and theurgical practices of mathesis, I’ll probably exchange the daily offering of the gods for something a little more personal and profound, perhaps expanding the daily meditation of the letter with a brief pathworking exercise, and so forth.  We’ll cross that bridge once we get there.

The last post described a daily practice for people interested in working with mathesis, and how I use it for getting myself in line with the entities and powers present within this system: a meditation on the Tetractys, a meditation on the Greek letter of the day of the lunar month, a grammatomantic divination to plan my day, an offering to the god of the day of the lunar month, a pre-bed invocation of Hermes Oneirodotes for dreams, and a recollection of the day’s events as I go off to sleep.  It’s all fairly simple and I described the method of each, except for one: the offering to the god of the day.  I realize that not everyone has the same offering procedure: some go all-out with the gods with wine and food and the like, some make a quick prayer under their breath as they leave their house for the day, and some fall in-between the two extremes.  I never really offered a method of offering to the gods, so I want to talk about what I do as a template for other mathetai.

While it’d be nice to make awesome offerings to all the gods, that’s pretty much going to be impossible; there were effectively an infinite number of gods back in the old days (not like that’s changed since), with regional rituals differing from polis to polis as they differed from town to town, neighborhood to neighborhood, or even household to household.  Some people hold this god in high esteem, some that god, while nobody seems to really rever this other god even though they have a high mythological stature.  It’s important to honor all the gods, but honoring the gods doesn’t necessarily mean to make offerings or vows to them all; all deities should be honored, but not all deities should be worked with.  We can make a personalized practice and roster of gods by limiting ourselves to the deities have an important role in our lives: major gods relate significantly to our lives’ works, acts, jobs, and activities, while minor gods don’t have much of an active role.  For instance, as a software engineer, Hermes has a huge role in my livelihood, while Demeter doesn’t since I’m not much of a gardener, planter, or farmer.  Zeus as king of the gods has a universal all-ruling aspect to him, but besides honoring him as cosmic king, I’m not much of a prince or ruler besides myself.

Just to clarify: the terminology here of “minor” does not imply a generally unimportant or localized role, like how river gods or gods of a particular grove or street corner might be consider minor.  Rather, “minor” only implies that one doesn’t have much to do with that god, like a software engineer with Demeter or a hippie pacifist with Ares.  When making an offering to a minor god, the minimum we need to do is an invocation of them to praise them for the general work they do in the world and that they continue to bless us, however indirectly, by the people who carry out their work, by their general blessing to make our lives better, and by their presence that we may come to know and honor them more in a better way.  “Major” gods, on the other hand, directly impact our ability to live and prosper in the world, and so we fall much closer to them than the “minor” gods.  Again, the minimum needed for them is prayer, but a much more personal prayer, asking for the blessing of the god as we carry out their work and that we may receive their blessing in the work we do, and by it to

So, how do we know which god to honor on which day?  We use the lunar grammatomantic ritual calendar I developed, where each day of the lunar month is associated with a particular letter of the Greek alphabet.  Each letter can be associated with a stoicheic force, and one or more of the gods can also be associated with a stoicheic force, and so we honor that god/those gods on the day of that letter that shares a stoicheic force with that god/those gods.  So how do we associate the letters with the gods?  Again, let’s use our threefold division of the letters into simple consonants, complex consonants, and vowels:

• The simple consonants are associated with the twelve signs of the Zodiac.  Cornelius Agrippa corresponds the zodiac signs with the Twelve Olympians (counting Hestia, not Dionysus) in book II, chapter 15.  His method seems a little haphazard, but it works.  Agrippa seems to be using a combination of assigning pairs of gods to opposing signs based on relationship (e.g. Apollo and Artemis, twins, to Gemini and Sagittarius) or pairs of gods to signs ruled by the same planet based on idea (e.g. Athena and Ares, gods of warfare, to the Martial signs Aries and Scorpio).  However, we can expand this list to include closely-associated deities with the Olympians, such as Asklepios with Apollo, Pan with Hermes, Nike with Athena, Eros with Aphrodite, and so forth.
• The complex consonants are associated with the four elements and the metaelement of Spirit.  Agrippa doesn’t assign these to the Olympian or other gods in his Three Books, although we can assume that the gods of these days directly pertain to the element of the day and, moreover, aren’t among the Olympians.  I’ve settled on giving the letter Psi, associated with the metaelement Spirit, to Dionysus, since he’s the outsider god, able to commingle with gods and men and travel in all places above and below.  Theta, associated with Earth, is given to any divinity of the Earth itself: Gaia, Rhea, and Kybele come to mind, but this also would include any flora or fauna spirits, the fae, gnomes, and other nature spirits of the land, mountains, or forests.  Xi, given to Water and generally falling on the day of the Full Moon, can be used to honor Okeanos, Thetis, or any divinity or spirits of the seas, rivers, or lakes, but I also give this to the underworld gods Hades and Persephone, since deep waters often have chthonic or subterrestrial associations.  Phi, associated with Air, I give to any spirits of the air and the mind, including the Muses and Graces.  Khi, associated with Fire, is given to any spirit of light, fire, the stars, or otherworldly spirits, but given that Khi falls near the end of the month, I also give this to the fiery underworld goddess Hekate.
• The vowels are associated with the seven planets, and although one could honor the Olympian associated with each planet (e.g. Ares for Mars) or the pair of Olympians associated with the planets by means of their signs (e.g. both Ares and Athena for Mars), I reserve these days for magical operations involving the planets.  Technically, the planets were considered either as the bodies of the Olympians or as titans in their own right, so I don’t really make offerings on these days so much as I call down the forces themselves.  Alternatively, we can associate the planets with the seven directions (north, south, east, west, up, down, beyond) with the different winds (Boreas, Notos, Apeliotes, etc.) or other guardians of the directions (Erbeth, Lerthexanax, Ablanathanalba, etc.) and honor them, too.

However, in our lunar grammatomantic calendar, we also have two other types of days: three days that use the obsolete letters of Digamma, Qoppa, and Sampi; and three days that have no letter at all.

• The days of obsolete letters are given to our ancestors, heroes, and blessed dead, spiritual entities who are lower than gods and were human but are no longer among the living.  These days have no stoicheic force, but the spirits that guide them are those that helped us become real in our lives; without our ancestors and blessed dead, we literally would not exist.  I generally divide up the spirits of the dead into three categories: Ancestors of Kin (blood-related and otherwise familial ancestors), Ancestors of Work (masters and teachers in one’s studies, profession, traditions, and lineages, both spiritual and mundane), and the Ancestors of the Great (culture and war heroes whose work impacts us today though not directly, as well as all the forgotten dead).  I honor the Ancestors of Kin on the day of Digamma, Ancestors of Work on the day of Qoppa, and the Ancestors of the Great on the day of Sampi.  However, this division is kinda artificial, and it does no harm to honor “the dead” generally on the obsolete letter days.
• The unlettered days have no offerings prescribed for them.  Moreover, without a letter or stoicheic force or spirit to guide or rule the day, these days are generally considered unlucky and unfit for most spiritual activity.  It’s better to focus on the world itself today and get one’s cleaning, chores, and purification done on these days.  Clean up altars and spiritual spaces, aerate the house, take a good long bath, and the like.

So, my overall ritual calendar (after a bit of fine-tuning) has come to look like this:

Now, while one could adapt this type of lunar grammatomantic calendar to other pantheons, such as the Norse or Egyptian pantheons, I’d question why you’d want to do that.  This is all based on the Greek alphabet, after all, which is tied up culturally and mythologically with the Greek gods.  Before you go saying “Well, Thor is a god of lightning, so he should be given the same day as Zeus or the planet Jupiter!”, you might want to ask Thor whether he’s okay with that.  Heck, even this type of calendar isn’t traditional at all in Hellenismos or attested Greek cultural practice (at least in Ionia, Hermes was honored on the fourth day of the month, not the seventh), but my gods don’t seem to mind it one whit, and they’ve given me the go-ahead to use it in a cohesive system with the rest of my work.  Be respectful when trying to squish systems together.

So, say you’re good to go now with the ritual offering times for the gods based on grammatomancy and the lunar calendar.  Now what?  Now you need to make offerings to the gods, bearing in mind the major/minor distinction from above.  In general, we can use the same format for the individual gods, groups of gods or spirits, ancestors, and planets, although the fine details will differ from each to each.  The general format of offering I do follows the same course:

1. Preparation of ritual space.  It’s important to maintain a proper sacred ritual space to invite the god into, and this usually consists of sprinkling a small amount of holy water or khernips (ancient Hellenic lustral water), around the area chanting “απο απο κακοδαιμονες” (“begone, begone evil spirits”).  I also make sure the lighting is right, not too bright but usually not completely dark, and I always make sure there exists an open window or doorway leading outside for the god to come into the room; of course, if you’re doing this outside, there’s no need for that last part.  Also, always involve Hermes into your worship; after all, he is the messenger of the gods and goes between the gods and mortals, and helps to ferry our prayers and offerings to them, and their messages and blessings to us.  Call upon him as Hermes Odolysios, Hermes the Road-Opener, before calling upon the god properly.
2. Initial invocation of the god.  At this stage, I open up the ritual by singing the Homeric Hymn to the god (usually if there exists a short one), or some other personalized invocation to the god to invite them to the ritual space.  This sets the mood and formally announces to the gods that I’m calling upon them to receive my offering.  I also ask them to be present to accept the offerings and devotion that follow in a gesture of goodwill and grace.
3. Announcement of the officiant by name.  I announce myself fully so that the god knows who’s making offerings to them.  I declare myself by my full name, being a child of my parents called by their full names, and I also announce any magical or working names I may be using so that the god knows who I am openly and without deceit.
4. Dedication of offerings.  This is the part where I offer candles, incense, wine, oil, water, food, statues, or whatever I feel is good to give to the god.  For some of my shrines, I dedicate new altarpieces and nondisposable votive offerings during this point, but this is a once-in-a-while thing.  Usually, it’s just a liquid libation paired with at least one candle and one stick of incense.
5. Singing of hymns.  I usually dedicate the singing of a hymn, such as one of the Orphic Hymns, as part of the offerings being one of praise and honor, but sometimes this accompanies the offerings in fulfilling a different role, something that blends both the previous step of dedication and the next step of supplication together.
6. Supplication and meditation.  After I make my offerings, I request the blessing of the god in whatever senses I may need, or I may just sit back and chill in the presence of the god, meditating in their presence, conversing with them, learning from them, and the like.
7. Closure of the invocation.  I thank the god for their presence and for having accepting the offerings prepared for them, and I use the Roman closing supplication of “if anything was said improperly, if anything was done improperly, let it be as if it were done correctly” from the Iguvine Tablets.  I bid farewell to the god respectfully, bidding them to go or depart as they choose to but acknowledging that they will be honored again at a proper time.

Optionally, if you’re of a more traditional bent, you might also consider making a preliminary and concluding offering to Hestia.  In Hellenismos and ancient Greek reconstruction paganism, Hestia is given the first and final offering every time a god is made an offering to, since she’s both the first-born of Gaia and last-saved from Kronos (and, in a sense, last-born), and most altars of the gods doubled as hearths for the family.  I don’t do this, and you can read more about my own work with Hestia in an older blog post, but it’s something to consider.

Just a note: whenever possible, the prayers and invocations and whatever should be spoken aloud, at least loud enough for you to hear yourself clearly.  It was traditional practice in ancient Greece that prayers were meant to be spoken aloud, that even if the gods are, y’know, gods, they aren’t necessarily omniscient or mind-readers.  Be direct and clear with the gods, speak your mind (respectfully, of course).  Indeed, Sophocles in his tragedy Electra has Clytemnestra (not a good person, thus her actions in the play are against common practice) pray to Apollo (who is certainly not on her side) in silence and obscurity rather than being outspoken and direct as a way to suggest that such prayer is badly done:

Raise then, my handmaid, the offerings of many fruits, that I may uplift my prayers to this our king, for deliverance from my present fears. Lend now a gracious ear, O Pheobus our defender, to my words, though they be dark; for I speak not among friends, or is it meet to unfold my whole thought to the light, while she stands near me, lest with her malice and her garrulous cry she spread some rash rumour throughout the town: but hear me thus, since on this wise I must speak.

That vision which I saw last night in doubtful dreams—if it hath come for my good, grant, Lycean king, that it be fulfilled; but if for harm, then let it recoil upon my foes. And if any are plotting to hurl me by treachery from the high estate which now is mine, permit them not; rather vouchsafe that, still living thus unscathed, I may bear sway over the house of the Atreidae and this realm, sharing prosperous days with the friends who share them now, and with those of my children from whom no enmity or bitterness pursues me.

O Lycean Apollo, graciously hear these prayers, and grant them to us all, even as we ask! For the rest, though I be silent, I deem that thou, a god, must know it; all things, surely, are seen by the sons of Zeus.

Just…just speak your prayers aloud, please.  You don’t need your son killing you with the blessing of the god you’re invoking because you decided to sleep with another man and want to hide it from the gods and other people around you for the sake of saving face.

So, let’s give some examples of worship.  As might be guessed, Hermes is one of my “major” gods, being my patron generally as well as the patron of mathesis specifically, so I make offerings to him not just on his day of the lunar month but also lesser observances every Wednesday (the day of Mercury of the week), but let’s focus on what I do for his major offerings.  Note that I have a shrine set up for Hermes, but you may not need one; it’s up to you, but I make full use of my shrines for my gods whenever possible.  If you read closely into the following, you’ll catch snippets of the phrasing I use with the gods and can apply them as easily in your own offerings.

1. At sunrise (or whenever I can), I ritually prepare his shrine by sprinkling holy water around it, and I open the window in my temple room.  I set out four tealights anointed with a special kind of oil, and a stick each of frankincense, cinnamon, and sandalwood incense.  I pour out his offering bowl of wine and clean it out, if needed, and pour in fresh wine and a dallop or so of good quality olive oil.  I don a special orange silk scarf I use when doing my Hermaic priestly stuff, and I take up my ritual caduceus staff.  Since this is the offering to Hermes himself, I don’t really need to have him open the roads for his own reverence, though it can’t hurt if you so choose to do this.
2. I knock on the shrine four times (four being the number of Hermes) and I recite a personal prayer I wrote to Hermes as well as the shorter Homeric Hymn to Hermes (#18).  I call out for Hermes by several of his epithets and roles, and I call for his presence with me
3. I announce myself to Hermes as his priest, servant, dedicant, and devotee by my full name, my parents’ names, my magical names and mottoes, and that I have come to make him offerings in a spirit of love, thanks, honor, glory, and joy.
4. I dedicate the candles to him burning for his honor, glory, exaltation, enlightenment, and empowerment, asking that as the candles shine their light upon the room, so too may he shine his light on my paths and empower and enlighten me.  I dedicate the incense to him burning that it may fortify, sate, and cheer him, asking that as the incense rises to fill up the room, so too may he fill up my body, soul, spirit, and mind with his blessing and essence of his divinity and presence that I may be initiated deeper into his presence and mysteries.  I dedicate the wine mixed with oil to him that it may refresh, please, and satisfy him, asking that as the libation has been poured out to him, so too may he pour his spirit into my life that I may be blessed completely by him in all aspects.
5. I recite the Orphic Hymn to Hermes reverently, seeking that as my words ring out in the air, so too might they ring out throughout the entire world that all people may come to honor and revere Hermes.
6. I ask for the blessing of Hermes in my life: skill in my profession, guidance when traveling, sharpness in thought, swiftness in talk, protection in work, proficiency in Work, and that he help me communicate and commune with all the other gods, as well as leading me through the mysteries of mathesis as he and I are both able.  I ask him for his guidance on any specific matters that might come to mind, and I generally chat and enjoy time with him, meditating in his light and power.
7. I thank Hermes for his presence, for he has come as I called and aided me as I asked.  As he has come to receive these offerings, I bid him farewell; he can go as he will or stay as he will, but I leave him letting him know that he will always have a place of honor and respect in my life and in his shrine, and that if anything was done improperly, if anything was said improperly, let it be as if it were done and said properly.

Now, what about a “minor” god?  Let’s pick Demeter, the goddess of fields and produce of all plants, who although I rely upon for sustenance and survival, I don’t much deal with directly.  The format is overall the same but is much more pared-down; while an offering to a “major” god for me can last half an hour or more, a “minor” god’s offering can be as short as three or five minutes.

1. At sunrise (or whenever I can), I ritually prepare a clean, raised space in my temple room by sprinkling holy water around it, and I open the window in my temple room.  I don’t usually make offerings of light, incense, or libations to gods I don’t have much of a relationship with, though if I feel moved to do so, I’ll set out a tealight, a stick of generic temple incense, and a clean glass of pure water or wine without oil.  I knock on the altar once and call upon Hermes Odolysios to be present with me and to clear the path from me to Demeter and from Demeter to me so as to allow my prayer to be heard and my offering to be received.
2. I invoke the presence and blessing of Demeter to be with me in my life, to nurture me, and to help me honor her more fully as a human who relies upon the gods for his survival.
3. I announce myself by my full name as a child of my parents, and that I have come to make her offerings in a spirit of love, thanks, honor, glory, and joy.
4. I dedicate my praise to Demeter much as I would to Hermes, but without expectation or asking for reciprocal blessing; rather, I’m giving her offerings for her own sake and honor.
5. I recite the Orphic Hymn to Demeter reverently in the same way I would Hermes’.  If a particular god lacks a hymn, I generally praise them however I can with whatever comes to mind, or I just sit in contemplation of their presence singing a Hymn of Silence focused on them.  Even then, if a god does have a specific hymn, I often just get by with a Hymn of Silence and contemplation with them praising them in silence.
6. I ask for the blessing of Demeter generally, that she use her powers to help me in my life as I need them, and that I may come to be more aware of her work and her workers in the world that I may come to honor her more and more suitably.
7. I thank Demeter for her presence, for she has come as I called and aided me as I asked.  As she has come to receive these offerings, I bid her farewell; she can go as she will or stay as he will, but I leave her letting her know that I will honor her again, and that if anything was done improperly, if anything was said improperly, let it be as if it were done and said properly.

Overall, all my offerings go mostly the same, though the prayers and specific offerings might differ.  Some gods prefer food, and I like offering fresh apples to Aphrodite; some gods like something done to one of the things on their altar, like making a notch in a specific wooden figure every month.  My ancestors get separate glasses of wine, water, and rum, and I also pray the Chaplet for the Dead, sing the Mourner’s Kaddish, and meditate with them while I play the Eggun song used in Santeria.  I rarely make offerings to the planets themselves, instead using the Orphic Hymns for their respective Olympian figures while I work with the planetary angels from my Hermetic/Trithemian work to honor and invoke their presence and powers in my life.  While my calendar may seem full, I only make major offerings to a very small subset of them based on the work I do, and I generally pare down my offerings to the minor gods to just a quick acknowledgment on mornings I’m busy.  It’s the major gods I work with who get focused offerings, after all.

So what happens if you happen to miss a day of offerings?  Let’s say it’s the day of Kappa, where one honors Zeus, and you have Zeus as a major god in your personal practice.  You get up early to make offerings at sunrise, only to remember that you have extra work to do in the office and need to leave early to make it home as you normally would, so you say that you’ll make offerings to Zeus when you get home.  However, despite leaving early, your day has still more work than you expected, and on the way home there’s a nasty traffic accident blocking the roads that makes you even later getting home.  By the time you get home, it’s already your bedtime, so you simply didn’t have time to make offerings.  In this case, you could simply pare down the major offering to a minor one during a few moments of silence or peace in the office, or do it right before you make your nightly supplication for dreams from Hermes; if you can’t manage that, try making the offering the next day, or at least on the next day you’d honor the ancestors.  So long as you catch up on the ritual sometime by the following unlettered day, you should be good, but this doesn’t give you a blank check to procrastinate on making offerings.  Whenever you can, always make at least one minor offering a day to the god, gods, or spirits of the day, no matter how rushed or quick.  Always acknowledge the gods each and every day; that’s the important bit here.  If you can’t afford the time or materials to make a major offering, don’t, but always try to make some kind of invocation to the gods as an offering of praise and honor.

One of the takeaways from all of this is that, for the mathetai, Hermes becomes a major god for us all, uniting us as being his students; we’d be οι μαθεται του Ερμου, after all, the disciples of Hermes, so it’s proper to honor him as a major god for us in mathesis.  Beyond Hermes, however, I can make arguments for all the others gods being both major or minor depending on what you do in your life, but for the purposes of mathesis, Hermes takes a central focus.  If you already have a relationship with Hermes, consider bumping it up by making more offerings to him, at least once a month (either on the seventh day of the lunar grammatomantic month or the fourth day of the traditional Ionian lunar month), but maybe a “minor” god-type of offering to him as well every Wednesday as you can.

I use holy water a lot.  Like, a lot.  I use a shotglass’ worth to cleanse off after taking a shower, I spritz myself with a spraybottle of the stuff (sometimes mixed with Florida water) first thing in the morning before meditation and before doing any ritual, I spray it around the house to do a quick cleansing of the airs, I wash off votary gifts for my altars before giving them to the gods, I mix it into omieros and other washes to give it a good kick of holiness, I pour some into the wash for laundry; you name the purpose and I probably already use holy water for it.  About the only thing I don’t do is drink it, and even then, I’ve been known to sprinkle holy water onto large batches of food for parties to bless people with without their explicit knowing (I mean, since it’s just salt water, it’s not like it leaves much of a taste).  As a ritual tool and supply, holy water is a must-have for magicians.  As for obtaining it, you could get it any number of ways: getting it from a Catholic or Orthodox church, taking some home from the local shul’s mikvah or temple, or even making it yourself.  I make my own using a combination of Catholic, Orthodox, and Solomonic techniques, based in part on Fr. Rufus Opus’ directions from his Red Work courses.  After a lot of experimentation, I make mine with plenty of sea salt so that it can keep for a good long while, even with a dash of hyssop or basil in it so that it doesn’t get all moldy inside.

Now, while I use my Christian-Solomonic holy water for pretty much everything, even filling small wearable containers to act as an amulet for protection, its main use is that of purification and spiritual cleansing.  In that regard, another name for it would be “lustral water”, or water used for lustration.  Lustration, in ancient Roman and Greek practice, was a purification ceremony, often to remove one of evil spirits, miasma, negative influences, and the like, and the term survives in any kind of purge or forceful removal of negative or detracting forces in a group or organization.  Lustral water, on the other hand, is any water specifically blessed or consecrated in some way to aid one in spiritual lustration, and its use can be seen in most of the world’s religions and practices.  Sometimes the lustral water was taken from a holy river or spring, and sometimes the water had to be prayed over or otherwise ritually consecrated.  And, yes, the ancient Greeks and Mediterranean peoples had their own holy water variants, which I want to talk about today.

