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Sunday, June 8, 2003

Tarot card: 8 of Wands (swiftness)

I use the Thoth deck for my readings, and the design on this card looks like the Chaos Sphere, a symbol used by Chaos Magickians to represent (among other things) a model of the universe and the 8 magicks. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, because I am intending upon making a personal magick system by cobbling things together from lots of different sources. For example, this person, who goes by Kite, has a lovely list of archetypes that correspond to the 8 magicks on his web site - just nicely put.

[Wow, uh, I just got the worst call. A woman called here looking for a "Timothy" (and no one by that name is here of course). When I told her that, she said that she was going "to bust him up" and that she was going to "bust" me up, too, and called me a "bitch," then hung up. What a cunt. No wonder Timothy is fucking someone else, you ugly whore. How dare you call my home and threaten me, especially when I have done nothing to you. May you die a horrible, rotting death from whatever STD Timothy gives you, crackhead.]

OK, so where was I? Oh, yeah, enlightenment. So I was saying, there are 8 magicks, each with a corresponding color and association with one of the classical planets. There are other associations, too, like day of the week, gods, plants, whatever. My first step is to match up associations and make a table of correspondances for my own use. Mostly this is pretty easy, because Crowley did all of the hard work, but I wanted to match the magicks with the major chakras (as we see them in West - I have no idea how historically accurate this information is, so I'm guessing it isn't). The chakras are matched up like this, from highest to lowest:

Sahasrara (crown) - purple
Ajna (third eye) - indigo
Visuddha (throat) - blue
Anahata (heart) - green
Manipura (navel) - yellow
Svadisthana (genitals) - orange
Muladhara (root) - red

[all apologies to learned gurus everywhere for my igorance.]

I'm not so worried about that there are 7 chakras and 8 magicks. The 8th magick, octarine, is sort of an all-encompassing energy, so it doesn't matter that it doesn't fit into this schema. What bothers me is the placement of Luna and Mercury. In the colors of magick, Mercury's color is orange and Luna's is blue. In the chakras, Mercury is associated with the throat chakra and Luna the navel. As you can see, their colors are switched in between systems. I'm not sure that I can rectify this discrepancy. I know that others have been trying to incorporate chakras into other systems, such as the Tree of Life, but without much success. It might be one of those things that simply can't be resolved. Or maybe it has been resolved by someone and I just haven't come across it yet. It's one to sleep on, I suppose.

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