Tree of Life Geometry, Revisited

I’m not entirely sure this will work. But here goes.  Thanks to Gordon’s recommendation to try out VINE, I was able to produce a trio of short videos today, including this one on the traditional geometry of the Tree of Life.  It’s fast, because Vine only allows six-second videos.  But it’s kinda cool, and if you watch it a few times, you can probably figure out how the geometry of the Tree fits together.  Enjoy!

Vine: Video of the Tree of Life

Update: Apparently you have to go to Vine’s website to view it, because I can’t embed it on a WordPress site.  Alas.  Enjoy anyway.

Vervain Spagyric

Filtering Spagyrics

Alchemical Spagyric of Vervain

This is a preparation of common vervain (Verbena officinalis) made using Bulgarian from Mountain Rose Herbs.   In a Spagyric tincture, the herb is macerated or soaked in high-proof alcohol, and then strained after several weeks to produce a menstruum or herb essence-infused alcohol. The herbal residue is calcinated or burned to black or white ash. The ash and the menstruum are then recombined for a period of cohobation, before the ash is re-filtered out, and the resulting spagyric bottled.

Vervain is also known as van-van, and is a common ingredient in hoodoo and other rootwork. It is an ancient herbal cure for eye strain, and a relaxant of some kind. A few drops in a large amount of water is a strong dose.   I produced this as part of my initiatory work in the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn. I’m not at all sure that I’m ready to drink even a few drops of it, actually.   I mean, it’s black. With this tinge of green around the edges where light can pass through.

Except, when I hold it up to the light, it has this green color which is somewhere between the traditional color of Venus, and the green glass of a bottle of Rolling Rock Beer. After several strainings through cotton balls and coffee filters, it is nearly cloudless; there are no remaining films or mists of particulate left in it, and it is vaguely emerald in color.

The residue

One is reminded of the Emerald Tablet, and the wisdom of Hermes Thrice Blessed.

So, from a Design perspective…

So, from a design perspective, this is dumb.  I mean, what’s to be gained from soaking a bunch of herbs in alcohol for weeks, burning the remaining herbal mess, recombining the ashes with the herb-infused alcohol, and then letting it sit for a week.  Add a teaspoon of wine to a barrel of sewage, you get sewage.  Add a teaspoon of sewage to a barrel of wine, you  get… sewage. Seems utterly dumb, right?

And yet the symbolism, both alchemically and chemically, as well as the value of the actual nutrients left over in the ashes, is kind of important.  The soaking part, what alchemists call the menstruum, is where you get all the easy stuff to make the switcheroo from being solid to being liquid. The alcohol becomes a solvent which makes it easy for the plant essentials to cross over from being plant to being something else.

But there’s a whole crowd of things in a plant that can’t make the crossover that easily.  You have to break them down, break them out, smash them up, and mash them up, and then recombine those shattered, broken-down bits back into the easy stuff.  This process is called Calcination.  In alchemy you do it by putting the oven on 500°F and then putting all the soaking-wet alcoholic leafy bits in there, and watching them burn.  It’s pretty.  It’s ugly.  It’s hot.  You’re making sure the dross burns off — all the crappy parts of the design.  Some writerly type said, “Kill your darlings.” Harlan Ellison said, “don’t write crap.” Stephen King said, “Cut 10% of everything you write in the first draft.”  The Alchemists did that too.  Dump the bad stuff, and reduce the waste to ash.  Make it utterly black, make it gray, make it white.  Heat it up, and burn away everything but the essentials.

Then dump that ugly black ash, the leftovers of your furious cutting-away, back into that beautiful green, herb-infused alcohol.  And leave it in the darkness for a while, bringing it out only a couple of times a day to shake it and stir it and make a mess of it all over again.  It will turn so black and so dark, you won’t be able to see light through it.  It will become utterly opaque.  That’s cohobation.

And then filter it.  The coffee filters, or the cotton balls, will be ugly and slimy and burnt-looking.  It will be crusty and black.  And the liquid will still look black from the side.  Tilt your head funny at great design, and you can see the magic that’s being used against you in the final product, and the ghastly waste that went into producing something that amazing… it’s like following the production chain of an Apple product back to the iridium mines in Africa and the sweatshops of Shanghai, that leftover teaspoon of ashen-black liquid tar leftover at the end of a spagyric operation.  It’s the difference between good design and great design.  It’s the difference between taking twenty minutes on a project and twenty months.