In ancient Greece, lustral water was called khernips (χερνιψ), and the use of khernips for lustration was called khernimma (χερνιμμα).  There are several guides and tutorials to making khernips on your own, including a YouTube video by the author of the Hellenic reconstructionist blog Baring the Aegis (who has written about khernips several times on her blog, since apparently this is a source of confusion for people in Hellenismos).  The general idea is that you need to combine the elements in it which makes it able to purify a person or a place, and the process is fairly simple to produce:

1. Procure an amount of clean water and fill a vessel, known as the χερνιβειον (khernibeion).  You might mix spring water with seawater, or just use clean tap water.
2. Light dried herbs, a stick of incense, or a torch above the water and quench it in the water.  The herb can be verbena or laurel or something else, depending on the sources I’ve seen so far.
3. Wash the hands with the water, then the face.  You might say “Χερνιπτομαι” (“Kherniptomai”), meaning “I wash with lustral water”.
4. Sprinkle the area and all participants in the ritual with the khernips, saying “Εκας εκας εστε βεβηλοι” (“Hekas hekas este bebēloi”), or “begone, begone ye profane!”.  Alternatively, you could say “Απο απο κακοδαιμονες” (“Apo apo kakodaimones”), or “begone, begone evil spirits!”.

That’s basically it; the simplicity beats out my Solomonic holy water by far, though there is a trade off.  I’ve noticed that my Solomonic holy water definitely keeps its charge over a long period of time; I usually only need to make a large batch once every season, and I’m good to go even using liberal amounts of it every day.  Khernips, on the other hand, wouldn’t last as long, and it’s suggested to make it every day or before every ritual as part of the preparation and setup.  I can definitely see the argument for that, even if one produces a sufficiently large enough batch just for one day’s use, though it’s certainly different from what I’m accustomed to.

So, why wash off with khernips at all?  Given the simplicity of it, it’s not about physical hygiene; a brief rinse of the hands and face in a communal basin does not make you sanitary, nor anyone else for that matter.  There’re two major thoughts on the subject, and both relate to miasma, spiritual pollution.  Spiritual pollution happens; it’s part of being mortal and living a human life on this orb we call the Earth.  Birth, death, sex, masturbation, murder, lying, breaking vows, and the like are a matter of fact for everyone, often every day, and these wear on us and collect like dust on a mirror.  The gods despise and loathe miasma, being alien to it, and will not accept offerings from one tainted by miasma (at best) and could actively harm or curse the tainted one (at worst).  The two theories are that either the miasma is an internal, mental thing and khernimma relaxes us and frees us from the cares, concerns, and fears of the world and puts us in the right state of mind to counter the gods; the other is that miasma is an external thing and is on us whether we feel good about ourselves or not.  I contend that both are at play, but miasma is definitely (and especially according to the historical record) an external thing; we incur miasma by living, end of story.   We have a naturally pure state, but so does a freshly-made clean mirror; just as the mirror collects dust over time, we collect miasma just by being in the world.  It’s a thing.  We clean off with khernips and we’re good to go.  It helps to meditate briefly on being purified and collected and calm for the ritual, but that comes as a matter of course after one cleans off the miasma that’s already collected.

I’ve been thinking of making a mathesis-specific ritual for making holy or lustral water because…well, while my Solomonic holy water certainly works, it feels a little weird to use it when it comes to mathesis, like a bit of cognitive dissonance pulling on the mind.  It works, definitely, but I decided to try something simpler and more ancient-y than my Renaissance-European-Christian-Solomonic method, and if possible to develop a specific ritual that fits within the parameters of mathesis for my practice.  The simple method above, using laurel leaves (since laurel was a plant associated with Apollo, the god par excellence of ritual purity), works quite nicely, but why not be a little more original than that?  Besides, we can tie in the creation of khernips and ablution into our daily practice, too, and since I’ve been discussing the use of holy water or lustral water without explicitly describing a method for mathetai to make the stuff, I may as well do so now.

Taking a cue from Elani at Baring the Aegis, I’ve decided to work making khernips into my daily routine, making enough to last me for one day.  I make and use khernips as preparation for invoking and meditating on the Tetractys, as well as using it just before approaching Hermes Oneirodotes as I begin my process of winding down the night for bed.  However, I make a sufficient amount in the morning (you don’t need much) to allow for another lustration in case of a mathetic ritual at some point during the day, as well as to allow enough for others to lustrate themselves in case anyone else participates.  To create a simple style of khernips to carry out the khernimma, you will need:

• One whole bay laurel leaf
• A small amount of salt, preferably sea or rock salt
• A measure of clean water (tap water works fine)
• A wide, shallow bowl, preferably white
• A lid or cover wide enough to cover the bowl
• A clean dishtowel, preferably white

Pour out the measure of water into the bowl, then sprinkle in a pinch of the salt.  Light the tip of the bay leaf until it’s on fire, then quench it into the water.  As you do this, say:

For the sake of purity and becoming pure, be purified!

If you have a large or high-quality bay leaf, set the bay leaf aside; otherwise, you can just drop the whole leaf into the water.  If you save the leaves, they can be reused until they’ve burned down enough to be disposed of, preferably outside.

Scoop up some water with the right hand and pour it on the palm of the left, holding the left hand above the bowl so that the water drains into the bowl, then pour some more water onto the back of the left hand, wiping the hand off from the wrist down to the fingertips.  Repeat the same process with the right hand, pouring water onto the palm and then the back with the left hand.  Then scoop up water with both hands and gently wipe them off with the khernips, again from the wrist down to the fingertips.  Scoop up some more water and wash the face from the top of the forehead down to under the chin.  With hands and face still moist, say:

In purity, I cleanse myself and free myself from defilement.

Dry off with the cloth, wiping the hands downward from the wrist to the fingertips and the face downward from the forehead to the chin.  As you wipe off your hands and face with the water and the cloth, let go of your worldly concerns, your cares outside the work to be done, your fears, and all the like.  You’re now purified and fit to approach the gods and the mysteries.

If you need to use the khernips to purify the area, which I recommend before beginning any ritual in an area where ritual is not normally done or has not been done for some time, dip the fingers of the right hand into the water and sprinkle it around the ritual area in a counterclockwise fashion four times, saying:

Begone, begone, you profane spirits, you evil spirits, begone, begone!

Dry the hand off once more with the cloth.  At this point, if there are other ritual participants present, they should wash their hands and face in the same manner as you did after the area has been purified.  Cover the khernibeion with the lid and set it aside in a high place until it can be used later that day again to wash the hands and face and, if necessary, the ritual area, being sure to cover the khernibeion afterwards.  Fold the towel loosely, placing the bay leaves within a fold of the towel, and lay it across the khernibeion lid.  At the end of the day before retiring, uncover the khernibeion and empty it outside, preferably on a patch of earth or grass, but if this is not possible, dumping it in the sink respectfully will do.  The khernibeion and the towel for drying off should be washed at least once a month, preferably on unlettered days of the month.

To be fair, the use of bay leaves specifically isn’t something required here.  What makes khernips khernips is the use of three elements: salt, water, and fire, perhaps to represent the three realms of Earth, Sea, and Sky, or perhaps the three of the four elements (the fourth, Air, being represented by the actual words spoken in lustration).  If using up bay leaves isn’t to your taste, you might experiment using a cotton ball soaked in grain alcohol or wine, or better yet, a tincture made with purifying herbs.  I’m experimenting with such a tincture (alcohol-based herbal solution) made from frankincense, bay laurel, hyssop, basil, and mint, soaked in grain alcohol with a small dash of wine and olive oil; I take a cotton ball on some forceps or long tweezers, briefly touch it in the tincture, light it on fire, quench it in the water, and boom.  The specific herbs used is icing on the cake at this point, I believe, so long as you have something on fire you can quench into the water.  What I’m using is a tincture of bay leaves, basil, hyssop, and frankincense that I dip a cotton ball in, ignite, and quench in the water; the fire is present, but the burning tincture of the herbs also gives the water extra purificatory punch.

All told, even though I’ve made my khernips ritual a little more complicated than Elani’s or other Hellenists’, it’s still far simpler than my Solomonic holy water, and much more in tune with the general feel of mathesis.  I wouldn’t push the use of khernips for a heavy purification or cleansing ritual except as a preliminary to loosen what really needs to be scoured or blasted away; for that, I’d still rely on something stronger, like my Solomonic holy water.  Still, for basic meditation and approaching the mysteries, this mathesis-specific lustral water is definitely a tool I plan on using in the future.  Not to the extent of my Solomonic water, perhaps, but definitely for mathetic rituals.  Speaking of, if we tie in the use of khernips into our daily practice, then I expect it’d look something like this:

1. Consecration of khernips and morning khernimma
2. Invocation of the Tetractys and Tetractean meditation
3. Meditation on the letter of the lunar date
4. Daily grammatomantic divination
5. Offering to the god of the lunar date
6. Evening khernimma and disposal of khernips
7. Invocation of Hermes for sleep and dreams
8. Recollection of the day’s activities

However, given the simplicity and speed of making khernips (though it should be done thoughtfully and slowly enough for it to count whenever possible), then it’s not like one’s burdens are substantially added to.  I was already in the habit of purifying myself with a spritz of holy water perhaps mixed with Florida water, even just washing my hands and face in a similar way with khernips; I’ve noticed that some gods candles wouldn’t light until after I had cleansed myself accordingly.  Using khernips instead of my Solomonic holy water is a much better match for them, anyway, so I recommend its use for mathetic work.  Eventually, I may change the short prayers said over the khernips to using Greek or using barbarous words of power, but to start with, simple mystical commands work fine.

Also, just one final note I’d like to tack on.  When I prepare a ritual bowl or vessel for something, like the khernibeion bowl for the khernipsI like to specially cleanse it out first.  It’s pretty simple, and it blasts everything out of it for use for pretty much anything, especially if it’s been used for another ritual and needs to be thoroughly “reset”:

1. Take off all stickers, gunk, markings, etc. as much as possible.  Rubbing alcohol is your friend here, just make sure not to damage the vessel itself.
2. Wipe it out with holy water (not khernips, but something stronger).
3. If the vessel is sturdy and heatproof enough (i.e. metal, ceramic, etc.), pour in a small amount of 99% grain alcohol or denatured alcohol and set it alight.  If it’s not heatproof or sturdy for that, light a cotton ball soaked in the stuff and wave it around inside the container with a pair of pincers.
4. Once the vessel cools down, turn it upside down and set a candle on top, then light it.  A tealight is fine, you don’t need anything bigger.
5. Once the candle goes out, the vessel is ready for ritual use and further consecration if needed.

It’s weird sitting here in this living room, full of clutter and boxes and antiques and the occasional errant Christmas decoration that was never put away two years ago.  We keep saying we’ll get it tidied up, but between me living 200 miles away and my sister busy with being a Tarot-reading poledancing camgirl, we haven’t.  Between a variety of memories, a vague sense of comfortable unease, and several mountains of candy and chocolates that’re amassed in one of the unused rooms, I don’t know whether I prefer or disprefer being here.

I’m staying at my mother’s.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my mom, and she’s basically the only one I ever actually call and talk to on the phone (and for someone who hates phonecalls, this is notable).  And, add to it, I hardly ever visit the place where I grew up, about 150 miles away as the bird flies.  While growing up with her could oft be a pain, our relationship markedly improved once I moved out for college.  I don’t see her that often anymore, but when I do it’s usually a combination of fun and stressful; she’s still my mother, after all.

This visit I’m paying to her is to help her out after a recent surgery she had, a hip replacement.  This is her second this year; the first one was on one hip, and this is on the other.  She needs someone to chill with and run a few errands during the day while she’s staying at her rehab center, and during the night I’m out wandering playing Ingress or just internetting idly at her place.  It’s not unbearable, though it is odd that it coincides with my birthday week and the Full Moon, and right after Crucible Convention 2014, and that my boyfriend isn’t with me.  I do get to hang with my sister aplenty, too, when she’s able, and I have plans with a few friends from high school and college.  Not too shabby a birthday week, I reckon.

Still, it’s weird.  I’m not one for travel generally, despite my Hermaic nature and despite that I’ve rarely not enjoyed a trip.  What’s probably most weird is that I’m currently away from my home, and with it my temple.  I have a small bedroom at my house set up to act as my temple, shrine, and altar room; the boyfriend and our housemate are okay with this, since they get the even-larger outside shed for their work.  I’m used to spending at least a little time each day in my temple for meditation, contemplation, prayer, jamming with the spirits, making offerings to the gods and saints, and the like.  And this week, I’m cut off by a lengthy distance from all that, and it’s somewhat jarring.  It’s kinda funny how much I’ve gotten used to having a whole temple all to myself within only a few months of living in my (still relatively new) place, and now that I’m without it temporarily how much my spiritual practice has changed and can still yet change.

To be fair, nothing I do strictly requires a temple.  For that matter, nothing I do strictly requires being in any one place; I carry my gods with me in my heart and in my mind, and occasionally in the jewelry that I wear.  All of my tools are relatively compact and can fit in a duffel bag with enough space leftover for a bottle of wine, and if I don’t have my tools with me, I have my own force and prayers to wield as wands and swords.  The statues and shrines I have set up for my gods and spirits are nice to have, but not strictly necessary if I have somewhere outside to pour out wine and water and oil.  I memorize my prayers, formulae, and rituals, and what I haven’t memorized I keep written down in a small journal that can fit in a cargo pants pocket.  If I have a lighter, a box of generic incense, a pack of tealights, a bottle of wine, a bottle of oil, and a bottle of water, I have more than what I need to make my offerings and prayers, and even then most of that isn’t necessary if I have time and a quiet space to pray.

Having a statue to dedicate to a spirit is nice.  Having a shrine to interface with a spirit is nicer.  Having an altar to do Work with spirits is even nicer than that.   Having a room to store shrines, altars, tools, and supplies is pretty damn nice.  Having your head on your shoulders is all you need, though, because without your presence, mindfulness, and mental effort, nothing else matters.  If all you have is a quiet room, or even a public room with a few minutes of quiet and maybe a little bit of privacy, you have all you need to be any level of spiritual, religious, occult, magical, or whatever.

All this is rather clear right now to me.  I used to have a little “shrine” on a bookcase with a few baubles, a mini-sand garden, and plants when I was in middle school and high school, but I never considered it anything special, nor was I doing Work back then (just reading about it with all the fascination of a middle-schooler).  That room has long since been taken over with extra Christmas presents, surplus clothes bought on discount, and giant bags of yarn, and I’m basically living in the living room while my mom’s at rehab.  As far as my spiritual needs are concerned, I have everything I need: a space to sit, time to myself, and all the privacy I could want.  As a bonus, I have a countertop to make offerings on, so even if I can’t pour wine out at my shrines, I can at least do it here.  And yes, I did bring along my carcanets and chaplets as my major tools plus a bottle of Florida water; the heavy work that requires full circles can wait, after all, but even if an emergency happened, I could still manage here just fine.

Even then, say I had nowhere to stay this week.  Say my mother’s house was either metaphorically or literally wrecked to the point where I didn’t even have the couch to sleep on or enough floor space to sit, and I had to live out of my car.  I’d be able to manage just fine, then, too; there’s this little thing called the astral temple, after all.  We all have access to it, and we all have our own astral temple, if not our own astral “country”, our own little space and neighborhood that exists all to ourselves.  Whether you access it in your dreams or through projection of one sort or another, you can get to it all the same.   The rules are a little different on the astral than they are here; there’s no limit to the things you can do, really, so long as you can think and command it so.  Any tool or drink you want, craft it from thought alone; call on any spirit, and they’ll appear before you in any form you ask (if they’re willing); any ambiance or setting you need, snap and the set changes immediately.  The more you work in the astral, the more you can do and the easier it gets to work there.  If all you have is a bed in a shared room to spend time in at night with someone else asleep, if you can slip into your astral temple, you really have pretty much all of magic at your disposal (give or take a few physical actions to ground out the purely-spiritual work).

You don’t often find me talking about astral temples or astral work generally because, generally speaking, I don’t do it.  I have my own temple in the physical world that I (almost always) have access to; what more could I need?  Well, I don’t strictly need a physical temple if I have an astral one, and even then, I don’t strictly need an astral temple, either, if I can pray and work anywhere.  Magicians have gotten by without astral temples far longer than the notion of them has existed.  Even priests and the faithful used to worship anywhere they could, regardless of the regalia or temples or community they might’ve been accustomed to; the real purpose of it all was the things you did as Work.  Even the ancient and huge temples of the Hellenes weren’t the focus of worship, but the tiny, almost insignificant altar just outside to the east.  Temples, devotional art, shrines, processions, tools, and the like all exist to support and facilitate the Work, but they themselves are not the Work.  They’re convenient.  That’s all.  They’re nice to have, but the Work does not require them.

Of course, I am taking this time to get my astral skills back up and running and dust out my astral temple.  I’ve been neglecting my astral presence and environment, after all, and I could do with a good banishing and touching up of the place.  Even if I don’t strictly need a temple space to do my Work and offerings, I am used to it, and even if all I have is a place in my head I can overlay with the place my body’s at, I’m good to go.  I’m used to the convenience of having a temple; it’s nice to be reminded that I don’t need one, and if all my wordy gaudy blinged-out shit isn’t needed, then none of you need it to do the Work, either.  They’re nice, but they’re not needed.

So, if you’re not Working yet, what’s your excuse?

To go along with our daily practices of meditation on the Tetractys, meditation on the letter of the day, daily divination, honoring the gods, and the like, I’ve considered also adding in a daily energy work ritual specifically tuned to mathesis.  I mean, it makes sense for mathetic work to round one out in many ways, especially as one prepares oneself to make the leap from Hypognostes to Gnostes, from simple magician getting acquainted with the forces of the world to a theurgist becoming powerful within and above the world.  I currently use a mish-mash of energy works put together, involving a form of the Qabbalistic Cross, the AL-KT banishing ritual, some PGM stuff, this and that; it’d be nice to have something more coherent that could fit nicer with mathesis, but that got me to thinking: how do we explain energy in mathetic terms, and moreover, what even is spiritual energy?

Energy in its basic scientific definition means a property of objects that can be transferred between them, such as motion, heat, electromagnetic radiation, and the like, but when we start talking about spiritual energy…well, I’ve never really seen a good definition of spiritual energy.  Everyone seems to vaguely know what it is, even though it wasn’t a word we used before two hundred years or so ago; the energy model of magic is a relative infant compared to the spiritual model, and we wouldn’t “charge” a talisman (like a cell phone) so much as we’d “ensoul” it (with a spirit or blessing of a spirit).  We might call those blessings or presence of a spirit a type of energy, but that doesn’t really account for other forms like qi/ki/chi or prana, nor does it reflect the energies of the elements or planets (unless you revert back to the spirit model of magic and consider the energies to be manifestations of the presence of the spirits of those elements and planets).  It gets real confusing real fast.

So, as we often like to do around these parts when we come across definition confusion, let’s go back to our etymological roots.  Energy comes from the Greek ενεργεια, “activity, action, operation”, ultimately from εν+εργον, or “at-work”.  The term was coined by Aristotle, and used in contrast to δυναμις, dynamis.  Dynamis has a variety of meanings, but Aristotle used it to refer to potentiality or power.  Dynamis here refers to the innate ability or tendency of something to change or act, something that is not yet real or accomplished but what could be real or accomplished.  Energeia, on the other hand, is the actual change or work something does when it pulls upon its dynamis; dynamis is anything that can happen, energeia is anything that is currently happening at a given point in time.  Energeia is the process of actualization of dynamis into something that exists, but it is not something that exists on its own.  As energeia emerges from or pulls upon dynamis, we develop what Aristotle called εντεληχια, or “being-at-an-end”, a continuous energeia that completely realizes the complete dynamis to result in a complete being.

So we have three terms we should inspect for a better understanding of energy from its older, original senses:

• Dynamis, the potency or potential something has to accomplish something
• Energeia, the realization of something’s potential
• Entelechia, the full realization of something’s potential which makes something what it is and which is the end result or perfection of something by its realization

One common example Aristotle and others gives is when Aristotle talks about motion, κινησις or kinesis, which is defined as the entelechia of dynamis of something as that something.  Consider a pile of building materials; they all have different potentials, different dynames, and one of those is that they can be built with; that which is buildable is present in the building materials as a dynamis.  The action of building is a kinesis or motion that had been potential or inherent within the building materials, so the energeia of the building materials is putting them into use to build as building materials.  Once the kinesis of building is complete, we have (say) a house, which was inherent in the original building materials as dynamis and is the persistent energeia of the building materials having been actualized into something built.

I think.

Anyway, so how does this all relate to spiritual energy?  Well, I’m not a big fan of the energetic model of magic, where things are accomplished spiritually by means of directing and manipulating subtle energies from one form to another or from one entity to another.  However, I do use a little bit of that idea in my spirit model that forms the basis of much of my understanding and magical theory; the action of a spirit or entity and how it works as an agent is what generally I mean by accomplishing spiritual work.  So, for example, when I consecrate a planetary talisman, I don’t charge it with the energy (in a modern sense) of that planet, as if the planet is some nuclear reactor emanating cosmic radiation that can be harnessed by a wand and some crazy words, which can then be directed like a flashlight or hose to change the energy or motion of other things.  Rather, I call upon the spirit of the planet to take residence within the talisman so that, by using the talisman, I have the spirit within it accomplish work for me.  When I want to make use of the element of Fire for, say, warming myself up, then my model gets a little hazy; I use a certain word and I focus on the element of Fire, and either the power of fire inherent within me comes up as spiritual energy manifesting “hot”, or I call upon the primal spirit of Fire to be present and, by its presence and activity, warm myself.  Ultimately, the end result is the same but the explanatory theory behind it differs in a few ways; whether we call magic the activity of spirits or manipulation of energy doesn’t matter so long as the Work gets done.

