SUBLUNAR SPACE - Research

Sublunar Psionics: Psithemius

2020-05-05T20:20:00+02:00

This is a description of a magical device I invented based on Renaissance magic and psionic technology, how it came about and the research it is based on.

v.1.3 - updated on June 21st

Autodidactic Quarantine

Today the strange experiences on Tenerife surrounding my initiation into the sphere of Saturn this January almost seem like some eerie precognitions of the world plunging into lockdown and panical angst from Covid-19 that we started experiencing from February on.

One effect of my initiation was the rediscovery of an idea that's been in the back of my head ever since I started experimenting with the Trithemian system: a portable version of a "table of practice" that also includes some "psionic" improvements.

The sudden extended holidays and quarantine measures provided me with a great opportunity to revive my rusty knowledge of electronics and dive head-on into studying the art and craft of software-based circuit board design.

I hired an engineer from the Ukraine to assist me in navigating the new terrains and eventually we turned my idea into physical reality. Behold the Psithemius:

The Psithemius is a psionic device for spirit conjuration and magical manifestation.

Its basic architecture consists of printed circuit boards hosting concentric circles with magical names and symbols and a triangle with a spiral shaped transmitter in its center. The design is based on a system attributed to the German abbot and polymath Johannes Trithemius who lived around the end of the 15th century and developed methods for communing with transdimensional entities.

For the Psithemius device to work properly, a small single terminated quartz crystal is needed (it should have one pointy tip and one flat tip) or a small crystal ball. The device emits light and an electromagnetic field around and into this quartz crystal set in the center of the triangle that acts as a focal point and spirit medium.

The Psithemius device utilizes principles from Psionics to detect and electrically amplify intent in the form of magical sigils or radionic rates sent to it. The goal is to charge the crystal with energies resonating with the nature of an entity and act as a beacon of condensed intent to attract them to the ritual space.

Now I admit those are quite bold claims, but they are based on a ton of research. Let's dive into the juicy underlying theories of Solomonic magic, Radionics, and quartz crystals and then tie them all back to a conclusive manual of operation:

A Matter of Three

As many readers will be familiar with, in the so-called Solomonic tradition of ceremonial magic the magician protects themself from the potentially dangerous forces by means of one or two concentric circles surrounding them for the whole duration of their operation. Daimonic entities that are compelled to appear before the operand are by their nature not able to cross the circle that is often additionally fortified by powerful holy names and symbols.

In several grimoires that evolved from the notorious Lemegeton¹ an additional apparatus is used for self-protection and coercion of the spirit, the so called "triangle of manifestation" that supposedly aids the spirit to appear on the material plane but also restricts it to do so in a confined locus. In most of these protocols the magician stands inside the circle and the triangle is located outside of the circle.

The triangle is the archetypal symbol for manifestation because it represents the union of two giving birth to another. It also represents the three dimensions of space necessary for the universe to exist. The triangle is also a symbol that can be used to trap spirits and energy. In both the Goetia and the Tantric Phurba rituals, the triangle is used as a place to hold unruly spirits so that they can be dealt with. --Jason Miller⁷

The concept of triangle and the number three as symbols of the manifest world go way back to ancient Pythagorean ideas. In Book I of De Caelo Aristotle wrote:

A magnitude if divisible one way is a line, if two ways a surface, and if three a body. Beyond these there is no other magnitude, because the three dimensions are all that to there are, and that which is divisible in three directions is divisible in all. For, as the Pythagoreans say, the world and all that is in it is determined by the number three, since beginning and middle and end give the number of an 'all', and the number they give is the triad.⁸

An allegedly plagiarized early 19th century magical text named The Magus² by Francis Barrett contains a treatise called The Art of Drawing Spirits Into Crystals³ attributed to the aforementioned magus Johannes Trithemius. This magical protocol marked the beginning of an alternative approach to the traditional configuration of circle and triangle in the art of spirit evocation. Instead of placing the triangle of manifestation outside of a protective circle, the Trithemian method reverses this logic by placing it inside a small circle. As mentioned before, this apparatus is called Table of Practice and meant to be used as a base for a pedestal holding a scrying crystal. The operator conjures the spirit into the crystal inside the triangle of manifestation while being shielded by the magic circle surrounding it.

21st century magicians like Joshua Gadbois aka. Frater Rufus Opus (RO) have undertaken extensive experimentations with the Trithemian method and simplified its design by getting rid of the pedestal and placing a scrying device directly onto the triangle. RO made this simplified table of practice the central apparatus of his magical work and describes it as follows:

The Table of Practice is a symbol of the cosmos. [...] The outermost circle represents the Seven Heavens and the Intelligences therein. They are the governors of the spheres, and their presence helps ensure you get the spirit you’re looking for when you perform your conjuration. The Elemental Kings provide the gate to the material realm, so the spirits can influence your life materially, if necessary, but they also make sure that any spirit you call up of a terrestrial nature won’t go ballistic and eat your soul, leaving you dead by dawn. These two circles together represent the meeting of the Heavens and the Earth in your temple space. [...] Taken altogether, the Table of Practice represents our relationship with the Seven Governors, the Four Elemental Kings, and the Process of Manifestation. It is designed to provide the place where a spirit can manifest, and to give us a shared space between the Heavens and the Earth in which we can work together to accomplish the things we have to do.⁹

The Psithemius device is basically such a Table of Practice, but enhanced with "psionic" technology to simplify its operation and amplify its effectiveness. If you want to read more on the Trithemian method, I highly recommend the extensive treatment given to the topic by Polyphanes that gives the best available overview of its history and contemporary variations.

Deus Ex Machina

What do I mean by psionic technology?

A popular definition of the term "psionic" is "denoting the practical use of psychic powers or paranormal phenomena."⁴ I use the term as its inventor John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding magazine coined it in 1951 combining the word "electronics" with "psi." I'd like to re-claim the term "psionic" as "magic aided by electronics" and prefer to use it over the other term "radionics" that describes quite similar things but has the tendency to reject anything "magical" in favor of some more materialist concepts such as "scalar waves" or "quantum effects" to describe what makes them work the way they do.

Radionics is using devices with the belief they have a basis in physical reality.

Psionics is going through the same motions with the belief it's all in your head.¹⁰

To me that distinction seems a bit reductionist. I think if you take "radionics" and "psionics" as used in this quote as two ends of a spectrum, from materialist physical effects all the way to magical or subtle "psi" effects, the truth of "how it works" probably lies somewhere in the middle - as with so many things. The clear distinction between the two reminds me a bit of the usual metaphysical "spirits" vs. "psychology" dichotomy so passionately discussed among occultists.

I simply prefer the term "psionics" over "radionics" because the latter mainly presents itself as a scientific art of healing, whereas the former seems to have a more open approach and range of application.

The healing science of radionics started in the early 20th century and was invented by Dr. Albert Abrams. Its basic premise is the concept that each life form has its own electro-magnetic field, which resonates with, influences and is influenced by other such fields and that all life shares a common ground of being immersed in the vibrating electro-magnetic field of the earth. If sufficiently distorted, an organism's electro-magnetic field ultimately results in disease. Psionics is the art and science of receiving, selecting and emitting these vibrational waves for diagnostic and healing purposes⁵.

Practitioners of this art use the principle of radiesthesia (dowsing) to detect distortions in an organism's energy field in much the same way as a water diviner detects the location of water or mineral deposits. Besides classic radiesthetic tools such as pendulums, radionic diagnosis and treatment usually involve electric devices with a number of variable resistor or capacitor dials, coils in various sizes and shapes, and quartz crystals, that all together can be used to tune into these frequencies and determine their unique vibrational fingerprints in numbers, so called 'rates'.⁵

Each rate has a specific shape and direction on a multi-dimensional level and works on the principle of resonance. Imbalanced areas of organism can be put into resonance with correcting vibration sent to it resulting in its optimum health level.

Psionics utilizes the power of electro-magnetism to detect, manipulate, store, and emit psychic energy to influence reality and therefore can be seen as a modern branch of ceremonial magic. In principle the rates can be compared to magical symbols and sigils. Both can be conceptualized as numerical or geometric representations of multi-dimensional vibrations, addressing transdimensional entities, intentions, ideas, or forces.

In traditional magic the symbols and sigils are usually seen as supportive tools to amplify the main force of a magical operation: the focused intent of the operator. When magic fails it is often attributed to a lack of focus.

This is where psionics comes in. Ed Kelly of KRT Laboratories explains:

A pivotal benefit of a live-signal instrument is that it acts a repeating station for the Intent you've defined for unlimited periods of time. Most of us can only maintain pure focus for moments or minutes at a time. The instrument allows you to define an output radio signal that resonates with your intent [...] and pump it out into the Universe 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The operator only has to stay engaged for the moments it took to set the instrument [...]. With a live signal instrument, the electronics do the work.¹¹

Let's face it: most electronics exist to work so we don't have to. Psionics can provide that to some extent too. But there is also another important factor in favour of psionics: safety!

A live signal instrument is a mind-matter interface and serves as a firewall between the operator, the subject(s), and the energy vampires in their various forms. Any of them following the light back to the source find only a box of components, not the operator. With symbolic instruments and other radiesthesia tools, the operator is still the one doing the work and remains the principal conduit for the energy, so the path still leads back to them.¹¹

If you are interested in learning more about this fringe technology field, I highly recommend reading the KRT handbooks for a more radionic/scientific angle and Uncle Chuckie's freely available ebooks for a more psionic/psychological one. For a great overview that covers the history and most prominent figures in the field as well as more artistic approaches to the topic, Duncan Laurie's book is a treasure.

Crystal Beacons

The shared element between the Trithemian method of conjuration and the architecture of many Psionic devices is the quartz crystal. The former utilizes a clear spherical crystal as locus of visual manifestation for the magician while the latter usually exploits the physical and energetic properties of quartz crystals for purposes of amplification.

Although the principles laid out by Trithemius focus more on the optical properties of spherical crystals for scrying purposes, there is enough evidence for a more magical property of natural quartz to be used for aiding transdimensional entities to manifest.

quartz crystal was used by prehistoric humans as early as 75,000 B.C.E. Quartz has been found in prehistoric burial grounds, as well as the monuments of pharaohs and the ruins of Sumerian cities. Archaeologists have discovered Egyptian and Babylonian crystal scarabs, vases, and cylinders dating back to 1500 B.C.E. Egyptians were mining agate as early as 3500 B.C.E., while early inhabitants of Mesopotamia fashioned cylinder seals, signet rings, beads, and other ornamental objects from this stone.¹²

The famous polymath scientist Nikola Tesla wrote in a 1900 article for Century Magazine:

We can conceive of organized beings living without nourishment, and deriving all the energy they need for the performance of their life-functions from the ambient medium. In a crystal we have the clear evidence of the existence of a formative life-principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is none the less a living being. There may be, besides crystals, other such individualized, material systems of beings, perhaps of gaseous constitution, or composed of substance still more tenuous. ln view of this possibility,-nay, probability,-we cannot apodictically deny the existence of organized beings on a planet merely because the conditions on the same are unsuitable for the existence of life as we conceive it. We cannot even, with positive assurance, assert that some of them might not be present here, in this our world, in the very midst of us, for their constitution and life-manifestation may be such that we are unable to perceive them.¹³

Not only did Tesla perceive crystals as living beings, but he was also convinced of the existence of invisible entities.

Not only are crystals animate beings with an unfathomable consciousness, but they also have properties that allow them to act as a host and medium for subtle energies and even unmanifest entities. This is also in line with ancient "shamanic" knowledge:

The archetypal cosmology of shamanism portrays crystals as solidified light originating in the supernal realms. Although fallen or brought down to Earth, crystals offer the shaman both a bridge to the heavens and a key to supernormal powers associated with celestial beings. Shamans generally ascribe a singular importance to quartz above all other power objects, perceiving it to be the bones of the earth, a “live rock,” a living being. As such, crystals are regarded as among the most powerful of the shaman’s “spirit helpers.”¹⁴

To this point the famous father of chaos magic, Peter J. Carroll wrote in Liber Null:

Any sort of material base is a spirit trap in some way, but some substances, notably crystals, absorb aetheric imprints very readily. Quartz crystals, which are large and readily available, can be used to pick up impressions by leaving them near charged places, persons, or objects. If a spirit or elemental is discovered to be inhabiting some place it can be trapped by plunging a crystal into its form.¹⁵

Aside of mad genius polymaths like Tesla and magicians like Carroll who spoke of crystals in that fashion, also very down-to-earth materialist scientists like IBM engineer Marcel Vogel became obsessed with quartz after realizing the crystals' potential:

Each living form has its own distinct vibration, It is our signature in that we broadcast a distinct vibration (the same as we have a signature in our handwriting and our fingerprint). This vibration [can be] transferred to the crystal. It is through this signature or vibration than you can transfer or receive a charge to or from another person or object.¹⁶

To me it seems that the highly geometric physical properties of quartz are in tune with basic natural principles of the universe (sacred geometry) that also informs basic operating principles of two-dimensional symbols in ceremonial magic, notably triangles, hexagons, hexagrams, but also three-dimensional ones like the Platonic solid of the tetrahedron. They operate on a principle of resonance.

To this point Marcel Vogel said in a lecture given at a Yoga retreat on Paradise Island, Nassau:

Quartz is particularly wonderful in storing the information of the mind. It is silicon dioxide, with a space group very close to that of water. Our bodies are over 70% water. The energy of water, as it is from the body, forms patterns or fields which surround our bodies. The energy of mind utilizing these fields can penetrate crystals of this type. The energy can be reabsorbed or retransmitted as information or as an image - a communication link. The basic shape is hexagonal. We in our pattern of energy around us hexagonal. The most economic use of space is a hexagonal space. You’ll find this in a beehive - hexagonal, 6 sides.¹⁷

Quartz crystals are made up of atoms stacked together in tetrahedral patterns. They are manifestations of sacred geometry and universal principles:

Simply put, a tetrahedron is a triangular pyramid with a triangular base. To Euclid, who is considered the father of geometry, the tetrahedron was the most special of all the Platonic solids. How so? If you look at the other four Platonic solids, each of them can also fit inside one another and be perfectly nested. The tetrahedron is different. It is the only solid that cannot nest other solids. Rather, the tetrahedron has the ability to “give birth to itself” endlessly, through a process of regeneration (or as healers would put it, “transformation”). Although for Pythagoreans, triangles were the most stable of geometric figures, modern science has shown that the tetrahedron alone produces not equilibrium but instability. No wonder Plato associated it with fire. Fire is the only element that possesses the power to change all that it touches. That is why tetrahedrons are associated with transformation.¹⁸

To create balance, tetrahedrons must be in pairs or sets of pairs. A 64-tetrahedron cluster creates equilibrium in the vacuum of space. When tetrahedrons work in pairs, they also create the star tetrahedron, which is associated with balance. The star tetrahedron consists of two inverted tetrahedrons contained within each other. This represents our polar world and the inseparable relationship between the two complementary halves: the positive and negative, the manifest and unmanifest, the masculine and feminine, spirit and matter, heaven and earth, which form a perfect equilibrium. According to the ancients, when we are able to integrate the polarities within us, we can achieve “oneness” of our unlimited selves: in other words, the authenticity that is inside each one of us."¹⁹

Whether you consider them beings or mere material objects (for me that's the same, but that's a whole other discussion), fact is that crystals have abilities/properties that allow them to store subtle energies and act as media for unmanifest entities. When working with them one notices that crystals don't really care which type of spirits, vibrational patterns, or information of the mind to attract or store. Just like magnets don't seem to differentiate what ferric metal to attract. They just do it by nature.

There are methods that allow us some control over their memory though. It can be wiped and re-formatted like a hard-drive. Every New Age crystal healing practicioner can assure you that and there are different approaches for erasing a crystal, like rinsing them with spring water, rubbing with salt or by exposure to sunlight.

Crystals built into psionic devices had to be removable for that exact reason. Otherwise the accumulated subtle energies from past operations would start interfering with current ones. At least that was the case until Aetheric Arts craftsman, chaos magician, and radionic practicioner Joseph Max had an innovative idea:

Assuming the cleansing power of sunlight comes from it’s powerful ultraviolet component, I figured I could cleanse the internal crystals using shortwave UV light.⁶

It was a great discovery that UV-A light can not only cause sunburns, sanitize surfaces and disinfect aquariums, but also erase the memory of quartz!

This innovation in crystal erasure has also been implemented in the Psithemius device by a simple push of a button. It cleans the crystal prior to its dedicated use and acts as an extra "kill switch" safety feature during the operation if it goes awry or as a simple banishing at the end of the operation.

Operating the Psithemius

The Psithemius device is the product of my research into the overlap of Renaissance magic and the powers of modern psionic "quackery". It is a ritual accessory that can be used without electricity in the same way any other classic table of practice can be used. Plugging it in and using it as a "live signal instrument" has a lot of potential to improve its efficiency. It is new and still needs to be extensively tested in all kinds of different ritual situations.

The Psithemius is available for purchase. Please contact me if you are interested in buying one.

Again: it is a tool. Like a phone. A phone can't do the talking, it can provide the connection. The Psithemius device will not do the conjuration work for you. It attempts to assist you by acting as a beacon radiating intent and correspondences in the form of light and electromagnetic waves in a tested and approved geometric and symbolic framework. It also gives the operator more control of the energies within the triangle of manifestation.

Like with a phone you need to know who you wish to call, the number to reach them at, and how to speak to them. The optimal way to do that is by learning the Trithemian method and the most straight forward way that I also followed is by getting Rufus Opus book "Seven Spheres⁶" or even better, by studying his "Red Work Course" material disseminated by his talented students of his here, here or here.

Now, with all that out of the way let's get to the practical part of using the Psithemius:

Refer to the new Operator Manual

Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis or The Lesser Key of Solomon. Joseph H. Peterson. Digital Edition. 1999 ↩
Barrett, Francis, F.R.C. The Magus or Celestial Intelligencer. 1801, Lackington, Alley & Co. Scanned at sacred-texts.com, October 2002. J. B. Hare, redactor. ↩
Trithemius of Spanheim. Secret Things and Doctrine of Spirits. Drawing Spirits Into Crystals. From Barrett, Francis. The Magus, Book II, London, 1801, pp. 135 ff. electronic edition 1999 Apr 21, by Joseph H Peterson ↩
https://www.lexico.com/definition/psionic ↩
Radionics Manual ↩↩
Fr. Rufus Opus. Seven Spheres. 2014, Nephilim Press ↩↩
Miller, Jason. The Sorcerer's Secrets: Strategies in Practical Magick. New Page Books, 2009. pg. 44 ↩
Leofric, Stocks John. Translation of the De caelo. The works of Aristotle translated into. 1922, Oxford : The Clarendon Press. Book I. B. p268a ↩
Fr. Rufus Opus. The Red Work Course. The Black Work, Lesson 6, pg. 14-18 ↩
Facebook comment in the group "Radionics" ↩
Ed Kelly of one of the leading providers of radionic machines, KRT Laboratories, in a Facebook comment ↩↩
Singer, Beatriz. Crystal Blueprint: Reconnect with Your Authentic Self Through the Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science of Quartz Crystals. 2019, Hay House. EPUB ref. 13.8 ↩
Tesla, Nikola. The Problem Of Increasing Human Energy. Century Magazine. June 1, 1901. pg. 180 ↩
Footnote 11. EPUB ref. 14.10 ↩
Carroll, Peter J. Liber Null and Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. 1987, Weiser Books, pg. 61 ↩
Vogel, Marcel. Workbook for Marcel Vogel's Crystal Healing Workshop. pg. 25 ↩
Ibid. pg. 95 ↩
Footnote 11. EPUB ref. 13.166 ↩
Ibid. EPUB ref. 13.167 ↩

Quantum Geomancy

2019-05-25T11:00:00+02:00

This is not an article about the divination practice usually referred to as "geomancy". I use the term according to its original meaning: magic of earth. This is about a practical application of geomancy in the context of "randonauting". I will give a brief overview about this technique, then report some experiences, and layout some techniques of practical enchantment using randonauting as a tool.

Version 2.1 - May 18, 2020

Randonautics

Inspired by a video by Tommie Kelly of Adventures in Woo Woo I recently started "randonauting" because I've always been very fascinated by spirits of place and psychogeography and this new activity seemed like a fun way to expand my practice in the field.

Randonauting is the exploration of places in your immediate surrounding solely determined by a random set of coordinates. These coordinates are provided by an online software called Fatum Bot that can be accessed via Telegram messenger and a phone app called Randonautica.

The numbers used to find the coordinates are provided by a so called quantum random number generator (QRNG) that measures the magnetic field fluctuations of virtual particles in a vacuum and continuously spits out these measurements.

Initially the creators of this software wanted to just see was what happened when people visit randomly generated geographic points. But then some really weird stuff started to happen. People found strange objects or messages at the random locations, or they started experiencing strange repelling emotions.

The makers of the Fatum Project came up with a gamified theory for a real world application of their software: to break the user's predetermined probability-tunnel:

All things in the world are causally connected with each other and everything that happens, including our thoughts, is usually determined by the sum of all environmental factors. This makes the world close to deterministic. [...] This means that no matter what choices you make, and no matter how many variations on how your day may pass, there are always some places where you simply cannot be, because none of the chains of your decisions leads there.

Interesting that such places may be somewhere nearby. On your street there may be a lane in which you will never think to look and you do not even know about its existence. What could be hiding in such blind spots? [...] To find such places, it was decided to create points with random coordinates and go there, regardless of whether they look interesting or convenient to visit.¹

Attractor Points

The Fatum Bot offers different methods of generating random points. Pseudo-random coordinates and QRNG generated ones, but the most interesting type that seems to reveal the weirdest places, are so-called "attractor points":

For it's generation a few thousands of quantum-random points will be created and then program will find an area with maximum density of these points and calculate it's center as an attractor.

The power of the attractor is a relative coefficient to verify that the attractor is generated correctly. It is based on the ratio between the density of points near the attractor and in the entire search zone as a whole. In theory, if it is less than two, then it is difficult to call it an anomaly. (Farum Bot /help text)

The opposite of an attractor point is a so-called void, an area with the minimum density of random points.

Memetics

During the first experiment, when 70,000 randomly selected people were sent to random points coordinates, almost all of them immediately decided that the points were sent with the aim of a scam and saw danger in them. As a result, a very few decided to go there. Such a reaction can be explained by the activation of the despair-meme, with which the holistic memeplex tries to keep you within the framework of the pattern.¹

First a quick update on the terminology used in the quoted paragraph:

A meme is a unit of information in consciousness, whose existence influences events in such a way that a large number of its copies arise in other consciousnesses.²

Memocomplex (memeplex) - A set of mutually supporting memes that co-evolve in symbiotic relationships. Religious and political dogmas, social movements, artistic styles, traditions and customs, paradigms, languages, etc. are meme complexes.²

The aforementioned "strange emotions" that around 25% of randonauts experienced are explained in the official theory as being manifestations of the so-called "Despair Meme". To learn more about this phenomenon, I highly recommend the following two videos by Tommie Kelly and Fred Andersson. I have personally not experienced it much on any of my randonaut trips and I have to admit that I am sceptical about it.

Entanglement

It is hypothesized that part of the reason that the places seem to have some kind of weird uncanny ambience could be the use of quantum event generated randomness and the alleged phenomenon of entanglement with consciousness. This effect has been observed in many experiments, the largest ongoing one being the Princeton University Global Consciousness Project:

When human consciousness becomes coherent, the behavior of random systems may change. Random number generators (RNGs) based on quantum tunneling produce completely unpredictable sequences of zeroes and ones. But when a great event synchronizes the feelings of millions of people, our network of RNGs becomes subtly structured. GCP

It means that the theoretical "true randomness" of a QRNG is practically altered by the consciousness of the user through the so-called observer effect. Depending on the intent of the user in the moment of generation of the QRN, the randomness seems to get modulated and the random coordinates suddenly seem to point to places that have some kind of significance.

