Astrological Magic with Christopher Warnock • Episode 41 • Free •

[00:00:28] Speaker A: Welcome to the mushrooms, apprentice. My guest today is the esteemed mage and celestial priest Christopher Warnock, who will be discussing astrological talismans. And before I introduce him, I want to begin with a quote by Paracelsus from Claude le Couteau's text, the Book of Grimoires. Quote, they too, the signs, characters and letters have their strength and efficacy. If the nature and distinctive essence of metals, the influence and power of heaven and the planets, the meaning and arrangement of the characters, signs and letters harmonize and simultaneously correspond with the observation of the days, time and hours, what then in heaven's name could prevent a sign or seal manufactured this way from possessing its force and ability to work? End quote. Well, Christopher Warnock has been a traditional astrologer and Renaissance astrological magician. Since 1998. He has been called the father of the traditional astrological magic revival and the elder statesman of astrological magic with John Michael Greer. Mister Warnock translated the Latin Picatrix, the most important grimoire of traditional astrological magic, and has written and published many books on astrological magic entries. Traditional astrology. Mister Warnock also teaches astrology and magic courses and offers authentic astrological talismans. He follows the spiritual path of hermeticism, a practical path to gnosis based on the writings traditionally attributed to Hermes trismegistus. As well as working with the Renaissance ceremonial magic of Cornelius Agrippa, Marsilio Ficino and Picatrix, he is working towards using astrological magic theurgically as a practice that leads to spiritual gnosis. As a celestial priest, he is the steward of the Society of Astrologers, the international association of Traditional Astrologers. His website is renaissanceastastrology.com. dot welcome, Christopher. [00:02:43] Speaker B: I'm glad to be here. [00:02:45] Speaker A: I am so happy to have you. This is a great honor. So what I'd like to do first, because I'm always so fascinated by the backstory, is just hear about what led you to this path that you're on. [00:02:59] Speaker B: You know, it's funny because, you know, I, when I was. I was just thinking about this. So when I was a kid, I had two things. I wanted to speak up for the oppressed, like Clarence Darrow, and I wanted to be a wizard. So I knew from a very early age, you know, kind of what, the broad outlines of what I wanted to do. You know, I. I think that as I was in my, kind of, like in high school, I just was all caught up with whatever, the conventional stuff. And then I went to college, first in the United States, and then I started with a junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews. And then I ended up staying there and graduating. And I actually specialized in renaissance history. And then I went to law school, the University of Michigan, and they kind of tracked you to either be at a big law firm in Washington, DC or New York. So I just kind of followed the flow and ended up in Washington, DC. And sort of spontaneously in Washington, DC, I started to become a spiritual seeker. And so a spiritual seeker is kind of, there's this. We have this incredible sort of smorgasbord of possibilities that we can follow. And so I started sampling all sorts of different things. And one of the first things I started with was Sufism. There was a iranian Sufi order in Washington, DC that had a meeting place, and I started attending that. So that was probably my first really sort of deep dive, and I was initiated as a Sufi, and that was kind of the first step on the spiritual path. Now, at the same time, I started just looking a lot of different stuff. And I had noticed astrology books in the bookstore or whatever and sort of looked at sort of modern astrology. And it just. It was interesting, but it just didn't seem to have the. Quite the depth that I was interested in. And it just. I just, for some reason, instinctively didn't get to. I mean, I read a couple books, but never got. Did much with it. Then I stumbled onto, there's various names for it, but basically, what now I call medieval Renaissance astrology, which is european astrology of the middle Ages and Renaissance. And then Horary astrology. And horary astrology is instead of looking at someone's birth chart, you look at the chart of a question. So if you have a significant, important question, you ask an astrologer, and then they note down the time that they receive the question and then look at that chart. And then, so that's what I started studying, you know, basically by correspondence. Lee Lehman was my teacher. And so then sort of the sister of horary astrology is what's called electional astrology. And electional astrology is choosing times to take action. So you want to find an astrologically auspicious time to, say, get married or start a business or something like that. So a chart that would give you a yes answer to Horary. Someone said, should I get married? And you got a yes. That same chart would also be a good chart, an electional chart. It had positive factors. If it was a no, it would have too many negative factors to be a good chart. So, like I said, they're kind of a mirror of each other. So I started getting interested in electional astrology and then I. Astrological magic was sort of the next step because in order to make a talisman, an astrological talisman, you have to do it at an astrologically appropriate time. So that's, you know, one of the key factors. So this was, you know, 1990, 1989, something like that. And at that point, the people that were doing the, you know, again, it's very confusing because we used to, you know, there was various names like traditional astrology, which was pretty much used for the horary astrology. And then other people came in and said, oh, we have to. The hellenistic astrology is traditional. So and then they've kind of, you know, there was a big shouting match and everything. And that's been kind of hijacked as a name. So it's a little. The nomenclature is a little confusing, but the medieval renaissance stuff, nobody. People were doing horary and natal astrology. Robert Zoller was the one who's doing the medieval natal astrology using Guido Bonatti. And then there was Hori astrology using Lilian Lilly was a 17th century english astrologer. But nobody wanted to do astrological magic because the magic was a little kind of too out there. And so I thought, well, I just want to go. I just was really taken with it and started actually looking at the sources. And there's a good number of traditional sources on astrological magic. Corneas Agrippa, that you mentioned, three books of occult philosophy, Barcillo Ficino's three books on life. And really the premier source was called was Picatrix, which was written in about 1000 AD in Arabic and then translated into Latin in 1256 at the court of Alfonso the wise of Castile. And so that Picatrix really became the sort of Bible of astrological magic for making talismans. But what I did was to take a look at those sources. And then they don't give complete information, at least from our modern standpoint. They kind of. They're either too advanced or they're leaving pieces out, or they. You already know how to do it. So since I've been trained in traditional astrology, I could take a look at that and kind of fill in the blanks. So basically what I did was two things early on, which is to try to get picatics translated, which I did with John Greer. But basically then the deeper thing is to set up a framework so understand how to take those traditional sources and how to work with them. Because one of the problems that people have now is they'll either kind of make it up as they go along, which is what I might call the new age approach, without being too pejorative about it, just kind of make it up and throw it together without too much knowledge of the underlying essence of principles. Or I guess that I have to think of another term other than source. I call the source. Fascist, maybe source. I don't know what to say. Obsessive compulsive. But anyhow, what they'll do is they'll look at the source, and if it says, you do x, y and z, you have to do x, y, and z. If you ask them why, they say, cause it's in the book. So it's absolutely inflexible. So, for example, if the talisman, they say, make this talisman in a white crystal, then you have to make it in a white crystal, and you couldn't make it in a blue crystal, and you couldn't make it out of bronze, and you couldn't make it out of paper. You have to make it in a white crystal and say, why? Because the book says so. So it's a very circular sort of approach. So what I try to do is to look at it and see the essence of it and to try to understand. Now, this is very much like what I do as an attorney, because, again, as an attorney, I once had a friend of mine say, well, it's easy to be an attorney. Just look up the rule in a book. And it's like, it's not because so many of the situations do not fit the rules. And so what do you do in a situation? I mean, judges spend most of their time trying to figure out a situation that's new, or trying to figure out a situation that doesn't fit exactly in the rules, or deciding that the rules perhaps need to be changed. I mean, it's much more complex. So that's really what you need to do, is to look at the essence of what the purpose of it is and to see, to understand how that. So that's sort of the things, you know, in that bio. They're talking about the father of being the father of the astrological magic revival. What I did first was to say, let's actually make talismans, which no one was doing. And then what I did was to help translate Picatrix was as the main source. But the most important thing is to provide a framework for looking at how to look at those sources and how to use those sources in a practical way. Because a lot of what happens on social media is people will come in and they'll say, oh, these