I mentioned recently that I got Jason Miller’s excellent “Advanced Planetary Magic”, which, again, you should totally get, since it’s worth far more than the cost.  It’s a collection of 49 short prayers or invocations to be used during different combinations of the planetary hours and days for different ends (so there’s a Moon/Saturn call to be done in an hour of the Moon on the day of Saturn, a Saturn/Moon call to be done in an hour of Saturn on the day of the Moon, etc.).  As part of his goal to get this magic out in the world and practiced by the masses, Mr. Miller started up a project called The Crying of Calls 49, where people participate by calling out one of the calls each for 49 consecutive days in the proper hour for a given week.  So, the first week is for the Moon calls, the second week for the Mercury calls, and so forth.  I’m posting my results in the Facebook group for the project, but I also thought I’d share my results and experiences with you all as well.    I won’t share what the Calls are or what they’re for, since you should go buy the ebook and find out for yourself, but the astute among you will figure it out.

This past week, Monday 8/12 through Sunday 8/18, we did the calls to Jupiter.  Below are my experiences and thoughts:

8/12: Jupiter/Moon 

Made the Jupiter/Luna call in the last hour of Jupiter, the hour just before dawn on Tuesday. Standard operating procedure with cedar and jasmine incense.

This is…for some reason, weirdly calming. The Luna/Jupiter call was deeply calming as well, but for some reason, this just feels weird, though I don’t know why (I wasn’t expecting anything else). On the one hand, it feels so calm and peaceful, almost sleep-giving like light opium; on the other, it feels like it’s produced an awakeness and benevolent alertness that keeps me grounded. Between these two smooth and light influences, the harmony between them is a delightful mix, but it’s still something that I have this internal headtilt at. Visualizing the sigil was simple enough, picturing bright tin on (royal) purple, and inhaled like an icy cool yet thick drink, spreading all throughout me and supporting me in my bones with a kind of bright chrome-silver light. Interesting feeling; maybe this is the inner grace described in the annotation.

8/13: Jupiter/Mars

Made the Jupiter/Mars call in the second hour of Jupiter tonight. Standard operating procedure with cedar and pine incense.

It’s weird that the Mars/Jupiter call seemed to have the Jupiter force dominant, and that the reverse is true here, too: the Martian force seems to be stronger than the Jovian one. There’s definitely a lot of heat in this call, but it’s all surface-heat, nothing deep; rather, the coolness and “breeze” of Jupiter seems locked in deep (much like Jupiter/Luna), but lends its lightning and storminess to the outward expression of this Call. A good phrase for this feeling might be “martial law”, though maybe that’s because it’s my own rulership of my kingdom that needs work instead of defense from outside. I feel regally warlike, or martially professional, like a top-tier officer issuing orders and having things set aright. Inhaling the sigil was interesting; the tin of the Jupiter sigil seemed to melt like solder in the red heat of Mars, and it seemed to seal my joints and around my head like a helmet. The eliminating nature of Mars and the expanding nature of Jupiter here don’t seem to be at odds, but work complimentary to that of Mars/Jupiter: whereas Mars/Jupiter gets one’s ass in gear on the things that matter, Jupiter/Mars orders things to matter and get done. It’s like two sides of the same coin.

8/14: Jupiter/Mercury

Made the Jupiter/Mercury call tonight in the third hour of Jupiter. Standard operating procedure with cedar and cinnamon incense.

With respect to the elements, I go with Agrippa’s association and give Mercury to water and Jupiter to air; with the quickness and sharpness of Mercury combined with the coolness and airiness of Jupiter, this Call feels ice cold, but in a completely rejuvenating, refreshing way. It’s as if someone dunked an overheating processor into a supercooled ice bath, improving processing speed like whoa. It’s like the frost that develops at superhigh altitudes when any moisture is present, gathering more and combining with other moisture to form precipitation that then falls down, which heats up to repeat the cycle. In a sense, it feels like an unusual metaphor of the cycling and recycling of money to produce money. That said, the expansiveness of Jupiter doesn’t mesh so great this time with the connectivity that Mercury brings; while the Mercury/Jupiter call was relaxing and well-connecting, this just feels overactive and overinvolved, like the predecessor of a fast-acting storm. It almost feels uncomfortably ungrounded and easy to get confused in this state.

8/15: Jupiter/Jupiter

Made the Jupiter/Jupiter call tonight in the third hour. Went with a full blown conjuration of the angel, intelligence, and spirit of Jupiter tonight with the Trithemius ritual in conjunction with a Gate of Jupiter rite and adoration of Zeus, within which happened a bottle of good chardonnay and the Jupiter/Jupiter call. Preceded with donning a new ritual robe and a complete set of prayers, ablutions, meditation, and energy work.

Honestly, after all that, it’s hard to pick out what was from the Call and what wasn’t. Since this was a “pure planetary” Call, it approximates any other purely jovial working, and since this was just one big Jupiter ritual, it blended in nicely. Besides, the similarities between this Call and Jason Miller’s prayer to Jupiter are fairly high (I can’t fathom why). All the same, I’m feeling pretty shiny and golden and good right now. Hail Zeus, and hail to you all!

8/16: Jupiter/Venus

Made the Jupiter/Venus call tonight in the third hour of Jupiter. Standard operating procedure, rose/cedar incense.

I feel wet. Like, covered in humidity wet. It’s weird, but refreshing and embracing at the same time; this is a truly good feeling produced from this call. It’s sensual and smooth, as expected from Venus, and cool and airy, as expected from Jupiter, but the moisture from the two combined is much closer this time than in the airy breezy feeling made from the Venus/Jupiter call. I feel safe and embraced, yet at the same time there’s this stimulating, sensuous feeling along my spine. Everything seems precious, everything seems needed; I made a small request beforehand, adapting the info text with the call specifically for my partner and myself, so we’ll see what comes of that. Seeing the sigil of Jupiter tin on green tonight was interesting; unlike the baroque filigree of Venus copper on blue from the Venus/Jupiter call, this had an organic, almost naturally-formed look. Inhaling it was just as sensual and exciting in its own way as the rest of the air around me, and filled me with this neat kind of joy.

8/17: Jupiter/Saturn

Made the Jupiter/Saturn call tonight at the end of the third hour of Jupiter. Standard operating procedure, myrrh/cedar incense; I may have gone over in time into the hour of Mars, but I didn’t let that stop me. Just in case, I made a quick reading of the call beforehand to make sure I got it in time.

This is an interesting combination of forces, and it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends; Jupiter is normally airy as I’ve felt it, but it’s noble airy with this kind of gravitas of force. Saturn is heavy and smug as usual, but this is a weird kind of cheerful call in its own manner, like resolution in the face of adversity, brushing the dust off one’s shoulders and keeping on, like a king faced with problems solving them one at a time. I felt like weights were attached to me all around me, but that I was standing and growing tall. Inhaling the visualization of the Jupiter sigil tin on black was interesting; it went slow, though the tin was exceptionally bright (almost magnesium-burning white), and it gave me this kind of weird inner exoskeletal feel, like I was growing a layer of armor just underneath my skin with a kind of fullness under it. Then again, this Call was about expansion within limits, and the skin is certainly the limit to the body.

8/18: Jupiter/Sun

Made the Jupiter/Sun call in the first hour of Jupiter today after my morning rites and purifications. Fittingly, I also anointed myself with King Solomon oil; not as commanding as High John, but suitable for this call. Otherwise, standard operating procedure with cedar/frankincense incense.

This is a GOOD call, dang. Unlike the Sun/Jupiter call which was really mild though posh for me, Jupiter/Sun feels extraordinarily lively and good. I feel energized and charged, active and awake, deeply happy and content. For me, it’s as if the airy joy of Jupiter combines with the golden stillness of the Sun and penetrates deep within me, radiating outwards without heat but with much light and Good Feels. Visualizing the sigil today made the sigil of Jupiter tin on yellow look…I dunno. Ideal? As if it wasn’t anything actually made or constructed or designed, but Original. Inhaling it seemed to actually have it pass through the crown of my head in a shower of light and descend totally through me and every part of me. The slow light-bearing fire of the Sun and the fast lightning-bolt gold of Jupiter combines exceptionally well in this call for me.

A while back I wrote about some different elemental correspondences for the four directions.  Long story short, there are different systems of corresponding the elements to the four directions, with two primary methods: Agrippa’s method (Fire/East, Earth/South, Air/West, Water/North) and the Golden Dawn method (Air/East, Fire/South, Water/West, Earth/North).  However, in a recent post Aaron Leitch discusses some of the biblical origins of the Golden Dawn system while exploring other methods of correspondence, and in a reply post Alex Sumner discusses why the Golden Dawn correspondences are the way they are.  It’s all pretty interesting to read, so I suggest you do so.

Alex Sumner brings up a good point: should you change the correspondences of the elements to suit your working and placement in the world?  To quote,

In my opinion, there can only be one answer – a categoric NO. And I say so for the following reasons:

A Golden Dawn temple physically located in England or America, is not operating in England or America;

A Golden Dawn temple in (e.g.) Australia, is not operating in Australia.

Both of them, despite being on opposite sides of the world, are actually operating in one and the same place. The magical inner-workings of the Golden Dawn ceremonies take the Temple, and astrally transport it through Time and Space and across dimensions – to the Hall of the Duat, in the Egyptian otherworld.

What he says makes sense, and points to something I’ve brought up in the past: if you’re working within a set tradition, don’t change stuff to suit your needs.  If a text, grimoire, ritual, or teacher says to use a particular method, don’t change what they say to do until you’ve tried it first and, even then, only if you have an actual need to once you understand why it is the way it is.  For the Golden Dawn system of magic, the physical location of the Temple (and thus the place where the elemental correspondences come into play the most) doesn’t matter, but the astral/spiritual location of the work, which takes place Elsewhere.  That said, if you’re not working in that kind of framework, it may be better to experiment and change things before trying them out.  It honestly depends.  For instance, for an upcoming project (if ever I stop putting if off) where I plan to work with Wraeththu magic and mythos, the standard Golden Dawn/neopagan system of elements is used, but the system is also very personalized and dependent upon personal exploration.  In that case, changing the directions of the elements may not be such a bad thing, and may help in my case to tie it into my other overall magic work.

So, with all that in mind and with a slew of elemental correspondences to pick from, which one should you use?  As in all else with magic, it depends.

• If you’re working in any kind of tradition that has already set its own rules (traditional Wicca, Golden Dawn, etc.), use the correspondences already set down in stone.  This way, you’re tapping into the current of that tradition, which links you to the overall power and history of that tradition, giving your rituals a stronger boost based on the power already built in that.  Unless you want to experiment within the bounds of that tradition, you’re breaking away from it, which deprives you of the force already built up into it.
• If you’re working in a tradition that is place-independent and takes place in another dimension, much like the Golden Dawn where the physical location of the Temple is meaningless since the work in the Temple takes place in the Hall of the Duat in the Egyptian otherworld, then use the correspondences of that astral/otherworldly place.  Since the correspondences of that otherworldly place take precedence, using a physical set of correspondences is meaningless.
• If you’re working in a solitary earth-based or nature-primary tradition, you might be best off using the elemental correspondences that best reflect the place where you’re currently working.  This helps plug you into the natural flow of the powers that be where you currently are, and helps sync you to the place where you are, respecting the land and nature you’re actually working with.  The standard Golden Dawn system is fine for Wicca in its original land of Great Britain, but other systems may work better should one works on the east coast of the US (e.g. Water/East, Fire/South, Earth/West, Air/North) or in the Southern Hemisphere (e.g. Air/East, Earth/South, Water/West, Fire/North).
• If you’re working in a tradition that is celestially-based or star-primary, I’d suggest using Agrippa’s correspondences that use the elemental associations of the zodiac signs.  This implies that the elements come from the planets, which is pretty standard Hermetic doctrine, and helps link your work down here in this worldly sphere with the rest of the spheres of the cosmos, tying your elemental work into that of the planets directly.

For myself, I use that last method, since as a Hermetic magician, my primary work is with the planets and the stars, which form the basis for the elements down here on Earth.  By working with the powers of the cosmos, I can influence how these powers manifest down here, and by using the correspondence of the elements to the directions based on the zodiac, this gives me the easiest opportunity to make the transition from Up There to Down Here as smooth as possible.  However, even this might change depending on the situation; if I were doing something specifically with the spirits of the elements and the land down here limited strictly and solely to down here, I’d find out how the elements locationally and temporally work around me and use the natural power of the place of the working, buffed out with my own celestial correspondences.  Then again, if I were to tap into a more Golden Dawn type of current or if I were involved in setting up a Golden Dawn ritual by the book, I would use the Golden Dawn method because that’s what works for that specific ritual.

In a way, rules in magic are helpful, but only up to a point, and only up to their own usefulness.  Sticking to one rule at the permanent exclusion of all else can very easily deprive you of working methods or ideas to help buff out your work.  As anyone familiar with Saturnine work knows, walls can bind and block, but walls can also be knocked down and rebuilt.  Tradition, focus, scope, and need should all be taken into consideration when setting up a ritual or cosmological framework, and the combination of all of them may not be constant depending on the situation.

I mentioned recently that I got Jason Miller’s excellent “Advanced Planetary Magic”, which, again, you should totally get, since it’s worth far more than the cost.  It’s a collection of 49 short prayers or invocations to be used during different combinations of the planetary hours and days for different ends (so there’s a Moon/Saturn call to be done in an hour of the Moon on the day of Saturn, a Saturn/Moon call to be done in an hour of Saturn on the day of the Moon, etc.).  As part of his goal to get this magic out in the world and practiced by the masses, Mr. Miller started up a project called The Crying of Calls 49, where people participate by calling out one of the calls each for 49 consecutive days in the proper hour for a given week.  So, the first week is for the Moon calls, the second week for the Mercury calls, and so forth.  I’m posting my results in the Facebook group for the project, but I also thought I’d share my results and experiences with you all as well.    I won’t share what the Calls are or what they’re for, since you should go buy the ebook and find out for yourself, but the astute among you will figure it out.

This last and final week, Monday 8/19 through Sunday 8/25, we did the calls to Saturn.  Below are my experiences and thoughts:

8/19: Saturn/Moon 

Made the Saturn/Luna call tonight in the third hour of Saturn. Standard operating procedure, myrrh/jasmine incense. For Saturn, I’m repeating the call three times.

Heavy, certainly, which is fitting for Saturn. It’s like the smugness of the past */Saturn calls is from being self-important or beyond judgment, which now I’m starting to get more on that side of things. Still, heavy and fixed as Saturn is, the Moon gave everything a rapid, fluid feel, like I was a rock at the center of a whirlpool, or a fixed point in space and time. I felt like being able to reach out and gathering whatever it was I needed from the world outside of me, like everything was circling around and to me instead of me having to catch up to it. For the intent of this call, this is certainly one way to keep up with time, but not the expected one. Inhaling the visualization of the sigil of Saturn lead on violet was…sticky, like trying to breath in wet jello, but it tasted sweet enough due to the incense blend (which lends itself well to each other). This is less a mischievous feel (as in Luna/Saturn) and more of a…confident overseer feel. Interesting.

8/20: Saturn/Mars

Made the Saturn/Mars call twice today, first in the first hour of Saturn at work (just under my breath) and again in the second hour of Saturn, standard operating procedure with pine/myrrh incense.

This one has a kick to it; the heat of Mars is strong, but it’s heavy and restricting in a Saturnine way I haven’t yet felt in this project. Visualizing the sigil of Saturn lead on red made it seem much more…not necessarily sinister, not quite despondent, but something between the two; it felt like a grill or a net, and inhaling it didn’t quite work, but it wrapped around me as a chain blanket and seeped into my bones, which now feel denser and hotter. The heat built up in this isn’t painful, but it is discomfortingly deep. In that regard, it’s probably good paired up with the Jupiter/Mars call to get off one’s ass, especially if one’s weakness (like mine and others, certainly) is sloth.

8/21: Saturn/Mercury

Made the Saturn/Mercury call today in the second hour of Saturn.  I’m visiting a friend today out of town, so I made the call outside in the sunlight; a change, but a pleasant one.  Otherwise, standard operating procedure with cinnamon/myrrh incense.

This is a weird feeling, but perhaps mercurial me doesn’t often like shutting up, with either my voice or my mind.  If Mercury deals with circuits and channels of communication, the normal connections and flows I feel changed drastically; it was like all channels of communication were thrown open and flowing towards me.  The heaviness of Saturn made me feel like the bottom of a well or a lake, with all the buzz of Mercury flowing to me like water to a low spot.  Between feeling low and looking up and this weird centralized-stillness-external-buzzing, this feels like a weird kind of spiritual adderall.  Probably good to use before meditation, classes, or any period of observation that requires focus.  Visualization of the sigil of Saturn lead on orange didn’t have any unusual effects or signs this time, but inhaled smoothly and made me feel solidified and more “here”.

