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

*THE INSULT*

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

*WHAT HAPPENED IN MELANESIA*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*FEYNMAN'S AIRSTRIP*

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

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

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

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

*THE SHAPE OF AN INEXPERT RECOVERY*

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

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

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

*HOW THE ART CAME BACK*

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

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

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

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

*WHAT THE BOOK ACTUALLY SPENDS ITS PAGES ON*

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

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

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

*ONE RECIPE, READ BOTH WAYS*

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

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

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

*MY OWN AIRSTRIP*

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

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

*WHAT THE PLANES NEED*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And also how to change that.

Come read how:

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

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

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

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

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

--Clifford

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

My first attempt at drawing a pentacle.

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

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

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

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

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

--Clifford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi everyone! I'm new to planetary magic and would appreciate any advice:)
I want to work with the energies\ intelligences of mercury and try to make a talisman. are there any positions in my natal chart that would have a bad effect on this?
I also studied several discussions here and saw that now is not the best time for the Jupiter talisman, but I was wondering if it is possible to interact with its energies. or it also depends on the phase of the planet and can be harmful?
thank you in advance🙏

This is a two-part essay that I started several years ago, which documents some unconventional discoveries that I made in the earliest days of my involvement in astrological magic.

It was through a series of accidents where I ended up randomly mixing up the correspondences of the planets and found that they worked better, but I could not determine why. This would have been 2001 or 2002.

What I eventually discovered was that there were multiple systems of colors and numbers, and the most commonly shared correspondence lists were among the least effective.

How I found the alternate ones and what they did are told in this two-part essay, which started originally on my old blog. (I have begun to sour on WordPress, and I will eventually dismantle that site in preference to the new one.)

One or two Hermetic bloggers found my very idea that the main sets of correspondences might be incorrect to be the worst of heresies. That declared me a liar and demanded that I prove my assertion. One of them even called me a wide assortment of very bad names. You would be shocked. People can be so rude on the internet.

Originally, I intended on documenting everything in a highly granular way, but the years passed, and I've decided that it's more important to get this information out there now than to apply a standard of perfection.

The most important proof of my assertions is simply through trial and error. If you are curious, or even if you doubt me, try this information out and see where it gets you. My motivation here is not particularly selfish, but helping you get what you want. This information has served me very well, and it should not be private any longer.

If you use it and benefit from it, all that I ask is that you credit me.

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/your-astrological-magic-is-broken.html

I’ve only worked with paper talismans thus far, and while they have been efficacious, I am in the process of planning a larger-scale operation which needs a bit more oomph. That being said, I am not a crafty person whatsoever and have no idea how I am to combine mineral, vegetable, and animal matter alongside telesmatic images with anything other than a sack, locket, or pillbox ring (which I don’t suppose will be large enough to hold the relevant synthemata). What do you all do?

I'm wanting to cast a spell to encourage my friend to self-reflect and I'm wanting some advice on the most effective intentions and planet(s) to invoke. (I'll explain why).

Sorry for the copious amount of background context but I want to cover my bases and make sure I'm presenting all parties as accurately as possible.

Context:
I live in an apartment with two other people and one of my current roommates is a friend of mine who I've been close with for like 10 years at this point (we've been living together for about 1.5 years, we also dormed together senior year of college).

But I've started to notice that when she has a conflict with me or we have a mutual conflict, I'm able to listen to her, see where she's coming from, and own up to the ways I need to improve both as a roommate and a person. (ex: she informed me recently that sometimes the way I say something can come off as condescending and I apologized, explained how that it's not my intention to be condescending but understood how I could have that effect anyway, and I've since been trying to be more mindful about my word choices and the way I say things).

But when I have a conflict with her where I have to bring up a behavior of hers that needs to be worked on or a way she's hurt me, those conversations somehow become about me and my issues again. And in those moments she ends up telling me about issues I have or says things about me that, when I follow up later on, she doesn't remember saying or it turns out she didn't even feel that way and just said it in the moment. (ex: a few months ago she told me she feels like the "manager" of the apartment and said she thought it seemed like I was using weaponized incompetence. So I spent months trying to improve on that but when I followed up with her, she told me that a) she had no memory of using that term against me or making that complaint and t b) that she didn't actually feel that way and had probably just been overstimulated at the time).

Normally I would try to talk to her about this. I know that magic cannot or should not be used as a replacement for human-to-human conflict resolution but I have doubts she'd even be able to see what I'm talking about let alone work on it.

