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Planetary
Magick is the next system to layer onto one's
practice, after mastery and understanding of
Solar, Lunar and Elemental Magick. If you have a
yearning for an ancient link to magickal practice,
it is more likely to be found through the seven
"fixed stars" or planets than by any particular
witchcraft tradition or magickal system, most of
which date to the 1950's or Medieval times.
In ancient times, the movements of the "planets"
were easy to observe as different from the stars.
Most of the stars rotated in unison, over the
course of the night, but seven heavenly bodies
could be counted in different rhythms. Fastest
moving among them is the Moon, whose orbit has a
periodicity of about 29 days. Faint, but
still observable much of the year also, Mercury
travels its path every 59 days (or 88 days, it used
to be believed). Venus at 243 days, the Sun itself
at 365 days, Mars at 687 days, Jupiter at 12 years
and elder Saturn takes 29 years to complete its
circuit, from an EarthlingÄôs
perspective.
From Sumerian times, these unique heavenly bodies
were seen as representations of the gods, if not
gods themselves. And through the ages, the names of
these planets have changed, but the roles of the
gods they have been named for have changed very
little. For example, in ancient Sumer, Enki was the
name for the planet we now call Mercury, and they
are both gods of information and communication. The
Babylonians called the planet Mars by the name
Nergal, who was also god of war. Our beloved planet
Venus was Aphrodite in Greece, Astarte in
Phoenicia, Ishtar in Babylon, and Inanna in ancient
Sumer, love goddesses all of them. Solaris or
Helios is the Sun god, Iuppiter or Jupiter is a god
of kingship and growth, Selene or Luna is goddess
of the Moon
The association or correspondences of these gods
with the planets is discernible from their colors,
movements, or time signatures. Saturn, with its
lengthy period, was associated with elder or death
gods, gods of the underworld or harvest, master of
time, architect of destiny. Mercury, with its
speedy cycle and quick changes of direction were
related to the messenger god.
Some astrologers and magicians have added Neptune,
Uranus, and Pluto to the classic seven planets.
These planets are not discernible to the eye
without telescopes, and therefore they are not as
familiar to humanity, and they have fewer Earthly
correspondences. Neptune is viewed as a higher
frequency of Venus, Uranus likewise is an octave
over Mercury, and Pluto is the dark reflection of
the Sun. Their distance from our planet makes
magickal correspondence much more tentative and not
especially useful to most practitioners.
Most
important for the modern practitioner is that,
since the times of the most ancient western
civilizations, these planets or deities have
determined one of the most basic conventions of
social organization: the seven day week. Each day
is said to be
ÄúruledÄù by
one of the seven planets, and further, each hour of
the day and each hour of the night are ruled by the
same succession of planetary deities. We have lost
a bit in the translation of the names of the week
to the Germanic roots. The Norse gods are not
associated with the planets themselves, though
their diety functions are still correspondent to
the ancient rulers. The Latin names of the planets
and the days still correspond exactly.
- Sol = Sun = Sunday,
- Luna = Moon = Monday (Moon-day),
- Mars = Mars = Tuesday (Norse Tiu, a
war-god),
- Mercurius = Mercury = Wednesday (Wodin or
Odin, a scholar/magician god),
- Iuppiter = Jupiter = Thursday (Thor, god of
thunder),
- Venus = Venus = Friday (named for Norse
goddess of love Freya) and
- Saturnus = Saturn = Saturday.
Note
that our familiar workweek begins on Monday, ruled
by the quickest planet, and ends on
SaturnÄôs slow day, the day of
rest. More recent calendars have changed the
Sabbath to Sunday, or alternatively had Sunday
begin the week. Over time, and even in our current
datebooks, which of these three days is the start
of the week has rarely enjoyed consensus. If you
consider the matter you could derive logical
arguments for all three cases.
