@teryster, @kallielef

Rockin and a rollin. 

"Why don't I identify with my _________ sign?"

The planet may be weakly aspected, overruled or overlapped by another placement, in Detriment or Fall, in a house where it is not comfortable, or negatively aspected with other strong parts of your chart. Those are the most common (and likely) reasons, but there are specific possibilities for each planet and either luminary, so I will explain them below.

SUN: The Sun is your base personality, your ego, or your sense of self. This is you on the simplest and most succinct level, but certainly not the most comprehensive. While your Sun sign will have a kind of influence over every part of your life and character, it is merely the starting point – your other planetary placements add to and alter those traits. For example, if you are a Libra, you may not feel like a charming or flirtatious person as many stereotypes suggest, but that might be due to your Virgo Venus. I find that the sign your Mercury is in while have a great impact on what you do and don’t relate to, and I’ll get to that in a second.

MOON: The Moon is your heart and your past. It is about feelings and one’s core wants and needs. However, your Moon sign describes your natural way of operating on an emotional level, and many people grow past that. It is what you inherently or somehow immediately know, somewhat like the way babies cry to communicate every imaginable emotion that they feel must be conveyed – except, for example, if you have a Sagittarius Moon, your instinct may be to run, be careless or optimistic rather than to cry. That’s what the Moon is about: instincts. And instincts can be manipulated or ignored in order for you to grow.

MERCURY: Mercury is the way you think, speak, and learn. It is the intellectual planet, having everything to do with the mind. That being said, your Mercury sign is the one you think like, and it is very common for this to be a sign one greatly identifies with. However, it’s easy for the Sun to overrule this planet’s position, and it’s also easy to overanalyze your reactions and inner processes to the point of seeing yourself as something you’re not, which is something I’ve noticed is exceptionally common with people who have Mercury in Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces (the signs where it is in Domicile, Exaltation, Detriment, and Fall).

VENUS: Venus is your romantic and artistic side (or lack thereof). This planet rules the love and beauty department. The way you express affection (either romantically or platonically), your opinion on art and fashion, and your aesthetic choices will be determined by your Venus sign. It is possible for the Sun to overlap this placement as well, but also Mercury, especially if you’re a thinking-over-feeling type of person, and Mars, which rules passion and ambition. It is also not uncommon for someone to have chosen to condition themselves to behave a certain way in relationships or during creative exploits due to life circumstances or even simply their personal philosophies on those subjects.

MARS: Mars is your sex drive and determination. Mars is the planet of action, and thus it rules when, how, and where you choose to act upon strong feelings and intentions. Your Moon and Saturn signs have a great impact on this planet’s expression, and can restrict it to the point where you no longer trust your Mars impulses or reactions. I believe that the Mars sign is too ordinarily suppressed, and the reason you might not relate to it is that you could be ignoring it, refusing to acknowledge it as a relevant part of you.

JUPITER: Jupiter is your luck, morals, and life path. This planet is not only about what you’re good at and how staying true to that will benefit you, but how it can benefit others as well, and whether or not profiting yourself is more important to you than profiting others. However, since this sign also points to the lifestyle that will prove virtuous to you, it is something you have to grow into. Jupiter identification, unless another placement implies otherwise, is something that must be searched for and discovered, or accidentally (luckily) stumbled upon. And age has nothing to do with that.

SATURN: Saturn is your fear and sense of obligation. Saturn is the planet that tells you, “No, you can’t do that!” for a slew of probably irrelevant reasons that, strangely, mean a lot to you, and seem logical enough when at that moment but later look like nothing but irrational excuses that cushion one’s inhibitions. It is said that Saturn is the karmic planet, which means that it points to the negative things you did or that happened to you in your past life which will come back to haunt you in this one. Other than the general probabilities as to why you don’t relate with a particular planetary position, there aren’t usually many things clouding your ability to relate to it, and you might just not have encountered its affects on you yet.

URANUS: Uranus is your innovation and need for change. It is the planet that rules your inner rebel, but primarily values progression over wanting to “shake things up.” It is all about caring for humanity and community while still being original and unique. Ironically (and quite amusingly), the planet of individuality is one of the slowest to move, so extremely large groups of people will have the same Uranus sign. It, along with the next two on this list, is considered a generational planet, and you may not relate to it because it’s not meant for you to relate to, personally, but for your entire peer group, as well. If you want to notice the affects of this planet, look perhaps not directly inward and at yourself, but at the entire population of people who share your Uranus sign.

NEPTUNE: Neptune is your imagination and receptivity. It is about all things illusory and inspiring, desired but unreachable, mysterious but widely searched for. Neptune rules everything divine, whatever is beyond; it is perhaps the most spiritual planet, next to Pluto. But its influence is often hidden and shrouded in confusion. If you don’t relate to it, start looking in unfamiliar or frustratingly evasive places, such as the truth and fate of this generation and the last. You may find its affects amidst chaos and healing alike.

PLUTO: Pluto rules all powerful transformation and regeneration. This planet can take up to thirty years to change signs, so if you do not see its affects in yourself, look at the last few generations and all the great, irreversible changes that have been made during their time.

Trust me – it can take a lot of time to find the way a planetary placement applies to you personally, but humans are complex creatures and if you dig deep enough, I guarantee that astrology will become significantly reflective to you.

Andrea Dworkin - Wicked Witch, “Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality”, 1974.

A very brief guide to different interesting-looking angels.

(in descending order of rank in the angelic hierarchy)

Seraphim (singular ‘seraph’) are described as having six wings; two used to cover their face, two used to cover their feet, and two to fly. They also have a strong association with fire and may therefore be depicted as being on fire. 

Cherubim (singular ‘cherub’) have four faces: one of a man, one of an ox, one of a lion, and one of an eagle. They have four conjoined wings, each of which are covered in hundreds of eyes. They have the body of a lion and the feet of an ox, and human hands. 

Ophanim (singular ‘ophan’), also known as Thrones, are two adjacent blue-green wheel-within-a-wheels with hundreds of eyes covering their rims. They are also on fire. Ophanim often house the souls of Cherubim, and are therefore usually seen accompanying them. 

Dominions, also known as Hashmallim (singular ‘hashmal’) or Lordships, are the only angels described as appearing as beautiful humans with a single pair of wings. 

Virtues, then Authorities, come after Dominions, but neither are described in any detail.

Principalities, also known as Rulers, are described as wearing a crown and carrying a scepter of light. Not much description of their physical form is given, however.

Archangels have been frequently depicted as winged humans, but Biblical reactions to their appearances suggest that their real appearance is much more terrifying.

Angels, the lowest and largest class of angel, are described as having immensely varied forms, and so may come in all shapes and sizes,

It’s also worth remembering that most angels, in their true forms, are immensely large, and in some cases it would take several year’s journey on foot to travel from the top to the bottom of one. Also, most angels are quite luminous, and some are outright Lovecraftian in that gazing upon them may lead to blindness or insanity.  

Using Planetary Squares to Create Sigils

Sigils are very, very popular on Tumblr and the Internet lately. They are perfect for witches and magicians living in today’s dynamic world. There is much consternation and perhaps even a bit of debate, though, over what constitutes a sigil and how to use them properly. I personally just define them as any (usually) two-dimensional symbol communicating magical intent, and I’ve talked about my process for making and charging them here. A lot of us have different methods for making sigils, and there’s really no wrong way to do it (provided it works for you), but there do exist some traditional sigilization methods, among which we find the idea of using planetary squares.

This method, popularized by Agrippa, uses a series of number grids associated with each planet. A statement of some sort of magical intent is translated into numbers, and then the numbers are plotted on the grid. A line is then drawn between the numbers in their order within the statement, beginning with a circle to denote a start point, and ending with a perpendicular line across the main one. You’ve probably seen sigils made in this fashion before - the circle at the beginning and perpendicular line at the end make them rather recognizable.

While not all sigils with those features are planetary, they do employ a similar technique to those using the planetary grids, usually a grid setup of some sort. Of note, many technowitches will use keypads and keyboards as grids in making sigils. Here, though, I’ll describe what’s (mostly) the traditional method for making a simple sigil using a planetary grid. It’s pretty far beyond the scope of this article to include all the grids, but resources for them can be found in various places online, including this site.

Lets just here, as an example, focus on the grid for Venus, which is shown below.

Suppose you’re a witch and would like to create a sigil using it to help a friend find love, or to bring love of some sort into your own life, strengthen an existing relationship, or just invoke the concept of love for some reason in general. Venus is an ideal celestial sphere to work with for this purpose, as most people know, given that Venus is not only named for a goddess of love, but also associated with love in astrology. Venus is associated with other matters, too, such as creativity, fertility, and art, though, so we want to be specific. We could, in theory, just use the glyph, hexagram, or other symbol of Venus for this, but suppose your friend (who has bad luck in love, and needs help with it) wants a custom sigil specifically. It’s quite easy to do.

Like with most sigils, you begin by summing up your intent. Were I doing this for a specific, actual situation and not as an example, I might spend a long time deciding on the correct choice of word or words to sum up the goal of the sigil, but for the purposes of this example, we’ll just use the word LOVE itself as our statement of intent. It’s not very specific, but it’s positive, and using it in this fashion will be a great demonstration of this technique. The word LOVE, after all, only has five letters, and works well to sigilize in this fashion. That’s one thing I do want to emphasize before you try this with something more complex - try to reduce your intent to as few letters as possible. This can be done by removing vowels or repeating letters if your statement is complex, but planetary sigils really do work best with as succinct an intent as possible. You’ll soon see why.

