Seven Governors Cards

Seven Planetary Powers

Last night I had some artists’ trading cards in my pocket, and I was out for a bit, resting from a paper organization day planned at home. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, and avoiding it. So I got out my Prismacolor pens and made these seven tablets of the seven governors as a drawing exercise.

I’m not entirely happy with the Sun card in the middle — the number “6″ on it is nice, but his arms are in the wrong position and it really throws off the whole beauty of the card.  It’s close, though, and a few more iterations should make it relatively easy to draw again and again.

It’s the first time I’ve drawn the Moon image this way, with a motherly woman in the middle surrounded by a cheerleader-like daughter and an elderly grandmother.  It doesn’t really quite feel right, but I’m not sure if that’s because the figures are disproportionate to one another, or the actual image is off.

Jupiter feels about right, and so does Mars.  Mercury still needs work — his hat in particular isn’t right.  I need more practice at sketching figures, particularly the nude figure of Venus.  Saturn’s head is too far forward inside his/her hood.  There’s something to hate about every single card.

But, even if they’re terrible, these are some of the images I’ll be using with my sixth grade Latin class to help them create visual keys in their notes.  Now I have a small reference card for most of the figures they’ll use this fall, which I can use in class, or in some of my other work.

Peregrin Wildoak has written an amazing book about the power of visualization for magicians, called By Names and Images.  I don’t think that I can top his achievement by any means.  In a related way, Gordon over at Rune Soup has also written a powerful bit about Sigil Magic, which is about drawing symbols for creating magical results. I don’t know that I can add anything to the field of the internal work, but maybe I should think about writing an article called Drawing for Magicians.  I’ve learned a lot in the last few years and even in the last few months… something to think about for the future.

I’ve written this this morning, but I’ve set it up so that it will publish around 10:00 am, so you all have something to read while I’m teaching.

Kavad 4.8 — telling stories

So… Here what I was getting at yesterday. This Decan could have been a warrior, or that falcon-headed man I did earlier, that wound up looking like a pigeon. Instead, I went with a combination of the Hindu, the Picatrix and the Agrippa description. (I’m deeply indebted to Ben Dykes for his list.) We have a pair of arguing petitioners in front of a judge. The judge’s throne has the head of Horus upon it, and the lance and the pitcher and the hanging bird are around the judge’s throne. So a lot of the symbolism of many different cultures wind up being framed within the image.

But I think about the underlying story for a moment. So many of the images are warriors or lords or monsters. But this one, as it turns out, winds up being an image of mediation and the solving of problems through communication and the objective sense of a third party. Rather than resorting to weapons, these angry petitioners are being heard in court. As with the merchant in another image, which has the potential to become larger by the addition of multiple symbols, the story here becomes larger by the addition of multiple figures.

And I think that’s kind of the point, actually — the thirty-six decans have variant meanings because as humans we need variant stories. We need a range of options to think through our decisions, and weigh our choices. And these images are not just a tool of divination — they’re also a way of communicating essential truths — going into business? Weigh your options, keep good books, pay attention to both income (selling) and costs (selling). Angry at someone? You can hurt them, sure. But you can also argue with them face-to-face, in front of an impartial third party as necessary.

I think I’m going to make a better effort to make the thirty-six decans tell those kinds of stories. Clearly, today, we need them.

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.