The Histories of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

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The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP) is the best known of all

the rituals that have emerged from the modern occult revival. It was originally

developed and popularised by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the

late-Victorian period; and it continues to be found in numerous esoteric con-

texts today, not least because popular introductions to ceremonial magic and

related subjects continue to teach beginners the LBRP in what is recognisably

its Golden Dawn form.

1. This is true of e.g. Duquette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, 58 and Enochian Vision Magick,

191–92; Rankine, Climbing The Tree of Life, 247–51; Christopher, Kabbalah, Magic and the Great

Work of Self-Transformation, 18–22; Kraig, Modern Magick, 39–49; and King and Skinner, Techniques

of High Magic. It is also obviously true of sources that explicitly situate themselves within the

A Microcosm of the Esoteric Revival:

The Histories of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram

Graham John Wheeler

[email protected]

Abstract

This article examines the sources that underlie the best known of all the rituals that have emerged

from the modern esoteric revival: the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP), which

was formulated in the late-Victorian period by the creators of the Hermetic Order of the Golden

Dawn. A close study reveals that the sources of the LBRP are extraordinarily varied; and, in some

cases, extremely old. This eclecticism shows how religious rituals and other “invented traditions”

tend to be assembled from a bricolage of pre-existing materials, part familiar and part mysterious.

The Golden Dawn’s eclecticism also served the practical function of bridging the gap between the

Christian and pagan interests/allegiances within its membership. Moreover, the construction of

the LBRP provides an example of how older, more fluid traditions of esoteric knowledge came

to be codified and standardised by the Golden Dawn in the context of the modern occult revival.

Keywords: esotericism; occult revival; religious ritual; ritual; ritual magic

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In this article, we will undertake a detailed examination of the LBRP. As

our point of departure, we may take the memoirs of one of the better-known

recruits of the Golden Dawn: the writer Arthur Machen (1863–1947). Machen

wrote scathingly about his involvement with the order, which he called the

“Twilight Star”. One of his criticisms was that it was an essentially modern

construct – an incoherent assemblage of materials from disparate traditions:

Any critical mind, with a tinge of occult reading, should easily have concluded that

here was no ancient order. . . . For ancient rituals, whether orthodox or heterodox, are

founded on one mythos and on one mythos only. They are grouped about some fact, actual

or symbolic, as the ritual of Freemasonry is said to have as its centre certain events

connected with the building of King Solomon’s Temple, and they keep within their

limits. But the Twilight Star embraced all mythologies and all mysteries of all races and

all ages, and “referred” or “attributed” them to each other and proved that they all came

to much the same thing; and that was enough! That was not the ancient frame of mind;

it was not even the 1809 frame of mind. But it was very much the eighteen-eighty and

later frame of mind.

This article will examine the evidential basis for Machen’s intuition. We will

trace the disparate sources and origins of the different parts of the LBRP,

analysing in turn the successive component parts of the ritual. We are going

to unscramble the egg. This is, perhaps surprisingly, an exercise that has not

been undertaken before. The LBRP will serve in our analysis as a microcosmic

exemplar of processes that operated more broadly when Victorian occultists

sought to revive or recreate the Western esoteric tradition in modern times.

Golden Dawn tradition, such as Cicero and Cicero, The Essential Golden Dawn, 147–49. One

result of this is that there are numerous videos featuring the LBRP posted on YouTube. See also

Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, 243 on the importance of the ritual.

2. Machen, Things Near and Far, 153–54. The significance of 1809 is that it was the date of a

watermark found on some leaves of the Cipher MS on which the order’s rituals were based.

Machen’s words echo Aleister Crowley’s complaint, in his publication of the rituals, of “the

‘mixed-biscuit’ type of symbol which is . . . chosen so as to ‘show off’ superficial knowledge”

(“The Temple of Solomon the King (Book II)”, 266 fn.).

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The Golden Dawn was established in London in 1888. It was the first group

of the English ritual magic revival to experience any degree of success. The struc-

ture of the order was essentially masonic, being based on initiation into private

lodges (or “temples”) through a system of hierarchical grades. The Golden Dawn’s

rituals form a highly elaborate and rather confusing system based on complex,

interlocking religious and mystical symbolism. The rites may be seen variously

as an impressive monument of scholarship and erudition; a fine piece of late-

Romantic performance art; or, if one shares Machen’s perspective, a confusing,

semi -coherent mishmash that will have served to confuse rather than to enlighten.

In any event, the Golden Dawn system was distinctively a product of its time.

The Golden Dawn rituals had their origin in the “Cipher MS”, a mysterious

document which takes its name from the fact that it was written in a cipher

derived from the Polygraphiae (1561) of the German abbot and scholar Johannes

Trithemius. The Cipher MS came to light under disputed circumstances

through the offices of the physician and Freemason William Wynn Westcott

(1848–1925).

The document’s authorship remains unconfirmed, but it may

well have been composed by another Mason, the recently deceased occultist

Kenneth Mackenzie (1833–1886).

It contains only a skeletal outline of rituals

and doctrine: for example, it prefigures the LBRP and the other pentagram ritu-

als of the developed Golden Dawn system, but it nowhere sets them out in full.

The Golden Dawn rites are a strange mixture of scholarly research and mys-

ticism: “the product of antiquarian, if not scholarly, research motivated by a

desire to experience supernatural communion with Divinity and, indeed, to

3. For a more favourable assessment than Machen’s, see e.g. Bogdan, Western Esotericism, 121–22

(quoting in turn Gerald Yorke to the same effect).

4. The classic account and analysis may be found in Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, Chapter

1. Cf. also e.g. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Scrapbook, esp. Chapter 2. In this article, the pages of

the Cipher MS are cited from Runyon ed. Secrets of the Golden Dawn Cypher Manuscript. The other

standard edition of the MS is Kuntz ed. The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript.

5. This theory was advocated by, amongst others, the leading Golden Dawn historian R.

A. Gilbert: see “Provenance unknown: A tentative solution”; “Supplement to ‘Provenance

Unknown’”; “From Cipher to Enigma”; and The Golden Dawn Scrapbook, 5–6.

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become divine.”

There is still very little published work on the documentary

sources of the rituals. The process by which they were composed remains obscure:

the evidence simply does not survive. Most of the credit for putting the rituals

into their final form is normally given to Westcott’s protégé Samuel Liddell

MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918). Mathers was an eccentric who spent many

hours in the British Museum’s Reading Room trawling through the Western

esoteric tradition for material to revive. He was not necessarily solely responsible

for elaborating the Golden Dawn system – in particular, it has been argued that

Westcott had a greater role than has generally been recognised

– but this article

will proceed on the assumption that he may be credited as the principal hand.

The LBRP was the only ritual (other than the grade ceremonies) that was

revealed to members of the Golden Dawn’s “first” or “outer” order, which

prepared members for entry into the more exclusive “second” or “inner” order.

The LBRP was “the nearest thing to a purely magical ritual found within the

First Order curriculum”.

It was disclosed to neophytes immediately after their

initiation, in order that they “may have protection against opposing forces, and

also that they may form some idea of how to attract and to come into commu-

nication with spiritual and invisible things”.

Members were counselled to per-

form the ritual in the evening; a slightly different version, geared to invoking

rather than banishing, was to be performed in the morning.

In the context of

the Golden Dawn system, the LBRP and its invoking equivalent sat alongside

a set of other, similar rites known as the Supreme Ritual of the Pentagram and

the Rituals of the Hexagram. In addition to daily performances of the LBRP,

Golden Dawn initiates were recommended to use the ritual for cleansing before

6. Fuller, “Anglo-Catholic Clergy”, 189.

7. See Gilbert, “From Cipher to Enigma”.

8. Gilbert, The Golden Dawn: Twilight of the Magicians, 60. See also Butler, Victorian Occultism, 35, 38.

9. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 3:11.

10. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 1:107. It may also be noted here that a cut-down version of the

rite appears in the well known “Bornless Ritual” (3:262).

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a magical operation; as a “protection against impure magnetism”; and as part of

a technique to “get rid of obsessing or disturbing thoughts”; they were also told

to visualise themselves performing it as an exercise in meditation.

As is well known, the Golden Dawn splintered into pieces from around 1900;

its successor orders, such as the Stella Matutina and the Alpha et Omega, were

mostly moribund by the outbreak of World War II. Some of the Golden Dawn’s

rituals appeared in a pirated edition in Aleister Crowley’s periodical The Equinox

from 1909–13. The rest were published in 1937–40 by Israel Regardie, who had

accessed them through his membership of the Stella Matutina. Interestingly,

Aleister Crowley played a significant role in the preservation and transmission of

the LBRP. He incorporated it into his Liber O (1909), which seems to have been

the first time that it appeared in print. He subsequently produced a version of the

ritual in an ancient Greek idiom, the “Star Ruby”, in Liber XXV (1913); as well as

publishing a lesser known adaptation of it in Liber V vel Reguli (1929).

