SUBLUNAR SPACE - astrology

To Ram Through

2021-05-02T16:30:00+02:00

This is a half a year late quick report of personal gnosis that followed my initiation into the sphere of Mars right before he went retrograde in August 2020. I learned about the art of war, energy management, and to follow my instincts.

I admit it wasn't the best Astrological election to do my initiation into the sphere of Mars on Tuesday, August 18th. Mars was squaring Saturn, but also in a trine with a combust Mercury. But it was a New Moon and Aries was rising during the hour of Mars. I followed my intuition and just did it. My tropical sun-sign is Aries, so is my sidereal ascendant as well as my Lot of Daemon. So far, martian space weather has been mostly auspicious in my life.

I got myself into the right mood by listening to some war-glorifying electronic anthems from the local anti-german subculture, like "Alles musz in Flammen stehen" ("Everything must be in flames") by Das Flug, or Björn Peng's "We Do" and the theme of one of my favourite post-apocalyptic b-movies "Hardware". As soundtrack for the initiation itself I chose an organ arrangement of Gustav Holst's "Mars. Bringer of War".

My libation of choice was a deep port wine and I was excited to fumigate some of the Canarian dragonblood I had harvested on Tenerife some years ago. I decorated the altar with my taiji practice broadsword and a selection of corresponding Tarot cards: Ace of Wands, The Chariot, The Tower, ...The Force? I hesitated with the latter because it represents a more feminine yin form of martian energy but it made me think of Athena, the sister of Ares, symbolizing a more disciplined, strategic side of war. I wasn't sure about it, so I put it back into the card box.

Utilizing my Psithemius table of practice the invocation of Samael went smoothly. Like in my first use of the device for my solar initiation I got visual feedback again this time: the silhouette of a staff or spear wielding man appeared in front of my inner eye while gazing into the crystal.

Getting Things Done

I did not expect to have instant effects from the ritual, but already from the next day I had a burst of energy that lasted for a good week. I followed an urge to clear out our basement, a project I had successfully postponed over and over for months already. I also finally felt very motivated to start working on renovating our newly purchased transporter to turn it into a campervan. I worked on it almost every day.

A few days later things got weird. At 5 in the morning I was woken up by an obnoxious digital sounding noise. It came from my phone that was charging in the kitchen. It was an alarm. But the phone showed no indicator, no snooze button, no sign of the usual alarm interface. It stopped when I hit the volume down button. Then I saw that the phone was actually set to fully silent - even the alarms. It shouldn't have made any sound. Weird! When I went back to bed, slightly confused and annoyed, my daughter E suddenly started to giggle and cackle in her sleep. It creeped the hell out of me. Later that day I was sitting on the couch in our living room and opened a letter from the Police. Allegedly I had bumped into someone's car while pulling out of a parking lot. I was devastated and scared of the legal consequences. Suddenly my daughter came to me with a proud face to show me something she had done. I almost fell off the couch...

She handed me the Force card of my tarot deck, cleanly cut into two halves and the rounded corners clipped off. I should have known better but instead I yelled at her and she started crying. Of course she didn't know or understand what she had done. I was confused. I clearly remember having put this card back into its box. How did she get it? And how come it was the exact one I had so hesitated with? It struck me like an answer: "No, not this card is not Mars!"

And in combination with the letter from the Police! Samael clearly teaching some lessons here. I guessed this was about obedience, honoring rules and questioning my relationship with authorities. Things I have always had difficulties with.

The Art of War

The core martian teachings unfolded in the following weeks. But due to privacy concerns regarding a client I work as a consultant for I cannot go into any of the juicy details. All I can vaguely disclose is they had experienced an internal breach of trust that resulted in a power struggle destabilizing the whole company. Suddenly and out of nowhere my technical expertise was needed, but in more ways than anticipated. I found myself placed in the role of a war-general: assuming and predicting the next steps of the enemy and working on strategies to anticipate them.

My bursts of energy of the first week after the rite had been focused on my own personal projects, random and not very controled. Now I learned that directing martian energies towards a greater goal beyond mere personal gain and satisfaction seems to exponentially amplify them. My martial personality traits bloomed as never before and I felt contented to a whole new level.

