Four Names, Four Visions of the Sun

February 12, 2023 By polyphanes in occult, pgm Tags: adoration, barbara onomata, barbarous words, invocation, prayer, recording, routine, salutation, salute, solar, stobaean fragments, sun Leave a comment

Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve been quiet here lately over the past few months. I’m shaking myself out of it, as this past winter has been a bit more stressful than others on several fronts, but all told, I’ve been making do and getting by. I haven’t come through completely unscathed, and as it happens, some aspects of my spiritual practice has suffered as a result. It can be hard to rely on motivation alone when you have plenty else to deal with or worry about, but what matters more than motivation to do something is discipline to keep doing it. Motivation might be what gets you excited about something, but discipline is what keeps you engaged with it even when you’ve lost all motivation. (Which isn’t to say I’m particularly disciplined, either, of course.)

Even on my worst days, I still make time to do at least a little bit of routine spiritual observances, mostly in the form of saluting my orisha and also offering a salutation to the Sun; on days when I make it to my temple room, this takes care of my pre-temple stuff I get around to. Ideally, every morning when I wake up, my ideal routine is to get out of bed, brush my teeth, and wash my face. Being initiated to orisha, I then praise my orí (my head-spirit or destiny) to pray for a good day and a good life, and then I salute my orisha (at least Elegba and Ogún, the latter of whom I’m specifically initiated to). After saying hello to the rest of the spirits and shrines around the house generally (and closing or opening windows/blinds as necessary to prepare for the day’s weather), I then salute the Sun. In the colder time of the year, I’ll just do it from an eastern-facing window in the house, but when it’s pleasant enough to do so outside, I’ll head out and stand in the yard to do it instead. (It’s super nice that I’m able to work from home perpetually now, given both the ongoing pandemic as well as my work’s office being moved to an inconvenient place, but in the Before Times, I’d salute the Sun once I got to my train station’s parking lot.)

The specific prayer I use to salute the Sun ended up developing organically over the course of a few weeks. As I’d get to the train station parking lot in the mornings, I started just saying off-the-cuff supplications and simple praises, but over time, they settled down into a regular formula that I didn’t have to memorize for it to be repeatable and recitable easily. Of course, me being me and wanting to make sure all things I do can be expanded in a fancy way if necessary, I ended up polishing and refining my daily organic salutation to the Sun and reworked it slightly into something I’ve fancifully titled the “Grand Supplication to the Sun”. The prayer as a whole (even in its original organic form) relies on some subtle references to the Prayer to the Sun of Emperor Julian, Orphic prayers and ritual documents, and a few PGM references, but all told it comes together fairly nicely. I’ve included the prayer as part of my Preces Templi ebook, but I’ll share it here, too:

Hail to you, Lord Hēlios, Lord of the All!
O Spirit of the Cosmos, Power of the Cosmos, Light of the Cosmos,
o celestial Fire, Craftsman of creation, greatest of the gods in Heaven,
o far-reaching, wide-whirling, encircling the heavens forever turning,
o Father of Sky, o Father of Sea, o Father of Earth,
o all-maker, all-shining, all-radiant with golden glory!
Be kind to us, be gracious to us, be propitious to us all!

Shine upon us, your children, the children of starry Heaven and fertile Earth,
o you whose light enables us to see that which is good and true,
o you whose light is forever unconquerable,
o you whose light binds Heaven and Earth together,
o you whose light reaches even unto the deepest reaches of the abyss!

Bless us, your children, the children of starry Heaven and fertile Earth:
grant us your Spirit that we might live,
your Power that we might work,
your Light that we might see,
and your Fire to fuel and temper the flames of want and will in our own hearts!

Hail to you, Hēlios, this and every day of all creation!
ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΑΧΕΒΥΚΡΩΜ
ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ
ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΣΕΜΕΣΕΙΛΑΜ
ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΜΑΡΜΑΡΑΥΩΘ
ΧΑΙΡΕ ΗΛΙΕ ΠΑΝΤΟΚΡΑΤΟΡ
ΨΟΙ ΦΝΟΥΘΙ ΝΙΝΘΗΡ
Ι Ι Ι Ι Ι Ι

The last few words written in Greek script can be transliterated instead as:

ĒI IEOU AKHEBUKRŌM
ĒI IEOU ABRASAKS
ĒI IEOU SEMESEILAM
ĒI IEOU MARMARAUŌTH
KHAIRE HĒLIE PANTOKRATOR
PSOI PHNOUTHI NINTHĒR
I I I I I I

While the bulk of the prayer is just spoken normally in whatever prayer-voice one might find conventional, and while I often end up abbreviating the whole thing to a slightly more condensed version, the last barbarous bit is something I always set aside a moment to intone and sing:

The stuff in English and that last few lines in Greek are all pretty bog standard praises for the Sun, I’d claim; there’s very little to mention there beyond the usual stuff to point out, how we rely on the Sun for all things in life, how the Sun is among the most holy things in the cosmos, how the Sun is essentially a demiurge of our world, and the like. I mean, Hermēs Trismegistos himself notes how the Sun is something he himself worships in the Stobaean Fragments (SH 2A.14):

Tat: “What then, father, would one call true?”

Hermēs: “Only the sun, which is beyond all other things unchanging, remaining in itself, we would call truth. Accordingly, he alone is entrusted with crafting everything in the world, with ruling and making everything. I indeed venerate him and worship his truth. I recognize him as Craftsman subordinate to the One and Primal (Deity).”

The Sun is also particularly praised and discussed in CH V, CH XVI, and CH XVIII, and I suppose it should come as little surprise to anyone when you consider the Greco-Egyptian roots of Hermeticism. Sun-worship is something common the whole world round, but it was especially taken to a huge degree in Egypt, as evidenced not only by the survivals of it in Hermetic texts but replete throughout ancient Egyptian religious documents and slightly-less-ancient (Greco-)Egyptian magical documents. And it’s from that sort of magical documents, in the form of a few entries from the PGM, that I came up with the barbarous bits at the end of my invocations from, which I’d like to break down in this post.

