Tag Archives: program

“The Adocentyn Temple Almanac” Preferences Questionnaire

June 18, 2020 By in creative, news Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

This is just a quick update for tonight, but for once, I’d like some input from you, my amazing and darling readers.

As some of you might recall or have seen me go on about on Twitter, I’ve been working on a bit of a fun project lately, an automated almanac project that I call “The Adocentyn Temple Almanac” (or TATA for short, because I’m cute like that).  This is a project where, using the well-loved Swiss Ephemeris codebase and typesetting the output with LaTeX into something nice, I can produce a customizable almanac document for (almost) any populated latitude, longitude, and altitude on Earth.  It’s my hope that this becomes a truly useful thing for people: after all, can you imagine having a customized astrological/astronomical almanac for your very own temple room in your house or communal space, specific for where you might actually stand and see the stars?  My plan is, in exchange for a modest fee, to produce this almanac (made custom for each person, with a preliminary check to see what information they’d like) as a high-quality PDF, which you can have on your mobile device or laptop as needed, or which you can send off to a printer to have a hardcopy for on-hand off-line reference in your own temple space.

I’ve been working on TATA on and off for a bit now, and I’ve gotten a lot of features built into it already (all of which can be turned on or off as a user might desire):

  • Sun ingress Zodiac signs and decans
  • Sun transit seasons and season midpoints
  • Moon ingress Zodiac signs and lunar mansions
  • Moon phases
  • First and last sightings of the Moon
  • Solar and lunar eclipse times
  • Lunar month day numbers
  • Decan day numbers (using my “rebalanced true degree method” I mentioned in an earlier post)
  • Rising sign and culminating sign windows
  • Rising, setting, culminating, and settling times for the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars
  • Planetary hours
  • Simple ritual windows

Even so, however, because I have a perfectionist streak and because I want this to be the best, most useful, and most flexible bit of software that I can make it, I need your help to figure out what else I should build into this!  After all, there are some things that I just don’t know whether they’d be popular or some things I just don’t know about in general, and there are other things that I do know about and haven’t yet developed because I don’t know how desirable they’d be.  For that, I need to turn to you—yes, you!—to let me know what you think.

If you’re interested in helping me out with, please fill out this questionnaire on Google Forms.  You’ll need a Google account to take it, but this way you can change your responses afterwards if you have a wit-of-the-stair moment and need to add in something later.  It should only take about ten to thirty minutes, depending on your speed of answering and thinking about possibilities, but do feel free to suggest in the questionnaire whatever you might like!  After you’ve taken it, please also share this post (or my post on Facebook or tweet on Twitter) to your magical, astrological, priestly, occult, or spooky friends to also get their input.  I’ll keep everyone updated, to be sure, as this is a project I hope to bring to light and made accessible for anyone interested before the end of 2020, so please be sure to get your answers in soon to help guide my continuing effort on TATA!

On Timing Daily Prayers to the Degrees of the Decans

April 3, 2020 By in mathesis, occult, pgm Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I’ve had this idea in my head for prayer practice that revolves around the notion of cycles.  For instance, as part of my daily prayer practice, I’ve written a set of seven prayers, one for each of the seven days of the week, which I recite on an ongoing cycle.  They’re not necessarily planetary prayers, like you might find in the Hygromanteia or Heptameron, but they do have some planetary allusions and hints thrown into them.  The seven-day week, which is fundamentally a Mesopotamian invention, makes for a simple cycle of prayers, but I’ve been thinking about ways I could incorporate more cycles into my prayers.  For instance, a simple and short invocation for each of the days of a lunar month—with my Grammatēmerologion, my oracular Greek letter lunisolar calendar—based around the powers and potencies of each of the letters of the Greek alphabet, along with their spirits or gods, could be something fun to toy around with.  There’s lots of opportunities for this sort of practice:

  • the four turns of the Sun each day, a la Liber Resh (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight)
  • the seven days of the week
  • the 24 planetary hours of a given day
  • the four (or eight) phases of the Moon (new, crescent, first quarter, gibbous, full, disseminating, third quarter, balsamic)
  • the 29/30 days of a synodic lunar month
  • the 28 days of a sidereal lunar month (a la the 28 lunar mansions)
  • the 30/31 days of a solar month (a la the 12 signs of the Zodiac)
  • the four seasons (solstices and equinoxes), perhaps also with the four cross-quarter days (midpoints between the solstices and equinoxes)
  • the 10 days of a decan
  • when a planet stations retrograde or direct
  • when eclipses occur
  • when a planet or star is seen at its heliacal rising or setting

There are lots of opportunities to engage in prayers linked to or with the natural cycles of the cosmos, many of which are fundamentally astrological in nature.  The idea of coming up with a large-scale overarching prayer practice that engages in such cycles, to me, would be a fantastic way to recognize these natural cycles, bring oneself into alignment with them, and tap ever more greatly into the power of these cycles, especially when certain cycles interact or sync up with each other.  By aligning ourselves with these cycles, we can not just make use of χρονος khronos “time” generally, but also καιρος kairos “the moment”, the fleeting opening of opportunity itself that allows us to do the best thing possible.  There’s this Hermetic notion—it’s hard to find the note I was referencing for it, but I’m pretty sure it’s in Copenhaver’s Hermetica or Litwa’s Hermetica II—that we rely on kairos in order to fully carry out the process of rebirth in the Hermetic mystical sense, and that would be determined by the processes of Providence, Necessity, and Fate along with the very will of God.

Along these lines, I wanted to come up with a new cycle of prayers for myself, one specifically for the decans.  Some might know these as faces, the 36 10° segments of the ecliptic, three to a sign of the Zodiac.  The decans are old, as in ancient Egyptian old, and play a part in the astrological prognosticatory and magical literature of the Egyptians, Arabs, Brahmins, and Hermeticists the world over.  We see them referenced in magical-medical texts going back to the classical period, and they also appear in such texts as the Picatrix as well as Cornelius Agrippa (book II, chapter 37).  Though they come up time and time again, they also take so many wildly different forms between traditions and texts, which is fascinating on its own merits.  We even see Hermēs Trismegistus himself talk about the decans and their importance in the Sixth Stobaean Fragment.  In that part of the Hermetic cannon, Hermēs explains to Tat that the decans belong to a celestial sphere between the eighth sphere of the fixed stars and the higher sphere of the All, being a backdrop to the very stars themselves, and thus higher than the constellations and signs of the Zodiac.  These decans exert “the greatest energy” on us and the world, and they drive “all general events on the earth: overthrows of kings, uprisings in cities, famines, plagues, tsunamis, and earthquakes”.  In other Hermetic texts, like the Sacred Book of Hermēs to Asclepius, the decans also rule over specific parts of the body and the injuries and illnesses that afflict them (which is a very Egyptian concept indeed that we see in purer forms of Egyptian religion and spiritual practice).

