Showing all posts tagged planetary magic

In art, scholarship, witchcraft

Picatrix Image of the Moon

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Moments in Time

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

When I first began seriously studying ceremonial magic in August of 2011, it was with a lifetime of energywork and witchcraft already under my belt.  I grew up surrounded by reports of astral time-travellers, and rituals aimed at undoing the injustices of past and future… at least in theory.  Books on witchcraft were always talking about advantageous days and moon phases, but everyone I knew had successfully manifested most of what they wanted with no regard to those things  (Friday seemed so far away in my late teens…).  So when I created my first electional talisman, the notion of using that moment again, some time in the future, had already occured to me.

Last night I finally put that theory to the test.

Aradia and I constructed an altar explicitly for the spell in the livingroom, frankincense burning in a brazer at the top beside the paper Jupiter talisman I made at that first election.  We prepared the three-part maeteria: the candle to be annointed, the paper talisman for our client’s altar, and the bottle of Scotch whiskey for the client to drink in the company of Jupiter.  We banished and cast our elemental circle and called to the powers of Jupiter by means of the Orphic hymn and libations and fumigation.

Then I called upon the spirit of the talisman to open up a window in time to the moment of its creation.  Light shined through the talisman and into our circle, and Aradia and I wound that energy up using memory-evocation techniques from Andrieh Vitimus’ Hands On Chaos Magic: revelling in the sensory details of the day upon which I first called the spirits of Jupiter to aid me in my collegiate duel with Authority.  We drank our toast to Jupiter, and while Aradia dressed the candle and the bottle, I channelled sigils to augment those we had created by the Carol/Spare method.  Then, together, Aradia and I performed the Picatrix invocation by which I had first blessed the talisman, the final recreation of that first election, and poured all the power we had raised into the triparte maeteria.

We closed the ritual with an offering to the spirit of the talisman, which had performed so far above and beyond its original purpose, and a final repetition of the Orphic hymn to Jupiter before releasing the spirits and the elements.

The spell, as I mentioned above, was for someone else, so I cannot speak more to the purpose until it has manifested, but I believe that we have applied as large and well-placed a lever to the situation as could be managed with our combined skill-set.  The candle will burn on our altar and the other elements will be delivered to the client today.  Even now, the morning after and no longer entranced, I can feel the magic reaching out into the future.

Further testing is, of course, required, but these preliminary results are amazingly positive.  Time travel magick appears to work in conjunction with electional astrology.  The next tests will be achieving similar results with my Venusian and Solar electional talismans, and then with an election I have no direct connection to — perhaps one of the Martial elections from this last year.  Then maybe evoking multiple points in time toward the same end.  Go big or go home, right?

In witchcraft

Working Jupiter I

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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Aradia and I built our Jupiter altar just short of a week ago.  Since then, we have done relatively little Jupiterian magic — a couple Orphic Hymns, participating in the Magical Working Against the False Kings, a bit of dream incubation — but the changes in our lives have already been remarkable.

The very minute we established the altar, the feel of the whole house changed.  The … wan malaise that had permeated everything was replaced with a vigorous readiness.  We rose at dawn the next day to perform our rites at the Dawn hour of Jupiter, something we had not done since the very beginning of the Solar work.

Since then, we have both been filled with ambition — and, more importantly, motivation.  I can’t even begin to get into how much we’ve gotten done in the last week.  It has been so, so easy to find the time and energy to do things.  I’m not falling asleep on my commute any more.

Even better, for the first time since I came back to Kansas City from the Sunrise Temple, I have felt that old magician’s charisma again.  The way people have been responding to me … again, it is beyond words.

Jupiter and witchcraft, it seems, go together far better than I would ever have imagined.

Things are going to get exciting as we start escalating.

 

 

 

 

In witchcraft

The Sun versus Depression

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

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Midwestern Gothic 22 by Wormwood Groves Photography

When Aradia and I set out to spend the year re-exploring planetary magic and reframing it in terms more accessible to witches, we started with the Sun for a variety of reasons.  Firstly, we were beginning at the Winter Solstice: the return of the Sun or – depending on how you frame things – the be beginning of the waxing year.  Secondly, from a naturalistic standpoint, if there is any planet that rules the heavens, then it is the life-giving Sun around whose gravity all the other planets revolve. Thirdly, as witches, the Sun is familiar and friendly to us, second only to the Moon.  And, finally, we had hoped that the Sun would help me overcome the deep depression that overshadowed the second half of 2015.

