Today I have been prepping some Renaissance astrological magic. I might have actually been doing some Renaissance astrological magic, if the prepping hadn’t highlighted one of my less favourable planetary influences, laziness. In other words, I didn’t read the spell through to the end before I started.
According to The Book of English Magic, Renaissance astrological magic works by attracting positive influences through using the magical ‘law of correspondences’ (p.283), or sympathetic magic, or like attracts like, and by doing so we can change our destiny.
If I’m honest, I’m not sure I particularly want to change my destiny. If I have a destiny. And if it did change it, how would I know? What if I have a perfectly excellent destiny lined up, but because I didn’t eat enough nutmeg, it gets downgraded to a mediocre one? Apparently, along with laziness, procrastination is another of my unstellar planetary influences.
But putting questions of my fate aside, I ploughed on. First I had to identify my sun sign, Cancer, and then the planet it’s ruled by, the Moon, before checking the effects of the Moon on my character. Well, the good bits are that apparently I have a magnetic personality, I’m maternal, I like my peace (very true), and I’m psychic (ahem). The not so good bits are that I tend towards being frivolous (moi?), capricious (surely not) and being a lazy procrastinator.
Next I had to decide what positive influence I wanted to encourage. Apparently this could be anything, but I went with my planetary ruler’s suggestion of psychic (I could have also gone with spelling, as it took me three goes to correctly spell psychic in my notebook).
Then I had to gather together all the traditional correspondences associated with my planet of influence that I could find. Out of the Moon’s eleven correspondences, I managed to scavenge four from around the house – silver (jewellery), white (fun fur), nutmeg, and lemon balm (leftover Philosopher’s Stone).
Having gathered, I was all prepared to begin, until I read the next paragraph when it said the magicking should start on the day that’s ruled by the Moon. And that would be tomorrow.
So starting from Monday and for the next three days, with clear intention, I will be eating, drinking, wearing, smelling, burning, listening etc to as many things as I can associated with the Moon, to see if I can attract its influence to help me become more psychic. Of course, this might mean I’ll have to bust out the homemade Philosopher’s Stone Vodka™️ again…
Tattytracker
Thank you to everyone who voted in the poll both here and on Twitter to name what I should call my potato growing updates. Spudwatch overwhelmingly won the public vote, but I became very taken with Glorious Barbara’s suggestion of the Tattytracker, so have gone for that. Props also to Owen Davies for suggesting the Moon Mash Report.
Given I have no idea what my tatties should be looking like, I’ll leave it to you to tell me if all’s going well, but here they are after a week…
Resources
Carr-Gomm, P. and Heygate, R. (2014) The Book of English Magic, London, Hodder