First, there’s those final three lines of “KHAIRE HĒLIE PANTOKRATOR”, “PSOI PHNOUTHI NINTHĒR”, and “I I I I I I”. The first is just Greek for “Hail, Sun All-Ruler”; the last is just six intonations of the letter Iōta, the vowel I associate with the Sun itself in a number commonly given in a lot of modern magical practices to the Sun. The middle line is Egyptian transliterated into Greek from PGM IV.1596—1715 (the Consecration of the Twelve Faces of Hēlios), which would be the equivalent to “Pshai, the god of gods”; Shai in this case is the ancient Egyptian deity (or divine personification) of fate, later syncretized with Agathos Daimōn, which PGM IV.1596 renders equivalent to the Sun (“come to me, you who rise from the four winds, joyous Agathos Daimōn, for whom heaven has become the processional way”).

For the preceding four lines, each of which contains the “ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ …” formula itself. That comes from PGM XII.351—364, a ritual to create a ring for success and victory, but which also includes the OUPHŌR ritual, which is a sort of diminished/diminutive opening of the mouth ceremony. It’s a fascinating thing, but towards the end of the ritual, there’s a series of statements that all have “ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ …” followed by a divine name or two. The footnotes in the Betz version of the PGM say that “ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ …” corresponds to Egyptian i iꜣw “o hail”. Following this, this would mean that “ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ …” is a formula to invoke or salute something. I’ve used it as a sort of Greco-Egyptian parallel to a more Greek ΙΩ or Latin AVE (or even a parallel to the Buddhist Sanskrit namo) in chants or formulaic greetings to gods in prayers or offerings. Although I can’t personally attest to the linguistic basis of Egyptian i iꜣw becoming Greekified ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ or to i iꜣw actually meaning “o hail”, I’ve gotten good mileage out of it in practice.

That leaves us with the four barbarous names ΑΧΕΒΥΚΡΩΜ, ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ, ΣΕΜΕΣΕΙΛΑΜ, and ΜΑΡΜΑΡΑΥΩΘ. What of these?

ΑΧΕΒΥΚΡΩΜ: This name appears chiefly throughout PGM XIII as a divine name, but is actually explained in PGM XIII.343—646 as signifying “the flame and radiance of the [solar] disk”, specifically in the context of an invocation to Hēlios as an epithet of his, and also appears in the variant spelling ΕΧΕΒΥΚΡΩΜ in PGM XIII.1—343 as some sort of power of Hēlios.
ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ: I don’t think I really need to say much about this name, mostly because there’s already so much research about it in general. Whether conceived of merely as a divine word of power or as a divinity unto itself, ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ (sometimes ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ “ABRAKSAS”) appears throughout so much magical and religious literature of the Hellenistic Egypt period (both pre- and post-Roman) and on so many magical talismans that so-called Abrasax stones are a common-enough phenomenon to deserve their own field of study. What suffices for our needs here is that ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ is a common-enough divine name used in a number of solar contexts, which is appropriate since one of the most famous things about this name is that its numerological value is 365, the whole number of days in a solar year.
ΣΕΜΕΣΕΙΛΑΜ: The Mithras Liturgy of PGM IV.475—829 gives an interesting (albeit incomplete) list of barbarous names with their “translations” or meanings, like ΑΖΑΙ being “beautiful light” or ΕΛΟΥΡΕ being “fire-delighter” or ΦΝΟΥΗΝΙΟΧ being “fire-body”. In such a list, we see the word ΣΕΜΕΣΕΙΛΑΜ being given the meaning of “light-maker” with an alternative meaning of “encloser”. That said, this is a name (sometimes in the form ΣΕΜΕΣΙΛΑΜ) that occurs with tolerable abundance in the PGM. The most straightforward derivation of this word is from Hebrew or a related Semitic language, specifically from the phrase שמש עולם šemeš `olam “eternal Sun”, “hidden Sun”, or perhaps even “Sun of the world”.
ΜΑΡΜΑΡΑΥΩΘ: This is a word that we find in PGM IV.930—1114, which I’ve discussed before as the Conjuration of Light Under Darkness, overall a lamp divination ritual to produce a divine vision of a god. This name occurs as a “mystic symbol” in a solar hymn. In her amazing Magical Hymns from Roman Egypt, Ljuba Bortolani offers an explanation as “lord of lights” (if taken from Aramaic מר מאורות m’r m’r’wt) or as “lord of lords” (if taken from Syriac מרא דמרותא mr’ dmrwt’), either way “certainly a name with solar associations”. This name also appears in a number of other gnostic texts, magical items, and the like, sometimes appearing as a name of the a god of the first or second heaven, sometimes appearing as a name of one of the decans. Some have noted a similarity to the Greek word μαρμαίω “to shine/sparkle/gleam” and an appearance of the word ΜΑΡΜΑΡΑΥΓΗ (MARMARAUGĒ) in PGM XIII.1—343 (the Eighth Book of Moses).

(If this sort of discussion seems familiar, dear reader, it should. I once discussed this same thing some years back in another post from April 2020, same invocation and all albeit in a slightly earlier form. I had the nagging suspicion that I had written about this before, and I only realized that I actually had when I was already more than halfway through writing this post. Oh well! Consider this an update, then, and an expansion of what I had said before.)

