Compartments, measurement, geometry

My evolving druidry kit
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Over the last few days, while working on other things, I’ve been fussing and sawing and sanding and gluing small bits of wood into place to make this little box.

I’m a member of a couple of druidic organizations, namely AODAand DOGD, and I’ve noted that the more of these kinds of ritual groups and ritual paths that I practice, the more that my house and life gets cluttered up with stuff… stuff that’s difficult to pack, difficult to put away, difficult to sort or keep separate, and difficult, frankly, to explain in short order.

Plus, there’s the Hermetic Kavad, which is going to take more carpentry skills than I currently have, to finish in any appreciable way that people are going to find useful or interesting. So there’s the need to practice those skills, and this is a good way to do it.

I need more practice. Clearly.

Part of it is that carpentry is not pure geometry, nor pure measurement. The thickness of the wood worked matters; so does its flexibility and strength. The rules for assembling pieces are not hard and fast – there are knots in the wood, there’s the fact that a piece of wood which has straight sides is not perfectly straight, and there’s the challenge that cutting a piece of wood that looks flat may in fact warp it — particularly if it’s these tiny thin pieces that make up the internal walls of this box.

Also, this was about making sure that certain objects fit, and fit snugly, inside the box, without a lot of wiggle room (Some of them are fragile, after all). It’s not pure geometry by any means. Actually, most of it was done with a straight-edge, with only inches marked and not to any degree of accuracy (no quarter or half inches).

And you know what? It turned out ok. Not perfect by any means. But not bad. Not beautiful. But functional. Acceptable. A suitable learning experience.

A good beginning.

If you’re further interested in the contents of the kit, click on the picture, and visit the Flickr page… there’s about 20 notes about the contents of the box, but you have to be on Flickr to read/see them.

Via Flickr:
(Roll over the image to read the notes.. but on Flickr, not here.)

I had it in mind to build a small box for the tools and equipment of druidic practice in the DOGD. I got the box from Michael’s Arts & Crafts, and I’m in the process of laying out a Celtic knot-work pattern on the outside, along with spaces for the four animals of the directions (hawk, stag, salmon, bear), the sixteen geomantic characters, and the various other sigils of this society.

One of the big problems was the red cross and the green ring. The standard 5″ diameter one doesn’t fit in the box. I’ve now tried making a 3×3″ ring and cross, but the scale of the two parts seems off. Time to remember my proportional rules, and try again.

Inside the box are compartments for incense and candles, a small egg cup ‘chalice’, a crystal ball, three candlesticks, two cauldrons, a wand, and (tucked out of sight) four geomantic “Druid wands” for casting geomancy charts. There are also two bottles which will eventually hold Spagyric preparations, and space for several more. Although I don’t think this box will ever be able to hold all 17 spagyrics that the order has on offer… by then it will probably be time for a new box…

The Room & The Kavad

Yesterday, while ‘stuck’ (very pleasantly, despite the fact that it was due to expected inclement weather which never reached us) in Massachusetts with my lady, I had the opportunity to play a new game with her called The Room.  ”You’ll like it,” she said.  ”It’s about solving puzzles while opening a magical box.  The box is kinda like your kavad, but it’s a lot more fun to open.”

She’s got a point about that.  It’s a beautiful, amazing, elegant game, and I love it a lot.  I’d buy it for my own iPad, except I have a 1st generation model, and it looks like you need at least an iPad3 to play it.

But it did inspire me to consider re-building the kavad with some moving parts beyond hinges and drawers.  I’m not sure that my technical skills are up to the challenge, frankly, but the play-through last night of The Room offered a lot of interesting possibilities — from re-imagining the box with a steampunk aesthetic only, to actually including an iris window to cover over the built-in table of practice on the top.   Incorporating puzzles into the design will also keep onlookers intrigued or interested…

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  I can’t keep designing things if I don’t finish them.  And right now, I need to finish the kavad as is, rather than think about how to redesign it using engineering skills I haven’t even begun to develop.  At least half of every project involves knowing what things you can’t do, so you can concentrate on what you can.