Also, obviously the best solution to this issue is to move out and get some distance from the friendship so I can clear my head. It's plain to see that even if we're good friends, we don't work as roommates and I'm trying to get a new job so I can afford to move somewhere else (the rent at this apt is really cheap and I'm poor so for now, I'm stuck).

So my next thought was, in the meantime, to cast some kind of spell that might help her reflect and see clearly, without shame, the areas that she has to work on.

My thinking is if the energy I send via this spell is directed three-fold back to me, it's a win-win because then I'll get to reflect, work on myself, and maybe gain some insight into needed self-improvements that I'm not yet aware of.

My experience:
I mainly perform candle spells but I'm open to other forms of spell as well. I'd classify myself as intermediate, not advanced but not beginner either.

What planets do you think I should work with in this regard? Off the top of my head, the Sun and Saturn come to mind (clarity, light + discipline, growth) but I want to see what other planetary magic practitioners would suggest.

There are so many details to care (planets, asteroids, star signs, aspects, houses, fixed stars) about, and I'm not a person who is detail-oriented by nature. Yet, I still want to give a try before giving up.

I have read On The Heavenly Spheres (which is a very interesting books, that focuses on traditional astrology more than modern astrology) a book about Jupiter (that seems to be strong in my birth chart (Sun Aries and Jupiter in Sagittarius), but I like it as a planet because of its meaning and I think it's good for expansion and personal growth.

If I were to create a talisman about Jupiter, should I pick a particular moment in which certain things align? I've read Saturn tends to be an obstacle to Jupiter so you want to keep it away, but do you have any resources I can look into aside the usual astrology book?

Thank you ✨

II am very interested in hidden and occult subjects, especially religion, numerology, astrology, spirituality, magic, and other kinds of esoteric knowledge.

I wanted to eventually read some of the famous occult texts like Shams al-Maarif, Picatrix, and the Lesser Key of Solomon. But before getting into those, I wanted to build up some background knowledge first as I heard these books are somewhat dangerous, so I just finished reading “The History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult” which was very interesting but also boring at some parts.

What would you recommend I read next? I am looking for something that can give me a better foundation before I move on to the more difficult or practical occult texts.
next?

Helloooooo

I’ve posted here a couple times and have managed to get some decent answers and help from follow practitioners. I practice Louisiana Hoodoo and I am a folk Catholic/Southern Baptist (lot going on), Western esotericism and the occult is relatively new to me. Especially the magic of Solomon and planetary magic.

Everyone says that Saturn and Mars are the “harsh” planetary energies (being really reductive right now Im just trying to get my point across), but can you use the other planets for malefica or left hand workings?

For example, if you do a spell starting Saturday on the hour of Saturn to give someone grueling bad luck, then Sunday on the hour of the Sun you do a spell to bring light to/expose someone’s true shitty nature, then Monday on the hour of the moon you can psychically attack, and give them bad dreams about Big Bird trying to tickle torture them etc etc?

I hope this makes sense lol. Im new to this magic system.

Here's a new essay on my new website which covers magical theory, but also how astrological magic (the Science of Images) and traditional magics contrast with modern magics.

It may be of interest, I am a bit proud of it, and I hope that you all enjoy it.

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/where-the-power-is.html

WHERE THE POWER IS

The finger

There is a scene near the beginning of Willow, the 1988 film, that I have thought about for longer than I would like to admit. A traveling sorcerer, the High Aldwin, comes to the village to choose an apprentice. He holds up his hand and asks each candidate which of his fingers holds the power to control the world. One by one they pick a finger, and one by one they are wrong. Willow, the hero, picks wrong too, and is sent home. Only afterward, when the two of them are alone, does the old man ask him what his first instinct had been, and Willow admits that he had wanted to point to his own finger. That, the Aldwin tells him, was the answer.

The scene is meant to be moving and it is. It is also the clearest picture of one whole theory of magic that I know of in fiction. The power is not in the master's hand and not in any object he holds up. It is in you, and the whole of the art is finding the nerve to say so. Millions of people absorbed that lesson from a children's film without knowing that they were being taught a doctrine with a history, or that there is an older doctrine that answers the question the other way.

I want to set the two side by side, trace where each came from, and say which one the Science of Images belongs to and why. The question in the title is the Aldwin's question. My answer is not Willow's.

