Embodying the Sky

Dancing with the stars is a physical art. It takes time and beautiful attention.

I’ve said it many times, and I’ll keep saying it, because it’s easy to forget:

Real magic is a physical art.

It works through your body.

I often see people who are drawn to magic go into their heads. Getting lost in fantasy or theory.

But it really really doesn’t matter how many correspondences you get right, or how “high” your “vibrations” are, or what gods or energies you attune to, if what you’re doing doesn’t connect cosmic power to the Earth through your physical body.

Hermetic magic in particular can be super slippery on this point. Even within Hermeticism, “Hermes” (the Greek form of Roman Mercury) is a nod to the mind. Most described training is mental. Most learning is intellectual. You can feel like you’re making progress because things make sense and sync up with each other.

But even in Hermeticism, the mind isn’t actually central. It’s just the preferred medium.

The point of Hermetic mental training is to learn frameworks that you look through… so that you live in the world differently. You come to view the Sun as a literal embodiment of your soul, which makes its warm light feel meaningful in a different way than it did before. The moldy food you find in your fridge comes to feel like a reflection of alchemical nigredo — not because you tell yourself a story in your head, but because with practice your body comes to recognize nigredo even if you don’t notice at first.

The mental stuff is actually the fast and easy part. I can list some ideas, and you can memorize them, and then in some sense you would “know” Hermeticism.

But that’s not the interesting part!

The interesting part, in my opinion, is when you’ve internalized the framework. When you don’t need to call it to mind anymore because you can feel the truth it was designed to make available to you.

Without that, Hermetic tools become distractions.

Embodied charts

Of the Hermetic arts, astrology is maybe the worst culprit here. The whole point of the discipline is to feel the link between the cosmos and your Earthly experience. And it’s well-designed to do exactly that! But instead, by default today it’s often used as an exercise in mental abstraction.

But I don’t think it has to be. I think there’s a way to reclaim the deeply embodied nature of the art.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Right now, I type this, it’s 1:35pm Pacific USA time on December 14th, 2023. If I look up where the seven plants are at this moment, I get the following:

• The Sun and Mars are both in Sagittarius.

• The Moon and Mercury are both in Capricorn.

• Venus is in Scorpio.

• Jupiter is in Taurus.

• Saturn is in Pisces.

To interpret that information, I’d have to memorize what all of these things mean. “Sun in Sagittarius” basically means it’s between Thanksgiving and Christmas… but what does that tell me?

If I’ve memorized the Thema Mundi, maybe it’ll ping in my mind that Jupiter rules Sagittarius. So somehow Jupiter is sort of hosting the Sun and Mars. If I think about how Jupiter is king of the Olympic gods and Mars is the god of war… I can kind of start making associations.

But can you feel how mental this is?

Does it make you more aware of how it feels to be breathing as you read this? Or less aware?

Here’s an astrological chart for the same moment:

(This image is from the iOS app “Time Nomad”.)

Charts like this often get read as summaries of the same information. Once you know what all the symbols mean, you can see how (say) the Sun and Mars are both in Sagittarius. (The Sun is the circle with the dot, and Mars is the “male” symbol. The arrow with the slash in it indicates Sagittarius.)

But I think saying it’s a summary is a bit like saying a road map is a summary of driving directions.

Let me show you how to read this chart more literally.

That horizontal line through the middle is the Earth’s surface.

(Well, it’s actually the Earth’s surface at sea level. It doesn’t account for things like mountains on the horizon or my elevation.)

That vertical-ish line is a longitudinal line — which is to say, it’s part of one of those lines on a globe connecting the north and south poles. Counterintuitively, the top part of that line is south, not north — but it’s that way for a reason: you’ll see the Sun and the moving planets in the southern sky if you’re in the northern hemisphere. So we want the top of the chart to be the visible sky.

(You might wonder why the longitudinal line isn’t straight up in the chart. It’s a bit of a geometric mess to explain why. I think it’s worth coming to understand eventually! But I want to keep this exposé focused on embodied observations for now.)

So those two middle lines cross where I am. If I’m facing south, I’m standing on the Earth’s surface at that intersection looking in the direction indicated by the upper half of that longitudinal line.