are the 50 things you have to do. And they'll just be armchair and say, well, you don't have those 50 things in the election. Well, if you insist on having 50 factors, you can never make the, you can never make it. On the other hand, if you just do nothing or you have one factor, then it's very weak. So you have to have a compromise between practicality and trying to fulfill all the potentially possible astrological factors that you might be able to do. So that's part of it, too. And there's lots of different ways of doing it. That's another thing I would say, finally, is that my method is simply my method, and there was many different ways of doing it. So there's not a right way or a wrong way. What you want to do is to understand what your own perspective is and what your own influences are, and then not reject everybody else's stuff merely because it's just different than your own. [00:11:12] Speaker A: And by astrological factors. Could you explain what that means? Obviously, when you're doing election, you're birthing the talisman, essentially, right at the proper time for the purpose of that talisman. [00:11:24] Speaker B: Yes, yes. I mean, astrology, you know, again, is a methodology, really what I would say orientation. So orienting yourself to these various heavenly cycles. And again, this gets into some other issues, too, because how does it work? I mean, this is one thing that people don't. I mean, sometimes people ask that. I mean, I think it's almost considered sort of a naive question. I think if you talk to the average astrologer, esotericist, it's not something they want to really grapple with. And so the typical causality is going to be, I mean, I've got to say a little bit about worldview. It's extremely important to understand what your worldview is. And worldview is not just our conscious philosophy, but it's our unconscious assumptions about how things work on what, basically, it's your reality. And so the tendency is to see reality as well. Obviously, it's objectively true. There's only one reality. If you disagree with reality, then you're insane and not recognize that it's possible to have different worldviews. And so Worldview is really not a matter of choice. It's something that really basically is presented to us by our society and by the time that we're in. And so really, you could say that we are a manifestation of worldview, that each of us in the modern era is a manifestation of modern worldview. The other thing I would say about worldview is that it's a lot like gravitation. And so the modern worldview is like a planet or a black hole. It casts a gravitational pull over everybody, every modern person, which is not to say that there's not other influences. So, basically, the modern worldview is that nothing exists except matter and energy. And so when you say spiritual, then that's psychological. When you say psychological, that means it's a brain function. And the brain is a physical thing. It has. It has electrochemical impulses in it. And then you can break that down to atoms and molecules, which you can break down to subatomic particles. So everything that takes place is the result of the interaction of these subatomic particles according to physical laws or to chance. And that is the ultimate nature of reality. And so, and that's pretty much the. It is the underlying base that everyone's working from. So there's a lot of people, and again, I hate to say new age again, but they're doing magic and astrology, which are, quote, spiritual. But their underlying view of reality, or their unconscious view of reality is matter and energy. So, typically, if you're going to look at astrology and magic and how it works, the normal response as far as how it works is beams array some sort of energy. And there are a lot of people out there that think it's magnetism, that think it's scientific energy, which it's not. There's no detectable scientific energy for it's not gravitation. It's not sunspots or string theory or anything like that. So what people will say is that a little more sophisticated will say, well, it's a spiritual energy. It's akin to physical energy. It's just not detectable. But it's an impersonal force or forces. It's beams, it's rays. That's how it works. So a natal chart is basically conceptualized as sort of like the planets are at certain angles and they're beaming things at you. And so if it's a good beam, it causes good things. If it's a bad beam, it causes bad things. And that's basically the view of how the underlying causality of what's going on, which is, you know, in the traditional view, there is some support for that in terms of rays. But the rays are not a modern electromagnetic ray. They're basically analogized from light. And they saw light as having a level of consciousness, having a level of life awareness. So it's really a different view. But that was one view of the causality of it. But the spiritual is very hard for us to grasp because we're coming from a society that has no, that's been said entirely energy or mechanical. So to actually grasp what spiritual is, I mean, it often just means good. I'm spiritual, so I'm good without any further idea of it. Or it's like I said, it's beams or rays. So that's something that's difficult to grasp. One way to think about it as the underlying relationships that underpin reality. So, for example, if you thought about a savannah in Africa, it has a certain biological carrying capacity. I mean, even before there's any life there at all has a certain amount of sunlight, a certain amount of water, a certain amount of nutrients. So it has the capacity to have, say, a million tons of biomass. And so of that million tons of the biomass, it could have, like I said, you know, 99 million, 90 million tons of, you know, of plants, and then all. It has the capacity for a million tons of herbivore and then 100,000 tons of carnivore. And so these interrelationships, and you can't put any more on there. If you tried to have more carnivores, then they would die because there wouldn't be enough for them to eat. So before there's even any life there, all this intricate web of. Of potentialities is already present. And so. And that continually with the life. And so an interesting example of that in terms of the life is that if you think about the. You have different ecological niches, and those niches, again pre exist the existence of any life in them at all. They're already there and pre existing. So, for example, the wolf, right? This is sort of a, you know, 50 to 100 pound carnivore. And it, you know, it's oftentimes the apex carnivore and it's in the environment it's in, and it can eat various types of rodents and things like that in, you know, say, Africa or in the. In America, in Eurasia, that niche is filled by wolves. In Australia, they didn't have their marsupial mammals, so they had a wolf like tasmanian wolf. But it's a marsupial. It looks like a wolf, it's a appearance is like a wolf. It fits the same niche, but it is not at all related to it. It has evolved to fit that same niche. But what's a niche? Where's the physical existence of the niche? It's not, it's spiritual. It's a relationship. It's an. It's an interpenetrated web of relationship. So that's just one. That's not to say that spiritual is that, but that's just say, just kind of give a pointer in terms of understanding how the spiritual underlies the material and the spiritual patterns of material. And the material exists dependent on the spiritual without, you know, like I said, another one would be, if you think about sexual reproduction, the one cell creatures, you know, they'll. They just split and they make clone. They make exact duplicates of themselves. But at some point they're evolved the capability to move some of its genic, genic material over to another cell. And then you have, you have, you know, you have a much more mixing of, you know, instead of having exact duplicates, you have an opportunity to have all sorts of mixing of the genes. It's much more evolutionary, lots more possibilities. But right there, you have. You have sexual reproduction. You have fathers and sons. You have mothers and daughters. And so I can see a father and I can see a son, but I can't see fatherhood. But that inherent relationship is always present whenever you have sexual reproduction. So that's another way to think of the platonic ideas, not as being some ghostly thing in another physical place, but being the underlying, inherent patterning that of reality. And you can glimpse at whether that physically exists or not. [00:18:48] Speaker A: It sounds like an underlying master intelligence. I mean, that's obviously a master intelligence that then. [00:18:56] Speaker B: Well, again, this is what I would say is that certainly in the methodology and the philosophy and the worldview that I'm operating in, which is heavily buddhist, you know, that consciousness is an inherent quality of the ground of being. And therefore, yes, I would say that intelligence, see, the, how it expresses itself, though, depends on the situation and the matter. I mean, the intelligence of a rock is a rock intelligence, whereas the intelligence of a bee is a bee intelligence. I mean, it's expressing itself through the, the manifest of those manifestations at that point. But yes, I mean, I remember reading this book about, talking about this is by a scientist. You know, it's talking about the evolution of pines and pine trees evolved before the angiospurns, the flowering plants. And the flowering plants had a lot of advantages in an evolutionary way. So they kind of out competed them. So he's saying, well, the pine trees decided they would go up on the mountains and go into areas with lots of forest fires, and they adapted themselves to that. And so im really thinking of as a collective. I mean, theres an intelligence operating at the level of pine tree as an entity. And now if you challenged the scientists on that, they would say oh no, thats not true. Its just random evolution. But it is a useful model for conceptualizing