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Magic Squares

To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.paranormal.spells.hexes.magic,alt.magick,alt.lucky.w
From: catherine yronwode 
Subject: Re: Magic Squares
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2003 19:51:17 GMT

Seyfert-1 wrote:
> 
> 50031227 vii om
> 
> "S R" :
>
> # I must say Magick Squares are very interesting.
> # But a little complicated. I wonder if their is
> # a book just on Magick Squares?
> 
> there are several. one of them is by W.S. Andrews
> ("Magic Squares and Cubes") and is a classic. I've
> enjoyed reading through these and examining the
> more complex and astounding selections than
> were made for Agrippa and the Golden Dawn symbols.

I too recommend "Magic Squares and Cubes," edited by W. S.
Andrews, to anyone interested in the mathemagical aspects of
this byway of occultism. It was first published in 1911 or
so, but has been reprinted numerous times and should be
quite easy to locate aa copy through a library or to
purchase it online via amazon. It is not about occultism per
se, but it sets the necessary groundwork for understand the
topic -- and thus to uncover why magic squares have been and
continue to be so important to certain mages.

There is also a lengthy colloquium on the subject of the
relationship between magic squares and magic archived online at

http://www.netmastersinc.com/secrets/magic_squares.htm

that may interest you. The major contributor is Mark Swaney,

and the forum in which the discussion was originally hosted
was the Sacred Landscape elist, an open forum founded in
1995 to deal with such  interdisciplinary studies as the
relationship between religious belief-sets and architecture,
between natural landscape forms and myth, between magic and
geometry, and between mathematics and cosmologies. 

The Sacred Landscape elist is currently operated through
yahoogroups, and although the older posts from its pre-Yahoo
message base as a University of North Carolina elist (called
sustag-principles there, for bureaucratic reasons) or as a
private listserv elist called space-list (for equally
obscure reasons) are not archived at Yahoo, you can always
join and bring up the topic of magic squares and get some
new responses, for the topic is an area of perennial
interest in the elist. 
 
> # Do every planet has a Magick Square?

Every one of the planets visible to the unaided eye does. 
 
> that depends on what tradition you follow. older
> systems don't include all the Planets because the
> ancients couldn't see Uranus, Neptune and Pluto,
> for example. I'm not sure before Agrippa, but in
> Agrippa they are attributed to Planets as follows
> 
>       SQUARE ORDER ---   PLANET
>       -------------------------
>             3      ---   SATURN
>             4      ---   JUPITER
>             5      ---   MARS
>             6      ---   SUN
>             7      ---   VENUS
>             8      ---   MERCURY
>             9      ---   MOON
> 
> with consideration of modern occult Planets
> one might extrapolate the following novelty:
> 
>             3      ---   PLUTO
>             4      ---   NEPTUNE
>             5      ---   URANUS
>             6      ---   SATURN
>             7      ---   JUPITER
>             8      ---   MARS
>             9      ---   SUN
>            10      ---   VENUS
>            11      ---   MERCURY
>            12      ---   MOON
> 
> based on the mean motility from Terra,
> and thereafter achieve natural resonance.

As is his wont, nagasiva goes full tilt for the destruction
of historic forms in light of new scientific knowledge. :-)

I personally find that approach valueless, and feel that for
me it is sufficient to study and utilize the system as it
was written, with SEVEN "sacred planets" and SEVEN "sacred
magic squares." 

My reasoning for this is that the magic squares find some
use in planetary magic, and in that context they are linked
to the days of the week and convey a significant amount of
historical resonance and symbolic richness to magical works
performed on each day. We have not added three new days of
the week since the discovery of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto,
so to add three more "sacred squares" with or without
displacement of the existing weekday attributions of the
planets and their squares seems bootless to me since there
would be no days of the week to work the new squares
magically. 

Your mileage may vary. 

> # And can one simply create a unique Magick Square
> # by playing around with math & graphs?
> 
> yes, there are techniques for constructing them,
> families, first divided up in even/odd groups and
> thence distributed depending on method of construct.

See the W. S. Andrews compilation for numerous methods of
construction, including a novel method devised by Benjamin
Franklin, Freemason, Printer, and Patriot. 

cat yronwode 

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