The ring of symbols there is the zodiac — but you should really think of it as the ecliptic. Technically that’s the Sun’s apparent path across the stars over the course of a year. We care about it because you’ll find all the planets near that star path: if you draw a line connecting the Sun and Moon, and you extend that as an arc through the sky, you’ll find all the visible planets near that arc.

(Again, there’s a good geometric reason for this. It has to do with the Solar System being kind of a flat disk. But the point is, you’ll see this directly if you look!)

So this chart says that if I’m facing directly south, I can just make out the Moon in the sky nearly straight in front of me (but very slightly to the left). The Sun is lower in the sky a bit to my right.

That funny-looking “4” way on the left there is Jupiter, currently hidden below the horizon. It’ll rise a bit before 2pm today (so probably before I finish this article). But it’ll rise in the north-northeast. That’s practically behind me! You can see that in how that top line bends to the right. So if I’m at the very center and am facing in the direction of that upward-ish line, the place where the ecliptic meets the horizon is a little left of behind me.

So, why am I naming all this?

Because I hope that by my doing so, you can feel how looking at a chart like this one can physically orient you to the sky.

This visceral grounding is key to how you connect astrological ideas to your body.

You might still not know what (say) “Mars in Sagittarius” means… but if you learn how to feel the sky, and you also learn how to somatically tune into the relevant Hermetic frequencies, then the meaning will ring like a bell in your body.

At that point, not only will interpretations stop feeling so arbitrary, but you’ll even be able tell when an interpretation is incorrect.

And your planetary magic will become much more potent and skillful.

Watch the sky

Building this skill is actually really simple. It doesn’t require a ton of study. With modern tech, it’s downright easy. It just takes a while for it to bear fruit:

At roughly the same time each day, notice where the Sun and Moon physically are — relative to you, and relative to the constellations.

That’s it!

I recommend you do this with an app that lets you use your phone like a kind of magic window to the stars. I like Night Sky for this purpose.

I suggest you tweak the app’s settings so that the constellations are easy to notice. That way you can see what constellations the Sun and Moon are actually in. That also helps you track how quickly they’re each moving across the stars.

I also recommend making the ecliptic visible in your app. That’ll make it easier to find whichever planets (including the Moon!) you’re looking for: they all stay close to that line.

When I first started doing this practice, I’d check first thing in the morning, which was usually near dawn. That meant the Sun was in roughly the same place each time relative to the Earth. That consistency really helped build a visceral intuition for the Moon’s speed across the stars.

This practice doesn’t need to take long. Just a few seconds each day. And it really helps bring the sky into visceral reach.

Just be patient with it. The intuitions build up over weeks and months. This learning happens at the pace of the body, like with dance or martial arts. Give it time.

Enriching the practice

Here are some enhancements I recommend playing with as you feel ready for them. Add enough to feel engaged, but not so much that you feel overwhelmed. There’s no rush.

• Notice the Lunar phase and its angle with the Sun.
  This builds a superb embodied foundation for understanding what’s called “aspects”. Take a moment to notice how the Moon’s phase actually looks — either by physically looking at it or by using an app or website like this one. Then, after you find the Sun & Moon, point a hand at each of them, and feel how the angle between your arms feels. That angle and the Lunar phase are directly connected. You’re not looking for anything profound here; just notice how the angle and phase feel in your body.
  

• Look up the Moon’s zodiac sign.
  The zodiac isn’t based on the constellations; it’s actually based on where the Sun is on the ecliptic throughout the year.¹ You can learn to see where the sign boundaries are by noticing when the Moon changes sign. This practice will also help you internalize the signs’ order. You can look up the Moon’s zodiac sign on a site like this one.
  

• Find the non-luminaries too.
  (The Sun and Moon are called the “luminaries”, literally meaning “lights”.)
  Look for Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn through your stargazing app. You can find them somewhere near the ecliptic. I suggest either (a) finding them at roughly the same time of day each day or (b) taking the time to embody the angle each planet makes with the Sun (like I describe doing for the Moon in the first bullet up above). That way you’ll start intuitively picking up on how those planets move — their speed, their retrograde pattern, and the way Mercury and Venus stay close to the Sun.
  