how you think about things. But again, in the buddhist view we dont exist as individuals anyway. But you can certainly react to somebody as a person as a useful model. So that's what I would say about my general approach within the magical and astrological view is much more in terms of personalities. So if I'm interacting with Mars, it's as a personality, as a person, as a. Basically as an angel. So that's. But, but to say that that's an underlying. That's reality. It's a model. It's useful as far as it works. But then everything we do is modeling. So you know, it's. It's a. But yes, I mean my sense of it is that there is an intelligence. But look at Covid. I mean that's another. There seemed to be an intelligence operating with COVID I mean it was quickly. Every time they came up with a new vaccine, they were quickly. It was quickly coming up with a way around the new vaccine. It was mutating like crazy. It seemed like it was very intelligent. You know, all the cell, even if it's separate, you know, but the cells in our body, they, you know, they collectively are operating together. I mean what's is there a difference between Covid that's spatially separated and our humanity body with cells that are connected? I mean, again, these are all sort of levels of, you know, there's similarity and difference. So a lot of it is that if you open up your thinking to these possibilities, then you start seeing these patternings. And so insofar as you can practically make use of it, you know, that's the test. You know, if you say I see this out there and can I actually make use of it, you know, or a cause, a reaction or something like that, then that's what I think. That's probably the test. So as you can see, there's a lot to this in terms of before we get to the talismans. Because if you don't know how they work, then or if you have a particular idea, for example, if you think of a talisman as rays or energy as the cause, then you think of the talisman as a battery and the magic comes from the talisman. So when people talk to me, they're often saying, well, do I have to? There's this thing out there that you have to wear 24 hours a day and you have to wear next to your skin. And I'm not sure that part of it's just that everyone knows that it's one of those Internet things that everybody knows that just gets endlessly duplicated. But I think the logic behind it is it's got energy, and you charge it up like a battery and it's radiating energy, so you obviously wouldn't want to have it with you because otherwise you wouldn't have the energy rated at radiated at you. So I think that's the logic of it, which I don't think is wrong. But I mean, my approach is that the talisman is more like having the cell phone of the angel. And so that allows you to have a very quick connection to them. And then the purpose of the talisman is to help you to form that relationship. So in other words, that's what I'm typically doing with the talismans that I have as a means of contacting and forming a relationship with these angelic beings. And I'll reconsecrate it like light the candle and do the incense or whatever. So fumigating is traditionally you move that through the incense as a means of. It's like a friend. I mean, you want to contact them, you call up, hang out with them and you form a relationship. So that's. But that's only one model. I mean, there's other, there's plenty of other approaches to it, but that's the one I was drawn to. I call that a devotional approach. It's very much like the catholic church with a saint or an angel. You know, it's very similar sort of approach and it's a personal relationship. [00:23:44] Speaker A: Well, speaking of which, could you give us a little history of talismans? Because this is very, very old. [00:23:52] Speaker B: I think that, I mean, there's a difference between, I mean, you talk about talisman as a physical, magical object. There's a ton of that sort of thing going on. Astrological talismans, you know, the magical practice, you know, and again, how people conceptualized what a talisman was, say, for the, I mean, there's a lot of magical stuff. I mean, every society has magic, and so the talisman is basically, here's the other thing, is that the tendency is to think of a talisman as a pendant or maybe a ring, and that's a talisman. But in the medieval Renaissance tradition, anything that is made at a particular time, astrologically and consecrated can be considered to be a talisman. So, for example, you can have you think of Excalibur, you know, I was doing mirrors, you know, a magic mirror, mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Sort of magical stuff. But, you know, buildings. There's an entire city, astrological magic city, described in Picatrix. You know, I've worked with artists who did, you know, paintings and things like that. I mean, there's a really wide variety of things that you can. Now you're constrained somewhat by the fact that the typical time frame for that all the factors are in place would be maybe say, half an hour to an hour. So if you're going to make a talisman, it needs to be something that has a process that can be done very quickly, because otherwise, stamping, casting metal, I was acid etching mirrors. You could do sculpey. I mean, a lot of things like. But the standard engraving takes a couple hours, so that wouldn't work very well. So. So this is one of those things in order to fit that in there. But astrological talismans, there's record of astrological magic insofar as using, say, like, for example, the moon phases, the waxing away in the moon, or the signs of the moon in the greek magical papyri, which are like classical period astrological magic, the full astrological magic, full chart election, multifactor elections, you know, basically looks like probably early medieval was when that. And that's Picatrix, the Haranian, Sabians. Haran is a city in basically would have been northern Syria, or it's now in Turkey, it's in Mesopotamia, was a real source for a lot of the philosophy and magic and science. You know, there was all mixed together, though. There wasn't a differentiation between science and magic, but astronomy, astrology, magical text, things like that. And they may be the ones who invented it. They're the first that we have in notice of it. And so that would be like 7800 AD, and so. And we haven't surpassed that. I mean, Picatrix is basically the height of astrological magic in terms of that, but. So Picatrix was translated into Latin, like I said, in 1256, and it circulated in a manuscript in Europe. So you had to be able to read Latin in order to do it. But you'd also need a lot of math. I mean, to do the astrology, you had to do by hand, so you had to do all the calculations. So it really took somebody who really, a lot of sort of monks and clerics had that capability. It was never that popular because the skill set was just too difficult to do, but there was significant numbers of people. And William Lilly, again, who's 17th century, talks about sending a whole trunk full of talismans to Elias Ashmole, who was also an esotericist. And, you know, like I said, this would be like in 1650s, things like that. So there was plenty of people making them, but it died out because first of all, come about 1700 with the, quote, enlightenment, again, the view there was that, again, everything was made of matter and energy. And so one of the primary focuses of the, quote, enlightenment and singular royal society and the early scientists was to stamp out what they called superstition, which is stamp out any idea of spiritual anything, basically. So, and we still have that to this day. I mean, if you, you know, I've seen like the National Science foundation has a thing on astrology and it calls it a pseudoscience. And, you know, and basically it's no scientific evidence. But the bottom line is that it can't work because it's spiritually based and there's no such spirituals doesn't exist. And, but, you know, there's what I call the truce, which is that again, about, you know, in 1700 with the enlightenment, essentially the, the scientists and the, you know, the, I call it atheist materialism is what our physicalism is. This view that there's nothing subman and energy we're allowed to, they are the ones who define the nature of reality. But if you wanted to be religious, you could do it on Sunday and be irrational, so you could go into church and talk about God. But then when you're back to work on Monday, you'd recognize that of course, there's, none of that stuff really exists. So that's kind of the state that we're in is sort of a schizophrenia. So that if you push people, and I learned that as a child, not to ask people about religion because they could not explain it. And they would just get upset if you ask them questions about it. And that was one of the things that was important to me. And what I liked about traditional astrology or magic or philosophy was that there was not at that time a differentiation between science and theology. They were not in contradiction with each other. And now the reality of, I mean, people say over science and religion are coming together. They cannot come together. It's impossible because they're antithetical. Now, most people that religious, like the fundamentalism, has basically caved. And they also think that there's nothing except matter and energy in terms of their, their day to day stuff when they have God. But then if you ask how things work, then it's. Or there's miracles or something like that. I was reading a book recently about archaeology in Israel and there's a tremendous amount of the sort of, you know, fundamentalist christian stuff because they want to prove the Bible, which seems ridiculous to me. You know, it's like, like there's a ossuary which is sort of a casket for bones. And that somebody had a. Apparently, I mean, there's a controversy whether it's forged or not, but it said something to the effect of James Brother Jesus. You know, so it's like this is like Jesus's tomb or something. And somehow if you had the