Two assumptions

There are two assumptions about how magic works that run underneath almost everything written on the subject, and they contradict each other. Most practitioners hold one without knowing it, and a good many hold both at once without noticing the contradiction.

The first assumption is that magic works by expression. If you can express yourself to the universe completely, fully, and with perfect sincerity, by whatever means, technical or otherwise, the universe will follow suit and unfold in the shape you have expressed. On this view the work of the magician is inward. You must understand yourself to the bottom, know what you want without self-deception, and then state it flawlessly, in symbol, in feeling, in word, in act. If the statement is true and whole, reality conforms to it.

The second assumption is that magic works by structure. The universe has an order, the order can be known, and a person who knows it can operate within it to direct events, in the way that a person who understands water can build a mill. On this view the work of the magician is outward. You must understand not yourself but the world, learn its joints and its seasons and its chains of cause, and then place yourself and your instruments where the structure will carry your purpose. Your sincerity is neither here nor there. The river does not care how much you mean it.

I call the first the expressive art. It is imaginative by method, and in its ceremonial form it is neo-Victorian by descent, for reasons I will come to. I call the second the traditional and structural art. The Science of Images, the tradition this site is devoted to, belongs to the second. Most of what passes for magic in the English-speaking world since about 1850 belongs to the first. The two are not merely different techniques. They rest on opposite pictures of where the power is, and, underneath that, on opposite pictures of what a human being is.

Where the expressive art came from

The expressive art feels ancient to the people who practice it, and it is not. It has a birthplace and a birth date, or near enough.

Its central doctrine, that the magician's will, working through the imagination, is the engine of the work, was given its modern form by Eliphas Lévi in the 1850s. Lévi's Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie proposed a universal medium he called the astral light, which the trained will could impress through the imagination, and which would then shape the material world to match. The magician's task was to purify and concentrate the will and to form the image without wavering. The correspondences and ceremonies of the older books were kept, but demoted. They became aids to concentration, props for the imagination, ways of getting the operator into the state in which his will could act. The power had moved indoors.

Lévi did not invent this from nothing. Behind him stands Mesmer, whose animal magnetism of the 1780s had proposed a subtle fluid that a person of strong will could direct into another body to heal it, and behind Mesmer a long line of speculation about the operator's spirit and imagination as agents. But Lévi is where the picture crystallized into a theory of magic as such, and he is the source everyone after him drew on, whether they credited him or not.

From Lévi the doctrine went two ways, into two audiences who would have been surprised to learn they were relatives.

One way led through the Golden Dawn and its heirs. The Order's instructional papers make the imagination the will's instrument and the formed mental image the thing that acts; Crowley's later definition of magick as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will" is Lévi's doctrine in a single sentence, with the astral light quietly dropped. The whole apparatus of pathworking, visualization, and assumption of godforms that the twentieth-century occult revival built is expressive machinery. Austin Osman Spare took the logic to its end and threw out the apparatus: a desire, condensed into a sigil, charged by feeling, and forgotten, with no correspondences and no timing at all. Chaos magic is what you get when the expressive art is honest about what it thinks is doing the work.

The other way led through New Thought. Phineas Quimby, a mesmerist in Maine, concluded in the 1850s and 60s that disease was a wrong belief and that a corrected belief would cure it. His students and their students built this into a movement. Thomas Troward gave it a philosophical dress in the Edinburgh Lectures of 1904; William Walker Atkinson gave it the name it still carries in Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World in 1906; Wallace Wattles turned it toward money in The Science of Getting Rich in 1910; Neville Goddard, in the 1940s, distilled it to the purest expressive formula I know of, that feeling is the secret and that to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled is the whole of the method. In 2006 The Secret packaged Wattles for television, sold tens of millions of copies, and put the law of attraction into the mouths of people who had never heard of an occultist. It is the same doctrine, thought forming reality through sustained inner conviction, from Lévi's study to the airport bookshop, and the family resemblance is not an accident. Mesmerism is the common ancestor.

I am not telling this history to sneer at it. I am telling it because people who work in the expressive mode almost always believe they are working in the old way, and they are not. The old way is something else.

What the structural art assumes

Open the Picatrix, or Ficino's third book On Life, or Agrippa's Three Books, or Campanella, and the picture is different from the first page. The power is not in the operator. It is in the heavens, and beneath the heavens in the chain of causes that descends from them into stones, metals, plants, and animals. The magician does not generate anything. He arranges to receive.

