on the role of gnosis
sidereal or tropical? part 2
Hi y’all,
Here’s the second half of my article on approaching the stations sidereally vs tropically. Last time we talked about answers to this question in terms of a historical approach and I told you about the books I read. For this one, I’d like to give an answer in terms of gnosis and tell you what God said when I asked her.
If you’d like to refresh your memory of part 1, the full article is live on my website.
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.
— PGM IV 2622-2707
The way all of this started was through a dream divination spell.
With all of my astrological work, one of my top goals is to maintain rigorous standards of research and citation. I love digging through journals and inspecting papyri, and I’m excited to share the interesting things I’ve found with all of you. But at its root, this is an esoteric practice. I have no illusions about the scientific nature of esoteric knowledge; it’s just the wrong tool to use for this way of seeing the world. My own orientation as an astrologer is heavily informed by the work of Geoffrey Cornelius, may his memory be a blessing. Cornelius explains in The Moment of Astrology that astrology is primarily a divinatory practice, a “gift of the soul” as he puts it. Divination is better approached as a traditional ancestral craft, like basket-weaving or ship-building, rather than a formalized science.
I want to provide a true and honest citation for where any assertion I make comes from and, sometimes, that means citing dreams and divination.
Gnosis?
Gnosis, at least the way I’m using it, refers to a kind of revealed knowledge brought forth through spiritual contemplation of a subject. The kind of gnosis I describe isn’t gathered from books and articles, but from direct relation with the spirits who haunt these texts. Sometimes we see others sneer at UPG, unverified/unsubstantiated personal gnosis. Discernment is a vital skill, but I would argue that gnosis is inherently relational and personal. As we share our gnosis with other knowledge-seekers, we may deepen it through our relationships with other human spirits (sometimes I and others have called this “shared gnosis”). Even as we share, though, what the spirits reveal to us individually remains personal. And all real gnosis is unverified. Who could verify divine revelation? It is up to practitioners to develop their own tools of discernment and, ideally, connect with others to support them in navigating notoriously destabilizing contact with the spirit world.
The station stroll is a gnosis gathering project.
“it sends dreams [and] produces dream visions”
In the summer of 2022, I received a tarot deck that I had supported on Indiegogo, The PGM Tarot by Jason Augustus Newcomb. Up until that point, I had been performing various lunar magic and remedies on my lunar return each month for a little over a year. My natal Moon, as I’ve written about in the past, isn’t in great shape. These remedies became a nucleation site from which my magical practice developed into its current form. As we get into it, I think you’ll agree that it makes sense that this project was born from the womb of the dark Moon in Capricorn.
Each month, I would make and consume lunar remedies outside at night and do a quick divination about whatever intersections of fate I had found myself in that month, looking towards the coming month. Sometimes I would do a bit of magic and on an especially well-aspected return I had made lunar mansion talismans. I did whatever divination I felt called to on a given month, usually geomancy, tarot, or yijing. For my return in June that year, I was excited to try out my new deck.
Newcomb’s tarot is a fascinating system—it is a tarot, for sure, but it heavily incorporates many interesting elements of Greco-Egyptian occulture into it. Each of the minor arcana contain a more or less PCS-esque scene as you’d expect, but also a spell from the PGM on top and a token from the bibliomantic Homeromanteion on the bottom. Rather than full spread, I chose to draw a single card to help me get to know this dense system he’d created. I drew the 9 of Wands, depicted below. Newcomb’s guidebook explains that the spell is a protective charm from PGM IV 2622 - 2707.
The Homeromanteion token I had been given felt so evocative to me. That summer I had found myself in a major crossroads: I had recently moved to a new town where I knew no one, I been admitted to a competitive academic program, one of my long term romantic relationships was falling apart. Everything in my life appeared to be in flux amid my impending Saturn return.