When I recite this last bit of my daily solar salutation, I don’t just intone or sing these names, but I engage in a bit of light visualization to accompany them, as well. Consider what I’m doing: in the morning, I’m standing facing the sunrise (or at least the rising Sun), basking in its light and praising it for its light. As I get to each of the lines in the last barbarous bit, I close my eyes (if not already closed due to standing in the sunlight) and visualize the following:

ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΑΧΕΒΥΚΡΩΜ: I see the solar disc (in the form of the modern astrological glyph for it ☉ or the Egyptian hieroglyph for it 𓇳, the dotted circle), and imagine a single ray of pure sunlight descending from the Sun and connecting it to me.
ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ: The ray of Akhebukrōm that connects me to the Sun swings wide in a vast arc, connecting to itself to complete a cosmic circle, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun that takes 365 days (the enumeration of the name ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ) to complete.
ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΣΕΜΕΣΕΙΛΑΜ: The circle of Abrasaks expands and grows to an immense, infinite sphere, not just becoming a circle of the solar system but a circle of the endless and unbounded cosmos itself, with all the cosmos itself becoming its center. This is very same sphere described in statement #2 of the Book of the 24 Philosophers: “God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”.
ΗΙ ΙΕΟΥ ΜΑΡΜΑΡΑΥΩΘ: Within the sphere of Semeseilam becomes filled with a pure light; just as the ray of Akhebukrōm connected me (and the Earth) to the solar disc itself, the light of Marmarauōth joins all thing indiscriminately together, linking finitude to infinity, boundary with center, into the purest divine Light of God itself.
ΧΑΙΡΕ ΗΛΙΕ ΠΑΝΤΟΚΡΑΤΟΡ / ΨΟΙ ΦΝΟΥΘΙ ΝΙΝΘΗΡ / Ι Ι Ι Ι Ι Ι: Dwelling in such light that the Sun gives to me, to the Earth, and to all the cosmos from the very divine Source of all Light itself, I let myself be permeated with such light that I become dissolved within it, joining my own praise of the Sun to the cosmic praise sung constantly and silently itself, letting my praise become identical with the light itself that reaches, covers, surrounds, supports, ands fills all things.

In a way, this sort of progressive visualization proceeds along geometric notions: we start from the single point (0D) of the Sun, extending forth into a line (1D) of sunlight, curving upon itself into a circle (2D), and expanding upon itself infinitely into a sphere (3D), only then being filled with itself so that all of existence in space is permeated with Light. We see something similar in the “light-bringing spell” and “light-retaining spell” of PGM IV.930—1114, the Conjuration of Light Under Darkness: “let there be light, breadth, depth, Length, height, brightness, and let him who is inside shine through…” and “I conjure you, holy light, holy brightness, breadth, depth, length, height, brightness, by the holy names I which I have spoken and am now going to speak…”. All in all, it’s a simple sort of contemplation, but it’s one that I find helps orient me each day when I do it, and gives me a sort of “dimensionality” or vision when I contemplate these four names of the Sun themselves. In a sense, it’s not unlike the four names of the guardians of the Sun, except instead of reflecting four “faces” of entities for different directions or temporal nodes of the Sun, this is something higher and more about the manner and means of the Sun’s power itself reaching us and the whole of the cosmos itself.

Every year, when the seasons turn and winter begins to give way to spring, I always struggle a bit. In addition to finding the transition from cold weather to warm weather more physically troublesome than the other way around, although I revere the sunlight as an ever-present abiding of divinity with us, I’m more of a nocturnal person myself, and the lengthening of the daytime at the expense of the nighttime has a tendency to sour my mood. Then again, there’s always something special, something holy, something gladdening about dawn and daybreak, whether it happens at 7am or 4am. Although it might be facile and hackneyed nowadays to say that “it’s always darkest before dawn”, there’s a truth in it, too: the Sun will continue rise in the East, just as it always has and just as it always will. No matter how dark or difficult things get, there is always something for us all to rely on or turn to to remind us that we, too, can get up and continue along our path just as the Sun does itself.

Lunisolar Grammatomantic Calendar in Use

September 22, 2013 By polyphanes in creative, occult, philosophy Tags: calendar, favorability, festival, grammatomancy, isopsephy, lunisolar, ritual, solar, stoicheia 2 Comments

Now that the lunisolar grammatomantic calendar (LGC) is explained at length, let’s talk about how it actually might be used. To refresh your mind, dear reader, the LGC is a modern variation on the old lunisolar calendar that the Athenians used in classical Greece to determine their festival dates and religious observances. The months are marked by the passage of the moon, with adjustments made every so often to get a calendar year to match the actual solar year. With grammatomancy, they days are assigned a particular Greek letter for use in divination, magic, and advising on specific actions based on the day in the calendar; some days, however, don’t have letters. Months and years, likewise, can be assigned letters (or not depending on the circumstances), and there are overall cycles of 38 years which repeat a certain set of letters for the year, month, and days. All this to produce a calendrical divination tool, hence the LGC. I made a solar version as well, the SGC, with which the LGC shares a number of similarities, especially in terms of how they might be used.

Again, the core point of the LGC is for divination. Much as with the Mayan calendar stuff, or with the planetary weekdays and other Western ideas, different days will have different effects and different forces in effect; the use of the letters is to indicate what those forces might be and how we might align or counter them. By using a calendar to map these forces out, we have a tool to help us prognosticate and plan for different events and circumstances that we can harness for our own ends. With the Greek letters, each letter represents a different oracle, advice, planet, sign, element, god, number, and more; whole worlds can be unfolded from the use of a simple letter through the arts of stoicheia and isopsephy, as well as grammatomancy. In this regard, both the SGC and LGC can be used to determine on a day-by-day, month-by-month, or year-by-year basis how a particular period of time will go. By inspecting whether a day has a particular letter assigned to it, we might plan events for that day or avoid it entirely.

However, how these letters might be applied to the days can differ; for example, compare my own SGC and LGC, both of which have the same intention and the same core idea, but reflect it in different ways. Depending on the need, the use of the SGC might be more preferable than the LGC, or vice versa. Specifically with the LGC, the calendar is lunisolar, which is fantastic for most magical activities undertaken nowadays, especially by people in neopagan or reconstructionist traditions. Since these guys, as well as farmers and other people who work with lunar forces in some regard, all use the Moon as a focus for determining time, using the LGC can help with augmenting their current style of working with time and lunar forces. Another draw to the LGC is that it’s grounded in actual historical usage of an actual calendar, complete with its own cycle of festivals, religious observances, and power. For the Hellenismos crowd especially the LGC would be of help in combining religious observances with magical forecasting beyond other augury and divination. Being more in tune with natural cycles than artificial precision as the SGC has, the LGC would also be better in charting planting cycles or other worldly/earthy/natural events. Of course, this is all based on the Athenian ritual calendar, some of the days of which are associated with particular deities; for instance, Apollo is associated with the seventh day of the month, which is assigned the letter Ζ. This gives Apollo a similar connection, and can help explain other attributes of his or explain those of the letter itself.

