Category: Astrology

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A Brief Correspondence Course

Saturndelic

It occurs to me that the pun in the title of this week’s article is completely lost on a couple of generations accustomed to Google, Wikipedia, and Youtube as the source of all knowledge. By way of explanation, back in Ye Olden Days, ere the Internet was a one-lane goat track, and the Elves still appeared right out there in broad daylight, one might pursue educational endeavors by means of the postal mail service. The back and forth epistles between student and teacher made up said correspondence,

That’s okay, I’m sure nobody gets all of Gandalf’s jokes either.

However, it is the backing and forthing that are important, particularly in the art of spell casting. This is the root of sympathetic magic, which is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of magical practices.

There are three important tentpoles to remember in sympathetic magic.

The image of the thing is the thing.

The name of the thing is the thing.

The thing that is like the thing is the thing.

Number three is the Doctrine of Sympathies or Correspondences.

If a stone is deep red it connects to blood. If a flower looks like an eye it’s connected to the vision (both spiritual and mundane). If the leaves are dark we consider it saturnine. Pick up any spell book from the Greek Magical Papyri to the latest Witchcraft for Real Idiots on the ‘Zon and you’ll likely find at least one table of correspondences. There are even magic texts that are nothing but correspondences.

There are astronomical correspondences that match the planets to metals, stones, plants, parts of the body, colors of the spectrum, and hours of the day. Astrology is perhaps an early archetype of the use of correspondences. The nature of the animal applied to the constellation is used to express how those born with the sun in that sign are inclined. The facets of a person’s life are divided into houses, which “naturally” align with the nature of these signs, Then the nature of the planets may be interpreted as to how they react with the sign and the house, and in aspect with other planets.

Much work has been done with astrological correspondences to the Tarot, so that reading the cards can incorporate the heavenly influences as well as the imagery on the cards themselves. Of course the Tarot are also intimately connected with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and with numbers, and the four elements, and the core tools of the witch’s practice- wand/staff/broom/torch; cup/cauldron/well; sword/knife/pin/needle; and stone/coin/hearth/tomb. It is probably because Tarot has become so ubiquitous, due to it’s simple operation and portability, that all these additional connections are grafted on. They are not, perhaps, inherent to the Tarot itself.

Gemini-tarot

Tarot and Astrology are interlinked in most modern magical systems. There are traditional associations of the cards with specific planets, signs, and houses that allow the interpretation of the cards as astrological and vice versa. In the use of cards as symbols in spellcraft, these traditional correspondences may be called upon.

For example, Gemini is most usually connected with The Lovers, the seventh card in the RWS deck. This sees the two figures, as Gemini.

There are however, four other serviceable cards in the deck. The Deuce of Cups is seen as a “Lover type” card, and we have the inclusion of the serpent staff of Hermes/Mercury, ruler of Gemini.

The Deuce of Swords might be more beneficial to break up a romance. or perhaps break a contract or get out of a legal problem. These are the purview of Gemini /Mercury, and this Sword card always reminds me of Blind Justice (especially since in RWS, the Justice card is not blind).

Gemini also covers short travel, and the Deuce of Wands and of Pentacles have travel motifs. Although the long journey typically associated with sea-borne imagery is usually Sagittarius, Gemini/Mercury is involved with commercial ventures. Balancing your checkbook whilst your freight is on stormy seas applies.

While the idea of correspondence is nothing new, there are new correspondences. Much of the attachment to Tarot is perhaps a century and a half old or less. There’s good evidence that they were used for “fortune telling” back in the 1400s but the layers of esoteric synthesis started in France with Eliphas Levi. The same can be said for other correspondences you might find in all those spellbooks.

In pre-historic times, the use of herbal medication was a necessity. If something looked like a particular part of the body, then it could be used to treat ailments of that part. However, as Freud pointed out, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar. If the medicine worked, it was used again and again. If it didn’t it was likely forgotten, ignored, or left out of the oral tradition. This would not preclude it from being “rediscovered” by successive generations who might add it back to the pharmacopeia for a while. This methodology was followed up until relatively modern times.

The same practice was used for the medicinal/magical use of stones, jewels, crystals, and the like. The ancient Romans dissolved pearls in vinegar and chugged it down to give them a pearlescent complexion. Whether it worked or not is questionable. Pearls being largely calcium carbonate with trace compounds, it was probably equivalent to quaffing chalk, and may have made their bones and teeth stronger. But being wealthy enough to drink a pearl milkshake on a regular basis may have been more of an attraction than milky smooth skin. The apothecaries of the ancient and Medieval times were no less mercenary than their modern counterparts.

Mandrake has long been a witch herb. These images from a Medieval Herbal show lore that has been unchanged for ages.

The mandrake was supposed to cry out when pulled from the earth, and it’s scream would either cause madness or death. So the enterprising apothecary simply tied a dog to the plant, and then called the dog from out of earshot. It’s not clear whether the dog went mad or died, but in the Middle Ages dogs were not accorded the value they are now.

Mandrake roots came in male and female versions, and were selected for a specific purpose accordingly. Most texts considered the undivided root as male, and a root with a fork as female. The drawing here is probably wrong, as it appears to depict two different plant species. It was copied to several herbals of the time.

mandrake1

And certainly this contributed to adding to the lists of exotic, rare, and hard to come by ingredients that fleshed out correspondence tables throughout history. Chinese herbals call for bits of dragons, unicorns, and other mythical creatures. Sadly these were – and still are – often substituted by parts from rare and endangered terrestrial animals like the rhinoceros, whale, and condor.

In fact, the idea of correspondences makes substitution an “ethical” option for the harried apothecary. If this rock looks like that rock, or this bone looks like that bone, then they are, for most intents and purposes – the same. This obviously can – and did – have tragic consequences, as many herbs and plants are not only not interchangeable, but can be outright deadly.

Because medical/recreational use of certain compounds is hardly a new thing, it’s important to recognize that the use of something in witchcraft might be the same as it was in folk medicine. In so many societies magic and medicine were interchangeable, and this has only changed in the last 150 years or so. At the height of the Enlightenment, when the scientific method was about to burst onto the scene, people were still being bled and purged to remove “ill humours” that were the cause of their diseases. Opium, cannabis, and coca were used as anesthetics and soporifics into the early 20th century, and their chemically synthesized children are still with us today.

So called “flying ointments” often partake of a number of herbs which create euphoria or somatic states, and many of the ingredients are those old Saturnine herbs, the nightshades. Containing potent alkaloids, plants like Atropa Belladonna, Hyoscyamus Niger, Datura Stramonium, and of course, Mandragora Officanarum have been the companions of witches since time immemorial. These are highly dangerous toxic plants that have a real potential to kill. Yet they are closely related to other nightshade plants like the potato, tomato, bell and chili peppers, which we consume as part of an ordinary diet.

Tobacco is also part of this family, and has long had sacred use among Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere. It was readily adapted by witchcraft and voodoo in the aftermath of the discovery of the New World by European colonials. Like many magical herbs, it’s sacred use in moderate amounts might be deemed safe, but in mundane and constant consumption leads to a pernicious addiction and a plethora of health problems (I am a former smoker – I know of which I speak).

candle-color
Color is a common feature of correspondence, and one usually easy to work out. Red is associated with the blood, the heart, and love. Purple, the color of royalty, often connects with Jupiter, King of the Gods. Yellow represents the Sun and is used in solar magic. Black is color of death, the deep night, and in post Christian Europe, evil spirits that dwell there.

Color magic often employs candles, and much has been made of having the proper color of candle for the spell. Given that coloring candles is a fairly modern technique, and that witches historically would not only have made do with the tallow and beeswax they had, and would not have usually advertised a spell by showy ingredients, you are probably safe with plain old white candles. Personally, I have a number of faux candles in various colors that I use interchangeably with actual ones. The LED candles are safe for my cats, vegan friendly, and reusable.

So were the ancient sorcerors just bombed out of their gourd all the time? It’s possible. There is some good evidence to that theory. Also, if your job is to have visions for the tribe, and eating the little white berries gives you visions, you’re likely to be eating a lot of the little white berries. If your job is to hunt the mastadon, it’s probably not the greatest idea. (Seriously, though. Don’t eat the little white berries. They’re very bad for you.)

The sacred nature of altered states of consciousness is fairly accepted in some cultures, as are things like mental illness, and even what we used to call mental retardation. People who were “different” in the way they spoke and acted were assumed to be in touch with the spirit world, and cared for and respected. Other cultures, of course, see such things as evil. Joan of Arc was probably schizophrenic or suffering from a brain lesion. She was sent by God to the French, and burned by the English as a witch.

Correspondences change similarly from culture to culture and place to place. If you are perusing that Chinese herbal you’ll find a lot of dragon bones (possibly ground fossils, or crocodile or snake bones), ginseng, and mushrooms. A European grimoire might place greater emphasis on precious stones or metals, and the Arabs would favor much incense and spices that were native or common in their lands. These were all compiled as part of an industrial mechanism that fed both the magic and medical practices of the culture. While there is probably some folklore to a lot of it, there was clearly money to be made by padding the lists.

I personally don’t make much of correspondences. I’ll consider astrological metals if I am working on an amulet, but given the price of gold and silver these days, I’m not likely to be petitioning the Sun and the Moon. Since petitioning the Sun and the Moon might be beneficial, though, maybe I ought to consider a way to get around that pesky high-dollar metal thing.

magic-stones
We all love the shiny rocks, don’t we? Crystal and stone correspondences are some of the most common we hear about. They are regarded as “birthstones” so can be astrologically attached. They have associations with the Chakras (usually based on color), planets, and various “vibrations” that may be traditional folklore or modern myth.
The pieces in the image above are (Clockwise from top) amethyst- quartz contaminated with iron, rutilated quartz with bits of a greenish tourmaline crystal, fluorite, amethyst again, and iron pyrite, or Fool’s gold.

