For a long time, one of the questions running beneath Faring Forth was how far the operator could go beyond the ordinary material understanding of the world.
I do not mean escape in the ordinary sense of wanting to abandon life. The question was whether consciousness is actually confined to the material frame through which we ordinarily experience it. Through the subtle body, the soul, consciousness, or whatever terminology one finds least misleading, can the operator move into other layers of existence and experience them directly?
Much of my earlier work followed that direction, and what became particularly interesting, especially in retrospect, was that I found myself reproducing patterns that I later recognised in Hermetic, alchemical and related systems without initially knowing those systems well enough to have consciously imitated them. There were movements of separation, ascent, encounter, dissolution, transformation, return and reintegration that seemed to emerge from the work itself. It sometimes felt as though the older systems had preserved maps of processes that people could rediscover independently if they pushed far enough.
I would still describe what resulted less as liberation than expansion. Perception expanded, experience expanded, and the range of what seemed possible to know expanded. Many of those operations remain in the Faring Forth archive. Some of the more elevated work does not, partly because there comes a point where an account of another person's operation ceases to be especially useful. It may indicate that a territory exists, but it cannot undergo the territory for you. The deeper work eventually has to become the operator's own.
Yet the most important consequence of all this, at least for what I am doing now, was not the discovery that ascent appeared possible. It was the discovery that ascent did not abolish incarnation.
However far consciousness seems able to move, the body remains here. The circumstances of incarnation remain here. Work, money, relationships, illness, opportunity, obligation, ageing, appetite, temperament and consequence remain here. Whatever one experiences beyond ordinary material consciousness does not make the material world irrelevant, and eventually the operator descends again.
I no longer regard that descent as the failure to remain somewhere higher. It may be part of the operation itself. If something has genuinely been separated, encountered or transformed, the more interesting question is whether the change can be carried back into embodied existence. Ascent without return can become another form of avoidance, while return without transformation simply restores the original condition.
What interests me now is the third possibility: return with a changed relationship to the conditions of incarnation.
That is really the point from which Drakenson begins.
Ascent, descent and return
I do not think there is a single ancient doctrine that maps exactly onto what I am describing, and I do not want to manufacture one. There are, however, structural parallels that became increasingly obvious to me after the fact.
In the Hermetic Poimandres, Man passes into the ordered cosmos of the planetary rulers, becomes joined to embodied Nature and thereby participates in the conditions of Fate. The later ascent through the planetary zones reverses aspects of that involvement. Proclus gives descent and return a more philosophical form through procession into generation and reversion toward higher Being. Zosimos, in a different register again, repeatedly presents separation alongside transformation and renewed conjunction: spirit is divided from body, subjected to operation, and fixed again in another condition.
These are not interchangeable doctrines. Hermetic ascent, Neoplatonic reversion and alchemical conjunction should not be collapsed into one thing. What interests me is the recurrence of a pattern in which separation does not necessarily terminate in permanent separation.
I did not begin the operations because these texts instructed me to reproduce that pattern. I recognised the pattern afterwards. For me, the historical material is useful not because it supplies retrospective authority for the experience, but because it shows that the problem itself is old.
Incarnation as condition
Once ascent no longer appears to solve the problem simply by removing us from it, another question becomes unavoidable: what are the conditions under which we incarnate?
My working view is that we do not enter the world as completely unconditioned beings. We arrive with an imprint. We appear at a particular point within a vastly larger movement of time, matter, relation and celestial order, and from the beginning we participate in circumstances that were not consciously selected by the ordinary personality which later finds itself living through them.
I do not think this requires absolute predestination, but neither do I think the opposite claim—that the individual creates reality without meaningful constraint—survives much contact with experience. There are undoubtedly people whose lives contain extraordinary ranges of opportunity, influence, ability or apparent plasticity. If somebody genuinely incarnates with an unusual capacity to manipulate circumstances around themselves, then good luck to them; that capacity is itself part of the conditions under which they arrived.
For everybody else, the useful question is not whether every limit can be abolished through sufficient desire. It is what the limits actually are.
What is fixed? What is movable? How movable is it? What can be redirected without being removed? What can be mitigated but not transformed? What is temporary and what is structural? What can be approached materially, what might admit of another kind of intervention, and what is simply not ours to move at the present level of operation?