Heterotopian Journeys

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.³

During a holiday trip to Israel with my wife and daughter to see the in-laws aka. grandpa and his girlfriend I started to apply randonauting to my usual evening activity of exploring the city we stayed in. I visited single attractor points and experimented with attractor chains in which the visited attractor becomes the new location from which you generate the next point, and so on.

I started out with the minimum radius of 1000 meters around our flat and immediately got to very interesting places. The random coordinates led me to beautiful sculptures in a private garden, an abandoned car with plastic tubes strapped to it and a scarab beetle landing in front of my feet upon arrival, a lost toy car, strangely arranged objects in industrial areas, and a recurring number of water pipes, hydrants, and dry riverbeds. Most places surrounded an ambience of peaceful serenity and despite mostly being in an urban area, a feeling of liminality and heterotopia. They mostly felt inviting to contemplation and I often left an offering of tobacco in exchange for an artifact to take with me.

I had an interesting attractor chain experience: During a day trip to Tel Aviv I found a rare free parking spot next to a park. I sat down on a bench and checked my phone map for a public toilet. I started walking there and listened to a bunch of voice notes about Fatum Project. Sitting on the loo I generated an attractor point while focusing on the word "inspiration". I got a 4.2 attractor and went there. It turned out to be a backyard playground area of a kindergarten, shadowy and liminal, dominated by a large tree with a makeshift swing on it and surrounded by bushes. I would have loved to hang out at this place as a child. Very magical. But being a bearded grownup man wearing sunglasses sneaking around such a place invoked immediate anxiety (despair meme?) and I left. I chained up another attractor point thinking about "music production" and it appeared to be just 500m down the road I was already walking. I ended up at a construction site with scaffolding of a house front and it was quite noisy from drilling, throwing rubble and shouting in Hebrew and Arabic. I chained up another attractor with no intention and it lead back to the direction of the park. When I arrived I realized it was just 50m away from the bench I started out at and just a footstep away from where I started listening to the voice notes.

Manifestations

In two occasions I had the feeling that by doing the ritual of visiting a place and taking an artifact back into my own sphere of life had immediate effects of desire manifestation:

We had a rental car booked and when we arrived at the airport in Tel Aviv the company tried to scam us into having to book an additional allegedly legally required car insurance from them despite already having added one when we had booked the car online. We cancelled the booking and ended up without a car. I was quite devastated about it and felt stuck and trapped and thought about it all day. The first evening I visited an attractor point (power 2.77) that turned out to be a little green plastic chassis of a toy car, neatly parked next to a hedge on a sidewalk. I took it with me thinking "at least I have a toy car". When I arrived back home my wife excitedly told me that her father just messaged her that we can borrow his girlfriend's car for the whole time of our stay. I was happy and bamboozled by the "coincidence".

The next attractor point that I visited was at a rusty overgrown gate of a tall steel structure wall fencing a factory area. From the road-signs it was quite obvious that the place was private property but I walked in anyways, because the attractor had the unusually high power of 5.19 and I really wanted to get there. On the sidewalk in front of the gate was a wooden transportation pallet with a giant and very heavy looking flat white rock on it and a clean and unused car mat on top of it. I took the car mat with me, remembering the green toy car and wondering if and what this item would manifest. Arriving home I learned that a previously scheduled potentially awkward dinner with to me unknown friends of my in-laws that I had been anxious about all day got cancelled.

At this point the data-set is too small to draw any conclusions about a correlation of attractor points and manifestation of desires, but nevertheless I find the anecdote worth mentioning. I will certainly experiment further into this direction and I had an idea about using Fatum Bot points for casting intents. You will find it below in the praxis section.

Geomanteia Praxis

Aside from the official Randonaut theory based practice of bringing quantum randomness into the topology of your reality and using them to cause change, I had a few ideas for magical experiments that I will briefly describe here:

Divination

Set your location and radius in the Fatum Bot or the Randonautica app.
Choose Attractor (/getattractor) for the point and while it is calculating, ask a question out loud or in your mind which you want an answer for.
Go to the attractor and note any hints, symbolic objects, atmosphere, written text that might lead to an answer.
Optionally you might also want to note the same about anything you encounter along the path to the attractor.
Make it a chain of attractors for more complex answers.

Balancing the Void

(Currently this only works in the Bot)

Get a Pair (/getpair) to receive an attractor point and a related void point.
Go to the attractor and take an artifact, leave an offering, ask the spirit of place to charge the artifact with its energy.
Go to the void point, place the artifact, ask the spirit of place to receive energy from the artifact as an offering.
Remain in a meditative receptive state and record whatever emotions or insights you have.

Quantum Crossroads

If you imagine lines between attractor points as akin to ley-lines, then their intersections have power also. Call them 'crossroads' and you can apply all kind of crossroads related magic to these intersections.

Here is a calculator that lets you find the intersection of two lines defined by four coordinates or two coordinates with a bearing.

Also check out the other tools, like midpoint calculation or antipodes for even more potential magical applications.

Geosophic Sigil

This is the idea to trace the shape of a sigil by walking from attractor point to subsequent chained attractor points while keeping an intention in mind and then using that shape as viewed from above as a symbol to represent the intention and the journey of sigil creation itself.

Set your location and radius in the Fatum Bot
Get an Attractor (/getattractor) and while it is calculating, say your intention out loud or in your mind.
Go to the attractor and try to be as mindful about your intention and the journey itself as possible.
When you reach the attractor, set it as your current location and repeat steps 1 - 3.
Do this as long as you feel like you need to be doing it.
At the end, put markers for each attractor you visited on a map and trace them with straight lines from beginning to end. Terminate the beginning of this line with a circle and optionally the end with a dash or an arrow. This is a glyph symbolizing your geosophic sigil.
Optionally make it into a hypersigil, by putting more emphasis to the whole journey and taking notes on the way. Once you are finished, write a "Hero's Journey" type story using the places or atmospheres or other elements relating to your visited attractor points as plot-points. Ideally make up this story already during the journey.

Ad Hoc Sigil Network

There are already a number of discussions around using attractor points for a "sigil network" in the Fatum community. An early approach was based on the Floodgate Sigil Network by Ring of Lethe but it never really caught on.

Here is an outline of my own practice that has already been in the back of my head since my grave token network, but was also inspired by conversations in the Fatum community I engaged in.

At high power attractor points, place a unique sigil or half of a token pair (any pair of objects, halves of a rock/clay object, coins, whatever. See my Dawn of the Dead article part about my token network)
Record information about how the place feels like, any planetary, elemental or other magically related correspondences that come to your mind and which sigil/token represents this place.
At your altar space, do a ritual where you connect places that share correspondences by placing the sigils/tokens that represent these places around a central sigil that represents the intention of linking them together.
When you do other rituals in which you feel the need for more resonance of certain energies that you felt at a certain attractor point, use the above created network to pull energy from these places - or vice versa if you want to push some intent or energy to these places you can do that in the same fashion.
After the ritual, disconnect the places from the linking sigil again and dissolve the network.
With the above outlined method you can create ad hoc networks of places when needed and don't need to worry that your network might get taken over or other issues the famous DKMU "Ellis" aka. "Linking Sigil" network allegedly suffered from.

Here is my Fatum attractor linking sigil design, mainly inspired by a simpler design by AciaMeriPens/RoL, spelling FATUM but using Futhark runes as letters. I combined it with "a cube in a cube" as symbol for quantum randomness and spatiality, but also the appearance of a spiderweb for "network" and a downward pointing arrow known in electronic schematics to signify "ground".

Directing Intention

The four cardinal directions are paramount in many magical operations, some grimoires like the Steganographia by Trithemius of Spanheim or the Art Theurgia Goetia of Kinge Salomon have lists of spirits sorted by their direction on a compass.

You can use attractor points in directional relation to your point of origin as places to set an intention for a magical operation, to cast sigils, conjure spirits, whatever you want. The act of moving from a place to another in a certain direction is charged with magical meaning.

There are several esoteric systems you can apply to this method. The most straightforward one is using the four cardinal directions and their magical correspondences in the western tradition (according to Agrippa, not the Golden Dawn)

Direction	North	East	West	South
Element	Water	Fire	Air	Earth
Qualities	cold, wet	hot, dry	hot, wet	cold, dry

Find more correspondences on this extensive chart.

Using this logic you can derive other correspondences, for example which planetary energies can be found in which direction. Here is a planetary chart derived from the Aristotelian Qualities from the chart above:

Planet	Direction
Moon	North
Mercury	South-East
Venus	West
Sun	East
Mars	East
Jupiter	North-West
Saturn	South

Another excellent system for setting intention is the Bagua principle from Feng Shui geomancy:

Direction	Element	Trigram	Topic
North	Water	坤 Kūn	Career/Lifepath
North-East	Earth	震 Zhèn	Knowledge/Wisdom
East	Wood	離 Lí	Family
South-East	Wood/Wind	兌 Duì	Wealth/Prosperity
South	Fire	乾 Qián	Fame/Reputation
South-West	Earth	巽 Xùn	Love/Marriage
West	Metal	坎 Kǎn	Children/Creativity
North-West	Metal	艮 Gèn	Helpers/Travels

The best way to find the exact direction from your point of origin (OP) to the Fatum attractor point (FP) is by using degrees of bearing.

The bearing of a point is the number of degrees in the angle measured in a clockwise direction from the north line to the line joining the centre of the compass with the point. A bearing is used to represent the direction of one point relative to another point. (source)

Here is a chart of cardinal directions and the corresponding bearing degrees:

Direction	Degrees
North	315° - 45°
East	45° - 135°
South	135° - 225°
West	225° - 315°

with diagonal quarters:

Direction	Degrees
North	337.5° - 22.5°
North-East	22.5° - 67.5°
East	67.5° - 112.5°
South-East	112.5° - 157.5
South	157.5° - 202.5°
South-West	202.5° - 247.5°
West	247.5° - 292.5°
North-West	292.5° - 337.5°

I requested a feature from the Fatum developers to display the bearing degrees of a generated point. It has been implemented, but is only available in the bot.

Sublunar Almanac

2018-12-24T18:30:00+01:00

Version 1.2 - 19/09/2018

JavaScript Necromancy

Right at the beginning of the last Retrograde phase that just ended in the beginning of December Mercury had dragged me down into the "underworld" of my hard-drive where all the dead and forgotten projects lie. He made me dig up an undertaking I had left abandoned over a year ago.

Back when I did Gordon White's premium member sigil course I had hacked together some horrendous JavaScript code copied and pasted from GitHub projects and ancient websites and stitched up a web-based tool called "Hygromanteia Timer" that allowed me to find "fruit machine days": Auspicious days and hours where planetary rulers, good lunar days and zodiacal moon positions could could be matched up with a desired magical goal - all as described in the Hygromanteia. Of course I could have used the spreadsheets provided by Gordon and other members and used Lunarium to find certain lunar events, or the awesome tools over at Ghostly Harmless, but I am not only an occultist but even more a nerd, I wanted to do it better myself and as an all-in-one tool.

The initial code was chaotic but served me well and it was never meant to be used by anyone else. Soon I had reached a dead end when trying to add features to it and in a spontaneous Martian mood I heroically decided to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and make it modular and extendable. But as with so many things in life, the Saturnian forces in me won by mere tenacity and I lost interest in rewriting the code and left an unfunctional wasteland of code fragments behind.

Now suddenly Hermes Cthonios had kicked me hard and within several weeks of full-on total antisocial geek mode I collected all the rubble, sorted and rebuilt it into a modular structure, and almost on the minute of Mercury stationing back direct I leaned back from my computer screen and found myself looking at a finished project I dubbed "Sublunar Almanac".

Here it is as a publicly available tool you can use to find all kinds of magically auspicious hours for your own ritual needs:

SUBLUNAR ALMANAC

Merry Christmas! Please read on for detailed instructions on how to use it and how you can help developing it further:

User Guide

The Sublunar Almanac is a browser based tool to display and filter a roster of Planetary Hours, the most commonly used time-frames for starting magical operations. The starting and ending times, as well as the durations of Planetary Hours depend on the geographic location because they are defined by the respective local rising and setting times of the sun. The Sublunar Almanac can be used to find auspicious hours based on place and astrological data and information found in grimoires and other magical texts.

Too lazy to read the whole guide? Check these video examples:

Overview

When activated properly Sublunar Almanac displays a roster of rectangular boxes, each representing a Planetary Hour.

They are numbered from 1 to 24, the yellow ones are during the day (sunrise to sunset), the blue ones during the night (sunset to sunrise). The large number in the bottom row indicates the number of the hour, the numbers in the center of the top row show the real Gregorian Calendar date in the format dd/mm. The symbol in the top left corner indicates the ruler of the current Planetary Day (Sol, Luna, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn) and the one in the right corner the ruler of the Planetary Hour. Below you find the starting time of this hour on the left in hh:mm format and the ending time on the right, respectively.

But before the Sublunar Almanac shows you any of this, it needs to be individually set up.

Settings

The program needs to know a geographic location and a range of hours to display, among other options. These must be set properly. To do that, click the Settings button on the top left of the grey navigation bar:

The easiest way to set up a location is by clicking the Locate Me button and allowing the browser to pass the geolocation information to the Almanac. If your browser does not support that feature or if you want to calculate the Almanac for a location that is not the one you are currently at, you can enter it manually by typing the name of your city or place into the "Manual Geolocation" field and wait for the auto-complete list to show you all the matches. When you click one of the options in the list, the fields for UTC-Offset (time difference from Universal Time), Latitude and Longitude are automatically filled in.

Alternatively you may of course provide the coordinates and offset yourself manually. These latter fields are crucial for the Almanac to function, so if they are empty, it won't work.

The other important information needed is the time-range to be displayed. The Time and Date field can be used to adjust the desired starting point of the Almanac. It is set to right now by default. The number of days for which the Almanac will calculate the hours can be set in the Generate Days field. It is set to one week by default but can take any number of days. The Almanac takes around one second to calculate all information for one day, so if you want to generate 30 or more days, prepare to be patient.

The Almanac shows you all the hours from the beginning of the day set up in the Time and Date field. If you want to only see hours that lie in the future, tick the Hide Past checkbox. By default the Almanac uses the Tropical Zodiac for Astrological calculations. If you - like myself - prefer to use the Sidereal Zodiac, please make sure you tick the Sidereal checkbox. Since September 2022 the Almanac only shows operations and tags in the filters (see section Filtering below) that are relevant to the chosen timeframe. If you would like to see all possible filters including the ones outside of the chosen timeframe, untick this checkbox.

The bottom part of the Settings are a list of all Plug-in Modules currently implemented in the Sublunar Almanac. Each module calculates and displays different information based on astrological phenomena and lists of auspicious times transmitted through magical texts and these modules are the power behind the Almanac.

By default, all modules related to astrological phenomena and planetary timing are activated and all modules related to magical texts are deactivated, so if you want to see for example, what the Hygromanteia or PGM have to say about certain times the moon is in certain Zodiac signs, make sure to activate these modules by ticking their checkbox.

When all settings are made, click the blue Generate button and watch the magic unfold. The Settings window will close and a blue line and circle on the top of the screen will indicate the status of the background calculations. When it is done, the roster of Planetary Hours will appear according to your settings.

Hour Information

When you click any of the Planetary Hour boxes you can see all calculated information about this hour depending on the modules previously selected in the Settings:

If you want to save this selected hour to your Google Calendar or any other calendar that supports the iCal format, such as Apple or Microsoft Calendar, click one of the buttons on the bottom of the information window.

Filtering

The main power of Sublunar Almanac is the filtering. Notice the small menus that appeared in the top right of the navigation bar after you clicked Generate? These are filters provided by the modules to find an auspicious hour for whatever operation you want to execute.

When you click on one of them, its filter options will be displayed:

Here you can see two columns with all the filter criteria you can apply to the hours in the roster. The left column is a list of tags related to all the criteria listed in the right column. If you click on one of the tags, only the criteria related to this tag are listed. When you click a filter criterium in the right column it will immediately be applied to the grid of Planetary Hours in the background. The filter criteria are mutually inclusive ("OR" logic), that means that when you select more than one of them, all of the selected ones are applied ("show hours matching criterium A OR B OR C").

In contrast, the filter sections themselves are mutually exclusive ("AND" logic). So if you select criteria from filter A and criteria from filter B, the calendar will just display dates that have an overlap of the criteria of A and B ("show hours matching criterium A OR B from filter A AND criterium C from filter D"). This has been done to make it possible to find Planetary Hours that have overlapping auspiciousness criteria (for example to "find an hour of Mercury on the day of Jupiter when Mercury is exalted") - in Rune Soup terms also known as "Fruit Machine" moments.

Beware: If you choose too many criteria that do not match any of the displayed Planetary Hours, the roster will become empty. To reset all the filters at the same time and display all Planetary Hours, click the Reset button in the navigation bar.

Offline Functionality

In a limited way it is possible to use the Sublunar Almanac offline. This is practical when you know that you will not have internet or when you want to calculate a larger range of days for a place and you don't want to wait for the lengthy calculation everytime you use it. When you have generated a roster it is possible to save the data by going back into the Settings and clicking on the newly appeared download button on the bottom left. Now simply leave the Sublunar Almanac open in you browser before you go offline or save it locally.

Next time you want to regenerate the roster, simply open Settings and instead of providing location and time information as described in the Settings section above, click the Select File button on the bottom left and select the file you downloaded in the step explained in the previous paragraph. Now you can still select whether to Hide Past hours or use the Sidereal zodiac and which modules to use, but all other fields are ignored. Hit Generate and the roster is immediately generated without any necessary calculations.

License

Sublunar Almanac is free to use and also published as open source under MIT License! If you find it useful and it helps you improve your enchantments, please be so kind and Buy Me a Coffee!.

Notes and Caveats

Most importantly: I take no reliability or warranty on the accuracy of any of the information provided by Sublunar Almanac.

I am not a professional JavaScript programmer, but I taught myself how to code to get stuff done. Please forgive me if my code looks shit or has bugs.

Of course astrological phenomena are in constant change, from minute to minute. The Sublunar Almanac calculates all data for the start time of each Planetary Hour, so if your magical operation strictly depends on the moon being in a certain range of degrees of the Zodiac or needs to happen only on a certain Lunar day, please double-check with other sources. Usually it is magically sufficient to start a magical operation in a certain hour.

The difference between tropical and sidereal Zodiac I use is 24° 07' 02"

For technical reasons the only dates where all phenomena can be fairly accurately calculated are between 1900 and 2100 CT, Lunar Days only between 1970 and 2100.

Lunar Day 1 starts on the exact moment of New Moon, all consecutive Lunar Days start at local moonrise-times.

For astrological aspects I use orbs according to Hellenistic sources. All planets have an orb-size of 3 degrees, the luminaries 3.2 degrees for all aspects except conjunctions where the moon has 13 degrees and the sun 15. For direction and speed calculations I interpret all speeds between -0.01 and 0.01 degrees as stations for the inner planets and between -0.001 and 0.001 degrees for the outer planets, everything below that is retrograde, everything above direct.

Contribute

If you would like to contribute to the development, there are many different ways to do so:

Research: if you have access to an interesting grimoiric text or astrological system that has useful magical timing information that could be added to Sublunar Almanac as a module, find and extract the information and send it to me! info (ät) sublunar (dot) space

Invent: if you have more ideas how to make the project better, please let me know! info (ät) sublunar (dot) space

Report: if you are an astrologist or other cyclic-time-nerd, double check the information calculated by Sublunar Almanac and report errors you stumble upon! info (ät) sublunar (dot) space

Code: if you want to code your own module to plug into Sublunar Almanac head over to the module dev section or if you want to improve the overall code, check our GitHub. If you happen to have experience in javascript phone app development and know WebAssembly JS please contact me immediately! info (ät) sublunar (dot) space

Donate: support me with a bit of Mercurial cash to keep me motivated: Buy Me a Coffee!

Module Development

Module Structure

The plug-in modules are simple JavaScript objects with a fixed architecture that neatly integrate into the Sublunar Almanac. The structure of each module is the same:

:::javascript
var module_x = {

  definitions: {
    name: "Module Name",
    actions: [
      [0],
      [{
        "id": "1",
        "action": "Action description",
        "tags": "tag1 tag2",
        "hide": "info"
      }]
    ]
  },
  property: function(m) {
    return m;
  },
  calculate: function(definitions, property) {
    return definitions.actions[property];
  }
};

As you can see it is a simple JavaScript object with variables.

var module_<x> where <x> is a unique module identifier

definitions.name is a string with the descriptive name of the module to be displayed on the page

definitions.actions is an array of arrays of objects. Each object is a descriptor of an operation or phenomenon the module can display or filter according to information it gets from Sublunar Almanac. The id should be a unique number inside the module, action is a descriptive string of the operation or phenomenon, tags a space delimited list of tags associated with the operation or phenomenon. Optionally you can define hide either with info which will keep this phenomenon or operation hidden from the information window that appears when clicking on the planetary hour but visible in the filter lists, or filter which hides it from the filter lists but displays it in the information window.

definitions.property is a function that receives a JSON ephemeris object from Sublunar Almanac for each planetary hour calculated. In the function you can modify or filter anything from this object and return it to the next function:

definitions.calculate is the main function that calculates and relates the property object received from the previous function with any data of the whole definitions object itself (mainly for actions). It should return an single dimension array of objects defined in the actions part of the module.

