Everyday Sun Magic, by Dorothy Morrison
Llewellyn Worldwide, 0738704687, 336 pp., 2005
In Dorothy Morrison’s Everyday Sun Magic, she asserts that the Sun completes its circuit of the astrological stages faster than the Moon and is therefore a more practical basis for astrological magick is inaccurate. The astronomical fact that it takes roughly 365 days for the Sun to transit the entirety of the zodiac as opposed to the 28 days it takes the Moon to make the same journey appears to have been missed.
The statement that astrologically speaking the Sun “controls the personal intellect and all things psychological… everything we think and see… shapes our psyche… and determines who we really are” would literally cause any half-informed astrologer to fall into convulsions the moment they heard it. The most consistent complaint of astrologers is the over-emphasis of the role of the Sun in an individual’s natal astrological wheel, as though the rest of the planets in the solar system weren’t even there.
The words “magick” and “spells” were used a bit too liberally throughout the text. Avocado face-masks most likely do make you better looking, but I don’t think that qualifies them as magical spells. The same can be said for making a bird-feeder that will magically draw birds to itself (with a little help from the bird food you placed in it), rituals that contain nothing but Sun-themed positive-affirmations and instructions on how to make Bahama Mama’s (4 oz. pineapple juice, .5 oz. dark rum, .5 oz. coconut liqueur, .25 oz. rum, .25 oz. Kahlua, half a lemon juiced, cherry and crushed ice). Not that a good Bahama Mama isn’t magical, but let’s not get carried away here.
What actual magick there is in the book is pretty traditional, largely derived from hoodoo and Wicca (hot-foot powders, charged crystals and candle magic) with some of the author’s stilted poetry attached to it. All of which categorically defines the Sun in masculine terms and really ends up reading like a Baptist prayer-book with a few so-mote-it-bes slapped onto the end.
Although I believe that the average practitioner can indeed benefit from the incorporation of astrological formula into their practice, one might be better served leaving Everyday Sun Magic on the shelf and grabbing a basic astrology primer, an ephemeris, and a copy of their own natal chart.
