Hacking the Elemental Hexagrams

Most Augoeides readers are familiar with my operant field system for using the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram and Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram. To briefly recap, as I see it the "Lesser" rituals are general rituals that you use to set up your magical working space or "field," whereas the "Greater" rituals are used to conjure specific magical forces. I am not fond at all of the "Lesser" versus "Greater" nomenclature, because there should be no implied hierarchy between the types. You do want to learn the "Lesser" rituals first, but that's only because they are the first rituals you use when doing magical operations. They are in no way inferior or less important - they are foundational to the work.

But one of the things that some of the Golden Dawn groups teach these days does not fit very well with this concept of the forms, and to my way of thinking just confuses things. This is the idea of "Lesser Rituals of the Hexagram" for specific planets. From a technical standpoint, what you do is pretty straightforward. You trace the four elemental hexagrams from the point attributed to the planet, according to where the two triangles that represent each elemental hexagram map onto the Tree of Life when placed in the "standard" or star configuration. But if the Lesser rituals are general rituals, how should that even work?

To be clear, my operant field model is developed from Aleister Crowley's versions of these rituals published in Liber O, which in turn is Crowley's adaptation of the Golden Dawn rituals he learned from S. L. MacGregor Mathers during his time in the order. Thus, my system is based on material that effectively diverged from the Golden Dawn tradition over a hundred years ago. So what I am not trying to say here is that the modern Golden Dawn teachings are wrong in some objective sense. I have no idea where the idea of specific "Lesser Hexagrams" came from, or what experimental testing was done to verify that the method works.

So going forward, keep in mind that I am talking about my own operant system and offering no comment one way or the other on how other traditions such as the modern Golden Dawn orders teach these ritual forms. I naturally believe that my methods work better based on my own experimental testing and that of a number other magicians who have tried it out and compared it to more traditional methods. But my suggestion is, as always, if it works it works. If you learned these forms from a Golden Dawn group and they work for you as you learned them, that's great. But I also invite anyone to give the operant system a try and see if it works for them as well as it does for me.


Since in my system the Lesser rituals are general and the Greater rituals are specific, it is not clear to me what a specific Lesser Hexagram ritual is supposed to do. My basic sequence for any planetary operation is LBRP/LIRH (the operant field) followed by tuning the space to the energy you are conjuring using the GIRH for the planet. I create the magical field, and then I tune it. Mixing up those steps is just messy, and in my experience leads to poorer results. Modularity in magick serves the same purpose as modularity in my professional field of software development. It helps you design new operations and debug existing ones much more easily.

But a recent discussion on Facebook did get me thinking. Outside of the Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram itself, could an argument be made for using the elemental hexagrams elsewhere? And if so, what would they represent? The Greater Ritual of the Hexagram always uses the "standard" or star or "Earth" hexagram as it is called in the LRH itself. Whether it still represents elemental Earth in the context of the GRH is another question, since as I have discussed elsewhere I am not convinced that the "Earth pentagram" used in the LRP just represents the elemental Earth or something more general. But for the sake of argument, let's say that it does. If so, that implies that the other elemental hexagrams might have their own applications specific to the elements they represent.

A caveat - pretty patterns do not necessarily constitute a system of magick. I can't tell you how many times I have come up with something that seems logical, but which doesn't work, or at best fails to outperform the original method that I am trying to optimize. Nature and logic are not the same thing, and magick is not simply a matter of whatever you happen to believe is going to work. For strong macrocosmic effects - that is, magick acting directly on the external world - the symbols you are using need to resonate closely with specific natural forces. That's something I figured out early on when I started probability testing my rituals.

Incidentally, that observation is one big reason that I tend to be skeptical of mind-only or even psychic-power-only models of magick. If you want to engage in a whole bunch of mental gyrations, you can still get a psychic-power-only model that might return these results if you approach it from a Jungian perspective and consider the "natural forces" I'm talking about as archetypes. But I fail to see what utility is really gained there, and anyway with a model like that you run into problems again as soon as you try to work out why a ritual that calls on my own power is almost always produces a lower probability shift than a ritual that calls on my own power plus that of a spirit.

