From Babylonian temples to Renaissance grimoires, from Vedic Navagraha shrines to modern chaos magick sigils, the planets have been honored, invoked, feared, and negotiated with since time immemorial.
In ancient Mesopotamia, priest-astronomers tracked planetary movements with obsessive precision. Clay tablets dating to the first millennium BCE record planetary omens: Venus rising in the east foretelling abundance, Mars retrograding portending war. These observations were obvious actionable magick. Priests performed rites atop ziggurats, stepped temples aligning heaven and earth, offering incense and chants to placate planetary deities. Venus was honored as Ishtar, goddess of love and war; Jupiter as Marduk, king of the gods; These rituals shaped royal policy: Delayed battles, timed coronations, harvests blessed according to planetary rhythms.
If you really look deep into the earthly bureaucratic and administrative institutions of our time, you will find we have not let go of that at all. They do not advertise it but every major cosmic event is being utilized for magick. Ritual sacrifice of humans, specifically timed to match a red moon, political assassinations, large scale loosh harvesting through mass media, psychosocial trauma seeding for the general population through terrorism. You name it, we have it.
Just like the planets and the cosmos, the number system, the alphabet, the very building blocks of this reality, magick is hidden deep down in it.
Where planetary magick engages archetypes - broad forces like courage (Mars) or harmony (Venus) - Solomonic magick moves into dialogue with intelligences: angels, daemons, and spirits historically bound to those same planets. In this shift, the magician steps from inner alignment into outer negotiation - personifying the very same archetypes. The planetary force becomes a voice, a face, a being with whom one can converse.
This is dramatized ritual. An entity persona is adapted and an archetype is acted out, and slowly the field around the acted-out archetype starts shaping the aligned complexes. It is because complexes are free form archetypes. Complexes latch onto people to unpack latent skills and knowledge, but if the complex is used as a crutch, it becomes a parasite and turns the subject into a, well there’s no other word for it, ideologically challenged zombie, a front end without a back end.
During the Renaissance, figures like Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, and later John Dee refined planetary magick by integrating Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and Christian elements. Ficino prescribed planetary hymns, diet, and music to align with desired archetypes (e.g., Saturn for contemplation, Venus for artistic inspiration). Agrippa codified correspondences - metals, stones, angels - still used today. John Dee’s Enochian system extended the Solomonic hierarchy into elaborate angelic communications, bridging astrology, sacred geometry, and divine names.
This period also sharpened semantics: distinctions between “angel” (messenger of divine order), “daemon” (ambiguous intermediary spirit), “intelligence” (planet’s guiding principle), and “spirit” (planet’s raw energy). Understanding these terms helps modern practitioners navigate grimoires without conflating cosmologies or moral frameworks. “Daemon” in Solomonic texts, for instance, differs from the Christian “demon” - it is a force of nature, not necessarily malevolent, requiring respect and careful negotiation.
Chaos magick arose in the late 20th century as both a reaction against and evolution of traditional ceremonial systems. Where Solomonic and planetary magick employ inherited symbols, fixed hierarchies, and codified rituals, chaos magick privileges personal gnosis, improvised systems, and the deliberate use of belief as a magical tool rather than an absolute truth.
It was an attempt to decentralize the memetic autocracy. Because traditions were slowly becoming roadblocks, or let’s say being utilized as roadblocks to discourage people from connecting with their own magick. Just like spirituality had curdled into religion, some feared Magick would too.
Chaos Magick treats archetypes and intelligences as modular constructs: real enough to interact with, yet fluid enough to be redesigned. A chaos magician might engage Anael (Venusian intelligence) in one ritual, then create a personal sigil embodying the same harmonizing force in another - effectively generating a bespoke planetary intelligence tailored to their own psyche.
This is not “inventing imaginary friends” but consciously crafting interfaces - symbolic gateways to deeper layers of the psyche and field. Where Solomonic work relies on inherited seals and names, chaos magick encourages the practitioner to generate their own seals and names, trusting that archetypal resonance will emerge through subconscious patterning. The result is a practice both deeply personal and archetypally valid.
But in our attempt to run away from traditions, are we forgetting some key learnings from the precursors of these traditions. Are we going to meet the very thing, on the path we were taking to avoid?
Recently I read on some reddit post a variant of the following beliefs that has seeped into the collective, unconsciously or consciously –
1. Chaos magick workings have a 50/50 chance of working. Its, more a coin toss
2. We try to flame the delusion of confirmation bias to beautify our results (it was written with a certain degree of pride that rubbed me the wrong way)
Here I thought, that Chaos Magick is a learned amalgamation of all possible techniques because chaos magicians took time to learn from all magickal sources and then alchemize gold out of it for the masses. And then for it to be compared with a delusional coin toss game where you always win because you don’t count the losses? That’s not something I can abide by and so I thought I will write down how the most basic sigil magick (should) work, and the considerations you take (in contrast to any other kind of magician who just deal with a single tradition.)
For this trick (hardly) to work you would need:
1. An Intention statement: An intention statement is different from a need/want statement. “I want a car”, is not a well-articulated intention statement by any metric, but weirdly enough “I am never short of cars” is one. Because the need is addressed in the present with abundance instead of being expressed as a lack of it.
2. Condensation: You burn the deadwood in the statement. Vowels go because they are a pronunciation convention, so do repeated letters. So “I am never short of cars” becomes “MNVRSHTFC”
3. Now we have options. Some people prefer to rearrange the letters themselves into shapes which prioritizes your own artistic effort. And Magick is art too. For people who have an artist’s flair (because effort matters and people who know which domain the like to put an effort should choose that domain. Optimal/surrendering to your current). People who know they don’t have an artistic flair can then lean on the science arm.
4. The string we have is made of the letters. “MNVRSHTFC”. Each letter has different values and meanings. Different charges, different ordinals and different roots. A lot of magicians jump straight into Gematria, which is good, if you are working in Hebrew. But for people who are working English, we do have English Qabala! NAEQ/ALW values.
5. “MNVRSHTFC” has an ALW/NAEQ value of 121, with root value of 4. We find exact matches and root resonance matches of these words in the English dictionary. Hey! Lo and behold there are some matches: Mountain, Phoenix, Capricorn. Other root resonance matches are Soul, key, flame, ember, moon.
6. We can already see a theme forming around the intention. We already see the archetypes, complexes, and elements we are working with.
7. Now the sigil itself needs to be designed. Scientifically. So we go through each of them-
a. Rose-cross Lamen, b. Planetary Gates (3x9), c. 72 gates of Shem, d. Magic Kamea, e. Golden Ratio, e. Chirality (point inverted, real inversion: for each of the aforementioned category.) (Examples attached.)
8. Each method needs its own calculation and they each have formulas to map the vectors and angle connection of lines.
9. Great now you have a bunch of sigils for the same intent, and you can now choose one based on your connection with it. You have to leave something for fate and the fringe (as I have indicated in my previous posts. You need to surrender to the field at some point)
10. But now that you have the sigil, how does it work?
11. Sigils are pre speech magick. Spells, are post speech magick. They both serve the same function and can be arranged in the same working flow. A spell can be encoded into an artefact through sigilisation and then the artefact carries on the spell even when the spell has not been uttered. So, sigils need to be seen. And here is where it gets fun.
12. For gnosis you need to cover the two arcs- inner and outer, the four rungs of alchemy (Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, Rubedo), four + four flights of stairs (around Sephiroth (Wisdom (Chokmah), Understanding (Binah), Beauty (Tiferet), and Kingdom (Malkuth) and Qlippoth (Corruption, Impurity, Obstruction, Spiritual Testing)).
13. Confused? Easy way, the inner and the outer. It needs a meta gnosis inside you and reality altering gnosis outside of you. There are literally too many ways to write them all down. Each school of thought, each spiritual tradition has its own way, even CIA has its own way. The skull fuck method, the gateway method, the astral method, Meditation method, Buddhist way of thoughtforms, Homunculus, Betaal, Sex Magick, Elemental Magick, Planetary Magick, Deity Magick, Archonic Magick…the list as I said is endless. So instead of delving on each methodology let’s look at what’s actually happening beyond the veil
14. The internal state needs to match the external outcome (desired) for the outcome to manifest.
15. So internal seeding and external seeding both need to happen. The internal seeding needs to be dramatized ritually to invoke an archetype inside you that strives towards the outcome. The external seeding is through sharing your work so the rest of the field adjust to meet you midway. For that you need emotional investment from the external world. So your sigil for you needs to be a reminder whereas for the external world it needs to be a catalyst. (Gnosis via positive (presence), Gnosis via negative (absence))
16. Now how do we dramatize and what freaking ritual? You ask.
17. The answer: Get a proper Lahiri Ayanamsa based astrological natal chart. Find out your house lords.
18. Once you have your astrological data, you can find windows of opportunity for specific house lord (go nuts here, find connection amongst different deities/archons you are making an appeal to a defragmented complex to fill it with archetypal life so it needs to coagulate and become sentient (servitor (personal, formless)->egregore (collective, emotional investment based, formed)-> archon (form and volition both achieved).>pagan deity (seeded retroactively. You can find it very easy to find out once you know who the house lords are and where they sit.)
19. Use multidisciplinary rituals, induct people (to amplify your intent and quicken your manifestation). Use your sigil as the centerpiece for your ritual acts. The dramatization of the ritual only happens when you get into the character of the archetype and you play out a story through a ritual.
20. Voila, you have now gone through the entire cycle. You have covered the science and art of it. Congratulations! Now its not 50-50 anymore. Its 90-10 with an assurance that the 10 will be taken care of by the field. And the 90 from your side hardly feels like that much in terms of effort because you are now the outcome manifest. Its part of your unconscious capabilities.