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Seeking Recommendation Planetary Magic Resources

Seeking recommendations for books.

UT_Clownhunter

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Planetary magic has piqued my interest lately so I thought id inquire here. What is everybody's favorite resource they use? Be it a text on theory, practice, or both I'd love to hear everyone's opinions.
 

Nerone

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Picatrix, book III in particular. It has that nice sweetspot before astrology became "Jungianized" and well after the metaphysical foundations of the Neoplanists settled in the Arab world.

Lots of wisdom between the lines. Pay particular attention to the rules for calling a planet; for Mercury, it says one would have to be dressed as a scholar in such and such garb. This is of course metaphorical; one has to "dress up" psychologically and meet the planetary power halfway there
 

altima

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Picatrix, book III in particular. It has that nice sweetspot before astrology became "Jungianized" and well after the metaphysical foundations of the Neoplanists settled in the Arab world.

Lots of wisdom between the lines. Pay particular attention to the rules for calling a planet; for Mercury, it says one would have to be dressed as a scholar in such and such garb. This is of course metaphorical; one has to "dress up" psychologically and meet the planetary power halfway there
Thanks for the info!
 

Calipac

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Biggest problem with that book is the order he recommends doing the initiations, and recommending not doing Saturn or pushing it off forever. Start with the Moon and work your way up the Tree to Saturn. It'll go way smoother that way.
Yeah, I get that he was probably just trying to warn unprepared dinguses from screwing themselves over, but he does go a little overboard in his warnings against Saturn, its not THAT bad.
 

Jadugar

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Solomonic Pentacles (
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) and any planetary hour tracker app (I trust you to use Google) is a fair start. Too many arguments have been had about the necessary rituals to consecrate these, so I'll leave it to you to find a system you like.
 
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Picatrix, book III in particular. It has that nice sweetspot before astrology became "Jungianized" and well after the metaphysical foundations of the Neoplanists settled in the Arab world.

Lots of wisdom between the lines. Pay particular attention to the rules for calling a planet; for Mercury, it says one would have to be dressed as a scholar in such and such garb. This is of course metaphorical; one has to "dress up" psychologically and meet the planetary power halfway there
I follow those instructions to a tee. As magus we are making the metaphysical manifest physically. We do this through ritual action. The materials, synthemata, and dress are incredibly important. They receive the form into the matter, the form stops being a perfect ideal and gets brought into the swirl of earth and water. You imbue water and earth with fire and spirit when you do this, using word. It is the reenactment of the Divine Pymander, it is practical demiurgy, we are brothers to him.
 

UT_Clownhunter

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Biggest problem with that book is the order he recommends doing the initiations, and recommending not doing Saturn or pushing it off forever. Start with the Moon and work your way up the Tree to Saturn. It'll go way smoother that way.
Out of curiosity, what makes the standard order better than the one he outlines?
 
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Out of curiosity, what makes the standard order better than the one he outlines?
The Chaldean order is the order in which Man descended through the spheres and was granted his powers of demiurgy by the governors in the Divine Pymander. We can trace hermetic planetary ascent rituals to the Abassid Caliphate being practiced by the magicians there. Hermes Trismegistus instructs us in the Divine Pymander to move up through them making specific sacrifices of attachments in order to deify ourselves. This is echoed a lot in alchemical literature as the alchemists reference frequently that if you do the operation out of order you will need to restart the work.

Now you can definitely initiate into the spheres in any order you want, but you will not be granted the same transformation. In the Golden Tractate of Hermes Trismegistus the vulture cries out that he is the black and the white in the black and the white and the yellow in the white and so on and so forth. This is particularly clear instruction on why the order of operations is so incredibly important when making "the crow fly without wings", that is, the souls transcendence through the sequence of operations. The vulture is stating that within every stage the beginning of the next stage is seeded.

So you can, for example, initiate into Jupiter and then Venus and then the Moon and reap immediate magical effects, however, you will not be performing the ascent ritual which can take up to a decade, and in this, the Opus does not happen. So if you just want magic dont worry about the ordering, if you want deification then do the spheres in the right order (Moon -> Saturn) because all of the Hermetic discourses are very clear about how to approach the governors to become as Poimandres.
 

UT_Clownhunter

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The Chaldean order is the order in which Man descended through the spheres and was granted his powers of demiurgy by the governors in the Divine Pymander. We can trace hermetic planetary ascent rituals to the Abassid Caliphate being practiced by the magicians there. Hermes Trismegistus instructs us in the Divine Pymander to move up through them making specific sacrifices of attachments in order to deify ourselves. This is echoed a lot in alchemical literature as the alchemists reference frequently that if you do the operation out of order you will need to restart the work.

Now you can definitely initiate into the spheres in any order you want, but you will not be granted the same transformation. In the Golden Tractate of Hermes Trismegistus the vulture cries out that he is the black and the white in the black and the white and the yellow in the white and so on and so forth. This is particularly clear instruction on why the order of operations is so incredibly important when making "the crow fly without wings", that is, the souls transcendence through the sequence of operations. The vulture is stating that within every stage the beginning of the next stage is seeded.

So you can, for example, initiate into Jupiter and then Venus and then the Moon and reap immediate magical effects, however, you will not be performing the ascent ritual which can take up to a decade, and in this, the Opus does not happen. So if you just want magic dont worry about the ordering, if you want deification then do the spheres in the right order (Moon -> Saturn) because all of the Hermetic discourses are very clear about how to approach the governors to become as Poimandres.
Thats a very informative answer! Thank you for sharing.
 

gerardobraham

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Hello, this is one of the areas where I have worked the most. Some would argue that you need to know a lot of astrology in order to do your rituals right. At least you need a passable knowledge of where a planet has strength and where not. So a good basic book of astrology can help a lot for that.
Now for the magic side, I agree Picatrix is the basis. Christopher Warnock has a lot of resources on his webpage where you can learn a lot without buying his course (which I recommend), he also has several small books which digest the picatrix invocations a bit in order for them to be more accesible.
I like a lot he Heptameron of Pedro de Abano which has a planetary basis although it invokes more spirits than just the angels of the day.
David Rankine recently published a book about spirit conjuration in which he works withe the Planetary Intelligences which is also a good starting point.
 
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