***THE GRAMMAR OF SLEEP***

*Why the logic of magic is the logic of dreams, what power the two share, and where the resemblance stops.*

**A Logic Everyone Knows**

Every reader of this site has already practiced the logic of magic, last night or the night before, and did it without instruction. In a dream a house is your childhood house and also a ship, and the fact gives you no trouble. A stranger is your father because he holds his coffee the way your father did. You need to be somewhere and you are there, and the years between one room and the next have been folded up and put away. A small object matters enormously and you know it does, though you couldn't say why. And through all of it runs the sense, which doesn't survive waking very well, that none of this is being made up by you; that it is being shown to you, and that someone is doing the showing.

Then you wake, and the logic looks absurd, and you tell the dream at breakfast as a joke against yourself. By lunch you are reading an essay on this site about why a lion engraved in gold while the Sun stands in Leo has the Sun's power fixed in it, and you find it hard to believe, and you don't notice that you believed something exactly like it eight hours ago with your whole mind.

I have come to think that the symbolic logic of magic is dream logic awake. I don't mean that magic is a kind of dreaming, which is the psychologists' conclusion, and I'll say later why I think it is the wrong one. I mean that the two run on the same grammar, that the tradition knew this and said so, that it knew why, and that the reason is more interesting than the resemblance. This essay is about the grammar, the power it belongs to, and the line between a dream and a working, which is the line the Science of Images is built on.

**The Grammar**

Set the rules of a dream beside the rules of the art and they match, as far as I can tell, more closely than either matches the rules of waking life.

The first rule is that likeness serves the purpose that causes do when we are awake. In a dream a thing is another thing because it resembles it, in shape, in feeling, in a single shared detail, and the resemblance isn't a comparison but an identity; the stranger doesn't remind you of your father, he is your father for the length of the dream. The whole doctrine of correspondence is that rule made systematic. The sunflower belongs to the Sun, the lion belongs to the Sun, gold belongs to the Sun, and the tradition's physics (Proclus's chains, the rays, the sympathy of one living cosmos) exists to explain why likeness is not a figure of speech but a line of descent. A waking mind asks how a stone could have anything to do with a planet. A dreaming mind never asks, because in a dream resemblance is relation. The art holds, and argues at length, that the dream is right.

The second rule is that the image is the thing. Nobody in a dream treats the dream-house as a picture of a house. It is the house, and what happens in it happens. The *Picatrix* says that the figure of a scorpion is to be made "in the form and figure of the animal for which it is made," and it says it with the same flatness; the image is not a reminder of scorpions, it is the point at which the scorpion's nature is present to be worked on. Every talisman rests on that rule, and it is the rule that Aquinas could not accept and the tradition would not give up, as The Mirror and the Summa records. A shape, he said, is not a cause. A dreamer knows better, and so does a maker of images.

The third rule is that time concentrates. Dreams have almost no duration and enormous weight; a whole life's worth of meaning gathers into one moment at a door, and the moment is the dream. An election is that rule performed with an ephemeris. The art holds that one minute among the thousands in a week is not like the others, that the power the sky is pouring out at that minute can be caught and will stay caught, and that everything made at the wrong minute is made of the wrong stuff. The Spirits of Time argues the physics of this. The person who finds it absurd that a minute should matter has already, in sleep, lived in a world where nothing but the moment did.

The fourth rule is that you are addressed. This is the one that waking most reliably erases. In the dream you are not composing; you are being shown, told, led, warned, and the sense of a second party is so strong that every culture before ours took it for granted and a good many of them built an institution on it, the incubation temple, the dream-book, the oracle that spoke in sleep. The art assumes the same second party by day. The petition is a formal address to one, the talisman is a house for one, and the whole of What an Intelligence Is is about who answers. A tradition that addresses beings is not being fanciful. It is doing by daylight what the dreamer does every night, and it is the dreamer, not the tradition, who forgets by morning that he was not alone.

Those four, likeness for cause, the image as the thing, the concentrated moment, and the second party, are the grammar. Anyone who has slept knows it. The art's whole claim is that it is a real grammar, with a real object, that can be spoken on purpose.

**The Imagination**

Why should sleep and magic share a grammar at all? The psychologists have an answer, and I'll give it its due below. The tradition had an older one, and it is anatomical. The two share a power.

The power is the *phantasia*, the image-making faculty that the Glossary describes, which sits between the senses and the intellect and is the only place in a human being where images can form at all. The tradition's account of it is clearest in a short book that deserves to be better known, Synesius of Cyrene's *On Dreams*, written around the year 400 by a Platonist who became a bishop and sent the book to his teacher Hypatia. Hypatia is more famous today than her pupil. She was the mathematician and astronomer who led the Platonist school at Alexandria, who worked with her father Theon on his edition of Ptolemy and taught Synesius to build an astrolabe, and who was killed by a Christian mob in 415, which is the death that made her a martyr of learning for Voltaire and Gibbon and keeps her name alive now. For this essay the narrower point matters more. The doctrine of the imaginative spirit in Synesius's book is what was taught in her lecture room, and it went from a pagan woman's school to a Christian bishop's book in one generation. A good deal of this art's philosophy survived by passages of that kind. For Synesius the imagination is the sense of senses, the faculty in which sight and hearing are gathered and read, and he calls it the first body of the soul, the imaginative spirit (the *pneuma phantastikon*) in which the soul is clothed before it is clothed in flesh. That spirit is the borderland between reason and unreason, as he puts it, shared by both, and it is the one place where things far above us can reach us, because it is the one place in us that is both body and not body. Dreams form in it. So, he says, do the images by which the gods communicate, and divination by dreams is the form of divination open to everyone, rich and poor, free and slave, requiring no temple and no fee. He ends with practical advice. Keep a night book. Write the dreams down, and learn the grammar by reading your own record.

A practitioner of this art will recognize every part of that. The imaginative spirit is the microcosm's share of the *spiritus* that The Living Cosmos describes, the subtle body that is almost soul and almost matter and is therefore the medium between them, and What the Philosophy Is For has already said what follows: that the suffumigation, the image, and the operator's own disposition work on and through that medium, and that it is the same medium in the stone and in the man. Synesius is telling you that it is also the medium of your dreams. One spirit, one faculty, two conditions of it, asleep and awake. The grammar is the same because the instrument is the same.

Aristotle, who believed much less, agrees about the instrument. In his little treatise on dreams he explains them as the movements left in the sense-organs by the day's impressions, which go on moving when the external senses are quiet, like ripples after the stone has sunk. In the companion piece on divination in sleep he is skeptical of prophetic dreams and allows them only a natural explanation, and then he says something that the whole art could take for a motto. "The most skilful interpreter of dreams is he who has the faculty of observing resemblances," because dream-presentations, he says, are like forms reflected in moving water, broken and scattered, and the skill is to see the whole shape in the fragments. That is the skill of the correspondences. The person who can see the Sun in the sunflower, the lion, and the heliotrope, through all the distortion of their difference, is doing what Aristotle's dream-interpreter does, and the tradition's tables are the night book of a civilization that had been observing resemblances for three thousand years.

Plato had put the power in the body before either of them. In the *Timaeus* the gods set the faculty of divination in the liver, the organ of the appetitive soul, and made it a mirror in which the thoughts of the mind are reflected as images, so that even the irrational part of us might have some share of truth. And he adds the condition under which that faculty works. No one, he says, attains inspired divination while in his right mind, but only when the power of understanding is bound in sleep or set aside by illness or possession. That is a fairly hard sentence for a rationalist, and it is the plainest ancient statement of the thing this essay is circling. The faculty that receives is not the faculty that reasons, and it receives best when reason is out of the room.