This is a crystalline formation of iron and sulfur, bonded at the molecular level. It doesn’t have the malleability and ductility of true gold, so it probably didn’t substitute for it in all those solar amulets. On the other hand, being made of iron and sulfur, it can serve as well for Mars and Ares, or Vulcan, lord of the forge, or even Infernal association.

How about aluminum instead of silver? It’s a shiny white metal. It’s relatively cheap (compared to silver) easier to get, and – hey – it was actually used to go to the moon. There’s aluminum that we left behind on the moon right now, in fact. Would the Angel of the Moon accept aluminum instead of silver in my mystic moon amulet? Well, probably not if one goes with the strictest rules of the grimoire. But I am fairly sure that gold and silver were just as hard to come by in the days before alchemy, so I’m not at all sure that the Angel of the Moon didn’t accept the equivalent of a wooden nickel.

Alchemy, of course, changed everything because you could make all the gold you wanted. I hear you snickering in the back there. There actually is a chemical trick, doable with the technology of the time, which has the appearance of turning a piece of metal into gold. It’s a kind of simple electroplating, and for a short period of time (perhaps time to pass it off to an irate landlord) it would pass most Medieval tests for being gold.

So again, how many of the spells in the old grimoires actually used gold and silver and rubies and emeralds is open to question. I think potentially a lot of them employed early synthetics made by the alchemists. And if it was good enough for the Angel of the Moon in 1278, it’s good enough now. Scribing the spell with a shiny metallic marker might horrify some working in “high magic” and I can’t guarantee your results, but it has worked for me on occasion.

Substitutions can be made. Instead of silver you might use a silver coin, like a nickel or a quarter (if you’re in the US). These were originally struck from silver, but now operate as symbolically so. There’s no reason the correspondence between a modern silver colored coin and an antique silver coin can’t extend to the correspondence between that silver coin and the Angel of the Moon.

The working witches of yore didn’t have access to all the shiny stuff you can get shipped from the ‘Zon. They were frequently on the down low to begin with, so having a bunch of shiny stuff around the hut probably alarmed the local populace who sent out the torch and pitchfork memo. To the extent that an herb or a stone or a piece of red thread worked, they kept it, maybe in secret. But I don’t believe any of them looked up a table of correspondences and said “Well, we can’t fly to the Sabbat, tonight, we’re out of eye of newt.”

Because any fool knows you need wool of bat for a flying potion. Duh.

I hope you found this diversion diverting. I will be back again next week with more windmills to tilt at.

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Twisting and Turning

Twisting And Turning

‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogroves
and the mome raths outgrebe.

—Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll

Language is a defining mark of humanity. Chimpanzees and bonobos use tools. Ants and bees build communities. But speaking is the one trait that separates us from the rest of the terrestrial animals on the planet.1 The ability of cetacen species like dolphins and whales to communicate linguistically is still a much debated topic. Whether their keening songs represent a language or are simply instinctive vocalizations remains unknown. For perspective, I recommend you read Roger Zelazny’s My Name is Legion. While the work is science fiction, one of the stories in the anthology poses an interesting idea about species communication.

Language has allowed us to rise to the point where we can manipulate the planet in ways unimaginable. We transmit our memory and our understanding from generation to generation through the spoken and written word. This innovation enables us to reach back thousands of years into the collective human experience. Without language, these memories would disappear, as Bladerunner’s Roy Batty puts it, like tears in rain.

Yet we waste this vital resource constantly, talking about the weather, nattering about the latest celebrity scandal, or arguing over politics on social media. We spend it away without thought or appreciation, without any idea of how important it is.

If you’ve been following this site for a while, you already know that I refuse to write to a fifth grade reading level. I think the vast majority of people who are interested in the kinds of strange things I write about are generally more intelligent than that. So give yourself a pat on the back if you don’t care for the fine art of small talk.

The place where I come from
is a small town
They think so small;
They use small words.

—Big Time – Peter Gabriel

It’s a sad fact that sometimes just the possession of a large vocabulary has marked some for derision, isolation, and harassment by the general population. “Nerd”, “brainiac”, and even “professor” were meant as hurtful and derogatory in my youth and I am sure my experience is not singular. The root of this, of course, is that if one does not understand the words I am using, it tends to make them feel like they might not be so bright. No one likes to feel dumb, so why not respond with hurtful bullying. Brute force, verbally or otherwise, is far easier than looking things up in the dictionary.

I did, and still do, follow that latter route. Words are a fascination to me, and if I discover a new word I will delve deep until I ascertain it’s meaning. When I was in elementary school a millennia ago, we were taught how words were formed. We explored the entire dictionary entry of a word, including it’s origins in Aulde Anglish Old French, Latin, Greek, and a few that were more exotic. From this practice I could begin to construct words, and to greet new words with familiar endings and openings ( called suffixes and prefixes officially) with some knowledge of what they were about. This is vastly helpful in learning new and complex things.

wall-o-books
“In the beginning was the Word” is a phrase out ye aulde King James Bible. That book, and hundreds of others, have been used as source material when constructing magical spells and incantations. The Psalms feature prominently in some of the folk magic of my native Appalachians and practices from the American South. These probably migrated from Protestant England.

The Hebrew Torah and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet are believed by Kabbalists to hold the secrets of the Cosmos. Indeed, the letters are believed to be capable of making reality all by themselves. One can find this in the cautionary tale of the Golem, a man of clay who was inscribed with the word “Truth”. When the creature began doing damage, the letter Aleph was rubbed out, changing the word to “Dead”. While this may not strictly be Kabbalistic magic, the folklore partakes of the idea of the power of the letters as archetypes of the energies of creation.
Many ancient cultures had similar beliefs. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that showed snakes, scorpions, or other baneful creatures were often “killed” by being incomplete or broken, so as to prevent the creature “coming to life” and doing magical harm.

Photo by Dana Ward on Unsplash

For instance. logos, from the Greek, is the basis of the suffix -ology. The -ology suffix generally is taken to mean “the scientific study of”. So you could take a word, and add -ology to the end, and you made a new word that was the scientific study of whatever that root word was.

My youngest collects a series of books that begin publishing in their childhood using this principle. The first, I believe, was printed in England, and called Dragonology. It was followed shortly by Egyptology (ironically, actually the scientific study of Ancient Egypt), and the race was on.

Now, those of us who spent far too many hours of our youth perusing the entries in the great big Webster’s dictionary at the library (I now own four) are quick to point out that the scientific study of dragons is more properly Draconology, or possibly Dracology, because the word dragon comes from Old French, that borrowed if from the Latin Draconem (or draco) who stole it from the Greek drakon, which was a sea serpent, and not a dragon at all.

However, these beasts were also known by the term Vermis, from which comes our modern English Worm (after taking a trip through Germany and France, of course). Vermis was applicable to snakes which the ancients did not separate from worms of the more earthly sort. This is why cadaver art and dans macabre images frequently show serpents entwined and emerging from corpses. So when you find translation of Aulde Anglish sagas about slaying dragons where they call it “an old worm” you now know how that happens.

We also get our modern word vermin from the root vermis, and this has broadened to a generic class of undesired pests and parasites. In the dialect of my Appalachian homeland and the various child dialects of the American West, the word has become “varmint”. If you are unfamiliar with the term, I recommend reviewing the Bugs Bunny/Yosemite Sam Warner cartoons, where Sam drops it about every three seconds.

In my herbals, I find the word frequently attached to the suffix -fuge. This ending derives from the Latin fugus – to fly, or put to flight. Thus a vermifuge, is an herb or compound that drives worms from the digestive tract. I’m not sure it would deter a dragon, though, unless you planted an awful lot of it.

The vermifuge always gets me thinking of febrifuge, which is an herb or compound that gets rid of fevers (febris – Latin: fever). And so on and so forth. In this way I learned herbology. Herbology is the scientific study of herbal medicine, as opposed to botany, which is a generic subset of biology that focuses on the scientific study of plants.

Botany is one of those words that defy the structure we rely on. It comes from the ancient Greek botane, which is basically “plant”. Now why should the study of plants not be called botanology? I have no answer for you. Perhaps the Greeks used that word, but the French didn’t, and we English speakers stole the French word.

One of the other words that “break” our neat system is astronomy. Astronomy is the scientific study of stars (from the Greek astronimos – literally “star-arranging”). Astronomy and astrology were once the same thing. It was the same thing when the Greeks used astronomy, and when the Romans borrowed both words. It was only in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance that the two started to divide. Astrology went forward as a means of viewing the star arrangements as indicative of events in the world, and astronomy evolved to mean studying the mechanisms where these star arrangements came to be.

It’s interesting that the seminal texts of both sciences were written by the same person, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria. I’ve mentioned him before and with reason.

Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos (tetra – Greek: four / biblos – Greek: book) is the basis of Western astrology as we know it today. He was consolidating and editing the various texts from the Library of Alexandria, some of which went back to original sources in ancient Babylon, Chaldea, and Akkad. And those were probably based on Sumerian and older traditions, possibly, going back to the earliest human impressions of the night sky. This is just one example of how language can transcend our long long tenure on the planet.