This chapter lasted almost the whole Mars retrograde phase but ended in a glorious victory. The internal enemy was defeated, their actions repelled and retaliated. I was high from pride, the client both as surprised by my skills as I was and very satisfied by my work. Soon after, we agreed on a long term commitment. I felt very lucky, because the pandemic had killed my 15 year career from one day to another and I really needed a new job anyway.

Ovine Instincts

The other "thing" that happened in the aftermath of my Mars initiation was more of a process than an event. It started out as just a subtle but then day after day increasing irrational feeling of panic and looming danger. I got very anxious about it but at the same time it also felt eerily familiar.

In the the last decade I have already learned to trust my general instincts and gut feelings about life decisions more than my rational faculties. Ever since treading an enchanted path I tend to attribute this subtle "knowing" to my "higher self", "daimon", or my "guardian angel". When I found out that the planetary ruler of my astrological lot of daimon (Aries) is Mars I wasn't surprised at all. This intuitive force has always felt that way to me.

The growing anxiety felt exactly like that. Almost animal-like. An ovine precognition of imminent danger. And it was clearly related to the pandemic. Day after day I felt a stronger urge that we must escape Berlin as fast as possible, or else...

I talked to my wife about it and she trusted me. We came up with a crazy plan. Our initial incentive to buy a van and convert it into a camper was to travel France, Spain, and Portugal. We even did a test camping trip through the South of Germany in July and really loved it. Well, then pandemic related travel restrictions were put in place, so we had to ditch that whole idea. Now it was back on the table, but modified. Not "travel" but "escape".

At this point we didn't really know what to escape from but we knew where to: The Canary Islands.

That in itself seemed quite crazy: drive to an archipelago off the coast of Morocco, almost 4000km away, by car?! Mars didn't think it was crazy, so that's what we ended up doing...but that's going to be the content of another article.

Postscriptum

The police sent a letter a few weeks later that the case was dropped. And eventually also my intuition was right. After we left Berlin, lockdown measures got implemented, all childcare and schools closed. Most flights cancelled. Travel restricted. We would have been stuck in a locked down metropolis during a cold and dark winter with a bored and anxious child without kindergarten to go to and without friends to meet. Thanks to Mars we avoided a mental health crisis.

Canary Capricorn

2020-03-02T20:45:00+01:00

This is a detailed report of strange days full of pine tree portals, morning glory vines, tachycardia, synchronicities and personal gnosis that preceded (or retroactively followed) my initiation into the sphere of Saturn during a vacation with my wife and daughter on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

Escaping Winter

In the last years the time after Christmas has always been quite a downer. Berlin falls into a mode of total greyness that just makes you want to hibernate. Usually my freelance economy is also hibernating during that time when there are no jobs around. For this year my partner T. and I decided to escape this misery and booked vacations on my beloved Canary archipelago - first a couple of days on the chthonic gods' black rock altar manifested as the island of Lanzarote and then three weeks on the sacred island of Tenerife. We prepared for relaxed weeks, but ended up in wonderland...

A few days after we arrived on Tenerife things became very strange. It all started on a Wednesday, two days after we arrived by sea with a ferry from Lanzarote. The trip between the islands was beautiful but also wavy and quite long. All tired and unnerved from the journey we arrived at a small and quite cold little hut in the mountains of La Esperanza. The hut was cute but had no heating, just a malfunctioning fireside. That Wednesday we all decided to go for a walk in the forest which according to the map was only minutes away. Remembering the ancient pine trees we had visited last time we came to this island, I let my offline-map-app Osmand show me all points of interest of the "tree" category and chose the closest one to our house.

Ten minutes later we found ourselves in a stunningly beautiful forest of mostly pine trees with eucalyptus groves and small leaved shrubbery on hilly ground covered in an endless carpet of pine needles. The walk was very soothing and gave us back a sense of peace of mind. We eventually arrived at our waypoint marker: a really creepy and old pine tree that must have barely survived a wildfire. Its trunk was hollowed out and from the remaining black bark dripped thousands of threads of golden resin. The bottom part of the trunk was so thoroughly burnt from all sides it created a hole you could see through to the other side, large enough for a person to crawl through.

