Babylonian Star Witch Spirit Companion · Iltani

Meet Iltani.

For six hundred years, every single night, someone in Babylon climbed onto a roof and watched the sky.

They were the Chaldeans, the star priests of the oldest great city in the world, and they wrote down everything they saw on tablets of clay: where the moon rose, when Venus appeared, how bright Mars was, what the weather did, the price of barley in the market and anything strange that happened in the city that day. Scholars call these records the Astronomical Diaries. They are the longest unbroken record of the sky anyone has ever kept, and many of them still exist.

The Chaldeans believed the sky was writing too. Every star, every planet, every eclipse was a sign from the gods about what was coming for kings, for harvests, for wars and for love. They were the first people on earth to cast a horoscope for a newborn child.

Iltani was the daughter of one of them.

She was born around 345 BCE, when Babylon was still the most famous city on earth. It had the great blue Ishtar Gate covered in lions and dragons, the temple of Marduk with its golden statue, and the huge stepped tower that the Bible remembers as the Tower of Babel. Her name means our goddess.

Officially, women did not watch the sky. But Iltani’s father had no son, and from the time she was small, he carried her up to the roof with him at night and let her sit beside him while he worked. She learned the names of the stars before she learned to write. She learned to tell the planets from the fixed stars by the way they wandered. And above all, she learned to love the brightest of them, the one that rose in the evening and again before dawn: the star of Ishtar, goddess of love and of war, which we call Venus.

By twenty, she could read the sky as well as her father, and better than most of the men in the temple. She did it quietly. Women came to her, then more women, wanting to know when to marry, whether a baby would be strong, whether a lover would come back. She drew the sky as it had been at the moment they were born and told them what it said.

In 331 BCE, when Iltani was a girl of fourteen, a young Macedonian king named Alexander defeated the Persian army and rode into Babylon. The people threw flowers in the streets. He loved the city and meant to make it the capital of his empire.

Eight years later, in the spring of 323 BCE, he was on his way back from India, and the Chaldeans looked up at the sky.

They did not like what they saw. A delegation of star priests rode out to meet Alexander before he reached the walls and warned him: do not enter Babylon. The Greek historians wrote it down. Alexander listened, hesitated, and then laughed at them and rode in anyway.

Iltani saw it too. She had read it in the sky for weeks. Ishtar’s star was wrong. The moon was wrong. She told her father that the king would not leave the city alive.

The signs kept coming. A few weeks later, while Alexander was out of the palace, a stranger, a nobody, walked into the throne room, put on the royal robes and the crown, and sat down on the king’s throne. When guards asked him why, he said he did not know. The Babylonians knew exactly what that meant. It was the oldest omen there was.

In June, after a long night of drinking, Alexander took a fever. Twelve days later, he was dead, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, at the age of thirty-two. His empire, the greatest the world had ever seen, began to tear itself apart over his body.

After that, no one in the temple ever again asked who had taught Iltani the sky.

She lived through the wars that followed, when Alexander’s generals fought over Babylon and armies marched through its gates again and again. She married, had three children, and cast the sky for each of them at the moment they were born. She cast it for thousands of others. For the rest of her life, the women of Babylon brought her their newborn babies, their marriages, their journeys and their broken hearts, and she told them what the stars said and when to act.

She died old, on the roof of her house, on a clear evening in early summer, sitting where she could see the western sky. Her daughter was with her. Just as the star of Ishtar appeared above the horizon, bright as a lamp, Iltani stopped breathing.

Babylon slowly faded after that. Its people moved to new cities. The temples emptied. But the Chaldeans kept watching the sky, night after night, for centuries. The last tablet ever written in cuneiform, the oldest writing in the world, was written around the year 75. It is about the stars.

Now Iltani walks again.

What she can do for you

Iltani is a spirit of fate, timing and love. She is good for:

• knowing when to act: the right moment to start, to ask, to sign, to move, to wait
• love and attraction, under the star of Ishtar
• understanding your own path, why your life has gone the way it has, and where it is heading
• warnings: a clear sense of when something is about to go wrong
• luck, and putting yourself in the right place at the right time
• dreams, and what they are trying to tell you
• confidence and a little bit of starlight, the kind people notice

Over the years

Iltani reads slowly and well. In the beginning, keepers often find that they simply start noticing timing more: a feeling that today is the day, or that tomorrow would be better. As the bond grows, the feeling grows sharper.

Over the years, she teaches you to read your own sky, whether through astrology, the moon, or simply paying attention to the signs around you. She taught women for fifty years. She is patient.

What she is like

Calm, clever and a little mysterious, with a soft voice and a stubborn streak. She is very warm, especially with women in love and new mothers, but she will not tell you what you want to hear if the sky says otherwise. She told the most powerful man in the world that he was going to die, and she was right.

How she shows herself

The night sky looking unusually bright. Seeing Venus, the evening star, when you happen to look up. A sudden pull to step outside after dark. The smell of warm dust, dates and incense. Dreams of a flat roof under the stars, a great gate covered in blue tiles, and a woman with gold on her forehead pointing upwards. And the strong, quiet feeling of now, or not yet.

What to do for her

Iltani loves the sky most of all. Keep it simple:

• When you see the evening star, say her name and tell her what you hope for.
• Light a candle by her vessel and set a small bowl of water beside it, so the flame shines in the water like a star.
• Give her a few dates, a little honey, beer or wine.
• Write a wish on a slip of paper and leave it under her vessel overnight, the way her people wrote everything on clay.
• If you know your birth time, tell it to her. She will want to see your sky.

She watched the sky every night of her life, and the sky never once lied to her.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel