i can’t go anywhere without my sun medallion!
on solar remedies, identity and the body
“Got out of a dream today in the graveyard where I do my dreamin’
Tied my hair in braids, yeah, the colored pinwheels spinnin’
Smoking pipe—thought I’d get away
But I can’t go anywhere without my sun medallion!”
Medallion with a portrait of the winner of a music contest named Gennadios, c 3rd century, via the Met Museum
The time period around the solstice and the new year always makes me very reflective. My natal Sun is in Capricorn III which gives me an especially acute sense of the transition that this time of year represents. To celebrate my birthday this year and usher in a new year of creativity, I thought it could be nice to review some things I’ve been working on with y’all. I’ve had a really good time sharing my headier, research-intensive thoughts on the lunar stations but I’m looking forward to an opportunity for a more casual chat!
Back in 2023 I wrote an essay about my ongoing journey of connecting with my luminaries through astrological remediation, a series of practices I had been engaged in for 4 years at the time of that article. Having added 2 more years of practice, I think I have some more thoughts to add.
On my birthday in 2023 I entered my Taurus year ruled by an extremely combust-and-becoming-combusteder Venus in Capricorn. I approached my spiritual engagement with my chart that year through some relatively labor intensive magical practices.
For the entire year I endeavored to:
Perform solar remedies alone each Sunday to build up my solar persona for the future I want to live
Devote myself to the spirits of Venus at every possible chance, especially with my friends and lovers
Approach the Moon as a teacher, gathering gnosis on all 28 of her stations throughout the year
I won’t go too deeply into the third goal—I’ve already discussed it on here at great length because it was what produced the lunar stations project I’ve been yapping about all last year! I think that project, a huge endeavor by itself, is a good symbol of what I hoped to do with my Taurus year. With Taurus being my 6th house, I was drawn to immerse myself in spiritual toil as a way of handling the major year of transition that year represented.
In 2022 I had my heart broken by a lover for the first time. It feels wild to admit that I made it until my late 20s without having had my heart crushed by a boy but, I suppose, in typical Capricorn fashion I was a late bloomer in that regard. Saturn stationed retrograde in Aquarius that summer within two degrees of my natal Saturn, which marked the end of a relationship that I had devoted a lot more to than I perhaps should have. The way it happened was extremely hurtful and unexpected, and the rest of that year was marked by some of the deepest grief I have ever experience in my adult life, certainly about something so intimately relational as that.
I felt that grief most intensely in the blow to my identity as a trans woman that that break up represented.
I came out of that Mars year from a place of intense pain. By the time my birthday came around and Venus became my time lord, I was ready to begin moving into a new phase of my life—these were the circumstances in which I began my year of spiritual toil.
Throughout the year my monthly baseline was 4 solar rituals (one each Sunday) and 4 lunar station rituals (the new Moon, full Moon, and the Moon’s return to 21 Balda and 23 Bul’a, the stations who co-officiated my gnosis project). Additionally, most months included 1 to 2 special occasion rituals for one purpose or another so, yeah, the incense on my altar almost never went out. My busiest month, November, featured 12 rituals, including the creation of a small set of talismans for Venus in the 13th lunar station. Like I said: toil.
The soundtrack to this yearlong journey was a playlist I built around a song my friend Hawk shared with me some time ago, “Sun Medallion” by King Tuff. The opening lines of the song are quoted above. You’re welcome to listen to the playlist below if you like:
Bringing sunlight into a dark chart
As I said back then, the way I see it, astrological remediation is as simple as using astrology to identify the best medicines for your nativity. I have very strong malefics in my chart, but my benefics are hindered. One of my luminaries isn’t strong and the other is weaker. I feel like the Moon was ground-zero for me because she is in just such dire straits and I genuinely credit Moon medicine to my successful survival of my 20s.
I think my chart does alright with solar things—at least after I came out as trans. My Sun being peregrine left me simply befuddled about what to do with the tools it was given initially, but the remedy of gender transition was exactly what my Sun needed to figure out how to use them. I’m pretty outgoing, I love public speaking, I worked in sales for a long time (a job where the Sun and Venus become a tool for mercurial aims).
I did okay with my Sun in a very external sense, but the kind of blow to my identity and sense of self that the grief of heartbreak dealt me was something that I needed spiritual medicine for.
“I am someone’s daughter, are you somebody’s son?
Can I ease your pain until the morning comes?
I’m no one’s daughter, I belong to the sun.”
All those years of Moon remedies actually built me a stable lunar base to grow from, but all of that work ended with my Sun in the background. Despite her essential weakness, there was something about all of the Moon business that came more naturally to me. I’m inherently more comfortable in the nighttime, astrologically speaking. I have a night chart but I was born shortly before Moon-and-Sun rise on the day of the dark Moon with my luminaries conjoined in Saturn’s nocturnal sign.
How do you bring sunlight into such dark places? I’m still not 100% sure, but here’s what I did:
I said the Gāyatrī Mantra at least once every Sunday, ideally first thing in the morning. As often as possible, I paired it with ritual invocation of the directions (experimenting with format all year).