Curiously enough, the next couple of publications of the LBRP came from

Christians rather than Crowleyans. In 1915, an initiate of the Stella Matutina,

Father J. C. Fitzgerald, published a pared-down and Christianised version of the

rite.

Subsequently, in 1930, the Christian esotericist Dion Fortune publicised a

key element of the LBRP. In her book Psychic Self-Defence, Fortune recommended

the use of banishing earth pentagrams as protective tools; and she described

herself as using pentagrams in combination with certain “Names of Power that

are unsuitable for disclosure in these pages”.

As we shall see, these are more or

less obvious references to key elements of the LBRP. After Fortune, there came

Israel Regardie, who published the text of the LBRP in his Tree of Life in 1932;

following which he included it in his full edition of the Golden Dawn rituals.

11. Regardie. The Golden Dawn, 1:107–8; 3:11, 15; see also 3.28.

12. See Fuller, “Anglo-Catholic Clergy”, 305–7.

13. Fortune, Psychic Self-Defence, Chapter 18 (pages unnumbered).

14. Regardie, The Tree of Life, 166.

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Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, subsequently imported the LBRP into

early versions of the Wiccan sacred text, the Book of Shadows.

Although the

ritual did not survive in its complete form as an established part of the Wiccan

tradition, Gardner did bequeath to Wicca various elements that are found within

it, including the use of pentagrams and the practice of casting a magical circle

by reference to the cardinal points of the compass.

In broader perspective, the

first mass–market magical “self-help” book to recommend the LBRP seems to

have been The Magician (1959), which was published by one of Dion Fortune’s

followers, W. E. Butler.

As we have already noted, the LBRP has since become

ubiquitous in popular introductions to esotericism and ceremonial magic.

We may now move on to examine the component parts of the LBRP itself.

We will employ the ritual text contained in Israel Regardie’s original publication

of the Golden Dawn papers, which appears to be essentially the same as that

used by the original order.

15. See e.g. page 7 of “Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical”, Gardner’s original MS which underlay the

Book of Shadows: a version is available online at www.oldways.org/documents/geraldgardner/

ye_bok_of_ye_art_magical.pdf [accessed 17 May 2019].

16. Gardner was not, however, concerned with banishment. He noted that ceremonial magicians’

circles, like that cast in the LBRP, were regarded as being protective, whereas a witches’ circle “is to

keep in the power which they believe they can raise from their own bodies and to prevent it from

being dissipated” (Witchcraft Today, 26). Contrast the words of Israel Regardie: “The Lesser Banishing

Ritual of the Pentagram is the ceremonial magician’s way of casting a circle of protection” (The

Middle Pillar, 178). As a matter of historical accuracy, there is doubt as to whether circles did originally

have a protective function for ritual magicians: see Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 161.

17. See Butler, Magic and The Magician, 228–31.

18. See Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 1:105–6. There have been no advances in research that have

led to any modifications of the text in subsequent editions of Regardie’s work. The text of the

LBRP was not included in R. G. Torrens’ separate publication of the Golden Dawn rites in

1973 (The Secret Rituals). The earliest text of the LBRP which the present author has been able to

locate is found in a collection of MSS held at Freemasons’ Hall in London (call number GBR

1991 GD 2/1/13). The author intends to analyse these MSS further in a later publication; but

it is sufficient to note here that their contents are consistent with a dating in the 1890s. The

discussion below will indicate a couple of minor respects in which this very early text differs

from Regardie’s.

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The “Qabbalistic Cross”

Take a steel dagger in the right hand. Face East.

Touch thy forehead

and say ATEH (thou art)

Touch thy breast

and say MALKUTH (the Kingdom)

Touch thy right shoulder

and say VE-GEBURAH (and the Power)

Touch thy left shoulder

and say VE-GEDULAH (and the Glory)

Clasp thy hands before thee and say LE-OLAM (for ever)

Dagger between fingers, point up and say AMEN.

This is the first part of the LBRP: it was used elsewhere in the Golden Dawn

system in group rituals.

The first thing to note is that the ritual script is written partly in a foreign language

(Hebrew), with English archaisms (“thy”, “thee”). These unusual linguistic features

are characteristic of sacred texts in different cultures. Archaic English would have

been familiar to Victorian Englishmen as a sacral vernacular from the Anglican lit-

urgy and the King James Bible. Hebrew is obviously the sacred language of Judaism;

and for Golden Dawn members it would have had, more specifically, associations

with the Kabbalah. It bears noting, however, that the Hebrew elements of the LBRP

are linguistically problematic. It would be more correct to use the definite article

ha in front of the names of the three sephiroth Malkuth, Geburah and Gedulah. The

Sephardic pronunciation is used, but again, in an imperfect form. For example, in

the names of the sephiroth, Malkuth is rendered in the correct fashion – contrast

the Ashkenazi Malkus – but Gevurah is rendered as Geburah. This is proof, if proof

were needed, that we are dealing with a constructed ritual put together by gentiles.

(One might also make the point that there is no sign in the LBRP of the Aramaic

language, which is just as important as Hebrew in the Kabbalistic tradition.)

19. See Regardie, The Golden Dawn, e.g. 2:158, 160, 197.

20. See e.g. Mopsik, “Late Judaeo-Aramaic”.

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The ritual begins with the practitioner facing east (and indeed east was a place

of significance in other Golden Dawn ceremonies too). It is well known that the

traditional Christian liturgy, in both its Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox

forms, was performed facing an altar located in the east. This eastward-facing

posture was invested with eschatological significance: one turns to the east to

greet the returning Lord.

The posture is far older than Christianity, however.

It may be traced back to ancient pagan practices – not only from the Graeco-

Roman world, but also from the Near East, India and Africa – which were linked

to sun-worship.

It is noteworthy in this context that the Cipher MS associates

the east with the rising sun: the ‘golden dawn’, so to speak.

The cardinal points,

moreover, have symbolic meanings in Freemasonry, a point to which we will

return. As will become clear, this congeries of Christian, pagan and masonic sym-

bolism is entirely typical of the LBRP and of the Golden Dawn system generally.

As we have intimated, the three main nouns mentioned in the text are

Kabbalistic. Malkuth and Geburah are the names of sephiroth, while Gedulah

(greatness) is an alternative term for the sephirah Chesed. In carrying out the

prescribed physical actions, the magus is identifying his physical body with

the Tree of Life, in which Malkuth is at the base and Geburah and Chesed are on

either side of the central pillar. Despite these plainly Kabbalistic associations,

however, the basic framework of this part of the LBRP would seem to have a

Christian inspiration. Not only does it involve making the sign of the cross

like a Catholic or Orthodox believer,

the text recited by the initiate strongly

21. This point was made by no less a person than Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope

Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, esp. 68–70. Note also, in this context, his point at 83:

“very early on the east was linked with the sign of the Cross”.

22. See Dölger, Sol Salutis, 20–60.

23. See pages 3 and 5.

24. At some point, the direction of the horizontal part of the cross was altered from the Roman

Catholic left-to-right to the Eastern Orthodox right-to-left. This is apparent from a comparison

of the Regardie text with the earlier text mentioned in n16 above. Oddly, however, the earlier

text adopts the Orthodox tradition of making the cross with the thumb and the first two

fingers, whereas Regardie’s does not (Catholics generally use the whole hand).

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resembles the concluding part, or doxology, of the Lord’s Prayer (Pater Noster)

in its Protestant iteration. This text ultimately comes from the Bible, from

Matthew 6.13:

For yours is the kingdom [basileia], and the power [dynamis], and the glory [doxa], for

ever. Amen.

Bible scholars have long known that this is a problematic text. It does not

appear in the earliest surviving MSS of the Gospel of Matthew, nor in the

parallel version of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke. It appears only in later MSS of

the Byzantine textual tradition.

It is probably an interpolation, and it is left

out by most new Bible translations, just as it was absent from the Vulgate and

the traditional Roman Catholic liturgy. Nevertheless, the doxology has a long

history. The early Christian treatise known as the Didache (1st/2nd century CE),

which was influenced by Matthew’s Gospel, contains a version of the Lord’s

prayer with the following line:

For yours is the power [dynamis] and the glory [doxa] for ever.