You can probably guess where I’m going with this: more prayers and a ritual practice dedicated to the decans.  This would consist of two parts:

  • An invocation of the powers of the decan itself, according to its specific form and name and virtues, to be done when the Sun enters that decan.
  • One prayer per each day the Sun is in a given decan, a set of ten prayers to be recited over a ten day decanal “week”.  Since the Sun spends about one day per degree, this means that each degree of a decan can be considered a separate day, and each day with its own prayer.

After some thinking, I was able to come up with a relatively straightforward set of prayers for the decans themselves at the moment (or the first sunrise following) the Sun’s ingress into them, but it’s the latter part I’m still struggling with.  I have ideas about what to base them on—the ten Hermetic virtues from the Corpus Hermeticum, the Pythagorean symbolism of the first ten numbers, and so forth—but coming up with those prayers is a slow process, indeed.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on a bit of a programming project, something to plan ahead and help me figure out what such a prayer practice would look like scheduled out.  This is basically what I was doing with my Grammatēmerologion project, coding up a variety of astronomical functions to calculate the various positions and attributes of celestial bodies for any given moment, and courtesy of SUBLUNAR.SPACE (whose online customizable almanac is an invaluable and deeply treasured tool for any magician nowadays), I was tipped off to a much easier and faster way to develop such astronomical programs: the Swiss Ephemeris codebase, of which I found a Python extension for even more flexibility.

And that’s when the problems started.  (Beyond the usual mishaps that come along with any nontrivial programming project.)

See, as it turns out, there are more days in a year than there are degrees in a circle—which means that while the Sun moves roughly one degree per day, it actually moves slightly less than one degree per day.  This is why we have 365 days (or 366 days, in leap years) in a year.  To the ancient Egyptians, they considered the civil solar year to only have 12 months of 30 days each, each month consisting of three decans, with a leftover set of five days at the end of the year, considered to be the birthdays of the gods Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis, and Nephthys.  These intercalary (or epagomenal) days were considered a spiritually dangerous and liminal time, but once those days were over, the calendar was brought back into sync with its proper cycle.  However, what I wanted to do is to come up with a 10-day cycle linked to the degrees of the Sun, which means I would have to deal with these epagomenal days throughout the year instead of bundled up all at the end.  My logic was simple:

  • Start counting decan day assignments (decan day-numbers) starting from the first sunrise after the March equinox (which is when the Sun enters 0° Aries as well as the first decan).
  • Judge the degree of the ecliptical position of the Sun based on sunrise of any given day.
  • Take the whole degree of the Sun (e.g. if 9.459°, then 9), divide by 10, take the remainder, and that’s your day in the cycle.  Thus, if o°, then this is our first day; if 1°, the second day; if 2°, the third day;…if 9°, the tenth day.  Thus, when we hit the next o° day, we start the cycle over.
  • If the whole degree of the Sun is the same as the previous day (e.g. 7.998° for today and 7.014° for yesterday), then this is an epagomenal day, and we say either no prayer at all or an eleventh special prayer not otherwise used except for epagomenal days.

A relatively simple method, all told.  Or so I thought.  When I actually ran the program, I noticed that there were not five epagomenal days (e.g. 1-2-3-4-5-X-6-7-8-9-10, where X is the epagomenal day) in the final count, but seven, which was…weird.  This would mean that there were 367 days, which would be wrong, except that there were 365 outputs.  It turns out that there were two skipped days (e.g. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-9-10, but no 8), one in early December and one in mid-February.  On top of that, although I expected the epagomenal days to be spaced out more-or-less equally throughout the year, they were all between early April and mid-September.  After looking into this, and making sure my code was correct (it was), what’s going on is this:

  • I made the mistake of assuming that the Sun moves at a constant speed each and every day of the year.  It doesn’t, for a variety of astronomical factors.
  • The Sun spends more time in the northern celestial hemisphere (about 185 days) than in the southern celestial hemisphere (about 180 days).
  • The Sun moves slower in winter around perihelion than in the summer around aphelion.
  • From winter through summer, the sunrise gets earlier and earlier, pushing the judgment-time of each day earlier and earlier, while in summer through winter, the reverse happens.

Talk about vexation: I had here what I thought was a perfectly reasonable method—and to a large extent, it is—yet which results in the cycle just skipping days, which I intensely dislike, since it breaks the cycle.  Without doubling up prayers on the skipped days, which I’d really rather like to avoid, it means that I couldn’t use this otherwise simple method to figure out a decanal 10-prayer schedule that would be in sync with the Sun.

After thinking about it some, I considered five different ways to associate the days to the degrees of the decans:

  1. The “Egyptian” method.  This is the most old-school and traditional, and mimics the behavior of the actual ancient Egyptian calendar: starting from the New Year, assign an unbroken cycle of days from day one to day ten 36 times.  This gradually becomes more and more unsynced as time goes on, but we throw in five or six epagomenal days at the very end to catch up all at once before the next New Year.  Simple, traditional, clean, but it’s really the worst of the bunch with the accumulating degree differences that get resolved all at once at the end of the year instead of periodically throughout the year.
  2. The “plan-ahead” method. Like the Egyptian”method, this is a pretty artificial way to allocate the days, but elegant in its own way, and spreads out the epagomenal days across the year more-or-less regularly.  We know that, at least for the foreseeable future, we’re going to deal with either normal years of 365 days or leap years of 366 days.  For normal years, we need to have five epagomenal days, so we insert an epagomenal day after the 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th, and 36th decans (or, in other words, every seventh decan not including the first).  For leap years, we need six epagomenal days, which we insert after the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th, 30th, and 36th decan (i.e. every sixth decan).  Note that we judge a year to be a normal year or a leap year based on the Gregorian calendar year prior to a given March equinox; thus, for this method, we start assigning days from the March 2020 equinxo using the normal method because the prior calendar year, 2019, was not a leap year; we use the leap year method starting from the March 2021 equinox because the prior calendar year, 2020, was a leap year.
  3. The “true degree” method.  This is the method mentioned before: starting with the New Year at the March equinox, when the true degree of the Sun is exactly 0° and using sunrise at one’s location as the reference time, take the degree of the Sun and compare it to the degree at the previous day’s reference time.  If the degree is in the next whole number (e.g. 23.005° and 22.025°), the day proceeds to the next whole number; if the degree is in the same whole number (e.g. 23.985° and 23.005°), then it’s an epagomenal days.  The problem, as stated earlier, is that due to the varying speed of the Sun as the Earth travels between perihelion and aphelion (which also has the effect of the Sun spending more time in the northern celestial hemisphere than in the southern celestial hemisphere), we end up with more epagomenal days than expected around aphelion, and with days that are outright skipped around perihelion.  While the exact match of day to degree is appealing, it’s the skipped days that breaks cycles and which ruins the whole prayer system I was trying to devise.
  4. The “average degree” method.  This is a variation on the true degree method, only instead of using the Sun’s true position at the reference time on each day, we take a theoretical position of the Sun based on its average daily motion of 360.0°/365.2421897 days = 0.98564735989°/day.  Starting with the New Year at the March equinox, when both the true degree and average degree of the Sun is exactly 0°, using sunrise at one’s location as the reference time, take the theoretical average degree of the Sun (advancing it by the Sun’s average daily motion day by day at the reference time) and compare it to the degree at the previous day’s reference time, with the same epagomenal rule as before.  The benefit to this method is that it gets us the expected number of epagomenal days which are evenly distributed throughout the year without skipping any other days; the downside is that, as we get closer to the September equinox, the theoretical average position of the Sun drifts further away from the true position by as much as 3.780°, putting us three or four days out of sync with the true position.
  5. The “rebalanced true degree” method.  This is an extension of the true degree method above.  We start with the assignments of days to degrees as before, extra epagomenal days and skipped days and all, but we “rebalance” the days by removing some epagomenal days and reinserting them where we were earlier skipping days.  For every skipped day, we alternate between choosing the first and last of the epagomenal days.  So, if we have seven epagomenal days on year days 24, 59, 83, 105, 127, 151, and 182, and we have two skipped days on days 274 and 333, then we first remove the first epagomenal day from day 24 and reinsert it on day 274, and then the last epagomenal day from day 181 (was 182 before we removed the other one) and insert it on day 333.