This is why I increasingly think the familiar argument between fate and free will is too crude. Agency does not appear to me to be an on/off property. It appears bounded, unequal and stratified. Different conditions admit different degrees of intervention, and the degree of freedom available may also depend upon which level of the person is doing the acting.
The ordinary embodied personality is obviously conditioned. It has a body it did not design from nothing, a time and place of birth it did not choose through ordinary conscious volition, a temperament, appetites, capacities, weaknesses, inherited circumstances and a world already in motion before it appeared. Yet the deeper operations suggest to me that the embodied personality may not exhaust what a human being is. If that is true, the freedom available may differ according to the level from which action arises.
That is a more useful position to me than either hard fatalism or unlimited manifestation, but it is also a more demanding one because it does not flatter the operator. Increased awareness does not automatically produce increased power. One may come to know far more about a condition than one has the capacity to change.
Sometimes that knowledge may itself be the freedom available. Sometimes it may reveal a lever.
Learning the difference is one of the things Drakenson is intended to do.
Number, astrology and the visible order
This question of conditions is also why Faring Forth spent so much time with number.
I was never particularly interested in number as a set of decorative correspondences. What interested me was the suspicion that number sits extremely deep within manifested order. Time is numerical. Cycle is numerical. Interval and proportion are numerical. Position, angular relation and recurrence can be expressed numerically. Harmony depends upon relation, movement can be divided into period and ratio, and form repeatedly exposes mathematical structure.
It is difficult to say where number stops.
Whether number is ultimately constitutive of reality or whether it is simply the language through which mind most successfully apprehends structure is a larger philosophical problem. For present purposes, the operational result matters more to me: number makes order intelligible, while celestial movement makes that order temporal and observable.
Astrology is one of the places where those relations cease being merely abstract and become conditions that can be examined in connection with an incarnated life. This is the sense in which I increasingly regard astrology as an operational layer of number. I do not mean that astrology is merely arithmetic decorated with symbols, and I am not claiming that every ancient arithmologist would have accepted the proposition. It is simply where my own investigation of number eventually led.
Traditional astrology also interests me because its concerns are far more concrete than the strongly psychological astrology that many people now encounter first. The older texts are interested in livelihood, resources, position, parents, relationships, health, conflict, fortune, adversity, opportunity, loss and, above all, timing. They look outward as much as inward.
That is much closer to what I need from astrology.
Before attempting to intervene in a situation, it is useful to know what is actually happening. Is the condition natal or temporary? Is it passing through, returning periodically or becoming progressively entrenched? Are several factors converging upon the same matter? Is the apparent problem actually the expression of a larger period of change? Is an opportunity genuinely being supported or merely desired? Would resistance improve the situation, or is the current moving toward contraction, severance, restructuring or delay irrespective of what the personality currently wants?
None of these questions requires the claim that astrology reduces life to a perfectly predetermined mechanism. They require only that timing and condition matter.
This is the reason I built Drakenscope the way I did. I wanted something that helped make the astrological field visible as a field rather than producing a large collection of disconnected descriptions of personality. The introduction to Drakenscope sets out that foundation in more detail.
Drakenscope is concerned primarily with seeing the conditions.
The harder question follows only once those conditions can be seen: what agency do we actually possess within them?
Fate, number and intervention
The older material gives several answers to this problem, and I find their disagreement more useful than forcing them into one doctrine.
Vettius Valens often writes with a severe awareness of Fate. Astrology can reveal something of the foundation allotted to a life and prevent a person exhausting themselves against circumstances that are not presently available to them. Knowledge does not necessarily remove the condition; sometimes it removes ignorance of it.
Ptolemy allows considerably more room for intervention. In the opening of the Tetrabiblos, an astrological indication does not make every outcome unavoidable. Some causes are powerful enough to realise their effects, while others may encounter counteracting causes. His analogy is medicine: if the probable development of a condition is known in advance, a remedy may be introduced. Importantly, the remedy is not conceived as escaping nature or fate. It becomes another cause inside the same field.
Iamblichus takes the problem to a different level. Embodied human existence participates in nature, necessity and fate, while the human being also contains a principle capable of participation in an order beyond ordinary generated nature. Theurgy therefore does not make the embodied ego omnipotent; it changes the level of participation.
