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Category magic
A Hermetic Meditation on the Triple Awareness
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys!
October is my birthday month, the 31st to be exact, and it’s a personal tradition for me to give gifts on this day as a way of saying thank you to life. This months journey, like previous years for October, is that offering. I received it myself yesterday while in meditation, and it is itself a guided meditation that explores the triple awareness of mind, body and soul and its importance in a very Halloween appropriate subject – magic.
In this meditation you will explore the mental, astral and physical awareness that you have and the relationship these three types of awareness have to one another as well as the nature of the inhabitants of the mental, astral and physical realms that your awareness is focused in and the relationship your awareness has to them. You should be able to accomplish some degree of success in this meditation regardless of your degree of initiation but if you are at higher degrees of initiation your experience will be more nuanced and complete. The meditation is a conscious breathing meditiation that also trains the awareness to be magically effective while also being adaptable to specific needs that you have for improving your circumstances.
We can call the combined influence or focus of the three types of awareness we have a triple awareness or power focus. The majority of the time uninitiated people move the focus of their awareness around between the three types in response or reaction to changing circumstances. For example, you might be walking down the street thinking about something that isn’t happening yet and thus mainly focused in your mental awareness while your astral and physical awareness become more subconscious to you, until you suddenly trip and sprain your ankle at which point your focus immediately shifts to being physical (and then probably astral as you react emotionally). In other words we move our awareness around between these three types of focus (as well as from subject to subject within them) depending upon whether we are mostly thinking, feeling or doing things that draw or need our attention, and while we are focused on one type of awareness the other types of awareness fade slightly into the background. A true triple awareness or power focus is one that has been trained to combine all three focuses into one focus. This means you are aware of your physical, emotional and mental state simultaneously, and at advanced levels also in control of it, at all times you choose to be. It’s not as difficult as it might seem on paper. A main way in which magical initiation trains this capability is by strictly advising the seeker to stay focused on the present now moment, as this focus and kind of concentration naturally leads to a merging of perspectives into a triple awareness – you can easily observe what you are doing, feeling and thinking in the now without splitting your focus. The trick is not to think about it (which focuses you in mental activity) but to observe it, to witness it as it arises without being attached to it. Thoughts occur to your consciousness and feelings arise in your soul and things happen in and around your body but you simply watch them play out and do not identify with or dive into them. Gradually this replaces your drifting focus with a still, observant one, and the still mind, emotions and body make it easier not to drift in focus.
The triple awareness, like the astral equilibrium, is one of the key requirements for being able to work true magic. All magic is performed with the triple awareness and the astral and optimally also the mental equilibrium in place. This is what makes it effective, what makes it work and elevates the acts involved beyond mundane gestures. While this meditation does not provide you with the necessary training and practice to attain these things by itself, it will help you to explore them and understand them and it will indirectly assist you in attaining them if you are practicing Initiation into Hermetics, which does provide you with the training you need to attain these essential requirements or milestones on the path.
This meditation is quite long and so you may be concerned that you will not be able to remember it all when you come to practice it. Don’t worry, this isn’t necessary. The meditation is presented in simple steps that you must memorise, and each step has a commentary that you do not need to memorize, only read. The step is presented first, then the commentary. The commentary is part of the guided meditation but you do not have to explore it all in one sitting, you can pick and choose which parts of the commentary you explore in each sitting or work through the commentary in the order I present it. Just follow your creative intuition about what feels right. Each time you do the meditation, however, follow all of the simple steps.
Preparations: Un-clutter your space, or go outside to an area where you feel the energy is good. Sit or lie down comfortably. Relax. This meditation is easier on an empty stomach so you may wish to fast beforehand or make sure you are not full.
Step: Centre yourself in your mental body by focusing on the now moment, releasing attention to thought and placing focus only on the presence of consciousness within you, the awareness.
Commentary: This is your true mental body, which has all the thoughts. The thoughts are not the mental body, but the mental body can shape, gather and form thoughts as an expression of the activity of consciousness. Thoughts are properties of your astral awareness because they are personal, but ideas or notions are properties of the mental realm and occur to consciousness as connected sets or patterns of meaning. You true awareness is a peaceful, still one. It is not the idea of peace, but the idea of peace points towards it because it stills activity.
Select an idea and observe and contemplate the fact that when your mental body or consciousness focuses on an idea, for example the thought of how a rose looks, other ideas that match it quickly come to add to it, for example the smell of the rose, the feel of the petals on a cheek, a sprinkling of beautiful rain drops, thorns, etc, and as focus is maintained these components intensify and seem to come alive merely through the maintenance of your attention. You may find matching memories being conjured too, and sometimes beliefs, because these are all things we have thoughts about too. You have observed the law of attraction on the mental plane, where like notions are drawn together, as well as how this conjures a response from you on the astral plane (conjuring specific personal responses).
If you continue observing your rose, or whatever idea you selected, you will begin to experience empathy with it through your connection, and then it will not only feel alive but also more like you, and this awareness will grow until you have the sensation that you are the rose. You have become your own creation and thus your own Creator. The fact that with an imagined rose we can become our own creation and Creator is a demonstration of the co-creative power of consciousness to create its own experience of reality. Even if you cannot achieve this yet, you can observe the empathy growing.
It is possible, with the appropriate training and a focus that is placed upon the presence of a physical thing, for example a real rose on the table in front of you, to transfer your own awareness into that of the rose and you may even begin observing yourself from the perspective of the rose, although the observations your consciousness makes will not be made through a brain attached to a nervous system, etc., but through the senses of the world around it that are available to the rose. You will sense light, warmth, touch, sound as vibration, etc. This is an example of the magic of mental wandering and transference. You may not be able to focus so deeply yet to be able to transfer your consciousness from one form to another, but if you select an idea with which you already experience an enormous degree of empathy, for example your pet, you may start to get glimpses of this through experiences of telepathic communication, or shared perspective. Try to build empathy with your rose or whatever topic you have chosen to focus on, by which I mean try to feel what it feels, to walk in its shoes as it were. You can have a sense of what the other is experiencing, and full mental transference of consciousness is just a development of this natural faculty. What this should make clear is that the development of this faculty leads to an enormous and ongoing growth in empathy towards all things. This empathy is a large part of what reduces the innate curiosity of the human mind to pry, because this not empathic and the reduction of empathy leads to the degradation and eventual temporary loss of the ability to transfer awareness. The Mystery always protects itself!
In the deepest core of the rose, in the place where its inner being dwells, you will find the same thing you find within yourself – consciousness or awareness, presence. The different ways in which humans and roses experience the world due to their different sensory forms are mere expressions of the inner awareness of that ‘I am’ or ‘I exist’, just different ways in which that beingness explores and experiences existence. Ultimately, everything is One. It is not easy to observe this without training the mental body sufficiently, but if you consider the fact that literally everything is ultimately an idea, an expression of some kind of meaning, and that the core idea in everything that exists is ultimately ‘existence’ or ‘I Am’ (otherwise it could not exist in any form), then you can catch glimpses of it from this perspective. In the example, consider the fact that the rose exists, even if it is just in your imagination, and contemplate all these things.
The fact that ideas are part of this Oneness of existence or being is not only what draws them together so quickly but which also gives them consciousness or a life of their own. They are also beings, beings who dwell in the mental realm. They come in infinite forms. Some are ancient, some are just being born, others timeless. In kabbalah these are the beings of the Sun, Mars, and Jupiter spheres. Some are human created, others not because they are part of nature (physical and metaphysical). The human created ones are fed and birthed by human focus, made to swarm and cluster into larger and grander notions, to weave more intricate webs of connection, and their survival instinct (all things want to continue to be because consciousness is eternal) leads them to draw our attention towards them, sometimes in very powerful and manipulative ways, depending on how we resonate with them. The beings of fearful ideas are especially good and active at this, because as beings of fear they fear for their own survival. We sense their pull on our astral bodies, on our emotions, in the astral plane when we focus our consciousness on their ideas or wander through locations where they have accumulated as thought-forms. The rose is a notional entity, it is an idea first. The idea of the rose is part of the idea of flowers, which are part of the idea of plants, and so on. There is a hierarchy of meaning here. The rose is also an assembly – it is made of component ideas (colours, petals, thorns, leaves, water, roots, etc.) gathered and arranged into a specific and unique form. Everything is like this. You are utterly unique and cannot ever lose your innate specialness. Nor can anything else. It is all equally beautiful in this way, as it is all a unique expression of the One consciousness. The more any individual thing expresses this unique beauty alongside an awareness of the same in all things, the more it fulfills of the Great Work.
Step: Now centre yourself in your astral body by noticing what all those thoughts have made you feel. Contemplate these feelings. If these feelings are turbulent or upsetting, try to release them and focus on being calm.
Commentary: The ideas you conjured in the mental plane have resonated into the realm below, the more personal expression in the astral, as specific thoughts and in particular as emotional responses. You may have imagined a specific rose, given to you by a lover in the past – a very personal thought arising from the idea of ‘roses’. The rose or whatever you chose has certainly conjured a certain feeling, a certain mood, and this mood is very much dependent on the idea you selected and also the personal circumstances you have regarding the idea, the story you have with it, in fact your feelings are the indicator of the personal significance that idea currently has for you. If you chose the idea of sleep, for example, then you might have thought of bed, and pillow, and night, and stars, wife or husband, lover, bedsheets, and your cat or dog, for example. And if you have been having trouble sleeping lately and you have been very upset about it, then the mood these thoughts will have conjured will likely be an upsetting one. Notice also that some of the thoughts associated with sleep, in this example, are pretty much universal ones, at least for humans (bed, pillow) while others may not naturally occur to some people but which others think of almost immediately (cat, dog, water because of a water-bed, a specific book because it is kept by the bedside, etc.). There is a relationship between the mental and astral which has to do with how the specific meaning of ideas draws in a significance matching the thoughts and emotions we have about the idea, which in turn summon associations to more personalized ideas with potentially branching and variant meanings, and so on in a cycle. Try to observe all this going on within you in the meditation and notice how you feel about all the different associations that come up for you in the meditation. Observe how the dots connect just for you.
You are not only unique, you have a unique relationship to everything else. You resonate with everything in a totally unique way although you may share some things in common with others, and this resonance is your unique astral vibration. This vibration fluctuates, it rises and falls with your moods. What we call ‘heavy’ moods are ‘lower’ or more dense in astral vibration while what we call ‘light’ are ‘higher’ or more subtle. Your moods are your indicator of your vibrational reality, your current astral location. Elevated moods like joy, unconditional love, satisfaction, peace and ecstasy lift you to locations in the astral that are more in resonance with the meaning of things in the mental plane that they are expressions of because they are at the astra-mental boundary. The truth or meaning of things becomes clearer from these astral perspectives. Therefore bringing these elevated perspectives to all of our unique relationships is a key to enlightenment. Try to bring such a perspective to the subject of your meditation.
In the astral where ideas resonate as emotional reactions these feelings act as the power source or dynamo which draws thoughts together, they power the law of attraction on the mental plane where like things are drawn together. Emotion or desire, in other words, is the driving force and fuel of this law of attraction, and when there is a strong desire or emotion the ideas gather momentum very quickly. If you have focused very strongly on something that bothers you and with a strong emotion, then you have put a great deal of attention onto something that has gathered a lot of force into itself and will continue to manifest so long as you continue to place your attention on the unwanted things, and it will need to come up so that you can continue to diminish its power until it is resolved. The habit of worrying about problems not only lowers our astral resonance, making it harder for us to see or attract the solutions to things, it also keeps us trapped in vicious cycles as the thing we do not want keeps gathering more and more force. As an example, express a desire to understand the subject of your meditation and note what feelings you receive in response as well as how strongly and easily they flow (or not) depending on the strength of your desire to understand it and your absence of worry about it. Try to let go of any kind of reaction and just be still waiting in stillness for a while for a response that registers as a feeling.
In the astral, every desire for something we wish for (and these are endless because life is ongoing change and so new desires are always arising) is immediately matched through the power of its emotional resonance with the exact thing it resonates with (i.e. with the fulfillment of that desire) and its opposite, and at the same time a vibrational path is laid out from where the desire originated to where it finds its manifestation in the physical universe. The path to the manifestation of that desire can then be perceived and acted upon in a timely manner, i.e. according to the schedule required for the journey to be made, a timing which is always perfectly calibrated, through maintaining focus upon that desire and a feeling of expectancy or peace or some other ‘higher’ astral frequency concerning it. The spiritual laws then ensure that we will be inspired by the ideas, thoughts and actions that are required to manifest that desire and that we will be lovingly guided in precise ways whenever it is necessary. The journey will be one of enlightenment and this will ultimately be the true treasure of the manifesting desire. However, if our attention is not upon the fulfillment of the desire but instead upon the absence of that thing in our lives or on something of a low astral frequency we will serve to block this manifestation because we will be focused in opposition. Note how your desire to understand the rose, or whatever the topic of the meditation happens to be, is affected by these things. For example, note how your desire to understand it leads to further desires, and also that there is introduced an opposite idea that you will not understand it or do not understand it currently, or cannot ever, and that when you focus on that aspect you feel yourself in a state where it feels like it will not happen. However, the moment you shift your attention to the idea of how you will feel in fully understanding the rose, the more things start moving in that direction.
We can also encounter our own astral karma here, in that some ideas will conjure painful or traumatic memories, or reactions like anger, depression, and fear, and we can keep fueling these thoughts and adding more emotion, so that these things have a lot of power and seem difficult or impossible to escape. When we think of these things they immediately arise with great force and can be overwhelming because they are the accumulation of everything we have put out, all at once. They become so strong because we maintain our powerful astral and mental focus upon them for long periods of time, manifesting them again and again until we are sure we are right about them, and then they become beliefs. In astral transformation we can then need to encounter these beliefs as disappointing experiences that we need to move through in order to manifest what we really want. Usually these are beliefs about ourselves or beliefs about others but they can be beliefs about life or beliefs about any topic, any notion. They can also stem from other lives, other souls we have been. Try to observe any astral story you have with the topic of your meditation as part of these things. If you observe anything that feels ‘heavy’ in that story, try to enlighten or lift that feeling so you can see beyond the blockage in your perception. Try to believe that you are going to understand the topic of your meditation with absolute clarity, including all the aspects you are unaware of. If you cannot believe it yet, repeat the thought that you will until you do.
Every human being has these issues with doubt and resistance and character blocks, which is why the astral equilibrium is so important, and why meditation is so good for us, and a magical practice. The calm mind does not offer any resistance and is both alert and receptive to messages. It is able to follow the path and perceive the meaning of it. Self knowledge not only brings clarity to what we really desire, allowing us to make better choices in what we co-create with our great power of focus, but also the transformation of our astral character removes many obstacles to the paths we walk, making the journey from desire to manifestation not only shorter but more enjoyable and meaningful. This is what we call synchronicity. We come into synchrony or alignment with the goal and with the path to it because we continue to match its frequency and it is drawn to us in remarkable ways. Part of the intelligence which lays out the path leads us to make all the necessary character transformations we need to undergo in order to match the vibration of the desire. Repeat your meditation with the desire to understand the topic of your meditation regularly and observe these things occurring in response.
All the emotions and thoughts that occur to us at the level of astral response have a life of their own like the ideas we interact with, since again all these things are expressions of a One consciousness, a unifying presence. These beings, similar to the beings of the mental realm, are vastly numerous and varied and express every kind of thought or feeling that humans have access to and many more that they do not currently have access to. They are very important in the work we do together with them which is everything because everything requires thought and feeling. They differ from mental plane beings in that they are vibratory, they have their own unique astral resonance, and so they form more personal connections with us. Since they are also all ideas themselves they represent that meaning to us in a way we can resonate with and understand (in fact, only we can understand that form) . This means they take symbolic forms that communicate in a very personal way the ideas or meaning they represent, in other words the shape of such beings is adaptable and they appear in whatever symbolic form is most appropriate to the perceiver. Angels, for example, do not really have wings, these are symbolic to humans of their connection to the airy realm, the mental plane, as they express astrally the meaning of the highest virtues. The symbolic form astral beings take is always very precisely calibrated to the unique astral resonance of the perceiver, so they can change shape as we change shape within, and every detail is significant for us in terms of self knowledge. This also means one person can perceive them very differently to another, but they will be perceiving the same thing, and that the forms they can take can seem very bizarre. In kabbalah these are the beings of the Moon, Venus, and Mercury spheres as well as the Earth Zone. During your meditation simply acknowledge the reality of these beings and see where it leads while meditating on what I have written.
Step: Now centre your attention in your physical body by focusing on your breathing.
Commentary: The physical body is the container or vessel which unifies everything into a material form for us to experience it in. The astral and mental body are the energy field of the physical body, the consciousness of its cells and organs and all the power and complexity of its life. The physical can be thought of as a transceiver through which the senses perceive the material world and in that perception cause it. The physical body has an enormous binding power because it is the nexus or culmination of expression for the subtler bodies. The breath is a key part of this binding power because it is driven by the solar plexus, from which the mental body is connected to the physical. When breathing stops, the mental body (consciousness) is separated from the physical. In other words, your breathing is binding your consciousness to your body, enabling it to function. Contemplate this as you breathe.
Since the mental body is bound to the physical body through breath, focusing our consciousness on the breath brings clarity of mind, and ideas can be easily attached to the act of breathing and inhaled along with oxygen. This is the practice of conscious breathing described by Bardon in his first book in the first step of initiation. In fact this process of consciousness influencing the body is what we call the mind-body relationship, a field of science we are only just beginning to explore. The reality is that we rarely stop thinking about things that worry us or concern us and that with every breath we take holding these thoughts and feelings in our astral body we draw in with our breath the very thing that is worrying us and this is transmitted throughout all the cells of our physical body by the blood. Positive minded people are more healthy and vital because of this. Concerning the topic of your meditation pick a positive quality you perceive in it and imagine that you are breathing this in as you meditate upon it.
The subtle bodies that power and give life to the physical body, the astral and mental bodies, can be felt within the physical body through its warmth, degree of comfort, sensations and so on. The physical body is packed with energy of all kinds – electrical, thermal, chemical, rhythm and pulse, etc. It organises and directs all of this energy, much of the time without your notice. Take a moment to notice and appreciate this ongoing orchestra as you breathe and continue your meditation on the topic, you may be able to sense a vibration or a feeling of melting in your hands or feet, or some other indication that you are sensing energy rather than physical form.
Note that your skin breathes too. It is the largest organ in your body and not only serves as a barrier protecting you from the environment around you but also becomes part of the physical mechanism binding your consciousness to your physical form like your solar plexus, lungs and diaphragm. Take note of the energy within your skin, the temperature, the flow of blood to every surface point, the sensitivity it has to touch, the pores that allow the passage of oxygen, and breathe your idea, chosen from the meditation, into your entire body so that it begins to fill up to capacity. Do not overstretch yourself, just continue until you reach a sense of fulfilled satisfaction.
Ideas and emotions (mental and astral focus) manifest in the physical body somewhere. Specific organs and parts of the physical body have specific meanings and thus roles to play and so embody specific principles (for example, the solar plexus and diaphragm control the expansion and contraction of the lungs). This is all according to the natural working of the body when it is healthy and fully functional. However, the creative power of consciousness and emotional thinking also leads to manifestations in the physical form. When there are ‘heavy’ accumulations the body attempts to discharge them and we may grow unwell. For example, stress can manifest in the body as acne. Obsessive worrying about health or particular health issues going wrong with our bodies is very damaging for them. On the other hand, positive attitudes enable the body to recover, repair and defend itself more effectively. Try to sense the health of different areas in your body by noting any tension or lack of freeness, and imagine breathing directly into any such spots through your skin.
Even things seemingly separate from the physical body have a resonance in our astral body which our physical can feel. The rose that we imagined or placed in front of us for this meditation in the example has a resonance with the human heart, for instance. You may also have noted from the previous paragraphs comments that certain areas of your body respond to certain issues in your life. Try to identify in which area of your physical body the topic of your meditation resonates.
Take a moment to appreciate the fact that every physical thing, every animal, every plant, every rock and mote of dust on the planet, is just like you – it has a mental, astral and physical form or body, a being that vibrates and is conscious, and experiences this in a physical way. The physical beings we share the physical with on this planet are not just animals and plants but its water, light, mountains, wind and fire. Realise that you are part of this grand physical creation in which everything is made in this way and try to sense your physical body as a connected part of it, not only in the way you share the oxygen you breathe or the connection this brings you with trees, but the entire thing, the heat in your body for example is transferable too, and there are minerals in you that are also part of the mountain. Your physical body has resources but it is not limited to the resources within it, it can gather resources into itself from this vast storehouse of energy, and it does (it eats, drinks, translates light into vision, etc.). You may not be able to eat a fire, but you can breathe in the essence of its energy.
Step: Now select a positive idea that you want to being into your life and repeat all previous steps by first examining all of its positive aspects with your mental awareness, letting thoughts gather momentum as you contemplate how all these positive aspects inter-relate and what they all mean, then with your astral awareness, how all this makes you feel and the symbols and positive desires it awakens in you, and then bring all of these things together by imagining that with each breath you inhale these properties into your physical body where it distributes them through your lungs and blood to every cell in your body, which begins to throb with the energy. Maintain the triple awareness by just focusing on your breathing in this way.
Commentary: As an example, let us imagine that we want to feel more courageous in life. First, contemplate and conjure all the ideas you can related to the positive aspects of being more courageous in your life, what it will mean to you. Keep doing this until you begin to feel things strong enough that you begin to feel an increasing desire for it. Allow this desire to gather momentum by continuing, eventually you will actually start to feel courageous, let this gather and when you are ready begin breathing all of this in, staying conscious of all the positive aspects and the feelings this brings to you. With practice this simple triple awareness becomes easy to maintain.
Focus on the now moment and be alert and ready for the magic to happen as a result of what you have done. This means after the meditation be alert for symbols and signs and the inspiration that the path to the manifestation of your desire requires you to take. Repeat the exercise often but avoid doing so because it has not yet manifested in the way you wished. Do so only to increase the energy you put out and because you enjoy it. Let the timeliness of things pass out of your hands. Try to focus on the path and not the manifestation because the path is the true reward. You may be led through character transformations by experiences that arise, each of which is an essential step on the path to the manifestation of your desire. Witnessing this occur is how our self awareness clarifies and our desires purify as well as manifest.
That’s all for this month, thank you for reading! This journal is provided free of charge to the public through the generous donations of my Patrons, who also receive a private monthly newsletter with a forecast if they donate 5$ or more. If you would like to join them and support more journeys like this one, please come along!
The Three Voyages of Being
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This month I explore the three voyages of being, including a discussion of what happens to us after death.
For Tina, Amber and Ben
What we call life is in reality just a portion of it. We do not come into existence at birth, only into physical existence, and we do not go out of existence at death, only out of physical existence. The portion of our existence that we call life is really the middle part of it, the second voyage in a linked set of three. The first voyage is the descent into form, the second voyage is the journey through form, and the final voyage is the journey from form. In this respect what is meant by form is more than just physical embodiment in flesh, it is embodiment in the mental and astral realms as well. Hence life is a voyage in three parts with three integrated vehicles, the physical, astral and mental bodies. Since what we call time and space arise as consequences of the mental and astral plane (i.e. they do not apply in the same way that they do in the physical) the voyage into and out of form is also a voyage into and out of the dimensions of time and space.
What we are, ultimately, may go by many names, faces, personalities, styles and individual expressions, but it is essentially consciousness, an indestructible and timeless presence that dwells in and of the Eternal Now moment. It chooses to ‘voyage’ into form, entering time and space, in order to develop its expression in the mental, astral and physical universe, willingly and confidently choosing to encounter hardships and troubles on these voyages as a means to develop the spiritual maturity of its unique, incarnated expressions. I say “voyage” because to this essence of us there is no time or space to voyage through, instead it must project itself through focusing on a particular point in time and space, condensing its vibration until it manifests itself as a physical being. In other words, we have a picture of eternity and we pick the ideal moment for each specific incarnation and as our eternal awareness focuses on that moment we condense first a mental presence, then an astral presence, and finally a physical presence into that moment, all of which leads to birth. This process takes no time from the perspective of eternal consciousness but the mental, astral, and especially the physical do experience time and space in different degrees, and so from the perspective of ‘being alive’ i.e. being physical, it takes time – 9 months in the womb in human beings, different units of time for different physical beings. Likewise, while our physical form experiences time, aging and decay, the eternal consciousness within us does not experience these things except as a way to measure its progress.
When death occurs the consciousness is released from the physical form, first into the astral body and then into the mental, before returning to the source of One eternal consciousness. This lack of a material form immediately makes it impossible to measure any progress while simultaneously revealing to the awareness that the purpose of life is not the pursuit of material aims but the pursuit of spiritual ones. The awareness longs to return, despite all the hardships it will face, in fact because of them, because it knows they offer opportunities for great advances. A powerful transformation occurs immediately as the astral and mental awareness are no longer occulted by physical sensations and this makes the deceased aware of the spiritual reality of life and the unconditional love which operates the workshop of the universe in every moment.
In this journey, dedicated to the memory of my sister Tina who died last month, and her two children, I will attempt to share with you some of my understanding of these three voyages in the hope that it will be both instructive to readers and comforting to those who are grieving.
THE FIRST VOYAGE
The first voyage is epic and it is a voyage of Creation. The eternal essence of awareness, what we call the Greater Self or Holy Guardian Angel in hermetics and occultism, essentially a discrete expression of the One Self, is involved in a Great Work with other Greater Selves. Together these Greaters possess a collective awareness of eternity, in other words they are aware of everything, everywhere, all at once, and they incarnate literally countless expressions of themselves throughout time and space, weaving the Great Work. Ultimately what this leads to is the full embodied awareness of all their individual expressions at once, so that every physical thing in the universe is fully consciously united with its Greater. This process requires an infinite amount of time, which means the Great Work will only continue to grow forever in beauty and complexity, but individual parts of it may reach completion ‘before’ others do, at least from our perspective as physical beings subject to time and space. In other words, it is possible to leave the cycle of incarnation in physical form having attained enough maturity, but beyond this physical universe there is still further expansion possible. From the perspective of the Greaters it is possible to witness the unfolding of time and space throughout eternity as well as its ultimate completion. This is a principle of the Akasha, the dwelling of the Greater awareness.
Infinite individual expressions of each Greater are seeded throughout all of the possible timelines and universes at once, and each of these is continually guided and watched over by its Greater Mother. The point of access to receive its guidance while in physical form is alignment with the now moment where the Greater awareness dwells, so that this guidance is always available to all of its children. Voyage into form is one of condensing awareness through focus, first leading to the creation of an individual expression of the Greater in the mental realm (a spirit or mental body which in turn is assigned a set of temporal locations along a particular timeline/s of the Great Work), then to the formation of an astral body (a soul or personal expression of the spirit) and finally a physical form and its emergence into the material universe.