So where does that leave us?  Let’s take a high-level look at the Tetractys, first:

At the top, the Source of All, is the Monad, where nothing is actualized, only potential; the Monad is dynamis in its basest, rawest, most vague state, the dynamis of existence itself.  Nothing yet exists; there is neither Creator nor Creature (which is the Dyad), nor is there anything yet to exist.  This is the level before even the Unmoved Mover, because a Mover (energeia) can only exist if there’s something to move.  Thus, energeia is not a property of the Monad; it is a property of the Dyad and, by extension, all the other numbers.  Energeia is that which combines two Monads (individual potentialities) into a Dyad; just as building materials have the buildable as a dynamis but only realize the buildable by the energeia building, individual Monads have greater numbers as a dynamis but only realize them by the energeia of the connection between them.  The other numbers (Dyad, Triad, etc.) may be both energeiai and dynames in their own rights, but only the Monad is pure dynamis.  The other numbers are both potentials in their own right (since any number can be combined with another number as dynames by means of energeia to make a larger number) as well as energies (since they realize the power of the lesser numbers combined).

When we consider the Tetractys as sphairai with odoi between them, we can simplistically consider each sphaira to be a dynamis, and each odos linking the sphairai to be an energeia.  The dynamis, in this instance, is the possibility of the substance of the sphaira becoming something else (a number becoming another by means of addition or subtraction), and the odos the realization of the substance of the sphaira becoming something else (the process of addition or subtraction as applied to the number).  Each sphaira, however, with the exception of the Monad, is already a realization of the other numbers, and so contains within itself an energeia, but when viewed from the outside, each sphaira is “just” a dynamis.  While we are present within a particular sphaira, we explore what the dynamis is of that sphaira, but it’s on the odos that we actually realize the changes between the sphaira and the changes that we ourselves must go through to understand how those dynames can be effected.  The odoi cannot exist on their own; they can only exist as relationships, as processes, between the sphairai.  The Monad is pure dynamis, and the other sphairai may be both dynamis and energeia, but the odoi are pure energeiai.

While that’s all well and good for a theurgic and theoretical understanding of the framework of mathesis, how can this all be applied?  Well, like I said, this is where the difference between magical models becomes moot: whether you consider spiritual work to be accomplished from the activity of spiritual entities or the manipulation of spiritual substance doesn’t matter so long as the work gets done all the same.  However, we know that the Tetractys is the “root and the source of all eternal and eternally flowing creation”, that which “enforms gods and men”; all dynames and all energeiai are present within all of us, as they are within all other things.  However, how we effect the dynames within us as we live our lives is important; some of us never pull upon all our potentials.  That’s the distinction between the Gnosis and Agnosis schemata: by working and living on the Gnosis Schema, we are able to pull upon all our potentials and achieve what we might call our real entelechiai through the energeia of the zodiac, but most of us reside on the Agnosis Schema, where we’re limited to only a subset of the things we do and the things we can do.  It is only by exploring all our potentials that we obtain gnosis and, if we so choose, escape from domination by the forces in the cosmos.

In mathesis, we make use of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, each of which is associated with a particular force: the 12 zodiac signs, seven planets, four elements, and the quintessence of spirit.  Each of these letters is associated with an odos on the Tetractys that links two sphairai together.  Thus, each force is an energeia, a process that transforms or realizes a dynamis within ourselves.  By carefully selecting different energeia, we activate and realize different dynames within us, but in order to choose certain energeia, we have to be able to enact those processes, and without having been initiated into the Gnosis Schema (mathetically or otherwise), we simply don’t know how.  We normally live under the powers of the seven planets, four elements, and spirit; these are the forces we’re caught up in and which we are most familiar because they’re closest to us and have the most bearing on our lives.  It’s the forces of the zodiac, however, that really guide to our entelechiai, but they’re so distant and occluded by the other forces that we aren’t as familiar with them.  In order to access those zodiacal forces, we must first work our way through the elemental and planetary forces, understanding not only how they work but why, so that we can build upon them and ascend to the sphere of the fixed stars and, thus, to the energeia that link all ten of the sphairai of the Tetracts rather than those that link only six.

Contemplation of the letters, say by our means of daily meditation on the day of the letter, is one way by which we become accustomed to and aligned with the energeia of the letters and the force they represent; by contemplating and harmonizing with the letter and its force, we understand more and more the energeia it represents and what sorts of dynames it pulls upon.  When done regularly and cyclically, one may not need an energy ritual to align oneself with the forces because they’re already doing that by contemplation alone; the process may be made more mystical, such as by the use of chanting or vocalization to make the contemplation more like an invocation, but the result is the same.  However, this is done on a letter-by-letter, force-by-force, energeia-by-energeia basis, and for more complete ritual where one may wish to achieve a balance of forces, we need something more.

If I were to write a mathetic energy work ritual for regular practice, I’d write it so that it could be done in several stages, with different types of letters involved in the process.  If we tie this back into our distinction of Hypognostes/Gnostes practices, then we know that it’s the role of the Hypognostes to study and integrate the forces of the elements and planets to build upward to the zodiac, while it’s the role of the Gnostes to study and integrate the forces of the zodiac based on their footing with the elements and zodiac.  Assuming one keeps up their daily contemplation of the letters of the day, by the time one reaches the status of Gnostes and is initiated into the Gnosis Schema, they’ll have the understanding and ability (though not yet proficiency) in working with all the zodiacal forces, even if they have not yet made the theurgic exploration of those forces on the odoi of the Tetractys.  Thus, the Hypognostic energy work would focus on a maximum of 12 forces (elements and planets), but more likely four (4 elements), five (4 elements + 1 spirit), seven (7 planets), eight (7 + 1), or eleven (4 + 7) up to the maximum of twelve (4 + 7 + 1).  On the other hand, the Gnostic energy work all 24 (elements, planets, spirit, and zodiac).  As the mathetes successively works with more and more forces, they slowly introduce new forces while strengthening the ones the mathetes is already familiar with.

So while all this has been a lovely(?) discourse on my thoughts on what spiritual energy is and how we could/should use it theoretically, I haven’t really touched upon how that might be accomplished in a practical manner.  Like I said, I prefer to think of energy as the action or presence of spiritual entities, so rather than thinking of an energy ritual as channeling or directing specific forces in one’s sphere, it might be preferable to think of it as the invocation of spiritual entities to effect change within one’s sphere or the invocation of spiritual entities already present to induce motion within one’s sphere.  That latter interpretation is interesting, since it aligns with late Neoplatonic theories that the soul (ψυχη) is an energeia within the body that causes motion as it actualizes its own dynamis based on the perception of the body, the reason of the spirit, and the divine contemplation of the mind.  In that light, the notion of energy work takes on a different meaning and purpose in mathesis.  Instead of energy work simply empowering the body or stabilizing it in the forces we work with, mathetic energy work has the goal of familiarizing ourselves with the processes we need to take to obtain gnosis.  It’s a work of spiritual alchemy, preparing ourselves for purification and spiritual development by means of the forces of the cosmos, exercising our soul so that, when faced with the energeia we need to effect, we’ll be prepared to make the changes we need both internally (soul acting within itself) and externally (soul acting within the body).  It’s not about being able to channel certain forces into the world, but to practice the changes and processes those forces present to us.  Some of those forces we already use/effect on a day-to-day basis, perhaps unknowingly, but energy work brings them to the forefront of the mind so that we’re consciously aware of the changes those energeiai make so that, should we need to, we can undergo those processes again at the drop of a hat.

While we moderns are perhaps best accustomed to thinking of spiritual energy as we’d consider electrical current, flowing along certain conduits from an empowering source to charge an appliance, this isn’t perhaps the best way to think of it, especially in terms of theurgy.  Rather, consider that energy is a process of change that allows an inherent potential power within something to be effected and perfected, literally acted-upon and completely-done, so that we refine something into what it should be rather than what it is.  It’s not you simply channeling some vague force from source A to target B and then using B to do work for you; it’s you undergoing the work as well as being at work that transforms something into something better.  That is the goal of energy work; remember, it’s still Work.  In that light, we should consider what ways mathesis can apply Work to effect energy qua ενεργεια.

Put simply, mathesis is theurgy, literally “god-working”.  While this can mean several things, the sense I use it is in the sense of elevating oneself to the level of the gods and beyond to henosis, a mystical union with the Monad, the Source, the Good, the All, God, or whatever you want to call It.  The whole purpose of mathesis is to perfect the self both in body, soul, spirit, and mind, and in that sense it takes mathesis as one would a spoonful of medicine to encourage healing and health.  After all, in Agnosis we are trapped in a disease of ignorance, but it is by Gnosis that we begin the process of healing ourselves.  If we falter in Gnosis, we lapse back into Agnosis, much as one relapses into disease if one forgets to take their medicine or skips their physical therapy or exercise.  It’s hard, but it’s worth the effort.  The purpose of mathesis is seen in many Hermetic or Hermetic-related disciplines from the spiritual alchemy of the Rosicrucians to the theoretical kabbalah of the Jews, and to that end we have plenty of Work to do.

However, in order to engage in the practice of theurgy, we need to prepare ourselves for engaging with the gods and the forces of divinity.  This is no light task; while some people can just easily walk up to a temple and go “sup”, being on that casual level of entering into the presence of the gods is difficult.  Often enough, not only are we trapped in Agnosis, but we’re just simply too dirty to engage in their presence.  The gods, after all, hate miasma and flee it as we’d flee the plague, and we incur miasma in any number of ways.  Christians, similarly, have their notion of sin, which impedes the progress one makes to Christ and inhibits the spiritual medicine of the Eucharist.  In these traditions, as in many others, there’s a process of purification involved to prepare ourselves to walk more properly into the presence of the gods.  In the ancient Hellenic practice, one would lustrate themselves with khernips as well as living in a proper manner of piety as well as making the right sacrifices in the right way; in Christian practice, one would anoint themselves with holy water and holy oil, undergo confession and penance, and carry out good works in addition to partaking in the Eucharist.  Even the low-down dirty ATR I’m involved with has their purification and purging practices which need to be undergone before major initiations, if for nothing else than to prepare the body to receive something Bigger.

There’s a similar role that purification has in mathesis, as well.  During the ritual of initiation, one has to undergo the Mathetic Rule of Observance to help direct the body and mind to live in a proper way, and the ritual itself involves a cathartic freeing of the self from ignorance as well as purifying the scene with lustral water.  Add to it, one should always be spiritually washed before engaging in mathetic practices, hence the role of making and using khernips on a daily basis.  Even though the daily use of khernips helps raise our standards of spiritual hygiene and keeps us there, however, on occasion khernips simply isn’t going to be enough.  After all, sometimes a stain can be gotten rid with a cloth damp with water wiped once or twice, but sometimes it requires lye, bleach, and a lot more effort.  If we want to undergo the process of mathetic theurgy, then we need to make sure we’re in a suitable state at all times, or as often as we can, to engage with the forces of divinity, and if we’re in such a state that khernips itself doesn’t wash away our stains, then we need something stronger.

Thus, mathesis should have a heavy-duty purification ritual, something like a banishing ritual as used by magicians (e.g. the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram/Hexagram) and something like a healing ritual (e.g. the Christian Anointing of the Sick) as used by other religions.  The question is, how would we formulate such a purification ritual?  To have one purify themselves is possible, though it’s preferred to have one already pure to perform the purification.  Since there’s no Matheteion or association of Mathetai set up just yet, a self-purification will have to do for the time being for those of us who want to engage in mathesis.  The idea and reason for a self-purification is the same; much as we call upon Hermes as mystagogue when there’s no initiator into mathesis for a candidate, we need to call upon a god to act as καθαρτης (kathartēs, purifier) for us in the stead of a human priest or purifier.  For that, instead of turning to Hermes, we call upon his half-brother Apollo, the unparalleled god of purification and himself the god of καθαρσις (katharsis, purification or purgation of miasma), which is accomplished through the ritual of καθαρμος (katharmos, the ritual of purification).

The role of Apollo here is pretty much straightforward.  As a solar god, he shines his light and burns away the darkness, dispelling shadows as easily as he does lies; he illuminates and enlightens, not only with his solar chariot or oracles, but even spiritually so, as lies and deceit incur a kind of miasma on ourselves.  Plus, he’s the father of Asklepios, the god of healing and healer of gods, men, souls, and heroes; Asklepios takes care of the physical body, while Apollo takes care of the spiritual self, and both tie in together holistically to ensure a proper life and lifestyle.  Moreover, Apollo concerns himself with the health and well-being of humankind, while Asklepios concerns himself with the health and well-being of individual humans.    However, Apollo is notably connected with katharmos, especially caused by murder, because he himself underwent purification as a result of killing the Python at Delphi before he set up his oracle there and so that he could be pure enough to do so and to purify others as Apollo Katharsios.  The Pythian herself, all her priests, and all her supplicators purified themselves in a similar manner to Apollo, by bathing in a special spring and suffumigation with barley.

One of the more dramatic instances of Apollo’s concern with the well-being of humankind via purification is the role he plays for Orestes in Aeschylus’ triology Oresteia; there, Orestes kills his mother Clytemnestra who had killed his father and her husband Agamemnon who himself had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia.  Having incurred the miasma of killing his own blood (his own mother!), Orestes is pursued by the Furies to Delphi to be purified by Apollo, who himself had helped Orestes carry out the vendetta-driven matricide so as to finally put the generational curse of Pelops and Tantalus to rest.  By bringing peace back to House Atreides (yes, the same one in Frank Herbert’s Dune, no less, though there’s more drama going on there a few tens of thousands of years after this point in history), Apollo helps not only Orestes but also all of Greece by introducing, with Athena’s help, the jury trial.  A little convoluted, but that’s what you get for involving the Far-Shooter into things.

However, Apollo plays a special part in mathesis for us beyond having a significant mythologic role in Greek paganism.  Apollo, after all, is the half-brother of Hermes, and Hermes’ best friend after they made peace over the whole cow-stealing incident, and the two team up often enough in a godly bromance in many myths and practices.  However, looking at Apollo another way, we find that he’s claimed to be the father of Pythagoras of Samos himself, you know, the dude who founded Pythagoreanism, one of the core traditions that mathesis has.  And, as we all know, Pythagoras had a major spiritual hard-on for purification, issuing lots of vows and rules one should undertake to make sure they’re spiritually and mentally and physically fit enough for engaging in his philosophical and theurgic practices.  My own Mathetic Rule itself is based on his stuff, too, and helps one purify the body and mind slowly.  By calling on Apollo Katharsios in a ritual katharmos, however, we can further engage the purificatory practices of the god and of mathesis.

While I won’t yet release my ritual of mathetic katharmos, the idea is fairly straightforward.  First we undertake the Mathetic Rule of Observance for several days, at least one day but preferably four or ten depending on the level of miasma incurred, along with regular physical therapy or exercise to get the body working again in a proper way.  After this period, we take a special ritual bath; lacking water from the Castalia Spring at Delphi, we use a batch of khernips made especially for this purpose and in a slightly different way from our daily-use khernips, something that packs a powerful purgative and purificatory punch.  After undressing and physically cleaning ourselves off, this special khernips (as icy-cold as one can stand it) is poured over the body while prayers are said to Apollo Katharsios and while a special incense of bay laurel and other herbs and plants is burning to surround oneself.  After air-drying, one dresses in all white and spends some time in contemplation of their actions, especially those that incur miasma; this is sort of a devotional conversation-cum-introspection to dig deep as to why thekatharmos was needed in the first place and how one can live better so as to avoid the cause and need for it again.  Readings of the Delphic Maxims, Golden Verses of Pythagoras, and similar texts can have a calming and directive influence on the mind to inculcate a better life.  Based on the reason for miasma, a special offering might be made to Apollo to act as a type of payment, votary, or personal sacrifice so as to help one overcome the miasma fully both internally and externally.  In this way, we develop a holistic treatment of purification: physical fasting and hygiene, religious cleansing and purgation, and spiritual counseling and guidance.  Having a trained therapist or priest playing the role of kathartes in the stead of Apollo Katharsios would help, especially to offer one a confidential and objective opinion on things, though that’ll have to wait until there’re more trained mathetai to do so.

This katharmos ritual isn’t something to be undertaken lightly, and it operates in a different way than simple lustration with khernips (χερνιμμα, khernimma) or an energetic/spiritual banishing ritual .  Those latter two types of ritual wipe away the spiritual grime we accrue through our day-to-day actions, like dust on a mirror; we can’t help but incur miasma through our daily lives, though we’re naturally in a pure (ish) state that these rituals help us return to time and again.  These simple rituals, as well, can help one in getting rid of harmful or negative spirits that cling on for energy or emotions, and keep them safe from them for a time.  However, katharmos operates on a different level; there are things that make us so impure, so jarred, so off-balance that we can’t easily return to our natural state of purity through the normal means, or we have let our day-to-day minor miasmas congeal into something that dominates our lives and prevents us from taking the steps necessary on our own to help ourselves.  The fasting with the Mathetic Rule helps begin the process of change in the body, the cleaning of the body prepares the soul, the ritual bath purifies the spirit, and the counseling elevates the mind in a holistic manner that gives us a total reset in every level of our body.  The presence and blessing of Apollo Katharsios helps initiate these changes and sees them through, and while I wouldn’t consider this an energetic ritual, the changes made are such that the energies of the body (either in the vague sense of subtle forces or winds or in the sense of processes of change and action) are altered, redirected, and purified to resume working in a proper way.

Of course, by the same token, the katharmos ritual is pretty heavy-duty and not something one could do on a regular basis.  I mean, you could, but generally speaking it’s not needed unless you’re, like, murdering someone every week or your family is having a child every month. Mathetic katharmos is going to be a high-grade thing, several steps above the daily or pre-ritual khernimma.  As of right now, there’s little place for a middle ground between the two.  Either:

• You’re fit for ritual.
• You’re not fit yet but can become fit with khernimma.
• You’re not fit yet and khernimma won’t help without katharmos.

Khernimma is the general cleansing ritual for mathesis, not quite a banishing but accomplishing many of the same goals.  Sprinkling khernips around a room can do the banishing as well as cleanse other people, which in the majority of cases is all that’s needed to ritually prepare a space; however, just as katharmos accomplishes what khernimma cannot, perhaps a heavy-duty banishing or exorcism ritual for a space or place can be called for in the future.  This would perhaps fall under a different god’s jurisdiction, say Ares or Zeus, since it’s less that the area needs to be purified and more that it needs to be emptied of spiritual malignance; the area would be purified just fine if the spirits there would let it happen, but the spirits must be removed first.  Katharmos, then, deals with the person, while khernimma can be used for people and places; perhaps a ritual for εκβολη (ekbolē, throwing out/banishment) could be written in the future for dealing with places or even things.

While Apollo makes sense and is definitely useful in calling upon for katharmos, I’m wondering whether there’s a way or even a reason to mix Hermes into this.  At first glance, that wouldn’t fly; purification is definitely associated with Apollo and Delphi, and Hermes swore an oath to never go near the houses of Apollo.  Then again, we’re not necessarily involving ourselves with making a temple of Apollo, just calling on him for his help, and since our work is heavily influenced and guided by Hermes, he should have some hand in all this.  Although we do find the occasional votive offering given to Hermes in sacrifice for healing or helping one out from a tight spot, the vast majority of votive dedications are nothing related to this, more often connected to gymnastics, wrestling, marketing, and the like.  However, two things come to mind about Hermes that I picked up on from the Hermes/Mercury conference earlier this year: Hermes both gives speech and takes it away (mentioned on day one), and Hermes is the god of banter, cajoling, and “heart-cutting” words (day two).

• By giving his scepter to someone, Hermes bestows the power to speak; by taking it away, he takes away their ability to speak.  Hermes is the god of both speaking and silence, and has been known to silence or put to sleep any dangers to his travels and exploits so as to preserve himself.  Speech and travel are intimately connected in Hermes, as is knowledge and motive, and we have to experience the same as we travel along the Gnosis Schema.  If we fall off, our journey is stopped and we’d do best to shut up and stop getting ourselves into more trouble; the longer we hold onto that scepter of speech, the more we mislead ourselves, and the more evident it becomes that Hermes needs to take it back so we’re lead back to the path we should go on instead of the one we’ve found ourselves on.
• Hermes is the god most closely associated with hilarious, vulgar, obscene, and disturbing humor, all falling under the word κερτομον (kertomon, heart-cutting).  While we don’t need to go to the level of Hipponax, such humor points out cruelly and pointedly our flaws, our pretentions, our pride, and anything that makes us hilarious to others as well as to the gods themselves (and seeing a god laugh isn’t usually a sign of benevolent mirth).  Without paying attention to the heckling, groaning, and popcorn-tossing vulgarity of the gods, and especially Hermes, we sometimes get wrapped up in ourselves and either blithely ignore the miasma we’re incurring or puff ourselves up in overmodest wailing of how terrible we are.  We need to lighten up without making light of our situation, and the best way we can do that is by cutting to the heart of the matter and telling it how it is, often with a bit of humor.

To that end, this mathetic katharmos ritual can be done for anyone as a stand-alone ritual as they need it, but mathetai would need another ritual to be done afterward to ensure that they’re brought back spiritually and gnostically to the place they should be at, letting Hermes reorient them to the Path they should be on and keeping them from getting lost any longer.  At that point, the caduceus of speech and gnosis can be spiritually “returned” or renewed back to the mathetes, entrusting them once more with the authority to continue on the Gnosis Schema.  Of course, all this should be coupled with a good dose of hilarity and good-natured poking fun at yourself; the best medicine is laughter, they say, and Hermes can definitely pull that off as the god of heart-cutting wise-cracking and snarky comedy.  In addition to the kathartes who’d carry out the katharmos ritual, there should be someone else there to make sure things don’t get too serious or too out-of-hand with the purgation while, at the same time, pointing out objectively and offensively what it was they did and how easy (perhaps) it is to not fuck up.  By shedding a candid, common light on the situation, Hermes can also help us reorient ourselves through blunt and snarky comments, which helps to bring a bit of realism to our lives and to our situations in general.  After all, every tragedy play in ancient Greece was followed up by a hilarious and crude satyr play to lighten the mood and make sure the audience wouldn’t leave the festival sour and dour.  Likewise, the mathetes shouldn’t leave the ritual without being returned to good health, good life, and good humour; if the mathetes feels worse off or guilty for having needed and undergone katharmos, then the ritual wasn’t worth it or it was done badly.  Hermes Kertomios can help us laugh at ourselves while being cruelly instructive, and can help jeer us back into the Work we need to be doing.

