Author: Nicholas Chapel (Page 5 of 7)

So god help us, it was bound to happen sooner or later: that most undeservedly popular of occult texts, The Kybalion, has gotten a movie based on it made.

Well, “based on” is a strong overstatement, as it turns out. I gathered together with friends from the Hermetic House of Life Discord last night to watch this cinematic travesty, and I knew going into it that there was no way I could withstand the experience sober. We decided to make it an MST3K-style viewing with drunkenness and heckling. My sanity could not have survived the experience any other way.

Now, I’ve said plenty about the Kybalion in a variety of places, so my expectations were low going into this. But even if I were stone cold sober I could have watched this movie and still not known what the actual fuck was going on. It presented the most disconnected ramblings about material almost but not entirely unrelated to the subject matter of the Kybalion, interspersed with even more disconnected vaguely psychedelic/shamanic vignettes that appeared to exist only to be vaugely sp00ky for the sake of provocativeness. Much like the Kybalion itself, it was the esoteric equivalent of a Rorshach test, which says nothing especially useful but into which you can read a great deal if you want to.

That said, I had a great time jeering and heckling at the film with friends. It was exactly the experience I wanted and needed in order to stomach this indigo starchild woo dumpster fire without losing sanity points.

Sam Block posted a far more entertaining and ire-filled account of the experience over on The Digital Ambler. I apologize to Sam for suggesting this watch party of existential dread, and thank him for writing the more substantive critique of the Kybalion movie so I don’t have to. Give it a read, it’s well worthwhile!

Greetings, friends! As an interlude before transitioning from my LBRP videos into those covering the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram, I’ve recorded a guided performance of the Middle Pillar Ritual. In this video I take you through the exact guided meditation I used to lead others in performing when I was still operating in a Golden Dawn temple. We would generally perform the Middle Pillar Ritual together as a group to raise energy prior to launching into the opening LBRP for ceremony. I invite you to listen and participate along with the video, whether you’re a novice with the Middle Pillar or whether you’re an old hand at it.

As I mentioned in my previous post introducing my LBRP theory video, the content is dense enough that I wanted to break it out into a separate and more digestible post. I’ll largely follow a Q&A format here. If you have any additional questions I don’t cover, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or email me!

Q: Where did the LBRP originate?

The LBRP was created by the founders of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and does not appear in the Cypher Manuscript. It was likely created based on several different sources.

While one may be forgiven for thinking that the Qabalistic Cross is simply a portion of the Lord’s Prayer badly translated into Hebrew, this is in fact not the case. While the Qabalistic Cross does bear a structural similarity, the semantic meaning is different in some small but important ways. Most notably, what you’re actually saying here in translation is “thou art the Kingdom and the Power and the Greatness forever, amen”.

This portion of the LBRP likely comes directly from Eliphas Levi, in his chapter on the “Conjuration of the Four” from Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, translated into English by A. E. Waite as Transcendental Magic.  The Conjuration of the Four itself calls upon the four elemental creatures—the salamanders, sylphs, gnomes, and undines—rather than the four Archangels, and does so in all four directions.  By contrast, the invocation of the four Archangels in the LBRP is likely taken from the Hirsch Siddur, a traditional Jewish bedtime prayer, in which the following line occurs:  “In the Name of God, the God of Yisrael: may Michael be at my right hand, Gabriel at my left, Uriel before me, Raphael behind me, and above my head, the presence of God.”

Q: What is the purpose of the Sign of the Enterer and the Sign of Silence in the LBRP?

These are the Neophyte grade signs of the Golden Dawn, and have further use in the ritual of the LBRP itself. The Sign of the Enterer, also called the Projecting Sign or the Sign of Horus, functions to project energy outward.  When paired with the divine name appropriate to the quarter, you are infusing and inflaming that pentagram with the divine name. The Sign of Silence which answers it, also called the Sign of Harpocrates, is used to withdraw and contain the current of energy that is expelled by the Sign of the Enterer.  So if for whatever reason after projecting with the Sign of the Enterer you feel fatigued or drained, make the Sign of Silence again and stand in that position to regain your equilibrium before proceeding. Much of the “troubleshooting” involved in the energetic portions of the LBRP focuses on balancing these two signs to ensure that you are not expending or depleting your own energy while performing the ceremony, and correct use of these Signs is key to maintaining that balance.