On the other hand, Ptolemy’s book on astronomy, called now the Almagest (an Arabic corruption of the Greek megiste: greatest) was instrumental in suppressing things like the idea of a spherical earth that orbited with other planets around the sun.

The original name in Greek was Mathematike Syntaxis is a bit more accurate, and terribly similar to the Principia Mathematica of Sir Isaac Newton which ultimately replaced it as the “correct” explanation of planetary motion.

The Almagest asserted that the earth was a more or less flat and finite object in the middle of the universe, the Center of All Creation, with the Sun, the Moon, the Planets, the Stars, the Orders of the Angels, and God Almighty in His Heaven circling above (in roughly that order).

As this model was amenable to both Medieval Christianity and Islam, it was given support over other radical ideas like that of Aristarchus who had proven the earth was round, and calculated it’s size very accurately around the same time as Ptolemy was editing these works.

With the Renaissance and discovery of sea routes to Asia and then the Americas, the Almagest became a volume of quaint and curious lore to be found in the libraries of esotericists, collectors, and cranks (I have a pdf copy from here.) The Americas, were named by the Italian cartographer who drew up the first charts for Christopher Columbus. He was called Amerigo Vespucci and was happy to name an entire hemisphere after himself. That may not have been his actual intention, but other swathes of Terra Incognita ( Latin: Land Unknown) kept the names as the maps expanded and they became Terra Cognita. Personally I prefer those spaces on the edge, past Terra Incognita, with the admonishment: Hic sunt dracones!

“Here there be dragons!”

And just like that, I’ve circled back around. And this is theme of this week’s article. Our mastery of words, and the capacity we have to manipulate them gives up power in the universe. The words we use mark us out among others. The way we use words gives us the power over others. We can lead. We can wound. We can poison. We can heal. We can inspire.

The importance of the word and language is buried deep in our human history. It is that oldest form of sympathetic magic. The name of a thing is the thing. That is the same as the image of the thing. If you know the name, you can affect the thing.

And by this you can name things for which there isn’t an image, like the wind, or a spirit. You can call upon the slyphs of the breeze, and the angry heart of the hurakan (native Taino name for “evil wind spirit” from whence comes “hurricane”). You can anthropomorphize the seasons and the days and such things to make it easier to communicate with them. We can speak to the genius loci (genius – Latin: attendant or guardian spirit / loci – Latin: place) and ask permission or at least detente (French from Latin: to relax or loosen) when we perform our rituals. In doing so, we may teach them the words to lend their voices to the process, and we may learn some words from them.

Jabberwocky
Jabberwocky is called by many a “nonsense poem” , meaning that it’s simply a collection of words that rhyme without any real meaning. According to the Wikipedia article however: “Linguist Peter Lucas believes the “nonsense” term is inaccurate. The poem relies on a distortion of sense rather than “non-sense”, allowing the reader to infer meaning and therefore engage with narrative while lexical allusions swim under the surface of the poem.” In other words, because Carroll uses the framework of English grammar, we can read the poem and “see” the creatures in it. While I typically prefer other sources to Wikipedia, the section of the article on the “definition” of some of the words is quite entertaining.

I started out with Lewis Carroll because I have always loved the linguistic twisting of that poem. There’s a lot of magic hidden in Lewis Carroll, though I am not sure if he even knew it. A little girl follows a person sized, waistcoat-wearing rabbit down a hole in a hedge. Such a creature is called a Púca in Welsh tradition. It is a mischievous spirit related to the Fae. Certainly Alice’s trip into the earth is not so different than many other Celtic tales of visiting the world of the Tuatha De Danann. Alice returns to the Wonderland by passing through to the other side of the mirror. These are all found in folklore tales about witchcraft and faeries. It is perhaps why his works are so frequently classed with the tales of the Brothers Grimm.

But what he does with Jabberwocky is simply marvelous. He takes an algebraic approach to words. That is, if one follows the proper order of operations – in this case, English grammar, any n can be inserted into the formula and the equation still solved.

“‘Twas brilliant and the slimy toads
did gyre and gambol in the wave.”

This “translation” as it were is something I discovered in a literature treatise some years ago, but the lesson is profound. Words can be changed at will and if you still follow the rules of grammar the statement is readable. Here, in a poem it also needs to rhyme, which is easier if you can make up the word, especially if oranges are involved.

But the fact that it is a poem gives us a clue that “outgrebe” is pronounced with the last syllable as “A” rather than “E” in order to rhyme with “wabe”.

Unless of course, those words have an additional syllable and are pronounced out – gre – bE and wa – bE, which is perfectly possible. In this case the final -bE rhymes. 2 Any good poet will tell you, having the same sound rhyme is lazy writing, so I’m going with wAbe and outgrAbe. The ghost of Lewis Carroll can sue me if I’m wrong.

Does all this linguistic and grammatic gymnastic make your head hurt? Try reading a Medieval grimoire sometime. The tenets of Qabbalah have evolved from the practice of rearranging Hebrew letters to make new words, and then contemplating those words to discover hidden truths. Angelic magic is full of words and symbols that twist and turn. The famous Sator magic square reads the same up and down and left to right; and right to left bottom to top.

In this flexibility and agility with language and writing we can find a metaphor for the fluidity of reality itself. Even in modern quantum science, the observation of a phenomena is considered the cause of it’s existence. In quantum terms, every particle is moving at an unknown speed through an unknown point in space. It is only when we seek to measure it’s location or speed that it really is there. Add to that, the uncertainty principle, – a concept that says we can either know where it is at any point, or how fast it is moving at any point, but never both, and you start dancing through the hedge after that rabbit.

In this flaky quantum multiverse (yes, since the particle can be anywhere at any time until someone somewhere sees it, the “other” places and times can be seen by other someones in other somewheres and make other universes) tiny tiny little particles act freaky all the time. But as they lump together and get bigger and bigger and turn into protons and neutrons and electrons and atoms and molecules and cruise ships and nebulae and galaxies they start to behave more in line with Mr. Newton’s rules in the Principia. There are some important modifications from Mr. Einstein’s Relativity (General and Special) and much more work done since then, but essentially the bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to influence it. At least when you are bound by those pesky laws of physics in normal space-time.

But the mind is not bound by that. Science really can’t determine if the mind is even part of that. The mind can travel back into our past, replay events, re-see and re-hear experiences that were a long time ago. We can hear music. We can remember speech. Though these events once had a physicality they are now stored in a form that is not physical, in a much more confined space (if we accept that the mind and brain are co-resident), and capable of immediate recollection.

But the mind can also experience things that were never real. We call it imagination, but our brains can present us with pasts we did not ever live through, futures which are yet to be, and worlds we can only dream of far across the great expanse of night. And these are equally accessible as the memories of our “real world”, perhaps even moreso.

Well, of course, but that’s “all in your head”. To make things happen in the real world you get bound by physics. I’m not sure about that.

Mozart was really good at making the music he heard in his head come out into the world. Shakespeare did the same for words, as did Carroll. Many words we use today were just invented by them (and other’s of course) to fill a need, or make a cunning rhyme.

For instance, if you’ve ever found something so funny it made you chortle, you owe it to Lewis Carroll. He made up the word “chortled” in Jabberwocky, though others deconstructed it to be a contraction of “chuckled” and “snorted”. As Jabberwocky employs a number of onomatopoeia – words that are made up to represent a sound – like galumphing, burbling, and whiffling, chortling is likely meant to represent a deep rumbling laugh, rather than the laugh-snort that sends your coffee across your phone screen. 3Again, the ghost of Lewis Carroll can haunt me if I err.

There’s a frequent meme that translates the word “abracadabra” as “What I say I make.” While my research indicates that “abracadabra” is probably a corruption, mispronunciation, or pun relating to the Gnostic deity named Abraxas (the X is pronounced as K) , the idea comes from a long belief in the power of the spoken word to make things happen. J.K. Rowling takes the sounds and gives them a Latinesque twist to create the Avada Kedavra death curse, working in a pun on cadaver in the process.

abracapocus
That “wascawy wabbit” has a bit of fun with magic words in the Warner cartoon “Hocus-Pocus Hare” using abracadabra, hocus pocus, hocus-cadabra, abracapocus, walla walla, and ultimately newport news. He starts by finding the book of Magic Words and Phrases on the shelf in the guest room of the nefarious Count, who suffers mightily at the utterance of the mashed up incantations. While hilarious, the principle of turning and twisting words and phrases, particularly rhyming and alliterative ones, is common to the craft of spellwork. There’s a reason they call it a spell.

Abracadabra can almost always be found in close proximity to hocus-pocus (believed to be a derivation of the blessing Hoc est corpus meum). That these rhyming words make no real sense is not relevant. We like the way they sound. They are music to the ear and quicksilver on the tongue. They’re also mnemonic (Greek mnemon – mindful). A lot of spells use rhyming and poesy to make them easier to remember. Most of us, even if pressed to do so, might not be able to remember a famous speech or quotation, but we routinely sing along to hundreds, if not thousands, of performances by our favorite bands. Small wonder that our words enchantment and incantation share the Latin root “cantare” for “sing”. This is inherent in the Welsh Bard, and the Greek Chorus. They had the power to charm the spirit, even if the spirit were just sitting there in the audience in their meat suits.

Language and it’s use to charm and enspell is a fascinating and potentially endless subject of examination. I have gone on much longer here than many of my other articles. If you have had the stamina and resolve to reach here to the end, I greatly appreciate it. For the TL;DR version, words are cool, and you can make things happen with them. Especially when you make them from scratch.

