Our Lineage

We commit ourselves to right relationship. This entails open acknowledgement and gratitude to those who have taught and inspired us. Idola Stellarum represents a new link in a chain of tradition stretching back to ancient sages, and we owe a continual debt of gratitude to those whose hands have touched and passed down their insights to us.

Teachers

Our approach to astrological magic has been nurtured by two primary sources. First, the direct teachings of Christopher Warnock, the preeminent astrological magician whose scholarship and practice for over 25 years have revived and rejuvenated the tradition of stellar image magic. Warnock’s talismans, books, and online offerings have been a key part of our personal and magical development. Second, personal one-on-one instruction and mentorship from Ursula Rising, whose talismans were instrumental in our development. Following in the footsteps of Warnock and Rising, we acknowledge the absolute necessity of technical expertise and exacting standards for astrological elections while emphasizing that the ceremony of talismanic creation is uplifted and graciously inspirited through celestial devotion, personal relationship, and ongoing dialogue with the stellar entities to whom we issue petitions.

Influences

Idola Stellarum has also benefited, as has the entire astrological and stellar image magic communities, from the efforts, offerings, and innovations of Kaitlin Coppock, proprietor of Sphere + Sundry, the original astro-magical atelier and leading purveyor of talismanic materia. Her leadership and generosity merit outstanding praise and recognition. The wondrous talismans of the jeweler-metalsmith Tony Mack have also been an enormous aesthetic and magical inspiration, and we prize our relationships with the talismanic spirits we have been introduced to through his jewelry.

We also acknowledge learning from the public contributions of the magical scholar, lecturer, and theorist Clifford Low, whose long standing and meticulous research has been an essential boon to the revival and flourishing of stellar image magic.

Research

We are also indebted to manuscript traditions and scholarship on the Islamicate occult sciences and their reception history in the Latin-speaking “West.” Our research and commitment to textual and conceptual fidelity to traditional sources and practices constantly puts us in touch with ideas and practices of the Abbasid Empire/Islamic Golden Age, their reception in medieval Europe, and their roots in late and classical antiquity as well as in pre-Classical Eastern Mediterranean civilizations.

We honor the contemporary translators and scholars, as well as the unknown and unnamed scribes and translators of the past, without which we would not possess knowledge of these beautiful arts. We endeavor at all times to adequately and accurately cite our sources both to make this knowledge more accessible and to respect and honor the efforts of others on which we depend.

Our Grounding

We rely on the roots we have planted in other traditions and practices that ground and nourish us, and within our relationships with the more-than-human and human, the terrestrial as much as the celestial. 

We live and work on the outskirts of a small town in the Taconic Range of the Appalachian Mountains, homeland of the Mohican people. Between us, we have over three decades of experience in occult and esoteric practices, twenty-some years of divination experience, a dozen years of daily Zen meditation, a PhD in clinical psychology, an MA in English literature and environmental history, and nearly 20 years of offering professional relationship in psychotherapy and astrology. 

We bring with us into the tradition of stellar image magic lifelong histories of religious impulse and spiritual longing. Each of us descends from religious families—multiple generations of Lutheran ministers on the one hand, untold generations of devoted Catholics on the other. Idola Stellarum is not Christian, but rather the culmination and expression of the queer alienation that necessitated serving and conversing with spirit(s) in our own uniquely evolving temple-kingdom.

As such, our spirit relationships begin at home, and we have been dedicated to ancestral veneration and healing for many years, both through our own personal practices and formally through the methodology of Ancestral Medicine and Daniel Foor. As descendants of colonizer settlers from Europe and the UK from as far back as the early 1600s to as recently as 1930, we collaborate with our ancestors to integrate, account for, and remediate histories and contemporary realities of racialized colonial violence, white supremacy, and land dispossession.

It wasn’t long ago that at least some of our people understood the world the way we do and lived as we attempt to now: as embedded and interconnected in an inspirited, alive, and conversant cosmos. While “animism” is a helpful contemporary term for something not new at all, its racist anthropological roots can serve to hide the ways in which many of our (recent) ancestors lived closely to the land, the seasons, worked with (and protected against) numerous spirits and creatures through prayer and incantation, charm and ritual, natural and spiritual magic, both Christian and not.

As such, alongside our ceremonial method and aesthetic, we bring a strong land-based, relational and ancestral witchcraft sensibility to our astrological magic, having been initiated young into natural philosophy, animal communication, and plant relationships. The books and offerings from Althaea Sebastiani and Josephine McCarthy are particularly resourcing regarding the kind of experiential, embodied witchcraft approach we take to magical and visionary work. We also acknowledge learning from Gordon White’s Rune Soup courses and community circa 2018-2020.

A leading edge of our work is the presencing of an ethic of local land relationship into talisman creation, as the place where a talisman gets created and how its materials were collected are crucial context for the magic alongside the timing and methods by which it is inspirited. We ritually welcome our materials from all over the globe as they arrive to our home, and do our best to balance financial accessibility with aligned sourcing practices.

Our practices and values are also shaped by our lived experiences and struggles with trauma, madness, grief, disability, and poverty. Witnessing how deeply healing and supportive magical and spiritual connection can be, we aspire to develop Idola Stellarum as a vehicle to support accessibility to and diversity in the stellar image magic and astrological communities.