One of my favorite works of scholarship regarding the PGM is Eleni Pachoumi’s monograph The Concepts of the Divine in the Greek Magical Papyri. It’s a great overview and analysis of…well, exactly what it says on the cover, breaking the various texts in the PGM down according to three major sections: the personal daimōn, the paredros, and the concept of deity and divinity itself as it might present through Hēlios, Erōs, some variant of the God of Abraham as fundamental creator-deity, Aiōn, Osiris, Hekatē, Typhōn-Sēth, and the like. It’s a great resource to get a better handle on how the gods sh ..read more

So, for The Adocentyn Temple Almanac (TATA) (about which you can learn more here and request your own customized almanac here), one of the big things I wanted to do was incorporate a daily set of planetary hours for every day for a given location.  For those who don’t know, the system of planetary hours is a useful system that’s damn near ubiquitous throughout Western magical literature and countless grimoires; I have a write-up on it here to cover the idea of what they are and how they’re calculated, and besides other write-ups across countless other websites and web applications or mobi ..read more

At long last, I have finally brought one of my personal projects to a close, and I’m thrilled to share the fruits of my labors with you: The Adocentyn Temple Almanac (TATA)!  This is a project I started many moons ago, ultimately because I wanted to try my hand at making an offline almanac (originally lunar mansion ingress times and solar decan daycounts) customized by location to provide an abundance of astrological information for timing rituals: As some of you might recall or have seen me go on about on Twitter, I’ve been working on a bit of a fun project lately, an automated almanac ..read more

A question from a friend on Discord, my reply to which I expanded on in a Twitter thread, and which I’ll expand on further below: I recently watched a YouTube interview with Dr. Stephen Skinner, where he said he had some problems with thieves who stole from him.  He performed a ritual, and the thieves changed their mind.  In the art of magic, can we influence other people with our rituals?  I ask because other esotericists claim that we can’t do that because humans have free will and Gods or other entities cannot break that. Of course you can influence people through magic. Th ..read more

We all like the number seven, don’t we?  Of course we do!  It’s one of those mystical and magical numbers that keeps cropping up in system after system and tradition after tradition, and for any number of reasons besides: the seven days of the week, the seven planets, the seven seas and the seven continents, the seven colors of the rainbow, the seven arms of the Menorah in the Temple; the seven churches in the Book of Revelation, the seven penitential Psalms, the seven sacraments of the Church and the seven holy orders of the Christian clergy, the seven ages of man, the seven stars o ..read more

Yanno, I swear I have this whole backlog of Twitter threads I have stored up to be remade as proper posts, and I haven’t gotten around to as much of it as I should have by now.  Ah well, c’est la vie.  In the meantime, a discussion in a Red Work Course chat about what the phase of the Moon matters for in terms of magical timing reminded me that I have this post to share, so this is timely indeed! First, some context.  A while back, me and a mutual (@saul_mondriaan) on Twitter had a bit of a chat regarding how to use a waning Moon for ritual purposes in magic, because in general ..read more

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

It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at or used CuriousCat (remember all those posts and tweets from back in the day?), but that doesn’t mean I stopped replying to questions generally.  Whether it’s on Discord or over email or on Facebook or whatever, I still try to keep myself open to discussion, explanation, and sharing ideas or notions when people ask.  And, recently, two people pinged me on two different platforms separately with basically the same question: how do I deal with doubt and disbelief in my spiritual life? Phrased one way (on Discord): A question about faith: a lo ..read more

Back when I was a child, my father (an officer in the US Navy) was stationed at one point in Sasebo, a city in the southwestern prefecture of Nagasaki in Japan.  I had the good fortune to visit him once while he was there, but I was still in like seventh grade at the time, so I was maybe about 12 or 13 years old, and didn’t have as much appreciation or means to appreciate things as I might have later on.  Still, it was neat to do so, and he picked up a few souvenirs, trinkets, and other things that may one day become family heirlooms.  One of those things he got, which he recent ..read more

I didn’t intend to make a post series about shrines and the like for a Hermetic context, but after the last two posts on offerings and feasts at a Hermetic shrine which themselves followed up on a bit about the importance of a shrine lamp for Hermeticists, I figured I may as well finish what I inadvertently started as a bit of musing on my part.  I mean, I’ve spoken a bit now about what can do and when one can do it at a shrine, but what of the shrine itself?  What concerns should one have for a shrine for Hermetic practice, what should go on it, how should one maintain it?  The ..read more