Since this is a focusing of the Greater awareness into denser and denser form it is also a voyage for that awareness as it dresses itself in layer after layer of meaning and descends from the subtlest (Akasha) to the most dense (physical) state of awareness, becoming more complex and defined as it journeys into time and space. As it journeys it descends through what magicians call spheres, dimensions of being that are the seats of these more and more dense collations of meaning. These spheres are literally infinite in number and are all universes in their own right with inhabitants where many of the same things that apply in the physical universe also apply. There is family, love, song, mortality, rivalry, and so on, although there are often differences in how these things are experienced. No complete description of these realms or their beings can ever be made, but models can be crafted by human ingenuity that serve as maps for the invisible world as it applies to our experience on this planet. One is the Tree of Life, another is astrology. The planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun and Moon, the zodiac signs and the mechanism of astrology all symbolically describe the influence of these spheres and the activities of their beings. The Saturn sphere is the realm of the Greater awareness, and so the movements of Saturn in the sky symbolically describe the Work of this being in our lives. The Sun sphere is where the spirit or mental body comes into form as an expression in time and space (for us, a type of Sun astrologically) and the Moon sphere is where the soul or astral awareness is born and has its seat. This all occurs pre-natally as the physical body is developing. Between the Moon sphere and our physical universe is a zone occultists call the astral plane but which Bardon also calls the Earth Zone. This is our next door neighbour, dimensionally speaking, and it is a complex realm which we inhabit immediately before being born and after we die. I will explain this zone in more detail in the third voyage.
In total, 8 spheres directly affect us on Earth – The Earth zone, the Moon sphere, the Mercury sphere, Venus sphere, Sun sphere, Mars sphere, Jupiter sphere and Saturn sphere, in that order of ‘closeness’ (which is a matter of density with spheres closest to the physical being more dense), although many others exist which do not affect us as directly and are not part of the spiritual agenda we are seeking to master on the physical Earth. Note that these are not the same as the physical planets they share names with. The relationship between Mars and the Mars sphere is like the relationship between blood and the colour red, for example – analogous but not synonymous. Going to Mars is not the same as going to the Mars sphere, but it does bring us closer in relationship to the Mars sphere. The spheres are universal principles with planets and stars and moons as just part of their physical expressions. In another solar system the Mars sphere might be attached to a very different planet (obviously not called Mars) that orbits in a very different position to where Mars lives in our system, and it may revolve around two Suns, and all of this symbolically describes the hierarchy and the spiritual teachings available to life in that system.
The Greater Selves utilize the beings or spirits of the spheres in the Great Work too – there are Greaters guiding them too. They utilize them in the creation of all physical phenomena and guide them to perfection in the specific thing that they do, that they are. This includes all the mental and astral beings, the muses, faeries, elementals, god-forms, etc. Some of these ‘spirits’ are not truly spirits but are physical beings and races who have evolved to dwell in the physical, astral and/or mental plane at will i.e. they have perfected that part of the Great Work and may now guide others in doing so. Others have developed technologies which allow them to travel between dimensions but in doing so have come to understand that they have neglected their spiritual development and now seek to correct this. There are many extraterrestrial peoples with these capabilities so that they must more accurately be called extra-dimensional beings.
In the first voyage into form, the Great Work will gather all the needed components for that incarnation together, meaning it will call upon the guidance and help of certain beings in the creation of the mental, astral, and physical forms and the experiences it needs to gather in order to mature. It will accomplish this through what we can call a kind of kabbalah, or magical utterance, i.e. it will introduce a causation into the Akasha of the mental, astral or physical plane that brings its intention about. All of this is done with perfect love and understanding. We are educated in what we are to achieve, given advance warning of the hindrances and tribulations, equipped with the necessary powers and abilities (for example, talent with dancing, vision to see with), meet with many guides who are assigned to us, and so forth. The spirit will understand all that is before it and all the guidance it can call upon. It will also understand that it will forget all of this, as knowing it ahead of time would remove its free will. The forgetting is a hindrance that, once overcome, leads to great advances for the soul and spirit and in the meantime provides additional challenge, which equals even more opportunity.
Many of these beings then regard us as family members and even as lovers following this voyage. They may have made many such journeys with us. These beings can follow us throughout our many incarnations, both learning and teaching as they experience with us. If they are able to condense their vibration as the Greaters do, such beings may be able to even physically manifest to guide us, if that is necessary. However in order for this to happen we have to have a matching vibration in our own awareness that allows the conduit to be opened in other words we have to be at a matching level of consciousness before we are able to receive such guidance. This is also how we deal with the negative beings we are destined to deal with – we have to raise our level of consciousness in that sphere so that we are no longer a match for the negative being, causing them to depart. The experience with that negative being is intended to provide the contrast and motivation that teaches you to transform that part of your being, thereby gaining mastery of it. There is no guarantee of course, you have free will but if you do not succeed you will simply have to reincarnate with the same lesson. Part of the paradox though is that the Greater Self already knows the outcome of all of your free will choices, but that again must be kept hidden. However, in exercising our free will we alter the fabric of the Great Work around us, causing timelines to ‘move’ in perfect and eternal equilibrium with everything else, and this resolves the paradox and preserves our free will. This is yet another reason why we need to forget so much.
The first voyage then is truly one of Creation but also one of alliance and cooperation as many components are gathered together in service to the Great Work. The pregnant mother can feel all of this within her. She is the vessel through which this magic occurs. The three trimesters of pregnancy are analogous to the three voyages and the accumulation of focus into the three bodies. Her struggle and effort at the moment of birth is what causes the physical form of the newborn baby to be separated from hers and reach the end of the first voyage. It is a physical manifestation and culmination of the concentration of the Greater Mother as it focused its being into form. At the time of a natural birth the consciousness of the mother joins with its Greater as there is no way to focus on anything else except the now. In this way, motherhood becomes a sacred act that changes the mother forever, and mothers become vessels for profound spiritual wisdom and insight. Many traditions of magical midwifery, most of them now lost because they were not recorded and only passed from woman to woman, once existed to attend to every part of the first voyage. Much of this honoured the Earth as Mother of all earthly life or some other representation of the Great Mother, but it also involved specific evocations of the beings of the spheres at astrological junctures. This wisdom remains inside all women, however, only waiting the right time for its reawakening, which is underway.
THE SECOND VOYAGE
The second voyage is epic and it is a voyage of Experience and it is life as we know it, but many things need to be said here. Our understanding of life is very limited and we (usually) do not comprehend the invisible world beyond the physical, having forgotten its existence shortly after birth or into childhood.
The purpose of the second voyage is, as stated earlier, spiritual development. In more detailed terms it is not only awakening to the presence of the Greater Self (your existence as timeless consciousness incarnating through eternity) but also doing full justice to and conscious expression of the birthright you have inherited from the first voyage. Additionally, you have to clear any karma you have taken on board for clearing in this incarnation, this being the consequences of your past free will choices. And you have to do this while being unaware of it, at least until you reach a point where you have the maturity you need to be able to remember.
I have already pointed out that the portal to the Greater awareness is in the present moment. Focusing on the eternal now brings us into alignment with it, which is why meditation is so popular. However, other things bring us into alignment with it too – the conscience is one, since it is the whispering perception of Greater guidance. Joy and unconditional love and gratitude are also powerful forces that align us with how the Greaters see literally everything. Giving ourself unconditional love, managing our astral and mental vibration so that we feel good and not bad regardless of conditions, also brings us into alignment because unconditional love is how the Greater sees us, and such character work allows the Greater to shine more vividly through us. This is really the essence of the Great Work in human form – shaping the soul and spirit and body to be perfect expressions of the Greater, the consciousness of the universe fully awakened in physical form and celebrating that in everything.
The clearing of karma from past lives is astrologically regulated by the planet Saturn as an emissary of the Saturn sphere in our solar system. As I explained, solar systems throughout the physical universe have specific arrangements of planets in orbit around their stars which match the hierarchy of the spheres for that system and its life. In our system Saturn enacts the will of the Greaters and the Great Work in the circumstances of our life, which are all precisely timed and calibrated. The greatest division is a threefold one that mirrors the threefold voyages – childhood, adulthood and elderhood, delineated astrologically by the Saturn returns. Karmic circumstances will be astrologically timed by Saturn in each of these trimesters. However, the whole of astrology will describe the influences accrued and the missions agreed to in the first voyage, right down to timing by transits and progressions. Somehow, astrologers have managed to create a workable system that symbolically describes the workings of the spheres. This is a testament to the power of the birthright that is placed in each of us, especially collectively.
Given free will it is possible for human beings to interfere with the intended missions of others, for example to kill them before their alloted point in time has been reached. In these cases it becomes the karma of the killer to provide the killed with all of the experiences that they denied them, in effect ensuring that their next life or lives will be one of service to that individual. They may need to provide the money, resources, opportunities and all the help that they would have received from others. This ultimately also enables the person they killed to forgive them, but if that soul does so on its way out (in the third voyage) it receives many blessings because this act of forgiveness leads to a deep maturation of the spirit and soul. Contemplation upon this leads to a profound appreciation of the gift of free will that has been given to each of us. Every human life is an attempt to do justice to the power and beauty of this gift and not to abuse it. It is part of the birthright I mentioned earlier, and it is the duty and ultimately the destiny of every human being to bring about its perfection. The second voyage is guided by shamans, magicians, nature itself and all those who know how to bridge the visible and invisible worlds.
Every physical life has a span in time and space along a particular timeline allotted to it in the first voyage, and when that time is up, the sand runs out and we die. This begins the third voyage.
THE THIRD VOYAGE
The third voyage is epic and it is a voyage of Assimilation and Unification, sometimes called the ‘2nd death’ although in reality it is truly an awakening to life wherein all of its Mystery is revealed.
Immediately following death there is sometimes a period of shock in which the now discorporate consciousness inhabits its astra-mental body and comprehends that it has died, but eventually comes the realisation that one still exists, which ends the shock. The awareness is now in the Earth Zone, the astral plane, which does not merely encompass the globe of the Earth but extends throughout the entire physical universe and has many bands of increasingly subtle density, which I will explain below. The soul immediately discovers that it is no longer bound by space, being able to travel anywhere it conceives instantly without impediment by any barriers, and it begins to perceive the spiritual laws and truths behind all experiences, especially its own. An immense release of worry and suffering occurs but the soul also realizes that all of its material achievements mean nothing because it can take none of it with it. Only the spiritual development matters. All of the souls relationships are transformed as the divine laws of love and truth become clearer to it – for many souls, this is the first time since childhood when they are able to feel unconditional love for themselves. Now it is obvious how they should feel, and they yearn to feel it while in a body. This is the presence of the astral light, the Akasha of the astral. It will work many such powerful magics on the third voyage.
Some souls fall into dark astral zones immediately, grappling with necessary demons before they can perceive this astral light, for example evil-doers who have caused great suffering. They need to experience what they have inflicted upon others so that they understand what they have done. No soul can escape the consequences of fully understanding its full effect on others, from the smallest action to the greatest. The discarnate soul perceives the ripple effect of all its kindness, the life changing consequences of every small mercy they granted another as well as the hurt they caused. For souls who have lived virtuous lives the third voyage is an exaltation of the spirit, for those who have lived cruel ones the voyage is very perilous indeed. Some lifetimes are truly ‘wasted’ in that nothing of value was learned, and only negative karma was accrued, but such lives exist in the context of an eternity of incarnations.
Many guides, including the Greater Self, draw close to the soul to protect it and teach it while it remains in the Earth Zone for a time. The length of time (as we measure it) that it will remain there varies greatly, sometimes it passes through instantly, other times it lingers for what we call decades or even centuries, although magic is often involved in these cases (see mummification). In ancient times, some of these guides were human, i.e. they were necromantic magicians and shamans who acted as psychopomps, guides to the dead like Charon of Greek myth. Such figures are often cloaked and carry a magic lamp which guides the deceased on its path, like the Hermit of the tarot. They could sometimes convey messages between the physical and astral world, but their main purpose was to guard and keep safe the pathways through what was termed the Underworld. Many offerings, rituals and prayers were also made by ancient cultures to safeguard the soul.
One reason for this is that there are numerous astral entities that seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the new arrival either by vampirizing its energy or using the astral body to deceive the earthly world. As the soul sheds its form by releasing its attachment to physical experience and draws forth the necessary lessons it becomes more and more transparent, eventually becoming only faintly visible, as the astral Elements that it is composed of are returned to the Earth Zone (this is why some spirits manifest in the physical as invisible or semi-visible forms and others do not while still being able to pass through solid objects). The astral body – the personality for that lifetime – is dying (it exists only as an intermediary between the spirit and the flesh) and the awareness of the deceased is moving from an astra-mental form to a purely mental one, a spirit. Some entities will then abscond with the discarded astral body and use it to impersonate the deceased. Only a person who has a strongly developed mental body and mental senses, i.e. someone with a high degree of maturity in the spiritual laws, can perceive whether or not the spirit of the deceased is present or some other spirit.
The dis-integration of the astral body occurs alongside the dis-integration of the astral cord (silver cord, the astral matrix) that connects the astral body with the physical body at the naval, where the umbilical cord is cut at birth (the sacrum chakra in the astral form), and this is analogous to the attachment the soul has to being physical and having physical experiences, like eating chips, hugging your kids, feeling the Sun on your face, having a stiff drink, etc. While in a physical body this cord binds our astral and physical form together, but its usefulness is at an end once the physical dies. In other words we must let go of attachment to the physical world as part of the third voyage, and when we do so completely the process of moving on will accelerate. This is how the soul finally lets go of any addictions it has to physical things that it has not managed to overcome in life – there is simply no longer any opportunity. This process has a momentum that begins with struggle but ends with ease. This is because as the astral matrix is disintegrated the awareness becomes more fully aware of its spirit and of the eternal nature of being.
One of the most beautiful parts of this process is how our attachments to those we love and care for are resolved as the awareness of our eternal spirit reveals itself. For illustrative purposes let’s take the case of a mother who has died in childbirth and yearns to care for her still physical child. In the beginning her soul will feel strong needs to be with her newborn just as any mother on Earth would feel but without the ability or any chance to physically do so. She would still be to communicate with the physical world and perceive all that happens within it, but remotely, similar to our status when we watch things happening on a screen that occur live elsewhere. We can send messages to those involved but we can’t physically interact. In this time many guides and spiritual helpers will be drawn by their divine missions toward her, guiding her and protecting her as she experiences these things. Some of these may be members of her own family with a strong resonance to the situation, such as the spirit of her own mother.
The mother’s yearning for being with her child will naturally not cease, meaning it is an issue with respect to the disintegration of the astral matrix that could potentially bind her soul and spirit to the earth plane for a long time. Her love for her child is different to an incarnate mothers love, because it is tireless and able to watch over it wherever it goes at all times. With enough power and condensation of the astral Fluids she can even appear near to the child in the physical world for brief moments, either as a transparent ghost or as a seemingly solid figure (hands will pass through her, so touch is still not possible for her, but she can rock the cradle or move other objects like a wind chime or cause lights to flicker in alarm by an effort of will and love). If her will is very strong she may resist the disintegration of the astral matrix potentially for the rest of the child’s life, but this would represent a huge block in her own progress. In these cases someone in the physical world who knows how to persuade her to move on may need to be called in.
This process (or the gentlest one) is one of leading her attention away from focusing on her relationship with the child and guiding her to her own inner knowing that it is okay to let go of that relationship and of the child. She must be guided to look within her. With this more inner focus a natural process occurs in which her love for the child, once occulted by fears for its safety, is transformed and clarifies. As she focuses only on the love she has for her child within her, she begins to understand and experience for herself everything that will happen to it throughout the course of its life. In effect, the universe (specifically, the astral light) steps in to reveal what her spirit knows, that there is One consciousness shared by all forms, and she catches glimpses of what her spirit, on the timeless mental plane, already knows – she can never be apart, from anything. This realisation frees her from the need to stay and causes the astral matrix to finally disintegrate. This also means that the mothers spirit is in a very real sense never apart from the child, they are bonded completely by their love, forever, and this is how it is possible for her spirit to communicate with her child even after she has already reincarnated. The magic of the timeless mental plane makes it possible, as there all moments in time eventually converge into a single now moment, wherein lies the boundary of the upper mental plane and the Akasha, the realm of the Greaters.
This process of joining our awareness with things we love through empathy (mental transference) is the same for every attachment of love that we feel. It is one of the defining features of the third voyage, that all the individual expressions of love are collected together and it is also the explanation for the many native beliefs that their spirits will enter the land and sacred objects they used after they die. All of that love becomes transformed by the realisation that all love is an expression of the One self, which loves all its creations, all its forms, and is equally present with all of them for eternity. Love is perfect – a path to perfection – because it is what the One self does.
The mental matrix, the violet or gold cord connecting the spirit to its soul which is positioned at the solar plexus, must also disintegrate before the incarnation is complete. This attachment is not about attachment to the physical but instead about being a specific person – beautiful, smart, vain, poor, male, American, – whatever we think we are beyond an individual being and consciousness. A huge amount of ego attachment is transmuted here. It occurs often alongside and in rhythm with the process of detaching from physical experience and form, but sometimes it transpires later. Some souls remain in the astral for learning purposes or with specific missions to do there. However eventually the soul, being mortal, will perish and the awareness will enter the mental body, having returned all of the spiritual properties imbued into the astral body on the first voyage back to their astral sources – we part ways with many beings who have been with us, returning their gifts and sharing our learning with them. A similar process of returning the individual properties of the temporal spirit to their sources on the mental plane will also take place before the awareness rejoins with its Greater. This is the part of the entire journey where lessons and teachings are received and the next incarnation is formulated. There is a full reunion with all of those who have died before us in this stage and as much time as we need to enjoy it.
All the paths to perfection that have been delivered to the Earth have arisen through inspiration that has its origins in the invisible world, in the Earth Zone, and have their causes in the Akasha and mental plane. All genuine teachers and gurus have come with the same teachings in different forms that have universal principles – that we are eternal beings, that the purpose of life is spiritual development, that love is key, that there is more than we perceive at work in the physical universe, and that it is the destiny of all human beings to reach perfection. All of these things are revealed to be true by the third voyage,. During its time in the Earth Zone the soul will comprehend all of these things from a specific perspective, this being a band or region of the Earth Zone that corresponds with the sphere resonant with the maturity of the souls development. For example, the soul who has mastered the astrological energy of the Moon may be drawn into the band of the Earth Zone that is analogous to the Moon sphere and its beings. The Earth Zone is in effect a cosmic mirror of Creation as it contains bands for all of the spheres that our awareness must voyage through when seeking incarnation on Earth. We can think of these as being like the bands of the rainbow, for the rainbow is their analogy in the physical plane. The bands are bands of density, meaning that there is a hierarchy for the soul to ascend, with the Saturn sphere and its band representing full completion of the Earthly agenda. Souls that come to rest in this band of the Earth Zone may become teachers for all those still working on their perfection, or move on to whatever comes next. Because these are bands of density within the Earth Zone that connect with the various spheres beyond it the bands serve as portals between the spheres. However, it is not possible for a being of a lower density to stay in a band or sphere that is above its maturity, as it will just be drawn back to wherever it resonates with. Only a being of a higher sphere or band can use these connections to condense their form into a lower vibrational frequency (this is how travel between dimensions is made). A being on a lower level must petition one on a higher level to come to it. This is the reason why prayers are offered to the deceased. It is also the intention of the work of The Practice of Magical Evocation – the magician visits all of these bands and spheres and becomes astrally and mentally able to withstand their vibrations and hold them while at the same time befriending the beings that inhabit those spheres.
The path to perfection is long but the spirit understands that it has all the time it will ever need, and more, in the present moment. Each moment is precious and perfect because it offers us an endless opportunity to progress and measure that progress. When we pass from this world we do not truly die but instead return to where we came from, into the very heart of the sacredness of life, where we always were, and always shall be.
Progressions of the Soul
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This month we are diving deep into the rhythms of life and the soul of the world with the secondary progressed Moon. Come with me, there are wonders to reveal!
For my lil sis, Tina.
Rest in Peace
You’ll Never Walk Alone
While I have made many explorations of transits in the 10 years I have been sharing these Journeys with you, I have not said much in comparison about progressions. The 5 previous Journeys that focus most heavily on this topic can be found by following the links at the end of this one, and I will only be repeating some of that information here for fresh eyes.
The reason for this is that progressions are somewhat harder to generalize about – they are far more personal – and more technical to explain. For those unaware, while transits are what we call the influences that arise from the current positions of objects in the sky and how they interact with your natal astrology, progressions are symbolic movements of your natal objects representing their growth and inner development. There are two main techniques for progressing the objects in a chart, one called solar arc progression and one called secondary progression.
In secondary progression, the one I use most, the positions of objects in your natal chart are symbolically moved according to the following: the positions of the planets 1 day after you are born describe the progressions of your first birthday, age 1, 2 days after is year 2, 3 days after is year 3, and so on. In other words, to know the secondary progressions of your 30th year we look for the positions of planets 30 days after you were born. To obtain fully accurate dates for when these years begin astrologers in the past needed to make frequently confusing and error prone calendrical adjustments, but computers are taking over this heavy lifting now. The unfortunate consequence of this, however, is that we are forgetting how to generate them without computers, and so in my book The 26 Keys I explain these calculations in detail. Secondary progressions are today the most popular of the two techniques.
Solar arc progressions are a related but simpler form (in the sense that they are much easier to figure out) because the objects in the chart are simply moved forward 1° for each year – 1° being the rate at which the Sun travels each day, hence the name. This means that by solar arc all the objects progress at the same rate (1° for each year) while in secondary progressions the differing motions of the planets produce different rates or speeds of progressions – 30 days after you are born the Moon will have gone all the way around the chart once, while Saturn will have hardly moved at all and the Sun will have moved 30° or one sign. Also, because secondary progressions are drawn from the actual positions of planets in the days and weeks after birth and some of those planets can retrograde, your planets could actually progress backwards in the zodiac by this method. It is also complicated when you need to find a secondary progressed ascendant and midheaven, as people move around often in life.
Thus one of the main differences between the two types of progression is variability of motion or speed, but another less commonly observed one is that solar arc directions are by their nature connected to the solar principle and thus have something to do with us becoming conscious or more alive to various forces in life while secondary progressions are not so much connected with conscious awareness and more with the evolution or development of pure archetypes – for instance, the solar arc progression of your Mercury will show how you become more conscious of what Mercury is and more alive to it while the secondary progression of your Mercury will concern itself almost solely with the development of all the things of the intellectual mind. These are only general rules but this is the subtle but important difference between becoming more aware of a thing (solar arcs) and the thing itself changing within us (secondary progressions). Both have uses and many astrologers make use of both but often without understanding the differences. Both techniques can be used to forecast or predict major life events just as transits can be, but the difference between transits and progressions is that transits most often arise from our response to external conditions while progressions arise from a response to internal ones. Astrology is one of the few divinatory techniques with an advanced system designed to distinguish between and provide this kind of information. This distinction between transits and progressions is a direct analogy and likely arises in origin from the eternal debate amongst astrologers regarding the philosophy of fate and free will. With transits, there is a more fated feel to the way they operate while with progressions there is an implication that we can exercise our free will in the shaping of our own being as it continually evolves within us rather than as a response to things that continually change in the outer world.
With transits the big influences, the ones with the most significance, arise from the slow-moving planets (from Jupiter outward) because these events occur far less frequently than transits from the faster moving planets. The Moon, for example, takes only 28 days or so to transit your entire chart (thereby triggering every possible aspect every month) while Saturn takes about 28 years to do that. This means you will have many thousands even tens of thousands of Moon transits to deal with throughout the course of your life but only a handful of Saturn transits in comparison. Something that happens once a month is deemed not as significant as something that happens once every 28 years, for obvious reasons.
However with progressions the complete reverse is true – since we are dealing in days the fast moving planets can potentially move very long distances in 30 days while the slow moving objects of the solar system will barely move in that time. Since they will barely move they will not progress very far from their natal position and do not have anywhere near as much of a range of flexibility to progress. They can still progress to significant places in the chart depending upon where they are placed in the overall pattern of that chart – for example your Saturn might be placed at the end of Aquarius and therefore, at some point in your life, progress into Pisces marking a significant change, or it might progress enough degrees by the time you are 60 that it makes a conjunction with your natal Sun or Moon – but this eventuality is uncommon. In progressions, then, the more frequently something occurs the more significant it is, not less. We can also understand from this that the natal positions of the slow-moving planets offer much less opportunity for progression. Our relationship to Jupiter, Saturn, etc., evolves mostly not from internal change but from our response to external change as we age, encounter life and grow through the transits we encounter from them and to their natal positions. Conversely our relationship to the faster moving objects from the Sun and Moon out to Mars and the asteroids evolves mostly from shifting internal states as we evolve the principles of those planets chiefly through progressions. A big transit to your natal Mercury from transiting Pluto still has a profound effect on the way you internally experience Mercury (changing it forever) but it has a different origin or source and is less likely to happen than a change to your Mercury that comes from progression of that Mercury (or a progression by something else to it). In fact that big hit from transiting Pluto to your Mercury may never come at all in any form, it depends on the position of Pluto relative to Mercury in your birth chart.
Another important observation to make between transits and progressions is that transits are global and universal while progressions are, as stated before, deeply personal. When transiting Jupiter recently entered Taurus, for example, it did so for everyone and everything at the same time. When transiting Mars and Neptune are in opposition (as they are at the time of writing) they are in opposition for everyone everywhere at the same time. Some people will be more or less sensitive to these influences depending upon how they contact that person’s natal chart so there is some personalization but it is made from a whole cloth which everyone has to deal with every part at the same time, just in differing degrees. With progressions however this is not the case. If your progressed Jupiter enters Taurus it’s not global, it’s about you, because this is only happening because of where Jupiter was in the days after you were born, not where Jupiter is up there now.
There is actually a deeper esoteric mystery here which we won’t dive into too much as it is a really big rabbit hole but considering the above we can actually understand progressions to be about cohorts of souls or group souls, families of souls that progress together. These are all the people born on the same day and year as you, in other words everyone who shares your exact birthday (actually it will also include most people born near to that day too, up to a few days or so either side). They will express and experience the journey differently depending on where in the world and when in that day they are born but they will have similar progressions at similar times of life. They just wont ever realise they are astrally connected in this way, at least not until they are initiated into it. We have astral twins who journey with us and we rarely meet any of them but if we did and we compared our personalities and experiences and when they occurred we would find astonishing parallels. I feel this is an area of research we could not plumb before now but with the advent of the internet it is very possible for people to locate many of their astral twins. What we might learn from this excites me.
Before I get started I would like to make the point that all of the times and ages at which things occur (given below) are rough, practically useful approximations. The Moon does not take exactly 28 days to orbit us, celestial mechanics is almost never this precise, and its speed varies, which throws variance into the mix. However, all the figures used are good enough to use in practice to give a general idea of timings. I recommend seeing an astrologer for more precise and detailed timings.
What I would like to share with you this month is built upon what I wrote in the previous two months about the lunar cycles. In these journeys I explained that the lunar cycle has 8 stages:
The New Moon – the beginning of the cycle, the planting of seed.