Please join me again next week, where I cannot promise to be less loquacious (loqui Latin talk), but will at least remove the parentheticals.

SirJohn Tenniel’s woodcut of the Jabberwock from Alice Through the Looking Glass is public domain. The still from Hocus-Pocus Hare is copyrighted by Time-Warner, and is employed under the Fair Use doctrine. The header image was provided by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash. The thumbnail image for social media was provided by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash. Unsplash is a free resource for bloggers and artists when photographers offer royalty free content for use.

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The Equinox

Equinox

Twice in a solar year, due to a quirk of astral mechanics, the rotational axis of the Earth aligns straight up and down with regard to our path around the sun. These days are called by the old Latin term equinox, because the hours of the night and the day are roughly equal. From thence the spinning top we live on continues to wobble over until one of the solstices, at which point it reverses.

This is handy, as if our poles keeled over further it would result in one half of the planet being constantly exposed to the sun and the other half enduring a perpetual frozen night. If such a cataclysm was gradual enough, species might evolve that could live in the “twilight zone” around the equator, where the oblique rays of sunlight could be similar to northern Alaska in summertime.

Our ancestors seemed keenly aware of this horrible potential. As the days shortened in the northern hemisphere (as they soon will be doing), they conceived great fire festivals, to push back the cold and the dark, and remind the sun through their earthly bonfires, that we were still down here, and still interested.

When enough generations had passed, it became fairly well accepted that the sun was going to come back in the springtime. By modern reckoning, Spring starts on the date of the Vernal Equinox, when the sun transits from Pisces into Aries. This perhaps is an accurate date if you live at the latitude of central Europe, as much human population did in the Neolithic. This was important for settled agrarian societies, that had become dependent on domesticated crops. “Spring” was when it was safe to plant, because the likelihood of damaging winter frosts was over.

But further south in Egypt, the beginning of the agricultural year was the annual flooding of the Nile, which happens about mid-August. The Nile flood is the result of torrential rains down in Africa. The rainy season was presaged to the Egyptian by the rising of the star Sirius in the southeastern sky. This visibility of the Canopus constellation is also occasioned by our wobbly world and it’s eccentricity.

During the period the Nile was in flood, the general populace that were usually engaged in farming were put to work as unskilled labor in various public building projects such as the erection of pyramids, obelisks, and temples, the majority of which were focused on keeping the sun spinning round the Earth in it’s usual happy way. This was an expression of “Ma’at” or “Truth” which has a very different meaning in ancient Egypt than in our present day.

Truth to the Egyptian was cosmic Law. It was the nature of things the way they were ordained, written down in the secret language of hieroglyphs by ibis-headed Tehuti for all eternity. Ma’at is symbolized by a single feather, both in texts and iconography, unless She appears as human goddess with the feather on her head. 1Frequently deities in Egyptian art are often depicted as nearly identical persons with the glyph of there name as a headdress. Thus the four goddesses guarding the shrine of Tutankhamen’s canopic jars can be identified as Isis, Nephthys, Serqet, and Neith. Ma’at is perhaps most famously known to Western eyes as the feather on the balance in the Weighing of the Heart ritual from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This image is the source of our “scales of justice” and related imagery.

To the Egyptian way of thinking, the “Truth” that rested in the heart of the deceased was more about these cosmic rules than whether or not they had prevaricated. There was a long list called “The Negative Confessions” that the dead person was supposed to recite prior to, or during, the weighing of the heart. These were a recitation of wrong things that the deceased hadn’t done.

Again, for the purposes of the ritual, it didn’t matter whether or not the mummy had actually done them, it was important to say that it hadn’t. There’s also a handy little rubric, usually inscribed on a basalt scarab placed over the heart during the wrapping process, that admonishes the heart not to betray them, to keep silent if they had broken the rules. Obviously our modern ideas of Justice and Law differ.

ChichenItzaEquinox
The building called El Castillo at Chichen Itza is an example of astronomically tuned architecture. A temple to the Mayan god Kukulkan, the predecessor of the Aztec Quetzelcoatl or Plumed Serpent, this structure does a magic trick on the Equinox. The corners of the building cast the shadow of an undulating snake along the side of the steps, which moves slowly as the sun travels across the sky. To the ancient people this kind of display was proof of the presence of their deity, and affirmation that he had ordained another year for the world.

For the ancients, though, the doctrine of sympathy meant that the image of a thing was connected to the thing itself. So if you said you weren’t guilty, then you magically became not guilty (I’m certain there are number of persons incarcerated who wish that had worked). It was important to keep the universe in balance. Otherwise the world might flop over and the sandstorms of Set/Sutekh would overwhelm all civilization. Better to build another pyramid or temple to make sure the sun god stays happy.

Or maybe there’s more to it. We first have records of the famed obelisks being used for astronomical purpose by Aristarchus of Samos at the library of Alexandria. It’s entirely possible, given phenomena we can still observe, that the Egyptian temple and funerary architecture were astronomically aligned. This should not surprise us. In the late Stone Age and early Bronze age architecture was one of the few methods of accurately telling time.

Solar, lunar, and astronomical alignments are not a feature of Egyptian culture alone. Stonehenge and similar megalithic sites are fairly well understood as calendars. Mesoamerican pyramids and structures throughout Asia and Africa have solstice “clocks” built into them. Often these take the form of a slot or window, that shines light into a particular niche or area on the day of the winter solstice.

The equinoxes are a consequence of the solstices. If the planet didn’t reach over to the extremes at the beginning of Cancer and Capricorn, it wouldn’t have these crossing points. The equinoxes form a 90 degree angle to the solstices, so the year gets divided into four quarters, which are subdivided into three astrological signs.

As noted, the Vernal Equinox is the beginning of Aries. The Autumnal one, the beginning of Libra. As our trip around the sun is a tad over the 360 days that the Chaldees worked out (and applied to the Zodiac as degrees), these celestial events wander between the 21st to 23rd of March, June, September, and December. If you have an ephemeris handy (you don’t?) you can extrapolate the transit of the Sun into the relevant sign and plot it on your own calendar. There are at least a couple of occult almanacs that will give you the information, and the mundane Farmers’ Almanac will reference them as the beginnings of the seasons.

SmartSelect_20220919_112052_Armillary Sphere
I’ve always been fascinated with astronomical, mathematical, and navigational instruments. A working armillary sphere is rather expensive (don’t even get me started on the cost of the astrolabes). You’ve probably seen “prop” versions at a number of department stores and garden centers, but these are usually fixed pieces of metal that at best might be spun around to point north. These screen shots from the virtual one on my phone show the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. The slanted band on these showing the month and sign is the apparent path of the sun from the earth. It’s really the earth and us that are slanted, but in the geocentric cosmology of the armillary, we are the fixed point. If you’ve dabbled at all with astrology you know that the Equinox is at the beginning of Libra and that the Solstice signals the start of Capricorn. Alas the more scientifically inclined authors of this app are using a sidereal zodiac, which is based on the positions of the constellations as the actually are, whereas Western Astrology uses a tropical zodiac that places a perfect 90 degree division between the Equinoxes and Solstices. Projected onto the earth the highest and lowest points of the suns travel give us the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, Depending on time of year, the sun is more or less directly overhead at midday between these points. Further north or south, and the sun never which actually comes directly overhead.

The quarter points also define the Cardinal signs, one for each element. Aries is fire, of course, and Cancer is water. Libra is the cardinal air sign, and Capricorn, represents earth. The next sign around in each quarter is a Fixed sign, Taurus/Earth; Leo/Fire; Scorpio/Water; and Aquarius/Air. The last sign in each quarter is the Mutable sign, signifying the nature of that sign’s character transitioning back toward the Cardinal. These are Gemini/Air; Virgo/Earth; Sagittarius/Fire; and finally Pisces/Water.

The Cardinal is an emergent energy. It has great force, and may be viewed as archtypical of the elemental nature of the sign. Planets on cardinal points influence powerfully, but sometimes in a raw or brutal way. Subtlety and sophistication may be lacking. This is good to keep in mind when picking times for planetary workings, or elemental based magic.

Magical timing and the use of astrology in ritual, derives from centuries of tradition. Much of it may have passed into Medieval texts with no real understanding of the ancient rationale. There are a number of examples where these correspondences were copied unquestioned into modern ritual manuals, and passed into present day with even less connection to the rudimentary ideas of relating magic to the greater state of the universe.

The approach of “scribe an amulet of bronze with this sigil in the hour of Venus” is, to my mind, far less efficacious, and less personal, than working out how the skies will aid your goal. There are apps aplenty to cast horoscopes and tally the planetary hours (I have several ). If you’re old school, or just want to understand the bones of the thing, you can use a paper ephmeris2 There are pdf versions available for free, here . to work out when the planets, signs and elements bode well for your venture. If I’m planning something especially complex, I will spot check the software results with paper calculus, and possibly even personal observation (saving pennies for that working astrolabe).

