The phareseology was mine. But the method and terminology was developed by Ancients. Anyway, your post has brought to my mind A Nightmare in Elm Street.

Freddie can only act in dreams. But if he can inflict harm in dreams. The physical body responds.

Cant say much. I have to learn a lot. Maybe the ultimate reality of magical astrology is some spiritual beings, maybe thought forms or maybe sympathetic magic.

I can only agree and I am very glad for every entry and response that this subject has received. It feels as if something is lost or forgotten here. The desire to learn and get to the bottom of things is the obvious reason for raising the question. I assumed that the planetary tables had a function beyond that of being mere signatures. My opinion is that several of the contributions made have provided something to chew on.

Anyone with ideas, insight or interest in the subject, please keep coming.

Techniques of High Magic: A Handbook of Divination, Alchemy, and the Evocation of Spirits (Paperback) by Francis King and Stephen Skinner is good beginners book with a chapter on constructing talismans. They use the kameas along with the various sigils. They include a good introductory ritual to charge the talisman. Their chapter on GodForm invocations says that the climax of that rite can be used to charge a talisman. The book has chapters on skying vision journeys, using symbols such as i-ching hexagrams, tarot cards, and elemental tattwas. I know that this technique can be applied on the constructed talisman to empower it further. Skrying can be done with astrology symbols as well.

Some random things to throw into the pot:

The Saturn square is also the Lo Shu. This brings us into the I Ching being derived from the Lo Shu and the concept of the I Ching as a repesentation of a lunar calendar.
http://www.emotions.64g.ru/xron/xr5en.htm This suggests that there IS a direct way of using magic squares as an astrological forecasting device.

Similarly, Men Dun Jia is an ancient Chinese form of divination based on the I Ching and directly uses the Saturn square. ?A series of symbols is imposed on a 3 x 3 magic square, and the symbols are rotated around the magic square every two hours, in accord with the double ? hour of the traditional Chinese lunar calendar. The symbols are arranged in four levels which correspond to Heaven, Spirit, Earth, and Humanity, and rotate from square to square? tarotcanada.tripod.com/ChineseOrWesternMedicine.html

The Tibetean mewas are focussed around all nine permutations of the Saturn square. The mewas move move with each month, day and year. If you follow the track of their movement, you end up with the Saturn seal with additional lines filled in. http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:I2fo ... =firefox-a

The system of Byung rTsis (Nagtsi) has no mathematical calculations or planetary observation but is based on the relationships of the five elements, twelve animal signs, nine magic square numbers and the eight parkha trigrams. Each year has its own element and animal sign, and also each month, day and hour has its own element. Elemental astrology is used to construct a birth horoscope, marriage compatibility, yearly predictions, medical calculations and death horoscopes for funeral arrangements.

This is more or less what it says at http://www.tibetan-astrology.com/

What it doesn?t say is that the hours appear to be planetary hours, so I don?t see how we lost all calculation. Also the elemental calendar is based on a solar/lunar cycle and each year begins with a new Moon. It looks like there?s more astrology that we?d recognise here than tends to be stated.

More is at http://www.tibetan-astrology.net/

Michelangelo?s ceiling at the Sistene Chapel:
?Another extremely important feature in the design of the ceiling is that the overall design?s pattern is in the shape of several 3 x 3 squares, Kameas of Saturn (see: Diagram #11b). These should be seen as 3 x 3 squares because the spine of the ceiling with its nine central panels is broken up into three biblical categories, Creation, Adam and Eve, and Noah. Each of these categories has three panels. When each set of three panels is viewed individually with its adjoining panels to its right and left the 3 x 3 square is depicted again and again. In looking at the mosaics in the floor of the chapel it can be seen that there is one large 3 x 3 square formed by circles in front of the altar and two smaller ones flanking the altar (see: Diagram #1).? http://www.rosecroixjournal.org/issues/ ... meegan.pdf

The Saturn square pops up in Japan in nine stars theory:

The astrology using the 9 stars is called "kyu-sei jyutsu" (nine stars theory) and there are many variations thereof. Nine stars theory says that there are nine signs in the sky ( like zodiac signs ) and the nine stars change their places from one to another sign and the world changes accordingly. The nine signs are placed on a diagram similar to that of the magic square, one in the center, which is dominant over time and space, and 8 others surround the central sign. A star is identified for a person according to his birth year and the relations between his star and the present constellation decides his present luck. http://www.okada.de/archive-japanasitis ... ation.html

(An odd thing I found. It's possible to create a magic square of month, day, year and day of week. So clearly, a magic square can be calendrical, using the Western calendar, which favours a direct astrological connection.
http://savantartist.com/about.html)

The Saturn square at least seems to pop up everywhere, and that in a number of systems it's the basis of a divination that's associated with astrology. The association with talismanic magic, in the West at least, seems to all hinge on Agrippa. But I can't help thinking that this is only part of their original function. I think your first premise was right. There is something lost or forgotten, it may well take us a little while to find it

Kim

The maths is starting to hurt my brain.

