Gnosis on the Fixed Star Sadalsuud
Wisdom from the brightest of the bright
It's been four years and change since I adopted the moniker "sadalsvvd", after the fixed star Sadalsuud, "the brightest of the bright" or "luckiest of the lucky". I'm renaming this blog from Cosmic Indigestion to just my handle to make it feel more personal to me and expand the topics I write about. And to celebrate the occasion, I spent some time doing contact work with none other than the fixed star-spirit itself, Sadalsuud. I would like to share with you the gnosis I have received over my explicit sessions with him, and years of unwitting (if in retrospect, very obvious) work within his nature.
Stellar contact and lunar mansions
Talking to a star--spirit, god, really big non-human person-thing, whatever--is actually relatively easy to do with some basic astrological knowledge. The general idea is that you wait until the Moon is close to the fixed star and the star is rising on the horizon or culminating in the sky. The indicator stars, however, are much more significant and big stars, which can be accessed easily while the Moon is anywhere within their lunar mansions. (They do still need to be rising or culminating.)
The lunar mansions, stations, or manazil, is a system of 28 (sometimes 27) divisions of the zodiac, based on the number of days it takes for a full lunar cycle and the degrees that the Moon occupies during each day (12° 51' 26"). All of these lunar stations are associated with different stars, and magically, are used to attain certain effects. (Here's one list of them and their meanings.) Their indicator stars are particularly easy to reach, which make them ideal practice for stellar patronage, and they are frequently influential and powerful.
The lunar mansions are an underappreciated and fascinating system in astrology, and they are incredibly powerful if you're into lunar astrology or magic. Explaining them in depth is beyond the scope of this post, so here are three excellent posts by friends which can help you understand how they work and how to use them, along with the tools required to calculate and work with them:
A note on the lunar mansions: because they are based on the sidereal zodiac, lists will sometimes use sidereal degrees or tropical degrees. Shuly and Hawk's posts provide tips and charts for translating the sidereal degrees to tropical degrees if you use the tropical zodiac.
So, the gnosis. Stars are very big; like many kinds of big, old, or complex spirits, they have many multitudes and layers, only some of which may have been written about or recorded in the records we have access to. Any contact is also filtered through the prism of our personal subjective experience, disposition, and ongoing myth-stories. So images, impressions, and wisdom received will all to some extent be blended with our nature and the skies of the moment. But repeated sessions help show the core nature of a star through the recurrent themes, imagery, and ideas it expresses.
If you do work with the fixed stars, your thoughts on the nature of Sadalsuud are more than welcome. (For beginners--make sure you understand the nature of a star before you contact one, and be cautious of working with malefic ones until you have more experience. If you’re interested in an introductory course to the fixed stars, I highly recommend Chloe’s An Introduction to the Fixed Stars.)
For now, here is my experience.
Gnosis
My second session was on January 30th as Sadalsuud rose on the horizon. In this one, I planned to ask him more generally about his nature, and what he wanted the world to know about him.
I anointed myself in Heloise's 24th Sadalsuud lunar mansion Midas Touch oil materia, dressed a candle with it, and meditated for a while. It had been raining all night, which fell in pitter patters on the grass and dirt outside, gentle and uniform.
The night before, I had drawn a small image to represent Sadalsuud: a fish with a coin in its mouth. He had given it to me in our first, more personal session, and I contemplated, staring at it for a while.
In my mind's eye I saw imagery of rain falling into rivers, creeks, and streams, water pushing against river banks, silt left behind. A sense of ease and serenity, and repair.
I stood up to draw cards and ask my questions.
What is your nature?
I shuffled thoroughly and drew three cards in a pyramid. I use this spread frequently, where the center card is the general theme or subject and the two supporting cards are complementary descriptions that add more nuance to the first card.
I drew the Seven of Swords in the middle, The Moon on the left, and the Queen of Wands on the right. Words flowed into my mind, and I wrote them down:
The armies go there; I hold the keep.
The armies come here; I hold the keep.
The women and children laugh and pray; I hold the keep.
I know what I hold and it is precious;
hard won and hardly understood.
I am a god of keeps, keeping—sustenance and slow repair.
You won't see me without knowing what to look for.
Blessed or trained eyes. Blink and you'll miss it.
Invisible effects, proliferation. Soaking roots.
Where you see rain, I am the dew.
If you're not aware, every minor arcana card in the tarot deck has an associated astrological decan, the 10° divisions of the zodiac.1 The Seven of Swords is the card associated with the third decan of Aquarius, 20° Aquarius - 0° Pisces--which is where the fixed star Sadalsuud is. The riverbanks in The Moon immediately chimed with the image of water and rivers, and the Queen of Wands pointed to an element of performance and sleight of hand. I'll elaborate on that part later.
What do you want to say to the world?
I drew a single card for this, the Hermit reversed. My eye was drawn to his gaze toward his lamp, inner light, and the shape of the cloak falling from his arm upward reminded me of a bird's wings.
More came into my mind.
"Come closer to your source."
Be not afraid, as they say. You are not as alone as you think you are.
Wisdom is available wherever you look; seek that the deeper structure—
you are surrounded by them, made of them.
