This week, after literally years of waffling between planets and images to pursue next, I have finally produced another talismanic image from the Picatrix, following up on the Image of Venus that I produced so many years ago.
“The image of the moon according to the opinion of Picatrix is the form of a man who has the head of a bird, and he holds a stick above him, and he has a tree before him.”
— Picatrix Bk.II Ch.10, p.105, as translated by Greer and Warnock.
As with my Venus talisman, I turned to the grand planetary seal and the Agrippan characters for the reverse.
Although I could probably rationalize it in a variety of ways – a decision to pursue the rest of the talismans in Chaldean order, perhaps, or a fictitious upcoming election (this year sucks, there are no elections – my decision to make an Image of the Moon was ultimately based on the easy availability of the most appropriate metal: silver. By that same logic I should probably do a Solar image next, for all that probably no one will be able to afford the ten pennyweights of 14k gold.
The image I selected was not my absolute favorite. That honor goes to an image described on the preceding page: “… a woman with a beautiful face, with a dragon about your waist, having horns on her head with two snakes encircling them, and with two more snakes entwined around each of her arms, and a dragon above her head and another dragon under her feet, and both these dragons have seven heads.” which is somewhat beyond my current ability to produce a mold positive. But I think that a second bird-headed figure makes a fine follow-up to my Venus talisman, and I know that I need to enjoy the few relatively simple images presented in the Picatrix.
I have already ordered the mold positive of this Image, and will hopefully be able to present the first silver prototype in early August. It will probably end up being priced identically to the Venus — $116 in my Etsy store, assuming that the price of silver does not continue to rise, and will be available in brass and bronze for those who are less concerned with material than image.