But that’s where excellence comes from. From the reuse and the burning up of ideas, from the consumption of materials, from the willingness to apply tools and heat to a problem.  Getting the low-hanging fruit — getting the base chemicals to cross from plant to alcohol — that’s easy.  Getting the raw chemical building blocks of the world into the spagyric… that requires a different kind of effort.  A deeper one, a heartier one, a more dedicated one.  Separate, Dissolve, Burn Up the Leftovers, take the Ashes and dump them back in, Recreate the Work Fresh and New.

It’s a beginning.

From A Teaching Perspective…

The Filtration Process continues

From a teaching perspective, this is hard.  The rewards of a spagyric tincture aren’t really meant to be shared. They can’t be, really — nominally, this is medicine, but medicine from a style and philosophical approach to medicine that is no longer common nor approved.  The techniques require access to tools and materials that we no longer accept that students should work with.

And yet the process!

“Take something natural — using human gifts, dissolve the easily-gotten parts, and break them down — using other human gifts, shatter what remains into miniscule pieces — burn those pieces to release the even stranger bits — recombine with the easily-gained bits — leave them alone a while, except for a little gentle stirring — filter out the raw bits.”

Isn’t that what we ask students to do with their writing? Or their lab reports? Or when correcting mathematical errors in a piece of homework? Don’t we teachers sit like coffee filters over open jars, to collect the black bile that students spew out, and find a way to make sure the pure essence of their work, and the pure essence of their personhood, reaches the page or the presentation or the planning book? Don’t we occasionally apply too much pressure, and the filter breaks, and we say terrible words, and reach for the paper towels, and call in the heavy hitters and have to re-filter the whole batch?

Does anyone get what I’m trying to say?

There’s richness is the reminders here.

Poem: for Jupiter

I have it in mind to write seven planetary odes— hymns for the seven classical planets of the ancient world, and the principal divine forces of the “seven heavens” as laid out in classical Hellenistic/Roman philosophy, and as later used by Medieval Christians, and as later used by Renaissance humanists.

Today being Thursday, the hymn in question is for Jupiter:

O Jove enthroned in lightning and in cloud,
And ruling over heaven, earth and sea;
Imperial, magnanimous, and proud,
Fountain of abundance, and fatherly:
Give ear to your disciple and attend,
For every mountain and each court of law,
And any place where lightning touches down
Becomes a realm that your decree can bend
To fulfill your aim, sure and without flaw—
Thus in majesty you wear heaven’s crown.

Yet loving kindness spills forth from your hand:
Your magnanimity respects no bounds,
And though Earth trembles at your mighty nod,
All kinds of heroes join your royal band —
That hidden chivalry whose grace astounds,
When they act for you, great Jovial god.
Your fatherly kindness extends to all,
And our first being finds its source in you —
You offer a feast, and we heed that call,
To take up life abundantly, anew.

These sacred rites of purity and health,
O thundering Jove, in mercy take part:
Grant to me an increase of needful wealth,
Yet lead me to act with generous heart.
Forge me as a link in the golden chain
By which heaven’s mercies descend to earth,
And all of life’s diversities expand:
Swans, bulls, and eagles, even Danae’s rain,
Or fecund grapes of Bacchus in his mirth —
All born of the lightning of your command.

This one came through much more easily than the Hermes/Mercury text… But even Jove demanded a second draft.

Poem: for the moon

I have it in mind to write seven planetary odes— hymns for the seven classical planets of the ancient world, and the principal divine forces of the “seven heavens” as laid out in classical Hellenistic/Roman philosophy, and as later used by Medieval Christians, and as later used by Renaissance humanists.

Today being Monday, the hymn in question is for The Moon.

Hail, night’s goddess, enrobed in silver gown,
Bull-horned and wandering from phase to phase.
You borrow light but claim your own renown
And lay a firm foundation with your rays!
At first you crown your brother in his dusk,
Then swell each evening til your splendor shows,
To rise alone as heaven’s greatest pearl.
Yet, by days, you shrink, ’til broken tusk
You reveal at the arrival of dawn;
Last, in deep darkness your banners you furl.

Female and male, you govern month and week,
By laws no simple calculation finds,
And yet to every dedicant you speak,
revealing, year by year, your grand designs.
Through tidal change, and dreams, you greatly grow
In power — veiled in cloud and crowned with stars.
Thus every drop of water knows your Name.
In all your mansions you rule ebb and flow,
Desperate laughter and pregnancy’s tears,
And every increase and decline of fame.