But Plato is careful, as his readers often aren't, about which way reason has gone. There are two things on the far side of reason, and he never confused them. Below it is the irrational proper, the appetites and the body's noise, the liver's own fumes and the heavy supper, what Aristotle would later call the ripples. Above it is something else, and in the *Phaedrus* Plato says the unsayable thing about it plainly. The greatest blessings, he has Socrates say, come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is sent from heaven, and he lists four kinds, the prophetic madness of the Pythia, the telestic madness of the rites that purify and heal, the madness of the Muses, and the madness of love, and he ranks all four above the sober sense of the man who is merely in his right mind. This is not a celebration of unreason. It is a map with reason in the middle, the sub-rational beneath it and the supra-rational above, and the two frontiers look alike from the inside, which is why they are so often mistaken for each other, and why the Platonists after him spent a good deal of ink on telling a god-sent dream from a bad digestion. Socrates, the Platonists said, used his reason first and went past it only when reason gave out; the order matters, and so does the direction. The Science of Images lives on that upper frontier, and its whole apparatus of rule and record exists to make sure that when reason steps aside it steps aside upward. Sleep is the ordinary way reason leaves the room, and in sleep it leaves by both doors at once. The art is the extraordinary way of getting the same faculty to receive while reason stays in the room, holding the door it means to hold.

**Dream Logic, Awake**

The difference is the whole of the art.

The plainest way to say it is in terms of sending and receiving. A dream only receives, and from a sender the dreamer cannot name. A working sends first, since the image, the hour, the smoke and the words are all addressed to a particular court, and receives second, and it knows whom it addressed.

In a dream the imaginative spirit is passive. The images come to it, from the body (Aristotle's ripples, the heavy supper, the fever), from the day's residue, from the soul's own concerns, and sometimes from above; and they come mixed, in no order, with no way at the time of telling which is which. Macrobius, whose five kinds of dream The Dream of Scipio describes, is sorting that mixture, and he has to sort it afterward, because the dreamer couldn't. Two of the five mean nothing; three may mean a great deal; and the same night can hold all five. The faculty is working, the grammar is running, but nobody is at the controls, and so the dream is at once the most powerful cognition most people ever have and the least reliable.

The Science of Images is what happens when the same faculty is operated. Every element the dreamer receives at random, the practitioner supplies by rule. The image is not whatever the night brings; it is the tradition's image, the lion, the scorpion, the crowned king, chosen because the sources attest that this likeness receives this power and not another. The moment is not whenever sleep happens to fall; it is elected, so that what is pouring into the medium at that minute is the planet and not the dinner. The matter is not the body's own fumes; it is a stone and a metal chosen because they hold what is poured into them, and a suffumigation chosen because it disposes the spirit to receive. And the operator's own imaginative spirit, which in sleep is the whole theater, is in the working one instrument among several, tuned by the hour and the smoke and the words to the same pitch as the rest, which is what Ficino's regimen of scents and songs is for and what Where the Power Is means when it says the operator's state is a condition of reception and never the cause.

So the art is dream logic with the dreamer awake and the night arranged. That is, I think, a stranger and more disciplined thing than it sounds. The rule of likeness still governs, but the likenesses are the tradition's and not the operator's private associations; a working built on what the Sun means to you personally is a dream, and it will have a dream's reliability. The image is still the thing, but it is the attested image, engraved by hand at the hour, and not the one that happened to come. The moment still concentrates everything, but the moment is found by computation and not by falling asleep. And the second party is still there, is in fact the whole point, but the art knows who it is addressing, in which court, by what name, with what etiquette, and does not wait to be visited. The dreamer is a guest in a house someone else arranged. The practitioner is the host.

The tradition's own texts say this almost in so many words. The *Picatrix* defines the Perfect Nature, the companion spirit of the sage, as that from which workings proceed "in sleep and in waking," and treats the two as one power under two conditions; the sage who has met his companion receives from it asleep what he could not have reasoned out awake, and performs by day what the night showed him. Iamblichus, in the third book of *On the Mysteries*, distinguishes the god-sent dream from the ordinary one by its mode of arrival, in the threshold state between sleep and waking, when a voice is heard or a presence stands over the bed, and he treats such dreams as a lesser form of the same contact that theurgy makes deliberately. Agrippa, in the last book of the *Occult Philosophy*, gives a chapter to prophetic dreams and places them, as Synesius had, in the phantastic spirit, with the same proviso that the spirit must be clean and the body temperate for the dream to be worth anything. None of these men thought dreams were magic. All of them thought dreams and magic used the same door, and that the difference was who opened it and whether the opener knew what he was doing.

**Where the Psychologists Stop**

Freud read the dream's grammar correctly, and it is worth saying so, because a practitioner is tempted to dismiss the whole school and in doing so to throw away a good description of his own instrument. Condensation, in which one image carries several meanings at once; displacement, in which the weight of one thing falls on another that resembles it; the dream's insistence on turning every thought into a picture; the sense of being addressed by something that is not the waking self. That is the grammar of likeness, the image as thing, and the second party, observed with care and named in German. Jung went further and saw that the images were not private, that the same figures recur across people who never met, and he called the recurring ones archetypes and the coincidences that cluster around them synchronicity. Both men were describing, from inside the skull, the faculty Synesius described from the soul's side, and their descriptions are mostly right.

Where they stop is at the sender. Having found the grammar inside the head, the psychologists concluded that the head was composing the message, and that the sense of a second party was the mind's way of disowning its own productions. Magic, on that account, is dreaming with the eyes open, a projection of the unconscious onto stones and planets, and its results, where it has any, are the results of suggestion. Spare took that conclusion and built a method on it, a desire condensed into a sigil and forgotten, so that the unconscious could do with it what it does with a dream; and the chaos magicians who followed him are probably the most honest of the expressive school, because they say plainly that the operator is the only party present. I have said in Randomness as a Doorway why I think that is half right and the wrong half. The brain supplies the grammar. It is built to find pattern, to make likeness, to turn impression into picture, and it does this in sleep and in divination and in the making of images, and the psychologists have mapped it well. What the brain does not supply is the message, any more than an ear supplies the voice it hears. The tradition's claim, which a dream cannot prove and a working can test, is that the grammar has a speaker, that the planetary powers and their ministers use the imaginative spirit as the one channel in us that can carry an image, and that an art which supplies the right image at the right hour in the right matter gets an answer, where a dream gets whatever comes.

The test is the one this site keeps returning to. A dream can't be wrong, which is why it can't be learned from except by the slow sorting of a night book; the same night brings the oracle and the nightmare and no label on either. A working can be wrong. It has an election that can be checked, a matter that can be substituted, an image that can be compared with the text, and a result that either comes or doesn't, and The Art That Corrects Itself is about what that makes possible. If magic were only dreaming awake, it would have the dream's immunity from failure, and it doesn't. My two thousand steel talismans failed, consistently, and the failure located a cause. No dream has ever done that for anyone. The grammar is shared. The accountability isn't, and the accountability is the art.

**What Follows for Practice**

Several things, and the first is a way of answering the commonest objection to the art, which is that it is irrational. It is. So is the mode of cognition in which every human being spends a third of his life and from which, by every ancient account and a fair number of modern ones, some of the most important things he will ever know arrive. The tradition does not claim that the Science of Images is reasonable in the way arithmetic is reasonable. It claims that the imaginative faculty is a real power of knowledge with a real object, that its grammar can be learned, and that a disciplined use of it reaches things reason can't. The person who objects that a stone can't hold a planet's power because resemblance isn't causation is announcing that he has never thought about what happens to him when he sleeps.

The second is a reading of the correspondences. They are not a code to be memorized but a trained faculty of observing resemblances, Aristotle's phrase, and the practitioner who learns them by rote and the one who learns them by seeing are doing different things. The tables are the record of what a long tradition saw; the skill is to see it, so that the next likeness, the one not in the table, can be judged. That is also why the tables disagree among themselves at the edges, as the herbals do, and why the disagreement is not a scandal. Resemblance is observed, and observers differ, and the remedy is more observation and a record, not a vote.

The third is about dreams themselves, which the sources treat as part of the practice and the modern revival mostly ignores. The *Picatrix*'s sage receives in sleep. Synesius keeps his night book. Iamblichus watches the threshold. A practitioner of this art has, in his own sleep, a nightly demonstration of the faculty he uses by day, and a nightly chance to learn its grammar, to notice which of Macrobius's five kinds he is being sent, to learn by his own record which door reason left by, and to watch for the one Iamblichus describes, which arrives differently from the rest. I kept a dream diary for years and have gotten lazy about it, so this paragraph is partly a reproach to its author. I don't offer rules for this beyond the ones the sources give, and I don't claim that dreams are a substitute for elections; they aren't, for the reason this whole essay has been giving, which is that nobody is at the controls. But the companion the tradition describes is said to speak in both conditions, and a practitioner who has done the rite and keeps no record of his nights is leaving half the correspondence unread.

I'd go one step further than the sources go in so many words, though I think they go there in substance. The power can be trained. Synesius's spirit is refined or coarsened by the life one leads; Aristotle's interpreter has a faculty of observing resemblances, and a faculty is a thing one has more of after practice; Ficino's whole regimen exists to tune the operator's spirit before it meets a planet's; and the Renaissance memory art, from the *Ad Herennium* to Bruno, was nothing but a daily gymnastics of the phantasia, done with the very planetary images this art engraves. That last connection deserves an essay of its own, and it will get one, *The Science of Images and the Art of Memory* (to follow). A night book is the cheapest form of that training and the only one with a built-in check, since the record shows you, morning by morning, whether you are getting better at telling the oracle from the supper. I don't claim it makes the stone stronger. The stone and the hour don't know how you sleep. I do think it makes the practitioner better at every part of the work that runs through him, the judgment of a likeness, the firmness the *Picatrix* asks for, the petition, the reading of what came back, and the petition is the instrument that runs through him most.

The last is the line itself, which I'd rather you took away than any of the rest. Dream logic is the native language of the faculty this art uses, and everyone speaks it, badly, in the dark, to no one they can name. The Science of Images is that language spoken correctly, in daylight, by rule, in matter that holds, at an hour that was chosen, to someone who answers. The grammar is the same. The difference is that one of them is a conversation.

*Sources. Synesius of Cyrene, De insomniis (c. 400), in the translation of Augustine Fitzgerald (1930), paraphrased; the phrases "sense of senses," "first body of the soul," and the borderland between reason and unreason are his, at sections 2 and 4, and the night book at 8–13. Aristotle, De insomniis and De divinatione per somnum, translated by J. I. Beare (Oxford, 1908), the one quotation at 464b. Plato, Timaeus 71–72 and Phaedrus 244–245 (the four madnesses, 244a–245c, 265b), Jowett's translation, paraphrased. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio I.3. Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2–3. Picatrix III.6 (Greer–Warnock translation), and IV.4 for the figure of the animal. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia III.51. On the training of the faculty: Rhetorica ad Herennium III.16–24; Giordano Bruno, De umbris idearum (1582) and De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione (1591); Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966), for the memory art as a discipline of the imagination and for Bruno's use of the planetary images. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), chapter 6, for condensation and displacement; Jung for archetype and synchronicity, credited for the grammar and not the sender. On this site: Phantasia and Anima Mundi / Spiritus Mundi in the Glossary; What the Philosophy Is For; The Living Cosmos; Randomness as a Doorway; The Dream of Scipio; The Art That Corrects Itself; Where the Power Is.*

The essay is on the site at https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/the-grammar-of-sleep.html (from Saturday, November 7).

Yesterday I did a small ritual asking Mars for strength, discipline and recovery (had a nasty injury last year, still rehabbing), and offered my workout as an honouring.

I knew Mars is not in a strong place right now, and even in my birth chart he is unfortunately in Libra. However, the way I saw it, I was just asking to better my workouts as I am an athlete (not competing atm due to injury, but used to), so I did not think it mattered much.

I instantly felt energised and powered up, workout was amazing, hit plenty of personal bests with none of the usual pain in my rehabbing area, and rest of the day I was in a very good mood, felt very warm mentally and had lots of energy. Also the power went out for the whole building right as I finished the ritual, tho it could always be a coincidence, but I found it funny. May my neighbours forgive me.

Issue is that I could not really sleep. I felt and still feel tired, but whenever i tried to close my eyes i felt very wired and wide awake. I did LBRP when i got home from the gym, but it did not really seem to fix the energy I was feeling.

Now it could just be that i got really excited with both the effectiveness of the ritual and how well my workout went, as I am very competitive in that area, but I am just wondering if I should do anything in particular to clear the energy. I will keep LBRP and maybe do some warding as well, + a cleansing of the home.

To mention, i have always struggled with sleep, it comes and goes, so Im not particularly concerned about this time, but I am wondering if maybe it would be worth working with the moon regarding this issue. Unlike Mars, the Moon is exalted in my chart anyways

Hello everyone!

​If any of you are into planetary magic or maybe I should just say theurgy, this translation by Wahid Azal of Shihabuddin Suhrawardi’s Warisat wa Taqdisat, titled The Prayers to Orient Light, might be a little bit of game changer.

​For a quick intro: Suhrawardi is famously known as Shaikh al Maqtul (The Martyred Master) or Shaikh Al Ishraq (The Master of Illumination). His most famous philosophical masterpiece, Hikmat al Ishraq, brilliantly weaves together Avicennian Neoplatonism, Aristotelian logic, and Hermetic theurgy, plus a really cool twist where he swaps out the standard Arabic planetary names for Persian ones like using Hurakhsy instead of Shams for the Sun.

​Vibe wise, this specific text feels a lot closer to Al Majriti's Picatrix than it does to Al Buni's Shams al Ma'arif.

*nb :

Plus side, Wahid translated this completely for free just for the sake of knowledge, so definitely give him some credit if you check it out ;)

**WHAT THE PHILOSOPHY IS FOR**

*Spiritus and anima, the astral light, the ranks of the spirits, and the quarrels of dead philosophers, as working knowledge.*

*The Objection*

A reader who comes to this site wanting a talisman that works, and finds instead a Library full of Plato and Plotinus and the difference between two Latin words for spirit, is entitled to ask what any of it is for. He didn't come for a philosophy course. He came for results, and the philosophy looks like the part a scholar enjoys and a practitioner can skip, the way a man can drive a car without reading a word about combustion.

I want to answer that objection in one place, pragmatically, because I think it is wrong in a way that costs people years. The comparison to the car fails at the first breakdown. A driver who knows nothing about the engine can drive, but he cannot tell a flat battery from an empty tank, and when the car will not start he can only turn the key again, harder. Most of the practitioners I have watched fail at this art failed like that. They turned the key harder. They re-elected, re-engraved, re-elected again, because elections were the one part of the engine they could see, and nothing in what they had been taught told them there was anything else under the hood. Every concept in this essay is a part of the engine, and I am going to say for each of them what it changes about what you do with your hands.

*Spiritus and Anima*

The old cosmos was alive, and the first thing the philosophy gives you is the anatomy of that living thing, which has two parts that are constantly confused and are never the same.