Q: Why is movement around the circle in the LBRP performed clockwise?

The direction of progression around the circle is clockwise, because movement in a Golden Dawn temple is always performed according to the sun (i.e. clockwise), with only one notable exception. This exception is during the Mystic Reverse Circumambulation, which is designed to release the current of energy built up by the movement of the Kerux and the other officers around the Hall in the Mystic Circumambulation symbolic of the rise of light and the decrease of darkness. Otherwise, as a system which focuses predominately on attaining and cultivating the state of harmony reached in the solar sphere of Tiphereth, motion around the circle will always be clockwise in direction.

Q: What does the phrase “in the column shines the Six-Rayed Star” mean?

This is without a doubt one of the most unwieldy phrases in the entirety of the LBRP. Remember that the LBRP is a microcosmic ritual, and as such the practitioner is standing in the sphere of Malkuth. As a result, Tiphereth is positioned directly above the practitioner’s head, along with the other Sephiroth of the Middle Pillar. This phrase alludes to the six-rayed hexagram of Tiphereth, the sixth Sephirah, and its position above one’s head in the orientation of the action within the ritual as well as representing the sphere of equilibrium to which one is aspiring as one works toward the attainment of the Adeptus Minor grade.

Q: Why are the elements attributed to the quarters they are in the LBRP, rather than following the more common grimoiric directional attributions (which have Fire in the East, Earth in the South, etc.)?

As Alex Sumner has done an excellent job of articulating in a blog post on the subject, the “Four Winds” directional attributions which the Golden Dawn uses for microcosmic rituals such as the LBRP derives ultimately from Ptolemaic astrology, specifically from the Tetrabiblos. This scheme assigns the four winds—Eurus, Notus, Zephyrus, and Boreas—to the cardinal directions we’re familiar with in the ordering of the LBRP.  The more grimoire-standard ordering of Fire in the East, Earth in the South, Air in the West, and Water in the North is preserved in the Golden Dawn’s macrocosmic rituals.

Q: Why are the pentagrams traced clockwise in the LBRP, rather than counterclockwise? Shouldn’t banishing be performed widdershins?

In order to understand why the LBRP’s pentagrams are traced clockwise, you have to gain some understanding of the larger Adept-level Pentagram Ritual within the Golden Dawn tradition. The four elements crowned by Spirit are arrayed around the figure of the Pentagram as follows:

While there is some problematic history here regarding the Pentagrammaton, I will not go into it here: for further information on that front, watch the video, in which I briefly digress into the history of the Pentagrammaton and the ordering of the letters around the Pentagram. Suffice it to say that this diagram did not originate with the Golden Dawn, but represents the key to understanding the Pentagram Ritual.

While we are used to the trope of “invoking = deosil/clockwise” and “banishing = widdershins/counterclockwise” in modern occulture, this isn’t how it’s done in the Pentagram Ritual. Here, it isn’t whether you’re moving clockwise or counterclockwise that determines whether you’re invoking or banishing; it’s whether you’re moving towards or away from the element you’re working with.

In the LBRP, you start and finish with the Earth vertex of the Pentagram. Earth is used here as a substitute or stand-in for a general banishing, as it is the heaviest and densest element. You can see this same logic behind the use of the Saturn Hexagram as a general banishing figure within the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram.

So far, so good. Things get complicated, however, by the fact that the lower “X” of the Pentagram—the paths joining Fire/Air and Water/Earth—are reserved for the element of Spirit or Quintessence, as those two paths connect and unite the active and passive elements respectively. Consequently, these two paths are unavailable for use in drawing an Earth banishing pentagram. In the LBRP, you start at the Earth vertex and move away from it to banish.  Because you can’t use the path of Spirit Passive to do this, however, you use the path between Earth and Spirit instead, tracing the figure the only way you can—which is clockwise.