Many magicians in many traditions hold crossroads to be sacred or magical spaces.  Think about it: a crossroads is where several paths meet and intersect each other.  At a crossroads, you’re able to go in any direction, not just along the same path you were taking to get there.  This can be a place of decision or of opportunity; the letter upsilon in Greek (Υ) was known as the “philosopher’s letter”, since it has the form of a fork in the road, which is also represented in the word “dilemma”, literally meaning “two ways to go”.  Hermes and Hekate were known to be deities of the crossroads, especially of four-way or three-way roads (quadrivium or trivium in Latin, respectively).  Exu, Eleggua, Legba, Lucero, Nkuyu, and the like are all African diasporic deities for the same thing.  Crossroads are places of opportunity, being able to go in any direction, but they’re also places of liminality, being between places entirely.  Consider the famous location “Four Corners”, a place where four large states in the US meet at a grand crossroads.  Closer to where I live, there’s a notable (and terrible) place called “Seven Corners” which is a seven-way (!) crossroads.  You can get the gist of where I’m going with this.

But we have lots of other places that can be considered liminal as well.  Anything that is used to transfer or lead us from one place to another without being in any one place itself can be considered a crossroads of sorts, and I had the idea recently that stairwells fulfill this function as well as any intersection of roads or hallways.  After all, in a stairwell, you’re able to go between different floors or levels, able to take one road or another that are superimposed atop each other.  We often consider the world to have four directions, or that we travel only along two axes, but we often neglect to remember that there’s a third dimension we live in as well.  Two roads can occupy the same X and Y coordinates, after all, but they may be going in opposite directions; being on either one, you’d never know about the other, but stairwells and floor interchanges make this possible.

I propose that stairwells can be used as a crossroads in magical practice, with pretty much the same ideas and powers as the usual crossroads would have.  However, the crucial difference is in directionality of the “crossroads”.  In a standard intersection of roads, one can go into any direction on this plane; in a stairwell, one can go onto any plane in the same direction.  It’s an interesting difference to note, and although the purposes for which one may choose to use a stairwell versus a crossroad may be a little different, the idea is the same.

Stairwells have always intrigued me.  Some of the prettiest hotels and office buildings with the most elaborate hallways and baroque elevators have the simplest, barest, most architecturally brutal stairwells I’ve ever seen.  In fact, I’ve always considered the quality of a building’s stairwell to be a mark of craftsmanship; how wide is it, what materials are used, what pipes and wires are exposed, what kind of lighting is present, and the like.  I’ve always had an affinity for these kinds of access structures, the dank and dirty, claustrophobic, gritty, often ignored tunnels and chambers and stairwells that actually set the structure for a building.  All multi-story buildings need stairwells, after all; elevators, escalators, and everything else is mere decoration.  Besides those who want to take the stairs for health, few people ever actually use stairwells except in emergencies and emergency drills.  I’ve always found them subtly exciting, like being in someplace I shouldn’t because nobody else goes there, a kind of pit-of-the-stomach adventurous nervousness, despite their commonality and prevalence, especially when you ascend or descend to a level of the stairwell that you know you don’t or shouldn’t have access to.

Note that I’m not talking about staircases here; while they fulfill the same purpose, staircases are often open, decorated, and part of the public part of a building, and they act more like a hallway between two (and only two) floors.  Escalators do the same thing, for that matter, and when an escalator breaks it devolves into a staircase; no big change there.  But stairwells are different from staircases.  Stairwells are towers within buildings, a small tunnel going vertically up and down that connects all floors of a building to the same room, the same trek; you’re going nowhere when it comes to the cardinal directions, and yet you’re still going somewhere when it comes to the sky and earth.  Throw in the natural spiral, quadrated or not, that stairwells must of necessity have, and you have cycles, patterns, and vortices that connect the different vertically-arranged planes of physical existence.

Elevators, too, are different from stairwells.  Sure, they both have the same purpose of ferrying one from one physical height to another, but there’s another crucial difference: you can’t get stuck in a stairwell, but if you’re stuck in an elevator, heavens help you.  If you’re stuck between floors, you’re SOL until the elevator comes back online or someone tries to yank you out.  You can’t get stuck in a stairwell unless all the exits are blocked off (which is unlikely in most cases), but elevators can stop at any point.  Plus, elevators literally box you in and while they ferry you from one floor to another, they don’t have the same power as crossroads; that’d belong more to the elevator shaft.  It’s like being in a car at a crossroads; yeah, the car can take you through the crossroads in any direction, but the car itself is not the crossroads.

The only problem is that a stairwell in a building is often like having a crossroads on an island: the amount of distance you can travel once you leave is confined.  With the island crossroads, you’re going to have to turn back once you hit the shore, and you’ll eventually hit the same crossroads again.  With the stairwell, you’re going to have to go back down if you went up or vice versa.  Likewise, if there’s only one crossroad on the island, or if there’s only one stairwell in a building, you’re going to be stuck with that one and only place.  Stairwells are symbols of liminality, but they’re constrained by the building they’re in.  However, within that building, the stairwell is golden, just as that one crossroads is golden within that island.  Work with what you got, after all; whether you’re traveling vertically or horizontally, so long as you’re in a place that connects to other places, you’re good to go.

So, the next time you want to work magic in your office building and your building distinctly lacks a four-way intersection of hallways, try heading to the nearest staircase and leaving something in a corner of a platform between floors.

As many of my readers and followers on Twitter and Facebook are aware, one of the most important things I craft for my personal practice are pieces of jewelry I wear in honor of the spirits or as talismans of particular forces.  This goes far beyond the lamens used in conjuration or Solomonic rings, but include what I’ve come to call carcanets, beaded necklaces and bracelets with colors, stones, and metals that resonate well with a particular spirit.  I started making them to have simple wearable talismans of planetary and elemental forces that wouldn’t attract too much attention or be too bulky to carry around, but I ended up making more for some of my gods and spirits, and then more for other people based on custom needs.  On Facebook, The Professor from the blog Traif Banquet noted that she’s seen me make many different types of carcanets and was interested in how I pick the colors and patterns for each, and how I consecrate them and use them in ritual work.  Of course, I was headed to a theme park that day to support the local LGBT community, so it wasn’t quite the time for such a discussion then and there, but I decided to oblige anyway and write a fuller explanation of what exactly I do.

So, what is a carcanet?  Physically speaking, a carcanet is ritual talismanic jewelry made from beads that sometimes incorporate precious and semi-precious stone or metal or wood or bone, sometimes religious items like saint medallions or crosses, and sometimes other items that is worn to derive the blessing, presence, and aid of a particular spiritual force or entity.  I make mine from artificial twine and seed beads and make them into necklaces and bracelets, though there’s nothing saying you have to use the same materials I do.  I use artificial twine because it’s sturdy and resistant to breaking, though elastic cord or leather can be useful too on occasion.  Each carcanet is attuned and consecrated to a particular force or spirit, and the colors, materials, and patterns on the carcanet indicate exactly what that attunement is and to whom or to what it’s consecrated by or under.

For instance, consider my Sash of Powers, something I made a while back for use in standard Western ceremonial work, which contains representations of all the forces used in Western ceremonial magic based on the Golden Dawn and Agrippan materia.  This is worn across one shoulder and drapes down to the opposite hip, since it’s far too long to wear as a necklace or bracelet.  Among other forces, the Sash of Powers contains the 24 forces that we use in mathesis and, for that matter, most of the Western mystery tradition, and the colors I use for this tend are those I tend to use in most of my work:

• Four elements: I use the system of flashing colors that the Golden Dawn instituted.  Thus, I use red (primary) and green (secondary) for Fire, yellow and purple for Air, and blue and orange for Water.  They didn’t really have flashing colors for Earth that I can find, instead using the “muddled” colors associated with the sephirah Malkuth (black, citrine, olive, russet), so instead I use black (primary) and white (secondary).
• Spirit: I’ve never really considered this an element proper (as my mathesis stuff shows), though it can be considered an element or a planet or any other force based on the need.  Because of this, it’s hard to give a color for pure Spirit; I tend to use pure white, clear, pearlescent, or rainbow for Spirit.  If we consider Spirit to be the realm of the fixed stars (i.e. Chokmah), then some combination of silver, clear grey, or light blue might work; if we consider it pure divinity (i.e. Kether), then white and clear would work.
• Seven planets: I use the system of Queen and King scales of the Golden Dawn, so black and crimson for Saturn, blue and purple for Jupiter, red and orange for Mars, and so forth.
• Twelve signs of the Zodiac: I never liked the scales of the Four Worlds the Golden Dawn uses for the paths of the Tree of Life, from which we can get  colors for the twelve Zodiac signs.  Instead, I use a combination of the Queen scale of the Golden Dawn for the ruling planet of the sign as well as the colors that Agrippa gives for the sign (book I, chapter 49).  Thus, as an example, consider Aries and Libra.  Agrippa gives white as the color for both these signs, while the corresponding Queen scale of the ruling planets are red for Aries ruled by Mars and green for Libra ruled by Venus.  Thus, Aries has red and white, and Libra has green and white as its colors.  I tend to differentiate the Agrippan zodiacal colors from the Queen scale planetary colors by using a slightly brighter, more reflective, or metallic variant (so a reflective clear red instead of a flat red), but it’s not necessary.

Of course, the Sash also has a few other things marked on it, including the 12 Banners of the Names of God and the 16 geomantic figures, but those aren’t forces, per se.  These are less colors to be used with forces and more representations of more complex things that can vary.  Geomantic figures, being ultimately related to the Earth, use white and black as the colors of the element of Earth (with a white bead noting an active line and a black bead a passive line in a geomantic figure); I used white, yellow-gold, black, and brown to represent the four letters of the Tetragrammaton put in their different permutations, but I’m not sure that it matters for this how or which colors to use.

Of course, I don’t make carcanets and the like for just pure forces.  The major focus of what I make nowadays is for individual spirits, gods, saints, and the like, and that’s where creativity and research really come into play.  Unfortunately, most of the Western tradition (especially books like the Lemegeton) focus on the use of certain kinds of metals or woods and less on colors than I’d like, so I have to branch out and be a little more innovative to figure out what colors go with what spirit.  However, the way I tend to settle on colors follows a pattern:

1. Traditions of the spirits takes precedence; if there’s a body of lore or worship built up around something, I’ll likely start with those colors, if not just use those colors.  For instance, it’s tradition that Saint Cyprian of Antioch’s colors are generally perceived to be black, purple, white, and red, so nearly all my Saint Cyprian gear has black, purple, and white on it (red I tend to reserve for specific workings or subsume it into purple, perhaps settling on a compromise of wine or dark red).  The archangels of Christianity often have their own color symbolism, especially in icons from the Orthodox tradition, so I might use the colors most commonly seen on their robes or in their icons, like light blue and pink for Sealtiel.
2. Association with the forces described above can play a role in deciding colors.  For instance, I work with Hephaistos, the blacksmith god of the Greeks, except there’s so little known about Hephaistos’ cult back in the day that I have no tradition to go on.  However, Agrippa in his scale of 12 (book II, chapter 15) helpfully gives an association between the 12 Olympian gods (including Hestia and excluding Dionysus) and the 12 signs of the Zodiac.  There, Hephaistos is associated with the zodiac sign of Libra, and my colors for Libra are white and green, so good colors to use for Hephaistos can include white and green, as well.
3. Asking the spirit themselves for colors they like can also work well.  This generally requires being in tune and in good standing with the spirit to get that kind of information about, and it might require divination or light trancework to get a good set of colors that works well, but overall asking the spirit themselves for what colors they like can be hugely helpful.  However, no two people may arrive at the same colors for the same spirit, based on their relationship with them.  For instance, my Hermes altar uses orange as the primary color (since I started off conflating the god Hermes with the planet Mercury, which isn’t too hard a leap to make), but my ritual necklace I have for him uses bone-white, brown, light blue, and gold beads based on a color scheme he gave me.
4. Syncretism of different traditions can be informative as well.  If it’s alright with the spirit, looking at other traditions not native to them can help me pick what colors to use.  Going back to Hephaistos, I asked if it was alright if I looked at another tradition with a huge repertoire of color symbolism: Santeria.  The elekes and collares of Santeria are color-coded necklaces that indicate which orisha one has received, and although the ATR I’m in (yes, I’m an initiate in one) doesn’t have colors of its own, our spirits in that ATR are happy with using the same colors as Santeria (since they’re basically cousins of each other, much as how Roman and Greek gods are mythological cousins).  In Santeria, the blacksmith god Ogun has the colors black and green, so with the permission of Hephaistos, I also use black and green for some of my works in conjunction with white and green derived from Hephaistos’ association with the zodiac sign of Libra.  This can be tricky, however, and you need people on both sides to agree that the use of another traditions’ colors is alright, especially if you happen to live in an area with a large number of that other tradition who might confuse you for one of them.

As a rule, I like to have at least two colors on the carcanet.  To be honest, this keeps the thing from being visually boring; I dislike having a single solid color unless it’s required for a spiritual purpose, kind of like the Santerian orisha Obatala having his eleke being pure white.  That said, most spirits tend to have a multitude of powers, fields, strengths, and things they rule over; the different colors I use reflect those different responsibilities and dominions.  Too many colors can be confusing, however; I usually stick between two and four colors per carcanet, but sometimes more if there’s a specific need for it or if the spirit itself is associated with having many colors.

Beyond the colors of beads themselves, most of my carcanets and the like often make use of precious and semi-precious stone and metal beads, and those are much better attested in the Western traditions generally.  Of course, color symbolism is important in picking these, too, as well as the specific resonances of the stones or metals or whatnot.  For instance, red stones tend to be ruled by Mars in general, though carnelian, ruby, and fire agate all have slightly different feels that may make them better for some forces or spirits instead of others.  The minerals and chemicals within the stones themselves, too, can be important, which can link them together with metals.  For instance, one of my favorite green stones is malachite, which contains a high amount of copper that gives it its bright green color.  Copper and green are both associated with Venus, which makes this an excellent Cytherean/Venereal stone suitable for the planetary force as well as the goddess Aphrodite.

Once I have the colors figured out, then it’s time to figure out the patterns.  The most straightforward and simple pattern, assuming two colors, is to alternate the colors of beads one by one (so red, black, red, black, red, black…).  Personally, I hate this system, and I try to stay away from it as much as I can.  I generally figure out patterns based on numbers sacred to the spirit.  For instance, Saint Cyprian’s sacred number is 9, so the patterns I use tend to involve 9 in some way; one such carcanet I made for him has nine black beads, three wine beads, one white bead, one clear bead, one white bead, and three more wine beads for a “set” of 18, or 2 × 9, and I’ll repeat this as many times as necessary to get a carcanet of suitable length.  My mathesis carcanet (yes, I even made one for that) has ten white beads followed by one gold bead, since 10 and 1 are sacred numbers in mathesis and Pythagoreanism.  My Venus carcanet has two sets of seven green beads separated by a tiger’s eye bead, two sets of seven gold beads separated by a green aventurine bead, and a set of 14 (2 × 7) beads that alternate green and gold.  Making the patterns can be tricky, but usually I have a good idea in my head before I launch into stringing the beads.  On occasion, I’ll decide a few sets into the carcanet that the pattern isn’t good and I’ll start over, but they’re generally close to what I had in mind.

Of course, crafting the carcanets and the like is only half the process; the other half is consecration.  Just like how the colors and patterns may change based on the purpose, the means of consecrating the carcanet will also change.  Generally speaking, however, consecration falls into two different methods.  Both methods first start off with ritually washing the carcanet off in holy water to cleanse and prepare it for future blessing, and both tend to involve anointing with oil and suffumigation in incense, but beyond that, they’re different:

• Force carcanet consecration: A carcanet that’s a talisman of a force (e.g. Water, Mercury, or Taurus) is consecrated by conjuring the angel associated with the force (e.g. Gabriel, Raphael or Asmodel, respectively) at an appropriate time, generally during an appropriate planetary day and hour or when the zodiac sign in question is rising or culminating during the waxing moon.  I’ll charge the angel in the appropriate godname and office to consecrate, sanctify, dedicate, bless, and empower the carcanet to serve for me a powerful talisman and connection and link to the force in question, that it may radiate the same force into my sphere that I may call upon and direct it at will and in my need.  I’ll suffumigate it in the incense burning for the conjuration and anoint it with an appropriate oil if desired and if I have one.  You know, the usual.  After the conjuration, I’ll set the carcanet on top of the lamen of the angel wrapped around a candle to continue and complete the charge of the carcanet.  Once the candle burns out, I’ll often (but not always) conjure the angel again and thank them for helping me consecrate the carcanet, charging them to seal the power into the carcanet and make it a powerful tool and instrument for my work.  This completes (and, usually, overdoes) the consecration.
• Spirit carcanet consecration: A carcanet that’s dedicated in the honor and blessing of a spirit, on the other hand, takes a slightly different route.  Instead of turning the carcanet into a simple talisman, it becomes more of a devotional offering to be worn in the honor and service of a particular spirit.  Yes, it still accomplishes the result of bringing the blessings of a particular force into my life, but this way it’s less that it’s being filled with a particular power or motion and more that it’s bringing the attention and blessings of a particular spirit.  In this way, I’ll go up to the spirit, make offerings to them at a time good or convenient for them, and formally dedicate the carcanet as an offering to them to be worn in their honor and devotion.  I’ll often anoint the carcanet in oil or their offering drink (wine or water, usually), drape the carcanet on the image or statue of the spirit or wrap it around a prepared candle, and I’ll ask that they consecrate, sanctify, dedicate, yada yada the carcanet to their own blessings and purpose.  After leaving the carcanet on their altar or shrine for a week, I’ll make another offering to them thanking them for the carcanet’s blessings and wear it during certain times to obtain their blessing and in their honor as a kind of votive action.

Now that I think about it, the methods for consecrating them for a force via an angelic conjuration and for a spirit by dedication aren’t that different; it’s just two variations of the same idea, really.  Plus, depending on the carcanet and spirit/force it’s consecrated under, I may maintain its power in different ways, sometimes by anointing it with oil or “feeding” it with other sundry liquids, sometimes by praying over it, sometimes by letting it sit out in sunlight or moonlight.  It all depends.  The carcanet is a general ritual tool that, even though the material basis looks the same being made out of twine and glass, its spiritual essence and use may vary wildly.

Speaking of, how are these things used?  It’s pretty simple: you wear them.  That’s it.  I’ll often say a short blessing or invocation of the spirit or force to which a carcanet is dedicated or consecrated under when I don one, and I’ll say a prayer of thanks and blessing when I remove one, but that’s about it.  Seed beads are often too small for my big fingers to manipulate, so I don’t bother with using them as prayer tools but rather as part of spiritual regalia, armor, and connection when I need it.  On occasion, I’ll make a chaplet or set of prayer beads large enough to be worn, and in those cases the carcanet doubles as a prayer instrument, but this is the exception and not the norm for me; such prayer carcanets tend to use stone and metal beads more than seed beads, so the way I make them tends to differ a little bit since my options are usually more limited.

And yes, if you’re interested, I do take custom commissions for carcanets and can make them to your specifications or based on my own interactions with the gods and spirits.  If you like, contact me or send me a message through my Etsy shop and we can hash something out.

Far be it from me, a ceremonial magician, to take something simple without introducing some complexity or confusion into it.

In continuing and reviewing my mathesis and Greek language-based mysticism research, there’s one modern book that’s invaluable to my studies: The Greek Qabalah (1999) by Kieren Barry.  Barry’s scholarship is excellent, and he wrote the book as a hybrid between pure academicism and applicability for occultists and magicians, so it’s highly accessible for most people but with plenty of inroads for deeper analysis.  Of course, I’d love to read Franz Dornseiff’s “Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie” (1925) since it has plenty more raw information, but that’s all in German, and alas, nope.  Anyway, Barry’s book is a good start, and it’s one of the original influences that led me to go against the “Alexandrian Tree of Life” and start over fresh.  From chapter 6 (emphasis mine)

On the evidence we have seen, it is plainly incorrect to state that there are only a few correspondences to the letters of the Greek alphabet along the lines of those found much later in the Hebrew Qabalah.*  It is also anachronistic, as well as completely pointless, to attempt to project Hebrew Qabalistic symbolism onto the Greek alphabet, or to imagine anything so historically impossible as an “Alexandrian Tree of Life,” as has been done.*…

* (48) See for example, S. Flowers, Hermetic Magic (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1995), a forgettable mixture of historical fact and personal fantasy.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I claim that when a scholar is throwing those kind of footnotes at you in an academic work, you prolly dun’ fucked up.  But I digress.

So, of course, Barry mentions the property of stoicheia in several parts as he begins to discuss the mystical associations of the letters with other well-known forces or powers in the cosmos; the seven planets are a given, as well as all the permutations and wing- or heart-shaped formations of letter triangles that are formed from having rows of letters with slowly increasing or decreasing numbers of letters in each line.  However, the system of stoicheia Barry shows is much different than the one I use when it comes to the association of letters with the planets and elements.  Not that it matters much to me; I’ve gotten used to my system, and I’ve gotten good results from using it, but just in case anyone wants to start a meaningless argument with me saying that my way isn’t the only way, lemme preempt that and discuss what Barry talks about.  First, if you’re forgetful or unclear on what my system of stoicheia is like, read more here.  I honestly don’t know how far back the system I uses goes, but it’s at least as old as Cornelius Agrippa (book I, chapter 74); if it’s not any older than this, at least I know it works and makes sense to me.

The Greek words for the five elements are ΓΗ (earth), ΥΔΩΡ (water), ΑΗΡ (air), ΠΥΡ (fire), and ΑΙΘΗΡ (rarefied air, ether, spirit).  Note that there are only five consonants used between all of these words: Γ (used only in γη), Δ (used only in υδωρ), Π (used only in πυρ), Θ (used only in αιθηρ), and Ρ (used in all except γη, but the only one used in αηρ).  Thus, we can associate each of these five consonants with the five elements:

• Gamma with Earth
• Delta with Water
• Rho with Air
• Pi with Fire
• Theta with Spirit

This method of assigning the letters to the elements, which I call the acronymic method (though this isn’t a true acronymic method), seems to have more truck in really old antique and classical systems than the phonologic method I use, which is based on the comparatively recent Cornelius Agrippa.  However, since the system of vowels connected to the seven planets remains the same in both the phonologic and acronymic systems, we can also complete this system of stoicheia by associating the other letters to the zodiac signs in the same way.  Thus, Beta in both the phonologic and acronymic methods is given to Aries, but in the phonologic system Taurus is given to Gamma (the next simple consonant), while Taurus is given to Zeta in the acronymic method (since Gamma is given to Earth, Delta to Water, and Epsilon to Mercury).