physical proof of Jesus, that would be the highest again, because there's nothing more important than matter and energy and. But to me that just seems irrelevant. You know, that the. The Bible clearly to me was divinely inspired. It had to become through individual humans. So there's. But there's clearly incredibly spiritually important. But so was the sutras and the Quran and everything else, you know, and that's what's important. Not the physical relic itself or the manifestation, but looking through the essence of it. And so to me, the worrying about whether Jesus. I mean, I think Jesus did exist, but that's not the point. You know, I'll give an example that they had the shroud of Turin. Have you heard of that? Yeah. And so it's got this face of Jesus on it and somebody did some scientific analysis of it and they said, oh, it looks like it's from 1300. And I'm like, well, if it's from 1300, it's received all this devotion over that period. And it's cold charged anyway, so I mean, the fact that it has to be Jesus's actual thing, it's like that doesn't particularly. You know what I mean? It's like the physical reality of it is less important than to me that the spiritual. I mean, that sort of devotion, I like that pilgrimage and all sorts of things like that. I mean, I kind of think that the reformation was a disaster in a lot of ways. But, you know, it's. You know, that's because it took me a long time, but I have more or less come to a spiritual worldview. And so to me, the world seems to be. Everything is alive. You know, it's alive in its own way, but like, trees obviously are alive, but I mean, they have a spirit. A rock has a spirit of. You know, I had a lot of the Zen experience I had was useful, but the Shinto, which is the sort of basic native religion of Japan is very much has that view of the kami. Everything has a spirit. And so that my wife is very much naturally in that kind of viewpoint and was very helpful and kind of, she's. A lot of people are like that. That's their sort of natural setup and that's their natural orientation. So it's just sad that the society in the philosophy disavows that. So you can't have somebody give you a logical, rational, philosophical explanation of that. They'll call it animism or something that's just kind of putting it in a box and putting a label on it and being sort of pejorative. But there actually is, that's one of the things I enjoy about is being able to say, look, I can, if you accept the existence of the spiritual, if you're willing to open to that, then all this makes sense and it is very logical and I can give chapter and verse an explanation for it. But, you know, that's so, so that's what I would say is that the bedrock is that the magic and astrology have a spiritual basis and then not dependent upon matter and energy, and that they underline that. And so they're really practical applications of spiritual, you know, sort of principles. And so astrology has essentially is looking at uses geocentric. We're looking from the viewpoint of being on earth. And they all say, oh, it's fake because it's, you know, we know that the sun goes around the earth. Well, if you look up in the sky, it does look like the sun is rising in the eastern setting in the west. So it is an accurate visual explanation from the standpoint of Earth. If you go out in space, it looks different, but we're not in space. And so if you think about like, you know, before gps, people were doing navigation, celestial navigation, it was geocentric and it was perfectly accurate. Same thing with surveying. If you're doing surveying, it's also going to be celestial and it's also going to be geocentric. So for that purpose it's, you know, it's a bit like saying, well, when you see that stop sign, it's not really red because it's actually these magnetic, you know, the vision and everything and all the processes and it's like, well, for a stop sign it looks red. You see this red sign, you stop. And again, this is what I'd say about it is it's perfectly geocentric. Astronomy and astrology that we use is perfectly accurate from the standpoint that we're coming from, which is on Earth. So we see these celestial cycles which are very, very regular. The planets are doing their dance with each other and orbiting and retrograding and going forward and backwards. And so if you look at an astrological chart, it's a perfectly accurate 2d representation of the actual position of the planets from that time, date and place. And if you took it to the jet propulsion laboratory or the astronomers, they would grumblingly say, yes, they couldn't really deny that. So it's perfectly accurate. What they deny. Is there any significance to it? Because the problem with the modern worldview is that not only is it physicalist or atheistic materialist in denying there's anything except matter and energy, but they also are nihilist. So eventually ends up being nihilistic because everything is either these random interactions of these subatomic particles or again, chance or physical laws. Therefore, there's no inherent meaning to anything. So life is meaningless and you're this tiny little person trapped in this huge universe and you didn't exist. And you exist for a short time that's full of pain and then you die. That's the ultimate view of reality, which is perfectly accurate from the ego self standpoint. If you identify entirely with the ego self, then that's correct. So in order to find meaning, you would need to have a larger identification. And I think that to me is the real tragedy of the modern era is not that people are poor, you know, that people have economic problems, but that we've somehow removed their meaning and the reason for living. And so that's one of the things that's really helpful for me with because, you know, I've done over 5000 horary charts, for example, for questions for clients, and I keep a record, I do it right and keep a record. And if you keep getting stuff, I don't always get it right, but if I keep getting it right again and again and again and it's impossible because there is no spiritual reality, then you're like, that's a very tangible sort of practical recognition than in fact that this idea that there's nihilism and that nothing fits and there's random, everything isn't true, that in fact the cycles of the heavens reflect the same cycles that are taking place on earth. And therefore, if you see the heavenly cycles, which are very clear, we can understand the cycles on earth as well. I mean, your birth chart is the same way. I mean, it's just kind of amazing that the time, date and place of your birth, if you look at the way the planets are arranged, you can tell a tremendous amount about someone's personality. And so that's an area of my, when I do a natal reading for somebody, I do a modern style reading of this personality. I add some more techniques into it because traditional astrology is much more complex, as many more techniques than modern astrology. So we have some additional nuance, particularly in the negatives, because traditional astrology is predictive. So it has to have a way of mapping everything from the most positive things to neutral to the most negative. So I can look at a chart and I can do that careful calibration of the positive and negative. Whereas modern astrology, since it comes from a psychological standpoint, if you go to a psychologist, they're not going to be negative with you. They're going to want to talk to you, listen to you, be sympathetic. And even though they can only help, I mean, I'm blanking on his name, famous psychologist, he said only a third of people recover. So the third people don't, aren't hurt by it. And, you know, a third of, you know, but you'd only have about a third recovery from, you know, from, from your typical therapy. And so. But you don't say that to your patients. You give everybody an opportunity and you want to be upbeat and positive. And that upbeat positive nature is reflected in modern astrology. With a few exceptions. They've imported a few things like vortex moon or retrograde, particularly mercury, but all, all retrogrades now. And those have to take all the weight of negativity. So while in traditional astrology void, of course Moon is really not that big a deal. It's a minor affliction. It's apocalyptic in modern astrology because there's just not anything else negative. So all the negativity kind of has to focus on either retrogrades or the void, of course, moon. The other problem with modern astrology is that among the problems is that for the most part, ostensibly astrology is for predictive purposes, but for mostly it's used for reassurance or for false sense of control. And so the skeptics, I certainly don't believe that astrology works any more than I believe that atoms exist. I mean, it makes sense to me. It's not a belief system, it's that it makes sense within the thing. But my view is astrology works, but nevertheless, there's a lot of people using it not for predictive purposes. And so again, you like the retrograde mercury stuff, that's many people have heard of that. And so people will say, oh, that was retrograde mercury. Well, they can't predict in advance what's going to happen. They don't know what's going to happen. Mercury's retrograde. And if something does happen, they can't connect it to mercury necessarily. I can only do it after the fact. So if you can't predict in advance and you don't understand what's going on, you know, you can look at any chart and pull anything out of it. You know, if you know what the outcome is, you can find something that will fit that outcome. But that's not prediction. So that's an unfortunate, or, like I said, false sense of control. It's like, oh, something bad happens. Well, at least I know what it was. Mercury retrograde. Well, not really, but you feel better, but that you at least have some idea of what's going on. So a lot of the, what's, what people are doing or they're looking at Hitler's chart or Einstein's chart. Oh, we can see why Normandy, whatever, because I can see Hitler's