Page 64 Picatrix Rubeus:
“Next you should learn that they do not calculate these figures in any way except from the nature of the stars and signs. In this way you will be able to understand what was said above concerning the second face [decan]. All their sayings are of this sort. What I have said up to this point, you will be able to understand by using your senses and your imagination, and thus you will be able to make all things according to your wishes.
“Abenoaxie… named the watery triplicity, and wrote there… When someone seems to speak of water, a river, a swamp, or any other thing similar to them, you ought to understand that its work is in water. In the same way, all the other figures of the triplicities that are assigned to fire, earth, or air, should be understood in the same way…
“This is what they said about the names of the degrees, and they also said the same thing when they gave examples of their forms in their places, because all these are signs by which you will be able to understand the powers and workings of the degrees. Thus you ought to interpret them in the same way.
“As an example of the foregoing, when someone refers to a mutilated head and mutilated hands, he means by this phrase death and weakness and the way of one planet with others, because all these are ways to understand the effects of the planets, and how other bodies are strengthened by them, so that marvels, and the effects of the planets in these bodies, become apparent. In this way you should understand the whole art of magic.”
Picatrix is saying here that the ymages of the Signs and Faces are constructed from interactions between the essential dignities and natures of the the Signs, Triplicities, Faces and Degrees and the properties of the planets traversing them. Likewise, this is a two-way process, where by identifying how an particular interaction between planets and each other or with a particular set of Zodiacal degrees can be depicted as an ymage, this can be used to manifest or influence that ymage’s parallel in the material world.
That means (as I’ve said before) Face ymages which include a mutilated or ugly figure tends to be governed or empowered by an infortune or a highly afflicted planet or other bad interaction. Likewise, if you want to conjure up a horse you probably will want to work with Sagittarius– or find lost keys with the 2nd Face of Taurus.
This allows us to break out of the rote recipes for rituals and talismans and allows us to use the panoply of ymages available to develop ritual projects and talismans, which do not appear in any available text.
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