Mother of Ages, mirror of the Sun,
Treasure-house of humanity’s dreaming,
Friend to vigil-keepers and owls of night,
All-seeing eye, across the skies you run,
Sending light, in all directions streaming,
Opposing strife, and upholding the right.
Lover of horses, enforcer of tides:
Attend our oblations, accept our praise
And reunite in us what Time divides
With benediction of your mystic rays!

There will be other poems in this series, and the Venus poem is already complete. I’ll be setting up an archive of them when I get back from my current trip. in the meantime, enjoy!

Taiji Day 366: Bit of a let-down, really.

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Topher after a morning in the Design Lab getting set up for a workshop this morning. (I’m teaching fourth graders the core skills of graphic design in a 2-hour workshop: page layout, hand-lettering and font selection, thumbnailing, color choice, page hierarchy, and so on.) After that, I worked on a couple of art projects at home (and gave myself a mild burn with the wood-burner — a wonderful tool but dangerous as all get-out; though admittedly not as bad as a buzz saw). Then I went up to my local metaphysical shop to get candles for a thank-offering to the angels today, Day 366 (I haven’t figured out what I’m going to label tomorrow’s work).

While I was there, I ran into someone who I’d done a prayer card for, based around a pair of angels from the Mansions of the Moon: one of the angels was the angel of the day, and one of them was the angel when she was next going to see a doctor about her cancer. That was maybe two weeks ago that I did this. Today, I find out that that doctor’s visit went swimmingly well, and she asked for another one, for her next appointment. I made it for her, right then and there, and wound up being given all the candles and things I was planning to buy. We’re all connected, right?

And I wound up making another card based on the 26th Mansion of the Moon: The Forespout of the Bucket, showing a woman washing and combing her hair. And after my little candle-shopping trip, I came home and made her in my book. Here she is: You can’t get as good results from looking at a picture of her, as drawing her yourself, but she’s plenty strong for a lot of different kinds of work. And this customer — customer? friend — also got the First Mansion, on the other side of the card. Because she needs Tagriel to wash and comb the cancer right out of her system; and Geniel to chase it off.

So, all things considered, yesterday was a pretty awesome day: completion of a year of tai chi; anticipation of a great day tomorrow and a clean-up of the Design Lab; lunch with a friend; some artwork; some magic work; and some down-time for meditation and rest. Lovely.

In that light, today’s tai chi practice was a bit of a let-down. I mean, sure… I’m stronger than I was a year ago, but I’m not stronger than yesterday. It’s like… it’s like when I turned forty. I was forty for a a week, and everybody was asking me if I felt older or if I was worried now that I was on the wrong side of the Big 4-zero!? And of course, I didn’t. I didn’t feel any different on one side of the number than on the other. It’s just a day.

Because, as much as we’d like to believe that things will be different on the exact day, they aren’t. And today’s no different. I had an absolutely terrific Ward off Left early in the form; and I missed my left hand-touch in the Windmill Kick near the end. Yesterday, my Golden Pheasants were rock-solid, but my Low Kicks were unexciting. How often are all of these practiced moves going to be magical, all on the same day? Not often. But when they are, it should clue us in: there’s no guarantee that the rest of the day will be magical. It all depends on how awake you are.

Am I as awake today as I was yesterday? Maybe, maybe not. How about tomorrow? Will the day ever arrive when I have an absolutely perfect practice?

Who cares? This is today’s practice. Enjoy it.

