Almagest

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Correspondences of the Moon

the classical correspondences of the Moon: day, metal, colour, incense, angel and deva

What the tradition reads

The grimoire tradition gives the Moon Monday as its day, the day the Heptameron's own working text assigns to this planet's operations, and silver as its metal, correspondences Agrippa's Scale of the Number Seven records. Agrippa's separate chapter on planetary colours gives the Moon no colour of its own, grouping it instead with Venus and Mercury under one shared set, all white, fair, curious, green and ruddy, between saffron and purple, while his chapter on planetary fumes gives the Moon a suffumigation built on the dried head of a frog, the eyes of a bull, frankincense, camphor and the seed of white poppy; white poppy is itself the opium poppy, a poisonous plant, and this entry records that recipe as history, not instruction. Here the Moon is one of the few planets where Agrippa's own Scale of the Number Seven and the Heptameron's working text actually agree: both name Gabriel as the angel of this office, the Scale giving Gabriel to the Moon directly and the Heptameron naming Gabriel again for Monday, a rare point of straightforward agreement between two grimoire lineages that disagree over most of the other six planets. The Vedic tradition names its own significator for the same body, Chandra, also called Soma, read by the tradition as governing the mind, emotion and the night, whose own day, Monday, called Somavara after this second name, matches the Western tradition's day for the Moon exactly.

The story

The Moon's correspondences travel the same route as every other planet's, through Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and its Scale of the Number Seven, a sixteenth century synthesis of older astrological material. Where the grimoire tradition and the Heptameron actually agree on Gabriel as the Moon's angel, both draw on an older Judeo-Christian association of Gabriel with the Moon and with revelation given at night, an agreement this corpus's other planetary correspondences rarely show. Chandra's own Vedic myth gives the Moon a family history recorded two different ways: Wikipedia's account of the deity names his parents as the sage Atri and his wife Anasuya, yet the same tradition elsewhere holds that Chandra was one of the fourteen treasures churned from the ocean of milk by gods and demons together, rising as a crescent that the god Shiva then claimed and set upon his own crown, an origin the Navagraha Stotram's own verse to this graha echoes when it calls him born of the ocean of milk and the ornament of Shiva's crown, a second birth the tradition keeps alongside the first rather than choosing between them.

Written from

Corpus key correspondence:Moon.