One notable difference between the SGC and the LGC is that the LGC has far more unassigned periods of time than the SGC. To clarify, the SGC year has only five to six days that have no letters at the end of the year to make up for the difference between the total duration of the letter-months and that of the solar year. Further, only days can miss a letter; the intercalary days are not assigned to any month, and all the months, years, ages, eras, eons, and so forth are all labeled with letters. On the other hand, the LGC has roughly 65 days per year that are without a letter due to the length of the lunar synodic month, and even whole embolismic months or leap years have no letter assigned, either, according to the system I proposed. Similarly, embolismic months and leap years might be considered special times for settling debts, finishing work, and clearing out the old brush to make way for new growth, since these times always represent some kind of closing or coming to an end of a cycle. This would especially be true of the last embolismic month of the 38-year cycle for the LGC, which I envision as something of a party month.

That also brings up another important difference between the SGC and LGC: the use of the obsolete letters in the LGC. Digamma, qoppa, and sampi are ancient letters that were used in very early forms of Greek as it began to borrow the Phoenician script for its own use; however, these letters were no longer in use at the time of the Greek alphabet oracle I use, and hadn’t been for quite some time except to mark numbers. As such, they have no oracular meaning ascribed to them, nor are they used in stoicheia, qabbalah, or magic. Due to this, days that are marked with these obsolete letters are effectively letterless, or explicitly unlucky days as opposed to the otherwise unlettered days, which might be considered more like a Moon void of course period or “thin time”. Since these letters were overall dropped due to their uselessness, not even retained for their etymological value, these days might also be considered “dropped” from usefulness, with business being avoided entirely or similar prohibitions observed. Since in the second and third decades of the lunar month the last day was letterless and the second to last had an obsolete letter, this gives the calendar a type of “weekend” for rest or for other observations. The first decade, on the other hand, would be focused on ritual and sacrifices throughout those ten days.

Another change in purpose is how dates are even used between the SGC and LGC. The LGC is focused on near-term natural cycles that have an immediate and direct need, and doesn’t really have much of a convention for calculating or even denoting dates far into the future or the past outside of the current cycle. This follows the traditional view of time, where these things simply had no real meaning; events far in the past were history-myths, and events far in the future were undetermined and up to the gods. What was needed was individual human timeframes that one could deal with and live within. On the other hand, the SGC is meant for determining times and dates far into the future and the past, around 7000000 years in either direction when used with the letter-eon place, or around 13000 years without it. This calendar might be considered more “scientific”, determining astrological or astronomical events or determining mystical transitions of the cosmos and universe over large stretches of time. The enforced precision of the SGC and the organic flow of the LGC can easily compliment each other, much as the Mesoamerican calendar systems were used in tandem with each other. In other words, I see the likely scenario to be the Babylonian magus or Academic geometer making use of the SGC, and the common families and townspeople making use of the LGC. It’s like the difference between someone giving you an informal calendar date for ease and a Barycentric Julian Date for exactness.

Because of its regularity and association with the Sun and solar movement, I’m more likely to use the SGC in my Work, mostly because I resonate with that kind of independence from imperfection that the SGC (mostly) allows; plus, its ability to mark specific times arbitrarily is useful, especially when planning long-term effects that might not be immediately seen or noted. That said, I can see the use of the LGC being helpful as well in determining lower or more nature-y rituals, such as offerings to the gods or the Earth as well as planning out lunar effects through a grammatomantic lens, especially in determining the letters associated with lunar months. I know that a lot of this was an exercise in complexity, but it was helpful for me to get ideas, especially if I ever get into mobile platform programming or Twitter bot programming if I want to make a bot or a mobile app for these calendars (or to help others do the same, just let me know!). Being able to use grammatomancy in a new way beyond “mere” letter-drawing is a useful thing, I think, and brings the power of time a bit closer than would otherwise be possible.

Solar Grammatomantic Calendar in Use

September 16, 2013 By polyphanes in creative, occult, philosophy Tags: astrology, calendar, favorability, grammatomancy, isopsephy, numerology, olympus, solar, stoicheia 3 Comments

In the last post, I unleashed a terrifying yet really not that complex new calendar system based on the Greek alphabet. To summarize, I made a cycle of days, where “months” are 24 days long, each day corresponding to one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet. A “year” of these days starts with the spring equinox, and there are 15 “months” in a “year”, leading to 360 days. The leftover days between the end of the last “month” and the start of the first “month” of the next “year” are left as letterless. In effect, I produced a solar grammatomantic calendar, or SGC; I expanded it to be able to note dates and times (down to periods of around one hour long) millions of years in the future, though this was just adding completion to the system for its own sake. The heart of the SGC is the day cycle of letters to produce a usable cycle of days for divination.

How might calendars be used for divination? Well, consider the cycle of the weekdays: there are seven days in a week, and each one is associated with a particular planet among the seven traditional stars so used. We might expect more solary things to occur on Sunday, for instance, or cytherean things on Friday. We might also use the weekdays for particular aims or purposes benefitted by the planet ruling the day, such as writing letters on Wednedsay for Mercury, or beginning business proposals on Thursday for Jupiter. This system, combined with that of the planetary hours, forms much of the framework within my own ritual construction, which uses the ebb and flow of planetary forces as they change throughout the days and hours of the week. In a sense, “divination” here can be expanded to the use of omens or the change in power or dignity of forces to achieve a particular end or to understand the world around us.

A similar thing is done with the tzolk’in, the Mayan cycle of 20 days, each with their own name, symbol, and oracular meaning. I mentioned this before, that one of my friends on Facebook started doing a daily tzolk’in interpretation of the day, allowing for people to prognosticate based on the symbol representing the day in the cycle. To an extent, this is still used in modern Mayan and Mesoamerican societies, though it’s mostly in the hinterlands and rural areas. Still, the idea is the same: by recognizing the natural flow of powers, one can tap into them to forecast or to alter the future based on what one plans to do. Other such prognosticatory calendars have been used across the world, even if they’re in a debased form that notes only what “lucky” and “unlucky” days are.

