i call upon the goddess of the months
a rite for collecting lunar gnosis
Spell Words (1922) by Nicholas Roerich, via WikiArt
I call upon you who have many forms and all names, double-horned goddess, MĒNĒ
whose form no one knows except the one who made the entire cosmos…
—PGM VII 756-94
There is a ton of lunar magic in the PGM. Really, the Helleno-Kemetic magical tradition represents one of the major ancestors of astrological magic as we envision it today, [1] and many of the astral spells are in one way or another lunar in nature. Picking a good lunar invocation from the corpus of the PGM is not difficult, but this one from PGM VII is my favorite one. I think there are some special things about it that I’m looking forward to discussing today.
My last post was about the charm that I swear by for protection during lunar work and for performing dream divination, from PGM IV 2622 - 2707. I also gave an intro to the PGM (the Greek-and-Egyptian Magical Papyri) and discussed some of its history and context before that. Check them out if you haven’t yet, this post will build on those!
The Invocation of the Moon
This prayer is one of the more interesting and mysterious sections of the PGM, in my opinion. It has no name in the papyrus, only the title “Prayer.” It’s presented as a dense paragraph of text which hides a complex ritual structure that seems to gesture at the waxing and waning of the Moon throughout the month. This is a very multipurpose invocation. It makes no request except that the Moon listens to the one performing it. I’ve taken to calling it The Invocation of the Moon, if only because I feel like it deserves a proper name. Perhaps an even more proper name would be The Invocation of the Signs and Symbols of the Moon. Kinda wordy though…idk I’m still taking suggestions.
It’s made of 4 parts:
A general invocation
A series of 14 sounds
A series of 28 images
A final invocation with a magicial formula made of 16 voces magicae (magic words).
This one has been translated several times. It’s a bit difficult to translate, especially the section with the 14 sounds, so I think looking at several translations is recommended. There are, of course, Karl Preisendanz’s translation into German and Hans Dieter Betz’s academic translation into English but they obscure some of the implicit ritual information in the text.
As a starting point, I recommend Phainolis’s translation and commentary from his forthcoming new translations. I also think that Polyphanes’s treatment is also very helpful—between the two of them you can really get an idea of how versatile ritual approaches to this prayer could be. Also, I believe she’s still working on her commentary, but I learned a lot from Ɔ. Martiana’s translation as well. I’ll let you take a break to look through them.
I was first introduced to this prayer and its potential sync with the stations in 2020 by Chris Reppucci and Elodie St Onge Aubut’s dinner and drinks Q&A about the lunar mansions for the Association for Young Astrologers. Some of their takes are summarized in this essay on types of magic and the lunar stations. There they discussed their own gnosis-building work that involved dreams, divination, art and this prayer. I believe their project has a book in progress so be sure to keep your eye out for it.
I believe this gnosis originates in the work of Jake Stratton-Kent, may his memory be a blessing. This prayer is popular and I know there are several other practitioners working with it. Today’s discussion focuses on my own reading and commentary of it, but I do recommend you check out everyone else’s too. [2]
At the end of the day, there is a lot of leads that you can take from this invocation. When it comes down to it, I am a witch. I am not a translator or classics scholar (look to them for answers in those domains). I have performed this invocation over 100 times and what I would like to offer in this commentary is an example of how I have taken these leads and pursued them to an end that has served me in my practice.
Breaking down the invocation
The initial invocation very beautiful and pretty straightforward. In situations where I’m looking for a quick and brief Moon prayer, the first invocation stands beautifully on its own. We call upon the Moon whose true form no one knows except the Creator. In this prayer, we call her Mēnē, the name for the lunar goddess who especially rules the progression of the lunar months. Mēnē actually comes from the word for “month” in a dialect of Ancient Greek with a feminine suffix added. The word might look familiar—it’s ultimately a cognate of the English words Moon and Month, as well.
Mēnē is not formless, rather, the opposite. She is a goddess who takes all forms.
The prayer goes on to call upon the Goddess of the Months who has been shaped into 28 figures to disperse breathe to every living thing. These figures are 28 schemas representing each day of the lunar month. Outside of these schemas, no one can know the true form of the Moon but her Creator, due to her constant waxing and waning. She never stops changing her form, but we can begin to know her by understanding her shape each day.
