Many of us are massive technophobes! I can be too and one of my jobs involves working in software! Tech often makes us forget the world we live in, but good magical practitioners often use it for something different. There are a few things that tech gives us which allows us to connect up to the world we live in, particularly with astrological moments.
- Birth chart apps – These are often a few degrees inaccurate and a little cheesy, but with them we can give anyone a birth chart reading. The usefulness does not stop there. What’s more, is you can use them for the current time and day to find out what is going on in the heavens at the present time. If it is night don’t forget to look up and see if you can see it for yourself! Some apps are free too. Many of us are trying to align ourselves with what’s going on celestially. It makes sense to have an app which allows us to actually see for ourselves what’s going on now and giving us practice interpreting the interaction of heavenly forces and what that might mean on earth. Even if you don’t believe in using heavenly bodies to predict what’s going on, on earth, it still allows you to practice identifying certain traits with certain planets which will allow you to work on the individual parts of yourself or to psychologically ritually banish certain parts of yourself you’re not happy with.
- Planetary hours apps – Okay so a ritual can take be made very complicated with all the bells and whistles… or you can do a quick short spell at the appointed time. I often want to sort something in my life quickly and then to get on with life until the next major solstice. Having a planetary hours app is incredibly helpful! Maybe I need a venus hour for a money spell, I have a quick look only to find the hour I need is 1-3 hours away or in a couple of instances, I realised I’ve got 20 mins left before the hour finishes. I get a candle ready, some relevant incense, oil and a piece of a relevant plant and note down the names of the intelligence and spirit from Agrippa and… hey presto! A ritual. I often end up with a wait. Okay so I haven’t had the best results from these basic planet magic spells in comparison to working with Saints, but you just need to do it once instead 9 prayers a days for 9 straight days (Android :
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.lunarium.droid.hours or Apple :
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hours/id312276382 ) - Calendars – We spend forever trying to put dates in the diary that match up with various solar positions, lunar positions and things on earth. We try to do rituals that mark times in the year when certain things are either happening in the heavens (i.e the solstices, equinoxes, moon phases) or during times when the earth is doing certain things (Imbolc – begin sowing, Beltane – fields are ready for cattle, Lughnasadh – harvest begins, Samhain – Harvest is over). Why do we do this? Well we recognise these natural cycles and that it is healthy to be consistent with those cycles. Some people also see power in these cycles, after all, they have been running like that for thousands of years and are part of bodies much larger than us. How can technology help us? Well I use a Google Calendar to manage my week. Why not use it to track moon phases and the like? I’m often doing so much stuff that I need to keep track of everything I am committed do (Chinese Martial Arts, Board games, Ceremonial Magic, Wicca, stage performances / cabaret, business admin, working on my career in software and recently moutaineering and masonic meetings.) This means I actually look at my calendar. With google calendar you can log in in your browser by going to calendar.google.com and go to your “other calendars” click add and choose browse calendars of interest and tick the phases of the moon to see it in your calendar. I also imported calendars of changes of signs like at the time of writing the moon is going into Scorpio, this keeps me aware of the cycles. Don’t put i in your events calendar keep it separate. Often when I have used these before it became irrelevant to my practice at the time and then the notifications were annoying, by putting it in another calendar I could set different notifications for it. Notify me in advance so I can organise a ritual for it or no notification at all when I don’t have time for such observances.
There are many ways technology is your friend. We often lose track of the world we live in because we are lost in some tech feeding our addiction to it and our dependency on it, but if we make it help us observe the world then we use it to connect to the world outside of the screen.