What this all inspired me to do was to see if I could create a flow of the days such that each one might be associated with a particular letter. With the SGC, we have a method to do that, and with varying levels of specificity. The most important part of this is the use of the letter-day, which for 360 days of every year will have one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet. Those days are held to be “ruled” or signified by the influence of that letter; thus, if the letter-day is Α, the oracular statement for which is “[Apollo] says that you will do everything well”, then the day is highly fortunate and beneficial for all endeavors. This doesn’t bar more specific divination just for that day; I could always still ask the gods for a particular letter-divination myself and apply it just for my own ends, but the influence of the letter-day is universal across all places, peoples, and endeavors.

I also mentioned in the SGC a method of attributing the hours to the individual letters, much as in the same method as the planetary hours: take 1/12s of daylight and 1/12s of nighttime, and ascribe each to one of the Greek letters starting with Α at the dawn “hour”. Thus, every day will have a cycle within itself of the 24 Greek letters, with different hours indicating different flows of power. Unlike the system of planetary hours and days, where hours are held to be of more importance than the days, the grammatomantic hours here are less important than the days, since their effect is less and dependent on the overall letter, and is detached from any one grammatomantic day. After all, the order of the planets used for the planetary hour changes from day to day depending on the planet ruling the day, but the order of the letters is fixed for every day.

Going bigger than individual days, I also set up a method of noting years and months using the SGC. For divination, long periods of time such as eons, eras, or ages don’t have much bearing on divination using the SGC, but years and months may. Whole lengths of time can be said to be under the sway of the force of the letters, but again, these are of less importance than the individual days themselves. The months are less important than the days, and the years are less important than the months. Trends may be predicted based on the letters for larger spans of time, but the letters become less and less meaningful as the length of time increases.

To make use of an example from last time, let’s look at September 1, 2013 at 10:35 a.m. for Washington, DC, USA. We converted it into the SGC date 6.19.23.6.22:4, or Ζ.Τ.Ψ.Ω.Χ:Δ. The letter-day is Χ, the oracle for which is “in succeeding you will fulfill a golden oracle”; this is a great day for success and carrying on great plans that may reach beyond one’s knowledge. However, the letter-month is Ω, “you will have a difficult harvest, not a useful one”, indicating that this general time is difficult to achieve much at all. The letter-hour is Δ, “in customs inopportune strength is weak”, indicating that for the moment it is unhelpful to force one’s way through; working with others, over approved channels, or according to protocol is best for attaining what can be attained at all.

If one looks at the general patterns of the oracular statements for the Greek letters, you’ll note that the best oracles tend to be clustered towards Α, and increase in difficulty, strife, or cheer as they get closer to Ω. In fact, among the oracles in grammatomancy, Α is the best and Ω is the worst. Extrapolating this towards the SGC, we can say that as time goes on, things get progressively more difficult and arduous after pleasant and easy starts. The first days of the month, or the first days or months of the year for that matter, or the first hours of the day, would be considered the best for any working, while as the day (or month, or year) goes on, things get worse and more unfortunate.

Using the longer date form, incorporating the letter-era, letter-age, and letter-year, we might also say that the more there are of a certain letter in the date, the more powerful that force is. Thus, if the date were Α.Α.Α.Α.Α, then this would be the best of all possible days in the calendar, happening only once every 13100 years or so. Likewise, if the date were Ω.Ω.Ω.Ω.Ω, then this day would be the utter, absolute worst, and also the end of the entire cycle. For most prognosticatory purposes, if the letter-month and letter-day coincide, it might be said to be a day of power suitable for any number of things, but especially those that the letter itself might portend through its divinatory meaning.

Alternatively, one might use the other occult meanings of the figures. We might assign a set of lucky numbers based on the isopsephic (gematria) or ordinal values of the letters. For instance, on letter-day Π (day 16), we might say that one could use the number 16 as a lucky number (ordinal value), or 8 or 80 (isopsephic) as lucky numbers. So, if one were going to the market on a Π letter-day, one might buy things in amounts of 8 or 80, or one might go with the obvious pun and get maybe an eighth of a pie for oneself. Instead of the numeric value of the letters, one might go with their stoicheic meanings, the elemental, planetary, and zodiacal indications of the letters. For instance, on the letter-day Ι, we might say that anything particularly solar would be favored, since Ι is associated with the Sun; on the letter-day Β, which is associated with the sign Aries, anything involving rams would be good, as well as fighting, war, leadership, and the like. By associating the different forces with the Olympian gods, either through their planetary equivalents (Jupiter for Zeus, Moon for Artemis), their zodiacal correspondences (cf. Agrippa book II, chapter 14), or the like. For the qabbalistically inclined, you might choose different days to work with a particular path on the Tree of Life using the Greek letters instead of the Hebrew alphabet. For those so inclined, I lay all this out in my ebook on grammatomancy (available here!).

Since the SGC is a solar calendar, with the start date of the years tied to the spring equinox of the year, we can use the SGC to approximate other solar phenomena. For instance, the passage of the Sun through the zodiac can be approximated through the use of the SGC. Since the Sun travels about 30° around the ecliptic every 30 days, the Sun travels through four complete signs after five-letter months, with an error of about 1.75 days. Thus, the passage of the letter days can mark the passage of the Sun through the ecliptic in a fairly orderly way. Marking the letter-months with Arabic numerals (to avoid the complicated assignment of letters to the letter-months based on the letter-year):

1.Α or 1.1: Sun ingress Aries, spring equinox, Ostara
2.Η or 2.7: Sun ingress Taurus
2.Χ or 2.22: Sun midpoint Taurus, Beltane
3.Ν or 3.13: Sun ingress Gemini
4.Τ or 4.19: Sun ingress Cancer, summer solstice, Litha
6.Α or 6.1: Sun ingress Leo
6.Π or 6.16: Sun midpoint Leo, Lughnasadh
7.Η or 7.7: Sun ingress Virgo
8.Ν or 8.13: Sun ingress Libra, fall equinox, Mabon
9.Τ or 9.19: Sun ingress Scorpio
10.Κ or 10.10: Sun midpoint Scorpio, Samhain
11.Α or 11.1: Sun ingress Sagittarius
12.Η or 12.7: Sun ingress Capricorn, winter solstice, Yule
13.Ν or 13.13: Sun ingress Aquarius
14.Δ or 14.4: Sun midpoint Aquarius, Imbolc
14.Τ or 14.19: Sun ingress Pisces

