Liber Shemesh

Liber Shemesh is a solar invocation combining elements of Aleister Crowley's Liber Resh vel Helios and liber V vel Reguli. Crowley explains in Liber O that following the general (that is, Lesser in his parlance) rituals of the pentagram and hexagram, the next step is to perform a Preliminary Invocation. Elsewhere he writes that this preliminary invocation step identifies the magician with the divine, and it is this identification that allows them to conjure spirits successfully.

Along those lines, Crowley experimented with modifying the Stele of Jeu from the PGM into the Bornless Ritual, published in the Crowley/Mathers edition of The Goetia in 1904. He would later adapt his Bornless Ritual into Liber Samekh, a similar ritual designed to be performed daily over a six-month period to facilitate the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel in a procedure that he believed to be analogous that of the Abramelin operation.

In the 1920’s Crowley developed Liber V vel Reguli, which he described as “an incantation proper to invoke the Energies of the Aeon of Horus, adapted for the daily use of the Magician of whatever grade.” When I first started looking into Liber Reguli, I was struck by its structural similarities to Liber Samekh and to the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for Malkuth, the version of the GRP that employs all four elemental pentagrams.

As I discussed in my article on the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram, you always do the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram for something, either one of the four elements or the sephira Malkuth. The Malkuth version, which is often found in books describing the ritual, uses pentagrams for all four elements drawn to their corresponding directions. This version is specific to Malkuth and does not served as a "souped up" Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram, since the Greater Ritual of the Pentagram is alway specific and the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is always general and foundational.