There’s also another method of stoicheia introduced by the classical Hellenic astrologer Vettius Valens, who associated the entire Greek alphabet to the 12 signs of the Zodiac.  This doesn’t assign letters to the planets or elements themselves, just the Zodiac, and since we have 24 letters and 12 signs, the associations are very straightforward: start with Alpha and Aries and continue on to Pisces associated with Mu, then Nu with Aries again until Omega with Pisces again.  This was used in a system of “onomatic astrology”, less astrology than numerology-like stoicheic interpretation of names, where yes/no divination on a matter involving multiple people can be performed based on how their names compare based on number and stoicheia.  Perhaps eventually I’ll get around to finding more about this, as there exist similar things at least as far back as the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM XII.351) and at least as recent as Christopher Cattan’s “The Geomancy”, but we’ll see.

So, if we compare these three systems of stoicheia (the full phonological stoicheia, full acronymic stoicheia, and zodiac-only stoicheia), we get the following system:

So, how does this impact my work with mathesis or Greek letter magic (grammatomageia as opposed to grammatomanteia)?  Well, not much.  It’s like the use of different house systems for astrology or different ways to assign the figures from the Shield Chart to the House Chart in geomancy; it’s just a different way of using the same tools and the same symbols.  While the system overlaps for 1/3 (8 of 24) of the Greek letters, the system is notably different.  But, if the only thing that really changes is what forces we associate them to, then the only thing that really changes is, maybe, the association of letters to the odoi of the Tetractys.  Remember, we assigned the letters to the paths based on their stoicheia.  The path of Taurus is still going to be the path of Taurus, the path of the Moon is still going to be the path of the Moon, and so forth; it’s just that, in my system, the path of Taurus is given the letter Beta, but in the acronymic stoicheic system, it’d be given the letter Zeta.  The letters alone change on the paths, as well as any tangential associations the paths receive based on the shapes and non-stoicheic associations of the letters; otherwise, the structure is pretty much solid.  Then again, like I said, I’ve gotten good results with my phonologic stoicheic system, so I see no reason to switch.

And no, I’m not going to redraw up that lettered Tetractys picture again for this.

As for Valens’ zodiac-only stoicheic system?  That’s almost neither here nor there; it’s geared for a different purpose, although it is one that’s interesting and bears further exploration.

One of the more common sets of search terms I get on my blog, for some reason, involves how to write Japanese words, characters, or kanji in English, or whether there’s a Japanese to English alphabet conversion.  I mean, there are ways to write Japanese using the Roman script (which is what the English alphabet actually is), but it’s not translation, and people are stupid and don’t understand the basics of writing things in different languages well.  Let me clarify some linguistic terms:

• Translation is the conversion of words with meaning from one spoken language to another.  For instance, to say the word “love” in Latin, you’d say “amor”, ερως in Greek, (“erōs”), and 愛 in Mandrain Chinese (pronounced “ài” with the voice falling slightly from a high level to a lower level).  The meaning is preserved although how it’s pronounced is not.
• Transcription is the conventional means by which one writes a spoken language in a graphical, non-spoken medium.  For instance, for English, we use a variant of the Roman script as conventional, while Japanese uses a mixture of hiragana and katakana (syllabic scripts) combined with kanji (Chinese characters).  I could write English using Devanagari, the writing system most commonly used in India to write, say, Hindi, and it’d be a way of transcribing spoken English, although only people who use Devanagari could read it.
• Transliteration is the conversion of written symbols from one writing system to another.  As opposed to translation, transliteration preserves the sound of a word while the meaning is not.  For instance, my name “polyphanes” in Roman script is written πολυφανης in Greek alphabet, ポリファニース in Japanese katakana, and полыфанис in Russian script.  The sound is preserved across each, although it has no meaning in any language but Greek (meaning “many appearances”).

It must be remembered that a writing system is not a language; a writing system is a means by which one transcribes a spoken language with a set of symbols that represent sounds or meaning, and a spoken language is a means by which one person orally communicates to another person.  However, the two are not the same; consider the status of Hebrew, German, and Yiddish.  “Hebrew” refers both to the spoken language used in Israel as well as the script used in, say, the Torah; “German” refers to both the spoken language used in Germany as well as a variant of the Roman script used to represent the same.  Yiddish, however, blends the two by using the writing system of Hebrew but the spoken language of German.  A German speaker can understand spoken Yiddish but could not read written Yiddish (because it’s written using the Hebrew script); a Hebrew speaker can not understand spoken Yiddish but can read written Yiddish aloud without understanding its meaning (because the Hebrew script is here transliterating German words that have no meaning in spoken Hebrew).  I gave an example about all this specifically with Japanese back in my January 2014 Search Term Shoot Back:

“japanese alphabet with english letters” — This is one thing I really don’t get; so many people have come to my blog looking for Japanese writing translated into English, when I’ve mentioned Japanese four times on my blog to date, and none were about transliterating Japanese into English.  First, Japanese does not use an alphabet; an alphabet is a system of writing that uses letters to indicate either consonants or vowels.  Japanese uses several writing systems, among them kanji (Chinese characters that are combinations of semantic, phonetic, and pictoral images drawn in a codified way) and the syllabaries hiragana and katakana.  A syllabary is a writing system that use letters to indicate syllables, often consonant-vowel combinations.  Thus, while English uses the two letters “k” and “i” to write the syllable “ki” (as in “key”), Japanese might use キ (in katakana), き (in hiragana), and any number of kanjifor the syllable depending on the context and meaning of the character; some might be 幾 (meaning “some” or “how many”), 氣 (meaning “energy” or “atmosphere”), 木 (meaning “tree”), 箕 (referring to the “winnowing basket” constellation in Chinese astrology), or any other number of kanji, all of which we would transliterate as “ki”.  So it’s not as easy as it sounds; not everything is an alphabet!

So why am I talking about writing systems and languages?  Because this is a fundamental distinction between writing systems and spoken languages, and it impacts mathesis and grammatomancy, and Greek letter mysticism and magic more generally, in an important way for many of us non-Hellenes.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the use of stoicheia is a valuable tool in mathesis and grammatomancy.  It’s like isopsephy, or Greek gematria, in a lot of ways, but instead of evaluating a word in Greek using number, we evaluate it using the forces of planets, zodiac signs, and elements.  For instance, if we wanted to use the Greek name ΜΑΡΙΑ, “Maria”, we’d say that it’s a mixture of the forces of Libra (Μ), Capricorn (Ρ), the Sun (Ι), and the Moon (Α), perhaps indicating a balance of masculine and feminine or receptive and active powers balanced through darkness turning into light.  It’s a useful tool, especially when interpreting barbarous words of power that are best or originally written in Greek, but we have a major stumbling block when we come to the use of non-Greek words and names that aren’t historically written in Greek.  After all, I only know of systems of stoicheia and isopsephy for Hebrew and Greek, and I generally distrust anything for the Roman script since it’s highly language-specific, yet most languages I work with tend to be written in Roman.  Thus, for me to get a meaning out of something normally written in Roman script or one of its descendants (English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, etc.), I need to find a way to transliterate a non-Greek word into Greek script.

Consider my first given name, Samuel.  Samuel is a Hebrew name, originally written שְׁמוּאֵל (ShMVAL) and pronounced something more like “shmūwehl” originally.  However, in Latin, it’s written SAMVEL, and pronounced “sahmwel” as in modern Spanish.  In Greek, however, the name is written Σαμουηλ, or Samouēl and pronounced “samūīl”.  Since my name is natively a Hebrew one, I find a good argument to use Hebrew gematria and stoicheia for analyzing it, but since I also have a correspondingly clear way to write it in Greek, I can just as easily use Greek stoicheia and isopsephy for it.  However, the problem is that the meaning of the name is not preserved; in Hebrew, depending on your interpretation, the name means “God has heard” or “Name of God”, while in Greek it’s just a string of letters that’s pronounced “samūīl”.  If we were to translate the name, we’d end up with either Θεοκουσος (“Theokousos”) or Θεονοματιος (“Theonomatios”); these are straightforward translations of the name, and while we preserve the literal meaning of the name, we end up with radically different spellings, pronunciations, isopsephies, and stoicheias because the pronunciation, and thus the spelling, have changed.  So we can either go with the conventional spelling of Σαμουηλ, or we can go with the translation (properly “calque”) of Θεοκουσος, though I’m inclined towards the former, since a name is what you’re called, and the literal meaning of a word is often occluded by the importance of pronunciation (cf. all the barbarous words we use, which we don’t know the meaning of but we pronounce and intone them all the same for great effect).

Worse yet, the problem with my name is simple compared to many others, because Samuel is an old name in a well-known and well-translated/well-transliterated text in Greek from Hebrew.  Other languages, such as Chinese or Russian or parts of Africa, have no standardized way to transcribe names or words from their languages into Greek; the closest you can get is what best approximates the sound of it, unless you want to go the way of calquing things, which…honestly, if someone called me Theokūsos, I’d never respond to it as I would Samuel, so calquing is basically right out.  For many names in English, it can be easy, since Greek and English tend to share many sounds; for some languages like Chinese, this can be exceptionally difficult, since Chinese has many sounds that Greek does not, and the Greek alphabet isn’t equipped to handle the sounds or structure of Chinese spoken language.  (Worse, there’s no official means to transcribe Chinese using Greek, as there is with Hanyu Pinyin for Roman script, though there are some unofficial means to go from Hanyu Pinyin into Greek.)

Meditation on names is important; I claim that you don’t know yourself or where you’re going if you don’t know your own name, either given at birth or chosen at will.  And since I’m a big fan of using Greek to meditate on as a sacred or mystical writing system, then I like meditating on Greek letters if at all possible so as to understand what’s in a name.  It’s just that getting names into Greek, if they’re not already in Greek, can be difficult, especially for people like my Brazilian, Chinese, or Malaysian readers, especially if the language-to-be-transliterated-from doesn’t share the same sounds as Greek does, or as what the Greek alphabet is meant for.  However, there are some exceptions, and generally speaking what I do is this:

• If the word is just a word and not normally used as a name or isn’t used as a name for a given entity, like discussing what a rose is, I’ll use the Greek word for it.  Thus, to talk about roses, I’d use the Greek word “rhodē” (ροδη).
• If the name is natively a Greek name, like “Stephan” from Greek Στεφανος meaning “crown”, then I’ll use the Greek form of the name.
• If the name is not natively Greek but has a corresponding form in old works like the Bible, like “Samuel” above, then I’ll use the Greek spelling of the name regardless of how the name is spelled or pronounced in the originating language.
• If the name is not natively Greek, I’ll transliterate the name according to modern Greek rules of spelling and other conventions.  Thus, someone given the Chinese name Yuping (宇平),  I’d transliterate it as Γιουπιν, “Gioupin” pronounced “Yūpin”; the final “-ng” is typically written as “-ν”, since “ng” is a weird phoneme in Greek.
• If the name is a common word, like a flower, I’ll typically use the phonetic spelling and not the Greek word.  Thus, if someone is named Rose in English, I’ll use the phonetic transliteration of Rhoūz (Ρoουζ) and not the corresponding Greek name Rhodē (Ροδη).

Transcribing a name or word from one spoken language (or written language!) into Greek can be difficult, since it requires a good understanding of what the letters actually sound like so as to prepare an accurate transliteration and transcription of the name or word.  However, once that’s out of the way, it’s then straightforward to understand the mystic meaning behind such a name using Greek letter mysticism via isopsephy and stoicheia.

Now, let’s say we’re comparing the names of two different people, say Stephen and Sarah.  Stephen is a native Greek name from Στεφανος, while Sarah is natively Hebrew spelled שָׂרָה (ShRH), yet we know it’d be spelled Σαρα since she’s a figure in the Old Testament.  Conversely, from Hebrew translations of the New Testament, we know that Stephen would be spelled סטיבן (STIBN) in Hebrew.  How do we go about comparing these two names?  Do we convert both names to one language, or do we mix-and-match based on the native language of each name?  When simply doing a run-of-the-mill analysis, I’d stick to the former when possible; I’d run a stoicheic and isopsephic analysis of Στεφανος in Greek, and a similar analysis of שָׂרָה in Hebrew and compare what results.  Thus, I’d reduce the name to what it mystically means on a stoicheic and numerologic level, and use that as my means of comparison:

• The Greek name Στεφανος has the stoicheia Aquarius (Σ), Pisces (Τ), Mercury (Ε), Air (Φ), Moon (Α), Scorpio (Ν), and Mars (Ο).  It has the isopsephic value of 1326.
• The Hebrew name שָׂרָה has the stoicheia Fire (Shin), Sun (Resh), and Aries (Heh).  It has a gematria value of 505.
• Sarah has almost entirely fiery symbols, while Stephen is mostly air and water.
• Although the number of Stephan is close to thrice that of Sarah, by reducing the value down by adding up the individual digits, we get 1 + 3 + 2 + 6 = 12 → 1 + 2 = 3 for Stephen and 5 + 0 + 5 = 10  → 1 + 0 = 1 for Sarah.  Alternatively, we ignore the powers of ten: for Stephen, we get Σ + Τ + Ε + Φ + Α + Ν + Ο + Σ = 200 + 300 + 5 + 500 + 1 + 50 + 70 + 200  → 2 + 3 + 5 + 5 + 1 + 5 + 7 + 2 = 30  → 3 + 0 = 3, and for Sarah, we get  5 + 200 + 300  → 5 + 2 + 3 = 1.

So, when we’re comparing two names against each other for the sake of a pure stoicheic and isopsephic analysis, I’d prefer to use the systems in place for the scripts in which a name is derived.  However, as I mentioned before, I only really trust the systems for Hebrew and Greek, and when possible, I prefer Greek; thus, if I were comparing Stephan and, say, Julius, I’d convert Julius to Greek as Ιουλιος and go from there.  And, even if I were analyzing a Hebrew name, I’d convert it to Greek anyway if I were using something like Christopher Cattan’s Wheel of Pythagoras or the onomatic astrology of Vettius Valens I mentioned last time; if there’s a Greek-specific system in place that I don’t have in place for another language, then I’ll convert any and all names into Greek for that system if I have to.

Thing is, however, that Greek (and Indo-European languages generally) tends to complicate things because of how it’s written and spoken.  There’s the whole problem of word endings: case and declension for nouns, and the voice, tense, mood, and the like with conjugation for verbs.  English, mercifully, has tended to drop those things out or simplify them dramatically from its Germanic ancestry, but Greek uses them heavily.  As a rule, when analyzing a word on its own, I tend to use the nominative case for nouns, and for verbs…well, I’m not great with Greek grammar too well just yet, and I haven’t decided how to approach that.  Still, because the ending of the words change based on how they’re used in a sentence, their letters change, and so too do their isopsephic values.  For uniformity, I just stick with the “plain jane” or “unmarked” endings.

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 October 2014.

“the ‘talisman’ used in the ritual. your name will be written 9x around the diagram using your own blood.” — I don’t know of any such talisman that requires instructions like this, though depending on the size of the talisman, I will say that that would appear to be a significant amount of blood.  When using blood in ink, especially your own, I suggest taking a few drops (maybe a certain number of drops depending on planetary hours, qabbalistic symbolism, or the like) and mixing it into dragon’s blood ink or some other sacred ink you have prepared.  That way, you don’t go dizzy from losing too much blood, and you can buff out the potency of blood with particular herbs.  Just be careful when you tap yourself for blood: be clean, use sterilized needles or blades (preferably non-reusable and disposed of in a sharps bin), be careful that you don’t cut on an artery,sanitize the area to bleed from first, clean up afterwards, use a fresh bandage, aim carefully with the blood, and the like.  And, given that the ink and the talisman has your own blood on it, be very careful that you don’t lose the stuff; you don’t want others to get ahold of your own bodily fluids, after all.

“things to ask a geomancer” — Putting my geomancer hat on for a second, well, what do you want to know?  Geomancy is a pretty awesome divination system that I’ve been practicing for years, and it’s helped me countless times in my work and spiritual development.  In my opinion, however, geomancy is best for queries that are clear (no confusion or ambiguity), concise (pared down to the fewest words needed), and concrete (about a single actionable topic that isn’t abstract), and ideally can be answered in a binary sense (yes/no, should/shouldn’t, etc.).  Beyond that, ask whatever you want.

“making natron for egypt project with baking soda and washing powder?” — I actually wrote about this waaaaay back when, when I was just starting to get involved with Hermetic magic.  If it’s any indication, this was when my blog was still hosted on Blogspot.  So, natron is this nifty powder that’s like supersalt and can be used for embalming, desiccation, and making protective circles, and it’s formed from a mixture of sodium chloride (salt), sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and sodium carbonate (washing soda).  While salt and baking soda are easy to find, it can be a little more difficult to find washing soda in your local supermarket, and isn’t strictly necessary if you can’t find it.  I make natron (I’ve really only made the one batch, since I use so little of it) by crushing all the dry parts up into a fine powder and mix it well.  You could make a solution out of them in water and dry it out, but natron is so absorbent that you’d need to use an already spotless pan to hold it in and put it in the oven on high for a week; leaving it out in the open would just keep the natron moist since it’d absorb moisture from the ambient air, and in my humid house where we grow carnivorous plants, that ain’t gonna work.  I just suggest grinding it to a fine powder and storing it in an airtight jar.

“ghost rituals” — Yes, I’m sure there are occultist ghosts who have free time just like I do, and I’m sure they have their own rituals and ceremonies.  I don’t know what they are, however.  I might ask my ancestors to see what they’re up to in the afterlife, maybe get some advice from them in my own works.

“best planetary hours for working out” — It’s true, you can use planetary hours to time pretty much anything to get more out of it.  For working out, exercising, and physical training generally, I’d go with hours of Mars and hours of the Sun, which should get you three or four windows of 45 minutes to 2.5 hours a day, depending on where you live and what time of year it is.  However, some of these hours are at ungodly o’ clock in the morning or really late in the evening, so you may not be able to get to a gym or it may not be safe to go outside during some of these hours.  To be honest, the best time for working out is an hour you set each day every day and get into a routine of it.  You don’t need magic for physical goals like this, though it can certainly help.  Don’t let timing factors influence your goals for a healthier, fit life.

“is barachiel archangel recognized in the catholic church” — Alas, not anymore.  Back in 2002, the Vatican banned all veneration of any angel not named in the Bible, i.e. any angel that wasn’t Michael, Gabriel, or Raphael.  Any other named angel, they claim, could lead to deviation from Catholic doctrine and too permissive of “new age spiritual practices”.  This isn’t new for them; back in the eighth century, Pope Zachary banned the veneration of Uriel on the grounds that the angel did not exist, because he wasn’t mentioned in the Bible, either.  Now, this only applies to the Catholic church; the Orthodox church has a much more permissive view on angels, and in fact venerates seven archangels.  Of course, the names and functions of those archangels may not always coincide with those popularly known, but whatever.

“can we place organite and a crystal grid by each other” — I mean, you can, but given how I consider orgonite (note the proper spelling) to be worth less than a well-timed dump, I don’t think putting a chunk of the crap near a crystal grid would do much.  You can involve the orgonite into the crystal grid, sure, but at that point, why not just use a lump of peat coal or of simple quartz instead?  To be honest, if I knew that putting orgonite and crystal grids near each other could cause some sort of violently explosive reaction, I’d be hawking that shit all over the place in the hopes that nobody would be googling for orgonite ever again.

“petition an angel using his seal” — While the most recommended use of an angelic seal is to conjure the angel, you don’t need to straight-up call them down into a crystal and converse with them and charge them with an action if you don’t want to go that far.  You might adopt something like what the Queen of Pentacles does with “goetic conjurework”, by drawing out the seal of the angel on both sides of a piece of paper, writing the name of the angel on one side and your petition on the other, then lighting an appropriately-dressed candle on top of that.  Alternatively, you could use the seal of the angel as a focus for meditation to attune yourself to them and allow for a slow-growth, natural form of contact to eventually come to you.  Be aware that, in Hermetic theory, the symbol of a spirit is, in a sense, the presence of the spirit; the spirit is where the seal is, so wherever the angelic seal is drawn, so too will the angel be.

“pompeii penis sandals” — To be fair, if you look at any Roman archaeological site and especially Pompeii, you’ll note that the ancients loved them some good ol’ fashioned phalluses.  An erect penis, no less, was the standard shingle for any brothel back in the day; charms to ward off the evil eye were often in the form of flying penises (some with a penis of its own!); anything from oil lamps to gambling tokens to warning signs were ithyphallic in nature.  That said, I’ve never heard of “penis sandals” before from a Roman culture, much less one from Pompeii, and some googling of my own isn’t helping.  So, uh, sorry.

“the japanese alphabet that they use nowadays in English” — They don’t use Japanese writing in English.  We use the English writing system (a derivative of the Roman system) for English.  That’s why it’s, you know, called English.  Japanese, on the other hand, uses the Japanese writing system, and it’s used for a handful of other languages, such as Ainu and Ryukuan, all of which are Japonic in nature, but none of which are found outside the Japanese archipelago.  Now, if you’re wondering what Japanese writing is and how it works, first note that it’s not an alphabet, and that alphabets are not synonymous with writing systems generally.  Second, Omniglot is your friend when you have questions about writing systems.  Third, Japanese writing is actually composed of three separate systems: a syllabary used for native Japanese speech, a syllabary used for onomatopoeia and foreign words, and a system of Chinese and Chinese-derived characters.

“best florida water to bless my house” — Surprisingly enough, there are numerous different brands of Florida Water out there.  By far the most common and the most popular is Murray & Lanman, which you can usually find in any botanica, though botanicas will often have lesser-quality brandless or store-brand types available as well.  Oddly, Florida Water is also popular in China, and I’ve been able to find a few bottles of the stuff in some places in the DC Chinatown area, but ohmigawd they’re shitfully terribad and smell like baby powder and rotten fruit, specifically the Butterfly and Liushen brands (at least in my honest opinion).  Of course, my friends and I make our own Florida Water, and you can find my recipe on this older post of mine.  My other friend uses a bit of laundry blueing and more lemongrass, so his Florida Water smells like Fruit Loops and is delicious, and a tad closer to the Murray & Lanman stuff, though ours are still distinctly different from the brand name.  All the same, Florida Water is an amazing eau de cologne, though I would suggest you mix the stuff with holy water to bless a house properly, if not just use holy water.  Florida Water can help brighten a room or cleanse someone off, but for real blessing, you want real holiness.