Everything in these books follows from that. You must know astrology, because the heavens are the source and you cannot tap a source whose motions you cannot read. You must elect the moment, because the source is not always flowing toward your purpose, and there is no amount of sincerity that will make Mars give what Jupiter gives. You must use the right matter, because the gift descends into what is fitted to hold it and runs off what is not. You must form the right image, because the image is the shape of the receiver. And you must know the order of the intelligences and the manner of addressing them, because the highest causes are minds and are approached as minds are approached. None of this is about you. Your desire sets the goal, and after that the work consists entirely of learning what the world is like and conforming your operation to it.

This is why the structural art looks, to the expressive practitioner, so cold and so fussy. All those tables. All that waiting for elections. Where is the passion, the will, the inner fire? The honest answer is that the tradition thought your inner fire was a small thing next to the fire of the Sun, and that the sensible course was to catch the Sun's. The magician in this picture is closer to a farmer than to a poet. He does not make the harvest. He knows the seasons, prepares the ground, plants at the right time, and takes what the order of things then yields.

I have come to think this is the more humble of the two arts, and that the humility is not incidental to it. The expressive art puts the self at the center of causation. Whatever else it says, its working assumption is that reality is downstream of my inner state, which is a large claim about myself. The structural art puts the self at the periphery. It asks me to surrender to an order I did not make and cannot alter, to learn it patiently, and to succeed only insofar as I fit my purpose to it. That surrender is not resignation, since the whole point is to get something done. But it is a submission, and I find that the people who last in this art are the ones who can stand to be small in it.

The two arts differ, at bottom, about what a human being is. The expressive art assumes that mankind is supreme, that the human self is an expression of ultimate divinity, so that what it wills and images with sufficient purity is what the divine wills, and the world has no standing to refuse. You can hear this in Lévi, who makes the magician a little god commanding the astral light; you can hear it in the Golden Dawn's godforms and in Crowley's every man and every woman is a star; you can hear it, in a flatter key, in every law-of-attraction book that tells you the universe is waiting to give you what you already are. The structural art assumes something older and less flattering. Mankind is a link in a chain. Above us are the heavens, and above the heavens the intelligences, and above them their cause, and we are neither the top of that order nor its author. We are a middle term, with real powers, which are the powers of a middle term, to know what is above us and to bring it down into what is below. That is a dignified position, and the tradition made much of it, but it is not supremacy. A magician who understands that he is a link works differently from one who believes he is the source.

It is also, for the same reason, the art that sits naturally with traditional religion and traditional metaphysics. A cosmos with a given order, a hierarchy of causes, and minds above the visible world is the cosmos of the Platonists and of the Abrahamic faiths alike, and a magic that works by fitting into that order is at home in it in a way that a magic of self-assertion is not. The old objections to astrological magic were about which powers one was dealing with, not about whether the world had a structure to be dealt with. The expressive art, by contrast, quietly requires that the world have no fixed shape at all, since it must be able to take any shape my conviction gives it, and that is a metaphysics very few traditions have been willing to accept...

[At this point you will need to click the link and go to the website to continue. The next section includes a table that I cannot figure out how to insert here. There's a lot of juicy stuff in the next part too...]

https://www.astrologicalmagic.com/library/where-the-power-is.html

Are these too simple or could they yield results/help build a relationship with the planet?

1. You can write a glyph or planetary square and wish/desire on the other side and carry it around with you.
   
2. Simply Writing planetary glyph in a circle or triangle around petition or target.
   
3. Simply Writing planetary glyph and writing desire, or petition/prayer around the glyph during planetary day/hour.
   
4. Reciting Orphic Hymn or Picatrix prayers during planetary day and/or hour
   
5. Planetary square on one side, planetary glyph written x times on other side (saturn = 3). As a simple talisman made during planetary day and/or hour. Annoint or recite Orphic Hymn or Picatrix Prayer
   

6. During planetary day and/or hour, create Planetary square on one side, planetary glyph written x times on other side (saturn = 3). Draw a triangle or circle. Write your petition or desire in the shape (in corresponding color). Recite Orphic Hymn or Picatrix prayer. Incorporate tea light or candle, herbs etc.

7. Burning planetary glyph written in corresponding color and corresponding amount of times with herbs during planetary day/hour?

8. To just simply honor planet; Write planetary square + glyph. Say Picatrix prayer or Orphic Hymn during planetary day and or hour.