It is quite likely that the doxology was inspired by a text from the Hebrew Bible,

from the First Book of Chronicles – the same text, in fact, that Kabbalistic

rabbis believed disclosed the names of the sephiroth.

The relevant passage

consists of the following words, which are attributed to King David:

Yours, O Lord, are the greatness [gedulah; LXX megalosyne], the power [geburah; dynamis],

the glory [tiphereth; kauchema], the victory [netzach; nike], and the majesty [hôd; ischys]; for

all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom [mamlakah], O

Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.

25. See e.g. Liefeld, “The Lord’s Prayer”, 162.

26. Didache, 8.2. See further e.g. Keith, “Lord’s Prayer”.

27. See e.g. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, 161, 263.

28. 1 Chron. 29.11; translation from the New Revised Standard Version. The word “kingdom”

does not appear as a noun in the LXX, so there is no correspondence with basileia in the Lord’s

Prayer doxology.

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We can be quite sure that the creators of the Golden Dawn knew about this

passage, and the consequent correspondence between the Lord’s Prayer doxology

and the Kabbalistic sephiroth. Here is a translation of a passage from the central

Kabbalistic text known as the Zohar, which refers to the passage from Chronicles:

663. And in the book of the dissertation of the school of Rav Yeyeva the Elder it is thus

said and established, that the beginning of the beard cometh from the supernal CHSD,

Chesed, Mercy.

664. Concerning which it is written, “LK IHVH HGDVLH VHGBVRH VHTHPARTH,

Leka, Tetragrammaton, Ha-Gedulah, Ve-Ha-Geburah, Ve-Ha-Tiphereth, Thine, O Tetragram-

maton, Gedulah (another name for Chesed), Geburah, and Tiphereth (the names of the fourth,

fth, and sixth Sephiroth, which Protestants usually add to the end of the Lord’s Prayer, substituting,

however, Malkuth for Gedulah), Thine, O Tetragrammaton, are the Mercy, the Power, and

the Glory (or Beauty).” And all these are so, and thus it (the beard) commenceth.

The significance of this translation is that it comes from none other than Sam-

uel MacGregor Mathers; and it was first published in 1887, just before the in-

ception of the Golden Dawn. Indeed, Mathers’ translation of the Zohar was the

first translation to appear in English (albeit it was only a partial one, based on

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s earlier translations into Latin).

Yet the occultist who first noticed the resemblance between the Lord’s Prayer

doxology and the Kabbalistic sephiroth was not Mathers. It was Éliphas Lévi.

Lévi had been a Roman Catholic seminarian, so he would perhaps have been

struck by the fact that the doxology in the Greek New Testament which he

and other clerics studied in seminary was omitted from the church-approved

prayers that ordinary Catholics recited and listened to in the course of their

daily observances. This anomaly seems to have set him thinking: perhaps the

doxology had a mystical significance and had been deliberately withheld from

the uninitiated. He wrote:

29. Mathers, The Kabbalah Unveiled, 327. The passage comes from Portion Ha’azinu, Chapter 41

in “The Lesser Holy Assembly”.

30. See Huss, “Translations of the Zohar”, 99–100.

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The sign of the cross adopted by Christians does not belong to them exclusively. This

also is kabbalistic and represents the oppositions and tetradic equilibrium of the ele-

ments. We see by the occult versicle of the Lord’s Prayer . . . that it was originally made

after two manners, or at least that it was characterised by two entirely different formulae,

one reserved for priests and initiates, the other imparted to neophytes and the profane.

For example, the initiate said raising his hand to his forehead, “For thine,” then added

“is,” and continuing as he brought down his hand to his breast, “the kingdom,” then to

the left shoulder, “the justice,” afterwards to the right shoulder, “and the mercy” — then

clasping his hands, he added, “in the generating ages.” Tibi sunt Malchut et Geburah et Chesed

per aeonas — a sign of the cross which is absolutely and magnificently kabbalistic, which the

profanations of Gnosticism have lost completely to the official and militant Church. This

sign, made after this manner, should precede and terminate the conjuration of the four.

Mathers and the other Golden Dawn leaders were quite familiar with Lévi’s

work; and the fact that they replicated the Hebrew solecisms in the passage

above makes the influence almost certain.

We may observe that Lévi was seeking to add two additional components to

the Kabbalistic symbology of the sephirah and the Lord’s Prayer doxology. First,

he made reference to the “elements”, meaning the four elements of the classical

Greek philosophers: earth, air, fire and water. The “conjuration of the four”

denotes the magician’s endeavour to impose his will on the four elements by

undertaking various exorcisms and prayers – which were, in fact, borrowed into

other parts of the Golden Dawn system. This “conjuration” exercise had deep

roots. The grimoires of Christian ritual magic used the idiom of conjuration

or exorcism for both spirits and objects; and the tradition of exorcising objects

goes back at least as far as patristic Christian baptismal ceremonies.

The four

elements will become more important in the subsequent parts of the LBRP. For

the present, we may note that, aside from their pagan Greek antecedents, they

featured in traditional Jewish thought, including the Kabbalistic tradition.

31. Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 222.

32. See Young, A History of Exorcism, 30–40.

33. See e.g. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, esp. 1.1.3.10–4.2. For a Kabbalistic example, see the

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It may also be observed here that Lévi considered four to be a sacred number,

a notion that goes back to the ancient Pythagoreans and their doctrine of the

tetrakys. As we will see, the number four is embedded in the structure of the

LBRP: it relates not only to the four elements, but also to the four cardinal

directions, four divine names and four archangels.

The second new component that Lévi added was the Roman Catholic sign

of the cross. (The use of the dagger as a tool to perform the crossing motion

may come from the tradition of Solomonic magic.)

Cruciform symbolism is

a recurring theme of the Golden Dawn rites – there is the cross, the crucifix,

the crux ansata; and in the ritual of the Adeptus Minor grade, the initiate is

physically bound to a cross. Superficially, this is unsurprising, given that the

Golden Dawn originated among Christians in a Christian country. But the

crosses in the Golden Dawn system are not (or not necessarily) the cross of

Christ. In general terms, of course, the cross may be seen as one of the basic

trans-cultural symbols of humankind;

but we can be more specific than that

in identifying what it might have meant to Mathers and his colleagues. In

the footnotes to the passage quoted above, Lévi cites sources pointing to the

Rosicrucian and Kabbalistic associations of the cross. For other contemporary

writers, its associations were outright anti-Christian: there existed a small but

significant literature which maintained that the cross was of pagan origin.

As we will see, the cross was also specifically linked in the Golden Dawn rites

quotation from the Zohar in the next section.

34. See e.g. Key of Solomon, 2.8. The use of the dagger, however, seems to be a later development.

The earlier version of the LBRP text mentioned at n16 above states more vaguely that the tool

should be “any convenient steel instrument, or other weapon”; and that an initiate of the

Adeptus Minor grade should use his magical sword or lotus wand. In his first publication of the

LBRP in 1932, Regardie wrote that “the sword to represent the dispelling critical faculty of the

Ruach [a Kabbalistic term for one of the levels of the soul] is usually the instrument employed

in this connection” (The Tree of Life, 166).

35. See e.g. Chevalier and Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, s.v. “cross”.

36. See e.g. Hislop, The Two Babylons, Chapter 5, Section 6; Ward, History of the Cross; Thomas

Inman, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism.

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to the Egyptian deity Osiris. The cruciform motifs in the Golden Dawn, then,

offer a good example of the skilfully ambiguous or syncretic way in which the

order’s creators made use of the diverse stock of religious symbology that they

had available to them.

In conclusion, the origins of the first part of the LBRP lie in a series of

eclectic connections made by nineteenth-century occultists between such

disparate bodies of material as Kabbalistic mysticism rooted in the Hebrew

Bible; devotional observances from the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox

branches of Christianity; and the legacy of ancient pagan religion. This is a

surprisingly extensive yield from a text consisting of only 64 words.

The pentagrams

Make in the Air toward the East the invoking PENTAGRAM as shown and, bringing the

point of the dagger to the centre of the Pentagram, vibrate the DEITY NAME — YOD

HE VAU HE — imagining that your voice carries forward to the East of the Universe.

Holding the dagger out before you, go to the South, make the Pentagram and vibrate

similarly the deity name — ADONAI.

Go to the West, make the Pentagram and vibrate EHEIEH.

Go to the North, make the Pentagram and vibrate AGLA.

Return to the East and complete your circle by bringing the dagger point to the centre

of the first Pentagram.

