Category: Taoism

Chinese Astrology circa 246 BC: Wuxian Five Star Divination

On By benebellIn astrology, divination, feng shui, grimoire, I Ching The Oracle (book), Magical in the Mundane, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft2 Comments

Wuxian’s Five Star Divination 巫咸五星占 is a system of astrology that dates back to the Qin dynasty, around 246 BC during Qin Shihuang’s reign, documented in a manuscript from that era titled Five Star Divination 五星占, the “five stars” being Mercury (Water), Venus (Metal), Mars (Fire), Jupiter (Wood), and Saturn (Earth). The astrological text is attributed to Wuxian 巫咸, and so this system of astrology became known as Wuxian’s Five Star Divination.

Wuxian 巫咸 (also referred to as Xian Wu, 咸巫) is the ancestor god and ascended master of the Wu 巫 shamans. Venerated as the first and most masterful Wu 巫 and thus every Wu 巫’s primordial ancestor, he may or may not have been an actual historical figure; either way, Wuxian is a fixture in Chinese lore and deified as a patron god to shamans, healers, and, in particular, diviners and astrologers. In this video lecture, “Shamanism Meets Taoism: The Hidden Link in 3,000 Years of Magic and Mysticism,” we talk about Wuxian 巫咸, the primordial ancestor of all Wu 巫 shamans, at timestamp 12:35.

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Advanced Introduction to Taoist Alchemy

On By benebellIn Fu talismans, grimoire, I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), Magical in the Mundane, numerology, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft1 Comment
  1. Lesser Mandala of Heaven: A Taoist Secret to Cultivating Personal Power
  2. Greater Mandala of Heaven: Advanced Introduction to Taoist Alchemy

This is Part II of what we started in Part I on the Lesser Mandala of Heaven. Part II covers the Greater Mandala of Heaven, and in doing so, provides an advanced introduction to Taoist alchemy.

We are continuing from Part I, so I’ll presume you’re already familiar with what we covered there. If you haven’t watched that video lecture “A Taoist Secret to Cultivating Personal Power: Inner Alchemy Basics,” please do before proceeding.

In this introduction, I want to explore the inner logic that underlies one of the world’s most sophisticated (in my opinion) systems of spiritual cultivation. I intend for this intro to be a deep-dive into the heart of Taoist alchemy by delineating the Greater Mandala of Heaven.

The ultimate goal of Taoist alchemy is to transform the finite into the infinite, matter into spirit, and limitation into transcendence. We cover this ground by first understanding the distinction made between inner alchemy and outer alchemy.

Philosophically, this is a system and tradition that presents a compelling perspective on how Change happens.

Historical Textual References

In addition to the two texts mentioned in Part I, these are some of the oft-cited sources of insight on the Greater Mandala of Heaven 大周天. The titles are hyperlinked to the full texts over at ctext.org (the Chinese Text Project). While CTP as a site has its limitations, it’s one of the best free, accessible, and online databases for primary sources of pre-modern Chinese texts, so it’s the most user-friendly for folks like you and me.

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A Taoist Secret to Cultivating Personal Power

On By benebellIn feng shui, free download, grimoire, I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism11 Comments
  1. Lesser Mandala of Heaven: A Taoist Secret to Cultivating Personal Power
  2. Greater Mandala of Heaven: Advanced Introduction to Taoist Alchemy

This video introduces a Taoist secret breathwork practice known as the Lesser Mandala of Heaven, or Xiao Zhou Tian 小周天. Rooted in classic Taoist inner alchemy (內丹, neidan), it teaches you to unlock a hidden energy circuit that runs through your body, up the spinal Du 督 meridian and down the frontal Ren 任 meridian, forming a continuous loop of vitality.

By circulating breath and intention along this hidden energy path, you harmonize the body’s three dantian 丹田, or energy centers, with the three realms and cycles of the universe. Taoist masters believe this alignment refines your essence, restores internal balance, and elevates your personal power.

This orbit is set up to attune with the cyclical convection current of nature: heat rises and expands, as it rises, it then cools, contracts, becomes denser, and so the denser, cooler flow sinks down, contracting.

