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Final Riverboat
To set sail until the sailing is no more. Find the link in the main conference space.
Drew Levanti: Sound, Shape, Space & Conference Closing
Music goes all the way to the roots of western esotericism. In Ancient Greece, the music of the seven-stringed lyre was widely considered to cultivate the divine intellect, mirroring the logos of the sky’s seven wandering stars. In cult ritual and Dionysian revelry, however, another instrument rang supreme: the aulos, a double-piped wooden horn similar to today’s oboe. An extremely controversial instrument, Iamblichus is quoted maligning its spiritual effects as compared with the lyre: the former “stains” the spirit, while the lyre chases away the irrational desires of the soul. With Greek music and ritual dance as a case study, this talk will explore how “the divine” can be constituted at a sonic level.
Drew Levanti is a consulting astrologer and mystical educator based in San Francisco. His work cultivates godly presence through astrological relationship and poetic craft. Levanti’s teaching spans astrology fundamentals, elections, predictive technique, and the magic of the Orphic hymns, co-teaching STAR: An Orphic Initiation with Kristin Mathis. In his own class Initiate, astrology is an everyday tool for fortifying collaborative, spirit-enriching engagements with Time, understood as a relational entity. His client practice is fueled by astropoetic interpretation that is realistic, strategic, and affirming of a free-will world. Levanti received an undergraduate degree in 2018 from the University of Chicago where he studied cultural anthropology.
Jo Flinders: Astral Tech and The Rosette Stone
Through the lens of a little known and mystical form of harmony, we will trace the origins of culture, cultural intelligence, language and star magic from prehistory to the modern age, and we will conclude with a way any seeker may construct a piece of Astral Tech for their own creative and spiritual use: a spiral strand from Harmony's Mirror, the scrying tool for finding the mystical music of anything we can measure in the cosmos.
Harmonys Mirror is not only nature's mirror but also the mirror of any imaginary or potential nature. It is also a system that has been used in some form for developing fair and meaningful culture that lasts, from prehistoric large game hunting to industrial markets and planetary resonance science.
Making rhythmic patterns of the planetary positions in orbit relative to one another. Using the frequencies of the comparative spins of the planets (planetary day length), we can make musical themes and decipher harmonic patterns in the planets in a number of ways, especially using Natal Charts.
The Rosette Stone of the title comes from how the rosette is a way to break up a circle into equal parts by using a Pisces Vescica as petals from a common center, it is also much the same as flower of life in some forms except only one circle is complete. It is commonly found on barns in rural America but also in Egyptian Tombs and Temples across the world. This is a pattern we use musically in a 12 petal form, if you correspond notes to petals.
Joseph Flinders is a filmmaker, writer, musician, natural mystic and everyday sort of dude with a BA in philosophy (with a high concentration in physics and mathematics). He studied magic in a classical mystery school mold as a Quareia Apprentice for 3-4 years. Trained in Qi Gong and Ba Gua Zhang 4 - 5 yrs. In 2024, Jo wrote and published two books about the mystical form of harmony: the Musical Cosmos Hypothesis (a thesis in 5 different disciplines about testing the oldest mystical theory of the cosmos) and Natural Mystic (divine harmony for the non-specialist). Music can be found at bandcamp under The Invisible Army.
Chris Reppucci: Fidelity and Saturation: Navigating Alien Incoherence
The Air Period series in two acts
As we are headlong into an AIR Period with Pluto in Aquarius and Uranus soon to be in Gemini we are experiencing a new and novel texture of reality which functions on unfamiliar dynamic principles. As magical practitioners this shift should also cue us to adapt in our practices. In delving into the current predicament we find ourselves in culturally and looking at likely incoming societal scenarios we can begin to compose a picture of what even existence is and how we might situate within it for optimized coherence in an increasingly dissonant era, finding basic techniques such as journaling useful as it has been for magic historically throughout the ages. Considering elemental modes, presence within environments, and what endures throughout the perpetual flux.
Chris Reppucci is a full time practicing astrologer and diviner that has applied his work across a variety of spectrums: personal consultation, art, design, spatial conditioning, installations, objects, events, star tours, lectures, forecasts, and mundane modeling. He likes to keep the pulse on what is budding in the macro while keeping his body immersed in nature. Growing up with magic and divination in the home his practice has been long form morphing over life and is ultimately an integrated dialogue with the symbiotic field and what is phenomenologically occurring. His existence is entangled within wharfs, uninhabited islands, red glass, blood orange, olives, stars, saints, dogs and playing cards.