The most prominent feature of this part of the LBRP is the use of the four

Hebrew names of God. We may note that a different set of divine names (in

both Hebrew and the “Enochian” language of John Dee and Edward Kelley)

is used in the LBRP’s sister ritual, the Supreme Ritual of the Pentagram. These

other names include “Elohim” in the south and “El” in the west. In truth,

using the names of God or gods in magic is a very old practice. Such names

were employed in practical Kabbalah; and Hebrew divine and angelic names

are attested as being widely used in ancient Jewish magic. Interestingly, gentiles

were already borrowing them in this early period. Gideon Bohak has written:

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In addition to the Tetragrammaton and its derivatives, we find many of the old epithets

of the Jewish God, including Adonai, Sabaot, El, Shaddai, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (“I-am-who-

I-am”), or just Ehyeh, Holy Holy Holy, the God of the battle-formations (of Israel), the

God of retributions, the One who sits upon the Cherubim, the God of the spirits for

all flesh, and many others

This is all of a piece with the Golden Dawn’s practices in the LBRP and other

rituals. Nevertheless, the LBRP does not merely contain divine names: it presents

us, specifically, with four divine names which are distributed at the four cardinal

points around a magic circle. This arrangement requires some further analysis.

The concept that different spiritual entities are associated with the cardinal

directions has ancient roots. For example, one Graeco-Egyptian magical papyrus

contains the following passage, in which four names of spirits are associated

with the “four regions”:

Eros, darling PASSALEON ÉT, send me my personal [angel] tonight to give me

information about whatever the concern is. For I do this on order from PANCHOUCHI

THASSOU at whose order you are to act, because I conjure you by the four regions of

the universe, APSAGÉL CHACHOU MERIOUT MERMERIOUT

The entities named in this spell are evidently spirits or daemons rather than

gods. This association of lesser spiritual entities with the cardinal points also

survived in the Christian Solomonic tradition, from the Hygromanteia onwards.

More pertinent to our current inquiry, however, is the fact that names of God

are used in the Solomonic tradition for purposes including (but not confined

to) empowering magic circles.

Magic circles themselves are extremely old, their

roots lying in antiquity.

Such are the origins of this part of the LBRP.

37. Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 306. See also Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton, 169–72.

38. Taken from the spell at PGM VII.478–90 (translation from Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri).

39. See e.g. the digitised examples of Solomonic magic circles (together with the associated text)

among the illustrations at http://www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/ksol.htm> and <http://

www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/ksol2.htm (Key of Solomon) and http://www.sacred-texts.

com/grim/lks/lks08.htm (Lesser Key of Solomon) [all accessed 17 May 2019].

40. See generally, on cardinal points and circles in ancient Graeco-Egyptian magic, Skinner,

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How much of this history would Mathers have known? As we shall see, he

was certainly familiar with Solomonic magic. In addition, by at least the turn

of the twentieth century, contemporary scholarship had traced the origin of

the protective magic circles of the Christian grimoires back to ancient Assyria.

It remains unclear whether Mathers knew about this research, but at least one

of the relevant scholars knew about him.

As for the Greek Magical Papyri,

Mathers’ knowledge of them would necessarily have been limited: some of the

material from the papyri had been made public; but they were not published in

anything like full form until Karl Preisendanz’ Teubner edition of 1928–31.

Mathers was handling materials that had older, and perhaps more interesting,

origins than he realised.

If Mathers himself had been asked to explain this part of the LBRP, it is likely

that he would have made reference to Freemasonry. Freemasonry is the most

historically immediate source for the circular motion that is prescribed for the

initiate. Circumambulation appears on a number of occasions in the Golden

Dawn rituals, and several times it is said expressly to represent the course of the

sun.

The cardinal points were linked together in a pattern of solar symbolism: in

the Neophyte ritual, it was explained to initiates that the east is “the place where

the Sun rises”; the south is the place of “Heat and Dryness”; the west is where

the setting sun brings about an “increase of Darkness and decrease of Light”; and

the north symbolises “Cold and Moisture”.

In the same way, Freemasonry at-

tributed symbolic meanings, related to the path of the sun, to the cardinal points,

Techniques of Graeco-Egyptian Magic, 70–74, 82–90. See also Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages,

159–61 on magic circles in later times.

41. See Thompson, Semitic Magic, lx, where the eminent archaeologist Reginald Campbell

Thompson makes a gratuitously slighting reference to Mathers’ translation of the Book of the

Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.

42. The publication history of the papyri is summarised in the Introduction to Betz, The Greek

Magical Papyri.

43. See Regardie, The Golden Dawn, e.g. 2:267, 277, 3.58. See also the link which is made with

“the course of the sun” in relation to the Lesser Rituals of the Hexagram at 3:36.

44. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 2:14–16.

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and used clockwise circumambulation in its ceremonies. The traditional masonic

ritual texts affirm that “the sun rises in the East”, the south symbolises “the Sun

at its meridian”, the west “mark[s] the setting sun”, and the north is the place

of darkness.

One influential nineteenth -century masonic encyclopaedia declares

that this symbolism “is a portion of the old sun worship, of which we find so

many relics in Gnosticism, in Hermetic philosophy, and in Freemasonry”.

other esotericists have observed, circumambulation may be found in the rituals

of a number of religions around the world, with the clockwise, solar patterning

being associated in particular with Hindu and Tibetan traditions.

The cardinal points have other meanings in the LBRP besides representing

the stations of the sun. We may reiterate that a God-name is assigned to each of

them; and we must also mention here the links between the cardinal points and

the four classical elements. In the Golden Dawn rituals, east is associated with

air, south with fire, west with water and north with earth. These associations are

all part of a broader pattern of mystical correspondences – a subject of intense

interest for Golden Dawn occultists. It is well known that a staple of the Western

esoteric tradition is the enterprise of identifying and exploiting correspondences

between different ideas and things located in different realms of reality. This

enterprise has been central to Western esotericism and magic since antiquity,

when Middle- and Neo-Platonist philosophers and theurgists posited that the

cosmos was permeated by synthémata or symbola (“signs”, “signatures”) of the

gods. The Golden Dawn ranks alongside the Catholic Reformation-era scholar

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) as one of the most influential gener-

ators of correspondences in history. Its developed system of correspondences

was immortalised in 777, an enormous and disorderly collection of matches

45. The relevant texts have, of course, been published repeatedly, and there are minor variations

in the wording. The quotations above are taken from http://www.stichtingargus.nl/vrijmetsela-

rij/ovo_remul1.html [accessed 17 May 2019].

46. Mackey, An Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, 535; see also 165–66, 237–38 and 727.

47. See e.g. Guénon, The Great Triad, 50–51.

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between Hebrew letters, Kabbalistic concepts, gods, colours, gemstones, tarot

cards, drugs and other things besides, which was subsequently published (in

lightly edited form) by Aleister Crowley in 1909.

To return to the correspondences embedded in the LBRP – one Golden

Dawn text explains the attribution of the elements to the cardinal points by

referring to the winds:

This attribution is derived from the nature of the winds. For the Easterly wind is of the

Nature of Air more especially. The South Wind bringeth into action the nature of Fire.

West winds bring with them moisture and rain. North winds are cold and dry like Earth.

This explanation is surprising and idiosyncratic. It allows us to identify the

ultimate source with a high degree of confidence: a second-century CE treatise

known as the Tetrabiblos which was composed by Claudius Ptolemy, the ancient

Graeco-Roman astronomer and astrologer. In the Tetrabiblos, the winds are

expressly associated with the four cardinal points: the east wind being dry, the

south hot, the west damp and the north cold.

So much for the correspondences between the cardinal points and the

elements. How do the names of God fit into the picture? One explanation for

the allocation of the divine names to the different directions makes reference to

the pattern of solar symbolism that we have already mentioned:

The name of YHVH, the Tetragrammaton, is vibrated after the pentagram is drawn in

the east. . . . Tradition tells us that YHVH is a symbol for the highest, most divine name

of God. Therefore it is appropriate that this name is vibrated in the east, the place of

the dawning of the light. . . .

Adonai, meaning “lord,” is the name vibrated after the figure is traced in the south. . . . The

name “lord” carries with it connotations of high rank, especially power, rulership, and dominion.

Here the name is associated with fire and the south, the direction of the sun’s greatest strength. . . .

48. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 3:14. The same text also puts forward an alternative, “Zodiacal”

set of correspondences: fire-east, earth-south, air-west and water-north.

49. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, 13. The third-century alchemical author Zosimos of Panopolis sub-

sequently also wrote about correspondences between the elements and the cardinal points,

mentioning specifically east-air and south-fire (On the Letter Omega, 6).

