a greco-egyptian dream divination spell
or: a spell to the moon that works for everything
It feels a bit vulnerable to get into the occult nitty-gritty on such a public platform but I’ve decided I’m just going for it. Today, I’m coming to you to discuss how I developed the framing rite I use for my gnosis-gathering sessions with the spirits who haunt the lunar stations. We’ll be discussing a spell that contains a protective charm to be used by magicians during lunar workings, the first of two texts I draw from for my station stroll.
I introduced my personal narrative with this dream divination in a previous post. Check it out if you want to refresh your memory. My last post laid the foundation for this one, so please don’t skip it either!
One of the first issues we encounter as students of astrological magic is that there isn’t really a step-by-step guide to this system of magic. Many forms of ceremonial magic provide the adept with highly choreographed rituals with extensive lists of gear, ornaments, candles, and ritual movements that show an entry point to embodying the desired ritual. Often all of these components are intricately related with each other in terms of symbology and color correspondences. It all contributes to crafting a physical entry point into the gnosis these rituals are directing their practitioners to.
We don’t find anything like that in the teaching texts we have about astrological magic.
For all the pages upon pages spent on discussing how to identify magical elections, the types of images that are appropriate, and the potential effects of a given recipe, there is very little attention given to, like, what you should do moment-to-moment in an astrological ritual.
The PGM gets really complicated really quickly and I decided to indulge myself by truly saying everything I have to say about this spell in particular. This post is a winding journey, but it will end with a recipe for a simple dream divination spell, so stay with me!
Here’s how I do it.
“do not approach the procedure carelessly or else the goddess is angry”
Respect and care are at the forefront of my engagement with others. This goes for my interactions with spirits. I mean, really, that’s a personal opinion—certainly not everyone takes this attitude. As you read on, consider the ways that I attend to these principles.
Respect for divinity doesn’t necessarily look the same across all cultures. A common form of magic in Egypt looks very disrespectful to my Western sensibilities, but we must respect its context and lineage.
This brings me to diabolē, or the “slander spell.”
Pre-Hellenistic Egyptian magic isn’t my area of expertise but researchers suggest that the slander spells in PGM IV originate in a style of Egyptian “threat-formulae” found in the Pyramid Texts, 2000+ years older than PGM IV. Egyptian magician-priests would actually threaten the gods themselves as a part of coercing them into fulfilling their requests. In the slander spells of PGM IV, we see curses designed to draw a given god’s ire towards a target by making blasphemous and slanderous statements about that god, then attributing them to the curse’s target. These spells basically look like the magician saying “hey, Goddess! Sarah down the street said you were a bitch and put trash on your altar! Are you really gonna stand for that?”1
I wont get into the morality of cursing but suffice to say that working magicians at this time seemed to have been equally comfortable with cursing as with blessing and requested the audience of the gods for all of it. Amidst all this slander and blasphemy, the author reminds us to approach the rite with care and to perform it in a holy manner, not a flippant one, or else we’ll make Selene mad. My definition of respect and their definition of respect clearly differed, but it’s important to respect the perspective of these magician-ancestors. They believed that, even in slandering the Goddess, they were engaging with her in a holy and careful way.
Between you and me, though, I still don’t recommend slandering and threatening the gods without the training of an Egyptian priest!
on the phylacteries in pgm iv 2622 - 2707
The English word “phylactery” means a wearable charm or amulet that provides protection. It comes from the Greek phylaktērion • φυλακτήριον and the practice has an interesting history that is outside the scope of this essay. If you aren’t too familiar with the concept, I highly recommend Tobias’ work on the topic. They’re like the ancestors of the magic circle you may recognize from medieval and renaissance European magic.