8/22: Saturn/Jupiter

Made the Saturn/Jupiter call tonight in the second hour. Standard operating procedure with myrrh and cedar incense.

Like the Jupiter/Saturn call last week, this feeling of combined forces is difficult to discern in differentiation (oh my god Jason, confound you for getting me stuck alliterating endlessly), and the feeling is really similar: guarded kingship, decisiveness, clarity. The breeziness and coolness of Jupiter mesh well with the heaviness and cold of Saturn, although this call is the exact opposite of the other; while Jupiter/Saturn was about expanding within contraction, Saturn/Jupiter is about contracting on expansion. It’s almost the same sensation, and I feel like I have everything spiritually or metaphorically at hand in a kind of “waste not want not” atmosphere. Inhaling the sigil seemed odd tonight; visualizing the sigil of Saturn lead on blue ended up getting wrapped around my head, looping through my spinal column and forming a kind of ring through my nose, like it’s circulating and pushing stuff down and away from the head elsewhere in the body. Probably some good information in that symbolism, I’ll wager.

8/23: Saturn/Venus

Made the Saturn/Venus call today in the second hour of Saturn. Standard operating procedure with rose/myrrh incense. I tailored my preceding prayer with a specific intent to solidify and make permanent and transcendent my relationship with my partner.

Unlike the other Saturn calls, this one isn’t heavy at all, though it has an interesting other effect; I feel like there’s some weird chain or cable pulling from within my chest out towards the back elsewhere; I know where it ends, my own partner, or my link to him, rather. The heaviness is definitely around my chest due to this weird tethering, but it’s not unwelcome; unlike the Venus/Saturn call, this one is actually fairly pleasant, if not sobering. The kindness of Venus certainly cancels out the otherwise harsh feeling of Saturn, but the way they combine here is almost surprising, showing a weird kind of sober, somber, dedicated love that (for someone as young as I am) I wouldn’t expect to feel anytime soon. The incense has a type of wine-like twinge to it tonight missing from before, and the sigil seemed as normal as ever besides shooting into and through me to form the chain instead of just inhaling it as usual.

8/24: Saturn/Saturn

Changed things up today. Opened up with an invocation of Saturn from the Picatrix and used my lead Saturn talisman from an election a while back as a focus for the ritual. Used three candles and three sticks of myrrh incense, and anointed my palms and the talisman with myrrh oil. Beyond that, standard operating procedure, but with nine repetitions of the Call (three times three): three out loud, three quietly, three silently.

This one knocked me on my back, or rather, on my front; I ended up lying down prostrate on the ground before my altar for a while after making the call, since the heaviness of Saturn turned into a deep, profound sense of falling. Entering the Abyss, indeed. I’ll reserve most of my thoughts on this for later; I don’t even really know where to begin with this tonight. Visualizing the sigil of Saturn lead on black tonight was sharp, and inhaling it into my energy body felt painful or like being macerated inside. Everything is calm, but…

8/25: Saturn/Sun

Made the Saturn/Sun call today in the first hour of Saturn. Performed a ritual cleansing and full Sevenths-calling beforehand, and got out the fancy censer and grains of myrrh and frankincense resin (partially because I ran out of frankincense sticks). Otherwise, standard operating procedure.

After last night’s heavy and depressed call, this one was sorely, sorely needed, but having done it, I feel recharged in the deepest and most thorough way possible. It’s a weird kind of joy; not a temporary or emotional joy, but an existential, survivalist joy that doesn’t quite match up with words or laughter. The stillness of the Sun provides a kind of crystal clarity to the world around me, while the solidity and heaviness of Saturn this time has turned into a kind of support and guide, a chain bridge or a ladder to help me. The visualization of the sigil, though dark like coal on gold, inhaled in among the densest and most spiritually forceful way yet; it seemed to form a chain extending from infinitely above me to infinitely below me, a kind of shivalingam of gold and black that I can neither escape nor lose myself from.

And that does it for me! All 49 Calls have been made, and this project is drawn to a close for me. This has been a fantastic trip for me, you guys, and I give my deepest and sincerest thanks to Jason Miller for writing up this set of prayers.  I wouldn’t've thought to combine the planets like how he did, and I’m glad he shared his work with the world.  If you haven’t gotten your copy, do so immediately and start putting them to use.  I can’t emphasize how powerful yet simple this stuff is; it may be Hermetics Lite, but it has no small punch for your Work.

After a long while of not having classes at Sticks and Stones, the local new age/earth-based spirituality store I do readings at, the lovely owners and I finally came up with a few classes and workshops for me to teach through the rest of 2013.   After all, being one of the few ceremonial magicians in the area, I’ve got a lot of experience and knowledge under my belt (though by no means enough) to share around with folks willing enough to hear me out and pay a small-but-reasonable fee.  With that in mind, here’s my teaching schedule for the first half of 2013.  All the classes will be on Sunday afternoons.

Greek Alphabet Divination ($30), Sunday 9/29, 2pm ~ 4:30pm
Alphabets and letters have always been held as magical tools and powers in their own right, and have been used as a form of divination in countless cultures.  Much like the Nordic runes, the ancient Greeks had their own method of letter-based divination or “grammatomancy”, where each letter has a particular oracular meaning.  When combined with the other astrological and magical meanings that the Greek alphabet has gained over the centuries, this can become a powerful divination and magical tool indeed!  Join yours truly in discussing the origins, development, and use of the Greek alphabet for easy-to-use divination and magic.  A copy of his first 60pp. publication, “De Grammatomanteia”, is included with the course for reference and study.  No prior knowledge is necessary, though a familiarity with the basics of divination and magical ideas would be helpful.

Introduction to the Headless Rite ($30), Sunday 10/13, 2pm ~ 4:30pm
Written 2000 years ago in Egypt, the powerful ritual known as the Headless Rite has been used for exorcism by mages in the Mediterranean, knowledge and conversation of the higher Self by Samuel MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley, and empowerment over harmful forces by countless other magicians.  Join yours truly in discussing the origins, development, and use of this ritual as he shows participants how and where to use the ritual to get the most out of it, both in the physical and the astral.  No prior knowledge is necessary, but a desire for ultimate cosmic power would be appreciated.

Basic Magical Tools and Supplies ($15), Sunday 11/3, 2pm ~ 4pm
Magic can be seen as the use of higher forces to attain lower ends or vice versa, and has been practiced differently by countless traditions, groups, lodges, and people across the ages.  That said, you don’t need to be a Wiccan to use an athame or a Christian to use holy oil!  Some magical supplies can be made, created, or adapted for any practitioner of magic for fantastic results.  Join Sam Block to discuss what forms magical tools can take, how to create basic tools and supplies, and methods to augment and empower yourself with everyday blessings and items you wouldn’t otherwise consider magical.  No prior knowledge is necessary.

Thinking With Planets ($15), Sunday 11/10, 2pm ~ 3:30pm
A lot of modern magical traditions focus on using the four elements of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth, occasionally with the fifth element of Spirit, as the primary or only forces of their work.  However, even a few hundred years ago, magicians of all kinds used another set of forces: the planets!  With the powers of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, magicians were able to accomplish a lot more a lot faster, including directly affecting the elements themselves.  Join yours truly to learn how to introduce the use of the planets into your own work, basic magical timing, and how to connect the planets to the elements and vice versa.  No prior knowledge is necessary.

Introduction to Angelic Conjuration ($30), Sunday 12/8, 2pm ~ 4:30pm
When you hear about “conjuration”, do you think of pompous magicians in ruined castles wielding swords and hurling imperious threats at misunderstood spirits bound in arcane circles?  Then stop by with yours truly and learn the truth about ceremonial magic’s most famous type of ritual!  He will go over how conjuration really works, its history and roots in shamanic practices, proper conjuration etiquette, and a complete and easy introduction to conjuring and chatting with angels.  With little more than a circle and a glass of water, you too can start a magical practice with some of the most powerful and easily accessible forces in the cosmos!  Some knowledge of planets and spirits in the Western Mystery Tradition would be appreciated.

Dear readers, you have a good idea of what I know, do, and write about.  If you were (or are) able to stop by for a class or two, what other classes would you like to see taught?  I’m planning my two-day geomancy class for sometime early in 2014, but I also have a few other ideas.  What might you think would go well for a broadly introductory or basic topic for workshops?

I get a lot of hits on my blog from across the realm of the Internet, many of which are from links on Facebook, Twitter, or RSS readers.  To you guys who follow me: thank you!  You give me many happies.  However, I also get a huge number of new visitors daily to my blog from people who search around the Internet for various search terms.  As part of a monthly project, here are some short replies to some of the search terms people have used to arrive here at the Digital Ambler.  This focuses on some search terms that caught my eye during the month of August 2013.

“magic orgone” — I wouldn’t call orgone “magic”, per se, but it is basically the quintessence, akasha, ether, or spiritual force underling the energy model of magic; orgone can be said to be the same thing as odic force, qi/chi/ki, or prana, depending on your tradition or viewpoint.  Orgone technology was developed as a kind of fringe science using the principles of magnetism, electricity, and polarity extrapolated towards human energy/subtle-body models of working with the body.  There are ways to work with orgone in a magical way, as my own experiments with orgone have shown, but it can be used outside of a magical framework just as easily, just as radionics or reiki aren’t necessarily considered “magical” (though basically are, anyway).

“planetary hours for july” — Planetary hours are calculated for individual days, based on the location and date of the observer.  Trying to form a generalized calendar independent of location won’t work, since planetary hours rely on the sunrise and sunset times for a particular place (which change depending on latitude, time zones, and the like).  Lots of free planetary hour calculators abound on the internet, however, so look instead for “planetary hour calculator”.

“sex sigil” — Yes please.

“ikea altar” — It’s true, my altar furniture is pretty much just from IKEA, or to a lesser extent, Target.  IKEA is fantastic for cheap but sturdy stuff, so long as you don’t mind the appearance of it; if you use an altar cloth, you’ll be set.  The small LACK side tables are perfect for corner altars or working tables in conjuration, I’ve found, and their price can’t be beat, especially if you want something disposable (a la Enochian Tables of Practice) or if you want something to engrave or woodburn without too much cost going into the thing.

“the kybalion homosexuality” — This probably references my post from before on the comparatively recent book Kybalion, gender, and sexuality.  I wish I could talk about this more, and I probably should one of these days, but my thoughts on the matter haven’t much evolved past the point of “I don’t know”.  Everyone has their own dynamic within themselves to work with, and even though the Kybalion is great at simplifying the world down into a few rules and laws of occult motion, they’re also sufficiently broad to gloss over the minute subtleties involved with actual experience in the world around us.  Plus, the interplay between the laws isn’t well developed in that short text as much as we might like, and the cultural and personal bias of the original author(s) may have had something to do with the laws as they apply to homosexuality or queerness more generally.  I’m going to appeal to authority here and say that Crowley had it probably more correct and concise when he said “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”.  In the end, it’s really only you yourself who can figure out who you are/Are, understand what you can and should do/Do, what’s good/Good and bad/Bad, and judge your own progress/Progress.  Nobody else has that right; nobody else can judge you or tell you what it is you need to do, or what’s a beautiful thing for you to preserve or maintain.  In this light, especially if you have any respect for Thelema or Crowley, to use any text, occult or otherwise, to justify judging, discriminating, controlling, or maligning others because of personal bias is revolting, and I advise all my readers to cut that shit out.

“strongest geomancy figures in order”  — It depends on what you mean by “strongest”, and even then which author you read, since geomancy is an old tradition of divination going back a thousand years across multiple continents.  If you mean favorability and fortune, i.e. how good a figure is, you might use a general rule such as that of Robert Fludd’s or an older Arabic system, but this is pretty broad and doesn’t take into account specific situations or context.  If you mean positions in the houses of the astro-geomantic chart, you might use the directional correspondences of the figures or their planetary joys, but this isn’t used by all geomancers.  At the risk of making my dear readers do a bit of goddamn research and study, I suggest you review my De Geomanteia posts on the figures to get a full grasp of what they mean and how they relate to any arbitrary situation.

“yes no meaning to six sided dice”  — I suggest looking at Balthazar Black’s post on using six-sided dice for this.  I use a set of RPG dice for my divinations, specifically the 2d10 dice for yes/no questions.  Simple methods can be made, however: high numbers indicate high likelihoods of “yes”, while low numbers indicate low likelihoods, or odd means “yes” and even means “no”, or other combinations.  Dice are an ancient tool and game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you found any number of traditions from different cultures or ages indicating different methods of cleromancy with dice.

“quick divination”  — Tomorrow you’ll wake up, do a bunch of stuff, and then go back to sleep.

“is sprinkling salt in bath water and praying to god” — This was, in fact, the entire search term; it seems like something got cut off, but who can say?  Assuming the searcher in question ended the query with something like “evil”, “damnable”, “wicked”, or “sinful”, I can say that the answer is very firmly no.  Salt has long been used across cultures and ages as a cleansing, purifying, or protective agent; spiritual baths are a longstanding tradition in pretty much every occult and religious tradition, from misogi in Shinto to wudu in Islam to baptism in Christianity.  Prayer is, of course, a good thing in magic and religion, and any action whatsoever can always use that heavenly or divine boost from having the hand of God or hands of gods involved.  I should take full spiritual baths with prayers more often, honestly, but I content myself with a regular sprinkling of holy water every day with prayer; before any significant working, however, I’ll definitely cast some salt I’ve prayed over into a clean tub of tepid clean water, immerse myself completely, and pray a number of psalms while in the tub.

“tojil strategic ffxi” — er…I don’t play Final Fantasy XI, though my boyfriend does.  Tojil in FFXI is a pretty nasty boss mob, and from what I’ve seen over my boyfriend’s shoulder and from what I’ve heard him say about it, learning how to time attacks with Tojil’s changes in aura is key; you’d be able to take down this beast in fairly short time if you have a decent linkshell group with you.  However, this entity has its origins in Mayan mythology and religion; Tohil was a fire, sun, and rain deity, with some qualities similar to the more popularly-known Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.  One of my friends works with these pantheons, but I don’t myself, though they’re very cool guys and very powerful in their ways.  Then again, it takes a powerful practitioner to actually get any good work done with them, so caveat orator.  I’m pretty sure, since none of these terms actually appear on my blog, that it was grabbed by a Google spider from my twitterfeed on the right.

As some of my readers have noticed, I’ve begun taking commissions for designs and tools over on my Services page.  This is a fantastic opportunity for me, since it helps get me a small cash flow on the side while getting more experience in crafting, and it also helps various occultists and magicians across the globe get tools and supplies they need for their work from these oh-so-learned hands of mine.  However, in starting this, I have learned a few lessons that aren’t that fun: it’s hard to balance commissions with other work and Work going on, and it also brings up the issue of buyer responsibility to both me and themselves.  That latter one is something that’s been gnawing on me as of late, and I’m going to basically institute a new rule for myself on taking commissions.

(Don’t worry; if you’ve already gotten a commission from me, I’m still going to complete it.  All orders already made will be honored, of course, but

So, Fr. Rufus Opus has this idea called “kinetic meditation”, where one does a particular activity as a kind of magical or contemplative act by itself.  In performing that act, one syncs or aligns one’s sphere with that particular activity.  What we might call kinetic meditation in magic might be better described as, well, “practice” in anything more physical or tangible: sports, engineering, cooking, whatever.  In other words, by actually doing the thing, you not only become better at it but start incorporating it into yourself and thinking processes.  A well-trained chef, for instance, can whip up a complex dinner with minimal planning because he intuitively understands what goes together and how to prepare it without much thought, relying on shortcuts and drawn-out procedures alike as needed.  A pro soccer player doesn’t have to plan every action out or check with his teammates; he acts instinctively, reacting as well as and at the same time as acting on the field.   A competent programmer doesn’t always need an API and syntax guide open for a given program, but spews out code that works and works well as if he were writing a Facebook message to his good friends.  This sort of practice builds muscle memory, reflexes, split-second thinking, and a deep intuitive understanding of how things work.  It’s not easy, sure, but it makes things easier given enough time and practice.

Magic and meditation, on the other hand, is far more a mental and spiritual process, and to perform kinetic meditation with this stuff requires something physical.  RO gives examples such as actually drawing out the complete Circle of Art from the Lemegeton Goetia, or drawing by hand the lamens used in conjuration of the angels.  I might suggest (and one which timed up perfectly with my getting my acceptance letter into RO’s classes back in 2011) getting a compass, straightedge, and coloring pencils and drawing out the Tree of Life based on its mathematical properties.  Performing calligraphy with the names of God, singing barbarous words of power, drinking herbal infusions of specific plants to see their effects on the body, all that can be considered kinetic meditation in some way or another.  All this has the effect of helping the magician intuitively and automatically understanding the designs, words, incantations, processes, and supplies used in our ritual.  For magic and meditation, kinetic meditation is the process of aligning ourselves with our Work, and is crucial for any significant level of success.