So, five different methods of assigning days a decan day-number, one of which (the Egyptian method) being the most regular and artificial with the worst drift, one of which (the true degree method) being the most accurate and realistic yet which skips days entirely, and three other methods (plan-ahead, average degree, rebalanced true degree) that vary in terms of computational complexity and accuracy.  We know that the true degree method is the most accurate, so we can plot the various other methods against it to visually see how bad the drift is between it and the other methods.  In the following graphs, the true degree method is given in red, with the other method being compared to it in blue.  Epagomenal days are marked as having a decan day-count number of -1, hence the severe dips at times.  Where the blue and red lines are more in sync, the method is better; where the lines depart, the method gets worse.  The true degree method gives an epagomenal day in decans 3, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15, and 18, and if you look close enough, you can see the skip in the days towards the end of decans 27 and 33.

Just visually looking at these methods, we can see that all four methods start off the same for a little more than the first two decans, but after that, most of them begin to diverge.  The Egyptian method is worse in how often and by how much it diverges, with that nasty flatline of epagomenal days at the end, and the plan-ahead method doesn’t fare much better, either; note also how both of these methods end with epagomenal days for at least the final day of the year.  The average degree method doesn’t look too bad, though it does get worse around the September-October area of the year before it gets better again, eventually getting back in sync for the final three decans of the year.  By far the most pleasing and in-sync graph we see is with the rebalanced true degree method, which does vary a little bit but by no means as bad or as irregularly as the other methods; we have about five decans where they’re in sync, 22 where they’re one day off, and nine when they’re off by two days.

But, besides just looking at them with my eyeballs, how should I best compare the accuracy of all these methods?  What I settled on was a ratio between the day’s decan day-number according to a particular method and the true degree expected for the Sun for that day:

  1. If a given day is an epagomenal day, throw out the value entirely, and don’t factor it into calculations.
  2. For a given day reckoned at the reference time (sunrise on the March equinox for a given location), find the Sun’s true ecliptic position.
  3. Take the whole degree of the Sun (e.g. if 9.227°, 9).
  4. Divide the number from the previous step by 10 and take the remainder.
  5. Add one to the previous step.
  6. Divide a given day’s decan day-number by the previous step.

The shortcut to this method would basically be to divide the method’s decan day-number for a given day against the true degree method’s decan day-number, but I wanted to be sure I was getting the Sun’s true position here for mathematical rigor.  This ratio indicates the general percentage difference we expect; if the ratio is 1, then the given method’s decan day-number is what we’d expect; if more than 1, it’s ahead of what we expect; if less than 1, behind what we expect.

Doing some simple math on these ratios for these given methods gets us the following statistics (omitting the epagomenal days entirely), judged against the year from the March 2020 equinox through the March 2021 equinox (considered a normal year).  I calculated these results based on a prototype decanal calendar starting on March 20, 2020 at 11:12 UTC (the first sunrise after the spring equinox for my town’s given longitude) for 365 days.

Method Mean Median Min Max STD Variance
Egyptian 1.71222574 1 0.1 8 1.856253825 3.445678262
Plan-ahead 1.467144864 1.333333333 0.1 6 1.09989769 1.209774928
True degree 1 1 1 1 0 0
Average degree 1.351345416 1.166666667 0.1 5 0.9200161032 0.8464296301
Rebalanced true degree 1.211630551 1.2 0.1 3 0.5348857385 0.2861027532

In the 2020/2021 year, we can see that it’s the rebalanced true degree method that has the lowest standard deviation and variance, with the mean closest to 1.  This means that the rebalanced true degree method gets us the closest decan day-numbers to what the Sun’s actual position is on the whole, being at worst three days ahead (compared to the potential of being five, six, or eight days ahead with the other non-true degree methods).

For another look, we can also consider the leap year (according to our rule above) for the March 2021 equinox through the March 2022 equinox.  I calculated these results based on a prototype decanal calendar starting on March 20, 2021 at 11:13 UTC for 366 days.

Method Mean Median Min Max STD Variance
Egyptian 1.704857316 0.85 0.1 8 1.89868141 3.604991096
Plan-ahead 1.432609127 1.333333333 0.1 6 1.044951208 1.091923027
True degree 1 1 1 1 0 0
Average degree 1.338694885 1.2 0.1 5 0.8991436886 0.8084593728
Rebalanced true degree 1.142828483 1.142857143 1 2 0.3982472329 0.1586008585

We get even better results during leap years, it’d seem, at least based on this example alone; we’re only a max of two days ahead of the Sun’s true position, and we have even less variance and deviation than before.

If I were to go with any system of assigning a 10-day repeating cycle of prayers to the days to keep more-or-less in sync with the position of the Sun as it goes through the decans, I’d go with the rebalanced true degree method.  Still, even if it’s the most in sync, it’s not truly in sync, as there really isn’t such a system possible without skipping days due to the inconvenient misalignment of physical phenomena with discrete human systems of calendrics.  As SUBLUNAR.SPACE commiserated with me about on Facebook, as he found out when he was coding his own almanac program, the decans “do not like to be pushed into human patterns”, and that we really have to choose degrees or days, because we can’t have both.  In his almanac, he settled with marking things by the actual ingress, which was the common practice in the decan calendars of Ptolemaic times.  On top of that, as far as calculation goes, it’s among the more complicated, requiring manual rebalancing after figuring out the true degree day equivalences first for the whole year until the next March equinox; easy enough to do by a computer program, but tedious or outright difficult to do by hand.

