Mansions of the Moon
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Magick, at least in the West, seems to be far more Solar than Lunar. I've been reading up on the Mansions of the Moon and I'd like to know what role, if any do they play in the Western Mysteries, post 1904?
Dan
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93,
I don't use them, nor do I recall anyone ever telling me they did. I don't think Crowley ever referenced them either.
So, while I'm not aware of any broader data on this, my sense is that this is a little used system in modern occultism. This is not necessarily because of the Aeonic changeover, however, which your question seems to reference.
93 93/93
David
@ar said
"Magick, at least in the West, seems to be far more Solar than Lunar. I've been reading up on the Mansions of the Moon and I'd like to know what role, if any do they play in the Western Mysteries, post 1904?
Dan"
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@dshoemaker said
"I don't think Crowley ever referenced them either.
"He did once, in reference to the scheme of the Tarot in the Book of Thoth. 777 also lists them in reference to their positions on the zodiac.
I guess what I'm getting at is, how do they fit in the scheme of the Qabalah/Tarot? Are they valid at all? Or are they like the planetary hours in that they don't reflect a verifiable part of astrology?
Dan
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93
@ar said
"
He did once, in reference to the scheme of the Tarot in the Book of Thoth. "
Where? It's not ringing a bell for me.
" 777 also lists them in reference to their positions on the zodiac."
Here, as with many of the surrounding columns, Crowley is just listing traditional correspondences. I am not aware of him ever using these (meaning the Mansions, specifically) in a practical sense.
"I guess what I'm getting at is, how do they fit in the scheme of the Qabalah/Tarot? Are they valid at all? Or are they like the planetary hours in that they don't reflect a verifiable part of astrology?"
I'm not aware of any empirical data on the use of these, either ritually or astrologically. Of course, "validity" in our line of Work can be somewhat subjective. And again, I don't use them, nor do I use the planetary hours, because in my opinion, they are of highly questionable merit.
93 93/93
David
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@dshoemaker said
"Where? It's not ringing a bell for me."
I'm not surprised. It's only mentioned in passing as not directly entering into the scheme of the Tarot. I don't have the book handy, but I can look it up the quote this evening.
Dan
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"I guess what I'm getting at is, how do they fit in the scheme of the Qabalah/Tarot?"
I'm sure some enterprising soul(s) have played with correspondences, but I don't know of anything approaching "authoritative" either.
In the Chinese and Arabic systems, there are 28 mansions. The Chinese broke these up into 4 groups of 7, and thus I could see a Western Esotericist producing a table of elemental/planetary attributions. However, there are only 27 Hindu mansions. (Maybe Liber Trigrammaton?) The Chinese and Hindu systems are said to have assigned "ruling planets" to the mansions, but I don't think I've ever seen those tabulated.
None of the systems broke up the 360-degree circle into evenly divided mansions. The longitude definitions are all "sidereal" and influenced by specific asterisms (sub-chunks of constellations; sometimes just single stars). There's some commonality here with the discussion of sidereal astrology in:
heruraha.net/viewtopic.php?t=449I've been long fascinated about the origin of the latitudes of the mansions. They flop up and down about the ecliptic and don't seem to be simply correlated with the Moon's inclined orbit. Something lost to antiquity, probably.
Steve
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The lunar mansions. Probably more than you want to know.
Basically Chandra, the Moon God, stays in a mansion (degrees of the zodiac) with a lovely wife in each because he has to share his favors. It's interesting how polygamy has its responsibilities. The first mansion runs from Aries 0 degrees to 13 Degrees 20 minutes, the second mansion is from 13Aries20 to 26Aries40. The increments are always 13 degrees and 20 minutes.
Each of the Mansions is ruled by a "Star Lord" or planet, each of the nodes being considered a planet. North Node is Rahu and South Node is Ketu. The first mansion is ruled by Ketu, or the South Node.
The fourth mansion houses Rohini whose starlord (planet ruler) is the Moon and she is very beautiful. So a Moon or Asc. in Rohini tends to make the person very attractive. Rohini is Chandra's favorite wife.
The mansion or nakshatra of your Moon helps define your personality, along with your ascendant. Ascendant predicts the personality traits in Vedic astrology rather than the Sun sign of Western astrology.
This is sidereal.
