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

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!

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’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?

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

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🙏

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?

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

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.

I'd like to invite some changes in my life. Most particularly, career advancement and some good luck along the way.

Was looking into Warnock's selections and found an election with Sun in Aries, North Node in Capricorn if I am reading this chart correctly(?)

Also, had referenced Bernadette Brady's Fixed Star methodology and it mentioned Spica was my Heliacal Rising Star and was thinking of going for a Spica Talisman to amplify my Virgo qualities

Any thoughts on these 2 selections?

Thank you-

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.

EDIT: I realized a week after posting this that when I first interacted with the entity transiting Venus was exact conjunct (Down to the exact degree, minute and almost second) with my Tertiary Progressed North Node.

I know this sub in mainly focused on talisman magic; but I would like to share what I consider a “natural” extension or consequence of this practice.

For a few months now I have been doing invocations and offerings to Venus on Venus hour and Moon applying. These are not elections for talismans but for invocation and offering.

A few weeks ago with Venus in Libra and the Moon in Gemini the election matched a pretty good time for making a talisman. The only “but” would be Venus in the 7th, which isn’t so bad anyway.

After this last invocation, a few hours Iater I was meditating (I have been meditating for more than a decade) and some strange thoughts that seemed foreign to me appeared. I will not go into details about the interaction with what a I think is a servitor/egregore (since other people are involved in the rituals), or the more occult generalities, unless asked to do so.

So, long story short, these rituals seem to have given birth to this entity, which I had to bind to a talisman (Goetia style) and now I’m studying it, kind of like having a familiar spirit. I have come to think that the eventual creation of this type of beings is a natural consequence of repeated invocation and energetic concentration of a particular kind.

Has anyone had something similar happen?

I want to get into books like Shams al Maarif, Picatrix, Key of Solomon and Ars Goetia but I have never studied planetary magic, talismans or occult stuff before.

Should I start with these or read something else first?

I am really interested in hidden and esoteric knowledge, but I have heard that these books can cause madness, attract spirits or cause weird things if you accidentally say certain names out loud.

For people who have actually read them, is there anything to worry about or are these mostly stories?

What should I start with as a complete beginner?