Hidden within the recesses of astral knowledge scholarship were a series of thinkers who posited stellar origins for our familiar alphabet. These origins tend to focus around the stations of the Moon, or the lunar mansions, as the first formulation or standardized list of letter-signs. Later Semitic mystics and magicians would persist in these connections between the stars and their letter correspondences as a ‘divine language,’ capable of being used towards magical ends. Using their texts as well as an imago-speculative chronology from cave paintings to today, this lecture will explore the possibilities of language as it is connected to our earliest stargazing and beyond.
J.M. Hamade (he/they) is an independent researcher, writer, and educator at the crossroads of occultism and artistic practice. They’re work bridges contemporary creative modalities with archaic forms of knowing. Various species of ‘image magic,’ both general and historical, are explored through like practices of astrology, poetry, and oneiric journeying. Similarly, the investigation and experimental application of talismanic art forms is at the forefront of their work.