For me, the process of kinetic meditation started from day 0, when I first saw the Table of Practice design to use.  I studied the design, memorized the components of it, practiced visualizing the Table in my mind until I could hold it indefinitely, learned the Celestial Hebrew script so I could write out the names of the planetary angels, and drew it out many times on scrap pieces of paper for practice.  Later, I got on Adobe Illustrator and produced my own version, after having understood the components and purpose of it and after having studied other associations I could augment or modify it with.  Then I practiced drawing that out, then I got the supplies together and made my own official wooden Table of Practice, which I’ve been using ever since.  Similarly, I did the same with the lamens of the planetary angels, memorizing each one’s sigil and name and how to spell or draw them out, I visualized them with colors, I memorized and intoned the names of God around the lamens, and so forth; then I printed them out, prettied them up, and have used them ever since.  I did the same with my Circle of Art, my Wand(s), and everything else.  It’s exceedingly and increasingly rare for me to just up and use a particular tool nowadays that I haven’t already analyzed, understood, and integrated into my own sphere.

In other words, if I can’t manage a replica of the thing astrally both in form and function down to the minutest detail, and draw it out or make it from memory (with minimal memory refreshing), I don’t consider myself ready to use it yet physically.

Now, that’s what I consider appropriate learning and education in tools in magic.  And yet, here I am offering to make these same tools for others, depriving them of the same joys and frustrations I had, and of all the kinetic meditation I did, that they might be able to have all for themselves with an equal (and minimal) amount of work.  So, here’s the deal from here on out.  If you want set up a commission for a tool, email/pay me and let me know as you already would and do.  I probably won’t turn you down unless I’m busy for the time being or unless I think it’s a terrible idea, for anyone involved.  However, you better know what it is you’re asking for and you better be able to at least conceptually have it ready for yourself in your mind’s eye and astral form.  Don’t get a commission from me because you want “someone who knows what they’re doing” or “someone initiated to do it for me”.  I know what I’m doing because I did the work for myself, not because I had someone else do it for me.  All the initiations I’ve gone through are from the spirits themselves, and they’re all for you as well if you ask and are ready for them, and if you’re not initiated for something you need, you don’t need it anyway.  Ask for a commission if you honestly are unable or don’t have the resources for something, or if you lack the crafting skills to make something you otherwise comprehend and understand for a quality piece of work.

Caveat emptor, my readers.  My tools are not meant for those who want to make things easy on themselves.  My tools are meant for those who want to make their work go farther and harder.

Despite my primary focus relying on “high magic” or theurgy, which is supposed to be divested from the use of natural or physical objects, material tools and the materials those tools are made from fill many important roles in my work.  For instance, the use of specific herbs, oils, or incenses for rituals, or the consecration of knives or wands using specific liquids or treatments.  Specific stones and gems are important, too, and can not only significantly empower a ritual but can be consecrated tools in their own right.  For instance, I have a handful of large citrine points I use as focuses or pseudo-wands for solar work, especially when I work with the Headless Rite.  The ability of a particular substance to affect the world around it is called its virtue, or its occult or “magical” characteristics that lend it power.  The discussion of virtues is the primary focus of Cornelius Agrippa’s First Book of Occult Philosophy, in which he discusses “Natural Magic”, and from which much modern Western occult literature follows.

Of the stones I like (and there are some I don’t), labradorite is among my favorite.  It’s a feldspar mineral, and so retains all the occult virtues of feldspar, which also includes sunstone, amazonite, and others.  Labradorite specifically has a particular blend of sodium and calcium that has it lie between pure albite (sodium-based without calcium) and anthorite (calcium-based without sodium).  It ranges in color from dark grey to pale grey, sometimes with a brown or dark olive coloration, but it has an interesting optical property called labradorescence, where the fine layers of growth in the stone allow for a kind of metallic iridescence ranging in color from deep blue to green, red, purple, and yellow.  The iridescent qualities, however, rely on a particular angle of reflection; labradorite may appear dull and boring until tilted just so.  Labradorite was officially discovered by the West in 1770 in Labrador in northeastern Canada, but has also been discovered in Finland, Russia, Madagascar, and other places around the world, and occurs among the artifacts of native peoples.  As a type of feldspar, it has many commercial uses of the same including road paving and ceramic integrity, but has also been used as a gemstone since its discovery due to its interesting optical beauty.  Particularly iridescent or gem-quality labradorite is known as the variant spectrolite, with Ylämaa, Finland being the most well-known centers of this variant.  Darker variants of labradorite are also called black moonstone.

Due to its relatively recent discovery, there isn’t that much reliable knowledge on labradorite as it applies to magic, especially in Hermetic work.  As such, Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Crystal, Gem & Metal Magic lacks an entry on the stone.  According to the fluffy new-agey yet highly thorough Love is in the Earth by Melody, the general mineral feldspar is said to have the following attributes [sic]:

This mineral assists one in detaching from the old, encouraging unconventional and exciting methods to attains ones goals.  It provides for support in issues of self-awareness and self-love, for with realization of love one can become united with all aspects of the world.

It has been found as a constituent of moon rock and provides for a connection with inter-galactic intelligence.  Feldpsar also enables one to access the communicative forces of this intelligence.

It assists one in locating that which has been mis-placed and in discovering and understanding previously unidentified messages from both within and without of the self.

It can be used in the treatment of disorders associated with the skin and muscular structure.

In her entry on labradorite, Melody has this to say [sic]:

In addition to the properties listed in the FELDSPAR section of this book, this mineral protects ones aura, and helps to keep the aura clear, balanced, protected, and free from energy leaks.  It assists in the alignment of the subtle bodies, enhancing the connection between the physical and ethereal realms.

It is said to represent the “temple of the stars”, assisting one in sustaining and maintaining, while providing for the understanding of the destiny one has chosen.  It brings the light of the other planetary beings to the soul of the user.  The labradorescence is a luminescence, derived from extra-terrestrial origin, which is enclosed in the mineral to bring the galactic evolved energies from other worlds to the Earth plane.

The energy of labradorite facilitates the transformation of intuition into intellectual thought such that one can implement the instructions provided.  It assists one to traverse changes, attracting strength and perseverance.  IT has been known as the matriarch of the subconscious mind, providing instructive sessions to the user concerning the implementation of inner messages and the utilization of same in the physical domain.  it can help to provide clarity to the inner sight, instilling a passionless peace of imperturbability via the annihilation of disturbing thoughts.

It also symbolizes the moon and helps one to advance, without constraint, through the cycles of progression, heralding the arrival of ascension.  It also symbolizes the sun, providing for vitality and for a sense of “self” during transitions, and promoting refinement of action and discernment in direction.

It unites the personal self with the understanding required to both realize and achieve the destiny of this life, relieving insecurity and apprehension, while enhancing faith and reliance in oneself and the absolute purity of the universal harmony.

It assists one in eliminating aspects of familiarity which obscures thought and blurs instinct, helping one with originality and precision, and bringing uniqueness without judgment to ones contemplative patterns.

It helps one to reflect and to facilitate transformations which are beneficial.  It also enhances patience and an inner knowing of “the right time”.

It allows for recognition that humanity represents the “Being of Light”, transcending the limitations of the past and the thoughts of the future, and embracing the infinite possibilities of the moment.  It helps one to both “be” and to proceed with the assurance that the light is always there, surrounding and pure.

Labradorite brings the commencement of the recognition of ones inherent and analytical and rational abilities.  It further promotes the synthesis of intellectual thought with the intuitive, mystical, and psychic wisdom.

It assists in inspiring one to introduce the teachings of other worlds to this world of love and light, bringing assimilation and illumination to further the advancement of humanity.

It can be used during radionic analysis; holding a sample and placing a sample on the witness or using a pendulum of this stone, the energy of the stone interferes with the energy of the user and points to the problem[s] involved.

It has been used in the treatment of disorders of the brain, to stimulate mental acuity, and to reduce anxiety and stress.  It can assist in digestion, regulation, and metabolism.  It has also been used to clarify the eyes.

Labradorite has an associated myth according to its Canadian origin.  A common version of this myth says:

According to an Eskimo legend, the Northern Lights were once imprisoned in the rocks along the Labrador coast, until one day an Eskimo warrior found them and freed most of the lights with a blow from his spear. Not all the lights could be freed from the stone however and for that reason we have today what is known as labradorite.

All this is well and good, but even with the nice Native American legend and the wealth(?) of Melody’s new age fluff, this doesn’t speak much about its virtues in Hermetic magic, though it is helpful.  The labradorescent light within the stones definitely has a varying and ephemeral quality not unlike the Aurora Borealis, formed from the interplay of the Sun and the magnetic sphere of the Earth.  This also ties labradorite in with the Roman goddess Aurora, or Dawn, who heralded the coming of the Sun with her many colors, or “rosy fingers” as is frequently seen in literature.  From the legends, then, we can already assign a celestial, nocturnal, and luminary quality to labradorite, a kind of interplay of the Sun and the Moon against the larger firmament of the stars.

Since labradorite was discovered well after Cornelius Agrippa’s time, and since he otherwise doesn’t mention feldspar in his tables of correspondence or discussion of virtues, it helps to look at the qualities of things Agrippa lists to figure out what forces labradorite might play best with.  For this, Agrippa might say that labradorite is lunary, solary, and mercurial based on the qualities of things he ascribes based on these planets:

• Moon (book I, chapter 24): silver, white, or green things, crystals generally
• Sun (book I, chapter 23): opal, rainbow quartz (Iris, or “Rainbow”), glittery things
• Mercury (book I, chapter 29): things that are mixed, those which are of diverse colors or are mixed with yellow and green, things that change forms or appearances

Of these, the connections to Mercury and the Sun are probably the strongest, with the Moon being a little less likely.  Of course, all celestial forces are present in all sublunary things anyway (book I, chapter 30), but labradorite’s strongest connections might lie with Mercury and the Sun.  Peculiar to labradorite, however, we have definite nocturnal tendencies; the Northern Lights are primarily a nocturnal feature, and the darkness of labradorite combined with its bright luminescence is similar to those famed lights at night, or light shining in the darkness from otherwise hidden features.  Mercury is probably the strongest connection to go with, then, with the Sun and Moon playing equal parts in its virtue (or slightly unequal, biased towards the Sun).  If it is mercurial, however, it’s a kind of holy, celestial, or ouranic force of Mercury.  Given the variance in color with labradorescence, it might not be wrong to say that labradorite is definitely stellar, as in pertaining to the sphere of the fixed stars in addition to or instead of any one particular planet.

In addition to its almost-gaudy beautiful radiance, the magical feel, or aura or dweomer, of labradorite is what really hooks me.  It feels very cooling as far as stones go, like smooth, soft, light water or a thick cool mist that washes away filth.  It doesn’t have a strong centering aspect to its feel, but it is clarifying, sharpening the mind into precision.  It doesn’t feel slow or heavy, but it doesn’t seem to speed up the mind or jolt it into activity, either.  It’s not luxurious like stones of Venus or Jupiter, but it has a kind of safe and still feeling that I’ve associated with the Moon and Sun in the past.  It tastes (metaphorically speaking) clean and refreshing, more pleasant than unpleasant, again tastes which are lunar and solar.  It would seem like it would be a spiritual kind of ruby or carnelian; these stones are known for energizing and supercharging physical acts, while labradorite might be better for energizing or supercharging spiritual activity, more than star sapphire or other “celestial” or “spiritual” stones which seem only to draw upward.  Its varied colors do help in unifying various forces within the mind, certainly, and would seem to help act as a kind of “spiritual grounding” stone, in which one can ground “higher up”; use of labradorite in astral ritual would not be a bad thing, using it as an anchor for the physical body to link to the astral one.  Its iridescence that comes from within, normally hidden until turned just right towards the light, can be an indication that this stone can help bring out magical power, talent, or genius from within; again, this ties into supercharging spiritual activity, giving these things more light than would otherwise be known or seen.

During the last gem show that I go to every so often with some of my crafty occult friends, I kept getting distracted (as in past gem shows) with labradorite.  Its interesting appearance kept tricking me, leading me to inspect samples and beads over and over again until I realized that it was just the same stuff.  At the gem show before the last one, I ended up buying a labradorite orb about the size of a small orange, which is beautiful and dark with bright labradorescence showing, which will be good for meditation or scrying of specific entities.  At the most recent one, however, I decided to finally suck it up and got a few strands of labradorite beads that I fashioned into a mala, or prayer beads not unlike a rosary.

A mala is a string of 108 beads, the number 108 assuming high importance in Hinduism, Buddhism, and other dharmic religions.  I’ve always liked malas, and have owned several in my life, but I’ve never crafted one myself before.  Using repetitions of prayers is helpful in my work, and I use Buddhist mantras, my magical motto, or other short prayers with these things.  My mala design uses 108 beads as the actual prayer counter beads, plus four extra beads: a large banded onyx bead plus three extra labradorite beads, with a black tassel and held together with black silk cord.  The four (or three plus one) beads assume different meanings, depending on tradition.  In Buddhism, the larger bead represents the guru or teacher, and the three smaller beads represent the Three Jewels of Buddhism (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha).  For me, since I’m less Buddhist than other things, these extra beads can also refer to the three persons of the Triune God, plus the larger bead to represent the One God, or the One Thing or Whole of Hermeticism.  I used onyx since it’s a stone associated with Saturn, representing the firmament and black night sky against which all the stars shine and the celestial light is filtered through from the Divine Supernals down all the way to our sphere of the Earth.  Plus, onyx is a fairly heavy and dark stone, which can also represent the physical power and material result of prayer, magic, and meditation; in this sense, the three extra labradorite beads and onyx bead can also represent the Hebrew understanding of the elements, where the elements of Fire, Air, and Water are independent in their own right and Earth is a combination of the other three elements.

So, that’s my contribution to widening the scope of magical knowledge on this stone.  What about you, dear readers?  Have you used labradorite in your work for anything?  Are there any particular experiences or thoughts on this stone you’d like to share, or theories on how it might be used in rituals or talismanic magic?

I know I’m a day late, but I celebrated my monthly Hermaia today, the monthly ritual I perform to Hermes at dawn on the fourth of the lunar month, four or five days after the New Moon.  This is an old tradition, dating back at least to the Athenian/Attic calendar from classical or pre-classical times, and it honors Hermes on his birthday; the ancient Greeks considered the gods’ birthdays to be a monthly affair instead of a yearly one, though yearly festivals were also held with extra grandness and glory.  I use this as a special day to make offerings of wine, incense, and prayers (reading out the Orphic and Homeric Hymns in full, for example), as well as a general request for blessings and divinatory work and divine guidance.  So, I figured today would be a special day, as the Sun is in Virgo (the sign with both the domicile and exaltation of Mercury) to share some short prayers I use when working with the god.

There’s a prayer I ended up spontaneously making every morning just as I leave for work.  I have a small figure of a Roman Mercury hanging from my rear view mirror in my car, and I hold it and make a prayer for travelling generally just as I leave my car for work and for any daily travel.  After it’s been prettied up and formalized, the prayer goes like this.  Implicit in the prayer is that I myself will go to spread the praise and honor of Hermes; with my interesting caduceus tattoo, that’s not hard, since it’s definitely a conversation starter with a lot of strangers and colleagues, most of whom don’t know anything about it or him.

Hail to you, Lord Hermes, Hermes Enodios!
Hail to you, god of the roads, god of travelers, god who goes!
Hail to you, god who leads and who leads us on!

Lord Hermes, I pray to you, I call to you, I beg you for your blessing.
Grant that I may travel swiftly, secretly, safely, and speedily on all my paths!
Grant that I may make all my destinations swiftly, secretly, safely, and speedily!
Grant that I may not be hindered, delayed, obstructed, slowed, or impedited!
Grant that I may not be harmed, followed, chased, arrested, maimed, or stolen from!
Grant that I may attain all my destinations, fulfill all my goals, and attain all my ends!
Grant that I may enjoy your glory, your presence, and your blessing wherever I go!

Lord Hermes, be with me wherever I go!
Grant that wherever I go, I may come to spread and honor your good name, your good works, your good power, your good praise,
that the entire world may come to praise you, honor you, glorify you, and rejoice in you, your good name, and your good works!
Grant that wherever I go, the entire world may come to call upon you in their need!

Hail to you, Lord Hermes, hail to you!
ΙΩ ΕΡΜΗΣ!  ΙΩ ΕΡΜΗΣ!  ΙΩ ΕΡΜΗΣ!  ΙΩ ΕΡΜΗΣ!

Here’s another little short prayer which I’ve picked up from Charles Leland’s Etruscan Roman Remains, a (sometimes long-winded) book on old Etruscan and Roman beliefs and rituals being maintained in rural Tuscany.  Using the modern name Téranó, derived from Hermes’ Etruscan name of Turms, this little prayer is said as a letter or package is sent off for fast and safe arrival:

Téranó, Téranó, as it is true
That you are my friend, I pray to you
Grant that this letter/package that I send
May quickly and safely reach its end!