Now, note however that when you perform the LBRP, you are NOT banishing the element of Earth!  The LBRP is a general banishing ritual that works on the microcosmic level—that is to say, the elemental and terrestrial realm.  Remember that Earth here is just used as a shorthand or signature for the overall operation, and is used as a stand-in because it’s the heaviest and densest element.  But again, it’s not an Earth banishing or even a specifically elemental ritual when you’re talking about the LBRP.

Because of the symbolism of the pentagram and its connection to Gevurah (or Geburah), it may be more accurate to say that the LBRP is a Gevuric ritual than an elemental one, insofar as it operates in the same manner that tracing a protective magic circle on the ground with a sword does in the grimoiric tradition—especially when the LBRP is performed using the Sword of the Hiereus or the Magic Sword of an Adept.

I’ve posted a video on the theory underpinning the LBRP. This one really plumbs the depths of why exactly every action in the LBRP is done the way it is, and I’ve been looking forward to putting it out since I filmed my first video. I hope you find it informative!

Because this goes into such depth, I won’t be summarizing the contents of the video here–I’ll save that for a series of smaller posts on the subject. In the meantime, though, here’s the outline of the major content I cover:

• Qabalistic Cross
  • History and origins
  • Reason for the mapping of Gevurah and Chesed to the right and left shoulders
  • Explanation of “in the column shines the Six-Rayed Star”

• Tracing the Pentagrams
  • Further information on the Sign of the Enterer and Sign of Silence
  • Reason for the clockwise progression around the circle
  • Reason for the scheme of attributing the elements to the four quarters, and why this differs from common grimoiric attributions
  • Reason why the pentagrams are traced clockwise instead of counter-clockwise
  • History behind the Pentagrammaton formula used in the Pentagram Ritual
  • Reason why the Earth Pentagram is used in the LBRP (spoiler alert: the LBRP is not an Earth banishing!)

Special thanks are due to Erik Arneson for filling me in on the history of Johannes Reuchlin and the Pentagrammaton. Check out his website and podcast at Arnemancy!

I’ve posted a new video on YouTube about the next steps to take in the LBRP once a student is comfortable with the mechanics of the ritual itself. I cover some minor quibbles about ritual performance, discuss visualizations, and then talk about the specific use cases for the LBRP.

For those of you who prefer to consume your information by reading rather than by watching videos, here’s a summary rundown.

• While words other than divine and angelic names are not generally vibrated in Golden Dawn magic, the Qabalistic Cross is a notable exception.  Although the original manuscripts instruct only to say the words, today, by tradition, the words of the Qabalistic Cross are vibrated as well.

• Note that the Qabalistic Cross is an equal-armed cross, not the familiar Calvary cross. It additionally touches the right shoulder first, whereas the customary Christian gesture of crossing oneself begins with the left shoulder.  Unlike the usual crossing gesture, this also isn’t “spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch” — if you reach your testicles, you’ve gone too far!  You’re aiming for somewhere between the bottom of your sternum and your bellybutton.  Keep those cross arms equal.

• Now that you’re comfortable with the mechanics, it’s time to add visualizations. But don’t be too quick to add visualizations before you get the basics down: you don’t want to be focusing so much on your visualizations that you forget what you’re supposed to be doing. Note that ALL visualization is a matter of tradition–it was never part of the original writings on the LBRP when they were given to Neophytes of the Golden Dawn–and there’s significant variation out there as far as the specifics of visualization. In the video, I talk through the visualization that works for me.

• The pentagrams should be visualized in a flaming light. In Liber O, Aleister Crowley, an initiate of the original order, relates that the pentagrams should “appear in flame”.  Regardie elaborated on this and said that the pentagrams should be visualized as “flaming figures of bluish-golden hue similar to that produced by igniting methylated spirit”.  There’s been a somewhat ridiculous amount of discourse on this subject, but the bottom line is that whether you visualize the pentagrams as the blue of a gas-jet flame, the golden color of a candle flame, or simply a brilliant white light, do whatever works best for you.  The core idea here is that the pentagrams should be flaming ones; the specific color of that flame is less important.

• Some sources say that you should visualize the Archangels facing outward and away from you when banishing, and facing toward you when invoking. In practice, I have not found this to make any difference, and I always visualize them facing me.