Review: The Arte of Glamour

Deborah
Castellano’s first book on magic is called The
Arte of Glamour. The foreword is by Gordon
White, of the blog Rune Soup.
Glamour is a complex concept in magic. Originally, the word meant
or means something like “enchantment or magic,” and then gradually
morphed toward “outward seeming”, and then morphed still further
towards its current meaning, along the lines of “the quality of
being beautiful, exciting and attractive, which excites attention
and notice,” as in a way for the external appearance of something
to fail to match its internal reality. One casts a glamour spell,
in other words, to delude the observers into believing things about
yourself or another that simply are not true. The Fairy Godmother
in Cinderella, for example, casts a glamour
over her charge, to make a prince fall in love with a woman who
isn’t quite real. Except. Except, of course,
that the glamour cast is so effective, because it raises
Cinderella’s own self-worth, and breaks the chains that bind her
mind.  Her self-worth is battered by ugly stepsisters — whose
glamour serves to clothe the outward form of beauty, but does not
cover over or hide inner self-worth; and yet the glamour makes the
outward appearance of Cinderella match the inner beauty. It makes
her confident enough to dance with princes, to be the belle of the
ball, and to leave on her own terms — not as concubine to a spoiled
prince, but as suitable quarry for the royal hunt for a queen —
embodying both the power of the throne and the future bearer of
royal heirs.  This is not to suggest that Cinderella’s sole
power is as a baby-making machine, of course — only that this
option is open to her as to no one else at the royal ball…
because her outward appearance and her inner character have been
brought into alignment.  Glamour, in other words, is a magic
not exclusively to change outward appearances, although it can be
used that way.  Even more so, though, it is a magic to bring
the inner character and the outward appearance into alignment.
 As the Steve Martin character says to Rick Moranis
in My Blue
Heaven, “Sometimes
you gotta change from the outside in!”  The Fairy Godmother’s
glamourie on Cinderella is one such bit of
serious spellcraft — change the outward appearance so the inner
beauty shines through; change the outward accessories so that the
inner character is revealed; change the mode of travel so that the
capacity for regal mercy is apparent to all. So, to say that
glamour magic is only about fixing up one’s outward appearance is
to cast aspersions on the whole art.  And this glamour is not
about transforming pumpkins into coaches, or mice into coachmen, or
rags into sumptuous gowns, but about transforming one’s magic with
sumptuousness and sensuality — not, strictly speaking, sexuality,
but rather the play and interplay of senses and sensory experience
upon one’s daily life.  And THAT
is what Deb is about doing — to your magic, to your
life, to your friends (and, in my case to my students), and to your
world. Accordingly, there is only one pumpkin in Deb’s book.
 And for her, the spell here is a vehicle for transforming
one’s arrival at a party from awkward guest to mistress of the
seasonally-appropriate sensory-overload experience.  No mice,
but plenty of ideas about how to transform rags to riches on a
budget. For there is a Cinderella story threaded through what she
writes in this book.  In Cinderella’s time, to be the
fireplace-ash collector was to be lowest among the low; today, we
don’t think much of people whose job it is to handle baby fluids
like puke and burp on a regular basis.  And yet, Deb shows us
how she’s been able to transform such complicated and demanding
labor through a ritual and spiritual practice that raises her
quality of life, that makes her queen of her own
dominion, and look good doing it.
That requires vision.  It requires even greater vision — and
more than that, a degree or three of self-discipline — to bring
that vision to fruition in a way that others can read it and learn
from it and experience it themselves. As I read through
The Arte of
Glamour the first time, I thought of
six or eight people I knew whose magical practice would be
strengthened by reading it. Then, as I finished it, I thought,
“Actually, all those people already practice their magic
this way.  I just never quite noticed before, that this is how
they work…” It was as if Deb helped me take the
blinders off, and helped me see that magic didn’t have to be one
way alone, all candles and incense and stentorian commands — it was
also cocktails in a wood-paneled bar with a live jazz quartet, it
was learning to tie a new knot in a beautiful silk tie, it was
helping to paint a friend’s house on a weeknight alternating with
poetry and food and conversation
because COLOR! and SENSUALITY! and POETRY!
and FOOD! matter.  They
matter a lot. One of Deb’s big concepts is La Dolce
Vita — The Sweet Life.  The Creamy Life, almost.
 A lot of the Puritan values we grow up with in New England
are ritualistically opposed to anything resembling the sweet life.
 Instead, we get a long litany of work hard, be
content with your lot in life, if things are rotten you must have
deserved it, God wants you to be miserable here so you can have a
happy life there, you were destined for what you get.
 If Deb serves to remind me of anything today, it’s that
there’s huge value in recognizing that the 4o-hour work-week is a
magical construct which serves almost everyone else except you, the
one who has to live in it. Yet the quality of our lives matters. It
doesn’t matter if we’re peasants in 14th century France or
modern-day wage slaves — the girl who buys a tortoiseshell comb
