Marked into stones, animal horn, virgin wax tablets, or plates of metals – whether archly alchemical or simply smelted from what was to hand – as well as found in countless amulet catalogues, grimoiric manuscripts, and occult treatises, planetary number squares (sometimes called kamea) are a consistent feature of the folk magics of the pre-modorn world.

The working-books of the pre-modern British service magicians, wise women, local wizards, private sorcerers, and community healers known as cunning-folk provide practical uses of planetary number squares: from their traditional functions and services for unbewitching, divining, locating lost and stolen property, and treasure-hunting; to other more specific and downright terrestrial cultivations and manipulations of planetary virtues. So common were these kinds of planetary remediations that some evidence of them even makes its way into the murky ground where cunning-folk history becomes witch-trial studies…

In this class-bundle, we present a survey and celebration of a wide variety of traditional cunning techniques and materia for formulating and deploying the potencies of these planetary ‘tables’ and the talismans, powders, oils, incenses, and myriad medicines they empower, and even invite us to reflect on how we ourselves may better turn such tables to our mutual aid and benefit.

This class-bundle includes: 

An illustrated lecture of two hours duration
Lecture slide-deck
Primary source documents on early modern astrological magic
Bibliography of further reading

A full table of contents of the lecture itself runs: 

•       Magic Squares Are Magic
•       Crafts of the Cunning
•       Mars in East Anglia
•       Blighting Pubs
•       Hiebner’s Mathematical Medicaments
•       The Boxgrove Tables
•       Belenus’ Sigillated Cakes
•       Some Conclusions