Upon being sent:

Go fly afar for me!
And Téranó keep you company!

This is, of course, in addition to the Orphic Hymns to Hermes (both ouranic/celestial and chthonic/terrestrial) as well as the Homeric Hymns (the short and the long ones), plus my own prayer to Hermes.  Use them well; the god likes to be gossipped about, and likes more to take you to faraway and much-needed places.

Earlier this year, I produced my first ebook, a short text detailing the history and use of grammatomancy, or divination using the Greek alphabet much as one might use runes for divination. It’s an interesting system, and I combined the ancient oracular meanings of the letters with their isopsephic (gematria) meanings, stoicheic (planetary/elementary/astral) meanings, and qabbalistic symbolism to produce a full divination system suitable for any student of the magical arts. It got real complicated real fast, but also real complete in the process. (If you don’t have a copy, stop being lazy and get one here.)

As some of my readers may know, I make use of this every day (mostly) for my Twitter/Facebook feeds under the posts “Daily Grammatomancy”. It’s helped me and others plan our days out, using a simple oracle for how the day will go; the question I ask for our mutual and communal benefit is “for myself and for all who come in contact with my words, for this day, this very day: how best should we live our lives in accordance with the divine will of the immortal gods?”. For some people, it’s no better than a newspaper horoscope; for others, it hits dead on time and time again.

Doing this for a while has lead some of my friends to start pursuing their own daily divination methods. One such friend, Raven Orthaevelve (who is a fantastic artist and crafter whom you should totally buy and commission things from for anything fancy, magical, or otherwise), has started using the Mayan calendar as a divination tool. This isn’t any 2012 bullshit, either; the Mayan calendar was known for being a reasonably complex set of interlocking cycles. One such calendar used for these cycles is the tzolk’in, a 260-day calendar made up of 13 20-day “months”. Each day has a particular name and divinatory meaning which forms the basis of much of Mayan divination, natal astrology, and prognostication. Raven posts her interpretations of the tzolk’in daily on her Facebook, and will eventually build in other Mayan cycles into the mix for a more complex and complete daily prognostication.

In some sort of weird feedback loop, this has started to help me pursue my own idea of a cyclical divination using Greek letters. In other words, although the daily grammatomantic divination would be helpful for specific days, a day might generally have a particular meaning based on its location in a cycle of days; combining the two can help focus knowledge and energy for particular problems, much as one might combine the cycle of planetary days and planetary hours for rituals. Interesting as this idea might be, though, it’d be incredibly difficult; there’s no information I can find that this was done in ancient times, so it’d be a new innovation. Add to it, the development of any kind of calendrical cycle is difficult (as my experiments with forming a ritual calendar for planning things out have shown).

One option I might explore is just using the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet in making a type of calendar. 15 repetitions of this cycle would produce 360, a very nice number indeed; if I were to tie it to the solar year, then it’d produce 5 or 6 intercalary days that would not be associated with any particular letter. This kind of practice isn’t uncommon by any means: the Mayans used a similar practice with their haab’ calendar: 18 cycles of 20 days, again producing 360 days with five days (wayeb’) at the end; the ancient Egyptians and modern Copts use 12 cycles of 30 days, again 360 days, plus five or six days at the end. 24 is a pretty convenient number, I have to admit, especially with its divisors and amenability to larger cycles of 12, 360, and the like.

Plus, if I were to use this cycle of 15 months of 24 days, I could further associate each month with a particular letter, which could afford another general cycle around the day-letter cycle. Say that we associate the first month of the first year with Α, then the second with Β, and so forth. Because the year only has 15 months, the last month of the first year would be Ο, and the first month of the second year would be Π; likewise, the first month of the third year would be Η, the first month of the fourth year would be Χ, and so forth. This produces a cycle such that every 9th year has the first month starting with Α; thus, there are eight distinct years with this month-letter cycle. And if we have a month-letter cycle, we could also expand this to a year-letter cycle, such that three such month-letter cycles form one year-letter cycle, or 24 years (8 × 3 = 24). Alternatively, we might have a great year-letter cycle, where one month-letter cycle is given a letter, and 24 month-letter cycles completes a great year-letter cycle; this would be a cycle of 8 × 24 = 192 years. At this point, I’d just be forming cycles for the sake of cycles for a kind of neo-Greek long count calendar, but it’d be nifty all the same for finer, long-term gradations of influences.

To use such a cycle, however, I’d need to use a particular day as a start date, at least for the months. Although the Greek alphabet oracle as I use it was found in modern Turkey, different parts of ancient Greece used different calendars with different start dates for individual years. The Attic calendar, about which we know the most among all ancient Greek calendars, started on the first new moon after the summer solstice; other Greek calendars often started off between autumn and winter. For simplicity, I’d say that either the spring equinox (to tie it in with astrology) or the summer solstice (to tie it in with Athenian practice) would be the official start date. Thus, the five or six days leading up to this start date (according to the Gregorian calendar) would be the intercalary days, which would have no letters assigned to it; alternatively, I might devise a scheme to associate particular letters with these intercalary days based on specific properties of the letters. This doesn’t even mention where the month-cycles (years of day-letters) would begin, or what the anchor date might be.

If I were to use the Attic practice of using the summer solstice as the start date, though, why not actually go ahead and use the Attic calendar itself as the basis for my cycle? The Attic calendar, specifically the festival calendar used to determine festivals and rituals, was a lunisolar calendar. There were 12 months as determined by the observation of the Moon; months began on the first sighting of the New Moon just after syzygy (νουμηνια, “new moon”), and ended on the day of the syzygy itself (ενη και νεα, “old and new”). Thus, the months could be 30 days (full months) or 29 days (hollow months). A month was divided into three periods of ten days each, which I’ll call decamera; if the month was hollow, then the third decameron would have only nine days, with the usual 29th day being omitted entirely.

The problem with using this type of lunisolar calendar is that there are more days in a month (29 or 30) than there are letters in the Greek alphabet (24). Even if I were to include the obsolete letters digamma, qoppa, and sampi for a total of 27 letters, this would still leave three days leftover. This might be remedied by throwing “letterless” days into the mix, on which no advice can be given, as well as making the obsolete letters effectively “letterless” since they have no associated oracles or stoicheic meaning. They have isopsephic meaning, however, which can be substituted with Hebrew gematraic meanings (and, through them, Hebrew stoicheic meanings), but this is starting to overreach and combine different traditions.

However, the use of those three decamera within each month does lend itself well to the Greek alphabet, assuming we use the full body of 27 letters. Using isopsephy, the letters Α through Θ (including digamma) are given to values 1 through 9, Ι through qoppa are given to 10 through 90, and Ρ through sampi are given to 100 through 900. Thus, we have nine letters per decameron, of which two days per period are letterless (or one day for the final period in the case of a hollow month); one for the obsolete letter in the mix and one extra letterless day at the end of the period. In this manner, we’d have a method to create a grammatomantic lunisolar calendar, which would be interesting to use. There’d be gaps in the calendar, of course, but it’s no worse than other magical calendars I’ve seen, e.g. PGM VII.155-167 or the Munich Manual, for determining which day of a given month is good or bad for magic or divination.

Using a year of 12 months is convenient, and can make the process of assigning letters to each month much simpler: a month-cycle of two years can be had here, since two years of 12 months produces 24 months, one for each letter. That said, the issue with lunisolar calendars is that the months get out of sync without an embolismic month, or intercalary month every so often. Using the ancient Metonic cycle of 19 years, there would be 12 “short” years (years with 12 months) and 7 “long” years (years with 13 months). The embolismic month could be held as letterless and placed at the end of the year in long years. Thus, every two years would complete one month-letter cycle in this lunisolar scheme; due to the parity of the Metonic cycle, every 38 years would complete one year-letter cycle. Using the Babylonian and Hebrew method of assigning embolismic months, years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19 would be long years.

So, that turned out to be a much longer discussion on calendrical cycles for divination than I intended. Then again, calendars and cycles have never been easy to work with for any culture or era. In all honesty, the use of the simple 15 months of 24 days plus intercalary days is highly appealing for the sake of its simplicity and ability to lend itself to cycles within cycles. There is something to be said for the attribution of letters to the lunisolar months, though, especially for the sake of timing rituals or determining favorable lunar influences for a given letter. I’ll try drafting the rules and algorithms for these two types of grammatomantic calendars, along with date calculation methods, and see where that gets me.  The next few posts will go over these two types of calendars, one based on the solar cycle of the seasons and one based on the lunisolar cycle of the lunar months as tied to the seasons, so stay tuned!

So, based on that last post where I discussed possibilities of forming a divinatory cycle of days based on the grammatomantic meanings of the Greek letters, I came up with my first draft of a kind of grammatomantic calendar, based on a simple cycle of the letters.  In many ways, this functions much like the tzolk’in calendar of the Maya, but with a little bit of their haab’ thrown in, too.  Essentially, I’ve created a cyclical calendar capable of dating many years into the future or, with some modifications, to the past.  For simplicity, I use the Greek alphabet itself as the core cycle used for this calendar, which is tied to the spring equinox every year.  In effect, I’ve developed a solar grammatomantic calendar, or SGC.  While an interesting little system of noting dates and times in a really obscure fashion, it is at heart a divinatory tool expanding on the methods of grammatomancy applied to a general flow of time, noting how a particular person or event might be affected by the forces at work in the cosmos at that particular time.

So, let’s set some rules and definitions to calculate dates and times in the SGC:

• Letter-day: Duration of time starting at a particular sunrise and the next sunrise. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-days is Α, then cycles around as expected
• Letter-month: 24 consecutive letter-days. The first value in a cycle of 15 letter-months dependent on letter-year, and cycle around as expected:
  • Α if letter-year is Α, Ι, or  Ρ
  • Π if letter-year is Β, Κ, or Σ
  • Η if letter-year is Γ, Λ, or Τ
  • Χ if letter-year is Δ, Μ, or Υ
  • Ν if letter-year is Ε, Ν, or Φ
  • Δ if letter-year is Ζ, Ξ, or Χ
  • Τ if letter-year is Η, Ο, or Ψ
  • Κ if letter-year is Θ, Π, or Ω
• Letter-year: 15 consecutive letter-months, or 360 consecutive letter-days plus some number of intercalary days. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-years is Α, then cycles around as expected. Begins from the first sunrise after or coinciding with the spring equinox
• Intercalary day: Days used to align the cycle of 15 letter-months with the solar year. Not associated with any particular letter, nor are they considered letter-days or belonging to a letter-month. Placed at the end of the letter-year, after the last day of the 15th month of the current year but before the first day of the 1st month of the next year. There are as many intercalary days as needed to fill the gap between the number of letter-days and the number of days in the solar year.
• Letter-age: 24 letter-years, 360 letter-months, or 8640 letter-days plus some number of intercalary days. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-great-years is Α, then cycles around as expected
• Letter-era: 24 letter-ages, 576 letter-years, 8640 letter-months, or 207360 letter-days plus some number of intercalary days. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-ages is Α, then cycles around as expected.  At most 13824 years can denoted using only 24 values for the letter-era.

A table for converting one of the larger units of letter-dating into smaller ones shows the relationships between the units.  Note that asterisks in the letter-day column indicate that intercalary days will cause this number to increase as the number of letter-years increases.

Of course, even though I’ve listed only five place values for a SGC date, we’d end up with a weird kind of Y2K-esque problem once we finish the ultimate letter-era Ω completely, approximately 13824 years after the first possible date.  Although it’s unlikely to be needed, further spans of time may be indicated by adding larger units, such as a letter-eon which is equivalent to 24 letter-eras; 24 letter-eons would be equivalent to 576 letter-eras, 13824 letter-ages, or 7962624 letter-years.  This easily reaches up into geological or cosmological timeframes, but could be useful for indicating distant, mythological, or astronomical/astrological phenomena.

As noted above, all the cycles have 24 values, each lettered according to the Greek alphabet starting at Α and ending with Ω, with the exception of the letter-months.  Instead, the cycle of letter-months within a letter-year is dependent on the value of the letter-year itself.  Though this seems arbitrary, this is to preserve the cycle caused by there being 15 letter-months within a letter-year.  For instance, the first letter-month of the overall cycle of letter-months is Α, the first letter in the Greek alphabet; the last letter-month of the same year is Ο, the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet.  The second letter-year continues the pattern of assigning letters to the letter-months: since Ο was the previous letter used, Π is the letter assigned to the first letter-month of the second letter-year.  Continuing this cycle, the first letter-month of the third letter-year is assigned with Η, the first letter-month of the fourth letter-year is assigned with Χ, and so on until the last letter-month of the last letter-year is given to Ω, after which the cycle begins anew with Α.  This produces a cycle of eight letter-years; since there are 24 letter-years in a letter-age, this cycle repeats three times.  By taking the remainder of dividing the letter-year ordinal value by eight (substituting 8 for a result of 0), the table below shows the letters associated with the letter-months for a given letter-year in the cycle.

As for the epoch, or the reference date from which the letter-calendar is calculated, I’ve settled on April 3, 1322 BC as the first date in this letter-calender system.  My readers will likely be utterly confused as to why I chose such a distant year and date.  Since I’m a fan of ancient Greek history and civilization, I decided to look back as far as I reliably could, and recalled dimly somewhere in my memory that archaeoastronomers had calculated a date in the Trojan War based on mentions of eclipses in book 17 of the Iliad as well as Hittite and other archaeological records.  As it turns out, such an eclipse happened on November 6, 1312 BC at around 12:35 p.m.  Since the Trojan War took about ten years according to the myths, I wanted to set the epoch date to the day after the spring equinox ten years before the year in which this eclipse occurred.  Looking at an ephemeris for the year 1322 BC, we know that the spring equinox (Sun ingress Aries) occurred sometime on April 2, 1322 BC, making the following dawn of April 3, 1322 BC the start of the first official day of the SGC.  Negative dates, or dates that come before April 3, 1322 BC would not be possible in this system, making the first day “day zero” and anything before prehistory or mythical.  If reverse calculations were desired, the rules to convert dates could be adapted for this, with some kind of inversion applied to the notation (writing it upside down, for instance).

To mark a given date using the SGC, let’s use the notation A.B.C.D.E, where A indicates the letter-era, B indicates the letter-age, C indicates the letter-year, D indicates the letter-month, and E indicates the letter-day.  Each of these could be represented equally well in Greek letters (Α.Ρ.Ψ.Χ.Ε) as they could in Arabic numerals (1.17.23.22.5), so long as one uses the ordinal placement of the letters in the Greek alphabet in mind as well as the funky letter-month 8-year cycle given above.  For intercalary days which don’t belong to any letter-month, a dash, dot, or zero is used for the letter-month position and a Greek letter to indicate the intercalary day.  So, for the fourth intercalary day on the letter-era Α, letter-age Ρ, and letter-year Ψ, we might use the notation Α.Ρ.Ψ.–.Δ with the dash, Α.Ρ.Ψ.•.Δ with the dot, or Α.Ρ.Ψ.0.Δ with the zero.  Arabic numeral representations of the intercalary “month” should use the numeral zero.

Now that we have the units defined, the cycles understood, the epoch proclaimed, and the notation set up, it’s time to begin our rules for converting dates from this letter-calendar to Gregorian dates and back.  Let’s use E, A, Y, M, and D to indicate the ordinal values of the letter-era, letter-age, letter-year, letter-month, and letter-day in these conversions; in other words, these variables represent the Arabic numerals associated with the place values, bearing in mind the funky ordinal values associated with the Greek letters for the letter-month.

To convert a Gregorian calendar date to a letter-calendar date:

1. Find the number of years elapsed (J) between the Gregorian calendar year (GY) and the epoch year (EY).  If the Gregorian calendar date falls on or after the first sunrise after or coinciding with the spring equinox in its year, J = GY − EY.  If the Gregorian calendar date falls before the first sunrise after or coinciding with the spring equinox in its year, J = GY − EY − 1.
2. Divide J by 576 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-eras that have passed (JW), and take the fractional part to find how much other time has passed (JF).
3. Calculate the letter-era: E = JW + 1.  E should be a whole number between 1 and 24.  Assign E the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.
4. Multiply JF by 24 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-ages that have passed (AW), and take the fractional part to find how much other time has passed (AF).
5. Calculate the letter-age: A = AW + 1.  A should be a whole number between 1 and 24.  Assign A the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.
6. Multiply AF by 24 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-years that have passed (YW), and take the fractional part to find how much other time has passed (YF).
7. Calculate the letter-year: Y = YW + 1.  Y should be a whole number between 1 and 24.  Assign Y the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.
8. Find the number of days that have elapsed (T) between the Gregorian calendar date (GD) and the most recent spring equinox date (ED).
9. If T is greater than 360, this is an intercalary day.  Set the letter-month M = 0 or missing.  Calculate the intercalary day D = T −  D.
10. Otherwise, if T is less than or equal to 360, this is a letter-day.
    1. Divide T by 24 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-months that have elapsed (TM), and the fractional part to find the number of days that have elapsed (TD).
    2. Calculate the letter-month:  M = TM.  M should be a whole number between 1 and 15.    Assign M the Greek letter according to its ordinal value according to the eight-year cycle above based on Y.
    3. Calculate the letter-day: D = TD  × 24.  D should be a whole number between 1 and 24.    Assign D the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.