chart. We already knew the outcome. So I did an example of that once on my group. I posted this chart. It had Scorpio rising and had a lot of plants in the 8th house, which would be considered to be negative. And I said, oh, this is a famous serial killer. People say, oh, yes, famous serial killer. I said, oops, actually it's Gandhi. And so again, depending if you know who the person's chart is, you can again make it fit whoever you want. And so in my natal astrology course, we don't do any celebrities and you don't do your own chart. What you get is a bunch of charts of people you don't even know. And then you have to predict based just on the chart. And so that's real astrology. That's real predictive astrology. And, you know, I think that that's, you know, because my focus is, you know, again, it's, it's on actual prediction. And so again, what I'm doing is I'm going to give a written prediction in advance. And you could do with anything. If you're a psychic, you make a written prediction in advance. And then when you get the results, you check back to see how close your fit, because if you're making predictions and you're not writing it down, it's very easy to fool yourself with that as well. And also, people don't want to follow up on it. So a lot of times, again, I mean, I get people asking me like a hori question, when will I get a job? And they're not asking me, they want to know, they're worried and they want me to make them feel better. And my job, when I'm getting paid to do is to make them feel better. So I'll say back to people, I say, well is it going to help you if I say you're not going to get a job? And a lot of people will be upset with that. Or they say oh well that would make it worse. Now some people think, no, that's useful information, I can do it. But I mean with Horary, astrology you get a lot of no's. I mean people don't ask questions when everything's going great. They're usually asking a question when things are, they're having problems. So it's not too surprising that things don't come back. I mean how often do things you want to have a plans they don't work out. I mean that's frequent, like relationships. I mean I got a lot of relationship questions. I mean every single relationship doesn't work out even if you'd like it to work out. So I mean that's, and I'm not, I'm guilty of that myself. I mean I do I ching readings, you know, I'll do like a daily one. What's the current situation? And I certainly would like to get a positive, but you know, I accept that I won't, I don't always. And I'm like okay, I'm just going to roll with it. And I want today my business has slowed down a certain amount. And I asked and I got the hexagram four which often the I ching will give to you if you keep asking the too many the same question too often. So it's like, I'm like which I try not to do. I try to respect the oracle. And for example, I don't ask a question, then ignore what it says. I don't ask the question multiple times until I get the answer I want. You know what I mean? You respect the oracle and that's what astrology is. As an oracle, I mean whats different about astrology, predictive astrology is that like traditional astrology is that you have a tremendous amount of technique so you can get a lot of information from the chart itself, but you still have to use intuition in your interpretation. So for example, if someone asked me will I marry x or have a committed relationship with x, you would look at the first house to represent the person asking the question and look at the planet ruling that house to look at where that person was, what state they were in. You look at the 7th house for relationships and the ruler of the 7th to look at the person you're asking about. So for example, if the planet ruling the 7th house was afflicted, that would be an indication that the person is unable, unwilling or unsuitable for the relationship. Now which of those three it is, you need to look at the rest of the chart, but also use your intuition in terms of your judgment. In terms of that, I've got it because the intuition is the ability, that patterning ability, the ability to see the underlying, you know, like if you're like a paleontologist, you get the little bone, you can see the whole rest of the dinosaur. And that's something you can work at and learn. I mean, some people don't have it, other people have it naturally. But something you can definitely, I've, you know, you work at it a lot. The, you, what's useful about the traditional astrology is you have a lot of information to start with and you don't use your intuition to overthrow the chart. If I'm coming in with someone's afflicted 7th house, you know, afflicted plan and ruler of the 7th, I'm not going to be saying, oh, I'm getting these vibe that you're going to have a great relationship. You're just not going to be coming up that way. In terms of the chart. [00:43:45] Speaker A: Now, in terms of charts, with regard to talismans, you highly recommend before someone purchased an astrological talisman, you need to have a look at their chart or you should have a look at their chart. Right. [00:43:59] Speaker B: I think it's useful. I think people, again, people get really, there's a lot of fear in this area. There's a tremendous amount of superstition and fear. People are scared to death. I had a guy the other day, he was had, he got Venus, Venus talisman, and he was doing a consecration of it. And he was, what he was doing was rather than doing stick incense, he was doing like a resin incense. In order to do burn that, you have to get charcoal. Now there's this sort of standard cheap charcoal that you get online or from a store that comes in a foil package and it's round. Right. It is terrible because when you light it, it's hard to light and it pops, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And it goes out. And so he's like he said, I got this charcoal and it kept popping and it's a bad omen, isn't it? And I'm. Should I stop? Should I? You know, Venus is cursing me and I just said, I said, dude, I said, that's the way that charcoal works. I said, use japanese charcoal. I said, that works better, you know, but that's what I'm saying. That's what people are bringing to this. And he was. But he was scared, obviously, the demons were coming after him or something like that. So that's one of the things I say to people. I said, really? With my talismans. I don't know about anybody else's but mine. I'm only working with angels. It's as positive benefic magic as I can get. And really, the worst you're going to get, for the most part, is nothing happens. And that's always a possibility, too, because people say, what's going to happen? I said, it could be nothing. You have to take a leap in the dark with it. And if you're expecting a specific result, you know, it's often going to be, you know, like particularly love talisman. I want this person to come back to me. That's probably not going to happen. If you're saying I like love, then that's a broader thing. But you're still trying to influence the outside world to conform to your. If you're saying, I would like to be transformed to be a more loving person, that's doable, you know, that's something that's. And that's pretty effective. If you become a more loving person, then you're naturally going to have this a much better way to have a relationship. So that's what I would say is that a lot of it is. But not to downplay the. Because you can have miraculous effects with it, but it's unpredictable. If I could guarantee you win the lottery, I would sell it for a million dollars. I mean, that's the thing about talismans, but people do have all these incredible results, but you can't expect to have, again, it's not Harry Potter, it's not technology, it's not lightning bolts coming your fingertips. It's not 1001 nights. It's real. And because it's real, it has to operate in the real world so it can be instantaneously powerful. And the work that you do makes a difference, too. I mean, there's a lot of. It's like if you heard that, oh, Tiger woods won the US Open with these golf clubs, so I want to win a million dollars, too. I'll just buy these golf clubs and you don't win the Open. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the golf clubs. I mean, Tiger woods couldn't win the Open without golf clubs, but there's a lot more that goes into it than just buying the golf clubs. And so that's the tenant, again, that's the technology with an iPad. You just buy the iPad with a, you know, watch. You just buy it. It does it automatically for you. It's technology. But these are not technology. You know, there's an interaction, there's. And, and so that's what I would say about it, is like, and the reason I try to keep my prices reasonable, I'm not. If you charge $5,000, I think you're making an implicit promise about what's going to happen with the talisman. And so I really try to keep the prices down. And that's one of the reasons I'd like to make it available to people. But I also don't want to be making, I think if it's three or $400, which is what I typically charge, I don't think that's as much of a promise of the miraculous effects as a $3,000 talisman. [00:47:28] Speaker A: Right. But you're following the guidelines of the Picatrix, which is very, very important book on. [00:47:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you could do it in a different way than what I do. And even if you followed it exactly, you wouldn't necessarily guarantee, because that's what people say. They'll say, well, did you do all 50 things? They say, no. Oh, that's why it didn't work. I'm like, that's not why it didn't work. It's because no one, you couldn't follow 50 things that still wouldn't work. You know what I mean? That's not. The people will do that, too. They'll be like, I got this son Aries talisman and this happened, and I got the son Leo talisman. And that happened. And that means now we know the difference. Sun Aries and Sun Leo. I'm like, you're crazy. Because it's totally subjective, it's anecdotal, you know, I mean, I