Baal's Portal

Well, that's what we did, jokingly calling it a "gateway to another dimension". First I, then my wife T. and a bit more hesitantly, my 3 years old daughter E. stepped through the tree trunk. It was fun! Before leaving I decided I wanted a branch from the tree to keep as a magic wand because maybe the old pine had been struck by lightning which is supposed to be the perfect magically charged wood for wands. I circled the tree four times and threw a small log at one of the branches that broke off. The branch was not as straight as I had hoped for but was a bit crooked like a sickle, but I kept it anyway.

We walked a bit further, had a small picnic and started our way back to the car. Making our way through a bushy and narrow path downhill my daughter started to get a bit tired and bored and made up one of her roleplaying games. She declared: "I am Juno now! You have to call me Juno, OK?” I smiled and nodded and we continued our descent. Suddenly I remembered that the ancient mother goddess who was venerated by the aboriginal population of the Canarian archipelago and who had been syncretized into the Catholic patron saint Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria was assumed to have been the Catharginian goddess Tanit, whom the Romans dubbed "Juno Caelestis." What a curious synchronicity!

In the following night I had a strange dream involving a village road that we needed to urgently pass through and that it had something to do with Saturn. We needed to pick up a brown rental car of the type "Reverend" and it was a brown SUV stretch-limousine. The pick-up location was at a wide sandy beach and there were plenty of people wearing suits wildly racing stretch-limousines across the sand and performing wheelies and other tricks. It was loud and stormy. I looked along the beach and saw a body of a woman lying face down in the wet sand, white roaring waves breaking violently around her. Suddenly a humanoid giant emerged out of the whitewater and carefully picked up the body. The woman was was my wife! I ran to the giant as fast as I could. T. was confused but seemed fine. I thanked the giant and suddenly had a moment of realization. I looked at her, saying "If they are on our side, this must be really important!" Then I woke up.

Horned Gods

I obsessively thought about the "Saturn" part all day long. I just couldn't shake it off. In the evening I did a search for "Saturn" in my collected research documents folder on my computer related to myths and archaeological findings of the Canary Islands and found an interesting paper¹ I had not read yet. It was about a curious theory that the Canaries must have been visited by Christian missionaries before the official arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the late 14th century, because the aboriginal population mainly venerated a heavenly creator god and his holy mother when encountered. The author found this a too curious coincidence and looked into what numinous creatures local folklore had declared "devils" like in so many other Christianized areas of Europe where the previous pagan gods were either syncretized into Saints or declared evil demons. He found matching stories about "wooly goat or sheep like creatures" with "red eyes" an on one island a "wooly black haired man" who were usually appeased on mountain tops with offerings of milk and butter. The author's theory was that this was probably their god before they started believing in a transcendental heavenly father. He related the goaty god to Baal-Hammon, who was the other prime deity next to Tanit worshipped in Catharge and throughout many areas of North Africa, primarily by Berber tribes. In the paper¹ it was mentioned that the Romans saw in Baal-Hammon a form of Saturn.¹

Mind blown, I went to bed and thought a lot about everything I had learned. Then it dawned on me: Saturn! Kronos! Baal-Hammon! My dream and the forest walk suddenly made sense in an uncanny way. The pine tree is considered a Saturnian creature. The branch I had broken off: it looked like a scythe! My daughter suddenly coming up with the name "Juno". Tanit!

The next days were weirdly interwoven with synchronicities. I felt strangely disconnected from life and seemed to experience everything from a weird observer perspective. I obsessively started to think about doing a ritual for Saturn or Baal-Hammon. Maybe using the Trithemius method from "Seven Spheres"? I didn't have my "table of practice" with me. I would need to make one. I needed materials, incenses, candles, corresponding plants... The moment I had just finished this last thought I just finished parking our car next to a park in the city of La Laguna and almost fell into a gigantic hedge completely overgrown by purple Morning Glory vines. There it is! A Saturnian plant! We walked through the city and past a large mural sculpture made from plastic trash. It was a black crow! A Saturnian animal! Needless to say that I noticed SUVs everywhere we drove to, all in this weird brown color like the one in my dream.