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The name of Eheieh is vibrated after the western pentagram is drawn. Eheieh, meaning

“I am,” is the divine name of Kether. The west is the place of sunset, the completion of

the sun’s journey across the sky. . . . The west is a symbol of the completion of the soul’s

journey and the goal of spiritual growth. Therefore the west is an emblem of Kether, the

goal which we seek throughout our incarnation on earth and which we hope to reach

at the end of life. . . .

After the northern pentagram is drawn, the word Agla is vibrated. . . . [T]he sentence

from which Agla is formed is Atah Gebur Le-Olam Adonai. This means, “Thou art great

forever, my Lord,” which is a powerful invocation — clearly calling upon all the might of

Adonai to aid and guide us through the darkness of things unknown. Agla is vibrated in

the north because that is the direction of the greatest symbolic cold, darkness, shadow,

illusion, and the unfamiliar.

It has not proven possible to find evidence of this interpretation being advanced

by any commentator prior to Israel Regardie in the 1930s. It may be original

to him: it certainly has the feeling of being a retrofitted explanation. If it is,

the original reasons for Mathers’ allocation of the divine names to the cardi-

nal points must remain a matter of conjecture. Perhaps the allocation was not

based on any earlier source. Perhaps it was purely arbitrary. As we shall shortly

see, Mathers was not necessarily punctilious about such things.

In any event, despite the use of authentic Hebrew God-names, the correspon-

dences found in this part of the LBRP are not well-founded in the Kabbalistic

tradition. The Jewish Kabbalistic sages certainly posited correspondences between

the cardinal points, the elements, the names of God and the sephiroth; but they

did not necessarily employ the combinations that are found in the Golden Dawn

system. One passage in the Zohar, for example, sets out the following attributions:

Come and see: Fire, air, water and dust – these are primordial ones, roots of above and

below; those above and below are sustained by them. These are four, in four directions

of the world: north, south, east, and west – four directions of the world, inhering in

those four. Fire to the north, air to the east, water to the south, dust to the west.

50. Regardie, The Middle Pillar, 191–92.

51. See Matt, The Zohar, 83.

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It also bears noting in this context that there was one strand within the Kabbalah

which held that only three basic elements existed. This, in particular, was the doctrine

taught by the Sefer Yetzirah. This foundational text of the Kabbalistic tradition was a

major influence on the Golden Dawn from the Cipher MS onwards, and Westcott

produced a translation of it in 1887, in the period when the order was gestating.

This points to an important insight which arises from close study of the LBRP,

and which has implications for the way in which we view the Golden Dawn ritu-

als more generally. Mathers, Westcott and their brethren were not drawing on and

preserving an immutable body of timeless esoteric wisdom. They were prepared

to diverge from traditional source materials, and indeed they had to do so to the

extent that these materials were inconsistent within themselves. This was true in

relation to the Kabbalah and also as regards Christian ceremonial magic. In the

Solomonic grimoires, we find combinations of divine names and cardinal points

that are both inconsistent and divergent from their usage in the LBRP.

Mathers, for one, was perfectly aware of this. In his translation of the Key of

Solomon, which was published at the time of the birth of the Golden Dawn in

1888, he writes:

And within these Four Circles thou must write these four Names of God the Most Holy

One, in this order:—

At the East, AL, El;

At the West, IH, Yah;

At the South, AGLA, Agla;

And at the North ADNI, Adonaï.

These correspondences clearly have nothing to do with those in the LBRP. But

Mathers was not troubled by such matters. He adds in a footnote:

The MSS. vary as to the point whereat each name is to be placed, but I think the above

will be found to answer.

52. Mathers ed., The Key of Solomon, 16.

53. Ibid.

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This is a very revealing comment. Where Mathers’ sources were inconsistent,

he was prepared to cut the Gordian knot and impose what he considered to

be a practical solution. This points to a wider insight to which we shall return:

the role of the Victorian occult revivalists in the development of Western

esotericism was not merely to restore old traditions, it was also to codify and

solidify a body of what had previously been more flexible ideas and materials.

Moving on to the pentagrams which the magus is directed to draw: these are,

within the framework of the Golden Dawn magical system, “banishing Earth”

pentagrams. This is determined by the directions in which their constituent lines

are drawn in the air. We will return shortly to the subject of the pentagram as

an esoteric symbol.

The sister ritual of the LBRP, the Supreme Ritual of the

Pentagram, also uses pentagrams, drawn in different ways, which are attributed to

the other three classical elements and to the fifth element of spirit. In addition, the

Supreme Ritual uses other signs at this point in the action, including most notably

the astrological glyph of Aquarius in the east, the glyph of Leo in the south, the

outline of an eagle in the west and the glyph of Taurus in the north. These signs

are in turn associated with the four classical elements and with the four Kerubim:

supernatural entities which can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible and the vision

of Ezekiel which exerted such influence on the Kabbalistic tradition.

Again, the

correspondences which are implied here are not necessarily traditional. In partic-

ular, they differ from those found in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, which were in

turn repeated at the start of the nineteenth century by Francis Barrett.

54. Note that the concept of a banishing pentagram appears to have predated Mathers. It is

already found in the Cipher MS, page 14 – although this page may be written in a different

hand from the rest of the MS.

55. See e.g. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 3:10–14, 18–19; also 3.121–2. Ezekiel 1.10 describes the

cherubim as having four faces: of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. Revelation 4.7 describes four

separate creatures with those same faces. The link with Ezekiel and Revelation was acknowledged

explicitly by Mathers: see Gilbert, The Sorcerer and his Apprentice, 40. In 1882, not long before

the Golden Dawn rituals were composed, the four Kerubim had been depicted on the cover of

Edward Maitland and Anna Kingsford’s work of Christian esotericism The Perfect Way.

56. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, 2.1.7; Barrett, The Magus, 112. The corres-

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The invocation of the archangels

Stand with arms outstretched in the form of a cross and say: —

BEFORE ME RAPHAEL

BEHIND ME GABRIEL

AT MY RIGHT HAND MICHAEL

AT MY LEFT HAND AURIEL

The position described in this part of the LBRP, in which the initiate stands with

his arms stretched out horizontally, was referred to in the Golden Dawn as the

“Calvary Cross”. It also served as the position representing the god form of “Osiris

Slain” – god forms being physical postures associated with Egyptian deities. As we

have already intimated, cross-based symbolism was one way in which the Golden

Dawn sought to elide Christian and pagan religious traditions, thereby dissolving

a dichotomy that was basic to conventional Victorian thinking.

The four archangels named in this part of the ritual are all mentioned in Jewish

scriptural texts. Gabriel and Michael appear in the canonical Book of Daniel,

while Raphael appears in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit in the Septuagint,

and Uriel appears in the apocryphal Books of Enoch and Second Esdras. It is

interesting to note that the four archangels had been borrowed into pagan magic

as early as the Greek Magical Papyri.

Three of them (Michael, Gabriel and Uriel)

also appear in the Gnostic texts of the Nag Hammadi collection.

It has been claimed that this part of the LBRP has an identifiable source in

a traditional Jewish prayer that was easily accessible in the nineteenth century,

even to gentiles like Mathers.

The prayer in question is sometimes referred to

as the “Bedtime Shema” (Kriyat Shema Al HaMitah, also rendered as e.g. Kriyas

Shema). But the likelihood is that this prayer is not where the four archangels in

the LBRP come from; rather, the Bedtime Shema and the LBRP both appear to

pondences in these sources are: lion-east-fire, calf-south-earth, eagle-west-earth and man-north-water.

57. See e.g. PGM VII.1009–16, 1017–26 and XC.1–13.

58. See e.g. the text known as the Gospel of the Egyptians.

59. This claim is made, notably, in the Wikipedia page relating to the LBRP: see https://en.wi-

kipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_banishing_ritual_of_the_pentagram (accessed 17 May 2019).

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have an earlier common source in Jewish literature. The clue is found in one of

Westcott’s writings: “According to one Jewish tradition which has met with much

Christian support, [there] are four principal Angels who stand around the throne

of Jehovah; they are Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel.”

The throne is not

mentioned in the Bedtime Shema, and so we may surmise that Westcott – and

presumably also Mathers – probably knew of the motif of being surrounded by

the four archangels from another source, one which did mention God’s throne.

The motif appears in such a form in mediaeval rabbinical writings; and it is

suggested that this is the ultimate origin of this part of the LBRP, perhaps medi-

ated through some more recent Christian source or sources.

