Posted by I am loathe, of course, to base anything in my practice entirely on gnosis, but I have to give credit where credit is due. This bit of tech was suggested to me by Hekate.
Using a triangle to help focus magical energies has a precedent, of course. You can see examples of this in Solomonic Magic, Martial Arts, and in the Philosophus and Practicus grade signs of the Golden Dawn. This is no surprise. There are three alchemical principles, which describe the mystical make-up of the cosmos. Three is the most stable number of table legs. Three is the easiest number to of things to remember, and things grouped in threes are more easily memorized. A triangle is the two dimensional form made up of the fewest number of straight lines. Again, three.
The triangle spiral catches the energies which move clockwise around the temple, and focuses them. Around the outside you see, in Greek, Thalassa, Ouranos and Gaia. These Protogenoi describe the three components of the living world. They are blood, breath and bone, life force, mind and body, or things that swim, things that fly, and things that walk or crawl.
Placed in the center of a working space, it is an excellent place to empower a talisman, stationary god form, or whatever else you want to focus and give power to.
Why not try it out and tell me what you think?
Magick From Scratch 
I’m considering radically reconfiguring my temple framework for astrological magic rituals:
East: Ouranos/Sky
North: Khthon/Land
West: Thalassa/Sea
South: Hemera/Day or Nyx/Night–depending on when I’m doing the ritual.
Center: Kronos, Zeus, Ares, Helios, Aphrodite, Hermes, Selene, or Gaia–depending on the working.
Thoughts? Questions?
Yeah. I’m actually interested in whether or not you tried to work up correspondences between the astrological signs and the Olympians. Based on the work of Mamdouh Al-Daye, I was inspired to hang the Zodiac with Cancer/Leo at the top, so that the remaining signs sat opposed to the other Astrological sign with which they shared a ruler.
Leo: Zeus
Cancer: Hera
Mercury: Hermes (Gemini) and Artemis (Virgo)
Venus: Dionysos (Taurus) and Aphrodite (Libra)
Mars: Ares (Aries) and Athena (Scorpio)
Jupiter: Poseidon (Pisces) and Apollon (Sagitarius)
Saturn: Demeter (Aquarius) and Hephaistos (Capricorn)
alternately:
Leo: Zeus
Cancer: Hera
Mercury: Hermes (Gemini) and Hestia (Virgo)
Venus: Demeter (Taurus) and Aphrodite (Libra)
Mars: Ares (Aries) and Athena (Scorpio)
Jupiter: Poseidon (Pisces) and Apollon (Sagitarius)
Saturn: Artemis (Aquarius) and Hephaistos (Capricorn)
After a bunch of thinking, though, I just figured, to hell with correspondences between deities and Zodiacal signs. Astrological magic has always felt completely unsatisfactory, no matter what way I tried to do it, and it was never worth the effort. All of my workings have some kind of easily stated practical goal, and I have never had a goal where the best answer to the problem was anything that sounded like “Invoke Capricorn.” I think the Olympians sort of represent their own, alternate division of the plenum, neither more nor less subtle than the astrological signs, so if I ever had a need that was that specific, I’d just call an appropriate deity and ask for advice.
A temple space needs to recapitulate the pattern of the universe in whatever mythology you are working out of, and inspire the imagination to implicitly summon up all of the forces, and no extraneous ones (if possible), even before you begin your invocations. Actions and spoken words are two thirds of the effort.
How do you feel your temple space maps onto your structural understanding of the wheel of the zodiac? In what ways do you feel it represents the connection between the heavens (Stars, planets, etc) and the earth (human existence)?
I’ve tried associating the zodiac with the Olympians in the past, and eventually realized that in traditional astrology the signs are understood as spaces in which the planets act, rather than powers in themselves. The zodiac isn’t a focus of my astrological rituals, though I am doing a monthly meditation at each solar ingress.
In case you’re interested, my correspondences were:
Aries – Ares
Taurus – Hera
Gemini – Hermes
Cancer – Artemis
Leo – Apollon
Virgo – Demeter
Libra – Aphrodite
Scorpio – Dionysos
Sagittarius – Zeus
Capricorn – Hephaistos
Aquarius – Athene
Pisces – Poseidon
Matched by nature, as you understood it, roughly? I see there are certain points where we agree. 🙂
But, to answer you more important question…
My model here is the four angles of the chart:
* East is the ascendent, and thus the place of rising into the sky.
* North is the nadir, which is frequently called “the angle of the earth” in medieval texts, thus the land beneath me.
* West is the descendent, and thus the place of sinking into the underworld, represented by the depths of the sea.
* South is the zenith, and thus the place of the heavenly powers. Given the emphasis on diurnal vs. nocturnal sect in traditional astrology*, it seems appropriate to honor the tutelary of the sect as the representative of all the heavenly powers.
Then I’ll go to the altar at the center of the temple to offer a hymn and incense to whatever god/planet I’m working with. (I’m only planning on working with Gaia/Earth when performing a rite of balance at each equinox.)
* Traditional astrologers always practiced safe sects.
LOL! That sounds really cool, actually! Gosh, David Geraki would really appreciate this. I wish WP would let me link to him, but he doesn’t have an active blog, yet.