Even if you don’t want to go that extreme, understanding the why of the ritual holidays, whether we call them sabbats, or equinoxes, or the first day of fall, is, to my way of thinking, integral to the idea of a nature-adjacent lifestyle. Nature, after all, includes the sun, moon, stars, galaxies, and all the great big unknowns out there in the sky. 3If you’re really dedicated, or compulsive, or maybe a little wacky, you can even calculate things like seasonal shifts on the planets as part of your zodiac. The information is available out there. But maybe that is a little wacky.

sundial
A sun dial seems to be a fairly straightforward gadget. In fact, you can make one by poking a stick in the ground and seeing where the shadow falls. But there’s more to it that that. This little brass number – which I keep in a room with drawn curtains – has a means to tilt the surface based on latitude. I have mine set to around 30 degrees north, roughly the same as the Great Pyramid of Giza. There’s also a compass in the base to determine which way is north (since you are trying to maximize East-West exposure). There are also leveling feet if one is on uneven ground, though there’s not a level bubble, so I’m not sure what use they are. The sun dial has evolved significantly from the stick in the ground. There are some that have a figure-eight still grid laid out, to account for the variances in solar position due to the wobble of the earth’s axis.

I hope this has given you some things to think about when you see these days cycling around on that Witches’ Calendar plaque above the altar. I find the movements of the heavens fascinating, as they do affect how we live down here on earth. These wiggles of the planet give us the seasons, spawn hurricanes, monsoons, and typhoons, and control the hibernation of animals and plants. We are here because of it.

I’ll be back next week with other reflections. Thank you for reading.

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Math is Involved

Einstein Math

Way back in my early years (between five and seven) as a weird child, I had discovered The Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Wisdom by Zolar in a dark corner of the family bookcase. I don’t know where it came from or how it got there, and no one else ever acknowledged its existence when I took it to my room.

Within its tattered coverless pages, I gained access to many of the mantic arts, including astrology, tarot, palmistry, phrenology, and a host of others. The one that was of most immediate interest and service, however, was numerology.

The reason is simple. I did not have any tarot cards. There was no Amazon in the early 70s. There was no internet, and the few bookstores that existed in the nearest large town (a two-hour trip away) did not have shelves resplendent with 57 varieties like the B&N does today.

A sampling of sorcerial tomes from the local mass market bookseller. Had I this kind of access in my early teens and twenties my practice would look vastly different now, and I fear, would be less rich and complex. These can’t all be good. That’s just statistics. Sensing a marketable concept, publishing houses, some far outside the usual occult presses, are churning out “magic” titles like they were printing money, and they are.

Sadly some of these books are even written by machine, collected via web search AI and only moderately edited before some “author” is paid for the use of a name. The hundred or so titles in stock in the store are the tip of the iceberg carried online, or available as a digital version.

And among the ones in the store, I didn’t even notice the lone dubious volume on numerology. But, hey, you can learn all about all these secret sacred practices and have matching covers.

If you are starving for a resource that goes beyond packaging, take a spin around archive.org. You can find scanned copies of old magical texts downloadable for free, like the Tetrabiblos of Claudius Ptolemy, Waite’s Pictorial Key to Tarot, The Greek Magical Papyri, The Keys of Solomon, and Paracelsus’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy. If you are multi-lingual you can even find Eliphas Levi’s works in the original French, and a number of good texts in German, Latin, and Greek.

I started my own journey with the few mass market omnibus texts available in the 70s and 80s, so there’s no harm in it. Just be aware there’s more to it than that.

Likewise, astrology required an ephemeris and tables of houses and complex calculations which also were not readily obtainable in my current environs.

But numbers, well, those were free. I could work with them in my head while I didn’t sleep at night ( I suffered from terrible insomnia into my 40s) . They were also much more limited in scope than Tarot. Ten digits, 0 through 9. And while it took me a bit to visualize the layout of the 26 English letters against the ten digits, once they were converted, and computed, and got down to a single significant digit, then there were only a few meanings to keep track of.

So between experiments with astral travel (also in the book) I lay awake and reduced names and dates and places down to their essential numeric quantities. And I developed a love for number play that serves me to this day.

I haven’t seen a lot about numerology discussed on the interwebs. It doesn’t have the flash of posting a handful of tarot cards or the hook of warning about Mercury Retrograde.

I gather it may be a bigger thing in Hindu culture, but I must confess that I know very little about the method or the meanings. Perhaps that is something I shall explore.

There’s a Kabbalistic version as well, since Hebrew letters have assigned values, thus words may be read for the numbers and the meaning of the numbers interpreted. This permutations of letters that is part of the Kabbalistic tradition can also be worked with the numbers. I’ve dabbled with this a bit.

Numerology, like all the mantic arts, seeks to reveal something to us about ourselves and our future that is not readily apparent. It does this by taking numbers like dates, and reducing them down to a single digit, or two sets of double digits.

For instance, take July 4, 1776. That’s a 7, for July, plus 4 plus 1 plus 7 plus 7 plus 6. The result is 32. So then we add 3 and 2 to get 5. Five is number associated with this date. Five by the system I learned can be interpreted as conflict, chaos, or instability. This might be readily applied to that date.

But as the day of the month can be seen as a separate thing unto itself, it’s possible to come up with different numbers.

4 plus 7, of course is 11. 11 is one of those special numbers (22) being the other one, that typically are considered “resolved” without adding the last digits (to get simply 2). And the year resolves to 3. Three is considered a stable number because it represents the union of the masculine 1 and the feminine 2 (apologies to folks struggling to find non-binary traditions, this is from thousands of years ago) . Eleven can be seen to be a spiritual number, and two may be read as community or loyalty within a group.

These could also be effectively applied to this date. While I am sure some readers will hold differing views in this regard, the example was to illustrate the method, and not to render a judgment.

In actual practice, however, we have to suppose John Hancock went to Ben Franklin and asked him the best date in July of 1776 to get the Declaration signed. Been would have run the numbers and said that the 2nd should be good, because it resolved to three and spoke of harmony and union. But Hancock said they couldn’t get it back from the printer on time.

So Ben took out his tables again and told him that the next best time to sign it would be August 2, because that equates to a 4, and 4 represents the Four Cornerstones of the Universe and the Foundation of the Temple (any National Treasure fans out there. You know what I’m talking about).

And that’s when it was signed. August 2, 1776. The July 4 date is when the membership voted agreement to the version we now know, which deleted Mr. Jefferson’s more blunt condemnations of the slave trade objected to by the southern colonies. But it was signed in August, and no one has a picnic. According to the almanac it was time to be harvesting instead of picnicking.

It’s not unreasonable to assume that old Ben, and potentially many of his contemporaries, dabbled in the mantic arts. The 17th and 18th Centuries saw us moving from Mesmer to Faraday, and from Ptolemy to Newton, but it was never an immediate and brutal break. Sir Isaac Newton himself was a practicing alchemist, and the period of madness he suffered around 1693 is often attributed to mercury poisoning from his experiments. Yet he invented calculus to prove how the wheels of the universe turned.

Franklin is one of those fascinating polyglots from history that you just know was into something they left out of the books. Put aside all that secret Masonic conspiracy stuff. He was playing with lightning. Gotta love that.

And his inventions are still in use today. Otherwise I couldn’t see what I am typing.

A true figure of the Enlightenment; he was philosopher, scientist, and, I think, magician. Franklin is rumored to have rubbed elbows with Count Cagliastro and the Comte de Saint-Germaine during his numerous European travels. Some of his other buddies were known students of the occult.

Magic, alchemy, and the mantic arts survived into the Enlightenment by transmuting themselves.

Astrologers could accommodate Newton’s Principia Mathematica because it gave far more accurate calculations. Knowing better the true nature and motions of the Heavens, they reasoned, could not but result in a truer reading of their portents.

The concepts of Sacred Geometry were better expressed through the new math, and the analogy tied into the Masonic doctrines. The symbol of the All Seeing Eye atop a pyramid of sacred numerical dimensions adorns the back of the Great Seal of The United States and is familiar to anyone who has seen a dollar bill. Boldly the motto proclaims “By Divine Favor – A New Order for the Ages”.

Looking for ancient occult symbols? You need not go further than the good ol’ greenback.

The back side of the one dollar bill features both sides of the Great Seal, commissioned just after the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4, 1776. The final design, however, wasn’t adopted until 1782 (there was a war on, you know.)

Despite what Jerry Bruckheimer would have you believe, the symbols employed are from common heraldic devices of the time, and not the product of a secret Masonic code. Of course, the heraldic symbols have a whole heapin’ lot of occult meaning going back into pagan days. That eagle is Roman, of course, the pyramid Egyptian. Don’t miss the hexagram layout of the 13 stars over the eagle’s head. As above, so below.

Officially, the 13 courses of stones in the pyramid is representative of the 13 Colonies that became the United States. If you look on the opposite side of the Seal, the eagle holds 13 arrows, has 13 stripes on the shield, and there are 13 stars in the circular cloud (a variation on the mandorla of religious art) over it’s head with the motto “From Many One”. The olive branch of piece held opposite the arrows of war has 13 leaves and 13 olives.

You gotta wonder, if 13 is such an unlucky number, how come they were so enamored of it. Surely this was courting disaster. Okay, sure, they were kind of stuck with it, being as they had 13 colonies, but if it’s a bad number, how do you fix it? It’s not like Gandalf could add a hobbit.

Well, one way to do it is to rationalize it as King George’s bad luck. But the numerological way is to get a different number, and you can do that by including the bad number enough times to get a better one. In this case, there are 6 instances of the number 13 on the Great Seal. Six times 13 is 78. Seven and eight add up to 15, and one and five add up to 6. The number 6 can signify harmony and stability, so that’s better than unlucky 13.

Alternatively, we can reduce 13 to one plus three and get 4. The number 4 represents stability, responsibility, structure and effort. It can represent the four elements, four cardinal directions, and by extension tie into the order of the universe. That’s definitely something a New Order for the Ages would be looking to partake of. Of course, there are six instances of 13 so we have to do six times 4, and that comes back to 6 again (24 = 2+4 = 6).

