I’ve been wanting to make Rasalhague talismans for many years, especially since my visit to the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus in 2024. I was deeply moved by spending time in the sacred sanctuary of Asklepios, where I conducted a personal ritual and dream-incubated in the Abaton, met the dream serpents, and collected dirt from the site.
Ras Alhague is the brightest star in Ophiuchus, the constellation that traces the man holding a snake in his two outstretched hands. Ras Alhague marks his head, and its Arabic name means “the head of the serpent collector.” Ophiuchus has long been associated with Asklepios, the Greek god of healing.
This healing association appears in the ancient astrological text known as the Anonymous of 379, written by an unknown author in 379 CE. The text connects the bright star of Ophiuchus with help from Asklepios, describing healing through dreams, appearances of the gods, and friendships with doctors.
I could keep dedicating pages to the lore of this star, but I already have a lot to cover. Instead, I’m including a webinar my resident astrologer, Gray Crawford, made about Ras Alhague. If you’re unfamiliar with this bright star, or you only have a basic knowledge of Asklepios, please watch the video first. From here on, I’ll assume you know the basics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBm_yTR87NU
About the Talismans
The Daimones of Asklepios—the stellar spirits of Rasalhague—were called under the auspices of the elected time of 1 June 2026 at 1:55 a.m. PDT in Portland, Oregon, when the Moon conjoined Rasalhague on the Midheaven.
The Moon in the election is applying within one degree to Rasalhague on the midheaven at night. The Moon was waning in her full phase, visible in the night sky underneath the head of the Serpent Bearer. Jupiter in his exaltation of Cancer is the lord of the ascendant, placed in the 5th house of Good Fortune along with Venus, who has her joy in the 5th place. Although there is not a Ptolemaic aspect between Jupiter and the Moon, they are in signs of equal ascension (also known as contra-antiscia) and have the mutual reception of the Moon being in the domicile of Jupiter and Jupiter being in the domicile of the Moon.
During the election the undersides of the gemstones were engraved with the image of a man and a serpent. According to Albertus Magnus in De mineralibus, this image, engraved on a stone credited with protection against poison, was believed to protect its wearer against poisons and venomous bites. Agrippa, in Three Books of Occult Philosophy, says it “chases away poisons and cures poisonous bites.” Material attributed to Arnold of Saxony describes this talisman worn on the person, as “freeing its bearer from poison”.
Carnelian was chosen for its long history of use in talismans and amulets. It is a variety of chalcedony, and historical lapidaries credit it with these properties:
“Calms anger, purifies the flesh, gives patience and resignation to those who wear it as a ring or otherwise; it strengthens eyesight, enlivens the soul, and gives one a venerable air and good character.”
—Claude Lecouteux, A Lapidary of Sacred Stones: Their Magical and Medicinal Powers Based on the Earliest Sources
The Dispensatory of Renodaeus, first published in 1608, also credits carnelian with, preventing sad dreams, expelling fear, preserving its wearer from witches and harm, and curing diseases through an “occult virtue,” as quoted in Joan Evans’s Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
It was decided that each gemstone would form the heart of a ring. A ring was chosen as the vessel because it connects to the long tradition of rings worn for protection against poisons and baskania: bewitchment or harmful magical influence, fascination, and the evil eye. An early literary reference to a protective ring appears in Aristophanes’ Wealth, from the fourth century BC. There is magic in creating something with such a long history. To make such a ring is to connect with the current of every ring made using these ancient smithing practices.
The carving of this ring took a full lunar cycle, as it went through many permutations before its final form emerged. While the election is important, the slow art of smithcraft has a magic of its own. The sustained work of sculpting and working metal is itself devotion and communion with the stellar spirits. In The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade describes a distinct “magico-religious experience” shared by smiths, smelters, and alchemists in their relationship with material understood as alive and sacred.
In Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Agrippa describes spirits of the stars willingly inhabiting images because they find the material agreeable:
“Thus we read that ancient priests made statues and images that predicted the future and infused them with the spirits of the stars. These spirits were not confined in such material but were happy there; they found that material agreeable to them, always and willingly inhabiting there.”
My slow-art smithing practices are altogether concerned with the crafting of happy homes! It is to this end that I bring a Saturnian devotion to beauty. Beauty may be Venusian, but I myself am quite Saturnian. The beauty you see in the finished pieces is a devotional expression of care that requires the cultivation of skill, discipline, patience, along with countless hours of labour. My hands are not the pretty, polished Venusian kind, but the worn hands of a smith.
The final form of the ring became two snakes wrapped around the carnelian gemstone. It was hand-carved and cast in solid sterling silver and finished with an antiqued patina. The two snakes refer to an account of an Asclepian incubation ritual in Aristophanes’ Wealth, the same text in which we find that early literary reference to a protective ring.
Wealth is the story of the blind god of wealth, called Ploutos. Zeus blinded Ploutus so that he would distribute wealth randomly and indiscriminately, rather than favoring only virtuous, honest, and deserving people. As a result there was an unbalance of the wicked growing rich while the honest citizens starved.