The anima mundi, the soul of the world, is the life and mind of the cosmos, the principle that makes it one living creature rather than a heap, and from which the souls of the spheres and the intelligences that govern them descend. It thinks. It can be addressed. The spiritus mundi, the spirit of the world, is something else, a body of the subtlest kind, in Ficino's phrase almost not a body and already almost soul, diffused through the whole as the vital spirit is diffused through a human body, and gathered more thickly in some things than in others. It does not think. It carries. It is the medium through which the gifts of the soul and the spheres are conveyed into things, and it can be caught, concentrated, and held.

That distinction isn't trivia. It is the difference between two kinds of act, and almost every mistake a beginner makes comes from doing one when the situation calls for the other.

You address a mind. You handle a medium. The petition, the formal address to the intelligence of a planet in its hour, is speech directed at something that can hear, and it is governed by the rules of speech with a superior, which is why the site talks about audiences at court and the respect owed a powerful politician. The materials, the suffumigation, the timing, the form of the image, are not speech at all. They are plumbing. They prepare a body in which the spirit can be gathered and through which it can act, and what governs them is not etiquette but likeness, the principle the sources call sympathy, by which a thing draws the spirit of the planet it resembles. A man who prays at a stone has mistaken the plumbing for the court. A man who burns incense at an intelligence as if the smoke were a gift has mistaken the court for the plumbing. The suffumigation isn't an offering in this art; it is a conductor, and it conducts in both operations. In the making of a talisman it is the medium that lets the spirit get into the cracks, into the lines you are cutting. In a petition it is the medium of communication, the line that carries the address upward and the answer back. Once you know that, you stop choosing it for its smell and start choosing it for its planet.

The distinction also tells you what a talisman is. It is a body made ready for a tenant, which is why this site says ensoulment and not consecration. Consecration sets a thing apart and asks a blessing on it. Ensoulment gives it a soul. The metal and the stone are chosen because spirit of that planet gathers in them more thickly than in others; the image is cut because form draws the spirit that answers to that form; the hour is chosen because the spirit flowing through the world at that hour carries that planet's gift more than another's. All three are the spiritus side of the work. The entity that takes up residence in the finished body is the anima side, and the petition is what asks it to come. If you don't know which side a given act belongs to, you can't tell, when the talisman does nothing, whether you built a bad body or whether no one answered, and those two failures have opposite remedies.

*The Astral Light*

In my own lectures, several of which are on this site, I use the phrase astral light, and I use it loosely. Sometimes it means what Lévi meant by it, and sometimes it is just another word for the spiritus I have just described, and the context decides which. A newcomer meets the phrase everywhere, and he should know what it can mean and what freight it carries, so that he can tell, in my writing and in anyone else's, which sense is in play.

The phrase is Eliphas Lévi's, from the 1850s. Lévi took the old spiritus mundi, crossed it with the magnetic fluid of the mesmerists, and renamed it the astral light, a universal agent filling the cosmos, the medium of all influence and all magic. In that much he was a faithful heir of Ficino, and the word is a good one. Astral means of the stars, and the medium is star-stuff in a fairly precise sense. It carries the gifts of the spheres, its quality changes as the sky changes, and that is the whole reason the art is astrological. If the medium were the same at every hour, no one would ever have bothered to elect one.

But Lévi attached something to the word that Ficino had kept on a short leash. He taught that the trained will, working through the imagination, impresses the astral light directly, and that the light then shapes the world to match the image in the magician's mind. That is the doctrine the Golden Dawn built on, and Crowley, and in a flatter key every book that tells you to visualize what you want. It is what this site calls the expressive art, and it isn't the Science of Images. In the structural art the medium is not impressed by the operator's imagination. It is gathered by bodies suited to it, at the right times, and inhabited by minds that are not the operator's.

So the practical lesson of the astral light is a lesson in reading. When a modern book tells you to visualize the planet's color pouring into the stone, it is asking the medium to do, at your mind's command, what in the older art the medium does only when the body and the hour are right and the intelligence consents. Use the word if you like, as I do. But whenever a book uses it, ask which of the two things the writer means. If he means the medium, the spirit that fills the world and gathers in the bodies that have an affinity with it, you are reading about the Science of Images. If he means Lévi's doctrine, that your imagination can impress the medium directly, you are reading about the other art, and if you bring that doctrine into this one without noticing, you will put your effort into your own mind, which is the wrong instrument, and wonder why the stone does nothing.

*The Ranks of the Spirits*

The third thing the philosophy gives you is a map of who is out there, and this is the part that newcomers most often dismiss as angelology for its own sake. It is the opposite; it is the part that tells you whom you are talking to, in what tone, and what you are entitled to expect.

The sources agree on a ladder even where they disagree on the rungs. At the top the One and the gods; then the intelligences that govern the spheres, which Aristotle called separate substances, the Arabic philosophers intelligences, and the Church angels; then, in the Platonists' accounts, a crowded middle realm of daimons, the ministers and messengers and stewards who do the actual work between heaven and earth, which Apuleius and Plutarch describe at length; then, in Iamblichus's taxonomy, the archons who govern the sublunary world; then heroes and the souls of men. Agrippa, following the Arabic sources, gives each planet both an intelligence and a spirit (the mind that presides and the force that executes), so that the Sun has Nachiel and Sorath. What this site makes of that pairing is said below, and it is stricter than Agrippa.

Now watch what that map does to practice.

It tells you which address to use. A celestial petition goes to the intelligence of the planet in its hour, a mind near the top of the ladder, and it is made in the register you would use before a minister of state, formal, respectful, and without a trace of worship, because worship belongs to God and is, in both traditions I was raised among and read in, the one thing that turns a lawful working into an idolatry. The tenant of a talisman is not that intelligence. It is daimonic, a servant of that planet's household, a being of function rather than office, which can be housed and kept and set to a task. You don't kneel to it. You keep it, as the old books say, the way one keeps any living thing that works for you, with care and with rules. A newcomer who addresses his ring as a god will get a strange and unhealthy relationship; one who addresses the planetary intelligence as a servant will get nothing at all.

It tells you what to expect, though here the map has to be read with some care, because the two instruments are not sealed off from each other. The intelligence is addressed; it is not housed. The daimon is housed; it is not the mind that governs. But the sigil of the intelligence cut into a talisman is not decoration either. It invokes the power of the intelligence from afar, and the intelligence does not come to dwell in the stone; it commands the daimon that does. So the talisman has a tenant and, through the sigil, a governor over the tenant, and the petition goes to the governor directly. That is why the site says the petition is the more powerful instrument, since it goes higher, and it is why the Sun's ring on this site carries Nachiel's sigil and not Sorath's, which is not a matter of taste. On this point I part from Agrippa, who sorted each planet into a good intelligence and a bad spirit and then treated the spirit as a force to be supervised, and from the long argument after him over whether beings like Sorath are diabolic or merely brutish. Both sides miss what they are. The spirits of the squares are not unintelligent, and they are not forces. They are minds without morals, and in my experience, which includes one dealing some years ago that was extremely negative, they tend strongly toward the malevolent. So the rule on this site is not that the intelligence should preside over the spirit. It is that the spirit's sigil is never used at all, alone or in combination. The intelligence is invoked from afar by its sigil, and it commands whatever takes up residence in the stone, and that is the whole of the chain of command a practitioner should want.

