Harpocrates and the Gnostic Mass

Harpocrates occupies an ambiguous spot in Thelemic theology. On the one hand, he is Aleph or Kether: spirit in its most transcendent form. On the other hand, he is Heh-final or Malkuth: spirit in Assiah. Kether is in Malkuth and vice versa—As Above, So Below, etc.

Kether is the “Child” of Nuit and any Hadit. “Nu being 56 and Had 9, their conjunction results in 65, Adonai, the Holy Guardian Angel.” (Old Comment on AL I.1)

In Liber LXV, V:65, we read:

So also is the end of the book, and the Lord Adonai is about it on all sides like a Thunderbolt, and a Pylon, and a Snake, and a Phallus, and in the midst thereof he is like the Woman that jetteth out the milk of the stars from her paps; yea, the milk of the stars from her paps.

Thus we may attribute each of the four elements to a letter of the formula ADNI in the following fashion:

Aleph = Air
Daleth = Fire
Nun = Water
Yod = Earth

If we assign these counterclockwise starting in the east, we get the usual attributions from the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram.

If we place Heh-final (Harpocrates) in the midst thereof, we get a pentagrammaton enumerating to 70, the value of Ayin, which is attributed to the Lord of the Gates of Matter, the Devil, and Baphomet. (See Gunther, Initiation in the Aeon of the Child (2009), p.152.) This matches with Crowley’s claim in The Book of Thoth that, “There is no doubt that this mysterious figure [Baphomet] is a magical image of this same idea [embodied in figures like the Fool and Harpocrates].”

Thus we might think of Baphomet (the “product” of the Gnostic Mass) as the form taken by the Holy Guardian Angel in Malkuth or perhaps in Assiah.

There is some further justification for this idea in Magick in Theory and Practice, Chapter V:

The first process is to find the I in the V — initiation, purification, finding the Secret Root of oneself, the epicene Virgin who is 10 (Malkuth) but spelt in full 20 (Jupiter).

This Yod in the “Virgin” expands to the Babe in the Egg by formulating the Secret Wisdom of Truth of Hermes in the Silence of the Fool. He acquires the Eye-Wand, beholding the acting and being adored. The Inverted Pentagram — Baphomet — the Hermaphrodite fully grown — begets himself on himself as V again.

If the particle the Priest breaks off the bread is I, Yod, or his Secret Root, then putting it in the cup of wine (“the essence of the joy of the Earth” or Malkuth) would be equivalent to creating the “Yod in the ‘Virgin'”. And indeed, this is the very process Crowley describes as leading to the formation or expression of this Yod as Baphomet.

Interestingly the colors attributed to spirit in Assiah are red, blue, yellow, black, and white, the colors worn by the five officers of the Gnostic Mass.

This is another way in which the Gnostic Mass can be seen as an invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel on the material plane (i.e., in a physical talisman like the Eucharist).