Kavad 4.8 Progress

The kavad, open to show the decans

Sachiko Umoto’s work has really helped me a lot in the last few days to push through a number of drawings, and complete many of the illustrations of the Decans of the Zodiac. There are perhaps six or seven more illustrations in the Decans to do, and then I can get started on the Mansions of the Moon. I’m eager to do those; I’ve managed to do about half of them in one form or another, but I’d like to push myself and just ‘get ‘er done’, you know? This prototyping business is kind of wearing-down, after a while. This object has been sitting, partially finished, on my desk or near my desk for most of the summer, while I taught myself drawing skills. Something in one of the Sachiko Umoto books really spoke to me, though. She said, basically, that the quality of your drawings don’t really matter at the beginning. It’s important to try. Zach, who does the illustrations at the coffee house I go to in the mornings, said much the same thing. He started out by scribbling his drawings, knowing that somewhere in that ‘cloud’ of lines, was the ‘right line’ that made the drawing clear and visible. He needed to make the mistake of several different versions of that line in order to find the right one. Even now, after years of practice, he said that the correct line still eludes him.

From an artistic perspective, I still have a long way to go. Many of the drawings within this kavad are copies of someone else’s, or composites. It may not matter, though. I’ven oticed that some of the drawings ‘speak’ to me, through the eyes or through gesture. Others of the drawings are still dead — the image I’ve tried to create doesn’t speak to the spirit or the mindset of that time of year, and so the picture doesn’t wake up or speak to the audience yet.

From a magical perspective, if such a thing exists, some of the pictures are starting to wake up.  The eyes carry expressiveness and meaning to me, and I’m starting to feel like I’m communicating with some of the figures.  Very unusual.  The image for Cancer 3 is most expressive; I already feel like I’ve bonded with that little guy on the back of the turtle.  Maybe it’s because I’ve drawn him so much and in so many varied forms.   I find myself wishing there was a scene like that for every one of the figures; frankly, they’d be easier to draw.

It’s clear that some of these images will have to be drawn, again and again and again, until the final form of them emerges.  Ironically, some of my earliest drawings in this series are the most accurate, and closest to their final form. The ones I did later are the ones which are farthest from their final form.  IT’s as though I began drawing them in the right frame of mind, and I’ve never been able to recapture that frame of mind again, ever since.  More practice, of several kinds, is clearly needed.  Elements of the drawings are waking up, though, and getting stronger. There’s this sense that I’m looking at ‘real people’.  My doing, or the work of my genius, in the sense of the Elizabeth Gilbert video — not entirely me, not entirely something or someone else?  I don’t have a good answer to that.

A video of the kavad:

Go Big, then Get Small

The Third Face of Libra has a lot going for it — for one, a lot of the original sources all agree on the bow and arrows thing; for another, there’s a lot of suggestions of sexual impropriety, and a guy with the head of a (ahem) horse has a range of meanings.

Naturally, I’ve screwed up.  I’ve put the bow, and consequently, the main figure’s arm, in the wrong place.  This one is going to have to be redesigned at some point.  But I like the idea of the reclining man with a wineglass and a loaf of bread in hand.  Can I work it into the final version that goes on the kavad?  Hard to know for sure… these pictures are 4″ wide by about 11″ tall — there’s lots of space to work in.  On the kavad, the space is maybe 1.5″ by 4″. That means a lot of the data from these big images is going to have to be compressed down.

Why didn’t I start out by making the windows in my sketchbook the same size as the windows on the kavad? Maybe you’re wondering that.  (Maybe I am, too.)

But the core reason should be obvious — I’m working through a traditional system of learning, and working through a traditional system of training artists. If I jumped right to the crafting of an image, I wouldn’t understand what I was painting or drawing. What is essential here? Do you know?  Do I know, without drawing it?  How will you draw it at a tiny scale, if you’ve never even seen the image before?  And so I draw them large, to figure out what I must know about the image before I try to make it tiny.