See if the degrees of your ascendant and your moon sign put you into a mansion that reflects your attributes. I have found only one person who objected to an interpretation of their Moon nakshatra.In L.V.X.,
chrys333Example:
(NAKSHATRAS)
constellation size ruler gunas Purpose
- Ashwini 0.13.20 Aries Ketu RRR D
- Bharani 13.20-26.40 Aries Venus RRT A
- Krittika 26.40 Aries-10 Taurus Sun RRS K
- Rohini 10-23.20 Taurus Moon RTR M
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@Chris Hanlon said
"The first mansion runs from Aries 0 degrees to 13 Degrees 20 minutes, the second mansion is from 13Aries20 to 26Aries40. The increments are always 13 degrees and 20 minutes."
Interesting. I think modern Hindu sidereal astrology must diverge from the older divisions into unequally-spaced mansions. I got most of my information on this from Richard Allen's book "Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning." (Highly recommended for the evolution of constellation names and attributes from the ancient world to the present.)
While on the topic of the north and south nodes of the moon, I think that Aryeh Kaplan's Sefer Yetzirah has something about how they relate to traditional Kabbalah.
Steve
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@Chris Hanlon said
Doh! Sorry to double-reply, but I noticed that the table of 27 mansions is broken up into nested triplets of the gunas (RRR, RRT, RRS, etc). Depending on how you define the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, one can make an exact one-to-one correspondence with Liber Trigrammaton ... and thence into the rest of Qabalah...
Steve
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Dear Steven,
Thanks for discussing this with me. Could you elaborate more on the correspondences and how they match perfectly? Then I could follow your reasoning?
In L.V.X.,
chrys333 -
@Chris Hanlon said
"Could you elaborate more on the correspondences and how they match perfectly? Then I could follow your reasoning?"
Whoops - sorry 'bout that. I was channeling those annoying textbooks that would say "The way this was derived is trivial," when it was far from it!
Liber Trigrammaton contains 27 sections that lay out the permutations of Yang, Yin, and their synthesis (which Crowley calls "Tao") when you group them in threes ("trigrams"). There are 3 possible choices for each of the three "slots" - thus (3 cubed) = 27 in all. In the little diagrams in the book, Yang is a solid line, Yin is a broken line (two pieces separated by a space) and Tao is a dot. Yang is the active, "heavenly," creative force, Yin is the passive, "earthy," receptive force, and the Tao is supposed to be the combination of both.
(Hadit, Nuit, Ra-Hoor-Khuit, anyone?)
In most classical Chinese Taoism, I'm pretty sure, this isn't the system that is used. The I Ching really just deals with the "binary" combinations of Yang and Yin - i.e., there are only 8 (2 cubed) trigrams. However, I do recall once seeing a Korean (?) divination system that used three co-equal concepts in a very similar way to Liber Trigrammaton.
One can make a case for assigning Rajas (fire, activity, cardinal signs) to Yang, and Tamas (water/earth, passivity, fixed signs) to Yin. I guess that leave Sattva (air, mutable signs) to the Tao, but it is a bit strange for me to think about singling out one of these three principles as the obvious synthesis of the other two. I'm not all that familiar with the gunas as the primary concepts - I'm mainly going by the elements and the quadruplicities.
The last thing that needs to be done is to decide how to correspond the three lines of a trigram (top, middle, and bottom) to the primary, secondary, and tertiary gunas in that table of the lunar mansions. Once that's done, each mansion has a trigram. Then the system opens up in various ways.
First, the short sentences in Liber Trigrammaton that are associated with the trigrams are quite profound and might be associated with, say, the 27 "tides" of the month/year, as the moon/sun moves through the mansions, in a divinatory sense.
The traditional Hindu planetary rulers of each mansion can certainly be brought into the mix. Maybe they can be used to help find the best "calibration" of top/middle/bottom lines to primary, secondary, and tertiary gunas.
Also, of course, Crowley assigned English letters to 26 of the trigrams (with the 27th being "silent") in an attempt to create the English Qabalah discussed in Liber Legis. There are several ways of assigning numbers to these letters (i.e., from their sequential order in Liber Trigrammaton, or from "trinary" numbers formed by the trigrams themselves, etc). Once there are numbers, the rest of Qabalah opens up.
All told, though, I'm not sure how beneficial this whole process would be. I don't think that western, Golden Dawn derived Qabalah and/or astrology is "unbalanced" by not using the lunar mansions....
Steve
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Dear Steve,
That is an excellent explanation. You made that so clear to me. I am interested in the correlations, and will look things over. Of course, I just discovered a website that was wonderful for the qabalah, do maybe someone has done just that - correlated the Liber T with the lunar mansions.
www.psyche.com
which has the best pictures of Microsoft Office symbols, the Hebrew letters and the Thoth deck.
genn.org/junk/mibrew.png
Much thanks.
chrys333