The invocation of the four archangels stands out somewhat in Jewish

practice, as the notion of praying to angels was traditionally disapproved of

in monotheistic rabbinical Judaism. The invocation of angels first appears in

Jewish prayer in the Seder Rav Amram Gaon from late ninth-century Babylonia:

When a person goes out at night at no specific hour, he should say: God is on my right, and

Uziel is on my left, and Nemuel is before me, and Sha’a-shuel is behind me. The presence of

God is above my head. Save me Lord from an evil affliction and from an evil satan.

It would seem that this text was known to some esotericists in the Golden Dawn

tradition, as the notion of the presence of God being above one’s head appears

in a later variant of the LBRP used by the Stella Matutina.

It is not clear, how-

ever, whether the text influenced Mathers’ original composition of the LBRP.

The motif of four (or five) angels who surround a person is found not only

in Jewish but also in Christian, Islamic and Manichaean texts. It has appeared

in both liturgical and magical contexts, including amulets and incantation

60. See Gilbert, The Magical Mason, 128.

61. See Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, 4 and Numbers Rabbah (Bamidbar Rabbah), 2.10. For a later Christian

source that would have been available to Mathers, see Gill, An Exposition, 55.

62. Levene et al., “‘Gabriel is on their Right’: Angelic Protection in Jewish Magic”, 192.

63. The evidence for this is a text entitled “The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram” which is held

in the library of Freemasons’ Hall, London (call number BE 699 STE). The relevant wording

reads: “And above my head the Glory of God!”

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bowls, from antiquity to modern times.

The identity and directions of the

angels are not consistent in this body of material;

so, again, the Golden Dawn

had no fixed traditional set of correspondences to preserve. When we try to

track the motif back in time, the trail leads us to the profoundly pagan world

of Babylonia in the second millennium BC. Here is a text from that world, in

which an exorcist is invoking the protection of the gods:

I am the Exorcist and Šangamahhu-priest of Ea,

I am the purification priest of Eridu,

the incantation which he casts is dedicated to bringing calm.

When I go to the patient,

when I push open the door of the [house],

when I call out at his gate,

when I cross the threshold,

when I enter the house,

with Šamaš in front of me and Sîn behind me,

with Nergal on my right,

and with Ninurta on my left,

when I approach the patient, and lay my hand on the patient’s head,

may the good spirit and good genius be present at my side

This part of the LBRP, then, is a very old piece of Near-Eastern paganism, mediated

through the Abrahamic faiths and articulated in Jewish language. Again, Mathers

had stumbled on something that had more baggage than he could have realised.

We noted above that there are no fixed traditional attributions of the

archangels to the cardinal points. How, then, did the archangels acquire the

positions that they occupy in the LBRP? The Golden Dawn correspondences

between the archangels and the elements go back at least as far as Agrippa (as

64. See e.g. Naveh and Shaked, Magic Spells and Formulae, 27–28; Shaked, “Manichaean Incantation

Bowls in Syriac”, 58–92; Levene et al., “‘Gabriel is on their Right’: Angelic Protection in Jewish Magic”.

65. See Levene et al., “‘Gabriel is on their Right’: Angelic Protection in Jewish Magic” for a

table of different angels and directions.

66. For the text, see Geller, Healing Magic and Evil Demons, 110–13.

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plagiarised by Francis Barrett).

But the correspondences between the archangels

and the cardinal points depart from those in Agrippa. It is evident that they

were generated by mapping Agrippa’s archangel-element correspondences onto

the separate set of element-direction correspondences derived from Claudius

Ptolemy. This is a prime example of the kind of conceptual surgery that was

performed by the Golden Dawn in the course of creating its magical system.

The two stars

BEFORE ME FLAMES THE PENTAGRAM —

BEHIND ME SHINES THE SIX-RAYED STAR

Here, the magus declares that he is positioned between the pentagram and the hexa-

gram – two important esoteric symbols. The pentagram, which we have already met

in an earlier part of the LBRP, has become inextricably associated with the occult

tradition, to the extent that it serves quite widely in popular culture as a symbol

of magic and witchcraft. The historical roots of the symbol are profoundly deep.

Pentagrams are archaeologically attested in Europe and Asia as far back as the Stone

Age; and they found their way into religious and philosophical currents ranging

from Pythagoreanism to Paracelsianism.

Most relevantly for our purposes, both

the pentagram and the hexagram appear specifically in the Solomonic tradition

– for example, in the magical tool known as the “seal of Solomon” – and they

were subsequently borrowed into Freemasonry.

The pentagram and hexagram

symbolism in the LBRP is likely to derive from these sources, as mediated primarily

through the writings of Éliphas Lévi.

In general, in the Golden Dawn system, the pentagram is the sign of the

microcosm, while the hexagram is the sign of the macrocosm. In esoteric thought,

67. Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, 2.1.7; Barrett, The Magus, 112.

68. It may be worth noting that this had already been done before Mathers came on the scene.

The LBRP’s system of correspondences between archangels, elements and cardinal points is

apparent in the Cipher MS.

69. See e.g. the remarkable Stöber, Drudenfuss-Monographie.

70. See e.g. Waite, A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry, 2:108–10.

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of course, the microcosm is the lower level of reality which corresponds to the

higher universal level – “as above, so below”. Hence in this part of the LBRP, the

magus is locating himself between the two levels of reality. The microcosm can

be equated to the human body, which explains a reference in the Golden Dawn

papers to “the power of the Pentagram constituting the Glorified Body of Osiris”

– another reminder of how Egyptian symbolism permeated the order.

The association of the pentagram with the microcosm goes back at least to

Paracelsus and Agrippa, but it probably came to the Golden Dawn through Lévi. It

is worth quoting the French magus’s Gothic prose on this subject at some length:

We proceed to the explanation and consecration of the sacred and mysterious penta-

gram. At this point, let the ignorant and superstitious close the book; they will either

see nothing but darkness, or they will be scandalised. The pentagram, which, in gnostic

schools, is called the blazing star, is the sign of intellectual omnipotence and autocracy.

It is the star of the magi; it is the sign of the Word made flesh; and, according to the

direction of its points, this absolute magical symbol represents order or confusion, the

divine lamb of Ormuz and St John, or the accursed goat of Mendes. It is initiation or

profanation; it is Lucifer or Vesper, the star of the morning or the evening. It is Mary or

Lilith, victory or death, day or night. . . . The pentagram is the figure of the human body,

having the four limbs, and a single point representing the head....

The sign of the pentagram is called also the sign of the microcosm. . . . The complete

comprehension of the pentagram is the key of the two worlds. It is the absolute philos-

ophy and natural science.

Given what we know of Lévi’s influence, this is a very plausible source for the

use of the pentagram in the Golden Dawn system. But there was also another

relatively recent potential source: the German Romantic poet and polymath

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The vital clue to Goethe’s influence is found in

the following piece of advice that was given to members of the Golden Dawn:

“In all cases of tracing a Pentagram, the angle should be carefully closed at the

71. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 2:160. The notion of a glorified body is also Christian: see e.g.

1 Corinthians 15.35–55.

72. Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 224–25.

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finishing point.”

Why would this seemingly trivial matter be emphasised?

The answer, it seems, lies in Part 1, Scene 3 of Goethe’s Faust. Mephistopheles

explains to Faust that a pentagram is preventing him from leaving the latter’s

study. How, then, did he manage to enter in the first place? It appears that there

is a fatal gap in the shape of the pentagram:

MEPHISTOPHELES: I must confess that forth I may not wander,

My steps by one slight obstacle controlled, —

The wizard’s-foot, that on your threshold made is.

FAUST: The pentagram prohibits thee?

Why, tell me now, thou Son of Hades,

If that prevents, how cam’st thou in to me?

Could such a spirit be so cheated?

MEPHISTOPHELES: Inspect the thing: the drawing’s not completed.

The outer angle, you may see,

Is open left — the lines don’t fit it.

The peculiar detail of the incomplete pentagram appears to indicate that Faust

influenced the usage of the pentagram in the Golden Dawn – and it is clear that

the scene in question was known to contemporary occultists.

Interestingly,

this is the only element of the LBRP which appears to have been consciously

borrowed from a work of fiction.

As a final point regarding the hexagram, the words “behind me shines the

six-rayed star” are often altered in modern versions of the LBRP to “in the

column shines the six-rayed star”. The “column” in this formulation appears

to be the middle pillar of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life – with which, as we men-

tioned earlier, the magus is associating himself. The “in the column” wording

first seems to appear in Crowley’s “Star Ruby” variant of the LBRP.

The rite closes with a repetition of the “Qabbalistic Cross”.

73. Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 3:11.