We take the word LOVE and transliterate it into numbers using the following table of values. The table has variations, and witches assign numbers to letters in a variety of ways - some might transliterate their intent into Hebrew or Greek letters and use those systems of gematria, for example. This is the most common way that I’ve seen of doing it in English, though. Of note - Dixie Deerman (whose book taught me to do this back in the day) actually includes a & symbol at the end, equal to 900, and uses that to connect words if necessary. I’ve never been much for that, but some might find it useful, so I mention it. It’s in the image below.

For LOVE, it gets transliterated into five numbers, which are, in order, 30, 60, 400, and 5. This can then be plotted on the Venus square using the method described above, beginning with the first number (30) and ended with the 5. But wait! If you actually look at the Venus square, it doesn’t quite go as high as 400, does it? It doesn’t even go up to 60. So, how do we include those numbers (representing the letters O and V) in the sigil? Well, simply divide them by 10! Instead of plotting straight up 30, 60, 400, and 5 on the grid, we’re plotting 30, 6, 40, and 5. This is how it is commonly done, and, in my experience, it works quite well.

Below is the finished LOVE sigil plotted on the Venus grid. Notice how the first number is circled, to designate where the sigil begins, and the last one is marked with a perpendicular line. Feel free to use this yourself if you want (and feel like doing love magick!), but I do encourage everyone to experiment and make their own for whatever purposes they favor.

Sigils made in this fashion on planetary grids can be used without the grid, naturally. If I were wanting to use the one above as a bit of gesture magick by tracing it in the air, or perhaps just sketch it on a piece of paper for a quick boost, I’d do so without drawing the full grid - just the lines themselves. The grid is implied. When creating the grid on paper in preparation for creating a sigil, though, it’s traditional to draw the lines, and then jump around the grid, filling in the numbers in order. I personally make most of my planetary sigils digitally in Photoshop, but some witches will have all the grids in their grimoire and use tracing paper over them to create the sigils. There’s a lot of methods for making a planetary sigil physically or digitally, so practice, and see what works for you.

Color can play a role in any sigil you create, too. If anything peeves me in the magical community these days, it would be that so few witches realize you can use colorful sigils. I just feel that people miss out when they don’t explore that, and it can be a lot of fun! With planetary sigils, each planet is associated with several colors traditionally (as an example, Venus has an association with both pink and emerald green), and you yourself might have color associations on your own for the planets or the intent of your sigil that can be used. You’ll note above that I’ve tinted the lines of the sigil itself a nice Venusian green, and were I casting the sigil, I’d do it with green ink if possible, or just visualize it in green. In fact, were I to suggest someone use this sigil (or were I using it myself), it might end up looking something like this:

The usual “rules” (as in, whatever you usually get results doing) as far as charging and preparing mentally to use a sigil apply with planetary sigils, as well. If you’ve read my article on charging sigils, you know that I personally know some folks who don’t “charge” sigils formally, yet still get good results. A lot of them work with planetary sigils, and the general consensus between us (having discussed this) is that, for some people, the very process (which you now see is quite involved) for creating these sigils can be sufficient to charge them. Whatever works for you is fine, but definitely experiment a bit.

I hope this article on planetary squares and sigilization was useful or entertaining for you, and that you create wonderful magick, regardless of how you do it! Planetary squares used in sigilization are a great way to get started working with celestial forces in specific ways, and they’re ideal for witches who’re on a budget or trying to keep things low-key, as they, like most sigils, require essentially nothing but paper and pen to create. If you like my work, consider donating or purchasing a divination reading in my shop, and if you have an questions, feel free to contact me. 

Makpal Abdrazakova

27-year-old berkutchi (she hunts with a trained eagle) from central Kazhakstan

Story here

Hace unos dias vi una serie de gifs de Marie Kondo explicando que a la hora de ordenar nuestra ropa debemos elegir la que nos produce felicidad, y para no sentirnos mal por la ropa que queremos botar, agradecer el tiempo que estuvo esa prenda estuvo con nosotros y dejarla ir..

Esto me llamo la atención y luego en Netflix descubri que habia una serie de ella, donde va a casas de personas y las ayuda a organizar. Me gusto su método y quise compartir algunos de sus consejos con ustedes. Quien sabe. Siempre se aprende algo 😉

Some users translated my words, because in the comments were asking for it, so here I shared one that I considered the most exactly. Thank you so much everybody! 🤗and specially @streptomycinn. If you wanna see more post about Marie Kondo and her Konmari method of tidying up please check my tumblr 😉🌷👩🏻‍💼

“A few days ago, I saw a series of gifs of Marie Kondo explaining that, when we’re organizing our clothes, we should choose those that spark joy, and in order to not feel bad about the clothes we have to throw away, we should thank the clothes for the time that they were with us and then let them go.

This caught my attention, and I found on Netflix that she had her own series, where she goes to people’s houses and helps them to organize. I like her method and I want to share some of her advice with you. Who knows. You can always learn something 😉