For now, I’m going to content myself with marking the Sun’s ingress into the decans, and leave it at that.  For one, though I’d like to engage in a 10-day cycle of prayers aligned with the decans, and even though I have some sort of system in place to explore that, I still don’t have those damn ten (or eleven) prayers written up for them.  But, at least knowing what the schedule looks like is a start.

On Geomantic Figure Magic Squares

February 18, 2019 By in geomancy, occult Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

We all know and love magic squares, don’t we?  Those grids of numbers, sometimes called “qamea” (literally just meaning “amulet” or “talisman” generally in Hebrew, קמיע or qamia`), are famous in Western magic for being numerological stand-ins or conceptions of the seven planets, sure, such as the 3×3 square for Saturn, the 5×5 square for Mars, and so forth, but they’re also huge in Arabic magic, too, from which Western magicians almost certainly got the idea.  Sure, magic letter squares are ancient in the West, such as the famous Sator Square from Roman times until today, and have more modern parallels in texts like the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, but magic number squares are fun, because they combine numerical and numerological principles together in an elegant form.

Which is why I was caught off-guard when I saw these two squares online, the first from this French blog post on Arabic geomancy and the other shared in the Geomantic Study-Group on Facebook:

Well…would you take a look at that?  Geomantic magic squares!  It took me a bit to realize what I was seeing, but once it hit me, I was gobsmacked.  It might not be immediately apparent how to make a geomantic magic square, but it becomes straightforward if you consider the figures as numbers of points, such that Laetitia stands in for 7, Puer for 5, Carcer for 6, and so forth.  Sure, it’s not a traditional kind of n × n number square that goes from 1 to n², but there are plenty of other magic squares that don’t do that either in occult practice, so seeing a kind of geomantic figure magic square actually makes a lot of sense when they’re viewed as numbers of points.  In this case, the magic sum of the square—the sum of the columns or rows—is 24.

Consider that first magic square, elegant as it is.  When it’s oriented on a tilt, such that one of its diagonals is vertical, we have the four axial figures (Coniunctio, Carcer, Via, and Populus) right down the middle, and all the other figures are arranged in reverse pairs in their corresponding positions on either side of the square.  For instance, Amissio and Acquisitio are on either side of the central axis “mirroring” each other, as are Tristitia and Laetitia, Fortuna Maior and Fortuna Minor, and so forth.  This is a wonderful geometric arrangement that shows a deep and profound structure that underlies the figures, and which I find particularly beautiful.

Of course, knowing that there are at least two such geomantic figure magic squares, and seeing possibilities for variation (what if you rearranged the figures of that first magic square above such that all the entering figures were on one side and all the exiting figures on the other?), that led me to wonder, how many geomantic magic squares are there?  Are there any structural keys to them that might be useful, or any other numerical properties that could be discovered?  So, late one evening, I decided to start unraveling this little mystery.  I sat down and wrote a quick program that started with the following list of numbers:

[ 4 , 5 , 5 , 5 , 5 , 6 , 6 , 6 , 6 , 6 , 6 , 7 , 7 , 7 , 7 , 8 ]
  • Why this list?  Note that the figure magic squares rely on counting the points of the figures.  From that point of view, Puer (with five points) can be swapped by Puella, Caput Draconis, or Cauda Draconis in any given figure magic square and it would still be another valid magic square that would have the same underlying numerical structure.  There’s only one figure with four points (Via), four figures with five points (Puer, Puella, Caput Draconis, Cauda Draconis), six figures with six points (Carcer, Coniunctio, Fortuna Maior, Fortuna Minor, Amissio, Acquisitio), four figures with seven points (Albus, Rubeus, Laetitia, Tristitia), and only one figure with eight points (Populus).  If we simply focus on the point counts of the figures themselves and not the figures, we can simplify the problem statement significantly and work from there, rather than trying to figure out every possible combination of figures that would yield a magic square from the get-go.
  • How does such a list get interpreted as a 4 × 4 square?  There are 16 positions in the list, so we can consider the first four positions (indices 0 through 3) to be the top row of the square, the second four positions (indices 4 through 7) to be the second row, the third four positions (indices 8 through 11) to be the third row, and the fourth four positions (indices 12 through 15) as the fourth row, all interpreted from left to right.  Thus, the first position is the upper left corner, the second position the uppermost inside-left cell, the third position the uppermost inside-right cell, the fourth position the upper right corner, the fifth position the leftmost inside-upper cell, the sixth position the inside-upper inside-left cell, and so forth.  This kind of representation also makes things a little easier for us instead of having to recursively deal with a list of lists.
  • How do we know whether any permutation of such a list, interpreted as a 4 × 4 square, satisfies our constraints?  We need to add up the values of each row, column, and diagonal and make sure they add up to our target number (in our case, 24).

Starting from this list, I set out to get all the unique permutations.  Originally, I just got all 16! = 20,922,789,888,000 possible permutations, thinking that would be fine, and testing them each for fitting the target number of 24, but after running for twelve hours, and coming up with over 170,000 results with more being produced every few minutes, I realized that I’d probably be waiting for a while.  So, I rewrote the permutation code and decided to get only unique permutations (such that all the 5s in the base list of numbers are interchangeable and therefore equal, rather than treating each 5 as a unique entity).  With that change, the next run of the program took only a short while, and gave me a list of 368 templates.  We’re getting somewhere!

So, for instance, take the last template square that my program gave me, which was the list of numbers [6, 6, 5, 7, 8, 5, 6, 5, 6, 7, 6, 5, 4, 6, 7, 7].  Given that list, we can interpret it as the following template magic square:

6 6 5 7
8 5 6 5
6 7 6 5
4 6 7 7

And we can populate it with any set of figures that match the point counts accordingly, such as the one below:

Fortuna
Minor		 Fortuna
Maior		 Puer Laetitia
Populus Puella Carcer

Cauda
Draconis
Amissio Albus Acquisitio Caput
Draconis
Via Coniunctio Rubeus Tristitia

Excellent; this is a totally valid geomantic figure magic square, where the point counts of each row, column, and diagonal add to 24.  To further demonstrate the templates, consider the two images of the figure magic squares I shared at the top of the post.  However, although I was able to find the first magic square given at the start of the post (the green-on-sepia one), the second one (blue with text around it) didn’t appear in the list.  After taking a close look at my code to make sure it was operating correctly, I took another look at the square itself.  It turns out that, because although all the rows and columns add to 24, one of the diagonals adds up to 20, which means it’s not a true geomantic figure magic square.  Welp!  At least now we know.