To convert a letter-calendar date to a Gregorian calendar date:

1. Sum together the year-based units multiplied by their coefficients to get the number of years elapsed since the epoch: S = (576 × E) + (24 × A) + Y
2. If the date refers to an intercalary period, sum the total number of letter-days plus the intercalary days: Z = 360 + D
3. If the date refers to a non-intercalary period, sum the count of letter-days plus the number of letter-months multiplied by the number of letter-days in each month: Z = D + (24 × M)
4. Add the number of elapsed years S to the epoch year to find the year of the Gregorian calendar date.
5. Add the number of elapsed days Z to the date of the first dawn after or coinciding with the spring equinox of the Gregorian calendar year to find the month and day of the Gregorian calendar date.

Since we’ve already done this much work to clarify letter-days, we can focus our attention on dividing up individual days into smaller units.  I don’t think it’ll be necessary to get into the magnitude (or lack thereof) of seconds, but having letter-hours might not be a bad idea.  Since there 24 letters, we can create 24 letter-hours for each day.  The process for this would be nearly the same as calculating planetary hours.  Let’s define a letter-hour to equal either 1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset of the current letter-day or 1/12 of the time between sunset of the current letter-day and sunrise of the following letter-day, whichever period the letter-hour is found within.  Each letter-hour is assigned to one of the 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, in the order of the Greek alphabet starting with Α.  We might augment our notation of date to also include time using the notation A.B.C.D.E:F, where F indicates the letter-hour.

To convert a modern time to a letter-hour or vice versa for a given date and location:

1. Find the time of sunrise and sunset for the given date and location, and the time of sunrise for the day following the given date and location.
2. Divide the total length of time between sunrise and sunset by 12 to find the length of the diurnal hour (DH).
3. Establish the divisions of the diurnal hours starting at sunrise according to DH, assigning them the letter values Α through Μ or number values 1 through 12.
4. Establish the divisions of the nocturnal hours starting at sunset according to NH, assigning them the letter values Ν through Ω or number values 13 through 24.
5. Locate the time given among the letter-hours to convert the modern time to a letter hour, or establish the time limits on the given letter-hour to find an approximate modern time.

So, examples!  Let’s take September 1, 2013 at 10:35 a.m. for Washington, DC, USA and convert it into SGC date:time notation.

• Letter-day and letter-month: on this year, the spring equinox occurred on March 20, 2013 after dawn; thus, the first day of this year began on March 21, 2013.  There are 166 days between these two dates.  166 ÷ 24 = 6.91666…, indicating that the letter-month is 6 and the letter-day is 0.91666… × 24 = 22, or Χ.
• Letter-era, letter-age, and letter-year: between 2013 AD and 1322 BC, there are 3334 years.  3334 ÷ 576 = 5.78819444…, indicating that the letter-era is 6 (5 + 1).  0.78819444… × 24 = 18.91666…, indicating that the letter-age is 19 (18 + 1).  0.91666… × 24 = 22, indicating that the letter-year is 23 (22 + 1).
• Letter-hour: on this day, sunrise was at 6:37 a.m. and sunset at 7:38 p.m., with the next sunrise at 6:38 a.m.  The length of a diurnal hour in this day was about 65 minutes long, and a nocturnal hour was about 55 minutes long.  10:35 a.m. falls during unequal hour 4.
• Notation: the full Arabic numeral notation for this date is 6.19.23.6.22:4.  The full Greek letter notation for this date is Ζ.Τ.Ψ.Ω.Χ:Δ.  The letter-month is Ω, not Ζ as might be expected for the ordinal value of 6, due to the letter-year being Ψ (see the chart above).

In the opposite way, let’s convert the SGC date Η.Ρ.Λ.Ο.Υ:Α for Washington, DC, USA to Gregorian notation.

• Conversion to Arabic numerals: The date Η.Ρ.Λ.Ο.Υ:Α resolves to 7.17.11.9.20:1, using the table above to resolve the letter-year.letter-month combination Λ.Ο to 11.9.  Since the letter-month is not blank or missing, this is not an intercalary date.
• Sum the years: There have been (576 × 7) + (24 × 17) + 11 = 4451 years since the epoch date.
• Find the year and spring equinox: 4451 years elapsed from the epoch year 1322 BC refers to the year 3130 AD.  The spring equinox occurred at night after March 20 that year, so the first day of the SGC year would be on March 21.
• Sum the days: There have been (9 × 24) + 20 = 236 days since the year’s first dawn after or coinciding with the spring equinox.
• Find the day: 236 days after March 21, 3130 AD leads to November 12, 3130 AD.
• Find the time: The letter-hour Α indicates the first unequal hour of the day, sometime just after dawn.  Sunrise for this day in Washington, DC, USA occurs at 6:47 a.m., and sunset at 4:56 p.m.; an unequal diurnal hour here would be about 49 minutes long, so the letter-hour Α indicates a time between 6:47 a.m. and 7:38 a.m.

Well, this was all well and good, and despite the complexity only took a day to hash out all the major parts of forming a new calendar system from scratch.  However, while this was a fun exercise in computus of a sort, this doesn’t actually say much about why it was made to begin with: divination using the flow of time itself!  Since I’ve ranted on long enough about the minutiae of date conversions, let’s leave that for next time when we start putting the SGC in practice and making use of its mechanisms for divination, as well as seeing how it lines up with other solar or theophanic phenomena.

Okay, so, money’s tight for me, but it’s always getting better (and there’s much more to wealth than monetary numbers, anyway).  Still, there are some upcoming expenses that I need to pay off, including a few plane tickets and otherwise prohibitively expensive books.  Since divination’s something I like to do and can do well, let’s do this: from Sunday, 9/15, through Thursday, 10/31, I’ll be offering discounted rates on divination readings.  Instead of the normal $30 for a reading, Here’s what I’m charging:

• $10 for a single query
• $40 for five queries, or if you submit four $10 single-query requests within this timespan, you get a fifth for free

The process of divination will be the same as normal, where you clicky-click on a PayPal button below, then once I get the payment request, we’ll start talking over email.  For my line of divination, keep in mind that I’m much more a worldly advisor than cosmic seer: I like to help people with down-to-earth, real-world problems and issues.  To that end, the best queries will be clear, concise, and direct.  We’ll hash the query out over email and I’ll get you an answer, and we can talk about methods of action for advising afterward.  All the same rules, etc. apply as for normal readings (you can get all that over on the Services page).  This only applies to divination readings obtained through the Internet by email, and is only valid through the last day of October 2013.

Geomancy Reading Special (1 Query)
$10

Geomancy Reading Special (5 Queries)
$40

If you’ve gotten a reading from me before, feel free to leave a testimony (if you so desire) in the comments.  After doing 40 divinations this past Tuesday in the service of Hermes, a good number of people have gotten good worth out of my readings.  Feel free to share this and spread the word; the world needs answers, and I’m more than willing to do my best to provide people with them.  If this goes well, you might expect to see more of these discounted months every so often.

In the last post, I unleashed a terrifying yet really not that complex new calendar system based on the Greek alphabet.  To summarize, I made a cycle of days, where “months” are 24 days long, each day corresponding to one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.  A “year” of these days starts with the spring equinox, and there are 15 “months” in a “year”, leading to 360 days.  The leftover days between the end of the last “month” and the start of the first “month” of the next “year” are left as letterless.  In effect, I produced a solar grammatomantic calendar, or SGC; I expanded it to be able to note dates and times (down to periods of around one hour long) millions of years in the future, though this was just adding completion to the system for its own sake.  The heart of the SGC is the day cycle of letters to produce a usable cycle of days for divination.

How might calendars be used for divination?  Well, consider the cycle of the weekdays: there are seven days in a week, and each one is associated with a particular planet among the seven traditional stars so used.  We might expect more solary things to occur on Sunday, for instance, or cytherean things on Friday.  We might also use the weekdays for particular aims or purposes benefitted by the planet ruling the day, such as writing letters on Wednedsay for Mercury, or beginning business proposals on Thursday for Jupiter.  This system, combined with that of the planetary hours, forms much of the framework within my own ritual construction, which uses the ebb and flow of planetary forces as they change throughout the days and hours of the week.  In a sense, “divination” here can be expanded to the use of omens or the change in power or dignity of forces to achieve a particular end or to understand the world around us.

A similar thing is done with the tzolk’in, the Mayan cycle of 20 days, each with their own name, symbol, and oracular meaning.  I mentioned this before, that one of my friends on Facebook started doing a daily tzolk’in interpretation of the day, allowing for people to prognosticate based on the symbol representing the day in the cycle.  To an extent, this is still used in modern Mayan and Mesoamerican societies, though it’s mostly in the hinterlands and rural areas.  Still, the idea is the same: by recognizing the natural flow of powers, one can tap into them to forecast or to alter the future based on what one plans to do. Other such prognosticatory calendars have been used across the world, even if they’re in a debased form that notes only what “lucky” and “unlucky” days are.

What this all inspired me to do was to see if I could create a flow of the days such that each one might be associated with a particular letter.  With the SGC, we have a method to do that, and with varying levels of specificity.  The most important part of this is the use of the letter-day, which for 360 days of every year will have one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.  Those days are held to be “ruled” or signified by the influence of that letter; thus, if the letter-day is Α, the oracular statement for which is “[Apollo] says that you will do everything well”, then the day is highly fortunate and beneficial for all endeavors.  This doesn’t bar more specific divination just for that day; I could always still ask the gods for a particular letter-divination myself and apply it just for my own ends, but the influence of the letter-day is universal across all places, peoples, and endeavors.

I also mentioned in the SGC a method of attributing the hours to the individual letters, much as in the same method as the planetary hours: take 1/12s of daylight and 1/12s of nighttime, and ascribe each to one of the Greek letters starting with Α at the dawn “hour”.  Thus, every day will have a cycle within itself of the 24 Greek letters, with different hours indicating different flows of power.  Unlike the system of planetary hours and days, where hours are held to be of more importance than the days, the grammatomantic hours here are less important than the days, since their effect is less and dependent on the overall letter, and is detached from any one grammatomantic day.  After all, the order of the planets used for the planetary hour changes from day to day depending on the planet ruling the day, but the order of the letters is fixed for every day.

Going bigger than individual days, I also set up a method of noting years and months using the SGC.  For divination, long periods of time such as eons, eras, or ages don’t have much bearing on divination using the SGC, but years and months may.  Whole lengths of time can be said to be under the sway of the force of the letters, but again, these are of less importance than the individual days themselves.  The months are less important than the days, and the years are less important than the months.  Trends may be predicted based on the letters for larger spans of time, but the letters become less and less meaningful as the length of time increases.

To make use of an example from last time, let’s look at September 1, 2013 at 10:35 a.m. for Washington, DC, USA.  We converted it into the SGC date 6.19.23.6.22:4, or Ζ.Τ.Ψ.Ω.Χ:Δ.  The letter-day is Χ, the oracle for which is “in succeeding you will fulfill a golden oracle”; this is a great day for success and carrying on great plans that may reach beyond one’s knowledge.  However, the letter-month is Ω, “you will have a difficult harvest, not a useful one”, indicating that this general time is difficult to achieve much at all.  The letter-hour is Δ, “in customs inopportune strength is weak”, indicating that for the moment it is unhelpful to force one’s way through; working with others, over approved channels, or according to protocol is best for attaining what can be attained at all.

If one looks at the general patterns of the oracular statements for the Greek letters, you’ll note that the best oracles tend to be clustered towards Α, and increase in difficulty, strife, or cheer as they get closer to Ω.  In fact, among the oracles in grammatomancy, Α is the best and Ω is the worst.  Extrapolating this towards the SGC, we can say that as time goes on, things get progressively more difficult and arduous after pleasant and easy starts.  The first days of the month, or the first days or months of the year for that matter, or the first hours of the day, would be considered the best for any working, while as the day (or month, or year) goes on, things get worse and more unfortunate.

Using the longer date form, incorporating the letter-era, letter-age, and letter-year, we might also say that the more there are of a certain letter in the date, the more powerful that force is.  Thus, if the date were Α.Α.Α.Α.Α, then this would be the best of all possible days in the calendar, happening only once every 13100 years or so.  Likewise, if the date were Ω.Ω.Ω.Ω.Ω, then this day would be the utter, absolute worst, and also the end of the entire cycle.  For most prognosticatory purposes, if the letter-month and letter-day coincide, it might be said to be a day of power suitable for any number of things, but especially those that the letter itself might portend through its divinatory meaning.

Alternatively, one might use the other occult meanings of the figures.  We might assign a set of lucky numbers based on the isopsephic (gematria) or ordinal values of the letters.  For instance, on letter-day Π (day 16), we might say that one could use the number 16 as a lucky number (ordinal value), or 8 or 80 (isopsephic) as lucky numbers.  So, if one were going to the market on a Π letter-day, one might buy things in amounts of 8 or 80, or one might go with the obvious pun and get maybe an eighth of a pie for oneself.  Instead of the numeric value of the letters, one might go with their stoicheic meanings, the elemental, planetary, and zodiacal indications of the letters.  For instance, on the letter-day Ι, we might say that anything particularly solar would be favored, since Ι is associated with the Sun; on the letter-day Β, which is associated with the sign Aries, anything involving rams would be good, as well as fighting, war, leadership, and the like.  By associating the different forces with the Olympian gods, either through their planetary equivalents (Jupiter for Zeus, Moon for Artemis), their zodiacal correspondences (cf. Agrippa book II, chapter 14), or the like.  For the qabbalistically inclined, you might choose different days to work with a particular path on the Tree of Life using the Greek letters instead of the Hebrew alphabet.  For those so inclined, I lay all this out in my ebook on grammatomancy (available here!).

Since the SGC is a solar calendar, with the start date of the years tied to the spring equinox of the year, we can use the SGC to approximate other solar phenomena.  For instance, the passage of the Sun through the zodiac can be approximated through the use of the SGC.  Since the Sun travels about 30° around the ecliptic every 30 days, the Sun travels through four complete signs after five-letter months, with an error of about 1.75 days.  Thus, the passage of the letter days can mark the passage of the Sun through the ecliptic in a fairly orderly way.  Marking the letter-months with Arabic numerals (to avoid the complicated assignment of letters to the letter-months based on the letter-year):

• 1.Α or 1.1: Sun ingress Aries, spring equinox, Ostara
• 2.Η or 2.7: Sun ingress Taurus
• 2.Χ or 2.22: Sun midpoint Taurus, Beltane
• 3.Ν or 3.13: Sun ingress Gemini
• 4.Τ or 4.19: Sun ingress Cancer, summer solstice, Litha
• 6.Α or 6.1: Sun ingress Leo
• 6.Π or 6.16: Sun midpoint Leo, Lughnasadh
• 7.Η or 7.7: Sun ingress Virgo
• 8.Ν or 8.13: Sun ingress Libra, fall equinox, Mabon
• 9.Τ or 9.19: Sun ingress Scorpio
• 10.Κ or 10.10: Sun midpoint Scorpio, Samhain
• 11.Α or 11.1: Sun ingress Sagittarius
• 12.Η or 12.7: Sun ingress Capricorn, winter solstice, Yule
• 13.Ν or 13.13: Sun ingress Aquarius
• 14.Δ or 14.4: Sun midpoint Aquarius, Imbolc
• 14.Τ or 14.19: Sun ingress Pisces

Since the letter-days will be the same across years, we can say that Α, Τ, Ν, and Η are solstice days, and Χ, Π, Κ, and Δ are cross-quarter days.  Further, because five letter-months cross four signs of the Zodiac, this links different triplicities together, such that all the days of the fire signs Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius share the same letter-days as each other, all starting off on Α days.  Thus, we might call the letter Α fiery (since it starts off all the fire signs), Η earthy (since it starts off all the earth signs), Ν airy (since it starts of all the air signs), and Τ watery (since it starts off all the water signs).  Viewed another way, we might divide up the letter-year into three divisions of five letter-months each: months 1 through 5 are first “season”, 6 through 10 the second “season, and 11 through 15 the third “season”.  In other words, a season begins at the start of the fire signs of the Zodiac: Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius.  Considering where I live in a costal area in the the Northern Hemisphere, I’d name these seasons “warming”, “cooling”, and “dark”, respectively.