On the other hand, we can take 4 and 6 and get 10, which can be read in many ways. Reduced to 1, it represents unity. That charts. Read as 1 and 0, it contains the generative principle of beginnings and the unlimited potential of the future. It can also be seen as a union indivisible (where have I heard that before…) and finally, 10 being the number that occurs after the first series of single digits, can also represent a new beginning.

Now I am not saying that the founders of the nation, or the committee to design a Great Seal, or anyone in that secret Masonic conspiracy to hide the Templar Treasure, ever did any of these calculations. That does not alter the fact that the calculations can be made, and the meanings inferred, and there being something to it after all.

Numbers are part of the nature of the universe. We can argue about gravity and electromagnetism and strong and weak force and spooky action at a distance and whether or not anything can exceed the speed of light, but we cannot change the absolute fact of number.

Math, Science, and Magic were still very much entangled at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1927 science fiction epic Metropolis, we find the robotrix/homonculus brought to life using both electrical arcs and the power of the pentagram. Her creator Rotwang speaks of sacrificing his hand to gain the knowledge to bring her to life.

In the long version of the film, we find out the robotrix is created to resurrect Hel, a woman that both Rotwang and the city master loved. But she favored the city master over the eccentric scientist/magician, and died giving birth to the male protagonist in the story. Hel, of course, is also the name of the Norse Goddess of Death.

The process of animating the robotrix gives her the appearance and life force of the human woman Maria. She puts it to immediate use presiding over an orgiastic scene as Babylon riding on the Beast with Seven Heads.

There’s a lot going on with this movie. If you can locate a copy of the restored version (I think it is available through one of the online services) I recommend viewing it with an eye toward the magical symbolism.

If there is a thing we’ve got numbers. If there is a thing, and another thing, we’ve got numbers. If there is nothing at all, we still have numbers. Zero is a number, and even zero is one. There is one nothing if we have nothing (Did you hear that in Count von Count’s voice; because I did?).

Two is always two. It’s two here. It’s two on the dark side of the moon. It’s two on Alpha Centauri and two ten billion years ago. While the symbols and words we use to describe number may change from language to language and era to era, number does not change. Number is a fact of reality. Any reality. All realities.

If you are looking for an anchor in the Waters of Darkness, numbers will be there. It is not for nothing (“one,,,one nothing,,,,”) that numbers play such a significant role in magical practice.

Our use of triangles, circles, squares, pentagrams, hexagrams, and other geometric constructs derive from the power we associate with these numbers, and the symbols we can attach to them.

The pentagram is the Five Elements of Aristotle – Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Quintessence (literally Fifth Substance).

The hexagram is the Star of David, the Seal of Solomon, and a symbolic representation of the Hermetic maxim “As Above, So Below”.

The Hebrew alphabet has 22 characters each with a numeric value. Tracts written in Hebrew can be read as either letters or numbers when seeking hidden messages. And they can be manipulated numerically as well as alphabetically to reveal new secrets. According to Eliphas Levi these 22 letters equate to the 22 cards of the Major Arcana, thus demonstrating that the secret teachings of Kabbala are recorded in the Tarot.

There are 21 numbered cards in the Major Arcana, and one unnumbered card, the Fool, which is regarded in modern decks as zero. The placement of the Fool actually varies, and Levi put him at the point between the Last Judgment (20) and the World (21). If you are using Waite or a deck based on his, you probably have the Fool before the Magus.

In any case, it’s possible to read the 22 cards as representing the meanings of the Hebrew characters assigned to them, as well as in the usual way. For that matter, we can read the Tarot astronomically because planetary and zodiacal connections have been made. 1The traditional astrological correspondences don’t always work for me. For example, I have always felt that the Hermit was Saturn, even though the usual attribution is Mercury. I find some justification for my purely intuitive association, in that on the old Sforza deck, the Hermit carries the hourglass of Time rather than the lantern. And then both these correspondences can be read numerologically. And, of course, there’s the numbers on the cards themselves. Death is XIII, our unlucky 13. The Devil is XV, or 1+5. Here the resultant six is likely connected with the Biblical Number of the Beast 666, from Revelation.

Here’s another little game to explore. The first three cards – Fool, Magus, Priestess, are 0+1+2=3. The next three cards – Empress, Emperor, Heirophant, are 3+4+5=12=1+2 = 3.

The Empress can be seen as the material incarnation of the Priestess principle. The Emperor the earthly Magus, and the Heirophant the structured dogma ascribed to the natural Creation of the Fool. That these numerically equate reinforces this interpretation, as above, so below.

In fact, if you add the numbers on the next three cards, you also get 3. And the three after that. And the three after that. Until you are left with the last card- the World, which is number 21. Two plus one is three.2 While this trick works for the numbers 0-21 split into sets of three (with the one remaining), it’s always intrigued me how the Major Arcana can be so readily divided this way. Viewing them as trines is integral to my personal work with the deck.

Then we have the Minor Arcana, which until Waite, were usually just pips. So there wasn’t an image to evoke a particular meaning. These were done solely by number and quality. The number 5, for example, was seen as instability and conflict. The 5 of Wands, for example, then is a disagreement, potentially in the courts, as the wand may be symbolic of civil or religious authority. A 5 of Pentacles, which represents the home, heart, and wealth, could presage marital difficulties or a loss in the markets. The face cards typically were assigned to people, a child, a young adult, and a mature man and woman, though these are as easily numbered, 11 through 14. This makes the queens bear the burden of unlucky 13. I wonder if there was intentional misogyny there. Taken together the four suits have 56 cards, that reduce to 11.

So the combined deck of 78 cards (which would work out to 6) can be viewed as 11 and 22, the two super numbers of numerology.

When you start seeing numbers, you start seeing numbers everywhere. Not just the direct numerals that are on the mailbox or the clock. You start to notice quantities and sets. You become a kind of Count von Count all on your own. Why are there three pillars on that building? What is the significance of the octagonal base of the columns? Why does the building have a round footprint?3If you know the answer to some of these questions, you might be part of that secret Templar conspiracy. But if I told you about it, I’d have to kill you.

Our awareness of numbers in our life is generally very low unless we are performing some function that required counting, math, or reference, like telling time. But number permeates the universe.

Like the so-called “angel numbers” an enhanced observation of the apparently random appearance of numbers in our everyday life can be a source of relevant insight.

Numerology goes past the basic birth number and life number. it includes things like sequences of prime numbers, π and Φ, and fractal as well as sacred geometry. It’s angles and calculus are inherent in every pentagram and magic circle, whether we consciously evoke them or not. We can express through number both time and space, and use number to manipulate them.

If I woke up and saw that it was 2:22 in the morning, I might briefly recognize that this was an Angel number before rolling over to sleep. If it occurs on February 22, I might need to pay more attention. And if it happened this year, that is 2:22 2/22/22, I had better take notice. It was 2:22, on February 22, of 2022. If it was not revealed to you personally, it might just be a fun coincidence, but if something woke you up that morning, it bears further investigation.

Numbers being what they are, this kind of thing can actually lead to compulsive behaviors. Superstitions abound with instances of threes, sevens, and nines. You can become so obsessed with number that you need to have an exact number of items on your plate at lunch or you won’t get on a bus with certain number, or you regard certain dates as being bad luck.

Numerology, like astrology or Tarot, can be taken to the extreme. I have never seen it as an absolute, but I definitely use number in my practice, in my art, and in everyday life. I don’t look askance at going out on Friday the 13th, anymore than I hide out in my house during Mercury Retrograde. But as tools to expand my universe, and a means of listening to that universe, numbers are very handy. And you really can’t escape them.

I hope you have enjoyed this foray into the wild and wacky world of numbers. I have only scratched the surface of the connection numbers have with magic and esoteric thought. We haven’t even mentioned things like the Golden Ratio, magic squares, planetary hours and other complex beliefs around number that fire the mind and open the eyes. I will probably revisit the topic in future articles. In the meantime, I hope you will join me again next week.

Count Von Count is a creation of Sesame Street/The Children’s Television Workshop/Jim Henson.

Metropolis was in the public domain but has since been re-copyrighted by the FW Murnau Foundation.

Images of Albert Einstein were found on the Internet. While the intellectual property probably belongs to his estate or the original photographers, they are fairly ubiquitous.

I am not making a profit on this blog, so I consider the inclusion of these images as fair use. I will remove them if requested by the respective rights holder(s).

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It’s Full of Stars

Saturn Sunrise

This morning, when you got up, everything you saw, touched, heard, tasted, and smelled was made of tiny atoms that were formed in the dark fiery heart of a giant dying star untold billions of years ago.

Those atoms are clouds of circling particles, that are made up of clouds of circling particles, that are probably also made of clouds of circling particles over and over and over.

It’s turtles all the way down.

The particles aren’t really particles. They’re packets of energy, moving through space, in ways that cause invisible forces to shape the nature of space to create our ordinary visible world.

This is not magic. This is science. At least, this is among the leading current theories on the nature of the universe.

So if you have someone giving you a hard time about believing in invisible spirits that influence your life and alter your destiny, ask them to show you a box of gravity.

There is nothing new under the sun. Or in it. Although the sun itself is reckoned to be about 4.6 billion years old, it too, is made from the bones of dead worlds. We’re all in someone’s afterlife here.

And around that other sun, the mother sun, that gave birth to us all, there may have spun many worlds as well. And on the surfaces of those worlds may have been water, and oxygen, and amino acids and condominiums and car parks.

