Spiritual Friends
Notes on Fixed Stars and Lunar Mansions
This week, I had the privilege of performing two visioning ceremonies one day after the next. The first was for an upcoming fixed star1 essay: in addition to extensive research and contemplation on a given star, I also like to meet them myself. There’s already so little substantial fixed star wisdom out there that I often find it especially useful to spend time in their realms, conjuring visions that often lead to deeper, more poetic ideas.
As I am working on an introductory fixed star class, geared towards the deep practitioners and wanderers alike, I keep rolling around this line from Marsilio Ficino’s “Three Books of Life,” where he describes the effect of the fixed stars in this way: “For indeed if the fixed stars alone are in the aspect with her, they excessively overcome the human proportion, I mean, that of one individual; but fixed stars are more commensurate with cities”.2 Spending time with the fixed stars really is like exploring landscapes; there are different characters, shifting scenes and background stories you could follow and find that same depth as the one you started with.
The fixed stars can also be harder to sink into, in my experience. In comparison to my lunar mansion ritual, which I do every new and full moon at the same time as some friends, the fixed star spirits took much longer to show themselves on my inner black screen. The Lunar Mansion visions, by comparison, came much more quickly, and excitedly. A Lunar Mansion is one of the 27-28 places in the sky the Moon traverse as it makes its full ~27.3-day orbit. It is likened to a Lunar calendar (versus our 365-day Solar one). The Ancient determined the lunar mansions by the stars; whenever the Moon was near the Pleiades or Orion, it was in a certain station, with certain qualities and magical abilities.
They day before my Lunar Mansion ritual, the Moon conjoined Markab, a fixed star in the shoulder of the Pegasus constellation. It took a while after praying and sitting in the ritual before that it began to reveal itself to me.
Though also connected to the stars, the Lunar Mansions, are filtered through the influence of the Moon: in ancient cosmology, the earth was surrounded by concentric circles; the farthest out was the starry firmament, where the fixed stars live, and the closest is the sub-lunar realm, home of the Moon. We know the Moon loves us most and thus I’m unsurprised the lunar mansions are so accessible to the average seeker.
I found them more playful too: while the fixed star visions played out like a movie, the mansion gnosis came in colorful drips and drabs— little stories, songs, declarations, physical events. With the 28th mansion, the one I gnosed with last week, which called The Rope, I found the candle flame, which had previously been on the verge of blowing out in the wind, grew strong and tall when I sang. There was more a fragmented, collage quality to the Moon, more attuned to where I was and what was surrounding me.
Whether I call it that or not, I realize a lot of my foundational magical work has been aided and elevated by my zen practice. I have been taught for years to empty my mind, sink to the bottom of body’s cavern. With that underlying stillness, I eventually open myself to other spirits and beings.
From the empty space, I can let the world teach me: an infinitely harder tasks, at times, then letting the wisdom seep toward you, at its own pace and in its own way.
If you have any questions about spirit contact, ritual craft or gnosis, let me know in the comments!
If you want to learn more about the fixed stars, what they mean, and why you should use them in your astrology practice, check out my essay, “Why Fixed Stars?” in the Mountain Astrologer!
And if you want to spend time with your own stars or explore how these celestial spirits guide our purpose, our vocation, our archetypal situations, then my books are currently open! I am a poet-mystic who reminds you of your place in the world and all the enchantment that comes with it. My April books just opened so book now to save a spot!
Until Wednesday, loves,
Chloe
for the uninitiated, fixed stars are the shining orbs that make up constellation; they’re contrasted by the planets, “wandering stars,” who all more fast enough for us to notice night by night.
Marsilio Ficino, “Three Books of Life,” Book Three Ch. VII
Love this so much, also can't wait till that class opens up!