The Crescent Moon, the first growth appears. The Moon has moved about 45 degrees or 1.5 signs.
The 1st Quarter Moon. A time of momentum building with action, a leafing. The Moon has moved 90° or 3 signs.
The Gibbous Moon. The blooming or ripening time. The Moon has moved 135° or 4.5 signs.
The Full Moon. The high tide of the cycle, culmination, the fulfillment of the seed. The Moon has moved 180° or 6 signs.
The Disseminating Moon. The withering time, a winding down. The Moon has moved 225° or 7.5 signs.
The 3rd Quarter Moon. Harvest time, gathering the fruit. The Moon has moved 270° or 9 signs.
The Balsamic Moon. Rest time. The Moon has moved 315° or 10.5 signs.
The Moon begins a new cycle after 12 signs of 360°.
To get something out of what I am going to share you really only need to know the natal position of your Moon, but a full chart is best. You can obtain this easily online using one of the free services that calculate your chart for you. For this you obviously also need to know a time of birth and this needs to be reasonably accurate for the purposes of this journey but not exactly precise. To help with explaining I will be using the chart of the legendary singer, Tina Turner:
Note the Moons position at Gemini 07° as this is the component we will be working with. What we’re going to do here is map the cycle of the secondary progressed Moon around her chart, a cycle that takes around 28 years to complete, onto the above structure. The first step is actually very easy. Since the progressed Moon takes around 28 years to orbit the chart, it traverses half of it in 14 years or a quarter of it every 7 years. Half of the chart is six signs and a quarter of it is three signs. So we arrive at the following
The cycle begins at Gemini 07° (initially at birth, then every 28 years later).
The first progressed square (equivalent to the 1st Quarter Moon) takes place 7 years later with the Moon at Virgo 07°.
The progressed opposition (equivalent to a Full Moon) takes place 7 years after that at Sagittarius 07°.
The second progressed square (equivalent to the 3rd Quarter Moon) is 7 more years after that at Pisces 07°.
The new cycle will begin 7 years after, 28 years after it began, at Gemini 07°.
This means that Tina Turner experiences major turning points in her progressed Moon cycle at age 7, 14, 21, 28, 35 and so on occurring at seven year intervals. This is the core fabric of the progressed Moon cycle which is shared by everyone – these are universal life experiences for specific ages – but notice that for Tina Turner the Mutable signs (or Reactive) signs are the ones that control these turning points and that they are specifically attached to either a square and opposition or conjunction in these signs.
We can then add the remaining parts of the lunar cycle as follows:
The Crescent stage is at Cancer 22° beginning at around the age of 3.5 and every 28 years after (this being 1.5 signs or 1 sign plus 15 degrees after Gemini 07° and half way between birth and the age of 7) – at 3.5, 31.5, 59.5, 87.5
The Gibbous stage is at Libra 22° around the age of 10.5 (and every 28 years after).
The Disseminating Moon is at Capricorn 22° around the age of 17.5 (and every 28 years after).
The Balsamic Moon is at Aries 22° around the age of 24.5 (and every 28 years after).
Notice that these parts of the cycle are all focused on Cardinal (or Active) signs and again that each particular stage will be associated with a different Cardinal sign. In total we combined these parts together with the the map for Tina Turner’s progressed Moon:
The cycle begins at Gemini 07° (initially at birth, then every 28 years later – at 28, 56, 84, 106).
The Crescent stage is at Cancer 22° beginning at around the age of 3.5 and every 28 years after, so at 3.5, 31.5, 59.5, 87.5
The first progressed square (equivalent to the 1st Quarter Moon) takes place with the Moon at Virgo 07°, at ages 7, 35, 63, 91.
The Gibbous stage is at Libra 22° around the age of 10.5 (and every 28 years after) – 10.5, 38.5, 66.5, 94.5.
The progressed opposition (equivalent to a Full Moon) takes at Sagittarius 07° – at 14, 42, 70, 98.
The Disseminating Moon is at Capricorn 22° around the age of 17.5 (and every 28 years after) – 17.5, 45.5, 73.5, 101.5
The second progressed square (equivalent to the 3rd Quarter Moon) is at Pisces 07° – at 21, 49, 77, 105.
The Balsamic Moon is at Aries 22° around the age of 24.5 (and every 28 years after) – 24.5, 52.5, 80.5, 108.5
We can now make some notes about the cycle as a whole:
1) It hinges on Mutable signs and the midpoints of each quarter of the cycle are in Cardinal signs.
2) Its all related back to the natal Gemini Moon every 28 years. The seeds are all Gemini themed.
3) The Crescent Moon stage of first growth appearing is given to Cancerian themes.
4) The 1st Quarter stage of action gathering momentum is given to Virgo themes.
5) The Gibbous stage of things fruiting and blooming is coloured by Libra themes.
6) The Full Moon stage of culmination and high tide is given to Sagittarius themes.
7) The Disseminating stage of things winding down is given to Capricorn themes.
8) The 3rd Quarter stage of reaction and harvesting is given to Pisces themes.
9) The Balsamic stage of rest and closure of the cycle is given to Aries themes.
If we want we can replace or add to this using the four Elements instead of the signs:
1) New Moon stage: its all related back to the natal Air Moon every 28 years. The seeds are all Air themed.
2) The Crescent Moon stage of first growth appearing is given to Water themes.
3) The 1st Quarter stage of action gathering momentum is given to Earth themes.
4) The Gibbous stage of things fruiting and blooming is coloured by Air themes.
5) The Full Moon stage of culmination and high tide is given to Fire themes.
6) The Disseminating stage of things winding down is given to Earth themes.
7) The 3rd Quarter stage of reaction and harvesting is given to Water themes.
8) The Balsamic stage of rest and closure of the cycle is given to Fire themes.
This version is especially useful for those seeking or maintaining the magical equilibrium of the soul. For example, in Tina’s chart the 1st Quarter stage of action gathering momentum is Earthy, so this might be a good time for her to seek a greater quantity or quality of connection to the Earth Element. However the entire cycle is Air themed and always brings her back to a development of that Element. She might use the waxing phase (from the Full Moon stage to the next New Moon) to tackle certain Earth or Fire traits she wants to diminish in her soul, or work with the Water Element to draw meaning and teachings from the cycle.
If we want to we can now also add the house or temple positions for each of these stages. We just have to locate 07° of all 4 Mutable signs and 22° of all 4 Cardinal signs to locate the temple the Moon will be in:
1) The cycle itself always leads back to the Moon at 07° Gemini in her 10th house of career and public visibility.
2) The first growth (Crescent in Cancer) occurs in the 12th house of isolation, retreat and the interior world (where we locate 22° Cancer).
3) The stage of building momentum (1st Quarter in Virgo) is placed in the 1st house of identity and life energy.
4) The stage of fruiting or blooming (Gibbous in Libra) is placed in the 3rd house of communication and siblings.
5) The stage of culmination or high tide (Full Moon in Sagittarius) is in her 4th house of home, the past and family.
6) The stage of winding down (Disseminating stage in Capricorn) is in her 6th house of illness, employees and services.
7) The stage of reaction or harvest (3rd Quarter in Pisces) is in her 7th house of partners and relating.
8) The stage of rest and closure (Balsamic Moon in Aries) is located in her 9th house of discovery and the broadening of the mind.
Just using this information we have a very solid basis from which to form an interpretive view and we can research different periods in her life that should correlate with these influences, but it will often be hard to see them publicly as the progressed Moon is about how our soul or personality changes – only those really close to us can truly perceive them all, so it is best to start with your own chart and the charts of those you have known personally for some time.
Going deeper, the next step is to involve the positions of her natal planets. First, start with dividing the cycle into four parts using the major turning points just as we did earlier:
The cycle begins at Gemini 07° (initially at birth, then every 28 years later).
The first progressed square (equivalent to the 1st Quarter Moon) takes place 7 years later with the Moon at Virgo 07°.
The progressed opposition (equivalent to a Full Moon) takes place 7 years after that at Sagittarius 07°.
The second progressed square (equivalent to the 3rd Quarter Moon) is 7 more years after that at Pisces 07°.
The new cycle will begin 7 years after, 28 years after it began, at Gemini 07°.
This gives us four parts of the cycle and four parts of the chart, and we can then just add the positions of her natal planets:
Gemini 07° to Virgo 07° – contains Moon, Chiron, Pluto and the Leo ascendant
Virgo 07° to Sagittarius 07° – contains Neptune, the Dragons Head, the Sun.
Sagittarius 07° to Pisces 07° – contains Mercury, Venus and Mars (Mercury is at Sagittarius 7° which really belongs to this stage)
Pisces 07° to Gemini 07° – contains Jupiter, Saturn, Dragons Tail, the midheaven, Uranus and Moon. Also Eris.
The first part, where things are planted, show themselves and eventually gather momentum is all about the Moon, Chiron, Pluto and the Leo ascendant and each of those objects in her natal chart will become involved in this stage and will be part of the cycle at that time. If you want to know where in this quarter of the cycle these particular planets will be involved (I.e. if we want to know whether it is likely to be in the planting stage, the stage of showing itself, or the stage of increasing momentum), then we just use the knowledge we gained earlier about when these phases occur – we know the Crescent stage, half way between the New and 1st Quarter stages, is located (in its centre) at Cancer 22°. Now all you need are the degrees of the Moon, Chiron, Pluto and the Leo ascendant and to figure out whether those positions are closer to (for Tina Turner) Gemini 07°, Cancer 22° or Virgo 07°:
Moon is at 7° Gemini and will always be powerfully connected to the planting stage.
Chiron is at 19° Cancer and connected to the Crescent stage.
Pluto is at 2° Leo and closer to being part of the Crescent stage.
Ascendant is at 17° Leo and closer to being part of the 1st Quarter stage.
Now we have a really useful map of this segment of the cycle and we can repeat this with the other three quarters of the chart. After this we can again look at the temples or houses that the progressed Moon travels through and when, which basically means using the house cusps of your chart as additional objects to check and remembering to think about which temple each of the natal planets are in. You can go into even greater detail with aspects of course – adding squares and trines and oppositions and sextiles really multiplies the details you can gain from this work but it may drown out the most significant parts which I have tried to highlight here. And you can also compare the current position of the progressed Moon to your transits and activations in your keys where the progressed Moon acts to strongly emphasize particular transits if it occurs alongside them and somehow matches them in significance, for example if your secondary progressed Moon is in the 9th house and Jupiter is activating (transiting) your 9th temple, that is a period in which your are quite likely to travel on a long voyage which will change the way you feel about yourself by expanding your horizons.
In terms of how long these influences last, the times when the progressed Moon is moving through a particular temple or house are easier to define since it’s just between one degree and another that this will be case, and this will be in most cases 2.5 years on average depending on the width of the house, but with planets the issue is a little murkier. The progressed Moon will be stimulating that natal planet for around two or three months in total, longer if that planet is something really significant like the Sun, the Moon itself or the ascendant or chart ruler (in which case it will be about 6 months to a year). The transiting Moon can be used to focus the timing more. As an example, we know that Tinas Chiron gets involved in her progressed Moon cycle at the Crescent stage, and we know the years of her life in which this happens (3.5, 31.5, 59.5, 87.5). Chiron is not a major chart factor for her, its in the 12th and not tied to either of the Lights or the ascendant/ascendant ruler by aspect, and so sometime in these years of her life, lasting for around 2-3 months, Chiron will get involved and be a powerful part of the cycle. The most likely (by far) time for this to happen is when the transiting Moon is in the same place, i.e. when she has transiting Moon AND secondary progressed Moon conjunct Chiron. Since the transiting Moon will reach this place once a month, we only need to focus on the times each month of the year when that happens (giving us 12-13 occasions out of that year to consider as likely, one or two for each month, which each occasion covering a day and/or night). To narrow this down further, more accurate calculations must be made.
I hope this journey into progressions inspires you to study your own progressed Moon cycle and that this helps reveal to you the endless mysteries of the soul and the astral realm. I may be taking time off in September or October, but if not, see you mext month!
Further Reading:
The Magic Garden
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This month I want to share with you some of the things I have learned recently and in my life in my work with plants.
For Dad
In the realm of plant cultivation there exists a lesser-known yet profoundly intriguing practice that delves into the celestial dance of the stars and planets. Astrology, with its ancient roots and mystical allure, has been intimately intertwined with humanity’s understanding of the cosmos for centuries. But what if this celestial wisdom could be harnessed to enhance the growth and vitality of plants? This journey aims to explore the fascinating relationship between astrology and plant cultivation, illuminating the insights of esteemed astrologers like Nicholas Culpeper and other authors who have embraced this captivating field.
Plants have always fascinated and attracted me. I have Saturn in Taurus and they have taught me many things as whenever I was alone (Saturn) except for plants (Taurus), things came to me, realizations, senses. One of my earliest memories is being around three years old and planting daffodil bulbs in the back garden with my father and sister. I remember being initially put off by the strange, somewhat ugly bulbs and puzzled as to why we were burying them until I actually put my hands in the soil to dig a hole at the direction of my father and felt instantly and instinctively the rightness to what I was doing, it felt completely natural and human. This must have been in the late winter around February because there was no frost and the soil was easy to scoop up. After this my father directed my sister and I to wait, and we waited not just a few minutes as we perhaps thought but what seemed to us an absolute eternity for anything at all to happen so that my sister (a Sagittarius) went on to focus on more exciting things while I (a Scorpio) stuck it out, watching every day for anything to happen. When the first verdant green shoots appeared like emerald spears I was shocked and excited (my sister immediately became enthused again) and also instantly filled with excitement about the mystery of what would happen next, because it was clear those emerald spears meant business. I was not disappointed of course – daffodils are spectacular in both colour and form and when they popped open it was more than a delight to me, it was a miracle. How did this incredible beauty emerge from something that looked like a potato when I put it in the ground? It just lay there! I remember most clearly having a question which I never put into words at the time because I couldn’t – what was inside the bulb when I put it in the ground that made this happen? Was the daffodil inside the bulb like a sleeping animal or like my neighbours tortoise which we fed lettuce to? Or was there some secret, some magic inside the bulb that made this happen and if so what was it?
My father had ignited my love of plants in this lifetime by revealing this mystery and he nurtured it by offering no explanation whatsoever. He let it be, the whole point for him had been introducing his children to the wonder and mystery of nature and so there was no point in trying to explain it. I have the feeling now that this was something his father did with his children, and so on back to an original gardening enthusiast, or possibly a magician, or even an astrologer. Both magic and astrology have been used in gardening since gardening, and gardening is as old as our relationship to nature. I imagine that what I felt as a child in witnessing the daffodil explode into colour is just a shadow of what our ancient ancestors must have felt at the whole of nature before we learned about agriculture. Our teachers then were not books and professors, of which there were none, they were instead our own inner being and the spirits of the plants themselves and so the whole of nature was a thing of wonder and magic. Now we take almost every tree we encounter for granted as if it doesn’t really exist but then we saw every tree every plant indeed every thing from the stars in the sky to the dust beneath feet as an individual being with its own story, personality and spirit. Ultimately our ancestors understood the truth, that the Earth is a living being with an intelligence. When someone got ill, tribal cultures did not consult libraries, experts or the Internet for a diagnosis and remedy – they consulted nature. They talked to the spirit guides of animals and ancestors, they listened to the whispers of trees and the wind, they followed the signs to the precise location where the remedy grew and they recognised it the moment they set eyes upon it, taking respectfully and only what they needed. Their shaman would then tell them how to prepare and apply it.
Although we have moved on and now interact with the world of plants through the technology of agriculture and most of us or many of us now only have contact with plants that arrive in plastic bags and are consumed without any first hand awareness of how they have come into being, my early experience revealed to me the fact that deep inside all of us this original and primal connection still exists. It may have atrophied through misuse and disuse so that we can no longer communicate with the world of plants the way we used to without relearning it, but the basic connection has been unaltered, the fundamental sense of wonder and mystery is still within us. It is actually intrinsic to who we are which is to say it is fundamental to being human and being born on this planet. Furthermore, the fact that we have drifted so far away from our intrinsic connection to plant intelligence and being only means that at this point they have a great deal of spiritual insight and guidance to offer us. One of the most significant and profound offerings that all plant beings extend towards all of us is their mastery of presence, stillness and acceptance, which is to say they are masters of being in magical equilibrium with all of nature. There is no resistance in plants, no judgment, which equates to an awareness aligned with cosmic consciousness. Even a single blade of grass knows exactly where the Sun is, when it rises and sets, and it aligns itself with that at all times. If we imagine this on a universal scale it’s quite beautiful – we can perceive the light of our star shining upon our living world and where she is lit by his warmth, all the plants down to every blade of grass take note, become animated, and stand to attention, reaching out to it as if to embrace it across the gulf of space, and as Earth turns, this wave of plant motion rolls around the globe, as if she is opening billions of colourful, pretty eyes to look at him. In a sense, our planet is very much like a giant plant or flower itself, a seed floating and nested in the dark soil of infinite space. Other worlds exist, of course, and plants are certainly growing there too, perhaps following two or even three suns, or something more exotic. The universal scale of plant life is a staggering, stupefying vision to contemplate. In worlds with low gravity and the appropriate environment, plants could grow into the atmosphere. They might float like giant gas balloons trailing their root system towards the ground without actually being embedded in it, and they might use it to ‘walk’ or touch each other, for instance. Such gigantic plants might have actually realised their dream of showing their flowers to the sun, and release spores into space to colonize other worlds. We could on, and on. When you really think about it, it is at least as interesting as the possibility of other kinds of alien life, but we rarely wonder about it. If the first alien life we found were a plant, I wouldn’t be disappointed, I’d be thrilled. Because to me, plants are, from a certain perspective, a more advanced awareness than ours – because they never lose that cosmic consciousness I mentioned. They are perfectly aligned with all that is, always. No lightning strike or storm can affect that, ever.
Plants are not only attuned to suns (really, stars) but also to moons and in our particular case they are even more attuned to the Moon than they are to our Sun. This is something that is well-known in gardening and is not at all controversial, but the claims of astrology, of course, are. In this article I will explain these claims and invite you to experiment in your own garden or balcony to verify whether these claims are valid or not for yourself.
SUN and MOON
The way the Sun affects plants is pretty obvious – it controls the seasons which govern their life cycles and provides sustenance in the form of light and warmth. The Moon is more subtle but even more powerful an influence than this. Essentially these are the plant gods who control, or rather profoundly influence, their lives. Actually this is true of us too, but only astrology believes that today. Plants have just never forgotten, and never will. Plants do not resist and allow the control, which means they have already achieved what we are trying to do – come into full alignment with our own inner Sun and Moon. Plants still have a will of their own, as any gardener can attest.
The Sun not only generates the seasons which govern the life cycle or phases of activity for plants but also serves as a source of the vital energy which plants require to be healthy. In fact there is a connection between the two, as the zodiac sign that the Sun is in not only acts as a seasonal marker but also as a marker for the quality of the vital energy it supplies – they are the same thing. Plants do not just respond to the degree of light and warmth but also to the tone of the vital energy contained in that light and warmth. The major points in the solar journey which govern the life activity of plants are the entry of the Sun into the Active or Cardinal signs of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, which are the two equinoxes and two solstices (the Cardinal signs which initiate things and so begin the seasons), and the halfway points between each of these major stations, which occur in the middle of each of the Fixed/Stable signs, one in Taurus, one in Leo, one in Scorpio and one in Aquarius. These are ancient festival times known as Beltane (May 1st, mid Taurus), Lammas (August 1st, mid Leo), Samhain (November 1st, mid Scorpio) and Imbolc (February 1st, mid Aquarius). These are midpoints or hearts for each of the seasons and thus represent their essence – Fixed signs sustain things. When plants react to these solar energies we see them display the essence of the season very directly – flowers bloom, leaves burn gold and fall, they are fully out of the earth or sleeping in their roots – but we also note them beginning to adapt to the arrival of the next season, which they fully engage in when the Sun enters a Reactive or Mutable sign, the signs which transfer things, since they act to regulate the seasons, changing one into another. These eight festivals form a solar wheel, eight pointed star or disc upon which the calendar of the ancient world was often firmly fixed and although cultures differed in the ceremonies that took place the essential meaning of the festival remained the same:
Samhain (October 31st – November 1st): The Scorpio festival, Samhain, also known as Halloween, is the beginning of the solar cycle. It represents the end of the harvest season and the start of the dark half of the year (in the northern hemisphere). It is a time to honor and remember the ancestors as well as reflect on mortality and the cycle of life and death. During this time, the veil between the world of the living and the world of spirits is thinnest. People would light bonfires, dress in costumes or masks to ward off evil spirits and leave offerings for their ancestors. Divination and rituals to honor and communicate with the dead were also common. At mealtime places would be set for beloved departed, ancestors or faeries, or plates of sustenance would be left on doorsteps. It marked the end of the harvest season when crops had been gathered and stored for the winter.
The Winter Solstice or Yule (December 21st – 22nd): The Capricorn festival, Yule, coincides with the shortest day and longest night of the year (in the northern hemisphere). It celebrates the return of the Sun and the rebirth of light. Yule is associated with themes of renewal, hope, and the promise of brighter days ahead. People would decorate their homes with evergreen branches, holly, and mistletoe to symbolize life and ward off evil spirits. Yule logs were burned in the hearth, and feasts were held to celebrate the return of the Sun and the promise of longer days. Gift-giving and sharing of food were important parts of the festivities. It coincided with the period when crops lay dormant in the fields, and people looked forward to the eventual renewal of growth.
Imbolc (February 1st – 2nd): The Aquarius festival, Imbolc heralds the arrival of spring and the awakening of the Earth. It is a time of purification, inspiration, and the anticipation of new growth. Imbolc is traditionally associated with the Celtic goddess Brigid and is celebrated through candlelight processions, divination, and the honoring of hearth and home. It was a time of purification and inspiration. People would light candles or bonfires to welcome the increasing light and ceremonies were held to bless seeds and agricultural tools. It was also a time for divination and crafting Brigid’s crosses or dolls – effigies and offerings for the Fae and the deities of spring.
The Spring Equinox or Ostara (March 20th – 21st): The Aries festival, Ostara, is observed during the spring equinox when day and night are of equal length. It symbolizes the arrival of spring and the renewal of life in nature. It is a time to celebrate fertility, balance, and new beginnings. Traditions often include the decorating of eggs, planting seeds, and honoring deities associated with growth and rebirth. It was a time to celebrate the onset of lambing season and the return of milk production, signaling the beginning of agricultural activities so it marked the start of spring and the agricultural season, with the emergence of new plant life, the birth of animals, and the beginning of planting and sowing. Despite the name there is no firmly established connection between Ostara and Easter (which is on a different day tied to the lunar calendar as the first Sunday following the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox, but has borrowed some symbolism for Ostara, like the eggs and the bunnies). It seems certain to me this was appropriated by the Church in order to convert people from local customs.
Beltane (April 30th – May 1st): The Taurus festival Beltane marks the beginning of summer and is a joyous celebration of fertility, passion, and the vitality of life. It is associated with the union of the god and goddess, symbolizing the sacred marriage and the blossoming of the Earth. Traditions include dancing around maypoles, bonfires, and rituals to promote fertility and abundance. It corresponded with the time when livestock were traditionally moved to summer pastures, and it was associated with the fertility of the land and the desire for a bountiful harvest. On the eve of Beltane the faerie realm is especially accessible and people may leave offerings or perform rituals to invite the blessings and protection of the fae. Their sacred trees, the hawthorn, oak and ash, are often where you will find them, especially if these trees are positioned in a triangle (see the poem by Kipling, ‘Oak, Ash & Thorn’).
The Summer Solstice or Litha (June 21st – 22nd): The Cancer festival of Litha corresponds with the summer solstice, the longest day of the year (northern hemisphere). It represents the peak of the solar power and the abundance of nature. Litha is a time of celebration, gratitude, and honoring the energy of the Sun. It often involves outdoor rituals, feasting, and enjoying the beauty of nature. Some traditions light bonfires to honour and draw the fae, whose powers are at their height, and jumping over the flames or walking through the smoke could provide protection from malevolent spirits and invite the blessings of the Fae. It aligns with the period when crops are maturing and fields are filled with the abundance of nature. In many places it was also a time of flooding, such as at the Nile, fertilizing the land with both light and water.
Lammas/Lughnasadh (August 1st – 2nd): The Leo festival, Lammas, also known as Lughnasadh, marks the beginning of the harvest season. It is a time to give thanks for the first fruits of the harvest and to honor the god Lugh, associated with skill, craftsmanship, and abundance. Lammas celebrates the bounty of the Earth and encourages reflection on personal growth and achievements. People would gather in fields or at sacred sites to give thanks for the fruits of the land and leave offerings to the genius loci or local spirits, sometimes baked into shaped bread. The first sheaves of grain were cut and made into a corn dolly or wreath also for this purpose. Games, competitions, and communal feasts were held to celebrate the abundance of the harvest and foster community spirit. It marked the reaping of grains, such as wheat and barley, and the acknowledgment of the fruits of the land.
The Autumn Equinox or Mabon (September 21st – 22nd): This is the Libra festival. Mabon occurs during the autumnal equinox when day and night are once again of equal length. It signifies the second harvest and the beginning of the descent into winter. Mabon is a time of balance, gratitude, and reflection. It emphasizes the importance of harmony and acknowledging the cycles of life, both in nature and within ourselves. Mabon is a time to give thanks for the second harvest and reflect on the balance in our lives. People would gather fruits, nuts, and grains and create altars or displays to honor the harvest. Feasting, sharing of food, and communal rituals focused on gratitude and introspection were common.
As you probably noticed, the theme of each festival is reversed if we are in the southern hemisphere because there the solstice of Cancer in June represents the longest night not the longest day, and similarly the festival at Capricorn is the longest day, not the longest night. By adapting the symbolism and meanings of the festivals to align with the appropriate seasons in the southern hemisphere, practitioners can honor the natural rhythms of their environment and embrace the unique qualities of their local seasons. In this case, the dates for the festivals are changed, and this in turn changes the starting point of the solar cycle:
Samhain ( April 30th/May 1st)
Yule (June 20th/21st)
Imbolc (August 1st/2nd)
Ostara (September 21st/22nd)
Beltane (October 31st/November 1st)
Litha (December 21st/22nd)
Lammas/Lughnasadh ( February 1st/2nd)
Mabon (March 20th/21st)
However this is problematic astrologically because now the beginning of, for example, spring is not the Sun entering Aries, but Libra. This problem is a consequence of an intellectual astrology being mostly practiced in the northern hemisphere. This isn’t too problematic though, as the symbolism of the 12 signs is flexible and broad enough to embrace it. Libra is a sign of beauty and colour and perfume, which makes perfect sense for spring. It’s more difficult to adapt the symbolism of Capricorn to the heart of summer, though. However even signs like Capricorn are still adaptable – for example, during the summer solstice, which represents the persistent peak of warmth and vitality in the southern hemisphere, the symbolism of Capricorn can be incorporated to highlight the inner persistence, resilience, and determination (Capricorn traits) needed to make the most of the abundant energy and seize opportunities during the summer season, and Capricorn’s traditional association with work and responsibility can be re-imagined to encompass the idea of balancing work and play or the signs inclination towards long-term achievements and grounded aspirations can lead to a focus on nurturing personal development, setting goals, and channeling the vibrant energy of the season towards scaling personal mountains. Culture has always adapted and re-imagined these festivals according to the local experience of the environment and the times we live in and we should do the same. Creativity is part of the essence of magic.