I drank a solar tea on Sunday made of calendula, ginger, and cinnamon. I also anointed myself with sunflower seed oil infused with calendula and chamomile.
I tried to get sunlight on my face, eyes and the top of my head for a few minutes every day, but especially on Sundays.
This was my first experience with a mantra practice. Several of my friends who are more knowledgeable about this topic encouraged me to explore Gāyatrī as an entry point. The feminine solar energy of Gāyatrī (also known as Sāvitrī), the goddess of the mantra herself, really appealed to me and I felt called to pursue it. On my solar return and the first Sunday after, I said the mantra 108 times. On subsequent Sundays, I tried to say it in the morning at least, which I mostly succeeded with.
Directional rituals have always fascinated me. In many spiritual traditions, invocation of the 4, 5 or 6 directions is a foundational framing rite used before magic or devotion. During 2023, I experimented with all kinds of directional rituals as a kind of solar devotion. The relationship between the Sun and Earth is what brings forth the cardinal directions, and then the extra directions of Center/Up/Down reference our subjective experience of the planet. Some time I’ll compile a list of all the directional rituals I tried but the one that stuck with me the best was the one I learned years ago through Quareia. One of the most magical parts of this experience was the way I was introduced to more prayers and invocations of the directions from many different languages and cultures organically through friends and community members. My most treasured experiences involved being unexpectedly invited to honor directional prayers in Diné bizaad and Hand Talk, but it really felt like everywhere I looked that year I encountered different takes on the ancient spirits of these directional guardians. Unbidden, I found myself encountering directional rituals everywhere.
And, well, the sunlight seems pretty obvious right? The Sun’s light is surely the greatest solar medicine there is, it brings us all the energy and life on our planet! I live at a relatively high elevation in a place with cloudless days for like 300 days a year. The Sun isn’t hard to come by but safely experiencing it (as a white person with light-colored eyes) without overdosing requires a lot of strategy! As the year went on, this balancing act of getting an exact medicinal dose of Sun was a form of devotion of itself.
What changed?
I think the greatest shift that this year of solar remediation gave me was a harmonized internal light. I had figured out how to shine outwards to other people very effectively already. What I learned was how to direct that same light inward as well. I suspect this is a common condition of many women—we’re skilled at hosting and entertaining others but using those same powers to host our own selves in our bodies is not a skill that is encouraged at all.
So much of my experience of the Sun has been tied up in the way that women are cautioned against and even blocked from observing or, heaven forbid, basking in our own sunlight.
What this looked like in a material sense for me was a greater understanding of who I was for myself, rather than who I was for others. I don’t mean that I experienced my identity in a self negating way at all!
I mean, can you answer this: who are you in your heart of hearts when you’re completely alone with yourself?
Can you describe that person? A year of solar remedies brought me my own answer to that question and an immense amount of psychic peace followed.
Aside from the healing of my ego and identity, I also experienced a number of strange physical things. For one, my eyes became much less sensitive to sunlight, something that I had always struggled with (even when I lived in a slightly less sunny place closer to sea level). I’m not sure how it worked but I found myself able to do things like walk out of a dark building into the sunlight without sunglasses and without it hurting my eyes, which I didn’t even know was possible for me.
The absolute weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced in the interface between my energy body and my physical body also occurred: my glasses prescription changed quite markedly for the better.
Sometime in the spring of 2024 I started getting headaches from my glasses. I had had a relatively stable prescription for several years but when I went to the optometrist I learned that not only had my prescription changed a ton from the last several years, but that it had actually gotten better! My right eye’s prescription needed to be reduced by 0.25 diopters and my left eye by a whopping 0.75. My optometrist was really surprised and we checked multiple times!
The most notable change in my prescription was actually that the difference between my left and right eye also reduced significantly. For my whole life, my left eye has always needed about 1.50 diopters more magnification than my right, but now it’s just a difference of 1.00. This was likely what was leading to my headaches, more so than my vision becoming over-corrected.
I think this could have been caused by multiple things, of course. Practitioners of sungazing as a spiritual practice believe that it improves eye health (note that gazing at the sun was not what I was doing—I simply experienced sunny days for a few minutes without sunglasses). Perhaps my use of screens reduced over the year (all that magic took up a lot of time after all).
Whether it was lifestyle changes or old-fashioned magic, this is an interesting representation of the way that our spiritual practices can have tangible and measurable influence on our lives—and that influence is often represented in and mediated by the physical body itself. Note that an especially ancient signification of the luminaries in medical astrology is the eyes—most particularly the left eye for the Moon and the right eye for the Sun.
What are the occult implications of my sense of vision improving and my eyes drifting closer to parity?
You may have noticed that this essay has solely discussed the solar part of my devotions that year. The reason for that is that I don’t (as of yet) know how to condense the experiences that Venus devotion amid the deep luminary work brought into my life into a bloggable format. My intensely intimate, erotic and sometimes painful Venus devotions deserve their own dedicated space. If I figure out how to craft it, I’ll pass the stories along later!
Happy new year <3