had somebody, this is a long time ago, they say, bought a Jupiter talisman. They said, oh, three weeks later, my mother fell down the stairs. So I threw the talisman away. I'm like, what are you talking about? Again, that's superstition. And so, I mean, I'll give you an example. Algol, very powerful, protective talisman. I had this happen and I've had, I don't know, at least 100 people report this to me, that they had electrical electronic interference when they first got it. And that's very typical. Now, plenty of people don't, right? But someone like easily said, yeah, my whole block lost power, that when it was delivered. So. So that it happens enough and it's logical within that particular type of talisman because it's very powerful. Talisman protection. Talisman that. Yes, I think that that's. We can say that that's a typical effect, not for everybody, but typical. But, oh, I did it once and this happened. How do you even know that was caused? But other people say, oh, I got this talisman, something bad happened. I'm like, how do we know the talisman caused it, either for good or for ill, you know, that's what I would say about is that so much fear, you know, or credulousness, and that's one of the things I like to bring to it. But yes, I like to follow the traditional stuff, you know, and at the same time, what I'm doing is Picatrix also. People say, well, Picatrix does this. I said, picatrix does a lot of stuff. I mean, Picatrix is a compilation. It was compiled from over 200 books and no one went through it and tried to. There's a lot of contradictions. I mean, for example, there's one section that says, this is just having to do with elections, of choosing when to do things like marriage or something. Don't have the moon in the ascendant, because the moon is very fast moving and it causes things not to last very long. Okay. And then I have moon talismans. And the moon talisman section says, make the talisman with the moon rising. Well, of course that makes sense because it's the most powerful position, either rising or at the midheaven, directly over on the horizon or directly overhead. But some would say, oh, you can't do those are bad talismans because this other section of Picatrix says, don't make it. When the moon ascended, I said, well, I mean, it doesn't fit together. I mean, it's contradictory. And to look for some objective, 100% true for all time is just not going to make sense. I'd like to look at Picatrix in sort of modular sense. I said, if you look at the sections of it, they tend to focus on a set of, like, for example, there's a section on moon signs. So you put the moon in a sign that's appropriate for the activity. You have the moon rising or culminating. And I think waxing or waning. And those are three factors. That's about as much as you can get in an election, and that makes sense. But you don't try to put that into then the Jupiter talisman. Oh, Jupiter. What about the moon? I mean, I mean, you'd have, again, you'd have 50, if you tried to follow everything in pictures, you'd have 50 factors in an election and you could never get it to work. So just how do you sort through that stuff is what I spent a lot of. And that's the advanced part of my astrological magic course is actually looking at these texts. And sometimes they won't have enough information. Sometimes there won't be enough in there. Other times they'll be too much. So it's like I said, it's a very close analogy to law because if you're a five year old, it's enough to know, don't follow the rules or are you going to get in trouble and you don't go into the deeper meaning of it. You were told to do this, you do it, you follow it. And if you don't follow it, you're going to get in trouble. But that doesn't work for the person. The judge or the legislator. Can't have that attitude, you know, and, or a lawyer. Like I said, as an advanced practitioner, you cannot have that attitude about it because otherwise, well, I mean, people do. I mean, the perfect example is this, and this is also the materialist stuff. There's a standard listing of metals that go with the planets. Now, that's only one of maybe 20 different listings. I mean, they're all over the place in terms of the traditional sources. But the standard listing of metals is Saturn is lead, Jupiter is tin, mars is iron, sun is gold, Venus is copper, mercury is liquid mercury, and the Mars is silver. People are like, why aren't you making your talismans out of lead and Saturn talismans? I was like, well, it's not a very good material. It's poisonous, and it's also soft like the book says. So, but the reason they really follow it, like, if the greater key of Solomon, for example, has that listing in it, so people like, why aren't your pentacles from the greater key of Solomon done that way? And they're like, if I try to explain everything, they're like, well, you're not following the book. You're an idiot. So they just, but they don't follow the ritual. There's this incredibly elaborate ritual, and nobody worries about that. But the materials really because the talisman is the source of the magic. And matter is the source of all truth and power comes from material objects. So the has to follow same thing with the whole sidereal zodiac thing. That's another one. So the zodiac that we use, zodiac is basically 360 degree circle. It allows us to very precisely show the positioning of anything. So if you want to have an astrology where it's showing chinese astrology or vedic astrology or the western and arabic astrology that we use, they always have a zodiac because it allows you to precisely indicate, instead of saying, you say seven Taurus, that's equivalent to saying 37 degrees of the 360 degree circle. So that's basically what it is. The tropical zodiac is oriented to the seasons. On the first day of spring is when the sun enters Aries. And that's also the equinox, when the days are equal, the day and the night are equal. The sun goes into cancer at the summer solstice, which is the time in the northern hemisphere when the sun quits, stops moving to the north and stands still. And then it's also the longest day of the year. And then the fall that enter Libra in the fall, which is the autumnal equinox. Again, the days are equal. And then you have the winter solstice, which is when the sun enters Capricorn. Very natural, very logical. Makes a lot of sense. This is what everyone's been using for 2000 years. However, it doesn't correspond to the physical constellations. And since the physical constellations have to be the source of astrology, because what else could be? Because nothing exists except matter and energy, it must be the physical stars and doesn't correspond the physical stars, then we just toss out the tropical zodiac. Now, the sidereal zodiac is what they use in vedic astrology. It is not corresponding to the physical stars. It has a fixed point point with a fixed star, fixed point as opposed to the seasons. Otherwise it has twelve signs of 30 degrees each. It doesn't correspond. But people don't know that. But they do know that all the idiots in the past, they're idiots in the past. So we're going to throw it. It's like, you know, they all thought the earth was flat. Not true. That was. That was invented in the 19th century to make us all feel superior. Any educated person since about 300 bc knew that the world was round because it's obviously round. So then they again don't under not educated people. Like I said, this is sort of like, that's just a modern problem, but so that's what I would say about it is that, you know, there's a lot of the sort of physicalism and everything that permeates people's thinking. And that you always are going to be putting your foot wrong until you get your. Your philosophical and worldview in line with your practices. So if you're doing magic and yet you think the world is only matter and energy. You're going to have all sorts of these things coming up. But I get hassled all the time about the tropical zodiac. To me, it's like arguing about whether the metric system versus inches. I mean, it's a measuring system. And you can do perfectly well with sidereal zodiac if you're doing vedic astrology. But it's a lot like, for example, if I'm playing Bach and I'm trying to be in a baroque orchestra and use a harper's chord and all that. And someone come in and said, oh, well, the ragas, they use these quarter tone scale. I'm like, that's fine. Go ahead and use it. But you're not going to be doing, you know, we don't change it around. Right. And if you want to change a sedereal, you can. In modern, modern, you can mix and match the basics. One of the things about modern astrology is you can use any technique from any type school of astrology. You just. It's because the view is it's so like tinker toys. You can just take it out and it works by itself. And you can just stick it together with everything else and create your own thing. It's like everybody else has created own thing. But it's. That's the. Which is fine. It's how modern works. But if you're going to do traditional, you're going to do the medieval renaissance. We have a methodology that we use, and we don't mess it around with it. Like I said, ballet. Why aren't you wearing, you know, tennis shoes? Why are you wearing pointe shoes? Because that's what we do. Well, that's wrong. We're going to throw that out. You're not doing ballet anymore. It's fine. That's modern dance, you know? So that's what I would say about it is that, again, this idea of astrology? There's no astrology. There's various schools. And if someone says they do astrology, then it means they do modern astrology. Because that's what people have heard of. And there's, again, nothing wrong with it. I do, I have. I like it. I think it's great for psychological stuff. But it's important to understand where you come from, because if you don't know where you come from, you don't know your history, if you don't even know your own philosophical beliefs, you don't even know your own methodology, then you really are lost. So a lot of people are