One afternoon we took a walk along the large meadows surrounding the little house we had rented for our vacation. Suddenly a large flock of sheep entered our neighboring field with their archaic looking shepherd and his dogs. Half of the livestock were sheep, the other half a strange looking breed of black and very wooly goats with very long corkscrew-like horns. "Baal-Hammon" I thought. The "wooly goat god" of the Canaries. Also "Capricorn" popped into my mind. Of course. The sun just entered the sidereal zodiac sign of Capricorn, home of the planet Saturn who would also join his sign in the upcoming days. This was too much!

At night I couldn't sleep well. Something really bothered me. It was the fact that the Catharginian cults of Tanit and Baal-Hammon were tightly connected to human sacrifice, specifically child sacrifice. Followers had allegedly offered their firstborns to their gods, unless the whole story was just Greek, Jewish and later Christian propaganda. Nobody really knows. But it bothered me a lot, being a father and all. I did not want to go that path of syncretizing Saturn with Baal-Hammon. It just felt: wrong! In the night I had a nightmare of which the only image I remembered upon waking in panic was holding the limp body of my daughter in my hands.

Another evening my wife and I had a long and serious talk about our current life. It was a talk that had been long overdue. About our financial situation. About our job situation and occupational outlooks. About the lack of overview over our assets. About living from day to day, the lack of perspective and planning. About stability and getting our shit together. It was good. We also had more and more serious talks about what we want in our life. About where we want to live our life. About how much we loved it here and whether we want to stay in Berlin or relocate to the Canary Islands. A once wild dream suddenly became a concrete topic that needed attention, consideration, planning. Saturn in Capricorn. It all felt appropriate and weirdly controlled, as if external forces made us finally have these talks.

Transience

I felt very light-headed and dizzy one early evening and went to bed earlier than usual. I felt weirdly sick. My body was completely exhausted, but my mind was highly alert. I took this as an opportunity to try to induce "sleep paralysis" and attempt and out of body experience. It didn't fully work. I was able to shift my awareness around in the room and even push it outside of the house, but wasn't sure how much of it was just vivid imagination. It was a strange evening and I had feverish repetitive dreams that night without actually having a fever. The following evening our daughter seemed extraordinarily restless and crazy. Even for a three and a half year old. She was clumsy and whiny and when my wife took her on her lap to comfort her she suddenly said: "her heart seems very fast!". I put my ear on our daughter's chest and counted. 22 in 6 seconds. Holy Shit. A heart rate of 220 beats per minute! We calmed her down and went to bed, hoping for her pulse to slow down during her sleep.

It didn't.

The next day we rushed to the hospital. The closest one was the University Hospital Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria. How appropriate, I thought. We were treated nicely and with patience, although the emergency ward was completely overcrowded and in chaos. Nobody spoke English or German, yet we managed with my very limited Spanish. The very young doctors in the pediatric section did an electrocardiogram and gave our little one a shot of adenosine. A heart reset. It stops the heart for a moment. It is a very scary thought. But it works. It did work. Her little heart reset to normal speed and we were very relieved. She was very scared and confused. Poor thing.

Apparently she had relapsed into a fairly common heart condition she had as a small baby which she was supposed to be cured from a long time ago. During the next 6 hours staying in the hospital for observation so many things went through my mind. About parenthood and responsibility. About not taking things for granted. About more awareness of risks. About protecting my child better from insensible doctors. About fear of loss and parental anxieties. It was hell. But my daughter loved it. So much attention and hours of cartoons.

Eventually we could go home. When I left the building to get our car I saw a rainbow in the sky above the city. Problem was that I couldn't find our car anymore. Where had I parked it? I randomly walked up and down the small roads around the hospital. They all looked the same. Then I saw the rainbow again, at the end of a small street. I took a turn and walked towards it to get a better look and suddenly there it was in front of me: our car!