Number and harmony provide another part of this background. Plato's Timaeus builds cosmic order through proportion, interval and harmonic relation, while later writers such as Theon and Ptolemy connect arithmetic, harmony and celestial order in different ways. I would not use this material to support the crude slogan that everything is number. The inheritance I find more useful is that reality presents itself through relation, proportion, recurrence and ordered difference, and the heavens provide one of the most visible manifestations of that order.
Put together, these traditions suggest a more useful question than “Are we free or fated?” The question becomes: what kind of condition is this, and from what level is it being approached?
We are inside the machinery
There is another implication of all this which I think is easy to miss.
If planetary and celestial order really do describe significant conditions of incarnation, then those conditions cannot be regarded simply as external pressures acting upon a completely independent “me.” The body itself belongs to the same world. So do temperament, appetite, endurance, vulnerability, instinct, fertility, aggression, attraction, fatigue, cognition and whatever other capacities arise through embodiment.
The phrase I keep returning to is uncomfortable but useful:
You and your body are, in a meaningful sense, as much theirs as they are yours.
I do not mean that planets own human beings like property. I mean that the embodied instrument through which we experience this world has itself been produced within the same order whose movements astrology attempts to describe.
If one provisionally accepts that some aspect of consciousness survives the failure of the physical body, then the body cannot be identical with the entirety of what is meant when I say “I.” It is nevertheless the indispensable instrument of this incarnation, and that instrument appears to participate deeply in the conditions of this realm.
The planetary field, in other words, is not weather happening to an otherwise unrelated self. Some portion of the incarnated self is already made out of the weather.
That changes the way I understand magic.
The operator is not standing outside the machine and attempting to push its controls. One part of the system is becoming conscious of its participation in another part of the same system. If ascent has any lasting operational significance, perhaps part of that significance lies here. It provides, at least experientially, the possibility that consciousness is not reducible to the particular layer through which it is presently operating.
The question then becomes less “How do I force these conditions to change?” and more difficult: from where in the composite being am I acting, and what kind of relationship can that level establish with the forces participating in the rest?
Where magic enters
Astrology alone does not require the conclusion that planetary forces are intelligences, and I think that distinction should be stated plainly.
One can construct an astrology based upon natural celestial causation, symbolic correspondence, synchronicity or some combination of these without ever treating a planet as an intelligence with which one can enter into direct relation.
My own operative work takes a further step because I have encountered the planetary order as involving intelligence.
Once that proposition is admitted, even provisionally, magic becomes relevant to the same problem astrology is describing. Magical traditions repeatedly involve intermediary intelligences: planetary intelligences themselves, angels, daemons, demons, spirits or other beings whose classifications depend upon the system being used. The metaphysical explanations vary enormously, but the operational question remains the same.
When a magician asks such an intelligence to alter circumstances, where is the operation occurring?
I increasingly doubt that it occurs outside the cosmic architecture described by astrology. A more coherent model, at least to me, is that magical intervention takes place somewhere within the same architecture but at another layer or degree of granularity. More universal currents may possess more particular expressions, offices, administrators or intelligences associated with them, and an intermediary being may therefore be capable of working upon a current with a precision unavailable to the ordinary incarnated operator.
That does not mean every demon is simply a planetary servant, nor that every magical hierarchy can be flattened into a single universal diagram. It means only that there is no obvious reason to imagine spirits as standing outside the order in which embodied events occur. If they act here, they presumably act through something; and if astrology describes some of the larger conditions of here, the relationship between magical intervention and planetary condition needs to be understood rather than ignored.
There is another caution here. I have sometimes described intermediary work as involving a cost, but I would not reduce that to crude supernatural commerce. Cost may mean obligation, attention, relationship, devotional commitment, entanglement, distortion, exchange, unforeseen consequence, or simply the introduction of another intelligence and another set of variables into an already complex matter.
A successful intervention is not evidence that the intervention was consequence-free.
That is one reason I do not think remediation of this kind should be approached casually.
The other reason concerns authority.
Someone who has actually undertaken deeper operations may eventually stand in a different relationship to the intelligences encountered within them. This is where I use the word authority, although it needs to be handled carefully.
