The secret behind Rubeus might be that it is supposed to represent a full moon lunar eclipse and its redness comes from the moon's colour in its fully eclipsed state. Rubeus is a little problematic when it comes to meanings as it is considered completely bad while the astrological meaning of Mars in Gemini is comparatively benign. In addition, the mansions of the moon that Rubeus is attributed are the sixth and seventh. The sixth is about couples, love, and friendship but with a dark duality about destruction and revenge. The seventh is a mansion for wishes and particularly business success. It does have a Martian side and was believed to “make things happen.” So with all this it is possible to

I write for IT magazines, and we talk a lot about roadmaps. These are the plans that companies have for their product launches. Most of the time they are good, but very often products drop off the roadmaps.  Intel recently changed its legendary Tock-Tick road map because it had production difficulties. While these changes are a little embarrassing, not one cares that much.  They move on with the next Roadmap. If you look at the many magical and religious systems out there, they have a lot of similarities to roadmaps; the only difference is that people get very precious about them. In my life, I have followed lots of different roadmaps. Some of them have been dead ends, and others had taken

Last night during a troubled sleep I realised that Geomancy was not mathematically binary in that a dot was not one and a line was not zero. This becomes important when looking at elemental theory applied to Geomancy. Modern Geomancers tend to see a dot as representing an elemental power switched on (One) while a line as an element switched on. However binary mathematics requires the use of zero as a decimal place holder. So one plus two would equal 10 while in geomancy it would have the same value a line (or two dots).  Olcam would say that 1+2=3 (is an odd number and therefore 1) is a more logical way to create a geomancy reading. Christopher Cattan (Geomancy 1591)talks about

For the last few months, I have been having nagging doubts about the way I have been interpreting some geomancy symbols. It has been nice to use the traditional black and white methods with absolute meanings, but the issue was that some of my readings were subtly off. Some of this is due to the assessment of elemental action in each of the symbols.  Populus has all its elemental attributions switched off so it is entirely passive and via has them all switched on and is so is entirely active.  What sparked off my train of thought was a chart which strongly perfected and had a comparatively positive court (which should have meant “yes”) could only be read as “no” because

The recent attention to the pulling down of statues of those whose history has fallen short of modern expectations has a long magical tradition. In Ancient Times statues had a magical function. They were supposed to represent either Gods or Heroes looking down on society and protecting it. Sometimes they were used as a focal point for a god at a particular site. In other times a statue was erected to a dead human “hero” to appease them. In Egypt, the Hermetica (and repeated by Iamblicus) statues were used by magicians to communicate directly with the dead or Gods. They were doorways between the worlds, and the statues could speak. But statues were often destroyed or buried because they were not doing their

One of the central issues about contacting spirits, either ritually, channeling, scrying or through inner plane chats is a fear that they might be lying. Much time has been wasted by magicians listening to what they believe is their “contact” or “an angel,” getting duff information and acting on it. Iamblichus mentions spirits who seek to trick the magician into following them by pretending to be much more important than they are. Much of the problem is based on a lack of knowledge of how spirits work. The assumption often is that the gods and spirits are “like mighty humans” and approached in the same way. However, Gods and spirits are not humans -- they are spiritual forces which have a consciousness

In looking at ancient systems and texts there are shedloads of pitfalls for those who have worked within a system and those who are self-taught. When people have started to suggest that you do not have undergo that basic training in a system and can just launch into ancient texts and cobble together a workable system, I wonder how. I love adopting a historical approach to magic – my bookshelf is no longer dominated by modern occult classics and has been replaced with academic texts and different translations of source texts. It is part of my make-up that I love history (up until the renaissance where I lose interest.) It is natural then that my path would involve taking a historical

If you had to boil down Hermetic thought into a single idea, then you are left with a saying which would be familiar to those who know their Led Zeppelin lyrics (and the Three Musketeers). It would also prove inconsistent with the Kybalion and other modern beliefs as to what Hermetics really are. All is one and one is All. Meditating on this one phrase can keep you up at night and when accepted as truth and applied to most magical or spiritual situations it answers most questions. Hermetics is a very wide church and binding it to too many ideas is tricky but the idea of a Monad is consistent.  It means that everything is made up of One Thing or a