Of course, since the Sun doesn’t exactly travel 360° every 360 days, this attribution of the letter-days to specific solar phenomena doesn’t quite hold, and the dates will slip a little earlier as time goes on in the year.  This is why, at the end of every letter-year, there is a short period of five or so intercalary days to fill in the gap between the end of the last letter-month and the beginning of the first letter-month of the next year.  The intercalary days are meant to adjust the SGC so that it doesn’t get out of sync with the solar year, and as such don’t belong to the proper cycle of letter-days or letter-months.  These intercalary days have no associated letter and their hours have no letter attribution, as far as divination and magic are concerned.  Much like the intercalary wayeb’ days of the Mayan haab’ calendar, these days would be considered completely unfortunate.  Consider that it’s basically a gap between the proper letter-days, and that the most recent letter day (15.24) would be Ω, a bad omen; this would stick around and linger, filling the gaps in time and space and force.  Similarly, as a gap between the cycles, the intercalary days would be considered a time when the veil between the worlds or cycles is thinnest; just as the saying that “it’s darkest before dawn”, these days are those immediately preceding the spring equinox, the solar “dawn” of the year.  Alternatively, as might be done in Egyptian or Hellenic times and cultures, these might be considered a time of celebration, partying, and loosening of social rules and rites, for the same general idea that this is a time in-between, when cycles and routines are temporarily thrown off, when no work can properly be done anyway.

So, those are my thoughts on how one might apply the solar grammatomantic calendar for magic and divination in a few ways.  Of course, this is just one of the two possible grammatomantic calendars I suggested using in my first post on this; this calendar is based on the simple cycle of letters to form discrete months of time.  The other idea I mentioned exploring was combining a historical calendar, the Attic festival calendar, which is lunisolar and has a number of quirks and irregularities that make the SGC look simple in comparison.  Although grammatomantic days will still be used, the method to ascribe them to the days will be much more complicated, based upon the phases of the Moon and fitting it into a system complete with other religious and mystical observances.  Let’s save that for next time.

Recently, my online friend and increasingly-awesome cohort in wine, magic, and divination and I were talking about Facebook on Facebook (there’s a “yo dawg” joke here somewhere).  Long story short, we agreed it’d be awesome to start a Facebook group for traditional divinatory geomancy, so we did just that.  You can find the link here, which you should totally click on and join, assuming you have a Facebook account and are also interested in geomancy.  Yours truly, after all, is an admin of the group, and would so love to see you start a new conversation on an old art.

Of course, the original geomancy mailing list, the Yahoo! group Geomantic Campus is still alive and kicking, and if you haven’t joined there yet, you should, assuming you have a Y! account and are also interested in geomancy.  There’s also the Astrogem Geomancy Facebook group, for those of you who practice Les Cross’ innovative method of modern geomancy (which I’ve reviewed here). And then there’s also my own geomancy posts you might read and ask questions on.  The power is yours!

In my first post on grammatomantic calendars and day cycles, I hypothesized that it would be possible to a kinds of calendar suitable for assigning a Greek letter (and, by extension, the rest of its oracular and divinatory meaning) to a whole day without an explicit divination being done, similar to the Mayan tzolk’in calendar cycle.  I did this creating a solar calendar of 15 months of 24 days each, each day assigned to a different letter of the Greek alphabet in a cycle, and also extended it to months, years, and longer spans of time; its use could be for mere cyclical divination or for more complex astrological notes.  At its heart, however, it is essentially a repeating cycle of 24 days, plus a few correctional days every so often to keep the calendar year in line with the solar year.  Because of this, it is essentially a solar calendar, keeping time with the seasons according to the passage of the sun.

Awesome as all this was, it’s also completely innovative as far as I know; the Greeks didn’t note time like this in any recorded text we have, and it takes no small amount of inspiration from the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar system.  Wanting a more traditional flavor of noting time, I also hypothesized that it might be interesting to apply a grammatomantic cycle of days to an already-known calendar system used in ancient Greece, the Attic festival calendar.  In this case, the calendar system already exists with its own set of months and days; it’s just a matter of applying the letters to the days in this case.  No epoch nor long count notation is necessary for this, since it’s dependent on a lunar month a certain number of months away from the summer solstice (the starting point for the Attic festival calendar).  The primary issues with this, however, is that the Attic festival calendar is lunisolar following the synodic period of the Moon, so it has months roughly of 29 or 30 days, depending on the Moon.  This is more than 24, the number of letters used in Greek letter divination, and 27, the number of Greek letters including the obsolete digamma, qoppa, and sampi.  With there being only 12(ish) months in this calendar system, this is going to have some interesting features.  To pair this calendar with the Solar Grammatomantic Calendar (SGC), let’s call this the Lunisolar Grammatomantic Calendar (LGC).

So, to review the Attic festival calendar, this is a lunisolar calendar, a calendar that more-or-less follows the passage of the Sun through the seasons using the Moon as a helpful marker along the way to determine the months.  Many variations of lunisolar calendars have been created across cultures and eras, since the changing form of the Moon has always been helpful to determine the passage of time.  With the Greeks, and the Attics (think Athenians, about whom we know the most), they used the fairly commonplace system of 12 months as determined by the first sighting of the new Moon.  As mentioned, the start date for the Attic festival calendar was officially the first new Moon sighted after the summer solstice, so the year could start as early as late June or as late as late July depending on the lunar cycle in effect, making mapping to the Gregorian calendar difficult.  The names of the 12 months along with their general times and sacredness to the gods are:

1. Hekatombaion (Ἑκατομϐαιών), first month of summer, sacred to Apollo
2. Metageitnion (Μεταγειτνιών), second month of summer, sacred to Apollo
3. Boedromion (Βοηδρομιών), third month of summer, sacred to Apollo
4. Pyanepsion (Πυανεψιών), first month of autumn, sacred to Apollo
5. Maimakterion (Μαιμακτηριών), second month of autumn, sacred to Zeus
6. Poseideon (Ποσειδεών), third month of autumn, sacred to Poseidon
7. Gamelion (Γαμηλιών), first month of winter, sacred to Zeus and Hera
8. Anthesterion (Ἀνθεστηριών), second month of winter, sacred to Dionysus
9. Elaphebolion (Ἑλαφηϐολιών), third month of winter, sacred to Artemis
10. Mounikhion (Μουνιχιών), first month of spring, sacred to Artemis
11. Thergelion (Θαργηλιών), second month of spring, sacred to Artemis and Apollo
12. Skirophorion (Σκιροφοριών), third month of spring, sacred to Athena

Each month had approximately 30 days (more on that “approximately” part in a bit), divided into three periods of ten days each (which we’ll call “decades”):

The first day of the month was officially called the New Moon, or in Greek, the νουμηνια, the date when the Moon would officially be sighted on its own just after syzygy.  The last day of the month was called the Old and New, or ενη και νεα, which was the actual date of the syzygy between the Earth, Moon, and Sun.  The last day of the second decade and the first of the third decade were both called “the 10th”, with the earlier 10th being the first day and the later 10th being the second.  Days in the months would be referred to as something like “the third day of Thargelion waning”, or Thargelion 28.  Only days 2 through 10 were referred to as “rising”, and days 21 through 29 were referred to as “waning”; the middle block of days from 11 to 19 were unambiguous.  When a month was “hollow”, or had only 29 days instead of 30, the 2nd waning day was omitted, leading to the 3rd waning day becoming the penultimate day of the month instead of the 2nd waning day.  Since this was all based on observation, there was no hard and fast rule to determine which month was hollow or full without the use of an almanac or ephemeris.

At this point, we have enough information to start applying the Greek alphabet to the days.  As mentioned before, there are fewer letters in the Greek alphabet than there are days, so there are some days that are simply going to remain letterless; like the intercalary days of the solar calendar, these might be considered highly unfortunate or “between” times, good for little except when you have a sincere need for that bizarre state of day.  A naive approach might be to allot the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to the first 24 days of the lunar month, then leave the last six or seven days unallocated, but I have a better idea.  If we include the otherwise useless obsolete letters digamma (Ϝ), qoppa (Ϙ), and sampi (Ϡ), we end up with 27 days, which is 9 × 3.  In using the Greek letters as numerals (e.g. isopsephy), letters Α through Θ represent 1 through 9, Ι through Ϙ represent 10 through 90, and Ρ through Ϡ represent 100 through 900.  In other words,

In this system of numerics, it’s easy to group the letters into three groups of nine based on their magnitude.  This matches up more or less well with the three decades used in a lunar month, so I propose giving the first nine letters to days 1 through 9 (Α through Θ) and skipping the 10th rising day, the second nine letters (Ι through Ϙ) to days 11 through 19 and skipping the earlier 10th day, and the third nine letters (Ρ through Ϡ to days 21 through 29, and leaving the Old and New day unassigned.  If the month is hollow and there is no 2nd waning day for Ϡ, then the Old and New day (last day of the month) is assigned Ϡ.  Letterless days might repeat the preceding letter; thus, the 10th day of the month (or the 10th rising day) might be called “second Θ”, but still be considered effectively letterless.

With the usual Attic festivals celebrated monthly (they treated the birthdays of the gods as monthly occurrences), the lunar month with all its information would look like the following:

That’s it, really.  All in all, it’s a pretty simple system, if we just take the lunar months as they are, and is a lot easier than the complicated mess that was the SGC.  Then again, that’s no fun, so let’s add more to it.  After all, the fact that the months themselves are 12 and the Greek letters are 24 in number is quite appealing, wouldn’t you say?  And we did add letters to the months in the SGC, after all, so why not here?  We can also associate the months themselves with the Greek letters for grammatomantic purposes; if we assign Α to the first month of the year, we can easily get a two-year cycle, where each of the months alternates between one of two values.  For example, if in one year Hekatombaion (first month of the year) is given to Α, then by following the pattern Skirophorion (last month of the year) is given to Μ; Hekatombaion in the next year is given to Ν to continue the cycle, as is Skirophorion in the next year given to Ω.  The next Hekatombaion is given to Α again, and the cycle continues.  Note that the obsolete Greek letters digamma, qoppa, and sampi would not be used here; I only used them in the lunar month to keep the days regular and aligned properly with the decades.

The thing about this is that the lunar months don’t match up with the solar year very well.  Twelve lunar months add up to about 354 days, and given that a solar year is about 365 days, the year is going to keep drifting back unless we add in an extra intercalary (or, more properly here, “embolismic”) month every so often to keep the calendar from drifting too far.  Much as in the SGC with the intercalary days, we might simply leave the embolismic month unlettered in order to keep the cycle regular.  Days within this month would be lettered and celebrated as normal, but the month itself would be otherwise uncelebrated.  For the LGC, we would add the embolismic month at the end of the year, after Skirophorion, so that the next Hekatombaion could occur after the summer solstice as it should.  I depart from the Athenian practice here a bit, where other months would simply be repeated (usually Poseideon).

Of course, figuring out which years need the embolismic month is another problem.  To keep the cycle regular, we’d need to add in an embolismic month one year out of every two or three.  Although there’s no evidence that the Athenians used it, I propose we make use of the Metonic cycle, a period of 19 years in which 12 of the years are “short” (consisting of only 12 months) and 7 are “long” or leap years (consisting of 13, or 12 months plus an embolismic month).  This cycle has been in use for quite some time now in other calendrical systems, so let’s borrow their tradition of having years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19 be long years, and the other years being short.  Just as with the months, the 12 short years might be assigned letters of their own, while the long years would be unlettered due to their oddness (in multiple senses of the word).  Since the Metonic cycle has an odd count of years, two of these cycles (or 38 years) would repeat both a cycle of letter-years as well as letter-months in the LGC.  Since the use of an epoch for the LGC isn’t as necessary as in the SGC, figuring out where we are in the current Metonic cycle can be determined by looking at another calendar that uses it; I propose the Hebrew calendar, which does this very thing.  In this case, the most recent Metonic cycle began in 1998, with the long years being 2000, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2014, and 2016; the next Metonic cycle begins in 2017.  The two Metonic cycles, which we might call a LGC age or era,  starting in 1998 and ending in 2035, are below, and the same cycle is repeated forward and backward in time for every 38 years.

A few others of these cycle-epochs include the following years, covering the 20th and 21st centuries, each one 38 years apart from the previous or next one:

• 1884
• 1922
• 1960
• 1998
• 2036
• 2074
• 2112

Creating an epoch to measure years from, although generally useful, isn’t particularly needed for this calendar.  After all, the Attic calendar upon which the LGC is based was used to determine yearly and monthly festivals, and years were noted by saying something like “the Nth year when so-and-so was archon”.  Similarly, we might refer to 2013 as “the 16th year of the 1998-age” or 2033 as “the 35th year after 1998″.  In practice, we might do something similar such as “the sixth year when Clinton was president” or “the tenth year after Hurricane Sandy”; measuring years in this method would still be able to use the system of letter-years in the LGC, simply by shifting the start of the epoch to that year and starting with letter-year Α.  The Metonic cycle would continue from that epoch cyclically until a new significant event was chosen, such as the election of a new president, the proclamation of a peace between nations, and so forth.

Associating the letters with the years and months here is less for notation and more for divination, since the LGC is an augmentation of the Attic festival calendar (with some innovations), and not a wholly new system which needs its own notation.  That said, we can still use the letters to note the years and the months; for instance, the 16th year of the cycle given above might be called the “year Λ in the 1998-age”, while the 17th year (which has no letter associated with it) might be called just “the 17th year” or, more in line with actual Attic practice, “the second Λ year”, assuming that (for notational purposes) a letterless year repeats the previous year’s letter.  Likewise, for embolismic months, we might say that the 12th month of a year is either “the Μ month” or “the Ω month”, and the 13th month of a year (if any) could be said as “the 13th month”, “the empty month”, or ”the second Μ/Ω month” (depending on whether the preceding month was given to Μ or Ω).

Converting a date between a Gregorian calendar date and a LGC date or vice versa is much easier than the SGC conversion, but mostly because it involves looking things up.  To convert between a Gregorian calendar date and a LGC date:

1. Find the year in the cycle of the LGC ages to find out whether the year is a long or short year.
2. Count how many new moons have occurred since the most recent summer solstice.
3. Find the date of the current moon phase.

For instance, consider the recent date September 1, 2013.  This is the 16th year in the LGC age cycle, which has only 12 months and is associated with the letter Λ.  The summer solstice occurred on June 21 this year, and the next new moon was July 8, marking the first month of the LGC year.  September 1 occurs in the second month of Metageitnion, associated with the letter Ξ this year which starting on the new moon of August 7, on the 26th day of the lunar month, or the 5th waning day, associated with the letter Χ.  All told, we would say that this is the “fifth day of Metageitnion waning in the year Λ of the cycle starting in 1998″; the letters for this day are Λ (year), Ξ (month), and Χ (day).

Now that your brain is probably fried from all the tables and quasi-neo-Hellenic computus, we’ll leave the actual uses of the LGC for the next post.  Although the uses of the SGC and LGC are similar in some respects, the LGC has interesting properties that make it especially suited for magical work beyond the daily divination given by the letter-days.  Stay tuned!

Now that the lunisolar grammatomantic calendar (LGC) is explained at length, let’s talk about how it actually might be used.  To refresh your mind, dear reader, the LGC is a modern variation on the old lunisolar calendar that the Athenians used in classical Greece to determine their festival dates and religious observances.  The months are marked by the passage of the moon, with adjustments made every so often to get a calendar year to match the actual solar year.  With grammatomancy, they days are assigned a particular Greek letter for use in divination, magic, and advising on specific actions based on the day in the calendar; some days, however, don’t have letters.  Months and years, likewise, can be assigned letters (or not depending on the circumstances), and there are overall cycles of 38 years which repeat a certain set of letters for the year, month, and days.  All this to produce a calendrical divination tool, hence the LGC.  I made a solar version as well, the SGC, with which the LGC shares a number of similarities, especially in terms of how they might be used.

Again, the core point of the LGC is for divination.  Much as with the Mayan calendar stuff, or with the planetary weekdays and other Western ideas, different days will have different effects and different forces in effect; the use of the letters is to indicate what those forces might be and how we might align or counter them.  By using a calendar to map these forces out, we have a tool to help us prognosticate and plan for different events and circumstances that we can harness for our own ends.  With the Greek letters, each letter represents a different oracle, advice, planet, sign, element, god, number, and more; whole worlds can be unfolded from the use of a simple letter through the arts of stoicheia, isopsephy, and grammatomancy.  In this regard, both the SGC and LGC can be used to determine on a day-by-day, month-by-month, or year-by-year basis how a particular period of time will go.  By inspecting whether a day has a particular letter assigned to it, we might plan events for that day or avoid it entirely.