Demetra George: From Text to Translation: A Long and Winding Road
The Sacred Book of Hermes to Asclepius on the Thirty-Six Decans is an astro-magical hermetic handbook written in the first century milieu of Greco-Roman Egypt. It gives instructions for creating magical gemstone rings for each astrological decan in order to avert illnesses. When we read this text in English translation, we assume that it is a straightforward rendering of the original text.
This next instalment of my AM series of talks on the Egyptian decans will focus upon transmission of the Sacred Book itself which travelled across many countries before reaching contemporary eyes. What myriad roles were played by earlier authorities and mythic deities who informed the authors themselves, followed by the long line of orators, scribes, book collectors, private libraries, monasteries, merchants, universities, professional copyists, museums, editors of critical editions, and translators who all had a hand in passing on the wisdom of an ancient text to future generations?
The Egyptian Thoth, credited with inventing writing, was the patron of both scribes and magicians. Giving something a name by writing it down was considered a magical act that gives life to a notion. How do the scribe, the editor, and the translator take on the power of the magician who not only imbue the words with renewed life, but also shape, modify, substitute and add to text they receive, whereby the changes become part of the tradition itself?
Finally, this talk will discuss some of the challenges encountered in the actual translation of the Sacred Book regarding the accurate identification of the Egyptian deities invoked and the plants and gemstones of Greek taxonomies of the natural world so that the text may be used as a practical manual, as well as a historical document?
Demetra George, scholar, translator, and practitioner, brings the practice of contemporary astrology back to its ancient roots. Early in her career with the publication of Asteroid Goddesses (1986), she looked to cross-cultural mythologies to draw out the archetypal meanings and psychological expression of newly available planetary bodies. She then turned to Greek and Latin texts, articulating the history, cosmology, and techniques of traditional astrology. Author of seven books, her most recent is Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice: A Manual of Traditional Techniques, Vols. 1 &2 (Rubedo Press, 2019,2022).
Cynthia Day: Hymn to Orpheus
Orpheus and Orphism are re-emerging into popular consciousness from antiquity as medicine for a world shaped by the failure to adequately hold and process individual and collective grief. This stuck grief attacks the lungs and mutates across time and space into increasingly brutal forms of violence. Cynthia Day's "Hymn to Orpheus" offers a means of accessing this medicine in ritual or meditative space. Come listen to the hymn and hear Day tell its story.
Cynthia Orpheus Day is a genderfluid oracular poet, singer and diviner based in Oakland, CA. As an Orphic initiate and high priestess of Artemis, he aligns with the power of queer ancestors and spirits of wildness and liberation to establish space for those who reject patriarchal gender and sexual roles. She resists the hegemony of academia and empirical forms of knowledge in favor of a collectively comprised and equitably distributed authority; she would rather sing than know. Their writing and sound-based work can be found under various names in baest, dirt children, and Hot Pink Magazine.
Elodie St Onge-AUbut: Dreaming Awake, Sifting Through Air, & Shapeshifting Across Realities
The Air Period, a series in two acts.
The Air Period is here for the next two centuries and our relationship to information, light, technology, language and consciousness is changing extremely rapidly. What does this mean for those of us who actively engage with Logos and Light? We are on the verge of major breakthroughs with quantum computing and the merging of binaries, proving what many ancient traditions already knew; that we can be in two different places at once.
This presentation will serve as an exploration of various states of consciousness and their interaction with what we deem to be real. From remote viewing, to ritual trance and prayer, to being on the internet while interacting with a multitude of beings along with the cultural egregore floating out there, words and language shape the perception we have of ourselves and of the world around us.
Elodie St-Onge-Aubut is a French Canadian born on the east coast of Québec and relocated on the island of Newfoundland where she has been haunting the meadows since 2006. A professional astrologer since 2014, Elodie writes, teaches, and lectures on a variety of astrology-related topics along with having a full-time consultation practice. Research, divination, archeoastronomy and the study of various healing and magical modalities are her main interest outside of being in nature.
Chris Warnock: Choosing Talismans: A Deep Dive
As the astrological magic community has grown, a variety of different ways of choosing talismans have sprung up. Christopher Warnock discusses alternative means of choosing talismans, in particular, the use of the natal chart and the underlying assumptions that underlie talisman choice. Chris offers multiple examples and will make talisman suggestions for audience members to illustrate his approach. Chris discusses his approach to using a wide variety of talismans including planetary, fixed star, constellation, Mansion, Decan/Face and House based talismans while recognizing that many different talisman choice methods are valid.
Christopher Warnock has been a traditional astrologer and Renaissance astrological magician since 1998. He has been called "the father of the traditional astrological magic revival" and the "elder statesman" of astrological magic. With John Michael Greer, Mr. Warnock translated the Latin Picatrix, the most important grimoire of traditional astrological magic and has written and published many books on astrological magic and traditional astrology. Mr. Warnock also teaches astrology and magic courses and offers authentic astrological talismans.
Kadmus & JD Kelley: Panta Rhei/Everything Flows: Paradoxes and Pluralism within Astrology
Join Kadmus and JD Kelley as they investigate celestial polarities, planetary dualities, and stellar oppositions to speculate on the fecundity of astral paradoxes and the pluralism they produce.
Embedded within the coherence of Western Astrology are a series of fundamental relationships to the great circles, the elements, the luminaries, the planets, the signs, the stars, and the houses. These relationships are not exclusive to, but perhaps best approached foremost through their arrangement in polarities.
Polarity, in a strict astrological sense, refers to the division of the twelve zodiacal signs into two groups, positive/odd/masculine/finite and negative/even/feminine/infinite, with roots in Pythagorean philosophy. However, we can approach the term in a broader way metaphysically to involve duality and the interplay of seemingly opposing forces.
By way of introduction we will focus on Mercury. For it to be most fully understood astrologically, we can relate it to the polarity of which it is a part, that of the Mercurial-Jupiterian. Wherever we find Mercury we, too, find Jupiter. Considering the Mercurial and its associated impulses within this pairing offers a fuller spectrum of expression to clearly describe this necessarily ambiguous force.
While it may be easy to assume that these connections are allotted, fastened to their associations and like oil and water, never mix, this goes against the coherence implied within these relationships. For even prior to the sources of Hermetism, Heraclitus reminds us, “everything flows”, and, equally, “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” These fundamental relationships are paradoxical in nature—constantly pushing us to go beyond the polarities out of which they are made—and as such they are decidedly generative in effect, much like the cosmos from which they are based. It is these productive paradoxes, attesting and giving rise to pluralism, that we will seek to explore.
Kadmus is a practicing ceremonial magician. He published the book True to the Earth: Pagan Political Theology through Gods and Radicals Press and has taught classes every year for Salem Summer Symposium as well as for The Cauldron Black. He has also presented at the AstroMagia astrological magic conference the last two years including two keynote address, “Towards a High Pagan Astrology” and “Orpheus and Art as a Model of Magic”. Most recently he published the paper "Every Nekuomanteia is a Katabasis: Ancient Insights for Contemporary Necromancy" in Hadean Press’ Conjure Codex: Black anthology.
NM Thomen: The Descending and Ascending Power of the Kerykeion: Thaumaturgic Transmissions
The Kerykeion as a symbolic emblem of the genesis of humankind can be traced back to the Egyptians and Babylonians. The wand of Hermes brings that which is liminal, unnamed and formless into being, transmuting death and life through the agency of the daimones entwined upon its sceptre. Drawing from the Papyri Graecae Magicae, Vettius Valens, Zosimos and other sources we survey thaumaturgical ritual praxis by exploring the lineages of the alchemical to astral magical traditions birthed from the interweaving relationship between Hermes and the daimones that descend and ascend upon the Caduceus.
NM Thomen is an astromancer, spirit-worker and body-worker, writer, researcher and multi-hyphenate creative based in Ouidah, Bénin where they serve as the official astrologer for the Supreme Chief of Vodoun, Dada Daagbo Hounon Houna II. Their work centers at the intersecting roots of various mystical traditions, ancestral cosmologies and the creative impulse.
Morning Riverboat
Enjoy a sail with JD, AM Organiser, connect, and enjoy a tea or coffee to get this show back on the road. Find the link in the main conference space.
Late Night Riverboat
To set sail until the sailing is no more. Find the link in the main conference space.
Linsey Gosper: The Cunning
'The Cunning' is a series of analogue photographs exploring contemporary cunning craft. Based in personal practices these images are a documentation of herb witchery, folk medicine, divination, pilgrimage, and spell casting. Astrological magic plays a key role in these practices, in ritual timing and in sympathetic magic.
As I discussed in my 2022 Astromagia presentation, the creation of images in the darkroom uses astrological days and hours and is an alchemical tempering of the Sun (light) and the Moon (silver present in the silver gelatin).
Linsey Gosper is an artist and magic practitioner based on Bundjalung country, NSW Australia. Their creative practice is an intersection of art and magic, Linsey has an active ritual practice which informs their artwork as an area of research, play and documentation. Working predominantly with photography and installation they experiment with the materiality of the photographic medium through darkroom processes, incorporating various magical techniques in the production of the images. Since 2019 Linsey has been sharing their experience and knowledge of magic through facilitating rituals, tarot readings, presenting at conferences, and writing about plant magic and astrological magic.
