Spica: The Gift of the Goddess
“Under Spica, they made an image of a bird or a man laden with merchandise: these give wealth, make one conquer lawsuits, and take away difficulties and evil.”— Agrippa
The Bodleian manuscript adds: “[It] will increase gold, accumulate riches, bring victory in lawsuits, and free men from evil and anguish.”
Spica is the gift of the goddess, the stalk of wheat held by Demeter, the goddess of the Virgo constellation. Demeter, goddess of the earth and mother of all, brings sustenance and abundance to the living, and claims the dead as her own. Present at the sowing, heaping, and threshing of grain, she offers material nourishment through the gift of agriculture, and spiritual nourishment through her Mysteries. Spica is the wheat that is her gift to us, the very same grain held up by the hierophant at the climax of the Eleusinian Mysteries, revealing the eternal power of the earth to regenerate life.
According to Anonymous 379, Spica is of the nature of Aphrodite and Hermes, and is associated with a host of blessings linked to the planetary qualities of Venus and Mercury: eloquence, creativity, cleverness, intelligence, artistry, cheerfulness, sagacity, virtue, charm, belovedness, high-mindedness, and a knack for hitting the mark—along with a strong likelihood of success. The text also connects Spica with hierophants, priests, philosophers, interpreters of sacred rites, and priestesses of Demeter, Persephone, or Isis. Fittingly, on the first day of wearing my Spica talisman, I was asked by some friends to officiate their marriage, and so became an officiant. Another mundane thing of interest is that on two occasions while wearing the Spica talisman I have been in the right place at the right time to win prizes, entirely unplanned.
Spica and the Artful Life
Spica grants eminence and honors akin to the royal stars Regulus and Aldebaran, yet without the pitfalls that can accompany them. Unlike the royal stars, which are noted for bringing dramatic rises and sudden falls, Spica offers a steadier, more sustaining influence. Spica has been said to be the most beneficial of all the fixed stars. While Spica is associated with material prosperity, as the star of the goddess, Spica reminds us that true wealth arises through right-relationship, through living an artful life attuned to the web of interdependence that connects all life.
I’d like to explain a little of what I mean by an artful life. This understanding emerged through the slow, deliberate making of these talismans. The process felt like an apprenticeship under Spica’s tutelage, rich with symbolic impressions and insights. There’s too much to include here, so I’m focusing mainly on the heart of it: the artful life.
As I worked I was led down many pathways. In the myths of Demeter, I found insights into how to remain with the grief and uncertainty of these times while still holding the capacity to experience the world with wonder, some of which I will share in the accompanying booklet. Through it all, a clear call emerged: wealth is cultivated by living an artful life. This is less about producing art (though art-making can teach us valuable ways of seeing and being) and more about how we orient ourselves: whether our habits of attention allow our activities to feel unified and alive, or leave us moving through life in a state of fragmented drudgery.
There is something important about holding both the wonder of the world, and the grief of the world, without collapsing into only one or the other. We truly live in a world full of wonder, and yet there is much to grieve. These are contradicting emotional states that require the cultivation of capacity. To oscillate between them without balance robs the present of its depth and reality. In doing so, we risk missing the opportunities to shape life in meaningful and life-enriching ways.
I found echoes of this in John Dewey’s writing. For Dewey, art arises not outside of life, but from it. He writes, “Living is the supreme art. It demands a fine touch, skill, and meticulous craftsmanship; a sensitive responsiveness and subtle attunement to situations beyond reflective analysis; an instinctive sense for the right harmonies between action and action, person and person.”
Scott Stroud, in John Dewey and the Artful Life, expands on this by asking: if “art” means the careful, skillful shaping of something, what does it mean to shape our lives artfully? Can we bring the qualities of aesthetic experience—which he describes as engaged attention, harmony, and responsiveness—into daily life? He suggests that what distinguishes an artful life from one of fragmented drudgery is the cultivation of an orientation: an ongoing, attentive shaping of how we habitually engage with experience. Art, in this view, becomes aesthetic not through fixed properties, but through its capacity to draw us into deep, unified presence.
This brings me back to a line from Bernadette Brady: “the wheat sheaf [of Spica] symbolized human knowledge of cultivation.” The word cultivation derives from the Latin cultivare, meaning "to till or prepare the land," but over time, it has come to describe any intentional process of growth, development, or refinement.
In the context of Spica and the goddess, this symbolism takes on a deeper dimension. Cultivation is not simply about growth, it is about intentional growth. It speaks to a form of life shaped or grown deliberately through the artful tending of attention. In this sense, the artful life becomes the ground from which meaningful transformation emerges, not as a result-driven ideal to be achieved (the kind of orientation that leads toward drudgery), but as a practice of continuous becoming.
This resonates with Dewey’s assertion:
“Life, when done right and with the sort of approach that would best result in that quality of experience called ‘‘growth,’’ would be done with this artistry of touch and attention to the very materials that make up our desire and our interactions with others.”
I spoke of the artful tending of attention in relation to Spica. The word tending feels important to expand upon. This entire working has led me to reflect on talismanic relationship, which also involves a kind of tending. To be in right relation with the spirits of the stars begins in relationship. These talismans are born out of relationship, and through a devotional art-making practice I’ve sustained for over 30 years. It feels increasingly overlooked in contemporary understandings of magical practice that art-making—the making of art—is our oldest magical tradition. As Sylvia and Tristan Eden write in Great Lady Under the Earth:
“The making of art, our oldest magical tradition, was born from the womb of Our Lady.”