The video is timestamped, and you’ll find a step-by-step guided practice on how to direct breath up and down this internal orbit, transforming your body into a living mandala and tuning it to the rhythmic cycles of nature.

This practice is more typically transmitted from teacher to disciple, but here, let’s see if we can offer a more direct and more easily accessible method.

Whether your goal is improved health, increasing your energy reservoir so you can get more done in a day, or to unlock your mystical potential, this is a cultivation technique worth your while to learn.

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On Preventive [Spiritual] Care: Nine Precepts of the Healer

On By benebellIn free download, I Ching, Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft7 Comments

There’s this section in Chapter 9 of The Spiritual Axis (Ling Shu) from the classical medical treatise Inner Canons of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi Neijing), which in canonical versions is often designated as Verse 27 that I love for many reasons.

Nine universally applicable precepts of healing can be extracted from Verse 27. The way they’re worded, you can interpret them through different lenses and they still hold true. The verse functions as axiomatic to acupuncture, and to both the ancient and the modern healthcare provider.

You can read it through the lens of how to ensure physical health, and also how to ensure mental, emotional health, and — as to the primary scope of work I operate in — to spiritual health.

If you’re looking at it as a road map for your own healing journey, it works. If you’re a healer of any stripe, these are nine clinical axioms for guiding patient care. You can look at these nine precepts as applied medical wisdom, or heuristics for clinical decision-making. They work as key tenets for helping a practitioner refine their diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

And finally, in my view, these nine precepts can be instrumental to helping anyone set the foundation of their personal spiritual practice. It’s designed in such a way that you can account simultaneously for mundane physical health and hygiene tenets and for basic considerations in ritual or ceremonial magic.

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Chinese Shamanism Meets Taoism: The Hidden Link in 3,000 Years of Magic and Mysticism

On By benebellIn divination, feng shui, free download, Fu talismans, grimoire, I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft8 Comments

Course Description

Let’s time travel and step into the mystical lineage of the Neolithic Wu 巫 shamans that laid the foundation for Taoist mysticism. This free public video lecture explores the birth of Taoist magic and the enduring legacy of Wu shamanism. We’ll decode Taoist occultism as it is practiced today to reveal the hidden history of how shamanism shaped the mystical practices of East Asia, preserving and refining early shamanistic techniques into a structured magical system, giving rise to Taoist mysticism.

Taoism is the enduring legacy of the Wu 巫, and how their oft-forgotten roots and history have shaped the modern practices of spirit mediums, Asian modalities of witchcraft, and Taoist ritual magic today. We’ll bridge the gap between the ancient traditions we’ve inherited from the Yellow River cradle of civilization and modern mystical practices, presented in a way rarely explored in the English language.

This is Taoist witchcraft decoded, in reclamation of the Wu 巫’s shamanic practices of the Tao 道.

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An Overview of the Taoist Grimoire Baopuzi

On By benebellIn free download, Fu talismans, I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft8 Comments

The Baopuzi 抱樸子 (circa 300 – 343 AD) by the celebrated alchemist and polymath Ge Hong 葛洪 is a Taoist grimoire that I would posit to be the most if not one of the most influential and impactful texts on Taoist mysticism.

Scans of the text you see in this video are from here [四部備要], this copy of it archived between 1924 and 1931 as part of a national effort to preserve essential ancient Chinese texts. You can also access a digitized version of it via the Chinese Text Project, ctext.org here.

This write-up is the companion blog post to the video to provide some additional notes on the Liu Jia Secret Mantra and other fun (to me) tidbits from the Baopuzi.

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The Semantics of Devil, Demon, and Ghost: 鬼 Guǐ

On By benebellIn I Ching The Oracle (book), Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft11 Comments

I stumbled upon an online discussion criticizing Fabrizio Pregadio’s translation of gui 鬼 to “demon, devil” [in Encyclopedia of Taoism (2008)], calling this translation inaccurate and problematic. The commenters in that discussion thread preferred the translation of gui to “ghost,” emphatically declaring that gui as ghost is the right approach, and that equating gui to demon or devil is wrong.

The rationale was that demon and devil have a connotation of evil in the West, which the term gui does not have. The term “ghost” is a bit more neutral – they say – and so gui as ghost is the better translation.