Sitting in the dark, I felt compelled by the spell presented in front of me. Homer, the original magician-ancestor in Greek culture, says “I shall send him wherever his heart and spirit urge him” to me. My heart and spirit definitely felt urged by the charm.
I dashed back into the house to grab my copy of the PGM and read the spell I’d been given by nothing but the flickering candles and the light of the waxing gibbous Moon rising. Its introduction is quoted at the top—it appears to be a spell to the Moon that does anything within the purview of the lunar sphere. The charm on tarot card is a phylactery, a magical charm which was inscribed onto something (in this case, cardstock) to provide protection in encounters with divinity.
The way I approached “casting” it followed the urges of the spirits. I decided to suffumigate the tarot card with the lunar incense I’d been using and ask for Selene to send me a dream. At that time, the question plaguing me was a super technical astrological one:
Should I use tropical or sidereal coordinates when working with the lunar stations?
I had talked to so many other practitioners, read everything I could, and I still couldn’t decide. I mean, I could really see technical and esoteric arguments in both directions (as I discussed in the earlier part of this essay). I was at a complete impasse.
So I decided: maybe I should just ask Selene herself?
Outside, I raised the perfumed tarot card to the glowing silver orb and asked from the bottom of my heart what the Queen of the Night thought I should do. Then, without doing anything else or speaking to anyone, I went straight to bed.
Selene’s dream
i dreamed i was questing through a dark and decaying city with a small group of people. i didn’t recognize any of them. the city appeared to be long under siege, with uncontrolled fires burning in collapsed buildings and no living thing in sight. perhaps the siege had been long ago and this was the desolation left in its wake. my group was led by someone else, i was just following along.
we reached the end of our journey: a tall building, the only one remaining standing in the destroyed city. when we entered, it appeared to be an office building inside. the lower levels were derelict, but the elevator was working. my group piled in and headed up. we stopped intermittently, but each floor we hit was just as destroyed as the last.
finally, we reached the top, and the elevator opened into a clean, white office. the floors and walls gleamed with an inner light, all of the fixtures and accents were shining silver. a tall woman with long straight black hair burst out of an office, swarmed with advisors. she held a laptop open in one hand and was responding to emails while her attendants harried her with overlapping questions. members of my party chased after her as she went into the elevator and headed back downstairs, others wandered off in other directions.
alone, i found my way into a corner room where a short woman with mousy brown hair sat in front of a perfume organ. she seemed relaxed and unbothered. she invited me to sit down to mix a bespoke perfume together, which she poured into a little vial and gifted to me. she told me she hoped it would help and gave me some words of encouragement.
then i woke up.
Okay, but sidereal or tropical?!
It’s been my experience that a dream divination doesn’t always reveal its meaning initially, it takes some interpretation. I spent the day after furiously texting my friends and discussing the dream with my partner and pouring over what it might have meant. I cast a dream horary for the time I woke up and interpreted it following the techniques of Sahl ibn Bishr. As time passed, the interpretation I settled on was this:
The woman with the straight black hair was the spirit of the moon’s tropical station in my nativity, Sa’d al-Bul’a (station 23)
The mousy woman was the spirit of my nativity’s sidereal station, al-Balda (station 21). Through my research, I learned that my natal Moon actually shares her degree with the projected degree of the 21st station’s indicator star, π Sagittarii (whose traditional name is identical to the Arabic name of the station)
My natal sidereal station and its star have something special to offer me. My tropical station isn’t who I need to be chasing after on my lunar returns.
Maybe the Moon can be in two stations at once? There are strong arguments for each approach, maybe each individual practitioner just has to choose which coordinate system resonates with their soul?
If you look back to my intro post, this interpretation is the foundation of the approach I have chosen to take with the stations. Perhaps this story can serve as an example of how to navigate esoteric research.
Maybe you can decide which system you should focus on by asking the Moon to send you a dream?
That’s all for now, besties.
Take care,
Shuly Rose
Oh, what a great read! Loved reading about Selene's dream. Thank you for sharing! 🌝