However, how these letters might be applied to the days can differ; for example, compare my own SGC and LGC, both of which have the same intention and the same core idea, but reflect it in different ways.  Depending on the need, the use of the SGC might be more preferable than the LGC, or vice versa.  Specifically with the LGC, the calendar is lunisolar, which is fantastic for most magical activities undertaken nowadays, especially by people in neopagan or reconstructionist traditions.  Since these guys, as well as farmers and other people who work with lunar forces in some regard, all use the Moon as a focus for determining time, using the LGC can help with augmenting their current style of working with time and lunar forces.  Another draw to the LGC is that it’s grounded in actual historical usage of an actual calendar, complete with its own cycle of festivals, religious observances, and power.  For the Hellenismos crowd especially the LGC would be of help in combining religious observances with magical forecasting beyond other augury and divination.  Being more in tune with natural cycles than artificial precision as the SGC has, the LGC would also be better in charting planting cycles or other worldly/earthy/natural events.  Of course, this is all based on the Athenian ritual calendar, some of the days of which are associated with particular deities; for instance, Apollo is associated with the seventh day of the month, which is assigned the letter Ζ.  This gives Apollo a similar connection, and can help explain other attributes of his or explain those of the letter itself.

One notable difference between the SGC and the LGC is that the LGC has far more unassigned periods of time than the SGC.  To clarify, the SGC year has only five to six days that have no letters at the end of the year to make up for the difference between the total duration of the letter-months and that of the solar year.  Further, only days can miss a letter; the intercalary days are not assigned to any month, and all the months, years, ages, eras, eons, and so forth are all labeled with letters.  On the other hand, the LGC has roughly 65 days per year that are without a letter due to the length of the lunar synodic month, and even whole embolismic months or leap years have no letter assigned, either, according to the system I proposed.  Similarly, embolismic months and leap years might be considered special times for settling debts, finishing work, and clearing out the old brush to make way for new growth, since these times always represent some kind of closing or coming to an end of a cycle.  This would especially be true of the last embolismic month of the 38-year cycle for the LGC, which I envision as something of a party month.

That also brings up another important difference between the SGC and LGC: the use of the obsolete letters in the LGC.  Digamma, qoppa, and sampi are ancient letters that were used in very early forms of Greek as it began to borrow the Phoenician script for its own use; however, these letters were no longer in use at the time of the Greek alphabet oracle I use, and hadn’t been for quite some time except to mark numbers.  As such, they have no oracular meaning ascribed to them, nor are they used in stoicheia, qabbalah, or magic.  Due to this, days that are marked with these obsolete letters are effectively letterless, or explicitly unlucky days as opposed to the otherwise unlettered days, which might be considered more like a Moon void of course period or “thin time”.   Since these letters were overall dropped due to their uselessness, not even retained for their etymological value, these days might also be considered “dropped” from usefulness, with business being avoided entirely or similar prohibitions observed.  Since in the second and third decades of the lunar month the last day was letterless and the second to last had an obsolete letter, this gives the calendar a type of “weekend” for rest or for other observations.  The first decade, on the other hand, would be focused on ritual and sacrifices throughout those ten days.

Another change in purpose is how dates are even used between the SGC and LGC.  The LGC is focused on near-term natural cycles that have an immediate and direct need, and doesn’t really have much of a convention for calculating or even denoting dates far into the future or the past outside of the current cycle.  This follows the traditional view of time, where these things simply had no real meaning; events far in the past were history-myths, and events far in the future were undetermined and up to the gods.  What was needed was individual human timeframes that one could deal with and live within.  On the other hand, the SGC is meant for determining times and dates far into the future and the past, around 7000000 years in either direction when used with the letter-eon place, or around 13000 years without it.  This calendar might be considered more “scientific”, determining astrological or astronomical events or determining mystical transitions of the cosmos and universe over large stretches of time.  The enforced precision of the SGC and the organic flow of the LGC can easily compliment each other, much as the Mesoamerican calendar systems were used in tandem with each other.  In other words, I see the likely scenario to be the Babylonian magus or Academic geometer making use of the SGC, and the common families and townspeople making use of the LGC.  It’s like the difference between someone giving you an informal calendar date for ease and a Barycentric Julian Date for exactness.

Because of its regularity and association with the Sun and solar movement, I’m more likely to use the SGC in my Work, mostly because I resonate with that kind of independence from imperfection that the SGC (mostly) allows; plus, its ability to mark specific times arbitrarily is useful, especially when planning long-term effects that might not be immediately seen or noted.  That said, I can see the use of the LGC being helpful as well in determining lower or more nature-y rituals, such as offerings to the gods or the Earth as well as planning out lunar effects through a grammatomantic lens, especially in determining the letters associated with lunar months.  I know that a lot of this was an exercise in complexity, but it was helpful for me to get ideas, especially if I ever get into mobile platform programming or Twitter bot programming if I want to make a bot or a mobile app for these calendars (or to help others do the same, just let me know!).  Being able to use grammatomancy in a new way beyond “mere” letter-drawing is a useful thing, I think, and brings the power of time a bit closer than would otherwise be possible.

One of the blogs I’ve recently added to my blogroll recently posted about his problems when people define being religious, spiritual, and spiritual-not-religious.  To a large degree, I agree with him; it’s simply not true that you can’t be spiritual and religious at the same time, though one can be “religious” without doing much spiritually and vice versa.  It’s complicated, but it does have some truth to it.  I know that I myself (way back when I was younger and a little more pompous than I am now) described myself as spiritual-not-religious, but now that I think back on that, I can’t say that I’d mean now what I meant then by that phrase.

Being a Hermeticist, I like to classify things into large groups.  When it comes to beliefs or the lack thereof, I go by two big classifications, materialists and spiritualists.  I define these terms specifically for how they perceive the world:

• Materialists believe that there is nothing except the physical, tangible world around us; in other words, to them there exists only Malkuth as the whole of existence.  Among others, atheists, agnostics, and “hard science-only” people fall into this category, either believing that there is nothing else besides the material world or having the lack of belief that anything immaterial exists.  Everything that exists only exists in terms of matter and material processes, having material starts, material ends, and material changes.
• Spiritualists believe that there exists the physical and tangible world around us in addition to other non-physical, or spiritual, worlds around, involved with, or separated from us; in other words, there are other sephiroth besides Malkuth that make up the whole of existence.  This includes people of faith, magicians, mystics, and other such people.

I further break down that group of spiritualists into three further groups:

• Conventional religionists believe that there is more to existence than the material world, but focus only on the material.  Most common people of faith such as Christians who go to church only on Sundays or just on Christmas and Easter but are otherwise uninvolved with spiritual matters, fall into this group.  For all intents and purposes, these people are pretty much the same as materialists with a veneer of spirituality.  No explicitly spiritual action is taken by these people.
• Mystics believe that there is more to existence than the material world, and endeavor to go to and through other spiritual places so as to reach the Divine Source/God.  This is their sole or primary purpose; in qabbalistic terms, they’re interested only in bringing things from Below to Above.  Monastics, holy men, prophets, and theurgists fall into this group.
• Magicians believe that there is more to existence than the material world, and endeavor to go to and through other spiritual places so as to change the world down here using spiritual or material means.  This is their sole or primary purpose; in qabbalistic terms, they’re interested in bringing things from Above to Below.  Magicians, sorcerers, witches, and the like fall into this group.

Of course, I’m defining the terms “mystic” and “magician” completely on a whim for the sake of classification at this point, and it’s entirely possible that someone spiritual but not a conventional religionist is either at any given point; it’s like the difference between theurgy and thaumaturgy, or doves versus snakes; even I myself switch modes depending on what needs to be done.  This isn’t to say that a mystic or a magician can’t be faithful as would normally be reckoned, either; I know many witches or ceremonial magicians (or “magicians” in the scheme above) who also have devout practices to particular gods.  In a way, the mystics and magicians could be combined into bigger group of “active spiritualists”, while conventional religionists might be called “passive spiritualists”.

The big difference between conventional religionists and magicians/mystics is the property of spiritual action; religionists believe but do nothing, while mystics and magicians believe and do things.  Of course, if you count prayer as spiritual activity (as one should), then many conventional religionists may be considered mystics (e.g. for salvation and purity); then again, depending on the nature of the prayer, they might also be considered magicians (e.g. for financial wealth and children).  Most American Christians I know, for instance, who don’t really do much of either fall into the conventional religionist/passive spiritualist category.  This is a pretty large group, and like I mentioned before, it’s basically the same as the materialists but with a veneer of spirituality; they’re otherwise the same.  That said, being seen as religious or involved at a minimum with social religion can be very useful for some people, and I can’t fault them for that, whatever their reason may be.

So whither the spiritual-not-religious people in this scheme?  It depends on the nature of their activity.  If they do work, they’re an active spiritualist and are likely a mystic or magician (in the scheme above), either in terms of bringing good stuff up there to down here or in terms of bringing themselves and others up there from down here.  If they don’t do much at all, then they’re a passive religionist, and no better or worse than a Sunday-only Protestant.  And, perhaps more obnoxious, that’s really not saying much more than if you were a materialist with an extra social connection.

Plus, a lot of the terms many people use are colored by Christianity’s definition of spirituality and religion; not all religions, faiths, or paths use these concepts.  For instance, when performing a religion census in China and Japan, it’s incredibly difficult to classify people as “just” a Buddhist, or a Taoist, or a Shinto practitioner, or a Confucianist.  Many people are all at once, depending on their work and upbringing, and instead of asking “to what faith do you belong” when many people would say “all of the above” (which is a concept shockingly different from what most of the Western world believes), such census questions ask instead whether one has read a particular canon of texts, whether they’ve taken refuge in the Three Gems of Buddhism, whether they go to a particular temple or set of temples, whether they’ve performed priestly or monastic work before, and the like.  The answer may still be complex, but then, nobody said this was a simple matter.

So, I suppose the big question in defining someone in terms of spirituality is: what do you Do?

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 2013.

“satanic pagan ritual altars instruction offerings halloween” — I’m kinda insulted by this query for a number of reasons, not least that it somehow directed someone to my blog.  I’m guessing that the person who searched for this was around 12 years old, to boot.  Just…ugh.

“satanic ritual to summon ghosts” — Again with the “satanism”. Lots of requests for this thing, or alternatives with “black magic rituals” or “for beginners”.  Seriously, guys?  I know that people growing up in a primarily anglophone evangelist protestant Christian culture have a hard time with this, but not everything that isn’t explicitly Christian is automatically Satanic, or “black magic”, or whatnot.   But if you want to go ahead with this, it’s really simple to summon a spirit like a ghost.  Light a candle and some good, heavy incense, make an oration to the spirit calling them there, and make an offering of wine or food or rum or pennies or candies or something.  Wait for the spirit to arrive, then chat with it.  Afterwards, dismiss it and leave the offerings.  (Yes, I know I’m omitting the protection and energy work and meditation and prayers, but whatever, most people aren’t that serious and probably need a good slap in the face to realize the importance of these things.)

“dismissing spirits after ritual” — Generally a good idea, though it pays to be respectful.  First, always thank the spirit: “I thank you for your presence, for you have come as I have called and aided me as I have asked”.  If it’s something like an angel or some other servant spirit, you might want to say something like “as you have come in peace, so now go in power; as you have come in the name of the Trinity, so now go in this same name”.  Demons should be treated similarly, especially the powerful ones, but you should always cover your ass and include some sort of binding for mutual peace and not leaving harm or malice behind them.  For ancestors, land spirits, and the like, which deserve respect as individual entities that do not serve, say something like “go if you will, stay if you will, but know that you have my honor”; ditto for gods and deities, though these should be given proper honor generally.

“wasn’t the sanctuary a bloody mess from all of the animal sacrifices” — Perhaps surprisingly, no.  Places of holiness, especially well-known and well-attended places like the Temple of the Jews, tend to have elaborate rituals and logistical setups to perform sacrifices, which often include cleaning up pretty well.  In Santeria, for instance, the orisha rooms and throne areas must be exquisitely and perfectly clean and hygienic, and given that animal sacrifice is pretty messy, it would seem like the two don’t mix.  That said, they’ll have a whole team of people cleaning things up as they go, carrying out the waste or corpse, and keep things under control.  Other traditions, like Palo Mayombe, may not have an emphasis on cleanliness, so sometimes sanctuaries can indeed be messy.  It depends on the tradition, I suppose.

“the angels that govern mars” — The Hebrew name I use is Kammael (kaph mem aleph lamed), which has also been Latinized as Camael and Samael.  This can lead to multiple ways to write the name in Hebrew, however, so it can get pretty confusing; I generally treat all these as the same entity.  From the Heptameron of Pietro d’Abano, Mars has the following spirits: the angels Samael, Satael, and Amabiel; the angelic king Samax, and the angelic ministers Carmax, Ismoli, and Paffran; the eastern angels Friagne, Guael, Damael, Calzas, and Arragon; the western angels Lama, Astagna, Lobquin, Soncas, Jazel, Isiael, and Irel; the nothern angels Rahumel, Hyniel, Rayel, Seraphiel, Mathiel, and Fraciel; and the southern angels Sacriel, Janiel, Galdel, Osael, Vianuel, and Zaliel.  The Liber Runarum has Mamarayl as the angel, and the Picatrix has Raucahehil or Rubijai’il.

“archangel michael consecrated swords to sell” — My ritual sword, inscribed and consecrated according to the Key of Solomon with a few extra bits, was entirely a personal project.  However, I can probably make them as well for you; your choice of sword, all you need to do is give me the money to buy one you like plus $150 plus shipping and handling, and the whole thing will be consecrated to your liking.

“what are the ingredients in florida water” — Contrary to its name, water doesn’t actually take a part in this, though you can throw it in.  Generally, Florida water has citrus elements in it like lemon and bergamot, along with spices like clove.  It’s pretty simple, and you can expand on it in many ways.  Rosemary-based versions are intensely aromatic and amazing, in my experience.

“kybalion changed my life” — That makes one of us, at least.  It’s a pretty basic book, if you ask me.

“rituals where you defecate on an altar” — No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.  This really should not be a thing.  I know of only one ritual where feces are needed, and that’s the consecration for the Mirror of the Seven Winds from the Picatrix, where they’re used as an ingredient in incense.  Directly shitting on an altar?  Unless you mean the throne of the porcelain god, this is terrible.  Don’t do this.

“how do i get oil blessed to cleanse my home” — Generally, go to your local priest and have them bless some olive oil for you, or ask if they have any chrism on hand.  Go throughout the house, preferably with the priest doing this, and pray in each room.  Anoint every door, threshold, window, and windowframe with the oil; once in the middle in a cross shape would work, or you might do a five-spot pattern (one in each corner and one in the middle).  You might also combine this with suffumigation with incense, lighting consecrated or purified candles in each room, and the like.

“using dice for yes/no” — You might do this in any number of ways, from rolling a die and inspecting the number or using several different colored dice and using the color itself.  For instance, you might decide that high numbers are “yes” and low numbers are “no”, or odd and even numbers for the same purpose.  You could expand this and add more categories, based on ranges of numbers.  I know that Balthazar Blacke uses a simple system involving a white die and a black die to get detailed answers, so you might consider that.  I use two ten-sided dice, one marked from 0 to 9 and the other from 00 to 90; for me, high numbers are “yes” and low numbers are “no”, and how high or low a number is increases the forcefulness of the answer.

“cloacina goddess symbol necklace” — Er…Cloacina was an aspect of the Roman goddess Venus, and Venus Cloacina was basically the goddess of the sewers of Rome and other cities.  This comes from the Roman word cloaca, meaning sewer, but is used biologically to indicate the excretory/genital area of birds, lizards, and similar animals.  Basically, it’s a shit-vagina.  And I’m unsure why one might have a symbol for that or want it on a pendant, but I’m sure you can find plenty of vagina pendants on Etsy, because it’s Etsy, and Etsy is horrifying.

“{searchterm}” — Yes, I do believe that that’s the point.

Recently, I made a Table of Practice for a new magician; this isn’t that uncommon a thing, and I do enjoy making them (and for a pretty economical price, hint hint).  For this specific Table, he requested I add the symbols of the 12 signs of the Zodiac on the outside bevel, much as I made one for my sister a ways back.  For comparison, the one for my sister turned out like this:

And for the dude who recently commissioned me, the Table turned out like this (his photo):

The two Tables are essentially identical (the one for the recent commission has Tetragrammaton around the triangle, but that’s basically it), but the big issue here is the orientation of the Zodiac signs.  For some bizarre reason, I unthinkingly drew the signs of the Zodiac onto this recently-commissioned Table clockwise instead of counterclockwise.  The counterclockwise depiction is the most common, since it represents the view of the ecliptical Zodiac constellations from our point of view down here on Earth; so, for instance, if you look up into the night sky when Aries is at the midheaven, Pisces will be on the right of Aries and Taurus will be on the left.  I’ve made several Tables with this pattern, but this recent commission is the only one I’ve goofed on.  It’s weird, and I’m both embarrassed and confused at how this happened.  That said, for some reason it also doesn’t strike me as “wrong”, despite the weird orientation of it.