from a wandering pedlar’s pack is after as much glamour  as I
am when I buy a new purple and dark blue tie for Thursdays.
 We need a bit of richness in our lives, and we need a bit of
sensuality and color and… frankly… splendour.  We don’t
have to live beyond our means to achieve this kind of magic; we DO
have to find ways to look for it, to manage it, and to create it
where it is lacking. And Deb gives you permission to fail at this.
 Not every spell will work.  Not every glamourous outfit
will survive contact with the party (grease drippings and paint on
a new pair of pants, alas!) Not every delicious potluck party will
go according to plan.  You won’t like every cocktail, and the
jazz quartet is playing too loud.  There are days when you
will be a hot wreck of emotion because something you planned
meticulously and deliciously to be a feast for the senses is in
fact a bunch of rapidly-cooling food at a party that no one showed
up for. But Cinderella would have gone to the ball anyway. Even if
her fairy godmother hadn’t shown up, to cast a spell and throw a
glamour over everything she glanced at, Cinderella made her own
plans. She had a dress picked out from the Salvation Army, and
modified to suit her needs.  She wouldn’t have been the
bellest belle at the ball, but she would have gone.  Her shoes
were shined, and she had a tip for the bartender ready in her Vera
Bradley purse (that matched the fabric of her belt in color). Deb’s
best gifts are these, though she hardly calls them that: pluck,
courage, risk-taking, risk-management, adventurism. What my
mother’s mother used to call sportiness.  ”Go on, girl.
 Go out. Be a sport.  Who knows? Maybe your date tonight
has a tall friend.”  There are always risks to take in calling
something magic when it doesn’t look especially like “woo”, and
even in calling it magic at all. But Deb,
and Deb’s book, says, “Go on, be a sport.  The Ladies are
waiting. The bartender tonight makes a great cosmo, and the
saxophonist is awesome.  This is your life.  Live a
little. Find your own sweet life.” A Note for
Non-Magical Teachers I don’t know how much or how
many of my readership left have been sticking with me since 2009,
and the days when I was an up-and-coming teacher-blogger (I’ve left
a lot of that behind in the last few years, haven’t I? Thanks for
sticking around).  You may be wondering about the relevance of
a book about magic to your classroom, where there’s no magic unless
someone does a Harry Potter book report.
 Here’s my thoughts on a takeaway on that. One of the big
thoughts I’ve exported from magic to my own classroom is the
concept of Darshan: we benefit in
our daily lives by being in the presence of a great teacher.
 Being in their physical presence helps us absorb their habits
and modes of thought.  And the research on teachers bears this
out — students in great classrooms, in the company of great
teachers, make amazing progress in a relatively short time.
 (We’ll leave aside the other research that shows that
teachers can have an awesome year one year, and help their kids
make great progress; and be absolutely appalling the next year — as
my friend Sou says, “sometimes the chemistry can be amazing, but
the timing is wrong, and it just can’t work out”).  But I
think that we, as teachers, have to believe that a kid in our
classroom takes away from us some of our ideas about success, and
dress, and habits of life.  If we bring a brown-bag lunch to
school with a bag of potato chips and a sloppily made sandwich,
that conveys one message; a bento box with quality food conveys
another.  And parents and school districts expect us, in part,
to convey quality messages to our students even through our
non-verbal cues. So, in part, Deb’s book is about learning to ramp
up the quality of one’s non-verbal cues, both to yourself and to
those around you.  I don’t think you have to do any of the
altar work or the magical spells work she suggests in order to
radically improve the quality of
the Darshan energy you put out; you
don’t have to do “woo” magic to benefit from the kind of mind-set
rearrangement she suggests here.
 And doing the lesser levels of
work she suggests will help you do better at speaking to your own
students about the non-verbal cues they send to themselves and to
each other through what they wear, how they dress, and how they
choose to live.  If you find yourself wondering how you’re
going to make ends meet, or wonder what’s becoming of the culture
in which we live, then I think Deb’s book has some important things
to teach us, as teachers — she’s saying (as much through what she
doesn’t say as what she does) that as the educators of today’s
youth, we have a responsibility to teach kids that their outer
messages can reflect or even change inner character — as much as
inner character is broadcast through our outward glamourie.
 The average teachers’ guide doesn’t ask us to think about
that or teach about that, and yet we have to teach “that stuff” on
a fairly regular basis, through dress codes and our own outward
presentation to our students. Deb is saying, it’s important for
folks individually to be thinking about this stuff for ourselves.
 I’d add to that, it’s important for us as teachers, that we
try to be thinking about the effects of our non-verbal cues upon
the children we teach.  For they will inherit the earth, and
our non-verbal messages wind up becoming part of their long-range
symphony of the senses.  We should be conscious about how and
what messages we broadcast, and Deb’s book is a great way to begin
thinking about the issues anew. Rating:
★★★★★, for practical advice and for a sense of an overall theory of
glamour workings.

