Squared Magick

In planetary magic, there is an association between the seven planets as known by the ancients and the numbers 3 to 9. The so called planets include what we know today to be a star, the sun, and a satellite, the moon.

It is easy to remember those seven ‘planets’ as they are associated to the days of the week. The association may not be obvious in English but is easier to spot in other European languages.

The attribution of the planetary numbers is based on an order that can be obtained from the sequence of the days of the week. To find this order, starting from Moon (Monday), just take the planets every other day. Moon as the highest number, 9, and Saturn the lowest, 3.

We can find the same ordering on the back of the chair of Dürer’s Astrologer, the character for moon being hidden by the pillow on which the astrologer is sitting.

There are several mapping between sets holding an equal number of entities. For the number 7, we have 7 days of the week, 7 gods, 7 celestial bodies and 7 metals.

I use here the traditional ordering for the days of the week, starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday. This would give a first mapping to the number 1 to 7. But there exists another classical pairing of these seven gods to the numbers 3 to 9, so called planetary numbers.

We will found more on this gods/numbers association in the making of kamea, or planetary talismans. For now, I just want to show what happens when we put back those gods/numbers pairs in the order of their weekdays sequence.

In this order, the planetary numbers decrease, starting from Monday/9, every two days. Or they increase, starting from Saturday/3, every 5 days.

While today the number of days in the week remains 7, the number of known planets and the number of known metals have increased with the advance of science. Interestingly, new found planets and some metals have been named with the blessing of tradition, by selecting the name of one of the god from the roman pantheon. And of course, those three gods have fitting planetary numbers. If we put those celestial body in the order in which they occur in the solar system as we know it today, we get the following sequence.

Kamea are talismans that can be used to influence the occurrence of good or bad events. The form I will discuss here is based on magic squares as exposed in book II of Agrippa‘s De Occulta Philosophia (1510).

In order to open this blog to public access I had to sanitize its content. But of course it is not possible to suppress ideas that are only in the reader’s mind. So, reader, beware! You will not find here more, or less, than I intended to write or show. Anything else is the fruit of your imagination.

Notes here included are mainly for my personal usage, with no practical use whatsoever for someone else. They have mainly a technical nature, in the sense that technics precede science.

 

Martial [Epigrammaton libri, XII, XLIII]:

Facundos mihi de libidinosis
Legisti nimium, Sabelle, versus,
Quales nec Didymi sciunt puellae
Nec molles Elephantidos libelli.
Sunt illic Veneris novae figurae,
Quales perditus audeat fututor,
Praestent et taceant quid exoleti,
Quo symplegmate quinque copulentur,
Qua plures teneantur a catena,
Extinctam liceat quid ad lucernam.
Tanti non erat, esse te disertum.

Tu m’as lu, Sabelle, des vers beaucoup trop parlant sur des luxures,
Tels que n’en savent ni les filles de Didyme
Ni les livres voluptueux d’Elephantis.
Il y a là de nouvelles figures érotiques,
Telles qu’un débauché n’oserait les tenter,
Ce que les prostitués pratiquent et taisent,
Par quel mélange cinq peuvent s’accoupler,
Comment un plus grand nombre peuvent s’étreindre à la chaine,
Ce qu’il est possible de faire une fois les lampes éteintes,
Tout cela, ce n’était pas à toi de l’exposer.

That picture was taken, warped and convert to brush stroke using my mobile.

Update works, the image is also added in the album Blog Images. Only thing is that the image appears twice in the album. I was also able to add the category journal to this post.

It is also easy to open previous post that have been created from the website.

Table insertion works fine, but spacing is a bit odd.