But there’s still more to find out, because we don’t have all the information yet that we set out to get.  We know that there are 368 different template squares, but that number hides an important fact: some template squares are identical in structure but are rotated or flipped around, so it’s the “same square” in a sense, just with a transformation applied.  It’s like taking the usual magic number square of Saturn and flipping it around.  So, let’s define three basic transformations:

  1. Rotating a square clockwise once.
  2. Flipping a square horizontally.
  3. Flipping a square vertically.

We know that we can rotate a square up to three times, which gets us a total of four different squares (unrotated, rotated once, rotated twice, rotated thrice).  We know that we can leave a square unflipped, flipped horizontally, flipped vertically, and flipped both horizontally and vertically.  We know that a square can be rotated but not flipped, flipped but not rotated, or both rotated and flipped.  However, it turns out that trying out all combinations of rotating and flipping gets duplicate results: for instance, flipping vertically without rotating is the same as rotating twice and flipping horizontally.  So, instead of there being 16 total transformations, there are actually only eight other templates that are identical in structure but just transformed somehow, which means that our template count of 368 is eight times too large.  If we divide 368 by 8, we get a manageable number of just 46 root templates, which isn’t bad at all.

What about total possible figure squares?  Given any template, there are four slots for figures with five points, four slots for figures with seven points, and six slots for figures with six points.  The figures of any given point count can appear in any combination amongst the positions with those points.  This means that, for any given template square, there are 4! × 4! × 6! = 414,720 different possible figure squares.  Which means that, since there are 368 templates, there are a total of 152,616,960 figure squares, each a unique 4 × 4 grid of geomantic figures that satisfy the condition that every column, row, and diagonal must have 24 points.  (At least we’ve got options.)

What about if we ignore diagonals?  The blue magic square above is almost a magic square, except that one of its diagonals adds up to 20 and not 24.  If we only focus on the rows and columns adding up to 24 and ignore diagonals, then we get a larger possible set of template squares, root template squares, and figure squares:

  • 5,904 template squares
  • 738 root template squares
  • 2,448,506,880 possible figure squares

So much for less-magic squares.  What about more-magic squares?  What if we take other subgroups of these squares besides the rows, columns, and diagonals—say, the individual quadrants of four figures at each corner of the square as well as the central quadrant, or the just the corner figures themselves, or the bows and hollows?  That’s where we might get even more interesting, more “perfect” geomantic figure magic squares, so let’s start whittling down from least magic to most magic.  Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, here are examples of the different patterns I’m considering (four columns, four rows, two diagonals, five quadrants, four bows, four hollows, one set of corners):

To keep the numbers manageable, let’s focus on root template square counts:

  • Rows and columns only: 738 root templates
  • Rows, columns, and diagonals: 46 root templates
  • Rows, columns, diagonals, and all five quadrants: 18 root templates
  • Rows, columns, diagonals, all five quadrants, bows, and hollows: 2 root templates
  • Rows, columns, diagonals, all five quadrants, bows, hollows, and the four corners: 2 root templates

With each new condition, we whittle down the total number of more-magical root templates from a larger set of less-magical root templates.  I’m sure there are other patterns that can be developed—after all, for some numeric magic squares of rank 4, there are up to 52 different patterns that add up to the magic sum—but these should be enough to prove the point that there are really two root templates that are basically as magical as we’re gonna get.  Those root templates, along with their transformations, are:

  1. [6, 4, 7, 7, 8, 6, 5, 5, 5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6]
    1. Unflipped, unrotated: [6, 4, 7, 7, 8, 6, 5, 5, 5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6]
    2. Unflipped, rotated once clockwise: [5, 5, 8, 6, 7, 7, 6, 4, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7]
    3. Unflipped, rotated twice clockwise: [6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5, 5, 5, 6, 8, 7, 7, 4, 6]
    4. Unflipped, rotated thrice clockwise: [7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 4, 6, 7, 7, 6, 8, 5, 5]
    5. Flipped, unrotated: [7, 7, 4, 6, 5, 5, 6, 8, 6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5]
    6. Flipped, rotated once clockwise: [6, 8, 5, 5, 4, 6, 7, 7, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6]
    7. Flipped, rotated twice clockwise: [5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6, 8, 6, 5, 5, 6, 4, 7, 7]
    8. Flipped, rotated thrice clockwise: [6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 7, 7, 6, 4, 5, 5, 8, 6]
  2. [8, 6, 5, 5, 6, 4, 7, 7, 5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6]
    1. Unflipped, unrotated: [8, 6, 5, 5, 6, 4, 7, 7, 5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6]
    2. Unflipped, rotated once clockwise: [5, 5, 6, 8, 7, 7, 4, 6, 6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5]
    3. Unflipped, rotated twice clockwise: [6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5, 7, 7, 4, 6, 5, 5, 6, 8]
    4. Unflipped, rotated thrice clockwise: [5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6, 6, 4, 7, 7, 8, 6, 5, 5]
    5. Flipped, unrotated: [5, 5, 6, 8, 7, 7, 4, 6, 6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5]
    6. Flipped, rotated once clockwise: [8, 6, 5, 5, 6, 4, 7, 7, 5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6]
    7. Flipped, rotated twice clockwise: [5, 7, 6, 6, 5, 7, 6, 6, 6, 4, 7, 7, 8, 6, 5, 5]
    8. Flipped, rotated thrice clockwise: [6, 6, 7, 5, 6, 6, 7, 5, 7, 7, 4, 6, 5, 5, 6, 8]

That second one, for instance, is the root template of that first figure magic square given above (green-on-sepia), unflipped and rotated clockwise twice.  So, with these, we end up with these two root template squares, from which can be developed eight others for each through rotation and reflection, meaning that there are 16 template squares that are super magical, which means that there are a total of 6,635,520 possible figure squares—414,720 per each template—once you account for all variations and combinations of figures in the slots.

That there are 16 templates based on two root templates is suggestive that, maybe, just maybe, there could be a way to assign each template to a geomantic figure.  I mean, I was hoping that there was some way we’d end up with just 16 templates, and though I was ideally hoping for 16 root templates, two root templates is pretty fine, too.  With 16 figures, there are at least two ways we can lump figures together into two groups of eight: the planetary notion of advancing or receding (advancing Populus vs. receding Via for the Moon, advancing Albus vs. receding Coniuncto for Mercury, advancing Fortuna Maior and receding Fortuna Minor for the Sun, etc.), or the notion of entering or exiting figures.  Personally, given the more equal balance of figures and the inherently structural nature of all this, I’m more inclined to give all the entering figures to one root template and all the exiting figures to the other.  As for how we might assign these templates to the figures, or which set of templates get assigned to the entering figures or exiting figures, is not something I’ve got up my sleeve at this moment, but who knows?  Maybe in the future, after doing some sort of structural analysis of the templates, some system might come up for that.