• Look up the Sun’s & five non-luminaries’ zodiac signs too.
  At first you’ll want to do this daily, but after a while you’ll probably notice a pattern and will likely just want to check once a week or so. How you look the signs up doesn’t matter all that much; one option is to go to Astro.com and scroll down to the chart on the right labeled “Current Planets”. It’ll tell you the sign’s name if you hover your cursor over the colored symbols. You can ignore all the rows below Saturn and all the numbers for now.
  

• Physically go look at these objects in the sky.
  You want your body to relate directly to this Hermetic sky clock. So go outside and just look! Notice the way the sky feels like a giant dome overhead. How the crescent Moon’s “bow” kind of points at the Sun even below the horizon. The way the planets aren’t quite on a straight line. How the non-luminaries don’t twinkle — and how that helps you find them! Take a little time noticing how your body subtly responds as you gaze at each planet (other than the Sun!) and mentally note what it is. (“That’s Mars.”) There are far more things to notice than I can list in a simple paragraph — which is why you want to go look for yourself! Build your own embodied direct relationship to the sky.
  

• Feel the Sun.
  The Sun is central in astrology for the same core reason gold is central in alchemy. What you’re seeing when you look at the Moon and the non-luminaries is reflected sunlight. So bring it some extra attention. Here are a few suggestions about how you might do so — but see if you can notice the underlying feeling of attending to the Solar frequency:

  • When you feel direct sunlight, take a moment to savor its warmth and the way it can stir alive stillness in you (if it does!).

  • When you can, catch dawn (or dusk) and notice how seeing the Sun’s very first (or very last) glimmer of light affects you. Notice how it rises (and sets) at an angle relative to the horizon: if you’re not in the tropics, it doesn’t just come straight up (or go straight down). Physically observe how it rises (and sets) in a very slightly different place each day: what band of the horizon defines a rising Sagittarius Sun, for instance?

  • Go for a walk during the “golden hour” and let its beauty touch your heart. Notice how this is golden light touching your skin and the land around you. Like alchemists’ gold.

  • The Sun’s path through the sky during the day is called the Sun path — and it’s different from the ecliptic! Try to find that path each day. Anticipate where the Sun will be at a given time, and then check. (There are apps that can help with this. I use one called SunQuest.)

Where does this lead?

Originally astrology and astronomy were the same art. Just like chemistry comes from alchemy.

But starting around three centuries ago, we started distinguishing between magic and science, mostly disavowing the former. This resulted in magic becoming ungrounded fantasy and science growing more mechanical and pointless.

But they really are one art. They’re both much more rich together.

The practice I’ve described here starts to recombine the magic and science of the sky. Most of what I’ve named here is astronomical. But hopefully you can feel how it ties into myth too. It’s not just memorizing dead facts or rehearsing how empty the universe is. You’re learning to feel the sky.

The next steps into the Hermetic cosmos involve learning the stories more deeply. The zodiac in particular. I have a pretty unusual approach that I think is much more natural — and it also suggests some corrections to the usual interpretations of the so-called “star signs”.

Once that’s in place, we can take a look at natal charts. Your natal chart can act as a kind of meditative glyph that makes both thaumaturgy and theurgy a lot more accessible. In my experience this is a key missing step for most people who attempt planetary magic: if they get any effects, they can be hard to tell apart from coincidence, and even the clear effects are sometimes very strange for unknown reasons. Tuning into the natal chart helps tremendously.

(…but not the way most modern astrologers seem to think!)

And, all of this is in the “as above” thread of Hermeticism. There’s similar recombine-magic-and-science work to do with alchemy, and ways of internalizing the Qabalistic Tree of Life that are rich and meaningful.

But one step at a time.

For now, I hope you enjoy making the art of stars more tangible, and real.

1. Technically I’m describing what’s called the tropical zodiac. Another popular zodiac is the sidereal one, which matches the 12 signs much more closely to their respective constellations. However, tropical astrology is by far the most popular, and it also fits Hermeticism much better (by making the Sun more central than the stars).