Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Ritual Night Talk for January 4th

Here is the video of Tuesday's Ritual Night Talk, on the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram. The Greater Ritual of the Pentagram link is here and the donation link is here.


In this video I discuss the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram. Lesser rituals are foundational and are used to set up your magical working space. Greater rituals, on the other hand, are used to tune your magical working space to a particular energy or quality for specific operations. In the Thelemic system the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram is used for invoking and banishing elements, and to induce the vision of the Holy Guardian Angel.


Enjoy!


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4 comments:

master bates said...

@scott, I've always been confused as to why Tiphareth, the sphere of the blazing fiery Sun,has been assigned to the element of air, on the GD Qabalah. Any thoughts on this?

Scott Stenwick said...

Personally I am not a fan of assigning elements to sephiroth above Malkuth, My guess, though, is that the GD probably did it because of the arrangement of the four Qabalistic worlds. In the GD arrangement, above the Abyss you have Atziluth (Fire) and Briah (Water). Then, from Chesed down to Yesod, you have Yetzirah (Air), and finally Assiah (Earth) consists of Malkuth. These map to the standard arrangement of YHVH - Yod = Fire, Heh = Water, Vav = Air, and Heh final = Earth.

Saturn is attributed to Binah, but other than that Yetzirah includes the rest of the planetary realm. The Sun is the ruler of the planets, so if you map it as Yetzirah = Air = Sun, you can at least get there in terms of correspondences. But again, I don't really like it, even the GD elemental sephiroth attributions that were picked up by Crowley and used in the Thelemic system.

I don't see sephiroth as elemental unless we're talking about all four elements being attributed to Malkuth, which is why my Path of Initiation series is set up the way it is. Mapping Tiphareth to Air isn't the only one that's messy, most of them are.

master bates said...

Thanks Scott. It also explains, I assume, why we do the bizarre and counter intuitive elemental signs to the 4 directions, when performing the Resh adorations during the course of the day.

Scott Stenwick said...

Not exactly. Liber Resh is a whole other conversation. You absolutely do not need to do the Golden Dawn elemental grade signs with Liber Resh - that's just how a lot of people do it. The reason for that is that Liber Resh is an A.'. A.'. practice in which the written portion simply instructs the student to give "the sign of his grade" prior to the adorations.

https://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/lib200.htm

That's the full written text. Different people interpret it differently. The "sign of your grade" is presumably your A.'. A.'. grade, but if you're not in A.'. A.'., what do you do? Some OTO members give their OTO grade sign (at least in private, since as modes of recognition they are supposed to be kept secret). I've done it that way myself and it seems to work fine. If you do it that way, you will only be giving one sign (the grade sign) for all four quarters. There's actually not much support in Crowley's work for giving different signs for the different directions - but again, it's open to interpretation.

Note that you are NOT attributing Air to Tiphareth even if you use the Golden Dawn elemental signs. The arrangement is strictly elemental based on the "winds" model used in rituals like the LRP. So you would have:

East is Air, Sign of Zelator (2=9)
South is Fire, Sign of Philosophus (4=7)
West is Water, Sign of Practicus (3=8)
North is Earth, Sign of Neophyte (1=10)

Tiphareth would be the Signs of LVX, which correspond to Adeptus Minor (5=6). It's above the veil of paroketh, so it either transcends the elemental realm or is attributed to spirit.