Since the letter-days will be the same across years, we can say that Α, Τ, Ν, and Η are solstice days, and Χ, Π, Κ, and Δ are cross-quarter days. Further, because five letter-months cross four signs of the Zodiac, this links different triplicities together, such that all the days of the fire signs Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius share the same letter-days as each other, all starting off on Α days. Thus, we might call the letter Α fiery (since it starts off all the fire signs), Η earthy (since it starts off all the earth signs), Ν airy (since it starts of all the air signs), and Τ watery (since it starts off all the water signs). Viewed another way, we might divide up the letter-year into three divisions of five letter-months each: months 1 through 5 are first “season”, 6 through 10 the second “season, and 11 through 15 the third “season”. In other words, a season begins at the start of the fire signs of the Zodiac: Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius. Considering where I live in a costal area in the the Northern Hemisphere, I’d name these seasons “warming”, “cooling”, and “dark”, respectively.

Of course, since the Sun doesn’t exactly travel 360° every 360 days, this attribution of the letter-days to specific solar phenomena doesn’t quite hold, and the dates will slip a little earlier as time goes on in the year. This is why, at the end of every letter-year, there is a short period of five or so intercalary days to fill in the gap between the end of the last letter-month and the beginning of the first letter-month of the next year. The intercalary days are meant to adjust the SGC so that it doesn’t get out of sync with the solar year, and as such don’t belong to the proper cycle of letter-days or letter-months. These intercalary days have no associated letter and their hours have no letter attribution, as far as divination and magic are concerned. Much like the intercalary wayeb’ days of the Mayan haab’ calendar, these days would be considered completely unfortunate. Consider that it’s basically a gap between the proper letter-days, and that the most recent letter day (15.24) would be Ω, a bad omen; this would stick around and linger, filling the gaps in time and space and force. Similarly, as a gap between the cycles, the intercalary days would be considered a time when the veil between the worlds or cycles is thinnest; just as the saying that “it’s darkest before dawn”, these days are those immediately preceding the spring equinox, the solar “dawn” of the year. Alternatively, as might be done in Egyptian or Hellenic times and cultures, these might be considered a time of celebration, partying, and loosening of social rules and rites, for the same general idea that this is a time in-between, when cycles and routines are temporarily thrown off, when no work can properly be done anyway.

So, those are my thoughts on how one might apply the solar grammatomantic calendar for magic and divination in a few ways. Of course, this is just one of the two possible grammatomantic calendars I suggested using in my first post on this; this calendar is based on the simple cycle of letters to form discrete months of time. The other idea I mentioned exploring was combining a historical calendar, the Attic festival calendar, which is lunisolar and has a number of quirks and irregularities that make the SGC look simple in comparison. Although grammatomantic days will still be used, the method to ascribe them to the days will be much more complicated, based upon the phases of the Moon and fitting it into a system complete with other religious and mystical observances. Let’s save that for next time.

Solar Grammatomantic Calendar

September 13, 2013 By polyphanes in creative, link, occult Tags: algorithm, alphabet, calendar, conversion, date, grammatomancy, greek, haab', mayan, planetary, solar, time, tzolk'in 2 Comments

So, based on that last post where I discussed possibilities of forming a divinatory cycle of days based on the grammatomantic meanings of the Greek letters, I came up with my first draft of a kind of grammatomantic calendar, based on a simple cycle of the letters. In many ways, this functions much like the tzolk’in calendar of the Maya, but with a little bit of their haab’ thrown in, too. Essentially, I’ve created a cyclical calendar capable of dating many years into the future or, with some modifications, to the past. For simplicity, I use the Greek alphabet itself as the core cycle used for this calendar, which is tied to the spring equinox every year. In effect, I’ve developed a solar grammatomantic calendar, or SGC. While an interesting little system of noting dates and times in a really obscure fashion, it is at heart a divinatory tool expanding on the methods of grammatomancy applied to a general flow of time, noting how a particular person or event might be affected by the forces at work in the cosmos at that particular time.

So, let’s set some rules and definitions to calculate dates and times in the SGC:

Letter-day: Duration of time starting at a particular sunrise and the next sunrise. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-days is Α, then cycles around as expected
Letter-month: 24 consecutive letter-days. The first value in a cycle of 15 letter-months dependent on letter-year, and cycle around as expected:
- Α if letter-year is Α, Ι, or Ρ
- Π if letter-year is Β, Κ, or Σ
- Η if letter-year is Γ, Λ, or Τ
- Χ if letter-year is Δ, Μ, or Υ
- Ν if letter-year is Ε, Ν, or Φ
- Δ if letter-year is Ζ, Ξ, or Χ
- Τ if letter-year is Η, Ο, or Ψ
- Κ if letter-year is Θ, Π, or Ω
Letter-year: 15 consecutive letter-months, or 360 consecutive letter-days plus some number of intercalary days. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-years is Α, then cycles around as expected. Begins from the first sunrise after or coinciding with the spring equinox
Intercalary day: Days used to align the cycle of 15 letter-months with the solar year. Not associated with any particular letter, nor are they considered letter-days or belonging to a letter-month. Placed at the end of the letter-year, after the last day of the 15th month of the current year but before the first day of the 1st month of the next year. There are as many intercalary days as needed to fill the gap between the number of letter-days and the number of days in the solar year.
Letter-age: 24 letter-years, 360 letter-months, or 8640 letter-days plus some number of intercalary days. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-great-years is Α, then cycles around as expected
Letter-era: 24 letter-ages, 576 letter-years, 8640 letter-months, or 207360 letter-days plus some number of intercalary days. The first value in a cycle of 24 letter-ages is Α, then cycles around as expected. At most 13824 years can denoted using only 24 values for the letter-era.