More than that, how could these squares be used?  It’s clear that they’ve got some sort of presence in geomantic magic, but as for specifically what, I’m not sure.  Unlike a geomantic chart, which reveals some process at play in the cosmos, these geomantic squares are more like my geomantic emblems project (and its subsequent posts), in that they seem to tell some sort of cosmic story based on the specific arrangement of figures present within the square or emblem.  However, like those geomantic emblems, this is largely a hammer without a nail, a mathematical and structural curiosity that definitely seems and feels important and useful, just I’m not sure how.  Still, unlike the emblems, figure squares actually have a presence in some traditions of geomancy, so at least there’s more starting off there.  Perhaps with time and more concentrated translation and studying efforts, such purposes and uses of figure squares can come to light, as well as how a potential figure rulership of the sixteen most-magical templates can play with the 414,720 different arrangements of figures on each template and how they feel or work differently, and whether different arrangements do different things.  Heck, there might be a way to assign each of the different combinations of figures on the templates to the figures themselves; after all, 414,720 is divisible by 16, yielding 25,920, which itself is divisible by 16, yielding 1620, so there might be 1620 different figure squares for each of the 256 (16 × 16) combinations of figures.  Daunting, but hey, at least we’d have options.

Also, there’s the weird bit about the target sum of the magic squares being 24.  This is a number that’s not really immediately useful in geomancy—we like to stick to 4 or 16, or some multiple thereof—but 24 is equal to 16 + 8, so I guess there’s something there.  More immediately, though, I’m reminded of the fact that 24 is the number of permutations of vowels in my system of geomantic epodes for most figures.  For instance, by giving the vowel string ΟΙΕΑ (omikron iōta epsilon alpha) to Laetitia, if we were to permute this string of vowels, we’d end up with 24 different such strings, which could be used as a chant specifically for this figure:

ΟΙΕΑ ΟΙΑΕ ΟΕΙΑ ΟΕΑΙ ΟΑΙΕ ΟΑΕΙ
ΙΟΕΑ ΙΟΑΕ ΙΕΟΑ ΙΕΑΟ ΙΑΟΕ ΙΑΕΟ
ΕΟΙΑ ΕΟΑΙ ΕΙΟΑ ΕΙΑΟ ΕΑΟΙ ΕΑΙΟ
ΑΟΙΕ ΑΟΕΙ ΑΙΟΕ ΑΙΕΟ ΑΕΟΙ ΑΕΙΟ

From that post, though, Populus only has a three-vowel string, which can be permuted only six times, but if we repeat that chant four times total, then we’d still end up with 24 strings to chant, so that still works out nicely:

ΙΕΑ ΕΑΙ ΑΙΕ ΕΙΑ ΙΑΕ ΑΕΙ
ΙΕΑ ΕΑΙ ΑΙΕ ΕΙΑ ΙΑΕ ΑΕΙ
ΙΕΑ ΕΑΙ ΑΙΕ ΕΙΑ ΙΑΕ ΑΕΙ
ΙΕΑ ΕΑΙ ΑΙΕ ΕΙΑ ΙΑΕ ΑΕΙ

So maybe 24 is one of those emergent properties of some applications of geomantic magic that could be useful for us.  Perhaps.  It’s worth exploring and experimenting with, I claim.

In the meantime, I’ll work on getting a proper list drawn up of all the templates for the various types of geomantic magic squares—ranging from less magic to more magic—at least just to have for reference for when further studies are or can be done on this.  This is more of a curiosity of mine and not a prioritized topic of research, but at least I know it exists and there’s the potential for further research to be done on it for future times.

Search Term Shoot Back, April 2014 (and an announcement!)

April 30, 2014 By in geomancy, internet, link, news Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I get a lot of hits on my blog from across the realm of the Internet, many of which are from links on Facebook, Twitter, or RSS readers.  To you guys who follow me: thank you!  You give me many happies.  However, I also get a huge number of new visitors daily to my blog from people who search around the Internet for various search terms.  As part of a monthly project, here are some short replies to some of the search terms people have used to arrive here at the Digital Ambler.  This focuses on some search terms that caught my eye during the month of April 2014.

First, a bit of an announcement: I’m going to be taking the month of May off from blogging, since I’m moving from my apartment of four years into a house with my boyfriend and a friend of ours.  I just need some time to myself and away from writing the blog for a bit so I can get all my stuff packed up and moved, my new ritual schedules implemented, my new commute acclimated to, and my old place cleaned out and patched up.  I’ll still do my Daily Grammatomancy on Twitter and Facebook when I can, and if you have any questions, please feel free to email me or contact me through social media, and I’ll still reply to comments on my blog.  Also, I won’t be taking any craft commissions until the start of June, though you’re welcome to get a divination reading from me or get one of my ebooks off my Etsy page.  I still have those St. Cyprian of Antioch chaplets for sale, too, if you want to help out with moving expenses.  With that, onto the search results!

“computer generated geomancy” — If you’re looking for a place to get you geomancy figures automatically generated, you could do worse than go to random.org and use their random number generator to produce 16 binary results (0 or 1), or 4 results with a value of 0 through 15 (or 1 through 16).  If you’re looking for a program that draws up geomancy charts for you, there are a handful out there; I’ve coded one myself, geomancian, which is available for free on the Yahoo! and Facebook geomancy groups, but it’s command-line only (and old).  There’s Geomanticon available from Chris Warnock’s Renaissance Astrology, and I think there are a few mobile apps that do similar, but you’d have to pay for these.  If I ever learn mobile programming, I’d make a new one for Android, that’s for sure.  Still, no application can ever give you a proper interpretation of a full geomancy reading, though it can help you with interpreting the chart for yourself; if you want a full reading, I’m more than happy to offer them.

“do virgo males have big penises like greek god hermes” — I…really can’t speak to this.  (Disclaimer: my boyfriend is a Virgo, so there’s nothing I could say here that would end well for me.)  Also, save for the odd herm and a few ithyphallic representations of Hermes (more properly Mercury, especially in Roman art), Hermes isn’t portrayed with a particularly large cock.  It was actually seen as a good thing for a man to have a small dick in classical times, since they were easier to keep clean and reduced the risk of vaginal/anal/oral injury, trauma, or tearing, which would’ve very easily led to infection in pre-modern times.  That said, well, Hermes has shown me a few, shall we say, fulfilling things once in a while.  I’ll let you get on your knees and pray for that yourself, if you like.

“how to turn holy water into wax” — I don’t think you have a proper understanding of the physics that goes on here.  I mean, water and wax don’t mix, literally or metaphorically, and no ritual or physical process could achieve this short of a biblical miracle.  It’d be easier to turn water into wine, but that wouldn’t turn out so great, either.

“occult symbols of death” — Good question, and not one I really know an answer to.  You might use a seal for a spirit of Saturn, commonly associated with death, or of Azrael, the angel of death itself.  You might find symbols associated with Santissima Muerte, too, since she literally is death.  Other such symbols, such as the cap of Hades, associated with gods of death can work equally well.  When trying to find symbols for concepts like this when a spirit is not necessarily called for, I tend to look for sigils made from the letters of the word itself (so a sigil for the word “death” or “θανατος“), an Egyptian hieroglyph, or an ancient Chinese bone script or seal script character which you can easily find on Chinese Etymology.