Optional variables:

definitions.core with boolean true/false defines it as a core module that is enabled by default in the Settings

definitions.group defines the module as being part of a group of modules

definitions.group.id unique identifier of the group. All modules belonging to the group should share the same id.

definitions.group.text string of the group name how it appears throughout the Sublunar Almanac

definitions.group.info with string true sums up all submodules informations under the headline of the group.text in the information window

Helper Functions

Here are some functions that can be called from within the module to calculate certain things. The function involving the zodiac respect the setting for tropical or sidereal in the Settings

SL.Astro.Nomy.moonPhase(object) function that takes an object argument with properties angle and day as provided by the JSON ephemeris object and returns the phase of the moon (1 - 8)

SL.Astro.Logy.zodToDeg(string) function that takes a string argument in the form "12 Aries 24" or similar and calculates a decimal degree (tropical ecliptic longitude)

SL.Astro.Logy.degToZod(float, sidereal) function that takes a float argument (tropical ecliptic longitude) and turns it into a string like "12 Aries 24" (degrees, sign, minutes)

SL.Astro.Logy.getZodiac(float) function that takes a float argument (tropical ecliptic longitude) and returns an integer indicating the zodiac sign of the degrees (1 to 12)

JSON Ephemeris Object

All loaded modules are called each time a planetary hour is calculated and the property function receives a JSON ephemeris object with the following data as a base of all the module's calculations and returned information:

:::javascript
{
"ts": 1544161663,
"lunar": {
  "day": 1,
  "angle": 176.388282,
  "phase": 0.000993
},
"planetary": {
  "day": {
    "no": 5,
    "start": 1544161663,
    "end": 1544205306
  },
  "night": {
    "start": 1544205307,
    "end": 1544248088
    },
  "hour": {
    "no": 0,
    "start": 1544161663,
    "end": 1544165299,
    "length": {
      "day": 3637,
      "night": 3565 }
    }
  },
  "ephemeris": {
    "sun": {
      "deg": 255.057706,
      "speed": 1.015755
    },
    "moon": {
      "deg": 254.313237,
      "speed": 12.599819
    },
    "mercury": {
      "deg": 237.281215,
      "speed": 0.060434
    },
    "venus": {
      "deg": 212.702776,
      "speed": 0.646929
    },
    "mars": {
      "deg": 343.510950,
      "speed": 0.651342
    },
    "jupiter": {
      "deg": 246.386171,
      "speed": 0.222509
    },
    "saturn": {
      "deg": 278.507393,
      "speed": 0.111683
    },
    "asc": {
      "deg": 258.847077
    },
    "mc": {
      "deg": 166.819098
    }
  }
}

ts is the unix epoch timestamp of the calculated hour

lunar.day is the current lunar day (0 to 29)

lunar.angle is the phase angle of the moon to the sun (0.0 to 180.0)

lunar.phase is the percentage of illumination (0.0 to 1.0)

planetary.day.no is the current day of the week from Sunday to Saturday (0 to 6)

planetary.day.start is the start of the day (sunrise) in unix epoch format

planetary.day.end is the end of the day (sunset) in unix epoch format

planetary.night.start is the start of the night (second after sunset) in unix epoch format

planetary.night.end is the end of the night (second before sunrise) in unix epoch format

planetary.hour.no is the number of the planetary hour (0 to 23)

planetary.hour.start is the start of the hour in unix epoch format

planetary.hour.end is the end of the hour in unix epoch format

planetary.hour.length.day is the number of seconds a planetary daytime hour on the current day has

planetary.hour.length.night is the number of seconds a planetary nighttime hour on the current day has

ephemeris.<planet>.deg tropical ecliptic longitude position of the planet in decimal degrees (0.0 to 360.0)

ephemeris.<planet>.speed tropical ecliptic speed of the planet in decimal degrees per day (0.0 to 13.0)

ephemeris.asc.deg tropical ecliptic longitude position of the ascendant in decimal degrees (0.0 to 360.0)

ephemeris.mc.deg tropical ecliptic longitude position of the midheaven in decimal degrees (0.0 to 360.0)

Example

How all this works together you will hopefully understand better looking at this example module that provides filters and information about the sign of the moon for the planetary hour:

:::javascript
var module_moon = {

  definitions: {
    core: true,
    name: "Moon Sign",
    group: {
      id: "astrology",
      text: "Astrology",
      info: "true"
    },
    actions: [
      [0],
      [{
        "id": "1",
        "action": "Moon in Aries",
        "tags": "moon aries",
        "hide": "info"
      }], [{
        "id": "2",
        "action": "Moon in Taurus (Exalted)",
        "tags": "moon taurus exalted"
      }], [{
        "id": "3",
        "action": "Moon in Gemini",
        "tags": "moon gemini",
        "hide": "info"
      }], [{
        "id": "4",
        "action": "Moon in Cancer (Domicile)",
        "tags": "cancer moon domicile"
      }], [{
        "id": "5",
        "action": "Moon in Leo",
        "tags": "moon leo",
        "hide": "info"
      }], [{
        "id": "6",
        "action": "Moon in Virgo",
        "tags": "moon virgo",
        "hide": "info"
      }], [{
        "id": "7",
        "action": "Moon in Libra",
        "tags": "moon libra",
        "hide": "info"
      }], [{
        "id": "8",
        "action": "Moon in Scorpio (Fall)",
        "tags": "moon scorpio fall"
      }], [{
        "id": "9",
        "action": "Moon in Sagittarius",
        "tags": "moon sagittarius",
        "hide": "info"
      }], [{
        "id": "10",
        "action": "Moon in Capricorn (Detriment)",
        "tags": "moon capricorn detriment"
      }], [{
        "id": "11",
        "action": "Moon in Aquarius",
        "tags": "moon aquarius",
        "hide": "info"
      }], [{
        "id": "12",
        "action": "Moon in Pisces",
        "tags": "moon pisces",
        "hide": "info"
      }]
    ]
  },
  property: function(m) {
    return SL.Astro.Logy.getZodiac(m.ephemeris.moon.deg);
  },
  calculate: function(definitions, property) {
    return definitions.actions[property.sign];
  }
};

Notes: you can see that this module has the id "moon" and the name "Moon Sign", it is a core module and enabled by default in the Settings, it belongs to a whole group of modules called "Astrology". The actions are sorted by Zodiac sign and only the ones that show the moon in a sign where she is in domicile/exalted/detriment/fall should be displayed in the info window, all others are hidden, yet still visible in the filter window. The property function takes the ephemeris.moon.deg degree and passes it to a public function SL.Astro.Logy.getZodiac (described below) and returns the result. The calculate function takes the result object, takes the sign property ( 1 to 12 in the Zodiac ) and returns the appropriate object array from definitions.actions back to the Almanac.

Flogging a Dead God

2018-10-23T13:41:00+02:00

Version 2.0 (19/10/2026: update with Egyptian sources on the head, the heart and the serpent after the conclusion)

Version 1.2 (29/10/2018)

In my last article on the Headless Rite I drew some conclusions about its function according to my understanding after several months of practice. I mentioned that I stopped believing in the Headless One being a specific deity or spirit, but that it is the headlessness itself as a symbol that seems to matter as a core aspect of the ritual.

In this article I would like to elaborate on what I meant by that. In addition I want to attempt a deep dive into the powerful symbols found in the ritual and polyphanize the meanings of headlessness, having sight in one's feet and the name of a heart entwined by a serpent.

The Stele of Jeu was written by an Egyptian mage who lived in Roman ruled Thebes that had already witnessed centuries of assimilation and intertwining influences from Greek, Jewish, Persian and other cultures and religions. He lived in a different era and cultural background than us. Obviously he had a different set of symbols than I would intuitively understand as a German occultist from 21st century post-modern Europe. So how can we attempt to unlock the symbols in the PGM?

The other day I had an insight. It was about the Egyptian myth in which Set and Horus were fighting for the throne after Set had killed Osiris. Set gouged out Horus's left eye, which is said to represent the moon, while his right eye is the sun. In one variant of the story the eye was then restored by Thoth. My vision was this: Horus is our mind and his right eye represents clear and rational solar perception and his left eye irrational and intuitive lunar perception. Set took this sense from us. But who is he? Our confusing desires that want full control over our soul? Our fears? In any case, he blinded us in a way where we are forced to rely on the logical analysis of things to not lose control. Here comes Thoth, symbolizing both, intelligence and reason, but also magical enlightenment. With these powers he heals the broken left eye of lunar intuition! It means we can actually regain what we have lost in order to perceive fully.

Let's intelligently apply reasoning and magic to patch over the flawed intuition and to understand the symbols that lie in front of us. But at the same time we need to be cautiously aware of what Schwaller de Lubicz called "mentality of complexity":

Our exoteric evolution, through the Greek metaphysical phases, leading currently to an exclusive rationalism, has given us, owing to the necessity for analysis, a "mentality of complexity" which today prevents us from seeing simply.⁹

How does that work? I found it helpful to rationally analyze the information in front of me while keeping my intuitive faculties open and active and allowing my mind to have free associations, detect patterns and correspondences, evoke emotional reactions and spontaneous ideas.

Let's apply that method to jailbreak the meaning of the Stele of Jeu aka. The Headless Rite. By "reasoning" and "analysis" I mean applying methods of careful comparison of details and learning about the cultural background of the symbols' origin.

Let's start simple and intuitively: just from mere hunch, the symbol of "being without a head" immediately evokes different ideas. In a frightening way it reminds us of the loss of the "ego" or "sense of self", or of losing "control". On the other hand - as known from different methods of meditation and from the Buddhist tradition it can also be something to strive for, to "calm the mind" or "transcend the ego". In magical practice one of the fundamental skills is to overcome the ever analytical mind and reach an altered state of consciousness or mode of trance in order to tap into the powers that lie beyond. Whatever the goal may be called: ayin, samadhi, gnosis, there seems to be a symbol that fits all of them: to become headless.

Headless Rites

Let's compare! This image is such a strong symbol that it can be found everywhere. Throughout human history, spiritual decapitation or full dismemberment have been central to shaman-like initiations around the world. To offered one's head or body to the spirits to be replaced or upgraded to a new divine one with more magical powers. Following are a few examples found in Mircea Eliade's tome on "Shamanism".

(Note: I am using the term 'shaman' in this article, fully aware of the controversy around it. I am not claiming that Siberian shamans are the same as 'medicine men' from Borneo or Tibetan Buddhist monks. I use it to describe the conceptualization of trance-like states of consciousness as means of initiation among differenct cultural practices that can be described as "shaman-like".)

According to North Siberian Yakut shamanhood, spirits carry the initiate's soul to the underworld and imprison it in a house for three years. They behead him, and set aside the head, so the initiate is forced to watch his dismemberment with his own eyes. Them they cut him into small pieces, which are then distributed to the spirits of the various diseases to empower him with the ability to cure.¹

The blacksmith then [...] forged his head and taught him how to read the letters that are inside it. He changed his eyes; and that is why, when he shamanizes, he does not see with his bodily eyes but with these mystical eyes. He pierced his ears, making him able to understand the language of plants. Then the candidate found himself on the summit of a mountain, and finally he woke in the yurt, among his family. Now he can sing and shamanize indefinitely, without ever growing tired.¹

Among the Dyak of Borneo shaman-like initiation requires three different ceremonies. In the second one, the initiated elders take the neophyte to a room shut off by curtains...

And there, as they assert, they cut his head open, take out his brains, wash and restore them, to give him a clear mind to penetrate into the mysteries of evil spirits, and the intricacies of disease; they insert gold dust into his eyes to give him keenness and strength of sight powerful enough to see the soul wherever it may have wandered; they plant barbed hooks on the tips of his fingers to enable him to seize the soul and hold it fast; and lastly they pierce his heart with an arrow to make him tender-hearted, and full of sympathy with the sick and suffering.¹⁰

About the Tibetan Tantric chöd rite ethnologist R. Bleichsteiner wrote in his book "The Yellow Church":

To the sound of the drum made of human skulls and of the thighbone trumpet, the dance is begun and the spirits are invited to come and feast. The power of meditation evokes a goddess brandishing a naked sword; she springs at the head of the sacrificer, decapitates him, and hacks him to pieces; then the demons and wild beasts rush on the still quivering fragments, eat the flesh, and drink the blood.¹¹

Also in the initiatory cult of Mithraism, the symbolic headlessness played an important role:

The degree of solider (Miles) was given to those who taken up the spiritual battle against the ego (nafs), the struggle with lower self. During the rite the neophyte is crowned while in bondage of the material world, he is given the kingdom of this world, but he rejects the crown and once his binds were cut, he removes the crown saying: "Mithra is my only crown". The removing of crown also symbolises an attempt to remove the head (intellect) itself, allowing Mithra to be the guide [...]¹²

Becoming Osiris

So, how does all relate to our "Headless One"? Do ancient forms of "shamanhood" have anything to do with the complex metaphysical universe of Ancient Egypt or the spiritual melting pot of Alexandria that birthed the type of ritual practice described in the PGM? To me it does, and apparently some people that - unlike me - are scholarly educated in these topics have also drawn parallels between "shamanic" initiation and Ancient Egyptian religious practice or at least pointed to traces of the former in the latter.

German Egyptologist Sabine Neureiter published a paper with the thesis that "shamanic" practices from Neolithic times must have survived into the collective memory of Pharaonic Egypt. Clear traces can be found in the Egyptian cosmology of a threefold world (heavens/earth/netherworld), the prominent death cult (mummification and resurrection), and many of the texts on magic and medicine.

The philosopher Jeremy Naydler, who specializes in the religious life of ancient cultures, wrote several books on the "shamanic" mysteries that can be found in the pyramid- and the coffin-texts. His works predate Neureiter's paper so they obviously don't feature her research but his conclusions are the same.

Since he features as a main character in our ritual, let's take a look at Osiris. He was the primeval fertility god, killed and dismembered by his brother Set, resurrected by his sister and consort, Isis, and became father of the eternal god-king Horus. He symbolized death and rebirth - of the land and its inhabitants, on a material and spiritual level. His myth is the core of all of Egypt's metaphysics. Egyptian gods were not inconceivable and distant deities that required to be worshipped and appeased. They rather represented archetype-like divine principles - "states of soul" - that humans pass through.

Perhaps the classic example of human identification with divinity in ancient Egypt is the way in which people became united with the god Osiris. This was a pious wish in New Kingdom Egypt, for all who passed over to the otherworld. Osiris was the god who died in this life to be born anew in the otherworld. It was a pious wish, but it was also a necessity if one was to undergo the transformational experiences involved. And so we often see people portrayed as Osiris, and we read their names in The Book of the Dead conjoined to that of Osiris. This same Osiris, it should be said, governed the cycles of death and regeneration throughout the natural world.¹³

[Osiris] presides over and facilitates this rite of passage from one mode of existence or awareness to another. As "an Osiris", a person is able to enter into and come out of the otherworld. Their consciousness is liberated from the limitations that normally restrict it in this life.¹³

The framework of the Stele of Jeu ritual is built around the Osiris myth. He is invoke by his name as "Osor-Onnophris" and in his role of an ancient creator god, but he is also called "headless one", thus invoked in his dismembered, magical, "shamanic" state.

It was part of the fate of Osiris to be dismembered, and this included his decapitation. Decapitation should be understood as an essential phase in the Osirian process that led to the revirilization and "solar resurrection" of both the god and the king.¹⁴

[...] the condition of headlessness and the restoration of the head were important initiatory experiences within the Egyptian Sed festival "secret rites". This is not to suggest that Niuserre was literally undergoing a shamanic initiation, but rather that the initiatory experiences he was undergoing have clear shamanic parallels. The text describing Niuserre’s “secret rites” indicates that the restoration of his head corresponds to his rebirth as a god, that is to his rebirth as one who—like a shaman—is as much at home in the spirit world as in the world of the living.¹⁵

Dismemberment of the Symbolic Body

The symbolic attitude of ancient knowledge cultivated the intellect to the extent of perceiving all of the phenomena of nature itself as a symbolic writing revealing the forces and laws governing the energetic and even spiritual aspects of our universe.¹⁶

To the symbolic mindset of the Egyptians, every single subject and object had a meaning but was also made up of smaller things that had meaning by themselves. This was especially the case with the human body:

Just as the gods were present in the landscape — in desert, river, plant, and animal — so they could become present in the members of the human psychophysical organism, in hair, face, eyes, and hands. By drawing the gods in, in this way, a greater sense of self-integration was achieved. The degree to which people could claim their inner experiences as their own was necessarily compromised, and this meant that the overall experience of unitary self-consciousness was far more attenuated and fragile than it is today. In the process of initiation it was broken down altogether in order to rebuild it more strongly. The important initiatory idea of physical dismemberment becomes comprehensible when it is seen as the only way of describing the experience of catastrophic psychic fragmentation. To a consciousness for which the parts of the body were all psychically charged, the mutilation of the body undergone by Osiris was the prototype of psychic fragmentation that must have been experienced by the initiate in a psychophysical way. This psychic fragmentation was precipitated as a prelude to the initiates reidentifying with a new psychic centre that transcended the “distributed psyche.” The reintegration of the body must have involved coming to a new relationship with one’s “members,” a relationship in which “possession” of the parts by the person was frequently emphasized:

You have your heart, O Osiris;
You have your legs, O Osiris;
You have your arms, O Osiris;
So too my heart is my own;
My legs are my own;
My arms are my own.
A stairway to the sky is set up for me
That I may ascend on it to the sky;
I ascend on the smoke of the great censing.¹⁷

What is the Head?

(Update 2026: more on what the Egyptians thought the head was, after the conclusion)

Besides its importance in "shamanic" and Egyptian initiation, we need to dive a bit deeper into what "the head" actually meant symbolically to the Egyptians in order to fully unlock the symbol of headlessness:

Of all the parts of the body, it was the head that seems to have corresponded most to the whole person as an individualized being. Hieroglyphically the head shown on its own could represent the whole person (or equally the whole god or animal). The legend that the head of Osiris was buried at Abydos was one and the same with the claim of Abydos to be the burial place of the whole god. Since the head bears our individual facial features, it most naturally symbolized the whole person and was—of all parts of the body—least prone to being invested with the kind of psychic autonomy that we find attributed to other members or organs. It is significant that the ancient Egyptians represented the ba (the soul of a person freed from the body) as a bird with a human head. The head would have the individualized features of the person to whom the ba belongs.⁴

In the Greek original the headless one was called Akephalos. It has been argued whether the Greek word for head κεφαλή (kephalé) might also mean "source" or "origin" in certain contexts, especially in the translation of parts of the New Testament from Greek sources. Regarding the "Stele of Jeu" this also must have been a question, because we are left with the famous "Bornless One" Mathers and Crowley had used in their versions of the ritual ("Liber Samekh"). I am quite certain that κεφαλή means "head" in this context, first because that's the literal meaning and second, because we are talking about a god and a demon - a person - so it just seems way more obvious that akephalos refers to person without head, not a person without origin. But nevertheless, I know it's Greek but the Egyptians loved puns and double meanings in magical formulas, so keep this other meaning in mind as well - it may help to fully grasp the ritual.

Egyptian and Jewish Gods

What does a headless god represent outside the context of the meaning-heavy myth of Osiris? What is left of Osiris without his individualized features, without his ba? The simplest way to understand this is actually part of the text: "you are Osor-onnophris whom none has ever seen". The Egyptian God-king Osiris is turned into an "invisible god" and given more names: Iabas and Iapôs, which are allegedly Samaritian enunciations of "the One" god the Jews called YHVH.

I have read claims that the author(s) of the PGM wanted to "spice up" their spells with some foreign sounding voces magicae and concepts from new and "exotic" esoteric sources and appropriated Jewish magic and religious ideas into their spells. But to be honest, that sounds like a quite lazy explanation and I am sure there is much more to it.

In "Future of the Ancient World" Jeremy Naydler wrote an excellent chapter on the fundamental difference between Jewish and Greco-Egyptian metaphysics:

in ancient Egyptian spiritual life there existed two levels of self-consciousness. On the more “mundane” level, people experienced their psychological processes as originating from, and as tied up with, the activity of the gods. They would thus identify their psychological processes less as their own and more as arising from the gods, with whom they felt the necessity to relate themselves. Beyond this, at a higher level, there existed the possibility of mastering the gods and achieving an experience of union with the divine creative source from whom all the gods derived their power. But in order to achieve such a union with Ra, or Atum-Ra—“to look upon his face” as the Book of the Dead expresses it—a person had to come to experience the polycentric consciousness as involving an inner fragmentation or dismemberment of the soul. This “Osiris” experience was the necessary prelude to the reconstitution of the soul about a single divine center.¹⁸

For the Israelite, by contrast, at the level of ordinary awareness, the activity of the gods was constantly negated in the psyche. The soul was no longer an arena in which the gods were seen as actively giving rise to psychic events. Whatever occurred therein was ultimately to be claimed by a person as belonging to him or herself alone. At the same time, the “liberated” personality referred more and more to moral and legal exhortations and prohibitions as a way of maintaining a relationship to the divine, now conceived as the One God Yahweh. But unlike Ra, Yahweh was not a god that any human being could become identified with, in the sense that the ancient Egyptian initiate might identify with Ra. Yahweh was a god unlike any other god in that it was not possible to become united with him. Except for the prophets through whom Yahweh spoke, no Israelite would dare to say “I am Yahweh” as an ancient Egyptian—in an exalted state of consciousness—might say, “I am Ra.” And yet Yahweh’s absence was curiously and uniquely present in the still depths of the human soul, demanding an allegiance, which was to be forged in a specifically moral way.
[...] It is a new voice that can be heard coming out of Israel. It is as if the god of the Israelites had in some uncertain way made common ground with what was noblest in the human spirit. And this god, despite his forbidding persona, was at the same time felt to be a “personal God.” He was both far away yet also strangely close to hand. And it is this closeness, this intimacy of Yahw*eh and the human spirit, that distinguishes the Israelite from the ancient Egyptian (or Mesopotamian or Canaanite) relationship to the divine.¹⁸

Judaism did not reject the possibility of "union with God," so much as it feared and cautioned against the potentially devastating consequences of such an encounter on the functioning ego.

Then God spoke all these words [and] . . . all the people shook with fear at the peals of thunder and the lightening flashes, the sound of the trumpet, and the smoking mountain [i.e., their face-to-face encounter with Yahweh]; and they kept their distance. 'Speak to us yourself,' they said to Moses, 'and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we shall die' . . . So the people kept their distance while Moses approached the dark cloud where God was.
-- (Exodus 20:18-21)

Applied Systasis

Besides the Jews who saw such an idea as a strictly forbidden heresy and the (Neo-)Platonists who strived for experience of union with "the One" through an ecstatic ascent from the physical realm, there was also another strange sect in town whose followers had been secretly obsessing about this exact topic: the Gnostics!

In "Abrasax II" Merkelbach and Totti already acknowledged that it was probably no coincidence the ritual was called "Stele of Jeu" - in analogy to a contemporary work of magical technology among Gnostic initiates called the "Books of Jeu"². These were a complex and very technical collection of chapters in which Jesus teaches the apostles how to "crucify the world", which saves from the archons of this aeon, and about bringing the word of the Father down to earth and raising the minds of men to heaven. This is accompanied by endless numbers of magical launch code sequences, secret names, sigils and diagrams of the path up through god's emanations to the godhead.

Keeping all of these discussed points in mind, it seems to me that the Stele of Jeu tries to attempt no less than applying the well practiced Pagan magical technology of "Systasis" (union and identification with a god) to the distant and ineffable, yet personal Jewish god-form of YHVH!

In the beginning of the ritual he is addressed as Osiris, but headless: As an incomprehensible god without individualized features, as a creator god who from an Egyptian point of view exists in the magical state beyond inner fragmentation or dismemberment, reconstituted with a single, divine soul. Here the other meaning of "head" as "source" also fits: a god without a source, a self begotten, primordial one. In the following step it becomes more clear as one identifies as Moses in his role as an initiated prophet who has experienced direct contact with Yahweh, who had been chosen to mediate between human and divine. This role is associated to being a "messenger of the Pharaoh Osor-onnophis". It seems like Osiris serves as proxy gateway to reach the godhead.

As I have already laid out in "Towards the Godhead" in my Akephalos Redux article, what follows next in the ladder of ascent are potent calls to the supreme god using magical barbarous names, and a process of cleansing and purification through self-exorcism of restraining demons. Eventually one reaches the highest level of abstraction where words are transcended beyond vibrations of the seven divine vowels to the level of pure resonance, the unified field of consciousness.

See? The Headless One is actually a quite approachable archetypical symbol if we allow our immediate intuitive ideas to roam freely and try to match them with historical and anthropological data!

More Symbols

The central part of the Stele of Jeu ritual comes after the adoration of the headless god and purification of the self. The ritualist identifies with being a "a headless daimon" with sight in his feet and a flaming mouth and bearing the name of "a heart girt with a serpent". In the same way we looked at the meaning of "head" through the lens of Egyptian symbolism to unlock the meaning of "headlessness", let's do the same about the other quite powerful images in the ritual:

Sight in the Feet

Much has been speculated about the peculiar phrase "I am a headless daimon with sight in my feet". As already mentioned in my article Preisendanz' Headless God Armand L. Delatte identified the headless demon with the god Bes and referred to some depictions of that deity with serpent- or jackal-heads, but Karl Preisendanz found this insufficient and argued that instead it could refer to a practice that could be found on images of beheaded captives in Egypt who had their heads between their feet. He backed his argument by referring to the Egyptian custom of Akroteriasmos, the dismemberment of a body before embalmment and mummification where the head is usually put between the feet to make it impossible for the dead to wake up and pick it up again. In his Typhonian interpretation of the "Headless One" Jake Stratton Kent sees in this expression a reference to a form of priestly foot-wear bearing an Anubis head on the upper part of the foot.

