Solar-to-Lunar

Correspondences

Weapons

The Solar typically is unarmed, or bears only a shield, a flag, a helmet. The image of the Solar-Lunar is a sword, or a swift arrow, or a spear - a blade which cuts, organises, demands, pierces the truth, asserts, shines brightly.

The spear can also resolve itself into a hiking pole or quarterstaff- a tool to help with walking, but one that can also prod, distinguish, and defend.

Materials

This is the least natural of any of the positions on the grid, and governs machinery, inventions, creations, craft (including the forge), glass and metal, the electric, science, alchemy, tools and things made by man – especially lenses and prisms - and particularly, anything transformed by fire. The touch of Lunar motion and change gives this position the meaning of the future, to the Solar's unchanging stagnation and morbid focus on tradition.

In my notes, I use the ᚠ rune to denote the elemental presence of materials that have been transformed through human working.

Think also: this position is related to sky and fire, that is steam and coal and what is made by those processes, and also to lightning and electricity. Think also of what this position is not - it is not lush or verdant, it has that made-barren-by-the-winds unliving quality. It is not substantial. There is no such thing as a material of sky or fire, they are energetic processes. The abstractions of physics are here, appropriate to this - a powerfully happening place.

a strong-looking man in red and gold armor, holding a spear in front of a glorious sun

Magics & Magical Style

Its magical style is ritual magic - an awkward mix of human certainty and rigid form with actual magic, helper spirits and guidance from Solar gods or Light as an abstraction. Ceremonial magic stresses the use of a magic circle and adherence to form for safety - in other words, it is rooted in a mindset that tampering with magic is dangerous. Most outlines available to the magician are rooted in a Christian mindset, making ceremonial magic traditions as they are a kind establishment unorthodoxy. Hutton notes that earliest documented forms of ceremonial magic from Egypt focus on coercing, bribing and threatening gods to do the things you want - combining a Solar belief in gods with a Lunar irreverance.

When we step further outwards to the Lunar, we encounter magic as a natural state of being - a release from form, from being the mortal underling of gods, from trying to square a need for both a greater God and magical power, and from confinement.

Examples of magic on this current include:

So you can see, the figure of the witch travelling between the outskirts of the village and the woodland or the wizard wandering in the hills is a dweller here. One thing this current notably lacks is an essential connection to the 🜃 or Water, so notice the lack of emphasis on earth mysteries and connections to the natural world and the great darkness. It's a celestial, often cerebral current, that attempts to square the circle between a safe and ordered human universe and

This path is especially suited to:

Light

Specifically candles, or a dazzling brilliance (not firelight, which is Solar, and not magical light, which is Lunar) - the blending of sunlight and moonlight. It is also the abstraction of light as in Enlightenment. You could call this energy the meeting point, of the Lunar’s clarity, and Solar’s heat – certainty, mixed with anger and drive.

This point also rules over the literal Sun and Moon and Stars in the sky, the light emitted by light-bearing celestial objects, and calls us to consider their similarities (after all, suns are stars and moonlight is but sunlight reflected; it's all the same light)

Separation in the Evening - Paul Klee

Tides and Times

In terms of weather and times of the day and year, think freshness and renewal. Lucifer’s times are the dawn and mid-day; Brigid’s day is Imbolc and the springtime.

As it is a brilliance, moments in time expressing a brief apex of brightness - midday, sunset, sunrise; across the year, midsummer, midwinter, new year.

Colour

Its light is a brilliance. Gold and silver experienced at once. Like the light of the two Trees.

Landscapes

See the index in the Journeys chapter.

Relationship To Other Domains

☉☽ sits opposite to pure Stellar on the Map. This dynamic is very much that often evoked by celestial magic:

The Stellar represents the imagination and wilderness, into which the ☉☽ is empowered by, tempted deeper into, and but also stands in opposition to. A sense of the world outside of man – both the natural world, and the spiritual one – and a willingness to follow ideas, whims and dreams is essential to the ☉☽ . This frequency cannot function without the imagination, our Stellar ability to connect disconnected ideas in new ways.

And yet, when things become too Stellar, we see the Solar-Lunar genius driven to madness, and good ideas turn to chaos: the horror of war, the chaos of rebellion, the outcome of forbidden science or strange lost ritual.

Finally, the Stellar can be all that ☉☽ rejects: for it is the rational world, law and lore, the skill to master and impose your will and to overcome baser things, and to transcend all limitations - mortal and otherworldly. On this current, we defy fate.

Alchemically, we can ask ourselves if the ☉☽ is not Stellar, what else is it not? It is not wet (not related to the Sea or the misery of weather) and it is not lush (it contains no water, it is not fertile or verdant or interconnected). It is not heavy (and thus tends to be ephemeral and insubstantial, as in fleeting ideas or the overly cerebral). It is not strange - it is brightly lit, obvious, whole-hearted. It is not cthonic - its magics are a blending of Solar order and Lunar skill, a little too controlled.