“invocation of akasha or ether” — I suggest you don’t bother.  The only Western tradition that can even make good use of akasha is the Golden Dawn, since they’ve spent so much of their time augmenting classical and Renaissance Western mystery traditions with pilfered and appropriated Eastern, Vedic, Taoist, and Buddhist systems.  The use of a fifth element directly in magic doesn’t really have that much of a place, as I see it; Agrippa doesn’t reference it in his Scale of Five (book II, chapter 8) where he lists “a mixed body” instead, and its description in Plato’s Timaeus has it “arranging the constellations on the whole heaven”, so it’s probably more strongly based in stellar powers than perceived emptiness.  This makes sense, since we have no prayers, invocations, or workings of quintessence in the Western tradition before the Golden Dawn, but we have plenty for the gods, signs of the Zodiac, and stars.  To that end, you might use the Orphic Hymn to the Stars.  Alternatively, since the quintessence is the underlying substratum of the elements themselves, you might pursue your own Great Work, much as the alchemists did to find the Summum Bonum and Philosopher’s Stone, to understand and invoke ether on your own; I personally use the Hymns of Silence and invocations of pure Divinity.  And if you’re a neopagan who insists there are five elements because Cunningham says so, I hope you’re up for some actual magical lifting.

“how do i attach a crystal to a wooden dowel for wand” — In my experience, use two-part epoxy.  It forms one of the strongest adhesive bonds I can think of, far stronger than superglue, and it’s commonly and cheaply available at most craft or hardware stores.  If you have some sort of aversion to using artificial materials in crafting, the best I can suggest is carve out a niche in the wand just big enough for the crystal to fit and hold it in place with wire or cord.  Even then, it might fall out.  I strongly suggest the use of some kind of suitable adhesive for this, especially if you’re a heavy duty tool user.

“the use of crystals in conjuring” — Generally, I use crystals as the scrying medium within which I see spirits and by which I communicate with them, and this is often the case by many conjurers, especially those doing Enochiana with Dee’s works or the Trithemian system I use.  I also make use of a crystal on my ebony Wand of Art to help direct and focus power, if needed, but the crystal is not strictly necessary for the wand.  Beyond that, use crystals how you otherwise would in other rituals if you find a need for them; otherwise, don’t bring them into the ritual at all.  You don’t need a crystal for your wand, nor even for the scrying medium; a mirror, an obsidian plate, a blown-glass paperweight orb, a bowl of inky water, or a glass of clear water can all suffice as a perfectly good scrying medium, depending on your preferences; hell, depending on your second sight or conjuration skills, you may not need a scrying medium at all; with practice you’ll be able to perceive the spirit directly in the mind, or even evoke them to visible and material manifestation (which isn’t as important, I claim, as others may say it is, since it’s mostly a gimmick done for bragging rights at that point).

“when u draw a circle in a triangle,does it summon spirits? — On its own, no, otherwise every copy of Harry Potter with the Sign of the Deathly Hallows would actually be magical in more than the fantasy sense.  You’re just drawing shapes at this point, and the shapes are so basic and simple as to have no direct effect on their own.  However, you can summon spirits into the circle in the triangle afterward, which is the standard practice in Solomonic magic.

“is holy water used to bless the new fire?” — I mean, you could flick holy water into a fire to bless it, but the mixing of water and fire here bothers me.  The better way to make holy or blessed fire is to bless the fuel you use, such as the wood or oil, in conjunction with or just by saying prayers over the fire once lit.  This is common in Solomonic magic as it is in other religions, such as the fire blessing rituals of Zoroastrianism.  You might also consider making fire from holy woods or herbs, such as Palo Santo, sandalwood, or similar trees, depending on your tradition.  Generally speaking, fire is already one of the holiest substances we know of in the world and held in high esteem by many religions and traditions.  It can be made infernal, wicked, or evil, but the same can be said for anything material or physical, while it being naturally holy and closest to holiness is something that can be said for very few things, indeed.

“people who write in theban scripts” — Generally fluffy Wiccans, nowadays, who insist on making things blatantly-yet-“seekritly” magical.  The Theban script, as noted by Agrippa and Trithemius, has its origins in medieval alchemical ciphers common at the time, a simple 1-to-1 cipher for the Roman script (hence the use of a doubled U/V for a W).  Theban script used to be popular for enciphering alchemical and occult texts, but now it’s used once in a while for neopagan charms or quasigothic anime character design.

“how did saint isidore react when things went wrong” — Uh…”went wrong” is a pretty vague thing here.  For that matter, so is the saint; are you referring to Saint Isidore of Seville or Saint Isidore the Laborer?  The former didn’t really have much go wrong in his life, and the latter had his son fall into a well and needed to be rescued, so that’s hardly an epic to recount to kings.  I mean, the general Christian thing to do when things go wrong is prayer, which is probably what these guys did generally and how they also became, you know, saints.

“can we use orgonite ennrgy to cean air ?” — Short answer: no; long answer: fuck no.  Orgonite energy is properly orgone, which is a meta-energy that does not directly affect the physical world.  Orgonite is a lump of resin and metal shavings with other fanciful crap inside which is claimed to purify orgone from deadly orgone (DOR) to positive orgone (POR), which is crap and impossible even according to the (surprisingly versatile and workable) pseudoscience of Wilhelm Reich who developed orgone technology.  All orgonite could feasibly do is collect orgone energy inside to pull things out; even according to the rules of orgone theory, it cannot purify orgone from DOR to POR, since orgone tech cannot distinguish between the two (nor do I think a distinction is even possible, having never noticed any negative effects of DOR or overly positive effects of POR).  Physically speaking, there’s no mechanism for cleaning the air using a lump of congealed robot vomit, and you’d be better off putting a few fine sheets of cloth on your home HVAC air intake vent and washing it every month or so.  Orgone is orgone, energy is energy; there’s no real difference between “good energy” or “bad energy” when you’re talking about orgone.  You’d be better off learning energy manipulation and clearing space than using orgonite.

“greek alphabet as magical sigils” — Totally doable.  People have used various forms of the Hebrew alphabet magically for centuries now, and the Hebrew letters are well-known as symbols and referrants to the paths on the kabbalistic and Kircher Tree of Life, especially as stoicheic symbols for numbers, elements, planets, and signs of the Zodiac.  The Greek alphabet, sharing an ancestor with Hebrew and many of the same qualities, can be used similarly, right up to its own system of qabbalah.  Just as there exist magical cipher scripts for Roman script (Theban and the Trithemian cipher) and the Hebrew script (Celestial, Malachim, Passing the River, and the Alphabet of the Magi), I know of two cipher scripts for Greek: Apollonian and a medieval Frankish cipher (from Trithemius’ Polygraphia).  I’m sure others could be devised from similar principles or adapted from another magical script; alternatively, you could use archaic or variant styles of the Greek script, such as Coptic or even a variant of Phoenician.

