Hello,
I’m interested in planetary remedies, especially ways of strengthening or harmonising a planetary quality that may be weakened in the natal chart, for example a planet in its fall, badly placed by house, or under difficult aspects.
What kinds of remedies do you usually use?
One approach I find very interesting is the use of talismans created under specific astrological elections. Do any of you work with this?
For example, if someone wanted to strengthen solar energy, vitality, confidence, clarity, visibility, authority, and inner centre, I would consider making a solar talisman on Sunday, the day of the Sun, during the hour of the Sun, ideally when the Sun is astrologically well placed.
For the material, one could use a solar stone such as citrine, amber, heliotrope, ruby, or another golden/bright stone. Amber and citrine feel especially solar because of their colour, warmth, brightness, and symbolic connection with light, vitality, and clarity.
I’d love to know what remedies you use: talismans, prayers, stones, herbs, colours, music, offerings, devotional practices, or practical behavioural remedies.
Thank you for making this thread!
There are many different philosophies when it comes to fate, but the main question most people have to decide upon is "can you change your fate or not" - and most people posting on this website, indeed most people alive today, for historical reasons I won't get into, think that they can. And indeed, not only do most people think that you can alter your fate (if they even believe they have one at all), they believe that the notion that you CAN'T is absolutely absurd, if not actually horrifying. VERY RARELY, indeed, literally NEVER have I EVER come across ONE PERSON who EVER believed, as many did in ancient times, that you actually have no means whatsoever of changing your fate, and instead, the purpose of astrology and indeed, the purpose of everything you ever do, is to assist your higher self, the divine spark of the Monad within you or whatever, escape this awful place and leave all of it and everything here behind. This perspective is mostly developed to it's culmination by the stoics and the gnostics, who made it their entire philosophical project to teach people how to be "soldiers of fate" (amor fati) and accept their fate with courage and dignity.
BUT, we can ignore all of that, because I'm sure you've already made up your mind about and decided. So then, the hell with that, I won't have it, certainly I can change my fate, certainly the gods would not have made it so that I must always do whatever they tell me to do and the only thing I can actually do is be conscious of what is happening to me or not. They would not have made it so that I cannot actually interfere with anything in any way, even my own volition being just an illusion that I am bearing witness to, as if I am just the audience and even my own thoughts are not "my" thoughts, they are just thoughts that are spirits passing through the mind of this being which I am testifying for, acting as the witness of its existence, until that existence ends, and nothing more. It cannot be that I have no involvement whatsoever with "this" beyond just being that eternal all-seeing EYE that watches, and that's it.
SO IN THAT CASE, let's do some astrological magic! I highly recommend starting with either Agrippa's Three Books on Occult Philosophy, or, if you want to avoid qabalah, I recommend you check out Christopher Warnock's modern translation of the Picatrix, and his website as well. Fantastic resource for this stuff. The Pictarix is your bible when it comes to astrological magic.
However, I want to plug a historically famous and very important writer on astrological magic that very rarely gets mentioned and that bothers me a lot. His name is Marsillo Ficino. Check out his "De Vita Libri Tres" (Three Books of Life). Marsillo Ficino is important to me personally, and I think in general, because he tried to do something very challenging which only Porphyry, the direct student of Plotinus, came close to doing. And that was, reconciling the "theurgy" that Iamblichus argued was essential to neoplatonism with the purely meditative approach Plotinus (the founder of neoplatonism) taught was necessary. Iamblichus (who studied under Porphyry, Porphyry being Plotinus' student) felt that it was not enough to merely contemplate the divine, you must somehow leverage direct mystical experiences to elevate your soul out of the base and mundane level of reality that you were born into, you cannot transcend this earthly form and reunite with the divine through pure meditation alone, you must do rituals, ceremonies, and so forth. Plotinus felt such things were just illusions and distractions and were not necessary, which follows in the footsteps of the stoics and other fatalistic greco-roman philosophies of that era which basically taught you to just accept life and not fight it and try to just rise above it somehow.
Marsillo Ficino, like Porphyry, believed you needed both. But they leaned in favor of contemplation and meditation over theurgic practices. In other words, every single author, every single occultist, every single philosophy and philosopher, following the schism between Iamblichus and Plotinus, tended to agree with Iamblichus, and even if they agreed there should be a balance of both, tended to lean more toward theurgy and rituals over just sitting around and meditating. To my knowledge, ONLY Ficino (unless you go far east and look into eastern traditions like zen buddhism) advocates for the "hands off" approach as the main point, that you only engage in theurgic stuff at a bare minimum, just to help the process of spiritual evolution, but not to take over the process and make it central to the process itself. I agree with this. I think meditation and "zen" is kind of the real deal and we don't need to be casting spells for every single little thing, or doing elaborate rituals all the time. Simple daily rituals just to remind us of something should be sufficient, like a musician who keeps an instrument in good repair, but he doesn't spend ALL DAY polishing it, every day, all the time.
Anyway, I love talking about astrological magic and the history and philosophy of it, so again, thank you for making this thread about one of my favorite subjects! I hope some of my rambling produced something useful to someone.