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Taoist Mysteries of the Six Holy Kings

On By benebellIn I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), Tao of Craft (book), Taoism1 Comment

In my video “Taoism: A Decolonized Introduction,” I made a passing reference to the Six Ancestral Sage Kings (or Six Holy Kings) and their significance in Taoism, promising that I’d dedicate a standalone video on the subject, so here we are.

Everything you need to learn about the Tao can be learned from the Six Holy Kings – or so goes an axiom credited to Confucius.

He isn’t the only one to uphold the Six Kings as the paragon of aspirational virtue and wisdom. Even Confucianism’s rival school of thought, the Mohists, would name-drop the Six Kings, 堯舜禹湯文武.

Cultural references to the importance of the Six Holy Kings continues well into the modern era with the founding of the Republic of China. Sun Yat-sen cited the importance of the new Republic upholding the tradition and values of the Six Holy Kings (“中國有一個道統，堯、舜、禹、湯、周文王、周武王、周公”).

Chinese historian and philosopher Li Zehou 李泽厚 notes that the Six Holy Kings are shamanic rulers, wū 巫, and that their divine right to sovereignty comes from their alignment with Heaven, which is received on the basis of their abilities to commune with Heaven. The shamanistic-historical traditions of the Chinese civilization comes straight from the Six Holy Kings. (You can read more about this in Chapter 10 of I Ching, The Oracle.)

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I Ching Oracle Cards (Free Printables)

On By benebellIn cartomancy, create your own deck, divination, free download, Fu talismans, I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), oracle deck, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism13 Comments

Download the digital files to a text-driven 64-card I Ching oracle deck for a free companion tool to my book, I Ching, The Oracle (North Atlantic Books, 2023).

This is a serviceable everyday personal divination deck that also doubles as an easy, accessible introduction to the I Ching.

It makes for a great study tool as flash cards and for learning the Ba Gua trigram and Wu Xing alchemical phase correspondences.

For your convenience, I’ve also uploaded the files onto makeplayingcards.com. External link and info below.

The listing is $23.20.

  • $22.95 of it goes to makeplayingcards.com, not me.
  • Only $0.25 of it goes to me.

Yes, that’s right. A quarter.

But if you are on a tight budget, you can download the printables file and crafty craft your own DIY copy of the deck.

Apart from the six-line hexagram images, the card faces are text only. No one is trying to wow you with artistry here. =P

This deck is intended to be a functional beginner’s tool for learning the I Ching, to be used in tandem with the book, I Ching, The Oracle.

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Secret Book of the Three Sovereigns

On By benebellIn free download, Fu talismans, grimoire, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, Tinkering Bell, traditional witchcraft8 Comments

Also known as the: 三皇文 (sān huáng wén); 三皇經 (sān huáng jīng); 三皇内文 (sān huáng nèi wén); Version transmitted to Ge Hong: 小有三皇文 (xiao you sān huáng wén)

Is the Seal of the Nine Immortal Realms 九老仙部印圖 from the Secret Book of the Three Sovereigns 三皇內文遺秘, which is now canonized in the Daozang, or Taoist Canons, part of the lost, legendary grimoire, the Book of the Three Sovereigns 三皇文?

According to lore, during the Three Kingdoms Era (220 – 280 AD), the Taoist mystic and later an ascended master Bó Hé 帛和 finds this text buried inside a stone wall atop Mount Xīchéng 西城山. From Bó Hé’s teachings arose of the earliest traditions of Taoist magic: the School of Bó Taoism 帛家道 (bó jiā dào), or The Way of Bó. Popular among the upper class during the Jin (266 – 420 AD) and Wei (386 – 534 AD) dynasties in the northern central plains of China, the tradition focused on study of the Book of Three Emperors and formulated their own approach to talismanic magic, invocation of gods, and alchemy.

Then, around 300 AD, atop Mount Songshan 嵩山, the Taoist occultist Bao Liang 鲍靓 receives this text painted on silk, as transmitted to Bó Hé. Bao Liang was a renowned master of various occult practices, from astrology and alchemy to necromancy. He married his daughter Bao Gu to the alchemist Ge Hong.

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