Our
reckoning of the day as beginning at 12 am (the
middle of the night) is a new convention. For
millennia, the day began with sunrise, and the
night began with sunset, and the planetary hours
commenced their count at sunrise. The order of the
hours follows the periodicities of the planets:
slower, elder Saturn begins the week (or used to
do) and the quickest planet, the Moon is the last,
repeating eternally in the pattern:
Saturn
Jupiter Mars Sun Venus Mercury Moon
But
this is not the order of the days of the week!
Which is of course:
Saturday
Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
The
explanation is that in Babylonian times, the day
was divided into twenty four hours (Sumerians used
a twelve hour day) with twelve hours of day and
twelve hours of night. If you begin at sunrise on
Saturday with the first hour being ruled by Saturn,
24 hours later you will end up at dawn the next day
with the hour of the Sun. That being the planet
governing at the time of sunrise, that planet
governs and names the new day, Sunday. Beginning
with Sun ruling that first hour of the day it
rules, if you tick off another 24 planetary hours
in that order: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn,
Jupiter, Mars, etc., you will arrive at Moon at
dawn of the next day, Monday. After another 24
hours you will arrive at dawn at the next day,
Tuesday. Repeat this pattern and you will derive
the order of the days of the week.
It
is easy to think of time and days of the week
proceeding this way, a function of the relationship
of the number seven with the number twelve, and
indeed, this relationship is expressed elsewhere,
most notably in music in the relation of the
chromatic to the diatonic scales. Mystics,
alchemists, and early philosophers were always
seeking to understand, and emulate in law,
architecture, art, and social convention, the music
of the spheres, a way to harmonize human activities
with the movements planets of our solar system and
then hopefully, further into the heavens. (You
might note that the next tier of magickal practice
after the seven-planet realm is the astrological
zodiac, which is a system of twelve.)
One
problem is that nature does not always fit the
philosopherÄôs ideal mathematics.
We have here the inconvenience of unequal day
length caused by the seasons. With the advent of
uniform timepieces, the convention has moved toward
the fixed hour. But in ancient systems, the length
of the hour changed according to the length of the
day. Around the equinoxes, September 22 or so and
March 22 or so, the hours of the night and day are
equal, and this is where convention set the fixed
hour. Somewhere along the way, the rigid
application of fixed hours made it expedient to
even change the time of the beginning of the day to
the darkest hour of night!
In
Natural Magick, we follow Nature and ancient
customs. Wednesday morning begins at Dawn on
Wednesday, and it lasts all day and all night until
the Sun rises upon the next day. If that Wednesday
is near the Winter Solstice, the hours of the day
are shorter, and the hours of the night are longer.
We go through the exercise of calculating the
relative length of the hours through the seasons in
order to precisely time magickal operations,
especially those that are related to the planets. A
bit of algebra and interpolation is applied to our
magick. This brings us closer to the magick of the
Spheres and the practices of ancient magickal
systems. Not to mention, it reminds us that we did
once pass Algebra in high school!
With
this we introduce the <a href=/magicoils.html
>Natural Magick line of Planetary oils<a>.
Each of these oils is made on the day ruled by the
planet and in the hour of that day that is ruled by
the planet. Five of the seven planets are made
during the day in the waxing Moon. Moon is made at
night under the crescent Moon in the hour of the
Moon. Saturn is made on the first Saturday after
the Full Moon, in the Saturn hour of the night, to
fully capture the elder and dark aspect.
Each
oil is potentiated with a mineral which corresponds
to the power of the planet concerned:
- Saturn - Hematite
- Sun - Citrine
- Moon - Moonstone
- Mars - Garnet
- Mercury - Fluorite
- Jupiter - Amethyst
- Venus - Peridot
Each
bottle of oil has a 4mm bead of the same stone as a
focus.As each oil is made, I use the following
binding spell:
- This is the Day that you were made
- This is the Hour that you were born
- This is the moment of your creation
- To magick of ___________, you are now
sworn.
Each
of the planets and the gods that govern them has
resonance with different parts of our Selves. In a
sense, by honoring each of the planets in a ritual
way, we are dissembling, re-assimilating, and
reclaiming each part of our Selves, the whole and
separate parts of which issue forth from the Music
of the Spheres.
©
Cedar Stevens 2007
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