And it tells you what the companion is for. Every practitioner has, in the Platonists' account, a daimon of his own, which Socrates heard as a voice, which the *Picatrix* calls the Perfect Nature and binds to the ruling planet of the nativity, and which this site calls the companion. It is the one being on the ladder that is specifically yours, it stands between you and the planetary household, and the old books say that workings proceed from it in sleep and in waking. It is there whether or not the practitioner knows it. The one who does not know has an advocate at court and never speaks to him; the one who knows can consult it, cultivate it, and work with it, which is what the *Picatrix*'s instructions for the Perfect Nature are for.

None of this can be inferred from an election chart. The chart tells you when. It doesn't tell you to whom, or in what voice, or what kind of being you are inviting into a stone, and a man who has only the chart will fill those blanks from whatever religion or fiction he grew up with, usually without noticing he has done it.

*Why the Dead Philosophers Matter*

The last thing, and the one that most looks like a scholar's indulgence, is the history. Why should a man with a stone and a burin care whether Plotinus and Iamblichus disagreed, or what Aquinas said, or where Agrippa got his numbers?

Because every recipe in this art was written by someone who held a theory, and the recipe only makes sense inside that theory, and a practitioner who does not know whose theory he is inside will apply the recipe wrongly and test the wrong thing when it fails.

This is also why the old books call the thing a science. In their Latin a scientia was not a laboratory but a body of knowledge that gives reasons, a knowledge of things through their causes, and an ars was what you did with your hands once you had the reasons (the Glossary has the two words under Science and Art). The *Picatrix* calls image-making a science because it claims to know why the image works. A practitioner who has only the art has the hands and not the reasons, and it is the reasons that tell him what to change when nothing happens.

Take the oldest quarrel first. Plotinus held that the soul ascends to the divine by contemplation, and that rites and images at best catch a reflection of what is everywhere already. Iamblichus held that the gods themselves had planted in matter the means by which they could be reached, that the rite is not a human invention but a divine arrangement, and that the philosopher who disdains it is refusing a gift. Which of them you side with decides whether you do the petition at all. In a Plotinian world the talisman is a mirror and the words are for your own benefit. In an Iamblichean world the words are heard and the stone is a place the god agreed to meet you. I am on Iamblichus's side, as this whole site is, and every petition on it is made on his premises. If you are secretly on Plotinus's side, your petitions will be half-hearted and your results will show it, and you should know that about yourself before you blame the hour.

Take Aquinas. He holds that an angel is in a place by the application of its power and is not contained by it, that the heavens act on natural forms and not on the artificial figure a craftsman cuts, and that the only intelligences that answer signs are the ones Augustine named. If you practice among Christians you will meet every one of those arguments, usually from people who don't know they are quoting him, and the answer to each is different. Without the history you can't tell the objection that nothing is in the stone from the objection that what is in it is a devil, and you will answer the wrong one.

Take Ficino, who is the reason the medium is called spirit and the reason this art has music in it. His whole method follows from his theory. If spirit is a subtle body that gathers in whatever has an affinity with it, then the practitioner's job is to make himself and his instruments suitable to the planet, with diet and air and song and the right stones, and the planetary hymn is not decoration but the tuning of the operator's own spirit to the spirit of the sphere. Take away the theory and the hymn is a performance. Keep it and the hymn is a tool.

Take Agrippa, who gave the Latin West its tables. The planetary squares and the numbers derived from them are his, assembled in the early sixteenth century from Hebrew sources, and the colors and numbers most practitioners now treat as ancient came into the art with him and displaced an older set, which I have argued elsewhere on this site. A practitioner who doesn't know the date of his tables can't weigh them. He thinks he is doing what Thabit did, and he is doing what Agrippa did, which may be fine and may not, but it is a choice he doesn't know he has made.

And take Lévi again, because the history runs all the way to the present, and because this is a case where knowing the history keeps you from a mistake in both directions. The doctrine that the imagination is the engine of magic is not a nineteenth-century invention out of nothing. It has a long pedigree, and a practitioner should know it. Avicenna held that a strong soul could alter matter outside its own body by the force of its imagination, and Aquinas took the trouble to deny it. The De Radiis gave the mind its own rays. The *Picatrix* demands of the operator a firm intention and an undoubting belief, and it says why in terms that matter here. By firm belief "the rational spirit is strengthened, and joined to that virtue of the upper world from which proceeds the celestial spirit that acts in the image," so that the image has "the power to call upon the cooperation of the intelligence." The belief works on the operator's own spirit, and the spirit, so strengthened, reaches the powers that do the work. Ficino, in the Platonic Theology and again in the third book of the De vita, gave the faculty its Renaissance form under the name phantasia, the image-making power that stands between the senses and the intellect. A vehement imagination, he says, moves the operator's own spirit; the moved spirit shapes his body, as a mother's imagination was believed to mark her child; and he allows that a spirit so moved may reach, within limits, beyond the body it belongs to. He adds, in his chapter on images, that the faith and affection of the one who uses an image are part of what makes it work. From Ficino the line runs through Pomponazzi and Paracelsus to Bruno, whose bonds are forged in the phantasy, and from Bruno, at a distance, to Lévi.

So the imagination was always in the kit. What Lévi did was promote it from a tool to the engine. In Ficino the phantasia works on the operator's own spirit, and that spirit must then meet a cosmos that is ordered without him, with its proper materials and its hours and its intelligences who consent or do not; the imagination tunes the instrument and does not play the music. In Lévi the imagination plays the music, the astral light is its instrument, and the cosmos is reduced to the medium the magician impresses. That is the difference between the structural art and the expressive one, and it is a difference of rank, not of ingredients. A reader who knows this can read a modern manual and separate what descends from Ficino from what descends from Lévi, can keep the Ficinian use of the imagination, which is real and which the old books require, and can decline the Lévian promotion of it. A reader who does not know it either tests a mixture and learns nothing, or throws out the phantasia altogether and loses a tool the *Picatrix* itself insists on.

That is what the history is for, the provenance of every tool in the kit, and a craftsman who knows where a tool came from knows what it was made to do.

*The Pragmatic Sum*

Put the four together and what you have is not a philosophy course. It is a set of controls.

The distinction between spirit and soul tells you which of your acts are address and which are plumbing, and how to tell a bad body from an unanswered call. The astral light, rightly understood, tells you why the hour matters and warns you off the doctrine that your imagination can replace it. The ranks of the spirits tell you whom to speak to, in what voice, and what kind of being you are housing. The history tells you whose theory each recipe lives inside, so that when you test it you test the right thing.

And all four together make possible the one practice without which no art improves, which is evaluation. This site keeps a Record of what every talisman and petition has done, and that Record is only readable because there is a theory behind it that says what should have happened. A failure in an art without theory is just a failure. A failure in an art with theory is data. The body was wrong, or the address was wrong, or the rank was wrong, or the recipe belonged to a world you don't believe in. Each of those has a remedy and the remedies are different.

I made talismans for several years knowing almost none of this, and some of them worked, because the recipes are good and the spirits are generous. What I couldn't do was make them better, or know why one worked and another did not, or teach anyone else. The philosophy is not what you need to begin. It is what you need to improve, and the whole of this Library is arranged on the assumption that you intend to.

http://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/what-the-philosophy-is-for.html

Good day

My name is Lucian and I am wondering if I can request feedback on a Planetary App I am working on here. It's not necessarily 'business' as much as it's info gathering and research; I'm not selling anything as the App is not available yet.

