On my birthday, I try to present a magical ritual/performance for my friends. I call them “spellings.” The first one I ever performed was called “A Magician Looks at 40.” While I do write the thing down, there’s a lot of improvisation and extemperaneous stuff going on, so what you’re about to read isn’t exactly what I said or did, but made for the basis of it. By the way, this is also the first chapter of my RPG about magic called Secret.

I’m posting this because a couple of friends posted some stuff about astrology and it made me think of Robert Anton Wilson’s suggestion for replacing the ancient Babylonian study of the stars with something more personal.

 

I. Invocation

The 2 of Wands in Aleister Crowley’s Tarot Deck. Two primal creative forces. “Destruction is the first step of creation.”

I’m fifteen years old and Robert Anton Wilson, writing in The Cosmic Trigger, destroys the simplistic twelve symbols of the zodiac for me, explaining how the Gregorian Calendar Shift in the beginning of the Middle Ages makes the charts astrologers use today completely useless. Most modern astrologers don’t even know who Pope Gregory was, let alone that he made a decision that made their craft irrelevant. I’m not a Sagittarius, I’m a Scorpio, all thanks to Pope Gregory. Just sitting there, right there, alone with your thoughts, alone with your friends, think about this for a moment. Over seven hundred years ago, a man made a decision that only now is catching up to you. Across time and space, from the Vatican in 1582—over five hundred years ago—that one man’s actions reach out and touch you where you are seated. Time and space mean nothing to ideas. You’re not a Virgo. Never were. You are a Leo. Not an Aries, you’re a Pisces. Trade in your old sign for the new sign! Half price! Only now at Pope Gregory’s Mad Calendar Sale!

I’m not a Sagittarius, I’m a Scorpio. All because Gregory changed the calendar five hundred years ago and astrologers today are using the wrong charts. Of course, it didn’t hurt when Richard Dawkins informed me that the charts have also not kept up with the wobbling of the planets, orbital drift or any other basic principles of modern astronomy. You are a Cancer because the Sun was in the constellation of Cancer when you were born. Go back and check. You’ll see the charts your neighborhood astrologer uses and the charts your observatory use are a little different.

I’m a Sagittarius, I’m not a Scorpio.

Robert Anton Wilson, writing in The Cosmic Trigger, tells me to ditch any notions of the traditional zodiac and make my own “sign” based on the events of my birthday. Build your own cosmic significance from that. I’m fifteen years old. I start reading.

 

December 10, 1684. Sir Isaac Newton first publishes thoughts that question Kepler’s accepted understanding of the planetary movements. Newton is too busy with his important experiments—alchemy, creating gold from lead—but he pauses for a moment to make minor corrections in the world’s understanding, thus changing all of science forever. A distraction from his true passion. Magic.

December 10, 1864. Tecumseh Sherman demonstrates a fundamental understanding of warfare. He knows strategy cannot defeat Robert E. Lee. He knows the grey-bearded man is the greatest military mind the United States has ever known—perhaps may ever know—and will continue to defeat the Northern Generals with the sheer power of his mind. Tecumseh Sherman knows this and begins a different kind of war. He begins his long March to the Sea. He isn’t fighting Lee. He’s burning everything Lee believes in. He’s fighting a different kind of war. A symbolic war. A war against the very idea of the South. A war of ideas. A war of magic.

December 10, 1901. The man who invented the very symbol of destruction begins to reconsider his legacy to the world. The tool he invented for miners and construction workers, meant to assist in taming the American West, to level mountains and build railroads, is now in the hands of madmen. Anarchists. They abducted his idea and made it their own. His name is Alfred Nobel. And he invented dynamite. And perhaps to wipe clean the blood from his hands, put there by men who used his tool as a weapon, he has taken his wealth and fame and created something better. Something sacred. Something holy. Alfred Nobel, creator of dynamite, detonates his legacy so he may build something greater in its wake. The Nobel Prize. He hopes we will remember him for one thing and forget his invention of the other. But if we did, we would not see the magic he made. The alchemy. Transforming lead to gold. Transforming the base and vulgar into the sublime. Just like Newton before him. Magic. True magic.

December 10, 1968. The year I’m born. The Nobel Prize is given in science to the two men who break the genetic code and discover the true purpose of proteins. Same year, in Toshiba, Japan, four men are driving a large van with large metal casks containing almost three hundred million yen. Their progress is impeded by a motorcycle police officer who is nearly panicked. He tells the four guards the car was targeted by thieves who have sabotaged the van. With dynamite. He orders them to stand back and climbs under the car, hoping to defuse the bomb. Moments later, smoke and fire emerge from the underside of the vehicle. They hear him screaming through the smoke. The four men back away… and the officer jumps out from under the vehicle and drives away, taking all three hundred million Yen with him. The greatest robbery in the history of Japan. And he did it with nothing more than a bluff. His only weapon was his confidence.

Magic, science and con men. Themes that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

This is my birthday. This is my zodiac. Magicians and con men.

And this is my fortieth birthday. The year the Zohar declares I am fit to begin studying the mysteries of the Qabalah. For centuries, it was the age a man had to be before he was raised to a Master Mason. The year an initiate may be exposed to the greatest secrets of the Golden Dawn. Forty days, forty nights for Noah and his collection of floating friends. Forty days and forty nights of temptation for Jesus in the desert. It’s also the magic temperature for unrefrigerated food. As soon as it hits forty degrees Fahrenheit, you may as well eat it or throw it out.

It is the atomic value of zirconium. The planet Venus forms a pentagram in the night sky every eight years with it returning to its original point every 40 years. That same forty years, the Jews wandered the wilderness, looking for their promised land. Lent runs forty days. Muhammad was forty when the Angel Gabriel came to him with the revelations of Allah and in his Islamic faith, we mourn the dead for forty days after their passing.

Forty lashes for raising a hand to an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy.

Forty days for Moses waiting for the Ten Commandments.

In the Hindu faith, the most sacred prayer—the Rigveda—has 432,000 syllables. In each day, 30 Muhurtas. 360 total number of days in a Hindu year. Do the math… forty years.

Forty winks. Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves. And those nine months of pregnancy? Divide them up and you’ve got… forty weeks.

It isn’t a number we can easily ignore.

So, let’s not ignore it. Let us celebrate it. Celebrate it as the spiritual and symbolic number it is. The Great Number. The number of the Flood. The number of the desert. The number of ritual and ordeal.