In the story, Ploutos is brought to the sanctuary of Asklepios and sleeps there. While he is sleeping, Asklepios comes to his bedside and wipes his eyelids. Panacea then covers the face of Ploutos with a purple cloth. Asklepios whistles, and two enormous snakes come rushing out of the sanctuary. They crawl beneath the cloth and lick the eyelids of Ploutos, restoring his sight.
The offerings made to Asklepios before healing were described in this story as inexpensive cakes. This distinction of an “inexpensive offering” speaks to the accessibility of Askelpios, and gives clues as to the kinds of offerings we ourselves can make in petition. There is another account of a child seeking healing who offers their toy knucklebones, a children’s game that has endured for thousands of years—I even played it as a kid. Again this is about offering what is accessible or meaningful; overly elaborate offerings are not required.
For the election, we made offerings of bouquets of fresh flowers picked from our garden, an egg, fresh bread, honey, cherries, nuts, water, and wine. We recited the Orphic Hymns along with our own invocations.
Asklepios the Serpent God
While Asklepios is most familiar to us in his anthropomorphic form, he was also known to manifest as a serpent. And while Epidaurus is the most famous centre of his cult, there were many more throughout the Mediterranean.
When he travelled to establish new sites, he was said to do so in serpent form. One of the most poetic accounts comes from Ovid, who describes Asklepios as an enormous serpent, glittering with gold, with an erect crest and eyes that flash like fire. He leaves his sanctuary at Epidaurus, boards a Roman ship, and travels to Italy to choose a place where his new sanctuary will be established.
These sanctuaries were called Asklepieia, and they thrived as centres of healing throughout the Mediterranean. They housed sacred snakes, part of a much wider Greek tradition in which serpents embody protective and beneficent divine powers. In his book Drakon, Daniel Ogden discusses Asklepios, Hygieia, and the Agathos Daimon in relation to the divine powers of serpents and their associations with healing, wealth, fertility, luck, and household protection.
As is the way of all things, the cult of Asklepios and its sanctuaries, the Asklepieia, eventually declined. For roughly a thousand years, they had flourished throughout Greece and the wider Mediterranean before Christianity took hold across the late Roman world. But this is not where the tradition ends; this is where the serpents shed their skins and take new forms. While these skins hold the memory of power, and we can don them like sacred cloaks and dance out the mysteries—we must be wary of mistaking a serpent’s discarded skin for the serpent itself.
And with that it is time to speak about the shifts occurring in my own practice.
As you likely know, for many years my magical arts practice has centred on making astro-talismans. At the core of this work is the veneration of the ancient Greek gods. I court and call to their daimones—the stellar spirits—to inhabit handcrafted vessels in the form of precious jewels. Through a recent series of omens, I have come to understand that I need to consciously bring what scholar Sasha Chaitow describes as “cultural continuity” into my practice: to bring the living current of energeia into the magic, and to honour my ancestors, my heritage, and myself.
Chaitow describes how the sacred traditions and rituals associated with the gods of classical Greece have been carried into Greek Orthodoxy and the folk magic of everyday life. Chaitow, “Continuity, Adaptation, and the Layered Life of Greek Ritual”
Like serpents shedding their skins, the gods and demi-gods transform under the shifting culture, taking on new names, images, and theological explanations; they become the saints of Orthodoxy. And if we were to squint sideways at the first ray of light, we, for a moment, just might glimpse the shifting holographic forms of the amorphous eternal beings; psychedelic layers upon layers of dimensional echoes refracted through the shifting cultural lenses of the seculareum.
I have had saints showing up in my workings for years, before I even understood them as masks of the gods. I came to all of this through direct contact in my practice, and have since had to figure it out.
Chaitow describes how the West claims ancient Greece as its own cultural inheritance while pushing aside the living people and the knowledge they hold. Ancient Greek traditions are celebrated, while the Orthodox and folk practices through which elements of those traditions have continued and live on, are dismissed as superstition or irrelevant folklore. Chaitow, “Thyrathen FAQ”
This helps me understand why I have kept my communion with saints mostly hidden from public view. In part because it has taken time to understand how important it is for me to share it, and also because, although I grew up in the Orthodox Church, as I approached adulthood I followed the secular-rebellion pipeline into the occult. It was the ’90s, and I was drawn to what I thought of as “cool” magic, without understanding how Western occultism drew from my ancient heritage while overlooking its living traditions. I hadn’t yet understood how I could participate in that same dismissal, seeking out the gods while overlooking what had been carried forward within my own family and culture.
Honouring cultural continuity is especially important to me as a person of Greek and Italian heritage. My father was born in Greece, my mother is of Italian heritage, and I grew up in the Greek diaspora in Australia, where I experienced prejudice for being Greek-Australian. We lived in a culture that saw us as greasy and, at times, dirty, and called us “ethnics” or used the ethnic slur “wogs.” Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, Serbians, Turks, and others from across the Mediterranean and southern Europe were all lumped together under those labels.
Since moving to the USA and experiencing a very different culture, I have come to recognise how that prejudice created a kind of self-erasure in me.