The common theme in all these solar festivals, naturally, is light and flame, from torches to baking goods in hot ovens and spooky Halloween lanterns. They are celebrations of the wheel of light in the year, mirrored daily in the wheel of the Sun as it moves across the sky from east to west and back to the east. These eight festivals form a continuous cycle, representing the eternal cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth that is reflected in the natural world and in spiritual journeys. They offer opportunities to connect with nature, celebrate the seasons, and honor the life of the world, our life, in a meaningful, cyclical pattern. For many practitioners of magic, then, they are the most important dates in the year.
While the Suns influence comes from its brilliance, its radiant power, the Moon gains its influence over plants through its proximity, which has an effect on gravity, which in turn causes the water in plants to react, sometimes pulling it up, other times pushing it down. This is actually a gross oversimplification as the astral and physical effects of the Moon on the plant kingdom are truly beyond any kind of inventory. We can, however, make practical use of some general, universal principles. These principles are well known in traditional gardening lore. Gardeners, by nature, are not theoretical speculators – they are practical observers and this lore comes from hands on experience, not thinking.
Three primary factors to remember are the phase of the Moon, the zodiac sign of the Moon and the Element of that sign. The phases of the Moon are connected to the way it regulates gravity and therefore its influence over liquids. In general the waxing Moon is when the plants energy is increasing, making it suitable for harvesting plants that have tonifying and strengthening properties while the waning Moon is better for reducing and eliminating energies, making it suitable for harvesting plants used for purifying and detoxifying purposes.
New Moon: There is no light (vital energy) from the Sun and the Moon’s effect on gravity is strong, pulling water up, which aids in the germination of seeds, which swell. Thus, this is the Moon of the seed of the plant sleeping in the dark. It is the best time to plant aboveground plants that produce seeds outside of the fruit (for example lettuce, cabbage, grains). Planting of such seeds at the New Moon can be paired with the analogies of signs and Elements to certain plants (described below) for optimal planting (the same being true for the other phases too). This advice applies until the 1st Quarter Moon (so it includes the waxing crescent phase too).
1st Quarter Moon (waxing half Moon): Light is increasing upon the face of the Moon and there is less gravitational pull over water. This is good for leaf growth and is the the best time to plant aboveground plants that produce seeds inside of fruits (like beans, melons, peas, squash, tomatoes, etc.). This lasts until the Full Moon, and so includes the waxing Gibbous Moon as well (the Moon as a glowing brooch of light).
Full Moon: This is the peak of the lunar cycle where gravity is strong, water tables rise and vital energy is drawn down powerfully into a plants root systems. After the Full Moon and the light upon it starts to decrease, i.e. once it enters waning phase, root growth increases and so this is a good time to plant root crops like beets, carrots, onions and potatoes. It is also a good phase to transplant any kind of plant. This lasts until the 3rd Quarter Moon and so also includes the waning Disseminating Moon. The Full Moon is considered the peak of the plants energy and is often associated with harvesting plants for their essential oils or those with cooling and calming properties.
3rd Quarter Moon: As at the previous Quarter Moon, gravitational pull is less. This is a time of rest and readjustment for plants and is therefore a good time to weed, prune, fertilize or graft. This lasts until the New Moon and so includes the waning Balsamic Moon (a crescent again but this time darkening). However, at the Balsamic Moon (a few days before the New Moon) plants enter a dormant period wherein the death of the old takes place before the start of the new. This is a good time to leave them alone, but things like grass can be cut now if you want it to grow slowly. The same is true of hair (and the reverse, cut it a little at the 1st Quarter Moon to encourage its faster growth).
There is a direct correlation between the 8 phases of the monthly lunar cycle and the 8 solar festival days:
The New Moon is analogous to the Winter Solstice, Yule, the darkest, longest night of the year.
The waxing Crescent Moon is analogous to Imbolc, a time of growing light.
The 1st Quarter Moon is analogous to the Spring Equinox, Ostara, a time of equal light and dark, with lght ascendant.
The Gibbous Moon is analogous to Beltane, a time of momentum gathering as light peaks.
The Full Moon is analogous to the Summer Solstice, Litha, the brightest, longest day of the year.
The Disseminating Moon is analogous to Lammas, a time of decreasing light.
The 3rd Quarter Moon is analogous to the Autumn Equinox, Mabon, another time of equal dark and light, but with dark ascendant.
The Balsamic Moon is analogous to Samhain, a time of rest as darkness draws in.
This direct connection can become quite a powerful thing when the cycles actually align, such as when there is a New Moon on the Winter Solstice or a Crescent Moon around Imbolc, doubling the power of that particular influence. You can observe plants visibly responding to these alignments within a few days, sometimes less. The connection between the solar and lunar cycles is very useful for magical practices, especially those seeking to commune with plant spirits, working in spagyrics or plant medicine, or working with the Fae. They can form the basis of ritual interactions with sacred trees, groves or the flowers on your balcony as well as serving to guide you in the growing of foods like fruits, nuts and vegetables or the production of herbal medicines. The easiest way to do this is to follow the solar cycle and celebrate its festivals as special days and in between you follow the lunar cycle and perform mini versions of the solar festivals at the appropriate phase of the Moon on a monthly basis. You can also adapt this to what you are growing, for example since the 1st Quarter Moon is the best time to plant aboveground plants that produce seeds inside of fruits and Ostara is associated with honoring deities of growth and rebirth and painting eggs, you could combine these elements into your own ritual at the time of the 1st Quarter Moon. Don’t feel confined to what has already been practiced in traditions – make up your own in the same spirit! That is the heart of real magic because then it means something to you.
SIGNS & ELEMENTS
Both the solar and lunar cycles can be further delineated by the Zodiac signs and their Elements, providing the opportunity to add even more detail to your interaction with plants. Simply observe what sign the Moon is in and consider the following alongside the above:
1) First of all, if the Moon sign is Cardinal or Fixed, relate it to the matching solar festival (so, if it is Taurus match it to the meaning of Beltane in the northern hemisphere and Samhain in the southern) and combine this with the significance of the phase the Moon is in. For example, if the Taurus Moon is a Full Moon, and we are in the northern hemisphere, you might reach out to the faerie realm (a Beltane practice, which is analogous to the Full Moon) petitioning for assistance in planting a good crop of onions (a Full Moon planting activity). In the southern, you might do so while reflecting on the cycle of life and death, feeding something into the soil that will decompose and enrich the onions as you plant (Samhain themes). There are really many possibilities for your creativity here.
2) If the Moon is in a Fire sign, which is barren and dry, consider using it for fruit and crops grown for their seeds. You can also prune fruit trees and weed. Fire signs pair well with the 3rd Quarter Moon for harvesting to preserve fruit and vegetables for storage.
3) If the Moon is in an Earth sign, focus on roots. The Earth Element is fertile and good for planting in general but Earth signs are associated in plants with their roots and so are especially good for any underground crops and for transplanting to encourage root development. This pairs well with the Full Moon.
4) If the Moon is in an Air sign, focus on blooms and flowers. Libra is especially good for blooming flowers and herbs, vines and roots, Gemini for melons and Aquarius for onions. Air signs are generally a good time to harvest and cultivate the soil.
5) If the Moon is in a Water sign, focus on leaves. The Water Element provides the best days for planting all plants but is especially good for aboveground bearing, leafy annuals such as lettuce, spinach and chard. It pairs well with the New, 1st Quarter and Full Moon and is a good time to water plants.
6) If the Moon is void of course (meaning it will not make any more major aspects – conjunction, sextile, square, trine or opposition – to any other planets until it leaves the sign it is currently in), do nothing and wait for the Moon to enter a new sign. This is equivalent to a short period of rest for plants, like the Balsamic Moon. The void of course occurs every time the Moon leaves a sign (so every 2-3 days) and it will tend to be long when there are many planets in early degrees of their signs and short to non-existent when there are many planets in late degrees of their sign. A long void can go on for a day or more, while a short one can be only a few seconds. The issue with a void is that the Moon itself is resting.
7) Consider the traditional associations of each of the signs with specific plant properties and match accordingly:
Plants associated with Aries possess qualities like stimulation, heat, and invigoration. Examples are thorny plants, nettle, thistle, hops, red belted conk mushroom, rosemary and hellebore. Plants of Mars (see below) are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Taurus have properties related to fertility, nourishment, and earthiness. Examples include violet, primrose, shiitake mushroom, lady’s mantle, Solomon’s seal, and mint. Plants of Venus are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Gemini have properties related to the nervous system, respiratory health, and versatility. Examples here include caraway, lions mane mushroom, dill, parsley, lavender, and fennel. Plants of Mercury are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Cancer possess properties related to emotional support, nurturing qualities, and digestive health. Examples are white lily, watercress, turkey tail mushroom, moonwort, clary sage, and cabbage. Plants of the Moon are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Leo have properties related to heart health, vitality, and creative expression. Examples are bay, marigold, reishi mushroom, rosemary, sunflower, and saffron. Plants of the Sun are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Virgo possess properties related to digestion, purification, and healing. Examples are chaga mushrooms, maidenhair fern, valerian, chamomile, elecampane, and caraway. Plants of Mercury are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Libra have properties related to beauty, aesthetics, and hormonal balance. Examples are maitake mushroom, vervain, periwinkle, mugwort, olive, and golden rod. Plants of Venus are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Scorpio possess properties related to healing, rejuvenation, and reproductive health. Examples include basil, wormwood, horehound, cordyceps mushroom (just don’t eat “The Last of Us” kind!), rhubarb, and blackthorn. Plants of Mars are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Sagittarius have properties related to the immune system, mobility, and optimism. Examples include centaury, sage, betony, witch hazel, enokitake mushroom and borage. Plants of Jupiter are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Capricorn possess properties related to bone health, longevity, and grounding. Examples include comfrey, hemlock, tremella mushroom, Solomon’s Seal, hemp, and horsetail. Plants of Saturn are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Aquarius have properties related to circulation, nervous system support, and unconventional healing. Examples are southernwood, mugwort, agarikon mushroom, frankincense, bistort, and borage. Plants of Saturn are also appropriate.
Plants associated with Pisces possess properties related to relaxation, emotional healing, and connection to the spiritual realm. Examples are water lily, white poppy, psilocybe mushroom, seaweed, euphorbia, and almond. Plants of Jupiter are also appropriate.
You can also consider the ascendant in the same way when choosing a suitable time of day to plant or work on a particular plant. You want the rising sign to match the sign or planet of your plant and optimally plant it when the Moon is in that sign and on the ascendant (giving it a birth chart with the Moon (or the planet ruling the plant) rising in the sign that governs it, which you can treat as any natal chart). Avoid days when the Moon or planet is in hard aspect with Mars, Saturn or Pluto and favour days when it is conjunct, sextile or trine Venus or Jupiter. One final consideration you can apply is the difference in the Fluids between the morning and evening. In the morning as the Electric Fluid rises the Earth exhales, which permits the sap and water to rise making it the best time of day to harvest plants with aboveground edible parts. This is also the best time of day to apply plant food. In the evening as the Magnetic Fluid rises the Earth inhales, which pulls sap and water down into the roots and soil. This is the optimal time to sow seeds, spread compost, dig soil and harvest root crops.
PLANETS
Planets have long had associations with specific plants and you can also draw upon these connections in any work you do with them. You could cultivate a plant which ‘houses’ the spirit of a particular planetary energy. Often this is done by planting the seed when the relevant planet is well aspected and rising, or just whenever the Moon is in a good, strong condition, and working with it ritually over time. Plants sacred to the Faerie realm can be created this way, but in this case you should only harvest from it for ritual purposes, not for mundane meals, as this might count as eating faerie food, something warned against almost everywhere in the world. Many authors have written about these associations and some sources differ, so you will have to experiment to find what works for you. Here are some examples of plants connected to the Lights and planets:
Plants ruled by the Sun have warming and tonifying properties. Examples: chamomile, St. John’s Wort, marigold, rosemary, and bay laurel tree.
Plants influenced by the Moon have cooling and moistening properties. Examples: aloe, cabbage, cucumber, lettuce, jasmine, pumpkin and silver birch tree.
Mercury-ruled plants have stimulating and purifying effects. Examples: caraway, dill, fennel, lavender, parsley and hazel tree.
Plants under Venus’ influence have soothing and balancing properties. Examples: almond, apple, myrtle tree, rose, violet.
Mars-ruled plants have warming and stimulating effects. Examples: garlic, nettle, tobacco, wormwood, holly tree and radish.
Jupiter-ruled plants have nourishing and protective qualities. Examples: borage, fig, sage, mugwort, oak tree and agrimony.
Saturn ruled plants are often toxic to humans and include many poisons. They have astringent and grounding properties. Examples: henbane, patchouli, cypress tree, hemlock, mandrake, and comfrey.
Chiron: Very little known, but try echinacea.
Uranus: Associations are less well established but try the wild orchid and cedar tree.
Neptune: Associations are less well established but try seaweed, anything that grows underwater and water hemlock.
Pluto: Associations are less well established but try belladonna (very dangerous like hemlock) and the yew tree.
A NOTE ABOUT CONSUMPTION
Plants have been mindlessly devoured by humans for a long time. There is almost no thought given to the notion that this is a living being, just as an animal is a living being. This practice is not only disrespectful it also diminishes the power of plants to assist and uplift us. The occult and many spiritual traditions have long held that plants are aware and know what it happening to them and indeed that they have a vast intelligence largely hidden from humans. This is true. In the field of plant biology, researchers have uncovered fascinating aspects of plant behavior and communication. They have discovered signaling mechanisms, such as chemical and electrical signaling, that allow plants to respond to various stimuli and interact with their surroundings. Additionally, plants can exhibit adaptive behaviors, such as adjusting growth patterns in response to environmental cues. Yet this is just the view of traditional biology – quantum biology is an emerging field that explores the intersection of quantum physics and biology, aiming to understand how quantum phenomena may play a role in biological processes. In the study of plants, quantum biology has provided intriguing insights into various aspects of plant life. Plants use quantum coherence (the state of being in multiple places or states at the same time) in photosynthesis (it is part of how they know the optimal places to grow and enables them to ‘see’ where light falls), quantum tunneling (the ability of a particle to move through a barrier it does not have the energy to penetrate, due to its ability to function as a wave as well as a particle) in enzymatic reactions, quantum entanglement to communicate with one another and within their own internal structure (meaning they can be any distance apart physically, even on opposite sides of the universe, and still be in communication, and within the plant itself quantum entanglement enables rapid signaling between different parts of a plant, coordinating responses to stimuli and aiding in defense mechanisms), and quantum sensing and navigation to gather information from their surroundings. And this is just the very beginning of what we are learning.
Many plants are ruthlessly and brutally treated by human activity. Barley, grapes, tobacco, cocoa, coffee, cannabis, hops, wheat – the list is draining and staggering, including everything we consume in great quantities that has some origin in the plant realm. Their spirits and energies are chemically altered to benefit us as foods, pharmaceuticals, make-up, dyes for our clothing, perfumes, cleaning agents, beverages and books – a truly uncountable range and quantity of things. Often, they do this year after year, trillions of them. And we hardly notice. The time to notice again is now. We notice, at least in the beginning, by being mindful and grateful again, especially when we consume, but really at all times and not just with a special plant we grow in our garden or balcony, but with all of them, all year around. If we want to partake of their magic, we have only to ask and be receptive to it. Plants just give and give, and not just to us. It is, in essence, what they do, who they are. We live alongside these incredibly beautiful people in near blindness to all that they offer and provide, looking for strange new life out there when it is right under our feet.
Plants want to help us – in general – but nothing enjoys or benefits from abuse. We cannot blame them for the problems our own relationship to and use of them leads to. That’s all us. Tobacco and alcohol do not kill. Tobacco calms and focuses the mind, that is its spirit or what it offers to us, and alcohol wants to help us loosen up and enjoy social interaction. Neither of them seek to do harm. It is the human abuse of these things that does harm, along with all the actually toxic chemicals we add to plant products for things like colour. aroma and preservation. That abuse all begins with taking them for granted. This is what my father knew and gave me – an early respect for these living things that was intended to counter the complacency he knew was to come. It worked, and I suggest we do the same with children everywhere – beginning with ourselves, for we are, after all, children of the same magic garden – the wonderful, bountiful, fruitful and ever nourishing plan(e)t Earth.
Thank you for reading and coming on this journey with me! If you would like to support more articles like this please consider joining the gang at Patreon where at the 5 dollar or more a month tier you gain access to my monthly newsletter and forecast. See you next month!
Why we are all here
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This month we dive into the heart of the power of the astral and its relevance to astrology, magic and life.
This is a topic I have been talking about a lot lately with the people close to me. What I have to share will be useful to all readers, no matter their knowledge level of the subjects, but it may be especially interesting for people who are turning their Keys or involved in a system of magical initiation like Initiation into Hermetics. For everyone this message represents advice on how to improve every aspect of your life and it will help you to understand what life is for. For people turning Keys (as per the instructions in The 26 Keys) what follows can help to clarify the relationship that exists (and develops) between the practitioner and the various intelligent components of astrology that they interact with via conduction – the bonds and connections that form between you and the Lights, planets, signs and temples. Astrology is an astral language and so understanding the astral also illuminates what astrology is. For magicians this information will help them to understand the powerful role the astral plays in mediating between the mental and physical, particularly in manifesting desires, as well as providing a perspective (mine) on what the astral equilibrium is, how you know it, and how to stay in its flow. It will also venture into discussing the mental equilibrium and the connection all this has to astrological practices.
To venture deep here we need to understand some things about the invisible, or occult, universe we are always immersed in and the relationship this has to the physical. Astrology is fundamentally based on the universal law of ‘as above, so below’, sometimes called the principle of correspondence or the law of analogy, but there are actually other universal laws being expressed by astrology. Two fundamental ones we need to understand that relate to this in this journey are known as the principle of vibration and the principle of mentalism. The Kybalion (1908, ‘Three Initiates’) defines these as follows:
The principle of mentalism: “The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.”
The principle of vibration: “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”
A third principle, the law of attraction or manifestation, arises in part from the interaction between these two principles and it is this law of attraction that I want to explore with you here. To state it simply this law of attraction is that giving and receiving are one, that you receive what you put out, you get more of what you give. In essence the law of attraction is a manifestation of the other two principles so we need to understand these first. We also need to understand how the law of attraction operates differently in the mental and astral plane.
The first principle is an important one. The ‘Mind’ being referred to is not the ‘mind’ of personal thought. It is the universal mind, hence the capital ‘M’. A more modern word for what it represents (but still an inadequate one) is consciousness – so, everything is consciousness, the universe is conscious. Consciousness, as an experience, is the awareness of being, which is the awareness of being alive, of existing. We mistakenly think of some things as non-conscious (rocks, for example) because their physical form does not display consciousness in the ways we recognise (yet), but they are still conscious. There are no exceptions, either in the physical universe or anywhere beyond it. Everything has an ‘I Am’ awareness, although it may not think that as thought, lacking words or a brain that thinks.
The subtlest manifestation of consciousness that humans commonly recognise is its presence in the mental plane, a conceptual plane where it is experienced as a continuous flow of thought and ideas. However, consciousness itself is just a vehicle for thought and pure consciousness is without thought. This is the state of mind we attain naturally when we sit in meditation, empty and open and spacious, so that our awareness can encompass the timeless and formless presence of pure consciousness, alignment with Mind, our source and true being. Thought, and the mental plane, serve to focus consciousness. This focusing of pure consciousness into thought, once disciplined, is a key skill in magic of any tradition. It is through the ability to focus the mind on thought without distraction, with the knowledge of the co-creative universal power which is present in all things, the power to create things through the mind when it is a channel for Mind, that the magic is made to flow in the desired direction. Another way to put this across is to contemplate on the fact that no matter how the universe began or what it is, at this present moment in its existence it has evolved consciousness and self awareness in us, and that we and everything else that is conscious now are therefore literally the consciousness of the universe.
The principal of vibration is again universal but we perceive it’s activity more in the astral plane than in the mental or physical. In the astral plane the thoughts and concepts of the mental plane are translated into vibrational reality, their formless mental essence being given a shape in the form of symbols. The concept of joy, for example, expresses itself symbolically as smiling (among other things). It’s important to note that these symbols are specific to personal perspectives – humans smile to symbolize the expression of joy, but apes do not. For them it symbolises a different thing. Human beings have an occult anatomy that interacts with the astral plane primarily through their feelings and emotions – we sense it and perceive it this way most of the time. We do have astral senses that are the equivalent of our physical senses – so there is an astral vision, an astral hearing, etc. However, these senses are largely dulled and overpowered/obscured by our focus on what our physical senses provide. When we learn to focus on the senses of the astral body we develop psychically, becoming able to translate the vibrational reality of the astral with our physical and astral senses simultaneously.
Because of this relationship between human emotions and the astral realm we can say that the primary indicator we have for our astral condition – the astral vibration we are currently resonating with – is our mood, and also that emotions are the most symbolic things we know. However the astral plane is not just a realm of emotions but more accurately one of vibrational significance – everything vibrates and these vibrations interact so that they affect one another in an endless ocean of waves and pulses and rhythms – an energetic ocean of resonance, of things buzzing and triggering reactions in an endless feedback loop. When you walk through the forest your vibration merges with the vibration present in the forest and you sense it as your vibration shifts to be more aligned with that of the forest. Then you get in a car and go to work and your vibrational frequency shifts again, probably to a more tense feeling. The part you’re probably not noticing is how the forest and car and workplace are also shifting to align with your vibrational frequency. The astral body is more porous than the physical body, so unless you seal it off with a shield or a cloak you are continually interacting with the vibration of your environment in an intimate way. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it is what allows you to feel what you feel when you walk through that forest. It is important to note, however, that how you feel is the indicator of your astral vibration in every case and that you retain the ability, in most situations, to shift your mood at will simply by focusing on things.
Because the mental plane is closer to pure or undifferentiated consciousness than the astral plane is, thought naturally leads to or gives birth to feeling. What we focus on in the mental plane – what we think about – causes corresponding vibrational frequencies on the astral plane ‘below’ it – it brings feelings related to those thoughts. If we maintain our focus on a thought, the feeling or vibrational power of it on the astral plane increases. Focusing on an idea also causes other ideas which are similar to it to be drawn to it on the mental plane – if you think about the concept of colours, for example, it is not long before you are also thinking about red. This is the law of attraction on the mental plane. It causes things which are similar to one another to be drawn together when focus is applied. This is how ideas ‘add up’ and evolve, by gaining traction. It is also the secret behind mental transference, the ability we have to transfer our awareness into different things. By focusing our thought on a tree, for instance, it is possible to join with its awareness, to become the tree, because our own mental awareness is able to assume its shape through the focused application of creative imagination.
In the astral, the idea of the colour red is symbolically experienced by human perception as being resonant with or symbolic of blood, and there is a strong emotional response to this. In a nonhuman body where the appearance of blood is not red, red does not have that significance in the astral realm. This is an example of what I said earlier about symbols being specific to personal perspective. However, in the astral plane the law of attraction polarises as a quality into attraction/repulsion because every feeling we have is actually both a desired and a not desired state or condition. Whereas the law of attraction on the mental plane draws like to like, forming chains and clusters of ideas and concepts with similar meanings to collect into larger entities, on the astral plane the same law encompasses the qualities of both repulsion and allure, and quantitatively all topics are vibrationally defined by a lack or an abundance – there is the feeling of not being loved and the feeling of being loved (or of having money, or health, or etc.), and these polarities are astrally connected. Every topic that exists as a pure concept in the mental realm (in other words everything) is experienced personally in a unique way by everything in the astral, and as a having and not having, a wanting and not wanting. You might like the colour red, it might make you feel really good, but I might feel uncomfortable with it. For you, red is alluring and for me it is repulsive. We can agree that neither of us is right, right and wrong have no place. We can argue and discuss the topic in attempts to shift the others view and thus the feeling they have about the topic, and this might occur, but we cannot fundamentally change the fact that there is a range of personal reactions to the colour red, some people will want it and some people will not want it. In the astral, every topic is like this, it is either something we want or something we do not want for ourselves. It’s either a feeling that makes us feel good or one that makes us feel not so good. Obviously, our personal history is a big factor in how we feel about everything – that is why the astral body is also what we call a soul. The soul is a vibrational body composed of how we feel about everything, and everything we have felt strongly in the past in this life or another is stored there vibrationally. The primary vibration, though, what we really feel and always will in the core of our being, is alignment with all that is, because it is our default state, our factory setting. We are just not focused there. In meditation, when all the vibrational activity settles because the absence of thought causes it to become calm and peaceful, we feel the vibration of the indescribable love of creation pouring into and out of us, the natural vibration of the soul. It’s just that most of the time we are not focused there and are frequently resistant to receiving it. The good news is the universe doesn’t care, it just keeps coming at us full tap knowing that one day our resistance will be surrendered. This is a genuine case of resistance being futile. There is an eternity for us to get it.
The astral serves the same purpose for the physical that the mental realm serves for the astral – it gives birth to it. The vibrational or energetic reality behind the universe of physical matter is its mother. The astral is therefore in between, so to speak, the mental and physical universe. However, everything beyond the physical universe is fully integrated with it in the present moment forever. These astral and mental realities are not ‘higher’ in the sense of being more distant and therefore remote. They are fully present in each moment of the physical universe at all times and in all places. In that sense, we can’t go there because we are already there. It is all around us, all in us. We can ‘go’ there only when we leave the physical body behind us, either by dying or finding a way to shift the focal point of our awareness into a separated astral or mental body. The way we ‘go’ or travel there all the time in everyday life without noticing it is the way our emotions and thoughts move us internally throughout the day – and boy do most of us go on epic journeys, even from one second to the next!
There are some important things we need to observe about these facts at this point. First, we can discipline our thoughts and learn greater and greater focus for our consciousness. Most people ramble in the mental plane, wandering all over the place and being drawn from one thought to another without much consciousness. This creates many thought forms with many different directives – beings I have described in a previous journey on psychic protection. Most of these beings are as feeble as the thoughts that organise them. Focus and repetition, however, can create powerful clusterings of thought. Some of these beings grow self aware through the law of attraction – a person (or culture) keeps thinking a particular thought and after a while it has grown from this idea and then this idea being drawn to it and added to it, until eventually it attains enough meaning that it is like a huge snowball rolling down an endless hill of snow, just gathering, gathering, until it becomes self aware, an intelligence to be reckoned with by anyone in its path. Entities take on substantial symbolic forms as astral beings at such points. Roleplaying gamers, painters, writers, performers and anyone who has felt obsessed by a living idea knows what this is like. Imaginary things come alive and start dictating their own desires, outcomes and destinies. Such beings often come back to us seeking to be fed more, they are after all our children in the mental plane. Novelist Anne Rice created one of these when she dreamed up her character Lestat, and in interviews she seemed to be aware of that. He would literally haunt her into writing more about him, and she would eventually give in. So, focus is powerful!