First decan of Aquarius

First decan of Aquarius
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Started a new illustration project today. I’m gearing up to do some posters for our spring musical, Annie, so I’m trying to get my figure-drawing and composition skills up to speed. As regular readers know, I prefer drawing in frames to not drawing in frames; the spinning woman is a rough crib from an image I found on Scottish Tartans Authority, while the man is a completely made-up figure. He’s not bad, but I wish I’d shown him in profile, now that he’s inked, with a clipboard or an abacus in hand. Poor prudent man, utterly without hands!

One of the things that I like about the Decans images or “Faces” as they’re called in traditional astrology, is that they’re each supposed to be a little story that you can tell to clients about the nature of their problem. A book containing all thirty-six decans, and a parallel book containing all twenty-eight mansions, contains sixty-four little stories about the world, each of which could speak to the experiences of people living in it.

This one, for example, contrasts the prudence of the man with the industry of the woman. He watches her work, but his own work isn’t specified. He’s ‘prudent’, which suggests he’s careful with his money, and she’s industrious. Yet the nature of her work is that it goes in circles, and she can never produce more than her hands can work. There are real limits on their industry — partly limited by technology, partly by his non-working nature, partly by their own ambition. Aquarius as a sign, as I understand it, is partly about limitations and boundaries, and this first Decan image is a pretty strong reminder that you can be hard-working, and industrious, and prudent, and still get nowhere. You might love your work, as Venus suggests; and yet the hard limits on your world mean that you’re not going to grow or achieve any great degree of success.

The medieval astrologer might look at this image and conclude for a client, Get in there and do some of the work yourself, or he might say, invest in better technology or he might say, you’re doing what you love, but don’t expect to get rich off what you’re doing. Or he might obviate all of that, and point out some of the limits in that person’s life and work, and suggest some ways around it.

The idea that the Decans are intended to be teaching stories packed with good advice, or reminders about ways to enter good situations or avoid bad ones, is really appealing to me. It means that eventually, I could make them big, and use them as teaching tools in school or elsewhere.

Via Flickr:
Following Benjamin Dykes who himself is following Agrippa in the construction of an image for the first Decan of Aquarius: “A prudent man, and a woman spinning” — A prudent man, and of a woman spinning; and the signification of these is in the thought and labor for gain, in poverty and baseness.

I take this, with the two related planets of Venus and Saturn, to represent a mindset intent on gain through craft or artisanry, with the intention of achieving economic success. They have a creative enterprise in mind, and they go after it… except the man is in a supervisory role rather than an assisting role. There’s too much administration in this business, and not enough actual making. The result is a tendency toward poverty and decline rather than success.

Creative Work For Others

Scroll of Power
Originally uploaded by anselm23

I’ve had much more success lately at doing interesting and useful work for others, than for myself. A few months ago, I was asked to assist in doing some prosperity work involving a fountain dedicated to Jupiter at a local shop — which, as near as I can tell, worked. Odd, that. What was odder still was that the fountain broke after a few months, right after a major repair to the shop’s infrastructure was required. The owner had the money to pay for the repairs, but then the fountain broke. And one of the employees there has been asking me to do something new.

It’s been my experience that magic, like design, never quite works the same way the second time around. It’s part of the reason Apple never recycles its hardware cases from one design to the next: they design a completely new case or frame to go around a redesigned machine for a reason, and that reason has a lot to do with the dream and hope of the “new and improved”.

So, it’s a little early to tell if this is going to work for the shop in the way that they, and I, want. She only got it this morning, after all. But, it feels good to do work for someone else, and provide them with a tangible object of material benefit.

What’s the relationship between magic, and Design Thinking? It’s a harder question to answer. The late-Medieval/early-Renaissance author Henry Cornelius Agrippa states that the magician’s power lies in knowing the three-fold virtues of the universe, namely the virtues of plants and stones and woods; the virtues of measurements and patterns rooted in mathematics; and finally the realm of spirits and spiritual qualities. I’m paraphrasing, but I think that there’s a powerful relevance to design, and to design thinking. If a magician’s job is to know the three-fold virtues of the universe, then a designer’s job is likewise to know the three-fold virtues of the universe — because the designer, like the magician, is tasked with the duty of taking real-world materials and tools, measuring them and parcelling them out in the proper ways according to rules of mathematics and science, and making something to excite the human spirit with love and wonder.