A table for converting one of the larger units of letter-dating into smaller ones shows the relationships between the units. Note that asterisks in the letter-day column indicate that intercalary days will cause this number to increase as the number of letter-years increases.

	Letter-day	Letter-month	Letter-year	Letter-age	Letter-era
Letter-day	1
Letter-month	24	1
Letter-year	360*	15	1
Letter-age	8640*	360	24	1
Letter-era	207360*	8640	576	24	1

Of course, even though I’ve listed only five place values for a SGC date, we’d end up with a weird kind of Y2K-esque problem once we finish the ultimate letter-era Ω completely, approximately 13824 years after the first possible date. Although it’s unlikely to be needed, further spans of time may be indicated by adding larger units, such as a letter-eon which is equivalent to 24 letter-eras; 24 letter-eons would be equivalent to 576 letter-eras, 13824 letter-ages, or 7962624 letter-years. This easily reaches up into geological or cosmological timeframes, but could be useful for indicating distant, mythological, or astronomical/astrological phenomena.

As noted above, all the cycles have 24 values, each lettered according to the Greek alphabet starting at Α and ending with Ω, with the exception of the letter-months. Instead, the cycle of letter-months within a letter-year is dependent on the value of the letter-year itself. Though this seems arbitrary, this is to preserve the cycle caused by there being 15 letter-months within a letter-year. For instance, the first letter-month of the overall cycle of letter-months is Α, the first letter in the Greek alphabet; the last letter-month of the same year is Ο, the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet. The second letter-year continues the pattern of assigning letters to the letter-months: since Ο was the previous letter used, Π is the letter assigned to the first letter-month of the second letter-year. Continuing this cycle, the first letter-month of the third letter-year is assigned with Η, the first letter-month of the fourth letter-year is assigned with Χ, and so on until the last letter-month of the last letter-year is given to Ω, after which the cycle begins anew with Α. This produces a cycle of eight letter-years; since there are 24 letter-years in a letter-age, this cycle repeats three times. By taking the remainder of dividing the letter-year ordinal value by eight (substituting 8 for a result of 0), the table below shows the letters associated with the letter-months for a given letter-year in the cycle.

Year

1
Α, Ι, Ρ

2
Β, Κ, Σ

3
Γ, Λ, Τ

4
Δ, Μ, Υ

5
Ε, Ν, Φ

6
Ζ, Ξ, Χ

7
Η, Ο, Ψ

8
Θ, Π, Ω

As for the epoch, or the reference date from which the letter-calendar is calculated, I’ve settled on April 3, 1322 BC as the first date in this letter-calender system. My readers will likely be utterly confused as to why I chose such a distant year and date. Since I’m a fan of ancient Greek history and civilization, I decided to look back as far as I reliably could, and recalled dimly somewhere in my memory that archaeoastronomers had calculated a date in the Trojan War based on mentions of eclipses in book 17 of the Iliad as well as Hittite and other archaeological records. As it turns out, such an eclipse happened on November 6, 1312 BC at around 12:35 p.m. Since the Trojan War took about ten years according to the myths, I wanted to set the epoch date to the day after the spring equinox ten years before the year in which this eclipse occurred. Looking at an ephemeris for the year 1322 BC, we know that the spring equinox (Sun ingress Aries) occurred sometime on April 2, 1322 BC, making the following dawn of April 3, 1322 BC the start of the first official day of the SGC. Negative dates, or dates that come before April 3, 1322 BC would not be possible in this system, making the first day “day zero” and anything before prehistory or mythical. If reverse calculations were desired, the rules to convert dates could be adapted for this, with some kind of inversion applied to the notation (writing it upside down, for instance).

To mark a given date using the SGC, let’s use the notation A.B.C.D.E, where A indicates the letter-era, B indicates the letter-age, C indicates the letter-year, D indicates the letter-month, and E indicates the letter-day. Each of these could be represented equally well in Greek letters (Α.Ρ.Ψ.Χ.Ε) as they could in Arabic numerals (1.17.23.22.5), so long as one uses the ordinal placement of the letters in the Greek alphabet in mind as well as the funky letter-month 8-year cycle given above. For intercalary days which don’t belong to any letter-month, a dash, dot, or zero is used for the letter-month position and a Greek letter to indicate the intercalary day. So, for the fourth intercalary day on the letter-era Α, letter-age Ρ, and letter-year Ψ, we might use the notation Α.Ρ.Ψ.–.Δ with the dash, Α.Ρ.Ψ.•.Δ with the dot, or Α.Ρ.Ψ.0.Δ with the zero. Arabic numeral representations of the intercalary “month” should use the numeral zero.

Now that we have the units defined, the cycles understood, the epoch proclaimed, and the notation set up, it’s time to begin our rules for converting dates from this letter-calendar to Gregorian dates and back. Let’s use E, A, Y, M, and D to indicate the ordinal values of the letter-era, letter-age, letter-year, letter-month, and letter-day in these conversions; in other words, these variables represent the Arabic numerals associated with the place values, bearing in mind the funky ordinal values associated with the Greek letters for the letter-month.

To convert a Gregorian calendar date to a letter-calendar date:

Find the number of years elapsed (J) between the Gregorian calendar year (GY) and the epoch year (EY). If the Gregorian calendar date falls on or after the first sunrise after or coinciding with the spring equinox in its year, J = GY − EY. If the Gregorian calendar date falls before the first sunrise after or coinciding with the spring equinox in its year, J = GY − EY − 1.
Divide J by 576 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-eras that have passed (JW), and take the fractional part to find how much other time has passed (JF).
Calculate the letter-era: E = JW + 1. E should be a whole number between 1 and 24. Assign E the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.
Multiply JF by 24 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-ages that have passed (AW), and take the fractional part to find how much other time has passed (AF).
Calculate the letter-age: A = AW + 1. A should be a whole number between 1 and 24. Assign A the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.
Multiply AF by 24 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-years that have passed (YW), and take the fractional part to find how much other time has passed (YF).
Calculate the letter-year: Y = YW + 1. Y should be a whole number between 1 and 24. Assign Y the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.
Find the number of days that have elapsed (T) between the Gregorian calendar date (GD) and the most recent spring equinox date (ED).
If T is greater than 360, this is an intercalary day. Set the letter-month M = 0 or missing. Calculate the intercalary day D = T − D.
Otherwise, if T is less than or equal to 360, this is a letter-day.
1. Divide T by 24 and take the whole part to find the number of letter-months that have elapsed (TM), and the fractional part to find the number of days that have elapsed (TD).
2. Calculate the letter-month: M = TM. M should be a whole number between 1 and 15. Assign M the Greek letter according to its ordinal value according to the eight-year cycle above based on Y.
3. Calculate the letter-day: D = TD × 24. D should be a whole number between 1 and 24. Assign D the Greek letter according to its ordinal value.

