visual representation of the lesser ritual of the pentagram. Includes godnames in Assiah, the names of the Archangels, and the AHIHVH hexagram.

Visual representation of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram

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visual representation of the lesser ritual of the pentagram. Includes godnames in Assiah, the names of the Archangels, and the AHIHVH hexagram.

Those who regard this ritual as a mere device to invoke or banish spirits, are unworthy to possess it. Properly understood, it is the Medicine of Metals and the Stone of the Wise. 

—Aleister Crowley, The Palace of the World

This is a visual representation of the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram.

In the center is the Kabbalistic Cross with the Hebrew words Ateh, Malkuth, ve-Geburah, ve-Gedulah, le-Olahm, Amen. Ateh is white to represent Kether, Malkuth is yellow to represent Malkuth, ve-Geburah is orange to represent Geburah, ve-Gedulah is deep violet to represent Chesed, and le-Olahm/Amen is clear pink rose to represent Tiphareth.

Around the center are four orange scarlet pentagrams, one drawn in each quarter.

Arranged around that are the godnames, beginning at the top in the east and moving clockwise: YHVH, ADNI, AHIH, and AGLA.

Around that are the names of the Archangels invoked in each quarter: Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, and Auriel.

Each quarter is colored according to the element associated with it: air, fire, water, and earth.

Around that is the AHIHVH hexagram. As Crowley says in The Palace of the World:

[The six-rayed star] flames both above and beneath the magus, who is thus in a cube of 4 pentagrams and 2 hexagrams, 32 points in all. And 32 is [AHIHVH], the sacred word that expresses the Unity of the Highest and the Human.

For more on the significance of this hexagram, see Sepher Sephiroth, entries for 32 and 358, as well as Crowley’s introduction to Liber HHH in Magick.

AHIH and Liber V vel Reguli

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Elemental attributions in Reguli

When I was creating my Kether diagram, I was thinking about possible elemental attributions for AHIH, similar to how they’re attributed to ADNI and YHVH. A and I seem obvious; they could just be the same as they are in ADNI and ALHIM.

A – Air
H – ?
I – Earth
H – ?

That order—air, _________, earth, _________—looked familiar to me, though. And then I remembered, that’s the order that you draw the inverted pentagrams in Reguli. Maybe Crowley wrote Reguli to be an AHIH operation above the abyss, in which case the attributions are:

A – Air (Nuit)
H – Fire (Hadit)
I – Earth (Therion)
H – Water (Babalon)

If you swap the Hehs for mother letters, you get AShIM, which according to Sepher Sephiroth is “Angels of Malkuth”. Kether is in Malkuth and vice versa.

In the commentary to Reguli, we read:

I am God, I very God of very God; I go upon my way to work my Will; I have made Matter and Motion for my mirror; I have decreed for my delight that Nothingness should figure itself as twain, that I might dream a dance of names and natures, and enjoy the substance of simplicity by watching the wanderings of my shadows. I am not that which is not; I know not that which knows not; I love not that which loves not. For I am Love, whereby division dies in delight; I am Knowledge, whereby all parts, plunged in the whole, perish and pass into perfection; and I am that I am, the being wherein Being is lost in Nothing, nor designs to be but its Will to unfold its nature, its need to express its perfection in all possibilities, each phase a partial phantasm, and yet inevitable and absolute.

—Liber V vel Reguli

Not that I think it’s entirely clear what any of this means, but it seems to suggest one is performing the ritual from the standpoint of the identity of being and nothing in Kether, whose godname is AHIH, or “I am.”

Also, if it’s an above-the-abyss operation, that might help explain the inverted pentagrams. The Master of the Temple is the Hanged Man.

Harpocrates and the Gnostic Mass

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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).