For example, when I first came to the USA in 2022, I used a made-up surname on my name tag at the ISAR conference. When I met Sam Reynolds, he looked at my name tag and asked why I wasn’t using my real name. I told him it was hard to pronounce.
He said, “We can learn your name.”
That came as a surprise because I had never had that kind of validation before. That was when I began to understand the extent of my self-erasure. I didn’t even want to use my Greek name because I didn’t want to inconvenience people.
Recently, I have become increasingly concerned that by focusing primarily on the religious and magical traditions of ancient Greece, while overlooking the ways they have continued through Orthodox and folk traditions, I have participated in the erasure of my own inheritance. I have kept parts of my Greekness, and parts of what I actually experience in my workings, out of how I speak about my work. This, too, is a form of self-erasure.
I can now see how my learnt self-erasure has kept me from answering the call to cultural continuity that came from the saints years ago.
I invite you to approach this with curiosity and openness—to concurrently dance in the cloak of the serpent skin and explore the energeia of the living serpent. Because this is what it means to bring cultural continuity into practice. It means recognising the saints of Orthodoxy as living masks of the ancient Greek gods, and directing scholarship towards the living traditions through which the veneration and rituals have continued.
And with that, I’ll speak about the next part of the working: the red thread that links us, here in 2026, to Asklepios and the daimones of the Asklepieia—Saints Kosmas and Damian.
Saint Kosmas and Damian
The talismanic working was completed on the feast day of Saints Kosmas and Damian. We understand such days as openings in time, when a saint, the dead, or a sacred power becomes especially accessible. A feast day offers a meeting point between the turning year and the eternal, where tempus saeculāre gives way to tempus sacrum.
The saints are known as the Holy Unmercenaries, or the Silverless Ones, because they offered healing without accepting payment. They are our red thread: the living vein connecting us to Asklepios in antiquity through place, practice, and veneration.
Two notable places are found in Athens and Piraeus. Below the Acropolis in Athens, the church of Aghioi Anargyroi—the Holy Unmercenaries—was built on the site of the Asklepieion. At Piraeus, a church dedicated to Kosmas and Damian was also built on the site of a sanctuary of Asklepios. Matthew Dillon records both examples in Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece.
Dream incubation was continued at the shrines of Saints Kosmas and Damian. Byzantine accounts describe people sleeping in these sacred spaces in the hope of encountering the saints and receiving healing or guidance through dreams. Ildikó Csepregi explores these continuities in “The Miracles of Saints Cosmas and Damian: Characteristics of Dream Healing.”
Within folk-magical traditions, Christian saints are understood as guises through which older gods, spirits, and traditions remain visible. In this sense, Kosmas and Damian can be understood as masks of Asklepios, carrying the healing and dream-incubation traditions of his sanctuaries into a Christian times. Their tradition combines healing with protection, Their Orthodox kontakion explicitly invokes their aid in casting down the audacity of enemies, alongside their power to heal the world.
In the spirit of the Silverless Ones, we directed our feast-day offerings toward charity, giving to an organization supporting women who have survived trafficking and domestic abuse.
That evening, we petitioned the saints before their icon, with Orthodox candles and frankincense. We read the petition aloud, then burnt it. We asked Kosmas and Damian to grant those who would bear its ashes protection from the poison of enemies; healing and guidance through dreams; and the discernment, strength, and clarity to recover from harm without being poisoned by it.
Each ring was then set with the engraved carnelian gemstones, a mixture of the petition’s ashes, and earth collected from the sanctuary of Asklepios at Epidaurus.
Bibliography
Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated with commentary by Eric Purdue. 3 vols. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2021.
Anonymous of 379. The Treatise on the Bright Fixed Stars. Translated by Robert Schmidt. Edited by Robert Hand. Berkeley Springs, WV: Golden Hind Press, 1993.
Aristophanes. Wealth. Edited with translation and commentary by Alan H. Sommerstein. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2001.
Chaitow, Sasha. “Continuity, Adaptation, and the Layered Life of Greek Ritual: Clearing the Air.” Thyrathen, July 16, 2025.
Chaitow, Sasha. “Thyrathen FAQ: On Greek Magic, Pagan Survival, and Orthodoxy in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and Modern Greece.” Thyrathen, July 18, 2025.
Csepregi, Ildikó. “The Miracles of Saints Cosmas and Damian: Characteristics of Dream Healing.” Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU 8 (2002): 89–122.
Dillon, Matthew. Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece. London: Routledge, 1997.
Eliade, Mircea. The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy. Translated by Stephen Corrin. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Evans, Joan. Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Particularly in England. Clarendon Press, 1922.
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “Cosmas & Damian the Holy Unmercenaries.” Saints and Feasts. Accessed October 1, 2026.
Lecouteux, Claude. A Lapidary of Sacred Stones: Their Magical and Medicinal Powers Based on the Earliest Sources.Translated by Jon E. Graham. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2012.
LiDonnici, Lynn R. The Epidaurian Miracle Inscriptions: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Scholars Press, 1995.
Ogden, Daniel. Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Oxford University Press, 2013.
The Orphic Hymns. Translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Ovid. “Metamorphoses, Translated by Brookes More. Theoi Classical Texts Library.