I do not mean omnipotence. I do not mean that somebody who has undertaken an anabasis through the spheres can subsequently issue orders to Saturn or Jupiter as though the cosmos had become their employee, nor do I think that an intense subjective experience automatically grants rank.
Authority, as I currently understand it, is closer to standing, competence and established relationship. The operator has encountered an order directly rather than knowing it only through a text. They have entered its conditions, endured something of its operation, learned enough to remain coherent in contact with it and, ideally, returned with the experience integrated rather than merely remembered.
That alters the basis of the relationship.
One is no longer approaching a wholly unknown external power solely as a meek petitioner. I still like that phrase—not as a meek petitioner—but the opposite of petition is not cosmic dictatorship.
A better formulation for what I mean may be authority without sovereignty.
The operator may acquire the capacity for direct relationship without possessing ultimate jurisdiction over the intelligence. Authority is therefore not something created because someone obtained a name from a grimoire, learned a seal, purchased the correct equipment or memorised an invocation. If it exists, it arises from the work.
Spirits, hierarchy and authority
There is good historical precedent for treating magical operation as something occurring inside a structured cosmos rather than outside it. Iamblichus distinguishes more universal divine orders from daemonic orders concerned with more particular activities. Ficino develops planetary chains in which celestial powers, bodily substances, activities, images and intermediary spirits participate in interconnected series. The Picatrix embeds magical action in celestial configuration, planetary power, timing and material correspondence, while the Heptameron organises spirit work very visibly through planetary days, hours, directions, seasons and angelic orders. Agrippa later attempts to bring much of this into a single occult philosophy.
These sources do not agree on what spirits ultimately are, and none proves that all spirits are reducible to planetary functions. What they do show is that a layered universe, in which more particular intelligences mediate or administer more universal forces, is not a novel way of understanding magic.
Authority is more complicated. Iamblichean theurgy places a strong limit on fantasies of human domination: divine powers are not compelled because the operator has discovered a sufficiently clever sequence of techniques. Later operative traditions can employ far more commanding language toward subordinate spirits while still locating ultimate authority above the operator. I find the tension useful. At one extreme lies passive petition before something treated as wholly external; at the other lies the fantasy that the individual ego becomes sovereign over the invisible world. Between them lies the possibility that relationship, ordeal, participation, competence and hierarchy create genuine standing without making the operator the ultimate source of the power being engaged.
Direction and remediation
If we are already embedded in these currents, why work with them at all?
I currently see two main reasons. The first is to understand the direction of a current and position oneself intelligently within it. The second is remediation.
I have sometimes used the word intent when speaking of planetary currents. I do not want to push the word too far. I do not necessarily mean that Saturn or Mars possesses a small humanlike plan concerning the details of an individual life. Office, tendency, direction or even telos may in some cases be better words. What matters operationally is that different periods appear to emphasise different kinds of development: contraction, severance, pressure, expansion, consolidation, conflict, visibility, dissolution, rebuilding and so forth.
Once enough of that direction becomes legible, the operator can ask something more intelligent than “How do I make reality give me exactly what I currently want?”
The question becomes: What is the best available expression of this current that remains compatible with my legitimate objectives?
There is a considerable difference between being carried by a current one cannot see and recognising enough of it to position oneself. The analogy in my original notes was that suddenly you have some idea where the vehicle is going and can begin talking to the driver. I still think there is something in that. It does not mean controlling the entire road, the vehicle, the weather and every other traveller upon it. It means that ignorance is no longer the only relationship available.
Sometimes what follows from that knowledge will be action; at other times it will be timing, restraint, preparation, redirection or the recognition that the present current is not one that should be fought. The ability to distinguish these cases is already a form of agency.
Remediation is the more difficult question.
Natal conditions appear to me to be established at some level, but I do not think that means every possible expression of those conditions is equally fixed. A pattern can remain while the way it manifests changes, and this distinction matters enormously.
Remediation therefore need not mean erasing a natal condition. It may involve altering its reception, balancing it with another influence, giving a difficult condition a more coherent channel of expression, changing behaviour or environment, choosing better timing, modifying material circumstances, or, where appropriate, engaging more directly with the planetary intelligence involved.
There is a world of difference between saying “this condition exists” and saying “therefore it must always manifest in the most destructive form available to it.”
