Yanno, I swear I have this whole backlog of Twitter threads I have stored up to be remade as proper posts, and I haven’t gotten around to as much of it as I should have by now. Ah well, c’est la vie. In the meantime, a discussion in a Red Work Course chat about what the phase of the Moon matters for in terms of magical timing reminded me that I have this post to share, so this is timely indeed!
First, some context. A while back, me and a mutual (@saul_mondriaan) on Twitter had a bit of a chat regarding how to use a waning Moon for ritual purposes in magic, because in general so much of what most people tend to do workings for tend to be best done during waxing Moons:
Use the waning Moon for matters of ascent. As the Moon reflects more and more light of the Sun away from the Earth, it’s a good time to go with the flow of things away from this world and into other/higher ones. A good time for anabasis, astral travel, elevation, and the like.
It’s tied to the whole “sending things away” notion for waning Moon periods. Anything you want to lessen, cut back, decrease, vanish, or otherwise unmanifest is a good thing to do under the waning Moon.
The waning Moon is only thought of as malefic/baleful because, as humans, we generally like things being More More More and also to be permanent (and permanently ours).
Heck, even we ourselves aren’t even permanently ours. A time for everything, etc.
This, however, led to a so-called “liberation discourse” about how to get around the inconvenient timing of the Moon being waning half the month for making talismans or doing things one might otherwise want to do during waxing Moons:
you could also, like…just ignore it.
Like, if the various energies that the states of the planets indicate are currents, then consider a river. It’s easiest to go with the flow, right? But when you need to go upstream, you push harder. It’s not impossible, not at all, though you might need to take a different approach or apply more power, perhaps both in the initial consecration/commencement ceremony and in subsequent follow-up rituals/feedings/etc. to keep things going until you have your own established current to rely on.
Thinking that the state of the Moon dooms a ritual done under it is like thinking that someone born with a particular configuration of planets is doomed to live life *only* in one way and in no other. It’s dreary, dreadfully boring, and not at all representative of actual life.
Like, I know I say things like “just throw more incense and yell more words at candles until its done” jokingly, but while going with the flow of things is “working smarter”, you can also just, like…work harder instead when the flow is against you, and accomplish the same thing when you need to.
Not all magic needs astrology or even needs to *care* about astrology. People have been not-caring about planets and stars but still got by just fine with their magic since day one. It’s a thing that can matter if you want it to (often quite a lot!), but it doesn’t *have* to.
Even if you *do* care (and *want* to care) about astrology for magic you want to do, remember: there’s always more than one way to skin a cat. I claim that *every* moment in time can be good for doing *anything*, so long as you’re inventive enough to make use of its astrology.
Don’t get me wrong: I love me a good election! It’s literally great timing to do something I want to do, and provides a ready-made source of power to tap into. But not all elections are of the same grade; sometimes you have to use what you can get instead of what you want, and if the only time you can get for doing something is “now” because that’s when you need to do something, then that’s the time you do it. Change course accordingly while maintaining the same goal, and just do the thing.
This led to a side-discussion with another friend regarding the use or lack thereof of elections in astrological magic, and that while one can elect a time astrologically for everything one does, one doesn’t have to, not even for planetary magic:
I recall when I was getting involved with astrotwitter a few years back that I casually brought up working with planets in a grimoiric fashion outside an election-based framework. The mere idea of not using elections completely flabbergasted some people.
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…I wouldn’t deny that having elections is super nice, helpful, and great in every regard—with the sole exceptions of (a) having enough astrology (or astrologer-budget) to find them and (b) having to wait and prepare for them and make use of them in time.
But while elections are certainly a benefit for magic, that’s all they are: benefits, not requirements. Other methods to achieve the same goals exist, whether planetary or otherwise, even if the means by which we attain them can be vastly different depending on our present need.
Heck, the difficult astrology of doing a ritual to achieve a given end with a conventionally-reckoned “bad time” is often indicative of the very struggle we go through and the energy we need to put into doing something when we *need* to (rather than merely *want* to).
Plus, sometimes it’s helpful to minimize the specificity of what we want. Like, do we really need “Saturnian wisdom”, or do we just need “wisdom”? And if we do need something Saturnine, maybe the timing is bad because the thing we need is itself a challenge. That’s a flow, too!
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[Elections enhance and restrict at the same time; so we should get more incense while we’re at it.] And candles, costume changes, food/drink offerings, etc.
All these elaborate ritual elements are there to collectively power up, boost, and add oomph to the whole performance—and to make up for what otherwise might be missed. No incense, more candles; no timing, more incense.
The TL;DR of all these discussions culminates in this sort of digest: while we might say “a time for everything”, we should also remember “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. We can (and many should) make at least some observation of the astrological influences at play for timing our works (whether material or spiritual), but let’s be honest, these observations don’t need to be fully exact, or even all that heavily-weighted in order to get best results. For most people and for most objectives, given how much stuff is done on a routine or ongoing basis and how there are exceedingly few things we do that are once-in-a-year, once-in-a-decade, or once-in-a-lifetime things, “good enough” is already more than sufficient. Heck, in my Secreti Geomantici ebook, I include a lengthy section about timing rituals focusing on planetary influences, and at the end of it, I include a list of options for doing work from “most to least appropriate”:
- Astrological election, when the dignity of the planet is unusually strong or, at the very least, not debilitated
- The planetary hour on its planetary day
- The planetary hour not on its planetary day, but on the day of a planet it is friendly towards
- The planetary day but not in its planetary hour, but in the hour of a planet it is friendly towards
- In the planetary day and hour of any other planet with whom it is friendly towards
- In the planetary day and hour of any other planet with whom it is neither friendly nor unfriendly towards
- Any other time
Would best results be expected from a full-blown astrological election? Absolutely! But the effort of finding such elections and scheduling necessary work to be done during them is often a matter of diminishing returns for most things mages and mystics end up doing, when a simpler set of observations (planetary hour, planetary day, rising sign, lunar phase, etc.) that can be ascertained at a glance or which reoccur with reliable and frequent regularity cover most people’s bases.
And even then, we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the idea of “more than one way to skin a cat”. Sometimes we focus on a particular planet (or energy or entity more broadly) based on our associations of what it can do for us, but at the same time, we might neglect the thing itself we’re seeking and how it can be a manifestation or gift from any number of entities (as I mention with my wisdom/Saturn example in the third thread). When we recall that everything that exists in our world is a product of the entire symphony of the music of the heavens, with every star singing some contributing tone, then there’s always going to be some way to achieve or realize anything by going to any of the stars. It might take a bit of ingenuity to figure out how to get what we want from a particular planet, sure, but when we recall how the ancient Greeks worshipped Aphroditē Areia (literally “warlike” and wearing full armor), then we should be able to remember likewise how we can find the influence of all the stars in everything down here in one way or another—and we should likewise strive to develop the good sense to rigorously pursue our ends given the means the cosmos presents to us at any given time.