Following on from this it is clear, as I pointed out earlier, that since we can always choose what we focus our thoughts upon we can always also control our mood, and thus our vibration. If something we are thinking about makes us feel bad we can always choose to think about something else. We would do this more often except for the fact that some thoughts come with very powerful negative emotions and those emotions overwhelm our will and dominate our awareness. When we think about how such and such a person lied to us, for example, we don’t feel good about that but in that moment we don’t choose to think about something else to feel better either because of the strong emotion that carries us along with it or because we feel right and being right is too important for us to choose to feel better. We might be right, of course, but the point is we don’t choose to feel differently when being right feels bad. It is not loving to ourselves. If we cared about how we feel more than about our opinions and being right, we would choose to be happier immediately. In fact when you realise that some thoughts always make us feel good – for example, think of the cutest or most special animal you have ever known and notice the feeling – then you also have to admit that much of the time we suffer unnecessarily by thinking of things that make us feel bad, often to the point of wallowing in them, especially when they are not happening in our present but either in our past or some dreaded future. A lot of our suffering could just be disposed with.
We can also understand from this that the more frequently we think a thing the stronger and more powerful its vibration in our astral body becomes. This is part of the reason why some thoughts come with such overwhelming power over our awareness – we have simply thought that thing so many times that it’s vibration in our astral body is intense and dense enough to temporarily overpower our will and ability to choose to think about something else. This is how mantras and some talismans work – mantras through the act of repetition and the activation of the vibrational frequency of the mantra as its words lose their meaning and merge into a continuous sound, a resonance field that shifts consciousness (birdsong is similar and has a magical effect on all of the nature in audible range, for instance encouraging flowers to grow), and talismans through the powerful will of the magician impressing meaning into the object so that it becomes effective as a vibration when worn or held.
Here is the essence of the teaching, then – by maintaining our focus on thoughts that make us feel good, the universe creates a path forward toward our desires, and because we are listening for those signals without resistance in an expectant and calm manner, they come quickly and we notice them. As we act on that inspiration, which always feels uplifting and exciting, we move closer to what is desired and the momentum builds so that the next step, the next signal, is bigger, clearer. And all of this happens without effort or struggle because the process is one of feeling good as often as possible, whatever that involves for you. It is not required to stay feeling good all the time. Instead it’s required that we develop the habit of choosing to think in ways that make us feel better again whenever we notice that we are feeling bad.
The vibrational reality of the astral attracts and repels and so every feeling or desire that we have situates somewhere along the continuum of these absolutes – we like it a lot or not at all, we hated all of it, we are lukewarm, etc. This matters and is a gift because it helps us to clarify our desires and become more brilliant individually. When we came into this incarnation we knew this, we had the understanding that all of the things in the world we don’t like would clarify for us what we really do want for ourselves and each other, and we knew that by focusing the magically creative power of our consciousness through thoughts with strong desires, the vibrational laws of the universe would draw towards our physical orbit all of the experiences we needed to have to manifest that desire, provided it intended no harm. However, we also understood, each of us, that while in the physical universe we would lose sight of the vibrational reality we were swimming in and that we would need to rediscover this as well as use it for our benefit. We knew that all of the things in the world that we did not like would potentially become traps because by focusing upon them we would simply be re-creating them vibrationally in the present moment. In other words, we knew that if for example we focused too much on the loneliness of the lack of a lover in our lives then that is what we would get and we knew that having lost sight of the vibrational reality of the astral we would not realise that in order to break out of the trap of no lover in our lives we would have to change the way we feel about it and reach for a different vibrational frequency, in other words we would need to learn to focus on what we do want, not what we don’t. This means using the creative imagination to imagine the vibrational feeling of having a lover already being in our lives, conjuring that and building it up until its vibration is a match for what you have previously put out, and then gets stronger. Instead of waiting for a lover to give you a reason to feel happy, you focus on the happiness of how good it feels to be loved.
The universe is intelligent and therefore knows the best path for us. It knows what we want and responds with love to every desire we have for our happiness. The infinite astral universe moves around us to lead us on a path to the fulfillment of that happiness, often communicating to us symbolically what the next step is. However, because we are so focused on the material universe and on what is already present and very often focused on the lack of things that we want, we are not positioned to be receptive to the signals. We either miss them or refuse them because we are not vibrationally receptive to them. This is because we focus too much on the lack of what we want. If we are thinking a lot about the lack of that lover, we are not receptive to any signal the universe sends about meeting one. In fact, if the negative power of how we feel about not having a lover is intense enough, we wouldn’t even accept them if the perfect person came up behind us and goosed us cheekily – we simply wouldn’t believe it could happen to us and would dismiss it. However if we are thinking about how good it will feel with that lover in our lives, or if we are not thinking about that situation at all and are instead thinking about something else that feels good, or are just sitting peacefully and calmly in meditation, then our consciousness will be receptive to those signals when they come – and they will, because the universe will match it vibrationally, adding more and more inspiration to the pile – and if we take the action those symbols inspire we will move towards the experience of physical reality that matches our astral one. If we stay feeling generally good and calm and not blocking what we want by mismanaging our mood, the path is always laid before us and more importantly we will be able to recognize it and accept it. Any feeling of being unworthy or of not deserving happiness is delusional.
The fact that the astral universe moves around us (like the physical) leading us on a path to the fulfillment of happiness, often communicating to us symbolically what the next step is, is clearly relevant to astrology. It is a symbolic language we use to divine the way to happiness. It is also very much a vibrational science and art, displaying the intricate and complex mechanism of the solar system within us. Two planets, Venus and Mars, symbolize desire – Mars the pursuit of desiring and Venus of being desired. Mars is also symbolic of the specific vibration of desires we put out (I want this specific thing) while Venus is about the power or capacity of our vibrational ability to attract, specifically our capacity to feel (I want it so much because it will feel so good). The Moon symbolically represents our own astral vibration, the kinds of things and issues we vibrate or resonate with personally, and thus what we are naturally comfortable with (or sometimes in the case of difficult aspects, what we deny ourselves the comfort of vibrationally). The Sun is symbolic of the individualized expression of Mind within us, the creative power of our conscious focus of being, while Mercury reflects the focusing of that consciousness through different kinds of thoughts and ideas. The entire inner solar system plays a symbolic role in the way the astral realm of vibrations and the focusing of thought cause physical things to manifest into being through the law of attraction. Jupiter and Saturn play broader more general roles – they are principles of abundance and lack, of the overflowing cup that the law of attraction is and how open we are to its flow (Jupiter) and the experience of a lack of things, the necessities of which lead to us formulating efforts that restructure our vibrational output into something that creates a more stable framework for our own happiness – the redemption of the souls karma, its vibrational foundation (Saturn). The signs and houses and aspects of the ancient planets, the 7 visible planets, all shape the expression of the law of attraction in us in the physical universe. This is one of the things that distinguishes the ancient planets from the more modern ones. This means that we can actually make a very detailed map or blueprint of our relationship to the law of attraction from studying the birth chart. This map is not a static one, something we are stuck with from birth, because the inclusion of transits and progressions allows us to trace its development through time.
Relationships of all kinds also shift our vibration. We are in vibrational relationship with the entire universe but primarily with the Earth and the solar system we live in. Relationships are worlds. We enter into them and gradually create a private, intimate world that exists only between those in the relationship. This is a vibrational world, an attunement to one another that, if kept healthy with unconditional love, will only serve the growth of both. This is also true of our relationships with other worlds, with the planets. But unconditional love must begin within us, we must be unconditionally loving towards ourselves first because we cannot give what we have not already received. This means we have to love ourselves enough that we choose to think differently about the things that bring us pain and in some cases to choose not to think of those things – to choose loving thoughts and feelings regardless of conditions. Everyone who has suffered from depression at some point knows that it becomes like a bottomless pit, the more you think about the things that bring you depression the more depressed you feel and the less likely you think it is that it will ever end. The solution is not to drown it out with tablets, spend hours and hours in therapy talking about it, or tell yourself to just snap out of it – it is simply to put your mind consistently on things that either make you feel better or just not bad, such as going for a walk in a forest or going dancing for a while. Even the smallest thing – deciding you would enjoy a cup of tea and making it – begins the process. When there is only a glowing ember of the love of life left in you, you have to really milk that experience with the tea by focusing on it and the feeling it brings. Whatever uplifts you or takes your mind away from focusing on the things that are dragging your mood down is where you need to focus. Sometimes we need a good friend to come along and force us to focus on something that makes us feel better, even if it is something small. The power that some thoughts have over our emotions, the vibrational power of certain experiences we have, can set us up for quite a journey, which is what we call the healing of trauma. It’s often not possible for us to make the vibrational leap from feeling like we want to kill ourselves to feeling ecstatic joy – that leap is just too vast. We can however get there eventually if we move from depression to anger and then to something that feels slightly less bad and so on. And if we expect to get there because we focus on the abundance of things that are good in our lives (Jupiter), starting with the tea if necessary, instead of the limitations and burdens of what we lack (Saturn) then the universe will lay the path before us step by step in more and more significant ways. We just have to stay focused on managing the way we feel and following its guidance. When we feel bad, it means we need to think about the topic differently if we can, or think about something else that is good to think about if we can’t, and about nothing at all if we can find nothing good to think about. We should also observe the same guidance regarding what we say and write.
Sometimes the traumas we have experienced are distant enough that we can handle them or we can think of those things without the negative emotion or fear being so strong that it overwhelms our awareness. In these cases we don’t have to avoid thinking about those things entirely we can instead try to come at them from a fresh angle, perhaps extracting lessons and wisdom for the future, which causes our vibration on that topic to shift and thus allows healing and transformation. If someone has wronged us we may eventually be able to understand the reasons for it or we may not but what we can always do is realise that nothing gets to determine whether we are happy or not except ourselves. We can reach for better experiences by setting our astral vibration, by using our creative imagination to conjure the feeling of that better experience before it happens or just by choosing to dwell upon things that are fun or pleasing, things that are working out. This ensures that we will eventually escape the negative vibration we feel and the circumstances and thoughts that are attracted by that vibration.
What does all of this mean for students of Franz Bardon and “Initiation into Hermetics”? Simply put the astral equilibrium is the clearing of our own astral vibration so that it becomes receptive as a conduit for magical creation to occur through us. Fundamental to this attainment is that we acquire self-determination in how we respond to the constantly shifting ocean of resonance within the astral, internally and externally. We remain calm and in control of all of our emotional responses. If circumstances arise which cause us to feel (for example) anger at something then the presence of the astral equilibrium means we always get to choose whether or not we will express that anger (attaining the mental equilibrium means we won’t choose to express it because we know it is not in alignment with how the Greater Self perceives things). With the astral equilibrium there is never a loss of control over the astral response. However, more fundamental to the experience of the astral equilibrium is that it feels good. This is because we are being the best version of ourselves that we can be in that moment and we are also focused on the positive within us and in all of our experiences. In fact, if we choose habitually to interact with things that make us feel good, that uplift us emotionally and that keep us expectant of more good things happening in the future, we will naturally attain and stay in equilibrium. The simple but powerful truth is that you know you’re at least moving in that direction if you feel good about life and being who you are, and the more you know about who you are the more deeply and completely you can feel this joy of being you.
Furthermore, the Greater Self or Higher Self, the you of you, your Guardian Angel, wills your happiness at all times and is therefore always leading you to your greatest good. This means that when you feel good and are unconditionally loving towards yourself you are aligning with how your Greater Self feels about you. Aligning with how your Greater Self perceives you and by extension all of the universe is the result of the work of attaining the mental equilibrium. Therefore, by aligning with good feelings and their vibration you are aligning with your spiritual guidance and being led on a path that maintains or establishes the mental equilibrium as well as the astral equilibrium. Ultimately the inner spiritual being within you knows that all is well, and when you align with that thought you feel good because you are coming into alignment with that inner being. It is the discord in vibration between us and our Greater Self that causes us to feel bad. Therefore all of the bad feelings we have can be taken as signposts pointing us in the direction of our Greater Self, of enlightenment, of equilibrium and re-alignment with the universe.
On this path we choose to do things and think things that make us feel good and when other things arise that do not feel good we receive them as indicators that show where we are not yet in alignment with how our Greater Self perceives things. We try to perceive it differently, in a way that feels better to us, so that we move closer to alignment on that topic, or we choose to focus on something else that does feel good and is working out knowing that in doing so our situation is shifting on that difficult topic anyway because it is our vibration now that the universe is responding to now. Eventually it may shift enough that we can see a solution to that troubling topic where we could not before. Instead of focusing on the negative feelings we have about our now reality – the lack of money, of love, or health – we focus instead on the now-ness of our vibration, on what we are feeling now. Instead of having to figure out and hack the path to the manifestation of our desires – figure out which course to take, figure out which college to go to, study hard and attain degree, find ideal job (factors which can set a vibration that feels discouraging from the start) – we instead focus on the feeling of how good it will be to have a satisfying, fulfilling and rewarding career, we feed that thought and let its astral vibration, the good feeling, gather momentum, and when the inspiration to act comes, which is always coming, we follow through excitedly. And the joy, the true happiness of this path, is not the way it feels when we finally attain the material manifestation of what we desire, it’s the magic of the journey as we get to see the path laid out before us in synchronicity, coincidences, magic and surprises, the joy of seeing the power of creation moving through us into manifestation. Because that’s the wondrous experience we all came here for.
Spatial Astrology
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This month we look into the astrology of space and location.
Just over 10 years ago I opened this blog with a post titled “Journeys with the Astral Light” in which I discussed the concept of astrolocality, the idea that a chart manifests itself geographically in specific locations, using the astrology of Paramahansa Yogananda as an example. In this inaugural post I briefly explained the use of culminating, anti-culminating, rising, setting and paran lines and made some suggestions for their use in magical practice with astrology. Today I want to expand on that, adding what I have learned since then as well as diving more deeply into the topic than I have before. I want to show you this very exciting and very powerful technique which opens up many fertile areas of research, and will likely become an important element of future astrology. Using this technique we can add a new sentence to the meaning of any particular part of our chart – I can say, for example, that I have Neptune in Scorpio, Neptune in the 10th house, Neptune in conjunction with Moon and Venus, and I can also say I have Neptune in Berlin. This last statement may seem strange at first but it is as valid as any of the others and in my case it also describes my experience with Neptune more aptly than the others and is more concrete, less symbolic. When I first came to Berlin I was profoundly drawn to a particular fountain in the city centre, the Neptune Fountain showing Neptune surrounded by aquatic creatures and water nymphs. It sits just next to the tallest building visible anywhere in the city, the (very phallic) TV tower which can be seen anywhere and provides the most elevated view of the city. I didn’t know it then, but through astrolocality I have Neptune on the midheaven in Berlin – it picks up the energy of my natal Neptune and transfers it to the highest point in the chart, the midheaven, a place which can also be said to fountain, in a way, much like the invisible TV transmissions (Scorpio?). I met with a literal manifestation of the astrology in the landscape. Interesting though this is, however, it’s just the beginning of the discoveries awaiting astrologers who venture into this field. So let’s explore!
EMBARKING
Firstly, this use of astrology isn’t new, but in modern times it is being radically reinvented. This is due to the late astrologer Jim Lewis who pioneered the innovations in the late 1970s and patented his system as astro-cartography (ACG). The idea of astrolocality has been a traditional one for millennia, with the practice being to simply change the location of birth, keeping the time and date and thus all of the planetary aspects, and to interpret the new chart both independently and in comparison with the natal chart. If, for example, you are born in Rome then to find out what kind of conditions you meet in any given place we would recast your birth chart for that place instead of Rome and if the new chart put Venus or Jupiter on the ascendant or midheaven, and those planets were not terribly afflicted in the natal chart, then it would be seen as a beneficial place to visit, marry into, do business with, etc. Conversely, if Saturn or Mars was on the ascendant or midheaven, war or adversarial conditions might be expected, especially if these were planets that were harshly aspected in the natal chart. Houses and angular cusps become important in this interpretation as these are the ways in which planets change from one geographic location to another – for instance, today (March 29th) the Moon is in Cancer. It will be in Cancer wherever we are in the world (also with the same aspects), but our location will place it in one of the 12 houses. If that placing by house is also angular (conjunct the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th house cusp) it will be especially powerful in that geographical place, just like it would be if it were so in a natal chart.
What this means is that if, for example, you have ever wondered what it would be like to have had the Sun on the ascendant, or Venus on the midheaven, you can. It’s possible to simulate and thus cultivate it by living in a place that carried that resonance at birth. Or, lets assume you have Venus in Libra, a good placement for relationships, but she is in the 12th house of your natal chart, something indirect that brings a feeling of loneliness and isolation or shyness, and you have always wondered how it would be if she were instead more powerfully placed on the descendant, the cusp of the 7th, which is all about direct, open relationship. Again, you can have that experience, you just have to know where in the world you can find it. This is what astrolocality does. The reverse is also true – there are some places that we do not thrive in. Saturn/Pluto for example can be very harsh, like hard labour and extreme transformation that comes with a heavy price. If we have a Saturn/Pluto hard aspect in our natal chart, moving to a location that makes it angular could be devastating.
Importantly this does not negate anything in the birth chart, that remains our primary pattern, but what occurs when we travel is that we encounter our chart in the larger body of space that is the Earth, which is in effect a meta-body for everything that lives here, an expression of our being on a higher level. We are part of the life and body of the planet Earth and are entangled with it at the astral level of being, just like the solar system is. Also importantly, we can encounter this resonance in two ways, by going to it or having it come to us. That 12th house Venus person seeking a loving relationship may not have to travel to a place where Venus sets, they might just meet someone from there. Conversely, doing business with a company that has its head offices in that Saturn/Pluto location may not be a great idea.
Traditionally this practice has been limited by the fact that a new chart needs to be drawn for every location. Additionally, the traditional approach did not (really could not, practically speaking) take latitude into account – only zodiacal longitude was used, which is important because the true rising and setting of planets are also determined by how far away they are from the celestial equator (you can read more about this here). The use of computers and the work of Jim Lewis means we have now transcended these limitations and in the process we now have many new astrolocality techniques available, with further advances in technology still ahead suggesting that this will become a hot field of study in the future once more people catch on to it. The biggest transformation by far is that we can now project the entirety of our astrolocality onto a global map where the contacts planets make with various places emerge as continuous rings or lines that wrap around the globe. Essentially we can now visually see all of our astrolocality at once, as well as being able to filter and sort it. In the journey ahead I will explain the lines and present you with some examples of their importance. There are four types of lines to understand and work with, with two of the types splitting into two further subgroups each:
Planet Direction Lines – lines that amplify a planets natal position
Rising/Setting Lines – lines that simulate a planet being on the ascendant or descendent
Culminating/Anti-Culminating Lines – lines that simulate a planet being on the midheaven or IC
Paran Lines – lines that bring planetary relationships into manifest potential
The spatial power of these lines varies according to the dignity of the planet and (I suspect) the type of line, with rising and culminating lines gaining the edge, and lines connected with the Lights and a chart ruling planet having greater presence, but as a general rule of thumb a radius of 500 miles (about 800km) is average, with something like up to twice that range for a planet in rulership and on the ascendant in the natal chart. This is a long way so be sure so keep it in mind when looking at maps, as a simple natural or national border does not stop astral resonance! However the closer you are to the line, the stronger all effects become. Also, bear in mind that the geographical surface of the planet has changed considerably in human history – not only do national borders and identities change but the land too (most of Europe and North America were covered in ice up to about 12,000 years ago, for example) – something that is especially important when studying places for potential past lives, which are often the lines connected to the Lights (as symbols of life), Saturn and the Dragon (as symbols of karma).
PLANET DIRECTION LINES
Imagine that you are transported back to the time and place of your birth and that as you stand there you turn 360° scanning the horizon. The various planets in your birth chart will be positioned in certain directions. The Moon, for instance, might be located directly west of you. A planet direction line is a line that is created if you were to walk in the direction of a particular planet from this position. It’s the simplest line to understand as it is literally the direction in which the planet is located from the place and time of your birth. This is literally what the three wise men did in following the star (a bright Jupiter/Saturn conjunction in Virgo) to Bethlehem. If you keep going west following that Moon or star, you will of course eventually just circle the world and return to where you started from the east. When plotted onto a flat map of the Earth these lines appear to curve but they are in fact perfect circles which encompass the globe. Take a look at the image below:
This is a map of the southeast of the USA and these are the planet direction lines for Elvis Presley (January 8th 1935, 4:35am, Tupelo, Mississippi) who was born with Sagittarius rising and chart ruler Jupiter in Scorpio on the cusp of the 12th. Jupiter is also ruler of his 4th house. Jupiter was a big issue for Elvis (the rhinestones, sequins and sexually charged flambuoyance should give that away – his Jupiter rising line, explained below, goes through it). The place where they all fountain from is his birthplace. Notice the blue line that is connected to Jupiter that extends in a north-west and south-east direction. It goes directly through Memphis Tennessee, the location of Graceland, his ostentatious home. Presley died and is buried there, as are his parents, paternal grandmother, grandson, and daughter (Jupiter in Scorpio, a palatial mausoleum). Presley’s Sun and Mercury in Capricorn in the 2nd house, as well as his Pluto in Cancer in the 8th, have lines that pass through the Hawaiian islands where he made many financially successful films. The same lines also go through San Diego where he performed on live television with grinding, sexual movements that seemed shockingly vulgar at the time.His Moon in Pisces line goes through Paris, where he used to take leave as a soldier while posted as a young man in Germany. His Neptune line goes by New Orleans which greatly influenced his musical style.
Below you can see the planet direction lines for Cassius Clay (better known as Mohammad Ali), born January 17th 1942 at 6:35pm in Louisville, Kentucky:
His natal Saturn in Taurus in the 10th goes through Miami, Florida (where he won the heavyweight title aged 22 and declared “I am the greatest!”) and his Capricorn Sun (chart ruler with Leo rising) and Chiron (in Leo in the 12th) both go through Zaire (“The Rumble in the Jungle” where he regained the title through taunting his opponent into a knockout). His Mercury in Aquarius, which is closely conjunct his Moon with both square his midheaven and tightly opposite his Pluto and Chiron, leads all of these lines directly through New York City (“The Fight of the Century” where he suffered his first professional defeat, although he refused to accept the result and called it a ‘white mans decision’).
The literal interpretation of a planet direction line is “go here to meet me”. These lines carry the energy of the natal chart, so they embody all of the aspects as well as the sign and house of a given planet, basically amplifying the total natal effect of that planet and making it easier to manifest in concrete ways. It is like there is no getting away from that planets significance. On the opposite side of the world to where we were born these lines will all converge just as they do at our birth place, but I have no experience to share with you on that as nobody I know has visited such a place (often they are in the middle of the ocean anyway). Such a place might offer us an interesting new perspective on the totality of our life, as if seen in a mirror or upside down.
For practitioners of the approach I set out in The 26 Keys these lines can help you to locate places to go if you’re seeking to explore a particular activation. For example, if you want to get more out of a Saturn activation of the Moon key, interact with or travel along the Moon direction line, or possibly Saturn, at the appropriate time. They can also be good places to explore your natal planets even when there isn’t an activation of their key happening.
Another way you can use these lines is as a type of Feng Shui in the planning of your home and interior spaces such as altars or temples – simply transfer the lines onto a plan of your dwelling and place objects in the appropriate directions that act to capture and express (or perhaps contain and limit) that planets energy. For example if your Moon line heads west, think about aligning either your bedroom or the bed itself in a westerly direction, or placing plants of the Moon in the western parts, or if you have Jupiter in the 2nd house and its line moves northeast, place a pot of coins or some other symbol of income in the northeast. These objects then become your ritual tools for interacting with specific planetary energies in your birth chart. Colour and decoration can be creatively employed here too. In a way, this is a form of bringing the location to you rather than going to the location. You will notice however, that each planet will have two directions, and they will be opposite one another, since the world is a globe while your home is (probably) not spherical. In other words your Moon line will go west and east, your Jupiter line northeast and southwest, etc. You have to adapt the situation to the location, perhaps placing different but analogous things in the opposing directions (such as Moon plants in one area because it is a garden and moonstone at the other as it is a mantel over a fireplace). This duality can actually be a useful feature if you place objects with an affinity for the two binary Fluids as well as a planetary resonance, for example a masculine/force and a feminine/form object or thing for each planet.
RISING/SETTING LINES
Probably the easiest way to grasp what these lines are is to think for a moment about the fact that because the Earth is round, it is always sunrise and also sunset somewhere on the surface at any given moment. Right now, it is dawn somewhere and dusk somewhere else, as well as being midday and midnight in other locations. With rising/setting lines we are looking for the places where the planets were rising or setting elsewhere in the world for the time and place of your birth. So if you are born at dawn then your Sun rising line will pass through your birthplace and if you are born at sunset then your Sun setting line will pass through your birthplace. Being born at other times of day means the Sun was rising or setting somewhere else and it is this line that your Sun rising and setting lines will follow. By interacting with these lines you can have an experience of what a particular planet is like when it is placed on the ascendant or descendant of your chart instead of where it actually is. This is how you can have that experience of Venus in Libra in the 12th transferred to the 7th house – you travel to or interact with the locations along your Venus setting line, for example.
Rising lines can affect our appearance (like the kind of clothes we wear), our health and our identity. In evocation work the rising line for a planet will facilitate a more powerful manifestation of beings from the relevant planetary sphere, but it also useful for invocation. These lines are possibly the most powerful of all since they have an innate ability to manifest a planet’s potential in ways we consciously recognise as well as in physical and material space. They can be overwhelming if the planet is particularly strong in our natal chart, causing our identity to become flooded with the planets significance as well as heightening it. If we are seeking a closer merging of our identity with a particular planets function or a healing or rebirth experience with that planet this an ideal line to work with.
Setting lines often manifest themselves through our relationships either in the people that we meet who are connected to these locations or in the way influences from these places shape our relationships and empathy. They also shape our need for relationship. They have an astral power that externalizes itself in our interactions and therefore have greater objectivity than the rising lines where our identity merges with the planet, setting lines allowing us to instead have some kind of intercourse with that planet, a face-to-face confrontation, which makes them also useful in evocation, especially with troublesome entities that require control. If we have a strong Venus the setting lines will make ideal locations for things like honeymoons or romantic getaways or artistic inspiration. A strong Mars will instead make for thrill and adventure and the need for confidence on its rising line while its setting line might bring us into conflict and competition with others more readily.
These are the rising and setting lines for Queen Victoria of England (May 24th 1819, 4:15am, London UK):
The black lines are setting lines, the white lines are rising lines. Her Eris setting line goes through India, which rebelled against her and which she enslaved, similarly her Sun and Moon rising lines dominate the parts of Africa her empire extended into. Australia is dominated by both Saturn and Chiron setting. She inherited it as a penal colony but phased out and eventually ended this practice while seeking to unify the colonies, for which she is still remembered there. She also established the continents first university, in Melbourne. Her Uranus and Neptune rising lines lead toward Canada and the United States – she united Canada for the first time (thereby becoming the Mother of Confederation for Canadians) and while her relationship with the States was fraught with economic rivalry and suspicions following war she was committed to good relations and expressed personal interest in the inventiveness of Charles Morse (known for his development of the telegraph industry, not for inventing Morse code – that was Samuel Morse) and Washington Irving (author of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip Van Winkle’). These are very apt Uranus/Neptune connections!
CULMINATING / ANTI-CULMINATING LINES
These lines are the same conceptually as the rising/setting lines – they pass through all the places where a particular planet would be either on the midheaven or on the IC of the chart, the cusps of the 4th and 10th houses in many systems – but they differ in form because these circles circumnavigate the globe north/south rather than east/west and thus on a flat map they appear as straight lines that run from top to bottom. Here the energy of a particular planet is again heightened because it is angular but on the culminating lines which relate to the planet being on the midheaven there is a strong focus on attainment, ambition and public status and so these lines are very strongly connected with career interests and also with reputation or notoriety, with how we are seen by the public, while the anti-culminating lines are concerned with planting things, laying down foundations and building bases as well as with uncovering matters of the past and exploring family, national, cultural or clan identity. Culminating lines can provide a clear or higher perspective on a planets significance, clarifying its meaning in the mental realm, while anti-culminating lines ground and earth planetary energies and make ideal locations for temples, geomancy, the burial of ritual objects, burial of the dead, or giving things to the land. These are astra-physical places that also resonate with ancestry and past lives.
Albert Einstein (May 14th 1879, 11:30am, Ulm, Germany) moved to the USA from Switzerland and became a professor of physics at Princeton University – his culminating line for his natal Moon in Sagittarius (university) passing directly through the location.
Born in Europe, Audrey Hepburn (May 4th 1929, 3am, Ixelles, Belgium) became a beloved Hollywood icon and a humanitarian activist after moving to the United States. Her natal Neptune (film, humanitarianism) in Leo (glamour, spotlight, cats) moves to the midheaven there (one of her most famous photographs, the poster for “Breakfast at Tiffanys” literally shows her in glamorous evening wear with a cat on her shoulder):
Ernest Hemingway (July 21st 1899, 8am, Oak Park, Illinois), born with a powerful stellium of Saturn/Chiron/Uranus in Sagittarius, has this configuration transferred to the IC and grounded in 4th house concerns in Cuba, where he moved to spend much of his later life and where he wrote some of his most famous works, including “The Old Man and the Sea,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Hemingway’s time in Cuba is reflected in his writing, which often captures the rhythms and moods of the island’s culture and people:
PARAN LINES
Paran lines are easier to explain visually, so look at the image below:
These are the rising, setting, culminating and anti-culminating lines for Frank Sinatra (December 12th 1915, 3am, Hoboken, New Jersey, USA), but only the Sun and Moon lines are shown to make it easier for you to see what a paran line is. Turn your attention to Rio in Brazil and you will see that his Sun rising line (a wavy white line) passes almost directly through it. Notice also that there is a Moon anti–culminating line (a dotted straight line in purple) running north to south which bisects the Sun line just south of Rio. At the point of the intersection a solid straight yellow line extends in a ring East/West around the globe – this is a Sun/Moon paran line. A paran line forms at the intersection of any two of the rising, setting, culminating and anti-culminating lines, provided the planets are different ones. Notice that another paran line is generated just south of Japan (at the intersection of his Moon culminating and Sun setting lines) and that this line is the same distance from the equator as the previous line – paran lines exists in a mirror relationship with the equator as the mirroring line. Also note that a second pair of lines emerge from the intersections of his Moon rising/setting and Sun culminating/anti-culminating lines, located in Russia and the extreme South Pacific ocean. Notice how these yellow Sun/Moon paran lines highlight Hong Kong, Brisbane, Miami, Lisbon, Paris and London – all places where he gave memorable performances, mostly away from home. His Sun/setting line also passes close to Beijing, China, where he gave a concert that opened the way for other western musicians.
Paran lines are always horizontal and always come in pairs positioned on equidistant sides of the equator as explained and they can also be formed between planets and stars (or stars and stars) which opens up powerful possibilities for research into stars and their effects. I gave some examples of this in my analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. These lines indicate a potential for a planet to be at one of the angles in a 24 hour period (one rotation of Earth) using the degree of separation between these angles at the birth place (i.e. in the natal chart) as a basis. This means that if my midheaven is at 15° of Scorpio and my ascendant is 15° of Capricorn then an angle of 60° (the distance between them) will be used to figure out paran lines, but the software will do more than this as it will also take into account more complex factors which determine where planets are seen to rise, culminate, etc. Consequently these lines vary greatly from chart to chart in what is potentially possible as a paran.
An important word in the above is “potential” – a paran carries the potential for both objects to be angular, the potential for enhancement. This potential translates into practical experience as well, since around these lines we have to do something to coax out the influence, it won’t emerge to meet us unless it is being activated by another more fundamental nearby line, including planet direction lines. So they tend to activate or trigger more powerful lines, especially when there is a matching resonance (for example when a Venus paran line bisects Venus setting, or a Venus planetary direction line) and at other times they require us to make some effort to activate the potential that exists. They become stronger when there is a natal aspect between the two planets as the paran will then work off of that innate potential, especially when the aspect is a square, conjunction or opposition. This makes them quite important in working with both challenging aspects as well as transits, and to show this I will present two case studies that include all of these lines with transits – the mysterious disappearance of Amelia Earhart and the destruction of Pompeii.
TWO CASE STUDIES
Amelia Earhart (July 24th 1897, 11:30pm, Atchison, Kansas) was an American aviation pioneer who developed a fascination with flying at an early age and in 1921 began taking flying lessons, soon becoming an accomplished pilot. She set several aviation records over the course of her career, including becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932 and records for altitude and speed, and was known for her skill as a navigator and her courage in the face of danger. In addition to her achievements as a pilot Earhart was also a tireless advocate for women’s rights and gender equality. Tragically her life was cut short when she disappeared on July 2nd 1937 while attempting to fly around the world. Despite an extensive search, no trace of Earhart and her navigator or her plane were ever found. This is Amelias natal chart:
Note the difficult squares, especially the Moon/Pluto/Venus/Neptune conjunction in Gemini square Mars/Jupiter in Virgo and the stubborn-minded Fixed grand square involving Sun/Mercury/Chiron/ascendant and the Dragon. She did not have a troubled life, although being a tomboy (and possibly lesbian) in that era must have been challenging at times. She was instead raised in a family that moved a lot (her father worked in the train industry) and had parents who encouraged her passion for exploration and adventure instead of fearing it, bringing out the more positive potential in such squares. Also note the conjunction of Saturn with Uranus in Scorpio.
Earhart and Noonan had encountered a number of challenges and setbacks on their journey, including technical problems with their plane, difficulty navigating over long distances, and poor weather conditions. Despite these challenges, they had successfully completed most of their journey and were just a few thousand miles away from their final destination and completing their journey when they disappeared. They were last seen in Lae, New Guinea:
The location of Lae is circled. The island is about 1000 miles across, so even lines on the far western side could be factors in Lae. We see that her Moon/Pluto/Venus/Neptune conjunction in Gemini is setting (the four black lines – is this Gemini setting symbolism not an apt omen of falling from the sky?) and her Mars/Jupiter in Virgo has moved to the midheaven (technical failure?). The location captures and manifests the square between these parts of her natal astrology, making it immediately dangerous. We also see yellow paran lines going directly through Lae – Sun/Chiron and Chiron/Dragon – bringing out the natal square between Sun in Leo and Chiron in Scorpio (and Dragon and Chiron) – and north of these lines we see Moon/Mars and Moon/Jupiter parans (again highlighting those natal Moon squares from Gemini) as well as another Sun/Chiron paran. To the south there are also Mars/Pluto and Jupiter/Pluto lines, which are also quite threatening. It looks like a very difficult location indeed when you consider it in the context of her natal chart.
The location where they both disappeared is somewhere near to Howland Island, approximately circled to the right of New Guinea in the map below:
We see Chiron in Scorpio moved to the top, the MC, the Sun and Mercury in Leo setting, the Dragons Head in Aquarius rising and paran lines for Saturn/Uranus in Scorpio. Lots of Scorpio, indications of overheating, fuel problems or engine failure (Sun/Mercury square Chiron in Scorpio and Saturn conjunct Uranus in Scorpio all being emphasised). Its very likely the aircraft ran out of gas and that they were both killed in the water or from an explosion or fire, or the consequences of both fire and water. When we add the transits that were affecting Amelia at the time the picture is even more concerning – she was having Uranus in Taurus square Mercury in Leo and Mars in conjunction with Saturn/Uranus in Scorpio (and it was retrograding over them, which helps to explain the previous troubles in the journey). So those Saturn/Uranus in Scorpio paran lines were being energised by Mars while the Mercury setting line over the area of disappearance was being squared by Uranus. Radio communication was disrupted during their last contact with the world.
Pompeii was an ancient Roman city located near modern-day Naples, Italy. It was destroyed and buried under volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The eruption occurred on August 24th and it is estimated that around 16,000 people were in the city at the time. The event was sudden and violent, with a column of ash and pumice reaching heights of up to 33 kilometers (20 miles) in the air. The ash and pumice from the eruption were carried by the wind and the volcanic cloud traveled as far as the eastern Mediterranean and parts of the Middle East. The city was buried under a layer of this ash and pumice, which preserved many of the buildings and artifacts as well as the (sterilised) bodies of the people, many of whom died instantly. Here is the chart for the eruption (we only know from ancient reports by Pliny who witnessed it that it began sometime in the afternoon of August 24th, but one look at this chart set for 2pm leaves little doubt as to the approximate timing):
It is very striking – a Mutable grand square with the Moon rising in Sagittarius, squared by an opposition of Uranus in Pisces and Mercury in Virgo, and opposed by Jupiter in Gemini (a huge plume of smoke obscured the Sun for days afterward). The Sun in late Leo also manages to add to the heat by being in conjunction with Mercury. Additionally, Mars is in Aries and angular, conjunct the Dragons Tail, and he is finding an easy way out into the world through a trine to the Moon and ascendant. Its all so hot and gaseous! The Moon rising in Sagittarius is a critical time-piece that triggers the pent up tension of Mercury/Jupiter/Uranus. I think this chart not only captures the eruption event but also the panic of people hastily fleeing the area.
Here we can see the same chart expressed on the map, with paran lines added:
The scale of this map from east to west is just over 1000 miles, the location of Pompeii circled in red. We see that Moon rising in Sagittarius line close by, and about 300 miles to its left is the black Jupiter setting line with the Mars/IC line (the red dotted straight line, north to south) about the same distance to the right, along with the Dragon MC/IC line. But we also see two very strong paran lines, Venus/Eris and Eris/Neptune, both just about 20 miles from Pompeii. The addition of Eris energy is very interesting, especially as Eris is in Scorpio, but the Venus/Neptune is a bit mysterious until you remember that the sterilization and preservation of the bodies in their moment of agonizing death is actually a unique and macabre kind of art. With Venus in Cancer, the destruction turned into an emotion tugging glimpse into history.
Pompeii was rediscovered on April 12th 1748, nearly 1700 years after it was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The rediscovery of Pompeii was accidental and occurred during the construction of a summer palace for the King of Naples. While digging a well, workers uncovered the remains of ancient walls and buildings, which were eventually identified as the lost city. During this time, Pluto in Scorpio was square the Sun of the Pompeii eruption chart (thus also in reach of a square with Mercury and square the position of Pluto in the eruption chart) and Saturn in Scorpio was square the charts natal Saturn in Aquarius – a powerful energy of Saturn in rulership and a powerful Pluto transit led to the discovery of the preserved bodies. What is more Mars was also in Taurus, squaring the eruptions Sun and Pluto.
There are many more things to discover in astrolocality and as technology enables more and more ways to display information we may well see a surge in the popularity and interest in this field. If you would like to explore your astrology in this way with me, I am open for business at astralvisions.org. Patrons at the 5 dollar or more tier are also welcome to request maps to be sent to them at any time. Thanks for reading!
On Psychic and Magical Shields
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This Samhain, popularly known as Halloween, we will look at psychic self defence – why it is necessary and how to do it.
The word occult literally means “hidden”. Within the world of the occult, then, it should be no surprise that it is full of hidden things. These things range from the familiar – our own soul and spirit for example are hidden from normal awareness and therefore occulted – to the utterly unfamiliar and strange, including the many invisible and intelligent entities we call spirits. In the Western magical tradition this time of year is known as the time when the veil between our physical and material existence and the occult world – the astral and mental planes – thins, allowing greater sight in both directions and permitting spirits greater freedom to roam in our realm for a period of time. In the past among these traditions this was a time of lighting lamps and candles in windows to guide the spirits, especially of the recently departed, but also to ward them away from human domiciles. It was a ritual acknowledgment of the invisible, hidden world that surrounds us. Scorpio takes much of its connection to the occult from this festival.
In the bright, modern world of neon lights and the internet and constant connection to others through wireless technology this belief may seem quaint at best, more like superstitious nonsense for dark autumn nights, but the reality is that we are constantly immersed in a hidden world where hidden influences interact with us without our awareness and some of those influences are not welcome ones. There is far more hidden from our perception than what we typically perceive around us (if we even notice that, given our current pre-occupation with looking at screens). To make matters worse, the vast majority of human beings have minimal defences against these factors and their bodies natural defences are also coming under constant assault in the modern environment (from pollutants, modern stresses, etc.). If we were to lift the veil on the occult world we would see that it is a major factor in many social ills such as addiction, suicide, violence, mental health disturbances and emotional disorders as well as many physical ones. It isn’t just hauntings we are dealing with here. It is, quite literally, in every facet of society and culture and all of the troubles we meet with in the course of life that these occult factors play a significant role. Many animals have not lost their senses as we have, and so pet cats and dogs often form a front line of defence that keep many such unwanted and unseen influences at bay, but many wild animals do this too. Wolves, coyotes, crows, owls (indeed most birds), for example, use sound to ward areas or harry spirits they do not like. They also help us to relax and unwind, which helps us in other ways as the lessening of tensions reduces the potential we have for creating personal entities, thought forms that feed on our anxieties, hurts, etc. Many traditions also hold lore concerning the innate protective properties of certain plants, for example onion and garlic are renowned for their ability to absorb negative or toxic energies and would sometimes be strewn about a home for a while and then burned.
The sources of negative influences are varied. Sometimes (most often it seems to me) they are initiated by other human beings, sometimes they are locked into certain locations or spaces or objects like curses or hauntings, sometimes they arise from our own karma, sometimes from the interference of entities, of which there are also many varieties. Sometimes this source will be obvious, like a creepy painting or a body buried under the floorboards, but more often it is occulted. Even weak spirits have a strong self preservation instinct just as we do and this is in many cases a primary motivation for their activities, meaning they tend to conceal themselves, especially in the presence of someone who can recognise and deal with them. Fortunately, it is often not necessary to identify the source of whatever is involved as even more fortunately they can almost always be dealt with in the same way. In other words, you only have to learn one way of creating your occult shield and that one way will probably be all you ever need as it will be effective against every kind of threat whether it is a curse or a spirit. The only thing your shield will not protect you from is your own karma or stupidity. However the power and strength of your shield is a factor that needs continuous attention.
Before getting to that, however, I would like to talk about the things your shield is protecting you from because the understanding of what you are dealing with is itself a form of protection. Ignorance is most definately not bliss in this area.
SOURCES OF POTENTIAL PSYCHIC ATTACK
As I said above most attacks come from people, with intentional psychic attack being pretty rare – many attacks are to some degree unintentional. This becomes even more the case once you understand the nature of many of the invisible entities that we deal with, as I will explain shortly. In my experience about 80-90% of cases where people feel that they are under psychic attack arise from their own imaginations or the unconscious, in other words we attack ourselves most frequently. We have unhealthy mental and emotional habits that manifest our magical potential in hidden, unwelcome ways – how often do you hear yourself or other people saying “This makes me sick!” with real passion, for example? Such thoughts and words contribute towards eventually making us sick. Better instead to express “I don’t like this”, or something less impactive to our being. In extreme cases, this factor can easily be so severe that it seems no different to a curse or a spirit. In reality it often is all of the above as spirits and curses operate effectively through our unconscious and are drawn toward thinking that is alike to their own nature. Identifying a source can therefore be problematic, like a chicken and egg conundrum.
However regardless of the source the key aspect of the attack to deal with is always at hand because it is within us. All forms of astral and mental assault exploit weaknesses in our own psyches. Our own negative qualities, our darkness, is what enables the attack to land and take root. An entity or thought-form in the vicinity of humans will seek out a resonant mental or astral body, looking for a match like a human on a dating app. If we do not have such a hook in the first place the attack will be repelled and if it lands and we then later uproot its hold over our psyche it will stop affecting us. For example a being that feeds on anger will gravitate towards the angriest people in its vicinity, while those who have mastered their anger will be immune to its attachment, and an angry person who works through their anger issues will cause any entities that feed on that anger to migrate, just like any animal. This means that the key to never being psychically attacked at all in the first place is self awareness and self-knowledge as well as the commitment to work through our own negative character qualities. Unfortunately, nobody is perfect and the psyche is immensely complex and so we always have to deal with the potential for the unconscious to expose us, and so the use of a magical shield to guard against such situations is necessary. However it cannot replace the real work of making ourselves invulnerable to such attacks – self tranformation towards a better version of ourselves. Its function is merely to supplement and support that work. Aside from a purity of being the bedrock of any impenetrable psychic defence is the conviction that you cannot be attacked at all. If you have no belief in the power of a curse, for instance, not even an unconscious one, it cannot land before that conviction is shaken or removed. This means that many people who do not believe in any supernatural or occult factors have some degree of natural defence but it is a very fragile one that can be easily negated. The strongest forms of psychic defence are based not on ignorance but on knowledge, self knowledge. Working to the point where you have transformed the majority of your unknown darkness into known darkness and then into something positive and developing a strong will is not only essential to effective psychic defense but to progress in magic as well. Ultimately with self knowledge we reach the realisation that the unity of our consciousness with all other things makes the very idea of an attack itself utterly void. The idea of evil as an external force also disintegrates.
Ultimately you are a sovereign being which means that you are always in a position of control, but many ‘dark’ entities will try to convince you that this is not the case as a way to get their hooks into your psyche. By generating experiences of terror, helplessness, fear and doubt, by sowing dissent and playing little tricks, by displaying violence and power, or simply by slowly leeching you of life and vital energy, such entities not only feed on what they create (growing more powerful) but also use it to erode the sense of control people have which is a key part of the attack. Once this sense of control is removed the person (or group) is much easier to manipulate and it is much harder to deal with the issues. For this reason it is also quite difficult for many entities to attach themselves to people with strong willpower, composure, self discipline and will to live such as members of the Armed Forces, emergency services, or similarly trained individuals – once the initial connection is made with the psyche it will take longer for the entity to wear down the will and the sense of sovereignty and control over life situations. However the exposure to negative or traumatic situations such people often have and the way those experiences are suppressed also makes plenty of fertile ground for that initial connection to be made.
Many places where people work are crowded with negative beings, additionally hospitals, prisons and places where people grieve or suffer like war-zones. Such places used to be more protected by the spiritual traditions of their cultures, but this is no longer the case. Cities everywhere are similarly crowded with negative beings for what I think should be obvious reasons but which will become clearer once I explain what we have to deal with spiritually. People seek the solace and comfort of nature on regular vacations for many reasons. Moving through such spaces on a regular basis with unregenerate and unknown darkness within us we become like sponges soaking up these entities, which ultimately helps to create more. Some places become breeding grounds. Beings can also hitchhike on us from these places back into our homes or other locations where we spend time or migrate from person to person like birds moving their nests from tree to tree. Especially sensitive, empathic and unconsciously psychic people (Pisces or Neptune attuned souls especially) can have severe issues with this situation and never know why. It is possible for this problem to become chronic enough to affect us physically, disturbing our sleep, draining our energy generally and potentially harming the organs of the body as time passes. All of this is often extremely worrying and concerning for people to learn, leading to fear and paranoia, but really there is no reason for that, you might just as well spend your entire life worrying yourself sick about the influence of microscopic bacteria everywhere. These creatures are a part of the natural way of things and we are better off being aware of them and taking appropriate precautions, measures that serve to increase our self confidence, not reduce it.
The beings of the astra mental universe or ‘spirits’ are literally infinite and beyond description but we can understand that vast scope according to certain types of entity that exist in close proximity to us. In the Step 6 physical training of ‘Initiation into Hermetics‘ Franz Bardon groups these beings into elementals, larvae, phantoms and phantasms or shadows, in Step 7 he discusses elementaries (which are magically distinct from elementals) and in ‘The Practice of Magical Evocation‘ he discusses the hierarchy of Divinely created Intelligences in the spheres that make up the astra-mental universe surrounding the Earth. There are also beings outside of this framework who are either inhabitants or travelers through the astra-mental realms such as magicians wandering in their astral or mental bodies and visitors from other physical worlds. All of these things can be categorized as ‘spirits’ in some sense or another. Of these the most relevant to psychic attack and defence are larvae, phantoms and phantasms. Some of these entities are extremely ancient, having been fed collectively for many thousands of years, others are modern arrivals or beings with very little relative power. What follows is a brief description of each of these types.
Larvae and Elementals are both formed by human beings and represent a vast number of the problematic beings we deal with on a regular basis. Larvae are more common than elementals. They are practically identical with the only difference between them being that larvae are created unconsciously while elementals are the same type of being created consciously by a magician. These beings are formed on the mental plane and live out their existence there but if they gain enough density they are capable of manifesting astrally and even physically as well – some orbs of light that people see are elementals or larvae. Larvae are the problem entity here but, like all negative forces, once properly understood the nature of these beings reveals itself to be a spiritual teaching for the soul since the presence of a larvae in your life serves to teach you about yourself. It has attached itself to you because you were somehow a match. Human beings are continuously creating these entities, which some traditions refer to as thought forms, through their passions, excitements and the intense empowerment of their thoughts through the feelings – it is a natural thing that humans cannot help but do all the time but the involuntary nature by which we do it becomes a major problem when coupled with the darker urges in the human psyche. These beings feed from a particular thought-feeling, the substance which created them, and their self-preservation instinct causes them to seek richer and greater sources of that substance so that they can grow in size and power. Aside from this they are mostly mindless, unintelligent entities with purpose but no life force of their own, akin to parasites in the physical world except that they can grow very large. The form of a larva symbolically reflects the substance which created them and which they feed from, for example larvae created from loving feelings may appear as a cupid or as a love heart while hate as arrows or flashes or burning light. This form, along with the mental force needed to create it, is drawn from the unconscious of the creator of the larva. Thus the form of the being not only reveals its nature but also potentially the identity of its original creator and in the mental realm we witness a constant stream of larvae being created and sustained by human beings, the larvae interacting with human mental bodies in ways that stimulate the mind of the person in a particular way, usually by drawing attention to the subject matter it feeds upon. We can notice the coming and going, the constant traffic of these entities in our awareness, simply by being present and taking note of the train of thoughts arriving and bringing with them various emotional attachments. Through mental discipline such as that gained through meditation we learn to take control of this phenomena and to lessen its negative impact not just in our lives but in the entire world, and the universe. Bardon mentions these larvae in connection with the Inquisition and the burning of many innocent people as witches, but this is clearly just a horrific example (as well as a warning to fellow magicians) and not a special case. The early and ongoing life process of initiation, which involves continuous self reflection and introspection and grappling with the soul seeking to transform and master it, leads to the natural purging of these negative entities from the magicians bodies, since they no longer find a source of food to sustain them and either die or detach themselves. Thus the key to dealing with destructive larvae is to transform the negative character trait that acted as bait or as a creator for them in the first place. The science of affirmation, hypnosis and other methods can help here. Stop telling yourself that terrible thing and replace it with something that feels better for you.
Phantoms or spectres are similar to larvae, being created by humans in a mostly involuntary way, but instead of drawing their forms and life force from the unconscious mind of their creator they draw it from the conscious imagination of the person, from their dreams and fantasies. Hence there are many of these with an erotic charge to them, beings who have been created through the constant fantasies of people sleeping with specific celebrities or ‘sex symbols’, for example (traditionally a type of demon called a succubus or incubus, depending on their apparent gender), but there are many other kinds formed from all kinds of conscious fantasizing. Players of role playing games create such beings as ways of exploring their own psyches and authors do the same with characters they imagine – even with worlds. Some of us create epic phantoms that try to take over our lives and they often succeed because we are willing. When these beings grow strong enough they can start dictating their own stories, taking control of the stories they are in – our story! Other, darker, phantoms are created from horror movies and the minds of serial killers. These beings have more intelligence than unconsciously created larvae because of the involvement of a degree of conscious imagination. They are bound by the rules of the imaginer and behave as they have been imagined to behave. They can interact with us more cleverly, using our dreams for example to stimulate activity that feeds them, and then cause an orgasm in order to feed on the vital energy, which can be very draining for the person. They can therefore be very dangerous. Bardon gives two examples of these entities, one concerning a situation in which a perfectly mundane and not at all magical person is mistaken by another person for a black magician because of the way they look (clearly, this poor dude is a Scorpio!), leading to the eventual suicide or mental degeneration of the second person as the phantom created by their thoughts grows stronger, only for the soul to realise after death that they have committed an elaborate kind of magical suicide. The other example given is of a succubus or incubus. Other examples of this entity are doppelgängers (doubles of people we know that appear when the person is far away, often when they are in some kind of trouble) and beings born out of memes or urban legends. Entities we would think of as demons are very often just powerful phantoms bloated and gluttoned by millennia of collective imagination – ‘the devil’, for example. Some of these entities can become powerful enough to enact forms of possession on the most vulnerable human beings. They have no existence outside of the human world but they are powerful enough to be real to us and that matters. They are obviously a major problem in our society, like larvae, but like larvae they also serve to teach us about ourselves, since we actually created them all. Think of what we could do with elementals and phantoms if we were all responsible with it.
Phantasms or shadows/shades are similar to phantoms but their image is drawn from that of a deceased person, specifically from the remembering and mourning of the deceased by the living. These are the beings that most frequently manifest themselves to spiritualists and mediums (sometimes to different mediums in different places at the same time). They are quite intelligent and adept at trickery. Bardon tells us that it is very sad that these phantoms are always mistaken for the real dead persons by the spiritualists. They have the same memories as the people who remember that person (who are its creators) and due to the long time in which people are remembered they can exist for centuries, even thousands of years. Statues, monuments and images of ancient dead rulers were specifically designed to create powerful shades that would then be used to guide and influence cultures after their deaths. Mummification magic, in which the astral body is preserved alongside the physical body, is different to the creation of a phantasm but related. In mummification the objective was to preserve the astral body, which would disintegrate following the physical body’s death, enabling the spirit of the departed to influence the physical world for a time after its passing. However the vast majority of people pass beyond this world immediately following their death and the apparitions which we see of them after that point are mostly phantasms. Not always, as the departed may still be contacted through the Akasha, but in the majority of cases, contact with the dead is actually with a shade. Phantoms and phantasms can also be consciously created by magicians but their employment in intentional psychic attack is rare.