The data is already contradicting enough, so why not throw in another interesting information to make it even more complicated: the Greek word for "sight", ὄρασιν (horasis) also seems to be the name of a bird appearing in a Hellenistic Greek version of a legend about the Egyptian goddess Tefnut's quarrel with her father, the sun god Re, which led to her departing from Egypt to Ethiopia in the form of a cat. Horasis here is probably the Greek form of the name of an Egyptian deity who, portrayed as a bird, symbolised good sight. (pBritMus 274, fr. 9a, col VI, l. 7).³ So, there could also be the possibility that "Horasis next to my feet" refers to Isis or Nephthys who in their form of two birds guard the dead Osiris.

Besides speculation there is no way to find the answer from the data we have, so let's look at the original text and try a more direct and simple way:

The whole phrase "headless god with sight in the feet" and some of the following lines of this divine self-description in the Stele of Jeu appears as a much longer, second person address with minor variations in three other Magical Papyri. In PGM VII 222ff and PGM VIII 64ff, as well as pOxy XXXVI 2753, fr. E, D, C (aka. Betz PGM CII 1ff):

I call upon you, the headless god, having your face beside your feet, the one who hurls lightning and thunders; you are the one whose mouth is continually full of fire, the one placed over Necessity. I call upon you, the god placed over Necessity, Iaeō Sabaōth Adōnai Zabarbathiaō; you are the one lying on a coffin of myrrh, having resin and asphalt as an elbow cushion. You arc not a daimon, but the blood of the two falcons by the head of Osiris, chattering and keeping watch.
(PGM VIII 64ff)¹⁹

I suspect that "headless daimon with sight in the feet" might just have been a commonly used epithet of Osiris in magical spells and the reason to use it in the Stele of Jeu was because of the obviously corresponding symbolic connection of headless Osiris with the invisible god. It is interesting that in the Stele of Jeu many parts of the invocation are omitted. Especially because the omitted parts are the ones that identify the invoked god more clearly as Osiris than the parts that were adopted. To me this is another hint that in the Stele of Jeu Osiris serves as a proxy god deprived of all his individualized features to represent the invisible god of the Jews.

Nevertheless I looked into the symbolic meaning of "feet" to the Egyptians. Unfortunately I could not find anything specifically Egypt related, but I dug up an interesting text on the symbolic meaning of hands and feet from rock art to the Quran in North Africa and Arabia that proved to be quite useful.

Associated with the ancient stone cult of Arabia and North Africa, the foot and the hand became the mark of the Creator. Feet and sandals engraved on rocks, said Cervicek (1986, 96), represented the “striding of the deity” and marked the sacredness of the place. Nowhere is the spirituality of rocks and footprints as dramatically illustrated as in the recently-excavated temple of Ain Dara, Syria. There, two giant footprints, each three feet long, were delicately carved in the limestone slabs covering the temple portico. A single left footprint is carved on an adjoining slab at the threshold of the antechamber, while a single right footprint is carved on the threshold from the antechamber to the main hall. A prototype of a Canaanite temple, with feet proceeding through its three sections towards the “holy of holy,”²⁰

The text also reveals that sandals signified sovereign power and regal potency in Egypt and that for example in Egyptian wedding ceremonies sandals were exchanged: the father gave the groom his daughter's sandal to indicate that she was now under the groom's care. Also sandals were used as offerings to the dead. In all these cases the sandals are symbols themselves: of the feet of the owner.

Besides transmitted knowledge through rock art and lore from the past, the language itself has some great hints about the underlying symbolism as we can see here:

Thanks to the generous pliancy of the Arabic language, with a small phonemic shift, a lowly word such as qdm ("foot") is transmuted through the semantic canopies of this language into Muqaddam, one of the ninetynine Most Beautiful Names of Allah. [...] Another small phonetic shift and qidam "eternity" is born. And what an awesome word! So significant is this kindred term of the foot that it forms the ontological core of the Divine transcendence in Islam.²¹

If we carefully put the puzzle pieces together we can conclude that feet probably symbolize the manifestation of influence and authority on earth ("footprint"). Feet of a deity manifest the divine will and power on earth. What has been "imprinted" is established for eternity.

From the feet let's go to the eyes to unlock the meaning of "sight":

Intuitively I can think of a few meanings of "eyes": they are often used synonymous to "the soul" or windows to and from the soul. In Alchemy, the eye is a commonly used symbol. It usually represents a desire to hold to a vision for the future. The eye is also commonly a symbol of 'keeping an eye' on that which is important.

In Ancient Egypt the eye was probably one of the most complicated symbols. There are several myths featuring storylines around eyes (Wadjet, Eye of Re, Eye of Horus, etc.) and to cover all of them would probably easily fill a whole book. Fortunately Wim van den Dungen from Sofiatopia already did all the work for us about the meaning of Eyes in Egyptian mythology, so I will quote from his page:

To grasp the meaning of the Eye, two registers can be invoked. However, in Egyptian pre-rational thought, these levels are often confused, whereas there is a semantic bridge between both registers:

the Eye is a cosmogonic goddess, symbol of reunification and divine kingship : this is the Single Eye of the Supreme, Self-created High God of before creation, namely Atum. This Eye is also called the "Eye of Re" and the "Eye of Horus" (the Elder), associated with the right hand side, the summer and the Sun. Its mythical activity (like that of the autocreation of Atum and the family drama of Osiris) took place in the "first time", the so-called "zep tepy" ("zp tpy") or "Urzeit".

the Eye is an anthropological symbol of restoration and popular wellness : this is the Restored Eye of Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, the "Wedjat" ("wDAt" : hale or uninjured), associated with the left hand side, the winter and the Moon. Because Thoth played an important role in its myth, it is also called the "Eye of Thoth".

I also found some paragraphs in Jeremy Naydler's books that are even a bit more on point:

The eye, as source of vision, was also source of inner strength. It was here that a person’s courage, or lack of it, resided. [...] For the ancient Egyptians, the eye had both psychic and magical properties, which meant that reference to the eye was reference to specific attributes that the eye intrinsically possessed. The fact that human beings have eyes meant that the properties attributed to the eye could then be utilized by human beings. But the eye was regarded as an entity in its own right, existing virtually as an independent spiritual archetype. As such, it was personified as the sacred wedjat eye, a potent symbol or divine creative and destructive power that was often employed in a protective capacity in ancient Egyptian religious art. It is sometimes depicted winged or, with an arm so as to emphasize its independent status.⁴

mythologically the Eye of Horus is torn out by Seth in their battle for supremacy over Egypt. This act plunges the night sky into darkness, for the Eye of Horus, cosmically understood, is the moon—the heavenly body that illumines the night. It is Thoth who finds the eye shattered into fragments and, having reassembled them, causes the moon to reappear after its short period of invisibility. In so doing, Thoth restores harmony and wholeness both macrocosmically and microcosmically.21 On the microcosmic level the restoration of the eye signifies the consolidation of spiritual power in the king.²²

So, boiling them all down to a generalized definition: to the Egyptians the eye symbolized a focused spiritual vision and a divine power that unifies and heals whatever it sees divided and injured.

Given that the Greek term Horasis in the original text means "sight" or "vision" and does not refer to a bird, if we combine the meaning of the eyes and the feet, having "sight in ones feet" could be symbolically jailbroken to mean: manifesting the divine will with a clear and healing spiritual vision on earth and establishing it for eternity.

Bam!!

The Heart Girt With a Serpent

(Update 2026: more on the heart and the serpent from Egyptian sources, after the conclusion)

At the end of the Stele of Jeu the ritualist proclaims that his name is a "heart girt with a serpent" - a very powerful image! Let's break it down.

My spontaneous ideas about the heart are: unconditional love and affection, intuition and emotions, the sacred, irrational but fundamental knowledge...

How did the Egyptians conceptualize the heart?

Physically higher than the belly, the heart was also psychologically higher. It was regarded as the spiritual centre of a person, the place where a person would come closest to his or her ka (or vital spirit).⁴

But the heart was also a place of reflection, of contemplation, of memory, and of intention, a "listening place" where one might come to a deeper level of understanding of, and harmony with, life (maat). The true wishes of the heart are mediated by reflection and attuned to maat, unlike the impulses stemming from the belly.⁴

For, as the organ in the body most associated with the spiritual self, the heart was essentially pure. It was therefore considered necessary to protect the heart from corrupting influences or tendencies. We thus find admonitions to “conceal” or to “seal” the heart. This idea of the essential purity of the heart is linked to that of the heart as the source of a person’s being. [...] The heart, then, was a part of oneself that ultimately could not be identified with any of the desires, decisions, or actions that were out of tune with maat. The heart was the incorruptible core of a person, and thus detached enough from all that was mundane in them to stand as witness against them.⁴

So, in contrast to the head symbolizing the individualized ego of a person, the heart symbolized the incorruptible spiritual core and links the human back to the celestial gods.

For the condition of soul that Horus represents is that of Osiris reborn, and equally of Ra grounded - in other words the celestial self that has become incarnate. Horus, to the ancient Egyptians, was the earthly image of Ra: the radiant source of light physically embodied. And the place where Horus came to reside in the initiate’s psychophysical organism was the heart.²³

As below, so above - so what is the incorruptible spiritual core of a god? In his role as the creator-god, Ptah Tatenen, it is said that he is the father of the gods:

Tatenen, the oldest of them all.
He gave birth to himself by himself
before any becoming became.
And when his becoming became,
he made the world
from the thoughts in his heart²⁴

We can conclude that in the context of our ritual the heart might represent the incorruptible core of creative power and love of the godhead. But why is it entwined by a serpent?

My immediate associations with serpents are "dragons", "primeval kingship" and "unpredictable danger", as well as ideas that come from my Christian cultural background: sin and deception. In contrast, there are serpents aplenty in Egyptian symbolism, as they were also part of everyday life in the area. So, of course my own associations are useless for analysis.

In order to understand what the core symbolic meaning of serpents in Egypt were, is it helps to take a look at one of the Egyptian myths of cosmogenesis: the birth of the primeval god Atum:

In the Beginning, there exists only Nun, the dark and abyssal waters that stretch everywhere to infinity. There is no distinction of any one form from another within this primordial ocean; there is only a pervasive formlessness that amounts to nothingness, as all things merge together in this great sea of Nun. One has to imagine a quality of existence that is prior to space and time, up and down, before and after. Nothing lies outside anything else, for everything is intrinsic to every other thing; hence, there are no separate things. Here there is a primordial unity, of which it is impossible to speak save in terms of negatives. And yet the image of water conveys the positive notion of Nun as the source of life. Nun, though nothing in itself, nevertheless contains everything that is to be. Nun is the whole diverse and varied universe existing in a state of potentiality.
This primordial condition to which the name of Nun is given was sometimes pictured as a great serpent. But already, the image of the serpent of many coils must be seen as a first manifestation of something from out of the ocean of potentiality. This serpent is called Nehebkau, which means “Provider of Life-Energies.” In the Pyramid Texts, Nehebkau says:
I am the Outflow of the Primeval Flood [Nun],
the one who emerges from the waters.
I am Nehebkau, the serpent of many coils.
Nehebkau has a similar ambivalence to Nun, in that the snake’s coils both entrap the life energies of all existence in a state of unrealized potentiality, and at the same time provide a secure home, a protective embrace from which these life energies can flow forth. Within the coils of the serpent, and also swimming within the waters of Nun, resides a creative principle that is the spark of life; it alone can release the life-energies held in potential within Nun.²⁵

The serpent was thought of as having the most primeval of forms, and hence was the creature closest to the conditions that prevailed in the beginning of time. The eight famous ancient Egyptian primeval gods - or "Ogdoad" - were named after the different qualities of the unmanifest: formlessness, or chaos, darkness, or obscurity, unendingness, or limitlessness, and the hidden, or unmanifest. They were depicted as four serpents and four frogs.

Also the Egyptian Decans, deities residing in asterisms that rule over fate (like our Zodiac signs) were often depicted as serpents, sometimes winged or with arms and legs. They were considered unpredictable, potentially dangerous or benevolent.

I think we can make a quite safe statement that the coiled up serpent symbolized "ultimate potentiality".

The "heart girt with a serpent" also bears a striking analogy to the Orphic "cosmic egg", a powerful alchemical symbol that Frater Acher analyzed quite well in his latest book "Holy Daimon":

Phanes, the Orphic primeval deity of new life hatched from an egg with a serpent wound about it, has been called the ‘Revealer’; and indeed new wisdom awaits us by learning more about this mystical image. [...] let’s take a moment to meditate on the body of the serpent. Can you see the polarity here? The painful and deeply personal dilemma of the snake? At every moment the serpent has to make a decision. Should it continue to incubate the egg with the warmth of its coiled body, or should it tighten its muscles just a little more and break its fragile shell? The snake’s immediate desire is to break it: serpents love devouring fresh eggs. Yet it can choose to resist this desire, even though this means resisting its every instinct. Instead of breaking the egg, it can choose to turn its body into a tool of generation and creation.²⁶

Having unlocked the meaning of "heart" and "serpent" the god-name in the Stele of Jeu is a very powerful one: the incorruptible core of creative power of the godhead in a state of ultimate potentiality.

Although we should to be very careful with comparisons between fundamentally different cultures, I can't stop seeing the striking similarities of the symbology we unlocked with the Kundalini serpent from Tantric Hinduism:

the Shakti coiled round Shiva, making one point (Bindu) with it, is Kundalini Shakti. This word comes from the word Kundala or "a coil", "a bangle". She is spoken of as coiled, because She is likened to a serpent (Bhujangi), which, when resting and sleeping, lies coiled; and because the nature of Her power is spiraline, manifesting itself as such in the worlds — the spheroids or "eggs of Brahma" (Brahmanda), and in their circular or revolving orbits and in other ways. [...] In other words, this Kundali Shakti is that which, when it moves to manifest itself, appears at the universe. To say that it is "coiled" is to say that it is at rest—that is, in the form of static potential energy. This Shakti coiled round the Supreme Shiva is called Mahakundall ("The great coiled power"), to distinguish it from the same power which exists in individual bodies, and which is called Kundalini.
Kundali Shakti in individual bodies is power at rest, or the static centre round which every from of existence as moving power revolves. In the universe there is always in and behind every form of activity a static background. The one Consciousness is polarized into static (Shiva) and kinetic (Shakti) aspects for the purpose of "creation". This Yoga is the resolution of this duality into unity again.²⁷

Resurrection

Gluing all the dismembered and thoroughly studied pieces back together we end up with this potent meaning of the ritual's core lines:

I am an unperceivable daimon with a single, divine soul. From my incorruptible divine core and with unpredictable potentiality I manifest my will with a clear spiritual vision with every single step securing it for eternity.

It's quite deep, but far from the poetic formulation of the original symbols, right? That's the magic of symbolic language.

Conclusion

The Stele of Jeu is a quite universal spell and the involved headlessness enables boundless possibilities: stripping away the individual features from the god puts him in the magical state of unlimited potentiality: If you want the Headless One to be Osiris/Typhon/Bes/YHVH/Ketu/..., he becomes Osiris/Typhon/Bes/YHVH/Ketu/... A headless god stripped of individualization seems to become whatever head is being put upon him through the intent of the performer. In my experimental performance of the rite to conquer Shai-Hulud I became the Headless Serpent Wrangler.

Update 2026: What the Egyptians Said

When I wrote this article I went from intuition to Naydler and back. Eight years on, with the Egyptian texts themselves in translation, most of the 2018 readings hold, and some get much sharper.

The head

The head, as Naydler says above, stood for the whole person as an individual: the face, the features others recognise, and the ba that travels after death has a human head. It was also where the senses are and where speech comes from. The Opening of the Mouth ritual worked on the face, and its aim was "to endow the statue with a soul and to quicken it"⁵. Its instrument was made of "the iron which issued from Seth"⁶: the force that took the head off is the one that gives it back.

To lose the head was to be unrecognisable, deaf and mute, dead and scattered. To get it back was resurrection. Chapter 43 of the Book of the Dead is titled "To retain one's head":

Formula for not letting the head of N be cut off in the necropolis.
[...]
To whom his head was given after having been cut off.
The head of Osiris shall not be taken from him,
My head shall not be taken from me!
I am risen, renewed, refreshed,
I am Osiris!²⁸

The heart

In 2018 I called the heart the incorruptible core. The Egyptians would have said more: it was where you thought. For them "the heart was the seat of emotions and knowledge"⁵. When the embalmers drew the brain out "through the nostrils"⁷, they threw it away; the heart stayed in the body, because it would be weighed before Osiris. A headless god whose name is a heart hasn't lost his mind. It was never in his head.

The heart is also the record of everything one did, and it can speak against you. In the Book of the Dead the dead plead with it:

O my heart of my mother,
O my heart of my mother,
O my heart of my being!
Do not rise up against me as witness,
Do not oppose me in the tribunal,
Do not rebel against me before the guardian of the scales!²⁸

The serpent

My 2018 reading of the coiled serpent as "ultimate potentiality" holds, and the Book of the Dead takes it further. In chapter 175 the creator says that when the earth returns to the primeval flood, "I shall remain with Osiris after I have transformed myself into another snake which men do not know and the gods do not see". Hornung: only the creator and Osiris "can change back into the enduring, original form of a snake", the form also visible in the Ouroboros, "the regenerating nonexistence that encircles the world"⁸. The serpent is what is before the world and what remains after it, and it is unseen, like the god "whom none has ever seen".

The same coiled form is also Apophis, the dissolution itself, and Nehebkau's coils, as Naydler says above, both trap the life energies and shelter them. A coil can hold or crush.

So a heart girt with a serpent reads, in Egyptian terms: what you have done, held inside what is not yet and what is no longer.

And one guess, which is mine and nothing more: in Egypt a name written inside a ring is a king's name, the cartouche. "My name is a heart girt with a serpent" sounds a little like a royal name in its loop.

If you made it all the way to down here, congratulations and thank you! This post may have been a bit confusing as it is actually three articles crammed together into one, covering the topics of a technique for intuitive analysis of symbols, sam-blocking the meaning of The Headless One, and analyzing other powerful symbols in this spell. I decided to keep them all together because in this way it reflects my flow of consciousness while researching. I know of at least one regular reader who told me a main reason they like my blog is that it reflects my thought process, so I'll keep it that way.

What? I forgot something? Ah you mean the symbolic meaning of "having a flaming mouth"? Well, consider that homework! ;)

Thanks to Ricardo for valuable feedback and to Aaron for motivation and to the spirits of Düsseldorf for reassurance and inspiration.

on the terms of "sam-blocking" and "polyphanizing":

Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard R. Trask, with a foreword by Wendy Doniger (2004). p. 42. ↩↩
Merkelbach R., Totti M. (1991) Eine Selbstoffenbarung des Obersten Gottes. In: Merkelbach R., Totti M. (eds) Abrasax. Papyrologica Coloniensia, vol 17/2. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. ↩
Arnott, W. Geoffrey. Birds in the Ancient World from A to Z. Routledge, 2007. ↩
Naydler, Temple of the Cosmos. Chapter 8: The Soul Incarnate. Body and Soul. ↩↩↩↩↩
Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2001). ↩↩
Pyramid Texts, utterance 21, after Edward P. Butler, "Seth", Henadology. ↩
Herodotus, Histories 2.86, trans. G. C. Macaulay. ↩
Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, trans. John Baines (Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 162–163. ↩
De Lubicz, R. A. Schwaller. Symbol and the Symbolic: Ancient Egypt, Science, and the Evolution of Consciousness. Aware Journalism, 1981. p. 82. ↩
H. Ling Roth, The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo, I, 280–81 (found in Eliade, Shamanism). ↩
Bleichsteiner, Robert. L'église jaune. Payot, 1937. p. 222 (found in Eliade, Shamanism). ↩
The Cult of Mithras - An Ancient Rite ↩
Naydler, Jeremy. The Future of the Ancient World: Essays on the History of Consciousness. Simon and Schuster, 2009. Chapter 6: Gods and Humans. ↩↩
Naydler, Jeremy. Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts: The Mystical Tradition of Ancient Egypt. Inner Traditions Bear & Company. Kindle Edition. The West Wall (Utts. 254–60). Utt. 254. ↩
Naydler, Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts. The Fifteen West-to-South-Wall Texts (Utts. 254–58, 260–63, 267–72). ↩
De Lubicz, Symbol and the Symbolic. p. 9. ↩
Naydler, Jeremy. Temple of the Cosmos: The Ancient Egyptian Experience of the Sacred. Inner Traditions/Bear & Co, 1996. Chapter 8: The Soul Incarnate. Transcending the Distributed Psyche. ↩
Naydler, The Future of the Ancient World. Chapter 11: The Judaic Path to Monotheism. ↩↩
Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells. Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1996. p. 147. ↩
Achrati, Ahmed. "Hand and foot symbolisms: From rock art to the Qur'ān." Arabica 50.4 (2003): 464–500. p. 487. ↩
Achrati, "Hand and foot symbolisms". p. 494. ↩
Naydler, Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts. Part 4: Anointing with the Seven Holy Oils (Utts. 72–78, 79, 81). ↩
Naydler, The Future of the Ancient World. Chapter 11: Christ and the Gods. The Gods and the Psyche. ↩
Naydler, The Future of the Ancient World. Chapter 6: On the Divinity of the Gods. God and the Gods. ↩
Naydler, Temple of the Cosmos. Chapter 3: Myths of Cosmogenesis. Heliopolis. ↩
Frater Acher. Holy Daimon. Scarlet Imprint, 2018. ↩
Avalon, Arthur. The Serpent Power. Ganesh & Co., Madras, 1950. pp. 35–36. ↩
Book of the Dead, chapters 43 and 30B, in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II: The New Kingdom (University of California Press, 1976). ↩↩

Diosa Madre Chaxiraxi

2018-06-14T11:30:00+02:00

Version 1.2 - 14/06/2018

Introduction

I was baptised and raised Protestant and have always been puzzled by and admired Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin. During my spiritual journey I have always been drawn more towards the old pagan goddesses and archetypes of the feminine divine, who seemed to have more depth than merely praising the Catholic virtues of "immaculate virginity" or "divine motherhood" and the Neopagan analog of "Maiden, Mother, and Crone" that always felt way too patriachic to me.

It was the outstanding book "The Black Virgin" by Jean Hani that blew my mind, explained and "jailbroke" the "Marian Mysteries" for me. After I had finished it I finally understood the underlying forces of this archetype and immediately felt an urge to connect to her, the "Primordial Mother", the "Shekhinah", "Shakti", "Magna Mater", the "Yin" in the cosmic duality of "Yin and Yang" in her Christian form as Blessed Virgin Maria.

Through my life-long connection to the magic of the Canary Islands I eventually found a form of her that I could very much relate to and connect with and I am happy I got to meet her "in person" on a vacation I did this year.

Before the Beginning of things Thou didst exist in the form of a Darkness which is beyond both speech and mind, and of Thee by the creative desire of the Supreme Brahman was the entire Universe born. This Universe, from the great principle of Mahat down to the gross elements, has been created by Thee, since Brahman Cause of all causes is but the instrumental Cause. It is the Ever-existent, Changeless, Omnipresent, Pure Intelligence unattached to, yet existing in and enveloping all things. It acts not, neither does It enjoy. It moves not, neither is It motionless. It is the Truth and Knowledge, without beginning or end, Ineffable and Incomprehensible. (Mahanirvana Tantra, Chapter 4, 24-28)

This article is about the patron saint of the Canary Islands, the Virgen de la Candelaria and how she is a syncretized form of an older Guanche goddess called Chaxiraxi. For better contextual understanding and my interest in her form of the Blessed Virgin Mary, please check my other article.