The final invocation is a magical formula made of 16 divine names. Martiana notes that all of these names appear to only occur in this prayer, which appears to be the case as far as I can tell as well. It makes them hard to analyze but, to me, all the more enticing and precious.
Sigh, hiss, bark and wail!
The prayer then moves into a list of 14 signs, which are called “companions of her name.” These signs are sounds made with the mouth. The invocation names sounds like moaning, hissing, popping, and barking. My experience with this spell is that the practitioner is intended to produce each of these sounds themselves. When I perform the spell myself, this section is simply a list of (really strange and somewhat off-putting) sounds. I don’t “read” it, just perform.
I’ve performed this spell in groups many times and every time I make clear that under no circumstances will anyone be participating if they don’t click, groan, and hiss with me!
I believe this section represents a kind of somatic invocation. The practitioner is encoding a seal with their vocal tract that opens up a portal for the Moon goddess to manifest among us. Because the Moon is the ruler of our bodies themselves, it just makes sense to me that a kind of arcane embodiment would be required to conjure her.
Dosoo & Galoppin explain that signs (sēmeia) refer to kinds of events that serve as proof of a working as well as another name for the magical glyphs found on Greco-Egyptian magical objects (like the phylacteries we talked about last time). [3] Essentially, the production of these sounds represents a kind of occult event that marks the Goddess’s appearance. We could call them omens of her arrival.
Do also note that this technique of making strange nonlinguistic sounds is quintessentially Egyptian.
Researchers explain that in Egyptian religion the gods’ appearance was accompanied by a menagerie of the animals of their cult. We know, for example, that hissing was used when the practitioner wanted to depict the arrival of snake gods (like Wadjet, the winged cobra or the primordial Agathodaimon) while the sound called “popping” or “clicking” refers to approximating the sound that crocodiles make, which accompanied the arrival of the crocodilian god Sobek. I don’t personally know the details of each of the sounds yet, but I assume that they are each intended to invoke a particular energy related to the face that the Goddess of the Months shows us on a given day. [4]
The ritual details in the text are very sparse, just the list of 14 sounds, but here are some thoughts about turning it into a workable rite:
Let the sounds go from 1 - 14 when the Moon is waxing and from 14 - 1 when she is waning.
Count the days of the Moon starting with the emergence of the crescent (the day after the dark Moon).
For example, suppose the night of the dark Moon (the day the Moon conjoins the degree of the Sun and there’s no Moon up at night) is on the 5th of June. That means that if you wanted to do this prayer on the night of June 12th, you would recite the first 7 sounds.
Suppose the full Moon were on the 19th. If you wanted to invoke the Moon on the night of the 30th of June, you would recite the fourteenth sound through the third sound in that order (14, 13, 12 … 5, 4, 3).
If you do your math, you’ll find that if we go up to 14 and back down like this then we only have 27 sounds. That’s a feature not a bug. Don’t bother Mēnē on the night of the dark Moon—she’s sleeping! Pick a different prayer that night.
Now for the elephant in the room: I don’t know what any of these sounds are supposed to sound like!!
The best I can say is to follow your heart. Many of the Greek terms are not clear (do we bellow or moo on the 8th day?) and even the ones that have clear meanings aren’t so easy to interpret (when we moan on the 6th day is that like an erotic moan or an undead moan?) I have personally found a system that works for me but this has taken a lot of experimentation.
“Shaped into the 28-fold pattern by the Creator”
The next section has some debate associated with it.
The way it is presented is simply a list of 28 images. The first 20 are animals, the last 8 are a grab bag of humans, objects, natural phenomena and one very enigmatic, hard to parse word. All 28 of these images represent cult objects of the goddess Hekate, who was strongly correlated with the Moon by the time of late antiquity, along with those of other lunar deities like Thoth or Khonsu. The core sentiment I can identify from this prayer is that it is a series of invocations through identification.
the Goddess of Months = the waxing and waning Moon = Hekate, the goddess of many forms.
It is truly an invocation of the shapeshifting spirit of change and time itself.
This prayer represents the richness of Helleno-Kemetic religious pluralism. The 14 sounds are extremely Egyptian, while the 28 images are mostly those of late antiquity Hekate. The atmosphere of the prayer is intentionally syncretic and multipolar, perfectly crafted for our Hekate-Mēnē (Hekamēnē? Mēnēkatē?)