Elementaries are intentionally created beings that differ substantially from elementals. Elementals are composed of consciously condensed mental light while an elementary is composed of the Elements and therefore has a more complex occult anatomy with more potential, and it is invested with life from its creators life energy. The creation of an elementary is an act of magic and is only possible by a well trained initiate. A physical representation of the beings body – like a doll – is constructed and ritually prepared so that it is brought to life astrally and mentally. Many varieties exist, from the crudest and simplest (corn dolls and scarecrows used by magician farmers) to the most advanced and mystical. A Golem is an advanced and extemely powerful type of elementary that has been imbued with Divine power through ritual kabbalah and evocation so that its physical form is animate, for example. Despite the prevalence of this trope in horror stories the practice of creating elementaries is very rarely an issue in psychic attacks as it requires a well trained black magician. Most people are attacked instead by larvae or phantoms.
Intelligences are Divinely ordained entities not created by human beings. They have a role in the natural order, a function and meaning that they embody and personify. These come in countless types but they exist in a hierarchy. In hermetics this hierarchy of Intelligences is expressed as spheres that are named after the objects in the solar system – the Sun sphere, the Moon sphere, etc Included in this category are the Intelligences of the Elements (from which magical elementaries are created), beings of the pure Elements such as the gnomes and sylphs and many nature spirits. These are different from the phantasms humans have created by imagining these beings – another reason why dealing with the spirit world requires a keen discernment. Magical shielding will protect you against these if it is ever necessary, but only if it is not karmic for you to deal with it. Specific magical shields can be crafted for resisting the oscillations of these spheres and are some of the secrets first learned by magicians from these spirits in evocation. There are positive entities and negative entities, with the negative ones being called contra-Intelligences and representing the opposite of their positive counterpart, the destructive power of their principle. These beings are part of the natural order of things (things have to be destroyed as well as created) and assist us in our incarnation but not necessarily in ways we would like. Many of them are aware of us and can interact with our world in various ways, sometimes even visiting it or even taking us to visit theirs (faerie lore is full of such encounters, for example). They take forms that express their innate being, what they are in essence, but also ones that communicate that to us specifically through symbols, thus it is possible for two people (or cultures) to see the same Intelligence differently, even at the same time.
Curses are actually quite common, since they can be placed upon people through the unconscious creation of larvae and phantoms, but as I hope I have made clear most often we have done so to ourselves, not to another human being, and we can also see that many curses arise from repeated use of a building or place for acts which generate and nurture such beings. Objects can also carry residues from human use, persistent influences that bring either good or bad luck. The same principle is used by magicians in the conscious creation of a talisman or amulet and you can employ the same idea in your psychic shield.
CREATING A MAGICAL SHIELD
There are as many ways of doing this as there are traditions – they exist for every kind of religion, mysticism, magic, culture, etc. In finding your own occult shield I suggest you begin where you are comfortable meaning that if you have a particular leaning towards a particular spiritual tradition then you should examine how that tradition views psychic self protection and shielding and become familiar with the symbols that tradition uses in this respect. For example if you are drawn towards the Egyptian tradition then consider using the Eye of Horus, while if you are drawn towards the Norse tradition then use Thor’s Hammer as a warding symbol, if you are Christian, use the cross instead, etc. Animal totems, religious icons, magical sigils, mantras, words of power, gestures, incantations, guardian spirits and whatever your personal tradition provides can be involved in the ritual you design to create your shield. The magical power of symbols is in what they signify to us, so select symbols that speak directly to you. This also means creating your own is a wise strategy but these will lack the weight and substance of centuries of use by other humans, which can be considerable. A self created, original symbol relies more on the power that we invest into them, meaning they are often better for those with more practice in the occult. Whatever tradition we use it provides a framework and a support structure for our shield, anchoring it in that traditions power and philosophy, in its history as a successful counter to unwanted influences. Employing no tradition at all frees our creative power but leaves the shielding dependent on the power of our own will, our conviction in the protection, and without a strong support structure backing it up. This is part of why many banishings, exorcisms and wardings follow a strict ritual process. You don’t need to learn any of these to create an effective magical shield, though.
The process of creating a magical shield is relatively simple and can be accomplished without much effort or training, however its effectiveness will dramatically increase if you do have some skill in meditation and mental discipline as well as creative imagination. If you lack this skill or feel that your shield is not strong enough you will need to continuously replenish it to offset this weakness. Additionally there are certain extra steps you can take to strengthen and empower your shield as well as to make it easily accessible in an emergency. You do not have to follow all the steps outlined below, you can just concentrate on the creation of the shield itself if you wish, but if you do follow these steps your shield will be much more effective.
Preparations: Banishing, Cleansing and Blessing
Before you create your shield it is a very good idea to dismiss from yourself or the area you are shielding any negative influences that already dwell there. If you do not do this you run the risk of shielding yourself in with something, especially if your shield is to encompass your home or vehicle. This would lead to a psychic battle with that entity. In the case of a personal shield being made for your own bodies a cleansing and banishing ritual prepares your space and will give the shield a stronger basis to ground itself in.
If you are clearing a space such as your home or vehicle then the first part of the banishing and cleansing is to literally clean up the physical space, removing all clutter, dust, webbing, untidiness, garbage, etc. If you have to, let go of old objects anchoring things to you or your space – have a clear out and pass things on. Then your space should be astrally and mentally cleared of influences, something that is often accomplished through incense, music and chanting or through the creative imagination of a bright, cleansing positive light filling the space or surrounding your body and driving out anything negative that is hiding within. However you do it the key point is to summon all of your conviction and all of your willpower and shoo all negativity away. It’s worth noting at this point that there are other things that act as banishing and cleansing factors – humour and laughter is an incredibly powerful force here, as are wild parties and celebrations, sometimes. It depends on the party. However a party thrown with the intent of banishing away evil spirits is a time-honoured way of doing this. I’m often amused that the materialistic expression of Samhain as Halloween, a time of crazy and fun parties, laughter at the spooky side of life and sweet treats, seems designed with the lurking fear of the truth in the back of the collective mind. Try as we might, we cannot stamp out the natural instincts that tie us to the invisible world. After all, as I have hopefully pointed out already, many of its local inhabitants are our spiritual kin or the spiritual children of our ancestors, and such familial bonds are of the strongest kind.
If you are creating a shield for yourself then I would recommend that before the first time you do so you have a ritual magical bath, if possible. This is a powerful banishing and cleansing ceremony in which you bathe not to clean your physical body but your astral and mental bodies. You shower and clean your physical body before the bath, making the focus the process of cleansing your subtle bodies. You can employ bath salts, candles, oils, incense, music and other ritual elements as you wish. I cannot do better than point you in the direction of Kaitlin Coppocks article on this subject: https://sphereandsundry.com/lo-a-step-by-step-guide-to-ritual-bathing-personal-energetic-cleansing-w-astrology/
In her article you will find a most excellent and extensive set of instructions on magical baths, including what to do if you have no bath. I recommend you read it and create your own version of it with the tools you have at hand or can obtain in a reasonable amount of time. Undergoing a magical bath before you create your magical shield will greatly enhance your experience and empower your shield to be more effective. If you do not have the time or the means for a ritual bath then instead you can perform a banishing and cleansing of your bodies using the simple method of imagining yourself in a universe filled with white light that drives away all darkness, or you can use the more involved meditation that follows (you could also make this a part of your magical bath ritual if you wish):
Sit or lie down in a comfortable position and begin to relax, focusing on your breathing. Breathe normally and naturally as you relax each of the muscles in your body in turn, noting where the greatest tension lies. When you are ready begin to imagine a golden light above your head beginning to descend into its top. As this beautiful golden light descends into your head it gradually fills up the inside of your body like warm golden honey. Take your time feeling it moving slowly into every crevice inside your head. The pulsing, warm light continues to pour down and the golden liquid gradually descends into your throat and shoulders, chest and upper arms, flows over your elbows and into your stomach and abdomen, trickles towards the end of every finger and over the edge of your hips, down towards your feet, until your entire body is filled with this golden fluid. As it passes through your body it takes with it all negativity and all disharmony and dysfunction and breaks it down until it is nothing. When the inside of your body is entirely filled from head to tips of toes and soles of feet, imagine that the liquid begins to transmute and ooze out of the tips of your toes as a gaseous golden mist that begins to float upwards. This beautiful golden cloud returns to your head slowly, filtering through your astral and mental bodies and your aura as it does so and removing negativity and disharmony from them and your space. When it reaches the top of your head where the light began to descend into your body it seals you completely in a bubble, front and back, left and right sides, leaving you wrapped in an egg shaped golden mist and all negativity has been removed from your being. Give thanks that it is so.
These examples exist alongside many other methods of accomplishing the same goal of banishing and cleansing. You might go to see a professional such as a shaman or a medical practitioner such as an acupuncturist to accomplish the same ends.
Creation of the Magic Shield around a Person
Once again, sit or lie down in a comfortable position and relax, focusing on your breathing. I prefer to be sitting because the spine is straight and vertical, but comfort for you is the main thing. Before you begin, affirm silently in your mind that this process will bring an increase in self confidence. Be certain that your shield is not established based on fear or paranoia but instead is founded on empowerment. Additionally, and perhaps even before you begin, give some time to contemplating how your shield will behave toward negative influences. Does it drain them, reflect them back at their source, make you invisible to them, trap them, destroy them, notify you or not, does it give you an option to let them in so that you can examine them? How long is it meant to last for, and in what situations or places is it meant to be present? Does it behave differently toward different entities or sources of attack, for example does it notify you when it specifically comes from an individual known to you or does it destroy one kind of entity but trap another? This is an important design step that should be a reflection of your intentions and also your morality. These are after all, living beings like us – many are our unwanted children! Human beings do an enormous number of negative things but that doesn’t mean all entities need to be destroyed.
The shield you will be creating utilizes a very common energy source for this purpose, the universal Light. It relies on the fact that every individual human being (indeed, all beings) has a connection to the highest spiritual realms that they can call upon at any time. The Light will be drawn down from above your head into your bodies and circulated around them with the instruction that it protect you as you intend it to. When the process is complete you will then ensure its supply of energy by connecting it to the universal storehouse of Light from which it will be continually replenished.
Begin by relaxing deeply, then imagine a white light above your head beginning to move down into your crown from which it begins to overflow like a fountain. As this white light flows from above into and out of your crown it begins to move in a clockwise direction around the top of your head, very slowly and gracefully. Affirm that as it does so it protects you in the way that you have intended and be sure to continually press this idea into the Light as it moves. Be sure to visualise and feel its movement around the back of your head as it crosses in front of your eyes and brow, ears, nose and mouth, and finally wraps itself around your chin and neck. It makes contact with your skin because it envelopes you internally as well but its boundary extends slightly beyond your skin into the space you consider your own personal space. With the shield now formed as a kind of hood or helmet around your head region pause for a while and again affirm your will and desire that the shield protect you in the way you design it to. It begins to broaden out to encompass the space around your shoulders and then spirals down your upper arms to your elbows and around your chest and back, wrapping your upper body. Take your time and be sure to continually focus on the idea of your magical shield and its protection. Breathe normally and naturally and feel the protective layer of the shield encompassing the whole upper half of your body. When you’re ready mentally affirm once again the purpose of the shield and remind yourself that it will lead to an increase in confidence as you direct the Light to continue circulating in a clockwise direction around your abdomen and lower body, shielding your belly and stomach, and wrapping itself around your hips, always pressing the intention of the magical shield into it as it passes around you. You want to calmly know that absolutely no negative influence can get past it. Continue to let the light circulate in this way until you reach the soles of your feet. At this point, sit within your shield and feel its presence, try to get used to its energy so that you can recognise it when it is activated. Enjoy being in the safe space for a while. When you’re ready, simply instruct your shield to begin drawing its energy from the universal storehouse of Light that is available at all times in all places. Imagine that the original portal to this Light above your head slowly fades and disappears and place yourself in an entire universe of this Light stretching in every direction. Instruct the universal Light to then begin to pour into your shield from every direction continuously, and include the thought that this connection can only be severed by you. Know that this is true. Now go and have a cup of tea or coffee and watch a movie or read a book – anything that takes your mind off the shield for a number of hours, so that you forget about it. This helps the shield to establish itself. Beyond that, from time to time give attention to your shield and replenish it by repeating the ritual.
If you wish you may repeat the process two more times, making the first shield for your mental body, the second for your astral body and the third for your physical body. The process is exactly the same, all that changes is that you make sure to impress the shield with the idea that it is protecting a specific body. A single shield works to protect you on all three levels but separate shields allow you to distinguish more between influences that affect different bodies and the act of repetition makes them generally sturdier as well.
On that note there are other things you can do to make your shield even stronger. First, learn to utilize all of your astral and mental senses in the shields creation, not just visualizing it but smelling, hearing, tasting and feeling it as well. For me this is actually the really fun part of the process where you get to employ the creative side of your creative imagination. What is the smell of protection for you? Look back into your memories and you will find an archive of aromas and odors that you have mostly ignored in favour of visual stimuli. These are literal treasure troves waiting assignment to some kind of magical operation, all you have to do is consciously recall them with your imagination. The journey of just discovering these things is itself a magical one. For example, most people have a long buried memory of the smell of their mother’s skin when they were babies. If you can remember this smell and creatively imagine it as the smell of your shield while you are wrapping it around you it will greatly empower that shield (unless perhaps the shield is for use against your own mother!). Similarly, give your shield a presence in imagined sound (an instrument, a musical tone, birdsong, an alarm bell, etc.), a taste and a feeling as well (hard, smooth, rough, spiky, hot, cold, etc.). You can also instruct your shield to bring these sensations into your awareness under specific trigger conditions, for example you can instruct it to give you a bitter taste or the sound of an owl when a specific entity tries to interfere with you. These are more advanced shielding techniques for people more familiar with the practice but in the beginning simply personalizing your shield by adding all of your senses in these ways is one of the most powerful techniques you can use to increase its strength and effectiveness. The more personal your connection is to your own shield, the more it protects you. Always keep the personal details of your shield a secret to preserve its power.
Secondly you can ground your shield, giving it a material object to root itself in. Very often this will be some kind of jewellery, a ring or necklace that you wear that is specifically worn only as a part of your shielding and which you do not have to take off in bed or when washing. By touching the object you can activate the shield at will or strengthen it. By turning it or otherwise physically manipulating it you can also cause your shield to enter different configurations. The problem with this is if you lose the object. At that point you have to construct a new shield for yourself or modify the old one so that it is not dependent upon the object if that was the case. Losing our protective items is sometimes a profoundly deep lesson for us. Specials words or phrases can serve the same functions as can certain hand gestures. Grounding your shield can also be done in another way, by planting a magical tree or plant which you nurture as its physical form. Fruit trees can be especially useful in this respect as their fruit can be eaten and their seeds given to others or planted in a protective circle around an area.
Creation of the Magic Shield around a Space or Object
When it comes to creating a shield for a location or object such as a vehicle or something that is to be sent in the post the process is exactly the same but you must ensure that the Light is circulated around the object itself, from whatever its top seems to be to its bottom. Special attention must be given to all of the doorways and windows, chimneys, vents and any other entrances into the building or space as well as the four cardinal directions of east, west, north and south. Don’t forget that many things come into the home through the computer and the internet now – we have portals into digital spaces and the news isn’t good lately. It is customary and beneficial to begin with the east (where sunlight becomes visible each day) and rotate the Light in a clockwise direction from there (or in the direction the Sun travels in the day), so around the space from east to south, south to west, then west to north and back to the east again. Make sure that you cover underneath the area and above it so that is encompassed in a sphere. Begin at the top of the area or structure and rotate down into the ground beneath it. If you have land or a garden, extend the protection to the boundary and not just the building walls. If you have a garage or parking space treat that as part of the boundary of your shield and make sure it covers them too. You can do this room to room or cover the entire building and location in one go as you wish. Afterward or during it is a good idea to ground the shield by placing symbols or guardian objects in the cardinal directions or entryways of your home, over the doors or facing them or on window sills. I like to use wooden objects because wood is alive in a very special way for me.
If the object is to be used as a grounding object and a material representation of your shield, like a ring you want to wear, you simply have to hold the object in your hands while you perform your shielding and from time to time remember to put your attention on the held object and instruct it to behave in the way you wish. Make sure that your object is saturated in the universal Light of your shield.
The creation of a shield around your space constitutes a clear signal in the astra-mental planes that says “Caution! Conscious humans live here!” and this alone serves to protect you. The vast majority of our abodes, with no such spiritual protection placed around them, appear to many entities as open territories that they are free to move through at will, perhaps even live in. By establishing a boundary and signaling that it is our own astra-mental territory many negative entities are discouraged from coming near. If this seems familiar to you it’s because it is – it’s the tradition of lighting jack-o’-lanterns in your windows on Halloween, an occult tradition that is ironically itself heavily occulted. The lantern can become the object which grounds the shielding of your home, the pumpkin and its face the spirit of your home itself, warding intruders away, the candle flame the Light. This is why the tradition involves making the lantern a fun activity with children, because their natural magic is invested into it. As I have said before, adults may have largely lost (actually, misplaced) their psychic senses, but not entirely. They operate through the unconscious until they are consciously re-claimed and trained. They are occulted but still there. If you want to make this a true magical operation involving your children, I suggest you leave them to hollow out the pumpkins while you focus on impressing the Light of protection into the candles that will be used.
That’s all for now, be safe out there and don’t be afraid, one of the things I hope you take away from this post is just how powerful we all are. Let’s realise it together. In a previous journey I have discussed the use of astrology in warding and banishing magic and I suggest you read this article after this one if you’re interested in learning more about that.
My love to all of you!
The Lost System of Hermes
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This month we journey into the past to explore the possibility that an entire tier of astrological knowledge has been lost, one that we can only now observe gradually returning.
“How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.”
– Wilhelm von Humboldt, 18th and 19th century philosopher and linguist
Every practicing astrologer knows many variations of the following problem – your clients chart has Venus in a configuration which suggests emotional trouble and conflict connected to their siblings, or Jupiter strongly placed in the 9th house, indicating growth and spiritual expansion of horizons through faith or exploration of the world. However, the client with the troubled Venus has a brother and a sister and only gets along badly with one of them, or the person with the strong Jupiter has absolutely no interest in faith or travel but is instead a lawyer, yet another signification of the 9th house and Jupiter. There seems to be no mechanism in astrology for delineating which of these outcomes will manifest itself. The modern practice of astrology, with its great emphasis on the worship of free will and human psychology, approaches this problem by emphasising that a chart exists within a context which is provided by the choices we make, tasking the astrologer with ascertaining through consultation how the person is manifesting the archetypal energies. To put this more simply, we assume (correctly), for example, that the way that a dancer manifests their Venus will be different to the way that a banker does and it is not really the astrologers job to guess but to adapt the charts pattern to the life circumstances. The problem remains however – the astrologer is faced with a daunting task in interpreting not just one planet with many possible manifestations but an entire chart full of them (and rapidly overflowing with modern discoveries), and that is just planets – the signs, houses and aspects also manifest with spectacular scope. Even a square between planets can signify either continuous trouble or perpetual energy and stimulation.
This context in which astrology operates is composed of what are sometimes called “co-determining factors”. A good example of a co-determining factor is your biological gender. It is not readable from your birth chart. Nor is your skin colour, the cultural background you are born into (your nationality or race). Clearly these are major factors influencing your life, but astrology or your natal chart doesn’t seem to care, only showing our relationship to archetypes. Other co-determining factors are currently up for debate – sexuality is a big one, disability is another. As modern attitudes towards these topics evolves and changes it is forcing a re-evaluation of basic astrological principles. Whereas, for example, in the past it might have seemed acceptable to assign the hard aspects of Saturn to mobility issues or Uranus with homosexuality and lesbianism, shifts in the collective paradigm now bring such judgments into question. The outdated and historical treatment of homosexuality as a perversion, for example, clearly underlies part of this assignment to the planet Uranus, while the emerging maturity with which we treat the disabled now perceives their situation as a social disability involving lack of access and recognition rather than a physical disability which invites pity, a shift which calls into question the idea that disability by necessity has to be represented by ‘hard’ or ‘bad’ or ‘malefic’ planets and influences. Here, again, we touch upon the same issue – why do only some people manifest such aspects as homosexuality, for example, while others do not?
The ancient world had simpler words for many of these ‘co-determining factors’ – fate. The concept of fate, however, was extremely developed and multivalent, requiring several words to describe the different kinds of fate which existed in a metaphysical model that had many deep roots in hermetics, especially in reference to the planetary spheres, the three realms or planes (four if you include the Divine) and the three bodies which act as the vehicles for their realms. This philosophy of fate is at least as extensive as our modern psychology and defies easy summary, so you will need to do more research in this area as it is beyond the scope of this journey, but I will give some explanation here because it is important for understanding what follows:
Pronoia is Divine will, Divine Providence, the fate of implicit order, of universal principles, and it relates to foresight in the human being. Night follows day, day follows night; spring follows winter and is followed by summer, etc. It is the fate of the nature of things as they are, the fate of a human being differing, say, from that of an acorn seed, or a star. It is universal, hierarchical, orderly, with that which is closer to the Divine being ‘higher’ in this hierarchy and that which is more material being ‘lower’, with the important addition that what is ‘above’ is like that which is ‘below’. Possessing foresight permits us to perceive how fate will play out based on our understanding of the natural order of things. It is a part of being. This is an expression of fate in the mental realm, i.e. of spiritual fate. We can say, for example, that the Pronoia of Venus is that it is connected to love and to feelings. It is part of the essential meaning of Venus. Every human being has a specific set of archetypes, the same signs, planets, potential aspects, etc., which is also an expression of Pronoia.
Heimarmene or ‘incarnation of destiny’ is astrological fate, the fact that each thing is born into a certain set of astrological conditions which shape its experience, and is closest to our modern definition of fate. It can be adapted to, escaped or worked out through effort and spiritual maturation and is a part of becoming. A seed must contend with the cycle of the seasons over many years in order to reach its full potential. This is an expression of astral fate, i.e. the fate of the soul, of things at work within it. Venus gets two signs, Taurus and Libra, which acts as another allotment of fate. Thats the Heimarmene of Venus. Valens tells us ‘the planets are servants of Heimarmene. Your specific astrological chart, with its seeding of the universal archetypes in a specific, personal configuration or mandala is an expression of fate at this level too.
Ananke (necessity) is the fate of inevitability and compulsion, the fact that if you jump off a cliff you will not fly but will fall to the rocks below (unless you are winged like a bird and thus fated to fly by virtue of the nature of your being at the higher order of Pronoia). It is the fate of reality and coercion, of things working upon the soul. It can be manipulated with magic or technology so that what is necessary to happen does not transpire or occurs in a particular way. Ananke is a constraining force that embodies the densest form of fate in the material plane, i.e. allotted fate. It represents the fact that we have to operate in a world where things happen independent of our own actions or designs. It is not under our conscious control and has inevitability attached but it is not necessarily bad for us – hunger, for example, prevents us from starving to death. By Ananke the seed falls on a certain type of ground, as in the parable of the sower, and thus meets with this third order of fate – it is eaten by birds, strangled by thorns, burned by the Sun, or grows into full life as a tree. Ananke manifests in human beings as hindsight – shit happens and we learn from it for later – and in modern astrology as things like transits, synastry and the overall way that happenings and the context provided by those co-determining factors and a persons choices in expressing the archetypes in the chart manifest themselves.
This is a super gross simplification of an elaborate philosophy but it illustrates the essential thinking on fate as having multiple levels and forms of mnifestation, represented by different deifications of fate, not just in the ancient Greek world but in other old mythologies like the three Norse Norns. A thing has the mental fate of being what it is (which it cannot change), the astral fate of contending with becoming what it is (which it is born into but can influence), and the material fate of contending with necessary and constraining events in the world it seems to have no control over and can do nothing or little about but can learn from anyway. In modern astrology we could also say that the third level of fate, Ananke, is connected not just to transits and so on but to the house that Venus falls in and all of her aspects. This makes a lot of sense because the house cusps are determined by the time and place of your birth and are the most personal parts of your astrology, so the ascendant literally allots all the planets and signs a particular power and duty according to where they fall, like scattered seeds. Yet the ancient world had a much more developed system for analysing this level of fate, one that practically disappeared but is now being revived: the Lots.
A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON
Like almost all, of astrology we have only the vaguest idea of the origins of the Lots. This fact alone is testament to their antiquity. It’s very unlikely that they were just discovered by noticing things happening in people’s lives and events. Its much more likely the system was received through direct inspiration and/or systematic development with intent by an individual or group. The earliest significant record of them (earlier mentions exist without giving great details) comes from the Tetrabiblos written by Ptolemy in the 2nd century but it is of course well known that he was in the business of cataloging and compiling as well as streamlining, not inventing, and he repeatedly tells us that he is drawing on Egyptian and Chaldean sources for his information. Later writers also tell us the Lots (which became known as Parts) were used extensively by the Egyptians and Babylonians as evidenced in books by them that they were reading but which have not survived down to the present day. It is very unclear whether this is actually true or just a fable from the ancient world. The notion of Lots could have been imported from India, for example.
Regardless of their origin they were an almost universal part of the practice of Hellenistic astrology for many centuries and it seems that they became popular in Arabic practice around the 7th century, leading to the mistaken idea that they were invented at this time and thus being given the alternative name ‘Arabic parts’ by which they are more commonly called today. Use of these Lots continue to be popular after the fall of Rome and throughout the medieval period until the Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries (take that in, it’s at least 1500 years of use, much more if you source them in Egypt or India), when astrology as a whole came under attack as a result of the shift in the paradigm towards rationality and reason together with the still powerful influence of the Church and faith. It seems to me that these factors led to the eventual abandonment of the Lots as astrologers (trying to avoid fatal heresy and blasphemy charges) sought to justify their practice and art more scientifically and the Lots lacked a firm basis in astronomy, physics and reason, concerning themselves more with the concept of fate as a metaphysical force. Without power or influence to shield you it became lethally unfashionable to believe in fate, as either the rationalists would humiliate and dismiss you as superstitious and fatalistic or the Church would kill you for trucking with evil spirits. Since that time the Lots have been largely forgotten, the Part of Fortune somehow weathering the purge but remaining a minor factor not used by many astrologers, although knowledge of their use and examples of that use existed in texts that lay untranslated until the late 20th century. Beginning in the early 1990s, a project was begun to translate these texts for modern astrologers and since that time great advances have been made in recovering the knowledge that has been lost. However, we are still unclear about many issues related to their use and there are even controversies about their calculation. This isn’t too surprising when you consider the fact that thousands of years have passed, for many centuries of which the ideas were lost, and even when they were popular and widely used there was still a lot of debate (pun unintended) about them and their origins. The ideas have probably been resurrected and reconstructed more than once, with the Hellenistic astrologers having to do much the same with holes in their understanding and being just as baffled about where they came from as we are. However, thanks to the work of astrologers at Project Hindsight, many of these treasures are now being unearthed and re-examined and have started to find their place in modern astrology.