But I digress. Following that Facebook discussion I meditated a bit on ideas for using the elemental hexagrams in other contexts besides the LRH itself. If we assume that the standard Greater Hexagram does represent Earth, the logical reason for its use is that with practical magick we are attempting to act upon the material world. This is called Assiah in Hermetic Qabalah, and is one of four Qabalistic worlds attributed to the four elements. You also have Yetzirah, the formative world, Briah, the creative world, and Atziluth, the archetypal or emanation world. In the standard arrangement Yetzirah is Air, Briah is Water, and Atziluth is Fire.

As far as the Tree of Life goes, I am working off Crowley's Naples Arrangement, which is derived from the Golden Dawn arrangement which in turn was derived from the Kircher arrangement. As has been previously discussed here on Augoeides, keep in mind that what I'm talking about here is not necessarily "THE Tree of Life," since the traditional Jewish systems use different versions of the Tree with their own attributions. Some of those match the attributions of Kircher/GD/Naples and some of them do not. So the attributions I am discussing here are those from the Thelemic system, and don't necessarily correspond to any other.

At any rate, the most logical interpretation, then, is that you would use the other elemental hexagrams when tuning your space to a planet or sign of the zodiac (since I use hexagrams for zodiac signs - some groups use pentagrams instead) in one of the three other worlds besides Assiah. But to be clear, this would still be a "Greater Hexagram" in my parlance because it is being used to tune the space to a specific magical force. According to Crowley's elemental attributions, that would mean the hexagrams would be used as follows:

Planet/Sign in Assiah	Earth	"Standard" Greater Ritual of the Hexagram (Earth).
Planet/Sign in Yetzirah	Air	Greater Ritual of the Hexagram with Air hexagrams.
Planet/Sign in Briah	Water	Greater Ritual of the Hexagram with Water hexagrams.
Planet/Sign in Atziluth	Fire	Greater Ritual of the Hexagram with Fire hexagrams.

To complicate this a little more, I have also come across the works of The Philosophers of Nature, who use a system in which the elements are assigned to the four worlds in density order - swapping the attributions given above for Yezirah and Briah. One of the things my magical working group did was compare explorations of the elements in the order shown above versus in density order, and the density order turned out to be far superior. But whether that only relates to the order of the elements in Malkuth, or can be extended to the structure of the four worlds, is still hard to say. So that's one more set of attributions to test when evaluating this method.

I have no idea if this schema will work, but it seems like a reasonable enough place to start experimenting. As far as applications go, that's an open question too. According to the Naples Arrangement, each of the planets is supposed to exist in all four worlds. There are some names in Liber 777 related to Yetzirah and Briah in Table III, but little instruction as far as how to put them to use in a practical sense. Or perhaps the worlds above Assiah are more mystical in nature - but that makes them a lot more difficult to test than practical operations where you can measure probabilities.

But here's one thing I think I am going to try. Sometimes when we work magick, we come across problems that are "sticky" - that is, they are especially hard to solve for some reason besides pure probability. For example, I'm a whiz at job spells. I always have been, and I've used that ability to build a pretty successful career in the mundane world. But I also have tried to start businesses on several occasions, and for whatever reason I magick doesn't seem to help me much. There are some other areas as well that seem to behave similarly, even though from an objective standpoint they are more likely than the kinds of things I can generally make happen.

Crowley once wrote that the secret to any seemingly intractable problem was to go "up a level," whatever that means. It certainly is open to interpretation, and it should also be noted that on other occasions he warned against "mixing the planes." But what if the solution to a "sticky" problem is to attack it from the next level up - that is, a Qabalistic world above Assiah. I'm going to have a go at some of those problems and see if I can get them to work by tuning my space to Yetzirah instead of Assiah, which is what I have done up to this point for all my practical work.

If any of you would like to give this a try and report your results, that would be great. More data is always better, and experimentation is how we move the study of magick forward.