It appears that recitation of the symbols of Hekate as an invocation may have been used to avert evil and misfortune. Another papyrus has a verbal charm for Hekate-Ereshkigal against fear. For that charm, all you do is hold onto your ankle just say “Ereshkigal, virgin, bitch, serpent, wreath, key, herald's wand, golden sandal of the Lady of Tartaros.” [5] Virgin, bitch, serpent, wreath, key and herald’s wand, of course, also being images in the list of 28 for this prayer.
It’s unfortunate that the golden chancla doesn’t make it into our present invocation!
Knowing and being able to recite a quick list of the Goddess’s attributes like this is a powerful tool for the working witch.
Researchers speculate that these lunar symbols are intended to connect with Mēnē in a way that transcends the cultural constraints of individual divinities such as Thoth, Hekate, or Isis.
Those god(desse)s rule the Moon—Mēnē is the Moon herself.
Speaking these symbols aloud conjures the Moon goddess in the greatest fullness of her form. These symbols, themselves, function the same way as the other secret names of the gods: they demonstrate that the magician has the right to call on these cosmic forces because they have uncovered their God’s secret nature. The encyclopedic recitation of the symbols of a god(dess) serve as a invocation in and of themselves. [6]
As I said above, the discussion of this broader 28-fold pattern originates in the work of Jake Stratton-Kent. He drew comparisons between the 28 lunar stations, the 28 cult images of Hekate in this prayer, the 28 demons of the Grimoirium Verum, and the 28 corresponding exu in the African diaspora religion of Quimbanda. [7] Much of that is outside my area of expertise but suffice to say that there appears to be an underlying pattern of 28 that permeates the spiritual landscape of the Moon and there are a number of different ways to approach it.
As I hope I’ve been able to explain through my annotated bibliography, the origin of the lunar stations means that there is no way that the system as we know it could have been present in Greco-Egyptian Alexandria in the 4th century when this prayer was composed. That being said, though, it’s impossible not to observe that there are a number of synchronicities here.
It makes me a bad classics scholar to draw a comparison between this invocation and the lunar stations—I think it makes me a better witch to do it.
The essence of the magicians who wrote these papyri is one of innovation and syncretization. There’s a sense of irreverence for neat boundaries and a willingness to mix things together that work, even if its scholarly basis is questionable. I feel that, based on the material culture they left behind, these magician-ancestors would be proud of us for innovating on their work like this!
I have found some strong threads of correspondence between the stations and these images and its something I have explored a bit in my gnosis sessions. Some of them came up especially strongly and will be discussed more in their station’s upcoming writeup. For now I’ll focus on how I use this section. Its meaning will take much more than a single essay to unravel.
See, I told you we would come full circle back to the station stroll!
This brings me more or less to the end of my extended introduction to my lunar station project. We’ll get back into it next month, when I plan to start releasing my write-ups on each of the individual stations!
Notes
[1] For more about the connection between Helleno-Kemetic magic, astrological magic, and the later European grimoire traditions, a great place to start is the introduction of Skinner’s treatise on the PGM.
[2] See, for example, this approach to practical use of this invocation. I also recommend the PGM group on Facebook, which contains several threads discussing various practitioners’ takes on this rite.
[3] This comes from a fascinating book I’ve only read a portion of about the relationship between animals and magic in history. It seems like a total treasure trove, and has been published in an open access edition so we should all be more familiar with it. One of the editors, Korshi Dosoo has done a lot of work on the PGM. I highly recommend looking into what they’ve studied so far. Here’s the citation, the notes on this prayer start on line 26 (but I recommend the full chapter):
Korshi Dosoo & Thomas Galoppin. 2022. Animals in Graeco-Egyptian Magical Practice. In Magikon zōon. Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.irht.704
[4] For more on this, see this abstract for a conference talk or this more comprehensive book (written in French).
[5] This comes from PGM LXX 4-25, “Charm of Hekate Ereshkigal.” Ereshkigal is a Babylonian underworld goddess who is often syncretized with Hekate in the PGM. She rules the underworld as Hekate is said to, here, as the Lady of Tartaros.
[6] This is also from Dosoo & Galoppin referenced above.
[7] Stratton-Kent’s take here is a little out of my wheelhouse so I can’t comment on it. I really don’t know anything about African traditional religions or the Renaissance Solomonic grimoire tradition. To learn more, check out Reppucci’s article I’ve already linked above and Stratton-Kent’s Encyclopedia Goetica. If you know anything more about this, tell me in the comments!