• The LBRP literally grounds or “earths” you. It is used as a preliminary and concluding ceremony in every other Golden Dawn ritual, and serves the same purpose as the magic circle in grimoiric magic.

• Per Regardie, the LBRP is also used to get rid of disturbing or obsessive thoughts, and as an exercise in concentration–but these uses are secondary. Grounding and protection, and sweeping away the astral dust bunnies, are the primary use cases.

The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is a cornerstone of Golden Dawn magic. It’s also one of the most widely taught, adapted, and sometimes abused rituals in modern occulture. Unfortunately, some of the written presentations of the LBRP aim to be so thorough and complete that they risk thoroughly overwhelming and confusing the beginner rather than helping them to learn proper practice.

That’s why my goal in this video, the first in a series, is to give you the “no-BS” LBRP. Simply put, my intent is to give you the minimum necessary amount of information to get you working the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram correctly and competently within the Golden Dawn tradition.

The LBRP is a fairly straightforward ritual, and the novice is likely to encounter difficulty in only a few areas. The first of these is in recalling the correct names to pronounce during the Qabalistic Cross; the second lies in remembering the correct names of God to vibrate in each quarter; and the third involves keeping track of which Archangel rests in which direction. All of these are simple matters of memorization that practice will quickly reinforce, and I treat each of these components individually within the video instruction.

Rather than including a lot of detail on visualizations, because this instruction is geared toward the novice I focus instead on the verbal and kinesthetic parts of ritual. After the student has achieved comfort and fluency with the ritual words and actions, they can then add visualization into the mix and begin building up the onion of symbolism layer by layer. Attempts to introduce instruction on visualization from the outset is a large part of what I feel contributes to “instruction bloat” in articulations of the LBRP, and overwhelms the newcomer to the practice who’s looking to gain an initial foothold.

For those of you who need a foothold, I hope this video serves you well.

Within contemporary occulture, one often runs into people who are uncomfortable with the pervasiveness of the Abrahamic god in grimoiric and other magic, and especially with the person of Jesus Christ. Given the familial religious abuse that many of us have grown up with, this is no surprise. (Please, Lord, save us from your followers!) Many people have successfully substituted non-Abrahamic deities and spirits for the Christian variety; but like it or loathe it, the presence of Christian names and thought in Western magic must ultimately be dealt with in one fashion or another.

While I escaped the familial religious trauma so many have experienced, I too have my own ambivalence regarding Christianity and the person of Jesus in the magic that I work. What follows is a bit about my own background, and how I personally reconcile my own religious sensibilities and magical work with the Christian view of God and the person of Jesus.

My Background

I grew up in a liberal family in college-town Oklahoma. My parents were non-observant Christians; I don’t recall ever going to church during my youth. After my first religious experience at age 12, I became very involved in the Episcopal Church, and at one point wanted to enter the clergy and become a priest. After several years, however, I started to feel a growing discomfort around reciting the Nicene Creed without being able to fully assent to what it was I was saying. I came to realize that I had very little idea who (or what) this Jesus person was; and given that the concept of animal sacrifice has always violently clashed with my sensibilities, the central idea of Christianity, with its sacrificial death for the remission of sin, has never really worked for me. At age 16, I quietly left the church to pursue my own path.

While I never went through any familial religious abuse, I was still a liberal kid growing up in Oklahoma, which has a large population of fundamentalist Christians. Between school and my extracurricular life, I still had plenty of abuse directed at me. I’ve met Christians who are true to the spiritual journey and model the true values espoused in the Gospels, but they have been fairly few and far between. So despite my relative privilege with respect to abuse trauma while growing up, I still was not left unscathed.

Over time, I came to a different understanding of Christianity that largely works for me, even though I don’t identify as a Christian (instead considering myself a religious adherent of Hermeticism). While I still have few if any answers to the questions that bothered me so much in my teens, in hindsight those new understandings made a lot of the discomfort and cognitive dissonance I had with respect to Christianity dissipate. Nonetheless, I never returned to the church: I had found my own road to travel instead.