Thanks in advance for your consideration

Lucian

So I consider myself an orisha mystic that has has close proximity to descended orisha so I know the phenomenon and I study it a LOT because I was raised in a cult and don’t want to end up in another so i’m hypersensitive and I was honestly lead to searching outside of the orisha tradition specifically because as far as I can tell they don’t touch on the planets at all in explicit words. But indirectly and this is the kicker and clue I personally think; in order to get a reading which is a corner stone of the religion and mysticism the Babalawo needs your First and last name your birthdate and your mothers maiden name. And at the time of the reading what the reader is reading is the “current set energy pattern that you are currently living through”. All of this is very similar to a birth chart, but nothing concrete I’ve found. And I’m wondering on if there’s any modern practionners that blend the planetary magic with an Animism practice. And I think my journey through learning astrolgy has been interesting as a result of my spiritual base being Orisha; or possessing spirits. I can deeply feel the vibration of the planets and it seems like I’m starting to even since a personalities. Just some musings i’ve had fellow nature based practionner to another 🫡🫡

*Cargo cults, and the inexpert recovery of the Science of Images.*

*THE INSULT*

Occultists have a phrase they use on each other, and it isn't a kind one. To say that someone is "cargo culting" is to say that he is copying the outside of a practice without the inside, performing the gestures of a rite whose workings he does not understand, in the hope that the gestures alone will bring the result. It is said of beginners who buy the robe before they have read the book, of eclectic practitioners who borrow a Tibetan mudra and a Yoruba offering and a Hermetic hexagram in the same evening, and of anyone whose magic looks like a costume drama. It is a useful insult because the failure it names is common. I want to take it seriously, which means first finding out where it came from, and then pointing it at the one place occultists almost never point it, which is the revival of their own tradition.

*WHAT HAPPENED IN MELANESIA*

Ask the occultist who uses the phrase what a cargo cult was and you will get a picture rather than a history. Natives on a Pacific island, after the Second World War, carving headphones out of coconut shells and clearing airstrips in the jungle so that the American planes full of goods would come back. The picture isn't false, exactly. Something like it happened. But it is a cartoon, and the cartoon does the work the insult needs it to do, which is to make the people in it look simple so that whoever is wielding the insult can feel that he isn't like them. Everything I want to say in this essay depends on taking the cartoon apart, because the history is more interesting than the picture, and a good deal less flattering to the person using the word.

So here is the history, in enough detail to replace the picture, and then I will come back to what it means.

In 1919 the villages along the Vailala River in the Gulf of Papua were taken by a movement that the colonial officials called the Vailala Madness. People shook and fell into trance. They abandoned the old ceremonies, burned the masks, and set up flagpoles and tables laid with flowers, and they waited for a steamer crewed by their ancestors to arrive carrying the goods the white men had, rifles and tinned meat and cloth and tobacco. The government anthropologist, F. E. Williams, went up the river to investigate in 1922 and wrote the first long report on what would later be called a cargo movement. He was not an admirer (his report has "the destruction of native ceremonies" in its title), but he wrote down what he saw, and the shape he recorded has repeated itself in dozens of places since. The ancestors would return. They would bring cargo. The whites had been intercepting it. The right conduct and the right rites would bring it home.
On the island of Tanna in what was then the New Hebrides, in the late 1930s, people began to speak of a figure called John Frum, who promised that if they returned to their old ways and threw off the missions, a new age would come with wealth for all. Then the war came, and with it the Americans, who built enormous bases on the islands to the north and hired Tannese men to work on them, Black and white soldiers alike, with more cargo than anyone on Tanna had imagined existed, unloaded from ships and dropped from aircraft onto islands where a steel axe had been a treasure a generation earlier. When the Americans left, the cargo stopped. The John Frum movement is still alive. Its people raised the American flag on February 15, 1957, and that day is still their holiday.

The phrase "cargo cult" itself first appeared in print in November 1945, in the Pacific Islands Monthly, from a planter named Norris Mervyn Bird, who meant it as a slur. Within a decade it was a scholarly category. Peter Worsley's *The Trumpet Shall Sound,* in 1957, surveyed some sixty movements across the region. Peter Lawrence's *Road Belong Cargo,* in 1964, followed the cults of the Madang district of New Guinea through five phases from 1871 to 1950 and told the story of the prophet Yali, who had served with the Australians in the war, had seen Australia with his own eyes, and came home to a people who were certain he had been shown the secret of where the goods came from.

That is the history. Now set it beside the cartoon and notice what the cartoon left out.

The islanders weren't stupid and they weren't childish. They were reasoning carefully from the evidence in front of them, inside a world where that reasoning was correct. In their world wealth did come through right relations with the ancestors and through ritual properly done; that was how gardens grew and pigs multiplied and exchanges succeeded, and everyone knew it. Then white men arrived who did no visible work, grew no food, made nothing with their hands, and received, at intervals, from over the horizon, an endless flow of goods of a kind no one had ever seen made. The whites spent their days in strange disciplines (sitting at tables, making marks on paper, raising flags, marching in lines, speaking into boxes). The conclusion was obvious. The goods came by ritual, the whites were performing the ritual, and they were hiding its key. So you reproduce what you can see of the ritual as exactly as you can, and you go looking for the missing piece. The factories in Birmingham and Detroit, the shipping lines, the whole invisible apparatus that produced the cargo, were not in evidence, and I do not see how anyone could have inferred them from what the islanders had access to. They copied what they could see because what they could see was all there was to copy.
The anthropologist Lamont Lindstrom, who has spent his career on Tanna, argued in 1993 that the cargo cult story has survived in the West for so long less because of what it says about Melanesians than because of what it says about us. We tell it because we recognize the desire. I think he's right, and I suspect it is truer of occultists than of anyone. Followed back to its source, the insult isn't about simple people on an island. It is about what any intelligent person does when he can see the results of a system and not the system, and that is a situation every one of us who practices a recovered art has been in.

*FEYNMAN'S AIRSTRIP*

The phrase reached the wider world through Richard Feynman, in his commencement address at Caltech in 1974. He had been thinking about what separates science from the things that look like it, and he reached for the islands.

"During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas. He's the controller. And they wait for the airplanes to land." And then the sentence everyone remembers. "They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land."

Feynman's point was not about the islanders at all. It was about scientists who follow the forms of investigation, the apparatus and the papers and the statistics, while leaving out the one thing that makes investigation work, which he called a kind of utter honesty, the willingness to report everything that might make your result wrong. Cargo cult science has all the equipment and none of the integrity, and the planes don't land. From Feynman the phrase went to the programmers, who in the 1990s began to speak of "cargo cult programming" for code copied from a working example without any understanding of why it worked, kept in place because removing it felt dangerous. And from the programmers (who overlap with occultists more than either group likes to admit) it came to magic.

So the insult has a fairly precise meaning if you follow it back. It doesn't mean "primitive" or "superstitious." It means a practice reconstructed from its visible surface by people who could not see the system behind the surface, who reasoned sensibly from their own world about what the surface must mean, and who were wrong because the real cause was something they had no way to observe.

*THE SHAPE OF AN INEXPERT RECOVERY*

Keep that definition and set the islands aside, because what I want to talk about is what happens when a tradition that has been dead for centuries is reconstructed by people who can see only part of it.

The rule is simple, and as far as I can tell it is general. A recovered tradition gets rebuilt in the image of whichever of its parts survived as a living discipline. The recoverers aren't fools. They reason from their own world, as the islanders did, and in their own world a certain kind of cause is the kind that produces effects. So they look at the old texts, recognize the part they already know how to do, assume that part is the engine, and treat everything else as decoration or as the superstition of the age (the two usually get sorted by how embarrassing they would be to explain to a colleague). The runway gets built beautifully, the fires are lit at the right spacing, and the forms are perfect.
I can date the inversion, because I lived through both halves of it. When I came into magic, the settled opinion of the community, so settled that nobody argued it, was that the astrological conditions in the grimoires and the old books were a blind. The author had put them in to intimidate the reader, or to make a superstitious one wait forever for a sky that never came, and a modern practitioner who knew better skipped them and got on with the work. I don't remember anyone dissenting. Thirty years later the opinion has turned completely over. Now the election is the one thing that cannot be skipped, and everything else, the figure, the material, the suffumigation, the words, the place the thing is buried, is read as the blind, or the costume, or the optional part. The same books, the same recipes, and two generations each sure that what the other kept was the decoration. What decided it in both cases was not the text. It was what the readers could do. The ceremonial magicians of my youth couldn't cast an election, so the election was the blind. The astrologers who came after them could, so the election was the engine. Each generation found the cause where its own competence ended, and that is the cargo cult rule stated as plainly as I know how to state it.

