The culmination of a lot of magical work just came to a head, although I wasn’t going to post about it because I didn’t want to mix up professional lives with magical lives. However, I also think that spirits enjoy a little bit of fame, and… if we do magic for our professional lives I’ve already crossed that line, and published a good portion of the whole operation so far. Plus weirdly three separate people asked me about how things played out directly or indirectly so I felt prompted to write-up a post-operation log.
Overarching themes here are that it’s OK to get multiple spirits working on a project. In fact after reading Agrippa, I would think that it is a requirement that multiple spirits get working on a project. It’s OK to mix and match pantheon so long as they have their own separate rituals. Each spirit should be honored in their own way, and responds best to its own ritual. While I like spirits working on a set problem, I petition them all individually. The reason is because problems tend to be complex problems, and represented by more than one force.
More or less the nuclear option panned out. The Iceberg Operation involving King Blumaza not only got us professional services at work but we’re shutting down the DBA’s old database sets and the end of the road for them has had a public date set. I get to pick up the work being the only other person with enterprise DB skills at work.
So on the day of Mercury, the Hour of Venus and into the Hour of Mercury, I got called into my boss’s boss’s office and told I was promoted. So why did this work? Why not use Jupiter for everything? Why not expect the meeting in the time of Jupiter? Because working with one single planet and expecting it to solve all your problems is shortsighted. All, and I mean all, of the classical occultists talk about admixtures of things and companies are certainly no different. Sure, there’s one obvious overarching theme to this entire operations (Jupiter – commerce) but this isn’t a financial instrument. I work in a company which employes financial instruments, and to this end people are paid to operate them. Those people have customers, who I would hope cultivate some love of the brand (venus) and at the same time the employees communicate amongst themselves (mercury) about technical products (mercury again). If I were to go back and do it all again, I would have sat down and mapped out the problem a bit better, but at the same time, I can be observant of how things interact, and I can see that the company is more interested in how people interact in their management than the actual act of management. I think in some heavily regulated environment, Mars and Jupiter might even be appropriate, but the mix which makes this company work is mostly Mercury, some Venus, and of course Jupiter as an afterthought. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense. In a forward-looking way, it’s a blueprint for how to approach rituals in the future.
So that being said, I got mail from a gentleman in Ghana (I’m really fascinated with how far culturally and spatially the blog has reached) and he had mentioned the other really common magic interest – love. So what is love? It’s more than a feeling! How do we apply classical thinking to love? There are five classical loves, three of which are worth working with. Storage love-by-chance, which is the default love in a family such as between siblings, and mania is obsession, which is governed by luna and that’s that. That leaves us with phila (friendship), agape (love for love sake), and eros (romance). Collectively the planets to work with would be Mercury for phlia, Venus for eros, and Jupiter for agape. However there are subset influences at work here also. While Mars might dominate the idea of the storage type of love as a family has to weather conflicts, internal and external, it also serves as a minor component to phila. At some point you might have to pick your friends over other people. Similarly agape is represented by Jupiter as charity, but it also Saturn, as Saturn endures and is the fixity of something. Eros might be Venus, but the Moon plays a role as your girlfriend might put on her makeup. It is a pleasant illusion and roleplay during sex. The secondary planet isn’t as important as the first – both partners should be stimulated into being able to have congress before putting on the hot librarian outfit – but it plays a role. In this way the second planet is like the “day of” part of the timing and the primary planet is the “hour of” part of the timing.
That being said, I’m quite happy in my new role but I feel a need to renew the rounds of the planets. If working with a subset of them got me here, my influence (their influence) is going to be good for different people, but that also means different people are going to be ruled by different planets. The only reasonable conclusion here is that in order to best serve the people I lead, I best soak up as much planetary energy as possible in order to dispense it on the mundane level. Hopefully the insights provided will make me effective as a lead.
Or I could just sacrifice them, but the company looks down on that.