Characteristics

I get a fairly gaunt sensation from the spirits here - like they are under strain. Old men, and young men, both striving beyond the bonds placed upon them. It is tense, ambitious, doubting, pressured, striving - none of the restful acceptance of the Solar, or the Stellar revelatory cosmic awe beyond which crushes all petty worries into atoms.

The physical landscape of Solar-to-Lunar (Skyishpath) is barren - bare hills, open plains - suggesting a hunger which cannot be sated, for the is no water, no plant life, no beasts, no fish, nothing which suggests what it is to be filled up. The materials of the position similarly tend to be man-made - silicone, glass, metals - things which are barren/non-verdant, an unlivingness.

On a spiritual level, this suggests the place you are when you have not yet arrived - you are blocked out from surrending yourself to the Stellar or tasting Lunar grace or becoming one with the ☉✺ forest or proceeding by permission and pacts in the ☽✺ , or even relaxing into the predictable rhythms of Solar tradition. The magics here are the most tryhard - forced, even, and sollopsistically human. It governs Golden-Dawn style ceremonial magic, through which you can indeed do anything with enough effort, learning, and willpower; concerned with self and light and form. It offers control in the abstract but always returns to the self. But god, don't you get tired of looking into the sun and hiking through the desert at midday?

We see here also the paths tension between the self and the collective - because to choose one or the other is simple, but to bear it all and yet be alone is most effortful of all. To be a sole rebel trying to rouse a community, to be a sole scientist trying to further the wellbeing of man. This path does not sleep, and cannot rest. You are between destinations.

For this reason, the path also strives upwards. For when a woman is lost on the hillside, unwilling to either go home or go ahead, wherelse does she look than far-distant horizons, and then up. This path is associated with Light as an abstract thing, the blending of Solar-and-Lunar lights into a brilliance. And so, this tends to indicate gnosis and enlightement - the energy and power of smiting - the drive of roaring chariots. The ☉☽ Hillside is often depicted as grey, overcast, miserable with a harsh wind - the longing for the clouds to break and light to come back through.

And it is also the concept of the Celestial. The Moon and Sun as physical objects are governed here, as well as what we might imagine 'heavenliness' to be in a children's Bible; bringing together the Solar authoritarianism with the Lunar true-holiness to suggest visions of angels, brilliant and a little frightening. Christianity is many things, but many of the everday things a Pagan associates with it is here - the path is both Lucifer and Jesus, both renewing sons, both challengers and change (but a Christian would note different things, of course, such as Eden and gods peace in the Solar village or mercy in the Lunar sanctuary. The Fencraft Map is of a world that's always turning.)

In the triad Land/Sea/Sky, this is the meeting of Land and Sky, which puts me in mind if big flat planes, bare hills, any environment in which you are simultaneously as aware of the sky as you are of the land.

In the elements, this position is the meeting of Fire/Air, and therefore tends towards the insubstantial and celestial

And as Solar and Lunar can both describe interactions to the the mortal world, at times this position can't help being a little too absorbed by it.

Darker aspects tend to be just-fire, and stellar. Too much industrialisation, the burning of witches, the horror brought on by war and change (the Solar has the darker aspect of just-earth, too mundane; the Lunar has the darker aspect of just-air, too disconnected)

Its Landscapes and Weathers are a fresh wind, a going places day, a brisk blow-away-the-cobwebs walk. This point can tend towards the ascetic, but never obsessively so; it is wanderlust, but never too far; it is the energy of spring cleaning + new years resolutions

It combines the best of Solar and Lunar, and so produces Galileo and so forth: needed change and renewal, not destruction for its own sake, but necessary. By this, we say it can be balanced - not the extremity of Solar or Lunar but the best impulses of both combined.

As a place, seek where there is land with a strong awareness of air - the top of a hill, say - or awareness of horizon. Elementally it is associated with Light or perhaps Fire, combining the light of Lunar with the heat of Solar and implying the forge, the spark of renewal, enlightenment and so on.

Spiritually this can represent man striving for heaven: it is any person in an ordinary context seeking outside of it, be that a scientist defying the church or a woman in the rut of life seeking it. Priests, nuns, monks: mortals who seek (but haven't found) the spiritual are here. An old man in green and brown serving a goddess of the stars in white and blue, whom he never hears.

In this diagram the Stellar is heavy, inert and attractive, whereas SolarLunar is light, insubstantial and escape. Simultaneously, however, SolarLunar is mundane and mancentric as it gets, blind to the infinite. It is important to understand this point is "absolutely no Stellar", so no darkness, no disorientation, no wilderness. Sometimes you long to pull down the shutters and sleep.

Seeking the Landweird

This path can be most evocative of Fen as a whole because this is where you are. You are within the mortal world, and occasionally step a little outside. You can see the three practices (Walking, Reading, Disconnection) as associated with this path specifically - the techniques by which you begin your leaving, wandering by foot, in memory and mind, separating from everyday things - but always back in time for tea.

These actions put us on the Hillside and Hedgeways of the soul, the little roads aroundabout the village of our lives boundaries, straying and seeking.

Many of the roles you may see yourself filling in the future of your craft are ruled by this path: the wandering bard, the community priestess, the forest ranger.

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