We’ll never meet them. We’ll never know how they felt or the songs they sang or if they cried when it rained. Because they’ve all gone down to dust and the dust has come back up as us.

Cosmic time can kick you for a loop.

On the left is one of countless galaxies visible to the instruments of modern technology. It represents billions of billions of billions of worlds, each possibly full of richly diverse life forms that are similar to, and vastly different, from what has grown on our little speck of damp rock circling an unspectacular star in a quiet backwater of our own galaxy. The lovely spiral arms bely a terrible secret. At the heart of most galaxies, we think, is a monsterous black hole, swallowing entire star systems into an impenetrable void. One theory holds that our entire universe will eventually end up in such a state, when the energy of the Big Bang is no longer able to withstand the inward pull of gravity. The opposite fate is just as terrifying; a future where every particle of every particle drifts so far apart that no energy remains at all, and the rest is darkness.
This is the much shown Hubble Deep Field image. This shows galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies (many of which may already be extinct, since the light left them before the dinosaurs were born). Each galaxy may be like the one above, with untold numbers of life-creating planets. And this represents a part of the sky equal to the size of a tennis ball viewed at the other end of a football field. There are roughly 24 million times more galaxies than the 3000 or so here.

For example, the vast majority of humanity has lived and died in the last 30,000 years or so. Of them, we remember the names of princes and potentates, and a few laureates, visionaries, and healers.

And that’s it.

The further back we go, the fewer we can name. Past about 7000 years or so, it’s totally anonymous. They may have been called Gilgamesh or Noah or Hermes or Lucifer but that’s what we called them later. No one really knows their names, and their stories are doubtless confused and embellished.

We don’t know the name of that Sorceror on the wall of Troi Freres, or the artisan that lavished so much time and care on shaping the tiny Venus of Willendorf. The builders of Catal Huyuk and Gobekli Tepe are abstractions. We know only the little that remains. A few bones, some stone tools, and then oblivion.

Back along that path the family turns into the ancestors, and the ancestors into the legends, and the legends into the myths. And past the myths, we are going out beyond Saturn, beyond the old Titans, into the realm of the outer dark.

It’s a cold, dark, and largely empty universe that might as well be infinite because we can’t really work out how to get outside it.

Science can’t even agree on that. So far theories suggest three possible outcomes.

It’s either an expanding universe that will keep expanding until everything is so far away from everything that all those particles of particles of particles cease to glow with any residual spark and the entire thing becomes nothing.

Or it’s a collapsing universe that expands just so far before the gravity within it starts to overcome the initial energy of its creation and everything falls back down into itself, crushed into an infinitely dense and infinitely tiny dot. Again, essentially nothing.

And some argue that it’s an oscillating universe where cycles of expansion and contraction go on and on and on forever, where each previous universe is erased from existence by being crushed into a point so dense and so small that it erupts into the next one.

Does any of this sound a tad magical to you? Mythical at the very least? There’s a few similar stories in old Sanskrit. The kalachakra, or Time Wheel, oscillates universes that are born, grow old, and die, just as humans do, and as with humans, the universe is reborn into the next order of life.

And that one about the universe suddenly springing into existence in a flash of light. . . well, the scientists call that the Big Bang. You can find it Genesis if you read carefully.

The world was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Let there be light.

This is about energy expanding into the void of space.

What the Kabbalah expresses as emanations of the divine into the material; the bolt of lightning comes down through the realms of the Tree of Life to illuminate the mundane worlds.

This action was a conscious withdrawing of the Divine Intelligence to create something that was Other than itself.

The light was divided from the darkness.

The Divine Intelligence created the universe in order to know itself.

And the morning and the evening were the first day.

Time started. And we’ve been trying to understand it ever since.

In this image by Stonehenge Dronescapes Photography shared on Facebook, we can see the sky as our ancient ancestors experienced it. Without the light pollution of modern industrialization, or even the fire that kept predators away at night, the universe we inhabit is very much present. It is not hard to imagine seeing Indra dancing above the horizon, or the plumed serpent Quetzlcoatl rising up into the night sky. Now we are only able to experience such awe in places like the deep desert, where technology doesn’t intrude.
An artificial starscape is projected on the ceiling of the Gobekli Tepe museum. This site in modern-day Turkey is possibly 7000 years older than the megaliths at Stonehenge, but seems to have some similar purpose as both temple and timepiece. Much recent archaeology suggests that multitudes gathered at this site over a period of 1500 years, to feast, trade, and get intoxicated. The remains of ancient beer is found here among the animal bones, suggesting that the fermentation of grain was a key part of the site’s activity. One theory has been put forth that this desire for mind-altering grog is what led to domestication of grains, and not the other way around. Fascinating if true, it makes our remote ancestors need to travel inwardly as well as outwardly of far greater significance that was once believed.

That’s why we watched the stars on cloudless nights when we huddled around the fire, and named those stars after things in our world. We noticed the ones that were wanderers and called them planets.

We used them to tell us when it was time to move south because the winter was coming. We used them to show us where south was. When we started to domesticate plants and animals we used them to tell us when to plant, when it was birthing season, and when we should harvest.

We built places like Stonehenge and the Sunwheel and the temples of Meso-America and pyramids of Egypt to connect with this fundamental understanding of space-time. Religion and ritual are built around propitious times and locations.

We do things when the stars are right.

We mark out our year by equinoxes and solstices and dot the in-between times with feast days derived from lunar phases and tallied days. We divide our time by months that were once moons, and split them up by days defined by the seven planets of the ancient Chaldees. We live in a modern digital scientific world and modern science basically proves that those ancient Chaldees had it on the ball.

So when your scientist buddy scoffs at you discussing energy work, you might remind them that all matter is energy, that the universe is teeming with light, and that energy can be manipulated to create various effects. They might choose to use a high voltage magnetic field rather than an incantation. The only difference here is that their “spell” is supported by modern convention and belief, just as a few hundred years ago, yours would have been.

In the 1600s, everyone believed that magic existed and did things, even if they didn’t really understand it. It was potentially dangerous, maybe evil, and could be used effectively only by those who knew how.

In the 1800s the same things could have been said about steam engines and electricity.

The 20th Century applied these ideas to the power of the atom.

All are ways of describing how the universe works, and harnessing that natural energy that is everywhere. We don’t know where it came from, or how it got here, but it’s here, and we are affected by it.

We are made of it. We can’t help but be affected by it.

Let’s consider that our scientific universe of space-time is spinning and whirling and oscillating along like mad. Yes, the planets circle the sun, but the sun is spinning around the galaxy, and the galaxy is whizzing across the universe, and the universe is doing whatever it is the universe is doing. So relative to where we are here on Mother Earth, it might look like we see the sun going up and down in about the same places, and those places wiggle ever so slightly between Midsummer and Midwinter, and the planets and the stars overhead seem to repeat their familiar patterns.

But this is all relative to our viewpoint. Which is what Einstein was telling us about the universe. What we see isn’t what is. It’s what was, a moment or so ago, when the light of whatever happened left the place it happened and headed toward us. So for the moon that’s only a few seconds. For Mars, it appears to be where it was a couple of minutes ago.

The sun itself is about 8 minutes back in time. If it went out right now, we wouldn’t know it for eight whole minutes. If we were on Pluto, we wouldn’t see that final sunset for over four and a half hours.

So we really are time travelers in this fixed formal digital modern magicless universe. We see the stars as they were years and decades and centuries and millennia and eons ago.

The universe we look at each night was gone before we were even born.

We, our children, grandchildren, the human species, and even the earth itself, may be gone before the light of some of those stars, as they are now, ever reaches this spot.

But it’s safe to say that whether it’s the universe of the past we see, or the universe of the present that we never will, each moment in time describes a unique and never repeated structure of the energy within the universe. Now is now. The instant before was different, and the instant after will be different, and it keeps on going and going.

Even on a summer night on a quiet suburban street, we are still drawn to look up and marvel at the heavens above us. In such a scenario, the best we can hope for is the changing face of the moon, a few of the brighter planets, and a handful of the most prominent constellations on a very clear night, and away from the glare of street lamps and house windows. We know instinctively that there is something out there that we are a part of, even if our technological conveniences have blinded us to seeing it.

This is one of the reasons I find some merit in the practice of astrology. Granted, the most usual natal charts are based on the relative local positions of the planets, asteroids, and some calculated points derived from these, as seen overhead (or below the horizon) at the time of your birth.

Plug that into the context that a constantly spinning, whirling, whizzing, evolving universe is never in the same place at the same time ever, and each human lifetime can be seen as a change in the fabric of the universe. When you are born, you alter the nature of all that is by your presence. Surely an event of such significance participates in something of that greater universe.

The light from the sun and moon reach us first, and then all the planets. So applying their energy, their influence, most directly, seems only logical.

The background stars, which form the signs of the Zodiac, and to some extent rule the houses, take a lot longer.

By virtue of that, they are only slightly changed from when Claudius Ptolemy charted their positions in Roman Alexandria, using data compiled by those witty Chaldees a few thousand years earlier.

The energy we receive now, may only have left some of those stars when the Chaldeans named them, or when Ptolemy charted them. That energy is consistent, and thus the attributes we ascribe to it is consistent. At least for as long as I will be drawing up horoscopes anyway.