We are all angels in disguise.
There was no more need for cards; the channel felt wide open and words spilled in as quickly as I could transcribe them.
What should one do to draw closer to you?
Listen. Hear the water and the wind.
Think about where it goes, and how far it has traveled.
See me in the moving current, feel me in its quiet implications.
Breath is a luminous light.
I am the inhale and exhale, not the air itself.
This is my fortune.
What blessings do you bring?
Bounty for those willing to receive it and the art to perceive it.
I am both large and small, and mistaken for one or the other while being both.
I can move weary trees and soothe tired knees.
I am the invisible plan, careful in composition and virile in execution.
As you know I bring coin bearing my name,
but as far as I am concerned, that is a happy "accident."
Know me by my name, hold me on your breath,
contemplate me on your crown,
and you will understand.
Thoughts on Sadalsuud and gnosis from the first session
My experience of Sadalsuud from this and my first session gave me the impression of a king who successfully manages a vast kingdom through the virtue of careful and thoughtful curation of systems. Repeated imagery across sessions and amongst my friends who have been doing Sadalsuud work have been elements of water, rivers, creeks, streams.
These intricate pathways and networks feed entire ecosystems, providing fresh water and depositing minerals upon riverbanks in an effortless, endless way. Sadalsuud enables his kingdom to prosper through the careful and expert manipulation of levers in the world, carefully stretching and realigning flows until everything just works on its own. From the outside, this can be an almost completely invisible process.
In my first session, the first image I saw was coins dropping and tumbling down steps, a few at first, then a voluminous many, clinking endlessly in a rush.
"Countless scribes drafting my name by hand on each coin, an endless bounty."
A golden mask radiating light. Water, coins, hopping like fish, imagery of rivers. I drew cards on his nature--the Ace of Cups on top (water spilling downwards), then The Emperor, The Magician reversed, and the 10 of Wands.
“The king whose cleverness lets me wrap my arms 'round the world.”
I drew more cards asking specifically about my relationship to him, and some key imagery came forward: a hand tracing circles in a stream, leaving orbiting trails partially swept away by the current. It struck me as something about the simultaneous beauty and futility of trying to endlessly map the orbits (of the stars) in a current that washes away everything. The trails remained to some extent, but wavered, requiring constant retracing to remain.
Another image: the rivers rush and overflow, running through the trees, overrunning villages and the land. The water becomes coin. People stand scratching their heads, rich but their land covered in glittering metal, the crops ruined. "Man cannot live on gold alone." It was about the understanding of the meaning of wealth, its purpose, its role, its balance.
I want to see more but it obscures itself; not yet. I can't see the star in its full glory. (As I wrote this line, I noted a brief burst of applause from normally silent neighbors outside.) I think about the golden mask image from before.
"If the people saw what it takes to create prosperity, they would be horrified."
There's something about the clapping. About being entertained, while not actually understanding what one is clapping at. There's a performance to Sadalsuud's nature, a sleight of hand which obscures the hard and diligent work of carefully adjusting systems to yield their bounty. The mask radiating light being self-serving, but also helping one (Sadalsuud) do their job, and keeping the onlookers safe.
There's an administrative element to Sadalsuud. I think of his nature as not only being like a philosopher king but also an accountant king--one who knows the numbers of his kingdom just as well as his endless hordes of sub-accountants administrating his kingdom. Wealth doesn't come from nowhere; the phrase "You make your own luck" comes to mind and feels very applicable to him.
It's his design, executed by thoughtfully maintaining ratios, calculating and matriculating quantities and amounts to sustain life without drowning. It's not overly rigorous and rigid yet still deeply calculated, building and tending to structures and systems that produce wealth in a way that appears automatic and almost effortless. Done properly, an endless reservoir amasses. Nobody on the outside can tell exactly why; the king must be blessed or just plain lucky. And at one point he tells me: “The throne is not for whiners!”
Embodying Sadalsuud
I came away from my first session with Sadalsuud with a phrase stuck in my head: "administrative magic". After working with him, I felt like I had easier access to a different kind of consciousness where I was "pulled back" within myself, away from my immersed anxiety and fretful tactical thinking about how to do all the things I want to do with the little time I have. Instead, budgeting and reckoning debt was no longer a harrowing, emotionally invested experience but a cool, rational understanding that it's like a game. Better last month, worse this month. We just have to adjust some numbers and stick to the plan and it'll all work out exactly as it needs to. I feel like I can see flows of money like flows of water.
Even being in bed at night, I found this "administrative consciousness" helpful; rather than being stuck in the visceral nighttime thoughts, I could see these hours of sleep as essential part of a holistic plan that stretched out for years ahead of me. The consequences of staying lost in my thoughts tossing and turning feel clear, and the upsides of letting them go were even clearer. And for some reason it is easy to put my thoughts down and actually rest, because it feels easy to understand what is actually important and fruitful.