There’s a learning process at work here, and to avoid it is to short-circuit your own learning process. Don’t do it.

Kavad 4.8 – rectifying a Decan

Kavad 4.8 – rectifying a Decan
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Well. This was interesting. First, I talked with a friend of mine who’s been through Chris Warnock’s astrology course, and my friend gave me some pointers on looking at the Decans. First, most ‘modern’ traditional astrologers (or is that most modern ‘traditional astrologers?’) don’t use the decans at all, or simply use them to determine certain ways of reading the data about the planets. Second, it’s important not to mix Sidereal and Tropical data — thus, limit the information borrowed from Hindu sources, unless you want to precess the data from Hindu stuff back 25 degrees (putting this beach scene in the first Face of Libra). And third, use the Chaldean order of the planets for determining ruling sign of each face, so that certain other rules continue to apply further down the road. Fourth, have fun with the images as best you can within the previous limitations.

So, I tried to do that. I don’t know that I succeeded. Given that this is an image of disappointments and plotting, it seemed appropriate to combine a lot of information here: hence, we have the Hindu snake, but also Picatrix’s man with a lance a a severed head. She’s not being struck, as Agrippa suggests, but she’s clearly being threatened, and the violent threat is clearly a real one. The woman isn’t eating, but she is on a beach and the sea is in the background — a lightning storm behind her and a sunset makes this a dark day for her.

All in all, it’s a striking visual image, even in rough sketch. It’s also clear that a student, or a storyteller, could work with this image quite well, and tell a rollicking good scene. Someone working with this image magically would want to go a step further, and meditate on the image or even ‘skry’ the image — imagine themselves stepping into the image, walking around the scene, and seeing what else there is to be seen from another point of view, and using that information to expand on the meaning of the image.

I’m going to have to go through this process for a lot of the Decans, I think, before I can know what comes next for the Kavad.

Kavad 4.8 – making sense of Decans

Kavad 4.8 – making sense of Decans
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Ok, this is a quick post to show what’s been occupying my time the last few days. I’ve been reading up on the Decans, because I want them to be part of the Kavad… only, it turns out that they’re a ghastly mess of a system.

There’s evidence that there was something like a Decanate system in Egypt — thirty-six gods ruling over 10 (or sometimes 11) days each. The systems got exported to Babylonia, and probably from there to Hindu astrology, where it became hugely popular. Each face was further subdivided into three “munificences”, so that there was the Sign, and then its three decans, and then nine of these ‘officials’. The idea was that this was a spirit court of all the different layers of officials….

ANYWAY, it hardly seems to matter. Here’s the first Decan of Scorpio. None of the image descriptions from the major sources match each other. They’re not even closely related enough that you could borrow symbols from one and another to add to a third, to make a composite. And they’re all like this.

There’s three basic ways to solve this kind of mess:

1) Pick one person’s list, and stick to it.
2) Pick one person’s list, make that primary, and include a symbol or two from one other source’s list.
3) Sod it for a game of soldiers, and make a completely new list!

I’m unlikely to do #1 or #3… Option #2 is pretty likely. What do you readers think?

Kavad 4.8 – the Decans of Leo

Kavad 4.8 – the Decans of Leo
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Here are the Decans (or Faces) of Leo. I’m not sure if I like Decans or Faces better as a word. Decans references the fact that they’re the 10-degree windows of each of the 30-degree Signs of the Zodiac; but Faces is more suggestive of what they are, which is images or pictures to help you remember their function, purpose and mindset. These used to be a lot more common in astrology than they are now; now only traditional astrologers use them, I understand — people like Christopher Warnock.