74. Taylor trans., Faust, 50.

75. It was mentioned shortly before the foundation of the Golden Dawn in Collins, “The

Theosophical Meaning of Goethe’s Faust: I”.

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It is time to draw the strands of our inquiry together. There are two principal points

to be made in relation to the examination that we have conducted: the first may

be summed up in the word eclecticism, and the second in the word codication.

As to eclecticism, it has become abundantly clear that the sources of the

LBRP were extraordinarily varied, and in some cases extremely old. The ritual

itself was a modern creation – there is no evidence that anything like it existed

in any form before the 1880s – but it was heavily and self-consciously indebted

to earlier sources. These sources range from the exorcism rites of pre-Christian

Mesopotamia to Éliphas Lévi’s ruminations on the Lord’s Prayer, taking in

Jewish mysticism and Solomonic magic on the way. They were brought together

in the late Victorian era to create something new that was distinctly different

from the sum of its parts.

It is particularly interesting that, in a number of cas-

es, the ultimate sources of the LBRP are likely to have been obscure to Mathers,

and to his fellow Golden Dawn magi, since they came to the latter through

mediated channels. It is sometimes said that the Golden Dawn initiates were

playing with supernatural forces that they did not fully understand. The secular

scholar cannot affirm or deny such a notion; but we can say that Mathers and

his brethren drew on rites and symbols that sometimes went back much further

than they are likely to have suspected. They did not fully grasp where their own

system had come from. This is not, of course, an uncommon phenomenon in

the religious world, nor one that is confined to the esoteric domain.

Mention of Mathers brings us to the question of how far the LBRP can

be regarded as an idiosyncratic product of one man’s interests and activities.

If one shares Arthur Machen’s negative value judgement, it is easy to attribute

the eclecticism of the LBRP, and of the Golden Dawn rituals more generally,

76. This reflects a broader tension in the Golden Dawn between novelty and tradition, which

has ignited an ongoing debate about how “modern” the Golden Dawn system was: see e.g.

Plaisance, “Magic Made Modern?”.

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to the personal obsessions of Mathers – that man of “much learning but little

scholarship” (W. B. Yeats); that “comic Blackstone of occult lore” (A. E. Waite).

Such a notion should be challenged, however. In this regard, Mathers was not,

for once, behaving eccentrically. As we have intimated, the LBRP, along with

the rest of the Golden Dawn system, amounts to a microcosmic exemplar of

trends and phenomena that are characteristic of the esoteric revival more gener-

ally. Mathers’ magpie-like appropriation of ideas and symbols, collected together

and decontextualised from their circumstances of origin, was far from unique.

The Golden Dawn emerged out of and ran parallel to other currents – including

high-degree Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and Theosophy – which borrowed, and

experimented with, ideas and symbols of diverse and exotic origins. Egil Asprem,

for example, has shown in some detail how nineteenth-century occultists from

Lévi onwards creatively appropriated Kabbalistic concepts for their own spiritual

purposes, disembedding them from their Jewish context in the process.

There is, of course, a bigger picture here. Outside the esoteric subculture, the

era in which the Golden Dawn gestated was particularly fertile in comparativism.

The enterprise of finding and linking together elements of disparate cultures

was very much in vogue: this is what lay behind Machen’s reference to “the

eighteen-eighty and later frame of mind”.

As the characteristically Victorian

forces of technology and imperialism brought ethnographic data flooding into

the European intellectual world, the temptation to fashion that data into ambi-

tious comparativist constructs affected many contemporary thinkers and writers,

77. O’Donnell and Archibald eds., The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 162; Waite, Shadows of Life

and Thought, 124. Mathers himself later boasted that his task as a reviver of esotericism “required

a knowledge of many languages and an enormous amount of work”, and that he was according-

ly “probably the busiest man living”. He made these claims in one of the court cases which he

was involved in with Aleister Crowley: see the contemporary press reports in e.g. The Globe, 27

April 1911, 10–11 and The Jarrow Express, 28 April 1911, 6.

78. Asprem, “Kabbalah Recreata”. Lévi himself was influenced in this regard by the

seventeenth-century work of Knorr von Rosenroth.

79. Machen did, admittedly, underestimate how far back the comparativist tradition could be

traced. Its roots dated back in some respects to the sixteenth century: see e.g. Stroumsa, A New Science.

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not just on the occultic fringe of society, but among academic anthropologists

and scholars of religion and mythology. The Golden Dawn appeared just a few

years after the publication of E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), at a time when

F. Max Müller was about to commence his Gifford Lectures (1888–1892) and the

first edition of James Frazer’s Golden Bough was shortly to come out (1890).

Another respect in which Mathers’ eclecticism is unsurprising is that it

exemplifies how the rituals of new religious movements tend to be assembled

from a bricolage of older, pre-existing materials. It has been stated that “[o]ld

and well-established rituals predominantly serve to maintain and stabilize pre-

vailing religious traditions, while rituals in NRMs [New Religious Movements]

are elements in the installation of experimental novelties.”

Yet, paradoxically,

it would seem that such novelties often require the impression of age and

authority that is derived from well-constructed rituals based on semi-familiar

models. The same paradox may be seen in the broader category of “invented

traditions” that grew up in the period of unprecedented social and economic

change between 1870 and 1914, as discussed in the classic volume edited by Eric

Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger.

In his critique of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s

work, Guy Beiner noted that the success of invented traditions “very much

depends on their association with transformations of existing traditions”.

this vein, a Golden Dawn initiate would be presented with quasi-masonic cere-

monies in King James Bible English, studded with words and gestures that were

in part broadly recognisable and in part impressive and exotic. The resulting

impression of familiarity, mystery and antiquity must have gone a long way

to dispel any sense that the initiate was participating in an essentially novel

80. See further e.g. Nicholls, “Max Müller and the Comparative Method”. Asprem makes the

comparison with Frazer’s Golden Bough explicit in “Kabbalah Recreata”, 133–34.

81. Rothstein, “Rituals and Ritualization in New Religious Movements”, 335.

82. Hobsbawm and Ranger eds., The Invention of Tradition. See also subsequently Lewis and

Hammer eds., The Invention of Sacred Tradition. Alison Butler identified the Golden Dawn as an

example of invented tradition in Victorian Occultism, 17, 173–74.

83. Beiner, “The Invention of Tradition?”, 6.

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endeavour, using texts which Mathers had concocted out of books in the era of

phonographs and steam turbines.

It cannot be emphasised too strongly that the eclectic and academic nature

of Mathers’ work is likely to have been irrelevant to its effect on those who

participated in his rituals. As the scholar of ritual Catherine Bell has noted:

“Purity of lineage has never been an important principle of ritualization;

evocative symbols and familiar practices are readily revised for new purposes or

reinterpreted for new communities.” Bell was writing in the context of Soviet

Communism – a kind of political NRM – and its bureaucratically composed

public ceremonies. Such observances were at least partially effective in engag-

ing citizens of the Workers’ Paradise: “They would find in these rites bits of

folk custom remembered from childhood, songs sung in school, formalities

that fit their expectations for proper etiquette, and tedious bits of government

ideology.”

One does not have to strain too hard to find a parallel here with the

likely effect that Mathers’ researches in the British Museum had on the middle -

-class Victorian Christians who entered the Golden Dawn’s temples. A more

immediate parallel is offered by another nineteenth-century NRM for which

an elaborate and eclectic liturgy was created: the Catholic Apostolic Church, or

Irvingites. John Bate Cardale (1802–1877) equipped the new Irvingite church

with a Eucharistic service that was combined from Anglican, Protestant, Roman

Catholic and Eastern Orthodox elements, going back to the patristic period

but mediated in many respects through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

scholarly writings.

The basic similarity of Cardale’s endeavours to those of

Mathers is evident; and it bears noting that the Irvingite liturgy was generally

considered even by outsiders to be moving and impressive.

It should be recognised that eclecticism is not confined to NRMs. It is not

unusual for established religious communities to draw their rituals creatively

84. Bell, Ritual, 231. See also 235–56 on the Black American holiday of Kwanzaa, which was

created in the 1960s out of authentic but eclectically selected African cultural data.

85. See Lancaster, “John Bate Cardale”, 173–90.

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from a body of source materials that originally came into being in substantially

different contexts. One clear example of this is the Roman Catholic Mass. The

components of this ritual derive from a varied combination of sources which

have quite different origins, genres and functions. The laconic, repetitive Kyrie

can be traced back to a mixture of pagan, Jewish and early Christian texts;

the Gloria is a patristic hymn based on the model of the Psalms; the Credo is a

technically precise theological statement which reached its developed form at

the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE); the Sanctus derives from the early Israelite

prophet Isaiah’s vision of the throne of God, spliced with a Gospel verse which

refers to Jesus in a totally different context; and the Agnus Dei is based on a

different verse again from the Gospels. The texts are a mixture of prose and

verse, and they contain words from several different languages (leaving aside

modern vernacular translations).