Now, I don’t want the rest of this to sound like some justification for my design mistake, but the orientation of the Zodiac here led me to some thoughts on the role of the magician or conjurer in a conjuration.  Consider that if we as humans view the Zodiac as going in a counterclockwise direction around the celestial sphere, then having them situated clockwise indicates that we’re viewing the Zodiac from the other side.  The Zodiac is part of the eighth sphere, the sphere of the fixed stars, and the only thing higher than the eighth sphere is the ninth, the sphere of the Prime Mover, also referred to as Kether or God.  By using a Table where the Zodiac is present in a clockwise pattern, we’re essentially viewing the spirits positioned within the Table from the same viewpoint that God perceives the cosmos and all within it.  And that’s where this gets interesting.

What do we, as conjurers and magicians and magi, do?  We take our divine birthright as children of the Most High and join with him in the ever-continuing act of creation of the cosmos.  We ask for the blessing of God to do what is Right and to enact our True Wills, thereby rejoining God in his infinite Grace.  We step into the role as agents of the Divine, of the Most Divine, to work with the spirits who are our relatives, who are our brothers and sisters from the same Source, and who endeavor to aid us as they aid the Divine themselves.  We, essentially, become a consciously direct extension of God and join with God.  I’m going to stop this little poetic waxing short of saying “we become God”, because we already are essentially part of the Prime Mover down in this little ass-end of the cosmos, but we come closest to it consciously when we do our Work.

There are points when working with the spirits simply does not work; as Fr. Rufus Opus has said, the general idea is “move  this or move me”, where either a thing desired is changed or made in the world or where we ourselves are changed if nothing else can be changed.  God, clearly, can change everything, since that’s pretty much his thing; nothing disobeys God, since everything is a part of God and works as part of the One, the cohesive Whole.  But, that said, by moving ourselves, we partake in that same action, and bring ourselves closer to becoming what we need to Be and do what we need to Do; in these cases, we bring ourselves closer to attaining and carrying out our True Wills.  This is also the same in all other instances when working with the spirits gets us results in the external world.

Being a magician can be a scary thing.  It puts you in control, and therefore gives you responsibility, over your life, your station in life, and what happens in your life.  These all have their own caveats and asterisks and conditions, of course, but generally speaking, being a magician raises you to the point of Divinity.  In that sense, why shouldn’t we view the cosmos as the Divine would?  Isn’t that the whole point?  Isn’t attaining Kether and bringing more Light down here the objective of working with Hermetic Qabbalah?  Isn’t purifying and rarefying ourselves the end goal of the Great Work?  Isn’t understanding things as they are without human ignorance clouding them the result of fulfilling the Oath of the Abyss?  Isn’t attaining eventual power, reunion, unity with the Divine the point of all this crap we’re doing?

Maybe drawing on the Zodiac backwards wasn’t that bad an idea from a philosophical standpoint, after all.  I certainly didn’t have it, but then, where do all Ideas come from, anyway?

So I’ve recently been compiling all my notes, lore, and some of the most important rituals I use into a single text that, eventually, I’d like to send to be published.  Basically, I’m writing up my own grimoire for a modern Hermetic magician, and though I admit I’m still fairly new in my work and young as a magician (and a human, for that matter), I feel like I’ve got enough to at least get started, like an outline or something.  But seeing how I’m casting my eye on the possibility of having apprentices or even teaching my own set of classes, I figure having a core text written by me can help out those who might follow me.  It’ll be interesting, for sure, but I need to have something to provide besides giving teenagers some translations of Renaissance texts, however interesting that may be.  So, I figure I may as well provide some of the things I learned and started with.

One of the things that Fr. Rufus Opus starts off with are something he calls a set of aphorisms, more properly called the “Definitions from Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius”.  Those who are familiar with the Corpus Hermeticum (which, dear reader, of course you are or should be by now and you can read online here) will recognize the two names immediately, with Hermes Trismegistus being that thrice-great god-mage-prophet who founded the path of Hermeticism and Asclepius being his disciple, in addition to Hermes’ son Tat.  In this case, the Definitions would be presented from Hermes to Asclepius as another sort of Corpus Hermeticum, either a distillation of it, an addition to it, or something extra alongside it.  The Definitions are preserved only in an Armenian text from the 6th century AD, but likely originate in the 1st century, about the same time or earlier than the Corpus Hermeticum.

You can probably find the aphorisms online or elsewhere; the book The Way of Hermes contains an English translation, and you can easily find a PDF of it online (at least as of this writing).  The Definitions are a set of 49 more-or-less short but dense explanations of various parts of Hermetic philosophy, a little longer than the Kybalion but much more true to classical Hermeticism than that New Thought/Theosophical amalgam of early 20th century occult thinking.  Although it’d be nice if the aphorisms were broken down into seven groups of seven, they’re not; instead, the Definitions are broken down into 10 groups, some having as few as two aphorisms and some as many as seven.  The aphorisms themselves are pretty dense, and each deserves contemplation both on their own as well as with the other aphorisms, and it’s been a while since I reviewed them.  Like Alan Moore’s Promethea series, every time I go through them, I always pick up something new or something blatantly obvious stands out to me that wasn’t there before, and Fr. Rufus Opus himself said that these aphorisms should be regularly reviewed.

Since we’re at the tail end of another Mercury retrograde period, which is good to review old work, why not take this time to get a 49 day blog project going?  For each of the next 49 days, I’ll be posting one of the Definitions along with my explanation and contemplation of each, how I consider it and how I can apply it to my life and practice.  Feel free to join in with your own interpretations and contemplation; each of these definitions has a lot of meaning packed into each other, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s read these or has contemplated on them or similar concepts before.  I’ll probably start next Tuesday, November 12 to give me a few days to prepare and get the next few days sorted out (I’ve got another weekend trip set up this week), but in the meantime, find those aphorisms for yourself and take a look.  That’ll be 49 days of my interpretation of an ancient Hermetic text, lasting through the rest of 2013; you can consider it my Advent calendar Christmas present to you all.

This post is part of a series, “49 Days of Definitions”, discussing and explaining my thoughts and meditations on a set of aphorisms explaining crucial parts of Hermetic philosophy.  These aphorisms, collectively titled the “Definitions from Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius”, lay out the basics of Hermetic philosophy, the place of Man in the Cosmos, and all that stuff.  It’s one of the first texts I studied as a Hermetic magician, and definitely what I would consider to be a foundational text.  The Definitions consist of 49 short aphorisms broken down into ten sets, each of which is packed with knowledge both subtle and obvious, and each of which can be explained or expounded upon.  While I don’t propose to offer the be-all end-all word on these Words, these might afford some people interested in the Definitions some food for thought, one aphorism per day.

Today, let’s discuss the first definition, part I, number 1 of 5:

God: an intelligible world; world, a sensible God; man, a destructible world; God: an immovable world; heaven; a moveable world; man, a reasonable world.  Then there are three worlds.  Now the immovable world (is) God, and the reasonable world is man: for both of (these) units (are) one: God and man after the species.

So short a statement, so dense the meaning!  This aphorism starts off the Definitions by discussing the different worlds that exist in the broader sense of the word, but we already have some confusion.  “There are then three worlds”, which are God, man, and heaven.  However, the only definition for “world” that we have is that it’s a “sensible God”, leading to a recursive definition between God and a world.  God is a world which is God, and a world is God which is a world.  So clear, right?

The distinction between what God is and what a world is, however, is present both verbally and spacially here.  God is called “intelligible”, while a world is called “sensible”, and this distinction is crucial to understanding the intertwined relationship between the two.  A little unpacking of these terms, however, is also in order.  Sensible refers to anything that can sense or be sensed by an outside observer.  Intelligible, however, refers to something higher and greater than mere capacity for logic and imagination; the philosophical sense of “intelligence” is closely associated with the Greek word nous, meaning “mind” but having connotations of the metaphysical soul or Oversoul and the most divine parts of creation.  Consider that Agrippa places intelligence as the highest power of the Soul under the element of Fire in his Table of Four (book II, chapter 7), where intelligence is greater than the other faculties of reason, fantasy, and sense, and you’ll begin to grasp the far-reaching implications of these words.

For our human selves, it may help to describe these things in terms of the bodily functions.  Sensible things are things that the human body can physically sense, observe, or interact with through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, motion, pain, and so forth.  This sense data is picked up through the body’s nervous system and relayed to the brain, which collects and prepares sense data for the mind as well as relaying instructions and directives to the rest of the body from the mind.  The brain can be thought of as the physical component, antenna, or hardware for the mind, which itself is immaterial and nonphysical.  The mind is given sense data for it to understand and know; this capacity is called intelligence.  However, the mind is not limited to understanding just the things the body senses; it can also understand dreams, see hallucinations, and work with other data similar to sense data but not derived from it.  It’s like the difference between hearing something via clairaudience versus hearing it with the ears, or predicting with logic tables that a given event will happen though it has not yet happened to be sensed.  Mind, in this case, can work with both intelligence and sense, but the body only works with sense.

So we have things that can be sensed, and things that are known.  Things that are sensed are known, but not all the things that are known can be sensed.  Thus, things that are sensible form a strict subset of things that are intelligible; God, which is intelligible, is greater than any world, but includes it because it knows and can be known by it.  However, the world is only the part of God that can be sensed; God is in the world and yet still greater than it, which is a classic statement of panentheism.  Only things that are a world can be sensed, so while God is a world, not all of God is sensible.  This is further implied by the way the definition is phrased: God comes first, and world comes after God, which relies on God.  The two cannot be separated, but neither are they the same.  This is similarly said in the Asclepius (book VIII, part 1), where Hermes describes the distinction between the bigger and lower states of God that we might call God and the world:

The Lord and Maker of all things, whom we call rightly God, when from Himself He made the second [God], the Visible and Sensible,—I call him Sensible not that He hath sensation in Himself (for as to this, whether or no He have himself sensation, we will some other time declare), but that He is the object of the senses of those who see;—when, then, He made Him first, but second to Himself, and that He seemed to Him [most] fair, as one filled to the full with goodness of all things, He fell in love with Him as being part of His Divinity.

(Yeah, I know I’m pulling from another contemporaneous text.  I’ll do that from some well-known texts, such as Cornelius Agrippa later on, but bear with me.  This will only be needed rarely, primarily for the first few aphorisms, which do require heavy unpacking.)

Next, we have Man, which is another world, and since worlds are sensible and part of God, so too is Man sensible and part of God.  Further, just as worlds come after God, Man comes after the world, and just as the world is part of God, so too is Man part of the world.  However, Man and the world are not the same, because Man is further identified as “destructible” in addition to “sensible”, indicating that things that of the world may or may not be destructible but that Man certainly is; Man is part of the world now and again, and while the world always is, Man may not always be.  However, we need to clarify the meaning of “destructible”, since it can be difficult to say what exactly is destroyed.  According to the Corpus Hermeticum (book VIII, part 1):

Concerning Soul and Body, son, we now must speak; in what way Soul is deathless, and whence comes the activity 1in composing and dissolving Body.  For there’s no death for aught of things [that are]; the thought [this] word conveys, is either void of fact, or [simply] by the knocking off a syllable what is called “death,” doth stand for “deathless.” For death is of destruction, and nothing in the Cosmos is destroyed. For if Cosmos is second God, a life that cannot die, it cannot be that any part of this immortal life should die. All things in Cosmos are parts of Cosmos, and most of all is man, the rational animal.

Thus, Man is unique in that the part of him that is in the world can be destroyed, but as Man is part of God, Man cannot ever truly be annihilated out of existence entirely.  The sensible part of Man, or the body and the physical senses, may be destroyed, but not the intelligible part of Man.

The next two definitions come up for both God and heaven: God is an immoveable world, and heaven is a moveable world.  God is both intelligible and immoveable, while heaven (a new term) is a world that is moveable.  God, in this case, moves but is not moved; heaven is moved by others, which (if nothing else is immoveable) generally means God.  Thus, heaven is, like any world, less than and part of God, but God exerts a force on heaven that causes it to move, while the same force cannot be exerted on God.  However, since heaven is also a world, and a world is sensible while only the part of God that is in that world is sensible, we can also say that heaven is sensible.  The difference between that which is moveable and that which is immoveable is more clearly referenced in the Corpus Hermeticum (book II, parts 6 through 9):

Her. If space is, therefore, to be thought, [it should] not, [then, be thought as] God, but space. If God is also to be thought, [He should] not [be conceived] as space, but energy that can contain [all space].  Further, all that is moved is moved not in the moved but in the stable. And that which moves [another] is of course stationary, for ’tis impossible that it should move with it.

Asc. How is it, then, that things down here, Thrice-greatest one, are moved with those that are [already] moved? For thou hast said the errant spheres were moved by the inerrant one.

Her. This is not, O Asclepius, a moving with, but one against; they are not moved with one another, but one against the other. It is this contrariety which turneth the resistance of their motion into rest. For that resistance is the rest of motion.  Hence, too, the errant spheres, being moved contrarily to the inerrant one, are moved by one another by mutual contrariety, [and also] by the stable one through contrariety itself. And this can otherwise not be.  The Bears up there, which neither set nor rise, think’st thou they rest or move?

Asc. They move, Thrice-greatest one.

Her. And what their motion, my Asclepius?

Asc. Motion that turns for ever round the same.

Her. But revolution—motion round same—is fixed by rest. For “round-the-same” doth stop “beyond-same.” “Beyond-same” then, being stopped, if it be steadied in “round-same”—the contrary stands firm, being rendered ever stable by its contrariety.  Of this I’ll give thee here on earth an instance, which the eye can see. Regard the animals down here,—a man, for instance, swimming! The water moves, yet the resistance of his hands and feet give him stability, so that he is not borne along with it, nor sunk thereby.

Asc. Thou hast, Thrice-greatest one, adduced a most clear instance.

Her. All motion, then, is caused in station and by station.  The motion, therefore, of the cosmos (and of every other hylic animal) will not be caused by things exterior to the cosmos, but by things interior [outward] to the exterior—such [things] as soul, or spirit, or some such other thing incorporal.  ’Tis not its body that doth move the living thing in it; nay, not even the whole [body of the universe a lesser] body e’en though there be no life in it.

Asc. What meanest thou by this, Thrice-greatest one? Is it not bodies, then, that move the stock and stone and all the other things inanimate?

Her. By no means, O Asclepius. The something-in-the-body, the that-which-moves the thing inanimate, this surely’s not a body, for that it moves the two of them—both body of the lifter and the lifted? So that a thing that’s lifeless will not move a lifeless thing. That which doth move [another thing] is animate, in that it is the mover. Thou seest, then, how heavy laden is the soul, for it alone doth lift two bodies. That things, moreover, moved are moved in something as well as moved by something is clear.

Thus, we know that the heavens are a part of God that is inanimate, and can be moved, while God is animate yet cannot be moved by another, since God cannot technically move; God is intelligible, and that which is intelligible has no space in which to really move, since space is something sensible and the intelligible is not necessarily sensible.  In this sense, we might describe heaven as less as a spiritual place but more of a cosmic place, containing the spiritual and material realms that are within God.  This, then, also includes the world literally around us physically.  This makes more sense if we use the Greek word for heaven used here: cosmos, implying both “order” as well as “heaven”.

The last of the definitions here relates to Man again, where Man is described as “reasonable”.  Reason is not the same as intelligence; again, just as Intelligence and Reason are described as associated with the elements of Fire and Air or the Mind and the Spirit in Agrippa’s Table of Four, intelligence refers to that which is spiritually knowable by the divine mind while reason refers to that which can be predicted and calculated by taking in data from both above and below.  For instance, once can predict that, based on the physical sensation that fire is hot, they will burn themselves if they put their hand in a fire; this is reasoning using sensible data.  If one receives a vision or prophecy of a king losing in battle, one can reason based on intelligible knowledge that they will have a new king; this is reasoning using intelligible knowledge.  Reasoning is what separates Man out from the rest of the world, in addition to being destructible.

Thus, there are three worlds, in something that begins to look like a list of correspondences:

• God: intelligible, immovable, partially sensible
• Heaven: sensible, moveable
• Man: sensible, destructible, reasonable

The definition goes on to say that that which is immoveable is God, and that which is reasonable is Man, but also that “both of these units are one”.  After all, both Man and God are worlds, and while God is intelligible and greater than and including every other world, Man is one particular world, and thus is part of God.  However, there are parts of Man that are also part of the world, and there are parts of Man that are destructible, and so do not necessarily belong to any one world except the world-containing-all-worlds that is God.  Plus, not only are God and Man one, but they are one since they are paired as “God and man after the species”.  ”Species” here refers to the type of substance or essence or form that both God and Man take, or that Man takes after God.  In this sense, God and Man are one in substance, which is another way of saying that Man is of the same form (as in Platonic form) as God.  This recalls the Biblical statement in Genesis 1:27, “so God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”.  However, while God may be the form of Man, Man is only an instance of this form; God is far more than just what Man might describe just as the concept of “tree” encapsulates every possible variation we know of between individual trees or species of trees, and even those that we have never yet seen or witnessed (sensible vs. intelligible).