“what can i engrave on a blade to be able to slay demons” — Happily enough, you can find out here on the page I made about my ritual sword.  Be aware, though, that slaying demons can be bad for your health, since demons do tend to fight back and are nontrivial to slay.  Besides, what did demons ever do to you?  Don’t be a douchebag.  Talk it out first, maybe share a drink or five over a Circle of Art.  Who knows, maybe some good demon sex could be just what you need!

“hga vs other gods” — Now this is a pretty interesting comparison to make.  Generally speaking, the Holy Guardian Angel (HGA) is not a deity in the traditional sense of the word.  The term itself was coined by Abraham of Worms in his Sacred Magic of Abramelin, although the concept of guardian angels generally goes back to late classical Mediterranean times in Abrahamic traditions, if not much earlier. In the Judeo-Christian scheme, the HGA is definitely not on the same level as God or the Trinity, and is under the ranks of the archangels and the four Holy Living Creatures, to be sure, though whether he belongs to a particular choir is up for debate (though the Ars Paulina would suggest that he’s of a choir no lower than the Powers or the angels of the fifth heaven).  The HGA has sometimes been linked to the Agathos Daimon of the ancient Greeks and the Genius of the Romans, though with a more cosmic or divine purpose than just watching over the well-being of the human they look after.  There is some similarity with the HGA and tutelary deities generally, and these tutelary deities are often called Zeus or Hera, or in Latin Jove and Juno (depending on the gender of the human), but I feel like these are different entities, personally.  To be extraordinarily brief on the subject, the HGA watches over a human and guides them to divinity and their divine purpose, helping them by clearing out obstacles and providing an impetus for action where needed.  Whether that intersects with other gods’ responsibilities is up to the other gods.

“ithyphallic devil” — I’m down to go down on one.

“chaplet of st. chamuel” — So, as I’ve mentioned before, there are lots of different sets of archangels.  The system of seven archangels I use is that of the Orthodox Church: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel (who are common to nearly all sets of seven archangels), as well as the lesser-known Barachiel, Jehudiel, and Sealtiel.  However, in Catholic and Hispanic countries, another set of seven archangels are known, which are described by the Christian author Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite: the same big four as before, but with Jofiel/Jophiel, Zadkiel, and Chamuel/Samuel.  It’s hard to map one set of archangels to another, since their roles tend to differ as well as their names.  However, I did find in one painting at a local botanica the names of the Orthodox angels mapped to those of Pseudo-Dionysus, and in it Chamuel was linked to Barachiel.  Whether this holds up in practice, I’m not sure, but if you’re interested, use my chaplet to Barachiel and see how the angel responds.  I don’t work with the angels of Pseudo-Dionysus, however, so this is up for experimentation.  According to at least one (not entirely) reputable resource, Chamuel is the angel presiding over relationships and all the love and trauma they bear.  This isn’t quite in line with the role of the angel Barachiel, who presides over blessings and bounties, so I’m not sure what a chaplet of St. Chamuel would look like.

“i want to know where you live, what your apartment? how much time do you devote a day of prayer? text” — …wow, creeper.  You don’t get to know that.  I do devote at least an hour a day to prayer and meditation, however, and would prefer to do more if it weren’t for commuting, martial arts practice, sleep, and my office job.  None of which you get to know when and where I do it.

I don’t consider all systems of divination to be equal.  More specifically, I don’t consider all that is considered to be divination to be actual divination.  Geomancy, Tarot, augury, extispicy, horary astrology, and the like are divination systems to me: the interpretation of omens from physically random, spiritually determined sources by means of inspiration and technique.  This is distinguished from prophecy or clairvoyance, which is sheer revelation of messages or sights from the gods, and it’s likewise distinguished from purely mechanical methods of prediction, such as economic and weather forecasts derived from mathematical formulae alone.  All these things, however, share something in common: revelations about the future.  As a diviner, I find this an extraordinarily useful field of magic and occultism, and one of the things I insist those who are interested in magical practices to investigate first.

However, I don’t rank numerology among useful methods of divination or prediction.  I never have, and I doubt I’ll ever ascribe it the same level of predictive power or flexibility as, say, geomancy, and I put numerological methods of divination in the same category as phrenology, palm reading, and other forms of physiognomy.  Something about the use of fixed factors in divination irks me, especially when it comes to matters of names, number, and the body.  Then again, I consider my natal horoscope in astrology to provide useful information, and I do consider haruspicy to be worthwhile; I suppose some fixed factors can be used in divination, if applied judiciously enough.  Moreover, even if I don’t consider such methods to be the most reliable or trustworthy, I’d appear to be in the minority with that view, considering how much of the old literature dating back to Hellenistic times is devoted to these topics.

One of the most well-known and well-used forms of numerological divination involved the isopsephia, or Greek gematria, of a person’s name in determining their health or lack thereof.  Divination was heavily used as a prognostic tool in medicine up even through the Renaissance and early modern times, sometimes through pre-modern medical means like uromancy, sometimes through astrology, and sometimes through numerology.  One such method of numerological divination using names, sometimes called “onomancy”, involves determining whether a patient will live or die from their illness based on their name and the date on which they fell ill.  Although my resources are scant, mostly coming from some Gutenberg texts and the PGM, let me describe two (or three) ways Greek name divination was used with isopsephy to determine how a given matter would turn out.

A few notes first:

• When we say “the day on which the person fell ill”, we mean the lunar date starting with the Noumenia.  Thus, if someone fell ill three days after the Noumenia, then the day number of the lunar month would be 4.  If someone fell ill on the last day of the month, i.e. the New Moon, then you’d need to check whether that month had 29 or 30 days.  We note the day that someone fell ill based on when they took to rest; for us modern people, that might be the first morning we just couldn’t get out of bed to go to work or class if we were feeling okay the night before, or the very day we suddenly fell nauseated and went home to rest from the office or school.
• Obviously, given the advance of modern medicine, people don’t tend to get sick as severely or as fatally as they used to (but who knows, that’ll probably change given the end of useful antibiotics and the rise of superbacteria looming over us).  While it’s possible someone could always die from an illness (gotta love human mortality!), consider the more dire warnings given by these divination methods to be something indicating a chronic, debilitating, or acute disease, while the more mild warnings something comparably mild to endure.
• In mathematical notation, the percent sign (%) used as an operator indicates the “modulo” operation.  While the division mark (÷) indicates division, the modulo mark indicates the remainder.  So, 28 ÷ 9 = 3.333… or 3 with 1 as a remainder, while 28 % 9 = 1.

The first is the Sphere of Democritus, a prognostic technique from PGM XII.351.  This technique determines whether a sick person will live or die based on their name and the calendar date that they fell sick.  First, calculate the isopsephic value of the person’s name and add to it the day of the lunar month on which they fell sick, took to bed, or called out of work.  Once this sum has been found, divide this sum by 30 and take the remainder.  The text gives a rectangular chart divided into two parts; if the remainder is in the upper part, the person will live, but if in the lower part, the person will die.

• They will live if the remainder is 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, or 27.
• They will die if the remainder is 5, 6, 8, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 22, 28, 29, or 30.

So, let’s say it’s 200 AD, and my name is actually polyphanes (Πολυφανης), and it’s a few days before the full moon, say the 12th of the lunar month.  I suddenly get a fever and I decide to go to bed, and a healer-magician comes by and runs some tests.  The isopsephy of my name is 1339, and added to the day number 12, this yields 1351.  1351 % 30 = 1, and we find 1 in the upper portion of the Sphere.  Good news!  I’ll be fine.

The next method is the Circle of Petosiris, which was popular enough back in the day to take several forms.  I found two such methods which are essentially the same to each other and to the Sphere of Democritus, but the level of detail is different.  The idea, however, is the same, at least for the first Circle of Petosiris: take the isopsephic value of the person’s name and add it to the day number of the lunar month on which they fell ill.  However, instead of taking the sum and dividing by 30, here we divide by 29 and find the remainder.  Instead of just determining whether someone will live or die, we get more detail:

• Great life: 2, 3, 7, 9, 11,
• Average life: 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20
• Short life: 22, 23, 26, 28,
• Short death: 1, 25, 27, 29
• Average death: 4, 10, 15, 18, 21, 24
• Great death: 5, 6, 8, 12

Let’s say that, once more, I’m sick and instead of calling over the healer-magician from before, I call over a different magician who uses the Circle of Petosiris instead of the Sphere of Democritus. Again, the isopsephy of my name is 1339, and added to the day number 12, this yields 1351.  1351 % 29 = 17, and we find 17 in the “average life” section of the Circle.  Good news!  I’ll live reasonably well once I recover without too much a threat of relapse.

The second Circle of Petosiris is more complicated, however, and involves a slightly different method than the first Circle of Petosiris and the Sphere of Democritus.  Generally speaking, however, the technique used for the first Circle can also be used for the Second, dividing by 30 instead of 29, but with a slightly different arrangement of numbers:

• Great life (speedy recovery): 11, 10, 9, 7, 3, 2
• Small life (recovery within seven days): 22, 23, 26, 28
• Small death (destroyed within seven days): 27, 25, 30, 1
• Great death (speedy death): 12, 8, 5, 6
• Brightness (vertical line above horizon): 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20
• Darkness (vertical line below horizon): 4, 15, 18, 21, 24, 29

Another method can be used in this Circle such that one takes the isopsephic remainder of the person’s name divided by 30 and compared against the day number of the lunar month on which they fell ill.  These are then both compared against each other.  If both numbers are in Brightness, the combination promises a good figure; if both in Darkness, an unfortunate one.  If the day number of the lunar month is Bright and the number of the person Dark, then misfortune will occur under the pretense of fortune; if the number of the person is Bright and the day number of the month is Dark, the person will do well eventually though they’ll be in danger.  This method is extended more generally such that if one number or the other or both are above the horizon or below, we can get similar answers, though the Bright and Dark numbers themselves appear to be middling between “great life/death” and “small life/death”.

Once more, I’m sick and instead of calling over the healer-magician from before, I call over a different healer who’s much fancier in his techniques and who uses the this second Circle of Petosiris instead of the other methods. Again, the isopsephy of my name is 1339, and added to the day number 12, this yields 1351.  1351 % 30 = 1, and we find 1 in the “small death” section, where I might die within seven days due to the illness.  However, if we compare the numbers of my name and the number of the lunar date, then we compare 1339 % 30 = 19 against 12; 19 is Bright (above the horizon) and 12 is Dark (below the horizon).  All told, this will be reasonably chancey for me, but I should be able to live and get through this with enough help, though I’ll be in danger of dying all the same.

The “lobes” around the edge of the Circle are, starting at the 9 o’ clock position and going clockwise, indicate both the course of the Sun around the Earth in a single day as well as the four elements:

1. Midnight (Arctic stars over the earth)
2. Fire
3. Sunrise (Rising above the earth)
4. Air
5. Noon (Midday over the earth)
6. Water
7. Sunset (Setting under the earth)
8. Earth

The octants on the inner circle say much the same thing, though these are really quadrants, since each pair of octants has the same text.  Much as with the outer lobes, these use astronomical phenomena to describe times of day, though some of them don’t make sense (the Arctic stars only ever stay in the north).  Starting at the upper left quadrant and going clockwise:

1. Nighttime (Arctic stars over the northern earth)
2. Daytime (Midday over the northern earth)
3. Nighttime (Midday under the southern earth)
4. Daytime (Arctic stars under the southern earth)

After the last post on onomancy, I realized that there’s more to Greek letter and number divination involving names than simply determining whether a sick person will live or die.  Plus, there are far more ways to count the letters in a Greek word than straightforward isopsephia, and this time I’ll go over a slightly different method that can be used in a more straightforward fashion than looking things up in a complicated table or circular chart.  This is called the method of pythmenes, or “roots”, and is based more on the numbers 1 through 9 than anything else.  The source text for this is from Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies (book IV, chapter 14), which is a fantastic resource of how everyone did things back in the day that were offensive to early Christian sensibilities, including a good chunk of occult knowledge.

For the system of pythmenes, instead of assigning each letter of the Greek alphabet a number 1 through 9 by ones, 10 through 90 by tens, and 100 through 900 by hundreds, we only assign a single digit value to each letter ignoring magnitude.  Thus, Alpha (1), Iota (10), and Rho (100) all have a pythmenic value of 1, even though their isopsephic values differ.  Here’s a full chart comparing the isopsephic and pythmenic values of the Greek alphabet:

Or, shown a simpler way based on the pythmenic value:

Alright, so we have our numbers for our letters.  And yes, note that 6 only has two letters assigned to it and 9 only has one; 6 would also be assigned the letter digamma, and 9 would be assigned qoppa and sampi, but these are all obsolete letters and thus unused in pythmenes.  So, how do we use these values?  Generally, the rule to form a pythmenic value of a name is similar to that of calculating an isopsephic value.  However, there’s a little more complexity involved:

1. Find the pythmenic value of every letter in the name.
2. If any letters are duplicated, count the duplicated letter only once.
3. Add up the pythmenic values of all the remaining letters.
4. Divide the pythmenic sum by nine and take the remainder.  This is the pythmenic value of the name.
5. If the remainder is 0, then the pythmenic value of the name is 9.

Now, say you want to compare two people who are, say, in a fight, and you want to know who wins.  Take the pythmenic value of each name and compare them:

• If one pythmenic value is odd and the other even, the larger number wins.
• If the pythmenic values are both odd or both even but are different numbers, the smaller number wins.

So, what happens when both numbers are the same?  This is where things get a little hairy, and it all depends, but both can be considered equal in power, yet a winner must result.  Generally speaking, if both pythmenic values are the same and are both odd, then the “lesser” one wins; if both values are the same and are both even, the “greater” one wins.  “Lesser” and “greater” are terms I’m applying to the notion of the challenger (“lesser”) and the challenged (“greater”); the challenger is one who must prove their strength or supremacy, while the challenged is the one who has already proved it.  However, “lesser” and “greater” can also imply other criteria such as age, wealth, standing, or other factors depending on the contest or struggle at hand.  Going by old (and admittedly sexist) number symbolism, odd numbers are perceived as masculine and therefore aggressive (“challenging”), while even numbers are perceived as feminine and therefore passive (“challenged”); thus, if both numbers are the same, they fall in line with whichever side agrees with the value.

So, consider two people fighting each other, and let’s pick the names Hector (Εκτωρ) and Patroclus (Πατροκλος) from Homer’s Iliad to determine who wins the fight.  Hector’s name has the pythmenic value of 5 + 2 + 3 + 8 + 1 = 19 % 9 = 1.  Patroclus has a pythmenic value of 8 + 1 + 3 + 1 + 7 + 2 + 3 + ∅ + 2 (the second Ο is a duplicate, so we don’t count it, thus ∅) = 27 % 9 = 0 → 9 (nine divides evenly into 27, so although the remainder is 0, this is pythmenically equivalent to 9).  Both of these numbers are odd but are not equal to each other; thus, Hector, who has the smaller pythmenic value, wins, and indeed, Hector kills Patroclus in their fight.  However, we know that Achilles (Αχιλλευς) also fights Hector after this; the pythmenic value of Achilles is 1 + 6 + 1 + 3 + ∅ + 5 + 4 + 2 = 22 % 9 = 4.  The pythmenic value of Hector’s name is odd, while that of Achilles is even, and since Achilles’ number is larger, Achilles wins and kills Hector.

Instead of determining the winner of two parties in a fight, this same method can be used to find out whether one will live or die in an illness.  We can see the disease as a struggle between patient and illness, and we can use the pythmenic values of the person’s name as well as of the day letter as we did before with the Sphere of Democritus and the Circle of Petosiris.  In the case of both numbers having the same pythmenic value, we can consider the patient to be the “greater” and the illness the “lesser” or that which challenges the patient.  Of course, sometimes the rules also took into account days of the week or other numbers, which could shed a little more light into the situation.

So, let’s say it’s 200 AD, and my name is actually polyphanes (Πολυφανης), and it’s a few days before the full moon, say the 12th of the lunar month.  I suddenly get a fever and I decide to go to bed, and a healer-magician comes by and runs some tests.  The pythmenic value of my name is 8 + 7 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 1 + 5 + 8 + 2 = 43 % 9 = 7.  The pythmenic value of the day number is 12 % 9 = 3.  Bad news for me; both values are odd but not equal, and the day the disease took hold has the smaller value, so the disease wins and I lose, i.e. die.

What if we take into account the day of the week?  Marking Sunday as day 1 and Saturday as day 7, let’s say that the 12th day of the lunar month happened to fall on a Tuesday, which would have the value of 3.  If we add 3 to the day number 12, we get 3 +12 = 15, and 15 % 9 = 6.  The news isn’t so bad after all; now the date on which I fell ill is an even number, and my name has an odd number which is greater, so I’ll win out in the end after all.

A variant of this technique can be applied to the notion of rematches.  If the conflict between the two sides is the first time they’ve fought, then you use the whole names of both.  If, however, this is their second match, drop the first letter of each name before calculating their pythmenic values; if the third match, drop the first two letters; etc.  This process can be continued as long as there exists at least one letter in one of the names, at which point we might expect that to be the final match between the two parties.

And just to leave you with a bit of fun to toy around with, I should mention that there are plenty of variations to this rule, as there are with many Greek numerological traditions.  Some of them follow:

• Don’t discount repeated letters.  (It’s possible that an earlier form of pythmenes didn’t discount them, but I prefer doing it.)
• Discount a letter that is repeated twice and only twice.
• Discount letters that repeat a pythmenic value, e.g. Ω and Η.
• Divide the end result by 7 instead of 9 to obtain a remainder.
• Separate the letters out into three groups (vowels, semivowels, and consonants) and apply the pythmenic winner method above to each group of letters in the two names.  Best of three “rounds” wins overall.

As some of my readers know, I organize my offerings to the Greek gods, goddesses, and heroes according to a calendar of my own creation, the lunar grammatomantic calendar (lunisolar, really, but that doesn’t really matter when it comes to monthly offerings, so whatever).  By associating each letter of the Greek alphabet with one of the days of the 29-day/30-day lunar month, I not only have a regular cycle to do my letter meditations on, but I also have a way to schedule offerings to the theoi according to what their letter associations are.  For instance, the 13th day of the lunar month is assigned to the Greek letter Lambda, and Lambda is associated with the astrological sign of Virgo according to the rules of stoicheia.  Cornelius Agrippa, based on classical sources, associates the sign of Virgo with the Olympian goddess Demeter (book II, chapter 14).  Thus, I give the 13th day of the lunar month to Demeter, performing offerings and sacrifices to her by reserving that day for her and her closely-associated mythological and divine people.

Now, I admit wholly and fully that this is not a traditional Greek/Hellenic calendar; it’s something I developed on my own for my own use, going back before the invention of mathesis but definitely playing a part in mathetic ritual timing.  I strongly doubt that this sort of calendar was ever used, much less thought of, in ancient times, and I’m okay with that; I never claimed to be a Hellenist to begin with.  Hellenists, i.e. those who follow Greek reconstructionist paganism or Greek neopaganism, typically arrange their monthly rituals and dates according to an actual ancient Greek calendar, specifically the one that we have the most knowledge about, the Attic or Athenian calendar.  Hellenion uses it, and I believe most other Hellenists do, too, especially since this is the one that has the most work done on it to keep it modern and updated.  Now, I don’t live in Athens ancient or modern, and I don’t practice all the same festivals or maintain Athenian practices, and I prefer the completeness of my grammatomantic calendar, so I personally get more out of my own calendar, and the theoi seem to be okay with that.  Your mileage may vary, of course.

It’s convenient to use the Attic calendar, of course, but it’s certainly not representative of all of ancient Greek practice.  Consider the following, at least for my US-based readers: how much would you trust an all-pervading knowledge of different regional customs, local celebrations, and the like of all of the United States of America five hundred years from now based on only the records that survive from Boston?  While you may have plenty to go on for that area of the US, you might not know as clearly what’s done in southern Virginia, Alaska, Texas, Hawai’i, or Puerto Rico.  That’s what it’s like for what we know about everything from ancient Greece; of all the native knowledge, i.e. information on ancient Greece written by ancient Greeks, the vast majority of information and records we have comes from a single city-state, Athens.  We have some records here and there from other major city-states, but when we talk about “ancient Greek culture”, we generally mean “ancient Athenian culture” because nearly all of what we know comes from Athens about Athens written by Athenians for Athenians.  Thus, while we know some about Theban, Spartan, Boeotian, Delphian, Cretan, and other cultures within the broad geographic region known as ancient Greece including all her far-flung colonies across the Aegean and across the Mediterranean, it’s generally scant or written through an Athenian lens.

To learn more about other cultures, specifically their calendrical practices, you could do worse than browse the six-volume work Origines Kalendariæ Hellenicæ by Edward Greswell from the 1860s (volumes one, two, three, four, five, and six), but this is a massive undertaking and quite boring, useful only if you want to know some of the specific legislation, customs, and timing of festivals and rituals among really niche groups.  It’s detailed but dense and hard to read, and there hasn’t been a work like it since it was published.  Instead, I’d like to suggest you check out the fantastic blog of Ruadhán J McElroy, Of Thespiae, a long-time Hellenist who notably doesn’t use the Attic calendar.  Instead, he uses a modernized version of the classical Boeotian calendar, which is notably different from the Athenian calendar in many respects.  In addition, Ruadhán sells PDF copies of the calendar for your easy and convenient reference on his paganism-focused Etsy shop for only US$4.00!  You should totally buy a copy, since this is dirt cheap for a lot of heavy work put into formatting and planning all the Boeotian monthly and yearly festivals for 2015.  I bought a copy, and I’m pleased with what I found.

Why is this important?  Because “ancient Greece” was much, much bigger and much, much more diverse than what our common knowledge would indicate.  As I already mentioned, most of what we know of ancient Greece comes from Athens about Athens and written by Athenians for Athenians, from the dramas to the histories and everything in-between, so having an alternative view from a practitioner about things done a different, yet still reconstructionally valid and legitimate way, is extraordinarily valuable for the growth and further understanding of Hellenic classical religion and modern practice.  Just knowing Athenian religion and making that the default can stymie further research and opportunities for exploration within Hellenic paganism, and as Edward Butler said on Twitter, “regional [traditions] are valuable…Hopefully in the years to come we’ll see more of these regional [traditions], which require high research skills.  Good to support them.”  As Ruadhán is one of these very few people competently researching and practicing alternative and regional traditions within the framework and boundaries of ancient Greece, it’s crucially important for him to be able to continue this research, and what better way than buying what he produces?