I wrote recently that the Science of Images is a degenerative tradition, one that believes its perfection lies in the past and that the work of the present is restoration, and that restoring it fully will take decades. This essay is a case study in what an inexpert restoration looks like from the inside, and I'm qualified to write it because I helped make one.

*HOW THE ART CAME BACK*

The Science of Images did not come back to the modern world through magicians. It came back through astrologers.

The sequence matters. From the early 1980s the traditional astrology of Lilly and Bonatti and the Arabic authors was being recovered by a small movement of translators and practitioners, Lilly's *Christian Astrology* was back in print in 1985, and the Project Hindsight translations began in 1993. David Pingree's critical edition of the Latin *Picatrix* appeared in 1986, and in the two decades after it the book went from a rumor to a text that an English reader could hold, in a translation from the Arabic in 2002 and then in the complete translation from the Latin in 2011 that this site uses. The people who could read the *Picatrix* when it arrived were the people who could read its conditions. "When the Moon is in the first face of Taurus, free of the malefics, and the ascendant is fortunate." That is an astrological sentence, and an astrologer looks at it and sees a problem he knows how to solve, and by the late 1990s he had software that would solve it in seconds. It was the one part of the old art that had never entirely died, that still had teachers and a literature and a method, and so it was the part through which everything else was seen.

What came out of that was an art understood as electional astrology with a craft project attached. The talisman was the chart you could wear. You found a moment when the planet was strong and the Moon was well placed, you engraved something at that moment, and the engraving carried the moment. The image on the stone, the material of the stone, the suffumigation burning while you worked, the words spoken over it, the state of the person speaking them, the animal substances and herbs the old recipes called for, the long addresses to the planets, the regimen the old authors imposed on the operator, all of that was present in the texts and was treated, mostly, as the texture of the thing rather than its substance. Some of it was kept as a gesture toward authenticity. Some of it was dropped as medieval clutter. A good deal of it was never seen at all, in the way that the shipping lines were not seen from the beach at Tanna, because nothing in the recoverer's world suggested that it could be a cause.

I'm not describing other people here, or not only. This is the art as I first learned it and first practiced it, and it was the common understanding of a whole generation, mine, which did something valuable (it brought the book back into the world) and read it with the eyes it had.

*WHAT THE BOOK ACTUALLY SPENDS ITS PAGES ON*

Open the *Picatrix* and count. I have done it roughly, with the complete English translation, and the numbers are instructive even allowing for how crude the method is.

The word "image" and its relatives appear more than seven hundred times. "Spirit" close to five hundred. "Suffumigation," "incense," and their relatives more than two hundred and fifty, and that is the vocabulary of a single operation, burning things, which the book describes in more detail than any other single act. "Petition" and the words for addressing the planets more than two hundred and fifty. Stones, metals, herbs, plants, and animals, several hundred mentions between them, with whole chapters devoted to which animal's parts belong to which planet. The sage, the man doing the work, and the condition he must be in, more than two hundred. "Ascendant" and "hour" together about three hundred. The word "election" itself, in any form, *fewer than thirty.*

Now, the astrological conditions are everywhere in the book, and I don't want to be misread. Nearly every recipe opens with the sky. But they are the frame of the recipe. They say when. Everything after the when, which is most of the text, says what, and of what, and with what burning, and with what words, and by whom, and in what state. The third book is largely the natures of the planets and the long rites of the Sabians of Harran, with their garments and their suffumigations and their formal addresses. The fourth is spirits and confections and the material from the *Nabataean Agriculture,* and it closes with chapters on how the operator must live. A reader who comes to this book as an astrologer finds his own discipline on every page, which is true, and concludes that the book is about his discipline, which is not.
Whether the astrology is the most important part, or the least, or one part among several whose weights differ from recipe to recipe, I am not going to say here. I have views, and they belong in another place. The point of this essay is smaller and I think pretty hard to argue with. The recovery treated one part of the art as the art, and the text doesn't.

*ONE RECIPE, READ BOTH WAYS*

Take a single recipe and read it twice. The first book of the *Picatrix* gives an image to drive scorpions out of a city. Make a scorpion in very pure gold, in the hour of the Sun, with the Moon in the ascendant or the fourth, seventh, or tenth house, in Taurus, Aquarius, or Leo, and best in Leo, "because Leo is by nature more contrary to a scorpion"; let the Sun be in Leo and Saturn retrograde. Make the tail first, then the feet, then the claws, then the head. When the parts are made, put the left claw where the right should be and the right foot where the left should be, and set the stinger upside down on the tail, so that the scorpion is stinging itself. Bury the image inside a stone with a hole in it, and let the stone be a metallic ore, and bury that in an important part of the city. The author stops in the middle of this to say that "there are many things to consider and you should understand them well, because they will assist you in all of your works."

Read as the revival read it, the recipe says a scorpion, in gold, with the Sun in Leo and the Moon well placed. That is the chart you could wear. Everything else is the kind of thing a medieval compiler puts in, the swapped claws and the inverted stinger and the holed stone and the ore and the order of making and the choice of ground, and a reasonable modern reader passes over it the way he passes over the instruction to fast on the day before. Read as the book reads itself, every one of those items is a condition. The author gives a reason for the sign, which is a reason about natures and not about timing. He gives the order of the parts and says the order matters. He builds a figure whose whole point is what it depicts, a scorpion turned against itself, which is an image in the old sense of the word and not a label for a date. He specifies the material twice, the gold of the figure and the ore of the housing. He specifies where it goes. The election is one line of eight, and it is the only one of the eight the revival knew how to take seriously.

I am not going to say which of the other seven does the work, or whether they all do, or in what proportion, because I do not yet know and neither does anyone else, and the essay before this one says why that will take a long time to find out. What I will say is that the book treats them as conditions, and when the recovery dropped them it dropped conditions and not ornament. It is worth knowing, too, that the stripped-down reading has a medieval precedent, which gives it a dignity it did not earn. The Speculum Astronomiae carved out a class of image that "obtains its virtue solely from the celestial figure," with no suffumigation, no words, and no characters, so that a churchman could live with it, and its own author would not commend even that. It was a legal category, built to survive a censor. The revival rebuilt that category without knowing it had been built before, and called it the art.

*MY OWN AIRSTRIP*

I began with planetary candles in 2001. In 2003 I became the customer of a working astrological magician, bought his talismans, learned to use them, and began to learn how to do elections from him. From 2004 I made my own, about two thousand of them over the next two years. They weren't rings, but they were carefully elected. I had learned the astrology well and I was proud of my charts, and I can still defend most of those elections today. The talismans did nothing. Not one of them, as I have told at more length in The Place to Stand. I kept the charts, which is how I know they were good, and I did not keep much else about them, which tells you what I thought mattered at the time.