These phylacteries are said to be “for protection” but I don’t think that they only mean it the way it might seem to us. Contact with divinity can be extremely destabilizing—to Helleno-Kemetic magicians, it could even be deadly. This means that a “protective” charm is required for the rites the PGM teaches us. It is sometimes stated explicitly in the text, sometimes not, but many practitioners and scholars both believe that phylacteries would have regularly been used. Considering these are the notebooks of working magicians, they likely assumed that their readers would be familiar with what was expected of them anyway. Their spells often include stock phrases like “add the usual,” assuming that a magician interpreting their notebook would already be familiar with what “usually” accompanies such rites (perhaps some magicians never even intended for their notebooks to be read by others). Considering that we 21st century witches don’t have that same kind of training, I think it seems prudent to use an appropriate phylactery with any Greco-Egyptian magic we perform, just to be on the safe side.
Another way of thinking of it is that these phylacteries are like secret passwords that we show to these powerful spirits to demonstrate our knowledge of their rites. Part of approaching them respectfully means studying their traditions and preferences; a phylactery is a way we show them that we’re not some rando off the street but in fact a highly educated magician who demonstrates respect to the Goddess by spending time in research and contemplation before we approach her with our requests.
For now, we’re going to discuss a specific phylactery I use for lunar magic from PGM IV.
“Slander spell” to Selene which works for everything and every rite. For it attracts in the same hour, it sends dreams (oneiropompeî), it causes sickness, produces dream visions (oneirautopteî), removes enemies when you reverse the spell, however you wish. But above all be protected by a protective charm and do not approach the procedure carelessly or else the goddess is angry.
This diabolē/slander spell is especially multipurpose—it works for everything, our author assures us. They provide us with three options for a phylactery for this spell and explain its basic format, which is to offer sweet, expensive incense to the Moon goddess with a prayer for a beneficent request, or to do the opposite for a malevolent one.2 The first phylactery depicts Hekate laying across the image of a heart inscribed in a lodestone, the second contains a long magical name written on lime/linden wood, and the third is just a series of symbols written on silver leaf. The third phylactery is the one selected by Newcomb for the 9 of Wands tarot card, and has become the one that I have used for my own lunar work. The spell is very clear that you need to wear a protective phylactery, but it isn’t immediately clear to me why there are 3 different examples given. Often these papyri represented the notebook of a working magician, so perhaps this is just a collection of three protective charms our magician-ancestor had come across for lunar work? Maybe it’s just one of those things where three is better than one at covering all your bases?3
In any case, through working with this phylactery over the years, I have found it to be a powerful protective charm under the auspices of the Moon goddess. In lunar magic I have used Phylactery #3 as general phylactery for showing my respect any time I approach the Moon.
I have made at least a dozen of these charms, mostly on paper. The one depicted at the top of this post is one especially close to my heart because I made it as a gift for my girlfriend during an emergency.
The Moon is notoriously ambivalent in astrological magic. She provides us equally with spells for safe travel at night, invisibility for our seditious acts, and curses of lunacy for our enemies. The Moon, especially in the faces we get to see in the PGM, is neither benefic or malefic. She is an agent of change. She can be chaotic.
Immersing yourself in lunar magic requires protection and discernment. A lunar phylactery is a great place to start when approaching these workings as a novice, and Protective Charm #3 has served me and my family very well.
The phylactery is very versatile though. Aside from using this one as a component of a larger ritual, I’ve used also it for making a variety of nocturnal and lunar wishes, especially as it concerns dreams. Here’s an example of how I do it.
using phylactery #3 to procure a dream vision • oneirautoptos
Our author-ancestor assures us that the spell they give is good for everything but, for me, I have found this phylactery to be an extremely reliable method of dream divination. I don’t follow the spell it comes from to the letter (especially not the slander part), but I do follow the overall format of the spell in my adaptation.