It’s not often that explicitly Christian prayers or verbiage enters my magical practice, though I do draw from a variety of Christian sources between the grimoires and my work with the planetary archangels. The archangels in my experience have been pretty neutral with respect to bringing in that Christian lens, though it does happen from time to time–and it’s always jarring to me when it does, because Christianity is neither the lens that I see through nor is it one that I find to be of especial personal significance to me these days. It was observing my own cognitive dissonance in these circumstances, and a desire to engage with it, that inspired this post.

Jesus and the Christ

As mentioned above, a big sticking point for me in my latter teen years with respect to the Nicene Creed was my agnosis regarding who the historical person of Jesus was, and what if any relationship that person had to the mythos that later developed around him.

What do we know about Jesus? There were many apocalyptic movements emerging around messiah figures during the time he lived, in Roman-occupied Galilee and Judea. This is not especially surprising: when an occupier wields absolute power over a marginalized group, the only hope for deliverance comes from religious eschatology. Jesus was likely a revolutionary, and was executed when he gained enough popularity that both the Romans and the Jews who represented the established mainstream began to view him as a threat. Regardless of whether Jesus was indeed the unique incarnation of God on earth, he embraced the symbolism of animal sacrifice to represent himself–the scapegoat of the hegemony–as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

But how do we connect the idea of Jesus as a person to Jesus as the Christ? My solution has been to regard them as two separate figures entirely. On the one hand there’s the human Jesus–the historical person, much of whose life has been lost to the sands of time. On the other hand there is the mythic Christ, a cosmic entity only loosely tied to the historical personage, who shares more in common with the other gods than with humanity. When I look at the issue through that lens, it sidesteps a lot of my own discomfort.

Nor is it clear to me that the person of Jesus as the Christ was ever intended to represent the one and only true son of God. The word generally translated from the Greek as “only-begotten” (μονογενής, monogenês) refers to the only member of a kind or kin, but a better translation would be “unique”. And we are all unique children of the Divine, are we not? Consequently, I tend to regard μονογενής as meaning something more like “uniquely special”–just as every human being is.

Additionally, we must look at the words χριστός (christos) and  מָשִׁיחַ‎ (moshiach or messiah), in context. Both words simply mean “anointed”, and again it is not at all clear that this was intended to be a singular designation. Anointing in the biblical context was primarily done as a part of the coronation of a new king of Israel, and was itself viewed as the magico-religious act by which a selected individual became king. After the Assyrian invasion and conquest of Israel, there were no more kings to be anointed. The Jewish concept of the messiah then became an eschatological one, the future anointed king of the new kingdom of Israel. Part of the subversive theology of early Christianity was the idea that this new king named Jesus was not a temporal ruler, but rather a ruler in the heavenly realms and in the world to come. Either way, we must bear in mind that Christ is properly speaking a title, and not the surname of Jesus.

Reconciling the Conflicts

Explicitly Christian verbiage very rarely comes up in my own practice and extemporaneous invocation/prayer, but it always weirds me out when it does. That said, I also do my primary spirit work at this point with the planetary archangels, who are a bit more keen on Christianity than the gods or other spirits. So it does come up at times, and it’s a bit jarring. I’ve had to compartmentalize the historical Jesus and the mythic Christ into entirely separate concepts in order to reconcile my own differences.

I still have only the barest idea who and what the historical Jesus was. I’ve largely set aside that question for the last 15 years or so as not especially relevant to my interests. In my case, I found a lot of my own reconciliation through a study of the historical context of Christianity as a religion, and through seeing the mythos of Christianity as one “true” sacred story among many other true sacred stories. When viewed from the perspective of the infinite rather than the human and finite, there is no reason why Christ should be incompatible with any other mythos in that regard.

I confess, Jesus still doesn’t do it for me, and neither does Christ. I resonate a lot more with the Graeco-Egyptian gods. But I’ll form relationships and work with both, and continue to lean into my discomfort and cognitive dissonance with an aim to sort it out and unpack my baggage. As an apocryphal story goes, when a Christian missionary once proselytized to a Native American tribe, the chief listened to the story with interest. At the end, he said, “That is a good story. We will tell that one too.”

Here’s to good stories, and the divine truths they conceal within.