Increasingly I think of myself as a designer rather than as a teacher, or a magician. But I don’t think I could have been a designer without being a teacher or a magician first. I needed to wrestle with the core concepts of those three-fold virtues of the universe before I could see that Design Thinking involves using real-world tools and materials to excite the human spirit.

The exciting thing, of course, is how much excitement I get out of being a designer-magician. I may not be any good at it, but it certainly delights my soul and my spirit to be a creator of things, above and beyond what mystical benefits accrue to the present owner of this scroll of power.  And it’s another way to bring more diversity into the world, which I think is A-OK.

Via Flickr:
A friend of mine runs a shop, and has been experiencing some of the ups and downs of the current economy. We tried doing some magical work to keep her shop running a while ago, using the energies of Jupiter — bringer of generosity. The earlier work was some Jupiter sigils attached to a fountain; that worked surprisingly well. But, then the fountain broke; the parts to the fountain have been sitting in a back room of her shop for a while.

So, last Thursday I started this scroll of the Orphic Hymn to Jupiter. I finished it last night, and gave it to her this morning — charged with Jovian, Solar and Lunar energies. For my first major piece of “calligraphy” (with a Sharpie pen!), I think it turned out rather well. Jupiter’s face is a little off-balance and crazy, but on the whole it turned out pretty well.

I didn’t use the traditional “medieval” page-layout that I’ve been experimenting with for this particular page, but there is an underlying geometry behind it, particularly on the illumination in the lower-right. All in all, it obeys Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s model of the three-fold virtues.

20th Mansion: al-Na’am “the Beam”

20th Mansion: al-Na’am “the Beam”
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
This effort at doing the 20th Mansion of the Moon was much more successful than my last one. (Apparently I’m growing in power and strength as I do this work… )There’s something about the intersection of man and horse that’s intimidating. And the lack of background behind the centaur is currently annoying — but I’m not sure I know how to get the scale correct between foreground and background.

What is this sensation I’m experiencing? Oh right… It has a name. It’s fear. I’m afraid.

Having mastered some of the techniques I’m using here — like line, and operating from drawing “how to” manuals, and the geometrical rules for the page layouts — I encounter a set of drawing challenges based on previous conditions, and I hesitate. I hold back from completing the work beyond what I’ve already done.

How wonderful! Evidence of magical change instituted through the Mansions of the Moon — I can achieve different mental states by reaching a new plateau in my artistic practice, and holding back or hesitating from accepting the challenge presented by the next level. Funny, that.  (And it’s similar to the feelings of breaking rules or trying NOT to break rules, that I experienced while drawing the 18th Mansion of the Moon.)  And yet.

And yet, it shows just how deeply into this game it’s possible to go. You’re always going to hit a limitation of your current skill or your current awareness. There’s always a new challenge to overcome. And it’s fun to overcome them. As difficult or as awful as overcoming a challenge may be, it’s nonetheless pointless to be afraid of a drawing.

Let us therefore be determined! Take on the challenges of Mars and the Moon, of Jupiter… Go find that which you seek.

Breaking Rules

18th mansion: drawn & inked
Originally uploaded by anselm23

One of the things that I’m learning about the rules for laying out the pages in my notebook according to medieval rules, is that there is sometimes benefit to breaking them — as I do here on the right-hand page, with the ogival/Gothic arch that contains the snake. This isn’t the best layout I’ve ever done, but it’s in part about learning to break the rules, even though I’m just learning them.

Talking with my friend Craig’s friend Allegra over the weekend, we got into talking about margins and fonts, and she pointed out that the standard computer word-processing margins of 1″ on all sides are pretty terrible. They’re ugly, but they’ve become the norm. The margins here are not necessarily perfect, by any means, but at the same time they’re interesting, in part because they deviate from the normal rules.

So… if I follow “medieval margins” rules, and break those rules, am I breaking our rules and inventing my own, or breaking their rules and leaning towards ours? Am I playing with conventions and norms? Am I making art according to my own rules?

How much of what we teach children these days are really hard-and-fast rules, and how much of what we teach are actually rules of thumb? How much of what we teach is determined by rules laid down by computer programmers and computers?

Time was when there were a range of such rules of thumb, and people had to learn all these rules of thumb by experimenting with drawing lines on blank paper or parchment…. and as I do these exercises, I wonder what we’ve lost by moving away from this kind of training?