Jenn Zahrt: Essential Dignities: To Weigh or Not to Weigh?
This talk traces the development of weighing essential dignities—by 5,4,3,2,1, -4, -5—from a tradition that employed an equal point method. Textual sources before 900 CE reveal equal considerations that appear to morph into a hierarchy, and ultimately a compound system of planetary “winners,” or almutens. As the classical tradition developed into the European Renaissance, the split of essential dignities into major and minor camps led to the “minor” varieties withering on the vine of astrological transmission. The recent revival of astrological image magics alongside the larger restoration of traditional threads of astrology through translation projects has revitalized the use of minor dignities in assessing planetary condition, yet the point system remains. By returning to earlier understandings of these “minor” conditions, we will deepen our relationship with what they signify and what they make possible in astrological interpretation. At the heart of the inquiry is an examination of power, power preferences, authority, and a critique of positivist scientism and islamophobia.
High-octane Germanistin par excellence, Dr Zahrt delivered a veritable Blitzkrieg upon the academic world with her resounding 2012 doctoral debut, The Astrological Imaginary in Early Twentieth Century Germany (University of California, Berkeley). She honed her razor-sharp editorial skills on the relentless interdisciplinary journal, Representations (2007–2010), the cutthroat literary arts quarterly, Threepenny Review (2011–2013), and an onslaught of seminal releases from the Sophia Centre Press, Rubedo Press, and Revelore Press. Audacious translator of Elsbeth Ebertin, intrepid Director of the Celestial Arts Education Library (CAELi), and newly minted President of the International Society for Astrological Research (ISAR)—Zahrt wields her arsenal of professional superpowers with consummate sophistication. Dr Zahrt resides in Olympia, WA.
Arturo Martinini: Etruscan Magic: Language as Embodied Divination
The "Piacenza Liver" is one of the most extraordinary Italian archeological findings, a life-sized bronze model of a sheep's liver covered in Etruscan inscriptions. From this artifact we have been able to learn some incredible information regarding the tradition of Etruscan divination. This talk will introduce the basic techniques and mythological origins of Etruscan magic and its profound connection with the Mesopotamians, drawing connections that will span from the Enūma Eliš (Myth of Creation) to Chthonic Hermes, Enoch's Book and the Qumran scrolls.
Arturo Martinini is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Portland, OR and Rome, Italy. Author of The Oracle of DelphA.I., published by Revelore Press. He has recently embarked on a 30 years long project concerning our world's' Mythology.
Micki Pellerano: Austin Spare and His Avant Garde Legacy
Magic has consistently suffered the threat of extinction. Its preservation has historically been entrusted to hidden sanctuaries, such as secret societies and lands remote from ecclesiasticism.
The arts have also played an important role as keeper of esoterica. Medieval craftsmanship, neoclassical architecture, the French decadents, and the Surrealist movement cultivated magic within their time and culture. From their combined periphery emerged Austin Osman Spare, whose channelled artworks and innovations upon magical philosophy and practice were seminal to the development of an esotericism that thrived through the end of the twentieth century.
The rich prolific publications of ancient texts in our time and their resulting furor are an unprecedented forward surge for the occult. But its backward gaze obscures the development of the same Greco-Egyptian paradigms enshrined in Trismegistus, Picatrix, and Agrippa in the forms they assumed from the 1940s to the new millenium.
In this lecture, Spare's extravagant tapestry of works will be discussed, along with his magical ethos and its impact on his devotees who broke boundaries in magical theory and practice. It reveals how their cultural influence forced esoterica out of the arcane and avant-garde to disseminate through the reaches of popular culture itself.
Micki Pellerano is a reputed professional astrologer and a practitioner of Hermetic Magic with over twenty years' experience. His practice derives inspiration from a broad range of systems including yoga, tantra, and chaos magic. Occultism permeates Pellerano's history as a visual artist. He speaks and presents regularly, while maintaining his program and educational platform Time Lord TV.
Kristin Mathis: “Great Things in Riddles”: Deciphering the Mystery Language of the Orphic Hymns
The Orphic Hymns, a collection of 87 poetic invocations of deities and divine natural forces dating from the pre-Platonic period, are arguably the most complete liturgical texts surviving to us of all ancient Mediterranean Mystery religions. Since ancient times, these hymns have been noted for their “riddling” use of language, as well as their extraordinarily long lists of epithets for each deity. Philosophers, magicians, and astrologers from Plato to Vettius Valens to Iamblichus and Proclus all believed the hymns contained great esoteric wisdom, but no modern scholar has sought to understand the hymns in light of what we know about ancient theories of language and interpretive practice, particularly as they pertain to the ancient Mysteries.