In this last, we found a ourselves to be very wrong.

There are a lot of reasons.  The crash after leading the main rituals at Heartland last year (an event that I still haven’t written about).  My house flooding in the Biblical rains we had here in KC from April through June.  The implosion of a long-standing friendship.  Family drama, in part political, in part related to the problems with my house.  Financial troubles.  All manageable, even taken together, except … I just didn’t have it in me.  This has been one of the worst years of my life for my mental health.

Here in the depths of winter … even the Sun wasn’t enough.

There were days … weeks when I considered abandoning the project altogether.  I thought that perhaps I should switch to an elemental experiment, to better prepare me for the rites of HPF 2016.  It got to where just walking into the room with the altars gave me panic attacks.

In retrospect, I think that conjuring the Sun at the Winter Solstice was not the best plan.  The Sun is not the Moon, where it’s ebb is the flow of a different sort of power.  The Sun is always there, holding the spinning orbs in place, and the turning of the terrestrial seasons has little bearing on the efficacy of traditional astrological magic.  But I was … am practicing witchcraft, and the turning of the seasons is the heart of that power.  And right now the Solar year is waxing,  but it is still … distant.  And cold.  And it is the warmth of the Sun that I needed to drag me out of my Abyss.

Instead, I have been climbing out of my depression the other way available to those of us without the appropriate healthcare: by what Aradia describes as the ladder of anger and anxiety.  Fortunately, most of my friends are as mad as I am, and have been very understanding of how difficult it is to be around me.

As I said, I very seriously considered giving up the experiment of planetary witchcraft.  But we did get some very solid results early on, and in contemplating the Sun I did also gain some insight into how to more effectively proceed.  More importantly, though, I remembered something I learned from all my science friends: negative results are not the same thing as a failed experiment.  The things I learned from this round will help me execute the next.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Orphic Hymns to the Sun: Translations in Action

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

A great deal of the current work being done with planetary magic right now relies heavily on the use of the Orphic Hymns, chiefly the 18th century translations by Thomas Taylor.  Long-time readers may recall that I am uncomfortable with those translations, and have argued that the more recent and more accurate translations of Apostolos Athanassakis be used instead.  It was not only inevitable, then, but entirely by design that my first week of conjurations put these two translations back-to-back to see what differences might be discerned in their efficacy.

For those magicians who are not also ancient language geeks (how have I not bored you to death?), the gist of it is that the Ancient Greek in which the Orphic Hymns were composed was written in meter rather than rhyme, and hammering the verses into a simple English rhyme-scheme takes some serious torture.  Also, archaeology is amazing, and we know more about the languages of Hellenistic Greece today than Taylor did, so some of his mistakes may be rooted in bad dictionaries.  Some magicians, equally if not more geeky and educated as I, believe that the Taylor translations work better magically for all sorts of reasons, but I ride this hobby horse to hell, regardless.

Taylor’s rhyming cant does, I must concede, a certain something for the brain of the English speaking magician.  We have this whole thing with magic and rhyme, and any good Chaos magician knows how valuable it is to tap into that sort of unconscious power source.  Moveover, between their ready (and free) availability, and the work of Rufus Opus (among others), the Taylor translations of the Hymns are explicitly tied to the planetary rites of the modern Western magical tradition.  All this goes to say that when I used the Thomas Taylor translation of the Hymn to the Sun, by itself, as a part of RO’s Seven Spheres rite, and as a part of conjurations of my own design, I already knew something of what to expect.

The warmth of the Sun responds readily to the hymn, and one may ride that way direct to the planetary current, and the Archangel Michael or the Titan god Helios respond equally readily to accept the offerings laid out before them.

The translations of Apostolos Athanassakis are aimed at the casual enthusiast as much as the professional Classicist, so they are not as sharp-edged as some might fear — the pages are unmarred by indications of broken text in the original, or annotation regarding the academic infighting of one translation versus another.  Moreover, in the particular case of the Hymn to Helios, the differences between the two translations are much less stark and more stylistical than other Orphic Hymns.