kind of wandering around in confusion and then hassling me about why you use the topical zodiac. I'm like, whatever. There's these various different house systems and things like that, which, again, I could care less. To me, it's sort of like, it's not important. It's like whether you have an intel chip or AMD chip, I don't worry about that stuff. I need to use the software. You know what I mean? Again, that's the idea that the technique is somehow significant in and of itself, that there's a best technique for everybody. It's like there's a best paintbrush for painting. Like what? I mean, it just. You have a preference. Perhaps there's techniques that maybe you can use better with your intuition, but there's no objectively better methodology. That's good. And I get that with the traditional, oh, you have to use this particular, you know, equal, whatever it is, whole sign houses or whatever. There's a huge big fad for that and shouting. And I had people call me up on the phone and the first thing they ask me is, they say, do you use whole sign houses? And I say, no. And then they just hang up because that's their entire decision. Because I'm not going to be working with somebody who uses whole sign. Or people say, I'm not. I'm comfortable with that. That's what I call. I like, it resonates with me. So therefore, I'm going to reject everything you do based upon the fact that it's not using whole sign houses. So it's really kind of frustrating. But that comes from an attitude, again, that the. It works itself, that's not looking at the intuition, the combination of the technique and intuition. And there's, again, nothing wrong with whole sign houses, if that's the choice you want to make for yourself. But it'd be nice to leave me alone and let me do my own thing without getting dumped on that. Because that's what I do as a sort of self preservation in a way, is I recognize I need to be tolerant. And it doesn't make any sense logically to me to say that I'm right because I'm right for what I do. Right. I'm not a relativist. Though, either, though, because what I would say, there's no right way. There's a couple of sort of right ways and there's an infinite number of wrong ways, you know, and that's where the prediction comes in. Because take your methodology, get a question or a chart that you don't know the outcome from. Make a prediction in writing, an analysis and prediction, and then check whether you got it right and do that about a hundred times. And then you can see whether or not it's workable, you know, and that's what I. But. But again, I wouldn't try to say that only one method works, you know, because again, there's a highly intuitional and vedic works. Like I said, hellenistic is a good school. You know, these are all workable schools. Modern is good too. And so you just find the one that resonates with you and the one that gives you those accurate results if you want to do predictive astrology. But very few people are doing that. Again, what most people are doing is, like I said, it's after the fact stuff, you know, are made up or whatever. So. So it goes. [00:59:45] Speaker A: I want to have you talk about these talismans. And so there's talismans for different planets, planetary talismans. [00:59:54] Speaker B: Can you talk about celestial factor? Like we're saying? Has a. Has a soul, has a spirit. So potentially anything celestial and, well, anything, we're just happening. Astrological magic, basically has decided we're going to sort of focus on astrological things. We're not doing like, Earth magic, you know, we're not doing magic of like stones or something. We're not doing, you know, we're not doing like kabbalah, right? So Agrippa has three books of occult philosophy that correspond to the three worlds, the material world, the celestial world and the divine world. And so these are all potential interfaces. So we're just focusing on celestial. So astrological magic, in my formulation, is a type of ritual and ceremonial magic in the western tradition because there's lots of ceremonial magic, you know, the solomonic grimoires and things like that, that only works with astrological spirits and does so at astrologically appropriate times. So we only interact at a time that's astrologically appropriate for that celestial factor. And we're only dealing with celestial factors. And we're working in the western esoteric tradition. But you could break that apart. I mean, there's people that do magic. They want us, they do Jupiter invocations, but they just do it whenever they feel like it. They don't time it. There's people that just time things and don't do any invocation. That was very popular in the Renaissance because they didn't want to have any be accused of working with demons. So they were like natural magic. It works by itself, which fits with the modern view. It's raised. That's automatic too. It's impersonal. And then you can also do ritual magic and time it without working with astrological spirits. Like the Goetia are not astrological spirits, but they do astrological time timing for like pretty basic, like, you know, waning and waxing. Moon and moon sign things. So you can take it all apart. But basically that's, that's how I, you know, how I define astrological magic. So, for example, fixed stars, if you look up in the sky at night, there's stars, right? They're called fixed because their position doesn't change relative to each other rapidly like planets do. There's about a thousand visible fixed stars. And they're arranged in 48 constellations, traditionally. So twelve zodiacal constellations and then 36 extra zodiacal constellations. So potentially, each one of those fixed stars you could contact as a spirit would have its own thing that it did, and you could make a talisman for it. But from our traditional sources, we have the best one for fixed stars is called Hermes on the 15 fixed stars. So we have 15 fixed stars that we have a lot of information about. We have an image for the talisman, a picture that you could use for it. You have a sigil, like a little like a symbol. We have things that are rules, and then we know what it does, what its functions are. So thats enough information that we can contact that spirit and then we can make a talisman. And we pretty much know what general areas its going to handle. But potentially it could be a thousand of them. But my view is that the original information came from direct contact with the spirits, either through dreams or visions or psychic means. So we're just going to have to wait until we catch up people starting, because fomohop, which is a star in the mouth of the southern fish constellation, is very prominent in my chart. It's conjunct a particular planet in my chart. And I feel like I had a close connection to it. So I did a divination about whether I could do the talisman of it, and I got a yes. So I went ahead. So the talisman I did for fomohaud is fish. It's easy, it's fish based. So it has a sort of fish, you know, image on the talisman, and it has a fish sigil, sort of fishy looking sigil, and then it's. But we have an idea of sort of what the effects are from other traditional sources, not from talismanic use, but more predictive. And so. But that seemed to resonate so and so. But to me, the real seal of approval was the divination. I was really impelled to it, my intuition, and also that got that positive divination for it. So that's the only one I've done in, say, 25 years. But so that's what I feel like. We'll have a slow progression of modern people in this tradition that'll. That'll start doing that. Whereas I've had people say, oh, well, just willy nilly, contact them. Just like, you know, like the 17 angels of the 72 angels of the. What is it? Shem hem? Flourish. I'll just call them all up just for do it. To me, they're less like a judge. I mean, you can talk to a judge if you have a reason for talking to the judge, but you don't just start calling them up willy nilly. And that's what I, you know, I don't feel like the angels are just waiting around to do stuff for me, like servants or something. You know, like. Like a customer service line. You know, I think these are super powerful beings you want to treat respectfully, and if you have a reason for contacting them, fine, but that's the problem. Like, we have a lot of fixed stars that we don't really know exactly what they do or what the sigil or symbol or we don't really know what to do with it. So that's just a practical difficulty in doing that. But I think all celestial factors could. Like, for example, we have names for all the, like the 28 mansions of the moon. That's another example. So the moon orbits the earth in 27.5 days. And so the Vedic, they have nakshatras. Of course, someone hassled me about this, saying, well, there's 27 nakshatras, and there's not. There is, there's not. They had some big, complicated vedic astrology thing. But anyhow, more or less, there's 27 vedic mansions in the western and arabic system. There's 28. And so the moon, in each of these mansions, they have a magical use. So they have an image again, they have the name of the lord of the mansion or lady of the mansion, and they have the use and incense and the things that it does. And so the third mansion, I really love. So every month when the moon comes to the third mansion, I do an invocation of the spirit of the third mansion. There's a couple different names, and it's for all good things. So that's the magical use of it. But those are all, those are all, as far as I'm concerned, angels. But we have all that laid out, our nutritional sources. It's quite easy to figure out that information. People are most comfortable with planets. And so this is again where it comes into this view of what we're dealing with. If you see the natal chart as sort of a map energy, and this shows where the planets were at your birth, beaming energy at you. So, for example, Saturn was in the 7th house, but he's afflicted. Well, we may be not even afflicted. Saturn's in the 7th house at your birth, then. Oh, Saturn is a love talisman