Specifically, we are using this charm to produce an Oneirautoptos, which means something like “dream of an in-person vision.” Its name comes from oneiros, “dream” + autoptos, literally “self-seen.”4 An Autoptos is a technical term in Greco-Egyptian magic for a direct vision of a god, a vision in which you “see a god for yourself,” rather than through the help of a medium or a divinatory tool. It appears that this term is a Greek calque of the much more ancient Egyptian term pḥ-nṯr, “arrival of a god” for the same concept.5 An Oneirautoptos, then, would be a visionary dream in which you are able to interface with a spirit directly. This kind of dream divination allows the practitioner to pose a question directly to the goddess of the Moon. The only limitation in terms of questions you could I would identify is that it’s probably best to ask Luna about things she would know the answer to!
Here’s how I use Phylactery #3 to ask questions of Selene:
Inscribe the symbols in Phylactery #3 on something. Paper is fine. Look at the examples below.
Light some kind of sweet and fragrant incense. Show your respect to the goddess by using something especially nice.
Run the phylactery through the stream of incense smoke, bathing it in sweetness. This is called “suffumigation.” Bathe your hands in the smoke too.
While holding the phylactery in your hands, make a heartfelt request to the goddess. Aloud, please. Tell her your question and why you want to know the answer.
Go immediately to sleep, still perfumed with her incense.
If you don’t get your answer immediately, try again each night for up to 3 days. I don’t know what to do if you don’t get an answer after 3 days because it’s never happened to me yet.
That’s all I’ve got on this strange little spell in PGM IV for now. I hope that this interpretation of a dream divination spell can be a helpful example of how to engage with these ancient texts our ancestors have left us in a creative way!
Take care,
Shuly Rose
The other slander spell in PGM IV is on lines 2441-2621. Page 83 of Betz has a footnote on diabolē with several more sources discussing the Egyptian origin of this kind of magic. Note that this is the spell before the one we’re discussing
The coercive request is more complicated and gross, go find it yourself in the papyrus if you want.
I wasn’t sure where to stick this in but here’s a fun fact I learned during my study of the original Greek of PGM IV: the author was a bad speller. Maybe they didn’t even speak Greek that well? In particular they seem to be familiar with the concept of dream-vision-producing magic, but every time the word comes up in the papyrus, it is misspelled! The proper word, according to Preisendanz, is oneirautoptei but in this spell the author writes oneirothauptei, switching the vowels in the middle of the word and spelling it with a Theta instead of a Tau. This likely reflects popular pronunciation of Greek in this time period (something I hope to write more about someday) as well as the author’s level of familiarity with the Greek language. Perhaps they were a native Coptic speaker and learned Greek as a second language? Maybe they had another rarer native language? Or maybe they were even dyslexic? Delving into these texts always makes me wonder so much about the interior experiences of their authors.
See the original translator of the PGM’s extensive notes (in German) on this term in section 17 ΟΝΕΙΡΟΘΑΥΠΤΑΝΗ from Karl Preisendanz. 1920. “Miszellen zu den Zauberpapyri. V.” Wiener Studien: 42. pp 31-32.
For more information on Autoptos rituals, see these three sources:
Ljuba Merlina Bortolani. 2016. Hymn 5. Hymn to Horus Harpocrates: IV 939–48, Hymn 13. Hecate‐Selene’s διαβολή: IV 2574–610 [A] and IV 2643–74 [B]. In Magical Hymns from Roman Egypt: A Study of Greek and Egyptian Traditions of Divinity. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316257999
Korshi Dosoo. 2014. Rituals of Apparition in the Theban Magical Library. [Doctoral Dissertation: Macquarie University, Sydney] https://www.academia.edu/15681152/Rituals_of_Apparition_in_the_Theban_Magical_Library
Stephen Skinner. 2017. Visions and Dream Revelation - oneiraitēton (V). Face-to-Face Encounter with a God - autoptos (F). In Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic. pp 263-6, 268-70. **Golden Hoard Press.
"perhaps some magicians never even intended for their notebooks to be read by others" unexpectedly made me emotional 🥺
Thank you for this share, it's super interesting!