As Above, So Below! I acquired this polished orb of ocean jasper because it immediately reminded me of the storms that churn across the surface clouds of our largest planetary neighbor. The stone sphere is some two inches or so. Jupiter is 1000 times larger than the entire Earth. Our planet would fit across it’s famous Great Red Spot. The most easily seen feature on Jupiter’s surface was possibly discovered by Galileo Galilee in the 1600s. It’s a hurricane that potentially has been going for 400 years or more. Despite it’s horrifying size, Jupiter is made of mostly “air”, a swirling miasma of hydrocarbons, floating above seas of liquid methane. It may be much bigger than the little stone sphere, but the sphere is more solid. For comparison, Great Jupiter would fit inside the sun as many times as our Earth fits inside Jupiter. There are millions of stars in the galaxy that are 1000 times bigger than the sun.

But if I were standing beneath the red rays of far Antares, and looking up through Scorpio’s claws toward our tiny pale sun, I would have a very different universe. I might have two moons in the sky at night, or seven. My longer year would be punctuated by their movements, forward and back (with multiple moons you get retrograde). The names I would give to the stars and the pictures I would draw between them would be what my remote ancestors had seen when they set by the fires in front of their caves, and began trying to work out how to manage the energy that was teeming through the universe.

Because that’s what living beings do.

The Divine Intelligence created the Universe to Know Itself.

We all participate in that. We are all bright sparks of that limitless eternal energy.

That’s why we’re here.

Thank you for reading to the end. I hope you found it enjoyable. These are the things I think of when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, the market is down, inflation is up, and Monday lies too closely ahead. It is, I think, helpful to remember that we are all part of something much brighter than the dust and bones around us.

Space images are courtesy National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) unless otherwise noted.

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There and Back Again

Mercury Header

Last week’s article was brought to you by Mercury Retrograde.

That is, I had postponed the live date for it before heading off to New York City on family business, intending to edit, polish, or postpone it again, ere I returned.

But no. That was not going to happen.

Flight delays. Missed appointments. Lost items. All the typical hallmarks of Mercury dancing merrily widdershins whilst we mere mortals can’t remember the word we want to say.

And thus, the pre-scheduled but possibly not final version of last week’s article was auto-posted as pre-scheduled.

My intention then, was to connect to my blog, unpublish the article, and reset it for a time when I had returned home and could contemplate it’s perfection at my leisure.

But drunken Mercury wasn’t done with me yet.

Seems that my new webhost uses a security program that blocks mobile access to WordPress’s backroom, even from the browser.

So being several thousand miles from my laptop, I had to content myself with the fact that the article was live and there was not a thing I could do about it.

Fortunately, the article as it stands is acceptable, and I have decided not to travel back in time and create a retroactive continuity (though Mercury might approve of that just now.).

Scoff ye skeptics. Once upon a time I walked amongst thee. Now, I’m not entirely sure.

If one adheres to any faith in astrology, Mercury Retrograde comes with the territory.

Whilst other planets share this optical phenomenon, the frequency and regularity with which the innermost world makes it’s backward track is viewed with particular dread.

Retrograde motion is an illusion. It’s observance in ancient times, before telescopes and the discovery of the extra-Saturnine planets, was considered an ill omen. But it’s basically the result of a pre-Newtonian understanding of orbital mechanics.

Ancient astrologers considered all the visible planets to be traveling around the earth. In the works of Claudius Ptolemy, the planets and the sun and moon were all pinned to a series of transparent spheres or shells, that moved around our own globe. His Almagest gave calculations for their movements, and was a standard1Although Aristarchus of Samos had published works at Alexandria where the planets rotated around the sun, the popular acceptance of Ptolemy meant that an earth-centered universe prevailed until the Renaissance. The geocentric order was favored by the Holy Mother Church as it allowed convenient location of Heaven and the angelic orders. until Newton’s Principia Mathematica corrected planetary order.

The Sun, of course, never goes retrograde. Nor does the Moon, ironically the only body that does orbit the earth. For this reason, and because they were biggest and brightest, they each get to rule their own signs; the zodiac signs of Leo and Cancer respectively.

Leo, beginning with the Summer Solstice, and the hottest of the fire signs, is the natural home of the Sun. Ptolemy in his Tetrabiblos (the astrological companion to the astronomical Almagest) says that the Moon is associated with moisture, so as the next brightest light, she is assigned as ruler of Cancer, the water sign immediately preceding the Solstice.

planetaryrulers
This chart from Cafe Astrology shows the distribution of planetary rulership in the ancient world. The mathematics of Ptolemy’s Almagest made possible the first ephemeris. His Tetrabiblos is believed to be a summary of several earlier texts on astrology he researched at the Library of Alexandria. So these attributions may be as old as the Chaldean or Akkadian cultures, despite their Graeco-Roman names.

And thence all the remaining visible planets are awarded rulership over the zodiac in pairs, since there were only five of them, and there were ten signs left. So little Mercury gets both Gemini and Virgo; Venus rules Taurus and Libra; Mars: Aries and Scorpio; the expansive quality of Jupiter attend Pisces and Sagittarius; and finally cold and dark Saturn is lord over Aquarius and Capricorn.

Modern astrologers ascribe the “new” outer planets and some asteroids as rulers of signs and houses, but I find Ptolemy’s system to work fairly well, at least to gauge the basics.

And it warns us about Mercury. Mercury as ruler of Gemini presents duality and ambiguity. Perfect situation for a planet that can’t seem to make up it’s mind which way it’s going.

About that. Well, Mercury (and any other retrograde planet) isn’t actually moving backward. That would defy the laws of physics. . . Newton’s, not Ptolemy’s.

What’s happening is that all us planets are whizzing round that jolly old sun, at a pretty constant clip. But because of the different sizes of our orbits, every now and then it looks like some of the planets are moving backward, relative to our viewpoint here on little ol’ Earth2which means that Ptolemy’s universe might be more in line with Einstein than Newton’s, from a certain point of view.

And for naughty little Mercury, this happens about three times a year; more often than any of the other planets. So obviously the ancients took notice, and so do we. This wiggly motion astrologically indicates communication breakdowns that even Led Zeppelin could not have imagined, along with related interruptions in travel, technology, and other best laid plans.

So why do astrologer’s consider retrograde motion to be “bad”? Well, it may be helpful to compare it to the reversed meaning of a Tarot card. In Tarot a card that is drawn upside down is considered reversed, and it’s symbolism may be interpreted as an opposite or reduced version of the standard upright meaning.

thoth dual magician
In the Thoth Tarot, artist Freida Harris envisions the power of the Magus as synonymous with Mercury. This is something of a nod to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus (the Thrice Great) a possibly fictitious author of many occult books. The god Hermes is the Greek equivalent of Mercury. He is also equivalent of Thoth (Tehuti) in Ancient Egypt, so there’s a bit of magical punnery at work here. This card is from my personal deck, one which has two alternate Magus cards. Ostensibly this was a publisher’s conceit, but much has been made of the symbology and secret intention of its having Three Magi.
thoth magician-hangedman
When the card is reversed, the once powerful and competent Magus now has lost control, and he, along with all his workings, appears to be plunging toward the abyss. The design is reminiscent of the 12th card, that of the Hanged Man. This card usually symbolizes life in constraint, or a delay in action. The Hanged Man, suspended between Heaven and Earth, partakes of neither. His energy is stalled, his intention frustrated. Like the infant Jupiter, he is invisible to the gods. As Mercury travels unnaturally, the normal order of things is upside down.

The same general rule applies when Mercury goes wandering. As the Messenger of the Gods, Mercury influences those things that have to do with sending and receiving messages, and in the 21st century, that covers a whole lot.

We have trouble finding the right words, or say things we shouldn’t. We forget to use BCC or forward that private internal memo to the whole office. We drunk text. We can’t access the Wi-Fi. We have no bars on our phones. We forgot we were on speaker. And Chaos ensues.

retrogradde
The retroshade of the current Mercurial backward transit. The wiggly spiral is Mercury’s observed direction through the zodiac. This chart represents all of 2022, which begins in the center and ends on the outer rim. The shadow period is defined by outer limits of the backwards S shape. The end of the retrograde casts a shadow backward in time, and the beginning of the retrograde casts the shadow forward.

The red overlay was added in Photoshop, but this graphic was generated by a nifty piece of software called Planetdance. If you’re a Windows User it’s free to download from the link. It has many of the features of professional astrology software. Like any freeware, it’s not always plug and play.

I am by no means a professional astrologer, but I am a professional computer guy, so it works for me. Calculations that would have taken me hours or days in my youth with paper ephemeris, tables of houses, and a slide rule (google that) are now just a few mouse clicks. It does a number of things that I don’t even begin to understand, but I’m learning.

Mercury only runs backward for about three weeks. But astrologers also reckon the “shadow period” which begins at the point in it’s forward orbit adjacent to its backward travel limit; and ends when it’s return to forward motion passes the point where it turned backward. So while the actual retrograde motion is from May 10 to June 3, the shadow period goes from late April until just past the middle of June.

Does Mercury’s little dance actually cause all the problems we associate with it? Or do we just see it as a convenient reason we butt-dialed the ex? As I said, I used to be skeptical, but 2022 is tempting me to reconsider.

Besides, that’s the only explanation I can find for my airline believing that Denver, Colorado is located on the flight path between New York City and Houston, Texas. I have had to travel more than halfway across the country, just to travel back home.

Twice.

Mercury is laughing his ass off.

Thank you for reading this article. I hope it has entertained, and possibly educated. I’ll be back again soon.

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Ms. Renee Watt in pointing me in the right direction (pun intended) on some key astrological questions. She is a published astrologer and podcaster, and a delightful person to share Sun and Moon with.

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