Jeff Russell

For what it's worth, I had been practicing sympathetic/planetary magic in the tradition of Ficino and the Picatrix, which has Christian/monotheist underpinnings despite a heavily Hellenic bent. I can't really say, then, what the impacts would be for other people. As with all things, though, I suspect "you will know them by their fruit."

There were attempts by some in the Renaissance to really distinguish between "natural" magic (simple alignment of correspondences that produced results) and "spiritual" magic (which involve spirits). This distinction was undertaken likely so as to allow magic to "pass," as it were, in Christian settings, and is less about controlling spirits (a la Goetia) than about the action of magic itself: when you're aligning those correspondences, who are the meditators of the action? After all this time, philosophically I have to say that they are (in my estimation) spirits (daimones), and therefore the disinction is spurious.

I wish you nothing but the best in all your endeavors, and Axé,
Fra' Lupo