I think their main purpose, though, was probably as figures of memory in a Palace of Memory. By knowing the images or pictures, one could remember how to find that particular piece of information again. By distinguishing the frames from one another, by color or by image, a whole range of information could be conveyed to the viewer all at once. And THAT color could carry information, too.

I think my biggest problem is that the image descriptions are very, very figurative, and I don’t know if these are reliable or not.

Kavad 4.8 – faces of cancer 1&2

Kavad 4.8 – faces of cancer 1&2
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Having done the third face of Cancer in the previous post, I did the first and second faces of Cancer on the next page in my sketchbook (since the Kavad is at home right now, on my desk).

The first image is a friendly man with a basket of fruit in a sandalwood grove, with feet like a monkey’s and crooked hands, and a horselike body. I’ve chosen to interpret him as chunky, shorthaired, and with clunky, chunky arms and weird fingers. (It was odd trying to draw him… how do you deliberately screw up fingers, when they’re not that easy to draw in the first place?

The second image is a hard-hearted but beautiful woman with a stick and a snake, and a crown of myrtle or lotus leaves on her head. I was a little too rushed with this one, and it didn’t turn out very well. I’m not entirely pleased with it, particularly her nose, which i didn’t do so well at.

At least they’re preliminary sketches, right? I shudder to think what it’s going to be like doing these as miniatures, when/where the ‘canvas’ is three inches tall by two inches wide on the Kavad itself.

Kavad 4.8 – sketches

Kavad 4.8 – sketches
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
I’m traveling today, and away from the kavad — but I find that I can at least do some of the reference work in a sketchbook. Today I decided to work on how I’ll present the Decantes.

The Decantes symbols are….

• A) very old
• B) somewhat confused
• C) appear to have no set names
• D) started Hindu
• E) passed through Islam
• F) got mangled in medieval Latin
• G) have different interpretations based on what the image is, which lost of names one uses, and which image.
• H) can be used as a list of memory images
• J) all of the above

Here’s some of the key data I’ve collected, in a sketchbook — the planet of each decan, and its original Hindu name (maybe) translated into English… and a sample image from the Decanates.

The sample image shows pillars down the sides of the image which could be painted in the relevant colors, column bases that could reference other positions on the kavad (activating its database-like functions), and triangles to either side of the arch that reference the data of the year.

The image itself is a composite of bits of the Hindu, Islamic and Medieval Christian images for the 3rd Face of Cancer, or about July 11-21. It shows a lonely man riding on the back of a turtle as his ship, the sail adorned with the rings of his wives. He carries a snake.

Kavad 4.7 — Sacred Geometry

The pentagram, badly drawn, with eight geometric constructions, and nine roundels of mathematical formulae (eventually)

There’s a beautiful geometrical pattern that I learned from JMG’s work, that was actually in a book by Mark Stavish.  Eventually that proof, I think, is going to go onto this panel as a nod to my initiaiton as a Freemason.  For now, I don’t feel comfortable putting that proof on display — the discovery and rediscovery of such a proof is not mine to share, especially not in working photographs of a construction project.  But the IDEA that there should be a panel within the kavad devoted to the issue of geometry, and sacred geometry — as well the “Blazing Star” of the pentagram, representative of the five elemental forces, and a tool for teaching the LBRP and other systems of energy work related to Hermeticism, strikes me as critical.  No less, the five pointed star (correctly drawn, of course, not as shown here), reveals the principle of Φ — phi, the Greek letter representing the golden ratio, or 1:1.618… and so on.  Including it large-scale in the kavad as a pentacle is a way of relating the Hermetic tradition to Wicca, to mathematics, and to concepts of natural beauty.

It occurs to me that I now have the five pointed star and the six pointed star both arranged in the Kavad now, and even though in an earlier post today I was dubious of the value of having the Cross in the center of the Kavad, maybe it makes more sense now to have it there. I wonder… can I get the star and moon of Islam in there too? What about the Om symbol of Hinduism?  The yin-yang? Maybe I should just put a big “coexist” sticker on the thing somewhere.