Pronunciation Note: The Guanche terms and names in this article are written in a phonetic way suitable for English speakers, but consider the following rules:

"ch" (t͡ʃ) pronounced like the "ch" in "leach"
"sh" (ʃ) pronounced like the "sh" in "sheep"
"gh" (ɣ) is a bit more difficult as it does not exist in English and it is pronounced like the "g" in the Spanish word "amigo" or the Portugese word "agora" or the German word "damalige" or the "γ" in the Greek word "γάλα". In Spanish representations of Guanche language it was usually written as an "x".

La Morenita

Once upon a time, long before the Canary Islands were even known to the Christian world (approximately during the 14th century) two Guanche herdsmen pasturing their flocks had to cross a sandy beach going towards a ravine when suddenly their sheep were frightened and turned back. One of the shepherds went forward to see what had frightened the flock and saw a dark figure standing on a rock, holding an infant. He took a stone and raised his arm threatening that he would throw it. At that moment he was paralyzed and stiff and could not move his arm anymore. The shepherds were puzzled about this and came close to the figure, a statue of a woman holding a baby. Still unsure whether it was alive or not one of them tried to cut one of the statue's fingers with a sharp tool and miraculously only found himself cutting his own until he was bleeding.

[...] the most important element concerning the origin of Black Virgins is the collection of legends explaining in it terms of a miraculous 'discovery'. Nine times out of ten these statues were found, thanks to a supernatural sign, underground, in a tree, flowering bush, spring, lake, well, or foundation. And eight times out of ten it was an ox that made the discovery [...] (The Black Virgin, pg. 15) (1)

The two herdsmen went straight to their Mencey (king) to report what had happened and he was so curious about this, that he ordered them to go and bring this figure to him. When they carried the statue back to him their stiff arm and cut finger were suddently healed. The Mencey and his followers concluded that this visitor must be something supernatural or divine and the statue was put into the Mencey's cave palace at Chinguaro.

Decades later when some of the islands were already in Spanish hands, the Mencey of Güímar learned from a baptized Guanche who came from Mahorata (Fuerteventura) who the depicted lady was. Not knowing anything about Christian faith they still understood the identity of the icon and called her "atch mayes wayya ghi raghi āhghuran ashshaman" - "the mother of him, the spirit that is sustenance of the universe. Sparkling one. Heavenly one." - short "Chaghiraghi" (Spanish: "Chaxiraxi"). The statue was moved from the Mencey's cave to Achbinico, a lava cave right next to the sea.

From the reports about this legends from later missionaries and Spanish historians it usually seems that the Guanches had picked up veneration of the Virgin Mary as something completely new that would replace their pagan beliefs, and that the Achbinico cave was established for this spiritual purpose. But according to carbon-14 dating of ashes found in the cave it had been used for ritual purposes for already at least 3,000 years and had a sacred eternal fire like the Vesta in Rome.

A stone stele known as "Stone of Taganana" was found in a different village on Tenerife that featured engravings of symbols, and most prominently the symbolic representation of the Catharginian goddess Tanit. So it is obvious to assume that the Guanches already had a concept of a primordial mother goddess they called "Chaghiraghi" and saw in the found statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary a fitting representation of an already venerated female divine principle. This goddess even had a herd of over six hundred goats under her protection who had their own grazing land forbidden to be trespassed by anyone and rams from that herd were used as sacrifice - something that resonates with ancient Phoenician cults, but also with the mediterranean goddess Artemis, to whom goats were sacred before the bear became important in more Northern areas (6). A number of names and by-names of Artemis/Astarte has an uncanny overlap with personal names (Artemi, Artendeyfa) and locatives (Artejeita, Artagayda, Aritarime, Artaos, Artenara) on the Canary Islands, as well as the royal title Guanarteme (guan arteme = "Man of Artemis") which Menceys of Gran Canaria carried (6). All evidence that the mother goddess was present for millennia on the Canaries before she took the form of La Morenita.

...the Virgin Mary recapitulates and stores the ancient figure of the neolithic Great Mother, which, over the course of time, had deteriorated in some of its materialized forms [...]. The spiritual message that the pre-Christian figures were no longer able to deliver passed over to Mary, in whom the total truth burned anew through the eternal symbols she salvaged, a truth that is [...] an essential element of every religious conception (The Black Virgin, pg. 69) (1)

The statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary became known as the "Lady of Candelaria" and she became and remained until today a strongly venerated patron saint of the Canary Islands. She is one of the enigmatic "Black Madonnas" also found all across Europe, built from a dark, almost black wood, and thus her nickname among the Spanish until today is "La Morenita" ("the little brown one").

Under its benefic aspect, [...] black symbolizes mystery, the inexpressible and ineffable, and inwardness, particularly in connection with Knowledge. Obviously, the black representations of the Virgin should be considered under this latter aspect, and immediately we recognize in the symbolism of the color black the principal characteristics and attributes of the Virgin [...]. First and foremost, we have the chthonic character of Mary as she is likened to the earth, for black evokes not only its surface, which more often than not is dark, but more especially its inwardness, its mysterious depth, which is revealed at the surface in grottoes and caverns, those privileged places of manifestation of the Virgin, and their ritual substitutes, crypts. These places recall the womb of the earth, where life develops in darkness, and thus immediately refers us to the maternal womb; we could also say to the womb of the waters, whose depths are the image of the dark Primordial Waters. The maternal womb is related to the mystery of life, the gestation of wheat in the earth being the image of that of the embryo in the belly of the mother. The blackness of the earth, like that of deep waters, also has two senses: its visible color, or inwardness, and the mystery of the hidden gestation of life. (The Black Virgin, pg. 85-86) (1)

Symbols and Codes

The Lady of Candelaria has her name from the tall green candle that she carries in her left hand (Axis Mundi?!). The 16th century Historian Alonso di Espinosa described La Morenita in detail:

This image is of carved work and perfectly finished, the like of which I have never seen in my life. It is almost five palmos (1 meter) in stature, and the pedestal on which its feet are placed has a thickness of two dedos. It is of reddish wood, not very heavy, close-grained, but it is not known to what tree it belongs. The face is very perfectly proportioned to the body, rather long, the eyes grand and so placed, that in whatever direction a man may be they look as if they were fixed on him. Such gravity and majesty is represented in them, and in the face, that no one can look at them fixedly without his shoulders rising and his hair standing on end. (2)

An interesting feature of the figure is that infant Jesus is holding a bird in his hands. It alludes to the interpretation of it symbolizing the Holy Spirit, but my mage friend Ricardo pointed out to me that it could also relate to a chapter in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphical text about the wizardy youth of Jesus:

This little child Jesus when he was five years old was playing at the ford of a brook [...] And having made soft clay, he fashioned thereof twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when he did these things. [...] And Joseph came to the place and saw: and cried out to him, saying: Wherefore doest thou these things on the Sabbath, which it is not lawful to do? But Jesus clapped his hands together and cried out to the sparrows and said to them: Go! and the sparrows took their flight and went away chirping. (Infancy Gospel of Thomas, II. 1-3)

The Virgen de la Candelaria had letters engraved in the carved drapery that puzzled people for centuries as it doesn't make any sense in any known liturgical language and the words were assumed to be secrets written in a code. The meaning was unknown until 2007, when the Spanish philologist specialized on North African Tamazight language, Ignacio Reyes decoded their meanings (3):

In the waistband of the neck:
Text: TIEPFSEPMERI
Pronounciation: Ti yebb f sǎb Meri
Translation: The Father protected by the Virgin Mary.

In the left sleeve:
Text: LPVRINENIPEPNEIFANT
Pronounciation: Lbu rinni bǎb nə ǎfa ənt
Translation: Be gracious in the victory Lord of the original eternal light.

In the lower part of the tunic:
Text: EAFM IRENINI FMEAREI
Pronounciation: Ê af-m irenni f-əme arey
Translation: Oh, your find increases the protection against superstition!

In the belt:
Text: NARMPRLMOTARE
Pronounciation: Narəm əbər ɣər muttar
Translation: Sharing food is a duty towards the needy

On the mantle, on the right arm:
Text: OLM INRANFR IAEBNPFM RFVEN NVINAPIMLIFINVIPI NIPIAN
Pronounciation: Ul-m yən ǎr anfər Iaeb ənubi f-m ǎr fwen. Nwi-ina bib am əliffi n wibbib. Ni bi-an.
Translation: Your heart, the place of the treasure more important, Yahweh child over you, luminous treasure. A weight in our consciousness is like a pile that is carried on our backs. Dominate that load.

On the border of the left hand:
Text: FVPMIRNA ENVPMTI EPNMPIR VRVIVINRN APVIMFRI PIVNIAN NTRHN
Pronounciation: Ffu b-mirna. Ǝnubi am ti ewen am bir ur wiwi-n rn, abu i məfri. Bib-wən əyyan nut ərɣun.
Translation: Dawn, great power. The child, like the father and the path of perfection, avoid illness, they are a balm for the person who suffers. Your only weight must be a bright candle.

In the back, in the tail:
Text: NBIMEI ANNEIPERFMIVIFVF
Pronounciation: Nəbbi y əməyyi, An-năy əberref mi əwif Uf
Translation: We welcome the ignorant pagan. We will forgive the offense that is fear of the Sublime.

Abduction and Disappearance

The Lord of the islands of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, Sancho de Herrera, heard of the legendary Virgen de la Candelaria and he wanted to possess her and was convinced that she should belong to the Christians who understood how to appreciate and venerate her, while the Guanches, being a people without God, did not possess that knowledge. The Mencey of Güímar denied his request of transferring the statue to his island, so Sancho de Herrera plotted a kidnapping. The seizure was successful and La Morenita found a new home in the church of San Salvador on Lanzarote where she was venerated with great joy and devotion. But Lady Morenita did not like it.

For in the morning of the day after they had very joyfully received the image, they found it turned with its face to the wall and its back to the people, which was no small mortification for them. They turned it with its face to the people, but as often as they did so, it was found next morning with its back to them. The people consulted together and determined to have processions, public prayers and penances, that the Lord might see fit to let them have that sacred image, for they knew better how to serve and venerate it than the gentile Guanches where it had made its first appearance. But God was not served by listening to them, and another course was ordained. In order to undeceive them, a noisome and pestilential sickness was sent, of which many persons died. (2)

Sancho de Herrera decided to bring La Candelaria back to her original cave, but when he arrived there nobody believed him that the statue had been stolen, because she had been seen by the locals in her usual spot all the time - to them she had never been absent!

Decades later, after all of the Canary Islands and their autochtonous inhabitants had been brutally murdered, raped and forced into submission and conversion to the Christian faith by the Spanish overlords, the Lady of Candelaria was moved into a larger home a stone-throw away from her cave, the Basilica de la Virgen de Candelaria that better suited the growing number of pilgrims and which featured more pomp that seemed more appropriate to the new servants of La Morenita. A small chapel was built in front of the Achbinico cave entrance and dedicated to Saint Blas.

The Black Lady seemed to not really have liked her new home. She had to bear with it for a few centuries, but in the year 1826 a big storm hit Tenerife that created such rivers of water coming down from the mountains that it flooded the Basilica and washed the statue of the Lady of Candelaria into the sea. Back to where she had risen from five hundred years before.

Whoso knows my essence in the water of the inner sea, Attains he the Goddess’s abode. (Devi Upanishad, 7)

Spirit on a Mission

The Basilica was rebuilt and a new statue was made to replace the lost icon. A bronze copy of the original icon of la Morenita was made and put in her old spot in the Achbinico cave as a memorial. It is a quite strong image, because the bronze is all black and her famous gaze has been replicated in an uncanny way it gave me chills when I saw it.

The rebirth did not lessen the passionate devotion she enjoys up until today, not only on the Canaries, but across the world, especially in the Americas and the Philippines, to which Canarian migrants had taken their cult along with them. In the Cathedral of San Fernando of Texas, USA is a replica of the Virgin of Candelaria, which is accurate to the venerated in the Canary Islands. This is because the city of San Antonio was founded by Canarians. She is widely venerated in South America and the Caribbean, Bolivia, Medellín, Puerto Rico, and she is the patroness of Western Visayas and Negros Occidental in the Philippines.

In Cuban Santería, the Virgin of Candelaria is identified with Oyá as well as Oba. In Brazilian Candomblé, the Virgin of Candelaria is identified with Oshun. For the indigenous people in the Andes, she is identified with the Pachamama.

The Lord possessed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth, before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the children of man. (Proverbs 8:22-31)

Stella Maris

The Catholic Feast Day of La Candelaria is on Candlemas (February 2nd) and on the Canary Islands she is celebrated mainly on August 15th.

Both dates are roughly in sync with the heliacal setting and rising of the brightest star of the Southern Hemisphere, Canopus. This ties her back nicely into the ancient Guanche / Berber cult of Chaghiraghi / Tanit for whom this star is the mother of him, the spirit that is sustenance of the universe. A similar association exists also in other parts of the world:

Atutuahi is the star Canopus, hymned as ‘the Mother of the Moon and Stars.’ Sometimes male, Atutuahi is one of the primary stars used by the Polynesians for open ocean navigation, equivalent to the Northern Hemisphere’s Pole Star. (Star.ships) (4)

Christian Conspiracy

Today it is taken for granted that the original image of La Candelaria with the amazigh inscriptions on her drapery was left on the beach in Tenerife on purpose by very early missionary friars of the Islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. And for their planned mission to fully unfold, they used the aforementioned Guanche that had been captured before, then "Christianized", and finally returned to their land to tell his people about the Virgin Mary: the one today known as Anton the Guanche Monk.

Depending on who you ask, their conspiracy was a success and turned the heathens into devote followers of the BVM, or it failed because the inhabitants of Tenerife simply continued their already ancient cult of Chaghiraghi now disguised under the embroidered mantle of the Virgin of Candelaria. In the end it does not matter, because from the spirits perspective the Primordial Mother prevailed, flourished and spread across the globe.

Dialing up La Candelaria

Aside of inhaling the island's omnipresent magic on every step I took on our vacation on Tenerife, through the lava deserts, pine and laurel forests and black beaches, I had some rituals planned to connect to the local spirits and Queen Chaghiraghi herself. I prayed the novena to la Morenita for nine days in a row and visited her on the last day to give praise and do the last prayer in front of her. It was a quite touching moment.

I did some research about fragments from the Guanche language and found some that can be used as "barbarous words". I added them to known prayers to the Virgin de Candelaria, which you can find below. To stick with the strictly Catholic originals, just omit the Guanche parts.

Prayers to Chaghiraghi

Oh, atch mayes wayya ghi raghi ahghuran ashshaman (a), Oh Lady of Candles, Oh Great Mother, blessed above all creatures, I pray that your soul is now with me as I give tribute of my worship to the Creator.

Achuhuraghan achuhukanak, A atti chchash shagren sha ondi, Wassksad anti ishachcha-ana, onan-da er ar-i (b)

Virgen de la Candelaria, we come to you with the trust and simplicity of children. We arrived with our anxieties and hopes, our joys and sorrows, with the fatigue of work and the weight of our sins; with all that we are and have.

Virgen de la Candelaria, You are the first carrier of Light, which is Christ; You are our Mother; You wrangling us with Christ the Saviour; You are our hope, comfort and joy; You accompany us in the city, the desert, the valleys, the mines, and the sea; You are our star on the way to the Father; You are our footpath to meet Jesus.

Virgen de la Candelaria, Virgin Mother of God, hear our prayers, bless our homes, obtain for work and health; teach us to hear the word of your Son and to live it every day, obedient to the Holy Spirit. We know to build a nation of brotherhood in our Church and in our land. Amen.

And here a shorter prayer:

Atch mayes wayya ghi raghi ahghuran ashshaman (a),
Our Lady of Candles, give me a mother’s protection
for I need your watchful care.
Comfort me in my discouragements,
solace me in my fatigues,
raise me after my falls,
reward me for my successes.

Our Lady of Candles, bearer of Jesus, the Light of the world,
please obtain for me this favor… (silently mention your petition here).
I shall always rely on your help,
to be what Jesus wants me to be.
Achwayaghiragh (c),
I am His; I am yours, my good Mother. Amen.

Translations of the 'barbarous words':

(a) the mother of him, the spirit that is sustenance of the universe. Sparkling one. Heavenly one.
(b) Here is this that is in the fiery or bright, here is this one that is in the rain, from the rising of the sun to its sunset the Name of Yahweh is praised
(c) here is the spirit that (is) sustenance (or support) of the universe

Instead of these, also other prayers can be used to address the mother goddess, for examples Orphic Hymns (5) to Hera, Rhea, Gaia, or any other of the desired forms of the archetype, but most self-evidently the hymn of Meter Theon:

(The Fumigation from a Variety of Odoriferous Substances.) Mother of Gods [Meter Theon], great nurse of all, draw near, divinely honored, and regard my prayer: Throned on a car, by lions drawn along, by bull-destroying lions, swift and strong, Thou swayest the sceptre of the pole divine, and the world's middle seat, much-famed, is thine. Hence earth is thine, and needy mortals share their constant food, from thy protecting care: From thee at first both Gods and men arose; from thee, the sea and every river flows. Vesta [Hestia], and source of good, thy name we find to mortal men rejoicing to be kind; For every good to give, thy soul delights; come, mighty power, propitious to our rites, All-taming, blessed, Phrygian saviour, come, Saturn's [Kronos'] great queen, rejoicing in the drum. Celestial, ancient, life-supporting maid, fanatic Goddess, give thy suppliant aid; With joyful aspect on our incense shine, and, pleased, accept the sacrifice divine. (5)

Another beautiful option is the Prayer to Tanit taken from the English translation of Gustave Flaubert's "Salammbô" by M. Walter Dunne:

Oh Tanit, white deity, goodness fecund, oh mirror of purity, send in severity your beams on the world. Your radiant chariot is in horror of sombre night. So mysterious monsters, as soon as you appear, return to the desolate gloom. How lightly you slip through the clouds moist and clear. The golden stars in the firmament. like a flock gently go where you guide them. You reign on the ocean where the wave mounts on high; fill the air with thy splendor, carpeting earth with flowers, at the bottom of the sea the pearl. The crowd madly in love follows thee, enchantress. You take them in your course, changing as you do every day, only more youthful tomorrow. Oh, Tanit, white goddess, goodness fecund, oh, mirror of purity, send in severity your beams on the world.

Novena to the Blessed Virgin of Candelaria

(Based on this with translated additions from here)

Novenas are prayed on nine days in a row, optimal is the same hour of the day on each of the nine days. Start each with the Opening Prayer followed by the day's prayer and finish with the Closing Prayer.

Opening Prayer

Dear Virgen de la Candelaria: we gather together with you. We bring our devotion and our love. Accept it, our Mother. Let us contemplate your virtues and teach us to imitate them. May we resemble you more each day, to please the Lord as you did and live like this, in peace and joy and then come to share with you the eternal bliss of glory. Amen.

Day 1

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria: you who being pure in the sight of God, were yet willing to be purified like a sinner to teach us the importance of living in God's grace, grant that we, in imitation of you, seek to give due importance to being purified in the eyes of God, even though we should humble ourselves to recognize our sins in confession. Amen.

Day 2

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria, who, being full of holiness have nevertheless presented yourself at the temple to fulfill the Law of God, grant that we, in imitation of you, come to love our church and consider it more each day as a place to approach God. Amen.

Day 3

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria: you who did not hesitate to put your son Jesus into the hands of Simeon, knowing how he prayed in the temple for the grace of seeing the Redeemer grant that we too may sigh to have Christ in our heart so that you may hand it to God. Amen.

Day 4

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria: You who upon presenting your son Jesus in the temple heard the announcement of your pain and accepted it as the will of God, grant, that we shall not become that prophesied sword and our sins the cause of your pain. Amen.

Day 5

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria, You who neither upon presenting yourself in the temple nor at any time thereafter invoked your condition as Mother of God, demonstrating the importance and value of humility, let us put aside everlasting self-concern and based on your example may we grow in appreciation of humility. Amen.

Day 6

Oh Blessed Lady of Candelaria: we pray that you obtain for us from your beloved Son Our Lord Jesus Christ the grace to imitate your virtues, keep the commandments and be repelled by the horror of mortal sin. So one day we will rejoice eternally in heaven. Amen.

Day 7

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria: aware of our weaknesses, we come to you, so that you may obtain for us the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be able to lead a life worthy of our Christian vocation, to imitate your virtues and thus obtain the reward of eternal life. Amen.

Day 8

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria, through your virginal purity, your immaculate conception and your prerogative as Mother of God, obtain for me from your beloved son, humility, serenity, purity of heart, body and spirit, holy perseverance in what is good, the gift of prayer, a holy life and glorious eternity. Amen.

Day 9

Immaculate Lady of Candelaria; by your obedience to the Father, aware of our pride and arrogance, we beseech you to assist us to accept the will of God, so that our whole life may become a renewed Yes to the will of the Eternal Father. Amen.

Closing Prayer

We thank you, our Mother and Lady. We are your children and we put ourselves in your hands, so that you educate us and make us true children of God, holy and joyful Christians. Amen.

Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, now and forever and ever. Amen.

Blessed Virgin of Candelaria. Pray for us. (3 times)

Incense

A suitable incense for all invocations would be an ancient Guanche mix of Canarian herbs, which you can find in my other article, or dried "smudge-sticks" of Artemisia thuscula, or simply frankincense.

Other

Here is a beautiful poetic piece I found on the website of the Order of the Black Madonna about the spirit of the Lady of Candelaria that I resonate well with.

Bibliography

(1) Hani, Jean. "La Vierge noire et le mystère marial". Trédaniel, 1995. / "The Black Virgin - A Marian Mystery". Sophia Perennis, 2008.

(2) Espinosa, Alonso de. "The Guanches of Tenerife, the holy image of Our Lady of Candelaria, and the Spanish conquest and settlement", 16th cent; Markham, Clements R. (Clements Robert), Sir, 1830-1916

(3) Reyes García, Ignacio. "La madre del cielo. Estudio de filología ínsuloamazighe." (2007).

(4) White, Gordon. Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits. Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge. Kindle Edition.

(5) The Hymns of Orpheus. Translated by Taylor, Thomas (1792). University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

(6) Caridad Arias, Joaquin. "Artemis-Astarte". Die Göttin in der vorspanischen kanarischen Kultur. Almogaren 32-33. Wien 2002

Spirits of Achinet

2018-06-09T20:00:00+02:00

Islas Canarias

My parents have been in love with the Canary Islands since they first visited together in 1977. My father had already explored its largest island, Tenerife in 1972. Back then it was just the beginning of tourism there and most of the infrastructure was in a quite desolate state after Franco's rule. It was a time where just a few people visited, also because of a political independence struggle involving terrorist attacks. In the early 1980s Spain eventually granted autonomy status to the archipelago and tourism started booming.

From 1977 until today my parents visit their favourite of the islands, Fuerteventura, at least once a year, so since I was born in 1980 until I was 16 I also naturally came with them.

The white beaches contrasted with jagged black lava cliffs, the untamed Atlantic ocean, colourful but bleak basalt deserts and the neverending strong wind feel like a second home to me and this is such a strong feeling that I really start missing the place if I don't visit regularly myself.