To convert a letter-calendar date to a Gregorian calendar date:

Sum together the year-based units multiplied by their coefficients to get the number of years elapsed since the epoch: S = (576 × E) + (24 × A) + Y
If the date refers to an intercalary period, sum the total number of letter-days plus the intercalary days: Z = 360 + D
If the date refers to a non-intercalary period, sum the count of letter-days plus the number of letter-months multiplied by the number of letter-days in each month: Z = D + (24 × M)
Add the number of elapsed years S to the epoch year to find the year of the Gregorian calendar date.
Add the number of elapsed days Z to the date of the first dawn after or coinciding with the spring equinox of the Gregorian calendar year to find the month and day of the Gregorian calendar date.

Since we’ve already done this much work to clarify letter-days, we can focus our attention on dividing up individual days into smaller units. I don’t think it’ll be necessary to get into the magnitude (or lack thereof) of seconds, but having letter-hours might not be a bad idea. Since there 24 letters, we can create 24 letter-hours for each day. The process for this would be nearly the same as calculating planetary hours. Let’s define a letter-hour to equal either 1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset of the current letter-day or 1/12 of the time between sunset of the current letter-day and sunrise of the following letter-day, whichever period the letter-hour is found within. Each letter-hour is assigned to one of the 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, in the order of the Greek alphabet starting with Α. We might augment our notation of date to also include time using the notation A.B.C.D.E:F, where F indicates the letter-hour.

To convert a modern time to a letter-hour or vice versa for a given date and location:

Find the time of sunrise and sunset for the given date and location, and the time of sunrise for the day following the given date and location.
Divide the total length of time between sunrise and sunset by 12 to find the length of the diurnal hour (DH).
Establish the divisions of the diurnal hours starting at sunrise according to DH, assigning them the letter values Α through Μ or number values 1 through 12.
Establish the divisions of the nocturnal hours starting at sunset according to NH, assigning them the letter values Ν through Ω or number values 13 through 24.
Locate the time given among the letter-hours to convert the modern time to a letter hour, or establish the time limits on the given letter-hour to find an approximate modern time.

So, examples! Let’s take September 1, 2013 at 10:35 a.m. for Washington, DC, USA and convert it into SGC date:time notation.

Letter-day and letter-month: on this year, the spring equinox occurred on March 20, 2013 after dawn; thus, the first day of this year began on March 21, 2013. There are 166 days between these two dates. 166 ÷ 24 = 6.91666…, indicating that the letter-month is 6 and the letter-day is 0.91666… × 24 = 22, or Χ.
Letter-era, letter-age, and letter-year: between 2013 AD and 1322 BC, there are 3334 years. 3334 ÷ 576 = 5.78819444…, indicating that the letter-era is 6 (5 + 1). 0.78819444… × 24 = 18.91666…, indicating that the letter-age is 19 (18 + 1). 0.91666… × 24 = 22, indicating that the letter-year is 23 (22 + 1).
Letter-hour: on this day, sunrise was at 6:37 a.m. and sunset at 7:38 p.m., with the next sunrise at 6:38 a.m. The length of a diurnal hour in this day was about 65 minutes long, and a nocturnal hour was about 55 minutes long. 10:35 a.m. falls during unequal hour 4.
Notation: the full Arabic numeral notation for this date is 6.19.23.6.22:4. The full Greek letter notation for this date is Ζ.Τ.Ψ.Ω.Χ:Δ. The letter-month is Ω, not Ζ as might be expected for the ordinal value of 6, due to the letter-year being Ψ (see the chart above).

In the opposite way, let’s convert the SGC date Η.Ρ.Λ.Ο.Υ:Α for Washington, DC, USA to Gregorian notation.

Conversion to Arabic numerals: The date Η.Ρ.Λ.Ο.Υ:Α resolves to 7.17.11.9.20:1, using the table above to resolve the letter-year.letter-month combination Λ.Ο to 11.9. Since the letter-month is not blank or missing, this is not an intercalary date.
Sum the years: There have been (576 × 7) + (24 × 17) + 11 = 4451 years since the epoch date.
Find the year and spring equinox: 4451 years elapsed from the epoch year 1322 BC refers to the year 3130 AD. The spring equinox occurred at night after March 20 that year, so the first day of the SGC year would be on March 21.
Sum the days: There have been (9 × 24) + 20 = 236 days since the year’s first dawn after or coinciding with the spring equinox.
Find the day: 236 days after March 21, 3130 AD leads to November 12, 3130 AD.
Find the time: The letter-hour Α indicates the first unequal hour of the day, sometime just after dawn. Sunrise for this day in Washington, DC, USA occurs at 6:47 a.m., and sunset at 4:56 p.m.; an unequal diurnal hour here would be about 49 minutes long, so the letter-hour Α indicates a time between 6:47 a.m. and 7:38 a.m.

Well, this was all well and good, and despite the complexity only took a day to hash out all the major parts of forming a new calendar system from scratch. However, while this was a fun exercise in computus of a sort, this doesn’t actually say much about why it was made to begin with: divination using the flow of time itself! Since I’ve ranted on long enough about the minutiae of date conversions, let’s leave that for next time when we start putting the SGC in practice and making use of its mechanisms for divination, as well as seeing how it lines up with other solar or theophanic phenomena.

The Digital Ambler

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