This has been a profound part of working with Sadalsuud for me. Either the phrase "administrative magic" or envisioning the fish with a coin in its mouth acts as a psychic hook for me to come back to this state, which has helped me manage more and more complexity and ambitious projects in my personal life to a degree I never have before. Sadalsuud points to systemic effects, small additive changes, the nudges, the removal of hitches and irritations and delays in otherwise smooth processes, which all add up in an exponential way, but only if you do all of it together.
This mindset helps me calm my need to go, do things, now and actually spend time tuning my systems, and getting a bigger picture and context of what actually matters, and what is actually important. Through this constant tuning and resonance you can't help but create sustainable success from the thing you're doing. That is, I feel, how Sadalsuud operates his "kingdom".
Sadalgedi
I actually had another question that I asked second after asking about Sadalsuud's nature. I kept it last here for continuity and because it's a bit of an aside, but probably an important one.
What is your relationship to Deneb Algedi?
My friends and I (collectively, the "Stoat Zone"2) have experienced a collective gnosis (verb: "gnosed", for short) around the relationship between Deneb Algedi and Sadalsuud. Deneb Algedi is almost exactly on top of Sadalsuud, a mere 8 minutes away in zodiacal longitude.
We recently had a profound experience of Deneb Algedi performing its role as the guardian of borders, a spirit whose nature is to gently but firmly defend and demarcate the boundaries between peoples and places. These events seemed interwoven simultaneously with my Sadalsuud contact workings. We've started calling the pair together "Sadalgedi", as we are beginning to feel that they operate like twin stars, hand-in-hand, and to only note one without the other may be to miss half the story.
So I drew three cards to ask, "What is your relationship to Deneb Algedi?" The left card would be Sadalsuud, the right Deneb Algedi, and the bottom, the two together.
First, The Moon--again, for the second time in the row, to represent Sadalsuud! The Five of Wands for Deneb Algedi. The Knight of Wands reversed for the two together.
Deneb Algedi is the army. We would never wage war if
we didn't have to. Some other lines must be
drawn when men trespass rivers (that are [illegible]!!).
I am the hidden reason; they are the clear action.
Crossings and uncrossings.
With rushing water and heavy boots, we hold the line.
I tried to remember a word I learned recently, but couldn't, and scrawled something instead--which I marked "illegible". I spent a lot of time on this word. both trying to remember it while gnosis pounded through my mind, and when trying to figure out what the hell I actually wrote. I eventually realized that it was "that word"--and that word is thalweg, which I had learned about a month earlier.
A thalweg is the deepest continuous line along a river or valley, used to define boundaries between countries along waterways when the entire river does not demarcate the boundary. It feels like the perfect word to represent the relationship between Sadalsuud and Deneb Algedi. Sadalsuud is the water and Deneb Algedi is the boundary, rushing water and heavy boots. A kingdom cannot prosper without both prosperous economies and protected boundaries, acknowledged by convention and mutual agreement rather than actual borders.
This idea and the general imagery of Sadalsuud feels aligned with the section of the tropical zodiac that the 24th lunar mansion encompasses--20° Aquarius to 3° Pisces, which includes the border between the two signs. Aquarius' role as the water-carrier also seems very prominent here. Despite being considered an air sign, the water motifs are endless with these two stars at 23° of Aquarius. To me, this feels like the mythic and decanic nature of the last third of Aquarius being expressed through imagery, while the subject matter it tangibly concerns is of an airy nature. For Sadalsuud, it's the ability to mentally comprehend and manipulate systems to achieve aims through abstract perception. For Deneb Algedi, it's the ability to perceive and respect abstract, non-physical boundaries and their purpose.
I look forward to doing more work with both of these stars, and learning more of their nature. If you've done or will do some work with Sadalsuud, Deneb Algedi, or Sadalgedi, please comment and let me know how it went and what your experience was like. I feel that these are profoundly powerful stars--though I might be a bit biased.
Even as I step outside to get some fresh air before going to bed after writing this, it has been raining, and the night seems brighter than usual and everything is dark blue-green and dripping and wet.
Thank you for reading. 🪙🐟
An overview of how this works is here, but for an in-depth treatment of the systems and every individual decan and its myths, I recommend Kira Ryberg's guidebook .
"You won't see me without knowing what to look for.
Blessed or trained eyes. Blink and you'll miss it."
Ohhh this is so interesting! There's something about Sadalsuud... When scrying or just feeling out vibes in someone, I can feel Sadalsuud's influence pretty strongly but it also generally feels somewhat elusive, difficult to demarcate and explain. I'll know it's there but couldn't tell you why, whereas some other stars show up in more defined ways (I see flowers blooming for Alphecca, a playful smirk for Castor, etc).
This was such an interesting read, thank you so much for sharing this gnosis. I really dig the image you drew!
As someone who has engaged with Deneb Algedi for over a year (with a mini shrine with evil eye stuff, interestingly, as well as Sphere+Sundry kolonia), I have experienced nudges of social obligation in the form of finding issues on public transport and reporting them. I am also in a paid job that is befitting of Their nature, namely a school crossing guard. To me, DA has a quality of upholding elements of the social contract, as well as personal prudence (though to a lesser extent). On a more omen-like vibe, I found and purchased a dark blue bandana at an op shop at around the Sol-DA conjunction.