After having started this journey of expanding my mindspace into the realms of spirituality and enchantment and thinking in a more and more animist way, exploring and conceptualizing spirits of place and their influence on and coexistence with us, I have instinctively also begun to wrap my head around the Canaries and the fixed place they inhabit in my heart.

So, this year our summer vacation destination was chosen to be Tenerife, the largest and most populated of the seven islands, as well as most diverse in its landscape, history and lore around its spirits and gods. This two weeks long holiday with my wife and my daughter was not only for exploration, recreation and relaxation, but also a kind of pilgrimage to the ocean bathed lava rock archipelago inside myself, to meet the archetypal mother goddess.

To fully understand what I mean by that and to get a glimpse of the magic that I experience wherever I am on the islands, let's go back in history and put some light on the world of the native human and nonhuman inhabitants of the archipelago before it became a Spanish colony...

The Guanches

According to the latest findings, the Canary Islands have been inhabited by humans dating back to the 6th century BC. The indigenous people is commonly called The Guanches, although strictly speaking this term just refers to the inhabitants of the island of Tenerife in their own language (Guan = people, Chinet = name of the Island of Tenerife).

Academia and the internet are full of wild speculations around the origin of this race, ranging from "Celtic seafarers", to "White Aryan survivors of Atlantis", but if we can trust materialist science for a moment, mitochondrial DNA analyses confirmed a North West African origin for their ancestors, related to the Amazigh, or their more known name: Berbers.

A more recent term used in Spanish for the natives of the Canary Islands and for their language is insulo-amazigh ("island Berbers").

Records by the first missionaries and later conquerors describe the aboriginal inhabitants to have been a simple and primitive race of sheep-herders who lived in caves and had no knowledge of seafaring. Of course seen through the Catholic Spanish imperialist eyes this description does not surprise.

The Guanches had a political system of hereditary autocracy on some islands, on others it was elective. There seemed to have been almost an 'over-governance' considering the size of the islands and their populations (Star.Ships hypothesis, anyone? (2)). When the Castilians arrived in Tenerife for example, it was divided into nine small kingdoms (menceyatos), each ruled by a king or Mencey.

I won't go into more details about the Guanche civilisation itself, since much can be found about them online, but instead cover their spirituality a bit:

Canarian Spirits

(Guanche names of deities and spirits given in their Spanish writing and thus also pronunciation)

Their Supreme Creator God was Achaman ("the skies"), and besides him they venerated the sun deity Magec or Mageb, possibly a goddess ("mother of brightness") and the moon god Achuguayo ("father of time"). The sun as a goddess and her consort moon as an old man ruling over time also seem to have been widespread among other neolithic Berber people around North Africa. In Guanche cosmology the world was held together by an Axis Mundi, some pillar-shaped rocks were venerated on all of the islands, but it mainly manifested as the 3718 meters high volcano mountain on Teneriffa, the Teide. According to their legends, Achaman's black adversary Guayota ("the destroyer") once captured and kidnapped Magec, locked her into the volcano and turned the world into darkness. The people then prayed to Achaman for help and he rescued Magec and in turn imprisoned Guayota in the volcano where he is ever since, continuing trying to influence the world commanding his evil spirits, who appear sometimes as black wooly dogs with red eyes, the Tibicenas. (1)

A belief the insulo-amazigh also shared with continental Kabyle berbers was that through a series of specific places: cracks in the ground, caves, certain trees, and so on, evil forces from the netherworld could manifest, which often had to be counteracted. In order to do so, magical objects were placed into or close to these gateways. Many of these talismanic items have been discovered everywhere in the islands, mostly ceramics of diverse morphology, objects for domestic use, often very small in size. In North Africa, women go to these places and hide talismans, draw sigils or utter invocations to neutralize the evil, or ask favors from the "geniuses" or spirits. It is assumed that the Guanches had similar rituals to counteract the Tibicena demons or request help of their benevolent counterparts, the Maxios, guardians and spirits of specific places, who often also became helpful domestic spirits. (1)

It is unclear what the Guanches belief of an afterlife was. Some of the missionaries reported Guanche myths that evildoers would be imprisoned in the Teide volcano. When members of the nobility or higher classes died they were mummified in a complicated process and believed to become gods. They were placed into sacred caves and communicated with by sleeping next to their bodies and have their spirits visit in dreams. (1)

Missing Links

One of the many unsolved mysteries of the Canaries are the step-pyramids found in different places, most prominently in Güímar on Tenerife. The famous Danish anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl was so impressed by them that he spent the rest of his life on the island. He claims that they must be the missing link between the pyramids of Egypt and the ones in Middle and South America. Most of academia doesn't believe in his theory and claim that the pyramids on the Canaries are "simply rock piles". I think the truth probably lies somewhere closer to Heyerdahl's hypothesis, because they have precise east-west alignments and look a lot like ritual places, although they look way less symmetrical and are much smaller than the step-pyramids in the Americas.

The Guanches apparently could read and write. Many petroglyphs could be found on rocks across all islands, some using a variant of the very intriguing Tifinagh alphabet still used by Berbers today, but most of them using a system of rune-like letters probably distant relatives of the Phoenician alphabet. German researchers have collected petroglyphs from Mahorata (Fuerteventure and Lanzarote) of the so-called Sinicava type in the early 1990s and afro-philologist Gerhard Böhm (3) matched them with the existing Canarian phonemes and came up with a translation of the letters that can be written from left-to-right or right-to-left:

A, Â/E/O, I/J, U/W, T/D, DH, K, GH, Q, P, F, L, R, S/SH

In total not much could be preserved and reported of the old insulo-amazigh culture and knowledge, because in cases where they did not Christianize and assimilate to the Spanish overlords, they got either killed or sold as slaves to more distant colonies. Nevertheless, until today many of their traditions seem to live on as hidden undercurrents and in between the lines of mainstream culture. A few years ago a neopagan recronstructivist Church of the Guanche People was founded as a cult of the ancient goddess Chaxiraxi.

Chaxiraxi

The biggest spiritual impact on the Guanches happened a few decades before the Spanish arrived. If you like the idea of a "spirit on a mission" it also marked the survival of their own gods into syncretization with Christianity: The Blessed Virgin of Candelaria. You can read all about her history and how to connect with her in my next post:

Diosa Madre Chaxiraxi

Suffumigation

In some of the aforementioned excavated ceramic bowls used for offerings and as protection against evil spirits some remains of ashes were found and analyzed (1). They resulted from burning a mixture of different endemic herbs found on the island. Here is the full list of the found herbs, in case you visit the place and want to recreate a magical Guanche incense yourself, like I did:

If that is too complicated to obtain, then you can also use the plant with the obvious local name Incienso (Artemisia thuscula), a Canarian variant of mugwort with a strong and distinct Anise smell that surrounds you everywhere you go on the island, at least at the end of May when I visited. It has been and is still used as a popular incense.

Bibliography

(1) Tejera Gaspar, Antonio. "La religión de los guanches : mitos, ritos y leyendas". Ediciones Idea, 2011

(2) White, Gordon. Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits. Scarlet Imprint / Bibliothèque Rouge. Kindle Edition.

(3) Böhm, Gerhard. "Sprache und Geschichte im Kanarischen Archipel", "Bd. 2. Sprachdenkmäler: Punisch und Berberisch: Kanarisch". AFRO-PUB, 1996.

Spirits of Berlin

2018-04-21T12:00:00+02:00

Psychogeography

Imagine Berlin. Imagine a city of fragments and ghosts. Imagine a metropolis which inspired countless artists and witnessed uncountable murders. Imagine a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history’s most bloody century. Imagine the most arrogant capital of Europe devastated by Allied bombs then divided. Imagine it reunited and reborn as one of the creative centres of the world. (Rory Maclean "Berlin: Imagine a City")

I live in Berlin for almost two decades now. It's the place I call home - my freely chosen Zuhause, not the Heimat where I was born. Besides enjoying the obvious perks of living in a European capital city, Berlin has always felt to me like I belong here. It has given me subtle weird and at the same time beautiful tingles from the first day of my arrival: uncanny feelings of nostalgia I only know from some of my dreams and a permanent sense of out-of-time-and-place-ness that I very much resonate with.

I live in Berlin. [...] it is different from anywhere else. But I cannot quite express that difference, that otherness, in words yet. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

In the past I have always explained away the strangeness with the unique historical impacts of two World Wars and a Cold War that one encounters almost on every street corner, but since I started travelling my path of enchantment, I've wanted to dig deeper into the metaphysical heart of this city - to find the Spiritus Loci.

Berlin is the city of the negative space, the space where something is not, the bombed-out-of-existence, the closed-off, the mysteriously forbidden. The symbol of this is the bullet holes that you can see so often, small indentations, places where stone or brick should be, but where they are conspicuous by their absence, just as people are absent from closed metro stations. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

The twentieth century has had such a harsh impact on Berlin that it becomes difficult - almost impossible - to look beyond the trauma, to get a larger historical perspective, to try to grasp a more macroscopic image of Berlin's soul from the times before the death and destruction.

He did not have the same feeling in France, in Italy, or in his own country. Those places had enough past, but somehow it had transformed more or less organically into a present. Here, the transition was not complete. The past had become stuck, bogged down, coagulated, curdled, been torn away. But it was still there. Perhaps it was just waiting. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

Obviously Berlin is haunted with ghosts - eerily silent ghosts. I didn't want to look for those, they are everywhere anyway. I wanted to find the spirit of the city itself.

In his books, Gordon White writes about the importance of a city's river spirit:

[T]he story is always the same because river spirits are always the same: How long have we been here? Who came before? Where did they go? Who or what answered their night prayers, and at what cost? Civilisation is the tobacco of river spirits. They seem to crave it, to will it into being up and down their banks, even though the relationship appears damaging over the long term. (Gordon White "Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits")

In our local monthly meetup of Berlin based witches & wizards we've also discussed this topic and it inspired me to look for folklore and myths about Berlin's Spree river to find clues about the nature of it's inhabiting spirit. I started digging into German online sources, looking as far back as the very beginnings of the history of Berlin:

Prehistory

In pre-christian times the area of Berlin had been visited by Germanic as well as Slavic tribes. Although the Germans had been here first, almost all of their tribes had settled here just temporarily on their way further South during the great migration periods in the 5th until the 7th century. The Wends, a Slavic people coming from the East, settled in the area but mostly in the South of Brandenburg along the Spree. They had established and defended themselves against German re-conquest until the end of the first millennium. A second and larger germanisation attempt in the 13th century was successful, the Slavic rulers were defeated and their people were slowly assimilated. Of course history was way more complicated than that, but this is the very short summary. Their legacy are names of places (like Berlin), the Sorbic language spoken by a minority in the East of Germany, and lots of interesting folklore.

All through the timeline I could not find any relevant myths and legends regarding the Spree river from the close proximity area of Berlin, I guess because Berlin had no real significance until the beginning of the era of long distance trade with ships during the Middle Ages when it became a real city.

The Nix of the Spree

So I followed the Spree upriver looking for hints and I found a whole treasure of legends from the Spreewald area, where the river splits into numerous creeks and canals surrounding marshes and swamps. The other place that offers legends surrounding the river is from Lausitz (Lusatia) further upriver towards the Czech border.

Besides very interesting local legends about the Serpent King, the little dragon Plon, the funny Lutki gnomes and the midday woman, who likes to kill everyone who works at noon instead of taking a break, I found tales of the spirit of the river in the form of the Nyks!

The Nix or Nyks, also called Wodny Muž or Vodnik is a quite moody merman shaped trickster daimon. There are many legends of mermen and mermaids across Celtic, German and Slavic lore, also very often called Nix or Nök but the Spreewald one seems to be especially peculiar.

In his evil or grumpy version he is depicted as having a fish or toad like appearance or of a water corpse. He likes to sit on the banks of the river and scare or even kill children with a club or pull people into the water who are not paying attention or who are mindlessly picking water lilies. He is responsible and feared for causing floods, especially during spring time. The Nyks is said to have beautiful daughters (Nixen) that lure young men into the waters.

When he is in a good mood he appears as a rich farmer, fisherman or a well dressed groom (of "Mother Spree"). He likes to dress in red or wear a green jacket and he is known to help poor fishermen. The Nyks has quite mercurial features as he likes to trade on the market square and play cards and drink in taverns. He can be recognized by his coat having a wet seam and because he never touches cards with a cross (clubs). He likes to loiter around the riverbanks smoking his pipe. Fishermen ask him for help by placing a pinch of tobacco in the water and saying, "Here's your tobacco, Lord Vodník, now give me a fish."

(The Nök, a similar spirit of the Karpfenteich pond in Berlin Treptow)

Being a mercurial trickster it becomes clear why he likes the presence of creatives and entrepreneurs, artisans and merchants. The city is crowded with mercurial people and is a hub of globetrotters and travellers. The creative scene and nightlife are well known around the globe. The open-mindedness is nothing new: it probably peaked in the roaring 1920s and was already present in different ways even before that under Frederick the Great and Frederick William despite their military fetish.

The Black God

It made me wonder about the dark and malefic aspects Berlin certainly has. The constant re-occurring Martian obsession with order, control and militarism, fascism, xenophobia, the omnipresent scars and absences, the borderlines, the dragging stubbornness.

I stumbled upon several references to another myth surrounding the Spree - also further South near today's Bautzen: When the Wends ruled the region, apparently there had been a cult-statue of a god called Flins, Flynz or Flinc who loomed over a steep gorge of the Spree that flows like a wild river until this spot, after which it becomes silent, deep and slow. The icon is described as a bearded skeleton-like figure wearing a long coat, holding a burning bowl in his right hand and having a lion on his left shoulder - other sources describe him as standing next to a lion, being made from gold, holding a spear in one hand and holding up a cauldron over his other shoulder that started steaming when this war-god called his people to battle.

Sounds very Saturnian to me!

There are legends of caves around the gorge where his priests dwelled and about human sacrifices to him. When the Germans conquered and christianised the area, the icon was pushed down the cliff into the roaring Spree. People have tried to dive for it and there seem to be legends about underwater gold treasures and the Flins seems to demand more and more human sacrifices as people disappeared in the waters of the Spree.

It has been speculated that the Flins is no other than the notorious West Slavic black god called Chernobog or Diabol about whom much has been speculated but little can be said definitively.

So assuming the Flins was an animate icon of the West Slavic black god whose veneration for appeasement had suddenly ceased after christian conquest and he was forced into the Spree, it seems obvious that he haunts the river ever since and emanates his Saturnine influences into it. Combine that with the darker aspects of a mercurial spirit Nix and it becomes uncanny that the people in the largest city on the river's banks became obsessed with war and death, and had the world's most famous border-wall cutting right through the heart of the city - a border between people, countries, ideologies, worldviews. And before all that happened, the city was even the home of an occult Saturnian brotherhood.

Not that I want to blame all evil on the river, but he might certainly have had some influence.

Spirits of Berlin

Although the Nix seems at a first glance to not be specifically Berlin related, he is the spirit of the Spree that flows through Berlin. On top of that he seems to also be possessed by a restless black god who occasionally demands sacrifices. It's about time the Nix and the Flins get the recognition they deserve as spirits of place with influence on this city and time for us to try to connect with them.

How does a fish see the river it is swimming in? It cannot leave the water to gain distance or perspective. Something like that is happening in Berlin. Everything is flowing. (Nooteboom "Roads to Berlin")

I live in the area of Kreuzberg, near the Landwehrkanal, a canal connected to the Spree through a series of locks. The banks of the canal host farmers markets twice a week and occasionally flea-markets. The area is also popular for its abundance of bars and clubs - all places I can imagine the Nyks haunting regularly.

I walk along the canal every morning during my strolls with my daughter and I cross its bridges several times a day running chores, so I decided to start trying to hook up with grumpy old Nyx through offerings.

Judging from the folklore, appropriate offerings to him seem to be tobacco or a handful of earth or toasted bread. I assume he would also not deny strong alcohol. Protection from him can be achieved by wearing a cross.

Now I always try to bring some tobacco or bread along with me when I know that I'll be crossing or walking along the canal to offer it to the Spree spirit. I have asked for a few little general favors, like to bring luck. I have not had clear and obvious communication with him, but I hope that will be established soon. He is known to be stubborn, but so am I.

(I found a "7 of Clubs" card and burned it as an offering to the Nix)

I also started including the Flins into my Saturday routine of praying to Kronos and perhaps start thinking about offerings to him too - although plenty of forces from Berlin seem to have provided more than enough human sacrifices during the 20th century to keep him pleased for a while, right? Let's hope so...

Quotes taken from:

Nooteboom, Cees (2013 [2009]), Roads to Berlin: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Germany. Trans. Laura Watkinson. London: MacLehose Press.

found mainly in:

Böttcher, Hannah (2016), Sydney and Berlin Cities of Silence and Absence - A psychogeographical reading of contemporary non-fiction texts, PhD thesis.

Akephalos Redux

2018-02-22T11:00:00+01:00

(Version 3.0 - 19/10/2026: update with Egyptian sources at the end)

(Version 2.3 - 28/10/2018)

After half a year of monthly practice of the Stele of Jeu in different variations I have come to a different understanding of it than when I started. Before beginning to practice the routine I spent several months researching every single bit about this ritual and about the Headless One, which proved quite fruitful in terms of grasping and executing the ritual and the deities addressed.

In this post I am briefly revisiting my path with the Headless One, summing up some points of my research and laying out my own conclusions. It will most probably be updated in the future.

Headlessness

In his amazing book about the history of spirits and their interaction with humankind - "Star.Ships" - Gordon White talks about "headlessness" being a very ancient spiritual concept, possibly from as far back as the Paleolithic. In his chapter "Part VIII. The Mirror of Heaven" he writes:

Ritual dismemberment remains a dominant motif in many initiatory traditions to this day and may ultimately date back to the very beginning of the formation of the Laurasian storyline (and perhaps earlier) where the universe is created from the dismembered parts of a giant monster or ancient god. It is quite possibly a very early conceptualisation of the microcosm/ macrocosm connection of the ‘unified human’ with all of Creation. The most potent visual is, of course, the removal and then return of the head, a seat of power recognised in magic and sorcery for tens of millennia, which is – I posit – reflected in the faceless (headless) T- shaped pillars of Göbekli Tepe and, of course, the ‘headless hunter’ that is Orion itself. From an Egyptian ritual perspective, when Osiris is headless, he is in the Underworld. The restoration of his head corresponds with his restoration to the Living world thanks to the magic of Isis/ Sirius.¹⁷

The Aghori Vimalananda about the symbolism of headlessness in Tantric magic:

When I am finished with the number of offerings I have planned to make, at the very end of my homa, I put a coconut into the fire. The coconut represents the worshipper’s head, with its three eyes. Also, it is full of water, just as the head is full of blood, cerebrospinal fluid and glandular secretions. When I offer the coconut I offer my entire consciousness to the fire with a request that it be transmuted into a divine consciousness. I offer my own head to get a divine head. Then I bow to the fire and request my deity to return to His or Her home, and my homa is completed. Then I sit by the fire for a while, after I am finished, and commune with it.¹⁸

Akephalos in the Greek Magical Papyri

"Akephalos" seems to be one of the most controversial deities that appears in the Greek Magical Papyri. He has been identified as quite opposite demons and deities by academia and operative magi. Roughly, the interpretations can be broken down to two different directions: one is the "Typhonian" camp, the other one the "Osirian" camp.

In academia the former is represented most prominently by Armand L. Delatte, who claimed to have identified the headless one as being the Egyptian god of the desert, Seth, syncretized with the Greek monstrous demon Typhon¹. The German classical philologist Richard Wünsch follwed this interpretation in his work "Sethian curse tablets of Rome." In magical circles, besides Mathers, The Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley and the OTO, the prominent contemporary occultist and magician Jake Stratton-Kent delivers more diverse arguments in his booklet "The Headless One"² than the other mentioned authors, but comes to the same conclusion.

First to challenge this interpretation academically seems to have been Karl Preisendanz, another translator of the PGM, who argued against Delatte and Wünsch in his monograph "Akephalos - The Headless God"³ (which I summarized here). He argues that the headless god could not be any other than the dismembered and resurrected Egyptian god of the underworld, Osiris. More contemporary scholars of this camp are Reinhold Merkelbach and Maria Totti, who found more supportive evidence of the Osirian character in their "Abrasax" collection of PGM spells⁴ through parallels in the phrasing to the Isis Mysteries.

Both camps also introduce the Egyptian protector spirit Bes as a witness of their interpretation. Bes is often depicted as a lion rearing up on his hind legs, or as a hairy demon with his face on his chest, which one could interpret as "having no head" with a lot of imagination if one really wants to. The former camp syncretizes this demon with Typhon, the latter underlines his role as the protector of Osiris.

In my eyes both ways are completely useless attempts that prove nothing. I've seen many depictions of Bes, and in none of them he appeared even close to being "headless". He was one of the most commonly worshipped spirits by royal as well as common families in Egypt and able to help establish relationships with every other spirit, so it is to no surprise that he appears in many occasions in Greco Egyptian spells, but I doubt any close connection to Akephalos.

(Photo: Statues of Bes in the Neues Museum Berlin)

If I had to choose between the two camps, I would lean more towards the Osirian one, simply because their arguments seem more consistent to me. And in relation to the "Headless Rite" it makes more sense to ritually identify with the god of the underworld in order to gain control over the world of spirits. Oh and yes, Osiris is literally called by his name in the ritual.

But to be honest, the more I am practicing the Headless Rite the less I believe the Headless One to be one specific deity or spirit, but an archetype of headlessness itself, with all the symbolism and interpretations it evokes, from loss of orientation to transcendence.

(Update: in a newer article I dive deeper into this topic)

(Update 2026: what the Egyptian sources themselves say about Osiris and Seth, at the end of this article)

PGM VII and VIII

In PGM VII 222ff I don't believe Bes has anything to do with headlessness. Yes, he is being conjured and even called "headless one", but I agree with Preisendanz that this is probably an erroneous version of the same spell in PGM VIII 64ff, where Bes is conjured, but with the help of Osiris.

The Berlin Papyrus

PGM II aka. the Berlin Papyrus features this famous drawing of a headless person with the seven sacred vowels written over his chest. The Typhonian camp likes to see "snake heads" coming out of his shoulders as a proof of the Typhonian character of this Akephalos. The Osirian Preisendanz claims that the seven vowels and the magic words "Damnameneus" and "Semesilam" that are written next to the drawing, as well as the scarab drawing on the previous column and the spell itself hint towards a solar deity, a syncretized Helios-Osiris.

I think both are over-interpretations of this drawing, because when you read the instructions of the spell this drawing is a part of, it says to "make a lampwick out of a piece of cloth taken from one who has died violently" and the provided image is to be drawn onto this piece of cloth. In the Greek orginal the term "one who has died violently" is "βιαιος". Usually, the spirits of the dead who died violently (βιαιοθανατοι) are considered very powerful. I support Franz Dornseiff in his quite pragmatic explanation that the drawn headless figure is simply a sketch of a decapitated "βιαιος"⁵. Also Merkelbach/Totti lean towards this interpretation⁴.

Another possible interpretation is that the depicted headless god is the Egyptian Decan deity "Kenmu" who is most commonly pictured as having no head or his head hidden behind a disk shaped object. Kenmu's Greek name is "Komme" and in lines 117 until 124 the spell calls upon "Kommes" several times, the whole ritual might even be an attempt to bind the Decan god and one of the ways to achieve this is by drawing his picture.