WHAT IS A LOT?
Remember the problem raised when we began this journey? Planets are literally godlike, world spanning properties, with Venus representing every kind of feeling and emotion, as well as the arts, beauty, women, sugary treats and more specific things like roses, fashion shows and emeralds, to name just a few. Planets represent a huge number of things through the law of analogy, which is a problem when it comes to interpretation.
The ancients used Lots to solve this problem. A Lot is basically a degree somewhere in the zodiac that represents a single topic related to a particular planet. This means that there are literally countless Lots, with some being more archetypal and thus more commonly used. There are Lots connected to each of the houses with their large scope of concepts and to planets with theirs. Thus, the troubled Venus showing sibling dramas can be further delineated by generating the Lot of Brothers and the Lot of Sisters, which will fall in separate places, and a distinction can then be made between them, or the strong Jupiter can be delineated by looking at Lots related to religion, law or travel which, in theory, will then show the Lot of lawyers to be more favorably placed.
A Lot is generated from the position of three different points in the chart. The practice is always the same – the distance between two objects is calculated and this same arc is then projected from the third, which is most often the ascendant. This locates the Lot. The formulae for any Lot can therefore be expressed algebraically:
Lot = A + B – C (where A is nearly always the ascendant while B and C are usually planets or other Lots)
For example:
“If you want to know the market for wine, which is had from the condition of the grapes, take the place of Saturn from the place of Venus and add the degree of the sign of the ascendant to the remainder”
– Guido Bonatti, the most famed court astrologer of the 13th century, adviser of the Holy Roman Emperor
This means the formula for the Lot of wine is Ascendant + Venus – Saturn. To find it, you would add the zodiac degree position of Venus to the zodiacal degree of the ascendant, and then subtract the zodiac degree position of Saturn to arrive at the Lot for wine.
Example: Venus is at 10 ° Taurus, Saturn at 20° Taurus, and the ascendant at 10° Aries. Taurus 10° (Venus) is 40° of the zodiac, and Aries 10° (ascendant) is 10° of the zodiac. First we add these together to get to 50°. Then, we have to deduct the position of Saturn – Taurus 20° is 50° of the zodiac – which puts the score at 0°. The Lot is thus located at 0° of the zodiac, or 0° Aries.
This gets problematic when you end up with a negative number like -50° and then have to add 360 to find the zodiacal position of the Lot, making them a little more mysterious and tricky to work out sometimes. The ancients expressed the Lots geometrically rather than algebraically, as the quote from Bonatti illustrates. Understanding how to find Lots the way they did not only preserves the thinking of the system, it is also easier. The instructions sometimes take the format of saying to start from a certain planet and project or count to another. You always count in zodiacal order, counting from Aries to Taurus, Taurus to Gemini, etc, and always project from the ascendant in zodiacal order, too. So in the quote above Bonatti would be telling us to start from wherever Saturn is (Taurus 20°), go forward in the order of the zodiac signs to wherever Venus is (Taurus 10°), figure out what that distance is (350°), and then add it to the ascendant (Aries 10°), also moving forward in order of zodiac signs. This lands at 360°, which is 0° Aries but by another route.
Ignoring all of this altogether, an easy way to do this in your head is to start from point C in the formula, count the shortest distance to point B, and then move the same amount and in the same direction from the position of point A, which is almost always the ascendant. In the example, point C is Saturn. The shortest distance to Venus (point B) is 10°, and we went backwards in the zodiac. So we just do the same from the ascendant of Aries 10°, move back 10, and we get to the same answer of 0° Aries for the Lot of wine.
Modern technology and software give us an even easier way to visually locate any Lot quickly. We just have to move point C to the ascendant, preserving the relationship between all the objects in the chart, and when we do that the location of point B (which has moved the same distance) will locate the Lot. So when we move Saturn to 10° of Aries in our example, placing it at the ascendant, we will see Venus 10° behind it at 0° Aries, the place of the Lot we are seeking. We can also use software to calculate the Lots for us.
UNDERSTANDING THE FORMULA
This is a very important aspect of working with Lots to grasp because it enables you to interpret them and also to create your own Lots. The first point in the formula of A + B – C, the A, is usually the ascendant because this is a deeply personal degree determined by the location and exact moment of your birth. It is philosophically and astronomically the place where things first appear or arise and in the formula it projects and personalises the matter at hand, applying it to you, causing it to show itself. It is therefore revelatory and a primary reference point. If another part of the chart is used as point A then the Lot is derivative of that specific point rather than of the chart as a whole. Point C in the formula is the planet of the main or general topic being considered, while point B of the formula, is a specifier, a descriptor and definer of that topic. The formula of the Lot for wine is therefore a topic of Saturn (agriculture, harvesting, the ripeness and condition of things, wine because it matures with age) defined more specifically by a topic of Venus (grapes, wine because it brings pleasure, parties, etc). This understanding will be important later when we look at 7 powerful and commonly used Lots.
A great deal of thought was put into this matter and the many hundreds of agreed upon formulas we have had handed down are far from arbitrary, in fact they reveal a deep subtlety of thought and a sophisticated philosophical position, especially in the early Greek and later Arabic traditions. These were all considered to be astrological operations upon fate, which is why the term Lots, as in a lottery, for there is no telling where the various Lots of your life will fall, and this places the outcome in the hands of Divine Providence like any divination does.
HOW THE LOTS ARE INTERPRETED
Once a Lot has been determined its position in the chart is evaluated in much the same way as other positions, however the way that astrology operates and the various systems attached to it have changed greatly over the millennia and so the descriptions of how to use the Lots are all based on the more traditional Hellenistic system. This means that they use sign based aspects rather than degree based aspects – a planet in Scorpio is always opposite one in Taurus regardless of degrees, while Virgo is always square Gemini and Sagittarius for example – and many used a whole sign house system which does away with the problem of house cusps – if you have Capricorn rising, Aquarius is the sign of your 2nd house, Pisces your 3rd, Aries your 4th, and so on. In essence the emphasis on degrees is minimised, although certain emphasis did exist such as with the position of the ascendant, exaltation degrees for the planets, actual degrees for the planets, etc. These changes are easy for us to mentally compute and visualise without needing to recalculate a chart.
The system for analysing anything present in the chart is remarkably consistent and is one of the features of Hellenistic astrology we can be confident about. Being concerned much more with fate it is mostly a process aimed at evaluating whether a planet or Lot will be beneficial or malefic towards us, strong or weak, well placed or not. The first step is to look at the sign and to consider how that sign shapes the object, with planets becoming stronger in the signs of their rulership and exhaltation and weaker in the signs of their fall and detriment. Since, unlike planets, Lots do not have these attributions among the signs the process at this point for a Lot is mostly for the astrologer to consider how well the sign expresses the concept of the Lot and to gather clues and hints about what it might contribute, for example a Lot of children in a masculine sign (Fire or Air) would be symbolising boys, with Aries more specifically suggesting boys who are born soldiers. Judgments like these are gathered and layered together at each step to form an answer. Next the house position of the object is considered. In this respect the ancients evaluation operated quite differently to ours with some houses being clearly worse and some better than others. The strongest houses are the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th places of the chart (angular houses) while the weakest are those which are cadent, the 3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th, with succeedent houses (the 2nd, 5th, 8th and 11th) all having an intermediate power. Houses are also strengthened if they form a major aspect to the ascendant – the 3rd and 11th are sextile the 1st, the 5th and 9th are both trine, while the 4th, 7th and 10th are all square or opposite it. Taken all together, and there was some variation on this, this resulted in an order of power from greatest to least as follows: 1st, 10th, 7th, 4th, 11th, 5th, 9th, 3rd, 2nd, 8th, 6th, 12th. The placement of the Lot would be evaluated according to the strength of the house it fell in, often with more attention than the sign, and the nature of the house would provide further information for the answer. Next, the Lot or planet would be evaluated according to the other planets and Lots in its sign as well as the planets which were in major aspect to it by sign, with the malefic planets Mars and Saturn always harming what they aspect (especially in a hard aspect) and the benefic planets Venus and Jupiter increasing the fortunes of the Lot or planet (especially in a soft aspect). Aspects were seen as testimonies or planets witnessing one another (part of a prevalent judicial paradigm) and more generally as having vision of, seeing one another. A planet or Lot that is not seen at all by Mars or Saturn but is seen by both Jupiter and Venus, especially by trine or sextile, has a lot of good going its way and much less bad. Mercury and the Lights are generally neutral to positive influences that only cause trouble when the aspect is a square or opposition. Conjunctions were a special case, not considered an aspect as such because the planets were not beholding one another, they were more closely bonded in some kind of union like a marriage. Finally, the ruler of the sign that the Lot or planet falls in is evaluated, following exactly the same procedure, starting from its sign position. You get a secondary full layer of interpretative context from this ruler. This was really the main function of the sign the Lot falls in, to identify its planetary ruler, the one responsible for responding to the allotment. This means that, for example, if the Lot falls in one of the signs of Saturn then the person should take a responsible and enduring approach to the Lot, but their ability to do so will rest upon the condition of Saturn in the chart. In other words, the position of the ruler of the Lot or planet modifies both the outcome of how the situation fares (it gets worse or better) as well as how well situated we are to be able to deal with it (which is perhaps why it gets worse or better).
Sometimes the Lot position is also used to generate a new subsidiary chart by considering its sign as a 1st house and reading the natal chart accordingly. This is called turning the chart and was most frequently used with the Lots of Fortune and Spirit, described below. For example, if your natal chart has Leo rising with the Sun in Leo in the 1st house and the Lot of Fortune in Gemini in the 11th, the chart will be turned so that Gemini is instead the rising sign, placing the Sun in Leo in the 3rd house of the Fortune chart. As you can see when this is done the planets of the natal chart end up in new houses relative to the Lot, changing their strength, unless of course the Lot in question happens to fall in the native charts 1st house. The position of the Lot will then be evaluated in both charts according to the same general rules described above, adding even more complexity and nuance to the system.
Many considerations were involved in all of this, including whether a planet was retrograde, in reception, combust, in some form of essential dignity or debility, rises before or ahead of the Sun, whether a planet is in sect or not, etc. Some of these considerations would be familiar to us, others completely unfamiliar. In fact these considerations are so many that they present one of the more cryptic aspects of the entire system as different astrologers noted different considerations at different times. It’s in these considerations that much of the present confusion for us arises, as it did for them, as evidenced by some of the texts where authors remark on the controversies of their time and the missing information they have from ancient sources which for us are now completely lost or hidden in private collections. There was further controversy over some of the technical aspects of astrology such as the calculations for various Lots, as there always are in scholarly matters, and these are worth looking into if you want to go deeper.
An astrologer, then, when faced with a soldier going to war, might first look at the natal chart Mars, perhaps also at Saturn and Jupiter to consider the innate likelihood of defeat, death or victory in the natives chart, these being natural to consider in all matters of war, then might consider the ruler of the 8th (again because that might show death) or the 9th if it is a crusade oveseas, perhaps the ruler of the 1st house if the war is initiated by the soldier or the 7th ruler if they are being invaded, but then finally would also examine the Lots, probably Fortune, Spirit, Courage, Victory, Nemesis and Necessity (described below), as well as any other Lots they considered specific to the war. They might do all this for charts they construct for the nations or the war itself as well as for the soldier. They also had their own sophisticated forecasting techniques added on to this (the equivalent of progressions and transits today). If all indicators pointed in the same direction, the strongest warnings or encouragements would be given. Most often this did not occur of course, and a more nuanced and carefully judged interpretation had to be arrived at. Lives and reputations were often at stake, including the astrologers.
THE HERMETIC LOTS
Seven of the Lots have a special place as the Lots of the visible objects in the sky, the Sun, Moon and planets out to Saturn. These Lots are given descriptive names like the Lot of Eros for Venus and the Lot of Courage for Mars. Some of this is a bit cryptic to us now as the use of dead language, several paradigm ending cultural shifts and the perils of translation get in the way. The primary Lots in the entire system are two of these Lots, the ones for the Lights, and the Lots for the luminaries are used to calculate the Lots for the other planets, so must be calculated first. The Lot for the Moon is called the Lot of Fortune (in modern parlance the Part of Fortune) while the Lot for the Sun is called the Lot of Spirit or Daimon. These were the two Lots that were most commonly used to turn a chart as described above.
These Lots are called the Hermetic Lots because according to ancient texts (Paulus and Olympiodorus) we are told that they originate from a book called the ‘Panaretus’ which was written by Hermes Trismegistus. It is possible, in my view likely, that this text or one of its companions, all lost, is the source for the entire system of Lots, a seed that was developed over the many centuries that followed. We may never know.
The fact that there are Lots for the planets raises a question – why do we need them? If the use of other Lots is to treat the vast array of topics given to a planet as individual concerns, what does a Lot for Venus mean that differentiates it from the natal position of Venus? What we are told in answer to this question in the ancient texts (as well as the way history went down as I mentioned earlier) indicates that we are dealing with an entirely separate tier of astrological interpretation, one that deals head on with fate and destiny. That is, the Lots are potentially like the signs, houses, planets and aspects, a fundamental component of the whole, generated at a planetary, astral level but applying themselves to worldly, physical experience, a more concrete level that is closer in nature to the way houses shape things but actually at a more granular and differentiated, i.e. incarnated, level than houses. In fact it could be argued that the Lots are a subset of the house system since they often project from the ascendant, and additionally the placement of a Lot in a house acts to modify the natural significations of that house, adding something potentially foreign to it. For example, your 10th house might contain Lots for captives, soldiers, kings and cucumbers. These don’t necessarily naturally belong to the 10th (kings does) but in your case your lottery draw places them there. You are reputed (10th) as the king of cucumbers who will go to war and be captured! I joke of course, because in reality only Lots of concern to a matter at hand were usually given attention.
In this scheme, then, the position of planets is an astral situation and the planets become more about what we experience of that planets principle being placed within us (its presence in our soul) while its Lot expresses how that planets essential meaning operates upon us, as an allotment of fate in the Akasha (its presence in the world at large), and how well we are equipped to respond to these happenings. The experiential difference is that the planet itself represents our innate inborn connection to that principle, a relationship we can work upon and change, while the Lot is what we experience of that principle in the external world, the way that a planets stuff interacts with us outside of our intention or action. This, to me, is one of the most fascinating revelations of the Lots.
REVERSING THE FORMULA
Before looking in detail at each of the seven hermetic Lots we need to address an important curve ball thrown in by the doctrine of astrological sect, the idea that astrology functions differently during the day and night. This was an important consideration throughout the astrology of the ancient world and according to what we are told we must reverse the formulas we are given if a person is born during the night, exchanging B and C. This does not seem to apply to all of the formulas but it does apply to the hermetic Lots and many of the older ones. For example the formula for calculating the Lot of Fortune is given as Ascendant + Moon – Sun. However, if instead you were born at night the formula is changed to Ascendant + Sun – Moon.
The problem with this is that reversing the formulas interchanges the general and main topic with the specific one, as explained earlier in Understanding the Formulas, which obscures our ability to understand what the Lot is actually about and over time occults our ability to perceive the underlying philosophy of the formulas as well as how to formulate our own. This is not the only philosophy underpinning the Lots that helps to explain the formulas, there are others which don’t necessarily contradict one another, revealing the underlying thought behind the system to be extremely sophisticated. Ultimately, lurking in the depths where we cannot go in this article, there is esoteric and magical thinking on the power of number behind the entire system, even behind all of astrology. If you’re interested in exploring this further I recommend you read my journey on harmonic charts.
In any case, when reversing the formula as described, remember that it is the original day formula that identifies the general topic and specific topic, with C being the general and B the specific.
FORTUNE & SPIRIT (SUN & MOON)
Lot of Fortune (Moon) : In a day chart you measure the distance from the Sun to the Moon and then add that same distance to the degree of the ascendant. By night you measure the distance from the Moon to the Sun and do the same.
Day Formula: Asc. + Moon – Sun
Night Formula: Asc. + Sun – Moon
The general topic is related to the Sun (life, vitality, enthusiasm, spirit, consciousness and being) and the specific topic is the Moon (change, the soul, the astral realm). This Lot is about how being alive and constantly exposed to the ebb and flow of fortune and change in the world around us personally affects and shapes our life story, causing us to act or shine. Interestingly, the ancients connect it to the body (the Moon was taken generally as the body, the Sun as the soul, with spirit or conscious presence being represented somewhat by its Lot rather than the Sun), with the formula neatly expressing the hermetic philosophy of the three bodies, since the formula (as well as Spirit, below) is composed of Sun, Moon and ascendant, the three representatives of the spirit, soul and physical body in the chart, suggesting the Lot is connected to the astral matrix or silver cord which connects the physical and astral bodies and also therefore with the karma of the soul in its earthly incarnation (the cord or matrix is set to naturally expire at a certain time from birth according to the needs of the incarnation). Other significations for this Lot given include possessions, the way we make a living, reputation and how much privilege we enjoy. It is taken as a general indicator of fortune and its positional strength and that of its ruler indicators of how much favour we enjoy generally.
Lot of Spirit or Daimon (Sun): In a day chart you measure the distance from the Moon to the Sun and then add the same distance to the degree of the ascendant. By night you measure the distance from the Sun to the Moon and then add the same distance to the degree of the ascendant.
Day Formula: Asc. + Sun – Moon
Night Formula: Asc. + Moon – Sun
Notice that this is the reverse of the formula for Fortune. This means that both of these Lots will be equal distances from the ascendant but on the other side, like a mirror with the ascendant as the reflector, the midpoint. The general topic is related to the Moon (the soul, astral realm, change) and the specific topic is the Sun (life events, consciousness and being). This is a more spiritual Lot connected to the enlightenment and awakening of spiritual powers within the soul. It characterizes how life will present us with events that are tailored towards our own personal spiritual evolution according to our fate in the Akasha and the needs of the soul. This Lot both awakens and inspires us to take some kind of action and can be interpreted as the fortune we are fated to create through our own actions. It is the nature of the Sun to invigorate and enliven, to bring about action, and so we can interpret this Lot as being about how life events in general happening around us are fated to cause us to take action that results in changes within our soul, adaptation and personal change – to astrally respond to the light. It therefore also connects with the mental matrix or golden/violet cord that binds the astral and mental body together and which naturally expires when the souls return journey is complete. Paulus writes that it signifies the exercise of every power. The world changes according to our actions and this Lot connects with that power.
Lot of Necessity (Mercury): For a day chart you measure from Mercury to the Lot of Fortune and by night you go from the Lot of Fortune to Mercury, and then project the same distance from the degree of the ascendant.
Day Formula: Asc. + Lot of Fortune – Mercury
Night Formula: Asc. + Mercury – Lot of Fortune
The general topic is related to the planet Mercury while the specific focus is the Lot of Fortune. This Lot is about our fortune, fate and karma with Mercury. It is about how interaction in the world with all Mercurial things brings either what we would call fortune or misfortune, trouble and strife or agreement and alignment. In the ancient texts we see this Lot is given many malefic qualities like imprisonment, exile, enmity, poverty, a lack of education, battle and disagreements and in general is delineated as being about restrictive and difficult situations, bringing about the necessity for adaptation and mercurial inventiveness (“Necessity is the Mother of invention.”). The world is bothersome, we get into all kids of trouble, there are countless problems, things we must learn about, controversies, opinions and factors to consider, and overwhelming input like this forces us to make choices and develop our own viewpoints. Knowledge itself is part of this as from the earliest age we must learn number, letters, and all the subjects to study and lessons just multiply from there. The Lot shows the outcome of our pursuit of knowledge, the way our own mental viewpoint can imprison our thinking and how we are fated to experience being affected by all this, all of which expresses the trickster side of Mercury who delights equally in creating problems and solving them.
Lot of Eros (Venus): For a day chart measure the distance from the Lot of Spirit to Venus but by night measure it from Venus to the Lot of Spirit, then project the same distance from the ascendant degree.
Day Formula: Asc. + Venus – Lot of Spirit
Night Formula: Asc. + Lot of Spirit – Venus
The general topic is the Lot of Spirit (things that happen to inspire you to take a course of action and which serve as spiritual instruction or awakening) while the specific topic is Venus (emotions and desires, the Venus sphere), so this Lot is about the outcome of pursuing those things we cant help but set our hearts on firmly, the Venus things in and of the world (really, the universe) which inspire us to take action, to live life and embrace it as a lover by pursuing them. Do we attain them, and is that attainment to our satisfaction? Remember though that Venus is as much about attraction as she is about repulsion. Eros is about how the sensation of being alive in a world where everything else is alive and expressing stimulus towards us goes down according to our destiny or fate, the karma we have with Venus, and about what happens concerning those things we cannot help but desire. It connects with how Cupid’s arrows will strike us unawares or without our intention and the responsiveness we have to artistic muses. The ancient texts say it is connected with appetites and desires that arise by choice and voluntary association or friendship.
Lot of Courage (Mars): Measure from Mars to the Lot of Fortune for a day chart but from the Lot of Fortune to Mars in a night chart and add the same distance to the degree of the ascendant.
Day Formula: Asc. + Lot of Fortune – Mars
Night Formula: Asc. + Mars – Lot of Fortune
Here the general topic is connected to Mars while the specifics are connected to Fortune. This Lot is about those events and happenings in the world which force us to draw upon courage in situations where we would not normally feel courageous in and expresses our souls karma that is connected to our use of power and strength – Mars. Thus it is often connected to calamities and very dire situations such as treachery, plotting and “all kinds of evil doing” in the ancient texts, as well as with boldness and conviction, which seem positive but it is important to understand that these qualities can also be employed toward acts of great cruelty. Esoterically Mars is connected to individuation (it emphasises difference, specialness) and what the Lot expresses is how we are fated to encounter risk, danger, battles and struggles as a result of fortune and how this will shape and define the uniqueness of our individual nature as well as awaken inner strength we did not know we had. This differs from Mars because Mars in our chart represents how we initiate such situations and how we tend to handle them. This Lot is about the battles that seek us out, not the ones we seek.
Lot of Victory (Jupiter): Measure from the Lot of Spirit to Jupiter for a day nativity and for a night chart from Jupiter to the Lot of Spirit and then project this distance from the ascendant.
Day Formula: Asc. + Jupiter – Lot of Spirit
Night Formula: Asc. + Lot of Spirit – Jupiter
The general topic is the Lot of Spirit (spiritual awakening, the impetus to take part in life, self awareness and presence) and the specific topic is Jupiter (spiritual truths and laws, connection to a greater and larger whole, deity), so Victory is about those (positive) happenings which inspire us to have faith and hope and to act upon the spiritual laws which lead to the awakening of the spirit. We are told in the ancient texts that it brings about successful and satisfying conclusions to enterprises, success and all kinds of generosity, winnings and contests and things which inspire us to be hopeful. The Lot is about how we are fated to encounter these situations seemingly at random, seemingly by the spinning of the wheel, as it were, but really arising as an impetus for our own awakening and as a broadening and deepening of our awareness of natural law and spiritual truth. It is in essence not the Jupiter within us but what we are alloted to encounter of the Jupiter principle in the world and how this will lead us to be more active as a positive force in life as an active manifestation of Divine laws.
Lot of Nemesis (Saturn): Find this in a day chart by measuring from Saturn to the Lot of Fortune and in a night chart measure from the Lot of Fortune to Saturn and project the same distance from the degree of the ascendant.
Day Formula: Asc. + Lot of Fortune – Saturn
Night Formula: Asc. + Saturn – Lot of Fortune
The general focus here is Saturn and the specific descriptor is Fortune. This sobering Lot is about how we are seemingly randomly fated to encounter very difficult situations, the most difficult kind, some of us more than others, situations we can do nothing about and must simply be endured and learned from as aspects of our karma and as situations which potentially embroil us in new karma. We each come into this material existence prior to earthly life understanding that the conditions of physical life increase the problems and difficulties that we will have to contend with and this is a feature, not a bug, one that draws us towards earthly incarnation again and again seeking the precious opportunities for growth that it offers our being. The ancients say in the texts that this Lot relates to spirits of the underworld (ghosts, demons, evil spirits like vampires, witches and werewolves too, I think in modern times we would also include malevolent aliens as well) and all things that remain concealed or hidden, which we may say in our modern language means those things we are fated to encounter as a result of the unconscious, but I would say we have to add this to what was said before, not replace it with it. The texts also say that this Lot symbolises the quality of death as well as the degree of sorrow and burdens we will face along the way to that nemesis. The frail, mortal, temporal world is full of sorrows, an endless parade of them, just as it is an endless parade of other things too, and how we are allotted to experience this is expressed in this Lot. Yet instead of death as the nemesis of this lot we could also say that it is time and that the lesson is for us to mature through the ever-changing circumstances of the world, especially through the suffering we witness in the world which can serve to awaken us to more enduring things within us.
As you can hopefully see from this brief exploration the system of Lots was/is very intricate and well thought out and presents the modern mind with some uncomfortable notions that can make working with them difficult but this perception can be overcome if you understand the core principles being communicated. While we are all furnished with the same archetypal forces – a zodiac, a complex solar system, houses and aspects – and we all differ from one another in the specifics of those archetypes and the aspects which arise from a universe constantly in motion, we all also differ according to the way we meet with more or less of certain kinds of experiences as we journey through a world where there are billions of other souls at the same time, leading to so many happenings, and we each have to deal with a different set of experiences as a result. In modern astrology the planets take all of these responsibilities, they signify the principle within us and the principle as we encounter it in the world as well as all of the topics that each planet must represent, but in the ancient word the latter factors – how we encounter the planet while incarnated and the specific individual topics of each planet – seem to have been taken up more specifically by the Lots, as tokens of fate.
As always, I suggest that you learn from direct experience and calculate your own Lots as well as the Lots of other people you know to evaluate their effectiveness, remembering that you would be best served by switching to a whole sign house system and adopting sign based aspects rather than a degree aspect approach, as it seems this is how they were looking at things much of the time. Maybe not, but I am not getting into that controversy here though! So, where are your Lots? Do they reflect your worldly reality? How do my interpretations of the Lots match up with your experience? Have fun exploring!
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Project Hindsight: http://www.projecthindsight.com/geninfo/about.html
The Arabic Parts in Astrology, a Lost Key to Prediction (Robert Zoller)
Hellenistic Astrology, the Study of Fate and Fortune (Chris Brennan)
Sextiles and the Grand Sextile: Complementary Elements
Greetings, and welcome back to Journeys! This month the path takes us into an – exciting! – exploration of the sextile aspect.
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journeys in the astral light 