Life itself demonstrates that conditions develop. Some improve and some degrade. Repeated behaviour can deepen a pattern; injury can distort it; circumstances can reinforce it. A useful tendency can become pathological through excess, while a difficult tendency can sometimes be disciplined into competence. If conditions can deteriorate through participation, it is at least reasonable to investigate whether they can also improve through participation.
For practical purposes I find it useful to distinguish three forms of work, although they are not completely separate. Alignment is understanding the current and acting intelligently within it. Remediation is balancing, mitigating, filtering or redirecting the expression of a condition. Transformation is deeper work upon the operator's relationship with the current or intelligence itself.
These should not be confused. Poor timing does not automatically require planetary magic; sometimes one should simply wait. A difficult natal configuration does not necessarily need to be abolished; it may need another channel of expression. And in many cases ordinary action will accomplish far more than ritual.
Ficino is especially interesting to me here because his astrological magic occupies this space between fatalism and fantasies of unlimited will. He accepts celestial influence while remaining interested in the way that influence is received. A difficult Saturnine condition, for example, does not automatically lead to the conclusion that nothing can be done. Other planetary influences may temper it through activity, environment, medicine or correspondence, while Saturn itself may have a higher or more coherent expression in contemplation rather than deprivation. Electional astrology follows the same principle: timing does not erase a celestial condition; it seeks a more favourable relationship with it.
The natal structure remains real while its reception, balance, channel or expression may change.
That is very close to what I mean by remediation.
Material action remains material
None of this removes the material world from the equation.
If a condition requires physical action, the physical action should be taken. A financial problem may require work, restraint, negotiation, positioning or a change in strategy. A relationship problem may require communication, discipline, separation or a change in behaviour. An opportunity still has to be acted upon. A medical problem requires appropriate material care.
No amount of planetary language makes ordinary causality disappear.
At the same time, I do not think ordinary material causality necessarily exhausts the available field of action. For those equipped for it, deeper operative work may address another layer of the same condition.
The practical system I am developing is therefore deliberately layered. It begins with establishing the state of the field as clearly as possible through astrological analysis. If further inquiry appears warranted, direct communication may be useful. For that I currently favour a pendulum with boards constructed specifically for the question being asked. I do not claim an ancient pedigree for these boards, nor do I need one. They are simply instruments I have found useful because they constrain the inquiry and make the communication more structured than free association.
Another person may find a suitably constructed tarot deck more useful.
For deeper interaction there is visionary work and the planetary or related operations themselves.
And throughout all of it, physical action continues.
The movement is therefore not astrology followed by magic as though the second replaces the first. It is a movement from observation into increasingly direct forms of participation while remaining anchored in the actual material condition being addressed.
There is also a discipline I think needs to become increasingly important as this work develops: recording outcomes.
If Drakenson is going to become more than a collection of memorable experiences, then the original astrological judgement should be preserved, along with whatever communication occurred, what intervention was attempted, what ordinary actions accompanied it and what subsequently happened. Memory is far too accommodating. It is very easy to unconsciously rewrite an earlier impression until it appears to fit the later event.
A record creates the possibility of correction.
That matters because a practical system worthy of the name should eventually be able to tell us not only where it works but where its assumptions are wrong.
An unresolved possibility
There is one point where my own experience currently takes me further than I can comfortably support from the inherited material, and I want to preserve that boundary rather than hide it.
I have begun to wonder whether remediation is always one-directional.
The ordinary model is obvious: an operator finds themselves under a difficult condition, works with the relevant intelligence, and something changes either in the operator or in the expression of the condition.
There have been operations, however, that have left me with the impression that the intelligence involved may itself participate in some form of upward movement.
I do not yet know exactly what this means.
Older metaphysical systems provide structures in which procession downward is complemented by reversion upward and in which mediation can transmit influence through a hierarchy in both directions. That makes the idea intelligible, but it does not establish the specific proposition that a human operator can in some meaningful sense “raise” a planetary intelligence.
For the moment I regard it as an observation rather than a doctrine.
That distinction is important to me.
As Drakenson becomes more systematic, I want to preserve a clear boundary between what appears repeatedly in the work, what can be placed with some confidence inside inherited models, what I infer from those two things, and what remains genuinely uncertain.