(Photo: The Decan Kenmu, image on the ceiling of the Hypostile Hall of Dendera)

Akephalos in the Stele of Jeu

In the "Headless Rite" aka. "Stele of Jeu" it is Osiris who is summoned as "the headless one" and "the beautiful Osiris". He is being identified and syncretised with the Jewish desert demon / creator god YHVH. In his forms as Osiris-Ra, and Osiris-Aion he also hints towards the demon Abrasax and the declaration of his name being a "heart girt by a serpent" clearly points to the primordial god Phanes and his other later synthesized mutations as Aion and Mithras.

The descriptions in the praises of the text clearly point to Osiris who had put the newly created world into an order of harmonious opposites together with Isis. It also fits the creation process in Genesis.

I tried to find the meanings of the barbarous names used in the rite. Some of them are Hebrew (e.g. αρβαθιαω = Arbah Iao = "four of god") voces magicae, some are strings of sacred vowels (e.g. αηωωυ), some sound Egyptiany (e.g. σοχοu) but for most of them I was not able to determine a meaning.

Number Crunching

It is interesting that by adding the isopsephic values of all subsequent words in the strings of barbarous names and then reducing them ("rule of nine") to single digit numbers, most of them result in 1 or 4.

αρβαθιαω ρειβετ αθελεβερσηθ αρα βλαθα αλβεu εβενφχι χιτασγοη ιβαωθ ιαω (5905 reduced to 1)
αρογογοροβραω σοχοu μοδοριω φαλαρχαω οοο (5737 reduced to 4)
ροuβριαω μαρι ωδαμ βααβναβαωθ ασσ αδωναι αφνιαω ιθωληθ αβρασαξ αηωωυ (8887 reduce to 4)
μαβαρριαω ιεηλ κοθα αθορηβαλω αβραωθ (3142 reduce to 1, also when adding up the ordial values gematrically, they reduce from 289 to 1)
αωθ αβαωθ βασυμ ισακ σαβαωθ ιαω (4321 reduce to 1)
ιεοu πυρ ιοu πυρ ιαωτ ιαηω ιοοu αβρασαξ σαβριαμ οο υυ ευ οο υυ αδωναιε (7490 reduce to 2)
ανλαλα λαι γαια απα διαχαννα χορυν (2188 reduce to 1)

For completion here the revived vowels and six names too:

αιη αιωι ηωιαη αη ιω ωη αιηουευωαι εαι υο ιαω ιωη οαυ αεη υωυω (9999 reduce to 9)
χαβραχ φνεσχηρ φιχρο φνυρω φωχω βωχ (9999 reduce to 9, also when adding up the ordial values gematrically, they reduce from 486 to 9)

Towards the Godhead

After regular practice, my own understanding of the Stele of Jeu ritual is that it follows a quite transcendental logic and seems to describe an almost Gnostic ascension of the own self towards the Godhead through stages of self-identification with different spiritual forms up to the highest being of the universe.

One begins as a human being humbly praying to Osiris, praising his divine achievements and immediately syncretizing him with the Jewish god YHVH as Iabas and Iapôs in the usual pagan way of accepting the gods as gods beyond belief-systems.
On the second step the practitioner identifies as an enlightened human, having achieved Gnosis, having become a prophet: Moses as well as a Messenger of Pharaoh Osiris.
The third step is a more potent address to the supreme god by using a row of secret barbarous names, to really get his attention. Embedded in more similar subsequent calls is a request to exorcise restraining demons, which is applied to oneself. It's a process of cleansing and purification embedded in magic language of the ancient gods.
After being cleared of all demons, in step four one identifies as being an angel of god, taking the form of an invincible, eternal, headless daimon.
The velocity of the ascent now increases rapidly, as in step five one becomes the truth itself, with clear moral views, one becomes the thundering and lightning wielding Zeus as well as the terrifying and unpredictable god of creation and destruction - raging with a flaming mouth, Yahweh!
In the next step the image becomes blurrier and more abstract. No more identifications with anthropomorphic deities, but a rise up to the level of the symbolic, the Favor of the Aion, your own name having become ineffable and only to be understood as an image: a heart encircled by a serpent.
The seventh and final level of ascension to the godhead becomes completely inexpressible and can only be attempted to be described beyond human imagination, by the largest possible magical number of 9,999 expressed in voces magicae and the vibrations of the divine sounds of the seven vowels. Images are transcended to the level of pure resonance, the unified field of consciousness.

The ascent is completed and one demands the subjugation of all daimons. From such a perspective that literally includes everything, even gods.

(Update: in a newer article I dive deeper into this topic)

(Photo: Phanes Protogonos, surrounded by the Zodiac)

Aligning the Temple

In the beginning I used to draw a circle, do a banishing routine and face the direction of Orion while doing this ritual. In his book Chaos Protocols Gordon White suggested this direction and he elaborates on it connecting to the millennia old tradition of honouring the Headless Hunter in the sky in Star.Ships:

Straddling the modern and supremely ancient world, the Headless Rite is an invocation of an asterism that led tribes across the globe for tens of millennia, that had ‘headless’ star temples raised in honour of it and its consort where hunters would feast, take drugs and learn the skills of grain cultivation, that became associated with stellar immortality (and still grain) to such an extent that great stone maps of it were built upon the earth. In a transparently shamanic survival, alignment with this asterism conferred kingship over the realm of the spirits. So potent was the initiatory power of headlessness – to have one’s head in another realm – that it has survived into two of the three great religions of the Near East in the form of John the Baptist, who ‘initiates’ Christ and thus brings that same promise of victory over death back down to earth.¹⁷

After several executions I found myself more drawn to the Egyptian parts in it and faced the consort and sister of Orion, Isis, in her form as Sothis or the star Sirius.

But once I had worked out the six names to be used according to the PGM, I started following the orientation in the original text towards North. The difference in power to this ritual was very much noticable and I continued facing this direction until today.

As I understand the ritual today I assert that North is the only logical direction on your ascent up. And it's not the magnetic North, it's the celestial North. The visible turning point of the axis mundi, the heart girt by a serpent (the constellation Draco revolves around the polar star).

Having experienced the potency of this proceeding I also completely stopped drawing a circle and banishing. It just doesn't fit. I visualize myself and my changing divine position in the universe during each of the seven steps and as the universe revolves around me while I rise up it becomes the magic circle. As I grow in divine potency after my self-exorcism, there's nothing left to banish.

I am certain that it is quite a risky ritual that needs to be followed through until the end once started. I think there might be unpredictable consequences if one doesn't complete it or skips parts in it. Sometimes it happens that I stumble pronouncing the barbarous names correctly and to be on the safe side, I usually repeat the whole sentence until it feels right.

(Continued in a newer article)

(Update 2026: on the North and the Bear, see below)

Update 2026: Osiris and Seth in Egyptian Sources

Eight years later, with better sources than I had in 2018, I still side with the Osirian camp. But the Egyptian texts themselves add a lot to the picture, and some of it is a fair word to the Typhonians too.

Allusion, not story

The famous story of Osiris' death, the coffin and the fourteen pieces, comes to us mostly from Plutarch, a Greek. Egyptian texts of the pharaonic period "never say that Osiris died", as Erik Hornung puts it; an image "would fix the event and even render it eternal"⁶. Miriam Lichtheim: the death of Osiris "could only be alluded to"⁷. In the Egyptian allusions he is either drowned or cut to pieces, alternatives rather than one story, and the drowning puts him into the Nile's yearly flood⁸.

Onnophris

The name the Stele calls him by, Osoronnophris, is Egyptian: Osiris Wennefer. Jan Assmann translates the epithet as "he who remains matured"; Edward Butler as "Enduring in well-being/the good". For Assmann, Osiris is the god of djet, the time of what has been completed and stays, as against the sun god's time of what comes and is possible⁹.

The whole god in every tomb

I used to think each tomb of Osiris held one piece of him. Butler corrects this: each was a resting place of his whole person, and linking the provinces to his limbs "affirms the nation's indivisibility, not its fragmentation, by literally taking up or 'incorporating' the local cults into the God's body"⁸. In the Late Period this became a rite: forty-two priests, one for each province, carried "the limb specific to that nome" in canopic jars and poured it into a mould shaped like a mummy, with sand and barley. "After a period of eight days, the barley would sprout and the mummiform body would be covered with green."¹⁰

Seth at the prow

Seth is the murderer, but never simply the villain. He also stands "at the prow of the sun god's boat in the act of stabbing Apopis with a huge spear". Assmann: "He represents an evil that is necessary to keep the world going"¹⁰. In the Pyramid Texts Horus sets Seth under Osiris "so that he may lift you up", and the instrument of the Opening of the Mouth, the ritual that restores the dead person's senses and speech, is made of "the iron which issued from Seth": iron, for the Egyptians, came from the sky, as meteorites¹¹.

The Ramesside tale of Horus and Seth tells it with humour. When Isis harpoons Seth in the water, he cries: "Do you love the stranger more than your maternal brother Seth?" She lets him go, and Horus, furious, cuts off his mother's head; she walks on as "a statue of flint without a head". The throne is finally settled by a letter from Osiris in the underworld: "Who among you is mightier than I?" And Seth is kept: "Let Seth, son of Nut, be given to me to dwell with me and be my son. And he shall thunder in the sky and be feared."¹²

A word to the Typhonian camp

"In the older versions, there was always a consensus, with Seth agreeable and compensated at the end, whereas in the late versions, he was punished, annihilated, driven out, and explicitly condemned", nicknamed "the Mede"¹³. The Stele of Jeu is a Roman-era text, from the time when Seth was most hated. I still don't think the god it calls is Seth. But Seth is in the rite: as the one who made the god headless in the first place, and in the iron of the Opening of the Mouth, the ritual that gives the dead their face, their senses and their voice back.

The unseen one

"Whom none has ever seen" need not point to Seth either. The same papyrus as the Stele, in an oracle of Sarapis, names Bainchōōōch, Egyptian b3 n kky, the "spirit (soul) of darkness", alongside the "hurler of shudderful thunder and lightning"¹⁴. A god unseen because he is in the dark.

The North and the Bear

Facing North made the rite stronger for me, and the papyri suggest why that North was charged. Plutarch says the soul of Typhon is the Bear¹⁵. A "Powerful spell of the Bear" in the papyri has you write "the hundred-lettered name of Typhon", and Betz notes that "The association of Typhon with the constellation of the Bear [...] is Egyptian"; the so-called Mithras Liturgy calls the Bear "a golden shoulder of a young bull"¹⁴. Whether the pharaonic Egyptians already saw Seth's foreleg in the Big Dipper is disputed¹⁶. In the Stele's own world, facing North meant facing a sky Seth had a share in.

Delatte, Armand L., ""Études sur la magie grecque. V. Akephalos Theos", Bulletin de correspondance hellénique Année 1914 Volume 38 Numéro 1 pp. 189-249 ↩
Stratton-Kent, Jake, "The Headless One. A Guide to the Underworld.", Hadean Press, Published in June, 2012. 28 pages. ↩
Preisendanz, Karl, "Akephalos. Der kopflose Gott", Beihefte zum Alten Orient 8 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1926) ↩
Reinhold Merkelbach, Maria Totti, "Abrasax: Ausgewählte Papyri religiösen und magischen Inhalts", Sonderreihe Papyrologica Coloniensia, 1991 ↩↩
Dornseiff, Franz, "Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie" ↩
Erik Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, trans. John Baines (Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 151–152. ↩
Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II: The New Kingdom (University of California Press, 1976). ↩
Edward P. Butler, "Osiris", Henadology. ↩↩
Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 77–78; Butler, "Osiris". ↩
Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), chapter "Seth the Iconoclast". ↩↩
Pyramid Texts, utterances 356 and 21, after Edward P. Butler, "Seth", Henadology. ↩
"Horus and Seth", in Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature II, pp. 214–223. ↩
Assmann, The Search for God, pp. 139–140. ↩
PGM V. 1–53, PGM IV. 1331–89 and PGM IV. 475–829, in Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (2nd ed. 1992), with the glossary entry on Bainchooch by R. K. Ritner. ↩↩
Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 21. ↩
Joanne Conman, Ancient Egyptian Sky Lore (2013), against; José Lull and Juan Antonio Belmonte, "A Firmament above Thebes", Journal for the History of Astronomy 37 (2006), for. ↩
White, Gordon, "Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits", Scarlet Imprint (VIII. The Mirror of Heaven, X. Children of the Mother of Heaven) ↩↩
Robert E. Svoboda, AghoraII: Kundalini, Brotherhood of Life Publishing, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA ↩

Shudderful Names

2017-09-12T19:30:00+02:00

(Version 1.0, 12/09/2017)

Every since my discovery of the missing formula in the Stele of Jeu papyrus and its torn edge with the vowel annotation, I've been obsessing over the seven vowels and their use in the PGM (1) and excessively diving into heaps of articles and books about the topic.

My left brain keeps insisting "There's gotta be a system or pattern!" while my right brain keeps smiling, saying "it's all just about the harmonic sounds, dude!".

Anyways, this post serves as a (growing) public collection of my notes about "the shudderful names" and to some extend also the "barbarous words" and how and if they are related to the single spells they are part of.

The Alphabet in Mystic and Magic

The best attempt of an academic analysis of the seven vowels I have found so far is in a German book from 1925 called "Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie" by Franz Dornseiff.

In Chapter II §3 the author lists examples of the vowels and in which context they were used in different papyri and gnostic texts. He states that the prayers that contain vowel variations are addressed to the following Egyptian deities: Isis, Osiris, Thoth-Hermes, Sarapis, Harpocrates-Chnuphis. More than to the Egyptian gods they are used in prayers to the Jewish/Christian god JHVH/IAÔ and in a few cases to the Archangels. Other deities are Helios, Aion, Abrasax, but mostly Apollon and Hekate.

He talks about the directionality of the vowels and the way they are supposed to be pronounced according to the PGM. Ne also notes, that the vowels are used more at the end of invocations than at the beginning, as most powerful magical words. Dornseiff points out that the source of these vowels is most probably to be found in Egyptian theurgy. He presents the two often used quotes by Demetrios and Nicomanchus (see below) and pinpoints the beginning of the use of vowel variations to the end of the 19th dynasty (around 1150 B.C.).

One probable reason for the vowel combinations is the magical practice of seeking a deity's "real name" beyond their given name that ususally does not come close to their true essence in a limited human alphabet. He also notes that one should not forget that not all magicians were pious idealists, some also made up gibberish on the fly, because they had paying customers.

He refers to a paper by his colleague A. Harnack who alleged that the rows of vowels could be a "dialect" of the "convulsive languages" ("speaking in tongues") and that they need to be ecstatically vibrated.

What follows is a list of use cases of different vowel variations, that they are written in triangle shapes, or cycling through them forwards, backwards, and so on and so forth. He does not offer any conclusion about the vowel use at the end of his chapter about this topic, but in general Dornseiff notes that evidence against a randomly used gibberish and for a system is the fact that a lot of the voces magicae including the vowels are often accompanied by an explicit comment about how many letters long they are. Often these numbers refer to the stars: 7 (planets), 12 (zodiac), 28 (mansions of the moon), 36 (decans) or kabbalistic numbers 12, 42, 72. Sometimes they are palindromes, in other cases written in triangle or other shapes (wings, grapes, heart).

Books & Documents

Correspondences

Google Spreadsheet with correspondences found for the seven vowels

Quotes

The Seven Vowels

The Seven Greek Vowels symbolised the seven heavens, or Planets, whose harmony keeps the Universe in existence, each vowel having seven different methods of expression corresponding with a certain Force, the correct utterance of these letters and comprehension of the forces typified being believed to confer supreme power, bringing success in all enterprises and giving complete control over all the powers of darkness.

(William T. Pavitt & Kate Pavitt, 1922, The Book of Talismans, Amulets and Zodiacal Gems, 2nd edn., Rider & Son, London, p.65.)

Greek letters became hieroglyphs, [...] while Egyptian hieroglyphs could be ‘spoken’ in Greek; Egyptian priests claimed Greek vowel sounds as the divine inheritance of Thoth, while Greeks turned the same vowel sounds into the visual insignia of cosmic forces.

(Frankfurter, 1994, “The Magic of Writing and the Writing of Magic.” From p.211)

The Greek initiates also recognized a fundamental relationship between the individual heavens or spheres of the seven planets, and the seven sacred vowels. The first heaven uttered the sound of the sacred vowel Α (Alpha); the second heaven, the sacred vowel Ε (Epsilon); the third, Η (Eta); the fourth, Ι (Iota); the fifth, Ο (Omicron); the sixth, Υ (Upsilon); and the seventh heaven, the sacred vowel Ω (Omega). When these seven heavens sing together they produce a perfect harmony which ascends as an everlasting praise to the throne of the Creator.

(Manly P. Hall. Secret Teachings of All Ages (New York, NE:Tarcher/Penguin, 2003[1928]))

Sound and Harmony

[...] if all existing things were tunes, they would have been a number, but a number of quarter-tones, and their essence would not have been number; and the one would have been something whose substance was not to be one but to be the quarter-tone. And similarly if all existent things had been articulate sounds, they would have been a number of letters, and the one would have been a vowel. And if all existent things were rectilinear figures, they would have been a number of figures, and the one would have been the triangle. And the same argument applies to all other classes.

(Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book X, Part 2)

There are seven vowels, seven strings to the scale, seven Pleiades. . . and seven heroes who attacked Thebes . . . [The Pythagoreans] also assert that xi, psi and zeta are concords . . . because there are only three double consonants, and . . . there are three concords. . . . And they point out that the interval from alpha to omega in the alphabet is equal to that from the lowest note of a flute to the highest, whose number [twentyfour] is equal to that of the whole system of the universe.

(Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book N, 1093a-b, in H. Treddenick (trans.), (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 300-301)

And the tones of the seven spheres, each of which by nature produces a particular sound, arc the sources of the nomenclature of the vowels. These are described as unpronounceable in themselves and in all their combinations by wise men since the tone in this context performs a role analogous to that of the monad in number, the point in geometry, and the letter in grammar. However, when they are combined with the materiality of the consonants just as soul is combined with body and harmony with strings—the one producing a creature, the other notes and melodies—they have potencies which are efficacious and perfective of divine things. Thus whenever the theurgists are conducting such acts of worship they make invocation symbolically with hissing, clucking, and inarticulate and discordant sounds.

(Nicomanchus of Gerasa, "Manual of Harmony")

The seven strings of the magic lyre gave out, as they sounded, vibratory numbers corresponding to the astral waves of the seven planets. The Hierophant applied, for his musical purposes, the mechanism of the cosmic vibrations, and it was thus that at the propitious moment, he proceeded to the animation of the transvitalized phantasm of the Pharaoh. To capture the astral influx of planetary life, and to transfuse it into the mummy, the Hierophant made the seven notes resonate magically: A, G, F, E, D, C, B; according to a slurred ternary rhythm which repeated like a charmed circle.

Then the atmosphere of the tomb was animated by lines of subtle energies, and the prodigy of an extraordinary condensation of cosmic life manifested by the rhythmic palpitations of the supervitalized air.

The astral waves became more and more condensed, so as to form a wondrous fluidic spiral, the shape of the magic vortex of protection and animation whose center was the mummy itself. At that instant, the Hierophant intoned the incantation of astral life and fixed it, following the law of magical correspondences, in the breast of the mummy, whose phantasm was animated by an inextinguishable flame: and the miraculous existence of the Pharaoh's double would last as long as the land of Egypt.

(Fidèle Amy-Sage, "Le secret de la sépulture d'un Pharaon")

Sound is a form of energy. Different vibrations of sound cause varying energy levels. Your state of consciousness can be changed by your own vibrational rate. You can also obtain visions of the gods and shape-shift [...]. When sound is used as a mantra, your concentration, visualization, and power during magic can be accelerated. The rate of vibration in your pronunciation of words and names changes energy molecules. Every cell of a thought, emotion, plant, animal, person, and all that is visible and invisible, vibrates, because every atom of every molecule within a cell is energy. All that is animate and inanimate consists of energy. The human voice produces two different sound qualities: consonants and vowels. Each quality releases and enhances the energy of your consciousness and therefore empowers your divination or magic work.

(Eleanor L. Harris and Normandi Ellis "Ancient Egyptian Magic")

Gematria and Isopsephy

For the monad, therefore, as being beneficent, they assert that there are consequently names ascending, and beneficent, and masculine, and carefully observed, terminating in an uneven number; whereas that those terminating in the even number have been supposed to be both descending, and feminine and malicious. For they affirm that nature is made up of contraries, namely bad and good, as right and left, light and darkness, night and day, life and death. And moreover they make this assertion, that they have calculated the word Deity, (and found that it reverts into a pentad with an ennead subtracted). Now this name is an even number, and when it is written down (on some material) they attach it to the body, and accomplish cures by it. In this manner, likewise, a certain herb, terminating in this number, being similarly fastened around (the frame), operates by reason of a similar calculation of the number. Nay, even a doctor cures sickly people by a similar calculation. If, however, the calculation is contrary, it does not heal with facility. Persons attending to these numbers reckon as many as are homogeneous according to this principle; some, however, according to vowels alone; whereas others according to the entire number. Such also is the wisdom of the Egyptians, by which, as they boast, they suppose that they cognise the divine nature.

(Egyptian Theory of Nature; Their Amulets, Refutation of All Heresies (Book IV), Chapter 44, Hippolytus)

the inhabitants give attention to every branch of learning and especially to astrology; and they use letters which, according to the value of the sounds they represent, are twenty-eight in number, but the characters are only seven, each one of which can be formed in four different ways

(Iambulos Island, Diodorus Siculus, Book II, pg. 37)

Gnostics

"There is no mystery which is more excellent than these mysteries on which ye question, in that it will lead your souls into the Light of the lights, into the regions of Truth and Goodness, into the region of the Holy of all holies, into the region in which there is neither female nor male, nor are there forms in that region, but a perpetual indescribable Light. Nothing more excellent is there, therefore, than these mysteries on which ye question, save only the mystery of the seven Voices and their nine-and-forty powers and their ciphers. And there is no name which is more excellent than them all, the name in which are all names and all lights and all powers.

"Who then knoweth that name, if he cometh out of the body of matter, nor smoke nor darkness nor authority nor ruler of the Fate-sphere nor angel nor archangel nor power can hold down the soul which knoweth that name; but if it cometh out of the world and sayeth that name to the fire, it is quenched and the darkness withdraweth.

"And if it sayeth it to the demons and to the receivers of the outer darkness and their rulers and their authorities and their powers, they will all sink down and their flame will burn and they will cry out: 'Holy, holy art thou, most holy of all holies.'

"And if one sayeth that name to the receivers of the wicked chastisements and their authorities and all their powers and also to Barbēlō and the invisible god and the three triple-powered gods, straightway if one will say this name in those regions, they will all fall one on another, will be undone and destroyed and cry out: 'O Light of all lights, which is in the boundless lights, remember us and purify us.'"

(Of the highest mysteries and of the great name, Pistis Sophia, Book V, Ch. 143)

Iota, the Universe came out; Alpha, they will turn them; Omega, will become the completion of all completions.

(Jesus quote, G . Horner (trans.), "Pistis Sophia" ( London : Macmillan, 1924), p. 180.)

But these are the names which I shall give from the Boundless One downwards. Write them with a sign, that the sons of God should be manifested from this place onwards. This is the name of the Deathless One AAA ΩΩΩ . And this is the name of the sound by which the Perfect Man was moved III. But these are the interpretations of the names of these Mysteries. The first is AAA. Its interpretation is ΦΦΦ . The second is MMM or ΩΩΩ . Its interpretation is AAA. The third is ΨΨΨ . Its interpretation is OOO. The fourth is ΦΦΦ . Its interpretation is NNN. The fifth is AAA. Its interpretation is AAA. He who is upon the throne is AAA. This is the interpretation of the second AAAA AAAA AAAA. This is the interpretation of the whole name.

