Join IAAM on All Saints Day for this AM joint-sponsored session with Daniel MacDonald!
This talk proposes that the Saints represent an accessible and underexplored avenue of knowledge and assistance in matters of astral magic, and points towards ways we can begin to consider this idea with initial explorations.
It is a contemplation as and leading to praxis, an invitation into an unfolding relationship. It offers avenues of thought for how to see in Saints their potential celestial correspondences and virtues, and therefore how to build relationship with them to potentially deepen one's own astrological magic pursuits.
Many systems of magic focus on the acquisition of or congress with a spiritual guide, a tutelary spirit, an intermediary. From the Olympic Spirits of the Arbatel, to the Angels of the Solomonic Pentacles, to the Agathos Daimon of the 11th House, and the Holy Guardian Angel. Ceremonial magic is replete with many guides that can help in our work with the Spheres. This is one avenue of approach. To begin above the horizon, in the realm of star and spirit given primacy. Saints offer a more direct link to ancestry, the once human. Breath within clay returned to dust and lived on in legends and stories and a role of the bone-bothered elevated ancestor.
Saints contain within their iconography and associated symbols hints towards planetary associations. Their hagiography and the lore they accrue through time and folklore offer further links. With this in mind, Saints are a category of spirits with great potential to teach and assist the astrological magician. We will consider examples of specific Saints and how to call forth their virtues as it relates to astrological magic. Especially in how they may function as tutelary daimons and magical assistants in the broad work of astrological magic or witchcraft, and relating to the stars and celestial spirits in an operative animist worldview.
Instagram: @runach.consulting
Daniel MacDonald traces his astrological background and learning starting with the work of Demetra George, continuing via Austin Coppock in his Fundamentals of Astrology course, and now sustained with personal explorations and fed by the ongoing scholarship of Dr. Ali A Olomi. Astrology sits under the broader umbrella of Animism as a primary way to understand and relate to the world. From this flows an interest in magic as a means to exist within this ecosystem. The primacy of spirits as ontologically distinct beings and personalities that can be related to, with a language and perspective that can be learned and changes you with contact drives his work and projects now.
With a background in academic Theology, Psychology, and Art, he seeks always to be learning in service to this goal of not just understanding spirits intellectually but in striving to ever better walk alongside them. To this end his current work and services are centred around divination, having spent two years in an extended ritual with a teacher to learn one perspective of the Norse Runes as a means to understand both self and the world around us, then a further year digesting this and applying it in a divinatory context. This focus on system agnostic divination as a language by which spirits may speak informs his use of other tools and systems, and allows his blending of approaches while maintaining respect and rigour for the traditions and lineages he is involved in.