So, dear reader, what are you waiting for?  Go buy a copy of Ruadhán’s Boeotian calendar PDF today!

For someone who doesn’t much care for numerological and onomantic techniques, I sure have caught some kind of bug on this.  Then again, I suppose it’s helpful to brush up on these methods of exegesis and esoteric analysis of individual words.  I have it on my to-do list to analyze the Ephesian Grammata and other barbarous words within a mathetic framework, and besides pure meditation and contemplation, it helps to have some other guiding principles that can tease out deeper meaning.  Seeing how many of our forebears in philosophy, the occult, and religion used many of these techniques and in many different variations for their worldviews, I suppose there’s something to it.  Still, I can’t help but feel like I’m grasping at something hilariously dumb here, but I could use any tool I can get.

The last two posts have discussed a few methods of Greek numerological divination based on names, isopsephy, pythmenes, and modular division (taking the remainder after division).  With these methods, we know how to determine who will win in a fight, how a conflict may be resolved, and whether one will recover from illness and, if so, how soon.  These methods can be expanded in any number of ways, but I want to take this in a slightly different direction.  For me, although the isopsephy of the letters are important, the stoicheia is even more so (at least at my early stage of study).  It’d be awesome to find a way to tie isopsephy and stoicheia together, and I think I’ve found such a way.  Similar methods exist in the extant literature of Greek numerology from the early first few centuries AD, but I’m combining this with the rest of grammatomancy and a few of my other tricks to expand the system a bit further.

The process is similar to the other onomantic methods we’ve seen before, except instead of using 9 or 30 as our divisor, we use 24, since there are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet:

1. Find the isopsephic value of a word.
2. Divide each by 24 and take the remainder.
3. If the remainder is 0, then we use 24.
4. The letter corresponding in the Greek alphabet with the value is our letter.

Thus, consider my name, polyphanes (πολυφανης) has an isopsephic value of 1339.  1339 % 24 = 19, and the nineteenth letter of the Greek alphabet is Tau (Τ), associated with Pisces, lending my own name Piscean traits.  If we also include the Greek alphabet oracle into this, we know that Tau is associated with the oracle “You will have a parting from the companions now around you”; this can be an overall message to my life, something I should heed in all matters that can direct me as a fundamental bit of advice.  These two factors combined suggest that I’ll have a bit of a problem holding onto friends for a long period of time, possibly due to constant wandering, possibly due to constant mystery and mysticality surrounding me.

However, we can expand this as well by recalling that there are three groups of stoicheic forces represented by the Greek alphabet: five elements, seven planets, and twelve zodiac signs.  Although taking the remainder by dividing by 24 yields an overall view, an all-encompassing force to which a word or name belongs, we can take the remainder by dividing by 5, 7, and 12 to obtain a specific view for what element, planet, and zodiac sign specifically relates to that word under the overall context of the stoicheion obtained by dividing by 24.  Thus, again, using my own name of polyphanes with its isopsephic value of 1339:

• Element: 1339 % 5 = 4.  The fourth element is Fire (Χ).
• Planet: 1339 % 7 = 2.  The second planet is Mercury (Ε).
• Zodiac: 1339 % 12 = 7.  The seventh zodiac sign is Libra (Μ).

Oddly enough, these are all some of the most important things I value in my work.  What about my actual given name, which is in Greek Σαμουηλ?  The isopsephic value of this word is 749, which yields:

• Stoicheic: 749 % 24 = 5.  The fifth letter is Epsilon (Ε), whose stoicheia is the planet Mercury and whose oracle is “You desire to see the offspring of righteous marriages”.  Mercury certainly is a dominating force in my life (could you guess?), and one of the recurring messages I keep getting is to stop peering around and start acting on what I can and should be acting upon.
• Element: 749 % 5 = 4.  The fourth element is Fire (X).  Although I’m more earthy than fiery in my birth chart, I still tend to run hot and dry.
• Planet: 749 % 7 = 7.  The seventh planet is Saturn (Ω).  A planet that’s oddly and powerfully dignified in my birth chart, and with which I have a fascination and reliance upon after Mercury.
• Zodiac: 749 % 12 = 5.  The fifth zodiac sign is Leo (Κ).  I have nothing in this sign in my birth chart, and it’s not particularly important, but then, this is all just me throwing things off the top of my head.  Leo is a sign of rulership and renown, and I do tend to end up with that despite my best attempts to avoid it.

Thus, by taking the remainder of a given isopsephic value by dividing by some sacred number, we end up with an association of a given word to an overall stoicheic force as well as specific forces that constitute its parts.  We can analyze a word through these stoicheic connections, determining overall esoteric or expressive meanings to each.

However, we can also use these stoicheic associations to make sacred words that “encode” the forces of a given word.  Combinatorically, it’s no different than just taking the isopsehic value itself; any word that has the same isopsephic value will have the same stoicheic associations.  So, let’s say we have our four letters based on a given isopsephic value of a word: stoicheic, elemental, planetary, and zodiacal.  The stoicheic force is both the end and beginning of the word, since it encapsulates and contains that entire word; we have this letter at the start and end of the word.  The other letters fill in the space between the “bookend” stoicheic letters.  Thus, for πολυφανης, we know that our four letters are Τ, Χ, Ε, and Μ.  If we use our rules for pronouncing generated Greek words from before, we might end up with the word Taukhemyt (Ταυχεμυτ, based on ΤΧΕΜΤ) to represent my name as a mantra or obscuration/occultation that focuses the entire forces of the word together, or that might act as a type of spiritual alias for the name based on its stoicheic forces much as the name of the natal genius functions for one in astrology.  For my given name Σαμουηλ, the corresponding letters are Ε, Χ, Ω, and Κ, and the corresponding word might be Ekhōke (Εχωκε).

This sort of linking between the isopsephy of a word and a given letter of the Greek alphabet, along with its corresponding stoicheia, isn’t too far a stretch of isopsephic and numerological techniques.  Similar techniques have been used in methods of onomancy that derive an astrological birth chart from someone’s name by modular divination by 7 and 12 combined with other numbers, and there are echoes of this in some geomantic techniques I’ve used and seen other use as well.  The written works of Joel Kalvesmaki in the modern day are an incredibly useful resource on how Greek numerology was applied, as well as number symbolism was used and interpreted in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire period, and I plan on experimenting with some of these techniques in the future besides straightforward isopsephic comparison.  Who knows?  Maybe my own views on what I’ve perceived as nonsense will change.  It’s happened before with orgone tech, after all.

My birthday was last month, and I was fortunate enough to spend it with my mother and sister, with whom I haven’t spent a birthday in something like eight years.  I was in town to watch over my mother after a hip surgery of hers, and it coincided with my birthday (a few days after Crucible, no less!), and besides coming down with a minor cold for a day or two, it was overall a fantastic trip and a good way to spend my birthday.  My mother is the type to always spoil people on their birthday; she lives for gift-giving, and most of her house is filled with Christmas, Hanukkah, and birthday supplies year-round.  One of the rooms in her house (my old room, no less) is filled with nothing but tchotchkes and trinkets that she’s accumulated over the years of working at Lillian Vernon and shopping at antique stores and QVC that she doles out regularly, always somehow replenishing her wares of knick-knacks and the like.  I tend to dislike her taste of gifts, personally.  It’s only occasionally that I find something I like in her house that I’d like to have for myself, and I’d rather her save her money for herself.  She insists otherwise, however, so I just redirect her to my Amazon wish list and she’s content with that, and I’m more than content with her buying me stuff I actually know I want.  She’s really too kind to indulge me at all at this age.

This year, like many years, she’s gotten me books on magic and divination; of the more-than-200 items on my wish list, a vast majority of them are books, so this isn’t surprising.  However, this year she got me a book I’ve had my eye on for a while: Oracle Bones Divination by Kostas Dervenis. The author calls it a “Greek I Ching”, and although I don’t quite agree with that, I can see where he’s coming from.  The book is short and to-the-point, focusing on a form of divination used in ancient and classical Greece where one uses a set of five dice to obtain a particular oracle.  It’s not unlike the use of Greek letter divination or grammatomancy in that light, but there are some major differences; no letters are required here, and while grammatomancy has only 24 results, this form of divination has 56, and the literature explicitly links each result not only to an oracular answer but also to a particular deity or divinity.  However, there’s no one single body of oracular verses for this; many different sites had their own variations, although they generally coincided for the most part.  Fritz Graf’s article “Rolling the Dice for an Answer”  (published in “Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination” as part of the series “Religions in the Graeco-Roman World”, vol. 155, Brill, 2005) contains one such list, based mainly on the inscriptions found at Kremma in Pisidia and Perge in Pamphylia, both in Anatolian colonies of the Greeks, while Dervenis’ work is based on other locations from ancient Anatolia; they’re mostly the same, with about 40% of the divine names different and 25% of the oracular verses different.  No one complete list of names and verses survives, though it’s hypothesized that there’s one specific originating text from which derive all the others.

In a word, this book describes Greek astragalomancy, or divination with astragaloi.  Astragaloi (singular astragalos, or Latinized astragalus) are the knucklebones (actually the anklebones) of sheep, goats, or rams, and were used as a type of die by primitive people and are still used in some cultures, especially nomadic, shepherding, or rural communities like those in mountainous areas of Greece or by Mongolian people in traditional games.  Given the way an astragalos is shaped, a person can throw an astragalos like a die and can come up with one of four results, each with a numeric value associated with it:

• Khion (χιον, “of the island of Chios”), narrow concave side, with a value of 1
• Hyption (υπτιον, “lying on the back”), broad concave side, with a value of 3
• Pranēs (πρανης, “lying on the front”), broad convex side, with a value of 4
• Kōon (κωον, “of the island of Cos”), narrow convex side, with a value of 6

Just a note: classically, the astragaloi were tallied such that they counted the side that was face down.  Us modern people are used to throwing dice to read the side facing up.  It could be that different regions had or have different ways of traditionally throwing dice and counting things up.  I prefer the modern way, although Dervenis doesn’t specify which method to use.

While the names of the four sides are fixed, and the values associated with each name is well known, I found some confusion in figuring out which of the narrow sides was Khion and which was Kōon.  Dervenis gives Khion (1) to the narrow convex side and Kōon (6) to the narrow concave side, while most other sources I’ve found reverse the two, such that Khion is concave and Kōon convex.  I use the latter method since I find it more plausible.  Like any die, the opposite sides add up to 7 (3 + 4 and 1 + 6), and it makes sense that the convex (bulging) side is given to the larger number of a given pair, while the concave (hollow) side is given to the smaller number.  Thus, I give the narrow convex side to 6 and the narrow concave side to 1, even though Dervenis switches them.  It’s really a matter of style, I suppose, since it only affects how I read the bones; the actual oracles themselves don’t change, though my selection of them differs from Dervenis’ method.

The astragalos has a shape approximating that of a rectangular prism, so there are technically six sides to the thing, but the two short sides are too round and narrow for the astragalos to land on them.  Thus, although it’d make sense for an astragalos to have six sides with a value for each (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6), there are really only four results (1, 3, 4, and 6).  A modern tabletop RPG four-sided die can be used instead of an astragalos, substituting 2 with 3, 3 with 4, and 4 with 6.  Alternatively, Dervenis suggests the use of three coins flipped so that three heads is equal to 1, two heads with 3, two tails with 4, and three tails with 6.  Astragaloi can be a little difficult to obtain, but you can find them in some Mongolian traditional supply stores from time to time.  Dervenis suggests one uses three coins flipped to obtain one of four results (T = tails, H = heads):

• Khion: HHH
• Hyption: THH
• Pranēs: TTH
• Kōon: TTT

The problem with this is that one gets slightly different probabilities using coins than when one rolls actual knucklebones.  In order to get one of four results with three coins, we ignore the order in which we flip the coins.  However, each combination has a 1/8 chance, or 12.5% chance.  There’s only one combination that has all heads or all tails, so Khion and Kōon come up approximately 12.5% of the time each.  Hyption and Pranēs, however, are split with the rest; thus, if Khion and Kōon have 1/8 each, then we have 6/8 leftover, meaning that obtaining a Hyption or Pranēs with coins has a 3/8 chance each, or a 37.5% chance.  Knucklebones, however, have different probabilities due to their odd shapes; rolling a Hyption or Pranēs has about a 40% chance each, but rolling a Khion or Kōon has about a 10% chance each.   Thus, the likelihood of certain outcomes when using coins or when using astragaloi are going to differ.  It reminds me of a similar debate in i ching divination, where the traditional yarrow stalk method yields a different probability than the coin-based method, leading some people to favor one method over the other or claim that coin-based methods are false and misleading.  Still, the difference in outcome probabilities with coins versus knucklebones is much smaller than it is with coins versus yarrow stalks, so perhaps Dervenis is alright in suggesting the use of coins.

In Greek astragalomancy, five astragaloi are thrown and their combination inspected without regard for order.  Thus, a throw of 1-1-1-3-6 is equivalent to one of 6-1-1-3-1, and both are associated with the same oracular verse.  As mentioned before, there are 56 different combinations of throws, but we can view each throw of the astragaloi as a sum of the value of each astragalos.  Thus, 1-1-1-3-6 yields the sum 12.  This sort of summation was used in the ancient game of pleistobolinda, which is basically Greek dice gambling where the highest throw wins (though there are more complex rules to make scoring more fun).  In pleistobolinda with five astragaloi, we can get 24 different results ranging from 5 to 30, with the values 6 and 29 impossible to obtain given the numeric values available to us.  This means we link astragalomancy with grammatomancy, using give astragaloi to obtain one of 24 numbers and link that number to one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.  Happily, Apollonius Sophistes on his page about the Greek alphabet oracle already gives us such a correspondence between the sums of five astragaloi to the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.  Following the rule of pleistobolinda where the greatest sum wins the round, we give the highest throw of five astragaloi (30) to Alpha, the best oracle in grammatomancy, and the lowest throw (5) to Omega, the worst oracle.  The rest of the letters get assigned their respective values accordingly from high to low based on their position in the Greek alphabet.

Thus, with five astragaloi, we can pick and choose which set of oracles we want to use: if we’re only going to use the sum of the throw, we’d use the Greek alphabet oracle, but if we inspect the combination of individual astragaloi, then we’d use the astragalomantic oracle.  With the same set of tools we can pick and choose how we can get an answer, but it’s not clear to me how to link the two together, if we should at all.  For instance, consider the throw 1-1-1-1-1.  The sum of this throw is 5, associated with Omega with the oracle “you will have a difficult harvest, not a useful one”, which is the worst oracle you can get in grammatomancy.  However, in astragalomancy, the corresponding oracle for this says “Zeus the Savior will inspire you; he will give you happiness and all that you wish for, but sing the praises of Aphrodite and Hermes”.  This is actually quite a nice oracle to get, so long as you pay your respects to the good gods; plus, Dervenis links this throw of the astragaloi to the god Zeus Olympiou, Zeus of Olympos, while grammatomancy would link its corresponding oracle to the planet Saturn and, thus, the titan Kronos.  I see other issues with other results in trying to link Dervenis’ astragalomancy with grammatomancy, so although I can use the same set of tools for both, it may not be great to link the two together unless I find that grammatomancy and astragalomancy serve different ends.  Like, it’d be cool if grammatomancy could suggest a method of action while astragalomancy what will overall happen, but both seem to answer in terms of both advice on action and what will happen.  It’s unclear, although there is some connection between the two; one of the throws has in its oracular verse the verse associated with the letter Kappa (“fighting with waves is difficult; endure, friend”), though whether astragalomancy came before grammatomancy or vice versa isn’t clear.

Happily, the order in which the astragaloi are thrown don’t matter for astragalomancy; while one can simply throw a single astragalos five times, it’s implied that one throws five astragaloi at once.  However, although it’s never said in any text, it’s never mentioned about whether the manner in which the astragaloi themselves fall is interpreted, not just on which side but how far apart they end up, whether they bounce, the overall shape of the astragaloi placement, and the like.  There’re no rules for this, as far as I can tell, but where the astragaloi fall can often be as important as how they fall.  It’s similar to the cowrie shell divination I use; if they tend to fall in a straight line, it indicates motion to or some involvement with a particular entity, especially if all the shells fall in a line leading to a particular shrine or statue.  One flying off in a bizarre direction can indicate a wild hare up something’s ass.  This is far more free-form and is more ominous than oracular, so it all depends on the circumstances of the query, but it’s something to keep in mind.

All the same, astragalomancy is definitely a divination system I plan to be using and studying in tandem with grammatomancy.  After all, the use of dice has always been important for divination (sorcery and sortilege come from the same word, Latin sors meaning “lots” or selection by chance), and are excellent symbols of Hermes, to whom astragaloi and dice generally have always been linked.  Still, the use of knucklebones for divination has a different feel to it, a different charm and aesthetic that feels…well, older, classier, and more classical, and happily the set of knucklebones I bought on Ebay came in a set of 10, so I can keep one on Hermes’ altar and one in a satchel I keep of divination and magical tools on the go.  I’m getting to the point where I prefer to use them over my divination dice (a standard set of tabletop RPG dice from Chessex), but since I went ahead and consecrated my plastic divination dice, I figured why not undergo a consecration ritual for my astragaloi, too? Or, hell, turn astragalomancy from something casually done into something with a bit more flair?

Astragalomancy, as I brought up in the last post, is divination using knucklebones.  Besides the fact that I can legitimately say that I “throw the bones” when I do readings, I’m excited to learn about it because it’s such a classical system of divination, and one tied directly to Hermes.  Thing is, however, that it’s pretty straightforward, pretty simple, and pretty clear.  I’m a ceremonial magician.  Can I make something more complex?  You bet your ass I can, so I did with this.  After all, knucklebones and a guide to divination is well and good, but why not consecrate my new divination tools or set up a ritual divinatory framework with them?

Dervenis in his Oracle Bones Divination happily gives instructions on how astragaloi were cleansed and prepared from the actual sheep by repeatedly boiling them in a fresh dilute solution of vinegar and cleaning off whatever can come off until they’re completely cleaned of blood and flesh.  He admits that this is a bit much to ask of the everyday reader in our culture far removed from home butchery, and my knucklebones are already cleaned off.  Still, I figured I’d incorporate this simple act into a ritual of consecration under Hermes to dedicate the knucklebones for divination; the ritual boils the knucklebones more for effect and going through the motions instead of actually cleaning them, but if you’re actually cleaning off flesh and blood from the knucklebones, the ritual can be adapted for that, too.

At dawn on the day of the month given to worship of Hermes (the fourth day of the lunar month if you go by the Attic calendar, or the seventh day if you go by the mathetic calendar), prepare a large batch of khernips and wash yourself off with it.  Set aside frankincense and cinnamon incense, olive oil, white vinegar, clean water, and red wine, and make an offering to Hermes as you would normally with the usual prayers, incense, wine, candles, and whatever else you do; be sure to offer a good-sized glass of wine to the god during your offering.  Present to Hermes the five astragaloi, either by laying them on his altar before his image (if you have one) or by raising them up to the east facing the sunrise; dedicate the astragaloi to him as a gift and a means by which you can communicate with him and he with you for advice, divination, guidance, and direction:

Hail, Hermēs Khrēsmophoros! By your guidance, I seek messages from the gods.
Hail, Hermēs Euskopos! By your guidance, I seek wisdom from on high.
With these five knucklebones, these five astragaloi, I seek to know my life and the world I live in.
O Hermēs, you who love to be a friend to humanity, I give these astragaloi to you!
Let us throw these together as friends, sharing knowledge and wisdom of action and reaction!
Let us throw these together as mates, giving and hearing words of reality and advice!
Accept these five knucklebones, Hermēs Astragalios, as tools by which we may speak together!

After this, take a small pot and wash it out with the khernips.  Take one measure of vinegar and four measures of water in the pot, enough so that the entire amount is enough to completely cover the knucklebones, and heat the solution until it comes to a rolling boil.  Place the knucklebones into the boiling solution and slowly say the Orphic Hymn to Hermes.  Take the knucklebones out of the solution and place them on a clean white towel to dry and cool off, and throw out the liquid from the pot.  If so desired, repeat all this four more times, from rinsing the pot out with khernips to drying out the knucklebones, so that the knucklebones have been washed off five times in diluted vinegar; once, however, is enough, especially if the knucklebones have already been cleaned.

After this, rinse off each knucklebone in the khernips.  Take a shallow bowl and place the five knucklebones in it, and present the knucklebones to Hermes again as clean instruments for divination.  Light the incense of cinnamon and frankincense.  For each of the five knucklebones, take one from the bowl, hold it aloft, and dedicate it to Hermes in work with divination, submerging it in the wine you offered to him earlier:

With this wine, I nourish these bones that they may be fed to work in my divination.
With this wine, I honor these bones that they may help me in my life.
With this wine, I exalt these bones that they may loosen the tongues of the gods.
With this wine, I dedicate these bones to Hermēs that he may speak with his power.

After all five knucklebones have been fed with wine, empty and clean out the bowl, then place them back in the bowl (you may want to pat them dry first) and drizzle them all with the olive oil.  Rub each with the olive oil, making sure that they’re slick and covered with the stuff.  Waft each of the knucklebones in the incense so that the smoke completely surrounds each bone, having come in contact with all its surfaces.  Present the oiled and suffumigated knuclebones in the bowl (again emptied and cleaned out) to Hermes again, setting them before his image (if you have one), and pray:

Hail, Hermēs Khrēsmophoros! By your guidance, I seek messages from the gods.
Hail, Hermēs Euskopos! By your guidance, I seek wisdom from on high.
Great Hermēs guides all on their paths.
Great Hermēs leads all to their ends.
Great Hermēs knows all in their minds.
I dedicate these five astragaloi, to the words and works of Hermēs Astragalios,
that I may not be misguided, that I may not be mislead, that I may not be left in ignorance.
Cleaned, fed, anointed, suffumigated, dedicated,
may Hermēs speak clear and true through his oracles of his dice!