(G. Horner (trans.), Pistis Sophia, p. 62)

Yea, yea, for I adjure you in the name of the 7 letters that are tattooed on the chest of the father, namely, A 7 (times), E 7 (times), E 7 (times), I 7 (times), O 7 (times), U 7 (times), O 7 (times), yea, yea, that you obey my mouth, at this moment, before it passes and another one comes in its place, and you appear to me in a vision that is not frightening, through the power of the holy father.

(Spell to obtain a good singing voice, London Oriental Manuscript 6794)

(1) Betz, ed. by Hans Dieter (1992). "The Greek magical papyri in translation including the Demotic spells" (2nd ed.). Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

(2) Kieren Barry, "The Greek Qabalah: Alphabetical Mysticism and Numerology in the Ancient World", 1999 by Red Wheel Weiser

Preisendanz' Headless God

2017-09-02T20:30:00+02:00

For my research about the headless one that got way beyond my initial goal of simply translating the text for personal praxis I stumbled upon a publication by Karl Preisendanz, the first translator of the PGM into German in the 1920s, called "Akephalos - The Headless God" The book is a monograph Preisendanz published as a reaction to several publications by other researchers who had misinterpreted the identity of the headless one in his opinion. It is a very interesting book that cleared up a lot of questions and confusions for me and in my opinion has very concise lines of arguments that convinced me more than similar ones by other authors who wrote about the same topic.

It seems to me that there is no English translation of this book, so here is a brief summary of the contents, in case you are interested.

Akephalos - der kopflose Gott

In the preface Preisendanz explains that he had read the work "Akephalos Theos" by A. Delatte and felt the need to publish a paper in order to point out errors and misconceptions in Delatte's work, although he found this work very helpful and inspiring for his own research. Additionally he wanted to argue against R. Wünsch's idea of following Delatte's conclusion of a Seth-Typhonian character of the headless one.

In the first chapter Preisendanz gives a general overview of headlessness in folk magic and mythology around the world. He talks about decapitated ghosts in Germanic lore, the headless Molos and Triton in Greek folklore, general lore of veneration of heads of gods and martyrs, the stoic round god of Varro, the Thracian and Phrygian god Korybas, the Pepelekismenoi of Kypros, headless ghosts of decapitated criminals, animal ghosts without head, some history of separate head burials in pagan Germanic cultures to prevent a return from the underworld, the black headless men on ships in Byzantium, the burning of fallen travelling warriors in Italy and separate burial of their heads for mere practicality, the dismemberment of corpses in ancient Egypt with subsequent reassembly and embalment related to the Osiris cult, the legend of the papyrus head ship from Egypt to Byblos, the importance of headless godliness in Egypt in general.

Preisendanz continues with a rant against Delatte's connection of the headless demon Phonos from the Testament of Solomon with the Graeco-Egyptian god Seth-Typhon and arguments that already the description in the Testament of Solomon states that Phonos has his face on his chest, thus he is "stethokephal" and not "akephal" while the real headless one has no mouth or eyes but looks like a decapitated man.

(Egyptian drawing of the headless one holding a sun disk)

In "The Headless God on Gems" Preisendanz again rants against Delatte's interpretation of gem no. 615 of the numismatic museum of Athens which shows a human figure with the head of a horse or donkey in which Delatte saw the solar god Seth-Typhon and a about Delatte's interpretation of a second Athenian gem of the Roskowitz collection that shows a similar but decapitated figure and an ourobos where D. had claimed that it depicted an act of self-decapitation. Preisendanz doubts these interpretations and concludes that it was probably a depiction of the jackal headed Anubis and the beheaded Osiris like on the gnostic gem of C.W. King that Delatte had correctly pointed out.

What follows is a chapter about Seth in the PGM. Here Preisendanz objects to the syncretism of Osiris, Horos, Apollon, Seth-Typhon and Bes by A. Delatte who sees them all as solar gods who could all be depicted as headless. He deconstructs every single claim by Delatte of Seth being a solar deity: Just because Seth had helped Ra with the removal of Apophis doesn't make him a solar deity. He goes through PGM IV 155-285 proving that there is no proof of Seth-Typhon being a solar god, but a powerful and dreadful spirit, despite ritual details about facing the sun. In PGM VII 961-970, Seth is conjured as a powerful creator god and fire demon, but that does not make him a solar deity either, the same goes for PGM XII 11, 15ff, PGM IV, VII 366.

"The Roman Curse Tablets" is a quite lengthy chapter where Preisendanz deconstructs the identifications of headless or donkey-headed figures with Typhon-Seth by his fellow researchers Richard Wünsch, M. Matters and others. I skipped over this chapter quite a lot, because it is quite boring when not knowing the works Preisendanz referred to.

Preisendanz points out inconsistencies in Wünsch's interpretations because sometimes he sees Osiris as "god of the waters" and on other occasions he connectes Seth to being a water deity. He condemns Wünsch's way too speculative interpretation of the beginning part of conjurations on the roman tablets that says "dee Phrygia, dee Nymphee, Aidonea" as merely misspellings of "dee Ephydrias, dee Nymphaios, Adonai". Apparently Wünsch created a god "Ephydrias", who sits on a water vessel whom he equates with Osiris and a god "Nymphaios", allegedly just another name of the former (god of the water nymphs and Adonai as the Jewish god syncretised with the Greek Aidoneus. WÜnsch describes Osiris as god of the water and the underworld. Preisendanz corrects that instead the names refer to a female demon "Phrygia" and "Nymphee" to be either the plural form of the female water nymphs or as is written in PGM IV 2614 the alias "Nymphê" of the goddess Hekate, which also explains the last name "Adoneia", another name for Hekate as of PGM IV 2564, 2855, 2726. So it's actually all about Hekate. Preisendanz goes on and on about other errors Wünsch apparently made, so I skipped to the end of the chapter where Preisendanz concludes that the Headless God can not definetly be identified within the Roman Curse Tablets, neither by Delatte, nor by Wünsch.

The next chapter, "The Headless God in the PGM", was obviously by far the most interesting one for me.

Preisendanz presents the "Stele of Jeu" text but without all the barbarous names. He explains the mixing of Graeco-Egyptian deities with Jewish elements and claims that the scribe "Jeu" was probably a jewish magician and added his own elements to Graeco-Egyptian magic tech.

Preisendanz states that the headless one is no other than Osiris. One evidence for this is that Osiris has been depicted as headless on a sarcophargus in Kairo. Delatte's claim that Seth is literally also part of the spell is wrong, because "Reibetatheleberseth" is one word, so just taking "seth" out of context is simply false. He acknowledges that "awesome and invisible god" is usually a term for Typhon, but argues that description could also be used for other deities.

(The headless Osiris on a Sarcophargus in Cairo, guarded by Nephtys and Isis)

Preisendanz criticizes the equalization of the headless god with Bes that Delatte concluded about PGM VII 222ff and PGM VIII 64ff. He argues that the former is probably a corrupted and fragmented version of a spell that was written down in a more detailed and correct version as the latter. In the latter version it is clearly Osiris who is being called as "the headless one." The other reason is the sketch that comes with PGM VIII of how to draw Bes. He is not depicted as headless and also not like he is usually depicted - as an ugly and hairy demon with a deformed face on his chest, but as a normal male figure wearing a crown and a sword. About the quite obvious connection of the "headless god, the face on his feet, etc." with Besas in PGM VIII 234, 244 P. argues that Besas in his classic depiction has his face on his chest, so he can't have his "face on his feet" at the same time. The rest of the conjuration also rather hints towards Osiris, the two birds next to the head representing Nephtys and Isis who took the form of two falcons. Preisendanz explains his interpretation of the term having the "face on his feet": Delatte's explanation of the serpent or jackal heads on the feet of some depictions of Bes is not sufficient.

(Drawing of Bes in PGM VIII)

Preisendanz presents images of beheaded captives in Egypt who had their heads between their feet but admits that he could not find any image like that that clearly depicted Osiris. He explains the Egyptian custom of Akroteriasmos, the dismemberment of a body before embalment where the head is usually put between the feet to make it impossible for the dead to wake up and pick it up again. As Osiris is the prototype of the concept of a dead god, so he probably also has had his head between his feet.

(Drawing of beheaded prisoners)

Preisendanz concludes about PGM VIII that instead of a syncreticism of Besas with the Headless One the real explanation is a simple magical practicality: Besas is correctly conjured as a protective spirit, partially by using the provided drawing, but in order to successfully conjure Besas there is a need for a higher authoritative spirit, so obviously Osiris is being called as the headless god, to kick Besas' ass. Preisendanz says Besas is a well known minor folk magic spirit and never depicted as headless, so the only possible identity of the headless one is Osiris.

He lists more evidence of Osiris as headless god, e.g. PGM XII 2, 1ff talks about a beheaded scarab, a symbol closely connected to Osiris, he also refers to the "Book of the Dead" and Budge's work "The Gods". Also the bas relief of Philae apparently shows a beheaded Osiris

In his chapter "The Headless God of the Berlin Papyrus" P. explains in great detail what PGM II is about, that some text seems to be missing and that it is a hymn to a syncretised Helios-Apollon, and that the magic image is a headless deity but it is not 100% clear who. The magic words "Damnameneus" and "Semesilam" hint towards a solar god, also the planetary vowels are usually used in a solar context. The scarab image described in the text and shown as a drawing hints towards that conclusion too.

What follows is a short chapter about two images of the Oslo papyrus where P. explains two headless depictions, of which one could be interpreted as Osiris, but the "questionable artist" drew the image so badly that it's too difficult to clearly interpret.

(one of the headless ones from the Oslo P.)

A very interesting chapter is "Akephalos in the Sky". Here P. describes that on the Dendera Zodiac some of the decan depictions show headless figures. He talks about every single one of them and that it is unfortunately unclear who is being depicted. He regrets that it cannot be proven but that it would be a beautiful connection between the headless one in the decans and the PGM. He refers to the book "Sphaera" by Franz Boll who talks about the decans in detail and that K. Dieterich even connected the drawings of PGM II with zodiac signs in one of his works.

In the last chapter Preisendanz lists examples of talismans showing Osiris as headless one or scarab headed one.

The Six Names

2017-08-19T21:00:00+02:00

Updated version 4.0

During my work on a functional version of the Stele of Jeu for ritual use based on the German translation by Preisendanz¹ and his monograph Akephalos - The Headless God² I hit a massive roadblock.

The ritual requires a formula of 6 names to be written on a parchment and recited facing north. But it surprised me to find no actual mention of these names in the text.

Isaac's Sabaoth

According to what I have seen in books, articles, and online discussions, all modern practitioners use the following voces magicae as the required formula:

AŌTH ABRAŌTH BASYM ISAK SABAŌTH IAŌ

This seems to work well enough for modern chaos magicians. But in the original PGM text there is no indication whatsoever that above words are the formula to be used. These six words are merely the only row of six subsequent voces magicae to be found in this spell³.

On top of that, above transliteration has a typo. It's supposed to be ABAOTH and not ABRAOTH. An observant reader has pointed out in the comments that both, this typo and this choice of six names, are most likely traceable to the book Hermetic Magic: The Postmodern Papyrus of Abaris by S. E. Flowers⁴.

I checked the sources and found that when the spell was first published⁵ in 1852 by Charles Goodwin it did not contain any transliterations of barbarous names. And as preliminary invocation in The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King⁶ by Aleister Crowley the spell neither had this typo, nor any special meaning attributed to these six words. But then again, Crowley was also quite liberal in his translation and adaptation of the spell.

So back to the original source. If you'd want to be persnickety like Preisendanz, who interpreted BASYM⁷ not as a name but as the Aramaic word "ba'shem" or "in the name of", it would only leave five names, wouldn't it?

According to the work "Abrasax" by Reinhold Merkelbach and Maria Totti⁸ from 1991 which includes a number of PGM spells with commentary, AOTH and likely also ABAOTH are shorter forms of SABAOTH. This means that the string of "barbarous names" reads as:

(SAB)AŌTH, (S)ABAŌTH, in the name of ISAAC('s) SABAŌTH-IAŌ

The Orphic Formula

In Betz' Greek Magical Papyri in Translation⁹ you can find a footnote regarding the six names:

The term ὄνομα apparently refers to a formula containing a number of magical words.

At this point in my research, I considered the possibility that the original author of the papyrus was referring to a formula so obvious and well known to magi at the time that simply mentioning "the six names" would have been enough for the reader to understand what was meant. What supports this idea is the fact that throughout the PGM, some voces magicae that are commonly used are just noted down as "do the usual" or as abbreviations, e.g. "ABERAMEN (formula)" in PGM IV, 182 actually refers to the palindrome:

ABERAMENThŌOULERThEXANAXEThRELUOŌThNEMAREBA

(See also Leonardo Drakon's awesome post on this)

But what could be the well known "six names"? One of the most famous magical hexagrammata of the time that can be found on numerous talismans and in other protective magical contexts in dozens of places between Egypt and Sicily are the Ephesia Grammata, also called Orphic formula. This terminology can also be found in PGM VII, 452:

But if you cause [the plate] to be buried or [sunk in] river or land or sea or stream or coffin or in a well, write the Orphic formula, saying, "ASKEI KAI TASKEI" and, taking a black thread, make 365 knots, ...

The six names of the "Ephesia Grammata" are:

ASKION KATASKION LIX TETRAX DAMNAMENEUS AISION

I highly recommend the awesome paper The Ephesia Grammata: Logos Orphaikos or Apolline Alexima pharmaka? by Radcliffe G. Edmonds III. and this great post over at the Hekate Covenant on a different version of the Ephesa Grammata that is being used in the PGM.

While the orphic formula is indeed a powerful choice that would make much more sense to use instead of the widespread Isaac Sabaoth one discussed above, this is not the end of the story...

Scarab Hunt

The German Preisendanz translation¹ has a very interesting footnote regarding the "6 names". It claims that the original papyrus contains an annotation about the missing formula! Betz had merely hinted at this. The Preisendanz footnote says:

"On the upper edge of the column is written the (damaged) name ...AIE AIŌI EYIAE AEI ŌŌE AIEOYEYŌ... [and that] the formula is 49 letters long and has a value of 9999 ... reference to a different spell about resurrection of a scarab that has the same name with 49 letters."

(damaged note on the edge of the London Papyrus 46 aka. PGM V)

I also asked my friend Spiro who knows Greek to take a look at it and he interprets the annotation as something along the line of :

αιη αιωι ηυιαη αη ιω ωη αιηουευω ... ιωη οαυ αεη υωυω. And this is what the revived words of the scarab call for.

I found some spells in the same papyrus that involve a scarab: PGM V 213-303 which is neither about a resurrection of the beetle, nor does it have any voces magicae in it. Another one is PGM VII, 505-28 which features the 48 letter long magical name "AŌ SATHREN ABRASAX IAŌAI AEŌ ĒŌA ŌAĒ IAO IĒO EY AĒ EY IE IAŌAI", but isn't about resurrecting the bug. The only spell about actually reviving a scarab in the PGM is number IV, 475-829 but it only contains very short barbarous names.

But eventually I found something:

PGM II. 64-183 features a drawing of a scarab at the bottom edge. The described ritual is an "alternative procedure" of a conjuration of Apollon-Helios for wisdom and blessing. Especially when you look at the original papyrus (Berlin P. 5026) you will find it in the third column on the bottom.

And guess what image is drawn right next to this column? A HEADLESS figure! The same one that Jake Stratton-Kent used on his little "Headless One" chapbook.

In the middle of the column above the scarab (PGM II. 127) it is written:

I am he, NN, who have presented myself to you, and you have given me as a gift the knowledge of your most great name, of which the number is 9999: IĒ IE IA IAĒ IAE IEY IĒA IŌA IEY IĒI ĒIA EA EĒ ĒE ŌĒ ĒŌ EĒE EEĒ ĒEE AAŌ ŌEA EAŌ ŌI ŌE ĒŌ EĒ EAE III OOO YYY ŌŌŌ IY EY OY ĒEA IĒEA EAE EIA IAIE IĒA IOY IŌE IOY IĒ IĒ IĒ IĒIE;

Sounds familiar? Of course it does! Vowels!

Is this the formula the author was referring to in the scribbled note regarding the scarab?

Perhaps the annotation on the Stele of Jeu papyrus was done hastily. The author might have remembered that the name to be used was "on that scarab whatever page", that it enumerates to 9999 and consists of something along the line of "...AIE AIŌI EYIAE AEI ŌŌE AIEOYEYO...".

I threw the Greek letters from Preisendanz transcript into an isopsephy (Greek gematria) calculator but they add up to 15446. Weird...did I miss something?

When I cross-checked Kieren Barry's "Greek Qabalah"¹⁰ for the correct isophsephic values I stumbled upon the solution by coincidence.

There it was! I found it on page 96:

A talisman that features an image of Harpocrates (Horus) seated on a lotus flower surrounded by triads of adoring animals; on its reverse, the formula:

χαβραχ φνεσχηρ φιχρο φνυρω φωχω βωχ

A magical formula apparently known as "The Great Name" which gematrically adds up to 9999!

And it was there all the time!

This exact formula is written shortly AFTER the above mentioned vowels in the middle of the column with the scarab on it! It is mis-spelled and the whitespace is off, and due to the typo it actually doesn't add to 9999 but only 8139

χαβραχ φλιεσ κηρφι νυρω φωχω βωχ

According to footnote 39 in Betz⁹:

The spacing of this formula has been changed to conform to the spacing of the same formula found elsewhere in the PGM (see I. 141—42; III. 77—78, 151-52 , etc.)

the editor also erroneously "fixed" it to:

CHABRACH PHLIESKĒR PHIKRO PHINYRŌ PHŌCHŌBŌCH

Instead, the correct formula of the six names that add up to 9999 that the scribe hastily (or purposefully?) mis-spelled are actually supposed to be written like this:

χαβραχ φνεσχηρ φιχρο φνυρω φωχω βωχ

CHABRACH PHNESCHĒR PHICHRO PHNYRŌ PHŌCHŌ BŌCH

BINGO!

Chimeric Splicing

Now, the perfectionist in me wondered: what about the vowels from the annotation?

I remembered that in Merkelbach/Totti's Abrasax⁸ the authors offer a slightly different take on the annotation:

On the upper edge an annotation; First a series of vowels, then: These are (in total) 49 letters; the sum of the calculation is 9999.

No mention of a scarab here. According to the authors, it's the vowels that are supposed to add up to 9999.

Sure...let's do this...

Minus whatever vowels got lost from the torn corner of the papyrus we still have 39 vowels that add up to a gematric value of 8291. That leaves us with ten missing vowels that need to add up to 1708 to reach the required 9999.

I spent over an hour trying to splice the missing vowels into the ones we already have - and I failed!

It was just impossible to create an isopsephy value of 1708 with just 10 vowels and possible values of 1, 5, 8, 10, 70, 400, 800 without deleting any of the letters that we already have. Aaarrgh!

So I went full OCD and looked back at the original papyrus and deciphered the handwritten letters myself. I noticed that the first ypsilon (in ĒYIAĒ) seems to have been actually quite a guess by Preisendanz. More than half of the letter is missing at the top. It could totally also be another letter the scribe does not necessarily write in the full line height, for example a miniscule omega.

So I tried again with ĒŌIAĒ in the series of vowels instead of ĒYIAĒ:

αιη αιωι ηωιαη αη ιω ωη αιηουευω ιωη οαυ αεη υωυω

This leaves us with a value of 8691 and 1308 missing. Back to the splicing table. Eventually I got it!

If we add 1 omega, 1 ypsilon, 1 omicron, 3 iotas, 1 epsilon, and 3 alphas to get from 39 letters to the required 49 we reach an isopsephy sum of 9999!

To put these new letters into a meaningful combination I tried for quite a while to make them adhere to the following rules:

they need to sound nicely and in tune with the existing vowels when vibrating the whole series
be made up of realistic vowel combinations that already exist in the PGM, and
hypothetically fit into the empty space of the missing papyrus corner.

I eventually succeeded! Here is the chimerically spliced vowel series of the annotation:

αιη αιωι ηωιαη αη ιω ωη αιηουευωαι εαι υο ιαω ιωη οαυ αεη υωυω (9999)

and a photoshopped version of the papyrus itself:

Conclusion

Unfortunately the London Papyrus 46 with the annotation is torn on the edge, so we will never know what it really said but the reference to the scarab papyrus makes sense. Dfinitely more so than repeating the completely randomly chosen "AŌTH ABAŌTH BASYM ISAK SABAŌTH IAŌ" formula.

So, why not use the magically resurrected 49 vowels of the annotation in addition to the famous greatest name that both enumerate to 9999:

AIĒ AIŌI ĒŌIAĒ AĒ IŌ ŌĒ AIĒOYEYŌAI EAI YO IAŌ IŌĒ OAY AEĒ YŌYŌ

CHABRACH PHNESCHĒR PHICHRO PHNYRŌ PHŌCHŌ BŌCH

I guess the only solution to the missing formula is the magic solution: take it, use it, experiment with it, and see where it will take you!

Preisendanz, Karl, "Papyri graecae magicae", Band 1 (Leipzig, 1928) ↩↩
Preisendanz, Karl, "Akephalos. Der kopflose Gott", Beihefte zum Alten Orient 8 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1926) ↩
Someone on /r/occult had an interesting dissection of the 6 word name AŌTH ABRAŌTH BASYM ISAK SABAŌTH IAŌ. ↩
Flowers, Stephen E. "Hermetic Magic: The Postmodern Papyrus of Abaris." Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 1995. Archive Copy ↩
Goodwin, Charles Wycliffe, ed. Fragment of a Græco-Egyptian Work Upon Magic: From a Papyrus in the British Museum. No. 2. Deighton, 1852. Archive Copy ↩
Crowley, Aleister, and Solomon (King of Israel.). Goetia. First Impressions, 1904. Archive Copy ↩
בְּשֵׁם, [b'shem] derived from בְּ־ in; by and שֵׁם name. ↩
Reinhold Merkelbach, Maria Totti, "Abrasax: Ausgewählte Papyri religiösen und magischen Inhalts", Sonderreihe Papyrologica Coloniensia, 1991 ↩↩
Betz, ed. by Hans Dieter (1992). "The Greek magical papyri in translation including the Demotic spells" (2nd ed.). Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. ↩↩
Kieren Barry, "The Greek Qabalah: Alphabetical Mysticism and Numerology in the Ancient World", 1999 by Red Wheel Weiser ↩

Ankle of God?

2017-06-15T18:00:00+02:00

When I translated the planetary prayers from the English translation of the Harleianus 5596 manuscript (Hygromanteia) by Marathakis into German for my personal use I stumbled over this peculiar expression in the prayer to Jupiter:

I conjure you, most valorous and most beneficial Jupiter, by the immeasurable ankle of god.

Marathakis seems to have been puzzled by this too as he added a footnote claiming that it must have been a corrupted text because he could not find any other reference to this 'ankle of god'.

Digging a bit around myself I came to a different conclusion. The Greek word for 'ankle' is αστράγαλος and the term might actually refer to a game of chance similar to dice popular in ancient Greece and elsewhere that was played with ankle bones:

Knucklebones (astragali), were an essential part of many ancient games: αστραγαλισμοσ was played using four astragali with different values on each side […] πευτελιξοι was played with five astragali, simultaneously thrown into the air to be caught on the back of the hand. Natural knucklebone was usually cut down, grinded, drilled and filled with lead. (source)