Temporality

That evening I was scared to the bones. Baal-Hammon. Saturn. Child sacrifice. A moment of death before the heart resets. My nightmare of holding my limp daughter. It was way too much. I wanted it all to stop. I suddenly felt almost compelled to do a ritual. Not to start something, but to stop it. The next day I gave my wife a day off to recover from the stress and I took my daughter to Puerto de la Cruz, to do something nice, buy her ice-cream, visit some playground. The secondary objective was to go to the local Esoteric shop and a paper shop to buy ritual accessories. A quartz crystal. Storax incense. Black paper. Silver pen. It had to be done.

At some pont it hit me! Saturn! Father of time! Of course! I realized that everything that happened in the last days had the strange taste of initiation to it. I remembered the Jovial initiation I did last year. The feeling of outside perspective on my own life. The sparks of inspiration. The lessons and emotions. All the weird synchronicities that happened after I initiated into the sphere of Jupiter. This was the same but different. Why did all of this happen BEFORE my initiation ritual and not AFTER? Why? Because Saturn rules time! He can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. Why not reverse it and let the initiation ritual ripple into the past instead of the future, or why not both ways? It was crystal clear to me now that I had to do the ritual as soon as possible. I decided to do it on the 25th of January. New Moon in sidereal Capricorn, sun also, and Saturn just entering his home sign too. Plus it was a Saturday. Perfect space weather. I asked my Tarot whether it was a good election and what to expect.

To my defense: it wasn't just me who felt this omnipresent looming weirdness. T. felt it too. Ever since we crawled through that creepy tree, she said. Oh god, that tree. It was true. Like another dimension! We decided that we needed to go back and crawl through it again – this time from the other side! And we were not joking.

On Friday and especially on Saturday I felt awful. Very depressed and sad for no apparent reason, anxious and clumsy and very snappy. Tired and unnerved we barely managed to go back to the tree, but we did. It had to be done. I circled it four times, this time clockwise, and all three of us climbed back through the gaping hole in the charred trunk.

We suddenly felt very relieved and strangely happy and walked back to the car.

Calling Qaftsiel

In the evening I packed all my ritual accessories I had gathered and prepared in the days before and got into the car around sunset. I drove down the village road to a hedge I had spotted before. Overgrown by Morning Glory! I harvested a few vines with the purple flowers and hit the road uphill towards the mountain. It was pitch black as I drove up the serpentine roads through the forest. After cancelling a hike up to the mountain top due to the darkness and also deciding not to use a cave near the road due to unbearable urine stench I spontaneously opted for a manmade cave I had marked on my phone-map a few days before. It was just off an easy to find hiking path and should be doable even in the darkness.

I was a bit scared walking through the forest at night but I felt excitement and an urge to push through with the plan. I climbed down a steep hill into a small valley in total darkness, slipping on the pine needles and mossy rocks. My phone reception went dead. I should have left my coordinates. Fuck it. Let's do it. I eventually found the cave! It was a small horizontal mine shaft from old attempts to dig a tunnel for water. There are thousands of these on the island. This one was around a meter in diameter and just two meters deep into the rock. But it was dry and clean and fortunately too inaccessible to be used as a toilet. It was perfect!

I set up my altar and table of practice, decorated it with the flowers and checked the time. Almost an hour left until the appropriate planetary hour of Saturn. I crawled back out and sat down on a rock. I closed the flashlight and looked around. Complete darkness. Complete silence. Just the wind in the treetops and omg, the stars!

I was mesmerized by the beauty of the night-sky. The Pleiades were right above my head and I saw a satellite pass by when I looked up. I stared into the sky for a long time lying on my back enjoying each moment that seemed like eternity. Then it was time for the ritual.

It took quite a while. I started with the day's prayer of my ongoing novena to La Virgen de La Candelaria and did a full Headless Rite following my usual new moon routine. The cave filled up with the incense smoke and hummed in resonance with the frequency of my voice while I recited the prayers of the Seven Spheres protocol. I was an amazing feeling.

After I was done I had such an intense feeling of relief and peace of mind that I got high from it. Absolute Clarity.

I somehow made it back to the car and drove home. The remaining days on the island were dominated by peacefulness and joy. Hardly have I felt so happy and clear minded. My family too.

Cold and dry in the head. Capricorn season.

Wipf, Karl A. "Der sogenannte Hochgottglaube der Altkanarier." Almogaren 15 (1984): 45-76. ↩↩↩

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.