A system becomes weaker rather than stronger when every interesting experience is immediately promoted to universal law.
Bounded agency
Taken together, all of this has gradually led me to an idea which I think ties the work together: bounded agency.
We are neither helpless objects inside an absolutely predetermined mechanism nor unlimited creators standing outside reality. We participate in conditions. Some are deeply constitutive of the incarnated self; others are more superficial. Some are temporal, some structural. Some can be worked with materially, some may respond to occult intervention, some may change primarily because the operator changes the level from which they participate in them, and some may simply not be meaningfully alterable in the form we desire.
The task is therefore not to begin with the conclusion that everything can be changed.
The task is to discover the actual boundary.
That seems to me a far more interesting magical problem, and a harder one, because it does not flatter the operator. Knowledge is not authority. Experience is not automatically mastery. Contact is not control. One successful operation does not establish that every operation will succeed. Ascent does not make the conditions of embodiment disappear, and an astrological indication does not tell us by itself whether the condition should be resisted, redirected, integrated or accepted.
Those distinctions have to be learned through the work.
This is also the point at which the relationship between Drakenscope and Drakenson becomes straightforward.
Drakenscope is concerned with diagnosis: making the conditions legible.
Drakenson is concerned with agency: what relationship the operator can actually establish with those conditions and whether alignment, remediation or deeper transformation is realistically available.
There should be no automatic movement from one to the other. For many people, seeing the field will be enough. Understanding that a condition is temporary, recognising that preservation matters more than expansion for a particular period, seeing that the same effort made six months apart does not occur in the same circumstances, or finding a better expression of an existing natal pattern may already change the quality of their decisions considerably.
That is a legitimate endpoint.
For others, seeing creates the next question: what can be done?
If I am going to help other people through this work, that distinction matters. I have no interest in selling the idea that every feature of a life can be magically rewritten. Sometimes the useful answer will be timing. Sometimes it will be an ordinary physical change. Sometimes it will be finding a better channel for a natal condition. Sometimes deeper work may be appropriate. And sometimes the answer may be that the particular current is not realistically movable in the way the person wants it to be.
A system worth using has to be capable of saying that.
Otherwise it is not a navigation system. It is a machine for producing reassuring answers.
Returning differently
There is an irony in where all of this has led me.
Much of the earlier Faring Forth work began with the desire to get beyond the material world, or at least beyond the assumption that material reality was all there was. Years spent investigating that problem eventually returned me to the more immediate question of incarnation: how material existence is ordered, how we participate in that order, and what room for meaningful agency actually exists inside it.
I no longer think that diminishes the earlier work. It may be its consequence.
Perhaps the value of ascent is not that we escape this world, but that having discovered that our ordinary frame is not the whole of experience, we return with enough distance to see incarnation differently.
The body looks different. Fate looks different. The planets look different. Magic looks different. Even freedom looks different.
Freedom no longer has to mean the absence of conditions. It can mean accurately recognising the conditions in which one is operating and establishing the most intelligent relationship with them that is genuinely available. That may mean moving with a current, introducing a countercurrent, changing the channel through which a force expresses itself, undertaking deeper work upon the relationship between operator and intelligence, or recognising a limit and refusing to waste a life fighting something that is not presently ours to move.
It is less spectacular than a promise of unrestricted manifestation.
I suspect it is considerably more useful.
Faring Forth began, in large part, by recording attempts to move beyond the ordinary world. Drakenscope emerged from the need to see more clearly the conditions encountered on returning to it. Drakenson is emerging from the question that remains once those conditions become visible:
What authority, leverage and capacity does the operator actually possess here?
I do not regard every part of the answer as settled, and I would be suspicious if I did. The work now is to make the distinctions better, test the methods more carefully, record what occurs, and become increasingly precise about the boundary between what can be known, what can be changed, and what merely appears changeable because we want it to be.
For anyone who wants to begin exploring that question in their own circumstances, I think the order matters.
The first step is not magical intervention.
It is seeing what is actually there.
That is what I am now making available through Drakenscope: a way of examining the astrological conditions, timing and larger field in which a person is operating.
For many, that may be all that is needed.
Where the picture suggests something deeper, the next question belongs to Drakenson.
Not How do I force reality to give me what I want?
But:
What, here, can actually be moved?