The Sun that responded to Aradia and I when we called by this hymn, both by itself and as a part of the Seven Spheres rite, was startlingly different from that which answered to the Taylor translation.  It was tarnished, or perhaps brazen rather than gold.  It was older, more aloof, more … Titanic.  Aradia described the experience as having used a back door to the sun.

It was the Athanassakis translation of the Orphic Hymn to Helios, substituted for Taylor in the Seven Spheres rite, which produced my most vivid experience of the experiment so far: the sensation of having ascended to an old, cooling, and abandoned region of the Sun, and of being observed by a vast red-gold eye, the size of a planet, staring widely at my from within an almost understandably vast head.

 

In witchcraft

Gearing Up To Lick the Socket Again

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

I am a terrible Chaos magician.

I mean, I make really, really pretty sigils.  (That whole “life dedicated to art” thing.)  And I think I get better-than-average results from them —  as much as one can say so without comparing notes on a level that very few of us are able to keep, let alone willing to show them off.  My one and only servitor has been … odd, but effective, and has been protecting my home for nearly three years running.

But I am terrible at code-switching.  When I dig into a paradigm, I can’t help but let it get under my skin.  As I do more and more of the magic, it sinks into my bones.  I can’t put it back down just like that. Read More

In art, witchcraft

Image of the Moon

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Image of the Moon
Image of the Moon

Image of the Moon as she appeared to me in February of 2015.

A feminine figure on a black field, a blue-lined purple cloak hangs from her shoulders.  She holds a bowl in one hand and a stang in the other.  She is crowned, and broad horns extend from the sides of her head.  Her face bears three eyes, and two more stare from each of her horns.

When Aradia and I conjured the Moon at the end of our cycle, I had no idea how the archangel Gabriel might appear to me. After all, Michael had appeared to me as the most femme Sun I had ever seen.  That the archangel appeared to me in the guise of the Witches’ Goddess, then, was not unsurprising … but neither was it expected.

In art, witchcraft

Image of Mercury

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

Image of Mercury
Image of Mercury

Image of Mercury as he appeared to me in February of 2015

A yellow-orange figure with wings sprouting from his head.  He has large orange eyes which his orange helmet cannot contain.  His arms are held tight to his body, one hand clutches a book and the other is open like a claw.  A billowing garment hangs from his waist, concealing one leg, the other boasts a winged ankle.

This image was at once one of the  most clear and one of the least surprising: active, winged, and helmed, he strongly resembles many traditional images of Mercury and Hermes, though he lacks the Caduceus.

In witchcraft

Failure to Bind

Author Satyr MagosPosted on

More than a year ago I wrote a somewhat theoretical post about applied feminist ethics in witchcraft.  It was, of course, not all that theoretical.  Someone that I had, until that point, considered a friend had stalked anohter friend of mine home from a party and violated zir personal space in a few ways.  The creeped-on friend, however, did not want a scene made, which prevented me from summarily barring the creeper from my social circle.  What I could and did do, however, was attempt to bind the creeper from further infringing on my friend’s boundaries.

I drew a sigil, called upon my familiar spirits and the spirits of Saturn and Venus, and arranged for the person in question to drink a series of toasts that had been poured over the sigil.  A couple other people from the social circle were there as well, which was not strictly ethical, but seemed … necessary and appropriate, and it was what my Genius and Daemon had led me to do.

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My binding worked, in one sense.  To the best of my knowledge, the creeper in question never infringed upon my friend again.  In another sense, it failed utterly.  Zie went on, instead, to assault someone else.  In full view of one of the others who had been present at the binding toast, actually, which is … interesting.

Divination indicated that I should not, at that point, escalate: that all would be taken care of behind the curtain.  And by divination, I mean my tarot cards and the VERY LOUD YELLING of the very many spirits who at that point were hanging about my temple.

Doubt lingers, of course, to this very day.  What could and should I have done differently?  I was constrained in mundane action in both the initial instance and the subsequent by the wishes of the victims.  How could I stand by and NOT smite zir into the dark depths of the earth–except that it was made very clear to me that further attempts at intervention would only go awry?

I’m not even certain why I’m telling this story except, in a new life in a new Temple, it’s past time to burn the original sigil, but I wanted archival evidence of the results.And in the hopes that someone reading this has productive thoughts on how such a situation could be handled better in the future.  Because neo-Pagan sexual mores often make a highly effective smokescreen for mainstream rape culture, and there will be a next time.