for me. Or if I'm having problems with relationships, it's because Saturn's fault. So I'll do remediation, I'll stop that energy, or I'll fix it. And I can do that. I can easily see what's going on from looking at the chart, because the planets are causing everything. They're the direct cause of all the positives and negatives, and it's all individual to me. And so if Saturn is associated, like I said, with love in my chart, if it predicts it, then Saturn is the problem, or Saturn is the solution. And so that's the typical view. Again, I have a different view of it, because to me, when you look at your Natal chart, it's like repertory theater. You have twelve houses, so you have twelve roles and you have seven actors, and they can all play those roles. And so they step in and give you information. They're messengers. But my view is that the planet like Saturn in the 7th house is not that Saturn is messing you up or beaming energy at you, or that you can fix your chart by fixing Saturn somehow. If Saturn is predicting you have love problems, then my view would be you want to deal with it by a talisman that naturally rules love or naturally has the effect of dealing with love. So Venus. And so that would be my suggestion now, so that, as you can see, that's a different approach. And that's. But it is, if you look at the talismanic stuff, there's no support in any traditional source for saying that Saturn becomes a love talisman because he's in your 7th house. If you look at Saturn, they say Saturn rules these following things. Saturn rules old men and senators and agriculture and melancholy and the cult philosophy and deeper wisdom and things like that. Or Venus is love, pleasure, playing stringed instruments, having sex, art, beauty, things like that. And so if you did a Venus talisman, then that's the kind of effects that you'd expect from a Venus talisman. Not because, okay, Venus in the 10th house, it'll help my career. It's like, that's different. I mean, that's not saying it's wrong, but again, the traditional I'm trying to follow along with, because, see, what's weird about it is once you get heavily into the traditional approach, your instinctive reaction tends to follow that. And so I've had that numerous times, had a view about, okay, this particular indication and I'll find a nutritional source that follows that because, I mean, I'm just deeply imbued with that. And I've had the same, it's a bit same thing as a lawyer with a judge. What I do is I try to predict what a judge is going to decide, and I can do that because I've spent 25 or 30 years practicing and I know how they think about stuff. And so I have the same reaction that they do. Not all the time, but oftentimes where it'd be different from somebody who has no idea, who doesn't train in law and hasn't had actual practical experience with judges. They're going to be all over the place in terms of predicting how they come out. So that's what I would say about it, is that it's a craft, you know, and that's the same thing with this, which isn't to say, again, if you want to have that approach that that's wrong or anything like that. It's just that. But it's not because I don't want to be like, oh, I, I'm the one who's backed up by the sources. So I'm right and you're wrong. I'm just like, what you want to do is find out what resonates for you, you know, and then follow that approach. But it is a little problematic to have an approach where you don't understand why you've come up with things. Things just seem automatically true to you and you have no idea why it is. And from a practical standpoint, you don't want to worry about philosophy, but it ends up being, you're controlled, and I'm controlled by mine too. I'm not saying I'm independent of it, but I try to have a little higher awareness of what my sources are and what my background is. But recognizing that, again, I'm not free of them. I just have weird sort. I just have weird sources. [01:09:56] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:09:57] Speaker B: So, but anyhow, with the talismans, if you want to make a talisman, you need to find a time that's appropriate, that particular celestial thing. So for a planetary talisman, you want to do a time when that planets energy or whatever influence is strong. So for a planetary talisman, I look at book two, book two, chapter ten of Picatrix has a bunch of planetary talismans and it lays out a bunch of factors, about four, three or four factors, and they kind of change around because it's a traditional source of being consistent. But if you look through that, you can see that those factors are basically that the planet be dignified in essential dignity. So essential dignity is based on the sign placement of things and where in the sign it is for the lesser dignity. So for a sun talisman you want to have an assign. It rules, which is Leo, or in its exaltation, which is Aries. So those are the two strongest essential dignity placements for the sun. You then want to have the sun either rising on the eastern horizon, which is at the ascendant, or directly overhead at the midheaven. Those are the two strongest placements for it in terms of placement in the chart. And then you want to have the planetary hour of the planet. And the planetary hours are natural and that they start at sunrise and end at sunset for the day. And then the whole 24 hours day ends at the sunset of the next day. So you can see though, that they're going to change in the summertime. The summer hours are going to be long and the winter hours, I mean, the night are going to be short. In the winter time, the day is going to be short and the night is going to be long. So you basically need a calculator to figure it out. But each planet has a planetary, you know, during the day maybe, I think there's three. And depending on what time of year it is, it could be short or long period of time. So you. But that's the planetary hour. You can get a calculator to do it. So you have rising or culminating, exalted or sign planetary hour and then you want it to be unafflicted. Now, exactly what the constitutes unafflicted is going to depend on the individual person. But for example, making applying square our opposition. Those are bad aspects. It's retrograde. Sun's not gonna be retrograde, but other planets can be retrograde. That's an affliction. Combust too close to sun, that's an affliction. So there's just a whole bunch of different possibilities as far as that. Now there's about 50 different ways to be afflicted. So if you followed every single, like Guido Bonatti, list a bunch of them in his aphorisms, if you followed every single, it's in the book, it says it's an affliction, then you're not gonna make the talisman. You're gonna have to make a judgment about which ones you're gonna follow and which ones going to not. So, for example, I don't worry about void, of course, moon, not a major affliction. So I'm not going to worry about it. You know, separating versus applying aspects. Again, in horary, astrology or electional astrology, an applying aspect is effective. A separating aspect is ineffective. But that's good for malefic stuff. If you're separating from malefic, you're separating from a square. It's not a problem. But it would be in a natal chart. So again, people know Natal and they bring it into this. And so there's all that sort of stuff, stuff that goes on also, people are afraid. So, but you need to. What I do is I select these factors in advance. So I have these specific factors that you must have specific factors that you can't have. Other stuff is a bonus. I don't worry. It's nice you have a bonus. Don't worry about it. And then I look ahead for elections that fit that. What I get the impression from the modern style is that you just start looking at random charts and whatever pops out at you is how you do an election. And they'll have intuitive stuff, you know, and that's, I mean, again, people will look at the chart of the talisman when I've only look at those particular factors and they'll start wandering all over the chart of the talisman and they want to treat it like a natal chart and so they're going to marry the talisman. Except the problem is the talisman doesn't have like neighbors, it doesn't have a home, it doesn't have children, it doesn't have illnesses, it doesn't have a spouse, it doesn't have secret enemies, it doesn't have a career and it doesn't have, you know, hopes and dreams. So the chart of a talisman is not like the chart of a person, okay? It's different and different factors. I mean, it's universal. I mean everything that happens at that moment, at that time, date and place has got the same chart, whether it's a death chart, a birth chart, a Horary chart, chart of a chicken chart of, you know, all the stuff's going on at the same time. You have to kind of. And each chart is going to have different things you're going to be looking at. So that's another thing to look at. But, um, so if it's a fixed star, you would not have that fixed star rising or culminating and the moon making and applying conjunction, sextilla, trine, and then unafflicted. Those are the factors that I use, and that comes from our traditional sources. There's a book called, like I said, hermes and the 15 fixed stars. And that's what it, again, it's got a lot of stuff in there. If you look at all, if you compare everything, that's the underlying sort of essence of it. Mansion, the moon mansion. A moon would be rising or culminating and the moon in the proper mansion. So those are all different things that you look at. But then, so those would be the initial making of the talisman at that time. [01:14:35] Speaker A: I'm going to have you stop here, and we're going to, because we're over an hour, but we're going to go into the second hour. So come to themushroomsapprentice.com. and, and we're going to continue because this is absolutely fascinating. And I want you to also get into the effects of these various planets and also of house based talismans. So we will talk about all of that in the second hour.