“cockring orgone” — I…suppose this could be a thing.  Orgone does have its origins in the study of the life energy produced from sexual activity, so you’d just be going to the source for this.  I suppose you could make a cockring out of…hm.  Maybe something made of layers of synthetic latex and natural rubber?  Metal with a plastic core?  I’m unsure.  But more importantly, WHYYYYYYY.  If I wanted to give my partner a good zap, I’d just as soon use mentholated lubricant or, better yet, Tiger Balm (protip: for the love of God never do this).

“alan shapiro puts off the fire for the usps” — G…good for him?  I guess?  Seeing how I’ve never used that name on this blog nor known anyone by it, I…well, let’s just say that I’m so odd, because I can’t even.

“circle filled with triangles orgonite” — My first thought was the image of the Flower of Life, a circle filled with overlapping circles which can form triangle-like shapes within, and a potent magical and religious symbol for thousands of years.  And then I saw “orgonite”, and my next thought was “new age bullshit”, which is about what people use the Flower of Life nowadays for anyway.  On the one hand, you’re talking about sacred geometry, and on the other, you’re talking about lumps of crap, so I’m unsure what you’re getting at here.  Also, I’m starting to loathe the popularity of these orgone searches, but they’re just so ripe for making fun of.

“hermetism and homosexualit” — Hermetism isn’t a word often used, and chances are that you’re referring to “Hermeticism”, the Neoplatonic-Gnostic-ish philosophy that came about in the classical Mediterranean from a whole bunch of philosophies and religions rubbing shoulders with each other.  In that sense, Hermeticism and Neoplatonism generally helped form a new concept of what was then called “Platonic love”, a love of souls more than that of bodies.  Men and men, men and women, and women and women can all have Platonic love for each other, while before this movement (especially in the Renaissance) it may have been hard to communicate one’s feelings about another, especially if love was itself defined between two people of the opposite gender.  Another point to consider is that “homosexuality” as a concept and identification didn’t exist until the late 1800s; labeling ourselves in this manner simply wasn’t done before then.  You either never had gay sex, were having gay sex at that moment, or had gay sex at some point in the past; it was an action and not a state.  Actions like this have no significant ramifications I can think of in Hermeticism, since there’s no sin to deal with or laws that say you can’t do that; it’s a very abstract yet thorough philosophy that embraces pretty much whatever and whoever you throw at it.  As for the other meaning of Hermetism, which I take to be a henotheistic worship of Hermes, well, the god-dude himself likes the occasional dick, so he has no problem with it.

“the most homosexual magician on the planet” — I…honestly don’t think I’m the best candidate for this esteemed title.  I mean, yeah, I’ve sucked a lot of dick, but I don’t go around drinking skinny margs, watching Glee, or wearing turtlenecks, either.  I mean, I’m not particularly effeminate (though I do have my moments), nor am I stereotypically promiscuous (not like that’s a bad thing), so…yeah.   Besides, the notion itself is kind of absurd; unless you’re a 6 on the Kinsey scale, I don’t think “most homosexual” is really a thing, but since I do score a 6 on that scale, I suppose I get the title?  Maybe?  I still claim that you’d be better off finding candidates for this title on Twitter, all of whom are good, noble, professional, upright people and magi (also I love you guys~).

“energy circle when summoning spirits how do you draw it” — You don’t draw energy circles when summoning spirits; you draw conjuration or summoning circles to conjure or summon spirits.  In that case, you draw (shock of the ages!) a circle.  You can add other symbols, names, or whatever to it as you want, but these are highly varied, as Ouroboros Press’ Magic Circles in the Grimoire Tradition by William Kiesel points out, but really, a circle is all you need.  You can use chalk, a knife, paint, rope, or whatever to draw it out, but do draw it out, even if it’s just in the carpet with a finger.  Energy circles are used in various forms of energy work with varying degrees of significance, though I’ve never needed such a thing except for shielding or putting out feelers in my local surroundings.

“ikea-rituals” — I’m not aware of any Ikea-specific rituals, but their wide array of furniture and household goods is quite amazing, much of it able to be repurposed to ritual use.  I plan on getting a few more LACK side tables as a series of altars, to be sure, and some nice shelves for my temple and personal library in the near future.  I assume rituals for Ikea would take on a strongly Nordic and Scandinavian flavor, but that’s not my area of expertise.

“where do i put my incense when summoning a demon”  — I would put the incense somewhere between you and the conjuration space for the demon, that way you have the smoke rising up to offer a kind of veil or ethereal lens through which you can more easily perceive the demon.  Where you put the conjuration space (Triangle of Art, Table of Practice, etc.), however, is another question entirely.  Some grimoires offer directions you should face, or a particular direction associated with the demon or spirit, which would provide you with a good idea of directional and spatial layout.

Also, this wasn’t really a search term, but something did catch my eye.  I keep track of what other sites lead people to my blog; search engines like Google and sites like Facebook are at the very top of the list, of course, but also some blogs are also notable.  One crazy hilarious blog linked to my post on the divine names written on the Trithemius lamen,  From the crazy blog itself, it’s about:

We are living in Biblically significant Times. Ironically it was the most persecuted man in modern history that lead me to dig deeper into the Bible and taught me more about God than any other human being on the planet. And that man is Michael Jackson. I started a blog to defend him. I ended up researching him and learned just why they were after him. They did everything they could to shut him down. In the song “Cry” he said “take over for me”, so that is what I am doing. God bless that man and his faith and strength

…alright, then.  Specifically, the post referenced my blog in that those silly Jews never understood God in that God obviously only has one possible name (the one referred to as the Tetragrammaton, which even they say has two pronunciations…I think? it’s hard to read the post) and that all other names refer to demons, and that Michael is not the angel of the Sun but is a demon because it’s another Michael besides Michael Jackson.  They also attempted to bind the angel Michael and God in the name of God because reasons.  My good friend Michael Seb Lux, before discovering that the blog doesn’t allow comment except from certified crazy people it allows, was going to reply with this:

Actually, there are multiple names ascribed to G-d in the Hebrew Scriptures. While Yahweh is the more common one, in Exodus 3:14 G-d speaks His Name as, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh” or “I am that what I shall be”. Similarly, the use of Adonai is common as a theophoric and literally means, “Lord”. Other names used in Scripture are Yahweh Tzevaot (1 Samuel 17:45), ha’el elohe abika (Genesis 46:3), Elah Elahin (Daniel 2:47), Elohim (Exodus 32:1; Genesis 31:30, 32; and elsewhere), and so forth. The four-fold name may have originated as an epithet of the god El, head of the Bronze Age Canaanite pantheon (“El who is present, who makes himself manifest”) or according to the Kenite hypothesis accepted by scholars, assumes that Moses was a historical Midianite who brought the cult of Yahweh north to Israel.

May all the angels pray for us and God (in every one of his names) bless the Internet that we may be worthy of the lulz of paradise.

Anyway, see you guys in June!