Perhaps for this reason, English translations of the hymns–from Taylor to Athanassakis–have never yet explored the full depth of the esoteric content embedded in the original Greek text. In this talk, classically trained scholar of ancient Mediterranean religion and magic Kristin Mathis explores the deeper layers of meaning in the poems, revealing surprising esoteric content that sheds light not only on the historical development of astrological magic and Western esotericism, but also on the nature of magical incantation and of language itself.
Kristin Mathis is a scholar of religion and ancient history; translator of Ancient Greek texts on magic, myth, and esoterica; poet and teacher. Kristin is dedicated to revealing the wildly liberatory power of the teachings of the Ancient Mediterranean ancestors to transform and undermine oppressive social structures, showing us how to connect to each other, to our earth, and to the realm of the “more than human”—animals, plants, minerals, and the wide heavens above.
Ben Jeans Houghton: Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius
‘Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius’ is a black and white film-essay comprising of many still images and narrative voice over, inspired by Chris Marker’s poetic exploration of tragic romance and möbius temporality ‘La Jetée’ (1962) and Andrej Tarkovsky's psycho-geographic odyssey ‘Stalker’ (1979) whose protagonists self-reflexive search, quests through a post-cataclysmic landscape, pregnant with perilous psychic portent.
‘Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius’ sings a cosmogenic swan song of a histories end, before speculatively exploring fictive tableaus depicting ritual technologies of stellar theurgy, whose reliquaries, figurative sculptures and votive altars are imagined amongst post cataclysmic urban environments, re-membering the techné of a once embodied Astral Magic.
By collaborating with Ai to ‘dream-into-being’ these images, I invited ambiguity, adaptation, chaos, chance, symbolism, synchronicity and the celestial into my creative process. When fed poetic esoteric prompts, Ai offered me oracular visions of the mystery’s architecture, which inspired in me a recognition of magic's insubordinate atavism and irrepressible perennialism.
Ai can impossibly illustrate the irreconcilable complexity of as yet un-arrived contexts, in ways that may move me beyond the depthless spectacle of its artifice, but can it inspire our creative capacity to create new stages, doors and thrones for the stars and planets that dance us through the metamorphic dreaming of our world?
Gnostic Animist, Artist and Astrologer Ben Jeans Houghton’s multidisciplinary practice spans votive sculpture, architectural installation, oneiric film essay, self-reflexive writing, ritual-costume, improvised performance, mantric-glossolalia and esoteric lectures. The work explores and expresses magic; the art of transformation and its methodologies, technologies, agencies, and implications, through art-praxis, as-gnosis, informed by astrological, philosophical, and metaphysical perspectives.
Ben has delivered exhibitions, screenings, presentations, performances and publications internationally in Germany, Greece, Africa, Japan, South Korea, and America and nationally across the UK with CCA, Gymnasium Gallery, Bloc Projects, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Generator Projects, Whitstable Biennale, BFI and Channel Four amongst others, alongside writing and presenting lectures for esoteric conferences: Trans-States; Esoteric Arts - UK, AstroMagia; Art of Astral Magic - INT, and Occulture - DE.
Danny Larkin: Mapping the Egyptian Gods onto Planets
In an astrological lapidary attributed to Damigeron and Evax from 2nd century BCE Alexandria, we encounter a set of correspondences that connect the luminaries and 5 visible planets with old Egyptian gods. The sun is syncretized with Re and the Scarab. The moon is given to Isis. Jupiter is connected to Amun. Mercury is cast as Thoth. Saturn is linked to Sobek. Mars is lost but consistently connected in other sources to Horus, while Venus is named simply as Venus. This talk will draw upon images from a recent trip to Egypt along with research into myths and archeology to draw out the connections in this old neglected magical lapidary between the Egyptian lore and certain core significations associated with the planets in our astrological tradition. Our magical work can be fertilized by unveiling the legacy of Egyptian gods in the core significations that form the bedrock of our astrological tradition.
Danny Larkin is the Vice President of the International Association of Astral Magic (IAAM). He previously served as Vice President and then President of the Association for Young Astrologers (AYA) (2017-2020). He is a lifetime member of the International Society for Astrological Research (ISAR) as well as the National Council for Geocosmic Research (NCGR). He is a pillar of the astrology community in New York City, organizing the largest monthly gathering of astrologers.