Here's last night's Ritual Night Talk, covering Aleister Crowley's Liber Samekh. Crowley adapted Liber Samekh from the Stele of Jeu or Headless Rite from the Greek Magical Papyri into a Thelemic invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel. I covered some of that background last week. This week I walked through the ritual itself, along with Crowley's directions for use and some of my own findings from personally working with it.
@Scott, I don't understand why we are to go round the temple in a widdershins direction.
ReplyDeleteI thought the rule was widdershins when banishing and deosil when invoking.
And surely this is an invoking ritual, both of the elements and,of course,of the HGA.
I think the deal is that it is another way to get at something akin to the operant field idea. This is explicit in Liber Reguli, where you circumambulate widdershins and trace invoking pentagrams at the quarters. That would mean that the widdershins circumambulation represents the microcosmic banishing component of the rite.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion this is "cleaner" in the operant field model - banish microcosmic, invoke macrocosmic by means of LRP/Star Ruby followed by LRH/Star Sapphire. It's "messier" to keep using pentagrams in the winds orientation because there's still a lot of microcosmic symbolism there, and the macrocosmic shift only happens when you reach the solar symbolism of the Mark of the Beast and so forth.
I like setting that dynamic up at the start of any operation by means of the "lesser" foundational forms. But I do think that Crowley was working with and trying to represent a similar idea.
Are you saying that Liber Reguli should be performed before liber Samekh and after the usual operant field?
ReplyDeleteNo, I am saying that Liber Reguli has a lot of similarities with Liber Samekh because Reguli is a daily practice that prepares you for doing Liber Samekh. So that would mean you do Reguli for a period of time and when you think you are reading to start working directly on HGA contact you would switch from Reguli to Samekh.
ReplyDeleteThere are also some points in Reguli that suggest Crowley was trying to implement the microcosm/macrocosm unification that the operant field accomplishes within Reguli. Reguli was originally written as a daily practice ritual that did not include other ceremonial forms, or at least Crowley makes no mention of them.
I like to treat Reguli as analogous to the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for Malkuth, which means I precede it with the operant field in my own practice. I do the operant field with Samekh too, although Crowley probably intended it as a stand-alone practice as well.