There are some wonderfully odd discussions at the below on errecting magic squares. I'm hoping that this makes more sense to someone than it does me at present.

http://www.nabble.com/forum/Search.jtp? ... gic+square

Kim

Kim - you are quite a resource !!
I don't know about the pain but my brain is spinning at present, too! It must be the tablets that are getting me into a mix!

These magic tables are interesting but it is a challanging subject to get one's mind wrapped into!

On one level I wondered whether they functioned as a sort of ancient official post office mark. Then in the back of my mind I remember a local story of how someone appeared and removed the pain of an injured child by writing some numbers and figures down on a piece of paper and uttering some words or names of intelligences.

Now it appears that my natal chart also might be drawn in terms of a magic table, and that directions could be read from that figure. Is that roughly where we are?

These magic tables are interesting but it is a challanging subject to get one's mind wrapped into!

I've always been fascinated by them but never had enough time and energy to look properly. A discussion makes it so much easier.

On one level I wondered whether they functioned as a sort of ancient official post office mark. Then in the back of my mind I remember a local story of how someone appeared and removed the pain of an injured child by writing some numbers and figures down on a piece of paper and uttering some words or names of intelligences.

The talismanic properties of the squares seem to be the thing that has sustained everywhere.

Now it appears that my natal chart also might be drawn in terms of a magic table, and that directions could be read from that figure. Is that roughly where we are?

Yes. Precisely how is a little more complicated. Hopefully, someone with more knowledge of Tibetean or Japanese usage can say something about that as this isn't something I know about more than superficially.

The Chinese associations are very suggestive of a lunar connection, so I'm wondering about them being used in relation to the natal chart in that way. Also, given the number of references to longer hours in the Tibetean and other similar systems I've taken a look at, there's a temptation to see them in terms of being used for interrogations (horary, electional or event) as a different way of defining the properties of planetary hours.

Regarding the seals - someone contacted me privately pointing out that the sequence glyph appears in different forms in sources about Tibetean astrology. I think that it's worth remembering here that what we know as the Saturn seal isn't the only possible form of it, simply the most common and owes a lot to Francis Barrett. I think what's more interesting is the similarities between the glyphs from wildly different locations and systems.

Though there's lots of material on the web, a lot of it seems to be the same stuff regurgitated again and again, hopefully someone good at lateral thinking can make more connections. However, I'll put this on my list of things to look at when I'm slightly bored at the library as it may be that we can only make real sense of it by referring to older texts that aren't readily available. I'm glad that this has emerged now though, as I'm running classes in amulet making in the autumn and have to design a piece of amulet jewellery for a US craft magazine in the next week or so. People do ask me to do odd things

There may also be clues in alchemical texts and we haven't mentioned the Mayan calendar, which seems to have associations, so I'd better do that before getting back to work

Kim

I still have talismans drawn some 25 years back, completed under the appropriate planetary influences but with figures I copied out of a book, rather than I could call myself the true artist.

More interesting is a candlestickholder of about the same period that I engraved on the day of Venus and the hour of Jupiter, with Venus exalted in Pisces. According to inscription it was the 14th day of the Moon, she being located in her VII mansion. I find it fun to hold on to these items from my teenage period, although my work of engraving is not carried out with any sense of professional skill.

My curiousity for the talismanic was put to one side as my studies moved in to other fields of astrology.

You made talismans as a teenager? I am impressed. I was saving the world through politics at that age. Astrology wouldn't fit in my head until my late twenties.

I hope that someone else can chip in with info on how to use the squares for non talismanic purposes. Though that's more than interesting, it's relatively easy to find information about. I'm personally fascinated by what seems to have fallen through the gaps.

Kim

Impressed? You shouldn't be. I used to take astrology books with me to read at parties, and even took them up with me into the woods when we used to go mushrooming and picking berries.

As a previous neighbour of mine will relate, when comet Hale-Bopp went flying past in 1997 - he knocked on the door to arose my family in the middle of a night with the following message: "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I think you should know that the house next door is in full fire". My reply was: "Oh that's all right, I wanted to get up and see the comet anyway!"

So there I stood trying to direct the press photographers camera lenses to the tail of Hale-Bopp in the background. We were later evacuated by the police and spent the night in a hotel while the house next door burnt to the ground.

Here is more information on the magic squares. It looks like 666 can be derived from the 6 sided kamea of the sun. See this link.
http://www.geocities.com/SatanicReds/666b.html

There are 12 divisibles for 666 which represent the zodiac. Interesting article.