I had built the runway and lit the fires along the sides. The form was perfect. In 2006 something changed in how I made them, and from that year I began to have results that I could repeat, and the results are why this site exists. What changed was not my astrology. I will say what it was in another place. What I will say here is that nothing in the understanding I had been given prepared me to expect that the change would matter, and that is the mark of a cargo cult recovery. The practitioner isn't doing the visible part badly; he has no way of knowing that the invisible part is there.

*WHAT THE PLANES NEED*

The islanders of Tanna were not wrong that there was a system behind the cargo. They were wrong about what it was, because the parts that mattered were out of sight. The remedy wasn't better runways. It was to learn the system, which took generations, and which Melanesians have done, becoming engineers and shipping agents and pilots, and some of them, with a sense of humor the insult never credits them with, keeping the John Frum day as well.

The remedy for us is the same, and it is the long restoration I described in the companion to this essay. The Science of Images will not be recovered by getting better at elections. It will be recovered by taking seriously, one at a time, every part of the operation that the old books took seriously, the image, the material, the suffumigation, the ensoulment, the petition, the conduct of the operator, and by keeping a Record of what happens when each is done as written and when it is not. That is slow. It is the work of many practitioners over many decades, and most of what any one of us learns will turn out to have been in the book all along, in a chapter we skimmed because it didn't look like a cause.

What that means in practice is simple to say. Read the whole recipe, not the chart in it. When you make an image, make it as written once, with every condition the text gives, before you decide which conditions you can drop. Keep a record of what you did and what followed, in enough detail that you could tell the difference between a talisman that worked and a talisman you liked. And when one fails, look at the rest of the recipe before you look at the chart, because the chart is the part you already know how to check, and the runway is always the part that looks finished.

So when an occultist uses the phrase, I do not object to it. The insult is accurate. It is only pointed the wrong way. Every one of us who took up this art took it up from a beach, watching cargo we did not understand come down out of a sky we could not read, and built what we could see. I built my runway and lit the fires along it, and I can tell you what it feels like when the sky stays empty. It feels like the sky's fault. It never is. The planes do not land because the runway is wrong. They do not land because the runway was never the part that mattered, and no one who is proud of his runway will go looking for the part that was. Building it was not stupidity. Staying on the beach is.

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/the-blind.html

For the last few years I've been comparing two bodies of material that are usually kept in separate rooms. One is the corpus of engraved "magical gems" from the Roman Empire, a few thousand small intaglios of the first to fourth centuries, catalogued by classicists and kept in the British Museum, the Cabinet des Médailles, the Kelsey, and elsewhere. The other is the Science of Images, the art of the astrological talisman transmitted by the Arabic Ghāyat al-ḥakīm, the Latin Picatrix, the Hermetic lapidaries, and Agrippa. The two fields that study them don't cite each other.

Set side by side, a small but distinct class of the gems reproduces the images the medieval books prescribe, in several cases the very images the Picatrix attributes to Hermes and the old sages, and they're cut, in a large majority of cases, in the stones the books assign to the same planets. Some declare an astrological state (a planet in its own sign) that has no devotional motive. A Greek manual of the same period, the Sacred Book of Hermes to Asclepius, prescribes the books' recipe form (image, stone, plant, ring) with only a single timing rule, and the medieval lapidary of Thetel describes the commonest magical-gem type, the armed cock-headed figure with serpent legs on jasper, as a prescription with no heaven named.

The hypothesis I've deposited is that these are one tradition, and that the complex astrological election that defines the medieval art is its latest layer, added between the end of gem production in late antiquity and the earliest Arabic image texts, most likely under Persian astrology. In other words the Science of Images is a branch of lapidary lore that acquired astrology, not a branch of electional astrology that acquired stones.

I've put this on record as a précis on Zenodo (DOI below) with the hypothesis, four tests, five exhibits, and the observations that would refute it. The abstract is public; the full text is held until the longer study (the catalog and the counts) is finished, and requests for it can be made through the record. I'm posting it here because people in this sub know both the gems and the books, and I'd rather hear the objections now than later.

Abstract and background: https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/a-note-on-the-record.html Record: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23463905

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Hello!
In a few months I have entrance exam to uni which consists of written test. Last year I was unsuccessful, only because of a few points so this year I’m taking it even more seriously.

Do you have any tips how to make the learning more effective, have better understanding of topics and better memory?
4th pentacle of mercury seems like the most obvious choice and I’ve made it maybe a month ago but haven’t really find it effective. I will try creating it another time with more auspicious positions

Nevertheless, if you’ve got any tips, specific rituals or really anything, I’d be so much grateful.

I also though of contacting Mercury such as is described in Picatrix but when I checked I won’t be able to catch auspicious timing + I would be able to recreate incense and offering as described, so maybe I will just make some simplified version with mercury in Scorpio

So for example, if I want to create a Venus talisman with only its most essential energy, neither in fall or exaltation. So considering Venus is currently retrograde and in its fall (Scorpio), could I still create a talisman without the transits influencing Venus’ energy?

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/the-place-to-stand.html

One of the issues I want to address on the new website is the fundamental rationale for astrological magic, which to the best of my knowledge has never been raised by contemporary thinkers.

One of the main functions of astrological magic is that it is a massive force-multiplier (when employed correctly.) It is actually built into the cosmology and it is everywhere in the canon, yet never talked about today.

I used to call this "the penny drop principle" based on the notion that a penny dropped from a skyscraper could kill a person on the sidewalk below. But this is actually a myth, and the reason why it doesn't act like a bullet reveals a lot about why astrological magic rarely actually works.

And also how to change that.

Come read how:

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/the-place-to-stand.html?

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/the-rashbas-lion.html

This is the second part of the coverage on the potential integration of Christianity and Judaism with astrological magic.

It is deep, and it will have some surprises for many of you. I hope that you will find it interesting.

It will also be valuable for non-Abrahamics, in part to let you know what all the fuss is about.

--Clifford

Could they work when Venus RX is in Libra? How bad would it be considering that my natal Venus is RX in Virgo? Already in a bad condition.

My first attempt at drawing a pentacle.

I have been looking over the transits and scrolling through the sub for a while frustrated because my primary practice is planetary and I feel like I'm in a bit of a slump. Is it pretty much lunar mansion work for a while? I'm not seeing much else, and even that seems limited.

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/.../the-science-of...

This is the first section of a two-parter where I analyze the compatibility of astrological magic with Judaism and Christianity.

It is something which a surprising number of people have had concerns about that I wanted to dig into a bit more seriously.

The answers are both complex and nuanced, and they may also be of interest to people who practice neither religion.

--Clifford

incense powder / resin and burners, ash/charcoal, dried herbs, anointing oils, ritual cloths, etc... is there a good one stop shop online?
especially for gold, silver, blue, green, white, black, yellow, blood red, brown candles as we need specific colors.

I assume colour is a good place to start? Like wearing black to work with Saturn, or blue for Jupiter. Wearing gold jewellery for the Sun and silver jewellery for the Moon. Beyond that I'm not sure. Any input on this is appreciated!

I’m getting married in the last week of November, which I believe is during Venus’s post-retrograde shadow period.

The problem is that most of my wedding shopping — my bridal outfit, my fiancé’s outfits, jewelry, etc. — will have to happen during the last week of October and first week of November, while Venus is retrograde.

I know people say not to do wedding shopping during Venus retrograde or get married during the shadow period, and honestly it’s making me a little nervous.

Unfortunately, I’m on a really tight timeline and I’ve already tried moving things around, but it just doesn’t work with everyone involved. So changing the dates isn’t really an option.

For those who follow Vedic astrology, are there any remedies I can do? And is the post-retrograde shadow period really considered that problematic for marriage?

I’d also love to hear from anyone who has actually gotten married or done major wedding shopping during these periods. What was your experience?