November livestream: The Song of Hermes

November 25th at 9am Pacific

Hello everyone!

I have several things I’m excited about bringing into this Hall. Now that there’s an overview in place, we have context for some practical work I’d love to share.

I think the right place to start is what I’m playfully calling “the Song of Hermes”. The name is a nod to the Harmony of the Spheres, which is an old Pythagorean idea that the seven heavenly bodies must each create a kind of silent sound. The speed of the planets suggested to ancient minds that their “sounds” must correspond to the seven notes of a musical major scale.

The idea itself is pretty simple: there are these seven energies that show up in a range of different ways (musical notes, planets, gods, metals, herbs, states of consciousness, etc.). This fact leads to some fun observations, like how a musical perfect fifth resonates with alchemical gold, and the dissonant tritone (“the Devil’s chord”) is the sound that challenges the Hermetic mage at the edge of discovery.

But the real value isn’t the mental understanding. It’s the embodied attunement.

When you can really feel these seven energies, you can start to “hear” a kind of mystical “song” ringing through everything. Listening this way lets you dance in time with the anima mundi, the soul of the world. Consciously joining the world dance allows you to become magic rather than simply performing magic.

(This difference is a reference to theurgy versus thaumaturgy from the intro talk.)

I’d like to guide y’all through this Hermetic scale for this month’s livestream. That’ll be on Saturday, November 25th at 9am Pacific. Paying subscribers will have the opportunity to attend live and also access the replay later.

For everyone, whether attending/watching the replay or not, I recommend reading my essay on Saturn from my old blog “Relentless Dawn”. It’s both an example of one of these celestial “notes” and also a correction. Saturn corresponds to the octave, which in a curious way is “the same note” as Earth. Understanding and feeling why that makes sense is both precious on its own and great context to have for what I’ll share on November 25th.