After this, leave the knucklebones on his altar for some time, at least a full day but, if possible, a full lunar month; set a candle on top of the bones every day that they’re being consecrated.  Once the consecration period is over, make an offering to Hermes in thanks for consecrating and accepting the knucklebones as a tool to be used with him for divination; the dice can now be wiped off from any extra oil that did not take and can be kept in a clean, protective bag.  Afterwards, that same day, also make an offering to Apollo, the best friend of Hermes and the other primary god of divination, and present the dice to him that his words may also come across true and clear through the dice with the guidance and aid of Hermes.

With that, our astragaloi are consecrated and ready for use.  Now, how do we go about using them?  Traditionally, astragalomancy was performed in the agora or forum, the town marketplace, by a herm (four-sided pillar topped with a bust of Hermes) with the 56 different oracles inscribed on the sides.  Next to the herm would be a table or a bowl containing the five astragaloi for divination; you’d ask Hermes the question, take up the astragaloi, roll them on the table or on the ground, and look up the corresponding answer.  Pretty simple and straightforward; ritually speaking, we don’t need to do more than just invoke Hermes and ask him our query.  Then again, that’s boring, so let’s be a little fancier.

Before consulting the astragalomancy, it helps to always figure out what exactly you’re going to ask.  I’ve talked about this plenty before, more in person than otherwise, but the query is the most important part of the whole divination process.  Without a good query, your answer’s going to be shit.  A good query follows the rules of the three “C”s:

• A good divination query is clear.  There is no obscurity, duplicity, or vagueness in the query; you’re being honest about what it is you want to know, and you’re putting it bluntly, frankly, and openly for both yourself, the diviner, and the gods or spirits who answer.
• A good divination query is concise.  You aren’t droning on for half an hour telling your life story, nor are you taking the garden path when asking your question.  Instead, you’re able to succinctly phrase your question into a single, short sentence.  This goes hand-in-hand with the clarity of the query.
• A good divination query is concrete.  You know exactly what you’re asking about and you’re asking it clearly and concisely.  You aren’t talking about abstract concepts or hypothetical theoretical potentialities of what ifs, but something that can actually happen with tangible or viewable results.

So, rather than asking “will I ever be happy in my love life?”, which is clear and concise but not concrete, you might ask “will John Doe propose to me by the end of this year?”; instead of asking “am I in the right place in my life” after droning on for an hour about your college mistakes, you might ask “should I leave my current company to work on my start-up idea?”.  You get the gist.  Given the placement of the oracle and given the major focus of the astragalomantic verses, although astragalomancy can be applied to any query, they’re especially powerful for matters involving business, trade, travel, and other worldly affairs.  It’s quite probable that tradesmen, shopkeepers, and other business-minded people would consult the agora astragalomancy before business deals or other ventures as our modern businesspeople consult the stock market and trade indexes.

Once you have the query fixed in your mind, understanding what it is you’re actually going to ask, prepare yourself and a few supplies for making a formal supplication for divination from Hermes.  Wash off with khernips and sprinkle it around the area you’ll be divining in as well as on the astragaloi.  Set the astragaloi before you.  Make an offering to Hermes by lighting a white candle and, if desired, some frankincense incense, and pour out a small amount of wine, praying:

Hail, Hermēs Khrēsmophoros! By your guidance, I seek messages from the gods.
Hail, Hermēs Euskopos! By your guidance, I seek wisdom from on high.
Great Hermēs guides all on their paths.
Great Hermēs leads all to their ends.
Great Hermēs knows all in their minds.
I make you this offering, Hermēs, and I seek your presence here!
I come with a question seeking answers, a query seeking advice!
Accept this light, this incense, and this wine, blessed god, and be pleased with them.
Open now my paths and see now my plight!

Feed the astragaloi with wine, using the fingers of your left hand to dip into the glass of wine for Hermes and sprinkling them onto the astragaloi.  Pray the same wine-feeding prayer as above:

With this wine, I nourish these bones that they may be fed to work in my divination.
With this wine, I honor these bones that they may help me in my life.
With this wine, I exalt these bones that they may loosen the tongues of the gods.
With this wine, I dedicate these bones to Hermēs that he may speak with his power.

Take up the astragaloi in your left hand and speak your query directly into them; focus on the query, breathing onto the astragaloi, until they become warm.  Once they’ve taken on your heat, cup them in both hands, shake them four times, and toss them onto the ground before you.  Make a note of how each astragalos falls, both in terms of which side it falls on (Khion, Hyption, Pranēs, Kōon) and how it falls in terms of speed, bounce, location, direction, and whether it bumps into another astragalos or into another object.  Announce the god associated with the throw of the astragaloi, and read aloud the corresponding oracle associated with the throw of the astragaloi.  Meditate on the god, the oracle, and the manner in which the astragaloi fell and how it all ties into a single answer for your query; if desired, also consult the Greek alphabet oracle interpretation for the sum of the throw.

If there are any more questions to be asked, wash off the astragaloi with khernips and feed them with wine again, saying the prayer as above, then repeat the process of throwing the astragaloi and meditating on the answer.  Once all questions have been asked, the divination ritual can be brought to a close.  Wash off the astragaloi with the khernips once more and pour a bit more wine into the offering for Hermes, thanking him for his answers and guidance from your heart, and asking that he continue to guide you that his advice may not be wasted or spoken in vain.  The candle can be respectfully put out or left burning as an offering.

Of course, if all the above is too much for you, you might invoke Apollo and Hermes, the gods of divination and prophecy, in a simple prayer that Apollonius Sophistes gives on his page about the Greek alphabet oracle.  This is an invocation at the top of a pillar with a set of oracular verses upon which grammatomancy is based, directly preceding the verses themselves.  The prayer runs thus:

Apollo, Lord, and Hermes, lead the way!
And thou, who wanders, this to thee we say:
Be still; enjoy the oracle’s excellence,
for Phoebus Apollo has given it to us,
this Art of Divination from our ancestors.

As far as ritual timing goes, I’d say that pretty much any time is good for Hermaic astragalomancy.  He’s both ouranic and chthonic, liminal, and everywhere all the time; there’s no bad time to work with him for this.  That said, as a matter of custom, any days the agora or market wouldn’t be open is probably a day to not consult the bones for this; in my lunar grammatomantic calendar, the unlettered days would be an example of this.  The usual astrological phenomena apply, of course: be wary of Mercury retrograde, rethink starting a matter when Mercury is afflicted or Moon is void of cource, yada yada.  Taking observance of the weather, a common warning in geomantic practice, is useful, too; you probably don’t want to do divination with the gods when those same gods in charge of the weather and the world are fighting or upset, causing storms or hurricanes or damaging winds or sharp frosts or whatever.  The process of figuring out the query can be coupled with meditation to clear out your own mind and settle your own passions, too, but you probably already know this.

In doing research for another ebook of mine that’s coming up soon, I was googling around for a particular set of seals of the four elemental archangels.  Eventually, I found what I was looking for, but in the process I found something else: my own lamen designs for the planetary angels Haniel and Gabriel.  Now, I’ve made many designs for my occult work, and I share a good number of them freely on my blog, so it’s not uncommon anymore for me to come across my own work when looking for something new while searching Google.  (It’s a curse, truly.)  Add to it, I post my designs on my blog for free so that people who are interested in following the path of a Renaissance Hermetic magician and whatever-the-fuck-else-I-am can make use of the same tools and designs for their own personal experiments.

The thing was, however, that these specific lamens I had come across had been printed out and were being sold as a listing on somebody’s Etsy page.  The Etsy seller had never contacted me for my permission or right of use, and I know them only because I saw some of Asterion’s fine occult art also copied for their own listings (again, as it had turned out, without Asterion’s permission).  Their listing never attributed the designs to me.  That’s not cool.

Don’t get me wrong, of course.  I’m personally thrilled that other people are able to make use of my lamens, Tables of Practice, force compasses, and various other types of seals in their own magical work and practices.  I’m flattered that people find them worthy and powerful enough, maybe even pretty enough, to share around online.  After all, it makes me feel like my time and my productions are useful and well-used, and I share these designs freely for the benefit of everyone.  That said, using my designs and productions for commercial purposes without attributing the design to me, without my permission, and without even asking me if it’s alright to do so is disrespectful, and I will not allow it.  I’m not a fan of taking my ball and going home, but I make my designs free for others to help them out without cost; if you’re going to ruin it for everyone and make it so that I stop sharing these designs, stealing them for your own ends is a good way to do that.

Just to make it explicit: my designs are under my copyright and are provided for personal noncommercial use only.  So, going forward, here’s what my policy is:

• You are free to download, print, copy, and modify any design I make and post on my blog to use in your own magical workings, public or private.
• You are free to redistribute without cost these designs while giving due credit for the design to me or my blog.  A link would suffice.  Heck, if you want to pass out my business cards to other people in the flesh, lemme know and I’ll send you a pack!
• You may not redistribute these designs without linking to my blog or attributing me (polyphanes) as the creator of the design.  Hey, if crazy armageddon-minded conspiracy-theoried Christian bloggers can do that to defame me and my vocation, you can, too!
• You may not redistribute, replicate, or use these designs in any publication, physical or electronic, without my permission.  This excludes blogs, Pinterest, Facebook, and others, of course, but don’t try putting my lamens in a book you’re writing about conjuration without asking whether it’s okay.
• You may not use my designs to sell in physical or electronic form for commercial gain without my permission.  This includes printing out the lamen designs and consecrating them to sell for others, making resinated pendants, or simply selling sets of the lamens that you yourself print out.  If you have a commercial idea for a product that uses or incorporates my design, ask me whether it’s okay first.
• If you do not ask me for permission to redistribute, replicate, or use these designs before using them, I will ask you to remove the designs from your work, take down your shop listings, etc. and you will never have permission to use any of my designs publicly for any purpose.
• If you do not comply with my requests to remove my work from your commercial work, we’re going to have some problems that will be resolved with lawyers.

Now, as a priest and devotee of Hermes, I understand the power of theft and how it may be needed.  I also realize that, from my point of view here on the end of a computer outside of DC, that I’m not omniscient and cannot see the actions of everyone who comes to my blog.  If you’re going to steal my designs for profit, do it smart and off the radar where I can’t see you and where your pictures won’t come up on Google.  If I catch you, you’re done.

Now, if you want me to custom design you something, by all means, contact me!  I’ll make you a design that’s yours and yours alone; my rates are decently priced and fair, and I’m pretty handy with Adobe Illustrator and a pen.  Publishers, I’m talking to you!

And while I’m at it, about my PDF ebooks I sell on my own Etsy page?  Please don’t redistribute them, either.  I haven’t noticed it becoming a problem, and I’d like for it to stay that way, but if I find people sharing my PDFs, I’m going to ask that you stop and take down whatever links or resources you have to share them.  If you’re going to share my work without my permission and if there’s nothing I can do can stop you, then do it in a way that I can’t track, will never know about, and have no means to change.  I have no way to ensure that it doesn’t happen, of course, but I won’t go to the lengths that Fr. Rufus Opus has gone and put a conditional curse on my PDFs that kicks in if you illegally share them, either.  I understand the benefit that a single copied PDF can give.

Really, in the end, just don’t be a douchebag.  Give credit where credit is due.  Ask me whether it’s okay first if you use something.  If you want to see me make more stuff, help support me so I can make more stuff.  Stealing from me is only going to make me annoyed and make it so that I produce less stuff for fewer people.

Using the astragaloi, or knucklebones, for divination has really intrigued me lately, as if you couldn’t tell from my last two posts on the subject.  Something about them feels different from other divination tools I’ve used; it could be that they’re actual bones taken from a living creature once, or that they just feel more arcane and ancient than my divination dice or cards I’m known to use.  All the same, they’re quickly becoming my favorite divination tool (besides geomancy generally), and I’m struck by their power and potency in getting answers.  The method is overall simple: take five astragaloi, throw them, and find the oracular verse associated with the combination of the sides that come up.  It’s simple, but elegant and straightforward.

However, they’re also different from my other divination tools in that they have really weird statistical properties.  Consider a die: every side of the die has (approximately) an equal chance of coming up when thrown.  Thus, on a six-sided die, throwing a 1 comes up as often as throwing a 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6.  Knucklebones, however, are different: they’re not ideal Platonic solids, nor are they regularly shaped in any sense.  Their organic and geometrically awkward shape results in there being different probabilities in throwing an astragalos on any given side.  Of course, the probabilities will differ slightly based on the individual knucklebone used and how hard it’s thrown, but based on an analysis by Phil Winkelman, we can approximate throwing an astragalos onto a particular side as follows:

• Khion (1): 10%
• Hyption (3): 40%
• Pranēs (4): 40%
• Kōon (6): 10%

It struck me that, because of the statistical probabilities associated with each number, not all oracular verses associated with each throw of the astragaloi will come up equally.  Some verses might be relatively common, while others would be extraordinarily uncommon to obtain, whether for good or evil.  Having some free time on my hands, I decided to run a short statistical analysis on how common different throws of the astragaloi would come up and how that would affect divination using astragaloi as compared to my other divination methods or suggested ways to use the astragalomantic oracular verses.

For instance, consider the use of astragaloi for grammatomancy.  Grammatomancy is my expanded version of the Greek alphabet oracle, and traditionally you would use five astragaloi for obtaining a Greek letter by throwing the bones and summing up the sides of the astragaloi.  So, for instance, if you threw (1,1,6,4,3), the sum would be 1 + 1 + 6 + 4 + 3 = 15.  The minimum sum you can get is 5 (1,1,1,1,1) and the maximum is 30 (6,6,6,6,6); based on how the numbers add up, you could not obtain a sum of 6 which requires (1,1,1,1,2) nor a sum of 29 which requires (6,6,6,6,5).  Between the numbers 5 and 30 inclusive, excluding the numbers 6 and 29, there are 24 possible sums.  Thus, we can associate each sum with one of the 24 Greek letters, starting with 5 = Ω and 30 = Α.  However, because the probability of an astragalos rolling on a 1 or 6 is 0.1, and on a 3 or 4 is 0.4, we get different possibilities for rolling different combinations of astragaloi and, further, obtaining different sums.  Below is a table that maps each letter of the Greek alphabet with its corresponding astragaloi sum (presented both in Arabic numerals and Greek numerals) and the probability one will obtain that letter from rolling five astragaloi.  The more extreme (higher or lower) the sum, the more rare the throw.  Thus, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that one will obtain Α or Ω with astragaloi (0.001% of the time), but comparatively common to obtain Μ and Ν (15.48% of the time).

For me, being used to my divination dice, this is shocking.  I use a dodecahedron die (d12, 12-sided die) for grammatomancy, where I roll the die twice.  The first roll gives me an odd or even number, which refer to the first 12 or last 12 letters in the Greek alphabet, while the second roll gives me the letter within that set according to its rank.  So, if I roll a 5 and an 8, I end up with the Greek letter Theta (eighth letter of the first half of the alphabet).  Using a 12-sided die where every side has an equal chance of turning up (approximately 8.333% of the time), every letter of the Greek alphabet has an equal chance of occurring (4.1667% of the time).  The statistical difference between getting the same Greek letter with a 12-sided die used in this way compared to using five knucklebones is huge; we’d get Α on the die 4.1667% of the time, but on the astragaloi only 0.00001% of the time.  It’s not impossible, just far more unlikely.  Then again, another classical method of grammatomancy was the method of ψηφοι, psēphoi or “pebbles”, where one has a jar of stones each marked with a different letter.  By reaching into the jar and pulling out a random stone, you get approximately an equal chance of obtaining any single Greek letter, which gets us the same results as using a 12-sided die in my fashion of using one.  Whether the use of astragaloi or psēphoi was more common for grammatomancy isn’t clear to me, but both methods work.

So what about the actual throw for proper astragalomancy, where we’re looking at the combination that results instead of the sum that’s formed from the combination?  We know that:

• There are four sides (1, 3, 4, 6) on each astragalos
• There are five astragaloi
• Order of the dice doesn’t matter

Thus, although there are 1024 possible combinations of astragaloi, we only end up with 56 possible throws of the astragaloi when we disregard the order and only consider unique combinations of the bones.  Below is a table that shows the probability for each possible throw of the astragaloi; remember that order doesn’t matter, so (1,1,3,4,6) is equivalent to (1,3,6,4,1) and (6,3,1,4,1).  Generally, the more 3s and 4s there are, the more likely a particular throw is.  Thus, we end up with a probability of 0.0001% for (1,1,1,1,1) and (6,6,6,6,6) as our most unlikely throws, and a probability of 10.24% for (3,3,3,4,4) and (3,3,4,4,4) as our most likely throws.

These probabilities are still different from the coin-toss method Kostas Dervenis gives in his Oracle Bones Divination.  Dervenis suggests one uses three coins flipped to obtain one of four results (T = tails, H = heads), each with the following probabilities:

• Khion: HHH (12.5%)
• Hyption: THH (37.5%)
• Pranēs: TTH (37.5%)
• Kōon: TTT (12.5%)

Thus, using coins as a substitute for astragaloi, we’d have a 0.0000305% chance of obtaining a (1,1,1,1,1) or (6,6,6,6,6) roll and a 7.41577% chance of obtaining a (3,3,4,4,4) or (3,3,3,4,4) roll.  These are pretty big changes in the probabilities of particular rolls, and all the other rolls would be affected similarly.  In either case, however, we have a situation where some results will come up far more regularly than others; then again, the oracle overall seems designed to have common outcomes assigned to the common fates, and extraordinary news to uncommon throws.  After all, it’s not every day you have the help of Zeus, King of the Gods and Men at your side, but far more common that you should wait a bit longer since your right time to act in the cosmos isn’t yet here.

So where does this leave us?  Should we forsake the use of dice and coins in favor of authentic knucklebones for astragalomancy since the probabilities of a given outcome are so different based on the tools used?  I don’t think so.  If we were playing a game of chance, then yes, the tools definitely matter, just as weighting a particular die to come up more on a given side would.  However, we’re not simply gambling with the gods here.  Divination is a sacred art and profession, and it helps the gods communicate with us so that we can ascertain their will as well as understand our own fates and our place in the divine order of creation.  Sure, it may be our hands that throw the bones, but it’s the hands of the gods that determine the outcome and how they land.  We’re not just rolling dice on our own, no more than things in the cosmos happen according to pure chance and nothing else.  This is why it’s important to invoke the gods of divination, like Hermes and Apollo, so that they’re involved in the throw of the astragaloi and can help guide them to fall on the proper sides so that we have a proper understanding of their wills and knowledge based on the result of the throw.  In that sense, using dice or bones or coins wouldn’t really matter, since it’s ultimately up to the gods to determine the outcome, and nothing is impossible for the gods.  Although they may have a preference for the system and tools used (hence the consecration and divination ritual from the previous post), they’re pretty handy when it comes to the myriads of tools used for divination.  So long as you’re letting the gods answer when you ask, the tools and their statistical qualities don’t matter in the long run.

A while back at Crucible, on the eve of my giving my presentation, I had an interesting dream.  There was a new fad of piercing going around: three horizontal barbells going through each cheek, like it was a variation of corset piercings but for the sides of the face.  I decided to get a set for my own cheeks, and I was amused at how they looked, but they came with a drawback I hadn’t expected.  It was hard to open my mouth fully, and if I tried to open my mouth too wide then it would hurt too much, like having one’s wisdom teeth pulled.  Add to it, every time I tried to open my mouth, I would get these flaky bruises all down my neck and onto the left side of my chest; they would flake and brush off pretty easily, but more kept coming back.

The night before giving a presentation, I have a dream where it’s hard for me to open my mouth?  Yeah, I wasn’t going to chance it being “just a dream”, despite that I don’t often put stock into dreamwork or premonition dreams.  That said, I’m in the habit of going before Hermes every night and asking for true dreams to understand and to remember, so I wasn’t going to just shrug it off.  It may very well have been a stress dream, but some quick divination suggested it was a cross of some sorts, and I wasn’t going to have that going on the first time I gave a presentation to the occult community.  So, with my friends, I went to the local grocery store, got a few things, and cobbled together an on-the-spot uncrossing ritual with the aim to remove all blockages and bindings on one’s mouth.  This would be good for anyone leading a presentation, speech, or discussion, and isn’t too labor-intensive by any means; after all, if I can do this on the fly on a road trip, you can do this just as easily.

For the record, I would have completely forgotten about writing about this if it weren’t for the fact I’m also considering more follow-up ritual and investigation from some more recent dreams.  But hey, in case you were looking for a ritual to free one’s mouth from possible spellwork, here you go!

For this ritual, you’ll need:

• Holy water
• Four lemons
• Whole cloves
• Figs
• Honey
• Wine

Take the lemons and stick four whole cloves around the meridian of the lemon where it’s fattest.  When appropriate to do so, go to a 4-way crossroads of some sort (I used a bridge over a river), wash off with the holy water and fling the spiritual filth into the middle of the intersection.  Invoke Hermes and make an offering of a small mound of figs drizzled on top with honey and poured over with wine, saving some of each for yourself later.  Take each of the four lemons and roll them in an always downward direction from the top of your head, down your neck, down each of your arms, down your chest and back, down your legs, and down to under your feet, asking Hermes all the while to remove all crosses, curses, bindings, and restrictions placed upon you.   Spit on each of the lemons and pray that Hermes remove all crossings and bindings and have them affect the lemons, sour that they are that they close the mouth and tighten the voice, and that the lemons take all the hit placed upon you.

Take some of the leftover figs, honey, and wine for yourself.  Dip the figs in the honey, eating them while saluting Hermes and proclaiming that “truth is sweet and smooth”; drink some wine while saluting Hermes and proclaiming that “truth is swift and strong”.  Pray that Hermes especially watch over your mouth and tongue that you may speak fluidly and fluently, saying what must be said that it may be swift and convincing and that you may bear the messages of the gods and men to those who might hear them.

Carry two of the lemons in your pocket with you.  Take one of the lemons you spit upon and  throw it into the crossroads.  Leave the crossroads without looking back and taking a different course to your origin than you took to get there, and halfway through throw one of the lemons over your left shoulder.  During your presentation or speech, set one of the lemons out in a discrete place between you and the audience (on the podium, between your feet, etc.), then throw it away after the presentation.  Keep the last lemon with you until you return to a safe place at the end of the day, then throw it away outside your safe place where you most likely won’t pass by and is out of the way.

By the way, feel free to wash off with any kind of holy water, khernips, Florida water, or the like frequently during the time you do the ritual until the end of the day.  A bit of extra spiritual cleanliness definitely won’t hurt and it’ll help loosen up any curses or crosses sent upon you, making it easier for the lemons to take the hit.