The slow, deliberate processes I use are part of a life dedicated to art. This work is part of my own ongoing tending to the cultivation of an artful life, one aimed at developing inner wealth and the capacity to hold the contradiction of grief and wonder simultaneously. I have in no way perfected this, at times I find myself oscillating, but through my practises I can come back to, and continue to tend to it’s cultivation.
The more-than-human world speaks to us through feeling, symbol, vision, and inspiration. By engaging creatively with the symbolic—through embodied, sustained practice whatever form it may take —we enter into relationship, with the ancestors, with spirits, the celestial, and other unseen forces that surround and move through us.
This tending should not end with the purchase of the talisman. It should be understood as a beginning. Spica teaches cultivation. She invites us into relationship and co-creation and offers a kind of wealth that begins within, as wealth of spirit. To cultivate this inner wealth is to generate prosperity that reflects into the material world without being extractive.
Extractive refers to a mindset or system that takes without giving back, depleting what it draws from. By contrast, Spica’s wealth is cultivated. It grows from the inside out. It is important to understand that to be in right-relationship with Spica is not about material wealth used to cover a poverty of spirit. It is about material wealth arising from a richness of spirit.
We see this clearly in the story of Erysichthon, king of Thessaly, a cautionary tale about the dangers of extraction and greed:
There was once a king named Erysichthon who ruled in Thessaly. He was a man of great wealth, but arrogant, self-absorbed and self-important, he saw no reason to honor the gods or the sacred places of the earth. One day, while walking the land, he came upon a grove of ancient oaks. He should have recognized it as a holy place, home to dryads and sacred to Demeter. But in his greed, he saw only timber for a feast hall.
When he reached the great oak at the grove’s center, adorned with garlands and reverently untouched, he knew its sanctity. Still, he lifted his axe against the goddess herself and declared:
“Though this be, itself, the goddess, not just what the goddess loves, now its leafy crown will meet the earth.”
As he spoke, and poised his ax to strike, Demeter’s oak trembled and sighed. Its leaves and acorns turned pale. And when his impious hand cut into the trunk, blood poured from its bark, and a sound of a voice came from inside the oak, chanting these words:
“I am a nymph, most dear to Demeter, hidden beneath this sacred wood. And as I die, I prophesy: punishment will follow blood. From my destruction, no good—only ruin—shall arise.”
Demeter responded with a punishment meant to stir pity, if pity could be found for such a man. She summoned Limos (Famine), a spirit so gaunt and fearsome that even the gods kept their distance. Demeter instructed her to enter Erysichthon’s body and nest within his belly, to curse him with an endless, insatiable hunger.
From that moment on, the king was consumed by ravenous hunger. No matter how much he ate, his appetite grew. He devoured his livestock, his grain, and his stores. He sold his lands, his possessions, even his daughter, whom Poseidon pitied and gifted with the power to change form and escape. But still, the hunger gnawed. In the end, when nothing remained, Erysichthon turned on his own body. He fed on himself, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.
This myth is a clear warning: are we acting from a place of extraction, or cultivating inner wealth?
I want to acknowledge that the systems we live in are often extractive, and we may not be able to remove ourselves entirely from them. But we can work toward change, choose how we orient ourselves, through practices of artful cultivation, through tending to what is sacred. Even small gestures can become acts of resistance against fragmentation. This is the way of Spica: a steady path of co-creation, where wealth begins as an inner resource, grown through devotion to the spirit of the artful life.
Astrological Election
The Moon was in a waxing gibbous phase, illuminating the night sky as it culminated at the midheaven, applying within one degree of a conjunction with Spica, currently projected at 24°10′ Libra in the tropical zodiac. Visually, the Moon was also nearly in exact conjunction with Spica in the sky, with a declination of 11°S13′30″, closely paralleling Spica’s declination of 11°S17′45″.
The Moon’s capacity to support material gain and prosperity was enhanced by her bright phase and an exact trine with Jupiter, who was angular on the descendant. Jupiter’s angularity boosts the beneficence of the election and strengthens the Moon’s condition through a superior trine. After separating from Jupiter, the Moon’s next aspect was with Mercury—one of the planets traditionally associated with Spica’s nature. The lord of the ascendant, Jupiter, formed an exact trine with both the Moon and the degree of Spica from his position on the western horizon.
While the Moon was not moving fast, both divinatory insight and personal experience with the talisman affirm that this slower speed aligns with Spica’s nature favoring the steady cultivation of prosperity and the long-term investment in personal well-being that grows and accumulates over time.
The Talismans
These talismans were hand-carved from jeweler’s wax and cast in sterling silver, inspirited under a blue flame and quenched in water collected from the spring of Kanathos in Greece on the 9th of May at 11:24pm PT.
The spring of Kanthos was believed to possess regenerative powers. According to myth and local cult practice, Hera would bathe in its waters each year to becomes a virgin again. This was not so much about restoration of sexual innocence, but rather about symbolic renewal. This was a localized mystery rite centered in Argos, where Hera’s sanctuary, the Heraion, was located.
Hera and Demeter can be seen as sister goddesses of regeneration. As Walter Burkert notes, both retain traits of earlier Great Goddesses and preserve many features of pre-Greek fertility and mother deities. The Paris School places such rites within a broader context of mystery traditions focused on purification and renewal, which connects it to the Eleusinian mysteries and to Demeter.
It was for this reason that I chose to use the sacred water from Kanathos in the making of the Spica talismans.
Offerings of freshly baked bread, honey, wine, and fruits were made, along with incense composed of sage, harvested from the garden during a Moon–Spica conjunction, and frankincense.
The talismans are set with natural emeralds in the eyes and emerald beads in the tails, as emerald is the traditional gem of Spica. At the heart of each talisman is a pearl, to represent Spica’s position as the star of Chitra Nakshatra, whose corresponding gem is the pearl.