There are evident parallels here with Mathers’

Golden Dawn texts, including the LBRP. The difference is that the latter were

artificially confected, not the outcome of a long, unplanned process of evolu-

tion: they were the product of book-learning rather than organic growth. But

they looked the part, so to speak. Mathers’ efforts – like those of Cardale and

the Soviet nomenklatura – generated ritual products which had the same kinds

of characteristics as are found in established religions. The fact that Mathers’

sources were varied helped rather than hindered his success in this regard. The

very eclecticism of the Golden Dawn rites concealed their artificiality: it made

them look and feel organic and traditional, like the Mass.

A further noteworthy feature of Mathers’ eclecticism was that it tied in with

the essential ambiguity of the Golden Dawn’s religious stance, as manifested

by the apparently indiscriminate appropriation of language and imagery from

Abrahamic and pagan milieux. On the one hand, the Golden Dawn presented it-

self explicitly as being affiliated with the Christian tradition. The order’s pledge

form stated:

86. Although dated, Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite is still fundamental for the history of the Mass.

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Belief in a Supreme Being, or Beings, is indispensable. In addition, the Candidate, if

not a Christian, should be at least prepared to take an interest in Christian symbolism.

But yet – as adumbrated by the reference to “Beings” in the plural – the Golden

Dawn rites made explicit reference to pagan gods such as Isis, Osiris and Horus.

The rituals also encouraged the initiate to interact with the divine in ways that

went beyond the boundaries of orthodox Christian worship, leading Ronald

Hutton to remark of the LBRP: “It was far from obvious . . . whether the king-

dom, the power, and the glory belonged to God or were being promised to the

human carrying out the ritual”.

Over the years, some commentators have succumbed to the temptation to

attempt to classify the Golden Dawn – and related esoteric orders – as essentially

Christian or pagan. Gerald Yorke, a well-known figure in the British esoteric

community, posited a division between Hermetic orders like the Golden Dawn,

which “include some Christianity but do not stress it”, and Rosicrucian orders,

which are primarily Christian. In this schema, Hermetists “try to become God”,

while Rosicrucian Christians only try to “become as Christ”.

In the same vein,

we may refer to the attempts of some writers to see A. E. Waite’s Golden Dawn

successor order, the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross, as safely Christian, while the

Golden Dawn itself is labelled as occult and pagan.

Such divisions have the

appearance of being ideological and self-serving. They amount to an attempt to

force the source material into categories to which it is fundamentally resistant.

The central feature of the Golden Dawn’s religious stance was its essential

ambiguity. This ambiguity no doubt served a spiritual purpose in the eyes of the

Golden Dawn magicians themselves. Egil Asprem has written of how the eclec-

ticism of Golden Dawn-style occultism was characterised by “comparison, cross-

87. See Gilbert, The Golden Dawn Scrapbook, 23.

88. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 82.

89. See Raine, Yeats, the Tarot and the Golden Dawn, 9–12.

90. See Roukema, Esotericism and Narrative, 77–78.

91. Cf. Roukema, Esotericism, 97.

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reference and combination of material disembedded from their original contexts,

in search for a universal, perennial truth underlying the particular phenomena”.

This process was (Asprem argues) underpinned by a sincere quest for a universal

truth or sophia perennis which manifested under diverse forms in the world’s dif-

ferent spiritual traditions. It is worth noting, however, that the Golden Dawn’s

studied religious ambiguity served a practical purpose too. Victorian occultists

wanted to stray from orthodox Christian ideas and praxis; but not necessarily too

far. They could swallow the worship of Osiris more readily if he was elided with

Jesus Christ, through cruciform symbolism and the language of death and resur-

rection.

The Golden Dawn had to accommodate recruits ranging from Anglican

clergymen to the likes of Aleister Crowley. The eclecticism of the LBRP and the

other rites served as a tool for easing the anxieties of the order’s more conservative

members, while also providing material to stimulate those who were looking for

an altogether more robustly counter-cultural experience.

So much for the eclecticism of the Golden Dawn. The second main

conclusion to draw from our analysis of the LBRP is that the order’s rites were

also codicatory. The process of drafting a ritual script for a new magical order

– in particular, the need to incorporate correspondences in the time-honoured

occultic manner – involved some significant choices. Choices had to be made

between elements of what had previously been diverse and fluid traditions; and

in some cases choices were made that flatly contradicted or departed from those

traditions. Once made, the Golden Dawn’s choices took on an authority of

their own for subsequent generations of esotericists.

This point has already been alluded to by previous writers, although it has

not been pursued at length. Some years ago, Carroll Runyon noted that the

Golden Dawn was required to choose between the competing correspondences

92. Asprem, “Kabbalah Recreata”, 136.

93. Admittedly, this probably did not apply to all Christian initiates. Some clergy were

seemingly attracted to the Golden Dawn precisely because of its unorthodox theology rather

than in spite of it: Fuller makes essentially this argument in “Anglo-Catholic Clergy”.

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contained in the different versions of the Sepher Yetzirah.

More recently, Stephen

Skinner has pointed out that the order’s attributions of Hebrew letters to the

planets and to the paths on the Tree of Life differ from those found in historical

Jewish Kabbalistic traditions.

As for flatly departing from older source material,

Egil Asprem has drawn attention to how Mathers was prepared to use “Enochian”

material from the magic of Dr. John Dee which he found in the Cipher MS even

though he knew that the material in question was not true to Dee’s original system.

In any event, the choices made by Mathers and his brethren, once they were written

down, taught as a system and (eventually) published, were codified into something

like an orthodoxy – or, more accurately, an orthopraxy.

This development was probably inevitable, given the enormous influence

exerted by the Golden Dawn on the modern occult revival – it has been de-

scribed as “the defining occult society in recent Western history”

– and the

tendency to standardisation that is probably inherent in the mass marketing of

occult materials. From at least Israel Regardie’s time onwards, the Golden Dawn

system came to be turned into a prepackaged product, and an industry- standard

one at that. Here was timeless wisdom, to be followed rather than questioned.

The dissemination of the Golden Dawn texts in and as popular books for

novices lent the choices – contestable, even arbitrary – made by those who com-

posed them an air of immutable authority. They were accepted by those who

were not in a position to question them, and they exerted substantial influence

even on those who were.

Once again, this is a particular case of a broader phenomenon. Christian

scholars have made a similar point in noting that the invention of printing

not only froze the text of the church’s liturgy but also constituted it as a new,

94. Runyon, Secrets, 46–47.

95. And, in the case of the paths, from the original Cipher MS: see Skinner, The Complete

Magician’s Tables, 18, 29–30.

96. Asprem, Arguing with Angels, 55.

97. Butler, Victorian Occultism, 2.

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reified authority-source.

In the case of the Golden Dawn, of course, the crucial

development was not the invention of printing technology, but rather the increase

in the number of esotericists who were interested in using it, together with the

growth of a book-buying public with sufficient levels of wealth and literacy

to sustain a small but viable market for books on unusual spiritual topics.

It was no longer a world in which the occasional literate rabbi wrote down

his Kabbalistic theories for posterity, freely reinterpreting and reshaping his

inherited materials; but rather a world of modern communications in which

the Golden Dawn brand was eventually to become a kind of Microsoft in the

esoteric subculture. In such a world, the decisions that Mathers made while

poring over his books have taken on a life of their own.

The LBRP is only a short ritual, and one that might at first sight seem somewhat

banal. But the examination that we have undertaken shows that it richly repays closer

study. We have seen that the LBRP exemplifies the eclecticism of the sources of the

Golden Dawn rites and how they have come to serve as the foundation of a modern

esoteric orthopraxy. In these regards, the LBRP is far from being anthropologically

unusual, even if its content would be found baffling by the uninitiated. The Golden

Dawn and its members may be described as eccentric, but on closer inspection their

ritual material proves to fit in well both with their own time and culture and with

wider trends in the history of ritual and religion.

98. So e.g. Crouan, The History and the Future of the Roman Liturgy, 100: “instead of tradition gua-

ranteeing the missal, the missal becomes the guarantee for the tradition”. See also on this point

Daniélou et al., Historical Theology, 233; Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, 173, 338; Monti, “Late

Medieval Liturgy”, 94; and Chadwick, “The Roman Missal”, 109.

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